7th Sunday after Pentecost
July 28, 2019

¹Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ²Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say:
 Father, hallowed be your name.
  Let your dominion come.
  ³Give us each day our daily bread.
  ⁴And forgive us our sins,
   for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
  And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
  ⁵And Jesus said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to that friend at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; ⁶for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set out.’ ⁷And the friend answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸I tell you, even though the friend will not get up and provide anything because of the friendship, at least because of the neighbor’s persistence the friend will get up and provide whatever is needed.
  ⁹“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? ¹²Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? ¹³If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask!” – Luke 11:1-13

“Teach us to pray.” A simple request from Jesus’ disciples. John taught his disciples, now teach us. Tell us what to do. Our #2 pencils are sharpened, we have extra paper at the ready. What’s step 1?

In one sense Jesus gives them what they are looking for. A script that prays a mostly timeless and expansive prayer. One that is both deeply intimate and yet includes all of creation in its scope. Whether Jesus intended it to become the kind of shared, global, ecumenical prayer that it quickly became or not, it was a pretty good start to a lesson on prayer. Pray as a child to a loving parent. Pray for God’s will, God’s heaven, God’s reign to become real in us and on earth. Today’s needs met today and tomorrow’s not worried about until then. Forgiveness that is reciprocal and live-giving for everyone. Power to live in a complex world full of forces beyond our understanding. It’s sometimes hard to imagine a better prayer. Sometimes it’s the solace of repeating the familiar that draws me in to God. Sometimes a line I’ve said 10,000 times will startle me with new insight. Jesus has more than answered the question.

But then Jesus goes on. Prayer is like an unprepared and slightly obnoxious friend who comes pounding on your door in the middle of the night waking up your whole family for a few loaves of bread to feed a guest arrived in the middle of the night. Pounding, pounding, pounding until at last you get up and get the bread just to stop the pounding and shouting. This is not neat and simple prayer. This is prayer that is messy and loud, prayer an inopportune times, prayer that wakes up the neighbors. It’s prayer that leaves us a little unsettled, like we’ve been woken from sleep by the pounding, because we aren’t quite sure what it’s like. Jesus gave us a rich, deep prayer we can repeat for a lifetime and still find new meaning. And Jesus gave us an image of frantic pounding.

Just this tiny glimpse at the breadth of prayer has invited me to wonder this week what images for prayer we operate under today. What prayer would you recite or what story would you tell to describe what prayer is like with God?

Sometimes I wonder if we pray like two people who just met at a dinner party, strangers seated next to each other, struggling to find common ground to speak about. The conversation is interesting at moments, but often formulaic. What do you do for work? Where are you from? Oh, how’s the weather there? How’s the sports team from there doing? We ask and answer these questions, sometimes out of genuine interest in relationship, sometimes out of obligation to talk to someone right in front of us. Best case scenario it evolves into something more. Worst case scenario there is a misunderstanding and lingering feelings of ill-will. Or maybe sometimes it’s that way but between two people who used to have a connection, used to share so much in common, but who are reconnecting after an absence only to find paths that have diverged too drastically and the rekindling of friendship too difficult. I know we sometimes pray like this, saying the words because we know we are supposed to say them, sometimes hoping they will become more and other times hoping it will just keep us occupied in an awkward moment.

But what if prayer is also sometimes like the person you just met whose life is radically different yet seemingly so perfectly intersecting with your own that the conversation grows until hours have passed in deep back and forth listening. Or the long-ago friend that you see again and discover that the years apart and the diverging paths have only made the conversation richer. Time disappears. Minds, voices, bodies relax into an easy rhythm of sharing and listening. Silence is not awkward but full of meaning and connection. The conversation varies from calm and informative to wildly exciting to the sharing of deep sadness. And all of it feels right. What if conversation with God was like that?

Sometimes I wonder if we pray like a couple who has lost the spark in their relationship. The texts that go back and forth are about what groceries need to be picked up, reminders about the day’s schedule, questions about the bills that need to be paid. It fills the pantry, gets the house cleaned, and life functions on the proscribed schedule. There is love and affection, gratitude and kindness, but the communication is often a matter of what is functional. It’s pleasant, comfortable, even good. I know we sometimes pray like that – we ask for what is needed, maybe we even talk a little about our lives, we listen respectfully, but the spark of energy and excitement is rarely felt.

But what if prayer is also sometimes like a couple in the throes of romantic passion? Moments where just a look or a word can stir up intense feelings of connection and longing. People who throw off obligation to be with one another. People who put everything else on hold, who are consumed in heart, mind, soul, and body, who pull the other close, who open up their deepest selves. What if God’s invitation to prayer was at least some of the time to enter that kind of deep, romantic, even erotic relationship with God?

Sometimes I wonder if we pray like the tired parent and worn-out child at the grocery store checkout line. Some of us have been that parent, many of us if we remember back have been that child. It is almost nap time. The errands today have been longer than expected. No one is feeling at their best. The child asks again and again for the candy just within their grasp. Maybe the parent declines for the umpteenth time. And maybe the child feels sad and defeated, or throws a fit of anger, or takes what is wanted, or just sighs and moves on. Or the parent gives in out of pity, exhaustion, defeat, or out of just wanting finally to be able to say “yes” to something for the child they love. And the child is excited or confused or first thrilled then ultimately disappointed that what was desired did not fulfill in any lasting way. I know we sometimes pray like this. We ask, maybe even bargain, for what we want. Maybe we expect a “yes” or maybe we just feel compelled to ask again even if we only expect to hear “no” or “not right now.” Maybe we know it’s something that won’t fulfill us, but we still in our hearts hope it will. Maybe we are simply not yet able to understand why we hear “no.” Maybe we get what we ask for but have no sense in the moment of the love behind what is given. But the feeling is overwhelmingly of the tiredness felt all around.

But what if prayer is also sometimes like the parent who plans for weeks to surprise a child with a day full of interactive and fulfilling activities. When the child wakes up, an unexpected note leads her to the kitchen where she gets to help make chocolate chip pancakes. She discovers a new book to be read together and an adventure to a favorite museum awaits for parent and child. A carefree romp in the sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon. At some point the child sneaks off to create a song or dance or work of art to honor the day or honor the parent, and the parent takes delight both in sneaking a glance at the creative process and the final product, whatever it is. A simultaneously indulgent and nutritious dinner is served and enjoyed. A long snuggle together as the day’s memories of joy and love sink deep before finding rest for the night. There has been asking and receiving in both directions, but the relationship has been renewed instead of depleted. What if prayer were like that?

What if we are the sleeping ones, stuck sometimes in prayer with God that has lost its energy and joy, lost its playfulness and romance, its creative and adventurous expression. What if God is the friend pounding on the door, rousing us from tired prayer, calling us to welcome the guest of grace, calling us to unexpected moments of encounter with the holy?

Maybe your prayer is rich and full already. And maybe today or some days it isn’t. But here in a moment, at the response of God’s knocking, we will bring out the bread we have to share. And here at this table God breaks into our sometimes sleepy spirits and the midnight guest of grace who arrived already while we were asleep, invites us to eat of the bread we have offered. And there, in the joy-filled feast, God enters us in body and blood, bread and wine. And that connection is rekindled. The possibility of joy and playfulness, romance and creativity is sparked again. And God prays into us a persistent and never-dying love that is forever and ever. Amen.

