A hundred years ago last month I wrote an article for the March Trumpet about the Old Testament reading for this morning. In the article I remarked I was reflecting on it there because we weren’t reading the Old Testament readings during Lent and I didn’t want to miss it. And then, well, all of the carefully made plans Laurie, David and I had for how our Lenten worship would happen went out the window, along with every other thing I thought I knew how to do. And I’ve found myself dwelling on this Ezekiel text a lot recently. So before we dig into the Gospel text, I want share this Ezekiel text with you and why it’s been on my mind.
Ezekiel chapter thirty-four starts: “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord God, you know." Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord." So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord."
“Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.” Whew, I love the prophets in general, but that is just some solid good news right there. So here’s the backstory on what we just read. Ezekiel was a prophet for a people in exile. Jerusalem had fallen to Nebuchadnezzar and Ezekiel and the people of Israel were scattered across Babylon, alone and isolated, strangers in a foreign land.
And to these scared and scattered people, the Lord through Ezekiel gives this vision of hope and comfort. The Lord showed Ezekiel this valley full of bones. Just to make sure the point gets across, the scripture clarifies, “there were very many [bones] lying in the valley, and they were very dry.” How this description must have resonated with Ezekiel’s people, because they felt like scattered dry bones. Their community, their social safety net, their very way of life had been taken from them. They couldn’t see how the culture and community they’d once had could ever be rebuilt.
Of these dry bones, the Lord asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers with a question that I think is such a testament to his faith, “O Lord God, you know.” I say that I think that is a testament to Ezekiel’s faith because Ezekiel places the entire situation in God’s hands. He doesn’t plead for life or ask God to cast away death and make a new thing. He simply lays the world as it is in the hands of God. “O Lord God, you know” how this will turn out, let it turn out to your will.
“Prophesy to these bones,” God told Ezekiel. Prophesy, remember, does not mean tell them their future, it means tell them the truth. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers; they are truth speakers. They tell the truth, even when that truth is hard, about what is right and what is wrong. “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” So Ezekiel prophesied to them. He told them of God’s promise to cause breath to enter them, to bring sinew and flesh back to them. And flesh and sinew reunited the bones, and breath entered them. But still they were just flesh and breath. Though they lived and stood, they still were just bones for they had no hope. So again the Lord said to Ezekiel, prophesy and say, ‘I am going to open your graves… and bring you back to the land of Israel… I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”
Think about the order of that. First flesh, then breath, then finally spirit. What we see displayed here is that flesh and breath are not enough. It is the spirit that makes a community, the relationship, the connection, the movement of God within us that brings us together. I think we’re seeing truth of that in this time where churches have gone online for the time being, that it is the Spirit of God in our communities that make us church, not our building or even our people. Trinity has joked for a long time that the church has left the building, and now that we’ve really legit left it, we’re finding new ways to find God’s movement within us. Ways that will only enrich and enliven our life together once we are able to be together again. We live, people of God, because of the Spirit of God. Thanks be to God.
But we’ve still got Lazarus. And it’s easy to rush ahead to the miracle of returned life at the end of the story, but I think the author is inviting us to dwell in the unclear middle. Most miracle stories in John have a very predicable pattern, first there’s a miracle, then people talk about it for a while, then Jesus explains what it means. But the raising of Lazarus is different. For this story, the death of Lazarus is announced right at the very beginning, and then we wait with the disciples and Martha and Mary for forty long verses to see what Jesus is going to do. We hear this weird sentence where we learn that “though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” We hear Martha and Mary’s statements of faith tinged with regret, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And we witness Jesus’ own grief, weeping for Lazarus, or the sadness of his sisters, or the misunderstanding of those who gathered.
There’s a lot of amazing good news in this Lazarus story. As I shared in the Wednesday bible study that has become the Wednesday bible lecture of Pastor Kjersten geeking out about the Gospel of John, this story is one of my favorites because there is just so much depth to it. But the things I take from it in this particular time and place are two. One, Jesus took on grief rather than rushing to a solution. I think that’s what’s demonstrated for us in the verse I read about how Jesus waited to go heal Lazarus. I think the point isn’t that Jesus let Lazarus die so he could do this cool miracle, I think the point is Jesus was willing to put his own emotional needs aside for another. Jesus certainly could have rushed in and saved the day, and saved himself the sadness, but he didn’t. I don’t know why he didn’t, I just know that he didn’t. So in this time when I feel so helpless, like I just want to rush in and do something, this texts invites me to ask the question, who am I trying to help? Am I trying to help another, or am I trying to help myself? Sometimes, not just in pandemics, but in other parts of life, when we rush in to be the savior in someone else’s problems, we miss the fact that they might not need saving and the only person we’re helping is ourselves, by making ourselves feel good about how helpful we are. I think this text models for us a Jesus who moves for others, who acts for others, not for himself.
And second, and most poignantly in this time of waiting, this text reminds us that it is ok to sit in the feels. To follow the lead of Martha and Mary and wonder why God is not acting, even as we trust that God will act. This text reminds us that healing takes time, that new life takes time. This text tells us that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, and that Jesus revived Lazarus even though Martha and Mary never asked, and never understood. To the end, standing at the tomb, Martha was still like, in the poetic words of the King James Version, “Lord, he stinketh,” and still Jesus acted.
And the final, and most important, good news for us in this text is about where it’s located and where it points us. If we read on from verse forty-five, we’d see that the raising of Lazarus was the final straw that led to the death of Jesus. It was seeing Lazarus raised from the dead that convinced the authorities that Jesus had to die. This text is layered with images that point us in that direction. And while Lazarus was raised, we know that Jesus will be resurrected. Resurrection is different from raising, because resurrection promises not a return to the old way of being, but the creation of a whole new thing.
So friends, here’s the good news: As we wait, and we walk, and we wonder, the Spirit of God is among us. We can’t see it, we maybe can’t feel it, but God is here. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, March 30, 2020
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Jesus is Bad at Social Distancing - A Sermon on John 9:1-41
So what I’ve taken from the texts both last week at today is that Jesus is just the worst at social distancing. Like, he’s super bad at staying six feet away from people, avoiding crowds, and especially avoiding physical contact. Last week we heard about how the woman went to the well at noon to avoid the crowds in the morning and the evening, only to find Jesus waiting for her. Picture Jesus during the 7 am to 8 am seniors only hour at Meijer’s, camped out in front of the giant pallet of toilet paper, waiting for someone to come help him reach the top shelf. Then today he goes and breaks all the social taboos with this one. What are the two things we are the most not supposed to do during the pandemic? Shake hands and touch our faces, right. So what does Jesus do in this passage? He goes up to this poor unsuspecting fellow, makes mud from his own spit, and rubs it in the guy’s eyes. This guy didn’t ask Jesus for healing, doesn’t talk at all until verse eleven, and remember, is blind, so may not even have known that Jesus was coming at him with the spit-mud. Now, I know that the first century had a different understanding of germ theory than we have now, but I feel like even then rubbing spit-mud in peoples eyes was considered kind of gross. But that’s Jesus for us. Jesus has no good social distancing habits. And this, in this weird and surreal period where we’re supposed to stay at least six feet from one another, is the first and maybe best good news for us in this text. Jesus is the absolute worst at social distancing. Jesus is right up in your life, in your world, in your space right now. Things feel distant and out of control. We can’t go to church; we can’t do the things we normally do to find rest and fulfillment. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus has never cared. I’m in the sanctuary because it seems like it is comforting for you to get to at least see the sanctuary while we worship, but Jesus isn’t stuck in here with me. Jesus is with you, wherever you’re watching this. And Jesus, as we see with his treatment of the man born blind, isn’t asking for permission first to be in your life, to heal you, to be with you. Jesus is more of a “sin boldly” sort of a fellow, he acts and then waits for us to come along behind as we’ll see in the unfolding of this passage.
So, to the passage. I learned a thing this week that changed my whole read not just of the passage, but of suffering as a concept. If you’ve got the passage in front of you, I want you to take a look at verse three. “Jesus answered, ‘neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me.’” What I learned this week is that the translators stuck extra words in here. I actually made a visual here so you can hopefully track where I’m a little easier. So here’s the verse as it shows up in most English translations. But the words I have here in red, “he was born blind,” those are not actually in the original Greek. The Greek actually reads like this, “neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Period. New sentence. “So that God’s work might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me.” Why is this important? It’s important because sometimes we humans try too hard to find lessons in suffering. Sometimes our own, but often other peoples suffering. So it’s important to remember that this man’s life was not an object lesson. God did not subject this man to decades of poverty. Because poverty really was what the man’s problem was, not his blindness. His blindness led to his poverty, but poverty was the real source of suffering. God did not subject this man to decades of poverty so that one day Jesus would come along and perform a miracle. The message of this passage is not that God causes suffering so that Jesus can one day relieve it. The message is that there is suffering. There is suffering, and when Jesus encounters it, he finds a way to transform it, to use it, to work with it to make a whole new thing. This is a pretty bad analogy but we’ll go with it, it’s like Jesus upcycles suffering. He mucks his way into the junk of the world and finds a way to bring goodness from it. The work of God is to go to where there is suffering and reveal God’s glory, and this is the work that we too are called, empowered, freed to do.
And our man born blind is suddenly able to see. He doesn’t know how this happened, doesn’t know who Jesus is, doesn’t know what this means. So he stutters out this strange reply, “‘The man called Jesus made mud… Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’”
And the Pharisees are not having that for a response. Thus begins this back and forth between the man and the Pharisees, the man’s parents and the Pharisees, the man and the Pharisees again. Then Jesus and the man, then Jesus and the Pharisees. And in each of these conversations, we see the man whom Jesus changed coming into a deeper knowledge of who Jesus truly is, of what had truly taken place. This knowledge shifts from, “the man called Jesus” to “he is a prophet” to “If [Jesus] was not from God, he could do nothing” to “tell me [who is the Son of Man] so that I may worship him.” And finally, after a miraculous healing, four conversations, and nearly forty verses, to this full confession of faith, “Lord, I believe.” This shift in the experience of the man is a shift not of head knowledge but of heart knowledge. He experienced not just a miraculous healing, but he experienced a Messiah who stuck with him, who sought him out when others had cast him aside, and who pursued him persistently.
And I love that what theologians assert to be the full confession of faith is so simple, “Lord, I believe.” Because think about it, believe what? “Lord, I believe” isn’t a statement of great intellectual definition. It leaves open a whole lot of questions of what that belief is. Believe probably isn’t even the best translation here, though I know why the translators went with it, because it comes the closest to encapsulating the meaning. But the feeling is more, “Lord, I trust.” I trust without really knowing where that trust lies, I trust without a full understanding of what that means. But I trust in this relationship, in this experience of your presence, and that trust brings comfort amidst all the unknowns.
And then we have the Pharisees, and the great rhetorical question of the age. “Some of the Pharisees near [Jesus]… said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” The question the Pharisees ask here is a question not about sight or even about believing, it is a question about judgment. Jesus had just spoken about his role as judge, and the Pharisees immediately go on the defense, surely we are above your judgement.
The reason the Pharisees assume they are above judgment is because they are quite confident they have all the answers. They know all the rules, they follow all the regulations, they do all the right things, hang out with all the right people, pray in all the right ways. They’re set. The point being made here with the man born blind and the Pharisees is that the problem isn’t seeing or not seeing, it isn’t even believing or not believing. The problem is with thinking you know all the things and have all the answers. Faith is knowing you don’t know, and trusting that it’s ok not to know, because God knows. God knows this, God knows you, and God knows, God loves, God’s world.
So friends, here’s real talk with Pastor Kjersten to end this thing up. I don’t know how to do this thing either. I don’t know how we’re supposed to be church in this time. I don’t know how to keep people safe. I don’t know how to connect. You see my smiling face on the video a couple times a week, you don’t see the many hours of Project Runway Travis has been forced to suffer through because it’s the only thing my brain can handle. I’m, maybe foolishly, not super worried about my health, because I’m in the lowest risk demographic, but I worry about yours. I worry about our economy, I worry about our neighbors who run local small businesses, I worry about the work load of our doctors and nurses, OTs and PTs and med techs, janitors and cafeteria workers, and grocers and police and politicians and everyone trying to keep the basic services met. And I worry like heck about all the members of the Co-op, trying to navigate a world that is already impossible to navigate with no safety net in place. I worry about what the world will look like in a couple months, when we’ve crawled our way out of this and have to rebuild from the rubble.
So yeah, I’m scared too. And I’d be lying if I told you what the world, what the church is going to look like in a couple months, or even next week. But here’s what I do believe. What I know not in the way that the Pharisees knew, because their research, their study, their intellectual ponderings told them. But what I know in the same way the man born blind believed, trusted, from his own experience. Here’s what I know not because I have a Master of Divinity, or I can read some dead languages, or I’ve studied it, but what I know with my heart, what I know from my own experience of who God is and how God works. I know that while God did not cause this, God is in the midst of this, transforming it and us and this world from within. I know that God is finding a way to reveal Godself to us in a million ways. I also know that it is ok not to know. It is ok to just be in the midst of our world for a time. To embrace the model of the man born blind and lean not on heads, but on our hearts. To say in the midst of all I cannot know, I can trust in the experience I have had in the past, I can trust in the stories I read in the Bible, I can trust in the comfort I have felt in the community of the faithful, and I can know that hope always comes after despair and resurrection always come after death. So dear people of God, be gentle with yourselves in these wilderness days. Be ok not being ok. We don’t have to have all the answers, or see all the blessings, or have all the right believings. God’s not going anywhere. And Jesus, as we’ve seen the last couple of weeks, is the absolute worst at social distancing. So you can’t shake him if you tried. But don’t put spit mud in people’s eyes, even if they are people you’re social distancing with. That’s just gross all the time. Be well. Amen.
So, to the passage. I learned a thing this week that changed my whole read not just of the passage, but of suffering as a concept. If you’ve got the passage in front of you, I want you to take a look at verse three. “Jesus answered, ‘neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me.’” What I learned this week is that the translators stuck extra words in here. I actually made a visual here so you can hopefully track where I’m a little easier. So here’s the verse as it shows up in most English translations. But the words I have here in red, “he was born blind,” those are not actually in the original Greek. The Greek actually reads like this, “neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Period. New sentence. “So that God’s work might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me.” Why is this important? It’s important because sometimes we humans try too hard to find lessons in suffering. Sometimes our own, but often other peoples suffering. So it’s important to remember that this man’s life was not an object lesson. God did not subject this man to decades of poverty. Because poverty really was what the man’s problem was, not his blindness. His blindness led to his poverty, but poverty was the real source of suffering. God did not subject this man to decades of poverty so that one day Jesus would come along and perform a miracle. The message of this passage is not that God causes suffering so that Jesus can one day relieve it. The message is that there is suffering. There is suffering, and when Jesus encounters it, he finds a way to transform it, to use it, to work with it to make a whole new thing. This is a pretty bad analogy but we’ll go with it, it’s like Jesus upcycles suffering. He mucks his way into the junk of the world and finds a way to bring goodness from it. The work of God is to go to where there is suffering and reveal God’s glory, and this is the work that we too are called, empowered, freed to do.
And our man born blind is suddenly able to see. He doesn’t know how this happened, doesn’t know who Jesus is, doesn’t know what this means. So he stutters out this strange reply, “‘The man called Jesus made mud… Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’”
And the Pharisees are not having that for a response. Thus begins this back and forth between the man and the Pharisees, the man’s parents and the Pharisees, the man and the Pharisees again. Then Jesus and the man, then Jesus and the Pharisees. And in each of these conversations, we see the man whom Jesus changed coming into a deeper knowledge of who Jesus truly is, of what had truly taken place. This knowledge shifts from, “the man called Jesus” to “he is a prophet” to “If [Jesus] was not from God, he could do nothing” to “tell me [who is the Son of Man] so that I may worship him.” And finally, after a miraculous healing, four conversations, and nearly forty verses, to this full confession of faith, “Lord, I believe.” This shift in the experience of the man is a shift not of head knowledge but of heart knowledge. He experienced not just a miraculous healing, but he experienced a Messiah who stuck with him, who sought him out when others had cast him aside, and who pursued him persistently.
And I love that what theologians assert to be the full confession of faith is so simple, “Lord, I believe.” Because think about it, believe what? “Lord, I believe” isn’t a statement of great intellectual definition. It leaves open a whole lot of questions of what that belief is. Believe probably isn’t even the best translation here, though I know why the translators went with it, because it comes the closest to encapsulating the meaning. But the feeling is more, “Lord, I trust.” I trust without really knowing where that trust lies, I trust without a full understanding of what that means. But I trust in this relationship, in this experience of your presence, and that trust brings comfort amidst all the unknowns.
