New Testament

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for December 9th, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

Malachi 3:1-4
Canticle 16 (Luke 1:68-79)
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

Click here to access these readings.

        Goodness gracious, Luke.  I didn’t know this was going to be a history test!  What’s with all these names?  “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius (oh, which one was that), when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea (oh, good, I know him; he’s the guy with Jesus at the end), and Herod was ruler of Galilee (I know him, too; he’s the guy who kills John the Baptist, right?), and his brother Philip (who?) ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis (wait, where?) and Lysanias ruler of Abilene (huh?), during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas (I think I remember that last guy), the word of the God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”  That’s.  a.  mouthful.  I had to look up half of these names to figure out how to pronounce them.  And if John hears the word of God in the wilderness, what does all this stuff about kings and emperors and rulers who have been dead two thousand years have to do with anything?  Why does Luke care, and why does he think we should care about who ruled what when?

        Well, let’s try this.  Instead of talking about biblical times, let’s do Luke’s thing in our own time.  So: “In the second year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, in the year when the film E.T. – the Extra Terrestrial was wowing audiences, when Michael Jackson released his hit album, Thriller, when John Belushi died of a drug overdose, when stamps cost 20 cents and a movie ticket about three dollars, and in the year when the first artificial heart was implanted in a human, your vicar Timothy Hannon was born.”  Fwew.  Did you get all those references?  Now, I could easily have said, “I was born in 1982”, and this would have given you all the information you needed about how old I am.  But that would have been just a number, and a number isn’t what’s important about a person.  I hope that when I was describing the things that happened in the year I was born, you heard a little voice say, “E.T. phone home”, or you saw in your mind Michael Jackson doing the moon walk, or thought of the Blues Brothers, or thanked God, perhaps, that we have such medicine as artificial hearts.  I hope you experienced that, and more, in one sweeping image.  That’s the world I was born into, and knowing that world helps you learn just a little bit more about me.

        This is what Luke wants us to experience as well.  And while we might not know who Herod’s brother Philip was, and while we might not be moved in the same way by the name Lysanias of Abilene as we might be the name Ronald Reagan, I think we can still see what Luke wants us to see: the gospels are no fiction.  This all happened in history, and Luke wants his audience back in the first century to remember what it was like living under Pontius Pilate, or of the stories their parents and grandparents used to tell about Herod.  And John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, Peter and Judas and the rest of the apostles, they did not walk around in some never-never land.  As my high school chemistry teacher used to say, “This ain’t no play-like.”  No.  This is real.  John called on folks to repent beneath the same sun we sitting under today; and Jesus went to get baptized in the river Jordan, that same river that, if you don’t mind a long plane trip and have the money, you yourself can go and see and swim in.  And, to skip ahead to the end of the story, Jesus was crucified on a real hill outside a real city.  This stuff is real, and it really happened, and that’s one of the reasons it’s all so important.

        Now, I preach often about the “realness” of Jesus Christ.  I think it’s important that we remember, and remember often, that Jesus Christ was a living, breathing human being.  He had hands, he sat by the fire and listened to stories, he slept and sneezed, laughed and cried.  Remembering this teaches our heart that God is not some far distant entity, sitting alone in some heaven that we can’t even hope to reach.  God became a human being to bring a message of love and hope and peace.  And when Luke rattles off the names of six rules like it’s nothing, he’s trying to remind us of just this fact.

        But there’s another sort of realness that Luke’s trying to remind us about.  It’s the realness of the world.  Now, in the Bible, oftentimes “the world” is the bad guy.  We Christians are called to live apart from the world, to step away from the ways normal people live and accept a higher and more godly calling.  We Christians are meant to be counter-cultural, and not in the way that we all should be hippies or something, but that we are called to be guided by something much different from what our cultures say is good and right to do.  St. John, in his gospel, reminds us that we should only have one father, one single person who we follow, and that is our father in heaven.  We Christians follow a higher law.

        But, that said, we Christians are called at the same time to work within the world.  The world is real, and it is a place where we may – and often do – encounter God.  For God is everywhere, everywhere trying to push his way in to fill the world with a greater light.  One of professors at seminary used to tell us this, half joking, when she said that we need to develop a theology of administrative work.”  We all laughed, but she was series.  She said, “When you become priests, you’ll be called to fill out schedules; to record attendance for annual reports; to answer the phone; to chair meetings; and to call the repairman.  You might think all this is all just extra stuff, but that leaves God out of so much of your work.  Being a priest isn’t only about the deep, spiritual stuff; you will do all the boring, little things around a parish.  Find God in all aspects of your work, and you will forever be gracious and loving.” 

