From the Psalter:
He whose throne is in heaven is laughing; the Lord has them in derision.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 2;4 (BCP Version) – December 2, 2013.)
In the library of my parish church is a pen-and-ink drawing of Jesus laughing. It’s not a picture I particularly like, nor is it particularly well executed. In fact, if someone hadn’t told me that it is supposed to show Jesus laughing, I would have thought he was angry! Whenever I look at it, this verse from the Psalter comes to mind.
I think it’s hard for some people to conceive of Jesus (or God) showing emotions, particularly negative ones. I remember years ago (I was in my early 20s) listening to a meditation on anger at a church retreat. The priest offering the meditation said, “Jesus never displayed anger.” Really? I thought. What about that little incident in the Temple overturning tables and brandishing a whip? A false and mistaken idea that Jesus was never just plain mad, that God never gets royally pissed off does nothing more than create guilt in people who do (that would be everybody, I think).
One of the most interesting portrayals of the Lord in art that I have ever seen was a small hand-carved crucifix. The face of Jesus was contorted in obvious rage. I asked the artist about it and he told me it was how he saw Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them.” — “I think that what he is saying at that moment is, ‘You forgive them because, right now, I can’t! I have done everything you asked of me. I have taught them, healed them, exhorted them to proper conduct, shown them how to live, and this is what they do to me. I have run out of forgiveness. You do it!'” — I wish I’d been able to obtain that crucifix, but it wasn’t for sale.
I am quit certain that Jesus exhibited the full range of emotion, and I am equally certain that God does, as well. After all, Jesus was — is — God Incarnate. Furthermore, our faith teaches us that through his Ascension, Jesus has taken humanity into God’s heavenly domain; that includes everything it means to be human, including our emotions, positive and negative.
During these days of preparation for Christmas, this season the church calls “Advent,” emotions run high. For many people, sadness, anger, depression, a sense of loss, feelings of exclusion and betrayal may be the major emotions of the holidays. Laughing Jesus who looks to be angry, God laughing in derision, Jesus angry in the Temple, Jesus in exasperated rage on the cross . . . they should remind us that there should be no guilt in feeling these things. They are part of our humanity. Our human task is to accept them, work through them, and let go of them.
Lord, accept my Advent anger, my Christmas blues; help me lay them aside so that I may enter into the joy of your Incarnation.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. A day whose name comes from financial accounting and the ancient practice of recording profits in black ink, losses in red. Supposedly, at one time, this was the day when retail merchants who might have been running “in the red” the whole year would see themselves “in the black” at long last. I don’t know if that is still the case, but the name has stuck. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving Day.
I had to read the first line of this familiar parable three or four times this morning before my eyes (it had to be my eyes; it couldn’t have been my brain) focused well enough to properly read the word landowner. On first reading, I read it as lawnmower. 
Obadiah’s words (on behalf of God) are directed to the Edomites; this short (one-chapter) book is a rather dire prediction of the complete destruction Edom for the way it had dealt with Israel. Apparently it was correct for there seem to be no Edomites, nor any descendants of Edomites identifiable in the modern world.
I will go on record has being not an adherent of the ransom theory of the Atonement, which holds that the death of Christ was a ransom sacrifice in satisfaction for the bondage and debt on the souls of humanity as a result of inherited sin (another theory, “original sin,” with which I have some strong debate). It is unclear to me exactly who is the recipient of the ransom. Depending on who is setting out the argument, the ransom is usually said to have been paid either to Satan, which I think makes the ol’ devil rather bigger than he ought to be, or to God the Father, which makes the Almighty considerably less than we ought to think of God.
Read it carefully, it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you expect. It’s not a call to make agricultural implements out of the weapons of war . . . it is quite literally the opposite!
This part of Isaiah was written shortly after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, which Cyrus of Persia had allowed in the middle of the 6th Century BCE. Isaiah (on God’s behalf) was promising two things with these images of laborers enjoying the fruits of their own efforts: first, that the people would no longer be (if not slaves) subjugated workers of foreign (or domestic) overlords and, second, that there would be peace. Israel’s and Judah’s history had been one of regular (if not constant) upheaval with invaders coming in and taking control of the vineyards and seizing the people’s lands and homes: the simple planting of vineyards with an expectation of enjoying the crop was a metaphor of peace and security. 
Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Like everyone who was even marginally grown up or conscious on that day, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when it happened. It is one of those moments in time that are surreal in their clarity. 
I’m following a thread on a friend’s Facebook page about the future of the “institutional church,” by which I think the various participants mean their several denominations. (We are Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc., all of whom seem primarily to identify as Christians and only secondarily with the variety of polities, theologies, liturgical styles, and so forth we each prefer.) I suggested in the discussion that creating institutions is in the very nature of human beings; we create them, criticize them, tear them down, reform them, and recreate them, but we never escape from them. Another participant in response said, “I do not create community.”
Reading a verse like this one from the Second Book of Samuel makes me feel like I’m sitting at my in-laws’ kitchen table, or even in my grandmother’s kitchen. Up until very recently, this is the way people connected with other people. I can hear my late father-in-law reminding my wife of someone in the small town where she was born and raised:
