Today’s appointed gospel lesson begins abruptly with these words, “The Jews took up stones again to stone [Jesus].[1] There’s a context for these words that we haven’t heard at the daily Eucharist this week. I’ll get to that and to today’s lesson, but first I want to remind you and me that the stories of Jesus’ visits to Jerusalem in John and are very different than in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. One might say, it is John’s Jesus who lives out the words to Mary and Joseph of Luke’s twelve-year-old Jesus, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”[2]

I want to begin by mentioning the name of a priest who died on the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Wednesday, October 31, 1981. I was in my second year of seminary at Nashotah House. Since it was a Major Feast day, the community’s weekly Solemn Mass was celebrated on Wednesday night that week. (The weekly community Solemn Mass was usually on Thursday nights. But we arranged our lives around the Church Calendar, as Saint Mary’s still does.)

Last November, when I was reviewing the lessons for the Daily Office in Advent, I realized for the first time, that though the we would be reading Luke in Year One in Advent, today’s gospel, which I’ve always thought as belonging to John, was appointed for Wednesday in the Week of 2 Advent.[1] I had never noticed when reading John or Luke in one of my annotated Bibles that there’s a note attached to this passage in both gospels. This is from the New Revised Standard Version:

The book of the Bible we know as the Wisdom of Solomon is a Jewish writing that has never been a part of the Jewish scriptures. It was accepted as scripture by important third-century Christian writers and became a part of the Bible in the Christian East and West.[1] At the English Reformation, it was placed apart from the books of the Old Testament which were known in the original Hebrew. These Greek-language pre-Christian texts in the Bible were called the Apocrypha—meaning “hidden things.” The Apocrypha was included as a separate group in all of the English language Bibles of the sixteenth century and in the King James Version at the beginning seventeenth century.[2]

The lesson and the psalm go together. Moses has gone up on Mount Sinai. He has been there with the Lord for forty days and forty nights. Exodus tells us, “When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.”[1]

I have never had the privilege of doing a careful study of the Book of Isaiah or of the Revelation to John. I hear the familiar, beautiful words of today’s lesson from the last section of Isaiah, chapters 56 to the end, and think not of the restored Jerusalem after the exile but of the visions and emotions of heaven that we read in Revelation:

When I began attending Saint Paul’s Church in Charlottesville during my college years, there were very small Prayer Books and a copy of Services for Trial Use[1] in the pews. The latter was known as “The Green Book” because of its cover’s color. I wasn’t really paying too much attention; I wasn’t very regular. But I liked going there, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself. Looking back now, one can say that the biggest change in our church’s worship since the English Reformation had already begun: the revision of the Lectionary.

Today’s gospel lesson can give the impression that Nicodemus went in the darkness of the night to Jesus, the Light of the world and just disappeared.[1] Nicodemus asked three questions. Jesus responds at some length. Then, Jesus and his disciples are off to Judea. Only later in John’s gospel will we learn what this encounter with Jesus meant for Nicodemus.

The story of Jesus’ baptism is found in Mark, Matthew, and Luke.[1] In all three gospels, the Spirit drives, or leads, Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. Moses received the tables of the law on Mount Sinai after being there for forty days. When he came down with the tables in his hands and saw the golden calf, he threw them down and they broke. Moses would go up a second time, and this second time he fasted from food and water before he received the tablets of the law. Unlike Mark, Matthew and Luke include an account, from what we call the Sayings Source, of Jesus’ testing or temptation—take your pick[2]—in the wilderness.

At the end of my second year in seminary, my classmate, John McCausland, whose family had a cabin in northern Wisconsin, invited me and another classmate, Jim Nutter, to join him there for a few days just to get away. I remember a couple of things from that weekend. After a run, when we jumped into the lake, it was really cold—the snow had melted only a couple weeks earlier—and Jim, a guy from Maine, stayed in that very cold water the longest.

