Gifts of the Spirit

A sermon for Pentecost 2020

Today is the day of Pentecost, the day we remember the giving of the Holy Spirit to the disciples. Sometimes we call it the Church’s birthday, and I think it’s beautiful that we do that. We mark our birth not on Good Friday, when God died and the whole world changed  and not on Easter Sunday, when God showed us that even death could not keep God away from us, but from Pentecost, when the wind rushed in and tongues of fire rested on the disciples. We are Spirit-filled people. That is who we are.

And it’s amazing to me the variety of things the Spirit can do with us. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that through the Spirit, we can share wisdom and knowledge and we can discern. I know those sound like overly intellectual gifts, but I can testify that the Spirit has been present as I’ve talked to each of you and you’ve shared your wisdom about this community and about faith. The Spirit has been present as you’ve shared your knowledge with me, from what to plant in our garden and when to plant it to the best way to cook Brussel sprouts and so many other things beside. I’ve seen the Spirit work within all of us as we’ve discerned the best way to get through this pandemic as a church community. Formal education can help, but we’ve seen over and over again that the Spirit is always ready to help us know the things we need to know.

But Paul also names those other gifts of the Spirit, the ones that we’re a little less comfortable with these days: prophesy, speaking in tongues, and interpreting tongues. We hear Moses speaking about prophesy in our first reading today and we all know the story of Pentecost, how the disciples were able to speak to others in their own languages. While there are many understandings of prophecy and speaking in tongues out there, and I want to leave the door open for all the ways the Spirit can genuinely work within us Spirit-filled people, I want to offer you my thoughts about both of those gifts of the Spirit this morning.

So first, prophecy. I want to center this understanding of prophecy in the tradition of the biblical prophets, prophets like Nathan and Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Amos. For them, prophecy is not so much about predicting the exact day and time that events will happen or making general predictions about the future, as we might first think when we hear the word, “prophet” or “prophesy.” That’s the understanding that the soldiers have when they blindfolded Jesus and told him to prophesy about who hit him. That’s not the understanding I want to draw on today.

For these biblical prophets, it’s much more about seeing the world around them as it truly is, hearing from God how the world should be, and proclaiming that difference to anyone who could listen, sometimes with words and sometimes with actions. Jeremiah buys a field in the middle of a war against Babylon to put his money where his mouth is: the Lord has told him that, against all odds, the land of Israel will be restored and Jeremiah is preparing for that restoration. Isaiah prophesies that a young woman will conceive to remind the king that life will go on regardless of the king’s choice, but the king’s choice will impact the quality of life that goes on. Nathan comes to David with a story of a lamb stolen from a poor man by a rich man to convict David of his crime. Jesus overturns the money changer’s tables in the Temple, naming the corruption that made coming to God a burden for the poor.

Prophecy, then, isn’t so much about predicting what might happen in an individual life, but seeing the writing on the wall for all of our lives and witnessing to the change that needs to happen. Spirit-filled people with the gift of prophecy have a gift of seeing and saying, a gift of perceiving and proclaiming, even when that knowledge makes others uncomfortable. We have prophets today who proclaim, “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace” because these are Spirit-filled words. All lives matter to God, but after having seen over and over again the instances where Black lives are treated as inconsequential, the Spirit moves prophets to proclaim to us the truth God wants us to see. Prophets remind us, in the face of actions that speak to the contrary, black lives matter too. And our prophets today remind us, as prophets throughout scripture have, that peace is not simply the absence of violence, it’s the presence of justice. It is, after all, the Biblical prophet Amos who declares, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Until that happens, any peace we have will be temporary at best.

I hope and pray each of you is able to hear me with an open heart as I say these things. I know that they might not be easy to hear. I know it sounds like coded, partisan political talk, but I don’t believe that to be true. I will never tell you that you need to register for one political party or another. I won’t tell you who to vote for. I want to leave plenty of space for healthy discussion about policies because there can be healthy disagreement about how to solve problems. You are wise, knowing, discerning people and there is always space for discussion among wise, knowing, discerning people, especially when we ask for the Spirit’s blessing in our conversations. I say these things because I believe they are rooted in the Biblical witness and because I genuinely believe the Spirit is at work in our world and has been at work in our world. I say these things because I believe that on this particular Pentecost, in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and I do think we have to call them murders, the Spirit is calling us to awaken to the work of the Spirit.

But, as Paul says, and no matter how much Moses might wish it, not all of us are given the gift of prophecy. The Spirit rests on us according to our ability, which is why I think the Pentecost story is so important for us this morning. When the Holy Spirit rests tongues of fire on the disciples, they’re able to talk to others in their own language, even though they’ve never studied it or learned it. Thousands of people are able to hear the gospel in their own language. With that language barrier gone, we see the truth of the gospel sticking. People are able to hear one another and be heard, to understand and be understood. It is the miraculous work of the Spirit that enables this to happen.

And if you’ve ever tried to communicate with someone across a language barrier, you know how important language is. If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know just how much is overcome by learning the language. As you learn the language, you learn culture and you learn mindsets, all sorts of things that are shaped by language. We see this all the time as we read the Bible. There’s a joke in the Hebrew that just doesn’t come through in translation. There’s an idiom in Greek or Aramaic that we miss when we look at the plain words. Speaking the same language as someone else lets you understand them more deeply, more fully, than you would otherwise.

I think that this Pentecost, the Spirit has gifted us all with tongues. I don’t mean literally speaking in other languages or speaking in the language of the angels, but being able to speak with one another and to speak with others and to be understood.

In the midst of this week, Black people in the United States have been sharing their stories. They’ve been sharing them online and directing people to books. The floodgates have opened and those of us who are not Black have been given the gift of beginning, in the small ways that we can, to understand what it’s like to be Black in the United States. The Spirit has opened up this metaphorical language to us. All we have to do is listen. Listen and learn and trust that we are being guided by the Spirit in this time.

And I know that this, too, is a difficult thing. I love my country. I love its natural beauty and I love so many of the ideals that we hold tight to. I believe so deeply in freedom that it’s become central to how I talk about salvation. I believe that Jesus came to set us free, to unbind us from all that holds us back from abundant life. I also believe that one of the things Jesus can set us free from is white supremacy in all its forms, because we ourselves cannot have abundant life until all have abundant life. This is the gospel message that we are convicted with when we listen to the stories of Black and brown people living in this country. The freedom those of us who are white experience is so very often not experienced by others. This is a difficult thing to hear. This is hard to grasp. This is difficult to admit. And yet, this Pentecost, in the midst of all these stories from our Black siblings, the Spirit is waiting, giving us the strength to wrestle with this difficult thing.

My friends, I invite you this week to remember that we are Spirit-filled people. God will neither forsake or abandon us, even as we confront difficult things. God will be right beside us as we weep with those who weep and as we feel our hearts dragged into despair alongside those who have endured so much loss and lived with so much trauma. God will guide us to the voices that we need to hear, the Spirit giving us the gift of tongues that we might understand. And while I’m hesitant to claim a gift of the Spirit for myself, I trust that the Spirit has made me an interpreter of tongues. If you are struggling with the events of this week, or with this sermon, or with why all of this matters, let me know. We’ll set up a time to talk. These are important things to talk about.

And we’ll start each conversation by praying for the Spirit to be among us. May the Spirit of Pentecost be with us all, now and always. Amen.

Scream

I want to open up my mouth and never stop screaming. I want my life to be turned into a never-ending wail, a siren marking and mourning all the deadly pain that this world bears. I want to screech, I want to shout, I want a sound as clear as a bell tone to come out of me, shot through with the horror of this place, this country. I want to scream.

I want to scream through every second of the video of George Floyd’s murder. I want to scream as I hold the bleeding head of a black girl injured at the protest after. I want to scream over Amy’s 911 call. I want to scream for Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. I want to scream for them all, every name that is now a hashtag, every family with an empty place, every person traumatized again and again by the news, every mother teaching her children how to behave around cops, every father praying to come home each day. I’ll scream until the atmosphere runs out of oxygen.

I want to scream for every person who is still incarcerated during this pandemic, trapped as the virus ravages those inside the prison walls. I want to scream for every person whose symptoms are ignored, have always been ignored. I want to scream for those who couldn’t get tested, those who couldn’t get a hospital bed, those who can’t trust the hospitals and died at home instead. I want to stand and scream outside nursing homes and meat processing plants and by fields and in Amazon warehouses, all the places where humans are disposable. I want to pace in overflowing morgues and around mass graves, a living banshee conjured by these days we’re living in.

I want to scream at the gravesides of every missing and murdered Indigenous woman and girl.

I want to scream through each and every one of my days. I want to scream for the chaplains on the COVID ward. I want to scream for my Asian American friends who have walked home shaking from slurs that have been hurled at them. I want to scream for my partner, harassed while wearing a face covering. I want to scream for the woman trying and failing to cover up her bruises with makeup. I want to scream for the hungry who come back, asking why there’s no meat in our food pantry boxes. I want to scream for the people who have overdosed during the pandemic. I want to scream for the desperately lonely. I want to scream for myself.

I want to scream with all that I have. I want to reach down into this soil and scream along with the blood soaked into it. I want to be dropped through the centuries, screaming for each act of violence, screaming as if, somehow, the sound would awaken humanity within the oppressors and cause them to change their ways. I want to wail in the face of every person possessed by white supremacy, because a white woman’s screams are the only screams they hear.

I want to lose myself in the screaming. My throat is already raw from holding the screaming in. So many dead, so many lives ruined, generation after generation, that the only response is an undying wail and I long to voice it, to give myself over to it. God, let me scream. Let me weep and shriek. Perform a miracle on me, on my vocal cords and my lungs so that I can keep up the deafening despair until the reasons to scream are gone.

Find me in the scream, Holy One.

Enter into this pain and make it whole.

And when I am empty again, because I know you will give me the gift of being empty again, fill my lungs once more and let me breathe. Begin to teach me again tenderness of heart, and grace, and love. Stretch out my muscles and set my bones aright. Restore my voice and my mind. Steady my feet.

Send me out, so that I may teach others how to hear the screams, that we may all one day be whole.

Amen.

