3rd Sunday of Advent
December 17, 2017

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

  ¹⁹This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” ²¹And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” ²²Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” ²³He said,
 “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
 ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ ”
as the prophet Isaiah said.
  ²⁴Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. ²⁵They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” ²⁶John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, ²⁷the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” ²⁸This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing. – John 1:6-8, 19-28

Not no one, to be sure, but certainly very few people would want the job of John the Baptist. If the church asked you to go live in the wilderness, whether that be an urban or rural one, shouting to crowds of strangers about some unnamed, yet unseen prophet coming to wash you with fire – you would probably join a different church. If in baptizing infants and children we asked parents to promise to let their children live in an ascetic community, shunned by most, someone who would never quite fit in with society, we’d probably have fewer baptisms. If we asked people interested in joining the church to spend all their time preparing for something we can’t promise is coming anytime soon and which we can’t fully understand, we’d likely have fewer new members.

But in a certain way, especially in Advent, God asks us to the same kind of work as John the Baptist. Not exactly the same. Not necessarily shouting to crowds of people about the coming Messiah. But called to the work that is set out for us in the waiting. And yet, like John, we must be clear about a few things. When asked who he is, he adamantly replies first about who he is not. He is, first and foremost, not the messiah. He is not Elijah or the prophet. That ought to be reassuring to us – our sacred calling does not require saving the world or living as a famous prophet. But for John that doesn’t diminish the calling he has to lead others with passion, purpose, and vision. He is a voice in the wilderness. He has a voice to name God and name the power of God to renew lives broken by the wilderness within us and around us.

What does your voice cry out? What voice has God given you? What voiceless wilderness does your voice break into? Is it a voice that draws feeds others by setting a welcome table with rich food or by making sure that food gets to the people who need it? Is your voice one that gathers little ones to experience God’s good news? Is your voice one that expresses itself in the written word to comfort or challenge or inspire or delight? Is your voice one that leads businesses and entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams in ways that build up the community? Is your voice one that refuses to accept the social stigma of mental health concerns? Is your voice one that speaks comfort to the aging, grieving, sick, and imprisoned? Is your voice one that designs and creates the materials and machines that help us do the tasks of living on a daily basis? Is your voice one that tends the land that all people may eat and land and animals are protected and nourished?

Whatever your work is, this task of crying out in the wilderness can be exhausting. It is never ending. If you are called to something that sees results, God bless you, but there will be something after that, too, another invitation to use your voice to lead. If you are called to voice a need that may not see an ending in our lifetimes, God bless you, because you will need every ounce of blessing you can get. But take heart from John, you are not the Messiah, or even the prophet, but a voice. To speak, to act is to live your calling, even if you do not understand fully what you think might come of your speaking and acting.

And as crazy as John’s message is, people are drawn to it. Not everyone, mind you. Not everyone is found out in the desert to repent and get dragged into the river by John. But a significant crowd. Enough people from enough walks of life that it raises the attention of the authorities. Enough of God’s power found in his voice to unnerve the power seat of the empire. Enough to get people riled up against him. So take heart when it seems not everyone heeds your voice. God is still opening ears and gathering people. And ultimately it’s not whether people find you and your voice but how your voice might help people find God’s voice and God’s presence in the world in ways you may never know.

In some ways that is the heart of Advent, the reason we spend so much time on John every year in this season. Because we are people in the wilderness and people with a voice and a calling from God to point people whatever way we know how to the God who is born, who dies, who rises again to gather all people to himself. And for such a large task God uses every voice that can be stirred up to do it. Your voice and mine.

In some ways that’s what this growing nativity scene is all about, too. Each week we’ve been adding more figures. I suspect that many of them come with stories about the ways that the tale of the Christ child has been told in our own families year after year. But in our midst we have named the ways they represent angels and prophets who carry God’s good news in a variety of ways, shepherds and all the other workers who are too often ignored and forgotten, the Josephs, the leaders who make room for others in the kin-dom of God and who lead others to safety. Next week we will add Marys, the ones who step forth into the unknown with courage, who bear God into the world, who risk ridicule and shame for the work of God. All different. All calling out with their own voice in their own work, with their own role to play. All drawn to the center, to the Christ, the one for whom they call out, the one who ultimately calls them home. This scene we are creating together is really a scene of all of us, each one different, each one gathered at the manger, crying out with our voice in our wilderness for the coming of God.

And when our voice tires and falters. When our task and calling seems to be more than we can handle. We are reminded of the words from our second reading: “The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.” God will “sanctify you entirely.” God will lead you in rejoicing and praying and giving thanks. God will well up an unquenchable Spirit within you and help you hold fast to what is good.

We each have a message to speak in this time of waiting and hoping, we can join John the Baptist in finding our authentic voice to proclaim the coming of the one greater than ourselves, we can do this because God is faithful. God has come to us already. God is coming to us now. The coming of God we wait for is already arriving. In our questioning and doubting, when the waiting seems beyond what we can handle, God’s faithfulness calls out to us like that voice in the wilderness: “Prepare the way. For God’s kingdom is already making its way to you.”

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Second Sunday of Advent
December 10, 2017

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

¹The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
  ²As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
 “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
  who will prepare your way;
 ³the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
  make his paths straight,’ ”
⁴John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” – Mark 1:1-8

In October, I spent 10 days with my family driving and hiking through southern Utah, much of which is desert wilderness. Some of the territory we explored was among the last land to be mapped in North America. Land left unsettled longer than most. Places so inhospitable to human life that only a smattering of settlements managed to eke out a bare bones existence until well into the modern era, and even now it’s not densely populated with whole stretches where no one lives. We entered from civilization into this wilderness on a paved highway. To be sure it was a bleak one in some places – I got a little nervous at signs saying things like: “Next Services 130 Miles.” But it was still a highway which pretty much always had basic cellphone coverage.

As we sing Prepare the Royal Highway and listen to John the Baptist crying out Isaiah’s words to make a way in the desert, to level hills and valleys, I have always pictured a road like that. A paved road, a straight superhighway, blasted into the landscape with dynamite, cutting into a barren and inhospitable landscape, domesticating the wilderness by creating access to that which was once difficult to enter. That we are called to be some sort of holy road crew making a way for God to come and save us. And if I’m honest, in that picture in my mind the road we create provides not only a way in for God but a also a way out of the wilderness for us to a place that has a little more to offer.

