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

Easter Vigil 
March 31, 2018

The references in the following sermon will make sense if you have a familiarity with the readings below, all of which were read in our liturgy tonight, but you’ll get the gist of it even if you don’t….

Readings: 
Creation: Genesis 1:1-24a
Deliverance at the Red Sea: Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21
The wisdom of God: Proverbs 8:1-8, 19-21; 9:4b-6
Valley of the dry bones: Ezekiel 37:1-14
The deliverance of Jonah: Jonah 1:1-2:1
Deliverance from the fiery furnace: Daniel 3:1-29
Dying and rising with Christ: Romans 6:3-11
and…

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

It would be easy to imagine with this intimate scene of Jesus fresh from the tomb in the garden with Mary that tonight is all about Jesus rising from the dead and appearing to his closest companions. It is of course, about that. The scene touches us because we know the power of death to rob us of what we hold most dear. We long for that restoration, that moment of recognition, that moment of being made whole again. But tonight is not just about that. Tonight is about an uprising. That’s another way we might translate the word resurrection. And not just Jesus rising up, but a real, honest-to-goodness uprising.

The Christian tradition has long held the belief that when Christ dies, it is not just to a three-day rest in the tomb but a descent into the depths of death where all the dead and dying reside to rally them together and lead them into eternal life. This empty tomb is not just the empty tomb of Jesus, it’s the empty tomb of all human life. Jesus’s rising up isn’t just our beloved savior returning to the land of the living. It’s an uprising, an insurrection of all the dead and dying against the power of death itself.

This is an uprising against the existence of death in God’s very good creation. It is the Spirit and the Word that once hovered over the chaotic deep pouring out of the empty tomb to jostle every wild particle of the universe into a new order of resurrection, into a life that God calls “very good.”

This is an uprising of the Hebrew people not just against Pharaoh and his horses and chariots and his chariot-drivers and whole army, but against all oppressors, dictators, slave-owners, and violent war in every time and place. They come singing and dancing their way out of Jesus’ tomb to proclaim the victory of God over death.

This is an uprising of God’s wonderful wisdom, which sets a table in the face of human folly. From Jesus’ tomb come the generations of people who have served a meal in the face of danger, whose humble connection to God has been lived out in every age with simple acts of caring and love.

This is an uprising of dry bones, who come rattling out of Jesus’ tomb to breathe again. To breathe a prophetic word to all those who have lost a sense of hope. To be a living, breathing sign that the depth of despair is not the end. To be the proclamation that nothing in all creation can any longer rob us of the blanket of God’s profound love.

This is an uprising of all the reluctant prophets who have spent time sulking in the belly of a giant fish, all the people who have been afraid of God’s grace, all the people that haven’t jumped on board with God’s message of inclusive love. And with them all the many from the nations whom God embraced long before people like Jonah managed to get over their prejudice. Together marching out of Jesus’ tomb to proclaim an end to discrimination and the power of God’s forgiveness.

This is an uprising of three men who survived a fiery furnace, marching out of Jesus’ tomb to remind the kings, the satraps, the prefects, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials of all of the nations, that God’s power is greater than anything they can muster all together. This is an uprising against coercion and injustice and any attempt to use authority to oppress and tear down.

We might be fooled by the fact that this great outpouring, this tremendous uprising occurred in the middle of the night before even Mary Magdelene was awake and walking to the tomb. We might miss that the Jesus who greets Mary so warmly that first Easter morning has just led an unstoppable army up from the grave to renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God, all the powers of this world that rebel against God, and all the ways of sin that draw us from God.

Which is what makes Jesus’ coming to Mary and to us, so incredibly powerful. Because this Jesus who has just wrestled a nonviolent army back to life to upend the world pauses to greet his friend. Pauses that she might know resurrection, too. Pauses so that she won’t be left out of this great movement of God. And so, too, Jesus pauses here, with us, in the dark of night, to greet us by name and raise us up with that great multitude to face down the powers of death in our world and walk boldly into life with God forever.

