So I don’t know if I’m super smart or if Jesus is, but here’s the funny coincidence of my life right now. As I think most of you know, I do some freelance work writing Vacation Bible School curriculums for ELCA World Hunger. ELCA World Hunger is the service arm of our denomination, the ELCA, and it supports programs both in the US and around the world that create sustainable communities. Actually, let me just step away from the sermon for a sec here and toot our church’s horn, because this is a pretty cool ministry we support. It’s called ELCA World Hunger, but the focus isn’t just on hunger, it’s about actually changing the systems that perpetuate poverty. So they don’t just provide food, they provide like, animals and seeds for farmers, training and education to help farmers farm more effectively, microloans for small businesses, school supplies and tuition for children, health care and preventative medicine, advocacy, and they do all this through local partners, people who know the community and what the real, on the ground needs and solutions are. The ELCA is known around the world as being one of the first groups on the ground when a disaster strikes and, maybe more importantly, the last to leave.
But, to the task at hand. So we just finished the Family Camp using the 2019 curriculum, which was based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke chapter ten, also known as the Gospel reading from last Sunday. And this week I turned in the manuscript for the 2020 curriculum, which is based on the Lord’s Prayer, also known as the Gospel reading for this Sunday. I did not, when I came up with the theme for the 2020 VBS, realize that these two readings came in line with each other like that, but I’m feeling pretty smart now that I do.
I want to start with a little bit of teaching about the Lord’s Prayer and what we’re praying for when we say those familiar words. Last week we heard a lawyer summarize the law as “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” “You have given the right answer,” Jesus responded. “Do this, and you will live.” Love God and love your neighbor. As the Gospel of Matthew phrased it in its recounting of the event, “On these two commandments hang the law and all the prophets.”
So now, just a few verses later, we find Jesus at prayer. Prayer holds a special role in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus prayed before all the major turning points of his ministry. When one of his disciples noticed Jesus had finished his prayer, the disciple asked, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Theologian Matthew Skinner wrote that he thinks the disciple wasn’t asking for proper praying techniques, models or “best practices” for prayer, he was asking, Lord, “show us your heart,” “tell us, what is it like to be in communion with God.” This request for instruction on prayer, as Dr. Skinner reads it, was asking Jesus to teach them “what love looks like—love in action, love for God and neighbor.” To which Jesus replied, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.” Opening by addressing God as father tells us this prayer is about relationship, a relationship we can depend on. We do not address the benevolent creator, Lord of the Universe, Alpha and the Omega, great shepherd of the sheep, or any other majestic, fancy, formal title, we address God who is father, who is not just in relationship with us, but is family to us. This prayer is not the pleas of a serf to their overlord; it is the intimacy of a child to a parent.
And what is that prayer? Well, first, “hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.” Hallowed, by the way, is just a fancy way of saying holy, set apart, marked for a purpose. So when we pray that God’s name be hallowed, that God’s kingdom come, what we’re praying for is for God to be God. And more than that, as Luther wrote in the Small Catechism, “It is true that God’s name is holy in itself… [that] God’s kingdom comes on its own… but we ask in this prayer that it may also become holy in and among us… that it may also come to us.” We are asking, praying, that God might lead us, that God might make us more like God. We are asking that the one we call Father might be in relationship with us. As Luther might phrase it, it is true that God loves us, but we ask in this prayer that God might lead us to better love God.
Love God. That’s step one, that’s what it all comes down to, where it all starts. And what’s next? Love your neighbor. Let’s start with this request for daily bread. I started by talking about how ELCA World Hunger doesn’t just provide food, it provides all the things needed to make food possible. Luther describes this request for bread like that. Daily bread is “everything included in the necessities and nourishment for our bodies, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, farm, fields, livestock, money, property, an upright spouse, upright children, upright members of the household, upright and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, decency, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.” So, basically, everything. And that word “daily” is interesting too. It’s not a very common Greek word, but it seems to mean something physical, something tangible, something we can touch. And the verb “give” is in the present tense, which in the Greek means it’s repetitive, it happens again and again. So what we are saying here is that every day, again and again, not just that God will give us what we need, but that we will recognize it, trust it, and receive it with thanksgiving.
The prayer goes on: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” “For we ourselves forgive everyone” sounds more aspirational than accurate, but hey, aim high. Here’s your fun Greek fact for the day. The first forgive, “forgive us our sins,” that’s in what’s called the aorist tense. It’s used to describe an event that happens once with lasting effects. And the second, “as we ourselves forgive everyone,” that one is in the present tense. Which, as I mentioned earlier, describes an event that happens repeatedly. We forgive then, we can forgive, because we have been forgiven. Not again and again, like some sort of whiteboard that has to be continually wiped clean, and then gets that like gunky pen buildup on it after a while, but once for all time, forever. To continue with the bad whiteboard analogy, the forgiveness of God is like putting the cap on the pen, so now we can write our sins on the whiteboard all we want, but nothing shows up. We forgive, we can forgive, because that’s the kind of forgiveness we already have.
“And do not bring us to the time of trial.” This one’s a bit of a tricky one, because one might ask, why would we need to ask God not to bring us to trial. Shouldn’t not bringing us to trial, or temptation, or sin, depending on your translation, shouldn’t that just be a thing God doesn’t do? Luther had a funny story he loved to use to describe this about a young monk who “longed to rid himself of his evil thoughts.” An older, wiser, fellow monk said to him, “Dear brother, you cannot prevent the birds from flying over your head, but you can certainly keep them from building a nest in your hair.” The point being, trials, temptations, are a part of life. This prayer is about having the strength, the courage, and the perseverance to move forward despite the obstacles, to have confidence in the presence of God. Bread, forgiveness, perseverance: all things without which we cannot love our neighbor.
Love God, love your neighbor, it’s as simple as that. As Jesus told the lawyer back in chapter ten, “Do this and you will live.” Of course, as the lawyer’s immediate follow-up question and Mary and Martha’s confusing interaction displayed, put into any actual situation it immediately becomes not simple. So here then is the good news in the parables. First we have the parable of the friend going and waking another friend up in the middle of the night, asking for bread. The request is granted “because of his persistence”, says the translation we heard. But, one more Greek fun fact, this is probably better translated as “shamelessness.” Theologian Walter Liefeld describes it thusly, “the petitioner”—the one requesting bread so, in the context of the Lord’s prayer, us—“acts in shameless disregard of his neighbor (and perhaps of the other neighbors who will witness this midnight disturbance).” In other words, we humans can be needy and kind of demanding. But, Liefeld goes on, “the focus quickly shifts to the one in bed. Though the petitioner asks in a shameful way, his neighbor deals with the shame in a way that will bring honor to them both. Perhaps this is a better away to view what “hallowed be your name” means: God will act to honor Gods name even when we act in dishonorable ways.”
Moral of the story here, prayer isn’t about asking God for what we need; it isn’t about us at all. Writes Theologian Brian Peterson, “We are not the key that makes prayer “work.” If we keep asking, seeking, knocking, it is only because God has done so first, and continues to do so.”
I want to close by pointing out the picture on the front of your bulletin. It’s a stylized version of that famous painting that is so often described as Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. The question being: will you receive Jesus into your heart, will you open the metaphorical door and let Jesus in? This always seemed a weird question. Jesus appeared behind locked doors to his disciples, he rose from the dead and found his way out of a tomb sealed with a stone, so why this garden gate is apparently such an obstacle I’ve never understood. So I wonder if maybe we have the question of this painting wrong. Maybe Jesus is not the weary traveler, beating on the door of our heart, begging for us to grant him hospitality. Maybe Jesus is the neighborhood instigator, knocking on the door of your life, inviting you to come out into the world where he already is.
