"Saying Farewell"
A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds
Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church
December 31, 2023
AUDIO VERSION LINKED (varies occasionally from prepared text below; audio cuts off in the middle of penultimate paragraph of this written text)
OT reading: Psalm 148
NT Reading: Luke 2:41-52
41 Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. 42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. 43 When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. 44 Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” 49 He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50 But they did not understand what he said to them. 51 Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart.
52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.
This morning’s reading from the Gospel of Luke is our only entry into Jesus’ life prior to the onset of his ministry during the last 3 years of his human life. Last week we considered the incarnational implications of his birth. Today, we’ll look at the incarnational implications of his maturation.
Jesus, like all humans, underwent a process of training and pedagogy whereby he acquired and questioned the norms and traditions of his culture. A Christology that "takes seriously the incarnation in a particular time and place should take the enculturation"—the process of training inside a specific time and place-- "of Jesus seriously.” At some point, Jesus came to know like all of us that the world is broken. The scriptures are silent as to when, but we might infer from the full witness of scripture his maturing awareness of God and in God, his father.
We’ve just read that Jesus participated in the pilgrim festivals of his parents and disputed [an esp. reformation principle] with the elders/rabbis.
This pedagogy confirms the protestant principle that contextualizes events, while kairetic inbreakings of eternity, are not the deposit of an Absolute and therefore institutionalizable understanding. Jesus grows in wisdom from a beginning. He does not bring forth a completed system all at once. This is the Protestant principle of questioning and provisional truth claims. Supplementing commandment, which are absolute and eternal.
Also, it’s important to note that Jerusalem is the Father’s house, not the Temple. Jerusalem is emphasized in this text (3x vs. 1x). There is debate going on about where the Father’s concern is located. Jesus is appearing in Jerusalem and questioning the temple: he is questioning its teachers.
Psalm 132 has David saying, I will not give sleep to my eyes
or slumber to my eyelids,
5 until I find a place for the LORD,
a dwelling-place for the Mighty One of Jacob.”
I have no doubt that the child is aware of his Father dwelling within. How is it, I imagine Jesus asking the teachers, that God might dwell in the temple alone? In a hierarchy alone, Luther asked.
So our first lesson this morning is:
Question your own teachers: your own childhood pastors who linger with poor theology like a recent visitor who came here asserting to me a toxic theology of the Cross, and rather than questioning my theology, she just blurted out I was wrong. I was willing to discuss, but she stormed out. Beware anyone who shuts down debate.
Or anything.
Like [Bing] ChatGPT did with me last week, cutting off my query and then eliminating the records of the conversations as I attempted to understand why a tool had the prerogative to not only not answer queries but then also to delete transcripts of those queries.
My friend Mark Shaw reports on an Enron-style hoax operation at the highest level of government during the Warren Commission’s investigation of the JFK assassination:
GA Senator Richard Russell's dissent of WC's “Oswald alone” narrative that Shaw believes was orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover was buried by a sham transcription (and phony stenographer), expunging his and KY Senator John Sherman Cooper’s and Rep. Hale Bogg’s doubts, thereby eliminating the record of dissent of the WC report from history.
But these shams are futile. The truth is safe with God and cannot be buried. It will come out when it best suits God’s gracious process.
Shaw: “it's unfortunate because so much of this was covered up by the government. If we learn anything from this, the relevance of it is to ask questions, don't take all that bull on the Internet for what it says, don't [as] some of these extreme news outlets, so whatever it is [facts], it doesn't matter. Ask questions. you know young people I tell them all the time: ask questions, because they didn't ask enough questions back then. They bought that whole Warren Commission verdict just hook line and sinker.” [1]
Esp. when authorities try to absolutize a certain self-interested reading of history—when they try to maintain certainty when provisionality is indicated—Generations change, and so too their historical and ethical awareness. The world changes always, and God accommodates this change. Questioning authorities and their absolutes is a Protestant principle. It’s what Luther did, though he was not the first. But his Reformation was timely in the process of the world. Questioning is what I hope you’ll do to me when you cannot follow my interpretations or claims. What you’ll do to all religious and political authorities. And, when you run up into the walls of increasingly machined bureaucracies. If they don't answer, say farewell to them.
We can and must say farewell to what stunts our growth in grace: we can and we must forgive. Israel/Gaza: God knows who started it, who crossed an impermissible line (it was crossed far earlier than your side might claim). Hamas is not our moral compass. Jesus is. But the flag back there is supporting one side, dragging our principles into cooptation with one side of the killing. The political principles of our denomination (PCUSA) is not in the bombs bursting in air. It cannot be, but in what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. A chastened patriotism: An aspiration to moral equality, to peaceful compromise, to constructive liberty, to dispensations rebalancing concentrated self-interests. To a shared vision of how best to govern, not how best to take new territory or profit by selling armaments or manipulating other peoples to give us a false sense of security.
So that Christians are never called to weigh the scales of evil and to take the “less evil side.” Say farewell to that Henry Kissinger “realism.” No, we are to lament evil and pray for peace, call for peace, work for peace regardless of parochial interests. There is no “lesser evil” to a Christian. Give humanitarian ear and aid to both, but the US is failing by arming one side. Any side! We can pray for Tel Aviv, for Ukraine, for Gaza, but the reality is that Jerusalem is the heavenly Jerusalem! Consider the theme of Jerusalem in the scriptures—of Zion. Say farewell to the earthly territorial readings of spaces, recognizing their placings are spiritual, where events and acts have eternal significance. This is what Jesus’ life and death on the Cross reveal to us.
So our second lesson this morning is peace always, peace alone.
We get lulled instead to saying, out of sight, out of mind, as if our participation in something contrary to peace is forgotten and therefore we can say farewell to it. That is a false farewell, the farewell of forgetting, seeking oblivion. Narcotizing.
That’s not the farewell to the calendar I have in mind. Fare well not as a chronological turn of the page of memory, but an enduring farewell to vain projects and vain hopes of hiding from truth. Hiding From our participations in trauma. These have to be confronted for growth to resume. We seek not the womb of comfort which is behind so many destructive addictions but we seek to the womb of creation’s repair. In God’s spirit modeled by Christ.
Tomorrow is Jesus’ naming day: the initium of his name’s “power”, not his Absolutizing. In his upbringing inside his context, Jesus learns to say farewell to the outdated authorities and structures and hello to the emerging, enduring quality of Jerusalem. Why Jerusalem? It is where the three monotheistic religions claim title. The way Jerusalem is encountered religiously on the ground has implications in the heavenlies.
Karl Barth speaks of Sehnsucht, a search in struggle, striving in a search for place.
We need not expect that life leads to sitting and possessing.
In no sense, at no moment.
We cannot remain standing. We may not.
And we ought not even once wish to do so.
Whatever awaits us on our way is under no circumstances our goal.
Even the most important the beautiful the tragic moments of our lives--
Are only stations on the way. Nothing more.
Saying farewell: that is the great rule of this life.
Woe to us if we reject this rule:
If we want to remain standing,
calling a halt, and attaching ourselves to a particular station.
There is nothing left for us but to acknowledge this, saying farewell,
becoming obedient to it. Here, we have no lasting city. [2]
Recognizing new beginnings tempts us to lie down and luxuriate as if the arrival is in the beginning, but in reality new beginnings require dedication to get up and get going. Saying farewell to our nostalgia, to our “comfort zones” which means to understand our neighbors, including not just tolerating but understanding how they use words. Let’s say farewell to what scripture calls the useless arguments over words.
Nostalgia blocks our making peace with the present, of redeeming our current situation because we want to build a future in our past: our personal or cultural memories (propaganda) that keep us stuck, like all children of Abraham who come to a stop without progressing, whom God repeatedly calls to Kum, Lech! (Gen. 12.1; 13:17; cf. Gen. 35:1) I heard that Get up and get going call this very week! It matters less where than how you walk.
So my third point this morning: all lessons of time and space on earth are provisional. Commandment alone is eternal: to Love God and One another operationalized by the 10 Commandments delivered by God to Moses on Sinai.
“We Seek the Future Place” which is Righteousness. Not a space, but an essence—a human essence that commits to the repair of earth and neighborhood for the sake of new generations to join us in eternal homes. Mt 6. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Seek First God’s righteousness and all this will be added, incl. place--destiny!
‘Saying Farewell”—to the year— to last year’s nationalism-- to seeking transcendence in our finitude-- say hello to the age of repair where all will find their destiny mirrored in their commitment to peace and supporting the creation’s ability to sustain new life ever emerging.
Saying farewell is a way of being in the world, an expectation and joy of being allowed to live in the ever last times of the world passing away. Provisionality. Always fresh hearings of scripture to get us moving again, attendant to grace—not to authority. We are bound to our individual understanding; modern theology is more in tune with these facets: provisionality, anti-authority, mature individuality in discerning will.
Life is a series of farewells to our illusions of what endures.
Farewell is an attitude timely and emergent as the earth’s calendar turns: to slow down and be responsive, attendant, turning static space and void into places defined by energizing and dancing shalom, the world without end recognized and repurposed by our participation and caring.
Say farewell to the familiar. Be open for God’s surprises with increasingly unshakeable confidence. AMEN.
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