God transcends holy purity to enter into impurity in blood and flesh, sharing even the hard and gross experiences of life with us.

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
The Presentation of our Lord
Texts: Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40 

Beloved saints, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It’s hard being trapped in these bodies.

Even in the best of times, when everything is working like it should, these bodies of ours still require so much care, and they still produce so many various fluids and waste. Even when we are perfectly healthy, living in a body is, just a little bit, gross.

That’s what I was thinking about this week as I was imagining this scene in the temple. Imagining the moment when Simeon took the baby Jesus in his arms, I was reminded of the times I held my newborn nieces and nephews. And how cute and tiny and perfect they were – but also how their tiny baby bodies were kind of gross sometimes. Every parent I know has a horror story that ends with the line, “and that’s how we learned that you always need to bring two sets of spare clothes.”

Snot and spit up and overflowing diapers-that’s what being around a baby is like.

Perpetual messiness, briefly interrupted by rare moments of cleanliness. And so who’s to say that while Simeon was singing the Nunc Dimittis, Jesus wasn’t leaving some kind of fluid on him? Like babies do. Because he was. A real alive baby, experiencing the reality of living in a baby body.

And I think that’s pretty amazing! God alive as a baby! Tiny and vulnerable and smelly and alive – just like we are!

And this was clearly an important point for the writer of Hebrews as well.

Our text today begins in the middle of a theological argument centered around Jesus’ divinity and Jesus’ humanity – trying to answer the question that Christ-followers have been grappling with since the days when the New Testament was still being written: Why did God become human?

The Preacher in Hebrews answers: “Since, therefore, the children [that is humans – creatures – you and me] – since therefore the children share flesh and blood, [Jesus] himself likewise shared the same things…to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect.”

To free us and to help us and to reconnect us with God – Jesus shared our flesh and blood.

Actually, in the Greek, it’s the other way around. It says “haimatos kai sarkos” – “blood and flesh.”

It probably shouldn’t make that much of a difference.  Every English translation I could find switched the two around because it makes perfect sense to use the familiar English idiom “flesh and blood.” But I almost wish the translators would leave it in the original order: blood and flesh.

Blood and flesh feels so much visceral, more connected to the earthy stuff of our bodies. The liquids and the solids that make up these meat sacks. Jesus doesn’t just share our “flesh and blood” because we have some kind of kinship in a nice, sanitized, metaphorical way.

Jesus shares our blood and flesh – our experience of life from within our biological containers.

So that he could share in our experiences about everything we undergo in life – every joy and pleasure and satisfaction and every craving and pain and ache and excretion of our bodies. Everything! Even the things that are a little bit gross. The things that are literally called “unclean” in the Torah.

God becoming blood and flesh meant that Jesus, like everyone else, was “unclean,” ritually impure, most of the time.

Purity, for Jews, doesn’t mean a state of sinlessness.

It doesn’t really have anything to do with sin – it has to do with living! Any time you come in contact with the fluids and the stuff of living, because of menstruation or because of ejaculation or because of childbirth or because of burying a corpse¹ – all these things of blood and flesh – which are perfectly normal and perfectly good and healthy – are unclean as well.

The idea of maintaining a permanent state of ritual purity is laughable. It isn’t supposed to even be possible for creatures who are blood and flesh. For Jews like Jesus, permanent purity was only achievable for God, who didn’t experience the viscera of life, or for angels, spiritual beings who didn’t experience embodied earthiness.

Because that’s what holiness is: that set-apartness that transcends reality and materiality.

God’s holiness lies in the fact God isn’t a being, God is Being-Itself.² The creative force of all existence, permeating all existence, and somehow also the things that doesn’t exist – so completely and utterly incomprehensible to us because we are small and finite and contained.  And how could we ever approach divinity with our limited senses and leaking orifices?

We can’t. Holiness isn’t our natural state. And this is what the rituals of purification practiced by Jews for centuries are for. And if you remember, this is half of the reason that the family went to the temple that day: “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses.” Most scholars assume that Luke was talking about a purification ritual that was required after childbirth. Childbirth is one of the most bloody and fleshy experiences a person can have – an experience so human, so creaturely, so alive, so good, but so different from the intangible, ineffable, disembodied holiness of God. The rituals of purification helped connect the two, helped tend to the joys and sorrows of living and dying, helped unite the physical and the spiritual, helped each person see beyond their blood and flesh container to glimpse the transcendent holiness of God. 