Most of us, given the choice, would high tail it out of the wildernesses we find ourselves in. It seems everyone I talk to these days is felling the disorientation of the wilderness. For some it is the ways in which the violence, misogyny, and racism resonate and reinforce their own experience. For others it is the disorientation of waking up to this as the long-covered-up reality. Either way it confronts us more and more in the daily news that we live in a wilderness of injustice and inequality and no easy answers to level the field. When it seems that work done to further the reign of God on earth falls apart as soon as it seems to make a difference, we realize we live in a wilderness that seems to go on forever. We find ourselves wandering in the deserts of long-term illnesses, grief that never fully leaves us, broken relationships that never mend, cycles of addiction that catch us again and again.

We long for a way out. Perhaps that’s what draws us to this crazy figure in the desert wearing camel’s hair clothes that reek of a life lived outdoors and whose uncombed beard traps bits of honey and locust drawing flies that buzz around his head. We are drawn to him because he cries out our longing for a way through the wilderness. We recognize his truth-telling about who we are and what we need. We are people whose wilderness lives need repentance. We need a place to name that whether we look like crazy uncle John in the desert or not, we are wilderness people longing for renewal and transformation.

But at the center of John’s proclamation, the center of the words he borrows from Isaiah before him, are not about a highway out of the wilderness for us but a path into it for God. And that got me thinking about a very different kind of path we encountered on our trip. Where one of the paved roads ended there was a path, not a human-made trail but a path carved by gushing water. In October when we walked there it was bone-dry, not a drop of water to be seen anywhere and only the hardiest of plants sucking what little moisture they could find from the air and the ground. But for brief moments during the rainy season it becomes a gushing river, pushing boulders along, carving through the rock face, sweeping new canyons into existence. As we walked along the flattest path we travelled the whole trip, there were grooves everywhere in the rock rising high to either side of us, evidence of the swift-moving water and the debris it carries along. Even without a cloud in the sky and not a drop of water to be seen it felt as if we could drown at any moment, so present was the evidence of the water’s motion on the rock walls beside us, the water which had leveled a path in the enormous rock.

Maybe that is the kind of pathway that John is talking about in the desert. He is, after all, a man whose proclamation, and even the very name by which we have come to know him, is rooted in water, in a flowing baptismal river. He is remembered for fiery words, for calling out the truth of our world like the prophets before him. But he also invites people into the water, to feel in their bodies the movement that is already as he speaks carving a pathway in wilderness.

What John proclaims is not something he yet fully understands. In fact there is ample biblical evidence to support his being very skeptical later on about Jesus being the one to bring the kind of transformation he was expecting. He doesn’t get what this kingdom he proclaims is all about any more than the rest of us ever do. John will be arrested and killed before he sees Jesus bring his work to completion. Like Isaiah before him, he is called to proclaim God’s presence in a wilderness he does not understand, to people who feel God’s absence, and to live and die in that wilderness without seeing it transformed.

And yet he stands in the water. And perhaps that is enough for him. Enough to feel the moving water, enough to know its carving a way in the wilderness, a level path. Maybe that is enough for him to feel God’s royal entrance into his own wilderness. And maybe that is enough for us, too, as we wait and hope in our Advent desert. Enough to know the promise of the water that claimed us children of God. Enough to have felt on our bodies the water that carves into our wildernesses a pathway for God’s Spirit to enter. Enough for us even to stand in a dry and dusty wilderness and see the watermarks on the landscape around us, reminding us of the redeeming floodwaters of baptism that sustain us in the wilderness, and to know that the water has come before and it will wash us clean again. It’s not the modern super-highway out of our wilderness into something else, but it’s the path that God takes not just into the wilderness in general but into our individual lives, dry and dusty as they might be, to dwell there with us, to be the spring of water that fills us with life despite all that surrounds us, to continue leveling a path for us to walk until one day that baptismal water sweeps us right into God’s forever feast.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

First Sunday of Advent
December 3, 2017

 ¹O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
  so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
 ²as when fire kindles brushwood
  and the fire causes water to boil—
 to make your name known to your adversaries,
  so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
 ³When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
  you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
 ⁴From ages past no one has heard,
  no ear has perceived,
 no eye has seen any God besides you,
  who works for those who wait for him.
 ⁵You meet those who gladly do right,
  those who remember you in your ways.
 But you were angry, and we sinned;
  because you hid yourself we transgressed.
 ⁶We have all become like one who is unclean,
  and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
 We all fade like a leaf,
  and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
 ⁷There is no one who calls on your name,
  or attempts to take hold of you;
 for you have hidden your face from us,
  and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
 ⁸Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
  we are the clay, and you are our potter;
  we are all the work of your hand.
 ⁹Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
  and do not remember iniquity forever.
  Now consider, we are all your people. – Isaiah 64:1-9

[Jesus said:] ²⁴“In those days, after that suffering,
 the sun will be darkened,
  and the moon will not give its light,
 ²⁵and the stars will be falling from heaven,
  and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
²⁶Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. ²⁷Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
  ²⁸“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. ²⁹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. ³⁰Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. ³¹Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
  ³²“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. ³⁵Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, ³⁶or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”- Mark 13:24-37

I have a prediction for you. One I am willing to bet money on. Are you ready? … Tomorrow the sun will rise. Now it might be cloudy or hazy or otherwise obscured, but the sun will rise tomorrow. The earth will continue spinning on its axis. The moon will continue its cycle every 29.5 days. The daylight hours will shorten until December 21^st and then we will get gradually more daylight even though the worst of winter weather will still be ahead of us. Even though I couldn’t tell you much about the constellations and where and when they will appear in the sky, I know that they will continue in a predictable pattern. I don’t think much about these things but I take for granted that they are so.

I have some more predictions for you. Just as surely as the sun will rise, tomorrow someone somewhere will commit an act of violence against another. Someone will dishonor their parents, lie, cheat, steal, commit sexual assault, and covet everything from candy bars to human beings. There will continue to be an inhumane disparity between the richest and poorest in the world. In the next months if not sooner, somewhere in the world, there will be another mass shooting and another terrorist attack, more refugees fleeing their homes, wars that continue without end. In the next years we will continue contributing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is sustainable for life on earth as we know it. You and I will continue to do the things we know are wrong for us and for others. You and I will continue to fail and continue to get sick and injured. These things I do think about often, and I have come to expect them with the same regularity with which I expect the rising of the sun and change of the seasons.

This is the world as we know it. With each day, each season, each year, we continue to experience a world that isn’t as we want even as we act in ways that contribute to the problems at hand. To be sure, there is also a lot of good out there in the world, a lot of good right here in this room, but not enough to save us from ourselves, much less the whole world. So it is that we enter Advent with talk of rending open the heavens and stars falling from the sky. We turn over the new church year to find texts with imagery that, if taken seriously, frightens us. In the words of Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—“ and in the words of Jesus: “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”

In Advent we are calling for God to upend the whole order of the earth and the heavens. To so radically alter all we take for granted that the stars fall from the sky. But as we plaster peace, joy, and love across our seasonal decorations and greeting cards, I don’t think very many of expect the kind of rending of the fabric of reality for those kinds of things to actually happen. Maybe because it’s just too hard to hold out hope, at least the kind of gritty, desperately waiting kind of hope, in the words of pastor Ryan Marsh the kind of “hope [that] ignites the painter’s imagination when staring at a blank canvass, [that] burns in the activist’s bones until they tell the truth to powers that be, [that] pushes the laboring pregnant woman past the pain to a child in her arms, [that] drives the vigilant parent to wait up all night when a teenager breaks curfew.” We can only sustain that level of longing for brief periods of time.

