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Advent rings true.  Because we know what it means to dwell in lowly exile here, we can sing with integrity when we sing, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel."  Because we know war, and rumors of war, and the endless background noise of almost-war, we are ready to sing, "dear desire of every nation, enter every trembling heart."  Because we are a people who live in deep darkness, we know how to long to see a great light.  Advent is a season of anticipating the coming of Christ.  It is a season that gives voice to our yearning.  And because we yearn, we can live into the season.  Advent just rings true. Yet I have to confess:  I'm always a little confused in Advent.  I yearn, I wait, I hope--Come, Thou long-expected Jesus!--but I also remember.  I remember singing these same songs last year.  I remember watching and waiting.  I remember keeping the wick in my lamp trimmed.  And I remember the coming of the Bridegroom.  I remember singing, "Joy to the world, the Lord is come!"  Just eleven months ago!  "O come, all ye faithful," for unto us is born this day in the City of David a savior who is Christ the Lord.  I remember singing Gloria with the angels.  Here in Advent, I remember Christmas, the feast of Immanuel, God-with-us.  How could I forget?  Even as I pray my Advent prayers, I'm wearing a shirt I received as a gift last year.  For Christmas. Those memories of Christmas complicate my Advent hope.  Christmas celebrates the coming of God among us, as one of us, Word made flesh.  If that dwelling-with-us is God's answer to our yearning, then why are we still yearning?  And if that dwelling-with-us is not an answer to our yearning--if Christmas does not bring the Prince of Peace, who shall reign forever and ever--then why are we looking forward to Christmas?  Why do we direct our yearning towards a Christmas that won't even last even until the end of January?

"By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace"   Luke 1:78-79. Luke's first chapter sounds like a Sunday in the upcoming season of Advent in the church where I serve.  There is music everywhere!!  A little different, perhaps, from the brass and organ and choirs, but still the music of holy encounters, praise and prayers, and glory to God is everywhere.  Angels are visiting a favored Mary.  Elizabeth exclaims a blessing upon her pregnant cousin, and Mary magnifies the Lord as she echoes the ancient praises of Hannah.   We'll hear a lot about these holy encounters in the upcoming season of Advent, and we'll find our own hymns and anthems and music enlightened by their melodies and meanings. Among the choir of voices that Luke tells us about in his first chapter is the aged, toned and weathered voice of Zechariah.  This righteous priest is not unlike the old bass singer in our chancel choirs whose presence and decades of service make him blend into a familiar weekly tableau.  But lest we forget his constant presence, we can't help but realize how essential he is to the foundation of the choir's sound and the community that exists up in that choir loft every week. Luke tells us of the priest of the temple named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth are "righteous, living blamelessly, according to the commandments and regulations of the Lord" (1:6).  But they join the who's who of barren parents, too old to conceive, like Isaac and Samuel's parents in the Old Testament.  They're pregnant with a hope of deliverance, but the womb is empty.  In a culture where fertility is expected, blessed and a connection to the future, they're muted and overlooked.

It's about this time of the year when I start reaching deeply into the kitchen cabinets--not the ones that get opened everyday for our daily dishes, silverware, or spices. These are the ones that go deeply enough to take me from the mundane of "the everyday" to the treasures of "once a year." I'm gathering the dishes and linens for the family feast, starting to polish the silver, gather the china and iron the linens for the Thanksgiving banquet. As I pull out the forgotten items that only make a showing once or twice a year, I'm connected again to the stories of these treasures from the experiences of table setting from the past. I remember how my grandmother taught me on which side the silverware goes and how china gets properly laid out. I recount the gifts given at special times that now rest on my family table. I'm thinking about how getting a table ready can even be a sacred heart-setting, preparing our lives for the Christ to enter and be our welcomed guest. In Lee Daniels' The Butler, a film released in August about a White House butler who served eight American presidents over three decades, there is a very different table-setting scene. The scene juxtaposes two different tables being set in the 1960's. The first is a dignified state dinner at the White House with African-American butlers serving the white DC elite and world leaders. The other table, a soda fountain counter like those all around the nation, where black college students endure the horror of being spit upon, bullied, physical abuse and unimaginable taunting.

An important discussion was taking place in the mid-priced hotel just five blocks from the church.  It wasn't so much a deep theological discussion about atonement through Christ's sacrifice on the cross.  It wasn't about the level of poverty in the inner-cities of our nation or the poor high school graduation rates of at-risk youth.  It was about socks or no socks!  That's right!  The clothing we wear next to our feet that keeps our skin from touching our shoes.  It was an animated discussion.  It was the Sunday of my call sermon to what would become my new Connecticut parish that I would serve as its Senior Minister.  Along with the worship leadership I had been asked to attend a coffee--a get-acquainted time, an hour and a half prior to the worship service.  The lively discussion was over whether two children--then in their pre-teens--would wear socks with their blue shirts, their ties, their blazers, their tan slacks, and their loafers.  It was all the fad--regardless of the season--to go sockless.  Since I believed good first impressions are made with socks--I was wearing them--therefore I thought it was even more important that my sons, in spite of their charming personalities, should also wear socks.  My wife was the mediator.  There became two options:  wear shocks and not go to the coffee hour before worship or wear no socks and go to both the welcoming coffee and the worship service. They attended both events wearing no socks and, believe it or not, I still got the job. I had raised my blood pressure unnecessarily and made the family less enthusiastic about attending the coffee.  I made small stuff big stuff!

