And now for something completely different...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ the President/King

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 

The one coming with the clouds rules over all

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

Psalm 93 

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

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

Revelation 1:4b-8 

Glory to the one who made us a kingdom

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

John 18:33-37 

The kingdom of Christ

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

*******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ the Widow

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

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

********

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

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

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

So beware the celebrities and learn from the destitute.

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

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

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

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

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

Waste of toilet paper

John 11:32-44

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

*******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories, forgotten and remembered

Jeremiah 31:31-34

The days are surely coming, says Adonai, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt - a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says Adonai. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says Adonai: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know Adonai,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says Adonai, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Psalm 46

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains shake in the depths of the sea; though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble with its tumult. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be shaken; God shall help it at the break of day. The nations rage, and the kingdoms shake; God speaks, and the earth melts away. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold. Come now, regard the works of the Lord, what desolations God has brought upon the earth; behold the one who makes war to cease in all the world; who breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire. “Be still, then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.” The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

Romans 3:19-28

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

John 8:31-36

Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

*******

Everybody has a story. You want to know who somebody is, you get their friends (or their enemies) to tell you a story about them, a defining event, an over-the-top decision, an outrageous experience. Tyler is a kid with a heart of gold, he’ll even use the gift card his teacher gave him to buy dinner for his friends. Luke loves the city life but takes his prayer time on his neighbor’s tractor out in the country. Dr Klein has been teaching Old Testament for so long he reads directly from the Hebrew and loves telling those stories of his two grandsons who were put together in a petri dish. Stories.

Then there are the stories of baseball teams like the Cubs, stories of celebrities like Bill Cosby, stories of family fishing trips and community traditions that help us re-live the historical events that shaped every celebration ever since then. Some stories are told with pride and carried forward, others with pride that we’ve gotten past them and don’t live like that any more. Many stories tell how we got to where we are and why we respond in the way we do when tragedy strikes or when a certain time of year comes around. My grandmother was always sad in mid April, because she suffered a miscarriage one April well over fifty years ago, and her body carried that story until the day she died. 

The Jewish people had a story they tell every spring, and two thousand years ago that storytelling became for us what we call Holy Week. The story of the Passover, the signs and plagues sent down on Pharaoh to set God’s people free from slavery. They were in slavery in the first place because Pharaoh forgot the story of Joseph, who interpreted the dreams of a previous Pharaoh and saved Egypt from starvation during seven years of famine. You’d think a famine lasting seven years would be a big enough struggle that folks would remember it for generations. When I lived in Massachusetts, every snowstorm led to the grocery stores being picked clean by people who remembered another storm from 40 years ago. But a seven year famine didn’t concern the Egyptians who figured their Pharaoh was a god, and they put all those foreigners in their midst into forced labor, despite the fact that those foreigners had been part of their basic survival.

Passover tells the story of God liberating God’s people from that slavery, sending the plagues, leading them in the wilderness, drowning Pharaoh and his army, providing manna in the desert, promising a homeland. It’s the defining story of the people. 

So it’s a bit funny that when Jesus talks about true freedom, the people who tell this story as their own, year after year, would say ‘we’ve never been slaves of anybody!’ Not just funny, it’s downright sad. Like the fairy godmother rescued Cinderella from a life of poverty, and she claims she’s always lived in the palace. Or the nation of immigrants goes on and on about how lazy and dangerous immigrants are, or the adults forget what it was like to be a teenager and the teens forget what it was like to be a kid. How have we lost who we are, where we come from?

There’s this movie with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, called “50 First Dates,” where he falls for her but she has long-term memory damage and can’t remember yesterday when she wakes up in the morning. Every day, Sandler’s character has to reintroduce himself to Barrymore’s, because every morning she wakes up with no idea of their history together. It doesn't seem to phase him, though. Every morning she wakes up to a video reminding her of the reason for her memory loss and a recap of the recent history she’s lived through. God seems to be in that same sort of position with us, over and over again, reminding us that we were once strangers, that we were once far off and have been brought near, that we have all fallen short of the glory of God, that we are grafted into the tree as outsiders, that we were slaves in Egypt and have been slaves to ourselves and to our sin from the outset.

So that, when we get to the end and wonder what it was all for, when we get into the middle of the mess and wonder what’s the point to all of this, when we ask ‘why me?’ or ‘what now?’ or ‘what does it matter?’, we have a defining story, a root, a source to turn back to for strength and hope and freedom when it seems for all intents and purposes that our hands are tied and we’ve buried ourselves alive again.

We are grafted into a long, deep, rich heritage of God, where every time we run to our own destruction we are pursued, every time we turn our back on each other we are brought back together, every time we sin we are forgiven. Our short memories, however, lead us deeper and deeper into the lie that we can free ourselves from sin, that we can live perfect lives if only we try hard enough, that we’ve gotten this far on our own strength and so should everybody else if they’re worth the effort.

There’s the great story Jesus tells about an older brother who works for his father as though he has to earn his place in the family. He never takes a holiday, never asks for anything, works his fingers to the bone, and then his younger brother takes half of the family bank account and runs off to splurge on childish, irresponsible, immature… Anyhow, with the younger brother out of the way, the older still has to do most of the work, but then one day that little snot comes home all apologetic, and the father sends servants to slaughter a prize animal for a feast! A feast to welcome back this piece of worthless mess, while the eldest has never gotten the recognition he deserves. He might as well be a slave, for all the thanks he gets, so he doesn’t bother to welcome his brother home, because he’s too busy working and trying to earn the love his father gives away freely.

We have been set free, but we keep living like slaves, insisting we were never slaves in the first place. It's messed up. It’s why we confess our sins together at the start of each worship service, because it’s the most basic rule of recovery: admitting you have a problem is the first step in healing. We tell a story on Reformation Sunday about Martin Luther, a Catholic monk who was absolutely terrified of God’s judgment, who lived in a time when the church was ignoring the pain of the poor who were dying all around in their own unholy fear of God, who in the age of a brand new printing press published some ideas for academic debate which ended up turning the world at the time upside down. One of those early ideas was: “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.” No matter what sort of financial situation the church would ever be in, the story of our salvation, of God’s work setting us free from captivity to sin, is the source of our life and our greatest treasure.

Righteousness apart from works of the law. Law as no longer accuser or guilt-bringer, but gift of life and marriage covenant. God who relentlessly pursues us wherever we run or hide. A story of rescue, over and over again, and once and for all in the cross of Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this Reformation Sunday. This is our story, our freedom. Thanks be to God.

Powerless before Glory

Mark 10: 35-45

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Professor, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

*******

I’ve been thinking about power and powerlessness a lot this week. Some of you know I’ve been sitting with a family in ICU for the last week while they wait for their son to wake up after a terrible car accident nine days ago. The family is of course powerless to wake him up, the doctor and nurses are keeping him alive and taking good care of him, his healing process will be long, everything about his family’s life has changed. Many friends and relatives have been spending their days in the lobby waiting, just waiting, and hoping, and chatting, and of course running the gamut of emotions through the stress and grief and fear and anger. I don’t want to say he’s ‘not one of ours,’ since God doesn’t do that whole ‘us and them’ separation, but just so you don’t think you’ve missed something, he’s not a member here, I just get to do this sort of thing with people who ask for a pastor because I’m local enough to get there, and sitting powerless with other people is uncomfortable, holy time. Of course there’s nothing I can do to fix anything, I don’t have any answers, I can’t explain why these things happen, I just get to sit in the awkward powerlessness with other people and pay attention to God in the midst of it.

This morning’s Gospel reading skips over a few verses from last week’s reading. I don’t know if that’s for the sake of cutting out repetition of verses we’ve already heard twice recently, or because the lectionary folks wanted us to focus differently, but I can’t help but back up to the end of last week’s reading and go on directly from there to today’s, so, from verses 32-34: 

And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.”

For some reason, after this third prediction of his betrayal and death, James and John come up and demand to sit at his right and left hands in his glory. It’s so insensitive of them. But on the other hand, it sort of makes sense. They don’t want to hear about suffering, don’t want to think about it, don’t want things to change, don’t want Rome to burst their bubble of hope yet again while they remain powerless to do anything about their oppression. Rome, remember, can just come in a steal any woman they please, use her up and throw her away. Rome, remember, is an empire that keeps the peace by making public witness of humiliating anyone who expresses a desire for equal protection under the law. In our recent American history, we might say that Rome is in charge of the most public state-sanctioned lynchings, and here Jesus is saying that his own people are going to hand him over to just such a lynching. Terror and powerlessness. He’s letting his disciples know that he knows this is coming, and he’s reminding them again that it won’t be the end of him, because he will rise after three days.

So, say James and John, let’s just jump right to the glory then, okay? We’ve got to be able to do something more than just sit by and watch, than just stand around and wait. Being powerless is such an awful feeling, especially when you’re powerless to save someone you love and hope for.

But, yet again, James and John have missed the point of who Jesus is. God has been watching us live with the consequences of our free will for generation after generation, calling to us, crying to us, through prophets and signs and miracles to turn around, to repent, to just be kind to one another and stop with the self-centeredness and the killing and the shaming and the isolating and the imprisonment and the abuse. We have turned our backs on God over and over throughout history, claiming we know better how to live in the glory we want. Our fight for glory only turns our world and our communities into broken bits of debris, adrift in the chaos. Then when we’ve made a real mess of things we turn in desperation to God and demand God fix what we have broken. God created this world out of chaos, so we claim in one of our creation stories, so we know God can do it again, but we’d rather God get out of our way, until we need God to swoop in with all of the power and bring us glory. This is how people have lived generation after generation. Heartbreaking.

So God isn’t getting the message across with the prophets, it seems, isn’t mending fully what we have broken, not even with the many sacrifices of the priests. Certainly we aren’t keeping order and justice with any consistency through the kings. We can’t fix this ourselves, so God comes in the flesh, descends into the chaos and the suffering and the madness and the gore. God comes deep down inside our powerlessness, to show us what real power, what real glory, what real salvation, is.

If you want to sit at the right hand of God, I know a few bedsides in the ICU with empty couches. 

If you want to sit at the right hand of God, I know a few prison inmates who could use a penal. 

If you want to sit at the right hand of God, I heard there are schools with ‘buddy benches’ in their playgrounds for the lonely kids.

If you want to sit at the right hand of God, look to your left, to your closest neighbor.

Because this is who God is, among us, with us, in our suffering and our everything. We can’t escape the realities of living in a world where our actions have consequences, and God doesn’t pull us out of it so much as crawl into it beside us. When Jesus talks about the cup he is to drink, remember that cup he poured out for us when he sat at that Passover supper with his disciples the night we betrayed him, that cup of his blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, the cup of salvation, of cells and plasma that flowed in his veins and has been given freely for us. When he talks about the baptism with which he is baptized, remember that day when the heavens opened and the voice of God said “This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased,” and remember how God has claimed you and named you in baptism, too. When we talk about the glory of God, we talk about this passionate love which has been flowing throughout all of history and flows among us and within us in the here and now as much as it did two thousand years ago.

For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. And to give his life as a ransom for you.

Can't earn it, can't lose it

Mark 10:17-31

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments; ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father of children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

*******

My father has been retired now for two years. About six months into his retirement he went back to work. His own father never took a day of vacation, never took a sick day, until he had two years or more accumulated at the end of his career working for the postal service. Granted, my grandfather was a first generation immigrant from Denmark and grew up on a Minnesota farm during the Great Depression. Or so the story goes. Work has been a matter of survival, pride, and good citizenship. Grandpa struggled a lot in his last years, though, with grief over having missed so much of his children’s and grandchildren’s lives because he was at work so much.

Then there was a tweet written this past week from mega-church Pastor Creflo Dollar, who said that Jesus bled and died so that we could have financial security. This is the same guy who told his congregation that God wanted him to have a personal jet.

And were still sort of hearing about the Syrian refugees, who are fleeing in droves and many arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Oh, and also, I got to spend an afternoon at Whittier with a community of people whose memories are slipping away, and another couple of hours with family and friends of a young man in a coma after a car accident.

I wonder how this morning’s Gospel speaks to people from these sorts of experiences, what it can mean to us here. We have a strange relationship to stuff, all the buying and selling and collecting and tag sales and all. I still don’t own any furniture, at 32 years old, though I’ve never wanted for comfort. I could probably build a table and a bed out of all my books, but desk and bed and chairs I’ve not yet acquired, and I like it that way. Traveling light is my preference. Except now it takes multiple car loads to move all of my books. So traveling light has kind of gone out the window, and I keep getting more books, and as roommates come and go they bring new kitchen supplies… I guess I’m sort of building a collection of “adult,” “responsible” stuff that I ought to have by now. So many kids my age have houses and spouses and kids and comfy chairs and kitchen tables of their own, many of us reflecting on how strange it is to have all these trappings of adulthood and not knowing where they came from.

This young man in today’s Gospel reading has many possessions. Whether he’s worked for home or inherited them or some combination of both, we don’t know. He’s a sincere fellow, it seems, wanting to please Jesus, to inherit eternal life from God, and he’s followed all the commandments about loving your neighbor. Can you see him, running up to Jesus, “Good teacher!” he says. Oh, he’s excited, all right. He’s finally going to meet the guy everybody’s talking about, the Rabbi who’s stirring up the hearts of people everywhere, the one who’s making the Pharisees squirm and really reminding folks about love. “Good teacher!” he says, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And the first thing Jesus does is burst his bubble, just a little bit: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” Maybe this guy has been rewarded for his behavior by doting parents, calling him a ‘good son’ when he’s done nice things, practicing that positive reinforcement so he continues his best behavior. Who knows? But this style of praise, a cycle of rewards for good behavior, only works sometimes. We don’t always do good, we don’t always feel good, we don’t always recognize good. Only God is good.

We spend a lot of time talking about good and bad, usually in relation to people, usually measured in how they dress or talk or what sort of money they have or how their children turned out. “Good” can often mean “useful,” or it did to my grandfather. Being a “good immigrant” he worked very hard for a very, very long time so he could contribute to society and help take care of his family. He passed that down to my father, who cannot stand being idle and needs to work, to be productive, to earn a paycheck even now that he’s a week away from sixty-eight years old. To Creflo Dollar, being a “good Christian” is shown in how much money God has given you, and if you have enough faith you will soon be blessed with abundant wealth, which you then have to show off in order to prove you’re faithful to God. Refugees need sanctuary and a good, honest welcome. Folks who are completely dependent on nurses and machines need good care. 

Jesus, on the other hand, looks at this young man who has probably been called a good man all his life, and loves him. The young man wants to know what to do to inherit eternal life, as though being welcomed into God’s family, being saved, is something we earn. And with all of our talk of “good” and “bad,” we sure get stuck in that mindset no matter how our theology tells us it’s not how God works. The question of why bad things happen to good people is one of the oldest questions there is, as though we only have to earn and always deserve what happens to us. The young man has been rewarded in life with many possessions. He can point to those things, to his faithfulness to the law, as proof that he himself is a good man, perhaps. Or at least that he is well on his way to becoming good, to becoming good enough. But he still doesn’t know for certain that he’s part of God’s family, still doesn’t know if he’s missing something, still doesn’t know if maybe there’s anything else he needs to do to inherit eternal life.

Imagine you’re a parent with one child who is always double-checking that you love them. Who thinks you must certainly hate them if they got less than a 4.0 grade average in school, or keeps trying to stay up all night on multiple work projects so they can buy you a better car or pay off your mortgage so that you will love them. And how terribly worthless that kid would feel if they got sick and you had to take care of them but they didn’t trust that they had done enough for you to really love them? If every time you told them you loved them they said you were only following the rules of being a parent and it wasn’t really love? How heartbreaking would that be? 

This young man with his many possessions and eagerness to inherit eternal life reminds me of my grandfather, of my father, of the refugees who have to prove they’re not a drain on society in order to find safe haven here. He reminds me of the kid on life support and the folks who will never get their memories back this side of heaven. He goes away sad when Jesus tells him to sell everything and give it to the poor, because who is he without his stuff and his proof of righteousness? He’s gotten all of these things because he’s been so good, how will he show that he’s so good once he has nothing to show for it? What good will he be to heaven if he can’t contribute anything to it? If he gives everything to the poor now, he will himself be poor, and what will he be able to do in the future that’s worth anything? 

We know these questions, we wrestle with our own worth so often, we take refuge in entitlement or we end up in despair.  But when this young man asks Jesus about inheriting eternal life, Jesus invites him to life eternal right now in the present moment. He’s always saying that the Kingdom of God has come near, isn’t he? Even when we’re not looking for it. But we forget, we cut each other off based on earnings. Simply put, the young man couldn’t point to his achievements as a golden ticket into eternal life. None of us can. We can not earn heaven. We can not build ourselves a resume’ worthy of eternal life. We never could.

And we’ve never had to. We are not our stuff, and we are not our achievements, we are simply and forever children of God. Saved by grace through faith apart from works for Christ’s sake. Jesus, looking at this guy, loved him not for his stuff but for his self. Just as Jesus, looking at us, loves us, not because we’ve earned it, not because we deserve it, not because we can prove he ought to, but just because that’s what Jesus does.

My grandfather’s grief at missing out on so much of our growing up is that same kind of hunger, that pull between needing to work to feed his family and needing to spend time with his family to know and to love them and to be loved by them. My father’s work ethic is admirable to a point and yet will no doubt be incredibly sad when they tell him he’s too old for the office work and will have to let him go. He had the hardest time getting hired at his age, and what’s a man to do who’s worked so hard for so long? Learning how to be loved regardless of station or “usefulness” might take some of us longer to learn than others, but it’s there, irregardless, for all of us.

Creflo Dollar’s got it all backwards about why Jesus bled and died. Yet Creflo Dollar has a mega church and millions of dollars, so it seems he’s doing something right, right? He’s preaching that God blesses us abundantly with wealth when we are faithful, but he’s measuring it out all wrong. Because the wealth that Jesus promises his disciples is not stored in mutual funds and bank accounts, is not shown in shiny gold watches and stretch limos, but in a family that stretches across time and around the world. Jesus tells his disciples “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father of children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” It’s not an easy road, but it’s full of love and relationships with so many people who are made in the Image of God, like Syrian refugees, and boys on life support, and people living with Alzheimer's, all part of one great family of God. One eternal family that just makes your heart break with love, that aches and groans with shared pain, that celebrates together the richness of eternity and rejoices at each new rebirth that comes, in reconciliation and forgiveness.

For we can never earn such love. Nor can we ever lose it. Because it does not depend on us. It never has, and it never will. It all depends on God, whose love will never fail.