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.

Called to Reconfigure (Mark 2:1-12)

Called to Reconfigure

First UMC of Pocatello

September 29, 2024 

Mark 2:1-12 

*** 

This story occurs early in Mark’s Gospel. It is part of a series of stories about Jesus’ first days of public ministry around the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. I’m going to briefly go over what happened before the healing of the paralytic in Capernaum, because the context of the story helps us understand the importance of what happens in it.

After traveling down into the Judean wilderness to be baptized by John, Jesus of Nazareth returned home to Galilee and began preaching about the kingdom of God. Mark and the other Gospel writers tell us what Jesus’ earliest sermon was: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news” (1:15, CSB).

Jesus then called his first few disciples, including the brothers Peter and Andrew. He then attended worship at the local synagogue in a town called Capernaum, performing his first exorcism after a demon-possessed man interrupted the service. News of that healing traveled fast in the small town. By nightfall, the whole population had assembled outside the house of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, where Jesus and the disciples were staying. For most of the night, Jesus performed more healings and exorcisms, confirming the rumors about his authority over sickness and spirits.

The next day, after a morning spent in prayer, Jesus told his disciples that it was time for them to travel around the region, preaching the message of God’s kingdom in other towns. During those local travels, Jesus encountered a leper, a man considered to be ritually unclean and unfit for normal social life due to his skin disease. Jesus healed him.

The fact that Jesus had transgressed this boundary between clean and unclean, and had cured a disease that was assumed to be incurable, caused news of his power spread like wildfire. He couldn’t travel anywhere without being mobbed, so he started to withdraw into the countryside and to move about from place to place more secretively.

Our story begins with Jesus sneaking back into Capernaum only to have it be “reported that he was at home” (2:1). In other words, Jesus was outed. Predictably, a crowd soon descends upon the house where he’s staying. “So many people gathered together,” Mark writes, “that there was no more room, not even in the doorway” (2:2, CSB). No rest for the weary.

The great crowd clogging the house presents a problem to an odd group of five men who now appear in the story. Here they come, desperate to get into Jesus’ presence. But they don’t come quickly enough. The reason for their delay is obvious. Four of them are carrying a portable cot with the fifth man lying on it, unable to walk. Their breath is heavy, their arms burn. Their hearts sink when they see that there is no room for them to get their friend in ear or eyeshot of Jesus. Mark puts it bluntly: “they were not able to bring him to Jesus because of the crowd” (2:4, CSB).

Right here, I want to point out an important connection between words. When Jesus preached that the kingdom of God had come near, the Greek verb translated as “had come near” is engizō. It means “to approach” or “to be at hand.” In this story, Mark uses a verb with the same root. The four friends are unable to prosengizō, “to come near to,” Jesus. You see, Jesus has brought the kingdom of God near to all people, but some people, at least these five, were being prevented by others from coming near to it. This is not good! In their very effort to enjoy the closeness of God, a crowd of people crammed themselves so tightly into a space that there isn’t room for anybody else.

I don’t think that the size of the building is what the Gospel wants to direct our attention to. After all, Mark says, “[T]hey were not able to bring him to Jesus because of the crowd” (2:4). It’s the people blocking the paralytic from his audience with Jesus through the way they’ve configured themselves in the space.

We configure ourselves in many “spaces”. Physical, of course. But also mental, the way we think about things. And moral, our convictions about what is right and wrong. Cultural, our language and rituals and assumptions about what is normal and what is strange. We configure ourselves theologically according to what we say about God. We configure ourselves politically and arrange power and authority in our community in certain ways.

You see, it’s not just that our buildings can sometimes obstruct some people from experiencing the nearness of the kingdom. No, our thinking and feeling, our doing and assuming, our relating and our organizing can become obstructions as well.

Have you ever felt unwelcome in a Church? Felt like you couldn’t get to the heart of what the people around you found so meaningful, because maybe you talked a little differently, or you saw the world a little differently than the crowd? Have you ever remained on the outside of the gathering, because no one helped you understand what was going on? Have you ever been told, explicitly or implicitly, that you simply were not able or worthy to draw close to God?

Rarely is the problem actual lack of space in the house. It’s usually the crowd’s inability to pay attention or to exercise some holy imagination; it’s the crowd’s unwillingness to change how it’s configured.

I think the rest of the story bears this out. The four friends recovered quickly from their initial disappointment, and they pivoted to a new approach. Up the ladder, onto the roof.

Homes in Galilee at that time had flat roofs made from slats of woods layered over with branches, reeds, and clay. Roofs were used for leisure and work; they were always accessible. Somehow, the four able-bodied friends managed to lift the fifth man and his cot on top of the house. Then they started to make a hole in the roof, breaking apart that plastered mixture of dirt and wood.

Mark may have said that “there was no more room” in the house, but do you know what I think? When clouds of dust and lumps of clay and splinters of dried reeds started to rain down on the people below, I bet that they very quickly managed to get themselves away from the falling debris. Can’t you seem them wincing, looking up confused, seeing more material falling, and then bodying themselves around to at least clear that immediate area. If for no nobler reason than their own self-preservation, certainly they made some room right there at Jesus’ feet, room where there had supposedly been no room.

And I don’t think getting out of the way was their only response. Certainly a few people inside or outside ran to see what in the world was going on. “Hey, what in the world are you doing that for?”  But evidently, no one tried to stop it! When they realized the reason for this massive disruption – realized that this mess was being made for the sake of a person who needed help – I bet that they changed their mind about stopping it. They started to help. Can’t you see them now, laughing at the audacity of the four friends, shouting up words of encouragement, reaching up their hands to gently guide the lowered cot down to the floor.

Deep down, we long to see the things that separate us from one another broken down. We crave the expansion of our horizons, the unroofing of our perceived limitations. The stories that sustain us are stories of bold acts born of desperate love, and we want to participate in writing those stories ourselves.

Because of the bold, transgressive act of four friends, a whole crowd of people discovered that they also possessed the power to reconfigure themselves, to reshape the room and redirect their attention. They did it to meet the need of one person who couldn’t, until that moment, come near to the One who had come near to him.

Mark then shows us Jesus’ response to the whole situation: “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven’” (2:5).

Their faith… Whose faith did Jesus see? The obvious answer is the four friends’. They made a way where there was no way; they took the roof apart. But maybe he also saw the faith of the people in the house, who made a little room and reached up to help. The faith of a community learning to adapt itself to God’s limitless love meeting our boundless need.

And what kind of faith did Jesus see? It wasn’t faith in him – at least not directly. Obviously, these people wanted to get to him, but there’s nothing to suggest that they had faith in his identity as the Son of God or the Messiah, faith in salvation or eternal life.

Faith, at heart, means trust. Faith is different than belief. We believe that 2+2=4, but we trust a person. I think Jesus was noticing some trust. He was seeing a community trusting that it change without ceasing to be near him.

As long as Jesus abides with us and speaks his word to us, we can tear a hole in the roof and make a mess and change the terms of our belonging all without needing to be afraid of death. The death of who we are or were or will be. Nothing we do should prevent another person from coming near to Jesus. And changing how we come near in order to make more room, that won’t kill us, even if it’s disruptive. There’s life and joy not just on the other side of that change but in the very midst of it.

This is the first instance in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus not only heals someone but tells them that their sins are forgiven. ‘You’re not just healed,’ in other words, ‘but you’re right with me, beautiful and whole in God’s eyes.’ Forgiving sins is only something God can do. In that house in Capernaum, seeing the light pour in through the opened roof, Jesus revealed something deep and profound about himself.

Might it be that the depth of what Jesus will say to us in some way depends upon the breadth of the space we make for others?

If that is the case, let us ask ourselves three questions:

First: How is God calling me to reconfigure my life to make space for somebody else?

Second: How is God calling us, the Church, to reconfigure our life so that everybody can come near?

And finally: How is God calling us to instigate the reconfiguration of the world, not through violence of any kind, but by lifting up the excluded, the overlooked, and the disinherited, and making a good and holy mess on their behalf?

I’ll end it here with Paul’s words from the opening of Romans chapter 12, which strike me as particularly appropriate to the challenges and opportunities facing the Church today:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (12:1-2).

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

The Wesleyan Way, Part 5: Made Perfect in God’s Love

The Wesleyan Way, Part 5:

Made Perfect in God's Love

September 8, 2024

Ordinary Time

Philippians 3:10-12

***

Since 1773, every pastor about to be ordained in the Methodist Church is asked a series of questions by their bishop in front of the gathered conference assembly. These nineteen questions are known as the "historic questions," because they date back to John Wesley, the British evangelist and organizer who founded the Methodist revival movement.

A few of the questions have to do with pastoral care. For example, Will you diligently instruct the children in every place? Will you visit from house to house? Some of them are aimed at economics and time: Are you determined to employ all your time in the work of God? Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your work? (Still working on that last one.) There is a question about trusting the scriptures as adequate sources of divine revelation and a few about honoring and upholding the institutional life of Methodism. But the ones I want to linger with today are the first four, and they go like this:

1.   Have you faith in Christ?

2.   Are you going on to perfection?

3.   Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?

4.   Are you earnestly striving after it?

And the answer to each of these must be Yes.

Faith in Christ. Okay, that seems like an obvious requirement for Christians. But what's up with these three questions about perfection -- going on to perfection, expecting to be made perfect in love in this life, and striving after such a thing?

If you're thinking that perfection is an idea that can really hurt people in the church, maybe because you've been hurt by it yourself, you're absolutely right. When participating in church is about presenting and maintaining the appearance of a perfect life or or perfect faith or perfect family to others, it can do a lot of damage. If church is about constantly measuring and monitoring ourselves and others -- are we doing and saying all the "right" things? -- it sucks all the joy out our fellowship. We become mean to ourselves and less forgiving of others.

Perfection as a kind of pristine spotlessness has to do with performance, legalism, and conformity, and aren't these tight, airless spaces precisely what Jesus came to break open for us? How many of us have found freedom in the fact that Jesus was perfect so that we don't have to be, and that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). At the heart of the gospel is this liberating mercy: Our imperfections don't disqualify us from grace; they make us perfect candidates for it!

So why in the Methodist Church are we concerned with "going on to perfection"?

I'd like to try to answer that today as a way of wrapping up our series on Wesleyan spirituality. We've explored four other lasting characteristics of our tradition: experiencing divine love on a personal level, combatting social and economic injustices, organizing members into small groups of mutual empowerment, and singing. We end today with the hope of being made perfect in love in this life, a hope that is not just for pastors, but for all of us. John Wesley once said in a sermon that Christian perfection is “the glorious privilege of every Christian.”[1]

John Wesley did not invent the concept of "Christian perfection." He inherited it, and across his whole life he was engaged in debates about whether or not it was possible for ordinary people to experience it. Christian perfection is the idea that a person who has trusted in Jesus' grace and received the Holy Spirit ought to think and act and love the way that Jesus thinks and acts and loves, that is, perfectly. The Holy Spirit is God, and God is perfectly loving and forgiving. If God dwells in us, that should make a difference. As time goes on, our lives should become more and more transparent to God's life, and our love for others should more and more reflect God's love for us.

