Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

January 2017 "New Year, New Dawnings"

Dear Church,

New Year's Eve and Day always brings much in the way of pomp, circumstance, and tradition with it: the making of resolutions, the watching of the Times Square ball, the singing of Auld Lang Syne, and much more. It is a holiday of celebration, of renewal, and of hope for the future.

It feels appropriate, then, that I would begin my sabbatical on the dawn after New Year's Day, for those are indeed my own hopes for my three months away on study leave: to celebrate what we have done, to find sources of renewal for myself, and to plan for the next stage of our future.

This, then, is a (temporary!) good bye to all of you—I will begin my sabbatical on Monday, January 2, and I will be away for exactly three months. I will be back in the office on Monday, April 3, and I will return to preaching and worship leadership on Palm Sunday, April 9. I am very grateful for the chance to take a sabbatical, and to the church for including the contingency for a sabbatical in my contract when I first arrived here as your pastor over five years ago.

I must confess to you that the sabbatical comes at a very needed time for me. 2016 has left me emotionally and spiritually drained--in addition to losing several beloved members of our congregation over the past few years, I've felt enormously grieved by the poverties and obstacles faced not only by many folks right here in Longview, but around the entire world, from Aleppo to Berlin and all points in between. So first and foremost, I am hoping and praying to find some renewal and restoration for my spirit during my time away.

I am also hoping to be able to spend some time working on the future. I already have a pair of sermon series planned for after I return in April, but I also would like to use my work on my doctoral thesis as a chance to reflect on what my ministry here should look like--what I have learned so far from five-plus years here already, and how I can take what I have learned and more deliberately put it into action.

During these three months, the life of the church will be a little different. I will not be involved in the day-to-day running of the church office, and I will not be available for those regular day-in, day-out things that I usually do as your pastor. I won't be around on Sundays or at Tuesday Bible study. I won't be sitting in on Monday morning staff meetings with Charlotte and Jamie. And I won't be making trips over to St. John hospital for pastoral care.

That does not mean you will not hear from me—I will be updating my blog throughout my sabbatical to let all of you know what I am up to, and you will still hear from me in this newsletter column each month, just like usual. And though I will not be physically present at the church, please know that all of you will be spiritually present in my prayers, just as you always are and just as I always hope that I am in your prayers.

I know that while I am away, you will be in good hands--we have some very talented guest preachers lined up, and both the board of directors and the elders have stepped up to be responsive to some of the things that I would ordinarily address in the course of my ordinary workdays. I will still miss all of you, though, and I look forward to my return to the office in April!

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

Christmas Day Sermon: "Joy to the World"

Matthew 1:18-25

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 Joseph her husband was a righteous man. Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly. 20 As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled: 23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Emmanuel means “God with us.”) 24 When Joseph woke up, he did just as an angel from God commanded and took Mary as his wife. 25 But he didn’t have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son. Joseph called him Jesus. (Common English Bible)

“The First Christmas: Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Five

One of the things I associate Christmas the most with, for better and for worse, is the music. Sometimes, it really does feel magical to hear a Christmas song played a way that I’ve never heard it, and other times, when I’m hearing some hackneyed, tired rearrangement of Jingle Bell Rock, I want to pull my nonexistent hair out. But most days, it is capable of bringing to me—and to the world—joy.

But the music makes up so much of this season for me, and so much of my life. I listen to the jazz radio station to and from work most days. I still keep an extensive collection of CD’s for when I’m not in the mood for jazz. And I still end up moved by stories like this one from the Washington Post, which conveys the story of a homeless man in Montreal, Canada, named Mark Landry who is a street musician who plays the violin quite beautifully—at least, he did until his violin was stolen, and he turned to his faith in God to find a new one.

This is not nothing—this isn’t someone asking for something utterly superficial. The violin represented Mark’s livelihood. But then Jean Dupre, the CEO of the Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra, heard about Mark’s predicament, and I’ll let the Post take it from there:

The Montreal man doesn’t have much in terms of material things. He lives on the streets, but he brightens many commuters’ days with his violin, which he’s been playing since he was 17 years old, in Metro stations around the city. That small piece of hardwood and taut strings also kept him fed, as he used it to busk during rush hour…

Landry prayed, convinced in his faith that God would deliver him a new instrument.

“God’s gonna give me a new one,” Landry said. Otherwise he would “go through a lower level of poverty, which is to live without my violin.”

He told Dupre that he was lost without his instrument.

“I talked to God this morning and said I cannot live without my violin,” Landry told him…

Tuesday afternoon, Dupre, joined by a CBC news crew, delivered the violin to Landry. The resulting video shows the bearded man’s eyes light up as he rips off his red-and-black checkered jacket to free his arms and begin playing.

“Immediately when I gave him the violin, he opened the case and said, ‘God listened to me,’” Dupre said. “He just grabbed the instrument right at that exact moment and began playing.”

There is joy to behold in that story, but that joy comes as a direct result of human participation—or of God participating through us. We pray to God, but, as the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard is quick to point out, prayer is meant to change us, not God, and then we in turn change the world!

This has a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins today, on Christmas Day, and extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.

Advent was meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we revisited the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.

We end this sermon series, then, one day after the last day of Advent and on the first day of Christmas, with an excerpt from the book’s final chapter, aptly titled “Joy to the World:”

Advent and Christmas are about a new world…How will this transformation of the world come about? To say the obvious, it has not yet happened, despite the passage of two thousand years…Does this mean that the Christmas stories are a pipe dream? That they (and the New Testament as a whole) are another example of failed eschatology, of hope becoming hopeless…?

We who have seen the star and hear the angels sing are called to participate in the new birth and new world proclaimed by these stories…

The birth stories are not a pipe dream, but a proclamation that what we see revealed in Jesus is the way—the way to a different kind of life and a different future. Both personal and political transformation, both the eschatology of rebirth and the eschatology of a new world, require our participation. God will not change us as individuals without our participation, and God will not change the world without our participation…

Jesus is already the light in the darkness for those who follow Him. Conceived by the Spirit and christened as Son of God by the community that grew up around Him, He is, for Christians, Emmanuel: “God is with us.”

God is with us. Today, we celebrate that at long last, God is indeed with us.

When it feels like we have been abandoned, when we have had something most precious taken from us, like Mr. Landry, or when we feel like we ourselves are that precious thing that has been taken, we are reminded on this day that one day, over two thousand years ago, God decided that it was finally time to become flesh and bone and blood in order to speak to us, minister to us, and save us in a way never quite done before.

And truthfully, we don’t know for sure if that grand adventure began on December 25. We celebrate it on this day, but neither Matthew nor Luke say that this was the day. We rejoice in it, though, because we know that regardless of the day, God worked within us and upon this earth in a brand new way in sending to us, as the angels in Luke said, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

It is the prophecy in Matthew, though, which Borg and Crossan refer to here, and it comes from the seventh chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah: “Look, a virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”

God is with us. What a revolutionary thing to say to a people who have felt so trodden upon!

