Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 10, 2018

[Jesus went home;] ²⁰and the crowd came together again, so that [Jesus and the disciples]could not even eat. ²¹When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” ²²And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” ²³And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. ²⁶And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. ²⁷But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.
  ²⁸“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; ²⁹but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—³⁰for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
  ³¹Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. ³²A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” ³³And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” ³⁴And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” – Mark 3:20-35

What causes you deep despair? What causes you to lose all hope? What causes you to lose your faith in God?

Is it the magnitude of human suffering in the world? The devastation in Puerto Rico, the economic, political, and otherwise violent unrest in Central America that sends people fleeing homes to begin again in a land that refuses to welcome them? Is it the persistence of racism and the violence against black and brown bodies? The oppression and subjugation of peoples and the exploitation of others for personal gain or pleasure? The weight of the world’s pain is enough to crush us some days.

Or is what causes you to despair a shadow that consumes you alone? The intense grief of loss of someone who held a part of your own heart? The haunting of addictions? The cloud of depression? The overwhelming onslaught of daily responsibilities? The pain of illness and decline? The sense of having failed in ways that hurt oneself and others? Sometimes our own lives crush us to the point of despair.

There was all manner of speculation in this week’s news about what kind of despair led fashion designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain both to take their own lives this week, what it was that led them to become part of a growing number of people who turn to suicide. Whatever the reasons, it strikes me that people who finally feel they have no other option have reached a point of despair which is beyond what can be born in the human mind and body. It’s as if they have been cut off from the power of life, as if they cannot see the possibility of God’s renewing them this side of the grave.

Let me pause to say that if you find yourself in such a place now or at anytime in the future, there are people ready to help, people ready to listen, people willing to stand with you in the place of despair. My door is open, this community is here, and, if not, there are well-trained people available through local and national hotlines. Your life is valued and precious.

As I read today’s gospel, I have this deep sense that in the midst of this tense conversation Jesus is grieving for those who are in deep despair, those who cannot see the ways in which God is already among them restoring life, that his whole being is longing for them to be able to see the hope and possibility of God’s resurrection in this life and to come. Jesus has just been healing people, casting out demons, and calling ordinary people to holy things. There is already early in this gospel a sense of God’s kingdom unfolding for the world. But Jesus’ family tries to restrain him and the scribes come down to call him names and label his healing and transforming work as of the devil. And however frustrating, I think Jesus has compassion on them.

His words can seem harsh in response. And maybe to some degree he means to be a bit harsh with the people who hold power over others, sometimes oppressive power, over others but who in their own power and privilege fail to recognize the power God has to transform. That can be a particularly disastrous combination – having influence and control but unable to recognize when God is doing something new. We see it in kings and rulers, just as God predicted for the Hebrew people demanding a king, but if we look closely enough we probably see it in ourselves, too, the ways we sometimes take our despair, our inability to see the power of God at work, and turn it outward in spite or anger at others who seem to be able to see that very hope we long for. But ultimately I think Jesus feels sorry for them, for theirinability to see God at work, for the kind of despair they must feel as a result.

And I worry that we could miss Jesus’ compassion and get caught up in Jesus’ statement about an unforgivable sin. Far too many people have speculated about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, and in tragic ways used it in ways that blame and oppress and bring pain to others. But in this context, in which the scribes and even Jesus’ family, fail to recognize the incredible transformation of God taking place among them, it seems to me this sin against the Holy Spirit is the failure to see the work of God and recognize it as what it is – the beginnings of resurrection.

And who among us hasn’t failed to recognize God at work? Who among us hasn’t called something in our own lives or out in the world the work of the devil only later to realize it was the beginning of God’s transformative power at work? Who among us hasn’t had at least a moment of deep despair in which we could not believe in the power of God to bring us back from the brink of death, literal or figurative?

I think it’s not so much that Jesus is condemning these people as Jesus is naming how in the place of utter despair it feels irredeemable and it feels cut off from eternal life. To reach the point of such deep despair or such failure to recognize the possibility of God’s turning things around, is to feel disconnected from the eternal source of life. And I have to think that Jesus has compassion even on the ones who keep standing in his way, because he wants to leave no one behind in that place of despair that place of failing to believe in the power of God’s transformation.

And the reason that’s clear to me is that already in these early chapters of Mark’s gospel we see Jesus headed to the cross. We see in this moment Jesus already moving toward the place of utter despair. We can see on the horizon Jesus going to that place of deep pain and suffering, the place from which he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” Jesus in all his human fleshiness goes to the place of death and there, falsely accused, abandoned by nearly everyone, suffering and dying, commits this same blasphemy, this same failure to hope, this same inability to see God’s transformation taking place. He joins the ranks of all humanity whose suffering leads to despair that seems beyond redemption. He joins the temple scribes who call him names when they cannot see God present in his work. He joins the many who despair beyond hope. And he joins them all the way to death.

But then God is not done. The source of eternal life, the source of life itself in all its fullness, has life yet to give. The moment of despair, the moment that seems irredeemable, the moment in which we can no longer see hope ahead, opens to a morning of resurrection. It opens to Jesus alive again and setting free from their graves all the people who have experienced deep despair and reconnecting them with the life they could not find in themselves. God’s victory over death breaks through even that which seemed before to be unforgivable, breaks through what we could see only as a place of deep despair.

And that is what we proclaim today, what we eat and drink at the communion table today, what we go forth from this place to proclaim in the world – that the power of God’s life beyond time and place is more powerful than anything we can imagine. It has the power to overcome our failure to see, our failure to hope, our failure to live. And it brings us over and over again in this life to the kind of eternal living that is part of God’s transforming the whole creation into something new.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 3, 2018

²³One sabbath [Jesus] was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. ²⁴The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” ²⁵And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? ²⁶He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” ²⁷Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; ²⁸so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
 ^3:1Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. ²They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. ³And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” ⁴Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. ⁵He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. ⁶The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. – Mark 2:23-3:6

According to Anne Lamott, there is a “Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why onour hearts, and not inthem?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”[i]

That is a part of what our religious practice is about, why we gather Sunday after Sunday to sing and pray and hear scripture, why we gather in church communities at all. Not because God isn’t out in our daily lives or because God only saves people in the church, but because that practice writes God’s words over and over on our hearts, so that when they break open the holy words fall inside.

