Category Archives: Sermons

Big Questions, Current Events, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, July 20

So what’s your favorite summer fruit?…

I don’t know what was in the basket in Amos’ vision, but for me one hallmark of summer fruit is that you’ve got to use it fast. We got some peaches this week from the folks who drive a truck up from the south, and Phil and I had to chat about how many to buy, knowing that even when they’re perfectly ripe, we can only eat them so fast. And if those peaches, or plums, or berries, sit around a little too long… you get bruises and fruit flies and puddles of goop. Summer fruit is a glorious thing while it lasts. But within days, or hours, it becomes a disgusting mess, no good to anybody. Eat it, freeze it, can it, but do something fast. 

Our text from the prophet Amos doesn’t really explain the meaning of the fruit. Old Testament scholar Tyler Mayfield says it’s based in part on wordplay: the word for “summer fruit” sounds very similar to the word for “end.” Just as ripe fruit can spoil quickly, the kingdom of Israel is approaching an end. 

Just one chapter earlier, Amos had another vision. God showed him a plumb line. Raise your hand if you know what a plumb line is?… Sometimes called a plumb bob. It’s a very ancient tool that’s still used by builders and surveyors today. You have a weight, usually lead, on the end of a string. And you let it hang. And once it stops swinging, gravity means you’ll have a straight up and down line that you can use to make sure your wall isn’t leaning. 

God tells Amos, I am setting a plumb line in the middle of my people Israel. As with the fruit, the image in the vision isn’t really explained, but we understand that something is askew, crooked, bent. The foundations are bad, or the build is shoddy. The structure cannot stand. Summer fruit and plumb line both point to the same deep truth about God’s people in Amos’ time: Something was deeply wrong –  rotten, askew – with terrible consequences in the near future. 

The book of Amos is part of the Old Testament; it’s one of the prophetic books, books that record the words of the prophets who spoke to God’s people on God’s behalf. The most famous passage of Amos comes from chapter 5: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!” That famous line follows God’s frustration at a people who make offerings and hold festivals but don’t honor God by how they order society: “I reject your festivals; I won’t even look at your offerings of fatted animals; take away the noise of your songs!” It’s part of God’s call to stop making a show of faithfulness while wallowing in injustice. Amos, speaking for God, says, “Doom to you who turn justice into poison, and throw righteousness to the ground!… Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!…”

Amos was a shepherd and arborist who felt called by God to leave his home in the southern region of Tekoa to go speak God’s words to the leaders and people of Israel in the mid-eighth century before the time of Jesus. David’s united kingdom had split some time earlier, into a southern kingdom, Judah or Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, and the northern kingdom, called Israel. Israel was enjoying a brief period of peace and prosperity… and apparently the wealthy and powerful used this moment to accumulate wealth and cheat the poor. We hear God’s accusation through Amos in today’s reading: “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land!” God accuses the wealthy of being impatient with keeping holy times of rest, eager to get back to cheating the poor with false weights and poor-quality products, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” 

Amos declares, “The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it?…”

Prophets are called by God to speak God’s word in times when things are rotten or askew. God appoints a prophet to call the leaders and the people to repent, restore, repair, renew, to avoid the consequences of their current actions and their current path. Being a prophet is not an easy vocation! Right after the plumb line passage, someone tattles on Amos to the king, telling him that Amos is being a real downer and possibly committing treason. Amos is advised to run away and go prophesy in his home territory, for his words are not welcome in Israel. Other Biblical prophets are persecuted, exiled, or even killed. 

There are also beautifully comforting passages in the prophetic books, that offer assurance of God’s continued care and promise a future beyond suffering. The peaceable kingdom from Isaiah – the lion snuggling with the lamb – is one famous and glorious example. There’s a line we learn in seminary that’s often quoted in sermons: Prophets are called to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. But, you know, it’s not uncommon for the prophets of the Bible to afflict the afflicted, too – by saying, You had this coming. You brought this on yourselves. And that brings me to something I want to explore here: the concept of judgment. 

God’s judgment, divine judgment, is an important theme in Amos and elsewhere in the prophetic literature. And it’s an idea that I suspect a lot of us are pretty ambivalent about. On the one hand, I bet some of you prayed today’s Psalm pretty hard. The idea that God is watching, that cruel and evil deeds are noted, and that eventually, there will be consequences for leaders whom we see as evil and dangerous, has an understandable appeal. But we’ve also heard God’s judgment thrown around as a weapon and a threat against people we love. 

What are we talking about when we talk about God’s judgment? 

I think there are several axes that this concept moves along; we need at least a three-dimensional model! First, there’s individual versus collective judgment. Does judgment, and the suffering that may follow, result more from our individual choices and sins, or from the way we organize our common life, the injustice and suffering that we tolerate together? And does it land on people individually, or on the community or nation as a whole? 

Second, there’s the question of judgment in this world or the next. Do our bad actions (or failures to act), whether individual or collective, bring down punishment or consequences in the short to medium term? Or does the reckoning happen after we die? There are many jokes and cartoons that hinge on someone coming face to face with St. Peter at the pearly gates to Heaven, and discovering exactly what is written about them in the Book of Life. But that’s not a particularly Biblical idea. 

Third, and importantly, when divine judgment is not in our favor, there’s the question of whether the suffering that follows is a punishment, per se – something extra sent by God, the proverbial lighting bolt – or simply the consequences of our bad actions. The summer fruit rots; the crooked wall falls. 

We hear a lot from evangelical Christianity about individual punishment in the afterlife, in the form of damnation to hell. That’s actually a long way from the dominant concept of judgment in the prophetic literature. The prophets are much more concerned with collective judgment, though they’re also very aware of the role of leaders in creating or tolerating an unjust or rotten society. 

The prophets are not at all concerned with an afterlife; that simply wasn’t a very important idea in pre-Christian Judaism. They anticipate consequences in this world – though sometimes those consequences may take a generation or two to mature. 

The second book of Kings tells us about King Hezekiah: the prophet Isaiah tells him that his kingdom will be conquered, and his people, even his own children, taken into exile – but none of this will happen during Hezekiah’s lifetime. Hezekiah literally tells himself, There will be peace and security during MY life… so who cares? I think of that so often with respect to the climate crisis. 

So the prophetic concept of divine judgment is collective or corporate, and happens in this world, this life, though the timing can be mysterious. As for punishment versus consequences: that’s interesting. In the Old Testament, texts about judgment are often retrospective, trying to make sense of why bad things happened. How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? How did we bring this down on ourselves? Why is God angry with us? 

Often, the Old Testament names terrible events as God’s punishment for the people’s wrongdoing. As something God has brought upon them to discipline and correct them, to get them to recommit to living the way God has called God’s people to live. 

But often, it’s easy to see that suffering as a natural consequence rather than a punishment per se. For example, there’s the situation Amos rails against: leaders who are much more interested in enriching themselves than in building and tending a nation that manifests God’s purposes – justice, mercy, nobody hungry or desperate or excluded, dignity and safety for everybody. When leaders abandon that work, the foundations weaken; the nation becomes rotten, askew, vulnerable to disaster, attack, collapse. Which happened to the kingdom of Israel. 

What’s our relationship with the biblical concept of judgment? Thinking about that question this week, it’s really hard not to think about the floods in Texas, and the lives lost there. 

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a couple of notably bad takes emerged. Some people were quick to say that if people in Texas don’t like climate disasters, they should have voted differently in the last presidential election. Those voices weren’t invoking divine judgment, but it’s buried somewhere in that “eff around and find out” perspective. On the other hand, there were the usual voices saying that it’s inappropriate to talk about what went wrong, insisting that we limit ourselves to thoughts and prayers. The Biblical prophets also encountered leaders reluctant to heed warnings or change their ways. 

No person of good conscience thinks the children who died at Camp Mystic, or anyone else who lost their lives that terrible night, deserved what happened to them.The idea of divine judgment as individual punishment is clearly not helpful here. Not just because it’s awful, but also because it shrugs off any shared accountability. If I’m still standing, I must be OK! 

In many ways this is exactly the kind of event that we see Biblical prophets interpreting through the lens of divine judgment. It’s collective rather than individual, affecting a whole region – and implicating a whole state, a whole nation. It’s this-worldly, not an afterlife situation. And it’s pretty easy to see it as the consequence of intensifying weather due to human-caused climate change, and the choices and actions of leaders from the federal down to the very local level. Many layers of failure helped turn this natural disaster into a human tragedy. To point to just one: The guy at the regional National Weather Service office whose job was to coordinate local warnings in that area took Elon Musk’s early retirement offer a few months earlier. The NWS did their job that night; the right alerts went out. But the guy with couple decades’ experience working with local officials, the guy who knew how to tell folks, This could be a biggie, send out the cavalry, was gone, because of DOGE’s purge of federal employees. 

Would his presence have made a difference? There’s no way to know. That’s just one of so many ways that night could have gone differently. It didn’t have to be this way. 

This isn’t just an intellectual exercise in whether we can map a Biblical concept onto current events. Is divine judgment a useful framework for us? Does it help us make sense of calamity? 

I think it might. First, because there were (and are) prophets. We don’t serve a God who just spots a sinner and squashes them like a bug, end of story. In the Bible, when things were going badly wrong among God’s people, when things were dangerously rotten or askew, God sent prophets to try to tell leaders and people that the path they’re on leads towards struggle and suffering. Amos says, “Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!” Chapter four of Amos rehearses all the bad things that have already happened to God’s people, and their refusal to learn from them, with God’s frustrated, anguished refrain: “Seek me and live!” The Bible is full of texts like that, God speaking through prophets and saints to call God’s people back to better paths. 

The prophetic books are also full of texts describing in detail exactly where leaders and people are going wrong. Buying the needy for a pair of sandals is the tip of the iceberg. Judgment goes hand in hand with a reckoning: what happened, and why? Peeling back layers of responsibility, things done and left undone. Afflicting the afflicted by naming names and calling for accountability, with the goal of understanding and amending. Whether the calamity has already happened or can yet be prevented: there are things to learn, here, and things to repair. There’s a better path. Always. 

God sent the prophets; God sends voices in our time – investigative reporters, scientists, whistleblowers, community leaders, poets, occasionally even pastors. God gives us those people, those voices, so that we can heed, and learn, and change, and live. Because God wants better for us, and from us. 

And that points towards something else really important about divine judgment: it’s nested within the much bigger truth of divine love, divine mercy. The author of the letter to the Colossians talks about Jesus as this embodiment of God’s desire to reconcile and make peace with all people and all things in heaven and earth. 

Scripture and the experience of the holy ones through the ages bear testimony to that deep desire of God’s heart – to call us out of the harmful patterns we create for ourselves and each other, to reconcile and restore, to heal, welcome and celebrate. As we hear other prophetic texts in the coming weeks, I invite you to notice the recurring theme of God’s yearning, frustrated love. 

Judgment isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s more like someone who really knows you and really loves you, sitting you down at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and saying, Hey. I’m worried about you. Some of the stuff you’re doing is not good for you. I’m afraid you’re not safe. Except the you is all of us, and the stuff is big and complex and systemic and hard to change. We live in difficult, complicated times – as did our faith ancestors. 