Because when we do feel abandoned, when we do feel bereft…well, part of that feeling of loneliness is a feeling that maybe God is not with you after all.

But Christmas changes all of that. Forever.

And for that, we say joy to the world. We say that the Lord has come. But when we say those things, we are saying something very particular, and very special: that not only are we meant to be changed by what has taken place in Bethlehem, but that the world is meant to be changed by what has taken place in Bethlehem.

It does us no good to keep that joy for ourselves. The carol does not go, “Joy to the church…” It does not go, “Joy to the United States…” It goes, “Joy to the world.”

We’re taught that this world is only a temporary home, that we’re just passersby here, and yet, joy is meant for this world. Joy is a part of God’s design and wish for this world. Joy is a part of what should be our experience of this world.

I know that were I in Mark Landry’s shoes, I might well find joy hard to come by. I could easily wallow in self-pity and resentment at being shelterless and at losing one of the dearest possessions I had.

He did not. He trusted in God, and acted with great joy when that trust was rewarded.

So this Christmas, keep your trust and faith in God, however hard it may be for you to do so.

And when God does appear in your midst, when you do indeed believe that Emmanuel is here, that God has come and is with you, then it is right for you to react with great joy.

Earth, receive your king! Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

December 25, 2016

Christmas Eve Sermon: "And on Earth, Peace"

Luke 2:1-20

In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. 2 This first enrollment occurred when Quirinius governed Syria. 3 Everyone went to their own cities to be enrolled. 4 Since Joseph belonged to David’s house and family line, he went up from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to David’s city, called Bethlehem, in Judea. 5 He went to be enrolled together with Mary, who was promised to him in marriage and who was pregnant. 6 While they were there, the time came for Mary to have her baby. 7 She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the guestroom.

8 Nearby shepherds were living in the fields, guarding their sheep at night. 9 The Lord’s angel stood before them, the Lord’s glory shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you—wonderful, joyous news for all people. 11 Your savior is born today in David’s city. He is Christ the Lord. 12 This is a sign for you: you will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger.” 13 Suddenly a great assembly of the heavenly forces was with the angel praising God. They said, 14 “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

15 When the angels returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go right now to Bethlehem and see what’s happened. Let’s confirm what the Lord has revealed to us.” 16 They went quickly and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they reported what they had been told about this child. 18 Everyone who heard it was amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 Mary committed these things to memory and considered them carefully. 20 The shepherds returned home, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. Everything happened just as they had been told. (Common English Bible)

Christmas Eve 2016

So much of what I do in performing weddings is simply preparing the couple emotionally and mentally for the big day—not just spiritually preparing them. It’s almost like I’m their coach—I give them pointers on how to make their wedding the best for them, I offer suggestions of what works and what doesn’t, and I also always prepare them for the fact that, true to Murphy’s law, something will always, always go wrong.

Sometimes, that thing which goes wrong is a relatively simple fix, like, say, the pastor forgetting to bring the marriage license (yes, I have done this)—you just get everyone together later and sign it.

But sometimes, the snafu is a bit bigger—like a wedding dress that breaks apart on the day of your wedding, which happened to a bride in Canada named Jo Du. But then, well, fate intervened in a truly inspiring way, as Jo’s wedding photographer, Lindsay Coulter, conveyed on her Facebook page:

The neighbor living next door to the house they had rented for the wedding had his garage door open…so I suggested they run over and ask if he had pliers. One of the bridesmaids quickly went over and spoke with the neighbor.

She came back with a handful of tools and some interesting information: the next door neighbor was hosting a family of Syrian refugees and the father was a master tailor and would be happy to help if we weren’t successful. After a few minutes of further attempts there was a knock on the door and the neighbor along with the tailor and his son arrived to help, sewing kit in tow…they had just moved to Canada four days ago. They didn’t speak a word of English, and had been communicating by using Google Translate…

Every weekend I take photos of people on the happiest days of their lives, and today one man who has seen some of the worst things our world has to offer came to the rescue…I’m in awe of the families who have welcomed these strangers in to their homes and lives, and I’m inspired by the resilience of the Syrian people.

I must confess that Syria has been on my heart of late as reports came in of the civilian inhabitants of Aleppo posting online videos of what they feared might be their very last public statements ever as the government forces of Bashar al-Assad closed in around the city and began summarily executing dozens of civilians.

For all of this is happening just days before we claim the birthday of a Savior whom is also known as the Prince of Peace, of whom the angels say here in Luke 2, “and on Earth, peace among those whom He favors.”

Perhaps it might be simple enough to say that God and Christ do not favor a violent strongman such as Bashar al-Assad, and fair enough, but what of the civilians whom Assad is killing? What of their favor with the divine?

The truth is, we should see Christ in this world already, long before He arrives on Christmas Day, because Christ leaves the world the exact same way many of the people in Syria have—by being murdered by a brutal and merciless ideology of oppression. It is the hurt that God sees in the world and the hurt that God sends Jesus neck-deep into in order to give us the means to fix for good.

Yet, we still have not. The pain and hurt the world is in remains the one great undone task of the church—especially when we ourselves are at times guilty for some of that hurt and that pain.

None of this I say to you to try to take away from the Christmas story, but in fact, I say it to hopefully add clarity to the Christmas story. It was not a feel-good moment for Joseph and for Mary to have to travel across the country with her nine months pregnant at the beck and call of the occupying empire that told them to do so, and it was certainly not a feel-good moment for them when she was forced to give birth in a barn because there was no room for them at the guesthouse.

In other words: we have made Christmas into a feel-good moment, and, I suppose, good for us for having done so. But that isn’t what the original Christmas was. It has never been what the original Christmas was.

But the original Christmas was, in the midst of that pain and humiliation and fear, the Good News that born unto us, unto you, this day, in the city of David, is a Savior, and that because of Him, there may yet again one day be peace on earth. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or the next day, but one day. That is the hope that God gives us to hang our hat on, and the hope that we must abide by still.

For God sees the hurt and trouble the world is in, and that the Israelites are in, having been violently handed over from one foreign empire to another for 600 or so of the past 700-some years, and not only does God do the right thing, God does the *most* right thing possible: God gives us this child, God’s Son, divinity made flesh. God could not possibly have done more right by us in this gift of a newborn Savior.

And so we, in turn, are meant not just to do right by God, but to do the most right by God and, by extension, the most right by one another as well. By a bride, by a refugee tailor, by each of us. All.

So when you return home from here, as you go from the Lord’s house back to your own house, and as you gather around the tree or the fireplace with your families and friends and loved ones, please lend an ear to what these angels are saying in the most fleeting of moments between their entry into earth and their return into heaven: “Glory to God in the highest, and upon earth, peace among those whom God favors.”