The Rev. Dr. Patti Hale up in Springfield taught me this one day.  Back while I was discerning a call to the priesthood, I was shadowing her to see what it was like being a priest.  And, one day, I pulled up to St. Matthew’s and there she was, out in the front of the church, pulling weeds from the garden.  “This is also the work of a priest,” she said, wiping her brow.  “Because God’s in the dirt, too.”

        At the end of every service, the deacon always says (and since we have no deacon, I say it) what’s called the dismissal.  “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord” or “Go forth, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.”  And what this means is, “Go, and lift the world to God with love.”  Because, goodness gracious, the world needs it.  Pain and suffering are real, and people – real people – live lives in lonely despair without hope.  And St. Luke reminds us, St. Luke together with all of the Bible, that it was to this world where darkness and despair are real that God came to do the work of salvation.  And so we are called to do the same.  We are called to be a light to the world, to remind a grieving world that goodness and love and hope are not just nice things to think about when the weather’s fair, but that they are the foundation of true reality. 

        So go into the world, and rejoice in the power of the Lord, for you are all torchbearers for God.

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for November 18th, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

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Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost.  And while it’s the last day of the long season of green, and your bulletin inserts have the same green header as we’ve had since spring, and it says “Last Pentecost” on the top – you’ll notice that our color today is white.  That’s because today is the feast of “Christ the King Sunday.”  This feast is celebrated on the last day of Pentecost, whenever that day falls.  It’s a pretty recent addition to the church year; Roman Catholics started the feast in 1925, and we Anglicans (along with Lutherans and some other Protestants) only adopted it in the 70s.  And while it’s a young feast, I think it’s an important one; it asks us to pause and to think about what kings are.

        They’re all over the Bible, and Jesus is the King of Kings, but in our world today, we don’t see many kings.  There are the royals in Britain – Queen Elizabeth II, William and Kate, and the rest.  And while Queen Elizabeth is certainly a queen and in line with all other kings of Britain before her, she doesn’t have much political power.  Then, there are medieval kings we might see in movies or read about in books.  These kings are powerful, have an iron grip on their kingdom, and often do so with an iron fist.  But, in truth (I’m sorry to ruin it), most of the kings we see in movies are more fantasy and romance than reality.  People didn’t run around in full armor all the time.

        Kings are pretty distant to us Americans.  And that is, in a large part, because we threw out our king in the Revolutionary War.  The colonists were being oppressed with heavy taxation by a king who lived a whole lifetime away across the Atlantic Ocean.  Colonists wanted to rule themselves, to have a country of the people, by the people, and for the people.  They wanted to make their own choices when it came to their government, and so they revolted and founded what we now know as the United States.  Thinking of our history, we might rightly wonder whether we need a king at all, even in religion.  Perhaps, we might say, kings were just a good metaphor in Jesus’s time, but now, for us, who know better than to have kings, we should find different metaphor.  Maybe like “Christ the President” or “Christ the Head Hancho” or “Christ the guy in charge.”

        But we have to be cautious, of course, of getting rid of things in the past because they might not speak to us in our modern day.  There are times when turning away from the past is important, both in our communal life and our personal lives.  There are some things that we should, certainly, put behind us and forget about.  Our government does this with diplomacy: although we fought a war against Great Britain, we’ve put that past behind us so we can work for the good of one another and of the world.  Our churches do this too: Anglicans used to really not like Roman Catholics (this is an understatement, to be sure!), but two Sundays ago, we not only gathered together at Holy Name Catholic Church, but with all the other churches in Coquille for an ecumenical service.  We put our past fights behind us so that we could glorify God in some semblance of what the Church should be.

        But there are many things in the past that we shouldn’t forget: things like veterans and the wars they fought in, or difficult times in our country’s history like the Civil Rights movement.  And we remember them not just to lightly smile at and pat ourselves on the back that things are perhaps better now.  No, we remember because in these moments our country and we ourselves learned something and grew.  We gained wisdom in going through those difficult times, and it is good to look back and revisit that wisdom.  Often we’ve forgotten it.

