At first read, the Gospel text for today felt like quite the refreshing break after a rough couple of weeks. After two weeks of, “see I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves” and “do not think that I have come to bring peace… I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” “whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” felt like ok a text about welcoming, here’s something we can handle. Welcoming, after all, is something we’re pretty good at. We joke about it all the time, right, how Trinity is the friendly church. And every church says they’re welcoming, but not to toot our own horns too much, but you guys actually are legitimately very welcoming. That’s not to say we do it perfectly, but we’ve done the work. Longer than some of you really wanted to, I made us go through the whole process, and we have a long statement of welcome hanging in the entryway of our building, plastered on our website, and in every printed bulletin that lists, in detail, who we are prepared to welcome.
I know that going through this whole welcome statement process felt like overkill, we’re welcoming, doesn’t having this extensive list run the risk of leaving someone out that we might welcome and thus leave someone excluded. Isn’t the blanket “all are welcome” a more inclusive welcome than this detailed list we present? In the strict dictionary definition of the word, yes. But in the actual, flesh and blood, messy and imperfect world we live in, no. If you have Netflix, watch the first episode of the new season of Queer Eye. First off, it’s just about the best explication of the Lutheran faith I’ve ever seen and it includes my parent’s bishop and a church that reminds me a lot of Trinity. But in the subject of what we’re talking about, one of the tensions that arises is the pain LGBTQ Christians experience in congregations that proclaim “all are welcome” while making it very clear that welcome does not extend to them. Or does not extend to all parts of them, to their authentic selves. We said people with disabilities were welcome, but until this winter we didn’t have a fully handicap accessible restroom. Our hearts were ready to be welcoming, but our building, quite frankly, was not. The welcome was well-intentioned, but it wasn’t truly available. Now, not only do we have the restroom but if you’ve driven by the church recently, Wayne outlined for us some van-accessible handicap parking spaces. Our facility is starting to match our declaration.
These things took work, take work. It’s been a process, one that is still on-going, to make our building fully accessible to people with a variety of disabilities. It was a process, one that stretches well before I got here, and it is an on-going process to be a congregation that is ready and willing to welcome people of different sexual orientations and gender expressions. It is work to welcome new people, to get used to new ideas, to adapt to new ways of doing, being, worshiping, and working together in the world. Being welcoming takes time and it’s hard. We’ve been roommates with Co-op for going on fifteen years now, and we still fight over who moved the coffee pot, right. It takes patience. But we know it’s worth it. We know the time and effort and energy has been worth it. As this text tells us, when we have welcomed our neighbors, we have welcomed God.
But, you knew there was going to be a but, but, two things actually. First but, we are in the middle of a global pandemic. One where in Michigan if you test positive for COVID-19 the first question you will be asked as part of the contact tracing efforts will be, “what church do you go to?” Because epidemiologists predict that churches will be the number one spreader of the coronavirus in Michigan. Number one. Number two is bars. All of you who’ve spoken to me have been super supportive of the decisions we’re making to try and keep people safe, but if you’ve been chafing at the bit a little bit, feeling like I’m being to cautious in keeping us closed, and soon in keeping us outside, because restaurants, hair salons, and so much else is opening, well, that’s the reason. So the first but is this question, what does it mean to be welcoming when being together is dangerous to public health?
Honestly, I think being welcoming now looks like this. Looks like what we’re trying to do. Being welcoming, really, truly, authentically, welcoming, in this time, means being a little bit unwelcoming. It means we’re going to be uncomfortable in worship for a while. We’re going to be outside. Though, honestly, I was thinking about this and its summertime and our sanctuary doesn’t have air conditioning. Outdoor worship may actually be more comfortable than what we traditionally suffer through in the summer. It gets hot in there. But, we’re going to be uncomfortable not for ourselves, but for the sake of others. We’re staying online, and when we do gather again we will wear masks and social distance not to protect ourselves, though that’s a bonus, but to protect our neighbors. So cases stay low and kids can go to school in the fall, so the economy can stay open and people can have jobs. Worship will not be as easy to engage in for a time, and, weird as it seems, that’s welcoming right now.
And but number two, and this is the harder one, but number two is this text isn’t actually about welcoming at all. This text is a call for us to be welcomed. Listen to the opening line again, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me.” Not, “when you welcome someone you welcome me,” but “whoever welcomes you welcomes me.” Friends, this text is calling us to be not the welcomer but the welcomed. Being the welcomed is hard because being the welcomed means giving up control of the situation, it means giving up the power, it means opening ourselves up to be vulnerable and be served by another.
Think about it. When we welcome someone into our space, yes it forces us to adapt and change if we are really being authentically welcome, but we still hold all the cards. When you have company over, you clean for them, make sure things are nice, arrange your schedule and your home to accommodate them, but it’s still your home and your schedule. When you are the welcomer, you have the ability to adapt the level of that welcome at any time. But when you are the welcomed, you are at the mercy of another. You have to trust that they will take care of you, that they are watching out for your allergies, that they aren’t letting rabid beasts running through their house, that their house is structurally sound. I’m being a bit melodramatic here, but you get the point.
There’s also, for me at least, this hesitation that I don’t want to be a burden on someone else. I don’t want to inconvenience them, to impose myself upon another. But thinking about it through the lens of this text, that’s kind of selfish of me. Because if Christ comes with the welcomed, by holding the role of welcomer I am denying others the ability to welcome Christ. It’s selfish of me, and it’s also not completely accurate. Part of me doesn’t want to inconvenience others, but part of me, probably the biggest part of me, doesn’t want to be uncomfortable. I don’t want to have to feel guilty or imposing, I’d rather just be self-sufficient.
I was thinking about all this the other day, and I was reminded of a conversation Tish and I had way back in February about going through hard times. Tish remarked that a verse that had sustained her was First Thessalonians five, eighteen which says, “give thanks in all circumstances.” We discussed how Paul didn’t say, “give thanks FOR all circumstances” but “IN all circumstances.” The word choice matters here, because this is not an expectation that every horrible thing that happens is the will of God and thus we need to be happy about it. Rather it is the promise that in every hard thing, there is something we can be thankful for.
I was thinking about this conversation, and I started to ponder what I am thankful for in the midst of the coronavirus. At first I was like, nothing. This is a horrible virus that is ruining people’s lives and livelihoods, and there is nothing to be thankful for. But then I thought about how uncomfortable I am, and I thought, maybe the opportunity to practice being uncomfortable is in some ways, a gift. Because being uncomfortable now, learning to worship with a mask, to stay apart from you, to shift the way I do ministry, is teaching me how to engage more fully in other uncomfortable situations. It will, in the long run, help me be a better guest, be better at being welcomed, and thus more faithful to the work to which I am called by this text.
I’ll be honest, there’s never a day that I’m stoked about this opportunity to practice discomfort. There are some days I’m tolerant of it, and that’s about as far as it goes. But considering how long I have had the privilege of being comfortable in churches and others have not, I will lean into this discomfort for as long as it takes, so that Christ can be present.
And, here’s the good news in this. Good news that I’d never noticed until this week is really the overarching theme of the entire Gospel of Matthew. There are two commissionings in Matthew’s Gospel, two times in which Jesus sends his disciples out to do his work in the world. There is the missionary discourse, which we have been reading through this month, and there is the Great Commission, which we started the month with. Remember back to June 7th when Jesus, just like at the beginning of the Missionary Discourse, sent the disciples out to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” And then it ended, not just the reading, but the entire Gospel of Matthew, with this promise from Jesus, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Friends the work before us is hard. Welcoming is hard, being welcomed is even harder. It will require us to give up our positions of control and enter into the trust of another. But the promise of this and every single other thing Christ calls us to is this, Christ is with us always, to the end of the age, no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Monday, June 22, 2020
Not Peace but a Sword - A Sermon on Matthew 10:24-39
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace,” Jesus said. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” I don’t know about you but given all that is going on in our world today, these are not the comforting words of Jesus I could have hoped for this morning. Things had started out ok, with two separate commands not to fear. A nice change from last week’s talk about what to do not if, but when they persecute you, this charge not to fear. But Matthew follows it up not with Luke’s endearing “little flock” but with this frightening pronouncement of violence.
But I guess the first question we have to ask here is what does Jesus mean by peace? Or maybe, more specifically, who’s definition of peace are we working from? What is the peace which Jesus is speaking of, and who is deciding what that peace looks like? Jeremiah six, fourteen warns, “They have treated the wounds of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace” and that is the kind of careless peace that ruled in Jesus’ time.
Both the life of Jesus and the life of the writer of Matthew’s Gospel occurred during what is known as the Pax Romana, the “peace of Rome.” But historian Walter Goffart noted: “The volume of the Cambridge Ancient History for the years AD 70–192 is called 'The Imperial Peace', but peace is not what one finds in its pages.” Historian Arnaldo Momigliano added that “Romans regarded peace, not as an absence of war, but the rare situation when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist.” During this time, history records among others, no less than three Jewish-Roman Wars, reminding us that the experience of peace can be very different between the ruler and the ruled. When Jesus said, “I have not come to bring peace,” I think this was the kind of peace he was referring to. The kind of peace that is “all opponents beaten down and lost the ability to resist.” The kind of peace that is maintained not by justice but by strength. Where peace is not experienced but imposed. The kind of peace under which one cannot breathe.
I mentioned last week when we read the sweet story about Abraham’s eagerness to greet some visitors, that Abraham and Sarah would not always get it so right. Today’s Old Testament reading shows us just one example of how wrong they could go. To recap, because the lectionary left this part out, back in chapter fifteen, so before even what we read last week, God came to Abraham in a dream and promised that his descendants would outnumber the stars. After a while, however, with no descendants forthcoming, Sarah became impatient and “gave” Abraham her slave girl Hagar. Which, there’s a whole lot of problematic stuff in there that we don’t have time to get into in a sermon, but let’s just acknowledge that it exists. Abraham had a child with Hagar and that child, Abraham’s oldest son’s name was Ishmael.
And many bad things followed for Hagar, but the final story was the one we read this morning. How Sarah saw Abraham’s oldest son playing with her son and, filled with jealousy over what Ishmael might have inherited over Isaac, ordered the boy and his mother cast out. How Abraham complied and left Hagar and her child in the desert with nothing but a loaf of bread and a skein of water, and how Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and waited for them both to die.
And yes, we could rush to the end where God showed Hagar a well of water, and they both lived, and Ishmael too became the ancestor of a great nation but I think the question remains why is this story told? When the people of Judea were complying their sacred text so many millennia ago, why leave this story in here? No one, not Abraham, not Sarah, not even really God come out looking good in this story of betrayal.
