Good Friday
April 19, 2019

Today’s central reading is the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John (ch. 18-19), found here on Bible Gateway. 

What does it mean for us that Jesus hands himself over to death?

The way John tells the story of Jesus’ passion, we see a Jesus who stays in control right to the very end. When the soldiers come to arrest him, he steps forward to identify himself, perhaps even stretching his arms out to them. He reminds them that he has not kept his radical love for all a secret, but rather handed his words out freely, in public places, for all to hear. In the farce of a trial Jesus quips back with words that intrigue and trap his accusers, reminding us that Jesus knows that he is choosing this way of death. He carries his own cross to the place of crucifixion and stretches his arms out to be bound and nailed. Even there he directs what happens, connecting his mother and the beloved disciple. At the moment of death he speaks, “It is finished,” and bows his head, control even of the moment of death.

Jesus willingly gives himself over to the people who have been his antagonists throughout his ministry, to the people who have the power to crucify him, to the people who don’t even know him but are willing to nail him up for all to see.

My first impulse every time I read the story is to demand that Jesus stop, demand that Jesus find another way, another path to salvation, another path for love to triumph. It seems there must be some other way. I don’t want Jesus to hand himself over to these people. It seems like he is just giving up.

But that comes from standing outside the scene. And much as I might like to be outside the scene, to join Peter in his distancing himself from whatever it is going on here, I can’t do that. Because Christ is crucified among us, in our world today, over and over again. And I find myself all too often on the side of those willing to crucify Jesus.

Our patterns of overconsumption and our participation in systems that strip the earth of its resources crucify the God who is embodied in creation. Our choices often impact low-wage workers around the world whom we will never meet, people who will live shorter lives because of the work they do on our behalf. Like some of the political and religious leaders in this story we fail to give up our own security to stand with the prisoner falsely accused, or, for that matter, with the refugee and immigrant, with those whose skin color makes them targets for brutality and violence. And so we crucify the God embodied in our neighbor.

Around us all the time it seems that Jesus is crucified all over again in those who die too early from lack of food and access to health care, veterans tortured by trauma experienced on our behalf, people labeled criminals and locked away to be forgotten. And this story of Jesus always reminds me of the thousand small ways I am complicit.

And I realize that we are the ones to whom Jesus turns himself over. To me. To us. To everyone. Every Sunday I stretch out my betraying hands and receive the body of Christ.  That’s the promise of this story. That Jesus hands himself over not just to the faithful ones, not just to the better than average ones, but to every last person in the world. Hands himself over knowing what will happen.

Hands himself not only on Easter, though he will do that, in a way, too. But hands himself over before the victory is won on the cross, before the resurrection is discovered, before the promise of life is proclaimed. The fullness of God comes to dwell with us, around us, in us before we have things figured out. The fullness of God goes willingly to those who are struggling to make sense of their faith but don’t yet have it all together. The fullness of God goes willingly to those who have no interest in or need of faith. God goes willingly to those whose faith falters and fails in difficult moments. God goes willingly to those who are faithful but make a real mess of things in the process.

God does not wait for us to put all the pieces together or understand the full meaning of this day, of this terrible, tragic and yet deeply good saving action. God comes now, here, today in the midst of our pain, our death, our hurting, grieving world. And in doing so, God triumphs. Triumphs not just in heaven, not just on Easter, not just when things are sorted out, but somehow in a way that we cannot fully realize or understand already at the cross, already now, God has come willingly to us and triumphed over the sin and death the has reigned in our lives for far too long. And that is the profound goodness we find in this day. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

Maundy Thursday
April 18, 2019

¹Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ²The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper ³Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, ⁴got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. ⁵Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. ⁶He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” ⁷Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” ⁸Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” ⁹Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” ¹⁰Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” ¹¹For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
  ¹²After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? ¹³You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. ¹⁴So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. ¹⁵For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. ¹⁶Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. ¹⁷If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
  ^31b“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 himself 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.’ ³⁴“I 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, selected verses

Love is messy. If it isn’t at least a little bit messy, then it might not be love. Because love involves getting to know another person. And people are, well, messy.

In part we are messy because we are embodied. We need to eat food and digest it and, well, get rid of it from our bodies. We move about in the world picking up dirt and germs. Our very life depends on entire ecosystems of tiny organisms within our bodies. And bodies break and fail and get sick. And that gets messy.