This whole thing ends where talk about God always ends. God loves you. Right now, who you are, as you are. God is not knocking on the door of your heart begging for admission. Neither is God callously waiting for you to knock loud enough, beg persistently enough, pray well enough, for God to respond to your request. God loves you. And all of this, worship, scripture, prayer, even the law itself, all of this is all about letting you know this one simple fact. You are loved by God. It really is as simple as that. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, July 29, 2019
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Bring Life: A Sermon on Luke 10:38-42
If you’re following along at home, you may have caught a bit of a switcheroo in the Gospel readings. The assigned text for today is actually the one right before this one, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. However, as the theme for Family Camp—which, quick commercial break, starts tomorrow, right here at 4 pm, be there or be a rectangle—the theme for Family Camp is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Pastor Jennifer and I decided that rather than having both our congregations hear two sermons two weeks in a row on the same passage, and St. Peter even hearing the same person preach two weeks in a row on the same passage, we would both flip the weeks, preach on Mary and Martha this week, and save the Good Samaritan for next week.
And I’m going to preach on Mary and Martha. But I do want to start with a really quick recap of the Good Samaritan, because these two stories are presented right in a row for a reason and I think to truly understand the radical statement Jesus was making we need to first be made uncomfortable by the parable.
The parable starts with a lawyer standing to test Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Like today, a first century lawyer was an expert on the law. In the first century, the law being the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments as well as all the other laws spelled out in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, as well as all the rabbinic teachings on those laws over the centuries. So when Jesus flipped the question back to him, “what is written in the law,” he knew the guy knew. And, as expected, the lawyer answered correctly. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Love God, love your neighbor, is the most basic summary of the Ten Commandments, that’s what it comes down to. Love God, love your neighbor.
But, as humans are wont to do, this guy wasn’t after a simple explanation, he wanted details, “and who is my neighbor?” Again, commercial break, that is the title of Family Camp, and we’ll be learning this week all about who our neighbors are and how we can love them, but back to the story. So Jesus launched into this parable about this man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, a road that was notoriously dangerous and patrolled by bandits, when robbers attacked him, beat him, and left him for dead. Along came a priest, who certainly should have been familiar with the commandment to love his neighbor, but also would have known the laws against touching someone who was unclean, and faced with these conflicting narratives, decided to err on passing by the man. Next came a Levite, which was someone who worked in the Temple, and thus like the priest would have the conflicting obligations of neighborly responsibility versus ritual purity, and likewise passed by the man. Next down the road came a Samaritan. Now because this parable is so popular we all immediately know him to be the hero. But in Jesus’ time, Samaritan was as much a code for villain as a dark suit and spiral mustache was in old silent movies. You can almost hear the crowd booing as Jesus introduced him. So when the Samaritan is the one who stops along the way, cares for the man, and sets him up in an inn, those boos turned to stunned silence. This is Snidely Whiplash rescuing the damsel in distress from the train tracks, like this does not happen. That was the one who was the neighbor to the man. Not the ones who had lived in all the right ways and done all the right things, but the one who, in that time, in that place, in that moment, helped out a person in need with no regard for their own reputation or standing. That is what it means to be a neighbor. Go and do likewise.
But “love your neighbor” was not the only law the lawyer answered to Jesus. In fact, while it was the one the lawyer asked a follow-up question about, in the initial response “love your neighbor as yourself” seemed like almost an afterthought to the law that preceded it, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” So if the Parable of the Good Samaritan is the answer to the question, what does it look like to love my neighbor, the Martha and Mary story may then be the answer to the question, what does it look like to love God. And if that’s the case, then it’s important to let both of these stories together both comfort and challenge us, because the way to life then is somewhere in between.
So, opening confession, this is not my favorite text. First off, because there are a seemingly infinite number of women’s spirituality books dedicated to determining whether you are a “Mary” or a “Martha.” And I know a lot of people for whom that question is very powerful and meaningful, and if a book on that theme has changed your life, that’s amazing, and I’m super glad. But for me, any book I’ve tried around that question always felt like judgment, like I was doing it wrong somehow. And I think I’ve always felt that way because I relate to Martha. There is zero biblical evidence of this, but in the family Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, I’ve always read Martha as the focused, driven older sister, the one who keeps everyone on track, Lazarus as the peace-making middle brother, and Mary, with her dramatic running to Jesus in tears in John’s Gospel as the dramatic youngest child, who does what she wants when she wants. This probably tells you more about my family of origin then about the bible text, but there you go. So I relate to Martha. I relate to her need for order and structure, to her “first things first” approach to hospitality, and to her comfortable being backstage work ethic.
And if we think back to the lawyer’s question, Martha was doing exactly what was asked of her, Martha was loving her neighbor. There are all sorts of laws in the bible about the requirement to show hospitality to strangers, to take care of travelers. These laws were about more than just being welcoming; these were literally questions of life and death. It’s not like there was a Holiday Inn first century travels could check into, if they did not receive hospitality from people they met along the way, the consequences were dire. To travel in the first century was to place your life in the hands of others and hope they would take care of you, welcome you, provide what you need. So these “many tasks” that are described as “distracting” Martha, these are the Mosaic obligations she owed to visitors in her care. And the story only speaks of Jesus, but let’s face it, by this point in the Gospel Jesus was never on his own. There’s probably fifteen or twenty, dusty, hungry, road-weary men in Martha’s home, men she is obligated to care for. So to say that the problem is as simple as Martha having her priorities out of order is I think to sell Martha, and Jesus short. Jesus just finished telling a story about a Samaritan who took care of a man in need, so certainly the problem here wasn’t Martha’s wanted to care for needy travelers.
But there’s more going on here with Mary too. You may have noticed that all of Jesus’ disciples were men. This was not a coincidence or an oversight, discipleship was men’s work. To sit at the feet of a teacher, any teacher, not just Jesus, and to learn from him, that was the proper and appropriate place of men. Only men belonged in those roles. So what Mary did when she sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying wasn’t about having her priorities in the right order and taking time to listen to Jesus, it wasn’t about putting prayer before work, or valuing God over all things. What Mary did when she sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying was make a profound statement about who was welcome, who was able even, to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Like Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech or Kathrine Switzer’s hiding her gender to enter the Boston Marathon, Mary’s seat at the feet of Jesus was about expanding the understanding of who was welcome at the table. Mary, and Truth, and Switzer belonged because they could do the work, and gender identity or expression had no bearing on their ability.
So I think the real problem with Martha wasn’t that she was focused on work and distracted from worship, I think the problem was she was willing to let expectations dictate what her role was. Martha couldn’t love God because she was too busy worrying not about her neighbor, but about what her neighbor thought of her. And, similarly, the priest and the Levite couldn’t love their neighbor, because they were too busy worrying not about God, but about if they were living up to their understanding of the ritual purity God demanded of them.
As is so often the case with Jesus’ teachings, this story leaves us not with a clear-cut answer, but with the wonderful greyness of maybe. The command is to love God AND your neighbor. Too much love of God and we risk ignoring the neighbor, but too much focus on our neighbor can leave us missing God. So how then do we live? There is not hard and fast answer that works every time. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Mary and Martha reminds us that each decision is situational. Some days, like the Samaritan on the road, like Mary at the feet of Jesus, we get it right. Other times, like Martha’s over-wrought hospitality or the priest and the Levite’s misplaced piety, we get it wrong. So we come to the font, we come to the table, we confess our sin, know we are forgiven, and we try again tomorrow. But there is a helpful litmus test in trying to figure out how to respond, and that test is this, one simple question: Does this bring life? Does this bring life to myself and those around me? Mary’s piety brought life; it expanded the understanding of who could follow Jesus. The priest and the Levite’s did not; it left a man on the road to die. The Samaritan’s service brought life; it helped a man in need. Martha’s did not, it left her frustrated and overwhelmed.