Or perhaps it is out of ambivalence that we have ceased to believe in the kind of heaven-rending power of God to change what is. Ambivalence because of what it means about the things we must let go of in order for God’s reign to burst into reality. Ambivalent because the hope has left us with an emptiness we have learned to fill in other ways. Ambivalent about the reign of God because we have become comfortable with our way of life – a way of life in which most of us one way or another depend on an ever-growing economy of ever more chances to fill the longing we experience with more and more stuff. Ambivalent because the predictability of the world, even in its utter brokenness, at least leaves us knowing what to expect.

Into this the regular cycle, the voices of angels and prophets proclaim the day that we both want and don’t want at the same time. We need them to startle us out of our daily realities, to help us keep awake when the routines of our lives and the complacency with which we respond to the world lull us to sleep. We need them to kindle and rekindle hope deep in our being, to remind us that in Christ something different is possible.

I don’t have a prediction about when things will be made right or how God will do it. But I do expect God will show up for us this advent. God will walk with us in the wilderness, cry out for justice, blaze a trail through the desert, come with bold and mysterious angelic announcements, all the while rekindling our hope in the long dark night of waiting. It will be a hope based on a tiny infant born to an unwed mother among the animals in an out-of-the-way town. It will be a hope that trusts in a God who becomes the epitome of vulnerability.

And while I cannot explain when or how what began 2000 years ago with an angelic announcement to Mary and the birth of a baby in a stable will bring the world to this new reality, I am just crazy enough to believe that God taking human flesh is the kind of earth-altering disruption that shakes our daily existence into a new reality. When the Creator becomes Creature it seems to me it’s as unnatural as the stars falling from the heavens. It’s enough to set in motion the kind of world-altering revolution that will strip us of our false hopes and all the ways we have filled the void left by our deepest longings, and welcome us into a new reality, one that is filled with the peace, joy, and love we have only begun to understand.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Reign of Christ Sunday 
November 26, 2017

In addition to my sermon below, if you have time for a podcast, check out the Nov. 26 rebroadcast of On Being’s interview of Fr. Greg Boyle. Though today’s gospel reading is mentioned specifically at the end, it echoes throughout the entire interview.

Listen to the gospel reading and sermon here:

[Jesus said to the disciples:] ³¹“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³²All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. ³⁴Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ ³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ ⁴⁰And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me.’ ⁴¹Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴²for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ ⁴⁵Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” – Matthew 25:31-46

The sheep and the goats, though it is a parable of judgment, is one that we tend to love. It gets quoted often in social justice circles to bolster the work of caring for our neighbors. We tend to like to think of ourselves, of course, as sheep who, despite having heard the parable, will feign surprise at the day of judgment, “Oh?! That was you, Jesus? I never would have recognized you!” We serve our “least of these” neighbor, recognize their humanity and even the presence of Jesus in them, and we are glad to have been a part of such an interaction.

And I am grateful for this parable’s strong and clear call to care for the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned. It has galvanized whole movements within the church to create social service agencies, advocate for change, and develop one-on-one ministries with individuals who are very much hurting and in need. I don’t remember exactly if and when it has been articulated, but this passage has almost certainly been a part of the influence on our own congregation’s commitment to care for others through the Survival Center, the Cot Shelter, Cathedral in the Night, refugee and immigrant support and much more. At last Tuesday’s interfaith Thanksgiving service all the faith traditions talked with gratitude for one another, for a community that makes room for one another, for people who come together to serve others. Wednesday we again hosted the Amherst Survival Center Thanksgiving dinner, where the parish hall was filled with young and old, people from many countries speaking several languages, people as far as I know across the socioeconomic spectrum. It was a holy feast.

But I am feeling cautious this week in reading the parable, because I am aware that I tend to read this parable just that one way. I put myself in the place of the sheep, or more rarely when I’m feeling a little less magnanimous toward myself and the world I might worryingly put myself in the place of the goats. But I tend not to put myself in the place of the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned. And I’m not eager, frankly, to find myself in one of those positions.

All too often the church has seen itself this way, too, casually tossing around the phrase “the least of these” with tremendous pity and with the assumption that these people are not already part of the church. I, at least, am too often guilty of setting up an “us and them” mindset when it comes to people in need. On the one hand this speaks to my own position of power and privilege, which this passage calls me to use in service of others. But I am uncomfortable with the idea that I am reluctant to do that to the extent that it puts me in the place of the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned. I have not and frankly likely will not go willingly to the place that Jesus lives. I will visit. I will visit with nourishing meals and bread and wine from this table. I will visit with prayers and conversation. I will visit with support and care. But at least until now I have mostly been a visitor.

I know that some of you, many of you even, have had a different experience. That you have found yourself in the place of profound vulnerability and need. Some of you have known the presence of Jesus in that place with you. Some of you have known the companionship of sheep through those times. Some of you have not. But I believe what Jesus says, even though he says it in parable form, that as much as we wonder about Jesus’ absence from this world, that Jesus is present in those in need. Present in a way that transforms, renews, and resurrects, but which also demands the love and care of those who are able in any way to provide assistance.

But what are we sheep to do? First, clearly, if we find ourselves with any resources that meet the needs of others to offer them, and to expect Jesus to show up in that relationship. We continue to do this with respect and dignity, constantly challenging ourselves to set aside our “us vs. them” mentality that creeps into all of our minds.

But this is Christ the King Sunday, when we celebrate not only the upside down reign of God from the place of the vulnerable ones, but also our citizenship in that kingdom. If Jesus, our leader and ruler, is in the thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned, then we are invited to seek God there rather than in the usual ways of power, money, and success. We are invited into the kingdom of thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned. We are invited to become them. We who bear the name of Christ are called into a way of life that embodies God’s rule in this world, living in vulnerability and entering a place not given much privilege by the world around us. It is a call not simply to carry what is needed to people who need it, but a call to enter into profound and life-altering kinship with those who have been othered by us and by society. It is a call to live with constant and profound awe for one another. For that is God’s kingdom on earth, ruled from the cross, God’s throne in disguise, gathering in the beloved community to a place where brokenness and need is transformed by God’s presence into a community of kinship, relationship, and unity.