And we are unpredictable. We are emotional. Our actions are imperfect at our best, capable of downright evil at our worst. We have a tendency to lash out at those closest to us when we are stressed. We let each other down. We act in irrational ways.

That’s what makes love messy. We are imperfect and embodied. So to enter into relationship with one another is messy business.

Jesus knows and lives this. He ate with unclean people, he touched unclean lepers, he went to the tomb of Lazarus and raised a dirty, smelly, rotting body back to life. And on this final night with his beloved friends, he washes their dirty, dusty, muddy, calloused, blistered feet.

He takes on the role of the servant. He takes a towel and basin. And he washes their feet. He gets on his hands the dirt of his friends. He gets on himself the dirt of his betrayer. He gets on himself the dirt of his denier. He gets on himself the dirt of the ones who will mostly abandon him at the end, the ones who will doubt and flee and lock themselves away in fear. But he loves them – all of them, and so he gets messy.

And this makes them uncomfortable. Because they know they’re messy. They know their feet are dirty and scarred. They know they haven’t been perfect along the way. They sense something big is happening and they aren’t sure they are capable of what it will take to handle it. They know their mess, and they are pretty sure they don’t want Jesus to get it on him.

But this is what service and love is all about, at least the kind of service and love that Jesus is demonstrating. People in roles of service often get to know the messy, dirty, nitty-gritty details of our lives. People like personal care aides, cleaning staff, EMTs, and others get to know the intimate details of our lives in the course of providing service, often for very little compensation. They are people who see us at our most vulnerable or enter our most private spaces. And if we stop to think about that, it can make us a little uncomfortable because we know how messy our lives are, even if we are people who try to keep things neat and tidy.

Jesus invites us the kind of love and service that actually gets to know another human being. This is more than the kind of service that involves collecting supplies and food and money to send off to people who are in need, though that is certainly worthy and needed. This is more than the kind of casual service day opportunity that arises. This is a way of being in the world that stops to get to know the intimate details of our neighbors, especially our neighbors in need. It’s the kind of love and service in which we get so close to them that we get a bit of their mess on our hands. It means entering into the chaotic struggle for survival of people experiencing poverty, sitting with those whose illness has no cure without offering cheery sayings, befriending those whose history has left them a little bit prickly around the edges.

It means getting to know people as people and entering into mutual service. That is to say that Jesus’ call is also to allow others, maybe especially those we think we go to serve and help, to know the messy, intimate details of our own lives. It is a call to open ourselves up, become vulnerable to one another. This is sometimes even more uncomfortable for us in American culture than serving another. It is not easy, letting others see our mess, see the things we usually hide away, the things that are in desperate need of tender care but rarely see the light of day.

In a moment you will have an opportunity to practice giving and receiving this kind of love and service, following the command of Jesus in the act of footwashing. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But so is the kind of radical, messy, embodied love to which we are called as Christ’s disciples. And you can participate in this act by coming forward, removing your shoes and socks, letting your feet be washed then washing the next person’s feet. It’s a symbolic washing – there is no soap, no scrubbing; and yet it can be transformative to feel what it feels like to serve and be served in this way. But you can also participate by holding this moment in prayer and song. And I hope either way you will participate by considering where in your own life you are called to enter a deeper and probably messier and more uncomfortable way of loving and serving your neighbor. And where in your own life you are being called to greater vulnerability, where you are being called to open your life to someone else’s tender love and care even when that makes us uncomfortable.

And however you participate tonight, know that tonight Jesus comes kneeling at your feet, at the feet of your messy, imperfect, embodied life. Jesus sees and knows your imperfections, your inability to be perfect disciples, your capacity for all manner of not so great stuff. And Jesus still comes, and kneels, and washes you with tender care. And in doing so Jesus shares in your life and you in his. Jesus bears a bit of the mess from you on his embodied hands. And Jesus carries that to the cross, bearing the parts of you in need of tender care all the way to the tomb and all the way to the resurrection. And so on this night you, too, are swept into God’s great work of leading creation into wholeness and life.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Palm/Passion Sunday
April 14, 2019

The following brief homily was given as an introduction to the reading of the passion of Christ according to Luke: Luke 22:14-23:56

At Christmas time, everyone is excited to think of themselves at the manger scene. New life, an adorable newborn, friendly animals. When recruiting for the Christmas pageant no one is offended by any of the roles. Angels, shepherds, Mary, Joseph, Magi, even the lowly animals have a place of honor in the scene. The humility of some roles is part of the charm. In reality there was a great deal of pain, especially for Mary. There was the fear that accompanied every birth in an era of high maternal and childhood mortality. There was life-or-death kind of poverty always present. We overlook a lot of the details at Christmas, but it is a scene of hope.