And then we have the Pharisees, and the great rhetorical question of the age. “Some of the Pharisees near [Jesus]… said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” The question the Pharisees ask here is a question not about sight or even about believing, it is a question about judgment. Jesus had just spoken about his role as judge, and the Pharisees immediately go on the defense, surely we are above your judgement.
The reason the Pharisees assume they are above judgment is because they are quite confident they have all the answers. They know all the rules, they follow all the regulations, they do all the right things, hang out with all the right people, pray in all the right ways. They’re set. The point being made here with the man born blind and the Pharisees is that the problem isn’t seeing or not seeing, it isn’t even believing or not believing. The problem is with thinking you know all the things and have all the answers. Faith is knowing you don’t know, and trusting that it’s ok not to know, because God knows. God knows this, God knows you, and God knows, God loves, God’s world.
So friends, here’s real talk with Pastor Kjersten to end this thing up. I don’t know how to do this thing either. I don’t know how we’re supposed to be church in this time. I don’t know how to keep people safe. I don’t know how to connect. You see my smiling face on the video a couple times a week, you don’t see the many hours of Project Runway Travis has been forced to suffer through because it’s the only thing my brain can handle. I’m, maybe foolishly, not super worried about my health, because I’m in the lowest risk demographic, but I worry about yours. I worry about our economy, I worry about our neighbors who run local small businesses, I worry about the work load of our doctors and nurses, OTs and PTs and med techs, janitors and cafeteria workers, and grocers and police and politicians and everyone trying to keep the basic services met. And I worry like heck about all the members of the Co-op, trying to navigate a world that is already impossible to navigate with no safety net in place. I worry about what the world will look like in a couple months, when we’ve crawled our way out of this and have to rebuild from the rubble.
So yeah, I’m scared too. And I’d be lying if I told you what the world, what the church is going to look like in a couple months, or even next week. But here’s what I do believe. What I know not in the way that the Pharisees knew, because their research, their study, their intellectual ponderings told them. But what I know in the same way the man born blind believed, trusted, from his own experience. Here’s what I know not because I have a Master of Divinity, or I can read some dead languages, or I’ve studied it, but what I know with my heart, what I know from my own experience of who God is and how God works. I know that while God did not cause this, God is in the midst of this, transforming it and us and this world from within. I know that God is finding a way to reveal Godself to us in a million ways. I also know that it is ok not to know. It is ok to just be in the midst of our world for a time. To embrace the model of the man born blind and lean not on heads, but on our hearts. To say in the midst of all I cannot know, I can trust in the experience I have had in the past, I can trust in the stories I read in the Bible, I can trust in the comfort I have felt in the community of the faithful, and I can know that hope always comes after despair and resurrection always come after death. So dear people of God, be gentle with yourselves in these wilderness days. Be ok not being ok. We don’t have to have all the answers, or see all the blessings, or have all the right believings. God’s not going anywhere. And Jesus, as we’ve seen the last couple of weeks, is the absolute worst at social distancing. So you can’t shake him if you tried. But don’t put spit mud in people’s eyes, even if they are people you’re social distancing with. That’s just gross all the time. Be well. Amen.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Keep Social Distance and Lean In - A Sermon on John 4.5-42
Jesus was at the well at noon when the Samaritan woman came to him. This is as important a detail to this story as Nicodemus coming at night was to last week’s Gospel. Nicodemus came at night so that others wouldn’t know he was approaching Jesus. The woman came to the well at noon, so that others wouldn’t be there when she arrived. Both sought anonymity. But while Nicodemus traveled at night in order to protect his status, the Samaritan woman went to the well at noon because her status was already gone.
Here’s the thing we with indoor plumbing may not be aware of, it is hard work to transport water. Water is heavy and awkward, and transporting it is work better done in the coolness of the morning or with the evening breeze. That is when most women would have traveled to the well to fetch their family’s daily water. This woman went at noon because she was unwelcomed at other times. She was, if you will, quarantined from the rest of her community. At this time of COVID-19 and the fear surrounding it, let me be clear that I use this word deliberately, though let me also unpack why.
There is a time and a place for quarantines and what we are doing today, watching a video in our homes, is one of those times. It is wise for those who have been exposed to a contagious illness that could be easily passed to others to stay outside of the community for a time until the threat of contagion has passed. It is wise for us who don’t know if we’ve been exposed, if we could be carriers, to stay apart from each other for the good of each other. There is even examples of this in the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws in the Old Testament, where those with a variety of illnesses are required to remain outside of the community until declared clear by a priest in order to protect the health of the rest of the community. This is good and wise practice.
But good and wise practice is not why the Samaritan woman was traveling to the well at the heat of the day. Her “quarantine,” if you will, was of a very different variety. There’s a page on the CDC website titled “Stigma and Resilience.” This page addresses people who may be experiencing stigma or discrimination due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including people of Asian descent, people who have traveled, and medical and healthcare workers. I’m sure we’ve heard, even laughed at, the jokes about people avoiding Chinese restaurants or Corona beer because of the outbreak. But social stigma, and the prejudice around it, is real. And this is not the only place we see it. Maybe you remember the accusation that those crossing the border carry diseases, or that all Muslims, or brown people in general, are terrorists, or insert stereotype here. There is a difference between healthy, appropriate social distancing for the good of the weakest among us and the fear driven accusation against “the other.” It is that sort of “quarantine” that drove the Samaritan woman to the well at noon, where she met Jesus.
And it is striking too that Jesus was at the well at noon. The Gospel reading started us at verse five, which leaves out some important details about how Jesus came to be in Samaria. So let us set the stage with those skipped verses. Last week, we heard about the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. Following that, Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside where they spent some time teaching and baptizing. John also was in the countryside, teaching and baptizing. When asked how John felt about Jesus, he reiterated his place as “not the Messiah, but [the one] sent head of him.” Which brings us to the start of chapter four. “Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’—although it was not Jesus but his disciples who baptized—he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria.”
“But he had to go through Samaria.” Now here’s the thing about that. Jesus didn’t geographically HAVE to go through Samaria. In fact, most good, God-fearing Jews would not go through Samaria. Jesus had to go through Samaria not for travel reasons, but for theological reasons. He had to go through Samaria because there was something that needed to happen there to make clear a truth about who he was and what he’d come to do.
Jesus sat at this well in Samaria, where he, a good, Jewish teacher and leader did not belong, at noon, in the heat of the day, when a Samaritan approached. And, adding to the risk of cross-contamination, the Samaritan who approached was not just any Samaritan, but a woman. Good Jewish men did not mix with women of any sort, but especially not women who were not also Jews. And not just any non-Jewish woman. This woman had had not just one husband, but five, and was currently living with a man not her husband. One can assume this complicated marital situation is what sent her to the well in the middle of the day. That fear we all know is irrational but still feels so real, that poor fortune is contagious. That the reason for this woman’s complicated relationship history is in some way her fault, and that association with her will cause it, or her, to rub off on us. She is a sinner, don’t get to close.
But Jesus does get too close. Jesus gets right up in her business. “If you knew… [who I am] you would ask me for living water.” “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” These are bold, declarative statements of who he is, who she is, and who God is. And when the disciples returned, confused and dismayed that Jesus had taken up with a Samaritan woman of all people, she ran right back to that village who has cast her aside with this message of hope and truth and promise, and the people came and were transformed.
So here’s the thing, friends. This is a scary time. There is a truly dangerous global pandemic sweeping across the world, and we are right to be cautious, we are right to be afraid. But we are not right to panic, we are not right to fear. Sure John Oliver is not a scientist, but his words seemed fairly representative of what was expressed on the CDC website, and way more memorable, when he recommended that the proper amount of concern is somewhere between gargling with bleach and licking subway poles. “If you’re gargling bleach,” Oliver quipped, “you need to calm down. And if you’re licking subway poles because you’re convinced the whole thing is a hoax and you’re invincible, well that’s just gross under any circumstances.” Our Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, reflected this week on a treatise Martin Luther wrote in 1527 in response to the plague’s return to Wittenburg. Bishop Eaton wroted: “In [Luther’s treatises “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague,”] he emphasized the duty to care for the neighbor, the responsibility of government to protect and provide services to its citizens, a caution about recklessness, and the importance of science, medicine and common sense. To provide care for the neighbor, Luther recommended that pastors, those in public office, doctors and public servants should remain in the city. Luther himself remained in Wittenberg to care for his people. He recommended that public hospitals be built to accommodate those with the plague. He condemned those who took unnecessary risks that put themselves and others in danger of contagion. Luther also encouraged the use of reason and medicine, writing, “God has created medicines and has provided us with intelligence to guard and take care of the body. … Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence.” This five-hundred year old wisdom is still good wisdom. Do what the science says. Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick, if you’re at high risk, or if you’ve been in contact with someone who’s sick. As I wrote in the email announcing our decision to cancel worship and move to this online forum, this is about caring for our neighbors. And yet, we still find ways to worship, we still find ways to connect, we still find ways to care for each other. We still find ways to be the people of God for each other and in the world. All of this, by the way, not that we need a reason other than it is the thing we are freed in Christ to do, is also recommended by the CDC. These actions are good for our mental health. They create community resilience.