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

Good Friday
Ecumenical Service Sermon
March 30, 2018

A man named Joseph of Arimathea comes to bury the body of Jesus. I wonder sometimes about this man, a member of the council who was “also himself waiting expectantly for the reign of God.” I have often thought him to be not unlike myself, a person who deals with grief and stress by doing what needs to be done, by creating a task list, by taking care of the details. He gets the body, wraps it in linen, arranges the tomb. He even rolls the heavy stone in place. And then I suppose he goes home, not sure what to do with himself now when all he has left to do is to feel his grief.

Maybe he is grieving over Jesus, although it’s not clear how personally he knew the Galilean preacher. But he is certainly grieving over the loss of yet another opportunity to see the reign of God. Like so many of us waiting expectantly for all kinds of things, Joseph of Arimathea had probably too many moments in his life where he came and collected his hope having died and buried it away in a tomb.

Every time he buried a friend, a relative, a child, it became a little harder to keep looking, to keep expecting the reign of God. It became a little harder to believe in a God who saves, in a God who has power to create new life. A little piece of hope died and was buried.

Every moment in which he failed to live up to the person he wanted to be. Every time he gave up on a dream, went back on a promise, failed to change his life in the way he wanted. The reign of God seemed that much harder to find. Another piece of hope dead and buried.

Every mass shooting, every accidental gunshot, every suicide after which nothing seemed to change. Every act of domestic violence which was allowed to continue. Every sexual harassment and sexual assault allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged. Hope: crucified, died, and buried.

Every time his goals for his community failed to be realized, every time his vision for what we might do and be together faltered, every time the world simply didn’t look as it should. Every time even the people of faith failed to come together in harmony. Another little piece of hope died and got placed on the shelf in the tomb.

When the earth itself became sick and life on the planet was threatened by human greed, consumption, and violence and the movement to make a difference, to change the direction, to usher in a renewed understanding of God’s good creation all fell flat, it became a little harder to hold on to hope as each attempt to find the reign of God ended in failure.

So by the time Jesus died, I don’t expect Joseph of Arimathea had much hope left. So this time he was gong to make sure it had a proper burial. I imagine him putting the body of Jesus in the same tomb he had been putting all that other death – all the reminders of his failure to find the reign of God for which he had been so expectantly waiting. And now, with Jesus’ body there too, the tomb was full with all those things he’d buried along the way, so he rolled the stone in front and walked away. Hope for the reign of God dead and buried, once and for all. Some days I know how he felt: hope all sealed up in a tomb, trying to move on without it.

But Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of Joses, were watching. And even if Joseph had given, it seems that they hadn’t. They weren’t sure what to do or how they would roll the stone away when they came back, but they weren’t done waiting expectantly for the promised reign of God, even though they, too, had buried hope again and again. Even though they had failed, too, to find the reign of God for which they were expectantly waiting.

Whether we are Joseph of Arimathea or one of the Marys, whether our hope is sealed away forever or whether we simply haven’t figured out yet how God will open up new possibilities, here we are living among so many signs of hope dead and buried, so much actual and figurative death sealed away in our tombs. And we ponder that place of despair today. We dwell together with our buried hopes in the tomb. We consider the finality of the hard rock walls that close us in. We ponder our failed visions for God’s reign of peace and love. We worry about whether there is any way to resurrect our hope.

And we go home with Joseph and the Marys. We go home to figure out how to keep living. We go home to wait. Maybe no longer expectantly, but waiting nonetheless. And perhaps we will return on Sunday with Mary, Mary, and Salome, to discover not only Jesus’ body risen but also Joseph’s tomb emptied out and ours as well and all our buried hope set free to live again in the world.

Prayer: Crucified One, come be with us. Join us in our despair, in our failure to hope. Join us in our darkness. Join us in our waiting – for hours, for days, for years. Join us in our tombs and in our grave. Stay with us here until the day when you restore all creation to new life. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Maundy Thursday
March 29, 2018

Jesus knew. He knew what was coming. He knew of Judas’s intended betrayal, of Peter’s coming denial, of nearly all of them falling away. He knew that his hour had come to depart from the world through a tunnel of pain, suffering, death, and burial. He knew.

And Jesus loved. Jesus loved his own in the world, all the way to the end. He loved them with a big, broad, loving-the-whole-world kind of love and he loved them with a having-walked-through-fire-with-a-friend kind of love.

Jesus knew and Jesus loved.

For better or worse Jesus knows us. We began tonight with an extended moment to take in God’s forgiveness. Having been dwelling together in Lent these past weeks, time for an honest accounting of who we are and how we have failed, we lay that bare before God tonight. Like Peter, we are so often afraid to make ourselves vulnerable to receiving Jesus serving us. We are so often afraid to name who we really are. Because we fear it will cost us God’s love.

We fear naming the dark secrets we hide from even our closest companions, the secrets we sometimes even hide from ourselves. We fear naming the ways in which we have done wrong. We fear naming the ways in which we cling to words and deeds we know to be wrong. We fear acknowledging that we are not as much in control as we like to think. We fear that all of this will make us unlovable, that our self-worth will crumble if we name who it is we really are.

We enter this story with Jesus and we would like to think that knowing what we know now we could really follow Jesus all the way to the end. Maybe we’d like to think we can do what the disciples could not – recognize him as God’s chosen one, surrender ourselves to the crowds, name our faith in the face of persecution and threat of death. Maybe we could. Or probably we wouldn’t do much better than Judas and Peter and all the rest. And Jesus knows it.

And Jesus loves us anyway. Jesus loves our quirks and our faults. He bears with us when we make fools of ourselves. I’d like to think he responds to our foolishness in the same way he does to Peter’s sudden desire to get a head-to-toe washing: “OK funny guy, one who has bathed does not need wash.”

Jesus includes us in the washing when we are in the midst of plotting to betray him. Jesus stoops down to serve us when we still haven’t repented of our sins. Jesus humbles himself to us even when we fail to relinquish our own pride. As if to say to us, “It’s ok. It’s ok to be vulnerable, to show your weakness, to name your truth however messed up it is or however much society will shame you for it.” Jesus knows our truth, and with a towel and a pitcher of water he bends down to show us God’s love.

This act we are about to share – the washing of one another’s feet is a moment of vulnerability. It is a beautiful thing to pause and serve in a way that is both real and symbolic. But it is vulnerable to allow someone else to serve us and to bend to serve another in this way. It is a way of holding out our imperfect bodies, our imperfect selves and saying – this is the imperfect truth of who I am, and God loves me anyway.

And it’s this by which the world will know us as Jesus-people – that we show love for one another. That we name with brutal honesty the truth of ourselves and our world and then we go ahead serving one another and loving what society has told us is unlovable. Because that is the love that Jesus has shown to us. That is the love that these three holy days are all about. That is the love of a God who stoops to human life to suffer and die along with us. That is the love that resonates through us tonight and always. That is the love that will burst forth three days from the washing of the disciples’ feet, never again to be hidden or killed. That is the love that raises us to new life forever.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Palm/Passion Sunday Reflection 2018

The following is a reflection shared before the reading of the Passion of Jesus from the gospel of Mark.

I’m here to give you a warning about the story you are about to hear. This story of Jesus is one that contains violence and pain. It contains betrayal and injustice. Along with the triumphal entry we proclaimed at the beginning of worship this story contains acts of political and social subversion. It contains vivid details of state-sponsored execution.

This story is not for the faint of heart. For anyone who loves Jesus and the message he has been teaching, the way he has been transforming lives of the sick and welcoming children, the way he miraculously commands the natural world, this story is deeply disturbing as all those wonderful, amazing things seem to come to an end. For anyone who believes that Jesus was the Son of God, this story has the power to call into question our assumptions about what that means. For anyone who considers Jesus a trusted friend and companion on the journey, this story will hit hard. For anyone who is looking for comfort here, it will seem like a strange place to find it.

This story deserves a warning because it is likely to remind you that we still live in a world where sanctioned executions take place. It is likely to remind us all that we have been both victims and perpetrators of betrayal, denial, and violence. It is likely to remind us that political injustice still runs rampant no matter what party is in power. It is a story that reminds us of our own and others’ failures. It is a story that reminds us of the power of death to rob us of hope, to rob us of our loved ones, to rob us of living.

But to be honest you can hardly get through a day in this world, especially if you watch, read, or listen to the news, without being confronted with all of that and more.

The real warning I have to give to you today is that this story of upside down power, of God entering the depth of human suffering and despair, of God entering death itself, has the power to transform us. I can’t fully explain how and why. I cannot explain how it is that this movement of God saves us, how it allows us to live with hope now and how it allows us to live forever in God. But I can attest that it does just that in me. That it has compelled me to greater compassion, to bolder protest of the systems of power and control, to deeper hope in the face of despair, to a better ability to let go of the fear that holds me back.

And that is wonderful, but frightening, too. Because it upends my life, my power, my way, my will, and the empire of which I am a part. It forces me to give up easy answers. It forces me to acknowledge power and wisdom beyond my wildest imagination. It asks me to come to terms with dying before I get to experience resurrection.

So listen with care. This story has power. The words spoken now in this space speak us into faith and into life. This story of God entering human suffering and death is alive beyond this room, too. It is alive in all the corners of the world crying out in despair and every place of the dying and grieving. It is, even as we tell it again here, active in the world defeating death and raising this world to life.

Let us now enter into the contemplation of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and meditate on the salvation of the world through his sufferings, death, burial, and resurrection.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 18, 2018

¹Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love;
  in your great compassion blot out my offenses.
 ²Wash me through and through from my wickedness,
  and cleanse me from my sin.
 ³For I know my offenses,
  and my sin is ever before me.
 ⁴Against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight;
  so you are justified when you speak and right in your judgment. 
 ⁵Indeed, I was born steeped in wickedness,
  a sinner from my mother’s womb.
 ⁶Indeed, you delight in truth deep within me,
  and would have me know wisdom deep within.
 ⁷Remove my sins with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
  wash me, and I shall be purer than snow.
 ⁸Let me hear joy and gladness;
  that the body you have broken may rejoice. 
 ⁹Hide your face from my sins,
  and blot out all my wickedness.
 ¹⁰Create in me a clean heart, O God,
  and renew a right spirit within me.
 ¹¹Cast me not away from your presence,
  and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
 ¹²Restore to me the joy of your salvation
  and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. -Psalm 51:1-12

Listen to today’s sermon here:

After mealtimes our toddler usually needs a fairly hefty cleaning of face and arms. She’s not the messiest eater I’ve ever met, and nothing, I’m told, compared to myself at her age. Nonetheless several times a day we commence a ritual of wrangling to the sink or scrubbing with a cloth or both. And at least 95% of the time she puts up a fight. Sometimes we can get through most of the cleaning pretending it’s a game, but she figures out fairly fast that it’s not a game – it’s cleaning up. On the one hand, I actually kind of admire that she doesn’t mind being messy, that she thinks nothing of smearing hummus in her nose, her hair, her clothes, and onto anything else she can reach. She isn’t yet really aware that having hummus in those places is a negative thing we call messy. That seems to be a large part of the challenge of cleaning up – she hasn’t figured out what messy is. So she resists the fixing of a problem she doesn’t yet realize she has.

The psalmist, who perhaps was the famous and infamous King David himself, says “Wash me through and through from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin…Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Many of us, in contrast to my daughter, like the feeling of starting fresh again for the day, washing away the dirt and grime of a muddy hike or a day digging in the soil. We recognize in part, at least, our messy lives. But to achieve a clean heart and to be washed from our own wrongdoing would require the kind of scrubbing of our lives that would have us squirming to be put down and left again to our messiness. And sometimes we’ve been with some of our dirt for so long we’ve ceased to recognize it for what it is and we fight any attempt, however well-intentioned, to strip us of the grime we are accustomed to smearing wherever we please.

We often begin our worship with confession and forgiveness. This Lent we have begun with an extended time for meditation as part of that confession with an opportunity to name in writing on stone or in the silence of our thoughts the things that hold us back from the life God intends. Burdens, wrongdoing, failures to act. We each have our own stories, our own caked on dirt that needs scrubbing if we are going to come out with clean hearts.

As a society we are still trying to understand what it means to be washed from our communal sin and scrubbed to a clean heart. We still cling consciously and unconsciously to racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. We still collectively defend the actions of those who degrade others. I wonder that even if we believe in a world of equal access and opportunity that we sometimes are afraid to be scrubbed clean of our power and privilege or to give up the messy way that has become all too comfortable for us.

A key component for the psalmist and for us is truth-telling: “For I know my offenses and my sin is ever before me…Indeed, you [God] delight in truth deep within me, and would have me know wisdom deep within.” This is foundational for moving forward into something new, an honest accounting, recognizing our mess for what it is. It’s a primary part of the MeToo movement sweeping our country – the need to name the overwhelming reality of harassment and assault and the need for perpetrators to own their actions. It’s at the heart of the perpetuation of racism – the failure to truthfully account for the generations of profound, systematic, and ongoing oppression that allows this communal sin to perpetuate itself over and over.

I see this all the time in restorative justice – the only thing that truly halts the process is the failure to acknowledge responsibility. Our legal system is designed to discourage people from owning their guilt. Our world is set up to let us sit in our messiness as long as we don’t really call it what it really is. A colleague of mine wondered out loud this week if God watches all this and says, “Can we all just acknowledge the messiness so we can move on to what’s next?”

Because God isn’t interested in finger wagging about the past but in leading us from that past into something new. The psalmist uses strong language to name the reality of personal brokenness and sinfulness, but it’s not to berate or wallow. It’s not to beat oneself up about or to spend hours in self-hating reflection for our failures. It’s about the last lines of this part of the psalm which we have been singing as our offering song throughout this season: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.” And hear especially the last line: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your bountiful spirit.” It’s about the restoration of joy and the abundance of God.

And here I return to my toddler, who even though she fights the scrubbing clean after meals, has discovered that it is great fun to play in the water in the bathtub. So she now demands several times a day very insistently, “I need a bath! I need a bath!” She does not mean, of course, that she wants her hair shampooed or any soap used, but simply that she wants to play in the water and all that splashing actually gets her pretty clean. And what an image for us of the restoration of joy and the bounty of God’s spirit, what an invitation to come playfully to the waters that wash us to God even when we don’t recognize the need to be made clean.

That’s where we are in this fifth Sunday of Lent. Holy Week is nearly upon us. Easter is but two weeks away. But before we dive into that week of God’s incredible actions on our behalf, before we die and rise again with Christ, the lectionary takes us back to Ash Wednesday, to this psalm that helped us begin this season. Perhaps to make sure we are fully ready to engage that truth-telling about ourselves and our community. To make sure we have named the messiness we have and our resistance to being washed clean, that we have named our ashes to ashes and dust to dust nature as human beings. Because in Christ’s movement from death to life, in our own movement from death to life, we’re going to get scrubbed whether we like it or not as we are drawn into new life.

God offers in the waters of baptism an opportunity for us to splash and play in God’s grace. To splash and play in such a way that we are made clean and new. I wonder if Lent could be for us a time in which naming the reality of who we are and the wrong we have done could begin to open us to that kind of joy. That in honest reckoning before God and one another, we might no longer carry the burdens and sins of our past but leave them here at the cross, and that we might then with burdens and sins acknowledged come not reluctantly, not fighting the water at every turn, but come eagerly with joy to splash in God’s grace. That we might demand multiple times a day to know the joy that God’s claiming us in baptism can give. That we might enter Easter, as we do a the Easter Vigil, splashing joyfully through the waters of baptism to find that in our unhindered enjoyment of God’s grace we have, without even realizing we’ve been made clean, walk forward with clean hearts and our joy restored.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 11, 2018

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon:

[Jesus said:] ¹⁴“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
  ¹⁶“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
  ¹⁷“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. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” – John 3:14-21

Let us consider for a moment what young children believe about their parents. A growing and exploring toddler might believe parents have powers and skills that seem almost superhuman. A survey of 6-8 year-olds in the UK revealed that as many as 55% believe their parents are actual superheroes, including such powers as telepathy, super-strength, and healing. Nearly a third thought their parents had a secret lair where they kept their capes. They might believe that their parents have lots of wisdom and know lots of things. We recognize these things to be true in one sense and not in another – children eventually realize the very real limitations and faults of their parents and yet their perceptions mean something true about the relationship that exists. It speaks to their daily experience of care and love.

I wonder that our belief in God isn’t more like the beliefs that young children have about their parents. Because those beliefs are based in relationships rather than in intellectual assent or getting it right, about trusting the power of the one whose strength and wisdom is beyond ours. The extent to which children can articulate the belief is only an imperfect and imprecise description of the daily relationship they have with their parents. They may believe all kinds of things, but fundamentally they know that these people are their parents, because their daily reality of being together speaks what a creed about the parent-child relationship never could.

And so we come to this famous verse about belief: “God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may have eternal life.” We have so often gotten this verse all tangled up because we think that belief is about deciding particular theological principles, making a choice for this idea over that idea, or for understanding something about God. We worry about who believes what and what is considered enough in bounds to count for salvation. And even if we don’t worry about others, maybe we worry about ourselves. Do I fit in if I struggle to believe this thing or that thing about God?

But throughout John’s gospel especially, Jesus is interested in being in relationship with people. Though he has profound theological things to say, and he can sometimes sound very heady in the discourses that follow his encounters with people, it’s all about the people. This most famous verse comes in Jesus’ response to Nicodemus, a Pharisee of Pharisees who comes to him in the cover of night. It is when Nicodemus recognizes how impossible it is to understand much less believe what Jesus is telling him that Jesus speaks this most famous verse about God’s profound love. It is almost as if the belief itself isn’t the central part, but the relationship in which the questions are asked and the power experienced.

When we confess the creed each Sunday in worship, we say we believe. I wonder if we take seriously the claim we make in saying that word. Surely many Sundays the words wash over us, they fall from our lips with the comfort of familiar phrases, and this is good. Surely some Sundays a word or phrase strikes us and invites us to deeper wonder or curious investigation. But too rarely for me does it invite me to remember the relationship with the one about whom we are speaking. Which is really what we mean in the creed – that we are in relationship to the God of creation, redemption, and sanctification.

I believe that the daily living that my body does for me, the created goodness which fills my table and creates beauty outside my window, the wonders that we have mined and developed with our God-given creative powers all speak to a daily interaction with the God who created all things.

I believe that my interactions with my fellow embodied human beings, perhaps especially the ones who are born into unusual circumstances, into poverty and suffering, speak to me about the relationship I have with God. That my experiences of pain and suffering are shared by the body of Jesus and the whole body of Christ and brought into new life in the church shows me the promise of something stronger than death itself, and helps me to understand being in relationship with God.

I believe that in my daily experience of community something more than my own power and breath shape my experience, that I feel God leading and guiding in ways I cannot understand or explain. And where all that is leading I can’t describe very well, but it is surely the renewal and resurrection of all things.

That’s still a lot of words to try to describe what it is to live in daily relationship with God, but living in daily relationship with God is eternal life. “This is the judgment…” Jesus says after that famous verse. This is the moment, the crisis point, the time that matters. The here and now is the opportunity for that daily relationship, here and now is eternal life. So look, not just to Jesus and to the cross, but to the moments of joy and frustration and everything else to see God there living those moments with you. Nicodemus never assents to all that Jesus says, but he comes back at the end of the gospel to help lay his body in the tomb. He never says yes to Jesus with words, but something of that conversation keeps him in connection to Jesus such that at another moment of judgment, another crisis point, he is there in relationship.

The power of this most famous verse is that it grounds all of this, the whole relationship we have with God and the relationship that all of creation has with God, in God’s tremendous self-sacrificing love for the whole world. It does not start with our understanding or our recognition of God, for surely that is imperfect at best. Instead it starts with the love of God. It starts with God’s saving action. It starts with God’s claiming us in Christ not the other way around. Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, we have God’s freedom-giving, life-affirming, boundary-respecting love. And we have today the invitation to turn our eyes to that, to that love, to that relationship and in doing so find for ourselves now and always in God’s eternal life for the whole world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Let’s start this morning with a hymn text by poet Brian Wren (Copied from a fine Journey with Jesus lectionary essay by Debie Thomas):

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

We hear in his poetic words an affirmation of bodies we too rarely hear in our culture and in the church. Too often we disregard bodies that do not meet societal standards of beauty and sex appeal. We look with shame at our own bodies that do not look or feel the way we want. We mistreat trans bodies and gender non-conforming bodies. We forget about the millions of bodies trapped in modern slavery and we have failed to address the millions of bodies locked up in our obsession with incarceration. We write off people whose bodies don’t work like other people’s, whose bodies have changed from what they once were. But I would argue that affirming bodies is a central theme running through today’s texts.

It starts with the ten commandments, so often used to chastise, condemn, or even intimidate, they are part of the covenant the creating God makes with creation to affirm a way of life that honors the bodies of ourselves and others. Yes, it’s a set of rules and limits, but a set of rules and limits that invites us into the kind of life God intends with a recognition of the ways in which we all too often hurt one another. The embodied commandments might read like this:

You shall have no other Gods, because what else would you worship beside the one who made you to be you? And all the other things you put your trust in can’t possibly compare to the one who forms your body from the dust of the earth. And God made your body in the image of God, so you, too, need time for rest and renewal – try doing it every seventh day.

Honor the family relationships, especially the parents who kept your fragile body safe as it grew and formed, perhaps especially mothers whose bodies gave way to bear you into the world.

Not only should you not use guns or swords or anything else to outright murder someone, but as Luther says, you should help and support others in all their bodily needs. So do not kill people by refusing to share your food and shelter, or by cutting people off from the community.

Honor the body of your partner in a way that is consensual and life-affirming and which does not destroy the relationship you have with that person or with anyone else.

And God affirms that as embodied people we have stuff that fills our needs and wants. And so we respect that reality for ourselves and others not only by not pickpocketing but by proactively contributing to an economic way of life that allows everyone to flourish in body, mind, and spirit.

In case in all that we forget that words can and do take flesh, we are reminded to speak well of our neighbors and find ways to build them up, for we bear in our bodies the burden of words spoken to tear us down or the gift of words spoken to build us up.

And respect the spouse and service animals and, well, anything that your neighbor has, because to do so honors the embodied relationships all of us have with one another.

You can read those commandments other ways – I’m not suggesting this is the only way. But it’s a powerful reminder that a huge part of God’s promise to us is to lead and guide us in caring for ourselves and one another as embodied creatures. Indeed we cannot honor our own body without learning to honor all other bodies, and we cannot honor other bodies without learning to honor our own body.

And so into a world in which we have failed so miserably at doing just that, God comes as word made flesh in the body of Jesus. God’s embodied covenant with us is so strong, and God’s love of our embodied selves so great that God takes on that flesh.

It’s that, I think, which gets Jesus fired up enough to take out the tables set up outside the temple. It’s not, in John’s gospel anyway, about their cheating people who are coming to fulfill the law at the temple. It’s not even about overturning the temple itself. It’s about getting their attention on the embodiment of God in other places. It’s about getting people to see that the Word has taken flesh in an imperfect human body – one capable of being arrested, beaten, and crucified. That God’s body isn’t limited to the places we tend to assume it dwells, that God doesn’t only dwell in bodies that fit the dominant social paradigm or in centers of religious or political power. That God has taken flesh in all kinds of other places, too. In bodies that have been otherwise ignored, shunned, beaten, damaged, worn, or made sick. In bodies that get hungry and have to use the bathroom and in bodies that give out and give up, in bodies that die. Jesus is so fired up because he wants us to see in his own body the way in which God takes flesh in us all.

And all of this would be surprising, amazing, profound – a God who actually cares about the daily embodied realities of our living in community and a God who cares enough to become embodied in that reality. But Jesus does not stop there, because he hints at what is yet to come. God’s embodiment in Jesus will be the rebuilding of something new. It will be the beginning of bodies rising again, of community that abides by the rules that make it safe for every body to flourish, of a shared recognition of God’s life and God’s eternal Word embodied in us all.

Today we live in a world that doesn’t always respect God’s embodiment in other people. Sometimes we, too, fail to recognize the surprising ways that God takes flesh among us. But here today, God’s Word made flesh is shared with us at this table. Here today we are welcomed to that promised life of resurrection in which all bodies have a place at the table. And we remember here that “Good is the body, for good and for God, good is the flesh that the Word has become.” Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2018

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

[Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.³²He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
  ³⁴He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? ³⁸Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” – Mark 8:31-38

Could we possibly imagine what the world would be like without those people who hold on to a vision of how things might be different? Imagine if people like Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and all the people who stood with them had never been able to imagine something new and different, something more fully alive than what they knew? Not just what if those particular individuals never rose up, for they rose up to stand in for whole movements of people with a vision for equal voting rights for women, for an end to apartheid, for an end to colonial subjugation of others. But what if all of us together lost the vision for what could be?

What if we gave up on the idea that we could live in a world without mass shootings? What if we could no longer imagine a world in which black lives and brown lives and indigenous lives actually do matter to society at large as much as any other lives? What if we could no longer imagine peaceful resolutions to international conflicts and homes for refugees? What if we could no longer dream about a world in which everyone had enough to eat? What if we could no longer envision the reign of God?

That’s what is at stake in Jesus’ conversation with the disciples and with Peter in particular. Jesus is speaking about what must inevitably come. Jesus has maintained in his relatively short ministry a vision for the reign of God on earth. And like every prophet before and since he could see the writing on the wall, the way in which his life was on the line for imagining such a reign of peace and justice. But Jesus also has a deep awareness in this conversation that it’s actually not about him. It’s about the reign of God having come near already, about the reign of God already bursting open into the world, and about our being able to see and understand that happening. And maybe because he can see that vision, he can also see God’s promise of resurrection. He can see that on the other side of the suffering that is to come he will rise again to lead us once and for all into that coming reign of peace and justice.

This is what he tries to explain to the disciples, to Peter. And this is what Peter cannot envision. Peter’s attempted rebuke of Jesus surely is a rejection of the suffering that is to come and not a rejection of the whole idea of rising again after three days. But the problem is that Peter knows suffering and death. Peter knows what goes on in the world even if he hasn’t experienced it all himself. So he cannot yet fully envision what Jesus is trying to tell him. Because he doesn’t know resurrection. Resurrection doesn’t happen all around him like suffering and death do.

It’s as if he hears the first part of what Jesus says and stops listening to the end. Peter doesn’t want to have anything to do with the suffering and death part, not of Jesus, anyway. Not of the one who is already beginning to give them a taste of what life could be like instead. But his ability to imagine something as incredible as resurrection was hindered because he couldn’t see through the other stuff. He couldn’t see past what he knew to fully imagine the reign of God released to all the world.

Jesus recognizes immediately what is at work here. He names Satan in his rebuke, but is it that Satan, the personification of all that stands against God, is really the failure to imagine the reign of God? Jesus recognizes in Peter the failure to imagine something new, something beyond death, something beyond the world as he knows it.

And the call Jesus then issues to all of them, to any who want to be followers of Jesus, is to deny themselves and pick up their cross to do so. That is to do what Jesus does, to put aside the idea that one’s own self is the most important thing. To set aside the idea that it all depends on us, on our doing, on our importance. The self-denial Jesus invites us to isn’t to give things up for Lent, or take on spiritual practices, or even to serve our neighbor at great cost to ourselves, though all of that may very well be quite helpful. This kind of self-denial is to set aside our needing to be right, our needing to be the one to fix everything. This kind of self-denial is to let go of the self we try to project in order to be the kind of self we have been called to be in baptism. The call to take up the cross isn’t to go find a place to die for Jesus, but to live so fully in the vision of the reign of God that we loosen our grip on self and other.

At the end of the day the coming reign of God was bigger even than Jesus. The goal wasn’t for Jesus to stay alive to keep proclaiming that coming reign of God. The goal was to live so fully with that vision of something different that not even death itself could stop it. God lives fully into that world of suffering and death and in doing so unleashes the fullness of the reign of God into all the earth. And his resurrection helps Peter and all the rest of us hold in our imaginations the possibility that something could be different in our world.

So as we think about traveling together not only the way of the cross but the way through the cross to resurrection, we might try to be theologians of the cross, which is to be people who look head on into the suffering and death of Jesus and see there the presence of God in all of human suffering and also there the transformation that presence brings to resurrect new life from that very place that we are often so afraid to look into.

So let us follow Jesus to the cross, the tomb, and all the way to Easter morning. And along the way let us open our imaginations to see what could be different from the brokenness and hurt we find ourselves staring into. And maybe this Lent we will see with a bit of holy imagining in the cross, in our own hurt and fear, in the world crumbling around us, the reign of God’s peace and justice tearing into the world and sweeping us into it before we’ve even fully imagined it.

-Pastor Steven Wilco