And it is in the temple that day – after going through the ritual practices of purification – that Simeon and Anna recognize the Messiah. Salvation is revealed and the veil is lifted – and what they see is that God has chosen impurity. God has chosen the uncleanness and the grossness of blood and flesh. God has entered into life.

So that Simeon holds in his arms, not God – holy and unknowable, but God – tangible and accessible. God, transcending divine purity itself to become an unclean baby boy.

This is the paradox at the heart of our faith.

The paradox of the kind of love that leads purity to embrace impurity. That depth of love that leads God to share our human body. And this is the paradox that we celebrate every Eucharist when we proclaim with singing God is Holy, Holy, Holy and then immediately turn around and hold up the bread and say the words of Jesus “This is my body.” This is my blood and flesh, eat it so you don’t forget how my love drew me to you – every single part of you. Even the parts of your life that are hard and gross – you are good – you are beloved.

You are saints – holy ones.

You are fleshy containers not just of humanity, but of divinity as well. Catching glimpses of God’s transcendent perspective through Christ. So that your experience of life, though mediated through your blood and flesh, is not limited by it.  Because in Christ you experience life that transcends the limits of your body. In Christ you are free from the fear of death. You are free to embrace the goodness of the grossness of created life, and free to welcome death as a friend. So that like, Simeon, you can sing, “Lord you may now dismiss your servant in peace.” You are free, through the love of Christ, Jesus our brother in blood and flesh.

You are free.

In the name of the Father, of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

 

^{1. This list is adapted from Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington’s commentary on the Gospel of Luke, 2018, pg 64.} 

^{2. This section relies heavily on the works of Paul Tillich, especially Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 1951.}

God calls us twice, with patient urgency, into the reign of God. 

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
The Third Sunday after Epiphany, Lect. 3 B 
Texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20; John 21:1-19 

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is an urgency in all of the texts for this week. 

“The time is fulfilled!” Jesus says – his first words in Mark’s gospel. 

“The appointed time has grown short,” Paul writes to the Corinthians. 

“Get up and go,” God says to Jonah.

There is something pressing about the message of all these writers, and it reminded me of something my mom used to say: “If it’s urgent, call twice.” 

That was the instruction she always left for us when we were kids, in the days before texting, on any occasion when we might need to talk to her while she was gone.  “I might not answer the first time,” she’d say. “But if you call back right away, if you call twice, I’ll know it’s urgent and I’ll answer.” That was her promise to us and to this day I know that if I call twice, my mom will drop everything and answer.  She’ll know it’s urgent.

In these texts, something urgent is happening. So God calls twice.  

“God has spoken once, twice have I heard it,” the Psalmist sings.  God calls twice.

“The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.”  God called Jonah twice.  Because it was very urgent. The situation was dire.  God describes Nineveh as a place with more than one hundred and twenty thousand people who don’t know their right hand from their left. Whose wickedness, especially their violence, had risen up before God.  

Jonah’s work is urgent. There are people, thousands of them, who must be reached, who must be stopped, the violence must stop.  For the sake of the people that the Ninevites were hurting, and for the sake of the Ninevites themselves.  God calls Jonah twice, because the need was urgent.  It was time for a better way. 

This is the same urgency that drives Jesus. “The reign of God has come near,” he proclaims, and he pairs with an urgent call “Repent and believe the good news.”  As if he were saying: All you people who don’t know your right hand from your left. It’s time for the reign of God! It’s time for a better way.

It’s the same urgency that still drives prophets who speak and spread the reign of God today. 

This past Monday we celebrated perhaps our greatest modern prophet in the United States, Dr. King.  Dr. King understood the urgency of the reign of God. He dreamed of a better way. And he knew the reign of God meant love and power. 

The Psalmist knew it too: “God has spoken once, twice have I heard it, that power belongs to God. Steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord.” 

Power and love belong to God.  That is the recipe for meeting the urgent needs of the people, so urgent that God calls twice.  But power doesn’t work on its own. Love doesn’t even work on its own. That’s the crucial insight that Dr. King understood. 

“Power without love,” he said, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”¹

This is the reign of God- power and love, at their best, implementing justice. 

God called Jonah twice because it was time to implement justice.  With both power and love, God saved them all. God saved the victims and God saved the oppressors. Justice and Mercy, Power and Love correcting everything that stood against love.  

This is the reign of God. It’s what God calls each and every one of us into it. It’s incredibly urgent.  And it’s why God calls twice. 

But it’s not the only reason.  

Because God could have called somebody else, when God called the second time, right?  Jonah did not want to do this job, he made that very clear. If you don’t remember the story, the first time Jonah was called to Nineveh, he hopped in a boat and sailed the opposite direction as fast as he could.  That’s how he ended up in the belly of that big fish. Which spewed him up right back on land so that the word of God could come to him a second time. 

God calls twice because God is incredibly patient with us. 

God was certainly patient with Jonah.  Jonah ran away from the first call, because he knew God would be merciful. He knew that God would respond not only with power, but also with love, and he just couldn’t stand it. And in the end the only one who isn’t saved, the only one who isn’t part of the reign of God, is Jonah.  He is left looking down at the city in resentment, telling God he is “angry enough to die!” And the book ends with God patiently loving him too, calling him, yet again, into the reign of God. 

Because it is urgent, God is patient.

God was also patient with those fishers in the gospel for today. Andrew and Simon Peter and John and James. Now, it’s true in this story, they don’t seem to need to be called twice.  “Immediately” they leave their nets and their boats.  James and John up and leave their father in the boat and they don’t even seem to look back.  All four of them are caught up right away in the promise of God’s power and love implementing justice, ushering in the reign of God. 

But we know that they don’t really understand the reign of God yet.  Most of the rest of the gospel of Mark will show how they really don’t get it. And even these men who seemed so eager to leave their nets, will end up back in their boats.  On another lake shore. At the end of another gospel. Lost and despairing because they really didn’t think that God’s love and power in action would look like God dying on a cross. 

But Jesus will call them again. 

He will call these same followers again from their boats.   He will tell them to cast their nets on the other side. He will tell Simon Peter to feed God’s lambs and tend God’s sheep. And he will say, for the second time, follow me.  

Jesus called these fishers twice, in almost the same way. Because God was patient with them, even though they didn’t understand.

And with this patient urgency, God has called you too. 

Even when you, like these fishers, just don’t get it, don’t understand the fullness of the reign of power and love and justice you are being called into. Even when you, like Jonah, don’t like it, when the love of God makes you angry enough to die. God is patient. God calls twice. 

Or three times or four times, or too many times to count!

God has called you into the reign of God.  Maybe you heard God’s voice, saying “Get up and go!”  Or maybe you felt an urge, a stirring from the Holy Spirit that you couldn’t quite explain, maybe you feel it right now, calling you into urgent work. Maybe you heard the words of a prophet with a message as simple as “Repent and Believe.” Or another way you could translate it: “Turn and Trust.”

Turn away from standing against love.  Turn away from the ways you hurt others and hurt yourself.  Turn away from this present world and follow Christ into the new creation.

Turn and Trust.

Trust that power belongs to God. Trust that steadfast love belongs to God.  Trust that God is calling you and will not abandon you. That God will call twice. Again and again and as many times as it takes. 

The reign of God has come near. It’s urgent. Turn and Trust.

In the name of the Father, of the  ☩  Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

_{1. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Where do we go from here?” Speech. 15 August 1967. Transcript available at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here. Hear the quoted excerpt from the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsvSq5_vbL4&t=1s}

In this passage the Temple is functioning the way it was supposed to and God’s salvation is seen in many different dimensions.

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
First Sunday of Christmas, year B 
Texts: Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Luke 2:22-40

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When we think of Jesus in the Temple, we often think of flipping tables.

All four gospels include an account of the “Cleansing of the Temple,” when Jesus drove out the money changers and the merchants. Mark and Matthew include the detail of overturning the tables and in John’s gospel Jesus even has a whip! This encounter lives large in our imaginations and it means that the Temple in Jerusalem, the very center of Jewish faith and religious practice, is primarily associated with Jesus’ righteous fury. Often we only think of it as a place of exploitation and consumerism and corruption.

But in our gospel passage today, we see the Temple in a very different light.

This encounter, like so much of the Nativity story, is only included in Luke’s gospel. And it is a very different account of Jesus in the Temple. There are no whips, no overturned tables, no mention of money-changers. Instead, we see the Temple functioning beautifully, the way it was supposed to.

You can see it with the prophet Anna.

We don’t know much about her, we don’t even get to hear her speak, but we know that she was a widow and that she had lived for a long time without a husband to provide for her. For decades and decades. And we are told that she “never left the Temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.” Which prompts the question, who was taking care of her? Who was making sure she had what she needed and was holding her in love and respect? In the Temple the answer must be: her neighbors.

Because the Temple was supposed to be the place where the two Great Commandments – to love God and love your neighbor, were fully in effect. Where you could expect the laws commanding care for orphans and foreigners and widows were followed. And where Anna could deliver her prophetic words of critique and comfort and be fed and sheltered. That’s how the Temple should be and, in this story, that’s how it was.

And you can see it in how the young family, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, are welcomed.

They enter the Temple as strangers in Jerusalem, following the law, and presenting their firstborn son to God. They are too poor to offer a lamb, so Mary and Joseph bring a pair of birds to sacrifice, the most they could afford. Yet they are welcomed. Simeon and Anna rejoice over their baby. And their family is held not only in joy, but in pain as well, when Simeon acknowledges Mary’s coming grief, the sword that will pierce her soul. Just as they are, they are seen and embraced.

The Temple was supposed to be a place where everyone could come as they are. Elders and babies, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, gathering at the Temple to rejoice or fast or pray or wait or make an offering or receive a blessing. That’s how the Temple should be and, in this story, that’s how it was.

And you can see with Simeon.

Simeon is promised that he “will not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.” And when the time comes, the Holy Spirit guides him to the Temple. I imagine that the Spirit could have led Simeon to any place to meet Jesus. But Simeon is guided to the Temple.

Because most of all, the Temple was supposed to be a place to have encounters with God, a place where people were expecting God to show up. And when God showed up as the Messiah, not in the shape of a warrior, but incredibly in the shape of a child, Simeon saw! Simeon and Anna were looking for God and they found Jesus. And then they told everyone who would listen, everyone who was looking for God, everyone who was waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. “Look! God is here!” That’s how the Temple should be and, in this story, that’s how it was.

And here’s the point. When the Temple is what it should be – salvation is seen!

Simeon sees. “My eyes have seen your salvation,” he says, and in the context of this encounter in the Temple (with the Temple functioning the way it’s supposed to) we see it too. We see God’s salvation – and in many different dimensions.

We see the cosmic and eternal dimension of salvation.

Simeon is holding God in his arms! God, enfleshed and alive! Simeon recognizes God-with-us in this baby, who has come to reach us, to be made known to us, to love us, to suffer with us, to forgive us, and to save us. So that our broken selves won’t be this way forever, but instead every tear will be wiped away and every child of God will be restored to glory. This is God’s redeeming work to reconcile with humanity, to make all things new forever and always, and bring us into eternal life in the Spirit. And Simeon saw it face to face.

And this salvation is multidimensional!

Not only personal and eternal, but collective and immediate. Not just for you singular sometime in the future, but for you plural, now.

Jesus, destined to cause “the falling and rising of many,” flipped the tables that needed flipping. When the Temple wasn’t functioning like it was supposed to, Jesus brought salvation, driving out all who oppressed and exploited. So that there might be salvation for the poor – like Mary and Joseph, and salvation for the desperate – like Simeon, for the lonely and dependent – like Anna, and salvation for the outsiders – like the Gentiles that Simon sings of. This is the salvation which topples tyrants and lifts up the lowly, and tears down the barriers between us.

And this is the quiet and ordinary salvation of flourishing and abundant life. The kind of salvation that Simeon might have seen in the Temple that day even if Jesus hadn’t been there. But it was there, when Simeon was holding a child from a poor family, who were just going about their ordinary business of loving God and loving their neighbors, there he saw salvation.

This is why we gather, not anymore at the Temple, but as the church, week after week.

So that like Simeon, we can see all these many different dimensions of God’s salvation. Salvation on the scale of the universe, and on the scale of your own heart. And everything in between. At all scales, God is at work. Salvation is happening everywhere all the time. And we gather so that we can see it. So we can tell each other about what we have seen.

Isaiah imagined God’s salvation shining out like the dawn or like a burning torch so that the nations could see. But the dawn can be easy to miss. If you aren’t looking for it, you probably won’t see it. But God wants to be seen. God wants you to see salvation. God wants to guide you right to it. God wants you to hold Jesus in your arms.

We gather not in the Temple, but as the Temple, so that all are loved and welcomed and cared for, so that we can encounter God and see salvation. The way it’s supposed to be.

In the name of the Father, of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.