Message from the Moderator: May 2016

Our Story, Our Song: Christ

Rhonda Pittman Gingrich, Moderator

Throughout the Biblical Story, God repeatedly reminds the people to remember the Story. As God’s people, it is important for us to remember and tell God’s Story and to sing the songs of our faith—in good times and in bad times—so we don’t forget who we are and whose we are. When we forget who we are and whose we are, when we fail to remember and tell God’s Story and to sing the songs of our faith, we run the risk of allowing our identity and lives to be shaped by the prevailing stories of society. God’s Story must not simply be remembered (recited and heard), it must be re-membered (pieced together and retold ways that connect intimately with our lives), understood, and embodied.

So as we continue to move through this year, I invite you to join me in an ongoing exploration of the overarching Story of God and God’s people—a story that continues to unfold through us today. To provide structure for this journey of remembrance and reflection, I am drawing on The Story of God, The Story of Us: Getting Lost and Found in the Bible by Sean Gladding.

So grab your hymnal and your Bible and join me in exploring the Story that reminds us who we are, whose we are, and who we are called to be and become.

Sing: O Come, O Come, Immanuel (Hymnal: A Worship Book, 172)

Read: Matthew 1-20; Mark 1-10; Luke 1-18; and John 1-11

As we pick up our story this month, the Israelites are watching and hoping for the long-awaited Messiah. They have returned from exile, but for all intents and purposes are still living in bondage under the rule of foreign governments. Under the leadership of Nehemiah they rebuilt the Temple, but it barely hints at the glory of Solomon’s Temple. Even more importantly, God’s visible presence is missing. And so they wait. They wait for God’s return to the Temple. They wait for God’s forgiveness. They wait for a new exodus from their suffering. They wait for a renewal of the covenant. They wait.

In the midst of this longing a baby was born. Jesus. A vulnerable baby, born in humble surroundings to parents who led unremarkable lives except for their openness to God’s revelation and their determination to respond to God’s call with thankful obedience. God had returned to dwell among the people.  And yet, while recognized by the visiting Magi and even King Herod, this miraculous arrival of the long-awaited Messiah went unnoticed by his own people—with the exception of a few people on the margins of society: his young mother (who in responding to God’s call found herself an unwed, pregnant teenager); a group of lowly shepherds; the elderly, “righteous and devout” Simeon who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he “would not see death before he saw the Lord’s Messiah” (Luke 2:25-35); and the elderly, long-widowed prophetess Anna who fasted and prayed at the Temple day and night (Luke 2:35-38). This was to be the pattern throughout Jesus’ life: overlooked, rejected, even despised by many of the very people who longed for a Messiah, even as he touched the lives of many others in transformative ways, including both the most marginalized within Jewish society and Gentiles viewed with disdain by the Jewish people.

With the exception of just two other childhood episodes (the family’s flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and a trip to the Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of the Passover) the Gospels leave much to be imagined about the intervening years between Jesus’ birth and the start of his public ministry.  However, it is probably safe to assume that Jesus grew up in a practicing Jewish household, nurtured by parents who maintained traditional roles, surrounded by younger siblings, and trained in the trade of carpentry by working side by side with his father. A seemingly mundane and ordinary life—and yet perhaps it was just this life that prepared him to connect with real people leading ordinary lives when he launched his ministry.

His cousin John was called to lay the groundwork and prepare the way for Jesus’ ministry. The word of God did not come to the religious authorities, the word of God came to John “in the wilderness” where God so often met and continues to meet God’s people (Luke 3:2). “John, like the prophets before him, warned the people not to presume on their privilege as descendants of Abraham but instead to be faithful to the covenant Abraham made with God” (Gladding, 162). John piqued the interest of and aroused expectation in the people. Some even wondered if he was the Messiah. However, John was clear in his message: “I’m baptizing you in the river. The main character in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out” (Gladding, 162).