It isn’t easy to enter this kinship fully on earth. It is impossible to enter it with the completeness and openheartedness of Christ. But we try as the church. We eat a meal together welcoming everyone to the table. We seek not just to serve meals and hold food drives, but to build relationships with members of our community to discover what we have to learn about God in them. Last weekend some of us from this congregation traveled to Christ the King in Gladwin, MI, to build relationships with people who live in a different place, to serve with them, to worship with them, to become community across geographical and other differences. We have a healing ministry team, some of whom will take communion kits at the end of the service today for members of our community who cannot come to church. Members of that team lead all of us in seeking to accompany the members of our own community who are struggling: not necessarily to cure illness or disease, but to enter into relationship, to enter at least for a time, to the extent it is possible, the realm of the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned. And in each of those places to find ourselves sitting at the feet of Jesus, the great shepherd of sheep and goats, of hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned, of you and me, and all creation.

And there at the feet of Jesus, like both the sheep and the goats, we will look back with utter shock to discover Christ hidden among us in the most surprising places, not just in the people we identify as in need, not just the people we label as other, not just the people we have served intentionally, but in that day of making things clear and right, we will discover Christ in those we didn’t realize we had served, the people we didn’t realize were in need of the gifts God gave to us, the people we met and talked to everyday. And I suspect it will be revealed to us then, too, all the ways Christ has been present in us in moments we never understood or thought it possible that God could enter with us. All this revealed to us in the presence of the one born among us, the one who lived hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned, the one who goes to the cross and the grave – to hell itself and back again – to raise us up to the life that really is life.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, November 19, 2017
24th Sunday after Pentecost

This weekend members of Immanuel, including Pastor Steven, traveled to Christ the King Lutheran Church in Gladwin, MI, our partner congregation in the Face-to-Face project. We volunteered together at the community food distribution, shared meals together, stayed in their homes, worshipped with them, and joined them for some community events. Pastor Steven preached in worship and this is his sermon:

[Jesus said to the disciples:] ¹⁴“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. ¹⁶The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. ¹⁷In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. ¹⁸But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. ¹⁹After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. ²⁰Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ ²¹His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²²And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’ ²³His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²⁴Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ ²⁶But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? ²⁷Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. ²⁸So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. ²⁹For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. ³⁰As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ” – Matthew 25:14-30

Our congregation back in Amherst, MA, is right next door to the main campus of the University of Massachusetts, which provides us with give or take 25,000 next door neighbors. Now I know that Lutherans are not known for their active evangelism, but we do try to go out into the community around us to be present, build relationships, and make sure they know that just around the corner is, if not a church home, at least a place that cares about them and the stuff they care about.

So every Monday I walk down the street to the campus center and claim a spot across from the bakery and around the corner from the coffee bar. There I set up a whiteboard with a question on it. Students who mostly spend hours on their phones find the idea of an in-person message board with markers quaintly old-fashioned, so I get a lot of interesting looks and quite a few people sharing their answers. Some questions get more responses than others. But every year two questions seem to get more answers than any others: “If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?” And “What is your biggest fear?”

The former gets all manner of answers about fixing big social problems: poverty, racism, inequality, climate change, violence. People have no end of answers about things they want to be different about our world. And the second question, “What are you most afraid of?” Invariably evokes a variety of answers that can be summed up in one word: the are afraid of failure. They are afraid of failing exams, failing at job interviews, failing at repaying debts, but most of all failing in life, failing to make a difference in the world.

I wonder as I read Jesus’ parable today if the eagerness to respond to these two questions aren’t somehow related, if our failure to tackle the biggest things we want to change in the world is wrapped up in, well, our fear of failing. You see I imagine all three slaves in the story are eager to make a difference in the world – to earn money perhaps, but ultimately to transform something around them, to matter to other people. Two of them, at least according to the numbers, manage to do something with what has been given them. It doesn’t say they fixed the world or became powerful or rich or even well-liked. But they took what they had and they overcame their fear of failure and their gifts multiplied.

I’m quite sure this was no easy task. The parable almost makes it sound like they took their money to the marketplace for the afternoon, traded around a bit, doubled their money, and came home to wait around for the master to return. But the master is away for a long time – years perhaps. To put yourself and your gifts out in the world is to take a giant risk. To risk failure and loss. Maybe these two slaves labored day after day after day just to eke out a few pennies a week until the master returned. Maybe they invested their money in volatile stocks that had them sweating when the prices took a nose-dive. Maybe they earned some of it dishonestly and lived in fear that someone would find out. They did not take a safe path and they just as easily could have lost everything the master had given them. Nonetheless the master praises them. I think the praise isn’t for success, but for using their gifts in ways that deepen their engagement with God and the world around them. Or said differently, that the master praises the two servants who took big risks tells me that he is okay with our failure.

Which is all well and good, but there is a third servant in the parable, one who meets a somewhat dark and dreary end for having lived a life in utter fear that something might go wrong. This does not please the master. The master is okay with risk, but just sitting around doing nothing seems like not such a good way to go. Except that a lot of times that option sounds pretty good to us. Because failure is hard. Because failure hurts. Because failure is not celebrated by the people around us. Because failure is often our single biggest fear. And instead of finding a way to live free of that fear, we let it run our lives and our decisions and we make a hell of our living if not also of our dying. We live afraid to put ourselves out there and risk rejection and failure or, maybe worse, the possibility that we might do harm or make everything even more terrible than it already is.

But in the face of our fears, I am intrigued by this quote by Marianne Williamson, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela who used it in his 1994 inaugural address. She says: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”

Friends, you have a gift from God. I don’t know if its 5 talents or 2 or 1 or 237. I don’t know if it’s something you’re proud of or ashamed of. I don’t know if the world recognizes it in you yet or not, but God has given all of us something to work with and invited us to take a risk, put it out there, and see what God will do with it.

Our bishop back in New England has been trying to teach us to do this. We have been slow learners, to be honest, but we’re learning that it’s ok to take a risk and to fail. We have been invited to proclaim loudly and boldly where we have failed because we trust in a God who doesn’t chastise us for failure, but goes along with us into every new endeavor.

Sometimes those are big, life-changing risks, like moving away to follow your vocational call, or putting your life and livelihood on the line for the sake of justice and peace. We have churches in our synod who have shrunk in size and could no longer manage their building, so with much pain and hard work they let go of their buildings and let new building-less ministry emerge that looks different than what church did before.

But most of the time it’s something that doesn’t seem so big. Sometimes it’s as simple as two congregations from different places with different people entering into a partnership from 750 miles away. It takes courage and risk to enter into any kind of relationship, and this one is no different. We’ve discovered lots and lots of similarities, but we’ve risked sharing our differences, too, and it’s been a fruitful partnership already of shared community service, shared fellowship, shared worship. I dare say we have doubled our gifts in this endeavor.

