2nd Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2019 

³¹At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³²Jesus said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. ³³Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ ³⁴Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! ³⁵See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”- Luke 13:31-35

I’ve been thinking this week about the difference between a house and a home. That’s mostly because we moved to a new house this week, so that I can be a little closer the congregation and still be close to Michael’s work. We had visited the empty house we were moving to, imagining and planning. But it felt like a foreign place, someone else’s house. And then in a matter of hours on moving day our furniture fell into place and much of our stuff began to find a spot in the new house. I was surprised that in a new house it felt like home so quickly. And it made me think about what home really means beyond the place where your stuff resides. It means family, whether that’s others that live with you or simply a sense of the family from which you come that shapes how you live. It means a place of comfort and safety, a place from which one can venture out into the world to live and work and play and serve and experience God’s creatures and creation. For some people that is very much associated with walls and roof at a particular address – a place that is more than just a place, while for others that sense of home by choice or by necessity is found some other way.

In a sense I think Jesus is coming home in this week’s gospel reading. He isn’t from Jerusalem, though he has visited with his family before. He isn’t moving there or setting up shop there. But Jerusalem has been in Jesus’ time and continues to be today a place that is more than just a place, more than just a city, a point on the map. It’s a home. A spiritual home. The center of God’s presence. Since the time of King David it had been the physical address of God for the people of Israel. They absolutely understood God’s presence in many other ways, but this was the center, not necessarily geographically but spiritually. A place they could connect to, a place they could feel safe, a place from which God’s word and presence went out into the world.

But this is a mixed homecoming for Jesus. People come to warn him that he isn’t safe from Herod, whom Jesus in return calls a fox. Jesus recognizes that Jerusalem, like every home, is a little bit stuck. They have resisted the calls of the prophets to make changes. They have sometimes made things feel safe by keeping others out and resisting the transformations that God encourages to welcome the poor and the stranger. And so Jesus laments: Jerusalem, Jerusalem! How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.

Jesus is both drawn to the center, the home of this tradition of which he is a part, but he is also aware of the ways in which his own tradition has failed to live up to the things God has called them to be and do.

I wonder that Jesus doesn’t come to the church today, the church in a broad sense and also this congregation as part of that broader church and say the same thing. The presence of God dwells here. Dwells at this altar in bread and wine, dwells in the bodies that gather for worship, and in a certain way it’s as if in all those years of worship God has seeped into the walls as well. But Jesus stands among us, still longing to embrace, seeing that each of us in our own particular ways and times has been unwilling to heed God’s call, to live in the ways that God invites us to live for the sake of ourselves and for the world.

Perhaps most tragic of all I recognize the ways we sometimes reject God’s comforting and protective embrace. We reject it for all kinds of reasons. We think we can handle things on our own. We think we know better. We think we aren’t worthy. Or maybe we don’t want to have to accept the truth that God’s grace and protection will gather together people under God’s wing that we’d rather not be in relationship with.

And it’s here that I want to pause and think again about Jerusalem as a place of home. Because it is not just a home for people who follow Jesus, it’s not just a home for people who practice Judaism. It’s also a place the Muslim community calls sacred. It’s a unique place which is home for three of the world’s major faith traditions. The physical city is important, but the idea of Jerusalem is also important – that home place of safety and care, a place that shapes the way we live, a place from which we venture out into God’s world – together.

And so on this weekend when the world grieves yet another mass shooting, a despicable act of violence in New Zealand in which 50 Muslim worshippers were killed in an act of terror, I am keenly aware that in a broad sense members of our own home place are hurt and grieving. I am also aware that our immediate Muslim neighbors in our own community receive regular discrimination and that many live in fear of similar attacks. One of many reasons that Jesus weeps over this home we share – that we fail to love our neighbor and we harbor violence and fear that sometimes bubbles up into the worst imaginable. We do not heed the presence of God among us – among allof us – and we do not heed the warnings of those who call us to deeper love.

Over all of us Jesus stands, longing to gather us up under God’s wing. To huddle us up. Longs to protect us. Longs to make our home the ideal we wish it could be. And as I picture Jesus standing there over the city, longing to protect it, as I picture Jesus standing over us, longing to call us to our best selves, as I picture Jesus standing over Christchurch, New Zealand, longing to heal the wounds that have been ripped open, I cannot say it better than the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor who wrote the following about this passage:

“If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world –wings spread, breast exposed –but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand. …

“… Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first; which he does, as it turns out. He slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter. 

“She dies the next day where both foxes and chickens can see her — wings spread, breast exposed — without a single chick beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart . . . but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.”*

This, friends, is Jesus. Jesus who loves the home we have made for ourselves even when we mess it up, even when Jesus has to protect us from each other, even when we lash out at the one protecting us, even when we ourselves become foxes. This is Jesus who stands with open wings for the lost and the hurting, the lonely and the broken. This is Jesus who stands with open arms for Muslims and Jews and Christians and everyone else. And as much as I may not always like it, open arms even to the people who do terrible harm. This is Jesus, found among the victims having been gunned down. Because in the cross we see God made vulnerable for the sake of all people, and in that vulnerability a power that overcomes the depths of suffering and harm to redeem you and me and all the world and in doing so create the home we have longed for, the one we have longed to nestle in for safety and refuge, for love and comfort. And as Luke’s gospel will lead us, a place from which we can be sent out to proclaim that good news to the ends of the cosmos.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

*Quotation from Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor from the Christian Century as reprinted on the At the Edge of the Enclosure blog.

1st Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2019

¹Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, ²where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. ³The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” ⁴Jesus answered the devil, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ ”
  ⁵Then the devil led Jesus up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. ⁶And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. ⁷If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” ⁸Jesus answered the devil, “It is written,
 ‘Worship the Lord your God,
  the Lord alone shall you serve.’ ”
  ⁹Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, ¹⁰for it is written,
 ‘God will command his angels concerning you,
  to protect you,’
¹¹and
 ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
  so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
¹²Jesus answered the devil, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” ¹³Having finished every test, the devil departed from Jesus until an opportune time. – Luke 4:1-13

Do we trust that God is still God when our deepest hunger is not satisfied?

Do we trust that God is still God when the powers of the world act in ways contradictory to justice and peace?

Do we trust that God is God when we fall and crash land in a million pieces?

Those are the questions at the heart of this gospel passage.

Yes, this passage is about temptation. It’s about Jesus, vulnerable from a spiritual pilgrimage in the desert, alone and without food, facing very tempting temptations. From the seemingly innocuous conjuring of bread to fill a hungry stomach to the enticing power of world control to the carnival trick of leaping from heights to be saved by swooping angels, but what’s actually at stake for us, for God in these temptations?

I would like for the whole world to be fed, so conjuring bread from stone seems like a handy way to do that. Just fill the need, satiate the hunger. It can’t be that hard for the Word made flesh, the Word by which the world was created. It’s just bread.

I would like for the world powers to act with superhuman wisdom and grace, to create long and lasting peace – the kind of peace that, to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., is not merely the absence of tension but the presence of justice. If only Jesus were in charge! It seems like that would solve all the problems we have.

I would like everyone I know, and heck, even all the people I don’t know to be spared from pain. Whether their bodies are falling, or whether they are falling from someone’s good graces, or whether they are simply living a life that feels an endless fall grasping for some hold on something, anything that will give them a moment of stability. I would love them to be protected. And Jesus, too, of course. If only angels would swoop in.

But the temptation for Jesus, and the temptation for us in that kind of thinking, is to assume that God is most God-like when things are fixed, when prayers are answered in the ways we think God ought to answer them. If Jesus gives in to these temptations, the world changes. Presumably for the better in a lot of ways – the hungry fed, peace in the nations, people saved. But God is reduced to the orchestrator of benevolent things. God becomes the problem-solver, the fixer. God claims identity in certain actions and not the more fundamental identity of being God.

The tempter begins “IFyou are the Son of God…” Jesus willmiraculously feed thousands with bread. Jesus willstand up to the political and religious powers of the world. Jesus willfall all the way to the ground, not to be caught by angels, but to rise again. But that is not what makes his divinity. His divinity is rooted in his belovedness proclaimed just verses before this during prayer after his baptism. His divinity is rooted in being full of the Spirit from his very beginning and throughout this time of wilderness and on into his ministry. His divinity is rooted in his fundamental identity.

This matters for us. Because if God is God only when our needs are met, our world at peace, and the hurting saved, then God is absent much of the time. Then God has largely abandoned the world. And God isn’t really on the cross when Jesus dies.

But if God’s identity and God’s presence in our world is not dependent on individual moments of fulfilling even the most fundamental and noble of desires, but rather God’s presence simply exists, even in the hungriest of wildernesses, even in the face of hunger and abuse of power and human fallings and failures. Then, then this is a God we can trust. A God we can trust all the way to the cross. Not just to Jesus’ cross, but to ours as well.

And this matters to us, too, because it speaks to something about our identity. It speaks to the fact that we are who we are whether we succeed or fail. Even if we succeed or fail at our noblest and best actions, our deep and abiding call to feed the hungry of the world, to work for justice and peace in all the world, to care for those in need – success or failure even in those important matters – we are still God’s beloved. We still have the divine in us. We are still baptized children of God. That is our identity.

The world will present us with all kinds of conditions, all kinds of “ifs.” If you just had enough money then you would know what it means to be loved. If you just had a better  relationship. If you just had success in school or in business, then…then you would be loved. If you conquered your deepest, darkest, most persistent temptations, then…then would you beloved. The world will whisper that in your ear night and day. It will come from friends and neighbors. It will even sometimes, unfortunately, come from the human institution of the church. It will come from within you. If…. If only…. Then…THEN you will be loved.

But dear people of God. You have been sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever. Your belovedness does not depend on any of the world’s ifs. Your belovedness is rooted in the word of God spoken to you in baptism, the words that echoed in Jesus’ ears as he fasted in the wilderness and faced temptation and journeyed to the cross: “You are my beloved child. In you I am well pleased.”  People of God, you are welcome at this table because you are God’s creation. You have a place in this community because you are God’s beloved. You have a vocation in this world because God’s Spirit is alive in you. You will be tempted to put trust in other things. Sometimes you will give in to that temptation.

But in the face of failure, you are still you and God is still God. In the face of pain and trial, you are still you and God is still God. In the face of death, you are still you and God is still God. And God is a God of life and you are made for resurrection. Buried in this story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is this certainty of that. The certainty of God’s identity and presence everywhere and always and the certainty of your identity as God’s beloved here, now, and forever.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

Ash Wednesday
March 6, 2019

[Jesus said:] ¹“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
  ²“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ³But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
  ⁵“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ⁶But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
  ¹⁶“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ¹⁷But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, ¹⁸so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
  ¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; ²⁰but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” -Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

My grandfather was a coal miner in Quecreek, Pennsylvania. Like many others then and still today, he would descend into the mines day after day for a company that ran the whole small town and paid him barely enough for his family to live on. Every day he would emerge covered in coal and rock dust. He realized at some point that he was coated with it not just outside but inside. The coal dust on the outside could be scrubbed off eventually. The rock dust he breathed in would lodge in his lungs and slowly kill him over the course of several decades. The dust claimed his whole body.

Today we will bear a small smudge of ash on our foreheads and remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But my grandfather and many other coal miners then and now bear that dusty reminder all over and deep within their bodies. As we begin this season of Lent and hear this reminder of who we are and where we are headed, it can seem like such a small smudge of ash, so easily removed with a bit of water, is hardly enough. That perhaps we need the kind of reminder that covers our whole bodies inside and out. A reminder that we are creatures of the dust, that dust has claimed our whole bodies, and that we have made a real dusty mess of things:

Every year wildfires get larger, more frequent, and more devastating. They turn whole communities into ash. Houses, businesses, treasured possessions, and even more tragically human lives. While wildfires do occur naturally and are needed to help balance ecosystems, our human need for consumption and technological advancement, our quest to dominate the habitats around us, and ironically the very coal my grandfather and others mined, have pushed those ecosystems out of balance to increase drought and flood cycles and create the kind of conditions in which wildfires become too destructive and burn out of control leaving piles of ash in its wake. Other places experience previously fertile soil turning literally to dust as climates shift. This is the ash we rub on our foreheads today.

Wars rage on in so many places. Our weapons have now long held the capacity to turn whole cities into dust and ash. Even short of using the worst of those weapons, we continue to use obliterating violence in vain attempts to achieve peace, or worse, successful attempts to gain power and control over others and their resources. Refugees whose lives have been destroyed by these wars often travel dry and dusty deserts to reach safety, sometimes themselves turning to dust on the journey. This is the ash we rub on our foreheads today.

In our own lives we burn down bridges in our relationships with other people, leaving figurative piles of ash in the gulf that is created between ourselves and others. We burn up our time and energy with things that tear down rather than build up. Our bodies break and get ill in ways that remind us that we are dust. And anyone who has ever held the box of a loved one’s cremated ashes knows something of the meaning of “ashes to ashes dust to dust.” This is the ash we rub on our foreheads today.

The truth we tell on this day is that our whole selves are dust and ash inside and out. The world we live is sometimes a dusty, crumbling, ashen mess. Our brokenness, our world’s brokenness is more than a smudge – it marks our lives through and through.

Into this reality Jesus warns us as we start a season known for practicing extra acts of piety, not to let those acts of piety show before others. Which is perhaps in part to remind us not to pat ourselves on the back or expect everything to be all better once we engage some repentance and Lenten disciplines. By all means add or give up something that gives you opportunity to sink more deeply into relationship with God and neighbor. By all means give of your time, yourselves, and your possessions to those in need. By all means pray in whatever ways open your heart to God. By all means fast from things that are taking away your ability to connect with life and love and with God and neighbor. The world would be a better place if we all did that with intention and commitment.

But even if we did manage that, don’t expect the world to be something its not. Don’t expect that to make us or the world more than the creatures of dust and ash we are. Don’t expect to wipe away the power of sin as easily as we wipe away the ashen cross on our foreheads. You will not end the grip of death on you or on the world. Your reward is rather unseen. Your reward is in God’s realm. Your reward is participation in God’s promise to you that undergirds your life of dust and ashes from the very beginning to the very end. That promise exists before and beyond our acts of piety, and it makes our very life possible.

It’s out of that promise and into our world of dust and ash that Jesus speaks the other important truth of today. The truth that Jesus can take the mess we are, the mess we have become, the ashes and dust, and give them a shape. The shape of the cross. Christ’s work among us was to enter our dusty human reality and make some sense of it again. To shape us from a mess of dust into something with form and substance. We receive the ashes not only as a sign of our mortality but as a sign of being joined to Christ. Joined to Christ in death. Joined to Christ in resurrection.

The form God gives to our dusty lives is not something traditionally beautiful, not something that promises ease or constant joy, not even something that gets us out of dying. But it is the shape of the cross, which has become part the story of resurrection. The cross reminds us that our lives will end in death but that our messy, dusty lives and our messy, dusty deaths will be gathered together into something new.

Today God reminds us of that cross traced on our foreheads at baptism with water and oil. As if emerging from the depths of our lives covered inside and out with dust, emerging from our graves covered head to toe in ash, a small cross is wiped clean on our foreheads to show the truth of who we are – people of the dust who have been shaped and redeemed by God, that baptismal water making and remaking us until we are freed from our dusty labor and washed through with cleansing, healing water and given a place at the eternal feast.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Transfiguration of Our Lord
Sunday, March 3, 2019

²⁸Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. ²⁹And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. ³⁰Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus. ³¹They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. ³²Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw the glory of Jesus and the two men who stood with him. ³³Just as the men were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—not knowing what he said. ³⁴While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. ³⁵Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” ³⁶When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. -Luke 9:28-36

Have you ever tried to catch a beam of light? To hold some light in your hand? You can hold a light source, you can shine a light on your hand, but you can’t hold light. Not in any meaningful, practical way. If you try to grab the beam of light and hold it in your fist, you close in not light but shade and the light shines on the outside of your closed-in fist. You can chase the light all around the room like a cat after the beam of a laser pointer, but you will wear yourself out before you can grab the light itself and carry it off somewhere.

It seems like something so fundamental to our world, so essential for most of the tasks we carry out on a daily basis, really part of what makes life itself possible on Earth, it seems like we should be able to pick it up and hold it, touch it, turn it over in our hands, but light will not be pinned down like that.

I wonder if this is the experience of the disciples on the mountaintop with Jesus when he is transfigured before them with dazzling, shining light. They are starting to expect the unexpected by this point in their journey with Jesus, but they aren’t prepared for something quite like this. They are mesmerized until finally, it seems, they try to reach out and pin it down, hold on to the glory of this moment, and it is gone from their grasp. The moment is over. They aren’t quite sure what they’ve seen. They cannot even manage to find the words to describe it to the others until much later.

We – and the disciples – have the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, a deeply embodied God who lives in the midst of the world as it is. God we can touch. God we can talk to. We have the promise of God in water, wine, and bread. God we can feel and taste and take into ourselves. We have the presence of God in embodied community to offer healing and comfort. And without that our understanding of grace and of God would be greatly diminished. But even with that at the center of our faith, God – the full revelation of God and God’s enormous love and grace – remains elusive as a beam of light, because it is more than our human nature can comprehend.

Like the flash of motion that tells us that some small critter has been on the path ahead of us and leaped under cover before we could stop and identify it, God escapes our every attempt to see God in full, to pin down orderly and organized theologies that explain every last detail of God. The poet and theologian Christian Wiman, paraphrasing the great rabbi and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel, says that faith is really faithfulness to a time when we had faith. That is, that for many of us at least, we have flashes of faith, moments where we see more fully and clearly the profound love and grace of God for us but that we cannot hold onto them, contain them, or even explain them. In a life of faith we are invited to trust those moments, honor them for the glimpse we see of God, and, in the moments when we do not see it so clearly, trust the reality they have shown us a glimpse of.

But all that can feel so frustrating sometimes – to have a God whose glory is sometimes so elusive. And maybe in part it’s because of the kinds of things we can and do cling to with a relentless grasp. I seem to be able to get a really firm hold of guilt and shame. I could fill a suitcase many times over with things I shouldn’t have done. And probably many more with ways in which I am afraid I’m not enough. Maybe I can’t hold them literally in my hand, but I can sometimes feel the physical weight of them in my body.

All of us seem to be able to keep a pretty firm grasp on the systems that perpetuate racism and sexism. I can point my fingers at others and name intractable laws and customs that make progress difficult, but I know that the system has a firm hold on me and at times I on it, holding me in a place of privilege I don’t always want to let go of.

Sometimes the church holds a little too tightly to its traditions and practices, to its power and authority. It leads to things like church bodies voting on who can and cannot bear the word of God, who can and cannot be a full participant in the church, as happened this past week in our full communion partner the United Methodist Church, where a vote took place strengthening a ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-gender marriage blessings. The grasp on the way things have been may likely split the church, as it has in our own denomination and many others over one issue after another, one generation after another. And the devastating news from the Roman Catholic Church continues it seems now every week, in which we hear yet more stories of the church holding onto its power and authority at the expense of the safety of its children and other vulnerable individuals. But lest we point fingers, all of us in the church are complicit in one way or another of holding too tightly to things that aren’t about God’s all-encompassing grace.

And always looming in our lives and our families and our communities is the one grasp from which we cannot escape: death. Whatever else we may cling to with tremendous force, death surely holds us fast.

So on this Transfiguration Sunday with the image of the dazzling, shining Jesus about to slip away into the gritty earthiness of Lent, maybe we can begin to give thanks for a God who escapes our grasp. However frustrating it may be, however difficult it may be to maintain faith in a God whose presence is so often in the ordinary and sometimes too rarely for our taste shining in glory. Maybe we can give thanks for a God who doesn’t get caught up in our crushing grasp. Maybe we can give thanks for a God who dazzles us with just a twinkling of light that begins to draw us away from the places where we are holding on too tightly and begin to instill in us a wonder about what God might be up to next. For surely as soon as we have discovered something about God, we are invited to wonder even deeper, to search again for God’s ever-moving, ever-growing grace. As we reach for it, grab for it, as we try desperately to cling to that light, we will find it not held in our grasp but rather shining on our closed-fisted world.

With this glimpse of glory, with this fleeting hint at the resurrection to come, we turn our attention to the season in which we walk with even greater awareness in the way of the cross. We’ll begin with the reminder this Wednesday of all the ways that sin and death have us tightly in their grasp. But we carry with us this glimpse of glory, this reminder that God will not be bound by our human grasping, that God will not be bound even by death. And one day in resurrection we will find that the light we have been seeking, the light that seems so often just beyond our understanding, just beyond our knowing, just beyond our yearning, is just a tiny reflection drawing us back to the source of light and life, the very God who has held us firmly all along, even as we struggled to hold on in return.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

6th Sunday after Epiphany
February 17, 2019

¹⁷Jesus came down with the twelve and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
  ²⁰Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:
 “Blessed are you who are poor,
  for yours is the dominion of God.
 ²¹“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
  for you will be filled.
 “Blessed are you who weep now,
  for you will laugh.
  ²²“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son-of-Man. ²³Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
 ²⁴“But woe to you who are rich,
  for you have received your consolation.
 ²⁵“Woe to you who are full now,
  for you will be hungry.
 “Woe to you who are laughing now,
  for you will mourn and weep.
  ²⁶“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” – Luke 6:17-26

This morning I have a story to tell you. It’s not my story. Originally it was written by Anne Hebert, though a number of preachers have retold it in various versions, so perhaps you’ve even heard it before. It’s called “The Pointless People,” and it goes something like this:

In the beginning, God created human beings and sent them to frolic in the garden. They played and they played. They danced and they sang. They jumped and they leaped. They splashed in the river. They rested in the shade and basked in the sun. And life was good.

Until someone came along – some say it was a snake, but others whispered and pointed fingers at some of the other people around – in the end it doesn’t really matter who it was. The suggestion began to circulate that all this fun was a waste of time. It was all useless and pointless, unless of course you figured out a way to keep score. Points – now that’s fun. Points will tell you who is the fastest and best, who has the best voice and the nicest clothes. Oh, you can set up points for just about anything the people soon discovered. Instead of having fun they spent their time arguing about the rules and just how you could get ahead.

Pretty soon the whole world was out to get points. Anyone who didn’t have points was ignored and forgotten. People were always comparing the point totals and worrying about getting ahead. They were always a little jealous of some neighbors who had much and secretly smug about others who didn’t have as many points. They still did some of the same things but when they ran it was a race, when they jumped in the water someone gave them a score. The best dancers and musicians got more points. They no longer frolicked. And a lot of people didn’t stop to rest anymore. And it wasn’t as much fun. But pretty soon no one remembered any other way.

But God did. And God was a little bit angry, but mostly really sad to see what had come of the world. So God tried a new way. God came to live among the people and began to go around, frolicking a bit himself, but earnestly and joyfully reminding people that points didn’t really mean anything and that maybe it would be more fun without them. He hosted pointless picnics for thousands, pointless banquets where the guest lists got thrown out. He gathered a few of the people who didn’t have very many points to join him. A great many people were intrigued, but not so much they were ready to give up earning their points. In the end some people were so angry that they had to end him once and for all. And they thought they did, until three days later they found some of those followers frolicking away from his tomb shouting with joy about something called resurrection. And somehow that message about living without points lived on anyway.

Others tell that story better than I just did, but I tell you this quick version now because in our gospel reading we have just caught Jesus laying it out for the crowd that the point systems we know and love don’t actually matter. It’s a crowd of people longing for healing, people hungry for bread and hungry for wholeness. A crowd of curious onlookers and people with power. It’s a crowd of locals and neighbors and foreigners. It’s in-crowd folk and hangers-on. It’s a mix of every body. And I think Jesus looks out and sees what starts to happen in every crowd – people starting to compare their points. And he starts trying to explain this again.

Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are the weeping. Blessed are the reviled. Huh? What is he talking about? That sounds awful! But wait – he’s not done: Woe to the rich. Woe to the filled. Woe to the laughing. Woe to the ones that get lifted up. Wait! That’s not how the points work, Jesus!  You have it all backwards!

I don’t think Jesus is saying there’s anything nice or good or something to aspire to in being poor, hungry, weeping, or reviled. He’s not suggesting that the poor are extra virtuous, that the hungry have some better access to spirituality, the weeping are somehow better off because they can only go up from there. Poverty is exhausting and difficult. To be really profoundly hungry, to wonder where your next meal is coming from, to not be able to feed your family is awful. You see, Jesus isn’t suggesting we just change the rules so that those with the fewest points win. I think he’s suggesting we stop keeping score altogether.

And I don’t think he’s saying that the rich, full, laughing people are terrible people or outside God’s blessing. I sure hope not. Because while I might have challenges here and there – everyone does – I fall squarely in the “Woe to you” category. And I don’t think it’s a prescription for socialism, where everything gets redistributed so that everyone has just enough to live on, though I do think Jesus is probably appalled at the wealth disparity in our world, the way in which some live so far beyond their means while others starve. But I think Jesus is saying that when they realize their money and power isn’t going to save them, when werealize our trust in our own power and the world’s point system isn’t enough to keep us from dying and losing it all anyway, when we confront the reality that our comfort comes all too often at the expense of someone else’s, we are going to be really shocked to realize that we get resurrected into a kingdom without any points to tell us who’s more blessed than whom, and maybe that the things we thought were such blessings weren’t really so important after all. That’s honestly hard news to hear – these upside-down blessings and woes.

So maybe for the sake of those of us who are among the poor and hungry in one way or another and for the sake of those of us who need to have our point system challenged, it would be helpful to think about some modern beatitudes. Most of these are borrowed from Pr. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s fine book chapter and sermon on Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the agnostics and they who doubt; those who aren’t so sure of themselves that they can’t still be surprised. Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion. Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction. Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried. Blessed are kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. Blessed are the laundry guys at the hospital. Blessed are the sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers and the plow drivers. Blessed are the undocumented immigrants and the asylum seekers and the war-torn refugees. Blessed are the seniors who have been told they have nothing to contribute. Blessed are the wrongly accused and the condemned. Blessed are ones weeping over loved ones shot and killed this week. Blessed are the burned out social workers and the overworked teachers. The list goes on and on until blessing is bestowed in every lonely, hurting corner of the earth. [Note: Some of these are quoted from Bolz-Weber directly, others are added and/or rephrased.]

Probably somewhere in that list is something that challenges each of us, maybe something that touches each of us deeply. Some place in which we find ourselves unexpectedly blessed and probably some place we have failed to convey blessing on someone we thought didn’t have enough points. Maybe somewhere in that list or somewhere out in the world is something that makes us start to question the points we assign to just about everything in the world.

Wherever you find yourself in that list of blessings and woes, come join us at this point-less table, by which I mean come have a meal where your points don’t matter and you can’t earn or lose any by coming. Come receive Jesus. Receive blessing to know that whatever you tell yourself, whatever anyone else tells you, that you are beloved. Receive here the challenge to go out into the world and upend the systems that fail to bless far too many people. And maybe, just maybe, come back from the table with a spring in your step, ready to throw out your points and join Jesus again in a resurrection frolic in the garden.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5th Sunday after Epiphany
February 10, 2019

¹In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of The Lord’s robe filled the temple. ²Seraphs were in attendance above the Lord; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. ³And one called to another and said:
 “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
 the whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord.”
⁴The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. ⁵And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts!”
  ⁶Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. ⁷The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” ⁸Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” ⁹And the Lord said, “Go and say to this people:
 ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
 keep looking, but do not understand.’
 ¹⁰Make the mind of this people dull,
  and stop their ears,
  and shut their eyes,
 so that they may not look with their eyes,
  and listen with their ears,
 and comprehend with their minds,
  and turn and be healed.”
 ¹¹Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And the Lord said:
 “Until cities lie waste
  without inhabitant,
 and houses without people,
  and the land is utterly desolate;
 ¹²until the Lord sends everyone far away,
  and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
 ¹³Even if a tenth part remain in it,
  it will be burned again,
 like a terebinth or an oak
  whose stump remains standing
  when it is felled.”
 The holy seed is its stump. – Isaiah 6:1-13

¹Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, ²he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; those who were fishing had gone out of the boats and were washing their nets. ³Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. ⁴When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” ⁵Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” ⁶When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. ⁷So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. ⁸But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” ⁹For Simon and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; ¹⁰and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching human beings.” ¹¹When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed Jesus. – Luke 5:1-11

My own call story to ordained ministry involved no miraculous visions of God, no miraculous catches of fish. In fact, nothing that seems particularly miraculous at all. But I recognize something of my own call story in the ones we just read: it did involve the same kind of skeptical resistance that seems common to so many Biblical call stories.