The laws worth following, the services worth performing are the ones that bring life to yourself and those around you. Have life, bring life. That is what it means to love God and love your neighbor. Thanks be to God. Amen.
And I’m going to preach on Mary and Martha. But I do want to start with a really quick recap of the Good Samaritan, because these two stories are presented right in a row for a reason and I think to truly understand the radical statement Jesus was making we need to first be made uncomfortable by the parable.
The parable starts with a lawyer standing to test Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Like today, a first century lawyer was an expert on the law. In the first century, the law being the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments as well as all the other laws spelled out in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, as well as all the rabbinic teachings on those laws over the centuries. So when Jesus flipped the question back to him, “what is written in the law,” he knew the guy knew. And, as expected, the lawyer answered correctly. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Love God, love your neighbor, is the most basic summary of the Ten Commandments, that’s what it comes down to. Love God, love your neighbor.
But, as humans are wont to do, this guy wasn’t after a simple explanation, he wanted details, “and who is my neighbor?” Again, commercial break, that is the title of Family Camp, and we’ll be learning this week all about who our neighbors are and how we can love them, but back to the story. So Jesus launched into this parable about this man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, a road that was notoriously dangerous and patrolled by bandits, when robbers attacked him, beat him, and left him for dead. Along came a priest, who certainly should have been familiar with the commandment to love his neighbor, but also would have known the laws against touching someone who was unclean, and faced with these conflicting narratives, decided to err on passing by the man. Next came a Levite, which was someone who worked in the Temple, and thus like the priest would have the conflicting obligations of neighborly responsibility versus ritual purity, and likewise passed by the man. Next down the road came a Samaritan. Now because this parable is so popular we all immediately know him to be the hero. But in Jesus’ time, Samaritan was as much a code for villain as a dark suit and spiral mustache was in old silent movies. You can almost hear the crowd booing as Jesus introduced him. So when the Samaritan is the one who stops along the way, cares for the man, and sets him up in an inn, those boos turned to stunned silence. This is Snidely Whiplash rescuing the damsel in distress from the train tracks, like this does not happen. That was the one who was the neighbor to the man. Not the ones who had lived in all the right ways and done all the right things, but the one who, in that time, in that place, in that moment, helped out a person in need with no regard for their own reputation or standing. That is what it means to be a neighbor. Go and do likewise.
But “love your neighbor” was not the only law the lawyer answered to Jesus. In fact, while it was the one the lawyer asked a follow-up question about, in the initial response “love your neighbor as yourself” seemed like almost an afterthought to the law that preceded it, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” So if the Parable of the Good Samaritan is the answer to the question, what does it look like to love my neighbor, the Martha and Mary story may then be the answer to the question, what does it look like to love God. And if that’s the case, then it’s important to let both of these stories together both comfort and challenge us, because the way to life then is somewhere in between.
So, opening confession, this is not my favorite text. First off, because there are a seemingly infinite number of women’s spirituality books dedicated to determining whether you are a “Mary” or a “Martha.” And I know a lot of people for whom that question is very powerful and meaningful, and if a book on that theme has changed your life, that’s amazing, and I’m super glad. But for me, any book I’ve tried around that question always felt like judgment, like I was doing it wrong somehow. And I think I’ve always felt that way because I relate to Martha. There is zero biblical evidence of this, but in the family Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, I’ve always read Martha as the focused, driven older sister, the one who keeps everyone on track, Lazarus as the peace-making middle brother, and Mary, with her dramatic running to Jesus in tears in John’s Gospel as the dramatic youngest child, who does what she wants when she wants. This probably tells you more about my family of origin then about the bible text, but there you go. So I relate to Martha. I relate to her need for order and structure, to her “first things first” approach to hospitality, and to her comfortable being backstage work ethic.
And if we think back to the lawyer’s question, Martha was doing exactly what was asked of her, Martha was loving her neighbor. There are all sorts of laws in the bible about the requirement to show hospitality to strangers, to take care of travelers. These laws were about more than just being welcoming; these were literally questions of life and death. It’s not like there was a Holiday Inn first century travels could check into, if they did not receive hospitality from people they met along the way, the consequences were dire. To travel in the first century was to place your life in the hands of others and hope they would take care of you, welcome you, provide what you need. So these “many tasks” that are described as “distracting” Martha, these are the Mosaic obligations she owed to visitors in her care. And the story only speaks of Jesus, but let’s face it, by this point in the Gospel Jesus was never on his own. There’s probably fifteen or twenty, dusty, hungry, road-weary men in Martha’s home, men she is obligated to care for. So to say that the problem is as simple as Martha having her priorities out of order is I think to sell Martha, and Jesus short. Jesus just finished telling a story about a Samaritan who took care of a man in need, so certainly the problem here wasn’t Martha’s wanted to care for needy travelers.
But there’s more going on here with Mary too. You may have noticed that all of Jesus’ disciples were men. This was not a coincidence or an oversight, discipleship was men’s work. To sit at the feet of a teacher, any teacher, not just Jesus, and to learn from him, that was the proper and appropriate place of men. Only men belonged in those roles. So what Mary did when she sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying wasn’t about having her priorities in the right order and taking time to listen to Jesus, it wasn’t about putting prayer before work, or valuing God over all things. What Mary did when she sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying was make a profound statement about who was welcome, who was able even, to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Like Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech or Kathrine Switzer’s hiding her gender to enter the Boston Marathon, Mary’s seat at the feet of Jesus was about expanding the understanding of who was welcome at the table. Mary, and Truth, and Switzer belonged because they could do the work, and gender identity or expression had no bearing on their ability.
So I think the real problem with Martha wasn’t that she was focused on work and distracted from worship, I think the problem was she was willing to let expectations dictate what her role was. Martha couldn’t love God because she was too busy worrying not about her neighbor, but about what her neighbor thought of her. And, similarly, the priest and the Levite couldn’t love their neighbor, because they were too busy worrying not about God, but about if they were living up to their understanding of the ritual purity God demanded of them.
As is so often the case with Jesus’ teachings, this story leaves us not with a clear-cut answer, but with the wonderful greyness of maybe. The command is to love God AND your neighbor. Too much love of God and we risk ignoring the neighbor, but too much focus on our neighbor can leave us missing God. So how then do we live? There is not hard and fast answer that works every time. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Mary and Martha reminds us that each decision is situational. Some days, like the Samaritan on the road, like Mary at the feet of Jesus, we get it right. Other times, like Martha’s over-wrought hospitality or the priest and the Levite’s misplaced piety, we get it wrong. So we come to the font, we come to the table, we confess our sin, know we are forgiven, and we try again tomorrow. But there is a helpful litmus test in trying to figure out how to respond, and that test is this, one simple question: Does this bring life? Does this bring life to myself and those around me? Mary’s piety brought life; it expanded the understanding of who could follow Jesus. The priest and the Levite’s did not; it left a man on the road to die. The Samaritan’s service brought life; it helped a man in need. Martha’s did not, it left her frustrated and overwhelmed.
The laws worth following, the services worth performing are the ones that bring life to yourself and those around you. Have life, bring life. That is what it means to love God and love your neighbor. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
The Kingdom of God Has Come Near: A Sermon on 2 Kings 5:1-14 and Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Every week when I’m wrestling with the texts I’m to preach on, I try to come up with a short focus sentence to build the sermon around. The focus statement for this week’s sermon comes from verse five of the psalm we just read, Psalm 66, “Come and see what God has done.”
During the summer, the Old Testament text and the Gospel text aren’t chosen to purposely pair with each other. But once again this week, I was struck by how both texts seem to be addressing opposite sides of the same question. Because from the way I read it, both of these texts are addressing finding God at work in places you don’t expect.
