The Lost Sheep

A sermon for Sunday, September 15, 2019.

Would you pray with me?

God of the lost and God of the found, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

So last week, we talked about Jeremiah and the Potter and how God can not only reshape us as individuals but also as a community. Today, we’re looking at another well-known biblical image that I think speaks to us in several distinct ways: the lost sheep. In the gospel of Luke, the lost sheep comes as the first of three parables about lost things: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost sons, or as we might know the story better, the Prodigal Son. These stories come right after Jesus has had multiple conversations with religious leaders about why he choses to eat with sex workers, tax collectors, and others considered sinners. The parable of the lost sheep is the hinge in this section of Luke, the turning point where Jesus goes from addressing his particular situation to speaking truths for the ages.

The image of the lost sheep is an enduring one. We can all picture it, I think, even though many of us won’t have spent our lives around sheep. Many of us know that feeling of being lost, of being separated from those that we know and care for, that feeling of being alone, and if we’re lucky, we know what it’s like to be found. Jesus takes us on a rollercoaster of emotion in just a few sentences. (And for those of us who don’t know what it’s like to be lost and don’t feel that rollercoaster, there’s the story of the lost sons, where we can learn something from the father’s response to the older brother.)

But I think the lost sheep speaks to us on more than just a personal level. I think we often read it as a story that just relates to us personally, and that’s fine to begin with. We are all inspirited bodies and embodied spirits. Our experience in this life is uniquely and definitively ours; we will always experience things with our own senses first and that’s not a bad thing.

If we stop there, though, then we miss some of the richness of what Jesus’ metaphor has for us today. I think that most, if not all scripture, speaks to us in at least three ways: personally, theologically, and practically. And so this morning, I want to talk about the lost sheep in these three ways, personally, theologically, and practically, in order to help us gain some understanding about who we are, who God is, and what we as a community can do in light of those first two facts.

Let’s start by talking about those sheep, which might help us get some more personal resonance out of the story. Sheep are herd animals, meaning that they have an innate tendency to stick together. That’s handy, because the idea of fenced-in property that is cultivated with grass that is perfect for the grazing of sheep is a modern invention. In Jesus’ day, the shepherd would have to take the sheep out to graze, hoping that they would stick together as they grazed.

Now the sheep, as a grazing animal, has different eyes than you and I have. They’re actually just horizontal slits. These pupils help them see better side-to-side as they graze, so they know which direction to turn to after they’re done with their particular patch of grass. But this means that they don’t see what’s ahead of them so well, nor what’s above them. Because of this, the shepherd has to steer the flock away from danger they might not see.

Sheep are good at one thing and that is grazing.

But if a shepherd takes a herd of sheep into an area to graze that doesn’t have enough for all the sheep, a sheep or two will wander. They’ll look from side to side, see no grass, and they’ll mosey off in search of food. If you’re a shepherd going off to recover that wandering sheep, you’ll most likely have to break its knees in order to bring it back; otherwise, it’ll want to stay grazing where it’s found food. This could be why the shepherd who’s found the sheep puts it on his shoulder. Sometimes when we’re lost, we can’t walk back on our own.

That’s the point of the parable that we sometimes miss when we use this story to talk about ourselves personally. The sheep becomes this image in a larger salvation story: we go from “we all like sheep have gone astray” to “Jesus is the shepherd who saves us” to “now we belong to Jesus’ flock.” It’s original sin to Jesus’ death on the cross to Christian salvation. But that’s not what Jesus meant here. He was talking about one sheep that goes off because it didn’t have enough. One sheep that leaves the herd because it’s not being cared for. One sheep that’s trying to meet its needs but has gone far from the shepherd’s care. Jesus isn’t talking about those of us who were raised in church and have been in church all our lives and have been the backbone of this institution. Jesus is talking about those who left, and the effort it takes to bring them back, and the celebrating that happens because of it.

And that’s where we begin to understand what the parable is saying to us theologically, what the parable is telling us about God. Because any human shepherd wouldn’t go off searching after one lost sheep. For one thing, the shepherd was probably a worker hired by the owner of the sheep, rather than the owner of the sheep themselves, and if the shepherd went off searching for one sheep, he’d come back to fewer than ninety-nine when he returned. Despite their tendency to stay with the herd, they would, one by one, find less grass than they wanted, and wander off on their own. So any shepherd that would want to return the herd with as many sheep as possible would certainly not go off looking for one lost sheep. He’d report the loss to the owner and go about his day.

But God is not a human shepherd. God is not limited the way a human shepherd is. God can provide for ninety-nine and search out the one lost sheep all at the same time. More than that, these parables of lost things tell us that our God is a God who seeks. Our God is a God of abundance. Most importantly, as we see in Jesus, God-made-flesh, our God is a God who cares deeply for the lost and the least. When the faithful righteous people around him, those who were a part of the ninety-nine sheep who didn’t stray, told him that he was making a mistake by seeking out the lost, he told them these three parables to show them again that human ways are not God’s ways.

This is deeply comforting to us if we’ve ever been lost, if the church has ever been a place of barrenness for us rather than a place of abundance. I know that I’ve had times like that, years of my life where, even though I went to church every Sunday, I was prone to wander in my heart because there wasn’t anything life-giving for me there. Christianity for me had become a penned-in field and the grass I found there wasn’t sustaining me, so I started to look for breaks in the fence. It is deeply comforting to me that Jesus would seek me out anyway, with that abundant love of his, to find me where I was and to see me as I am, with all my needs and all my dreams. Theologically, this parable tells us that our God is a God who does that, who seeks us out and celebrates when we’re found.

And this means something for us practically. As Christians, we are always seeking to be more like Christ, more like our God. If our God is a God who seeks out the lost and the lonely, we should do that too. If our God is a God who celebrates when those who are lost are found, then we should too.

But we have to view our search for the lost as Jesus does. We cannot be self-righteous about it, because any one of us could have been that sheep that didn’t find grass to graze on. In the parable, the shepherd doesn’t send one of the sheep who stayed with the herd out to find the lost one, because sheep don’t see the way the shepherd does. Remember, they only see side-to-side, but it is the shepherd who sees ahead. If we as the church, sheep though we are, are going to be the shepherd in this community, we have to learn to see as Jesus sees and celebrate as Jesus celebrates.

This means looking at the community around us with new eyes. We have to look around at things as they are, seeing things through our own eyes, and we have to look at things as they could be, seeing things through Jesus’ eyes. Where we see a rundown building, Jesus could imagine a community center where we share stories and food and music, feeding those who have felt alone. Where we see a trailer park, Jesus sees vibrant homes where people grow and flourish. Where we an addict, Jesus sees a person fighting addiction. Where we see poverty and lack of resources, Jesus sees a field ready for growth.

And imagine our celebration when we can gather the community of Whittier together from its disparate parts to eat and talk and make music together. Imagine our celebration when we see people whose homes had been in disrepair showing people proudly around their property. Remember our joy when someone with addiction wins the battle. Imagine our rejoicing when we start to see something new growing.

Because for Jesus, it’s not just seeking out the lost for the sake of saving some souls. Jesus seeks out the lost here and now and he has banquets with them, because he knows what has been found. He knows that our rejoicing at being found will echo through eternity. He knows that new life in this world will bring joy in the next. Every life matters to Jesus, not just the lives of the ninety-nine but also and especially the lives of the lost one.

Now, I’m new here. I am still learning where it is that the lost can be found and how we can seek them out. But what I know for a fact after a few months here is that y’all will help me learn and that y’all are ready to reach out. Whether you’ve been one of the ninety-nine throughout your life or whether God has had to go seeking you, you are to go out and find those that God has laid on your heart to seek. Maybe it’s a neighbor, a cousin, a friend, a sibling who you know needs some more love in their world. Maybe it’s someplace you drive by every day and wonder who lives there, who they are, and what they do. Whoever it is, I encourage you, this week or in the weeks ahead, to reach out and say hello. Build a relationship where before there was distance.

Because remember, we are the sheep of a shepherd whose love knows no bounds. We are the sheep of a shepherd who sees things not only as they are but as they could be. And we are the sheep of a shepherd who can guide us out into our world. So let’s start seeking.

Amen.

The Potter

A sermon for Sunday, September 9, 2019

Just before the sermon started, we watched the first four minutes of this video of a potter making a teapot. This sermon relies heavily on this video. We recommend that you take a few minutes to watch it.

Would you pray with me?

God who shapes us all, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Amen. So this week, the lectionary starts leading us through a series of well-known biblical images. We begin with the potter, and then we have the lost sheep, and the balm in Gilead, and then Abraham’s Bosom, in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. I want to take the next few weeks to journey through these images and to see if they might speak to the situations that we find ourselves in today. The Bible is full of enduring truths, both hope-filled and challenging, and my hope is that these enduring truths will shake us up and guide us forward. And we start with the potter, one who might have shaped a pitcher like this.

I was visiting with my parents this weekend, mostly so they could get me to take some of my stuff out of their house. I’m sure those of you with adult children will understand that struggle. I have textbooks and photo albums and some odds and ends that haven’t followed me in my various moves since I left home in 2007 that have stayed in storage at my parents’ house, and they are ready for these items to find a home with me once again. So we sorted through some things, and as we worked on clearing out my grandmother’s hope chest for me to take back with me, I noticed this pitcher on a nearby shelf.

Knowing the passage for this morning, I immediately asked if I could borrow it. Being from a rather nomadic sect of my generation, I haven’t had the chance or the will to purchase much pottery for myself. I’ve lived in five different places in the last five years, one of them overseas. I’m not going to cart around anything heavy and breakable. But my parents have lived in their house since I was two and this pitcher fits right in with how they live their lives.

My mother said, sure, I could borrow it and my dad asked why it had flowers in it. My mother told him that it was because he never let her use it as a pitcher and it got a chip in it and now it was only good as a vase with a handle. My dad didn’t think that was true and off they went into the type of fight where no one’s right or wrong and each party can get to the other side with a little bit of compromise and light teasing. The pitcher was bought so long ago and has been such a fixture of the house that no one can really remember how the chip got there or whether it fit on the kitchen table at the time. So the flowers were removed and the pitcher traveled the two hours back up the mountain with me and here we are.

And what I love about this pitcher, as I love about all handmade pottery, is its uniqueness. The clay gives it color, with little flecks of black here and there. It has lines on it from the potter’s fingers. The clay bunches up at the bottom of the handle in a way that isn’t perfect and symmetrical but still beautiful. If l trace my fingers up it, my thumb fits perfectly in the groove at the top of the handle. I’m sure that many other pitchers like this were made in the shop that my mother bought it from, but no other one will look quite like this one. It is unique.

You all know this, I’m sure. You’ve been going to church a long time and this passage has shown up in the lectionary once every couple years. We live in a part of the state with abundant access to clay and plenty of people willing to throw it, so I’m sure you’ve seen some beautiful pieces over the years, each unique and lovely. You all know how pottery is a labor of love, sitting at the wheel day after day, learning the clay, learning to listen to it and how to shape it. We saw some of that as the potter making the teapot explained what he was doing.

I want to highlight three things this morning to let this image speak:

1.     Clay has to be ready to be shaped

2.     In pottery, there are many stages, and no stage is more important than another.

3.     There is always a chance to be reshaped.

Clay has to be ready to be shaped; in pottery, all the stages are important; and there’s always a chance to be reshaped. I want to use these three ideas that come to us from pottery to talk about not only our individual faith journeys, but also our journey as a community.

The first, that clay has to be ready to be shaped, comes to us from watching the potter, Mr. Pothier. I love that he gave us some pottery chemistry this morning. Clay is made of dirt and water, as we all know, but that dirt is made of silica, or silicon dioxide, and alumina.

Now, silica and alumina are abundant materials here on Earth. We know them as the main components in sand and in your regular dirt, which we have in abundance. The name Earth actually comes from an old English word for dirt, which is a lovely thought when you think about the rest of the planets. Mercury, named for the swiftest of the gods. Venus, named for the most beautiful. Earth, named for dirt. Mars, named for the warrior god.

You get the picture.

But maybe we need to revise our idea of dirt. Silicon is made in the core of large stars, stars that are 8-11 times bigger than our sun. Aluminum is made in the element formation that happens in supernova explosions. (To learn more, click here and here.) Dirt, clay, is stardust that we get to see in our everyday lives, and so maybe it’s fitting that that’s what we call our planet.

So silicon, then, combines with two oxygen to make this molecule, silicon dioxide.

You can see in the picture that it is oblong, like the potter says. It’s not like carbon, which makes nice neat circles. The molecules have to line up in order to form a crystal. Now, I’m not an expert in clay, but what Mr. Pothier says makes sense to me: the clay needs to be worked in order to be ready to be shaped. After all, it’s quite a journey from the stars to the potter’s wheel.

And that journey, for the clay he used, includes being brought together from all over North America. It’s good, solid clay and its mixed heritage is an asset, not a problem. Bringing together clay that formed in different creek beds and river beds all around results in a strong clay, good for practical uses.

Now Mr. Pothier knows when he’s got the clay in his hands whether it’s ready or not. And when the clay is ready, it’s easy to work with. He can feel when the clay, each unique ball of it, is ready.

Jeremiah tells us that God is like a potter. God knows us with the intimacy that a potter knows their clay. God is aware of the wonder that we are, that we, like clay, are everyday stardust, and God knows that it takes some time to get our molecules in alignment too. None of us is exactly like another and so there is individualized work that happens even before we begin to be shaped. As Methodists, we know that as prevenient grace, the grace that goes before, where God reaches to us before we’re ready to reach back to God. (To learn more, click here.)

For some of us, that grace came to us in bible stories and Sunday school and years of worship and growth within the church. For some of us, we found that grace in trees and oceans and the beauty of the sky. For some, it was in other people, whether in church or in not, who taught us what it means to love. But in all of these things, God was preparing us to be shaped. And when we’re ready, God can work with us.

And this brings us to our second point: in pottery, there are many stages, but none of them is more important than another. We can’t be impatient with one stage or another. It might take more time than we anticipated for us to be ready to be shaped by God. We might have come from particularly difficult clay, or we might have been set aside for a while and not taken care of. We can’t be shaped until we’re ready. But that doesn’t mean that someone who is being shaped is more important, or better, than another. After all, Jeremiah tells us that the clay on the wheel, clay that was already ready, spoiled, and that the potter had to rework it. Even when we’re ready, even when we’ve been justified by God’s grace and are ready to be shaped for our lives as redeemed Christians, we still have the potential to spoil on the wheel.

Which may seem odd to us. After all, God is reaching out to us always with prevenient grace. Our psalm this morning, Psalm 139, which we read part of as our call to worship, tells us that God is everywhere. No matter where we go, to the heights of heaven to the depths of the grave, God is there, and God knows it all. The rest of the passage in Jeremiah talks about how God can shape Israel any way God wants, can shape the nations that will rise up against Israel as God sees fit. It seems that God has this whole world, all this dirt and water, in the palm of God’s hands.

So why, then, does the clay spoil?

Surely God, the maker of the clay, would see the clay spoiling and be able to prevent it, instead of having to rework it.

I think this is one of the great mysteries of life, something to do with the glorious messiness of creation and with the beautiful unpredictability of our human selves. We are malleable, shaped by the environment that we grew up in, but we also have wills of our own and some ability to choose our own way. Jeremiah uses a perfect metaphor here for us as humans. We are clay in the potter’s hands and any potter will be able to tell you that clay, even prepared clay, has a mind of its own. There are many stages in pottery, and each is important, and in each, the potter has to consider the clay at hand, working with it, not imposing their will on it.

And so we have to be prepared. We have to be ready to be shaped. We have to be shaped, and then, before we are ready to be put to use, we have to be fired and hardened.

And here we come to the paradox of the last point. Even if we have been glazed and fired, with God, there is still a chance to be reshaped.

Now for me, I can’t wait until I’m shaped into what God wants me to be. I have yearned for that for years. I have waited as the potter has spun me this way and that, molding me through school and work and family and friends, occupations and relationships of all kinds, and I still don’t feel finished. Sometimes I feel like the lid we saw being made, or the spout of the teapot. I’m upside down or maybe there’s just some extra clay that needs to be cut away. Or I feel as if I have spoiled in the potter’s hands and my job now is to be patient and to see what God makes of me. This is particularly frustrating for someone who is used to the idea that she makes herself.

But you may not be in the same malleable place that I am. Remember, each of us is unique, formed from unique clay and shaped by the world and by the Potter in ways that can’t be repeated. Many of you have been shaped by careers and families that have been a part of your life for decades. You have been shaped by your understanding of faith and of your church that has also been with you for decades. God has shaped you and life has glazed and fired you and you have found yourself as one of many vessels that God can use in this world. You may, just like my parents’ pitcher, have a chip or two, and have found yourself used in ways you didn’t expect.

Now, as we learned before, every stage in pottery is important and none is more important than the others. Being sanctified, being shaped and formed into who God wants you to be, is a wonderfully important part of the Christian journey, the part of our lives, that we hopefully, by God’s grace, spend most of our time in. But for most of us, we will not be fully sanctified, fully alive in Christ, a fully complete work of God, until the end of this life or in the world to come. And that means that no matter how life has hardened us, there is still grace for God to make us anew.

We may find ourselves like Philemon, in today’s epistle lesson, asked to do something unexpected, something requiring forgiveness, something that may cost us, and something that goes against what the world around us tells us. Sometimes the story of Paul’s letter to Philemon slips past us in the Bible-ese of the verses, but Paul is asking a leader of the church to free the person he had enslaved, Onesimus. Not only that, but Paul is asking Philemon to free Onesimus even though he owes him a great debt. Philemon has every right to take Onesimus back into service, to punish him, to extend his slavery, and to profit off his labor, and yet Paul is asking him to do none of those things. Paul is asking for freedom.

Remember, as we talked about two weeks ago, a word from the Lord is a word that unbinds people.

Philemon is likely clay that has already been glazed and fired. He knows who he is, how he fits into society, what his role is. And yet Paul is asking him to be reformed. How can this be?

By the grace of God, even that which is firmly shaped can be remade. God can bring new life and new malleability.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve heard it from some of you. There was a need in the community and even though it was a new thing that you were unaccustomed to, you built a food pantry. You sorted through clothes. And when one of your own went through a struggle with addiction, you learned a new way of seeing. You allowed yourselves to be shaped with new compassion and now, we read letters from and send letters to this dear one in recovery. You thought that God had shaped you as a vessel into which compassion was poured. You realized that God had given you a spout, so that your compassion might be poured out.

Here, I went to the pitcher and poured grape juice into the cup for communion.

Friends, this morning, I want to you to take home three questions.

Are you ready to be shaped by God?

Will you be patient with how God is shaping you and others, each in their own way?

How is God reshaping us here at Whittier?

I’ll be honest, these are difficult questions for me. I don’t have straightforward answers. But I look forward to hearing your answers and I trust that God is guiding us and shaping us as we move forward and I trust that if we’re ready to be shaped, and if we’re patient as God works with us, God will make something beautiful here, within each of our hearts and within our community as a whole. We will be covered in grace and we will find a way to pour that grace out into the world.

Amen.

Words of the Lord

A sermon for Sunday, August 25, 2019

Would you pray with me?
God who sets us all free, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

We’ve talked for the past two weeks about how we need to investigate passages from scripture that seem to conflict but, in the end, are actually telling two sides of the same story. But sometimes, the lectionary passages for a Sunday have a through-line, some common theme that runs through them, and I think that’s our situation for this morning. There’s a little bit of a two-sides vibe with the passage from Jeremiah from Hebrews, but they come together in the gospel. To see this, we’ll start with Jeremiah this morning, jump to Hebrews, and land in the passage from Luke, which is where I think we find the grounding for how we apply these passages. You see, I believe that whatever the word from the Lord is, no matter who is called by God to proclaim it, we will always find that a word that truly comes from God is liberating, rather than binding.

So. Jeremiah. We’ve been reading from Isaiah the past two weeks, but this week the lectionary jumps to a different prophet. Our readings will stay with Jeremiah, so it’s worth it to get reacquainted with him.

Jeremiah is sometimes called “the Weeping Prophet.” The book of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to him. Why the weeping and lamenting? Well, Jeremiah is active at the time of the Babylonian Exile, which we talked about two weeks ago, the deeply traumatic event in the history of Israel and Judah where the Babylonian Empire comes, lays siege to Jerusalem, conquers the city, and after a long conflict, destroys much of Jerusalem and takes its leaders into captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah watches all of this happen. He’s taken off into exile too, despite his protests. After all that the Babylonians did to Judah, Jeremiah would rather stay with his land than go into exile in a foreign place. Jeremiah warns against the destruction, calling for the leaders to change their ways, and mourns when the worst happens.

We’ve dealt with some mourning this past week, haven’t we.

And as you expect from someone in mourning, the book of Jeremiah is disjointed. It’s difficult to make rhyme or reason of the book as a whole. At times it’s a compilation of various prophetic oracles that Jeremiah spoke over the course of his life, sometimes there’s explanatory prose, some of it sounds like sermons. The book of Jeremiah is doing what it can to make sense of the grief that comes upon the prophet and his land, but because the grief is so fresh and immediate, it’s hard to make heads or tails of it.

But Jeremiah speaks powerful words, words that have been handed down through the centuries, and that is why we have the passage that we read this morning. It’s Jeremiah’s call story. Jeremiah has heard a word from the Lord and it is a both a word of comfort and word of challenge for him. God had a plan specifically for Jeremiah before he was born, before he was formed in his mother’s womb. God had provided for Jeremiah.

And God’s providence can be a great comfort to us, can’t it? One of the many profound moments for me at Doug’s service on Thursday was when Pastor David closed out his remembrance of Doug by saying that Doug believed in and relied on the providence of God. It is powerful when someone witnesses to their trust of God with their life, and it is powerful when you see that God does, indeed, provide. I struggle with God’s providence. I struggle with verses like these from Jeremiah. And yet, what a profound thing to believe that God has provided enough for all of us, and to trust in that, and rest secure in it.

Whatever comfort Jeremiah gets from God’s providence, however, is short-lived, because God challenges him right away. God tells Jeremiah that God is appointing him to be a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah, like most prophets, doesn’t like the sound of this. He doesn’t want to be the person telling the powerful people that they need to change. He starts his ministry by trying to excuse himself from it. “I’m only a boy,” Jeremiah says. “No one will listen to me. I won’t know what to say. I can’t do this. I’m not prepared for this.”

“Do not say I am only a boy,” God immediately replies. “I have put MY words in your mouth and I have appointed you this day to pluck up and pull down nations, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.

God takes Jeremiah, this young man that God has already planned for, and God provides again for him. He gives him world-changing work and assures him that he won’t have to come up with words to make God’s case. God has put God’s words in Jeremiah’s mouth.

Now, I am not one to believe that you need anything special from God in order to preach. I think God gives gifts, sure, and scripture attests to that, but God speaks a word to each of us. While I often want us to resist the temptation of putting ourselves in the shoes of the prophets, I do think that something of Jeremiah’s experience is mirrored in our own. God has given each of us a word to speak with our lives. God has put God’s words into each of our mouths. It’s just whether we choose to speak it or not.

We can choose to speak it in our daily lives. We don’t have to be prophets or preachers to speak it. We don’t have to use words all the time either. When we are most fully ourselves, when we’re being the person that God created us with the potential to be, God’s word for our lives speaks whether we open our mouths or not. Maybe God shaped you to share a word of compassion. Maybe God shaped you to speak a word of challenge to those that need to be challenged. Maybe God shaped you to witness to God’s faithfulness, or beauty, or power, or mystery, or love. Jeremiah, as we find in this passage, was shaped to carry God’s specific message to a specific time and place, a message of both mourning and hope.

It’s also no wonder that Jeremiah was reluctant to receive a word from the Lord, given the description of God that we find in Hebrews. Remember, Hebrews was written to the church in Jerusalem during a time of persecution, a time when it was easier to fall away from the new Christian faith than to remain faithful to it. The church needed to hear that the God of power was on their side, because it didn’t seem like that to them at the time. They weren’t sure at all of the power of a God who was crucified and who had abandoned them to the same fate.

And so, the writer of Hebrews reminds them that God is a consuming fire. Those who come to encounter God encounter something that cannot be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice that makes those who hear it beg for it to stop speaking. God is a fearful mystery, more than we can endure or comprehend, much less flee from.

But those who come to God, Hebrews tells us, are not brought into a covenant of death, but a covenant of life. It is not violence that binds them, as Abel was bound by his brother Cain, but new life that frees them through Jesus. And just as Jeremiah knew that his words would challenge people and shake kingdoms, and so he feared his work, the writer of Hebrews acknowledges our fear at what could be. Kingdoms have been shaken before, we know, and they will be again, but kingdom of God, the reign of God that is to come, cannot be shaken.

We can rest in that providence. 

It’s telling that God choses people to speak for God, to convey God’s words about God’s reign to others. Hebrews makes it very clear that God has all the power she needs to do all that needs doing. And yet in both Hebrews and Jeremiah, God insists that we come along with God, that we bear the word of the Lord to those that need to hear it.

But we are not Jeremiah. God’s word was specific for him in his time. Nor are we the church in Jerusalem and the one writing to comfort and challenge it. We can learn from their situations but we’re not exactly in either of their stories. We learn from them that God has a word for us to speak and that God insists on us speaking. But how do we know what our word from the Lord is?

I think Jesus gives us the beginnings of an answer. We’ll know our word from the Lord because words from the Lord set people free.

This is a story you don’t find in any of the other gospels. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath, when a woman comes in who has been bent over for eighteen years. For eighteen years, she couldn’t stand up straight. And in the middle of the service, Jesus sees her, stops what he’s doing and calls her over, and tells her that she is set free. She’s immediately cured.

Now the leader of the synagogue thinks that he has the true word from the Lord: to honor the sabbath and keep it holy. He tries to reprimand Jesus for what he’s done. But Jesus is having none of this. If in keeping a commandment you are keeping someone bound, then you’re not truly keeping the commandment. If a word from the lord is being used to bind someone, it’s not from the Lord.

Words of the Lord set people free.

Now, I want you to notice that Jesus sets free more people than just the woman. The crowd around him sees what happens and knows that if they are ever in need on the sabbath, they won’t have to suffer until the next day. If they are ever in this woman’s position, they won’t be bound as she was.

He also sets the synagogue leader free too. He too is no longer bound by this limiting interpretation of the law. But he doesn’t respond to his freedom in the same way as everyone else, because he benefited from the way things were.

Sometimes people won’t see the word from the Lord as freedom. Doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

So, friends, I speak to you again the words from Jeremiah: Go where God sends you and speak what God gives you to speak. And I give you the words from Hebrews: you have come to a God who is a blazing fire and darkness, the same God tells you not to refuse a word from the Lord, but to know that you are being given something unshakable. And I give you the words from Luke: You are set free from whatever binds you. Go into the world and spread word that free others, for these are surely words from the Lord. 

Amen.

Provision

A sermon for Sunday, August 18, 2019

Would you pray with me?

Creator God, Gardener of us all, be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Last week, we talked about passages from the books of Hebrews and Isaiah, about how reading different passages in the Bible can cause us to challenge our definitions, and about what we mean when we talk about faith. We talked about how both patience and endurance, and accountability and action, are faithful responses to the world we live in. We did a lot of work understanding the context of the biblical scriptures, and how that changes how we read them.

Today, we’re still in Hebrews and Isaiah, so we won’t need to talk context as much for each of the scriptures. This means that we can talk a little more about our context. See, I follow three basic steps as I learn about what the Bible is telling me:

1.     I learn about the context of the passage.

2.     I figure out who I am in the passage.

3.     I discern how to apply the passage to my context.

It’s a context sandwich. It’s also a lot like a conversation: I figure out who’s talking to me, who they think I am, and what I should do with the information they’re sharing with me. This method is how I actively listen to what God is saying to me through scripture, in the same way that I actively listen to those around me. Because when you engage in conversation with another, it’s not enough to just listen to the words that are being spoken. You have to pay attention to who is saying them and what your relationship is with them before you can decide how to respond.

In many conversations, the work of listening is pretty easy. It’s come with practice. If you’re talking to a friend, a family member, a significant other, or someone you’re close to, you already know who they are and who they think you are. You know whether someone’s just teasing you about your tendency to be fifteen minutes late to everything or whether they’re actually concerned and you need to make a change.

A similar thing happens with the Bible. We feel like we know Jesus and we know that Jesus is talking to us in love when he tells us to remove the plank from our own eye before getting the speck out of our neighbor’s. There are some verses in the Bible that have a pretty clear application for our context.

But if we want to learn, and be pushed, and grow, then we have to reach out beyond familiar conversations and easy listening, in life and in the Bible. We have to listen to the stories of people who are different from us, either by talking to the people we encounter in our day-to-day life or by seeking out books, music, movies, and articles by people who don’t share the same background that we have. We grow by seeking out these interactions.

And we grow by digging into unfamiliar texts in the Bible, or by reading familiar texts with fresh eyes. This is when I apply my context sandwich, my three steps: I learn about the biblical context, I find my place in the passage, and I discern how to apply it to my context.

For me, this makes the Bible come alive. It’s no longer a book written primarily by men who lived a long time ago far away from me. It’s a whole library of stories and sermons and poetry and history and prophecy written by different people in different times, yes, but who still have something to say to me today, even though I’m separated by continents and centuries from them. I can sit down with Hagar or Rahab or Deborah or Tamar or Bathsheba or Phoebe or any of the Mary’s and learn from them, hear my story reflected in theirs and be encouraged or challenged by what they have to say to me. I can struggle alongside Cain or Jacob or Joseph or Jonathan or Nathan or Peter or Paul or Jesus. I can listen in wonder to what Isaiah or those who followed him had to say. I can weep along with Jeremiah. I can pray and praise and mourn and rebel and sing along with any of the psalmists. But I only get to experience these things if I listen to where the biblical writers are coming from, figure out who I’m most like in their stories, and then discern how what they’re saying applies to me today.

So, with all that in mind, let’s turn to Isaiah and see what he has for us this morning.

As we know from last week, Isaiah is a prophet in a nation on the brink of crisis. He’s seen the Assyrians conquer Israel and he’s worried that the Babylonians are coming for Judah. When he speaks a word from the Lord, he’s speaking it to those in power, those who have the capacity to turn things around. And this morning, he speaks a love song.

This is actually a common tactic among prophets, starting off with a story that draws the listeners in with pathos. Nathan does this with David. Amos does this with the entire nation of Israel. And Jesus actually does it, most notably in the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we, like Isaiah’s listeners, are drawn into this story. A man has planted a vineyard and he has done everything he should do: he picks the perfect place with the perfect soil, he clears away the stones that would inhibit growth, he even sets up a watchtower, so no one can come and raid his vineyard. He hews out a wine vat, so that he can press his wine on-site. He’s ready for this vineyard to yield. He’s invested in it.

And then, the bottom drops out. The grapes aren’t useable. They’re wild. The Hebrew here is בְּאֻשִׁים (be-oo-sheem), which can also mean stinking, worthless things. It’s not just that these are grapes that aren’t cultivated (after all, you can eat wild grapes if you find them out hiking, as long as you don’t confuse them for moonseed); it’s that they’re stinking, rotten on the vine.

The man pleads his case before the gathered listeners. “What am I to do?” the man says. “I did everything I could and yet my grapes are worthless.”

We, as the hearers in the court of public opinion, are meant to shake our heads. Must have had some bad seeds, we’re meant to say. You did everything right. Time to tear out that old growth and plant something new.

And the man reacts to that anticipated response. “I’ll tear this whole vineyard down!” the man says. “I’ll make it a waste. I won’t care for it at all. In fact, I’ll command the clouds not to rain on it!”

This is when you’re meant to start squirming in your seat. Who is this person, who says that he can command the rain? Maybe this isn’t the simple story we thought it was.

Isaiah comes out and says it. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”

Oh. Oh no.

The Lord has cared for Israel and Judah and they have not yielded what they were meant to. The Lord looked for מִשְׁפָּט֙ (mispat, justice) but got מִשְׂפָּ֔ח (mispah, oppression); The Lord looked for צְדָקָ֖ה (ts’dah’qah, righteousness) but heard instead צְעָקָֽה׃ (ts’a’quah, a cry for help).

Isaiah, in telling this story, is doing all he can to get his hearers to understand that they have not done what the Lord has asked them to do. He’s told them this heart-wrenching story. He’s even made a catchy saying, playing on words so people will remember them. He’s got a slogan. Mispat, justice, not mispah, oppression. Ts’dah’qah, righteousness, not ts’a’quah, a cry for help. It’s a speech that’s meant to send his listeners away with sorrowful hearts, hearts ready for change.

And now comes the difficult part for us. Who are we in Isaiah’s tale? Are we the planter? No, that’s God. Are we the storyteller? Well, not unless we’re feeling pretty prophetic. No, in this story, we’re meant to be the grapes. God planted us. God provided for us. And yet, we have not grown the fruit God needs. We participate in oppression, not justice. We drive people to need, not to righteousness. We were cultivated and cared for and we still grew up wild.

“No, no,” you might say. “I’ve been a Christian all my life. I can show you good fruit from my ministries. I’m not the one God wants to uproot. Isaiah’s talking to someone else.”

And this could be true. It could very much be that you, in your life, have earned your place among the cloud of witnesses that Hebrews talks about. God has made a different provision for you than what Isaiah is talking about. God has seen your faithful work and God will see to it in the eschaton, in the world to come.

But friends, today, I invite you not to rest in the assurance that you are already among the saints of God (not least of all because the writer of Hebrews tells us that even they do not receive their promise in this world). No, I invite you to sit in the uncomfortable knowledge that you have the potential to be wild grapes.

I know that there are parts of my life where God intended to grow goodness but God’s intentions weren’t cultivated in me. For many years of my life, God planted friendships, but I grew emotional distance instead. God planted patience, but I grew demanding. God planted justice, but I grew anxiety. God planted joy and endurance, but I grew despair.

It is up to you to figure out what God has planted in you that hasn’t grown. As people who live together in a community, a state, a nation, and a world, it is up to all of us to figure out what God planted in us that didn’t grow, and to change our ways accordingly. The story of the vineyard is a story of repentance, but repentance can only come when we’re aware of the problem. Our first reaction to hearing Isaiah’s prophetic words should be introspection. We have to look inside ourselves and see where what we have grown is outside of God’s desires for us. What grows in us that stops either ourselves or another from life and life abundant?

Now, it may also be that I’ve misread who you are in Isaiah’s story. You might not be the grapes planted that did not grow. You might be the people that suffered because the grapes didn’t grow. You might be the workers that didn’t get paid. You might be the wine seller who had nothing to sell. You might be the spouse or the children of those who could not provide for their houses because the grapes grew up wild. That is, of course, part of Isaiah’s story. Isaiah is raging at the leaders because there is suffering in the land, and suffering leads to weakness, and to being conquered, which only leads to more suffering. You might be the off-stage person that Isaiah is sticking up for.

There are many sides to every story.

But if you are, then the passage from Hebrews is especially for you, even if it broadly applies to all of us. Take encouragement that God has been faithful to others in the past, even as they have been faithful to God.

We can all take the message of Hebrews to heart, even as we investigate where we have not grown as God intended. No matter what, we are not alone. God never leaves us alone. Just as the saints who have gone before us, who have endured more than we ever hope to endure, God is with us. Not only that, but we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, including some who have charted the way from wild grapes to flourishing vineyard. It is up to us to listen to them, learn from them, and allow God to change our lives.

Amen.

By Faith

A sermon for Sunday, August 11, 2019

Would you pray with me?

God who is with us before, during, and after the great changes in our lives, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

These first few verses from Hebrews are astounding, aren’t they? “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

“Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.

“By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.”

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And we should have faith, the writer of Hebrews argues, because faith is how our ancestors in faith received approval from God. If we want to live life as God would have us live it, we need to have faith. Faith that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Faith that there is something more to this universe than the things that are seen. And faith like Abraham, who obeyed God’s call and who, because of his faithfulness, received an inheritance. It’s a powerful text, one that is challenging and dense with meaning.

As a student of physics, I love dense and challenging things. I am trained to break complicated things down into understandable pieces. Give me the parameters for a rocket launch and I will break that bad boy down into propulsion, air resistance, gravitational drag, wind speed, and orbital velocity. What I mean is that if you tell me where you want a rocket to go, I’ll look at every single thing affecting the rocket in order to make sure I understand what it will encounter along its journey. Not only that, but give me enough data and I’ll work on a theory that explains how every rocket launches.

So this dense and challenging passage from Hebrews fascinates me, especially since it falls in the same week in the lectionary as the Isaiah passage, one that contrasts it so completely. It brings up three questions for me:

·        What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

·        How can we break that down to find a definition of faith that works for both Hebrews and Isaiah?

·        What does it really look like for us to have faith here today, in the world that we live in, in 2019?

I’d like to tackle these three questions this morning because I think that, if we get through them, we’ll have not only a better idea of what faith means but also what we’re doing when we read the Bible. We’ll explore more about how we read the Bible in next week’s sermon and in the week after that, where we’ll continue to look at some contrasting passages in the lectionary.

So. What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

Well, the first thing to recognize is that Hebrews, even though we call it a letter, is actually a sermon. It’s not like the letters of Paul, where he writes to address specific issues or situations in specific churches, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Philippi or Ephesus. Hebrews is meant to be a single theological argument about what it means to be a Jewish Christian living in Jerusalem, someone who has a deep connection to the Jewish scriptures and also believes that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. The church in Jerusalem was being persecuted, as many of the early churches were, and the sermon is meant to encourage them to maintain their belief in Jesus.

Hebrews 11 and 12 is the climax of the sermon. It’s what we in the business call the Come to Jesus Moment. The author has built up an argument about how Jesus mediates between us and God, as a priest might, and that though Christ is no longer with us, we can still have faith in him and in our continued relationship with God. Faith, after all, is the conviction of things unseen.

And we know that we can have faith because we have seen what faith looks like in the lives of those who have gone before us. The writer of Hebrews leans into the story of Abraham and Sarah, and the other patriarchs and matriarchs, to show them as exemplars of what it means to have faith in things unseen. And it’s hard to find a better example than Abraham, who followed a God he could not see into a country he did not know in hopes of forming a family he didn’t think was possible. In all things, Abraham believed in what he had not seen, but what he hoped for.

Now, the writer of Hebrews is using rhetoric here to make a point. They’re telling part of a well-known story in order to get others to follow along with their point. The writer of Hebrews, writing to a persecuted community on the verge of losing faith, asks them to remember a hero of their faith.

But Abraham, as we all know, wasn’t always a paragon of faith. He trusts that God will give him an heir through his wife, Sarah, all the way until their journey led them to Egypt, where Abraham traded Sarah to pharaoh in exchange for his safety. (Genesis 12) He trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until Sarah reminds him that she is unable to have children and gives him her slave, Hagar, to make heirs with in her stead. (Genesis 16) Abraham trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until God asks him to kill Isaac, his son with Sarah. (Genesis 22) Abraham over and over again through his saga, fails to believe that God is faithful to fulfil promises and instead takes things into his own hands. Sure, in the end, he trusts God and, in the end, the promise is fulfilled, but along the way, Abraham’s faith falters, and Sarah, Hagar, and Isaac are hurt because of it.

Still, Abraham does have his moments and the promise does come through in the end, and so the writer of Hebrews uses him as an example. Abraham hopes in a promise that will be fulfilled, even if that promise has no evidential proof, and that, for the author of Hebrews, is faith.

Hoping in a promise without physical proof is a fine enough definition of faith, but the writer of Hebrews adds another stipulation into our theory of faith: We know our faith is true because it is confirmed with the faith of those who have gone before us.

Now, an easy way to test a theory is to push it toward its edges. We do this in physics by seeing how a model trends as it approaches infinity or zero. If there are problems with your equations or how you've conceptualized, how you've thought about, the problem, they might show up when you push a theory to its limits. And out of our lectionary texts this week, Hebrews and Isaiah are at opposite edges. Hebrews is meant to exhort people who are going through a difficult time into continued faith by making a dense theological argument. Isaiah is... yelling at the people with power because it's clear they're not doing what they're supposed to do.

Isaiah was written during one of the most crucial and chaotic periods in the history of Israel: the Babylonian Exile. The whole book is actually likely by three different authors, with the first writing before the Exile, the second during, and the third after the return from exile.

Now, how many of you have heard of the Babylonian Exile before?

I didn't hear about it until I took a Hebrew Bible class in college, but it's deeply important for understanding the Old Testament. A quick history:

·        King David unites all the disparate tribes in Israel into one kingdom. That lasts through his son Solomon's rule, and then Israel splits into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.

·        All is fine, more or less, until the northern kingdom of Israel is taken over by the Assyrian Empire but the southern kingdom of Judah still stands.

·        However, having just seen Israel conquered, people in Judah are able to see the signs of history repeating itself, only this time with the Babylonian Empire instead of the Assyrians. (This is where our passage comes in today.)

·        Judah ends up conquered by the Babylonians and the elite are taken into exile in Babylon. Most of the Old Testament is written, organized, or rewritten during the Exile.

·        Eventually, the Persian Empire comes in, defeats the Babylonians, and allows the exiles to return to Israel.

(For a full timeline, with links to descriptions of some of these events, click here.)

The Babylonian Exile is a tragedy that affects the whole Old Testament. It'll come up again and again as we seek to understand the biblical authors, which is why we’re talking about it now. But our passage this morning comes from before the Exile, as Isaiah is seeing the signs that tragedy might happen again.

And so, Isaiah speaks a word from the Lord to the people in charge: don't think you're comfortable because you have the faith of those before you to rely on. The living faith that Abraham had is, in the time of Isaiah, reduced to ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem. The most vulnerable amongst them, the orphan and the widow, aren't being cared for. And Isaiah tells those in power that God is weary of what they’re doing. God despises it.

Here's the thing about Isaiah: in Isaiah’s tine, they have the land. They have the inheritance. The promise that Abraham was holding onto faith for, it's completely fulfilled on their time. And Isaiah thinks they're squandering it.

For Isaiah, it's not just enough to "keep the faith" of those who went before. It's not enough to do the right things in the ceremony. (As a pastor who just preached for a month on liturgy and how we do our ceremonies, I feel convicted right now.) You can't just believe right and worship in the temple right: you have to live right.

Our definition from Hebrews needs some refining. Our faith is not only hope in things unseen, confirmed by our having faith like Abraham. We must have that hope and work to make it a reality.

See, Isaiah still has a hope for things unseen. Isaiah is speaking by faith about faith for his time, just as the author of Hebrews is for theirs. In Hebrews, the author tells her or his audience to have faith, that they might see what it's like when God reign is on earth as it is in heaven. Isaiah is hoping for that same kind of future, where God's peace reigns over all creation and all promises are fulfilled. For Isaiah, though, we don't have to wait for those promises to be fulfilled. We don't have to wait for anymore restoration. We can choose to live now as if God's reign were already here.

(To be totally fair to the writer of Hebrews, he or she also believes that our actions matter, but there are other, more immediate concerns for that community.)

So, then, faith is believing in things not seen, specially trusting God to fulfil God's promises. The faith we have is the type of faith evidenced by those who came before us in the faith and lived out in our lives. By faith, we play a part in God’s promises coming to life. 

Where does that leave us, here today?

Well, I think it opens some doors for us to look our lives and the lives of others in a more complicated way. Our theory is more robust, we might say. Because we expanded our definition, it can apply to a wider variety of situations in order to help us understand them. We can see other Christians living out their faith differently than we do and still trust that they have the same faith we do.

Sometimes, faith looks like clinging to promises. Sometimes that's all we can do. When life is overwhelming, when the world has taken more than it gave us, we hope for and trust in God's promises as we endure, as the early church in Jerusalem did.

But sometimes, faith looks like action. By faith, Abraham went. By faith, Abraham followed God to a land of promise, not just for him, but for the people who came after him. And no, he didn't always get it right. He wasn't always as faithful as we would hope that he would be. But he acted. And, if we're listening to Isaiah, action looks like caring for the least and calling for leaders to do the same.

Both are faithful paths. Sometimes God comforts us and sometimes God challenges us. But the paths are faithful to God only when the thing unseen that we are hoping for is the reign of God, where justice, goodness, and wholeness are the order of the day. Centuries apart from one another, Isaiah and Hebrews look toward that same future, when no one can claim domination or supremacy over another, when all are restored to their promised inheritance, and when everyone loves God, their neighbor, and themselves. They respond to their faith in that future however they can, either simply in hope because of their need or in action because of their ability.

There will come a day when, as Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is not here yet, but we have faith in it, hoping for this thing unseen, working for the day that it will be visible to all.

Amen.

Bread and Cup

A sermon for Sunday, August 4, 2019

Would you pray with me?

Living God, we trust that you meet us here and now. Be with us as we come to find you in light, word, water, bread, and cup. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

We have arrived at our final sermon in our series on the five symbols we use in worship. We’ve talked about light, word, and water, and today’s a two-fer: bread and cup. We’ve talked about why we light candles in worship, why we keep Bibles around, why we use water, and today, we’ll talk about why we set a table and eat during church.

Now, I love communion. That’s why I saved bread and cup for last. But it wasn’t always this way. I still remember the look on my college pastor's face when I told him that I thought communion was pointless. "Baptism I get," I told him, "but I don't understand why we waste our time on communion." He was flabbergasted, to say the least. 

Now, I've been raised a Methodist my whole life, baptized and confirmed, but for a long time, communion was mostly an inconvenience for me. It was the Sunday once a quarter where church went over by at least 15 minutes, and when I did my usual move of sneaking out at the beginning of the last hymn to tell my mother in the nursery that it was time to get the kids ready for pickup, I would walk into a chaos. In those extra 15 minutes, the toddlers' pent up energy would bubble over and they would tear up the place. Communion Sunday for me meant dozens of extra toys to pick up and a late lunch. 

Now, when I went to college, communion started to mean something a little different because I started to volunteer as a communion server. I liked being useful for the communion part of the ceremony. I even learned--and this is important-- that if someone drops their bread in the cup, you don't go fishing after it, only to have to hold a grape-juice soaked bread in your hand while the rest of the line cycles by. Nope, you just let that bread float and get them a new piece of Jesus. 

But even after years of helping with communion, I still didn't understand why we had a snack during the service. I mean, I knew that we did it to remember Jesus, because he told us to, but outside of that, I didn't see much point to it. We remember Jesus every Sunday. It's kinda hard to forget him when we've got these big crosses up everywhere. Why waste time and money on grape juice and bakery bread?

Well, I could give you a long, theologically-dense and nuanced answer or I could give you the "mom" version of the answer ("Because Jesus told us to, that's why"), but what I really want to do is give you a few ways to understand the bread, cup, and what happens during communion. I want to talk about the bread of life, the cup of promise, and the presence of Christ. Some of it may sound new to you and some of it may fit right in with how you think about communion, but your job during the sermon this morning is to expand your idea of what communion might mean to you, whether you delight in coming forward to receive or whether you, like me, don’t really know why we do this.

So. Bread and cup are our symbols for this morning, but I think it’s important that we look at them separately, because that’s how Jesus’ first followers would have seen them. Let’s start with the bread.

Jesus’ last supper with the disciples was a Passover meal, the meal that Jewish people use to remember the flight from Egypt, when the angel of death, the bringer of the tenth and final plague, passed over the houses of the Hebrews who were enslaved in Egypt. (We find this story in Exodus 12.)

Now, meals are a much more fundamental part of Jewish ritual than they are for us Christians, I think. Don’t get me wrong, Methodists put on a good potluck and our community dinners here at Whittier are a sight to see, but as Christians, we don’t celebrate shabbat dinners together on Friday nights. We don’t feast together as a Christian community on our feast days.  We know how to gather over food, but we don’t understand why our gathering is sacred.

And so, we miss part of what Jesus means when he offers the bread and the cup after the meal. Because it was always understood that bread, when it’s mentioned in the Bible, means life. Bread is one of the simplest ways we as humans have learned to sustain ourselves. Nearly every culture has some form of bread that it’s developed over time, especially if it’s agrarian, if it’s learned how to farm. It might look different, but it’s there. And bread is a hearty food. It’s simple carbs, energy in a basic form, to give our bodies what we need to sustain work throughout the day.

That’s why the Hebrew people used unleavened bread on the night of the Passover. They already had bread in the making for the next day, because it was what they needed to survive the work they would be put through, but they didn’t have time to let it rise. The cycle of breadmaking was interrupted, the cycle of life was interrupted, on the day of the last plague in Egypt. When Jesus raises bread and breaks it, he is giving us the bread of interrupted life, the bread of life on the verge of freedom. When we eat this bread, we too are partaking in the bread of life interrupted, the bread of new life.

When we receive the bread, we’re receiving new life. We’re receiving what we need to in order to do the work that we’re called to do as Christians. This bread is the body of Christ, broken for us and for our salvation, yes, but it is also life-giving for us, broken so that we can share it. Jesus breaks into our lives, interrupts into our lives, and calls us to live differently. This is what we see over and over again in the gospels. Jesus doesn’t just leave us alone. He’s not a prophet with a word for us to follow but no way to follow it. Jesus gives us the bread of life interrupted, the bread of new life, so that we can be fed for the road ahead of us. And Jesus breaks the bread, that we might share it.

This is Jesus’ body, broken for you and for many. Take it. Eat it. Receive the sustenance, the new life, that you need so that you can give to others.

Bread of life, cup of promise.

The cup, in a way, is a little more straightforward, or, at least, our liturgy makes it feel straightforward. Jesus tells us that the wine in the cup is his blood, the blood of a new covenant, and we’re all pretty familiar with the history of blood and covenants.

Covenants are legally-binding agreements. What we find in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers are a series of terms on which God agrees to interact with Israel. Honor me, God says, above everything else that you want to put your trust in. Your own power, your own smarts, your own wealth, your alliances. None of those matter as much as me, God says. Don’t get caught up with the lies those peddling false idols will sell you. Money, Riches, Fame, Security, none of those idols compare to being in relationship with the living God. (Exodus 20:1-4) Honor those who came before you. (Exodus 20:12) Don’t murder, don’t misuse people for sex, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet. (Exodus 20:13-17) Don’t let your rage overpower you—take only an eye for an eye, not a life, as the other people around you do. (Leviticus 24:19-21)

This is how the people of Israel covenanted to live with the Almighty as their God.

Covenants are sealed with blood. Covenants, when they’re broken, are mended with blood.

And so, the Church over the centuries has understood Jesus’ death on the cross as the beginning of a new covenant, sealed with his blood. The Church understands that Jesus brings us into another way of being with God, another set of promises between us and God.

God promises us life and life abundant.

God promises us freedom and power to resist all that’s wrong in this world.

God promises us community.

God promises to bring together people from all over this world who seek to live as Jesus taught us to live, people who want to love God and love their neighbors as themselves, people who have an unlimited idea of who their neighbor is and seek to be a neighbor to everyone who crosses their path.

In receiving the cup, we receive these promises from God. Not only that, but we renew our promise to live as Jesus taught us to live. That’s part of why we confess our sins before we come forward to receive, so that we can come with a clean slate to take part in God’s promise.

This is Jesus’ blood, the blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of the things we have done that have broken our covenant. Receive it. Receive God’s new promises to you and in return, give your promises to God.

Bread of life, cup of promise, presence of Jesus.

Now, this part does get theological. Not apologizing, just giving you a heads up. We Methodists, despite having gotten used to doing communion once a quarter, actually have a lovely theology about communion. We don’t get into the weeds of the debate over whether the bread and cup become the actual body and blood of Christ, as the Catholics believe, or whether Christ is above and below and in front of behind and to the left and right and in the bread and cup, as Lutherans do. We don’t do transubstantiation or consubstantiation. We believe in real presence. (Read more by clicking here.)

Real presence means that when we have communion, Jesus shows up.  

When we receive the bread of life and the cup of promise, Jesus is here in a way that we don’t experience at any other time. Communion is where we meet Jesus. Jesus meets us in the bread and in the cup.

That is what I was missing when I sassed off to my college pastor ten years ago. I did not know that Jesus was just as present here as he is in the sunlight of a beautiful morning or the story of the woman who reaches out for the hem of his cloak or the water of the mountain’s bending rivers. I did not know that just as we can be reminded of God in a visceral way through light, word, and water, Jesus meets us here, in bread and cup, in the promise and sustenance of new life.

This too is why we repent before we come to the table. Who wants to meet Jesus when they’re holding a grudge against their sibling in Christ? Who wants to meet Jesus with regrets on their hearts? Who wants to come meet Jesus while still dragging the guilt of their mistakes and the harm they’ve caused others behind them? This is what Paul is arguing against when he talks to the Corinthians. Don’t gather together as if one sibling in Christ doesn’t matter to you. Instead, join together and let there be no excuse for bad blood between you, for in this meal, you meet Christ.

More than that, this is when we get to interact with the other members of the Body of Christ, not just those who are here with us this morning but also those who are far from us and those who have gone on before. Those saints who led you to faith join you each time you come to the table. More than that, those who will one day think of you as saints meet you here as well. The Body of Christ gathers at the table, before being broken once again to be sent back out into the world, blessed by covenant of God’s grace.

And I believe that this is true. I believe that when I receive communion, I am not only connected to my savior, but I’m connected to the twelve who followed him, to the women who supported him and told about him, to Paul and the early generations who spread the gospel, to the saints throughout the centuries, even to the present day. I’m connected to my first-grade Sunday School teacher, who died last week, and to the kids that I picked up after in the nursery. I’m connected to my grandmother and grandfather who did all they could to raise three powerful women who had families of their own and I’m connected to families that I haven’t even met yet. I’m connected to my college pastor who opened my eyes to new ways of understanding the faith and I’m connected to those who I hope to speak a new word to in the days to come. I’m connected to you all this morning and to every new soul who will walk into this church and experience Christ through the love and care that y’all give. In receiving the bread and the cup, I am connected to the Body of Christ in a real and powerful way. And so are you.

The body of Christ, the bread of life interrupted, the bread of new life.

The blood of Christ, the cup of new promises.  

The presence of Jesus and all who are gathered with him.

I want you to remember these things when you come forward in a few minutes. Because what happens at the table is not some esoteric theological debate. It is the gift of life that gives you the strength you need to live as Christ calls you to live. It is the promise God will be with you and that you will seek to be with God. It is the presence of the living God and all who Christ has touched.

It is new life and all you need to live it.

Amen.

Water

A sermon for Sunday, July 28, 2019

Would you pray with me?

God, giver of life, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

We are entering the home stretch on our sermon series about the symbols we use in worship. If you remember, we’ve talked about light and word and now we’re on to water, before we tackle bread and cup next week.

When you think of water in worship, you immediately think of baptism, right? A friend of mine, who works at an Episcopal Church, sent me this picture this week, with the comment, “At least we know the bug is in heaven now.”

Photo by Grace Kreher

If you look, you can see it had gotten into the baptismal font and died, making it a holy bug, if a dead one.

Now, that’s not what we, as United Methodists, actually believe about baptism. It’s not your ticket to heaven. There’s nothing magical about the water we use or the place we keep the water. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but not magic.

We believe the sacraments, baptism and communion, are outward signs of an inward grace. Augustine said that first, in the early centuries of the church, and it’s stuck around since. What we do in baptism and communion, how we use our symbols of water, bread, and cup, don’t fundamentally change the water, bread, or cup, but it does remind us of a change that God has brought about in us.

And in light of that, water is the perfect symbol to remind us of the new life God is shaping and forming in us. When we think of water, we tend to think of the water that is outside of us: rivers, lakes, creeks, streams, oceans, the rain. We sometimes forget that we’re made of water too. Just as there is water out in the world, shaping and forming landscapes, enabling life, there is also water inside of us, essential to our lives. And just as water works outside and inside of us, so does God.

Water is essential for life as we know it. When we look for planets in other solar systems that might be capable of sustaining life, potentially habitable planets, we look for Earth-sized rocky planets in what we call the Goldilocks Zone—the range around a parent star where it’s not too hot and not too cold for liquid water. Venus and Mars are actually on the edge of the Goldilocks Zone in our solar system and that’s why evidence of water on Mars makes the news: where there’s water, there’s the potential for life. We think Mars may have had liquid water oceans until its atmosphere thinned and the water evaporated. There’s a chance that Mars was a watery planet for millions of years. It’s enough to get our imaginations going because we know that where there’s water, there’s a chance of life.

That’s something that the Biblical writers knew as well. We find the idea that water means life throughout the Old Testament and into the New, but it first makes its appearance in Genesis 1. “In the beginning when God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” “The Spirit moved upon the face of the waters,” the King James says. The Hebrew word is actually closest to hovering or brooding, like a hen over her eggs. The Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters, where life is about to spark from.

Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? God hasn’t made anything yet. No light, no land, no life, but there are waters?

To find the answer to that, you actually have to look at the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish. In it, the storm god Marduk defeats the water goddess of chaos, Tiamat, and uses her body to make the world.

The Hebrew word for deep, תְה֑וֹם (te-hom, or in the plural, תְּהֹמֹ֖ת (te-ho-mat)), is close enough to Tiamat that some scholars think the writer of Genesis 1 was making a point. See, Marduk, the Babylonian god, has to fight Tiamat and kill her. It’s a violent struggle for dominance. But here, in Genesis, all our God has to do is hover and speak and the chaotic waters obey. Our God doesn’t have to use violence to make the world. All our God needs is breath and the Word.

And then, creation begins.

It’s a beautiful story, even if it doesn’t pan out with how we understand the world. The Hebrew worldview is that water is primordial, before everything, but we know that the Sun and the Earth existed long before water cooled on the surface of the Earth. There’s also the business of the domes on the second day. The writer of Genesis tells us that there’s a dome above us, keeping waters above us at bay, and a dome below us, keeping waters below us down. When it rains, holes have opened up in the upper dome and when we draw up water from a well, that’s a hole in the bottom dome. The earth is held up by pillars. It’s a different picture than we’re used to, right?

Like I said a couple weeks ago, Genesis isn’t a science textbook, nor was it meant to be. Genesis 1 is actually a poem, with verses, stanzas, and a parallel structure to make it easier to memorize. It’s a story about what we understand God to do in the world. God speaks light into existence on the first day, then separates the waters into sky and sea on the second, then brings vegetation on the third. On the fourth, we’re back to light again, where God makes the Sun and the Moon, then on the fifth, the birds of the sky and the creatures of the sea, and on the sixth, we’re back to the land, where creatures begin to live on the land.

So what should we notice from this?

Well, what jumps out at me first is that the picture of God is not some warrior entrenched in a battle from time immemorial with evil. God is above that. And God has an order for creation. God sets the scene and then brings life into it. And third, God has the land and the waters and the sky participate in creation. We see in verses 20 and 21: “And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind.”

Where there is water, there is life.

And, lest we get too proud of our scientific knowledge, let’s remember that we know more about what’s in outer space than we do about the depths of our own oceans. I think Genesis 1 holds a truth for us. There is deep in our world, places where everything seems dark and chaotic, where creatures like the anglerfish are the norm. That is what te-hom is. That is what God hovers over at the beginning. But then, God brings light and life. God takes that which was formless and dangerous and lifeless and brings a world out of it, a world that continues to change and grow and evolve. And that world is entirely dependent on water, the substance that God transformed from chaos into life.

Of course, the Old Testament’s discussion of water doesn’t begin and end with Genesis 1. Rivers flow out of Eden in Genesis 2, the rivers that make the Fertile Crescent such a vibrant place for humans to thrive. There’s the cleansing waters of the flood, where the earth was given a new start. And every patriarch left and right is seen building a well. That’s even true for Hagar, the woman that Sarai had enslaved who bore Abraham’s child, Ishmael. Hagar is the only woman in the Old Testament to receive a theophany, an experience of God appearing to her, and it happens by a spring in the desert, which is later enshrined as a well.

Where there is water, there is life.

It makes sense, then, that we find Jesus sitting by a well in our lesson from John today. It’s actually a well that was dug by Jacob, one of the patriarchs I mentioned before. But here, we see the distinction between physical water that gives physical life and living water that gives eternal life. See, this woman comes to the well in the middle of the day, when it’s hottest. We don’t always pick up on that, because we have indoor plumbing and we don’t have to go draw the water we need to survive, but it was a task that had to be done every day and as such, you would typically do it in the morning. The fact that this woman comes in the middle of the day means that she’s avoiding other people. There’s something shameful about her existence.

And then Jesus names it for us. She’s had five husbands and the man she’s with right now isn’t her husband. I think we’ve been trained to think of her as a woman who can’t keep a husband, but think again about the times in which she lived. Men didn’t always make it to twenty, much less thirty or forty. Maybe she’s not a woman who struggles with faithfulness. Maybe she’s a widow five times over. And maybe the man who has taken her in wouldn’t marry her. After all that loss, she’s stuck living on whatever others will give her. Maybe this man won’t even give her the dignity of marriage, and the shame of that is what brings her to the well at the hottest part of the day.

And yet, this is the person who Jesus offers living water, new abundant life, to, the person who he reveals his messiahship to, a woman in desperate need of new life, of someone to see her as God had seen Hagar by a well all those years ago. Jesus sees this woman and knows who she is and offers her a new life as the one who would tell her entire village about Jesus. Jesus takes her from a tired woman, asking how it is that Jesus can change anything, to the first person to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah.

When we use water in worship, we use it with this double-meaning, as the water that gives our bodies life and the water that brings new life to our souls. Yes, it is a life-giving part of the creation we’ve been entrusted with but it also symbolizes for us our new life in Christ. Water cleans us and water revives us.

Now, I said before, there’s nothing magical about this water. It’s an outward sign of an inward grace. As United Methodists, we believe in a thing called prevenient grace, the grace which goes before us, the grace that works in our life to turn us toward God even before we know it. I think prevenient grace reaches us often through nature, through God’s general revelation to us. The joy and wonder we feel at creation can aim us back toward God. And since we believe that God is at work in our lives even before we know it, we baptize infants, trusting that God will work a new life in them throughout their lives. Baptism for us is a sign that God’s promise of new life is true and is working in us.

If we were baptized as babies, though, we have to claim that promise for ourselves as we grow up. That’s what confirmation is for, which I understand y’all just had a class go through. It’s claiming the promise of new life through Christ and understanding what that means. John the Baptist’s baptism was to clean people of their sins so that they would be prepared for the coming of the Lord, but the baptism that we Christians do is a sign not only that we are free from the things that keep us from God but also that God is working a new creation, new life in us.

In a minute, we’re going to turn to the renewal of baptism service. Martin Luther, when he found himself in the midst of a struggle, would say to himself, “Martin, remember that you are baptized!” and found that this assurance helped quell any of the damaging thoughts he was experiencing. Today, we’re going to remember our baptisms and the promises that were made for us, or that we made for ourselves, that we might remember the grace that God has given us to go through this world.

And it is astounding what God has given to us, considering that we’re made of water and dirt. We humans are mudpies that can walk and talk. But despite our limitations, despite our contingency, we are capable of marvelous things through the new life Christ draws for us. Baptism has always been a part of that new life for us Christians. I know that it’s been a large part of my life as a Christian, and my call to ministry.

If you weren’t baptized United Methodist or if you haven’t been baptized at all, I invite you follow along with the renewal service and speak what feels true to you, to see if these promises are ones that you want to keep as well. I think our baptismal promises take very seriously the harm we’re capable of and the freedom and power God gives us in the face of that harm. In baptism, God’s grace works within us and the waters of creation begin their work again, bringing newness in our lives in places that we thought were dark and lifeless. And that is a good and joyful thing. Amen? Amen.

Introduction to the Baptismal Renewal Service

We did a baptismal renewal service at Wesley, the seminary I went to, at the end of our orientation. We said words similar to what we’re about to say and at the end, there was the expectation that we would all go up and dip our fingers in the font and remember our baptism.

And I did. not. want. to go.

For me, in that moment, going up to the font meant admitting to all that God had been doing in my life since the pastor splashed me with entirely too much water when I was three, being baptized with both of my brothers. God had been shaping and forming me and quietly but insistently calling me toward ministry and I was teetering on the edge of not wanting any part of that. The church can be a challenging place to be, and though we love our siblings in Christ, we can also be agitated or angered or hurt by them, sometimes without any chance at reconciliation. Listening to God’s call to serve the church through ministry can be hard when the church is shouting so loudly about so many things that have nothing to do with our call to live gospel-guided lives.

I stood in the back at that baptismal renewal at Wesley, wondering if anyone would notice if I didn’t go up. Eventually, though, I got in line, shuffling my feet the entire time. As I approached the font, I felt all of my unsureness go away. I felt, for the first time in a long time, that God’s grace was actually working in my life and that this was a step toward the new life that God longed for for me. I didn’t dip my hands in the bowl; I splashed in it, spilling the water from the bowl onto the concrete of the courtyard. I went to receive a blessing from the faculty with my hands soaking and my heart full.

So I invite you, even if you’re unsure, even if you don’t think that even God can bring you joy to your life in this world, to come up to the font. You never know what God will do in your heart in the line on the way up. Where there is water, there is life, and I invite you to come a seek that life abundant for yourself this morning.