Have you ever noticed how the angels in the Christmas story scare the living daylights out of the people they greet?  The angel says to Mary, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" (Luke 1:28) and the Favored One nearly faints… I've come to the conclusion that Mary and company's anxiety is perfectly understandable.  After all, it's the case throughout the Bible that whenever God draws near to greet someone it's never just to chit-chat.  It's usually to make a request of that person-- and a humdinger at that! 

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When I was little, I thought Thanksgiving was for what I had. But now I understand Thanksgiving is for Who has us…

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As I was thinking about a person’s legacy, I got to wondering about churches. Do churches create a legacy? How would a church hope to be remembered? I remember several years ago a book that asked: If your church disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, would anyone in the community grieve?

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You’d expect vitality from a church that has Heart in the middle of its name. So how do you measure a heart’s vitality? We speak of vital signs – Body temperature. Pulse rate. Respiration rate. Blood pressure. But how do you measure a church’s vitality? Can’t stick a thermometer into Heart of the Rockies. Can’t put a blood pressure cuff around your upper arm and two fingers on your wrist to check your heart. How do you measure a congregation’s vitality? One way is to measure worship attendance, budget, baptisms, new members. But I think those numbers are but fruits of much deeper sources of vitality.  If the deeper vital signs are there, all the numbers will take care of themselves. 

So, what are those vital signs?

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Isn’t it true that from birth through our teen years and on into adulthood the deepest hunger of our hearts is to know that we’re beloved, that the favor of someone else rests upon us? Human beings are born hungering for love.

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People bear witness to their faith in many ways, some of them unusual. Take the guy who used to show up at every major sporting event with rainbow-colored hair and a made-for-TV-sized placard that read JOHN 3:16. I used to wonder how he got the tickets he did because he always seemed to be close to the field. At football games, he sat in the end zone behind the goal posts so that when the cameras covered the extra point attempt, his placard would appear in the lower right-hand corner of the screen like a footnote to the score: Chiefs 17 Broncos 14 John 3:16.

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From the time God's people left bondage in Egypt through the 40 years of their wilderness wandering and into the Promised Land, music accompanied their every step. Call it ‘traveling music.’ That’s what music does: it goes before us throughout our life’s journey – accompanies us through life’s high points as well as low points to the point that it can be said that music takes us places. Isn't that what our love for the old favorite hymns is all about? No matter what's going on in our lives, if we can just bring to mind a few bars of favorite music, we'll be all right. Just hearing a few notes takes us places.

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Pastor Jesus promises his congregation he’ll leave them some dynamite: the power of the Holy Spirit.    

Now, there are a lot of people who'd get a good laugh out of that – saying churches are powered by dynamite. I can hear some smart aleck say, Pardon me, Preacher, but if you asked me to come up with one word to describe my experience of church, dynamite wouldn’t make the top ten. Words that mean the opposite of dynamite would be there instead. Words that connote more fizzle than sizzle. Know what I mean? 

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We might wish Jesus would stay out of our pocketbooks and stick to heaven, but Jesus often mentions pocketbook and heaven in the same breath as if there’s a relationship between the two. This morning's scripture is a case in point. Says Jesus, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

I submit to you that the miracle among miracles is what Paul witnessed at the church in Macedonia where he says (and I quote), “They begged us earnestly for the privilege of sharing” (2 Cor. 8:4) … in a Stewardship Campaign. You heard me right: a congregation that begged to contribute to a Stewardship Campaign. As someone who has undertaken his share of stewardship campaigns over 42 years of ministry, that beats anything I’ve ever heard of. People begging to make a pledge? Pu-leeeze!

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There’s such a thing as an Easter posture. It’s exhibited this morning by the women running from the tomb exuberant, falling all over themselves to tell others what they’ve seen and heard. By contrast, there were two other postures exhibited that first Easter morning that are un-Easterlike…but not unusual. The postures I speak of represent two unhealthy orientations toward life. Let me describe them for you and tell you how Easter delivers us from them so we can rise up and live our lives out of an Easter posture.

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Jesus borrowed everything, I tell you. And here's the bottom line:  He'd like to borrow you.  He'd like to borrow your life for the rest of your life.  If I might borrow the words Jesus used on that first Palm Sunday: "If anyone asks you 'Why?', tell them the Lord has need of it."  The Lord has need of your life.

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Vulnerable though he was, Nicodemus didn’t walk away from Jesus; he walked to him. Hallelujah! Nicodemus didn’t walk away from Jesus out of the gnawing fear that Jesus would judge him, rebuke him, reject him. Rather, he walked to Jesus out of a courage born of the hope and trust that Jesus would receive him, welcome him … all of him.

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Whenever I read of Mary and Martha, a former parishioner comes to mind.  Bless her heart, June loved Jesus.  But this story stuck in her craw.  Got her goat.  Rubbed her the wrong way.  I can hear June now:  "If I'd been there that day, I guarantee you I would have taken up for Martha!"

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Here’s the thing: it isn’t called hurry sickness for nothing. It takes its toll on a body. We’ll get to that in a moment. But it sickens the soul, too. Ortberg writes, “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry can destroy our souls ... For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.”

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Ash Wednesday Repentance – biblically-speaking and Jesus-speaking – is a good word. The word translated repentance is metanoia, a 180° about face. A turning. Turning to God and God’s ways or turning back to God and God’s ways. Turning to certain others or a returning to them. Turning to your best self and your better angels or returning to them. Turn! Turn! Turn!

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I want to say to you this morning that though I rejoice in those moments when our spirits are made to “soar like eagles” and I give thanks for the times we’re infused with a charge of adrenalin that enables us to “run without growing weary,” I’m in awe when I see people facing adversity who are able to keep on keepin’ on with dignity, courage, and grace – “walk without fainting.”

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You can’t run away from God’s presence or run out of God’s mercy. Neither Jonah, nor the sailors. Nor the Ninevites. Nor you. Nor me. There is nowhere anybody can go that is beyond God’s presence or God’s mercy. How good is that?

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In God’s economy, nothing and no one is wasted.  Eli needs Samuel for his vision to be renewed. Samuel needs Eli in order to learn how to listen for God’s voice. It’s a beautiful thing when Eli and Samuel meet. When it happened in Israel long ago, it proved to be the dawning of a golden age.  And if Samuel and Eli, Samantha and Ellie, were to meet at Broadway today, who knows what new visions might break forth?  

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Warned in a dream not to go back the way they came, they went home “by another way” (Matthew 2:12). To put it a different way, they were led on a detour … for their own good.  I made a note to self this week:  Self, the Bible teaches that sometimes God sends us on a detour for our own good.

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And then it happened: the woman’s mother began to move her lips to form the words I was singing. No sound came out, just the whispered shape of the words on her lips: Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.

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I thought to myself, “What kind of sign is that?” The angels’ announcement is of the birth of a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And what is the sign that accompanies an event of such earth-shaking, world-changing, life-transforming magnitude? (Drum roll, please) … a baby in a layette in a feed trough. I ask you: is that kind of sign proportional to that kind of announcement?

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What do you make of this?  Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” Mind you, he’s in a Roman jail cell. How can he be rejoicing? He lifts his head and hands and rejoices when he ought to be burying his head in his hands and sighing. How can that be? What that says to me is that joy – biblical joy – is apparently not dependent upon external circumstances, but upon an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances.

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Advent is supposed to begin in Exile. Advent doesn’t begin shopping for doorbuster specials on Black Friday or surfing the web for bargains on Cyber Monday or in the garage or attic rummaging for those boxes marked "Christmas." No, Advent rightly begins in Exile because by definition the word Advent means coming. Coming as in the coming of a Savior to people who are in exile. Coming as in “Coming for to carry me home!” Exile is the natural habitat of Advent.

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By what criteria will we be judged? “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the nations are gathered before him... he shall separate people one from another … by what criteria? When I was in school, I mostly paid attention to what the teacher was saying. But when the teacher said, “This is going to be on the test,” I was all ears. Well, the Bible says one day our lives are going to be graded – judged. So, when the Teacher, the Rabbi from Galilee, tells us what’s going to be on the Test, the criteria by which God will judge us, we’re all ears. 

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When I was in elementary school, our teacher gave us a piece of paper and told us to write the letters T-H-A-N-K-S-G-I-V-I-N-G vertically down the left margin. Then, next to each letter we were to write something for which we were thankful that began with that letter.  It was a neat little exercise in counting your blessings.

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