Another phrase that Wesley used a lot which is more-or-less interchangeable with Christian perfection is "entire sanctification." To sanctify something is to make it holy, to set it apart and devote it to God. Sanctification is the process of yielding more and more of who we are to the love and service of God. Sanctification requires opening all the dark nooks and crannies of our hurt to the healing light of God, so that they can become sources of power rather than shame. Entire sanctification means that this yielding and opening are complete, and no conscious thought, desire, or act deviates from our love and devotion.

It's important to make a distinction here. We hear perfect and we think No way. People are mortal, finite, prone to accidents and misunderstandings; we aren't all-powerful, we aren't all-knowing, and we can control so very little of what happens to us and around us. And that's all absolutely true. The Greek word often used in the New Testament to convey the idea of "perfection" is the word teleios. (If you're into philosophy it comes from the word telos, meaning end, goal, or purpose.) Teleios means that something has fulfilled its purpose or achieved the goal for which it was made. Perfection understood as teleios is about fruition, ripeness, maturity. Energy, movement, and growth. Perfection is not about being static in a bland, stifling conformity but about growing patiently and devotedly toward the One who is good.

Are you going on to perfection? Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life? Are you earnestly striving after it? Christian perfection -- it's about holy discontent and restless desire, always wanting more of God, always wanting to grow more mature in the ways of love. If God is love and God is infinite, then why would I impose limitations on what God can do in and through me?

Wesley really believed that anything was possible with God, and that through God, a human life could become perfectly Christlike. And he didn't make this stuff up; he took it from Jesus himself. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And it's teleios here. "Be teleios, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is teleios." Fulfill your purpose, which is love, as your Heavenly Father, who is love, eternally fulfills His purpose. Be mature and complete, as God is mature and complete. Even Jesus is just riffing on Moses. Leviticus 19:2: "Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, 'You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.'" For millennia there have human beings who have wondered how deeply they could travel into love's territory, and if there is any hope today for the survival of the planet, for vitality in our churches, and for joy and equality in our neighborhoods it will come from people who have determined to earnestly walk that same way.

Someone who has ripened into love still stubs her toe, still accidentally says the wrong thing at the wrong time, still gets the flu or overdraws her checking account. Still has to ask others for help. The point is that no matter the experience, the throughlines are humility and compassion and the desire to learn and forgive. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”[2] Paul says, "God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him" (Phil. 2:13).

 In other words, the promised land of ripened love is where we all belong; from time to time we say to a leader in the faith -- be that a pastor or a layperson -- 'make a life out of going on a little ways ahead, and circling back to help us all get there together.' We do a massive disservice to our leaders when we expect everything of them except that they are actively growing in their own love of God. And we do a massive disservice to ourselves if we think the promised land of perfect love is only for these special few. It's for all of us. We are made in God's image. Each and every one of us is good, good, very good in God's eyes.

So, how do we get there? What does earnestly striving toward mature love look like? I ask because if we have to muscle our way to it ourselves, if it becomes an achievement, then it's just empty perfectionism again in another disguise.

Let's hear today's scripture again, from Paul's letter to the church in Philippi: "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me." We've explored the second half of what's there, that the journey into perfect love is what we are "taken hold of" for, and that it is something we press on to take hold of.

But that first part is key to the process. Knowing Christ. Knowing his power through participating in his sufferings. Knowing his resurrection by knowing his death. The way of Christian perfection is actually the highest affirmation of our imperfections. It is when we let God into our suffering that the roots of perfect love take hold. The ways in which we suffer and the degrees to which we suffer are different person to person, but the good news is that Christ will not abandon us or cease to be with us in our suffering.

The book of James says, "Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you." Letting perseverance finish its work means patiently enduring what comes while actively asking God for help. When we go through life both vulnerably and trustfully, our resistances to grace can be cracked open, and God's love can flow.

God is not the puppet-master of our suffering. And God has zero tolerance for abuse. But in the course of a life, many things come our way that we simply have to endure -- tragedies, sicknesses, sleepless nights; messy relationships, stressful jobs, political uncertainties; failures, sacrifices, grief. The breakthroughs on our journey into love come when we have patiently endured these things without losing touch with our longing for God.

In our pain, Christ communes. In the stripping away of what is worn out and false about us, Christ communes. Jesus emptied himself, and was therefore exalted by God. His love moved downward, toward the ground, toward us.  The way to perfection is a way downward. The miserable younger Wesley, who meticulously tracked every moment of his life in a journal to measure his progress on the way to perfection, became the elder Wesley, who was uncertain if he himself would ever reach it and was okay with that, because he was more concerned with approaching each new day humbly and faithfully and sharing God's love with others.

Today, we come to Christ's table. It's a table for all of us. And it's a table especially for the imperfect, the broken, the weak, the suffering, and the uncertain-- for us, who are nevertheless on our way to love's territory. This is nourishment for that journey, a miracle of a table that has been spread before us in the presence of our enemies. And for some of us it is not only nourishment for the journey but a very foretaste of that promised place: it is the Body of Christ, love Himself consumed and incorporated into our being. Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1]Sermon 40, “Christian Perfection” (1741), §21, Sermons (Outler), p. 81.

[2]John 10:10, NRSV.

The Wesleyan Way, Part 4: Singing God’s Love

The Wesleyan Way, Part 4:

Singing God's Love

August 25, 2024

Ordinary Time

Luke 2:8-15

***

"This only do I seek... to behold the beauty of the Lord..." (Psalm 27:4).

 God is beautiful. To be in God's presence is to be in the presence of beauty. To know God's love is to know that beauty has touched you, claimed you, and lives inside you. Sometimes the beauty of God is hidden, as when we enter the holy darkness of not-knowing, or as Jesus hangs broken and bloody on the cross. Yet beauty shines from these places, too. The beauty of silent mystery; the beauty of total solidarity.

 We are made in the image of God. This must mean that God has made us to manifest beauty. The Hebrew psalmist wanted nothing more than to come to God's house, the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and gaze upon God's beauty. The New Testament says to the Church, "You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house..." (1 Peter 2:5). Through Christ, the beauty we so desire, the beauty of God, is not out there awaiting our pilgrimage but latent within and between us; it is waiting to be unleashed through our attention. While meditating on the union of God and humanity in Christ, the early church father St. Irenaus wrote that the glory of God is man fully alive. God has made us to have beautiful lives, beautiful vocations, beautiful homes and neighborhoods, beautiful economics, politics, and art.

Wherever the Spirit of God is at work in the world, you will find people who are making things beautiful, and people who are making beautiful things. You will find people engaged with beauty through the work of restoration: mending what is broken, reconciling those who are estranged. And you will find people engaged with beauty through the work of creation: poems, gardens, paintings, and, unfailingly, music.

***

Music.

The good news of God is meant to be sung. This has been true from the beginning. We can't help ourselves. Song records the story; song stirs the heart; song binds the community together.

Our most ancient fragments of the Bible are verses of Hebrew song.

There is the song of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, who, with tambourine in hand, danced and sang of God's victory on the far bank of Red Sea:

            Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

            horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15:21)

There is the song of Deborah the judge, who celebrated the downfall of Sisera at the hands of Ja'el:

            Most blessed of women be Jael,

            the wife of Heber the Kenite,

            of tent-dwelling women most blessed.

            She put her hand to the tent peg

            and her right hand to the worker's mallet;

            she struck Sisera a blow;

            she crushed his head. (Judges 5:24, 26).

The good news of God is meant to be sung. It was true, too, at the beginning of the Christian Church. Songs of worship and ancient poetic liturgies came first. The letters and the Gospels of the New Testament, which record some of these songs and liturgies, came later.

The Philippian hymn:

            Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

            who, though he existed in the form of God,

          did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,

            but emptied himself... (2:5-7a)

The Johannine prologue:

            In the beginning was the Word

            and the Word was with God

            and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Revelation's heavenly worship of martyrs, saints, and strange creatures:

            To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb

            be blessing and honor and glory and might

            forever and ever! (5:13)

And, of course, the songs of Christmas. Mary's Magnificat. Zechariah's Benedictus. The angelic choir:

            Glory to God in the highest heaven,

            and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. (Luke 2:14)

Even then, when God had entered the world in almost complete hiddenness and humility as a newborn child, there were songs.

***

The history of Christianity in America contains one of the most powerful and enduring examples of the union between Holy Spirit, human spirit, and song. When Africans were taken by force from their homelands and forced onto the slave ships, they were shorn of their cultures, languages, and families. The intent of slavery was to commodify the bodies of men, women, and children and turn them into tools of economic production. Slavery works by taking somebodies and making them nobodies.

But song is the opposite. Song takes nobodies, takes anybody and everybody, and makes them a somebody. African and African American slaves were reborn through the songs that they discovered and made together. We now call these songs spirituals.

They were an entirely knew and unprecedented art form. More than an art form, they were and are a living power. They carried secret messages of freedom. They took the oppressive Christian language of the white master class and restored it to its true purpose. As the black liberation theologian James Cone once wrote, these songs undermined "the heresy of white Christianity. ...The spiritual, then, is the spirit of the people struggling to be free."[1] Strangers sang and swayed together in secret meetings; they became communities of resistances. Whipped, exhausted, dehumanized bodies danced and sang for a God who saw them, who knew their pain, who would one day set them free.

The good news of God is meant to be sung. Slavery was bad news, but the slaves had discovered that the crucified and resurrected Christ was on their side, and they refused to let slavery dictate their inner destiny.

When Israel was in Egypt's land, Let my people go;

            Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go;

            Go down Moses, 'way down in Egypt's land;

            Tell ole Pharaoh, Let my people go.

            ...

            O children let's go down, let's go down, let's go down,

            O children let's go down, down in the valley to pray.

            ...        

            It's me, it's me

            It's me, O Lord,

            Standin' in the need of prayer.

            ...

            Go tell it on the mountain,

            Over the hills and everywhere,

            Go tell it on the mountain,

            That Jesus Christ is born.

            ...

            We shall overcome, we shall overcome.

            We shall overcome someday.

            Deep in my heart, I still believe,

            We shall overcome someday.

At the same historical moment but from a very different social location, John Wesley was instructing his own people: "See that you join with the congregation [to sing] as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing." In other words, singing -- really singing -- takes us as we are in our weakness and makes us strong.

