Inevitably, conversation among the men turned to the issue of the depiction of the disciple John in the painting. Fueled by Dan Brown’s fictional conspiracies in “The DaVinci Code,” our group wondered about the accuracy of DaVinci’s work in rendering the scene. If you look closely enough, you could conclude that the character thought to be John the Baptist is actually a female. And once you start down that slippery slope, every painting or sculpture is open to reinterpretation and speculation.

The works of art in the documentary showed a number of different images of Jesus, from a soft, cherubic baby to a muscular, lean adult. Jesus is depicted as an effeminate, light-skinned rabbi and a dark-skinned, furrow-browed prophet. And that’s not including painting of Jesus on the cross, which are filled with blood and anguish. Which one of those is the most accurate? Or is the answer “none of the above”?

The documentary highlighted for me a truth I have always known, but which has become even starker for me in recent months: we simply don’t know Jesus. Even with four gospels, a bunch of Paul’s letters and approximately a zillion sermons, we still don’t truly know Jesus.

But that doesn’t stop us from drawing conclusions, does it? In his book American Jesus, historian Stephen Prothero traces the shifting identity of Jesus in our country, from the Enlightened Sage of Thomas Jefferson’s era to the Superstar of the 1960s and 70s. In each era, believers tended to cast Jesus in an image that spoke most to them, whether it was as a Sweet Savior or Manly Redeemer.

That tendency is not unique any certain group of believers. In the absence of a digital photograph or YouTube video of Jesus, our human nature is to draw our own pictures. In “Christ, the Universal Savior“, Hsu San Ch’un shows Jesus as an Asian. African-American artist Fred Carter paints Jesus as a black man in “Jesus Praying in the Garden“. And in probably the most famous painting of Jesus, Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ“, Jesus is a light-haired, blue-eyed man surrounded by a soft glow of angelic light. So who’s right? Will the real Jesus please stand up?

This issue moves from a curiosity to problematic when we see Jesus being portrayed in ways that allow the portrayers to draw dividing lines between “us” and “them.” As we move deeper in this political season, in which we know religion will play a pivotal role, it will be interesting to see how the major players will maneuver to show that Jesus is on their side or, more powerfully, that Jesus is NOT on the other side.
When we move into Lent, we’ll be taking a closer look at what the Bible tells us about Jesus. I suspect we’ll end up with a much different picture of Jesus than we expect. Until then, pay attention to all the ways Jesus is portrayed in your life: through scripture, through personal conversations, and in our culture. Then be ready to see Jesus in a new light. Who is Jesus for YOU?

SERMON
Something’s Fishy
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Jan. 22, 2012

Ah, Jonah! Jonah has a very special place in my heart. My very first sermon that I ever preached, 15 years ago, was on the book of Jonah. I had just started seminary and my home pastor asked me if I would like to preach one Sunday. I said, “No.” He said, “You know, if you’re going to be a pastor, you might want to rethink that decision.” So in January 1997, I stood in the pulpit of First Christian Church in Jeffersonville, sharing one thing in common with the prophet Jonah – I also wanted to run the other way!

When you ask people what they know about the Bible, the story of Jonah is usually near the top of the list. Most people know that Jonah was swallowed by a whale (although the scripture just says “a large fish”). This story is also the source of a lot of biblical skepticism. Did Jonah really get swallowed by a fish? How could he survived three days? We must remember that the bible is about theology, not ichthyology (the study of fish), so we’d do well to take this story as it is told rather than try to turn the Bible into a scientific textbook. Some folks try to do that, you know, but their motivations are a bit fishy.

So we know Jonah was swallowed by…a fish, a whale, Nemo, something like that. For most people, that’s where they’re knowledge of Jonah begins and ends. And that’s a shame, because this short book is one of the most interesting and humorous books in the Bible, and we risk missing out on the fun if we’re not willing to dive into Jonah. Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish, but as is true with most fish stories, there’s more to it than that.

The first thing to note about Jonah is that it is different than all the other prophetic books. While a few of the others contain some narrative description of the prophet, most of them are the proclamations of the prophet himself. So the book of Isaiah contains Isaiah’s prophecies. But not Jonah. In its four chapters, there is only one prophecy from Jonah, and it’s pretty basic: “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” That’s it. The rest of the book is a story about the prophet and his attempts to run away from God.

The book starts with a very dangerous sentence: “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah.” That usually means trouble is brewing. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and cry out against it, warning them to repent from their evil ways or else be destroyed. This command isn’t a lot different than what God tells the other prophets to do: go to a place and tell them that through their thoughts and deeds they have sinned against the Lord, and they better repent or else.

The only difference here is that most other prophets were called to go to the Israelites, God’s people. But not Jonah. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, which would be the equivalent of telling a Christian to preach to the lions in the Roman coliseum. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, an empire that was a constant threat to the Israelites. They were the merciless and violent enemy. And here was God asking Jonah to go the heart of their territory and tell them they needed to shape up. But Jonah wants nothing to do with that, so instead of heading to Nineveh, which was 500 miles east of his hometown, he hops a ship to Tarshish, which was 2000 miles west of his hometown.

Why did Jonah run? Was he lacking in self-esteem and not up to the challenge of being God’s prophet? Was he scared the Ninevites were going to harm him when he shared his prophecy? If those were true, it might make his running a little more understandable. But there’s another reason. Think about what that might be and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

So Jonah tries to run from God, forgetting that God has a pretty good tracking system. While on the boat, the Lord sends a storm that threatens to sink the ship, and the pagan sailors do everything in their power to keep afloat, including praying to their various gods. Finally, they wake up Jonah, who had fallen asleep, telling him to start praying and bailing, and not necessarily in that order. The sailors discover that Jonah is actually the cause of the storm, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard so that their lives may be saved. The sailors balk at first, but when they realize that is their only hope, Jonah walks the plank, the sea immediately calms down and all the sailors do what Jonah doesn’t – they worship Jonah’s God.

Meanwhile, Jonah is swallowed by the fish and spends three days and nights in there, during which he says a prayer of deliverance and presumably rethinks his original plan to disobey God’s command. I would suspect spending time in a fish’ gastrointestinal juices would make you rethink A LOT of things. The fish spews Jonah onto dry land and then we come to our reading for this morning, when God comes to Jonah and says, “Let’s try that again.” Jonah goes to Nineveh, makes his prophecy, and lo and behold, the whole city of Nineveh believed in God and repented. Hurray, right?

