Do Not Be Deceived

A sermon for Sunday, August 30, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose love reaches out to both the foolish and the wise, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, 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.

So I used to work for Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, as most of you know, and while I was there, I wrote, managed, and taught science summer camps, among other things. And it was always so fun, getting to see all of the LEGO projects at the end of the week or hearing kids identify the bugs they saw in the botanical gardens or seeing a kid’s face light up when they understood something for the first time. But it was a challenge, too, because there are some concepts that are just hard to communicate. Take atmospheric density, for example. Our atmosphere is made of mostly nitrogen, with some oxygen and carbon dioxide, and other things, and even though it’s a thin, thin layer of gases surrounding the Earth, it’s much thicker, than, say, Mars’ atmosphere. Plus, Mars’ atmosphere has a much different composition. It’s 95% carbon dioxide. That matters when you’re trying to land robots on Mars and it also matters when you’re teaching a camp about space robots.

So I found this demonstration where you give the kids these beans and you assign say that, like, the kidney beans are nitrogen and the lentils are carbon dioxide and navy beans are oxygen and you have them guess the ratios and then you show them the real ratios and it makes this esoteric thing tangible for the kids. They get that the atmospheres are made of different things. But me, thinking that I would be the cool camp curricula editor, decided that we should use jelly beans instead of regular beans. That way, the kids would be excited about learning because they could also eat the science. Plus, I scheduled this activity for right before the afternoon break, so they could run off all that sugar.

I thought this was all brilliant planning and I was pretty pleased. I went to order the supplies for camp, I did the math and I tallied up how many jelly beans I would need, and I bulk ordered them online, because I was ordering for, like, fifteen camp sessions that would do this activity. And you know how sometimes, it’s hard to tell what it is you’re ordering when you’re ordering stuff online or in a catalog? Sometimes, things aren’t exactly what they look like? Well, turns out, I calculated that I needed twenty bags of each color of jelly beans, which was true, but when I clicked on the picture of a bag of jelly beans, I instead ended up ordering twenty pounds of jelly beans. The delivery man insisted on helping me move the boxes from the delivery bay to my office.

Yeah, not my finest hour.

I bet they still have bags of red, green, yellow, and blue jelly beans floating around the outreach office to this day.

But stuff like this happens all the time, right? There’s a little bit of misleading advertising, or even false advertising, and suddenly, you’ve got a problem on your hands. You’ve got to slow down, pay attention, maybe even read some reviews, or you’ll end up swimming in jelly beans.

Now, this is a silly example, but I think it points to a larger truth, a truth that Jesus’ followers were wrestling with. There were a lot of voices speaking out in Jesus’ day, telling people what to believe and what to do. We know that many people were listening to John the Baptist before they were listening to Jesus. We know a lot of people were listening to the Pharisees and Sadducees. And the reason John the Baptist and others questioned whether Jesus was the Messiah is that there were a lot of Messiahs around in those days, each one with different hopes and dreams and plans and teachings. People then were hearing a lot of different messages, just as we are today. And in the cacophony of different voices and choices, it’s hard to know which one is right.

Which is why Jesus tells his followers to pay attention and read the reviews, as it were, because otherwise, they’ll end up in some trouble.

Now, this is at the very end of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has spent a lot of time teaching over the past few chapters of Matthew, culminating in his message of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which we read last week. But then he adds in this little addendum about wolves in sheep’s clothing and knowing trees by their fruits and how not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Instead, Jesus says, be doers of his teachings and not hearers only. Hearing Jesus’ words but not acting on them is like building a house on sand. The firm foundation of the followers of Jesus is acting on Jesus’ teachings.

This is something I appreciate so much about Jesus, because I think it shows us that Jesus understands how we humans work and accounts for that. We love something that grabs our attention and Jesus here is grabbing our attention. He’s speaking to some of our deepest hurts and deepest concerns and is telling us that there’s a better way to live. I mean, I hang on every word of the Sermon on the Mount because it offers me something new and exciting each time I turn to it. These words flood into my spirit, washing away the things that don’t matter, that things that aren’t eternal, the things that don’t shape me to be more like Jesus, and I love that feeling, that renewal, that newness I feel in my spirit. The word of God makes us new and I don’t know about the rest of you, but in times like these, I long to be made new.

But it’s not enough to hear or say words that make us feel like new. The words are an important part of it, sure, but anyone can say something that feels renewing, that feels good. It’s the actions that matter. It’s the fruits that matter. You can call on the name of Jesus all day long, but if you’re not doing what he told you to do, you’re building your house on shifting sands.

And what does Jesus tell us to do?

Jesus tells us to be salt for the earth and light for the world. Jesus tells us to be righteous, in the ways that matter. Jesus tells us not to insult our family in Christ, but to reconcile with one another as quickly as we can. Jesus tells us to see others as human beings and to care for them, not discard them, to keep our promises, to love our enemies so that they too might be renewed, to be complete in love, to do all that we do for God, to serve only God, to trust God, to treasure eternal things, and in all things, to love others as you would be loved; that is, to love others as God loves them.

Paul continues in this same vein in our passage from Romans 12 this morning. Let your love be genuine. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Rejoice in hope. Show hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Leave room for God’s work. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Do these things, and you’re solid. The storms of this world will rage about you, but they will come and they will go, and you will stand firm, because the word that goes out from the Lord does not return empty. If you hear Jesus’ teachings and if you act on them, you can trust that you have been planted deep into the soil by the One who taught gardens how to grow. Follow Jesus and you are rooted. You will bloom.

And, by the same token, if you’re looking to discern which voices in this world to listen to, this list is it. Pay attention to what the voices say—do they sound like Jesus? Watch their actions—do they do the things that Jesus calls us to do? Read the reviews, pay attention to their fruits—do they show things like patience, perseverance, hope, goodness, justice? Do they love others? Can you see the fruits of their love? Because we humans, we’ve got plenty in common. We were all made by the same Creator. And while we might bloom in an abundance of different ways and at different rates, growing a variety of different fruit, all our good fruit has a fundamental trait in common: love.

Friends, we are not living through easy times, and what we give our time and treasure to, what we pay attention to, has a much bigger impact than accidentally ordering eighty pounds of jelly beans. It is so important, maybe now more than ever, to pay attention to the reviews, to read the fine print, to think about what people are saying, and to know people by their fruits. Our decisions must be based in love, love that produces real, good fruit. Otherwise, we’re going to watch the ground slip away beneath us.

Now, I’m not saying that this is easy. I’m not saying that following Jesus won’t cost us anything. But on the day when we come to stand before Jesus, I don’t want to be a stranger. I want Jesus to know that I listened to all he said and I did my best to follow him.

And I’m sure you want to do the same.

Amen.

Seeing Clearly

A sermon for Sunday, August 23, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who loves us all, thank you for bringing us together in this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presences known among 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.

You know, we mountain people are storytellers. It’s just a part of our culture up here in these hills. I think that comes to some of us from those first Scotch-Irish Americans, because I’ve never known a Scot or an Irishman who could resist telling a tale when the opportunity was presented to them, but I also think that there’s something about these mountains that is ancient, something that’s held in the stories we tell. After all, these mountains, the Appalachian Mountain chain, they’re the same mountains that are in the highlands in Scotland. The islands we know as Ireland and the United Kingdom today were once the northernmost part of the mighty Appalachians, back when they towered over Pangea. The Cherokee and the other people who live up in these mountains have these same storytelling tendencies. It’s a deep part of who we are, a kinship that we share.

And at the same time, I think we’ve all experienced people in our lives whose stories go on a little longer than we’d like. We respect them, of course. We honor them, of course. But we’d also like for them to get to the end just a little bit quicker, to sum up what they’re saying, to get right to the heart of the matter. We can all only take so much storytelling in one sitting.

Jesus, too, was a storyteller. Storytelling is a deep part of Jewish tradition too. But as for us, here in the twenty-first century, reading Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew, starting our third chapter of Jesus’ teachings, we might be ready for Jesus to get to the point already. We’ve heard the beatitudes, we’ve heard teachings about the law, we’ve heard teachings about adultery, we’ve heard about loving our enemies, we’ve heard about praying and fasting and almsgiving, we’ve heard about worrying. If you’re reading from a red-letter Bible, the pages have been redder than an NC State fan during football season. Well, during a normal football season. My point is, I think we’re all ready for Jesus to wrap it up.

Which is maybe part of the reason that one of the most famous verses found in the New Testament is at the end of our scripture reading for today. Jesus, bless his heart, gets to the point. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 7:12, for those of you who went to bible camp.

Now, later, in Matthew 22, Jesus will say this again, worded a little differently. Then, he’ll say, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” because all the law and the prophets hang on the two commandments to love God will all that you are and to love your neighbor as yourself. This is, I would say, Jesus’ core message. Everything else he has said or will say is an explanation of these laws of love. This is the lens through which we see the rest of scripture clearly.

So let’s start back with these verses at the beginning of chapter 7 with this lens, with these laws of love in mind. “Judge not that ye be not judged.” Boy, am I guilty of pulling that verse out of context, because I use this verse to avoid conflict and to avoid upsetting the status quo all the time. I’ll say things like, “Hey, listen, I’m not judging you. You do you” or “Well, I can’t know what’s in their hearts, so it’s not for me to judge.”

And on one level, that’s a fantastic reading of what Jesus has to say here, especially for those of us who have known Christians who do pass judgement on others unthinkingly. Many of us know the harm that other judgmental Christians have caused ourselves or others. We do a lot of good by not judging others as we ourselves have been judged in the past. But I think we need to look at the first six verses of this chapter all together, as we’ve done with other sections of the Sermon on the Mount, to get at what Jesus means here.

Jesus tells us not to judge because the way we judge others will be applied back to us. The measure we give out will be the measure we receive. And if we’re complaining about the speck in someone else’s eye without noticing the log in our own, we’re being hypocritical. We’re not doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Jesus is not prohibiting us from seeing the actions of others and drawing conclusions; Jesus is telling us not to hold others to a different standard than we would hold ourselves. So before we draw conclusions about anyone else, we have to draw conclusions about ourselves.

This is where those laws of love become key, and we see a key part of those laws of love reflected in verses 7-11. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask!”

See, we all love imperfectly, incompletely, much of the time through no fault of our own. Our parents, our friends, our partners, even when they tried their best, couldn’t love us perfectly and so we haven’t ever learned how to do it, though, in some amazing, profound, holy moments in our lives, we get pretty darn close. And this isn’t a judgement. It just is what it is. All of us, every one of us, loves imperfectly.

