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SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her two most recent sermons on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. Our first sermon series of the year is Walking with Jesus. Enjoy.
The Beauty of God’s Words
January 16 & 19, 2025 2nd Sunday of Epiphany
2 Timothy 3:14-17 Luke 2:41-52
The Boy Jesus in the Temple is the only story that we have in the Bible about Jesus as a child. We know that Jesus had to flee to Egypt when he was a baby because Herod wanted to kill him to prevent him from supplanting him as king. Jesus lived in Egypt, until Herod died and then his family returned to Nazareth, when Jesus was a young child.
There are a lot of legends of Jesus as a small child. In one legend Jesus was playing ball with his friends, and one of the children accidentally hit a dove which fell to the ground stunned or possibly dead. Jesus felt badly for the bird, and he picked it up, stroked it, and then it flew away all healed.
There were a lot of these legends floating around when the gospels and other writings about Jesus' history were being considered for the New Testament. But the people who decided which books should go into the New Testament didn’t want to include legends about Jesus. They wanted to be factual, so they tried to only include events that it had been eye witnessed by people about Jesus. If you read all the Gospels, you see that most of the stories about Jesus are repeated throughout them. The Gospels, though written by different people, collaborate with each other.
Also, back then being a child wasn’t important. It was what you became as an adult that was important. And there is another fact from this time about the Jewish culture and religion. The reason why Jesus probably didn't begin his ministry before the age of 30 was because it was felt that until you reached the age of 30 you hadn't experienced and learned enough to be a holy man. If Jesus had started his ministry earlier, most people would have thought that he wasn’t yet experienced enough. Think about John the Baptist. He was only a few months older than Jesus and he didn’t start his ministry of prophecy until he was 30 either.
Knowing this, we can see why there are only these glimpses of where Jesus was when he was a baby and a child, and why there's a gap of 18 years after the story of the 12-year-old Jesus being in the temple until he is 30 and starts his ministry. So, if all the Gospels stayed away from childhood legends of Jesus why was this story, which is only in Luke, allowed in?
Jesus at 12, is at the age where young boys seriously learn the Torah, the histories, and prophetic scriptures. At the age of 13 boys would have a bar mitzvah, which indicates that they had learned enough about the scriptures to be accepted as adults in the community. This didn't mean that their learning stopped, just that it was now enough so that they could begin to take on responsibilities that would lead them into maturity that would allow them to develop skills for a job, to take care of a family, and to be a member of society. You didn’t stop learning once you had your bar mitzvah; this was the point that you began to learn seriously.
Like all well-raised Jewish boys, Jesus probably has been going to the local synagogue for his lessons. We do know that all the scribal schools started by learning to read and write through the Book of Proverbs. And then you would continue with the Torah, histories, and prophets. We can assume that at twelve, Jesus could read and write, and knew a fair bit about the Jewish Canon.
It would also have been usual for his parents to take a pilgrimage during Passover to the Jerusalem Temple. You might wonder: How could his parents not know that he was with them? They were probably traveling with a large group from the region, and they figured he was walking with some friends. It could be that Jesus set out with them and then remembered something that he wanted to do in the Temple. In any case he ends up in the Temple for a few days talking with the teachers.
I want you to picture this scene: Teachers would sit in the outer court of the Temple on stairs or stools and people would come and sit at their feet and ask them questions. The teacher would answer the question, and this might spark a debate among the group that was sitting by the teachers. This was a great way for people to exchange ideas and learn something.
Once Jesus’ parents realize that Jesus isn't with them, they backtracked to Jerusalem. Eventually his parents find him at the Temple and are surprised to see that he is sitting with a group of teachers, not at their feet, but in equal conversation with them.
We can assume that this was enough of an event that Luke actually had some eyewitnesses to this, which is why he included it in his gospel. It also shows that Jesus, at a young age, was a learned and serious scholar. Jesus when he appeared at 30, wasn't just some country bumpkin from the back hills of Galilee, he was someone who from a young age was well versed in scripture to the point of being respected by people who were older than he was. It gives us a glimpse into his level of education.
The story gives legitimacy to Jesus because there is a Jewish tradition, which still exists today, that learning, especially about God, is a lifelong process and goal.
This year we have a confirmation class at Bloomville. Confirmation is supposed to start all of us on our learning quest for God. But unfortunately, sometimes confirmation is seen as the ending of your learning about God. I’ve met people who feel: Oh, I finished all the classes, I answered all the questions and declared my faith as a Christian, so now I'm good. I don't have to read and study the Bible anymore or examine how what Jesus said relates to my life.
But people in Jesus’ time wouldn’t have seen it that way. They would have continued to study the word of God, both by reading the scriptures and by talking with each other about how those words related to their lives.
As Christians we’re also supposed to be life-long learners of God. John Wesley believed very firmly that life-long learning was important to a Christian. He came up with a system to help people live with and apply the Words of God called: The Four Legged Stool or the Quadrilateral. The first leg is Scripture, God’s word. Every Christian should devote themselves to studying God’s Word by reading the Bible and being familiar with Jesus’ story.
But it’s not enough for us to know scripture, we have to relate it to three more things. The first is Tradition: What does our history of how we live in the word apply to scripture in our lives? What is good in our past that we can bring forward into our future? The next thing is Reason. We always need to be evaluating and thinking through what our scriptures and traditions mean to us. And how can we truthfully interpret scripture and avoid interpreting it falsely for our own ends, not in the spirit of justice and compassion. And finally, there is Experience. The conditions in our lives aren’t the same as our parents or grandparents. The world is constantly changing, and we need to use our reason against our experience, and the new and changing world, to evaluate our traditions to make sure that they are still relevant to scripture in the present day.
God’s word is where we begin our journey. Bible study and reading books about how to live a Christian life can help us. But we shouldn’t feel that we need to do it alone. The purpose of church is to give us a place to come together and to share our experience of what God’s Word means to us. How it can help and support us, and we can even talk about what confuses us about it, because sometimes our world-experiences seem to collide with God’s Word, and it might take us some time and help from friends to figure out how to deal with that.
Think about what Jesus did. Starting at an early age he immersed himself in God’s Word, not just to learn it, but to apply it to his own life. This insight was why all those teachers were listening to him. Jesus was Being about his Father’s Business: Learning about the Word and how to apply it to our lives. It’s what Jesus did during his ministry all those times he gathered people around him and preached: He showed them how to apply the Word to their lives so that they saw and felt that God was closer to them then they thought.
If we follow Jesus’ example and keep learning about God’s Word, I think that all of us, no matter what our age, will continue to increase in wisdom and in divine and human favor.
Living in Our Baptism
January 12, 2025 2nd Sunday of Epiphany Baptism of the Lord
Isaiah 43:1-7 Luke 3:15-17;21-22
Both baptism and communion have very deep roots in the human religious experience. Feasting together as a part of a divine celebration has been going on through all of recorded history, and probably way before recorded history. Community feasts take place during ceremonies all over the world in so many religions. The Jewish Shabbat, which our own communion service is based on, is a ceremony within a family or community meal. Think of what happens when we eat together over at a friend's house or when we go out with someone for a cup of coffee and a muffin. We share stories of our experiences and become closer together.
When we have communion in church, we’re having a meal together and we’re sharing the story of what Jesus did for us during his life. How he released us from slavery to sin and death and gave to us a new way to relate to God.
Baptism has also been happening for a long time. The idea of using water to purify yourself has been used in nearly every culture. There are temples all over the world that have special bathing pools to purify your body before you enter a temple. One ancient temple found in Turkey had a pool of water that people had to cross to get to the inner sanctum. I don't know what people in the ancient world thought was being purified, whether it was cleansing the physical body, or if it was symbolic act of cleansing your mind and heart before you presented yourself to the divine, but it was prevalent and important. The Jewish religion had the mikvah bath, where both men and women purified themselves before important rituals or sacrifices so you could come to God clean and as your best person.
So, when John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness calling for people to come and be baptized, the idea wasn’t something new. What was new about this cleansing and purification, was that he was proclaiming that the Messiah was going to be coming soon and that people had to start to get ready for him.
For the people in who came to see John, baptism was a way to get them reconnected with God. Physically, they washed themselves clean, and mentally and emotionally they were washing away those sinful things that they did in the past that they were ashamed of and the parts of themselves that they didn’t like. Anytime they’d been mean to someone: anytime they’d thought badly about someone; any time they’d lied, or stolen, or cheated. We all carry around inside us the knowledge of what we did and the fact that we want to clean ourselves and wash away all that nasty stuff from us.
But John is taking baptism one step further. His baptism was a repentance baptism, not just a washing away of the daily sins. Since he was proclaiming that the Messiah is going to come and we had to get ready for him, his baptism was a washing away of your old life and sins, and a commitment to live a new life after the baptism, not go back to the old way of being you had been before. To repent you had to walk away from the old path of sin and selfishness and choose to live with a loving heart with God.
Then, when Jesus came and was baptized, he opened another path for us: The opening up of our hearts, minds and souls to receive the Holy Spirit as our guide. And to receive the Grace of God in our lives.
But what good is baptism to us on a daily basis? Well, if you know that you are open to the Holy Spirit and God’s forgiving grace, and you’ve done something wrong, then you know that you don’t have to carry around that grief and shame forever. Baptism also opens up a way for us to be forgiven.
If you do something wrong, you don’t have to kick yourself continuously. You don’t have to say: Oh, I’m such a terrible person, and I can never be a good person again. Instead, you can say to yourself: I’ve been opened up to God’s grace; his generous renewing actions of compassion every day, and I have the assurance of God’s forgiveness and the ability to restore things to being right again. I also have the ability to forgive myself and others for mistakes that are made.
One of the most generous, renewing actions of compassion that can be given is forgiveness. Forgiveness is generous. We don’t have to forgive, but we can choose to give it freely. Forgiveness renews our faith in the world and in ourselves; life becomes something that is good. Forgiveness is also compassionate, because God is saying that he understands us and what we’re going through. And when we forgive we also say to ourselves or others that we understand the situation that led to the guilt and shame.
When we are forgiven, we are no longer living inside the shame and guilt, instead we now live in hope. When you forgive yourself, you’re saying to yourself: Look you’re not a bad person. You don’t have to be stuck in this place. You can figure out a way to make what you did wrong right. You can make things better because you have the power to give generously to renew or remake situations and to be compassionate while you do that.
And when you forgive someone for doing something wrong, you’re also saying that they aren’t a bad person. You don’t have to be stuck living with anger and hatred. I’m not saying that just because you ask someone for forgiveness or give forgiveness that everything is going to be all right again. There is a process that has to happen of finding a solution to whatever went wrong and working to make it right. But if you know that you’re forgiven by God, that allows you to start taking those steps because you’re not trapped in your guilt, shame, anger, or hate.
Today we remember our baptism because the world can sometimes be so overwhelming, and we are living in physical bodies and physical surroundings, and we can easily lose track of the fact that inside this physical body is a divine soul that is connected to God. That is why we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord, to remind ourselves that there is a conduit open for us to God’s grace.
You can find God’s grace anywhere. John Wesley said that we live in a sea of grace, and if we look around, we can find generous renewing actions of compassion everywhere we look, and we can give generous renewing actions at any time, like when you smile at people or give them a compliment. On Monday, I went to Walton for a doctor’s appointment. It was snowing when I drove back and I didn’t really feel like fighting the weather and speeding up route 10. I stopped at the Price Chopper in Delhi, and as I was going into the store, a woman stopped me and said: I want to thank you. (I had never met this worman before!) All the way back from Walton you were driving behind me and you never pushed me to go faster. You never got on my tail. You never flashed your lights. It makes me so nervous when people do that to me. You just let me drive comfortably in the snow. I didn’t know I was being kind, but my driving for her was an act of Grace, and her thanking me was also and act of grace.
But remembering that we live within God’s grace so that we have access to the choice to forgive and be kind can sometimes be hard to do. Like playing piano, or playing a sport, or learning how to knit, you have to practice it to get better at it.
So, I recommend that this week you write down three instances that have annoyed you, or that you’re mad about and practice trying to forgive yourself, or someone else, or just the situation. And try to take it to the next step and see how you can offer yourself, someone, or something a generous, renewing action of compassion that will help to make things right again.
When you do this, you’ll be living in your baptism. You’ll be remembering your baptism and you’ll be connecting each and every time with God and the Holy Spirit. And if you’re having problems, finding forgiveness, or generosity, renewal or compassion, just ask Jesus to help you. If you do remember that you are connected to God, and that his grace surrounds you, then I think you’ll find that those connections will be more frequent. And I think you’ll find that there is a little more of the peace like a dove in your life.