Judgment is a hard, heavy word. It sounds like a door slamming; but in the Biblical context, it’s more like a door opening. The Biblical concept of judgment insists on interpretability: there’s something to understand here, something to learn, even in what may seem senseless and overwhelming. It insists on agency and possibility: if we can understand and learn, we can change course towards a better future. And it insists on relationship: even in calamity and disaster, we are held and loved by a Mercy larger than the universe. 

scripture, Sermons

Guest sermon, June 22

Our guest preacher on Zoom, Gail Sosinsky Wickman, shared a wonderful reflection on the prophet Elijah and the ambiguity of this story from 1 Kings. 

Good morning. Every time I reread the scriptures for today, Elijah’s story left me uneasy. What I’d like to do this morning is share the struggles I have had with this passage.

This week’s bit of 1 Kings starts with Jezebel making the most convoluted, difficult-to-read death threat I have ever come across in literature. Our passage ends with verse 15a, which immediately made me wonder what is in 15b, so I am going to bring in the previous action and follow through with the ending because extending the story helped me come to grips with it. 

In the action before Jezebel’s death threat, Elijah is having his big showdown with the prophets of Baal. This is a great story. We have a land suffering from drought due to the people’s wicked ways, and Elijah proposes a contest. He calls for the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Ashera to meet him at Mount Carmel. I cannot tell you what happened to the 400 prophets of Ashera. The passage never mentions them again. Anyway, the crowds gather, and Elijah proposes that two bulls be brought for sacrifice. Each side will build an altar, prepare the wood and lay the pieces of the bull on it, but put no fire to the wood. Instead they will pray, and whichever god sends fire is the one to follow. 

The 450 prophets of Baal went first. They built the altar, laid out the offering and prayed. All Morning Long. Nothing happened. 

About noon, Elijah starts with the trash talk – “Maybe he’s wandered off. Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s using the toilet.” 

So the 450 prophets step up their game and start cutting themselves and bleeding all over and praying louder. Still nothing.

Then it is Elijah’s turn. First, he builds an altar of 12 stones, one for each tribe of Israel. Then he lays the wood out, then he butchers the bull and lays it out, then he digs a big trench around the altar, enough for two measures of grain, which one source says means that it took two measures to plant the area. From the context, it was a big trench. Then he adds insult to injury and has 4 jars of water poured over the sacrifice. And a second time. And a third. The passage doesn’t say it, but that’s 12 jars of water, like the 12 tribes of Israel. Anyway, the sacrifice is so waterlogged that the surrounding trench is full. Elijah says a simple prayer, and BOOM!

“Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”

The people fell on their faces and acknowledged God’s power. Don’t you just want to end the story there? Dramatic, observable proof of God’s power and the people being transformed? But it doesn’t end there.

40 Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.” Then they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon and killed them there.

This bothers me. The 450 prophets of Baal had just seen dramatic, observable proof of God’s power. Didn’t any of them want to convert? One of the most cherished parts of my faith is the belief in redemption. It’s not offered here. Instead, depending on the version, the prophets are killed, slain, executed, put to death, or slaughtered. 450 worn out, bloodied, disheartened contest losers. 

What comes next makes me think that Elijah was bothered by it, too. He sends King Ahab off to get something to eat, climbs to the top of Mount Carmel and “bowed himself down upon the earth and put his face between his knees.” He’s curled into the fetal position. He is so utterly worn out that he sends his servant to watch for the signs of rain. It’s like he can’t even muster the strength to go look for the fulfillment of God’s promised rain.

So Israel finally gets some rain and Ahab hurries home to tell Jezebel what happened. Now Elijah might have thought that all would be well. He had been there for that dramatic, observable proof of God’s power and the people had fallen on their faces. Why wouldn’t it convince Jezebel?

This part reminded me of the past few years when it seems like you can have 47 peer reviewed studies and 100% reproducible experimental results supporting that something is true, and you are still going to have people say, “Nah. Not gonna believe it.” Unfortunately for Elijah, this was Jezebel. She uttered her convoluted death threat and like any sensible human being, he runs for his life.

Elijah heads into the wilderness and sits under a broom tree. Not exactly an oasis of delight, but shade. And he prays. “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” I read commentaries that said no one is really sure what Elijah means when he compares himself to his ancestors. I read a commentary that says he is comparing himself to previous prophets, particularly Moses. What it brought to my mind, and this is just me, is the scorched earth policy in so much of Joshua – kill ‘em all, even the animals. Even if Elijah did not personally wield the sword, 450 deaths is a lot to feel responsible for.

Eventually, he falls asleep, only to be awoken by an angel who tells him to eat and drink. There is no surprise from Elijah, but he did just see God’s fire consume beef, wood, stone, dust and water. He sleeps again, and this time when he wakes the angel tells him to eat up because he won’t be eating for the next 40 days. Again, there is no emotion, no reaction, no words from Elijah until he gets to Mount Horeb and shelters in a cave. 

In that cave, God comes to him and asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

I get the sense that these thoughts have been running through his head over and over again for the past 40 days and nights. 

Then comes the highlight of this text, my favorite part. God is going to be walking past, and Elijah is supposed to come out of the cave to find him. First, there is wind so strong it shatters mountains – but God was not in the wind. Then there was the earthquake shaking the ground – but God was not in the earthquake. Then there was fire – but God was not in the fire.

Then there was sheer silence, and Elijah went to entrance of the cave because that’s where God was. 

This section, too, has a number of translations. Some call the silence a gentle whisper, a still small voice, gentle blowing, a gentle breeze. I personally like the sheer silence, that idea that there is nothing there to get in the way of experiencing God. 

This section always speaks to me, but it is especially evocative now. We live in a time of Loud and Big – military parades, 11 million protesters, AI Bots working overtime to drive everyone on social media farther and farther apart. It’s overwhelming. It’s only when I strip all the noise away that I am ready to receive God’s presence. 

Again, don’t you just want to end here? God and Elijah have this beautiful moment in the stillness?

But God asks again, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 

14 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

Nothing has changed! Elijah is still frightened for his life. He’s had a one-on-one with God, and all he talks about are his credentials and his worries. This, too, leaves me uneasy. I want to see him feel comforted, but that’s not what he says.

When we look at the last half verse, God tells Elijah to go to the wilderness of Damascus, which doesn’t sound so bad if you stop there. Maybe it’s a pleasant spot for a little respite, a little relaxation. Nope.

Remember how I was suspicious of the half verse? Here’s the rest of the story. 

15 Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. 16 Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel, and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. 17 Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill, and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. 18 Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

Elijah is being thrown back into the political world and has a blood bath to look forward to. I want to shout, “Unfair! When does he get to rest? You were with him. You saw. You know.” As Elijah said, “Enough!” Yes, the ending bothers me.

After all the readings, this story still leaves me unsettled, but I think it is good to go over passages enough times that Holy Spirit can meet us in the reading. I think it’s important that we’re not just focusing on the parts of the Bible we like. Cherry picking is just a way of painting the picture of God we want to see. Mostly, I’ve discovered how grateful I am to be living under the New Covenant where everyone is invited to become God’s child and redemption is freely given. 

May we all be gifted this week with sheer silence and the presence of God. Amen. 

 

Saints, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, May 4

Today’s lectionary gives us important moments in the lives of two important people: Peter and Paul. Both became core figures in the early growth and spread of Christianity. Let’s start with Paul. At this point he’s using another name – Saul. Saul was both a Jew and a Roman citizen, meaning his family had some kind of tie to the Roman Empire. Saul is his Hebrew name, like the first king of Israel; Paul, or Paulus, is his Roman or Latin name, which he starts using more as his story moves along. 

Saul is maybe five years younger than Jesus. But he never meets Jesus during Jesus’ life. He grew up in the city of Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey. He came from a religious family with ties to the Pharisee camp of Judaism – a renewal movement to lead Jews to more active daily piety and practice. As a young man Paul studied in the Law in Jerusalem, as a student of Gamaliel, a great rabbi whom we met briefly last week. 

When the Christian movement starts to grow, in the months and years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Saul is angry about it. Throughout the Gospels, we see a nuanced relationship between Jesus and the Pharisee movement. They share a desire to have people commit deeply to God and to living in God’s ways. But the Pharisees care a lot more about following the daily faith practices laid out in the Torah. And when the early Christians start saying that Jesus is God, the Pharisees don’t like that. The idea that there is only one real, true, eternal God – the God of Israel – is absolutely central to Judaism. And this thing the Christians are saying about how it’s OK because Jesus is not a second God but somehow a different part of the one God does not cut it with many Jewish leaders. Christians are rounded up, imprisoned, and in some cases, executed. Stephen becomes the first martyr, stoned to death for preaching Jesus. That’s where we first meet Saul, in Acts chapter 7: he’s watching the coats for the mob, so they won’t get their clothes bloody. Acts tells us, with chilling simplicity, “Saul approved of their killing him.” 

Then Saul decides to help stamp out the Christian movement. He gets himself deputized to go round up Christians in the city of Damascus, so he can bring them to Jerusalem in chains. When we see someone who harbors a real hatred of some group of people – an active hatred that drives their actions – we look for explanations, because that’s not how most of us live our lives. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul tells us in his own words what was going on in his mind and heart: “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” Paul says he was persecuting Christians because of his zeal – his eager, burning commitment – to Jewish teaching and practice. He saw Christianity as a profound threat to something he loved, already under threat from the cultural and religious dilution of the Roman Empire. His hatred was rooted in love – and in fear. 

And then: this happens. He’s on the road to Damascus, and a blinding light strikes him. He falls to the ground. A Voice speaks to him, names him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” This moment and its aftermath completely change Saul’s heart and Saul’s life. Later in Acts, Paul retells this story; I expect he told it many times. In that re-telling, Paul says that the Voice also said, “It hurts you to kick against the goads.” A goad is a long stick with a pointed end used to control livestock – for example, to urge oxen along when pulling a cart or plow. To kick against the goad is to resist being steered to move in the desired direction. You can imagine how that could be painful for the animal! 

It hurts you to kick against the goads. There’s every reason for Jesus rebuke Paul in anger; look what he’s doing to Jesus’ friends! But instead Jesus names that Saul is in pain. That he’s fighting or resisting something within, perhaps something that underlies his fight with the Christians. 

Sometimes people’s hatred towards others is an externalization of something they hate inside themselves. I think of various leaders over the years who have been vocal in condemning the LGBTQ+ community, only to have it revealed that they themselves experienced same-sex attraction.

I don’t know exactly what kicking against the goads meant for Paul. But it meant something – enough to change his life; enough that he was still talking about it years later. And for me this detail just emphasizes the compassion that the Voice that is Jesus shows towards Saul, his persecutor, here in this pivotal moment for Paul and for the church. 

I love how the story continues – notice that Ananias also has a vision of Jesus, and also has to have his heart changed, to be willing to extent kindness to an enemy of the church! But I still need to talk abut Peter. The thing that’s hard about telling Paul’s story briefly is summing up his impact and importance for the early church! He spread the gospel of Jesus among non-Jews, founding many churches. He wrote letters and sermons that developed Christian teachings and shaped the growth of the movement. He mentored people and raised up other leaders. Eventually, he was most likely executed for his faith in Rome, in the year 66 or 67. But the impact of his life and voice and teachings extends to the present and beyond. 

