Everlasting Father

 Friends, now that we’re in the second week of Advent, we’re also in the second part of this four part sermon series lightly inspired by Names for the Messiah by UCC pastor and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. The next “Name for the Messiah”, suggested by the prophet Isaiah is “everlasting father”.

Per the revised common lectionary, this week we also get to spend some time with a very important branch on Jesus’ family tree, one that I get a lot of personal amusement from preaching about: Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. Conceived by Mary’s much older cousin Elizabeth, John is 6 months older than Jesus, and as aware as Jesus that he lives on this spinning rock for a very specific, Divine reason.

Luke wrote to a Gentile audience, emphasized the inclusion of the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame, and, in a story like this one, wanted to get straight to business. His contemporary, Matthew, on the other hand, wrote to a Jewish audience about a Messiah who came to fulfill their predictions and prophecies. Because of that, Matthew was more pulled than Luke by that old Sesame Street song, “Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?”, and included this description of John’s appearance and demeanor that we can also find in Mark:

“John’s clothes were woven from coarse camel’s hair, and he wore a leather belt around his waist. For food he ate locusts and wild honey.” A few verses later, John loses his temper with the Pharisees and screams “YOU BROOD OF VIPERS!!!!” at them.

So, to recap, of all the different qualities this person could possess, this cousin of Jesus whose job was to convince people to repent of their bad behavior and get ready to receive the teachings of Christ, God picked this guy. He hangs out on random street corners yelling about the mountains being too tall. He has a “river baptisms count as a bath” hygiene system. When he’s hungry for a snack, he grabs a handful of live bugs and chows down ala Timon and Pumba in The Lion King. When he needs a full meal, he tackles a beehive until he can pull some honeycomb out of it. When it’s time to get a new shirt, he sneaks up on an unsuspecting camel with a razor. I’m not sure I’d approach this guy and say “hey, will you go dunk me in the river over there? I’m sure that will go well.” And apparently after he pulls you out of the water he says “if you think I’m a lot, you should meet my cousin.”

The paradox of being a white Protestant in a small church in a suburb in 21st Century America is that we’re supposed to take some of our deepest spiritual lessons from this walking zoo of a man. But if he knocked on our front door, we’d be more inclined to pepper spray him than to invite him into the pulpit. Afterall, who wants him to come to a potluck with a 9x9 locust casserole? Everything we’ve ever been taught screams “RUN from that guy.” How do we unlearn enough to see the light he brings?

This is where Jesus comes in, as the link that connects our ancestors to our descendants, our mistakes to our promising futures, and people who shower to John the Baptist.

The Messianic Moniker we’re looking at this week is “everlasting father”. If we’re still singing “Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?”, John is going to be the obvious outlier. But a Savior who’s ok being called “everlasting father” is bound to fit right in. He folds neatly into the “our father” introduction of the Lord’s Prayer, and he sits comfortably alongside the traditional folks who begin every prayer they say with the words “heavenly father, we just…”. But then, in Jesus’ lived ministry, he weaves the formal “father” with the warm and casual “abba” or “daddy”. He describes our Creator as a mother hen who hides her chicks under her feathers, as a shepherd cradling a scared baby lamb, as a vine that grows branches, and as a small flame from an oil lamp. Jesus comes into a patrilineal society as a descendant of David, but quickly finds ways to make his followers comfortable with the idea of an authority figure who isn’t a big rugged manly man in armor riding his steed to battle the enemy with his superior artillery.

If Jesus can comfortably segue into softer, gentler, nontraditional, non masculine images for the Holy, he makes it ok for us to do the same. You may or may not be inclined to notice that Pastor Natalie isn’t so hip on using masculine verbage for the Divine, and doesn’t call God “he” or “him” from the pulpit. You certainly can call God “he” and “father” if those images work for you. But you can experiment, too, just like Jesus did. I worked closely with my clergy mentors to learn how to diversify my language for God, and to restructure my sentences so I don’t have to use any pronoun for the Sacred if I don’t feel called to. But this doesn’t have to be all studious for you. What does God feel like to you today? To my daughter, God is a big orange star, and that’s how she likes to draw the Divine into pictures. I asked Xander, my 5 year old, yesterday what he thinks God looks like, and he said “God is a really pretty angel with wings!” I asked Daniel, my oldest, what God looks like, and he yelled “I don’t know!” and ran out of the room. Fair enough. This week, God was like a warm fuzzy sweater I could put on when it was snowing. To you, God might have been the fluffy snow. On another day, God was the words of a song I sang in the car for no reason, that just made me feel joyous. On another day, God was raw, frozen cookie dough. But the more we’re willing to play with what God can look like, what God can be, where God can reveal the Divine Self, the more curious we become about where and what else God could be, and the less absurd it sounds to listen for the voice of the Holy in a complete stranger, even a scary looking one like John the Baptist. Jesus is the bridge that gets us there.

As for the everlasting part–164 years ago, when my great great grandmother Fredericke Weimersledge spent six weeks on a boat coming from Germany to America, the Divine was part of the portal to a new life. My family’s rootedness in faith helped my ancestors find churches to join, friends to meet, traditions to keep, and belongingness in a new place. To my dad, 70 some years ago, a Methodist Church in rural Indiana linked him to that chain. It stretched all the way to Vietnam, and then back to Chicago where he met my mom, and they got married at the church she grew up in. Faith led them to baptize me and my sisters in a church in suburban Chicago, and that same faith chain stretched to the University of Rochester, and then connected me to seminary. That faith has linked me to seven different churches in seven very different towns. And it brought me here. The same Jesus who kept my great great grandmother warm on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean in 1860 fueled me typing this sermon on my laptop. The Holy doesn’t go anywhere. How we see, understand, define, and articulate the Divine will change over the course of our lives, and with history as people and societies change. But even though camel-clad street preachers aren’t commonplace anymore, Jesus will meet us once again, in 2 and a half weeks, as the most common of wonders: a baby. And when he shows up, suddenly everything around him makes sense.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.