Not so, this Sunday of palms and passion. It is, in fact, hard to find a role that anyone wants to take. Judas is a betrayer, Peter is a denier, the disciples run away, Pilate is a pawn, the soldiers are mockers and crucifiers, the religious leaders unjust at best the other criminals are longing for paradise but at least one adds to the mockery. And most of us will speak the words of the crowds this morning. We shouted “Hosanna! Hosanna!” in the strange and humble procession, recalling Jesus’ humble kingship as he approaches the city of his death. But in a moment we will put the other words of the crowds on our lips, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

And Jesus. Jesus is betrayed, arrested, accused. He becomes a prisoner of the state and thrown on death row to be tortured and killed in one of the worst ways we humans have ever imagined. We know that Easter is coming, but we do not want to be in the place of Jesus.

And maybe it makes us so uncomfortable because in some way or another we find ourselves in these roles in our daily lives. All of us are people who sing praises one moment and then perpetuate injustice in another. This is a week in which we name the deepest truths of who we are and the deepest truths of who God is.

We are sinner-saints. Beloved of God who seek to love God and love our neighbor. And we are people who commit acts of violence with our words and our fists. We are part of the crowds swept up in unjust systems that perpetuate inequality and even horrendous violence to support our way of life. And we are people, too, who bear the scars of wounds inflicted on us by the harsh realities we see reflected in this story of Jesus’ passion.

But God does not seem as afraid as we are to enter into this story. That’s what Christmas is about – God’s willingness to enter into fragile and terrible and wonderful human life…and death. And it’s what this story is about. The Christ hymn we just read from Philippians tells us not just of Jesus’ willingness to live out humility and suffer death, but the willingness of the wholeness of God to enter into our human story over and over again, age after age after age. This is exactly who God is: the One who enters with humility into the pain we inflict and the pain we experience. This is the God who bears our deepest wounds and experiences our most violent wounding.

It’s not that God wants to enter this story. But God wants to be near to us, God wants to love us. God wants to love us into a new reality, love us all the way to Easter. This story we are about to read, this week of stories we are about to experience, is not only about events from long ago. It’s a story of how God enters into the reality of our stories, even the darkest, most painful moments of our stories and raises them to new life.

So let us enter the contemplation of Christ’s passion with the knowledge that the realities it names are still among us, that the pain it names is alive in us and in our world, and that God is entering it with us. Here. Now. Forever. And through it raising us to new life.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

5th Sunday in Lent
April 7, 2019

¹Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ²There they gave a dinner for Jesus. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. ³Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ⁴But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ⁵“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” ⁶(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) ⁷Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” – John 12:1-8

Last week’s reading began with complaints about the people with whom Jesus was eating. If only they could see this dinner party! There are rules for how to behave at social functions, even small private dinners! Sit up at the table, say please and thank you, compliment the food, stay away from politics. And though I can’t ever remember hearing this explicitly expressed, I don’t think you’re supposed to break open expensive perfume and wash someone’s feet with it using your hair filling the house with the overwhelming odor. These rules, when followed, make everyone comfortable. They keep things moving along. They make sure you keep your place in your social circles.

But no one told Mary. Or… maybe it’s that Mary understood that this dinner party was taking place under an entirely different set of rules. You see, when death is in the room all the rules change. We are prone to impose our rules of decorum, order, and logic on this story and our own, but they simply do not work in the presence of death. And Mary, Martha, and Lazarus know death.

Lazarus himself is sitting at the table. He has just days earlier been dead himself. After four days in the tomb Jesus came along and called him forth again. One wonders if the sight and smell of the dead and dying lingers on his body. Does he bear the marks of death as Jesus’ resurrected body will just a week or so later? Does his sitting there make the others a bit uncomfortable, perhaps even Jesus’ own disciples? In last week’s reading Jesus was in trouble for eating with tax collectors and sinners. Now he is eating with the no-longer-dead. That is sureto raise some eyebrows.