You may remember our Sunday lectionary is on a three-year cycle—and this is the year when most Sundays the gospel lesson is from Matthew. Saint Augustine of Hippo is credited with calling the first and longest of Jesus’ five discourses in Matthew, from which today’s gospel lesson is taken, the “Sermon on the Mount.”[1] New Testament scholar Ulrich Luz calls it “a happy choice” because it reminds us of Moses going up to Mount Sinai and receiving the tablets of the law[2]—and since we are talking about the Sermon on the Mount, it’s worth noting that Luz is among the scholars who think the Greek word usually translated as “blessed” is better, but not perfectly, translated as “happy.”[3]

The text of today’s appointed gospel lesson, in Greek and in English, begins with the second person plural pronoun, you—or in my childhood in Virginia with a Georgia grandmother, you-all. If February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, had not taken precedence over the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, we would have heard the beginning of what we call the Sermon on the Mount.[1]

When I was 6 years old, soon after the birth of my sister, I went with my mother to the local parish, The Church of Our Merciful Saviour, where the rector read the office, The Churching of Women. I think she was required to undergo it to resume service on the Altar Guild. In 1954, women were permitted behind the altar rail only to clean it. That liturgy was rooted in the reason Mary is going to the temple today. The Churching of Women assumed that childbirth, among other things, made women ritually unclean, and they had to have a special ceremony to become clean and be readmitted to the church. Fortunately, this liturgy does not occur in the current BCP. Giving birth and any number of other conditions do not make women ritually unclean. But they did in the first century and as recently as my childhood.

In July 1985, after two years in Dallas, I moved to my second job in the church as curate for the then-new rector of Saint Luke’s Church, Baton Rouge, and later bishop of Louisiana, Charles Jenkins. In the large parish in Dallas, I was one of five priests, in Baton Rouge, one of three. More Sunday preaching came my way. That fall, I bought the first of a series of short books—collections of articles—written for clergy and adult education, by Father Raymond Brown, for many years a professor at Union Theological Seminary here in the city. He died in 1998 and was widely regarded as the leading American Roman Catholic New Testament scholar of his generation. The small paperback book was: An Adult Christ at Christmas: Essays on the Three Biblical Christmas Stories.[1] These essays were based on one of Brown’s major works, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.[2] Brown’s approach in these articles helped make preaching on the gospel come alive for me.

Jesus is still in the wilderness, where the devil had tempted him, when he learns that John the Baptist has been arrested. So he leaves the wilderness and returns to Galilee, where he had grown up in Nazareth. The Greek verb here translated as “arrested” can also be a gentle one, meaning “give, deliver, entrust.”[1] But in a judicial context it means “handed over to the authorities.”[2] It’s the word behind our English translations of what Judas Iscariot did—he betrayed Jesus.[3] It’s the word used when the chief priests and the elders decide to send him to Pilate.[4] If I’ve counted correctly, it’s used 31 times in Matthew and always carries a sense that something is wrong, dangerous. As I often am, I gained this insight from Dr. Mark Davis’ scripture blog, “Left Behind and Loving It.” [5]

Some of you share with me fond memories of George Blackmore Handy, to use his full name. He was born in 1918. He died on May 9, 2012. He was ninety-three years old; in less than a month, he would have been ninety-four.

This glorious season of Epiphany opens us up to new opportunities for God’s love. We look once again at places where the Spirit flowed, focusing on times when God’s approval of earthly events brought light to the world.

The Magi—the Wise Men—do not arrive in Bethlehem until this evening, when we observe the Eve of the Epiphany. But for this morning, our lectionary has borrowed from our Roman Catholic friends what they call “The Feast of the Holy Family”—the story of the flight of Joseph, Mary, and the child to Egypt and their return after the death of Herod.[1] What is left out by our friends, and officially by us, is the heart of Matthew’s story. But we heard the omission: the three verses that tell of the killing of the young boy children in Bethlehem, a terrible story by itself, but made more terrible by the evil afflicted on Jews by Christians and others through the millennia.

I wrote in the newsletter for this week that I was surprised to learn that, in 1965, religion was already being excluded from television programming. So when Charles Schultz was invited to write A Charlie Brown Christmas, he chose to write it in such a way that no one could cut out the scene where Charlie asks, “Isn’t there anyone who understands what Christmas is all about?” and Linus responds by reciting from memory Luke’s story of the angels visiting the shepherds and announcing to them Jesus’ birth. Then Linus says to Charlie, “That’s what Christmas is all about.” CBS did not like the show with its religious content, but they had made a commitment to its sponsor, Coca-Cola. Coke got it right.[1]

Sixteen days and one hundred-fifty years ago, the first services in the first Church of St. Mary the Virgin, on the other side of what was then Long Acre Square, at 228 West Forty-fifth Street, were celebrated. Our present church home opened sixteen days and one-hundred twenty-five years ago. This evening we gather for the one hundred fiftieth celebration of Christmas at Saint Mary’s.