And yet, Jesus reminds us, we do still know some things. We know not to give a child a stone when asked for bread, or a snake when asked for fish. We get it, sometimes. But you know who gets it all the time? God. Because God is love. God can’t help but be perfectly loving. That’s who God is.

So it’s our task to learn how to love more completely, more perfectly. It’s our task to learn from God how to love our partners, our family, our friends, our neighbors, our enemies, more completely. And the more complete way to love others is to be honest about ourselves and how we ourselves love incompletely before we turn to teach others about the ways that they’re loving others incompletely.

But we also have to understand where they’re at, too, before we offer our love, however incomplete, to them. That, I think is, the wisdom of verse 6, which, on the face of it, sounds harsh. “Do not give what is holy to dogs and do not throw your pearls before swine.” Uh, Jesus, I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure that calling others dogs and swine is, like, the least loving you could be.

What Jesus means, though, I think, is that there are those who are not ready for the love that you want to show them. They’re not ready for those amazing, profound, holy moments of nearly perfect love. They don’t know what to do with that. They have been shaped by the world in such a way that they’re not ready to receive love, not yet. And you can love them and love them until the cows come home, but it’s like throwing pearls before feral hogs. They don’t know the goodness they’ve been given, and they can’t know, not until they’ve grown a little more.

This is complicated, I know. It seems straightforward to do unto others as you would have them do unto to you, to love others as you love yourself, but the fact of the matter is, we’re all still learning how to love. We’re learning how to love ourselves the way God loves us.

Because, again, we haven’t been taught how to love completely. We’ve been taught that love looks like making someone else happy, and while that’s part of it, it’s not all of it. We’ve been taught that love looks like making someone comfortable, and while that’s part of it, it’s not all of it. We’ve been taught that love looks like sharing wisdom with those who are still learning and while that’s part of it, that’s not all of it. Love is a fluid, active thing. Love looks like all of these things, yes, because we all need happiness and comfort and wisdom, but love also looks like self-reflection. Love looks like thinking before you speak. Love looks like learning. Love looks like listening. And as anyone who has done any teaching or parenting in any form known, love also looks like correcting. Love looks like explaining the consequences of our actions. Love looks like showing others how to love. Love, sometimes, when we’ve put in the work of learning and self-reflection, looks like holding others up to a standard they’re not used to yet in order to show them how to be more loving. Love, sometimes, looks less extravagant than we expect, because sometimes love looks like holding back until the person we want to love is ready for it. Love is all of these things and more.

In the end, then, I guess I’m happy that Jesus is a bit of a storyteller. I’m glad that Jesus understands what our ancestors who have lived and loved up in these hills understood, and what we understand today. I’m thankful that it takes Jesus a while to get to his point. Loving others more fully, more completely, looks different at different times and with different people and Jesus has been weaving us small tales of wisdom of what love looks like in different situations throughout the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet, we know that no matter how hard it can seem to learn to love others completely, all we have to do is ask. All we have to do is search. All we have to do is knock. God is waiting to give us the good gifts of wisdom whenever we ask for them.

So go, as Jesus calls us to go, and love as completely as you can. Search your heart before you invite others to do the same. Seek to understand where others are as you offer your love to them. And known that in all things, you are held in the arms of our loving Parent in Heaven, who longs for us to love others as we are loved, and is more than ready to pick us up when we fall and give us grace for where we come up short.

Amen.

Mammon

A sermon for Sunday, August 16, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of all good gifts, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, 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.

I’m sure y’all all remember the Family Circus cartoons that used to run in the paper. Maybe they still do—I haven’t looked at the comics section in a long time. But I remember one Family Circus comic where the mother is standing at the check-out counter of a department store, fixing to pay, while one of the kids holds up a toy that they want her to buy for them. And the caption says, “It’s okay! You don’t have to pay for it, you can just write a check for it!”

I suppose kids today say, “It’s okay! Just use a credit card!”

But I bring up this cartoon because I think that this was the first time I realized that money was a real, important thing, and that money matters. I can’t tell you exactly how old I was when I saw this cartoon, but I can’t have been older than eight or nine. And somehow, seeing money, or the lack thereof, as the punchline to a comic made me realize that if you wanted things in this world, you needed to have money to get them.

See, I didn’t grow up particularly wealthy, but I also didn’t grow up dirt poor. Sure, we were on food stamps for several years there, and my parents have told me, now that I’m grown, that a couple of Christmases were rough, but we owned a house and we had support from family members and the church we went to. We got by, and so our money, or lack thereof, didn’t really stick out to me. But I knew, before the age of 10, that money mattered to others.

And, as much as we might be uncomfortable admitting it, money mattered to Jesus too. The only thing that Jesus talks about more than money is the kingdom of God, making money the second most common topic for Jesus to teach about.

So what does Jesus think about money? Well, this passage is a good place to start answering that question. The first thing he tells us is not to store up treasures for ourselves here on earth, because the treasures of this earth don’t last. They can be taken from us. They’re subject to rot and ruin.

And Jesus doesn’t want us storing up treasures here because he knows that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. There’s no two ways about it. If your treasure is stored here on earth, that’s where your heart is. Our hearts follow our treasure.

Now, that is a hard word from Jesus for us in the United States today, because it is so different from what we hear from the world around us. We get the message that the pursuit of treasure here on earth is good, blessed, or holy, even, as long as we stay humble. We can have all the money in the world, but if we’re humble, we’re good.

That’s simply not what Jesus tells us here. Jesus says that where our treasure is, our heart is. The message we get from the world around us tricks us and traps us, leading us to think that we can pursue money and wealth and possessions here on this earth without any consequence to our souls, to our connection to others, or to our connection to God. But Jesus is firm in saying that’s not true. You can’t serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and wealth.

Now, the word that Jesus uses there for wealth has a long and storied history. It’s Mammon. It’s a Greek translation of an Aramaic word that comes from a root that word originally meant, “that which you rely on, other than God.” Jesus here is telling us that serving wealth is the same thing as worshiping idols, the same thing as abandoning God for the things of this world, and so you’d think that we as Christians would learn that we should stay away from striving for wealth. But Christians have, over the years, wrestled with Mammon over and over again because, well, we can see Mammon, but we can’t always see God.

Because where is God when, in the middle of a pandemic when people are losing their jobs and potentially their homes, the billionaires of the world have gotten richer? Where is God when the stock market is doing fine but people have to let their loved ones be buried in unmarked graves because they can’t afford funeral costs? Where is God when we have enough money to grow enough food to feed the world, but there are still hungry and starving adults and children around the world? Where is God when we as a nation have the ability to send people to the Moon but not to a quality hospital? Where is God when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

So, we turn to Mammon, because we can see Mammon doing work in the world. After all, Mammon made the billionaires. Mammon drives the stock market. Mammon guides hospital and pharmaceutical executives. Mammon chooses the food we grow and how we process and package it. Mammon has given plenty of people in this world more money that they could spend in a million lifetimes. Mammon gets things done. Mammon will keep us safe.

And once you know to look for Mammon, you can see it everywhere. Mammon is right and left and up and down our politics. Mammon is in our schools, in the jobs we tell our children to strive for, in the way we think about others. Mammon is in the property we own, in the decisions we make, in the pride we have in ourselves. Mammon is even in our churches, in our denominations, in the making of the Bibles we read. There is no way around it and no escape from it.

That leaves us believing that Jesus is calling us to an impossible task. How can we serve only God when we live in a world that is dominated by Mammon? You can’t exist in this world without money. Money matters! Well, let me invite you to jump to the end of our passage for this morning, before Mammon envelops our hearts once again and makes us believe that we can never have enough without it. Jesus tells us, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Jesus isn’t saying that money doesn’t matter. Jesus knows the reality we live in. We have to have enough to get by and God knows what we need. Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore the realities of this world. He’s telling us to put our trust in God, not in money. Our first question in life shouldn’t be, “Is there money enough to do this?”, it should be, “Does this please God?”

Imagine how different our lives, our world, would be if we asked ourselves this question first and foremost. Does what we do please God? Is what we’re doing kingdom-seeking?

And I mean that in a really real, really direct way. I know that I’ve heard sermons in the past on this passage that are about reducing our stress and doing random acts of kindness and things like that, which is all well and good, and I know that I’ve heard sermons about the kingdom of heaven as the world after this one, which has some merit too, but I don’t think Jesus is talking about just these things. I think Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we participate in, on this earth and to ask ourselves, “Does this please God? Does this seek the kingdom of God?” Because, as we know, Mammon is a part of everything in our lives, from our homes to our schools to our politics to our churches. Wealth, money, guides so much of what we do. What would it look like if instead of being guided by money, we actively chose to be guided by God? What if we chose to act like people who knew that they would be provided for, as long as we were seeking the kingdom of God? What if that guided the careers we encouraged people to pursue or the way we voted? What if we chose to move forward loving people extravagantly, in every circumstance, saying, “It’s okay! God’s got this!”?

Because that’s what it means to ask if something pleases God. That’s what it means to ask if something seeks the kingdom of God. We know that our God is love and we know that our God is at work in this world. What Jesus is calling to do here is to seek out love where it can be found and elevate it. Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we’re involved in, and to seek to make it more loving, and to set it aside if we can’t.

Because that’s what it means to seek out the kingdom of God first. That’s what it means to serve God instead of Mammon. It means in everything we do, to the best of our ability, seeking to love people extravagantly, without worrying about how to pay for it. There are so, so many people in this world today who need our love, in any way we can give it. That’s the work that Jesus calls us to, today. And we have to start doing that, today.

After all, today’s trouble is enough for today.

Amen.

Showing Off

A sermon for Sunday, August 9, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who is with us wherever we are, thank you for bringing us together in this time and place. By your Spirit, make your presence known 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.

You know, the way I know that the Sermon on the Mount is still working on my heart is that every week when I go to preach on a new section of it, I feel the need to confess something. Jesus is still out here, using the same words he used two thousand years ago, to shape our hearts and minds so that we can be more like him, amen?

I remember hearing this passage in Matthew as a teenager and thinking that I needed to start praying in my closet if I was serious about being a Christian, so I went into the closet in my room, cleared out a space on the floor, wrote a couple of Bible verses in pencil on the wall, and started to pray. To be honest, this was not the most effective way to pray for me, since, whenever God and I have a conversation, I tend to gesticulate and I kept on banging my hands on the walls, but I kept it up for a quite a while, because I thought it was what you had to do.