But Jesus encounters some people who grieve him with the hardness of their hearts. They have written the holy words all over themselves, but they have not let their hearts break open, or perhaps that Godhas not yet broken them open, so that the words might actually fall inside. They engage in a dialogue with Jesus about the meaning of one of the most fundamental commandments: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For many it has meant no travel, no picking of grain, no work, even healing work, on the day of rest. They had studied the law. They had interpreted the law. They had written it on their hearts. But it failed to sink in.

Perhaps their hardness of heart is a result of their misunderstanding of this very commandment. You see, God did not create the commandment in order to see if people could follow a rule. God set up this commandment for people who had just been liberated from 400 years of slavery. They hadn’t had a day off in 400 years. This, like all the commandments in one way or another, is a gift. A gift in the very image of God, who also took rest from the rhythm of creation. God created us and liberated us for the sake of rest.

This rest wasn’t about sitting still in church from sunup to sundown. It wasn’t about being somber or strict. It wasn’t about cracking down on weekend sports leagues creeping in on church time. On the other hand it wasn’t meant to be naptime, or a free-for-all, or a chance to get oneself into trouble either. It was intended as the kind of rest that restores wholeness to a person. The kind of rest that restores the spontaneous creativity and generative power that was shared with us by the one who created all things. The kind of rest that puts one back in touch with the person we were created to be in the first place, that puts ourselves back in touch with our identity as beloved of God.

This is what Jesus is busy doing on the Sabbath day. He’s walking and talking with his friends, eating along the way. He is doing what they need to restore themselves for sharing the good news of God’s reign come near. And in doing so they embody the reign of God, they embody the Sabbath of liberation and rest. They are not only resting so they can do more work, they are resting because resting is part of the world God created and the world God wants to restore.

But Jesus is not done. Because when he arrives at the synagogue, there is a man with a withered hand. A man who has not had a rest from his illness or injury in who knows how many Sabbath days. A man who perhaps has trouble working to feed himself and his family, who lives with that burden 24/7. So I suppose one might imagine he could have waited one more day for Jesus to finish his day of rest, his leisurely journey and his stop at the synagogue to have the word of God written again on his heart.

But when Jesus sees the man with the withered hand, his heart breaks open. And that word of God falls in anew. That word of rest and Sabbath and liberation. It is not a true Sabbath until it is Sabbath for everyone, liberation for everyone. Even though we must for the sake of our own lives find days and times of Sabbath rest and so participate in the reign of God, we cannot truly experience Sabbath until workers earn a living wage for their labor, enough to feed and shelter and provide health care for their families, until every person has the opportunity to take a day off without going hungry. We cannot have a true Sabbath until the workers who make our standard of living possible are treated fairly and justly, free of unsafe working conditions and discrimination. We cannot have a true Sabbath until the people seeking asylum at our borders find safe haven. We look at the world around us and our hearts break open and the word of God falls in. Then we find ourselves, with Jesus, unable to rest easy until this liberation takes place.

It’s not that the Pharisees are so hard-hearted that they don’t ever want this man healed or that they want people to go hungry because they didn’t get enough food ready for the day of rest. They just think it should wait its proper time. In a way they, too, want to bring about the kind of world that lives in God’s rhythm. But they’re so caught up in trying to write the law on their hearts, that they’ve failed to allow their hearts to be broken by the pain of the world, by the pain they carry themselves.

But in this scene it is in Jesus that God’s heart that breaks open at the pain of the world, and the gospel of Sabbath pours into the world. And healing takes place. A man who has been hurting enjoys Sabbath for the first time in ages. People are drawn into the reign of God. And perhaps ourhard hearts and the hard hearts of the Pharisees soften at that, just enough to let them crack open and let the words of God’s love and life, the words of Sabbath rest and liberation that have been written on our hearts drop in and fill us anew and welcome us to that place where new life can begin to grow in us and in the whole world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

[i]As shared by the Rev. Lauren Carlson in her blog post for Modern Metanoia: https://modernmetanoia.org/2018/05/21/proper-4b-the-law-of-grace/

Holy Trinity Sunday
May 27, 2018

¹In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. ²Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. ³And one called to another and said:
 “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
 the whole earth is full of his glory.”
⁴The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. ⁵And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
  ⁶Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. ⁷The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” ⁸Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” – Isaiah 6:1-8

For God loved the world in this way, that God gave the Son, the only begotten one, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. – John 3:16-17

Listen here to audio of today’s sermon:

“You are a child of God, sealed by the Spirit in your baptism, and you belong to Jesus Christ forever.” And the newly baptized two-year-old responded: “Uh-oh.” This was the scene described some years ago by former publisher of The Christian Century, John Buchanan. I’m sure everyone laughed. For better or worse people love to get a chuckle out of the honesty of children, especially in church. But the response of the child was, in Buchanan’s words “an appropriate response…a stunning theological affirmation.” An appropriate response to being claimed in love by the creator of the cosmos.

This is essentially the story of Isaiah the prophet. God claims him and calls him. And like anyone with any good sense he says “Uh-oh.” Or probably something more explicit which was later washed clean into the words we read today: “Woe is me!” “Woe is me! I am lost, for a I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” There is holy fear here. A recognition that the confrontation of God with broken humanity will utterly destroy Isaiah. He knows full well the stories of people before him who have tried to touch the ark of covenant, God’s throne on earth, who perished immediately. He knows one does not approach the creator of the universe for a casual chat. And in a sense that is true. The mystery of God is so beyond human existence that confronting even a vision of it breaks us apart.

But what Isaiah is still coming to realize is that God isn’t interested in destroying us. Breaking us open, yes, but not destroying us. Part of Isaiah’s internal question, I think, is whether God really does love the world in all its uncleanness. Can you really love this world, God? Can you really love me? And I suspect we live with the same underlying questions. When we say God so loved the world, we tend to think about the nice world. Beautiful flowers, delicious meals, nice people, happiness, communities without conflict or division. And we often explicitly or implicitly assume that God loves the people who love God back or at least those who do God’s work in the world. And of course God loves all that.