The first time I have a clear memory of someone suggesting to me that I should become a pastor, I wanted to laugh out loud. I was too shy and too polite to laugh in the face of an adult, but my 12-or-13-year-old self wanted to respond, “But real people don’t become pastors!!” Even though I was old enough to know better, some part of me thought pastors just emerged fully formed and existed only in the church building or at church functions. Normal people, which I suppose even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, meant broken people who don’t always feel confident or have the answers, people whose faith wavers and wonders, people who make mistakes. Thosepeople don’t become pastors. Needless to say, even though there was no profound vision or miraculous sign, I think God was at work, because from that brief comment on, the idea never let go of me. And ordinary and flawed as I was and am, I did become a pastor.

Today we get two of the many great call stories in the Bible. Isaiah, minding his own business, has a vision of God. And, according to the history he himself knows, people who see God face-to-face, drop dead. And if that weren’t enough he sees the seraphim, angels. But not the cute-faced chubby little cupids we’ll see plastered all over this week for Valentine’s Day. No, these are fiery serpentine creatures with six wings who are more intimidating than comforting. And Isaiah says, “Whoa! Not me. No. Normal people don’t see God. Normal people don’t go prophesying. People like me are just trying to mind our own business!” And God touches his lips with a burning coal, which, honestly can’t help God’s argument that much if he’s trying to convince Isaiah to be the prophet of God’s message, a message in that moment of history that was mostly of doom and gloom. Burning coals? No thanks, not for normal people either. And finally God asks, “Now, whom shall I send?” And most people read this as if Isaiah all of a sudden jumps up shouting, “Oo! Oo! Pick me! Pick me!” But I kind of wonder if instead he slowly takes a few steps back, sheepishly looks over his right shoulder than his left hoping that somehow there might be crowds of other people there to answer the question. Until he realizes that God is essentially just asking him. And he replies, “Um…I guess….you could, if you really want to, send me?”  Isaiah is just an ordinary person, with ordinary dreams and ordinary problems. And God steps in and makes him a prophet. Not an easy job, but one that God equips him to do.

And Simon Peter is pretty ordinary, too. He gets up in the morning to fish. He mends nets, he catches fish, he cleans them and sells them. He makes just enough to eke by, just enough to put a simple meal on the table most nights. And then he goes to bed, gets up the next morning to do it all again. He’s a hard working guy, maybe a little rough around the edges. Not a bad guy, but by no means perfect either. And along comes Jesus, who’s never fished a day in his life, giving fishing advice to this man. But maybe he’s heard something of Jesus already, maybe he’s even met him, or maybe he just wants to prove the guy wrong. And he casts the net one more time, knowing it will be empty because the fish just aren’t swimming into the nets today. And up comes a catch of fish beyond what this fisherman has ever seen in his life. The nets are breaking, the fishermen are falling into the water, the boats are sinking under this miraculous catch. And finally ashore, Simon Peter realizes he isn’t worthy of standing in the presence of this miraculously abundant teacher. And Jesus responds with an invitation to follow, an invitation, in fact, to be at the start of a whole new way of understanding who God is, to be among the first to share the good news with the world. An ordinary fisherman, invited to do the work of God.

Ordinary people, called to do extraordinary things. Because when they encouter God, even the most ordinary of tasks, the things they have done day after day of their lives, becomes infused with the miraculous. Both Isaiah and Simon Peter are blown away, nearly crushed by the abundance of God. For Isaiah it’s the abundance of the vision of God enthroned in majesty and glory. For Simon Peter it’s the catch of fish that nearly capsizes his boat. God shows up and they are physically, mentally, and emotionally crushed by the abundance of God. That sounds terrible, and in a way it sort of is. It’s grace so overwhelming that it makes them realize their own inadequacy. It’s the moment in which they are so fully confronted with God that they realize they can’t live, much less succeed, without God.

One way to say that is to say they recognize their own sinfulness. And we assume that the response of God to sin is forgivenss. Let me be clear that God’s response to sin and brokenness is absolutely one of forgiveness. But God’s response to human brokenness, especially perhaps the kind of brokenness that manifests as our not feeling worthy or not feeling capable enough or courageous enough, God’s response to thatkind of brokenness, that kind of sin if we want to use that word, God’s response is call. A call to do the work of God in the world, call to proclaim the good news in whatever way your daily life allows. God’s response to Isaiah, to Peter, to you and me, is something like, “Yes, of course you’re not perfect, of course you’re going to mess it up, of course this mission is more than you can handle. But that’s what I’mhere for, so come on! Let’s go!”

And that’s how very real people, very ordinary people, get called by God to do something profound and world-changing. But here’s the thing – that means you, too. I don’t throw my own call story in with Isaiah and Simon Peter because I think it’s worthy of being lifted up as a lofty and important calling. I lift it up because I recognize my own ordinariness and the ways that God uses me anyway. And because from time to time I, too, receive the gift of being utterly crushed by the abundance of God’s grace, so overwhelmed by God’s generosity and love that I cannot imagine how I could stand up in the world again. Sometimes it’s communion, the power of God’s very self given for you, for me.  That bread and wine is the presence of God as magnificent as the vision Isaiah has of God on the throne. Sometimes it’s splashing in the waters of the font, remembering the unequivocal welcome into the family of God. Often it’s the space of silence and a carefully worded question my spiritual director offers that allows an image of God to form in my mind. And it’s there I hear the voice of call again – call not just to my work as a pastor, but call to my work as spouse, parent, friend, citizen, human being.

And I believe wholeheartedly that you, too, are being called. You, too, are imperfect people who have gifts and skills alongside a history of mistakes and missteps. You are being called by God. So I want to offer you three questions in light of these call stories. Where have you been overwhelmed by God’s abundance? What is God calling you to at this moment of your life? And what message are you telling yourself to avoid that call?

Because all of us receive an invitation to serve God in our lives and all of us at one time or another try to wriggle out of that call. We tell ourselves that regular people can’t do evangelism. Real people don’t change the world. Average people don’t stand up and proclaim God’s word. Ordinary folk don’t walk around living out radical love for the poor and hungry. But, in fact, they do. There are only ordinary, normal, everyday people, no matter how famous or seemingly important.

As a church, too, we sometimes miss the incredible gifts God has already given to us. We worry that we are too old, too small, too poor, too whatever for God to use us. Here at Christ the King we think we’re just ordinary. But that’s exactly the point. We are just an ordinary church, and God shows up in our midst every week – every day, knocking us over with grace, and giving us a call to share the love of Jesus. We do well to open our hearts and minds to explore just what that call looks like for us in this place and time, but let us not think we are no longer called just because we can’t see past our ordinariness.

And maybe, just maybe, in all that exploring of call, we might start to realize that there’s another lie we’ve been believing– that ordinary people don’t get resurrected either. We sometimes think and often act as if God can’t or won’t bring us back from failure or defeat, as if God might not actually bring us back in the end from death itself. All too often we wonder if we do enough, have enough, are enough. And God must just smile and laugh and say, “Of course you’re not. Welcome to the resurrected kingdom of God where you have a place, and a call, and the joy of God’s love forever.”

-Pastor Steven Wilco

3rd Sunday after Epiphany
January 27, 2019

 

Sometimes we feel like there are too many words and not enough action. But sometimes words are the action. While we don’t want to just sit around and talk about things, there are times when a carefully spoken word changes the reality around us. This is called performative speech. Think marriage vows…with the words, “I do,” promises are made and someone proclaims a sentence that in fact makes a couple married when they were not before the words were spoken. Or “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” With word, and, yes, water, a person becomes baptized. Or much simpler and ordinary: “I promise to do the dishes tonight.” The dishes aren’t done, but a promise now exists because it has been spoken. Or when the promise is broken, someone says, “I apologize.” And, perhaps, “I accept your apology.”

But let’s be honest about this kind of speech – it’s not always so joyful. “You are under arrest. I sentence you to prison. We declare war. I resign. You’re fired.” All these things create a new reality in their being spoken, a reality perhaps at least someone doesn’t want to be created. Speech can create, but it can also un-create. Though it’s not technically an example of performative speech, hate speech and even simple name-calling creates or uncreates a reality, too. “I hate you. You’re worthless. We don’t want your kind here.” It speaks into being un unwelcome or hostile environment. And heard enough times, speech like that – and much worse, of course, that doesn’t deserve repeating – can shape those who hear it such that they internalize it. Someone else’s words create internal experiences for us that change and shape who we are – for better or worse.

Today’s readings are full of performative speech. In the book of Nehemiah, which even the most active of Bible readers rarely find themselves reading, we hear the story of God’s people returning from exile. There had been generations of failed leadership, tribal struggles, war with neighboring peoples. And, as often happens, an empire emerged that was powerful enough to destroy what was left and drive at least many of the people away from their homeland. Generations more lived in a foreign land struggling to find new expression for their faith in a different context. And now, some of the people have returned to Jerusalem. They have tried to make a new life in a home that they have known only in the stories of their grandparents and great-grandparents. They are trying to negotiate the ways their faith has grown differently than the faith of those left behind. They are trying to seek hope in the midst of ruins just beginning to be rebuilt.

And so Ezra calls them together and together they read. They read the promises of God to their ancestors. They read the stories of liberation from oppression. They read the stories of God’s vision for justice, for rest, for wholeness of person and community. And, just as it does when we gather on Sunday to hear the scriptures read among us, it creates a new or at least renewed existence. To hear the old stories of God’s promises made and fulfilled through all manner of trial and hardship has the power to create faith and hope in us. Words are read, promises are spoken, a new reality is created.

And even more so when Jesus stands in the synagogue to read scripture. He returns to his hometown synagogue now an adult who is beginning a ministry. All the eyes are upon him as he takes the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and finds the place: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of the sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” To people who largely still experienced a difficult life living on the economic margins of the empire it probably sounded like a pipe dream, something far off in a fairy tale land. But Jesus pauses and says to them: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” What they may not yet see is that in reading this, in placing God’s promise yet again in a new place, a new context, Jesus creates the reality of the promise all over again. Speaking the words creates the freedom of which it speaks.

And, yet, their troubles, ailments, poverty persists. The God of life has stood among them and proclaimed their release and yet they remain bound as ever. It’s what we experience to – the already and not-yet of God’s promise. Jesus has come, freedom has been proclaimed. But we remain caught up in all the same kinds of things that perpetuate oppression and poverty. We participate, most of us, as both victims and perpetrators. We are both the ones hurt and the ones hurting. We hold grudges, we cling to privilege at the expense of others, we speak division and violence into being, we alienate parts of the body of Christ by ignoring them, tokenizing them, walling them off. We still live among ruins and feel the weight of captivity.

And yet the words are spoken into our midst every Sunday. Today, in your hearing, the fulfillment of God’s promise. The God who spoke the whole of creation into being, speaks words of liberation and freedom and restoration in our midst, week after week after week. God says, “You are my beloved, with you I am well-pleased.” And it is so. God says, “Your sins are forgiven.” And it is so. God says, “This is my body given for you.” And it is so. God says, “You are blessed.” And it is so.

We so much more easily believe the things that tear us down and tear others down. We live as if to be set free might leave us unprotected and alone. We live as if setting others free might cause us to lose what we have. But into the midst of it all is God speaking to us over and over again, reminding us of the promises of old and speaking them anew in ourtime and place. God is calling us to speak with care, to speak justice and freedom, to speak love and welcome, to speak peace and hope, to speak all those things into existence. But even more than that God is speaking us into being over and over again. Renewing and resurrecting us from our failures and setting us free from the things that bind us, giving us new life every day. And calling us beloved. And when God speaks, it comes into being. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Epiphany
Sunday, January 6, 2019

¹In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the East came to Jerusalem, ² asking, “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 magi 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. – Matthew 2:1-12

Throughout college I worked as student staff at the campus chapel, spending time there most days of four years in school. It was their practice to give graduating seniors from the chapel staff a framed print, usually of a Bible verse. I was given this print, not a Bible verse, but as far as I know an unattributed quote. It has ever since hung near my desk to remind me to follow its sage advice. I think, perhaps, I had spent enough time with the campus pastors that they knew me pretty well and knew what kind of advice I probably needed to read and reread. It says:

“If, as Herod, we fill our lives with things, and again with things; if we consider ourselves so unimportant that we must fill every moment of our lives with action, when will we have the time to make the long, slow journey across the desert as did the Magi? Or sit and watch the stars as did the shepherds? Or brood over the coming of the child as did Mary? For each one of us, there is a desert to travel. A star to discover. And a being within ourselves to bring to life.”

This brief statement says a lot of things all at once. But more than anything it makes me think about the magi and their journey to see Jesus. Their journey had so many parts that it is a miracle in and of itself they made the journey at all.

Long before the star appeared in the sky over Bethlehem, these magi, whoever exactly they were, however many of them there were, they were people who watched. They observed. They spent hours perhaps every night watching the stars, discerning their patterns. Likely they were Zoroastrian priests who were searching for a sign in the stars of a the miraculous birth of more of God’s prophets. These were people who dedicated their lives to observing the ordinary looking for the miraculous, knowing that perhaps for whole generations there would not be a miraculous star to observe (though surely they saw many magnificent night skies). It is not a job I have patience for – to sit and watch and perhaps likely never see what one is looking for. This requires a deep and abiding awareness of the present that I struggle at times to find. I am much more like Herod who is busy paying attention to all the wrong things and letting myself get caught up in fear and anxiety, becoming reactive.

But back the magi…Having observed the star they make a decision to go and see. This, too, is amazing. How often have we observed something wonderful, even miraculous, and decided not to pick up our lives and follow it? How often have we decided it must not be for us or that we aren’t worthy or that we shouldn’t get involved in whatever it is that is going on? Or we decide we just don’t have the time and energy.

And then they have the arduous journey. At any point they might well have turned back. They might have risked thieves on the road, places of scarce water and food. They left behind their homes and communities. It cannot have been easy. The arrival of Jesus might be wonderful and miraculous, but it does not make their lives easier, rather it makes them harder. There are times, too, in our lives when following Jesus, or even seeking Jesus in the midst of all the other things that demand our attention, requires a difficult journey, hard decisions, perhaps periods of personal discomfort.

And after all that, they can’t even find what they are looking for. They have to stop and ask for directions. These are experts in observing the skies, people of deep spiritual understanding, and even they need help on the journey. And not just help from other people like themselves, but help from people very much unlike themselves. They needed the help of a crooked king and scribes from a tradition foreign to them. To find Jesus they needed to build connections in the communities along their way. They needed to bridge the divide they might have perceived between themselves and the other. They had to engage those they might not have known, those they might not have liked, those they considered to be not so spiritual. And it’s thatencounter that finally leads them to Jesus. Perhaps we too need to get out of our churchy circles and build bridges with unexpected partners. Maybe we will discover Jesus that way, too.

And so the magi arrive, bearing their gifts, gifting more than anything their presence, that is their p-r-e-s-e-n-c-e, their being present. They show up, they offer themselves. They behold the mystery. They do not fully understand. They do not develop a program or create a set of judgments about the world. They stand in the presence of the holy. Perhaps they give a deep bow. Perhaps they stand in silence. Maybe they sing. But they stand in the presence of the holy and let themselves experience it, something else we might learn from the magi.

And, finally, they return home. But on the advice of a vivid dream they go home by another route. Their encounter with Jesus – that is not just meeting the infant but the whole encounter with the holy from watching to journeying to heading home again – their encounter with Jesus changes something. It sends them home in a new way. It opens up new pathways for them.

Oh to be the magi! What gift that all would have been. Even the long waiting, the long journey, to be transformed by the presence of Jesus. Instead, as the print on my wall reminds me when I dare to read it, I am all too often more like Herod. Not malicious, though by many accounts Herod was. Not evil, as I’m sure many made him out to be. But having filled life with so many things that it becomes hard to make the journey. It becomes hard to notice the star. It becomes hard to bear gifts and to be present. It becomes hard to take new pathways. It becomes hard to make out the presence of Jesus.

Friends, it is hard. And we do well to think about the way our lives are shaped and how we might begin to make room for all of that, to claim our worthiness for the waiting, the watching, the journeying, the being present. To claim the boldness that God has given us. For there is indeed, as the print says, a journey for us and a being within ourselves coming to life.

But for now, you have come here. To this place. Some of you came this morning just from next door. Others of you from farther. Some of you were literally born in this congregation, others of us had paths to this place that wound through other communities. You have come seeking something, drawn in by something. And here we are. And here is Jesus. There will be new paths, new journeys, new ways of discovering Jesus. But for now, rest for a moment. Because you offer here your being present. And here is Jesus. Jesus in the words of scripture. Jesus in the bread and wine at the table. Jesus in your fellow magi next to you in the pew.

And even when you aren’t here. Jesus finds a way to you, a way to meet you on your journey. A way to lead you and push you, a way to comfort and protect you, a way to bring you courage and hope, a way to join us up with fellow travelers. And always, always, the presence of God drawing us in and bringing something new to birth in us.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

First Sunday of Christmas
December 30, 2018

¹²As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. ¹³Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. ¹⁴Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. ¹⁵And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. ¹⁶Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. ¹⁷And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God, the Father, through him. – Colossians 3:12-17

⁴¹Now every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. ⁴²And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. ⁴³When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. ⁴⁴Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. ⁴⁵When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. ⁴⁶After three days they found Jesus in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. ⁴⁷And all who heard Jesus were amazed at his understanding and his answers. ⁴⁸When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” ⁴⁹Jesus said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” ⁵⁰But they did not understand what he said to them. ⁵¹Then Jesus went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart.
  ⁵²And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. – Luke 2:41-52

If we were looking for a definition of how we want to be as people and how we want to be as church, Colossians 3 would be a pretty solid one: “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. ¹³Bear with one another and…forgive each other…clothe yourselves with love…let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…be thankful.”

Ok, any questions? Should we just go do that, now? Of course! And at the same time, of course we are not able to do that all perfectly all the time. Maybe we do alright a lot of the time. Sometimes we fall pretty short of the ideal. But mostly it’s not a matter of not knowing what we need to do. We know the goal, but we are on a lifelong journey of learning to live it out. I hate to tell you but there won’t be a magic day for each of us when we finally learn how to do this and then we’re all set. We will always be learning.

Which is why I love this unique story about Jesus. It’s the only story we get of Jesus in childhood – the only snippet between birth and ministry at around 30 years old. It’s a story of what it means to be an adolescent exploring independence and boundaries with parents. It’s a story that resonates with any caregiver who has lost a young one in a crowd. It’s a story that resonates with anyone who’s ever been a teenager wanting some time away from their parents. But if we take seriously the divinity of Jesus, if we believe what we confess that Jesus is fully God even as he is full human, then this is a story about God learning.

It’s easy to miss in all the other interesting details of this story, but Jesus is sitting at the feet of the temple teachers and learning and asking them questions. Perhaps much of the art depicting this scene, including the art on our bulletin cover, has gotten into our minds, and we picture a young Jesus holding court at the temple, lecturing the adults. But this is not what the text presents to us, nor the style of teaching that centuries of rabbis have used. What the text tells us is that Jesus was listening and asking questions. He was a star student, clearly: asking good, deep questions that created amazement at his understanding. But he was a student engaged in a traditional Jewish way of learning through dialogue and questions.

Already in Jesus’ time there were a plethora of voices in debate about how to truly take seriously the scriptures that guided their faith and life. There was an ongoing debate about what those scriptures meant with each new challenge that was presented to them with each new day. Even as wise teachers instructed the young, the young participated in this debate with their questions.

And so Jesus, God made flesh, sits at the feet of the teachers and engages the debates. And Jesus learns something. Learns many things, even. Imagine this, the God of the universe, the creator of all things, has, for the first time, fully and completely inhabited human flesh, and so now has the opportunity to engage these debates in a new way as Jesus’ body grows and changes and God experiences human life from inside. The mystery of the incarnation we celebrate this whole Christmas season is that God is experiencing something new by being human among us.

To learn fully what this human being thing is all about requires dialogue with others. And this is a fundamental characteristic of God, one that isn’t unique to Jesus but represented in other stories throughout scripture – that God is in ongoing conversation with human beings, that as God’s creation evolves and changes, so, too, does God just for being in relationship with us who are evolving and changing. God chooses to be in a relationship of mutual learning with us. And God does this not just from a distance with humanity as a whole but in one-on-one ways. God sits out ourfeet, too, eager to learn about us and our experiences, eager to know what it is that makes us tick. Eager to understand our deepest needs and desires, our fear, our hopes, our dreams. And God learns. God learns about us, God learns something new about grace.

Because grace isn’t just one thing that God pours out the same day after day. Grace is a unique response to each of us every moment. Grace is the power of love we need in the face of particular needs, particular failures, particular faults, particular good days and bad days. Grace is new for God every moment because the grace we need each moment is new and different.

I have to imagine that this is a piece of what Jesus is learning sitting in the temple with learned rabbis and other students. Learning what it means for grace to be new in every new place, with every new person, in every new time. Jesus is learning what God’s love looks like in Jerusalem, in the temple, and for his own life back in Galilee. What does it look like to live the pure and unbounded love of God in this body in this place and time?

And if God is learning, I think that gives us a call to be learning, too. It means that even when we get it right, even when we clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. When we let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts. It means we don’t stop there. It means we haven’t mastered it. Instead it means we are called to keep moving forward into the next moment, the next opportunity to see how all that manifests itself the next day. And we’ll fail at it again at some point – this is part of learning – making mistakes, then making amends and moving forward anew. It means we are called to keep engaging the question of how to live outå our faith in each new day.

It also calls us as the church to be a learning organization. This is something people are talking about in the business community and the non-profit management world, but at the heart it’s also a faithful way to be in the world. It means that one of the important ways we work to meet our goals is not just to figure out how to do something but also to shift our culture as a community to be one that is always learning, reflecting, asking questions. Some kinds of things – including being a faithful community – don’t tend to have the kind of work that you can figure out how to do once and just keep doing it. Becoming a learning organization means cultivating the kind of environment where we can raise questions, take risks, and not be satisfied with something going well or going poorly. If as a congregation we want to better serve families and young people we have to think about how to sit down at their feet, so to speak, to listen and learn. And then we have to learn not to make assumptions that once we’ve understood something about it that we’ve understood everything about it. God’s being a learning and growing God calls us to be learning and growing people, always asking ourselves, one another, and the community how we can better live our faith, how we can better live God’s grace.

But in that challenging and difficult calling, let us not forget the grace of a learning and growing God. A God who meets us each new day to linger with us, maybe longer than it seems God should be supposed to. A God who listens and asks questions to deepen an understanding of who we are. A God who seeks to know us deeply so that grace might be offered for us in the way in which we most need it. That is why we return again and again to the same scriptures year after year. Why we return to the many of the same hymns season after season. Why we gather week after week to hear the words of grace and forgiveness, to receive the body and blood offered to us in grace. Because each year, each season, each week, each day God is learning and growing with us and the grace offered today is offered in new ways and to new depths because we and God have grown and changed. That is the peace of Christ that dwells in our hearts and invites us into a life of thanksgiving.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Christmas Eve
December 24, 2018

¹In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. ²This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. ³All went to their own towns to be registered. ⁴Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. ⁵He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. ⁶While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. ⁷And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
  ⁸In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: ¹¹to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹²This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” ¹³And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
 ¹⁴“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
  and on earth peace among those whom God favors!”
  ¹⁵When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” ¹⁶So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. ¹⁷When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; ¹⁸and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. ¹⁹But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. – Luke 2:1-20

The night we have been waiting for is here. Week by week we have been lighting more candles on our advent wreath. Waiting. Hoping. Adding more and more flickering flames as the nights grew longer and colder. Finally all the candles are aglow, the lights reminding us that Christmas has finally arrived.

The night we have been waiting for is here. We have been decorating our homes and our church. Lights twinkling in the darkness. Perhaps, too, the wrapping of presents, the baking of cookies, the preparations for dinner, the waiting for Santa’s arrival. All in hopes of seeing the warm glow of joy on the faces of loved ones, perhaps to hold at bay feelings of grief and loss and sadness that so often also bubble up this season.

The night we have been waiting for is here. The world seems to be falling apart. Natural disasters abound like the tsunami in Indonesia this weekend. Political fights affecting so many families this holiday season. War and violence continue, including in modern-day Bethlehem, the city we read and sing about tonight. And we have been promised on this night hope and joy. We have been promised on this night a savior to come among us. We have been promised a new kind of life with God dwelling among us.

The night we have been waiting for is here. To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. We have sung the familiar carols. Heard the familiar story. Mary and Joseph, tired from travel, lodge in the only place they can find – among the animals. Mary gives birth. Though we didn’t read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth we remember the star that appears above, a bright beacon of light that shines down on magi far away inviting them to travel afar to this savior of the nations. We read, of course, of the angels appearing to the shepherds. Into an otherwise ordinary night sky, a glowing angel to make an announcement, and soon a bright array of the whole heavenly host singing “Glory to God in the Highest!” The most joyful, beautiful, boisterous sound – perhaps even with some of them ringing their bells! And bright. Brighter than we can perhaps imagine, maybe almost blinding the sleepy-eyed shepherds. They go and see, for they, too, have been waiting, hoping, longing for a savior. And they find there…a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger?

It’s here perhaps that we pause and wonder just what kind of salvation this is. Because all that waiting, all that hoping, all those promises of light and life, and we, along with the shepherds receive a baby. Not exactly what they thought they were waiting for. Maybe not a solution to all they want fixed in their lives. And, honestly, sometimes it seems, even at Christmas, like we don’t even manage to make it to the manger with the shepherds to see that much. Sometimes the long-awaited Christmas arrives and we feel more like most of the people the night Jesus was born…asleep in our beds, oblivious to the new arrival, sleeping away without having noticed the shining star or the angelic appearance, still dwelling in darkness. So often it can feel like Christmas comes and we are still hoping. Still waiting. Still wondering when salvation will come.

We can believe God’s great Christmas gift, and yet it still sometimes feels we are wandering around looking for the light of Christ to come shining in. We light candles, hang our Christmas lights, sing our angel choruses. And there perhaps we will see a glimpse, catch a glimmer of hope, a taste of what we have been hoping for and longing for.

But this Christmas, in the moments when I find it difficult to make out the Christmas light, I’m finding hope in the story of another light twinkling in the sky. One we simply don’t think about this time of year, one that come out only in the warmest days, seen only on the year’s shortest nights. The light of fireflies glowing in the sky. There is something magical about them, something magnificent and full of wonder. But they are only around a few short weeks before they lay their eggs and disappear. But those eggs quickly hatch as little worms that live for nearly a year under the soil. They crawl around, glowing away where no one can see them. Hidden from our eyes, forgotten from our minds, but no less alive and shining bright for our lack of awareness. Eating, working, growing bigger, brighter, stronger, ready to emerge and dazzle the world. They will live like that until very near the summer solstice when they will nestle into a mud chamber and in a matter of days transform into the fireflies we know. The ones we will see flying about flashing their wonder-inducing display of light. It gives me joy to know that under the cold soil, under the blanket of snow that will soon coat the ground, beneath our feet and forgotten, shines that warm summer glow already. We may not see it yet, but glows nonetheless.**

Maybe this Christmas you are feeling full of hope, full of a sense of God’s come to dwell with you in the messy, dirty details of your life. I hope you see bright beacons of hope warmly glowing like the gentle radiance of a newborn baby in the manger. I hope you are surprised by good news, with angelic radiance shining bright. But for those who still feel asleep, or who are still looking down at the dirt and wondering when your light will come, I hope you know somewhere, somehow that God has already come to shine in your life. The promise of Christmas is God taking flesh to know the depth of our lives. Not only long ago and far away, but in every new place and time. So whether we see it tonight or not, whether we receive the long-awaited promise tonight or not, the promise is there, the light is shining. Jesus has come and the light of the star, the light of the angels, the light of the Christ child shines bright out in the open, but it shines, too, for all those who missed the wondrous birth, who missed the announcement of God with them, those who still long for the awaited promise. And the light of Christ shines even deep in hidden places working away in our world even unseen by our eyes and unknown to our minds, the Christmas light is full and bright. It is growing bigger and stronger all the time, preparing for the moment when that light will burst forth again even more fully in a way that all creation will see and experience. But for now, in the long nights of winter, in the dirt and mess of our lives, Christ has already come to dwell among us! Alleluia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

**This image of the firefly has stuck with me from among many wonderful images in Gayle Boss’s All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings, the book that has been my daily devotional through the Advent season this year. It provides marvelous description after description of the way in which God’s creatures survive the long, cold winters in northern climates, and hints at the way in which their preparing and waiting reveals to us something about our own preparing and waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled.