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.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Sunday, March 15, 2020
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.
Monday, February 17, 2020
Feb. 16, 2020 - Make Good Choices - A Sermon on Matthew 5.21-37 and Deuteronomy 30.15-20
“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Thanks to this line from Deuteronomy being in our reading this morning, I’ve had an early nineties Christian praise song stuck in my head all week. Now, I’ll tell you I’m not a huge fan of a lot of early nineties Christian praise music because a lot of it is pretty theologically questionable. And this song is for the most part no exception to that concern, but there is one line it in that I think gets, possibly unintentionally, right to the heart of what Moses was saying to the Israelites. The line I’ve been singing all week goes like this: “Choose life, the way that is true / From the One who chose you, your Father in heaven.” It’s the second half of that which gets me. “Choose life… From the One who chose you.” What we hear there is this statement that the choice we are invited to make is the response to already having been chosen. We don’t choose to BE God’s chosen, that choice was already made. Rather we choose because we ARE God’s chosen.
That’s what’s happening in the Deuteronomy text Teresa read this morning. The whole book of Deuteronomy is basically Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites. Having rescued them from slavery in Egypt, having led them across the desert to the very cusp of the Promised Land, having put up with forty years of their whining, Moses is about to send them off into their promised yet unknown future. Before he does that, he wants to send them off as prepared as possible, so he delivers this very long speech, in which he recounts their history, outlines rules to live by, and stresses their responsibilities and obligations. This is not unlike the lecture a parent might deliver to their pre-adolescent child about to be left home alone for the first time.
Today we heard the very end of this speech. Chapter thirty, verses fifteen through twenty are literally the very last words of Moses’ exhortation to these people whom he has loved and cared about for so long. I had a housemate who whenever I left the house would yell out the door after me, “make good choices,” and that’s basically what Moses left the Israelites with. Make good choices. If we think back to the parent-pre-adolescent child analogy, that lecture is not “here are all the things you need to do in order to earn the right to be my child.” Rather, that list of expectations and obligations are made out of love. Here are the things you need to do so that you, and any younger siblings, pets, houseplants, you’ve been left responsible for can live and thrive while I am gone.
For Moses, choosing life meant choosing God. It meant loving God, walking with God, listening to God’s voice, and following God. Some translations translate this act of listening as “obey God.” But in our modern context, blind, unexamined obedience to authority is at best short sighted and at worst dangerous. What Moses refers to here is not “do whatever God says because God is God,” but it’s be in relationship with God. It is the active practice of walking, listening, learning, of growing deeper and clearer into who you are and how God is calling you to be.
Choosing life is also not an individual action. We do not choose life simply by choosing God and ignoring others. Choosing life means choosing, loving, each other, both friends and neighbors and foreigners and strangers, and loving and caring for God’s creation. As Christians we tend to have the unfortunate habit of seeing the Law as this very legalistic, moralistic list of prerequisites to be met. It is either this thing that absolutely must be kept exactly as written in order for God to accept us, or it is so impossible as to be completely ignored, Christ died for me, so I get to live however I want and you have to live how I say. This is true today—whoever you’re considering voting for in the next election, democrat or republican, liberal, moderate, or conservative, has certainly told you that God is on their side—and has been true throughout our history. Arguing about whether and how the law applies to us is like the favorite theological struggle of the Christian movement. So it’s important to remember as we’re hearing these words from Moses that our Israelite forebears did not have the same fraught relationship with the law that we have. For them, the commandments of God were not seen as burdensome or impossible, rather they were spiritual practices to be followed as best one could. They were ways to remain faithful, to mark their identity of people of God, and to respond to the gift of God’s claiming them as God’s chosen people. I’m sure I’ve shared before that my Old Testament professor in seminary referred to the Ten Commandments not as the regulations which decided who was in, but the rules of the playpen to help the people of God, those who were already in, live well together.
Which gets us to our Gospel reading for this morning and this next chunk of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After grounding us in our identity as blessed, salty, light-bearers, Jesus now digs in to what that identity looks like in practice. “You have heard it said” Jesus starts, listing off various commandments, “do not murder, do not commit adultery, get divorced in this way, do not swear falsely. But I say to you,” this much harder thing. It is not enough to just not murder people, if you so much as are at odds with someone, you must seek reconciliation. It is not enough to not commit adultery, if you even look at someone with lust, you must cut off your hand or pluck out your eye. It is not enough to get divorced legally. It is not enough to not swear falsely, you must not swear at all. What Jesus did here wasn’t about replacing the law with something harder, what he was doing was intensifying the law, drilling down into the heart of why it had existed in the first place. Remember what Moses said to the Israelites so many years back, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Let’s think about this command to not murder. My first thought on reflection is this is a ridiculously low bar. But I started drafting this sermon on Lincoln’s Birthday and I thought about the Civil War and the hundreds of thousands of people who died, and killed, defending our freedom and fighting for freedom for all people. Certainly we don’t consider that murder, but lives were taken. What does it mean to choose life on the field of battle? Can the choice of and for life at times require taking life? My friend Pastor Chris is an army chaplain and I give thanks every day that he helps the young men and women of our military sit with the results of those questions every day, a choice often made for them by leaders far away from the actual places and people where those choices play out. Or I was walking through St. Philip the other day, and I noticed they have a suicide prevention bench in the hallway. The idea being if someone is feeling alone or depressed they can sit on that bench as a signal that they need a friend. Are you choosing life if you walk past someone seated on that bench? Yes, you are not murdering anyone, but certainly someone is being left in need.
“You shall not commit adultery” is a seemingly low bar, but what about the harmless banter, locker-room talk, and the effects of our Instagram happy society on the self-perception of both men and women? Are Snapchat filters choosing life? Which side of the Super Bowl halftime show debate was choosing life, the side that said it was a disgusting objectification of women’s bodies or the side that saw a powerful display of strength, and a call for justice and inclusion? How should we consider divorce now that marriage is a decision between two consenting adults rather than, as it was in the time of Moses, a land contract between two men often involving the sale of a woman in exchange for camels. How is choosing life different now than it was then, when a divorced woman was a pariah to society? What does it mean to not just swear falsely, but to not swear at all? Our Pledge of Allegiance, only since 1954 I might add, has included the phrase “one nation, under God,” before “with liberty and justice for all.” Does God belong in our national allegiance? To be clear, I’m not arguing yes or no, I’m merely raising the question of what God are we pledging to, and who decides the ideas and beliefs that allegiance to that God contains.
These are hard questions, dear people of God. Hard questions with no easy answers. And do I wish some days that ours was a God who just spelled out for us how we have to live in with a very clearly delineated list of rules and requirements, yeah, some days I do. But I also know that the world is not that simple, there is too much complexity for any rule to work perfectly one hundred percent of the time. And the good news for us in this text is we have a God who knows that. We have a God who gets that no law can just work perfectly every time, in every case. And so instead of a list of hard and fast dos and don’ts, ours is a God who gives us the tools to make good choices. And a God who knows that the choices we make, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, will not always be good choices. And when we fail at this. When we get caught up in our own doubts, fears, egos, or idealism, and we do not make good choices, ours is a God who meets us again and again at the font and at the table, with this unending promise of forgiveness, grace, and love. So choose life, dear people of God. Choose life, because you have already been chosen. God has chosen you. Amen.
That’s what’s happening in the Deuteronomy text Teresa read this morning. The whole book of Deuteronomy is basically Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites. Having rescued them from slavery in Egypt, having led them across the desert to the very cusp of the Promised Land, having put up with forty years of their whining, Moses is about to send them off into their promised yet unknown future. Before he does that, he wants to send them off as prepared as possible, so he delivers this very long speech, in which he recounts their history, outlines rules to live by, and stresses their responsibilities and obligations. This is not unlike the lecture a parent might deliver to their pre-adolescent child about to be left home alone for the first time.
Today we heard the very end of this speech. Chapter thirty, verses fifteen through twenty are literally the very last words of Moses’ exhortation to these people whom he has loved and cared about for so long. I had a housemate who whenever I left the house would yell out the door after me, “make good choices,” and that’s basically what Moses left the Israelites with. Make good choices. If we think back to the parent-pre-adolescent child analogy, that lecture is not “here are all the things you need to do in order to earn the right to be my child.” Rather, that list of expectations and obligations are made out of love. Here are the things you need to do so that you, and any younger siblings, pets, houseplants, you’ve been left responsible for can live and thrive while I am gone.
For Moses, choosing life meant choosing God. It meant loving God, walking with God, listening to God’s voice, and following God. Some translations translate this act of listening as “obey God.” But in our modern context, blind, unexamined obedience to authority is at best short sighted and at worst dangerous. What Moses refers to here is not “do whatever God says because God is God,” but it’s be in relationship with God. It is the active practice of walking, listening, learning, of growing deeper and clearer into who you are and how God is calling you to be.
Choosing life is also not an individual action. We do not choose life simply by choosing God and ignoring others. Choosing life means choosing, loving, each other, both friends and neighbors and foreigners and strangers, and loving and caring for God’s creation. As Christians we tend to have the unfortunate habit of seeing the Law as this very legalistic, moralistic list of prerequisites to be met. It is either this thing that absolutely must be kept exactly as written in order for God to accept us, or it is so impossible as to be completely ignored, Christ died for me, so I get to live however I want and you have to live how I say. This is true today—whoever you’re considering voting for in the next election, democrat or republican, liberal, moderate, or conservative, has certainly told you that God is on their side—and has been true throughout our history. Arguing about whether and how the law applies to us is like the favorite theological struggle of the Christian movement. So it’s important to remember as we’re hearing these words from Moses that our Israelite forebears did not have the same fraught relationship with the law that we have. For them, the commandments of God were not seen as burdensome or impossible, rather they were spiritual practices to be followed as best one could. They were ways to remain faithful, to mark their identity of people of God, and to respond to the gift of God’s claiming them as God’s chosen people. I’m sure I’ve shared before that my Old Testament professor in seminary referred to the Ten Commandments not as the regulations which decided who was in, but the rules of the playpen to help the people of God, those who were already in, live well together.
Which gets us to our Gospel reading for this morning and this next chunk of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After grounding us in our identity as blessed, salty, light-bearers, Jesus now digs in to what that identity looks like in practice. “You have heard it said” Jesus starts, listing off various commandments, “do not murder, do not commit adultery, get divorced in this way, do not swear falsely. But I say to you,” this much harder thing. It is not enough to just not murder people, if you so much as are at odds with someone, you must seek reconciliation. It is not enough to not commit adultery, if you even look at someone with lust, you must cut off your hand or pluck out your eye. It is not enough to get divorced legally. It is not enough to not swear falsely, you must not swear at all. What Jesus did here wasn’t about replacing the law with something harder, what he was doing was intensifying the law, drilling down into the heart of why it had existed in the first place. Remember what Moses said to the Israelites so many years back, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Let’s think about this command to not murder. My first thought on reflection is this is a ridiculously low bar. But I started drafting this sermon on Lincoln’s Birthday and I thought about the Civil War and the hundreds of thousands of people who died, and killed, defending our freedom and fighting for freedom for all people. Certainly we don’t consider that murder, but lives were taken. What does it mean to choose life on the field of battle? Can the choice of and for life at times require taking life? My friend Pastor Chris is an army chaplain and I give thanks every day that he helps the young men and women of our military sit with the results of those questions every day, a choice often made for them by leaders far away from the actual places and people where those choices play out. Or I was walking through St. Philip the other day, and I noticed they have a suicide prevention bench in the hallway. The idea being if someone is feeling alone or depressed they can sit on that bench as a signal that they need a friend. Are you choosing life if you walk past someone seated on that bench? Yes, you are not murdering anyone, but certainly someone is being left in need.
“You shall not commit adultery” is a seemingly low bar, but what about the harmless banter, locker-room talk, and the effects of our Instagram happy society on the self-perception of both men and women? Are Snapchat filters choosing life? Which side of the Super Bowl halftime show debate was choosing life, the side that said it was a disgusting objectification of women’s bodies or the side that saw a powerful display of strength, and a call for justice and inclusion? How should we consider divorce now that marriage is a decision between two consenting adults rather than, as it was in the time of Moses, a land contract between two men often involving the sale of a woman in exchange for camels. How is choosing life different now than it was then, when a divorced woman was a pariah to society? What does it mean to not just swear falsely, but to not swear at all? Our Pledge of Allegiance, only since 1954 I might add, has included the phrase “one nation, under God,” before “with liberty and justice for all.” Does God belong in our national allegiance? To be clear, I’m not arguing yes or no, I’m merely raising the question of what God are we pledging to, and who decides the ideas and beliefs that allegiance to that God contains.
These are hard questions, dear people of God. Hard questions with no easy answers. And do I wish some days that ours was a God who just spelled out for us how we have to live in with a very clearly delineated list of rules and requirements, yeah, some days I do. But I also know that the world is not that simple, there is too much complexity for any rule to work perfectly one hundred percent of the time. And the good news for us in this text is we have a God who knows that. We have a God who gets that no law can just work perfectly every time, in every case. And so instead of a list of hard and fast dos and don’ts, ours is a God who gives us the tools to make good choices. And a God who knows that the choices we make, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, will not always be good choices. And when we fail at this. When we get caught up in our own doubts, fears, egos, or idealism, and we do not make good choices, ours is a God who meets us again and again at the font and at the table, with this unending promise of forgiveness, grace, and love. So choose life, dear people of God. Choose life, because you have already been chosen. God has chosen you. Amen.
Monday, February 10, 2020
Shine On - A Sermon on Matthew 5.13-20 and Isaiah 58.1-12
We’re in a section of readings for the next couple weeks that has us working our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. So before we get to today’s reading, let’s really quick recap what we heard Jesus say last week.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Justice, Kindness, and Humility - A Sermon on Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12
I think I’ve shared before that part of my sermon prep process includes listening to a lectionary podcast that comes out of Luther seminary. This week when they got to the Micah reading, theologian Rolf Jacobson quipped, “Micah, that’s a nice verse.”
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
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