***

The good news of God cannot help but be sung.

The Wesleyan revival caught fire in eighteenth century industrial England in large part because of the hymns written by Charles Wesley. Charles was John's younger brother. Like John, he was an ordained priest in the Anglican Church. Charles had traveled with John for the ill-fated Georgia mission in the American colonies. He was a founding member of the Oxford Holy Club.  Shortly before John had his Aldersgate experience and received an inner assurance of God's love for him, Charles had had a similar experience. The two were spiritually united.

We've seen how John brought to the Methodist revival his skills as preacher, theologian, advocate, and organizer. Charles brought the art. Charles knew the power of song, and of beauty more generally, to solidify, inspire, and energize a people. He knew that the good news needed to be sung.

He also understood the formative power of singing. People could learn and remember theological truths better through songs than through sermons. We teach our children numbers, colors, letters, and animals through simple songs. In college, I memorized the Greek and Hebrew alphabets by setting them to melodies.

And songs don't just help us remember. They also become something like prayers living inside us; they attach themselves to memories and feelings. They remind us of who we are and where we've come from. They orient us.

Charles wrote hymns that spoke of God's deeply personal love, God's immediate forgiveness and mercy, and God's presence in the community. For his time and place, these songs were radical. They were personal rather than abstract; they were written to be sung in intimate small groups as effectively as in large gatherings. By singing them, ordinary working-class people came to trust that God really did care about them.

Charles wrote 6,500 hymns. And though they've been set to different melodies over time, some of them have had remarkable staying power in the Church.

            O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise,

            the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace!

            ...

            Come, thou long expected Jesus,

            born to set they people free;

            from our fears and sins release us,

            let us find our rest in thee.

            ...

            Hark! the herald angels sing,

            "Glory to the newborn King;

            peace on earth, and mercy mild,

            God and sinner reconciled!"

            ...

            Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!

            Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!

            ...

            Jesus, lover of my soul,

            let me to thy bosom fly,

            while the nearer waters roll,

            while the tempest still is high.

            ...

            Rejoice, the Lord is King!

            Your Lord and King adore;

            mortals, give thanks and sing,

            and triumph evermore.

            Lift up your heart,

            lift up your voice; rejoice;

            again I say, rejoice!

All of these verses came to -- and then from -- the heart of Charles Wesley. All were written out of his own profound experience of God's love, which is beautiful, and God's beauty, which is love.

***

Beauty always accompanies great revivals of the human spirit. There is no single formula to beauty, art, and song. Often the imposition of a formula can get in the way.

It is good to take the songs of scripture and set them to melody -- power will always linger there. It is good to sing the African American spirituals -- to really sing them, with proper feeling, as a part of communities of resistance. And it is good to sing these songs of Wesley: they orient us to who we are and where we come from, and many of them have been inscribed on our hearts to the point that they are not just songs but prayers.

But the pattern across time is what's most important: The pattern of beauty and song entering the world through human communities that have been touched by the spirit of God.

God wants to make us beautiful as He is beautiful. God wants to make us fully alive as He is fully alive. God wants us be creative as He is creative. Sometimes this means, as the scripture says, that we must "sing to the Lord a new song" (Psalm 96:1).

We will always receive another email from another cause asking for our money, our vote, our volunteer hours. But God invites the Church to be a community with delight and wonder at its heart. God invites us to be a people whose activity springs from beauty, the beauty of divine love reaching out to us. God invites us to be a people whose activity is aimed at beauty, the beauty of the coming Kingdom of right relationship and peace. God invites us to be a people whose activity is all along sustained by beauty, the beauty of the community worshipping, serving, and reconciling.

For these reasons Wesley spurs us on from across the centuries: "[S]ing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength... [S]trive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound. ...Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing."

And the people of God say together: Amen.

[1]James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NW: Orbis Books, 1997), 23, 30.

The Wesleyan Way, Part 3: Knit Together in God’s Love

The Wesleyan Way, Part 3:

Knit Together in God's Love 

August 18, 2024

Ordinary Time

Mark 3:32-35

***  

            I've titled this third sermon in our Wesleyan Way series "Knit Together in God's Love." We've seen how John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed that God's love is meant to fill us and then, through us, to liberate others. Today, we're going to explore his approach to organizing Christians in community.

            In her small book about group spiritual direction, the Roman Catholic writer Rose Dougherty describes "the bond of spiritual community" as "a common wanting to do the will of God. Those who gather with [Jesus] in this seeking are his family."[1]  In other words, the force that 'glues' us together is a shared desire to say Yes to the Spirit. Bound together by, as Dougherty says so beautifully, "a common wanting."

            Being a part of the Church means sharing a will with others. And since the prayer of the Church is the one that Jesus taught us: "Thy will be done," we're left to ask: What does God will?

            Well, we can describe God's will, God's own desire and intent, in general terms: healing and wholeness, belonging and justice, forgiveness and freedom. Pastor Duane Anders from First UMC in Boise texted a quote by the Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio to a group chat this morning. "To follow Jesus is to be a wholemaker, essentially to love the world into new being and life." That gets to the heart of the matter. Being part of the Church means sharing God's project of making all things whole.

            As an individual who is a part of the Church, I can only perceive and respond to the way that I in my particularity am being called to perform God's will from a posture of prayer. And in that vulnerable, intimate space, it is very helpful to be among others who can help me see and lay claim to truth, just as I can help others see and lay claim to their truth.

            Jesus' first followers were Jews, as he was. After the resurrection, non-Jewish people, known by Jews as Gentiles, began responding in force to the apostles' preaching about Jesus. Jews considered Gentiles unclean; it was improper to associate with them, especially to enter their homes and eat from their tables. But here they were, responding to the Gospel, believing in Christ, and wanting to learn to live like him. Here they were, joining the Jewish Christians in that posture of prayer, walking up beside them on the same Way. Brought together in that "common wanting."

            The wanting won the day. Desire abolished distinctions. Jews and Gentiles joined together, and their love of Christ took such precedence over what had previously divided them that Paul could at one point in his ministry write, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

            This is why we cannot say to anyone: "You do not belong in the Church. You're the wrong kind of person." If someone has joined us in seeking God's will, they have as much right to be here as we have. By virtue of their desire for God and God's way, they have become our siblings, friends, and companions in the Spirit.

            Jesus really pressed this home when he redrew the lines of his own family early on in his public ministry. Things happen very quickly in Mark's Gospel, and by the mid-point of chapter three, Jesus has already aroused the ire of the Pharisees by criticizing the established religious institution and by drawing large crowds from all over Israel to hear his teachings.

            Earlier in the chapter, in verse 21, Mark writes, "But when [Jesus'] own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of Him, for they said, He is out of His mind" (NKJV).

            His own people... Family? Friends? Neighbors? His own people, presumably from Nazareth in Galilee, go to find him either to rebuke him, to shush him, or to outright restrain him and bring him home. When his mother and brothers arrive a little later, it seems plausible that they, too, for a time at least, thought that Jesus was "out of his mind." Or if not, they had come to warn him that people back home were starting to talk.

            When Jesus hears that his mother and brothers are standing outside the house where he's teaching, he says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” ...Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:32-35).

            There are clear resonances here, again, to the Lord's prayer. When we pray, "Our Father... They will be done," we are entering into the special relationship with God that Jesus had. In John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples: "Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my Father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them.” And in Ephesians, Paul writes, "God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure." Wholeness. Crossing familial lines and cultural divides. The will of God to make whole.

***

            "The bond of spiritual community is a common wanting to do the will of God."

            The authenticity and vitality of the Church must be renewed every day. It's not enough that we did the will of God yesterday. It's not enough that we plan to seek God's will tomorrow. The Church is where people are together in the present moment wanting what God wants, doing what God does, being who God says we are.

            If we simply come to Church to come -- perhaps to be comforted, to be seen, to be useful, or to do what we've always done -- our lives may be enriched, but we won't be going with others into the depth of things, into the free and unpredictable streams of the Spirit. It's good to pray for the grace to want what God wants. God is so kind that we can even pray for the grace to want to want what God wants -- and God will help us. "God, give me a hunger for you, a hunger to seek your way and do your will." And because, when we pray that prayer, we find ourselves joined to others, it becomes plural: "God, give us a hunger for you, a hunger to seek your way and do you will." It is always 'Our Father,' always a prayer prayed by the many who, by praying it, become one.

            John Wesley's great gift as an evangelist was the way that he organized people to continue growing in their faith so that their ministry could be sustained for the long haul. Many revival preachers of that time, George Whitefield among them, would blow through town, gain converts, and then leave for the next place without giving the people any structure or guidance for what to do next. People who responded eagerly to the message of salvation easily slipped back into their old habits and patterns of belonging. Wesley, on the other hand, lingered in the places where he preached. In each place, he set up large group gatherings called societies, and, within societies, he chose leaders to oversee small groups of about a dozen persons each, called classes.

            The purpose of the society meetings was for Methodists to join together for "fellowship, preaching, prayer, and hymn-singing. ...Members [also] agreed to follow three General Rules: avoid evil, do good, and employ the means of grace God gives for spiritual growth."[2] Societies were basically a second weekly church service, because Methodists were still encouraged to attend Sunday worship at their local Anglican parish to receive the Sacraments. They were also hubs for organizing the Methodist's local service to their communities.

            Classes, those smaller groups, also met once a week "for spiritual conversation and guidance. Members spoke about their temptations, confessed their faults, shared their concerns, testified to the working of God in their lives, and exhorted and prayed for one another to be more faithful. ...Every Methodist was expected to attend class meetings."[3]

            So after Wesley came to town, people had these three concentric circles of Christian community. The widest circle was membership in the Church of England, primarily for the purpose of receiving Communion. The next circle in was a more energetic, spiritual, and personal worship gathering in the Methodist society. Finally, once a week, each Methodist would meet in their class meeting and share about the wellbeing of their soul from an intimate, sacred place.

            I experienced something similar to this as a young person. When I first joined a Methodist church back in New Jersey as a teenager, these concentric circles of belonging were provided for me. I went to worship with the whole community on Sunday mornings. I attended a large youth group on Wednesday nights. And when I reached high school, I began participating in a Monday night Bible Study with some peers who were hungry for more depth of prayer, study, and conversation than we could get in youth group. It's not the way things have to be done, but I will say that I felt, even as a young person, like a vital part of that community. I could be with the whole church for worship, prayer, and teaching, and I could be with a few trusted friends as I began exploring my own soul for the first time. My whole self offered, my whole self loved. And also a sense of the whole Gospel -- God's love at work in the community and at work in me.

            Wesley's system of organization placed a premium on the development of local leaders, men and women who, while not ordained clergy, exhibited profound spiritual maturity and wisdom. Wesley's system of organization also emphasized the preciousness of every individual person who joined the movement, many of whom came from the working poor class. As one writer has put it: "Wesley had gathered his new underclass where they were and had gathered them into new social groups in which each person found acceptance and a new sense of dignity" (17).

            It was as if, by placing everyone in a society and a class, Wesley was saying, You are family now. You belong together. You all are wanting to know and do God's will in a realer way than before, so you are now on the journey together. The local organization of the revival is what, more than anything else, gave Methodism its staying power. It is why, even today, United Methodists are called to form lay-led churches, and to create what the Book of Discipline calls "a culture of call," a culture in which every person, through their mutual relationships with the others, realizes that they have a place and a purpose in what God is up to here and now.

            A  few hundred years on from Wesley's diligent attention to God's desire for wholeness, we should be wary of being on autopilot when it comes to our relationship with God and how that's expressed in our congregational life. Remember the words from Revelation? “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16). It's harsh, but it puts an exclamation point on the urgency to not let our wanting to be stifled or ignored for too. long. One set of questions you might ask is, "What is my posture toward my own spiritual hunger? Am I curious about it? Scared to consider it?" And here's a corresponding set of questions, without which the first questions mean nothing: "What is my posture toward the spiritual hunger of others? Am I curious about what's going on in my brothers and sisters in the pew? In the hearts of folks in my neighborhood?"

            It makes me wonder if it's time for our own congregation to get a bit more organized. I know that many of you get together in smaller circles of belonging throughout the week or month. But I wonder who is falling through the cracks, how well the "whole" congregation is being attended to. When someone new comes through our doors, we don't have clear pathways for them to enter into steady and deep spiritual relationships within groups. There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this, but I would be curious to know what you all are sensing and wanting in terms of formally organized spiritual community beyond Sunday morning worship.

            As we consider this, perhaps the most important thing we can do is to celebrate the bonds of love that we have forged here because of our unity in Christ, bonds which we wouldn't have naturally forged if we had followed the logic of the world. Who do you love because of this place, because of God's love, who you would never have expected to love?

These stories of friendships born of God's desire, they are such a powerful witness in our world where everything is divided, where politics and profits thrive on division, and where Christians are some of the worst perpetrators of division. May we renew our commitment to God and to one another as wholemakers, as we allow ourselves to be knit together in the love of Christ.

            Amen.

[1]Rose Mary Dougherty, S.S.N.D., Group Spiritual Direction: Community for Discernment (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995), 7.

[2]Charles Yrigoyen, Jr., John Wesley: Holiness of Heart & Life (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 17.

[3] Yrigoyen, Jr., John Wesley, 18.

The Wesleyan Way, Part 2: Liberating through God’s Love

The Wesleyan Way, Part 2:

Liberating Through God's Love

August 11, 2024

Ordinary Time

Luke 4:14-21

***

            These verses from Luke chapter four contain Jesus' first sermon. After his baptism in the Jordan river, Jesus had entered the Judean wilderness, enduring physical hunger and spiritual temptation for forty days. When he emerged from that wilderness, he traveled north, back to his home region of Galilee. He was "in the power of the Spirit" and ready to begin his ministry among his people.

            He went to worship in the local synagogue. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. These were his scriptures, the words that had shaped his own human imagination and convictions and furnished the language for his own life of prayer. He knew what he wanted to say in that moment, which ageless promises of God he wanted to bring into center focus for his congregation.

            "He found the place," Luke says.

            Jesus found exactly what he was looking for. Full of the Spirit, he found Isaiah's prophetic speech about what ministry in the Spirit mean: Good news to the poor, release for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, the year of God's favor. Jesus brought the written word of God into contact with his present reality, he collapsed the distance between the word on the page and the word taking living form in and around his body. And then he preached his first sermon. It was less than ten words: "Today," he said. "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

            Today.

            "Today" is one of Luke's favorite words to use in his Gospel. "Today" punctuates the critical moments of Jesus' story.

On Christmas night, when the heavenly choir of angels appears above the shepherds watching their flocks in the fields, the angels announce the good news of God coming to dwell among us: "For there is born to you today, in David’s city, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (2:11).

            In Luke chapter 19, as Jesus is entering the city of Jericho, he looks up into the trees and sees a man there watching him, a “wee man” named Zacchaeus, and he calls up to this man, considered by many to be a dirty scoundrel of a tax collector: "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today" (19:5). As they visit together, Zacchaeus pledges to return any ill-gotten gains back to the people. And Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house" (19:9).

            And while hanging on the cross between two other crucified criminals, Jesus extends mercy to the dying man beside him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise" (23:43).

            Today. This is why Christ came to us, to make today the day of salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). He came to wake us up to his humble, mysterious presence in the world -- today. He came to be our guest and companion, and through his gentle provocations lead us to repentance and new life -- today. He came to suffer what we suffer, to suffer as we suffer, and through that solidarity to gain our trust so that he might tell us of a Paradise greater than suffering. And he came to call the people of God to action -- today.

            Notice the second person pronouns attached to all those Todays. Born for you today. I must stay with you. You will be with me in Paradise, today. Today, this is fulfilled in your hearing. Shepherds, tax collectors, criminals, and congregations. Christ is the salvation of God for us, for you, today.

            Jesus didn't search out those specific prophetic words for his first sermon because they were interesting, though they are; or inspiring, though they are; or beautiful, though they are. He reached for them to illuminate the movement of the Spirit in the present moment, to see if the people of God would wake up to the today and not remain stuck in the yesterday or fixated on the tomorrow. For God, every day is today. And what does God want to do today? Bring good news to the poor.

            How often does the Church lose touch with the today-ness of it all? It is easy for us to live on memory or to wait for tomorrow. Sometimes we need a messenger to remind us that today really is the day of salvation, a messenger who will help us catch up with what the Spirit is already doing out among the oppressed. In his own time and place -- eighteenth century England -- John Wesley was that messenger. He came to his own people and said, Today.

            After John Wesley experienced the strange warming of his heart during a religious gathering on Aldersgate Street in London, after he ended his anxious efforts to win God's approval and received the gift of simple, steady trust in  Christ, the direction of his life changed forever.

What followed Aldersgate for Wesley was a time of searching for how to share the message of God's personal love with as many people as possible. This would mean that he needed to be present with the people, meeting them where they gathered, and that his preaching would need to be accessible to them, spoken plainly, not like the highly intellectualized treatises he had been trained to preached for his upper-class colleagues in the priesthood. It would mean transgressing the norms of the institutional church that had ordained him and to which he had pledged himself.

            Wesley was living during the beginnings of industrialization in England. There was a whole new class of working poor folk who were coalescing around the mills, factories, and mines cropping up around the countryside. These laborers, some of the first nameless masses of early capitalism, were unprotected by the law and almost entirely excluded from the political process. Wesley took the message of God's love directly to them. He went to them, preaching beyond the church walls and the Sunday morning worship hour.

            The first time that John tried this open-air style of preaching was in 1739. The famous evangelist, George Whitefield, invited Wesley to come take his place preaching outside a factory. Though Wesley's heart had recently been transformed by an encounter with God's love, the idea of preaching outside a church building made him uncomfortable. What would people think? What would the religious people think? He was so torn between doing it and not doing it that he reverted to a superstitious practice and cast lots to decide. The lots fell for him to go and preach among the unchurched poor.

            In his journal, Wesley wrote,

“I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.”

Notice those words: decency, order. Notice how different they are in energy from the proclamation of Isaiah, Christ, and now, Wesley; how different they are in energy from words like good news, release, recovery, freedom.

            His journal continues:

At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this, (is it possible any one should be ignorant, that it is fulfilled in every true Minister of Christ?) ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor…’[1]

I like to think of this moment as Wesley's second conversion. His first conversion happened when his heart was renewed by God's love; his second conversion happened when he was thrust out among the people.

            The Methodist Revival was born in that moment.

            From that point forward, Wesley called people to join him on a way where personal holiness, which has to do with the purity one's own heart in relation to God, was joined to social holiness, which has to do with welcoming the kingdom of God on earth and serving others. For Wesley, personal and social holiness were two sides of the same coin; there couldn't be any social holiness without personal holiness, and personal holiness meant nothing if it was not expressed as social holiness. Wesley didn't invent this idea; it's as old as Moses and was confirmed by Christ as the meaning of it all: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Wesley didn't think that he had come upon some secret knowledge. But he did think that his church had fallen asleep to the today. And when you fall asleep on the today, you fall asleep on the people living through today.

            For the sixty-some years left in Wesley’s life and ministry, he and the growing number of Methodists sought to transform English society through solidarity with those who suffered. They supported fairer wages and protections for workers. They enlisted women alongside men as preachers and teachers. They established free medical centers and schools. They advocated for the end of the slave trade.

            Because Wesley believed in the personal love of God for each individual human being, he he had no other option but to try and reach every person with Christ's invitation, and to better their circumstances as he was able.

            Here are two snapshots of that early Methodist history that I think are inspiring and instructive:

            The first piece of property owned by Methodists was a building in Moorfields, London called the Foundery. Originally, the Foundery was a factory that produced brass cannon for the British army. When John purchased and repaired the facility in 1739, he set about transforming it from a place that had created the weapons of war into a place that offered people, especially poor folk, comprehensive healing. Within a few years, Methodists at the Foundery complex opened a free medical clinic to their neighborhood, a free school for children, and free meeting spaces for community gatherings. This was a vision for property ownership that went clearly against the capitalist grain, a vision rooted in belonging, generosity, genuine encounter, and service. It is my prayer that as we raise a Roof for All, something of that early Methodist approach to property would grip us and pull us forward into the today of the Spirit.

            The second snapshot comes from the very end of John Wesley's life. In 1791, he wrote a letter to William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist. In the letter, Wesley described slavery as a "villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature." And he encouraged Wilberforce by saying, "Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it."[2] Wesley passed the baton, acknowledged and empowered the good work of others, and had a clear moral vision.

            This is our tradition. It's why at the beginning of this year your church leaders established ministry priorities related to health and housing, raising a Roof for All, and strengthening our partnership with our tenant daycare, TLC. We live in Pocatello in 2024. This is our today. And it's a day in which people need affordable housing. It's a day in which people need release from addictions and abuses. It's a day in which people crave belonging and peace. A day in which parents needs childcare that they can access and afford. A day in which people are hungry. A day in which our public servants are devalued and our public leaders are divisive. A day in which strangers crave to be welcomed and the earth itself cries out in agony.

            And Jesus stands among us in this today. And he asks us, every time we gather, whether or not we will allow him to make this day his day of salvation. May his words be fulfilled in our hearing. May Wesley’s commitment serve as a model for us. And may the Spirit's work of loving liberation be incarnated, enfleshed, made real in the prayers, presence, gifts, and service that we offer to the world.

            Amen.

[1]William J. Abraham, Methodism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7

[2]Quoted in James S. Thomas, Methodism’s Racial Dilemma: The Story of the Central Jurisdiction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 15.

The Wesleyan Way, Part 1:Filled with God's Love

August 4, 2024 Pastor Mike Romans 8:15-16

Over the next five weeks, I'll be helping us to explore some of the most enduring characteristics of our Wesleyan spiritual heritage. It's called "Wesleyan" because of John and Charles Wesley. They were two brothers, born in England at the dawn of the 18th century, who experienced the love of God so powerfully that they were compelled to organize a revival movement that escaped the rigid bounds of the national church to catch fire among the common folk of England, the American colonies, and, eventually, all over the world. John was the theologian, preacher, and organizer of the movement; Charles was the poet and hymn writer.

Their movement became known as Methodism. As an institution, Methodism has changed a lot over the past three centuries. Today there are United Methodists, Free Methodists, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, African Methodist Episcopalians, and others who all trace their roots back to the Wesley brothers. So it's better, I think, to talk about the Wesleyan Way as broadly as possible. It's a way that we share with others who may worship at churches with different names.

Today we are going to talk about being filled with God's love. In the book of Romans, Paul tells us that we have received a spirit of adoption, a Holy Spirit that speaks to and with our own spirits, steadying and grounding us in a divine love that we can trust. That assurance is the great privilege, John preached, of knowing Christ.

Listen to some of these lines from the hymns of Charles Wesley.

"My soul is all an aching void, Till thy Spirit here abides, And I am filled with God."[1]

“Send us the Spirit of thy Son, To make the depths of Godhead known, To make us share the life divine.”[2]

“Plunged in the Godhead’s deepest sea, And lost in thy immensity.”[3] “Give me thyself, forever give.”[4]

To share in God's own divine life, to be filled with God, to want more and more of God every day -- that's what you and I, along with every human being, have been created for. Let's go back and see how the Wesley's came to recover, in their own time and place, this basic truth of Christian life.

As John Wesley was growing up in Epworth one thing became increasingly clear in his young, developing mind: he would become, like his father Samuel, an ordained in priest in the Church of England. It might've been the daily examinations his mother Susanna put him and his eight siblings through, testing their Latin, Greek, and scripture memorization before meals, or her weekly spiritual interview with each child. It might've been watching Samuel go about his parish duties, preaching, teaching, counseling, and administering the Sacraments. Perhaps it was the fire that struck the family's home in 1709 when John was six years old, imprinting on him a sense of destiny; the fire had trapped him on the top floor, and he would have perished if a parishioner, standing on another man's shoulders, had not hauled him out of the window at the last second. He believed he was saved for a reason. Even outside these peculiarities of circumstance, to be upper-class, educated, and a preacher's kid in England at that time meant the chances were good that you'd turn out a preacher yourself. And so it was for all three of Samuel's sons: Samuel Jr., John, and Charles.

John Wesley was born and bred for the institutional Church of England, which in his time was high-brow and ritualistic, largely unconcerned with life beyond parish boundaries, with the growing number of poor folk -- men, women, and children -- forced into the new mines, mills, and factories popping up all over the country. John got an elite education, took on a modest professorship at Oxford, and  was ordained at the age of 25. His path could not have been more clearly laid before him.

But something in Wesley craved more. He had the pedigree. He knew the languages. He knew the scriptures by heart. He knew the rituals and traditions and the proper theological answers. But he was profoundly unhappy. His heart ached for something more than knowledge and tradition, for an experience of something living, personal, and real. That something, of course, was a someone. Wesley was longing for God. Not just the idea of God, but God Himself.

So John did what he had been trained to do at home and at school: he disciplined himself. He held himself to a high standard of Christian living, and meticulously tracked his progress in perfection.  He and his brother Charles started what they called the Holy Club at Oxford. The Holy Club was a small group of Christians devoted to the pursuit of holiness. They held each other accountable to a rigorous regiment of prayer, fasting, and service. In his journal, John broke down each day to the minute, keeping an account of how every moment was in some way devoted to God.

This didn't work. This intense discipline didn't bring him any closer to an assurance of God's love for him. So, John pivoted; he went for a totally new experience, taking a path that many kinds of seekers were taking at that time: a path across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies. At the age of 32, Wesley landed in the brand-new town of Savannah, Georgia to serve as the local priest.

But...wherever you go, there you are. The change of scene did not answer the longing in his soul, and his ministry in Savannah was doomed from the start. Ineffective among the native peoples, at odds with the colonists who preferred a less formal style of religion, and mired in a messy love triangle, Wesley returned to England a broken man after just two years abroad.

His next move -- and this, while not the answer, was a major step in cracking open his ego -- his next move was to seek spiritual counsel from leaders in a different tradition, the Moravian faith. Wesley had first encountered the German Moravians on his voyage over to Georgia. During a great storm at sea, Wesley had been terrified for us his life while the Moravians had remained calm, singing hymns and testifying to their unshakeable faith in God's love and power. It made a real impression on him. Their tradition emphasized individual assurance of salvation and personal prayer.

When Wesley got back to England, he sought out the Moravians and spent time living and praying among them. The story goes that he received this counsel from one of their leaders: "Preach faith until you have it." Wesley didn't have it, and he hadn't had it for so long that he was doubting even his call to preacOver the years, he had tried to muscle his way to perfection; he had tried healing his soul sickness in a different climate; he had tried to reproduce somebody else's faith in his own life. None of it had worked. That longing for a living relationship with God had almost become torture to Wesley. It would not go away, but he did not have the power to satisfy it.

It is very fitting that what came next came "unwillingly," because Wesley had done everything he could to will his way into God's love.

Here is the famous entry from Wesley's journal, dated May 24, 1738:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.[5]

Here it was. Trust. Assurance. The strange warming of a cold heart. The Spirit of Christ himself, suddenly burning in Wesley's very being. Knowing God's love in this immediate, personal way changed everything for him.

John realized that his great longing for God had all along been an echo of God's longing for him. And once he stopped trying to micromanage the journey toward God, God was able to break through to him. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourself, it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8).

We all have a longing deep within us. A wanting. A craving. Ages before the Wesley brothers walked the earth, the African bishop St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

At bottom, we ache for a love that will set us free. Free from fear.  Free from our ego's need to be in control, to force its way, to define itself and defend that definition. We ache for a love that will set us free from stories that don't fit or serve us any longer. We ache for the freedom and forgiveness and joy of God.

The church, as a human organization, can't satisfy that longing in you. Your pastor can't satisfy that longing. Your education or politics or possessions can't satisfy that longing. You can't get to God by trying to live the perfect life. It won't work to take your old problems to new places. You can't know love for yourself through the words and experiences of someone else, no matter how wise and good they are.

Friends, Christ wants to give you everything -- love, and trust and freedom. He wants to give you himself. God wants to put his very Spirit within you, to gather up all your longing and return it to its source: "Abba, Father!"

Whatever else it is, our Wesleyan Way flows from the strangely warmed heart, from the heart that has been brought to life by grace.

As we sang at camp this week:

Love is flowing like a river Flowing out from you and me Flowing out into the desert setting all the captives free.

At the bedrock of our tradition is John Wesley's conviction that his Aldersgate experience was not unique to himself or reserved for a super-spiritual class of people. He thought that every human being could come to know God in an intimate way. John dedicated the rest of his life to helping as many people as possible come to trust in God's love.

In response to a message like this, there are many good questions you might ask yourself. I think one of the best places we can begin is to become curious about our own inner longing.

In John's Gospel, Jesus doesn't call his first disciples to follow him. Instead, his first disciples come to him. When he turns and sees them already following him, he asks them: "What are you seeking?" And they can only answer his question with one of their own, "Master, where are you staying?"

What are you seeking? By waking up our deep wanting, by stirring up our desire, Jesus brings to bring us to himself.

So, take a few minutes to sit with those two questions printed in your bulletin. Or, if these questions don't seem to fit what you're feeling right now, sit with whatever God is doing in you in this moment.

●  What are you seeking?

●  And what does this seeking mean for your life

After a few moments of silence, we'll share Communion together.

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

[1]Charles Wesley, “Wretched, and miserable,” stanza 6.

[2]Charles Wesley, “Hymn 1,” Whitsunday Hymns (1746), stanza 6.

[3]Charles Wesley, “Hymn to the Holy Ghost,” Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), stanza 4.

[4] Wesley, “Hymn to the Holy Ghost,” stanza 2.

[5]William J. Abraham, Methodism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4.

“The Power of Parallel and Parable”

July 28, 2024

John Gribas

Reading from 2 Kings 4:42-44

(New Revised Standard Version)

[42] A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, "Give it to the people and let them eat." [43] But his servant said, "How can I set this before a hundred people?" So he repeated, "Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the LORD, 'They shall eat and have some left.'" [44] He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the LORD.

 Transition

 Holy God. I ask that the words I share today, and the thoughts and ponderings they prompt in all our hearts and minds, may be guided by your Holy Spirit. And may they reveal You and the good news of the kingdom of heaven. Amen.

 Sermon

 When Pastor Mike first extended the invitation for me to prepare and share a message as I am doing today, I learned that for weekly worship readings, this church, like so many others, traditionally follows the lectionary—a common annual calendar that provides a list of thematic scriptures for each week. Mike let me know that I should not feel any obligation to choose from the lectionary options. I appreciate that.

However, I have always chosen a sermon scripture from this common lectionary. To me, it just seems like the right thing to do. Also, it really helps in making a decision. Having all of scripture to consider would be pretty overwhelming. How could I ever make a choice? The handful of lectionary options narrows things down nicely.

So when I am invited to share with the church, I first spend some time reading and reflecting on the lectionary scriptures. And I listen. I listen for God’s prompting—some kind of nudge toward one reading or another. Sometimes the prompting is very clear and comes quickly. Other times, less so. Well, this time around was definitely a “less so” experience.

My initial thought was that I really didn’t like any of the options. They seemed either too familiar to do much with, or they were examples of very general declarations of God’s goodness and humankind’s foolishness, or they included those exceedingly long, grammatically complex, and for me pretty confusing introductory statements Paul was fond of in his letters.

In the end, though, I was nudged toward this rather brief excerpt from 2 Kings. I thought it was an odd place to be nudged, honestly. To begin…it is so short. Three total verses. And while I have been a pretty serious Bible reader for decades, I can’t say I actually recalled this story featuring Elisha and some guy who comes from a place with a name that sounds a bit like an actor’s pre-performance vocal warm-up.

Baal-shalishah! Baal-shalishah! Baal-shalishah!

 But seriously, this story felt completely new to me. At the same time, not new at all. I am sure as I read it moments ago, you had the same thought I did. This sounds a lot like something from the New Testament. Something really, really familiar—Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes and the feeding of 5000. In fact, John’s version of the feeding of 5000 event was another one of the lectionary options for this week. It has a lot more detail, more impressive numbers, includes a generous little kid which always makes a story more appealing…oh, and it also includes Jesus as the center of the action. You might think I would have been nudged toward this scripture from John.

Nope. 2 Kings 4:42-44.

Though it is short…and unfamiliar…and includes reference to an obscure city with a pretty weird name, I actually think there is a lot here. Especially if you are willing to consider this story from two perspectives. As a para-LLEL. And as a para-BLE.

Parallel. Parable.

I think it is pretty obvious how this 2 Kings 4 story can be seen as a “parallel” to the loaves and fishes story from the gospels.

Side note. Did you know that the feeding of the 5000 is the only miracle other than the resurrection that is recorded in all four gospels. Yep. So it is pretty safe to assume that most people with even a cursory knowledge of Christian scriptures is familiar with the feeding of the 5000. And I think it is safe to assume that you all see how the story from 2 Kings works as a “parallel.”

In both stories, someone brings a small amount of food and willingly offers it. A person recognized in one way or another as a “man of God” gives instructions for that small offering to be used to feed a lot of hungry people. Comments are made suggesting that the idea is seen by others as rather ludicrous. The “man of God” nonetheless directs others to distribute the food. And they do. And it is enough. More than enough.

Parallel stories.

But, to make use of some geometry terms, parallel is not equal.

These are not the same stories. And the difference is not just where they can be found in scripture, or the names of the characters involved, or the specific kind and amount of food offered, or the number of people fed.

Actually, despite the many similarities, I think the 2 Kings version can offer insights that are less likely to come from what we know as the feeding of the 5000. And one reason for that is because in the 2 Kings version…there is no Jesus.

It might sound disrespectful or not-very-Christian or even a little heretical, but I do think that, in some ways, Jesus’ presence in the gospel version of these parallel stories interferes with some valuable take-aways here.

Obviously, I am not standing here arguing that the feeding of the 5000 would somehow be “better” without Jesus. That is not it at all. But as I spent time reading and reflecting on this story from 2 Kings, I immediately noticed the connection to the parallel story in the gospels, but then I found myself thinking about things I don’t believe I ever thought about when reading the feeding of the 5000.

In 2 Kings, Elisha is a big deal. He is a man of God. This food miracle sits among a long list of Elisha miracles—many which are also parallels to other miracles of Jesus recorded in the gospels. Some biblical scholars see the earlier prophet Elijah as a kind of Old Testament John the Baptist, preparing the way for Elisha, who can be seen as a kind of Old Testament Jesus.

But the fact is, Elisha isn’t Jesus, and we know it. Reading 2 Kings, I am never tempted to consider that the purpose of the miracles is to demonstrate how awesome a man of God Elisha is. Instead, I am compelled to think about how awesome God is. In particular, I am struck by the fact that God—omnipotent, omnipresent, and everlasting creator of the universe—notices and cares that people are hungry. Not only cares, but provides.

That might seem rather obvious, but I don’t think it is.

Miracles are awesome things. But they can also be dangerous things, especially when they are big, splashy, public miracles. We can get all caught up in the spectacle and impossibility of it all, and that can prevent us from seeing some things that are less flashy and more mundane but, nevertheless, really important.

Like the fact that, in 2 Kings, there were a lot of people who were hungry. Apparently, God recognized that hunger, that human need, and God worked through the willing, modest gift of the man from Baal-Shalashah, and worked through the encouragement and faith of the man of God, Elisha…and the hungry people were fed.

God cares that people are hungry. God sees human need. God can and does provide. God often provides through the modest offerings of willing human beings, human beings like you and me. And, so often, what we have to offer seems like far too little. But God’s grace and power can transform even the smallest gifts into…enough. More than enough.

So the parallel between 2 Kings 4:42-44 and the loaves and fishes helps me. With Jesus being revealed as the messiah and as divine in the gospels, it is easy for me to get caught up in that as the central message—the central message of the story of the feeding of the 5000, and also of so many other Jesus miracle stories. Healing a man’s withered hand, making lepers clean and the blind see and the demon possessed freed and paralytics walk, restoring deceased loved ones to life, even responding to a potential wedding fiasco by providing wine when there was no more.

Yes, in all these cases, Jesus demonstrates his uniqueness and his power. But I have a difficult time believing that was his motivation. I don’t think Jesus was thinking, “Great! Here is a guy with a withered hand. This will give me an opportunity to show everyone what I can really do!!”

No. In all of these cases, Jesus saw human suffering. Human need. And he cared. And he acted. He acted with divine power, yes…but, perhaps more amazing, he acted with the deepest human compassion. This is Jesus’ nature. And Jesus reflects the nature of the Father. Our creator God.

The fact that 2 Kings 4:42-44 is parallel to but not equal to the feeding of the 5000 helps me—and I hope helps us all—to remember that.

I think there is even more to this story if we consider it not only as a parallel, but also as a parable. Here is one definition of “parable.”

A short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson.

Now, some might question the appropriateness of examining this passage from 2 Kings as a parable. Isn’t 2 Kings, along with many other books in what we typically call the Old Testament, considered ancient history?

Well, yes. It is. But we have to understand that the ancients who passed along this material—often passing it along from generation to generation through the oral tradition—understood “history” very differently than we do today. We assume that any history worth paying attention to represents fully accurate accounts of things that actually happened at particular times and places, filled with verifiable details and corroborated by other historical accounts and evidence. But ancient people simply did not have access to the kinds of records or resources needed to expect this from history.

This isn’t to say that ancient histories are “inaccurate” or that things and people and places referenced in ancient histories “didn’t really exist.” It means that the way ancient people understood history was different, and the way they recalled and shaped and passed along their histories had a purpose.

I share this only to suggest that, given this understanding of ancient history, it makes plenty of sense to look at 2 Kings through the lens of parable. Not simply to read it and conclude, “Yep. That happened,” but to read it and ask, “What might this mean? How does it illustrate some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson?”

So to finish up today, let’s do that. Let me suggest a few insights that I think are reasonable and that might be helpful.

First, with God’s help, even very modest gifts can have tremendous impact. Actually, that point has already been made earlier, looking at 2 Kings 4:42-44 as a parallel. But it is worth repeating. The man from Baal-Shalishah didn’t have a lot. And he seemed pretty incredulous that it would go far in feeding so many. Do you have something you are willing to offer but that you feel is just not enough? Maybe you need to find your Elisha and listen to that person’s encouragement to take the step to share anyway. Perhaps it is exactly what God wants to use to meet some human need.

Second, I think there are many like that man from Baal-Shalishah, willing to share their gifts but unable to see their real impact. Might you be the Elisha in their lives? How might you provide the vision, confidence, and encouragement they need to take the risk, offer what they have, and step out in faith?

Third, as a place, Baal-Shalishah is rather an oddity. It is mentioned only once in scripture. It’s meaning and location are very unclear. But based on what is known, it is unlikely that the person from Baal-Shalishah would be a member of the Israelite clan—unlikely that he would be a worshipper of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Unlikely that he would have any awareness of the practice of tithing. In fact, the “Baal” part of the place name might suggest that this person was a worshipper of a rival deity! Yet this man brought “food from the first fruits to the man of God.” And God did something amazing with it.

I recall a powerful experience from many years ago. My wife, Lana, and I were attending the performance of an original play at the experimental theatre associated with the Guthrie in Minneapolis. The play was about the French Revolution. It was certainly non-religious…a secular play performed by what we assumed was a secular theatre company.

During the performance, we in the audience began to smell something really good. The lovely aroma grew. Then, at one point, the action of the play stopped. The performers all went to a spot where production crew handed them fresh bread that had been baking back stage somewhere.

The performers, still in character, brought loaves to some members of the audience in the first couple of rows. In keeping with the principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood associated with the French Revolution, the audience members were simply told, “Here. Make sure everyone gets some.” It was a little awkward at first, but soon people were turning to those around them, tearing the bread and making sure all were included. People were very quiet, and the time felt…holy. Honestly, I will always remember that as one of the most real, sincere, powerful “communion” experiences I have ever had.

Sometimes, gifts come from unexpected people and places. Maybe people or places that don’t fit nicely into our idea of where Godly gifts should come from. We need to be ready to receive them.

2 Kings 4:42-44. A curious place to be prompted. A very small passage of scripture. Small but, if explored as parallel and as parable, filled with the potential for substantial insights to challenge, inspire, and feed our hungry hearts and souls.

Amen.

Benediction

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Charge

So let us go, reflecting on these words by Dorothy Day—journalist and one of the most well-known Catholic social activists of the twentieth century.

Young people say, "What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we can only lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform these actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Amen.

Into the Water Together

July 21, 2024

Jason Lee Sunday

Pastor Mike

Acts 8:26-40

At the Annual Conference session last month, Rev. Allen Buck, the pastor of Great Spirit UMC in Portland and leader of the Greater Northwest’s Circle of Indigenous Ministries, issued an invitation to all Oregon-Idaho Methodists to participate in the Circle’s new Truth-Telling Project. The purpose of the Truth-Telling Project is to build relationships and tell stories that will lead to repentance and healing for Indigenous communities often marginalized and traumatized by the Church. The initiative will contribute to the first phase of a robust new plan for indigenous ministries that was presented by Rev. Buck and adopted by delegates at last week’s Western Jurisdictional Conference. After truth-telling, the other three phases of the Jurisdiction’s plan are practices of repair, practices of self-determination, and leadership development. The Western Jurisdiction delegates approved spending $100,000 over the next four years to support this work.

One of the gifts of participating in a denominational system such as Methodism is realizing that the hopes for the Church which we hold as individuals – that our congregations be places of healing, authenticity, equity, and vibrant relationship – are shared by other people, and that there are people just like you and me who are involved in the system and doing something about what they want and inviting you to work alongside them. If you are interested in learning more about the Truth-Telling Project, I have a QR code here that you can scan, and I’ll also put out some information in the August newsletter for you.

It would be impossible to tell the truth about the relationship between indigenous peoples and Christianity in a place like Pocatello without taking a sustained critical look at Reverend Jason Lee, the Methodist preacher who became the first Protestant missionary in what was then called the Oregon Territory. Yes, Lee was courageous and ambitious; he founded settlements and schools; he helped set the stage for the annexation of Oregon to the United States. He responded to the call of God on his life as he understood it, and the Methodist Church in Blackfoot can trace its history directly to him, as we can trace ours to theirs.

But Lee was also a fallible man. He carried upon his body and in his mind the ideologies and sins of his generation. He came to this part of the country to evangelize its indigenous peoples – which for him was an expression of responsible love. But we know from his own journals and papers that did not – perhaps he could not – see them as fully human. He made the fatal mistake that so many colonizing Christians of that era made; a mistake that we, too, if we are not careful, can still so easily make: He bound together sharing Christ and imposing whiteness; he believed that, for a native person to become a Christian, assimilation to the culture, language, economy, and worldview of white Americans and Europeans would also be required. He equated faithful discipleship with a particular way of being human, and so he participated in the widespread erasure of native ways of being and in the theft of native land.

Jason Lee did not invent these sins and he certainly did not set off to the Northwest in order to bring about pain. But, as the scripture says, sin “clings” to us “so closely,” and Lee, as much as anyone of that time, viewed native peoples as problems and projects, not necessarily as partners and siblings. He wanted to change them; to improve them; to foist upon them a sense of identity bound up in labor and property ownership rather in ritual, community, and place. He didn’t consider that expanding the family of faith would require him to convert, require his understanding and practice of Christianity to change.

My point here is not to make us ashamed to be Methodists or Americans – that would be counterproductive – but to simply say that the present is built on the past, and that our history is full of good that’s been done and harm that’s been done. While we can’t go back and change things, we can learn from the past, the good and the harm, and move into the future with greater wisdom and care. Which brings me to today’s scripture.  

The early church’s expansion, recorded in the New Testament book of Acts, took a radically different form than the model of Manifest Destiny. After the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the first Christians on Pentecost, people began to preach and teach and baptize in Jesus’ name wherever they found themselves. At first the movement was centralized in Jerusalem, but very soon, due to persecution, it was scattered abroad into neighboring towns, cities, regions, and, eventually, through Paul’s ministry, into nations. The movement was meant to expand. Jesus came to reveal the heart of God to the whole world, and before his ascension he had commissioned his followers to go and make disciples in Jerusalem, Samaria, and then on to the ends of the earth.

As the Church grew, the earliest conflicts were about whether or not new believers from outside Israel had to adopt all the old Jewish customs. The apostles thrashed this out and decided that, no, people did not have to adopt a single set of customs, or a single language, in order to be the Body of Christ. One faith, one Lord, one baptism, but not one way of being human.

In fact, what happened instead was that the earliest apostles, the Jewish Christians, were changed through their encounter with the Gentiles. They, the missionaries and evangelists, were transformed by their love for these supposedly unclean people as much as the new converts were changed by the gospel. This is evangelism as true joining, where there is mutual change. It is very much like falling in love and combining families. Messy, transformative, we adopt this tradition from your upbringing, that one from mine, and we make some other things from scratch together. I don’t impose changes on you; you don’t impose changes on me. Instead, through our shared desire for Christ, we come closer to one another and figure out what it means to live together there, near him. 

We see something like this in the encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. These two people could not be more different. Philip was a Jew living in Jerusalem who was elected by the apostles to be one of the Church’s first seven deacons. The Ethiopian eunuch was from Africa and despite his bodily trauma, he was politically and financially powerful. The only reason the two of them met at all was because the Holy Spirit led Philip into the eunuch’s path.

When they encountered one another, the eunuch was reading from the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah, and the two men began a conversation about what the scripture meant. Philip responded to the eunuch’s curiosity and questions, very much like the way Jason Lee, according to the tradition, responded to an inquiry by several native people in the Northwest by coming out to Oregon as a missionary.

But here’s where the paths diverge: when the eunuch heard what Philip had to say and believed him and then asked, “What would hinder me from being baptized right now?” Philip’s response was, “Well, nothing. Let’s do it.” But in most situations during American colonization and expansion, there were conditions for indigenous communities becoming Christian. If they were not outright forced to do so, which often happened, native peoples were expected to become like the settlers – become capitalists, property owners, English speakers, etc. And these conditions were enforced by American military pressure.

Here in our story, there is no condition for the eunuch’s baptism. In fact, after the baptism, Philip is whisked away by the Spirit to someplace else. Which is very significant. Having shared the Gospel with this traveler, he does not get to go to the traveler’s home and oversee how things will unfold from there, that is, if the eunuch will be a Christian “the right way.” The eunuch takes faith in Christ back to his own people and gets to share that faith in a way that is authentic to him and authentic to his context.

The baptism at the climax of the story shows us what baptism, which is the fundamental identity-marker and initiation ritual in our faith, means for the community. We enter the water together. We both end up changed. There is no imposition but only a Spirit-inspired encounter, only curiosity leading to conversation, and conversation to mutual conversion.

The history of Methodists in this particular place is not unique. We are dealing with the same complicated legacy as the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, and others. But we do need to deal with it, to tell the truth, to begin the work of repentance and repair.

If God wills it and the Spirit guides, perhaps someday there will be a relationship between our church and members of the Shoshone Bannock tribe. Maybe someday a beloved community will be born that places obstacles and hindrances before no person. But for that to happen, we would need to be willing to set aside much that we think is normal, necessary, and permanent and enter the primordial waters of creation, the flood waters of judgement, the baptismal waters of new birth.

Maybe one day we will. Amen.

Abide

Fruitfulness, Part 11:

Abide

June 30, 2024

Pastor Mike

John 15:1-17

  “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:4-5).

 God calls us to be fruitful. The fruits that God wants us to bear are acts of service that heal and liberate others. Jesus’ teaching about the vine and the branches in John 15 takes us to the heart of the matter. Over the course of this preaching series, we’ve examined the call to fruitfulness, and we’ve explored several of the fears and challenges that obstruct or complicate that call. Jesus now tells us how living the fruitful life is possible: “Abide in me as I abide in you.” The essence of Christian spirituality is contained in those eight words. Here is God’s amazing grace: Christ abides in us. And here is our great responsibility in the light of that grace: we must abide in Christ.  

The Greek verb translated here as “abide” is meno. It’s a versatile word that can also be translated as “remain,” “dwell,” “continue,” or “tarry.” Let’s play with these possibilities, just to taste the richness of Jesus’ words.

Remain in me as I remain in you.

Dwell in me as I dwell in you.

Continue in me as I continue in you.

Tarry in me as I tarry in you.

Tarry is an old-fashioned word, but it’s in one of the great hymns: “And the joy we share as we tarry there / none other has ever known.” When we tarry somewhere, we stay longer than we intended; we delay our departure; we lose track of time.

What does it mean that Christ loses track of time in you – that Christ remains, dwells, and continues in you? And what does it mean for you to remain, continue, and dwell in Christ – to lose track of time in him?

One great instance of the word meno being used earlier in John’s Gospel comes from the fourth chapter, which records Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob. After a cautious start to the conversation, the woman receives the love of Jesus, and she runs back to her people in town and tells them to come and meet a man who “told me everything I ever did” (John 4:39). “So, when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to abide with them, and tarried two days” (John 4:40). Two uses of meno. Desire meets desire: Jesus responds to our deep longing for his presence. And all our longing, of course, is rooted in God’s eternal decision to be our loving, saving God.

What Jesus wants to get across in this teaching is that we are made for constant communion with him; we are meant to dwell in him and to make his words our own story. We are created to be branches, rooted in the vine and bringing forth fruit. We are channels of all the life and energy that the vine wants to give us. But we are not the vine. We do not plant or provide for ourselves; we do not determine when it is pruning time or harvest time. We don’t choose what the farmer will do with the fruit. This is good news because it keeps us from thinking we need to be particularly strong or intelligent or creative or influential to live the fruitful life. Jesus wants to give us himself, all that he is, with all the love and power that he has received from his Father in the Holy Spirit. All our striving should be aimed at making a home in him.

Jesus elaborates on what he means by this abiding as the passage unfolds. After saying “abide in me,” he says, “abide in my love.” And then: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” Me, my love, my commandments. My commandments, my love, me. I came across a great quote recently by a twentieth-century French Catholic social worker named Madeleine Delbrêl. She wrote, “[T]he only valid commentary on the Sermon on the Mount is our life.”[1] We come to know the truth of Jesus’ words as we live them – not as we debate or examine or repeat them, but as we practice them. Abiding in Christ is not passive but active. But the activity takes the form of trusting what Christ has told us about who we are and enduring in the way he has set before us. We abide in Christ when we pray, when we take his words to heart, when we serve others as he has served us. And as we abide in him, he promises to abide in us, to give us everything that we need to bear fruit; he promises to be the source of our love and our joy.

When I stood before Bishop Bridgeforth last Sunday for my Commissioning, one of the things he asked me was, Will you be faithful in prayer, in the study of the Holy Scriptures, and with the help of the Holy Spirit continually rekindle the gift of God that is in you? He could just as easily have said, “Will you abide in Christ, as Christ abides in you?” But I love that liturgical language: rekindling the gift of God that is in you…

What does that mean for you? How do you continually rekindle the gift of God that is in you? There is a gift of God in you – it is Christ himself! How will you open yourself to him? How will you set yourself up to lose track of time and tarry with him in prayer, in the scriptures, in compassionate service?

I see at least two ways we might struggle with this passage.

The first is with the idea of pruning. We’re called to bear fruit, but Jesus also says, “Every branch that bears fruit [God] prunes to make it bear more fruit” (15:3). So the abiding, pruning, and fruit-bearing go together; we can’t have one without the others. The metaphor suggests that our growth in Christ depends upon God cutting away all that is superfluous or worn out and unproductive. Our life in Christ moves through this rhythm: harvest time, pruning time, harvest time, pruning time. Part of abiding in Christ means allowing ourselves to be simplified, streamlined, integrated. As we abide in him in prayer, scripture, and service, he will teach us what is essential to our thriving and what is obstructive. Sometimes we are hindered by a material distraction or possession; sometimes we are hung up on old way of thinking, on an old story that no longer serves us about who we are or what the world is like. God makes the cut; and the cut hurts, but it also allows us to channel a greater concentration of divine energy, and to bear more fruit.

The second way we might struggle with this passage is with the black-and-whiteness of it: “apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus says that it is impossible for us to bear fruit unless we abide in him, and he in us; that if we don’t keep the spiritual channels open, we will whither up and be removed from him.

What does this mean, we might wonder, about those who do not follow Christ but who nevertheless are working for the good of the world?

The literary context of the passage is helpful here. Jesus spoke these words about the vine on the night of his betrayal and arrest. He had just finished washing his disciples’ feet in the upper room, and Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, left to set Jesus’ arrest in motion. With the betrayer gone, Jesus began a new teaching for the remaining eleven, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (15:1).

Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly speaks in these metaphorical “I am” statements. “I am the bread of life.” I am the light of the world.” “I am the gate and the good shepherd” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Some of these teachings – the bread, the light, the gate – come from the early days of Jesus’ ministry when he was preaching to great crowds. “I am the resurrection and the life” was spoken only to Martha when Jesus came to raise her brother Lazarus from the dead. Audience matters. Jesus has already said that anyone is welcome to find their nourishment in him, to make him the light of their life. But the audience for the vine teaching is not the crowd, not an individual, and not even the twelve disciples, but the eleven. Jesus tells those who would remain with him through the agony of crucifixion and the ecstasy of resurrection, those who would receive the Holy Spirit and become the Church to abide in him. This vine word is a word for the church, for those who “have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you” (John 15:3).

The point, I think, is that Jesus refuses to be an idea among other ideas, or a system among other systems, or a philosophy among other philosophies, or a curiosity among other curiosities. He is a person, the personal God, who wants to give all that he is and has to us. And for him to do that we need to open ourselves completely to him. God is so much vaster and at the same time so much more intimate than we can conceive, and we are called to grow into that vastness, into that intimacy through Christ. The vine is not a teaching aimed at excluding others, it's a teaching aimed at excluding everything in us that would keep us from the pure practice of his love, and the clear experience of his joy. If we want to retain the right to do some things without him, or to live a part of our lives apart from him, then we have not truly understood the promise or call of this abiding. He calls us friends; he wants to make our joy complete; he wants the world to know his love. His perfection, his fullness, requires our wholehearted devotion.

So I’d like to invite us into a time of reflection, and here are the two questions I want you to sit with: What does it look like for you to abide in Christ – and will you do it? Is something inessential being pruned away from you – and will you allow it?

Let’s tarry with these questions in the company of the Holy Spirit or a few minutes, and then we will celebrate the essential truth of our mutual abiding with a baptism.

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

[1] Madeleine Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, eds. Gilles François and Bernard Pitaud (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2024), 120.

Abide In My Love

Fruitfulness, Part 12:

Abide In My Love

July 7, 2024

Pastor Mike

John 15:9-11, 16

Back on April 21, shortly after Easter, I began a twelve-part preaching series on fruitfulness. Fruitfulness is a theme that runs through the Bible from cover to cover. We’ve encountered it in the Genesis creation story, in the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs, in the prophetic words of Jeremiah, in the parables of Jesus, and beyond. The ancient Hebrews, Palestinians, and Greeks who recorded and passed on the stories that would one day become our scriptures were people who lived close to the ground. As they searched for the words to describe their life with God across the centuries, words for what they had learned about God’s desire for humankind, they contemplated their grape vines, their wheat fields, their olive, date, and pomegranate trees, and they thought, God wants precisely this: that we remain deeply rooted in the Spirit, so that we might bring forth gifts for the world. God wants us to bear good fruit – fruit that feeds body, heart, and mind.

As I bring this series to its conclusion today, I hope that the fruit-bearing metaphor has rooted itself in your own imagination, and that you have become curious about and attentive to your own sense of call.

Here at the end, I want to revisit some words from the Apostle Paul. In the first chapter of his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes this: “We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9-10).

This is Paul’s prayer for Christians in the Church. He hopes that we are putting our faith in action, that we are not merely hearing the Word but also doing it. But he also acknowledges a sequence here, a priority. Before the fruit can be offered, it must ripen. “May you be filled with all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may bear fruit in every good work.” We must be filled, we must be rooted, we must be well ourselves if we are to sustain the work of helping others to be well. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). If we are going to multiply and share divine love in this world, we must experience divine love for ourselves. The fruit of the Spirit is the fruit of the Spirit. We are vessels, channels, branches, and we must be connected to our source.

In his great teaching on the vine, Jesus told the disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9). If Jesus loves us the way that the Father has loved him, we ought to wonder, ‘How has the Father loved Jesus?’ Answering that question will tell us a lot about the love we have been created to participate in, the love that will empower us to “walk worthy of the Lord.” How has the Father loved Jesus? Asking that question brings us to the very heart of the fruit-bearing life.

First, God prepared the way for Jesus. God appeared to a teenage peasant named Mary, announcing that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit who would save his people from their sins. God spoke to Joseph in a dream and commanded him to remain with Mary despite the scandal of her pregnancy and to guard her from the hateful violence of Herod. God led this family to Bethlehem for the child’s birth and guided the Eastern Magi there by a star. These Gentiles came to worship him, and in worshipping him, they confirmed his identity as the Savior of all people.

God set his Son in a religious community where Jesus would grow up connected to the sacred within and around him. God set him in a humble and loving Galilean home in which Jesus would grow up learning the ordinary trades and stories of his people. When the time was right, God sent John the Baptist into the wilderness to preach a baptism for the repentance of sins, a message that stirred the heart of Jesus and compelled him to step out of the obscurity of his origins into a life of dramatic public ministry.

Through all this scandal, danger, obscurity, and silence, God loved Jesus by preparing the way for him, and Jesus loves us by preparing our way. Jesus makes a way for us. We can trust him to guide our steps as we put one foot in front of the other. If we look backward and consider the roads by which we’ve come to this moment, we will say, ‘He helped me to get here.’ And as we look ahead, we can say, ‘I know that he will open the doors that need to be opened and frustrate the paths that need to be frustrated.’ Jesus works in us and for us long before we are aware of it. If you are uncertain of what the future holds for you, trust that grace goes before you into the unknown. You will meet the love of God there in the people and places that have been prepared for you.

How else has the Father loved Jesus? Well, God appeared to Jesus in a few moments of sublime spiritual clarity. At his baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove. He was embraced by the light of God, and he heard the voice of his Father speaking to him: “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.” The Spirit came down and anointed him with power for ministry. The voice and the anointing go together. Love is power. Affirmation is power. Later on, atop the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus was illuminated from within. In this presence of Peter, James, and John, his clothes became dazzling white and his skin glowed. And again there was the voice of the Father, speaking now to the world: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.” At both baptism and Transfiguration, the Father explicitly affirmed the goodness of Jesus: “You are beautiful. You are good. You have a voice that is worth listening to you.” The Father loved Jesus by separating the veil between eternity and time and naming Jesus’ essence, calling forth the very best that was within him.

This is how Jesus loves us. Jesus cuts through the murky, turbulent realities of the world to speak to our essence, to affirm that we are good and that we have our origin and our end in love. He steadies us in our God-given identity. Jesus breaks through to us – not often, perhaps, but enough – in moments of pure spiritual insight. He affirms our belovedness and anoints us for ministry in his name.

A third way that the Father loved Jesus was by empowering his ministry. God answered Jesus’ prayers and supplied power for miracles of healing, forgiveness, and multiplication of food. God surrounded Jesus with friends and coworkers, men and women who saw him, provided for him, learned from him. God was there in the day-to-day grind of ministering to the needs of the crowd, and God was there in the secret place when Jesus needed to slip away and pray. Jesus sustains us, too. He gathers us into a community of servants, helps us to endure the demands of our baptismal ministry, and provides our daily bread.

The Father also met and held Jesus in those moments when Jesus suffered most. There were many times when Jesus was exhausted and hungry. For forty days in the wilderness he experienced an onslaught of temptation. At the end of his ministry, he was insulted, betrayed, tortured, abandoned, and killed. In all of it, God was there. Even in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus prayed that the cup of suffering might pass from him, the Father received that prayer, and allowed Jesus to speak his agony without shame or reproach. The depth, trust, and honesty of their love kept all fear at baby. God went into the darkness with Jesus, shared the pain of his Son.  

Here, too, is Jesus’ love for us. When we are tempted, when our strength fails, when our bodies are sick or hungry or worn out, when we feel abandoned, when our love proves to be costly and being faithful means sharing in the sufferings of others, when voices of anger and fear and despair begin whispering to us, when the ground collapses under us and reliable ways of thinking shatter, when we grope about in the dark for God – Jesus is there, holding us close. He cries with us, and he also works creatively over and within our chaos. The darkness is not dark to him (Ps. 139:12).

Finally, God the Father loved Jesus by vindicating him. God raised Jesus from the dead. God broke the power of sin and shame. God did not let suffering to have the last word over Jesus’ story but gave Jesus a future beyond the worst things that could happen and did happen. And Jesus will vindicate us, too. Whether the worst for you is a relapse or a frustrated dream, whether it is facing a long-buried trauma or nearing the end of life in old age, Jesus promises that we “will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13). There will be a way where we think there is no way. He will make us new.

What can we say about the Father’s love for Jesus? It was a love that prepared the way; a love that affirmed; a love that provided; a love that suffered; a love that made new.

What can we say about Jesus’ love for us? It will be a love that lights our path, that calls forth our true self, that meets us in our daily work, that holds us when it all shatters, that lifts us up again. If we abide in him. If we make prayer our priority.

But we cannot stop with ourselves. We are branches, remember. This love is ours when we are rooted in the Vine. But our purpose is to bear fruit for others. From the Father to Jesus, from Jesus to us, from us to the world. I think, at last, that we’re ready to define the fruits that God has called us to bring forth.

Friends, go prepare the way for someone. Help someone, even when they are not aware of it, to find their footing in this world. Care for the children in your community, be the warm presence they carry with them unconsciously through years of turbulent change. Be a voice for the voiceless. Pay the first month’s rent for that family in secret. Tell the stories. Sing the songs. Keep the roof on the Church. Love others by preparing their way.

Bear God’s fruit by intervening in other’s lives at moments of critical decision, by affirming their goodness and validating their call. Tell someone, “God is well pleased with you.”

Bear God’s fruit by helping others get through their day-to-day labor with a measure of dignity and space for rest and even with joy. Help lighten the load when you can. Learn from each other, support each other, provide for each other.

Bear God’s fruit by being there for others in the worst of times. Compassion costs, but don’t run from the cost. Go and offer the gift of your presence; send the text that says, “I’m thinking about you, is there anything I can do.” Drop off the meal, watch the kids, affirm that tears are healthy and holy.

Bear God’s fruit by helping people to celebrate when light finally shines in their darkness, when long-closed doors begin to swing open, when wounds are brought to the surface and begin to heal. Just as you go down into the depths with people, go up onto the mountaintops. Push pause and say, “Don’t you dare move on from this yet. This is worth celebrating. We’re having a party.”

This is fruitfulness. It touches every nook and cranny of life and demands our complete attention. It manifests in the planned and the spontaneous, the critical moments and the small, mundane moments. It takes all of us. It is preparing, affirming, providing, suffering, and celebrating love. And it can only happen as we… abide. May it be so. Amen.