In our Old Testament reading, we heard about Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, “a great man” and “a mighty warrior.” Yet despite his high position, Naaman had a problem. The text translated the Hebrew as leprosy, but it could have been any number of skin conditions. Whatever it was, such a condition would have meant that Naaman was ritually unclean and unable to engage in society. Naaman learned from one of his servants that Elisha, the prophet of Israel, could cure him, so he set out with “ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.” So, in other words, in addition to being a great warrior and an esteemed commander, Naaman was also super wealthy. But when he showed up at the home of the prophet with all this great tribute behind him, the prophet wouldn’t even come out to greet him. Instead, Elisha sent a messenger to tell Naaman to wash in the Jordan seven times, and he will become clean.
To which Naaaman became offended. Yes, Naaman seems a bit ungrateful and melodramatic here, but think about the sort of treatment he was probably used to, and the sort of tribute he was bringing. One can’t really blame him for expecting maybe a little bit better treatment. And then there’s the whole question of the Jordan. Since the Jordan is like “the river” in the Bible, we know the significance of it. But here’s the thing about the Jordan, as rivers go, it’s not all that impressive. Especially down near Jerusalem where Naaman would have been, the Jordan is small, brown, and muddy. As a proud Syrian, Naaman would have known the quality of his own country’s rivers, the mighty Abana and Pharpar. Rivers that would have dwarfed the muddy little Jordan.
But what Naaman missed here is that healing doesn’t come from the prophet nor does healing come from the river. Healing comes from God. And I want to walk a fine line here, because I’m not saying that Naaman’s pride or unwillingness to follow Elisha’s words in any way impeded his healing. If you’re dealing with some sort of a chronic illness, and healing doesn’t seem to be coming in the way you want or hope, I promise you that God is not withholding healing from you until you accomplish some random task, because that’s simply not how God works. The point of this story is that God was at work in a different way and in a different place then Naaman expected. And, that healing, God’s healing, came in a different, and in fact an easier and more giving way then Naaman expected. The point of the story is that Naaman didn’t need to impressed the prophet with his power, buy off the prophet with his wealth, or accomplish some great task in order to earn healing. All Naaman needed was to receive the gift of God’s healing. We see this summed up in the words to Naaman from his servants, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said was ‘Wash and be clean’?”
So that’s Naaman, discovering healing isn’t something he had to earn. Then we’ve got Luke, and Jesus who “after this… appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Let’s remember really quick what “this” this sending is after. Last week we heard about how “when the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up… he sent messengers ahead of him… to a village of the Samaritans… but they did not receive him.” And the disciples response to the Samaritans’ failure of hospitality was, shall we say, not awesome. “When his disciples, James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Now, whether or not James and John actually had that kind of power, or if they were speaking metaphorically, or were just super full of themselves, we don’t know. The point is, come on guys. At what point up to now has “calling down fire to consume” someone been Jesus’ go-to solution to resistance? So before sending out the seventy, Jesus first gave them some very specific instructions. “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals… Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide… Do not move from house to house. Whenever you enter a town… eat what is set before you, cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’”
This text is about hospitality, but like Naaman’s experience with Elisha, it is not a text about giving hospitality, it is a text about receiving it. The lesson Jesus was teaching his disciples here is maybe the hardest lesson for we who are doers and servers to learn, it is the lesson of how to let others serve you. What this text required of the seventy was to realize that, yes, they had something really really valuable, they had the good news of the kingdom of God. But the people to whom they were bringing this good news, those people had something of value as well. And it’s not complex math to realize if I share what I have, that’s great, we’ll each have some. But if we both bring something, we end up with twice as much. In fact, in the wonky economy of God we probably end up with even more than that, for God has a tricky way of multiplying things, there’s really no other way to explain the feeding of the five-thousand, or potlucks.
And what if the seventy weren’t welcomed? What if, like the experience of the messengers to the Samaritan village last week, they are not offered hospitality and their presence and message is refused? Pro tip: calling down fire to consume them is still not the answer. Rather instead, simply wipe the dust from your feet and move on. “Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” That’s the sneaky, subversive power of the kingdom of God. It comes near. Not because of the seventy’s message or the village’s hospitality, but simply because drawing near to God’s people is what the kingdom of God does. Sometimes it takes time, and sometimes the first messenger is not the one who will carry the message, but none of this stops the coming of the kingdom of God. We know from the book of Acts, and, like I’ve said before, from our very presence here today, two thousand years and thousands upon thousands of miles away, that the message did in fact get shared. So come and see, not what God needs for you to do, but what God is already doing, what God has already done. The kingdom of God has come near. Thanks be to God. Amen.
During the summer, the Old Testament text and the Gospel text aren’t chosen to purposely pair with each other. But once again this week, I was struck by how both texts seem to be addressing opposite sides of the same question. Because from the way I read it, both of these texts are addressing finding God at work in places you don’t expect.
In our Old Testament reading, we heard about Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, “a great man” and “a mighty warrior.” Yet despite his high position, Naaman had a problem. The text translated the Hebrew as leprosy, but it could have been any number of skin conditions. Whatever it was, such a condition would have meant that Naaman was ritually unclean and unable to engage in society. Naaman learned from one of his servants that Elisha, the prophet of Israel, could cure him, so he set out with “ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.” So, in other words, in addition to being a great warrior and an esteemed commander, Naaman was also super wealthy. But when he showed up at the home of the prophet with all this great tribute behind him, the prophet wouldn’t even come out to greet him. Instead, Elisha sent a messenger to tell Naaman to wash in the Jordan seven times, and he will become clean.
To which Naaaman became offended. Yes, Naaman seems a bit ungrateful and melodramatic here, but think about the sort of treatment he was probably used to, and the sort of tribute he was bringing. One can’t really blame him for expecting maybe a little bit better treatment. And then there’s the whole question of the Jordan. Since the Jordan is like “the river” in the Bible, we know the significance of it. But here’s the thing about the Jordan, as rivers go, it’s not all that impressive. Especially down near Jerusalem where Naaman would have been, the Jordan is small, brown, and muddy. As a proud Syrian, Naaman would have known the quality of his own country’s rivers, the mighty Abana and Pharpar. Rivers that would have dwarfed the muddy little Jordan.
But what Naaman missed here is that healing doesn’t come from the prophet nor does healing come from the river. Healing comes from God. And I want to walk a fine line here, because I’m not saying that Naaman’s pride or unwillingness to follow Elisha’s words in any way impeded his healing. If you’re dealing with some sort of a chronic illness, and healing doesn’t seem to be coming in the way you want or hope, I promise you that God is not withholding healing from you until you accomplish some random task, because that’s simply not how God works. The point of this story is that God was at work in a different way and in a different place then Naaman expected. And, that healing, God’s healing, came in a different, and in fact an easier and more giving way then Naaman expected. The point of the story is that Naaman didn’t need to impressed the prophet with his power, buy off the prophet with his wealth, or accomplish some great task in order to earn healing. All Naaman needed was to receive the gift of God’s healing. We see this summed up in the words to Naaman from his servants, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said was ‘Wash and be clean’?”
