“Gone Fishin’”
Matthew 4:12-23
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 27 January, 2008
Third Sunday after Epiphany
 If you’ve ever been fishing, or if you know someone who goes fishing, you will know that the fishing trip is somewhat of a sacred rite in American culture. The fishing trip requires weeks of planning, and men speak with reverence about their catches:
“Hey Bob, I caught one THIS big last week!” “Aww, Jim, that’s nothin’, buddy! Mine was THIIIS big!!!” It is known as a legendary opportunity for male bonding, and a boy’s first fishing trip is seen as an initiation into manhood: “Son, the guys and I have decided to let you come on the annual fishing trip this year.” “Ah, REALLY, dad? Do you mean it?!” Up North (places where it’s 25˚ below zero, for example), people even brave the bitter cold of winter, sitting for hours in the middle of a lake in a tiny unheated shack, patiently awaiting a bite on their hook.
Yes, the fishing trip has an element of the sacred to it. It is common knowledge that a dedicated fisherman (or -woman) does not like to be interrupted while engaging in this sacred rite: “Shhh, the fish are biting!” Yes, if you interrupt a fisherman, your message had better be urgent! In today’s scripture lesson, Jesus does just that. He interrupts a group of fishermen and with just words, he turns their world upside down.
Granted, Simon and Andrew, James and John, were not out for the Galilean equivalent of the modern American fishing trip. For these four men, fishing was not a pleasant pastime but a necessary duty, their very livelihood. But would Jesus’ interruption seem any less rude or out of place to them? If someone were to show up at the office and say, “Leave your desk, follow me, because I have something else for you to do,” we would think the person was nuts! “Okay, first of all, who are you, and second of all, go away! Can’t you see I’m busy?!” We wouldn’t think of actually following this person who had interrupted our work day. Yet Simon and Andrew, James and John, immediately left their nets and followed Jesus.
How do we respond to Jesus’ call? Are you ready to just drop what you are doing and follow? And what is it Jesus is calling you to do? Regardless of where that call leads you, following Christ’s radical example can involve drastic life changes.
There are two aspects in which we are called to follow, to answer Christ. The first involves what we could call the “corporate” call, the call that begins with Jesus’ own words, “Repent, and believe in the good news!” This is the call we have all received as Christians. We are called to shift our lives to the lessons we hear throughout our scriptures: to help the poor, who are all around us. To embrace the outcasts, whoever they may be in our society. To truly love our neighbors -- even the ones who drive us crazy. In short, we have been called to not only read the gospel but to act upon it. By so doing, we will be able to “fish for people,” as we embody that which Jesus taught us.
Theologian Walter Brueggemann describes this aspect of Christ’s call as a complete rewriting of the modern American life script. In order to follow Christ we must let go of our greedy consumerism, our sense of entitlement, our need for safety, our assumption that everything should have an easy fix and that no issue is “so complex or so remote” that we humans cannot solve it. Brueggemann, in quoting the words of another preeminent theologian, Karl Barth, suggests that we have been called to enter “the strange new world of the Bible.” In Brueggemann’s words, we must realize “that there is at work among us a Truth that makes us safe, that makes us free, that makes us joyous in a way that the comfort and ease of the consumer economy cannot even imagine.” Once we realize that Truth, it will become easier to recognize the work to which Christ is calling us: to love the neighbor, to help the poor, to embrace the outcast, to do all of those things that seem so difficult when we read our scriptures.
This “corporate” call is of utmost importance if we are to make up our minds to follow Jesus. But there is another aspect of Christ’s call too. This involves our individual call, that which we need to discern both as congregations and as single human beings. While we are all called to help the poor, to embrace the outcast, to love our neighbors, it is important to discern where God is leading us to concentrate our energies. Will we, as a congregation, set up a food pantry (as several of you determined to do when two hungry men came to our church last Sunday), engage in health care ministry (as we do with the wellness center), support Earl’s Place, or do something else -- something that we’re not doing right now? As individuals, will we volunteer at such organizations or help those in need in some other way, such as donating goods or funds? ...Or will we speak out for the outcasts, either by making a specific effort to open our church doors wide or by finding other ways to reach out to those who struggle for acceptance in our society, whoever they may be? Or, will we concentrate on loving neighbors? Perhaps we will set up a ministry of mediation and reconciliation, or as individuals make a concerted effort to invite into our homes -- or at least reach out to -- the people we have the most difficulty loving.
