Let the Dream Breathe
Fruitfulness, Part 9:
Let the Dream Breathe
June 16, 2024
Pastor Mike
Leviticus 25:1-7
Two months ago, I began this preaching series on fruitfulness by asking each of you to consider how and where and for whom God was calling you to bear fruit. The fruits we’re called to offer are good works, and a good work is one that manifests Christ in the world: his lowliness, his sacrificial love, his healing and justice and mercy. In Ephesians, Paul say that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). If, every day, we are allowing God to mold us a bit more, we can be confident that the good works – the fruit – will come. God prepares the way, and God makes us fit.
That makes it sound easy, but it is not easy. Just as Jesus had to pass through the wilderness of temptation and the garden of agony in order to perfect that prayer, “Yet not what I want, but what You want,” so it is for us: learning to pray “Thy will be done” is the project of a lifetime. To be God’s handiwork means that God must reshape us, reform us. It takes courage, humility, and patience for us to open up to God a bit more every day and discern the purposes set aside just for us, rather than the ones we’d naturally choose for ourselves.
Over the past several weeks we’ve explored some of the challenges that we face in the fruitful life: Fear of our smallness; discontentment with our time and our place. Possessiveness. Premature judgement. To round out this section of the series, I want to face the fear at the root of so many of the other fears, this basic fear of letting God in in the first place.
This fear, strangely, rears its head not so much at the beginning of things but in the middle, after we are well underway. And that is because we often begin a job, a marriage, a spiritual journey, or a project from a place of hope or delight. We get a taste for fruitfulness, and we feel the possibilities and the power of it. But over time we fall into habits, into patterns of productivity.
We overidentify with the field and the fruit, thinking success depends upon us, and we begin to break our backs in and out of season to keep things growing. We white-knuckle it. Exhaustion and resentment start to grow, but we struggle to see it. We think this is what love looks like. We think this is the price of the good fruit. Managing everything alone.
Managing. Everything. Alone.
What I’m trying to say is that we can get addicted to fruitfulness; we can step into our various callings with earnest and end up in a situation, years later, in which we are never taking a break, because we’ve forgotten that God is the one who gives the growth (1 Cor. 3:6).
Walter Brueggemann – biblical scholar, theologian, preacher – once wrote, “Sabbath sets a boundary to our best, most intense efforts to manage life…”[1] Sabbath is God’s answer to this difficulty we have with releasing things into God’s hands. Sabbath requires that we let go and step back in order to rest and to be freed from compulsion. Sabbath is God’s way of helping us remember that everything we have and everything we’re called to is a gift from God, rooted in his grace not in our own teeth-gritting effort. Sabbath lets the field breath, the calling breathe, the dream breathe. Sabbath gives God room to come in and bless us with new perspective and vision and calm.
The Sabbath laws are recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, and each version of them is a little different. In all of them, there is a law about the Sabbath day: every seventh day the Israelites were commanded to rest from all work. No cooking, no plowing or harvesting, no mending, no building; and, importantly, no forcing anyone else to do these things for you. Sabbath extended to the whole community, landowners, homeowners, hired workers, slaves, animals, land.
The Sabbath day was set aside for rest and worship and joyful fellowship. It has its roots in the Creation story, which tells of God creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh day. The promise was that God could be encountered just as much in rest as in work; when we let go of management and being managed, we find that God is there in the space that’s been opened, waiting for us, enjoying us.
So, there’s a Sabbath day, and then there’s a Sabbatical year. After working for six full years, the Israelites were commanded to take a whole year off from agricultural production. No sowing, pruning, gathering. They had to leave their fields and plows and barns and threshing floors alone. And they could not force anyone else to work for them while they were resting.
Think about that, a whole year without the usual labor. And not just for you but for your entire community. The whole system of production ceases. In that openness and rest, what might spring up? Think about how that would change the character of years one through six, how in year one you’d enter back into work rested and rejuvenated and in years five or six you’d be tired, but you’d know that a great peace was about to receive you into it.
Think of a whole year for restoring your strength, then throwing yourself into things that delight you, then beginning to entertain daydreams about your work and seeing possibilities float through your mind that you hadn’t been able to see when you were so in it, so close to it.
You’d look out at your field and realize that it’ll be stronger for having this rest. And whether you were the landowner or the employee, you’d be opting into a situation of shared dependence, dependence on the daily bread God had promised to provide even in the midst of a great rest from labor.
Israel first received these Sabbath laws while they were journeying in the wilderness. In the wilderness, they had to live day by day trusting God for their basic needs. Every morning when they woke up, heavenly bread called manna was sprinkled on the ground for them to gather. And Moses told the people that they were allowed to gather just enough for that day, according to their family’s needs. Anything gathered above and beyond would get maggots in it. But if you gathered just what you needed, there was always enough.
Even this life of daily dependence in the wilderness was structured around Sabbath. On the sixth day, the people were allowed to gather twice as much as on the other days, because on the seventh day, the Sabbath, the manna would not come. The seventh day was not for gathering and baking but for resting. Even in the wilderness, when they were taking life one day at a time, the people were pressed to take this extra step and break from routine, trusting even more profoundly.
Here's God’s question for us this morning: When’s the last time you took your hands off your field? Wherever those energies for fruitfulness are being concentrated in your life, when’s the last time you took your hands off, stopped tinkering, managing, laboring? When’s the last time you took a break so that God could come in and have a say? When’s the last time you let your calling – the dream itself – catch its breath and feel safe and strong again?
God does not require your constant back-breaking labor. God made you. God prepared a field for you. God is “able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Eph. 3:20), but only if we let God’s power in. To the extent that we never rest, we diminish the possibilities for our fruitfulness. This is the paradox. We can go only as far as what we can think up or dream up or ask for, whereas God can bring into the picture that which we don’t even know to ask for, realities so far beyond what our minds can dream up.
The truth is that if you never take your hands off the field – for an hour, a day, a season – you will exhaust yourself, and you will exhaust the people around you, and you will risk even exhausting your gift. If you are working in your field but you’ve come to resent it; if you are sowing and plowing and harvesting without any joy or curiosity; if you’ve become selfish or possessive in way that closes you off to divine or human input, then you need a Sabbath, you need a boundary, you need to step back.
As I said before, the Sabbath laws were part of a social contract. They were given to a whole community, a whole nation, not just to certain individuals. To me, this means that when it comes to resting from our fields, to removing our hands so that God, whose handiwork we are, can do the primary molding and shaping, we in the Church need to hold one another accountable.
If Sabbath rest is good for each of us, and for the people around us, and for the very things we’re working toward, then you ought to be able to say to someone else, “Hey, you haven’t made space for your own rest like we agreed to. You’re bleeding yourself dry; you’ve lost the joy here; you’re dragging down the people around you; you’re missing the forest for the trees; you’re acting like it all depends on you, like you’re the cornerstone. It’s time you took your hands off.” And you ought to be able to hear and receive that word from someone else.
The New Testament tells us in many places that we are Christ’s Body, and that each of us is a member of that body, with a unique calling, a particular contribution to make. But to be healthy, a body needs rest – the rest of physical sleep, the rest of deep prayer. And we are Christ’s body. Did he not slip away from the crowds to pray in secret? Did he not sleep in the boat unconcerned while the storm raged?
Psalm 127:2 says that “God gives sleep to his beloved” (Ps. 127:2), and the writer of Hebrews tells us that “a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God, for those who enter God’s rest also rest from their labors as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9-10).
As we seek to be fruitful, to do the good works that God has prepared for us, may we learn that taking our hands off our field from time to time is not an expression of failure but of faith.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggeman, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Pres, 1977), 63.
Weeds and Wheat
Fruitfulness, Part 8:
Weeds and Wheat
June 9, 2024
Pastor Mike
Matthew 13:24-30
Okay, I need everyone’s help with something. Take a moment to have a good look at the people sitting around you. Now let’s get to the bottom of it. Who here is a weed? Which of your neighbors in the pew came from a bad seed sown by the enemy? Go on, point them out. I’ve brought a hoe with me, so we can start cleaning house.
[pause]
Of course, this is not how we would ever treat one another in the church. We might navigate legitimate conflict from time to time in order to address a wrong; we might hold others accountable and be held accountable to the purposes God has for us. But at the end of the day, we know that what unites us is not our shared moral perfection but our great need for God’s love. God asks us to be patient with one another, to be kind. God asks us to forgive each other not seven times but seventy times seven. 1 Samuel 16:7 says that “people look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” In that case, let’s just leave this hoe on the altar, in God’s hands, where it belongs.
We chuckle at the invitation to start weeding up one another. Why, then, do we often insist on treating ourselves and the wider world that way? When we look inward at the field of our being and when we look outward at the field of the world, we can be so sure that we know weeds from wheat. Jesus told this parable, and Matthew wrote it down, so that we would resist the temptation to be impatiently and violently critical, judging what we don’t yet see clearly, whether in ourselves or out in our communities.
In the parable, an enemy sabotages a farmer’s wheat field. The farmer sowed good seed, but when the crop sprang up from the soil and started developing fruit, something was wrong. A second type of plant was there. Weeds! Now, this parable does not have the typical Greek word for weeds in it. Instead, Jesus uses a word for a particular kind of weed, a weed that looks a lot like wheat. The two cannot be reliably distinguished from one another until they’re grown enough to start producing differently colored kernels of grain. You almost have to wait until harvest time to be certain which is which.
The servants were the first to notice that there were two different plants in the field, so they went and told their master. They asked him if they should go into the field to pull the weeds out. But the farmer told them to wait, to be patient. “You can tell that they’re different,” he says, “but are you sure you can tell which is which? If you go in hastily and start tearing things out, you might damage what’s good without meaning to. Let them mature until harvest time, and then I’ll tell the harvesters to take care of it. And do try not to worry about it; there will come a time when the two will be sorted out. Get back to the work that you know is yours to do.”
As I’ve been sitting with this passage all week, I’ve been thinking about where in my life I feel the friction of weeds and wheat growing close together. In two weeks, I’ll be commissioned as a provisional elder at our Annual Conference session, so my vocational journey has been on my mind. Pastoring is one of the areas in which God has called me to live a fruitful life, and along the way I’ve had some weeds spring up in me that I used to think were wheat, and I’ve had some good grain growing that I had once written off as weeds.
Perfectionism is a weed that got sown in me early on. I thought pastors had to be perfect people, immune to doubt and failure, always ready with the most intelligent thing to say. For a long time, I thought this tendency at work in me was wheat. It pushed me to learn as much as I could as fast I could, to rise to the expectations, real and imagined, of other people. If you’ve ever struggled with perfectionism, you know that for a long time it’s hard to diagnose because people come to admire you and achievement creates the feeling of being in control.
But over time the reality dawned on me. Trying to be perfect was miserable, and it was keeping me from real freedom in God and from risking myself in love and commitment. Underneath the constant performance, I was ashamed and afraid. Ashamed, because I knew the inner mess. Afraid, because I didn’t know whether I would still be loved and respected if I was more honest about my struggles.
