And now for something completely different...

Martin Luther said two things were required for a worship service: that the Gospel is proclaimed and the Sacraments administered. Therefore, Sunday, November 29, the first Sunday of our new liturgical year, Advent 1, fifth Sunday of the month, we are trying a different setting for worship by gathering at 4pm in the fellowship hall for a potluck supper with guided conversation, prayers, simple singing, and Eucharist.

For many years the first Christians gathered around home dinner tables, and in secret basements, to devote themselves to the apostles' teaching, the prayers, the care of the poor, the meal. We gather around the Meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the night we handed him over, a meal he had grown up with every year, a meal which told the Story of God's deliverance and faithfulness to a stiff-necked people, a meal in the home which formed the faith of multitudes across generations.

So how do you teach and support and question faith in the home? With your kids, parents, spouse, cats? It's not only the place of Sunday School to shape the faith of our children, since they pay more attention to what we do than to what we say anyhow, and they watch and learn everything we do regardless of whether we want them to. They learn if we think they are important and worthwhile by how we pay attention to them. They learn how to treat other people by the way we treat other people. They learn how to talk about other people by the way we do, how to feel about their bodies by the way we talk about and treat our own bodies, how to take care of the world around them by the way we do, even when we're not paying attention.

There are so many reasons why gathering around the meal is key to faith formation. Our relationship with food, with the world, the hungry, the earth, is borne out in our approach to meals, and Jesus shared mealtime with people from all walks of life (which got him into lots of trouble with the purists). When we eat we acknowledge that we need something outside of ourselves in order to keep going, and it can be a vulnerable time especially in time of drought or lost harvest when food is scarce. How many times have we walked past somebody sitting with a cardboard sign who is claiming to be hungry, because we have the power to do so and don't trust they'll make 'good use' of what we might consider giving them? Or spend mealtime on our phone rather than with each other at the table because we've got too many 'important' things to pay attention to? According to John's account of the Gospel, Jesus took on the servant's form and washed his students' feet at the dinner table. He paid attention to them. He knew they would all fall away, and he loved them to the end.

Potlucks are common in the Lutheran cultural tradition. Not only in our culture, certainly, but it's one of those cultural jokes we make about being Lutheran, and it's a blessing to behold when food comes out of so many homes to be shared at a common table. When winter sets in for the season here, there will be weekly community meals at St Luke's in Valaite, always hosted in that space with food provided by different communities (we will cook and serve in early February), and at those meals there are so many people from so many walks of life we have frequently spoken of the Kingdom of God with illustrations from that gathering.

How does your mealtime offer space for the hungry, welcome for the strange and uncertain questions in your own life and heart? What absolutely 'normal' places in your life have been touched by holiness or suddenly surprised with a moment of grace? It is Advent, after all. Keep an eye out and an ear alert: Jesus is coming.

Christ the President/King

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 

The one coming with the clouds rules over all

As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne, his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Psalm 93 

Ever since the world began, your throne has been established. (Ps. 93:2)

The LORD is king, robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength. The LORD has made the world so sure that it cannot be moved. Ever since the world began, your throne has been established; you are from everlasting. The waters have lifted up, O LORD, the waters have lifted up their voice; the waters have lifted up their pounding waves. Mightier than the sound of many waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea, mightier is the LORD who dwells on high. Your testimonies are very sure, and holiness befits your house, O LORD, forever and forevermore.

Revelation 1:4b-8 

Glory to the one who made us a kingdom

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the LORD God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

John 18:33-37 

The kingdom of Christ

Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews”? Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

*******

This morning’s story from the Gospel of John comes just a week after Jesus was hailed as the coming King of Israel, while riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as the people called out "Hosanna to the Son of David!” It was a great big heroic celebration, a revolutionary public statement of power that wasn’t Roman for once, and seemed Jesus was the latest celebrity preacher to win the hearts of the people. Imagine Oprah coming to town with expectations to give everyone a brand new car, or something like that, only better, more like expectations that all mortgages would be paid off forever and a permanent end to crime. But instead, here we are, a week later, where Jesus has been sent to the principle’s office by his best friends and classmates, while Pilate is scurrying back and forth between talking with Jesus and trying to make sense of the people’s leaders demanding he put Jesus to death. What a quick turn around!

And what a way to end the year. The church year, I mean. It's sort of a cliffhanger as far as story endings go. Today’s the last Sunday of this liturgical year, the culmination of the stories we’ve been telling since last Advent, the big celebration of the final and complete victory of Jesus our King, and this is how we’ve chosen to end it? With this story from halfway through Holy Week? I know we’ve been through a year of Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Lent, Easter and Pentecost, and we’re about to take off on that journey yet again with our Advent New Year Potluck next week, but to wrap it all up with this conversation between Pilate and Jesus seems a bit… a bit anticlimactic. There’s no Jesus storming the castle, no fire and brimstone battle of the armies who are righteous striving against the enemy who are many but not righteous enough. No ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers” to the glorious death. Not even a riding off into the sunset. We have a much more… enigmatic ending to this year’s journey with Jesus from the cradle to the cross to the creative works of the Spirit.

Though, to be fair, we did get beautiful end-time imagery from Revelation paired with this morning’s Gospel reading. And the Daniel version of the apocalypse is all sorts of fiery excitement, but it doesn’t show a God riding into battle as much as a God who is glorious enough that the only response possible is to bow down in worship. The consuming fire, the love, the strength and the grace and the glory, on open display before the masses, and the thousands upon thousands gathered before the throne of God, who can only respond by serving the Maker of the cosmos. John’s Gospel reminds us from the very beginning that the Maker had somehow been hidden in our midst the whole time. Remember how this Gospel according to John began: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

We have this obsession with being right and proving we are right by proving other people are just dumb. We do it all the time, as though finding the truth is a zero-sum game. But this right and wrong, black and white, my way or the highway, grounded in fear and insecurity, isn’t what we’ve got in the Gospel today. It’s in fact quite the opposite. We want to control, by the will of the flesh or the will of man, by genetics and family lines and race and class and immigration status, to be able to say who is in and who is out, but we are born children of God purely according to the will and free gift of God. When Jesus is talking with Pilate about truth, he’s coming from a tradition of faith that has a history of arguing with God, of Rabbis arguing with each other and with the sacred texts, of answering questions with more questions, of telling stories instead of giving yes or no responses. We hear this in his interactions with the teachers of the law all the time, and luckily for us our Jewish neighbors have kept much of this tradition of diverse interpretation alive. I remember back in college we had a guest preacher one week, William Willimon, who said that he believed in the Truth who is also the Way and the Life, who is the person of Jesus Christ. Which is a very different reading of that word ‘truth’ compared to, say, the truth of the laws of gravity and mathematical equations.

Heck, we even have this day called “Christ the King” as though we know what that phrase means. You can go ahead and break down the words, but that won’t get at the heart of things, only at the tip of the iceberg. See, “Christ” isn’t Jesus’ first name, it’s a descriptor, a title, a faith statement in and of itself. It’s from the word “Christos,” meaning “anointed,” and people are anointed as prophets, priests, and kings. To break that down basically and broadly, people are anointed to speak to the people on behalf of God, to speak to God on behalf of the people, and to settle disputes and protect people one from another. We like to separate these things, and ought to do so for the very least to protect leaders from burnout on the one hand or power corruption on the other. The only place where all three roles come together is in Christ Jesus, who as God with skin on brings together prophet and priest, serving also as priestly sacrifice. Where the kingship comes in is difficult to put a finger on exactly, because that’s an invented position. Some of us nerdier types have images of kings from stories like the Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings, or think of President Snow from The Hunger Games as the modern equivalent of an all-powerful state ruler. The reason, of course, that we give Jesus any of the titles of power from our own society, is to point out how differently Jesus ‘rules.’ Kings, Presidents, Governors, celebrities all have this sort of aura and public persona, this certain amount of protection from the masses because they are so outnumbered. These rulers typically have the power, sometimes even the authority, to call for a draft in time of war, or to institute a tax, or declare a holiday, or set minimum wage, without knowing personally the effects of those decisions on the majority of their people.

But Jesus is not that kind of king, not that sort of ruler. He lives in the world with us, fights beside us in the trenches, dies with us and carries us through to a life where he does not ask a percentage tax of our land and livestock, but rather demands a complete resurrection. Jesus works with us through many small deaths and renewals, through many conversions, through questions and stories and conversations and arguments, in relationship, which is not black and white, right or wrong, but living and active, both shining bright as the noonday sun above us and burning just as brightly within and around us.

There’s a line in the movie “The Princess Bride” where the Sicilian kidnapper has used his catchphrase “Inconceivable!” so often that his hired swordsman tells him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So we often do with words we use in church, words we use to talk about God. We get used to this language, or we expect that we ought to know what we mean by it, but to say Christ is King means something very different now than it did when Pope Pius XI called for its remembrance back in 1925. And that image of a King, and of who Jesus is and who Christians are called to be, is very different from what it meant in the time when the Gospels were first told around campfires and in secret catacombs gatherings.

To be sure, though, no matter what label we put on our God, what attribute we most want to lift up or what story we wish wasn’t there, God’s relationship with us is everlasting, God’s promise of resurrection is sure, God’s forgiveness is ongoing, God’s power outlasts every kingdom and country and war and term of office. Because even when we celebrate and look forward to the hopeful end of all the war and suffering, we will all of us be caught up in that everlasting that has no end, because our God is everlasting, without end, working in us and through us to put right this weary world, until all have found a home in God’s own kingdom and country.

Christ the Widow

1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

O God, you show forth your almighty power chiefly by reaching out to us in mercy. Grant us the fullness of your grace, strengthen our trust in your promises, and bring all the world to share in the treasures that come through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

********

This story from Mark's Gospel is one of those Bible stories we use over and over again for stewardship campaigns. If the widow, we say, can put in so much of her offering that she has nothing else to live on, what are we waiting for? Indeed, it’s a good question: what is there to keep us from giving all that we have, instead of working so many hours to hold onto it that we don’t even have the time left at the end of the day to enjoy it? What sort of giving - what sort of faith - are we part of if, like the rich who made offerings out of their abundance, we hardly even notice the giving? It’s a bit like a man getting a pay raise and buying his wife flowers for his anniversary so he can stay extra hours at work to make even more money, or like Santa giving the kids bigger toys each year even though mom and dad are working too hard to play with the kids. When we talk about stewardship, we either narrow it down to only talking about giving money until it hurts, or we talk about our struggles with the budget and paying the oil bill, or we hem and haw and don’t want to offend anyone by talking about money at all.

However, I want to say this morning that the story of the widow giving away all she has to live on is about way more than just money. First of all, let’s take a look at the obvious injustice: it was the job, the calling, the express purpose of the temple, second only to reminding people of the covenant God had made with them, to take care of the widow and the orphan. There are two laws that sum up the purpose of being God’s chosen people: love God, and love your neighbor. In order to be a light of any value to the nations, God’s people have got to take care of widows and orphans. It’s stated pretty clearly in the prophets that this is the will of God. So how in the world did this temple fall so far from that simple, basic commandment, that this widow ends up so completely destitute? Or had she been so uplifted by the temple that she knew she didn’t need those two copper coins because meals on wheels was going to show up again tomorrow? I’d like to say it was the latter, that she had been taken care of so regularly she knew she didn’t need even a penny, but I know God’s church is made of people, and that people have been falling short of those basic two laws of love since the beginning. So that’s a pretty big problem. God keeps choosing broken people to take care of broken people. The rich who don’t understand how to care for the poor, the poor who can’t take care of themselves, everybody in between on that spectrum, each in varying degrees of denial about how bad things are, somehow God makes a kingdom out of broken people. Which is pretty important, because there isn’t another kind of person on the planet. We’re all broken, broke, and poor, in one way or another.

In comparison with the high and mighty religious rulers of the day, too, it’s almost humorous how absolutely clueless those men in long robes are. And it’s not lost on me that I’m in a long robe when I lead worship. We like our privilege and our power whenever and however we can get it. Sometimes we’re born to it, like the priests of the ancient tribe of Levi, or the upper classes who inherit wealth and position just by accident of birth, and sometimes our hard work actually pays off and we get that promotion or make all the right connections in just the right way to climb the ladder, and often it’s a mix of the two. But then, like the scribes and the crowd gathered in the same space as that poor widow, we suddenly forget how to see one another as human beings, so completely taken in by gold stars and entitlement that we build walls around ourselves and our stuff so that nobody can threaten our status. It’s not healthy, but it’s certainly bought and sold as the new measure of success on nearly every television station and in every game of comparisons that we play.

So beware the celebrities and learn from the destitute.

But if it were even that easy. Of course, the way of human nature is that, even if we decided it was that easy, we’d soon make a contest of that, announcing who was most destitute and proclaiming most righteous those who gave the most money to the poor, while demonizing the celebrities for simply having any wealth, and again we’ve gotten lost in that trap of labels and expectations and stereotypes and human judgments. I’m of course not saying we shouldn’t lift up acts of charity, just that we can’t judge ourselves by what we see.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury, after we have had a few weeks of hearing him talk about being handed over to death, and we can finally rest in the beautiful temple and watch the work of worship take place, instead of thinking about sacrifice. Maybe Jesus hasn’t really stopped talking about his death, though. Maybe this is just one more way for him to foreshadow what is to come. We talk about stewardship and offering as though it is money we give to God. But nothing we have comes of our own work or even luck. It all, the whole world, comes first from God. Stewardship and offering starts with our creator God who has made the world and everything in it. The God who alone is able to say what anything is worth, who started off the world by saying it is good, who has watched us spend generations destroying the world (including each other!) and has rescued us time and again from ourselves, from our despair, and from our anxious clutching at life to tightly we’ve strangled it to death.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury and shows us the image of God, created in all of those people, made most evident in the trust and the generosity and even the foolishness of that widow who gave out of her poverty, her last penny, all that she had to live on. We have said it’s a good model, a showing of two extremes of giving, that we can learn how we ought to give to be really faithful Christians. Jesus talks a lot about money, so we can’t just ignore it. More than that, though, is the reality of who it is who is watching this and pointing out the widow to his disciples: Jesus Christ, in our confession of faith, is God incarnate, God with us, God with skin on walking in the world. And if God - who alone has the power to ultimately create and destroy and judge, took on flesh and blood and bone, lived through stubbed toes and puberty and the Roman occupation and threats to his life from his own people - this very God has come to us in our dirt and mess, what else can we say God is like but this widow? “All she had to live on” is all that she gave. To a temple that was failing miserably at taking care of her. Yet she gave anyway.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury and tells his disciples again, by way of another living parable, what he is about to do. Here are the scribes and priests who claim to know God, who have left God’s commandments in favor of being popular. Here is a widow who is the bottom of the social barrel and not even worth a second glance from anybody who’s got a reputation. Here are people who have forgotten God, and here is a widow who foreshadows what God is up to. Jesus is, after all, about to give us all that he has to live on. He’s already at the mercy of strangers as a wandering Rabbi - though those strangers soon become either followers or adversaries. He’s put himself entirely into the hands of the people who will kill him, disregarding their malice and hypocrisy, out of his love for them. His love for them is also his love for us, no matter how often we ignore or make mockery of him.

Widows in Jesus’ day weren’t seen as much, if they were seen at all. But God became weak and powerless just like that widow, in order to save us. The widow didn't hold back, but gave everything she had to live on. Jesus didn't hold back, either, but he gave his entire life. For us.  Just as God is always giving, always pouring God's whole self into us, always emptying out for us, given and shed for you. It's how this whole creation got started, after all. And if God can create a world out of a mess of darkness, or make a garden grow where there hadn’t been one before, or use a widow to feed Elijah the prophet during a famine, or bring Lazarus back from the dead, or let us kill him while he pours out forgiveness from he cross, or rise to new life on the third day and bring us all with him through death and on to the other side… if God can be seen in the life and meager gifts of a widow, what do you think God can reveal in your life, in your gifts, in your emptiness and weakness? Maybe an example for others. Maybe foolish and extravagant love. Maybe even resurrection and new life. May it ever be so.

Waste of toilet paper

John 11:32-44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the sone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

*******

I’m going to need your help with the sermon today. Maybe I’ve had too much caffeine with the new Starbucks job, or maybe I’ve gotten some leftover holiday spirit from Halloween, but I have with me the makings of a costume, and I need your help getting dressed for the occasion of today’s Gospel reading. Now, I only have four rolls of this store-brand toilet paper, so if I’m going to be a presentable mummy we might have to get creative. Who’s going to help wrap me up today? Kids? Now, who knows anything about mummies? Why do we wrap up mummies? Do you ever see zombies who have leftover mummy wraps on? What do you think of that? Zombies don’t smell very good, do they? Well, why should they? They’re dead meat! For real, dead meat smells bad. If you think not taking a bath for a week or two smells bad, death smells even worse. That’s why Mary and Martha put their brother Lazarus in the cave with a rock over it, because he’d been dead four days and was starting to look and smell more like a zombie than like their brother.

But you know what happened next? Jesus came! Jesus came to see his friends, and Mary and Martha were sad, and angry, and the neighbors were upset that he hadn’t come sooner and made Lazarus better before he’d died. When people we love die, even when people we don’t like very much die, sometimes we’re sad, sometimes we’re angry, sometimes we’re confused or afraid, sometimes we’re relieved they’re not in pain anymore, sometimes we’re all of these things at once! We might be mad at God, or we might be mad at our friend who died. We might only tell the good stories about the dead person, and not the hard stories. We might forget some things and remember other things not quite as they were. Death is weird for the living who get left behind. Especially when we try to forget about it, or hide it, or get over it before we’re really ready.

That’s one of the reasons we have Halloween. It’s called Halloween because we said “All Hallow’s Evening” all smushed up in one word and it got shortened to “Halloween.”
We know that sometimes it feels like the line between alive and dead is blurry, like the almost nighttime has all sorts of secrets we almost know, like life is bigger and more mysterious and there’s a chill in the air and we can see our breath in the cold for the first time of the season. Sometimes time and space feel so holy, so much more alive than we can see, and we think that maybe it’s because alive and dead aren’t as different as they seem, and maybe the dead are walking among the living, or the living are walking among the dead. So some of us dress up, to confuse the dead who might have a grudge against us, or just to be silly, to laugh at death like it’s a game, because we know we don’t have to be scared of it.

In the Christian church, we know this moment of the dead and the living all gathered in one place and time because we celebrate it every time we share communion. We pray at the Eucharist about all the saints, cherubim and seraphim, hosts above and saints below… because at God’s table, when we say all are welcome, we mean all - living and dead. So those grandparents you love and haven’t seen in years, they’re here at the Table with us every Sunday. It also means the absent father you haven’t forgiven or the friend who went off to war and died even though you came back alive, they’re here, too.

And this is the great thing about this morning’s story of Lazarus. I’m going to need your help again. Now that I’ve been all wrapped up like a dead man, I’m going to read this last bit of the Gospel lesson again: [Jesus] cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The same people who had wrapped Lazarus up to be buried now got to unwrap him, got to untie him, so that he could live again like Jesus told him to.

When God gives us this incredible gift of new life, it’s not for us alone as individuals, but it’s for the whole community. Everybody’s welcome, everybody’s involved in freedom and new life and forgiveness. When I’m wrapped up in guilt, or anger, or shame, or death, I can’t unwrap myself very well, can I? Especially if I’ve been guilty or sad or angry or ashamed or dead for days and days. If you think it’s tough to walk after your leg had fallen asleep, trying to walk when you’ve been wrapped up or sitting still for a couple of days is even harder. We need each other to get out of this mess, we can’t get out of it alone. We don’t get out of it alone. Because Jesus calls us. Anybody else could call us, or yell at us, or bribe us to do what they want us to do, but it’s the voice of Jesus that really brings us back alive again.

Not only that, after Jesus calls Lazarus alive again, Jesus himself gets hurt by angry people with a lot of shame, and he dies a horrible, terrible, painful death. He doesn’t get properly wrapped up, because it’s so late when they take his body off the cross, and they didn’t have flashlights to see after the sun went down, and it was a holy day for no working. So the women came back after the dark was over, after Jesus had been dead for awhile, to wrap him up properly. They come back to that cave with a big stone, just like when they showed Jesus where they had buried Lazarus… and Jesus is not there any more. Jesus didn’t stay dead. And neither will we, and neither will the people we love, or any of the people God loves (which is everybody). 

See, now, when you’ve finished helping me get all this toilet paper off and I’m all unwrapped, I’ll put back on my worship robe, called an ‘alb,’ that is a sign, a reminder, of baptism. Everybody is unwrapped from shame and death, then clothed with Christ, in Baptism, and we can’t ever have the death wrap on forever again. I just get this robe as Pastor to mark that I’m leading in worship, but it doesn't mean that I’m any more special, it means I'm just like you. That’s why I wear it, as a reminder that I’m representing you and representing Jesus, sort of both at the same time, just like we do when we leave Sunday morning and go to school or to work or to a football game. We carry Jesus with us wherever we go, because Jesus carries us when he died and when he’s risen from the dead. That’s what today is for. All Saints Day, the reminder that all who have died in the love of God are not dead forever, that we are all safe in God’s love, no matter what or where or who we are.