And whether or not they have actually understood that this is going to happen, Jesus has been explaining to his inner circle about where hisstory is going – about the cross and about his own tragic and unjust death. At this point in the story it is clear to the reader if not all those dining at Lazarus’ house that Jesus’ death is a very real possibility. The rules are different at this gathering because death is close at hand.

We know this instinctively when we accompany those we love in their final days if we are given the opportunity to do so. The rules change – nothing else takes priority. The community makes space literally and figuratively. The space and time become holy with the movement from life to death. We may not pour out thousands of dollars of perfume in a single act of lavish love, but we do tenderly care for bodies that are in pain as they approach death. The rules of careful accounting for pennies and the careful use of long-saved gifts go out the window.

This isn’t to idealize that time, as there is no such thing as a “good death.” Nothing about death that makes it pretty. But the rules are different. The end of life calls us all to engage more deeply in the present and to treasure what we have in the moment. Mary seems to be the only one who gets it, or at least the only one who does anything in response. There is no logic to her action. I don’t know that she’s been consciously saving this for Jesus’ burial and somehow suddenly realized it was time. And in other times she might have considered Judas’s legitimate question, and whether she ought to have shared that money with the poor instead. And there might have been other times when she would have done just that. Other times she might have thought it through, but in this situation, with the usual rules suspended she followed the movement of the spirit within her to this act of extraordinary grace and abundance.

And it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me cringe, in fact, every time I read about her pouring out $20,000 of perfume. There is something that makes me feel as if we shouldn’t be watching such an intimate act of love and faith expressed. Because most of the time we’re operating under this other set of rules. Most of the time we’re trying to appear put together. The exception could be, perhaps, at church. Now don’t get me wrong most of the time in this and many other congregations we operate under all the usual rules of decorum. But week after week we hear in scripture, in bread and wine, and in Christian community a hint that the rules are different. And it’s partly because death is always at the table with us. We are a community that supports one another as individuals face death, but we are also faced every week with the central symbol of our faith which is itself a reminder of death. But it’s more than that, because the church operates not under the rules of death but under the rules of resurrection. By the resurrection which is already hanging in the air with the smell of perfume in Lazarus’s home, we are freed to live under different rules.

As a church we are freed for lavish acts of generosity which make no real sense to people who do not understand what is going on. We are freed to engage more deeply in the present, to treasure what we have in the moment. We are freed to host a meal to which anyone – literally anyone! – is invited. In fact we proclaim that like Jesus’s meal with the resurrected Lazarus, that our meal of bread and wine is a part of the feast of all the saints present and past. We are freed to give primary place and generous attention and support to Jesus who shows up not only in the economically poor, but also in the outcast, the sick, the grieving, and, yes, the dying.  We are freed to give away food and money and clothing and shelter with Mary’s reckless abandon to all the ones Judas is supposedly worried about because it’s there in the always present ones in need that we meet Jesus and where we have the opportunity to enter into Mary’s lavish act of faith and love, even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. When it doesn’t even make logical sense to us.

The rules are just different when we’re dealing with the God of all life, the God who dies with us, the God who raises us to new life. It’s a different way of being together and a different way of going out to serve the world. Every Sunday calls us again to sit at the table, a table with the living and with the no-longer-dead whom we are still grieving, the ones we can still sense sitting at our tables. And the way in which that kind of banquet invites us into illogical generosity and lavish blessing may be a little on the uncomfortable side from time-to-time for those of us who are so accustomed to the world’s usual set of expectations, those of us who like things to follow the rules. But it makes for us a wonderfully rich banquet table, smelling of costly perfume, smelling faintly of death, smelling richly of resurrection. So come, join the feast.

-Pastor Steven Wilco
(adapted from a sermon preached March 2016).

4th Sunday in Lent
March 31, 2019

¹Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
  ³So Jesus told them this parable: ^11b“There was a man who had two sons. ¹²The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So the father divided his property between them. ¹³A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. ¹⁴When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. ¹⁶He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. ¹⁷But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! ¹⁸I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; ¹⁹I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ ²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. ²¹Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ ²²But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; ²⁴for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.
  ²⁵“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷The slave replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸Then the elder brother became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ ³¹Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ” – Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

At our most recent Forward Leadership retreat, we watched a video of a trainer who told a story about himself and his teenage son. The father was invited to speak at a conference at a famous golf resort and his son was really, really into golf and in particular loved this course. So the father arranged to bring him along. On the trip they were browsing the notoriously expensive pro shop and the father saw the son eyeing this jacket with the golf course logo on it. It was priced some absurd amount of money, but the father thought, “This is a once in a lifetime moment, I’ll get it for him.” The son is ecstatic.