And whom does God favor? Most likely, the dregs of the world. Not the kings and men of power, for God did not come to earth as one of those, but as a humble child born of humble parents, cast out to the margins of society. And if we make haste to walk alongside them, then, we pray as Christians, we too, like Mary, might find favor with God ourselves.

For Luke then continues: “When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us. So they went with haste…’”

And so should we all upon having heard the Good News that not just in heaven but also on earth that there is peace among those whom God blesses. Alongside the shepherds now, and the wise men to come twelve days later, let us go with haste in the name of peace to the manger in Bethlehem to ask what centuries of Christians have asked before us: “Newborn Christ, here I am. What is it you want me to do?”

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

December 24, 2016

This Week's Sermon: "The Fulfillment of Prophecy"

John 1:15-18

15 John testified about him, crying out, “This is the one of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.’”

16 From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace; 

17 as the Law was given through Moses, so grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ. 

18 No one has ever seen God. God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known. (Common English Bible)

“The First Christmas: Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Four

I remember as a kid that meeting your sports heroes was just about the most amazing thing that could happen, right after an all-day Power Rangers marathon on television or pizza day at the school cafeteria. It probably would have taken on even more meaning to me if I were not raised in the comfortable circumstances that I was, but was instead this little boy on the very margins of the world as an exile who idolized Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, whom Sports Illustrated writes about here:

Six-year-old Murtaza Ahmadi, an Afghan boy who rose to online fame by wearing a makeshift Lionel Messi jersey made from a plastic bag, finally met the Barcelona star after months of waiting. After a meeting was set back in February, and Messi sent along some signed jerseys and a signed ball, the boy was forced into exile in May amid threats from the Taliban. He emerged on Tuesday, alive and well, in the arms of his hero.

It is a heartwarming story, and yet even behind it, there are shadows that give the adult version of me pause. Messi is accused of tax evasion in Spain, where he plays his club soccer. The event was covered by the Qatari organization dedicated to putting on the 2022 World Cup, a tournament almost certainly awarded to them by bribing the FIFA executives who voted on where to host it.

As an adult, I have long since learned that my fellow adults will often let me down—and that I will often let myself down. It is why we need a fulfillment of prophecy like Jesus, who, as John writes here in John 1, provides for us “grace upon grace.”

This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins on Christmas day and extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.

Advent is meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we will be revisiting the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.

We began this series three weeks ago with an excerpt from the chapter “An Angel Comes to Mary,” and then we turned to a passage from the book’s next chapter, “In David’s City of Bethlehem.” Last week, we arrived at the next chapter, entitled “Light Against the Darkness,” and this week we come to the chapter entitled “Jesus as the Fulfillment of Prophecy,” which ends thusly:

(Jesus) is, according to Matthew and Luke (and the rest of the New Testament) the completion of the Law and the Prophets. He is their crystallization, their expression in an embodied life. He decisively reveals and incarnates the passion of God as disclosed in the Law and the Prophets—the promise and hope for a very different kind of world from the world of Pharaoh and Caesar, the world of domination and empire.

That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, is not a fact to be proved, as if it could be the logical conclusion of a syllogism based on the argument from prophecy. Rather, to call Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, Lord, and Savior, as the Christmas stories do, is a confession of commitment, allegiance, and loyalty. To do so means: I see in this person the anointed one of God, the decisive disclosure of God—of what can be seen of God in a human life, the fulfillment of Israel’s deepest yearnings, the one who reveals God’s dream for the world. This is what it means to call Him Emmanuel and to affirm that Emmanuel has come.

For Borg and Crossan, the truth of Jesus is not something that can be laid out in a logical or mathematical proof, it is something that must be experienced and understood in one’s bones before they say yes to God in a way that is indeed a confession of commitment and loyalty to the divine.

But it is a confession we ought to be able to make freely, willingly, and gladly precisely because we do know that our human heroes are, in the end, simply humans with all the attendant foibles, flaws, and pains that come with that fragile state of being, a state of being so fragile that we do indeed need, as John says here in John 1, grace upon grace from the fullness of God.

And betwixt God's fullness and our hollowness, there arrives Jesus, the fulfillment of all our wildest expectations in our souls.

We have our heroes, and it is right that we should have them. They light the way for us, show us the way forward in how to be better persons and a better people.

But they are not perfect. Nor are they are not the fulfillment of prophecy that Jesus was and is. Even our greatest heroes cannot, and would not, aspire to the mantle of godhood. When Emmanuel has come, we mean a very specific and special thing, that it is Jesus who has come to earth and will come to earth again.

Who are we, compared to such goodness and greatness as that? It is so very easy as a pastor but honestly, as any Christian who has been going to church for years, for decades, to say that we know what and who Emmanuel does indeed look like, and of course it is like those we most admire for their deeds, or their politics, or their stories.

We may see Jesus in our neighbors, we may see God in the stranger’s face, and it is right that we should do so. After all, God made us in God’s own image in Genesis 1. But we cannot allow that good nature to turn into us forming an Emmanuel in our image, rather than the other way around.

For Emmanuel represents not just a fulfillment of small slivers of prophecy, of a verse here and a verse there, no, Emmanuel represents the fulfillment of an entire history of prophecy, of centuries of a people waiting for and longing for a Savior in the truest sense of the title—someone who would save them, and save us.

That is a God-sized task, to save an entire world. And paradoxically, that God-sized spirit will have to take the form of a tiny baby first, who only after years of nurture will grow into the Lord we seek.

We’re one week away from Bethlehem, brothers and sisters. Stay devoted. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

December 18, 2016

The Jesus We Create

In my children's sermons this month, I've been teaching them about the nativity scene, since this Sunday they'll be putting on their annual Christmas pageant (you know, the one that is always dripping with cuteness and is about as accurate and true to history as a Hollywood script). Despite the artistic liberties that we routinely take with the nativity scene in order to portray it in our churches, on our mantels, and in our front yards, it remains a means of teaching our kids, and then decades later, their kids, about the Christmas story in a way that is tangible and concrete--no small thing when we're talking about a birth that took place over 2,000 years ago.

And I love nativity scenes, even as I sometimes poke fun at them--a few years ago, I used my chess pieces to create a nativity scene that received equal measures laughter and good-natured mocking on Facebook, as apparently I couldn't be bothered to go out and get, you know, an actual nativity set (an oversight my parents promptly rectified by sending me a nice olive wood nativity set that now sits on my desk in my church office).

All of these Christs are made by hand--and our hands, not God's. Which means we are apt to make these Christs in our image rather than the other way around. The kid who plays Jesus in the nativity scene looks like us because parents often pass physical characteristics onto their kids. The actor/underwear model who plays Jesus in a Passion film looks like us, only with longer hair, because we're the ones who are casting him, directing him, and paying our money to see him perform.

Christmas, a joyous time that it might otherwise be, has in truth become a time of irony for me as a I realize just how much we have made Jesus into our image rather than the other way around--and in so doing, created our own form of idolatry. We are not so much following a Jesus as much as we are following an idealized version of ourselves.

But does this idealized version of ourselves actually advocate on behalf of Syrian refugees, or does it repeat the xenophobic platitudes of our president-elect and is only now, with civilians being summarily executed by pro-government forces, getting on the #Pray4Aleppo train, as though a prayer now will excuse their apathy then?

Does this idealized version of ourselves really underscore the radical nature of the Christmas story, of a nine-months-pregnant teenager giving birth in a stable full of dirt and animal shit, or does it simply give us the warm fuzzies that a nice piece of gingerbread or a cup of egg nog could just as easily do this time of year?

Part of us making Jesus into our image, rather than the other way around, is not just making Him to look like us, it is to cut Him down to size--to exactly our size, in fact--rather than the cosmic-sized Savior that He is and continues to be.

I honestly wonder if part of the reason why Christmas seems to be a bigger deal at times than Easter (it's not like Easter themed-commercials hit the airwaves before Ash Wednesday, after all) is precisely because we actually prefer our Jesus small, infantile, and non-threatening.

Indeed, as one of the verses in a Away in a Manger goes, "The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes/The little lord Jesus, no crying he makes."

But we have little babies in my congregation who cry out, and to me, that is the true miracle--that they have voice, that they are known, and that they refuse to be invisible in this world.

Dammit, I want my little lord Jesus to cry out. I *need* Him to cry out. I need to know that He does indeed sit on the throne, see the ill that is happening in our broken world, and calls us to do something about it.

So instead of a nativity scene or a baby Jesus, today's post has the image of Christ the Pantokrator--which, in Greek, literally means Christ the All-Powerful or Christ the Omnipotent.

As difficult as it is for me to subscribe to the notion of an omnipotent Christ--He was also human after all--it is a damn sight more comforting to me this Christmas.

If a baby who miraculously does not cry is what brings you to the manger this Christmas, then by all means, let Him call you forth. But for this Christmas, I need a Savior who cries out. I need a Messiah who is indeed Lord. And I need a Christ whose miracle is not the absence of crying, but who is in fact quite capable of it--for Syria, for Newtown on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, and for all of us who long in our bones for a better world.

We're 11 days away from Bethlehem, brothers and sisters. Stay devoted.

Vancouver, Washington
December 14, 2016

This Week's Sermon: "Light Against the Darkness"

John 1:1-5

1 In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. 

2 The Word was with God in the beginning. 

3 Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being. What came into being 4 through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. 

5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light. (Common English Bible)

“The First Christmas: Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Three

This story feels personal to me, even if, on paper, you might tell me that it wouldn’t or shouldn’t.

A couple of weeks ago, a charter plane carrying the Chapeconese soccer team from Brazil was en route to Colombia for a championship match in what is called the Copa Sudamericana, a continental championship tournament waged between clubs from countries across South America. The plane ran out of gas and crashed, killing 71 of 77 occupants, including almost all of the players and journalists covering the team, and all of the coaching staff.

“Chape” were a beloved club by their town—imagine if this had happened to, say, the Seahawks or the Mariners, and you get the idea—and the tributes from around the soccer world have been pouring in over the past two weeks. Minutes of silence, black armbands, and jersey badges were among the most common, but the most substantive have come from the club slated to be Chapeconese’s opponent in the Copa final, Atletico Nacional and their home nation, Colombia. Atletico petitioned CONMEBOL, the continental organization that governs the tournament, to award first place—and the $2 million prize that accompanies it—to Chapeconese, and the Colombian men’s national team will play Brazil’s men’s national team in an exhibition where 100% of the ticket revenues will go towards the families of the players and staff who were killed.

Keep in mind—this is in South America, not North America or Europe. Global poverty looks very different than it does here, and Chape’s players, unlike many pro athletes here, were not on seven-figure wages. Nor, for that matter, were Atletico’s players. That $2 million would have made a huge difference to the financial security of Atletico’s players, but it was Atletico’s players who asked their club to petition to crown Chapeconese as champions. And still more players are offering to play for Chape for free—and clubs are offering their players to Chape for free—in a gesture of real sacrifice.

The charity work of many athletes tends to make headlines during this time of year especially, but in truth, few athletes can claim to have given so much, relative to what they already had, for kindness.

It is the sort of selflessness that does indeed flicker as a light in the darkness: the darkness of winter, of death, of loss—and it continues to give me hope that we are indeed capable of goodness after all.

This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins on Christmas day and extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.

Advent is meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we will be revisiting the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.

We began this series two weeks ago with an excerpt from the chapter “An Angel Comes to Mary,” and last week we turned to a passage from the book’s next chapter, “In David’s City of Bethlehem.” This week, we arrive at the next chapter, entitled “Light Against the Darkness,” which ends thusly:

Matthew and Luke and Revelation make rich use of the archetypal imagery of light. As in the Old Testament, light is associated with the presence of God and God’s glory. Light in the darkness is about illumination and seeing. It includes seeing that imperial theology legitimates darkness and the rule of “the beast.” And light is associated with salvation—about the coming of God’s ideal world, of God’s dream for the earth.

The imagery of light in the darkness has been central to the Christian tradition since its beginning. Ancient Christian prayers as evening falls sound the theme again and again…

Like much of the Bible’s language, the imagery of light is both personal and political. The contrasts between darkness and light are correlated with other central contrasts: bondage and liberation, exile and return, injustice and justice, violence and peace, falsehood and truth, death and life. These contrasts all have a personal meaning as well as a political meaning. It is important to see both. So it is with the stories of Jesus’s birth. They address our personal yearning and the politics of His world and ours. To see only the personal meaning is to miss half of their meaning.

In Genesis 1, it is written that in the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. In God’s infinite wisdom and understanding, God saw that the light was not simply acceptable, or serviceable, or adequate. It. Was. Good.

The goodness of this light shines through here in the words of John 1, as it shines in the darkness, protecting and guiding wayfarers and pilgrims like ourselves along the way to Bethlehem to prepare for the imminent birth of the Messiah. In creating the light, God has created a very real contrast with the uncertainty and insecurity of the cold and the darkness by providing us with both warmth and sight against that cold and that darkness.

As Borg and Crossan are keen to emphasize, this light is not solely personal—though in our cultish allegiance to individualism, we are often quick to make it so by claiming that Jesus is our *personal* Lord and Savior, or asking people if they have a *personal* relationship with Jesus. The light is personal, yes, but it is so much more than that. It is communal, collective, what Borg and Crossan call political. The light, put a different way, is public. It is visible, not just to me or to you, but to humanity, and it is meant to affect humanity on the grandest of scales like liberation from bondage, return from exile, seeking justice from injustice, making peace from violence, finding life in death.

Because it does you or I no good to hold this truth to ourselves, to keep it as our personal truth, oh no. The light of God’s dream for the earth, as Borg and Crossan call it, is far too big for you or for I. This is a light that we can see and stare into but that sees into us, stares into us, and calls us to then help bring about God’s dream for the earth, to bring about God’s world, God’s kingdom, in this earth and in this lifetime.

Perhaps we will never succeed in that endeavor. That may well be the case. But surely if a nine-months-pregnant teenaged girl is going to gather herself up to literally traverse her country for a census, then surely we can put down the stones and spears of our time for a little kingdom building.

That might be the toughest part about this passage from John 1: the light is freely given, but it comes with expectations, expectations that Jesus lists out: to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Your next-door neighbor. Your next-pew-over neighbor. And, sometimes, when nearly their entire soccer team brutally perishes in an airplane crash, the supporter-of-your-rival-for-the-crown neighbor. You love them and you show it. You show it not just with the token gestures of minutes of silence and black armbands, no, you walk the walk with that sort of kingdom-sized love, you sacrifice, you sacrifice millions of dollars and days and weeks of your time to comfort the bereaved, to honor the dead, and to plunge forward together.

That, that is what the light looks like. That is the light I see, shining through in the winter darkness.

And so I stare into the light, waiting to become the light. In that light, I begin to see a flicker of these themes, these virtues, that we speak of during the season of Advent. Hope. Peace. Joy. In the light and the warmth, I can reach out and see, sense, feel the Spirit—that awe-inspiring Spirit that inspires me still even in this imperfect world where seventy souls die in a plane crash simply because they did not take enough fuel on board, where thousands of children die by the hour from starvation and malnutrition, where we kill, and keep killing, one another in the name of resources and religion and retribution, and to see that despair, to feel it and experience it and yet still believe that within this insipid and stupid little world that there is something worth living for, and working for, and above all else worth loving for, that is what the light means.

That is what the light of God means. What it has meant.

And so I stare into the light, waiting to become the light. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

December 11, 2016

This Week's Sermon: "In David's City of Bethlehem"

Micah 5:2-4

As for you, Bethlehem of Ephrathah, though you are the least significant of Judah’s forces, one who is to be a ruler in Israel on my behalf will come out from you. His origin is from remote times, from ancient days. 3 Therefore, he will give them up until the time when she who is in labor gives birth. The rest of his kin will return to the people of Israel. 4 He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. They will dwell secure, because he will surely become great throughout the earth; 5 he will become one of peace. (Common English Bible)

“The First Christmas: Re-creating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week Two

There are lots of charitable gifts made this time of year—including to your church!—in order to ensure that you are eligible for any applicable tax write-offs come next April 15. But one gift in particular—an estate gift—was pretty impressive, as the BBC reports:

A former German soldier has left 384,000 pounds in his will to the Perthshire village where he was held as a prisoner of war during World War Two.

Heinrich Steinmeyer was 19 when he was captured in France and held in the POW camp at Cultybraggan by Comrie. Mr. Steinmeyer, who died in 2013 aged 90, bequeathed the money in return for the kindness he was shown there. He said in his will he wanted the money to benefit the village’s “elderly people.”

Part of his will reads, “Herewith, I would like to express my gratitude to the people of Scotland for the kindness and generosity that I have experienced in Scotland during my imprisonment of war and hereafter.”

Mr. Steinmeyer was held at Cultybraggan along with 4,000 other prisoners. Mr. Steinmeyer died two weeks after Comrie resident George Carson, who became a close friend of the former soldier. Mr. Carson said of Mr. Steinmeyer: “He was a dyed in the wool Nazi and once thought that Hitler was the finest thing ever to happen to Germany. He was captured and taken to Comrie and eventually was allowed to work and was treated with great kindness by people.”

First, let it be said, that considering the nature of the Second World War, I would have just as soon seen this former SS-man’s estate gifted to, say, Yad Vashem or the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but it still is remarkable to end up giving 384,000 pounds to a country you were indoctrinated into believing with your heart, mind, and soul, was your mortal enemy.

That’s nearly $490,000—this person’s entire estate—given out of gratitude for kindness shown to them while they were a prisoner of war. How many such estates do you think are bequeathed out of anger or fear rather than kindness? It is probably safe to say very few, if any at all.

In a time of war—of *the* war for the Greatest Generation, when the Allies had to defeat some of the greatest evil ever to spread across the earth, it was the peace-bearing, peace-giving mentality of kindness towards their enemy that now, over seventy years after that war ended, still bears fruit.

That is a lesson will still need to live by this Christmas.

This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins on Christmas day and extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.

Advent is meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we will be revisiting the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.

We began this series last week with an excerpt from the chapter “An Angel Comes to Mary,” and we now turn to an excerpt from the book’s next chapter, “In David’s City of Bethlehem,” which reads:

But insofar as there was any popular agreement, it was that the Anointed One would be a Davidic Messiah, that is, a new David, who would establish justice and peace for God’s people. His character, activity, and salvific success had to be like David’s…

At least for some Jews at the start of the first century CE (the) understanding of the warrior Davidic Messiah underwent a profound mutation in interaction with their experiences of Jesus Himself. For some Jews, in other words, Jesus was a nonviolent Davidic Messiah. It is necessary, therefore, to accept fully the profound mutation that Davidic messianism underwent within Judaism in that first century.

We are back, in other words, with these two questions about the Messiah…Would the Messiah be human or transcendent? Would the Messiah be nonviolent or violent? For those Jews who accepted Jesus as the Davidic Messiah—and whom we would later call Christians—the answer to those two questions was quite clear. As the Davidic Messiah or new David, Jesus was human and transcendent and nonviolent. His establishment of “justice and righteousness”—as promised by those prophets above—would be not by violence, but by nonviolence.

One of the arguments put forth by Borg and Crossan throughout the book—not just in the little excerpts we hear from—is that Jesus represents much more than the snippets of scriptures out of the Hebrew Bible that are lifted as specific prophecies of the coming of Jesus. Rather, instead of simply representing the fulfillment of those specific verses, Jesus represents the fulfillment of the entirety of the Hebrew Bible tradition as this just, righteous, nonviolent Messiah.

This passage from Micah, then, while one of those handful of specific passages used to point toward a Jesus Messiahship, is much more birds-eye in its view of Jesus and points to a total body of work by this nonviolent Savior: He will shepherd His flocks and those flocks will live securely under His peaceful watch.

Put another way: this isn’t foretelling a specific event like the famous Isaiah 7:14 verse that states that a virgin shall bear a son, and she shall name Him Emmanuel, which is what Matthew cites in his birth narrative. What Micah is prophesying is something quite different: not an event, but an epoch. Not a single point in time but a reign that extends through and transcends over time itself. Not only single day on the calendar, but all days on the calendar.

In other words, this passage from Micah, even more than the birth narratives themselves, puts forth a vision of Christ who is to be remembered and followed and worshiped not just during the month of December but for the other eleven months as well—and to be praised and celebrated not just on Sundays, but for the other six days of the week in addition. Micah’s vision of the Davidic Messiah is eternal in the truest sense of the term, yet our fidelity towards that Messiah is often anything but.

It is tough to understate the nature of the birthright to which Jesus lays claim. David was the king by which all other kings measured or failed to measure up to the point that even more than being a historical man, he became a sort of mythic national hero like, say, King Arthur for England or Prince Siegfried for Germany. Culturally and politically, never mind religiously, Jesus’s birthright portends a nation itself placing its hope in Him.

And while David brought peace with a sword, taking seven long years to unite Israel in a bloody, treacherous civil war with Saul’s lone surviving son Ishbaal, Jesus calls us, in the vein of these selfsame Hebrew prophets we cite to justify His arrival, to beat those swords into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning hooks.

So, then, lets return to the story of this young Waffen-SS solider turned prisoner of war turned repentant old man who decides to leave this world with one last act of magnanimity. Do you think that if the United Kingdom had beaten this man down, tortured him and mistreated him, evil though he was, that there would have been anything like this gift come from it?

The sword, while perhaps necessary precisely for such scenarios as World War II, bears no such fruit. It never has. And it never will. For indeed, as this nonviolent Davidic Messiah would teach His disciples right at the very end, the one who lives by the sword also dies by the sword.

Far better for us, then, to follow the way of the Christ, the Anointed, even as doing so might cause us to question so much of what we have been taught about the nature of strength and might. Because in achieving a complete surrender that entailed even crucifixion, that Prince of Peace did what nobody else has done before or since.

He conquered death.

He broke the grave.

He took away the fruits of the sword and replaced them with the fruits of the spirit.

And because of His life, which begins anew just three weeks from now, the world was forever changed.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

December 4, 2016

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column + Advent Sermon Series

December 2016: "Fireplaces and Farmhouses"

Dear Church,

One of the features that Carrie and I most love about our new house is the gas fireplace that sits as the focal point in the living area--it has classical style framing and wainscotting around it that makes it look amazing, and on a cold fall or winter evening, it is all I need, along with the cuddling of our dogs, to warm up again.

It is something that I have come to associate greatly with the Christmas season--after all, just a few years ago, the closest I could get to having a fireplace was to put a video of a Yule log up on my computer and set it next to my space heater! (It isn't the same. Trust me.)

That sort of warmth and coziness, in truth, is easy to associate with this season because we have all likely experienced it--the feeling of getting to bundle up, or of sitting up near a fire, and knowing that we will be able to celebrate the season in relative security. Some of us haven't had the chance to feel that sort of comfort every Christmas, though.

It is easy to forget that Jesus's parents had no such luxury--far from being able to stay in the inn (and some Bible scholars believe the inn may not have even been that--or, at least, an inn in the modern hotel sense--but simply a guesthouse, like a farmhouse bed + breakfast), they had to stay in a stable that was quite possibly open-air: while there was likely a roof of some sort, we have no inkling as to its quality, and we have no idea if there were even walls to the stable, or if it was simply a roof propped up by posts with mangers and feeding troughs running along the sides.

So as you draw inward towards the light and warmth of the Yule fire this Christmas season, I hope and pray that you will remember just how Jesus came into this world, and that you will also remember the billions of people who still live in similarly insecure circumstances today. For when God chose to become flesh and to come to earth, it was not in the form of royalty or wealth, and not in the form of a middle class American family (for neither the middle class or the United States existed then), but in the form of someone physically insecure, whose only security came from God, and God alone.

Part of the bargain of celebrating Christmas is remembering how it all began. And in remembering how it did indeed begin, may we also remember just how far we have come from that fateful night in Bethlehem, and just how much further we have yet to go in the building of God's kingdom here on earth.

So wherever you celebrate Christmas this year, from in front of a fireplace to inside a farmhouse, please take a moment of prayer to remember and recall the circumstances of Christ's birth--not as we might want it to have happened, but as it actually took place.

I wish you and yours a very merry and blessed Christmas!

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

Advent 2016 Sermon Series

Alright, it's officially holiday season--no, just because Starbucks and Dutch Bros hand out "holiday" cups by the time Veteran's Day rolls around doesn't mean it's the holiday season--and we've got a new series for it. Truthfully, what we think of as the "Christmas season" is in fact Advent: a month of preparing for the birth of Jesus Christ, which then kicks off the twelve-daylong Christmas season (yes, as in the Twelve Days of Christmas carol). For this year's Advent season, we started a new sermon series last week and will be continuing it up to Christmas Day, and it is based on The First Christmas, the sequel by John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg after their popular The Last Week book that you may recall I used as a template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. Just as The Last Week went verse-by-verse through the Passion story to uncover some of its original meanings and contexts, so too does The First Christmas with the birth narratives in Matthew and in Luke. We won't be sticking to the birth stories from Matthew and Luke themselves until Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, though, so that we may understand more deeply some of the theological points that Borg and Crossan make. I hope you'll join us this Advent and Christmas season for an exciting sermon series and some lovely worship services

Advent 2016 Sermon Series: "The First Christmas: Recreating a Holiday's Original Meaning"

November 27: "An Angel Comes to Mary," Luke 1:26-38
December 4: “In David’s City of Bethlehem,” Micah 5:2-4
December 11: “Light Against the Darkness,” John 1:1-5
December 18: “A Fulfillment of Prophecy,”
December 24: “And On Earth, Peace,” Luke 2:1-20
December 25: “Joy to the World,” Matthew 1:18-25
January 1, 2017: “A Year of Jubilee,” Leviticus 25:1-13

This Week's Sermon: "An Angel Comes to Mary"

Luke 1:26-38

When Elizabeth was six months pregnant, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a city in Galilee, 27 to a virgin who was engaged to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David’s house. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 When the angel came to her, he said, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you!” 29 She was confused by these words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God is honoring you. 31 Look! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and he will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father. 33 He will rule over Jacob’s house forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.” 34 Then Mary said to the angel, “How will this happen since I haven’t had sexual relations with a man?” 35 The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born will be holy. He will be called God’s Son. 36 Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled ‘unable to conceive’ is now six months pregnant. 37 Nothing is impossible for God.” 38 Then Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” Then the angel left her. (Common English Bible)

“The First Christmas: Recreating a Holiday’s Original Meaning,” Week One

I have had the blessing to be at St. John Hospital for a number of births during my time here at FCC Longview over the past five years. I’m not in the room when the birth takes place, but I’m at the hospital that day or the day after, and it really is one of the very best parts of this job. Usually I am summoned to the hospital for much worse news, and being able to be there for the creation of life rather than the injuring or sickening of it is a great joy.

And it is a joy that it is indeed at, well, the hospital. Not all of us, even in 21^st century America, are so lucky as to be able to give birth in so healthy and dignified of circumstances. Sarah Bessey, a Christian author and blogger, recounted the birth of her son in her book Jesus Feminist and, well, it went quite a bit different than what you or I might be used to:

But it’s the birth of our son, Joseph Arthur, that stays with me these winter months. His was an unintended, unattended birth in our building’s underground parking garage while we were on our way to the hospital.

No, I’m not kidding.

After beginning labor at home, we progressed far faster than we could have anticipated after our eldest daughter’s thirteen-hour labor. This was unprecedented for us, so Brian thought we had time to make it to the hospital just a few minutes away. I had four contractions on our way down the hall and in the elevator of our apartment building. My poor man half-carried, half-dragged me into the parking garage, now desperate for help. He leaned me up against a support pole and ran to the truck to pull it over to me.

We were on our own—no midwife, no doctor, not even in our own home with a clean floor. Instead, we were in a dirty garage filled with cars and the smell of gas and tires...Beside our old Chevy Trailblazer, standing up, with Brian’s arms under mine as a support, our son was born into my own hands…people applauded while they spoke to the 911 dispatcher.

I flat-out guarantee you that nobody has “make sure I crank the kid out in our parking garage” in their birth plan. But it happens. Life happens. And life comes into this world in the most unusual of ways—not just for us, but most famously for Mary, the mother of Jesus, who not only gave birth as a virgin but actually had an angel of God tell her so in no uncertain terms—something else that tends not to get penciled into our carefully laid-out birth plans.

This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, which is known pretty much in every other context as “the Christmas season” or “the holidays.” Except it isn’t the Christmas season: the twelve-days-long Christmas season (yes, just like the Twelve Days of Christmas carol) begins on Christmas day and extends to January 6, the traditional date of the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived at where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had been bedded down.

Advent is meant to be a season of preparation, and not just preparing for the Christmas dinner parties and the tinsel and ornaments, but a preparation for the least material of all things: of divine life becoming human life. To help us prepare for the birth of the Christ child this year, we will be revisiting the work of John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg who, if you remember, were the authors of The Last Week, a book I used as the template for my Lenten sermon series a couple of years ago. The First Christmas represents their sequel to The Last Week, and much as The Last Week sought to go verse-by-verse through the Passion narrative and place it into its historical and anthropological context, so too does The First Christmas deliver a similarly thoughtful treatment of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. We begin our series, then, with this from Borg and Crossan’s commentary on the annunciation story of the archangel Gabriel appearing to Mary:

Matthew draws parallels between Jesus and Moses in order to exalt Jesus over Moses in Matthew 1-2. Similar parallels are drawn to exalt Jesus over John the Baptizer in Luke 1-2. But Jesus is not simply the new John for Luke as Jesus is the new Moses for Matthew. The point is that—for Luke—John is the symbol, synthesis, conclusion, and consummation of the Old Testament. John was conceived—to conclude the Old Testament—in an aged and barren mother, but Jesus was born—to start the New Testament—of a virginal mother…look at this specific parallelism between the conception annunciations of Jesus and John:

“But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John’” (1:13).

“The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will…bear a son, and you will name him Jesus’” (1:31).

And, beyond that parallelism, of course, Luke looks back before Elizabeth and John to Sarah and Isaac: “Your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac” (Gen. 17:19)

If ever you wondered just why the birth narratives are so different between Matthew and Luke, what Borg and Crossan are hinting at here is a very simple, very obvious, but easily overlooked truth: Matthew and Luke were very different people, very different believers, and very different evangelists. Matthew was an Israelite tax collector, highly educated and steeped in the Hebrew Bible; Luke was similarly highly educated but as a Gentile physician with far less of a knowledge of ancient Judaism.

So for Matthew, the key parallel is between Jesus and Moses. But for Luke, who lacks the same cultural and spiritual attachment to Moses that Matthew has, the parallel is to Jesus’s cousin John and, more historically, to Abraham, the forefather of Judaism itself.

For neither Gospel writer does Jesus’s birth fit neatly into a box that can be easily labeled and categorized. And for Luke, who alone conveys this story of the annunciation and who, far more than Matthew, lavishes attention upon Mary’s role as the focal point in the birth narrative, by harkening all the way back to Abraham in his wording, he is subtly telling us that Jesus’s birth is unlike anything else seen between that moment and this one when Gabriel appears to Mary. The closest Luke can get to it, aside from Jesus’s cousin John, is to reach 1,800 years into the past to Abraham and Sarah and their son Isaac.

But Luke also makes abundantly clear, in a way that Matthew does not, just how messy a birth story this really was: Joseph and Mary are traveling, not because they want to but because they have to in order to register for the census, and they have to cut the journey short because she goes into labor and the door to the inn is closed in their faces.

So Mary gives birth in a stable, surrounded by animals and all their (lack of) hygiene. Which is probably the ancient equivalent of giving birth in a parking garage next to your Chevy Trailblazer.

Put in that context, this story of the annunciation is the cleanest, least muddled or confusing part of the entire birth narrative. The part when an angel of God appears and tells a virgin that she is about to give birth to the Savior of humanity is the *least confusing* part of this entire narrative, because that way, we only have to come up with an explanation of God’s goodness rather than an explanation for why a pregnant teenager in labor and her husband were deep-sixed from one of the very few places capable of sheltering them on that given night.

Which action do you think is easier to justify—God showing to a young girl an angel, or a person showing that same young girl the door?

This is a powerful story, then, one that we must pay attention to, for already it shows the depth of character and bravery of Mary. She knows what she is signing up for. And in that way, too, she harkens back to that tradition of strong, courageous mothers whom God calls to be more than mothers but to be extraordinary vessels for God’s message—Mary’s relative Elizabeth, King David’s mother Hannah, and all the way back to the matriarchs: Leah, Rachel, Rebekah, and, of course, Sarah.

Lend an ear to their millennia of lifebearing, life-giving, and life experience just as you would to Gabriel; indeed, just as Mary does for Gabriel. For theirs is an important message to hear in the church, but one that Sarah Bessey points out in her book that we often do not hear, that we instead often hear metaphors of sports and war rather than of child-bearing and child-rearing, even though these are surely far more a part of God’s works than whether the Seahawks win this weekend.

After all, it was Jesus who would go on to compare Himself to a mother hen wishing to gather her chicks underneath her wings. That is surely more a part of God than many of the metaphors we use, and more than many of the plans we claim for God to have.

For God indeed has other plans. In this story, those plans are now revealed. An angel has come to Mary. And nothing will ever be the same again.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 27, 2016

This Week's Sermon: "A Lonely Minister"

Luke 6:46-49

46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and don’t do what I say?

47 I’ll show what it’s like when someone comes to me, hears my words, and puts them into practice. 

48 It’s like a person building a house by digging deep and laying the foundation on bedrock. When the flood came, the rising water smashed against that house, but the water couldn’t shake the house because it was well built.

49 But those who don’t put into practice what they hear are like a person who built a house without a foundation. The floodwater smashed against it and it collapsed instantly. It was completely destroyed.” (Common English Bible)

“The Wounded Healer: Finding Strength in Our Scars,” Week Five

In the small(ish) world of mainline Christian pastors with social media presences, Derrick Weston is the friend of a friend whose blog I stumbled across some time ago for the first time some months ago, when I was linked to an emotionally honest post of his as he reflected on his time at his first pastorate, a solo pastor job much like mine, and how he loved the church and its people dearly but struggled to make the sort of impact that he had felt called by God to make there. He wrote in part:

Every effort I made to think through ways of inviting new youth into the church or to develop programming for young people was met with either indifference or outright hostility. To make it worse, the loyal young people we did have in the church were treated very poorly. They were critiqued for what they wore to church. Their behavior when they stayed in worship was analyzed. They were looked down upon when they didn’t stay in worship. It was frustrating. How were we supposed to bring in new young people when we treated the young people we did have like they were a nuisance? And these were good kids! Really good kids! It pisses me off to think about some of the things that were said to and about them…

Easter of that year, I had a panic attack. It took a while for me to realize that that is what it was. I couldn’t breathe. My chest tightened. I lost my balance. This was before worship began and continued into the start of the service. I was carrying the pressure that this might be this church’s last Easter service on me and it was devastating.

Think about that for a minute—the inability to change the culture of the church in ways that both he and they knew desperately needed changing was such a heavy burden upon him that it caused a panic attack. On Easter, the day most associated with resurrection and rebirth in the entire calendar.

That is the sort of loneliness ministry can inflict, and sometimes be about. And it is the sort of loneliness that can move us to construct a house built without a foundation like here in Luke 6.

This is the final week of a sermon series that, believe it or not, has taken us right now just up to church season of Advent, which is the time we prepare for Christmas and begins next Sunday, the 27th. Before we arrive at the land of egg nog and gingerbread, though, we have one more series to undertake together, and it is based on a formative book which I first read in its entirety when I arrived here and a colleague and friend of this congregation, Marvin Eckfeldt, gave to me: The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and theologian who passed away about twenty years ago, but not before leaving behind him a rich vein of theological and pastoral literature. Though relatively brief as far as theological treatises go, The Wounded Healer is arguably Nouwen’s magnum opus: accessible, lucid, poignant, and passionate in its fundamental premise that only by understanding our own wounds and scars can we as Christians and as ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ then, in turn, heal others of their own wounds and scars.

The Wounded Healer is a four-chapter book with a prologue, and we had five weeks in all, so we spent week on each section, and we finally arrive at the final chapter, which Nouwen entitled, “Ministry By A Lonely Minister,” and writes in part in it:

Ministers are called to speak to the ultimate concerns of life: birth and death, union and separation, love and hate. They have an urgent desire to give meaning to people’s lives. But they find themselves standing on the edges of events and only reluctantly admitted to the spot where the decisions are made…

In the cities, where children play between buildings and old people die isolated and forgotten, the protests of priests are hardly taken seriously and their demands hang in the air like rhetorical questions. Many churches decorated with words announcing salvation and new life are often little more than parlors who feel quite comfortable in the old life, and who are not likely to let the minister’s words change their stone hearts into furnaces where swords can be cast into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.

The painful irony is that ministers, who want to touch the center of people’s lives, find themselves on the periphery, often pleading in vain for admission…Our failure to change the world with our good intentions and sincere actions and our undesired displacement to the edges of life have made us aware that the wound is still there.

I promise this isn’t a “woe is me” message from either Nouwen or myself. What he—and I—are both lamenting is something far bigger than any one of us: it’s the willingness of people to set their lives about without that solid bedrock which Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Plain here in Luke 6.

Jesus is speaking the exact same lament that we are: “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,” and don’t do what I say?” It’s probably the same lament you had or have as parents with your kids on occasion: “Why do you call me Mom/Dad and don’t do what I say?”

And it is the exact same sort of lament with the church. We pastors who shepherd the church hear ourselves being called “Pastor, Pastor,” but we really do lament why more of what we bend over backwards and turn ourselves inside out in order to teach doesn’t quite seem to land in the fertile soil rather than on the gravel and the stones where no seeds will easily grow.

A significant amount of what we teach falls into that category, but one teaching in particular stands out—to me and, I think, in light of the arc of his book, to Nouwen as well: the church is still not a welcoming place yet. Not for LGBTQ seekers, not for people of other faith traditions, and not for young people. That, in a nutshell, is what causes the sort of emotional and spiritual pain that leads a pastor like Derrick Weston to a panic attack on Easter Sunday.

For the lack of welcome in the church can be directly tied to its decline: millennials are abandoning organized religion in record numbers and believe me, it isn’t just because we would rather worship at the church of brunch (although that is certainly a part of it). And it isn’t just because Sunday is now a day to do all sorts of things as opposed to a day when everything shut down for the day (although that is certainly a part of it as well).

It is because with all of those other options in mind, why would we come to a place for a couple hours on a rare day off to be treated with skepticism, suspicion, or condescension? Why would any rational person subject themselves to that sort of subtle hostility when they could be doing any number of other things that they legitimately enjoy?

In other words—we here in the church are the ones who are getting in the way of the Gospel being heard by even more people, and it is because we are acting as Jesus’s audience did, calling Him Lord but not doing all which He says to do in terms of providing a radically open welcome to all persons, not just the ones who dress like us, or fit into our generation, or quite simply look like us.

The Gospel is not simply for the people who look like us. It is for the people who do not.

Jesus, after all, was an Aramaic-speaking Israelite—not an English-speaking American. He never lived past the age of 33 or so. And He was homeless.

All of those factors, do you really think if you saw them in someone that it would make you more inclined to welcome them into the church, or less likely? Be honest.

That, in a nutshell, is how we have lost the bedrock that Jesus speaks of here in Luke 6. It is what we pastors have known for years, and have been pleading with our churches to understand and embrace the reality of, but like Derrick, many of us have ended up seeing our pleas fall on plugged-up ears.

Yet Christ also says, let the one who has ears hear.

So hear the words of those who minister to you in your life—not just me, but your family and friends and especially the youth in your life. Do not allow us to minister to you in loneliness. Allow us to minister to you in vitality, spirit, truth, and power, in a symbiotic relationship in which each of us is made better for the other being in their life. Allow us to provide you with that firm foundation, that solid bedrock of love and mercy, upon which life eternal through Jesus Christ is predicated.

For it is in such conditions that the Spirit is known to thrive in us. And forever may it thrive in our churches, in our lives, and in the kingdom.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 20, 2016