        So, enough of an old history buff’s lesson on why we should love history.  What about this kingship thing?  Why do we still refer to Christ as King?  Why do we talk about Christ’s kingdom instead of use some other image or metaphor?

          We have to remember, though, that when we balk at the idea of a king, when we hear “king” and translate it in our heads to “tyrant”, we’re not alone.  The people of Jesus’s day had seen their fair share of tyrants.  The Jewish people, throughout their whole history from their first king Saul down to the emperor in Rome, had know what it was like to be under the thumb of a tyrant.  This is why, for some, the Messiah was supposed to be a great military leader who came and destroyed all the tyrants.  The Messiah was supposed to come in power and might, and when they looked at Jesus, they probably laughed and said, “Yeah, like this guy can stand up to Rome.  Where’s the real Messiah?”  And they said this not because they had a fanciful image of kings but because they had seen so many kings mess up. 

        So when you think of kings, and of Christ as our king, I want you to think of this image: when we were kids, my neighborhood friends and I used to play a lot of baseball.  We played in my friend’s backyard, and this friend had a dog named Tess.  Now Tess was a sheep-dog, not by training but by breeding.  I don’t think Tess ever saw a sheep in her life, but herding sheep was in her bones.  So, instead of white fluffy animals, she had us kids to tend.  And whenever we played baseball, she would run around the whole field, circling us, nonstop.  The poor dog never stopped running.  And when we hit a ball out of the field, be it into a neighbor’s yard or into the woods, and someone had to go and get it, Tess would follow us and bite at our feet.  She’d shove and push and bite us until we got back into the field with the ball.  Then she’d run around and around us again.

        Now as kids, we thought this was annoying.  Tess would mess up our shoes and, often, really hurt us when she bit us.  But what was she doing?  She was protecting us, she thought, from wolves.  For shepherds, like sheep dogs, are there to protect their sheep, to guide them through difficult terrain, to go out and seek those who are lost and alone.  And a king isn’t supposed to do this just for sheep, but for his people: to guide them through tough times, to teach them and nurture them, and every once in a while give them a firm look to let them know they’re serious.

        And isn’t this what Christ does for us?  We who are so scattered and wayward, hasn’t Christ gone out into the wild of the world and gathered us all together, too?  Hasn’t Christ brought us out of the hazardous lands of Sin and Death and given us New Life in his flock that we call the Church?  And doesn’t Christ continue to teach and to guide us, to run around us like a sheep dog, to protect us; and, when we err, to come and seek us out so that we may rejoin his people? 

        And for these reasons, and many many others, we give him honor and praise and our loyalty.  We turn to Christ not because he commands authority like some tyrant, but because to him, and to him alone, should we train our hearts.  Christ is a king, though a king that is also a shepherd, a sheepdog, a lamb, a Son, and a brother.  Christ is the king of our lives, of our journey in this world, of our relationships and our communities, of our hearts, and of all our deepest loves.  In all things we turn to Christ who gives us the rule of faith.  And his throne is the cross.  And his decrees are love and hope and joy in God.  And his kingdom is life, life everlasting.

        Christ is a king – no other metaphors will do.  For in God’s kingdom are all our hopes.  In God’s hands is all our love, in a great world of joy that has no end.

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for 11 November, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

The Hill : Hobbiton-across-the Water, by J.R.R. Tolkien

1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

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            This morning, I want to spend a little time talking to you all about Hobbits.  I’ve not hidden from you that I’m a nerd, but it’s more than my love of fantasy and sci-fi that makes me think of Hobbits when we come to gospel passages like this.  For Lord of the Rings is not, of course, out of place in church.  The author, Tolkien, was himself a Roman Catholic, and his circle of friends included C.S. Lewis, who was both a great Christian writer and an Anglican just like us.  Tolkien called The Lord of the Rings an essentially Catholic work, and while I could go into all sorts of ways that Christianity founds his works, I want to talk this morning about the main characters: the Hobbits.

            Now, if you’ve not read The Lord of the Rings, Hobbits are just like us humans, except that they’re shorter in height and rounder around the middle.  They’re a small people tucked into the rolling farmlands of the world.  Although there are kings and great battles in the world all around them, they seek a peaceful life of the earth.  They’re more gardeners and farmers than warriors and leaders.  They are a simple people living simple lives.

            And the reason I mention them isn’t just because I like talking about Hobbits.  You see, when Tolkien was creating Hobbits, he drew on his experiences of common soldiers during the first World War.  This was the “Great War” for his generation.  It was the war that was supposed to end all wars, and one of the tragedies of World War I is that, after all that fighting and all that death, it only lead to a second, and more horrific war.  Tolkien himself was a soldier in France.  And while he serving, he saw that the trenches weren’t filled with hardened and grim warriors, but common, everyday people – people he might have seen selling produce at the market or sitting at the pub drinking a pint with their friends.  And what touched Tolkien was not just this common-ness, but the bravery he saw in these people fighting against all odds.  Even while fighting at the Battle of the Somme, which, if you’ve ever seen pictures of it, looked like a landscape of Hell – even here in these blown-out trenches, even when there was so little hope for coming through alive, these common soldiers held a courage and even a cheerfulness before it all.  Simple, common soldiers could do great deeds, Tolkien saw, and in this he also saw the Gospel: people living out the life of Christ.

            You see, there is a richness to simplicity.  Often, it seems, we think the opposite: simple things are basic, plain, and uninteresting.  Simple things are nice as building blocks, but at the end of the day you’ve got to move on and complicate things.  Our world certainly works this way: the more complicated things are, the better.  Cars have more options, cell phones have more functions.  Our systems of government and economics get more and more complicated.  And certainly, complicated things like cell phones and computers can do more, but is doing more always a good thing?

            I once experienced the richness in simplicity a few years back on Good Friday.  Up in Sewanee, they sit in Vigil from Maundy Thursday into Good Friday morning.  The idea is that, in the garden of Gethsemane, the disciples fell asleep, and Christ chided them, saying, “Can’t you stay awake, even for one hour?”  And so we stay away all night with the Body and Blood consecrated the evening before.  In Sewanee, we did this in shifts, so that there’s always someone present, but you don’t wear yourself out and come to Good Friday services exhausted.

            So my friend and I had signed up to sit in Vigil from 6 a.m. until 7.  It was still dark when we met, and we didn’t say a word to each other, not even in greeting, but went into the chapel together, knelt at the altar rails, and prayed for one, long hour.  And it was silent there, so completely silent.  At 6 in the morning, there weren’t ambient noises of people going about their day.  There was just the simple silence of an empty tomb, and it was powerful.  I have rarely known silences that deep.

            Then, after our hour was finished, we both stood up and went outside.  The sun had risen while we were in the chapel, and the morning was cool and beautiful.  And even though our time of Vigil was over, we remained in silence until we met up with Helene for breakfast, and even then words did not come easily.  That silence and that presence had stayed with us, so that even a simple phrase “good morning” retained the weight of that hour with Christ’s Body and Blood.

            And so when Jesus sees the poor widow in our gospel reading today, when Jesus sees her give just two, small, copper coins and commends her, this should give us pause.  The Kingdom of Heaven is found not with kings and princes, great leaders and grim soldiers, but with Hobbits – with common soldiers, in small garden plots, and in two young men kneeling in the silence of the morning.  It’s not in great books of commentary but in two people sitting down with only a single Bible between them, wrestling like Jacob with their Scriptures.  It’s in simple bread and wine that becomes for us a pathway to the heart of Creation.

            And in all this, I’m not saying that complicated things aren’t good, or that we should make do with simple things.  Jesus calls us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind.  There is a glory to digging deep into St. Thomas Aquinas, and there is some poetry that is so wonderfully complex that you can spend all your life with just a few short lines (Wordworth’s Prelude is like that for me).  But when Jesus commends the poor widow, he doesn’t say that great acts of kindness are bad but that there is a holiness to the simple and the small.  There is a holiness to those soldiers that Tolkien knew, those soldiers who were far from home, who had little hope to survive, who were scared and tired and alone but who went on, with courage and cheer, anyway. 

            We live in complicated times.  Last week there was yet another mass shooting; last week we had elections that seemed to just fuel more arguments.  The divisions between us are growing wider and deeper with each passing day.  And many are wondering what to do.  How can we help?  How can we heal rifts, bring people who hate and loath one another together in peace?  And Christ’s answer seems, here at least, to be: it is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.  Pray, do good, and love.  And if you have no more hope, then pray from the poverty of that hopelessness.  And if all seems dark to you, then do good in that darkness.  And if you feel that there is only hatred and sorrow and fear outside your door, then love within that emptiness, for what hatred and sorrow and fear need most is love.  For that is what Jesus did: he sowed love where there was hate, he gave of himself when there was nothing left to give.  And we, who are his disciples, can do nothing more, nor anything less, than give, and love, and hope with our God.