Home

A sermon for Sunday, May 10, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who is our home, thank you for gathering us together. Make your presence known among us and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Jesus’ words this morning have me thinking about homes. See, this passage comes from what we call Jesus’ farewell discourse, after they’ve shared the Last Supper together but before they head out to the garden, where Jesus will be arrested. And Jesus kicks off his farewell discourse, his last message to the disciples, by talking about houses; specifically, he talks about his Father’s house. It hit me as I read this passage again this week that Jesus thinks of his Father’s house as his home. And where Jesus is home, everyone is home. There are many dwelling places. There’s room enough for all, a place prepared for us, a place that is ready to welcome us in.

That’s what transforms this passage from talking about houses to homes to me. We all know that a house or trailer or apartment, wherever you live, isn’t necessarily a home. A place to live can be just that: a place to live. It takes something more to make a house a home. It takes preparation. It takes attention. It takes welcome. It takes love. A home is a place where you’re wanted. Anything else is just a house.

But wherever Jesus is, we are wanted. Wherever Jesus is, we are loved.

It’s taken me all this time to hear that in the context of this passage, because the rest of it seems so transactional. You have Phillip, whose longing is in the right place, but who misses the point. Phillip longs to see who he thinks is God: he wants to see God the Father. He doesn’t realize that God is standing right in front of him.

And the way I’ve heard this passage talked about before, Jesus is almost taken out of it. You want to see the Father? Believe in Jesus. All you have to do is believe. All you have to do is say the right words and you’ll see the Father.

But calling someplace home doesn’t make it a home, just by wanting it to be, and you cannot simply say that you believe in Jesus and see God. What does Jesus himself say? “I am the way, the truth, the life.” Jesus. Jesus himself. Embodied, fully God, fully human Jesus. The way to the Father is not through saying the right words or following the right rituals, it’s through Jesus. It’s with Jesus. It’s following Jesus, doing as he does, speaking as he speaks, loving as he loves. If we’re following Jesus, the Spirit is at work in us at this very moment, making us fit for the homes that Jesus tells us are being prepared for us.

What does it take to prepare a home? I know many of us who have been at home during this time can name off plenty that they’ve done to prepare their home: finishing floors, cooking and cleaning, washing windows. On this Mother’s Day, I’m sure some of us can think of how our mothers worked to prepare our homes, as mothers are often expected to do, filling, arranging, and maintaining the inside space that makes up a home. I know others of us can think of women who filled that mothering roll in our lives, pouring in love and support and nurturing when our birth mothers couldn’t, letting us into their own homes from time to time so we would know what a home feels like. I’m sure there are others of us who have been that mothering presence to others, building a safe, loving space, helping to make a living place more homey, for people in their lives. Goodness knows some among us have mothered ourselves, using our home-building instincts to create homes within and for ourselves. All of this mothering can be honored this day, mixed in with the sadness of mothering that didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet. As any mother, or any hopeful mother, can tell you, the work of preparing not only a house, but a space called a home, is difficult, complicated, grace-filled work.

And yet, Jesus tells us we will do greater things than he has done. Jesus has gone to prepare homes for us, to be a mother to us in a place where we are wanted and loved, and has given us the Spirit so that we might do even greater things than that. What might those great things look like?

Today, friends, I invite you to think about how you make a home. Look around the space you’re in and dream about the many mansions that God has prepared for us. What does that home look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Who all is there? Imagine the perfect love in that place, the place that Jesus is bringing us to, the place that the Spirit is preparing us for. And then, imagine that home here on this Earth, a place prepared for all the people this planet holds. What might that great thing look like? How can we make that home? How can each of us be mothers for others?

Go forward into this week with these dreams in your heart. Go forward into this week and build greater dreams than these. Go forward in the love of God, the father and mother of us all. Amen.

Sheep

A sermon for May 3rd, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God our shepherd, thank you for gathering us together. Make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Before I dig into the sermon, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been reappointed here at Whittier for another year. It means another year of being in community together, learning all that we can from one another, and doing all the good we can together. It also means for y’all another year of my sermons. They say that preachers only really have one, maybe two, types of sermons, and so, in that spirit, I want to offer you a standard “Historical Context Surprise” sermon. Here goes.

I had always been confused by this passage when I read it, and most of the time I wrote that confusion off as a lack of knowledge about how shepherding works. I guessed that there was a sheep pen that the sheep were herded into at night and then let out again in the morning, like a barn for cows, so it’d make sense that the shepherd would come in through the gate. But then, if the sheep are shut up all night, why wouldn’t the thieves just use the gate? They have hands. And how is the good shepherd any different from the bandits, in the end? I mean, isn’t the shepherd eventually going to kill the sheep too?

But I learned something this week that changed the whole passage for me. Sheep were primarily used for sacrifice in the Temple. Jesus is talking about the Temple sheepfold. Sheep were herded into the sheepfold through the gate and the only way out was death on an altar.

Knowing this changes the whole story for me. It reorients the metaphor. If these are sacrificial sheep, in the current Temple system, they were never going to be led out by their shepherd. They were only ever going to be taken into the Temple by the priests to be slaughtered or stolen by “bandits,” which is a code word in Jesus’ time for insurrectionists or rebels, like Jesus Barabbas, people who wanted to undermine the religious leaders because they were too close to Rome. This system doesn’t work out too well for the sheep. Their lives are either stolen by the Temple in order to maintain the status quo and keep the powerful in charge or they’re stolen by rebels who use their lives as a bargaining tool to get what they want. No one in this system cares about the sheep.

Except for the shepherd, the shepherd who comes in by the gate, like one of the sacrificial sheep. The shepherd doesn’t want to steal their lives. This shepherd, the good shepherd, wants to lead the sheep to life abundant, out to green pastures where they can have all they need. The good shepherd rejects sacrifice. The good shepherd would rather lay down his life than see one more sheep sacrificed. And it’s not only the sheep being sacrificed here. It’s sheep in other folds too.

See, most people understand Jesus’ death on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. But what we see here is that even before his death, Jesus was rejecting sacrifices altogether, as had the prophets before him. Jesus understood that God asks for mercy rather than sacrifice, to loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free, to seek justice and love kindness, to give ourselves as holy and living sacrifices. Jesus doesn’t make the final sacrifice on the cross—we do. We sacrifice the Lord of All Creation on Good Friday and on Easter Sunday, he rises and shows us that sacrifice was never what was needed.

And so the Good Shepherd leads the sheep out, away from the sacrifice, away from the world that asks for everything from them and gives them nothing in return and out into the pastures of abundant life. No more sacrifices. No more death.

Best of all, Jesus tells us that we know this voice. We know the voice that leads us from death to life, the voice that says that everyone matters and that no one is forgotten or left behind or left alone. The shepherd knows his sheep and his sheep know him. We always know Jesus’ voice, the voice that calls us to abundant life.

Friends, we have a long year ahead of us. I don’t say this in despair. It’s a matter of fact. It feels like we’re in the sheepfold and not in the pasture. But we know that we are being led by the Good Shepherd who is calling us to life and life abundant for all. As long as we’re listening to his voice, we can get through anything. Amen.

Let me leave you with this benediction, written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes:

“Come in and rest.
Go out and serve.
Find pasture.

Hear the voice from within.
Hear the voice from beyond.
Answer.

The voice unlike, challenging.
The voice familiar, calming.
Follow.

In green pastures,
in death-shadowed valleys,
want nothing.

Both centered
and engaged,
whole.”

Go out and be whole, friends.

Dealing With Uncertainty

A sermon for April 26th, 2020

Our two passages this morning are both passages about living in uncertain times. 1st Peter is talking to the church “in exile,” in a time of fearfulness and hiding, the early church’s time of persecution and separation from Jesus’ physical presence on Earth. The disciples walking on the Road to Emmaus are in another, shorter period of uncertainty, leaving Jerusalem on the Sunday after Jesus’ death, not sure if the resurrection is really real or not.

These scriptures fit the moment we’re living in, but they also fit liturgically; at least, they do if you’re Jewish. It’s currently Omer, the time between the Jewish festivals of Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot, the festival celebrating receiving the law on Mount Sinai. Our Christian calendar actually follows the same basic time frame between Easter and Pentecost; Pentecost is actually based on Shavuot. But while this Christian season of Easter is supposed to be a time of celebration, in Judaism, Omer is a time of wandering, uncertainty, and mourning. It’s the time of wilderness wandering between being freed from the familiar oppression of Egypt and receiving the new reality of the law on Sinai.

Our life right now feels more like Omer than Easter, and these passages fit right in.

But these passages also give us an idea of what to do in uncertain times and that’s what I want to offer you today. There are four things that stick out to me as I read through these two passages.

(1) Name what you’re feeling.

The story of the road to Emmaus describes the disciples as being sad. It seems like a simple description, something we’d use when talking to our children about their small feelings, but the Greek work actually conveys a deep sorrow of the soul. (Which, to be honest, some of our children are perfectly capable of feeling.) And when the stranger who approaches them on the road asks them what’s going on, they don’t hold back. They’re honest about their feelings and their situation. And that honesty is what opens the door for what Jesus has to tell them.

It’s important for us to be honest about what we’re feeling in this time. Life isn’t normal. We can’t just carry on as if nothing is happening. The sadness, grief, anger, and confusion that we feel, we need to be honest about all of those things. That’s the only way goodness can come in.

At the same time, we need to be aware of circles of grief. We should always be pouring comfort in and frustration out. (Click here for information about circles of comfort and grief.) It’s important to be honest about our feelings, but, at the same time, aware of what those around us are going through.

(2) Keep your eyes open to new ideas.

While the disciples are honest about their feelings, there’s something stopping them from hearing the good news of the resurrection. The women have returned from the tomb and told everyone what they saw, but these disciples didn’t believe them. Even with firsthand, eyewitness testimony, they don’t have room for hope in their hearts. They’re deep in grief. Even Jesus, opening the scriptures to them, isn’t visible to them. They can’t see the hope right in front of their faces.

Now, we live in a world where it’s difficult to trust the hope that we see. We live in a world where it’s hard to find the reliable sources among the unreliable ones. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be closed off. There is still real hope out there, and real information. It takes time to find it, but it is there.

(3) Ground yourself in normal things.

And that brings me to what is maybe the most profound part of the Emmaus passage for me. It’s not in the theological arguments or biblical interpretation that they recognize Jesus—it’s in something so normal, something they’ve probably seen him do a thousand times: the breaking of the bread. We remember it when we remember the Last Supper, of course, but Jesus was likely the one to be giving thanks, and we certainly know that he was the one sharing the food around. In this regular, everyday thing, they recognized Jesus. The normal thing is what cut through their despair and uncertainty.

Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio

Hard as it is to believe, there are still plenty of normal things happening around us. Flowers are blooming, butterflies are flying, bees are buzzing. Children are playing and laughing and fighting with one another. We eat and we drink. We clean. We exist. While much has changed, there’s much that has not. When the world around you feels uncertain and unmanageable, take a moment and look for the normal. Look for the normal, everyday things. These things can be sacred to us now. They can remind us of the hope and love and goodness that anchor us, in good times and bad.

(4) Love one another deeply from the heart.

1st Peter picks up where the Emmaus passage leaves off, I think. Once we’ve named what we’re feeling, kept ourselves open to whatever hope can come our way, and have grounded ourselves in normal things, we’re ready to do what 1st Peter calls us to do, which is to love one another deeply from the heart. Sometimes, I think, Christianity is too hard for us humans to handle, because our faith asks us to be kind in times of crisis and patient in times of panic and loving in times of despair. But if we’re learning from the Emmaus passage, if we’re grounding ourselves as we need to be grounded, God can begin to do good work in and through us, and that good work will look like love.

God will be with us and see us through this uncertain time. We’ve seen God do it over and over again in the past and God is always faithful to keep promises. And the good practices that we form now, in this time of uncertainty, we can carry with us into a time of certainty. Whether the world around us is uncertain or not, if we can name what we’re feeling, keep ourselves open to hope, ground ourselves in the sacred of the everyday, and love one another deeply from the heart, God will be able to do wonderful things in and through us.

Amen.

Buds

The day after I moved, sight unseen, into my house last July, I noticed with delight that there was a rose bush out front. The bed it was planted in was overgrown, sure, and it was choked with vines, but it was still a rose bush, like the one that grew up and around the entrance to the house I grew up in. The rose bush made me feel safe and at home and I determined then and there to do my best to tend it.

And tend it I did. I pulled the weeds from the bed, I disentangled the vine that had been choking it, and I pruned the plant. I checked it almost daily for blooms, even though it wasn’t the season for roses. It was the brightest day of my month when I saw a little red bud, reaching up to the sky from a branch pinned to the wall by the cable cords that run across the length of the house. It was life, undeterred. Life, striving to be. Life, producing beauty in the face of neglect. I felt a little flicker of hope.

Writing in parables and extended metaphors comes naturally to me. Maybe it’s the lifetime in church or maybe I’m too lazy to generate something completely novel when a perfectly good literary structure is sitting right there in front of me, but either way, I’m at home in a parable. I’m not surprised that in the midst of a particularly chaotic time in my life, full of strange newness and despair, I would gravitate toward this rose bush and hitch my star to its wagon.

Seminary was difficult for me. Not the academic content— that was easy enough. But the poking and prodding I had to do into myself, the emotional awareness I felt forced to develop, that was rough for me. I had spent my life building up ever-thicker walls around myself, as those with childhood trauma tend to do, and I didn’t really see the need to tear them down. Generations of pastors before me had had perfectly fine ministries without challenging their toxic masculinity or delving into the depths of their pain. I resented the emotional work that seminary put in front of me. Add into that mix the fallout from the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement, plus facing the bullshit the Purity Movement put me through, and it’s no great wonder that I walked out of seminary with boatloads of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

This, of course, is the perfect mental state to begin pastoral ministry with. Don’t @ me.

And so, in addition to finding a new therapist and going on antidepressants, I clung to the rosebush to help me make sense of my life. My brain screamed words of unworthiness at me every time I approached the pulpit and my knees buckled at least once every service, but I was still alive. I started using a sharpie to slash color onto my wrists when I really wanted to use a knife, but I was still alive. I laid up in bed on days when I said I would have office hours, hoping that, as usual, no one would stop by, but I was still alive. And somehow, ministry got done. Somehow, the job got done. And somehow, through virus and vines, this little neglected bush bloomed.

That is, of course, not the end of the metaphor. Anyone who knows plants can tell you that this bush is doomed and that I should, in all honesty, take it out and plant a new one in the same spot. I might do that. I’m not sure. I rent, so it’s not like it’s my decision alone, but I’m sure the owner wouldn’t mind it if I was paying for it. I inherited this bush and though I’ve tried to tend it, it’s the plants that I’ve put in on my own that have really flourished.

I’m trying to be healthier. I’m working on losing weight and changing my habits. I’m talking myself back from ledges and anchoring myself in the support of others. On good days, I can do something that feels like praying. On bad days, I produce plenty of sighs too deep for words for the Spirit to work with. But growth is a long and complicated process. We each require tending and we are each impacted by the weather and the soil we’re planted in. Flourishing doesn’t happen in a day.

And I know I’m not alone in this struggle. My life is unique, sure, but it shares plenty in common with others who are going through similar things: struggling with mental health, working in ministry, being a female-presenting person in this world, learning to care for my body, and things like that. I know for a fact that there are plenty of other former gifted kids out there who struggle to self-actualize without the approval of others. Hey friends. So I’ve decided to write my way through this struggle, in the hopes that, if nothing else, the solidarity will help us all through it all.

Here’s to growing.

Forgiveness and Belief

A sermon for April 19th, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God, our Holy One, as our spirits huddle together with grief and fear tangled together, let your peace be with us. Keep us from closing off our hearts to the world in pain. Wherever we encounter wounds, still tender from trauma or despair, may we be a healing presence, a community of compassion and solidarity. Amen. (adapted by Jo Schonewolf from enfleshed’s Liturgies that Matter)

On first glance, this passage is talking about belief. Thomas wasn’t able to believe until he sees Jesus’ wounds, but all of us, here today, even though we haven’t seen Jesus, we are blessed with our belief-at-a-distance. We are blessed with an imperishable inheritance because we believe the testimony of the faithful who have gone before us. It seems that belief is what’s important to the writer of the gospel of John.

And there’s a sermon in that, I suppose. Belief that God is with us, even when the world is falling apart, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Belief that in dying and being raised from the dead, Jesus ensures that we will we one day rise from the dead. Belief in the evidential proof of the miracles told in the Bible, as that last verse in John seems to suggest. But I don’t think any of those sermons are necessarily the sermons we need to hear today.

I think we need to understand why Thomas didn’t believe.

Because Thomas, of doubting fame, has not always been a doubter, as the gospel of John tells the story. Remember, years ago it seems, when Jesus was going to go wake up Lazarus, and the rest of the disciples were wary, but Thomas was ready to go? He said, “Let us also go, so that we might die with him.” That doesn’t sound like someone with a skeptical attitude to me. It sounds like someone who is very, very committed to following Jesus wherever he may go.

And yet, it wasn’t Thomas, or any of the twelve (probably) who followed Jesus to the cross and watched him die there. When the going got tough, the disciples got going. They hid for their very lives after Jesus was killed, even “Let us go die with him” Thomas. After all, Rome thought Jesus wanted to be a king. The religious authorities thought he wanted to be a Messiah. And while you might kill a movement by cutting off the head, as the authorities had thought they had, there was still a chance that Peter or one of the other disciples might try to start this rebellion up again.

This is why they hid, and I want to be very clear about this. The gospel of John is fairly antisemitic in its language, because the Church was trying to set itself apart from Judaism. When the gospel says, “They hid for fear of the Jews,” this shouldn’t lead us to think that we should blame Jewish people for Jesus’ death; we should remember how bitter and angry humans can be in a fight, even the gospel writers. In time that the Gospel of John was written, Christians and Jews were at odds. That doesn’t mean that we should accept the hate that resulted as gospel.

So the disciples were huddled in fear, as we ourselves might be on this day, though out of a different fear, on the day the Jesus arrives for the first time. Thomas has gone out into the hostile world, likely risking his life to get needed supplies for their quarantine, when Jesus comes back and says, “Peace be with you,” twice, to these men who ran away when he needed them most.

I know we’ve probably forgotten about Maundy Thursday and Good Friday during these weeks that seem like months, but remember, the disciples abandoned Jesus. They ran away to save their own skin. If I were them, the last person I would want to see, after the authorities who wanted to kill me, would be Jesus. If I were a disciple, I would not know what to say to Jesus after all of this.

And that is maybe the miracle of this moment, more than the giving of the Spirit, more than the loosing or binding of sins. In this moment, Jesus comes to those who have betrayed him, and offers them forgiveness. These men stood by and let Jesus die, and Jesus comes to them saying, “Peace.”

If Jesus had been most other gods, he would have exacted revenge, would have punished them with everlasting fire for abandoning him, after he called them by name, after they followed him for years. But Jesus is not like any other god. Jesus is God. And God, who is love, cannot do anything other offer forgiveness, even in a time like this.

So, of course, Thomas doesn’t believe them when he comes back. This is not the way the world works. The dead don’t rise, especially not the executed dead, and gods don’t offer forgiveness and kindness. The world Thomas knows is full of anger, and vengeance, and power. Comfort and acceptance don’t make sense to him. He has just seen his only hope at freedom nailed to a cross. He isn’t going to believe that freedom still lives until he feels the proof of it.

Imagine the pain Thomas is in. He had thought the world could be different, thought the world could be better, thought that the hate and fear and anger and oppression could all end with Jesus in charge, and he watched that hope die. He’s back into survival mode. No one can make him hope. No one can make him dream. It’s back to meeting basic needs, like food and water and shelter, and we’ll handle the rest later. That’s probably why he went out in the first place. Thomas, the bravest of them all, the readiest to put his life on the line, has gone out in public, meeting essential needs. He can’t believe that all the horror he’s experienced could be undone. He can’t believe that the horror he’s done can be undone. He can’t believe that Jesus could offer him forgiveness, not after all he’s done.

And yet, here is Jesus, saying, “Peace be with you.” Here is Jesus, really Jesus, Jesus in the flesh, showing Thomas his wounds. Here is Jesus, asking Thomas to be honest about his own wounds. Here is Jesus, saying, “Yes, we hurt. We all hurt. But look, I have overcome the hurt of this world. You needed to see this. I know. And because of you, generations after you will be able to overcome their hurt, to be forgiven of the hurt they caused. Your doubt, Thomas, will lead to the faith of many.”

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Friends, in our hurt, we doubt, just as Thomas did. It’s just what we humans do. But no matter how much we fear or doubt, Jesus is always ready to step among us and say, “Peace be with you.” Jesus is always more willing to forgive than we are to seek forgiveness. But this is the great promise of this passage, is that Jesus offer us amazing power. The sins we bind on this earth are bound, but the ones we loose are loosed. We don’t have to hold on to any of the hurt in our lives. We are free to let it go.