So while we are keeping safe social distance, while we are self-isolating or avoiding contact out of care of each other, it is important to remember that we live in a world where there are a myriad of ways to lean in, to like Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, to be close to one another, in ways that are healthy. And we need to do that as well. We need to, like Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, recognize the difference between actual contagion and stigma and discrimination. We need to be alert to those among us who are at risk not just from the illness, but from the economic ramifications of the illness. We need to be aware of who is being pushed to the side by the overabundance of caution, and make care for them a concern. We need to get up in the business of those who are looking out for themselves alone and putting others at risk, through fear-mongering, sharing false information, downplaying the science, etc. It’s easy, it’s so easy, to get bad information. I was at the gym Tuesday, having just gotten off the CDC website. Both CNN and Fox News were covering the outbreak, their numbers were not the same, and neither matched the CDC’s report.
And here’s the final thing to remember, dear people of God. Jesus had to go to Samaria, because he had to make it abundantly clear that “The hour is coming, and is now here” in which we are God’s. God is not bound to a time, place, or people, but God is active, alive, and in the world for all. God is the God of all that is and was and yet will be. As we heard read last week, God so loved not the Jews, not the Samaritans, not the Pharisees, the women, or even, the Christians, but God so loved the world. And getting too close to the much-feared Samaritan woman with a plethora of husbands is what God’s love looks like in the flesh. In the face of the plague, so many years ago, Luther “also reminded his people and us that we should trust God's faithfulness and promises, particularly the promise eternal life. Paul writes: "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). Thanks be to God, who is with us, and for us, all of us. No matter what. Amen.
Here’s the thing we with indoor plumbing may not be aware of, it is hard work to transport water. Water is heavy and awkward, and transporting it is work better done in the coolness of the morning or with the evening breeze. That is when most women would have traveled to the well to fetch their family’s daily water. This woman went at noon because she was unwelcomed at other times. She was, if you will, quarantined from the rest of her community. At this time of COVID-19 and the fear surrounding it, let me be clear that I use this word deliberately, though let me also unpack why.
There is a time and a place for quarantines and what we are doing today, watching a video in our homes, is one of those times. It is wise for those who have been exposed to a contagious illness that could be easily passed to others to stay outside of the community for a time until the threat of contagion has passed. It is wise for us who don’t know if we’ve been exposed, if we could be carriers, to stay apart from each other for the good of each other. There is even examples of this in the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws in the Old Testament, where those with a variety of illnesses are required to remain outside of the community until declared clear by a priest in order to protect the health of the rest of the community. This is good and wise practice.
But good and wise practice is not why the Samaritan woman was traveling to the well at the heat of the day. Her “quarantine,” if you will, was of a very different variety. There’s a page on the CDC website titled “Stigma and Resilience.” This page addresses people who may be experiencing stigma or discrimination due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including people of Asian descent, people who have traveled, and medical and healthcare workers. I’m sure we’ve heard, even laughed at, the jokes about people avoiding Chinese restaurants or Corona beer because of the outbreak. But social stigma, and the prejudice around it, is real. And this is not the only place we see it. Maybe you remember the accusation that those crossing the border carry diseases, or that all Muslims, or brown people in general, are terrorists, or insert stereotype here. There is a difference between healthy, appropriate social distancing for the good of the weakest among us and the fear driven accusation against “the other.” It is that sort of “quarantine” that drove the Samaritan woman to the well at noon, where she met Jesus.
And it is striking too that Jesus was at the well at noon. The Gospel reading started us at verse five, which leaves out some important details about how Jesus came to be in Samaria. So let us set the stage with those skipped verses. Last week, we heard about the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. Following that, Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside where they spent some time teaching and baptizing. John also was in the countryside, teaching and baptizing. When asked how John felt about Jesus, he reiterated his place as “not the Messiah, but [the one] sent head of him.” Which brings us to the start of chapter four. “Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’—although it was not Jesus but his disciples who baptized—he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria.”
“But he had to go through Samaria.” Now here’s the thing about that. Jesus didn’t geographically HAVE to go through Samaria. In fact, most good, God-fearing Jews would not go through Samaria. Jesus had to go through Samaria not for travel reasons, but for theological reasons. He had to go through Samaria because there was something that needed to happen there to make clear a truth about who he was and what he’d come to do.
Jesus sat at this well in Samaria, where he, a good, Jewish teacher and leader did not belong, at noon, in the heat of the day, when a Samaritan approached. And, adding to the risk of cross-contamination, the Samaritan who approached was not just any Samaritan, but a woman. Good Jewish men did not mix with women of any sort, but especially not women who were not also Jews. And not just any non-Jewish woman. This woman had had not just one husband, but five, and was currently living with a man not her husband. One can assume this complicated marital situation is what sent her to the well in the middle of the day. That fear we all know is irrational but still feels so real, that poor fortune is contagious. That the reason for this woman’s complicated relationship history is in some way her fault, and that association with her will cause it, or her, to rub off on us. She is a sinner, don’t get to close.
But Jesus does get too close. Jesus gets right up in her business. “If you knew… [who I am] you would ask me for living water.” “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” These are bold, declarative statements of who he is, who she is, and who God is. And when the disciples returned, confused and dismayed that Jesus had taken up with a Samaritan woman of all people, she ran right back to that village who has cast her aside with this message of hope and truth and promise, and the people came and were transformed.
So here’s the thing, friends. This is a scary time. There is a truly dangerous global pandemic sweeping across the world, and we are right to be cautious, we are right to be afraid. But we are not right to panic, we are not right to fear. Sure John Oliver is not a scientist, but his words seemed fairly representative of what was expressed on the CDC website, and way more memorable, when he recommended that the proper amount of concern is somewhere between gargling with bleach and licking subway poles. “If you’re gargling bleach,” Oliver quipped, “you need to calm down. And if you’re licking subway poles because you’re convinced the whole thing is a hoax and you’re invincible, well that’s just gross under any circumstances.” Our Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, reflected this week on a treatise Martin Luther wrote in 1527 in response to the plague’s return to Wittenburg. Bishop Eaton wroted: “In [Luther’s treatises “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague,”] he emphasized the duty to care for the neighbor, the responsibility of government to protect and provide services to its citizens, a caution about recklessness, and the importance of science, medicine and common sense. To provide care for the neighbor, Luther recommended that pastors, those in public office, doctors and public servants should remain in the city. Luther himself remained in Wittenberg to care for his people. He recommended that public hospitals be built to accommodate those with the plague. He condemned those who took unnecessary risks that put themselves and others in danger of contagion. Luther also encouraged the use of reason and medicine, writing, “God has created medicines and has provided us with intelligence to guard and take care of the body. … Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence.” This five-hundred year old wisdom is still good wisdom. Do what the science says. Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick, if you’re at high risk, or if you’ve been in contact with someone who’s sick. As I wrote in the email announcing our decision to cancel worship and move to this online forum, this is about caring for our neighbors. And yet, we still find ways to worship, we still find ways to connect, we still find ways to care for each other. We still find ways to be the people of God for each other and in the world. All of this, by the way, not that we need a reason other than it is the thing we are freed in Christ to do, is also recommended by the CDC. These actions are good for our mental health. They create community resilience.
So while we are keeping safe social distance, while we are self-isolating or avoiding contact out of care of each other, it is important to remember that we live in a world where there are a myriad of ways to lean in, to like Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, to be close to one another, in ways that are healthy. And we need to do that as well. We need to, like Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, recognize the difference between actual contagion and stigma and discrimination. We need to be alert to those among us who are at risk not just from the illness, but from the economic ramifications of the illness. We need to be aware of who is being pushed to the side by the overabundance of caution, and make care for them a concern. We need to get up in the business of those who are looking out for themselves alone and putting others at risk, through fear-mongering, sharing false information, downplaying the science, etc. It’s easy, it’s so easy, to get bad information. I was at the gym Tuesday, having just gotten off the CDC website. Both CNN and Fox News were covering the outbreak, their numbers were not the same, and neither matched the CDC’s report.
And here’s the final thing to remember, dear people of God. Jesus had to go to Samaria, because he had to make it abundantly clear that “The hour is coming, and is now here” in which we are God’s. God is not bound to a time, place, or people, but God is active, alive, and in the world for all. God is the God of all that is and was and yet will be. As we heard read last week, God so loved not the Jews, not the Samaritans, not the Pharisees, the women, or even, the Christians, but God so loved the world. And getting too close to the much-feared Samaritan woman with a plethora of husbands is what God’s love looks like in the flesh. In the face of the plague, so many years ago, Luther “also reminded his people and us that we should trust God's faithfulness and promises, particularly the promise eternal life. Paul writes: "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). Thanks be to God, who is with us, and for us, all of us. No matter what. Amen.
Monday, March 2, 2020
Starting With Jesus - A Sermon on Matthew 4:1-11
Since it’s the first Sunday of this new season I want to spend some time this morning stage setting where we are and where we’re going. First off, you may have noticed something missing from worship today. Namely, three of the four texts listed in the bulletin last week as “texts for next week.” I have to tell you, we, I, didn’t make the decision to leave them out of the service lightly. In fact, I’m going to continue to print them each week and I really commend them to you as excellent devotional reading on your own, because by leaving them out, we’re missing out on some of my favorite Old Testament and Romans readings. If you read my Trumpet article for this month, you know it was entirely dedicated to one of the left-out readings, the story of the dry bones from Ezekiel. But, in the end we did decide to go with just the Gospel reading during worship for a couple of reasons. One purely pragmatic, the Gospel readings are going to get rather long. Matthew’s version of the temptation of Jesus is the longest of all four Gospels, and this was the shortest Gospel reading we’ll have this season. By the fifth Sunday Lent we will read just about the entirety of John chapter 11. From a purely practical sense, there is the question of how much reading aloud we all are really able to process on a Sunday morning. But two, maybe more than any other year, the Gospel readings for Year A take us on a specific journey. So hopefully immersing ourselves fully in one reading each Sunday will help us enter into the arc of this Lenten narrative.
Fun historical fact for you, the Year A texts are some of the most ancient lectionary readings from the season of Lent. Back in the very earliest days of the Christian movement, our ancestors of the faith were reading these stories together in anticipation of Easter and to help new followers prepare for baptism. Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind and the raising of Lazarus are all stories of conversion, stories in which Jesus called people to a new life, a new purpose, a new way of being in the world. These stories invite us to pay attention to the “something different” that God is doing in the world through Jesus. In each of these stories, the person will be transformed by their relationship with Jesus, their life will be made new in a way they could never have imagined. And that new life will affect not only them, but their communities. Nicodemus will go from an uneasy nighttime visitor to one of only two men courageous enough to take part in the burial of Jesus. The woman at the well will call her whole town to come and see Jesus. The man born blind will stand up to the Pharisees. Lazarus and his sisters will throw a meal for Jesus and his disciples despite the very real threat such open association posed. These texts ground us in a Lent that is not about us preparing ourselves through proper fasting, prayers, or works of charity in order for God to redeem us on Easter, but a Lent that is about getting ready to be transformed by relationship with the One who will literally break through heaven and earth to be with us. Lent says, get ready dear people, for the curtain of the temple is about to be torn in two from top to bottom, just as the heavens were split as Jesus emerged from the waters of baptism, and new life is on its way.
But before we get there, we start here, where Lent always starts. With an account of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. The literary reasoning behind this starting point is maybe obvious. Jesus was tempted for forty days, Lent is forty days. Jesus fasted, those of us who gave up sweets have to walk through Meijer without giving in to the ever-growing array of Easter candy, potayto, potahto, right?
Obviously not. While I know why the lectionary committee always gives us the temptation story as the reading for the first Sunday in Lent, the risk of this “be like Jesus” comparison is pretty problematic. For one, Jesus is Jesus. Be a disciple of Jesus, follow in the model of Jesus, even do as Jesus taught are all good life examples. But “be like Jesus” is setting ourselves up for failure. When, after all, was the last time one of us walked on water, gave a blind person back their sight, or raised someone from the dead? If “be like Jesus” is the goal of a successful Lenten experience, friends, we can all just hang up the towel now, for there’s no point in trying.
“Be like Jesus” also under-emphasizes what Jesus does in this passage. Jesus is not just resisting temptation like I might resist the urge to turn off my alarm and go back to sleep and actually get up and go to the gym in the morning for once. Fun fact, rather than continually failing at this temptation, I’ve actually just stopped trying and given into the fact that I am an evening runner. Some battles are not worth fighting…
This passage, like, I might be so bold as to argue, all of scripture, is not about us at all but about what God is doing. And what God is doing through Jesus in this passage is drawing a very clear line in the sand about who is calling the shots, who is in charge of Jesus’ ministry in heaven and on earth.
So let’s scene set for a minute. In Epiphany we’ve been reading the Sermon on the Mount, which was Jesus’ first major teaching at the beginning of his ministry. This is chapter four, so this is before that. Chapter three, if you’ll flash back to the Baptism of Jesus back in January, is the first time we meet the adult Jesus, when he was baptized by John in the Jordan and, key in understanding today’s passage, the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove. Immediately following the Spirit’s descending, like literally two verses later, comes this morning’s opening verse about how “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.”
The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness. I probably point this out every year because this detail is in every account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. And it’s super important in understanding what’s going on in this story because it reminds us of who is calling the shots. The devil didn’t bring Jesus into the wilderness or come out and find Jesus while he was in the wilderness. Temptation didn’t get foisted on Jesus like the Peeps that patrol the entrance to Meijer or whatever cruel programmer put Snooze and Off right next to each other on my phone’s alarm screen. No, what is happening in this story is that God through the Holy Spirit led Jesus, and without delving too far into some defining the Trinity tangent, let’s just note we’ve got all three parts of it right there, at the very beginning of Jesus ministry, right at the moment in which Jesus was declared the Beloved Son of God, to stake his claim against evil and say here and no further. This so-called temptation isn’t even temptation with Jesus. Scholar Joy J. Moore notes that this is a question of provision. The devil first invites Jesus to provide for himself. To which Jesus says, God provides. Then the devil says, ok, prove God’s provision. Jesus responds, my faith doesn’t require proof. Then the devil tries, ok, well, how about I’ll provide. To which Jesus is like, ok, enough of you talking now, this isn’t about you, it is about God. Who God is, what God is doing. What we see here is Jesus right at the beginning of his ministry making it abundantly clear that what Jesus is doing is not an answer to the problem of sin or the power of evil, Jesus is the space before and after the question itself. The story of God is not: Adam did a bad thing so Jesus had to come and clean it up and make it right again. The story is “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The ending was set before the beginning, before the world began. The devil never had a chance in this temptation in the wilderness because the power of what Jesus was about to do had already rendered the devil powerless. This isn’t one of those, we’re reading it after it happened so we know the ending, things either. Like literally, even though the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had not chronologically, in real earth time happened yet, such was, is, and will be the power of that act that its effect is already being felt at the point in which the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. Where’s Chloe and her space-time continuum, that’s the thing that’s happening here.
And so, dear people of God, as we enter into this Lenten journey let us go with this absolute conviction. We don’t know where we are going. We don’t know where Jesus is calling us, how he is transforming us, who he is shaping us to be. We know that this relationship with God will change us, we know that new life is the result, but what form that new life will take, and what death that life will bring us through first, we cannot begin to imagine. But we also know this. Jesus is unequivocally in control. Whatever we face, whatever challenges, adventures, fears, or peril, Jesus has it, and Jesus has us. So let us take this first step forward into the mystery of Lent. Let us walk boldly into this wilderness knowing that we do not go alone and that the one who leads us is faithful. Amen.
Fun historical fact for you, the Year A texts are some of the most ancient lectionary readings from the season of Lent. Back in the very earliest days of the Christian movement, our ancestors of the faith were reading these stories together in anticipation of Easter and to help new followers prepare for baptism. Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind and the raising of Lazarus are all stories of conversion, stories in which Jesus called people to a new life, a new purpose, a new way of being in the world. These stories invite us to pay attention to the “something different” that God is doing in the world through Jesus. In each of these stories, the person will be transformed by their relationship with Jesus, their life will be made new in a way they could never have imagined. And that new life will affect not only them, but their communities. Nicodemus will go from an uneasy nighttime visitor to one of only two men courageous enough to take part in the burial of Jesus. The woman at the well will call her whole town to come and see Jesus. The man born blind will stand up to the Pharisees. Lazarus and his sisters will throw a meal for Jesus and his disciples despite the very real threat such open association posed. These texts ground us in a Lent that is not about us preparing ourselves through proper fasting, prayers, or works of charity in order for God to redeem us on Easter, but a Lent that is about getting ready to be transformed by relationship with the One who will literally break through heaven and earth to be with us. Lent says, get ready dear people, for the curtain of the temple is about to be torn in two from top to bottom, just as the heavens were split as Jesus emerged from the waters of baptism, and new life is on its way.
But before we get there, we start here, where Lent always starts. With an account of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. The literary reasoning behind this starting point is maybe obvious. Jesus was tempted for forty days, Lent is forty days. Jesus fasted, those of us who gave up sweets have to walk through Meijer without giving in to the ever-growing array of Easter candy, potayto, potahto, right?
Obviously not. While I know why the lectionary committee always gives us the temptation story as the reading for the first Sunday in Lent, the risk of this “be like Jesus” comparison is pretty problematic. For one, Jesus is Jesus. Be a disciple of Jesus, follow in the model of Jesus, even do as Jesus taught are all good life examples. But “be like Jesus” is setting ourselves up for failure. When, after all, was the last time one of us walked on water, gave a blind person back their sight, or raised someone from the dead? If “be like Jesus” is the goal of a successful Lenten experience, friends, we can all just hang up the towel now, for there’s no point in trying.
“Be like Jesus” also under-emphasizes what Jesus does in this passage. Jesus is not just resisting temptation like I might resist the urge to turn off my alarm and go back to sleep and actually get up and go to the gym in the morning for once. Fun fact, rather than continually failing at this temptation, I’ve actually just stopped trying and given into the fact that I am an evening runner. Some battles are not worth fighting…
This passage, like, I might be so bold as to argue, all of scripture, is not about us at all but about what God is doing. And what God is doing through Jesus in this passage is drawing a very clear line in the sand about who is calling the shots, who is in charge of Jesus’ ministry in heaven and on earth.
So let’s scene set for a minute. In Epiphany we’ve been reading the Sermon on the Mount, which was Jesus’ first major teaching at the beginning of his ministry. This is chapter four, so this is before that. Chapter three, if you’ll flash back to the Baptism of Jesus back in January, is the first time we meet the adult Jesus, when he was baptized by John in the Jordan and, key in understanding today’s passage, the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove. Immediately following the Spirit’s descending, like literally two verses later, comes this morning’s opening verse about how “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.”
The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness. I probably point this out every year because this detail is in every account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. And it’s super important in understanding what’s going on in this story because it reminds us of who is calling the shots. The devil didn’t bring Jesus into the wilderness or come out and find Jesus while he was in the wilderness. Temptation didn’t get foisted on Jesus like the Peeps that patrol the entrance to Meijer or whatever cruel programmer put Snooze and Off right next to each other on my phone’s alarm screen. No, what is happening in this story is that God through the Holy Spirit led Jesus, and without delving too far into some defining the Trinity tangent, let’s just note we’ve got all three parts of it right there, at the very beginning of Jesus ministry, right at the moment in which Jesus was declared the Beloved Son of God, to stake his claim against evil and say here and no further. This so-called temptation isn’t even temptation with Jesus. Scholar Joy J. Moore notes that this is a question of provision. The devil first invites Jesus to provide for himself. To which Jesus says, God provides. Then the devil says, ok, prove God’s provision. Jesus responds, my faith doesn’t require proof. Then the devil tries, ok, well, how about I’ll provide. To which Jesus is like, ok, enough of you talking now, this isn’t about you, it is about God. Who God is, what God is doing. What we see here is Jesus right at the beginning of his ministry making it abundantly clear that what Jesus is doing is not an answer to the problem of sin or the power of evil, Jesus is the space before and after the question itself. The story of God is not: Adam did a bad thing so Jesus had to come and clean it up and make it right again. The story is “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The ending was set before the beginning, before the world began. The devil never had a chance in this temptation in the wilderness because the power of what Jesus was about to do had already rendered the devil powerless. This isn’t one of those, we’re reading it after it happened so we know the ending, things either. Like literally, even though the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had not chronologically, in real earth time happened yet, such was, is, and will be the power of that act that its effect is already being felt at the point in which the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. Where’s Chloe and her space-time continuum, that’s the thing that’s happening here.
And so, dear people of God, as we enter into this Lenten journey let us go with this absolute conviction. We don’t know where we are going. We don’t know where Jesus is calling us, how he is transforming us, who he is shaping us to be. We know that this relationship with God will change us, we know that new life is the result, but what form that new life will take, and what death that life will bring us through first, we cannot begin to imagine. But we also know this. Jesus is unequivocally in control. Whatever we face, whatever challenges, adventures, fears, or peril, Jesus has it, and Jesus has us. So let us take this first step forward into the mystery of Lent. Let us walk boldly into this wilderness knowing that we do not go alone and that the one who leads us is faithful. Amen.
Breath, You're Mortal - An Ash Wednesday Sermon on Matthew 6.1-6, 16-20
Don’t be like the hypocrites, Jesus announces in our Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday. And if you are, like me, a bit of a rule follower, this pronouncement might have been met with a bit of relief. After all, Jesus is not generally one for clearly spelling out behavior. So to have a very clear, “see those guys, don’t do that,” for once is refreshing. But then that begs the question. What is a hypocrite? Who are we not supposed to be like?
Maybe you’re familiar with the old Sunday school song, “I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba, I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba,” which includes the verse, “I don’t wanna be a hy-po-crite, I don’t wanna be a hy-po-crite. Well, why not? ‘Cause they’re not hip with it. I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba.” I looked up hypocrite and, no joke, the dictionary definition of a hypocrite is “someone who indulges in hypocrisy.” Nothing like defining a word with the word. Hypocrite is one of those words where we’re not really sure what it is, but we know we don’t want to be one. But I feel like if we had a children’s sermon today and I asked the kids what the word “hypocrite” meant, after the blank stares, I’d get something about being a liar or being fake. A hypocrite is someone who’s words and actions don’t match up, who pretends to live by some strict moral code, but who in fact believe very differently.
At least, this is the modern definition of a hypocrite. Remember the fun with words we had on Sunday with the word “awful.” Well, I dug into the word hypocrite as well, and the Greek word used here, “hupo-kritai,” can also be translated as “stage actors.” “hupo” for the preposition “under,” and “kritai” “discriminate or distinguish”, to be a hypocrite is literally to “play a part.”
So the pronouncement Jesus gives us here is less about action and more about intention. The question isn’t what, but why. Why are you giving alms, why are your practicing prayer, why are you fasting? What is the goal, what is the motivation, behind these actions?
This text from Matthew is the text every year on Ash Wednesday. And while you all certainly know I don’t always understand the lectionary committee’s decisions on text, for this one I think they were right on because I think these are really important questions to ground ourselves in as we enter into Lent, a season seemingly dedicated to almsgiving, prayer, fasting, and other acts of piety. It is good to ask the question, why are we doing these things? What is the motivation behind our Lenten practices?
This is also an especially good question for us who identify as Lutherans, as “practicing our piety before others” is really the last thing we are interested in doing. At council last week, we were working on a questionnaire about Trinity’s ministries and one of the questions was about how well we prepare members to share their faith. And someone quipped, “just say ‘we’re Lutheran.’” The implication being that to be Lutheran means to be private about our faith, so much so that we maybe take too seriously Jesus’ proclamation that our faith be done “in secret; [so that our] Father who sees in secret will reward” us. All this, of course, on a day in which we mark ourselves, very publicly, with an ashy cross in the center of our foreheads. So what are we doing?
I was talking to someone the other day about interviews, and she remarked how strange it is that we tend to hire not the most qualified person, but the most confident. Interviewing well and being good at one’s job can be completely different skill sets. And let’s not even get started on the carefully curated world of social media. Point being, playing a part, being a hypocrite in the ancient Greek stage actor definition of the word, is part of what it means to be a person in our society. If someone asks, “how are you,” unless you know the person really, really well, “fine” or “good” is probably going to be the answer, right? And talking about why we don’t talk about our faith, have you ever looked at someone and thought, they are a way better Christian then I am, their faith is so much stronger, better, deeper, insert adjective here, than mine… The struggle is real, am I right?
So here’s the gift, dear people of God. Here’s the good news. The season of Lent is an invitation to put aside judgment, to lay down our self-criticism, to stop worrying about whether or not we measure up, and to simply be in the presence of God. What Jesus calls us to in this request to not be like the hypocrites is not a call to some stricter level of piety, but the offering of the freedom that comes from knowing yourself to be enough. On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are mortal, that we are human, that we were formed from the mud and the muck and the mire of creation. To be mortal is to be broken, to be sinful, to fall short. It’s part of the thing, to pretend otherwise is an act.
And so friends, in a few moments, we will join together in a long period of confession. We will be invited to lay before God our failure to love, our unfaithfulness, pride, hypocrisy, our self-indulgence, our negligence, our neglect, our waste. We are invited to bring all of this to God, and in its place to receive this cross of ashes. These ashes are not a mark of your sinfulness however, they are a mark of your redemption. On this day we in the church make visible to remind not others but ourselves of the promise that we always carry on our foreheads, the promise that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ. That we are loved, forgiven, redeemed, and set free by the love of God in Christ, because love and forgiveness are who God is. This cross of ash is meant to remind us that we are not acting as forgiven people, we are forgiven people. God’s mercy is great, and we are God’s beloved. Amen.
Maybe you’re familiar with the old Sunday school song, “I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba, I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba,” which includes the verse, “I don’t wanna be a hy-po-crite, I don’t wanna be a hy-po-crite. Well, why not? ‘Cause they’re not hip with it. I just wanna be a sheep, ba-ba-ba-ba.” I looked up hypocrite and, no joke, the dictionary definition of a hypocrite is “someone who indulges in hypocrisy.” Nothing like defining a word with the word. Hypocrite is one of those words where we’re not really sure what it is, but we know we don’t want to be one. But I feel like if we had a children’s sermon today and I asked the kids what the word “hypocrite” meant, after the blank stares, I’d get something about being a liar or being fake. A hypocrite is someone who’s words and actions don’t match up, who pretends to live by some strict moral code, but who in fact believe very differently.
At least, this is the modern definition of a hypocrite. Remember the fun with words we had on Sunday with the word “awful.” Well, I dug into the word hypocrite as well, and the Greek word used here, “hupo-kritai,” can also be translated as “stage actors.” “hupo” for the preposition “under,” and “kritai” “discriminate or distinguish”, to be a hypocrite is literally to “play a part.”
So the pronouncement Jesus gives us here is less about action and more about intention. The question isn’t what, but why. Why are you giving alms, why are your practicing prayer, why are you fasting? What is the goal, what is the motivation, behind these actions?
This text from Matthew is the text every year on Ash Wednesday. And while you all certainly know I don’t always understand the lectionary committee’s decisions on text, for this one I think they were right on because I think these are really important questions to ground ourselves in as we enter into Lent, a season seemingly dedicated to almsgiving, prayer, fasting, and other acts of piety. It is good to ask the question, why are we doing these things? What is the motivation behind our Lenten practices?
This is also an especially good question for us who identify as Lutherans, as “practicing our piety before others” is really the last thing we are interested in doing. At council last week, we were working on a questionnaire about Trinity’s ministries and one of the questions was about how well we prepare members to share their faith. And someone quipped, “just say ‘we’re Lutheran.’” The implication being that to be Lutheran means to be private about our faith, so much so that we maybe take too seriously Jesus’ proclamation that our faith be done “in secret; [so that our] Father who sees in secret will reward” us. All this, of course, on a day in which we mark ourselves, very publicly, with an ashy cross in the center of our foreheads. So what are we doing?
I was talking to someone the other day about interviews, and she remarked how strange it is that we tend to hire not the most qualified person, but the most confident. Interviewing well and being good at one’s job can be completely different skill sets. And let’s not even get started on the carefully curated world of social media. Point being, playing a part, being a hypocrite in the ancient Greek stage actor definition of the word, is part of what it means to be a person in our society. If someone asks, “how are you,” unless you know the person really, really well, “fine” or “good” is probably going to be the answer, right? And talking about why we don’t talk about our faith, have you ever looked at someone and thought, they are a way better Christian then I am, their faith is so much stronger, better, deeper, insert adjective here, than mine… The struggle is real, am I right?
So here’s the gift, dear people of God. Here’s the good news. The season of Lent is an invitation to put aside judgment, to lay down our self-criticism, to stop worrying about whether or not we measure up, and to simply be in the presence of God. What Jesus calls us to in this request to not be like the hypocrites is not a call to some stricter level of piety, but the offering of the freedom that comes from knowing yourself to be enough. On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are mortal, that we are human, that we were formed from the mud and the muck and the mire of creation. To be mortal is to be broken, to be sinful, to fall short. It’s part of the thing, to pretend otherwise is an act.
And so friends, in a few moments, we will join together in a long period of confession. We will be invited to lay before God our failure to love, our unfaithfulness, pride, hypocrisy, our self-indulgence, our negligence, our neglect, our waste. We are invited to bring all of this to God, and in its place to receive this cross of ashes. These ashes are not a mark of your sinfulness however, they are a mark of your redemption. On this day we in the church make visible to remind not others but ourselves of the promise that we always carry on our foreheads, the promise that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ. That we are loved, forgiven, redeemed, and set free by the love of God in Christ, because love and forgiveness are who God is. This cross of ash is meant to remind us that we are not acting as forgiven people, we are forgiven people. God’s mercy is great, and we are God’s beloved. Amen.
Mountains Keep You Safe: A Sermon on Matthew 17:1-9
Here’s a fun fact about your pastor you may not know, I am terrified of the plains. States like Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, places where you can see broad expanses of nothing but open fields and flatness make me super uncomfortable. I don’t like how things like weather, locusts, hordes of marauding armies, can just cross these vast flatnesses, and you can see them coming for miles but there’s nothing you can do about it, because there are no barriers between you and them.
My fear of flat places was an ongoing joke/argument between me and my friend Sally in seminary. I went to seminary in Illinois, I might add, not a place known for it’s stimulating topography. Sally, who I believe is actually from a sort of hilly part of Wisconsin but now appropriately lives in Iowa, would tease me about my anxiety around any weather happening anywhere in the state of Illinois. It’s so far away, she’d say, there’s nothing to worry about. To which I would argue, “it’s far away but this place doesn’t have any mountains, so there’s nothing between it and us. What we need are a few more mountains. Mountains keep you safe.”
I was thinking about this whole “mountains keep you safe” line recently, and it occurred to me that it’s not mountain peaks that make me feel safe, it’s the valleys. I like mountain peaks, don’t get me wrong. I did a lot of rock climbing in college and in my twenties and I loved the feeling of accomplishment that came from reaching the pinnacle of something. This feeling probably aided by a cat-like appreciation of being on top of things. But while I like the sense of accomplishment of reaching the top of something, being on top is not a place I want to dwell for any real length of time. While the view is great, mountain tops themselves are exposed and windswept, and I don’t like being cold. I like to go up to the mountaintop and look around for a while, but it’s in the going up and the coming down that the real sense of accomplishment lies.
The writer of Matthew’s Gospel seems to share my appreciation for mountains. The Epiphany-Lent-Easter season of the church year especially gives us a tour of Matthew’s mountainous terrain. For the last several weeks, we’d been seated at Jesus’ feet on an unnamed mountain as he taught us about what it meant to be blessed. Today, we stand atop another high mountain to see Jesus transfigured before us, his face shining like the sun and his clothes dazzling white, as a voice from the clouds proclaim him the “Son, the Beloved, with whom [God] is well pleased.” And then Wednesday marks the beginning of our forty-day journey through Lent, where we head to another mountain, a small hill called Golgotha, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, where Jesus will be crucified. And from there Matthew will bring us to one final mountain, a mountain in Galilee to which Jesus directed the disciples, from which he will send them to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything Jesus had commanded them. For Jesus will be with us always, to the end of the age.”
Our theme for this Epiphany season has been seeing the light of Christ shining in our midst. And more specifically, what we will do with what we have seen. What we will do, who we will be, how we will live, now that we have known ourselves to be blessed by God. And now, on this Sunday of the Transfiguration, we have one more chance to glimpse the glory, one more opportunity to stand in awe.
Six days later, our reading began, six days after Peter declared Jesus to be the Messiah and Jesus responded with the first foretelling of his death, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and let them up a high mountain by themselves [where] he was transfigured before them.” This word transfigure is key because to transfigure is to transform into something more beautiful or elevated. So what Matthew is telling us is that on the top of this high mountain, on a place of elevation, Jesus revealed himself to his disciples as something different, something greater, than what they’d known him to be. This is true to form of how Jesus always displays himself on mountains. On the Sermon on the Mount, a great teacher. On the mount of Transfiguration, a dazzling figure. On Golgotha, great love. And on the mountain in Galilee, a great commission. Mountains are places where greatness is revealed.
This morning on this mountain we see Peter, James, and John respond in a way that is I think pretty common in the face of greatness. Verse six spoke of how the disciples “fell on the ground and were overcome with fear.”
This is a bit of a jump here but stay with me, because I was thinking this week about the etymology of the word “awful.” Where did the word “awful” come from? Because if I say something is awful, that means it’s terrible, right? Something that is awful is bad or gross or generally distasteful. But the word “awe” alone, is a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. If something is awesome, that thing is impressive or daunting. Someone who is awestruck is filled with or revealing awe. So, because I’m a nerd, I dug into this a little bit. Turns out awful now means exclusively bad, unpleasant, or terrible. But it’s historical usage also included inspiring reverential wonder or fear. And even in modern colloquialisms, it can be simply a synonym for “very” as in, “the trip I took to Waldron on Wednesday to an awfully long time.” The bus trip wasn’t in and of itself awful. A little cold maybe, but more or less pleasant. But Waldron is basically Ohio, and that is a long time to be on a school bus.
All of this to say that the word “fear” in scripture is complex. When we hear the word fear, we think of being afraid, like how my basketball team felt when they got off the bus after spending the entirety of the aforementioned awfully long bus ride telling each other ghost stories. And one can certainly imagine the disciples experiencing that kind of fear from witnessing their friend and teacher start glowing and talking to dead people, while voices proclaimed stuff from clouds. If the clouds started talking to me, I’ll tell you what, I’d be afraid. But fear in scripture, especially fear of God, is less the knees knocking, bump in the night, don’t go in the basement sort of fear than it is a sense of awe. To fear God is to be faced with the glory and the power and the wonder of God. To understand a power that is awful in every sense of the word, sometimes terrible like an earthquake, sometimes transformative like transfiguration or forgiveness, sometimes amazing like a sunset or a mountain vista. But a power that is at the heart of it all grounded in the declaration that rings from the river valley of the Jordan to the top of the highest peak to the cross to Galilee and to the world. The declaration of what it means to be God’s beloved.
Which is why I think the heart of the Christian life is found not in verse six, but in verse seven. “But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” We who have seen the power and the glory and the might, the love and the grace and the forgiveness of God, who have been reborn in the waters, fed at the table, and sent to “Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach,” it is understandable, even appropriate that we might feel some fear at the weight and the responsibility of that task. We can fear this call, dear people of God, but we do not have to be afraid. Because as we will hear at the end of this book, there is a promise for the beginning of our journey. “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Amen.
My fear of flat places was an ongoing joke/argument between me and my friend Sally in seminary. I went to seminary in Illinois, I might add, not a place known for it’s stimulating topography. Sally, who I believe is actually from a sort of hilly part of Wisconsin but now appropriately lives in Iowa, would tease me about my anxiety around any weather happening anywhere in the state of Illinois. It’s so far away, she’d say, there’s nothing to worry about. To which I would argue, “it’s far away but this place doesn’t have any mountains, so there’s nothing between it and us. What we need are a few more mountains. Mountains keep you safe.”
I was thinking about this whole “mountains keep you safe” line recently, and it occurred to me that it’s not mountain peaks that make me feel safe, it’s the valleys. I like mountain peaks, don’t get me wrong. I did a lot of rock climbing in college and in my twenties and I loved the feeling of accomplishment that came from reaching the pinnacle of something. This feeling probably aided by a cat-like appreciation of being on top of things. But while I like the sense of accomplishment of reaching the top of something, being on top is not a place I want to dwell for any real length of time. While the view is great, mountain tops themselves are exposed and windswept, and I don’t like being cold. I like to go up to the mountaintop and look around for a while, but it’s in the going up and the coming down that the real sense of accomplishment lies.
The writer of Matthew’s Gospel seems to share my appreciation for mountains. The Epiphany-Lent-Easter season of the church year especially gives us a tour of Matthew’s mountainous terrain. For the last several weeks, we’d been seated at Jesus’ feet on an unnamed mountain as he taught us about what it meant to be blessed. Today, we stand atop another high mountain to see Jesus transfigured before us, his face shining like the sun and his clothes dazzling white, as a voice from the clouds proclaim him the “Son, the Beloved, with whom [God] is well pleased.” And then Wednesday marks the beginning of our forty-day journey through Lent, where we head to another mountain, a small hill called Golgotha, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, where Jesus will be crucified. And from there Matthew will bring us to one final mountain, a mountain in Galilee to which Jesus directed the disciples, from which he will send them to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything Jesus had commanded them. For Jesus will be with us always, to the end of the age.”
Our theme for this Epiphany season has been seeing the light of Christ shining in our midst. And more specifically, what we will do with what we have seen. What we will do, who we will be, how we will live, now that we have known ourselves to be blessed by God. And now, on this Sunday of the Transfiguration, we have one more chance to glimpse the glory, one more opportunity to stand in awe.
Six days later, our reading began, six days after Peter declared Jesus to be the Messiah and Jesus responded with the first foretelling of his death, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and let them up a high mountain by themselves [where] he was transfigured before them.” This word transfigure is key because to transfigure is to transform into something more beautiful or elevated. So what Matthew is telling us is that on the top of this high mountain, on a place of elevation, Jesus revealed himself to his disciples as something different, something greater, than what they’d known him to be. This is true to form of how Jesus always displays himself on mountains. On the Sermon on the Mount, a great teacher. On the mount of Transfiguration, a dazzling figure. On Golgotha, great love. And on the mountain in Galilee, a great commission. Mountains are places where greatness is revealed.
This morning on this mountain we see Peter, James, and John respond in a way that is I think pretty common in the face of greatness. Verse six spoke of how the disciples “fell on the ground and were overcome with fear.”
This is a bit of a jump here but stay with me, because I was thinking this week about the etymology of the word “awful.” Where did the word “awful” come from? Because if I say something is awful, that means it’s terrible, right? Something that is awful is bad or gross or generally distasteful. But the word “awe” alone, is a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. If something is awesome, that thing is impressive or daunting. Someone who is awestruck is filled with or revealing awe. So, because I’m a nerd, I dug into this a little bit. Turns out awful now means exclusively bad, unpleasant, or terrible. But it’s historical usage also included inspiring reverential wonder or fear. And even in modern colloquialisms, it can be simply a synonym for “very” as in, “the trip I took to Waldron on Wednesday to an awfully long time.” The bus trip wasn’t in and of itself awful. A little cold maybe, but more or less pleasant. But Waldron is basically Ohio, and that is a long time to be on a school bus.
All of this to say that the word “fear” in scripture is complex. When we hear the word fear, we think of being afraid, like how my basketball team felt when they got off the bus after spending the entirety of the aforementioned awfully long bus ride telling each other ghost stories. And one can certainly imagine the disciples experiencing that kind of fear from witnessing their friend and teacher start glowing and talking to dead people, while voices proclaimed stuff from clouds. If the clouds started talking to me, I’ll tell you what, I’d be afraid. But fear in scripture, especially fear of God, is less the knees knocking, bump in the night, don’t go in the basement sort of fear than it is a sense of awe. To fear God is to be faced with the glory and the power and the wonder of God. To understand a power that is awful in every sense of the word, sometimes terrible like an earthquake, sometimes transformative like transfiguration or forgiveness, sometimes amazing like a sunset or a mountain vista. But a power that is at the heart of it all grounded in the declaration that rings from the river valley of the Jordan to the top of the highest peak to the cross to Galilee and to the world. The declaration of what it means to be God’s beloved.
Which is why I think the heart of the Christian life is found not in verse six, but in verse seven. “But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” We who have seen the power and the glory and the might, the love and the grace and the forgiveness of God, who have been reborn in the waters, fed at the table, and sent to “Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach,” it is understandable, even appropriate that we might feel some fear at the weight and the responsibility of that task. We can fear this call, dear people of God, but we do not have to be afraid. Because as we will hear at the end of this book, there is a promise for the beginning of our journey. “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Amen.
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