So that’s Naaman, discovering healing isn’t something he had to earn. Then we’ve got Luke, and Jesus who “after this… appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Let’s remember really quick what “this” this sending is after. Last week we heard about how “when the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up… he sent messengers ahead of him… to a village of the Samaritans… but they did not receive him.” And the disciples response to the Samaritans’ failure of hospitality was, shall we say, not awesome. “When his disciples, James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Now, whether or not James and John actually had that kind of power, or if they were speaking metaphorically, or were just super full of themselves, we don’t know. The point is, come on guys. At what point up to now has “calling down fire to consume” someone been Jesus’ go-to solution to resistance? So before sending out the seventy, Jesus first gave them some very specific instructions. “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals… Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide… Do not move from house to house. Whenever you enter a town… eat what is set before you, cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’”
This text is about hospitality, but like Naaman’s experience with Elisha, it is not a text about giving hospitality, it is a text about receiving it. The lesson Jesus was teaching his disciples here is maybe the hardest lesson for we who are doers and servers to learn, it is the lesson of how to let others serve you. What this text required of the seventy was to realize that, yes, they had something really really valuable, they had the good news of the kingdom of God. But the people to whom they were bringing this good news, those people had something of value as well. And it’s not complex math to realize if I share what I have, that’s great, we’ll each have some. But if we both bring something, we end up with twice as much. In fact, in the wonky economy of God we probably end up with even more than that, for God has a tricky way of multiplying things, there’s really no other way to explain the feeding of the five-thousand, or potlucks.
And what if the seventy weren’t welcomed? What if, like the experience of the messengers to the Samaritan village last week, they are not offered hospitality and their presence and message is refused? Pro tip: calling down fire to consume them is still not the answer. Rather instead, simply wipe the dust from your feet and move on. “Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” That’s the sneaky, subversive power of the kingdom of God. It comes near. Not because of the seventy’s message or the village’s hospitality, but simply because drawing near to God’s people is what the kingdom of God does. Sometimes it takes time, and sometimes the first messenger is not the one who will carry the message, but none of this stops the coming of the kingdom of God. We know from the book of Acts, and, like I’ve said before, from our very presence here today, two thousand years and thousands upon thousands of miles away, that the message did in fact get shared. So come and see, not what God needs for you to do, but what God is already doing, what God has already done. The kingdom of God has come near. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Elijah, Elisha, and Not Looking Back - A Sermon on a lot of things, but mainly 2 Kings 2.1-2, 6-14 and Luke 9.51-62
Once again these children’s bulletins we have are sort of hilariously unintentionally perceptive this week. The inside is a picture with the disciples on one side and the three potential followers on the other, with Jesus in the center, and sure they’re all cartoons, but everyone looks a little bit confused. Which, fair enough, this passage is a bit of a doozy. Luke’s Gospel is known for Jesus’ special attention to the outsiders of the community, but here we have Jesus sounding much more like the Jesus from John’s gospel with these very metaphoric lines like “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” and “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Pair that with the laundry list of works of the flesh which are antithetical to inheriting the kingdom of God, and there’s a lot going on this morning.
To make matters weirder, our Gospel ended with Jesus saying “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” and then the lectionary paired it with an Old Testament reading where Elijah was taken up to heaven in chariots of fire, while his chosen successor Elisha ran along the ground, staring into the sky as instructed, yelling, “father, father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And that’s the semicontinuous reading; it isn’t even necessarily supposed to line up with the Gospel themes. The thematic Old Testament reading is even more jarringly opposite. We didn’t read that one, but it’s also a story of Elijah and Elisha. That one recounting when Elijah first chose Elisha as his successor. Elijah came across Elisha in a field and placed his mantle over him, designating him as his successor. A mantle, by the way is like a robe or coat that designated Elijah as a prophet. Elisha replied to this grand gesture, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Then Elisha went home to his family, killed and cooked his oxen, throwing a big final party for his family, and then he went and followed Elijah.
That’s the pairing of stories we have this morning. Jesus told his followers, “Let the dead bury their own,” and “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back,” meanwhile Elisha returned home, threw a party, and then followed Elijah. Then later he chased after Elijah as he ascended upward, after which he took on Elijah’s own mantle and his ministry. And since we are lectionary people—which means we read the whole bible, not just the parts we like—we’re stuck figuring out what these readings all have to say to us.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about all week, Elijah and Elisha are heroes of the prophets and Jesus is, well, Jesus, so how do we make sense of these two seemingly contradictory responses to discipleship. It occurred to me that what these three stories all have in common is they are all about what it means to be a follower of someone, what it means to carry on not just someone else’s legacy but more importantly the work of the Kingdom of God. That’s the end result of all of these stories. Elisha became Elijah’s successor. Our Gospel passage started, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up” taken up referring to Jesus’ death on the cross, resurrection, and ascension, “when the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” This line is meant to illustrate Jesus’ single-minded devotion to his mission. From here on out he is on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross, and he’s using what little time he has left to make sure his disciples are as ready as they can possibly be to carry on his mission in his absence. Even the Galatians text is not about how one gets freedom; it is about how we are to live now that we already have it.
That right there is the biggest good news statement I take from all four of these readings this morning. We have a future. And not only do we have a future, but God cares about how we live in that future, God cares that that future is good and rich and life-giving. And, God is so determined to move us into that future, that God has a whole host of ways to move us forward. How we follow God into this new future is situational, that’s one of the things I take from these four very different readings. God is not confined to one way of moving us, but many. This is a bit of an aside, but do you all remember that Footprints poem that was really popular a few years ago. The one where the man had a dream where he was walking along the beach with the Lord, and he looked back at the footprints in the sand and noticed that in the most difficult times of his life there was only one set of footprints. He asked Jesus why Jesus had left him in those times, and Jesus replied he hadn’t left him; those had been the times where Jesus had carried him. A pastor friend posted a comic that has an extension to that, where Jesus, after saying the whole “it was then I carried you” bit, goes on to add, “that long line is where I dragged you for a while. And over there, where there’s no footprints, that’s where I hid you behind that sand bank while I went to get a hot dog.” It’s a joke, but I think there’s truth there as well. We have a future, God is going to get us into that future, whatever it takes. The one who has been with us since before time began certainly isn’t giving up on the project of humanity now.
So what does all this mean today, for us, for the people of Trinity, a small, struggling, but strong and determined congregation on the edge of a small, struggling, but strong and determined neighborhood, in a small, struggling, but strong and determined town. First off, I think it means that we need to have a sense of urgency. Jesus’ words to these would-be followers were urgent, because the time was short. And we too need to have a sense of urgency.
I think it also means that we cannot wait until we are completely ready before we move. I was thinking about the man who asked to bury his father, and I realized, the text doesn’t specify if his father is even dead yet. Life expectancies in the first century were short because of childhood illnesses and the risk of women in childbirth, but if this man’s father was forty, he could well live to be eighty. Jesus didn’t have forty years to sit around waiting for this guy’s father to finally reach a ripe old age and die. We don’t know how long Jesus had, Luke’s Gospel is notorious sketchy on timing, but probably no more than weeks. I have a note taped to the computer screen in my office that reads “Begin before you are ready.” I put it there in my first couple months of ministry, because I realized I was spending so much time making sure I knew everything that I wasn’t actually getting anything done. If I waited until I knew everything I needed to know in order to properly and effectively lead this congregation, we’d close our doors or at best I’d retire before we got around to any actual ministry. We just don’t have that kind of time. So I stopped waiting until I knew what I was doing, and we did stuff. Now, in fairness, some things I wished I’d waited a little longer and learned a little more first, the on-going saga of the flat roof being a classic example. But honestly, as much of a headache as that is, and as much as I wished I’d known then what I know now, I don’t regret it. Because getting that done was our first big win in terms of getting the building back on its feet again. We got that done, and we realized we could, and we replaced the furnaces, and we fixed the pitched roof, and we spruced up the exterior, and we painted the whole interior and got new carpet in the office wing. All stuff this building desperately needed, that we just needed to take the risk and do. And we did it. And financially, no, we’re not better off then we were when I got here five years ago, but even with all that outlay of money, we’re not really any worse either. And we don’t have to remember our baptism during communion anymore. We do still sometimes get to remember it in the kitchen, but we’re working on that…
So we need to take risks, we need to move forward. We cannot get caught up in past failures, we need to jump before we really know where we might land. But I don’t think that means we are to disregard our history and leap blindly forward. Elisha took on the mantle of Elijah, he followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. And Jesus was calling these people to be followers, to learn from him, not to go out and just be him on their own. I am grateful for the history of this congregation as a place that cares about justice and believes in practicing its faith in action in love for Battle Creek and especially for this neighborhood. This is a congregation with a history of working, and of strength, and of some prickliness, sure, but of good hearts and hard work and devotion to God and God’s people. That’s a legacy we can and should be proud of, and a legacy to build on.
All this to say, I don’t know what we’re doing, you don’t know what we’re doing, but we need to be doing something. The time is short, the work is urgent. This neighborhood needs us to show up, to be God to them, with them, for the sake of God’s kingdom. If you’re new to this community, or fairly new, I’m so glad you’re here, because we need you. We need your new ideas, we need your fresh perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in what we’ve tried before and what used to work, and didn’t, and lose sight of the new thing God is doing right now. And if you’ve been part of Trinity since Moses was a member of the choir, oh man, we need you too. We need, like Elisha asked of Elijah, a double share of your wisdom. We need to know what you know, we need to learn from your experience, we need your leadership. It’s a hard ask, like Elijah said, I know, but this is no time to retire. We need you.
Dear people of God. The work of discipleship is hard, the stakes are high, and the time is urgent. But we know, because we are a resurrection people, that God has a future to us, that there is more for us to do, and that we have been set free not from something but for something. So let us move forward into this new future, into this new work, to which God is calling us. It is, as it always is, a great time to be the people of God. Amen.
To make matters weirder, our Gospel ended with Jesus saying “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” and then the lectionary paired it with an Old Testament reading where Elijah was taken up to heaven in chariots of fire, while his chosen successor Elisha ran along the ground, staring into the sky as instructed, yelling, “father, father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And that’s the semicontinuous reading; it isn’t even necessarily supposed to line up with the Gospel themes. The thematic Old Testament reading is even more jarringly opposite. We didn’t read that one, but it’s also a story of Elijah and Elisha. That one recounting when Elijah first chose Elisha as his successor. Elijah came across Elisha in a field and placed his mantle over him, designating him as his successor. A mantle, by the way is like a robe or coat that designated Elijah as a prophet. Elisha replied to this grand gesture, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Then Elisha went home to his family, killed and cooked his oxen, throwing a big final party for his family, and then he went and followed Elijah.
That’s the pairing of stories we have this morning. Jesus told his followers, “Let the dead bury their own,” and “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back,” meanwhile Elisha returned home, threw a party, and then followed Elijah. Then later he chased after Elijah as he ascended upward, after which he took on Elijah’s own mantle and his ministry. And since we are lectionary people—which means we read the whole bible, not just the parts we like—we’re stuck figuring out what these readings all have to say to us.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about all week, Elijah and Elisha are heroes of the prophets and Jesus is, well, Jesus, so how do we make sense of these two seemingly contradictory responses to discipleship. It occurred to me that what these three stories all have in common is they are all about what it means to be a follower of someone, what it means to carry on not just someone else’s legacy but more importantly the work of the Kingdom of God. That’s the end result of all of these stories. Elisha became Elijah’s successor. Our Gospel passage started, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up” taken up referring to Jesus’ death on the cross, resurrection, and ascension, “when the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” This line is meant to illustrate Jesus’ single-minded devotion to his mission. From here on out he is on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross, and he’s using what little time he has left to make sure his disciples are as ready as they can possibly be to carry on his mission in his absence. Even the Galatians text is not about how one gets freedom; it is about how we are to live now that we already have it.
That right there is the biggest good news statement I take from all four of these readings this morning. We have a future. And not only do we have a future, but God cares about how we live in that future, God cares that that future is good and rich and life-giving. And, God is so determined to move us into that future, that God has a whole host of ways to move us forward. How we follow God into this new future is situational, that’s one of the things I take from these four very different readings. God is not confined to one way of moving us, but many. This is a bit of an aside, but do you all remember that Footprints poem that was really popular a few years ago. The one where the man had a dream where he was walking along the beach with the Lord, and he looked back at the footprints in the sand and noticed that in the most difficult times of his life there was only one set of footprints. He asked Jesus why Jesus had left him in those times, and Jesus replied he hadn’t left him; those had been the times where Jesus had carried him. A pastor friend posted a comic that has an extension to that, where Jesus, after saying the whole “it was then I carried you” bit, goes on to add, “that long line is where I dragged you for a while. And over there, where there’s no footprints, that’s where I hid you behind that sand bank while I went to get a hot dog.” It’s a joke, but I think there’s truth there as well. We have a future, God is going to get us into that future, whatever it takes. The one who has been with us since before time began certainly isn’t giving up on the project of humanity now.
So what does all this mean today, for us, for the people of Trinity, a small, struggling, but strong and determined congregation on the edge of a small, struggling, but strong and determined neighborhood, in a small, struggling, but strong and determined town. First off, I think it means that we need to have a sense of urgency. Jesus’ words to these would-be followers were urgent, because the time was short. And we too need to have a sense of urgency.
I think it also means that we cannot wait until we are completely ready before we move. I was thinking about the man who asked to bury his father, and I realized, the text doesn’t specify if his father is even dead yet. Life expectancies in the first century were short because of childhood illnesses and the risk of women in childbirth, but if this man’s father was forty, he could well live to be eighty. Jesus didn’t have forty years to sit around waiting for this guy’s father to finally reach a ripe old age and die. We don’t know how long Jesus had, Luke’s Gospel is notorious sketchy on timing, but probably no more than weeks. I have a note taped to the computer screen in my office that reads “Begin before you are ready.” I put it there in my first couple months of ministry, because I realized I was spending so much time making sure I knew everything that I wasn’t actually getting anything done. If I waited until I knew everything I needed to know in order to properly and effectively lead this congregation, we’d close our doors or at best I’d retire before we got around to any actual ministry. We just don’t have that kind of time. So I stopped waiting until I knew what I was doing, and we did stuff. Now, in fairness, some things I wished I’d waited a little longer and learned a little more first, the on-going saga of the flat roof being a classic example. But honestly, as much of a headache as that is, and as much as I wished I’d known then what I know now, I don’t regret it. Because getting that done was our first big win in terms of getting the building back on its feet again. We got that done, and we realized we could, and we replaced the furnaces, and we fixed the pitched roof, and we spruced up the exterior, and we painted the whole interior and got new carpet in the office wing. All stuff this building desperately needed, that we just needed to take the risk and do. And we did it. And financially, no, we’re not better off then we were when I got here five years ago, but even with all that outlay of money, we’re not really any worse either. And we don’t have to remember our baptism during communion anymore. We do still sometimes get to remember it in the kitchen, but we’re working on that…
So we need to take risks, we need to move forward. We cannot get caught up in past failures, we need to jump before we really know where we might land. But I don’t think that means we are to disregard our history and leap blindly forward. Elisha took on the mantle of Elijah, he followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. And Jesus was calling these people to be followers, to learn from him, not to go out and just be him on their own. I am grateful for the history of this congregation as a place that cares about justice and believes in practicing its faith in action in love for Battle Creek and especially for this neighborhood. This is a congregation with a history of working, and of strength, and of some prickliness, sure, but of good hearts and hard work and devotion to God and God’s people. That’s a legacy we can and should be proud of, and a legacy to build on.
All this to say, I don’t know what we’re doing, you don’t know what we’re doing, but we need to be doing something. The time is short, the work is urgent. This neighborhood needs us to show up, to be God to them, with them, for the sake of God’s kingdom. If you’re new to this community, or fairly new, I’m so glad you’re here, because we need you. We need your new ideas, we need your fresh perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in what we’ve tried before and what used to work, and didn’t, and lose sight of the new thing God is doing right now. And if you’ve been part of Trinity since Moses was a member of the choir, oh man, we need you too. We need, like Elisha asked of Elijah, a double share of your wisdom. We need to know what you know, we need to learn from your experience, we need your leadership. It’s a hard ask, like Elijah said, I know, but this is no time to retire. We need you.
Dear people of God. The work of discipleship is hard, the stakes are high, and the time is urgent. But we know, because we are a resurrection people, that God has a future to us, that there is more for us to do, and that we have been set free not from something but for something. So let us move forward into this new future, into this new work, to which God is calling us. It is, as it always is, a great time to be the people of God. Amen.
The Spiritual Power of a Snack and a Nap - A Sermon on 1 Kings 19.1-15 and Luke 8.26-39
Welcome to the time after Pentecost. Also known as ordinary time or “the long green season.” I hope you like this green stole, because I’ll be wearing it until December. To do some stage setting, the church year is divided up into two sections. Advent through Pentecost, essentially the birth of Jesus through the coming of the Holy Spirit, is known as the Life of Christ. This is when we learn about who Jesus is, what he means, and how he changes the world and us. The second section, this so called “ordinary time”—which fun fact, is called “ordinary time” not because the Sundays are ordinary, but because the weeks are numbered or “ordered” – this “ordinary time” is what is known as the Life of the Church. The point of the readings in this time of the year is for us to think about, ok, now that we know who Jesus is and what Jesus did, how then do we as a church live in response to that gift? So we reread about Jesus’ ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing, reflecting on how we hear them differently in the light of Christ’s resurrection, now that we are resurrection people.
But before we get to talking about our Gospel reading for this morning, I want to make one more quick jump for one more fun fact: during Ordinary Time the lectionary gives us a choice on Old Testament readings. We can either follow what’s called the “thematic track” where the readings are chosen to echo the themes of the Gospel, or we can follow the “semicontinuous track” where the readings, appropriately, give us a more or less continuous narrative. During Year C, the semincontinuous track takes us through the prophets. And since I love the prophets and we don’t get to spend much time with them, I thought we’d go that route for a change. So I want to encourage you to pay attention to the Old Testament readings because while I probably won’t mention it every Sunday, we will occasionally pop in and see what the prophets are up to. An important thing to remember about the prophets is that prophets and prophecy are not the same thing. The prophets in the Old Testament were not fortune-tellers, they were truth-tellers. The role of the prophet was to declare the message of God. Another thing to remember about the prophets is that they were pretty ordinary people. Elijah is one of the most famous prophets in the Bible, he is one of the people who shows up with Jesus during his transfiguration, he is the spiritual predecessor of John the Baptist. And in our story this morning, he was portrayed as tired, scared, and maybe a bit hangry. Now, in fairness, and to set us in the context of the story, Elijah’s life was more than a little stressful at the moment. He’d just finished a big showdown with the followers of the false god Baal and as a result he was now on the run from Queen Jezebel. But in Beer-sheba he was outside of Jezebel’s land and therefore safe from her threats. Yet, the text shows us Elijah still didn’t feel safe and asked the Lord “that he might die.” And I love God’s response to Elijah’s request. First, God didn’t do anything until Elijah falls asleep. Then, God sent an angel to wake him up and instruct him to eat a snack which had been prepared for him. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on the internet sometimes about this story that always makes me laugh that reads: “This is your gentle reminder that one time in the Bible Elijah was like “God, I'm so mad! I want to die!" so God said "Here’s some food. Why don't you have a nap?" So Elijah slept, ate, & decided things weren't so bad. Never underestimate the spiritual power of a nap & a snack.”
But that’s not all God did for Elijah. After the whole snack/nap scenario, God showed Godself to Elijah. And this too is one of my favorite parts of scripture because of the power of the imagery. “God said to Elijah, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces… but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire was”—and this next part actually depends on which translation you read because Hebrew’s a tricky language to translate—“after the fire was a sound of sheer silence,” or “a sound of fine silence,” or “a gentle whisper,” or “a still small voice.” However it is translated, that is where the Lord was. “When Elijah heard THAT, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”
What I love about this passage is the unexpectedness of God. God gave Elijah all these huge, loud, powerful things, winds, earthquakes, fires, all things, by the way, which are symbols of the presence of God, remember two weeks ago Pentecost with the mighty wind and the tongues of fire, but God wasn’t in those things. Rather, God was in the sheer silence, the still small voice. This passage reminds me that, yes, God can do flashy. “Blood, and fire, and smoky mist,” and all that jazz. But God is not constrained to flashy. God doesn’t have to scare Elijah to make God’s presence known. God is also present in silence, in quiet, in persistence, in presence, and in the simplest of cures that is a long nap and a good snack.
Flash forward to our Gospel reading, and we’ve got another story about fear. Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee and entered the region of the Gerasenes. And the first person who met them was a man who had demons. And not just some demons, this guy had a legion of demons. And legion is a very specific word choice here, because a legion is a Roman fighting force of about six-thousand soldiers. So Luke is working in a bit of a social and political angle into this text here. Yes this is a story about Jesus having power over demons, but also the demons have the same name as Roman fighters so…
So the man with the demons met Jesus on the shore. And the demons, as demons do, immediately recognized Jesus, “What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” The demons begged Jesus not to cast them out into the abyss and Jesus, Doug Martens pointed this out to me in Bible study and I think it’s fascinating, Jesus showed the demons mercy by permitting them to go into a herd of pigs instead. But once the demons entered the pigs, the pigs immediately “rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.” This, as theologian R. Alan Culpepper points out, demonstrates for us that “when it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self-destructive… the demons that wanted most to avoid being sent into the abyss have been drowned in the lake.”
Once this happened, chaos ensued. The swineherders ran to tell the townspeople about what had happened, and the townspeople came to see what had happened, and there they found “the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told” the towns people what had happened, and they “asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.” This seems like such an interesting and odd response to this whole scene. In a story with demons and drowning pigs, the thing that freaked the townspeople out was the sight of their local village crazy guy sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, quiet, and in his right mind. So much so that rather than rejoicing that their community member had been healed, they instead asked Jesus to leave.
There’s a million different directions we could go with this, a million interesting questions we could ask. But two things really caught my attention in this text this week. The first is a question, what does this story tell us about our ability to allow people to change? Do we allow space for others to be transformed by Jesus, or like the townspeople, can we see only the man with demons, not the man as he now is? And the second is a sadness for the townspeople, and what they end up missing because of the fear they felt at this scene. Jesus healed a man of demons, and instead of rejoicing, instead of bringing Jesus into their town to see what other miracles he might perform, they asked Jesus if maybe he could just move along. Tombs represent places of desolation and death, and in some ways it seems like the man with the demons got out of the tomb just in time for the townspeople to metaphorically move themselves into it. Fear is a powerful force, and like evil it is both destructive and self-destructive. The townspeople’s fear first punished the man with the demons, keeping him on the outskirts of society. And now it was punishing them without their even realizing it, causing them to push away Jesus, the one who would ultimately set them free from fear and death.
But here’s where I found the real good news in this story this week. Not for the man with the demons. Not that not having demons anymore isn’t great but it’s both a) sort of low-hanging theological fruit and b) demons are hard to relate to. The good news I found this week was for the townspeople themselves. Because here they were, so wrapped up in their own fear that they asked Jesus to leave. And Jesus obliged their request, but not completely. See, the man who had been set free of demons wanted to come with Jesus, but Jesus told him to stay behind, telling him “‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.” Jesus couldn’t cast out the townspeople’s fear himself, so he left the man formerly known as Legion behind to do it for him. To be a living example for this community of the power of Jesus and his healing. So that slowly, they may come to get over their fear and through the power of relationship, of getting to know Legion not as Legion but as Frank or Joe or whoever he was now, to have their eyes opened and their minds expanded. Jesus did not leave them in their fear; he left them with a continued message of comfort and the power of God to transform.
Dear friends in Christ, that, I think, is the good news of both of these stories. That God does not leave us in our fear, but that God comes to cast out our fear. And as many ways as we have to fear, God has even more ways to cast it out. From earthquakes and violent winds, to sheer silence and still small voices, to snacks and naps, from casting out demons to the persistence of relationship, God does not leave us in fear. Amen.
R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” New Interpreters Bible Commentary, Vol. IX (Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1995).
But before we get to talking about our Gospel reading for this morning, I want to make one more quick jump for one more fun fact: during Ordinary Time the lectionary gives us a choice on Old Testament readings. We can either follow what’s called the “thematic track” where the readings are chosen to echo the themes of the Gospel, or we can follow the “semicontinuous track” where the readings, appropriately, give us a more or less continuous narrative. During Year C, the semincontinuous track takes us through the prophets. And since I love the prophets and we don’t get to spend much time with them, I thought we’d go that route for a change. So I want to encourage you to pay attention to the Old Testament readings because while I probably won’t mention it every Sunday, we will occasionally pop in and see what the prophets are up to. An important thing to remember about the prophets is that prophets and prophecy are not the same thing. The prophets in the Old Testament were not fortune-tellers, they were truth-tellers. The role of the prophet was to declare the message of God. Another thing to remember about the prophets is that they were pretty ordinary people. Elijah is one of the most famous prophets in the Bible, he is one of the people who shows up with Jesus during his transfiguration, he is the spiritual predecessor of John the Baptist. And in our story this morning, he was portrayed as tired, scared, and maybe a bit hangry. Now, in fairness, and to set us in the context of the story, Elijah’s life was more than a little stressful at the moment. He’d just finished a big showdown with the followers of the false god Baal and as a result he was now on the run from Queen Jezebel. But in Beer-sheba he was outside of Jezebel’s land and therefore safe from her threats. Yet, the text shows us Elijah still didn’t feel safe and asked the Lord “that he might die.” And I love God’s response to Elijah’s request. First, God didn’t do anything until Elijah falls asleep. Then, God sent an angel to wake him up and instruct him to eat a snack which had been prepared for him. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on the internet sometimes about this story that always makes me laugh that reads: “This is your gentle reminder that one time in the Bible Elijah was like “God, I'm so mad! I want to die!" so God said "Here’s some food. Why don't you have a nap?" So Elijah slept, ate, & decided things weren't so bad. Never underestimate the spiritual power of a nap & a snack.”
But that’s not all God did for Elijah. After the whole snack/nap scenario, God showed Godself to Elijah. And this too is one of my favorite parts of scripture because of the power of the imagery. “God said to Elijah, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces… but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire was”—and this next part actually depends on which translation you read because Hebrew’s a tricky language to translate—“after the fire was a sound of sheer silence,” or “a sound of fine silence,” or “a gentle whisper,” or “a still small voice.” However it is translated, that is where the Lord was. “When Elijah heard THAT, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”
What I love about this passage is the unexpectedness of God. God gave Elijah all these huge, loud, powerful things, winds, earthquakes, fires, all things, by the way, which are symbols of the presence of God, remember two weeks ago Pentecost with the mighty wind and the tongues of fire, but God wasn’t in those things. Rather, God was in the sheer silence, the still small voice. This passage reminds me that, yes, God can do flashy. “Blood, and fire, and smoky mist,” and all that jazz. But God is not constrained to flashy. God doesn’t have to scare Elijah to make God’s presence known. God is also present in silence, in quiet, in persistence, in presence, and in the simplest of cures that is a long nap and a good snack.
Flash forward to our Gospel reading, and we’ve got another story about fear. Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee and entered the region of the Gerasenes. And the first person who met them was a man who had demons. And not just some demons, this guy had a legion of demons. And legion is a very specific word choice here, because a legion is a Roman fighting force of about six-thousand soldiers. So Luke is working in a bit of a social and political angle into this text here. Yes this is a story about Jesus having power over demons, but also the demons have the same name as Roman fighters so…
So the man with the demons met Jesus on the shore. And the demons, as demons do, immediately recognized Jesus, “What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” The demons begged Jesus not to cast them out into the abyss and Jesus, Doug Martens pointed this out to me in Bible study and I think it’s fascinating, Jesus showed the demons mercy by permitting them to go into a herd of pigs instead. But once the demons entered the pigs, the pigs immediately “rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.” This, as theologian R. Alan Culpepper points out, demonstrates for us that “when it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self-destructive… the demons that wanted most to avoid being sent into the abyss have been drowned in the lake.”
Once this happened, chaos ensued. The swineherders ran to tell the townspeople about what had happened, and the townspeople came to see what had happened, and there they found “the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told” the towns people what had happened, and they “asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.” This seems like such an interesting and odd response to this whole scene. In a story with demons and drowning pigs, the thing that freaked the townspeople out was the sight of their local village crazy guy sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, quiet, and in his right mind. So much so that rather than rejoicing that their community member had been healed, they instead asked Jesus to leave.
There’s a million different directions we could go with this, a million interesting questions we could ask. But two things really caught my attention in this text this week. The first is a question, what does this story tell us about our ability to allow people to change? Do we allow space for others to be transformed by Jesus, or like the townspeople, can we see only the man with demons, not the man as he now is? And the second is a sadness for the townspeople, and what they end up missing because of the fear they felt at this scene. Jesus healed a man of demons, and instead of rejoicing, instead of bringing Jesus into their town to see what other miracles he might perform, they asked Jesus if maybe he could just move along. Tombs represent places of desolation and death, and in some ways it seems like the man with the demons got out of the tomb just in time for the townspeople to metaphorically move themselves into it. Fear is a powerful force, and like evil it is both destructive and self-destructive. The townspeople’s fear first punished the man with the demons, keeping him on the outskirts of society. And now it was punishing them without their even realizing it, causing them to push away Jesus, the one who would ultimately set them free from fear and death.
But here’s where I found the real good news in this story this week. Not for the man with the demons. Not that not having demons anymore isn’t great but it’s both a) sort of low-hanging theological fruit and b) demons are hard to relate to. The good news I found this week was for the townspeople themselves. Because here they were, so wrapped up in their own fear that they asked Jesus to leave. And Jesus obliged their request, but not completely. See, the man who had been set free of demons wanted to come with Jesus, but Jesus told him to stay behind, telling him “‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.” Jesus couldn’t cast out the townspeople’s fear himself, so he left the man formerly known as Legion behind to do it for him. To be a living example for this community of the power of Jesus and his healing. So that slowly, they may come to get over their fear and through the power of relationship, of getting to know Legion not as Legion but as Frank or Joe or whoever he was now, to have their eyes opened and their minds expanded. Jesus did not leave them in their fear; he left them with a continued message of comfort and the power of God to transform.
Dear friends in Christ, that, I think, is the good news of both of these stories. That God does not leave us in our fear, but that God comes to cast out our fear. And as many ways as we have to fear, God has even more ways to cast it out. From earthquakes and violent winds, to sheer silence and still small voices, to snacks and naps, from casting out demons to the persistence of relationship, God does not leave us in fear. Amen.
R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” New Interpreters Bible Commentary, Vol. IX (Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1995).
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