This time of quarantine lends itself to fear, I know, but it can also be a great time of introspection. What sin are you holding tight to, that you’re afraid to let loose? Is it one you’ve committed in the past? Is it one that has been committed against you? Is it one that you’re afraid will be committed? Friends, I invite you to spend time this week thinking about the sins that you are binding, and to work to let them go, even if that work will take longer than this week, because you, like Thomas, can be forgiven. You, like Jesus, can forgive. You have been given that strength. Be bold, and use it.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Easter, 2020

You know, there weren’t any lilies at the first Easter. There weren’t loud, joyous hymns, or big celebrations or dinners or large gatherings. There were the eleven disciples, huddled together inside, afraid of going out. All the followers of Jesus stayed in. Only the essential workers, the women, who had to go and take care of Jesus’ body, dared to go out into the world. On the first Easter, everyone was afraid. Everyone was mourning. The good world that they thought Jesus was going to bring was gone. It wasn’t a possibility anymore. And now, even their normal life had been taken from them. They were stuck, and they were frightened. They felt lost and abandoned.

I imagine many of us have felt like the disciples on that first Easter morning over the past few weeks.

But maybe they weren’t all feeling so lost and alone and frightened. Maybe they were past that. I don’t mean that they had gotten over what had happened to them. I mean, maybe they were numb. Maybe they couldn’t feel much of anything at all. That happens when you go through trauma. When events around you are too much, you just shut down. You do what you have to do. And so maybe the women, going to the tomb to do the grim task they had to do, weren’t nervous. Maybe they were just carrying on, because that was all they could do.

I imagine some of us can relate to that too.

Sometimes, when we talk about the disciples, we talk about them as those who mourn without any hope. We think that we know something they don’t know, that we have hope that they can’t have, because we know that Jesus is actually risen. But I don’t know that that’s completely true. They had promises like the one I read from Jeremiah, promises that no matter how bad things got, one day, there would be celebrating again, promises that God loves them with an everlasting love and that God would build them back up. They knew these promises. They knew that they had reason to hope that one day, things would be better. And still, they walked numb on the Jerusalem road to the tomb.

Sometimes, our circumstances eclipse our hope.

And that’s okay. That’s human. That’s normal. If hope is hard to find right now, you’re not alone. If you’re stuck on the Jerusalem Road, you’re not the only one. Many of us are here, standing six feet apart and wearing cloth masks. We’re doing what we have to do, whether or not we want to do it. And we have no idea what lies ahead.

We have no idea how long we’re going to need to stay home, how long this virus is going keep our essential workers working around the clock. We have no idea what the future looks like, which jobs will come back and which jobs are gone forever. We don’t know when our children will be able to go back to school safely. We don’t yet know how much we’re going to lose. We are headed toward the peak of this virus in a few weeks. We’re walking on the road toward the tomb.

And yet.

Even in the midst of all we don’t know, there is one thing we do know.

There will be a resurrection. There will be new life after all this is over. We know that we follow the living God, a God who is active in this world even now, strengthening those who are working to restore and rebuild this world. We follow a God who loves us with an everlasting love, who promises us that there will be celebrating again, who meets us at the tomb and says, “Do not be afraid!” Death has been defeated, if it doesn’t feel like it yet. There will be an end to pain and suffering, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet. We will, one day, be free to live life and life abundant through Jesus Christ our Lord. We will go from Jerusalem to Galilee. We will leave this place of fear and loss and hurt and mourning and return to the place where we first realized that life might be different. And best of all, Jesus meets us there. Jesus will be with us in whatever new life comes after this time.

This is not the Easter we wanted. I know that. But friends, I also know that when we are finally able to gather together again, and we will be able to gather together again, there will be rejoicing. There will be feasting and dancing. What a day that will be!

And for now, we walk the Jerusalem Road, headed toward the tomb, praying that we will find grace in the wilderness, just as Jeremiah promised. We allow ourselves to feel how we feel, whether that’s upset or afraid, angry or overwhelmed, or just sad, and we remind each other that we do have hope, whether we feel it or not. We know that we are never outside of God’s love and we know that God’s love never fails. Even though we haven’t seen the resurrection in our lives yet, we know it’s coming. We know it’s coming because Jesus is already risen. He is risen indeed!

Amen.

Who Will Roll Away the Stone?

A sermon for Easter Vigil, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of each and every one of us, thank you for gathering us with one another. Make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

As I’ve thought about what I might say in this service, what I might proclaim after all these words have been read, one question has stuck in my mind: What if it was good?

What if it was good?

What if this big story of salvation, this never-ending relationship between God and humanity, this tale of separation and return, what if it was a good story? And what if it was true?

Because I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I really believed that the Christian story is good. It’s been a while since I could trust that it’s true. It’s so hard to believe that the Christian story is good and true because it’s been hard to see the evidence of it in the world around us. See, the Christian story, which we’ve heard so many beautiful voices read this evening, tells us that the world was made good. The Christian story tells us that our God is a saving God. The Christian story tells us that God will give us hearts of flesh instead of our hearts of stone, that God will breathe life back into that which was dead, even us. The Christian story tells us that nothing, nothing, nothing, not even death, can separate us from our God who is love.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve felt pretty separated from things lately. I’ve been separated from my family, my friends, my congregation. And if I know I can be separated from these things that I’ve seen, how can I believe that I won’t be separated from God, who I have not seen? What I’ve been faced with instead are death and hardened hearts and a creation in need of saving, a creation that couldn’t possibly be good. How can I believe that the Christian story is true when the world shows me time and again that it’s not?

And listen, we read a lot of bible tonight, but it’s not the entirety of the Bible, not by far. If the Christian story we read tonight can’t be true, because the world has shown us that it’s not true, then maybe the true Christian story isn’t good, either. Maybe God only gives love to some. Maybe we’re not good enough for God, and so God doesn’t care about us. Maybe God isn’t a saving God. Maybe God is a destroying God. Maybe God is a God of half-truths. God isn’t going to drown the world in water again, but maybe God means to drown us in sickness and despair and hopelessness, and start again after all the humans are gone.

Can’t say I blame God, either. When I listen to the news these days, I’m tempted to end us too.

Friends, it is so easy to despair in this time. It is so easy to be hopeless. It’s easy now and it was easy before COVID-19. It is hard to live in this world, where there is so much pain and death and destruction, where truth is hard to see and love is even harder to find. Everywhere you look, you find another reason to disbelieve the Christian story, another reason to doubt that things could ever be good again, if they ever were. New York City has a mass grave on Hart Island for the unclaimed dead who have died from coronavirus. It’s hard to believe the tomb is empty.

But.

But what if it was good?

What if the world was made good? What if the goodness of the earth and everything that lives on it was and is always springing up around us, never vanquished, even in the face of all the evil we’ve seen? What if it was good?

What if the story of God’s relationship with humanity was good? What if God never quit on us, was always seeking us, has always been seeking us, ever since we turned away? What if God loved us so much, God couldn’t stay away, and was born and lived and died as a human, and then rose again so that we could be reunited with God, no matter what else had happened in this world?

What if our hearts can change? What if we could be good?

What if our story, this Christian story, was good?

Well, I imagine that we might react the same way Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome did. Because goodness like that, goodness that is never-ending, never-failing, and life-changing, goodness like that is stunning. Goodness like that is terrifying. Goodness like that is too much to believe, too much to take in. Jesus, their last hope for goodness, was crucified on Friday. There was nothing left for them, nothing but disappointment and doubt. Everything they had longed for was gone. It was not in faithfulness they went to the tomb, but despair.

And now, the stone is rolled away. And now there’s someone inside, not Jesus, and he’s telling them that Jesus is risen. And now he’s telling them to go out and tell other people about this great goodness that has happened, this unbelievable goodness, this goodness that was impossible just seconds before. What responsibility. What possibility. What amazing goodness.

Mark’s gospel, in its original ending, ends with the women running away and telling no one what they had seen, unable to share what had happened, maybe because sharing it makes it real, and it’s so hard to believe that it’s real.

But they must have shared the news eventually. It must have gotten out somehow. Because here we all are. We know the story. And we have gathered together because we are working hard to believe that the story is real. The tomb is empty. Jesus is risen. And it is good.

God is good and God is love and nothing can separate us from God. Not sickness, not grief, not sadness, not despair, not joblessness, not loneliness, not fear, not doubt, not hopelessness, not worry, not panic, not uncertainty, not even death can separate us from our God who is love, our God who died and rose again. No matter what happens in this life, we are not alone. We are not abandoned. We are not lost or hated or ignored. We are loved with an everlasting love, a love that will not let us go. We are held in the arms of Jesus Christ our Savior. Praise God for this amazing goodness that has been given to us!

And this goodness, this great goodness, this is too much for us to keep to ourselves. God knows the world could use some goodness right now, and we can share it with them. We can offer hope that the world will not stay the way that it is, but will become something new. We can work so that the new creation God is bringing about will be more like promised reign of God, where we care for the hungry, the thirsty, those without protection, the stranger, those in prison, and those who are sick, where we seek out the lost and the least and call them family, where we care first for the poor and the oppressed. We can be instruments of the good God of love, who died and was raised and remains with us still.

God, may this good news of your resurrection fill us this night! Amen.

Praise and Petition

A sermon for Palm Sunday, 2020

Would you pray with me?

O Lord, save us. Amen.

What a heartbreaking day Palm Sunday is. What a deeply, deeply sad day this day marks. If Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, is a roller coaster, Palm Sunday is the final click of the coaster on its initial climb out of the gate. The crowds in Jerusalem have no idea they’re standing at the edge of a cliff. They think they’ve made it to the top of the hill. They think they’ve come to their new home. But we all know that they are about to be thrown downward and tossed around for a week.

I just can’t get the crowd on Palm Sunday out of my mind. I’m caught up in their hope, their exuberance. Jesus is here! Jesus is here, now, right in front of us! The ancient promises have been fulfilled in our time. We are going to see a day with no more war, no more violence, no more oppression, no more needless death. No more Rome. No more back-breaking taxes that only make the rich richer. No more being excluded from the Temple if we can’t make the right sacrifices. No more begging, no more wanting, no more struggling. Jesus is here! The world is about to change!

Can you feel it?

Can you feel what that crowd was feeling?

Can you feel the hope so real and so powerful you can taste it, smell it in the air?

It smells like palm branches and sweat, like spices from a market and whiffs of air from coats, like dirt and a donkey and freedom. It sounds like a chant, maybe quiet at first, but growing and growing until it seems like it’s coming from everywhere. They’ve been shouting, praying, Hosanna for so long that it’s become just another way to say, “Hail!” when before, long ago, in different times, it used to mean, “Save us.”

This is what Palm Sunday sounds like. Praise and petition so closely woven together, you can’t even tell the difference between the two. Palm Sunday sounds like a prayer you’re sure, you’re convinced, you know has been answered.

God, they’re so sure! How could they not be? All the signs of salvation are there. Jesus, riding on a colt, fulfilling a prophecy, or so Matthew tells us. But Jesus, coming into town the same way a victorious general would, only he’s not here to shame and intimidate and frighten. He’s the prince of peace and he has come into Jerusalem triumphantly. The whole city is abuzz. Everyone knows that things are about to change. The crowd that greets him, that throws coats and branches in front of him, that chants for him, they follow him to the Temple and he kicks out the money changers and starts preaching new stories, new parables, a new way of living. This tragically hopeful crowd takes in all they can of Jesus, and they’re delighted to see that those in charge have noticed that a change is gonna come and they’re looking a little nervous.

All the signs are there.

The Messiah has arrived.

Now, it’s important to remember, as the rollercoaster of Holy Week continues, that there’s nothing in the text that suggests that it’s the same crowd who welcomes Jesus in on Sunday who will condemn him on Friday. I’ve heard it said that, in sermon after sermon, that that’s the case, that we should all have a little humility, because we’re are all, in the end, the people who love Jesus one day and hate him the next. We all, if we were there, would have condemned him too. Humans are fickle. Our minds can be changed with the slightest breeze. All it takes is someone in power to goad us and the masses will change their minds.

But I don’t think that’s so. I don’t think you can say that, not in the face of the hope-so-strong-you-can-taste-it, hope-so-strong-you-can-smell-it, hope-so-strong-you-can-feel-it, hope that could heal you if you could just reach out to the hem of its robe. The Palm Sunday crowd has been longing for salvation too long and they’ve seen and heard too much truth from Jesus, and hope and truth don’t just leave us. Hope is frail, but it’s hard to kill. Truth is hard to grasp, but these people have felt it in their bones. I say to you that the people who shouted Hosanna on Sunday were not the ones who shouted Crucify on Friday. At least, not all of them. And that’s the tragedy.

See, Jesus comes into town, bringing the hope-so-strong-you-can-smell-it, and teaches and preaches as the town prepares for Passover celebrations. The stir that started with the Palm Sunday parade spreads throughout the town, a bubbling low-boil that will be in danger of spilling over on Good Friday. But here’s the key—even though Jesus is making a stir, he’s not universally known. He’s not recognizable on sight. That’s why Judas has to betray him with a kiss: the soldiers don’t exactly know which one he is. The Hosanna Chorus set Jerusalem on edge, but all of Jerusalem wasn’t in that crowd.

It’s the people who have had their festival disturbed by these Jesus followers, the people whose lives could be overturned, and not in a hopeful way, who have gathered to try to convince Pilate to let Jesus Barabbas go and crucify Jesus the Messiah. Remember, the disciples have scattered. Anyone who could be associated with Jesus has made themselves scarce. It’s the people who have enough freedom already who are shouting crucify. It’s the people who think they’re already safe who are scared enough of the change Jesus brings to want to kill him. It’s not hope that drives them. It’s fear.

And yet, it had to be this way. There had to be a drop from the height of Palm Sunday because the prayer that was answered on Palm Sunday wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t enough that some of the people who had come to Jerusalem for the festival understood the hope that Jesus brings. Jesus doesn’t come in force. Jesus doesn’t set up free by violence. Jesus could have called down angels of vengeance, but that’s not what Love does. Love looks like, sometimes, like being willing to humble yourself in order to save others. Jesus knows the truth: Humanity will not be redeemed until all of humanity is redeemed. We can’t end on Palm Sunday. We have to make it all the way to Easter. Salvation is for those who shout Hosanna and those who shout Crucify. Salvation is for those who can truly only offer praise and those who can truly only offer petitions.

We are going to turn to the rest of Holy Week, telling the story, our story, the story of Jesus’ Passion, for the rest of this service. We’ll focus more strongly on the Last Supper on Thursday, the lament of the crucifixion on Friday, and the deep sadness and longing of the tomb on Saturday, but today, we’ll tell the story. As we tell it, as we go through it, I want you to think for yourself: which crowd are you in today? Are you hopeful, desperate for salvation, and confident that in Jesus it has arrived? Or are you scared, afraid that even the little you have will be taken from you? What is your heart shouting in this season?

Know, though, that no matter where your heart is, it can go through a painful change. Judas betrays Jesus. The Roman centurion swears that he must be the son of God. Can we cling to hope, even in these hard times? Can we find hope, even in the midst of fear? Can we trust God with the change God is working? Because if we can, if we can trust God through this painful time, then it won’t be a Palm Sunday that we wake up to, when all of this is over. It won’t be a celebration for the few who get it. It’ll be an Easter, an Easter that promises a new life for us all.

So let’s turn to one of the last gifts Jesus gives his followers before his crucifixion: the Last Supper. If you haven’t already, now is the time to do as the disciples did and prepare. Grab a grain of some kind and a drink so that we might remember the Lord’s Supper together.

Give Us This Day

A sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God our loving parent, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Make your presence known among us here and now, and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Leave your eyes closed, or close them if you don’t close your eyes when you pray. No judgement if you don’t close your eyes when you pray, but close them now so that you can focus your imagination for a minute. I want you to spend 30 seconds imagining a perfect world. Imagine what it looks like, what it smells like, who all is with you, what everyone is doing, how your heart feels. Take 30 seconds to imagine a perfect world.

Okay. If you’re with somebody else, or if you can call or text someone else, talk about your perfect world with someone else for a minute. If you don’t have anyone around you, write down some notes about your perfect world.

Good. Now, here’s the trick. What would it take for your perfect world to exist? What would have to happen, what would you or others have to do, in order for your perfect world to become a reality, here in this world, right now? Talk to one another or write it out.

Anyone feel like your perfect world is actually possible? Anyone feel like your perfect world is possible now?

I’m not here to tell you that your perfect world is within your grasp if you just change your perspective. I’m not even here to tell you that God wants your perfect world to exist. Christianity isn’t a self-help book and the Lord’s Prayer a deeply Christian prayer. There’s not any space in this prayer for anything less than God’s perfect love brought into existence in this world. The Lord’s Prayer is a world-changing prayer, friends. This prayer is about God’s perfect world, and what has to be done in order for us to live in it.

And the way we know that this prayer is about God’s perfect world is that it begins and ends with God. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven mirrors For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

My partner, Ian, is down here, riding out the governor’s Stay at Home order with me, and thank God for that. When I asked him what he’d preach on if he had a Sunday to preach on the Lord’s Prayer, he said, “God’s sovereignty,” and I frowned. I so, so dislike talk about God’s sovereignty, about how everything’s a part of God’s plan, which is the usual direction that talk about God’s sovereignty goes. A virus that has killed 30,000 people around the world and is still spreading? That’s a part of God’s plan? No. I’d rather leave the pulpit and the Church forever than avow that this new coronavirus was God’s intention for us all. I don’t want to talk about God’s sovereignty. I can’t talk about that. I can’t pray for that.

But what I can talk about is the God who is love, and what I can pray for is that the reign of God’s love is as real here on earth as it is in heaven. So if we’re going to change this world-changing prayer in these times that so desperately need a change, we need to first remember who this God is that we’re praying to. We need to remember who God is in order to pray for God’s perfect world to come to this earth.

So let’s talk about it. You’ve already heard me lay my cards on the table. I believe that God is love and I believe that creation as it was meant to be, creation as it will be again one day, is a gracious outpouring of that love. I believe that we were born in love, by love, and for love, and that at the root of all the love, true love, that we will ever know in this world, is God.

Do you agree with that? Am I making sense to you? Or is your idea of God completely different? Talk it out with someone, or write it out. This is your moment to write a scathing dissent from what I’m saying, or to just puzzle over who God is to you. Take some time and sketch out a big idea of who God is to you.

Now, take another minute and think about this first part of the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Does that line up with who you understand God to be? If you were to identify God, would you say, Our Father? Is God in heaven? What does it mean for God’s name to be hallowed? Talk it out or write out what you’d rather say instead.

And let’s think about where the prayer is going to land. For yours is the kingdom and the glory and the power forever. What does it mean to you for God to be glorious, to have power, forever? What kingdom is God’s? Work through those lines. Rewrite them as you need to.

To me, as I said, God is love. But I also believe that all things come from God and all things will go back to God. I like to talk about God as life-giver, as those who come on Wednesday night know already. God our life-giver, God who is higher than any other, your name is what it means to be holy, is how I’d rewrite this. It puts God on the side of life, it reminds us that God is more than we can ever imagine, and yet, we’ve all had an experience with something holy. God is both above us and directly with us. And that’s the glory of God, to me. God is as close to us as breath and yet God is beyond our mind’s comprehension. And yet, God is not just glory. God is not just something we notice. God is active.

God is active, even now. God has power, even now. God will continue to be God, to be love, and to act accordingly, forever. A virus doesn’t stop that. So God is active in our world. God is there, with those who are tirelessly caring for the sick. God is with each of us as we deal with our new reality. God is with those who need food, and shelter, and love and care and attention and unconditional positive regard during this time, and God is always drawing our attention to where those needs are, and to how we can help. God is with each of us as we mourn the loss what was normal for us. God is with all those who choose life over death, confirming them, and God is working in the hearts of those who choose differently. God is never powerless. God is never anything less than glorious. And God is always working to bring about the reign of God, God’s perfect world.

And if we follow such an active God, a God of never-ending, never-failing love, then we certainly need to be praying prayers that help make us capable of following such a God. Luckily, we have the Lord’s Prayer.

We can pray: Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

If our God is love, then we’re not asking for the imposition of some horror, some dictator who assures us that he knows better than we do and then goes off doing things that benefit him and only him. If our God is love, then praying for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven is praying fervently that love would be in the hearts of all on the earth, praying that each family, each group, each community, each nation would be grounded in and flourishing in love. If God is the life-giver, then praying for God’s will to be done is to pray for life and health and peace for all. We can pray that our wills line up with God’s will.

We can pray: Give us this day our daily bread.

We can pray for God to give us enough. Goodness, what hard prayer that is to pray right now. God, give us what we need to get through this day. Enough masks in the hospitals, enough ventilators. Enough food in our pantries. Enough supplies to keep ourselves safe, enough supplies that everyone can keep themselves safe. Enough money to make it through this time, enough money to get us through whatever comes next. And God, enough for all. God, give all of us, all your children, enough. And God, where our over-abundance stands in the way of another having enough, teach us what it means to have our daily bread, and open up our hearts so that others may have it too.

We can pray: Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Remember that God love. Remember that this part of the prayer shouldn’t be prayed how I so often pray it: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. It’s not a begrudging acknowledgment that we should forgive others, whether we want to or not. That’s not love. That’s guilt. But what would it look like if we were able to pray for forgiveness, a restoration of our relationship with God and with us, and pray at the same time that others might receive that same kind of grace and restoration? God, forgive me for my anger. God help me forgive the one who made me angry. God, bring us all back together.

This is such a crucial part of the prayer, such a crucial part of the work of making God’s perfect world. We all know how much strife that we can create by being more willing to accept forgiveness than to grant it, to think that we haven’t done a thing that requires forgiveness while pointing out the faults and sins of others. God is love and God does not desire for us to continue to separate ourselves from one another. God, forgive us our sins. Help us to forgive.

If we have already gone on this journey so far, we can pray: lead us not into the time of trial, but deliver us from evil.

If we’ve humbled ourselves, if we’ve already acknowledged that we need God’s help to be forgiven and to forgive others, to see what is unloving in ourselves and to have grace for what is unloving in others, then we can pray that God does not put us into a time of testing.

I remember that Jesus’ disciples were teenagers, teenagers frustrated with the world around them, teenagers ready to prove themselves. Put us to the test, Lord! Let us prove ourselves! Feed us to the lions and let us show you how we will wrestle them to the ground!

But that is not what we need to be praying. We do not need to pray for a battleground. Remember, we’re praying for God’s perfect world here, and we can’t walk into it with unearned pride. Instead, Jesus teaches us to pray: God, don’t take us anywhere we’re not ready to be yet. God, save us from those things that will destroy us.

Think back to your perfect world. What isn’t in it? Because what doesn’t belong in our perfect world is something that we have decided is evil.

Take thirty seconds. Think about what evil is to you. Talk it out or write it out.

Friends, this week, I want you to gather up all the thoughts this has stirred up in you, and I want you to rewrite the Lord’s Prayer for yourself. Pray that God’s will be done and pray that God works on you so that your will lines up with God’s. Write yourself a Lord’s Prayer in the time of COVID-19. I’m sending you home with homework.

Because we all know that this world is not a perfect world, and we don’t know how to make it one. But we know the one who can, and we’ve been taught the way we should pray. Make this prayer yours, so that the God who knows how to heal can better do that healing work in this world that needs it.

Amen.

God's Instrument

A sermon for Sunday, March 22, 2020

Would you pray with me?

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

In times of stress, I do my best to be there for other people, but after all the comforting and helping, at the end of the day, I turn to horror stories to unwind. Maybe not the best coping mechanism, but it’s been working for me. And as I’ve been working through Stephen King’s catalog, I found myself thinking about The Shawshank Redemption this week, and one particular storyline in the book. Andy Dufresne, who has been convicted of the murder of two people, including his wife, after he’s found his place in the prison, turns his attention to the prison’s library. He begins writing letters to elected officials to get better funding for the library, one a day for years. After he wears down the officials and gets the first round of funding, he turns around and begins writing two a day so that he can build up the library even more.

It’s a lovely modern parable of doing the good that you can, even in a period of limitations. As we go through this time of social distancing and, in some places, lockdowns, it’s our task to figure out how to do the good we can while still maintaining the distance that we need to. I think our prayer this morning, the prayer of St. Francis, gives us some guidance on the goods that God can work in us so that we are still doing good, no matter our circumstances.

Something that stuck out to me as I was researching for this sermon, though, is that this prayer was likely not one that Francis himself prayed. That’s not really a surprise—our two other prayers that we’ve tackled so far this Lent, a Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition and the Breastplate of St. Patrick, weren’t written by John Wesley or St. Patrick, but are prayers attributed to them or the communities they led. But the reason why this prayer probably wasn’t prayed by Francis is what stuck out to me: this prayer is for an individual. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me bring love.

See, Francis was focused on community. We as Americans are very used to focusing on the individual—we swim daily in the waters of individualism, focused on our individual hopes and dreams. Not so with Francis.

And we likely have something to learn from that stance of Francis’. The spread of COVID-19 has taught us that what individuals do impacts the community, and vice-versa. Reports out of South Korea show that one woman who did not get tested for the coronavirus and went to church spread the sickness to 37 people. What we as individuals do has an impact on our communities, and one way of doing good in this time is reorienting ourselves to be thinking of our communities all the time.

So when we turn to this prayer this morning, I want us to focus on community. If we as individuals are all shaped by this prayer into being those who bring love and hope and joy and forgiveness into the world, how will that shape our community? I believe that if we can be a community full of individuals who are shaped by this prayer, we will be able to persist in doing good in these uncertain times.

So. Let’s turn to the prayer. There are two parts to it, as I’m sure you noticed as I prayed it. There’s this first section, where we pray for God to make us instruments of God’s good works, and the second section of reversals, “It is in comforting that we are comforted,” and so on. The first section reminds me of the Covenant Prayer we focused on two weeks ago, where we prayed to be used by God as God saw fit.

There’s something powerful in asking God to work in you rather than asking God to bless your work, especially in these times where none of us know what the next right thing to do is. Instead of charging ahead and asking God to bless our decisions after the fact, this prayer asks that God be the one to do good through us. If we are grounded in being instruments of God’s peace, not potential peacemakers trying to work out things all on our own, we can trust that the guidance we get from God will produce good.

What might that look like? Turn to someone watching with you or take a moment to write down some thoughts. Have you been able to do any of the things the prayer asks this past week? Have you brought peace or love or hope into any situation? Can you do any of these things in the week ahead?

I want to speak about bringing faith where there is doubt for just a moment before we move on to the second part of the prayer. COVID-19 has us all thinking about what our faith means. I don't think we're doubting God's power by being careful and taking precautions like social distancing. I actually think we're allowing God to use our minds to do the Lord's work, not only for ourselves but for those who are most vulnerable and for healthcare workers. And yet I know, and I’m sure we all know, that there are other Christians who believe that the faithful response to a pandemic is to continue to gather, because God has not given us a spirit of fear. Sowing faith in this time of doubt is a complicated matter. I know for myself what I believe and how it has shaped my actions, but each of us has to wrestle with this question for ourselves. As you pray this prayer this week, allow yourself some time to think about how your response to this pandemic is grounded in your faith, so that God can use you as an instrument of faith during this time.

Now, what I want us to notice in the second part of the prayer is the balance that’s inherent in it. “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand.”

When I first began praying this prayer, I thought that this meant that I should never seek to be consoled and never seek to be understood and never seek to be loved. I thought, as many of us may think, that it was my job as a faithful Christian (and to name it honestly, as a woman) to always be the one who is giving and never the one who is receiving. It created a bit of a compulsion on my part and honestly deprived me of the fullness of some friendships and relationships.

Because the prayer doesn’t assume that relationships aren’t mutual; remember, this prayer is focused in community. The prayer assumes that each person praying it does seek out love and comfort and understanding because we as humans need those things. Instead, the prayer seeks to correct the selfish impulse of always seeking more to be understood than to understand.

If we in selfishness are seeking these things, we won't find them. It's in community with people who practice this way of life that we're able to see the fulfilment of each of these goods: consolation, love, forgiveness, understanding. We all know people who'd rather be loved than to love. We all know people who pour out love with nothing in return. But it's reciprocity that enables the thing to be good. It is in the relationship between people who are able to console and love and do so freely, trusting that whatever they give will come back to them.

It is hard to be in a community like that right now, but it is exactly now that we need to be in community together. What can you commit to this week that will build a community, a community that will reach back to you when you reach out them? Can you commit to phone calls? Emails? Cards? Or will you commit to doing some soul-work so that you can be a giving and receiving part of a community? Spend a minute or two talking that out with those beside you or writing it down for yourself.

I have to admit, in uncertain times, I want to be in charge. Put me in the governor's mansion or in the White House, I don't care, just let me be in the room where decisions happen so that I know that I'm doing all I can, no holds barred. But unless you're an elected official, you're stuck in the same boat as Andy Dufresne. All you can do is be persistent in communicating your needs and what should be done.

And that doesn't seem like anything. For those of us who aren't out there on the front line, the medical care professionals, the essential employees, the cash register clerks, it seems like we're stuck doing not a thing at all. But our prayer this morning is here to remind us that everything we do, as long as we are letting God guide us in doing it, is a powerful act that can bring good into the world. In everything, we can bring peace, love, etc.

Now, I don't mean to make you think that you need to emerge from quarantine a saint. But I do think we have the chance to be, as one of my favorite Avett Brothers songs says, "At least a little better than we've been so far. It's the only way to keep that last bit of sanity."

Amen.

Christ in...

A sermon for Sunday, March 15, 2020

Would you pray with me?

I arise today through

God's strength to pilot me, God's might to uphold me,

God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to see before me,

God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me,

God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me,

God's shield to protect me, God's host to secure me –

against snares of devils,

against temptations and vices,

against inclinations of nature,

against everyone who shall wish me

ill, afar and anear,

alone and in a crowd...

Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit,

Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

Salvation is of the Lord.

Salvation is of the Lord.

Salvation is of the Christ.

May your salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.

Amen.

God’s host to secure me alone and in a crowd.

We can all relate to that today, can’t we. We have learned a suspicion of crowds and the blessedness of being alone as COVID-19, the sickness caused by this new coronavirus, has begun to infect us here in the United States. We’ve watched as schools, universities, the NBA, the ACC, the NCAA, and the MLB, among many others, have cancelled gatherings. God secure us alone until it’s safe to be out in crowds again.

Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe that one of the ways that God has secured us in this world is by giving us the ability to reason and investigate things and that God has graced some people in this world with the vocation of gaining knowledge and wisdom that keeps the rest of us as healthy as possible, and I believe that there is good guidance out there for keeping ourselves and, equally importantly, those around us, healthy. For those of you on the livestream, you’re doing the right thing for yourself and for others around you, and you shouldn’t doubt that. We are all loving ourselves and our neighbors right now by limiting the chance for this virus to spread.

Still, I think we all long for God’s protection and, a couple of weeks from now, we’ll all be longing for a crowd, and the vibrancy of gathering together in community. Sometimes I think that “love your neighbor” is the most difficult thing Jesus could have asked us to do, because love looks so different in different circumstances.

And yet, as we’ve been reminded this week, we can still listen to music and read and sing and laugh and hope for better days, and those things are God-given gifts too. We can step outside, as we’re able. We can call and connect with friends and family. There is a gracious abundance of ways that we can be with one another and with the joyful beauty of creation just waking up from winter, no matter the quarantine. We might be exposing ourselves to allergies, but that’s another story. There hasn’t been a run on Mucinex yet.

I think it’s a gift of God that we’re focusing on St. Patrick’s Breastplate this morning, a few days before his feastday, even though there won’t be many parades this year. All of us, I think, could use the protection of God in the days ahead, both within us and without us.

I first really encountered this prayer when the youth choir from my home church, Crossflame, went on tour in 2018. I heard some of the teenagers who I have known since they were in elementary school sing concert after concert, declaring love to anyone who would listen and drawing the circle of care wider and wider with each song. But the heart of each concert for me was The Deer’s Cry, which is another name for this prayer. A beloved child of God who I had watched grow from an energetic but nosy fifth-grader to a beautiful but still nosy high school junior, was the soloist for this song and she would stand and sing this beautiful melody:

“I arise today, through God’s strength to pilot me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me.”

And the choir would swell around her and sing and make a joyful, glorious noise. I remember sitting in an old, old church in Massachusetts, windows wide open in June, no air conditioning, one poor teenager with her head in my lap as she drank water and recovered from the heat, sitting and listening to these teenagers filling this space with beauty. They would soar together in harmony verse after verse and then fade to the background when the soloist sang,

“Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me.

“I arise today.”

God, I wanted so badly to be the kind of person this song sang about.

I wanted so badly to be the kind of person who lived in such a way that Christ would be in the heart of everyone who thought of me, in the mouth of everyone who spoke of me. I wanted to arise daily, daily, firm in the knowledge that Christ had so fully filled my being that the world would be radiant with the love of Christ that dwelled in me. This poem, this song, this prayer named for me what the fullness of my life would be.

Christ before me.

Christ behind me.

Christ in me.

Christ beneath me.

Christ above me,

Christ on my right.

Christ on my left.

Christ where I lie.

Christ where I sit.

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me.

Christ in every eye that sees me.

Christ in every ear that hears me.

Oh God, I pray that those who encounter me would always see Christ before, behind, above, below, within, and around me.

But that prayer takes a little bit of unpacking, doesn’t it. It’s beautiful and powerful, but what does it actually mean for us to live in such a way that Christ surrounds us and is obvious in us?

Well, I would suggest that we think back to Epiphany to answer that question. For those who haven’t joined us before, we followed the lectionary passages in the gospel of John for Lent during our epiphany season. So let’s think back to Nicodemus, poor Nicodemus, the first one to hear, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him may not perish but have life eternal,” Nicodemus who was fascinated by Jesus but struggled to jump in with both feet.

Let’s think back to the woman at the well, St. Photina to our Eastern Orthodox siblings, who heard Jesus and could not believe what she heard and yet ran to tell the village about this man who knew everything about her and loved her anyway. Her whole town came to Jesus through her, the first person to ever know Jesus as messiah, and Jesus stayed with that town because of her witness.

Let’s think back to the Man Born Blind, who did nothing at all to earn his illness, nor did his parents, who was cared for by Jesus even after those around him rejected him.

Let’s think back to Lazarus, and Mary, and Martha, who all had to deal with deep feelings of abandonment in the face of illness and death, and who still let Jesus do what he was always going to do, and followed his instructions when he told them to remove the graveclothes off of the one who had recently come back to life.

If others are to think of Christ when they see us, we should be the first to remove the proverbial graveclothes from others. Check in with one another and with your neighbors, especially your neighbors who are struggling during this time. (For some of us, this might mean meeting our neighbors for the first time, and that is a good and brave step in and of itself.) Drag off the graveclothes of poverty and of difficult jobs and lack of childcare or transportation as you’re able and offer words of kindness and encouragement that match your actions. Do grocery runs for those who need it. Offer to watch kids. Share your toilet paper. Do all that you can for your neighbors who are struggling. If you’re local and able, volunteer with Grace House so that we won’t have to shut down as coronavirus spreads. We can be the shield of Christ for others in this time of need.

Of course, you can only do many of those things if you are healthy, well, not at increased risk of the virus, and if you haven’t come into contact with the virus. But if that’s not the case, if any of us are not well or if we’re at risk, let’s remind ourselves of what Jesus said about the Man Born Blind. It was neither his parents nor that man who sinned that caused his illness. Remember, remember, and remind yourself that God does not desire death. From humanity’s first breath until the coming of Christ, God has never desired death.

The story of the Man Born Blind has wisdom for those who are healthy and well too. It calls us to, without discrimination or judgement, help those who are affected. It can be as small as ordering Chinese food or as big as volunteering to deliver meals or watch children, as long as we’re healthy and well. The discrimination of Jesus’s day is clear to us now but we’re a bit blind to the discrimination these days. Having Christ all around you means letting Jesus heal you from any prejudices you may have.

But regardless of your health and your ability to help at this moment, let’s remember St. Photina and St. Nicodemus. Both engaged Jesus in deep, important, theological questions, and regardless of their background, both received the truth of Christ. All are loved. All are cared for. It doesn’t matter if you have a portfolio that’s taken a hit with the whims of the stock market or if you’re struggling to keep food on the table and to get medication for your little ones. Jesus speaks the same truth. The chains of this world have been broken and we have good news to share with anyone around us:

God is love and Christ is God and Christ is with us.

Love is with us.

Love goes before us and love surrounds us.

Love protects us and names us.

Love guides us and guards us and sets a path before us.

Love shields us and protects us not from the microscopic but from the macroscopic fear and panic that the world is trying to breathe into us. Love gives us wisdom and knowledge and love will be with us no matter what happens.

Love before you.

Love behind you.

Love in you.

Love beneath you.

Love above you,

Love on your right.

Love on your left.

Love in the mouth of everyone who speaks of you.

Love in the heart of everyone who thinks of you.

Beloved of God, will you arise with me as you are able and pray the Breastplate of St. Patrick?

Covenant

A sermon for Sunday, March 8, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who leads us in ways of wisdom and joy, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Make your presence known to 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.

When I was younger, I knew, I knew, that there was only one real way to pray. It involved you and the Lord and no one else, because the only real prayer was the honest prayer of the publican, not the prayer of the Pharisee, which was loud and could be heard on the street corners. No, the only real prayer was the prayer that was between just you and God, preferably with you on your knees, hands clasped in front of you, head turned up to the ceiling, eyes open or closed based on personal preference or depth of feeling. You had to pray what was on your heart, using words that only you would use. “God, I’m sorry that I laughed at Justin Thomas when he asked me out. I know you love him, I just don’t. God, I want to be an astronaut. Or a journalist. Or an astronaut-journalist. But I’ll go wherever you send me. Just tell me what to be. Also, be with Jessica—her cat’s not doing well. And be with Uncle Doug and Aunt Caroline as they deal with MS. And be with Sarah and help her to be smart around Robs. Amen.”

That’s how you pray.

Sarah and Robs got married, by the way, after they both graduated from college and found jobs. They have two beautiful children who call me Aunt Jo and who are interested in space and I think they’re a delight. God works wonders in life.

I still pray to God like that sometimes, though not always on my knees. Wherever I am when I pray, God is up and to the right and hears me when I ask for blessings, grace, and healing for other people, but I’m convinced that God will ignore me if I pray using some hifalutin words that I learned in some book somewhere. God doesn’t like it when you put on airs.

But what I’ve found as I’ve grown is that I only have so many prayers that I can pray to God. I can spend time thinking up new ones, and some of those are good and some of those are just okay, but after a while, those prayers all start to blend together. I am caught in my own perspective, after all, and I, unlike God, am not infinite nor omniscient nor omnipresent. I can’t see all there is to see in the world. I’m only one person. And my prayers are limited, in a way, by the fact that I am and will only ever be one person, one person limited by one body and one perspective.

And we know that Jesus shares wisdom when he talks about planks in our own eyes and splinters in another’s. Sometimes, we aren’t aware of our planks and it takes the perspectives and words of others for us to notice the planks on our own eyes, so that we can take them out. Since Lent is a time of self-reflection, of noticing what within ourselves mirrors God and what doesn’t, I want to offer us a new prayer each week of Lent that might help us notice some of those planks and give us the strength to pull them out. I want to give us some new-old prayers to pray this Lent.

So. Our first prayer is A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition, a prayer that John Wesley included with the book he sent over to America in 1784 for worshipers here to use. (If you want to learn more about Methodism in America, you can come to tonight’s Foundations of Methodism study!) The prayer is one that would be used in covenant renewal services, when believers would remember their baptism and remember their promises to God. And it goes like this:

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low by thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

You can pray a more modern version, without the thees and the thous, but the old soul in me likes the original wording. It reminds me that this is someone else’s prayer, from another time, and that I can let it push me and shape me, but I don’t have to hold onto it too tightly.

Which is good, because I have both loved and struggled with this prayer from the first time I read the first line. “I am no longer my own, but thine.”

That’s, uh, not very American, is it?

America is all about independence and self-determination and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and rugged individualism. The whole point of the colonies declaring independence from crown is that we, as the people of the United States of America, wanted to be self-governing, to be free. Leave it up to some Royalist Englishman to send over a prayer to the colonies that’s all about submitting to servitude, am I right?

The first time I prayed this prayer was when I was back at my home church on Christmas break, gathered with the brave group of souls who actually make it to church on the Sunday after Christmas. The Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition was used during Watchnight services, which would happen on New Years Eve, and so the pastor had decided to do a service about covenant renewal on the Sunday closest to New Years. As a college student, I was all about independence, all about figuring things out for myself, all about deciding who I wanted to be and how I was going to be it all on my own. I didn’t want to have anyone in authority over me. I wanted to be my own. I did not want to be God’s.

At the same time, though, I desperately wanted to belong to somebody. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted someone to pick me, to want me to be around them, someone who when they saw me wanted to see me again. I wanted a place and a people to be with. I wanted to know that my friends had chosen to be my friends, not that we were just friends of convenience, and I wanted to belong.

And so, this first line of the prayer sucked me in, and not in a totally healthy way. I wanted to belong so badly, could feel the ache with every atom of my being. Maybe I could belong to God. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe I didn’t need to belong with anyone else. Maybe, if I was good enough, if I was giving enough, if I erased myself enough, I could belong to God and that would be what I needed, what I longed for. I could be a Christian zombie, or a Christian puppet, allowing God to move my limbs wherever he needed them to move.

You have to admit, that first line has its problems.

So when you pray this prayer, I want you to pray the first line with the last few lines in mind. Pair it with: “I freely and heartily yield all things” and with “Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it,” because I think those lines have the key words that keep us from being Christian zombies when we affirm our covenant with God.

I freely and heartily yield all things means that this covenant that we’re entering with God, this agreement that we make with God, it’s a choice. No one is forcing us into it, not the expectations of others, not the fear of punishment, nothing is forcing us to choose God. This is the secret of Paul in Philippians, I think, how Paul has learned to be content with whatever he has. He chose to follow Jesus. He chose to follow Christ. He knew all the alternatives that were out there and the risen Christ appeared to him and Paul chose to believe that vision. Paul chose to believe in Jesus. It’s easy to give up everything you have for something that you really, truly believe in, easy to be content in all things when you know that you have gained the one thing in this world that really matters.

I’m not making an altar call out of this, but this prayer forces us to think about whether we have freely chosen God in our lives, or whether we’ve chosen God because we thought that we were supposed to. Is following Jesus the one thing that really matters in this world to us, and so we can be content with whatever comes our way, or is there something else that matters more? I’ll be honest, sometimes the thing that matters most to me is being right, not following Jesus. I would leave Jesus behind if I thought doing that would make me right.

This is the crux of the prayer to me, this question of freely and heartily yielding all things to God. Can I choose this freely? Do I want this covenant with God? Can I say this prayer with honesty and joy, or do I mutter it with regret and embarrassment?

Now, maybe you all have figured this out for yourselves and you know why you choose Christ and this prayer is an easy one for you. You’re happy to give all things up to God, to belong to God, to do whatever God calls you to do, to be put to suffering, to be laid aside, to be exalted or brought low, to be full or empty, to have all things or nothing. Maybe y’all have learned how to hand all things over to God and to rest in the shadow of God’s wings and maybe it is just the arrogant youth in me that struggles with this prayer.

Maybe y’all have it all figured out. But let me tell you how I figured out how to pray this prayer for myself anyway.

What clicks for me, what makes this prayer pray-able to me, and makes it into a prayer that can shape and form me to make me more like Christ, is to remember, as 1 John tells us, that God is love. God is love. God is goodness and kindness and mercy and truth and everything beautiful. God is love. And if I am ever to let go of my hard-won freedom from the things in this life that have held me bound, freedom that I now know I only gained because of the grace of God revealed to me in Jesus Christ my Savior, if I am ever to freely and heartily chose to hand over the direction of my life to anything at all, it must be love.

In the name of love, I can do whatever I’m called to do. I can be grouped in with whoever I need to be grouped with. I can run for miles and miles or I can rest. I can endure the difficulties of this world. If it’s in the name of love, I can be raised up unabashedly and if it’s for love, I can make do with nothing at all. I can be full or empty, regarded well by others or dismissed by others, I can be content in all circumstances, if I know that I belong to love and that it is in love that I act. I can with integrity give all of myself away if I am doing it in the service of love.

Because, when you give yourself to love, you get everything you need in return. Remember that the prayer declares “And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Thou art mine, and I am thine.” If God is love and if we, in giving ourselves to God, receive God in return, we will always have everything we need. It is not a soul-killing self-sacrifice. It is not mindless obedience. It is not zombie Christianity. Giving ourselves to God and receiving God in return is a vibrant, dynamic, life-filled thing. It is mornings and evenings of prayer, sharing and learning and giving and receiving. It is connecting with all those in whom God lives, seeing the divine love in all the places that it can be found. It is striving and caring and doing wonderful things for others, seeing the beauty of God in their faces in return. The prayer that this covenant asks us to make is a living thing, full of all the light of love come to life.

So friends, I ask that you pray this prayer each day this week. Let it work on you. Can you freely give yourself to our beautiful, vibrant, dynamic God who is love, or is there something in the way? Can you be content in all things or is there a need that must be met first? Do you desire to be in covenant with God or is that something that frightens you? Think through all of these things as you pray, be gracious with yourself, and raise up to God whatever is blocking you from praying this prayer with all your heart. As we’ve said before, this world put things between us and God and God is faithful to remove those things if we let God. And if nothing is blocking you, pray this prayer to remind you of the promise between you and God. You are God’s and God is yours and nothing on earth can change that.

So be it.

Amen.

Ashes

A sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of grace, 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.

I love Ash Wednesday. I love Lent. I love Good Friday. I love this season of the Christian year because it’s the time of year that the church can be honest with itself. We can’t lean on the comfort of Christmas or the glory of Epiphany or the rebirth of Easter or the renewal of Pentecost or even the long growing season of ordinary time between Pentecost and Advent. During Lent, we have to look at ourselves not as we will one day with God’s gracious help be, but as we are right now. During Lent, we acknowledge that even though the kingdom will come one day, it has not come yet. During Lent, we are honest with ourselves.

We’re honest about the fact that, despite all our efforts, there are still hungry, poor, unclothed people in this world, people without what they need to survive, people who are sick who we have not aided or comforted, and people who are in prison who we have not visited. We’re honest about the fact that we have only managed to bind up a few of the brokenhearted. We’re honest about the fact that it’s hard to be peacemakers, hard to be meek, hard to seek after God, hard to love our neighbor, and, especially in times like these, it’s impossible to love our enemy. It’s hard to be a Christian and Lent is our honest acknowledgement that we need help to do it.

What is has been most difficult for me during Lent, though, as I’m engaging in all this honesty with myself, is to remember that being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest. Being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest, and I can be so mean to myself. I think of the hours that I have spent at my house and a voice inside my head tells me that I haven’t done enough to invest in my community. I think of the empty calories I’ve put in my body and that voice comes back telling me that I don’t do enough to take care of what God’s given me. I think of all the hours I’ve spent wrestling with my faith and how to share it and goodness, does that voice in my head have an opinion about that. I have a voice in my head that thinks that I should already be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect and that voice takes Lent as an opportunity to be mean.

But being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest, and today is about honesty. Being reconciled to God is about honesty, as far as I’m concerned, because God is the truest truth, the brightest light, the most beautiful beauty. God is the one from whom truth and light and beauty flow. So if we’re going to reconcile ourselves to God, if we’re going to clear the air in the relationship between us and God, we’re going to have to do it by being honest, not by being mean.

Honestly, I have to say that, among other things, I’m still holding onto the hurt that came from my upbringing in the church, hurt that happened decades ago and hurt that I didn’t allow myself to feel until recently. I’m not done being angry about this hurt. In fact, I don’t want to be done being angry about this hurt. My anger feels righteous and powerful, which is the opposite of how the church made me feel, and I’m not ready to be done with it yet. When I was a teenager, the church taught me that my body was bad and that I had caused the abuse I endured and that I would be lucky if God could find me anyone to love me, which was a shame, because the most important thing that I, as a woman, will do is to be loved by a husband and bear his children. In all honesty, I am angry about the shame and the limitations the church put on me. Sometimes I feel like the church put me in a cage and then told me I was weak because I wasn’t flying.

Now, maybe you’re not holding on to hurt from the church, or anger at the church, like I am. Maybe it’s hurt or anger from somewhere else in your life. Or maybe it’s guilt that you haven’t done enough, or guilt over something you know you’ve done wrong, or fear about what the future might hold. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. You all have lived more life than I have and you know more about the ways that this world can come to stand between us and God. But what I do know is that each and every one of us has something that is standing between us and God, something that blocks us from fully knowing God and being fully known by God. For me, my anger at the church is a boulder that blocks almost the entirety of my path to God. I have to dodge around it, climb over it, chisel away at it, in order to find myself back in relationship with God.

But Lent is about being honest.

And being honest with God means admitting that this bolder exists.

Maybe more importantly, Lent is getting to a place where I want the bolder gone.

Lent is about clearing the path between you and God, so that no matter what debris the world has left in the road, when Easter comes, you can run with joy to meet your Lord and there is nothing standing in the way between you and the abundant life that God is waiting to breathe into you. Lent is about understanding that we are only given so much time in this world and that every minute of it we spend separated from God is a minute too many. Lent is about being honest with God about what stands in your way and asking God to help you move it.

You are not a bad person. No one is. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what has been done to you, no matter what you hold on to, you are good. God has said so, and so it is. But each and every one of us has lived in this world of hurt, this world waiting to be redeemed and reconciled to God, and so each and every one of us has something that’s standing between us and God, between us and life abundant. This Lent, be brave. Find that thing that stands between you and God and look it square in the face. You are strong, you are bold, you are good, you are loved, and this thing must be dealt with. Let today be the day you begin to deal with whatever stands between you and God.

I love Ash Wednesday. I love Lent. I love Good Friday. I love these days because we are honest with ourselves. And when we are honest with ourselves, change begins. When we are honest with ourselves, God begins again God’s gracious work within us. Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, these are days of bravery, days of looking into the dark parts of ourselves and our pasts and deciding that God is bigger than our monsters.

My friends, we are called to reconcile ourselves to God, to return ourselves to God. Take this time now, here, today and in place, to begin that reconciliation, that return. In times of reflection, go exploring in yourself and invite God along, so that you might know what stands between you and God. In our litany, listen to ancient words said anew, calling you back to God. During our confession, raise up to God those things that separate you from God and during the pardon, know that our separation is only temporary, and that God is always more willing to forgive and restore than we are to ask for restoration or forgiveness. And as the ashes are smeared on your head, remember that we are all dust and to dust we will return, but also remember that God gives us an infinity within our temporary days, and that these ashes are a sign of God’s great ability to make something out of nothing much at all. How much more, then, can God make out of us?

Amen and amen.

In this time of reflection, I invite you to begin thinking about what might stand between you and God. If it helps you to pray, pray. If it helps you to sit in quiet, sit. If it helps you to walk, walk. Take these few minutes to open your heart and mind to God, who is always faithful to draw us back in.

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.