Dropping what we are doing and following Jesus may involve a change in our career paths. For me, it involved a call to ordained ministry. For some, it will involve leaving a high-paying corporate job, or a job that seems nothing but drudgery, or a job in which we simply do not feel that we are living the life that Jesus is calling us to live. Or, as the church, it may involve changing our entire mission strategy, discerning what, as a congregation, Christ is calling us to do. Perhaps it will involve making the church building accessible to disabled people -- something it would be very good for us to do. Or it may involve doing something that we have always thought would be too difficult but that, nonetheless, our prayers tell us we are being called to do.
Regardless of whether answering the call will involve changing our jobs or how many chores we do around the house to help our parents, or our church buildings, or the programs we offer, it should involve a shift in our way of life, no matter how much we think we are already doing. Answering the call will involve dropping what we are doing and turning to God in prayer, beginning the difficult but all-important task of discerning that call. How will you help the poor? How will you welcome outcasts? How will you love your neighbor? And can you, will you answer, when Jesus calls? Are you able and are you willing to drop what you are doing and enter “the strange new world of the Bible”? Think about it. Pray about it. And listen. Now let us pray.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Sermon 01/20/08 (Ex. 6:1-13; 1 Cor. 12:12-13, 27)
“God’s Freedom”
Exodus 6:1-13; 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 27
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 20 January, 2008
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Martin Luther King, Jr. Observance
 In Jewish tradition, Passover is the holiday that marks the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. It is a celebration of freedom marked, among other things, by a special meal called a Seder. (You may remember that the Last Supper, which we Christians celebrate, was a Passover Seder meal.) Passover is one of the most important, most joyful Jewish holidays.
Several weeks ago Ben and I watched a show on PBS about Jews in America. One segment of the show was about Jews during the American Civil War, and a certain Jew named Judah Benjamin was noted. He was somewhat of a rarity among Jews, in that he was a staunch Confederate and had, in fact, a high- ranking role in the Confederacy. Not surprisingly, he was a slave owner. The program noted that when he and his family would sit down to their Passover meal, they would be served by slaves. The irony of this is mind-boggling. He had slaves serving him a meal that was meant to be a celebration of an end to slavery.
Of course, Judah Benjamin was in good company as a Southern slave owner. He was, perhaps, unusual because he was a Jewish leader in the Confederacy, but slavery was a way of life. Wealthy landowners were expected to have slaves. That was that.
Slavery is assumed throughout much of our Bible too. While the Exodus is a central story of liberation, there are other portions of the Old Testament that mention slavery off-handedly, and Jesus sometimes uses the example of slaves in his teachings -- and doesn’t just speak against slavery. Indeed, the prevalence of slavery in our scriptures caused some people to believe that modern (19th century) slavery was justified and even God-ordained.
It is my hope that Jews and Christians today are appalled at the notion that human slavery could be remotely acceptable in the eyes of God. Jews -- and we, too, as descendants of the Israelites -- recall our liberation from Egyptian slavery as told in the story of the Exodus, part of which we have heard this morning. Christians proclaim, as we heard in 1 Corinthians this morning, that “there is no longer slave nor free.” Even if we didn’t have these scriptures, we should simply remember Jesus’ command that we are to love one another. Historically, slavery is one of the cruelest, least loving ways to treat one’s neighbors. I’m not even taking into account the torture and physical detention that slavery often involves.
In 2008 we are a long way from the enslavement of Africans by Euro-Americans that occurred through the middle of the 19th century. We’re a long way, too, from Jim Crow laws and the level of racism prevalent in this country before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Still, as we observe the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tomorrow, and as we enter into African American History Month in February, I wonder how far we really have come.
