TOO MUCH STUFF

April 7, 2024

Kris Baker

Matthew 7:13-14

Adonai El Roi- The Lord the God who sees. The perfect Lamb of God- picked up all sin for you and me. 

For three days He was dead, His followers grieved, thought Him lost. With little faith and even less understanding they could not wrap their minds around what He told them when He said He would rise again. Three days passed; the tomb found empty. Death and hell cannot hold the innocent. After spending a short time here on earth, He ascended to Heaven. Jesus had to go back so that the Holy Spirit would come and help all people that believe in Jesus to grow in their individual relationship with God, and to share the Truth with the world. In Matt. 16:24, Jesus tells the disciples “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”

He lets His disciples know that following Him will not be easy. He told them; “narrow is the gate and difficult is the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14)

I have been thinking a lot lately about all the choices we are given in the world today. These days going to the grocery store is a daunting task. Not just because of the extremely high prices of everything but because of the many different kinds of the same things on the shelves. There seem to be so many different types of cereals, crackers, yogurt and frozen foods. Which ones to buy? You stand in the aisle looking at the ingredients and finally give up and either get the generic or the name brand that you see on TV the most. For me, I usually succumb to the least expensive, due to my budget. That is not always the best choice, but I have learned to live with it. Even produce has its challenges; you can’t just go get a carrot, you have to decide if you want them in a bag, individually, or baby carrots. Once you decide that then you have to choose between organic or not organic. The “organic” label makes them much more expensive. I used to think that all fresh produce was organic because it was created by God. But then I learned that organic is supposed to be healthier because it isn’t supposed to have harmful chemicals or be altered to make it grow better. THEN I learned that not all organic is created equal!. 

WHAT??? I just don’t want to get the wrong thing! I don’t want to be dupped and pay more and not get what I assumed I was. 

It seems that the days of getting value for your bucks and knowing what it is you are getting, when you get it, are gone. That ship has sailed. 

There are many choices available no matter what it is you  are looking to purchase. Clothes, tools, cleaning supplies, cars, “big boy toys, even flowers for our spring gardens. The variety is endless, and I don’t know about you, but I wish things were simpler. I find myself at times purchasing things not because I need them but because they are cool or cute or just because I got caught in an impulse buy. 

What am I going to do, I wonder? How do I get a grasp on the insanity of stuff? Has anyone ever been convinced to buy something from a TV infomercial, or Facebook endorsement or a pop-up ad online? You had to have the best non-stick cookware, a stain remover that NEVER fails, vitamins or supplements that will help you live longer or lose weight. You purchase whatever it is and when it comes it is not any better than what is available at the store, if it works at all. We all fall prey to clever marketing. Clever marketing does not stop with stuff, it also includes what we think, how we treat each other, who to vote for, even what to teach our children. 

With all that said you are wondering, what’s your point?? I believe we all know how clever this world is and its ability to manipulate people into doing whatever they want. 

Who to believe? How do we know which road to follow? When do we say ENOUGH? I have, on more than one occasion, fallen victim to the, OH I HAVE TO HAVE THAT… whatever it is. And if I like it, why not get every color or variety that is available? It becomes an addiction, I think. Up and down, back and forth… this opinion, that opinion that article or this one. 

Stop this rollercoaster, I want to get off!! 

In Matthew 7:13-14; Jesus says that narrow is the gate and difficult is the way that leads to life there are few who find it. He also says that wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many will take it.

I want to be more like Jesus each step of the way. I want to find the narrow gate and walk the narrow way. 

I began my journey when I was pretty young. I would think that each of us have experienced the teasing that goes on in school. I was always the tallest in my class, probably until high school, and was always being asked how is the air up there? Or being called “jolly green giant”. None of that really bothered me until one day we were all lined up outside of class after lunch, waiting for the teacher to unlock the door. There are always the kids that take teasing up a notch to just plain mean. When the teacher arrived, I was on the verge of tears. Once in the classroom my teacher posed a question to the class, “does anyone know why Kristine and Michael (a boy the same height as me) are so tall?” Nobody had a response to her question. She answered for them, “because they always sit up very straight in their chairs.” every one of them immediately sat up straighter in their chairs. I realized then that the ones that teased me were somewhat insecure and perhaps jealous because they were not as tall as me. It was insecurity on their part and not a flaw on mine. I continued on that day confident that Jesus made me as tall as I was for a reason. And my height just meant that I was different, as different as each of us are. Different is neither good nor bad, it just is.

Another story from my childhood that I would like to share. I have always been shy and timid but fiercely loyal and protective over those I care about. I remember a day in Jr. High. It was a beautiful day and my best friend and I were walking home after school. We came up  behind some older girls and we were talking and not paying attention and I accidentally gave one of the girls a flat tire. If you are not familiar; a flat tire happens when you step on the person’s heel in front of you pulling off their shoe. The girl spun around with anger on her face and hands clenched into fists at her side. I fervently apologized. My  friend backed away some as the other girls advanced some. I kept apologizing and telling her that I truly did not mean to step on her shoe, and that I did not want to fight. 

We stood there looking at each other until she finally took a breath and permitted us to go around them. As we passed them the girl that received the flat kicked me really hard in the rear.

As unbelievable as it may sound I just kept on walking. I had no desire to give back anger for anger. 

I look back on that day and realize that Jesus must have been holding me and I thank Him for that. There is no doubt in my mind that if I had given into anger and retaliation I would have hurt that girl. And then her friends would have hurt me and most likely my friend. It would have only created bad feelings that would have not ended there.

By walking away and getting kicked she probably felt avenged and saved face with her friends. I had no such need, in fact I remember how hard my friend and I laughed, once we were out of ear shot. This is my example of turning the other cheek, so to speak. 

I did the best I knew how to follow the WAY until I got into college. My dream of becoming a veterinarian was shattered by an advisor that refused to help me. He simply stated that I should change my major because he would not help me. I did not have the tenacity to stand up and fight for what I wanted back then, and I just walked away a broken, worthless girl.

I tried pursuing another career path only to have that blocked as well. By then I could not see any other way to move forward and had no clue on where I was going. I had fallen off the narrow path because I did not seek Jesus in my time of trouble and despair. 

For years after that I walked the wider path.  No resistance, no expectations and no challenges. I could be and do what I thought best. I still loved Jesus, but I figured that I could navigate on my own. I have a good foundation; I can do this.   I governed my own  life. Oh, I did alright, according to the world. There were some “firsts” in my life, and I had some successes. But along with that I fell prey to becoming of the world and not just in it. The wide path held nothing but temptation, traps and pitfalls for me. The more I tried the deeper down I went. I got so low the only way I had to look was up. When I finally looked up. I found that Jesus had been there all along. Just as He promised in Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave or forsake you.” no matter where we go he is there. Psalm 139: 8-10 says it all; and summing it up it says that no matter where we journey He is there, no matter how low or how high He is there.

Now as far as my journey goes I am back on the narrow path, trying my best to follow Jesus. With a renewing of my mind, I am giving all of my heart, mind and strength to love God. I try every day to deny myself, pick up my cross and follow Him. Proverbs 3: 5-6 states it clearly. My goal now; “trust in the Lord with all my heart, and lean not on my own understanding;  In all my ways acknowledge Him and He will direct my path.”

Each day is a journey unto itself; filled with forgetting and remembering. I remind myself in good times and in bad to seek Jesus. He will never steer me wrong or try to confuse me or mislead me. 

So, every day I try to remember;

Adonai El Roi - The Lord, the God who sees is always with me, He will walk beside me encouraging and reminding me to LOVE. To love Him, love myself, love one another. No matter how difficult this world tries to make our journey, stay focused on Him and choose the narrow path for even when I stumble and fall Jesus is there to pick me up and love me, encouraging me to continue now and forever. 

And Peter

March 31, 2024

Easter Sunday

Pastor Mike

Mark 16:1-8

The stories found in the New Testament were told and written down in light of Jesus’ resurrection. When we open our Bibles to read from the Gospels or Acts or the letters of Paul, trust in Jesus’ victory over sin and death runs under all of them, like a great subterranean river. Occasionally, resurrection bubbles up and breaks through the surface, but even when it doesn’t appear to be there, it’s there, deep and mysterious and nourishing. The same storytellers who tell us what happened at the cross and the tomb, and who in no way minimize or skirt around the Jesus’ real anguish, also know that the cross and tomb did not have the last word. And they told the whole story of Jesus in that joy and in that hope.