But as exciting as it has been for our two congregations to come together, we are not the biggest risk takers in that or any endeavor. Because God also takes a big risk here. If we see God as the master in this parable, it’s a pretty big gamble to pass along such wealth to some servants with no instruction and no supervision, which is essentially what God does with us, isn’t it? Hands us tremendous gifts and only a somewhat general instruction manual on how to use them?

But even more than that, this is the second to last thing Jesus says before his story unravels entirely toward the cross. God takes the ultimate risk with Jesus, and you know what? It fails. It ends in death. Like the single talent in the hands of the third slave, Jesus is buried in the ground by those driven by fear and, as we confess in our creeds, he descends into the place of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and where he finds all of us servants who sometimes just can’t get it together. God risks everything and it fails. Miserably. Or so even his closest followers think until three days later when the tomb stands empty and the Easter proclamation rings to the ends of the earth and even to the depths of hell and back again.

And that’s what gives us the freedom to risk everything, to fail. It’s what redeems us when we squander our gifts and when we cannot find a way out from under our fear. It’s having a God who risks everything to be in relationship with us that makes us forever and always children of God, children of God who have been gifted beyond measure and granted a share of God’s power to work in the world.

So gather your hopes and dreams for what this world could be, for a little corner of the kingdom of God to come to us on earth. Name your fears that we might very well fail and lose everything, that in fact one day all of us will fail and lose everything. But until then go forth boldly with the God who has shown us with God’s very own life that risk taking, including risks that end in utter failure and loss, can land us only one place–safely back in the arms of God.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, November 12, 2017
23rd Sunday after Pentecost 

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

[Jesus said to the disciples:] ¹“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ²Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; ⁴but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. ⁶But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. ⁸The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ ¹⁰And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. ¹¹Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹²But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ ¹³Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” – Matthew 25:1-13

Despite the increasing likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change, the possibility of earth-destroying nuclear war, and the somewhat less likely scenarios of a major asteroid hitting the planet or, say, the zombie apocalypse, most of us don’t stockpile goods in an emergency underground bunker. Maybe we buy some extra canned goods heading into winter or get a generator to cover power outages from storms, but most of us don’t have a plan to survive months or years beyond a catastrophic world event. As much as I like to be prepared, I figure as someone who grew up in the suburbs I’m not likely to have the survival skills to make it even with a stockpile of goods. Sometimes it seems almost foolish to stockpile so much more than we need for scenarios that at least seem not likely to happen.

Which maybe puts us in the camp with the five supposedly foolish young women in Jesus’ parable. They have prepared reasonably for an expected evening arrival of the bridegroom. They filled their lamps to the brim to account for delays caused by traffic, car trouble, or having to run back to pick up forgotten items. They were reasonably prepared. But the bridegroom doesn’t come in the evening, or even a few hours into the night. After hours of keeping each other up with chatter and merrymaking, the bridesmaids finally fall asleep – all of them. The bridegroom, for reasons known to no one but himself, does not arrive until well after midnight. And by now, all the reasonably prepared people have run out of oil for their lamps. It’s the absurdly over-prepared people that Jesus praises in the end, the ones the others thought a little crazy at the beginning for bringing so much. Why spend so much extra time, energy, and money for such a highly unlikely scenario? It’s the ones who, in their sheer abundance, were in retrospect living as if the feast had already begun.

I admit that a big part of me doesn’t love this. I am a person who appreciates logic, reason, and calculated risks. If the bridegroom can’t get himself together and arrive on time, then he ought not expect lamps to be burning when he gets there. And frankly he then has no business shutting anyone out for his own delay.

But what does any of this mean for us? What is it we are supposed to be overly prepared for? And what kind of preparations ought we to be making?

Maybe it goes without saying that it feels many days like the arrival of God in our world, the kind of entry that sweeps away violence and hatred and war and death itself, is delayed beyond what we would like. Even if we concede that such a day also brings the kind of justice that will put us in our place, we long for the promised kingdom. We pray, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” when a gunman walks in on a church community at worship, when disasters destroy whole islands and help is slow to come, when there is no justice for people whose skin color is too dark or whose first language is not English, when our own pain nearly breaks us. “Come, Lord Jesus, not quickly, but right now.” And while we see glimpses of the promise, the world is still groaning in pain.

And we get tired of waiting. It is hard to maintain hope and to hold onto faith when God’s coming seems like a distant and even at times unlikely possibility. We hold our vigils and say our prayers, we pour our time and energy and financial resources into justice work, we gather as community to accompany one another through joyful days and difficult moments. But it seems that precious little changes and all of us sooner or later fall asleep. We get tired of the work, we get tired of the waiting. Our lamps go out, and darkness seems to rule the hour.

Yet this parable calls us urgently to be ready, even in the most troubled hours in the depths of nighttime when we are fast asleep. Now I don’t think we are expected to stockpile goods like those who live in fear of end times. But maybe we can learn something for their zeal in preparing for what seems like a distant and unlikely possibility. Instead of the carefully calculated lives many of us live, I think we are called, in the waiting and longing, to prepare for a feast of wild abundance beyond our wildest dreams by living out of a mindset of ridiculous, absurd abundance, with the hope that God is coming despite a lot of evidence that seems to suggest otherwise. That’s what stewardship is really all about – living in the midst of a world where we continue to long for – to hope for – the coming of God’s reign of justice and peace with a mindset of abundance. Giving of ourselves, our time, and our possessions as if we could burn oil all night long and keep it going till the next day and night and on and on. It’s the mentality that Jesus might actually come at anytime, so we are free to give generously and without calculation for the care of those in need, the protection of God’s creation, the work of peacemaking, and the sharing of the Good News of God-with-us through it all.

Today we, those of us who are a regular part of this community, will be invited to make a pledge of our money and our time. We will be invited to consider the ways in which we have seen the fulfillment of our hopes and to examine what it is we still are hoping for. We will be invited into prayerful consideration of what we have offer in the coming year to the work of this community. We do this not because it earns us a seat at the feast or because we live in fear of being shut out, but because letting go of a piece of our carefully balanced budgets and carefully calculated schedules is an opportunity to loosen their hold on us, to open us up to the possibility of abundance even in the long, dark night of waiting,       and to live now not in fear but to live as if we are already dining at the wedding feast.

To be prepared for the arrival of God’s abundant feast for all creation is to celebrate what we know is coming, what we know is already a reality, that God’s victory over all things is complete and the feast has begun. And it is a matter of great urgency that we begin living that life of absurd abundance while we wait for God to wrap everything up, because God doesn’t want us to miss out on a single moment where we could be enjoying the atmosphere of the feast. God wants us to know the freedom of God’s wedding banquet before the bridegroom even gets there.

I don’t know fully what to make of the part of the parable where some people get shut out of the banquet. There is plenty of other Biblical evidence for wide open doors to the feast. But I do know that you are invited – all of you – to two great feasts today where Jesus waits with open arms. One of those is in the parish hall after worship where the council is hosting lunch for everyone to celebrate the abundance of God in our community. And the other is this table, where you who are tired of waiting, you whose lamps have run out of oil, you who have fallen asleep and given up hope, you who are excited for the coming of God. You are invited here, for bread and wine, the body of Christ given for you. And for a moment we will actually sit down at the wedding feast and know that the long-awaited one is here in our midst. We will continue back into a world of waiting, but we will do so filled with the presence of the one who is both already and not yet arrived to bring the peace and justice we long for. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

All Saints Sunday
November 5, 2017

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon:

¹When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
  ³“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
  ⁴“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
  ⁵“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
  ⁶“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
  ⁷“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
  ⁸“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
  ⁹“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
  ¹⁰“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
  ¹¹“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” – Matthew 5:1-12

What would this passage sound like if we all listened to it standing on our head?

That’s what Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, as she remembers what it was like as a child to do handstands and view the world upside down: “Grass hung in front of my eyes like green fringe. Trees grew down, not up, and the sky was a blue lawn that went on forever.” The A-shaped frame of her swingset becoming a V-shape instead. Gravity worked in reverse holding things up rather than pulling them down. (Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, p. 159) Nothing was quite as it should be.

And maybe Jesus should have asked his disciples, maybe even the whole crowd gathering for the sermon on the mount, to listen to his description of blessedness while standing on their heads. Because he takes what they know and turns it upside down. Beatitudes are nothing new to them. “Blessed are the wise, for they shall not be fooled. Blessed are the strong, for their enemies shall fear them. Blessed are the wealthy, for they shall never go hungry.” (Gospel Medicine p. 160) Blessed are the joyful, for they have found good things in their lives. Blessed are the well-liked, for they get invited to many parties. Blessed are the powerful, for they often get their way. The Biblical book of Proverbs actually includes quite a bit that leans in that direction.

And though we don’t say it, we hold such truths in our hearts. We believe that those who do well, who live happy lives with enough money and lots of confidence and good standing in the world are blessed, and that those who don’t, well…aren’t blessed. And sometimes we look at the lives of others with envy and assume some blessedness that they have and we don’t, whether their lives are as good as we think or not. But Jesus turns all this upside down.

Blessed are the meek? Those who mourn? Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? The poor in spirit? The merciful who let people walk all over them? The pure in heart who are so naïve they get scammed by anyone out to make a buck? Those crazy people who still toil hour after hour for a peace they think is possible? Their blessedness is as questionable as gravity working in the wrong direction. Sure we might ascribe some spiritual depth to their lives, but blessedness, let’s be honest, ought to have something to show for it in the real world. Shouldn’t there be some sign from God that their experience is worth something?

It’s not that Jesus is or isn’t interested in material well-being or the signs the world looks for when it comes to being blessed. Jesus shows over and over again his value for bodies that need healing and food and comfort in the world. And Jesus shows over and over again that there is a spiritual dimension that works in and through that material world in both rich and poor, feast and famine, hope and despair. What Jesus is doing here is turning our expectations upside down. And not just flipping things once so that that those on top are now on the bottom and those who were last are now first. I think it’s about disorienting our whole way of looking at blessedness in the world. It’s about calling into question the assumptions we make about ourselves and other people until we aren’t quite sure who is blessed and who isn’t, what’s up and what’s down.

And then we’re left free to do what Jesus does, to pronounce blessedness indiscriminately, to go out and name one another blessed. Blessed are the ones whose lives are falling apart. Blessed are those who feel empty, dry, or down. Blessed are those who are overworked and those who cannot find any work to do. Blessed are the ones who have striven for something really important and failed. Blessed are the people who have been marginalized by society and by the church. Blessed are the ones who make stupid mistakes and ill-advised choices. For they are surely people in need of blessing.

Blessed are the saints represented by these burning candles. Blessed are the saints whose names we will read in our prayers. Blessed, too, are the saints whose names have been forgotten. For they are people who embodied God in their strengths and weaknesses, who bore the image of God in their joys and challenges, who carried in them the life and death of Jesus. They were not perfect. They were not in the typical sense famous. But they were deeply important to us, to this community, to our lives. They blessed us. Blessed are they, for they live now in God’s eternal blessedness.

And you, friends, as much as this day is often about those who have died it is also about you living saints: you whose blessings are abundant and you who long for greater blessing. And when you can’t see it, and there will be many, many days when you question Jesus’ proclamation from the mountainside, years even where you question what possible blessing there can be at all, and especially in the most difficult and challenging moments – in meekness and mourning, in poverty and hunger of spirit, in peacemaking and holding fast to righteousness in the face of persecution.

I cannot give you a list of 10 ways that blessing comes out of those experiences. I can only say that Jesus has had a way of turning things upside down in my own life in such a way that I have a hard time being certain of much in the world except God’s love and grace, God’s claiming us in baptism and inviting us to the table. Turned upside down until we start to see in all kinds of surprising places, God’s blessing in abundance.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

From Conflict to Communion: A Joint Lutheran-Roman Catholic Prayer Service
Immanuel Lutheran Church and the Newman Catholic Center
October 29, 2017

¹I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. ²He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. ³You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. ⁴Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. ⁵I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. – John 15:1-5

Listen to the homily here:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” So says 13^th century Sufi Muslim poet, Rumi.

It may seem odd to begin a homily at a joint Lutheran-Roman Catholic prayer service with a quote from a Sufi Muslim, but in some ways it feels better than starting with a quote that is tied more closely to only one of our traditions. And it seems apt for this moment in the history of the Reformation. We’ve spent the better part of the last 500 years arguing about who is right and who is wrong. When I was in confirmation class and asked the question, “Why don’t we do that?” The answer was too often, “Because that’s what the Catholics do.” My own grandparents were in a mixed Catholic – Methodist marriage which resulted in such an impasse that they mostly disregarded religion altogether.

Sadly that isn’t the worst that has happened in the name of wrongdoing and rightdoing, in the name of wrongthinking and rightthinking since Martin Luther posted his 95 theses. We just moments ago made confession together of the ways in which we wrapped up theological debates with political ones, the ways in which we allowed faith to be an excuse for war, for killing one another, for demonizing one another, the ways in which we have compromised the proclamation of the gospel for the sake of being right. Even as we have spent the last 50 of those 500 years working toward deeper dialogue and a recognition of one another’s gifts, we have not always acted charitably toward our neighbors of other denominations.

But none of that surprises me. That is the way of human beings – to want to be right rather than to be in relationship. But what does surprise and delight me is that through it all the good news of Jesus Christ has continued to take root in the world and sprout new and exciting growth. For every moment we spent arguing about right and wrong, there was still something happening beyond our arguments, God still bringing new life and hope and resurrection into the world. Rumi describes it as a field. Jesus describes it as a vineyard, as a place where one vine expands out into ever-growing, life-giving branches.

It would be tempting to think, reading these particular words of Jesus in this context, that Jesus is the vine, and each Christian denomination is a branch, and each of us sprouting as leaves from that branch. But I think that’s far too simplistic a description. I think that also would lead us in the direction of complacency with divisions in the church. I hear in Jesus’ words a thriving vineyard in which growing out from the vine are more branches than we can imagine and people of every nation, background, and denomination all mixed together, growing out into a world full of brokenness, pain, grief, violence, and death. It’s not as if Jesus sprouts a Roman Catholic branch to do one part of the work and a Lutheran branch to do another. The sharing of the gospel, the proclamation of Christ’s victory, the growing in faith is done together, done with each of us growing alongside one another in whatever place we have been planted.

It’s the interaction, the sharing of gifts with one another, that allows the whole vineyard to expand, to allow the kingdom of heaven to permeate into our daily lives. It’s the way in which the Lutherans called others to deeper engagement with scripture, the way in which the Roman Catholics held onto the sense of mystery and beauty and tradition when we Lutherans chucked the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It’s the way in which we have come together to learn from each other and to recognize jointly the work that God does through baptism in both our traditions. It’s the way in which both our traditions, together and separately have worked to care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the refugee. Have you ever noticed how many hospitals bear Lutheran and Catholic names? Did you know that the two single largest refugee resettlement agencies of any kind in the United States are Catholic Charities and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, respectively?

What I imagine here is not a grapevine, though that image has great potential, too. I imagine the kind of ivy that as it grows it works its way into brick and mortar, even into concrete and with patient persistence it can crack open even the most solid-seeming of walls to push through with something living and active. That’s what God has been doing these 500 years since the start of the reformation (and of course long before that, too). God has been growing into our world, our world divided by ideas of right and wrong, a world where we build walls between us and hurl our verbal and actual bombs back and forth at one another, and sprouting new life and hope and promise there.

To my Roman Catholic siblings, I am sorry for all that has been done by Lutherans and in the name of Lutheranism. To you I also say thank you for the gifts you bring to the ecumenical table. We have done some important work getting to this 500^th observance together, and I pray that continues. We have big questions yet to be answered – about fellowship around the Eucharistic table, about leadership in ministry, about what it means to be church. This is hard work, and there are rightly deeply held beliefs on many sides. I don’t know where the next years of dialogue will take us. But I do trust that beyond those conversations, beyond our ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, that Christ the vine is growing ever more into our lives and opening pathways of grace, pathways that leads us beyond the divisions that exist in the church on earth and pulling us ever more into the place beyond that, the place where God dwells. Fellow Lutherans, Roman-Catholic siblings, I look forward to more opportunities to be together in the here and now, and I especially look forward to dwelling with you in the kingdom of heaven. I’ll meet you there.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Reformation Sunday
October 29, 2017

A brief note: Today we commemorated the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 theses intended to initiate a reform of the church. We remember with gratitude his commitment to God’s grace through faith as a free gift to all people. We lament the ways his movement resulted in the fracturing of the church. We wonder together what might be next for the church.

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

³¹Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³²and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” ³³They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”
  ³⁴Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. ³⁵The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. ³⁶So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” – John 8:31-36

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

But you know, sorry Jesus, I’m not actually sure I want to be free. Because being set free is kind of scary. It’s unsettling at least. Being set free means that I don’t have someone or something helping me make every decision, directing what, when, and how things get done. Being set free means being set loose on a new adventure, one without rules and guidance, maybe without structure or direction. I’m not actually convinced that Jesus’ words here are the kind of good news we’d like to make it out to be.

That may very well be the reason that the Jewish religious leaders claim in response that they have never been slaves to anyone. Surely we who read this story are meant to remember the central identity-forming story of God’s liberating the Israelites from hundreds of years of slavery and oppression in Egypt, or the history of the city in which they stand having been destroyed and the people taken into Babylon or scattered into the diaspora, or the present circumstances in which they live under Roman occupation. But if we were to acknowledge the slavery under which we live, then we might have to accept the freedom that is offered. If we were to name the truth of the ways in which we are bound up and oppressed, we would have to acknowledge our own fear of the unknown that is associated with freedom.

As we mark this week 500 years since Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 theses, as good a date as any to mark the larger movement of the Reformation in the church, we might do well to consider what it is that still binds us as the church and what we might risk by living into the freedom that Jesus offers.

For Martin Luther it was a deep conviction that God’s love and grace was freely offered and accessible to everyone, and the concern that some things the church of his time was doing were interfering with the proclamation of that good news. Though his intention was not to create a split in the church, he soon found himself, along with many faithful colleagues, lay people, and political leaders, leading a new church outside of the long-standing institutional structures that was all he had known. The reformers’ proclamation of freedom and the gospel was transformative, a message that still resonates with us today. But it must be acknowledged that for all the positives, that freedom paved the way for other abuses by church leaders. It led to arguing, persecution by the reformers of others, and outright violent war that left thousands dead. Martin Luther himself was anti-semitic and anti-Muslim among several other things that we must confess and disavow as 21^st century Lutherans.

And what ultimately emerged was another institutional church, another structure that had its own abuses of power, its own need for reformation. And we stand today in such a church. A church where in scripture, in the water, bread, and wine, in Christian community, we hear the good news of Jesus Christ, the good news of life, love, and grace for you and for everyone. And a church which, despite all that is not, in fact, free.

I fear that we have too long been in denial of the ways in which we, not just Immanuel, or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but many of the churches in our time, are still bound up by things that hinder the gospel. I fear we are still bound by buildings and bureaucracy. I fear we are still bound by a new kind of clericalism and clergy-centric ministry. I fear we are still bound by the subtle insider language and customs that keeps new people and new ideas out. I fear we are bound by a timidity and a reluctance to claim our power for the sake of justice and peace. I fear we are bound by the way we’ve always done it before even when we try to do otherwise.

Friends, it is a challenging time to be the church. It’s always a challenging time to be the church, but the pace of change in the last half a century is faster than anything seen since the era of the reformation. I don’t know what the church will look like in 20 years, much less in another 500. I don’t have all the answers about what we ought to be doing now. But I do know that we have to acknowledge with honesty the truth that we, the church, are not yet the kingdom of God.

It’s terrifying to acknowledge that things aren’t yet as they should be and that God might be working to set us free from some of the things that are comfortable and familiar. Oh, yes, there are wonderful things ahead. In some ways I can’t wait to see what God is doing with a new and ongoing reformation in our own time. But I don’t yet know what I will have to let go of for the church to emerge.

But that’s the way of love and grace. That it exists, without question, as a gift from God is something we take on faith and hear promised in baptism and communion. But what it does to us, what it opens us up to, is something wildly unpredictable. To live from a place of love and grace is to live beyond the place of right and wrong, beyond the place of simple answers, beyond the place of finite resources. It takes us to a place where we figure out what it means to give shelter to an undocumented immigrant being torn from his family. It takes us to a place where we make a place of welcome for people who don’t look like us or act like us, people who struggle with internal demons, people who can’t pay us back, people who don’t follow the rules. It takes us to a place where we give food away until everyone is fed. It takes us to a place where we put our privilege on the line so that one day the concept of privilege will no longer have to exist. It takes us to a place where we take bold risks because we no longer fear death and all that it brings. Because the new church that is emerging, that is always emerging, is sprouting from God’s very self who led the way through death into resurrection. The new church, whatever it will be, and the new creation that is emerging in each one of us, is God’s work and thanks be to God that we have been welcomed into that wild and crazy adventure of God’s ever reforming church where love and grace from God well up in us and welcome us into possibilities we cannot yet even imagine.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

20th Sunday after Pentecost
October 22, 2017

Listen here for today’s gospel reading and sermon:

¹²Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people’; but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ ¹³Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” ¹⁴He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” ¹⁵And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. ¹⁶For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.”
  ¹⁷The Lord said to Moses, “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” ¹⁸Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” ¹⁹And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. ²⁰But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” ²¹And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; ²²and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; ²³then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” – Exodus 33:12-23

¹⁵Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap [Jesus] in what he said. ¹⁶So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. ¹⁷Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” ¹⁸But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? ¹⁹Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. ²⁰Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” ²¹They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” ²²When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. – Matthew 22:15-22

Today’s readings present us with two contrasting images: the face of Caesar and the face of God. Like the coins we carry in our own pockets today, the religious leaders behold in response to Jesus’ invitation the face of the deified political leader stamped onto a flat and lifeless coin. Reproduced over and over thousands of times, more or less the same on every piece. This flattened image on a coin has only the power we give it, which of course is often a great deal of power, even if it is misplaced.

Contrast that with the face of God. The one that Moses, who by all accounts has a unique and particularly close relationship with God, is not given permission to see. Moses begs to see, after so many years of following one command after another, the face of the one who has been leading him. But the face of God is more than human eyes can behold, and so Moses is given the opportunity only to see the hem of the robe, God’s backside, the trailing edge of the divine. Unlike Caesar’s flat, lifeless, endlessly reproduced face, God’s face is a great mystery to all of humankind.

Many of the problems we face are in the confusing of the two: we too often assume that the political faces, whoever that may be in a given era, are invested with ultimate power to which we have little or no access while at the same time we domesticate our images of God, reproducing them into lifeless coins and treating them as if we own them and create their power ourselves.

And as an extension of that we also sometimes treat our fellow human beings and even ourselves as if they are more like flat, lifeless, spendable coins than unique and not fully knowable images of God. I am aware of two significant ways that has happened this week:

Across social media this week the hashtag #metoo went viral. As part of an awareness campaign, women who had experienced sexual harassment and/or sexual violence were encouraged to post the with the hashtag. It comes from women who have shared their stories with other women, and because the experience is so common, the response is often “yeah, me too.” We live in a society that has shaped all of us to accept as commonplace the commoditization and objectification of other human beings. We have failed to see the living face of God in others, in this case in particular in the face of the women around us. We have confused what belongs to whom. We have learned that it is ok or at least tolerated to flatten others into something to which we get to assign value or lack thereof. This is not ok. We have to change it. We have to work together to make this different. To see again the mysterious and wonderful face of God in our neighbors.

Also in our community this week, Lucio Perez took sanctuary from Immigration and Customs Enforcement at First Church, UCC, here in Amherst. He has complied with ICE requirements for years and been permitted to stay in the country to raise his three US citizen children. Now without a hearing he has suddenly been ordered out of the country, separating him from his family and causing them to lose a father and a large portion of their income. Lucio is just one very local, very public face representing millions more living with similar fears. As a society we have taken whole people with complex stories and histories and flattened them into a single stereotype that gets treated without reason or compassion. Whatever our beliefs about immigration reform, we owe it to our neighbors to see the face of God in them and to work toward their wholeness, well-being, and at the very least, due process.

We ask, then, as the religious leaders asked of Jesus, how should we respond to the brokenness in which we live? How shall we navigate the difficult questions around where to put our time and energy, our financial resources, our trust and hope?

I think the real invitation in Jesus’ clever answer here is to be clear about what has life, power, and authority and what ultimately doesn’t. In answering the trick question, he neither dismisses outright nor gives ultimate authority to the corrupt governing powers of his day. He doesn’t spell it out for us, but in a way he suggests that we look closely at the things to which we ascribe ultimate power – political leaders, financial wealth, success, power over others – and question whether they really hold the kind of ultimate authority we so often ascribe to them. Are they real problems, real concerns, real injustices that affect real people? Yes. Is that what holds power at the end of the day? No.

Because Jesus invites us also to consider, then, the one who does have ultimate authority. Who it is that breathes life into us, who redeems us, who makes us whole. Who has the power to raise us from the depths of despair and from the grave itself. Ultimately not the one whose face is easy to make out, not the one whose face is stamped on coins for all to spend. Instead the one whose face is still a mystery to us. The one to whom we owe not just our money but our whole lives and all they contain. In the face of so much troubling news, so much brokenness in our world, so many who need help, the one who already holds all that we are and all that we have is the one who has ultimate authority.

Jesus offers no easy answers about paying taxes, about respecting governmental authority, about how exactly we render back to God all the things which are due. He offers no clear right and wrong about how to navigate our way out of the complicated and complex ways we have destroyed the world around us by our mixing up of what has ultimate value with that which does not. But he does offer us himself, the fullness of God’s love, to show us the great value God places on us and to invite us to see that despite our best attempts at destroying it, God does maintain ultimate authority over all things – over principalities and powers, over pain and brokenness, over sin and death. It is God’s authority which sustains us through the ups and downs of the world around us. It is God’s authority and power which hold us up through the worst we can imagine. It is God who holds all things now and forever.

-Pastor Steven Wilco