Abundance: A Sermon on John 10:11-18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Palm/Passion Sunday and Why We Read the Passion Story: Mark 14:1-15:47

Well, here we are friends. It’s Palm Sunday. The first day of this most holy week of our church year. The first day of the week in which we celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord. We met this morning in the social hall. We heard a reading from Mark’s Gospel about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, how the crowds gathered and waved palm branches and shouted Hosanna to the Son of David as Jesus paraded into Jerusalem. And then we too waved palm branches and shouted Hosanna, and paraded into our sanctuary with trumpets and fanfare and singing. Then we heard the beautiful Christ hymn from Philippians, all about how Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and humbled himself to the point of death, for which God highly exalted him. Now we are preparing to read the passion story, now we are preparing to see what emptying himself looks like.

It is a strange flow of events, this Palm/Passion Sunday, and you might be asking yourself why? Why do we not stay at Palm Sunday, with all its palm waving and shouting and triumph? Why read the passion now, why not save it until Good Friday? Today feels a bit like theological whiplash, as we who play the role of the crowd in this unfolding Gospel drama suddenly go from adoring fans to hostile mob, all in about twenty minutes. Why not pick a theme and ride it out?

But the important thing to remember about Palm Sunday is the crowd who shouted Hosanna had no idea what they were doing. The crowd that shouted Hosanna was not some superior class of people who hid themselves away for the rest of the week when the bad, scary, mean people came in and shouted crucify him. It’s all the same people.

We read the passion on Palm Sunday to remind ourselves that faith isn’t orderly. That we cannot compartmentalize humanity into saints and sinners, we cannot distance ourselves from the shouts of praise or the jeers of rage. We are the throngs who praised and waved palm fronds, the crowd who called for crucifixion. We are the women at the grave, Joseph who served, the Centurion who marveled. These people, this story, is us people, is our story.

Most importantly, we read the passion on Palm Sunday to remind us that this story had to happen in this way. That Jesus came for a story that was to unfold just like this. That Jesus came to save people who shouted and people who jeered, because they, because we, are all the same people. We are the people so loved by Christ that Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, exalted by God so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess. So as we read the passion story, as we enter into this story, into our story, I invite you read along, play along, shout and listen and engage, but watch Jesus. Watch Jesus who fed and blessed and loved and forgave, who carried a cross and prayed and died. Let us enter into this story by singing our Gospel acclamation.

This is the passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ, according to John. Glory to you, O Lord.

Mark 14:1-15:47

So now we wait. With Joseph and Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus we wait outside the tomb with a stone rolled in front. Maybe still as confused as before as to how we got from there to here, how we got from Hosanna to the grave. But even in our confusion, we wait anyway. We wait because promises remain even when all hope is lost. We wait in the chance that God’s word is stronger than death, stronger even than hope. We wait, because this is our story.

Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber ended her invitation into Holy Week with these words: “Two thousand years ago in the Middle East, there had to have been crowds who shouted praise and friends who betrayed and followers who denied and women who wept and soldiers who mocked and thieves who believed. It would have happened like this even if the Jesus event were happening now instead of then. Even if we knew everything in advance – were we the ones on the street we too would shout Hosanna and a few days later shout crucify him. And that’s the good news when it comes down to it. Because these people of the Holy Week story are we people. And we people are the likes of which God came to save. God did not become human and dwell among us as Jesus to save only an improved, doesn’t make the wrong choices kind of people. There is no improved version of humanity that could have done any differently. So go ahead. Don’t wait until you think your motivations are correct. Just wave branches. Shout praise for the wrong reason. Eat a meal. Shout Crucify him. Walk away when the cock crows.” And I will add, walk away but then come, come to the font, come to the table, come and experience that Christ is here, come and experience that this story is true, come and receive in outstretched hands the Christ who came for you. Come meet the Christ who meets us in bread and wine, in water and word, come know that you are known and loved by God. This week is a celebration of a God whose love knows no bounds, a God who came in human likeness and humbled himself, became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, so that we might be exalted, so that we might be saved, so that we might know love. Bolz-Weber finished her reflection, “Because we, as we are and not as some improved version of ourselves…we are who God came to save. And nothing can stop what’s going to happen.” We can't stop God from loving us. Amen.


Quote by Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber from her sermon "Palm Sunday Sermon about Morbid Reflections, Home Perms, and Fickle Crowds," http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/03/palm-sunday-sermon-about-morbid-reflection-home-perms-and-fickle-crowds/

We Wish to See Jesus: A Sermon on John 12:20-33

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” the Greeks told Philip as they gathered for the festival in Jerusalem. And Philip told Andrew, and Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus that some Greeks, some outsiders, some beyond the scope of Jesus teachings, wished to see him, wished to meet him, wished to know of who he was, of what he meant, of all that he could do. The movement had spread outside of the Temple, outside of the synagogues, outside of the contained social circles of the Jews. This was great news for the movement, great news for the goal of liberation for the Jews from the Romans, great news for those who followed Jesus. It was with excitement and hope that Philip and Andrew rushed to Jesus to bring news of these Greeks who wished to see him. And Jesus responded, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

The hour has come. The arrival of this “hour” has been an on-going theme in John’s Gospel. For so long Jesus had been saying that the hour was coming. That soon, but not yet, the Son of Man would be glorified. He said it to a Samaritan woman getting water from a well, to a man born lame who suddenly could walk, as he taught to a crowd in the treasury. Nothing could happen, nothing would happen, because Jesus’ hour had not yet come.

But now, it’s time, it’s finally time. We’ve been waiting six weeks now, since we stood with Peter, James, and John on the mountain and saw Jesus transfigured, we’ve been waiting for this moment, and now it’s come. It’s time for the Son of Man to be glorified. It’s time to see what glory looks like.

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” Jesus said, and then he went on, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

And a few sentences later: “Father, glorify your name” Jesus said, and a voice from heaven responded, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” Jesus went on, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

The hour has come and so Jesus starts talking about death, Jesus starts talking about judgment, Jesus starts talking about driving out the rulers of this world, Jesus starts talking about the cross. This maybe isn’t the turn of events the Greeks or Philip and Andrew were expecting. But we who have been watching this unfold from a distance throughout this Lenten season are maybe not surprised by it, because remember several weeks ago when Jesus first spoke about his death and Peter tried to rebuke him, Jesus’ dreams, Jesus’ plans, Jesus vision for the world, is always about more than we can imagine.

We know this to be true about Jesus, but it’s hard to make sense of it when it comes to the cross. Because the cross is so violent, so brutal, so gory. How can such an instrument of pain possibly be the place of God’s glory?

On Good Friday we will hear the passion story according to John. And when you’re hearing the story, I invite you to pay attention to the movement of the story. The passion according to John unfolds like a drama, with characters coming in and out and scenes shifting from one to another. But throughout all this movement and chaos, Jesus stays unwaveringly in the center. From the moment Jesus leads his disciples across the Kidron Valley and into the garden until he is laid in the tomb, Jesus is the central figure, constant, solid, in control, never turning from the goal. The passion unfolds according to the plan, events happen, words are spoken, “according to fulfill what was written,” or “what Jesus had said.” Every movement, every action part of a carefully directed, elegantly choreographed event, the script of which Jesus had been writing since the beginning of time. There is no hesitation in John’s gospel, no moment of doubt. Pilate comes and goes, Peter comes and goes, the crowds gather and disperse, all the while Jesus marches on to the cross, to glory. The crucifixion scene in John’s Gospel isn’t gory and it isn’t dark. It is powerful. It sheer, unadulterated power that blinds the eyes with a love that cannot be understood. The cross isn’t weakness; it isn’t violence. It isn’t about Jesus sacrificing himself, or Jesus taking pain. It is about Jesus marching straight into sacrifice, into pain, and destroying it, so that the world’s dark control crumbled under the overwhelming grace and love and mercy of Jesus.

The closest analogy I can make to this scene, and it’s not a perfect analogy, but it gets close, is the image of the marchers of the Civil Rights movement standing on the far edge of the Edmond Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama preparing to march across into the waiting arms, and clubs, of the Alabama State Troopers. They marched across the bridge because they knew that the only way to defeat the evils of racism and oppression was to march right into the face of it. Because only by uncovering it, only by bringing it into the light, only by showing the world in no uncertain terms the violence of being a black person in 1960s America could that evil be defeated. They walked into the darkness because darkness can only be defeated by displacing it with light, hatred can only be done in by injecting into its heart a love so powerful that hatred has no room, death can only be undone by replacing it with life.

That is the glory of the cross. That Jesus with his own incarnate body replaced darkness with light, hatred with love, death with life. Like a stone dropped in a pail displaces water out over the sides, Jesus on the cross displaced glory, love, light into the world so that hatred, darkness, death would have no place to go. On the cross Jesus stepped into the very belly of the beast and said even here you shall not have hold, even here you shall not triumph, even here love wins.

And because love won, hope won, life won on the cross, then we know that hope wins, that love wins, that life wins everywhere. On the cross Jesus went not to his own death, but to all of the places where we face death, and not just physical death, but death of our hopes, death of our dreams, death caused by prejudice and judgment and inequality and fear. The cross is Jesus going to the places we fear most and displacing that fear. The cross is Jesus meeting us in the places that scare us the most and saying this has no power over you. The power of the cross is what gives us power to stand up in the face of injustice and hatred and death because we know that because Jesus went to the cross there is nowhere that love cannot triumph.

After we read the passion story on Good Friday we will sing “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” And I hope you, I hope I, I hope we will tremble. Tremble not from pain, not from shame, but tremble from the sheer overwhelming power of love. Tremble because we know that we are loved. Tremble in the presence of a love so powerful that it blazes out from the most unlikely of places, a cross, a bridge, our own broken hearts, and overwhelms us with its glory.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” the Greeks said. And Jesus responded, “look to the cross.” Because on the cross we see glory, on the cross we see power, on the cross we see a God who loves us so much that the love shines through the brokenness of the cross mending our broken parts and knitting us together into the glorious children of God. Look to the cross because there is God. Amen.

Snakes: A Sermon on Numbers 21:4-9 amd John 3:14-21

There are a lot of snakes in the readings today. A lot of snakes. I, truth be told, am not so much a fan of snakes. I don’t like the way they move, I think it’s creepy. I do also confess a bit of a bias here for animals with between two and four legs, so sorry snakes, spiders, and those weird silvery, feathery things with lots of legs that fall from the ceiling sometimes, ug. I get that snakes, spiders, those gross millipeedy things, are all God’s beautiful creatures, all part of the creation which God called good. But they can be God’s good creation outside, so far as I’m concerned.

Snakes also play a pretty important symbolic role in scripture. And as we dive into our readings for this morning, it’s important to keep those parts of the story in mind. Jesus did not compare himself to the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness just to give us all the heeby-geebies, there’s more going on here.

Snakes represent deception, remember it was a serpent who tricked Adam and Eve in the garden. They represent power, Aaron threw down his rod in front of Pharaoh and it became a snake. They represent the unknown. Proverbs thirty, eighteen and nineteen, “[Things] I do not understand…the [movement] of a snake on a rock.” When snakes show up in scriptures, they evoke for us all this sense of fear, of mystery, of things we cannot understand, cannot make sense of, cannot control.

This reading from Numbers is one of the so-called “murmuring stories.” It’s one of the many times in the Exodus when the Israelites are wandering along, complaining about how much better life was when they were all in slavery in Egypt. And then suddenly, in the midst of the camp, are all these poisonous snakes. There are all sorts of interesting, and difficult, questions about why God would send poisonous snakes amongst God’s people, but I don’t think the origin of the snakes is really the point here. I don’t think any of us need any help identifying the snakes in our lives. Remember what snakes stand for in the Bible. They stand for fear, for lack of control, for lack of power, for all the things we cannot know, all the things cannot understand. We don’t need the writer of Numbers to spell out what these metaphorical snakes are, we all know, we understand, we are familiar with the pain they cause, the uneasy way they creep through our souls, filling us with fear, with dread, with uncertainty. We know the way their powerful toxins take control of us.

So when the snakes come calling, God does a funny thing. God had Moses build a giant snake, set it on a pole, and raise it up over the Israelites. So that any Israelite who was bitten by a snake could look up at the snake on a pole, and live. Because when I am surrounded by snakes, the most comforting thing I can think of is to be instructed to look at a giant “thing I am the most terrified of.” Awesome. Helpful.

But it was helpful. More than helpful, it was healing, it was wholeness, it was life-giving. When the Israelites looked at the snake on the pole they found comfort, when the Israelites looked at the snake on the pole they found relief, when the Israelites looked at the snake on the pole, even though they were still in the midst of snakes, even though the camp was still crawling in, infested with, snakes, when the Israelites looked at the snake on the pole, they lived.

The Israelites lived, though the snakes remained, because the snake on the pole was never the point in the first place. The point was God. It was reminding the Israelites that no matter how bad things got, how afraid they were, how much they lacked, how long they journeyed, the snake on a pole reminded them that they were God’s people. That God was with them, that God was for them. And that from the most unlikely, uncertain, death-filled places, God would bring life. The snake on a pole promised the Israelites that things that look like death are not death with God, they are God creating life again, in a new way, because life is how God works, life is who God is. So powerful, so innovative, so redemptive is our God that God brings life through a snake from amidst a sea of snakes. It makes as little sense as the movement of a snake, but somehow, like the movement of a snake, it is true. We can know it, we can trust it in our gut even when we cannot understand it, when we cannot feel it. That’s what God bringing healing through a snake on a pole promises.

So then in our Gospel reading for today, Jesus was talking to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and he had come to Jesus for answers to questions he could not understand. But he came by night, under the cover of darkness, because he was afraid to be seen with Jesus. Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, because he was afraid of his own snakes, afraid of the snakes of judgment, the snakes of persecution, the snakes that would surely follow a Pharisee involving himself with Jesus.

And in the midst of Nicodemus’s fear, Jesus reminds Nicodemus of the story of the bronze serpent in the wilderness. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Then Jesus takes it a step further, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Belief in the Bible is about trust. Moses didn’t challenge the Israelites to know anything about God, Moses wanted them to trust and to follow, and really to just keep moving forward even in the wilderness. So belief then is not about understanding with our minds, or feeling with our hearts, belief is about knowing in our guts, about knowing even when we cannot understand. What Moses did for the Israelites when he set the snake on the pole was to give them something to follow, something to remind them to trust, something to point them to the One who is trustworthy, instead of trying to trust themselves. And just like Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so too will Jesus go to the cross. So that in the midst of death, in the midst of fear, in the midst of lack of control and things we cannot understand, we will see Jesus, facing down death, fear, lack of control, leading from a place of death to life. The cross is as inexplicable as snakes in the wilderness, and it is more powerful, more life-giving than we can understand with our minds, or feel with our hearts. Instead we trust, we feel in our guts that God is here, that God meets us here, even here, and that God brings life, God always brings life, for that is who God is. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

And like the Israelites looked to the bronze serpent on a pole in the wilderness, that is why we come here. We come here because we know, in our guts, that we find Jesus here. That Jesus meets us here, in the waters of baptism and in the bread and wine of communion. We come here because we know that no matter what we understand or what we feel, Jesus is here. Jesus meets us here. Like the serpent on the pole turned the Israelites attention to God, so that they could know that God was with them in the wilderness, so too these sacraments of bread and wine, water and word turn our attention to God so that in the midst of whatever wilderness we face, whatever snakes cross our paths, we can look to the font, look to the table and know, beyond all knowing, that God is here, that God is with us, and that God always brings life. So come, and look, and live. Amen.

Cleared Away: A Sermon on John 2:13-22

There’s an internet meme that always makes its way around the Facebook circuit anytime this reading comes up in the lectionary. The meme is based on a popular movement among Christian circles in the nineties about asking the question “What Would Jesus Do?” Maybe you remember, it was big for a while to wear those elastic band bracelets with W.W.J.D. emblazoned on them. The idea was that we were to approach any question, any issue, we might encounter with the question “What would Jesus do” in this situation? How would Jesus respond to this conflict with a family member, or this peer pressure temptation, or this moral dilemma, and by thinking about how Jesus would respond, and responding accordingly, we could be guaranteed to act correctly.

Well, this internet meme making the rounds right now is an illustration of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus cleansing the temple. It features a very angry-looking Jesus-figure in the center, dressed in red and brandishing a whip, while all around him, are strewn upturned tables and frightened, tousled people. Framing the image in bold letters, are the words, “If anyone ever asks you, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ Remind him that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibility.”

Maybe the better question of this Gospel reading today is not, “What Would Jesus Do? But “What is Jesus Doing?” What is Jesus doing? This is the Temple after all, the most sacred place in the Jewish faith. The center of the known world, the place where God dwelled. And here’s a little more background for you, these people Jesus is driving out, the people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers, they’re not just there all willy-nilly. This isn’t the same as setting up a pet store in the narthex. Part of the Temple culture, the accepted religious practice at the time, was animal sacrifice. People came to the Temple specifically to offer an animal to the house of God. A trip to the Temple was for people who lived in the outlying regions, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, they would travel miles, days, weeks, in order to worship the True God in the Temple. And so, to aid in their worship, to make the journey easier for them, a robust trade of sacrificial animals developed within the temple complex, in order to assist pilgrims in being able to enter fully into worship. Instead of having to travel long distances with a cow, a pilgrim could simply purchase a cow, or a sheep, or a dove, upon arrival. Much in the same way that if you were flying somewhere, you might pick up a bag of chips once you reached your destination rather than trying to keep them from being crushed in your carry-on luggage. And with all this commerce going on, money-changers were there to help people from foreign countries to trade in the local currency. This booming Temple industry had developed to help people worship God. So, one might ask, what was Jesus’ problem with this?

The disciples made sense of what happened here with one word: Zeal. The Gospel reads, “Then the disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” Zeal. Passion. Ardor. Fervor. Devotion. Even so far as intensity or fanaticism, zeal is the single-minded drive toward a goal so focused that nothing can stand in its way. So focused is Jesus’ devotion to the Temple, to God, that whatever stands in the way, good or bad, must be forced away to allow for God’s grace to enter through.

At Trinity this Lent we’ve been talking about Old Testament stories, and what these stories have to teach us about the nature of God and the nature of humanity. As we’re talking this morning about zeal, our Old Testament reading from Exodus about God giving the Ten Commandments, and what’s happened with those commandments over time, really gets to the heart of why Jesus cleansed the Temple.

Just a bit of a refresher on how we got to Exodus chapter twenty. The Israelites were in slavery under the Pharaoh in Egypt, then God sent Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery. But Pharaoh wasn’t keen on letting his entire workforce go free, so God had Moses bring plagues down, and God split the Red Sea, so the Israelites could walk on dry land, and then brought the sea back down upon the Egyptian army, and finally the Israelites were a free people, in the middle of the Sinai wilderness. The other problem, of course, is that the Israelites had been slaves in Egypt for so long that they really didn’t understood what it meant any more to be a community, to be the people of God. So part of what God was doing in that forty years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness was making them into one people again. God was uniting them as God’s people, teaching them what it meant to live together. The Ten Commandments were part of this uniting. God gave the Ten Commandments to the people of God so that they would know how to live well together with God and with each other. I had a professor in seminary who described the Ten Commandments as a playpen. We put children in playpens when they are learning to crawl so that they will be in a safe space. The Ten Commandments were about building community, about creating a place where the people of God could be united with each other, connected to one another.

But, because the Israelites were people, over time they turned the Ten Commandments from a playpen to a fence. They put more and more structures and rules in place in order to decide who got to be in the playpen. And the Ten Commandments changed from guidelines to create community to rules to divide people from community. Humanity broke the good covenant which God made with God’s people not by breaking the Ten Commandments, but by enforcing it so strictly so as to take the life out of it, leaving us not with a gift for living, but a weapon for dividing.

If only this was a thing that happened back then, but not anymore. But the truth is, we still do this. We still put up laws, rules, restrictions, on ourselves and on others, about what makes us worthy of God’s love, what makes us worthy to be in the community of the people of God. These restrictions may come from the best intentions, but they divide us. And I think, during this season of Lent and as people of the ELCA, we are even harder on ourselves. We’re quick to welcome others to the fold, quick to extend grace to our neighbors, but do we extend that same grace to ourselves, do we allow ourselves to believe that this good news that we are preaching is for us?

Here’s the good news for us in Jesus cleansing the temple this morning, Jesus cleanses the temple of all that holds us captive as well. All the ways that we fell short, the prayers we did not say, the Lenten disciples we did not keep, the sin and pain and brokenness that keeps us separate from God, with a whip and a shout, Jesus drives all of those things away as well. Because nothing will keep Jesus from us. Not the powers of evil, the death made clear on the cross, not our own failures in faith, or even our unfocused piety that draws our attention to us rather than God. Whatever it is that stands in our way, Jesus drives it away, because such is Jesus love for us, that Jesus will not let anything get in the way of relationship with us.

This morning, like every Sunday morning, we come to the Table to experience this grace. At this table there are no barriers, there are no boundaries, there is no code you have to meet or yardstick you have to measure up to, because Jesus has cleared them away. Jesus has set a feast for us, and all are welcome, because nothing, nothing, will keep Jesus from us. Amen.