Then, one week, in Bible study, we were talking about prayer and I proudly proclaimed that I go pray in my closet. The high school girls’ Bible study leader, Mary Nelson, bless her heart, said that I was being very scriptural but also asked if there was a reason why I would choose to hide in a closet to pray. Sensing that I needed to fill out my story a little more, I said that I had to go to my closet to pray because my house was SO LOUD all the time, I couldn’t find another quiet space for prayer. This was, unfortunately, a lie, because my older brother stayed in his room reading all the time and my little brother was either outside with friends or playing video games, but I stuck to it, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird. This is one of those stories that I will remember out of the blue and cringe a little. Yeah, in the end, it was just an awkward high school and no, no harm was done, but for someone who prided herself on being the smartest kid in class, I totally missed the point that Jesus is making here.

And I’ve found that to be true with several of my clergy friends. We were set on this path toward pastoral ministry because we were good at church. We were the smartest kids in Sunday School, the most devoted volunteers at the homeless shelter, the presidents of the youth group, the soloists in the church choir. We were shining stars of church and it turns out, if you shine bright enough at church, someone somewhere will give you a copy of The Christian as Minister and tell you that you should think about going to seminary.

But being good at church didn’t necessarily mean we were good at understanding what Jesus was saying. Sometimes, being good at church made us completely misunderstand what Jesus was saying, because Jesus tells us, in passages like this, to do everything for God, but being good at church sometimes, maybe even often, meant doing things for the approval of others.

Not that I haven’t heard several sermons in my life about doing good in secret, but it’s a little bit of a Catch-22 for the over-achieving kid. How can we show people how good we are at doing good in secret when we have to keep things secret? How can we get our gold star or our “Secret Do-Gooder” badge if we can’t tell anyone about the good we’re doing? And how does this line up with what we read last week, where Jesus told us not to hide our lights under a bushel and to be salt for the earth and shining city on the hill? Should we shine our lights or should we pray in secret? Is our faith public or personal?

This is a perennial question for us Christians, one that we’ve tried to answer over and over again, and one that we’ve wrestled with over the history of the United States. I should know. I’m descended from Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, both of whom were Puritan ministers involved in the Salem Witch Trials, a perfect example of faith lived out loud gone wrong. But both before and after the Puritans, the question of how we live out our faith as Christians has plagued us, and still does to this day.

I think it’s important to notice that here, in this passage, Jesus is talking about what we today call spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines, things like giving, praying, and fasting. Spiritual disciplines are like exercising for your soul, helping you grow spiritual muscle. The more we do this spiritual exercise, the more we show fruits of the Spirit. Giving can grow love, joy, kindness and goodness within us. Praying grows peace, faithfulness, and gentleness. Fasting can grow patience and self-control. We do these things because, as we encounter God more and more often, we see that we want to be like God and practicing these disciplines helps us be more like God. We do these disciplines because we want to, because we have hearts that long to be close to God but also hearts that need a little help getting there.

So it makes sense that Jesus would tell us to do these things in secret, because these things are not for the world; they’re for God. Giving to those who need it is not for other people to see; it’s for God, who Jesus tells us is in the least of these. Praying is not for other people to hear; it’s for God, who delights in coming close to us. Fasting is not for others; it’s for God, who can speak more easily to our hearts in times of emptiness. These disciplines that Jesus lists here, these common practices of faithful people in Jesus’ day, they were meant to grow a connection between us and God. The world doesn’t need to be involved in that.

And if the world is involved in these things that are best left between us and God, we run the risk of being performative, what Jesus later calls being white-washed tombs. Jesus spends so much time talking about these disciplines, I think, because we are so susceptible to being performative. It seems simpler and more rewarding to look like you’re doing what God tells you to do. It’s easier to get affirmation when someone sees you doing God than to trust in the affirmation that comes from God.

But here’s the thing: we already have all the affirmation we need from God. We are each beloved children of the one who makes us, saves us, and sustains us. We know where we stand with God. Nothing can change that and one else’s opinion matters.

And that frees us to make mistakes on our Christian journeys. It frees us to grow in generosity, being able to give freely to whoever needs it, without anyone judging what we give. It frees us to make mistakes in prayer, to change our minds in prayer, to not know what to pray for, exactly, and to be ourselves when we come to God in prayer. It frees us to have a relationship with God that is just between us and God, something that’s precious and holy and growing and changing. When we trust that God will give us what we need, including the affirmation we need, we don’t have to seek that approval elsewhere. We don’t try to receive what we need for life from other people. We receive it from God our life-giver.

That’s the knowledge and wisdom that I didn’t have in high school, and I’d bet it’s part of the wisdom that the people Jesus was criticizing were missing too. When we get our affirmation and support solely from other people, we’ve already received all they can give. When we get our affirmation and support from God, we receive gifts that last throughout this life and into the next.

And when we rest in God, when we practice these spiritual disciplines for God and God alone, then we are filled with what we need to go out into the world and do the good works God has set out before us. It’s not that our faith is entirely public or private; it’s that our faith is both. God calls for us to love God in secret, but that love was never meant to stay secret. It was meant to grow and grow and grow, until we can’t help but shine with it, give light to others with it, preserve the earth with it, and flavor the world with it.

So go. Seek out God in the quiet spaces where no one else is watching. But don’t stay there forever, because God wants to grow you bigger than that.

Amen.

Salt and Light

A sermon for Sunday, August 2, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who is light and breath and being, thank you for bringing us together today. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us in this place. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, we talked a little about images in midweek worship this week, and how Jesus is fantastic at using them. The passage was the one about the kingdom of God being like a mustard seed, and how, even though it starts off tiny, it spreads and grows until it’s so big, birds can make their nests in its shade. That mustard seed image sticks with us, doesn’t it?

And part of why it sticks with us, I think, is because it feels so comforting. The mustard seed image shows us that small things, tiny things, can make a world of difference. I mean, the world that God wants to build, an entire world, is contained in something so small as a mustard seed. And if the world God wants to build can be something that small, then maybe we can be a part of it, no matter how small. We have so many other obligations weighing on us, and we feel so helpless sometimes, but God takes the small things that we can give and makes them grow bigger than we could ever hope for. All of that hope and comfort is nestled into the image of this tiny mustard seed. It’s powerful.

I think our text for this morning, from earlier in the gospel of Matthew, sticks with us for the same reason, because in it, Jesus again uses images to capture our imagination, images of tiny things with a huge impact. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. I mean, salt crystals can be tiny, and photons, the particles that make up light, don’t even have mass. They’re weightless.

And yet, we all know the power of light. And if any of you have had to go on a heart-healthy diet, you know what a big deal salt, or the lack thereof, can be.

So, right from the top, we can take heart in Jesus’ words this morning. Every little bit that we can do helps, and each of us, no matter how small or insignificant we might feel from time to time, no matter how powerless, each of us are salt and light and these are not insignificant things. Small things make a big difference.

And I think, actually, that Jesus gives us two images here that show us two different paths of discipleship, two different ways of following his teachings. And I think that if we recognize that there are these two different ways of following Jesus and that we can each embody what Jesus is calling us to do in different ways, we’ll be better able to talk to each other and to other Christians in the days and weeks and months ahead. Some of us gravitate toward being salt and some of us gravitate toward being light, but Jesus proclaims to us, the gathered body of Christ, that we are both, and that is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere.

So. Let’s think about salt first. You are the salt of the earth. What does it mean to call someone “the salt of the earth”? I’ve grown to think of someone who is the salt of the earth as being kind, compassionate, reliable, solid, and wise, someone who’s always there and always ready to show someone a kindness or mercy. This is, actually, what I think of when I think of a good person. Someone who’s grounded, who can take everything in stride and who is always working for the good of those around them. I think of someone who has endured much in this life but all they’ve endured has made them kinder and more understanding, rather than bitter and closed off. In my deepest heart of hearts, I want to be a salt of the earth kind of person. I want to feel grounded someplace and I want to give all that I can out of compassion and mercy. Many of you are already the salt of the earth and here you are, preserving and flavoring this community of Whittier and beyond.

Jesus tells us that we are the salt of the earth, but then he says something interesting: “But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” Now, you and I both know that salt on its own doesn’t go bad. I’ve looked into this time and time again, but we don’t have a clear answer for what Jesus was referring to here. It might be that salt that was gathered from the nearby Dead Sea and the surrounding regions was sometimes mixed with other things and so wasn’t truly salty. And if salt doesn’t have its salty flavor, what can salt it? If salt isn’t salt, it’s worthless.

I think there’s another meaning we can draw out here, as those who are called salt of the earth, and that is that we are that which gives the world its flavor, and if we lose our flavor, we’re done for. If we each lose our uniqueness, that which makes us us, we can no longer be the salt of the earth. God in God’s wisdom has made us each with a beautiful, delightful diversity of attributes, shaped and formed by our life on this earth, and to stifle those good things is to deprive the world of its flavor. Revel in being who you were made to be, because in being who you are, you flavor the world. It's another way of being grounded, I think. When you know deep down in your bones who you are, when you have an unshakeable sense of self, and know that you are loved by God because of and not despite of who you are, then you are unshakeable. When you’re grounded like that, you are the salt of the earth. When you know who you are, all of the insecurity and worry and fretfulness gets set aside and you can, indeed, be the person who is kind, compassionate, reliable, solid, and wise. When you are who you are, just as God made you, you’re bedrock, an unshakeable place. You can be a preservative and you can give out flavor, all at the same time. You’re the salt of the earth.

Now, let’s look at light. What does it mean to be the light of the world? I’m tempted to think of someone who lights up your day, who just makes the world a better place in your day-to-day life, and I’m sure we can all think of someone like that in your world. But I get the sense from the later verses that Jesus is talking about something wider-reaching. Jesus, I think, is talking about the light of the world as light that shows the way for the world, light that shines on good actions so that the world can see them and follow. I think of someone like John Lewis, who never flinched from fighting the good fight. If we can follow him, marching toward a more just world and dancing when the march could wait just a minute, we too can be the light of the world, and people will give glory to God for the way we shined. Then, as Isaiah says, our light shall break forth like the dawn, and our healing shall spring up quickly. Our vindicator shall go before us and the glory of the LORD shall be our rear guard.