Fast forward to the next morning, they race off to the airport too early for breakfast. The son is proudly wearing the new jacket as they grab a quick breakfast to go and carry it on to the plane. They sit down on the plane and the son proceeds to open maple syrup packets, which splatter syrup on his brand new, very expensive jacket. And then he dips his French toast sticks, one by one, drip, drip, dripping syrup on the jacket as he hungrily devours his meal.

The father is enraged. In his mind he’s reciting this story about his son: “This kid is an ungrateful, unappreciative, idiotic slob who doesn’t appreciate the value of anything. He doesn’t appreciate this gift and by extension he doesn’t appreciate me.” And he wants to launch into this kid. But, just having given a talk at the conference about how to communicate in tense situations with people you care about, he managed to step back before he reacted. He said something like, “Um, did you notice that you got some maple syrup on your jacket?” Immediately the son’s face registers what has happened. He is beside himself with grief. He hadn’t even noticed the syrup. Now he is panicking trying to figure out how to save this precious gift. Instead of the story the father was telling himself, the story was actually that this was a hungry kid who just isn’t that aware when he spills maple syrup on himself. He doesn’t, it turns out, need an angry lecture. He needs some guidance and support.

It’s just a jacket. Just some maple syrup. But I think we’ve all been there. Jumping into telling those stories in our heads about what someone else is really up to when our emotions get triggered.

I suspect that many of you have heard Jesus’ story about a man who had two sons. I’m wondering if like the father in the story I just shared, you’ve been telling yourself something about the characters in this beloved parable just as I’ve been telling myself over the years. The stories might go something like this:

The younger son goes to his father, demands his inheritance long before the father dies and leaves it to him, and then he runs off with it, squandering it in dissolute living. This kid is rude to his father. He has no regard for the man who has raised him and provided this family farm for him and his brother. Perhaps we tell the story that he’s lazy, or ungrateful, or stupid, or morally corrupt. After what he’s done, maybe he doesn’t deserve to come back. There are days when we identify ourselves or our neighbor or our family member as a younger son. Days we tell ourselves the story that we are not good enough, that we deserve what we get, that sometimes you just dig your own grave and have to lie in it. Sometimes we tell that story about people whose own background we don’t even know, people who haven’t squandered a thing because they never had anything to squander in the first place.

But how about the older brother? Working hard, day after day after day. He’s the responsible one, the one who stayed and cleaned up the mess, who never broke the rules. And maybe we tell ourselves he deserves his angry moment, his chance to stew. After all, he never got the party they’re over there throwing for that loser brother. He should sit there all night until that father comes to his senses! Because sometimes we sit around waiting for others to come around to our side of the story, right or wrong. Or…maybe we tell ourselves that the older brother ought to just get over himself. The lost brother has been found, quit your pity party and go inside. We tell the story that he’s petty or cold-hearted, or just stubborn. And we dismiss him. Maybe because too often we wish we could let go of our resentment and join the party.

I have to say that I’ve often been drawn to identify with the elder brother. And I’ve found a lot of company in mainline protestant churches – other people who see themselves as elder siblings. People who have stayed, people who have kept the church going, people who long for others to be a part of it, but who sometimes can’t let go of the reins long enough to welcome them to the party. That’s just to say, we’ve all got a little of this one in us, too.

And where we stand determines what story we tell about this father. Maybe we think he’s a little naïve to have given this son the inheritance. A little too loving to have given so much away. Maybe we place some blame on him for not giving more guidance or setting better boundaries. Or maybe we see him more sympathetically, the one who runs to greet him, the one who throws a party to welcome him home, the one whose grace is too much for us to comprehend such that we push him off at a distance as just a figure in a fairy tale.

There are perhaps elements of truth in any number of these stories we tell. The need for repentance is real. The struggle to welcome the lost is real. The struggles of the parent are real. But telling the story this way sets up a lot of antagonism between the characters. And it sets up so much expectation for us, so many “shoulds” and “should nots.”

But, maybe there’s a different story going on here. Maybe these characters we have so long seen one way, characters we have for so long judged as good or bad, maybe there’s another way to see them. So here’s another story I propose we tell about the characters in this story. And it’s the same story for all the characters. You see, this story ends in a feast. A grand feast. A feast the likes of which this family farm has never seen before. So I wonder if the deeper story is this: these characters are hungry.

What if, instead of focusing on his wrongdoing, we focused on the younger brother’s hunger? Who knows what hunger motivated him at the start of the story…hunger for adventure, hunger for independence, hunger for whatever felt good at the time. But what brings him home is not repentance in the way we think of it. It’s not recognition that he has squandered his father’s money or done who knows what with whom. It’s his hunger that finally draws him home. He’s down on his luck partly of his own doing but partly the result of a famine in the land. And he’s hungry. Hungry for food, hungry for family, hungry for home.

The father is hungry. Hungry for this son who has been lost. Hungry for his family to be reunited. Maybe hungry for what was, but more so hungry for what might yet be for him and his sons. It’s his hunger that keeps him sitting on the porch and waiting, watching. It’s his hunger that drives him to run out to greet the long lost son.

And the older brother? His hunger is harder to define. But it’s the sound of the feast that makes him wonder to begin with. It’s the meat shared that makes him jealous. His brother’s return stirs in him a hunger that he hasn’t let himself name. Maybe it’s a hunger to have sowed his wild oats, too. Or a hunger to know the love of a father who has seemed distracted with grief over his brother. Or a hunger for the freedom of letting go of his responsibilities for once. And, sadly, as the parable closes he is the only one still hungry, not for lack of invitation, but for lack of willingness to sit down at the celebration.

And that is the story God knows about you. Whatever you’ve done or not done, whatever you’ve lost or not lost, wherever you place yourself in this parable and whatever story you tell about yourself, God knows your hunger and sets a feast.

The true beauty of this parable for me this week is that it ends in a feast to end all feasts. For the hungry ones – for all the hungry ones. For the longing parents, the long-lost children, and even for the ones who have been at the feast all along and forgotten to realize the joy in it.

And that’s the beauty of worship every Sunday – God sets for you here a feast. A grand feast. A feast where all are welcomed home. A feast where we join with all the saints around the world and all the saints who have gone before us, including Thelma, who was welcomed home to the heavenly feast just last Friday. We join together at this heavenly table and the feast is spread. We tell all kinds of stories about ourselves and about our neighbors. But in the end each of us has a hunger that too often goes unfed. And so this feast calls us again and again to come home. Come join the feast of all creation. Come, hungry ones, be fed.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

3rd Sunday in Lent
March 24, 2019

¹O God, you are my God; eager- | ly I seek you;
  my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there | is no water.
 ²Therefore I have gazed upon you in your | holy place,
  that I might behold your power | and your glory.
 ³For your steadfast love is better than | life itself;
  my lips shall | give you praise.
 ⁴So will I bless you as long | as I live
  and lift up my hands | in your name. 
 ⁵My spirit is content, as with the rich- | est of foods,
  and my mouth praises you with | joyful lips,
 ⁶when I remember you up- | on my bed,
  and meditate on you in | the night watches.
 ⁷For you have | been my helper,
  and under the shadow of your wings I | will rejoice.
 ⁸My whole being | clings to you;
  your right hand | holds me fast.  – Psalm 63:1-8

¹At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ²Jesus asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? ³No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. ⁴Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
  ⁶Then Jesus told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. ⁷So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ ⁸He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. ⁹If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ” – Luke 13:1-9

I am no stranger to dying plants. I have trouble keeping anything green alive. Apparently you’re supposed to water them regularly, but not too much. And make sure they have sun. And probably a bunch of other things I forget to do. Some people even swear by talking to their plants. But in the end, most of the plants I’m responsible for end up withering. And then I’m even more at a loss. I killed enough of them that I’ve really stopped buying more. Because when they wither, I sigh and chuck them out into the woods to become compost.

I suppose it’s not the same as a vineyard owner and his tree in Jesus’ parable, because presumably that person knows what they’re doing. Presumably they or someone they have hired has tended and watered and mulched and whatever else it is you’re supposed to do with fig trees. Presumably there has been some investment in this tree. But to no effect. And whether the combination of tending wasn’t just right or whether it’s just a barren tree, the vineyard owner is ready to chop it down and plant something more worthwhile.

We are, I think, supposed to imagine in this parable that we people are the fig trees in the vineyard. And sometimes we know we are barren. We know that we have nothing left to give, no energy left to produce another fruit, no desire to keep on going. Or we know we have been producing bad fruit. We have not lived up to our potential. We have let our worst selves shine through or simply failed to offer our gifts to the world. And sometimes that leaves us like the psalmist – thirsting deep in our souls as if in a dry and weary land where there is no water. We are too drained to offer much protest to the vineyard owner who wants to chop us down.

And sometimes from that place of feeling not enough we start to fancy ourselves gardeners. We start to look around at people who are suffering more than we are, at the people who at least by our estimation produce less fruit, the ones who look more dry and weary than we do. Whether it’s the poor slain Galileans or the people beneath the fallen tower of Siloam in Jesus’ time or whether in our own time it’s people who have come from other countries seeking refuge and work, people experiencing homelessness, hunger, and poverty, people who get sick. Maybe we know we shouldn’t but sometimes we are bound to look out and think, “Thank God that’s not me.” Or maybe worse, if only to make ourselves feel better about our own withering leaves, we think, “That tree over there must be lazy or bad or just plain unworthy.” And we whisper to the gardener, “If you’re going to cut anything down start over there. Maybe with them not taking up so many nutrients from the soil, the rest of us will start bearing some fruit.” Except of course we’re talking about other human beings, other people we are quick to uproot and throw out.

This whole story says something about the way we deal with the world. With ourselves and other people. We see our barrenness and we either wither with shame or throw blame out on someone else. Either way we are quick to yield the axe, quick to assign blame, quick to judgment. But the gardener is not so quick with the axe.

By all practical reasoning he should agree to do what is right and best for the vineyard. He should chop down the tree, let the soil be used for something fruitful. But there’s something special about this tree. One scholar suggests that it is important to note this is a fig tree planted in a vineyard not a fig orchard. Maybe it’s too much to make of a small detail, but perhaps it points us to this being a special project of the ones who tend it, a joy over and above the regular work of producing crops.

What would that do for us withering trees if we remembered that we, too, are God’s chosen creations? Not made for the sake of work, not planted in the world because God needs us, but rather planted because we are a delight to the One who tends us. Would remembering that every morning, give us enough of a boost to bear a little more fruit, to stand taller in the world, to remember the pulsing of life within us? Or at least to survive another barren day in a dry and weary land.

But that alone does not transform us from barren, fruitless trees. But when we call out for the chopping axe, there is one who gives us pause, one who says, “Give it one more year while I tend it.” It’s the response of one who loves this tree deeply. For that is the only reason to give it one more year, the only reason to keep tending it with extra care even though year after year it has been barren and has not responded as it should. And it’s just one more year, but it’s everything to this tree.

Because we live in that one more year. Each breath we take, each moment of care we receive, each season of life is lived in that one more year from the gardener. For we live only by grace. Each of us has gifts to bear into the world, but none of us manages perfectly. None of us produces enough to be spared the axe. Jesus himself says it – unless you repent, you will all perish just as the others have before you. All of us are called to repentance, to fruit-bearing, to a life worthy of the gospel. And all of us fail. Some get more years than others. Some die tragically, through no fault of their own. Others get many years and a full life before they meet their end. But all of us are in that garden, planted and tended in that one more year of grace.

To repent, perhaps, is first and foremost to recognize that reality. Yes, repentance is to live into something different, to live in new ways that are more life-giving for everyone. But to repent we have to let go of our judgment – self-judgment and other-judgment – and connect to our identity as trees planted and tended by God. We need places like this Sunday morning gathering to be fed and nourished with grace – in bread and wine, in water and word, in the gathered communion of saints. We need opportunities to hear the pronouncement of grace in spite of our fruitlessness, we need chances to hear that we have a reprieve, a one-more-year from God and then we have a chance to extend that one-more-year kind of grace to our neighbors. And it’s from that that we might begin to have the kind of energy and grace that is needed to bear fruit in the world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

As always, gratitude to other pastors and preachers whose thoughts help shape my own. Some weeks, like this one, very particular persons’ words stand out. In particular this week thanks to Bekki Lohrman’s commentary in Sundays and Seasons Preaching and to the above mentioned scholar – Robert Farrar Capon in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, p. 249. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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