But what Isaiah is about to be overwhelmed by is that God loves all the other stuff, too. God loves the dry and uninhabitable wastelands, the dark and frightening depths of the sea. God loves burnt potroast and wilted flowers, cranky people and communities where there is conflict and division. God loves people who don’t have time for God or who outright despise, reject, or refuse to believe in God. God loves the whole world – this whole world just as it is – in all its uncleanness. God loves everything we fail to love. God loves what we consider unlovable, especially when the one we fail to love is ourself.

We stand with Isaiah, people who try desperately to do the right things. People who love our neighbors near and far, people who love one another the best we know how, who try to live out our baptismal call to the world. But we are no match for the kind of love God has for the world, for the kind of love God has for us.

I think Isaiah fully expects to die when he meets God in this vision, because in confronting love that can overlook literally anything, Isaiah realizes his own incapacity for that profound love. And it tears him apart. He sees in God his own failures, not just to live up to the law, but his own failure to extend love beyond bounds. He recognizes how utterly necessary to the existence of the world that kind of love is and thinks that he cannot remain a part of the creation with his incompleteness. Believe it or not, this “uh-oh” moment is grace. This realization that God’s profound love holds the world together and simultaneously breaks apart our notions of who we are.

But here’s the thing. Isaiah isn’t utterly destroyed. God spares Isaiah. More than that, God transforms Isaiah into a prophet. One of the seraphim touches a burning coal from the altar fire to his lips to burn them clean, to sanctify the words he will proclaim on God’s behalf. But the story doesn’t really get better as far as Isaiah is concerned, because this is not going to be an easy message to proclaim. There will, yes, be beautiful words of comfort to speak from God, words that millennia later we still cherish and set to music and read in worship and at the bedside and with grieving families.

But if we had been reading along from the beginning of Isaiah’s record we would see that God has some really, hard things to say to this deeply beloved world. When God calls Isaiah in this mystical vision of the throne of God that the assignment isn’t a cushy one. In fact, it will put Isaiah at odds with all manner of people. It will cause him to confront again and again his incapacity to love the world with the same kind of love that God does.

And God says, “Whom shall I send with this message for the beloved world, this message of hope in the midst of utter desolation?” For the second time in this short moment Isaiah thinks he’s going to die. He Isaiah looks around. He sees no one else standing there. And he says, “Uh-oh.” Or “Woe is me!” Or something else more explicit. And then, perhaps more as a fact of his being the only apparent choice than as a grand assent to this mission, he says, “Here I am. Send me.”

And he goes. He goes to proclaim to a people lost and confused the profound grace of God. Doing so requires some hard truths to be spoken. It requires profound commitment to a vision of what might yet be possible from the midst of destruction. But Isaiah has himself already experienced confronting death in the face of God and lived. So who better to go and proclaim that to the world?

Dear friends, today you are invited to stand in Isaiah’s shoes. I cannot promise that God’s call to you will result in canonized scripture or that your name and words will be remembered for generations. But today the full presence of God is promised to us in worship. As we prepare for the Eucharistic meal together, we will sing the song the angels sing around the throne: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of your glory.” Then as we gather around the table we will again be confronted by the profound love of God. We will experience there, in ways we can touch and taste, the love of God for the whole world and for us. It breaks us open. It reminds us of our inability to love beyond bounds. And it loves us back to God. It is the coal from the altar that burns our lips, transforming us again into God’s body on earth. And we are sent with that same message of hope beyond hope, of love beyond love for a world that has forgotten how to love itself the way the creator intended all along. And, “uh-oh,” it is through us that God’s love is shared far beyond the bounds of what we think possible.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Pentecost
Sunday, May 20, 2018

¹When the day of Pentecost had come, [the apostles] 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 Jews 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, “Men of Judea 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 young men shall see visions,
  and your old men 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

It is Pentecost and the church is in turmoil, that is, a state of disturbance, confusion, and uncertainty.

We in this congregation are experiencing the sudden departure of a long-time staff member. We may be grieving and sad, confused and hurt, uncertain and angry. Perhaps a whole range of other feelings. I suspect we are not sure how to trust one another fully, how to honor this complex and difficult situation in a way that represents who we are as the church. It is not an easy place. I trust that somehow the Spirit of God who comes to us at Pentecost is holding all of this even as we struggle to find a way.

But the church is always in turmoil in one way or another, somewhere on earth. The church at large around the world is, depending on who you talk to, dying, being reborn, being resurrected, or undergoing a major reformation. In other words it’s in turmoil. None of those processes are easy or simple or clean or orderly. Something is happening in the church (as something has always been happening in the church) that we are thrown in the middle of – some way in which God is working something into being that we are caught up in. And it’s not always a comfortable place to be.

And the world is in turmoil, too. Today two young people will affirm their baptismal promises. They will remember the promises God made to them to love and protect them. But we send them out into a world in a state of disturbance, confusion, uncertainty. We send them out to be disciples of Jesus in a world in which gun violence is an ever-increasing threat. We live in a country that experienced this week at least its 22nd school shooting since January 1st. I worry about how any of us will live as disciples of Jesus is such a world.

However…It is Pentecost and the church is also celebrating, because the church is also always celebrating.

I can’t tell you how much joy it has brought me to teach confirmation this year after a long break since we’ve had young people ready for that course of study. A little less than a year ago two 10th graders, independently of one another, approached their families and asked if they could pursue this. Within the course of three days I had two requests to teach confirmation. And the richness of our conversations this year gave me new energy and excitement for the work of the church. They blew me away when they recently made a connection between the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego standing up for what they believed in against the powerful king and the way in which young people are rising up to speak truth to governmental power about guns in their schools. I can only explain that as the work of the Spirit doing something among us. And it is worthy of celebration.

But the Spirit is always doing something worthy of celebration in the church. Right now as North American and European churches wrestle with decline in numbers and status, churches in Africa, Asia, and South America are growing and the church is expanding and thriving. Even among a narrative of decline in our own cultural context churches are stepping up to be a part of a renewed Poor People’s Campaign across the country and to shelter immigrants as we did again this week transporting Lucio to and from the hospital for emergency surgery with the support of pastors and community members and mayors and hospital CEOs.

And alongside all the terrible things that happen in the world, there are always births to celebrate and new opportunities that open up. There are always weddings, even if they don’t all get the attention of yesterday’s royal wedding. (Side note, Bishop Curry’s sermon is more than worth the time to watch – talk about the Spirit moving!). At any given moment the Spirit is celebrating with someone.

It is Pentecost, and in turmoil and celebration and everything in between, the Spirit is at work.

That’s what the first Pentecost was all about – turmoil and celebration. “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs.” People of God, all speaking different languages. It’s a recipe for comedy or disaster, for celebration or turmoil. At best a gathering like this might be expected to navigate group interaction with lots of improvised hand gestures resulting in laughter at the miscommunications and a shared lightheartedness at the effort to communicate across language barriers. At worst, a gathering like this could result in the kind of cross-cultural misspeaking or misunderstandings that deeply offend the sensibilities of others and result in irreparable and entrenched anger and division.

But the Spirit came. The spirit came with wind and fire. The Spirit came with comfort for people divided and grieving. The Spirit came with challenge, too, sending them – all of them of every gender and tribe – out to proclaim a world-changing gospel message at great risk to themselves. But here’s the miraculous in this story. The author is actually quite clear that the disciples did not start preaching in different languages, but that each person heard in their own language. This may seem like a silly distinction, but at least one of the miracles of Pentecost is that the Spirit opens us up to be able to listen better to one another, to translate in a way that we can understand. This is true not just of one spoken language to another, but the Spirit teaches us to listen across difference, through turmoil, in moments of celebration. The Spirit has the power to help us hear one another more deeply.

This miracle is both comfort and challenge for us as the church.

Always, but especially right now, we who are part of this congregation need to be listening to one another deeply, listening more than we are speaking. The Spirit’s work in that will challenge us to hear perspectives beyond our own, and I have to hope that it will bring some kind of healing.

In fact, it is our baptismal calling to listen. As we met to review the promises they will affirm in a few minutes, the confirmands, their parents, and myself thought through what those promises mean in our own context. What struck me, even surprised me, as we parsed out the meaning is that over and over again it came back to listening: Living among God’s faithful people meant supporting one another – listening for what their needs might be; hearing the Word of God meant listening and engaging scripture but also listening to diverse perspectives to hear God speaking through others; to proclaim meant welcome for strangers, and openness to forgiveness, both of which requires careful listening; to serve following Jesus’ example was to both see the good in everyone and to spend time with people who challenge you; and working for justice and peace meant looking beyond our own perspective for justice for others, listening deeply to others’ need for liberation. The Spirit that moves in the waters of baptism, that dwells in us and through us, calls us daily to open our ears and our hearts to deeply listen to one another.

It’s in that listening that we find both comfort and challenge. The Spirit helps us hear both comfort and challenge in our joy and in our turmoil. The Spirit always coming alongside to assure us of God’s presence to carry us through and God’s presence to prod us into our baptismal calling for the sake of the world.

But it’s also the work of the Spirit that allows God to listen deeply to us. It is through the Spirit that God understands our prayers, even our sighs too deep for words. And in listening deeply to us, God is both comforted and challenged, too. God takes comfort and joy in listening, really listening to who we are and all we have experienced and is challenged by God’s own infinite compassion to accompany us on our journey. Not always to keep us comfortable or even always happy, but to continue working in us for the renewal and resurrection of all the world. That is what these young people affirm today, what all of us affirm today – the comfort and challenge of God’s Spirit in us through every turmoil and every celebration.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

7th Sunday of Easter (and celebration of the Ascension)
May 13, 2018

⁴⁴[Jesus said to the eleven and those with them,] “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 he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, ⁴⁶and he 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 he 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 (This is the gospel reading for Ascension Day, which we read at the beginning of worship today since we did not gather this year as a community on Ascension Day). 

[Jesus prayed:] ⁶“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁷Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; ⁸for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. ⁹I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. ¹⁰All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. ¹¹And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. ¹²While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. ¹³But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. ¹⁴I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁵I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. ¹⁶They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁷Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. ¹⁸As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. ¹⁹And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.” – John 17:6-19

Listen to today’s sermon and/or read below:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

We’ve been playing a lot of hide-and-seek at our house lately. But the rules of the game with a toddler are a little different. She always hides and we always do the seeking. And there’s pretty much just one hiding place she uses, though a blanket or curtain will do in just about any room. She waits until we’ve watched her hide to make sure that we are indeed participating in the game as we are expected to. Often she leaves her feet sticking out where we can see them. Then we loudly pretend to look elsewhere until she comes excitedly bursting out of her hiding place. Ta-da! And then we repeat, same hiding place, over and over again.

Sometimes I feel a little like we are playing the same kind of hide-and-seek with Jesus after we have celebrated the Ascension. There are many a depiction of the ascension in which the disciples are standing agape looking skyward and the only parts of Jesus’ rising body that remain visible in the frame are his feet, not unlike our hiding toddler. But more importantly, Jesus makes sure we see him disappear and he has told us exactly where to find him once he is gone from our sight, but we keep seeking in vain to find him elsewhere, expecting to find him hiding in our own plans for things, in our own ideas of power and privilege, in our own hopes for how things will turn out.

In one sense the disciples know right where he went. Up to heaven, of course. But even for first century disciples I don’t think there was a sense that heaven sat just up in the sky above the clouds, where centuries later he would have to dodge airplanes and satellites. They watched him go. He told them repeatedly in conversations where he was going and that they would know the way to follow Jesus even when they couldn’t see him. But still they weren’t quite sure how to find him. They weren’t about to float up into the sky after him. So they are left to figure it out on earth.

That’s the Christian life isn’t it? Maybe especially in the Easter season? We have experienced together the power of Christ’s rising, Christ’s defeating death, Christ’s overcoming the world with love and grace. And yet, Jesus sometimes seems hard to track down. He was just here. I just felt him. I just had this sense of clarity about where my life was going. I just had this sense of peace that things were going to be okay in my life and the life of my loved ones. I just had this vision of how the world might come to peace and wholeness. And then…gone. Thrown back into confusion. We may still be in Easter, but many of us may feel we’ve already misplaced Jesus and that sense of the Easter life.

The sense of certainty about the world that can sometimes come across in our Easter celebrations is called into question as powers of the world discuss nuclear war as if it is some kind of game and not mutually assured destruction. The Easter life seems still far away for young black men who continue over and over again to be subjected to violence at the hands of authorities simply for existing in the world, for being in places someone else thinks they don’t belong. Our Easter hopes for immigrants and refugees seeking a safe place to live and work are dashed by consistent bad news for thousands of people we don’t know and for Lucio, one person we as a congregation do know. Where did Jesus go?

We would like our lives to be settled, the future direction laid out for us. In this season of graduations we celebrate moving forward but sometimes forget how deeply complicated that transition can be, even when a next step is known. We want to know the answers to medical tests and how diseases will run their course in our lives and in our loved ones’ lives. And we search for certainty even in our faith, which is notorious for leaving us with more questions than answers. We would like to know Jesus present with us beyond doubt, but most of us go through at least periods of time when we don’t feel that deep in our bones the way we want to.

So I think this ascension story and the prayer that Jesus prays for his disciples as he prepares to leave them the first time, both of which we read today, are stories for us. Stories for us who have been following along and know right where Jesus has been, right where he disappeared to, right where he promised to be and yet live longing to find Jesus again. For all our searching, though, God points us again and again back to the places we can find Jesus.

Because Jesus has ascended, we are even more free to find Jesus in the same old places he’d been all along – among the poor, cavorting with the disreputable, sleeping among those without houses for shelter, sojourning as a refugee, condemned along with those labeled criminals. In the version of the ascension in Acts, which we didn’t read this morning, there is a messenger who comes and asks the disciples why they keep staring into the clouds as if Jesus is about to drop back down. But the messenger instead points them back to the world around them. Jesus left, Jesus is hidden from us, so as to make greater space for us to see the body of Christ in all the broken and hurting world. Jesus hiding in the vulnerable, the stranger, the marginalized.

And because Jesus has ascended, we are even more free to find Jesus within us. The traditional language is that Jesus has ascended to the throne of God. And yet the throne of God is not only beyond the universe it is also deep within us. If Jesus ascends to the heavens, Jesus also ascends into our hearts. With the same intimacy and compassion we witness in Jesus’ prayer for us in today’s gospel reading, Jesus comes back to us. When we find ourselves searching for certainty, for that Easter life, we realize from time to time that Jesus has already taken up residence within us, that the Easter life isn’t to be searched out beyond us, but is already emerging from within us, from the ordinary made holy, from our bodies, in all their strength and all their fragility, made to be the throne of God. Jesus hiding in our hearts.

And because Jesus has ascended, we are even more free to find Jesus in this meal that we share. From the time Jesus rises from the tomb on Easter to the time he ascends back into heaven, he eats meal after meal. He eats with the disciples at Emmaus, he asks for fish at the dinner table with the disciples, he eats with the disciples on the beach, twice. It’s almost as if he doesn’t quite want to leave the basic human pleasure of eating in company with others. But that’s exactly where we continue to find Jesus, in the bread and wine meal he promised to attend forever. In the words of Don Saliers, it’s as if “Jesus loved meals so much he became one.” Wherever we go, whatever might block us from recognizing Jesus in our hectic, sometimes tumultuous lives, we return to this table week after week to find Jesus hiding right where he said he would be. And it’s as if Jesus has ascended right into our bodies every time we share this meal together.

In ascending, in becoming in some ways a little harder to find, Jesus makes space for us to be the church. Jesus makes space for us to fumble our way through being church together. And while we are busy looking for Jesus, while we are fretting about when and how God will swoop in and act to bring our lives and our world back into order, Jesus comes bursting out from right where we left him, right from where he has ascended, from having been right beside us the whole time, from our own hearts and bodies. Now that Jesus has ascended, we are free to find him rising again from within us, the body of Christ in the world.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

6th Sunday of Easter
May 6, 2018

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

[Jesus said:] ⁹“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
  ¹²“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” – John 15:9-17

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

I stand in awe of people who can knit or crochet. People tell me it is possible to learn, and I have sometimes thought it would be something I would enjoy. But it remains a mystery to me how anyone turns a ball of yarn into something useful – a blanket, a sweater, a hat, a scarf. Even a crocheted coaster impresses me. It seems totally counterintuitive that something like a length of yarn can take shape to become something substantial. And there is something intriguing, I think about following the length of the single yarn through the whole, and getting a sense of the oneness of it.

It similarly is a mystery to me how God holds the world together in love in the way that is described in our readings today. Love one another as I have loved you. This is about the kind of love that serves others in need. It seems so simple and yet so utterly impossible. How do we manufacture feeling when it does not seem to come? How do we find the courage to take the actions to serve others that we know we should do when we just don’t want to do them? How does God knit a community together in a blanket of love from the meager and failed attempts we make to show love to one another?

I think of Chuong Nguyen, who arrived in the US as a refugee having fled Saigon on one of the last boats to leave before the fall of Saigon in 1975. He grew up to become a Roman Catholic priest. But a little over a year ago he made news because he offered to the president to relinquish his citizenship if it could be given to a Syrian refugee. And furthermore he asked his superiors to reassign him to serve in one of the countries from which visitors were being banned from entering the United States under the travel ban. Our immigration system doesn’t work that way, but he made the news with his offer. We could easily turn this into a story of heroic martyrdom and self-sacrifice, a story to aspire to. But those who talked with him directly spoke of his humility, his simple unquestioned recognition that he was knit together with the hurt and hurting, not just by his personal past but by nature of being a human being. He felt the tug in another part of the blanket and his response of deep love, of laying down his life for his friend, came not of his will but from the way God had knit him together with others.

I think of Waldomiro Costa Pereira who was an environmental activist in Brazil who stood up for the rights of poor farmers. He devoted himself to challenging the destruction of the land which also destroys the people who live in deepest connection to it and the people who are already on the margins. Like hundreds of other environmental activists in Brazil over the last decade, he was assassinated for his work. He too could be considered a martyr, another story of heroic proportions to aspire to. But like so many other people who speak on behalf of the environment, he did so out of a sense of deep connectedness. He felt the tug in another part of the blanket and his response of laying down his life for his friends, the forests and the farmers, came not of his will but from the way God had knit him together with others.

I think of Elizabeth Ramlow, who spoke in our adult forum last fall. In her partial retirement, she has traveled for extended stays more than 9 times with Doctors Without Borders to serve as a midwife and general nurse practitioner in places of extreme poverty or need. On a boat picking up refugees from the Mediterranean. In clinics that only got clean food and water with extreme ingenuity and perseverance  And in places where they frequently had to shelter-in-place as warring factions shot at each other around and over their clinic. She spoke in a straightforward way about the risks but saw her work as simply the work she needed to do. She felt the tug in another part of the blanket and her response of deep love, of laying down her life for her friends around the globe, came not of her will but from the way God had knit her together with all the others.

If you ask yarn to become a blanket, you’ll be waiting a long time to stay warm. If you expect it to hold together all by itself in intricate patterns where each loop holds another you’ll be disappointed. If you expect someone like me who doesn’t know how to knit and make it into a blanket, you are likely to end up with just a knotted up piece of yarn. But in the hands of an expert, you may find a treasured blanket beautiful to behold and excellent at keeping you warm.

If we go around telling each other to love, if we expect love to just emerge from our actions, I fear we will end up disappointed in ourselves and everyone else. If we go around trying to force love into the world we are likely to just get everything all knotted up. But if we feel ourselves pulled into the hands of God and expertly woven together, if we recognize the love God has for us and the way in which we have been drawn into intimate connection with one another, we too might feel the tug of the blanket when others are hurting and in need, and by nature of the way God has shaped us we find ourselves pulled in such a way that everything manages to hold together.

It’s what this gospel reading is all about. Love one another as I have loved you. Except it’s one never-ending loop: As I have loved you, love one another. Love one another, as I have loved you. As I have loved you, love one another. God’s skill at knitting us together is love poured out for us. That is what creates us into something from nothing. And that deepens God’s opportunities for pouring out love, which all the more create us into a people.

And Christ is spun right into the yarn, so that every tug and every loving response, even every attempt to cut or rip or destroy and every loving mending is felt in the body of God. Christ feels the tug in another part of the blanket and with a response of deep love, lays down his life for his friends, not by willing, not by force, not with heroic martyrdom, but because God has knit us together with Christ.

So yes, let us love. Let us love with feeling and with action. Let us love ourselves, our neighbors, our enemies, people we may never meet. But let us understand this essential commandment as the work of God knitting us together so that our experience of giving and receiving love is a natural extension of our having been made into one body in Christ.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 29, 2018

²⁶An angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) ²⁷So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. ²⁹Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” ³⁰So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” ³¹He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. ³²Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:
 “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
  and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
   so he does not open his mouth.
 ³³In his humiliation justice was denied him.
  Who can describe his generation?
   For his life is taken away from the earth.”
³⁴The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” ³⁵Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. ³⁶As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” ³⁸He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. ³⁹When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. ⁴⁰But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. – Acts 8:26-40

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

There’s nothing like the zeal of the convert. At least that’s the conventional wisdom. The exuberance of someone who has discovered a new podcast that changed their life and now can’t stop talking about it to anyone who will listen and maybe some people who won’t. The joy of someone who has discovered the most amazing restaurant you’ll never believe exists and insists over and over that you must join them for a life-changing dining experience. The person who has just discovered politics and thinks there is no other way to be but to experience their political party’s perspective. Or as we were discussing in our adult forum this morning – the joy of eating fresh, organic, locally grown vegetables after a lifetime of not being able to afford or access healthy food. It’s an exhilarating experience that creates positive movement in the world.

But then we all know, too, what it’s like to get in a rut with things we once couldn’t stop thinking about. The podcast you keep listening to even though it starts to feel a little tired sometimes after producing two episodes every week year after year after year. The amazing restaurant that is still good, but hasn’t put a creative and appealing special on their menu in months. The person who is seasoned in politics and still believes the party line but doesn’t believe it will ever actually create any change.

I don’t know about you, but I know what it’s like to lose that kind of enthusiasm. When it’s about a podcast or a restaurant, maybe it makes you search out some new adventure, but when it’s something core to your being, like, say, your faith, losing that enthusiasm can leave us in a difficult place. It’s natural, but it can be disheartening. And it can fill us not only individually but as a church, too, with a sense of complacency.

It’s not a renunciation of what we believe, it’s not even a falling away from the community, it’s just a softening of the zeal and the fire that burns within. It’s the sense our faith is good and important but not something we proclaim from the rooftops.

But I wonder if the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch could give us an answer to rekindling that passion within us. First let’s look at his side of things. This is a man who by nature of being a particular kind of sexual minority is barred from full participation in the temple, even though he comes from Ethiopia, a place that even by this time has many, many centuries of Jewish tradition. And he is faithful. He is reading the scroll of Isaiah as he rides his chariot down the road – no small feat mind you, to read a scroll in a moving chariot! – but he is having difficulty understanding what he is reading. What does it mean?

And he is met, through the work of the Holy Spirit, by Philip, someone who has been a witness to the person of Jesus and the events of Christ’s death and resurrection. And he is not met with a lecture or a forceful conversion, but with questions that back and forth begin to tease out some new insight into what God is doing in scripture and in the world. He is accompanied, if only for a short while, by someone else who joins him in interpreting scripture. Someone who has been around a while in the church accompanies thoughtfully and carefully and honestly a newcomer. Though this was common in the early church, which at least in many places revolved around the welcome, accompaniment, and teaching of newcomers, it is sometimes discarded in our churches today for fear that deep accompaniment will seem like to much of a burden, a barrier to a low-cost, low-engagement kind of participation we think appeals to our busy world today.

But Philip, who surely had told this story many a time already even at this early stage, engages this outsider and the encounter ends with the discovery of water in the wilderness: a sure a sign as any that it is time for a baptism. And the Ethiopian’s question comes so simply: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?!” Such a simple question and yet my slightly cynical side comes out and thinks up reasons to prevent it. He hasn’t learned enough. He hasn’t studied enough. He isn’t connected to a church community. There’s no baptismal certificate to fill out and no sponsors to affirm their commitment to him.

Now ongoing study, a connection to a faith community, sponsors, and even certificates are important. But when baptism is eagerly requested these are not the concerns of the new convert, who is overwhelmed at the life-changing explosion unfolding before him, the possibility of the cleansing, renewing, refreshing, shocking, drowning waters of God’s grace. These are not the questions we ask when we are burning with passion for a God who transforms us, who raises us from the dead.

Philip might not have had that long to get in a rut in this new and evolving church, but he certainly could have. Others in the church were already squabbling about who’s in and who’s out, who can be converted and how. They’re already putting up barriers to God’s grace. All well-intentioned, but the mark of people who have lost the zeal of the convert, the newness, freshness, and overwhelming power of God’s transformative love. But Philip does something in this passage that renews that in him. It converts him all over again. He engages with a newcomer, a stranger, someone not like himself. And not just as one who imparts knowledge, not just one who can welcome the newcomer into an established faith, but as one who is open to being converted again, as one who is open to the work of his own baptism refreshing his world anew.

It’s Philip who at the end of this story is whisked away to land in a new place where he goes right on preaching the good news. I wonder that this encounter might just as easily be called the conversion of Philip as the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. The conversion from a place that has lost the zeal of the convert, the freshness of God’s grace. And it comes because, at the leading of the Holy Spirit, he engages deeply with the questions of a newcomer.

And I think that’s the key to finding our energy again when we lose sight of how much God’s love and grace mean for us – to offer ourselves with openness to the stranger and to the newcomer and find in that engagement the freshness of God’s grace alive for us again.

And the real power is God’s word spoken in these waters. If you are new to this place and haven’t been baptized, these waters are for you. They are for you today if you want them. Consider this a Lutheran altar call. If you haven’t been baptized, here is water, what is to prevent us? Make yourself known and we’ll make it happen. And know that there is a community willing to surround and support you. And if you have been baptized, whether you are still burning with that transformation or whether you are feeling in a rut, these waters are for you, too, to remember the power of God’s grace again as you open yourself to the newcomer, the stranger, the outsider, and to the possibility of being converted all over again, that you might know throughout your baptismal life the power of God’s love for you.

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

Fourth Sunday of Easter 
April 22, 2018

¹The Lord is my shepherd;
  I shall not be in want.
 ²The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures
  and leads me beside still waters.
 ³You restore my soul, O Lord,
  and guide me along right pathways for your name’s sake.
 ⁴Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil;
  for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 
 ⁵You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
  you anoint my head with oil, and my cup is running over.
 ⁶Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
  and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. -Psalm 23

[Jesus said:] ¹¹“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹²The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. ¹³The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. ¹⁴I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. ¹⁷For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. ¹⁸No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.” – John 10:11-18

I think that Jesus’ beloved good shepherd metaphor works so well and has worked so well for centuries, not because we know that much about sheep and shepherding, but because we know just how relentless the wolves are. Jesus describes the difference between the good shepherd and the hired hand as the difference between the one who will do anything – even lay down his life – for the sheep, verses the one who in the face of relentless pursuit of the wolves, cuts and runs leaving the sheep to be attacked.

And while it can be harder to have a sense of the good shepherd, we know the relentless wolves pretty well. We know the pursuit of violence that consumes our bodies. The seemingly endless string of shootings, the use of chemical weapons that devastated the bodies of adults and children in Syria, the wars that kill soldiers and civilians with no clear objective in sight.

We know the relentlessness of hunger that consumes neighbors next door to us and whole nations of people suffering famine, the rejection of immigrants, refugees, and strangers that keeps our communities from thriving, the persistent refusal to address realistic, holistic solutions to affordable housing.

We know the relentless pressures of our daily lives, the snarling, growling voices that circle round us to feed our anxiety and fear, the demons of self-doubt that cause us to question our worthiness and belovedness, and the very real dangers of illness, injury, and even death that circle always around us sheep, huddled together hoping to escape.

And we know that we can only do so much to protect each other from the wolves that circle. At best we can step into the hired hand role for a while, to fend off what we can, to offer help, healing, and presence in the midst of danger and need. But we inevitably run off or succumb to the bite of the wolves ourselves. We long for the assurance of the shepherd that we can rest easily in green pasture and drink from still waters without fear of the circling wolves.

Which is exactly what Jesus is doing in this passage. This lovely metaphor and mini-sermon that Jesus gives doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a response to a controversy over Jesus having healed a man born blind. In the passage that preceded this, Jesus has stepped in, first to transform the man’s ability to see with his eyes, to transform something that had alienated the man from the flock. Jesus heals him into the fold of the Good Shepherd. And he makes it clear that this physical difference that set him apart was not about his sin or his parents’. It wasn’t something that should keep him out. The Good Shepherd comes along and sees the wounds that have been left by the wolves and in healing them gathers another into the fold of protection.

But it isn’t that simple – it never is in John’s gospel – because then all the religious authorities begin grumbling, snarling, holding tribunals. The wolves circle. And its after all this that Jesus begins to speak of himself as the Good Shepherd. It’s in response to the relentless wolves who for whatever reason cannot see that they are really wounded sheep at heart, wounded sheep Jesus is trying to heal into the fold also. And Jesus lays down his life for the sake of his sheep. Yes, at the cross, for this is one of the incidents which stir up the authorities against Jesus. Jesus literally lays down his life for the sake of the sheep. But before and after the cross itself, Jesus is already putting himself down between the attackers and the vulnerable ones, making himself vulnerable over and over again for the safety of the sheep.

And in laying down his life for the sheep over and over again, it begins not only to protect the sheep, but to transform the wolves. Not right away and not all at once, though the final victory over all things is assured in the cross and resurrection. But even before that comes to its fullness the Good Shepherd has a way of drawing people into the fold, healing wounds and transforming even our sometimes ferocious selves.

And having been healed into the fold, we have the 23^rdpsalm to describe God’s protection which is ever and always accompanying us through dangerous and shadowy places. Green pastures and quiet waters, restoration for the soul even in the valley of the shadow of death. An abundant feast and an overflowing cup in the presence of our enemies, in the presence of the relentless, circling wolves.

And then this, which strikes me this week more than all of that: “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Some Hebrew scholars suggest that we have softened that sentence in our familiar English translations. We might instead say that in the care of the Good Shepherd goodness and mercy will relentlessly pursue me all the days of my life.

With more ferocity than a wolf, with more energy and stamina to keep at us, goodness and mercy pursue us, find us wherever we go, catch up to us when we run away. My prayer for all of us is that we might know this pursuit as deeply as we know the pursuit of the wolves. That we might know the surprise of goodness and mercy catching up to us in spite of ourselves.  That we might know the goodness and mercy that seek us out at this table in bread and wine. That we might be overwhelmed with the goodness of God appearing in our neighbors, appearing even in the ones we have once considered wolves. That even when we stop ourselves from receiving goodness and mercy because we are too anxious, too afraid, or think ourselves too unworthy, that goodness and mercy pursues us.

Because we know better the power of the wolves, maybe we could begin this Good Shepherd Sunday to draw our awareness to that knowledge, to the relentless circling and snarling and nipping and consuming of all that seeks to destroy us. And to focus in not on its content but its intensity. And then remember that in the Good Shepherd’s care, those forces do not win the day but instead we are pursued with even greater power, with much more intensity than the wolves, by goodness and mercy all the days of our life, inviting us to dwell in God’s house forever.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Second Sunday of Easter
April 8, 2018

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ³³With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. ³⁴There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. ³⁵They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. – Acts 4:32-35

When 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 Judean authorities, 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 answered him, “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!

Teams can do wonderful, incredible things. A well-assembled team that has learned to think and move together can win a World Cup championship. It was a whole mass of people trained in nonviolent resistance who worked to set aside differences in pursuit of a common goal that helped galvanize the civil rights movement in the United States, and elsewhere around the world. Teams of architects and builders and workers can build skyscrapers and art museums and cathedrals.

However, teams of people working together can also do terrible things, as represented by the tag line about meetings from Demotivators poster series: “None of us is as dumb as all of us.” Teams of people have efficiently started wars and destroyed whole peoples. Teams of people have colonized lands with complete disregard for those who inhabited the land already. Anyone who has ever written a document by committee knows how terribly that can go in certain circumstances.

My question this morning is what kind of team the church is. I see both represented in our texts this morning. In Acts, this one corner of the early church was of one heart and soul. Everything was held in common (by which we might imagine not only the sharing of goods but also the sharing of burdens and the sharing of joys and the sharing of ideas and projects). There was not a needy one among them. When the church comes together in that way we can solve problems in ways we couldn’t have imagined possible. But the church didn’t start out that way.

John’s story of the disciples locked away behind closed doors reminds us that the veryfirstdays of the church are ones marked not by generosity but by fear. And while their fear is entirely justified – their friend, leader, rabbi has been arrested, captured, killed, and maybe now his body has gone missing. Their fear is not paranoia, but a realistic assessment of where they stand in relationship to the community around them. And yet, just a few nights ago they were all so confident they could handle whatever came their way. They were patiently taking notes aa Jesus gave them his final instructions. Love one another. Abide in me. Testify on my behalf. Whatever has happened to Jesus aside, they have been given clear instructions to go and be Jesus’ disciples in the world. But instead they are locked away in a room by themselves, afraid.

One can imagine how they reinforced one another’s fear. One of them, maybe impetuous Peter, wonders out loud whether they should try to go out and do something, to begin serving in the way that Jesus did, to proclaim the arrival of God’s dominion. And first one and then another reminds them all of the reasons not to go out. Before long they are rewriting Jesus’ last words to them to keep them from having to step forward in faith and trust into something frightening and uncertain.

What is it that moves this early church locked away reinforcing one another’s fear into the early church described in Acts where people reinforced one another’s generosity and commitment to shared hopes and dreams and if need be to share each other’s failures and losses? The transformation from a team of people reinforcing fear to a team of people reinforcing generosity is the resurrected body of Christ and the breath of God’s Spirit. It’s Jesus breaking in to their locked room.

Jesus doesn’t give them a motivational speech or tell them to get themselves together. He stands among them, he offers peace, he shares God’s Spirit with them and slowly they become the church that Acts so beautifully describes. They become the church because Christ is risen among them. Because God has shown them resurrection living in a way that changes them not only individually, but as a whole group.

But anyone who is paying attention has noticed that the church did not stay in that ideal form with everyone sharing everything. In fact, it only takes a handful of verses for us to discover things started to fall apart almost as quickly as it came together. It only takes a look around us to see that we as the church aren’t always getting it right. But the thing about the church is that the risen Christ keeps coming back to us. Things start to fall apart and we start ramping up each other’s fear. We start talking each other out of living the radical way of Jesus. And then Jesus shows up in our locked rooms. And meets us where we are in fear and in doubt and calls us again to an Easter way of life. Christ meets us here in bread and wine and in scripture and in messy human community and calls us again to be the church for the sake of the world.

We rarely manage the kind of perfect harmony that Acts appears to describe. We have only in rare moments, and for short periods of time, in certain communities ever managed to live in such a way that no one had need. But through the constant inbreaking of the risen Christ we are infused with God’s Spirit to be the kind of community that sets aside fear and lives with generosity.

Just in the last weeks two more immigrants have taken sanctuary in the Pioneer Valley. In addition to Lucio at First Church, Irida has taken refuge in Northampton and Gisella along with her children in Springfield. The risen Christ showing up to turn our hearts outward in love. ELCA clergy, including our presiding bishop, and lay leaders were visibly present at the Act to End Racism rally in DC this past week on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In his stead, churches today are rising up to speak uncomfortable truths about the power structure in America, not just around race, but, as Martin Luther King, Jr., himself did, around violence and greed and so much more.

Here, too, in this congregation we seek to follow boldly in the generous way of the risen Christ. We try to break down the walls in our own community, to stand with the oppressed, to support the weak and bind up the brokenhearted. To love as Jesus loves, to proclaim the truth of the risen one, to grow in generosity for the sake of the whole community. We are not perfect. We sometimes resemble the church of the first Easter – locked away in fear, doubting what we have seen. But the risen Christ keeps coming into our midst to remind us who we are and to remind us that death is defeated and God’s love has already won the day. Here today we gather around the table bringing our fear and doubt and are met with the body of the risen Christ. And with that we are sent forth to live that truth in the world.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Resurrection of Our Lord
April 1, 2018