Pastor Steven Wilco

6th Sunday after Pentecost
July, 21, 2019

³⁸Now as Jesus and his disciples went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. ³⁹She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. ⁴⁰But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” ⁴¹But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; ⁴²there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” – Luke 10:38-42

Nearly 20 years ago, some researchers set up an experiment to test something about people’s ability to pay attention. They filmed two teams of people, one in all white and one in all black, passing basketballs back and forth. People were then invited to watch the short one-minute film and asked to count carefully the number of times the team in white passed the ball. But the point of the experiment was notto see whether participants could pay attention enough to accurately count the number of passes. The point of the experiment was to see whether the participants noticed the person in the gorilla suit walking through the middle of the players. Something like half the people who watched the video didn’t notice the person in the gorilla suit walking right through the middle of the game!

If you’ve never seen it you can watch it for yourself, though now I’ve just ruined it for you – you’ll see the gorilla no problem because I’ve told you to look for it. You’ll wonder how anybody could be so obtuse as to miss it. But of course, we actually do this all the time – we focus our attention on some things and fail to notice other things entirely.

Some of this is necessary for life – we could never take in the sheer amount of information that comes our way in a given moment in sights and sounds and other stimuli. It’s a critical part of brain development at an early age to sort out what to pay attention to and what to screen out. But sometimes we have been trained to focus our attention in the entirely wrong direction.

Like some grand and twisted version of the gorilla experiment, our world asks us to focus on power, wealth, and productivity. It asks us to pay more attention to people whose physical features conform to a socially constructed understanding of what is beautiful and attractive. We are trained by embedded and systemic racism and sexism to see the default “norm” as male and lighter skinned. Though we can begin to train ourselves to see things differently, the broader society in which we live tends to keep trying to orient our attention back to all those other things. Even when we try to focus on something else, our attention is often short-lived.

And today’s gospel is at least in part about attention. Jesus has come as a guest to Martha’s home. Every guest is an honored guest, but they seem aware of just how important this particular guest is. But one gets the sense that Martha is too consumed with tasks to give her full attention to Jesus. In fact, as the story is told, I’m not sure she’s even giving her full attention to the tasks of hospitality. Her real attention is on resenting her sister, Mary, sitting quietly at Jesus’ feet. I wonder whether her busyness is more of a defense – a response to her own anxiety and worry, or a way to keep her hands busy because she doesn’t know how to be still. Or maybe I just assume that because that’s how I am. I look for projects and tangible tasks, feeling the need to be busy or at least look busy. Because being present, really present to others, to oneself, to God – that’s hard, and frankly kind of intimidating. And in my worst moments I direct my anxiety and worry outward in the form of resentment of others.

When we sit with the present moment, with Jesus, we may very well find ourselves challenged in ways we’d rather not be. It may bring into focus neighbors in need we have failed to consider. It may bring into focus things about ourselves we wish were not true. It may cause us to confront the deeper worries and anxieties that drive our energy. But maybe most of all, we busy ourselves when Jesus shows up, because unconditional love is actually a little bit frightening. To stand and truly absorb the profound and uncompromising love of God for us, to realize that nothing we do, nothing we are can change that love, that strips us down in a way that makes us feel vulnerable and even out of control. Much easier to focus on doing the dishes for Jesus.

Which is not to say that Mary gets it all either. One can sit quietly at the feet of Jesus one’s whole life and miss the point of it all, miss the opportunities to step up to serve and care for others, miss the joys of living, and most sadly of all, even sitting at Jesus’ feet, one can still miss the profound, unconditional love of Jesus. I suspect we do that to some extent every Sunday. Every Sunday, we sit here in the presence of Jesus. And mostly we sit pretty attentively, some of us are busy with tasks – tasks that absolutely need to be done and are in service to God and neighbor – but tasks nonetheless. But if we truly absorbed that radical love to its fullest extent every week, if every week we were fully attentive to the presences of Jesus, I can’t imagine the power of love that would be unleashed in the world. I can’t imagine the way in which we and the community would be radically changed. But sometimes we are busy counting basketball passes.

It’s a whole lot easier for churches to focus on metrics of success influenced by the things the world has trained us to look for – things like attendance numbers, the size of our budgets, the sense of success that looks like something we remember from the past. And I wonder how often we miss the presence of Jesus walking right through it all. How often do we really focus our attention on what God is doing here? How often do we take in the sheer grace of God that abounds in all the little interactions we have, in the moments of worship that connect us to grace, in the care that is shown to members, in the hospitality that is shown at our tables, in the outreach that is shared with our neighbors?

It’s not so much that sitting contemplatively is better than doing tasks, though probably many of us are more prone to err on the side of doing and could learn to slow down a bit. I think instead it’s that we often fail to train our attention on the presence of God in it all, whatever we’re doing. And I’m sure that sometimes it’s out of not wanting to let God in to see the stuff we are ashamed of. But so often I think what we really miss in redirecting our attention is the love that is more powerful than all of it. The love that knows our deepest selves and loves us without question. I think Jesus’s words to Martha are not so much scolding as sympathetic. Martha, Martha, if only I could find a way right in this moment for you to know deep inside the love of God sitting before you. If only you could rest in that love as you so graciously provide for my hospitality.

Eventually Jesus does find a way to get through to Martha. Jesus shows up when her brother dies. He weeps with her. And he raises her brother from the dead before her very eyes. It may be that it took until resurrection to focus her attention fully, to finally allow the full extent of God’s love to cut through to her core. And Jesus does this for you, too. In our busyness or idleness, in our misattention and our inattention, in this life and in death, Jesus meets us as a humble guest to share with us that never-ending, all-powerful love. In fact it’s walking among us now, it’s hiding in plain sight, it’s boldly walking into the midst of our lives and calling our name, and inviting us to rest in that love.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

4th Sunday after Pentecost
July 7, 2014

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. ²Jesus said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers for the harvesting. ³Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. ⁴Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. ⁵Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ ⁶And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. ⁷Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. ⁸Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; ⁹cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The dominion of God has come near to you.’ ¹⁰But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ¹¹‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the dominion of God has come near.’ ¹⁶“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
  ¹⁷The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” ¹⁸Jesus said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. ¹⁹See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. ²⁰Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” – Luke 10, selected verses

A note for internet readers: Congregation members were invited to bring in an item that represents their vocation – work or play – and these were placed on a table beside the baptismal font.

For this morning’s sermon you’re all going to need a red hymnal, so go ahead and grab one. Now you probably know that there are hymns in the hymnal, and prayers, but perhaps some of you haven’t explored the other material that is contained in this book. This morning we’re going to look at just a few pages of that material. So open up in the very front of the hymnal, among the first few pages of the book to p. 15.

This is our calendar of saints, or in more formal language, “Lesser Festivals and Commemorations”. Now those of you who come from a Roman Catholic background might be familiar with the idea of women and men whose life of faith we honor and learn from, and some who are dyed in the wool Lutherans might have heard that Lutherans don’t have saints. Though in the Lutheran tradition we generally don’t focus a lot on the saints nor pray to them, we do honor those whose lives serve to model something to us about God and about faith. So take a look at this list before you on pp. 15-17.

There you’ll see in all caps some lesser festivals: Mary, the Mother of Jesus and the apostles of Jesus. And you’ll see some other Biblical characters like Lydia, Dorcas, and Phoebe, Timothy, Titus, and Silas. You’ll see the kind of churchy people you might expect to see, people whose lives were dedicated to professional church work: bishops, missionaries, mystics, and theologians. People like Hildegaard of Bingen, 12^thcentury mystic and one of the few women to be formally given the title of Doctor of the Church by a pope. People like Martin Luther and some of the early Lutheran pastors in North America. You might expect some of the ancient martyrs who stood firm in faith til death, and alongside them modern martyrs like Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

But I want to draw your attention to some of the other people on the list. Because God is most definitely not limited to working through church professionals. Included on this list are nurses Florence Nightingale and Clara Maass, nurses whose lives modeled the love of Christ through their work. Musicians abound on this list – people you’ve heard of like Johann Sebastian Bach, first and foremost a church musician, Handel, and others. Civil Rights activists like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Japanese labor activist Toyohiko Kagawa. Scientists and mathematicians like Copernicus and Euler. Stewards of language like poet John Donne and translator Thomas Cranmer. Artists like Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Durer. Political leaders and peace-makers like Seattle, chief of the Duwamish Confederacy and namesake of the modern west-coast city, and Dag Hammarskjold, who brokered peace in areas of conflict around the world as Secretary General of the United Nations. Some who contributed in other ways are listed here by their primary vocation as teachers. Katherina von Bora Luther, wife of Martin Luther is listed here: she was known as an expert at managing a household, producing beer, providing hospitality, and stewarding financial resources. Perhaps she stands here in part as a reminder of all those whose names are forgotten to history without whose work in the home or behind the scenes, society simply wouldn’t function.

This list is here to remind us that God’s call comes in many forms and doesn’t always look like church professionals in clerical garb.

And so we can put the hymnals down for a moment and come back to today’s gospel text. Jesus’ ministry is in full swing. He has been teaching and healing and feeding. Now he is on his way to Jerusalem, to the cross. And along the way he stops to commission seventy “others” to go out and do God’s work. Now somehow I have always thought of this passage and Jesus sending out 35 pairs of little mini-Jesuses. They go out and say wise and spiritual things, they touch people and they are healed, they speak power over evil, injustice, and sickness and with words falling from their lips the world is changed, just like Jesus. But these seventy women and men…they weren’t all church professionals. Surely some were bakers and fishers and carpenters, raisers of children, tenders of sheep, and traditional healers. Perhaps they have been part of the crowd that had begun to follow Jesus town-to-town, or perhaps not. But Jesus gives very little instruction to them, at least as recorded for us in Luke’s gospel. Jesus sends them out with nothing extra, just themselves and their God-given gifts, which presumably were as unique as they would be in any group of 70 randomly gathered people.

Perhaps when Jesus sends them out he sends them not just to replicate his work, but to do their own work. To heal people with the herbal remedies that someone had spent a lifetime learning about, the best that first-century medicine had to offer. To raise up broken spirits with the gift of song and dance. To speak power over evil by naming injustice or serving the outcast. To bring relief to struggling people with their learned knowledge of skills and trades. What if this commissioning is a blessing of their daily vocation so that they might come to understand their daily work as part of the in-breaking of the reign of God?

And then they return with joy. They take time for rest, for celebration, for honoring what has been. They will go back out, they will serve in other ways, but there is room in the reign of God for rest and play and celebration, all held in Jesus who there reminds them and reminds us to make sure that others, too, have the opportunity both to work and rest in the knowledge that they are held in the arms of God.

And so, now we end the sermon with an affirmation of your vocation. On this table* are a few things that some of you have brought as signs of the work and play you do or have done in the world. They stand here by this font, placing your work in the world, whatever it is, in the context of your daily call to live out your baptismal promises. Here they are blessed and honored, placed in new light, and you are reminded that your daily life is lived in service to the reign of God, which is for the healing of all creation.

I invite you to stand for a blessing and affirmation of vocation:

Blessing and Affirmation of Vocation

We bless you, Jesus, for like your own disciples you empower us with gifts and send us out with them to serve in the world.

You call us to work:
To care for homes and gardens,
To tend fields and care for animals
To design, build, and repair the machines that make our lives possible
To tend bodies in health and in sickness
To protect others from danger, war, and violence,
To tend to the needs of others
To provide food for hungry people.
To ensure that goods and services are available to those who need them
To raise, teach, and care for children and youth,
To attend to cleaning and care for properties.
To lead and to support others behind the scenes
To steward our gifts of money and resources
And so much more. 

You call us to play:
To revel in sports
To dance our feelings
To sing and make music with joy
To ponder ideas
To walk in the beauty of creation
To enjoy games
To talk and laugh with one another
To dream, imagine, make-believe,
And so much more.

You call us to rest:
To take breaks for renewal
To refresh ourselves with sleep
To receive care from others
To make fresh starts
To enjoy seasons of rest
To enjoy the gift of your word and your love
And so much more.

Praise to you, God of all our work, play, and rest.
You are source of all that we have and all that we have to offer for the world.

We thank you.

Amen.

Siblings in Christ, both your work and your rest are in God. Will you endeavor to pattern your life on the Lord Jesus Christ, in gratitude to God and in service to others, at morning and evening, at work and at play, all the days of your life?

Response: I will, and I ask God to help me.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, by the power of the Spirit you have knit these your servants into the one body of your Son, Jesus Christ. Look with favor upon them in their commitment to serve in Christ’s name. Give them courage, patience, and vision; and strengthen us all in our Christian vocation of witness to the world and of service to others; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

**The last two paragraphs immediately above – what we know as Affirmation of Vocation – is from Evangelical Lutheran Worship with an adaptation for inclusive language. 

Pastor Steven Wilco

 

3rd Sunday after Pentecost
June 30, 2019

⁵¹When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. ⁵²And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; ⁵³but the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. ⁵⁴When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” ⁵⁵But Jesus turned and rebuked them. ⁵⁶Then they went on to another village.
  ⁵⁷As they were going along the road, someone said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” ⁵⁸And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son-of-Man has nowhere to lay his head.” ⁵⁹To another Jesus said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” ⁶⁰But Jesus replied, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the dominion of God.” ⁶¹Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” ⁶²Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the dominion of God.” – Luke 9:51-62

Thanks to the Sundays and Seasons Preaching Commentary this week for providing 2 of the 3 opening images for this sermon. 

Candace Lightener was the mother of a happy, healthy 13-year-old daughter. Like any parent she had probably thought about all the things that could pose dangers to her child. She had probably heard about drunk driving, probably thought it was a problem, probably thought something should be done about it. But when her daughter was killed by a drunk driver on May 3, 1980, her life took on a singular focus on just those issues. She decided she was the person to do something about it and she founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which became one of the most well-known organizations working on education and prevention on that issue.

And all of us, I certainly hope, support racial equality, but few of us have dedicated our lives to making that a reality in the world around us. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tomet were all dedicating their work hours to organizing around issues of racism and inequality. But it wasn’t until the killing of Trayvon Martin that they had finally had enough and dedicated more than just their work time to founding the Black Lives Matter movement.

Many of us are probably at least nominally supportive of rights for people in the LGBTQ community, but most of us, even myself included, don’t dedicate our lives to fighting for equality. But this week marked 50 years of the modern gay rights movement, when people finally stopped sitting by and letting injustice take place. Pushed to the breaking point with one too many abusive police raids and led at least in part by trans women of color, people put themselves on the line, risked their reputations and their lives to stand up and clear a path for others to live with freedom, dignity, and equality. It took some of them their all.

There is story after story of people who cared about issues and even actively worked on them, but finally began to transform things when some moment galvanized them into action, pushed them into a singular dedication to a cause. It’s these folks we end up reading about in history books and in the news.

And it’s that kind of moment we’re reading about in our lessons this morning. Elijah calls Elisha to be the next prophet of God in the community, to be the voice of God’s love, justice, and, yes, grace, too. The call is for now and there is not a second to lose. God’s people need to hear the message. There simply is not time to stop and go back and tidy up affairs.

When Jesus invites people to follow he is clear: this is hard and thankless work and there is not a moment to lose. There is not a moment to be wasted. Not even to finish plowing that field, not to put the dead to rest, not to pack your bag or tidy up your affairs. I would love to soften Jesus’ words. I would like to say he’s exaggerating for effect or that he doesn’t reallymean you can’t go back to bury your family before doing Jesus’ work. Maybe…

But Jesus has turned his face to Jerusalem. Jesus is on the way to the cross. Jesus is ready to bring to completion his mission “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.” His stops along the way will be to bring healing and to try desperately to help his followers understand the urgency and the breadth and the importance of bringing in the dominion of God. Jesus means serious business with this call to discipleship. And this encounter with Jesus, the same kind of encounter we have with Jesus every single Sunday and many more times throughout the week, that’s the kind of life-altering moment that I began the sermon describing. Encountering the profound love and grace of Jesus, the joy, gift, and challenge of a call to discipleship is the kind of thing that causes one without fully thinking it through to jump in wholeheartedly.

It means taking on a new identity and letting go of who we have been, letting go of the things we consider priorities. It’s not a part-time gig or something we do when we need to feel more engaged or when other things are done. It doesn’t mean doing it just because it feels good. The encounter with God’s grace is so radical that we cannot but drop everything and follow.

Now, it doesn’t mean for everyone picking up and leaving behind one’s whole life to do something new, although that can sometimes be part of God’s call. But it does mean understanding the deep importance of every moment being in service of bringing in the dominion of God.

In a week when we will celebrate a national holiday, it means taking seriously our Christian call not just to celebrate what is but to engage as Christians in the responsibilities we have as citizens and guests in this particular country in ways that seek to usher in the dominion of God. That doesn’t preclude rightly celebrating, but it does insist that we look, too, at the places where we as a nation are not yet living up to the ideals we celebrate and bringing our Christian faith to matters of politics and community engagement.

It means taking seriously the call to be the church for the world, and not just for ourselves. It’s something many churches wrestle with – we understandably have priorities around caring for one another, for doing things that help us learn and grow together, for working at how to be community together. And yet, if all of that isn’t in service to the gospel, to sharing the good news with the community, and actively responding to God’s call to usher in the dominion of God, then we have not fully been the church.

I remember several months back in adult forum we were considering what it means to be church and there were three quotes from famous theologians that essentially said that the church is most being the church when it exists for the sake of those who are outside of it. I think all of us bristled a little under that critique – certainly we need to care for one another and we want to make sure we serve the people we have. But that isn’t Jesus’ first concern. Trusting in God’s grace to hold us, we are called forward into new endeavors that participate in God’s work to bring about the dominion of God.

I’ll be honest here that I won’t entirely follow Jesus’ advice in this passage. In part that’s because there certainly are other places where Jesus does call us very clearly into Christian community to care for one another. But really it’s because I have my own set of “But first let me…” statements. First let me tend to those I care about. First let me take care of the needs of my own family and friends. First let me take a little rest so that I have more energy for God’s work later. First let me do the things I enjoy that are part of God’s work and put off the things that are harder or bring me less personal joy. But first… the list goes on…

Jesus knows the tug of family, he knows the desire to stop and care for those right in front of you. He even responds to those things elsewhere in the gospels. But today, he calls. Today he reminds us that every single moment matters, because God has taken flesh and lived among us. God has taken flesh and gone to the poor, the hungry, the sick and imprisoned, to the cross and grave. In Christ every moment of life is infused with God’s presence, God’s love, and God’s mercy. And therefore every moment matters. Today Jesus invites us to use those moments in service to the urgent needs of God’s movement toward liberation and freedom.

And we will falter, we will fall short. We will need to encounter Jesus again and again as so many small and big things come before us demanding our attention and distracting us from our deepest calling. Which is why that grace of God is offered here to you today, as it is every Sunday, in a life-altering, world-changing way. Words of forgiveness to acknowledge where we have not gone all in with God. Words of challenge to call us and send us out again. And an invitation to a meal where we are granted life in spite of our failures and where we are granted sustenance to try again and where we are reminding of the never-ending grace of God to call us into the world and to catch us when we fall and to bounce us back into the world again.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

2nd Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2019

²⁶Then Jesus and his disciples arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. ²⁷As Jesus stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. ²⁸When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me”—²⁹for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) ³⁰Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. ³¹The demons begged Jesus not to order them to go back into the abyss.
  ³²Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So Jesus gave them permission. ³³Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
  ³⁴When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. ³⁵Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. ³⁶Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. ³⁷Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. ³⁸The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with Jesus; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ³⁹“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him. – Luke 8:26-39

What would you give up to be released from your demons?

Because whether we consider them to be spiritual beings that possess us or whether we consider them to be a name for the forces within us and around us that drive us apart from God and neighbor, I suspect we all can name a few of the demons that exist in our lives. And I suspect that at some moments we’d give nearly anything to be set free from those demons, and I suspect at other times we might have grown so comfortable with their presence that we would rather let them stay.

I think the man who meets Jesus the moment he steps out of his boat would gladly give just about anything to be set free. I don’t know what his full story is, but by the time he and Jesus encounter one another, he is defined, named even, by his demons. His life is governed by them. The community knows him as the man with many demons. They have set him aside under lock and key and guarded, maybe for his own safety and maybe for a sense of safety for the rest of the community. He is marked as an outsider by whatever demons plague him; the chains mark him as one to be avoided. When he escapes he returns not to his community but to the wilds or to live among the tombs – presumably away from human contact. Maybe by his own choice and maybe because he has no other choice.

I’m not saying the community did anything wrong exactly. They did the best they could with what they had, perhaps. But putting the demon-possessed man out – whether in chains or in the wild – allowed them all to go on with their daily lives. And certainly the importance of daily work and living for the rest of the community is a worthy goal. There are fish to be caught and carpentry to be done and, well, pigs to be farmed. This man’s demon-possession would surely interfere.

Most of the time we read this story I think we focus on this man who has been set free. This one person healed of the things that plagued his body, mind, and spirit. He wants to follow Jesus. This man who for so long has been an outsider is commissioned to bear the good news to his community. Surely we want to be in his shoes – set free and sent out by Jesus. Thanks be to God, we are…sometimes.

Because sometimes we also are swineherds. Have you considered their perspective in all this? They are minding their own business. Whatever their personal demons are, they are things that are acceptable enough to society that unlike the man Jesus heals they remain a part of the community, they make a living, they mind their own business. They give thanks, perhaps, that they aren’t like thatman forced to live outside the bounds of the community. They aren’t like thatman possessed by a legion of demons.

When Jesus waltzes in and destroys their livelihood for the sake of healing this man they have long considered beneath them, they run to the town to get some backup. They aren’t sure what just happened, but they know it was something important. A large group from the town come to see what all the fuss is about. And there they see this man whom they have defined by his demons sitting in his right mind and the herd of pigs drowned in the water. And they are afraid. Afraid more than anything of Jesus’ power. And they ask him to leave. He has liberated a human being, and he has essentially destroyed the legion of demons. But that is too much disruption to their way of life; it is too much for them to see things differently, to imagine that the demons aren’t just relegated to the margins. It is too much to give up a sliver of economic security for the healing of their neighbor.

That is the way of liberation – it tends to disrupt things, and sometimes we’d rather just live with the demons as long as we can keep them locked away or pretend they are only prowling around over there, outside of the community. Sometimes we’re the swineherds, asking Jesus to leave our life as it is, demons and all.

I was reminded of this all too often this week. Monday night, as part of the ELCA’s 60-Day Journey toward Justice in a Culture of Gun Violence, I watched the documentary, Emanuel, about the racially-motivated murder of nine church members in Charleston four years ago. It is a gut-wrenching story, but the power of the movie is the way in which it sets the whole thing in context. What is so horrific is that isn’t an isolated incident, but one moment in centuries-long saga of enslavement and oppression. Most of us who have privilege because of our lighter skin tones relegate the demons of racism to the edges because we can live our lives without seeing most of it. We assume it takes place elsewhere  in acts committed by the worst of the worst. But all of us participate daily in a culture that fails to give equal concern and equal opportunity to people of color. Collectively we incarcerate black and brown people at obscenely higher rates, we allow repeated incidents of the murder of black and brown bodies, and we allow people of color to be relegated to second place. What are we willing to give up, what of our own power, wealth, and sense of security will we give up to allow Jesus into our community to liberate all of us from racism?

And what of the children in detention at the border and the calls for unprecedented raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement? What will it take to liberate them?Though we may disagree about the path forward, I can’t imagine anyone not being appalled by the treatment of people in these camps: denied basic access to enough food and drink, basic hygiene, basic due process. And yet they remain mostly out-of-sight from our daily existence, and so we sit back and sigh, wondering what to do. Closer to home people are regularly rounded up and detained for all manner of reason, justly and unjustly. I am struggling with the ways in which I let my day-to-day existence and my own security and stability take precedence over this and other human rights abuses that happen around the world every day. I wonder what we might have to give up to allow Jesus into our community to liberate all of us from our collective demons.

There’s so much more. The things that operate deep within our communities but which we pretend can be chained up at a distance they are legion. The weight of them is too much to bear and so we push them aside and pretend they can be quieted or that they don’t exist at all. But every day people are living with the kind of life-destroying helplessness that plagued the life of the man who met Jesus in the land of the Gerasenes.

The good news of this encounter with Jesus is that he shows up unexpected and uninvited. He shows up and meets the outsider first. He shows up and liberates from the forces that bind and oppress. And he shows up to do that without waiting for our readiness for change and disruption. God is always arriving anew, the demons that plague us and plague our communities are afraid in Jesus’ presence, and we are likely to experience both liberation and disruption. We have already invited Jesus here, today, as we do every time we gather as a church community. Perhaps we will walk away with burdens lifted and life restored; perhaps we will walk away with our lives rearranged and priorities changed, perhaps we will walk away feeling the disruption that Jesus brings to our daily lives. For certain we will walk away having encountered the Living God, the one who makes the demons afraid, the one who bears all things on the cross, the one who redeems and resurrects. And that Living God will send us out to proclaim that news to the world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

Holy Trinity Sunday
June 16, 2019

¹²“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³When the Spirit of truth comes, you will be guided you into all the truth; for the Spirit will not speak out of the Spirit’s own authority, but will speak whatever the Spirit hears, and will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴The Spirit will glorify me, taking what is mine and declaring it to you. ¹⁵All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.” – John 16:12-15

This sermon was inspired by the central image from Rev. Paul Carlson’s commentary on this week’s texts. 

I have fond memories of doing jigsaw puzzles when I was growing up. There was a time when my mom and I would pull out a puzzle every Friday night, stay up late watching TV, and assemble the puzzle together. 500 to 1000 pieces were our specialty – something challenging but not impossibly frustrating. We would put the border together first, then slowly fill the middle – starting with the parts of the picture that were most distinctive and then the more challenging sections once more of the pieces were gone. The picture it created didn’t so much matter as the satisfaction of finding the right piece and seeing it come together, though we always, always kept looking back at the picture on the box to figure out how it would all come together, trusting it would turn out just like the picture we could see on the box. The great feeling of satisfaction that would come as those final pieces would fall into place!

I imagine that by the time we meet them again in our gospel reading today, Jesus’ disciples were feeling like the puzzle was finally coming together. It had been a challenging and sometimes unpredictable ride, to be sure. And they all had a slightly different picture in mind about how the world would look when Jesus was done putting it together. Peaceable kingdom, an end to oppression, food for the hungry, healing for the sick – that sort of picture with some variation. As they followed along with Jesus, all of the gospel writers hint that the disciples were a little slow to get it. But piece by piece they began to catch on at least to part of Jesus’ mission and ministry. Their picture of how things might turn out had started to change here and there, but it’s almost as if it was finally starting to come together. Maybe they weren’t at the final pieces yet, but the border was done and some of the bigger parts of the picture were finished. They were beginning to understand who God was and what God was doing among them.

But Jesus wasn’t anywhere close. He had been trying to tell them that, but they were a little dense, like most of us disciples of Jesus. And in this passage we just read from the long conversation Jesus has with them just before his arrest, crucifixion, and death, some of the disciples are just starting to get the sense that the puzzle isn’t going along quite as well as they had thought. Jesus says, ‘There are many more things I have to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Wait? What? I thought we were wrapping this thing up? We finally had God in touchable form, in a human we can relate to, and you’re implying that we have to stop and wait for more to come?

Perhaps some of the disciples were go-with-the-flow kind of people, the blessed ones who are comfortable with fluidity, spontaneity, and uncertainty. But surely some of them were like me – anxious to see the puzzle put together, every piece in its place. And whether they realize it or not, they are about to be confronted by something so far beyond what they had been able to picture that it will change their puzzle-working forever.

Because God isn’t a puzzle to be solved, at least not that kind of puzzle. God doesn’t have nice, neat finished borders. We can’t study our way into understanding God. There really is no finishing of the puzzle. The nature of God is to be always creating, always renewing, always resurrecting. The borders we think we have put in place to contain God, to contain the church, to contain even our own lives, are, in fact, just places where we have failed to see more places for connecting and growing, more places for the puzzle of God and of the world to expand into something new.

With this puzzle image in mind, I’ve been thinking that Youth Sunday is especially appropriate on Trinity Sunday. Because so often we adults think of kids as a puzzle to be solved. Perhaps some of our young people, too, are like I was as a young person and like I still am today: anxious to see what the rest of my own puzzle looks like, anxious to grow up the rest of the way, anxious to see where I’ll end up and what the future will hold. And at the same times we as the church are sometimes guilty of tokenizing young people, imagining them to be an important piece of carrying forward the picture of the church we are trying to piece together and failing to see all the ways they are already a part of the church we are now and the ways they are helping us now add on to the picture we thought we’d figured out about God and church. I am so grateful for the ways our kids lead us in this congregation into this ever expanding vision of God and God’s plan for us.

And I’m certainly guilty of wanting desperately to know where this congregation is going. I’ve joined you in the ongoing work of discerning the future for the congregation. And I often find myself trying to imagine different scenarios for how things will play out – different ways our mission and ministry could continue or find new life or new directions. And because I am at ease with clear plans and schedules, I am often looking for that puzzle to come together and near completion.

But that is to deny the very important promise that Jesus makes to the disciples and to us: The Spirit will come and guide us into all truth. Now I have often simply thought about that statement as the promise that one day – maybe only after we’ve died and landed back in God’s presence in a new way – one day we would finally know the truth, we’d finally put the last piece into this puzzle and see everything for what it was and is and ever will be.

But that is to miss the promise – that the Spirit will guide us. I have always been so focused on understanding God’s future that I have been slow to think about the part of that promise that is the Spirit’s daily guidance. I am sometimes so focused on figuring out the puzzle that I miss the presence of God, with a steady hand on my back to calm my frantic work and worry, the presence of God reassuring that it’s ok to dwell in mystery and wonder, the presence of God helping me take joy in adding one piece at a time to an ever-growing, ever-changing puzzle of creation.

That’s the steady presence of God as we as a congregation experience change and sometimes even turmoil. Present in worship – in water, wine, and bread, present in community, present in our joys and in our fears, present in our wondering and worry for the future. Present, now as each day adds another piece to the ever-growing picture of what God is doing here.

So for my fellow type A folk, I’m sorry. The puzzle isn’t almost done. It will never be done. My picture of what God’s reign of justice and peace will look like isn’t what it will look like. And your picture of it isn’t it either. But the mystery of God is present in you and in me. And for that we give thanks today as we pause to dwell in the mystery of God.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Pentecost
Sunday, June 9, 2019

¹When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
  ⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jewish-born and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
  ¹⁴But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “You Judeans and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
 ¹⁷‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
 that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
  and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
 and your youth shall see visions,
  and your elders shall dream dreams.
 ¹⁸Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
  in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
   and they shall prophesy.
 ¹⁹And I will show portents in the heaven above
  and signs on the earth below,
   blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
 ²⁰The sun shall be turned to darkness
  and the moon to blood,
   before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
 ²¹Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ” – Acts 2:1-21

The following sermon ends with an invitation to prayers stations set up around the sanctuary. 

Let us breathe together. You can close your eyes if you wish.

Inhale for 4-3-2-1. Hold 4-3-2-1. Exhale 4-3-2-1 Hold 4-3-2-1. Again…

Inhale for 4-3-2-1. Hold 4-3-2-1. Exhale 4-3-2-1 Hold 4-3-2-1. And once more…

Inhale for 4-3-2-1. Hold 4-3-2-1. Exhale 4-3-2-1 Hold 4-3-2-1.

When we breathe, we take in the air from around us and it becomes a part of our bodies. Air comes into our lungs and our bodies in the miraculous work they do take in the molecules we need and return to the air around us the particles our bodies need to get rid of. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Once our bodies have taken in particles from the air, it becomes difficult to distinguish it any longer as something separate, something distinct. Those molecules infuse every cell of our being. Without them we die. And in that process those molecules are changed and released back into the world. It happens without our conscious attention, but it is essential to life.

The Spirit of God is our breath. It is the wind over the waters of creation, it is the breath that grants life to the first earth-creatures, it is what brings the valley of dry bones back to life, it is the peace of Jesus breathed onto the disciples, it arrives with the sound of rushing wind on Pentecost. This is the part of God that is most intimate with us. It is the part of God that enters our embodied selves down to every cell and becomes inseparable from us. It is the part of God that we take in and the part of God that goes out again from us.

Thisis what the disciples are waiting for – the awareness of God breathing in them – before they go to carry the gift of the good news out to the ends of the world. They gather and they wait. They have known Jesus, they have known God as companion and teacher, prophet and protestor, healer and helper. But maybe they have yet to realize that God is breathing within them.

And what a scene it is when the Spirit breathes into them. I don’t know what they were expecting, but I can’t imagine they were counting on flames of fire, a crowd of people from around the known world who all also receive the spirit. I can’t imagine they quite imagined the chaos – such chaos that some people think it’s a drunken party at 9 a.m. But the Spirit has a way of doing that – stirring things up, making things unpredictable, making things seem a little bit chaotic. If you were looking for an orderly and comfortable way of life, than the Spirit of God may not be what you’re looking for. Peter’s sermon reminds them and reminds us that God’s promises fall on and fall from all people – young and old, people of all genders and ethnicities, people of every walk of life.

And each of those hears the message in a slightly different kind of way. The way someone hears the Good news in Spanish or in Farsi or in Zulu is different than it is heard in English. It’s not fundamentally different, but each language encodes things with different nuances. Language shapes how we interpret and understand the world. That each person present on Pentecost hears God’s promise in their own language speaks to the diverse and intimate ways that God’s Spirit communicates the good news to each of us: as particular and intimate as the air we breathe. The good news I need to breathe in today and the good news that you need to breathe in today might be framed differently, yet each of us needs to know the power of that life-sustaining Spirit that flows in and out of us, that life sustaining Spirit that becomes a part of us.

It is my prayer every Sunday that the Spirit take responsibility for transforming the words we have prepared – in prayer and song and preaching – and carry them to the ears of those who hear them in a way that communicates the grace of God just as each needs to hear it, that they can breathe it in just as they need it.

And some would argue that nothing helps us get more intimate with God than prayer. It is in prayer that we name our deepest desires and listen for God’s voice. It isn’t so much that God doesn’t already know what we need or what we want, but that our asking, our taking an initiative in the relationship, opens up something deeper. Prayer is ultimately about relationship with God. And each of us prays in our own language. Not just actual languages, but each of us hears God and speaks of God in our own ways. It is as intimate as the breath that sustains us.

So today, instead of one person speaking one set of written prayers, all of us are invited into a time of prayer following the sermon. You are invited to wander here in the sanctuary to engage with one or more of the prayer stations:

-I’ll be available in the front for spoken prayers and anointing with oil.

-The kneeler at the chancel rail is available if you want to stand or kneel at the front and light a candle.

-There is a place to explore a breath prayer related to the fruits of the Spirit.

-A place to write advocacy letters around violence and conflict prevention.

-There is a station where you can pray for the nations or explore prayers from communities around the world.

-There is a place to offer prayers of gratitude.

-There is a place to write or draw your prayers.

Or you are welcome to sit and pray where you are. There will be music with repeating refrains that you can sing or hum as you move or you can make that your prayer. You do not have to interact with anyone else, but you are welcome to be in conversation together at the stations if you wish. There are chairs at some of the stations for those who want or need to sit, but please just help each other and make space as needed to sit or stand.

It might be just a little taste of the chaotic movement of the Spirit at Pentecost. And it might push you into a new understanding or expression of prayer. But however you experience this time, know that the Spirit of God is filling you with every breath and that you are loved more deeply than you can imagine by the one who invites you into relationship forever.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

7th Sunday of Easter
Ascension of Our Lord (transferred)
June 2, 2019

⁴⁴[Jesus said,] “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”⁴⁵Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, ⁴⁶and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, ⁴⁷and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. ⁴⁸You are witnesses of these things. ⁴⁹And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
  ⁵⁰Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. ⁵¹While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. ⁵²And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; ⁵³and they were continually in the temple blessing God. – Luke 24:44-53 

See also Acts 1:1-11 & Ephesians 1:15-23

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

My two-year-old and I were driving along, probably singing a repetitive rhyming song together, or maybe I had one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand reaching a hand puppet and into the backseat talking in a funny voice, when I heard one of those kid questions that snaps you to attention: “Where is God?” To be fair it wasn’t entirely out of nowhere – we had been talking about people who had died and where they were. But in a split second flashing before my eyes are years of theological training and pastoral experience, the little bit I know about child development, and the parental anxiety about handling big questions with grace and ease. Little of that was particularly helpful, because, how do you explain an unseeable, mysterious, immortal, invisible divine reality to someone whose brain works entirely in the concrete realm?

I took a deep breath and talked about how God is everywhere, how we meet God in church in bread and juice, in places where people help us, wherever we experience love and care. And in the way of 2 year olds, she absorbed what she was able to, left the rest, and asked for a donut. But it has had me thinking for weeks about how keep asking that question and how to keep answering it. Where isGod?

That’s one of the fundamental questions that the writers of the gospels were wrestling with. The people who had encountered God-made-flesh in Jesus were mostly gone, Jesus had not yet returned in the immediate way they had anticipated. The temple, the other physical manifestation of God’s presence on earth, had been destroyed. They were wrestling with how to maintain faith when they couldn’t see God. Each writer answers that question in their own way, but for the writer of the Gospel of Luke and its sequel the Book of Acts, it’s the story of Jesus’ ascension that helps answer that question. Oddly not once but twice the author tells us of the disciples gathered around Jesus as he gives them final instructions and then floats away into the clouds.

We supposedly sophisticated modern scientific people might scoff at first century folk who didn’t yet understand that the earth was round and revolved around the sun in what we now call “space.” We who fly on airplanes at 35,000 feet and who can google pictures of outer space know that Jesus didn’t go to live up above the clouds. But even though their scientific knowledge was primitive by modern standards, even they generally understood that you couldn’t just literally climb your way up into the clouds to find Jesus again.

And maybe we’re not quite as sophisticated as we like to think we are. We may be able to comprehend more than a still-developing 2-year-old brain, but how often to we operate as if God is “somewhere up there”?

Sometimes we operate as if we can climb our way up in to God’s good graces by going to church enough or doing enough good deeds or being a nicer, better, more productive person. We may not literally build a ladder up to heaven, but we fill our lives with things that we think will lift us up into better standing with others or with God or sometimes even with ourselves. It’s a way we think of God “up there” and ourselves as “down here.”

And we are not immune to looking up to the skies to plead for mercy in the face of tragedy we cannot fathom. Again this week, gun violence left 12 dead in Virginia Beach, while gun violence continues daily in ways that barely get a mention on local news. News of children traumatized, malnourished, and even dying in immigration detention camps at our own country’s borders make me long for God to be somehow more tangibly present, to somehow stop such horror from happening. Where is God in that?! People across the Midwest are devastated by violent storms and farther west people are dealing with now ever-present wildfires. Even for those of us whose theological convictions insist that the Crucified One is present wherever people are suffering or in pain, it is hard sometimes not to sit feeling helpless and wonder just where God is in all of this. Theological convictions aside, sometimes it feels like God is far away “up there” and we are struggling along “down here.”

And it can be just as hard to identify God when things are good. We may sing words of praise or quietly lift up a prayer of thanks for blessings small and large. We give thanks to God for our food and perhaps we give thanks as we wake in the morning and as we wind down at night. But it can sometimes be hard to find time and space for God in our busy daily lives. We are too often guilty of thinking of God primarily in places like church and mountaintop sunrises and moments of spiritual insight while failing to think of God in the ordinary tasks of washing dishes and sweeping the floor, on the ordinary streets where we live and work, in the thousand little daily struggles each of us finds in our lives. It’s another way we relegate God to “up there” and think of ourselves as stuck “down here.”

But even the ancients understood Jesus’ ascension in terms that went beyond Jesus going “up there.” The church as early as the 4^thcentury talked about Jesus ascending into the whole cosmos. The God who took on real human flesh, walked in real human dirt, ate with real human people, and died a real human death, ascends not just up to the clouds but into every real human moment. Into our human bodies and the everyday ground we walk on. Jesus’ ascension is in it’s way an opportunity for Jesus to again be birthed into human life, to take flesh again and again in our joy and suffering, in our ordinary human moments. Jesus’ ascension is a way we understand God infusing again each corner of creation: the distant stars and the tiny bugs, the air we breathe and the ground that supports us.

And just as early in the life of the church they spoke about Jesus ascending into the Eucharist. The absence of Jesus’ body in the sense in which the people of 1^stcentury Galilee and Judea knew it, opens for us the table where we meet Jesus’ body in a new way. Jesus goes not to dwell in the clouds but to dwell at our tables. To dwell not just with us but within us.

Maybe we know better than to understand that Jesus landed in a heaven located just above the clouds, and yet our understanding of just where Jesus has gone is sometimes still so limited. It would be easier to locate heaven and the presence of God in a geographic space, however inaccessible. It’s one thing to aspire to heaven, to find God in beauty and perfection, but it is sometimes a deeper challenge to discover God embodied around us in vulnerable people, and sometimes an even harder challenge to discover God embodied in us and in our imperfections and vulnerabilities. But that is the gift of Jesus’ ascension: that with our minds sometimes all too small to comprehend the mysteries of God, Jesus comes to reside with us and within us in every ordinary detail, in every imperfection, in every time of fear or sorrow or pain. Jesus’ ascension brings the heaven we long for, the dwelling place of God, right to us – at this table, in the world around us, in our daily stuggles, here and now and forever.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

6th Sunday of Easter
May 26, 2019

⁹During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” ¹⁰When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
  ¹¹We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, ¹²and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. ¹³On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. ¹⁴A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. ¹⁵When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us. – Acts 16:9-15

¹After this there was a festival of the Jewish people, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
  ²Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. ³In these lay many invalids—persons blind, lame, and paralyzed. ⁵One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. ⁶When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” ⁸Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” ⁹At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
  Now that day was a sabbath. – John 5:1-9

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleulia!

I want you to imagine with me an ordinary experience I suspect many of you have had. Imagine what it’s like to fish a floating piece of dirt out of water. Maybe it’s a little piece of dirt that’s fallen into the bath, or a tiny piece of eggshell that fell into the pan in the midst of the slimy egg whites, or a tiny leaf that’s fallen in the swimming pool. Surely you’ve had this experience before. You reach in to scoop it out and the movement of your hand only pushes the object away. You scoop again, and again, and again. You think you’ve finally cupped it in your hand, or gotten it on your finger only to lose it once more. Maybe in desperation scooping handfuls of water out trying to take the offending speck with it, to no avail. It seems so simple, and yet utterly elusive. Eventually, perhaps, we grab it, though surely sometimes we also just give up and let it be. I have the lyric from the Sound of Music in my head when this sort of thing happens – “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”

But this is sometimes what it is like to be the people of God chasing after the Spirit. As we move through Easter and approach the great festival of the Holy Spirit – Pentecost – we hear more and more about the work of the Spirit. It’s the Spirit that moves the work of the early church in the book of Acts, the Spirit that is breathed on the disciples after the first Easter. But as much as we hear about the Spirit, it’s as if we can’t ever quite put our finger on exactly what the Spirit is up to.

Paul, who by all accounts has extensive experience with the Spirit, hasn’t quite been able to figure out exactly where the Spirit wants him to go. Just before the verses we read this morning, he thinks he’s setting out to share the good news of Jesus in Asia. But for no given reason the Spirit forbids it. So, Paul thinks, let’s go share the good news of Jesus in Bythinia. But, quote “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” It’s only then they set up temporary camp and Paul has a dream that leads him somewhere he hadn’t yet thought of, in a different direction than he was heading. When he gets there, following what he believes to be the work of the Spirit, they wander the city for a  few days, still trying to understand what God is up to with all this. Only then do they happen upon Lydia and her companions and the Spirit gets to work. And this is the whole story of the early church – people thinking they’ve finally figured God out, and God surprising them again with new things, new directions. The apostles are always trying to scoop up God and never quite getting it.

This feels like my experience of trying to figure out exactly where God is leading me and leading the whole church. It’s easy to pick a seemingly good and valid direction to go, it’s easy to jump in and try things, but actually figuring out where God is leading is more elusive, a little harder to pin down, a little less clear quite when we’ve made it. Almost as if as soon as we realize the Spirit’s leading us to a place the Spirit has already taken off to the next, already out ahead of us stirring things up in the next place we’ll end up. And often the Spirit is already off stirring in others so that when we finally get to the people we’re trying to reach with good news, it’s they who surprise us with the Spirit we’ve been seeking. It’s not always easy, but it’s rarely boring, doing this work of prayerfully leaping after the Spirit of God.

And how about this man who is desperate for physical healing, desperate to be able to walk again and, in a time and place where his different physical ability limited his social sphere and capacity to earn a living, desperate to be restored to community. He waits, day after day, week after week, month after month, til it becomes year after year. Every day the waters are stirred up and the first person to the water is supposed to receive healing. But every time someone else beats him to it. Every day trying to scoop healing up out of the water, every day for years missing his chance. Until Jesus comes along, and it turns out the waters weren’t what he was waiting for all these years but Jesus. God meeting him in the midst of his desperate daily trying to reach for healing and wholeness.

It feels like our experience, too, doesn’t it? Seeking healing day after day – healing for ourselves, for our community, for our whole world. And moments where it seems we get a little closer, moments when it almost feels as if we might transform at least some small problem, transcend one small ailment, and somehow it escapes our grasp. Or maybe it’s just that for every healing, three more needs seem to emerge before we have time to enjoy what has been restored. It’s as if we can’t quite pin down the Spirit to heal in the ways we want or on our schedule. Sometimes the kind of healing we’re looking for isn’t the kind we end up receiving. Sometimes we are still waiting and looking long past the time we think we can manage to survive. And yet, the Spirit keeps working, and maybe even working within us in ways we haven’t yet perceived.

And we could walk away from these stories about trying to get a hold of God’s Spirit with the idea that we just have to keep working harder at discerning, working harder at following, working harder at understanding. If only we just did a little better job of tracking down the Spirit or were a little faster to the healing waters, or just a little better at one thing or another, then maybe we finally could keep up with God’s Spirit. If only we were a little more adept, we could do it.

But instead it seems that God invites us over and over again to sit back and be surprised by where the Spirit will pop up next. Not that this is an entirely passive way of being. To open our minds and hearts to the Spirit’s surprises, to be alert to what the Spirit is doing, we still have to be active. It means being present to receive the means of grace offered to us here. It means engaging the deep questions together as we’ll be doing this summer as we seek to better understand our deeper sense of why we do what we do in this particular congregation. It means going out to begin the work of God’s kingdom in the world starting somewhere, serving somehow, even when the healing and wholeness don’t emerge right away or in the ways we expect.

God’s Spirit is moving, and always will be moving, in ways that we can’t always scoop up and hold in our hands. And thanks be to God for that, because what I can hold in my hands, what I can easily grasp is far too small a vision to bring in the new reign of God that renews the earth and resurrects the dead. So we’ll keep engaging together, we’ll keep gathering for worship, we’ll keep serving our neighbor, we’ll keep seeking the kingdom. And sometimes through that work and more often surprising us in ways we haven’t planned for, God’s Spirit will blow in and raise us to new life again.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleulia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

5th Sunday of Easter
May 19, 2019

³¹When Judas had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son-of-Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³²If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in God’s own self and will glorify him at once. ³³Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Judeans so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ ³⁴I give you a new commandment, 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.”  – John 13:31-35

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Love is not just a feeling. If you love someone but you never enact loving gestures, is it really love? Love is the middle of the night feedings for an infant, the trip to the pharmacy in the middle of the night for a sick friend, getting dinner to the table for your spouse when he is having a stressful and busy week. It’s opening your home to someone who needs a place to eat or a place to stay. It’s taking time to listen to someone who needs to talk. It’s responding to those in need in our community with food for the food bank or diapers for children experiencing the trauma of being pulled from their home when they enter the foster care system.

But then love is also not just a series of actions. You can check all the boxes of loving actions toward a person and feel no real love. You can go through the motions with your partner and harbor hatred and disgust. You can serve your neighbor in line at the soup kitchen and silently judge them for a story you don’t even know. You can put on a smile and say nice things and walk away hating a person you’ve just met. Is it really love if the feeling simply never comes?

And love is not just a generality. I can say I love all people. I can say I love people of the opposite political party, or people of other faiths, or people from other countries, but without really knowing them, without really understanding their stories, without actually entering into relationship with them, those statements, even if they are heartfelt, lack real love. If I don’t really take the time to get to know them, to enter into their reality, to bear some part of their burden with them, is it really love?

But love is also not just reserved for specific people. The nature of love is expansive and inclusive. Of course I love at least some members of my friends and family. I experience love for people I get to know and like. But if that love doesn’t inspire me to care and concern for all people, for the recognition that all people share at least their humanity in common with the ones I love, then one wonders whether that love really is love.

And love isn’t easy. Love requires sacrifice and compromise. It involves give and take. It requires that we love ourselves but also to be vulnerable and take risks. It means working through moments when the feeling isn’t there but the commitment is. It means being willing to risk loss and grief. If means sometimes even putting yourself in harms way to protect a loved one. It asks a great deal of us.

But love isn’t hard, either. Love, genuine love, has a tendency to well up from deep inside us rather than being something we consciously manufacture bit-by-bit in our minds. It bursts forth when a parent watches a child do something new, when lovers lock eyes over a romantic dinner, when in recognizing the pain of people in extreme need our hearts well up with the desire to share of ourselves to care for them.

Love is…complicated.

Which is why the verse at the heart of our gospel reading today is so simple yet challenging: Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you. It’s as full of action and feeling, generality and specificity, easy and difficulty as that. It’s a nice thing to say, and a nice thing to hear: Love one another. But try to live it out, and it suddenly becomes more complicated.

One of the things I appreciate deeply about this congregation is that generally speaking people who walk through the door experience love and welcome. We are all of us learning to love across difference when it comes to people in general. We sometimes struggle to make the personal connections to the lives of people who receive our generosity through the many drives we support throughout the year. And because we’re human we carry none of this out perfectly. But faced with a fellow human in our midst, I sense a great deal of love here.

And yet, we, too, struggle to love in all those different dimensions. I do anyway. Sometimes my words or actions don’t match my feelings, my love for people in general fails to cross over to the particular person in front of me. I simply don’t put in the effort to love others that is required to move our world into something new.

But rarely has commanding anyone to love done much good. I could tell you until I was blue in the face to go out and love and you might go out and try a little harder or think a little differently about some person or group of people. But I can’t make you or even myself love just by saying so. Which is what makes this command from Jesus all the richer, because it is rooted first in God’s love for us. God’s actions and feelings, love for all and love specifically for you as you are, God’s automatic feeling toward you and God’s practiced embodiment of love in our world.

Jesus’ love is more than a feeling. He notably ate with those who were outcast, he reached out a hand in healing, he feed hungry people. His words were not empty but his love was embodied in service to neighbor. And Christ’s body is gathered here today to extend a hand of peace and welcome to you in this assembly.

Jesus’ love is full of feeling. He spoke tenderly to disciples, he wept over the city of Jerusalem, he cared tenderly for his mother at the end and spoke by name to a weeping Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. He calls to you today, knowing your name and speaking love and mercy for you.

Jesus’ love was particular. He healed the people who physically stood in front of him as he traveled along his way. He dined with particular friends who supported his life and ministry. He lived in a community in a time and place. And he offers here his life, his body and blood in bread and wine to you, his beloved.

And Jesus’ love was for people in general. They way in which he crossed boundaries and borders, cavorted with outsiders and welcomed the stranger demonstrated an openness to every last human being on the earth. And that table where you are welcomed and known is open to everyone today.

Jesus’ love was hard. It meant an itinerate life with no house and home. It meant being challenged and derided. It meant enduring the cross for the sake of loving the whole world. And Jesus love was easy. It flowed out into the world at every turn because he himself was the embodiment of love, the embodiment of God.

And that’s what allows us to grow in love for one another. We can practice the actions and even the feelings. We can stretch our love beyond the particular people we know and beyond the generalities we fail truly to love. We can do the hard work and we experience the spontaneous ease of love for others. But in the end it is God’s love for us that we proclaim here when we give thanks for baptism and open the table to all, when we read the stories of God in scripture and lift our world to God in prayer, when we are sent out to try again. It’s God’s love in all that that begins to empower us for loving one another. We will mess it up and try again. But God’s love will always be pouring into us and then beginning to flow out into the world.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco