At the last minute, I made the executive decision to change today's reading from the Hebrew Bible. Rather than spending time in the book of Isaiah, I took us back to the opening chapter of the book of Exodus 1:1-2:2. We'll hear this passage again in August when we focus on Moses's origin story. But today I want to focus on a different part of the Exodus story: Pharaoh's order that all male babies of Hebrew descent should be killed.

The last major story at the end of the book of Genesis is centered on Joseph (aka Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). He had become, over time, an important leader in the Egyptian government. After using the gifts God gave him to interpret dreams, he managed to save himself and the kingdom from ruin. A famine decimated the wider area but Egypt thrived because Joseph saved all the excess wheat they grew during plentiful years. His family (including his 11 brothers) and their households (including wives, kids, slaves, employees, and more) crossed the border into Egypt, become economic refugees. They did not know that Joseph was now a high-ranking official but, in a very colorful moment, the family was reunited and old grudges were forgiven. The Hebrew people settled inside Egypt, building homes and raising their families. They retained what made them culturally unique and assimilated only slightly into the wider culture. As time went on, the people in Egypt grew weary of the Hebrew people. They feared the Hebrews would replace them and the Egyptians would become marginalized. So in an act of political violence, the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrew people but that didn't satisfy the Egyptian xenophobia. They chose to do more. So, in a terrifying moment, the Pharaoh ordered male newborns to be killed once they were born. With the death of the male babies, it was assume the Hebrew women would be forced to marry Egyptians, transferring any wealth and property to the Egyptians or they would just die out. The Pharaoh ordered a genocidal act and the Hebrews, including their midwives like Shiphrah and Puah, did what they could to resist this command.

As you listen and read our story from the gospel according to Mathew today, keep in mind this Exodus story. The parallels are intentional and help us understand what Matthew chose to describe. When we forget the story of the Exodus, we end up missing the deep spiritual terror seen in the genocidal act Herod the Great ordered on the children of his people.

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I don't know about you but when I was a kid, I had a habit of counting the number of presents that appeared under my Christmas tree. It was my family's tradition to sort and organize all the presents before they were opened. My brothers and I would swarm the foot of the tree, quickly grabbing the presents that looked like they were for us while knocking the others to the side. Eventually we would each have our own little pile of gifts, and I would quickly count to see who had the most. It didn't matter, at that point, what the quality of each wrapped gift was. What mattered was how many were in each pile. And the kid with the most seemed to be, for a moment at least, the one who truly counted.

Tonight's story from the gospel according to Luke 2:1-20 is the same one we hear every Christmas Eve. But every year, to me at least, part of the story sounds new. We have to be careful as we hear this story that we don't skim over the words, thinking that we already know what the Christmas story is all about. Instead, we should slow down and let every word that's uttered fill our ears and our hearts with sound. When we do that, we can sometimes notice the part of this story that God knows we need to hear right now. We might need to spend time with Mary, sit beside Joseph, or stand in wonder with the shepherds on the hillside. And when we spend time with something, we can't always rush it. Instead, we need to sit with it as God's words work on our soul.

So in the spirit of slowing down, what struck me this Christmas Eve was the power of counting. The story begins with the Roman Emperor choosing to count who is under his control through the calling of a census. A census in the ancient world was used to find out how many soldiers could be conscripted in a specific and how much taxes could be raised to fund a new military campaign. By counting people, the Emperor could launch additional wars to expand the areas under their control.

The census, in the ancient world, could be a very disruptive tool—letting those in authority disrupt people's lives as they launched new campaigns to fill the hunger for power. The census in Luke is even more disruptive than most. People were forced to uproot their lives and travel great distances to the places where their ancestors were born. By the time Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, the city was full of people waiting to be counted. The Roman Emperor hoped that by counting them, he could discover new ways to exploit them. And that exploitation would show the world how the Emperor counted while everyone else didn't.

Yet it was during that act of disruptive exploitation when God showed up. While the Emperor was busy counting those who didn't count, God became truly human. The rules of the world that defined who had value and worth were disruptive by a God who knew that you counted. On this Christmas Eve, your worth does not depend on the number of presents under your tree. Your value has nothing to do with all the comparisons we've made between ourselves and those around us. Your status as a human being does not depend on how you choose to count yourselves or others. Because, to God, you count and you matter. We are good at making our own counts of ourselves and our world as a way to define how valued we think we should be. Yet, when it comes to God, how you choose to count in the world isn't what defines God's love for you. Rather, to God, you already count - because on this holy night, Christ is born.

Merry Christmas!

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Sometimes even the lectionary (our three year cycle of Bible Readings) feels like it skips the end of Advent and moves straight into Christmas. The reading from the gospel according to Matthew assigned for today (Matthew 1:18-25) is Jesus' birth moment. We're given the space to not only tell the story of Jesus' birth (like we are doing with our Christmas pageant at 9:00 am worship), but we can also start moving away from the expectation of Advent and into the event that is Christmas. Many of us, I think, do our best to make Christmas into something "big." We decorate, bake cookies, shop for gifts, and let the stress of the season interrupt a good night's sleep. Even if we prefer a simpler Christmas, there's still something different about this season. Our expectation can only last so long before we jump straight into Christmas.

But there's still, in theory, two more sleeps until Christmas Eve. There’s a gap until Christmas comes. Yet, we all know that the gap isn't empty. Your Christmas-to-do list is still long—as well as everything else your life needs you to do. There's still a lot of doing to do before Tuesday night. Yet we should, if we can, take a moment to also realize that something is also being done to us. Rev. Dr. Martin Otto Zimmann wrote in the Advent Devotion we're using this special prayer: Blessed Immanuel, thank you for becoming one with us that we might aspire to be one with you through word, water, wine and bread. With each passing day, we ask that you continue to draw us closer to you so that we might become the people you intended in a Creation free from sin and avarice. The story of Advent is also a reminder that our gap-to-Christmas is one that is full of more than just our doing; it's also full of God coming to us. We might think that we're getting closer to Christmas but the reality is that God is bringing Christmas closer to us. And, as we worship, pray and share in Jesus' body and blood, may the gap-til-Christmas help make us into the Christmas people God knows we can become.

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I know the stress of the holiday season is getting to me when I'm laughing way too much at liturgical memes. Liturgical memes are images shared online that poke fun at the things we do in church. As a professional religious person, I know I'm already going to laugh at any liturgical meme I find. But when the never ending to-do list of the Advent Christmas season begins to overwhelm me, I start laughing at these images longer than I should. I'm soon annoying my non-church nerd friends by sending them jokes about writing Year C (the label for the cycle of readings we used last year) on my checks and whether raisins in raisin bread can be consecrated as the body of Christ. Yet the meme I return to every year at this time comes from the movie Mean Girls and how on the third Sunday of Advent, we light pink.

Today is Gaudete Sunday which is Latin for "rejoice." In the 800s, a special Gregorian chant was created to celebrate the third Sunday of Advent. In the middle of a season filled with Biblical images about the end of the world, Jesus' second coming, and with John the Baptist calling us all vipers, it's sometimes hard to rejoice. The early church wanted to break through our sense of doom and gloom and remind us why we gather together. We are here to celebrate how God continues to break into our lives with guidance, love and hope. The opening word of that special chant was simply "rejoice." And during this season when we are overwhelmed by our to do lists, rejoicing is hard. We know that the journey to Christmas isn't always a Hallmark movie. An unexpected crisis will interrupt our plans, and we will find ourselves consumed by the broken relationships in our lives. As we get closer to the longest night of the year, it can feel as if a shadow might overcome us. And in these moments, we might not be able to rejoice on our own.

Which is why, I think, the liturgical calendar interrupts our expectations and reminds us to "rejoice." We are connected to a God who loves each of us as we are. And that love transforms our brokenness, our problems, our sins, and the ways we don't love ourselves and others. The liturgy—what we do in worship on Sunday morning—is a structure to tell the truth about God, ourselves and our world. It gives us words when we don't know what to say, and it helps us pray when we can't anymore. And the liturgy reminds us that Christ's light will always shine. So today we light a pink candle instead of a blue one. We remind ourselves to rejoice. We celebrate that no matter what we do, we know Christmas will still come. And we are blessed to trust that Jesus will lead us into a life where love never ends.

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Every once in a while, our lectionary (the 3 year cycle of readings we hear on Sunday morning), gives us a text that I don't always feel the need to explain. I don't necessarily want to describe what the text is about. Instead, I just listen to the words as they're read out loud. I don't rush to unpack what they say. I don't try to understand everything that was written. I let the words flow over me and I wait for the Holy Spirit to open me to what God wants to say. The word God gives me might not necessarily be exactly the same word God gives you. Yet the lesson we hear from the Bible will work on us, helping to transform us into the people God knows we can be. 

Today's reading from the book of Romans 15:4-13 is a passage from scripture meant to do something to us. It starts by pointing us to the scripture we've been given and how our faith actually transforms us. Through Christ, our relationship with each other is refined, reformed, and made new so that we can always be a people of hope. And as a people with hope, we have been given words that help carry us through whatever life might throw our way. These words appear in our scriptures, in our prayers, and in the Spirit-filled interactions we have with one another. Yet there will be times when our faith will be shaken, our confidence in God will weaken, and when hope will be hard to see. And when that happens, a passage like this from Romans can help connect us to the God who will never leave our side.

So I invite you to just listen to these words today. Read them out loud if you can. Let the words Paul wrote nearly 2000 years ago feed your faith. One way you can do that is place the sentences from these passages in different parts of our worship service. Include verse 7 in the opening we usually share. Add verse 4 before we read any readings from scripture. Let verse 5 connect you with one another as you gather around the Lord's table. Let verses 10 and 11 be the reason why you sing loud. Let this passage from Romans fill your soul so that verse 13 becomes your anthem and your way of life. Because, right now, you are loved.  And regardless of where you are in your life, God is transforming you into something new. 

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The following observation is obvious but important to say anyways: the readings from the Bible we hear on Sunday mornings come from somewhere. When the Holy Spirit first inspired these words, she gave them to specific people in specific places. Those people could, through prayer, worship, and study, understand them. As these words were written down, compiled into books, and passed on to us centuries later, the Holy Spirit shepherded that process so that these words could make sense to us too. When we pay attention to where these words come from (i.e their context), we discover the word God wants for us. These verses come from somewhere and where they are in the Bible matters too.

With that in mind, we need to remember that today’s reading from the book of Isaiah 2:1-5 does exist on its own because Isaiah has a chapter one. Chapter one is not an easy book to read. Many of its verses sound like a lawsuit where God indicts and sentences the people of Israel. The people and their leaders failed to live up to the vision God had for them and war has come their way. Although chapter one placed the prophet Isaiah in the early 700s (when the Assyrian empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and eliminated 10 of the 12 Israelite tribes), the final form of this book knew the entire history of Israel, including how Babylon in 587 BCE destroyed the Temple and depopulated Jerusalem. Even though the people worshiped God faithfully through prayer and rituals, the people’s relationship with each other was broken. Everyone cheated; everyone sought their own self-advancement; everyone fought to maintain their own privileges; and no one cared for the common good. The test God gave God’s people was to see how they cared for the most marginalized and powerless (widows and orphans in ancient Israel). Seeing their plight ignored, God ended chapter one by declaring Jerusalem judged guilty and putting them under threat from the God who once made them prosper.

But then, chapter two comes and we hear an unexpected word of hope. We expected the lawsuit to continue yet we are given a vision of a new future. Chapter two is not designed to cancel out chapter one. But it does say, quite boldly, that God is not done with God’s people. The vision God has will, someday, truly come. And God’s purpose for God’s people will be lived out. All people, regardless of their faith, will trust God because God’s people will show, through their care for the marginalized, the future God wants for us all. We begin this Advent season by being honest about our own context. We come from somewhere, with our own challenges as an individual and as a community. Yet in our baptism, we are grafted onto a new vision of God’s future where all people thrive. And this vision will require all people to re-evaluate their way of life and their identity. God’s vision isn’t about continuing our life as it is now. It believes in a change that will require sacrifice, prayer, and a willingness to be honest about makes us who we are. Yet there’s hope in this hard work because when we walk in the light of the Lord, we see a new kind of life where competition, self-centeredness, and violence are replaced with forgiveness, mercy, and love.

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Did you notice something odd in our reading from the gospel according to Luke 23:33-43? The copy printed in your bulletin has the first sentence of verse 34 surrounded by brackets. Those brackets are a sign that something about that sentence is a bit odd. And to figure out how odd, we need to recall how our version of the Bible came into being.

It's important to remember that we do not have any original copies of any biblical books. Our versions are a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a—you get the idea. Since the Bible is so important, we're blessed to have many old manuscripts of the biblical text. But the oldest copies we have are only dated to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th centuries. That means the best examples of the Biblical text that we have come from copies written 100-300 years after the original. And since there were no copy machines in the ancient world, these versions of the Bible were written by hand. This kind of copying can sometimes add errors into the text. A writer, after working for hours on end, might forget a word or accidentally skip a line. Some scribes even changed the text because they *needed* to fix its grammar. However, most of these changes were really insignificant and when we compare different manuscripts to each other, we can figure out what the original text might have been like. But there are times when even this kind of comparison runs into problems. And when scholars end up not knowing if a word, sentence or phrase is supposed to be there, they put brackets around that part of the text.

So the reason why there are brackets in verse 34 is because scholars are not sure if those words are supposed to be there or not. Many different manuscripts have that sentence and many others do not. Those words could have been added by a scribe trying to make Jesus' actions on the Cross line up with what Stephen does in the book of Acts. Or the words might have been removed by a scribe who couldn't stand Jesus uttering a prayer that might never be answered. I don't have an answer on why this text is in brackets but I like that it’s here. To me, the brackets invite us to reflect on our own assumptions and choices we make in our own faith. What verses from the Bible do you ignore? What sayings of Jesus are at the core of how you are? How do you interpret scripture? We all live with a bracket faith. There are parts of God's story that we cling to and others we ignore. I believe we should be honest about our core convictions and about the brackets that define the life we live. Because when we pay attention to our brackets, we also get a chance to lean into the brackets of support that God has already given to us: baptism, communion, this church and God's love. And it's through these brackets that God helps support, challenge, and change us into the people we are supposed to be.

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Today's reading from 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 contains a clobber passage. A clobber passage is a verse from the Bible taken out of context and used to push a harsh agenda. The clobber verse in this passage comes in the second half of verse 10: anyone unwilling to work should not eat. This passage has been used by a variety of people to punish people who are struggling. I've also seen this passage internalized, making people doubt their value and worth before God. If what we do defines who we are, we struggle to love ourselves when we can no longer do the work we once (or never) did. When we see a clobber passage, we need to recognize what it truly is: a sentence that's part of a wider story. So let's put this passage back into its context to see what is truly being addressed.

According to the author of 2 Thessalonians, a kind of "idleness" erupted within the small church in Thessaloniki. Yet, this idleness wasn't that people had stopped working. Instead, as we see in verse 11, this kind of idleness is related to being a busybody. A busybody is anything but inactive. They are super busy working in ways that are disruptive to the community. In the words of Yvette Schock, "the problem was members expending their energy and giving effort to the wrong kind of 'work' in the community." And, the work being done by these busybodies made the community feel anxious and worried. Some, I think, were feeling resentful of each other. Based on our reading from last week, I imagine some in the community were putting all their energy in speculating about the end of the world. They were so focused about what was to come that they stopped caring about their commitments to one another. Instead of using the promise God gives us in baptism and in fact that we have another chapter in our lives, these people were running towards the end of the world. They ignored the needs of the people around them. They stopped praying for each other. They disrupted the community by refusing to work to build each other up. Instead, they spent their energy tearing each other down.

Today's reading should not be used to target people who are poor, needy or unable to work a job. The passage should, instead, be read in its context. The community in Thessaloniki had turned away from their responsibility to care for one another. They were focusing too much on the life to come while ignoring the life right in front of them. The "living" mentioned in this passage isn't about having a job. This "living" is focused on being part of Christ's church in the world. We have a responsibility and a duty to be like Jesus to one another. That's a calling that takes work. That work is sometimes difficult, hard, and might make us uncomfortable. But that kind of work is also a work that is holy, loving and full of grace. When we do the work of the church, we discover a divine truth: we are connected, we are fed, and Jesus will help us to never grow weary of doing what's right.

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Today's reading from Second Thessalonians 2:1-5,13-17 is a bit strange since there's a big gap within it. We start off by reading the first five verses from chapter two but then skip to verse 13. Luckily, the missing verses do not get in the way of noticing what Paul was writing about. This is a text that wants us to ask ourselves a question: what kind of news are you always on the lookout for?

I think we'd like to say that we're into good news. But when we turn on our TV or scroll through the front page of any newspaper, the news we love to click on is mostly negative. We pay attention to whatever is the most recent tragedy, and we linger on stories when they're full of fear or sorrow. We even might get caught up in the most recent conspiracy theory, especially if that theory makes us feel superior to everyone else. Bad news is exactly that. Yet we hunger for it, devoting our time and energy consuming it over everything else. Because, for whatever reasons, we love to share stories that eventually end up as plot lines in Law and Order.

When we spend our energy focused on what's bad, there's a chance we'll miss seeing what's good. We end up being consumed by these negative thoughts and create an alternative reality filled with false facts. The more energy we spend in that false reality, the more we miss seeing what God is doing in the true reality. And this, I think, is what Paul was getting at. We need to be wary of all those who try to create alternative realities where one person or organization is seen as holding "the truth." Because, they will live in what's bad and miss the good news of the truth in the person of Jesus Christ. When we cling to His good news - good news rooted in a relationship with God - we are given the ability to see the world as it truly is. We'll see the true sin in the world but also what is good. We'll discover how we contribute to that sin, how our claims about "fake news" are anything but, and how we can grow into something better than we once were. We will often bear witness in a world that sometimes prefers a false reality to the truth. But we stay with the truth because we trust that Jesus' story will be our own. This trust isn't something we can figure out on our own. It's a gift, given to us by the Holy Spirit, that opens our eyes to God's reality. And when our eyes are open, that doesn't mean we are better or smarter than anyone else. We just have faith - and that's when we'll see the good news in Jesus because God, through Him, is creating a new future of love, mercy, and hope.

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If you read the Bible from cover to cover, you might notice that the Bible talks about inheritance a lot. In the Hebrew section, there are stories where inheritance is central to what God is doing in the world (see Numbers 36). Jesus in many of his parables dealt with the impact of inheritance (i.e. the Prodigal Son). And Paul's letters to the small Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean Sea, used the language of inheritance all the time. We know that inheritance is a big deal. Those with assets that will exist after we die need to create wills and make plans for how those assets will be passed on. But whenever assets and money are involved, problems (especially in families) come. We might think that people in Paul's day expected to receive some kind of inheritance during their lifetime. But their reality was very different. Few people ever earned enough money or had enough stuff to pass on to others. Most people lived at the poverty line. Yet people knew what inheritance was all about. And in our letter today to the Ephesians, the author described the inheritance we've already been given.

When you're reading this passage (Ephesians 1:11-23), make sure to read it slowly. The sentences are long, complex, and full of punctuation marks. The author is crafting a picture and using relationships as its paint. In the ancient Near East, hierarchy was everything. The king or emperor stood at the top, the quintessential human being. Everyone's value was then defined by their relationship to him. The king had certain responsibilities - i.e. to administer justice, wage war, and keep the peace. Yet their authority was, in theory, complete. They were the ultimate human being and sometimes viewed as gods. Your value was determined by your connection to your king - and whether you, in the hierarchy, could make some decisions on your own.

The church, and those who follow Jesus, know that Jesus is their king. He is the ultimate authority, the quintessential human and divine being. Yet where normal kings wield their power to tell others what to do, Jesus is the king who was crucified. And that, at its core, is scandal of our faith. The one who had authority chose not to use it the way we expected him to. Instead, in humility, he showed us that there was no experience in our life that God would not go through with us. The inheritance we're given isn't tied into any material or financial assets. Rather, our inheritance is rooted in a relationship where mercy, love, and forgiveness rule. While we clamor to see what we get in our inheritance, Jesus is busy giving us his life so that we can see what God's love is all about. The hierarchy of Christianity will always subvert the idea of hierarchy as we understand it to be. Whenever we look up towards God, Jesus is too busy coming down to us; because we, through our baptism and our faith, are his pledge of love to the world. And we're called to live a life where our inheritance from God actually matters.

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