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

²²At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴So the Judeans gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” ²⁵Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; ²⁶but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. ³⁰The Father and I are one.” – John 10:22-30

The following sermon was preached in two versions, one at Christ the King on May 12 and the other (as below) was preached at the chapel at the Lutheran Center in Chicago on May 15. 

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

A couple of years ago when my father died, I called for a pastor.

Even though I’d beena pastor responding to such calls for several years, in the moment facing death I couldn’t have told you why I needed a pastor or what I expected the pastor to do.  I certainly wasn’t expecting any miracles. I just knew that people who are part of churches call their pastor when someone dies and something deep inside kept insisting that a pastor needed to come.

There’s something about death, even when it is expected, that is disorienting. It leaves us a little confused and sometimes asking for things we don’t even ourselves understand.

So it is that when Tabitha, a.k.a. Dorcas, great saint of the earliest church, dies, some of the disciples send for Peter, a leader of the church, a disciple of Jesus, a personal direct witness to the resurrected Christ. They insist: “Come to us without delay!” I suspect they aren’t sure exactly what they need or what they want Peter to do. I suspect Peter doesn’t have any idea what is about to take place.

But he comes. He is present to their weeping. He listens to them as through their tears as they tell the stories of what Tabitha did for them, for their community. He, too, enters the disorientation in the presence of death. Then Peter makes some space in the room, and he prays.

It’s here that I don’t know what to make of these few short phrases. Just what does he pray? Are his prayers simply the shedding of tears along with the widows? Or is it some early version of the prayers and scriptures we use today to commend a life back to God? Does the idea to tell Tabitha to “Get up!” from her deathbed come to him from the Spirit or is it something he asks for? Is it moments or is it hours of prayer that move to the moment of Tabitha’s resurrection? What in this moment of prayer moves him from the disorientation of death to the clarity of resurrection? If only we could figure that out we, too, might be able to enter the disorientation that death creates and proclaim resurrection.

What would it be like to stand at the scene of yet another deadly school shooting last week and instead of just being disoriented, confused, hurt, and scared all over again we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?

What would it be like to stand in the face of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or at an ICE detention center, like the one in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where asylum seeker and ELCA pastor Betty Rendón is being held after a brutal arrest last week, or to stand at the border where many people whose names we do not know are being caged or sent back to deadly situations and, instead of being defeated by the power of death, we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?

What would it be like to stand in our own communities, where too many people live in poverty and hunger, and not be disoriented by the death-dealing forces of inequality, but instead we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?

What would it be like to stand in the chaos of an emergency room or a terror attack or a war zone or a natural disaster or a collapsing economy or just to stand up period in the chaos of our world, and instead of being shut down by the powers of death we heard the voice of God echoing resurrection into the world through us?

Because Peter may be a well-known saint, a witness to the resurrection, but so are we, people who have died and risen again in the waters of baptism. So are we, witnesses with the women at the empty tomb. So are we, people who have heard the voice of God speaking to us and reminding us that we are forever in the hands of God.

Maybe we don’t go out commanding dead bodies to rise again. While I won’t deny God’s power to do that, I suspect our call to speak resurrection might look a little bit different.

The pastor who came at my father’s death did not raise him from the dead. The fog of grief was still present. But after the prayers and scriptures he read something was different. Something had shifted. The voice of God, a voice I recognized even in the face of death, had spoken somewhere in all of that and resurrection felt somehow more tangible.

Maybe we won’t fix the whole immigration system, maybe we won’t end gun violence forever, maybe we won’t end hunger everywhere. Or…maybe we will. Maybe it’s possible to raise the dead when we hear the voice of God and it echoes through us into the world. Maybe for too long we have stood as witnesses to new life and failed to realize God’s voice speaking the power of resurrection into being through us.

Maybe with Peter we have an opportunity to pray with the bold idea that God might actually use us to change the world and not just to kinda help out a little here and there along the way. This Easter season we have again been witnesses. We have seen and heard what God has done. We are invited to the table again now to hear God’s voice remind us whose we are as the body of Christ. And then we are invited to stand with the dead and dying. Somewhere in the moments of prayer, in the moments when we ourselves are disoriented and defeated, we hear again the trusted voice of the one who in baptism has already called us forth from death. And then we get to be witnesses in a new way when we experience God’s voice echoing through us, speaking with boldness to the powers of death: Rise again! Get up!

