Sermon Jan 12 2025 ~ How it Started, How it’s Going (Lk 3:15, 13:31)      Rev. Betsy Hogan

I’m sure you’ve heard this saying: Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I don’t know if it’s true, though given human patterns and defaults it certainly makes sense. 

But what I actually think is just as true is how quickly and easily those who don’t remember the past can fall into despair in the present. Imagining that the feelings of "now" are entirely "new". Wholly unprecedented. Feelings and fears that have never arisen before. 

Probably the best and most evocative phrase we've ever come up with in the United Church is “we are not alone”. The first line of the closest we've ever come in the United Church to having a "creed" of our essential beliefs as a family of faith. And of course what we mean by it is that this is God’s world. And we as a human family don’t abide here alone – we abide here wholly surrounded by and filled by the goodness of Godness, God’s spirit unleashed, alive, at work. We are not alone.

But there’s another sense in which it’s good for us to recall sometimes that ‘we are not alone’ and it’s the sense in which we as a human family abide in this place in the company of all those who have gone before us. 

And who experienced all the things we experience. Who felt all the things we feel. And it’s not that knowing that makes it all better, but it’s good and it's helpful, I think, for us to remember that people just like us gathered here for Sunday services, for example, in 1812. In 1916. In 1940. During the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1980, when the Soviets rolled into Afghanistan. In 2017 on the verge of a new presidency.

Sunday after Sunday. When nobody knew how things would end -- and frankly, on a day by day basis it sometimes very much looked like things would not end at all well. And yet people were getting up, making breakfast, going to work, picking up groceries, getting through homework, making appointments, running errands, and trying to fall asleep at night – all carrying, every day, that same heaviness. Of not knowing how things would get sorted. Or even IF they’d get sorted.

Whatever feelings there are in the human family’s present there always have been. All the feelings have been felt. We’re not alone. Not laterally, but also not retrospectively.

Even Jesus in his humanness has been there. Felt all those feelings. And that’s good to remember too. Because very often we forget it. And it’s in the gospels for a reason.

The two passages from Luke that Michelle read for us just now, in a way they’re like brackets around Jesus’ ministry. The first one, its beginning with his baptism – and the second as he approaches Jerusalem at what will be the end of his life, roughly three years later – 

But both readings making clear that Jesus’ ministry is located firmly within the shadow of Herod’s petty and pathetic but very real violence. No less real than the violence of the FIRST Herod, this Herod’s father, whose petty patheticness had been unleashed in the massacre of innocent children, in his attempt to kill Jesus in infancy.

But THIS Herod, the son Herod Antipas, HIS violence initially gets aimed at Jesus’ cousin John. Whose mission is to prepare people for Jesus’ ministry by preaching for them a message of baptism as repentance and readiness for a fresh start. Who is himself the one who baptizes JESUS as the symbolic beginning of that ministry. But whose violent death at Herod’s hands almost feels like a footnote for Luke. 

Like, oh yes, John the Baptizer gets imprisoned by Herod. And oh yes, later he’s beheaded. It’s almost like they’re throwaway lines. But they’re not. At all.

They’re the open-brackets quiet setting of context, of perspective, of the hovering long shared experience that casts its shadow over this whole period of time, over the whole of Jesus’ adult life as we hear about it in the gospels. 

Not just the dramatic moments. And how does that matter? It matters because it’s easy to only get focused on the dramatic moments, on heightened anxiety and crystallized fear – and to forget the perspective of the degree to which life can and does just carry on day by day… those shadows notwithstanding. And it always has.

Everything in our gospels unfolds under this putative shadow of Herod Antipas. Here he is, “open brackets” -- popping up in Luke’s story at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, at the moment of his baptism. This is the context in which Jesus lays down his embodiment of Godness and his message of radical love and healing and wholeness. This is the context in which Jesus heads out on the road for his preaching and his teaching and his working of miracles – this extraordinary three years in which he lives and speaks and shows for all time the Way of being that’s God’s way of being.

