Blood and Touch

Lamentations 3:22-33

Psalm 30

2 Corinthians 8:7-15

Mark 5:21-43

And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea. Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” And he went with him. And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.

And there was a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, and who suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus and come up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made whole.” And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out form him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” And he looked around to see who had done it.

But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you whole; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James.

They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, get up.” And immediately the girl got up and begam walking (she was twelve years old), and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

“Do not fear, only believe.” I wonder if the father of the little dead girl even heard Jesus’ words, or if the news from home rang too clearly in his ears: “Don’t trouble the Teacher, your baby girl is dead.”

We’ve had a lot of mixed emotions this week, a lot of big things happening in the news and here at home. Kids are growing up, graduating, moving on and farther away. The Supreme Court has ruled marriage equality is in line with our national constitution. The Episcopalian Church elected a new national Bishop. Our ELCA Bishop has called for this day to be a national day of mourning and repentance for our perpetuation of the sins of racism and white supremacy. And it’s raining.

Some days are like that, though. Every emotion is at the surface, every moment we are pulled in a different direction, every hope and fear all in front of us at once. And when we go to get Jesus to help us out here, well, it seems even he is distracted. Jairus, a synagogue leader, who has done everything right to be on God’s good side, has every right to implore the Teacher to come and work a miracle for his little girl who is so terribly sick. He meets Jesus at the lakeshore just after Jesus has returned from that other side where he cast out some pretty powerful demons, and he begs for help. Jesus follows him, but word about this miracle-worker has spread, and Jairus is also probably pretty well known, and the crowd just keeps getting in the way. There are people all over them, wondering, asking, doubting, wanting, watching, waiting to see what will happen next, and in the middle of that cacophony of bodies pushing this way and that, suddenly Jesus stops and turns around and asks “who touched me?” 

Sorry? Jesus, there’s a crowd here you just can’t get away from, what do you mean, “who touched me?” They’re all touching you.

But Jesus had been touched with intention, not just in passing, not only accidentally. The hem of his robe, the farthest reach of what could be called his personal space, had been all that she wanted, but the bleeding woman needed touch so desperately to be whole again, all of her twelve long years of waiting were in that touch.

Can you imagine bleeding for twelve years? Twelve days is a stretch. Lots of women bleed for about five days out of the month, and it can be downright exhausting! It’s amazing women don’t die every month from that regular loss of blood, and its a good thing women have each other to understand that pain, because in Jesus’ day, and in a lot of ways and places even today, bleeding women get set apart, pushed aside, disregarded, and are considered ‘unclean’ to the point of not even being able to enter the worship space.

Because blood is such a powerful thing, you see. For the most basic scientific observer, blood is the thing which gives life. You see an animal bleed on the altar for sacrifice, and once the blood is drained there is no more life in the animal. Blood, we now know, also carries a number of diseases, and so anyone trained in first aid has to put on latex gloves before tending to the care of someone who is bleeding, lest the nurse or patient transmit an illness unawares. The MacHayden theater here in town is currently running a musical called “Rent,” celebrating life and friendship in the midst of that great and terrible plague we finally named as AIDS, which is carried in the blood and other life-giving fluids, and attacks the body’s immune system. When AIDS first hit, before we had a name for it, it was such a mystery, striking seemingly out of nowhere, and the President never talked about it, and there were so few people not infected who dared put on gloves and masks and actually touch those patients suffering from it.

But Jesus never wore latex gloves. Jesus didn’t worry about infection from the people around him. That’s how the world works, isn’t it, that illness and disease are catching, and we have to protect ourselves lest we, too, become ‘unclean,’ but Jesus is different.

“Do not fear, only believe,” he says. The woman who had been drained dry financially by doctors, and drained dry emotionally by being socially outcast, and drained dry by her own body which somehow kept living even while continually in the process of dying, she knew there was one last hope to cling to when all else had failed her. Or maybe she didn’t know, but was just desperate enough to give it one last shot. Jesus had been healing and teaching, calming storms and silencing his opponents, and word had gotten around that he didn’t discriminate like the rest of the world did. He didn’t wait to see someone’s credentials, didn’t look at someone and judge their worth by what they wore or what color their skin was or how often they had been to synagogue. Jesus was different. Jesus is different.

It’s no wonder he was so often interrupted. Who else would welcome the stranger the way he did? Who else would speak with such grace, truth, and forgiveness? Who else, on their way to a very important synagogue leader’s house, would stop and look an old woman in the face, and speak to her gently even though he had the right by law to stone her for being out in public while so terribly unclean? He should have devoted his entire focus to Jairus, the religious leader, whose little girl was just on the edge of womanhood, rather than spend his energy on this old woman whose usefulness had long since dried up.

“Do not fear, only believe.” The healing of that woman came not just to her body, but she was made whole when she was finally, after twelve years of invisibility, finally seen. Like the AIDS patients of the 1980s, she was ignored by her community until she went away, avoided in hopes that her problem would resolve itself without getting too many others involved, and she was shunned out of fear of contagion. But that fear itself became the contagion, infecting everyone who stopped being able to touch or see or care about the sick. And Jesus restored her to visibility, called her out and gave her her voice back to speak for herself and tell her story in public. What a relief, what a joy, what a miracle, that the community could now see and embrace her again after a lifetime of shame for something she could not control.

In the middle of that joy came word to Jairus that his little girl, his hope for a future, had died, and all that was left for him was to grieve. But Jesus had not forgotten him just because he was interrupted on the way. Jesus is not the sort to go halfway on healing ministry. Jesus reminded Jairus “do not fear, only believe,” and they continued on their way.

Now, after being touched by a bleeding woman, technically, legally, Jesus would have been considered unclean himself - but Jesus, remember, is different. Jesus doesn’t catch our disease, rather he himself spreads the contagion of wholeness and healing. So Jairus takes him into his home, where the wailing and mourning has already begun, and God only knows what Jairus expected at that point. Compassion for his now grieving wife? A word about resurrection someday? A witness to his own grief? Probably Jairus didn’t expect what he got: Jesus ran the wailing crowd out of the house and took three of his disciples, along with the child’s parents, to the bedside of the little girl, where he very simply woke her up and got somebody to bring her a little broth in a bowl or maybe some bread. Something to put the color back in her cheeks. “Little girl, get up.”

Jesus does the same for us, you know. There are so many ways this world bleeds us dry, so many ways the ones we love are taken from us when it seems God is looking the other way. But Jesus doesn’t ever forget us, doesn’t ever abandon us.

“Do not fear, only believe.” It is a hard word to hear when we are struggling, an easy one to say when we are rejoicing, and a true word no matter where in between the two we find ourselves. Because Jesus himself bled and bled and died to give us his life. Jesus himself, the healer, the Teacher, the one who feeds us time and again, gives his blood to us, for us all, at this Table of very ordinary, every day stuff which has sustained humankind for generations. Bread and wine, common around the world, body and blood, basic to our existence, grace and forgiveness, welcome and embrace, strength and sending, given and shed …for you, whoever you are and wherever you are and no matter where you come from or where you are going.

Our lifeblood now and always is Jesus the Christ, the One who made us, who has come among us, who still stirs in our hearts and surprises us with second chances, and third, and fourth… The world will bleed us dry, over and over again, breaking our hearts with joy and sorrow and pulling us apart at every change and challenge we face, and we will be bled dry as we give ourselves away in imitation of the One who names us and claims us, and that very One who gives us his own body and blood will continue to revive us, to renew us, refill us, restore us one to another until the whole world - and yes I believe that means the whole world - has been bound together in love and newness of life.

“Do not fear, only believe” is not something we can do on our own strength or individually alone, but it is a gift given to us in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the promise of resurrection and life everlasting, the witness of those who have known restoration and who walk among us or whose stories are told around all of those tables that feed us. It is something we receive when Jesus touches us where we are broken, when Jesus hold our shattered hopes and hurts, when Jesus embraces all of ourselves, even those things we have been taught to be ashamed of. For everything that makes us bleed, Jesus bleeds with us, bleeds for us, bleeds into us so that we may live again, whole and restored, welcomed and new. Thanks be to God.

Don't you care that we are perishing?

Job 38:1-11

Then Adonai replied to Job out of the tempest and said: “Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? Gird your loins like a man; I will ask and you will inform me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Speak if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions or who measured it with a line? Onto what were its bases sunk? Who set its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the divine beings shouted for joy? Who closed the sea behind doors when it gushed forth out of the womb, when I clothed it in clouds, swaddled it in dense clouds, when I made breakers my limit for it, and set up its bar and doors, and said, ‘You may come so far and no father; here your surging waves will stop’?

Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32

R: God reduced the storm to a whisper; the waves were stilled (Ps 107:29)

Give thanks to Adonai, because God is good,

for God’s steadfast love is forever.

Let the redeemed of Adonai proclaim, 

those redeemed from adversity,

whom God gathered in from the lands, 

from east and west, from the north and from the sea.

Others go down to the sea in ships,

ply their trade in the mighty waters; R

they have seen the works of Adonai,

and God’s wonders in the deep.

By God’s word God raised a storm wind 

that made the waves surge.

Mounting up to the heaven, plunging down to the depths,

disgorging in their misery,

they reeled and staggered like a drunkard,

all their skill to no avail.

In their adversity they cried to Adonai,

and God saved them from their troubles.

God reduced the storm to a whisper;

the waves were stilled. R

They rejoiced when all was quiet,

and God brought them to the port they desired.

Let them praise Adonai for steadfast love,

God’s wondrous deeds for all people.

Let them exalt God in the congregation of the people,

and acclaim God in the assembly of the elders. R

2 Corinthians 6:1-13

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”

See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see -- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing,; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return -- I speak as to children -- open wide your hearts also.

Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

****

I have to let you know I’ve been somewhat distracted since Thursday morning, when I woke up refreshed after a full night’s sleep, ready for a lovely day off, and opened my email to the daily news from the BBC. I try for an outside news source just to keep my perspective a bit more open, and when I looked at the first news story posted to the BBC Thursday morning I was nauseous, I spent the day foggy and the time since has been a flurry of emotions as more news comes down the pike through various sources. 
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old, was a beloved track coach and a minister at the AME church. Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old, was the lead pastor at the AME church, a state senator, and a graduate of one of our ELCA seminaries. Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old, was a librarian, whose birthday would have been today (Sunday). Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old, was a recent graduate of Allen University’s Division of Business Administration, and he died trying to shield his 87-year-old aunt from the shooter. Myra Thompson, 59 years old, was reverend Anthony Thompson’s wife, Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old, was the church sexton, Daniel L. Simmons, age 74, was a ministerial staff member, a father and a grandfather and a veteran of war. Depaynoe Middleton-Doctor, 49 years old, sang in the choir and preached at her church. Susie Jackon, 87 years old, sheltered young people who needed a place to live after her son moved away from home. 

I read these stories, and the story of hate which their killer was fed, and I hear the disciples’ ask Jesus in that storm on the sea: “Don’t you care that we are being destroyed?”

And, lest we still feel too detached from it all, the pastor who was leading that Bible study was a graduate of one of our eight ELCA seminaries. And if that doesn’t hit close enough to home, the shooter was a member of an ELCA parish. In other words, broadly speaking, a 21-year-old, white member of our church decided to kill black people out of a loud and proud self-professed hate for black people. A member of our dear beloved ELCA found a black church where he joined their Bible study for an hour, and then he shot and killed nine people in a house of prayer and worship.

It makes me so angry. It makes me so sad. It makes me despondent and hopeless and fearful and I feel so powerless that I want to go smash things. There is a storm in my heart, doubtful and confused and frighteningly overwhelming. Being white, I do have the privilege of deciding if I will let this act of domestic terrorism affect me, since it didn’t happen out of hate for white people and I’m therefore not in danger from it. But being Christian, I have the call and the command of Christ to take up my cross and follow Jesus through the pain and on out the other side. The call and command to enter with others into their pain. The call and command, also, to ‘be not afraid.’

But not being afraid means not to be afraid to be honest about when I am afraid. We take so many precautions to avoid pain, especially in church. When we gather for worship it is a happy time, a joyful community, and if discomfort enters into the space we don’t know what to do with it. But our Scriptures are full of pain, just as they are full of joy and promise, so that we can live faithfully in the realities of suffering, and can hold one another when our own strength runs out. We have an entire book called ‘Lamentations,’ the Psalms are full of expressions of grief and anger, the prophets wail and weep, Jesus himself weeps, for crying out loud. And this morning’s first Testament reading comes from a book that tells a story so deeply known to us we refer to it in connection with people who struggle mightily: they must certainly have the ‘patience of Job.’ Right? I mean, who’s used that phrase before?

We have multitudes of examples of suffering in Scripture. The prophet Isaiah has an entire song we refer to as the ‘suffering servant,’ and often use to point to Jesus. We don’t like to think about it if we can help it, and the fact that we ever get the choice is, well, a symptom of our privilege. I call it a ‘symptom’ because it is not right to be so disconnected from the rest of humanity. But humanity struggles mightily every day, and to see those sad faces on the TV over and over can wear a person down... to see those sad faces in your living room, or in the mirror, on the other hand? I mean, if we, of all people, can’t keep it together, what is this world coming to? ...Isn’t that mixed up in all of this? The certainty that everyone else can have pain but we can’t? Everyone else can fall apart, but we have to hold it together? How else do we learn grace and forgiveness, though? How else can we experience that we are carried in this pain, and through this pain, if we spend so much of our energy avoiding it?

While the disciples’ little fishing boat is being swamped by the waves, the disciples ask Jesus, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” And as we are the Body of Christ, the church, I wonder how often we keep our heads under the covers, while multitudes cry around us “do you not care that we are perishing?” Are we asleep, Body of Christ? The most racially segregated time in America is right now, Sunday morning. Yet the Body of Christ exists in every shade of human skin. Have we gotten too comfortable with Christianity to live faithfully, too isolated to be affected by the suffering around and within ourselves?

Because suffering is complicated, pain comes from all corners, and when we shut down pain we shut down healing. We have gotten very good at shutting down when we get uncomfortable, very good at hiding. But hiding will not lead to healing. Hiding, in fact, is the opposite of healing. Hiding is what we did in the garden when God walked in the cool of the day and we ducked behind the bushes because we were naked and afraid. God does not call us into hiding, but out of it. Out of ourselves and into the great wide world where Leviathan has been made for sport, where God has set the bounds of the deeps and scattered the stars across the sky like so many handfuls of glitter. We live in a great big wide open world full of life and joy and death and terror, and all of that bundled up together is a mystery and a miracle into which God has come to live with us.

When Jesus and his disciples go across the water to the other side, even though they know where they are going there are still storms along the way. Any time there is change, be it change of circumstance or change of heart, it can bring up a storm of emotions and reactions and griefs. Jesus and the prophets show us a vision of God’s kingdom among us, where we are headed, but in the meantime there are a lot of storms to get through. We have a long way yet to go in our little boat, tossed by the storms inside and out. We have come far, and Jesus has come along with us the whole time. Not only that, but Jesus can handle our storms. When the disciples woke Jesus up in that storm, they probably wanted him to lend a hand with bailing out the water that was coming up over the sides of the boat, and what they got was so much more than they asked for, because it was Jesus there with them. When we ask Jesus for help in our storms, for a life preserver, a little strength for the journey, we get far more than we ask for, too. Body and blood in bread and wine, for instance. Because all of our powerlessness turned to rage, all of our displaced fear, all of our insecurities and uncertainties, got thrown up there on that cross with Christ the day we crucified him. The day we nailed him up there and hung him up for all to see, ‘strange fruit’ right there on that tree of the cross, his blood poured out for the world, given and shed freely for the freedom of all people, of every race and nation, color and creed. It is that Blood alone which is responsible for our unity, our only eternal deep and lasting freedom. That freedom is our courage to speak out on behalf of life in the midst of death.

People of God, we are in this storm-abused boat together, every last one of us, in here and out there. We have been loved, all of this war-weary world, more than any of us deserve. We have been given dignity and honor as creatures of God’s handiwork, interwoven with the rest of creation in all its beauty and majesty. We have believed the lies for too long, given in to the power of false accusations for too long, hidden our shame and our God-given differences too long. We are the Body of Christ! And this is not by our own choosing, our own power, our own goodness, but by the Grace of God who made us and claimed us, who gathers, feeds, and sends us. All of us. Here at Christ Our Emmanuel Lutheran Church, and in South Carolina at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. When we weep, we weep together. When we celebrate, we celebrate together. When we repent, we repent together. When we are forgiven, we are forged anew together. There is no ‘us and them’ in the kingdom of God. There is no shame, no hiding, no fear. Only peace. Love. Joy. Kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, generosity, those gifts of the Spirit we have hung on banners around our sanctuary this Pentecost season. We have freely received these gifts from God. For we are the Body of Christ, fed by the Body of Christ, which is given in love for the sake of the world.

Crazy Little Seeds of Love

Ezekiel 17:22-24

Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

Mark 4:26-34

I saw a beautiful article online this week from a website called “Momastery,” which I shared on my Facebook page, about the world’s need for ‘mentally different’ people. It’s an old blog post, from April, written by a woman who has anxiety, depression, and addiction, and it speaks to the usual, typical way people tend to interact with those who have mental illness. You know the way, with medications and doctors, with pity and institutions, with suspicion and typically low expectations. So much mental illness is invisible until someone has ‘an episode,’ a nervous breakdown or behavioral tics that stand out from the statistical normal behavior. And because it’s not as clear as a broken leg or even cancer, we tend to act as though a person with mental illness can just pray away their illness, or think happy thoughts, or easily change their attitude and not be sick any more. It’s not that simple, human brain chemistry, and getting along in the world as it is, well, that’s nearly enough to put anyone into an anxiety attack if we’re paying attention.

That’s just what Glennon, the blogger whose article I’m talking about, has to say about the ‘mentally different.’ Here are a few words from her article:

“Sometimes we understand that our inability to accept and live resignedly in the world we’ve been born into is chemical and personal and that we need help integrating… But other times — we turn on the news or watch closely how people treat each other and we silently raise our eyebrows and think: Actually, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you, world. Maybe my inability to adapt to the world is not because I’m crazy but because I’m paying attention. Maybe it’s not insane to reject the world as it is. Maybe the real insanity is surrendering to the world as it is now. Maybe pretending that things around here are just fine is no badge of honor I want to wear.”

I say this because we joke a lot, I know I do, about people being ‘crazy.’ I throw that word around anytime somebody decides to do something that seems outlandish. As in, last winter my best friend and I drove an hour each way to meet for dinner in a snowstorm just because we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, and we called it crazy. But we needed to connect. When people today are outrageously, painfully generous, we tend to think there’s something wrong with them. The church in her first generations sold everything and shared in common with the poor, and if we did that today we would certainly be called crazy for it. Taking care of widows and orphans without repayment? Crazy. Standing up for the outcast? Crazy. Love your enemy? Crazy! Pray for those who persecute you? Crazy! Father, forgive them while they nail my body to a cross? Crazy! 

The letter we read today, that portion from Second Corinthians, has this line in it: “If we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right minds, it is for you.” In a world of buying and selling, competition and score-keeping, to be loved unconditionally and without reserve is so far from our experience it’s enough to overstimulate anyone to the point of breakdown. That’s kind of how we grow, though. Another image going around Facebook lately is simply a picture of a stalk of wheat with a phrase about the seed needing to come completely undone, to turn entirely inside-out, in order to grow into the plant it is designed to become. Usually one would look at a seed and notice, if anything, how small it is, maybe it’s general color and shape, and it might just as easily be brushed off the kitchen counter as planted in the soil with any intention.

But then all this stuff happens underground, in the dark, with time and warmth and water the seed splits and shoots sprout down for roots and up for more sunlight. If you’ve ever started a bean sprout wrapped in a wet paper towel in a ziplock baggie, you’ve seen some of what happens there, but it’s still a pretty miraculous process even when we think we know what’s going on. How does a seed know to do that? How do the cells know when to do that? How do the sugars and proteins and nutrients and everything work so well together that entire species can rely on the miracle of plant growth to sustain their own animal bodies?

This, Jesus tells us, is what the Kingdom of God is like. A farmer plants in the fields, and before she knows it there are roots and shoots, stems and leaves, flowers and fruits and veggies! I’d imagine that today Jesus might tell us the Kingdom of God is like those hostas growing out front. A few Wednesdays there were just hints of growth poking up out of the ground, and then three days later when we gathered for Sunday worship, wham! Suddenly there were more hostas than we knew what to do with! That is what God’s love in the world is like. It’s crazy! It’s amazing! It’s startling even when we think we know what to expect of it. And for all of our best intentions and for all of our worst ones, it will grow, we know not how, until it becomes a nuisance. Like dandelions all over the yard when we just spread fertilizer yesterday. Like wild mustard, and other invasive species that start out small and soon take over the garden and the lawn and come up between cracks in the sidewalk, and with their roots make even more cracks in the sidewalk.

The kingdom of God is like Mike, a guy I met yesterday in Albany who just got out of then years in prison for some dumb stunt he pulled as a kid, who claims that those ten years away were God’s gift to him, to help him slow down and calm down and learn a few things before getting his second chance. He was in town for some cancer treatment and spent a good long while telling me about God’s love and care for him, that the universe doesn’t owe him anything because everything he has is a gift, that he wishes people would understand the value of life more. Talk about a journey! He’s been through the ringer and grown up quite a bit in the meantime and is like a new person this side of prison. It’s a bit like the letter to the Corinthians reminds us: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away, see everything has become new.”

And that is the daily conversion we go through, little by little and sometimes in spurts and sometimes in dry spells. Growth slow and invisible underground, new life budding just below the surface, resurrection out of every little letting go. Jesus Christ has given us that planting, has planted us like seeds, has come like us, down to the cellular level, to resurrect our hearts. We do not regard anyone from a human point of view any more, even though we once saw Jesus that way, just like we’d gotten used to judging everyone at first sight. We put labels on him according to our reasons for wanting him dead, and he died and rose and shattered all of those assumptions about life and death and heaven and who we are. He brought us the kingdom of God, right in our midst!

That blog I first mentioned goes on:

“We addicts — we have rejected the world as it is. We left the big world and started hiding inside the small world of addiction for a reason. So inviting us back into the world as it is — it’s not effective. We are too smart to rejoin a party we couldn’t stomach… I needed to be invited not only out of addiction, but into a movement to change the world. I needed to join folks working to turn this planet into a gentler, saner, safer, more vivid place in which folks with wide-open eyes and tender hearts might survive and thrive.”

She’s using the language of addiction, but it’s the same message, because addiction language is sin language. We sinners - we have rejected the world as God made it, we left God’s world and created our own because we did not trust the word of life and of love. So digging ourselves in deeper is not effective. We are too proud to join a party where we are not the center of attention. We are not only invited, but carried out of sin and into a movement to change the world. We are connected through Baptism to people who are recognizing God in our midst and people who struggle with recognizing God, so that we can together bear God’s redeeming love to the world.

In September, we are going to host a community Heroin awareness event. We will reach out to help folks who are addicted to Heroin, to help those who love addicts, and we are inviting schools and community resources to come together, not only to offer help ‘out there’ but to receive help ourselves. We need to know our community better to serve and love our community better. We need to recognize ourselves as addicted people, too. Maybe not addicted to pain killers, maybe addicted to making people happy, or addicted to being in control of our own lives. So we invite the addicts among us to lend us their perspective, their uncertainty, their questions and struggle, their awareness of what is deeply wrong with the world, that we may learn how better to recognize Jesus alive and active in the world as it is, and to help create the world as it can be. Where folks with wide-open eyes alert for joy and for threat, and folks with hearts made tender out of love and out of pain, all together can not only survive, but thrive in love and hope, like a garden that blooms as though overnight, to wake us in the morning, fresh and alive.

Naked and not ashamed

Genesis 3:8-15

Psalm 130

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Mark 3:20-35

Now that it's the season of Pentecost, also called ordinary time, also called the season of the church, we’re going to dive right into the topic of sin. No wonder everyone goes on vacation this time of year! Beautiful, sunny days, and we come to church where the lectionary readings, chosen generations ago and read today around the world, talk about the onset of shame, the broken relationship between God and people, and the fight between people and the rest of creation. Then the Psalm response, which we sang today, is all lament and waiting, which does at least hinge on hoping to receive forgiveness. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians goes on and on about the relative insignificance of suffering, or at least attempts to offer consolation to the church in Corinth who are being greatly afflicted. Then, to top it all off, Jesus is accused of working in cahoots with the devil, he basically disowns his immediate family, AND we get that ugly phrase “eternal sin.” Also referred to as the unforgivable sin, which has led us into all kinds of dialogue and dispute about the nature of forgiveness and if there really is a place of eternal punishment where God would leave us just for speaking against the Holy Spirit, who we can’t ever fully grasp, anyhow.

On the other hand, we talk about sin all year long, don’t we? That’s exactly how we begin every Sunday worship service. We name our sin, maybe not specifically and in great detail, but as a community we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. At the very bottom of it, we recognize that we have broken the two great and basic commandments: love God and love thy neighbor. That’s what we confess every Sunday morning together. By what we have done, and by what we have left undone, we have not loved. We have not understood love. We have not allowed ourselves to be loved, either.

See, in that first reading, in the garden, at the beginning of life, just before the part we read this morning, we were naked and not ashamed. Sometimes we talk of reconciliation with God as taking away all of our burdens, removing the things we hide behind, being lifted out of the miry clay, but that brings us back to being naked. And we still talk about our nightmares about showing up someplace naked, giving a presentation or something and realizing we don’t have any clothes on. So we cover ourselves, for modesty’s sake, with clothing, and with good manners, then striving for the perfect job, marrying the perfect spouse, raising the best kids, taking the perfect vacation, having the perfect faith. Then somehow these become things we hide behind, and no matter how good they seem to us at the time, or how necessary, they are simply not all there is at the core of us, and neither are they God.

So, at the end of the day, looking back on the hours spent, the money spent, the energy and attention spent, when we’re just in general spent, what’s left?

Love. Compassion. Grace. Let’s jump from Genesis to the Gospel. The set-up here comes from earlier in the chapter, where the people are gathered for Sabbath in the synagogue, and Sabbath is a day of rest, no work allowed according to the Law. Good idea, Sabbath. Rest is important. Rest is holy. So on this Sabbath day, a man with a withered hand is there in the midst of the people. He can’t work, he probably shouldn’t be there, and he’s definitely making some people uncomfortable. You know the type. Any sort of suffering we can notice makes us a bit squeamish if it hits too close to home. So this guy is there and the religious leaders who are all about keeping the law are just waiting for an excuse to pounce on Jesus for breaking the Law (again, he already eats with sinners and cleanses the unclean) and Jesus tests their welcome by asking if it’s right to do good on the Sabbath. He knows the answer. They know the answer. He heals the man’s hand and they plot to kill him. Then suddenly Jesus is the go-to guy for hearings and exorcisms, and he’s even got students who study with him, and I’m not saying the Pharisees, Herodians, or scribes were jealous and spiteful, but their livelihoods were on the line if Jesus got a greater following than their temple did. Here’s this teacher who’s going up against the black and white basics of ritual and religious order, and the people are flocking to him, and where does he think he gets the authority to do these things? He must be in cahoots with the devil, in a bid to take down the religious powers that be. Certainly Jesus has made a pact with Satan to heal all of those sick people and cast out those demons…

In the middle of this paparazzi mess, with all the hungry, hurting people clamoring to see Jesus and all the usual faith leaders grumbling out of the spotlight, Jesus’ own immediate family is concerned for his health and well-being, and they come to try and extricate him from the crowds so he can get away and rest and at least have a little lunch.

So, two things are going on here, from what I can tell. One: the conversation around who is in Jesus’ family. The second: powers of destruction and powers of life are getting convoluted.

Because sometimes the powers of life feel like the powers of death. Sometimes the cure starts out feeling worse than the disease. Sometimes habits and expectations need to die in order for new things to grow. 

When the scribes accuse Jesus of working with the accuser, they’re playing that blame game for their own failure to evoke conversion among the people. They have the rules of faith and the right understanding for how things ought to happen, and here’s this rule-breaker who suddenly is drawing away all of their people to something a bit more wild, a bit less tame, a bit more wilderness and less centralized in one location they can control. They’re losing their grip on their positions of power, and grasping for reasons why they can not effect their followers in the same way. There’s gotta be something evil in working outside of the box, they call the work of the Holy Spirit - works Jesus does to bring about healing and wholeness - they call these miracles the work of the prince of demons.

Yet the Holy Spirit is not the one who makes Adam and Eve ashamed of their nakedness in the garden. The Holy Spirit moved over the waters in the beginning, breathed life into the dirt-people to make them human, but never refused to forgive, never refused to welcome and to embrace God’s children. How, then, could the ones who accused Jesus that day know the One whose love they so clearly denied, if they staunchly refused to recognize the work of the Holy Spirit? Jesus tells them they are really missing the mark, way off base in their understanding of God’s character. As the Psalmist says, with the Lord there is plenteous redemption, with the Lord there is steadfast love. Forgiveness is there, is always there. Forgiveness is the language of God. And compassion. And grace. And mercy.

Then this argument is interrupted. Someone tells Jesus his mother and brothers and sisters are waiting outside, and he responds ‘who is my mother? who are my brothers and sisters? The ones who do God’s will are my mother and sister and brother.’ Is Jesus blowing them off like he’s got it all together and doesn’t need them any more? No! Jesus isn’t turning their familial connections down, he’s just expanding them. It’s no longer just Mary and the children who are part of Jesus’ family, but all who do the will of God, loving their neighbors, loving God above all others. What wonderful news for anyone who has ever been left out, chosen last, forgotten, or intentionally excluded! Jesus is reprimanding the leaders, again, for their shallow imaginations and unimaginative hearts. Of course the Holy Spirit can forgive, and heal, and restore. That’s what She’s been about this whole time!

And that’s what we are about, brothers and sisters. Healing, forgiveness, and restoration. We have been claimed by the One who made us and called us good in the beginning of things, the One who followed us out of the garden of Eden and into the world, the One who has suffered alongside us to bring us new life. We are that family of Christ, led by that Holy Spirit who healed and exorcised the multitudes. We have a God who has seen us in all our everything and in all our nothing, our nakedness and shame, who has loved us still, who has pursued us all the way to the cross and brought us with him to the other side of the grave. Who are the brothers and sisters of Jesus? We’re sitting right here. We’re going to baseball games and music in the park and bringing the new life of Christ with us everywhere we go. Because we have been forgiven. Because that’s who God is, the creator who forgives.

Holy Trinity/Mystery/Heresy Sunday

Isaiah 6:1–8

Psalm 29

Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. (Ps. 29:2)

Romans 8:12–17

John 3:1–17

We’ve spent fifty days celebrating Easter, last Sunday was the festival of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and now today we take a look at the whole fullness of God. Or, rather, we look sideways through a handful of metaphors for God, most of them pointing to the bigger metaphor of there three-in-one, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons yet one God. This is why it is written on your bulletin covers that today is Trinity/Mystery/Heresy Sunday. We talk about God like we know what we mean when we use that word, and today is set aside to contemplate how little we actually understand of God even while we have spent generations hashing out in committee and confrontations and conspiracies of every sort what exactly we mean when we talk about the God whom we worship and serve. It’s kind of crazy, believing in this higher power, the concept of whom has been passed on to us through centuries of campfire stories and wars and famines and great victories and translations of translations. Ideas about God come from stories handed down and from personal experiences, both positive and negative. It has been said that we know we’ve created God in our image when God hates the same people we do, but there is also truth in the story of a God who does come into the world looking just like us to reach us where we are, as God did in the person of Jesus.

Hagar, Sarah’s slave who gave birth to Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael, has the first recorded story of giving God a name: El Roi, “The God who sees,” and there are a myriad of tribal names for God based on the surrounding countryside, from El Shaddai, “God of the Mountains,” to the unpronounceable “Yahwheh,” which means something like “I am, I will be what I will be.” What are some of your favorite names for God? There are quite a few on the bulletin cover, but maybe your favorite is missing from that image.

We as Lutherans center our understanding of and relationship with God on the cross of Jesus Christ, God incarnate for our sake, and that means every image and explanation of God comes from and reaches back to that experience of self-giving love and forgiveness. When we think about the God who made the world, the source of our hope and vision for life, the root of our being, we come back again and again to the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but even each of those illustrations holds a diversity of expressions. Some call God “Mother” on account of particular experience, some call God “Sneaky Trickster” or “Fire-breather” or “Companion” or “Divine Lover.” 

It might be hard to talk about how we experience God, how God has met us where we are, or how we have expected one sort of faith experience and gotten another. Synod Assembly in Rochester these past few days was on the theme of “God’s Story, Our Voices” and centered on just this sort of conversation: How do we share God’s story? How do we know the love of God in our day-to-day living?

I imagine the prophet Isaiah, in today’s first reading, wrestled with the same question. “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips! Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Moses complained of a stutter when God called him. Jeremiah said “I can’t tell about God, I’m just a teenager.” And yet all of these, and so many more, were given the words and the presence for telling God’s story. They spoke very particular things to very particular people, which still speak to us today from their central truths: We worship and serve a God who cares about justice and who brings us from slavery into freedom.

For Nicodemus, going to Jesus under cover of darkness, there had to be something more, something he could grasp and comprehend, to explain how this man, Jesus, had been healing the sick and turning water into wine. Have you ever looked for answers in the middle of the night and been only more confused? Yet Nicodemus is not a character who disappears after this encounter with Jesus. This story of God’s love for the whole world works on him, and in the Gospel of John we will see him twice again, defending Jesus to the other Pharisees, and bringing spices to care for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion. 

I wonder, then, what words Nicodemus would use to describe Jesus. What words we might use here in this place. What words and images and songs are sung across the world to speak of the many ways God reaches us right where we are? Sometimes the best words are silence, as the Quakers gather for prayer, sometimes the best words are actions, as we have been part of community meals and will be reaching out with hope for Heroin addicts in September. But whatever words we use to tell God’s story, to share the hope of the resurrection, the promise of new life, the gift of creation and the forgiveness and reconciliation which are ours to share, we worship, serve, and speak of a God who is bigger than our language can hold, so our storytelling is never done, because there is always more to the God of the universe who lives also in our hearts.

Pentecost!

Acts 2:1-21

Romans 8:22-27

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

[Note: The Robin to whom I speak later in the sermon is getting confirmed today!]

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen indeed, Alleluia!

Now technically we’re past that season of Easter, the fifty days have come to completion, and we’ve all graduated up a level from freedom to mission. That’s today. That’s Pentecost. Easter is all about freedom. It’s clear by the roots of that tree, the much older story of salvation from slavery to Pharoah, that Easter, falling as it does in the calendar on the same schedule as Passover, brings us out of bondage and into a wilderness wandering on our way to the promised land of milk and honey. From hiding away into living openly. From hating and hurting to hope and healing. From fear of death to full and engaged living.

Today we take the next step together. Or, rather, God takes us on the next step. In that wilderness wandering, set free from a slavery we’d gotten so used to that we hardly knew how to live without the chains and whips and brutality, set free from all of that weight that dragged us down into our dependable ruts, we didn’t know how to live in freedom. We’d been away from it for so long we’d forgotten what it meant to choose when to eat and when to play, when to sing and when to be silent, when to work and when to stretch our backs and look up at the sky. We’d lost that part of ourselves that lived in curiosity and wonder, that was open to love and forgiveness and the vulnerability that allows room for growth. So God gave us Ten Words on Mount Sinai. God gave us these commandments which were set about us like a playpen, an open field with a safety net, a wide-open safe place where we could stretch and run and grow and live secure in the knowledge that “I AM the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” would be with us.

It’s this structure which has been celebrated for aeons on Pentecost. Like a weighted blanked on an autistic kid who just needs to be held when life gets unpredictable, the Law is meant to be a comfort and a guide for healthy, life-embracing relationship. So God walks with us. And we walk away. God walks with us, and we shun God. God walks with us in the person of Jesus Christ, and we know what happens to him and to his followers: when the going gets tough the Christ gets killed and the sheep are scattered. The resurrection put a bit of a hitch in the unnatural order of things, messing up the powers that be pretty badly, and kicking off a movement even larger and stronger than the first time Jesus was alive and walking around on earth.

But then Jesus left. He ascended into heaven, was seen no more, and the only witnesses of his life, death, and resurrection could only live so long to tell the stories around meals and campfires and in temples and on street corners. Somebody had to remind them of the hope and fire that had first inspired them. Somebody had to spur them on to continue the ministry Jesus had begun among them. Somebody had to testify on behalf of Jesus.

And then, boom! Like a rush of mighty wind, the flames over their heads burned in the disciples’ hearts, and in the midst of this great Pentecost party already underway, they burst forth like Jesus from the tomb and babbled all over town about the mighty works of God. Creation, and new life, and restoration, and justice, and welcome, and feeding the five thousand, and forgiving the sinner, and loving even the Roman centurion and his slave, and water into wine, and walking on water, and healing the man born blind, and restoring Lazarus to Mary and Martha, and on and on and dying with prayers and blessings on his lips and rising again to offer even more forgiveness!

What sorts of witness will you bear, Robin, once you have confirmed your faith among us here today? What stories of God’s great works? What questions will you ask to help us grow in faith? What works of justice and mercy will you support? You will welcome the children at the Mac Hayden this summer, as Jesus welcomed them and announced the kingdom of God through them. You are not a child any more in the rites of this church, but you are not any more perfect now than the rest of us, either, which can be a struggle to learn to live with. We will continue to disappoint one another and learn to forgive each other. It’s part of how we know the Spirit is alive and active among us, no matter how difficult life can get.

Because today celebrates the free gift of God poured into our hearts, in our own languages, be those languages of art or music or hunting or baseball or auto mechanics or teaching or nursing or study. The creed confesses the Holy Spirit in the present tense. When it speaks to the work of God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, that’s all it says, all we can boil it down to, when it comes to the basics of the God we worship. When the creed speaks of Jesus Christ it points to the narrative of his eternal existence, his conception and birth, his suffering, death, burial, resurrection and ascension, as well as the future hope of his return. That’s how we know God in the person of Jesus, is that story which we tell over and over again. But the Holy Spirit, the way we know God in the here and now, we confess that Spirit revealed to us through the church, the community, the practice of forgiveness, the sacredness of the body to be resurrected, and the reality that the life everlasting includes the here and now. This is how we know and trust, how we believe in God in the present tense, in this numinous sort of mystery of the struggle of daily life in grace and the hard-won freedom that has been our inheritance. And you know I’m not talking about the hard-won U.S. freedoms we commemorate this Memorial Day weekend when we pray for fallen soldiers and their families, though many of them lived and died in that deeper, more lasting freedom, which spurred them on to more particular actions in their present moments while they lived. I’m talking about the bigger scale, the forever that includes today.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. Who has spoken, and I believe continues to speak, through the prophets. God active and alive among us. God active and alive in you, Robin. Testifying about the love and the grace and the forgiveness of God, which render us eternally free from all threats of death, despair, and destruction. Testifying to the Truth who we call Jesus Christ. Testifying to the hope that is in us, the hope that one day we will all know freedom and peace and love and justice. For that is what we mean when we acclaim that Christ is risen, alleluia!

Jesus prays for us

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, “Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus - for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us - one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.

Psalm 1

Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor lingered in the way of sinners, not sat in the seats of the scornful! Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and they meditate on God’s teaching day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper. It is not so with the wicked; they are like chaff which the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes, nor the sinner in the council of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall be destroyed.

1 John 5:9-13

If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.

John 17:6-19

I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

*******

In most of our collective memory, when we think about the prayer Jesus prayed before he was arrested in the garden, we think of “My Father, let this cup pass from me, yet not my will, but Thine be done.” In the Gospel of John, however, Jesus spends the entire 17th chapter of this story praying for those God has given to him. Then they go to the garden where he’s arrested as soon as they arrive. It’s a very different picture. Rather than a man struggling with the knowledge that he will soon encounter rejection and brutality and death, Jesus is praying for those who will soon watch him go through all of this, for his disciples who will also be hated and rejected as he is. And even there he doesn’t pray for the cup to pass them by, but for God to give them the strength of heart and spirit to endure all of the abuse the world will throw at them.

Because the world hated Jesus, it will certainly hate any who claim to follow him. Because God loves the whole world, those who follow Jesus into the midst of the muck and mire will stay in the trenches for the sake of that love.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the chance to escape World War Two Germany on a boat for New York, but he decided to remain and try to overthrow Hitler and teach theology in community, believing that he would have no place rebuilding if he wasn’t present for the conflict. We refer to him sometimes as a particular Lutheran saint who wrestled with fear and faith and being a witness to resurrection hope in the midst of terrible times, even though his sacrifice for the sake of the Gospel ultimately cost him his life. And there are many who wish he had just gotten on that boat and survived to teach another day. On the other end of the popular ideology spectrum are those whose hope for a future heaven is so strong that there is little room in their lives, if any, for caring for the world of ecosystems and suffering people in the here-and-now bit of eternity.

So let me make this very clear: Jesus does not come into the world in order that we may escape from it. We are to be a light to the nations, and yeast cannot make a batch of bread dough rise by sitting in its own little bag off to the side of the kitchen counter. We are called and sent into the world to live in it, to love it, to serve and struggle amid all of its sufferings and sickness. And, honestly, there’s no real way to escape imperfection this side of death. I mean, we know this. You ever have one of those days where, when it rains it pours, and everything that could go wrong goes wrong, not to mention the things that never ought to go wrong in the first place are suddenly broken and backwards, like your own head and ability to form complete sentences and respond with kindness to strangers? I know those days when nothing is right and everyone within twenty feet of me gets the full blast of my pre-coffee short-and-sharp commentary on the last seven facebook posts that pushed my buttons or trolled me or just threw off my groove. It would be so much easier if I could just live in a perfect world.

But Jesus doesn’t come to take us away from it all like some Jamaican island vacation. Jesus himself didn’t live life elevated half an inch above ground so as not to get the hem of his robe dirty. Born in blood and the muck of a stable, raised in first century Palestine under the oppression of the Roman Empire, thrown out of the synagogues that raised and taught him, surrounded by hungry, hurting people, day in and day out, Jesus did withdraw from time to time to pray, to focus, and to recharge, but it was time set aside for the sake of entering more earnestly into the maddening crowds, the way that we gather together for worship on Sundays or might start each day with a moment of deep breathing and centering prayer and meditation.

So, knowing that we would face those maddening crowds in our own ways, Jesus spends his last night alive with his friends washing their feet and teaching them about hope, and then he prays for them. Praying that we may be as close a community as Jesus himself is with the Father. That we be protected from the evil one. That we be made holy in the truth of the love of the Divine.

And then, as only God enfleshed can do, he goes and answers his own prayer by making it so. It’s part of that mystery of what it means that Jesus is entirely human and entirely God. It’s kind of hard to explain or imagine, what that looks like or feels like, but it’s also kind of hard to explain or imagine what it looks like for a fantastically diverse people to be one. You just know it when you experience it, when the people of God shine in the world with such brilliance that the world throws all of its ugly fear right back in that co-dependent, abusive manner which says “I hate you, you’re awful, don’t leave me.” In reply to that world, Jesus prays for his disciples, “I love you, you’re human, I will send the Advocate to be with you.”

Because this past Thursday was Ascension Day. We’re in the in-between, waiting space again. Jesus has returned to the Father, and as we tell the Story through the liturgical calendar year, we are now in the space of waiting until the Spirit comes to guide our hearts and give us strength and hope for living in the world and loving it with the love of God. That is what we will celebrate next week at the Pentecost festival, affirming our faith and renouncing all of the lies that draw us away from God. All of the ways the world hates us and works to get us to hate ourselves. Next Sunday we will, with Robin, renounce the empty promises that defy God and cling together to the promises of God, trusting in the love of God as we have seen it expressed throughout Scripture and especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

But for today, for the week ahead, for the waiting, in-between resurrection and resurrection time, for all of the times when everything breaks and our tempers flare and our hearts weep and our witness fails, Jesus lives and loves us with a love that makes us one, that makes us whole, that has riven asunder the empty lies and anxious misgivings of a world that tells us we are never enough. We are now more than enough, because Jesus has made us one, has loved us with an eternal love, has sent us into the world with his own Holy Spirit and the truth of the Word of God, that the joy of Jesus may be made complete in us.