Not for Jonah. For him, something’s fishy. In the translation The Message, the first verses of the fourth chapter says, “Jonah was furious. He lost his temper. He yelled at God, ‘God! I knew it—when I was back home, I knew this was going to happen! That’s why I ran off to Tarshish! I knew you were sheer grace and mercy, not easily angered, rich in love, and ready at the drop of a hat to turn your plans of punishment into a program of forgiveness!”

Now we’re getting at why Jonah ran way. He wasn’t insecure. He wasn’t afraid. He knew that God was true to God’s word, he knew that God was a God of mercy and forgiveness, and Jonah didn’t believe the Ninevites were worthy of receiving God’s grace. Jonah says, “So God, if you won’t kill them, kill me! I’m better off dead!” How ironic, isn’t it, that Jonah wasn’t worried God was going to be too hard, but that God was going to be too soft!

It’s tempting for us to tsk-tsk Jonah for his hard-heartedness. Surely he believed that everyone was a child of God and deserved God’s grace, because that’s what we believe, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Do we believe that’s true of everyone? Puppy kickers? Parking space stealers? Child molesters? People who steal from the elderly? Are we really that different from Jonah? It’s not a question of if we have our Ninevites; it’s a question of who they are.

Jonah’s selfishness was also fueled by nationalistic concerns. This book was thought to have been written during a time when Israel was returning to their homeland from exile and were in the process of clearing their territory of all the foreigners, the illegal immigrants who didn’t have a right to be there. So in the midst of that turf war and the exclusion of foreigners comes Jonah’s message of radical inclusion. Everyone deserves God’s grace.

The truth that Jonah’s story reminds us about is that we have no control over how God is in relationship with others. We may think that the prodigal son doesn’t deserve a welcome-home party or the thief on the cross doesn’t deserve a place in heaven or the death-row inmate doesn’t deserve a last-minute conversion. And when those things do happen, because we worship a God who welcomes those kinds of things, we may want to respond like Jonah and a lot of older siblings we know: “That’s not fair!” Isn’t it funny how it can be a real challenge to draw close to God when God doesn’t love who we love and hate who we hate?

Here’s the fundamental difference between Jonah’s view of the Ninevites and God’s view of the Ninevites. For Jonah, these people who live in a far –away land are not individuals or spiritual brothers and sisters or even human beings. They are the capital-O “Other.” And as long as they remain the “Other,” it’s easy for Jonah to hate them and wish destruction upon them. The Ninevites are not God-fearers; they don’t believe what Jonah believes; they don’t deserve the blessings he’s enjoyed. So when they repent and turn to God, Jonah’s whole rationale for hating them is turned on its head. There’s no more “Other” to hate.

For God, the Ninevites were never an “Other.” While they don’t figure prominently in the biblical narrative, we can assume each one of them was just as much a child of God as Jonah. Jonah is so quick to cry “Not fair!” when God doesn’t destroy them, not acknowledging that the “Other” have now become one with him. Sometimes it’s really hard to acknowledge that those who are different from us have a lot more in common with us than we want to admit, and they are no more outside of God’s realm of grace than we are.

Before we give into the temptation to label someone else as the Other, on the other side of the aisle, on the opposing ends of an issue, from a different place, speaking a different language, living a different way than us, we’d do well to remember that we are absolutely, incredibly, undeniably undeserving of God’s grace, and yet God gave his only son for us. For us! If we are willing to buy into God’s radical inclusion and to see everyone as worthy of God’s grace, it’s amazing how the label of “Other” is no longer useful, and the hate and animosity and resentment that comes with that label dissipates.

Jonah didn’t want to Ninevites saved. He wanted them judged, because in his narrow perspective, that’s what they deserved. Thank God – and I mean thank God! – we don’t get what we deserve. Instead, we are recipients of God’s grace. That’s the message we can humbly share with the Ninevites in our lives. And by doing so, we might just find that the ones we thought were “Others” aren’t actually “Others.” They’re us.

We were hosted by First Community Church of Columbus, a large DOC/UCC church that is doing some creative things in ministry. Their pastor, Dr. Richard Wing, started us off on Wednesday morning with a thought-provoking homily, in which he asked us this question: in our effort to make sure everyone feels welcomed and no one is offended or pressured to serve, do we coddle people too much? I’m not quite sure how I would answer that, but I appreciate him asking the question.

Our main presenter for the day was Dan Hotchkiss, a senior consultant at the Alban Institute. Alban is an organization that is dedicated to building up congregations and their leaders through books, workshops and online seminars. I have made use of many of Alban’s offerings and have found them all to be top-notch and incredibly helpful.

One of the Alban books I read was Hotchkiss’ “Governance and Ministry.” I found the book quite enlightening, so I looked forward to his presentation on the same subject, and he did not disappoint. He started off by reminding us that our job as leaders of congregations is to ask the right question. Our question is not “What are we going to do?” or “How are we going to do it”? The question we should be asking is, “Why are we doing it?” The How and What questions are important, but they should be driven by the Why question. How would you answer that question? Why do we do what we do at Crestwood?

We then spent some time talking about change in congregations, which is a great source of conversation but usually not very productive, because we almost always end up lamenting how hard it is for a church to make changes. Hotchkiss helped us see that the level of change tolerance in a congregation is driven by many factors, including resources available and age of the church. The more established a church becomes, the harder it is to promote change. The challenge in a church is to keep both resources and change tolerance high, and Hotchkiss said the more churches are willing to continually ask the Why question, the more open they are to change.

Hotchkiss then turned to the issue of governance in the church, which he said is basically the work of asking the Why question. In other words, a church’s governing body (in our case, the Administrative Board) exists for one main reason. It’s not to hear and receive reports (although we do that a lot) or to vote on budgets and policies (although that is a function of what the board does) or to give people another meeting to attend (although that is a reality). Instead, the Board exists to do the work of asking and answering the Why question, and how you constitute the Board and structure Board meetings should be dictated by this purpose.

Then Hotchkiss really stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. He asked us, “What would happen if your Board voted tomorrow to dissolve and no longer exist?” And he wanted us to answer that! Sadly, several pastors said, “Not a whole lot would happen.” In other words, the Boards at their churches didn’t have much of an impact on the church’s life and mission. So what would happen at Crestwood? Anything? Nothing? Hotchkiss’ question really got me thinking about why we have a Board and what it should be doing.

I’m going to spend more time on this issue as we look at the role of the Board in the life of the church. I appreciated my time in Columbus and the opportunity to be away from Crestwood for some big-picture thinking. My prayer is that what I learned will help us be more effective witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ, changing lives in his name. After all, that is why we do what we do.

But since using this new device I’ve discovered that not only does Angry Birds look even better, the iPad also has a number of uses for my work here at church. I’m really enjoying learning how I can use my iPad to track budgets, take notes in meetings and stay current on religious blogs and websites. It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that the iPad and other devices like it will have grow in their usefulness for churches.

Is that exciting or scary for you? How would you feel if, on Sunday morning, instead of being handed a paper bulletin you were handed an electronic tablet with the order of worship on it? How would you react if you saw a pastor leading a wedding from an iPad or reading scripture from an iPhone? How you answer those questions will help you determine your comfortable level with the proliferation of technology in our society.

While I don’t expect these above scenarios to happen at Crestwood anytime soon, they do make the point that churches need to figure out the role of technology in their purpose and vision. Some churches have already embraced this to the fullest extent; others have stood steadfastly against the encroachment of technology. I would say Crestwood is somewhere in the middle.

What we’ll need to decide as we move forward is how we can best use technology to share the good news. In some cases, it’s a no-brainer. For example, a church without a website is on its way to the grave. Websites are crucial for reaching new people and connecting with the community. We have a wonderful website at Crestwood that will continue to get better as we think about how we can use it effectively.

Other uses of technology in the church are not nearly as universally agreed upon. The presence of audio-visual technology in the sanctuary? The ability to pay your pledge online? Churches are divided over whether or not technology should be incorporated in these ways, and each church must figure out for itself how technology fits into its overall structure and purpose. That’s what I’m continuing to learn here at Crestwood.

In his theory on the diffusion of innovations, professor Everett Rogers describes five different groups of people based on their willingness to adopt new developments. The first people to jump on board are the Innovators, followed by Early Adopters, Early Majority and Late Majority. The last group to adopt new things are the Laggards. These are the folks who are skeptical of microwaves and whose phones all have cords attached to them.

So where does the church fall in relation to technology? Too often the church has been Laggards, which has put us woefully behind the culture in our ability to communicate and connect with people. But I don’t think it’s good stewardship for us to be Innovators of new technology that may be very expensive and not useful. We should probably fall somewhere in between.

I love technology and am excited about the different ways it can be used in the church, but I’m also sensitive to the fact that not everyone is as comfortable with it as me. So my promise to you is that we will continue this conversation so that we can figure this out together as we move forward. You’re not going to show up one Sunday and have robots leading the service!

If we are going to stay relevant in our culture, technology will be an important tool to help us do that. But our technology should serve us, not the other way around. I look forward to exploring how we can adopt new advancements while staying true to the timeless message of the gospel. And just so you know, this article was not written on my iPad!

SERMON
Knowing and Loving
I Corinthians 8:1-13
January 15, 2011

A.J. Jacobs has quickly become one of my favorite non-fiction authors. He’s the guy who wrote “The Year of Living Biblically,” where he tried to follow all of the biblical laws for one year. His first book was “The Know-It-All” in which he set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, all 33,000 pages of it. He read it from a-ak – an ancient East Asian music form – to Zywiec – a town in south-central Poland – and wrote about the experience. The subtitle of the book was “One man’s humble quest to become the smartest person in the world.” I don’t know if he achieved that objective, but I’m sure he’s a lot more intelligent than when he started out.

And that’s a good thing, right? Becoming smarter is a commendable goal for us. In fact, much of our lives are spent doing just that – trying to get smarter. Why else would we send our kids to school for 12 years, then off to college for another four or five or six? The more degrees you have, the more letters you have after your name, the more you are rewarded. Knowledge is power. We revere intelligent people and make fun of not-so-intelligent people. A smart person is “in the know” or looks at someone “knowingly.” Knowledge is a good thing.

If you read this passage from Paul in I Corinthians too quickly, you might think Paul is running an anti-Mensa campaign. “Knowledge puffs up,” Paul says. Or as the Living Bible translates it, “Being a know-it-all makes us feel important.” Paul says the person who thinks they know something doesn’t really know what they think they know.
In other words, the more you think you know, the less you actually know about what you should know. What do you think about that? Should you know or not know? You know what I think? I don’t know.

Paul is not arguing here against being intelligent. He’s not condemning the kind of knowledge one gets from reading the Encyclopedia Britannica or watching “Jeopardy.” Instead, he’s condemning knowledge that makes the knower feel superior or arrogant, which was an issue in the church in Corinth. That church was an affluent congregation made up of some of the Corinthian upper class. When Paul started the church, he preached that belief in Christ offered the believer a new kind of freedom, and some of the Corinthians were taking that to an extreme. They acted as if they were free to do whatever they wanted without considering the consequences for others, especially those who weren’t as intelligent or sophisticated as they were. They were practicing spiritual elitism.

The presenting problem here was eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Now, I know our world today presents us with a lot of moral dilemmas. Do I fudge a bit on my taxes? Is it OK to lie to my boss? How many chocolate chip cookies can I eat before I am considered a glutton? But I’m guess that you don’t sit around all day wondering if that Whopper you just ordered was originally a sacrifice to Zeus or Thor. Eating idol meat probably doesn’t make our top 100 list of spiritual dilemmas, so this passage may appear irrelevant to us. But it’s not. There is truth here for us, just as there is truth in every passage in the Bible. Sometimes we have to work a little harder to get to it.

Here’s the deal with idol meat. Worshippers were required to sacrifice the best animals to their gods, which means the choicest cuts of beef started out as sacrifices. Some of that meat was burned on the altar, some was eaten in a temple feast, and the rest was sold to local butchers in the marketplace. If you bought a leg of lamb or rib roast, that meat could have started out as an offering to a pagan God.

For mature Christians, this wasn’t a problem. They knew the others gods didn’t exist, so the source of the meat didn’t matter. But many fledgling Christians grew up with pagan religions and still strongly associated meat with idol worship. For the mature Christians – those “in the know” – this was a non-issue. But for the spiritually weak, eating this meat was akin to breaking a commandment and committing the sin of idolatry.

We have our own forms of this controversy today. We don’t deal with issues related to idol meat, but we do have religious conflicts around things like whether Christians should drink alcohol, dance, gamble, cuss, watch R-rated movies, read “Harry Potter” books, celebrate Halloween, and so on. And we don’t have the benefit of Paul writing us a letter saying, “You can read ‘Harry Potter,’ but you must not watch reruns of ‘Bewitched.” So we Christians are left to work out these issues for ourselves, and in case you didn’t notice, we don’t always do this peacefully or come to the same conclusions.

So what Paul tells us here is that when there is disagreement over a non-essential issue, love trumps knowledge. Eating idol meat or watching “Die Hard” or doing the Macarena isn’t a matter of life or death for our faith. Through Christ, we have been freed from legalism and oppressive restrictions. But just because we know it’s OK to do certain things doesn’t mean we should do them. Love trumps knowledge.

When Sydney was a toddler we loved to take her to play miniature golf. She always won, because her technique was to hit the ball once, then pick it up and drop in the hole. She got a hole-in-one every time, and each time she did this Leigh and I would clap and make a big to-do over it. Now, being the competitive, law-abiding person I am, I could have scolded Sydney and told her the correct way to play miniature golf. I could have given her a two-stroke penalty for illegally moving her golf ball when the “lift-clean-and-place” rule wasn’t in effect. I could have had the teenager working the counter throw her off the course for cheating. And according to the laws on miniature golf, I would have been right.

But love trumps knowledge. When we are faced with a conflict over a spiritual or social issue, a wonderful guiding question to ask ourselves is, “In this situation, is it better to be right or to be compassionate?” In our efforts to show how much we know and provide what we believe to be the “correct” way of thinking, we may inadvertently become a stumbling block to someone else in their faith journey. I’ve heard well-meaning Christians bludgeon their opponents with arguments about why true believers speak in tongues or why real churches don’t let woman serve in leadership. And I walk away thinking, “No wonder non-Christians don’t like us!” There’s nothing loving about trying to show everyone how “in the know” you are at someone else’s expense.

I don’t think many of us have to worry about that. If you’re like me, you’re much more aware of all that you don’t know instead of all you do know. Even so, Paul has a word here for us, because even as we seek to learn more about Jesus Christ and our faith and the Bible – which is something we should never stop doing – what truly matters is not what we know, but that we are known. In other words, I would rather be known by God through an intimate, personal relationship, than be a know-it-all.

This has implications for how we live our lives and live out our faith. If we define ourselves by what we know, we run the risk of using knowledge as a benchmark for how we evaluate others. And in this off-the-charts intelligent and sophisticated congregation, we may be tempted to think that our knowledge gives us an advantage over people who don’t have what we have. We may be tempted to use our knowledge to focus on what separates us.

But if we use love as our benchmark, then we are more likely to focus on our similarities instead of our differences. Puffed-up knowledge tells me I’m superior to people in certain neighborhoods or ethnicities or socioeconomic classes. But love tells me that I am a child of God, and they are a child of God, and that we are all a part of God’s good creation. We are all in the same boat, and we’re not going to get anywhere if I try to show that I can row faster than everyone else. We’ll just end up going around in circles.

The truth is no one has a monopoly on the truth. No one truly knows. Some people may think they do, but Paul says that just shows how much they don’t know. Later in I Corinthians, speaking about his earthly life, Paul says, “Now I know in part.” But when he meets Christ face to face, he says, “Then, I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Forget about reading all 33,000 pages of the encyclopedia. We would do well to make it our life’s goal to be fully known by God.

People don’t need more knowledge. But they do need more love. So many people around us are stumbling through life. They don’t need their theological doctrines corrected. They need a hand. They may not look like us, they may not live where we live, they may think differently than us, they may not be as far along on their spiritual journey as us. But there is so much more that connects us than divides us. Love trumps knowledge. I may not know much, but I know that.

SERMON
Call of the Wildman
Mark 1:4-11
Jan. 8, 2012

Sunday nights are usually my time to veg out in front of the TV after a long day of work, and recently – don’t ask me how – I’ve ended up watching Animal Planet. And I have to say…it’s pretty cool! The first show I got hooked on, so to speak, was “Hillbilly Handfishing,”where these two good ol’ boys take city slickers on noodling expeditions and teach them to catch catfish with their bare hands. This is too good to make up! Leigh would walk in the room and say, “What are you watching???”

The newest show I’m enjoying actually features a man from Lebanon, Ky., named Ernie Brown Jr., who catches snapping turtles with his bare hands, or at least what’s left of his bare hands. The show is “Call of the Wildman.” With his quirky demeanor and ear-piercing battle yelp, the Turtle Man has made quite a name for himself. But he’s not necessarily the guy you want your daughter to bring home on a date, unless you really like turtle soup.

That description of the Turtle Man could apply to our wild man in today’s scripture passage. John the Baptist was also a man who was making quite a name for himself, both for his demeanor and for what he was doing out there in the wilderness. As Mark tells us, people were flocking to hear the call of this wild man.

Of course, in true Mark fashion, that’s about all that he tells us. This is by far the shortest of the gospels, and Mark uses an economy of words to advance his narrative. He introduces John the Baptist and Jesus, has Jesus baptized, sends him the wilderness to be tempted for 40 days and starts Jesus on his preaching ministry – all in the fifteen verses.

Mark tends to focus more on actions than on words. Because he isn’t especially verbose in his writing, it behooves us to pay special attention to what he does say and what he leaves out. For example, you won’t find any shepherds or wise men or swaddling cloths in Mark. He forgoes the birth story and instead jumps right into the action. But interestingly, he doesn’t start with Jesus. Instead, he starts with the wild man we know as John the Baptist.

Actually, Mark starts with a Hebrew prophet, quoting Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming of the messenger who will tell of the Lord’s imminent arrival. This introduction to John is important because it helps us understand more about John’s ministry. We know that John is Jesus’ cousin, the child of Elizabeth and Zechariah who would have been a few months older than Jesus. But other than that information, for someone so prominent in the gospel story, John is a bit of a mystery.

Therefore, the prophetic introduction is important. At this time in Israel’s history, it had been about 400 years since they’d had a flesh-and-blood prophet in their midst, and you tend to forget things after 400 years. The Israelites had been passing down the stories and writings of the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but after 400 years you begin to wonder if any of their prophecies about the coming of the Messiah would ever come true. And then this guy John comes out of nowhere, looking and acting and talking like an honest-to-goodness prophet. He wore the same kind of clothes, had the same kind of diet and – maybe most importantly – worked in the same kind of environment.

Mark’s first words about John say, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness.” That is a statement fraught with meaning, because the wilderness had played a significant role in Israel’s history. The wilderness often signified God’s presence, much like the mountaintop will do in the New Testament. Moses, David and Elijah all flee to the wilderness, and often a Hebrew prophet would spend time in the wilderness and then return with a word from the Lord. We often think of the wilderness as symbolizing a time of trial or hardship, and that can certainly be the case. But the wilderness could also very well be where we find God.

So you see why it’s significant that John appears in the wilderness. He doesn’t come from the Temple, the seat of Jewish religious authority. He doesn’t come from Rome, the home of the emperor. He comes from the wilderness, bringing with him an anti-establishment message of judgment and hope. And it’s a message that people who had been waiting 400 years were desperate to hear.

John isn’t only preaching about the coming of the Lord. This wild man is spending a lot of time in the muddy waters of the Jordan, but he’s not looking for snapping turtles. He’s baptizing people. Now we tend to think baptism is a strictly Christian ritual, but there are deep Jewish roots in the idea of performing cleansing rituals. Jews knew about ritual washing as a way of dealing with uncleanliness and defilement, and baptism was also used as a way of initiating converts into Judaism by symbolically cleansing their souls.

But John wasn’t only baptizing the unclean or the newly converted. He was baptizing everybody! Don’t stand still too long around John, you might get dunked. The radical message he was preaching was that everyone – new Jew, old Jew, non-Jew – was unclean and that everyone needed to be cleansed through baptism. Paul will continue this theme later when he writes in Romans that “all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God.” Doesn’t matter whether you’re a Pharisee or tax collector, life-long believer or brand-new seeker. We all have something of which we need to be cleansed.

Why? What’s John’s purpose for insisting on baptism for everyone? Because John knew that someone was coming, someone so much greater than him, and he wanted to make sure everyone was ready to receive him. He wanted people to do everything in their power to prepare the way for the Lord to walk into their lives and into their hearts. And he knew that such preparation starts with some spiritual house-cleaning.

Mark tells us that John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The Greek word for “repentance” is “metanoia,” which literally means a reversal or turning around. That’s the idea behind New Year’s resolutions, isn’t it? We don’t make resolutions to keep doing what we’re doing. “I resolve this year to get less exercise and keep gaining weight.” No, we make resolutions to turn around something in our lives that isn’t working, to reverse attitudes and behaviors that are producing sour fruit.

The point John is making is that until we make these spiritual resolutions, we aren’t prepared to receive the one who has come and is coming. And preparation takes work. When I taught public speaking, I preached the importance of being prepared. And I could always tell the students who had prepared and those who hadn’t, usually by how much they were sweating. Any effort or project of significance requires preparation, and preparation takes work, but a lot of times people don’t want to do the work because they think they don’t have to do it. That’s the bad kind of pride, to which we are all susceptible.

If anyone had reason to be full of pride, it was John. In a time when the Israelites were pinched under the thumb of the Roman empire, wandering in their own spiritual wilderness, John single-handedly restores their hope in God and their belief in God’s promises. John was drawing audiences from the whole Judean countryside and all over Jerusalem. He was preaching and baptizing and changing lives. He was Jesus’ cousin, for goodness sakes! He was the closest thing Israel had to a camel-hair-wearing rock star.

And yet, he knew that the work he was doing was only a pre-cursor to what was coming. Anybody could be baptized on the outside. If you have some water and a willing participant, anyone can go through the outward ritual of baptism. But Jesus was bringing something different, an inward baptism, a soul cleansing, and it’s only going to work if the people start turning around from their sinful ways and clearing room in their hearts for Christ.

Is there room? Is there room in us for the peace and grace and purpose Jesus is offering? Of course there is, we think. Those other things don’t take up that much space! But when you start to think about the things that keep us separate from God – our negative feelings towards another person, our selfish belief that we don’t have to share, our liberal use of situational ethics – you realize that those things can take up a lot of space and attention and energy. Is there room?

Whenever we’re going to have guests at our house, the whole place gets a good cleaning. Except that one room. You know that room? It’s that room where you throw everything from all the other rooms and then close the door. Every house has one of those rooms. But what John says is, yes, even THAT room has to be clean in order for us to receive Christ as a guest. I find it funny that often times people will complain that they feel like God isn’t speaking to them when in reality they’re not prepared for that. They haven’t done their house-cleaning, the hard work of repentance. They want what Deitrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” which is all the benefits of faith without any of the repentance.

As we move into this new year, it’s a good time to make resolutions, but not the ones we’ll break next week or tomorrow or this afternoon. What’s a spiritual resolution we could make today, a metanoia moment when we promise to clear some space for Jesus? It doesn’t have to be anything big. We can always start with a few dust bunnies in the corner of our soul. But we have to start somewhere! We have to do the work of repentance, of turning around, if we want to receive Jesus. Let us prepare the way for the Lord to come into our hearts and our lives this year. There’s a Buddhist saying: When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. Are we ready?

SERMON
Using Our GPS Sermon Series
#3 – Arriving at Your Destination
Dec. 18, 2011

I got a text the other day from a friend who told me he was about to get on a plane to travel for the holidays. I texted him back the words “God speed,” which is a traditional blessing for someone about to embark on a journey. However, my phone didn’t like that phrase. For those of you not familiar with auto-correct, this is a function on so-called “smart” phones that takes the words you type that your phone thinks are wrong and changes them into what your phone thinks is right. So while I meant to tell my friend “God speed,” what ended up getting sent was “God speeding,” to which my friend replied, “Wow! I’d had to be the police officer writing THAT ticket!”

But maybe my phone was smarter than I give it credit for, because in a way we are celebrating that God is speeding – speeding toward earth in the form of a little baby to show us in a new way God’s love and grace in our lives and in our world. And there’s not a minute to spare, is there? We need to hear God’s message again, wrapped in swaddling cloths, and it can’t arrive a moment too soon. We’ve been on quite a journey to get to the manger, and we’re almost at our destination.

Or are we? Today we finish on sermon series on Using Your GPS (God’s Positioning System). We started Advent by acquiring our satellites, or locking into the guiding signal that God is sending us, over and above all the other signals that swirl around us. Then, we got lost together and figured out how God helps us recalculate our route when we go astray from God’s path. Today, we can breathe a sigh of relief as we hear the soothing tones of our GPS tell us, “Arriving at destination.”

No matter how relieved we are to be arriving at Christmas, we can’t come close to matching how Joseph and Mary must have felt as the lights of Bethlehem flickered into view over the horizon. This couple has been on a long and arduous journey, and I don’t mean only their pilgrimage from Nazareth. When we began our story in Advent, both thought they were on fairly straightforward paths – Joseph was going to be a humble carpenter and family man, and Mary was going to be his bride and the mother of their children. But God set them on a new course, one which involved Mary becoming pregnant and having a baby while Joseph stood by her side and supported her. A stable in Bethlehem was not the destination they had planned. They are like Clark Griswold in the movie “Vacation,” who is dead-set on taking his family to the Wally World amusement park, only to find out when they arrive that it’s closed for repairs. “Sorry folks, park’s closed. The moose out front should have told ya.” For Mary and Joseph, the life they were expecting to lead was closed for repairs.

Well, if that wasn’t enough, Luke tells us that Mary didn’t even have the luxury of spending her last few waddling weeks nesting in her own home. The Romans ordered a census, which meant that Joseph had to travel from his current home in Nazareth to his original home in Bethlehem. And he wasn’t about to leave Mary by herself. So the two of them make the 80-mile trip, which would have included about 42,000 bathroom breaks.

I wonder how they first reacted when they heard about the census. They knew Joseph had to go, but Mary didn’t. Was Joseph going to defy Rome and not go? Was Joseph going to leave Mary and miss their baby’s birth? Was Mary going to somehow make this long trip on the back of a donkey? I have to imagine the couple wondered just how they were going to get to Bethlehem.

Do you ever wonder about that at this time of year? I know I do. As each year comes to a close, I feel my soul being beckoned once again to kneel at the manger and behold the Christ child. But doesn’t Bethlehem seem so far away? There are so many other things we either want to do – like Christmas parties and shopping for gifts – or have to do – like Christmas parties and shopping for gifts. If we started a tally at the beginning of December, how many destinations do you think we will have journeyed toward? The mall, the post office, a restaurant, a school, a family gathering, our church. We go a lot of places each Advent. But do we, at any point, journey toward Bethlehem? Do we make intentional time to focus on Christ? Or do we throw the baby out with the egg nog? What is our destination this Advent?

Thankfully, Mary and Joseph finally arrive at Bethlehem and look for a place to rest. And it is there, in Bethlehem, in an animal stable, that baby Jesus is born. Mary wraps him in swaddling cloths and lays him in a manger. The end. But wait! The story isn’t over, is it? Next we have the shepherds, who hear the birth announcement from the angels and go to see the Christ child. The end. But wait! Then the wise men follow the star to see the miracle that has taken place in Bethlehem. The end. But wait! Just as Joseph and Mary are about to pack up and head back to Nazareth, an angel of the Lord recalculates their route and tells them to go to Egypt to avoid King Herod’s wrath. And they lived happy ever after in Egypt. No they didn’t! After Herod died, Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus finally return to their home in Nazareth to settle down into a calm, peaceful, uneventful life together. Or maybe not. For them, the journey was far from over.

You see, one of the things we can learn from these well-known stories is that Jesus’ birth causes people to travel. Mary and Joseph rack up some major frequent-rider miles, the shepherds ditch their flocks to go to Bethlehem, the wise men come from East to see the baby. Jesus’ birth dislodges people from the comfortable, the familiar, the well-worn routes, and sends them in new directions with a new destination.

Will Jesus’ birth this year cause us to travel? I’m not talking about over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house. I’m talking about the kind of movement, the kind of journeying that keeps our spirit awake and alive. It’s easy to settle into spiritual ruts, cruise-controlling through Christmas like this story is some kind of fairy tale. But the birth of Jesus can dislodge us from our places of comfort, sending us off on a faith-filled journey as we pursue a calling to serve in new ways, to show God’s love to new people, or to deepen our understanding of scripture or our relationship with God. Christ’s birth this year is another chance for us to set our course for a new destination.

But wait, you say! I thought Christmas was the destination! Isn’t this what the build-up is all about? Is that what we are anticipating during Advent? We’ve been setting our sights on Dec. 25, so once we get there, the journey is over, right? Just like once the baby is born, all the hard work is done. It’s smooth sailing from that point, right?

You see, the manger is not our destination. Jesus’ purpose on earth wasn’t just to be born. Mary and Joseph haven’t seen anything yet! This baby is only the beginning of what God has planned for us. God is going to be revealed in incredible, life-changing ways through this child who is born on Christmas, this Christmas. But here’s the thing – will we be there to see it? Or will be still be at the manger because we think that’s where the story ends? Or will we even get to the manger, or will we be tripped up by the season before we can kneel down and worship?

The manger is only the beginning. There is oh so much more to see! Our destination is not Bethlehem, but Golgotha. Jesus’ destination is not the manger, but the cross…and beyond. And we are called to take that journey with him, to hear the stories again about how he heals and teaches and forgives. We are called to travel, to make our way from Nazareth to Galillee, to Caesarea Phillippi and Bethany, from the Upper Room to the Mount of Olives. This Christmas is a new beginning for us, a new call to follow.

And as we make that journey, we will be reminded of a truth that we know, but sometimes forget to live out. The joy of this life, the blessings we are to experience, the lessons we will learn, the strength we will gain from perseverance, the challenges that will fortify us, are not to be found at our destination. They are to be found on the journey itself. If we put our blinders on and only focus on arriving at the destination, we will miss the glorious blessings that are to be found along the way. And in reality, do we ever really arrive at our destination? On my GPS, when I’m getting close to where I’m going, a bright green flag appears on the screen. Wouldn’t it be great if life worked that way, if a big green flag appeared when we finally arrived, at the right job or right decision or number in our savings account? But what we often find is what Mary and Joseph found. What looks like a destination – Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth – is really just a rest stop. We expect God will be a map for us, showing us exactly where to go and what to do, plotting out every point of our lives. But in reality, maybe God is a compass, pointing us in the right direction, but letting us learn along the journey.

For us, may this Christmas be a rest stop at the manger that then propels us forward, seeking the new paths that God has for us. I know 2012 is going to be an incredible year for Crestwood. God has already started to work in and around this congregation. And the same thing can happen for each of us as we pay attention to God’s guiding signal and allow God to work through our lives to put us on the right path. Go to the manger! Make that trip! Spend time marveling at the birth of the Christ child! There’s something wonderful to see there. You don’t want to miss it. But don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. Keep going.

This is the Doxology that we sing every week in response to the collection of the offering. For many of us (including me), we’ve sang this our whole lives as a part of worship. It is deeply ingrained in our spiritual psyche and is a natural, almost involuntary, response to the gifts we give to God.

Do you notice anything wrong with it? I guess that depends on who you ask. There are some people who have trouble with the way God is characterized in these verses. In fact, some of my minister friends and even people within our Crestwood congregation have taken issue with the words of the Doxology. God isn’t a “he” or a “him,” so why do we sing about God that way?

The concern over how we characterize God isn’t a new one, and doesn’t only revolve around issues of gender inclusivity. The Bible is full of a diverse collection of metaphors for God, everything from a mighty fortress to mother hen. I believe the authors did this because there is simply no good way to fully capture who God is. So we do the best we can. We anthropomorphize God by giving God hands, feet, eyes and ears to try and “humanize” God and make God more understandable.

But ultimately, all of our pronouns, metaphors and images will fall short. Nothing can describe God, but we have to call God something. So most often we follow the example of scripture, which most often characterizes God has masculine. Granted, there are feminine descriptions of God in scripture (the image of Sophia, the personification of wisdom, comes to mind). And as we know, the Bible was written in the midst of a patriarchal society which almost always favored men and devalued women. So even our source document for our understanding of God is flawed in this way.

So how do we proceed? Our denominational documents aren’t much help in clarifying this issue. In our Chalice Hymnal, there are three version of the Doxology printed. Along with our masculine version, there are these two:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise God, all creatures here below;
Praise God above, ye heavenly hosts:
Creator, Christ and Holy Ghost.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Christ, all creatures here below;
Praise Holy Spirit evermore;
One God, triune, whom we adore.

Which one should we sing? I believe, in true Disciples fashion, we have the freedom to sing whichever one we want. I don’t think it really matters to God what we call him…her…whatever. I believe what matters most is that we are singing from our hearts. If the masculine imagery is troubling to you, I encourage you to sing the words that are most meaningful to you. Whatever you sing, sing it loud! The Doxology is one way of thanking God, and that’s something we should sing about all the time.

• Alex, Tanner and Trevor, that God will watch over them and protect them and be with them always
• Claudia and Karen – comfort
• My daughter Isabella. She’s 7. Protect her until I can be with her. May God have mercy on me and give me divine justice in my case so I can be with my daughter.
• Pray for my wife and three children that God soften her heart. And pray for a hedge of protection around our marriage.
• There’s been a death in my family recently. Please pray for protection and unity of my family.
• Look over and comfort all of us.
• Bless everyone and their families. Provide strength for us to pull through the hard times.
• For Alec and Georgia to be safe while I’m gone.
• Carolyn, who found out she has lung cancer.
• For Stephen and Thomas, that they are healthy.
• For Lily, a cancer patient.
• For my pregnancy.
• I stepped off my path and need to get back on the right path. I need prayer for strength and a prayer to get out of jail so that I may be with my family and my church family. I need all of them. I hurt others by my choices and I want to make things right again. I need prayer for my children that they be strong and not be saddened by my mistakes anymore.
• I need prayer for proof that will show the truth.
• Pray for me and my family, and pray I will be reinstated when I go to court.
• Please pray that the Lord will provide stability, shelter, clothes, money, a job, an apartment and help with medical bills when I get out so I can break this vicious cycle of physical abuse I have been through. Let me spend Christmas with my father and see my daughter.
• I want to pray for strength for those around me.
• Please pray for my fiancé, who seems to be losing his faith since I’ve been in jail. I also pray that my nine-month-old remembers me.
• Please pray for my family and the strength to keep going.
• I pray that I go home before Christmas. I miss my loved ones.
• I pray for my family and for a miracle.
• I pray I leave here soon and be with my family. I deserve another chance.
• I pray that God reveal what He would want me to do and for my family as they go with me through this process.
• Pray that my faith is restored and God gives me the strength to make it through this journey
• Pray that I get released on probation and God keep me on his path and strengthen my faith.

SERMON
Using Our GPS Sermon Series
#2 – Recalculating Our Route
Matthew 1:18-25

Today we continue our Advent sermon series called “Using Our GPS,” or God’s Positioning System. The idea is that as we move toward Christmas we are on a journey, and our world provides us all kinds of detours and roadblocks to try and get us off-track. Last week we talked about how important it is to acquire the right signal to guide us forward, just as a GPS must acquire a satellite signal. Mary got her signal from the angel Gabriel and responded with profound trust and faith with the simple statement, “Here am I.”

Once you acquire a signal, you should be on your way. But sometimes the question to ask is, “On your way to where?” and even a technological gadget like our GPS isn’t immune to making mistakes. I was using my GPS one time to find a remote church camp in rural Illinois. I was far off the interstate in completely unknown territory, fully reliant upon my little hunk of metal and wires to get me to my destination. I took all the right turns, dutifully obeying the voice commands, even when they sent me down an unmarked dirt road. The road dead-ended into a cornfield, at which point my GPS proclaimed, “Your destination is ahead.” I think I detected a bit of a chuckle when it said that. So I shouted at it, “No it’s not!” I wasn’t at my destination, I was at a dead end.

I think God must love dead ends, because it gives God a chance to show us a new direction. Abraham and Sarah, who are supposed to be fruitful and multiply, are burdened with barrenness. Dead end. Moses led the Israelites to the shores of the Red Sea, but couldn’t get across. Dead end. Jesus, the supposed Messiah gets crucified and buried in a tomb. Dead end. In each case, the story could have ended right there, staring at a road that ends in a cornfield instead of at our destination.

That could have happened for Joseph, as well. To fully understand just how off-track Joseph’s life becomes, consider where he starts. As our story begins, Joseph was pledged to be married to Mary. This is more than a simple engagement, as we understand it. This is a betrothal, a year-long commitment between a man and woman that carried with it all the binding agreements of a marriage, but without the consummation. At the end of one year in betrothal, the couple was formally married.

So Joseph and Mary were in all senses committed to each other to be married. But when Mary returns from her three-month visit to her relative Elizabeth, Joseph discovers his wife is four months along in a pregnancy that she claims was initiated by the Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t you have liked to been privy to that conversation! “Honey, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. The bad news is, I’m pregnant and you’re not the father. But the good news is, neither is anybody else!” If you were Joseph, how do you respond to this? He wasn’t quite sure what happened with Mary, he only knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

This was not the life he had planned. He was going to marry Mary, build them a modest house, ply his trade as a carpenter, and have a house full of kids – that were his. There are no exit ramps on that road, no detours or scenic overlooks. You start on the road, you stay on that road, you make it to the end of the road.

How many of our lives have worked like that? How many of us are on the exact path on which we started, a path free from speedbumps and obstacles? I would guess no one. For example, people usually change their majors three or four times, and that’s before the journey really begins. I was all prepared to be a doctor until I took my first undergrad chemistry course, and all of a sudden communications looked a lot more appealing. The truth is that our lives are not defined by what we think is going to happen; our lives are defined by what actually happens while we were waiting for something else to happen!

That’s certainly true for Joseph. He is thrown for a curve when he finds out about Mary’s pregnancy, at which point his road forks into two choices. He can either divorce her publicly, bringing her shame and possibly even death, or he could divorce her quietly, which might save him some face and also protect Mary’s dignity. While he’s consider Route A or Route B, God comes in a dream to offer Route C. As my GPS would say, “Recalculating.” Did you notice that when the angel comes to Mary, she’s wide awake, but when the angel comes to Joseph, it’s while he’s asleep? I wonder if God knew that was the only time Joseph would really listen and not ask too many questions.

Joseph’s life is recalculated by God’s plan, but in most cases the rerouting we experience is caused by one of two things. The first cause of getting off-track is ourselves. Sometimes we make bad decisions, and those decisions cause us to stray from the path and head down dark alleys or winding roads. There have been several times when my GPS has told me to go one way, but I just knew there was a better way, so rather than staying connected to the signal, I’ve wandered off-track. And my GPS is always there to help me find my way once I get myself lost. Thankfully, my GPS doesn’t say what she probably wants to say: “Hey idiot! If you would have turned where I told you to turn, we wouldn’t be in this mess!” Instead, she just politely says, “Recalculating.” God could chastise us for not following directions, for not spending enough time reading the map, for brazenly thinking we knew better. But God doesn’t. God simply offers to get us back on track. It may require some extra twists and turns, it may take us down roads we weren’t planning on going, but the whole point is to get us heading in the right direction.

Sometimes, the rerouting of our lives has nothing to do with us, but is caused by the capricious circumstances of life. We are motoring along, windows down and radio up, coasting on cruise control, when we’re unwillingly sent down a new path by a doctor’s diagnosis or a plummeting economy, and before we know it there’s a dirt road under our feet and a cornfield in front of us. Dead end.

But we don’t worship the God of dead ends. We worship that God of rolled-away stones, of parted seas, of recalculated routes. Remember, the whole point of a GPS recalculating our route is to get us back on the right path. That’s true, no matter how far off course we get. There is nowhere on this earth we can go that is out of reach of God’s signal. No matter how many wrong turns we take, no matter how many dead ends we run into, God is always there with us, recalculating our route, offering us the opportunity to trust in God for guidance. God has given us the tools we need to get on track: God’s word as presented to us in scripture, a community of faith in which to find worship, comfort and challenge, even our own consciences, which can help us sort out right from wrong. The tools are there; it’s up to us whether we use them or not.

Thankfully, Joseph listens to God’s rerouting. Instead of divorcing Mary, he follows through with God’s plan. That took a lot of trust, just like it takes a lot of trust to blindly follow the directions of our GPS. I’m sure Joseph still had a lot of questions. How would this affect his business? His marriage? What would he be to this baby? A father or a stepfather or a foster father? If Joseph believes the angel, everything is full speed ahead. The story can continue. Mary will have a home and a family and her child will be born into the line of King David. But if Joseph doesn’t believe, if he decides to go his own way, then the journey ends here. If he wakes up from his dream, shakes his head, and goes to the courthouse to file the divorce papers, then Mary is an outcast forever and the future is in question.

For the working out of God’s plan, Joseph’s belief is as important as Mary’s womb, because it is Joseph’s decision whether or not to give this child a name that will determine the child’s fate. By choosing to name the child, Joseph would exercise his right as the father and acknowledge Jesus as his legal son. Will this righteous, intensely conflicted man speak the name of Jesus? Interestingly, we are never told what he says. We are only told what he does. Despite the consequences, despite the chaos, despite the detour, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded him.
Pastor Barbara Brown Taylor says this about Joseph: “The heart of the story is about a just man who wakes up one day to find his life wrecked: his wife pregnant, his trust betrayed, his name ruined, his future revoked. It is about a righteous man who surveys a mess he has had absolutely nothing to do with and decides to believe that God is present in it. He owns this mess, he legitimates it and gives it a name, and the mess becomes the place where new life is born.”

Joseph’s journey is often our journey. We are presented day after day after day with circumstances beyond our control, circumstances we would never have chosen for ourselves, tempted to divorce ourselves from the belief that God can lead us out of this mess, when an angel whispers in our ear: “Do not fear. God is here. It may not be what you had planned, but God may be born here, too, if you will speak his name.”

Really? We have a say in whether or not God is incarnated this Christmas? Oh yes, we sure do. We have the choice whether to let the circumstances of life and the consequences of our bad decisions set our direction, or whether we’re going to trust God to recalculate our route, to get us back on track to a life of faith and grace and generosity. I once was lost – at a cornfield in rural Illinois, among other times in my life. But now I’m found, praise be to God. May we all be found again this Christmas.