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

3rd Sunday of Easter
May 5, 2019

¹Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. ²Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. ³Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.
  ⁴Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. ⁷That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. ⁸But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.
  ⁹When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. ¹⁰Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. ¹²Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. ¹³Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. ¹⁴This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.
  ¹⁵When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” Simon Peter said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶A second time Jesus said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷Jesus said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to Jesus, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. ¹⁸Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” ¹⁹(Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.) After this Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” -John 21:1-19

This homily is with thanks to Rev. Kelly Faulstich-Svoboda, whose brief but eloquent homily at morning prayer at the Institute of Liturgical Studies last week inspired my own homily. 

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

So says many a parent, fitness trainer, dietician, doctor, and, well, a lot of people. Now some of you are undoubtedly people who can skip breakfast or get by with a coffee and pastry. But if that describes you, I do not understand you. I get hangry if I don’t get breakfast within a reasonable period of time after waking up. And not just coffee and pastry. I need eggs. Or at least some veggie sausage – something with protein. Or else I just can’t quite get through the morning. It can throw my whole day off not having a chance to eat a breakfast that grounds me for the day.

So I am especially glad for Jesus’ invitation to have breakfast in this morning’s gospel reading. Before the work that needs to be done. Before the mission to the ends of the earth. Before the pain that is to come for the sake of the gospel. Before the metaphorical sheep are metaphorically fed. Jesus invites the disciples to an actual breakfast.

Yes, they are hungry for Jesus, hungry to hear their call anew, hungry to serve the world, hungry for the peace that Jesus proclaimed, hungry for an end to oppression, hungry for a world in which all are fed. But in the moment, meeting Jesus on the beach in the early morning hours, they just have a human need for breakfast. They need someone to give them a moment to rest and eat.

In the midst of busy lives and the ever-constant work that we do together as the church, Jesus invites us to rest. He sets a simple but gracious table. The fire is already going. The smell of the charcoal fire, that conjures up comfort food about to be cooked and the sense of community that gathers for a summer barbeque. Then he takes what the fishermen have – an abundance of gifts presented to them through Jesus’ invitation to gather them up – and Jesus makes breakfast out of it.

Certainly we who celebrate at this table every week might hear resonances with Eucharist. We begin that part of worship with an offering – with a gathering of resources from our abundance. We offer up our financial gifts, our bread and our wine – gifts that are truly ours, but always truly a gift to us first from God. And there in the giving of thanks to God for salvation history, in the invitation to the Holy Spirit to breathe on us anew, God takes what is offered and sets a table. A table for us to feast, but also a table that opens us to the ways we might help others to feast in the world. It is always Jesus who makes the invitation to thistable – come, have breakfast.

Today we welcome another person to that table. Ella has been present at the table for years, where she joined in community – in communion – with us and where she has received a blessing in remembrance of God’s baptismal promise to her. But today she is invited to join the eating and drinking, to be at this table in a new way. To taste the invitation to eat and drink, to be reminded in a new way of God’s invitation to her. To be reminded that God is always setting a place for her at this table. Hear Jesus’ invitation: Come, have breakfast.

But it is not only at the Eucharist that we hear this invitation. This scene takes place in the midst of the fishermen’s daily lives. Who knows how much time has passed since their first life-changing encounter with the risen Christ. They are doing what they do. Fishing at night, trying to make a living. They are in the midst of the busyness of ordinary lives. And it’s there that Jesus appears to them. It’s not just special occasions, or exceptional events. It’s not even just every week in Eucharist, but in the every day moments of our lives when we need strength, encouragement, a simple word to sustain us – the invitation of Jesus: Come, have breakfast.

Maybe it’s the call to give yourself a little slack in the midst of a busy time. Maybe it’s the call to love your body as it is and not as you think it should be. Maybe it’s the offer of forgiveness for the things you can’t let go. Maybe it’s the invitation to a quiet moment before returning to your to-do list. Maybe it’s the care from a loved one in the depths of long-term illness. Maybe it’s a moment when someone asks you how you are and really stops to listen. Maybe someone brings you a little snack to get you through the afternoon. Sometimes all it takes to keep going is a little nourishment for body and soul. So before there is more to say, before there is more to do, the call of Jesus: Come, have breakfast.