I am impressed with the courage of our forefathers and foremothers in faith who chose to preserve this story. It would have been so easy to leave Hagar out entirely, or to paper over it in a way that makes everyone involved look better. But I am glad that our ancestors had the foresight not to do that. Because I think this story is a gift to us. I think this story persisted to remind God’s people that theirs/ours is not just a story of God’s freeing them from slavery, theirs/ours is also a story of God’s freeing of those whom we have enslaved. This story challenges God’s chosen with the truth that they, that we, do not have a corner on God’s care, and that we too are not without the sin of thinking that we matter over others. This story forces us to reckon with what we say when we say we are God’s children, and wonder who else God might have God’s eye on, who’s pain we have overlooked.
June is a big month for reckoning. There are a lot of grievous anniversaries in June which require reckoning with. Five years ago Wednesday, Dylan Roof, a young man born and raised in an ELCA congregation not unlike our own, attended a bible study at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the end of the study, Roof opened fire, killing nine people who had welcomed him in prayer and study. Friday was Juneteenth, a celebration of the day that word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the slaves in Galveston, Texas and, two and a half years after it was issued, slavery finally ended in America. June 1st is the anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses in the Greenwood, which was at the time the wealthiest black neighborhood in the country and was commonly referred to as Black Wall Street. Hospitals overflowed, hundreds of people were killed, and the property damage totaled over thirty million dollars by today’s standards. Juneteenth and the Black Wall Street Massacre are well known parts of Black American history, and that they are only now coming to the forefront for many of us is in and of itself an important question. What might our country have looked like if we had had the courage of the people of Judea, to preserve such history as sacred text, reminding us of what we are capable of, and how God cares for those whom we oppress? What kind of a world might that be?
The good news dear people of God is that our Gospel text for this morning invites us to not just imagine, but to create such a world. This text is Jesus inviting, calling, cajoling us into the fray to create a world where swords have no power and peace is not a weapon. This text is also Jesus loving us enough not to sugar-coat the challenge of this message, and assuring us of God’s presence with us throughout the struggle of its unfolding. “Have no fear,” Jesus declared, “for nothing is covered that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret will not become known.” Try as we might to forget our history, to clean it up or sanitize it for posterity, to memorialize it in a statue, Jesus assures us here that nothing is unknown to God, and nothing will not become known.
“For I have come,” Jesus said, “to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother… and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” To us this sounds terrifying, but to Matthew’s audience, this was the assurance of a reality they were already experiencing. So the good news that Jesus gives here is that the way to peace is not peaceful, and that is ok. I listened to a podcast where a Korean woman talked about going along with Asian jokes so as not to upset her white friends, and how a part of her died inside when she did. And I was challenged to reflect on times when I have been silent in favor of likeability, what parts of myself and someone else have I allowed to die in service to the peace that was not peace? This text promises us that it is not only ok but right to not seek peace in that way. That it is not only ok, but the Gospel imperative that we learn the parts of history that have been left in the shadows. Not just Black Wall Street, but the Internment of Japanese Americans, the Dawes Act, the Stonewall riots, and other uncomfortable truths of American history that define us more by our silence. That it is not only ok, but a Gospel imperative to speak out when we hear racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, or any other derogatory comment, rather than go along to get along. That it is not only ok but a Gospel imperative to lift up the voices of those who have been marginalized and overlooked, to admit we were wrong, to have our minds expanded, our eyes opened, and our hearts changed to encompass all of God’s people.
This will not be easy. And it will often not feel peaceful. But this text promises us that not only is it God’s work that we are being called to, but it is work in which God walks with us. I want to close this morning with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have this quote taped to the monitor of my computer, to encourage me on the days when my own courage falters and the way of peace seems easier than the way of Christ. The quote reads: “ “There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment. Wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of almighty God. Not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
But I guess the first question we have to ask here is what does Jesus mean by peace? Or maybe, more specifically, who’s definition of peace are we working from? What is the peace which Jesus is speaking of, and who is deciding what that peace looks like? Jeremiah six, fourteen warns, “They have treated the wounds of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace” and that is the kind of careless peace that ruled in Jesus’ time.
Both the life of Jesus and the life of the writer of Matthew’s Gospel occurred during what is known as the Pax Romana, the “peace of Rome.” But historian Walter Goffart noted: “The volume of the Cambridge Ancient History for the years AD 70–192 is called 'The Imperial Peace', but peace is not what one finds in its pages.” Historian Arnaldo Momigliano added that “Romans regarded peace, not as an absence of war, but the rare situation when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist.” During this time, history records among others, no less than three Jewish-Roman Wars, reminding us that the experience of peace can be very different between the ruler and the ruled. When Jesus said, “I have not come to bring peace,” I think this was the kind of peace he was referring to. The kind of peace that is “all opponents beaten down and lost the ability to resist.” The kind of peace that is maintained not by justice but by strength. Where peace is not experienced but imposed. The kind of peace under which one cannot breathe.
I mentioned last week when we read the sweet story about Abraham’s eagerness to greet some visitors, that Abraham and Sarah would not always get it so right. Today’s Old Testament reading shows us just one example of how wrong they could go. To recap, because the lectionary left this part out, back in chapter fifteen, so before even what we read last week, God came to Abraham in a dream and promised that his descendants would outnumber the stars. After a while, however, with no descendants forthcoming, Sarah became impatient and “gave” Abraham her slave girl Hagar. Which, there’s a whole lot of problematic stuff in there that we don’t have time to get into in a sermon, but let’s just acknowledge that it exists. Abraham had a child with Hagar and that child, Abraham’s oldest son’s name was Ishmael.
And many bad things followed for Hagar, but the final story was the one we read this morning. How Sarah saw Abraham’s oldest son playing with her son and, filled with jealousy over what Ishmael might have inherited over Isaac, ordered the boy and his mother cast out. How Abraham complied and left Hagar and her child in the desert with nothing but a loaf of bread and a skein of water, and how Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and waited for them both to die.
And yes, we could rush to the end where God showed Hagar a well of water, and they both lived, and Ishmael too became the ancestor of a great nation but I think the question remains why is this story told? When the people of Judea were complying their sacred text so many millennia ago, why leave this story in here? No one, not Abraham, not Sarah, not even really God come out looking good in this story of betrayal.
I am impressed with the courage of our forefathers and foremothers in faith who chose to preserve this story. It would have been so easy to leave Hagar out entirely, or to paper over it in a way that makes everyone involved look better. But I am glad that our ancestors had the foresight not to do that. Because I think this story is a gift to us. I think this story persisted to remind God’s people that theirs/ours is not just a story of God’s freeing them from slavery, theirs/ours is also a story of God’s freeing of those whom we have enslaved. This story challenges God’s chosen with the truth that they, that we, do not have a corner on God’s care, and that we too are not without the sin of thinking that we matter over others. This story forces us to reckon with what we say when we say we are God’s children, and wonder who else God might have God’s eye on, who’s pain we have overlooked.
June is a big month for reckoning. There are a lot of grievous anniversaries in June which require reckoning with. Five years ago Wednesday, Dylan Roof, a young man born and raised in an ELCA congregation not unlike our own, attended a bible study at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the end of the study, Roof opened fire, killing nine people who had welcomed him in prayer and study. Friday was Juneteenth, a celebration of the day that word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the slaves in Galveston, Texas and, two and a half years after it was issued, slavery finally ended in America. June 1st is the anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses in the Greenwood, which was at the time the wealthiest black neighborhood in the country and was commonly referred to as Black Wall Street. Hospitals overflowed, hundreds of people were killed, and the property damage totaled over thirty million dollars by today’s standards. Juneteenth and the Black Wall Street Massacre are well known parts of Black American history, and that they are only now coming to the forefront for many of us is in and of itself an important question. What might our country have looked like if we had had the courage of the people of Judea, to preserve such history as sacred text, reminding us of what we are capable of, and how God cares for those whom we oppress? What kind of a world might that be?
The good news dear people of God is that our Gospel text for this morning invites us to not just imagine, but to create such a world. This text is Jesus inviting, calling, cajoling us into the fray to create a world where swords have no power and peace is not a weapon. This text is also Jesus loving us enough not to sugar-coat the challenge of this message, and assuring us of God’s presence with us throughout the struggle of its unfolding. “Have no fear,” Jesus declared, “for nothing is covered that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret will not become known.” Try as we might to forget our history, to clean it up or sanitize it for posterity, to memorialize it in a statue, Jesus assures us here that nothing is unknown to God, and nothing will not become known.
“For I have come,” Jesus said, “to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother… and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” To us this sounds terrifying, but to Matthew’s audience, this was the assurance of a reality they were already experiencing. So the good news that Jesus gives here is that the way to peace is not peaceful, and that is ok. I listened to a podcast where a Korean woman talked about going along with Asian jokes so as not to upset her white friends, and how a part of her died inside when she did. And I was challenged to reflect on times when I have been silent in favor of likeability, what parts of myself and someone else have I allowed to die in service to the peace that was not peace? This text promises us that it is not only ok but right to not seek peace in that way. That it is not only ok, but the Gospel imperative that we learn the parts of history that have been left in the shadows. Not just Black Wall Street, but the Internment of Japanese Americans, the Dawes Act, the Stonewall riots, and other uncomfortable truths of American history that define us more by our silence. That it is not only ok, but a Gospel imperative to speak out when we hear racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, or any other derogatory comment, rather than go along to get along. That it is not only ok but a Gospel imperative to lift up the voices of those who have been marginalized and overlooked, to admit we were wrong, to have our minds expanded, our eyes opened, and our hearts changed to encompass all of God’s people.
This will not be easy. And it will often not feel peaceful. But this text promises us that not only is it God’s work that we are being called to, but it is work in which God walks with us. I want to close this morning with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have this quote taped to the monitor of my computer, to encourage me on the days when my own courage falters and the way of peace seems easier than the way of Christ. The quote reads: “ “There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment. Wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of almighty God. Not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
Sunday, June 14, 2020
I Don't Know How to Do This, but God Does - A Sermon on Genesis 18:1-15; 21.1-7 and Matthew 9:35-10.23
I joked a couple times in the Trumpet this week about how I really wish that someone had finished the book on “Pastoring in Times of Pandemic” so that I could buy it and learn all about how to re-engage in-person worship. Though if I’m honest with myself, while this is the first pandemic I’ve pastored through, this is not the first time I’ve wished for such a book. I also remember a deep longing for “Pastoring through a Bad Roofing Contract” and “What To Do When the Toilet Won’t Stop Flushing,” neither of which are book titles either.
Wanting more information than I have, or can have, is one of the things I struggle with as a leader. Before I got the new computer, I used to have a card taped to the monitor of the old one that said “Begin before you are ready” as a reminder that I usually cannot have all the information I need or want to feel “ready” to do something. Whether the thing is restarting worship during a pandemic, figuring out how to engage in dismantling systemic racism, or simply deciding where to put the welcome desk, I always want to know just one more thing before stepping forward. It’s actually one of the reasons I’m so grateful for our partnership with Co-op, because Teresa’s response to new ideas is the exact opposite of mine. She is a leap first, details second leader, whereas I tend to get so bogged down in details that I have trouble taking a step. We balance each other out well.
In the Old Testament reading, Abraham and Sarah seem to similarly balance each other out. Both here and in other stories, Abraham is portrayed as a jump first, think second guy, whereas Sarah tends to be more cautious. We’ll see over the next few weeks that both of those approaches have weaknesses, but for now we’ll just stay in the present. Which is that Abraham, who’s been told that his descendants would outnumber the stars, was sitting looking out of his tent during the heat of the day when he noticed three travelers approaching from a distance. Abraham went out to them, offered them “a little bread,” and then ran back into the tent and was like, “we’ve got company, all hands on deck! Get the best flour but don’t just make bread, make cake! Kill that calf and let’s get some steak going. Here, let me get them some cheese and crackers while they wait.” Sarah, on the other hand, upon hearing that she is going to have a child, bursts out laughing. Now, in fairness, Sarah was somewhere north of ninety when this story takes place, so this prospective child is a bit of a long shot. Sarah’s more measured response, while in this particular incident was wrong, does seem like the more logical one. And we also saw in chapter twenty-one that Sarah took being proven wrong in stride, naming the child Isaac, which means “laughter” because, “God has brought laughter for [Sarah]; and everyone who hears will laugh with [her].”
I’ve always thought of this as a story about radical hospitality, and I think it is that. But reading it along with the Gospel text for today, I also think it is a story about God acting before we are ready, and the promise of God’s presence in times of uncertainty. As we’ll see in the next few week, Sarah’s laughter is not the only mistake these two will make. In fact, Sarah laughing at messengers of God who tell her she’s going to have a baby at ninety is pretty cute in the bad decision department compared to what’s coming, yet none of this stopped God from fulfilling God’s promise to them, that their descendants would outnumber the stars. And the Gospel reading is really Jesus giving a lesson in beginning before you are ready.
Because we haven’t been in Matthew for a while, let’s scene set a little bit. In Matthew, the teachings of Jesus are grouped into five major speeches. For the next three weeks, we’ll be reading through the second of those speeches, what is known as the Missionary Discourse. In it, Jesus instructed his disciples on how to go about the work of “proclaim[ing] the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’” The reading started by explaining how as Jesus “went about all the cities and village, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness.” So, in other words, being Jesus. But while he was doing this, “when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” So he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” “Ask for laborers,” Jesus said, and then he sent the disciples. What’s cool about this is the harvest is frequently a symbol of eschatological action. Eschatological remember being the fancy church word for the end of days, or as I’ve heard it better defined, the ultimate goal of humanity. Which we’ve read the past couple weeks, the ultimate goal of humanity is oneness, is relationship, with God as intimately as God and Jesus are one. So what this harvest imagery tells us is that the work the disciples are being commissioned for here is to be part of God’s own mission. They are being called and sent not just to do nice things for others, but literally through acts of compassion to bring about the salvation of the cosmos. Friends, this is amazing. What this text is telling us is that the phrase we like to throw around, “God’s Work, Our Hands,” that phrase literally means that the work we do is the work of salvation. That working the food pantry, setting veggies out for the neighbors, picking up trash, calling a friend, those actions are literally the work of God for the good of the world.
And then Jesus started giving the actual instruction. And if I had been a disciple, well, those instructions feel to me about as clear as Pastoring Through a Pandemic, Through a Bad Roofing Contract, or What To Do When the Toilet Won’t Stop Flushing. Jesus was like, “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper… no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.” At this point, I’d be like, wait. How am I to do all the entirely impossible things you just commanded, without even so much as a pair of shoes? Jesus, I am not equipped for this! Of course, it didn’t stop there. Jesus went on, “see, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.” Oh, this is getting better and better. “When” not if, but when, “when they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” And that, that right there friends. That and the last line of last week’s reading, the last line of the whole Gospel, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” that is the summation of the good news of this whole reading, of the whole mission to which we are sent.
Abraham and Sarah are not going to get this mission thing right, in fact they are going to get it tragically wrong. And the disciples are not going to get it right. The Great Commission we heard last week was the first time the disciples were back on the scene in Matthew after having completely abandoned Jesus as his crucifixion. And we’ll hear Jesus get frustrated with the disciples more than once before we switch to Mark in December. But those failures don’t stop the work of God from continuing, don’t stop the promise of God from unfolding. So we try, before we have all the answers, with the best wisdom we can muster, trusting that God will work with our broken attempts.
As I mentioned in the Trumpet, I don’t know yet precisely when we will return to in-person worship, though I can guarantee that it will be outside for at least a time. My desire to be a good shepherd for you means I am absolutely going to err on the side of caution. We will go slowly into this new reality, trusting that God blesses our uncertainty.
This text also blesses our efforts to move quickly. Because while I worry about moving to quickly into worship, I know I also move to slowly in situations of injustice. It is long past time where it is not enough to simply be not racist, we must in fact be actively anti-racist. We need to be, as Bishop Eaton so beautifully phrased it last week, not color-blind but color amazed. Yet that same desire to have answers I cannot have, to know every possibility and carefully select the best, wisest, most thorough, most well-thought out, here that caution is a weakness. What is needed in this time and place is action, trusting we will get it wrong, and being willing to be corrected and learn along the way. And God blesses those actions too. God blesses every cautious step, while all the while urging us to walk more boldly in faith, trusting that we walk not alone, but with God.
Dear people of God, there are times for caution and times for action. These are times for caution and times for action. And sometimes, many times, it is easy to lose sight of what is brave action and what is foolish, what is good caution and what is inactivity. So we try, and we fail, and we try again tomorrow. And we do that with a God who promise “to be with [us] always, to the end of the age.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
Wanting more information than I have, or can have, is one of the things I struggle with as a leader. Before I got the new computer, I used to have a card taped to the monitor of the old one that said “Begin before you are ready” as a reminder that I usually cannot have all the information I need or want to feel “ready” to do something. Whether the thing is restarting worship during a pandemic, figuring out how to engage in dismantling systemic racism, or simply deciding where to put the welcome desk, I always want to know just one more thing before stepping forward. It’s actually one of the reasons I’m so grateful for our partnership with Co-op, because Teresa’s response to new ideas is the exact opposite of mine. She is a leap first, details second leader, whereas I tend to get so bogged down in details that I have trouble taking a step. We balance each other out well.
In the Old Testament reading, Abraham and Sarah seem to similarly balance each other out. Both here and in other stories, Abraham is portrayed as a jump first, think second guy, whereas Sarah tends to be more cautious. We’ll see over the next few weeks that both of those approaches have weaknesses, but for now we’ll just stay in the present. Which is that Abraham, who’s been told that his descendants would outnumber the stars, was sitting looking out of his tent during the heat of the day when he noticed three travelers approaching from a distance. Abraham went out to them, offered them “a little bread,” and then ran back into the tent and was like, “we’ve got company, all hands on deck! Get the best flour but don’t just make bread, make cake! Kill that calf and let’s get some steak going. Here, let me get them some cheese and crackers while they wait.” Sarah, on the other hand, upon hearing that she is going to have a child, bursts out laughing. Now, in fairness, Sarah was somewhere north of ninety when this story takes place, so this prospective child is a bit of a long shot. Sarah’s more measured response, while in this particular incident was wrong, does seem like the more logical one. And we also saw in chapter twenty-one that Sarah took being proven wrong in stride, naming the child Isaac, which means “laughter” because, “God has brought laughter for [Sarah]; and everyone who hears will laugh with [her].”
I’ve always thought of this as a story about radical hospitality, and I think it is that. But reading it along with the Gospel text for today, I also think it is a story about God acting before we are ready, and the promise of God’s presence in times of uncertainty. As we’ll see in the next few week, Sarah’s laughter is not the only mistake these two will make. In fact, Sarah laughing at messengers of God who tell her she’s going to have a baby at ninety is pretty cute in the bad decision department compared to what’s coming, yet none of this stopped God from fulfilling God’s promise to them, that their descendants would outnumber the stars. And the Gospel reading is really Jesus giving a lesson in beginning before you are ready.
Because we haven’t been in Matthew for a while, let’s scene set a little bit. In Matthew, the teachings of Jesus are grouped into five major speeches. For the next three weeks, we’ll be reading through the second of those speeches, what is known as the Missionary Discourse. In it, Jesus instructed his disciples on how to go about the work of “proclaim[ing] the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’” The reading started by explaining how as Jesus “went about all the cities and village, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness.” So, in other words, being Jesus. But while he was doing this, “when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” So he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” “Ask for laborers,” Jesus said, and then he sent the disciples. What’s cool about this is the harvest is frequently a symbol of eschatological action. Eschatological remember being the fancy church word for the end of days, or as I’ve heard it better defined, the ultimate goal of humanity. Which we’ve read the past couple weeks, the ultimate goal of humanity is oneness, is relationship, with God as intimately as God and Jesus are one. So what this harvest imagery tells us is that the work the disciples are being commissioned for here is to be part of God’s own mission. They are being called and sent not just to do nice things for others, but literally through acts of compassion to bring about the salvation of the cosmos. Friends, this is amazing. What this text is telling us is that the phrase we like to throw around, “God’s Work, Our Hands,” that phrase literally means that the work we do is the work of salvation. That working the food pantry, setting veggies out for the neighbors, picking up trash, calling a friend, those actions are literally the work of God for the good of the world.
And then Jesus started giving the actual instruction. And if I had been a disciple, well, those instructions feel to me about as clear as Pastoring Through a Pandemic, Through a Bad Roofing Contract, or What To Do When the Toilet Won’t Stop Flushing. Jesus was like, “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper… no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.” At this point, I’d be like, wait. How am I to do all the entirely impossible things you just commanded, without even so much as a pair of shoes? Jesus, I am not equipped for this! Of course, it didn’t stop there. Jesus went on, “see, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.” Oh, this is getting better and better. “When” not if, but when, “when they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” And that, that right there friends. That and the last line of last week’s reading, the last line of the whole Gospel, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” that is the summation of the good news of this whole reading, of the whole mission to which we are sent.