He does all that under a shadow that’s real – we know it is, Luke mentions it so we’ll know it is –

But life’s carrying on anyway. Day by day. Jesus carries on doing life anyway. People carry on doing life anyway. They always have, in the midst of as much or more heaviness of uncertainty as we might feel now. Whatever feelings there are in the human family’s present there always have been. All the feelings have been felt. We’re not alone. Perspective. 

But if Luke opens the brackets on Jesus’ ministry with a mention of the shadow of Herod under which his embodiment of love and Godness and goodness will unfold nevertheless… and magnificently…
Luke also closes the bracket on that unfolding with a very important reminder that the shadow is real. And all that love and Godness and goodness that have been unfolding despite it, have something to say to it. In no uncertain terms. 

It’s bizarre in the extreme. Jesus’ message is literally love. Love of neighbour, generosity with what we have, care for those in trouble, welcome to those who’ve been excluded and oppressed. It could all scarcely sound LESS like some kind of existential threat than it does – and yet that’s how his message is heard by those consumed by greed and obsessed with power. 

That’s how his message is heard by those who’ve long benefited from the way things are and have convinced themselves there’s not enough to share. That’s how his message is heard by too many. That’s how his message is heard by Herod.

As a threat. So the word’s gone out. King Herod’s on the warpath and he means it. The shadow is real, it’s always been real, the goodness unfolding nevertheless – but Luke wants us to know that the goodness does have something to say to it.

Because Jesus’ message and embodiment of love and generosity and care and justice, they’re not just airy fairy holiness, they’ve not just unfolded in an adorably naïve vacuum. The goodness has been perfectly aware of the shadow of ugliness and tyranny and violence the whole time – and the goodness has something to say to it. In no uncertain terms.

And so “Listen,” Jesus says to the messengers in Luke’s closing-brackets mention of that very real shadow of Herod under which the whole of Jesus’ ministry has unfolded…

“Go and tell that fox for me. That today and tomorrow and the next day I am going to do what I do, because that’s what I do. I am going to preach what I preach, I’m going to teach what I teach, I’m going to heal how I heal, my people are going to love neighbours and strangers relentlessly, my people are going to feed the hungry and comfort the sorrowful fiercely, my people are going to reject oppression and protect the powerless steadfastly, because that’s what we do.” 

“And whatever HE decides to do?” Jesus goes on to those messengers, “That’s up to him.” And he turns his back on them. Enough.

I don’t know, but I do try to hope, that it helps to know that this space of faithful community held all the feelings of 1812 and 1916 and 1940 and 1962 and 1980, and all the feelings of Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, and there is not one feeling we can feel that hasn’t been felt before in this space – because here’s the thing. 

All of it bears witness to there being not just comfort but actually meaning in our resilience as a human family. Not just whatever personal resilience we might each muster up as individuals, but the time-transcending resilience of the we-are-not-aloneness of our collective humanness. Not just laterally but retrospectively.

We learn it from each other – not just how to get through but that getting through is possible. We learn it by remembering the past, by remembering that there's no fear or worry or pain or grief that's new under the sun – that all of it's been felt in its heaviness, casting its shadows, but goodness still unfolded day by incremental day.

And we learn it by looking for its fierceness and its defiance – by noticing not just the big ways but the small ways that people muster up courage and do what they have to and stand up for the goodness and don't forget kindness and take care of each other. 

Against the Herods of any age, who always imagine that ugliness and greed and the basest of all impulses can win. 

Because we haven’t forgotten our history, as people of faith. Of the essential spirit of Godness and goodness that was poured out fully aware of the shadow hovering over it, bracketing it fore and aft with very real vulnerability – feeling every feeling of uncertainty and fear and worry and heaviness, but unfolding nonetheless.

And fierce under pressure. Listen. You can tell that fox for us, that today and tomorrow and the next day there will keep being goodness and there will keep being caring and there will keep being love. Amen.