But in God’s good time, and with the help of many harvesters – a spiritual director, a therapist, good friends – I discovered that I didn’t actually want to be perfect. What I wanted was integrity. They sound similar but they are as different as night from day. At this point in my life, I have let go of the idea that I need to have it all together in order to be a good pastor. That weed – so useful, so wheat-like in the early days – has been gathered and tossed into the fire.
I’ve had it the other way, too. I’ve had a weed that in the end turned out to be wheat. The simplest word for it is emotion. Early on in my life, I began cutting myself off from feeling and expressing strong feelings. Emotions are messy; they’re vulnerable. You ever feel that way? My experience as a young boy taught me that my emotions often went unreciprocated or opened me up to mockery. Better to not have them, then. Better to think and do than to feel.
The great exception to this, for me, was when I first encountered God’s love as a middle schooler. That conversion was extremely emotional. I longed for God, talked with God, sang and danced before God. But even in the church it didn’t take long for my religion of the heart to cool into a religion of the mind. I thought that detachment and academics were the road to earning the approval of people I wanted to impress, such as my professors. I also learned to critique emotional manipulation in the church, another good reason to separate emotional expression from spirituality.
But I was wrong to try and rip this out. Estranged from my body, afraid of what I felt, I could not truly love. I could not sustain joy in God or intimacy in relationships or compassionate service on behalf of others. Jesus loved from his gut, from his heart, from the tears that flowed out of his eyes. In recent years, the most powerful moments in my life as a pastor, husband, father, and even as a thinker have come when I have noticed and integrated deep feeling. What I judged an unwanted and ugly weed has turned out to be the most lovely, most necessary of grains.
What I’m trying to show is that I’ve gotten the weeds and the wheat mixed up. I’ve been impatient. I’ve misunderstood my role in the story. I thought I was supposed to be a harvester, but I’m not: I’m called to be a servant, whose task is to love God with all my heart, soul, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. In God’s time, what is healthy in me will be distinguished from what is unhealthy. God is patient with us, waiting until we are ready to experience judgment as a form of mercy. I wonder what’s going on in your own inner field, and whether you might be judging some aspects of yourself too quickly.
Let’s consider the weeds and wheat of the world. Republicans and Democrats. The rich and the poor. White American citizens and brown-skinned refugees. Southerners, Northerners, Westerners. Latter-Day Saints and United Methodists. Weeds! Wheat! Are we so sure?
When Matthew wrote down this parable, his own Christian community was in crisis. They had broken from their roots in the Jewish synagogue and were dealing with the grief of that separation. They were tempted to self-righteousness, to consider themselves better than the people around them. They had gotten it right, after all, believing in Jesus. “We’re the real children of God!”
Again, Jesus’ answer is patience, humility, and turning our attention from judgment to service. Earlier in Matthew, Jesus preached these words: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father” (Matt. 7:21) – which means there are weeds in here and wheat out there, those who confess Christ but don’t live for him and those who do not confess Christ who nevertheless do God’s will. We do not know what God knows; we do not see as God sees.
What it boils down to is this: There are times when as individuals we need to repent; there are times as a congregation when we need to navigate conflict; there are times when we must address the world with prophetic urgency and righteous anger. Exploitation, oppression, and abuse call for swift intervention. But when it comes to seeing ourselves or other people in such absolute terms – weed, wheat; good, bad; true Christian, false Christan – God tells us to let it be, let it go. Instead of slicing ourselves or our communities apart with criticism, we are to seek and do God’s will: self-emptying service, radical hospitality, and only the very occasional, very calculated turning over of tables.
The world is a mixed-up place, full of both beauty and brokenness, and we see through a glass dimly. Yet Jesus joined us in our mixed-up place. He shared our “true, slow confinement in time.” He did not anticipate the will of God but received and responded to God’s will moment by moment in perfect trust. And when he pours his Spirit into our hearts, he helps us to trust God’s wisdom, wait for God’s appointed time, and do God’s will.
And instead of hoeing, let us pray:
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Don’t Be a Fool with the Fruit
Fruitfulness, Part 7:
June 2, 2024
Ordinary Time
Pastor Mike
Luke 12:13-21
This is the seventh segment in our preaching series on the biblical theme of fruitfulness. Most recently, we’ve been exploring some of the challenges we face in the fruit-bearing lives that we’re called to lead. So far, we’ve been dealing with the challenge of fear, but this parable of Jesus, unique to the Gospel of Luke, introduces a new challenge, the challenge of pride. Fear is very often at the root of pride; we puff ourselves up or take more than our fair share because we are afraid of not being enough or not having enough. Even so, Jesus brings pride into central focus in his story of the rich farmer, warning us against “many kinds of greed” (Luke 12:15).
We can be greedy with a lot or greedy with a little. Greed is possessiveness, which is a disposition of the heart. Greed is most concerned with getting – getting money, power, stuff. Perhaps it’s because I live with two toddlers, but I feel particularly tuned in to the linguistic expressions of greed. Do you know what greed’s favorite words are? I. Me. Mine.
During his ministry, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached on this parable frequently. In one sermon, given to a congregation in 1967 in Chicago, King said this: “Now if you read that parable in the Book of Luke, you will discover that this man utters about 60 words. And do you know that in 60 words he said ‘I’ and ‘my’ more than 15 times? This man was a fool because he said ‘I’ and ‘my’ so much until he lost the capacity to say ‘we’ are ‘our’.”[1]
One of the areas that the I, Me, and My most forcefully exert themselves is in the area of money. In the time of Jesus, a field thick with grain meant financial security. As Christians, how should we behave when we have more resources than we need – even when we are surprised by a sudden onrush of abundance – like this rich man whose fields produced a surplus crop?
I want to recognize that money-talk in church can make us uneasy. One reason for this is that Christian leaders have abused money in countless ways throughout the Church’s history, demanding more and more of it from the people in the pews in order to fund projects of the ego: armies, cathedrals, jumbo jets.
Another reason is that we are culturally conditioned to think of money-talk as taboo. Which is exactly what the powers and principalities of our age desire. If money is the driving force in our society, the determinative factor between who thrives and who flounders, between who has access and who is excluded, between those who can escape from trivialities and those who suffocate under “a relentless piling on a problems,”[2] then of course we’re conditioned not to talk about it. Widespread poverty is America’s most enduring evil, yet American Christians balk at asking moral questions about their money.
But we must also admit that we avoid money-talk in the Church because money, along with the things it can buy and the security that it seems to provide, exposes some of our most deep-seated selfishness, underneath of which lies a complex of anxiety and hurt. I’ve worked for this. I’ve earned this. Our attitudes and actions around money often reveal our patterns of sin, as well as our wounds.
Jesus talked about money and possessions all the time. He talked about money without embarrassment or apology. He consistently taught that worldly riches, and the desire to accumulate them, are the greatest obstacles to God’s kingdom and to fullness of life.
Being both materially wealthy and a faithful disciple is not impossible, but Jesus indicated on numerous occasions that it takes an incredible amount of spiritual maturity and moral discipline. Few can do it, in part because money provides an illusion of security, and under that illusion the heart lets its guard down, growing lax like the man in Jesus’ parable who says, O Soul, relax! Eat, drink, and be merry. You’ve got ample goods to please you for years to come.
The story goes that the fields of a rich farmer yielded an exceptionally fruitful crop. There was more to be harvested than the man was able to store. To him, this presented a problem. What was to be done with the excess? It’s worth pausing here to note that the man turns his unexpected bounty into a complicated problem. How easy it would have been to simply share what he couldn’t store for himself. But whenever we are confronted by a clear and obvious opportunity for economic justice, we usually overcomplicate it. As Matthew Desmon says provocatively in his new book on poverty, “Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.”[3] In the case of the parable, the “expert” that the man consults is himself. He decides that the best course of action would be to demolish his barns and build bigger ones. “But just when he had resolved to do this” (Matt. 1:20, NRSV), God intrudes upon the man’s fantasy, his soliloquy, and calls him a fool – for this very night, God tell him, you will die.
The man doesn’t talk with anyone about his intentions to build these bigger barns. He doesn’t talk with his laborers about their capacity; he doesn’t ask his neighbors how their own fields have fared; he doesn’t turn to his congregation to see if there’s a need in the community that his excess could address. Most indicting of all, he does not welcome God into the conversation. Which is to say, the man does not pray.
This rich man from the parable mistook wealth, abundance, and fruitfulness as matters of individual concern and private decision making. He did not lay his situation as a creature before the will of the Creator. Dr. King was right, ‘I’ and ‘my’ dominate his words, and his only conversation partner is his own soul. But in a great irony, this soul, which the man treats as the only reality in all the world, is precisely what he loses when God comes calling.
Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Money has to be used for something; it has to represent something. The hard thing is that, as Christians, we don’t get to decide what the ends for our money are. God decides the ends, and God has revealed the shape of that decision in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus emptied himself of privilege to serve suffering humanity. Jesus drew together people from all walks of life and insisted that they forge a life in his Spirit where everyone would have enough daily bread to eat. Jesus sought the kingdom of God above all else, trusting that God knows and will provide for our needs.
The point I want to stress is that our decisions about money, especially when the harvest is extravagant, are not decisions to be made in the privacy of our own inner talk. That feels blasphemous to say in our society, yet it is the persistent position that that the Bible takes.
Perhaps you talk openly with your spouse about money, and you’re wondering if that’s enough. Sus and I certainly keep learning how to talk about money, since we were raised to approach it so differently. And it was messy before it got, well, less messy, requiring constant evolution for both of us.
If you can’t talk with your partner or spouse about money at all, or without it getting weird and contentious, that’s a problem. If you won’t allow your partner or spouse to have a say in how you earn or spend your resources, that’s a problem. If each person in the relationship thinks of money in “I” and “My” terms rather than in “We” and “Our” terms, that’s a problem.
The household can be a great practice facility for talking about money, and all the fears and habits and temptations that come with it. But even for the healthiest couple with lots of hard-won victories of communication behind them, money will still be an idol when God is not invited into the conversation. In addition to making money-talk taboo, our culture idolizes the family unit. When we do consider who our money and possessions and resources are for beyond ourselves, our imaginations often travel only as far as our bloodline. A marriage or committed partnership can amplify this tendency, rather than break it down.
In the Book of Acts, Luke records a story from the first days of the Christian Church about a couple named Ananias and Sapphira. They were early converts, and they made a half-hearted attempt at participating in the new economics of the Kingdom, selling a piece of property and bringing the proceeds to the apostles to be distributed in the community according to need. The scripture says that “with his wife’s full knowledge, [Ananias] kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet” (Acts 5:2). He told the apostles that he was giving everything, but in secret he’d conspired with Sapphira to keep a portion of the sale for themselves. Saint Peter caught them in their lie, and God struck both Ananias and Sapphira dead on the spot. When it comes to money, even the couple is not enough. God creates a new family in the Body of Christ, so the table must be big enough in include not only you and your household, but also your church, your community, your God.
The Apostle Paul used to drive people absolutely crazy. One of his grating habits was that he talked with churches about other churches finances. He knew how every congregation was fairing when it came to their material resources, and he insisted that wealthy churches had a duty to support struggling churches and that struggling churches had a right to ask for help from their more prosperous neighbors.
Paul spent years fundraising for the Christian community in Jerusalem which had suffered greatly because of famine and persecution. In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul says, “Give in proportion to what you have. Whatever you give is acceptable if you give it eagerly. And give according to what you have, not what you don’t have. Of course, I don’t mean your giving should make life easy for others and hard for yourselves. I only mean that there should be some equality. Right now you have plenty and can help those who are in need. Later, they will have plenty and can share with you when you need it. In this way, things will be equal” (2 Cor. 8:11-14). Paul was always making the church treasurer open the books, and he pressed congregations to think of their resources as belonging to the whole Body of Christ.
Parables ask us to place ourselves inside the story. So, where do you find yourself today?
Are you the man planning to build bigger barns to fit the surplus crop? The call for you might be to awaken to the reality of God in your life, the God on whom you ultimately depend, the God who, when push comes to shove, will interrupt, intrude, and have the final word.
Or maybe you’re the man in the crowd who causes Jesus to tell the story. Maybe you’ve come to Jesus because you think he’ll help you “get yours” in this dog-eat-dog world. It’s good that you’ve come to him, but the call for you is to become like him, praying, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).
Are you one of the invisible ones unconsidered by the rich man of the parable and bypassed by the man from the crowd? Are you standing in need of the generosity of your brother with the fruitful fields? Are you caught in the cycle of building bigger and bigger barns for someone else? The call for you is to guard yourself from envy while continuing to forge the beloved, just, and joyful community to which Jesus call us.
Finally, maybe you are one of the twelve disciples, listening intently as Jesus tells this parable to the crowd. Perhaps you have been faithfully following him, obediently holding all that you have and all that you are before him. The call for you might be to take just one more step in expanding your table, one more step in widening your circle of belonging and accountability.
May all of us understand that fruitfulness has the potential to stir up our pride and our greed. May we seek to guard one another from that temptation. And may we encourage one another lift up our eyes and ask what might be possible if we would only look beyond our barns.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” Apple Music, track 1 on Martin Luther King Jr., The Sermons (Volume 2), SoundWorks USA, 2013.
[2] Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (New York: Crown, 2024), 13.
[3] Matthew Desmond, Poverty, 44.
Fruitfulness at the End of the World
Fruitfulness, Part 6:
May 26, 2024
Trinity Sunday
Pastor Mike
Jeremiah 29:1-14
O God most kind,
break your bread for this hungering flock,
through my hands indeed if it should please you,
but with an efficacy that is all your own.[1] Amen.
We are in the part of this preaching series on fruitfulness where some of the fears and challenges that we face in the fruit-bearing life are coming into view. Last week we stood with the newly liberated Israelites at the very rim of Canaan. Twelve leaders had just returned from scouting out that good land, and they brought a report of ripe grapes, sweet honey, and flowing milk, but also of enemies that appeared gigantic, and of cities with great fortified walls. “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes” (Num. 13:33), the spies told the people. In essence they were saying, “We are too few, too weak, too ill-equipped to go in and receive what God has already promised to give us.”
They thought there was a problem with those proportions. They were unwilling to accept that situation – grasshoppers standing before giants – as the necessary condition for experiencing God’s power, which is made perfect in our weakness. The Israelite congregation was made to wander in the wilderness for forty years because, in that critical moment of decision, they got hung up on their own smallness when they ought to have embraced it. When God calls us to bear fruit in every good work, what matters are the promises that God has made, not the proportions which we happen to see.
A whole tragic narrative fills the space between that story from the Book of Numbers and this passage from the prophet Jeremiah. By the time Jeremiah had come on the scene, the Israelites had finished those forty years of wandering and gone into the land; they had settled in it and raised up a kingdom. They had briefly known the land to be home, and then they lost it again. The reason they lost the land basically boils down to their failure at keeping the great commandment. Instead of loving God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, they placed their ultimate trust in wealth, political allegiances, and the business of religion. Instead of loving their neighbors as themselves, they oppressed the poor and the foreigners among them, and they neglected to care for widows and orphans. After sending many warnings to the people through other prophets, God permitted first the Assyrian Empire and then, in Jeremiah’s time, the Babylonian Empire to come and conquer the people, carrying many of them into exile. Their downfall culminated with the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple in 587bce.
As I said, some of God’s prophets served before this time, trying to warn and reform the Israelites; a few served afterward. But poor Jeremiah was called by God to serve as the world that he knew was coming to a brutal end. He was God’s mouthpiece during the absolute worst of times, when he and his people suffered the loss of home and culture. Other than Job, Jeremiah is the only other person in the Bible who curses the day of his birth. Some days, he would’ve rather returned to oblivion than borne the words of God among the rubble.
Many of you know what it is like to have the world as you know it come to end. Okay, you weren’t carted off to a foreign land by an enemy army, and maybe you haven’t watched fire engulf every place you’ve ever loved. There are people experiencing that kind of world-ending violence today, and we must remember them. But in this moment, I’d like you to consider the crises and shattering events that have caused, or might cause, everything to crumble around you.
A move that took you far from your roots. The death of a spouse or a child or a friend. The first bounced check. Rejection. Betrayal. Accident. Diagnosis. The loss of faith. We have to be willing to remember the worst of times if we are going to enter into this passage from Jeremiah 29. It is good news that the Bible speaks to us on our worst days as well as on our best.
From the rubble of Jerusalem, Jeremiah wrote a letter to the Israelite exiles who had been taken to Babylon. The letter disclosed to the people that God had set a limit of seventy years to the exile; after seventy years, God would bring them back to their homeland. That’s somewhat hopeful. But seventy years is a long time! Long enough for most of the people receiving the letter to know that they’d never live to see the day of return. But maybe a few, maybe the youngest among them, would get the chance to go back again someday. In the meantime, how were they supposed to live? What were they to do?
Jeremiah offers some surprisingly straightforward instructions.
In the land of Babylon, in a place that is far from everything you’ve ever known, there in the presence of your enemies, I want you to build houses and settle down and plant gardens. Get married, have children, and arrange for your children to be married. Work for peace. Pray for the people around you. ‘Their wellbeing is connected to your wellbeing,’ God says through the prophet. ‘And I want you to increase while you’re there, not decrease.’
To use the words of the sixteenth-century pastor and Bible commentator John Calvin, God was telling the people to live “as though they were at home…as though they were not exiles but natives of that place.”[2] It’s the same call in Babylon, the place of suffering, as it was in Canaan, the place of promise: Be fruitful and multiply. Plant gardens and pray. Bear fruit in every good work.
If the first challenge to fruitfulness is our fear of being too small, then the second challenge is our fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here it is the circumstances, not so much the proportions, that appear completely unsuitable for putting down roots and growing into mature, sacrificial love.
The reasons for our resistance to our place in the world can be petty or profound. Sometimes, we can simply not like or “click” with the people we have to rub shoulders with every day. Our neighbors may be tiresome, the dominant culture not what we’d prefer. It is easy to ask what a place has to offer to us, but harder to ask what we might offer to our place.
The first time we went to the Farmer’s Market, soon after arriving in Pocatello, Sus and I met the potter who brings those grotesque, baby-doll-shaped mugs and bowls to sell. I thought this mug was awesome and had to buy it. We got talking with the artist, and we asked him about his history with Pocatello. Like so many people, he grew up here, moved away for a time thinking he’d never ever come back, and then came back. And he loves his life here.
He said something that was very helpful for us to hear in those fragile first months of grieving the place we’d left and being overwhelmed by the place we’d come to. He said, patting his chest, ‘One thing I’ve learned is that if you’ve got a problem with the place, the problem’s in here.’ And it’s true, much of the time our willful discontentment with the place we happen to be is a fearful defense that keeps us from the vulnerability that leads to belonging, and from the hard-won growth that leads to bearing fruit. By telling us to respond to what has been stripped away by making a life, Jeremiah forces us to ask why we assume that we need certain things around us in order to thrive. Often, we need much less than we believe we do.
However, as with the Israelite exiles, sometimes very serious and devastating things happen to us, and our protests rise much more legitimately: Certainly not here, God. Certainly not now. My world has been unmade, and I am out of place, a stranger to myself and to the people around me. At the moment I’m wishing I’d never been born. Plant gardens in strange soil? Pray for my captors? Fall in love with my enemies? Bring children into this world? Are you crazy? Can’t we wait for this season of my life to be over before we get on with the business of fruitfulness?
But the word of the prophet is emphatic: No. You can’t wait. Move forward “as though they were at home.” The Hebrew word here for garden is gannâ, and the ancient Greek translation of that word, found in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that the New Testament writers would have known, is παραδείσος, paradise. Plant little plots of paradise, Jeremiah says, in the place where you think living and growing and thriving is absolutely impossible. Do your part to fill your wrecked world with a little bit of beauty and prayer and love.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” – Jeremiah 29:11. Oh, it’s one of the best-known verses from the Bible, one we put on t-shirts and coffee mugs, and especially on graduation cards this time of year. We love to share these words with people who are doing well and on their way to doing even better. But that’s not who these words are for. These words are for people waking up as strangers and foreigners in their own lives. They are for people who have lost the thread of meaning to their stories. They are not meant for us when we shoot for the stars, but when we kneel in the ashes. Here’s John Calvin again: “Let us know that this sentence is rightly addressed to those in distress, who seem to have God against them and displeased with them.”[3]
Friends, the call and the promise of fruitfulness are not withheld from you when you are in distress, when your world has ended, when you seem to have God against you. You aren’t excluded from the call, but you also don’t get a pass. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (5:3-4).
All this very much reminds me of the women who came to the tomb on Easter morning. Their world had fallen to pieces; the great love and light of their lives had been crucified. Yet they pressed forward with those burial spices, intent on bringing at least a little beauty, a little dignity into the darkness. And it was because they were there doing something simple, earthy, creative, and loving that they were met by their resurrected Lord. The most essential thing about any of us is not the land we are in but the creative freedom to shape a life of faithfulness, which we receive through God’s Spirit.
Back in North Carolina I used to go birding at a nature preserve near Durham called Johnston Mill. A small river called New Hope Creek runs through that preserve, and all the land is thickly forested. From a point on one of the trails, you can see a small tree that, years ago, fell across the creek when it was quite young, when it’s trunk was no thicker than my arm. The fallen tree had grown up from roots on one bank of the creek, and then it’s young crown had adapted to the fall by becoming a second root ball digging deep into the bank on the other side. Right in the middle of the tree, what must’ve been at first just a branch had become a new trunk shooting straight into the sky, skinny but tall, wasting no time with extraneous branches but waiting to burst out into a leafy canopy at the height of all the surrounding trees.
I think about that tree all the time. I think about how what started as a trunk – the study center, the primary projection, the early effort to climb and lay claim to a spot in the light –failed and fell into completely impossible circumstances. And yet, in nature’s resilient way, that failure became part of the roots. That tree had one thing on its mind; to seek the sun. And it not only sought it; it found it.
“When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes.” Brothers and sisters, Christ is not ashamed to meet us at the end of the world, in the place that’s just blah, in the time that’s ill-fitting, among the people we are apt to not like. He comes and spreads his table before us in the presence of our enemies. Our Lord is risen and ascended, having made every time his time, and every place his place. Today is the day of salvation, and all the earth is his footstool.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Bernad of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh OCSO, Cistercian Fathers Series: 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc, 1977), 3.
[2] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, Volume 3, trans. and ed. the Rev. John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans’s Publishing Company, 1968), 418, 419.
[3] John Calvin, Commentaries on Jeremiah and Lamentations, 437.
Grasshoppers & Giants
Fruitfulness, Part 5:
Grasshoppers & Giants
May 19, 2024
Day of Pentecost
Pocatello’s 1st Anniversary as a Reconciling Church
Pastor Mike
Numbers 13 & 14 (selections)
We are entering the second phase of our adventure through the biblical theme of fruitfulness. The Apostle Paul prayed that the Church of every age would “bear fruit in every good work,” and we have seen how this is possible for us because of God’s own fruitful nature, God’s continual self-emptying and self-giving, most perfectly expressed in the life and death of Christ. We are created and redeemed by grace so that we participate in God’s fruitful life of sacrificial love. That’s the big picture.
Today, we shift our focus to some of the practical questions and daily challenges that come up as we seek to live a fruitful life. And there are many. The call to be fruitful is essentially a call to yield to God’s will, God’s timing, God’s way of measuring success. As the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams once put it, we have to be “unmade to be remade,”[1] implying a long process of change and transformation, which can be terribly hard and frightening. To start naming what stands in the way of our own ripening, we turn to a story about the fear that the Israelite leaders felt, and surrendered to, as they stood on the edge of their promised home.
Imagine it. You have witnessed God decimate the most powerful nation in your living memory, Egypt, with plague after plague, in order to free you from slavery. You have fled in the night with your people, protected by a pillar of living flame, and led by a stuttering exile named Moses, whom God has transformed into a mighty prophet. You have passed through the Red Sea, its great waters parted and held at bay to let you cross on dry ground, and you turned back to watch those waters crash down on the army that pursued you. During your first days as a liberated person, journeying through the desert, you drank water that gushed from a dry rock, gathered bread which appeared like dew drops upon the earth, ate quail blown in on the wind. You stood quivering at the base of Mount Sinai, as the dark thundercloud of God’s presence descended upon it, and you watched Moses walk up into that cloud and speak with the God. You have heard God’s promises to be with you and to bless you and to carry you into a good land that you could call home.
Every divine word and miraculous act has been for your sake, and the time has finally come to leave the desert and enter into the promised place. You are a leader, a representative of your people, and you have been chosen to go and scout out that land of promise, to bring back a sign of all the abundance, all the fruitfulness, that awaits you and your people there.
You go, and you return, and now you stand before your people – people who have seen God do the impossible – and you hold before them a cluster of ripe grapes so large that two men had to haul it back from Canaan on a wooden frame. You look your friends, your children, your elders in the eyes and you say, “It’s as good as God says it is, however…”
And with that however, everything begins to fall apart.
However – the cities are fortified with tall, thick walls.
However – the people living in the land are giants.
However – we got there, and we looked so small to ourselves.
Here is the fruit – however – we cannot go in and enjoy it.
Friends, this is the first fear that lashes out at the call to be fruitful. Sometimes we are afraid that God’s promises cannot be ours, because, in our eyes, we seem so small compared to all that stands in the way.
Have you ever believed in the lie of your smallness? Have you ever felt called to a creative work or a commitment, a vocation or a relationship; have you ever felt stirred to go into a place of promised fruitfulness, whether it require a dramatic public change or a secret daily re-organization of priorities, only to be overwhelmed by your own inadequacies, your own limitations, your own past failures and present uncertainties?
Usually we are hardest on ourselves when the fruit is so near at hand, when there is already evidence that it exists. We can seem smallest to ourselves when we come to a moment of necessary and important decision. I want to emphasize that it was the leaders of the people who capitulated to that fear. This is a fear that grows the more that mature in our faith, because, as Jesus said, “to him who has, more will be given” (Matt. 13:11). And we sure can struggle to believe that we are capable of, worthy of, more. It is not a fear to be ashamed of, but a fear to deal with properly – and the Israelites did not deal with it properly. “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes,” they say, “and we looked the same to them.”
I ask again, Have you ever believed in the lie of your smallness? Now, of course we are finite creatures. We have limitations. We have wounds. We live, each of us, in a constant flux of change, and our lives are irreducibly particular and infinitely complicated. Those are truths, not lies. But the lie creeps in when we forget about Jesus. God’s Word entered into a human life, the life of Jesus of Nazareth. And his life was, like ours, finite, limited, opposed, tempted, particular, and complicated. It was through the humblest vessel, the vessel of a single, small, ragged human life, that God brought salvation to the world.
So, it is not so much a lie that we are small. Rather, the lie is that our smallness is an obstacle, rather than a channel, for the power and purposes of God. The pattern of the fruitful life is the rejected, crucified Christ reconciling the world to God. As Paul says, God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, and God’s wisdom manifests as foolishness.
Here is where the Israelite leaders went wrong. They had this picture in their head, right, this picture of themselves as grasshoppers standing before giants, and they thought that it was the wrong picture to have. Certainly it should have felt different. Certainly it should have looked different. They rejected that fundamental situation when they ought to have embraced it. They had always been grasshoppers standing before giants, and that had never mattered to what God had done for them and through them. Didn’t the hours of forced labor seem to stretch endlessly on? Didn’t Pharoah and his chariots seem gigantic as they loomed in hot pursuit of the people? Didn’t the sea rear up high overhead? Didn’t the desert seem to swallow them whole?
Now, ruled by fear, they spread a bad report about the land, giving into their fear collectively. God bars them from experiencing the promise, stalling for forty years while the fearful generation dies. God will bring a new, wilderness-born generation, into the land.
It is never explicitly stated in the story, but I’ve been thinking about how children would have been there, standing in the congregation of Israel, when the scouts returned. Can’t you see the children running to greet the scouts, firing off their thousand questions, craning their necks to glimpse the grapes? Children would have hung on every word that these twelve men spoke. What would they see God do next? When would they get to go home?
You see, this was not just a moment of irreversible decision for the adults; it was also a profound teaching moment, as all our moments of decision are. And the unfortunate children got the message: We must be too small to be who God wants us to be. God must not be greater than our fear. And they had to share in the punishment of their elders, wandering for forty years in the desert, wondering if they would ever get to see those grapes again.
There are consequences not only for ourselves when we fail to embrace our weakness as the conduit of God’s strength, but also for those who already possess the faith of the child, who already know the secret pleasure of being a grasshopper in a world of giants, and who can so easily be thrown off course by the rest of us.
But let us remember Caleb. Caleb who, alone among the scouts, encouraged the people to go and receive what God had promised to give them. Caleb was permitted to enter the land as an old man, because he had “a different spirit” from the others, and he followed God “fully.” Perhaps some of the children never forgot Caleb’s opposition to the rest of the leaders, his lone voice of faith, his radically different, confident spirit. Perhaps a few of them, as grown adults, followed him into the promised place many decades later. God remembers Caleb, and rewards him. Always grasshoppers standing before giants; always grasshoppers standing before giants.
It is not the exception but the rule. It is not a sign that some possibility is rotten but that it might just be ripe. What should matter in moments like that is not the proportions we see in our heads between ourselves and the journey, but the promises that God has made to us and the evidence of that the fruits are there.
In a wonderful, old interpretation of this passage, a Jewish teacher imagines God reacting to the Israelite leaders with these words: “I take no objection to your saying: we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves but I take offense when you say so we must have looked to them. How do you know how I made you look to them? Perhaps you appeared to them as angels.”[2]
As Paul puts it, “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 Cor. 4:10). To carry that death and reveal that life is what it means to have a different spirit and to follow fully. God’s way of seeing and our way of seeing are not the same, but they can line up in moments of trusting faith.
It is like the Magi, bowing down to worship the Christ-child in Mary’s arms.
It is like the scholars in the Temple, marveling at the boy Jesus as he talks with them about spiritual things.
It is like the Centurion, standing under Christ’s cross and declaring, “Surely this man was God’s son.”
\It is like the elders and teachers of the law confronting Peter and John in the days following Pentecost: “When they saw [their] courage … and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
Brothers and sisters, on this holy remembrance of Pentecost, and on this first anniversary of our choice to go into the land and lay hold of the fruit of reconciliation, may God bless each of you with the different spirit of Caleb, which is the Holy Spirit. May you feel your frailty, your limits, your brokenness, and even your fear as the very places where Christ is present to you, working through you, and accomplishing more than you could ever ask or imagine. If the Lord is pleased with you, as we know he is, he will bring you into the fruitful place.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Rowan Wiliams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross (Lanham, Maryland: Cowley Publications, 1990), 18.
[2] Quoted in The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers, ed. Jacob Milgrom (Philadelphia & New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 107.
Everything Will Live Where the River Goes
Fruitfulness, Part 4:
May 12, 2024
Ascension of the Lord
Pastor Mike
Revelation 22:1-7
The Apostle Paul once prayed that Christians of every time and place would live lives worthy of God by “bearing fruit in every good work” (Col. 1:10). This is our fourth week meditating on that fruit-bearing theme. So far, it’s been my goal to root fruitfulness in God’s own character. God is a fruitful being, who brings forth life from life and plants the seed of his image in human beings. God is a lover, who seeks us out and showers us with delight.
Fruitfulness, then, is very different from productivity. We don’t labor out of anxiety. We don’t work to try and fill an inner emptiness. Our fruit is not the price of God’s blessing or God’s approval. Rather, we “love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). As Paul says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:8-9). The good works come; they are prepared for us. Yet they come on the other side of knowing God. Our roots must first plunge into the nourishing waters of God’s grace and God’s love.
This morning’s verses from Revelation 22 present us with a very simple point: God never stops reaching out to embrace the world. The fruit we bear through Christ is never just for us, never just for our families, never just for our small bubbles of belonging. Fruit is meant to freely flow beyond our immediate horizons – stretching farther, sharing more widely. Although it’s a simple point, to make it we’ll need to wend our way through several scriptures, beginning with the apocalypse itself.
Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ… “The apocalypse of Jesus Christ” (Rev. 1:1). These are the opening words of the Bible’s final book. Apocalypse brings to our minds the end of the world, yet the ancient Greek meaning of the word is to uncover something that was hidden, to reveal something that was concealed. If this Apocalypse, Revelation, is about the end of the world, then it must be about the end of every world. The visions John saw and recorded while imprisoned for his faith on the island of Patmos have helped the Church discern what is always going on just below the surface. Evil wages war against God, and we, the saints of God, are caught in the middle of the struggle.
I’ve been rereading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, which is a brilliant work of fantasy, and a top-five book in the Conner household. There is a scene toward the end of the first book, The Golden Compass, in which several of the main characters – an English girl named Lyra, a Texan mercenary named Lee Scoresby, an armored bear named Iorek Byrnison, and a witch named Serafina Pekkala – are traveling by hot-air balloon to the North Pole. While everyone else sleeps in the basket bobbing through freezing air, the Texan and the witch talk. Scoresby wants to know what exactly he’s getting himself into, as he never intended to enter into a full-blown war:
‘Mr. Scoresby,’ said the witch, ‘I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier.’
‘Well…Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not.’
‘We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born.’[1]
And that’s very much what Revelation shows those who follow Jesus. No matter what we would like to think, and regardless of if we know it or not when we first become believers, we are caught up in the struggle between life and death, and there is no neutral position, no privileged place of escape. The promise of Revelation is that Jesus will ultimately triumph over the forces of death, that the earth will one day be cleansed of its curse. God will once again live us, and God’s light will suffuse all beings and things. All we are called to do is endure to the end.
The book’s final two chapters, 21 and 22, present us with the consummation of that promise. After the seven seals have unleashed their seven plagues upon the earth, after the beast and the whore and the antichrist have risen up to clash with Christ and the angels, after the dead have been raised and judged by God – after all this, John sees the end:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tea from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. (Rev 21:1-4)
What does this city / bride / home-of-God look like? The verses read for us a moment ago depict a great garden-city, with a river of life coursing down its street and the tree of life flourishing along the banks of the river. The tree of life bears fruit for food and leaves for medicine. Light fills all things. The division between heaven and earth dissolves.
One of the delightful things about our passage is that it builds upon earlier stories and prophetic visions. Back at the very beginning, before sin, before separation, before conflict, there was a garden, and trees, and a great river. Here’s how Genesis 2, the story of Creation, puts it:
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the [human] he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.
After Adam & Eve were deceived by the serpent and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, God banished them from this Eden, from its tree of life. The scripture says, “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (3:24). And ever since then, we have all come into life estranged from that sacred center of our being, the essential truth of who we are in God and what we were made. We’ve all had to seek our way back there, “through many toils, dangers, and snares.”
Much, much later, deep into the history of God’s covenant people, Israel, a prophet named Ezekiel was granted a vision of salvation. What he saw drew upon the Eden story, and it gestured toward the future consummate vision of John. Ezekiel also saw water, trees, fruit, and God’s presence. Here is how he puts it down, in his forty-seventh chapter. It’s a long quotation, but worth sharing in its fullness:
Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east… [He] led me back along the bank of the river. As I came back, I saw on the bank of the river a great many trees on the one side and on the other. He said to me, ‘This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes. People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea.
… On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.’
Notice the river flowing out from the sacred center of God’s presence, in this case it is no longer Eden but the Jerusalem temple. Notice that trees line this great river on both sides, bearing fruit for food and leaves for healing. Notice that wherever the water of God flows, life springs up around it, and whatever it touches it heals. Stagnant waters become fresh again. Lifeless waters teem with fish. Communities regain their livelihood. This river begins in God and flows outward and on. Who knows where it ends?
Now, back to the Revelation vision. In it, elements from Genesis and Ezekiel are combined. The new creation is a new Eden, because the tree of life is there. Only, the tree of life not just one tree but, it seems, all the trees. The trees spring up along the banks of the river, as they did in Ezekiel’s vision, and they are all called the tree of life. (It’s like the Pando aspen clone in central Utah: 40,000 trees that are all genetically identical and bound together by a massive root system.)
The tree brings forth twelve fruits, one every month, and offers its leaves for salves and bandages. What human beings once lost access to is opened to them again. The fruit we were intended to eat from the beginning becomes our daily bread. And just like in Ezekiel’s vision, the great river flows from where God is. Only, it’s not a temple this time, for in the new creation it is pointless to restrict God’s presence to a building. All beings and all things are filled with God’s glory and light. And the river flows from the throne of God and of the lamb, set in the center of the garden-city.
The river flows. The river flows. And everything will live where the river goes…
What God does in the midst of God’s people tumbles forth as a pure, clear, life-giving force.
Friends, when we gather in this Sanctuary for worship, let us never assume that the healing waters which flow from Table & Font, from Word & Altar, flow only for us. God’s love courses far beyond our walls and imaginations. If we are stagnant and lifeless, it will touch us here, but it will not stop here. The river spreads out to touch all who live as though under a curse.
Imagine if we treated our neighborhood like that – Pocatello heights, Green Acres Elementary, the pockets of poverty between 15th and 5th. Imagine if we believed this neighborhood to be a place touched by the river of God, whose touch brings forth the tree of life, whose touch heals. Imagine if we saw that river gushing out of our heavy red doors. Where would it go? And what rivers of life would it converge with, flowing from other people of faith in our community, from other little Edens?
And it’s not only for our neighborhood. There are so many people in our world whose daily struggle is to survive, who live driven by desperation, who know what the end of the world, the end of their world, is like. Those without homes, without food, without friends. Those who are confined in nursing homes or prisons. Native peoples banished to the worst lands and locked in cycles of poverty. Gazans malnourished, bombed, pushed to the brink. Sudanese children piled in mass graves.
What we do here matters to all of them. When we pray, we are flowing with the river to touch the sick and suffering. When we open our wallets and give from our positions of privilege, we are casting our resources into the streams of God’s generosity. When we learn to forgive and serve one another in our day-to-day fellowship, we unblock channels through which the healing waters can flow. When we learn, it is so that we can apply; we are hearers of the Word so that we might be doers of the Word.
Our personal holiness, as John Wesley used to say, means nothing if it does not reveal itself in social holiness. Feeding the body and the soul, healing wounds of body and spirit – that is the work of the Body of Christ. It is not just a spiritual truth but also a scientific fact that all things are connected, intertwined, in relationship. You say a prayer here and you never know what mountain you might be moving. You pour out your gifts and your resources and who’s to say what balance you’re setting right, what stagnant dream you’re refreshing.
Everything will live where the river goes…
I have suggested that we come to the headwaters of God’s healing river whenever we gather together to worship. But can I tell you an even deeper mystery? Every single one of you can become a source of God’s river of life. Your own heart can be the headwaters.
Listen to the words of John’s Gospel:
On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7:37-39)
Friends, today he is glorified. He is the ascended Lord, seated at the right hand of God, ready to pour his Spirit into the heart of any who come to him thirsting for more. More life, more purpose, more holiness, more beauty, more depth, more wisdom, more joy, more hope, more healing, more freedom. You can be empty, and you can come to him, and you will not just be filled up, but filled with more of him than you could ever contain or enjoy for yourself.
You could be the new creation.
You shall be the city of God.
All you have to bring to him is your thirst, your need, and you will become the very stream itself, quenching the thirst of the world. If indeed it is God, the source and end of all love, who sits upon the throne of your heart, how could any of us settle for anything else?
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river
Flowing from the throne of God.
Amen.
[1] Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials, Everyman’s Library edition, 262.
The Time of Singing Has Come
Fruitfulness, Part 3:
May 5, 2024
Pastor Mike
Song of Songs 2:3-13
Behold, the winter is past;
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come… (2:11-12)
I meditated on these verses for the first time over lunch on Tuesday. I didn’t have to try hard to identify with the joyful feeling expressed here in response to the passing of winter and the coming of spring. Outside of College Market, it was sunny and green, and the daffodils had shot upward to show off their colors. But then on Wednesday afternoon, I sat at my desk, and I took this passage out for a more rigorous round of study, looked up and out my window and – it was snowing. Like, really snowing.
What even is Idaho? The winter is past? On May 1st? Naaah. I felt deflated. When I got home that afternoon, I found that the weight of the snow had snapped the fragile, flower-bearing stems off our bleeding-heart plant, which had just burst into life over the past two weeks. It’s humbling how quickly a day, a week, a season of nature or of the heart can turn. On Friday, it was snowing again in the morning, but by afternoon those of us gathered in the cemetery for Frances Baker’s graveside service were awash in bright, warm, gentle light.
Behold, the winter is past… /
the time of singing has come (2:11-12).
Hmmmm.
Despite our unpredictable weather here in Pocatello, these are the words of the Song of Songs, because this Song is a love song, and winter giving way to spring is how love – fresh, intoxicating, youthful love – feels. You might be surprised to learn that there’s a love poem tucked among the writings that make up the Bible. Or maybe you’ve known it but have tended to modestly skip over all that tasting-the-fruit stuff. Well, there is! And don’t! The Song of Songs is one of the world’s greatest love poems, as its ambitious title asserts. I’ve written some songs in my lifetime – but this one? This is the Song of songs.
The Song is found among the third section of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Ketuvim, or writings. It’s the only book in the Bible where “human, erotic love”[1] is brought to center stage. The Song has nothing to do directly with God or with any of the weighty themes of the Old Testament, such as the covenant, or the law, or the radical preaching of the prophets. It’s not prayer, not wisdom, not history. “With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. …His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me” (2:3b, 6). That’s love poetry, pure and simple. The whole book is structured as two voices, one male and one female, and the two voices alternate speaking, showing us two characters who pine for, seek, relish, and celebrate one another.
Song of Songs is perhaps the earthiest and most body-positive part of the Bible. You can literally quote the Bible if you need to say that you are “sick with love” (2:5). If ever in your life you have been so enamored with someone that you have snuck out to go and be with them, or have lain aching to hear a pebble against the window or to see those three dots appear in the text thread, then you can identify with the thrill of this lover leaping over the mountains to stand at his beloved’s garden wall, peering through the lattice and calling for her to “come away” (2:10).
Notice the language that the author uses to communicate all this ripe passion: fruit! Apples, raisins, figs, vine blossoms. This is the moment in our fruitfulness series when I want to say as directly as I can that fruitfulness for the Christian – whatever that may mean, we’re still working it out – is full of delight. God has created us with his Word and redeemed us through the Word-made-flesh so that we can take our part in a love-song. Fruitfulness has to do with desire, and it adds some joy and zest to the world. Joy, zest, delight, desire – perhaps there’s something out of balance if these are not a few of the words that leap to mind when we consider our relationship with God and God’s call upon our life.
The poem is most obviously about youthful passion, but in both Judaism and Christianity, there are long traditions of interpreting the Song of Songs as an allegory. People have read the Song as one great metaphor, finding hidden, symbolic meaning in the lovers and flora and fauna. In Judaism, the Song has been read as a love-exchange between God and Israel; in Christianity, between Christ and the Church. In both, God has been identified with the male voice and Israel or the Church with the female character. To read these verses in that way would mean that it is God who has come “leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills…like a gazelle or a young stag” (2:8, 9) – or we might say like a pronghorn or an elk –to stand at our wall, and peek through our stained-glass windows, and call to us: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one[s], and come away.” It’s good to know that God is not above being compared to a love-struck teen; that God, in fact, relishes it, blesses it, canonizes it.
When I consider that this poem might have something to say about how God feels toward me, and how I might feel toward God, I have to admit that there is something deep in the center of my heart that whispers, Yes. I want that. And yet that longing is very often accompanied by another, more fearful voice: But can it really be so? Can there be joy like that for me?
On Thursday morning after dropping the kids downstairs at TLC, I popped over to the ISU library to look for a commentary on the Song of Songs and do an hour of research and writing. (I hope you heard that, Heath: that I was working on my sermon on Thursday.) They didn’t have a commentary, but I found something even better: a collection of sermons on the Song Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century monk, mystic, and writer. It was just what I needed.
As a Medieval Catholic, Bernard unsurprisingly takes the allegorical route of interpretation. Only, he individualizes the metaphor. For him, the conversation between lover and beloved is not unfolding between Christ and the Church in general, but between Christ and the heart of every one of us. The Song’s words are those that God whispers to us as the beloved, and those that our souls can learn to whisper back to God. Bernard writes that the Song puts on full display “the mounting desires of the soul.”[2]
He also says that the Song shows us the point – meaning both the purpose and the summit – of life with God. The Song is the highest form of prayer. It’s not about repentance, turning from sin toward God; it’s not about sanctification, the lifelong process of growing in maturity. No, for Bernard, the Song reveals the possibility of breakthrough moments of utter perfection, moments of inner union with God. Moments when every nook and cranny of our being is flooded with a light and love that comes from God and return to God. Bernard’s writing put me in mind of John Wesley’s own description of the aim of Christian life as holiness and happiness.
Bernard knew how hard it can be for us to believe in such happiness. For some of us, no doubt, the very notion that our hearts might be singing love songs to God only reminds us of how cynical, dull, or knotted up and confused things have gotten in there.
Bernard offers these wise and gentle words: “Only the touch of the Spirit can inspire a song like this, and only personal experience can unfold its meaning. Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it; let all others burn with desire rather to attain this experience than merely to learn about it.”[3] In other words, this kind of intimacy with God is a gift of the Spirit, and it can only really be described or known as true by those who have held out their hands and received that gift. The Song can help us celebrate that intimacy, or it can help us to want it.
I go into all this detail about allegory and St. Bernard’s preaching because I personally believe that love songs belong in our life with God. God wants each of us to know our essential belovedness, and God wants us to treat each other as beloved children of God. We use a lot of words to describe how God wants us to relate to one another: we should serve each other, love each other, respect and honor and forgive each other. But it is another, deeper thing to desire and delight in one another.
I’m proud that our United Methodist Church put a lot of effort over the past two weeks into reharmonizing its principles and its policies with God’s love song. Hundreds of delegates from all around the world gathered in Charlotte, NC to pray and worship and legislate, and their collective ear finally caught the tune, and they began to hear a song not just for themselves but for all God’s children, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.
No longer in the United Methodist Church are queer folk considered to be incompatible with Christian teaching. That’s been struck from the Discipline. Hallelujah!
No longer are queer folk restricted from pursuing God’s call upon their lives and becoming pastors, deacons, and elders, ordained into ministry with all the authority God wants to give them. Hallelujah!
No longer is it a chargeable offence for a pastor to conduct a same-sex wedding in their local church. No longer are Methodist dollars prohibited from supporting LGBTQ-affirming ministries. No longer is marriage strictly defined as a relationship between one man and one women, but between two persons who fully commit themselves to one another because their hearts can say, “With great delight I sat in his shadow” (2:3). Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!
Thanks be to God, that for these children of God who have suffered and endured and overcome so much, it can be truly said:
Behold, the winter is past;
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come… (2:11-12)
And what has happened in Charlotte at the most institutional level can remind us of what can be true every time we gather together in the name of Christ. We can know ourselves as God’s beloved. We can amplify God’s song. Maybe we’ll learn just one new note. Maybe we’ll go back over a passage that’s gotten a little stiff. Or perhaps we’ll be fully absorbed and carried away by it.
Lest we balk at the notion of perfection, I want to be clear that a moment of perfect unity with God is just that: a moment. Yet moments like that make up for a lifetime of imperfections, they can sustain a lifetime of yearning for more. Robert Frost has a poem called “Happiness Makes Up in Height for What it Lacks in Length,” which is a great title. It goes like this:
Oh, stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.
It takes but one day, one moment, one love song to turn the tide. This morning, we are celebrating the sacrament of Communion. In the breaking of the bread, Jesus makes himself known to us. He meets us here at this table. Communion is, well, communion, a gathering of bodies and a unity of souls. It is as the Song says, “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love” (2:4).
What do you feel in your body when you hear those words? Are you comfortable here, in the banqueting house of God? Are you very uncomfortable here? Are you tightening up or loosening up? Do you feel hot, warm, or cold? Do you notice anything in your gut, in your chest, in your throat, behind your eyes? Do you feel a lot? Do you feel – nothing?
God’s name for every one of us is “Beloved,” and what we feel in response to that, and what we choose to do in response to what we feel are the most important things in all the world today. Revel in it or desire it, Bernard says. And my prayer is that this sacrament helps each of us to do one of those two things, to revel in a spontaneous and free and joyful love of God, or to desire it.
The Song says that the time of singing has come.
May it be so, in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit:
Amen.
[1] The Jewish Study Bible, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1555.
[2] Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh OCSO, Cistercian Fathers Series: Number 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1977), 5.
[3] Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 6.
Be Fruitful and Multiply
April 28, 2024
Pastor Mike
Genesis 1:26-31 & Mark 4:26-29
Last Sunday, we began a twelve-week series on the biblical theme of fruitfulness, exploring what it means for you and me to be followers of Christ who “bear fruit that will last,” as Jesus asked of us. This second meditation has to do with fruitfulness as a part of God’s character. We are made in the image of a fruitful God. This is why, late on that sixth day of creation, God blessed human beings with those well-known words: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”
Fruit contains seeds. Biologically speaking, that’s why fruit exists. Whether it be berries or melons or stone fruit, each piece of fruit contains the seed, the pattern and possibility of new life. Fruit might fall to the ground and rot and offer its seeds to the surrounding soil. Fruit has also evolved to be eaten, to sow its seeds on faraway ground with the help of the digestive systems of birds and animals. So long as a plant can produce a bit of fruit, it has a chance of securing a future for its species. Fruit is one way that life expresses its fierce desire to keep living. This is why children came to be known as fruits of the womb.
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” In the opening chapter of the Bible, which tells of the creation of the world, God speaks these words to the first human beings after creating them in the divine image. God, the source of all life, the heartbeat and breath at the sacred center of the universe, brings new life into being. God is Creator. God chose, out of sheer grace and delight, to share life with us.
God places a seed called the divine image into human beings, hiding the pattern and possibility of becoming like God deep within us. Since God is a life-sharing God, we have been made to be life-sharing creatures: Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill. God fashions an earth whose great drama is life emerging in “endless forms most beautiful,” to borrow Charles Darwin’s phrase.
Humankind was given this blessing by God at our beginning, but it is very important to realize that we were not the first ones to receive it. On the fifth day of creation, God made the creatures of the sea and the birds of the air, and God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Early on the sixth day, before the fashioning of humankind, God made the land-dwelling animals of the earth and saw, that they too were good, worthy of a place in the world.
Creatures of sea, sky, and land – all share in the blessing of their Creator to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The call to this kind of fruitfulness is not unique to us. What is unique are those other two words: subdue, have dominion. In a pre-sin context, those commands mean something like maintaining balance, tending soil, mirroring God to the planet. As United Methodist theologian Marjorie Suchocki has put it: “We are never addressed by God as if we were the only creature in the universe: We are addressed by God as a living participant in the fullness of God’s creative work.”[1] But one of our great sins is that we forget or fail or outright refuse to hold space for the fruitfulness and multiplication of other creatures. For today, however, I want to let dominion be and focus on fruitfulness.
Those three words of blessing – be fruitful, multiply, fill – show up all over the book of Genesis. God does not only bless every creature with the gift of producing more life, but God also promises fruitfulness to a very specific human family, for a very specific purpose.
As Genesis tells it, several generations after human beings were deceived by the serpent and fell into sin, they had already made such a mess of themselves that God decided to wipe them out, with all land-dwelling animals as collateral, with a great Flood. But to start the story over, God would need a piece fruit. So, God spared Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, and God preserved them from the Flood in an ark. After the devastating Flood subsided and the Ark had come to rest on dry ground, God commanded Noah and the animals to come out of ark. “Then God said to Noah, ‘Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth’” (8:15-17). “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’” (9:1). The original blessing outlasts the judgment and the devastation of the Flood. Life cannot deny itself. Upon animals and human beings, God affirms what God had established in the beginning: Be fruitful, multiply, fill.
After that, God decided to start a story of the world’s salvation with an elderly, barren couple named Abraham and Sarah. Impossible as it seemed, God promised them countless descendants, more than the stars of the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. The scripture says, “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly. …I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. …” (17:1-2, 6). Important to notice here that God has a part to play: ‘I will make you fruitful.’ It is one thing for life to beget more life. But for life to overcome the impossible, to defeat death, to open a closed future, the power of God must be added to the blessing.
Abraham and Sarah grew impatient for their child, and at one point decided to try and force the issue themselves by using a surrogate mother. Abraham impregnated a servant-woman of Sarah’s named Hagar. Hagar conceived and had a son named Ishmael only for Sarah to burn with envy and make life so miserable for them that Hagar took her baby and ran away into the wilderness. But God’s angel found her in her exile and told her: “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered” (16:10). Later, God repeats this promise to Ishmael “Behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation” (17:20).
The promise of fruitfulness goes on and on, passing from one generation to the next, spoken both by God’s mouth and by the mouths of fathers to their sons.
Isaac, Abraham’s son, receives the blessing while he’s wandering through the land of Canaan looking for a place to settle his family.
When the time came, Isaac laid his hands on his son Jacob – Jacob who deceived his family and stole his older brother’s inheritance – and Isaac blessed Jaco with the word of fruitfulness: “[May] God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples.” (28:1-4). God appears to Jacob years later to affirm that word: “ ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.’ So, he called his name Israel. And God said to him, ‘I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body’” (36:9-12).
When Jacob grew old and had fathered twelve sons, sons who would become the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, he blessed them with the same words he had been blessed with. Particularly poignant were the words spoke to Joseph: “Joseph is a fruitful bough, / a fruitful bough by a spring; / his branches run over the wall” (29:22). Joseph’s brothers had faked his murder and sent him off to Egypt as a slave. That didn’t stop the promise. Joseph, too, was fruitful.
As Genesis ends and Exodus opens, all three verbs are there to meet us once again. Even though at that point the Israelites were living in Egypt and laboring unjustly for Pharoah, the scripture says that they “were exceedingly fruitful; they multiplied greatly, increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them.” For this very reason, Pharoah became afraid of them and oppressed them all the more.
The promise of fruitfulness obviously really mattered to them – and really mattered to God. And when you lay it all out there like that, it sure starts to feel like God can make good on God’s promises regardless of our capability or our circumstances.
Elderly and out of possibilities like Abraham & Sarah? I will make you fruitful.
A social outcast like Hagar? I will make you fruitful.
Born into a dysfunctional family with the deck stacked against you like Ishmael? I will make you fruitful.
Have a checkered past like Jacob? Have you been betrayed by the people closest to you, like Joseph? Are you making do in the land of injustice like the Israelites? Starting over after the end of your world, like Noah? I will make you fruitful. I will make you fruitful. I will make you fruitful.
Now, in all these stories from the Hebrew Bible, fruitfulness is very closely tied with continuing the family line. The promise given to all these characters is that they will have children who have children who have more children. God starts with the patriarchs and matriarchs, then works with the twelve tribes, then eventually with the nation. As Christians, it’s important to ask what being fruitful and multiplying might mean for us. When Jesus opened the door of salvation to the gentile nations, to people of all flesh, he freed the promise of fruitfulness from the necessity of childbearing. Jesus never once commands his disciples to multiply by having children. Instead, Jesus came to teach us all that we all are children of God. He sends us into the nation; he doesn’t ask us to make a nation. With Jesus, fruitfulness, multiplication, and filling take on more spiritual meanings. Sowing love in the world. Multiplying resources so that all are fed. Filling the world with his glory. How are you being called to do that?
All the more, then, it is true that no matter how God has called you to be fruitful in your own faith journey, you can trust that God will make it so. You might think you aren’t prepared, aren’t knowledgeable, aren’t strong or wise or generous or interesting enough. You might look at your life stage and think, No way. You might look at your past behavior and think, Can’t be me. You might feel the injustice of the world pressing in around you and think, It’s all I can do just to get by. You might wonder how the great thing whispering to your heart could ever come to pass when you have so little to give to it.
This is a good time to bring in the parable from Mark’s gospel. Parable means a word thrown alongside, a word that illuminates some other reality. According to Jesus, the kingdom of God is like a farmer who scatters seed on the ground, and then sleeps and rises night and day while the seed sprouts and grow. The farmer doesn’t understand how the growth happens. The earth produces of itself, and only when the grain fully ripens does the sower come back into the picture as the harvester.
The power of growth comes from beyond the farmer. It resides in the seed and in the earth. The process of growth is not something the human farmer controls. The seed has its way, its own internal logic and flow: first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.
How often, when the desire to be fruitful for Christ rises in us, do we feel that the power and the process must come from us? How often do we become servants of anxiety, bound to activity? Certainly, there is more we must know, more we must do to make the fruit come. And this compulsion actually drains the power and confuses the process.
The good news of Jesus’ parable is that the earth produces “of itself”. The Greek word for “of itself” is automate – automatic! The mysterious power lies beyond us. Our call is to very simply to trust in the one who made the promise. God’s kingdom is not a kingdom made by human hands; it is not a kingdom of works, but a kingdom of grace.
Instead of anxiety, God call us to joy. Instead of control, God calls us to rest. Instead of compulsive busyness, God call us to presence and attention, a readiness to do our part when the time is right, but not before.
I want to hold all this up next to another sacred text; at least, it’s sacred in my house.
{Read “The Garden” from the Frog and Toad series.}
Amen? Amen.
[1] Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Whispered Word: A Theology of Preaching (St. Louis: Chalice Pres, 1999), 11.
Fruitfulness & Faith
April 21, 2024
Pastor Mike
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 & Colossians 1:3-13
Today, we’re beginning a twelve-week sermon series exploring the theme of fruitfulness. We’ve just heard the Apostle Paul tell us that “the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world,” and that we are called to live lives worthy of God by “bearing fruit in every good work.” But what does that mean – bearing fruit? It’s an earthy, organic metaphor pulled straight from the rhythms of the natural world, but it doesn’t come all that naturally to us. We live in an industrialized nation in a digital age, and even if some of us tend gardens or keep small farms, we’re formed inside of a culture that assess actions in other ways.
We use words like impact, measurables, deliverables, results. We measure the value of our work in terms of productivity, of meeting or surpassing goals. Anything and everything can be streamlined, optimized, perfected. In school, we get grades. At work, we get performance reviews. But when’s the last time your boss called you into the office to ask you about the fruitfulness of your work? Fruitfulness feels out of place in the business or even the nonprofit sphere, where the almighty dollar is the measure of all things. When I was in Oregon for my ordination interviews, one of the candidates had to give a presentation to the Board on something called a Fruitfulness Project, and I think it’d be pretty strange for just about any other job application to ask about fruitfulness.
But Christians hang on to the metaphor because, as I’ve learned, it’s all over the place in the Bible. Fruit, bearing fruit, firstfruits, fruitfulness – that language springs up from the page over and over again.
“Be fruitful and multiply” is God’s original blessing upon human beings.[1]
The prayer book of the Bible, the Psalms, opens with these words: “Blessed is the one…whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither — whatever they do prospers.”[2]
The Gospel of John, chapter 15: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. …This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. …You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last…”[3]
It’s in John the Baptist’s wilderness preaching: “Bear fruit worthy of repentance. …The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”[4]
It’s in Jesus’ mountain-top preaching: “By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.”[5]
The letter to the Corinthians declares that “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), and James wants us to know that we who are born again in Christ are the “firstfruits” of a new creation.[6]
And who doesn’t love the fruit of the Spirit? Love, peace, patience and the rest…[7]
These verses are just a portion of what’s there. After all, the whole story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is bookended by fruit. God’s relationship with humankind begins in Eden, a garden full of fruit-bearing trees, and it ends, in the New Jerusalem – the garden-city – whose great river, flowing from the throne of God, is lined with orchards.
I remember when my wife, Sus, a good Californian, taught me how to shop for citrus and stone fruit early on in our relationship. She taught me that you should weigh each piece of fruit in your hand, that you want it to feel heavy for its size. It turns out that the very language of fruitfulness is one of the densest, richest concepts in our scriptures. The Bible stretches the metaphor in so many different directions, and it really has become baked into the ways our Christian tradition approaches questions of labor and value.
So, as I said, we are going take this call to be fruit-bearing Christians in a fruitful Church and consider it from all sorts of angles. I really don’t have an agenda or endgame in mind. My only concern is that we refine our ability to think in a Christlike way about what it means for us to be healthy and growing and maturing and doing good works, especially as we enter a capital campaign and celebrate our first anniversary as a Reconciling Church and adapt to whatever new realities emerge from General Conference. I’m excited to wade into some of the more fun passages pertaining to fruitfulness and see what grows from the seed of this idea.
We can start right now with the basic but fundamental truth that any fruitfulness we enjoy is a gift that comes from God. Here are Paul’s words to the Colossians one more time:
“The gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world – just as it has been doing since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.
“…We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will …so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, … and giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”[8]
The gospels bears fruit in us and through us when we have truly understood God’s grace. Good works come when we are filled with God by God. It is only because God has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints, it is only because God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into fellowship with his beloved Son that the fruits come at all. We don’t have to make ourselves capable or worthy of bearing fruit. We don’t have to earn a place in the story of what God is growing in the world. God qualifies us, rescues us, and brings us into his work. Everything we might do or give or bring about for Christ is in response to what Christ is already doing and giving and bringing about in us. All we have to do is rest in our belovedness, consent to the light, open our hands and our hearts to receive the gift of new life. Then we become trees planted by streams of water and branches grafted onto the Vine. Christian life, in essence, is one unending Thank You.
Larry has already read the scripture from Deuteronomy 26, which commands the Israelites to tithe their firstfruits to God. Because fruitfulness, as a way of thinking, takes some getting used to, I’d like to just retell that passage for us but in slightly different words, words which I hope will allow each of us to put ourselves in the story and respond to whatever the Spirit stirs up. Let’s start this twelve-week meditation on fruitfulness by dwelling in this moment of offering and allowing God’s Word to guide us.
So, I invite you to adjust your posture if you need to, so that you feel grounded and comfortable and alert. Place your feet on the floor, uncross anything that’s crossed, either close your eyes or let them come to rest in an open gaze on a spot in front of you. Take a couple of deep breaths and then let your breath go to its natural rhythm.
As I retell this story about the firstfruits, I’ll offer a few opportunities along the way for you to linger with a particular question, and if it feels right, you can just stay there for the remainder of the meditation. Come as far into the story as the Spirit invites you to come.
A young farmer, skin darkened and rough from the long summer harvest, arrives at his local place of worship riding an ox-drawn cart that is laden with food. Sheaves of wheat and barley are piled next to baskets of grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates. He dismounts from his cart and takes hold of his first basket. It is heavy, the literal fruit of much labor and worried waiting. He has plucked these first fruits in the fields, held them up to the bright sun with tired arms and considered their deep color, and yet he has refrained from tasting them. Instead, he has brought them here, as an offering to God. Perhaps this is where you want to linger, standing next to this young farmer at the entrance to God’s house. Perhaps the question for you is simply this: What is in your basket? What are the firstfruits in your own life?
{silence}
Coming out to meet the farmer is a man dressed in fine cloth, the priest, who speaks a word of blessing – The Lord be with you – and beckons the farmer indoors to the altar room. Once inside, the farmer declares that he has come into the land that the Lord swore to give to their ancestors. He has come to offer the first produce of his harvest as a way of saying thank you for that land. He, in fact, was born there, in the land. He has known no other place than the homestead first established by his grandfather. He has farmed the same soil from the time he was a boy. But he knows the story, and that is what is important. He hands his first basket to the priest and prepares to tell the story that he has told so many times before. There upon the gray stone of the altar, he sees the fruit that his no longer his own. Perhaps this is as far as you come, today. Perhaps the question for you is a question of feeling. How does it feel to hand that basket over, to see what you have worked to grow and harvest there upon the altar? What does that act of offering, of sacrifice, bring up in you?
{silence}
The farmer knows that he so easily could have had nothing, been a nobody. He knows that before coming into this land his grandfather’s people had been slaves, subjected to brutal labor; that they had been nomads, wanderers, strangers. It was only because God brought the people out of Egypt all those years ago, only because God led the people into the promised place with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with terror and signs and wonders, that he can, today, walk through vast fields of golden grain, and know with certainty that he and all his people would have food to put on the table.
With his basket on the altar, he stands before the priest and before their Lord and he tells that very story. He remembers and rehearses the story of grace into which he was born. “God brought us to this place an gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the first fruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me” (Deut. 26:9-10). With that final statement he has shifted from third person speech to first-and-second person speech, from storytelling to prayer. He has done it – entered personally into the story of his people! He is the wanderer whom God has settled, the slave whom God has freed. And he has made this journey into the story by way of his gift.
Perhaps this is where you stay this morning, with the story. How did you come to be here, to have what you have and be who you are? How did you come to know the goodness and grace of God, to be set free by his power and established by his grace? What’s the story that you tell here at the altar as you offer this gift?
{silence}
Year after year, basket by basket, the farmer learns that all things belong to God and return to God, that there is an essential unity between the open hand and the open heart. And this wisdom brings about a profound sense of peace and trust and joy. He knows that he returns to fruitful fields, that he goes home to abundance. He could take the time to be here, to tell this story. He has gained so much more than he has lost in setting the firstfruits on the altar. Once again, there will be joy for him and his household, for the Levites – God’s servants – who live in his vicinity, and for the foreigners and strangers who dwell in his town who do not yet have land of their own. There will be joy because he will provide for them just as God has provided for him. He climbs back onto his cart and turns himself toward home. His sight is renewed: everything is a gift. Though his cart is empty, his heart is full.
This where we end the story and maybe your question is the final question: Who will benefit from your open-handed, open-hearted life? As grace flows through you, who will it touch? Your household? You faith community? The poor and the poor in spirit? Freely you have received. To whom, now, will you freely give?
{silence}
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Genesis 1:28.
[2] Psalm 1:1-3.
[3] John 15:5, 8, 16.
[4] Matthew 3:8; Luke 3:9.
[5] Matthew 7:16-18.
[6] James 1:18
[7] Galatians 5:22-23.
[8] Colossians 1:6, 9-13.
When Did Christian’s Stop Being Christian?
April 14, 2024
Heath Mann
John 13:1-20
I think I know your current thought….How dare this guy tell me that I am no longer a Christian! You must know that I am not talking about anyone here today. I believe the real point of this statement is, are we living a life that Jesus would be proud of? Please note that this is mainly describing our personal/political/ professional lives. It is not directed at anyone in particular but to our society as a whole.
To begin with I think we need to understand what it means to be “Christ like” or Christians. I think to start this conversation, I would pose the question, what kind of Leader was Jesus? Did Jesus require the people to serve him, or did Jesus serve his people?
In today’s Gospel Lesson, Jesus used one of his last teaching moments to Wash the feet of his disciples stating, “You call me “Teacher”, you call me “lord”, and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth no Servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent them. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”
This is interesting language especially in this context. Jesus in being the teacher, in being the lord washes the feet of his followers, doing them a service, a kindness, a gesture, he is becoming the servant, becoming the messenger. Furthermore, he indicates that they should strive to do the same to their followers, to their students, to their servants. He is giving them the example that to teach, to lead, to be the lord, to be the master is to serve. I mean isn’t Jesus’ whole life in service to us. Giving us an example of servant leadership. Doesn’t love lead us to serve the ones we love, at times receiving their service, and at times serving them. Equal in Love!
In numerous parables and teachings in the New Testament Jesus shares his message by serving the people who follow him. Think feeding the five thousand, healing the blind, forgiving the sins, and most of all two weeks ago we celebrated his resurrection after receiving the death penalty so that your transgressions can be forgiven.
Jesus goes on to instruct the Disciples to “go out and do for others what I have done for you”, in essence commanding them, commanding us to be “Servants”.
Have we as Christians in considering the current state of our political, personal and professional affairs continued to be servants?
Could those of us professing to be Christians be recognized by our actions, our treatment of others to be Christians?
Now that we have seen through his teachings and in reading the New Testament, that Jesus was a Servant leader and that he commands us to live in that same fashion, and many of us know his words and his teachings, who are we? Are we leading the life of servitude that he has instructed us to?
It is much easier to speak the language than it is to put the words into motion, to live our lives in a Christ like fashion. To be a servant to those around us.
We are inundated with the manipulation of our Christian beliefs, teaching us to hate instead of to love. To dehumanize those who do not think the way we do. Our politicians, leaders, large corporations, businesses and sometime our neighbors, friends and family members use divisive tactics to gain power, profit, and influence over us.
Let’s look at a few examples, manufactured crisis’s that I believe are being used to manipulate us by today’s politicians.
Please try to place our own political beliefs aside, and please understand that at the end of these examples I will try to provide a connection to the teaching of Jesus, but also note the title of this message (when did Christians stop being Christian) and this message itself is provided in the hopes that we will look at these manipulations, and the pressures found in today’s society to find a solutions, and to answer the question about if we as a society, as a church, and then in a lesser fashion as individuals, have indeed lost our way.
Are we still living a life the way the teachings of Jesus asked us to?
The first issue that we are going to look at has been used for well over a hundred years to spur us to action.
Immigration is my first example, look at how this subject has changed or not changed, from the arguments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when where we were told “they come to take our jobs”, this statement was used to talk about the Chinese, the polish, the Irish, and the Italians, describing how this influx of workers would displace us at our jobs. Since this did not happen and is no longer a “FEAR” in today’s society, this persuasive argument has now changed to the current manipulation about today’s immigrants stating that “they are rapists, murders, and thieves. Stoking the embers of Fear once again this time fear about our safety.
I know that we can find outliers, and show proof that some criminals have entered the country as immigrants, but don’t we have enough crime within our borders to prove that Crime has always been here?
Fear is the emotion that is most likely to move us to a course of action, so it is the most likely emotion to be used to get us to vote for one party or the other.
But let’s try to look at this issue through a different lens.
When reporting on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Camilo Montoya- Glavez a CBS reporter made this statement about the construction workers who perished in the catastrophe stating, "These jobs are essential, but they're also perilous...but many immigrants do them because they want to provide for their families." These jobs help our country move forward building the infrastructure that we rely on, and immigrants have filled these dangerous positions for the entirety of our country’s history.
Think of the Irish, the Polish, and the Chinese, what did this generation of immigrants do, nothing short of building the transcontinental railway, not to mention the bridges that we use currently today as well as the Francis Scott Key Bridge itself, the list continues today includes Mexicans, Columbians, Hattians, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, and Cubans to name just to name a few. They come to find hope, they build our country, provide health care to our citizens and work jobs most current Americans wouldn’t dream of.
I believe that the men who lost their lives on the bridge are a better representation of the average immigrants that are entering our country today, than what our political process is leading us to believe. But we allow our politicians to claim that these immigrants are a huge problem. Why so they can divide us and win our votes.
I ask you how would Jesus welcome an immigrant, how would Jesus receive a poor, hungry sick individual fleeing persecution in their country?
Did Jesus turn his back on the Poor, the immigrants, the elderly, the prostitutes, the taxpayers? What does the bible tell us?
I think he would welcome them, help them, nurture them.
And the lack of care and manipulation doesn’t stop with immigrants, it continues to our poor, our mentally ill, women, the LGBTQ community, and currently especially the trans community, and youth who want to simply participate in a game or use a restroom.
This example occurs much more closely to home when you consider the bills recently passed and signed into law in this state.
How would Jesus handle these current issues in our community. A life of service would indicate that the last thing he would do would be to alienate or push aside any of these marginalized groups. In fact, the reason his numbers grew at the rate and magnitude that they did, I would argue is because he would look to help them. “You can catch more flies with honey”.
If we allow our politicians, our community leaders and ourselves to use this type of manipulation, to move us in a course of action, it allows us to ignore the real problems we currently face. The hopelessness or mental illness that drives our own citizens to crime. If we deny or find a scape goat like the poor, mass of good people fleeing, fear, persecution, and “real crime” in order to find the American Dream, then aren’t we allowing our politicians to maintain the status quo. In essence it allows our politicians to stay inactive and leave unchanged the same rules of law that currently govern our situation, to maintain their power through inactivity. How many times throughout history have we allowed the people of power to blame the powerless?
These thoughts, and musings left me wondering when did Christian’s stop being Christian.
When did we start losing the path that Jesus laid for us? Would it make you feel better if I told you that it was during the Emperor Constantine’s rule.
The first time that Christianity was adopted by an empire (politicized), was in Armenia in 301 ad. Then it gained even more prominence rapidly with the conversion of the roman emperor Constantine, and later to be declared the official religion of the Roman empire by Emperor Theodosius. By the early 4th century Christianity was a powerful social and intellectual force. How long could the politicians of the era ignore this force.
The governors of the land saw the opportunity to accept this movement and therein gain power and the ability to manipulate its masses.
It is a bit Ironic, when you think that governments first sought to adopt religion in order to hold sway over the people, and our founding fathers sought to protect our government from any one religions power. They sought to protect our individual rights by keeping the government from forcing a belief system upon us. Would it surprise you to learn that the early Christian leaders fled fearing the bastardization of their religion, their teaching, their beliefs, seeing their most deeply held beliefs being used and manipulated in order to serve the state? It appears we have come full circle.
The Irony more plainly stated is that at first politicians, and governments pried into our personal belief systems by trying to control our religion, then they found that governments for the people needed to be protected from religion, and now once again our belief system is being used to manipulate us for money, power, and political gain.
So, my question is, have we forgotten to serve, forgotten to be servants in the manner Jesus instructed us to. Are we allowing these manipulations to spur on an attitude in our lives and in our country that is not Christian?
The previous issues I would argue we can justify our own actions by pointing to others at fault.
But let’s look a little closer into the mirror, look at possible actions or inactions in our recent history to give us individual accountability.
Look at the recent Covid pandemic, and I understand that we should have our rights but when we serve, do we, at times accept a position of discomfort, or delay in order to be kind, to help others, Jesus did. I mean who wants to touch other persons’ feet? I understand that wearing a mask is an inconvenience but isn’t it worth the minor inconvenience so that someone else, our neighbor, our friend, our fellow citizen, our family member stays healthy. Of course, we have the right to choose if we wear a mask but shouldn’t someone professing Christianity, professing to follow Jesus choose to wear a mask in order to helps others, in order to be a servant leader? OH. And mask wearers don’t be so self-righteous. Would it surprise you to know that several complaints, glares, thoughts, and arguments were leveled at our public servants and citizens in our community, by people that received the vaccine or where wearing masks. Did you ever glare at someone because they were not wearing a mask? I know I did.
Jesus showed compassion to everyone not just people that were a part of his socio-economic class or shared his beliefs, or wore similar clothes, or came from his hometown, he showed compassion to everyone.
I would argue that love, kindness, and compassion are essential in being part of a community, being part of a society, a country, and even our species.
I do feel like this is a lot to contemplate, but please note that we are not alone. Jesus taught us many lessons regarding this issue, so it was clearly an issue 2000 years ago as well.
In the book Connectable by Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen they discuss a study by behavioral scientists John Darly and Daniel Batson in the 1970s. The study was to try to determine if people in today’s society would stop to help someone in need if they were pressed for time. The findings were that 63% of people stopped to help if they had plenty of time to make it to their destination, 45% stopped to help if they were on time, and only 10% stopped when they were running late. The irony of this study is that the group being studied in their reactions, were college students, students attending Princeton Theological Seminary, and finally they had just been discussing with the researchers the parable of the good Samaritan, yet when faced with the exact same situation as the good Samaritan, the results indicated that these Seminarians were guilty of not being a good Samaritan.
What lessons can we learn from this?
1. Leave early enough to have time to help,
2. A life is always more important than our appointment/meeting/speech…
So, as you can see, Jesus addressed these issues 2000 years ago, the students at Princeton showed us in the 1970’s and the pandemic and current state of affairs have again given us proof that these problems still exist.
So yes we are not alone in dealing with these problems this lack of servitude, of compassion of love for our fellow Americans, Community members, Neighbors, and family members.
Finally, I want to look again at the teachings of Jesus.
I would ask you to show compassion to everyone, not just people that are a part of our own socio-economic class or share our beliefs, or wear similar clothes, or come from our hometown, but to show compassion and love to everyone. Jesus in his teachings shows us the way, the way to be stewards in our community, our society and for our species.
How different would our world look if we just used his teaching as a way to treat each other? How different would it look if we were all servant leaders?
Isn’t it time that we actually learn this lesson? If we can be the ones who learn this lesson, we can then begin to recognize when we are being manipulated, and I believe we can finally find our way back to Jesus’s path.
“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.
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.