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for 28 October, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus, Johann Heinrich Stöver, 1861

Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

Click here to access these readings.

        We can learn many things from our readings this morning, but one thing we can learn from the gospel today is this: that Jesus’s world was pretty noisy.  I think it’s often a little hard to think of Jesus being surrounded by a lot of noise.  Often, I think, we picture Jesus surrounded by a small group of disciples who are all quiet and with open ears, ready to drink in what Jesus is saying.  I remember seeing a movie about Jesus’s life a while back, and most of the scenes were in this rocky landscape, no trees or villages or roadways around, and everyone was poised so very dramatically around Jesus.  The Lord himself was sitting on a rock and, with a very kind and low voice, he taught them.  It was like someone giving a lecture in the middle of a library: everything was quiet, calm, and ordered. 

        But we learn from our gospel reading this morning that Jesus’s world was pretty different: it was noisy.  Here we find Jesus in Jericho, walking through the streets with a big crowd, and everyone’s talking at once.  But it’s not just Jesus’s followers, but other folks as well: there are probably people around wondering what the crowd is doing or who they’re following. And there are probably farmers or merchants or other travelers who are just going about their normal, day-to-day business.  They don’t know to be quiet so they can hear Jesus teaching; they’re worried about their cattle that they’re bringing to market, or the recent up-turn in the price of eggs, or whose daughter is marrying whose son.  And here comes this crowd, and they can’t see who’s at the center of it, and it’s probably in the way it’s so big, so there are surely people grumbling about traffic, too.  They don’t hear anything Jesus is saying, if he’s saying anything at that moment, and they certainly don’t have time for the blind guy on the side of the road, who’s calling out to someone named Jesus and is only adding to the noise and the confusion. 

        And somehow in all this mess, in all this noise, this blind beggar Bartimaeus, knows that someone important is there in the center of the crowd.  How did he know Jesus was there?  Perhaps through all the noise and the tumult, all the confusion of voices, Bartimaeus caught the name Jesus flitting by.  And something rises up in him, some Spirit, that tells Bartimaeus that this man, this Jesus, can help him.  And so he calls out to Jesus, but his voice is caught up in the storm of voices.  Then he calls louder, then louder, then louder still, until, finally, he’s shouting the name JESUS SON OF DAVID!  HAVE MERCY ON ME!  And even when he’s rebuked, he calls out again, “Jesus, son of David!”  Until, at last, Jesus hears him, and turns to him, calls him to himself, and heals him.

        Now this is a pretty dramatic scene, and it’s especially potent after our reading last week.  Remember, last week we looked at how Jesus dealt with his disciples’ anger.  James and John try to weasel their way into Jesus’s good graces, and the other disciples surround them and start an argument.  Jesus’s response, if you remember, is to call them to himself, to place himself, and not James and John, nor the disciples’ anger, at the center.  And it is only then, with Jesus as the center, does healing begin.

        And now, here, in our reading this morning, in the very next scene in Mark’s gospel, we see this lesson played out in the flesh.  Jesus is at the center of a large group, just like the Sun at the center of the solar system.  Here are the disciples, like Mercy and Venus and the Earth, close about him and getting a bit singed from the heat.  Then there’s the larger crowd, around them, like Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants.  And all around them are still more: here is Pluto and the other dwarf planets, who no one really cares about much, but are still circling about this bright figure at their center.  Maybe, just maybe, the disciples have figured this one out, and they’ve done what Jesus so powerfully called them to do.

        But have they?  The thing is, perhaps they’ve put Jesus at their center but not Jesus at the center.  They’ve put Jesus at the center of their group, but they haven’t internalized his teaching.  Jesus is still just a symbol, just an image that founds and supports their group.  He’s something like a foundation stone, something in the side of a building with a year on it that, every once and a while, you look at and smile at, then forget.  They haven’t really understood what it means when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  Even though they’re in this inner circle with Jesus in their midst, they still don’t get this teaching that is so central.

        But Bartimaeus does.  Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, who’s at the edge of this whole solar system of people, he’s the one who calls out in a loud voice the name of Jesus.  He’s the one who calls out, “Jesus, son of David”, not son of Joseph, nor even son of Mary, which might have been enough, but son of David.  And it’s Bartimaeus who understands, Bartimaeus, who is at the very fringe of the crowd, of this circle around Jesus, it’s Bartimaeus who gets that Jesus’s ministry isn’t about some hierarchy of positions but about mercy and love and healing.  Here’s this guy who no one wants at all, but who understands so much.  And he’s the one who’s healed, and given his sight, and follows Jesus on the way.

        Why is it that Jesus heals us?  Why is it that, when Jesus is at the center of our lives – at it’s true center – we are healed?  Well, it really depends on what we mean by center.  It’s not like our center of gravity, so that when we’re walking on a balance beam or doing aerobics, we have to make sure that we’re poised along some point inside ourselves that keeps changing depending where our arms and legs are.  And it’s not some physical center either, so that we should put up a cross in the direct center of our home, or our altar in the center of the church, because things in the middle are best.  No, for this “center” that Jesus calls us to is not at the center of our bodies, or our church, or our lives.  Jesus calls us not to our center, but to the center.  And this is what heals us.

        For we are called not just to put Jesus at the center of our lives, but to realize and see that Jesus Christ is the center of all Creation.  Jesus is at the center of my life, but only because he’s the center of your life, and your life, and your life.  Jesus is the center of my life, but only because he’s the center of Bishop Michael’s life, and St. Francis of Assisi’s life, and at the center of the life of some medieval farmer who no one knew but who lived a good, long, and happy life with God.  And Jesus is the center of my life, but only because he’s the center of the life of the big, red tree outside our house, and the life of those elk up near Reedsport, and the life of a seal Helene saw the other day out in the ocean.  Christ is the center of all creation, from tiny little one-celled organisms here on Earth to some new galaxy 40 billion light years away that scientists are only seeing little glimmers of.  And I don’t say this to be sentimental.  All things – all things – are founded on Jesus Christ, to God the Father, through the Holy Spirit.

        And knowing this, seeing that Christ is the center of all Creation, causes us to live a bit differently.  It causes us to seek out God not only in our own prayer or life of faith, but in the lives of others.  It causes us to look for God beyond our circle because it is we, not God, who draws lines.  It causes the entire gravity of our lives and our hope to shift, so that we hear folks like Bartimaeus and remember that Christ is in him, too.  And it causes us to live a life of freedom and love, loosed from anger and fear and hatred.  For our center is Jesus Christ, and from him flows all goodness and life.

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for October 21st, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

Proper 24
22nd Sunday after Pentecost
October 21st, 2018

Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

Click here to access these readings.

The first Bible I ever owned was a red-letter Bible that I got in middle school. I probably had a Bible before this, and there were definitely Bibles around the house growing up, but this Bible was the first one I remember having as my own. It was given to me for my confirmation. It was nice, with a kind of fake leather cover in black, and it came with my name printed on it in little gold colors. “Timmy Hannon.”

       I really liked this Bible, and for a while it was the only one I owned. I kept it by my bedside for years. I liked the maps in the back of it which were all in watercolor. I liked the pages, too, because they were thin and light like sand or air. And, as I said, it was a red-letter Bible, so that every time Jesus spoke, his words were written in red. So, all of the beginning was just like a normal Bible, all the way up to the New Testament, and suddenly there was this flood of red. Sometimes there was more and sometimes there was less, and I liked thinking of Jesus’s words like the ocean, his voice like a tide flowing in and out. And then, towards the end of each of the gospels, it suddenly turned black again, save for a few words here or there. “My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” or “Into your arms I commend my spirit.” These stark, red lines in the Bible had a deep effect on me as a young Christian and, in a way, they still do.

       Now, I liked these red-letter Bibles. Some people don’t, but I do. And one of the things that’s helpful about them is that they show how often we look only at what Jesus said and not what Jesus did. And this is, of course, pretty natural. Jesus’s words are so full and robust. They’re bursting at the seams with love and joy and hope. We want to drink them in, as if they were water on a hot day, or savor them, as if they were warm tea and a blanket in the winter. Jesus is the Word of God, and we want to know what his words are so that we can feel that love and live that joy and be filled with all that he was and is and will be. Jesus’s words are precious.