It was onto this stage that Jesus emerged to begin his public ministry, coming to John to be baptized. In that act he not only identified with the people who, in submitting to baptism, were admitting their human faults and failings and answering a call to greater faithfulness. Just as David was anointed by God’s prophet Samuel to lead the people, through baptism, Jesus was anointed by God’s prophet John to lead the people. As he emerged from the water, the Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove (the animal offered as a sacrifice by the poor) and a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).

Following his baptism, Jesus did not immediately begin his public ministry. He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he spent forty days and faced three trials that echoed the trials Israel, God’s firstborn son, faced during their forty years in the wilderness following the exodus. Where the Israelites failed in trusting God when faced with hunger and demanded manna, Jesus resisted the temptation to satisfy his hunger with bread alone, choosing God’s will instead. Where the Israelites continually tested God’s power, Jesus resisted the temptation the prove God’s power by jumping from the pinnacle of the Temple. Where the Israelites gave into the temptation of idolatry and failed to worship God alone, Jesus resisted the temptation to worship Satan in exchange for establishing dominion over the whole earth. Over and over again, when faced with trials and temptations, Jesus remained faithful to God.

When he returned from the wilderness, Jesus returned to his home in Galilee to begin his ministry. As he proclaimed the good news of God’s kingdom in word and deed—teaching in the synagogues, changing water into wine, preaching on the hillside, feeding the hungry, telling stories by the seaside, healing the sick, cleansing the temple, and delivering the demon-possessed—his reputation and influence as a rabbi grew.

He called twelve ordinary men from varying walks of life to follow him, learn from him, and be his disciples. In a striking parallel, just as God had once dwelt in the Temple among the twelve tribes of Israel, God was once again intimately present in the midst of the people represented by the twelve disciples.

Jesus came to deliver the Israelites from their present bondage, but throughout his ministry, he consistently reminded the Jewish authorities—through his words and his actions—that God’s covenant with the Israelites was meant to bless all people, not just Israel. God’s sought (and continues to seek) the restoration, reconciliation, and redemption of the whole world. The Jewish authorities and many of the Jewish people, including his own disciples, didn’t seem to understand this and often questioned his choices.

Where some saw categories, Jesus saw people with hopes and dreams, struggles and hurts. He looked into the eyes of the people he met and touched them—literally and figuratively.  This was huge.  It was the practice of the Jewish people to isolate those who were unclean because of disease or sin.  To touch them put one’s purity at risk.  But without concern for his own purity or cleanliness Jesus touched them and in so doing, didn’t just restore their physical, emotional, and spiritual health, but restored their relational health. How beautiful it is to be noticed, to be touched when recognition and loving touch have been withheld. Jesus’ actions serve as a reminder that the spiritual journey, while intensely personal, is also always relational.

Because he consistently reached out and touched the lost and the least, the marginalized and the oppressed, the sinners and the foreigners, is it any surprise that “outsiders”—like the Samaritan woman at the well—often recognized Jesus as the Messiah before the Jewish people who had been watching and waiting for “the Anointed One”?  Because he was not the Messiah they had expected and because he often confronted religious authority and societal conventions in bold ways, transforming lives and relationships, was it any wonder that the Jewish authorities felt threatened by him?

Are we as slow to recognize God’s incarnational presence in our midst as some of those who surrounded Jesus? What are the trials and temptations that trip us up and prevent us from living as faithful disciples? Who are the people around us who cry out to be noticed, to be touched?

Jesus said he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. When one of the Pharisees asked him, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He answered, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The law is love. Jesus was love incarnate. How has your life been transformed by Christ, God’s love incarnate? How are we called to embody God’s love for a hurting world in the time and place that we live?

As Jackie Deshannon wrote, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. No, not just for some but for everyone.” The world is still in need of reconciliation, restoration, and redemption. O come, o come, Immanuel. We are still in need of a Messiah to guide us as we seek to partner with God in building God’s kingdom. O come, O come, Immanuel into our hearts and into our lives.

Sing: Tú, Has Venido a la Orilla/Lord, You Have Come to the Lakeshore (Hymnal: A Worship Book, 229)