Why are we in this wilderness?

Numbers 21:4-9

They set out from Mount Hor by way of the Sea of Reeds to skirt the land of Edom. But the people grew restive on the journey, and the people spoke against Elohim and against Moses, “Why did you make us leave Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread and no water, and we have come to loathe this miserable food.” And I AM sent firey serpents against the people. They bit the people and many of the Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned by speaking against I AM and against you. Intercede with I AM to take away the serpents from us!” And Moses interceded for the people. Then I AM said to Moses, “Make a firey serpent figure and mount it on a pole. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, they shall recover.” Moses made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, they would look at the bronze serpent and recover.

Ephesians 2:1-10

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the children of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of humanity. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which God loves us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

John 3:14-21

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Humanity be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the cosmos that God gave the only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the cosmos to damn the cosmos, but in order that the cosmos might be made whole through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe in condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest their works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their works have been carried out in God.”

Why are we here? Why are we in the wilderness? Why are we in Chatham? Why are we in Lent? Why do we exist!?

Maybe a lot of questions for early in the morning. Or a lot of questions for any time of day. And it’s a big question, generally speaking. So perhaps we can take it in small bites, no pun intended. I mean, ‘small bites,’ and the first reading was about people getting bitten by snakes. See? Puns. They can be useful. 

Why we are in the wilderness has a lot to do with why we are in the season of Lent. That’s an easy one. The calendar takes us through this season every year. Old habits die hard. Even when those old habits are unhealthy. I’m not saying Lent isn’t healthy. Lent, in fact, is incredibly healthy, and we follow this calendar in the church year after year to form us into a more whole people. I’m saying that the wilderness people, in this morning's reading, were stuck in their old habits and wanted them back, even though those old habits included being owned and abused as slaves. In that first reading this morning, the first testament, first recorded history of God’s relationship with God’s people, we were led out of slavery into freedom, for the first time of many, on the road to the great promised land - and even though we had spent lifetimes dreaming and hoping for freedom it was pretty scary to get there. Habits are like that, when they’re broken. This far into Lent, if you’ve been trying to give up something like chocolate or dirty jokes or having that one extra drink after work, it’s probably getting pretty rough, especially if those were things you just sort of did without thinking. Habits. 

But Lent is about breaking habits - out of thoughtlessness and into awareness of who we are and how we are who we are - so it takes us out of our comfort zone, so we have to confront what we have been taking for granted. It’s great. It’s like sending the kids to camp so they can try new things and learn about their strengths and fears, and it’s for everybody, because we’re always in the process of learning more about our own strengths and fears, no matter what age we happen to be at the moment. Moses takes the people out of their abusive environment and on into a healthier freedom, and while it’s the best thing for them all they still crave that familiar pain and agony and bondage. They still crave the thing that was killing them, because, as the saying goes, ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,’ right?

When I was a kid, my mother used to smoke. I don’t know how much or how often, really. By the time I was four or five I had gone through so many ear infections, from all of that second-hand smoke, that my mom quit smoking, cold turkey. She had picked it up in college, so it was easier to give up than if she’d started as a teen. Mom knew it was terrible for her own health, even though it fed her craving and kept her skinny, which helped her feel sexy. You know how it is. In any case, she ought to have quit for her own health, but she didn’t quit that habit for the sake of her own heart and lungs. She quit smoking because her firstborn was in pain. All of that to say that sometimes we end up in a wilderness of learning new ways to live because of other people in our lives. Sometimes it’s because we see and know in ourselves that we have to change something for our own sake. 

We are in the wilderness of Lent because it’s good to look at where we are, and where we are going, and where we would like to go, and where God might be leading us, and where we are cooperating with or fighting against God. Are we trying to grow our church? Are we trying to grow our faith? Are we impatient and discontented and wondering what we should be doing with our time that might give us joy? Are we angry, frightened, sick, tired, and unable to say why? Are we on auto-pilot and missing the view entirely? Are we even a ‘we,’ or are we just a collection of individuals all isolated one from another?

This is why we are in the wilderness. God is calling us, leading us, carrying us out of slavery into freedom, over and over again as we make slow progress in our faith journeys. Like the kids at camp, we are in Lent to discover what God can do with us and where we might face our fears together. There are healthy, good gifts we have been given to carry forward, and there are less-than-healthy practices which need to be set down and left behind. What are they? Only time with God will tell. And sometimes God forces out those things we need to drop, and often we whine and complain and want them back even if they were killing us. So God makes us look at them. God puts them up on a billboard in our midst and shows them to us as they are, shows us our sin as it is, shows us our pain in a way we cannot hide from, by carrying it in his own body and telling us the story again and again, year after year, of love come among us and murdered by us, only to come again to love us beyond death.

For love did not come into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. This being saved, this being made whole, is not an easy process, but it is completed in Christ, it is begun in Christ, it is shown in the love of Christ living and dying and rising among us. We may not know what it is like to be loved as deeply and as completely as God loves us. We may fight being known that completely, being loved that completely. We may try to hide behind works and words and rebellions and making ourselves important, but in the wilderness there is no place to hide. In the wilderness there is sand and sun and there are other travelers and there is the journey itself. We are in Lent to strip away all those things by which we would save ourselves, to look honestly at the things by which we are destroying ourselves, and to be met, time and again, by God walking among us to make the whole of us whole. This love leaves no one out, none of the whole infinite cosmos.

This is why we are here. To be loved. From this love we love others with the love with which God loves us, which is why we are here in Chatham. But first and foremost, primarily, most importantly, we are here to be loved. Openly, honestly, in all of our naked beauty and struggle, we are loved. You are loved. Look upon our failure to love and know that even then, even when we nail love to a tree to die, that love continues to love us all and for always.

Absurd

Exodus 20:1-17 (JPS)

Elohim spoke all these words, saying: I am I AM, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: You shall have no other elohim besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, I AM, your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep my commandments. You shall not swear falsely by the name of I AM your God; for I AM will not clear one who swears falsely by His name. Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of I AM your God: you shall not do any work - you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days I AM made haven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore I AM blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that I AM your God is assigning to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house: you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s. All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. “You speak to us,” they said to Moses, “and we will obey; but let not Elohim speak to us, lest we die.” Moses answered the people, “Be not afraid; for Elohim has come only in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may be ever with you, so that you do not go astray.”

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 (ESV)

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will kill the wisdom of the wise, and the logic of the logical I will frustrate.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?  Has God not made dull the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the absurdity of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and absurdity to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the absurdity of God is wiser than humanity, and the weakness of God is stronger than humanity.

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

John 2:13-22 (ESV)

From the Holy Gospel according to John

Glory to you, O Lord.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of retail merchandise.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Demolish this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The Gospel of the Lord

Praise to you, O Christ.

***

The trouble with planning out preaching series and themes for a season is that sometimes after study and deeper preparation the key word for a day turns out not to be the word you want to use. This morning we’ve got the “A” from the word “prAying” to stand for “Amazed,” and I realize the “A” word I ought to have chosen is “Absurd.” Granted, the absurd is often amazing in its absurdity, and we go to the circus to be amazed by the absurd, with those sideshow acts and the like, not to mention the science fiction shows and fantasy stories we share. Translating today’s Corinthians letter included a nod to Spock, Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek character, who was always concerned with the logical, which seems to be wise. Faith, however, is not always wise. It is not logical to give our lives to a greater love without a clear plan of action... but I’m getting ahead of myself. Far, far ahead of myself. 

Because it doesn’t start with our deciding to give ourselves to anything. It doesn’t start with our decision, it starts with that greater love. Remember where we started with the first Sunday of Lent two weeks ago, when I read the creation story from the Jesus storybook Bible and God created everything just by saying hello to it, and then declared ‘you’re good!’ We could find logic in God’s decision to create in the first place, except then we messed up creation when we did the thing that got us kicked out of the garden, and while some say God has a plan, that doesn’t mean we’re living according to that plan. In fact, if God has a plan, we have a long history of telling God where to put that plan while we go off and make our own plans and do our own thing and keep messing up even our own best laid plans.

So we have the first reading here, the Exodus reading, the plan for living outside of slavery and into freedom. Here are the ten words that tell us what it means for us to be the people of God. We’re studying these commandments in the confirmation class currently, so if you have any questions about them, ask Robin or Liz Tucksmith since they’re in class this season. But be prepared to have a discussion about the complexities of these laws - they’re never as straightforward as they seem. Because relationships aren’t simply black and white, are they? Relationships are living and evolving and adapting and learning, and being in a covenant relationship with God means that our life together is also constantly shifting as we learn more about each other.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe how often we mess up on these simple ten basic commands, though. And when they’re boiled down to the heart of things, loving God and loving our neighbors, even then we can’t seem to get it right. God is ridiculously in love with us, and we keep turning away, abusing the promises, taking God for granted... who would put up with that in a human to human relationship? Yet God has a lot more patience, a lot more time, a lot more love, than we can imagine, and God just keeps on giving and giving and giving... it’s just not logical. It makes no sense, how often God goes out on a limb for us after all the times we spit in God’s face or ignore God completely.

Consider the ways we use marketing strategies to ‘grow the church.’ Church is not a place to collect money and look good and make ourselves feel good about being good people. Yet we market all sorts of programs that do just that in an effort to get more people in the doors, and if we fail to get more people in the doors we somehow translate that into feeling like we’ve failed at being a church! The system in Jesus’ day was rigged, too. People came from miles and miles around to worship in the one legitimized temple, which meant they had to give up time and resources to travel, they had to leave their fields and flocks to make the proper sacrifice to make God happy with them after all they had gotten wrong since the last sacrifice they had made. The only trouble was, they lived under a government that traded with different coins, with the images of whoever was the ruler of the hour on the face of those coins, and the law says ‘thou shalt not make for thyself any graven image,’ so they couldn’t use those coins for anything related to their faith. Traveling as far as they did to get to the temple for the sacrifice that would make God happy with them, or at least less angry, they couldn’t all afford to bring an animal or carry a grain offering, or maybe the priest would say it wasn’t good enough, so they’d have to trade the day-to-day coin for a temple-appropriate coin so they could buy the sacrifice-approved animal to offer back to the temple to slaughter and burn so that God would be happy with them, or at least less angry, and maybe this year their crops would grow enough to live on.

Sounds ridiculously complicated, doesn’t it? And of course, where there is money involved there are people who don’t have enough, and people who know how to get more than they need, and people who are afraid, and people who are clueless... If somebody is seriously concerned that they get the best animal for sacrifice and they need only so much temple-approved coin and you’ve got the weights and measures to trade government money for church money and those religious folk just trust you to do what’s right, how long will it be until your weights and measures dip a little heavy or light or generally off-balance? And, worse yet, how long will it be until your connection to the temple is only for the sake of what you can get out of it? What you can do to earn God’s favor or make a bit more money to earn someone else’s favor? What ever happened to God’s promise that ‘my house shall be a house of prayer for all people’? God never said that only the rich and socially deserving would be allowed to be forgiven. God never said that there was an entrance fee into heaven. 

When Jesus arrived preaching in the wilderness, it was to say that the Kingdom of God has come near. It was not to say ‘step right up and get your tickets on the cheap.’ See, it makes a lot more sense, it’s easier to wrap our heads around it, if there are different classes of people, different sorts and types of who is welcome and who isn’t and how we can tell the difference. Expecting everyone to be able to afford to buy the perfectly approved sacrifice at whatever cost the market is demanding is one way we can keep out the ‘dirty undeserving poor.’ But then what happens when we ourselves are somebody else’s definition of the ‘dirty undeserving poor’? Never mind that. It shouldn’t come down to what happens when we are down on our luck. It doesn’t, in fact, come down to that. Even that makes too much sense.

'The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.' Why in the world would a perfect, almighty, strong, eternal, righteous God get so messy as to be angry, fleshy, sweaty, dirty, poor, persecuted, beaten and humiliated, on purpose? What sort of logic is it that the God we try so hard to please, so hard to be ‘good enough’ for, would take on life among the outcast as one we would never deem ‘good enough’? For anyone who has ever met God in an AA meeting or other recovery experience, it might seem that of course there is no other way for God to save us than to be there for us at rock bottom when we land there in all of our broken pieces. But who would want to admit they’ve been there? Who would want to boast about meeting God in their darkest, weakest, worst possible moments? That would be admitting that we’ve had those dark, weak, terrible times in our lives. ‘...but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.’ If we can only find God where life makes sense, then we aren’t looking through the right lens.

Absurd, isn’t it? We try so hard to be successful, to grow our ministries and programs by being strong and exciting and colorful and well-organized, and God insists on meeting us in the weak and boring and plain and messy daily living that far too often wears us down. Even this winter, as long and hard as it has been, as often as it has made us stop ‘normal’ daily routines entirely, is a place where God has been with us. Because the cross, the Savior whom we worship, is not concerned with market values and perfect sacrifices - Jesus IS the perfect sacrifice and has already taken care of that for all of humanity. The foolish absurdity of our salvation is that we are able to look fear and death in the face and find God even there. And if we can’t find God there, God finds us there. If we can’t come up with words or slogans to sell people on coming to church, well, that’s just fine, because God is not a relationship to be bought or sold or marketed. It is in our very failures that God finds us and loves us. And everything we use to prop ourselves up is discarded, everything we use to make ourselves look better than we feel is thrown out, everything that could ever get between our hearts and our God is demolished by the God who wants us and adores us just as we are. It is absurd, that God would seek us and find us and go through hell and back to keep us, but it is what God does, it is the sort of God whom we worship, it is precisely the foolishness of a love so deep and wide and high and long and vast and incomprehensible that all we can do about it is nothing.

Righteousness & Rejection

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:23-31

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. It seems to be a constant struggle, figuring out these two things. Those who we deem ‘self-righteous’ often reach that status by rejecting a lot of other people. And yet those who we would off-handedly reject for one reason or another are often those held up as models of righteousness. Think of the poor, hungry, homeless, sick… those named in Jesus’ sermon on the mount as ‘blessed.’ Or, since we’ve got a bit of their story today, think of Abram and Sarai, who by all appearances were rejected, because they had no offspring, no heir, no future, no children to carry their name forward. In ancient times, barren women were often seen as deserving their childless-ness for having done something unrighteous. Any illness or misfortune, really, was seen as a sign of God having rejected the person on account of sin, and the rest of the ‘healthy’ neighbors would cut them off, point out their misfortune with a shake of the head and maybe a bit of that ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. This morning’s Psalm contains both, if we had read it entirely from its beginning. We only got the happy ending in the lectionary portion today, but the number of today’s Psalm is 22. The 23rd Psalm is the Shepherd Psalm, and the 22nd is the one we pray on Maundy Thursday while stripping the altar. You might remember the opening line for this Psalm from Jesus’ words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Guessing from the way the Psalm ends, one might never know it started off from such a place of barrenness. Such a despairing, empty, painful prayer as it begins, Psalm 22 lays out the fullness of the poet’s sense of rejection, works its way through all of those nasty uncomfortable feelings that we certainly don’t talk about in church, and then resolves in this triumphant word of hope: all who live, and all who ever have lived, will kneel before the Lord and declare to generations yet to come that Adonai has acted!

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. Jesus’ disciples are following him on his way to Jerusalem, amazed at the feedings and healing and miracles and still not quite understanding what they mean when they use the word “Messiah” about their teacher. “Who is this,” they ask, “that even the wind and the waves obey him?” They argue about who might sit at his right and left hand in his glory, they talk about his reputation as a powerful prophet, then he hits them - again - with the foretelling of his impending arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion. They see him as righteous and powerful, he tells them he will soon be rejected, and they can’t handle it. 

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. Following Jesus means that we will be rejected, too. “Take up your cross,” he says. And he didn’t mean just live with that horrible relationship or that terrible economic situation and suffer through because it’s ‘just your cross to bear.’ This is not Jesus’ way of saying be nice to the most annoying people in your life and give up a latte now and then so you can donate an extra five dollars to the hunger appeal. This is the hard work of discipleship. This is the answer to those who say being a Christian is an easy, low-risk, high-profile, every day is sunshine and roses sort of thing. It wouldn’t be honest to try and grow a church by telling people there’s nothing difficult about living in community and learning together how to more deeply love the world we live in. Loving deeply means sacrifice. Loving deeply means giving and giving. Loving deeply means there is a cost, and that love may not be reciprocal.

Righteousness and rejection, after all, are all tied up in this loving deeply. The word ‘righteous’ means ‘in right relationship.’ And since God is a God of deep and abiding love, to be in relationship with God means being loved deeply and eternally. And since we are a people, a humanity, infected by sin, it means we are of a habit of rejecting that love simply on the basis of proving ourselves and having a preference toward pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, thank you very much.

Yet when we look at the rest of the Jesus story, after he tells his disciples to take up their crosses, to openly bear those things others would likely shame them for, to wear their hearts and their hurts on their sleeves, he reminds them that this is the best and only way to truly live. Endlessly striving to save our lives, to protect ourselves from pain by hiding behind our work or our accomplishments or our wealth or the sin we point out in others, will only shrivel our hearts and keep us from truly living. Those who seek to save their lives, he says, will lose them. But to live openly, honestly, whole-heartedly, in such a way that risks rejection from the world, brings us more deeply into the great company of saints before and around us. To live truly is to give our hearts and our lives away in loving deeply, in living the Gospel that is the truth of God’s never-ending love for all of creation.

And even in those moments when the disciples fail, when we fail, to carry our cross and live as deeply as we were created to live, to love as openly as truly makes us alive, even then, Jesus does not fail to carry his cross for us. Jesus undergoes all that he said he would, the betrayal and beating and death unto resurrection, out of a deep and abiding love for us! For every time that we fail to follow, Jesus comes to walk beside us. Every time we fail to love, Jesus loves us anyhow. Every time we miss the mark, get in over our heads, feel abandoned and start to despair, Jesus comes and carries us - his love and his life - through every death and on into eternal life. 

Christ Jesus, who is Righteousness, lived through every deepest rejection the world has to offer,  to restore us all to righteousness.

40 days with a liar

Occasionally the pastor will preach without a manuscript, or read from other sources, and so the sermon will not be readily available in a blog-worthy format. Nevertheless, the notes one might take from this morning's sermon may go something like the following:

Genesis 9:8–17
Psalm 25:1–10
1 Peter 3:18–22
Mark 1:9–15

Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, with the wild animals, where the angels waited on him, and where he strove with Satan. Just after hearing from God those long-awaited words 'you are my Son, the Beloved,' Jesus is thrown into the wilderness by the Spirit, where that very word of God is tested by the accuser, which, in Hebrew, is pronounced 'ha-satan,' and that's where we get the word 'Satan.' No, the Accuser is not a red devil with horns and a tail and a pitchfork. But the images of Satan have changed throughout time, so it might be helpful to remind ourselves what Jesus was up against in that wilderness.

At this time, the pastor read the first two stories out of what is called "The Jesus Bible Storybook." It's a wonderful resource, fully illustrated re-telling of the major Scripture passages. Those first two stories, then, are the retelling of the first, well-ordered Creation narrative, where God finishes up each day by saying to creation, "you're good!" and it is. Over and over again, each and every day, God wraps up the work by saying 'you're good!' and it is. Lovely because God loves it all. And when God creates people, it's like they're going to live happily ever after, because now creation is perfect for that Never Ending Love Story... until the second story, that is. The second story where Satan creeps in, disguised as a serpent, and poisons it all. The problem isn't that Adam and Eve disobeyed. The problem is that they didn't trust God's word of love, that the serpent knew that eating the fruit would mean Adam and Eve would try to make themselves good enough on their own and think they didn't need God to live, and not only did their eating the fruit break the entire world, it broke God's heart. Which is a great image, that God's heart is the entire world, and that the entire world is God's heart. In any case, the story continues with Adam and Eve leaving the garden, and God promising to come and Rescue them, to come and live with them, so that they would Never Ever be apart.

Which brings us back to Jesus in the wilderness of that first chapter of Mark. Jesus is God as Rescuer, God Among Us, Beside Us, With Us. And Jesus goes into that wilderness to face down Satan and stand up to each of those accusations, and, as the letter to Peter reminds us today, to give us a clean conscience about where we stand with God. Because nothing, NOTHING, will get in God's way when it comes to getting back to us. No lies about who we are and what we're worth. No accusations about what we've done wrong and how hard it will be for us to 'earn' God's love back again. God in Jesus is reconciling the world to God's Self, ultimately dissolving those accusations and erasing those lies that have kept us running from God for so long. Jesus faces Satan's accusations about himself, and about us, and calls them what they are: lies. Jesus alone is the ultimate Truth, the living, breathing, Love of a God who will never EVER let us go.

Dusty Death

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

Psalm 51:1-17

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Dust. In the creation story, that’s how we begin. As dust. And not the sort of dust we’ll get on our faces tonight, but the sort that flies up in the air when you bang together chalkboard erasers. Light, fluffy, feathery stuff that’s easy to sneeze at. Scientists will tell you now that we’re made of stardust, and I’m not going to contradict them on that one. As old as the universe is, as immensely vast and diverse and interconnected, I have no qualms saying that we’re made of stardust. And the dust of dinosaurs. And of the dust of our parents. We are dust, and to dust we shall return, each and every living thing among us.

We just don’t usually announce our mortality to the world. It’s a sign of proper upbringing to wash behind our ears, scrub our fingernails, and have a properly cleaned shirt on for church. Not usually the place we go to get smudges on our faces. It’s how we separate the working class from the upper class. Manners and cleanliness, which is next to godliness. Or is it?

I’m not saying we ought to give up hygiene for Lent. I do not want to deny a hot bath to someone on days as snowy and cold as we’ve been having. But the fact of Jesus Christ is not that cleanliness is next to godliness, but that God is next to us. Jesus didn’t come down the mountain and hover just a centimeter above the ground his entire life. He was born in a cave surrounded by piles of animal feed, before and after it had been digested. He, too, was a dustling, with skin and fingernails, hair and sinuses, intestines and kneecaps. He who is God voluntarily took on our mortality - so why do we keep running from it?

To celebrate finishing my taxes, I got myself this lovely new toy, a FitBit Charge. It counts my steps every day, monitors my sleep each night, syncs with my phone to help me track what I eat and how often I go to the gym, and, the best part, it’s also a watch! With this lovely device I can earn wellness dollars through our ELCA health plan to help me pay for basic doctor, dentist, and medication fees, as they come up through the year. It’s here to improve my quality of living. To help me lose those pesky extra pounds and make the most of every step every day. Or something like that. But I’ll tell you one thing they’ll never invent a new tech toy for - keeping me from dying one day. Because no matter what I do to keep track of my health, no matter what vitamins, exercise, or care crossing the street, I am made of dust, and I will some day die. No idea when or what from. My next door neighbor dropped dead of a heart attack in his mid-40s. My grandfather had a heart so strong he lived much longer than the doctors thought he would once his Parkinsons took its final hold. It’s a mystery, what keeps us alive, why our hearts start beating and keep beating after the beatings they take. Loss and joy, birthdays and breakups, worry and expectation, all parts of life which both add to and take a toll on us.

I don’t say this to frighten you. Just to remind us all of what we already know - when it comes down to it, there is nothing that can ultimately keep anyone from dying, no amount of money, no club membership, no skin color, nationality, or political party. We are all the same. We are all mortal.

There was a king who wanted from his wise counselors a phrase he could wear on a ring which would at once keep him humble and keep him encouraged. The counselors conferred and brought him his ring. It read: “This, too, shall pass.” And it shall. Whatever pleasure, whatever pain, whatever hunger, whatever abundance, the constant which remains the same is that everything is always changing. 

We are still dust. We will once again become dust. Specks. Grains of sand. Stars in the sky. Made out of the same stuff as Jesus Christ himself who came to get dusty with us. Who mixed up the dust with the blood, sweat, and tears of living. Who first breathed into dust, in the garden of creation, that Spirit which animates all life.

Our Sundays in Lent will be focusing on PRAYING. I’ve hung the word on our back wall, with each week’s particular theme written on each letter. We’re going to be practicing different types of prayers, different postures, different voices. Because praying is relationship with God. Sometimes we do all the talking, sometimes all we hear is silence, sometimes we feel a prayer or its answer in our bones. As dustlings, we are already living, breathing, prayers, because that creation story in the garden is one where God breathes life into the dust so that we can live. God breathes God’s Self into us to bring us to life. Just by existing, we are prayer, we are relationship with God, because God lives and moves in and around us.

This evening we are marked with the dusty cross, which begins our Lenten journey, and the other end of the story will meet us in 40 days at Maundy Thursday, when Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and when we hear God’s word of forgiveness and feel it in the healing oil of another cross on our foreheads. This talk of dying is just the beginning of the journey into new life. Like a caterpillar entering its cocoon, we enter into Lent with all signs pointing to death, but trusting that we will emerge as something new. And we will. Jesus entered the wilderness and emerged proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near. We enter the wilderness with Jesus and find that Kingdom of God already breathing and alive within us. For we are God’s very own dust.

Mountain of heartache (Happy Valentine's Day Weekend!)

2 Kings 2:1-14

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9: 2-9

Since it’s Valentine’s Day weekend, we’re going to start with the first testament reading this morning. Elijah and Elisha. It’s like the saddest break-up story ever. Elisha has been following and learning from Elijah, they’ve been through some stuff, and now while Elijah is on his way to the end of his life on earth, Elisha goes as far as he is able with his mentor. It seems everywhere they go there are other prophets reminding Elisha that Elijah is going to be leaving him. “Shut up, I know. Leave me alone!” he tells them. Don’t want to think about his leaving, thank you very much. Don’t want to think about the end. Elijah himself tells him that he’s being sent farther and farther away. Three times, he’s told, three times he covers his ears. “As you live and as the Lord lives, I will not leave you!” Heartbreaking, right? It’s similar to what Ruth tells Naomi: “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, your God will be my God.” Often this is read at weddings, these words spoken between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law, both of whom have lost dear men in their lives. What a happy Valentine’s Day weekend reading, isn’t it?

Jesus tells his disciples again and again throughout the Gospel of Mark that the son of humanity will be delivered up to die and then three days later rise. They hear the words coming out of his mouth, but they just don’t make sense. “Surely this will never happen to you!” they exclaim. “Don’t worry, we’ve got your back, we won’t let the big bad Romans make a public spectacle of you.” Peter even goes as far as to say ‘even if everyone else should forsake you, I would gladly even die for you.’ We know how well that worked out for poor Peter.

And I wonder if today’s story was what Peter was thinking of when he said that. Not the Elijah/Elisha story, but the bright and glorious mountaintop experience Peter, James, and John had been witnesses to. I mean, if a guy goes up on a mountain in scripture, it’s to talk with God. If a guy goes up a mountain and there’s a bright light, there’s definitely something holy there, like when Moses spent 40 days on the mountain receiving the ten commandments. Moses had to wear a veil over his face when he came back, his face shone so brightly. It terrified the Israelites to no end. Not to mention that when Moses did come back down the mountain, the people had made themselves a golden calf to worship and there was a huge mess of folks who got killed for it. The Moses-in-the-wilderness-with-the-people story is gory and exciting and treacherous and full of miracles. I may have mentioned before that Game of Thrones has got nothing on the stories of the First Testament.

So Jesus is on the mountain, talking with Moses and Elijah. We’ve heard a bit of the Elijah story this morning, but his prophetic ministry is fascinating. He’s the one who called down three years of famine because of the terrible king Ahab and his terrible queen Jezebel. He’s the one who stayed with the widow and kept her jar of flour from running out during the famine. He raised that widow’s son back to life when he died, and he contended against 50 prophets of Ba’al on the mountain where God swallowed up the sacrifices with fire from heaven.

And it’s this Elijah who is on the mountain with Jesus and Moses, while Peter, James, and John look on. Elijah who represents the prophetic tradition, and Moses who represents the law. The defining characters of Jewish history and tradition and practice, right up there in plain sight, conferring with Jesus, when this great cloud covers them, the glory of the Lord, and they hear it spoken that “This is my Beloved Son. Listen to him!” No wonder Peter is overwhelmed. And wouldn’t it be great to stay up on that mountain where God’s glory is evident, where the founders of our faith are right there to teach us, where the rest of the world is down the mountain and has to come to where we are to experience this miracle.

No wonder Peter thought it would be a hayride from here on out. Seeing Jesus in that incredible light, it’s like falling head-over-heels in love and wanting to stay forever on your first date. The all-consuming awe of seeing the absolute best reality of the other person would give anyone a woozy head. But Jesus has already been telling them that he will be handed over and flogged. Jesus has already been telling them that the Son of Humanity came to serve, not to be served. Jesus has already been telling them that the Kingdom of God has come near, even before they had this vision. 

Then Jesus comes down the mountain with them and tells them to keep quiet about the event until after he is raised from the dead. Which means he is going to die. Moses and Elijah don’t have any recording of their death. Moses just sort of disappeared, and Elijah was taken up in that swing low, sweet chariot. But Jesus will not be taken up until he has descended as far down as it is possible to descend. Jesus will next be held up for the world to see as a bloody corpse nailed to a couple of pieces of lumber. Hardly the glorious vision we have today. But that is the paradox. To know Jesus is to know him in both extremes. The glory and the pain. Life and death. Resurrected and walking among us.

We talk a bit about this when we confess in the words of the Nicene Creed. On this last Sunday of Epiphany, as we consider how Jesus has been revealed to us, we confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” Our historical creeds kind of skip over the preaching and healing and jump right from incarnation, being truly human from the Holy Spirit and the virgin, Mary, right into the suffering and death. From the mountain of glory to the mountain of the cross. Most folks in Jesus’ day would climb a mountain to get closer to God, but from that mountain, Jesus comes down into our valleys to get closer to us. He does not require us to bleach ourselves dazzlingly clean before we approach. He does not sit on a high and mighty throne and dole out blessings and curses from a far off distance. He does not tell Peter to go ahead and stay on that mountain with him. He goes down the mountain with Peter, James, and John, and continues to teach, to heal, to feed the hungry multitudes, and to lead the disciples in doing that same work.

When Elijah was ready to be taken up to heaven, he asked his faithful friend Elisha what he would desire as a parting gift. Elisha asked for a double share of Elijah’s spirit. The strength to continue on with the work he had begun with his mentor. And he received that gift. Just as we received the gift of the Holy Spirit in our baptisms, the Spirit of Jesus, to continue the Kingdom work he had begun, not in a distant place of glory, but right here among us. As Jesus walks down the mountain with us, into the valley of Lent, on the road to Easter, we rejoice in his presence, we struggle with his presence, we live in his presence, day-to-day. And on this Valentine’s Day weekend we reflect on the glory Jesus left behind out of his love for us, the life-consuming, life-giving love, which brought him down the mountain so that nothing ever again could come between us. Thanks be to God.

Homily

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

I want to tell you a story. Mostly I want to hear that poem from the prophet Isaiah again. When I was on my gap year in the middle of college, touring with a family-oriented Christian youth band, we had a camp song recapping the last half of this morning’s reading. It was easy to play on guitar and had a few harmonies that were easy to pick up on. Whenever I read or hear this morning’s portion of Isaiah I get the song stuck in my head, so I thought I’d share. <teach song> “Why do you say, O Jacob, and proclaim, O Israel, ‘my way is hidden from the Lord’? Do you not know, have you not heard, the Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth, He will not grow tired or weary. And His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary, and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary. Young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not, not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Halleluia.”

It’s that first part, about saying our ways are hidden from God, that catches me every time. Isaiah was written in a time when people worshiped gods who were attached to their land. It would be like worshiping the god of New York here in Chatham and crossing the border to the east to worship the god of Massachusetts. Granted, after the build-up to the Super Bowl it seemed for a weekend we were doing something like that, and discovered which football gods reigned supreme this year, but it was life and death in the early 530s BC, Isaiah’s days, when neighboring empires overran their borders and scattered the people of God like so much dust on the wind. It’s no wonder they began to doubt God’s supremacy when they had been ripped from their homes and suffered so much by the hands of their Babylonian captors.

The prophet speaks to that suffering and exile in the chapters leading up to today’s reading. But this morning we hear words of the prophet from the days of the people’s return to their old home. It has been a very long time since they had seen Jerusalem in all its glory, and there is not much glory left to it since the conquering armies had their way with it. Not many among them remember firsthand the greatness of that city Jerusalem, they have been away for too long. They have gotten old and their weak knees and cloudy eyes could not rest on the safety of those great buildings and beautiful living spaces they had known as children. But the Lord has promised to renew their strength, that the old may run as well as the young to rebuild and, more importantly, to BE rebuilt. 

This is a story we know well. How often have we cried out that God surely must neither see nor care about what we are doing or what is being done to us? “My way is hidden from the Lord.” How many times have we seen other gods vying for power, other pressures on our lives to be other than God made us to be, other powers fighting to have the last word about what we are worth.

This is why I like Isaiah the prophet so much. He shows us God’s interactions with and promises to God’s own people through their ups and downs, their injustices and their healings. They may have lives three thousand years ago, but the history of God’s people is not unlike our own. History tends to repeat itself over and over, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, cycles of violence and destruction, pain and healing, when we think life is great and then something awful happens, or when the awful has been awful for so long that there’s nothing to look forward to, this is a history we are part of, a story we are not the first to tell. But over and over again in it, there is the presence of God among us, the promise of faithfulness, the prophet’s words that, yes, God sees and knows and cares. 

Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Our peace is in the broken Savior, Jesus, who could have very well stayed safe and secure in heaven but chose freely to come among us and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our healing is in that blessed community where Jesus comes to us all, where we are, and restores us one to another. Just as he went to the home of Simon and Andrew with James and John, took Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up, Jesus comes with us into our homes, into our daily lives, not to remove us from them but to bring us to more fully live in them.

Why do you say your way is hidden from the Lord? God sees. God knows. You are not overlooked. You are never forgotten.