The Deserted Place

February 14, 2024

Ash Wednesday

Pastor Mike

Matthew 14:1-21

This is not a traditional Ash Wednesday reading, and it may feel at first like a strange pairing. What could this miraculous story of feasting and abundance have to do with this solemn day of fasting and repentance? For here we are, acknowledging that we are empty, while they sit together, over five thousand of them, eating to the point of satisfaction with basketfuls of bread left over. We might wonder: What does this Table have to do with these ashes?

 Many times, when read of Jesus feeding the 5,000, we miss the set-up to the story. And we must go back and find out, for the scripture begins, “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” Heard what? What did Jesus hear that caused him to withdraw from other people and seek solitude in an empty place? He heard that his beloved cousin, John, the one who had prepared the way for his own ministry and who had shared with in him in the sacred moment of his baptism – John had been suddenly, brutally beheaded as a party trick, as the consequence of a king’s lust and arrogance. Jesus’ coworker, friend, relative was gone. Jesus sought out a deserted place to grieve, to be alone and cry, to be angry. Like an animal wanting to be alone in its pain, Jesus got in a boat and set off to a place where no one would know him, no one would need him, where no one would be.

Only, the crowds hear that he has slipped away from them, and they have their own need – their need to be close to him, for he has the power to heal them. They follow him on foot, which must mean that wherever he was able to get to by a straight shot across water, they could only come to by a slower, roundabout way. Driven by their desperation, just as he is driven by his grief, they are there to meet him when he steps off the boat in his no-longer deserted place.

Jesus has just made this huge effort to be alone only to find himself right back in the company of people who want something, who need something, from him. I can tell you how I would have felt and reacted had this been my ruined ‘alone time,’ but Jesus has compassion on the crowds, and in the Greek language the word compassion is related to the word for guts, which means Jesus was deeply moved in his bowels for the sufferings of the people, and he turned his bodily anguish into the power of healing. This day that he had set aside for himself was instead offered up to the many. He “cured their sick.”

Evening comes and the disciples approach Jesus – remember, they’re in the middle of nowhere – and tell him to send the crowds away so that they can buy food and eat. We might think this is the moment Jesus has been waiting for, a reason to be done, to finally get alone. Instead, he grabs the disciples with this gaze and says, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”  To which they, rather taken aback, reply, “We have nothing here but…”

Let’s pause to consider a few things.

First, our Savior grieves. God became human in Jesus and knows our pain, knows our grief, knows our need to withdraw to the deserted place and fall apart. As the book of Hebrews puts it, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Second, Jesus goes somewhere when he grieves. Jesus goes to the deserted place, a place that can hold the aches of the heart that know no words, a place that befits suffering. Not every place is equally hospitable to suffering. Jesus leaves the hustle and bustle of the town to seek the empty, wilderness place.

Third, Jesus sometimes withdraws from us, but he never sends us away. This distinction is very important to take to heart. Sometimes Jesus feels at a distance. Jesus is living, not bound to stay right here in the way we’ve always known him. Jesus is also loving and has compassion for us when we come to him. He always stays within eyeshot, and it is up to us to follow him if we are desperate enough for him. In fact, it is for our good that we follow the grieving, angry Jesus to the places that he goes.

Finally, for our purposes tonight, I want us to see that the feast, the feeding, the miraculous multiplication of food, is more than just unplanned but is brought about by Jesus in a moment of profound personal anguish. John’s body – severed, broken. Jesus’ heart – a wasteland of anger and sadness. The place – uninhabited. The food on hand – mere fragments. The loaves – blessed and broken. The disciple’s objection to feeding the crowds says it all: “We have nothing here but…”

And now we come to the turning point. Jesus draws strength and compassion out of his weakness. And he asks his disciples, his church, to do the same. You give them something to eat. I know that it is late, that we are coming to the end of a day of intense ministry; I know that you are tired and hungry and overwhelmed; I know that we are in the middle of nowhere. Still, give them something to eat. Just as I turned the fragments of my own heart into their healing, now, turn the fragments of this bread into their meal. Feed them and watch as they eat to the point of satisfaction. Watch as you end up with more than you started with.

“We have nothing here, but…” That is always the objection, because that is always the reality – truly, that is life. To have nothing here, but… but a few pieces. A little time. A story. A set of experiences, good and bad. A body, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. A broken heart. A meager budget. Limited capacity. Incomplete understanding. A botched night of sleep. A last wild hope. To have ‘nothing here, but’… is the sweet spot of Christian life, because Jesus can do anything, everything with the almost-nothing that is us.

To exist in that space of weakness as it becomes his strength, to feel our grief become his compassion, our emptiness become able to hold all things, that is where we learn the meaning of God’s words passed on by the Apostle Paul: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). We cannot experience the sufficiency of God, the feast in the deserted place, if we do not first let him lead us there, to an honest reckoning with our mortality, our hunger, our sin.

And now we can finally answer our questions: What does this Table have to do with these ashes? Everything. This season of repentance and fasting asks us to practice humility, to awaken hunger and face our creaturely finitude. In this season we mark ourselves as those following Jesus into the deserted place, where we can learn that God’s power and love do not depend on our own strength or perfection but are instead magnified by our desperation for him.

No matter how you have chosen to take up the call of this season, allow that sacrifice, discomfort, and ache to turn your attention back on the one who has compassion for you and for many. And may we all remember that we will one day die, that we are always nothing, but… but one brief moment of Life’s great Mystery. But in God’s hands, blessed and broken, we can nourish the world, losing nothing, but gathered up, more than we ever thought we could be.

Amen.

“He Is Able to Help”

February 4, 2024

Hebrews 2:14-18

Pastor Mike

One of the hardest questions that we face in living life with God is how to make sense of our suffering. I don’t mean the question of why we as human beings suffer. That’s a philosophical question better suited for classrooms, and it’s a question people ask whether or not they believe in a god. What I mean is, “Why am I suffering? Why am I desolate, exhausted, rejected, bereft or sick, overlooked or depressed? Why do I hurt like this – right here and right now. O God, O God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s the real question, the hard question for those who believe in Christ. It’s a question that each individual can only answer for themselves, and yet that aloneness in the question must be the right kind of aloneness. When we suffer it is very easy to kick our defense mechanisms, those automatic behaviors that conceal our pain, into high gear. It is very easy to reject input from others, to brush off or snap at another person’s offer to listen or help. It is tempting to suffer apart from the community. But the narrow way that leads to life is learning to abide alone in the question of my suffering while keeping the channels open to others.

 The question of suffering is also hard to answer because Christians have often approached it in ways that are sloppy, callous, or downright manipulative. Like this answer: Well, if you’re suffering, you must have done something wrong, because God only wills our health and prosperity. Or this one: You must stay and suffer in that abusive relationship because through your suffering you will learn unconditional love and forgiveness and may one day win over your partner. Or this one: God has willed your enslavement, because through your submission and lowliness you will emulate Christ and receive a reward in heaven. Eek.

Often, we do suffer as a result of our own sin. And we often can learn important lessons or experience God in new ways as a result of suffering. But all these explanations share the fatal flaw of coming from someone who is trying to take advantage of another’s vulnerability. One-size-fits-all answers to the question of suffering do not work. Sometimes we are just sloppy, and when someone is visibly full of pain it is not helpful to say things like, “Well, just have faith. Everything happens for a reason.” Jesus was able to forgive his executioners from the cross, but he might have had a harder time if faced with that sort of patter.

 So if in most cases we are unable to interpret the meaning of each other’s suffering (let alone our own) with any prepackaged cliché, then where does that leave us? Hear the Word again: “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things… Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect… Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”

 These verses point to a place we can go when we are suffering. It is a place accessible by grace and trust and the slow breakdown of our defenses and control. It is the inner spiritual awareness that Christ himself, the giver of salvation and hope and perfect love, is present with us, in us, and alongside us as we suffer. Though he was eternally God, holy and mighty and eternal, he emptied himself and took on flesh and blood, becoming human just like you and me so that he might share in the things that you and I suffer. And he did. In Jesus, God suffered.  

 He grew up in obscurity. He was carried from his home as a child when kings sought to kill him. He hungered. He thirsted. He was tempted by Satan. He was exhausted by the care that he offered to the crowds day in and day out. He wept at gravesides. His companions abandoned him. He despaired over his own people, that they had turned so far from the ways of God. He was betrayed, unjustly convicted, mocked, tortured, and killed. He, God, was God-forsaken.

There is no depth of human agony that Jesus has not participated in, no sphere of suffering that he has not brought, through his resurrection, into the life of God. Jesus is able to help us when we suffer, because he has gone with us into our sufferings, even into godlessness and the grave. He is able to help us because that solidary, that union, was perfect. He suffered yet was without sin. And so, in his resurrected and ascended life, where he intercedes before the throne of God for us with scars on his hands and feet and side, he becomes for those who abide in him a new resting place in times of suffering. Our darkness suffused with his companionship. The God who made all things knows what tears running down the cheek feel like.

How is this truth about Christ different from those one-size-fits-all answers to the question of suffering that get lobbed at us from the outside?

 Here’s how it’s different: Christ does not give us an answer to our sufferings; he gives us himself. He does not give us an explanation or interpretation; he communes. Our sufferings don’t bring us closer to God as if God is far from us, waiting for us to be in pain. But suffering can refine our sense that, even now, even here in the midst of this fresh hell, Christ communes. And in that sense, it completes us, because no corner of our heart remains closed off from him.

 I want to be clear that is not the only response to suffering. The Bible tells us to ask for prayers when we are sick, to seek healing. The Bible compels us to resist evil and oppression. The Bible shows us how to be tenacious, how to wind our way through the crowd in a last-ditch effort to relieve our pain, if only we might touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. But when the healing doesn’t come, when resistance would only exacerbate the pain, when there is nothing really to resist or no last-ditch effort to make, the truth remains: Christ communes. And that is a place we can get to, a place established by the brokenness of his own body, and the shedding of his own blood.

 The idea that such a place of spiritual awareness exists is not a passing fancy of Hebrews but a theme, a promise, that runs through the scriptures:

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering…    Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:4, 11).

“We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).

“For though He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall live with Him by the power of God” (2 Corinthians 13:4).

        “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3) – the words of Christ himself.

 Blessed when inwardly impoverished. Clearsighted when in anguish. Knowing Christ in our sufferings, that we might know him in resurrection.

 These are mature insights of faith that the Bible speaks of. I think one of the reasons it’s hard to talk about the why of suffering is because everyone must get there in their own time, and no one can go there for anyone else and, at first, we spend our energy grumbling, overanalyzing, evading, keeping up appearances. Remember, the disciples fled in the night from the prospect of the cross, and they could not stay awake with Jesus in the garden as he prayed for the cup to pass from him. But just as they came into maturity through the power of the Spirit and embraced the mystery of his communion in their own trials, so we, slowly and persistently, can seek and be found by his abiding presence in our pain.

But whether we can get there or not at this particular moment, the truth remains: Christ communes.

I want you to remember that as you come to this Table. No matter what you’re going through, no matter what ache or wound or panic or emptiness you bear in your soul, no matter what pain is in your body, Christ communes. And if there is something for you to learn from what you’re going through, you will learn it – in God’s time; if there is something for you to let go of, you will let go of it – in God’s time; if there is something for you to take hold of, you will take hold of it – in God’s time, because Christ communes. Your suffering is not a chasm between you and him but a bridge.

I also want you to remember that we are called to be Christlike, to have his Spirit and his mind and to live as he lived. If we cannot answer the Why of suffering for one another, then what can we do to bring one another strength and hope? We can enter in, as far as is appropriate and possible, to the suffering of others. We can bind our lives to the lives of those really going through it. We can offer our gentle, quiet, steadfast presence. We can become one flesh, one Body, weeping with those who weep, remembering those in prison as if we were imprisoned with them, visiting the sick, sharing at table with the hungry, opening our homes to strangers, washing feet. That is the Church, the Body that suffers and lives as one.

Thanks be to God that Christ communes.     

Amen.

January 28, 2024

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

By: Jan Simpson

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul, who was concerned about Christian conduct in churches, gives us a tutorial in each chapter about how we as a church can deal with different issues. He talks about immaturity, divisivness, jealousy, sexual immorality, misuse of spiritual gifts, among others. In Chapter 8 he addresses the misuse of knowledge. He says: don’t let knowledge just puff you up, use it for good and helping others to gain the true knowledge of God.  Knowledge shows up elsewhere in the bible as well. 

 From Proverbs: the knowledge of God’s word will build you and deliver your God-given inheritance into your hands. Here’s another from 2 Peter: but grow in the grace and knowledge of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ. What I take from this is, knowledge of God helps us to discern the knowledge in our lives that is irrelevant and acknowledge what is true... as Paul writes: “there is but one God, the father from whom we live and there is but one lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live”. 

 None of us have anything against knowledge. We all have brains to soak up all of the knowledge we can. Knowledge made the world a better place, but has it made it worse as well? If we get too puffed up with knowledge, we become know it all’s, we become pretentious, and downright annoying! I know I am guilty of it more than I would like to admit. I am reminded of an incident when I was in English 101 in college. I got puffed up in my writing abilities that it cost me a friendship. We were to read our cohorts paper and write a critique for the instructor to read. I had become kind of a mentor to another much younger classmate and had helped her out a little with some of her papers. Well, thinking that I would make some points with my teacher I wrote a fairly scathing critique on one of her papers. It backfired spectacularly. My classmate was really hurt. My instructor told me to back off, and I learned my lesson the hard way. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Of course, I could have written a critique in a more loving and constructive way. Even to this day I regret and feel bad about the whole incident.  

  How many of you get annoyed when someone talks about your area of expertise as though you know nothing about it? I’m a retired dental hygienist and I can get pretty testy when someone else thinks they know more than me, when, in my opinion they don’t know much. I immediately think I need to let them know how knowledgeable I am in my field. As we gain knowledge, we want to let everyone know how knowledgeable we are. Knowledge puffs us up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. but the man who loves God is known by God. Even the most knowledgeable Christian has to realize that their knowledge is limited, and that God is the only one who knows all.   I certainly need to be reminded of this often!  

 Paul also talks about animal sacrifices and how they relate to idols.  I have always loathed the thought of animal sacrifices because I have in my mind that it was probably done in a very cruel way to the animals, so I haven’t thought a lot about the whole animal sacrifice thing. When I chose this scripture Pastor Mike had suggested to me I surprised myself that I did indeed decide to preach on it. But as I read the chapter more I realized the focus wasn’t on animal sacrifice, but more about why it was being done for idols. 

Let’s talk about idols. What are we sacrificing to idols these days? Are we sacrificing our minds and our children’s minds to today’s idols? And who are these idols? Actors, actresses, comedians, influencers? Or inanimate idols created by movies and games.  Are we worshipping these idols as we would God?  I asked my grandchildren who their idols were. Two of the boys said Christian Bryant, who is a major league baseball player, the other boy said, whomever invented Minecraft, and my granddaughter said Naya Nuke a Shoshoni girl she read about. Interesting picks for sure and I don’t begrudge them for any of their choices.  The point I think Paul is trying to make in this scripture is that we cannot confuse idols with God.

We cannot worship them. We can sacrifice our time, attention, money, or not, to these false idols but it means nothing either way because they mean nothing. Let’s not worship a sports team, an influencer, actor, fill in the blank. Let’s turn our time and attention to only God and then, we will be known by Him. That is the most important knowledge we need to learn. This is easier said than done, in my opinion for it’s much easier to relate to something tangible or something we can see. The hard part that we always have to work on is realizing how immaterial our idols are and at the same time reminding those we love, especially our children and grandchildren that God is the only one that matters and the only one worthy of worship. 

On to the tricky part of this scripture. Paul says that not everyone has it figured out and we don’t want our knowledge to backfire. He says; so, this weak brother for whom Christ died is destroyed by your knowledge. The weak believers may still think it is a sin against God to sacrifice to idols when it really doesn’t matter. But if they see us (the strong believers) doing it, maybe it is easier for them to assume it’s really ok and it could spoil their conscience. I had to read this verse over and over again because it was hard for me to sort out.  Let me say it again, we who have the knowledge that idols don’t matter, but still appear to sacrifice to them may blunt the conscience of a weak brother. Are we responsible for teaching others about sacrificing to idols, I believe so, what do you think?

Paul says: love builds up, this is my favorite part of the passage and what drew me in. He talks more about it in Corinthians 13, he says in part: if I have all of the knowledge, but have not love, then i have nothing. love is patient, love is kind, love is not proud, rude, or self-seeking.  Love doesn’t record wrongs, nor delight in evil. Love always protects, trusts, always hopes and perseveres. No wonder love appears almost 700 times in the Bible. What better word to promote? knowledge puffs up…love builds up. I read this actually on social media the other day and is attributed to Liam Neeson, who is an actor. he says in part “in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt. What more needs to be said? 

 What should be our action plan in response to Paul’s words? Here’s a few I came up with… use love to build people up. Don’t sacrifice so much time to our phones, social media etc. Don’t puff ourselves up with our knowledge, do more to encourage people to attend church and learn the good news, or how about this, be more proactive in preaching the good news ourselves?

 There, I just delivered on that one!!! 

 Back to idols for a minute, Carole King has been my musical idol since I was a teenager. The other day I heard this song on the radio, and I thought I needed to include it in my sermon today. Carole says in the refrain of her song “Only Love is Real.”  

Only love is real

everything else illusion

adding to the confusion of the way we connive

at being alive

tracing a line till we can define

the thing that allows us to feel

only love is real

Amen.

In the Beginning, Grace

January 7, 2024

Baptism of the Lord

Pastor Mike

Mark 1:1-11

Mark begins his Gospel with the sudden appearance of John in the Judean wilderness beyond Jerusalem. John’s appearance fulfilled an old prophetic promise, that a voice would cry out in the wilderness and prepare the people of Israel to receive their Messiah. Mark tells us that this John character was rather eccentric: clothed in camel’s hair, getting by eating locusts and honey. John was also, in the tradition of the prophets, anti-institutional. He moved the practice of ritual bathing away from the Holy City and its Temple to the Jordan River, and he transformed it from a ritual that cleansed outward impurities to an act that shifted the whole direction of a person’s heart. Crowds of people flocked to him from city and country. Yet, despite his popularity, John’s message remained unchanged: “One who is more powerful than I is coming after me.”

That one, we know, was Jesus. Jesus responded alongside his countrymen and made a rather lengthy journey south from his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee, a northern province of Israel. Perhaps joining a caravan of other curious and convicted souls, Jesus went to respond to the John’s call. Jesus entered the desert and came to the waters. Unlike the other gospel versions, Mark includes no suggestion that John recognized Jesus as the anticipated Messiah prior to the moment of baptizing him. There’s no effort on John’s part to reverse things beforehand, so that he might be baptized by Jesus. Instead, we are to imagine Jesus wading into the river in obscurity and simple obedience just like everyone else. Then, suddenly, the sky splits apart, and living light flutters down to rest on him, and a voice cuts clear across the water: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Again, this is how Mark starts the story of Jesus – chapter one, verse one. In other words, his version of Jesus’ life and ministry has no Christmas. No miraculous pregnancies. No angelic visitations. No fathers making room in their hearts and homes for unexpected sons. No census or manger or “Glory to God in the highest heaven” ringing out through the night sky. No foreign kings bearing gifts. No star. All the stories that we’ve read and pondered and responded to in faith these past six weeks have come from other storytellers. With Mark, the beginnings of Jesus and John, their origin stories, go untold. They remain secret and hidden.

Which raises an obvious historical question: Did Mark know? Did he know about Zechariah and Elizbeth? Did he know about Bethlehem? We’re so familiar with the events of Christmas, we hold them so close, that it’s easy to assume everyone must’ve known. But actually that wasn’t the case at all – at least not at first. There is a curious passage in the seventh chapter of John’s Gospel that captures a moment of Jesus ministry when the people closest to him reveal that they are even unsure of his origins. It goes like this:

When they heard these words, some in the crowd said, “This is really the prophet.” Others said, “This is the Messiah.” But some asked, “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” So there was a division in the crowd because of him. (John 7:40-43)

There’s a division because they don’t know that this Nazarene man was once a Bethlehem baby. Strange. Jesus must not have brought up his birth in his teachings. He wasn’t like me, going around boasting about being from New Jersey. And if we look at the sermons preached by the apostles in the book of Acts, which are the earliest summaries of what people thought was important to say about Jesus, his birth is completely eclipsed by his death and resurrection.

It seems that the Christmas stories were some of the last stories about Jesus that got told. Only after his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven; only after the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost and the church was born and then scattered into the world by persecution; only after the spoken tales started to get written down so that they could be passed from the first generation of believers to the second; only after all this were those first stories, the ones long treasured in the heart of Mary, revealed.

As Jesus’ power to transform lives reached farther into the world and deeper into the heart, people wanted to know: Where did he come from? How did he get here? This man who began his public ministry at the age of thirty, was there anything deep in his story to suggest that he would one day become the Savior of the world? Slowly, the Christmas stories surfaced, and Matthew and Luke and, in a very different way, John, wove them into their own gospels.

Whether Mark didn’t know or did know but chose not to tell, the fact remains that his Gospel keeps the origins of John and Jesus a mystery. That silence reveals a truth for us to meditate on.

In one sense, until we have met God personally and been claimed as God’s beloved, our lives have not yet begun. We must be born again, Jesus tells us, through grace and faith. We must start fresh in the power of the Holy Spirit. Baptism testifies to that rebirth, so why not start the story at the baptism? It’s a perfectly valid choice.

But in another sense, one of the joys of beginning a relationship with God or experience a moment or season of profound transformation is that we get to turn around and ask ourselves, “How did I get here? Surely, this hasn’t come out of nowhere! No there was something, someone, at work in me before this, though I did not recognize it.”

How often do we not understand the meaning of events, the reasons we went through this or that, the gifts hidden along the way, until some later time down the road when we can look back with renewed eyes as God’s beloved and consider our stories with faith

Mark’s silence on Christmas reveals that the Church had to make a choice about how it would speak of Jesus’ beginning, just as we have a choice about how we will tell our own stories. After all, John was born to elderly parents, and instead of bearing his father’s name or taking up his family’s vocation as a traditional priest, he went into the desert to eat bugs and wear weird clothes and confront institutional religion’s sins. And, for his part, Jesus was conceived out of wedlock and born in a backwater town; his arrival as a King went almost completely unnoticed and he spent the first three decades of his life in the obscurity of a carpentry shop. At first glance, these are not great origin stories. What would those first Christians do? Keep the stories secret? Tell them with apologetic embarrassment? Exalt John and Jesus as self-made men who overcame the odds against them?

No, they made a different choice. They told the stories with confidence and gratitude and joy. Parents – some too old and others too young – were there to receive them and trust in what was said about them. Angels were there to announce them. The manger was there to hold Jesus. The shepherds were there to witness him. The Magi were there to worship him. Simeon was there to embrace him and bless him. Egypt was there to protect him. Make no mistake, a way was prepared for John and for Jesus – that’s what the stories have to say. Back there at the beginning, when they were but fetuses and newborns, the Spirit was already carving out space for two boys to come into the world and be nurtured in love and kept safe until the appointed time for their ministries to begin. God’s grace was in the beginning.

As John and Jesus grew up, they were not embarrassed by unconventional parentage, not ashamed of backwater beginnings, not under the impression that they did it all themselves. Mark let’s us imagine John and Jesus entering those waters and sharing together a knowing smile. They knew in that moment that those beginnings which remained for a time hidden in their hearts and memories were about to be proven good and true and full of grace.

We all crash land into life. Our beginnings are never without difficulty of one sort or another. Our stories are messy. The meanings of the things we go through are not obvious as we go through them. The damage may come from our family of origin, or the limitations or prejudices of the community we grew up in. Perhaps from the travails of adolescence, or early experiences of abuse or addiction, illness or death. Perhaps we were over-protected. For those of us who come to Christ later in life, there may be a whole series of false starts and missteps along the way, things we brought upon ourselves.

But once the light and love of God have enveloped us, once the word ‘Beloved’ has been spoken over us, we are able to look back with self-compassion and faith, and see how God was with us all along. God was making a way, and all the moments, all the interactions, all the inner and outer events, all the pain and joy, all the questions, and the long, slow plodding along – it’s all full of grace.

God’s love doesn’t rewrite our past or change our past or make it better, but it does redeem it. God’s love turns our stories into testimonies. And the more of God’s love we experience, the more of our story we will be able to embrace. Sometimes, our beginnings are the last thing to surface, the things buried deep in the past take time to bring into the light. Thanks be to God that with Christ there is no embarrassment, no shame, no need to prove ourselves worthy. There is only grace.

John and Jesus were not mess-ups. They were not self-made men. They were miracles.

Every one of you has a story. And you have a choice about how you will tell your story. I pray that God’s great love for you, God’s gentle but persistent healing, will give you a grateful and discerning heart, so that you will come to know yourself as a miracle, no matter what you’ve been through.

I pray, too, that you will never underestimate the importance of being involved in someone else’s story, especially the messy parts and the hidden beginning. For we never know if, perhaps much later, that person will look back on their lives through the eyes of faith to behold us with gratitude for the part that we played in guiding them toward God. Just as God makes a way for us, so God might use us to make a way for others.

The scripture says that “our lives are hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). All that we’ve been through, and all that we offer, shall be gathered up into God’s gracious purposes.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Advent & Men, Part 5: “Simeon”

December 31, 2023 

Luke 2:25-38

Pastor Mike 

At the beginning of Advent, I opened this sermon series with the question, “What is the good news of Jesus’ incarnation for men and boys?” It’s a question that matters for all of us because of the fear and the pain that many men carry forward out of their boyhoods and that they, in turn, even against their best intentions, bring upon others. But God has drawn near to us so that we, like those shepherds on Christmas, those men dwelling in the night far off from community – so that we might be brought to the very center of salvation’s story, with things to see and things to say.  

 Along the way, as we’ve explored Herod and the Magi, the prophet Zechariah, and Jesus’ adoptive father Joseph, some overarching themes have come to light. We’ve noted the difference between relating to the events of life out of a controlling mode versus a receptive mode, the difference between reacting to an inner stirring with fear and receiving it with the anticipation of joy. We’ve seen that there is a difference between living righteously according to the letter of the law and living righteously in a moment-by-moment responsiveness to the Spirit. And we’ve felt the power of the gifts and the blessings, the songs and the dreams, that flow from men to those around them when they have released themselves by faith into the flow of the Spirit.

 From the day I first sketched out these sermons in my journal, Simeon has felt like the fulfillment of the series, the center of gravity, an example of redeemed manhood appearing to us as the Christmas stories draw to a close.

 Like Zechariah and Joseph, Simeon is described as righteous, but his is already a living and receptive righteousness: the Holy Spirit rests upon him, and he is guided by the Spirit’s promises and nudges.  Simeon’s spirituality is already communal rather than individualized as he “[looks] forward to the consolation of Israel.” He lives his life in hope for his community’s coming salvation, and this must have felt at times like a naïve hope, given Israel’s ruthless occupation by the Romans. He does not try to control his circumstances or bring about the fulfilment of his hope; instead, the Spirit has told him that we will not see death before he sees the Messiah, and Simeon is at peace going about his days in a kind of in-between condition.

 Like Zechariah after he is deprived of speech and the Magi during the long months of their journey, Simeon goes about his days in a sanctified silence, a silence that is watchful, alert for signs of grace, and preparing to speak blessings. When the day finally arrives and he meets the Holy Family in the Jerusalem temple, Simeon takes the infant Christ in his arms and blesses him. He does not shy away from telling Mary the truth about who her baby is and the turmoil that will one day engulf him. He says what is true, not what is easy: “This child is destined for the rising and falling of many… and a sword will pierce your own soul, too” (2:34-35).

 But before that heavy word, Simeon offers his famous prayer to God:

        Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,

        according to your word,

        for my eyes have seen your salvation,

        which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

        a light for revelation to the gentiles

        and for glory to your people Israel.

 In Christian tradition, this poetic prayer has come to be known as the Nunc Dimittis, and for the better part of two-thousand years it has enjoyed a place of privilege in the worship and devotional lives of vast numbers of Christians. Nunc Dimittis are the first two words in the Latin version of the song: Now you are dismissing…

And what a remarkable quality of character that those two words reveal about Simeon. He is a man who has spent a lifetime awaiting the Messiah. He has the faith to receive the fulfillment of that promise in a baby and does not feel in any way cheated by only glimpsing the humble beginnings of his people’s consolation. And then he has the humility to dismiss himself, to be at peace with what he has received and slip away from the story, into an acceptance of his death.

For these reasons, the Nunc Dimittis has become a nighttime prayer. In the Bible, sleep is a metaphor for death. When we go to sleep, we enter into our most vulnerable, most receptive state. Simeon’s words help us say that we’re okay with that. At the end of every day, those who pray the Nunc Dimittis say to God that they are at peace with the day ending, that they in some way have glimpsed the presence of Christ, the unfolding of salvation, and can therefore rest in peace.

Simeon gives us a picture of God in that moment, prefiguring what Jesus himself came to do. Jesus has come recognize the good in us, to hold us tenderly, and to bless us with the truth. And his love for us is made concrete when we share it with others.

In preparing for today, I was startled to discover a surprising parallel in Luke’s Gospel between Simeon, toward the story’s beginning, and Joseph of Arimathea, towards the story’s end. You may remember Joseph of Arimathea as one of the “minor characters” from the summer; he was the man granted permission by Pilate to bury Jesus’ body after the crucifixion.

Here’s how Simeon is introduced in Luke 2: Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel (2:25). And here’s how Joseph is introduced in Luke 23: Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action. He…was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God (23:50-51). Both men are introduced with as similar formula; they are righteous and waiting to receive a better future.

In Luke 2:28, Simeon “takes” Jesus in his arms to bless him, while in Luke 23:53, Joseph “takes” Jesus’ body down from the cross to wrap it in cloth and lay it in a tomb. In both cases, the Greek word for “take” is the same – dekomai. These men touch Jesus’ body in order to care for it.

Finally, Simeon’s self-dismissal clears the space for Anna, the old, widowed prophetess who has spent the bulk of her life faithfully praying in the Temple, to become the principal witness of the Christ child to the city of Jerusalem. Similarly, Joseph’s actions clear space for the women who have followed Jesus since Galilee to gather at the tomb and become the first witnesses of the resurrection.

On one end of the story, a good man holds and blesses baby Jesus; at the other end of the story, a good man holds and tends Jesus’ broken body. Now, the actual beginning and ending of Luke’s story are miracles – the miracle of the incarnation and the miracle of the resurrection. But, in between the miracles, Jesus enters vulnerably into the difficulties and sufferings of human life, and he is met on either end of that hard road by these men who have been waiting for him and who choose to care for him.

“What is the good news of Jesus’ incarnation for men and boys?”

It is that Jesus, by coming to us as a fragile child, can awaken the minds of men to see themselves in him and to know that they, in their brokenness, are loved, that everything they have suffered has been gathered up into the life of God and redeemed.

It is that Jesus, by coming to us in such humility and beauty, can stir the hearts of men to receive those around them who need care, not to remove all danger or control all circumstances, but to provide the blessings and the companionship that will clear the ground for miracles.

As one year gives way to another, may Jesus be a light of revelation to us. May no more men, no more boys, see death until they have beheld the salvation of our God.

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

The Shepherds

December 24, 2023 – Christmas Eve 

Luke 2:1-20

Pastor Mike

“Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior” (Luke 2:11).

Can you imagine something happening in our world today that would be good news for all people? So much of our world is designed to be divided, what is good for one person or group always seems to come at the expense of someone else, and the question everything seems to boil down to is ‘whose side are you on?’ This nation or that nation, this party or that party, a booming economy or a livable planet. This is the story we are born in, and which wants our participation. What breaking news report, what mass notification causing all our phones to leap to life, could possibly bear a message that would fill all people everywhere with great joy?

The Bible dares to claim that it is possible. The angels dare to announce what to us seems impossible. They hold before us another, better story: a Savior, born to you this very day. And to really hear it let us place ourselves among those who first received the angelic proclamation, those shepherds living out of doors, working the night shift. 

Part 1:

How many folks here set up a nativity scene in your home every year?

Nativities are wonderful, they bring together all the elements of the different Christmas stories from the Gospels into a composite picture that is rich and joyful: the Holy Family, angels, shepherds, Magi, animals. They’re a great way to introduce the Christmas story to kids and to make things visual, not just verbal. Roger and Donna Boe have nativities from all over the world that adorn their home in December. Lana Gribas makes nativities, and this year made some midwives to introduce into the scene, local Bethlehem women who likely would’ve leapt into action to help Mary deliver her baby. So cool.

For as wonderful as they are, nativities collapse the chronology of the biblical stories, and for tonight I want to separate some things out. Take, for example, the sky filling up with angels, the heavens alive with song, the glory shining all around and dispersing the darkness. That was not a moment that all the characters of Christmas experienced, and it didn’t even happen in town or over the manger.

No, it happened outside the town, in the field, in the night, to those who were awake when no one else was because they had to be. It came to those who, because of their social class and family of origin, their desperation or, who knows, their disillusionment with the life of the city, had the night watch over the animals. They were awake in the darkness, and God was thinking about them. They were on the fringes of their community, but they were at the center of God’s concern. It is difficult for those who are awake all night to encounter God in the ways the rest of us do, but God found a way to them.

When you are awake in the dark, God is thinking about you. When you have drifted to the fringes of your community and your sense of self and can hardly remember what “ordinary” life is like, you remain at the center of God’s concern.

 Have you ever been awake in the night? By a sick bed or a death bed, nursing a child, or waiting up for someone to come home? Working a night shift, homesick, or afflicted for some inexplicable reason with insomnia? We can take the night figuratively, too. Sometimes the darkness becomes our native terrain in long seasons of grief or our depression.

  For you, the angel says. For you.

  As the Gospel of John tells us,

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness can never extinguish it.

And as the Psalm says:

I could ask the darkness to hide me

and the light around me to become night—

but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.

To you the night shines as bright as day.

Let’s take another look at this nativity. Here we have the three wise men, the Magi from the East, who elevate the scene with their royalty, their strange and exotic attire, their gifts of gold and spice. But the Magi did not come to the manger, they came to Mary & Joseph’s house. And they did not appear the night of Jesus’ birth but when Jesus was nearly two years old. On that first Christmas night, they were just catching sight of the star, and preparing to set off on their journey. So, if y’all will permit it, I’m going to move them over here for a moment.

As you can see, the scene is growing bare and ordinary. Just a mother and father with their newborn baby, awake in the dark, alone with their thoughts. Not lavished as royalty, not illuminated by glory, just… awake, exhausted from labor, feeling that indescribable mixture of ecstasy and terror at holding a newborn child. The night could’ve so easily gone unmarked. Their midnight vigil could so easily have grown lonesome as the hours crept on.

But all of a sudden, barreling into town come the shepherds. They decided to go and see for themselves, to pass on the news that the angels passed on to them, that this is no ordinary baby but the Savior of the world. And it took courage! Courage to believe that God was at work in the night. Courage for men toughened by life out of doors to go shower praise upon a mother and her child. Courage to come back into the town, to trust that God had really told them – of all people – something true. But the angels had told them to not be afraid, and they went unafraid. To share their joy with others who, for their own reasons, were awake that same night.

That same night!

Awake working, awake nursing, awake grieving, awake keeping vigil – all of us, at one point or another, whether in spirit or in body, spend time on night watch. When that darkness comes, we are not alone in it. God breaks through to us, and God helps us to break through to one another.

Is this not the Church?

Is this not the community of creative love that God has been stitching together since that first Christmas night?

Ordinary people gathered together to illuminate the night. Ordinary people who confirm the work of salvation in one another and who magnify one another’s joy. Ordinary people who stop living the lie that all is divided, the lie that our nights are ours to endure alone. Ordinary people who enter a new story and come to meet each another where Christ is.

        If you are in the dark tonight, God has given himself for you.

        If you are in the dark tonight, God has people for you, people to go to, people to receive.

        May we rejoice at the love God has for us, and may we love more creatively, resiliently, gladly than we ever loved before. Amen.

Advent & Men, Part 4: “Silence & Speech”

December 24, 2023 – Fourth Sunday of Advent

Matthew 1:18-25

Pastor Mike

On this fourth Sunday of Avent, we continue our reflections on the men in the stories from the Gospels who, for one reason or another, find themselves in close proximity to the incarnation of God’s Son, Jesus. We are keeping company with them because they have things to teach us about God’s intentions for a world in which men love themselves without shame, love others without fear, and are loved by those around them simply for being who they are. This world, far off though it may seem, can be ours if we would rest in Christ and receive through him the perfect love of the Father, if we would allow ourselves to be challenged and changed by this love.

So far, we have lingered with King Herod, the Eastern Magi, and Zechariah the priest. Now, we turn our attention to Jesus’ adoptive father, Joseph, drawing ever closer to the heart of this good news. For Joseph called not merely to adapt to a surprising movement of God but to make room in his life, in his house, for this family, and to provide for their safety in a hostile world.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Matthew’s Gospel is the only one of the four that we’ve ever had. In Matthew’s Christmas story, Joseph takes center stage. He is the one to whom the angels come and deliver crucial information about the divine origin and Messianic destiny of Mary’s baby. But this is only after Mary has conceived. In Matthew, there is no story of the angel Gabriel visiting the Virgin Mary, no advance news of her miraculous pregnancy. No time to prepare or reflect.

Matthew’s story simply starts with the shocking fact: Mary, promised in marriage to Joseph but not yet his bride, “was found to be pregnant” (1:18). Was found – those two words carry the sense of surprise, of scandal. This was certainly a situation that stirred up Joseph. How would he react to the shock and embarrassment that his soon-to-be spouse was pregnant with a child not his own.

Keeping his own counsel, Joseph decides to break off the engagement and send Mary away quietly. As a man of his time and culture, it would’ve been very easy for him to save face and also bring shame upon Mary or even have her punished. Instead, he plans to preserve both their reputations as best he can through a secret divorce. He goes above what is required by the letter of the law to care for Mary, too. Well, sort of. She’ll be on her own with the baby, partnerless and vulnerable, but at least she won’t be overtly disgraced. Matthew describes Joseph as “righteous” – that is, godly. Given the unsettling circumstances, Joseph proves himself to be a considerate man.

Joseph has made a righteous decision, yes. But he has made it by himself in the privacy of his own mind. Joseph practices a legalistic form of righteousness, rationally applying the letter of the law to life’s problems. Joseph, like many men, is most comfortable thinking alone, determining for himself what is most fitting according to fact, not feelings. He does not invite any input from God or from Mary as he decides upon a course of action. He broods over his problem until a lightbulb goes off in his head.

Precisely at this moment, God intervenes. God knows the thoughts of our hearts, God knows our words before they leap from our tongues. It does not matter to God that Joseph’s decision is technically righteous; what matters to God is the Savior, God’s own Son, growing in Mary’s womb, and preparing hearts to receive him.

Joseph goes to sleep settled on his plan of quiet separation, but he is disturbed by a heaven-sent dream. In his dream, an angel commands him to do exactly the opposite of what he has planned to do. The angel tells Joseph to take Mary as his wife and to adopt and name her child. The angel tells Joeseph not to be afraid to do this. That’s key, the fear. Fear is often at the root of our isolated counsel, our refusal to bring others inside our own thinking.

The dream is also important. Dreams bubble up from the subconscious dimension of the mind. Dreams defy rational thought and are composed of feelings, memories, images. They come to us in the vulnerability of our sleep.

God calls Joseph to embrace this affective way of knowing, a way that he can only receive and respond to but that is not of his own making or under his control. To follow a dream is a form of living righteousness. Living righteousness means practicing a moment-by-moment dependence on God’s Spirit to direct us; it means inviting divine input into our situation.

This is just the first time that Joesph will dream. When Herod determines to kill all the Jewish boys around Bethlehem, after being defied by the Magi, Joseph is warned in a dream to take the family and flee to Egypt. Years later, when Herod dies and it is safe to return to Israel, Joseph is told to go back through a dream.

Joseph begins a reasonable man, and he ends up a dreamer. He begins by determining his own way, and he ends by having his way determined for him. This can be a difficult shift to make, yet he need not be afraid, for God is with him, and the child of Mary is worth every cost. Joseph wakes from sleep and does what he has been commanded to do. He doubles down on his commitment to Mary; he consents to receiving a firstborn son not of his own flesh and blood; he adopts the child and names him Jesus.

Let’s circle back: Joseph’s initial impulse was to send Mary away, to separate himself from her. That’s another masculine tendency, to restore order by diminishing complexity and minimizing personal involvement. Often, men pull back from events or relationships that overwhelm them, that are too messy or seem to demand too much. But the angel does not permit Joseph to disengage from Mary and Jesus. Joseph is pressed forward into what is not easily understood. He chooses to be with them, and this choice to bring mother and child into his life undoubtedly makes his life harder rather than easier.

Anyone who’s ever had a kid can attest to that: the household gets noisier, messier, more chaotic in some ways, more stifling in others. The temptation for men is to pull back from that. Even biological fathers must choose to be present and engaged rather than removed emotionally or physically. A father (noun) must choose to father (verb). The power of men is in their presence.

Joseph submits to participating in God’s salvation. For several years, it costs him his personal comfort, security, and control. He is entangled in his son’s purpose. As I’ve noted several times, Joseph’s story continues into chapter two where he is called upon to protect Mary and Jesus from the violence of Herod. The idea of a man as the protector of his house and family is a masculine trope that we all know well. There are definitely harmful ways that this plays out in the masculine psyche, because to be identified as the protector primes men for violence and reinforces the idea that all things belong to us. Joseph keeps his family safe by serving them and paying close attention to his dreams. His providing work actually takes the form of self-sacrifice and loss; Joseph has to leave his community, workplace, and home in order to go and live as a stranger in Egypt. He flees in the night rather than standing his ground. He cares for his family like a shepherd, leading them through the valley of shadow, as God directs him.

I’d like to conclude by reflecting on the angel’s opening words to Joesph: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid…” Notice: The angel calls Joesph by name before telling him that he will name Mary’s baby. The angel reminds Joseph that he is a son, a part of a living legacy of faith, before telling him that Mary’s baby is a son. The angel tells Joseph not to be afraid before telling him that Jesus “will save his people from their sins.”

Remember the words from John that kicked off this series? “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave authority to become children of God.” God knows us and calls us by name. God loves us and calls us sons and daughters. When we hear God speak our true name, we are able to speak truth over others. When we trust in God’s love for us, we are able to bless others.

The only thing standing between our brokenness and the salvation that Jesus brings is our fear – fear of change, fear of intimacy, fear of feeling. But by doing the scary thing, by relinquishing control and receiving Jesus into our lives, all our fears are cast out by his perfect love.

This Christmas, may we be dreamers who take the Christ child alongside us and learn to worship, to love, and to rejoice without fear.

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

Guided Reflection

        What has this sermon series on men stirred up in you?

        How are you being called to grow?

        Who is one person in your life that you will talk to ab

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.