Do you feel the tension there, between being salt and being light? One is being grounded in who you are, in doing what you do to the best of your ability, preserving the earth and giving it its flavor. The other is letting what you do escape from you, becoming radiant, and giving hope to the world through your light. One is about how Jesus changes your life at home and one is about how Jesus changes your life in the world. The sense I’ve gotten over our past year together is that y’all are more comfortable being salt and I am more comfortable being light.

And yet, Jesus tells us that we are both of these things. By God’s grace, the Spirit is already at work in us to make sure that we don’t lose our saltiness nor shield our light. We might be more comfortable as salt or light, but still, we are both, and we must be both.

Because think again of what it means to be perfect, what we talked about last week. It means to be complete, fulfilled, just as Jesus promises to complete or fulfill the law. Jesus is calling us to be fully ourselves, to be both grounded and vibrant. Not an iota will pass from the law, Jesus tells us, and neither will one iota of us pass away. We are salt and light, these tiny things that change the world. We are the humble, mourning, meek, and those who are thirsty for righteousness, as the beatitudes name us. We are also the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted, those who hear Isaiah’s call to God’s chosen fast, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. To be complete as Jesus was complete, to be perfect as our Parent in heaven is perfect, we must be both of these things.

So, my friends, continue to be salty, as I grow in my saltiness. I will continue to shine as you all begin to light those extra lamps in your houses, until we are that bright city on the hill we dream of being. And throughout all our work, we will rest in the Spirit, knowing that what Jesus speaks, the Spirit enacts. Even in us, these tiny grains of salt, these tiny photons of light. Jesus is doing wonders with us, just as we are now. Imagine what Jesus has yet to do, if we can answer his call.

Be salt. Be light. Be complete.

Amen.

Perfect

A sermon for Sunday, July 26, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who knows each of us and calls us by name, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known among 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 have to admit, though it likely won’t surprise anyone here, that I have, throughout my life, been haunted by our last verse from the gospel of Matthew this morning. I know you know it. “Be ye perfect therefore as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” I just never seemed to be able to be perfect. Once, in fifth grade, I got 99 questions right on a multiplication test, and I cried because I didn’t get a hundred. I don’t care to count the number of paper towels I’ve cleaned up from public bathroom floors and sinks, washing my hands afterwards, but somehow, still, there are always more. And let’s not even talk about the time at the sixth grade science fair when I routinely said tongue dispensers instead of tongue depressors or in eighth grade when I said die-sentry instead of dysentery in a speech in front of the entire Soil and Water Conservation Committee. Y’all, it was rough.

But of course, we all know that nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We’re not God. So what does Jesus mean by, Be ye perfect? What superhuman feat is Jesus asking from us now?

Well, as I said last week, I think that in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is showing us how to think about the highest ideals of Christian life. Again, this is by no means the only place that Jesus teaches us about the way to live our lives, as I know y’all know, but I take this chapter of the Sermon on the Mount as a couple of examples about the way we can think about the life that Jesus of Nazareth, our Christ, is calling us to live, and the greatest example of that is his call for us to be perfect. It hinges on what the word “perfect” means. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s start by looking at the first four verses in our passage this morning, verses 38-42. The piece of context that we miss here is that “An eye for an eye” is actually a law, going back to the code of Hammurabi, an ancient set of Mesopotamian laws from nearly 2000 before Jesus’ birth, which the Jewish scriptures adapt into their laws, and then continue to adapt and interpret over the centuries. The law “an eye for an eye” is actually a de-escalation of violence, as far as ancient laws are concerned. It means that someone in power can’t overreact against a slight done by another. It’s not “a head for an eye,” it’s “an eye for an eye.” It’s a law of equal retribution. It’s actually the basis behind some of our legal thought today, but instead of an eye for an eye, we ask, “How much money should the aggressor have to pay for an eye replacement?” Actually, in Jesus’ day, in the Second Temple Period, this same type of system, money instead of physical retribution, was already taking shape.

So Jesus here is talking with the law, with justice, in mind. When someone hits you across the right cheek, offer them the other. In Jesus’ day, if you hit someone on the left cheek would mean backhanding them or hitting them with your unclean hand. Hitting someone’s left cheek would do them a great dishonor, but it would be an escalation of violence. Anyone who let their anger get the better of them in this way would bring dishonor on themselves.

It’s the same idea with the coat and the cloak. The coat mentioned here is really something more like a shirt, a lower-cost item that could be replaced or even done without, but cloaks are expensive. If you were travelling and couldn’t find a place to stay, your cloak was your shelter.

Suing for someone’s cloak was actually illegal in Jesus’ day, since it would deprive the poorest among them of their only shelter. So if, when sued for your shirt, you handed someone your cloak too, and they accepted it, they would bring dishonor on themselves.

And the same again with the “go one more mile.” Roman soldiers could, under Roman law, requisition anyone to carry a burden of up to twenty pounds for about a mile. Going the second mile would bring dishonor on the soldier who let you do it. It’s a way of protesting the law by exposing its injustice. With each of these examples, Jesus tells his followers to be exemplary in the face of violence and legal injustice, because your actions will show the injustice for what it really is.

Which is why he follows these teachings up with verse 44: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. This is the wisdom that underlies the previous teachings. We don’t go the extra mile because we want to enrage or shame our enemies or those who hurt or oppress us. We do it because we love them.

Now, love here is that agape love we Christians hear so much about. It’s the unconditional, unending, persistent love that God has for each of us. It’s the love that we so often experience as grace. It’s the love that creates us, saves us, and sustains us. It’s the love that holds us tight, just as we are, and the love that never lets us go, never stops seeking us out, even when we ourselves have strayed. It’s the love that wakes up our conscience, the love that speaks to us in a still small voice, calling us to do better because we know better. It’s the love that stays with us all our days and the love that will bear us home when our days come to an end.

So it’s clear that agape love is not passive love. It is not love that lays down in the face of wrong. It’s love that goes the extra mile whenever there’s injustice. It doesn’t do that for its own sake. It does it for the sake of the one committing injustice.

See, if we love our enemies, we want the best for them, and that means that we can’t let them remain abusers and oppressors. When you abuse someone else, when you oppress someone else, there’s something fundamental that breaks inside you, just like something fundamental broke in Cain when he killed Abel. And healing from that break can be the work of a lifetime. But, as we all know, admitting you have a problem is the first step to healing. If you don’t know there’s a problem, you don’t know that you need to seek out help.

So Jesus tells us to go that extra mile for the Roman solider. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of the law. Give away your cloak to those who sue you for your shirt. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of their suit. Turn the other cheek to someone who hits you. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of their violence. We pray, we pray, we pray for our enemies to wake up, so that we can both heal.

Because Jesus here understands the deep truth that the rest of us forget over and over again. We cannot be free until all of us are free. It’s all of us or none of us. Or, to use later Christian language, Christ is the head of the body, the firstborn, the first to enter into the fullness of life that is promised to all of us, but all of humanity is the body of Christ. If we leave anyone behind, we are incomplete.

This is what Jesus means when he says perfect. The Greek word is τέλειοι, meaning mature, full-grown, having reached your goal or purpose, or complete. It’s not about memorizing your multiplication tables or being tidy or knowing how to pronounce every word. We will all make mistakes like that. No, being perfect, as our Parent in heaven is perfect, means being perfect, being complete, in love. We are complete when we can love our enemies, and those we look down on, just the same as we love our siblings. We are perfect when we realize that without each other, we are incomplete.

This is hard. Believe me, I know it. It is so much easier to write off others as lost causes, to proclaim that they are beyond saving. (And sometimes it’s easier to believe that about ourselves, but that’s another sermon.) It is so much easier to let fear overpower us, the fear of what we might have to give up in order to love one another, and let that stop us from actually loving one another. It is so much easier to stay divided instead of doing the work of repenting, forgiving, restoring, and reconciling, because that work is hard.

And it’s hard because we, too, can be Christ’s enemy. I know that I have been the Roman soldier, asking for too much from someone who is struggling because it’s allowed under the law. I know that I have been the accuser, asking unjustly for an apology or a repayment that I was not due. I know that I have been the one to strike another, standing there with my hand ready for the backslap. I know that I have, even unknowingly, been on the side of the oppressor and it has only been through the deep love of my Black siblings, my Latinx siblings, my Native siblings, my LGBTQIA siblings, my siblings with a disability, my siblings in poverty, and my siblings struggling with mental health and addiction that I have in turn learned how to love them better and in so doing become more complete. The love of those who we have considered enemies heals us.

It’s so hard to do this work of love from either end, especially now, when there’s a pandemic, when everything feels so tense and uncertain, when we can’t receive the normal comfort we would from our families, whether they be the families we grew up with, the families we’ve formed, or our church family. Every day exhausts us with its challenges and real, palpable worries, especially those who are caregivers and peacemakers by nature, those who long deep in their hearts for conflict to cease and get eaten up from the inside out when it won’t. I know. I feel this way too. It is a hard thing for Jesus to ask this of us, always, but especially now.

But my friends, my friends, I promise that we can do this hard thing, and I don’t promise this under my own authority. This is a promise that comes from Jesus himself, the one who sent us the Holy Spirit, our advocate and comforter, the one who goes alongside us and strengthens us to do this hard thing. You are always, always, wrapped up in the arms of Almighty God and there is nothing that can change that. For who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are always surrounded and supported by the love of God that will not let us go.

So go out and love. Love those who love you, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and love those who you usually ignore or disregard, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and love your enemies, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and let others love you, freely, as best as they can, because God can and will change our lives through the love of others, and know that in all of these attempts at love, God’s grace will come rushing in to fill the gaps that we cannot bridge. Stand surrounded and grounded in the love of Jesus our Savior, knowing that no matter how difficult the conversation, how painful the lesson, how frightening the prospect, we can love and be loved by our enemies, and that love will heal this hurting world.

In fact, in the end, love will make it perfect.

Amen.

Highest Ideals

A sermon for Sunday, July 19, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who loves us all, body and soul, thank you for gathering us together. By your Spirit, make your presence known to us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Some of you may know this, but I imagine most of you don’t: in the United Methodist Church, part of what you have to do in order to be ordained is to submit anywhere between 40 to 60 pages of paperwork, not counting the manuscript for a 15-30 minute sermon. Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep you here for a 30-minute sermon. But I bring this up because our passage from the gospel of Matthew this morning has me thinking about one of the questions in the ordination paperwork. In the paperwork, we’re asked to reflect on how we live out our call to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life. This passage makes me think of that question.

Not that I think Jesus talks about the highest ideals of Christian life only in these verses. This is early on in the Sermon on the Mount, some of the earliest teachings in his ministry in the gospel of Matthew, and Jesus doesn’t stop teaching in this gospel. But the passage today is on the way to his first full explanation of the highest ideals of Christian life and we’ll talk about that next week. This week, though, I think Jesus is giving us a glimpse into how to live into some of the highest ideals in Christian life, how to live with one another and with God, and he does it in a very Jesus-y way.

So let’s jump in with the first three verses. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.”

Oof, Jesus. At first glance, this is harsh. Where is the “they’ll know you are Christians by your love” in these verses? I mean, many of us have felt heart-palpitating attraction for another human being. Should we all be popping out our eyeballs?

Well, first, I think we need to remember that Jesus was a good teacher and a good preacher and he knew how to use something called hyperbole to get his point across. I think we can trust that the man who heals the blind is not asking his followers to blind themselves. So setting the hyperbole aside, Jesus is drawing a line here, a line that he expects his disciples, the ones he’s called close to him in order to hear this Sermon on the Mount, to pay attention to. And that line has something to do with the word “lust” in verse 28.

The Greek word here is ἐπιθυμέω (epithomeho), I desire, I lust after, I covet, which comes from the root word θυμός (thomos), meaning an outburst of passion or wrath. It means rage. So Jesus here is not talking about that little fluttering you get when someone you’re attracted to walks by. Jesus is talking about looking at someone and wanting to possess them, violently if necessary. Jesus is telling us that it is better for you to cut off your hand than to take someone else’s body without their consent. If you’re going to be my follower, Jesus tells his young disciples, you can’t let the darkness of lust, this desire-turned-into-anger, live inside you.

Okay, fair enough, Jesus. We can get behind that message. But then he moves on to a harder teaching in verses 31-32: “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

Now, what you need to know and what I’m sure you know is that the situation in Jesus’ day is different than it is today. Women were considered men’s property. And so even though women ran the household (our word economics comes from the Greek word οἰκονομία, meaning household management, rooted in women’s work), even though they managed everything in the home, they typically didn’t own anything for themselves and they certainly didn’t have a say in what happened in their marriages. A woman’s husband could divorce her for something as simple as not preparing food the way he liked, and if he divorced her, she was left bereft, essentially a widow with no hope of remarriage; or, if she did marry again, she was likely to be treated like a bargain-basement wife, easily picked up and easily disposed of.

You also need to know that the writer of the gospel of Matthew, just like the writer of the gospel of Luke, is careful in how they arrange the teachings of Jesus. Usually, teachings with a similar theme are grouped together, building on one another. If the first teaching is a warning about possessing a woman in the wrong way, this second teaching is about dismissing a woman in the wrong way. You cannot possess a woman violently and you cannot get rid of a woman just because you’re done with her. Adultery, as Jesus is teaching it, is not simply about sleeping around in your marriage or calling into question the paternity of your children, as it might have been understood in times past. Jesus here is doing something that rabbis frequently do: he’s getting at what’s behind the rule, looking for the iceberg of wisdom that lies underneath the tip sticking out, which is the text of the rule. Adultery is, as Jesus teaches us, at its heart, about how we treat one another in our relationships. That is the truth that undergirds the commandment, that holds it up.

And that’s what has me thinking about ordination paperwork and the call for pastors to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life. It’s not enough to know all the rules and follow them. No, to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life, we have to know the truth that holds up the rules. The highest ideal of Christian life when it comes to adultery is not, “I don’t cheat on my spouse;” instead, it’s “I treat the person I’m in a relationship with with the respect, honor, and consideration they deserve as a beloved child of God.” Jesus, with these two teachings, is calling us to a much higher standard than the plain text of the law, and not just pastors either. Jesus is beckoning all us Christians, married or not, in a relationship or not, onward and upward, to meet the plain meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and to go beyond it.

So, then, where does that leave us with our last four verses this morning? “Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” What does Jesus mean here? How does this fit?

Well, he is harkening back to another one of the big ten: Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. But we misunderstand that commandment all the time. We think it means that we have to substitute goshdarnit instead of that other word, otherwise we’ll be struck by lightning. But what the commandment truly means is, “Don’t do something in God’s name that God didn’t tell you to do.” Don’t say, “By God, I’m going to steal them blind,” when you know that God has nothing to do with your thievery. That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain.

And so, “in ancient times,” as Jesus says, the rule was, Hey, you can swear by God, just make sure you’re going out and doing the righteous thing and keep your vows as you do it. A fine enough law, but as we see when we read the history of the kings of Israel and the prophets, all the way up to Jesus’ time (and to ours too, if we’re honest), there were plenty of people swearing sweeping, violent vows before God and slaughtering people in order to keep them. Instead of all of that, Jesus says, don’t swear by anything at all. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything more than that is not of God. These vows that people swear in the name of the Lord, they’re just breaking the commandment, so let’s do away with vow-making altogether. I will not have my followers making vows of vengeance or violence, not when I’m about to preach about turning the other cheek. No more with “By God, I’m going to…” because, unless you’ve checked with God first, you can’t know whether God is going to approve of what you’re about to swear to.

God likely didn’t intend for women to be seen as property, as was common in Jesus’ day, to be taken when wanted and discarded when not. Surely, God didn’t intend that, when God made the man and the woman in the garden and gave the woman the spark of creation and the joy of curiosity. Surely God would not make a beautiful creation and intend for it to be taken advantage of. And so, just as you must respect those who you partner with on this earth, so you must respect God. Don’t swear in God’s name as if you speak for God. Let your yes be yes and your no be no and in all things, turn to God and listen for wisdom and discernment from the Spirit.

And that, my friends, is where we will have to leave the highest ideals of Christian life for this week, though if you want to read ahead to next week or ponder it on your own, as we’ve pondered this morning, we’ll be tackling Matthew 5:38-48 next week. But let me send you forth, from sitting at Jesus’ feet into the world that needs Jesus now more than ever, encouraging you to live up to the ideals we’ve uncovered today: hold each person you encounter as precious, neither using nor discarding them, but valuing them deeply, especially your romantic and life partners, and do the same for God, neither using God as a tool to support what you want to do nor discarding God when God becomes inconvenient, but in all things, turning to listen to the One who made you, saved you, and sustains you still.

Amen.

Dealing With Conflict

A sermon for Sunday, July 12, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose Word is with us always, thank you for gathering us together. By your Spirit, 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’m sure you’ve seen from the pictures of our garden out back at Whittier UMC and all the other flower beds and gardens around, it is a growing season, with some early fruits of that growth already showing. For the church, too, this is a growing season. We continue to be in what we call Ordinary Time, the long summer of the church, which lasts from Pentecost until Advent. Though the rhythms of our Christian story, starting in Advent, then Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, all the way to Pentecost, are important for us to live and relive each year, this Ordinary Time is the dedicated time for us to focus on our growth as followers of Jesus Christ. And I think the Christians who’ve gone before us show a lot of wisdom in making this growing season the longest season in our Christian calendar. We all need that time to unfold and stretch, to dig deeper roots and to blossom.

In this growing season, we’ll continue to focus on listening to Jesus’ teachings in the gospel of Matthew. My hope is that each of us will be able to find again the Jesus who first called us to follow him and allow these teachings of Jesus to work on us as we grow in discipleship. I think I speak for all of us when I say that the world we live in sorely needs disciples of Jesus right now.

Now, Jesus is a great teacher. Sometimes, he offers us words of comfort, sayings that build us up and remind us of the beloved place God has for each of us in God’s heart. Sometimes, he nudges us, giving us just a little bit of wisdom that we can chew on throughout the week and learn how to apply to our own lives. And sometimes, he gives us words that cut right into us and challenge us, teachings that aren’t comfortable but will help us grow to be more like him.

Our scripture this week is, I think, the last of those. I know that I feel convicted as I read these words from the Sermon on the Mount and from later on in Matthew. He is teaching us how we are to resolve conflict between one another and how to handle disagreements. It’s such practical teaching, yet it is rooted in the enduring word of God, and so, of course, it challenges us. And in case we’re tempted to dismiss what Jesus has to say, remember that Matthew is the only gospel to use the word “church.” These teachings, as preserved in Matthew, are meant to speak directly to those first Christian gatherings that we would recognize as churches. They’re aimed specifically at how we are to interact with one another.

And remember, too, that the words from Matthew 5 are a part of the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus drew out his disciples from the crowds that followed him from all around Galilee, Judea, and even beyond the Jordan, and offered them the more difficult teachings that the crowd wasn’t ready for yet. In these teachings we’re focused on today, Jesus is calling us to rise above the worldly way of doing things. So he begins by affirming that what he’s teaching is rooted in the word of God, and that the word of God is fulfilled in him. Just Isaiah 55 and Psalm 65 remind us that the word of God goes out into the world and does not return empty, Jesus affirms that the law and the prophets aren’t abolished, but made complete in what he’s teaching. Jesus understands the spirit behind the commandments and calls us to understand them more fully.

He comes out strong with his first teaching of the fullness of the law. You have heard it said, “You shall not murder,” but Jesus tells us that not murdering is the low bar to jump over. If you are angry with a sibling in Christ or if you insult a sibling in Christ, you’ll have to answer to judgement just the same as if you murder. Jesus takes conflict seriously. So seriously, in fact, that before you can give your offering to God, you are to resolve any dispute you have with your siblings in Christ. That has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Before I can connect fully to God, I must restore my connections with my family in Christ. How many of us would need to take a week or two off of church if we followed this teaching of Jesus? Or how quickly would we come to the table and talk to one another if we truly believed Jesus’ teaching that before we can come to God, we must make things right with one another?

Now, I don’t mean to offer this as a stumbling block to any of us. As Paul says in Romans 8, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This doesn’t mean that we won’t ever give into the temptation unresolved anger with one another, but it means that the Spirit is constantly working in us, calling us toward repentance and reconciliation. Being angry or having a fight with a sibling in Christ doesn’t mean that we’re kicked out of the church and separated from God. It means that the Spirit will always be with us, guiding us toward what we need to do in order to restore our relationships with one another.

In our second teaching today, from Matthew 18, Jesus gives us the blueprint for how we are to handle conflict with one another. First, we are to go directly to the person who has wronged us, who has sinned against us, to use Jesus’ language, and explain to them how they have wronged us, remembering always that this person is just as beloved in the eyes of God as we ourselves are. If that person is able to hear you and begin that rhythm of repentance we talked about a few weeks ago, the matter is resolved. You’re good. If they don’t hear you, though, it’s time to bring in a few others from the church and try again. It might be that having witnesses will encourage the person who has wronged you to listen to you and take your words more seriously.

Again, the goal isn’t to gang up on someone or to bully them into doing what you want. The goal is correction, knowing the belovedness of the other, repentance, and the restoration of relationship between siblings in Christ. If they don’t hear you then, bring the matter to the whole church. If the whole church isn’t able to convince them of the harm they’ve done, you’ve done all you can. It’s up to the Holy Spirit to work on that person’s heart until they’re able to realize what they’ve done and to turn away from the harm they’ve caused.

Now, here’s the piece that we miss in this conversation. It’s something that was so clear to Jesus and his disciples at the time that it went without saying, but we’ve forgotten it over time. In Jewish practice, forgiveness is always tied to repentance and restitution. When Peter says to Jesus, “How often do I have to forgive?” and Jesus says, “Seventy times seven,” meaning, “As many times as it takes,” Peter is referring to forgiving someone who’s repented and made the right steps toward making things better. For Jesus and Peter, it goes without saying that someone asking for forgiveness would have done the work needed to make things right. It’s in that case, when someone has repented and done all they can to make up for the harm they caused, when Jesus calls us to forgive.

What difficult words Jesus has for us in these teachings! When we have wronged somebody, we are called to the hard, hard work of understanding what we’ve done wrong, truly apologizing for it, doing the best we can to make it right, and committing to not doing that again. If someone has wronged us, we are called to do hard work of seeing that person as beloved and calling them to repentance. We cannot ignore the cracks in our fellowship that come with disputes. We must resolve them.

And we are to practice this in our churches because it’s even harder to this out in the rest of the world. As Christians, we’re called to always be thoughtful about what we’re doing and what we’ve done, always ready to repent when we learn that we’ve done something harmful and always ready to learn a better way. In theory, this way of resolving conflict should come naturally to us, though in many churches, we’re out of practice. But this kind of reflection and humility isn’t taught in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, the strongest argument or loudest voice or most powerful person wins in any conflict, without any care for who is hurt in the process.

But my friends, if we follow Jesus, we can’t be like the rest of the world.

And so, this week, I invite you to practice what Jesus teaches us, even if you’re uncomfortable doing it at first. If you come into conflict with someone, remember that they are a beloved child of God, just as you are, and try to resolve the conflict as soon as you can, one-on-one. We don’t often take that first step, but it usually does the trick. And if it doesn’t, reach out for help. We’re never alone when we’re trying to make things right. If we take this step, we can be peacemakers. And if we’re peacemakers, Jesus tells us, we’re blessed.

Go and be blessed this week, my friends. Amen.

God Has Blessed America

A sermon for Sunday, July 5, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose love dwells within all creation, 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.

I will ask your forgiveness at the beginning of this sermon, because I will speak first as a citizen of the United States and not first as a Christian. I have to admit, I’ve cried more than once this week singing along with “America the Beautiful.” They have been deep, cleansing tears, tears that come from a place of love and longing. This hymn has grown dearer to me throughout each of my nearly 32 years as a citizen of these United States of America. In recent years, the choruses of each verse have become the prayer of my heart for my country. “America! America! God mend thine every flaw… May God thy gold refine… God shed His grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!”

God, I love the land I live on. It is gorgeous here. What astounding beauty our country is built upon! My soul is stirred by our mountains and soothed by our oceans. This land is full of soaring trees and rolling plains, rushing rivers and creek beds full of life. I am astonished by our cities and I feel at home in our towns. I am amazed and grateful that this is my home.

Yesterday, we celebrated Independence Day, and I had been longing for the promise of that day, the promise of freedom, for a long time. I long for a time when we truly “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Knowing “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

And yet, these former colonies have continued to struggle, even today, to live up to the ideals presented in the Declaration of Independence, whose signing we celebrated yesterday. We have struggled to be the America that we dream of being, the America that our hymns sing about. We have struggled to form a government that secures life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. We have the vision of liberty and justice for all, but that vision remains out of reach.

In a way, our struggle to be America is much like our individual struggle to be Christians, to be as Christ-like as we long to be. We are like Paul in our epistle reading from Romans this morning. We know what is good and yet it is not the good we want to do but the evil we do not want to do that we do.

Still, Jesus calls our struggle blessed. He says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Our hearts are in the right place. I truly believe that. I believe that each of you, listening this morning, is one of the ones that Jesus calls blessed here. I believe that there are many in the United States who are blessed in this way. We hunger, we thirst for the goodness of God to be spread all around us, throughout this land that we love and within all of the people who live here with us. I do believe our founders hear the prophetic cry of freedom and took to revolution because of it.

And I do believe that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.

But I also know that we’re not there yet.

And that’s what makes this moment in the United States such a frustrating and frightening time. We are on the precipice of something more like the kingdom of God. We’ve gone through an apocalypse, and I don’t mean to throw that word around lightly. Apocalypse comes the Greek word meaning uncover. I think a great uncovering has happened for many of us in the United States in the past few months. We have seen how vulnerable so many in our country are in times of sickness and unemployment. We have seen how the deep hurts of our history have followed us to today, from slaughter of people who the Declaration of Independence called “merciless Indian savages” to the compromise of counting Black enslaved people as three-fifths of a human. We are seeing, maybe more clearly than we have ever have before, how deep our hunger and thirst for righteousness is, and how much work is ahead of us before we’ll be filled.

But I trust that we will be filled. I trust Jesus when he tells us that the poor in spirit, the lost and downtrodden, are blessed with the kingdom of heaven. I trust Jesus when he tells us that those who mourn will be comforted, that the meek are blessed, that the merciful are blessed, that the pure in heart will see God, that peacemakers, the ones who seek the true, full peace of God, which is not an absence of tension but the presence of justice, that peacemakers will be called children of God.

My friends, my fellow children of God, I believe that we are blessed with these blessings Jesus gives out in the Sermon on the Mount, but I think we all know that these are uncomfortable blessings. They are the uncomfortable blessings for those who know what goodness is but find themselves unable to do all that goodness asks of us. They are the blessings of those who grow through struggling toward something better, toward a world that looks more like the kingdom of heaven. May we all keep in our hearts the vision of what America can be as we go through these coming months. May we all count these uncomfortable blessings as our own, knowing that God is working good in us and through us with these blessings.

I invite you to let the words of Langston Hughes in Let America Be America Again work on you this day. He casts for us a vision of what America can be, but is not yet. So let me send you to his words with this benediction, “A non-traditional Blessing,” popularly adapted from a prayer written by Sister Anna Rose Ruhland:

My friends, may God bless each of us and all of us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, hunger, and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

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

Repentance

A sermon for Sunday, June 28, 2020

Would you pray with me?  

God who calls us all to repentance and the wholeness found only in you, 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 begin the sermon, I want to take a moment, for the people who just watch the sermon, to let everyone know that due to the governor’s extension of phase 2, we won’t be meeting for in-person indoor worship until July 19th at the earliest. With cases on the rise in our part of the state, we’re following the bishop’s recommendation on this. I know that many of us are impatient to get back together, but the unfortunate reality is that gathering for indoor worship is one of the riskiest things that we can do and I don’t want to take the chance until the risk level is much lower.  

That said, we are doing in-person midweek worship in the fellowship hall on Wednesdays at 6pm, since that’s usually a smaller gathering. If you’d like more information about that, let me know. And if you are interested in trying outdoor worship, I’m open to seeing what we can do. We’ll keep offering online worship like this regardless until there’s a vaccine and it’s safe for all to come back to worship, so no matter what, you’ll have some opportunity to gather with us.  

In the meantime, I’d love it if we could gather with others to go through the full worship services we’ve been posting and create some house churches during this time. You’ll still need to be careful and maintain physical distancing, but even gathering with a few others can help us maintain that sense of community that we’ve been missing.  

That said, we as Whittier United Methodist Church are still out here being the church. Grace House is still operating, Gloria’s got two outreach fundraisers going on at her shop. Kay and Lynn have been helping her sanitize donations as they come in and Anthony even built her a plexiglass shield for the cash register. As I’m recording this on Thursday, Tony and Chris are working in the garden and Rita’s mowing the lawn.

Photo by Chris Espelage

Tesi and Alice Ann have been taking care of our roses and helping out in the garden too. Peggy and Eilene stopped by the church to pick up their Upper Rooms and Sam and Tonia have been coming to midweek worship. Carrol’s been going to Sunday School with Bryson City UMC and came to midweek worship, and we’ve even had a visitor stop by our online midweek worship—my friend Isaac from high school. Kathy Wiggins has been popping in to midweek worship and virtual coffee hour to say hello and offer some kindness and grace. Cathy Dunlap has been keeping up with our finances and we’re truly grateful for all the work she’s been doing. Pam Cope has been making sure we have all the supplies we need for reopening. Cozette called me the other day to let me know how she’s been doing—she’s one of the ones without internet that I’ve been sending sermons to. I’ve heard from many of you, like Sarah Malpass, that you’re checking in with one another and I’m glad that you’re still building whatever community you can in this time. As much as we all miss worshipping together in our sanctuary, we’re doing a pretty good job of proving the old axiom, the church is not the building.  

And so, let’s turn our attention to someone who never went to worship in a church building: Jesus. We pick up with his story in the gospel of Matthew right where we left off. He’s just come through his time of temptation in the desert and now, he’s beginning his ministry. Now, we don’t live in first-century Judea, so all these place names mean nothing to us. It’s important to Matthew’s gospel, though, and so let’s take a minute to learn the places.  

From Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey, by Mark Allan Powell.

Galilee is up here in the north of Judea. This is where Nazareth is, about halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea, and here’s where Capernaum is, up at the top of the Sea of Galilee. Galilee is surrounded by Phoenicia to the north (where we get phonics from), Syria and Decapolis on the other side of the Jordan River, and Samaria, where the Samaritans live, to the South. This is why we have so many stories about Jesus interacting with Samaritans: Anytime he goes to Jerusalem from Galilee, he’s got to cross through Samaria.  

Now, John was baptizing way down here, in the Jordan down by Jericho near Jerusalem. The wilderness that John was living in and that Jesus went up into is down here in the southern part of Judea. That’s why it says that Jesus withdrew to Galilee when John was arrested. Tensions are high down near Jerusalem, with the arrest of John the Baptist. Jesus starts his ministry away from that mess.  

See, John had been challenging the religious leaders in Jerusalem and Herod, the ruler in the land. The leaders were nervous. There could be riots or even a full-scale revolt against Rome. It had happened before. And we hear people asking John if he’s the Messiah who’s to come, if he’s the one who’s going to start a new revolt, a new war, and overthrow Rome. It is both a spiritual and political act for Jesus to get baptized by John and for John to proclaim that Jesus is the one who he’s been preparing the way for. The people are looking for someone to bring change to their lives. They thought that maybe it was John, but John says it was Jesus.  

Jesus diffuses that situation by leaving the area around Jerusalem, but he doesn’t lay down the cause. He begins preaching just what John did: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  

I want to return to this idea of repentance in a minute, but let’s see what he does next. Since he’s in Capernaum, he’s right by the Sea of Galilee and on the lake, he sees some fishermen: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and James and his brother John, the sons of Zebedee. We won’t get a full list of the twelve disciples yet, but we hear the story of these four being called. They’re fishermen but Jesus wants to make them fishers of men. What I want you to hear in that is that when you decide to follow Jesus, you don’t give up everything of who you are. In your life before Jesus, you’ve built up skills and hopes and desires and in many cases, those are good and given by God. Peter, Andrew, James, and John all know how to bring in fish. Jesus wants them to use their skills to bring in people.  

And even though his home is in Capernaum, Jesus travels throughout Galilee, preaching the good news of repentance and the coming kingdom and healing people: people with all sorts of sicknesses, even demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cures them. Great crowds follow him, some from Galilee, some from the Decapolis, which is right nearby, but some all the way from Jerusalem and other places in Judea, and some from the lands across the Jordan.

From Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey, by Mark Allan Powell.

Jesus left the movement near Jerusalem, but the movement came to hear him and to be healed by him, and so, they followed him.  

I think the movement and progression that we see here is key. John is down by Jericho and Jerusalem, down by Israel’s capital, testifying to the change that needs to happen in Israel and stirring up trouble doing it. People start to get hopeful. The people in power are noticing them. Maybe things will change. 

But then John gets arrested and the best person to take over the movement doesn’t push things in Jerusalem but heads back out to the countryside. The people still want change, and the ones who believe that Jesus can bring it are willing to go away from the places of power in order to seek it.  

And Jesus chooses not to do what John did, at least not yet. Jesus chooses to leave the stirring up for later. For now, at the beginning of his ministry, he focuses on preaching and healing.  

Now, this is the Jesus that I fell in love with. This Jesus, who has heard the cry of the people around him, who went to be baptized by John because he knew that things had to change. This Jesus, who chooses not to try to take power from political authorities but instead turns to teaching and healing. This Jesus, who knows that change has to happen at every level and everywhere, otherwise change will not last. This Jesus, who has such compassion for the people he encounters and such passion for the well-being of the people he hasn’t met yet.  

And so this wonderful, compassionate Jesus, starts off by telling us to repent. Now, I know repentance is a touchy subject for many of us, because we have only ever had repentance forced on us, and the repentance forced on us was filled with shame and guilt. But repentance is a part of our lives as Christians and it’s time that we reclaim it. So much of our healing and learning and growth begins with repentance, and that’s, I think, why Jesus starts his ministry with the same message as John.  

Repentance, when it’s done right, is a healthy thing, even if it’s painful sometimes. Repentance means understanding that you have done something harmful, feeling true regret and sadness because of that harm, and deciding to turn away from that harm. Repentance is something we must do over an over again in our lives as we understand God, ourselves, and others better. It’s a key part of what we Methodists call sanctification, becoming more holy, becoming more like Christ. As we live and move and breathe in this world, we’re impacted by the harmful things in it, many times through no fault of our own. Repentance is our way of clearing away harm, so that we can grow ever more like the one who brings healing instead of harm: Jesus.  

As we become used to a rhythm of repentance, of looking at ourselves, seeing what is harmful, and choosing to no longer do harm, we become better followers of Jesus. We become more humble, quicker to listen and learn, and more willing to offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God and to others through acts of service and kindness. We will, eventually, become more willing to do everything we can, including speaking out and taking action, when harm is done to others. I truly think our growth as disciples of Jesus Christ who long to be a part of this world’s transformation into something more like the kingdom of heaven begins in a rhythm of repentance. It’s why repentance and healing are so closely tied in Jesus’ ministry here in Galilee and beyond.  

Now, there’s much within ourselves that this rhythm of repentance can heal and in particular, we see right now that our broken racial relations here in the US are in need of healing. This, of course, happens at all levels, but we know that it must happen in our hearts too. Understanding the harm that we white people do to people of color, even without knowing we do it, is our first step in repentance. If we fully understand, we will feel that regret and sadness that will drive us to turn away from the harm we do. It’s not a one-time act of repentance. It is a daily rhythm as we work to heal the harm that white supremacy has done. In order to help us with that, I’ll be starting a small group that will meet here at the church to help us understand our role in the healing that’s needed. If you’re interested in starting this rhythm of repentance with me, let me know.  

Of course, there are more than just broken racial relations to repent of and to work on healing. We all have interpersonal broken relationships that could be healed by the rhythm of repentance. We have other biases, too, that we could learn to examine and repent of. The Spirit works within us when we practice repentance. The Spirit prods us into new understandings, comforts us in our sorrow, and strengthens us as we resolve to do differently. There’s a reason that the word spirit is connected to the word breath: the Spirit is constantly working within us, just as our breath is. If we work at it, if we find ourselves caught up in the healing rhythm of repentance, we’ll find this way of healing as natural to us as breath. It’s the work of a lifetime, but I believe that we can do it.  

Friends, we have covered a lot of ground today, from Jericho to Capernaum. We’ve followed Jesus from temptation to repentance and we trust that Jesus offers us healing too in this time. Don’t be scared of what Jesus has to teach us; after all, he calls you too, because the goodness inside you, the skills you already have, are precious and wonderful and necessary for the kingdom. Hear his words and let them work in you this week: Repent, for a light has dawned on us and the kingdom of heaven and all its goodness has drawn near.  

Amen. 

In the Desert

A sermon for Sunday, June 21, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who knows our every temptation, thank you for gathering us together in this moment. 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.

On Friday, our country celebrated Juneteenth. This year marked the 115th anniversary of June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved people in the South, living in Texas, received word of the Emancipation Proclamation and the freedom it granted them. It’s a holiday that I myself didn’t learn about until a few years ago and it brought joy to my heart to see the day so widely recognized. It felt like the world is breaking open, in the best possible way.

I say “breaking open” because, for many of us, that’s what’s happening. The world is breaking open and as the cracks widen, we’re beginning to see things we haven’t seen before. Sometimes, the breaking open of things is beautiful, like when you crack a geode open to see the gems inside.

Other times, it’s like tearing open a wall in an old house to find deadly mold growing everywhere. It’s frightening. It’s worrying. And it requires action. But in the midst of this breaking open, there’s still cause to give thanks. After all, once we know about the mold, we can do something about it.

We have a similar experience when we break open scripture. Some passages are exciting, giving us something bright and new to admire and ponder and receive joy from. But some passages aren’t, like our reading from Genesis today. Abraham banishes his first son, Ishmael, and Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, into the desert. This isn’t something we want to look at. This isn’t something we want to pay attention to. We want to hear the story of Abraham looking up at the stars and receiving God’s promise. We want to hear the story of Sarah laughing at the idea of having a child in her old age. We want to think about God’s faithfulness, which overcomes all obstacles.

But scripture doesn’t let us look away from Ishmael and Hagar in the desert. We can’t look away because God doesn’t look away. God sees Hagar and Ishmael in the desert. He sees this enslaved woman and her child, the child her master put within her, and God is faithful to her too. In the psalm, we hear echoes of Hagar and we are again reminded that we can’t look away from Abraham’s sin and the consequences of his actions, because God sees those in sorrow and desperation. God hears them and answers them. If we are striving to be more like Jesus, more like the Son of God, we have to do as God does. We have to look where God looks, even if we don’t want to.

With this backdrop in mind, let’s turn our attention to someone else in the desert: Jesus. We read the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert back on the first Sunday of March, on the first Sunday of Lent. That feels like at least three years ago, though, so here’s a quick summary, in case you skipped the scripture videos:

• Jesus gets baptized by John the Baptizer.

• He’s led up into the wilderness by the Spirit and fasts for 40 days.

• The tempter tempts him with bread, angels, and power.

• Jesus beats the tempter and angels show up to wait on him.

And we love this story, right? We love this righteous, brilliant, strong Jesus, armed with scripture and standing up to the devil. It’s clear who’s wrong and who’s right. None of that complicated stuff that we have with the Abraham-Hagar-Ishmael mess.

It might be enough to know that Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, was tempted and beat the temptation. That’s all that the gospel of Mark says. Mark 1:12 and 13 read, “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” and that’s it. Jesus is tempted, just like us, but Jesus can beat it, and because we are united with Jesus, as Paul reminds us in Romans, we can beat it too. Bada-bing, bada-boom, sermon done. But Matthew and Luke seem to think that what Jesus was tempted with matters, because they both tell a much fuller story, so let’s look at those temptations.

First, Matthew makes a point to say that Jesus was famished, and so that would explain why the tempter would offer up bread first. “If you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread,” the tempter says, and Jesus says, “One does not live by bread alone but by every word that come from the mouth of God.”

It’s a quippy response, but it’s also a resonant one. The tempter wants Jesus to offer some proof that he’s the son of God and offers up an easy opportunity: just turn some stones into bread. You’re hungry. You may as well. Meet your own needs and show off your power. But Jesus doesn’t need that bread to prove to anyone that he’s the son of God: he’s just heard for himself that he is God’s beloved son, from God’s mouth to his ears at his baptism. And that knowledge is enough to fill him up. He’s got God’s words. He doesn’t need anything else. The world will scream its needs at you, as I’m sure Jesus’ belly screamed at him, but the world’s needs don’t change who you are. You are a beloved child of God.

Next, it’s a trip to the temple mount in Jerusalem, the pinnacle of the temple. Again, the tempter says, “If you are the Son of God,” but this time, there’s a new way for Jesus to prove himself, not to the tempter, but to everyone. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.” Everyone will see the angels as they come down to save you. Everyone in Jerusalem will know who you are. Start your ministry off with a miracle, Jesus. Get their attention right from the beginning.

And goodness, isn’t that tempting? What would we give if we could get the attention of the world, get their ears, and let them know the transforming love of Jesus? And in this scenario, it costs nothing! God has already promised to bear us up—the tempter even points to scripture to make the point. All Jesus has to do is jump, and he’ll be given a megaphone that no one can ignore. For that kind of benefit, I have to admit, I would hesitate on that ledge.

Jesus, as always, is better than me, and he reiterates his first point and answers scripture with scripture. Again, God has already answered the question. Jesus is God’s son. Jesus doesn’t need to test it. The saying is true and worthy of all acceptance. The world’s attention doesn’t change who you are. You are a beloved child of God.

The tempter saves the best for last, and, though Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts differ on the order of temptations, I like Matthew’s better. Atop a very high mountain, the tempter shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor and promises them to Jesus. The tempter, essentially, promises to do Jesus’ job for him. Because we know that at the end of all things, at the name of Jesus every head will bow. In the end, the astounding, unfathomable love of God reigns over all the earth. In this moment, the tempter offers Jesus the easy way out. No long ministry. No suffering. You can skip over all the pain and worry and struggle and strife.

Now, notice what happened this time. No more doubting whether or not Jesus is the son of God. This time, the tempter wants Jesus to doubt God. Doesn’t matter if you’re the beloved son of God if there’s someone out there more powerful than God.

And that’s the lie. That’s the lie Jesus has been wrestling with this whole time. The lie is that there is somehow another way besides God’s way, that there is somehow an easier way than God’s way, that there is somehow a better way than God’s way.

Don’t we all want to believe that? Aren’t we all tempted by that? There has to be an easier way than this, we tell ourselves. There has to be some way where we can both follow God and rest comfortably all our days. Isn’t that what Psalm 23 tells us?

And isn’t that what we all long for right now? There must be some way to both hear the suffering of Hagar and honor the legacy of Abraham. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, there must be some way to hear and respond to the suffering of Black people in these United States without confronting and continuing to confront how white people benefited from their suffering. In these times of tumult, doesn’t God promise us comfort?

How tempting it is to bow to the comfort of white supremacy instead of following God’s way.

But, if we are following Jesus, we can’t help but love and worship God and God alone. And God, as scripture tells us over and over again, from Genesis to the psalms to the gospels to Revelation, hears the cry of the suffering and enslaved. God has always been on the side of the oppressed, even if we haven’t.

And hear me when I say this: even if you haven’t always been on the side of the oppressed, you are still a beloved child of God. Abraham still inherited the promise, even though he dismissed Hagar. No matter what the devil says, you are loved, deeply and wholly, and nothing in this world can change that. But we must learn from the example of Abraham. He and Sarah doubted that God would be able to fulfill God’s promise, and so Sarah told Abraham to impregnate Hagar, whether Hagar wanted it or not, in order to make God’s promise happen. Then, when God was faithful, as God has always promised to be, Sarah dismissed Hagar and Ishmael. She banished the reminder of her doubt and her shame. How often have we done the same.

My ancestors did not trust that God would provide enough for us all. They chose to enslave or benefit from the enslavement of people stolen from their homes in Africa, transported in horrifying conditions across the Atlantic, and made to work without pay or hope of freedom, in harsh conditions, so that white people could remain comfortable. And even when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, it took two and a half years for the news of their freedom to reach enslaved people in Texas on June 19th, 1865. The war would have to be won before enslaved people in parts of Maryland and Virginia were completely and finally freed. And even after that, my ancestors would continue to benefit from and participate in laws and systems designed to keep freed Black people down.

Believe me, I want to bow down to the tempter. I want there to be an easy way to fix this. I don’t want pain, nor do I want to cause others pain. But my friends, there is no way but God’s way. There is no easy way. We have to look at our history, our past and our present, as God sees it, which is through the eyes of the oppressed. As tempting as it is, we white people have to go through the pain of this moment and many other moments besides. After this moment, there must still be a reckoning for our Indigenous, Latinx, migrant, and poor neighbors. This moment is not our last moment of pain.

But my friends, we must follow the example of Jesus. We must say that there is no way other than God’s way. We must trust that we are God’s beloved children, because God has already spoken it, and that God will not abandon us as we do this work, because God has spoken that too. If we reject the easy path, the tempter’s path, and if we choose to confront the pain rather than to let it pass us by, God has promised to be with us. And angels will be with us. Angels like James Weldon Johnson, Sojourner Truth, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, Marsha P. Johnson, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, James Cone, Zora Neale Hurston, Katie Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, Renita Weems, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, Michelle Alexander, Angie Thomas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibrahim Kendi. Angels like the Charleston 9: Rev. Dr. Clem Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Myra Thompson, Depayne Middelton-Doctor, and Rev. Daniel Simmons. If we follow the way of Jesus, we will be surrounded by these saints and martyrs, these faithful beloved of God, and we will find God’s way forward, even though it may be difficult for us.

My friends, beloved children of God, we are in the desert, in the middle of temptation. Let us live the lives Christ calls us to live.

Amen.

Are You the One?

A sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God, our burden is heavy, but you have promised us a light yoke. Draw us together in this moment and draw us to you. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Church, I confess, I was not prepared for this. I was not prepared for this pandemic. I was not prepared for this moment in our nation’s history. On top of all of this, I was not prepared for preaching this summer.

This week, I erased the white board in my office, with all of the worship planning I had done for January to July. I erased the weekend off for my friend’s wedding, now postponed until the fall. I erased the next weekend, the half marathon in DC. I erased the dates for General Conference, which will now happen in 2021, and the dates for Annual Conference, which will be condensed into one day in the fall. I erased my plans for digging into Genesis texts over these next few weeks. The world is a different place than it was when I planned these months of worship, when June seemed so far away. I’m in a different place that I was in January. The slate needed to be cleaned.

But erasing that board left me with a blank slate and I’ve been thinking all week about how to fill it. I’m a lectionary preacher, as you know, which means that I tend to follow the church calendar and the schedule of texts known as the Revised Common Lectionary. I do this because the lectionary holds the wisdom of centuries and sometimes, when I don’t know what to say, the lectionary brings before me the right text for such a time as this. But as I looked over the lectionary texts for this summer and into the fall, this season we know as ordinary time, in these days that are anything but ordinary, I found myself struggling. While there were texts that appealed, they jumped between testaments and genres and timelines. I struggled to make order out of the chaos, and what little order I could make left my soul tired. I needed something else.

What I’ve figured out over this past week is that what I need is Jesus. That’s what rang through my spirit as I listened to Ahnnalise’s sermon last week. I need Jesus. I need to hear from the one who went to the cross to save me and the one who abides with us all still, the one who walked through the chaos of his day offering healing and hope, challenge and comfort. I need a good, long season sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to all he has to say.

Because I have the same question that John the Baptizer had in the passage that Ahnnalise preached from. “Are you the one? Are you the one we’ve been waiting for? Or is there another?”

Or, let’s put it another way. Over and over again, we call Jesus our savior. Is he the one who can save us again now?

It’s genuinely a question. Can Jesus save us now? Does Jesus have anything to say for the world we live in now? Is he the Messiah, the Savior, we’ve all been waiting on, to get us through these hard times?

I’ve sat with the Baptizer’s question all week. It could be that there’s someone else that we should be listening and looking to right now, someone who builds off of what Jesus says and speaks to our current moment. It could be that we should turn to the prophets or to Paul or to the psalms. There are other voices to hear in our time. I’ve searched around and listened and done my best to find some place to point us toward.

And yet, I keep coming back to Jesus. Jesus, whose every sentence in the Sermon on the Mount challenges our hearts. Jesus, who speaks in parables that return new wisdom each time we read them. Jesus, who pours healing from his lips from the instant he begins preaching. Jesus, who can’t help but bring good news to the poor. Jesus, a savior born into a world longing for a Messiah, a world full of people crying out for salvation from oppression. Yes, I think Jesus is the one we’ve been waiting on.

See, many of us today miss the point of John’s question, because we don’t live in first-century Roman-occupied Palestine. But what I think we’ve seen over the past few months is that our world has more in common with Jesus’ than we thought before. Sickness is all around us, and we fear it. Many physicians have been working as hard as they can, but it is hard to find healing in the land.

And the people are restless, just as they were in Jesus’ day. In Jesus’ day, Rome ruled, but Rome was not just. Rome enforced the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, by killing anyone who stood up to them and taxing everyone else deeper into poverty. Weapons and wealth ran the world in Jesus’ day, and the religious authorities knew it. While the poor and the sick languished under Roman rule, they had to pay another tax at the temple, to get right with God. And God have pity on anyone who tried to disrupt Rome or the Temple.

Because less than a hundred years before Jesus, a Roman general named Pompey laid siege to Jerusalem, desecrated the Temple, and installed Roman rule over Judea. No rebellions, no war. Just taxes and poverty, sickness and violence. And so you have a people longing, crying out for freedom, crying out for a messiah, crying out for a savior, someone who stop the tyranny and the deaths of the police state they were living under.

See, that’s why John the Baptizer was arrested. Because he challenged Herod, Rome’s puppet governor, and he challenged the religious elite. He started stirring things up. He made people believe that the world didn’t have to be the way it was. He gave people hope. And now, he’s turning to Jesus, to see if Jesus can make good on his promise of hope.

And Jesus says yes. Jesus says, “Look what I’m doing! See what is happening! John, if you can’t believe that I am the one, I don’t know what to tell you!

“But… I’m not exactly the one you think I am. I am here for those who are heavy burdened. I am here for those who are weighted down. I am here for those who don’t know where else to go. I love them, with all my being. Come to me, you who are weary, and I will give you rest.”

See, John, John didn’t promise rest. John didn’t speak with peace on his mind. John and Judas and all the disciples, they wanted some who could rise up against Rome. They wanted someone who could win. They wanted someone who could stand toe to toe with the powers of this world. But Jesus… Jesus is going to be someone different. Jesus has different ideas. Jesus doesn’t just want to upend the world we live in and free us from the sin in it, Jesus wants to bring about the reign of God, a new creation. All things made new. I think that if we walk with Jesus for these next few months, if we listen to what he has to say, I think we’ll be different too. Because I think now, more than ever, we need our savior.

In the middle of the pain we’re all living through, we need Jesus.

In the middle of all of the disunity and upending this world has to offer, we need Jesus.

In the middle of the hate and anger and vitriol that we have learned to swim in each and every day, we need Jesus.

Honestly? You can have everything else.

Just give me Jesus.

Just give me my savior.

Amen.

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.

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.

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.