And Jesus is clear: there is work to be done. Feed my lambs, Peter. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. There is ministry to be done – essential work for the sake of those in need of care. The very lives of Jesus’ many sheep depends on our care and engagement. Their lives depend on our setting a table, on our offering protection, on our shepherding others through the valley of death. And that work will take us the way of Jesus. It will take us to the cross. It will demand our lives from us in one way or another: “’someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.)” There is mission for us that will take us where don’t want to go. To set a place at the table for people we might not want to dine next to. To build our own charcoal fires and invite weary workers to a simple feast. To recognize and gather in God’s abundance for us and for the world. But before all that, an invitation from Jesus: Come, have breakfast.

It’s that simple invitation that gives us the strength to do one more task, to live one more day, to respond one more time from the grace we ourselves have been given. Sometimes we still get hangry, when we haven’t had a chance to stop and take in the nourishment that is offered to us. We get greedy for what is at the table or fail to set places for newcomers and strangers. But after a long night, a long day, a long stretch of years, we hear again the call to the table, the call that comes to us until we eat our fill, the call given at this table, the call of Jesus: Come, have breakfast.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

2nd Sunday of Easter 
April 28, 2019

¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Judeans, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
  ²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
  ²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸Thomas said to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
  ³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. – John 20:19-31

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

I have been haunted by an interview I heard this week. The reporter was talking to members of one of the communities impacted by the Easter morning church bombings in Columbo, Sri Lanka. We are rightly disturbed and disgusted by the violence that took place. The grieving will go on for generations, I suspect. But what struck me about the interview was the description of the neighborhood before and after the bombings. The residents being interviewed, who personally knew family and friends killed and injured, described the neighborhood before the bombings, a neighborhood in which Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus lived in deep relationships with one another. They did business together, went to school together, ate at each other’s homes on a regular basis – which is no small thing! But since the bombing last week, people have become suspicious of each other. They have stopped talking as freely. They have gone inside their homes whenever possible.

And despite heart-warming news stories that highlight the exceptions to the rule this happens in response to every act of terror. I fear the same will emerge from the California synagogue shooting that happened just yesterday. We know it will only be a matter of time before another happens, and people close themselves off a little more.

That’s the point of terrorism – isn’t it? Not just to destroy lives, but to instill fear, to make people suspicious of one another, to divide us one from another. Because when we are afraid, we close ourselves off and hide. Whether it’s fear of weapons and violence or whether it’s fear of rejection or of failure or of having to change. Fear makes us close ourselves off or at least freeze in place where we are. It makes us less likely to try something new or break out of our comfort zones.

This is where we meet the disciples every year on the Sunday after Easter. In the beginning of the gospel reading, it’s still Easter night. The resurrection is still new, most of the disciples, with the notable exception of Mary, have yet to lay eyes on the risen Christ. Only Peter and John have left their hiding place to visit the empty tomb. The doors are locked out of fear. Fear because they have been victims of terror. The intention of those who crucified Jesus was not just to kill the man but to kill the movement. It was a warning to anyone else who wanted to put love ahead of power and people ahead of systems. And it was working. At least initially the followers of Jesus locked themselves away in hiding.

And this is where the resurrected Jesus meets them. He doesn’t bother with unlocking and opening the door. (Something about resurrected bodies is just different and beyond our understanding.) In their fear Jesus appears. This, in and of itself, ought to make them a little bit afraid, though I think initially they are just stunned. Still so utterly shocked partway through the conversation that Jesus has to stop what he’s saying and breathe the breath of life into them again. But there’s no rebuke here. No chastisement for being locked away. Fear will not be banished by bidding it away with words. Nowhere in the history of people being afraid have the words, “Just stop being afraid,” ever worked.

But you know what does work? The gift of peace. The kind of peace Jesus offers the disciples that Easter evening. There’s the possibility to be utterly afraid and still have a sense of peace like a river attending one’s way. There can be bomb blasts or angry mobs or just cranky critics, and there is the possibility of tuning into Jesus’ words to the disciples that pulse with every beat of our hearts – peace be with you, peace be with you, peace be with you. Sometimes that’s enough to ground us in the midst of fear.

And you know what else works to dispel fear? A sense of mission. When there’s work to be done, work we feel a sense of call to. When there’s a clear human need to be met. That’s something that drowns out the fear long enough to at least take a step forward. And so Jesus sends the fearful disciples with a mission, a calling to proclaim this good news – “as my Father sent me, so I send you.”

And you know what else works? Touching the wounds. It is no small thing that Jesus’ resurrected body bears the marks of his torture and death. Not just because it gives us permission to wear our scars and our wounds, to view our wounded selves with affirmation, but also because it reminds us that wounds are not the end of the story. Instead they become part of our stories. They become part of our path to resurrection. They become a sign in our resurrection of God’s power and grace. I worry that too often we are quick to hide them away and deny their existence, even though all of us bear wounds from our lives. I think we need to tell the stories of woundedness, touch them, feel them, understand them. It’s part of what keeps us from re-enacting the abuse they represent, as we seem to be doing with violence in the name of religion. Jesus offers to let us touch the wounded places, and maybe that lets us be bold in getting in touch with our own on our path to let go of fear.

And you know what else works? Forgiveness. Not cheap “I’m sorrys,” but real, enfleshed restoration to wholeness in relationships. The hard work of exploring the wounds and committing to holding them in resurrection. Not ignoring or forgetting but transforming into movement forward. The kind of forgiveness that Jesus’ presence offers a roomful of fearful disciples.

If we’re lucky we’ll be able to hone in on those gifts in our lives. We’ll have a sense of peace, an understanding of call, a safe place to get in touch with our woundedness, a chance to experience deep and powerful forgiveness. Maybe just one of those things at a time, maybe far too rarely will we be able to really deeply enter those gifts that God offers us with abundance and generosity. But sometimes even that is not enough to break down our fear.

But you know what else works? The presence of the resurrected Jesus. And here we come to Thomas. The one who missed the first encounter with the risen Christ. I like to think it’s because he was the only one brave enough to go out and get some food for them all to eat while they sat in hiding. But whatever the reason, he isn’t there and he sure wishes he was. And I don’t think it’s so much that he has to see and touch Jesus in order to believe. But Thomas has a deep and abiding relationship with Jesus. And when you’re in relationship with someone, someone who has died, just hearing about their resurrection isn’t really enough, is it? I mean, it’s great to hear about their resurrection. But it’s not the same as having that relationship back in your hands, back in the same room to see and touch.

That’s what really sets the disciples free from their fear. That’s what really sets them free to know the peace beating in their hearts, to live out their mission, to get in touch with their woundedness, to live forgiveness. It’s the presence of Jesus in relationship with them. And that’s the one thing I can assure you is yours today: the presence of Jesus for you. In the scriptures and in this meal, in the reminder of baptism at this font. The presence of Jesus in relationship with you now. It’s God’s presence that will unlock the doors of fear in Sri Lanka and California and every other place impacted by violence and terror. It’s God’s presence that will unlock the doors of fear in our life together as a congregation. It’s God’s presence that will unlock the doors of fear in our individual lives, whatever fears hold us back from living the kind of resurrection life Jesus is calling us to live. So come to the table, touch and see and taste the wounded and risen Christ, and be set free from fear to live anew in the kingdom of God.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Resurrection of Our Lord
April 21, 2019

¹But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. ²They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, ³but when they went in, they did not find the body. ⁴While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. ⁵The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. ⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son-of-Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” ⁸Then they remembered his words, ⁹and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. ¹⁰Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. ¹¹But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. ¹²But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened. – Luke 24:1-12

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

Here we are on this most important day, the high point of our church year, and Jesus is conspicuously missing. It is one of the few times in the year when Jesus himself does not say or do anything in the Gospel reading.

Jesus does not tell a story to help us understand God’s reign on earth.

Jesus does not teach us how to live in the world.

Jesus does not comfort or rebuke.

Because when the women come to care for the body of Jesus what they find is not Jesus, but an empty tomb.

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women arrived. They were looking for Jesus. But I suspect that is not all they were looking for.

Perhaps they were looking for the company of others to help them through this time of terrible grief.

Perhaps they were looking for a concrete task like anointing a body in order to take their minds off the death of a dear friend.

Or maybe they were looking for some sense of closure after that awful Friday, a final chance to say goodbye.

And I would think that Jesus would have the decency to stick around long enough to meet these women. But when they arrived, the one thing they definitely did not find was Jesus. Only two dazzling messengers to tell them: He is not here! He is risen!

And a whole new search begins. Now they were looking for answers. They were looking for a missing body. They were searching their minds for the things Jesus had said to them. What was it he told us about this? Did he give us some clue about how to respond to all this? And so they went looking for the other disciples. But most of all they were still looking for Jesus.

And the other disciples, who don’t believe these women God has chosen as the first messengers of this good news, when they get involved…bold and impetuous Peter goes running out to join the search.

Searching for a shred of hope that the story of the women was true. Searching for proof, perhaps, searching for an answer to bring back to the others.

Searching under every rock and shrub like some kind of twisted Easter egg hunt.

Searching, ultimately, for Jesus.

But maybe you can relate to that frantic searching. In fact, maybe you came looking for something yourself this morning.

Maybe you came to worship on Easter looking for Jesus.

Maybe you came looking for relief from the heavy burden of a loved one battling a disease or the burden of grief over a loved one lost.

Maybe you came this morning looking for peace in a world where violence seems to rule.

Maybe you came looking for new life in a world where creation itself seems to be in danger of death.

Maybe you came looking for hope and security in the face of unemployment or financial uncertainty.

Maybe you came looking for connection with others in what can be a lonely world.

Or maybe you came looking for solace and rest because your life seems to be full of confusion or simply exhaustion.

But the messengers’ answer to all our searching is simply, “Jesus is not here. He is risen!”

So the question for us on this Easter morning, as we search for hope and life and renewal is: “Where is this risen Jesus?” Like the women at the tomb and the disciples who come running we sometimes have a hard time identifying this risen Christ among us and understanding what the risen Lord is up to in our world.

The problem is that God often does not do what we expect God to do. All this week we have been discovering the unexpected places God shows up.

God shows up riding into town in regal procession but oddly sitting on a young colt.

Then God shows up as a servant washing the feet of his disciples.

Then most profoundly God shows up as a criminal on the cross.

And you’d think we and the faithful women at the tomb and the rest of disciples would have learned the lesson by now to expect the unexpected. But death just seemed so final. You can’t blame the women or the disciples for their confusion. But none of that answers the question! Where is this risen Christ?!

We knew where Jesus was on Friday, and I am deeply grateful that the cross demonstrates Jesus’ willingness to walk beside us leading the way through our deepest terror, through the pain and suffering in our world, and even leading the way through death. I am comforted to know Jesus’ presence in my hardest moments. But sometimes I’m tempted to stop searching there, at the cross on Good Friday, just thankful that we have a God who is willing to be present in the depths of our darkness.

But Jesus’ absence on this Easter morning is a sign of something else, something new, something more. A sign of something so incredible, so fantastic, so unbelievable that Jesus cannot wait to lead us there. Now that death is destroyed and the feast has begun, Jesus has gone ahead to forge a path through our wildernesses so that we can join him in this feast!

So maybe when we find ourselves like the women at the tomb searching desperately for Jesus, when we have a hard time seeing or feeling or knowing Jesus’ presence beside us, it’s because the way Jesus is with us in those most terrible moments is in leading us into something that is beyond anything we can yet imagine. We cannot see Jesus because he is already helping us live into something we haven’t yet wrapped our minds around. God is with us in suffering, but also leaping ahead to the glorious new life we are desperately searching for.

We are not abandoned by God in our searching, but this new kingdom is so incredible that God has grabbed ahold of us and gone running ahead. We sometimes try to remain where we are, looking for the living among the dead, not able to conceive of a God who could do so much more for us, but God’s feast is calling: the empty tomb, the graveclothes, the mysterious messengers proclaiming to us “He is not here, He is risen!” They are all inviting us into a search for the new reality God is already ushering in.

And so we are invited today to a foretaste of that feast. We are invited to the table of bread and wine for a glimpse of that risen Christ. We are invited to join the singing and the celebration. Because the risen Christ went on ahead of the faithful women at the tomb to be present here, today, to be present among us in the meal we share. And in that meal Jesus calls us forward and runs ahead of us, leading us, inviting us, preparing a way for us out of pain into joy, out of despair into hope, out of death into life.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco