Re-membering the Church--Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 18, 2025

 Sermon for Year C, Easter 5, May 18, 2025, SMHP

Scripture:  Acts 11:1-18

          Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

          ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ ¹⁰This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.

¹¹At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ ¹⁵And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.

          ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” ¹⁸When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

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          “Even to the Gentiles…”

          How many know Fiddler on the Roof?

          Set in imperial Russia—what is now Ukraine—Fiddler tells the story of a family trying to live faithfully in a world that is growing and embracing modernity, even as it finds itself in the hands of a leader—the Tsar—who rules with an iron fist and only likes people who look, and act, and pray like him. 

          Tevye and his wife Golde have five daughters, all of whom are reaching the age of marriage.  It is still the custom to have marriages arranged by the parents and a matchmaker.  Even if you don’t know the play, you probably know the song, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.”

          As their parents begin to arrange “suitable” matches for them, the daughters keep defying convention by falling in love.  The first to engage in this inconvenience is the oldest,Tzeitel, who wants to marry her sweet friend, the tailor Motel Kamzoil.  Her parents, however, have betrothed her to the widowed butcher Lazar Wolfe. After both of the young people plead with him, Tevye agrees to allow Tzeitel to marry Motel, but that decision leaves him with some problems, not the least of which is:  how to tell Golde that they are breaking with tradition (!).

          So he hatches a plan.  He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming, and tells Golde he’s had a bad dream, knowing she will offer to interpret it.  In his dream, he shares, Golde’s grandmother Tzeitel comes, to say mazel tov for her namesake’s engagement to Motel, and then the butcher’s wife returns from the grave to make threats about what will happen if Tzeitel marries Lazar Wolf.

          Golde is persuaded by the dream, and Tzeitel and Motel get married and live happily ever after.

 

          Now, I’m not suggesting that Peter the Apostle made up The Dream of the Holy Tablecloth.  But if he did, I’m not mad about it.

          I mean, there he is—a traditional guy in a rapidly changing world that is in the hands of tyrannical rulers.  By the end of his story, just as in Fiddler on the Roof, the Emperor will tear that world apart.

In the chapter right before the place where we find ourselves this morning, Peter is in Joppa.  Joppa is a coastal town, up to that time best known as the place that Jonah escaped to, after being told by God to go to Nineveh.  In Joppa, he gets on a boat headed for Tarshish, and you probably know what happens next.  Big storm, Jonah overboard and swallowed by a big fish, nearly always depicted in art as a whale, as in the whale statue at the port of Jaffa, modern-day Joppa, a lovely area on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

So Peter’s in Joppa, and according to Luke (the author of Acts), Peter has this vision of all the delicious animals descending on a big cloth, and then some men come and take him to see a centurion named Cornelius in Caesarea. 

And he should have said “no.”  He says it himself a bit later in the chapter. Speaking to the crowd that gathers when he arrives in Caesarea, he says, “"You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

I’m going to pause right here, because the importance of this phrase.  This is a definitive moment in the development of Christianity.  Perhaps the most important moment.  Up until now, the Way of Jesus was a sect within Judaism.  Now Peter is saying that it is for everyone—Jews and Gentiles. 

How do you think that went over?

Well, we know, actually.  How does our text begin? 

 

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

 

Peter got back from his trip to the coast, and went to Church Headquarters there in Jerusalem.  He offered them his Parochial Report.  (Baptisms: 42, Offerings:  17 shekels, 55 denarii).

I can tell you that if I reported 42 baptisms to the ELCA on my parochial report, there would be great rejoicing.  But what did the “apostles and believers” have to say about Peter’s amazing efforts?  “Why are you eating with uncircumcised men?”

That is a rather bizarre question, two thousand years later, but I do want to linger on it for a moment, because this sort of thinking has been baked into the church for two millennia, and it’s important that we look at where it started and where we are now.  “Why are you eating with uncircumcised men?” they ask.  Whom do they believe is eligible to be part of this new religious movement, led by the “apostles and believers?”

Jewish men. 

Jesus came, healed, preached to, and loved on people from Gentile territories, women, people considered “ritually unclean,” and every other class and category of person—including-but-intentionally-not-limited-to “Jewish men.”  And still his church began as an exclusive organization limited to a fraction of the population.

Thanks be to God—and I mean that literally—it also began with leaders who were still listening to God’s call to carry the gospel to all people.  And whether Peter had a vision or just finally remembered what Jesus taught him—whatever happened, a dream was fulfilled.  Peter remembered, and the dream of Jesus Christ was fulfilled. Peter remembered, and I mean that literally as well.  He re-membered the church, from membership only for certain classes of men to membership for everyone—Jews and Gentiles.  Paul pushed the boundaries even wider—all the way to the Emperor’s back yard—and the church got re-membered again, closer and closer to the Beloved Community imagined by Jesus (and Dr. King).

In every generation, we re-member that church.  Because, and it is painful to say this, it really is, in every generation there are those who would ask why. 

“Why did you share the meal with the uncircumcised?”

“Why did you share the meal with women?”

“Why did you share the meal with children?”

“Why did you share the meal with gay people?”

Because that happens in every generation, it will always be part of our calling as Christians to re-member the church anew.  We’ve done that pretty well as a church, but there is always re-membering to do.

As a denomination, we’re getting better as well.  The Executive Director of my home area at the ELCA, Phil Hirsch wrote a recent article in our monthly newsletter encouraging us to encourage others to go into federal chaplaincy. To illustrate the need, he told the story of a naval base that had to fly in an ELCA chaplain to baptize a child, because one of the parents is transgender.  None of the chaplains assigned there would do it.

This story makes me sad, and angry, and proud, all at once.  I’m so glad that there was an ELCA chaplain available to serve that family, and so annoyed that it was necessary to find someone who wouldn’t withhold baptism from a child.

^“34I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Friends, it is not easy to love as Jesus loved.  It goes against our natural inclination toward exclusivity.  But we have found a way to do it, and while it is easy to take that for granted, I want you to know that in so doing, you have re-membered the church, and that work is no less miraculous than what Tevye did for his daughter and Peter and Paul did for all the Galilean centurions and Philippian cloth merchants across the empire.

This work of re-membering is vital, in every generation, and even more so in times when our culture seems more inclined to build walls than tables.  Thank you, for the work you do here and elsewhere to invite people into God’s reign, rather than keeping them out.  Let us ever be dreaming and re-membering our church, and our world, anew.

Idle Tales

Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025

Scripture:  Luke 24:1-12

          But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had followed him from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. ²They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, ³but when they went in, they did not find the body.

          ⁴While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.

⁵The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. ⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”  ⁸Then they remembered his words, ⁹and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

          ¹⁰Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. ¹¹But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

¹²But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

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This is Galileo.  You’ve probably heard of him.  He is the Godfather of Modern Science.  He proposed and championed all sorts of scientific theories.  Like this one [drop something from the pulpit].  Isaac Newton sharpened the theory of gravity, but it was Galileo who brought it to the forefront.

He heard about a device to see into space developed in the Netherlands and began developing his own.  Taught himself the art of lens-grinding and made a telescope capable of seeing detail on objects in space. 

With his new telescope, he could see to the sun, and observe the movement of the planets, and he began to advance the Theory of Heliocentrism, originally developed by Copernicus.  Heliocentrism, which means…? [the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system]

Heliocentrism went over big…especially with religious leaders.  They were so curious about it, they called him in to explain it…to the Inquisition.  After much back and forth during which Galileo refused to disavow the theory, he was threatened with burning at the stake, at which point he thought better of his principles and recanted.  Spent most of the rest of his life under house arrest, testing theories and recognizing that science could show us a lot about the world.

·       He was right, of course.  About science, about heliocentrism, gravity, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  But some of his theories contradicted what the Inquisitors understood from the Bible—because they were “Biblical Literalists.”  “Biblical literalism” is the most common heresy of our day, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Inquisitors read a few verses, like the 10^th verse of Psalm 96 and understood them to say that the earth did not and could not move.  So obviously it couldn’t revolve around the sun.

This idea of Copernicus’s, being touted by Galileo…it was nothing but an idle tale.

We humans are a proud lot.  We don’t like to admit when we don’t understand things, so we often find it easier to just declare something “wrong!”

 “Idle.”

“Woke.”

It’s easier to just dismiss things we don’t understand than to take after Galileo and investigate.  Stare into the heavens night after night and record the minute movements of the celestial bodies.  Drop objects of different masses off of a fixed point and see whether they reach the ground at the same time.

Have an actual conversation with a transgender person. Or better still—as scientific method would dictate—have several conversations, make notes, and examine what you learn.

It’s still not hard to find truth. When it’s the truth about individual people, the generally accepted best practice is to ask them.  “What do you like to be called?  What are your pronouns?  Are you a vegetarian?”  Pretty simple, right?

It’s not hard to find the truth.  If you’re looking.  Some people aren’t actually looking for truth.  And there’s a well-funded Anti-truth Lobby that makes a lot of noise and has its own TV network. 

We are gathered this morning around a simple truth discovered by women two thousand years ago.  They went to the tomb, prepared to anoint the body of Jesus, and found things amiss. 

So they utilized the Scientific Method:

--Observation:  “The stone is rolled away, and the tomb is empty.”

--Testimony from eyewitnesses:  “He is not here but has risen.”

--Reliance on previous research:  “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

--And finally:  Publish the results of your findings.  “They told all this to the eleven, and to all the rest.”

In a society that is interested in discovery, in progress, and in uncovering the truth of the world around it, your careful attention to all of those details will convince folks that your theory—it’s only a theory at this point—has merit.

In another sort of society, say, one which discounts the intellect and contributions of women—or one controlled by an increasingly paranoid religious mob:  your findings—no matter how carefully researched—will be dismissed as “an idle tale.”

And then you’ll have to wait until your words are repeated by the “right people,” or until the power structure returns to a focus on truth and progress.

The word of resurrection got out pretty quickly.  Jesus wasn’t going to leave that in the hands of the people who started dismissing his most ardent followers the minute he was gone.  So he appeared to them, ate fish with them, showed them all of the empirical evidence of his sufferings and of his resurrection…

…and then the men said, only a little late,

“Christ is risen! “ He is risen.  Alleluia!

And that’s why, if you Google “first apostles,” you’ll get something that looks like this [the 12].

Instead of this [Mary telling the disciples]

 

But, hey, at least the word got out relatively quickly.  For Galileo, it was a little bit longer.  After a period of thought and study, the church declared that Galileo had been right all along, and the pope lifted the condemnation of Galileo, and released a statement saying that the religious authorities in Galileo’s day had leaned too heavily on interpretation of scripture, rather than scripture itself. 

Fortunately, we never do that any more.

Which pope, you say?  Anybody know?

John Paul II.  1992.

 

When Jesus stood before the Pontius Pilate, the Governor of Judea, Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

          Truth can be hard to get a hold of.  Different people often hold to different truths, and in really dark times, even truths verified by science and reason are jettisoned for political expediency.  And we all start wondering, “What is truth?”

We have a truth, don’t we?  It’s a set of truths, really.  Sometimes we call it a Creed, but the truth is always more than can be contained in some statement of faith.

Our truth is about Jesus. This morning it centers in the proposition, Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, alleluia…

…but there is more.  We believe in a Lord who loves fiercely and accepts fiercely.  Whose two primary tasks are to proclaim a gospel of love for all people and care for the vulnerable, and to heal those who are sick in any way.  Who passed that work on to us, and demands that we do it, or not call ourselves Christians. 

Christianity without compassion, without empathy, is simply not Christianity.  It’s not true.

We hold that truth, and like Galileo, and the women apostles, we find ourselves in the difficult position of having to defend it.  Which we will, and we will be victorious as Christ is victorious, because that is the way the world works.  I’ve got thousands of years of evidence to back me up, here. 

Eventually, the truth will out.

One more thing, that must be said this day.  We have a truth, around which we gather this day.  You also have a truth, and here in this place, we want you to live your truth, whatever it is.  We will fight for your right to live true.  Because that’s what Jesus would do, and our truth is in him.

 

Amen

"Paschal Fire"--Sermon for Easter Vigil, April 19, 2025

 Sermon for SMHP, Easter Vigil, April 19, 2025

Scripture: John 20:1-18

          Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. ²So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ ³Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. ⁴The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. ⁶Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, ⁷and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. ⁸Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; ⁹for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. ¹⁰Then the disciples returned to their homes.

          But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; ¹²and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ¹³They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ ¹⁴When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. ¹⁵Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ ¹⁶Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,^* ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).

¹⁷Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ ¹⁸Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

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In Fredericksburg, Texas, on this night every year, they turn out all the lights in town, ring the church bells, and light bonfires on the hilltops.  They’ve been doing it almost two hundred years. Fredericksburg is in the Texas Hill country between Austin and the Mexico border.  That part of Texas was settled first by native Americans, then primarily by German immigrants, lots of them Lutheran.  They brought the tradition of the Paschal Fire with them from Germany, where it dates back to rituals performed by the Saxons, which were then picked up by Christians around the time of Luther (early sixteenth century).  No one knows how far back the tradition of lighting a Paschal Fire goes.  It is almost universally acknowledged as one of the many pagan rituals that Christians appropriated, particularly once the Council of Nicaea fixed the date of Easter to springtime.  Lots of religious festivals which welcomed Spring and its longer, warmer days with a fire that dispelled the darkness of winter.

In Fredericksburg, one tradition holds that it was actually Native Americans who lit the first fires on the hilltops, to inform each other about the movements of the European settlers, and doesn’t that add another wrinkle to the story?!  Then, the story goes, parents explained the fires to their children by telling them that the Easter Bunny was boiling eggs to dye for their Easter egg hunts in a giant caldron on the hill.  They’ve celebrated this story in Fredericksburg since the days of black and white photography.

Fire at Easter makes sense, right? The fire, our liturgy tells us “symbolizes the radiance of Christ and his power over death.”  The Vigil service in particular is full of images of darkness and light—so much so that we want to be careful to recognize that darkness itself isn’t bad.  For many years, the unexamined idea that light was good and darkness was bad became a useful metaphor to support the insidious racism baked into our culture. 

The first act of creation was the separation of light from darkness.  God calls the light good, but does not call the darkness bad, or cast out the darkness.  We need darkness for rest and rejuvenation.  Darkness can be generative.  Life-giving.  Some things only grow in darkness. 

More important to our purposes tonight:  the resurrection of Jesus took place in darkness.  It was discovered either in the first light of the day—according to the synoptic gospels, or—according to John, our evangelist for this evening:  “while it was still dark.”

Mary went to the tomb while it was still dark and discovered the stone rolled away.  She went and got the boys and they all came back to the tomb, where it was still dark, and they checked out the tomb—in the dark—and one “saw and believed,” and then…

…went home. John says he “saw and believed,” but his actions suggest something else.  Or maybe another way to say it is that he “saw” physically, but not spiritually.  The most faithful act, John teaches us, is to truly see what God is doing around us, to truly believe in the power of Jesus, and to act out of that faith. 

In our gospel for tonight—the Easter narrative—both physical and spiritual
“seeing” and “unseeing” are at play.  The Beloved disciple sees the linen wrappings and Jesus gone, and John even says that he believed, but he did not yet “understand.”  So he saw, but he didn’t see, and now you know why John is a challenging gospel.

After the boys go back home, Mary speaks to a pair of angels, and then to Jesus himself.  But she doesn’t see that it’s Jesus.  Why?

Well probably because it’s still dark.

And maybe because he looks different.

And surely because she doesn’t understand what’s going on yet. It’s a lot to comprehend.  Honestly, it’s pretty impressive that she recognizes him when he calls her name.  When he appeared to the disciples, he had to show them the marks on his hands.  Poor Thomas gets such a bad wrap.  None of the disciples recognized Jesus without seeing the marks or hearing him speak.  None of them truly see and more importantly understand what is happening.

 

Who can relate?  Who has struggled to understand what’s happening, even when you can see it unfolding before you?  I know I expend countless hours just saying to my poor wife these days, “I just need someone to explain it to me.”  Trying to use logic.  I think if I point out malignant narcissism or blatant lying or—and this one is probably my favorite:  wildly unchristian behavior that flies in the face of everything Jesus taught…I think if people can just see that and understand it, then they’ll change.

Believe in the good again.  Follow Jesus again if they purport to be Christians or just be decent and not be terrible.  Again.

These are the moments of darkness that Jesus describes in John’s gospel. It’s not the absence of light, exactly.  It’s the willing suspension of decency.  Truth.  Justice. It’s not new and it didn’t start last year, or eight years ago.  The cosmic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness has waged since God separated the two physically.

And there is no story that the church tells, no story from our faith that speaks into this struggle as well as the story we have heard and told this week.  We follow a savior, teacher, healer, Messiah who went all the way into the darkness in order to show us the light. Those of you brave enough to come to the cross on Good Friday have stared down human brutality, political violence, religious intolerance—the worst kind, the internecine stuff. 

And here we are, in this place we call “sanctuary,” staving off the darkness with chandeliers and fire and the peaceful sense that for an hour and a half, we are safe, from ignorance, and prejudice, and the news cycle. 

The darkness still exists.  Nothing we do tonight can totally dispel the darkness

Not that they don’t happen here, but we don’t let them live here.

It’s safe here.  Even in the dark.  [turn out lights]

Here in this place, there is peace.  There is justice. 

We bring in just enough light to see.  [light candles]

Enough to see each other.

Enough to see the beauty that surrounds us.

I want to just pause here and breathe it all in. 

Keep your candle lit for as long as you can, and let’s sing.  You’ll need to look up front, because I’ve altered the words a bit and it’s dark in here.  Let’s sing this nice and meditative.

[Sing 2 verses of “Here in This Place]

This place isn’t magic.  It’s much better than that.  This room is love.  This body is love.  This place, this body is a living reflection of the one who became incarnate for us, gave his life for us, and rose out of the darkness in order that we might have light. 

Here in this place, the light of hope streams.

Here in this place, the joy of chosen family weaves among us and creates a rich tapestry of coolness and weirdness and joy and just a dash of irreverence.

Here in this place, you are loved.  Filled up with a love you honestly won’t find many other places.  A love that says, “Come in.  Be you.

There’s another tradition relating to the Paschal Fire.  In ancient times, before people went to church for the Easter Vigil, they put out all of their lamps and cooking fires.  Then at the end of the service, they would take some of the Easter fire, which had burned for the whole service, back to their homes to relight everything.

We do that tonight.  Here in this place, we fill each other with enough love to take home and rekindle our spirits, even in challenging and even dark times.  Take home the light of this love tonight.  Let it burn like a fire on a hillside, for all the world to see.

 

 

 

 

 

A Jesus Story--Sermon for Good Friday, April 18, 2025

Sermon for Year C, Good Friday, April 18, 2025

Scripture: Luke 23:13-25, 39-49       

³²Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. ³³When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. ³⁴Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ 

And they cast lots to divide his clothing. ³⁵And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ 

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’  ³⁸There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’       

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ ⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? ⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ ⁴²Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ ⁴³Jesus replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

               ⁴⁴It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, ⁴⁵while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. ⁴⁶Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. 

⁴⁷When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’ ⁴⁸And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. ⁴⁹But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.

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On New Year’s Eve, 1996, I began my seminary cross-cultural experience. 

Cross cultural was a requirement for Masters of Divinity students at my seminary, PLTS.  There were a bunch of choices, but all but one were in parts of the continental US.  I wanted something truly cross-cultural, so it was either Shismaref, Alaska, or Quetzeltenango, Guatemala. 

As thrilling as the north coast of Alaska sounded…in January…I went with Guatemala. The group of a dozen of us were enrolled in three weeks of intensive Spanish language school, and each of us stayed with a different family in the town, Quetzeltenango, called Xela for short.

I hadn’t done a lot of trips abroad at that point, and neither had most of my classmates.  Contributing to our excitement, and trepidation, was the fact that the country was just two days into the end of its 36 year civil war.  The peace accords were signed on December 29, and Guatemalans and American seminarians alike were wondering whether they would hold.

With that on our minds, New Year’s Eve might not have been the best time to arrive.  See, in Guatemala, holiday means fireworks.  Lots and lots of fireworks.  More than this neighborhood when the Chiefs win the Super bowl level of fireworks.  When we got to Xela, there were little kids wandering around with belts of firecrackers just slung over their shoulders.  In the center of town, there was a shopping area covered by an atrium roof.  While we were standing in the center of it, on New Year’s Day, someone shot a bottle rocket into the building.  My friend Craig will never be the same.

We were nervous, and even a little scared…we were privileged.  We were all middle class, white grad school students, from a country that until then had not experienced much political violence.  Since the previous century, really.  Certainly nothing like what Guatemala had experienced for well over three decades. They had been living under a threat that we had never known.  People who can remember the sixties know something of what it is to wonder if you will be attacked for speaking out for peace and justice, but we had never known that.

Until now. This is the first time in my lifetime, and perhaps in some of yours, that we have truly wondered whether it was safe to speak out, and whether our citizenship and the US Constitution will be enough to protect us from our own government. 

And I will say again that it is privilege that creates the sense of surprise and shock around this moment.  There are people across the world who have known nothing else for their lifetimes.  I say that not to minimize what is happening around us, but to recognize the poignancy of this moment.  Our ideals have held until now, at least for most of us.  For our neighbors of color, our immigrant neighbors, and others, it’s a different story.  They’ve already known what it is to live under the threat of state sponsored violence. 

But for the rest of us, this feels new.  Like “little kids walking around with firecracker belts” new.  We don’t know where to turn.  We struggle to figure out what’s happening and we keep trying to figure out who is coming to save the day.

Who is coming to save us?  It doesn’t seem to be any of the people we expect.

And it probably won’t be any of the people we expect, and that’s what is SO vital to understand tonight.

This feels like a new story, but it’s not, is it?  It’s an old story, one we’ve been reading on this night for however many years we’ve been Christian.  We’ve just maybe never seen it from this side before and that’s unsettling.

This is a Jesus story, right?  Not a Sunday School Jesus story, where Jesus does a healing or talks about salt and light.  But the Jesus story—the story of how God became incarnate in order to suffer alongside us because of the rapaciousness of certain religious and political actors.

The story of Jesus is the story of someone who grew up in a community threatened and at times even terrorized by rulers far away from them in every way, and by authorities closer to home.  The Roman Empire exacted obscene wealth from its territories in the form of an unfair tax structure and an exploited labor force.  Sound familiar?

Add to that the machinations of religious leaders more concerned with their own power than with following God’s command to care about the poor and the needy rather than pomp and ceremony, and you have the social and political climate in which Jesus grew up, the world in which he preached and taught and healed.  And we can begin to understand what brought him to Jerusalem to stand before the leaders of the empire and the religious leaders.

This is the Jesus story.

This is the gospel story.  The story of a God willing to suffer and even die to show us another way. 

It’s not an easy story.  There will always be those who prefer to stay home on Good Friday.  We don’t want to confront what this day teaches: that following Jesus means—as he told us it would—taking up our own crosses to oppose “the powers of this world that rebel against God.”

We make that promise in baptism—at least we do if we’re baptized under the new hymnal.  We’ll make it again tomorrow night as we affirm our baptism.  We’ll promise to oppose “the powers of this world that rebel against God.”

And we’ll mean it.  But we’ll also be slyly looking around to see if someone else is really riding in to dispatch the powers. 

Someone big and strong, maybe.

Someone with a lot of authority?

Here’s where the old story becomes new again.  None of those people are coming to save us.  None of them came to save Jesus.  Most of them came to condemn Jesus.

Who stood for the truth in this age old story?

A thief.  One thief derided Jesus, but the other asked him for mercy and recognized his sovereignty

A Roman soldier.  A centurion, at the foot of the cross, declares, “Surely this man was innocent.”

Truth still exists.  Goodness still exists.  The gospel of Jesus Christ—the story of a God who loves us to death—is still the greatest story ever told.

But the ones coming to tell us that story may not be the ones we expect.  They probably won’t be religious or political authorities.  They might look differently than we expect.  They might look like us. 

 

"God Is God" Third Sunday of Epiphany, March 23, 2025

Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Lent 3, March 23, 2025

Scripture:  Isaiah 55:1-9

          Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

               ⁴See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. ⁵See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for God has glorified you.

               ⁶Seek the Lord while God may be found, call upon the Lord while God is near; ⁷let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that God may have mercy on them, and to our God, for God will abundantly pardon. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

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          There’s a thing we do, when we think about scripture.  It’s a common thing, which you have probably heard, or done, or both.  A simple Google search reveals just how common it is.

          Here’s one:  on the Christianity Reddit thread, a user asks, Why does the God of the Old Testament seem so different from that of the New Testament?

          Or there is this blog article:  Reconciling the God of the Old Testament with that of the New.  The article is actually a helpful reminder to consider context and differences in literary genres before making blanket statements about who God is in the two testaments. 

          There’s one comment.  Never read the comments.  “God's actions in the OT are deliberately and wilfully vengeful, violent and destructive to the extent that he torments the Egyptian Pharaoh in Exodus by hardening his heart to inflict more and more punishment. There is no justifiable reconciling of the God in the OT with that in the NT unless you go beyond the text and create your own justification.”

          And just for good measure, here’s one more article on the seekers’ blog Got Questions.  “Why is God so different in the Old Testament than He is in the New Testament.”

          “Old” Testament:  Mean, vengeful God.

          “New” Testament:  Kind, puppies and kittens nice God.

          There are multiple ways to dispel this myth, but I’m just going to offer one.  Isaiah 55.  I could probably offer all of Isaiah, which has been referred to as “the fifth gospel,” for the number of times it is quoted in the gospels and the themes it has in common with them.

          This prophetic book is not a gospel, though.  This is an “Old Testament” book, and that’s probably the last time I’ll use that term, because I much prefer “Hebrew Scripture.”  There’s a thread of anti-semitism that runs dangerously close every time we try to make the case that one testament has a mean God and one has a nice one.

          Does God do mean stuff in the Hebrew Scriptures?  Sure.  There’s over a thousand pages of history there, and the humans who wrote it down loved to say it was God who smote their enemies.  But it’s also God who establishes covenant after covenant with a people who philander and squander God’s love.

          To read all of that history and poetry and wisdom and conclude “Oh, the Hebrew Scripture God is super vengeful and mean” is like listening in to our house at bedtime and concluding, “Oh, Donna and Colleen are terrible parents!  All they do is say ‘have you brushed your teeth?’ over and over in an increasingly desperate tone.”

          No matter how long it takes him to brush his teeth—average time, in my unscientific study:  fifteen minutes—no matter how long it takes, afterwards we will be cuddled up in bed, all three of us, reading a book.  Because when you are a parent, you default to love and forgiveness.  At least, that is the plan, and it’s a plan written by…anyone?

          Yeah, God.  who says, in the voice of Lady Wisdom, “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”

          The heavenly banquet is an image of salvation.  Sure, God is offering water to the thirsty and rich food to the hungry, but what God is really offering is endless love, forgiveness, and eternal life.

          For a price of…nothing. 

          If you’re a human, and most of us are, that sounds kind of absurd.

          If you’re living in a world--and all of us are--where everything is increasingly transactional, and value is measured in dollars and “influence,” what God offers is, absolutely absurd. 

          Love—the thing we all want—for nothing.  God loves you, like a frustrated parent about to read to you from Laura Ingalls Wilder.  And it costs you nothing.

          Forgiveness—God will forgive the most egregious sins.  It’s there in verse five.  “I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.”       

          I don’t know if you know this, but David was kind of a bast…imperfect person.  He did some stuff.  And God called him on it, or Nathan called him on it.

          So when Lady Wisdom offers up proof of the “everlasting covenant” by tying it to David, we should imagine a great king, but also an imperfect man, forgiven by God for some very bad stuff.

          Just as many of us have been forgiven by God for some pretty bad stuff.

          Stop there and just breathe that in.  “I am forgiven.”  No matter what I’ve done, I am forgiven. I may be called to account…but I am forgiven.  God’s grace has poured down over me like an endless stream.

          Stop there and see if you can feel that.  God’s forgiveness pouring over you.  God’s grace set before you like a banquet of all your favorite things, for which you owe nothing.

          This is SO countercultural that it is often presented in poetry so that it can try to find a new neural pathway to use to sneak into our brains.  It’s so counter-cultural that we’ve always needed laboratories where we can practice this kind of living—out of abundance, resilience, gratitude, and joy.

          God has directed us to build labs where we can practice letting go of scarcity thinking, and of the idea that we are powerless over the foolishness of the world.

          They’re called, these laboratories…?  Church.  And synagogue.  Mosque. Sanga.

          There we experiment with showering each other with love, and we work on our ability to forgive the trespasses of others as God has forgiven us ours.

          Brilliant thing, this church—in Greek it’s the ekklesia—the called out ones.  We’re called out, separated out, so that we can be salt, and light, and leaven for our whole world.  There are people who don’t know how to interrupt the foolishness of living out of scarcity.  Paucity of thought. 

          And usually at this point, I’m thinking, “How can we share this with more people?!”  So many people need to come experience this grace and love and welcome for themselves.

          And they do!

          But this week I’m not thinking out there.  I’m thinking right here. [point to heart]

          Because the abundant love and grace that Lady Wisdom offers in Isaiah 55 has poured down on me and on my family for weeks now.  You all have shown up in so many ways, including making the time to be here on Friday, or contacting me to tell me why you couldn’t—which I completely understand.

          You’ve held us in the midst of our grief and made space for us and reminded me every day of the promise that Isaiah describes—the promise of bottomless love and welcome, and hope.  The God of a whole Bible’s worth of grace.

          The world does need this.  In each of our lives are people who need to hear Lady Wisdom’s cry:  “Ho!  Turn in here!” 

          There is still abundance.

          All is not lost.

         

         

"Antitheses Strongly Marked"--Sermon for Epiphany Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025

 Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Sunday of the Epiphany, Jan. 12, 2025

Scripture:  Matthew 2:1-12

          In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, ²asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” ³When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; ⁴and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 

          ⁵They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ⁶‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” 

          ⁷Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. ⁸Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”

               ⁹When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. ¹¹On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. ¹²And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

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          At my desk at the synod office, I have twin monitors…which was really helpful on Thursday, when I was able to put the funeral service for President Jimmy Carter on one and work on the other.  It was a stunning service, and I hope some of you got to see it.  If you didn’t get to see it, I highly recommend listening to three pieces in their entirety:

1.     The eulogy that Gerald Ford wrote for the man who defeated him in the 1976 election, read by Ford’s son, Stephen.

2.     The eulogy delivered by Jason Carter, Jimmy and Rosalynn’s grandson.

3.     The sermon delivered by Rev. Andrew Young.

          Rev. Young was a wonderful choice, because he represents the legacy of the carter presidency.  Young was a leader in the Civil Rights movement, and a member of Martin Luther King’s inner circle.  [From 1964 to 68, he was Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Alongside Bayard Rustin, he helped to plan the March on Washington in 1963.  He also helped to draft both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.]

          In 1977, Jimmy Carter appointed Rev. Young to be the first African American ambassador to the United Nations. In 1981, Carter awarded him Presidential Medal of Freedom.

          A good sermon has a bit of dramatic tension, and the honorable Rev. Young brought that, when he opened his sermon reflecting upon the days when he and Jimmy Carter were both residents of South Georgia.  Young was pastor at Bethany Congregational Church in Thomasville, Georgia.  He said he would occasionally drive north and have to go through Sumter County—home of Plains, Georgia.  He would be nervous, since, according to Dr. King, the sheriff of Sumter County at that time was “the meanest man in America.”

          When Young met Carter—back when Carter was running for governor of Georgia, he told Mr. Carter than the only thing he knew about Plains and Sumter County was that mean sheriff.  And Jimmy said, “Oh yes, he’s one of my good friends.”

          It’s a little hard to imagine how they got from there to working together, and to Rev. Young being the preacher at Carter’s funeral.

          But in his sermon, Young explained it.  “Time and time again, I saw in him the ability to achieve greatness by the diversity of his personality and his upbringing.”  Then he said this, and I want to use this statement as a lens for the story of the Epiphany, and probably for the season of Epiphany, when we will be girding our loins to defend our faith.

          “Dr. King used to say” Rev. Young preached, “that greatness is characterized by antitheses strongly marked. You’ve got to have a tough mind and a tender heart.

And that was Jimmy Carter.”

          Jimmy Carter was the rare human who was able to be friends with the small town sheriff who threw Martin Luther King in jail, and with one of Dr. King’s most trusted advisors—because he was able to hold together contrasts and to do so wisely.  He called both men friends, but he only invited one of them to join his administration.

          Dr. King used that phrase “antitheses strongly marked” in a number of speeches and sermons about discipleship.  It a rephrasing of the teaching Jesus gives to the disciples when he sends them out in Matthew, chapter ten:, “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

          The strong person, Dr. King said, is able to maintain toughness of mind (“wise as serpents”). They aren’t afraid of change, but they hold fast to principles.  At the same time, they have a tenderness of heart, which flows forth in selfless love.  There aren’t many who are able to do both really well, but if you know anything about Jimmy Carter, you know he had a tough mind and a tender heart.

          And we needed it, to knit this country back together after the Watergate scandal and the travesty that was the Vietnam War.

          Persons able to hold antitheses strongly marked are especially needed in the most troubling times. 

          We have come to such a time, without such a leader.  The leadership we need for the days ahead will not come from the usual places and the usual people.  In fact, the challenges we face in the coming weeks and years are rolling down upon us from the halls of power.

          But the story of Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia is still darn relevant.  As is another story we’ve heard this morning.

          The melding of a strong mind and a tender heart is not actually a well marked attribute of the dominant culture.  The sorts of capitulation required to stay in power often do lasting damage to the minds and hearts of the powerful.  By many accounts, King Herod the Great ascended the throne a wise and thoughtful man who did some great things for his people, including rebuilding their temple.  But by the time we meet him, he is a paranoid despot.

          If we’re looking for antitheses strongly marked in our gospel story, it won’t be Herod we’re studying, will it?  It will be the outsiders—the “wise men from the East.” Their tough minds are on display in both their title and their activity in the story. They have been observing the heavens and discovered a curious astrological phenomenon.  And they’ve come to investigate that Star they saw rising.  Their wisdom extends to multiple fields—they are scientists and philosophers.  They can read the stars and the ancient texts, which is how it is that they, the Gentiles in our text, come to explain to Herod, the King of the Jews, that according to the book of Micah the Jewish Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

          Their wise minds help them find the child, and their tender hearts are on full display once they arrive.  What a lovely scene it is, right? 

¹⁰When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. ¹¹On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

 

          Their interpretation of signs is rendered useful one more time, and they sneak out of town to avoid having to tell Herod where the child is.  Were they a bit less wise, this story could have been over before it started.

 

          “Antitheses strongly marked.”  A tough mind and tender heart.  That is the leadership Dr. King knew was needed to protect the vulnerable. 

          “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” This is the advice Jesus gave to the ones charged with sharing his Way with the world.

          These are teachings we must lean into in the coming days, my friends.  There will be leaders among us, and I believe there are leaders in this very sanctuary, who are able to gather all sorts of people together and mark a way forward that is both wise and loving.

          They will not be the leaders to whom we generally turn, as citizens and as people of faith.  There will be voices of resistance in Washington, but not enough to temper the brutal, Herodian reign to come.

          There will be teachings from church leaders, but they will fall short in both wisdom and heart.  It pains me to tell you that as someone who works for our churchwide organization, but I can tell you that, as someone who works for our churchwide organization.  Christianity is in the time of the growing pains, the time Jesus warned us would come.  Many have left the Way of Jesus.  And some speak the name of Jesus but have a heart full of Herod.

          They are, all of them, our siblings.  The ones with whom we have the most in common right now are the atheists and agnostics, because they still believe in humanity.  Many of them have the wisdom, the heart, and the courage to tell us that our house has fallen out of order.

          It will be harder to reclaim our Christian nationalist siblings.  Fear is a powerful force, and what many of them fear is us.

          And still we will try.  As the wise men went to Herod, we will go to the leaders of our own church and to those from other communions who are captive to fear.  We will offer the gifts we have—no gold, but the sweet-smelling traditions of worship and justice ministry that marks a church along the Way of Jesus. 

          Hard times are ahead.  Wisdom may seem to scarce, but it is there, and it will come from unexpected places, as it always has.

          If you find yourself in a room and there doesn’t seem to be a wise person, then it is probably you.  Bring a tough mind.  Speak from a tender heart.  That is the Way.  That is the hope to which we cling.