Abundance: A Sermon on John 10:11-18

Right now, my home state of California is in its fourth year of a historically devastating drought. One recent study of tree rings indicates this may be the driest period in the last twelve-hundred years. The good news, says Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of California’s State Water Control Board, is that no one denies the problem anymore. In fact, on April 1st, governor Jerry Brown instituted California’s first ever mandatory water restrictions, requiring cities and towns to cut back water usage by twenty-five percent. It’s a start, but experts agree California still has a long way to go.

What’s amazing about this is not the scope of the current problem, but that the problem had never been addressed before. We have this image of California, California has this image of itself, as a lush paradise where anything is possible, where oranges flourish in the warm Pacific sun and the mild Mediterranean climate means a year-round harvest season. The problem with this vision is it’s simply not true. Here’s the thing about California, it’s an arid state. The San Joaquin Valley, the heart of our entire nation’s agricultural production, is high desert. The food that we eat travels hundreds of miles to reach us, nourished by water that traveled hundreds of miles to reach those crops, through a vast system of canals and reservoirs. In addition to agriculture, the megalopolis of southern California, depending on how you define it, is home to between eight and ten percent of the entire US population. That’s a lot of people and produce to support in a desert.

Lest you think I am picking unfairly on my home state, or that problems like this are huge and far away, we in Michigan are not immune to our own issues of consumption and environmental destruction. Last summer the city of Toledo was without water for several days after the buildup of algae in Lake Erie, fed by the runoff of phosphorus from farms and cattle feedlots, contaminated the city’s drinking water. Even closer to home, Enbridge only just finished clean-up of the oil spill in the Kalamazoo River, an incident which left questions about the state of the rest of the pipelines that run through the state, including under Lake Michigan.

The fact of the matter is we as a species are not living within our means on this planet. I try not to bring my own politics into the pulpit, but this is not a political statement, is a categorical fact. And a fact that has profound implications for how we understand God.

Our Gospel reading for today is Jesus familiar words about how he is the good shepherd. The good shepherd, says Jesus, lays down his life for his sheep. This is in contrast to the hired hand, who does not own the sheep, who has no loyalty to the sheep, the hired hand will run away when the sheep are in danger. This is because the hired hand does not care for the sheep. But the good shepherd stays with the sheep, cares for the sheep. And the sheep, in return, know the good shepherd, follow the good shepherd for the sheep know his voice.

This in and of itself is good news for us, is comforting news for us, that Jesus, unlike all the powers of this world that do not love us, that do not care for us, that are invested in nothing but their own gain, unlike those powers, Jesus will never leave us. Jesus is with us, and for us, and is constantly working to bring us deeper into relationship with him. But more than that, this good shepherd discourse talks about what life with the good shepherd is like. The verses before this morning’s passage talk about the difference between the good shepherd and thieves. In John chapter ten, verse ten Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, I came so that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”

I came so that they might have life, and have it abundantly. Abundance, that’s what Jesus wants for us, that’s what Jesus lived and died and rose again to give us. Abundant life, full life, a life free of the powers of those who think only of themselves, only of their own gain, those who seek to steal or kill or destroy, or those not invested enough in our well-being that they run away and hide when such trouble comes calling. But abundance is not excess. In fact, abundance is in some ways the opposite of excess. Excess, living beyond our means, living in a way that is not sustainable, robs us of the abundant life which Jesus wants for us. When we do not live within the constrains of this good earth, when we take advantage of our planet and take more than our share, when we become the thieves who steal and kill and destroy, when we entrust ourselves to hired hands who do not truly care for us, we entrap ourselves in a system of dependence that is not freeing, it is not life-giving, and it is not abundance.

But, Jesus says, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd cares for the sheep. The good shepherd never leaves the sheep, even when they wander off. We have story after story, parable after parable, of how Jesus goes after the sheep, brings the sheep back in the fold, returns the sheep to the safety of the flock. The good news is no matter how far we stray, Jesus the good shepherd urges us home.

More than that, Jesus said in this reading this morning, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” Jesus here is talking about those outside the people of Israel, outside of those who heard the teaching he was giving, but I think it tells us something important about the message Jesus had. It says that this message is one) bigger than we can imagine, and two) constantly expanding and finding new ways to be in the world so that, as Jesus promised, “There will be one flock, one shepherd” and all will be drawn into God’s cosmic embrace.

If we apply the creativity of Jesus message to the problems facing our planet, we discover that Jesus’ constantly expanding message of salvation is also true for how we live together well on this good creation which we have been given. To jump back to where this sermon started, the conversations about how to respond to California’s water crisis are coming up with surprising and life-giving solutions. A project in Orange County has come up with a way of recycling wastewater. By running it through a series of filters and processes the end product is actually cleaner than most tap water, for a fraction of the cost of importing it from other parts of the country. There are also discussion of the creation of large-scale desalination plants to render water from the Pacific Ocean potable for drinking and agricultural usage. Such projects have always been unworkable in the past due to the large amount of energy they require. But modern technology has learned to harness what is one of California’s greatest natural resources, it’s sunshine, into a steady and reliable clean energy, that could power new ways of supplying one of it’s least, fresh water.

These are big scale solutions, but there are also smaller scale solutions that we can be a part of, that we are already a part of. At Trinity we’ve already switched some of our light bulbs to low-energy usage bulbs. We use paper cups at coffee hour instead of Styrofoam. We support a garden so that more food is produced right here in our community and doesn’t have to travel from California or elsewhere. These are small steps, but they are steps, ways in which we, right here, right now, in this place, are living into God’s vision of abundance.

The earth has enough, enough water, enough food, enough fresh air and natural wonder, for us to live in abundance. And we have been gifted with incredible abilities to think and to ponder, to learn and to create. That too is a gift from our creator. Things that were once not possible, to gain energy from the sun, to drink from the ocean, to grow plants in ways that are not only sustainable for our environment but that produce yields more than ever before, enough to feed all who hunger, all of that is proof of the ways in which God is working in a new way through us, is bringing the world closer into God’s heart through our hands, through our minds. The hard part, the part that takes courage, is letting go of the old ways of fear and our need for independence, so that we can live into the interdependence which God has created us for. But the promise we have is that Jesus, our Good Shepherd, came so that we may have life, and have it abundantly. And Jesus our Good Shepherd will not stop coming until we, all of us, put aside our ways of thieving and running and fear and are drawn into the promise of abundance.

This morning during our prayers we will have the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which we are living into God’s dream of abundance for our world. If you have not gotten a chance to already, when we sing our prayer refrain, I invite you to bring forward and place in our baptismal waterfall something that represents how you care for creation, how you live into God’s abundance. There is also paper and pens available near the waterfall if you want to write or drawn something to add to the display. We have placed the display in the current of the waterfall to remind us that God’s grace is abundant, and in flows through our lives, bringing newness of life and abundance. Thanks be to God. Amen.


Information about California’s drought came from “Drying Up: The Race to Save California from Drought” by Elijah Wolfson. Newsweek, April 23, 2015. . Accessed April 24, 2015.

"While in Their Joy": A Sermon on Luke 24:36b-48

Many of you know I was gone last Sunday so that I could be present at the baptism of my godson Karl. Now, I may be a little bit biased, but I’m pretty sure Karl is the funniest little guy around. One funny thing about Karl is he is in a bit of a no phase right now. This is pretty common, he’s fourteen months old so “no” is one of the few words he can say with any degree of reliability. He says no a lot, in the place of whatever word he means to say. For example, “Hi Karl,” “no.” Or, “Do you want a snack?” “No” with hands extended to receive said snack. My favorite is when he goes up to something he knows he’s not supposed to be doing, then turns to you and says, “no?” With a question in his voice, like he’s checking in, is this still a no? Playing with your computer, still a no? Jumping off the couch, still a no? Pulling the cat’s tale, still a no? I find it a super adorable trait, but I am not his parents. I’m guessing the constant chorus of no does get a bit old for them.

Karl’s preference for the word no did lead to a humorous moment in the baptism though. If you remember, there’s a part in the service of baptism where the sponsors, parents, and congregation are asked to renounce, to turn away from, a series of things. Do we renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God, do we renounce the ways of sin that draw us from God. The very first question we are asked is if we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God. So the pastor asked the question, do you renounce the devil, but before the congregation could respond, Karl shouted “nooooooo” at the top of his lungs, much to the delight of the congregation and embarrassment of his parents.

Now in all fairness, Karl’s proclamation really had less to do with the addressed question and more to do with the fact that he was done being held and wanted to be allowed to run in circles around the church. But I, as a proud godparent, thought there was really something profoundly honest about Karl’s answer to the question. Because as Lutherans we believe that baptism is a thing that God does to us, not a thing that we do for God. Yes we bring our children, or ourselves, to be baptized, but the act of baptism is all God. Whether you were baptized as a child or an adult, whether you came to the font willingly or someone brought you, regardless of any doubts or hesitations you may have carried, may still carry, when the waters of promise washed over you, you were claimed as God’s precious child, marked as God’s own. The questions posed before a baptism, the confession of faith are not conditions of baptism; we say those to remind us of what it looks like to live as baptized children. In fact, the confession and forgiveness we often start our worship with is linked to baptism, it is a reminder of baptism. We say the confession and receive forgiveness every Sunday to give us opportunity after opportunity to try again, to start anew, to hear again the words that God said to us at baptism, that we are forgiven, that we are loved. The power of God’s claim on us remains true even as we fall short, when we fail to renounce evil, turn from sin, when our faith waivers. In fact, the power of baptism is that when we sin, when we screw up, when we do all the things that we do as humans, we can come back to the font and remember that there is nothing that God cannot forgive, no place that we can go where God does not follow, because we have been claimed by God in baptism. We come to the font with our brokenness, knowing that God meets us here and through the power of water and promise, binds us back together.

Through the simple act of water and word, God claims us as God’s own. We are baptized once, and it remains true for our entire lives, no matter what happens, that we are God’s child. That is a pretty bold claim we make, maybe even a little unbelievable at times. Which is why we come again and again to gather as a community of the faithful to remind each other of what we may struggle to remember ourselves, that we are God’s chosen people, that we are precious, that we are loved, that we are forgiven, that we are whole, in God’s eyes.

Going to a baptism during the Easter season got me thinking about some of the bold claims of faith we make as Christians. The entire Easter season itself is really a bold claim. Think about it, on the first Sunday of Easter we celebrate that the tomb is empty, and Jesus has risen. We proclaim this promise of resurrection with confidence, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to figure out what this bold claim of resurrection could possibly mean.

The strange boldness of this claim of resurrection is reflected in these first readings of the Easter season. Every Easter season follows this pattern, Easter Sunday, disciples discover the empty tomb, Second Sunday of Easter, disciples gather in upper room, because they are scared and cannot believe the resurrection slash do not recognize Jesus when he appears in their midst. Third Sunday of Easter, Jesus again appears to disciples who, again, do not recognize him. These are the disciples, who had traveled with Jesus, who had known his teachings better than anyone, yet these Easter season readings remind us that this claim of resurrection is so bold, so unexpected, that even Jesus closest followers missed it when it showed up in their midst.

And yet, even though the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus, didn’t understand resurrection, their failure to understand did not stop Jesus from coming among them and bringing them peace. In fact, I think that it was precisely because they did not recognize him that Jesus kept coming among them and kept bringing them peace, until they could recognize him, until they could know that the promises he’d made to them were true.

What these Easter season texts tell us is that missing Jesus’ presence in our lives, that doubting Jesus has—or will—show up, is not antithetical to faith. In fact, doubt is a part of faith. Frederick Buechner called doubt the “ants in the pants of faith. [It is what keeps] it awake and moving.”* Jesus came to the disciples in their doubts, in their fears, and he just kept coming and showing them his hands and his side, and bringing them his peace, until their hearts knew what their minds could not, that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, and had gone on ahead of them, and would always, from that moment on, be with them and among them. Not always bodily as he had traveled with them before his death, but now, after his resurrection, truly with them. And Jesus just keeps showing up in our lives too. In the water and word of baptism, in the bread and wine of communion, in the gathered community who come together to confess the ways we fall short and hear again the promise that God forgives us, who pray for each other, support one another, and listen together for who God is calling us to be. Faith, fueled by our doubt, by our curiosity and by our desire for understanding, is in the end a journey, not a destination. The resurrected Christ holds out pierced hands to us, inviting us into the dance of relationship with the God whom we cannot see, so that in the journeying we can come to believe.

So when we come together in this place, when we come together as a community of the faithful, we come together, like the disciples, not as a community of people who have all the answers or have it all together, but as a community who is committed to the experience of journeying together. We come together as a community who are fueled by our doubts, by our questions, by the things we know and the things we cannot believe, a community who trusts in the promises God made to us, and a community who holds that trust for each other when our doubts, our fears, our humanity, cause us to miss the risen Christ in our midst.

There’s a line in today’s Gospel reading that I love. After Jesus had appeared to the disciples and said, “Peace be with you,” he showed them his hands and his feet. Then verse forty-one reads, “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.” I think part of being a person of faith is walking in the strange tension of joy and disbelief, of wonder and longing, of hope and assurance. So in this Easter season, the question this text leaves me with is what would it mean for us to enter into our questions with joy? How would we live differently if joy was the framework on which we built our faith? If we brought our questions, our fears, the things we cannot know, the paths we wished were clear, to God with joy, trusting that questions and uncertainty are God’s bread and butter, the places where our wonderfully surprising God always chooses to show up.

Since Easter, the back wall of our sanctuary has featured a nine-foot tall waterfall, flowing from behind the raredas, over the place where the torn purple banner of Lent hung, covering the scars with the promise of new life. That water flows through our baptismal font, and then out into the world, reminding us that in these waters we are made new, and from these waters we take this bold claim that has been made to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ into a world that so desperately needs to know the love made manifest here. The promise that Jesus Christ loves us enough to show up to us again and again, until in our disbelieving, we have joy and peace in his name. Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia. Amen.

*Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (Harper & Row, Publishers: New York, NY, 1973), 20

Bearing Witness: A Sermon on Mark 16:1-8a

I learned an interesting fact this week about the movie Dodgeball. Dodgeball, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a Ben Stiller movie about a scrappy dodgeball team that wins the championship. Now, before you rush out and watch it I will add this disclaimer that 1) I’m not really a Ben Stiller fan, 2) Dodgeball is not the type of movie that really justifies mention in a sermon, and 3) I’m about to tell you how it ends. So, you know, go with that. But, here’s what I learned about Dodgeball. The original ended had the team loosing. As sort of a poke in the face of all traditional underdog movies, the original script ended with Ben Stiller, leader of the bad guy team hitting Vince Vaughn, captain of the good guy team, in the face with the ball, the film cuts to a scene of Stiller and his teammates celebrating joyfully, and roll credits. Now this, probably expectedly, did not really go over well with movie-goers, so the producers changed the ending so the movie would tie up in the sort of feel-good way that we want movies to end. Because we don’t like movies to end with a lot of questions. Especially not scrappy underdog tales about hard-fighting sports teams.

So, why am I talking about a Ben Stiller film I’m not actually recommending you see at the beginning of an Easter Sermon. Because someone did to Mark what the producers did to Dodgeball. So we stopped reading this morning at verse 8. If you look in your Bible you’ll see that the Gospel goes on a bit from there, but the verses might sound a little funny, like they don’t really match the writing style of the rest of the Gospel. They’re probably also set apart from the writing by brackets and your Bible may even have a notice that these were not the original ending.

So here’s your fun Bible history lesson for the morning. In the days before the printing press, copies of the Bible were made by hand. These hand-written copies are a testimony to the faithfulness of the writers. Think how quickly a game of telephone can go awry, but we have thousands of copies of Bibles, some thousands of years old, all written by a scribe or a monk painstakingly working away for hours that tell these same stories over and over again in incredible precision and detail. But there are quirks here and there, words dropped or added, letters left out, details switched slightly. The kind of mistakes you’d expect given the incredible labor of love creating copies by hand would entail. The Bible we read today is a compilation of these copies. Scholars look through all the versions trying to pick out the oldest and most common occurrences to try to find the heart of the scripture, the ones most true to the original writing.

It is this rich history that makes the Bible real for me, that gives the Bible authority. That there are quirks and twists show the care for which our ancestors in the faith have treasured this sacred text. It is a book that has been wrestled with for centuries, for millennia, and still it offers us more to ponder.

So here’s where Mark is interesting. Those shorter and longer endings of Mark that are in our Bible. They’re set apart by brackets because they’re not in the oldest copies of Mark’s Gospel. So, in fact most Bibles will tell you, scholars are pretty universally in agreement that some monk at some point added those endings, because he wasn’t really satisfied with the ending Mark came up with. Some monk at some point didn’t like the fact that the women came to the tomb, saw nothing, and then ran away in fear and told no one, so he just sort of added a little ending on, added the women telling Peter, added Jesus appearing a couple more times, added something to make this ending make sense.

And I have to tell you, I’m in agreement with the monk that the story didn’t end this way. Maybe not enough in agreement to write my own ending to the Bible, but I agree that the resurrection appearance at the tomb did not end with the women running away and telling no one because they were afraid. I know the story didn’t end this way, because we are here this morning. Think about it. It the story had ended like this, if the women had ran and told no one, no one would know that Jesus had risen from the dead. We would not know that Jesus had risen from the dead. We are here this morning singing hymns and shouting alleluia and breaking bread together because someone told someone and that someone told someone else and on and on until someone told us. We know Mark’s ending is not the right ending because we are here giving witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The women didn’t say nothing, someone told.

In fact I think, no, I know Mark knew the story didn’t end the way he wrote it. After all, Mark is not listed as one of the people at the tomb. The story doesn’t read, “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and Mark.” Somebody told Mark so he could write it down, so clearly the story didn’t end here.

But I think Mark ended it here to make a couple larger truths known. We’ve been talking in Bible study throughout Lent about how the stories in the Bible are Capital T true because they tell us larger Truths about God and the world and humanity than any great theology textbook could ever hope to. And using a short story to tell us a huge truth is pretty much the thing that Mark is ace at. So here are three truths that I think Mark is getting at in this weird ending to our Gospel for this morning.

Truth number one: Experiencing resurrection requires the courage to bear witness to death. Experiencing resurrection requires the courage to bear witness to death. There is a temptation to judge these women, who came to the tomb, saw the stone rolled away, and then ran away and hid in fear. The monk does. They should have told someone, right, they shouldn’t have been afraid. But that’s projecting our own knowledge into this story. Because these women are the heroes of Mark’s Gospel. They are the ones who stayed, they are the ones who showed up. Think about it. Where’s Peter, the rock on whom Christ will build the church? Where are James and John, witnesses to the transfiguration? Where’s the centurion who recognized Christ on the cross? Where’s Joseph of Arametheia who tended to the body of Christ? They’re gone, they’re not here. Peter, James, and John slunk away at the cross, the centurion proclaimed and left, Joseph of Aramethia did his job and departed. No one stayed to bear witness to the body of Jesus, no one stayed to proclaim his death, no one, but these three women. They came with oil not to experience resurrection but to bear witness to death. These three women had the faith and the strength and the courage to show up and bear witness to his death, to bear witness to his pain, to bear witness to their loss. Showing up and bearing witness to death is the hardest thing we can ever face. Letting someone or something die and trusting that beloved thing to God, that is an impossibly painful and hard thing. And these women did that. Experiencing resurrection requires first the courage to bear witness to death.

Truth number two: Resurrection is hard to recognize in the moment. So these women showed up at the tomb, with oil in their hands to anoint the body of their Lord, and instead a young man in a white robe said “Do not be alarmed, Jesus of Nazareth is not here because he has been raised; he is not here. Go, tell his disciples that he has gone ahead of you to Galilee.” And they ran out and did just that! No, right, they said nothing because they were afraid. But not just because they were afraid, I think, but also because they could not comprehend the words the young many was saying, they could not understand the experience they were having. It was too much it, it was too far from their expectation, it was too unbelievable. They had believed that Jesus in life was their savior, but they had not expected salvation to look like this, had not expected salvation to take this form. So when they came across salvation, in an empty tomb and a surprising young man, they did not recognize it for what it was. They could not see it, even though it was right in front of them, because they didn’t know what they were looking for.

This is because resurrection is hard to see when you are in the midst of it. We know the women were experiencing resurrection because we see it from the future, and resurrection looks clearer when we look back on it. But when we are standing in the midst of the tomb of death, then even the brightest light can just be blinding. We think of resurrection like transfiguration moments, like suddenly resurrection swoops in and everything’s different, and we get it somehow. But sometimes resurrection is a gradual awakening, so subtle that only with the precious wisdom of the future can we look back and say, yes, there it was, there was the moment that life began again.

Which leads to the third, and possibly most important truth Mark has for us in this Gospel. In order to see resurrection, we need someone to show it to us. In order to see resurrection, we need someone to point it out. The women couldn’t see resurrection in the tomb, but later, afterwards, somehow, they figured it out and they told someone, and someone told someone else, and the story was passed on that Jesus had gone on ahead to Galilee, and we are here today because someone told. So this Gospel reading leaves us with the promise that when we cannot see resurrection. When new life does not look like we expect, when promises are shrouded in darkness, this Gospel promises us that even when we cannot see a way through, there is a way through, and someone will show us the light. What Mark does in this Gospel then is promise us each other. Mark promises us that resurrection is lived out in community. It is lived out in the people of God coming together again and again and telling these stories of faith. Telling of the empty tomb and the strange young man and the brave women who ran away, telling these stories until we can believe them, until we can bear witness to them, until we can see them lived out in our own lives.

And then, Mark’s Gospel challenges us to be those story tellers for each other. It challenges us to speak truth for each other when we cannot believe it. It challenges us to bear witness to resurrection in each other’s lives, to hold up for each other these words of promise, to assure one another that Christ is not here, for he has been raised, and he has gone on ahead of us, to Galilee, to freedom, to life. And so we bear witness to this miracle of the resurrection, we tell this story, again and again, year after year, because resurrection happens in the midst of us. Amen.