Life Eternal in a Time of War

Acts 17:22-31

1 Peter 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

Jesus promised “I will not leave you orphaned.” This Memorial Day weekend we remember too many who have been made orphans by war, too many who have felt alone in the trenches of war, too many who have returned from the front to feel orphaned by a government which can not offer housing and security to each and every veteran no matter how hard it tries. When war erupts, it leaves orphans on every side.

Memorial Day may be a formalized holiday now, but decorating the graves of the war dead has been a tradition long observed by people throughout history and across the world. Whether soldiers and civilians have willingly sacrificed their lives or had them taken by acts of violence, those of us who have so far survived spend much of our remembering trying to make sense of the loss, to make noble and honorable whatever cause our people have died for. Because war is ...divisive, to put it gently... the battles themselves can be remembered in many different ways. We’ve got all sorts of films and books about Vietnam, the World Wars, historical reenactments of the Civil and Revolutionary wars, to try and wrap our minds around what would move people to such violence, hatred, and fear, or to celebrate victories and study strategies for future engagements. We even have a whole genre of young adult novels that are hugely popular, around a future world of war and destruction, be it one where Hunger Games keep the people in line or one where social genetic experiments toward forcing people into peace create a strain of people called Divergent. 

When we fight and divide ourselves, fear and stereotype, bless the Spanish Inquisition and Crusades, lock away the Japanese Americans or shame German Americans out of their first language, beat the peaceful Sikhs because they wear turbans, we create even more orphans. Splitting people away from their roots, separating families on either side of a dividing wall like that in Berlin or Palestine, and then creating that one impenetrable barrier between us by killing one another, the whole human family is made less for our fighting. The ideals we strive for may be higher than ourselves, we may see no other way around current events but what seems a lesser of two evils, but if there ever was a clearer indication than war of how far humanity has fallen, I don’t know what it is. How can we keep doing this to each other?

I think that’s the point of Memorial Day, isn’t it? That we’ve had enough of death. That we’ve seen too many fall. That we are desperate for peace and have buried too many of our sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, friends and neighbors. Yet even on Memorial Day soldiers and civilians are being killed somewhere in some war or another. Even in those wars we have stopped talking about: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on hunger. Not every war kills with guns and grenades.

And it is into the middle of all of these wars, smack dab into the heart and the hurt of all of this world, that God has come, in the flesh, to live and die and live again. And did you hear what Jesus said after he promised not to leave us orphaned? “Because I live forever, you also will live forever.” I know it doesn’t say ‘forever’ in your bulletins, just “because I live you also will live,” but it’s the Greek, trust me on this one, the Greek word “Zoe” is more than simple biological life, it’s the life-force of God which gives life to all that lives. It’s bigger than whether or not you’re breathing.

It’s the life we are promised. It’s the promise Jesus makes just after washing the disciples’ feet and hours before he is handed over to be killed. He makes these promises, of eternal life and of eternal family, knowing that his disciples are about to watch him be betrayed and killed very publicly. He makes these promises knowing his disciples will scatter in fear and take some convincing after his resurrection. He makes these promises to offer a sure and certain hope and encouragement for the days and weeks and lifetimes ahead.

He makes these promises for you and I and all of those who have lived and died in times of war. Because Jesus has not left us as orphans. There is not a child on this earth who has not been loved by Jesus. Even when orphaned or unwanted by other people, every child is loved and known by Jesus, no matter how old or how bruised by war. 

And it is this love, this security of belonging to God’s own family, which frees us up to live as Christ’s own in this world, to live reflecting his commandment to love one another, to live in a true and deep down sort of freedom that is bigger than even our love of country and the freedoms professed in the ideals of our constitution. Because the promised Advocate, the Holy Spirit, who we will be carried by and challenged by and encouraged by for all of our days, is so much bigger and reaches farther than our own limits of imagination. For when we feel stuck in a life or death situation, the Advocate takes us through death and on into life. When we feel destruction is the only option, the Advocate brings forth new growth out of the rubble, new possibility in places of despair, new hope where before there had only been fear.

This Memorial Day weekend, we grieve the dead and recommit ourselves to rebuilding a broken world in the love which has given us life eternal, which has called us God’s own children. And we do it not to make our nation greater, but to remind the world of the love of God which knows no nationality, the love of God which sings in every language of the world, the love of God which cradles every orphan and upholds every widow and unites us in a family so big there is no corner of the world it does not embrace.

No, Jesus does not leave us orphans. God is so close, that it is in him that we live and move and have our being. Thanks be to God.

Resurrection and Forgiveness

Acts 7:55-60

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

What else could Stephen have asked for in Jesus’ name if not to forgive those who stoned him? To act in someone’s name is to behave according to their character - in the name of the King someone would issue decrees and collect taxes, proclaim war or declare peace, so that in the age before the internet people nearby and far off could know what was on the King’s mind and how this King ruled the kingdom. So when Stephen was dying, his last request was most true to the legacy of Jesus, basically verbatim the same request Jesus made of God when he himself was being crucified: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” If you’re going to ask for anything in Jesus’ name, according to the character of Jesus and in line with his way of living, it would be to ask for forgiveness.

But it’s so hard, isn’t it? To ask forgiveness for ourselves is hard, to admit a wrong we have done or left undone. It means admitting we were less than perfect, that we have somehow still not gotten everything right. Especially to own up to another person that we have done them wrong - you know the way kids hem and haw and avoid eye contact and make up stories when they know they’ve been caught and don’t want to admit they broke something or grabbed a cookie before dinner. You know the way public leaders backpedal when they’ve said something to make people angry, or voted one way but want to get re-elected by folks who vote another way. When it comes to asking forgiveness, we have a hard time. But then when another person sins against us it’s a whole different ballgame. We tend to want our money back. We take back our trust. We tend to want revenge. It’s not like getting back at someone would actually heal our hurt or restore what has been taken from us. We can’t get back the time or energy we spend on holding a grudge or blaming other people for our misfortune.

But we are connected to other people, and when we are hurt it can be hard to remember that. So we have before us two ways of living - retribution, defensiveness, and self-righteousness, on the one hand, and forgiveness, letting go, and resurrection, on the other. 

Our ways of living, of course, depend entirely on what we believe to be true. What sort of world we think we live in. What sort of power we think we have to change or maintain this world. Who we believe ourselves to be. Now, we can look around and see all sorts of stories about ourselves - that we are too fat or too thin, too weak or not tan enough, too poor or too socially awkward. That we need to be working all of the time because we need to have all the latest gadgets so we can download all the best apps and have the most exciting social life when we’re not working. That we have to fit a certain demographic to be successful, and that people on the outside of that demographic are threatening our place in it by looking for work or getting an education or moving into the neighborhood. We have lots of stories selling us newspapers and magazines and clothes and music and stuff that we could probably live just well enough without. And somewhere deep down we have bought into that core story that somehow we’re not yet good enough, somehow we haven’t gotten it together as we should, somehow if we just had a new car, a new phone, a new romance, we’d fill that space of wanting and be successful at last. But if we take these stories to be true, we can’t get back the time or energy we spend trying to be someone else’s picture of perfect.

And with all of this time and energy spent holding grudges and making ourselves perfect, how is there any time and energy left to spend on living? Where is the freedom to live fully and joyfully as God intended if we’re always afraid of being hurt and working our tails off to be the latest version of successful?

Well, this is where the rubber hits the road, then, isn’t it? We are a resurrection people. A people who follow a crucified and risen Savior the best we can. It starts at the core of that truth. The way to freedom, the life we are given. Forgiveness, honesty, new life.

Those last words of Jesus from the cross, those words that Stephen pondered, prayed, learned from his Lord and lived by, those words of faith are the marks of new life and resurrection. To have the trust to put your life and your death into God’s hands as Jesus did - “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” And with that comfort, with knowing that death is not the end, pain is not the end, forgiveness is possible. They are wrapped up in each other, faith and forgiveness. They are each a reflection of the old adage to ‘let go and let God.’ To take God at his word that you are forgiven is a big step, a big gift we receive without having to earn it. Remember, before Stephen spoke his famous last words, Jesus prayed for our forgiveness. It is out of that gift that Stephen was able to ask forgiveness, to have compassion for his own killers. We have been given that same gift of Jesus, that same forgiveness when we sin by what we have done and by what we have left undone. So we can live by that truth, live in that way. What kind of world would we have if we lived like that? Can you imagine a world where we forgive as we have been forgiven, where we really all understood the gift we have been given and can live in that freedom?

Of course, I could leave it at that, with the question, with the challenge to live like Stephen, to make the world better. And it certainly is a challenge. Real forgiveness is hard, and it’s not the same thing as letting others abuse you or walk all over you. It takes work and change, it means naming the wrong and deciding together that the relationship is too important to let it die.

But it’s also a promise. Jesus has told us he is the way and the truth and the life. And we have seen what happens when we respond with ‘my way or the highway,’ with our own versions of the truth, and with clinging to life so tightly we suffocate and die. We resurrection people have seen what happens in places of pain and death. What happens is that Jesus breaks through our mess, and our muck, and our world of competition and striving. What happens is Jesus shatters our false and fragile systems of oppression to bring new life, to bring resurrection, to pave a new way, and shine the light of truth into our darkness of fear, and make us alive again. When we are able to forgive and be forgiven, when we are part of making the world a reflection of the resurrection, it is because Jesus is present and alive here among us. It is because God is working for us, repairing, restoring, re-creating us. One might even say it is God who is building us, like living stones, into the church this world so desperately needs.

Mother church's Day

Acts 2:42-47   They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. 

1 Peter 2:19-25   For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit what found in his mouth.” When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

John 10:1-10   Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

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I love the last verse of this Gospel reading. I rely on it for times of joy and sorrow, discernment and encouragement. Abundant life. The mission of Jesus summed up, right there. Jesus did not come that we might feel guilty for killing him with our sin. He did not come so that we might all look and sound the same. He did not come that we might be able to tell the difference between ‘the saved’ and ‘the heathen.’ He came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. As scripture says in Matthew’s Gospel “you shall know them by their fruit” - if abundant life isn’t there, maybe the tree isn’t rightly rooted in Christ. Maybe if abundant life isn’t the fruit of our labor we’re listening to the thief and the bandit and not to the shepherd.

I’ve just come from a week of abundant life among friends old and new at a conference bookended by two days in Chicago on my old campus. It was a very life-giving gathering, a holy enriching time, full to overflowing with both memory and possibility. We shared Eucharist, remembered our baptism, prayed with one another, sang and studied and walked the road together for a short while, all of us in different places before we had gathered. Some of our conference have been in parish ministry since before the ELCA policies allowed for full inclusion, and have had to struggle for the denomination to allow them to pastor the people who called them knowing who they are. Others are still in seminary, looking forward with hope and excitement to get to where I’ve gotten, and after being in that category of people for so long it still feels surreal that I’ve finally landed here among you all, so blessed to be here and learn together with you how we do this ministry thing. We all shared at that conference abundant life - both the joy and the sorrow, the excitement and the disappointment, the comfort and the discomfort.

Because abundant life is not simply joy and celebration. To be open to joy is to be open to sorrow. To be alive to excitement is to be vulnerable to pain. Abundant life is in that way a bit like today’s secular holiday - Mother’s Day. It is set aside to be a day of joy and celebration for all. For many it is a very happy holiday. But for many it is a day of shame and struggle and sadness. Infertility, abuse, mourning the death of a mother, loss of children to early death or to runaways, all these conflicting pains come up today, too. What must Nigerian mothers be feeling these days, I wonder, as their daughters have been kidnapped from school and still remain lost, maybe sold into forced marriages, maybe into prostitution.

But the life of Jesus holds all of our lives together - the comfort and the pain, the security and the confusion. When we are all called to the same flock by the same shepherd, we share all things in common. No matter how distance separates us. We carry each other in our prayers, in the Psalms and the liturgy and the lectionary and our daily living. One flock, one body, one community. As the people in the first church gathering shared together everything they had, that means they carried each other. It wasn’t just that they gave away what money they made selling their possessions for the sake of the community, they shared resurrection life, which meant being honest about where they had died. With glad and generous hearts they found a welcome in the shepherd’s flock and fold, and God added to their number every day those who were being saved.

Saved from what, I wonder? Saved from eternal damnation? I don’t think so. I think they were being actively saved from the constraints of their guilt and anxiety. Saved from the fears of not having anywhere to call home. Saved from the shame of not living up to expectations. Saved from the pressures to look and behave according to class and race and gender. All the people shared what they had, the rich and the poor, which meant that everyone was valued, everyone mattered, everyone had something to share. How many times have you felt not good enough to contribute to something? How many times have you convinced yourself your idea wasn’t good enough, or you didn’t have the skill to sing or paint or dance or follow your dream or even dream in the first place? But we have such amazing gifts among us that Christ alive has freed us to share. Evan played saxophone for us at Easter and it was the first time he’d ever played in front of anyone! Hank is working on fixing up a broken car. Doris is helping me learn how to pick hymns we can actually sing since we like so much to sing - and it seems that might be an uphill battle, but I’m learning with your help. We may have been taught to place different value judgments on different gifts, but they are all gifts for the whole, just as your very selves are all gifts for this whole community. Your sorrow and your joy. Your struggle and your celebration. 

This is where abundant life is found among us, when we are able to be fully alive together, in trust and faith that God’s love is big enough for all. This is why we have historically talked about the church as “Mother church.” In the perfect ideal sense of the word, the Spirit gives birth to faith in this community, nurtures and protects, challenges and grows us, all of us in the same family but just as diverse and differently skilled as siblings. For example, I have no idea how my kid sister and I are related. She is so much awesomer. But somehow we have the same parents. The same genetic line. And we drive our parents crazy in different ways, too. The thing that most connected us, though, was our dinners. Every night until we kids got jobs, the four of us, Mom and Dad and Margaret and I, sometimes a friend or two from school, sat down together at the supper table to share a meal and talk about our day.

It feels very weird not to have that now, especially as I am the same age my mother was when I was born. It feels very weird, but at the same time it hasn’t really changed, because this Table hasn’t changed. Mother church is fed by the Body of Christ when we gather for worship, sort of like my growing-up family supper grounded us each night. Just like we’ve been fed and nourished in the faith since the first days, when “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

People of God, Jesus came that we may have life, and have it abundantly. It is why he lived the way he lived. It is why he restored communities, welcoming the outcast, giving sight to the blind, embracing the leper, calling all of us our of isolation and into a deeper sharing of our selves. It is why he let us kill him and still came back to us to carry us into a life more wide open than we could yet imagine. It is why the Spirit lives and moves among us in these days. We will not always be comfortable in the flock of Mother church, following the voice of our shepherd, traveling through the gate into open pastures not so clearly defined, but as 1 Peter reminds us, “he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

Emmaus reflection from the road

I'm having a lot of fun thinking about today's story on the road to Emmaus while I'm traveling by plane, train, and automobile to Wisconsin for a retreat called "Dreams and Visions." It all fits the Gospel story like baby bear's porridge: just right. I'm seeing people I haven't sat down with in years, we are sharing stories and meals and while it's not just like old times, it comes pretty close. Riding the train from Midway airport in Chicago, the automatic voice of the announcer saying 'in the direction of travel, doors open on the left,' very nearly got me choked up. Four good years I spent in this 'second city,' and while I don't know it like the back of my hand, there are quirks about it, certain streets and neighborhoods, full of memories, of good times, times spent with people who are now so very dear to me I can't imagine what life was like before I knew them, which makes living so far from them, though all of us are scattered, bittersweet. We've most of us gotten where we were aiming to go, but that means we are no longer with each other.
When Cleopas and his companion were leaving the Passover festivities in Jerusalem to head back home to Emmaus, was it a road they had traveled every year, or had this been their first visit, out of excitement to see this new Rabbi? Had they first walked that road as younger men, off to do their religious duty and worship at the central temple, growing up a little more each year as they traveled, to remember with the whole community the great works of God who had brought them forth out of slavery in Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm? Had they celebrated that story while under Roman occupation for their whole lives, praying and hoping God would send another miracle of freedom so they would no longer have to live under suspicion from the great military force which threatened and mocked their every tradition and holy place? What were their joys and hopes on that road between the great city and their hometown?
They tell their fellow traveler, though a stranger to them, that they had hoped for the redemption of Israel, some kind of freedom, to be bought back from their oppressors, maybe even reunited again into one kingdom. They had set their hearts on this one man and then seen him tortured and killed by their own religious leaders, in cahoots with the Roman authorities. So much for separation of church and state. What betrayal! What tragedy! What a mess! What did they have any more to trust in and hope for if their own chief priests and scribes had handed their hope over to the government for crucifixion?
No wonder they were looking sad when Jesus caught up with them.  No wonder they could not recognize their shepherd walking with them through the valley of the shadow of death. So Jesus has to take them by baby steps through the story they just celebrated, that great Exodus from slavery into freedom, the way we might tell stories at the Easter Vigil, huddled up in the dark of Good Friday waiting for our own resurrection. Beginning with Moses and the prophets, he opened to them the scriptures, reminding them of God's promises, God's faithfulness, God's history with God's own chosen people through generations of wandering and fighting and wandering some more. God's people are always a bit unsettled, it seems. We walk the margins between here and there, between life and death, between belonging to each other and bearing witness as a light to the nations who do not know God as intimately. We have been brought into this story as a gift, and now the story is also ours, so we tell it over and over again to remind us of the God to whom we belong.
We tell this story on the road, between here and there, between life and life, and Jesus himself is in the story, in the telling of it, in the space between us as we are drawn together by it. We may not recognize him on the road. We may be caught up in memories of days gone by, in hopes we have not seen realized, in whatever fears and distractions that keep us awake at night, but Jesus is there walking along the road with us, reminding us of the resurrection which is more true than anything we could have hoped for. It may not look or feel like anything fancy, for Cleopas and his companion it was simply the prayer of thanksgiving and the breaking of bread together, which we share, too, every time we gather at the table for communion. But whether we are on a road we have traveled many times before, or starting off for someplace new, Jesus walks with us, hidden in plain sight, sharing with us God's faithfulness to the promise of freedom.