Advent & Men, Part 3: “Silence & Speech”

December 17, 2023 – Third Sunday of Advent 

Luke 1:8-25, 57-79 

Pastor Mike

Part 1 – Luke 1:8-25

This Advent, as we prepare to receive and celebrate the incarnation of God’s Son, we have been asking together what good news these days might hold for men. In their journey from boyhood to manhood, men are pressured to forsake their sensitivity, their range of feeling, and their delight in being alive. The woundedness of men wreaks havoc in the home, in the community, and even in men’s own bodies. Jesus took on our nature and was born in Bethlehem to bring peace and healing to all of creation, including men. By admitting our need for Christ and opening our hearts to receive his grace, we are given “authority to become children of God” (John 1:12), children who are made whole again through his love, and who use their power to bless. Thankfully, men abound in the nativity stories from the Gospels, and with their help, we, too, can be moved to embrace the gift of God’s Son.

Last week, we read the story from Matthew about King Herod and the Magi. We saw Herod operate out of a mode of domination when he encountered a circumstance that was outside his understanding and control. He was stirred up by the Magi’s visit, and he moved from that inner stirring toward fear, then to control, to anger at the loss of control, and finally to violence. That movement won’t feel foreign to any man in the room or to anyone in the room who loves a man. In contrast, we saw the Magi operate out of a mode of receptivity. Responding to their stirring with wonder, they journeyed in community, asking questions, giving, and blessing. The stark contrast on the page was between control and joy.

And that was kind of nice, having such a simple story with a clear sense of who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. It gave us a sense of safety, being able to sit back and evaluate them in a moralistic kind of way. Certainly we’re not so bad as Herod, right?

With Zechariah, that all changes. Our theme is spiraling around again, and now we’re going a little deeper. There’s no good-guy-bad-guy in this story to keep things simple and out there. There’s just this one man, and the beautiful messiness of his heart.

What do we know about Zechariah?

We know that he was a priest, which means he presided over the religious life of the Israelites. As a priest, he was faithful to tradition, dutiful, and well-versed in the laws and scriptures of his people. We know that he was married to Elizabeth but that they had never been able to conceive, which means Zechariah was without a male heir in a culture where having a male heir meant everything. We know that he and Elizabeth were advanced in years, which means their hopes of having a family had withered and they lived every day with that familiar, unresolvable ache. Finally, we know that both Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous, people of pure heart and just action – highest praise for an Israelite. (And how about we hold that sermon for another time, that it is possible to be both righteous before God and out of hope that our life will turn out in a particular way.)

But God wants more from Zechariah, more for Zechariah, than even righteousness.

So, God sends Zechariah an angel.

At the time that this story takes place, Zechariah’s priestly order – there were 24 orders – was on shift at the Jerusalem Temple. When lots were cast to determine which person would do each job, Zechariah received a highly coveted, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go into the Holy Place, just a curtain removed from the Holy of Holies, and burn the evening incense offering. For a man whose life revolved around rituals, this was the ritual; for a job that drew its meaning from one place, this was the place. He went in there to perform this great service, and was met by the living reality to which that great service pointed: the reality of God.

The angel Gabriel appears to the priest and passes on wonderful, good, kind news. With one word he speaks both to the ache in Zechariah’s heart for a child and to the ache for his people’s salvation, to Zechariah the father and Zechariah the priest. Elizabeth will bear a son named John, and John will bring “joy and gladness” (1:14) to Zechariah and “turn many of the people in Israel to the Lord their God” (1:16). The way Gabriel says it, too, makes it sound like it’s a done deal: “Your prayer has been heard” (1:13).

Open your hands, open your heart, Zechariah! Receive fullness and abundance from the God you have served your whole life! But fear overwhelms Zechariah (1:12), and what come out of his mouth is this: “How can I know that this will happen? For I am an old man…” (1:19).

How can I know?

I am old.

Zechariah is unable to receive the joy of this announcement because he has come up against the limits of his mind and the limits of his body. And men do not like to come up against the limits of their minds or the limits of their bodies. None of us like coming up against the limits of our minds or bodies. But part of that discomfort for men is that we have been taught that we’re only as worthy as the strength of our minds and of our bodies.

These are the ironies of Zechariah: he is righteous but struggles to believe; a master of his religion but distrustful of a personal encounter with God; his prayer has been heard but he won’t hear its answer; he has been singled out for joy but can’t feel past the old ache; he has spent a career pronouncing blessings but balks when presented with his own blessedness.

God has set things in motion, though, and Zechariah has a critical part to play. God cannot have the soon-to-be father of John hung up on his own insufficiencies. Zechariah needs time for his heart to stretch to hold this news; he needs time to rehearse a different story for himself. So, Gabriel strikes him mute. A man, a priest, robbed of his words, “until the day these things occur” (1:20).

Everything will depend on when and how this father will speak to his son, but his words have already started wandering down the avenue of fear. It is a gift, not a punishment, that he is silenced.

Part 2 – Luke 1:57-66

Some of us are on our surest footing when we’re speaking. We give orders, tell stories, can turn anything and everything into a joke or a soapbox. We analyze, evaluate, prescribe. We assert, interrupt, talk just to talk. Silence would mean facing ourselves just as we are, so we will fill that silence. Silence might leave room for someone else to speak, requiring that we listen and adapt, so we fill the silence. Silence might hold space for feelings to arise, acknowledging that something beyond words is at work in the room, so we fill the silence. Some of us fear silence, and if Zechariah was this kind of person, then to be silenced certainly challenged him.

We skip ahead from verse 25 to verse 57 because, in Zechariah’s silence, other voices, other characters start to emerge. These characters are vulnerable, underprivileged. Elizabeth, Mary, even the unborn John growing in Elizabeths’ womb. A barren old woman, an unwed teenager, now both scandalously pregnant, take center stage. In the space created by the professional man’s silence, the work of salvation unfolds through the lives of two expectant mothers. Silence clears the ground for miracles.

Some of us, though, are on our surest footing when we’re silent. I bet there’s at least one person here besides me who heard that Zechariah wasn’t going to get to speak for the better part of a year and though, ‘You know, that sounds kind of nice!’ Silence can be an escape, a way of dominating through stinginess and our refusal to participate. That’s certainly a form of masculinity we often see in the world: the silent, withdrawn, emotionally unavailable man. The man who converses with one word, maybe two; the man whose anger will flare up simply by being called upon to explain what he means or talk something out from start to finish.

But Zechariah’s silence is not the silence of escape, but the silence of presence. Zechariah is re-ordering his inner being to the hope that’s been announced to him. Instead of praying publicly through rehearsed words, he’s praying spontaneously in his own spirit. He’s taking in what he sees happening in the lives of Elizabeth and Mary. He is drawn into greater intimacy with the members of his household. Before, he wanted to know how he would know, but now he has consented to other ways of knowing. He has been intimate with his wife, and he has watched with her for the daily, physical signs of the promise developing in her womb. Zechariah’s silence becomes a kind of womb. Gladness grows there alongside the words of blessing being prepared for him to speak over his baby boy. For those of us who move toward silence as a kind of numbing catharsis, Zechariah helps us see the true purpose of personal silence: it is always to help us move back toward the community with greater love.

Fear and emptiness and the need for control are at the root of both the need to speak and the refusal to speak. By the time Zechariah takes the tablet and writes, “His name is John,” he has undergone a profound transformation. Neither controlling nor withholding, he now says simply what God has given him to say. Oh, to live in a world, to live in a home, where the silence of men was a prelude to blessing. ***

Part 3 – Luke 1:67-79

The priest has become a prophet.

The man who was silenced breaks forth into song.

A man once discouraged by his twilight years testifies to the fresh dawning of God’s salvation.

By offering his song with his household, Zechariah enters into shared, intimate life with others. The “I” of his objection – How will I know this? I am old! – has given way to the “we” of community and the “you” of direct, personal speech. And where everyone up to this point has been filled with the Holy Spirit and tasted joy, Zechariah finally enters into this joyful life in the Spirit. Elizabeth was filled with the Spirit when she hosted and blessed Mary. Mary was overshadowed by the Spirit when she conceived Christ. Even John was filled with the Spirit before his birth, and leapt for joy in the womb of his mother when Mary came to visit. When John was finally born, even the “neighbors and relatives” (1:58) got to rejoice alongside Elizabeth. The Spirit was with everyone; joy was everywhere. At last, Zechariah “was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied.”

With his song, Zechariah talks directly to his son. Zechariah already knows what Gabriel has told him about John: that John will be a prophet in the spirit and power of Elijah. The most important thing about prophets, biblically speaking, is not that they talk but that they listen. They only pass on what they have received from God. In a beautiful mutuality, Zechariah the prophet models for his son this listening, blessing vocation, and the work that the son has been born to do has already transformed the life of the father. They have called forth the truth in one another.

May we – young and old, parents and children, brothers and sisters, partners and friends – call forth the truth in one another. Amen.

Advent & Men, Part 2: “The Stirring – From Threat to Gift”

December 10, 2023 – Second Sunday of Advent

Matthew 2:1-12

Pastor Mike

A few weeks back, Lana (Gribas) gifted me an Advent & Christmas devotional to read this year called Watch for the Light. For each day of these holy seasons, the book offers a poem or a theological reflection pulled from the Christian tradition, whether ancient or medieval or modern. This past Tuesday, the reading came from a man named Alfed Delp, a Jesuit priest martyred in Germany in 1945 for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Just before he was hanged, he wrote these words from his prison cell:

There is nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm, we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this to and endure it… Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken.[1]

 This shaking, this unsettling, which reveals what is true and what is false has a biblical basis in the characters we encounter today in Matthew’s Gospel reading: King Herod and the Magi.

 Our pew Bibles contain the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation, which says that Herod becomes “frightened” when he first hears the Magi’s news about the appearance of the star and the birth of the Messiah. Frightened – and all the city of Jerusalem with him. This translation actually does us, as readers, a disservice, because the Greek that’s been rendered as “frightened” actually means to “to be stirred up” or “agitated” – like when water is struck or worked into a froth by a wind. As an experience of feeling, tarasso, which is the Greek verb, means “to cause one inner commotion,” “to take away one’s calmness of mind.”

 Which is not the same thing as being afraid. A person may respond to that inner topsy-turviness with fear; fear may be wone of the strands of feeling that gets stirred up. But it’s not a given. Taking into account Herod’s actions, the translator’s decision to say “frightened” may be contextually appropriate enough, but it obscures from view the inner spiritual moment on which everything hangs: the moment of personal response to inner commotion. Often, our response to being stirred is so quick and compulsive and habituated that it has become a reaction, and we don’t even notice the moment come and go. But, with the Spirit’s help, we can learn to notice the stirring, to linger with it, and to experience it as a great gift which leads closer to Christ.

God is holy, more expansive and purer than we can fathom. God is mysterious, coming to us in ways we do not expect. God is alive and personal, not a dead fact we read about in a book. When we encounter the living God genuinely, being stirred up is the inevitable and appropriate outcome. So, how do we respond when something new strikes our spirits, when we find ourselves in unexpected circumstances, when unforeseen feelings and questions rise up in us?

 Herod responds as many of us do. He notices something happening in him and around him which he doesn’t understand, and he feels threatened. He reacts to this perceived threat by using his authority to manage and eliminate the threat, to bring it under control. How? By calling a meeting, of course, with the educated and influential professionals. By seeking specialized knowledge, the foretold whereabouts of the Messiah’s birth. He holds secret consultations with the Magi. He gives them orders to go find Jesus and then bring word back to him. He deals with the stirring of his own spirit, and the agitation of his city, by taking charge.

 The Magi’s response to Christ’s birth could not be more unlike Herod’s. They, too, are men; they, too, according to tradition, are kings. When, in the far Eastern lands, they looked up into the sky and saw that star, they, too, must’ve been stirred. In fact, they were so shaken that they literally came loose! They set off on a journey across many months and miles to see where and to whom their stirring would lead them. They responded to their stirring with wonder, awe, curiosity, a willingess to go and see. Most important, they responded to their stirring together, the firsts of those crowds that would come to coalesce around the body of Jesus and become the Church.

 Let’s make it as clear as we can. Herod’s reaction to the stirring is isolated and isolating; his knowledge of Christ is vicarious; his words are orders; his body remains stationary. The Magi’s response is communal; their knowledge of Christ is direct; their words are questions and blessings; their bodies are on the move. Herod and the Magi become something like cardinal directions which we can use to better understand our own ways of receiving or resisting God’s advent. There’s something in there for all of us.

Even so, since our question during this Advent season is what the good news of the incarnation might be for men, let’s look at this Gospel story through a gender lens. Let’s consider Herod and the Magi as men. After all, for men and boys who have been conditioned to repress their tenderness, dull their awareness of feelings, and break ties of dependence upon others, being stirred, agitated, and unsettled by something they do not understand or cannot control is, indeed, terrifying. Men are expected to move others and do not like to feel that someone or something has the authority to move them. Men have worked hard to tamp down the stirring, so when it comes upon one of us, we easily get overwhelmed, confused, or scared. In reaction to this, we try to reestablish control. And if that fails, as it fails with Herod, the only place we’ve been taught to go then is anger – even violence.

Last week, I shared about some of the ways men are conditioned to dominate, and dominance can range from the hot domination of rage and violence to the cold domination of silence and withdrawal. The need to be in control hides an inner emptiness, which has come about due to a series of boyhood wounds. From the outside, Herod sure looks like he’s got it all together with this consultations and meetings and order and plans, and I bet some people in his court and kingdom appreciated his management of the situation. But the King acts out of self-preservation. He feels his authority has been challenged, and when the Magi disobey him and do not return to Jerusalem, Herod’s panic is revealed as he escalates astonishingly fast to the ordering the murder of all Jewish boys aged two and under.

The Magi are men living in a receptivity mode. They receive the signs of stars, the messages of dreams, the hospitality of many along the way and finally of Mary. They invite the stirring into their hearts and letting it propel them along. But for being receptive and moveable, are they made somehow less as men?

No. They are acting fully in their power. They are really living – living an adventure. They’re the ones who end up being in a position, inside Mary’s house, to give gifts and speak words of blessing. It is a lie that when men give up the ways of dominance, when men surrender their need to control things, that the alternative is a kind of lifeless passivity. It’s the exact opposite. Dominance and control can only narrow life. There’s nowhere to go – Herod stays put in his chair. Living out of receptivity, consenting to God as God and trusting in the gift of the stirring, leads to a widening of our experience, and to a profound depth of joy. When men reclaim their fullness by receiving the love of Christ, they – we – become fully alive.

God stirs us up in so many ways. We listen to a person’s story, full of suffering or happiness, and something shakes loose in us. We read a book, or see a photograph, or hear a song, and something twinges within us. We’re asked a question, we have a confrontation, we’re made aware of a personal blind spot, someone we love asks us a hard favor, or even to change. We have a recurring daydream or thought that won’t let us go. We’re told that God is showing up out there in the world far beyond our realm of experience or expectation. There’s the moment of inner commotion, and the masculine compulsion is to say No. But the power of God the Father in us, and the authority that is ours as God’s children, is to say Yes.

Embrace, brothers and sisters, embrace the stirring. The clenching of your gut, the ache in your chest, the quickening of your pulse, the tears forming on the edges of your eyes. And ask the Spirit to be with you in those moments and to lead you through them to a joyful encounter with Christ.

The stakes are so high. The more we kill the stirring, the more our children will suffer. The more we trust the stirring, the more our children will be blessed. May God give us the opportunity to enter the house of mother and child and open our chests to share of the treasure that is there.

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

[1] Alfred Delp, The Shaking of Reality,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2001), 82, 86.

Advent & Men, Part 1: “From His Fullness We Have All Received”

December 3, 2023 – First Sunday of Advent

John 1:1-18

Pastor Mike

Part 1

 “No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known” (1:18).

 Jesus was a Son. Jesus had a Father. Being human, Jesus could be seen. Being God, the Father could not be seen. But the Father loved Jesus so much, and Jesus was so full of his Father’s love, that by looking at Jesus, listening to Jesus, drawing close to Jesus, people could know the Father. The love between Father and Son was so transparent and perfect that it didn’t really make sense to think of Jesus only as a human. God was fully and perfectly present in him. When the Son, spoke, he used his Father’s words. When he healed, he drew upon his Father’s power. When he loved us and suffered for us, it was because the Father wanted to save us.

Every Christmas, we celebrate that God came to us in the Son. We don’t have to scratch our heads, wondering what the Father is like, or what he ultimately wants for us, or whether he, in the end, will be good and true to us. The Father’s eternal light and love that are right there in that little baby boy, born of Mary in Bethlehem’s manger.

Advent is a holy time when we get spiritually ready for Christmas. The word advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means “arrival.” During the four weeks of the Advent season, we ask both personally and collectively how, this year, we are being called to prepare for the arrival of Jesus in our own lives. What is it that  the Son want to make known about the Father?

Part 2

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” (1:14).

I’m using all this Father-and-Son language – the he’s and him’s –intentionally. It’s pitch-perfect Trinitarian lingo, and obviously, as our Gospel passage shows, it’s biblical. Even so, Father and Son have not been my go-to metaphors for speaking about God and Jesus and their relationship.

As we moved toward becoming a Reconciling Congregation earlier this year, a church that affirms the inherent worth and beauty of queer people, I tried to stay away from the overtly masculine language for God. Which was good and helpful for a time, because we were working to acknowledge that God contains and transcends all masculine and feminine aspects of life. God contains and creates the gender spectrum, and in God’s image all people have all been made. We wanted to affirm that. We did, and we do, affirm that.

And, as we continue to make space around the table for all of us, we do not get rid of our differences, we don’t all become the same, but our community becomes more complete through our diversity. I am a son, a brother, a husband, a father. I want to know what Jesus can show me about those identities; the world and the Church have tried to show me a lot about manhood, and most of it has left me feeling confused, damaged, and adrift.

This Advent, we are going to pay attention to the Son of God’s arrival in the lives of men, men from the Bible like Herod, Zechariah, Joseph, and Simeon. We are going to observe how those men were disrupted and changed by the incarnation. As we journey with them, we will ask the Spirit to make our own hearts ready to receive Jesus.

We’re not starting with any single character today but with the question each of the characters lived: What is the good news of Christmas for men, boys, and those who love them? Just because we’ll be speaking about these men, our conversation continues to unfold within our celebration of the fullness of sexuality, gender expression, and experiences as a congregation. So: what is the good news for us?

You may be surprised that we need to ask. After all, we sing it with such effortless passion every December 24th: “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” But you have to understand that, for most people, inside that lyric a great hope and a great fear vie for supremacy.

The great hope is that, when the Father – when a man – uses his body to communicate his word, the result will be intimacy, love.

The great wound is that, so often, the body of the father, the bodies of men, have lost the word of love by the time they make contact with us – have distorted the word into a message of anger, disappointment, domination, or silence

***

Part 3

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:11).

The rules of the world have been written by men for the political and economic benefit of men, most of those men are wounded and left unsatisfied by who they have had to become in order to get admitted to the world of men. Most men live with some degree of personal anguish that is tied directly to their transition from boyhood to manhood. As they grow up, boys are taught that they must be tough – tough on themselves, tough on others. They are taught that being tough requires disconnecting from their emotional lives, limiting how dependent they are on others, and proving themselves worthy of respect through what they can achieve. To become tough, they must become less than whole.

Christian thinkers have long maintained that, because God is good, God can only create what is good. God doesn’t create sin. But because something created has already been changed in its journey from nothing to something, it can change in the opposite direction. Forgetting our original goodness, we can slip back toward nothingness.

When we say that we’re sinners, we’re not saying that we’re full of something called sin, that we’re all grotesque monsters underneath our skin. No, we’re saying instead that we are empty, that we are disappearing, that we are no longer whole. In a journey toward manhood, boys banish their tenderness to their depths, and then put up a sign: Do Not Enter. The writer bell hooks says this: “Somehow the test of manhood…was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief.”[1] In other words, we become men when we silently accept lost love and connection.

We might wonder: Is it really that bad?

Yes. At an abstract level, the story is told by our national and state statistics of male domestic violence, homicide, suicide by firearm, drug overdose, incarceration, alcoholism, heart disease, and depression. But most of us don’t need the statistics. We’ve experienced the brokenness from within. If any of you have ever lived in a household where life was ordered around accommodating a man, you know it. If any of you have ever loved a man, and the only way to be close to him was to endure verbal or physical assault, you know it. If you have ever made the perilous journey through boyhood, you know it. I made that journey, and I became less than whole. Asked to grow up and exercise my authority so that I could take advantage of my male privileges, I could only draw from an emptiness. Like so many men, even as I tried to do better than what was done to me, I could only pass along the curse.

I feel like it’s important to pause here and caution us against conjuring a caricature of a “dominating man” in our heads. Men can dominate through the “hot” violence of teasing, sarcasm, rage, or violence. But we can also dominate through the “cold” violence of emotional withdrawal, silence, or outright absence.

The novelist Willa Cather has a book called The Professor’s House, in which the main character is a gentle, cultivated man named Professor St. Peter. The Professor has a tiny attic study on top of his house to which he has retreated for years in order to write an eight-volume masterwork of American history. He also has a wife and two daughters, but once he is seated at his desk up in his attic, he does everything in his power to not be distracted by them. As Cather writes, “On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper.”[2]

I had to chuckle when I read that. Boy, that’s me. I’ll stay up here, thank you very much.  I’m leaving a legacy, doing my “real” work – and, hey, it’s not just for me, it’s the work I do as  a provider. I can’t get entangled in the day-to-day stuff right now. It’d make me impatient and frustrated. Let me be a little stingy, it’s better for us all.

Sometimes, as men, we pull back from our families (or our emotional lives or our communities) simply because they are taxing – I’m trying hard not to say annoying – in what they demand of us. We live in a society that doesn’t bat an eye at that cold version of masculine domination, the privilege of pulling away. But we will never be whole so long as we hold ourselves apart, so long as we view the “human house” as a threat.

To all of us, Jesus is a brother in this hell. He came to the world he loved, and most of the people he encountered chose not to receive him. In Christ, a little child is rejected. In that little child, we see our stories and our pain already being gently held in the love and salvation of God. For though his earthly reception was fraught with struggle, Jesus was never rejected by his Father in Heaven. That unobstructed Father-love kept him whole, and he wants to give his wholeness to all of us who trust in him.

Jesus wants to restore male love to our hearts and to our world.

Part 4

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (1:12-13).

There is a way to be a boy, to be a man, that emerges out of fullness. It’s not a way that we create or achieve or earn. It is a way that we can only receive. Only by believing in the one true Son of God can any of us receive the power to become a child again – a child of God.

Our true power as men is to become children of the Father. We aren’t given the power to dominate. We aren’t given the power to force accommodation. We aren’t given the power even to be fathers, but to be children, who through our love of God, make the love of the Heavenly Father known. Ours is the authority to return, reclaim, remember, reconnect, and show the world what God’s love looks and sounds and feels like.

The poet John O’Donahue once wrote: “We have fallen out of belonging.” We think, as men, that it is wrong to stumble and fall; we think this while hiding from ourselves and from others the truth that we have already fallen.

The question before us is not whether we will fall, but in what direction. Just yesterday after reading a pile of books before naptime, Loren leaned back on me and said, “I can nap on your body.” We will either continue to fall into oblivion, or we will so deeply rest in Jesus that we will become children again, children who, in Christ, fall back onto the Father’s chest.

***

Part 5

“From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16).

Let us begin today, for today is the day of salvation.

Let us begin here, at this Table where the Son has promised to meet us.

Let us begin together, men, boys, and all who love us.

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

[1] bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 15.

[2] Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (London: Virago Press, 1981), 16.

“Giving Thanks for What Will Be”

November 19, 2023 – 6:00pm

Portneuf Valley Interfaith Annual Thanksgiving Service

Pastor Mike

In the scriptures of the Christian New Testament, there is a famous passage near the end of the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus teaches his disciples about something called the Day of the Lord. The Day of the Lord was code for a future moment when God, appearing in the fulness of God’s glory and power, would settle accounts with the world – establishing justice, rewarding faithfulness, vanquishing evil, and making peace. Jesus did not invent this idea. As a Jew from Nazareth, he inherited hope in a final judgment from his own people. Hope is the key word. The Day of the Lord as Jesus preached it was not something to anxiously look for. No one, not even he, knows the day or the hour when it will arrive. Instead, the Day of the Lord is a promise to live and labor under. By releasing knowledge and control over the future into God’s hands, we can focus on our present task: serving with integrity, endurance, and joy.

 Even so, I have to say – Christians, and American Christians in particular, have taken the Day of the Lord in some pretty whacky, even harmful directions. Think of secret bunkers filled with food and ammunition for outlasting Armageddon. Think of Television and YouTube prophets who will reveal to you the secret signs of the times, for a fee. Think of moral crusaders who take God’s judgement into their own hands, either through the hot violence of weapons or the cold violence of public policy. And, of course, there are always those who look to their wealth or their power as confirmation that they are secure against the future. These are not attitudes or postures that nourish hope at all! They only magnify anxiety, pride, anger, or ignorance. They are very far from what Jesus had to say about how people should live in light of that coming Day.

 In Matthew 25, Jesus says this about the end: “the nations will be gathered before [God], and [God] will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Matt. 25:32). To the blessed group, God will say, “Come…inherit the kingdom…for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me in, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (25:34-46). But to the cursed group, God will say, “Depart from me…for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me” (25:41-43)

 In the teaching, the blessed and the cursed are both surprised by how God has judged them. They didn’t know beforehand how things would shake out, on which side of the line they’d be gathered. God used a rubric that they were not expecting. In their surprise, all of them ask, “When?! When was it that we did or did not do these things for you?” To which God replies, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (25:40).

 So what it comes down to, in the end, is compassionate service, real solidarity with those who suffer, whose basic needs for nourishment and belonging are not yet met. This standard does not divide one religion from the next, as if we are in competition with one another, but establishes the common ground and purpose for our fellowship. Where this standard does cut is right down the middle of all our faiths, separating those who serve even when the glory of their work is hidden from them, from those who don’t serve, perhaps because they’re waiting for the world to prove itself worthy of their attention and resources. But it is we who would dare name God in our diverse ways who must be proven worthy of God’s world.

 How do we give thanks for what will be? How can we say Thank You for what we do not yet know or have not yet received? Especially when present humanity is so broken, with fresh cracks forming every day.

We say Thank You for our shared call to serve the least.

 We say Thank You for our shared journey, this ongoing companionship and collaboration as servants.

 We say Thank You for our shared gift of compassion, which we, as spiritually alive human beings, are uniquely entrusted with practicing and passing on.

 It is because the call and journey and gifts of our future are shared that we can turn toward what will be with hope and say: Thank You.

        Amen.

Stewardship, Part 5: “Witness”

November 19, 2023 – Ordinary Time

Stewardship Sunday

Matthew 25:31-46

Pastor Mike

Growing up, I never heard this passage of scripture quoted or read aloud or preached. Which I now know is strange, because, in Matthew’s Gospel at least, this word is the very pinnacle of Jesus’ teachings – a final, urgent plea for his disciples to live in solidarity with those who suffer. But you wouldn’t have known this in the church I attended as a teenager. No, you, like I, would have instead heard another famous scripture frequently preached: John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”  Anyone else know that one by heart?

 In both John 3:16 and Matthew 25, Jesus draws a dividing line in the sand, and he tells us what, in the end, will separate those who perish from those who live. The condition for salvation in John 3:16 is belief. The condition for salvation in Matthew 25 is service. Seeing as all Christians are accountable to all of the Bible, we don’t really get to choose whether we’ll be a “John 3:16 Christian” or a “Matthew 25 Christian.” But more often than not, we privilege and overdo our preference. My childhood church chose to drill down on belief.

 Oh, I can close my eyes even on a cold fall morning in Idaho and feel the heavy heat of summer in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, feel my heart beat faster as the church camp evangelist moves us toward the moment of surrender at the altar: “For whosoever believeth in him…” That was the culture I came up in. In youth group, we memorized John 3:16, and at Christian music festivals it seemed like everyone sported a John 3:16 t-shirt or bracelet or tattoo.

 I absorbed this emphasis on belief and, because I was smart, I made it work for me. I aced every class on theology in college, got a gold star for orthodoxy, which means “straight” or “correct” beliefs about God. Now, John 3:16 actually calls us to believe in a person, to trust the love of a living Christ and receive his presence into our lives. When we – when I – start to think being Christian means thinking proper thoughts about Jesus, rather than knowing him, we lose the personal dimension of faith. I lost it. Despite my college honors, my fluency in God-talk, by the time I graduated I wasn’t talking to God very much at all, and my soul felt sick.

 Then, at twenty-two, I moved to North Carolina to attend Duke Divinity School. I was suddenly in a completely different theological environment; the focus shifted almost entirely to Matthew 25 form of Christianity. What mattered to my peers at professors at Duke was justice. I woke up to the world, realizing for the first time that structural oppression and systemic injustices exist. I followed a prophetic Jesus who spoke truth to power and proclaimed the coming of God’s righteous kingdom. There I was, learning how to be a pastor at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in a Southern town full of racial friction. I interrogated my privilege, I protested police violence, I changed my mind about matters of gender and sexuality and challenged my attachment to various “isms” and “phobias”. When three Muslim students from the University of North Carolina were shot just down the road in Chapel Hill, I went to the mass vigil and stayed up all night rewriting the sermon I had to preach the next day in class.

 When I think back on those years of epiphany and action, I hear the voice of William Barber, one of our great contemporary African American preachers, booming through those memories: “I was hungry and you fed you me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was in prison and you visited me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me in.” Matthew 25 came to the forefront, was seared into my spirit, and I will always be grateful for that.

But you know what? Even something as wonderful as justice can become depersonalized. In our efforts to prove our righteousness to the world, we can slowly lose real compassion and concern for real people. It is very easy, once you are convinced that Jesus does actually care about the brokenness of our politics, and about the evil hidden in our histories, to shift the focus from serving people who suffer to evaluating people just like you. ‘Does he believe the right things? Do she say the right things in the right way?’ And when that happens, Matthew 25 gets distorted just like John 3:16. We get legalistic rather than relational. We lose the living person of Christ, who dwells both in our hearts (John 3:16) and in the company of the poor and poor in spirit (Matt. 25).

 I got this way eventually. I developed a critical spirit. I’d go home for Christmas and lambast my parents for not being woke enough. I’d roll my eyes at other pastors who preached about intimacy with Christ, or whose sermons didn’t summon Christians to tangible actions. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but it’s true: I was fired up and immature. I was out of balance. Over time, the Spirit brought me back into balance, back to the living presence of Christ.

 The heart of Matthew 25 became clear to me when I started attending a creative writing group on North Carolina’s Death Row. Every Tuesday at noon I passed through several levels of security and was escorted down a maze of hallways to get to a room where I sat side by side with men in red jumpsuits, men who were, by brutal design, Nobodies to the rest world. Slowly, over several years, they became Somebodies to me. I read and critiqued their writing, I shared my own writing with them. I brought them books and carried out their own handwritten manifestoes, stories, and poems, hidden secrets slipped in my pockets. They were never cuffed or chained, and I touched freely their hands, their shoulders, their backs. We looked one another in the eyes, confirmed one another’s humanity.

  Paul, Rodney, and JT.

LeRoy, Lyle, and Melvin.

Braxton, George, and El Rico.

 I repeat their names as prayer. When I think about criminal justice reform, when I think about capital punishment, when I think about the Christian response to racism and poverty, I don’t think in abstractions anymore. I don’t think so much as I feel. I feel the love I have for those men, I feel the love I received from them, and my thinking builds upon the foundation of that love. The call of the Christian to justice is good and real. But it takes its shape from Christ, who took up residence in our condition, who lived among us and shared our sufferings. God did not sit up high and pontificate about the world; God came very near and transformed it from the inside out.

 And now?

 Well, today, I no longer perceive John 3:16 and Matthew 25 to be at odds with one another. They establish the inner and outer frontiers of our discipleship, calling us to keep Christ at the center. But I will tell you that Matthew 25 haunts me. I’m a pastor after all, the pastor of a Christian church. Surely, in the end, I’ll take my place among the blessed sheep, right? Well, in Jesus’ teaching everyone seems pretty surprised at their fate. They have to ask about it: “When Lord? When was it that we either did or did not serve you?” The implication is that God’s presence was not immediately evident in persons and situations that call us to service. The hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned – these are the messy, broken, taxing realities of life. The difference is that the righteous nations served anyway, out of compassion, even though God remained hidden. The cursed nations did not serve; they were waiting for the world to somehow prove itself worthy of their time and energy.

 So that’s why it haunts me. The element of surprise. Matthew 25 is a way of measuring all the demands on my time and attention, all my compulsions toward escape and distraction. Matthew 25 reminds me of what’s at stake. What’s at stake for God’s beloved, suffering children, and what’s at stake for my own soul, are bound up together.

 I’ve been very biographical this morning. I haven’t gotten into the weeds of the text at all. But I have lived with this scripture as a guiding light for many years, so I offer my witness to you. Matthew 25 is, after all, a word for the Church to live by.

 Did you notice that all the language in the passage is communal, that it’s all about groups of people? “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (v. 32). And all the questions are asked in the plural, “When was it that we gave you food?”

 We stand under this judgment together, as a Church.

 Will we pour out our presence, reminding the Nobodies of the world that they are Somebodies to God?

 Will we pour out our prayers, so that the cries of the needy never go unheard, but are held in perpetual remembrance before the throne of God?

 Will we pour out our gifts, using our shared resources to lace with life a social order built upon death?

 Will we pour out our service, even when the glory of it remains hidden?

 This is our witness.

 Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Stewardship Part 4: “Service”

November 12, 2023 – Ordinary Time 

Matthew 25:1-13

Pastor Mike

In Matthew’s Gospel, most of Jesus’ teachings are grouped into five long sermons, often called discourses. The first one, the Sermon on the Mount, is the most famous, and I’d bet that each of you could recall something from it even if you’ve never opened up a Bible to Matthew chapter 5. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are the salt of the earth. When you give, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Our Father, who art in heaven. In that first great teaching, Jesus laid bare the character of our daily discipleship.

Today’s scripture, the parable of the ten bridesmaids, comes from the fifth and final collection of teachings, found in chapters 24 and 25. Jesus gave them in Jerusalem right before his arrest and crucifixion, so they have a very different tone and texture. They are heavy, harsh, full of warnings. He talks about the final judgment and how his people will pass through many hardships as they wait for their vindication on the Day of the Lord. Jesus was teaching them – teaching us – about what it means to live and serve in an in-between time, in what our parable calls the groom’s delay.

These first and last teachings, one focusing on daily practices and the other on lifelong attitudes, resonate with each other. For example, Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who grieve, those who are merciful… In the final teaching, Jesus tells us why they are blessed. He says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:35-36, 40). Christ’s presence is hidden with us when we suffer, and we find Christ’s presence when we serve the suffering. The key to blessedness.

The Sermon on the Mount talks specifically to the parable of the bridesmaids, too. The language of lamps is a shared feature. In an early teaching, Jesus says, ‘You are the light of the world… No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’ (5:13-16). That’s clearly a call to put faith and love into practice, to walk the walk. In our parable, perhaps the light of the women’s lamps – and how long it can burn – has some connection to good works.

The Sermon on the Mount is also the only other place in Matthew where Jesus makes a vivid contrast between wisdom and foolishness. At the sermon’s finale, Jesus drives home, once again, the importance of action: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. …[But] everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” (Matt. 7:24-27).  So ends the Sermon on the Mount – with the collapse of a house built by a fool. It’s jarring and uncomfortable, but so is the end of our parable, with five fools barred from the feast.

Parables are jarring. That’s kind of their purpose, which can be frustrating to American Christians like us who are so used to “applying the Gospel” to our lives in a practical way and want the blueprint, the quick fix. Using a story or an image, parables illuminate one reality in the light of another: “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” (Matt. 25:1). Like a woman turning her house upside down looking for a lost coin. Like a father rushing out to embrace an estranged son while a faithful son stews with envy. Like a seed that hits different kinds of soil and grows or perishes as the conditions permit. Parables seem familiar and relatable at first, but by the time you get to the end of one you realize you’ve been duped, drawn out into strange territory where meanings are unstable and connections have to be forged afresh – by you.

There’s a great Billy Collins poem called “Introduction to Poetry” where he makes suggestions about how to expose new students to poetry: “I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out, // or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” But he ends the poem with this lament: “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” Parables are like poems in that respect; they have to be lived with and wrestled and ultimately yielded to. Living a parable shares a lot in common with love, the depth of attention that turns listening into true hearing. Which is precisely why Jesus loved them so much. When crowds flocked to him, parables helped expose the quality of each person’s heart. Their opacity drew in those who longed to understand, and it drove away those who, deep down, didn’t want that kind of commitment, who never intended to prepare for a long night of delayed understanding. A synonym for parable is riddle.

Here’s are some things we know about the riddle at hand, the parable of the ten bridesmaids. It was a wedding day, a day of joy. In Jesus’ time and place, weddings were not exclusively for invited guests but for whole communities. Weddings were not scheduled like ours with cocktails and appetizers at 4:00 and a ceremony at 5:00 and a reception to follow at 6:00. Their start time was loose and dependent upon the arrival of the groom. But once a wedding got going, it lasted for days.

Typically, what kickstarted the events of the wedding day was the groom going to collect his bride from her father’s house. Then, together, accompanied by the wedding party, they’d make their way back to the groom’s house to seal their covenant and begin the feast. Since no one knew the exact time the groom would appear – he would just come when he was ready – the bridesmaids were given the task of announcing his arrival. Then they’d go with the couple to the wedding.

The ten bridesmaids gathered, and they brought their lamps, ready to watch and wait. (My wife, Sus, has reminded me that this is still mostly what being a bridesmaid means. You wait around, you keep waiting, then you go for a short walk and wait some more…) Five of the girls, the wise ones, brought a lot of extra oil with them, more than enough to get through the day – which, to the other five, must’ve seemed wildly impractical, unnecessary, overkill. In the words of one writer, the foolish girls “do not take the possibility of a delay seriously.”[1] They assume the groom will come while there’s still plenty of light in the sky and the need for lamps is largely irrelevant. Or maybe they didn’t think much about it at all, and haven’t taken their participation in this festivity very seriously. They’ll go, they’ll get through it, and it’ll be done. Not the wise girls. No, they’re all in, ready for anything, with flasks of oil weighing down their dresses.

The day goes by. Night falls. The groom has not come. All the girls fall asleep. Finally, at midnight, he arrives, and the girls are roused by the sound of a voice announcing that he’s been seen on the horizon. We’re not told whose voice it was that cried out in the night. It’s one of the provocative mysteries of the parable, and I’d like to know – but I digress. Anyway, that part was supposed to be the bridesmaids’ job, but they’ll take it from here.

The girls pull themselves together, the wise ones with poise and excitement, the foolish ones with great anxiety because their lights have gone out and they don’t have any more oil with them. They ask the wise girls for oil and are told No, sharing would spread the supply too thin and there’d be no light for the parade. The foolish girls head off to buy some for themselves, but by the time they return it is too late. The wise girls have gone with the groom, bright lights bobbing in the dark. The feast has started. The door is shut. The groom, in the end, turns the foolish five away.

Or does he? Really, he only says that he doesn’t know them. I wonder what would’ve happened if they told him who they were, if they apologized for being so unprepared and so late. If they’d cared to try, to speak, to commit themselves with effort, could they have received mercy?

Again, they don’t seem to have understood the stakes of what they had signed up for.

Do you?

Do you understand the stakes of being here, waiting upon God? And I don’t just mean here in this particular room, though that’s important, but more broadly I mean your engagement with the people of God and with the Spirit’s movement in our world?

God is in love with the world. With all of it – air and oceans, mountains and fields; with the millions of marvelous species that fill the planet; and with every human person crafted in God’s image. God loves you. And God loves the people in our neighborhood and city who do not yet know that they are loved, who are wounded and in need of healing, lonely and in need of community.

Jesus has shown us how far God will go to press into our lives and claim us. God has taken on our very sufferings and sense of abandonment, and has renewed us from the dark depths of our soul’s midnight. God has done it once for all in Christ, and the Spirit of Christ stands ready in every moment to arrive at the door of someone’s heart, someone wondering if there can be more for them in this life than the shallow or shattered semblances of love they have known.

And we – we in the Church have a crucial and joyful part to play. We get to watch with eager expectation for the arrival of God in the lives of the others, and then announce and celebrate God when God comes. We get to be the ones who point to what is joyful and beautiful and good bubbling up around us and say, “Look! It’s here, it’s happening! Healing and wholeness are at hand!”

We get to announce that there is freedom from sin and from shame.

We get to cry out into the night that justice and peace are God’s will and way.

We get to affirm people stepping into their purpose.

We get to name the hard, dignifying truth that in our poverty, weakness, and suffering, Christ is present in a special way.

We get to keep our lamps lit and offer these good works in service of the Love at the heart of all that is, a Lover who wants nothing less than every heart awakened, every wrong forgiven and made right, every condition necessary to humankind’s physical and spiritual survival protected.

If you are here and you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, those are the stakes. And in the face of them, there really is nothing else.

And if you are here and you’ve never known the love of God in this way, you are among people who have been waiting eagerly with lights burning to announce this good news over you.

But if you are here for the party with a finite amount of oil, you have made a choice, whether consciously or unconsciously, that your engagement with the feast has its limits, that you have a hard stop at 8’o’clock when the easy light of day fades. You are retaining control over how long you will wait for the groom to arrive, how deep into the darkness you will go.

“[D]on’t begin until you count the cost,” Jesus says in another place (Luke 14:28). Attending to God’s love affair with the world is not a commitment that we make alongside other commitments; it shapes and orders all our other commitments. Attending to God’s love affair with the world is not something to which we give a portion of our time; it suffuses all our time. If you don’t count the cost, you won’t honor the magnitude or access the fullness of joy in what is unfolding. If you are not extravagant and impractical and generous with what you bring to the table, somewhere deep inside your heart the joy of God, the hope and assurance and purpose that are your birthright, is wavering. You will know it eventually. Perhaps you know it now.

Oh, don’t we want the wise girls to take pity on the fools and share some oil? Wouldn’t that make for a better, easier, happier end to the parable? But they cannot share their oil, because commitment cannot be had secondhand. There is no such thing as vicarious integrity. No one can make you want what you don’t want or bring what you do not intend to bring.

Yet there is a sharing at the heart of this parable, and it’s not the sharing we expect. Many of Jesus’ parables feature individual characters and lend themselves to individual interpretations: Am I the compassionate father, the prodigal son, or the envious older brother? Am I the good soil or the shallow, thorny ground? But here we have groups who have qualities in common. We’re told nothing about the individual bridesmaids, only that five came prepared for whatever the job would take and five did not and that the five who did were able to share together in the joy of the feast.

And that is because joy can be – must be – shared. There is such a special joy when people who are wholly committed to the work at hand join in that work together. A contagious joy when you know you are bringing everything to the table and the person next to you is bringing everything to the table. Anything is possible, then. What joy it is to be untroubled by darkness and ready to announce the coming of God at a moment’s notice.

Such is the joy of shared desire and common purpose. The joy of the birds who announce the sunrise, of parents who watch over their children, of Paul and Silas singing hymns at midnight from the depths of a prison cell.

We grow anxious in the face of God’s delay only when we have parceled ourselves out and brought less than everything. But when we stand ready to give everything, when we know our lights will burn and we will serve for as long as it takes, then even the waiting, even the delays, even the long nights become part of the wedding, are shot through with delight.

For this our task, thanks be to God.

            Amen.

[1] George T. Montague, S.M., Companion God: A Cross-Cultural Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 276.

Stewardship, Part 3: “Gifts”

November 5, 2023 - All Saints’ Day

John 13:1-17

Pastor Mike

Every year on All Saints’ Day, we honor and learn from those who have walked the way of faith ahead of us and whose stories serve as examples of the many different ways our lives might be offered to Christ. When the stories are particularly powerful, when another person’s love and faithfulness grip our imagination and help us to grow, we call them saints. In the languages of the Old and New Testaments, the word for “saints” is the same as the word for “holy.” Chadoshim in Hebrew. Hagioi in Greek. Holy ones – that’s what saints are. If something is holy it is set apart for a special purpose. Saints are not perfect, because no one is perfect. No, what makes them remarkable is that they made of their lives a perfect offering. They set all that they had and all that they were at God’s disposal, consented to the Spirit, and served the poor and hurting of their time and place.

If we are lucky, we have rubbed shoulders with saints, have learned from and been loved by people whose faith and vitality were contagious. All of us can be touched by the saints whose lives transcended a particular time and place and whose stories have inspired Christians for generations –people like Benedict, Frances, Hildegard, Ignatius, the Wesley brothers, Dr. King, and Dorothy Day.

The saints help us walk the Way. They set examples that we can follow. And it is this language of example that brings us to our Gospel passage, this scene from John which captures Jesus’ most famous act of service and his most direct instructions about love. Jesus came to set his life before us as a perfect example. He was full of grace and truth, and manifested the pure love of God in human gestures and words and attitudes so that, through his Spirit, we could manifest it, too. After the foot washing Jesus tells the disciples, “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. …If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (vv. 15, 17). This is Christ’s gift to us. He has set us an example.

The piece of his example that we immediately leap to when reading this story is the foot washing itself. In Jesus’ time, most roads were just dirt roads and people wore sandals everywhere they went. Feet were considered the lowliest part of the body as they were constantly covered in dust and grime. Household servants or slaves were given the task of washing their master’s feet, or the feet of their master’s houseguests, whenever they entered the home. Foot washing was both commonplace and a matter of caste, of honor and shame.

In his disciples’ eyes, Jesus was a privileged person. He was a powerful teacher, healer, and wonder worker. They called him teacher and lord. If anyone was going to have his feet washed, it should be Jesus. Yet he stooped down and took the place of a slave. He committed a scandal. He totally inverted established social stratification and household hierarchy. This is why Peter protested so passionately. Jesus challenges the prevailing values of his world by taking a position the world considers shameful, fit only for those at the very bottom, and blessing from the bottom up. That is part of his example. “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you.”

Even so, to leap there right away, right to the loving, scandalous act, is to miss something of great importance. Jesus’ loved and blessed out of his own spiritual abundance. He drew from an endless reservoir of divine favor. In one moment he could be the host, the next the servant, because classifications and ranking of that kind had been dissolved in the Father’s love. If we leap right to the act, the fruit, we miss the foundation which makes the act possible, the roots sunk down into God’s life. This is the first part of Jesus’ example: if we are to offer our lives as a gift to the world, we must first receive our lives as a gift from God.

Hear verses 3 & 4 of chapter 13 again: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself.”

Jesus knew that he had come from God, that God was his origin, his source, his native home.

Jesus knew that he was returning to God, that God was his destination, his goal, his true end.

And Jesus knew, in that moment at sitting at the table with this friends, that God the Father had put all things into his hands.

Jesus knew that he belonged to God through and through. God was his beginning, middle, and end. That deep assurance opened his life and he was able to receive all things – all wisdom, all love, all authority. He held it. It was at his disposal. And what did he do with it? He washed feet. He brought dignity and glory to the lowest, most menial position. And he did it without embarrassment, self-consciousness, guilt, or pride because he had located his worth and identity in a source beyond the temporal social classifications of his culture.

What does it mean to believe that God is your source?

It means trusting that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” that God has knit you together in secret. If you know that you have come from God, then you know God wants you in this life, that God has formed you in his image and spoken a word of original goodness over you. No one else, nothing else, no story, no wound, no scathing word you might level at yourself, has a prior claim on you than God’s word. God knows your true name. God has loved you from the start.

 What does it mean to believe that God is your end, that you are returning to God?

It means trusting that God has prepared plans for you, and good works for you to do. If God is the direction you are moving, then there is a purposefulness and meaningfulness to your life. God has not brought you into this life, into this wilderness, so that you might perish. God is with you until the end. God sees the end and provides for you. And when you come to the end of your understanding, the end of your strength, even the end of your lives, God is the one who receives us in death and beyond death, and weaves the thread of our story into the great tapestry of God’s story.

When we trust that we are God’s from beginning to end, when we know that from all eternity and to all eternity, God’s word over and in us is Love, we no longer have to cling to our lives as if they are our possession, as if we have to wrangle them into some semblance of respectability or worthiness in the lives of others, as if our worth depends on us. When God tells us who we are, we can open our hands and have all necessary things. We can give our lives to others. “We love because he first loved us.”

Every one of us must face and work through whatever woundedness or inner darkness sabotages our sense of having love as our origin and love as our end. There are often things said or not said, done or not done, to us as children which make it difficult to trust that love is our native home. Sometimes, as we grow, we don’t fit the molds the world supplies, we are misunderstood or mistreated by those closest to us, we make mistakes and write inner stories about our unworthiness. We become attached to things – habits and relationships, possessions and pursuits – that shore up our self-esteem, keep our depression at bay, and distract us from underlying pain.

We can never offer ourselves as a gift to others if we do not first possess ourselves, and we cannot possess ourselves if we look anywhere other than God for the key to our identity. You are God’s Beloved. Christ will come to meet you at your very lowest point – in the depths of your shame and self-talk, your spiritual or material poverty, and will take hold of you, will lovingly wash you. We must, like Peter, relent and allow Jesus to meet us at the bottom. Only by passing through our blockages can we feel that life is a gift that we have received and now want to give.

The saints are saints because God loves them. And God loves you, too.

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

Stewardship, Part 2: “Presence”

October 29, 2023 – Ordinary Time

Exodus 3:1-6 || Exodus 33:7-11 || Deuteronomy 34:1-12

Pastor Mike

Thursday

By James Longenbach

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I summered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

The phone rang. So with my left

Hand I answered it,

Sauteing the rice, then adding the broth

Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right—hello?—

The miracle, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,

Each graine releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit

While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,

It will be perfectly creamy,

But will still have a bite.

There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, used to go beyond the brim of his familiar circle and talk face to face with God. That tent was their familiar meeting place, yet Moses made sure that neither he nor anyone else could just pop in on God for a moment while heading somewhere else. No, you had to turn aside and put the camp behind you. Only then could you be truly present.

Moses and God were making something. They were making a holy people of the Israelites who had been freed from Egyptian slavery. It was an act of God’s radical imagination, and Moses had glimpsed the vision. To exist in the long, hard middle of it, the rich but difficult decades of leading while wandering, Moses needed the sustaining power of presence. He made turning aside to see and talk with God the fundamental rhythm of his life.

He had learned the importance of presence on the day he was first called by God. Before Moses was a liberator, lawgiver, and leader, he was a lost and lonesome man, silently shepherding the flocks of his father-in-law in the land of Midian. He was estranged from his people and his purpose, and he had traveled so far from spiritual vitality that Moses was not even in the wilderness, the Bible’s symbolic location for testing and transformation. No, he had gone beyond the wilderness, beyond any hope of change, and had only the ancient silence of the rocks of Mt. Horeb for company.

“If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of [creation], even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” So says the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, and so it was with Moses. Out in that place of despair, God found Moses, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in the bright liveliness of fire. God made the first move. The bush burned but was not consumed. Moses caught sight of it, but the question on which everything hung was this:

Would the sight of it catch him? Would he not merely take note of this great sight but come and behold it, be present to it? Would he turn aside and see?

Moses looked and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:2b-4)

By one single act of presence, his life was utterly transformed.

Moses did not know that the burning bush had anything to do with God. But he did know that something strange, beautiful, and holy had appeared to him and he allowed himself to be curious, to be interrupted, to be drawn in. God does not expect us to recognize divine purposes at first, but only to come and see. The rest takes care of itself. To turn and attend is already to make space for change.

God rewards the decision to turn and see by making a second move. “Moses! Moses!” God calls. God speaks the man’s name, restores Moses to himself. Knowing God and knowing ourselves go hand in hand; when we are intentionally present to God, we receive who we are from God in the same moment. [with wonder] “Here I am.”

Turning aside also has profound political implications. Having caught Moses’ deep attention, God binds Moses to the misery and hope of the enslaved Israelites. No longer will God permit Moses to wander about aimlessly and alone. That’s the gift – maybe it feels like the danger! – of presence. We get our personhood and we get our people.

So it was that out beyond the wilderness Moses learned that life with God takes intention and attention. Like a great friendship or a romantic partnership or a relationship with a child, presence communicates and clears space for love. The daily miracles are easy to miss if we aren’t willing to stop, turn, and see.

When Moses died at the age of one hundred and twenty years old, his “sight was unimpaired, and his vigor had not abated” (Deut. 34:7). It’s a spiritual statement as much as a physical statement. Moses was one of the pure in heart who see[s] God (Matt. 5:8). He had shaped his life and ministry around intimacy with God. As a matter of course, he slowed down, turned aside, and relished God’s presence while offering his own.

The burning bush is so famous that perhaps we think of it as the greatest encounter with God that Moses ever had. But it was not. It was the first, but it was not the greatest. No, on that first day Moses hid his face from the holy flame. Better were those later, ordinary days when he and God talked “face to face” in the tent, “as one speaks with a friend.” Best of all was that very last day, when God led Moses by the hand up to the top of the mountain, showed him the vast horizon of all that had been promised, and then returned his body to the earth.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I’m going to talk about stewardship.

The Church is an act of Christ’s radical imagination. The Church is something the Spirit is making with us and through us, just as the Spirit has worked with and through every generation of disciples. In a world of mass shootings, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, economic imbalance, and ecological devastation, the Church is a gathering of persons who say with one voice:

“Turn aside! Come, hear God speak your name. Turn aside! Come and receive unconditional love – love that forgives and heals your past, love that steadies and empowers your present, love that grants a purposeful future. Come and encounter a God who has already come very near to us, who gives his life to us in sacraments and songs and scriptures, through the embraces of those beside us and the inner stillness of prayer. Come and have your heart riven by the one who in crucifixion and death as brought the brokenness of the world into the heart of God. God out to bind your lives to those who suffer, who are pushed to the brink of survival, whose dignity the powers of the world daily threaten. Turn aside! This is a place where there is no Jew or Greek, no male and female, no slave and free – but only Christ shining in and through the singular glory of each person. Come join a people who bear the glory of God upon them yet are not consumed. Come be present to visions that bestow true hope for a world famished for good news.”

That’s the radical dream of the Church, and stewardship means responsibly caring for it. It is no small thing that every week sixty or seventy of us gather here to pay attention to how the Spirit is working in our personal lives, in the collective experience of our congregation, and out in our community. In our go, go, go world of trends and screens and compulsive productivity, turning aside to pay attention is the only thing that allows a concern from beyond us to reach in and lay claim to us. When I ask you to consider giving money to the Church, I want you to see that that money gets metabolized here into the possibility of presence. A building to gather in. A pastor – whoever he or she is – to direct our focus to what is holy. Funds to help kids get to camp and strangers in need feel seen and cared for and the daycare to be focused on patient care not leaky walls and the list goes on.

What does our group experience of presence have to do with Maine, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine; with broken hearts in our city; with sick soil, air, and water? Everything. Presence is political. And the evil powers of our world want nothing more than to both isolate us from one another and distract us from the stakes. If God can get one person to turn aside and see, God can free a whole people. What would happen if the Church really paid attention? Stewardship allows us to live that question.

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I went to the window with Loren.

Now that it is fall and the nights are lengthening and the great tree in front of our house has shed many of its leaves, everyone at my house wakes up while it is still dark, and we can watch the sunrise through our large kitchen window. That is, if we choose to see it. One morning this week, Loren, who is two-and-a-half, began to shout, “The red and orange are back, Dada! The red and orange are back!”

It took me a couple of minutes to understand what he meant. Some gleam out there in the still-murky world had caught his eye, and he, like Moses in the wilderness of Midian, had “turned aside to see” (Exod. 3:4). And, just like Moses with Joshua, just like God with every one of us, Loren, in the joy and unselfconsciousness of being a child, was compelled to bring me inside his own turning. We stood before the window naming the changing colors until the sky as a whole turned a light morning blue.

Across my life, this is how I have primarily experienced God: in the act of turning aside to see. I have turned aside for one reason and later found myself seated beside red-clad prisoners on Death Row; craning my neck for glimpses of the birds on threatened lands; praying beside bedsides and gravesides. Wonder and awe, curiosity and the capacity for interruption, seeing with feeling, being still – those are the ingredients of presence, and when God finds them in a person or a congregation, all things become possible.

In his Diary of the Beagle expedition, the great English naturalist Charles Darwin, after venturing into a tropical setting for the first time, wrote, “the vividness of an impression gives it the effect of duration.” Presence deepens our experience of time, and makes moments feel as if they have lasted forever. Presence grounds us, helps us to be thankful, and gives us peace. Presence makes us feel that we have really lived this one, glorious, unrepeatable life. Presence holds space for all life’s seeming fragments.

As the poet says,

“There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.”

Amen.

Stewardship, Part 1: “Prayers”

October 22, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Psalm 37:1-11

Pastor Mike

Psalm 37 is a wisdom psalm. Wisdom psalms are prayers that sound almost like proverbs because, in praying them, the worshipping congregation reminds itself of God’s unchanging desires and intentions for human life, and of the deep structure of God’s creation. Unlike prayers heaved up toward heaven in times of crisis, and unlike prayers that thank God for stepping in and redeeming a situation, wisdom psalms celebrate the essential characteristics of life lived well – in all times and all places. But you and I know how bad the world can be, don’t we? We know how far from God’s hopes we have wandered. Perhaps wisdom psalms strike us as naïve: The wicked will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb (v. 2)? Are you sure, God? Jesus found value in praying the wisdom psalms. The third beatitude in his famous Sermon on the Mount – “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” – is a direct quote of Psalm 37:11. Since Christ is our teacher, we ought to listen to these psalms, too.

Psalm 37 brings into focus the question of how we are to secure the material conditions of our communal life. The prayer is all about how the people are to “live in the land and enjoy security” (v. 3), how future generations will be able to “inherit the land,” a phrase that shows up in verses 9, 11, and 34. The ancient Israelites had been promised a land, a place to put down roots and make a home, but from the very beginning the land was a gift from God. The people could receive it through faith and keep it by living justly, or they could lose it by forsaking God and oppressing the poor. We usually think we have to wring fruitfulness out of the land by any means necessary, but this story was different; the people were promised stability and prosperity at home if only they could take a proper posture before God and neighbor.

Psalm 37 invites you and I to ask several questions: “As a congregation, what are the material conditions of our life together? What is the place, what are the resources, who are the people on whom we depend for our flourishing? And what’s the proper spiritual posture to take toward those things, since we live not according to the wisdom of the world but the wisdom of God?” Those questions bring us to the theme of stewardship, the proper care for our resources. We’re going to explore stewardship over the next five Sundays using the five United Methodist membership vows as a scaffold. We practice stewardship through our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness.

Let’s take a crack at those questions: “What are the material conditions of our life together, and how do we care for them?

Several things leap to mind: First off, we have our building, here at the corner of 15th and Clark. We have our bank accounts and reserve funds and endowment. We have our pastor and other staff. We have the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference. We have our people – we have you.

Are all these things essential for being a follower of Jesus? Jesus’ own ministry was poor and propertyless, and he never told his disciples to go build all these different institutions. There are Christian traditions that don’t have ordained clergy in the way United Methodists do, or at all. There are monastic orders that take vows of poverty. There are creative ways to be a church community without owning a building.

We would be okay if we didn’t have some of our possessions – but we wouldn’t be us. We wouldn’t be this community, First United Methodist Church of Pocatello, in this place and in this way and with our particular history. And since, so far as I know, we have not discerned a call to go into the future buildingless or pastorless or budgetless, I think we can say that for the time being these things are some of the conditions of our flourishing, and as such we need to take proper care of them.

Whenever the material health of a congregation is brought up, it is easy for us to think that the first question to ask is, “What do we need to do?” We formed to think that, culturally. We believe that if we run ourselves ragged, exhaust ourselves with unrelenting activities and meetings and programs, if we do, do, do, that we will get the blood pumping in this Body of the Christ. If we press a little harder, stay awake a little later, stress a little more, we will at last arrive at a time when we can simply be, a time when we can kick back and enjoy our wonderfully efficient and important church, and the worthwhileness of all our striving will be obvious.

Which is a lie. Times like that never arrive. The world and our lives are always changing, new challenges and opportunities rise up and old ones wear away. It is at the cost of our peace, our joy, our thankfulness, and our spacious presence that we do, do, do. In God’s economy, the ends do not justify the means. “Do not fret—it leads only to evil,” the psalm says. Only: “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” That Hebrew verb for “fretting” literally means “to heat oneself up in vexation.” Anyone here ever heated themself up with vexation, especially over what others seem to have gotten through wrongdoing that you’re trying to get through righteousness? But the call of stewardship is first and foremost a call to prayer, a call to be. If we are a people of true prayer, we will become a people of worthwhile activity, but if we start from anxious activity we will never arrive at prayer – and we will miss the whole point.

Psalm 37 calls us to a higher and more holy wisdom: the wisdom of being, the wisdom of prayer. In its first eleven verses, it lays out four commands linked to the holy name of God: “Trust in the Lord” (v. 3), “Take delight in the Lord” (v. 4), “Commit your way to the Lord” (v. 5), and “Be still before the Lord” (v.7).

Trust, delight, commit, and be still – the strong, four-sided foundation of prayer.

Trust is a synonym for faith in the Bible. Trust and faith are not about belief in the sense of believing in doctrines or ideas. We don’t trust concepts, we trust people and their promises to us. When we trust God, we open our lives to a relationship with God and we consent to who God says God is for us – our Creator, our Helper, our Provider, our Healer. To provide means to see ahead, and if we trust that God sees ahead and will take care of us when we get there, then we can release our anxieties about securing our own way, and we can let go of our need to be in control. When we trust God, we acknowledge that we are held, and we don’t need to hold on so tightly.

Delight is a word we don’t use enough in our spirituality. But the Psalms are insistent. Another one says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” and still another, “In your presence there is fullness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” God is truth and goodness and beauty in their perfection, and one of the great joys of being a person of faith is that God is enjoyable. God offers healing for our wounds, companionship for journeys, and God is always expanding our inner and outer horizons, leading us deeper into the adventure and mystery of life. Prayer, simple being with God, allows us to enjoy the truth of our belovedness. What would it mean if our activity was accountable to our delight? What would we do if we treated with urgency our need to seize upon moments of joy in our congregational life?

Trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, and then: “Commit your way to the Lord.” True commitment means brining all your resources to bear on your discipleship; it means actively integrating all the dimensions of your lives and aligning them with God’s will. Commitments means that you have given God the final say over every face of your being, that there is no area you have roped off from God’s touch. We can’t experience true delight or trust in God if we are not bringing our fullness to God. There is joy in alignment, in choice and responsibility. Commitment means you’re in for the long haul, and that is freeing, too, because your perspective can expand, and the true value of any doing can be made clear. And notice that the psalm does not say, “Commit your way to the Church.” I wonder, if the Church focused more on helping people joyfully commit their lives to God, would it have to worry about people committing to care for its own material needs?   

Finally, the Psalm tells us to “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him.” That verse is a good example of a poetic device known as parallelism, where the two statements sort of say the same thing but are really deepening one another. Be still…wait. Stillness is not passive or lazy or sleepy. Stillness is attentive and alert and ready. When we wait before God with a quiet, steady focus, we can receive what God wants us to receive. We are people, not cogs in a machine. And our desires are easily tangled up with the world’s notions of success; we need to still ourselves before God in order to keep our focus true.

There’s the prayerful foundation of stewardship. Trust – release control and depend on the One who provides. Delight – seek and celebrate the joy of life with God. Commit – bring all that you are to the table, so that you can receive all that God is. And be still – don’t rush ahead just because it’s more comfortable to be on the move. I wonder which of those four instructions resonates most with you this morning and how you will respond? And I wonder which of those you think our congregation most needs to heed?

The good news is that the doing does come! I said this earlier, but I’m going to say it again: If we are a people of true prayer, we will become a people of worthwhile activity. Trust frees us. Delight frees us. Commitment frees us. Stillness frees us. That kind of poised, unshakeable posture unleashes deep wells of energy. Vitality will come – if we pray. And you know what, there are times when the life of a congregation is packed with happenings, when things feel chaotic and even get nail-bitingly tense because the stakes are high. There’s nothing wrong with that so long as the activity rests upon the bedrock of prayer and is faithful. Even the hard stuff, like living the urgent questions of our time and bearing one another’s burdens and making a moral witness to the world can be deeply satisfying when they rise from joy, trust, commitment, and stillness.

Look, I’d really like our building to have a new roof. We’re beyond the point of needing it.

I’d like to receive my salary every month.

I want parents to drop their children downstairs with peace of mind every Monday through Friday, and for TLC to have better facilities than they currently have.

I want the heat to kick on in the winter and the printer to spit out paper when I tell it to.

I want our corner of 15th and Clark to become a sanctuary for queer people seeking spiritual refuge, and a gathering place for disillusioned evangelicals, questioning Latter Day Saints, spiritual-but-not-religious youth and religious-but-not-too-spiritual-please academics, and even for that strange cousin you haul here with you once a year on Christmas Eve to make sure he doesn’t forget that God loves him, too.

I want love and light to emanate from this block to touch our neighborhood and city, the university and prison and reservation and ecology, if God should will it, but you know what? –

I don’t want any of that if it means we must become an anxious, miserable, wishy-washy, busybodied people. There are many reasons in life to be those things, but God is not one of them. We are told that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom, and I’m going to say, even when it comes to stewardship.

I’m reminded of the words of Christ, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). May we consider 2024, and the ways we will give in support of the congregation, as a people of prayer. May we trust, delight, commit, and be still. May we not fret. May we “live in the land and enjoy security” and trust in God to act.

Amen.

“Commanded to Remember Who We Are”

October 8, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

John Gribas

Here are some voices I remember from when I was a child.

“Timmy… Bobby… Johnny… Time to wake up, honey.”

(pause)

“Timmy… Bobby… Johnny… Time to wake up, honey.”

This would happen again…and again…and, my brothers and I in our downstairs bedrooms, we did not get up.

And then…

“TIM! BOB! JOHN! GET UP, NOW!!”

We got up.

My mother’s voice. My father’s voice. Both voices of instruction that I remember well, coming to us from the top of the stairs. Voices instructing us—perhaps commanding us—to get up and get ready for another day at school.

Reflecting on the verses from Exodus I just read, for some reason my mind drifts back to those parental voices. And I find myself asking, “What kind of voice do I imagine when I read those very familiar pieces of scripture—the ten commandments?”

My mother’s gentle, loving, invitational call, nudging me from sweet slumber into gradual consciousness and then—just maybe—action? Probably not. In fact, definitely not. I mean, how could I? The scripture itself offers some pretty obvious clues to the “tone” of God’s literally etched-in-stone instructional message. It says that when the people witnessed all the pyrotechnics at Mount Sinai, “they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance.” It’s hard to imagine that kind of reaction to something resembling my mother’s comforting invitation to start the day.

No. I’m afraid I must admit that, at least for this part of scripture, my mind pretty naturally dubs in a voice for God that is much more like the loud, commanding, this-is-not-a-drill character of my father’s morning call to action.

Maybe it is because of those scriptural context clues in Exodus—the Israelites’ fear and trembling. But I suspect it is also, at least in part, because of Cecil B. DeMille. You know, the director, producer, and narrator of the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments. Many of you have seen this. Many of us saw it pretty much every year of our lives when it was shown on TV each Easter.

I vividly remember that film and that scene. A magnificently bearded Charlton Heston as Moses, cringing in fear and clinging to the rocky backdrop on Mount Sinai as bright streams of fire came shooting from the night sky, striking the rock, scattering sparks and burning the words into existence, with DeMille’s deep, ominous, rumbling voice-over portraying God’s narration of all of this.

Yep. I am sure that yearly TV experience shaped my sense of things.

The ten commandments. So familiar. This set of fundamental instructions, shared with humankind through God’s messenger, Moses. Everyone knows the ten commandments. Right?

Sometimes things that seem so familiar occasionally need a little “reframing.” Need to be looked at in a new light. But the ten commandments? Those are pretty straightforward, aren’t they?

Maybe not.

The commandments are a kind of message. In Exodus, a message to a long-enslaved and newly liberated people—escaping, wandering, searching for a new home and restored identity.

As a communication professor, one thing I know is that messages and messaging are never as clear, straightforward, or simple as we might like to imagine.

Some ideas from a communication theory known as CMM can be helpful in considering the ten commandments as a message. CMM stands for Coordinated Management of Meaning. It is a wonderful framework for insight into communication developed in the early 1980s, and it’s one of my very favorites.

CMM challenges the rather simplistic idea that communicating is the process of sending a message that “means something” to someone else. CMM suggests that messages don’t so much “carry” meaning from place to place but, instead, the meaning of messages must be “managed” by those who are engaged in communication.

If messaging is a part of meaning management, what is going on in this part of scripture—the part where God is sharing these commandments? According to CMM, any message can and must be understood within a number of different “contexts.” These contexts have a large impact on shaping the message’s meaning.

One fundamental context is the speech act itself—the basic purpose of the message. The speech act is “what you are doing” when you say something. Asking a question. Telling a joke. Disagreeing with what has just been said.

In Exodus 20, we might reasonably say God’s basic purpose is giving instructions or commands. Thus, the ten commandments.

But that is not the only context for managing meaning. “Relationship” is another context. A person may be telling a joke to another person, but that joke could be a very different thing if it were being shared friend to friend, or child to parent, or speeding motorist to citation-writing police officer.

In Exodus 20, how will we define the relationship between the one giving and receiving the instructions or commands? Who are the Israelites in this relationship? Let’s look back to the beginning of this section of scripture. Before God starts the actual list of commandments, there is a little preface. It says…

Then God spoke all these words, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

This pre-commandment opening statement is important, I think. It defines the relationship, and it therefore is an important “context” for managing the meaning of what follows. God defines the relationship as liberator to those who needed and who have been liberated. That is quite different than cosmic law setter and enforcer to potential law breakers.

And that same pre-commandment opening statement gives insight into a third meaning management context—a context the CMM theory refers to as “episode.” Episode is just another way of saying “what is going on right now.” It is how we define, label, and make sense of the larger social process we are engaged in at the moment.

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

I guess that means, from God’s perspective at least, what is “going on” is a rescue mission. The liberation of a people and the reestablishment of Israel as a new nation. I don’t get the sense here that what is going on is the establishment of a behavior contract which, if maintained, will satisfy a perfect and all-powerful being but, if not maintained, well…angry God.

So we, along with those lost and frightened Israelites, can consider God’s commandment message in light of speech act, relationship, and episode. According to CMM, these contexts don’t function independently, though. They work in a kind of meaning-making hierarchy. Kind of like Russian nesting dolls. One meaning-making context can only be understood within another context. Those involved in the meaning-making process ultimately decide which contexts frame which other contexts—which contexts are at the top, middle, and bottom of the meaning-making hierarchy.

My experience tells me that many people give top priority to the speech act when considering the ten commandments. The most important thing is that they are “commands.” I mean, come on. What are they known as?

I don’t think I have ever heard them called “a divine liberator’s message to a frightened and newly liberated people.” Or “God’s rescue mission manifesto.”

Nope. These are the ten commandments. To make that point very clear, I have on occasion heard someone quip, “They aren’t called the ten suggestions, you know!”

I get it. But we should ask ourselves this: Are they, first and foremost, commands? Or are they, first and foremost, a message offered by a loving liberator to a traumatized and newly liberated people, shared as part of an ongoing rescue mission? If the latter, then the fact that they also happen to be commands is a different thing entirely. In fact, given this framing, it might be difficult to even use the term “command” here. Maybe instructions. Or guidance? Or direction? Or wisdom?

You know, the word “command” pops up a lot in the book of Exodus. Curious that it is actually not used at all in this particular section of scripture—this section we all know as the ten commandments.

One more idea from the Coordinated Management of Meaning that I think could be helpful. The idea of “logical forces.” Logical forces are different ways of understanding motives—the stories we tell ourselves to explain our reasons for doing what we do in relation to others.

Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we did what we did because of some prior act that prompted or caused us to act. That is “prefigurative force.”

Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we did what we did as a necessary means to some future end. That is “practical force.”

Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we did what we did because it was expected or required by where we are, who we are with, or the particular situation we are currently part of. That is “contextual force.”

And, finally, sometimes, we tell ourselves that we did what we did because…well…because that is just who we are. We see our behavior as self-defining. That is “implicative force.”

Ask yourself, why do you obey these commandments?

Because God told you you must? That’s prefigurative force.

Because if you do you will earn or keep God’s approval or avoid his wrath or have a good and blessed life…or maybe even attain heaven or escape damnation? That’s practical force.

Because you are in church or among members of a faith community or consider the situation one in which certain moral behavior is proper or expected? That’s contextual force.

Because you believe yourself to be a child of God? Created by God through love and for love. Love of God. Love of your neighbor. Love of all creation. And these commandment instructions ultimately suggest behavior that is consistent with that love. Therefore, you obey because of who and what you are? That’s implicative force.

I would like us to ask, “What happens if we ‘reframe’ this portion of scripture?”

What if we prioritize relationship and episode over speech act? That is, what if we see this message from God to his people, and by extension to us, as first and foremost a message from a loving liberator to a lost and recently freed people—a message that is part of God’s rescue mission?

And what if we let implicative force be the grounding for this story? That is, what if our understanding is that the reason we or the Israelites or anyone would follow these commands is because of our own sense of who we are?

With this reframing, we can see these less as the ten commandments and more as the ten reminders. Not reminders of what to do and not to do, but reminders to this long enslaved and recently freed people that they are, indeed, the people of God. His children. Chosen to be a special kind of blessing to the world. People who understand that they were created through love…created to love. As reflected in this message known as the ten commandments, …

…people created to love by honoring the life and family and belongings and good name of others, recognizing them as fellow children of God created through love.

…people created to love by honoring themselves as God’s creation, appreciating the need for rest and the way such rest grows trust and reinforces reliance on the creator and expands the capacity to love, and appreciating parents who play an essential role in one’s becoming a child of God.

…people created to love by honoring the God of love, doing what is needed to keep one’s connection to the source of love open, strong, and undistracted—something without which love for others and self is just not possible.

You know, I have read some interesting things recently about ways to deal with people who seem to have “lost themselves” by participating with cult communities, or by getting caught up in conspiracy theories and falling into rabbit holes of online disinformation and propaganda, or through other forms of psychological and emotional trauma. Such individuals are not going to be restored through argument or evidence, or by rebuke or shaming or tough love. They need people who know and love them to remind them of who they were and who they still really are.

If anything can restore, that will.

Those Israelites had been enslaved for a long time. They most certainly were traumatized. It appears they had lost themselves. And it appears that here in Exodus 20, the God who loved them needed to remind them of who they really were. And of what their relationship to their liberator-God really was. And of what was going on—a rescue mission.

And God did this with a few shalts and shalt nots.

With all this in mind, I need to ask myself again: “What kind of voice do I imagine when I read those very familiar pieces of scripture—the ten commandments?” My dad’s voice? Now…maybe not so much. My mom’s? Perhaps. But I really think I would say…both.

Both, if I reframe a bit and choose not to focus on those parental voices as commands to get up, but rather focus on the relationship, on the episode, and on their words as reminders of who I am.

Those voices. Coming to me from loving parents who care deeply about me and my well-being. Coming to me as part of a morning ritual of parent-child connection and a welcome to a new and beautiful day. Both, in their own way, reminding me of who I am. Mom’s voice, reminding me that I am someone who is safe and loved. Dad’s voice, reminding me that I am someone who is capable and responsible.

It is easy to forget those things when you are nine. I appreciate the reminders.

May we all listen for the voice of our creator, and may we all be willing to reframe when needed to listen for how that voice is reminding us of who we are. His children. Created though love. Created to love.

Amen.

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 11: Priscilla and Aquila

October 1, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Acts 18:1-4, 18-21, 24-28

Pastor Mike

Paul first met Priscilla and Aquila in the city of Corinth, in Greece. He had come to Corinth with the intention of planting a church there and inviting people, both Jews and Gentiles, to follow Christ. No matter where Paul went in the Mediterranean world, his work as an apostle got him into trouble. He even catalogued his sufferings at one point in 2 Corinthians (16:11-29): frequent imprisonment, lashings, beatings, stoning, shipwrecks, sleeplessness, hunger – you name it! So when by some miracle Paul was able to make friends, they often became true companions and co-workers, and this is exactly what happened with Priscilla and Aquila. Their bond with Paul was immediate and lasting.

The couple had come to Corinth sometime before Paul. They had left Rome because of the government’s hostility toward Jews (Aquila was a Jew). They shared a religious background and framework with Paul, as well as a  kind of outsider or newcomer status. But what really brought them together was their shared trade. Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila were all tentmakers – leatherworkers – and so for eighteen months, as they shared the gospel and built up a Christian congregation in Corinth, they also worked together on the side to make ends meet.

Eighteen months of close-quarters life, work, and ministry must have been rich and dense, because when Paul sensed that it was time for him to move on from Corinth and preach in another place, and set sail for Ephesus, Priscill and Aquila uprooted themselves again and went with him. Paul didn’t stay in Ephesus for long. He sailed on from there. But he left the tentmaking couple behind to carry on the work of establishing a Church. He trusted them to be faithful to the Way, which they were. They gathered a congregation into their own home.

The importance of Priscilla and Aquila in the early days of Christianity, as well as Paul’s personal affection for them, are made clear in some of Paul’s later letters like 1 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, and Romans where he specifically sends them greetings and thanks them for their ministry. His greeting in Romans is especially poignant. Paul writes, “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life… greet also the church at their house (16:3-4). It seems somewhere along the line Priscilla and Aquila even saved Paul’s life. I wish we knew the story behind it.

After Paul left Priscilla and Aquila in Ephesus, a young man named Apollos arrived in the city.  Scripture describes him in glowing terms: “He was an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures. He had been instructed in the Way of the Lord, and he spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus” (Acts 18:24-25). Here was a talented preacher and teacher, full of promise – an enormous potential asset to the Christian community.

            With Paul no longer in Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila were the leaders of the congregation, and they immediately recognized Apollos’ gifts. They also realized that Apollos, traveling alone, was a bit of a lone wolf, without mentorship or accountability or support. He had lots of raw talent and a good education, but his experience was limited. He hadn’t ever met Paul or the other Apostles from Jerusalem, and there were some gaps in his understanding of the Way, particularly concerning the Holy Spirit. So Priscilla and Aquila decide to help him, and their actions are the key to understanding not only their unique gifting but this whole sermon series, too.

When Priscilla and Aquila heard him [speak] they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately.

Linger with that threefold movement and etch it in your memory: They heard, they took aside, they explained. They took the time to really experience him; they got involved in his life gently, not in a way that diminished him to others; and they showed him the Way.

Apollos was already speaking ‘accurately, but Priscilla and Aquila explained things to him more accurately. There’s wordplay there in the Greek, from akribos to akribesteron. Priscilla and Aquila recognized the gits, recognized the gaps – and knew that they had a finite window to take this young preacher aside and be a positive influence over his life and ministry. At the moment when Apollos was flexing his gifts and exploring his calling with others for the first time, God blessed him with this couple, who had been in the ministry longer, who had spent time with Paul, and who happily came alongside him to help him hone what he had to offer.

After some time, Apollos felt called to move on to another place and preach. He became, like Paul, a traveling missionary and teacher. The Christians in Ephesus, led by Priscilla and Aquila, encouraged him before he left, and they sent a letter of endorsement with him, commending him to disciples elsewhere. It was an ancient form of a letter of recommendation, calling upon others to take seriously the gifts and potential fruitfulness of this person.

Apollos sailed to Corinth, to the city where Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila first met, and he “greatly helped” the congregation there. He became so important to the Corinthian Christians that by the time Paul wrote his first letter to them, Paul had to scold them for dividing themselves according to which human apostle they liked best – Peter, Apollos, or himself.

Apollos was a rising star who kept on rising. Some scholars think he’s even the author of the New Testament book called Hebrews. There is a dimension to every calling that is interior and private. It seems Apollos already had an intuitive sense of his purpose. But callings make themselves known to others, and either someone will eventually come to you and say, I’ve noticed that you are really gifted in this – let me show you the Way, or we will go that person and say, I feel called, and I’m ready to step out and use my gifts but I’m afraid – will you show me the Way?

The point is that no matter what our gifts are and no matter how much formal education we might have, our journey is incomplete without the assistance of others, without the community who affirms and challenges what we believe about ourselves and sends us on with their blessing. We can only go so far on our own resources and understanding. We all need people who are more experienced in the Way to take us aside at critical stages of our development and refine our understanding.

Christian community happens when we trust one another to do this.      

Christian community happens when we trust one another to do this.

What would happen if every time you came into this room, you trusted that the people around you were going to do their best to really see you, to see you as God sees you? What would happen if you could count on them to take you aside when the time was right and help you take your next step? What would happen if you knew you could go to them without embarrassment or shame?

And what would happen in you, through you, if every time you came into this room, you believed that others were trusting you to see them, to really seem them as God sees them? What would you do if you believed others had entrusted you with taking them aside to speak truth into their life?

Christian community must be richly layered and interconnected along generational lines and experiential lines. We can all take aside and be taken aside. We can all mentor and be mentored. We can all direct and take direction. We can all teach and be taught. The question is whether or not we trust one another enough to allow this culture of call to manifest here.

Are you willing to be taken aside and shown the Way?

Are you willing to ask for help when you need it?

Are you willing to respond to another person’s request for help?

Are you willing to stay vigilant as you watch for the gifts and callings of others to emerge?

Are you willing, and do you trust?

Those are the questions that will make or break the vitality of a congregation.

If you are like Ananias of Damascus, and God has challenged you to participate in the redemption of your enemies, may there be someone in your life who will take you aside and show you the Way.

If you are like Shiphrah and Puah, practicing disobedience and deceit in order to protect the lives of those under your care, may you know when the time has come to ask for help.

If you are like Jethro, offering counsel to future leaders; or like Rahab, living in the wall and using God’s people to get what you need; or Ja’el, putting sin to death; or Bezalel and Oholiab, witnessing to God through your creativity and craftsmanship – you will not come into the fullness of your purpose alone.

If you are like Eli, or the Centurion, or Lydia, Mary Magdalene, or Joseph of Arimathea – no matter who you are, for God’s community is a rich tapestry, spanning time and space and cultures – may there be people in your life who come to truly know you, who take you aside, and who show you the Way, and then may you return the blessing to someone else.

Let us end this series on call with the famous words from the book of Hebrews – and if these are indeed the words of Apollos, we can thank Priscilla and Aquila revealing the truth of our interdependence to him:

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 1:1-2a).

Amen.

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 10: Lydia

Sunday, September 24, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Acts 16:11-15 (16-40)

Pastor Mike

The songs come from the innermost cell in the Philippian prison. Paul and Silas – covered with blood and bruises from their severe flogging in the marketplace – sing deep into the night. Suddenly, the whole prison begins to shake; doors and shackles come apart. A jailer wakes to his worst nightmare, a prison break, and he knows it will cost him his job, perhaps even his life. He reaches for a sword to take his own life, and a voice shouts from the darkness: “Do not harm yourself.” The jailor drops his sword and lights the facility. There, in the wreckage of the prison, the jailor washes his prisoners’ wounds, feeds them, and consents to be baptized along with all the members of his household. We might think that there is no hope to be had in the middle of the night in the bowels of a prison. We would be wrong.

I love this story. I have staked many of my hopes for the world upon it ever since I began to spend time in prisons while in seminary, meeting men and women who live on the inside. To the wider world, incarcerated folk are Nobodies, as far from being recognized as God’s children as it is possible to be. As the scripture shows us, the prison and the marketplace are always bound up together. The prison exists to protect the marketplace. In our time, the prison has even become a profitable business venture in itself.  Paul and Silas are arrested for casting out a spirit from a slave girl and ruining her masters’ business. They are interrogated and flogged in the agora, and then carted off to the prison. When Jesus comes to town, he disturbs the marketplace, and he brings the prison into central focus. When he does that, when he makes a scandal of himself for the sake of the slave-girl, for the sake of the jailor, will his people want anything to do with him?

Over-against the prison and the marketplace stands the home, where a jailor can be his own master, washing wounds, setting table, accepting baptism; where a woman might say, the church will gather and be sent out from here. Christians must always think deeply about our connections to these three spheres: the home, the marketplace, the prison.

Which brings us to our character for today, to Lydia.

Even though I have loved this chapter of the Bible, for years I overlooked Lydia. I would skip over her in my haste to get to the juicy center of the story. But her presence in the city, her baptism in the river beyond the gate, and the use she makes of her home form the outer layer, the container for the drama of the marketplace and the prison.

Lydia’s origin story will be familiar to us; it’s similar to one of our favorite cultural tales as Americans. Despite being born on the fringes of privilege (in her case, because of her gender), Lydia overcame the odds set against her and became an economic powerhouse in her own right: wealthy, propertied, elite. She was a self-made woman working in the top-tier of the merchant class. “A dealer in purple cloth” is how the Bible describes her, and purple cloth was one of the rarest and most lucrative commodities in the ancient world.

Purple cloth was dangerous to produce and exorbitantly costly to purchase. The Phoenicians mastered the art of harvesting purple dye from several species of Mediterranean sea snails. Harvesting the sea snails required risky deep-sea diving long before modern technology. And it took the secretions of thousands of snails to produce a single gram of dye. Archaeologists have discovered immense mounds of fossilized snail shells along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In contemporary terms, we would call this purple dye production unsustainable and exploitative, bad for workers and bad for ecosystems. But because of that very costliness, purple became associated with prestige, coveted and worn by royalty throughout the ancient world.

The biblical text does not criticize Lydia for her work – though in the background we can hear the scathing critiques of the Hebrew prophets from Isaiah to Ezekiel against the Phoenician purple-dye economy – but it’s an important detail. It’s a way of signaling that we are dealing with a wealthy, successful, shrewd woman who would have every right to be proud of what she’d accomplished and protective of her corner of the market.

Surprisingly, we’re also told that Lydia is a worshipper of God – a Jew either by birth or conversion – and that she goes outside the city gate on the Sabbath to pray with other women down by the river. She’s never fully left her place on the margins. Even though the economic challenges faced by women, she’s a Jew living in diaspora. So, every Sabbath, she leaves the marketplace and comes to this place of movement and fluidity. Beyond the gate, by the river, she meets Paul and has her heart opened to Christ. She and all the members of her household are baptized in the moving waters of the river. She becomes the first convert to Christianity not only in Philippi but in Greece, and not only in Greece but on the whole European continent!

Lydia then offers Paul and Silas her house as a lodging place and a ‘base of operations.’ Once they have this place to come and go from, Paul and Silas can linger in the city, enmesh themselves in the community, and start causing all sorts of trouble – trouble for people like Lydia, businessowners; trouble in places Lydia frequents, the marketplace.

Lydia worked hard to play by the world’s rules and climb to the top. She used the rules to her advantage and mastered them. Lydia surrenders her hard-won identity to her new baptismal identity. She allows her economic pursuits to be interrupted, and that holy interruption becomes the foothold for the Christian community in her city. Against all good business sense and contrary to a merchant’s desire for order and stability, Lydia enters a new partnership, with holy troublemakers and, from the world’s perspective, disturbers of the peace.

It’s really that simple, and I don’t want to overcomplicate it. We don’t need to do a lot of interpretive work to identify with Lydia. Sometimes, Jesus asks us to give away all our possessions. Sometimes, Jesus asks us to hold all things in common, distributing goods according to need. We are always called to make a habit of giving to the church, to those in need. But with Lydia we are not talking about a vow of poverty or tithing or charitable giving – we’re talking about the strategic, scandalous use of the resources and privilege at our disposal; we’re talking about cracking open privacy of the home and business place so that it becomes a place of gathering. We’re talking about reframing our view of what we possess – the home, the business, the bank account, the cloth, these aren’t things, these are potential energy. We’re talking about aligning that energy with the will of God.

Even though it’s simple, it’s extremely hard to do. From one angle, giving up all that one has is easier. It’s excruciating once, but then you’re free. But to live constantly at the intersection of material resources and life with God’s people takes maturity, humility, cunning, and great faith.

Money can buy us distance from the stakes. Possessions can insulate us from the urgency of the world’s needs and from the inbreaking Kingdom of God. Prisons and forced labor exist to protect the consolidated wealth of the world, and those who possess that wealth can push prisons and forced labor out of mind. It is not evil to be propertied or to have had a successful career; what is sinful is to believe that we know best what our stuff is for, that we draw lines around what we’re willing to let God touch.

Lydia brought the stakes into her home. She made her home and her life places of gathering and sending in Jesus’ name. When the Gospel comes to town to expose injustice, to question the market, to reveal the prison, to set people free on the top, to set people free on the bottom – when the Gospel comes to down to dissolve in the waters of baptism the very rules that have helped make us who we are and bring us what we have, Lydia teaches us how to say, “Have thine own way, Lord; have thine own way.”

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

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 9: Mary Magdalene

Sunday, September 17, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Luke 8:1-3

Pastor Mike

We’re encountering Mary Magdalene this morning as a part of our series on call. I have to admit, it’s a bit misleading for me to cast her into this assembly of “minor characters” from the Bible. A true minor character would be someone like the second woman named in this passage, Joanna, who followed Jesus and helped fund his ministry even though she was married to one of Herod Antipas’ underlings. Now there’s a compact, unelaborated drama – perhaps for another time. But Mary Magdalene, the woman we hear about every Good Friday evening and Easter Sunday morning? Really? Truth is, from the beginning one of Christianity’s great fumbles has been its unwillingness to definitively answer this question about Mary Magdalene: major character or minor character? Let’s take stock of the mess the Church has made of her legacy.

In the year 591, Pope Gregory I turned a piece of interpretive gymnastics and guesswork into official church doctrine. If you have your Bible open to our passage, you’ll see that just prior to it, there’s a story that ends Luke chapter 7 and is titled something like “A Sinful Woman Forgiven. That story is about an unnamed woman known to everyone in her city as “a sinner” who crashes a dinner party at a Pharisee’s house so that she can anoint Jesus’ feet with ointment. The Pharisee criticizes Jesus for letting a sinner like this touch him. In the other Gospels, a similar scene of anointing is recorded, but the woman in those stories is explicitly named as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the setting for the story is totally different, the town of Bethany down near Jerusalem, not somewhere in Galilee. Pope Gregory, trying to harmonize these two similar stories decided that the “unnamed woman” in Luke 7 must be the same person as Mary of Bethany. Furthermore, because of the proximity of the “sinner” in Luke 7 to Mary Magdalene in Luke 8, he decided that the “sinful” woman and the woman “from whom seven demons had gone out” might as well be the same messed up person. Gregory declared as doctrine that Luke’s unnamed sinner from Luke 7, Mary Magdalene from Luke 8 and Mary of Bethany from the other Gospels were all the same person. This doctrine wasn’t corrected within the Catholic Church until 1969.

If we remember that in 591 most Christians in the world were Catholic Christians, and that most people alive were illiterate, we can understand that by flattening Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and the sinner into one person, Gregory made it difficult for folks to consider Mary Magdalene on the Bible’s own terms. Two common myths about Mary Magdalene dominated her memory. On the one hand, identifying her with the forgiven sinner in Luke 7 led the Church to construe her as a depraved prostitute, in desperate need of forgiveness and moral correction. Which, to be clear, is never even said about the Luke 7 woman; the Church just seems to think that sinful women must be prostitutes. On the other hand, identifying her with Mary of Bethany, to whom Jesus shows special affection, especially in John’s Gospel, brought on the idea that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ lover or wife, (again, reducing her to her sexuality). These two personas – Mary the sinful sex worker and Mary Christ’s spouse – both obscure the Mary who clearly meets us in the Gospels.

One of the few details that all four of the Gospels agree on is that Mary Magdalene participated in and witnessed the ministry, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Unlike the disciples, Mary did not abandon Jesus when he was arrested and executed. Unlike the disciples, Mary came on Easter morning to experience the shock and glory of the empty tomb. John goes so far as to tell us that Jesus appeared to Mary first after he was raised from the dead, and that Mary was the first Christian preacher, the first person ever sent out to announce to others, “I have seen the Lord.” Forgiven sinner? Wife of Christ? How about forceful, faithful, privileged disciple of Jesus.

We can’t blame it all on poor Pope Gregory and his imagination. Every year at the seminary I attended, our school holds a symposium celebrating excellence in African American theological scholarship and preaching. One of the years when I was a student, a black scholar, writer, and preacher named Renita Weems was the visiting speaker. During a chapel service, she gave a sermon on the first chapter of Acts, which tells the story of the disciple gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem after the ascension of Jesus, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come. As they wait, they decide that replacing Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and filling the twelfth apostle slot would be a good thing for them to do. Peter gets up and says that the requirements for apostleship should be that a person was there from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry until the end, and that they witnessed the resurrected Christ. Two men are put forward, prayers offered, lots cast. A man named Matthias becomes the new twelfth apostle.

After retelling the story, Dr. Weems was incredulous, and she posed a question to us, to the Church, to Simon Peter himself: Who is Matthias?

I still get chills when I remember that moment. The room erupted. Who is Mathias? Who is this man, who has been named before this moment, who is never named again after it? Who was not, according to any Gospel writer, in Galilee, or Jerusalem, or at the cross, or at the tomb, or present on Easter morning? Who is Mathias?

Dr. Weems wanted to know. Because right there all along there was a person who everyone knew had been there from the beginning to the end. What is more, she had been the first to go with Christ through the end into the new beginning! There already was someone who had been, without question, a resilient witness and a summoned preacher: Mary Magdalene.

Dr. Weems was helping us see that the Church had overlooked Mary right from the start. And by helping us see this, she was making two points, one about patriarchy, the shaping of power and imagination by and around men, and another about what happens when Christians get to conducting their business before the Spirit has come to them. When we operate with the same old resources, when we rush ahead without guidance from God, we end up carrying forward our same biases, blind spots, and failures of imagination. Christians know and have known that Mary Magdalene is important, singular, a disciple unlike any of the others. But with her obvious and original significance repressed, we end up with theories like the sinner or the spouse.

Perhaps the Word that God wants you to hear today is simply this: No matter how willfully other people, perhaps people even in the Church, have misrepresented who you are; no matter how willfully other people have excluded you from the circle of power, God knows you, calls you, and will use you.

As I learned some of the history of how Mary’s been interpreted, and as I remembered Renita Weems’s sermon, I started to wonder: If we don’t buy into the sinner or spouse theories, what was it about Mary Magdalene and her experience of Christ that filled her with such devotion and resilience? Is there anything else we can say know about her?

Luke provides the sole biographical detail: “The Twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been healed from evil spirits and authorities: Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out…” Scour the New Testament and that’s all there is. Mary, from whom seven demons had gone out. It’s not much, but it’s more than enough. Seven demons. Not seven sins. Seven demons.

We can take it literally: Mary was a victim of spiritual oppression. We can take it figuratively: Mary was tormented by a multiplicity of false selves – by masks, anxieties, shame. Either way, being demon possessed meant that Mary was unclean, ostracized, and probably debilitatingly sick. Spiritual trauma always registers in the body. The only other person from Jesus’ ministry who is this spiritually afflicted is the Gerasene Demoniac, from whom the Legion of demons gets cast out, and he had to live chained up in the graveyard outside his town because no one knew what else to do with him. The point is that Mary didn’t have a life or a chance at a life. She didn’t know who she really was. Through no fault of her own, mind you. Again, not seven sins, seven demons.

This is not the only place that a reference to seven demons appears in Luke’s Gospel. In chapter 11, Jesus teachers a crowd and he says this:

When [an] unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it returns, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. (11:24-26)

If we bring these two references to the seven spirits together, we can wonder if Mary had once been freed from a demon, from some spiritual affliction or inner falseness. Perhaps she had experienced healing and freedom once and made a fresh start, swept her life clean. If she had been freed only to fall again to false voices, how much greater her agony and confusion. Maybe Mary didn’t just hurt; maybe Mary despaired. It is one thing to deal with a devil. It’s another thing to deal with the shame that comes when we fall to the same devil, and end up worse off than before. Jesus did not just set Mary free. He set her really free. He cast out whatever the original oppression was and the subsequent cyclone of shame. He restored Mary to herself. Gave her a true self. Gave her a hope and a future. He didn’t just sweep her house clean, he filled it with power and faith.  

What I am getting at is this: Mary’s love for Jesus was proportionate to her experience of healing and liberation. Jesus came to her on her worst day, so she stayed by him on his worst day. Jesus did not abandon Mary to her futureless circumstances, so she did not abandon him to his futureless circumstances. Jesus was the first to see her liberated, and she was the first to see him liberated. They knew the truth about each other.

Many of us love Jesus in response to his forgiveness. Jesus does away with our indebtedness to God as creatures and sinners. Christians call that experience justification, and it is merciful and beautiful and life changing.

But there is something deeper. Jesus doesn’t just want to forgive us. He also wants to heal us, to set us free from the false voices, the false selves, the masks we wear, the forces that oppress us within and without. Christians call that experience sanctification, and it is character-making and lifelong. It feels like having seven devils leave one by one and then –ecstasy, joy, power.

Mary was a disciple. She models for all of us the possibility of being cleansed and centered and committed. How good is God, that the woman oppressed by seven demons is the same woman who came running from the tomb on Easter morning to proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!”

And it wasn’t the first time that she had seen him.

No, not for the first time.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 8: The Centurion

September 10, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Luke 23:32-47

Pastor Mike

To the Centurion serving under the governorship of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem and duly appointed as overseer of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth:

Dear Sir,

Word – and we trust it is only hearsay – has come to Rome concerning your conduct during the recent execution of Jesus of Nazareth. More than one witness alleges that immediately after his official death upon the cross you pronounced him innocent, and what is more, that you pronounced this in the form of praise to his God, the God of the Jews.

Certainly you understand how such a statement, spoken by the presiding officer at a Roman cross, might be construed not only as a judgement against your own participation in this execution, but also against the soundness of Rome’s legal apparatus and the sovereign rule of Tiberius, lord of heaven and earth. Centurions, if they value their station, do not make such judgements.

Come, remove rumor’s stain from your unblemished record of service. We have it from Pilate that this was not your first crucifixion, that you have stood by the crosses of common criminals, prisoners of war, and traitors. Did these words pass your lips? We have no doubt that you will clear your good name.

The Secretary of the Military under Emperor Tiberius, Lord of Heaven and Earth

Rome

***

To the Secretary of the Military under Emperor Tiberius in Rome,

Dear Sir,

I have received your letter bearing the seal of Tiberius. Contrary to your hopes, I must confess that the report which has reached you in Rome is no mere rumor. The allegations made against me are accurate. As Jesus of Nazareth died, I declared his innocence –  to the great confusion and indignation of the soldiers under my authority that day. To my own confusion as well. We had, after, just executed him.

About Jesus of Nazareth I must say that I have never seen such dignity in suffering before, nor been the recipient of so great a  kindness in the midst of such horror. “Certainly this man was innocent.” That’s what I said. I will always remember those words. They leapt from my lips involuntarily.  It was an outburst I could not hold back, despite, as you have noted, my many years of training and leadership under the shadows of crosses.

While I cannot clear my name, ever since I spoke those words my soul feels washed clean.

I doubt this is the last I will hear from you and the high court of Tiberius,

May he live forever.

Your Centurion

Jerusalem                                      

 ***

To the Centurion serving under the governorship of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem and duly appointed as overseer of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth:

Dear Sir,

Was Jesus of Nazareth not condemned for insurrection by Pilate, governor of Judaea? Was Jesus of Nazareth not condemned for blasphemy by the leaders of his own people? By what authority could you possibly have declared his innocence?  

You have admitted to unforgivable unsoldierly conduct during the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. What is worse, reports are now streaming in from both Jerusalem and Galilee alleging that this very man you executed has been seen alive by certain of his followers.

This places you under great suspicion. Explain yourself at once. What happened that day?

The Secretary of the Military under Emperor Tiberius, Lord of Heaven and Earth

Rome

***

To the Secretary of the Military under Emperor Tiberius in Rome,

Dear Sir,

I am a man of duty, and I have never failed to honor the law of Rome. I have led men in the glories of conquest, suppressed uprisings, overseen crucifixions. I have felt, especially at crosses, as any living man must feel from time to time, twinges of sympathy and sorrow. But I have never been slowed by such feelings. I have felt strange impulses to irrational gentleness, but I have never indulged them. I have suffered a horrible sense of ambivalence, but I have never been paralyzed by it. No, I have always done what I was ordered to do – immediately, coolly, with an inner remove and outer zeal that befits a true servant of Rome. I was, therefore, invested with authority, and I have demanded the same quality of obedience from those who heed my voice.

As we nailed Jesus of Nazareth to his cross, as we taunted him, he spoke words of forgiveness over us. We crucified a thief on either side of him, and he used his last breaths to promise them a place in his paradise. And when the sky darkened overhead, he died with utmost dignity, commending his spirit into the hands of his God, the one he called Father. It was as if he, not the cross, had the power to decide when his sufferings were complete.

The whole purpose of crucifixion, as I have understood and practiced it, is to separate a man from his dignity, from his fundamental authority over his life. In this way he dies disgraced and becomes a Nobody – not only to Rome but also to himself.

But this Jesus, nothing could be taken from him .Yet he continued giving of himself until the end. For the first time I let myself touch those feelings that I have never let myself touch when standing beneath a cross. Despite all my formation, despite the hardness of my armor, those words of praise – “Certainly this man was innocent” – left my mouth. And as I spoke them I felt ecstatic – not joyful but possessed – as if I had been taken over, as if I was melting away, and it was not all bad. No, not bad at all.

That is what happened. Jesus of Nazareth was a contradiction – an innocent man executed, an unforgiven man forgiving. We were a contradiction – dolling out injustice as justice. My confession – it contradicted not only my actions that day, but all I have staked my life upon. That is how I will explain myself – by unexplaining myself!

I doubt this will be received favorably in the court of Tiberius. As I have reported, Jesus prayed to his God that I be forgiven. I only ask the same mercy of our great Emperor,

May he reign forever,

Your Centurion

Jerusalem

 ***

To the Centurion serving under the governorship of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem and duly appointed as overseer of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth:

Dear Sir,

The correspondence between yourself and my Secretary has been brought to my attention. Yours is a case of utmost alarm. I strip you immediately of your station as Centurion, and I order you to report to Rome with the utmost haste. You will stand trial for your defiance.

I write this with my own hand. Perhaps you need a reminder of who it is you serve.

Pilate has received his own instructions to prepare an escort for you.

Do not fail to come,

Tiberius, Lord of Heaven and Earth

Rome

 ***

To the Emperor Tiberius in Rome,

I shall come to Rome and testify. But under whose authority I will stand, and by whose authority I will speak, I no longer know.

Your former Centurion,

Jerusalem

***

To Mary of Nazareth, in Galilee, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, recently crucified, purportedly appearing, called Christ:

Dear woman,

I brought upon you what I am sure were the most agonizing hours of your life. I am the man, until recently a Centurion of Rome, who gave the orders on Golgotha, and oversaw the execution of your son.

I have done a great injustice. Jesus was innocent. He should not have been crucified. Should anyone be crucified? I am not telling you anything you do not know.

My years of experience as a soldier have taught me to recognize power when I see it. I have never seen power as pure as your son’s. I am versed in the power that binds and compels, but I see now that that is a small power, rooted in fear and in law. There is also the power which releases and gives, and that is a very great power. Jesus released us soldiers, praying for our forgiveness before we knew our need for it. He released the criminals hung on either side of him into the hope of Paradise. And he released himself into the hands of his Father God.

I lost myself – found myself? – at the cross. I pronounced him innocent as he died, the man I just finished crucifying! My words were heard and reported by others, and I have now been summoned to Rome to stand trial for subversion.

I would not be shocked to learn that it is true what many are saying: that he has been released from death and is alive. I’m not even sure it would be a miracle – I’m not certain Jesus was ever really bound. Can it be said that we killed him?

Your song is being sung by those who followed him, here in the city. You conceived it along with him, yes? As far as I can tell, it is a true song. My inmost thoughts have been scattered. I have been brought low and emptied. And your son, he is the lowly one lifted up – exalted, filled.

This is the last letter I will ever write.

Many looked on from afar that day. I want you to know what was seen and heard and felt by one who stood up close, and was changed.

I cling to his prayer for me.

Your servant,

Dominic

***

To Dominic, a former Centurion standing trial in Rome:

My child,

Grace overshadows us when we are at our most inadequate. Grace pierces us when we are most hardened against it. This is the way of God. To consent to it is salvation.

Whatever happens to you in Rome, I am glad that my son happened to you.

Mary

Nazareth, in Galilee

“Short Stories, Lasting Call” Part 7: Eli

September 3, 2023 — Ordinary Time

1 Samuel 3

Pastor Mike

Eli’s story is told in the first four chapters of 1 Samuel. His is a story of endings and beginnings – painful, all-encompassing endings; fragile, hidden beginnings. Eli is a tragic figure. He is betrayed by his family, let down by his nation, and at a distance from his God. His ministry context is a rapidly deteriorating religious and social order. Even so, he helps bring a new order into being. He’s not a hopeful person but a faithful person. And that’s the Word for today. God’s call is even for those of us who fail to have hope in what the future will bring, yet remain receptive, committed, and alert to signs of grace.

Eli was a priest in the town of Shiloh. That’s where the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant came to a semi-permanent rest after the Israelites conquered portions of the Promised Land. Eli, along with his sons Hophni and Phinehas, oversaw worship at the Tabernacle. At this time it was believed that God’s glory lived in the tabernacle. Israelites who wanted to worship God directly had to pilgrimage to Shiloh and offer their sacrifices. God had chosen the tribe of Levi, and Eli’s lineage in particular, for this priestly work. They got to live in proximity to God and handle holy things. It was a family trade.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons abused their ministry position. They slept around with the female worship attendants and, whenever anyone brought an animal sacrifice to Shiloh, Hophni and Phinehas would take the best portion of the meat for themselves. This is from chapter 2:

Now the sons of Eli were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord or for the duties of the priests of the people. When anyone offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan, or kettle, or cauldron, or pot; all that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. …Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord; for they treated the offerings of the Lord with contempt. (vv. 12-14, 17)

That indictment could apply to the abuses of church leaders today. Eli’s sons trampled upon what Eli cherished most: the priesthood, the ministry. They actively sabotaged their father’s work.

Eli either could not or chose not to curtail the actions of his sons. God faulted him for this and at one point sent a nameless “man of God” to Eli. This “man of God,” who appears in chapter two, prophesied against Eli and warned him that God was going to take the rights to the priesthood away Eli’s line and would start by killing Eli’s sons. That’s what was happening at home in Shiloh.

Farther afield, all of Israel was in trouble. A neighboring people, the Philistines, attacked them. Eventually, after a bloody battle, the Philistines overcame the Israelites, and they captured the ark of the covenant, which had been trotted out to the battleground because the people thought God’s presence would secure their victory. Eli’s sons were killed in the fighting along with 30,000 others. When Eli, as a 98-year-old man learned what had happened, it was not the news of his sons but of the ark’s capture that did him in. Grieving, he had a heart attack and died.

To spiritually sum up the disastrous state of affairs at this time, Scripture says: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread” (3:1). God seemed absent, which is always achingly painful for a person like Eli, whose life is devoted to serving that God. Given that his family and his nation and his faith were in shambles, Eli was able to do something remarkable in the years prior to the Philistine invasion: he was able to perceive a small spark of living faith when it appeared to him, and to fan it into flame.

That spark was burning in the heart of Hannah, a woman who desperately wanted to have children. Every year, Hannah and her husband came to Shiloh to offer their annual sacrifice. One year, Hannah went into the courtyard of the Tabernacle and began to weep and plead with God, silently but with mouth moving, for a son. When Eli saw her like this, he thought that she was drunk, and at first, he reprimanded her. But then Hannah told him that she had been “pouring out [her] soul before the Lord” and “speaking out of [her] great anxiety and vexation” (1:16). This was real, living prayer. Honest prayer. Intimate prayer. Prayer naming the injustices of life, asking God in earnest to do something about them.

Eli realized his mistake. He blessed Hannah and asked God to honor her prayers. Hannah returned home with her husband and conceived. She gave birth to a son and named him Samuel. She brought Samuel back to Eli and dedicated him to a life of ministry in Shiloh. She left him with Eli to be raised in the priesthood. After dedicating her son, she sang a song, recorded in chapter 2, that centuries later would serve as the pattern for Mary’s Magnificat. For his part, Eli received the gift of this child who would one day grow up to anoint David as King.

This brings us to the heart of the matter, chapter 3, which Lou read for us. This scene occurs at night. Samuel hears a voice calling him by name. He assumes it is Eli. He gets up and goes to Eli, but Eli hasn’t been calling him. So he goes back to sleep. It happens again. It happens a third time. When Eli is roused by Samuel the third time, he realizes what is happening: God is speaking to the child directly, calling him by name, for the first time. He teaches Samuel how to respond to God’s voice. “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’” (3:9). Samuel lies down and the voice comes a fourth time. Samuel responds as Eli has taught him, and God gives Samuel his first prophetic word. Devastatingly, it is a word of judgement against Eli, the very man who just taught Samuel how to really listen.

In the morning, when Samuel tells Eli about all this, Eli simply says, “It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to him” (3:18). Eli is not scared, angry, or offended. This was not the first time a word from God had been spoken against him and his family. He accepts the coming end to the world he has known and the privilege his family has enjoyed and abused. He remains committed to raising this boy, this new beginning; he keeps stoking this new flame. Repeatedly the story insists that something good is afoot in the life of Samuel, with verses peppered in like 2:26: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.” But make no mistake, as 3:1 puts it, “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli.”

What can Eli teach us about living with God and responding to our call?

For one, Eli’s story is a parable for one possible relationship between older and younger generations. One narrative that is easy to fall into as we age is that the world we have known and the things we have valued, including our own way of relating to God, are passing away or under assault, and that what’s coming to take their place is inevitably worse. Usually the blame falls on “the young people,” the very people the Church is supposedly so desperate to draw in. Eli was old and he was betrayed by those younger than him as well as by his contemporaries. But he managed to be reasonable and to recognize that every new generation contains both threat and hope. It might not come from his sons, but it could come from this obscure little child born and offered through faith. He taught this child how to listen. That’s the job of the old, to teach the young how to listen. What the young hear and then must say is between them and God. The elders can only say, like Eli, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.” But the lesson must be taught.

Eli also challenges the idea that belonging to God means we must have a dynamic, intimate relationship with God. Eli never received a word of God directly from God. God’s words always came to him secondhand: Hannah’s tears, the man of God’s prophecy, Samuel’s call. But Eli was very adept and faithful at acknowledging and conforming to these secondhand Words. With God, he nurtured a new destiny for faith in the heart of a mother and then in the heart of a child. For some of us, it is enough to have hope in the faith of others, to believe in their hope – enough to give ourselves to the nurture of their hope and their faith, even if most days we lack faith and hope ourselves. We live in a time that privileges authenticity over commitment. Eli’s story flips the script.

When the Israelites took the ark out with them to battle the Philistines, before it was captured, scripture says that “Eli” – who by this time was 98 and blind – was sitting upon his seat by the road watching, for his heart trembled for the ark of God” (4:13).

Sitting at attention.

Watching, though he could no longer see.

Heart trembling out of concern for the things of God.

Meanwhile, “The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord” (3:21).

Eli ministered between the times, as we sometimes do. And though he’d never walk it himself, he helped prepare a new way.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

“From Faith to Faith”

August 27, 2023 — “Camp Sunday”

Romans 1:16-17

Pastor Mike

The phrase that has captured my imagination from these two verses of Romans is the one containing the four little words “through faith for faith.” The two Greek prepositions, here translated as “through” and “for” have broad fields of meaning. This phrase could just as correctly be rendered “from faith to faith,” “out of faith into faith,” “by means of faith with the result of faith,” or even more loosely, “by faith from start to finish.”

In all its possible forms, the point that Paul is driving home with this phrase is that faith alone allows to us know God’s righteousness, which is to say God’s beauty, justice, and love. Faith amplifies itself, and a life of faith spirals to greater heights and depths. As we live with God, we return often to the basics, to the original questions, to certain fundamental experiences, but each time we come, hopefully, we do so from a more mature vantage. Let’s get away from the idea that faith is simply assent to doctrine. We can substitute “through trust for trust” or “through faithfulness for faithfulness,” which are synonyms in the New Testament for faith. The more we trust God, the more we practice faithfulness to God, the more trust and faithfulness become available to our spirits. God is revealed to us “through faith for faith,” “through faith for faith, “through faith for faith,” on and on, a little further and a little deeper every day. It is a dance of grace: God makes a move, we respond; we make a move, God responds.

One of the greatest ways we can help ourselves along this deepening, spiraling journey from faith to faith is by having places that remain constant in our lives – sacred and holy places that we return to whenever the curl of the spiral asks for them. Places hold memories; they hold our stories. They are steady while we change, so they help us to remember what has been, reflect on what is, and dream about what is coming. Familiar, returned-to places are one of the primary ways we continue to know who we are and trust in our own ripening as disciples.

For so many of you, Camp is one of those places. Camp is a holy place, a place where faith is received, renewed, deepened, and amplified. Commitments to Christ are made through faith, for faith. Self-love is gained by faith, for faith. Children, teens, and adults leap from faith into faith.

The American author, Annie Dillard, whose books include Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Writing Life, begins the memoir of her childhood with these words:

When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.

This morning we honor one of the places that has become inseparable from the intergenerational story of this congregation, inseparable from who you know God to be in your lives. Camp is a place that will go with you till your dying day. It persists in memory and, God willing, in reality. Camp is a holy piece of land on which we worship and pray, work and play. It holds the echoes of our faith’s ongoing response to itself.

This morning, we will hear from four folks who love camp: Caroline, Hannah, Tanner, and Marlys. As they share their experiences, may we all consider which places are our holy places. They may be exotic or ordinary, far away or right outside the back door of our homes. The crucial thing is to tend our relationships to these places as we would tend any lifelong friendship or love. Places are companions on our spiral. God willing, they outlast our mortal spiral and keep on blessing others who will come after us. So let us now celebrate the power of place in God’s great creation.

Amen.

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 6: Ja’el

August 20, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Judges 4:1-22; 5:1, 24-27, 31

Pastor Mike

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between
My brothers and my sisters, ah-ah
All over this land

The book of Judges is a bridge between Joshua, which tells the story of the Israelite’s initial conquest of the Promised Land, and 1 & 2 Samuel, which tells of the founding and failures of their unified Kingdom. In the time between settlement and monarchy, the judges – Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Samson, Gideon, and others – were temporary chieftains who helped Israel manage through decades of instability and disunity. The judges acted as military leaders and delivered the Israelites from militaristic oppression; some were legal experts who handled tribal disputes; and, on occasion, as with Deborah, the judge offered spiritual guidance as well. But the thrust was political. A judge’s leadership was considered successful if a period of prolonged peace followed his or her activity. In chapters 4 & 5, we learn that Deborah (a judge), Barak (a soldier), and Ja’el (a foreign woman) together win forty years of peace for Israel at the expense of King Jabin’s army and its general, Sisera.

All you have to do is read the story of Ja’el to know that the Bible is anything but boring or tame. Ja’el receives Sisera, the fleeing leader of Jabin’s defeated army, into her home. Sisera goes to Ja’el’s people because Ja’el’s husband, Heber, has an alliance with King Jabin. Sisera trusts that this political agreement plus the unbreachable cultural convention of hospitality will keep him safe among the Kenites. He confidently demands Ja’el’s cooperation.

Unfortunately for Sisera, Ja’el has a mind of her own, and King Heber isn’t home. Ja’el lulls the weary general to sleep, covering him with a thick rug and giving him warm milk to drink instead of the water that he asked for. She promises to stand guard while he rests. But once Sisera starts snoring, Ja’el takes a hammer in one hand and a tent peg in the other and pounds the peg through Sisera’s temple, nailing him dead to the floor.

If I had a hammer…

When Deborah and Barack come looking for Sisera among the Kenites and are shown his dead body by Ja’el, they sing a song of praise to God which tradition names the Song of Deborah. It is widely believed that the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 is the oldest written text of the Hebrew Bible that exists. Countless stories were told, certainly, but this song is, at least so far, the earliest written Hebrew scripture that we have. That taproot of the scriptures is a war anthem, sung by a woman, who’s praising another woman for hammering a tent stake through a sleeping man’s head. If you feel that this is both awesome and cringeworthy, join the awed, perplexed company of Bible interpreters everywhere.

Offering hospitality to guests was the pre-eminent social obligation of the ancient world, and Ja’el grossly violated it. She also transgressed her role as a woman, breaking the strategic political alliance forged by her husband. She also, contrary to the whole “thou shalt not murder” and “love thy neighbor” business of the Bible, killed a defenseless man in cold blood. She nailed a man to the floor of her home. Cringeworthy. On the other hand, why not hold Ja’el in the same emotional place we hold young David as he slings his river stone right into the temple of the giant Goliath? An underdog, a nobody, acting decisively to end a war, to say, “The bloodletting stops here. You don’t think I’m strong or important, but let me show you how God can use me.”

Regardless of how you and I might feel several thousand years on, the Bible has absolutely no qualms with Ja’el’s action. The whole story is designed to set her up as an unexpected hero. She has been memorialized in scripture and song: “Most blessed of women,” Deborah sings, “of tent-dwelling women most blessed.”

In this sermon series on call, drawing a one-to-one correspondence with Ja’el is a challenge. It’s one thing for me to say to you, “Go, be like Shiphrah and Puah, and preserve life where you’re being pressured by an authority figure to harm it.” Or, “Go be like Jethro and offer counsel and a listening ear to those younger than you.” It’s quite another to send you out to take a peg-and-hammer approach to the problematic people in your life.

What I think I can draw is an analogy between Ja’el’s response to Sisera and our Christian response to the times when evil and sin cease to be things “out there” abstractly and actually shows up in our hearts and homes. To make the analogy work, we must remember that God had already helped the Israelites to win the battle against Sisera’s army. Ja’el and her hammer didn’t change the outcome of the battle, but they did make God’s victory definitive; they brought the war to an end. Ja’el answered the question of whether Sisera would live to fight another day against God’s people. An enemy in flight is still an enemy, and what happened on the battlefield far from Ja’el – the victory of God – was realized personally, was brought to perfection, through her decisive response to the general in her tent.

From the time of the New Testament to today, Christians have drawn upon the language of warfare, battle, weaponry, soldiering, and victory to describe salvation and the Christian life. “Put on the full armor of God,” says Paul. And he encourages us to “fight the good fight.” This is because one way to explain what happened in Christ’s death and resurrection is so say that Jesus triumphed over sin, the death, and the devil. Defeated them. Won a cosmic spiritual war. On the cross, Jesus emptied the darkest and most broken manifestations of humanity of their power. He suffered betrayal, abandonment, injustice, denial, and pain. He exposed the collusion of political and religious power. He despaired at God’s apparent absence. And yet he was kept by God on the other side of death, and resurrected into a fullness of life that is greater than death. He canceled the power of sin through forgiveness; he filled the nothingness of death with his life; he duped the devil. He emptied hell of its prisoners. Warrior, liberator – Jesus overcame it all.

Which leads to one of the stranger dimensions of Christian faith. We believe that Jesus has already reconciled all things to God. He has already made peace, defeated death, forgiven sin. Yet we pray every day, “Deliver us from evil.” The kingdom is already and not yet; darkness has been overcome, but shadows still linger. As the Apostle Peter writes in his first epistle, “Discipline yourselves; keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary, the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith…” (1 Peter 5:8-9a). We are like Ja’el in this respect: we didn’t fight the Lord’s battle, he fought it for us on the cross and in the tomb. Yet Satan – just like Sisera – is in retreat, looking for a foothold.

We must experience the triumph of God in our intimate spheres – heart, home, and neighborhood – to know it as a present reality.

“The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus taught (Luke 17:21). His complete victory over what is false and oppressive exists for us potentially. And it really exists. But believing in what he’s done and opening our lives to experience his victory takes work, and that work is at the heart of our baptismal call. Paul writes in Romans, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Rom. 6:8-9). He says in Colossians, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly…” (Col. 3:5). Jesus himself once said that if one of our hands causes us to sin, we ought to cut it off, or if it be one of our eyes, to pluck it out (Matt. 5:29-30).

This vigilance against the echoes of evil has been called by many names in the long history of Christianity: repentance, fasting, testing the spirits, discernment, exorcism, death to self, ego-death, asceticism, to name a few. No matter how it manifests, it is part of the great journey of sanctification, our being made ever more perfect in love.

Here are the questions that Ja’el’s story poses to us:

 First, what am I entertaining in my tent that needs to be gotten rid of?  Consider all the things that Christ has already defeated – pride, greed, lust, violence, apathy, hatred, envy, despair. Are any of them showing up on your stoop, asking for a safe niche to rest and be nourished back to strength. Grab your hammer.

Second, what great battle out there has come into my space demanding my response? Consider all the battles that feel too big or distant for us to fully fathom how our engagement with them could possibly matter or take shape. Racism, environmental destruction, worker exploitation, cultural addiction to violence, homophobia, you name it. It’s easy to feel too small or overwhelmed to do anything about those battles. But when they come to your home, when they affect you or your loved ones, suddenly a respond is necessary. And doing nothing is an unfortunate response. So, grab your hammer.

And the final question: what would keep us from acting? Consider what boxes and boundaries you might need to transgress if you are going to be decisive against sin and evil while you have the chance. Our hindrance to action usually comes from some story we’ve created about who we are supposed to be or how we want other people to see us. These false stories must also die, though it is difficult to face the ego, the false self, head on in the moment. Brute strength won’t do. Like Ja’el, notice it’s there, lull it to sleep, and grab your hammer.

What can we learn about call from Ja’el, most blessed of tent-dwelling women?

She is not explicitly called by God. God never speaks to her. She never speaks to God. She is not one of the chosen people, the Israelites. She’s not, like Deborah, a spirit-filled judge. She’s a marginal character on the fringes of sacred history. Nevertheless, she knew when the battle between good and evil had arrived in her space. She inspires us to vigilance and courage when it comes to keeping a pure heart and a pure home. Whenever we battle what is false in us or in front of us, we can summon the memory of Ja’el. We can channel her boldness, rashness, and ingenuity, and drive the peg of our faith through Sisera.

This warrior woman is in our cloud of witnesses. She is there beside us when it’s time decide whose company we’ll keep.

Amen.

“I’m Exactly Where I’m Supposed to Be — Again”

August 6, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Matthew 13:1-9

Kris Baker

Good morning! I’m honored to once again be here to share with you.

Please pray with me:

Blessed are you Lord Our God, Creator of the universe! May the words from my lips and the understanding of all our hearts bring each one of us to You. In Jesus name, amen.

When I received an email from pastor Mike in June requesting someone to volunteer to preach in Blackfoot, my first thought was, “someone better than me will step up. But shortly after I had that thought I found myself replying that I would volunteer. Immediately after sending the email, I thought, “What have you done now?”

I began to ponder what I could possibly share. I prayed and told the Lord that He would have to guide me in this and provide the words. What is it that You want me to talk about?

Jesus’ response was, “YOU.”

WHAT?! ME!? I thought that wouldn't be very interesting.

In my mind I began to run, and in my “wisdom” I’m calculating how to spin this away from me. What could I do? Since it is summer I will talk about my garden. After all, who doesn’t want to get outside and plant flowers and veggies and get a little dirty? Scripture that popped into my head was the parable of the sower.

I know you are all familiar with this parable; the sower sows his seeds, some fell along the path, some on rocky ground, others fell in amongst the weeds and some fell in good soil.

The birds ate the seed along the path. The seeds that fell in the rocks had enough dirt to sprout but not enough to grow and soon died. The ones that grew in the weeds were choked out and never matured . But the seeds landing in good soil grew and produced fruit.

This is a great passage, teaching us what to expect when we share the good news of Jesus Christ.

But what could I say that would enhance the message, make it fresh and new like the flowers growing all around? I borrowed some reference material from a friend but even with that, I FELT STUCK! Where do I go from here?

I prayed for guidance in growing my message and the only response I received was, “YOU.”

I must say I felt a bit like Jonah must have after he was spat out of the fish’s mouth outside of Nineveh. It seems that I needed to do what Jesus told me, talk about my journey.

OK FINE, I went back and looked at the scripture again (it would have been a whole lot easier if I had listened in the first place).

I looked at the parable again, and I still understood that it is about spreading God’s Word to ALL kinds of people and how it will be accepted and acted upon. But then the meaning changed, and I began to see my journey reflected in these words. Here is what I saw:

When I was a small child (about 4 or 5) I remember being an acolyte. It was very exciting being the one to light the church candles. I felt so important, but I had no idea what it was all about. We sang songs in Sunday school about Jesus and how He loves us but there was no understanding.

As I grew a little older I went to Sunday school, church, and learned some more about Jesus. As a family we read the story of Jesus' birth, celebrated Christmas and Easter. My Dad would read Bible stories to us before bed.

I knew the stories, understood that Jesus loves me. What I did not comprehend was why. Why did God send His Son to die for us because of our sin? What did that mean??? The first seeds of faith in my life fell along the path and were eaten by the birds, no faith grew in me at that time.

It was clear that on Easter Jesus rose from the dead and went back to heaven to live with God. I believed in God, and I believed in Jesus, my seed was trying to grow.

Continuing through High School, going to church was something that was “expected” so we went most of the time. I would do the very least possible. You know “go through the motions”. There was no more Sunday school, my learning did not continue. I did not read the Bible because I could not understand what it meant nor what it had to do with me. The only thing I hung onto was that Jesus loved me. Just like the seeds that fell amongst the rocks, my seed had sprouted but soon died. No one had ever taught me what to do with my belief. I had no soil.

College came next; I was kicked out of one school due to low grades. I just didn’t care which tends to happen after the first time I met my faculty advisor, and without looking up, he stated that he will not help me and that I should change my major, never looking at me he simply continued with what he was doing.

He was unconcerned about the effect his words had on the shy 19-yearold young lady standing before him. I was devastated. My dreams, thrown away like so much trash.

The associate pastor at church suggested that I apply at the Christian College. I wasn’t very hopeful and a little “gun shy” after my last experience but I applied. I figured that with my poor grades from the previous year, I didn’t have much of a chance. However, I guess God had other plans. I was accepted. It seems that Jesus was still knocking at the door.

The school year began, my classes were wonderful and the chapel services that we had to attend three times a week began to open my heart. The college group at my church also served as the counselors for the Jr. High Youth group. I was invited to begin working along with them and I, reluctantly, said yes. The first time I went I have to admit, I was terrified! The meeting began with activity. Generally, it was a version of volleyball we called Jungle ball. After games, we would have supper, prepared by volunteer Mom’s. The meal finished the singing began followed by a message from the Bible then ending with prayer. It was a nondenominational group, and the kids would invite their friends and the leaders would visit the schools meeting friends and sometimes teachers. There were approximately 60 coming each week. God was clearly working. UNTIL………

Mrs. K, a big money tither, went to the administrative board and complained that the group leaders were too young and close to the kids' age, and that there should be parents present to chaperon the meetings. Needless to say, we were not pleased. To get the kids to open up with parents around was not going to be easy. We all knew the kids were the priority, so we kept going, until, as the saying goes; the other shoe dropped. Mrs. K returned to the board and once again leveraged her weight and demanded that Methodist curriculum be used at the Jr High meetings. We protested, telling the board that this was not a meeting held during church hours, but an outreach and most of the kids would stop attending because they were not Methodist. We also asked the board why they thought the Bible was not sufficient. Clearly God was at work in this group. In the end we were ignored. Immediately the attendance dropped. As leaders we agreed that since the Word of God was not enough then we must not be either. All of us left, the Jr High group fell to less than 10 and there was no more college fellowship. We were all broken-hearted.

The weeds kept growing stronger. I stopped going to church. The state program that I was hoping to join was defunded a month before I graduated. After graduation I had a difficult time finding a lab job, I would have to be trained (companies didn’t want to pay for that) and I had no experience. I finally settled on a QA position, which only required a high school diploma. So disappointed!!

I met a man at work, and we started seeing one another. The relationship got to the place where he asked Dad for permission to marry me. Permission was given and wedding plans began. I remember waking up from a bad dream and knowing this was not going to happen. He had never asked me to marry him. Apparently it was assumed since Dad was alright with it.

I ran and did the only thing I could think of, I joined the Marine Corps. Right after I enlisted on delayed enlistment, my brother was hit by a car and was in a coma. My brother survived but by this time the weeds had won! My faith was very small, I remember thinking, (I had stopped praying by now), that I can do this on my own. I have a good foundation and I will be just fine doing this myself.

Off I went to boot camp and then on to training to become an Air Traffic Controller. Graduated top Marine in my class which up to that point meant I could pick my duty station. Not this time, the Commandant thought it would be better to send me to Okinawa. So as not to get into all the details, allow me to sum up my career in the Marines with this: Having leadership of my life led me to have indiscriminate sex, begin to use drugs, distribute a controlled substance, get arrested the day I was going to re-enlist, have a trial, get sent to the brig and ended with a “big chicken dinner” as we called it. I was discharged with a Bad Conduct Discharge. And though I didn’t recognize it at the time, Jesus was still by my side. All charges were solely within the military, so I had no civilian record.

After my discharge drugs became much more prominent in my life. Using drugs, drinking and promiscuity ended up in pregnancy. I couldn’t get a job, but I did stop using drugs, drinking, and smoking as soon as I found out I was pregnant.

For a complete change, and other family factors, I moved to Idaho, lived with my sister’s family and became nanny to my niece’s and nephew (8,6,4). Still not turning to God I did the hardest thing I have ever done; I gave my son up for adoption. I reasoned that I was not fit to raise a child and because of what I had done I was not a good person, or ever would be. I wanted my baby to have a chance at a good life. Two weeks after my son was born I went to the judge and signed the papers to give him up. I still did not turn to Jesus, I felt that He didn’t/couldn’t love me anymore because of what I had done.

I had convinced myself that I was no good and would never be any different. Smoking, drinking, pot, coke and crystal meth became the way I dealt with the world. I went back to California under the pretense of getting a job. I did easily get a job, but the drugs were easier to get as well. It wasn’t until the morning I woke up; sleeping on the floor, after a 3-day runner that my eyes began to open. I remember thinking, “What the are you doing?” I was on the fast track to destruction. I made the decision to go back to Idaho and hoped my sister would take me in one more time. I still had not looked up. I still struggled, couldn’t love myself but managed to get a job and a place of my own, I made enough money to pay my bills, feed my critters and myself and to buy pot. Life was going well, I thought, I was doing alright on my own. Couldn’t figure out why I felt empty and alone. Promoted to full time at work, I bought a house, oh yea, I was doing just fine.

I tried going back to church, even. I was not at all comfortable, certain all the folks were judging me. After all, why not, I earned it. I was a horrible person.

Then one week my sister told me to pack a bag, we were going away for the weekend. This was not a request! I relented, packed my bag and Thursday afternoon we were off. We got off the freeway and I informed my sister that I would go no further without a cup of coffee and wanted to know where we were going. Coffee in hand we continued and pulled into a church. Then I found out that she was sponsoring me to Walk to Emmaus. Fear bolted through me!!! Certain that God was angry with me, I had no idea what to expect. That weekend I finally looked up. The seeds were being sown and this time they were falling on good soil. What I discovered was LOVE.

From that weekend to this, I keep my eyes on Him. Sometimes I forget and stumble but with the help of family and friends I get back up. I know He will never leave me. If any leaving is done I will have to do it.

The struggles are still there but now I have always got Jesus by my side. He DOES love me, and with His continual help I can love me as well. The seeds were growing in the good soil, coming up strong and true. I do not know where He wants me to go but I am willing. So, you see the parable of the sower did fit my life.

When I was young I did not know what faith was so the seed could not grow.

As I got older and had some understanding, faith began to grow. But I had no teaching, and no roots grew.

College came and again faith sprouted. This time it grew strong until the weeds choked it.

Life continued for many years. The weeds of the world over grew my life. Walking by myself only led me in the wrong direction.

God sent my sister to take me by the scruff of the neck and finally I discovered that Jesus had been waiting all this time for me to open the door and let Him in.

The soil was good, and my faith has been growing, slowly but surely, ever since.

I assure you I intend to hang on to Jesus as hard as I can. I am so thankful that I finally listened and shared my journey, a snapshot anyway. I am learning to keep looking up and it’s okay to make mistakes, we all do. But do not make the mistake, like I did, and shut Him out. All He wants to do is LOVE each of us. We can then love Him in return.

1 John 4:19 tells us, “We love Him because He first loved us.”

He will show us how to love. Now I am confident that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, again!

God Bless you all!

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 5: Rahab

July 23, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Joshua 2

Sus Conner

We’re in the middle of the series: “Short Stories, Lasting Calls” about some of the less recognized characters in the Bible who receive important calls upon their lives in the hopes that we might all start, within our own, biblical imaginations, to recognize call in our own lives.

Today we encounter a mother of the faith who is often skipped over in contemporary teaching, though she is not forgotten in the teachings of the New Testament, as we will see. And it is also one of the most fabulous adventure sequences in the whole Bible. This is the story of Rahab.

The Israelites, lead by Moses, have come to the far side of the Jordan River – the edge of the Promised Land. Upon Moses’ death, his assistant Joshua is appointed by God to now lead the people on the final leg of the journey. You’ll recall that the land promised to the Israelites isn’t empty, there are already people living there, so Joshua’s first act as leader is going to be the planning and execution of a complex military maneuver – they are going to take the walled city of Jericho.

Under cover of night, Joshua sends two spies to survey the area and assess the city’s defenses. Jericho is known for its fortress-like protection, but we’re told that just outside the city wall is the home of Rahab, a prostitute, and in fact she herself lives within the wall. Got to love the Bible, we never really know if we’re getting fact or poetic license, but, okay, Rahab – almost certainly because of her profession – lives half in and half out of the community; literally in the capital-M Margin of the city. And it is here that the spies find they can transgress the wall and gather intelligence.

Surrounding your city with a giant wall isn’t very useful if you don’t have guards on top of the wall. I assume that’s how the king of Jericho finds out that there are spies hiding at Rahab’s house. The king deploys soldiers to find the spies, they pound on Rahab’s door, shouting that she needs to turn over the spies, we know they’re in there. But Rahab hides the men and opens the door, casual, “Sure those guys were here,” BIG wink, “but they went thataway.” And off they run, the soldiers who will now search beyond the gates for days and find no one.

Rahab goes up onto the roof where she left the spies, pulls them out of their little flax stalk hiding place, and she tells them: I know you’re going to destroy my people. We’ve heard what you did to the Egyptians, to the two kings of the Amorites, to Sihon and Og. I understand that your God is the true God. Now. I saved your lives and in return I want a promise that you’ll spare me and my family when you bring your armies back here for war.

And, so, the spies swear to save Rahab and her family because she saved the spies from the soldiers of the King of Jericho. And when Joshua eventually leads his warriors in their seven-day march around the walls of Jericho, and he gives them the final pump-up speech before they take the city, he includes the protection of Rahab and her family: “Shout! (cheers) For the Lord has given you the city! (cheers) The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction! (cheers) Except Rahab!” And we’re told that her family lives forever with the Israelites.

_______________

Here’s a curious thing about Rahab: The Bible is preoccupied with the sexual morality of women. Old Testament law is lousy with ethical gymnastics when it comes to defining sexual purity and proving virginity. And then men who interpret the Bible, both the writers of the New Testament interpreting the Hebrew Bible and Christian theologians until, like, now, are always trying to figure out if women mentioned in the Bible are prostitutes or not or maybe just publicly sexually immoral? It’s like poor Mary Magdalene, the text describes her affliction as something that we, today, might recognize as acute mental illness and in two thousand years of Christian scholarship we can’t seem to stop asking about her sex life. It isn’t mentioned. And yet – Rahab is actually a prostitute for her job. One of only a handful of actual sex workers in the Bible, as opposed to the many women who are called “prostitute” for a sexual transgression, and in the ten times she is mentioned across the Old and New Testaments, no one ever has a single thing to say about how she makes her money.

When Matthew lists her in the genealogy of Jesus, it’s as the mother of Boaz. When she is mentioned in the letter to the Hebrews, it’s in a list of the faithful, presented on equal footing with Moses and David. And when her name comes up in the Letter of James, it’s as an example of the necessity of living with both faith and good works. The one other example James gives is Abraham.

Scholars think that Joshua chapters 2 through 11 is one of the most ancient portions of the Hebrew Bible. But the story of Rahab has clearly captured the imaginations of early Christians and I think it is significant – possibly essential – that the woman welcomed into the lineage of Abraham, Moses, and David; the woman adopted into the lineage of Christ; embodies the Biblical definition of unfit, unclean, unworthy. Feel this with me: we are some 2,600 years on from the first written record of this story and it would be hard for me, in America in 2023, to come up with a group of people more overlooked, undervalued, and unprotected than sex workers. What is going on here? That Matthew, the author of Hebrews, and James are clamoring to claim her as a mother of the faith? I mean, first century Christians are not known for their celebration of women. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul doesn’t even want a woman to speak in church. And now Rahab is up on the marquee with Abraham.

The ministry of Christ was to those on the margins of society. I think these guys, these early Christians, these non-Jewish gentile men recognize in Rahab, of all people, someone who was adopted into the family of God, not on her merits, but on the basis of her willingness to answer God’s call when it came. That’s what makes her an Israelite. That’s what makes her an ancestor. The fact that she recognized the presence of God, that two of God’s people put their lives into her hands, and that she used her exact literal place in the world – her place in the wall – to do what no one else could do.

For those of us who feel as if we have been relegated to live in the proverbial wall; those of us who, for whatever reason, present to the world or to our Christian community as unfit; the story of Rahab is a story for us. God can call us to anything from anywhere and the only thing that makes us People of God is that we answer.

_______________

Now. Here’s the second curious thing about Rahab: She’s not going to answer God’s call without asking for something in return.

When Joshua’s spies need to hide in her house, I can imagine that she doesn’t feel like she has a lot of choices. We know she knows that the Israelites are coming to destroy her city. And these spies have come to her house that’s on the wrong side of the wall and there’s two of them and one of her. There’s a way we can read this story where Rahab is really just choosing between being killed on this night or being killed a couple weeks from now. Simple self-preservation. But after she sends the king’s soldiers on a wild goose chase, she comes up to the roof and has the audacity to bargain for her life and the lives of her family members, when it comes time for the inevitable invasion of Jericho. Again: a foreign nation has concrete plans to destroy my home and my people, I am hiding two of this nation’s military men in my house, my job and my gender mean that I live unprotected by my own government, and I have just committed treason. Would I personally have the presence of mind or courage to now say to these guys, “I’m going to need something from you now”?

This is often the super power of people who have lived a long time in the wall. When you have long been without something that you need – food, love, protection – when you have long suffered with no relief – illness, pain, rejection – you are not going to waste any time if you meet someone who might be able to mitigate an imprisoning circumstance. If you’re like me and you’ve more or less lived your life so far with the illusion of control and the resources to address your own problems, it can be easy to dismiss people who are swift and adamant in asking for what they need. But Rahab is asked to risk her life to save the lives of two strangers; two strangers who, with their saved lives are going to bring an army back to slaughter Rahab’s people; thank God Rahab knows what she needs and how to ask for it. She needs to survive.

Christians have a tendency to talk about things like call or mission in terms of self-sacrifice. As if we will know that the call is from God if it involves a whole lot of suffering. We look at the life of Jesus and we can get confused about where to read ourselves into that story. I’ll say, I don’t think our part is really the part where he’s tortured and crucified. Because the ministry of Christ is all about Jesus answering the calls of regular people; all about people asking for something concrete in return for their faith; and about the ways that God wants to respond to those requests with brilliance and abundance. Healing incurable diseases. Giving sustenance where there was none. Returning the outcast to loving community. God isn’t calling us so that we can do some free labor, stick our necks out, tick off of our neighbors, risk financial insecurity, and look generally foolish. Although those can sure be side effects of answering a call. Jesus draws a crowd so that the people can come close enough to be healed. God is calling you to some kind of work in this life so that you come close enough to the ministry of Jesus to get what you need.

I think this is why these new Christians keep coming back to Rahab, how did she know? She wasn’t even one of God’s “chosen,” how could she have known that what God was really hoping for was someone to ask for something in return? To give God an opening for something miraculous.

Whatever God has called you to; whatever work, small or wild, no matter how ill-advised or impossible; you are not expected to receive that call and not call back. What do you need? To make it happen? What would you need? To make that change? It is yours to ask for and there is nothing about who you are now that would exempt you from being called, from being equipped, from being written into the lineage of the faithful.

And, more often than we are called, we will have occasion to recognize the call on the lives of others and participate in the abundant giving of God. My prayer this morning is not just that we would receive our calls and call back with great faith, but that we would embrace the askers. The bargainers. Those among us who require something in return and brave enough to make that known. People of God, these gifts are also ours to give. Life. To anyone who comes to us asking to live.              

Amen.

“Short Stories, Lasting Calls” Part 4: Bezalel & Oholiab

July 16, 2023 — Ordinary Time

Exodus 35:30—36:7

Pastor Mike

This sermon series, Short Stories: Lasting Calls, has taken us off the beaten path to encounter characters in the Bible who we might otherwise pass right by. If this were English class, we’d call them “minor characters.” But from the perspective of faith, they are individuals who responded faithfully to a diverse set of purposes and transformed the world for God. Ananias blessing his enemy, Shiphrah and Puah disobeying Pharoah, Jethro counseling Moses. They’re starting to gather around us, these faithful witnesses, and as they gather, they pose a question. This was my sacred story, what’s yours? How is God calling you into his kingdom and glory (1 Thess. 2:11-12)?

This morning, we head to the wilderness to meet two of the Bible’s great artists as they work: Bezalel and Oholiab, makers of the tabernacle.

After God liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the people wandered in the desert for forty years, slowly winding their way toward the Promised Land, camping here, camping there. During those forty years, God traveled with the people in the form of a cloud of glory that covered and filled a special tent called the tabernacle. The tabernacle was always at the center of the Israelite’s campsite. Here’s how it’s described at the very end of Exodus:

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. …Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of their journey, but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey. (40:34, 36-38).

It was a big change for God to want to live among the people like that. Up to that point, God’s appearances were more subtle and individual: a voice telling Abram to go, a man wrestling Jacob in the night, a burning bush catching Moses’ eye. The cloud in the tent was God’s first crack at domesticity, and the tent had to be perfectly made and perfectly maintained. It was holy.

Several chapters of Exodus are devoted to outlining the proper construction of the tabernacle – because it wasn’t just a tent. It had a perimeter with a gate. It had a courtyard, a bronze altar, a washbasin, a tent of meeting with table, altar, and candlestick inside, and, finally, a holy of holies. God explained the tabernacle’s layout, dimensions, materials, and furnishing to Moses in precise detail. Making it was a huge, complex project, especially for a community new to the wilderness, new to independence, new to the free expression of its own creativity.

This is where Bezalel and Oholiab enter the picture. God called them by name and set them apart for the task of making the tabernacle. Artists know who they are. God filled them with them a divine spirit of creativity (Exod. 35:30-31), and the spirit blessed them with knowledge and skill in all sorts of crafts – metalwork, woodwork, stonework, weaving. In Hebrew, “spirit” can also be translated as “breath” or “wind.” Bezalel and Oholiab, the artists, were filled with God’s breath, inspired to create.

The twentieth-century American poet Denise Levertov once wrote, “I believe poets are instruments on which the power of poetry plays. But they are also makers, craftsmen: it is given to the seer to see, but it is then his responsibility to communicate what he sees, that they who cannot see may see, since are ‘members one of another.’”[1] She’s saying that poets are both seized by the creative impulse, which they cannot control, and responsible for turning that impulse into work, a process they can control. Bezalel and Oholiab’s names even echo the creative yin and yang. Bezalel means “in the shadow of God.” Oholiab means “father’s tent.” Artists are overshadowed, overtaken by the creative spirit; but they also make tangible works for it to live in. Some of you are called to be creatives, artists, craftsmen and craftswomen. God needs all the poets, writers, woodworkers, sculptors, architects, musicians, chefs, jewelers, painters and so on that God can get. Your creative work casts the mystery of God in what we can see, hear, taste, and touch. You are the ones who help us feel that this world is truly where God lives.

Importantly, Bezalel and Oholiab were able to live their purpose as creators only because the rest of the community brought them all the materials that they needed to get the job done. Actually, the people brought more than enough. Moses eventually had to tell them to stop bringing more materials. That’s a good problem to have! The gifts are specifically called freewill offerings, which means that the people gave them voluntarily. No one forced their hand. No one tried to guilt them into it. Here’s how it’s put in Exodus chapter 35:

Moses said to all the congregation of the Israelites, “This is the thing that the Lord has commanded: Take from among you an offering to the Lord; let whoever is of a generous heart bring the Lord’s offering: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purpose, and crimson yarns and fine linen; goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, and fine leather; acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, and onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and the breast piece.”

And they came; everyone whose heart was stirred and everyone whose spirit was willing, and brought the Lord’s offering to be used for the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the sacred vestments. They came, both men and women… (35:4-9, 21-22a).

Without these materials, Bezalel and Oholiab could not make their vision a reality. The creative endeavor was supported by the whole community. What we have here is a bit like a Trustees committee – a group of artisans receiving the gifts of the people and using them to make God’s house. This is the kind of work that Roger Hanson, our beloved Chair of Trustees who passed away 10 days ago, did. And it’s the kind of work that you’ll have more opportunities to participate in, from either the making or the giving side, in the coming weeks and months.

We’ve got a lot more than a tent on our hands; we’ve got our building, a building that needs a new roof, greater accessibility, more energy-efficient heating and cooling. It’s a building that blesses the lives of over a hundred children five days of the week, every week of the year, by hosting a strong licensed childcare center, which, it turns out, is an increasingly vulnerable public good. We have the Wesley House, Idaho State’s Methodist campus ministry, soon to be inhabited by the Morton family. All of these spaces, from Sanctuary to Chapel to gym to basement to playground to Wesley House are spaces that, literally, hold us as we live the Christian rhythm of worship, learning, praying, and serving. They are the places where we and others meet the God who dwells among us. I believe that some of you are called, whether for the hundredth time or the first time, to step up and help us perfect these spaces. I believe that we are all called to give freely to the creators, so that our sacred spaces can thrive.

At first, this felt like a bizarre sermon to prepare for the Sunday morning when we’re worshipping outside, away from our property. But then I realized that we have an opportunity out here to get a little perspective.

Bezalel and Oholiab built the tabernacle in the wilderness with nothing but Moses’ vision and the people’s gifts. The first Methodists who worshipped in southeast Idaho, and then in Pocatello, and eventually at the corner of 15th and Clark started out with nothing but their dreams and raw materials. That’s not our exact situation, but it means we should not take for granted what we’ve already got on hand to work with. We should not let things fall into disrepair. We are a step ahead of our ancestors from a material perspective; but from a spiritual perspective, some of our urgency, our belief in the necessity of communal creative act, has waned. Truth is, every generation, even ours, needs its Bezalels and Oholiabs and freewill offerings.

I understand that God is not contained by buildings.

I understand that churches are notorious for driving their people into destitution in order to make opulent places of worship.

I understand that God’s people often engage in idolatry when it comes to their property, caring more about liability than livelihood.

I understand that we worship in spirit and truth, and that the sacrifices truly acceptable to God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

But none of that changes the fact that the creative spirit cries out for expression, and the Church can be a place where that spirit gets expressed for the good of many. Assets like ours can be leveraged to do work that others in our community find harder and harder to do.

Here’s something: In the Hebrew text, the word wisdom is like a bead strung throughout this story. In verse 33, “every kind of artistic craft” is, in the Hebrew, “every work of wisdom.” “Skill” in verse 35, which is something God gives to Bezalel and Oholiab, is, in Hebrew, “heart-wisdom.” And “every skilled person,” a phrase used in 36:1 and 2 to refer to those who come forward to assist the master craftsmen, is “every man of wise heart.” God is Wisdom. Art is wisdom-work. Artists channel the force of our endlessly creative God into the world. They, you, have heart-wisdom. Buildings can be albatrosses, money pits, burdens, idols. They can also be places of meeting, out of which life and glory and joy and energy reverberate into the neighborhood, the block, the city. A great divine drum, if tightened and struck just right.

When we sing, “Take, O take me as I am, summon out what I shall be,” we acknowledge that we are God’s handiwork, the work of God’s hands. God makes things beautiful, new, strong, and good. With God’s spirit, so can we.

Amen.

[1] Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World (New York: New Directions, 1973), 3.