COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
P. O. BOX 222811
CARMEL CA 93922
(831) 624-8595
www.ccmp.org
Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor
Independent and United Church of Christ
January 3, 2021
Dear Friends,
Welcome to our first worship service for 2021! I know we all share the prayer that sometime early in this New Year we will be able to celebrate worshipping in person again.
Please keep Joanne Anderson in your prayers. She is having surgery for skin cancer this Monday, January 4th.
The sermon this week is one that I have given at CCMP before. On January 17th I’m starting a new sermon series on the parables of Jesus, which we haven’t looked at in more than ten years. I’ve been busy reading the latest scholarship on the parables, linking each of the parables to a particular character trait that Jesus would like us to develop more fully, and, in general, making plans to have this series be as much about practical spirituality as it is about good theology.
Stay Safe, Take Care,
And Always Remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us!
Pastor Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR JANUARY 3, 2021
INTRODUCTORY READING J.R.H. Moorman, Contemporary (Adapted)
If we are to practice obedience we can scarcely do better than follow the examples of both Mary and Joseph.
And if we are to practice obedience we can scarcely do better than begin with the three commands which Jesus gave to Peter in the boat. ‘Thrust out a little from the land’; do not allow yourself to become earthbound, your life dominated by things of this world; . . .And then ‘launch out into the deep’ and explore the depths of God’s love; consider God’s nature, God’s goodness, God’s strength; let the thought of God’s majesty and of God’s tender mercy and compassion flow into your heart; learn to be alone with God in the deep. And then ‘Let down your nets for a draught’; learn to accept what God gives of God’s grace, God’s peace, God’s strength; spread your nets wide for that miraculous draught of all that your soul can need.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Mary Did You Know? (Official Music Video)
One Voice Children’s Choir cover You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Peter Armstrong, Contemporary
Mary could not have known
what she was saying ‘Yes’ to:
we pray for her trust.
Joseph could not have known
where his trust was leading him:
we pray for his patience.
The travelers could not have known
the end of their journey:
we pray for their boldness and adventure.
The shepherds could not have known
the meaning of their vision:
we pray for their open minds.
The Christ-child could not have known
what was happening to him:
we join with him
in his fragile humanity
in bringing before
the unknown of divinity
our prayer, praise, and wonder this Christmastide. Amen.
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING: Luke 1:39-56; Luke 2:19
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blesses are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me,that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is on those who {revere] him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever”
And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.
Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
SERMON: MARY EMBODIES THE DEEPER MEANING OF CHRISTMAS
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlining simply indicates what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
When I was a child there was a game we would play in our neighborhood to pass the time on rainy afternoons. It was a game of the imagination, and if it had a name, which I don’t think it did, it would have been called “Where would you leave the treasure?
The idea was this: Suppose you had a large amount of money, a treasure really, but some unexpected crisis has come up, and suddenly you have to leave the treasure with someone for safekeeping. You can’t put it in the bank or bury it under the tree in the back yard – there isn’t time.
The rule of the game is that you have to entrust it with someone. Who would you choose?
The fun of the game was sitting around in a circle exploring all the character flaws and virtues of the various possibilities, searching for someone who was trustworthy.
“How about the school principal?” somebody would suggest. “Nah, he’d probably
steal it.” “Well, how about the preacher?” “Too risky. He’d probably put it in the
collection plate.” “OK, then, what about your sister?” “Are you kidding? She’d want to split it.”
And on it would go, the search for just the right person to keep the treasure. In the mind of a child, the stakes were high: your whole treasure risked on something as fragile as the trustworthiness of another human being.
One way to read the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke is as a divine version of “Where Would You Leave the Treasure?” God was searching for some place in human life to leave the treasure.
In God’s case, the treasure was not gold, but the Gospel. The treasure was not silver, but news – Good News. Not cold, hard cash, but the deep, rich, and abiding promise that, when all is said and done, we are not alone, that God is, finally, “God with us.”
That’s the treasure.
Now, where in the world would you leave a treasure like that? Where do you leave a treasure like that so that it will be preserved, cherished, and encouraged to grow?
That’s what Luke wants to tell us. Luke wants to tell us the story of where God decided to leave the treasure, and this is the way he begins: “In the days of Herod, king of Judea. . .” (Luke 1:5), almost as if to say, “Now, there’s a possibility!”
God could have left the treasure with the Herods’ of the world, with the politicians, the ones who pave the roads and collect the taxes, the ones who pass the laws and command the armies.
God could have left the treasure with the Herods’, and it’s not as strange a possibility as it might first seem, because, after all, the treasure is, in part, political.
The treasure is the news, which we encountered in today’s Scripture reading, and which is commonly known as Mary’s Magnificat: that God is at work in the world to pull tyrants off their high horses and to lift up those who hunger and thirst for justice; that when one more starving child in Africa, or anywhere else, dies, something at the heart of God dies, too.
It would have made a certain kind of sense for God to have entrusted the treasure to the movers and shakers – the Herod’s of the world. But God did not leave the treasure with Herod, because the Gospel is the Good News that, if there is to be justice in the world, there can only be one TRUE king. If there is to be peace in the world, there can only be one TRUE ruler. If there is to be compassion in the world, there can only be one true Lord. . . And that person’s name is not Herod.
Every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, there is displayed, beneath the great Christmas tree, a beautiful eighteenth century Neapolitan nativity scene.
In many ways, it is a very familiar scene. The usual characters are all there: shepherds roused from sleep by the voices of angels; the exotic wise men from the East; Mary, Joseph, the babe – all are there, each figure an artistic marvel of wood, clay, and paint.
There is, however, something surprising about this scene, something unexpected here, easily missed by the casual observer. What is strange here is that the stable, and the shepherds, and the cradle are set, not in the expected small town of Bethlehem, but among the ruins of mighty Roman columns.
The artists knew the meaning of the treasure: The Gospel, the birth of God’s new age, was also the beginning of the end for the old world. Herod’s know in their souls what we perhaps have passed over too lightly: God’s presence in the world means, finally, the end of their own power. They seek not to preserve the treasure, but to crush it. For Herod, the Gospel is news too bad to be endured, and Luke wants us to see that God had to find another place to leave the treasure.
Returning to the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we find: “In the days of Herod. . . there was a priest named Zechariah.” (Luke 1:5) There’s another possibility.
God could have left the treasure with the Zechariah’s of the world, the ones who think holy thoughts, handle holy things, and perform holy deeds.
God could have left the treasure with the Zechariahs, and it’s not a strange thought, because Zechariah is a priest. Priest are theologians of a sort, and, after all, the treasure is, in part, theological.
The treasure is the Good News that it is God who is at work to set things right, that it is God who gathers up all efforts of human good will and gives them strength beyond their measure, mercy beyond their depth, and hope beyond their grandest dreams. It is God who has made us, and God who is with us, and God who reclaims us, and not we ourselves.
So, Zechariah, a person who handles holy things, and thinks holy thoughts, and performs holy deeds, would seem to be a good place to leave the treasure. There are signs that God did, indeed, consider leaving the treasure with the priestly family of Zechariah.
Zechariah was an ordinary priest, with the ordinary priestly responsibilities of burning incense and making sacrifices at the temple, and he had done the ordinary thing of marrying Elizabeth, herself the daughter of a priest.
But he and Elizabeth had one extraordinary problem. They were not able to have children, and for reasons which have to do with the culture of the first century, that was a sadness for them both, and a deep embarrassment to Elizabeth.
Then, one day in the temple, when Zechariah was lighting the incense, God – almost as a way of testing to see if Zechariah’s family was a good place to leave the treasure, gave Zechariah a taste of the Good News, an anticipatory touch of the treasure. An angel appeared to Zechariah and told him, “Do not be afraid, your prayer has been answered. You will have great joy and gladness, your wife will become pregnant and bear a son.” (Luke 1:13-14)
Zechariah, so familiar with the holy, finally could not believe the presence of the holy when it intruded into his life. “How shall I know this?” he whined. (Luke 1:18) “I need proof. I’m an old man. My wife is an old woman. This is impossible.”
And in a scene of great sadness, the angel reaches forth towards Zechariah’s lips, saying, “You will be silent. You will be unable to speak until the child is born, for you did not believe my words.” (Luke 1:20)
There is a familiarity with the holy which, ironically, produces a numbness to the holy, and Zechariah’s family was not the place to leave the treasure.
For Herod, the Gospel was news too bad to be endured. For Zechariah, it was too amazing to be believed, too good to be true.
God did not leave the treasure with the Herod’s; they would crush it. God did not leave the treasure with the Zechariah’s; they could not believe it. God did not leave the treasure in the palace or at the altar.
It is now that Luke tells us the surprise: God left the treasure in a place which was in that time considered the weakest of all places, the least likely of all spots – the womb of a woman.
And Luke also tells us that the first time that the Gospel is proclaimed by human lips, it is not in the Roman senate or in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple; it is not by Caesar, or Peter, or Paul. It is in a place the world at that time would count for nothing: a conversation between two women, Mary and Elizabeth, facing their pregnancies.
Luke wants us to know that the treasure of the Gospel, which will one day fill the earth with the power of forgiveness and compassion, must first be planted in those weak and helpless places which yearn for it the most, hunger for it most deeply, and thus can believe and cherish it most fully.
God’s treasure was to be entrusted with Mary.
I sometimes wonder if we don’t over-sentimentalize Mary. We tend to think of her, in the words of an old hymn, as “Gentle Mary, meek and mild, who looks upon her little child.”
Think about the ways Mary is portrayed.
Years ago when I was a Catholic, I checked out a Roman Catholic religious goods store for images of Mary. The store had dozens of Marys’ in stock. In every single case, Mary was portrayed as serene and beatific, came with a halo – in many cases a detachable halo – and light brown hair and blue eyes.
The clerk told me that all their Marys’ were made in northern Italy. Apparently, most women there have light brown hair and blue eyes. Choosing just one of many possible paintings of Mary as an example, let’s consider the “Annunciation” by Sandro Bottichelli of Florence.
You will see that, sure enough, Mary has light brown hair and light blue eyes, and is the epitome of serenity and peacefulness.
Now, Mary may well have been serene and peaceful, but if she was, it was in spite of, not because of her lot in life.
Think about it. She was poor. She was young, fourteen, maybe. Like most peasant women of her time, she was probably uneducated. She was pregnant out-of-wedlock. Her fiancé had lurking suspicions about her pregnancy. Her mother and father aren’t mentioned at all. Maybe Mary’s parents were embarrassed. Maybe that’s why Mary went out of town for three months to visit her cousin.
Think of the utter courage it must have taken for Mary to have done what she did.
Rather than “Gentle Mary, meek and mild,” the impression we get is of one strong and courageous young woman. As Denise Levertov mentions in a poem about Mary: “. . .We are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage.”
Poverty, scandal, questions at home, Roman oppression abroad, the anxieties of a first-time pregnancy. Then, giving birth in a stable, surrounded by animals, far away from home, with no midwives or female relatives in attendance.
Mary’s life wasn’t peaceful. It was a mess. But in the midst of Mary’s mess, there was a message: a reminder that God particularly chooses and uses the lowliest and became almost nothing.
Philip Yancey in his classic, The Jesus I Never Knew, writes: “. . .The maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and redivide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. . .God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenager for shelter, food and love.”
Taking another look at Bottichelli’s Annunciation, we see that the landscape in the background is not the landscape of Israel, but the landscape of Tuscany in northern Italy. This is why Mary has light brown hair and light blue eyes: she is being portrayed as a young woman of the Italian Renaissance.
These Renaissance painters understood Meister Eckhart’s dictum of God needing to be born anew in our own time and place. Every Renaissance painting of Mary, every Renaissance painting of Jesus, places Mary and Jesus solidly in the time and place of the particular painter.
The problem with the Catholic religious goods store I mentioned earlier was not that Mary had light brown hair and blue eyes, it was that this was the only Mary available. The buyer needed to be more inclusive in her selection of Marys’ and include the dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes of Marys’ from Guatemala and Peru, of Marys’ from India, of Mary’s from Israel itself.
Finally, we can learn from Mary that it is the places of weakness in our lives and in the world which are most open to the amazing intrusion of God’s presence. Part of the Good News is that it is precisely there where God leaves God’s treasure.
God does not come to that part of us which swaggers through life, confident in our self-sufficiency. God, rather, leaves the treasure in the broken places where we know we cannot make it on our own.
God comes to us in those moments when we transcend ourselves long enough to glimpse the needs of others and to feel those needs deeply enough to hunger and thirst for God to set it right.
Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Why do you think Mary went to Elizabeth’s home?
What do you need to share with an “Elizabeth” right now?
Which of the words found in Mary’s song best describes how you are feeling about your spiritual life at present? Rejoicing, humble, blessed, lifted up, filled, hungry, empty.
In what way would you like to be more like Mary?
Of the attributes of God celebrated in Mary’s song, which do you appreciate the most? Which challenges you the most? Why?
CLOSING PRAYER The Promise of His Glory
May the humility of the shepherds,
the perseverance of the wise men,
the joy of the angels,
and the peace of the Christ-child
be God’s gifts to us and to people everywhere
this Christmas time.
And may the blessing of the Christ-child
be upon us always.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Andrea Bocelli – Silent Night
(Piano Version/Lyric Video) You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.