I don't know what I'd do without Mapquest or the "map app" on my phone. All I have to do is type in the address where I'm headed, and voila! The map appears in front of me, and an invisible voice guides me to my destination. Amazing. If only I had a compass for every decision I had to make. Like where to turn when a relationship blows up. Or how to navigate a stressful medical crisis. Or what to do when my job hits a dead end. It would be nice to have voices around to guide my way then. But what if we do? What if we do have voices helping us find our way? All Saints Day suggests that they're here for us, if we're listening. And they just might offer a tip or two along the highway of life.  The saints of the past: we may not think of them often, or imagine they offer much for our challenging times. But research begs to differ. Though it's important to appreciate the present--to stop and smell the roses and live in the moment ... and though it's important to look to the future with hope--to work hard, set goals ... awareness of the present and future aren't the most important predictors of a satisfying, meaningful life. Instead, extensive studies show that our most important orientation toward time is a positive appreciation of the past. The more we savor memories of relationships and let go of grudges ... the more we connect to our roots and let go of our forebears' failings ... the more we treasure their legacy and let go of the myth that we are self-made: the stronger our sense of a positive past, the better grounded and centered we will be. In fact, the more crazy and stressful our circumstances, the more the past helps us navigate our way.[i]

I don't know about you, but I am sick to death of political grandstanding. Pontificating pundits. Ineffective officials. Pandering politicians. At least it's not a big election year, when the parties inundate us with urgent pleas for cash and TV ads depict "the enemy opponent" in these demonic black and white shots, complete with jarring music.  For this, you can blame Martin Luther and John Calvin. Almost 500 years ago, on October 31, 1517, the Catholic priest Martin Luther nailed 95 points of protest to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. His action against the corrupt papacy provoked the Protestant Reformation. Twenty years later, John Calvin took Luther's idea of "the priesthood of all believers" to Geneva, Switzerland, where he introduced this radical idea of democracy. For the first time, individuals would be responsible for electing their own civic government. Fast forward another twenty years, when John Knox took Calvin's ideas to his native Scotland. One hundred years later, Protestants carried these ideas across the ocean to the American colonies, seeking even greater religious and political liberty. I love that King George III called the American Revolution "that Presbyterian rebellion."   Over two hundred years later, what does that mean to us? For one thing, it's helpful to remember that there was a time--there was a time we couldn't vote. When people were subjects, not citizens. When princes ruled and we couldn't vote them in or out of office. When we had no say. As dreadful as our political process is, it beats the alternative by a long shot. It is our privilege to participate in our own governance. So let's explore our Christian responsibility as citizens: what it means to "render to God that which is God's and render to Caesar that which is Caesar's." Let's start with rendering to God that which is God's.

"All scripture is inspired by God."  My grandfather clearly believed this.  One look at his Bible, which as the first grandson--and a preacher to boot--I have inherited, tells how he felt about it:  tattered, worn, underlined, marginalia, prayer requests jammed between the pages.  My first day of seminary, Fr. Roland Murphy unluckily for me, picked me out of sixty students and asked, "Is the Bible inspired?"  I squeaked a nearly inaudible, "Yes?"  "Why?" he roared firmly.  Clueless, I resorted to humor, "Well, I find that very often the Bible agrees with what I think."  A woman next to me, not grasping my cleverness, shot back with, "No!  I think the Bible is inspired at precisely those points where it disagrees with what I think."  The class oohed and ahhed--and then my roommate bailed me out by saying:  "Yeah?  Like those passages that say women shouldn't speak in church?"  "All scripture is inspired by God."  We do not think of the Bible the way Muslims think of the Qur'an--as dictated directly by God.  The Bible has that awful, lovely human element.  God inspired the thing, guided those who were writing--but they were human, they did their best.  Inevitably they made booboos.  Historical mistakes are interesting, aren't they?  People say, "Oh, that invalidates the Bible."  But is this really the case?  Years ago I threw a birthday party for my dad's 70th birthday and people came. Then over the dinner my dad said, "Why did you go to all this trouble this year?"  I said, "Well, dad, you're 70."  He said, "I'm 69."  Now you could say, "Oh, that invalidates your relationship; you had the date wrong."  But I think it's endearing that there was a mistake. I like it that the Bible is kind of messy because that means there is room for me.  The families that are described in the Bible are a mess, kookily dysfunctional.  I like that.  There's room for me in there; there's room for all of us in there.

An earworm--I think that's what they call the song you get stuck in your head.  And it's never one of my favorites, like a Led Zeppelin riff or a Bach chorale.  No, it's always something like "It's a small world after all."  We get little messages stuck in our heads too, like "You'll never amount to anything" or "Look out for #1" or "I need a drink" or "You deserve a break." What if our offstage directions, the voice whispering inside my head, might be God?  Once upon a time people memorized Bible verses, little digestible messages from the Scriptures to shape us, define who we are, how we interact with the world.  Sometimes I ask people, "What is your favorite Bible verse?"  Lots of people default to John 3:16, because they like it or don't know another one?  It does not take my more clever Bible people long to come up with Jeremiah 29:11:  "'I know the plans I have for you,'" says the LORD, "'plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.'" Now I love that one too--but what does it really mean?  After the worst catastrophe in the entire history of God's people, the holy city reduced to rubble by the vile Nebuchadnezzar, the people barely existing after a forced march into exile, feeling pretty sure God had abandoned them forever, Jeremiah wrote a letter, which must have taken weeks to arrive.  Everything in the Bible is slow like that--it may be that we only know God in a kind of slowness.  In The Lord of the Rings, there are treelike creatures who speak Entish, "a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to."

  Earlier this spring I finished a fantastic and depressing book by psychologist Jean Twenge called "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are more Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable than Ever Before."  Twenge investigates the assumptions that many of us have about us--it's my generation, too--taking data from personality inventories given across the last 60 years.  Any of us who recruit volunteers or run teams sense things are changing--the way this generation relates--or doesn't relate--to institutions, their lessening sense of commitment, their anxiety and perpetual frantic busyness.  We are harried and confused and feel so out of control.  In her introduction, she writes: Today's under-35 young people are called the Me Generation or, as I call them, Generation Me.  Born after self-focus entered the cultural mainstream, this generation has never known a world that put duty before self.  [She points to a friend's daughter, Jessica, born in 1985.]  When Jessica was a toddler, Whitney Houston's No. 1 hit song declared that "The Greatest Love of All" was loving yourself.  Jessica's elementary school teachers believed that their most important job was helping Jessica feel good about herself.  Jessica scribbled in a coloring book called We are All Special, got a sticker on her worksheet just for filling it out, and did a sixth-grade project called "All About Me."  When she wondered how to act on her first date, her mother told her, "Just be yourself."  "You have to love yourself before you can love someone else," she proudly proclaims.

  Somehow, interestingly, this parable often shows up here in the fall, when many of us preachers are navigating our way through stewardship season.  We want to speak of the joy of seeing your gifts shared with others in a way that changes things. But we're also stuck.  We preachers have a budget to raise, our own salary included.  Some of this money goes out to organizations that feed and clothe and house, that are on the ground with hurting people in ways our churches hope to be yet so seldom are.  But these are anxious times.  Regardless of glimmers of hope amongst economic indicators, we don't feel free.  Folks in our pews are still worried about their jobs.  Too many churches, even good, strong churches, are hedging bets as they build the budget, asking those who run programs to run them on less, neglecting raises for staff, again, letting the budget anxiety nudge them into making decisions that lead to more keeping, more hoarding, less giving.  We don't feel free. And Jesus hits us on the head with this parable.  As best I can tell, the immediate context begins on the way to dinner at "the house of a leader of the Pharisees" in chapter 14.  The conversation continues, the crowds gather, and by 15:1, "all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him."  Chapter 15 holds the parables that build upon each other--lost sheep, lost coin, lost brother.  Luke 16 begins a discrete unit, Alan Culpepper argues, that begins and ends with a parable, both of which start with, "There was a rich man...." 

Just to get re-acquainted, I am Ian Punnett.  I'm an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.  Not everybody understands the difference between a deacon and a priest, and I understand that because the diaconate is expressed differently in various traditions; but remember that deacons, while less known or understood than the priesthood as holy orders go, actually there were deacons before there were priests.  And in the Episcopal Church, we are considered a separate but equal holy order. For the most part, deacons don't get paid; yet we are attached to a church, one where I preach regularly.  I serve within church services, but mostly the world is my cathedral.  You can follow me on Twitter @deaconpunnett.  And I travel and I tell stories and I serve a congregation at large, not unlike the evangelists of the New Testament. Earlier we heard the weirdest parable from Luke the Evangelist as he is known, a gospel passage that may take a minute or two to clarify, but it's important that we do.  Usually, I think most people who study scripture can do an admirable job unpacking the parables of Jesus but not this week.  This week, without a trained professional, you interpret the gospel at your peril.  Welcome to Luke 16; don't try this at home. Now proof of the weirdness of this biblical parable is that it comes down to us over time with a couple of well-known titles.  Luke 16 is known both as "The Parable of the Dishonest Steward" and "The Parable of the Shrewd Manager."  Can it be both?  If the conflicting titles of the parables seem confusing, the parable itself appears to be almost a riddle, one of the most debated and debatable passages in the New Testament. 

Nobody can sour a Baptist gathering like a liquored-up prodigal.  Donny staggered into a post-worship service reception for prospective members in a downtown church where I served as interim pastor.  Ordinarily, he would wander in before the worship service, asking for a few dollars.  This time his arrival was later than usual.  The prospective members, all decked out in Sunday best, tried hard not to appear offended. Like Donny, Jesus could throw a wrench into a fine religious function.  Indeed, nobody could ruin a Pharisaical gathering like the eccentric Nazarene.  Three times in Luke's Gospel, Pharisees invite Jesus to their homes; and every time the gala takes an unpleasant turn.  At one gathering, Jesus bypasses the ritual purity of washing before the meal.  Instead of apologizing for the oversight, Jesus thunders six woes at all Pharisees present, condemning them for their own impurity. At another dinner hosted by a Pharisee, Jesus rebukes his host for judging a woman who wipes and kisses his feet.  The nerve of this Nazarene--invited by one of the chosen few for a dinner party, only to offend him in his own house!  And now, at the home of a prominent Pharisee, Jesus' very presence attracts tax collectors and other sinners.  The riffraff are infiltrating the suburbs and, once again, the party starts to sour.  And it sours all the more when they see Jesus welcoming and dining with the wrong sort.

  Courage. Some consider it the most admirable of human virtues. Earnest Hemingway describes it as grace under pressure. Merriam Webster defines it as mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty. My favorite is Theodore Roosevelt's explanation. In his 1910 speech "Citizenship in a Republic," he declares: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.... Roosevelt's words, for me, embody the journey of faith, the adventure of faith, the joy of faith and the gut-wrenching challenge of faith. Because for so many of us, to accept the unconditional love of God and to work towards embodying God's love day in and day out is a supreme act of courage. At its heart, I believe that Psalm 139 paints a glorious picture of courageous faith. It paints the picture of what it means to dare greatly, to let God love us and to strive to love God, to step into the arena of faith and to wear the dust and sweat and blood that make for faithful Christian living.

  Well, whatever Jesus is talking about in this 14th chapter of Luke's account of the Gospel, he's certainly not talking about seating arrangements or etiquette in general.  If that were the case, then we could surely find some verses about four-way stops or cell phones in public.  But the banquet table and seating arrangements happen to be the classroom in which Jesus chooses to teach the lesson for today, so it will serve us well to look at them. I suppose that Jesus had witnessed some jockeying for position and seating around himself, particularly as his popularity increased.  He watched people who had forgotten some fundamental rules of decorum and hospitality; and he seized this instance to teach the greater lesson that we find our best selves in humility and sacrificial service and, ultimately, then that so very much depends upon how we treat and live with one another. Now there is a prosperity gospel out there that proclaims a different truth, that humility and sacrifice are merely means to an end, means to immediate and tangible rewards.  You've heard it and so have I.  "I gave God a hundred dollars and I got a thousand dollars in return."  "We are faithful Christians and because of that, Billy made quarterback and Andrea got a full scholarship and sits first chair in the strings section.  And we took the whole family on a magnificent vacation to Hawaii.  Praise the Lord!"  A man in our church told me once that he didn't understand God.  "We've started coming to church," he said.  "And we've been giving money and volunteering.  But our marriage is still rocky, our kids are still unruly, and I'm still having financial trouble."  Somewhere he had heard that humility and sacrifice are merely means to financial success and domestic harmony.  Where in the world did he hear that?

When I was a little boy in Sunday School, I learned a poem by Langston Hughes: Hold fast to dreams For life without dreams Is like a bird with a broken wing That cannot fly.   Hold fast to dreams. God has a dream. God has a dream, a vision, plan, a sublime divine purpose for this world. God has a dream for his creation, a dream for every man, woman, and child whoever walked upon the face of the earth, and God will not rest until our nightmare is ended and God's dream is realized. That's what Jesus is all about. That's what he came to show us.  He came to show us the way to live God's dream instead of our nightmare. He came to show us the way to be truly and authentically and genuinely human as God intended and created us. He came to show us how to become more than simply an individual collection of self-interests. He came to show us how to become the human family of God.  And when the world is lived like that, when our lives are lived like that, then children don't go to bed hungry. When the world is lived more in accord with God's dream, God's vision for life, then we will find ways to lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more. Oh, God has a dream. And God will not rest until God's dream is accomplished, and miraculously God will not do it without us.