But just as we, too, take for granted that Easter Sunday follows on the heels of Good Friday year after year, we can also forget that there was a time, brief as it may seem to us from this remove, when the resurrection was not a given. Stories like Mark 16 are about people who really did live through the passage from death to life, who experienced that aching Sabbath silence from sundown on the first day to sunup on the third. Jesus was gone, really gone – and it had happened so suddenly, so violently. Everything they had hoped for had fallen apart.

The women who went to the tomb on the first Easter morning cue us in to that original sense of defeat. They went to anoint Jesus’ body with spices and give it a proper burial. As purehearted and compassionate as their intentions were, they came as mourners, not believers. [pause] They even talked together about the difficulty of rolling the heavy stone away from the face of the tomb; they expected to find it firmly in place. Instead, they found the tomb open and a young man sitting upright where Jesus’ body should’ve been. They were terrified.

After listening to the words of the young man dressed in white, the women simply ran away. Mark puts it like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them” (16:8). The Greek words here that describe that condition are tromos and ekstasis, and you can just about hear our English equivalents in there: trauma, ecstasy. Mary, Mary, and Salome were so afraid that they trembled, so joyful that they were bewildered. That first experience of resurrection came as a complete shock. 

There’s a lesson for us, if we just linger on that moment. Jesus wants us to experience his resurrection in an integrated way, with both head and heart. His rising is announced to us as a message, just like the young man announced it to the women. We hear resurrection preached, we read about it in the scriptures, we confess it in the creed. But resurrection is also something that we feel, a truth that pierces us clear down to our depths and stirs us up. In other words, we believe in resurrection and we are seized by it. Our bodies respond to the gospel as much as our minds, and our burning hearts and gut feelings and tingling skin can point us toward mystery and miracle just as well as our ideas. Faith is born when we hear with feeling.

And what is so terrible and amazing about resurrection?

“You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. …He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him” (Mark 16:6-7).

We come to what we think is the end of the story, and it turns out to be the real beginning. We come to a moment of cold closure and find that it is unexpectedly open and airy. Resurrection sends us back into a world that we think we knew, only to discover that we don’t know the world at all. For we live in a creation where the living presence of Christ goes before us and is waiting to meet us. Ours is a world haunted by the holy.

If we can let ourselves feel some of that original defeat and shock, then we can hear something peculiar in the young man’s words to the three women: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee.’”

          ‘Tell his disciples and Peter.’

          …and Peter?

          I have some questions about that.

Why were the disciples not there on Easter morning? Why did only the women come? Where had the rest of them gone off to?

And what’s even more curious is that Peter is singled out by name. Why? Wouldn’t he be implied in the word “disciples”? Why doesn’t the angel just say, ‘Go and tell his disciples,’ and leave it at that? Why should Peter get his own special announcement?

To answer these questions we have to go back through the story of Christ’s passion and bring together some details about the disciples and Peter.

When Jesus had his final meal with the disciples during the night that he was betrayed and arrested, he told them that he, their shepherd, would soon be struck down, and that they, his sheep, would be scattered (Mark 14:26-27). In his audacious way, Peter objected to how Jesus had lumped him in with the others. He argued with Jesus: “Even though all fall away, I will not.” And Jesus argued back: “Truly I tell you, this very night, you will deny me three times.” Peter still wouldn’t let it be: “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you,” he said. That’s pretty committed. Peter loved Jesus, and he believed he’d have the power to see his conviction through to the end, that he would be able to stand by Jesus even if it meant dying with him.

After the meal, Jesus took the disciples to the garden of Gethsemane where he planned to pray. He brought Peter, James, and John a little farther into the garden than the rest, and he asked them to stay awake with him and keep watch while he prayed. But they fell asleep. Three times, Jesus came and asked them to stay awake. Three times they slept. When Jesus found them sleeping the first time, he aimed his words at Peter: “[Peter], are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? …The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mark 14:37-38). Jesus knew that Peter was trying. Jesus also knew Peter’s weakness. Peter had put himself out there as the most steadfast disciple. Maybe for that reason he was the one who had to bear Jesus’ words.

After Jesus finished praying, Judas, who had betrayed him to the chief priests for payment, came into Gethsemane with an armed crowd. When the disciples realized that Jesus had no intention of fighting back against the mob, they “all deserted him and fled.” Jesus’ words proved true: the shepherd was struck, and the sheep scattered. But wait! One remained – Peter. He may have fled with the others at first, but he circled back, and he followed the crowd at a distance until they reached the chief priest’s palace. Peter, the last disciple standing, slipped into the courtyard and took his place by the fire.

Judas had handed Jesus over. Ten had run away. Peter alone had come so far.

While Jesus was in the house being interrogated, a servant girl of the chief priest approached Peter in the courtyard, looked carefully at him, and said, “You – you were with Jesus.” Peter felt he was in real trouble. Should he get caught there, it’d be over for him. He quickly brushed her back, saying he didn’t know or understand what she was talking about. But she asked him again, and again he denied it. Others took notice, and a small crowd pressed him further: “You speak like a northerner, like a Galilean. You are one of Jesus’ people.”

Overwhelmed, scared, and defensive, Peter began to call down curses upon himself and practically shouted, “I do not know the man.” And there it was, a direct denial of his affiliation with Jesus, his love for Jesus, the new identity and vocation he had been given by Jesus. Peter denied it all with curses. He denied it with a vow. It was deep and binding speech.

The rooster crowed. Peter remembered Jesus’ prediction of his three-fold denial. Surely Peter felt that he had done something ultimate, something unforgiveable, that he had crossed over to the point of no return. Perhaps what shattered him in that moment was a sudden memory of something Jesus had once said in a sermon, back when the future of the ministry seemed bright and full of possibility. Jesus had said, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny” (Matt. 10:32-33). Crushed, Peter “broke down and wept” (Mark 14:72). And until the women arrive at the tomb on Easter morning, that’s the last we hear of Peter. A broken and brokenhearted man.

Go, tell my disciples… Well, we know why they weren’t there on Easter. Judas had cut himself loose and the rest of them had run away.

…and go tell Peter. I think we’re close to answering our questions about Peter, too. I want to bring in Luke’s Gospel here because he really puts a fine point on Peter’s unique position in the story. In Luke’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus has a conversation with Peter in which he says to him, “[Peter], listen! Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31-32).

 Jesus foresaw Peter’s cascade of failures. Jesus knew that Peter would be spiritually tested. But he also foresaw the unique gift that Peter, the Rock of the Church, would be able to give to strengthen his brothers after he had come back from those failures. So Jesus prayed for him, and his faith. Which means when Peter fell asleep in the garden, Jesus’ prayer was deeper than that sleep. And when Peter denied knowing Jesus in the courtyard, Jesus’ prayer was more definitive than that denial. At the moment when the rooster crowed and Peter’s shame engulfed him, Luke tells us that “the Lord turned and looked at Peter” (22:61) – turned and beheld him, as if to say, ‘You are going to lose sight of me for a little while, but I will not lose sight of you.’

I think Peter was singled out in the Easter story not because he a leader or a spokesman for the other disciples, but because he was somewhere else. I don’t think he was with the other ten. And even if he was with them physically, he was somewhere totally different spiritually. Peter had gone with Jesus the furthest, and he’d had the harshest failure. He had denied knowing his teacher and friend and Lord. In his own eyes, Peter had disqualified himself as a disciple. Why should he be included with the rest? So the women had to go find the ten who ran away, and then they had to go find Peter, the one who denied. “Go find the many,” the angel tells the women. “Then go find the one.” And Peter! Make sure you go get Peter.

Friends, the mercy, the terror, the joy of Easter is that even if you fall asleep when Jesus has asked you to stay awake, he will rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you;

—and even if you run away from him, he will still rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you;

—and even if you should deny him, and say you don’t know him, and with curses and vows lock yourself in a story of your own weakness and unworthiness, he will still rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you.

He is the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go and bring home the one. No matter how far you might feel from all of this, no matter how forgotten you might believe you are, someone is running after you! A messenger sent by God. A person with firsthand knowledge of the living Christ. God has put your name on another’s heart, and they are running, like the women, to catch up with you.

And Peter! And me! And you.

          So this Easter morning, I ask you: Are you hearing a name? Are you hearing a name?

          It might be your own. I think there’s room in the “and Peter” for any of us to hear our own names. Is someone calling to you?

          Or are you hearing some other name, the name of someone God loves and desires and forgives – someone who believes the story’s all over for them, that for a thousand possible reasons they are no longer disciple material, but whom God has not for one moment forgotten.