And then there’s Peter. The thing that’s hard about telling Peter’s story briefly is sharing all the nuances of his walk with Jesus. The Gospel story today is more or less the end of John’s Gospel. People sometimes call it the Beach Breakfast Gospel. 

Peter and some of the others don’t really know what to do with themselves. Jesus died, and everything was over, and then Jesus was alive again, but everything still kind of seems to be over, so they figure they’ll go back to their old jobs as fishermen. You gotta earn a buck somehow. 

So they go out on the Sea of Tiberias – another name for the sea of Galilee, where they were fishing when Jesus first met them. They have a lousy night, but at first light, someone standing on the beach tells them, Try the other side of the boat. Stupid advice, but they do it, and immediately catch one hundred and fifty-three fish. That surprising change of fortune makes the penny drop; suddenly they realize that the stranger on the beach is no stranger at all. They come ashore, and Jesus has fish and bread cooking over a fire – doesn’t that sound amazing? He gives them bread and fish, and then… he has a little chat with Peter. 

Let me give you a few Peter highlights, before we circle back to this scene. When Peter first meets Jesus – after another miraculous catch of fish – Peter falls at Jesus’ feet, crying out, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” There’s the story where the disciples are out on the sea in a boat and Jesus comes towards them, walking on the water; Peter wants to try it too, and jumps in, and it works for a second, but then he starts to panic and then he starts to sink, and Jesus has to grab him and pull him out of the lake, saying, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 

There’s the time when Peter boldly tells Jesus, You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God; but then when Jesus starts to talk about how he’s going to be arrested and crucified, Peter takes him aside and tells him, “No, that’s not right at all.” Jesus takes Peter, James and John with him when he goes to meet with Moses and Elijah, holy leaders from ancient times, on a hilltop; Peter gets so excited that he wants to build little shrines for all three of them. Peter often asks the questions the other disciples want to ask, like, So, if somebody sins against me, how many times do I have to forgive them? And, So you say it’s hard for the rich to get into heaven. Well, we’re poor, and we left the little that we had to follow you. What are WE going to get, in Heaven? 

On the last evening before his arrest, when Jesus tries to wash the disciples’ feet to show them how to be people of humble service, Peter initially resists: I won’t let you do this for me! When Jesus says, “If you won’t let me wash you, you aren’t in this with me,” Peter says, “Well, then, don’t just wash my feet! Wash my hands and my head too!” And Jesus has to say, Look, Peter. People who have bathed recently only need their feet cleaned.. 

And when Jesus predicts that his disciples will betray and abandon him, Peter insists: I would never! I’ll stand by you even in the face of death! And indeed, when Jesus is arrested and most of his disciples flee, Peter follows at a distance to try to find out what will happen… but when people around him start asking him, Hey, aren’t you one of that guy’s disciples?, he emphatically denies it. I don’t even know the guy! 

What picture of Peter emerges from all this? He’s a big personality with big feelings. He’s loving and enthusiastic and impetuous and sometimes doesn’t read the room very well. He very much wants to get it all right, but it sometimes takes a while for an idea to get through his head. His Hebrew name is Simon, which means, Listen or Hear, but Jesus calls him Peter, Latin for Rock, and scholars wonder if that was a little joke. He’s deeply devoted to Jesus, but also gets freaked out sometimes and isn’t as brave as he wants to be. Fair! 

The Peter we see in today’s Gospel is consistent with all of this. I love the detail that he puts his clothes on before he jumps into the lake. They’re probably fishing naked to protect their clothing from wear and wet. Peter’s pausing to get dressed seems like a moment when thoughtfulness triumphs over impetuousness… until he jumps into the lake fully clothed. Oh, Peter. 

The night  Jesus’ arrest, people asked Peter, three times, if he was one of Jesus’ followers. Three times, Peter insisted that he was not. His fear overwhelmed his courage, his commitment. 

So, here, on the beach, three times, the risen Jesus asks Peter: Do you love me? It’s an opportunity for Peter to reverse his denials, to affirm his love. That may be fairly obvious to anyone who puts chapters 18 and 21 of the Gospel of John side by side, but it is not obvious to Peter in the moment. His feelings get hurt that Jesus keeps asking him the same question; he feels like Jesus isn’t taking his words and assurances seriously. (I wonder why not!) Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you! 

Jesus does know Peter, very well. I think that’s why Jesus gives Peter clear instructions about what loving Jesus should look like, for him, in the days and years ahead: Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. In John’s Gospel, Jesus uses a lot of shepherd metaphors; the sheep and lambs here are clearly not literal livestock, but the community of those who believe in and follow Jesus. 

Now, attention to the needs of the group has not been a strength for Peter heretofore. He’s been very focused on his own spiritual growth, on being Jesus’ best student. Jesus is telling Peter, Your work from here on out is the work of servant leadership, of teaching and tending the community of believers. It’s a big reorientation for Peter – but it seems like he’s able to rise to it. We meet Peter again, in the book of Acts, as a core leader in the early church in Jerusalem, helping build, shape, and protect the growing Christian community and way of faith. 

Paul and Peter, Peter and Paul. I’ve heard them held up as different archetypes of the faith journey: Paul’s sudden conversion and transformation of life, Peter’s slow growth in faith and capacity to live from his beliefs. Over the years I’ve thought from time to time that my personal faith story is more of a Peter story. I’ve never really not belonged to a church, even as the place of faith in my life has changed over the decades. 

But I’ve had some Paul moments too – moments when my path, and my life, changed quite suddenly, in response to what I understand to be a nudge or interruption from God. And you know what: Peter had those moments too! What else can we call it than conversion, when he first walks away from his boat to follow Jesus? What else can we call this beach breakfast than yet another conversion to the role and work ahead of him – even knowing what it would cost him, at the end? 

If Peter had Paul moments of sudden conversation, I’ll bet Paul’s faith story is not just a story of sudden change, but also of long-term believing and seeking. Of his commitment to the God he’d loved and served since birth leading him – in spite of himself – to a new call and community. 

Peter and Paul, Paul and Peter. Many differences; lots in common too.  Pillars of the early church; human, ordinary, stubborn, flawed; and so, so beloved. Like Mary of Bethany, whom I spoke about a few weeks ago, it’s moving to me just to dwell with the glimpses we get of their personalities and experiences; to remember that these were real people whose lives were transformed by their encounters with Jesus Christ. And it’s moving for me to see how much love is at the heart of each story. How much each person’s life was upended and transformed and sanctified by Jesus’ understanding, Jesus’ gentleness, Jesus’ challenge, Jesus’ call. By Jesus’ love. 

May we know ourselves thus loved.

May we be ready to hear ourselves thus called. 

Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, March 9

Anybody else ever watch the TV show Alone? … 

It’s a reality competition show. Ten people with various survival skills are dropped into the wilderness, with limited equipment. They have to build shelter, and find their own food. They have special radios that they can use to “tap out” at any time – or they may get pulled out if their health becomes too poor. Whoever holds out the longest gets $250,000. 

I’m fascinated by the show because of what happens inside of people as they go through this ordeal. Some people just tough it out as long as they can by force of will. But a lot of people are driven to some profound self-reflection, by the isolation and the hardship. People who thought they could conquer Nature learn they have to cooperate with it. People who thought they could rely on their skills are forced to face their own limits. People who thought they were totally self-sufficient discover that they are profoundly lonely.

In today’s Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent, we see Jesus at the end of his Alone journey in the Judean wilderness – which is plenty harsh and lonely. And the Devil knows Jesus is vulnerable right now, and takes his shot. Let me say a quick word about who the Devil is, here. This is not the red guy with horns and a tail; that’s a much later image. In the Old Testament, the Devil has a role, a purpose, of testing the righteous, like Job – to see if their faith and piety and good deeds are only skin deep. That’s very much what’s happening here. 

As I said last week, the weird stuff in the Bible doesn’t especially bother me; but if you find it easier to imagine Jesus driven to self-reflection, Alone-style, I think this story works fine that way, too. 

Let me say a bit more about the third character in this story – the wilderness herself. There is a lot of literal wilderness in this part of the world – dry, rocky, hilly, and empty. 

The reason many ancient peoples of this region were pastoralists, keeping flocks of sheep and goats, is that a lot of this territory was lousy for farming. So, the importance of wilderness in the Bible begins from the geology and ecology of the region. 

And then on top of those realities, there are layers and layers of meaning that build up because of the kinds of things that happen in the wilderness. Abraham and Sarah leave a settled life in response to God’s call and set off into the wilderness. Hagar is driven into the wilderness to die, and instead meets God there. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Moses leads God’s people for forty years – struggling, starving, quarreling, but also, slowly, becoming a new people shaped by God’s purposes. David flees to the wilderness to escape King Saul’s rage, and eventually storms back from the wilderness, strengthened by its privations, to claim a throne. The prophet Isaiah dwells deeply with images of ruined cities, overgrown with weeds and overrun with wild animals – and with visions of wilderness redeemed, the desert blooming, rejoicing with flowers, as God returns to redeem God’s people and dwell among them. 

The wilderness is a deeply meaningful place, for the Biblical tradition. You don’t go there unless you have to. It’s a place of struggle and danger, a place where everything is stripped away, a place where you might die. And it is also a place where people encounter the Divine. A place of becoming, a place where people discover their purpose.

I think our Gospels have all of that in mind when they tell us that Jesus went to the wilderness, immediately after his baptism, to prepare for his public ministry, for the demanding three years that he spends in the public eye before he is arrested and executed. 

So. Jesus has been in the wilderness for forty days – not coincidentally, the same length as our season of Lent – and the Devil comes to tempt him. I’d like to talk about those temptations, one by one – what they meant for Jesus, and also what they might mean for us. Because we have wilderness seasons – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. This season in our common life feels pretty wilderness-y for a lot of us, for a lot of reasons. So let’s think about what happens in the wilderness… 

Luke tells us, “Jesus ate nothing at all during those [forty] days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” For Jesus, the temptation here is pretty clear: to use his power to meet his own needs. We’re invited to understand that this is something Jesus could actually do. But if he starts down this road – a loaf of bread here, some more comfortable sandals there, maybe a convenient roadside inn with a hot tub after a long day’s journey – it could become a slippery slope! 

What’s the equivalent temptation for us, in our wilderness seasons? Years ago, a wise clergy friend told me that for pastors, people like me, our version of this temptation is to, like, tie a bow around the hard things, and try to make them meaningful and pretty. She said: It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes a stone is just a stone. I’m glad she named that; I think about it now and then. People become pastors because they want to help people find meaning, and it takes discipline not to rush to platitudes and superficial reassurances, to be able to sit with people when meaning or healing or resolution seems distant or impossible. 

There are versions of this temptation for non-pastors too. Maybe it’s the toxic positivity that rejects all difficult emotions. Maybe it’s the denial and avoidance of anything uncomfortable or scary. 

It’s tricky, because real blessings can emerge from difficult times. I feel gratitude and hope about our life together as a church, right now: the ways people here are stepping up to strengthen our care for one another and our neighbors, deepen our theological and Scriptural grounding, make sure our young folks feel fully accepted and loved. 

And: This is a really hard time for a lot of you, in many ways. A lot of folks are dealing with uncertainty and stress and risk that just flat out sucks. As your pastor, I need to be able to hold both the good things and the bad things. Some of these stones just are not going to turn into bread.

Luke writes, “Then the devil led Jesus up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

For Jesus, I think this temptation is about checking his motives – and abdicating responsibility. The Devil thinks that maybe Jesus is the kind of guy who’s just in it for the acclaim and the glory – and would be happy not to have to actually run things or do anything hard. So the Devil says: You can have the throne; just put me in charge. 

Jesus refuses. Because he’s not in it for glory, actually. And because he knows what happens when the Devil is in charge. The hard work ahead is his work, and he claims it. 

How would we scale this temptation down to our little, ordinary lives? I think we can also wrestle with the temptation to cede our responsibility, our agency – a word which hear means our our capacity to act, to do things that matter, even if they are small things that matter in small ways. I know a lot of folks are struggling with overwhelm: not knowing where to focus, what actions are worth the time and effort, how to balance ordinary life stuff with everything that is out of the ordinary right now.

If that’s your predicament – it is certainly mine at times – there’s a lot of good advice out there. Pick a thread and follow it. Act locally. Build and build on relationships you already have, places you’re already involved. Find people doing work that matters to you, and ask how you can help or support. There are so many ways we can invest in the world we want to live in, the world that aligns with God’s intentions as best we understand them. 

You may have heard the wonderful saying of Rabbi Tarfon, about the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. (Though I like to remind us that sometimes caring for ourselves or our loved ones is the work before us for a while. Another wise sage, Lemony Snicket, writes, “It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.”) 

We need to be in ongoing dialogue with ourselves about what’s feasible and what’s appropriate for us. What is my work to do? 

If it would be helpful for us to convene some spaces of conversation where folks can wonder out loud about that stuff together, and share ideas, let me know; that could be fruitful. 

The important thing, I think, is to try not to get scared or overwhelmed or numbed into giving up our own authority, however local and limited it may be, and our agency, our capacity to act in the direction of our hopes. 

Luke writes, “Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

Note, friends, that the Devil is quoting Psalm 91, which is one of the psalms that says that if God loves you nothing bad will ever happen. The Psalms are sometimes wrong. 

What did this temptation mean for Jesus? I think Jesus knows from very early on that his path will lead him to death. I don’t think this temptation is about fearing death. It’s subtler than that. Jesus, as God temporarily confined to a human body, seems to have moments when he doesn’t know the plan, and struggles with exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, just like any of us. 

Here, the Devil is saying to Jesus, You’ve chosen a risky path. You sure must have a lot of confidence in the God you call Father, to believe that there’s some point to it all, that the Powers that Be won’t just crush you like a bug and your mission and message will be forgotten. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some assurance that God is actually on the job, here? To know you could really trust the Big Guy? Come on, just a little test; what could it hurt? 

But Jesus says: That’s stupid. I’m not going to put myself at risk for no good reason. I have work to do here. I have real risks to face – necessary risks. I admire Jesus’ clarity about his mission. And I wonder if, for a moment, this temptation got to him a little…  Wanting to know that it’s all going to be OK, somehow, despite everything, is so real. And that’s what the pinnacle-of-the-Temple temptation looks like, feels like, in my life: The desire to know that the people and things I love best are going to be all right. That God won’t let anything really bad happen to them. 

There’s a David Bowie song with the lyrics, “Give my children sunny smiles, give them moon and cloudless skies; I demand a better future, or I might just stop loving you.” I am almost certain Bowie wrote it as a prayer; I know it is when I sing along with it. I would very much like to be able to make some kind of deal with God, such that my dearest people, and my dearest church, will be safe, whatever else happens around us.

A side note that isn’t really a side note: Psalm 91, our psalm today, the one the Devil quotes, is one of the psalms used in Compline. When we started regular Zoom Compline during the first months of Covid lockdown, we found we had to edit out the verses of the psalm that say that even if ten thousand people die of plague all around you, God will keep YOU safe because God likes you best. It just didn’t sit well. 

I don’t think that’s the deal. It’s not the kind of world we live in. We’re not dolls in God’s dollhouse. Our agency, our responsibility, are real. We make choices. We shape the world. We can do real good; we can do real bad. When a lot of us work together, we can do BIG good and BIG bad. We’re able to inflict harm on one another, directly and indirectly, not because God wants to build our character through suffering, but because God made us free. I do believe God acts in the world, and in and through us, but that God chooses to make generous space for our freedom. 

When we talk about this in confirmation class – about how there can be a good and loving God and also a kind of messed-up world – I ask, Would it be good if parents were in total control of their children’s lives? Even good parents, who love their kids and mean well? Nobody has ever thought that that was a good idea. 

The 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich was once reflecting on sin and all the problems it causes in the world, grieving in her heart: All should have been well! Then in a vision she hears Jesus say to her tenderly: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I believe the truth of that vision. I believe that all is held in Love; that far more can be mended than we know. But that’s in the long term, and the big picture; all shall be well doesn’t mean in this world, or this lifetime. 

Here and now, we don’t get to know that everything’s going to turn out all right. Jesus had to undertake his mission, live out his call, without the assurance that everything was going to be OK, in human terms. So do I. So do we. 

The point of this whole story – the wilderness story, the Jesus story, the full scope of the Bible, four thousand years of humanity grappling with the God we know in Jesus Christ – is that God is in it with us. We are not abandoned in the mess; we’re not alone in the dark. 

There will be wilderness times – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. There are stones that will stubbornly remain stones. 

And yet. 

People have always found purpose in the wilderness. 

People have always met the Holy in the wilderness. 

And every so often, rarely, beautifully, the wilderness blooms. 

Inclusive church, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, November 17

The letter to the Hebrews is a challenging read. We are, fundamentally, not its intended audience, and you need a lot of context to understand what any given passage is trying to say. But let’s try to find a foothold in the text, today. 

Hebrews was probably written fairly early, like some of Paul’s letters that are also preserved as Epistles. In the year 70, about 35 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army, in the course of crushing a revolt against Roman rule in Judea. As Jesus predicts, in our Gospel today! 

The loss of the Temple was a HUGE event for both Judaism and early Christianity. Now, the author of Hebrews writes a lot about the religious practices of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple would fit into their argument really well – but they don’t mention it. So, they’re likely writing before that happens, the mid-60s or so. 

The letter is clearly addressed to a Jewish Christian audience – people who were pious and committed Jews, and then also became followers of Jesus, without abandoning their Jewish identity. That’s why it’s called the letter to the Hebrews – meaning, here, people of Jewish heritage. 

The letter offers Jewish Christians a series of ways to think about Jesus in terms of Jewish faith and teaching, such as presenting Jesus as a new Moses, and Jesus as both a great High Priest, and the ultimate Sacrifice, in the terms of Temple worship. The overall message is: You can be deeply grounded in Judaism and still follow and worship Jesus!

There’s also a recurring call in the letter to stay faithful to Jesus and the church. This author may be writing to people who are considering abandoning their new faith and returning to Judaism – perhaps in the face of some persecution. 

It’s hard to tell in English translation, but scholars say this letter is a very literate and sophisticated piece of writing. It’s written in more elegant Greek than, for example, the letters of Paul. This author was educated and eloquent. 

So… who was this author? Who wrote this letter? In terms of theme and timing, it was probably someone close to the apostle Paul, and with a significant role as a leader and teacher in the early decades of the church. But interestingly, this person’s name isn’t recorded. Hebrews is anonymous; if a name was ever attached to it, it was lost early on. 

There’s a theory among some scholars that this letter might have been written by Priscilla, or Prisca. Priscilla and her husband Aquila were Jews from Italy who met Paul in Judea and became Christians. They then traveled with Paul on some of his missionary journeys. They’re mentioned several times in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. On one occasion they take another preacher aside to explain some Jesus stuff to him more clearly. 

The couple is also mentioned twice in Paul’s letters. Priscilla and Prisca are the same name – the “illa” is a diminutive. Paul doesn’t use the diminutive; he calls her Prisca. It’s a little like everyone else calls her Becky but Paul calls her Rebecca. Make of that you will! 

Paul also names her as a co-worker: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus,” in Romans, implying they had ended up in Rome. And in First Corinthians: “Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord.” So, this couple were leaders of a local church community, at one point.  

But why name Prisca, specifically, as the possible author here? BECAUSE the letter comes down to us as anonymous. This fairly remarkable piece of early church theology, clearly the work of one voice, is not attributed. We know from the trajectory of New Testament writings that for the first couple of decades, the church followed Jesus’ lead in taking women seriously as spiritual leaders. Paul joyfully shared leadership and ministry with women like Prisca, Phoebe, and Lydia. 

But over time patriarchy reasserted itself. Women started to be sidelined, and told to be quiet in church. Formal church leadership became mostly a dude thing, for a couple of millennia. 

So, the theory goes – and it makes sense to me! – maybe Prisca wrote this letter, and the first generation of Christians knew that. But over time that tradition fell away, and the book became anonymous… kind of like the Harry Potter novels. 

If any of the men surrounding Paul had written this, their name would still be attached to it. One scholar writes, “The lack of any firm data concerning the identity of the author… suggests a deliberate blackout more than a case of collective loss of memory.” (Gilbert Bilezikian)

So what does Prisca have to say to us today? 

In the verses just before this passage, Prisca is wrapping up one of her extended analogies about Jesus and Temple worship. She says: in the Great Temple, the high priests have keep offering the appointed sacrifices, every day, because those rites can never fully take away human sinfulness. But Jesus gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice, which restores and sanctifies all believers, and eliminates the need for any further ritual sacrifices, ever. 

(By the way, for the folks who feel particularly burdened by substitutionary atonement theology – the idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed in our place, in order for an angry God to forgive us – the letter to the Hebrews, as a whole, could be a helpful read. Prisca does play with that idea, or something close to it; but she also works through four or five other ways of framing the meaning of Jesus’ life and death through Jewish Scriptures and practices. The early church was using all kinds of metaphors to try to describe what folks had experienced and come to believe about Jesus. It’s much later that substitutionary atonement emerged as a dominant theme, and you are 100% free to take it or leave it.) 

As our passage begins, Prisca continues to riff on the practices of Temple worship: the curtain that separated the holiest place that only a few could enter; the blood and water sprinkled in rituals of repentance and purification; the ritual washing that prepared someone to approach God. Prisca says: We have all that, always, already, through Jesus. It’s done, once and for all. All we have to do is hold onto it, to our commitment to Christ and our hope in Christ, without wavering. To be as faithful to Jesus as he is to us.

And then she says one of my favorite lines in the Epistles: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”  … 

That bit about “not neglecting to meet together” is clearly a little dig at folks who don’t get to church that regularly. And “all the more as you see the Day approaching” is pointing towards the end of time, the day when God will turn the world upside down and right side up. 

Prisca’s generation of Christians expected it any moment. We have learned, two thousand years later, that there will be many seasons of war, and rumors of war; of conflict, famine, and disaster; and that all of that is still just the birthpangs of the new world God is laboring to bring forth, with our help. 

Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. Provoke is an attention-grabbing word there, isn’t it? It’s only in the New Testament in three other places: once about a fight among the apostles; once when Paul is stirred up by idol worship in Athens; and once in the famous passage about love, from 1 Corinthians: Love is not irritable – not easily provoked. The Greek word means: Provoke, irritate, exasperate, incite… 

Provoke one another to love and good deeds? Can’t we encourage each other, instead? Inspire one another, maybe? … 

But the thing is: I know exactly what it feels like to be provoked to love and good deeds. 

It’s the interruption of someone at the church door who needs help with rent, or gas to get to their new job, or some clothes for the kids they just took in. 

It’s a longtime member asking a tough question that opens up a whole new direction in ministry. Or it’s a new member with particular needs, or particular hopes, pushing us, pushing me, to make space for new priorities.

It’s having someone tell me: We can’t just pretend that conflict didn’t happen. We should talk it out and learn from it. 

It’s deciding, a decade ago, to clarify our welcome for LGTBQ+ people, and then discovering we have work to do on actually BEING truly welcoming. And then having new people show up and say: I heard about y’all; are you ready be my church? 

And having people who’ve been here their whole lives say: Will you still be my church if I show up as my true self? 

So many of the directions in which we’ve changed, grown, stretched, or deepened, in the past many years, are because some person or group in this parish, or outside it, provoked us to love and good deeds. 

I love this verse because for Prisca, it’s not enough for people to keep the faith, to hold fast to the confession of our hope. Her vision for the church extends beyond some kind of bunkered, locked-down faithfulness. She wants to see her people, Christ’s people, living faith in action, in love and good deeds. 

And she knows that the way that happens isn’t all warm fuzzies and affirmation, marshmallows and daisies. We ask things of each other. We challenge each other. We struggle, sometimes, with directions, priorities, balancing needs, allocating scarce resources, managing anxiety, holding grief. 

But Prisca knows that that’s just how it is – that’s what happens when people choose to belong to each other, and to God. It’s part of the work, and even when it’s hard, it’s good. It’s holy. 

So let us consider, beloveds, how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, and to encourage one another – all the more as we see God’s Day approaching. Amen. 

Big Questions, Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Nov. 10

There’s a strong theme that runs through our readings today. 

And that’s a little bit of a surprise, because these readings don’t belong together. 

The Gospel we just heard is the Gospel assigned for this Sunday. 

The Leviticus reading comes from the Our Money Story materials we’re using this season, in conjunction with our giving campaign. 

And the Ruth lesson was supposed to be last week – but we did All Saints on Sunday instead of the regular Sunday readings. So I bumped this reading forward because I love the book of Ruth!

So these are very assorted readings. But somehow they hang together better than the assigned readings often do. And the thread – or maybe it’s a rope! – that ties them together is the question of how we tend to the needs of the vulnerable. 

Leviticus is one of the books of the Torah, the Law, telling God’s people how to live as holy people of a holy God. Leviticus has some hard and weird stuff in it, and has kind of a bad reputation. But there’s also a lot in Leviticus about justice and mercy and ecological wholeness. 

The parts we heard today lay out the practice of gleaning. If you are growing food, whether it’s wheat or grapes or olives or whatever: at harvest time, you don’t have your workers take everything. You leave the corners of the field untouched; you leave some bunches of grapes on the vine. Then those who need it can come and harvest, too. That’s what gleaning is. 

The text goes on to talk about the year of Jubilee – how every fifty years, everybody’s supposed to get their ancestral land back, and you’re supposed to let the land rest, and just eat what grows naturally. And celebrate a year of human and ecological restoration. 

This week’s theme in the Our Money Story materials is reimagine. These passages invite reimagining our relationships with land, work, resources, neighbors, God. What if our bounty is meant for everybody? What if the land’s health matters more than what it can give us? What if there is enough? 

In the happy little accident of our readings this week, we get to see gleaning in practice in the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth begins with an ending – and not a happy one. Naomi loses her husband and sons. She has no grandchildren, and her daughters-in-law aren’t even Israelites; they are from Moab, a long-time neighbor and sometimes enemy of ancient Israel. This is the end – of Naomi’s family; of her happiness and hope; of her wellbeing, without male family members to provide for her. She decides to go home to Israel, even though there’s nothing for her there, either. But then… Ruth insists on going with her. Ruth pronounces this beautiful oath, by which she makes herself Naomi’s daughter, and a Jew. And so – a story begins, after all. 

But the women still have nothing and nobody, except apparently a place to stay, some rickety ancestral hut. So Ruth goes gleaning. “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain, behind someone in whose sight I may find favor.” Ruth and Naomi will fend off starvation, because at least some of the farmers and landowners of the region follow the laws of Leviticus, and leave some grain for the poor, at harvest time. 

Next week we’ll hear how Ruth’s story turns out. (It’s only four chapters long, if you want to just sit down and read it!) What I want us to notice right now is that within their time and place, in a starkly patriarchal society, these women are incredibly vulnerable. Naomi and Ruth are both widows, and within the Biblical world, widows are seen as one of the the most socially and economically vulnerable kinds of people, lacking male protection and provision, and without the ability to own land or wealth. They are at risk of desperate poverty; of starvation; of sexual assault. That’s why, again and again and again, the Hebrew Bible defines mercy, justice, and righteousness in terms of making provision for outsiders, orphans, and widows. 

Which brings us to the widow in our Gospel, giving two copper coins to the great Temple in Jerusalem, while Jesus watches. This story has too often been treated as the jumping-off point for a stewardship sermon, with this woman’s self-sacrificial generosity praised as an example for all of us – “Give till it hurts!” Now, listen! This church’s continued existence depends on y’all’s generosity. But I can’t preach that sermon. Jesus is angry, here. The Temple, as the religious headquarters of society, is supposed to be gathering donations from those who have enough, or more than enough, and using those gifts to make provision for those with little or nothing. Instead, Jesus accuses the religious leaders who hang around the Temple of “devouring widows’ houses.” The implication is that they’re preying on the lonely and desperate, perhaps telling them that if they just give a little more, then surely God will favor them and turn things around for them. 

Jesus’ words here do point to something important about how we measure gifts – or, in this season, pledges. In our fall pledge drive we always have goals to meet and bills to pay. But we also know that a $20 a month pledge from one household may be a bigger sacrifice than a $500 a month pledge from another household. And we honor all gifts, and the care and the hope they represent. 

But Jesus is not glad to see this woman give away the money she might otherwise have used to feed herself that day. If a church or faith community is encouraging someone to give to the point of not being able to care for themselves, that is spiritual abuse. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Mieke Vandersall writes, “Widows and the perennially dispossessed were to be cared for through safety nets…, yet the systems weren’t working and needed reimagining. This widow gives all that she has and the system fails her. What would it mean if Jesus tells this story to use her act of giving as a way to highlight the corruption of the economic system in power?… How can we reimagine systems of charity that… fail to provide true transformation and liberation?”

The through-line in these readings is the question of how societies or communities tend to the needs of the vulnerable. It’s one of the more consistent themes across the complexity and diversity of the Bible: God judges us on the basis of how we, together, care and provide for those at greatest risk. Sometimes God’s expectation of care is for a whole society or people, as with the laws of Leviticus. Sometimes it’s for the church at large, or for a specific local faith community. It’s a theme in many of the Epistles, letters to the first churches. How y’all doing at caring for one another, especially the most socially and economically vulnerable among your members? And as you have capacity, how y’all doing at extending care to the same kinds of folks in your wider community? … 

That’s been the work, beloveds; that will always be the work.  

It’s not all of the work; there’s other stuff too, like learning and living God’s story, and cultivating joy, and so on.

But it’s a core part of the work. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Always. 

This week we elected our next president.

There are a lot of big feelings in the room about that. 

And a lot of big fears. 

We wonder how, as this next chapter unfolds, our society will end up treating the most vulnerable. 

Some folks have justified fears of being forgotten.

Some folks have justified fears of being targeted. 

Some folks think it’ll be fine… maybe better than fine. 

Regardless: We are almost certainly facing big changes.

I’ve read and heard so much wisdom this week. And not passive “it is what it is” wisdom. Brave wisdom. Fierce wisdom. Kind wisdom. And one big theme – for those in deep distress, grief, and fear, and for those seeking to respond to them – one big theme has been: don’t rush. Take time. 

Take time to feel. To grieve. To lick your wounds. To rest, if you can rest. To do things that bring you back to yourself. To connect and reconnect, because community, mutual belonging, is going to keep being really important.

One of the voices that stuck with me this week is Ethan Tapper, an ecologist who has a book called How to Love a Forest. He was talking about resilience. Now, the word “resilience” has gotten used and overused in reference to marginalized communities. It sometimes gets used to shame or silence suffering or struggle. “Just be more resilient!” 

Resilience doesn’t mean that big changes or big challenges don’t affect you. Tapper says, “Resilience is not capitulation. It’s not just accepting whatever happens.” 

Rather, he says, “In ecosystems, resilience is… the ability of these systems and all the species that comprise them to respond to adversity.”

Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t take damage or get knocked down for a while. It means that there’s capacity in the organism or the system to come back, somehow. To rebound and rebuild. Even if it takes time, to rest and gather strength. Even if the new looks different from the way things were before. 

And that got me thinking about our jack pine. You may know that we have a variety of conifers on our grounds, including some that don’t usually grow around here. One is a jackpine, which does OK here, but really prefers the western mountains. Jackpines are interesting because they are adapted for the inevitability of forest fires. They have cones that hold their seeds, like any other conifer. And some of their pinecones look pretty much like any other pinecone, like the pinecone that you’re imagining right now.

But some of their cones stay closed. All those little scales don’t open up. Here’s what that looks like. 

It looks a little like a dragon toe – or some kind of poop. It doesn’t smell like a poop, though. It smells like summer in a pine forest. 

START BASKETS GOING AROUND. TELL PEOPLE: take a cone and a bean. 

Why does the jackpine make these strange closed cones? Well: The jackpine has a deal with time and fire. Like a phoenix, jack pines are reborn through flame. These cones last a long time. They can lie for years on the forest floor. They will finally open when they’re exposed to heat. So when a fire tears through a forest – as it will – and kills most of the mature trees, those jackpine cones are ready. They open, and release their seeds. The soil is newly enriched by ash, and there’s plenty of sun, with the big trees gone. Jackpine seedlings become one of the first species that help a landscape recover after fire. Resilience lives in these weird little knobby cones. 

I knew this in theory but then I did it by accident, once. I had a batch of assorted pinecones from around our grounds for some craft project, and I put them in the oven on low heat for an hour, like you’re supposed to, to kill any bugs. And when I came back, the jackpine cones had opened. The hidden surfaces between the scales were the most beautiful dark reddish-brown. 

The Our Money Story materials offer us a little prayer practice, today. It goes with filling in the next circle of our circle prayer. You can see there are motifs of wheat and seeds, representing the crops left for gleaning, for sharing, and the bounty of Jubilee.

I’m supposed to give you two beans, a red one and a white one, to hold while we receive a prayer about reimagining. 

You’re supposed to give back the white bean, putting it in the offering plate – those will get added to our banner – and take home the red bean, as a reminder of our capacity to reimagine. Or maybe our capacity for resilience – those aren’t the same thing, but they definitely overlap. 

Instead of the red bean, I’m giving you jackpine cones. Our tree lost a branch this past summer, and I collected a bunch of cones from the branch at the time, not knowing what I would do with them. Turns out this is what I’m doing with them. 

Let’s take a moment now for an embodied prayer, holding your bean and your cone. Let us imagine what Jubilee could look like, in our community, our nation, our time. 

I’m inviting …. To lead us through the prayer from our Money Story materials, with a few minor edits! …  

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Nov. 3 (All Saints)

In the early church – among the first Christians – the word “saints” meant everybody in the church. All who believed in and sought to follow Jesus. For example: the Apostle Paul begins his letters, preserved in the New Testament, with greetings to the saints in Ephesus, or Rome, or Corinth. Meaning, the members of the churches there. 

Over the next couple of centuries of church life, Christians started to name and honor particular saints, and draw distinctions between ordinary Christians and capital-S Saints. Those who lived remarkable lives – or in many cases died remarkable deaths – showing forth their faith. 

Eventually there became enough of those special saints that the Church chose to honor, that the calendar started to get a little crowded, and there grew up a custom of having a day to honor all the extra saints who might not have their own special day. 

So All Saints Day became a tradition. 

But: people also wanted to remember their own beloved dead. People who might not have lived lives that attracted the Church’s official notice, but who nonetheless showed forth goodness and grace, and who were loved and missed. 

And so All Souls Day became a tradition – on the day after All Saints. 

(Incidentally, Halloween as we know it has lots of sources, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s the evening before All Saints Day. The word Halloween comes from All Hallows’ Eve, an old way of saying All Saints’ Eve. It’s a time when the dead feel close at hand…) 

Our practice of All Saints’ Day here at St. Dunstan’s reunites All Saints Day and All Souls Day, in the spirit of the early church’s conviction that we are all set apart to live holy lives. We gladly honor and remember the church’s capital-S Saints… and we remember our beloved dead, whether they went on ahead recently or long ago. 

People new to the Episcopal Church sometimes ask me: Does the Episcopal Church do saints? The answer is, Well, kinda.

It depends on the particular parish how much you hear about saints. We’re somewhat saint-y, here. We’ve got all those holy images, icons, of some of the faithful whom we particularly honor here, keeping watch over the baptismal font. In an Orthodox church we’d call that an iconostasis. 

And we have a growing practice of having something about some saint or another at our prayer candle station, many weeks. 

The most formal expression of how the Episcopal Church handles saints is the book Lesser Feasts and Fasts, a liturgical resource that contains information about people to commemorate, for most days of the calendar year. If you’d like to take a look at it, I can send you the link for where it lives online! 

The preface to that book says, “Christians have since ancient times honored people whose lives represent heroic commitment to Christ and who have borne witness to their faith, [sometimes] even at the cost of their lives. Such witnesses, by the grace of God, live in every age… What we celebrate in the lives of the saints is the presence of Christ expressing itself in and through particular lives lived in the midst of specific historical circumstances. In the saints we are not dealing with absolutes of perfection but human lives, in all their diversity, open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.” 

It’s hard to find a copy of Lesser Feasts and Fasts as a book because we – the Church – revise it a lot, often every three years. 

There’s been a lot of hard work over past couple of decades to make sure that our calendar includes people of many races, genders, times and places, to correct for the biases of earlier decades that tended to spot holiness more easily in some kinds of folks than in others. 

I have twice served on the churchwide legislative committee on liturgy and music, thereby getting a front row seat to some deliberations about who to add to the calendar – and rarely, whom to remove. In adding someone to our calendar of commemorations in the Episcopal Church, we are not looking for people who are somehow ontologically different from the rest of us. No post-humous miracles are required or expected. 

Fundamentally, what we are doing is more formational: who will it help today’s church to remember and honor? What lives meaningfully illuminate what it looks like to live out one’s faith in a broken world, in a way that may bless and guide us in the living of these days? 

So, yes, we Episcopalians do saints. But possibly not in the way you’ve encountered in other traditions. 

There are a lot of meanings woven into All Saints Day. The Scriptures for this Sunday in our three-year cycle of readings point to some of them. Our call to righteousness and holiness of life. The promise of an inheritance with God, after life in this world. And – remembering the faithful departed. 

This year’s assigned readings really invite us to dwell tenderly with the memories of our beloved dead, and the reality of death. 

They are all readings that can be – and often are – used at funerals. 

That first reading, from the Wisdom of Solomon, takes the experience of losing a loved one – which can feel like disaster and destruction – and offers the mysterious but hopeful promise that that person has passed through suffering and is now at peace in God’s hands. We used this reading at John Bloodgood’s funeral. And Jerry Bever’s, and Frances Verhoeve’s. 

The second reading, from Revelation, describes the culmination of human history. The Day of Judgment that sounds so terrifying when many people speak about it, and oddly beautiful and hopeful, here. Heaven and Earth renewed, restored! God among us; Death and suffering abolished; God tenderly wiping every tear from our eyes, and proclaiming: Behold! I make all things new! 

The text enfolds the reality of human suffering within the expansive promise of God’s redemption and renewal. 

We used this one for Mike and Terri Vaughan’s funeral services.

I wouldn’t mind having it read at mine. 

The third reading is from John’s Gospel. We read this one for Kaaren Woods, and Sybil Robinson. It’s a story of resurrection, of death miraculously reversed, of grief annulled. But first: It really dwells with the reality of grief. Lazarus’s sisters are devastated by his loss. The community is grieving – and angry, which can happen! Jesus himself is moved to tears. The fact that, this time, a family had their loved one restored to them, doesn’t mean that those feelings and thoughts and experiences didn’t matter. Don’t matter. We commend our loved ones to God – and we miss the heck out of them, too. 

With all these readings, and all these people, in mind, I want to say here what I often say at funerals about our church’s teaching about resurrection. 

Jesus and the other voices of the New Testament are super super clear that when we die, we don’t end. 

What that means or looks like is mysterious, and muddied by millennia of people dreaming up pearly gates and cloud landscapes and magnificent wings. 

And even without all those bells and whistles, it’s a hard idea to grasp and hold. Even if we really want to believe that our loved ones aren’t simply gone – and we do – we may find it difficult. 

Nonetheless we are invited – by the Church, the saints, by Christ himself – to trust and know that there is an After. There is a More. 

That when we leave this place, we are received into Love. 

And that those whom we miss are already there. 

The readings for All Saints this year invite us to honor the dead.

But here we all are, living. 

I can’t let this sermon, and this day, go by without observing that we are at a point of peak anxiety for most Americans. 

I saw an article that said 70% of Americans reported feeling very or extremely anxious about this election – and that was back in August. Now, it’s three days away. 

People casting their votes, no matter the candidate, feel that this is an election with incalculably huge consequences for our nation’s future and our human and planetary wellbeing. 

And here we are on All Saints Day.

I was talking to my husband Phil early this week about trying to preach this Sunday, and mentioned that it’s All Saints Day, and he said, Good. We need them. 

What does remembering our beloved dead mean for us in this moment? On November 3 of the year of our Lord 2024? 

If you grew up in the Episcopal Church, you may have grown up, as I did, singing “For all the saints” on All Saints Day. 

All eight verses. We only sang four today!…

But even those four contain some language that probably challenges some of us, doesn’t sit well. 

“Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight… O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, fight as the saints who boldly fought of old…”  And in the verses we didn’t sing: “And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong…” This hymn uses militaristic language to lay out an extended metaphor of Christian life as a battle. In so doing, it’s exploring the concept of the church militant and the church triumphant, an idea from Christian thought and theology. 

The “Church Militant” consists of Christians alive today, who are engaged in the struggle against – well, all the things we say we’re against in the baptismal rite: the spiritual forces of wickedness, the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, the sinful desires that draw us from the love of God. 

And the “Church Triumphant” consists of believers who have died, and are now in God’s presence, having come through their own seasons of struggle in this world. 

This hymn, For All the Saints, is about how the Church Triumphant can encourage and support those of us who are still on the battlefield as the Church Militant. 

I remember learning about the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant when I was in my teens, and thinking it was really cool! I liked – I still like – the idea that we are all one church together, the living and the dead, and that they’re looking out for us and cheering us on and maybe even helping us in subtle and mysterious ways, now and then. 

But! I absolutely understand discomfort with those militaristic images. There are good reasons for us to be wary of such language. We are painfully aware of other Christians who frame the battle between good and evil in our times very differently than we do. We know that Christianity has often been used to justify violence. We would far rather describe ourselves as disciples of the Prince of Peace.

I share that discomfort and wariness. I absolutely believe that the core work of the church is the reconciliation of all peoples and creation with God. Restoration, not conquest or domination. 

And yet: there are moments when this fierce metaphorical language offers me something I need. The military images in this and other hymns may not be the metaphors we’d choose, but they are the work of poets seeking language for the very real struggle involved in being people of justice, mercy, and love, in a broken world. 

As the letter to the Ephesians says: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.”

Who’s watched the West Wing? The long-running show about a fictional President of the United States? … I have not. But this week I saw a video of Martin Sheen, who prays President Bartlet, telling this story: “A man arrives at the gates of Heaven and asks to be let in. St Peter says, Of course! Just show us your scars! The man says, I have no scars! St. Peter says, What a pity! Was there nothing worth fighting for?…” 

Has anybody ever heard the expression, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”? Anybody know who said it? … 

Mother Jones was an Irish-born American labor organizer and activist. Her husband and four young children died in an epidemic in 1867, when she was thirty; four years later, her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Her work helping the city rebuild led to her joining a group called the Knights of Labor, and she later became an organizer for the United Mine Workers. “In 1902, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing miners and their families against the mine owners.” 

One of her favorite tactics was to organize the wives and children of workers to demonstrate, protest, on their behalf – to make the point that the working men deserved a fair wage and safe living conditions so they could provide for their families. 

“In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the [summer] home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.” The children marched with banners demanding “We want to go to school and not the mines!” and held rallies each night in a new town on the way with music, skits, and speeches, to build support for their movement.  (Source for all this: Wikipedia, some paraphrased, some directly quoted.) 

There’s a lot more to Mother Jones’s story. But I think that’s enough to give context to her most famous saying. 

For Mother Jones, to fight like hell for the living didn’t mean taking up weapons. It meant showing up where people were suffering, and seeking to understand the causes of that suffering. It meant an utter refusal to accept that some people are doomed to grinding poverty. It meant forcing those with economic and political power to face the impact of their decisions on human lives. It meant organizing kids and teens to walk across two states and annoy the president on his summer vacation. 

Mother Jones was a Christian – Roman Catholic. And she is absolutely up there, out there, right now, with the Church Triumphant, along with all the folks we named earlier in our service, and all the folks we’ll name in a few moments. 

Think of your own beloved dead. What wisdom, what hope, what consolation, counsel or courage do they offer you, for the living of these days? 

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, beloveds. And when the strife gets fierce, listen – listen for the faint echos of the Church Triumphant singing us onward. 

Amen. 

Big Questions, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 13

From the introduction to Job by scholar and translator Robert Alter:
“The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon…” (That means it’s not like anything else in the Bible!)

… “Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers” – that means a lot of other Biblical texts assume that this is how things work, though there’s some grappling with it elsewhere too! – 

Alter again: That dissent is “compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward…” I’ll say more about that next week. Upshot: the world, the universe, were not created to serve humanity, we’re not the center of it all, as many other Biblical texts assume. (Alter, the Writings, p. 457) 

It’s a remarkable book in lots of ways! Who wrote it and when? … 

Part of the broad category of Wisdom literature in the Bible & across the the Ancient Near East. Texts from other cultures also struggling with why people suffer and what it all means, though Job has its own perspective. It’s Job’s friends that sound the most like other Wisdom literature texts, with their advice – “just turn from evil and do good” – while Job himself – and eventually God – push back. 

As is common in the wisdom literature, there’s very little here about Israel’s covenant history or the specific obligations of the Law. You could say that Job is a deeply faithful book but not a very religious book, per se, in that it’s not very interested in worship or practice. 

Dating: Linguistic evidence places it probably 500 years before the time of Jesus, give or take half a century or so. 

Beyond that: We know nothing about the author of the Book of Job. But Alter suspects – based on the quality of the poetry and the uniqueness of the voice – that this is one author, though the text has been altered and some portions were added later. 

Alter: “One should probably think of [this author] as a writer working alone— a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.” (458) 

What’s the relationship of all this poetry with the preface we heard last week? – in which God brags about how pious Job is, and Satan says, He only worships you because you’ve given him everything he wants; let me at him and we’ll see how long it takes for him to turn from you!… 

Alter notes the “palpable discrepancy” between the frame story and the core text. He thinks this is a much older folktale that this author uses to set the scene and get us into the meat of what he really wants to explore – the experience and meaning of suffering. 

Ultimately it’s easy to set the folktale aside because you don’t need it. You don’t need a pissing context between God and Satan to have someone lose their home, their family, everything except their life. People face that kind of agony all the time. 

The book of Job is remarkable because it explores the meaning of suffering though tens of thousands of words of incredible poetry. Alter: “Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct [both in vocabulary and images] from its biblical counterparts.”

Alter notes Job’s linguistic and metaphorical breadth and creativity – this author someone who’s really stretching the bounds of language in order to create incredibly rich expressive text. Think of Shakespeare, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

The book is also notable for its passages about nature, in some of Job’s speeches and especially in God’s response, which we’ll hear a tiny bit of next Sunday. This author is someone who paid close attention to the natural world, including the wild and frightening parts of it – not just a stroll through the garden. 

I’ve done a terrible thing in creating this script, by simplifying and clarifying the language. I did that because I wanted us to be able to easily hear and follow the debate about the meaning of Job’s suffering, which is often a little more elusive in the Biblical text. 

But go read some of the poetry of Job, sometime soon! 

Listen, now, to Job’s first few lines, in Alter’s translation: 

“Annul the day that I was born, 

And the night that said, “A man is conceived.” 

That day, let it be darkness. 

Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it.

Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it; 

Let a cloud-mass rest upon it; 

Let day-gloom dismay it. 

That night, let murk overtake it.

Let it not join in the days of the year, 

Let it not enter the number of months.

Let its twilight stars go dark. 

Let it hope for day in vain, 

And let it not see the eyelids of dawn.”  (3:2-9)

Alter says of Job’s poetry: “Anguish has rarely been given more powerful expression.” 

That amazing poetry isn’t for its own sake. It’s in the service of diving into the problem of theodicy. (Spell it) 

Theodicy: The problem of evil and suffering: how do we make sense of these things if we believe in a good God who is actively involved in the world? It is one of the big questions, and it’s the question at the heart of the book of Job. 

Job’s friends have lots of answers, but they’re not very satisfying. 

Working on the script: my attention drawn to the friend who tells Job, You just don’t know God. Questions his faith. 

But I think Job is the person with the strongest faith, here. 

With the friends, I almost wonder whether what they think is their faith in God, is actually a kind of naive belief in a clockwork universe where people get what they deserve. It doesn’t take a lot of sustained attention to reality to know that people don’t get what they deserve. But Job’s friends cling to this idea SO HARD: “You must have secret sins, because that’s the only possible explanation.” The thing about a moral universe like that – where everyone’s fortunes in life are determined by their behavior – is you don’t really need God to run it. You don’t even need AI; we were building computers that sophisticated by the 1960s. 

Job is the person here who sees reality most clearly. And Job is the person with the strongest faith, the deepest conviction that there is actually a God out there somewhere, even when he feels utterly betrayed and abandoned. The most familiar passage of Job for many folks comes from chapter 19. It’s used – without attribution – as one of the texts at the beginning of the funeral rite: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, God will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold the Holy One, who is my friend and not a stranger.”

This is beautiful. It’s also a paraphrase of the Biblical text, making it substantially more hopeful and tender towards God. 

Job is not tender towards God. Job is furious at God. 

He denies God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s availability to humanity, period. And yet: Job is very, very sure that however distant and unresponsive God seems right now, God is. And he believes that he will, someday, get to see God with his own eyes. 

In working on this script, it was hard to end it, without resolution. 

We’re still in the middle of the book; there is more to come! But still, as a writer and as a pastor, I wanted to be able to offer some closure, some sense of grace and peace beginning to emerge. But one of the big messages of the Book of Job is, I think, that the point at which suffering resolves into meaning is often elusive. Sometimes terrible things stay terrible. No silver linings in sight. 

We know nothing about the author of the book of Job, but I wonder if we can reasonably guess that they had experienced great loss. And that this book is an expression of their conviction that God is present, even in the unthinkable. 

In November, I’ll invite folks to join me in a seasonal study group on prayer – what it is, what it can be. I’ve got a few things we might read and discuss: a lovely, light book by a friend that’s kind of an overview and introduction. A beautiful book about praying our way into Advent, with art and poetry. And I just ordered a brand new book called Rage Prayers. Sounds very promising! 

Job’s friends keep telling him to silence his rage prayers. That he can’t talk to God like that. But he can. We can. You can. Job refuses their rebukes, again and again – insists on his right to cry out to the Holy in anger and pain. One of the big gifts of this strange, difficult, beautiful book of the Bible is its utter conviction that prayer doesn’t have to be polite. That we can scream and weep and break things. That there’s nothing we can say or do that will make the Holy One turn away from us. 

God heard Job; God will hear you. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, October 6

This was a tough week to figure out what to preach on! There’s a lot of strange and difficult stuff here. There’s beginning of the book of Job – a piece of folklore probably much older than the rest of the book, in which an unknown author living perhaps 500 years before Jesus takes this darkly funny story of God allowing Satan to torment someone to prove his piety, and uses it as the jumping-off point for a staggeringly profound and unique work of ancient theology written completely in dialogic poetry. I’ll talk more about Job next week, I promise! 

Then there’s the first bit of the letter to the Hebrews, which is interestingly preoccupied by the relationships among Jesus, the angels, and humanity. The project of Hebrews – which is really more of a sermon or theological essay than a letter – is to explore the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross through the ritual practices of worship at the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It’s interesting stuff but requires a lot of context to follow, and we are not its intended audience. It was likely written for early Jewish Christians and seekers who were trying to fit Jesus into their existing religious framework. 

There’s plenty of meat there for a sermon. But then… there’s this Gospel. Let me tell you, the temptation to just edit out the divorce talk and focus on the little children is strong! But this week I read a short commentary that convinced me to talk about the whole thing. The commentary – on the Working Preacher website – was written by Phil Ruge-Jones, who’s a Lutheran pastor in Eau Claire and a Biblical storyteller. 

Phil’s specialty as a Biblical storyteller is the Gospel of Mark. He has memorized and told the entire Gospel – there are videos online. That commitment to Mark’s voice and Mark’s witness gives Phil a valuable lens on how any given passage fits into Jesus’ overall message as Mark understands it. 

In his commentary, Pastor Phil names the elephant in room immediately. He says, “Beware this week. As soon as you read the word ‘divorce’ aloud, a whole sermon will appear in people’s heads. Some will hear… sermons that were launched at them or someone they loved… Others will conjure up [judgment] based on this single word.” 

This is exactly why it’s tempting to skip these verses! I know that talking about divorce stirs up a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Pain, shame, defensiveness, judgment, fear, and more. I know people for whom divorce has been liberation, even salvation. I know people for whom divorce has been a bitter loss, a deep wound. And many experiences of divorce are complex mixtures of hurt and healing, grief and relief. Regardless of folks’ experiences: NOBODY wants me to try to preach about divorce. 

So let’s step back from divorce to the setting for this passage. Pastor Phil notes, “Our lectionary still has us in the section of Mark where Jesus is leading the disciples toward Jerusalem. He is also trying to help the disciples find their way into what God desires. Interestingly, he is not calling them to acts of spiritual prowess. Rather, he is asking them to live well in their common human condition and in such mundane realities as family, wealth, and their gathered community. Jesus has consistently asked them to use what they have in service of those who are most vulnerable: children, the poor, those denied status.”

Three weeks ago, in our Gospel, in Mark chapter 8, we heard Jesus say, What good does it do anyone to gain the whole world and lose their soul? Two weeks ago, in chapter 9, we heard Jesus rebuke the disciples for arguing about who’s the greatest, saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” and reminding them that greatness looks like welcoming those who are unimportant by the world’s standards. 

Last Sunday, still in Mark 9, we heard Jesus caution the disciples against being too eager to say who’s in and who’s out – “Whoever isn’t against us is for us!” And urging his followers to stay salty. 

In today’s text, the beginning of chapter 10, he’s preaching again, and some Pharisees have a question for him. Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common!  They were both interested in calling ordinary people into renewed relationship with God. They clashed a lot because of the overlap in their missions. And it’s helpful for us to understand that arguing about how to interpret and apply Scripture is a really core practice in Judaism, past and present. For example: The Talmud, a core source of Jewish law and theology, consists of a block of Scripture surrounded on the page by the commentary of generations of rabbis, debating with each other about what the text means. I think we tend to read these encounters in the Gospels as hostile when this kind of religious sparring was very normal. 

I’m not sure why the Pharisees ask Jesus about divorce. Maybe it’s because they’ve gotten mixed messages about whether he’s really strict or really lenient in his teaching – he is kinda both! – so they’re trying to suss it out. Maybe it’s because divorce is a difficult, tender issue, and they want to see if they can corner him into saying something awkward that will upset people. 

What Jesus does is actually really interesting. He knows the Law perfectly well; he knows that Moses, the great interpreter of God’s laws for God’s people, allowed for divorce. But, Pastor Phil writes, “Jesus relativizes the law of God in light of the story of God. (Repeat.) Jesus argues that God’s creational desire for integrity in our relationships remains. While Moses might have made allowances in some cases, this does not nullify God’s original intent.”

Jesus says: the Law is secondary to God’s intentions for humanity and creation. God’s underlying purpose and desire for the cosmos is for right relationship, mutual flourishing and joy – whether that’s between nations and peoples, between humanity and the non-human created order, between members of a household or partners in a marriage. 

For all kinds of reasons: right relationship and mutual flourishing often fail, and so, God through Moses permitted divorce, among other concessions. But that doesn’t change what God wants for us: wholeness together, for many different togethers. 

One of the reasons mutual flourishing often fails is the development of social structures that give some power over others, because of wealth, anatomy, skin color, etcetera. Pastor Phil notes something about the dialogue in today’s Gospel that I had never noticed: what Jesus does with the pronouns. The Pharisees want to keep their question abstract, theoretical. They ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” They say, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

Jesus is having none of it. He says, “What did Moses command you?” He says, “Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you.” He refuses to let this be abstract. In Judaism at the time, a man could divorce a woman, but not the reverse. Jesus’ questioners are men.

So Jesus is saying: Moses made an allowance for divorce because dudes like you didn’t want to commit to love and to cherish, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until you are parted by death. You want to be able to nope out if you start to find her annoying or boring or burdensome, or just spot someone you like better….  

And that’s cruel, because the way things work here and now, she has no protection and no livelihood, outside of a father or husband. So: Yeah, divorce is legal, because some of you are jerks. That’s a paraphrase and expansion of what Jesus says, but I think it’s the gist. 

Then Jesus goes home, and talks more with his disciples. So maybe this next scene with the little children is the next morning – or maybe it’s a thing that happened a lot, and this passage records what Jesus had to say about it. There’s no obvious connection with the divorce conversation… but then again, maybe there is. A social system in which women are often made vulnerable is also a social system in which children are often made vulnerable – true in Jesus’ time, true today. WayForward Resources, our local food pantry and resource center, regularly reminds us of the high numbers of children among their clients. And I think that, in both parts of this text, Mark wants us to hear Jesus’ insistence that his way is a way that cares for and honors those seen as less important, or pushed to the edges.

When Jesus holds up little children – literally and metaphorically – and says things like, “Whoever welcomes a little child in my name welcomes me,” and “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he is profoundly challenging a social order in which adult men made most of the decisions affecting the welfare of others. Pastor Phil writes, “Marriage, as well as relationships between adults and children…, are proposed as spheres where we can live toward the other in the promise of our divine image.” 

It’s an election year, beloveds. I know that’s on many of our hearts and minds. I don’t talk about it a lot when I’m standing up here. I think it’s more important for us to pray through this season together, than for you to hear me hold forth about what I think. 

But our way of faith does have some big things to say, in seasons like this. And this year, here we are in our Sunday readings, deep in these chapters of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus keeps talking about the fact that wealth and power don’t mean you’re God’s favorite. About the ways our hardness of heart have distorted God’s intentions for our common life. About mercy, justice, love of neighbor, as the path to true greatness. About how a community that seeks to follow Jesus needs to look to those often pushed to the edges, and call them to the center, to care for them and learn from them. About how we can continue to live toward the other, toward one another, in the promise of our divine image. 

Jesus didn’t live in a democracy. But for us, using our votes and voices as citizens is a really important way we can practice our faith and love our neighbors. Who’s vulnerable in our world today? Where does your faith inform – or challenge – your opinions and convictions on the big issues in the public square? How does this election season call you as a person of faith, as a follower of Jesus, to show up and speak up?

May God guard us, guide us, and empower us, for the living of these days. Amen. 

Phil Ruge-Jones’s commentary on this Gospel: 

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-27-2/commentary-on-mark-102-16-6

Intergenerational Church, Sermons

Homily, Sunday, Sept. 29

Jesus said to his friends, “Salt is good; but if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? Keep salt in yourselves and keep peace with each other.”

Let’s wonder together about what that might mean! 

What is salt? ….

Jesus says salt is good. I wonder why! 

Do YOU think salt is good? … 

How do you use salt at your house?

Do you know about any other ways to use salt?

– Melting ice… 

Do you know what it means to dissolve salt in water? …

Anybody ever gargle with salt water when you have a sore throat or a canker sore? … 

Or use a saline spray or saline drops for their nose or their eyes? 

People have been using salt to clean things and care for wounds, for thousands and thousands of years. And now that we have science to study how salt works, it turns out they were right! Salt kills a lot of bacteria. It sucks the water out of their cells so they shrivel up and die!!

Salt doesn’t work on all bacteria or other kinds of tiny things that can make us sick. So we have more effective cleaners, now. 

But people still use saline solution – which means, salt dissolved in water – for some things, like our noses and eyes and mouths, because it’s pretty gentle for our bodies. 

(Please don’t just mix salt and water and put it up your nose! Saline solution from the store is clean and safe to use.) 

 

Does anybody like pickles?

Does anybody like bacon? 

How about cheese? …

Besides taking care of our bodies, another way salt is useful is in preserving food! 

Pickles and cheese and bacon, or salted meat in general, are very old and very important. 

Think about people living a long, long, long time ago, without refrigerators or stoves or electricity at all. 

People living in warm places where food can go bad quickly.

What happens when food goes bad?…

  • It can get gross so you don’t want to eat it
  • It could make you sick if you do eat it

So for people living long, long ago: If you milk your goat, or you kill a chicken, or you pick some vegetables, you have to use them RIGHT AWAY… 

Or you have to find a way to preserve them, to do something to the food so it doesn’t go bad quickly. 

Long, long, long ago, people started to figure out some ways to do that. And salt is a really important tool. 

It kills bacteria so it helps preserve foods, and it tastes good, too. 

Pickling is a way of making vegetables last a long time. 

Salt-curing meat is a way to make meat last a long time. 

Cheese is a way to make milk last a long time. 

And all of those processes use salt. A lot of salt!

Salt really changed human history, because our long, long, long ago ancestors could save food. They could spend less time looking for food. They could travel farther. They could trade their pickles and cheese with other groups, and used those connections to learn and share. 

Where does salt come from? … 

(The ocean, or rock salt that can be mined in certain places.) 

  • Seeing salt gatherers in Tanzania

Today it’s easy to get salt. You can even get all kinds of fancy salt. 

But in those long, long, long ago times, salt was hard to get and pretty special and valuable. 

Salt was sometimes used as a kind of money. 

In some times and places salt has even been as valuable as gold!

Cities and nations that had access to salt could get really rich. 

In my research, everything I looked at said that salt was actually REALLY REALLY important for the development of human civilization around the world! 

Because salt was so important in real life, it also became an important symbol. 

Have you noticed how when something is really important to people, they start to stick ideas to it? 

One idea that people stuck to salt was the idea of something lasting forever. 

Because salt was good for preserving food, in some cultures it started to be a symbol of permanence, of eternity. 

Another idea that people stuck to salt was the idea of purification.

That’s like making something clean, but in a more symbolic way. 

Because salt was good for cleaning wounds, in some cultures it started to be seen as having the power to drive out bad energy or evil spirits, or for healing the part of us that isn’t our bodies, after somebody has done or experienced something bad. 

In some churches, when somebody is baptized, they give them a tiny bit of salt, as a symbol of purity… 

And I have heard of people, even Episcopalians!, using salt to help purify a space where something bad happened. 

So: Salt has a lot of uses, and a lot of meanings – a lot of ideas stuck to it!

Let’s look back at what Jesus says. 

Salt is good.

Now we know a lot of different ways salt is good, right? …

If salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? 

How could salt lose its saltiness? In science classes we learn that salt – the kind we use every day – is made of two elements, sodium and chlorine. You can’t really un-salt salt. 

But in those long-ago times, people weren’t getting salt from the grocery store. In Judea their salt probably came from seawater, because the coast was nearby. 

So that salt might have other stuff in it – other chemicals, a little grit, a little gunk. If that salt got wet, the actual salt might dissolve into the water and flow away, and leave that other stuff behind. That would be your not-so-salty salt, that’s not good for much anymore. 

Then Jesus says, 

Keep salt in yourselves and keep peace with each other.

This is from the gospel of Mark, the earliest version of the story of Jesus. Another version of the story, Matthew, has Jesus say this to his friends and followers: You are the salt of the land.  (5:13)

Start popcorn circulating??? 

I wonder what Jesus means by, Keep salt in yourselves! 

I wonder what Jesus means by, You are the salt of the land! 

We live 2000 years later, but we are friends and followers of Jesus, too. When he says these things, he’s talking to us.  

Why does Jesus want us to be salty? What does that mean?? 

Well, there are those ideas that got stuck to salt. 

Maybe Jesus wants us to help preserve the world, like salt preserves food. 

We could be people who help fight decay and keep things whole and good. 

Maybe Jesus wants us to help purify the world, like salt cleaning wounds. 

We could be people who look for the hurt places, and try to help heal and restore… and we could look for what’s causing hurt and harm, and fight to change those things. 

Either of those could make sense. Even both of them. 

Symbols can mean lots of things at the same time.

But I think there might be one more thing.

Because I think Jesus is talking about food and flavor.

Jesus liked food. People used to get mad at him because he enjoyed a good meal. 

I am sending around some popcorn. 

One kind has salt, and one kind doesn’t have salt. 

Which one do you like better?… 

How would you describe the difference? … 

The salty popcorn tastes brighter, to me. It makes my mouth pay attention. It’s more interesting and more satisfying to eat. 

With the unsalted popcorn I don’t think I’d eat very much. It’s kind of boring. 

(Some people have to eat less salt for health reasons!) 

I wonder if, together, we can be people who do for the world what that salt does for the popcorn. Make it a better, brighter place, that’s more fun and interesting and alive. 

Now, the word salty means something in slang today. What does it mean to be salty? …

(Grumpy, sassy…) 

I wonder if sometimes we have to be that kind of salty for Jesus, too!

Last weekend we went to see a show by a group called Bread and Puppet Theater. They use big cardboard puppets to make art about the problems and possibilities of the world. 

Phil and Iona got to help with the show, that was cool!

In one act, the leader shared a quote from the head of Amnesty International, a global human rights organization. 

She said: “We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been.”  We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been.

That means: we live in strange, scary times. 

Like Jesus lived in strange, scary times. 

Like Esther lived in strange, scary times.

But Esther had an important role to play, a job to do, in times like that, and maybe we do too. 

The Bread and Puppet performers showed us some Anti-Abyss Calisthenics – that means exercises!

And I want to show you a couple of them. 

Because I think they are also about ways to be salty for Jesus.

This is the first one: “Hey!” 

Like you just saw something bad happen and you’re going to SPEAK UP about it!… 

Let’s try it!… 

And this is another Anti-Abyss exercise: Aaaah.

They didn’t explain things at the performance, they just showed us and let us think about it. 

I think this is a movement about finding our goodness, and sharing it with others. Finding our peace, and sharing it. Finding our hope, and sharing it. 

So let’s practice those again:  

Hey!

Aaaah. 

Keep salt in yourselves, friends! Be the salt of the land! 

Amen.