The majority of people who ride the bus in Baltimore are African American. It is not uncommon for me to be the only white person on a crowded bus. I marvel, sometimes, at the knowledge that there was a time only a few short decades ago when I would be expected to sit at the front of the bus while all of the African Americans sat at the back. I think of this sometimes, when I take a seat at the back of the bus. Still, racial tensions abound in Baltimore, and a recent incident on a Baltimore bus is evidence of that. When a young white woman was beaten up by several black teenagers in December, accusations of racism were slung from both sides. The young woman accused the African Americans of refusing to let her sit where she wanted on the bus. The African Americans said she used the “n” word and spat on them. There was talk of calling the incident a hate crime.
I have heard people in this city speak of a neighborhood being “bad” simply because it is populated by African Americans. I have had people say to me, “I’m not a racist” when what they were just telling me certainly sounded like racism. Institutional racism abounds. African Americans continue to be denied the same opportunities as whites, and as a result poverty is rampant in African American communities.
Slavery continues too. Some say that there is more slavery in the world today than there was before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Modern slavery doesn’t usually involve Africans being torn from their homelands and dragged into servitude in the United States. Rather, women and girls from Europe and other places are promised a new life in a new country. Upon arriving in the United States, they find themselves forced into sexual slavery. As slaves they are not only sexually exploited by their “customers” -- they endure horrendous other abuses, including being chained in cages.
We hear from time to time about cheap American products being made by slave labor in third world countries. Even if they are not technically “enslaved,” people work for pennies a day in deplorable conditions so that wealthy Americans (and we are all wealthy by their standards) can have cheap goods.
Pieces of Martin Luther King’s “dream” have come to pass. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King expressed hope that one day his children would live in a nation where they were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Today Baltimore city has an African American mayor, and an African American man is doing well in the Presidential race. People of color hold high positions in both public and private life.
Still, King’s dream is far from fully realized. And, of course, African Americans are not the only ones judged by their external appearance. After September 11th a seminary professor of mine (he happened to be African American) admitted that he was nervous when he saw people of Middle Eastern descent standing next to him in the security line at the airport. He knew it was wrong to be afraid of them solely because of their dark skin and dress (goodness knows he had experienced such prejudice), but his knee jerk reaction was to fear them. He is not alone by far, and many people who see a Middle Easterner and think “terrorist” believe they are perfectly justified in their assumptions.
Illegal immigration is a particularly hot topic these days, and the furor over it has led to other forms of prejudice. When we hear a person speaking Spanish or see someone who “looks Hispanic,” we immediately wonder if they are “an illegal.” We forget the fact that many, many Latinos in this country came here legally, and indeed, some have been here for generations. We demand that they “speak American,” despite the fact that the language of this nation has always been in flux -- and the United States was populated by “illegal immigrants” who took over and destroyed the native peoples who lived here.
The truth is, we’re not there yet. In 1963, Dr. King proclaimed that “the Negro” was still not free, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While things have improved in the 45 years since King’s great speech, racism and oppression remain. And the truth is, as Gandhi once said, that “No one is free when others are oppressed.”
We are called to care about these things. Jesus calls us to reach out to the oppressed, and our job as Christians is not done when there remain oppressed people in the world. We need, also, to work on our own prejudices, which we all have.
May we share Martin Luther King’s dream. May we hear the word of God through the book of Exodus: “I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.” Let us hear the words of St. Paul: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
In the words of Dr. King:
“When...we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing.”
Now let us pray.
Exodus 6:1-13; 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 27
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 20 January, 2008
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Martin Luther King, Jr. Observance
 In Jewish tradition, Passover is the holiday that marks the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. It is a celebration of freedom marked, among other things, by a special meal called a Seder. (You may remember that the Last Supper, which we Christians celebrate, was a Passover Seder meal.) Passover is one of the most important, most joyful Jewish holidays.
Several weeks ago Ben and I watched a show on PBS about Jews in America. One segment of the show was about Jews during the American Civil War, and a certain Jew named Judah Benjamin was noted. He was somewhat of a rarity among Jews, in that he was a staunch Confederate and had, in fact, a high- ranking role in the Confederacy. Not surprisingly, he was a slave owner. The program noted that when he and his family would sit down to their Passover meal, they would be served by slaves. The irony of this is mind-boggling. He had slaves serving him a meal that was meant to be a celebration of an end to slavery.
Of course, Judah Benjamin was in good company as a Southern slave owner. He was, perhaps, unusual because he was a Jewish leader in the Confederacy, but slavery was a way of life. Wealthy landowners were expected to have slaves. That was that.
Slavery is assumed throughout much of our Bible too. While the Exodus is a central story of liberation, there are other portions of the Old Testament that mention slavery off-handedly, and Jesus sometimes uses the example of slaves in his teachings -- and doesn’t just speak against slavery. Indeed, the prevalence of slavery in our scriptures caused some people to believe that modern (19th century) slavery was justified and even God-ordained.
It is my hope that Jews and Christians today are appalled at the notion that human slavery could be remotely acceptable in the eyes of God. Jews -- and we, too, as descendants of the Israelites -- recall our liberation from Egyptian slavery as told in the story of the Exodus, part of which we have heard this morning. Christians proclaim, as we heard in 1 Corinthians this morning, that “there is no longer slave nor free.” Even if we didn’t have these scriptures, we should simply remember Jesus’ command that we are to love one another. Historically, slavery is one of the cruelest, least loving ways to treat one’s neighbors. I’m not even taking into account the torture and physical detention that slavery often involves.
In 2008 we are a long way from the enslavement of Africans by Euro-Americans that occurred through the middle of the 19th century. We’re a long way, too, from Jim Crow laws and the level of racism prevalent in this country before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Still, as we observe the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tomorrow, and as we enter into African American History Month in February, I wonder how far we really have come.
The majority of people who ride the bus in Baltimore are African American. It is not uncommon for me to be the only white person on a crowded bus. I marvel, sometimes, at the knowledge that there was a time only a few short decades ago when I would be expected to sit at the front of the bus while all of the African Americans sat at the back. I think of this sometimes, when I take a seat at the back of the bus. Still, racial tensions abound in Baltimore, and a recent incident on a Baltimore bus is evidence of that. When a young white woman was beaten up by several black teenagers in December, accusations of racism were slung from both sides. The young woman accused the African Americans of refusing to let her sit where she wanted on the bus. The African Americans said she used the “n” word and spat on them. There was talk of calling the incident a hate crime.
I have heard people in this city speak of a neighborhood being “bad” simply because it is populated by African Americans. I have had people say to me, “I’m not a racist” when what they were just telling me certainly sounded like racism. Institutional racism abounds. African Americans continue to be denied the same opportunities as whites, and as a result poverty is rampant in African American communities.
Slavery continues too. Some say that there is more slavery in the world today than there was before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Modern slavery doesn’t usually involve Africans being torn from their homelands and dragged into servitude in the United States. Rather, women and girls from Europe and other places are promised a new life in a new country. Upon arriving in the United States, they find themselves forced into sexual slavery. As slaves they are not only sexually exploited by their “customers” -- they endure horrendous other abuses, including being chained in cages.
We hear from time to time about cheap American products being made by slave labor in third world countries. Even if they are not technically “enslaved,” people work for pennies a day in deplorable conditions so that wealthy Americans (and we are all wealthy by their standards) can have cheap goods.
Pieces of Martin Luther King’s “dream” have come to pass. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King expressed hope that one day his children would live in a nation where they were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Today Baltimore city has an African American mayor, and an African American man is doing well in the Presidential race. People of color hold high positions in both public and private life.
Still, King’s dream is far from fully realized. And, of course, African Americans are not the only ones judged by their external appearance. After September 11th a seminary professor of mine (he happened to be African American) admitted that he was nervous when he saw people of Middle Eastern descent standing next to him in the security line at the airport. He knew it was wrong to be afraid of them solely because of their dark skin and dress (goodness knows he had experienced such prejudice), but his knee jerk reaction was to fear them. He is not alone by far, and many people who see a Middle Easterner and think “terrorist” believe they are perfectly justified in their assumptions.
Illegal immigration is a particularly hot topic these days, and the furor over it has led to other forms of prejudice. When we hear a person speaking Spanish or see someone who “looks Hispanic,” we immediately wonder if they are “an illegal.” We forget the fact that many, many Latinos in this country came here legally, and indeed, some have been here for generations. We demand that they “speak American,” despite the fact that the language of this nation has always been in flux -- and the United States was populated by “illegal immigrants” who took over and destroyed the native peoples who lived here.
The truth is, we’re not there yet. In 1963, Dr. King proclaimed that “the Negro” was still not free, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While things have improved in the 45 years since King’s great speech, racism and oppression remain. And the truth is, as Gandhi once said, that “No one is free when others are oppressed.”
We are called to care about these things. Jesus calls us to reach out to the oppressed, and our job as Christians is not done when there remain oppressed people in the world. We need, also, to work on our own prejudices, which we all have.
May we share Martin Luther King’s dream. May we hear the word of God through the book of Exodus: “I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.” Let us hear the words of St. Paul: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
In the words of Dr. King:
“When...we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing.”
Now let us pray.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Sermon 01/06/08 (Matthew 2:1-12)
“The Magi in the Midst of the Terrible Twos”
Matthew 2:1-12
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 6 January, 2008
Epiphany Sunday
When my cousin Konnor was two, he looked like an angel. He still has the blond curls that frame his pink cheeks, and he has a smile that will absolutely melt your heart. One would not be surprised to see little wings pushing forth from his shoulders. But... at the age of two he could throw tantrums with the best of them! I once saw him head-butt his sturdily-built father so hard that his dad stumbled backwards a few steps. ... And the perceptible grin on my baby cousin’s face surely gave “the terrible twos” their name. He was (and is) full of love, folding his little hands with his mother to say his bedtime prayers. He was (and is) full of joy. But he was also full of the mischief, the temper tantrums, and the hard work that every two year old creates.
Konnor’s little sister is now two, and it seems she is every bit as precocious as her big brother. I haven’t seen her since she was a baby, but I’ve been told she is absolutely beautiful. Those same blonde curls frame her chubby, rosy, cheeks, and just like her brother, one wouldn’t be surprised to see angel’s wings poking out from her shoulders. That said, she is still two. Over the Christmas holiday, my parents visited our cousins, and the phone was passed around to everyone so they could talk to me. While I was talking with my mother, little Samantha apparently walked up to her and showed her a book she had. My mother interrupted our conversation briefly to say, “Oh, you have a book, Samantha,” then “Would you like to say hi to your cousin on the phone?” Samantha answered with an audible, two-year-old “No!”
Now, as you play with those sweet, and messy, and temperamental images in your head -- as you remember all the two-year-olds you have known -- let me remind you of something. In this morning’s scripture lesson we find a seemingly solemn story about the wise men encountering Jesus for the first time. We call today the celebration of the Epiphany, when Jesus was revealed as someone truly holy, as the Light of the World, as God. We know this story well, from all of the solemn nativity scenes we have seen, from the songs we sing about those wise men, and from our own roaming imaginations, and our continued faith that Jesus is the Holy One, our Lord.
But do you know how old Jesus was at the time of the Epiphany, at the time the wise men visited and saw him as Lord? Despite the appearance of those wise men beside the manger in many nativity scenes, scholars estimate that Jesus was approximately how old?! Two! He was around two years old! He was the same age as my rambunctious, adorable, temperamental, joyful, head-butting little cousins!
If you believe every piece of art ever made showing Jesus as a young child, you will believe that he certainly looked angelic. Although it is very unlikely that he had the blond curls of my two Scandinavian cousins, his face looked just as sweet, and one would not be surprised to see little wings poking from his shoulders, just like I have imagined with Konnor and Samantha. That said, nearly every piece of art I have ever seen depicting the young Jesus shows a solemn child with a serious, adult-like face. Nothing of the giggling, spaghetti-sauce covered face, or the curious, but occasionally screaming face of my young cousins. Jesus’ face has undoubtedly been pictured in such a serious light out of an insistence that someone as holy as God surely would not make a mess with his food or throw two-year-old temper tantrums!
But is this the truth? Would the wise men who visited Jesus as a toddler have found a serious, grown-up man who was two years old only in age?! I don’t think such a belief is necessary or even helpful in our faith that Jesus and God are One.
So, what does it mean if we believe that the wise men really did find themselves in the presence of a two-year-old that day? What does it mean if we believe that God was revealed in the person of a two-year-old child, going through everything that normal two-year-olds do?
We are taught that Jesus was without sin, so perhaps he never head-butted Joseph then grinned about it, and perhaps he never used the word “No!” in quite the same way that other two-year-olds do. But we are also taught that Jesus was both God and human, and that he was human in every other way aside from the capacity to commit sin. This means that, as a two-year-old child, he likely had just as many temper tantrums, made every bit as many messes, caused his parents to giggle, and probably get exasperated with him, every bit as much as every other two-year-old does. You may believe that Jesus was without sin, but are the foibles of a two-year-old -- the tantrums, the messes, etc. -- really sin? The child is just learning how to be a person! And if those “terrible twos” are not sin, then we can believe that Jesus, the truly divine but also truly human One, went through them just like every other child.
What does it mean that the wise men saw God in the presence of those “Terrible Twos”? It means, first-off, that children, who are so often taught to be “seen but not heard” in church, should be the honored ones in our congregations. We are told that later in his life, Jesus welcomed young children when the adults wanted to shoo them away. This story of the wise men finding God in the presence of a two-year-old reinforces that lesson: children are holy, and should be welcomed in our midst.
We might not have many children around at St. Mark’s right now, but in a few months Melissa will have a baby. That baby should be welcomed here, screams and all. When they are able, Marie and Susie bring Sean. He should be welcomed with open arms. Our doors should be open to any other children who pass our way as well.
The wise men experiencing the Epiphany in the midst of a “terrible two-year-old” teaches us also that God is about joy, is about laughter, is about sweetness and love. It teaches us that God will be present in the middle of the messes, the temper tantrums, the silliness that we all do. And, perhaps most importantly, the belief that God was revealed in the body of a two-year-old teaches us that God is not an über-holy adult-like parent who lives at the top of a pedestal. Our God is not an unreachable, unavailable, unknowable god. Rather, God is at our level. God is truly human. God is that two-year-old. God is knowable, because God took human form -- even the human form of a silly, messy, two-year-old.
The next time you giggle, or sigh in exasperation, at the antics of a two-year-old, remember that it was in such a person that God was revealed to those wise men. Now let us pray.
Matthew 2:1-12
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 6 January, 2008
Epiphany Sunday
When my cousin Konnor was two, he looked like an angel. He still has the blond curls that frame his pink cheeks, and he has a smile that will absolutely melt your heart. One would not be surprised to see little wings pushing forth from his shoulders. But... at the age of two he could throw tantrums with the best of them! I once saw him head-butt his sturdily-built father so hard that his dad stumbled backwards a few steps. ... And the perceptible grin on my baby cousin’s face surely gave “the terrible twos” their name. He was (and is) full of love, folding his little hands with his mother to say his bedtime prayers. He was (and is) full of joy. But he was also full of the mischief, the temper tantrums, and the hard work that every two year old creates.
Konnor’s little sister is now two, and it seems she is every bit as precocious as her big brother. I haven’t seen her since she was a baby, but I’ve been told she is absolutely beautiful. Those same blonde curls frame her chubby, rosy, cheeks, and just like her brother, one wouldn’t be surprised to see angel’s wings poking out from her shoulders. That said, she is still two. Over the Christmas holiday, my parents visited our cousins, and the phone was passed around to everyone so they could talk to me. While I was talking with my mother, little Samantha apparently walked up to her and showed her a book she had. My mother interrupted our conversation briefly to say, “Oh, you have a book, Samantha,” then “Would you like to say hi to your cousin on the phone?” Samantha answered with an audible, two-year-old “No!”
Now, as you play with those sweet, and messy, and temperamental images in your head -- as you remember all the two-year-olds you have known -- let me remind you of something. In this morning’s scripture lesson we find a seemingly solemn story about the wise men encountering Jesus for the first time. We call today the celebration of the Epiphany, when Jesus was revealed as someone truly holy, as the Light of the World, as God. We know this story well, from all of the solemn nativity scenes we have seen, from the songs we sing about those wise men, and from our own roaming imaginations, and our continued faith that Jesus is the Holy One, our Lord.
But do you know how old Jesus was at the time of the Epiphany, at the time the wise men visited and saw him as Lord? Despite the appearance of those wise men beside the manger in many nativity scenes, scholars estimate that Jesus was approximately how old?! Two! He was around two years old! He was the same age as my rambunctious, adorable, temperamental, joyful, head-butting little cousins!
If you believe every piece of art ever made showing Jesus as a young child, you will believe that he certainly looked angelic. Although it is very unlikely that he had the blond curls of my two Scandinavian cousins, his face looked just as sweet, and one would not be surprised to see little wings poking from his shoulders, just like I have imagined with Konnor and Samantha. That said, nearly every piece of art I have ever seen depicting the young Jesus shows a solemn child with a serious, adult-like face. Nothing of the giggling, spaghetti-sauce covered face, or the curious, but occasionally screaming face of my young cousins. Jesus’ face has undoubtedly been pictured in such a serious light out of an insistence that someone as holy as God surely would not make a mess with his food or throw two-year-old temper tantrums!
But is this the truth? Would the wise men who visited Jesus as a toddler have found a serious, grown-up man who was two years old only in age?! I don’t think such a belief is necessary or even helpful in our faith that Jesus and God are One.
So, what does it mean if we believe that the wise men really did find themselves in the presence of a two-year-old that day? What does it mean if we believe that God was revealed in the person of a two-year-old child, going through everything that normal two-year-olds do?
We are taught that Jesus was without sin, so perhaps he never head-butted Joseph then grinned about it, and perhaps he never used the word “No!” in quite the same way that other two-year-olds do. But we are also taught that Jesus was both God and human, and that he was human in every other way aside from the capacity to commit sin. This means that, as a two-year-old child, he likely had just as many temper tantrums, made every bit as many messes, caused his parents to giggle, and probably get exasperated with him, every bit as much as every other two-year-old does. You may believe that Jesus was without sin, but are the foibles of a two-year-old -- the tantrums, the messes, etc. -- really sin? The child is just learning how to be a person! And if those “terrible twos” are not sin, then we can believe that Jesus, the truly divine but also truly human One, went through them just like every other child.
What does it mean that the wise men saw God in the presence of those “Terrible Twos”? It means, first-off, that children, who are so often taught to be “seen but not heard” in church, should be the honored ones in our congregations. We are told that later in his life, Jesus welcomed young children when the adults wanted to shoo them away. This story of the wise men finding God in the presence of a two-year-old reinforces that lesson: children are holy, and should be welcomed in our midst.
We might not have many children around at St. Mark’s right now, but in a few months Melissa will have a baby. That baby should be welcomed here, screams and all. When they are able, Marie and Susie bring Sean. He should be welcomed with open arms. Our doors should be open to any other children who pass our way as well.
The wise men experiencing the Epiphany in the midst of a “terrible two-year-old” teaches us also that God is about joy, is about laughter, is about sweetness and love. It teaches us that God will be present in the middle of the messes, the temper tantrums, the silliness that we all do. And, perhaps most importantly, the belief that God was revealed in the body of a two-year-old teaches us that God is not an über-holy adult-like parent who lives at the top of a pedestal. Our God is not an unreachable, unavailable, unknowable god. Rather, God is at our level. God is truly human. God is that two-year-old. God is knowable, because God took human form -- even the human form of a silly, messy, two-year-old.
The next time you giggle, or sigh in exasperation, at the antics of a two-year-old, remember that it was in such a person that God was revealed to those wise men. Now let us pray.
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