Prayer, Part 6: The Fruits of Prayer (Psalm 16:9-11)

Prayer, Part 6:

The Fruits of Prayer

First UMC of Pocatello

February 23, 2025

Psalm 16:9-11

***

Back on January 12th, on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, I began this sermon series on prayer. We watched Jesus, who had gone to the Jordan River to be baptized by his cousin John, come up out of those waters and settle into a time of prayer. Luke’s Gospel says that “as [Jesus] was praying, heaven was opened” (Luke 3:21). He prayed and received the anointing of the Holy Spirit. He prayed and heard the voice of God, “You are my son, whom I love” (3:22).

And this is a theme in Luke’s Gospel: Jesus’ own prayer life. Before he chose his twelve apostles, he spent a whole night in prayer (6:12). Prayer, as we will see next week, is what preceded his Transfiguration, unleashing, for a few moments, his inner light and thinning the distance between past and present, time and eternity (9:28-36). Jesus prayed – and things happened. And, as Luke tells it, it was after this series of revelatory events, after Jesus has modeled ministry flowing from communion with God that the disciples came to him and asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (11:1).

That’s been our prayer these last six weeks:

“Lord, teach us – teach your people here at First United Methodist Church – teach us to pray. We want to hear you speak our belovedness. We want to come into our power as practitioners of mercy and justice. Lord, teach us to pray.”

And to help us stay with that desire for prayer, we’ve been spending time with Psalm 16. Psalm 16 has served as a guide through the great landscape of prayer and shown us some of prayer’s essential elements.

We’ve seen that prayer means asking God for help and getting comfortable with being dependent on God’s grace (vv. 1-2). Also that prayer is an act of attention, and so it matters whether we are paying attention during the day to stories that amplify hatred and shame or stories that inspire steadfastness and mercy (vv. 3-4). Prayer works through metaphor, helping us to see God in all things, and prayer marks moments of transition throughout our day, allowing us to pause and re-center ourselves in God (vv. 5-6). Prayer is a daily tool for gently examining the deep movements of our souls (vv. 7-8). And we’ve tied each of these insights to prayer practices to try out during the week.

Here I want to offer a quick invitation. Next Sunday is the last Sunday before the start of Lent, and I’ll be concluding this series. I’m planning on making time in the service for some of you to testify about how you have grown as a result of this preaching series – either through the teachings or the prayer practices that you’ve been working with. If you have a story to share that would allow us to celebrate you and that would encourage others to keep going, please reach out to me so I will know how to include you in the service. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, just one or two minutes. And I’d be happy to help you craft what you’re going to say.

Today we come to the final three verses of the psalm, and the first word we encounter is a hinge. “Therefore.” This is a shift, a shift away from the “how” of prayer to the “why.” What are the fruits of prayer? What does prayer make possible? Prayer is not a magic trick that immediately fixes all our problems. Prayer is not a hack for understanding why things happen the way that they do. So, what can we expect from it?

Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;

my body also rests secure.

For you do not give me up to Sheol,

or let your faithful one see the Pit.

You show me the path of life.

In your presence there is fullness of joy;

in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Let’s start with that first line: my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; / my body also rests secure. The Psalmist is checking in with the different dimensions of his being – heart and soul and body – and noticing a pervasive sense of gladness and security. Now, this is where just looking at one psalm can be a little incomplete, because there are other psalms – other prayers – that express pain or anger or confusion and don’t end in such a resolved way. We might think of Jesus’ cry from the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Those psalms of anguish tend to be more “of a moment.” They reflect a specific circumstance of suffering and show us how to be fully open and honest before God in moments like it. But Psalm 16 is a wisdom psalm; it takes a long view of prayer. And it promises that, over time, as our communion with God deepens through prayer, as our attunement to God’s constant helping and loving presence keeps getting refined, prayer will strengthen us. In the core of who we are – in our hearts, in our soul, reverberating through our bodies – there will be a sense of wellbeing unlocked by our trust in God’s love.

I want to be clear here: prayer isn’t a substitute for therapy if what you really need is therapy; it doesn’t take the place of exercise or nourishment or sleep; praying is not the same thing as being informed or involved, so it doesn’t eliminate our need for education and our responsibilities to act; neither is prayer a substitute for intimacy with other people. But prayer is an act that integrates all these aspects of our personhood. In prayer, we know ourselves to be held together in God and through God’s Spirit, and prayer helps us rest in God’s perfect knowledge of who we are.

Verse 10 says, For you do not give me up to Sheol or let your faithful one see the Pit.

You know, this verse is quoted twice in the New Testament book of Acts. Acts tells the story of the first Christians and their first churches. Two of its main characters are Peter, who was with Jesus from the start as one of his twelve disciples, and Paul, who came later, starting out as an oppressor of the Church and then becoming the greatest missionary of the movement.

In their sermons, both Peter and Paul quote Psalm 16 verse 10. They use it as a kind of proof text when proclaiming Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus died, they say, but God raised him from the dead. God did not abandon Jesus to the underworld, to the decay of death, to the injustice of the cross. No, God protected Jesus from that bleak finality. And in raising Jesus from the dead, God changed the end of the human story – of our story.

The God who did not allow the powers of cruelty and death to have the last word over Jesus is the God who meets us in prayer!

The God who turned a disastrous ending into a glorious new beginning is the God who helps us when we ask for help!

The God we claim as our good, as our portion and cup, as the one who gives us a good inheritance, who counsels us, is the God of resurrection and life.

No matter what may come, God will keep our lives from being overwhelmed and dragged under, bound and defined by the power of the Pit. We can expect this of prayer. We can expect to be companioned by the God who has let death touch him without being overcome, the God who will not abandon us in our time of need.

And at last we come to the final verse of the psalm, one of my absolute favorites in all of scripture: You show me the path of life. / In your presence there is fullness of joy; / in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

The “path of life” always makes me think of Abraham. Way back in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 12, Abraham was called by God to leave his home and go to place that would be revealed to him along the way. He didn’t pray about it and see the destination ahead of time; he didn’t say Yes because he caught wind of where he was headed and could get out in the front of the difficulties entailed in getting there. No, he had to live the journey toward Canaan, the path revealed only in the going, each day unfolding into the next. He said Yes because he trusted the one who would walk alongside him and never abandon him.

God shows us the path of life. God leads us day by day – and prayer puts us in touch with that leading. And it is, make no mistake, a path of life – a path that takes us deeper into our real circumstances, not away from them. Deeper into our work, into our families and friendship. Deeper into our leisure, our service, our streets, and our ecosystems. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel (10:10, ESV). And another Psalm puts it like this: “For you, LORD, have delivered me from death, / my eyes from tears, / my feet from stumbling, / that I may walk before the LORD / in the land of the living” (116:8-9, NLT). Prayer allows us to live our real lives right now with hearts and eyes and hands wide open.

A couple years ago I heard our bishop, Cedrick Bridgeforth, say that Jesus calls us to “pray with our feet.” That can mean two things. There’s the phrase, “stay with your feet,” which means don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t go somewhere else. Stay here in this moment, in this place, and be present. Pay attention to what God is up to in you and around you right where you are.

“Pray with your feet” can also mean putting our prayers into action, become living prayers. And I think our psalm has shown us that that’s possible.

If are in the habit of being met by the God who helps us, won’t we step more bravely toward others who need help? If we are in the habit of saying to God, “I have a good inheritance,” won’t we want to work to make sure that others get what they need to experience joy and rest, even if right now they look ahead and only see struggle and pain? We might even be the one who comes along and helps someone else out of the Pit – like the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, who finds an abused traveler as he walks along the road, and stops what he’s doing to help his neighbor recover.

You show me the path of life. For two nights this week I was at the Monastery of the Ascension in Jerome, not far from Twin Falls. The monastery houses an aging Benedictine order of monks, but attached to the cloister is a lovely retreat center. I was there with other Methodist pastors from our district for a time of prayer, fellowship, and continuing education.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning, there was fresh snow on the ground, and some still softly falling from the sky. I joined the monks for morning prayer and then went out to take a walk. There is a long, straight driveway, probably a quarter of a mile, linking the entrance of the monastery to the closest country road, and along both sides of the driveway the monks long ago planted rows of conifer trees to break the wind and absorb some of the smell of nearby cattle. Today, those trees have grown into full stature; they are tall and thick and dark. Walking through them was like walking through a holy hallway, the wind hushed, life stirring.

Because of the slant of the snowfall, the row of trees to my left were covered with it, but the row of trees to my right were bare. One side white, another side green. In the morning light there were juncos and sparrows, magpies and chickadees stirring in the trees. A few hawks circled overhead. And I saw a Great Horned Owl for the first time in my life; we stood and looked at each other for a long, long time.

By planting those trees for practical reasons, the monks had created a new, micro ecosystem, a place of life and beauty. It took years for the trees to grow into their full effectiveness and purpose, but to walk through them today is to walk through something good and holy. Sometimes we begin to pray for very practical reasons. We’re trying to survive. We need help. We need a little more silence or beauty or reflectiveness in our days. And that’s okay! Prayer is practiced moment by moment, day by day. It is tended and patiently endured. And then? Then prayer grows up and becomes the very thing that holds and protects us, that marks the boundaries of our lives, that teems with life and blesses those who come alongside us, even after us.

If prayer is about coming to expect the presence of God in all persons and things, at all times, in all places – including in our very own heart, and breath, and bodies – then prayer really is about the fullness of life.

And this expectation, this hope, that the God of mercy and love is so very near to us always, is a source of joy and pleasure. It was what they sensed in him, those disciples, when they came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Amen.Prayer,

Sermon on the Plain: Loving Each Other on Level Ground (Luke 6:17-26)

Sermon on the Plain: Loving Each Other on Level Ground

2/16/25

Luke 6: 17-26

Jesus Teaches and Heals

Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Blessings and Woes

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

‘Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

‘Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

‘But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.

‘Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

‘Woe to you who are laughing now,

for you will mourn and weep.

‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

Luke’s writing is often characterized by literary excellence, historical detail and a warm, sensitive understanding of Jesus. And we can see why in the few verses that I just read. The back-and-forth wordplay between the poor and the rich, the hungry and the full, the sorrowful and the laughing man, the oppressed and the elite set up so elegantly is incredibly simple to unpack in our modern meditation today.

Is Luke saying anything new though? Haven’t we already heard it before in the Sermon on the Mount? Why does Luke repeat what Matthew already wrote about? One possibility is that Luke’s theme differs slightly from Mathew’s not only in the fact that it is shorter, 3 beatitudes as compared to 8 in Matthew’s account, but Luke points out that Jesus is paying particular attention to location. Level ground. There has to be a good deal of metaphor here, that everyone, even Jesus, is on level ground.

But why would Jesus give a sermon on flat land? Why didn’t Luke describe Jesus standing on something, a boulder, a chair, or perhaps another disciple’s shoulders? Why didn’t Luke mention that the throng gathered and sat at his feet? Or that Jesus sat down to preach as he did in the Sermon on the Mount.

Maybe, just maybe, Jesus came down with them and stood on level land with a crowd of his disciples gathered among a cross section of citizens from Judea, Jerusalem, and foreign-born travelers from Tyre and Sidon to prove a very specific point. By most definitions, to be on a level ground usually means to be starting at or on the same level for the sake of being fair regardless of position, power, status or authority.

Consider how Luke, with artful minimalism, conveys the historic image and real presence of so many different people gathered together to collectively be healed by Christ. We read that both peoples from Judea and Jerusalem gathered with the Gentiles from Tyre and Sidon.

History tells us that believers and non-believers, monotheists, and pagans gathered. Rich and poor alike, all of these people shared equal status in the eyes of the Christ. Equal not only in their grief and illness, but also equal in their degenerate spirit.

These tightly packed verses serve as a living testament to us today about Christ’s ministry to every person present in the ancient past when Luke writes: “for power came out from him and healed all of them.” What an incredible idea to contemplate that Jesus came to level the playing field and used the physical feature of the plains to give a sermon. In fact, that is what this sermon is called--The Sermon on the Plains.

In modern context, this scripture adds rich layers to the meaning of Christ’s abundant love, mercy, and forgiveness. There is a place at the table for everyone in God’s Kingdom. How powerful is it that Christ healed the baptized right beside the unbaptized, right alongside the foreigner and the citizen. Newsworthy? You bet! Revolutionary? There is no doubt.

But let’s dig further. What more is there to meditate upon in the scripture? I suggest that the deeper consideration for us to ponder is the “gaze of God” in the flesh through the Christ which was leveled upon his disciples. Do you recall the words of the verse which read: “Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: Blessed are you who are poor, you who are hungry, you who weep, Blessed are you when people hate you. Rejoice, for surely your reward is great in heaven.”

Jesus wasn’t addressing the masses. Unlike the Sermon on the Mount, Luke’s deliberate description states that Jesus was talking directly to his disciples. And what are we as baptized members of the body of Christ, if not his disciples, teachers, apostles, and prophets--each to our own and our gifts different one from another. These blessings are followed by a stiff warning of woe my friends. Woe to you disciples who are rich, full, laughing, and elitist like the false prophets. Woe…

Woe to those among us, leaders and lay leaders alike, gifted by position of birth, wealth, intellect, and power who do not follow the Christ’s ministry to disciple everyone. You see, Jesus and Luke both held special interests in the poor and in issues of social justice equally with their concerns for those who oppress others.

These people, these oppressors, are usually labeled in any number of the gospels as sinners. Sinners in that they are using their power and position to separate humankind from God’s all-encompassing love. And the sinners reward? Woe. Sadness. Desolation in the here and now.

Jesus was aware of the oppressive culture that amassed people of all races, creeds, and social status of the day to gather to listen to him. Representative stories from all walks of faith, Hebrew, Greek, pagan and believer are all on display illustrating for us that the oppressed have been waiting for a savior to liberate them from the burden of the Roman Empire for 400 years.

Much like then, there are still many even now waiting to be free of the various forms of oppression that plague our community today. Like the ancients of the past, our current time is still bursting at the seams with people whose struggles are manifest in the more modern form of “diseases” with names like cancer, heart disease, Parkinsons. Even “unclean spirits” exist in our present time. They bear names like racism, authoritarianism, and homophobia or transphobia.

But who wants to go hungry, right? Who wants to cry, and experience being poor. For that matter, how is that even helpful in our current circumstance?

In my own walk with Christ, I have been all three. In 2021, I was 180 pounds. The extra weight combined with extensive walking associated with my job duties cause me to experience plantar fasciitis. I either had to live with debilitating pain in both my feet, loose the weight intentionally, or start working with doctors and potentially get a surgery.

Weight loss was my first and incredibly harder choice because of my relationship with food. I abhorred not being able to eat whatever I wanted for a couple of reasons—one because as a child and even a young adult, I had days when there really wasn’t much to eat or drink. And 2, being born to an LDS mother, as a kid, I was made to fast alongside the rest of the congregation on Fast and Testimony Sunday once a month. I held deep resentment for that religious practice, and honestly didn’t want to face it as a mature Christian.

You can imagine now how hard it was for me to engage in fasting as a necessary practice, let alone a spiritual one. But, because of the plantar fasciitis, I had to rise to the challenge and think about how hunger and fasting in my body was a means to improved health and also a way to heal old religious wounds and connect with my maker. Being me—I was all in.

In my mind—working through the psychological reparations of understanding hunger from a mature spiritual perspective and reconciling the childhood trauma of being forced into a faith practice was hard to be certain. But on the other side, as an adult with much clearer personal understanding of the practice—I am now more spiritually fulfilled and better for it. I now know that God designed my body as another conduit of connection to Them—One that must be engaged with tenderness through maturity and free will and not forced traditions.

Though I am not here to encourage anyone to follow the path I took, I am here to say that you have to discern for your own present journey how your relationship with hunger can bring you closer to Creator Spirit. Eating differently and being present in the nurture and feeding of your body can bring you fulfillment. Maybe your body craves more strength. Go for a walk, and invite God to be present. Maybe your body craves abstaining from excessive amounts of work—give yourself permission to take a nap and rest in the Spirit of the Lord. What I needed may not be what you need—and that is why God gives you the Spirit—so you can discern what and how you should proceed this Sabbath.

Turning now to weeping, I wept as recently as this morning. I will tell you that leaning in and letting God take the wheel in spite of my own anxieties about standing here and speaking has resulted in my own personal growth. For one brief moment, I touched heaven here on earth.

One of my realizations this morning came to me about when and why I weep. I weep most often about how I have judged entire cultures, communities, and individuals poorly. I weep for my bigotry as a younger woman, and for my hardness towards my husband. I weep for the distance between my mother and I. I weep for parental failures—ignoring both of my teen agers when they came out to me. And If I cry now, please forgive me.

In my discernment, I have learned that weeping is just my own outward expression of what needs corrected in my life. Recognizing this signal, sometimes I choose to lean in, wear a seatbelt, and let Jesus take the wheel. My most recent example is an experience with Grandpa last October which resulted in an incredible gift--the gift of forgiveness.

Over 5 years ago, I cut ties with him out of anger, resentment, and if I am being honest, pure jealousy. But God thought that was long enough, so my Heavenly Healer humbled me in spirit and helped me reconnect to Grandpa. I traveled 2 days to see him. And I apologized deeply for my wrongs as his granddaughter. I acknowledged him not as my grandfather, but as a man—human, incredibly strong minded, loyal, and fiercely independent. For that sacrifice of my pride, I was rewarded his last birthday, Christmas and New Years before he passed away a month ago. And there was so much joy my friends—so much joy in the full circle of that reunification that we have laughter now in stories that no one else can share but he and I.

Enough said—or I will cry the rest of today for his recent loss. Let’s circle back a bit here. In my belief, God gives us grief, anxiety, tears, and distress as signals and indicators that we are off the path. If we wander too far for too long, perhaps it is time to be open to the need to correct past mistakes. Maybe these are issues in the workplace, or with our partners, spouses, and adult children. Whatever the conflict, between friends or even with our childhood trauma, these tears will become laughter if we do the hard, hard work of spending time with God and letting the spirit heal what needs mended.

The last bit—the bit about being poor. Oh friends—perhaps this is the hardest bit to chew on. Blessed are the poor—for yours is the Kingdom.

I am by no means rich. Look around the room here. None of us are rich. I have lived at 2 levels of financial wellbeing in my life. Poverty and lower middle class. I came from poverty. I mentioned going hungry as a kid. I wasn’t kidding. As an adult, I was also a single mom on food stamps. I have never been homeless, but should have been. School loans kept a roof over my head for a long time. Marriage was actually one of the ways I elevated my income, if I am being honest. But even then, my offering to the Church really wasn’t whole lot. Debt mounted frequently as I squirmed between title loans, small bank loans, rental centers, and even credit card debt.

Can I share a little wisdom? Credit card debt is, in my mind, the single worst cycle I ever engaged in. Looking back, if I were to give some advice—I would say stop comfort spending on coffee, candy, and new things. Learn to live within your means.

As a younger parent—comfort spending was second hand shopping for junk that I didn’t always need. As a lower middle-class earner today however, comfort spending happens to mean bailing out my kids instead of giving to the church. On my list of “I would rathers” if I am being incredibly candid here, I would rather give $500 to my son who has gone without a bed for the better part of 3 months than actually get one step closer to making a tithe offering into church budget. And so I did.

Justified or not, I have to really take a square look in the mirror and confront places where I need to grow in my faith. And money is certainly one of those places. I am by no means the picture-perfect preacher. Will never be, but I am working on myself, and that is all I can hope for.

In an article published 2 days ago called “A refreshed Wesleyan vision is emerging,” Reverend Dr. Paul W. Chilcote has revitalized what Jesus embodies for our faith—the need to engage in meaningful ministry. “The primary practices associated with this exciting aspect of our discipleship are acts of compassion and justice. We have no mission but to serve in these ways. A refreshed church seeks to care for all and spread the word of liberation to those oppressed and abused.

The rise of xenophobia, nationalism and nativism in our nation and world will call upon our steadfast proclamation of God’s love for all people in Christ. We will need to be those in the world who transform hostility into hospitality. We will bear witness to the extravagant, unconditional and unbounded love of God.”

In Psalm 1 it says, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, they meditate day and night.”

If my message today has spoken to you in any way, my prayer is that you understand that you are a disciple. There is a long list of beatitudes given in Matthew. But Luke’s version, the shorter version has 3 that should be your starting point. Choose to start now if you haven’t and gaze back at Jesus, eyes wide to the wonder and joy of a more ascetic life. Be blessed, find moderation in your life and oppose your own self manifested woes.

Know that here and now Jesus is aware of the current oppressive realities our times. Oppressing our bodies. Oppressing our mental health. Oppressing of our loved ones and close friends. Even oppressing how and what we are supposed to believe about the communities we live in and the homes we are stewards over. Everywhere the polarization of community is on display.

The guard might have changed, but there are still guards none the less. And the results? The same. I would wager if Jesus showed up today and called people to him on the Snake River Plain, people of all kinds from both sides of the fence would jump over to touch his garment. And he would heal them—without judgement. Of that, I am sure.

So how should I wrap this up? What is it that I can say to you that will bring home the message? Perhaps this: meditate day and night. Ponder. Consider. And above all—pray. Pray to try not to see yourselves through your own eyes. Pray to see yourself through the eyes of your liberator. Pray that when you see someone who has absolutely nothing in common with your practices, beliefs, or culture, that you will be like trees with deep roots that are planted by streams of living water.

In your season, a season that you alone have been prepared for, having prayed and fully joined in both body and spirit to Your Maker, you will be called to yield the goodness of Gods bounty to someone who has been oppressed—whom you can call out of bondage and into abundance. Meanwhile, it is in God’s name that I pray you will prosper greatly, and in so doing lift others up along the road that God has set you on.

Prayer, Part 5: The Heart is Our Teacher (Psalm 16:7-8)

Prayer, Part 5: The Heart is Our Teacher

First UMC of Pocatello

February 9, 2025

Psalm 16:7-8

 ***

In a little book called The Way of the Heart, Catholic author Henri Nouwen writes about prayer and quotes these words of a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox bishop named Theophan the Recluse: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

Let’s hear that one more time: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

The first part of Theophan’s statement, the part about the mind coming down into the heart, is instructive; it tells us something about how prayer works. Prayer is at its best when the powers of our minds – the powers to question, reason, associate, and imagine – are united with our emotions and our body’s sensations. The heart is always speaking. We pray when we learn to listen to our heart, becoming aware of its affections, disappointments, and hopes.

The second part of Theophan’s teaching is a promise. When we open the door of our heart and allow our mind to carry its candle of awareness there, God will meet us. God is both the Creator of everything, the Great Mystery always outstripping our understanding, and a personal presence in us. We are made in God’s image, which means we are born with a bone-deep craving for perfect love, for God. Our hearts teach us to pay attention to that holy hunger.

Psalm 16 affirms the goodness of our bodies, and shows us how important they are to a life of prayer.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel,

in the night also my heart instructs me.

I keep the Lord always before me;

because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Here in verses 7 and 8, we have our first two body words: “my heart” and “my right hand.”

The Hebrew word translated here as heart is literally the word for the kidneys. Ancient Hebrews believed that the heart and the kidneys were closely related. The two organs are often referenced side by side in scripture. For example, in one English translation, Psalm 7:9 says, “The one who examines the thoughts and emotions is a righteous God” – but in the original Hebrew, those “thoughts and emotions” are the “heart and the kidneys.” These organs were considered the places in the body that house a person’s emotions, affections, and deepest thoughts – the very purposes of their soul. It’s common in scripture to hear of God searching, examining, and naming what is in these parts of the body. In Psalm 16, they speak directly to the one praying, offering their wisdom: in the night also my heart instructs me.

Hebrew poetry uses a literary device called parallelism. Parallelism means that one line will – you guessed it – parallel the next. The most common kind of parallelism is when two lines of poetry say pretty much the same thing but in slightly different ways. It’s not always that the second statement builds on the first statement, though that does happen. More often, the second line and the first line expand one another, giving the reader a fuller picture. It’s like describing the same mountain from two different angles.

A good example of parallelism is the first verse of Psalm 51:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;

according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

‘Unfailing love’ parallels ‘great compassion.’ The plea for mercy parallels the plea for one’s transgressions to be blotted out.

Here’s what’s wonderful about Psalm 16:7: “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel” is in a parallel structure with “in the night also my heart instructs me.” The psalmist is not driving a hard wedge between the counseling Lord and the teaching heart. They are not the same thing, but they’re not separate either. When we quiet ourselves enough to really hear what our hearts are telling us; when we seek our body’s wisdom, we’ll hear God’s voice, too. The heart knows when it has strayed from God’s purposes and it’s truest desires.

For some of us, this might be a new and revolutionary way of relating to your body. Maybe you’ve been taught that your body is, at best, unimportant to your life with God, or, at worst, a cesspool of sin.  Maybe you’re simply out of touch with your body most of the time, living in your head. We can tell ourselves all sorts of stories up there, some helpful, many far from helpful. We can grind our reason against an immovable problem. We can rationalize anything and everything. We can do all these mental functions while being unaware of what our hearts really want or what our bodies already intuitively know.

Our bodies might contradict our mental stories; they might ask us to do something risky – to feel, and then to act on that feeling. I wonder what it would mean for you to descend into your heart, your chest, your gut as you ask, “What do I want? How am I being called to love? What’s the next right thing that God would have me do?”

How would your heart – speaking in harmony with God’s voice – guide you?

Of course our bodies get sick and suffer injury. They store up trauma and they age. But these challenges are also opportunities to learn to listen and honor the body’s wisdom. They do not mean that our bodies are evil. Our bodies, along with our minds and souls, are created in the image of God. The image of God is Jesus Christ, and he the embodied, enfleshed, incarnate One.

So, what does it actually mean to listen to the heart? How do we do it?

There’s no single answer to this, but the psalmist says that his heart teaches him in the night. For our Jewish siblings, the new 24-hour day begins at sunset. There was evening, and there was morning… There was evening, and there was morning. In the Bible, the days run from evening to evening, which is why Jewish folks begin their Sabbath observance on Friday night with the lighting of candles and singing.

Darkness, the time when most of us are winding down and letting go, is the time when God initiates fresh work. Maybe at the end of the day we’re tired and spent; maybe we’ve finally reached some delicious solitude. Either way, there is something about our vulnerability in the evening that allows us to lower our defenses and listen to what the heart has to say. Perhaps for just this reason, the Psalms speak often of evening prayer. Here are some examples:

·         Psalm 1:2 – “…their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.”

·         Psalm 17:3 –  “If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, / if you test me, you fill find no wickedness in me…”

·         Psalm 42:8 – “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, / a prayer to the God of my life.”

·         Psalm 77:6 – “I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit.”

·         Psalm 91:1-2 – “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, / to sing praises to your name, O Most High; / to declare your steadfast love in the morning, / and your faithfulness every night.”

Over the past month, I’ve invited you to try some different prayer practices, like praying “Help me” over and over throughout your day, and paying attention to good stories, and praying with metaphors, and saying a simple threshold prayer at moments of transition during your day. I now want to teach you the prayer of Examen.

The daily Examen was designed by St Ignatius of Loyola to take no more than 15 minutes at the end of the day. It has five movements that can take about 2-3 minutes each. The first movement is simply to acknowledge God’s presence with you and become centered and inwardly aware. Deep breaths help us connect to our bodies, maybe followed by saying a favorite psalm or poem or the Lord’s prayer.

The second movement is about gratitude, naming a few gifts from the day. That should be easy for us, since we’re already keeping our 5x5 gratitude journals.

The third and fourth movements involve reviewing the day, first noticing moments of spiritual consolation and then moments of desolation. Consolation is about freedom and love, openness to God and others. Desolation is about being unfree, reactive; distant from God or others.

Positive feelings don’t always correspond to consolation, and negative feelings don’t always correspond to desolation. If we spend time one day with someone who is grieving, we might feel our own sadness and come away from that encounter depleted. But at the end of the day, our hearts will tell us that we were right where we needed to be, alongside our friend.

Ignatius was concerned that we don’t applaud or judge ourselves for these moments; we’re just meant to notice them. The point isn’t to get fixated on one thing and relive the drama of it over and over. We review the day in a detached way, and ask the heart to show us when we were speaking and acting from inside or outside our grounding in God. If a moment from the day stands out as particularly important, we can take a minute to talk to God about it.

After reflecting on consolation and desolation, the final part of the Examen is looking ahead to the next day. One writer describes it this way:

[We] ask God to show us the potential challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. We try to anticipate which moments might go one way or the other for us: toward God’s plan or away from it. We ask for insight into what graces we might need to live this next day well: patience, wisdom, fortitude, self-knowledge, peace, optimism. We ask God for that grace, and we trust that he wants us to succeed in our day even more than we do.

     And that’s the Examen. Centering, thanking, and reviewing today’s consolations and desolations, and tomorrow’s needs. By praying the Examen once a day, we learn to listen to our hearts. Over time we notice patterns that can really unlock growth for us. Patterns of consolation and desolation show us where we are tripping up over and over again or where God’s joy reliably meets us. We can then act based on those patterns, avoiding the things that bring us down and moving toward the things help us love.

That’s partly what the psalmist means when she says, I keep the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be moved. In the ancient world, to be at someone’s right hand was to occupy the place of honor, the place of strength and trust. We come to know God as a strong and trustworthy friend by listening to our own hearts in the night.

     I’ve again made up some cards for you to take home, if you’d like. This time they have instructions for the Examen on them. I still have threshold prayers from last week, too, if you didn’t get one or want to take a few more. Let’s use the Examen to practice keeping the Lord before us by listening for the harmony between our heart’s voice and God’s voice.

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

God is waiting for us.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.

Prayer, Part 4: My Chosen Portion (Psalm 16:5-6)

Prayer, Part 4:

My Chosen Portion

First UMC of Pocatello

February 2, 2025

Psalm 16:5-6

***

The scriptures call us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). This is not because prayer is an end in itself, or because it magically solves all our problems, or because God is handing out gold stars to people who do it. It’s because prayer is communion. Prayer is the practice of being with and before God, letting love search us, claim us, fill us. In this series on prayer, we’ve already seen that one of the ways ancient Christians discovered they could “pray without ceasing” was by asking God for help, everywhere and at all times.

Do you remember Wendell Berry’s poem from two weeks ago?

It puzzled me once,

that ancient call

to ceaseless prayer.

Now I know.

Help me. Help me.

If I must stay

longer at work

give me strength.

We are always in need of help; we never outgrow our dependence on God. Asking God for help is a great foundation for a life of prayer. I want to add to that today.

As we read the scriptures, we see how richly they use metaphors when they are talking about who God is and what God is like. We make metaphors when we place two images or ideas side by side and explore their relationship – not just how they are like one another or not, but how they draw out of each other new dimensions, illuminating was had been hidden.

God is light. God is a vine. God is a rock. God is a desert shrub burning but not consumed. God is a shepherd. God is love. God is a groan. God is a wrestling match in the night. God is the sound of sheer silence. God is a fetus, and a midwife, and a womb. God is water, wind, and bread. An obscure carpenter, a gardener, the first sculptor of primordial clay.

God! Father running to embrace us. God! Son with a criminal record. God! Spirit that is sometimes fire and sometimes a bird and sometimes breath itself. God is.

God is, in the words of Psalm 16, “my chosen portion and my cup” (NRSV). These are metaphors, and their presence in the prayers of the Bible is an invitation for us to cultivate a metaphor-rich imagination and prayer language.

There is a sense in which God is, by definition, ineffable. If something is ineffable, it is “too great to be expressed or described in words.” That’s partly what God meant when Moses asked for God’s name at the burning bush and God said, “I am who I am.” Our words and concepts and images can never capture God with any kind of finality. God exceeds all the bounds.

But God is also the Creator of all things. Creation has its origin in God’s love, desire, and imagination and bears some likeness to its source. Traditionally, theologians have talked of the “two books of divine revelation,” the first ‘book’ being the natural world, and the second being the scriptures.

But more than that, for Christians, is the startling experience of a God who has opened his very life up to the world, to people, to everyday stuff by becoming incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus thought with a human mind and spoke in a human language – and the linguists, neuroscientists, and artists tell us that thought and speech are metaphor all the way down.

There is a kind of boundless playfulness that comes from God’s openness to us, and Jesus creatively worked from his own palette of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic words, walking around and pointing: “I am like that…and that… and that. And the kingdom of heaven is like that… and that… and that.” Seeds and yeast, salt and light.

One of the ways we can pray without ceasing is by imitating our open and creative God and our image-rich scriptures. If God might be speaking to us, or at least inviting our curious gaze, through all things, then we can move through our day engaged in prayer.

How is God like the waiter who pours your coffee?

How is God like the cup that holds your coffee, that you hold in your hands?

How is God like the chair you sit in, or the friend you sit across from, or the morning light that slants in through the gray clouds and smudged window?

What do these simple, everyday experiences teach us about the God who is in and through all things? Where do they break down and stop making any kind of sense? And once we are playing with an image of God, we can consider how we might relate to a God who is like this thing. For example, here’s a beautiful passage from St. Francis of Assisi: “We are spouses when the faithful soul is joined by the Holy Spirit to our Lord Jesus Christ. We are brothers to Him when we do the will of the Father who is in heaven [sic]. We are mothers when we carry Him in our heart and body through a divine love and a pure and sincere conscience and give birth to Him through a holy activity which must shine as an example before others.” Do you see what he’s doing? He’s saying, ‘Okay, if Jesus is a lover and a brother and a son, what might it mean for us to relate to him in that way – if we were his spouse, sibling, and mother, like Mary?’

Praying with metaphor is not primarily about having interesting ideas about God – though there is pleasure in that. The real heart of it is that metaphor unlocks new ways or relating to God, of imagining who we are to God and with God, and who we are for the world. The Christian tradition, and perhaps our own prayers on account of our formation in it, come heavily laden with dominating, masculine metaphors: Master, King, Warrior, Father, Judge. Not bad metaphors when held in creative tension and conversation with all the others – but definitely bloated ones in many traditions and minds. They’re definitely the metaphors energizing persons and groups vying for power in Jesus’ name in 2025 America. I’d argue that people who have a richer imagination for where and how God might reveal something about who he is and what he is like tend to be more appreciative of differences in the human family.

If God is like that friend sitting across from you and your steaming cup of coffee, if God sees you so kindly and clearly in that way, without agenda, simply enjoying your presence whether you are talking or being silent – well, maybe that’s a different kind of God than you’re used to relating to. Maybe you’d actually open up and tell that God some things you’ve been afraid to say to the God who is Judge or King. And here’s what’s surprising: a true friend might tell us the very thing we need to hear but would rather not hear; a God who is a friend might be the most incisive judge of all, a judge who names what is there directly, with mercy, knowing our faults and possibilities and wanting what’s best for us.

So there is both beauty and seriousness in metaphor play. The beauty is in coming to know God as being very near to us, very eager to engage us. The seriousness is in examining our own certainties about how God acts in the world and asking if they are built upon a very narrow set of pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and images generate feelings – of proximity or distance, of contrition or joy, of purposeful energy or quiet rest.

Do you have favorite metaphors for God? Favorite images?

Each day this week, pick something that you encounter in your daily life and ponder for a while, ‘How is God like this and not like this? How would I relate to God, speak to God, and act toward others, if I believed God was like this.’ And don’t be afraid of pushing some boundaries or venturing into heresy. God can take it. And a robustness of metaphors keeps us in touch with the God who, in his Great Mystery, dwells in the endless beyond, yet meets us here and there and everywhere.

The images in verses 5 and 6 of Psalm 16 all have something to do with measurement, things that hold or contain: a portion, a cup, one’s lot; boundary lines; inheritance.

Here’s how different English translations render verse 5:

NRSV: The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.

NAB: LORD, my allotted portion and my cup, you have made my destiny secure.

CSB: LORD, you are my portion and my cup of blessing; you hold my future. (CSB)

NLT: LORD, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing. You guard all that is mine.

Pausing over a portion of food to eat or over a cup to drink. Considering the boundary lines of our lives as holding good things. Hoping for a good future, a good lot and inheritance. These all brought to mind the idea of thresholds for me, thresholds being moments or places of transition, where we either pause in our day or move from one thing to the next

So, taking a cue from the particular metaphors of this psalm, I’ll also invite you this week to pray a prayer during the “threshold moments” of your own day – when you have your morning coffee or leave for work or come home in the evening.

Blessing the threshold is an ancient practice from Celtic Christianity, and I’ve composed a simple prayer for us using Psalm 121:8 and a line from St Francis of Assisi. It goes like this:

“Lord, you protect our coming and going,

both now and forever” (Psalm 121:8).

“Therefore, let nothing hinder us,

nothing separate us,

nothing come between us.”

Take one of these with you, and tuck in your pocket or your wallet as you go about your days this week.

Lord, as we imagine an illuminated world full of your truth, as we seek to know you in and through all things, and as we pray at our thresholds, help us, for the sake of your love, which is for us and for many. You are our portion and cup, and we want nothing less than to taste and see that you are good. Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.

Prayer, Part 3: Paying Attention to Good Stories (Psalm 16:3-4)

Prayer, Part 3:

Paying Attention to Good Stories

First UMC of Pocatello

January 26, 2025

Psalm 16:3-4

***

Several weeks ago, I shared with you that during this season of Epiphany I would be preaching a series on prayer, asking Jesus to “teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Prayer essentially means paying attention to God and being open before God. Prayer is the practice of true presence. Each of us was created in God’s image, and as a congregation we are entrusted with God’s “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). But it is hard for us to show others what God is like, and we certainly cannot effectively break down walls of division, if we are not grounded internally in God’s kindness and love. To become our fullest selves, we must learn to pray.

How do we do it, then? How do we pray? For this series, Psalm 16 is our guide. And as we reflect on one or two of its verses each Sunday, my goal is for each of us to come away with at least two things: a deeper longing for prayer and a simple practice to try during the week.

When we explored the first two verses of Psalm 16 last Sunday, I invited you to practice a prayer of the heart, a simple phrase playing on repeat that you could carry into any moment. I suggested one of the tried-and-true phrases like “Help me,” “Protect me,” or “Save me” – something that lets you be just as you are while opening a line of communication with God. “Help me” – it’s the way the psalm starts and it’s a good way to start learning how to pray.

Today we’re focusing on verses three and four of Psalm 16, so I invite you to hear the word of the Lord a second time:

3 As for the holy ones in the land,

they are the noble, in whom is all my delight.

4 Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows;

their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out,

or take their names upon my lips.

After asking God for protection and clinging to God as the source of all good things, the Psalmist now looks outward to consider other people. He sees, on the one hand, “the holy ones in the land,” and,

on the other,” those who pour out “offerings of blood” to “another god.” What’s brought to the forefront here is the question of who we are paying attention to.

Whose stories are we telling?

Whose names are we magnifying?

Whose actions are we delighting in and learning from?

Where are our emotional powers concentrated?

It's important to ask these questions. We live inside an economy where attention has become literal currency, where people make money based on how long they can keep your eyes looking at their product or using their app. And we live inside a politics bound to that economy, a politics that carefully manipulates our attention so that we are kept angry and engrossed in the chaos but ineffectively engaged on the ground. The algorithms will feed us a tweet coming out of or aimed at the White House, knowing it’ll raise our blood pressure and keep us scrolling, even as we remain unaware of suffering and injustice in our own backyards.

Let’s take some time to define these two groups of people, for the Psalmist the holy ones and those who choose another god.

The Hebrew word for “holy ones” is the plural form of the adjective qadosh, which means “holy.” Holiness means being set apart for a special purpose, which is a major theme in the Old Testament. Significantly, the first time this word is used is in Exodus chapter 19:3-6, when Moses hikes up Mt. Sinai to speak with God and receive the law. Here’s what God says to him as he goes up the mountain:

“This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’”

What this tells us is that, for an ancient Israelite, the “holy ones in the land” were first and foremost other Israelites, people who shared in God’s covenant. The holy ones were simply the community, those bound together by a shared trust in God and a desire to live out God’s ways.

If we think about what it means to channel our delight toward the “holy ones” in our land, its most basic sense is paying attention to one another – this Beloved Community – looking out for one another, taking care of each other, delighting in the fact that God’s Spirit has brought us together in Jesus’ name.

Then, of course, there’s the way that “the holy ones” has been understood in the Christian tradition to mean “the saints” – special kinds of individuals. The Church has recognized that certain individual lives and stories have been particularly powerful, have manifested the beauty, servanthood, and love of God in radical, world-changing ways.

No matter how we might feel about the institutional idea of saints, the truth is that we all have people we admire and stories that inspire us. The saints are those who make us want to do better for ourselves, to rise up and meet the challenges of our own time. It’s good for us to have these personal saints. They make us braver, more generous, more committed, more loving. As the poet Rilke put it, “Because once someone dared to want you, / I know that we, too, may want you.” It’s not just a poetic truth but a scientific fact that inspiration transforms us, delight steadies us, and stories of remarkable people help us grow. Who are your saints?

Finally, we might consider the “holy ones in the land” a third way, as the people that Jesus specifically pointed out as blessed. The poor and poor in spirit; the ones who mourn; the humble; the peacemakers and workers of justice. Jesus told us that he would be among the hungry and thirsty, the sick and imprisoned in a special way. He promised us that in serving and getting to know them we would be serving and getting to know him.

So, we have these three possibilities for understanding “holy ones” as: one another, as the saints, and as the poor and oppressed. Consider what this means for attention, for where and how we might concentrate our delight and our feelings of connection.

In prayer, we name one another, and we thank God for each other.

We reimagine the stories of those who lived exceptional lives.

We remember those who are typically forgotten, those we are not “supposed to” see.

Now, how about these people that “choose another god.” To understand who the Psalmist is talking about, we have to let the verse fully unspool: “those who choose another God multiply their sorrows; / their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out; / nor will I take their name upon my lips.”

Saints arouse delight. But those who choose another god? Look for sorrow. Look for blood. Look for the readiness to do violence. This is very important for our own context, because part of the crisis for Christians in America is that so many people are using the name of Jesus and the whole vocabulary of Christianity to promote visions of life as different as night and day.

As we know, Christian Nationalism is on the rise, and our own state is a breeding ground for it. Christian Nationalism is a complete blurring of the lines between church and state, where people seek to attain positions of political power or economic influence so that they can use the full weight of governmental policy to constrict personal freedoms and enforce narrowly-defined “Biblical values” on all people. But if you look at the sorrow this ideology causes, if you observe the violence it preaches, teaches, condones, and even commits – these are not saints in the boat with us who we should try our best to delight in. They are people who have chosen a different god, who are multiplying sorrows, who require sacrifices that amount to violence. And of course this doesn’t just apply to Christian

Nationalists, but to anyone who has staked their life on something that diminishes rather than expands their love.

Yes, we are called to pray for our enemies, and even to serve them when they are in need. We absolutely should believe in everyone’s capacity to be transformed, to pray for that transformation, and we need to always remain aware of our own shortcomings and blind spots.

But if prayer is about attention, about who we make ourselves present to and how we make ourselves present, then obsessing over evil and violence, filling our time and our minds and our eyes with only the stories that increase hatred and despair, is really bad for us. It multiplies our sorrows. We should carefully consider whether even to speak these stories one more time, to bring those names to our lips. To be a person of prayer means giving our attention first and foremost to stories that fill us with wonder and courage, and to those among whom Jesus has promised to be.

Here's a test we might give ourselves: Do I feel burning anger? (That’s not right or wrong on its own, but its what we do with it that counts.) Do I feel burning anger? Has it moved me to change my life in a way that specifically addresses the source of that anger? Or am I just stewing in it, letting it consume me? Am I adding to the noise or making a difference?

I quoted the Austrian poet Rilke a moment ago. He lived from 1875 to 1926, dying eight years after the end of the First World War. He lived through a war that ravaged the countries that he loved, that consumed the lives of many people that he knew. During those years, Rilke remained steadfast in his commitment to poetry, in trying to offer a wounded Europe the gift of their forgotten humanity.

Here’s how another poet of that same era, the Russian Maria Tsvetayeva described Rilke’s significance to her:

War, slaughterhouses, flesh shredded by discord – and Rilke. The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of Rilke, who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary. The times did not commission him, they brought him forth… Rilke is as…necessary to our times as a priest to the battlefield: to be for these and for those, for them and for us: to pray – for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen.1

I’ve never read a better definition of what it means to be a saint.

In harmony with this, Howard Thurman, an African American pastor, writer, and spiritual director once said this: “Always there is some voice that rises up against what is destructive, calling attention to an alternative, another way.”2 Our times may be ugly and brutal, but if we listen closely and are thoughtful about our attention, we can tune into the alternative voices, the living antidotes, the saints who are here to heal rather than to harm. We can resist the appeal of those blood offerings.

To sum all this up, another verse from the psalms, Psalm 119:37, says this: “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless; / give me life in your ways.”

And that’s just it: God, turn my focus away from violence, away from sorrow, and away from those who continually stoke violence and sorrow. Teach me who my delight should be in. Show me people who will show me You.

And now for a prayer practice that you can try this week:

Keep praying “Help me” everywhere and all the time. And add to that some focused reflection on a saint. It might be a grandparent, or a friend, or a mentor. It might be someone who lived decades, centuries, millennia ago. It might be someone who lived a very public life or someone whose name only you know. Perhaps in your memory there lingers just a single, bright moment when someone acted in a way that showed God to you, that changed what you believed was possible for your own life.

I want you to think about that moment, that person, or that story. Reimagine it. Journal about it. Tell someone about it. Notice how that offering of attention makes you feel in your body and what it makes you fantasize about. Pay attention to what is expansive in you and in others. That is prayer.

We focus on the holy ones because they teach us how to most honorable and effectively engage the world. They show us how to walk out onto the brutal landscape with a taste for delight rather than sorrow, having left the impulse to violence far behind.

May God make us holy and give us others to delight in.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.

Where there is Darkness, Light (Psalm 16:1-11)

Prayer, Part 2: Protect Me, O God

First UMC of Pocatello

January 19, 2025

Psalm 16:1-2

***

There are 150 written psalms in the Psalter. If you read them straight through, you’ll notice that these prayers express the full range of human emotion: ecstatic joy, blistering anger, deep shame, quiet hope, wide-eyed wonder, and more. For this reason, the Psalms have always been regarded as the essential “school of prayer” by both Jews and Christians. One of the tried-and-true spiritual practices from both religions is to pray psalms every day. From a Christian perspective, there is a unique layer of significance in that Jesus himself would have grown up praying the Psalms, knowing them by heart and drawing upon them in his own spiritual communion with the Father. So, there is a mystical yet very real sense in which we commune with Jesus in his own praying when we pray the psalms.

Psalm 16 will be our guide over the next several weeks as we explore some of the scriptural foundations and practical beginnings of prayer. Today, we will focus on verses one and two, so I invite you to hear the word of the Lord a second time:

Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;

I have no good apart from you.”

There are three insights that I want to draw out of these verses, the first being that prayer is not talk about God but conversation and communion with God.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord.” That’s first- and second-person speech: I, You. When we say “I” we speak from our personal center. We take ownership of our words and feelings, and we enter into a conversation. When we say “You” we acknowledge the livingness of God. God is not an idea to be debated or dissected, not a creed to assent to, but a personal Being who knows us and wants us. The original Hebrew of this phrase is even more poetic: “I said to the Lord, ‘My Lord, You.’” We can feel the basic affirmation and relishing of God’s there-ness.

There is plenty of room in Christian life to reflect upon God – I’m doing it right now, talking to you about God and prayer in the third person – but if all we ever do is reflect and we never actually pray; if we never say to God “Here I am,” then our talk about God will lose its helpfulness, its edge, its grounding in love.

In our society, we are formed to think of and speak about other people from a distance. Those people over there. They, them. We are quick to talk about people rather than to people. It’s certainly easier. There’s no room for argument, no human face to temper our speech, no other voice that might question our neat, closed narrative.

Prayer teaches us a different way of communication, because it brings even the most burning and painful and confusing emotions into the I-You conversation. “If only you, O God, would slay the wicked!” says Psalm 139:19, a fairly frequent sentiment in the psalms, actually. The motivation there is not so great; slaying the wicked isn’t, at least at face value, a “good” prayer. But it is a true prayer because what was in his heart was spoken to God, giving God space to respond to and transform – or even deny, for our own good – that request. When we learn to communicate with God as I and You, our relationships with other people, our whole posture toward the world, can be transformed, too.

I keep saying words like communication and conversation, but I want to make sure I’m clear that there’s no one “correct” way to pray. Not all prayer sounds or even looks like verbal conversation, something that could be written as dialogue in a story. The point of the “I” and “You” is that prayer means opening our depths to God and expecting to be met by a God who personally reveals himself to us. Prayer is presence, being who we are and as we are before God. So even something like silence can be a very powerful form of prayer if our intention in that silence is to simply be in God’s presence and allow the Spirit of God to search us completely.

The second point to make about these verses is that prayer often begins with acknowledging our dependence on God and our need for God’s provision and protection. “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” That’s how the psalm starts – with a demand, a plea, for protection. One of the best prayers we can pray, whether we are just starting off or have been at it for a while, is this: Help me. Help me. Help me. As the poet Wendell Berry has written:

It puzzled me once,

that ancient call

to ceaseless prayer.

Now I know.

Help me. Help me.

If I must stay

longer at work

give me strength.

Learning this was a huge breakthrough in my own walk with God about a year ago. I’m the kind of person who likes to do research, to go and learn a concept or idea or technique about prayer and then come and actually try to put into practice. Teach me over here, then I’ll pray over here.

But there was a time when Adrienne was still very little and not sleeping very well, and we had been sick probably ten times in a row, and it was late in the wintertime, and all the regular pressures of life and work were there – and I was so desperate for prayer but feeling so unable to pray, and I was short on time and even on interest for going off to learn some profound new thing or brilliant prayer hack. And my spiritual director encouraged me to just start praying the words, Help me, moment by moment, day by day. To turn “Help me” into what the ancients called a Prayer of the Heart, a word or phrase kept on continuous loop within us.

And so I did. I prayed it when I was awake with one of the kids for the 3rd time that night. I prayed it when I felt myself tempted toward anger or hopelessness. I prayed it when I about to have a hard conversation. I prayed it when something spontaneous interrupted my day and all I could do was respond as myself. I prayed “Help me” while grappling with an unexpected painful memory.

I might even be praying it right now!

Help me. Protect me. Save me. These can all be wonderful prayers of the heart. And here’s what was amazing about that: asking for Help is prayer. Even if what we’re needing help with is prayer itself, saying help me or protect me becomes prayer, the very thing we’re longing for. We might feel so stuck, so resistant, so confused or antagonistic or disinterested when it comes to prayer, but if we can be in that feeling and still say, Help me, then God has an opening to transform our hearts.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reaching out to God for help. We are dependent, finite, vulnerable creatures. But there is a difference between, on the one hand, crying out to God every so often when something very devastating or difficult happens and, on the other hand, praying “Help me” on repeat without ceasing, which is something the psalms model for us:

“O Lord my God, in you I take refuge; / save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me, / or like a lion they will tear me apart; / they will drag me away with no one to rescue” (7:1).

“O guard my life and deliver me; / do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you” (25:20).

Psalm 70:1: “Hasten, O God, to save me; / O Lord, come quickly to help me.”

And that’s only scratching the surface.

The third and final point I want to make about these first two verses of Psalm 16 is that prayer is about claiming God as our ultimate good and placing ourselves in God’s story: “I say to the Lord, You are my Lord, apart from you I have no good thing.”

These two short verses contain three different Hebrew names for God. The first, “Protect me, O God” – that’s El, the generic Hebrew term for a god.

I say to the Lord – that’s the holy name revealed to Moses at the burning bush which Jews do not pronounce out of reverence but which Christians occasionally translate as “Yahweh.” It’s the name of the God who makes covenant with the people.

And then, “I say to the Lord, You are my Lord” – that last one is Adonai, another name for God that means Lord or Master, someone in charge who we will listen to and follow and trust.

So, if we play with the translation a bit to bring out the nuances of those names, we might say something like: “Protect me, Creator – you who hold all things – for in you I take refuge. I say to the personal, promise-making God of the People, I am entering your way and your story. I have no good apart from you.”

Prayer is not about coming to know just any God, not God as blind force or impersonal energy or the philosophical idea of Being, but this God – the God of the covenant, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of Ruth and David and Solomon; the God of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; the God of Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph; of Peter and Andrew, and James and John; of Paul – and of all people from every nation who trust him and receive his Holy Spirit. When we pray we are entering into God’s great story, trusting that it guide us truly and be a source of good.

To sum this up: Prayer begins when, out of courage or desperation or innocence, we speak to God in personal terms. If we do that, we will find that God is always already reaching out to us, too. Prayer integrates us into a story and a community. And, finally, one of the best ways to begin own prayer practice is with that simple, ceaseless, honest prayer of the heart: Help me. Save me. Protect me. Pray it so that it becomes like a creek running outside a cabin, whose sounds become part of the landscape

Lord, teach us to pray.

And help us, for in you we take refuge. Apart from you we have no good thing.

Amen.

Prayer, Part 1: Being with Jesus in the In-Between (Luke 3:1-3, 15-17, 21-22)

First UMC of Pocatello

January 12, 2025

Baptism of the Lord

Luke 3:1-3, 15-17, 21-22

***

There was an in-between time. A passage, very much like a rest note in a musical composition. Purposeful, patient, preparatory. It was the time between Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River and the remarkable vision he received of heaven opening and the Spirit descending and his Father affirming his belovedness.

Luke is the only one who writes the story this way, whose Gospel tells us about the in-between. Matthew and Mark, they pack all of it in, the baptism from below and the gifts of power and love from above forming a single vivid scene. “And just as he was coming up out of the water,” Mark says, “he saw the heavens torn apart” (1:10). Matthew agrees: “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened” (3:16). But Luke slows things down a bit: “Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened” (3:20).

There it is, the in-between time. On one side, baptism. On the other, anointing and the blessing. And in between: Prayer.

Prayer is the only spiritual practice that Jesus’ disciples ever asked him to teach them how to do. “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), that’s what they asked, and they asked it after they had spent many days witnessing the consistency, intimacy, and power of his prayers.

They were in between. He had called them to follow him, and they followed, but they were not yet all that they would be. They had realized over time that prayer was the foundation of Jesus’ life – his anchor, his center. The truth he spoke, the compassion he exercised, the healing and light he brought to others – it all flowed from prayer. And so at last they came to him and named their own deep sense of need for prayer to be a part of their lives, too.

None of us are strangers to in-between times, those critical passages that bridge our initial responses to God’s activity in our lives and our becoming fully grounded in God’s pleasure and power.

I’ve experienced several in my own life already. I was baptized as a baby, so there was a record but no personal memory. It took many years, until I was about 13, to begin having experiences that woke me to the reality that God was there and wanted something to do with me. If I’m honest, my vocational journey continues to have in-between quality to it. I’ve felt called to ministry as a pastor as far back as high school, but I still resist being fully anchored in God’s unconditional love for me and power through me, often for reasons I’m not aware of in the moment.

I wonder what in-betweens you might be navigating right now. Maybe you got baptized or you joined the church; you started reading the Bible or you started serving in leadership; you sensed that God was calling you to something new – a new perspective, a new vocation, a new spiritual practice – and you took some first steps; or you’ve started a marriage; you’ve become a parent; maybe you’ve gathered great courage to step through the doors of a church for the first time in ages, maybe for the first time in your life. Whatever it is, you’ve had some kind of beginning, an initial response to the movement of God, like Jesus going to the wilderness. It was real and good and true, but no you sense you’re in an in-between time.

There’s more to be had there. More riches of love and power to unlock and unleash. God is deeply pleased with you and wants you to live your life out of that deep sense of love, but you’re not yet grounded in that love. You’re not in touch with the delight God takes in you or with your anointing. Since we are imperfect creatures, the in-betweens are inescapable. The critical thing is that we can respond to them in different ways, and how we respond matters.

For example, sometimes we respond to the in-between as if it is a betrayal. Imagine Jesus coming up out of the waters of baptisms, getting dried off, and, after waiting around for a while, deciding that, since there was no immediate vision of heaven, no obvious spiritual breakthrough, that his intuition had been wrong, that God had tricked or abandoned him, and he’d better get on home to Nazareth and be much more guarded when the next opportunity presented itself. Sometimes the space between beginning and fulfillment devastates us, and we throw in the towel and decide it was all meaningless – those early whispers of grace, those first steps. And we just sort of fade away from what once seemed so promising.

But at other times we take the in-between to be a false destination. We convince ourselves that the initiation without the full grounding in love and power is all that there must be, the best it’s going to get. We try to forge and forge an identity and vocation out of the in-between, out of some element that’s in the vicinity of true faith but not essential to it: skills, knowledge, volunteerism, piety. Others might even admire us for this. But deep down we’re ashamed, and getting by on our own power and self-justification makes us legalist, judgmental, and envious or bitter toward others.

Jesus does not want us to run away from the in-betweens, to count them as failure. He does not want us to make an identity out of emptiness and absence. He wants us to come and be with him in in the in-betweens. He is already there, waiting for us to join him. And he’s showing us how to be in the in-between. He’s teaching us to pray. More than that, he’s calling us to rest with him in his own patient prayers as he waits for heaven to open and the Spirit to come down and the Word of love to be spoken unmistakenly to him.

In his new book Passions of the Soul, Anglican bishop Rowan Williams says that Christian life means being “[p]laced together in the place of Jesus…[and] the place of Jesus is the place of the one to whom the Father has eternally said Yes.” That’s really what this great baptismal story wants us to see. Jesus is the Beloved. And, at least as Luke tells it, that belovedness was fully revealed after the drama of the baptism, as Jesus quietly, hopefully, and persistently prayed. When we join Jesus in prayer in our own in-betweens, we will hear that eternal Yes declared to our hearts. That Yes has been secured for us by the Christ who waits with us. Which means it is with joy, with hope, with great anticipation and tenacity that we can come to him and say, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Let me try and make it plain: If you are here today, and you have heard that God loves you unconditionally but you feel far from that love, Jesus will wait with you in prayer and teach you how to pray – and the love will come.

If you are here today, and you have sensed that God wants to work wonders of love through you, that you have a purpose, but you feel far from the presence and power of the Spirit, Jesus will wait with you in prayer and teach you how to pray – and the power will come.

As the scripture says, the one “who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Phil. 1:6).

Lord, teach us to pray.

And as it is for us as individuals, so it is for us as a community. In fact, I think we as a congregation are in an in-between time. We have made several good beginnings, we’ve responded to the movements of the Spirit. On the moral plane, we have become a reconciling community, honoring the full humanity of our LGBTQ siblings; we’ve made a public stand against the Death Penalty; we’ve provided for local childcare access. On the programmatic side, we’ve restarted classes for kids; we’ve got a full nursery; we’re empowering people to preach; we’re opening our building as a community resources and participating in local service. We even worked together to reimagine our worship space so that it more clearly reflects the nearness and kindness of the One we worship.

These are just a few things that come to mind, all good beginnings.

But there’s more, isn’t there? God wants us anchor us, as a community, in a deep trust. God wants us to know that we, together, are God’s Beloved Family, and that we will be cared and provided for, that God takes pleasure in us.

And God wants to send us the Holy Spirit so that we can love and serve with power, power exercised humbly, gently, patiently – and yet power that brings about healing; power that creates spaces of freedom and forgiveness; power that challenges injustice without bitterness or rage; power that feels the joy of one of our members as joy for us all, the pain of one of our members as all our pain; power that overflows and expresses itself as creativity, beauty, abundance; power to let go of old comforts and try new things; power that has something to do, something to say, about the overwhelming poverty, loneliness, and anxiety in which so many of our neighbors in Pocatello live.

Luke, the author of the Gospel, also wrote the book of Acts. And there are many ways that the two books mirror each other. Just as Jesus prayed in between his baptism and his vision of heaven, the early church also waited in prayer for their own spiritual anointing.

In Acts chapter 1, Luke tells us that after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Jesus’ followers gathered in Jerusalem. “They all joined together constantly in prayer” (Acts 1:14). And on the morning of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon in the sound of rushing wind and in the signs of tongues of fire, they were “all together in one place” – praying.

May we – individually and together – ask Jesus to teach us to pray. May our in-between times be full of purpose and communion. We are God’s beloved children. We are God’s chosen instrument. Until we know it for ourselves, may we abide with Jesus in the prayer in-between, patiently and with trust.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.

Prelude to Prayer: His Word Runs Swiftly (Psalm 147)

Prelude to Prayer: His Word Runs Swiftly

First UMC of Pocatello

January 5, 2025

The Second Sunday After Christmas

Psalm 147

***

During the first two months of this year, I will be preaching a series on prayer in our worship services. Two of the Church’s holy days, Baptism of the Lord Sunday, which is next week, and Transfiguration Day, which is on March 2nd, will bookend the series. We’ll be using the versions of those stories from Luke’s Gospel. Luke was a brilliant author, and he wrote these particular stories so that they “talk” to one another in illuminating ways. One of their common elements is prayer. They show us what happens when Jesus prays.

     From Luke’s story of Jesus’ baptism: “And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him…” (3:21-22).

From the transfiguration: “Jesus…went up onto a mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightening” (9:28-29).

When Jesus prays, God shows up.

When Jesus prays, a channel is created between heaven and earth, a channel through which love and power flow.

When Jesus prays, we look at him and see our destiny as people who pray in his name and through his Spirit. We see what it means for us to be the Body of Christ, continuing his praying life here and now through our own prayers.

In between those opening and closing movements of the series, I’m going to guide us through one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 16. It’s only got 11 verses, so we’re going to take just a verse or two at a time and dig deep. Of course, as a psalm, it’s a prayer in and of itself, a I have found it to also be a helpful teaching tool about prayer; it covers a lot of ground very concisely and contains a lot of the essentials in simple terms. The final verse of Psalm 16 says this: “You show me the path of life. / In your presence there is fullness of joy. / In your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Life, joy, and pleasure because of the nearness of God! That’s what prayer is about and makes possible. It’s also exactly what’s on display when Jesus prays after his baptism and before his transfiguration. He prays and God reaches out to him as the beloved child that he is. He prays and he begins shining like the sun.

I always try to remind myself that Jesus prayed the Psalms. They were his prayerbook. We should try to imagine what he felt and imagined and learned as he prayed them. More than that, we can trust that when we pray them, he is there praying them with us. The Psalms provide a special situation where our prayers, Jesus’ prayers, and the prayers of all God’s people coincide.

Our scripture for this morning is Psalm 147, and Jesus would’ve prayed that one, too.  Psalm 147 is song of praise – a Hallelujah Psalm, named after its first and last word, Hallelujah, which means “praise the Lord!” Reasons for why God is worthy of prays are strung like beads between those hallelujahs. Did you notice the verbs? When it comes to the hurting, God rebuilds, gathers, heals, bandages, helps. When it comes to creation, God covers, prepares, causes to grow, and provides. When it comes to the community, God strengthens, blesses, makes peace, and satisfies. You can imagine Jesus reading this Psalm and thinking, if this is what God does, then this is what I will do.

How does God do these things? “He sends his command throughout all the earth,” says verse 15 of Psalm 147. “His word runs swiftly.”

His word runs swiftly. What a great phrase. The word that was there in the beginning, speaking all creation into existence. The word that has sustained creation ever since. The word that came in a special way as Torah to the Israelite tribes. The Word that took on flesh in Jesus Christ. That same powerful word that orders creation and makes the seasons come and go; that same word that scatters snow and frost and hailstones and later melts them into flowing rivers; that word which reaches out to name the stars and reaches down to heal the brokenhearted – it runs swiftly to us, to meet us and transform us when we pray.

     A moment ago, I said that when Jesus prays, we see our destiny as people who pray in his name and through his Spirit. Let me be more straightforward: Our prayers, and the fruits of our prayers, should really not be all that different from his.

There is a theological term that’s relevant here called theosis. It’s a central belief in the Eastern Orthodox Christian world. Theosis means becoming like God, sharing in God’s life and God’s nature by becoming more and more unified with God. Those who write about theosis say that we become like God through prayer, by abiding in Christ. If you were here when I preached on John Wesley’s teachings about Christian perfection, you have a foundation for understanding this in our own tradition. Because Jesus has given us his Holy Spirit, we can become more like him every day. We can think his thoughts, feel his feelings, speak his words, do what he does. Many of the earliest Christian writers used to repeat the saying, “God became human so that humans might become God.” One of them, St Irenaeus, put it like this: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

Theosis.

God wants us to be our fullest, best, most beautiful selves by allowing the Word to become flesh in us. Just as Jesus, in the waters of baptism and on the mountain of transfiguration, experienced his own beloved identity while praying, just as he received the power of the Spirit for his ministry, so we can, too.

And let me tell you, our world needs people who pray.

The world needs channels between heaven and earth to open up in its homes, its neighborhoods, its workplaces, its ecosystems.

The world is stuck in patterns of belonging that exclude, in systems of power that oppress, in stories of wrongdoing that seed hatred generation to generation.

But deeper than all that people crave to know their belovedness in God’s eyes; they crave to step into their personal power as creatures who bless and heal others.

If we as a church are going to experience solidarity with the agonies and longings of our own community, then we need to pray, because prayer means paying attention.

If we are going experience the abundance of God’s resources in what can often feel like a fragile material situation, then we need to pray, because prayer means trusting that our daily bread will always come.

If we are going to be a community where wrongs are confessed, labels are dissolved, and divisions are overcome, then we need to pray, because in prayer we meet the God who releases us from shame and debt, who forgives us, and calls us to forgive others.

And if we are going to create space for new generations to come to know the love of God, we need to pray, because in prayer we meet the God who is living in the today and not stuck in the past, whose mercies are new every day; a God who helps us let go of what no longer serves the coming of his kingdom by praying, Your kingdom come.

Now, a lot of the language I just used echoes the Lord’s Prayer, and any extended teaching on prayer would be incomplete without those words that Jesus taught his disciples. Since I’m not going to deal with the Lord’s Prayer directly in this series, I’m instead going to have us pray it in worship in some versions different than the King James English that we’re used to. I’m not out to be a troublemaker. There’s something undeniably good about having a prayer so deeply inscribed in your heart and memory that you can call upon anywhere and anytime, that it becomes a living prayer, part of the fiber of your being.

But there’s also something healthy about doing a familiar thing in an unfamiliar way so as to focus on it freshly and explore the essence of what’s really there. Today, we had the prayer as it appears in the First Nations’ Version of the New Testament, a recent translation prepared by indigenous scholars from around the country. Jesus taught the “Our father” to the disciples in his everyday language, Aramaic, and I think it’s powerful to hear how the prayer can be said in the everyday language of people alive now. That’s really what this whole series will be about: Helping you – helping us –present ourselves to God just as we are so that he can transfigure us into more than we ever thought we could be, for the sake of others.

But here’s one thing I will point out about the Lord’s Prayer: It shows up later in Luke’s Gospel than it does in Matthew’s. Matthew places the teaching much earlier in Jesus’ ministry, embedding it in the Sermon on the Mount. But Luke holds it until his eleventh chapter, two chapter later than the Transfiguration. Luke has the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray after they have seen him do it day after day, after they’ve seen what his prayers make possible.

This is what’s next for First United Methodist Church of Pocatello. We’re going to ask Jesus to teach us to pray. This has to be our work; everything else we might want to do is secondary; everything else we’re called to do will flow from it.

And you know what’s wonderful?

If we ask Jesus to teach us, he will teach us.

His word runs swiftly to meet us.

I’d like to end by reading a few promises about prayer from the scriptures:

Deuteronomy 8:3: “…people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (NLT).

James 1:21: “…humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (CSB).

Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts” (CSB).

Isaiah 55:10-11: “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, / and do not return to it without watering the earth / and making it bud and flourish/ …so is my word that goes out from my mouth: / It will not return to me empty, / but will accomplish what I desire / and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (NIV).

May God’s purposes be accomplished among us.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.

Star Stories (Matthew 2:1-12)

Star Stories

First UMC of Pocatello

January 4, 2025

Epiphany Service at Trinity Episcopal Church

I’m not aways the most diligent follower of the lectionary, but I do know that the appointed Psalm for tomorrow’s worship is Psalm 147, the second of five Hallelujah Psalms that conclude the Psalter. Here is Psalm 147 verses 3 and 4:

[God] heals the brokenhearted

and bandages their wounds.

[God] counts the number of the stars;

[God] gives names to all of them.

One commentary on my shelf titles its chapter on this psalm “God of Stars and Broken Hearts.”[1] And that’s the truth of it: God — the one who created all things and whose purposes and love extend to the whole universe, even to the stars  — that God cares about our pain. And this Christmas season we celebrate that God did not just care from afar, but condescended to our level, bridged the unbridgeable gap between divinity and humanity, to meet us in the person of Jesus Christ. He comes to heal our broken hearts through his own suffering love.

                God counts the number of the stars, the Psalm says, and here and there throughout the Bible we get to read a good star story. Stories like the two included in our service this morning, one from Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, and one from St Matthew, the first book of the New. I wonder if there’s something to be pondered about beginnings and stars.

They make a curious pairing, don’t they, these two star stories. In the first, a man who has been on a long journey with no end in sight asks God for a bit of clarity. In chapter 12 of Genesis we read that Abram leaves his native land behind after God spoke to him. God promised Abram that we would receive descendants and a homeplace if he said Yes to the journey. More, God promised him a legacy, a new story: “all the families on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:3, NLT).

But by Genesis 15 ten years have passed, and in a moment of frustration, Abram demands a fresh speaking of the promise. In a wonderfully intimate scene, God brings Abram outside, out of confined space into open air, and says, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be” (15:5). As Abram looks up into a night sky glittering with stars, as he peers into the luminous haze of galaxies, his heart revives, and a patient, righteous faith is born in him. It was the sheer number of the stars that Abram was told to contemplate that night, a vision so awesome and beautiful that it calmed his soul.

Now let’s compare that to Matthew’s Magi. Immediately we see that it was not the grandness of a star-filled sky that caught their attention. No, they pondered that sky every night, charting its movements, developing a theory of its patterns, unpacking its signs. The American writer Wendell Berry has a poem that begins, “In a country you know by heart / it is impossible to go the same way twice, ”[2] which means, among other things, that the more familiar you are with a place the more capable you are of seeing something new. As a birder I can attest to this; its knowing the common birds in a place that makes the rare visitor so thrilling, even visible in the first place.

Well, the night sky was the Magi’s native country, and God reached out to them by manifesting a single difference within it. Not ten thousand stars. Just one. But that unexpected shift in the familiar picture was more than enough to set them off on their own journey into unfamiliar territory to seek the meaning of it for themselves.

I’d like to place one more star story into conversation with these others. Many of you are familiar with the beloved children’s book writer and illustrator Eric Carle, known for books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Walter the Baker. About a year ago, when my son and I were over at the Marshall Public Library raiding the Eric Carle section, we discovered an out-of-print book of Carle’s called Draw Me a Star.[3] We ended up enjoying it so much that I went online and purchased a used copy for us to keep at home.  

Draw Me a Star begins like this: “Draw me a star. And the artist drew a star. It was a good star. Draw me a sun, said the star. And the artist drew the sun. It was a warm sun. Draw me a tree, said the sun. And the artist drew a tree.” And on it goes, each creative act of the artist, beginning with that first star, calling for the creation of something else. The artist in the book proceeds to make a beautiful, full world – to make a life. The artist begins as a small child, laboring over each line of his star. By the time he is a young man, the star “is good” and full of color. The artist disappears for a while until, as a middle-aged man, he appears again, putting the finishing touches on a rainbow that arcs over a scene of dogs and cats; birds, butterflies, and flowers; trees, clouds, and a house. Turn the page and the man is elderly, called to draw “a dark night.” The night asks for a moon, and the moon for a star. The book ends with these words: “Hold on to me, said the star to the artist. Then, together, they traveled across the night sky.”

As readers, we don’t know who spoke that first imperative – “Draw me a star” – to the little child. Was it God? Was it the true self? Was it the artistic spirit laying claim to a life? Do we have to choose? The point is that the call came and that the artist responded, setting off a chain reaction of desire and creation. Every fulfillment opening onto something new. Every end a new beginning. The artist’s task was to submit himself to hearing and doing the next right thing.

As you leave the service a bit later, you’ll be handed your very own Epiphany Star. These stars were created by our friends at First Presbyterian Church. Each star has a word or a Bible verse written on it, and we offer it to you as a way focusing your reflections, prayers, and actions in the coming weeks. How will you write your own star story? And in case that sounds daunting, let me assure you that these other stories – Abram, the Magi, and Eric Carle’s artist – grant us a lot of room for imagining how we might live our own.

Perhaps, like Abram, you’re already on a journey – of a life, a calling, a commitment – but you’re stuck, frustrated, confused. You set out when the call and the promise were fresh and new, but what your heart craves now is a new experience of the wonder of it all. If that’s you, use your star to name these very complaints and questions before God. Ask God to gently lead you outside, out beyond your attempts to understand or predict or control. Ask God to meet you right there in the darkness of your not-knowing and to give you a broader, illuminated view of things. Maybe the best thing you can do for yourself is set aside some time to simply be – to be with God in silence, to be with your story, to be somewhere out in the world that causes you to look up. And there are people who will gladly guide you into these spacious places: spiritual directors, pastors, friends, one of the saints in your church. Perhaps this season is a time to ask for help.

But maybe, like the Magi, this is a season that will initiate a journey for you, that will disrupt your routine, upset your ordinary. They were just at home doing their thing, after all, looking at the sky. But they were present enough to their life and their surroundings that they were able to notice the new star when it appeared among the others. And not just notice it out there; they also noticed the questions it raised; they noticed how it made them feel. The Magi embraced a small change in their ordinary world and through the full weight of their energy at searching out its meaning.

Maybe that’ll be your task this Epiphany. You wouldn’t describe your life as a journey right now, but that’s just because you haven’t given yourself over yet to the subtle shift in the ordinary. You know, the one that’s been nagging at the back of your mind for weeks now, the question or vision surfacing to consciousness in your idle moments and day dreams. The person you’ve been wondering about. The place you’ve been wanting to see. The invitation that seems to keep coming. For you, a bit of journaling or daily prayerful examination to help you notice the subtleties, and then, some risk! A bit of seizing the moment, trusting your gut. Getting up and going to see. Perhaps the star you receive will help shake something loose or bring something into focus. Epiphany, for you, will bring the start of something new.

And for many of us, this might be an Eric-Carle’s-artist kind of Epiphany. Very often, all that God wants us to ask in our lives is this: ‘What’s the next right thing for me to do?’ In his brilliant little book Passions of the Soul, Rowan Williams says, “In the long run, the pattern of integrated, restored human life that we’re called to and drawn to in the labour of prayer and service and love is in all sorts of ways…a matter of doing the next thing.”[4] Williams calls us to “concentrate on the question ‘What has God asked me to just get on with?’” as a way of avoiding unnecessary sojourns into despair or pride or apathy. It’s the old writer’s rule: this follows that. And that doesn’t have to be boring at all. Doing the next right thing means adding the next layer of sediment, the next layer of color. It’s the cumulative beauty of a faithful life, fulfilment and desire giving birth to each other. Maybe your star will simply help you know what’s next: later today or tomorrow or several weeks down the line.

The point I want to emphasize in all this is that God is alive and creative and not bound by rules. God is a personal force, a constant call. Which means God is known in our going. God is encountered in our seeking.

For Abram, the stars provided strength to keep going.

For the Magi, the star of Bethlehem got them going.

For the artist, the star began a lifelong unfolding of creative potential.

In a new year when we will be ever tempted to adhere to old divisions, old labels, old habits, and old stories, may we remain willing to look up, to search out the meaning of new signs, and to do the next right thing.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] Leslie C. Allen, Psalms 101-120, Volume 21, Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 304.

[2] Wendell Berry, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2024), 6.

[3] Eric Carle, Draw Me a Star (New York: Philomel Books, 1992).

[4] Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024), 16.

To See: Intention, Fulfillment, and Benediction (Luke 2:1-20)

To See: Intention, Fulfillment, and Benediction

December 24, 2024

 Luke 2:1-20

***

  For the shepherds, Christmas Eve began with an announcement from heaven. An angel of the Lord appeared, telling them about the birth of a Savior in the town of Bethlehem, and then the shepherds stood awestruck as the sky was filled with whole ranks of these heavenly messengers singing their Christmas song. Once the angels had withdrawn again into heaven, once the sounds of proclamation and praise had faded once more into holy silence, the shepherds had a decision to make. Would they rest content with having heard the news, or would they go and see things for themselves? We know their choice; they chose to go: “Let us go now to Bethlehem,” they say to one another, “and see this thing…which the Lord has made known to us” (2:15). But let’s not miss that it was a choice. They talked it over. Word of mouth, word even of an angel’s mouth, was not enough for them. If there really was a Savior born that night for them, they wanted to see the truth with their own eyes.

In telling the story of the shepherds, Luke uses the verb “to see” three times. I’ve already quoted the first instance from the shepherds’ words, “Let’s go and see this thing.” The second instance occurs after they find the holy family: Mary, Joseph, and Jesus wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. “When they saw this” (v. 17), Luke says, they began to tell their story. They tell Jesus’ family and everyone else within earshot about their encounter with the angels. Mary gathers these precious details into her heart and imprints the shepherds’ words on her memory. Finally, as the story ends, the shepherds return to their fields, glorying God “for all that they had heard and seen” (v. 20).

Let’s go and see.

When they saw.

For what they had seen.

Intention. Fulfillment. Benediction.

Intention—they decide to go. Fulfilment—their going is rewarded. Benediction—they say Thank You.

                In many ways, living this cycle over and over again is what it means to be a person of faith. Somewhere along the line we decide that what we’ve heard – from parents, teachers, preachers, culture – isn’t enough. Our longing for a personal encounter with the truth propels us out on a quest. We are set upon by a question that won’t let us go. And then somewhere down the line there is a fulfillment, a resolution, though it often arrives in a form and a manner that we don’t expect. This is followed by a period of integration and reflection whose mood is praise. We return to our “fields” with new eyes and a change of heart until, once again, a holy restlessness sets us on the move.

Intention, fulfilment, benediction.

                If you were to imagine yourself there with the shepherds on that first Christmas night, which of these three moments do you see yourself in? Are you huddled with the others in the field, deciding if you will respond to the words of the messenger? Are you in the manger, staring wide-eyed at the holy child and spilling your side of the story? Are you heading back into the fields with songs on your lips, a changed person?

If your heart is begging you to go to Bethlehem and add firsthand sight to second-hand word, then tonight I think God would want you to set an intention. Jesus, in his kindness, has promised us so many things if we would but seek him for ourselves.

Things like – release from our efforts at holding it all together. He says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Maybe you are finally ready to go and seek the truth of that word. He has promised us unconditional love – “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” – and maybe tonight there’s nothing left to do but coming to him at last and learning how to abide.

Or maybe you look at the world today and struggle to believe in the goodness of it, to look hopefully toward its future, and you’ve heard Jesus say, “I have told you these things, so that you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), and now you are ready to seek that strong peace. Or you have been held captive by old grudges and have heard him say, “Forgive others, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37), and tonight you are ready to take the first step on the hard road of forgiveness.

Whatever it is that you most desire from God – peace, hope, forgiveness, communion, purpose – the shepherds invite you to stand in their company and be moved by their courage to go and see for yourself.

The good news for you this Christmas is that if you seek him, you will find him. You will find him because he has already drawn near to you. He has already bridged the distance between heaven and earth, his divinity and our humanity. He has already chosen to be with you. And his decision is irreversible. He has made himself inseparable from us. And he has united his perfect life with the stuff of creation. He has met us far more than halfway, and he will meet you far more than halfway. Indeed, it’s his Holy Spirit stirring up this restlessness in you from the start, awakening your longings, lighting the spark of your desire. “Everyone who seeks, finds,” Jesus says. I hope this Christmas that you will make it your urgent intention to know God for yourself.

Now, perhaps you are here during a time of fulfilment. You’ve waited faithfully through the darkening weeks of Advent – or far longer: you’ve been on a journey, you’ve been looking for the promised sign. And here he is, and here you are. You are standing face-to-face with the truth, or a facet of it, and something new and precious is being opened for you, unlocked in you. You quest has been rewarded. Christmas is a time of adoration and contemplation.

If that’s you, I want you to notice that in their own moment of fulfillment, the shepherds became messengers. Just as the angel made known the birth of Jesus to them, so they made their experiences to Mary and Joseph. The shepherds become message-bearers, heralds, angels, in their own way, to Mary and Joseph. They pass the great announcement along about who this child is. Mary and Joseph didn’t get heavenly angels, they got these earthy ones who smelled like sheep and campfire and dirt.

In their going, the shepherds found that they had a gift to give. They discovered a vocation. They found their voice.

So, your journey is never just for you. You may set off on a very personal quest, a need to experience the truth of God’s goodness, the reality of God’s nearness, for yourself. But in your going, you will be prepared not only to receive a fulfilment but to give a gift: the gift of your story. You never know at the beginning who else will benefit from your journey, whose heart will someday become a storehouse for your words. But if you are here tonight in a moment of fulfilment, I want you to ask God who your story is meant to bless. How might you encourage someone else with what you have experienced.  Isn’t God good, that the very questions and conundrums and longings that caused us to plunge into the unknown of our seeking were the very things that led us into our power? We went to learn something true for ourselves, and we arrived just in time to strengthen the truth in somebody else. Who is your story for?

Finally, maybe tonight you’re on the return journey, and this Christmas is part of an ongoing benediction for you. You’re looking back on a year, a season, a time of profound growth and change, and you’re here to simply say Thank You. You’ve seen what you went to see, and you’re returning now a different person. You’re learning what it’s like to live in this new skin, to see through these open eyes.

If that’s you, you task is simply to praise, to give gratitude and joy the space they deserve. Don’t underestimate the importance of this movement. The questing is full of turmoil and intensity, high highs and low lows. The fulfilment is a rapture, a time to be fully present and in many ways overcome. But the benediction – the thank you – is a time for memory and praise to do their work. You have a bit of distance from the events and can now turn them over and over in your heart, pondering the meaning of them all. You are here to infuse the darkness with songs of triumph, songs of hope, and if there is a task for you, it is the task of learning to let your praise shape and mold your so-called ordinary life. What will it mean for you to be a shepherd – a mother or a father, a son or a daughter, a colleague or a friend, a teacher or a neighbor – whose eyes have seen the Christ?

Intention, fulfillment, benediction.

What is the call of Christmas for you?

A final thought: Notice how every step of the shepherds’ journey unfolds in community. The shepherds decide to go and see together. They behold the face of Christ together and they tell other people their story. They return to the fields singing songs together.

I pray that God will provide every one of us with a community.

I pray that we find solidarity in our seeking and companionship in asking our questions.

I pray that our fulfillment will arrive among surprising company and that our journey will overflow in blessings for others.

I pray that in our times of return our reflections will be sharpened and our praises amplified by the corroborating witness of others.

In other words, I pray that we will each find a church, or better yet, that we will become the church for one another. For what is the church, if not a people who will say to one another “let us go and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us,” and then make the journey together.

Merry Christmas, friends.

Amen.

The Righteousness of Joseph (Matthew 5:17-20, 1:18-25)

The Righteousness of Joseph

December 15, 2024

 Matthew 5:17-20, Matthew 1:18-25

 In Matthew’s telling of the Christmas story, the whole of Matthew chapter 1, we only get Joseph. We get Joseph’s family tree, Joseph’s dream, Joseph’s naming of his son. Matthew chapter two, we’ve jumped ahead a couple years to Herod’s murder plot and the story of the Magi. But for the birth of Jesus we just get chapter 1. And, as with all Gospel texts, we’re presented with the life of Jesus with a particular point of view: Matthew shows us what he wants to show us, we see what he wants us to see. And what he wants us to see, when it comes to the birth of Christ, is the way that Jesus fits into the tradition. His Christmas story is just 25 verses and 17 of those are this genealogy: “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

             “Abraham was the father of Isaac,

            Isaac the father of Jacob,

            Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.”

 And this isn’t just a genealogy, it’s a list of the heavy hitters. Boaz. Rahab. Ruth. Jesse. David. Solomon. All the way down the line to:

             “Eleazar the father of Matthan,

            Matthan the father of Jacob,

            And Jacob the father of Joseph,

            the husband of Mary, of whom

            was born Jesus, who is called Christ.”

 Okay, so technically this is the genealogy of Joseph. In the strictest sense of the word “genealogy.” It’s presented in this neat list: “the father of, the father of,” every once and a while shout out to mom, but the lineage is an unbroken chain of fathers and sons. “Fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to Babylonian exile, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.” Well. Sort of. “The father of, the father of, the husband of---Mary.” Mary, who is the one that shares a bloodline with Christ. For a culture singularly fixated on provable paternity, it almost feels like Matthew is winding us up for this little hiccup. The Messiah will come from the line of David. And he has. In a manner of speaking.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place this way: Mary and Joseph were engaged to be married when Mary got pregnant. Joseph knew that they hadn’t had sex and, being a righteous man and unwilling to disgrace her in public, planned to quietly break off the engagement. Matthew tells us that Mary is “with child from the Holy Spirit,” but even the nicest, coolest guy in the whole world probably isn’t buying that. Culturally, Joseph would have had every right to publicly humiliate her, hurt her, kill her. Any of that would have been mostly in-bounds for his religion and his society; it would have been justifiable. Afterall, his fiancé is pregnant with someone else’s baby.

So, Joseph isn’t just righteous. He doesn’t just know his Torah and his Prophets, he isn’t just in good standing at the Temple. He puts his faith into practice with Mary. A pregnant girl in her teens who has, apparently, sinned and he’s going to do everything he can to protect her, while also distancing himself from a sinful woman. There isn’t an ancient Hebrew advice columnist who would have recommended more than that. Joseph, son of David, son of Abraham, is a credit to his faith and to his faith community.

But just when he had decided to do this; just when he laid himself down to sleep, resolved to wake up in the morning and go to Mary’s house to let her down easy, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Well, that’s a dirty trick. To play on sweet Joseph. Righteous Joseph. Joseph who really thought this through, made the godliest decision he could possibly discern. He had it right. And here’s an angel of the Lord, come to tell him he’s wrong. And, also, who said he was afraid? He’s not afraid; he’s not acting out of fear; he just doesn’t want his association with an unmarried pregnant woman to mar his reputation or decrease his standing in the community potentially leading to loss of wages, power, or privilege. He’s not afraid.

He’ll do it. He’ll marry her.

And I wonder how long it took him to wrap his head around this choice. He does what the angel says to do, but how long before his heart was in it? How long before his heart understood  it? Joseph’s original answer was the correct answer. And he’s not just a legalistically correct student of the Torah, he’s spiritually alive. He’s not just following the letter of the law, he’s trying to love God by loving Mary. And his plan to dismiss her is the product of the resources of faith to which he has access: an ancient law, a living body of interpretation (the prophets), and the decisions being made for and about him by the religious and political powers of his day. This is what makes him righteous, in the world of the scriptures. He is doing the absolute, mathematical best he can with what he’s been given. Yet, the minute the body of Jesus comes on the scene, the scaffolding of his faith fails.

Matthew wants us to see the way that Jesus fits into the tradition. Not the idea of Jesus, not the flat words on the page, not the poetic images of the ancient prophets, the body of the actual Christ. The physical, blood and bone of Jesus before it’s even an independent body, the fetus Christ, still inseparable from the person of Mary, is breaking the conclusions reached by those faithfully carrying forward the religious tradition.

Jesus is being grafted into the line of David via adoption, he’s being born into a situation that sits outside Righteous Joseph’s understanding of his faith – it may be “to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” but this is a suspect fulfillment. If I know the law and the words of the prophets and the correct way to act within my faith community, I would probably reject your so-called fulfillment of prophecy. It doesn’t add up.

It turns out, of course, that this is what Jesus’s blood-and-bone body does to everyone, everywhere he goes, for the rest of his life. Here is the Messiah that has been foretold and the major complaint of the most righteous religious leaders of his time is that this cannot be the Messiah, he’s wrong for the part. From the moment of conception he doesn’t fit. Not even into the faith of his father.

This morning we heard the part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount where he addresses this problem head-on: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” I had some questions about those words. Not to abolish but to fulfill. Not exactly opposites, “abolish” and “fulfill.” The word used for “abolish” here is also the word used when talking about destruction of the temple, taking apart, tearing down. The word “fulfill” here is the same word quoted in Matthew 1:22, the same word that points us to fulfilling the words of the prophets. Fulfilling scripture. Animating the story that started way back at the beginning of the book. I didn’t come to tear apart your faith, I came to make it manifest.

Which is very confusing, but— It's the bread. Right?

Jesus is always talking, telling weird little stories, disgruntling his own followers, and no one ever has any idea what he’s talking about. So, finally, he grabs the bread. First, insisting on the mathematical impossibility of feeding the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. Then, later, the scientific impossibility of feeding all believers for the rest of time with his own body. But there he goes, he starts breaking that bread up and it looks like your portion is getting smaller and smaller, you are going to get less and less as more people show up, and yet somehow there are just twelve, massive baskets of food leftover after everyone has eaten their fill. It’s the year two-thousand-and-twenty-four and that’s bread on that communion table. That’s not magic, that’s a promise fulfilled.

He says he didn’t come to negate even one letter of the law, he came to finally, fully embody godly interpretation of the law. The opposite of abolish, here, the opposite of “tear down” would be “to build up.” But that’s not what he says. He didn’t come to protect the law, fortify the law, he came to live rooted in the law and grow up and out to a fullness that no one could imagine. And his resurrection means that that surprising, surpassing fulfillment is what animates Christians still.

But it also challenges us, we who have found righteousness within the church. Who love the Bible. Who tie our faith to the practices and traditions of our faith community. Who want to see our beliefs valued at the highest levels of government. Who say God is alive, but resist the idea that the Spirit might be growing ever more robust interpretations of the law in the hearts of other Christians. When someone’s faith surprises us, we’re often quick to say: “You’ve come to destroy the church. You want to tear it down.”

It's the bread.

It’s going to look a whole lot like getting torn apart sometimes. It’s only a broken genealogy that puts Jesus in the line of David. Broken Jewish custom that sees Joseph and Mary taking a trip to Bethlehem as a couple. Broken taboos that allow Jesus to touch and cleanse a man with leprosy. Broken physics that let Jesus walk on water. Broken justice that frees Barabbas and crucifies Christ. And that big, thick curtain, protecting the inner sanctum of God’s dwelling place from the people of God, is torn right down the middle.

The presence of the body of Christ, even in the short months between conception and birth, is always characterized by the breaking of things to make people whole. What happens to Mary and her unborn child if Joseph isn’t willing to break with an old idea? When the religious culture, the religious institution is preventing people from being whole, Jesus is breaking the structure to reform it. And Matthew wants to make sure we know that he is doing it while walking perfectly and indisputably within the tradition.

Last Sunday, sitting over there on the side and appreciating the feel of the room in this horseshoe configuration I had a sort of -- I think we would call it a flight of fancy. That it’s almost like God reached two massive hands down and broke the room. And, that seemed to me, a hopeful thought. In an age where it can sometimes feel like Jesus has left the building, so to speak. That our laws, teachings, interpretations – but also – calendars, spaces, programs, and even pews remain good and fruitful material for the new work that God is doing in the world. And, if we can take the angel of the Lord seriously, and not be afraid, that the hand of God might also reach in and break open whatever has become static and rigid within me. No matter how righteous.

It is the third Sunday of Advent. Jesus isn’t even here yet. But the Body of Christ is drawing near. Close enough to throw even the righteous into Holy crisis. I want to be a person who’s willing to sacrifice what I think makes me good, in the eyes of other believers, for a chance to participate in the new work of the Spirit; the new ways Jesus wants to fulfill the law. And – I’m afraid. I should be afraid. Joseph ended up in Egypt in hiding while one of the most powerful rulers of the time hunted his family. It’s not a no-stakes proposal. But that’s the risk of getting close to the body of Christ. Just getting close to it. Whether that’s coming to the table or encountering him among the sick, the hungry, the refugees, the prisoners. Just brush up against him and your life might suddenly not be your own.

At least, that’s the hope.

May we be accepting of what will be broken and attentive to who will be made whole.

Amen.

ADVENT, December 8 2024

The season is changing, temperatures dropping, the wind carries a chilly bite and the hours of daylight are getting shorter. The trees and bushes give a brilliant display of color as they let their leaves go and the animals stock up and hunker down for the period of cold and darkness. They are waiting.

People begin bundling up, raking leaves, putting warm weather items away and get out the cold weather equipment (snow shovels/blowers, make sure their homes are ready for cold), some people get excited with the coming of winter sports and some are looking forward to a blanket, good book, and a hot drink while the wind blows and the snow falls. We wait. Advent means coming. The season of “already, not yet”.

The Hebrew people have always been in a state of “already not yet”. They already know the One True God but have not yet been able to obey and follow His ways. The reason, I think, that it is so hard is that we are easily distracted by this world and the evil one that tempts us all. Of course, we all know that the Evil One, the tempter roams the earth looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8-10)

As a quick recap of the Old Testament;

The Old Testament in a nutshell.

He spoke; the heavens and earth appeared He spoke; The stars twinkled, the sun rose and set the moon lit up the night. He spoke; plants grew, flowered, and gave fruit He spoke; all manner of creatures appeared on the earth, in the skies, under the earth, and seas filled. Man and woman were created He made them in His image and breathed life into their souls. Desiring fellowship with man and woman He gave them choice. They chose for themselves not to hear and obey Him, and sin/evil entered in. Man and Woman walked through the gate and God was sad but they chose. He watched: Abraham obeyed He watched; Noah built the boat and saved the day. He watched; His people were enslaved He gave; Moses instructions from a burning bush. His people were saved He led; his people through the wilderness, raining mana from the sky and water from rocks He watched; His people fall away, too afraid to believe His power God sent; Joshua, the promised land to claim His people; the Deceiver led astray God sent; Judges to show God’s way His people; Cried out: send a king, so like other nations we’ll be God sadly complied; You need only Me God sends; His prophets, to teach, plead, to expose His plan His people; rejected, refused change, their choice, they can God used; the enemies for exiles or correction, to open the Hebrew’s eyes God changed; the ruler’s heart, Hebrews’ were sent home, their temple rebuilt. God waited; for His people to turn, invite Him in His people; wanted His blessings now, their hearts not right, evil ways and apathy prevailed God tried; one more time, sent Malachi, to open their eyes and spirits to revive God sighed; His people denied change, God went silent and continued His plan.

The relationship between the living Creator and the creation He so dearly loves is found in the Old Testament. In the garden the fruit was eaten through an act of free will and that disobedience introduced evil to the world. God immediately had compassion and covered Man’s/Woman’s sin with the first blood atonement, shown in providing animal skins for covering.

The bridge to commune with the Creator was blocked when Man/Woman were evicted from the garden. Mankind has been waiting since then. But God has a plan. First mention of God’s plan is found in Gen. 3:15. “And I will put enmity between you and the women, and between your seed and her Seed”

This is the first mention of God’s plan for redemption, this first sin, evil now in the world and life made hard with man and woman being evicted from the garden.

Now God began waiting to have His people come back to Him so He could bless them and be their God. For about 2 thousand years God, loved, taught, entered into covenants(promises) saved His people from slavery, bequeathed land, He stayed with His children no matter what the people chose, watching, hoping.

God used all manner of peoples and nations, kings, judges and prophets to point His people to Him. the prophets told the people of the coming(advent) of the Messiah. God revealed details of the coming Messiah. For instance, the place of birth revealed in Micah 5:2, preceded by a messenger, just like a King, in Isaiah 40:3, virgin birth Isaiah 7:14. The Messiah is shown in all of the books in the OT.

The time of the Old Testament was a time of highs and lows, of rebellion and return. Times the people would love and worship, seeking Him, then, they would give over to the evil one and turn away from God. The age of the Old Testament came to an end and God sent silence to the people, He sent no more prophets. He remained patient. He waited. He prepared. Remember God HAS a plan which is a mystery to eyes that are not open and ears that cannot hear. We as limited human beings need to remember what is said in Isaiah 55:9; “For as the heavens are higher than the earth. So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

The people waited. God watched. The four hundred years between the Old and New Testaments brought more of the same as found in the Old Testament. The people find themselves in a desperate situation. A faithful servant arises to “stand in the gap”. Examples of this in the Old Testament would be Noah and the Ark, Moses and Pharoah, Joseph and the famine, the judges, Ester, Nehemiah. In each of these the efforts of Man had to be frustrated, they had to be unable to solve their problems by themselves before divine intervention happened.

During the 400 years between Testaments the people were oppressed by the Persians, Egyptians, Syrians. No one stood up for God until Matthias started the Maccabean revolt against the Syrians and king Antiochus when he demanded animal sacrifice to heathen gods and defiled the temple. Matthias and his 4 sons were successful in defeating the Syrians and the result was 70 years of peace. This revolt is the birth of the Festival of Hanukkah.

The Hasmonean dynasty came to power and the choice of the High Priest changed from selecting from the Aaronic line to more political of a choice. It had little to do with God and serving Him. The Pharisees (follow the Law to the letter) were opposed to the Hasmoneans who wanted to appoint a king that was not of the line of David. Those who opposed the Pharisees, supporting the Hasmoneans were called Sadducees. The Sadducees were related to the high priest and tended toward more social, political, and earthly aspects of their position. They formed the social aristocracy of the Jewish nation, wanted to maintain separation of church and state and believed holiness had nothing to do with the nation's destiny. The Sadducees looked at the Pharisees as old fashioned, irrelevant and fanatical.

The final oppressors in the four-hundred-year period were the Romans. The people are not able to deal with the shifting tide of political power and religious belief. They were now in a kind of spiritual bondage that was more desperate than their political bondage. The different factions and parties (the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots and the Herodians and the Hasmoneans) were all looking for a solution to their problems all without success. The people waited with no evidence of turning back to their One True God. God has a plan!

Living in these tumultuous days were Zacharias and Elizabeth, a couple that were well advanced in years. Zacharias was a priest in the division of Abijah and he waited to serve, day after day, he was never selected to serve in the temple of the Lord. Never had a chance to serve as he had dreamed of for his entire life. He was well acquainted with waiting. His wife Elizabeth was in the line of the daughters of Aaron, the first high priest, brother of Moses. Elizabeth was well acquainted with waiting also, you see she was unable to give Zacharias an heir. She was barren, childless. Throughout her life she waited, prayed, pleaded to be able to fulfill her purpose as a woman and a wife. In her culture if she was not able to have children, she had no purpose in life. In their culture they would have been scorned, pitied, talked about with sadness because neither of them has been able to perform their duties in this life, all they have been able to do is wait. In spite of a life spent with unfulfilled dreams and expectations Zacharias and Elizabeth “were both righteous before God, walking in ALL the commandments AND ordinances of the Lord. BLAMELESS.” In these days the number of priests that wanted to serve in the temple were extremely numerous. There were so many that not all would be able to serve in the temple, not even once. Zacharias waited and wondered if he would ever have the opportunity to perform the duties that he had been trained for.

Solomon tells us what to do while we wait in Proverbs 3:5-6 “trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”

Notice it does not say that waiting/trusting will be easy. Life happens one day at a time. These folks, heirs to Abraham’s promise, devout, loyal and faithful followers of Adoni, WAITED for the advent of their destinies. They didn’t give up and they were BLAMELESS. Zacharias and Elizabeth focused on the Lord.

God saw Zacharias goes to work as usual, gathering with the others to draw lots, as was the custom, to see who would have the honor of serving at the hour of incense in the temple. Zacharias literally won the lottery; his name was chosen to serve in the temple! Unbelievable, he may have thought, God has finally shown favor on His humble servant. He would have been nervous because verse 10 tells us that the whole multitude of the people was praying outside at the hour of incense. The pressure would have been immense, it all had to be perfect.

Zacharias went into the temple and standing to the right of the altar of incense was an angel. God breaks His silence. read Luke 1:12-23 Zacharias comes home with news that is quite unbelievable and could not tell Elizabeth what had taken place. He would have told her using Something to write on and it probably would have taken a bit. We can only guess at Elizabeth’s reaction to what she was reading but knowing the truth of it by her husband’s lack of speech. Verse 24 tells us that Elizabeth conceived. She was to have a baby! She says, “Thus the Lord had dealt with me, in the days when He looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.” This tells us that her life had not been easy among her people. Now she and Zacharias waited again, this time for the fulfillment of God’s promise.

Elizabeth and Zacharias were not the only ones waiting. Mary had been visited by Gabriel as well and God chose her to have the Son of God and Gabriel tells her about her cousin being pregnant now 6 months. Mary would have experienced anxiety about being pregnant and not married. In her culture being pregnant out of wedlock could have resulted in her being put to death. She left to go see her cousin in the hill country, while she waited. Mary had no idea what would happen outside of doing God’s will and bearing this child. She knew she could talk to Elizabeth about these miracles they were experiencing. Read Luke 1:40-45 Trust in God and all will be well. God has a plan; He is speaking again and he is using these people who love Him to bring about the miracle of the Messiah. God smiles, we wait.

And now we wait for the only birth that brought true redemption, true salvation, true peace, that of Emmauel, Prince of Peace, God with Us, Jesus’ son of the Living God as foretold throughout the age.

Within Despair, Divine Hope (Luke 1:36)

Within Despair, Divine Hope

Advent Week One, December 01. 2024

Luke 1:36

Good morning:

I would like to thank you all for your warm welcome this Advent Season as we lean in together as a community in waiting…until the arrival and celebration of Christmas.

As some of you have heard, have seen, and have witnessed the following weeks may tend to look a little different than the per usual celebrations of connection, due to the extended help and resources of some wonderful women stepping into sharing their journey and messages of truth along with all of us throughout this advent season… as well as all of you… for your warmth, love, and consideration into welcoming us as a part of our journey. Thank you!

Within the passage of Luke, the angel answered “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of The Most High will overshadow you” . . . Overshadow… this word has always struck such a chord within me… The Greek definition to overshadow means to envelop … to cast shadow upon. But here within this context it is often used to convey divine presence, suggesting a sense of intimacy and or closeness. Sometimes … at times for me within my own journey.. The vulnerability of closeness and change can feel both overshadowing and unimaginable.

Mary’s questioning response in reply to the Angel, when she was met in a life altering shadow of a monumental moment that I can only assume/ imagine… possibly felt deeply overwhelming… unimaginable to say the least and quite overshadowing… her only reply was… within this passage is… “How can this be?” How can this be that I am going to become pregnant… and bare a child…when I haven't strayed, from what I have been taught… have been told… known to be true? How can this be… that such an overwhelming life altering choice is being asked of. made.. for/ been consented for me? To me? “How can this be?!”

Such a narrative … for such a young woman on a path of something not only life altering … but also unimaginable.

Narratives of the unknown. Often, even subconsciously run rampant at times within my own depths and shadow of my soul.

A questioning and response to my own over looming shadows has often arisen and has also impacted me in many ways that have brought solace, peace, and growth when I have allowed myself to sit with…and acknowledge as well as discern and ultimately… loosen the grip of control …. Amongst the overshadowing…. enveloping …of. The unknown.

And. the capability of allowing it to occur. Holding space … within the questioning responses and narratives in overwhelming unknown momentous moments that often felt unimaginable and overshadowing. I too have wondered. “How can this be?” How can this be … that I am a …….

How can this be that I may be a burden to those I love? How can this be that I am now divorced… That I am a single mother … That I didn't finish my college degree… What are the stories… questions are you responding with. telling yourself? What are your narratives that may be feeling overwhelming trying to say to you? How can this be…. Because I am….?

The narratives that live within our beings…coincide with. Entertain. They can at times feel overshading Ing. enveloping … full of looming darkness. fear. …. quite unimaginable… but so often … it is easier to continue these narratives disqualifying ourselves…. disqualifying our actions. Our motives… and ultimately our truth. Just as Mary questioned the journey she was about to embark on. Overshadowing and yet unimaginable in a moment… in days. Within years… WE tend to at times feel fused to the shadowing in all sorts of ways. In questions. And navigating such depth with Self Sabotage. Addictions. Fearing Connections…and not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and ultimately seen by those we love…

often stating we will start tomorrow. Just a few more minutes of distractions. and or deflecting away from our truth… Our actions/reactions however do hold some truth though.... Some facts. And shed light. For within the overshadowing and allowing. Rumination. And responses...Some sense of purpose. For in the mist of overwhelming shadowing. Unimaginable. Intangible voids.

Often within the solitude and quietness of loneliness …God tends to remind us just as he did Mary that we are not alone. Sometimes he does this quietly with a smile of a stranger. Passing us by… sometimes with the outstretched hand of a neighbor... or the greeting and passing of peace next to each other at church. God reminds us … when we are open to listening. Open to being seen. Open to being a witness to each other.

Luke 1 Verse 36

Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who is said to be barren. Is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.

For within the overshadowing of questions. fears. And unimaginable circumstances amidst the waiting. We can be met with the overshading of growth. Divine presence. the connection of intimacy. Closeness of navigating overshadowing darkness… with the reminder that we are not alone amongst overshadowing light and lamination when we are brave and conscious enough to release our grip of responses and questions when we simply respond by changing our narrative from… “How can this be?” “Let… it be!” Mary near the end of the passage then. surrendered. and answered I am the Lord's servant. and the Angel replied. Let it be as you have said… Mary’s song has often been a nuance … during this season of waiting. tied to beautiful moments of questioning and hope. So, within this space. With you. I would like to offer up to you all a song that has resonated deeply within me… for not only what may have been Mary’s narrative… but also my own.

Interrogation or Conversation?

First UMC of Pocatello

November 24, 2024

John 18:33-40

This is Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of the Church’s worship calendar. The story spirals back around to its beginning next week when we enter the season of Avent and again await the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. The Feast of Christ the King is by far the newest of the Church’s holy days. It was created in the Roman Catholic context in 1925 by Pope Pious XI, who sought to resist the rise of Bento Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy. In response to Mussolini’s nationalist ideology, the Pope reminded Italian Catholics – and by extension Catholics and other Christians around the world – that their allegiance ought to be to Jesus and their citizenship in the kingdom of God. The theme of Christ as king is as old as the scriptures themselves. But the feast day is a modern creation, and it’s a good reminder that the Church can change and adapt something even as important as its worship life to meet the needs of the present moment.

Ideologies are systems of interlocking ideas. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann defines ideology as “closed, managed, useful truth.” When he says “closed,” he means that there’s no room to breathe in an ideology, no room to question the artificial boundaries or point out the blind spots of its claims. By managed, Brueggemann means that ideologies are actively protected and enforced. And then they’re useful; ideologies help those in power to achieve and maintain certain results. Ideologies protect an old status quo, or they want to overthrow the current one and impose a new one.

And so we have Pilate interrogating Jesus on the morning of his crucifixion. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked him. It was an important question, one that could’ve been asked sincerely, but Pilate was only vetting the threat level that Jesus presented to the prevailing ideological order. The Apostles’ Creed, which is an ancient and distilled statement of belief shared by many Christians, says that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Of all the details of Jesus’ life, the creed chooses to remind us of Pilate’s role in Jesus’ death. So we should know something about him.

Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor installed to maintain law and order in the Roman-occupied territory of Judea, which included the city of Jerusalem. In the Roman Empire, there was only one ultimate authority: the Emperor. At that time it was Emperor Tiberius. As long as obedience to the Emperor was expressed materially, through paying taxes and keeping the peace, people in occupied territories were generally allowed to continue with their own religious and cultural practices. But any suggestion of revolt against Roman rule was quickly and violently suppressed. Natives who were able to survive in positions of relative power – like tax collectors or religious elites – were often as loath to rock the political boat as their Roman occupiers. The Jewish prophetic hope for a coming Messiah, an anointed ruler who would set the people free, was a particular threat to the prevailing ideology, so much so that even the Jewish Pharisees refused to see Jesus for who he was. Instead, they handed him over to Pilate and told him, “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against Caesar” (19:12). They get Pilate to comply with their desire to kill Jesus by playing on his fears and duties as a Roman governor.

So, early in the morning, inside his headquarters, Pilate asks this exhausted, captive man, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus responds to his question with another question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” In other words, Jesus is asking Pilate, Is this a conversation or an interrogation? Are we encountering one another face to face, heart to heart? Or are you standing above me asking an ideological question, assessing whether I fit within your system or threaten its authority? Conversation or interrogation. Are you asking for yourself or on behalf of others?

Jesus tells Pilate that he came into the world to witness to the truth, and that those who are from the truth listen to his voice. He did not come to set up an ideology alongside other ideologies, some close system of ideas that would compete with others. If Jesus came to impose his own regime, he would’ve had soldiers fighting on his behalf right then and there! He tells Pilate: “If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” Several hours earlier, an armed mob came to arrest Jesus while he was with his disciples in a garden. Violence did almost erupt. John 18:10-11: “Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me’”?

Jesus did not permit Peter to defend him violently. Jesus rebukes him for drawing the sword. Only in John’s Gospel are we told the name of the person who drew the sword and the name of the person who was struck, Malchus. Ideology clouds over personal responsibility; it allows people to take refuge in the closed, managed system. The choice to do violence is a personal choice with personal consequences.

But Jesus will not allow it. He does not compel by force. He compels by the truth of his words, by the genuineness of his presence, by the sincerity of his love. And those who hear his voice – his living, breathing voice; those who desire authentic life and relationship beyond all pretense and propaganda are the ones who respond to it.

“Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

Pilate deflects Jesus’ words with a cynical question, “What is truth?” It doesn’t matter what’s true! It matters what’s useful, what’s normal, what keeps things the way that they are now. What matters is that I don’t have to change, that I don’t feel threatened, that I keep benefitting from the way things currently are. Pilate goes out and tells the Pharisees that he finds no fault with Jesus; he even attempts to release him. Yet when Pilate realizes that releasing Jesus would cause more local unrest than condemning him to death, he makes the politically advantageous choice, the choice that ideology, not truth, demands. In his eyes, it is the responsible choice. But it’s always the violent choice.

…

What does all this mean for you and me on Christ the King Sunday?

Here are three things we can consider for ourselves.

First, have we strayed from having a relationship with Jesus as a person to flattening him onto some closed system of ideas? Is Jesus a concept or a presence? Are the scriptures proof-texts or stories still crackling with the sacred? Are the creeds gates that we keep or doors that we pass through into deeper mysteries? I think Jesus wants us to assess whether our love for him has grown cold. We might think we are very zealous, very engaged, when in fact we’ve distanced ourselves, made ourselves safe.

Second, if our relationship with Jesus or our faith has strayed toward ideology, then we are probably protecting ourselves from the pain of change that we know that we need. Admitting we are struggling in some areas of our life is hard. Getting free from an addiction is hard. Dealing with loneliness, with old trauma, with fresh disappointment is hard. Sometimes, in response to our pain or our guilt, we harden rather than soften. We take up faith as ideology that we can hide behind. If we were to really talk to Jesus as life meeting life and personal truth meeting personal truth, we’d have to hear Jesus’ voice of truth in those dark, wild, murky spaces deep inside us. Love and truth are anything but safe. Easier, sometimes, to deflect and turn outward to defend Jesus with the sword – even if it’s the sword of our words or our Facebook posts. If you feel that your faith may be hardening into a kind of ideology, I wonder what you may be avoiding talking with Jesus about, where the possibility of change terrifies you? Underneath that terror is probably a desire for change, a desire to hear your inner voice speak, to really hear and know yourself. But when we interrogate ourselves to see if we are conforming to our ideology, or when we put off facing ourselves by focusing on interrogating others, that true self which belongs to Jesus and yearns for his voice of truth remains unheard.

Finally, if the mode of speech in ideology is interrogation, then we are likely not encountering our neighbors as full persons. Does being a Christian mean that we are right and everyone else is wrong? That others must see it the way we see it, or else? Do we sometimes think that being a Christian means that we are entitled to a kind of political power over others or economic security at the expense of others? Are we fighting for our turf among others fighting for their turf?

Treating faith as ideology will lead us to interrogating the people around us. Even if we act nicely in the moment, our questions will not be real expressions of curiosity and love, because we don’t intend to let the answers to our questions touch and change us. Instead, we are evaluating whether others are ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ We don’t encounter others name by name, face to face. We see the human family in categories, and categories applied to people are violent.

At the end of the day, are we practicing interrogation or conversation?

Toward God, toward ourselves, toward others?

Have we traded in a living relationship with the One who is truth and love and freedom for a set of ideas about truth that are closed, manageable, and useful to us?

If so, Jesus wants us to come to the Table and encounter him again in what can be heard, what can be seen, what can be looked at and touched with our hands (1 John 1:1). He calls us back to a life of prayer – of openness, curiosity, longing, and love. He wants you to digest him and become him, not systematize him and defend him. And he will meet you here. A living God who will put you in touch with your truest self and teach you to converse with others from a place of freedom, not interrogate them from a place of fear or pride.

On this Christ the King Sunday, Jesus wants us to ask about him from the depths of our own hearts. Only then can we know him as a King who sets us free from our self-imposed prisons, for a love that embraces all creation.

Amen.

Inside (Hebrews 10:11-25)

First UMC of Pocatello

November 17, 2024

Hebrews 10:11-25

I’d like to begin by sharing a poem with you. I read it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and have been returning to it almost daily. Marie Howe, a former poet laureate of New York, wrote it, and the title of the poem is “The Affliction.” I’d like to hold her poem up next to this highly theological passage from Hebrews, which, as we’ve heard, speaks of the affliction of sin, the saving sacrifice of Christ, and the promise of a cleansed conscience and renewed heart.

Here’s “The Affliction” by Marie Howe:

When I walked across a room I saw myself walking

as if I were someone else,

when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress,

as if I were in a movie.

It’s what I thought you saw when you looked at me.

So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you

I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else.

I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything

when it happened all the time.

But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen

for one second I was inside looking out.

Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking.

Would it happen again? It did, a few days later.

My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door

and suddenly I was inside and I saw her.

I looked out from my own eyes

and I saw: her eyes: blue gray transparent

and inside them: Wendy herself!

Then I was outside again,

and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon,

as if Nothing Had Happened.

She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There

for Maybe 40 Seconds,

and that then I was Gone.

She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months,

years, the entire time she’d known me.

I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds;

she had not Noticed The Difference.

This happened on and off for weeks,

and then I was looking at my old friend John:

: suddenly I was in: and I saw him,

and he: (and this was almost unbearable)

he saw me see him,

and I saw him see me.

He said something like, You’re going to be ok now,

or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it,

but what he said mattered only a little.

We met—in our mutual gaze—in between

a third place I’d not yet been.

Outside or inside. Absent or present. Distant or close. Watching the fiction of the self or seeing the reality of others. Marie Howe uses these dichotomies and tensions to explore the condition of sin as a kind of dissociation, an inability or unwillingness to be present. There are many reasons why we might dissociate from reality, flee the moment that we’re in, or numb our perceptions. It can be a legitimate defense against trauma, a way to manage anxiety. It can also come from a compulsion toward perfection, or a fear of intimacy.

This poem speaks to such a deep place in me because this is very often how I experience the affliction of sin. Just as an example, sometimes I will be playing with my kids and, suddenly, instead of truly seeing them, I will watch myself with them from the outside, see the dad I think others are seeing, evaluating whether or not he is one of the good dads. This happened just a few days ago at the Spaghetti dinner on Friday night. I was with the toddlers in the gym. They were running around, chasing each other, kicking and throwing balls. My son, Loren, got so carried away that without warning he tore all his clothes off and started sprinting around the gym naked, cackling. He was so completely happy. And I had a real war within me. On the one hand I was so happy to see him so happy. I was amazed by his unselfconscious joy. On the other hand, I felt myself popping outside, glancing over at the kitchen, wondering what other people were thinking. I was seeing myself and my reaction through the invented judgment of others.

I think that on balance I won that inner struggle. I noticed myself moving away in the moment and I called myself back. I didn’t experience the whole thing purely, but neither did I yell at or shame Loren. I laughed. Sus and I slowly corralled him and helped him get his clothes back on.

I wonder if you ever catch yourself watching your life from the outside, rather than seeing reality vividly through your own eyes? I wonder if there are voices that you carry which whisper or shout to you that you are not enough, that you need to keep close tabs on your behavior or image, that you need to go away, even when you’re “there,” to be safe. I wonder if it hurts that the people closest to you can’t tell that you haven’t been there, really, the whole time they’ve known you.

In Hebrews 10, the author quotes the prophet Jeremiah. In the tradition, Jeremiah is sometimes called the “Weeping Prophet” because of the intensity of his grief over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians six centuries before Christ. The Babylonian Exile was the darkest moment in the Israelite’s history. It felt like God had forsaken them because of how bad and broken they had been. Yet in a profound passage, the promise of God cuts through the darkness, speaking through Jeremiah about a complete forgiveness and forgetting of sins. There is coming a day, God says, when “I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest of them.”

We might wonder where Jeremiah found the strength to stay centered in himself. To see clearly and feel fully both the brutal reality of his people’s situation and the future hope of God’s salvation. Marie Howe would have us wonder if Jeremiah had been fully seen by someone else, whether someone’s fully present gaze had met his own gaze, and if, in that powerful third space where presence meets presence, this new possibility was born. And the answer is Yes! Yes, Jeremiah was fully seen, fully known. Here is how he describes his call into prophetic ministry in the first chapter of his book.

This is what God said:

“Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: A prophet to the nations— that’s what I had in mind for you.” But I said, “Hold it, Master God! Look at me. I don’t know anything. I’m only a boy!” God told me, “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a boy.’ I’ll tell you where to go and you’ll go there. I’ll tell you what to say and you’ll say it. Don’t be afraid of a soul. I’ll be right there, looking after you.” God reached out, touched my mouth, and said, “Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered! See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do…”

Before we were born, God saw us. Before we saw the light of day, God had crafted holy plans for us. God will show us where we need to go and provide exactly what we need to do what we’re called to do. And God knew our essence and our purpose before things got all beaten up and muddled and scary – before the affliction.

What Jeremiah experienced with God – knowing himself according to how God saw him – was special, but he prophesied that one day it would be the norm. And the author of Hebrews tells us that the day has come. Today, Jesus has put away our sin, broken the powers of sin and death. Jesus has forgiven us and forgotten all the mess that we’ve made of things or that the world has made of us. The affliction can be healed because God is there to meet our gaze, to really see us. And God calls us into a community of mutual seeing. God wants us to experience the power of that third space, where we all, seeing through our own eyes, experiencing things from the inside, meet each other’s reality.

What happens in that new creation where we are once again “naked and unashamed” (Gen. 2:25) as our ancestors were in the Garden? What happens in that new community where we know each other fully as we are fully known (1 Cor. 13:12)?

Well, the author of Hebrews tells us that we can “consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching” (10:24-25). When we really let ourselves be seen as we are, and when we really see others as they are, then we will know the right ways to encourage and be encouraged to step into our gifts and embrace the various beautiful “holy plans” that God has for us.

How can we work with the Holy Spirit to form this community of presence and holy provocation? The Church must be a place of profound hospitality. Marie Howe describes the experience of being seen as “almost unbearable.” We who are regulars must know this, and we must recognize that, for most people, coming to Church starts as a risk: How will I be seen? Will I be seen at all? What will the sight of the people teach me about the sight of God?

We have a responsibility to create an environment that corresponds to the reality of Christ’s forgiveness and forgetting of sins. This means being on guard against snap judgments, against making assumptions, against a consumer attitude toward Church. Coming to Church is not primarily about getting filled up or about defending a tradition. It’s about seeing and being seen. It’s about experiencing the power and possibilities of God among us when we encounter each other with true presence.

Perhaps today you are wrestling with The Affliction. I’m sure that, like me, some of you find yourselves from time to time watching life from the outside. Perhaps you’re even, like the poet, numbing yourself from dealing with the Affliction. She used pills, but there are a million different ways to avoid the “almost unbearable” journey back inside.

I want you to know that the journey back inside is worth it. It is the only way to experience the fullness of life, the ripeness of the present; it is the only way to experience true communion with others. The law of love can be written on your heart. You can be renewed from the inside out. You can come home to yourself, because God has made a home with you and in you.

There is a God who sees you and who has seen you from before the beginning.

There is a God who loves the you that he sees.

It is “almost unbearable,” being seen. Almost.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Eagerly Waiting (Hebrews 9:24-28)

Eagerly Waiting

First UMC of Pocatello

November 10, 2024

Hebrews 9:24-28

***

I’m sure for many of you this is a difficult Sunday, following on a difficult week. The antagonistic and supercharged nature of this national election meant that no matter what came out of it, about half the country would be reeling at the result. For many, a whole imagined future, with all its possibilities for progress, has been cut off. For others, the results suggest a secure possession of the future, a future to bend and craft according to the winner’s will.

Whether you or I feel that we have lost a possible future or are in secure possession of the future, neither is a faithful Christian position. The future is not ours to lose, and it is not ours possess. The future belongs to Christ and his promised future of shalom, of peace and justice and wholeness established through all creation. Neither Republicans nor Democrats can usher in this promised future. Only in communities where the Spirit of the Risen Christ is invited to have its way can we begin to glimpse it. The proper attitude of the Christian toward the future is not despair and disavowal. The proper posture of the Christian toward the future is not a selfish grasping. No, we are called to be people whose attitude is hope. We are called to be people whose posture is one of eager and resilient waiting.

“[S]o Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Heb 9:28.)

This final verse of Hebrews chapter 9 tells us that salvation is coming to those who wait eagerly for the appearance of Jesus. The future that matters is his future, the future of his coming. Both the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament writers tell us what the future of God looks like: every tear wiped away, every life honored and provided for, the death of death. Being a Christian in the present moment means being a person who endures with patience and waits for Jesus to come and manifest his future. Our call has not changed between this Sunday and last Sunday, though perhaps some of us have a clearer grasp of the truth and urgency of this call.

So let’s flesh out this call to wait eagerly for God’s salvation. What does our waiting look like? It’s certainly not passive. We don’t just sit around doing nothing, staring at the sky. The disciples tried that on the morning of Jesus’ ascension into heaven and were promptly told by angels to lower their gaze back down to the earth (Acts 1:9-11).

Sus and I just celebrated our five-year anniversary on November 2, so memories from the time of our wedding have been fresh in my mind. The stretch of time between getting engaged and getting married is a kind of waiting. You’ve made a promise to each other; you’ve set an intention. But the fulfilment of the promise has not yet come; you’re waiting for it. But the waiting is full of intentional activity. For us, it meant booking a venue, a caterer, photographer, a band. It meant crafting the guest list, sending out invitations, holding a wine tasting. To be ready for the moment of fulfillment, we had work to do.

In our hopeful waiting for the future of God, how are we called to live?

The Greek word used here in Hebrews 9:28 for “wait eagerly” is ἀπεκδέχομαι (apekdechomai). I tracked it down in the rest of the New Testament and found some powerful resonances. I want to share some of those with you as a way of naming three aspects of the waiting we are called to practice.

The first thing might surprise you. While we wait for salvation, we have to get in touch with our pain. We have to express our grief, acknowledge our groans, and voice our complaints about the ways that things are just not okay.

Here’s a passage from Romans chapter 8 where Paul uses that word for eager waiting – ἀπεκδέχομαι – three times:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. (vv. 18-26)

Our waiting is not easy. Our is not always happy. Waiting for God to come and set things right means honing our vision to discern what’s broken and disordered. When we give ourselves permission to groan along with the whole creation, we come into contact with God’s own groaning Spirit. And it’s from that place of authentic feeling that our groans can be transformed into creative labor pains.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, wrote this in a book called The Prophetic Imagination:

Only in empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right—either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism. …Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge.

In other words, when we present that everything, including what’s going on with us, sound okay, we end up hurting ourselves and holding back the transformation of our world. We do what the powers that be want us to do, because by maintaining the okay-ness of things, we don’t rock the boat, we don’t demand change. Brueggemann says that it was only after the Israelites cried out for God to come and rescue them from slavery in Egypt that God called and commissioned Moses. The demand for divine justice opened the door for an answer.

Complaint and lament and even protest have a prominent place in Christian spirituality. The world is not okay. Our planetary wellbeing and our national wellbeing, even before this election, were heading in dangerous directions. Groan! Experience unity with the discontentment of creation and of God’s Spirit. Let your own pain flow, and it will clear your system for solidarity, creativity, and hope. That’s the first aspect of Christian waiting: getting in touch with our groans.

The second aspect of our waiting is that we must take the long view, and to take the long view we have to make sure that we remain clear on our primary affiliation and place of belonging. Here is Philippians 3:20-21:

Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself.

Our citizenship is in heaven. Some other translations say that our commonwealth is in heaven. The point is that we belong to the realm, the kin-dom, of God. Our Savior comes from that place.

This is very important for us to get clear on, especially after an election week. I’m going to say it. America is not God’s chosen nation. The Republican Party is not God’s preferred party. God is not a Democrat, and neither Harris nor Trump is God’s chosen Savior. We eagerly await a Savior from the realm of God. We wait for Jesus.

Obviously, our political system matters. Protecting and providing sometimes, threatening and dehumanizing other times – the structures in which we live and move affect us. And though we should care about them and work for their transformation for the sake of the most vulnerable in our society, these systems are not where we ultimately belong.

We are citizens of heaven. We are citizens of a realm that critiques and holds every other realm accountable. And it’s very freeing to belong to God’s promised future. It frees us to tear down or build up what’s around us without tying our identity to what comes and goes. When we are not taken in by the idolatry of partisan politics, we are freed from having something fallible and finite and fickle as our source of hope.

While we wait, we groan. While we wait, we maintain our primary citizenship in God’s realm.

Finally, while we wait, we serve. We live into the unique gifts and graces that God has given us. Here is 1 Corinthians 1:4-8:

I always thank my God for you because of the grace of God given to you in Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in him in every way, in all speech and all knowledge. In this way, the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you will be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We don’t lack any spiritual gift while we wait. And we will be strengthened for the long waiting. This is really where the rubber meets the road. For the waiting, which for every generation of Christians since the time of Christ has been their whole lives, we are given the gifts that we need to love.

The New Testament tells us what many of these gifts are: teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, mercy, wisdom, healing, discernment, evangelism, pastoring. We know what the fruit of the Spirit is: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The spiritual gifts are gifts of grace. They come from God and God’s away of awakening us to our purpose, our truest selves. While we wait, we are called to be curious about our place in the human family, the place from which we are called to care for ourselves. Whether you are elated or devastated by the election’s outcome, you are first and foremost called to be a vessel of love.

Here’s what it means to put our hope in God’s future:

We groan, refusing the narrative that everything’s okay.

We keep our citizenship in heaven, refusing to give ourselves away to lesser things.

And we open ourselves to the Spirit, discovering our gifts and putting them to use.

I wonder which of these aspects of waiting speaks to you most, either as an affirmation or a challenge.

Do you need to name some pain? Do you need to groan and be met by God’s Spirit in that groaning? Can you make space for that? Can you invite others into a shared time and space for speaking pain and telling God it needs to be different than it is right now?

Or maybe, for you, it’s time to fix your perspective back on Jesus. Maybe you’ve put a little too much stock in something else – the election, sure, but also maybe your public image, your career, your family, the LA Dodgers, or even your conception of what Church is supposed to be. Perhaps it’s time to create a little distance and be set free for true service.

Finally, maybe for you it’s time to use the gift you’ve been sitting on, or to discover the gift that the Spirit’s waiting to reveal to you. Are you ready to take up your place as a strengthener of the waiting community? We need you, because if there’s one thing that we don’t do while we wait for Christ’s final deliverance, it’s nothing.

May we listen to the Spirit speaking to our hearts, and may we respond with courage and with confidence, knowing that the Christ who came and dealt with sin once for all will come again to save those who are eagerly, patiently waiting for him.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

God Has Swallowed Death (Isaiah 25:6-9)

November 3, 2024

All Saints’ Day 

Three days following the death of Mandy Mildon, two days before election day, and ten days before to the State of Idaho’s scheduled execution of Tom Creech.

***

There is a verse in the Psalms, Psalm 16:3, that says,

As for the saints who are in the land,

they are the noble, in whom is all my delight.

The psalms are prayers. Here, the person praying is thanking God for the presence and work of saints in the place that she lives.

In both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, the word translated into English as “saints” comes from the adjective “holy.” The saints are, literally, “holy ones.” Holiness has to do with devotion, being set apart for something particular, being wholeheartedly committed to a single purpose.

Psalm 16:3 describes the saints as “noble” – some other translations say “excellent.” That word’s root meaning is wideness. It’s a word used to describe the grandeur and expanse of the sea. Something is excellent or noble because it inspires us, fills us with awe.

So, the saints feel big. Which is not to say famous or proud or removed from ordinary life. The saints don’t necessarily fill up a room or draw attention to themselves. No, they are right here, walking among us every day. But if you’ve ever been in the presence of a person who delights and inspires you with their purity of heart, clarity of vision, and commitment to mercy and justice, you’ve probably been in the presence of a saint. The saints don’t lecture. They live. And by living they make us want more for our own lives.

When the scriptures speak of saints, they almost always refer to people in the here and now, those who are in the land. For example, the Apostle Paul regularly addresses the recipients of his letters as saints. The saints in Rome. The saints in Ephesus. Yet Christians also believe in what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints,” which includes the saints who’ve gone before us in life and in death. The departed saints are still with us. They continue their life in God, and God is with us here and now. Through memory, story, and, in some traditions, prayer, the departed saints continue their presence with us. They encourage, challenge, and inspire us.

The prophetic vision from Isaiah 25 tells of a time when all humanity will come together for a joyful and extravagant feast. All people will be God’s guests, and therefore they will be one another’s tablemates. All people will be fed with the best that God can give, “rich food filled with marrow” and “well aged wines strained clear.” It won’t matter whether they were rich or poor, Republicans or Democrats, foreign born or native born. It won’t matter if they had clean records or criminal records. It won’t matter where they fell on the spectrums of ability or skin tone, dialect or gender identity. All people, Isaiah says, will be gathered to the mountain, seated at the table, and fed with God’s food.

I think that a saint is made when this vision gets planted deep in a person’s heart and imagination. Saints are people who have glimpsed the glory of God’s purposes. And once they’ve glimpsed it, they find they’ve been grasped by it. Humankind gathered around the abundant table – that vision won’t let the saints go. They begin to place their whole lives in service of that vision. What they want most of all is to experience and help others experience the joy of God’s table in whatever ways they can. We are called to be saints. We are called to catch this vision. It’s what we practice seeing and enacting whenever we gather around this table.

For us to do this table-setting and community-creating work, we need to trust God to deal with death and all the ripple-effects of death – despair, agony, guilt, and disgrace. God needs to do what none of us can do – tear off the heavy weight of hopelessness, wipe tears from our eyes, get rid of our shame once and for all. This, too, is part of the vision. God will destroy the things that keep us from the feast.

There is another verse in the Psalms, Psalm 69:15, that says.

Do not let the floodwaters engulf me

or the depths swallow me up

or the pit close its mouth over me.

The psalmist is describing what it feels like when we are touched by death. It is overwhelming, engulfing, subsuming. When we are in the raw emotional states of grief and fear, it is as though something wants to drag us down into a bottomless place. We can feel like there is not room for anything else; our pain consumes us. The psalmist describes depths that swallow, a pit with a mouth. Malice and menace. And all she can manage is a desperate plea: “God, don’t let it happen.”

If we are going to eat at God’s table and not be consumed by death, then God needs to deal with death. And Isaiah says something startling. He says that God will “swallow up death forever.” So while we feast on rich food and well-aged wine, God dines on death.

God will eat death. God will take death into God’s own being, God’s own body. God will consume death and metabolize it into something new. God and death do not stand on equal footing. Death is within God. God has set a boundary for death, a limit for death. Death can’t take us away from God, far from God. To die is to continue in God. There is no death or diminishment we can experience – grief, sickness, displacement, imprisonment, guilt – that happens outside of, beyond, or without God. God has swallowed death.

The saints are those who trust that God has swallowed death in Christ. This part of Isaiah’s vision has come to pass. Jesus emptied himself of divine power and privilege. He took on the frailty and beauty of human life. He joined us on the ground. And he suffered. He suffered temptation and disgrace. He was lied to and lied about. He was threatened, hunted, and schemed against. He was betrayed by his friend and sold for silver. He was sentenced to death in a sham trial, and then imprisoned, tortured, and executed. He was abandoned by his friends and even forsaken by God. In all this, God in Jesus was swallowing death, taking our pain and suffering into himself, becoming fully united with our whole experience.

The saints know that because of the Jesus’ complete solidarity with us, in life and in death, there is now no God-forsaken person or God-forsaken place. And so they can carry their vision of the feast into the houses of the bereaved. They can testify to and demand abundance in places of despair. They can go into nursing homes, hospital rooms, prison cells, war-torn countries, dangerous neighborhoods, hostile school board meetings, or ravaged ecosystem and work toward the promise and possibility of God’s feast.

Friends, a beloved member of our church who worked for the church died this week, and her family is reeling with guilt and grief. This week we will vote, and no matter what the outcome is, there will be an outpouring of anger from nearly half the country. In ten days, the State of Idaho plans to ritually kill an old, repentant man. And that is to say nothing of the burdens each of us is carrying.

As the Church, as the Body of Christ, we have to keep our hearts and imaginations fixed on the feast, and we have to remember that Christ has taken death into the life of God. He is there, before the throne of the Father, interceding for us. His body still has the wounds and the scars. No matter what happens, nothing happens outside of or without God. We are called to work for joy and belonging and abundance, to manifest these things in the world, knowing that God has swallowed death, and we are the Body called to metabolize it into something new.

Amen. 

The Meaning of Magnification (Psalm 34:1-8, 19-22)

October 27, 2024

Reformation Sunday

John Gribas

***

When I reflect on these verses from Psalm 34, certain words stand out: praise, boast, exalt, delivered, radiant, saved, refuge, rescues, keeps, redeems.

With words like these, it would be easy to conclude that this psalm must reflect the author’s great confidence in God. Right?

Not necessarily.

If we take a closer look, we might notice some other, very different words that also stand out: humble, fears, ashamed, poor, cried, trouble, afflictions, broken, death, condemned.

What is going on here? Well, a little background might be helpful.

In most Bible translations, Psalm 34 comes with a brief initial statement that offers a kind of framing for what follows. Technically, these brief statements are called “superscriptions.”

In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the superscription for Psalm 34 is as follows…

“Of David, when he feigned madness before Abimelek, so that he drove him out, and he went away.”

Though the superscription references “Abimelek,” it is broadly agreed that this psalm reflects David’s response to a difficult situation when he found himself the source of wrath for two leaders.

Saul, the King of Israel, and Achish, the Philistine King of Gath.

We learn in 1 Samuel 21 that David had escaped the wrath of King Saul by running to Gath. That escape, however, only plopped him into equally hot water with Achish, King of an enemy clan. So David did what any great hero of the faith would do in a similar circumstance. According to 1 Samuel 21, David “changed his behavior” before the King and his servants.

The passage reads, “He pretended to be mad when in their presence. He scratched marks on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle run down his beard. Achish said to his servants, ‘Look, you see the man is mad; why then have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence? Shall this fellow come into my house?’”

This allowed David to escape in safety.

So, yes, Psalm 34 is an expression of confidence in God. It communicates David’s thankfulness to God for getting him out of the dire circumstances he was in. Maybe less directly, it also acknowledges a degree of contriteness on David’s part for allowing his fear of these two kings to overshadow his trust in God’s power and goodness.

Ultimately, in Psalm 34, David seems to be recognizing that his God was too small. Or, at least, in that moment of serious threat, David’s understanding of God was too small.

Perhaps this could be a message to all of us. Sometimes, our God is too small. Therefore, we need to heed the words of verse 3.

We need to “magnify” the Lord.

I’ll say it again: We need to “MAGNIFY” the Lord!

I’ll say it again, again: WE NEED TO “MAGNIFY” THE LORD!!!

You know, all this talk of “magnifying” takes me back to my childhood. To a time when something as simple as a magnifying glass seemed truly amazing…almost magical.

I can still recall myself, sitting on the curb at the end of the sidewalk that extended from my front door to the street. At that time, not even paved. It was gravel. But that was great because it meant an endless supply of little rocks to examine. With my magnifying glass!

Through that round, convex lens, those pebbles looked like pretty impressive boulders. And if I managed to find a broken one, I could transform the miniscule, sparkly mica fragments into huge motherload veins of diamonds or silver or gold.

And if a car drove by and kicked up a cloud of dust, I was happy to move back from the street and into my yard, where the magic magnifying glass opened up other enticing worlds, tucked in the folds of grass and garden.

Ants that became armies. Leaves that became land bridges. Grasshoppers that became…well…giant grasshoppers! Everything was BIGGER!!

But, wait a minute. Is this what is meant by “magnifying” the Lord?

I mean, I did just suggest that, when we feel that God is too small, we need to “magnify” the Lord. However, we should be careful here. There on the curb of the street and in my yard, I could wield the power of that glass and make small things look big. But in Psalm 34, David was not making a small thing look big. God and his presence and his protection and his power…these are not “small things.” Not in the least. They are big. Very big. Infinitely big!!

This whole magnifying glass idea…it has some problems.

I wouldn’t want to suggest to you a framework for thinking about this passage of scripture that in any way sends the message: “Yes, sometimes God IS too small. But with the impact of our magnification, he can become bigger. Big enough, at least.”

I’m not okay with that, and I am sure you aren’t, either.

And, when I think about it, there is another problem with the magnifying glass framework. And here is where I need to be honest and hope that you are the forgiving group of people I believe you to be.

Okay. Confession time. You ready?

When I was a kid…I don’t really want to admit it, but…

On occasion…

I used a magnifying glass…to burn some ants.

I feel horrible saying that. I really want to think of myself as a kind person. Considerate of all living things. Not taking pleasure in anyone or anything else’s pain or suffering.

But…I did burn some ants. Magnifying glasses can do that.

Once again, this magnifying glass idea fails. It is a framework of little to no value.

Or is it?

This is a bit of a digression, but I think it is worth considering. I can’t help but wonder. Sometimes, do people…good people…people who call and consider themselves Christians. People of God. Is it possible that sometimes, they end up using their particular magnifying glasses…use them in specific ways where they capture and focus the light of God—or at least what they consider to be the light of God…

They harness this light in a way that focuses…intensely focuses this force that they consider to be the light of God…

This standard. This doctrinal position. This moral requirement. This judgement. This sense of biblical truth. This…light. This hot, powerful, dangerous light.

And they burn things. People. Relationships. Maybe their own compassion and humanity.

And that’s not okay. And that’s not God or his light. And that’s no magnification at all. It’s just…

Damage.

End of the digression, and back to lenses.

There are different kinds of convex lenses that make things bigger for us. Magnifying lenses are one. Telescopes are another. Maybe the idea of a telescope would be a better framework for considering what is going on in Psalm 34 where David is “magnifying” the Lord.

Those heavenly bodies in the night sky—the ones we crane out necks back to see and that are the source of our wonder and amazement. The moon. Venus. The North Star. Alpha Centauri. Millions of them. Most small orbs or tiny specs of light.

But they aren’t tiny at all, are they? They are really, really big! And the telescope “magnifies” them and makes them appear closer and far, far bigger.

Telescopes are awesome but, once again, we have a problem. Likening God to a giant planet or star…that works pretty well. But suggesting that this very big God is really, really far away—far away enough to seem small. That is a problem.

As I already said, I wouldn’t want to offer a framework suggesting that God is too small but can become bigger through our magnification. I also wouldn’t want to offer a framework to suggest that God is really big but insanely far away, and that our “magnification” simply gives us the sense that he is closer and a bit more visible.

Maybe it’s time to just dump the whole attempt to play on the idea of magnification in terms of lenses.

Before we throw in the towel on lenses, though, I’d like to ask your indulgence. Actually, I ought to rephrase that. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but this is Reformation Sunday. And Reformation Sunday is probably the most inappropriate day of the year to be asking for “indulgence.”

So, instead, I will ask for your patience as I circle back to the magnifying glass idea once more to see if we can make something of it.

Think of a magnifying glass. What comes to mind? Maybe it’s making things in your yard look bigger. Maybe it’s burning ants. But I wouldn’t be surprised if what comes to mind is…Sherlock Holmes. The great British detective.

Sherlock Holmes, with his swooping pipe and weird hat. And his magnifying glass!

And what did Holmes use that magnifying glass for? Holmes was a detective. He relied on keen and accurate observation. He needed that glass to see—to see really well. Keenly. Accurately. He wanted to make sure not to miss something that might otherwise be overlooked.

And isn’t this precisely what David was doing in Psalm 34?

In light of the threat and his fear, David just wasn’t able to focus in on God’s providence. God’s concern. God’s presence. God’s power. And so he found himself experiencing some of those words I mentioned earlier: humble, fears, ashamed, poor, cried, trouble, afflictions, broken, death, condemned.

And David took matters into his own hands and played the madman. I suppose he felt he had to if God seemed to him to be small and incredibly far, far away.

But in this Psalm, David remembered. I think we could say he pulled out his “magnifying” glass. Not to make a small God appear larger. Not to make a distant God appear nearer. But, like Sherlock Holmes, to “see” God. Keenly. Accurately.

With David, let’s take a moment and get out our magnifying glasses to see God keenly and accurately, and reflect on the words of Psalm 34.

When we are humbled, let us magnify the Lord—and let our souls make their boast in him.

When we are consumed with fear, let us magnify the Lord—and know that, when we seek, he answers and delivers.

When we are ashamed, let us magnify the Lord—and our faces will be radiant.

When our poor souls cry, let us magnify the Lord—and realize that we will be heard and saved from every trouble.

Magnify the Lord. See him. Keenly. Accurately. And taste and see that the LORD is good.

One final thing to ponder.

We like a big and strong God. Don’t we? There is something about “bigness.” The night sky. The Empire State Building. The Rocky Mountains.

Bigness can be a bit frightening. But it also draws us, like gravity. Bigness has a kind of power, especially when it is close. Ever stand right on the edge of the ocean, or at the rim of the Grand Canyon? And if the bigness is benevolent—if it is good and on our side—then it offers a kind of comfort.

I understand how recognizing God’s bigness and strength and closeness can be a way of “magnifying” God. But if magnifying really is about “seeing” God keenly and accurately, then I think we need to be open to whatever is revealed in that seeing. And I can’t help but wonder what might be revealed if we look, not through our own “magnifying” glass, but through God’s.

God’s magnifying glass. What might that be? Well, let me wrap up by suggesting something.

I’m a Christmas fan. I know Christmas is still a ways off, but Advent is really just around the corner. And when I think of what might be God’s magnifying glass—what might be the thing through which we can look to see God’s own keen and accurate presentation of himself—I can’t help but think of the nativity. Specifically, the opening to that stable—whether it was a simple wooden structure or a cave or something else. I want to suggest that that opening is a kind of lens, revealing the true nature of God. Keenly. Accurately.

And through that lens we see…a baby. Small. Humble. Vulnerable. Human.

But still…God.

Is this, though, the big and strong and close God that comforted David and prompted Psalm 34? That’s a tough one. Maybe a little bit of a paradox.

The babe in the manger certainly seems close. Extremely close. As close as a child in the arms of a mother. But big and strong? That is more problematic. This “magnification through the lens of the manger” reveals not bigness and strength but the smallness and absolute vulnerability of a newborn.

What are we to do with that?

Well, maybe God reveals himself in bigness and strength when we need it, and in smallness, humility, and vulnerability when we need that, instead.

Or maybe the incarnation and the babe in the manger reveal our own misunderstanding of bigness and our inability to recognize the power of humility and vulnerability.

Like I said, a bit of a paradox. One that deserves pondering. Perhaps seeing, really seeing—keenly, accurately—takes some serious pondering.

On this Reformation Sunday, may we be open to “re-forming” our own understanding of what it means to magnify the Lord. And may we be open to what is revealed in that magnification.

Amen.

Seek First the Kingdom of God (Matt. 6:25-33)

Seek First the Kingdom of God

First UMC of Pocatello

October 20, 2024

Matthew 6:25-34

***

The scriptures insist that the kingdom of heaven must be sought after, searched for, and pursued, which means that it begins for us as a hidden thing. In one of his teachings, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field” (Matt 13:44).

Sometimes the new life that God is manifesting in the world is hidden because it is out there somewhere, and we have to leave our familiar sphere to go and find it. Like Abram and Sarai setting out from Haran to go to a land as yet unrevealed to them. Like Matthew the tax collector leaving his booth to walk the roads of Galilee as a disciple of Jesus.

More often than not, the kingdom of God is right where we are – within us, even – but hidden from view until we come to see so-called ordinary life through the eyes of faith. Jacob falls asleep in the wilderness with his head on a stone and dreams of a ladder rising from that very place up to heaven. A Roman centurion beholds a man who has just died a routine execution on a cross, and suddenly understands that this was God’s Son.

When I began “considering the birds” in earnest about six years ago by buying binoculars and going birding, I began noticing birds everywhere. I know that sounds silly. Of course birds are everywhere! All my life I had been vaguely aware of them. But I hadn’t known that chickadees were everywhere, or titmice, or juncos, wrens, and nuthatches. I hadn’t known that out of the same kitchen window I could witness downy, red-bellied, and pileated woodpeckers. Often, especially in the early days, I would go out to a nature preserve and identify a bird for the first time – maybe a brown thrasher or a catbird – and then I’d come home and start hearing that bird in my neighborhood. Considering the birds added depth to my moment-by-moment experiences. I sought them and found them. I wanted them until, all around me, there they were. Before, there had just been a blur of bird, but now I live in a world with layers of presence, a world where creatures appear individually and vividly, and whose names I know.

God wants us to want him. God wants us to seek him. God wants to reveal himself to us in all moments and in all things. Jesus says so himself. In the very same sermon that he talks about the birds, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find” (7:7). The more we prioritize looking for God, the finer our perceptions of God become. The more of ourselves that we offer to the quest, the greater the rewards along the way. God’s love fills the world, and just as there are many names for birds, there are also many names for that love: gentleness and mercy, compassion and justice, generosity, courage, and hope. It is our joy and privilege as God’s children to learn to distinguish and practice them all. God has placed our craving for divine love at the center of our being.

The prayer book of the Bible, the Hebrew Psalms, affirm that God is worth wanting, worth seeking. Psalm 16:11 – “You show me the path of life; / in your presence there is fullness of joy; / in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 63:3 – “Your unfailing love is better than life itself; / how I praise you!” Psalm 90:14 – “Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, / so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives.” God can satisfy us. God’s love is unfailing. God will show us the path to his presence, the path that leads to our joy. We are called to pray prayers like that: God, I want you to satisfy me. I want to experience joy. Help me find my way to you. Along all the paths we may take in our searching, down through all the inner depths we may plumb in our seeking, the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray bears good fruit: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Maybe somewhere along the way you stopped trusting that God wants joy, satisfaction, and fullness of life for you. The longings you feel in the purest part of yourself and God’s eternal longings for you are not in competition. They are in complete harmony. But if the people around you – especially the religious people around you – did not teach you to trust your longing; if they shamed your seeking, silenced your questions, forced you onto a predetermined path of their own creation, then the voices of fear or sadness or suspicion might be threatening to drown out the holy whispers of those deep spiritual stirrings.

“Seek, and you will find,” Jesus says. He does not shame you, silence you, put you in a box. Perhaps today your heart is begging you to really listen to it again. Perhaps the Gospel’s invitation to you today is to courageously cry out “Satisfy me with your love, God!” and feel the cleansing power of naming what you most deeply want. Your satisfying search can begin again right now.

Jesus’ teaching about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field is about two opposing powers: the power of trust and the power of worry. Worry – excessive worry that hardens into anxiety – is one of those “powers and principalities” that Paul wrote about in Ephesians 6. Worry is a force we must struggle against and subdue through prayer. Jesus was so concerned about our worry because he understood its power to waylay our seeking. If seeking is spiritual movement, worry is spiritual stasis. When we worry, we take energy that could be harnessed for prayer, service, and love and we use it to imagine worst-case scenarios about what’s to come, and then to work hard making sure those worst-case scenarios never come to pass.

Jesus knows that our worry,  while ostensibly trying to keep us from suffering, actually becomes a source of suffering itself. By trying to protect us from diminishment and death, it drains the present moment of its vividness and joy. When we worry, we give away his moment to get out ahead of the next, we give away today to get out ahead of tomorrow. And when we do that for a lifetime, well, we never really live.

This is why Jesus tells us to seek first the kingdom of heaven. Make that seeking the most important thing, not just in principle but in practice. For the Israelites, it meant keeping one day of the week holy as the Sabbath, offering the first fruits of their fields to the priests, dedicating their firstborn children to God. We also need to consider what it means to place God’s kingdom first in our families, our finances, and our leisure. If all our decisions are serving our great desire for God’s love and joy, and if we trust that God wants us to seek him and therefore won’t let our seeking ruin us, then the dark power of worry can be banished. All these things – our daily bread – will be added  to us if we seek first the kingdom of heaven. God knows our needs, our true needs. And God will take care of us.

Jesus gave these teachings to the disciples as a group. He knew that they would need to support one another in their search for the kingdom of heaven, and that they would need to help one another resist the temptation to worry over the future. Jesus was teaching the disciples what it would mean for them to be the Church. They would need to protect one another from anxiety and honor the true desires of each other’s hearts. We are still called to be a people, a community, that prays, “May your kingdom come” and “Give us today our daily bread” and “Satisfy me with your unfailing love.” When the Church’s heart is set on seeking the kingdom of heaven, when that’s our first priority, those of us who show up on any given week struggling to trust God’s provision or struggling to be brave with our longings can be held and supported and re-oriented by the strength of the Body. But if as a group we are anxious, if as a community we are worried about what we will eat and what we will wear and what tomorrow will bring, then we lose the ability to help each other.

I’d like to end today with a poem by Denise Levertov called ‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being.’ Her poem affirms that God is all around us, that we are encompassed by God’s loving presence, and that, if we would just let ourselves, we could fly like the birds do, like the saints do, like those who “seek first” do.

‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’

Birds afloat in air’s current,

sacred breath? No, not breath of God,

it seems, but God

the air enveloping the whole

globe of being.

It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,

leaves astir, our wings

rising, ruffled – but only the saints

take flight. We cower

in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly

on branches close to the nest. The wind

marks the passage of holy ones riding

the ocean of air. Slowly their wake

reaches us, rocks us.

But storm or still,

numb or poised in attention,

we inhale, exhale, inhale,

encompassed, encompassed.[1]

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] Denise Levertov, Collected Poems, eds. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (New York: New Directions, 2013), 961.

Let the Children Come to Me (Mark 10:13-16)

Let the Children Come to Me

First UMC of Pocatello

October 6, 2024

Mark 10:13-16

***

Last week the Gospel challenged us to make more room for others, to reconfigure how we think or how we gather so that all people have the opportunity to come and encounter Jesus without any interference from us. But the disciples were slow learners; every so often, as in today’s story, they continued setting arbitrary boundaries around Jesus. “People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them.” Rebuke is a strong word. Some other English translations say that the disciples “scolded” them, “spoke sternly” to them, “interfered” with them. The point was clear: the disciples thought that Jesus had more important things to do than visit with these tiny, needy humans who wouldn’t fully appreciate or possibly even remember him.

Even though Jesus had started telling his disciples that his ministry would end with suffering and death, they were still attached to political understandings of the Messiah and the kingdom of God. Like most of their fellows Jews at this time, the disciples had grown up believing that God would one day send a Messiah to the people, an anointed liberator who would throw off Roman occupation by force and re-establish Israel as a strong and righteous kingdom. The Messiah would be a revolutionary, known by his wisdom and his divine power over evil – that is, over those evil people.

Right before this encounter with the children, Mark says that “[Jesus] left [Galilee] and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him, and, as was his custom, he again taught them…” (10:1).

That’s really significant. Jesus makes a shift from his Galilean ministry in the north to his Judean ministry in the south. Jesus heads closer to the city of Jerusalem, where it’s all going to go down.  For him, what’s’ going to “go down” is the cross. For the disciples, it’s a revolution.

So the disciples couldn’t help getting excited about the journey south. They thought that things were finally about to get “real,” that Jesus was going to take his gloves off. And – c’mon! – the first thing that happens down in Judea is that a bunch of parents and grandparents show up not with weapons and rallying cries but with kids? “Get out of here. This guy’s got more important places to go, more important things to do.”

Jesus sees them turning children away and gets angry with them. He doesn’t get explicitly angry with his disciples very often, but this is one of those moments. He rebukes the disciples for rebuking the children. And, contrary to their expectations and their priorities, he takes the time to pick up every kid – every unaware infant, every wriggly toddler, every cautious or overenthusiastic elementary schooler. Takes the time to embrace them, to bless them. And while he’s doing that, he looks around at his disciples and says in no uncertain terms, “It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Look at them, Jesus says to the disciples, says to us, and learn something essential about who I am and about the kind of kingdom that I have come to bring.

I am grateful for the ways that this congregation has been expanding its ministry to children. In recent months, you have rallied around Camp Sawtooth in a rejuvenated way, sending more kids to camp on scholarship and getting involved as leaders. There are more kids attending nursery and Sunday School than there have been in the past three years, so you’ve made resources available for hiring nursery workers or you’ve volunteered to help teach these classes before worship. For nearly fifty years, y’all have stewarded the spaces used by TLC’s daycare community. TLC’s presence here hasn’t been an interruption, a distraction, or something beside the real point, but actual ministry – the embrace and blessing of kids, no strings attached.

We know that there is a critical need for licensed and affordable childcare in Bannock county, which qualifies as a childcare desert. We know that housing insecurity, food insecurity, and lack of childcare all mutually reinforce poverty. And so, over the past year, your church leadership has arranged for TLC to expand into new classrooms and has paid for several new HVAC units to keep old rooms useable. And, very publicly, you all have given so generously to raise a roof no only over your heads, but over the heads of children and caregivers you may or may not ever meet.

Well done. Keep going. Keep drawing the circle wider.

Just be wary of that impulse which we see in the disciples, the impulse to prioritize the institutional triumph of the Church over the simple embrace and blessing of people. Because, in our time, we don’t outright rebuke the kids who come to us; instead we’re tempted to desperately cling to them as a sign that one day the Church will rise up again and take its dominant place in the community and the culture. But no kid wants that pressure foisted upon them. No tired parents wants to feel like the survival of all this depends on the degree to which they have it all together. Our desperation is the equal but opposite desperation of the disciples, another way of seeing the kingdom of God not as a force of blessing but as a victorious program.

So I hope this congregation – I hope you continue to love kids without rebuking them or the ones who bring them. And I hope you continue to love kids just for who they are, not for what they represent. And if that kind of work of open-handed, open-hearted loving of children excites you, get involved. There’s more work to be done.

Now, what do Jesus’ words mean – “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”? I’m interested in the relationship between those two movements, receiving and entering. When we receive something, we can hold it, or it comes into us. It’s an inward dynamic. But we enter something that’s outside and around us. So in order to enter the kingdom that’s all around us, we first have to receive it for ourselves. And we don’t have to look very far to see what Jesus means by receiving the kingdom as a little child: “He took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.”

The kingdom of God belongs to those who are held in Jesus’ arms and who receive his blessing – his word of love, his word of truth. The kingdom of God belongs to those who commune with Christ, who abide in him, who bear his words. When we come to him with no agenda other than to be held and loved and blessed by him, then we can enter into the new world, the new creation, that he has brought about all around us. In other words, the kingdom of God belongs to those who pray.

What we experience shapes what we expect the world to be like. It’s why we tell stories to our children – stories of courage and kindness, stories of sharing and forgiveness. We want our kids to believe in a world where opportunities to have courage and kindness, to share and forgive wait around every corner. We tell our kids about faraway places, we point up at the moon, we read about dragons and elves and magic because we want our kids to believe in a big and expansive world that will never bore them but is always waiting to surprise them. We feed our kids, and put them to bed on time, and tell them that we love them because we want them to grow up in a world that they sense has warmth and affection at its core. We baptize our children so that a sense of God’s personal concern for and involvement with them tinges their sense of reality no matter happens later in life. Our experiences shape our expectations.  

And, similarly, it is in childhood that we have our first and most formative encounters with rebuke. You’re not meant to be here. You – your feelings, your interests, your questions, your needs – are in the way. This – whatever ‘this’ is – isn’t for you. Somewhere back there, each of us was denied something so simple: a blessing, an embrace, a place in the company of love. Somewhere back there, when we were in a state of utter receptivity, we were rebuked. And that, too, has shape our expectations of the world. Maybe this is a world where you are not fully wanted.

When that happened to you, it made Jesus angry. That rebuke was not from him. All he has for you is time, attention, blessing, and love.

Receiving the kingdom of God like a little child means going back to that vulnerable place, that receptive place, no matter how old we are, and allowing divine love to take hold of us. Only then can we enter the kingdom of God, which is nothing other than this life that we are living and this world that we are living in shimmering with the possibilities of grace.

At this Table, God wants to receive you, whether for the first time or the thousandth time. Come here to exchange rebuke for blessing. Come here to receive grace, that you might enter grace. Don’t hinder yourself. Let yourself come – your full self. The kingdom of God awaits you.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.