Abraham and Sarah are not going to get this mission thing right, in fact they are going to get it tragically wrong. And the disciples are not going to get it right. The Great Commission we heard last week was the first time the disciples were back on the scene in Matthew after having completely abandoned Jesus as his crucifixion. And we’ll hear Jesus get frustrated with the disciples more than once before we switch to Mark in December. But those failures don’t stop the work of God from continuing, don’t stop the promise of God from unfolding. So we try, before we have all the answers, with the best wisdom we can muster, trusting that God will work with our broken attempts.
As I mentioned in the Trumpet, I don’t know yet precisely when we will return to in-person worship, though I can guarantee that it will be outside for at least a time. My desire to be a good shepherd for you means I am absolutely going to err on the side of caution. We will go slowly into this new reality, trusting that God blesses our uncertainty.
This text also blesses our efforts to move quickly. Because while I worry about moving to quickly into worship, I know I also move to slowly in situations of injustice. It is long past time where it is not enough to simply be not racist, we must in fact be actively anti-racist. We need to be, as Bishop Eaton so beautifully phrased it last week, not color-blind but color amazed. Yet that same desire to have answers I cannot have, to know every possibility and carefully select the best, wisest, most thorough, most well-thought out, here that caution is a weakness. What is needed in this time and place is action, trusting we will get it wrong, and being willing to be corrected and learn along the way. And God blesses those actions too. God blesses every cautious step, while all the while urging us to walk more boldly in faith, trusting that we walk not alone, but with God.
Dear people of God, there are times for caution and times for action. These are times for caution and times for action. And sometimes, many times, it is easy to lose sight of what is brave action and what is foolish, what is good caution and what is inactivity. So we try, and we fail, and we try again tomorrow. And we do that with a God who promise “to be with [us] always, to the end of the age.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
Monday, June 1, 2020
Pastor Kjersten Doesn't Speak Swedish - A Pentecost Sermon on Acts 2.1-21
During this Staying Home. Staying Safe time, one of the things I’ve been doing to stay busy is trying to improve my Spanish. When I finally get to see Delgadina again, I’d really like to be able to say more to her than good morning. Unfortunately, since I’m learning Spanish through a free online Spanish app, at this point were I to run into Delgadina, the two phrases I have are “good morning” and “I would like a cheese sandwich.” So how helpful that will be is questionable. But anyway, improve Spanish is just one of the many fun, stay home, stay safe, save lives, quarantine projects I’ve been working on these last few months.
I got to thinking about this, because speaking in different languages is what often comes to mind when we read this Acts reading on Pentecost. Well, violent rushing winds, tongues of fire, and whether the disciples were day drinking, but also languages. When I was little, my home church would often do this thing that’s pretty common on Pentecost, where they would try to find as many people as they could to read the Acts reading in as many languages as they could. For some reason, my mother always volunteered me to read the lesson in Swedish. Fun fact: Name with multiple silent j’s notwithstanding, I don’t speak Swedish. Not a word of it. The only things I can say in Swedish are “welcome,” “thanks for coming,” and “where is the bank?” The last one because I once tried to learn Swedish using those “Learn a new language” cassette tapes. But I was like eight and didn’t have the attention span to get past the first sentence. I can also sing the Swedish happy birthday song, albeit with questionable pronunciation. The point is, most of my childhood Pentecosts included me sharing a reading which neither my audience, nor me, understood. Which is almost comically antithetical to the entire point of Pentecost. Because what happened on Pentecost is basically the exact opposite of that. What happened on Pentecost is that everyone understood in their own native language. Not that everyone learned the disciple’s language, or even that the disciples learned others, but that through the Holy Spirit, everyone was able to hear in their language. I think I’ve used the example of the babel fish from Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” before, the little fish that lives in your ear and can translate every language directly into your ear.
I actually hate to use the babel fish analogy, even though it’s a good one, because of another common comparison of Pentecost as sort of an undoing of the tower of babel. Maybe you remember that weird Genesis story where once upon a time everyone spoke the same language and thus, hypothetically, lived in peace and harmony. I say hypothetically, because going by the Genesis time scale, the first murder occurred when there were four people on earth, all of whom were related. Oh, and this is chapter eleven, and God had felt the need to wipe the whole thing clean and start over by chapter five, so clearly we humans didn’t start out with the greatest track record of getting along. But anyway, in the Babel story, humanity decided to “make a name for ourselves” by building a giant tower to heaven. Why we decided this was a good idea is up for discussion but as I already pointed out, good ideas maybe not always one of our gifts as humans. So we did this, and God decided we were showing too much organization and decided to scatter us across the face of the earth and give us all different languages so that we wouldn’t be able to work together anymore. This is a weird story, and I’m not going to try to get into it, because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me either. The point of sharing it is this, sometimes the Pentecost story gets cast as the undoing of the Babel story. Once we were spread out, unable to communicate. But now, with the Holy Spirit, we are “one body and one Spirit,” as Paul wrote in Ephesians, “just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
All of that is true, but not in the undoing of the Tower of Babel way. Because what happened at Pentecost is not that the people were able to hear one message. What happened is the Spirit was able to change the means of communication so that it worked for all people. Pentecost is the day when the church became adaptable, when it learned to meet people where the people were at. As we heard Tish read in the reading, “in our own native languages we heard them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” The message, God’s deeds of power, didn’t change. But the way that message was communicated was unique for each different person. The Pentecost reading is a lifting up of the beauty, and importance, of diversity, and the need to meet people where they are, not where we are, in order to share the good news of the kingdom of God.
Now, to be clear, this wasn’t a new thing. This was what Jesus had been teaching and preaching all along, when he ate with sinners and outcasts, called fishermen as his followers and taught them to be shepherds, taught as easily in the streets as he did in the synagogues and temples, and generally went wherever and to whoever he came to, to share the love of God with them. But what happens at Pentecost is with the coming of the Spirit, that ability reaches hyperdrive. No longer is it confined to one man, as it was when the Word had taken on flesh. Instead, that gift, as Jesus had promised, lives in each and every one of his followers, so that now we are the ones who take on that work of meeting people where they are at, to meet the needs that they had, and with the message that they can understand. The oneness of God, the words we heard Jesus pray last week, that we” may be one as the Father and [Jesus] are one” is not a prayer for sameness. One of my colleagues pointed out last week that in the creation story, God did not call creation made in God’s image to be “very good” until it was very diverse. The image of God is in the diversity of creation, in the things that fly and the things that swim, the stars and the soil, and people of all backgrounds, genders, and experiences.
Here’s something else I found interesting about this Acts reading this week. Especially in this time in which the church is open virtually, and what it means to worship together is so very different than what we are used to. The reading starts out “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Then we hear how the Spirit “like the rush of a violent wind… filled the entire house where they were sitting.” I’ve always thought of that as being about how the Spirit comes to the community rather than the individual. I still think that, but here’s where this gets cool. Because of the “in one place” and “whole house” references, I’d always thought of this story taking place amid a group gathered together in a physical space, like the disciples in the room with the locked doors from Easter. But here’s the new thing I learned. My friend Jonathan shared with me, without citation, I admit, so I cannot tell you the source to look it up, but Jonathan shared that he’d heard that the list of places Jeff rattled off, “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judean and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,” and so on. That list of countries probably sounded as weird to its original hearers as it does to us. Because that list has some outdated countries in it. It would be if the Battle Creek International Festival, in addition to having people from Japan, Mexico, Jamaica, and Burma, also had like Vikings or Romans or Philistines. People for whom the time period is wrong. Here’s why this is cool, and important. If the people who are hearing from the disciples about God’s deeds of power in their own native language are from a different time period, then the message of the Holy Spirit is not bound by time or space. Then the message of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit to translate God’s love, is a power for us. It also reminds me of what I always knew to be true, but certainly appreciate the affirmation, of how important and powerful this thing that we are doing is in this time and place of pandemic social distancing.
One of the thing that’s been so moving to me during this pandemic is how we the church have adapted on the fly to best serve our neighbors and continue to be church together, even when we cannot be together. We churches have maybe not done this as well as teachers, but teachers are ninjas, lets be clear. If America’s teachers weren’t so busy educating America’s future, I feel like we could just turn the whole response over to them and they’d have us all vaccinated, standing in neat lines six feet apart, and not hitting our neighbors with our masks, but I digress. The point is, we’ve adapted, and how we’ve adapted has been different from church to church depending on what the need is. At Trinity we’re doing this Facebook Live thing, St. Peter has Youtube worship, my parents are going to church on Zoom. Some congregations up north where the infection rates are lower, are trying parking lot worship. Also, we had a major environmental catastrophe last week with all the flooding, and you know who’s there already, standing six feet apart and wearing masks to muck out houses and make sure emergency stations have the supplies they need, we are. The church is there. Friends, this is what it means to be “all together in one place.” It doesn’t mean to be physically in one space. It doesn’t mean to be all together in one language. I don’t even think it means to be all together in one idea. It means to be all together in the mission of God, a mission of sharing the love of God across time and space, in ways as diverse as creation itself, for all of creation is required for the image of God to be made clear. So friends, on this Pentecost, we are apart, and so much more together. Thanks be to God. Amen.
I got to thinking about this, because speaking in different languages is what often comes to mind when we read this Acts reading on Pentecost. Well, violent rushing winds, tongues of fire, and whether the disciples were day drinking, but also languages. When I was little, my home church would often do this thing that’s pretty common on Pentecost, where they would try to find as many people as they could to read the Acts reading in as many languages as they could. For some reason, my mother always volunteered me to read the lesson in Swedish. Fun fact: Name with multiple silent j’s notwithstanding, I don’t speak Swedish. Not a word of it. The only things I can say in Swedish are “welcome,” “thanks for coming,” and “where is the bank?” The last one because I once tried to learn Swedish using those “Learn a new language” cassette tapes. But I was like eight and didn’t have the attention span to get past the first sentence. I can also sing the Swedish happy birthday song, albeit with questionable pronunciation. The point is, most of my childhood Pentecosts included me sharing a reading which neither my audience, nor me, understood. Which is almost comically antithetical to the entire point of Pentecost. Because what happened on Pentecost is basically the exact opposite of that. What happened on Pentecost is that everyone understood in their own native language. Not that everyone learned the disciple’s language, or even that the disciples learned others, but that through the Holy Spirit, everyone was able to hear in their language. I think I’ve used the example of the babel fish from Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” before, the little fish that lives in your ear and can translate every language directly into your ear.
I actually hate to use the babel fish analogy, even though it’s a good one, because of another common comparison of Pentecost as sort of an undoing of the tower of babel. Maybe you remember that weird Genesis story where once upon a time everyone spoke the same language and thus, hypothetically, lived in peace and harmony. I say hypothetically, because going by the Genesis time scale, the first murder occurred when there were four people on earth, all of whom were related. Oh, and this is chapter eleven, and God had felt the need to wipe the whole thing clean and start over by chapter five, so clearly we humans didn’t start out with the greatest track record of getting along. But anyway, in the Babel story, humanity decided to “make a name for ourselves” by building a giant tower to heaven. Why we decided this was a good idea is up for discussion but as I already pointed out, good ideas maybe not always one of our gifts as humans. So we did this, and God decided we were showing too much organization and decided to scatter us across the face of the earth and give us all different languages so that we wouldn’t be able to work together anymore. This is a weird story, and I’m not going to try to get into it, because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me either. The point of sharing it is this, sometimes the Pentecost story gets cast as the undoing of the Babel story. Once we were spread out, unable to communicate. But now, with the Holy Spirit, we are “one body and one Spirit,” as Paul wrote in Ephesians, “just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
All of that is true, but not in the undoing of the Tower of Babel way. Because what happened at Pentecost is not that the people were able to hear one message. What happened is the Spirit was able to change the means of communication so that it worked for all people. Pentecost is the day when the church became adaptable, when it learned to meet people where the people were at. As we heard Tish read in the reading, “in our own native languages we heard them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” The message, God’s deeds of power, didn’t change. But the way that message was communicated was unique for each different person. The Pentecost reading is a lifting up of the beauty, and importance, of diversity, and the need to meet people where they are, not where we are, in order to share the good news of the kingdom of God.
Now, to be clear, this wasn’t a new thing. This was what Jesus had been teaching and preaching all along, when he ate with sinners and outcasts, called fishermen as his followers and taught them to be shepherds, taught as easily in the streets as he did in the synagogues and temples, and generally went wherever and to whoever he came to, to share the love of God with them. But what happens at Pentecost is with the coming of the Spirit, that ability reaches hyperdrive. No longer is it confined to one man, as it was when the Word had taken on flesh. Instead, that gift, as Jesus had promised, lives in each and every one of his followers, so that now we are the ones who take on that work of meeting people where they are at, to meet the needs that they had, and with the message that they can understand. The oneness of God, the words we heard Jesus pray last week, that we” may be one as the Father and [Jesus] are one” is not a prayer for sameness. One of my colleagues pointed out last week that in the creation story, God did not call creation made in God’s image to be “very good” until it was very diverse. The image of God is in the diversity of creation, in the things that fly and the things that swim, the stars and the soil, and people of all backgrounds, genders, and experiences.
Here’s something else I found interesting about this Acts reading this week. Especially in this time in which the church is open virtually, and what it means to worship together is so very different than what we are used to. The reading starts out “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Then we hear how the Spirit “like the rush of a violent wind… filled the entire house where they were sitting.” I’ve always thought of that as being about how the Spirit comes to the community rather than the individual. I still think that, but here’s where this gets cool. Because of the “in one place” and “whole house” references, I’d always thought of this story taking place amid a group gathered together in a physical space, like the disciples in the room with the locked doors from Easter. But here’s the new thing I learned. My friend Jonathan shared with me, without citation, I admit, so I cannot tell you the source to look it up, but Jonathan shared that he’d heard that the list of places Jeff rattled off, “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judean and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,” and so on. That list of countries probably sounded as weird to its original hearers as it does to us. Because that list has some outdated countries in it. It would be if the Battle Creek International Festival, in addition to having people from Japan, Mexico, Jamaica, and Burma, also had like Vikings or Romans or Philistines. People for whom the time period is wrong. Here’s why this is cool, and important. If the people who are hearing from the disciples about God’s deeds of power in their own native language are from a different time period, then the message of the Holy Spirit is not bound by time or space. Then the message of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit to translate God’s love, is a power for us. It also reminds me of what I always knew to be true, but certainly appreciate the affirmation, of how important and powerful this thing that we are doing is in this time and place of pandemic social distancing.
One of the thing that’s been so moving to me during this pandemic is how we the church have adapted on the fly to best serve our neighbors and continue to be church together, even when we cannot be together. We churches have maybe not done this as well as teachers, but teachers are ninjas, lets be clear. If America’s teachers weren’t so busy educating America’s future, I feel like we could just turn the whole response over to them and they’d have us all vaccinated, standing in neat lines six feet apart, and not hitting our neighbors with our masks, but I digress. The point is, we’ve adapted, and how we’ve adapted has been different from church to church depending on what the need is. At Trinity we’re doing this Facebook Live thing, St. Peter has Youtube worship, my parents are going to church on Zoom. Some congregations up north where the infection rates are lower, are trying parking lot worship. Also, we had a major environmental catastrophe last week with all the flooding, and you know who’s there already, standing six feet apart and wearing masks to muck out houses and make sure emergency stations have the supplies they need, we are. The church is there. Friends, this is what it means to be “all together in one place.” It doesn’t mean to be physically in one space. It doesn’t mean to be all together in one language. I don’t even think it means to be all together in one idea. It means to be all together in the mission of God, a mission of sharing the love of God across time and space, in ways as diverse as creation itself, for all of creation is required for the image of God to be made clear. So friends, on this Pentecost, we are apart, and so much more together. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Bad Quarantine Puns and the Hard Work of Waiting - A Sermon on Acts 1.6-14 and John 17.1-11
Fun fact: I learned the etymology of the word “quarantine” this week. Quarantine is from the Italian “quarana”, meaning forty. From 1347 to 1350, the Black Plague ravaged Europe, killing nearly a third of the population. In an effort to keep the disease from spreading, officials in the port city of Ragusa established a policy of “quarantino,” a forty day period that ships arriving from plague-ridden areas were required to stay in isolation before being allowed ashore. It is important to note that even in medieval times, the system of quarantine was imperfect and rife with inequality. One article I read noted: “For [some], especially those with money, quarantine could be optional. “There are people who are able to evade quarantine, there are people who were able to buy their way out of quarantine, there are people who were able to just leave when a quarantine was imposed and not come back until it was over,” says [historian Karl] Appuhn. “So, the people who suffered under quarantine tended for the most part to be poor—people who had no choice.”[1] Coronavirus too, is having an inequitable effect. While all of us are equally vulnerable to infection—the virus itself does not register differences in race, class, or socioeconomic status—the effects of the economic shutdown are being born on the shoulders of those with the least to spare. It is the cruel irony of poverty that staying home to protect the vulnerable most hurts the vulnerable we are trying to protect.
But, why forty days? Why aren’t we all in “trentino” or “cinquatino”? I want to make a joke here about Quentin Tarantino, but I can’t come up with one, so just know there’s a pun here waiting to emerge. Anyway, the question at hand, why forty? According to Appuhn, the reason was probably arbitrary. It may have had something to do with the cultural weight of the number forty. Noah was aboard the ark forty days, Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness for forty years, Jesus fasted forty days, there are forty days of Lent. The Bible is full of stories in which the number forty is the mark of completion.
Biblical basis or not, I think this quarantine is hard because staying home and doing nothing is so antithetical to who we are as people of faith. Our faith is born out of following a man who regularly broke social norms to be with those cast out of their communities. Jesus regularly ate with sinners and outcasts, healed lepers, touched—and raised—the death, and generally did all the things a good, law-abiding person was not supposed to do. In Jesus we see someone for whom healing was contagious. The scriptural mandates against associating with lepers, the dead, and other deemed unclean were not made in cruelty but out of concern for the health of the greater community, yet when Jesus broke those barriers he didn’t become ill, the ill became well.
This practice of Jesus associating with the outcasts is baked into who we are as Christians. On my better days, when I am able to give those congregations who choose to gather unlawfully and despite CDC guidelines the benefit of the doubt, I remember that not being together in the midst of crisis is so antithetical to how the church has behaved for thousands of year. The early church thrived during an outbreak of the plague in the second century, when Christians put their own lives at risk to care for the sick. And Luther’s words from “On Whether One May Flee a Deadly Plague” urges care for the neighbor above all. When tragedy strikes, the church shows up, casserole dish in hand, to be with those affected. On Wednesday when the dams broke in Midland, the first announcements I got were from colleagues opening their churches to And what is so challenging about this particular pandemic is that the thing which we the church are uniquely gifted at, gathering for mutual prayer and support and being an embodied example of God’s hands and feet in the world, turn out to be the most dangerous things we could do right now. Because of the insidious nature of how this virus spreads, it is safer for us to eat at a restaurant than it is for us to sit together in our sanctuary, sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and share the Lord’s Supper together. And that’s weird, and hard, and painful.
Which is why these particular texts are a gift to us in this time and place, when the world around us is beginning to crack open and we the church are being urged to stay closed. Because these texts are about being in that uncomfortable period of waiting on God, and about trusting that there is work to do, and gifts to receive, in the waiting.
Our first reading today was from the first chapter of Acts. Acts, you might recall, is the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. Luke tells the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, while Acts is the story of how the early church emerged after Jesus’ ministry. Luke, like the other Gospels, ended with a series of resurrection appearances of the crucified Jesus to his followers. Acts starts during one of those appearances, with the disciples demonstrating that despite all that had taken place over the three days of Jesus betray, death, and resurrection, they still have no idea what Jesus ministry was about, when they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” The question asked here is basically, ‘Jesus, we know that you just literally rose from the dead, but we’re still waiting for you to ride in on a white stallion like the emperor and become king of the world, so, when is that going to take place?” To which Jesus responded, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”
It is not for you to know the times or the periods. What Jesus says here to his eager beaver followers is, wait. Wait. The thing you want, the action you crave, now is not the time for that. The work for now is waiting. How long and for what, that is not for you to know. But… “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Wait, but you will be my witnesses. Wait, because there will be—there is—work for you to do.
And the disciples waited. Not patiently maybe, but they’d just seen Jesus “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,” and then “two men in which robes stood by them [and said] “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” so really what else were they to do? They returned to Jerusalem and “went to the room where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthews, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James… constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”
They waited. They waited, they prayed, and they studied. They did those things together, yes, but together just the group of them, not unlike us in our houses in this time. And what we see in this passage is that waiting was not wasted time. It’s not that the disciples were just sitting around playing whatever the first century equivalent of Candy Crush was while the world fell apart around them. I mean, they may well have been playing the first century equivalent of Candy Crush, because you have to pass the time somehow, but that time of waiting, that time of quarantine, was sacred time. It was the time necessary for God to act.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is one of those that is just so achingly beautiful that I’m hesitant to even bring it up in a sermon because how could I hope to expand on words as powerful as Jesus’ prayer to the Father on behalf of his disciples, on behalf of us who are known to the Father through Jesus. What I’d encourage you to do today at some point is read Joh chapter seventeen aloud to yourself, and let these words sink over you. Read these words aloud and hear Jesus praying for you, because that is what Jesus is doing in this passage. Jesus’ last act as the Word made flesh, before going to the cross, was to pray to the Father on behalf of we his people, that we may be protected and saved and known. But the one part from here I will raise up here is verse eleven. “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Dear people of God, this waiting, this watching, this praying, and sitting still, and holding off, this is sacred work. This is God’s work right now. This, counterintuitive as it seems, is what it means to be the hands and feet of God in the world right now. So wait. But as you wait, know that you do not wait alone. For you are protected by the one who is as close as breathing, one with the Father as Jesus is one. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Johanna Meyer, “The Origin of the Word ‘Quarantine,’” Science Friday, < https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quarantine/>, accessed: 21 May 2020.
But, why forty days? Why aren’t we all in “trentino” or “cinquatino”? I want to make a joke here about Quentin Tarantino, but I can’t come up with one, so just know there’s a pun here waiting to emerge. Anyway, the question at hand, why forty? According to Appuhn, the reason was probably arbitrary. It may have had something to do with the cultural weight of the number forty. Noah was aboard the ark forty days, Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness for forty years, Jesus fasted forty days, there are forty days of Lent. The Bible is full of stories in which the number forty is the mark of completion.
Biblical basis or not, I think this quarantine is hard because staying home and doing nothing is so antithetical to who we are as people of faith. Our faith is born out of following a man who regularly broke social norms to be with those cast out of their communities. Jesus regularly ate with sinners and outcasts, healed lepers, touched—and raised—the death, and generally did all the things a good, law-abiding person was not supposed to do. In Jesus we see someone for whom healing was contagious. The scriptural mandates against associating with lepers, the dead, and other deemed unclean were not made in cruelty but out of concern for the health of the greater community, yet when Jesus broke those barriers he didn’t become ill, the ill became well.
This practice of Jesus associating with the outcasts is baked into who we are as Christians. On my better days, when I am able to give those congregations who choose to gather unlawfully and despite CDC guidelines the benefit of the doubt, I remember that not being together in the midst of crisis is so antithetical to how the church has behaved for thousands of year. The early church thrived during an outbreak of the plague in the second century, when Christians put their own lives at risk to care for the sick. And Luther’s words from “On Whether One May Flee a Deadly Plague” urges care for the neighbor above all. When tragedy strikes, the church shows up, casserole dish in hand, to be with those affected. On Wednesday when the dams broke in Midland, the first announcements I got were from colleagues opening their churches to And what is so challenging about this particular pandemic is that the thing which we the church are uniquely gifted at, gathering for mutual prayer and support and being an embodied example of God’s hands and feet in the world, turn out to be the most dangerous things we could do right now. Because of the insidious nature of how this virus spreads, it is safer for us to eat at a restaurant than it is for us to sit together in our sanctuary, sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and share the Lord’s Supper together. And that’s weird, and hard, and painful.
Which is why these particular texts are a gift to us in this time and place, when the world around us is beginning to crack open and we the church are being urged to stay closed. Because these texts are about being in that uncomfortable period of waiting on God, and about trusting that there is work to do, and gifts to receive, in the waiting.
Our first reading today was from the first chapter of Acts. Acts, you might recall, is the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. Luke tells the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, while Acts is the story of how the early church emerged after Jesus’ ministry. Luke, like the other Gospels, ended with a series of resurrection appearances of the crucified Jesus to his followers. Acts starts during one of those appearances, with the disciples demonstrating that despite all that had taken place over the three days of Jesus betray, death, and resurrection, they still have no idea what Jesus ministry was about, when they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” The question asked here is basically, ‘Jesus, we know that you just literally rose from the dead, but we’re still waiting for you to ride in on a white stallion like the emperor and become king of the world, so, when is that going to take place?” To which Jesus responded, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”
It is not for you to know the times or the periods. What Jesus says here to his eager beaver followers is, wait. Wait. The thing you want, the action you crave, now is not the time for that. The work for now is waiting. How long and for what, that is not for you to know. But… “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Wait, but you will be my witnesses. Wait, because there will be—there is—work for you to do.
And the disciples waited. Not patiently maybe, but they’d just seen Jesus “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,” and then “two men in which robes stood by them [and said] “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” so really what else were they to do? They returned to Jerusalem and “went to the room where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthews, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James… constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”
They waited. They waited, they prayed, and they studied. They did those things together, yes, but together just the group of them, not unlike us in our houses in this time. And what we see in this passage is that waiting was not wasted time. It’s not that the disciples were just sitting around playing whatever the first century equivalent of Candy Crush was while the world fell apart around them. I mean, they may well have been playing the first century equivalent of Candy Crush, because you have to pass the time somehow, but that time of waiting, that time of quarantine, was sacred time. It was the time necessary for God to act.
Our Gospel reading for this morning is one of those that is just so achingly beautiful that I’m hesitant to even bring it up in a sermon because how could I hope to expand on words as powerful as Jesus’ prayer to the Father on behalf of his disciples, on behalf of us who are known to the Father through Jesus. What I’d encourage you to do today at some point is read Joh chapter seventeen aloud to yourself, and let these words sink over you. Read these words aloud and hear Jesus praying for you, because that is what Jesus is doing in this passage. Jesus’ last act as the Word made flesh, before going to the cross, was to pray to the Father on behalf of we his people, that we may be protected and saved and known. But the one part from here I will raise up here is verse eleven. “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Dear people of God, this waiting, this watching, this praying, and sitting still, and holding off, this is sacred work. This is God’s work right now. This, counterintuitive as it seems, is what it means to be the hands and feet of God in the world right now. So wait. But as you wait, know that you do not wait alone. For you are protected by the one who is as close as breathing, one with the Father as Jesus is one. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Johanna Meyer, “The Origin of the Word ‘Quarantine,’” Science Friday, < https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quarantine/>, accessed: 21 May 2020.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
"Abandoned" Cats and a Very Present God: A Sermon on John 14:15-21
A couple of weekends ago I was downstairs reading the paper when I heard Dugan scratching on something and meowing sadly. I went upstairs to make sure he wasn’t locked in the closet. Which has happened a few times. He likes to sneak into the back corner of the closet and then because, he’s all black and hard to see in the dark, we shut the door on him not knowing he’s in there.
The problem was a closed door, not one that was keeping him in, but one that was keeping him out. Travis had shut the bathroom door so he could take a shower and Dugan decided that he had been abandoned. Never mind that I was downstairs, less than fifteen feet away, or that Travis has never once gone into the bathroom and never returned, Dugan was completely convinced that Travis had left him forever, that he was never coming back through that door, and he was irreconcilable. The sound I heard was Dugan, lying on his side, alternating between scratching at the bathroom door and reaching his paw under it trying to coax Travis to come back out, meowing sadly. Travis, of course, was in the shower throughout this whole ordeal, completely unaware of the pathetic tableau unfolding in the hallway. Cat emotions, friends, are real, complex, and powerful. Illogical. But powerful.
While I don’t feel compelled to lay on my side meowing sadly and trying to stick my hand out the front door, I admit a similar complexity of emotions these days as Dugan felt at Travis’s abandoning him out of the bathroom. I know the world is out there, I know everyone I love is just a phone call, a text message, even a Zoom conference away, but the distance feels immeasurable. I don’t completely understand it. I’ve moved a lot, which means I’m pretty experienced with being physically distanced from the people I love, but this feels different somehow. My family has started a weekly Zoom call. Every Sunday night my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, and Travis and I all log into Zoom from our living rooms and visit with each other. My family and I are close, but this regular weekly check in is more communication than we’d normally have with one another. And I certainly wouldn’t see them, we’d normally just call. Yet despite the regular communication, the fact that they cannot come makes the distance between us feel larger. My two best friends live in Wisconsin, I’ll regularly go a long time without seeing either of them, but that I can’t, that I don’t know when that gap will lift, makes the distance seem unbearable. Even you all, even people in Battle Creek feel far. Ellis was in the garage at church fixing the lawn mower the other day when I stopped by to check the mail, and I was careful to keep space between us. There was nothing strange about this interaction. I’ve never made a habit of inspecting Ellis’s lawnmower repairs. I own a push-reel mower, what do I know about the baby tractors that he and Bill ride, but just knowing that I needed to stay at a safe distance made him feel far off and distant.
I was thinking about all this this week, because our Gospel text for this morning is about the abiding presence of God through the person of Jesus and soon through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the work of the beloved community. This text is Jesus telling his disciples, I know you feel alone but I promise you, you’re not. So let’s take some time to walk through this text and hear this assurance of Christ’s presence that Jesus is proclaiming here.
Our text this morning, which follows immediately on the heels of the one we read last week, is all about Jesus stressing for his disciples two crucial points. Point one – loving Jesus and keeping Jesus’ commands are inseparable experiences. You cannot love Jesus without keeping his commands, you cannot keep his commands without loving Jesus. We’ll circle back to what we mean by “loving Jesus” and “keeping his commands” in a minute here, but first let me go on. Point two of this section is this is not the end of the relationship between God and Jesus’ followers, because God continues to dwell with Jesus’ own even after Jesus has gone. In verse sixteen, Jesus told his disciples that God would send them, “another Advocate.” The word translated as “advocate” here is a great one. The Greek word is parakletos, which means “one who exhorts,” “one who comforts,” one who helps,” and “one who makes appeals on one’s behalf.” There isn’t an English equivalent that captures all of its meaning. The NRSV translation uses advocate, with a footnote that “helper” would also be a possible choice. The King James Version goes with “Comforter,” the NIV tries “Counselor,” The Message uses “Friend,” and the Common English Bible, “Companion,” you get the point. There’s so much packed into this one word that some translations give up all together and just go with the English transliteration of the Greek word, Paraclete. This complexity coupled with the fact that our English translations tend to capitalize the word as if it was a proper noun. Like Jesus is introducing someone by their name, “I’d like you all to the spirit of truth, her name is Paraclete.” But Paraclete or Advocate or Helper or Friend, none of these are names, rather they are functions. They are descriptions of the work. This would be like if we all stopped calling Kendra, Kendra, and started referring to her exclusively as Occupational Therapist. Or we only called Ellis, “guy who fixes the lawn mower when the blade falls off.” Those are jobs they hold, but they’re not who they are. I make this point because Jesus said he was asking the Father to send us “another Paraclete.” Another tells us we had one already. Those roles I rattled off, counselor, helper, advocate, companion, friend, “one who exhorts,” “one who comforts,” “one who appeals on another’s behalf,” all of those are roles held by Jesus when he was with them. Now that he would be leaving, he promised there would be another who would continue to play all those roles for them.
“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus told his disciples, “I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me.” I’d always read that passage as being about Jesus’ resurrection appearances to the disciples, or maybe a reference to Jesus return at the end of days. But I heard a theologian this week who said this promise that they will see Jesus is more immediate than even the resurrection. They will see Jesus because of the Spirit. Just as they know the Father because they know Jesus, and Jesus and the Father are one, so too do they see Jesus, even when Jesus is gone, because they have another who is continuing in all the roles which Jesus held for them. Roles of teacher, friend, advocate, helper, comforter, yes. But even more than that, role of holder of the relationship between Jesus and the Father, the relationship which we learned last week that the disciples too are now a part of because of their relationship with Jesus.
Which gets us back to Point One of this section. Point One remember being what Jesus laid out in verses fifteen and twenty-one. Verse fifteen, “If you love me, you will keep my commands.” My Bible has a note that some translations read “If you love me, you keep my commands.” And then verse twenty-one, “those who have my commands and keep them are those that love me.” It’s the great chicken and the egg problem here, are the ones who love Jesus the ones who keep his commands? Or is that the ones who keep his commands the ones who love Jesus? Which comes first, loving Jesus or doing Jesus’ work? Yes is the very Lutheran response to this clearly not a yes or no question. The other question here also is what are Jesus’ commands? We talked about that last week, the command we are to keep is that we love each another as Jesus has loved us. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus told them, told us, just a chapter before, “if you have love for one another.”
So dear people of God, here’s the good news. Here’s the promise. This loneliness we feel right now. This sense of isolation, fear for each other and our world, our concern for our neighbors, that, really, is a sign of God’s presence with us, a sign of God’s love for us. This is a bit of a curveball, I know, but bear with me here. Because think about it. All those things I just described, loneliness, fear for others, concern for our neighbor, those are signs of love, of us having love for others, just as Jesus commanded us to do. Our love for others and Jesus’ love for us are in inseparable realities.
Dear people of God, there are not words for how much you are loved by the Father. English, Greek, it doesn’t matter the language, no words could do that love justice. To borrow a line from later in John’s Gospel, if the words describing God’s love for you were written down, “I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” Amen.
The problem was a closed door, not one that was keeping him in, but one that was keeping him out. Travis had shut the bathroom door so he could take a shower and Dugan decided that he had been abandoned. Never mind that I was downstairs, less than fifteen feet away, or that Travis has never once gone into the bathroom and never returned, Dugan was completely convinced that Travis had left him forever, that he was never coming back through that door, and he was irreconcilable. The sound I heard was Dugan, lying on his side, alternating between scratching at the bathroom door and reaching his paw under it trying to coax Travis to come back out, meowing sadly. Travis, of course, was in the shower throughout this whole ordeal, completely unaware of the pathetic tableau unfolding in the hallway. Cat emotions, friends, are real, complex, and powerful. Illogical. But powerful.
While I don’t feel compelled to lay on my side meowing sadly and trying to stick my hand out the front door, I admit a similar complexity of emotions these days as Dugan felt at Travis’s abandoning him out of the bathroom. I know the world is out there, I know everyone I love is just a phone call, a text message, even a Zoom conference away, but the distance feels immeasurable. I don’t completely understand it. I’ve moved a lot, which means I’m pretty experienced with being physically distanced from the people I love, but this feels different somehow. My family has started a weekly Zoom call. Every Sunday night my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, and Travis and I all log into Zoom from our living rooms and visit with each other. My family and I are close, but this regular weekly check in is more communication than we’d normally have with one another. And I certainly wouldn’t see them, we’d normally just call. Yet despite the regular communication, the fact that they cannot come makes the distance between us feel larger. My two best friends live in Wisconsin, I’ll regularly go a long time without seeing either of them, but that I can’t, that I don’t know when that gap will lift, makes the distance seem unbearable. Even you all, even people in Battle Creek feel far. Ellis was in the garage at church fixing the lawn mower the other day when I stopped by to check the mail, and I was careful to keep space between us. There was nothing strange about this interaction. I’ve never made a habit of inspecting Ellis’s lawnmower repairs. I own a push-reel mower, what do I know about the baby tractors that he and Bill ride, but just knowing that I needed to stay at a safe distance made him feel far off and distant.
I was thinking about all this this week, because our Gospel text for this morning is about the abiding presence of God through the person of Jesus and soon through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the work of the beloved community. This text is Jesus telling his disciples, I know you feel alone but I promise you, you’re not. So let’s take some time to walk through this text and hear this assurance of Christ’s presence that Jesus is proclaiming here.
Our text this morning, which follows immediately on the heels of the one we read last week, is all about Jesus stressing for his disciples two crucial points. Point one – loving Jesus and keeping Jesus’ commands are inseparable experiences. You cannot love Jesus without keeping his commands, you cannot keep his commands without loving Jesus. We’ll circle back to what we mean by “loving Jesus” and “keeping his commands” in a minute here, but first let me go on. Point two of this section is this is not the end of the relationship between God and Jesus’ followers, because God continues to dwell with Jesus’ own even after Jesus has gone. In verse sixteen, Jesus told his disciples that God would send them, “another Advocate.” The word translated as “advocate” here is a great one. The Greek word is parakletos, which means “one who exhorts,” “one who comforts,” one who helps,” and “one who makes appeals on one’s behalf.” There isn’t an English equivalent that captures all of its meaning. The NRSV translation uses advocate, with a footnote that “helper” would also be a possible choice. The King James Version goes with “Comforter,” the NIV tries “Counselor,” The Message uses “Friend,” and the Common English Bible, “Companion,” you get the point. There’s so much packed into this one word that some translations give up all together and just go with the English transliteration of the Greek word, Paraclete. This complexity coupled with the fact that our English translations tend to capitalize the word as if it was a proper noun. Like Jesus is introducing someone by their name, “I’d like you all to the spirit of truth, her name is Paraclete.” But Paraclete or Advocate or Helper or Friend, none of these are names, rather they are functions. They are descriptions of the work. This would be like if we all stopped calling Kendra, Kendra, and started referring to her exclusively as Occupational Therapist. Or we only called Ellis, “guy who fixes the lawn mower when the blade falls off.” Those are jobs they hold, but they’re not who they are. I make this point because Jesus said he was asking the Father to send us “another Paraclete.” Another tells us we had one already. Those roles I rattled off, counselor, helper, advocate, companion, friend, “one who exhorts,” “one who comforts,” “one who appeals on another’s behalf,” all of those are roles held by Jesus when he was with them. Now that he would be leaving, he promised there would be another who would continue to play all those roles for them.
“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus told his disciples, “I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me.” I’d always read that passage as being about Jesus’ resurrection appearances to the disciples, or maybe a reference to Jesus return at the end of days. But I heard a theologian this week who said this promise that they will see Jesus is more immediate than even the resurrection. They will see Jesus because of the Spirit. Just as they know the Father because they know Jesus, and Jesus and the Father are one, so too do they see Jesus, even when Jesus is gone, because they have another who is continuing in all the roles which Jesus held for them. Roles of teacher, friend, advocate, helper, comforter, yes. But even more than that, role of holder of the relationship between Jesus and the Father, the relationship which we learned last week that the disciples too are now a part of because of their relationship with Jesus.
Which gets us back to Point One of this section. Point One remember being what Jesus laid out in verses fifteen and twenty-one. Verse fifteen, “If you love me, you will keep my commands.” My Bible has a note that some translations read “If you love me, you keep my commands.” And then verse twenty-one, “those who have my commands and keep them are those that love me.” It’s the great chicken and the egg problem here, are the ones who love Jesus the ones who keep his commands? Or is that the ones who keep his commands the ones who love Jesus? Which comes first, loving Jesus or doing Jesus’ work? Yes is the very Lutheran response to this clearly not a yes or no question. The other question here also is what are Jesus’ commands? We talked about that last week, the command we are to keep is that we love each another as Jesus has loved us. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus told them, told us, just a chapter before, “if you have love for one another.”
So dear people of God, here’s the good news. Here’s the promise. This loneliness we feel right now. This sense of isolation, fear for each other and our world, our concern for our neighbors, that, really, is a sign of God’s presence with us, a sign of God’s love for us. This is a bit of a curveball, I know, but bear with me here. Because think about it. All those things I just described, loneliness, fear for others, concern for our neighbor, those are signs of love, of us having love for others, just as Jesus commanded us to do. Our love for others and Jesus’ love for us are in inseparable realities.
Dear people of God, there are not words for how much you are loved by the Father. English, Greek, it doesn’t matter the language, no words could do that love justice. To borrow a line from later in John’s Gospel, if the words describing God’s love for you were written down, “I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” Amen.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Not Being Troubled in the Midst of Troubled Times: A Sermon on John 14:1-14
On Friday I ran 2.23 miles in honor of Ahmaud Arbery, the African American man who was shot in February while jogging because he quote “looked like” someone who had been seen breaking into houses in the neighborhood. Friday would have been his twenty-sixth birthday. Instead, two months after his death, Friday marked the day that charges were brought against the two men who shot him. So on Friday I did my normal workout, so
I would be tired and able to focus. Then I ran the additional 2.23 miles in circles around the park by my house, thinking about this shooting, about our text for this weekend, and about how we read this text in the midst of the world we live in.
Our reading for this morning started with Jesus saying to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Do not let your hearts be troubled. I don’t know about you, but I find my heart is troubled a lot these days. I’m troubled by the death of Arbery, and by the fact that his is not the only name I can rattle off, far from it, of someone who was killed for looking like someone who might have committed a crime. I’m troubled that assault weapons are allowed in our state building, but poster board signs are considered too much of a threat. I’m troubled that in the midst of a global pandemic some people are clamoring to go back to work because to be without work means to be without health care, while others are so enraged at the imposition of wearing a mask that they will shoot the clerk who asked them to. I’m troubled.
I’m troubled, and so on first read I struggle with this command of Jesus for the disciples to not let their “hearts be troubled.” Because that’s what it is, a command. And there is, after all, much for the disciples to be troubled about. After three years of Jesus talking about how his hour had not yet come, suddenly he’d switched his tone and now it’s all, “my hour has come” and “now my soul is troubled.” They had gathered that night for a meal, a joyful time with friends before the Passover, but Jesus first had washed their feet, then predicted one of them would betray him, leading to Judas’ departure. Then he’d told Peter that he would deny him, and now this message not to let their hearts be troubled. Jesus, our hearts had been troubled since we came back here to watch you raise Lazarus, and things are going from bad to worse, are we just to push aside these very real fears?
“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said, but he did not stop there. He followed this up with two additional commands. “Believe in God, believe also in me.” On Palm Sunday we talked about the literary technique common in Hebrew poetry to say something, and then say the thing again with more detail to explain it. The example being the verse from the prophet Zechariah, “Lo, your king comes to you victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” We talked about how Zechariah was not implying the king was riding on two animals, the reference to the colt was further clarifying the age of the donkey. Fun grammar fact I learned this week, this is what’s called an appositive, which means a noun or pronoun that identifies or explains the first noun. Why am I sharing this with you other than fun with English grammar? Because the entire first verse of John chapter fourteen is an appositive phrase. We cannot understand what it means when Jesus says, “do not let your hearts be troubled,” without the additional information, “believe in God, believe also in me.” “Believe in God, believe also in me” is what makes “do not let your hearts be troubled” possible.
What do I mean? The central message of Jesus in John’s Gospel is that he and the Father are one. And because Jesus and the Father are one, the disciples can trust that everything that is about to occur, the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus is not the failure of the mission, but in fact the triumph of the mission, the culmination of the work which God through Jesus came to earth to do.
It is because of this promise, that Jesus and the Father are one, that Jesus goes to prepare a place for us in the Father’s own heart, that Jesus returned—that’s key too, notice Jesus said “will return” but I’m saying returned, because this was spoken by the pre-resurrection Jesus, but we read it with the knowledge of the resurrection, so we know already of the truth of these words, the fulfillment of the promise of his return—that Jesus returned to take us to himself, so that where he is—in relationship with the Father—where he is that we may be also. “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
If you’re confused where this is all going right now, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Thomas too at this point is like, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Bringing us to our second appositive phrase of the passage, “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Truth and life are meant to clarify for us what Jesus means when he calls himself the way. Truth – through Jesus, the Word made flesh, the truth of God is present in the world. What was once an abstract concept is now standing among us, available to see, to hear, to touch, to know. And life – in Jesus the promise of the life-giving, life- sustaining, power of God is accessible. Truth and life are what is meant by Jesus as “the way.” The way is not a road or direction, it is not a path to follow or a set of instructions. The way is relationship with God. The way is Jesus, because in knowing Jesus we know all that God has promised.
This text has the same expansiveness as Jesus’ pronouncement from last week that he is the gate. What we humans try to make so small, Jesus is the gate, and you can’t come in. Jesus is the way, we get to God and you do not, Jesus makes vast. This passage has no comment on the inness or outness of others, it is solely concerned with this promise of relationship of those who have been called out. You who have been left out of the promise, Jesus says, I am the way in, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. You are in because of me, because of what I said, who I am, what I am about to do. You now the way, because the way isn’t about what you know, but that I know you. You do not need to see the Father, because I see you, and if I see you, then you are seen and known by the Father also.
All of this is what gives “do not let your hearts be troubled” it’s robustness, it is what makes “do not let your hearts be troubled” possible. In all that followed we come to see that not having troubled hearts is not about not having feelings. It’s not about not being sad or scared or mad. Not letting our hearts be troubled is about not being paralyzed by those feelings. It is about being sad, scared, angry, alone, all the complexities of the human experience, and still knowing that God is in the midst of this world and is drawing all people to Godself, just like Jesus promised. So here is where I found hope this week. Here is where I found courage this week. Here is where I saw God in our midst, reminding me of this promise that the things of this world do not have the staying power of the promise of God. In the Sikh tradition, men are not allowed to cut their beards. But the N-95 masks which medical providers are required to wear while treating COVID-19 patients don’t fit properly if the wearer has facial hair. So in Canada, two Sikh doctors did just that, shaving off this symbol of their faith so that they could continue to serve their patients. Friends, that’s faith. It is about being sad, being scared, being angry, afraid, alone, and standing up and moving forward anyway. It is staying home, even though it’s uncomfortable. Or going out and running errands for vulnerable friends or neighbors. It is wearing a mask if you are able, and not judging those who cannot. Above all, it is about trusting that whatever we do and whoever we are, God has it, and God has us, and nothing can change that.
And here’s the other blaring good news in this passage, verse twelve, “very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” What this means, dear people of God, is that the work that we do matters. It feels so small the things we are called to right now. Staying home, running errands, wearing a mask, ordering take-out. These things are nothing. And yet, this verse promises that they are everything. That they are the hands and feet, the heart and voice of God in our midst. So do not be troubled, dear people of God. Be sad, be scared, be angry. But don’t be troubled. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Our reading for this morning started with Jesus saying to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Do not let your hearts be troubled. I don’t know about you, but I find my heart is troubled a lot these days. I’m troubled by the death of Arbery, and by the fact that his is not the only name I can rattle off, far from it, of someone who was killed for looking like someone who might have committed a crime. I’m troubled that assault weapons are allowed in our state building, but poster board signs are considered too much of a threat. I’m troubled that in the midst of a global pandemic some people are clamoring to go back to work because to be without work means to be without health care, while others are so enraged at the imposition of wearing a mask that they will shoot the clerk who asked them to. I’m troubled.
I’m troubled, and so on first read I struggle with this command of Jesus for the disciples to not let their “hearts be troubled.” Because that’s what it is, a command. And there is, after all, much for the disciples to be troubled about. After three years of Jesus talking about how his hour had not yet come, suddenly he’d switched his tone and now it’s all, “my hour has come” and “now my soul is troubled.” They had gathered that night for a meal, a joyful time with friends before the Passover, but Jesus first had washed their feet, then predicted one of them would betray him, leading to Judas’ departure. Then he’d told Peter that he would deny him, and now this message not to let their hearts be troubled. Jesus, our hearts had been troubled since we came back here to watch you raise Lazarus, and things are going from bad to worse, are we just to push aside these very real fears?
“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said, but he did not stop there. He followed this up with two additional commands. “Believe in God, believe also in me.” On Palm Sunday we talked about the literary technique common in Hebrew poetry to say something, and then say the thing again with more detail to explain it. The example being the verse from the prophet Zechariah, “Lo, your king comes to you victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” We talked about how Zechariah was not implying the king was riding on two animals, the reference to the colt was further clarifying the age of the donkey. Fun grammar fact I learned this week, this is what’s called an appositive, which means a noun or pronoun that identifies or explains the first noun. Why am I sharing this with you other than fun with English grammar? Because the entire first verse of John chapter fourteen is an appositive phrase. We cannot understand what it means when Jesus says, “do not let your hearts be troubled,” without the additional information, “believe in God, believe also in me.” “Believe in God, believe also in me” is what makes “do not let your hearts be troubled” possible.
What do I mean? The central message of Jesus in John’s Gospel is that he and the Father are one. And because Jesus and the Father are one, the disciples can trust that everything that is about to occur, the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus is not the failure of the mission, but in fact the triumph of the mission, the culmination of the work which God through Jesus came to earth to do.
It is because of this promise, that Jesus and the Father are one, that Jesus goes to prepare a place for us in the Father’s own heart, that Jesus returned—that’s key too, notice Jesus said “will return” but I’m saying returned, because this was spoken by the pre-resurrection Jesus, but we read it with the knowledge of the resurrection, so we know already of the truth of these words, the fulfillment of the promise of his return—that Jesus returned to take us to himself, so that where he is—in relationship with the Father—where he is that we may be also. “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
If you’re confused where this is all going right now, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Thomas too at this point is like, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Bringing us to our second appositive phrase of the passage, “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Truth and life are meant to clarify for us what Jesus means when he calls himself the way. Truth – through Jesus, the Word made flesh, the truth of God is present in the world. What was once an abstract concept is now standing among us, available to see, to hear, to touch, to know. And life – in Jesus the promise of the life-giving, life- sustaining, power of God is accessible. Truth and life are what is meant by Jesus as “the way.” The way is not a road or direction, it is not a path to follow or a set of instructions. The way is relationship with God. The way is Jesus, because in knowing Jesus we know all that God has promised.
This text has the same expansiveness as Jesus’ pronouncement from last week that he is the gate. What we humans try to make so small, Jesus is the gate, and you can’t come in. Jesus is the way, we get to God and you do not, Jesus makes vast. This passage has no comment on the inness or outness of others, it is solely concerned with this promise of relationship of those who have been called out. You who have been left out of the promise, Jesus says, I am the way in, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. You are in because of me, because of what I said, who I am, what I am about to do. You now the way, because the way isn’t about what you know, but that I know you. You do not need to see the Father, because I see you, and if I see you, then you are seen and known by the Father also.
All of this is what gives “do not let your hearts be troubled” it’s robustness, it is what makes “do not let your hearts be troubled” possible. In all that followed we come to see that not having troubled hearts is not about not having feelings. It’s not about not being sad or scared or mad. Not letting our hearts be troubled is about not being paralyzed by those feelings. It is about being sad, scared, angry, alone, all the complexities of the human experience, and still knowing that God is in the midst of this world and is drawing all people to Godself, just like Jesus promised. So here is where I found hope this week. Here is where I found courage this week. Here is where I saw God in our midst, reminding me of this promise that the things of this world do not have the staying power of the promise of God. In the Sikh tradition, men are not allowed to cut their beards. But the N-95 masks which medical providers are required to wear while treating COVID-19 patients don’t fit properly if the wearer has facial hair. So in Canada, two Sikh doctors did just that, shaving off this symbol of their faith so that they could continue to serve their patients. Friends, that’s faith. It is about being sad, being scared, being angry, afraid, alone, and standing up and moving forward anyway. It is staying home, even though it’s uncomfortable. Or going out and running errands for vulnerable friends or neighbors. It is wearing a mask if you are able, and not judging those who cannot. Above all, it is about trusting that whatever we do and whoever we are, God has it, and God has us, and nothing can change that.
And here’s the other blaring good news in this passage, verse twelve, “very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” What this means, dear people of God, is that the work that we do matters. It feels so small the things we are called to right now. Staying home, running errands, wearing a mask, ordering take-out. These things are nothing. And yet, this verse promises that they are everything. That they are the hands and feet, the heart and voice of God in our midst. So do not be troubled, dear people of God. Be sad, be scared, be angry. But don’t be troubled. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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