Are you hearing the call to run and find and tell?

Are you hearing the call to be found?

Mark gives us this first picture of the Easter Church. A community of those who seek and those who are sought; those who have run away, and those who are running after the ones who ran away.

If you are hearing a name this morning, perhaps with some trembling and bewilderment, and you need strength for the work of seeking, or you need courage for the work of being found, in a moment I’m going to ask you to stand. I will ask you to stand in response to that word and that feeling, so that you can receive prayer. And then I’m going to ask those of you sitting around any who stand to rise and lay hands on them in a posture of solidarity and blessing. And then I’ll pray for us.

Mark’s Easter story ends with the women initially overwhelmed by their fear. And we know from the other Gospels that Peter had to work through some stuff once he actually met the risen Christ in Galilee.

You’re either taking the risk of going to tell someone that God is looking for them, or the risk of slowing down long enough for someone to catch up with you. The story isn’t over by any means, but this is the beginning that God is making.

So, if you’re hearing a name this morning – whether it be your own or another’s – I invite you now to stand for prayer.

          [Prayer]

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

***

          Benediction

And Peter! There is always one more. There is always one more life… the forgotten, the poor, the hungry, the despised, the cast

We Are Witnesses

The Season of Lent

March 17, 2024

Pastor Mike 

Ruth 4

 The morning after Ruth went to Boaz at the threshing floor, surprising him in the night and asking him to marry her, Boaz went to Bethlehem’s city gate to see to the matter of her redemption at once. The drama of the story hinges on a piece of the Torah, the law of Moses, that called the closest male kinsman, usually a brother, to marry the widow of his deceased brother and have a son with her who would, for legal purposes, be the dead man’s son, continuing his name and inheriting his property. Boaz is closely related to Naomi and Ruth, but there is another man even closer. Boaz finds this other man and gathers ten elders of the city, and he sits them down at the gate to force the issue of who will act as the kinsman redeemer. The other man initially agrees to redeem Naomi, thinking it’s just a matter of property. But when Boaz reveals that this duty would include receiving a Moabite woman, Ruth, for a wife, the unnamed man recoils. He relinquishes his right as the closest kin, passing that right to Boaz, who promptly buys back Naomi’s lost property, takes Ruth as a wife, and bears a son with her named Obed.

The story of Ruth began with famine and death and the erosion of all security and stability for her and Naomi; it ends with harvest and birth and a new future opening up before this family, before these two women who clung to one another when they had hit rock bottom.

Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David, and she is in Jesus’ own family tree. Jesus grew up hearing this story told over and over again. It would have shaped his appreciation for his own immediate family – for his young mother Mary, favored by God; for the scandal of her miraculous pregnancy by the Holy Spirit; for his father Joseph’s courage in marrying her anyhow; and for their resilience as the threats of King Herod and of Rome loomed over them.

The story of Ruth is not at all divorced from the events of Holy Week, which we will contemplate and proclaim beginning next Sunday:

As the crowd paraded him into Jerusalem with ‘Hosanna’s and palm branches he would have looked out upon them and seen them as a glorious and unlikely community forged together by their desire and their need to be close to him, a community of the highborn and the lowborn, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, men and women, young and old, foreigners and natives.

In the upper room as he broke bread and gave it to his disciples, he might’ve thought about Ruth’s promise to Naomi – Where you go, I will go; Where you stay, I will stay; Where you die, I will die – and about the power of people on the margins who have nothing to give one another but their loyalty, their very selves.

As he prayed in the garden that the cup of suffering would pass from him, he might’ve though about Naomi, who believed with all her heart that the hand of the Lord had turned against her, that God had emptied her out and made her bitter – and how, thanks be to God, that was just chapter one of what turned out to be a beautiful story of salvation.

When the betrayer, one of his nearest and dearest friends, came to him with a battalion of soldiers, he might’ve thought about the passing of the sandal at the city gate of Bethlehem, about how we can forsake our communion and our duty, and how there was another hand to receive.

When he hung upon the cross, inviting the criminal next to him into Paradise, he might’ve thought about the foreign Moabite widow, about Ruth, whose companionship must’ve seemed absolutely worthless to Naomi and to the rest of Bethlehem when they first returned to town, but who became one of the great mothers of Israel, like Rachel, Leah, and Tamar, who became better to Naomi than seven sons.

And when, after washing his disciples’ feet, he told them to love another as he had loved them, to serve one another as he had served them, because by their love the world would know his love, his presence, his truth, and his kingdom, he might’ve been thinking about that little town of Bethlehem during the days of the judges, swimming against the stream of its times by putting God’s love and mercy into practice. He was teaching them how to be a kind of community that can shelter people as their lives fall apart and get stitched back together again.

That’s been our consistent theme throughout this series on Ruth: the dynamic relationship between personal and communal faithfulness. We saw it in chapter one, when the townswomen were there to witness Naomi’s return to town, to adjust their vision to her new, broken reality. We saw it in chapter two, when Ruth when to glean in the field of Boaz, and was not only permitted to glean, but was singled out for protection and care and blessing. Witnessing, gleaning, blessing – these may seem like small acts, but the truth is that Naomi and Ruth, two widows with no sons, and one of them a foreigner, could have so easily been overlooked or discarded or taken advantage of by their community. Instead, because Torah was being practiced in Bethlehem, the women’s resilience and mutual love was able to gain traction and move them forward into a better future.

The community comes front and center in this final chapter, too. It begins with the elders, the old men. Boaz gathers them together at the gate to witness the legal proceedings between himself and the other potential redeemer. The elders say to Boaz, “we are witnesses,” sealing his right to redeem. They bless him; they bless Ruth. They graft her into the story of Israel, counting her among the great matriarchs. The men see it all, they hold the record of this day in their memories They tell the story. Without the gate, without the elders, without the men there to perform their duty, Ruth would have no ultimate justice.

Then come the women. After Ruth and Boaz have their son, the women gather together, the very women who saw Naomi at her absolute worst. The women who did not shame her, did not try to fix her, did not exert their will upon her, but simply held her in their vision as she went through the necessary stages of bitterness and recovery. These women now come to witness the birth of Ruth’s son, the one who will inherit Naomi and Elimelech’s name and estate. They, too, offer their blessings. They tell Naomi that the Lord has favored her. They tell her that Ruth is better than “seven sons,” which is a sermon all in itself about the undercutting of the patriarchal system and the good news that your ally in the midst of suffering and survival, who chooses you and who you choose, is better than any other obligatory, perfunctory foundation of security. And then in a great culminating surprise, the women actually name the child. Obed, worshipper.

Naomi and Ruth and Boaz are incomplete without the men at the gate and the women in the birthing room. To Naomi’s scheme, to Ruth’s fidelity, to Boaz’s kindness – the community adds its blessing.

And the community of God is still doing that. We are still doing that. We are still called to add our witness and our blessing to the stories of redemption being lived out in our midst. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus tells us. Just as the Bible shows us the worst of ourselves, it also shows us the best. And this is some of the very best.

We should always be open to the new thing that God is doing in our midst, ready to repent from old habits and ways of thinking and to go a different direction, try new things. But very often what God speaks to us is a word of patience: Stay the course, abide in me, practice the essentials. Worship and serve together, take care of the least among you, advocate for the poor and the oppressed. Keep gathering together in God’s name. Keep telling the story of God’s saving involvement with all creation, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

The fact that we are maintaining the time as God’s time, the space as God’s space, the work as God’s work, can do more than we might initially suspect. We might be right where someone else in need needs us to be.

Thanks be to God for Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, who made God’s love real to another and did not let bitterness have the last word.

Thanks be to God for the men and women of Bethlehem in the days of the judges, who made it possible.

And thanks be to God for God’s own faithfulness, mercy, and love, both now and forever.

Amen.

Spread Your Wings Over Me

The Season of Lent

March 10, 2024

Pastor Mike

Ruth 3

The Book of Ruth began with Naomi and her family leaving their home in Bethlehem during a famine to go and try to make ends meet in a foreign land, the country of Moab. They lived there ten years, enough time for that strange place to almost feel normal, and Naomi and Elimelech’s sons, needing to move forward with their lives, went ahead and married Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth. Over time, all three men of the family, the father and his two sons, died. In her grief and supreme sense of displacement, Naomi set off to return to her own people in Bethlehem. One of her daughters-in-law, Orpah, opted to stay behind in Moab; the other, Ruth, vowed to go with Naomi, live in Israel, and take care of her mother-in-law until death. As a husbandless, sonless, bitter version of her former self, Naomi walked back through the gate of Bethlehem. The townsfolk were stunned and could only ask, “Is this Naomi?” Naomi, the local without her old place, and Ruth, the foreigner determined to carve out a place for herself, settled into life during the busyness of harvest time. And that’s chapter one.

While gleaning grain to provide for her mother-in-law, Ruth the Moabite meets Boaz, a man of Bethlehem and the owner of the field. Boaz acts kindly toward Ruth, promising to protect her while she gleans, feeding her at his own table, and sending her home to Naomi with an abundance of grain. When Ruth returns in the evening and tells Naomi about her run-in with Boaz, the women realize how lucky – or, we might say, providential – that encounter was. “He’s closely related to us!” Naomi shouts – meaning Boaz is eligible, through marriage, to redeem them, to continue Elimelech’s family line and protect the family’s assets. “Keep going to his field,” Naomi tells Ruth. “Keep getting to know him. See what happens.” And that’s chapter two.

Where we are today is chapter three, and here the action peaks. Wanting a future of security rather than insecurity, Naomi and Ruth decide to shoot their shot. Naomi gives instructions: “Tonight, at the threshing floor, Boaz will be all alone. He’ll work, eat, drink, and be merry. Ruth, wash and anoint yourself, dress yourself, and go meet him there. Uncover his feet and lie down as he sleeps.” Naomi is asking Ruth to take on a great personal risk: a foreign widow, reduced to gleaning in a field, going to present herself and request redemption of the propertied, respected, above-reproach older man. To do it in under the cover of darkness, secretly and stealthily. The sexual subtext and tension are obvious. They are, actually, important. Risk and desire are at work, swirling around the threshing floor like the chaff.

As we zero in on this midnight encounter between Ruth and Boaz, we should remember that all this was Naomi’s idea. She is scheming.

If you’re scheming you’ve moved beyond bitterness, beyond despair. Sometimes we might scheme out of anxiety or fear or a need to get or keep control; but sometimes scheming is a form of hope, a way of clawing beyond bitterness and despair. This is especially true if you’re scheming from the very bottom of the social ladder, like Naomi; if you’ve got nothing left but a wily idea, and if that wily idea is born of love, it might just be a form of hope. Hope doesn’t always need to be serene; hope can be scrappy. .

As the chapter unfolds, three times some form of the statement “I will do whatever you tell me” is spoken. First, Naomi to Ruth: “He” – referring to Boaz – “He will tell you what you should do.” Then, Ruth to Naomi: “Whatever you to me, I will do.” And finally, Boaz to Ruth: “Whatever you say I will do for you.” Ruth promises to follow Naomi’s words; Naomi says Boaz will take charge; Boaz gives the reigns to Ruth.

These three characters are putting themselves in one another’s power, in one another’s trust throughout the chapter. They are giving everything while also consenting to everything. Three persons, each acting out of their own center, each reaching, risking, and receiving; three persons, fully themselves, yet working in one mysterious accord, with desire and a reversal of power at the heart of it.

In this way, Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are realizing the life and love of the Trinity, of our three-in-one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Any time we talk about the Trinity we come to the fundamentals, the essentials. And we talk not only about who God is but about who we are, for we are made in this God’s image and likeness. The Trinity is essentially a mystery; all attempts to describe it rationally fall short. Which is fine, because it’s not a doctrine to be memorized but a reality to be entered into and lived through prayer.

Humans are made in the image of a communal God. I am made for you, and you are made for me. We belong to one another, and to all of creation, at the most basic level of our being. Which brings us to a very important distinction, the distinction between being an individual and being a person. And here I want to let Thomas Merton, the Kentucky-based Trappist monk who died in 1968, speak about this. Merton’s words come from a conference that he gave in Alaska of all places, where he was searching out a possible location for secluded living as a hermit. (I guess Kentucky had gotten too crowded-feeling for him, so he went poking around Alaksa. God bless.)

Merton says this about personhood and the Trinity:

“We misunderstand personality completely if we think, ‘My personality is nothing but my little exclusive portion of human nature.’ Because it isn’t. That is my individuality; when I die that individuality has…got to disappear immediately… Personality is not individuality. Individuality is exclusive; personality is not. Each of us has an individuality which is exclusive, but that is not the whole story, and that is not the person that you are trying to fulfill. If you try to fulfill an exclusive individuality as if it were a person, you end up in a complete self-contradiction, because what the person really is is an existence for others, and the pattern for that is the Trinity.

“The divine persons don’t have three pieces of the divine nature. They have one divine nature and each one exists unto the others, for the others. Perhaps you begin to see something of the sense of the refusal to assert one’s own exclusive individuality in the presence of the other, of being completely open to the other. On the other hand, you cannot at the same time be completely absorbed in the other. There has to be a certain distance. How do you reconcile the fact that the person is not just an exclusive little fence around a section of nature and yet is different and unique? You have to combine uniqueness and complete openness and non-exclusiveness, and the only answer to that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who confers on the human person this particular character of being completely open and yet being nonetheless unique.”[1]

 Let’s apply that. I exist for you and with you, in relationship to you and God and all of creation. And you exist for me and with me, in relationship to me and God and all of creation. I don’t get to define myself over here in this corner in distinction from everything else and then come and say, “This is me – and you have no right to say anything about it!” And you don’t get to define yourself in your little corner and come and say, “This is me – and you have no place in determining who I am!” We are created to be fully ourselves, pouring ourselves out freely through our own loving choice; and we are created to be fully open, receiving and responding to the free gifts of others without fear. When this way of life is practiced and relished and celebrated, we have the Church.

We spend much of our lives, certainly the first twenty or thirty years, working on the project of our individuality, our self-creation. With God’s help, somewhere along the way we are convicted of sin and seduced by grace, and we spend the rest of our lives sloughing off the crust of that individuality to embrace the power of personhood, of knowing and being known, giving and being given to. We receive who we are.

Naomi is looking out for Ruth’s welfare. Ruth is looking out for Naomi’s welfare. Boaz, once he recovers from his shock, receives Ruth and, by doing so, looks out for both her and Naomi’s welfare. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. It’s erotic in the most wholesome sense, because each of them desires this life of mutual consideration and choice.

And here’s what can happen when we embrace the Trinitarian shape of our life together: we are set free from the identities and stories that hold undue power over us in the world. This chapter, chapter three, with its threshing floor and darkness, is the only chapter of Ruth where Ruth is not referred to as a Moabite. In the darkness, in the moment of risk and reversal, of give and take, Ruth is no longer a Moabite, no longer a foreigner, no longer a widow. She is no longer defined by where she came from or what she’s lost. Instead, she’s defined by her essence.

“You are a worthy woman,” Boaz says.

Embracing a self that is born of communion always feels like we are entering a dark mystery. And that holy darkness is where we actually give and receive the truth of who we are.

So, one way to test whether or not we are pressing into the life that God wants for us as a people is to notice whether or not we are hung up on secondary things, secondary identities: race and class, male or female, local or transplant, Methodist or seeker, young or old, straight or queer, Republican or Democrat. We might also ask ourselves: Do I feel invisible here at Church? If so, that’s not good. Or: Am I thrusting myself to the center of things to try and prove my value? If so, that’s not good either. Somewhere the dynamic of giving and receiving, the dance of uniqueness and openness is getting lost. What we want is for those secondary identities to get lost in the darkness of communion. What we want is for everyone to be so fluidly involved in mutual concern and responsibility that you can never quite tell who’s at the center and who’s at the periphery at any given moment.

After Boaz wakes up and finds Ruth by his uncovered feet – that’s the PG version – after he asks her to tell him what she wants him to do for her, Ruth says, “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family” (NIV). Cover me with your blanket, in other words. This is basically a marriage proposal. But here’s something wonderful. The word for “corner of your garment” in Hebrew is kaw-nawf. And kaw-nawf has a wide range of meanings. It can be translated as wing, edge, extremity, border, cover, or shirt. In the majority of its uses in the Old Testament, it actually means “wing.” Many translations translate it that way here. For example, the English Standard Version has it like this: Ruth says, “Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer” (ESV).

We’ve already had this word once in Ruth, back in chapter two, in perhaps the most significant verse, where Boaz blesses Ruth in the field. Remember? He said to her, “May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”

        So, in the field, Boaz said, “You’ve taken refuge under God’s wings.”

        And at the threshing floor, Ruth now says, “Spread yours wings over me.”

        In other words: Hey, Boaz, you’ve said that God will do it, so you do it!

I love that. God’s grace and kindness must be incarnated. They must be made flesh. They must not be abstractions or sentiments but concrete realities. We are responsible, as persons made in God’s image, for showing God to one another.

Oh, how the world would be transformed if we treated our wings like God’s wings.

May we, God’s people, consider the necessity of our communion together in the Spirit.

May we neither lose ourselves in that communion nor hold ourselves back from it.

May we give all and receive all.

And may God help us to do it, for our sake and for the sake of all those yet to receive this indescribable gift, those still waiting to be gathered under the shadow, the holy darkness of God’s wings.

Amen.

[1] Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1989), 86-87.

Blessings Begin

March 3, 2024

The Season of Lent

Pastor Mike

Ruth 2

As we pick up this story in its second chapter, two characters move to center stage.

Ruth, the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi, is one of them. Ruth married Naomi’s son in Moab and then, after his death, vowed to return with Noami – herself husbandless and sonless – to land of Judah and care for her: “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” Ruth was both sacrificing her future for Naomi’s sake and going against the grain of the standard animosity between Moabites and Israelites.

The other character who steps to center stage is Boaz. He is a local of Bethlehem, a “prominent rich man,” a “kinsman” of Naomi’s. As the chapter unfolds, we learn that Boaz is a landowning farmer, with chief servants and field hands under him. By the way that he greets Ruth in the fields as “my daughter,” we know that she must be rather young and he, if not old, is certainly old enough that their generational difference is noticeable.

The actions and interactions of these two characters, the young foreign widow and the rich local man, occupy the rest of book. But let’s not forget that this story begins and ends with Naomi, her bitterness and, at the end, through the son of Ruth and Boaz, her redemption. So, we’ll want to keep an eye on her, too, as she moves through and eventually out of her bitterness.

Torah is a Hebrew word that means teaching, instruction, law. It can be used to refer to the whole Hebrew Bible or just to the Pentateuch, but when it’s used within the Hebrew Bible it often specifically refers to the divine commandments revealed to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai, God’s instructions for the Israelites about how to live and grow as God’s people.

The failure to keep Torah resulted in the tumultuous, violent, moral depravity of the days of the judges. But here in Bethlehem, the Torah is observed to the ‘t’, and it’s important for us as readers to brush up on two elements of Torah if we’re to understand what’s happening in Ruth chapter 2.

The first element of Torah concerns gleaning. When someone gleans in a field it means that they are following the harvesters and taking whatever fruit or grain the harvesters overlooked. Here is the section from Deuteronomy where God teaches the people to allow gleaning:

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this. (24:19-22)

It’s not often that God gives a rationale for a command, but here God tells the people that they should leave food behind for the poor out of gratitude for being freed from slavery themselves. By remembering their own reversal of fortunes and God’s mercy towards them, they too are to practice mercy toward those “bound” by difficult circumstances in their own community.

In her effort to provide for Naomi despite their material poverty, Ruth takes advantage of this teaching and goes gleaning. As a widow and a foreigner, she certainly qualifies as a gleaner.

It’s beautiful, but did you catch Boaz’s words to Ruth about staying in his field because of the danger of going to glean in other fields? This is because women gleaning in the fields were easy targets for sexual violence. Gleaning, though commanded by Torah, was often not safe. That fits right in with what we know about the “days of the judges.” Only, not here in Bethlehem – at least not in Boaz’s fields. Here, Ruth and the other women shall glean in safety. The hired hands are instructed specifically against touching or reproaching her. They’re even told to make the gleaning easier and more profitable for her by pulling out whole stalks and leaving them in her path.

The second element of Torah that we need to know about is something called Levirate marriage. It explains why Boaz being a kinsman of Naomi is so significant, and why Naomi is thrilled to learn that Boaz’s field is where Ruth ended up that day. Again, here’s the relevant section of Deuteronomy:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. (25:5-6).

In other words, the first son of a Levirate marriage will legally be the dead man’s son for purposes of inheritance. When a brother wasn’t available, the option was extended to the next-closest male family member. In ancient Israel, families were patriarchal, ruled by men; they were patrilineal, passing inheritance and family name from fathers to sons; and they were endogamous, which means it was socially preferable that people from the same tribe or the same extended family get married. In a context like that, the Levirate custom makes sense as a way of protecting both widows and family legacies and assets.

So, if you know all that, then you’ll get the “wink” that the writer gives us in the very first verse of this chapter when Boaz is introduced as Naomi’s rich kinsman. Here’s a person eligible to fulfil the Levirate custom and act as a kinsman redeemer for the family. So, we’re already primed to want to know what this guy is like. How convenient that Ruth ends up in Boaz’s field!

It turns out that Boaz’s actions – from blessing his servants in the fields to welcoming Ruth to eat from his own table – reveal him to be a kind and righteous man. When Ruth returns to Naomi at the end of the day with an unlikely bounty, and Naomi learns that it was Boaz who helped Ruth to prosper, we glimpse the first sign of Naomi’s new life. She cries out, “Blessed be he of the Lord, who has not failed in His kindness to the living or to the dead!” After all the bitterness, Naomi names this first kindness from the Lord, which was revealed in the material kindness of Boaz. Blessings begin. There will be more.  

The point I want to stress today is the dynamic between individual action and community faithfulness. Ruth and Naomi are simply trying to survive. They need to get back on their feet after returning to Bethlehem. They don’t have husbands or sons to provide for them, and the future of Naomi’s assets are in jeopardy. Going to glean as a young foreigner was a vulnerable thing for Ruth to do. It was fraught with risk, for she could not control how she would be treated by the fieldhands. She did not know how Israelites would respond to seeing a Moabite taking advantage of their harvest. But she did it anyway, for Naomi.

Yet, as she goes, she experiences a community that is practicing faithfulness to Torah. The gleaning is not just permitted but encouraged. Ruth joins a company of gleaners. Boaz follows the law of Moses, the instructions that came from God’s very mouth. By doing so, he provides food for the most vulnerable members of his community. It may not have been happening anywhere else in Israel in the days of the judges, but it was happening here.

As for the Levirate custom, more to come on that. That’s where the real juice of the story is, and we’ll get there next week. Needless to say, we’ve been primed for it.

But also, the blessings – all the blessings. The blessings exchanged between Boaz and his servants: “The Lord be with you.” “The Lord bless you.” The blessing that Boaz speaks over Ruth: “May the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge, reward you fully” (NLT). The Lord’s name is honored and spoken in love. It’s in everyone’s mouth. People know God and God’s ways and they’re speaking God’s name over one another.

Ruth has come to take refuge under the wings of the Lord, the God of Israel. But the way those wings are made known, the way that she as an individual in a fragile situation can actually feel the protective embrace and guardian shadow of God is through the community’s practice of gleaning and blessing, through the people’s faithfulness to God’s instructions. Ruth is a story of people taking risks for one another, of individual commitment and love and courageous action but it’s the foundation of the community and its adherence to Torah that holds up those individual acts and makes them prosper. If Boaz and his men had been scoundrels, if they had neglected their obligation to care for widows and foreigners, if blessings had been traded out for curses or silence or banal speech, then Ruth and Naomi, no matter how tenacious, would have been lost to the underbelly of history.

There’s a lesson in here for us as a church. And the lesson is very simply that the invisible God must be made visible, and that hearers of the Word must also be doers. This is what the Apostle Paul has in mind in Ephesians when he says: “And God placed all things under [Christ’s] feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”

We as the church are the body of Christ, the incarnation and extension of his love in history, in our local time and place. It is by our faithfulness and mercy and love, our vigilance in keeping his commandments, that the foreigner, the widow, and the fatherless, the hungry, the poor, and the needy are covered by God’s wings.

Do you consider your participation here among this people to be a participation in the life of Jesus? Do you consider your hands to be his hands? Your mind to be his mind? Your words to be his words? Those are heavy and good questions to ponder during this season of Lent. The union of Christ with his church is both a deep mystical bond and a nitty-gritty reality manifest in daily life. If we are just here superficially or half-heartedly or by habit, then we have lost both the deep mystical joy and the prophetic urgency.

This story also teaches us how to properly see one another. All of us have a bit of Ruth in us. There is a reason we come here, into the fields. We are in need. We need the embrace of God, the love of the community, the provision of the harvest. There is great courage and great need at work in every person who steps through those doors, including you. How would you speak to one another if you believed that each of you was here, gathered around the table, because of great desperations and great hope? How would you honor the person who comes to this table for the very first time, if you knew that in their coming there was both great risk and great courage?

Do you see? The personal and the communal dynamics are at work in each of us. We come to the Table in our need, and we offer the Table to those in need. We extend mercy because we have received mercy. We love because we are loved. We accept because we have been accepted.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Is this Naomi?

The Season of Lent

February 25, 2024

Pastor Mike

Ruth 1

Up to now in this Lenten series on Ruth we’ve come only as far as the first seven words: “In the days when the judges ruled…” (1:1). We had to pause there last week and inquire about those days, the days between Joshua’s leadership over Israel’s twelve tribes one the one side and David’s united Kingdom on the other. The days of the judges were bad days. Days of social insecurity, ongoing warfare, and faithlessness. Local chieftains called judges were raised up by God to bring about deliverance and repentance, but their success was only ever temporary. Upon their deaths, the people would relapse into sin.

Reading Judges is like listening to a record skip. Sick of itself, the book throws up its hands after 21 chapters and spits out a final condemnation: “In those days…everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” That’s the 10,000-foot view; that’s the headline.

Only – turn the page, and the story of Ruth has something different to show us. In a little out-of-the-way corner of this precarious and divided country, God’s law has become one community’s way of life. Individual persons like Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz are upheld by a strong community fiber as they honor one another with lovingkindness and contribute to each other’s redemption.

When “the days” confound us, the Book of Ruth calls our focus back to the ground on which our feet stand, shows us the eternal importance of our next word or action, small as they may seem. A community can defy the diagnosis of the times, it seems, and all things end well in the story of Ruth.

Even so, just as we miss much about this story if we don’t first consider “the days,” we will miss even more if we don’t let ourselves begin where the story begins, in the utter desolation, anguish, and vulnerability of Naomi, a bereaved widow and mother, far from home and at odds with God. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

We have to linger with Naomi’s losses and bitterness and elemental need to simply survive if we are to feel viscerally her final reversal of fortune and love of those around her which makes it possible. It is very much like this Lenten season, which we must start with the dust and ash of our mortality and brokenness. This is the way of conversion and ongoing healing – from cross to empty tomb; out of darkness, into light. Let us consider Naomi, a sweet woman turned bitter by life.

In a dark twist, famine has come to the House of Bread. That’s what Bethlehem means – House of Bread. The famine causes Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, to uproot his family and lead them away from their home in Judah. He takes them to the fields of Moab, a country with deeply entrenched animosity toward the Israelites. But in that hostile place they are able to find what they need to get by. Suddenly, Elimelech dies. Husbandless in a foreign land is a fragile place to be for Naomi. Luckily, she has her two sons to protect and provide for her.

Time passes. Her sons take Moabite wives and mingle their Israelite bloodline with the bloodline of the enemy. In theory, this was a big deal. Hebrew Bible scholar Robert Alter explains that “for biblical Israel, Moab is an extreme negative case of a foreign people. A perennial enemy, its origins, according to the story of Lot’s daughter in Genesis 19, are in an act of incest. The Torah actually bans any sort of intercourse, social, cultic, or sexual, with the Moabites” (58). But we are not told what Namoi thinks about her sons’ actions. Life must go on.

After moving from place to place in Moab for ten years, both her sons die, leaving now three widows from two different nations unprotected and awkwardly linked by what they have all lost. Having heard that the famine in her home country ended, Naomi decides that she has no other option but to return. She tries to free her daughters-in-law from their obligation to go with her. Somehow, even in her pain, she concerns herself with their future and wants to give them another chance to become wives and mothers while they are young. After an initial objection, one of the women, Orpah, accepts Naomi’s blessing and turns back to remain in Moab. But the other woman, Ruth, clings to Naomi and vows by the name of Naomi’s God to be with her for as long as they are both alive.

Ten years earlier, Naomi had left Bethlehem with her husband and two sons. Now, she returns with only a Moabite daughter-in-law in tow. When things got tough at home back in the days of famine, she sure tried to better her circumstances! She and Elimelech made the hard call, leaving home for a better opportunity, trying something new over there. But the effort completely backfired, and she has ended up worse than before. She went off sweet and full. She has returned bitter and empty.

Remember, Ruth’s companionship, while beautiful in our eyes as readers, is not necessarily a comfort to Naomi. What is Namoi going to do with this woman when she’s back on Israelite soil? How is she going to care for her? How is she going to explain her? Will she need to protect her? Ruth’s presence may at first make Naomi’s predicament more insecure, not less. 

And, oh, how she blames God for it all. “The Lord’s hand has come out against me” – that’s what she says. God is behind it: the deaths, the emptiness, the bitterness. Naomi is still willing to use God’s name, has not thrown it completely out in disgust. But she has resigned herself to the fact that for some unexplained reason God has decided to become her enemy.

When she comes through the town gate, the women lean toward one another and ask in hushed tones, “Is this Naomi?” Ten years is a long time to be gone, so we might hear their question as simply an attempt to recognize and remember her. But there’s a deeper meaning to their question. It is as if they are asking, Can this really be the same woman, the same Naomi, who left us? Is this what’s become of her? This is not the person we once knew?  What has life done to her?

It's one thing for life to fall apart; it’s another thing to have to walk back into town and face your community. Being perceived in suffering can be an additional form of suffering for many of us. We’d prefer to hide it. But some losses just can’t be hidden.

Is this Naomi?

Happily, we are still just at chapter 1 of the story. But we shouldn’t rush past it. We shouldn’t let Ruth’s compassion and poetry, inspiring as they are, eclipse the fact that this is a story that starts with Naomi, her shattered life a microcosm of those very bad days in which she lived. Only from here does this become a story about the difference love and community can make for someone whose life has gone to pieces.

Naomi at rock bottom gives us permission to face up to our own brokenness. Sometimes, before we can heal, we have to be able to admit in the presence of the townsfolk, No, you’re right. I’m not who I once was. My suffering has changed me. And God is against me. Call me Mara, which means bitter.

For this, our congregational life and witness, to be a House of Bread, a house of abundance and healing, we first have to be okay walking through those doors and being seen in all our mess. God’s holy assembly is a place to be seen and asked about, a place we can come to even when we’re worse off than the last time we were here.

That’s the first gift that the community gives Naomi. They are there to receive her back, not as they remember her but as she actually is. They don’t judge her or minimize her pain. They don’t give advice. They don’t say a thing about this strange Moabite woman who’s with her.

Instead, they adjust their sight to match her reality. Because of that, they earn the right to speak blessings over her at the story’s end, when what was bitter becomes sweet again, and Naomi brings the son of Ruth and Boaz to her own breast.

Friends, Jesus did not come to save the righteous but sinners. He did not come to heal the healthy but the sick. So let us show ourselves to one another, and let us adjust our vision to properly see one another, not as we’d like them to be but as they are. In those basic acts of showing and seeing, there are already great energies of courage and compassion at work.

In that honest showing, in that disciplined sight, we are on our way to new beginnings.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Seeing All Creation Through Transfigured Eyes

February 11, 2024

Mark 9:2-9

John Gribas

(New Revised Standard Version)

The Transfiguration

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, [3] and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. [4] And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. [5] Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." [6] He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. [7] Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" [8] Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. [9] As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

 Sermon: Seeing All Creation Through Transfigured Eyes

 Wow. This is an amazing story. It’s no wonder the three disciples were terrified. Peter’s awkward offer to build some shelters is understandable; how many of us when surprised by a new and profound situation have ended up babbling something kind of silly? Jesus’ sudden radiance—apparently turned up to eleven—and the sudden appearance of long-dead icons of the faith… This was no ordinary day for Peter, James, and John.

Actually, I can imagine why it might not seem all that amazing—at least in light of all the other amazing stories we see in scripture. The creation of the universe. That’s a big one, for sure. The almost total destruction of the earth through a worldwide flood. The parting of the Red Sea. The fortified walls of Jericho falling down. A reluctant prophet swallowed by a great fish and then spit up onto dry land.

Certainly, Peter and company were well-versed in these stories that were so central to their lives as Jewish men. But then, for Peter, James, and John, this amazing story, the transfiguration…wasn’t a story. It was an experience. They were there. They saw and heard all of this. And that cloud that overshadowed them. Have you ever been high on a mountain trail and had a cloud move in and overtake you? It’s awesome, and rather frightening, and something to remember.

So the fact that this was not just a story but an experience should help us appreciate why Jesus’ three companions were so overwhelmed.

At the same time, this wasn’t their first up-close-and-personal amazing  experience with Jesus. Water into wine. Healings. Calming a storm. Feeding the 5000. Walking on water. These men had seen a lot in Jesus’ company. So why did this particular amazing thing seem to stand out in terms of its impact and significance.

As I spent time with this passage in preparing for today, something dawned on me. All of the previous amazing things these disciples had witnessed and experienced were situations where Jesus’ presence, words, and actions showed his ability to somehow impact his external world: physical substances like water and bread, the weather, hurting and broken people, death.

These things left Jesus’ followers amazed. They also often led to questions like, “Who is this man who does such things? What should we think of this person who the wind and waves obey? Where does he come from?”

The transfiguration was different.

It was different because it revealed, not what Jesus could “do,” but who Jesus really was.

Rather than prompting questions about Jesus’ origin, nature, and true identity, the transfiguration experience offered an unequivocal, gigawatt-sized answer.

"This is my Son, the Beloved.”

And then, some unequivocal instructions. “Listen to him!"

At least, these instructions seem pretty unequivocal. But I have to wonder, why all of this for such a straightforward message? Why single out these three followers? Why have them go with Jesus up a high mountain, apart and by themselves? Why the turned-up-to-eleven brightness? Why have Moses and Elijah there as backup singers for this cosmic performance? Why the cloud?

Was it because Peter, James, and John were simply bad at listening? Maybe. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether the emphasis in God’s brief three-word instruction was on word number three, not word number one.

Not “LISTEN to him,” but “Listen to HIM!”

HIM! This one you see here, now. Radiant beyond imagining. This one whose magnificence summons the likes of Moses and Elijah from their places in eternity. When you listen to this one you know as Jesus, you need to understand who you are listening to. You, Peter, James, and John, take in all of this and understand. You are listening to HIM!

And then, in verse eight, we are informed that “Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.”

Only Jesus. But now, for these particular followers, definitely not “only” Jesus. How could it be, given what they just saw and heard and learned? This Jesus, this carpenter turned rabbi from Nazareth, this prophet who said and did amazing and inexplicable things, was now…different.

You ever watch the Antiques Road Show? I love that show. People arrive with all kinds of things. Most often things that have been in their home and in their possession for a long time. Things that often have sentimental value and that they know well—or think they know well. And then, they discover something rather amazing.

Those funny animal figures seemingly carved out of some pale-green rock, that someone found in a dusty box in their grandparents’ attic, and that they so often nonchalantly played with when they were young—these, in truth, turn out to be rare jade Ming dynasty royalty tokens. Ancient, precious, and priceless.

In some ways, with this revelation, nothing has changed. The figures are still the same beloved childhood toys that they were. But in other, very real ways, they are and will always be quite, quite different. At least in the eyes of the one who brought them in to the Antiques Road Show.

And so it was for Peter, James, and John. They traveled up that mountain with Jesus. Who did they travel down with? We might be tempted to look at verse eight here and say, “only Jesus.” But, no. Not only Jesus. No way! The owner of those strange, pale-green animal figures didn’t leave the Antiques Road Show with “only some childhood playthings.”

But, what changed? What changed for the one leaving the Antiques Road Show? What changed for Peter, James, and John? What was transfigured? Jesus? I guess I have to say “Yes.” I mean, in my experience this piece of scripture is most often referred to as “the transfiguration of Jesus.” At the same time, the word “transfiguration” suggests some kind of change, and I think we can safely say that Peter, James, and John came away from their experience with a dramatically changed understanding.

I mentioned Fr. Richard Rohr in an earlier message. Rohr is a Franciscan priest and author, and his work offers some keen insights into differences between the “Jesus” the disciples followed up the mountain and what was revealed to those disciples on the mountaintop. I believe Rohr would argue that what was revealed was not simply a brighter and more awesome “Jesus,” but “the universal Christ.”

In a meditation written for Advent, Father Richard asks:

What if we’ve missed the point of who Christ is, what Christ is, and where Christ is? I believe that a Christian is simply one who has learned to see Christ everywhere. Understanding the Universal or Cosmic Christ can change the way we relate to creation, to other religions, to other people, to ourselves, and to God. Knowing and experiencing this Christ can bring about a major shift in consciousness.

The kind of major shift in consciousness Peter, James, and John experienced on that mountain, perhaps. Father Richard continues by describing this universal Christ as “the blueprint of reality from the very start,” and as “love and beauty exploding outward in all directions.”

Here are a few more ideas from Father Richard’s meditation:

In Jesus…God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world. The formless took on form in someone we could hear, see, and touch, making God easier to love.

And…

Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. The Christ [is] clearly historically older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time; Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time.

And…

When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than the historical incarnation that we call Jesus. Jesus is the visible map. The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us and includes all of creation since the beginning of time.

I don’t know about you but, while I find ideas like this really intriguing…they also kind of make my head hurt. These are big ideas. I suppose that makes sense since they are ideas about the material and the immaterial, the finite and the eternal, Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ.

Maybe the bigness of all of this explains the reaction of the disciples. For finite creatures, getting a glimpse of the divine has got to be more than a little uncomfortable.

Actually, I think I can relate. I have a vivid memory of a moment when I was a kid. Probably about eight or nine years old. It was a late summer evening. I had been outside in my yard, bouncing on one of those overinflated tractor tire innertubes that were my generation’s version of a trampoline. I lay inside that innertube, my head resting on one side and my feet propped up on other, looking up into the clear night. The stars were everywhere and so far away. How far? Very, very far. And then beyond the stars? The darkness of space…forever.

I don’t know how long I lay there, giving my mind freedom to explore the idea of forever. But in a moment something happened. I know the human mind cannot truly grasp the idea of forever, but it seemed to my eight or nine year old mind that I was really close to doing just that. Super close. Too close. And it was terrifying.

I had this sense that, if I allowed myself one more small step into whatever it was I was grasping, it would inevitably grasp me, and every molecule that was part of me would separate and shoot out in a different direction…into the cosmos. That idea seemed like something to avoid, so I quickly reigned in those thoughts, closed my eyes, let my heartbeat slow down to something closer to normal, and headed inside.

That night, it seemed the evening sky was transfigured for me. But in actuality, nothing about the evening sky changed. What changed was my perception of it. I think it would be correct to say that my eyes were transfigured.

And it seems to me that on that mountaintop, the eyes of Peter, James, and John were also transfigured. Yes, the gospel story draws our attention to a real and awesome change in Jesus. But Mark doesn’t just say that Jesus was transfigured but that Jesus “was transfigured before them…” Before them. In their presence. In their sight.

Have you ever heard teachings about the dangers of always wanting “mountaintop” experiences to fuel one’s faith—mountaintop experiences like the one Peter, James, and John had? I’ve heard teachings like that, reminding me that most of life is lived down in the valleys and away from the awesomeness. I get it. We live in a time a place that constantly seeks the spectacular. And I understand the caution against seeking or expecting our life of faith to be a continuous stream of amazing “mountaintop” experiences.

But I don’t know if that is the best take-away from this gospel transfiguration story. What I see here is a story of some individuals who had an opportunity to get away from the hustle and bustle of life, spent some private time with Jesus, and were blessed to recognize in Jesus something else. Something cosmic and timeless and huge. The Christ.

And while in one way what happened on that mountaintop stayed on that mountaintop, Peter, James, and John were changed. They came down from that mountain with transfigured eyes. I suspect that they never saw Jesus the same way again.

Why can’t we all have a transfiguration experience? Well, I think we can. And I don’t think it requires a mountain trek or radiating garments or Moses or Elijah or a cloud or a voice from heaven. We have to remember, at the time, those disciples were living on the other side of the resurrection. We see Jesus from a very different historical angle. But even with our historical advantage, and even with scripture for revelation, it seems help is often needed for recognizing the universal Christ. That help might come through inspiration from an actual hike to a mountaintop. Or some quiet time of solitude. Reading a little Richard Rohr. Possibly laying in an innertube and gazing into the forever of the night sky on a summer evening.

In so many ways and through so many experiences, I think Jesus is inviting all of us to look at him and to see the Christ. And since Jesus identifies so closely with humanity that he says, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me,” I think he wants us to use our transfigured eyes to see the Christ not just in him, but in all of humanity. And as we profess this Christ as the one through whom all things were made, certainly using our transfigured eyes can reveal the hand of the maker in all of creation.

This might sound like a pretty big ask. It might take some practice. So let me finish up here today with one practical idea. Growing up, Fred Weber was an important spiritual mentor to me and hundreds of other young people in Havre, Montana. A committed Catholic man, Fred attended mass regularly. Catholics celebrate communion in each service. During each mass, as the line of people filed past him in his pew for the bread and wine, he intentionally looked at each one, and to himself he would say, “Hello, Jesus.” “Hello, Jesus.” “Hello, Jesus.”

I don’t think he read Richard Rohr, but I know that what Fred was doing was recognizing, in each of these fellow human beings, Christ—the universal Christ.

Recall the words of Richard Rohr from earlier: “I believe that a Christian is simply one who has learned to see Christ everywhere.” If this is so, then Fred Weber was doing a very good job of practicing his Christianity…and putting his transfigured eyes to excellent use.

May we all look to Jesus and, in and through him, see the Christ. And in that seeing be blessed with transfigured eyes allowing us to see Christ in others and in all creation.

Amen.

How We Tell the Story Matters

February 18, 2024

Judges 2:6-23; 21:25

Pastor Mike

This Lent, I’ll be preaching through the book of Ruth. Ruth is a short, four-chapter book in the Hebrew scriptures, those books of the Bible that we often call the Old Testament. In Christian Bibles, Ruth is placed right between the books of Judges and 1 Samuel. Judges follows on the heels of the Book of Joshua, and Joshua on the heels of the Five Books of Moses ending in Deuteronomy. It’s good to remember that for our Jewish brothers and sisters, the ordering of the scriptures is different. In Hebrew Bibles, Ruth is placed towards the end of the whole thing, among what’re called “The Writings for reasons having to do with public worship. Jewish folks read Ruth in its entirety on Shavuot, a holiday coinciding with the Israelite wheat harvest and celebrating God’s giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. These themes of bread and law, of God’s provision and human faithfulness, are central to the story of Ruth.

Despite its brevity, Jews and Christians have praised Ruth for millennia for its dense, rich narrative put down in masterfully crafted yet accessible language. It’s one of the easiest and quickest books of the Bible to read, yet the power and depth of its message rewards repeated readings. Many Christians I’ve met who struggle to connect with the Bible still love Ruth.

Ruth tells the story of an Israelite woman named Naomi who experiences displacement, the death of her spouse and children, and then a reversal of fortunes through the love and boldness of her daughter-in-law, a foreigner named Ruth. Ruth becomes King David’s great-grandmother, which means she was an ancestor of Jesus. Jesus’ genealogy is recorded by both Matthew and Luke, and in each of their long lists of fathers begetting sons, Ruth is one of the few women to receive an honorable shoutout.

Sounds great, Mike. Soooo, did you make a mistake? Why all this doom and gloom from the book of Judges this morning? Why did we sit here and listen to all this dysfunctional stuff about idolatry and oppression and battle and God’s anger?

The reason is because the very first words of the Book of Ruth, chapter one verse one, are these: “In the days when the judges judged…” (Ruth 1:1).

In the days when the judges judged. This is very different than saying, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Ruth is timestamped. Ruth’s story unfolds within a very specific moment of history. We need to know something about that moment, about those days when the judges judged, in order to understand what Ruth can teach us.

The days of the Judges were bad days. Leaderless days. Days of division. Of insecurity. Of divided hearts and loyalties. Moses had been the strong, wonder-working leader for the whole people of Israel. Through Moses, God had begun forging a holy people out of the freed Israelite slaves. Through Joshua, God had let that people into a land to inhabit, a land promised to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But after Joshua died, there was no leader of his caliber to replace him, and the people settled into their newly conquered lands according to tribal affiliation. Tribal identity became more important than a unified identity as God’s covenant people, and the new generations no longer knew the Lord or remembered God’s works or were faithful to God’s law and covenant.

Because of this, their life in this land was marked by turmoil rather than peace, by political, economic, and religious instability. The people were under military threat from all sides, as well as from within their own newly drawn borders. The people fell into worshipping the regional gods and idols. God made God’s anger known, actively foiling their military efforts, permitting their oppression by other nations.

But when God’s anger turned to pity, God raised up, localized military chieftains called Judges to deliver the people from their enemies. The people were grateful for these leaders, but their gratitude lasted only as long as each judge’s tenure. No matter how many times God sent them a judge to secure their freedom, the people fell further and further into sin.1

Let us listen again to a few verses from Judges chapter two: “When Joshua dismissed the people, the Israelites all went to their own inheritances to take possession of the land. The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. ….Moreover, that whole generation was gathered to their ancestors, and another generation grew up after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (2:6-7, 10).

        There are few things worth pulling out of that.

The Israelites went to their own inheritances, which, again, sounds to me sounds like they became concerned with what materiality belonged to each of the tribes, rather than to their common inheritance of God’s law and covenant. As Christians and as Americans we know how bad things feel when everything gets tribal, and common affections are forgotten.

Also, the generational rift is mentioned several times. Once the generations that had been with Moses in the desert, and then with Joshua through the conquest, passed away, the younger generations no longer knew God or the stories of God’s work on their behalf. The scripture seems to blame the younger generations for this, but weren’t the older generations supposed to teach their children and grandchildren about God?

One of the most important parts of the law says this:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. …You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut. 6:4-9).

It makes you wonder if the elders had tried to do what God had asked them to do. How else does a whole generation fall away from the stories, the memories?

        Judges is one of those books of the Bible that ends worse than it starts. The very last verse, after we get all the stories of all the different deliverers – Samson and Deborah, Jephthah and Ehud – says this: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25, NKJV). Sit with that for a moment: Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. A totally fragmented people, autonomous, self-determining and self-defining, far from God and from one another. A time such as ours? Read the headlines, scroll the feed and it seems so.

But, but, but – turn the page and: Ruth!

“In the days when the judges judged” – this! This happened! The characters of Ruth and their loving actions are pure examples of the kind of love and devotion that God wanted everyone to have for one another, for the commandments, for God.

Judges’ conclusion isn’t the whole picture. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Yes, I’m sure it seemed that way, but there, in that little town called Bethlehem, something good and holy and against the grain of the culture was happening.

The law was being lived out and honored. People were sticking by one another and working toward one another’s healing. Courage was manifesting rather than fear, hope rather than despair, community rather than individual autonomy. A person who so easily could have ended up as a complete cast-off, a childless widow named Naomi, is brought back to life by a person who so easily could’ve been mistreated by or outright excluded from the community, a foreign childless widow named Ruth. But the law calls for widows to be cared for, and, in Ruth, they are cared for, first by one another, then by others. The law calls for the harvest to come in and for the poor to be permitted to glean in the fields behind the harvesters, and the harvest comes in and the poor are permitted to glean. The law calls for the elders to sit at the city gate, and there they sit, ready to witness Naomi and Ruth’s redemption by Boaz. Over and over again, in this out-of-the-way place, in the lives of these ordinary people who know both sorrow and joy, everything that Judges tells us isn’t happening is happening.

Which brings me around to the why. Why preach Ruth right now? And why start Ruth with the days of the Judges? 

Because Ruth is a local story of human goodness and obedience to God’s ways in a divided, unsafe, unpredictable time and place. Judges gives us the doom and gloom perspective that you get when pull the camera back. But the book or Ruth zooms us in to see that hope comes from the daily actions and risks and commitments of people like you and me. Ruth offers a different point of reference, a different way of seeing. Things are really bad in the land, but things are different here in Bethlehem, among these people. Ruth is in some ways is the answer to Judges. Judges may offer an accurate aggregate assessment, but it is not the final word of the story. Through Ruth, Boaz, and Namoi, the people will receive their good King David, and, at long last, through Ruth, the King of Kings of will come, the one called Christ.

Ruth can help us commit to the way of the local church, the life of the community, the daily efforts to be God’s people. It is no small thing to look out for our neighbors, to provide for the poor among us, to walk the journey of grief together, to attend to the rhythms and rituals that bring us stability and joy, to keep a promise, to take a risk for love. These things do more than defy the headline, they send the story in a different direction. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. You can barely see it, until you can’t help but see it. It is like yeast, an invisible power bringing richness and life to the whole.  

How might our own story begin? In the days of warming temperatures and vanishing species, in the days of purchased politics and brutal economies, in the days of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, of wars and rumors of wars, in these days of – you fill in the black – there was you, and me, and a congregation gathering and going out from this plot of ground on the corner of 15th and Clark.

What will our story be?

Will it be a confirmation of or an antidote to the general diagnosis?

Thanks be to God that God “chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28), to bring about new beginnings.

        Amen.

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.