       But Jesus is the Word of God not only in what he said but also in what he did. We’re reminded of what he did in some of our readings today. We’re reminded of what he did for us on Calvary, of the sacrifice that he made for us – and not just for those who knew him in life or who were present at the crucifixion, but for all people, everywhere, throughout time and across the world. With Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, he became “the source of eternal salvation,” as we hear in the letter to the Hebrews. We are alive in God because of what Jesus Christ did for us. You are alive in God because of what Jesus Christ did for you.

       But it’s not just the big stuff. The big stuff is important, and in a little bit, from Advent all the way to Pentecost, we’ll be talking about the big stuff. But the small stuff is important too, those small, little acts between the red letters that we might often skip over; those small acts of a man who was also God and who was also a man; these small acts that helped to save us.

       Look at our gospel reading this morning. Here, we find the disciples preparing for something great that they just know is going to happen. Jesus has been talking about the end, about the fulfillment of their ministry on earth. And where Jesus is talking about his death and his resurrection, the disciples are planning on what is going to happen afterwards. A lot of people in Jesus’s time were waiting for a Messiah that was going to come in with a great army and kick Rome out of Palestine. Many of them were waiting for a great leader or a king, someone who would bring back the days of David or Solomon.

       And there’s a bit of anxiety among the disciples, it seems. They’re wondering who will be on top when everything happens. And so James and John, the sons of Zebedee, they go up to Jesus and they ask if they can sit on his right hand and on his left. This question sets the rest of the disciples into an uproar. They surround the brothers, literally “surrounding” them; the Greek is “and they were angry around – surrounding – James and John.” And we, hearing this story, are waiting for what Jesus will say to break up this argument. But the first thing Jesus does isn’t teach them why arguing is bad, or why the last will be first and the last first; he does that, eventually, but not first. No, first he calls them, he summons them, he gathers them around himself. Then, and only then, does Jesus begin to teach.

       This calling the disciples, this “gathering” them around himself, this is so very small but it is so very important. It’s not just a stage direction we can skim over. For it says something very important about anger. For when we’re angry about something, we fixate on it. Think about when you get angry – really angry. That thing we’re angry about becomes all-encompassing, it becomes the center of our world. Once, while driving from Tennessee to New Jersey, I was cut off. We were in New Jersey by this time, and we had driven something like twelve hours straight. It was dark and the kids were crying and we were looking for that last exit before getting to my parents’ house. And this guy cuts me off. Oh, I was angry! And in this anger, I started making up stories. I thought, this guy did it on purpose, everyone in New Jersey is so rude, this whole place is filled with angry people, and on and on and on. Anger does this sort of thing (especially when we’re tired). It blossoms into this ugly flower of lies with a stinking fragrance. It becomes the center of frustration and hatred.

       And how does Jesus respond to the anger of his disciples? He doesn’t jump to admonish them and tell them why they’re wrong. That first act, that first response to anger is to call them around himself, to gather them and change what they’re centered on, what they’re surrounding. He takes James and John who are at the center of his disciples’ anger, and he replaces them with himself. Now he is the center, now he is the focal point, now he is the foundation. And while we don’t hear how the disciples responded to this, I assume they quieted down, and were calmed, and they listened. And I assume this because we have recorded what Jesus said. People listened to him when he was at their center and they remembered what he said. People opened their ears and heard what this man who was also God said to them and taught them, because of this simple act of placing himself – of placing God – at the center of their community. And this made all the difference.

       Can we do this ourselves? Can we, who are the disciples of Jesus Christ, make that same Jesus Christ our center? Now, our world is a very angry world. Some of that anger is justified, and people should be angry; and some of it is not justified, and it’s scary. But whatever the case, whether anger is justified or it is not, whatever we do needs to be centered on Jesus Christ. And this is the same for all things: our relationships, our hope, our love, our striving and our dreams and the goodness we hope to see in the world – all of it needs, as their center, Jesus Christ. For in Jesus is the Light and the Life; in Him is our Salvation and our Resurrection. All good flows from God through Jesus His Son, the center and very heart of our world. And, like the twelve disciples, we are called, we are summoned to gather around that heart. Let us listen to that voice and heed its call in our lives, for there we shall find the true drink to quench our most desperate thirst.