Sunday, September 17, 2017
15th Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon:

²¹Peter came and said to [Jesus], “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” ²²Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
  ²³“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. ²⁴When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; ²⁵and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. ²⁶So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ ²⁷And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. ²⁸But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ ²⁹Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ ³⁰But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. ³¹When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. ³²Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. ³³Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ ³⁴And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. ³⁵So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” – Matthew 18:21-35

The kingdom of heaven is practically impossible for us to imagine because it is so completely and radically different from the kingdoms in which we live our daily lives. In today’s gospel, the disciples, now well into Jesus’ ministry, are trying to figure out what kind of kingdom Jesus is trying to usher in and among other questions they want to know just how many times they should extend forgiveness. They are ready for a challenge. They are expecting Jesus to tell them an absurdly high number. I think they are all still more or less nodding their heads when Jesus tells them to forgive their neighbor not seven but seventy times seven. That’s 490 times for those of you keeping score. This kind of number, symbolic or not, is exactly what they expected. They mentally pull out their forgiveness logs and start adding up names and numbers, perhaps ready to show how generous they are or perhaps to see just how much longer they have to put up with some people.

My next door neighbor has been parking just at the edge of the end of my driveway every day for the last month, and I have forgiven him 30 times that I remember, that’s another 460 to go before I can write him off for good – a year and a half is a long time to put up with that, but maybe I can do it, you know, for Jesus. And my little brother has been pestering me to borrow my stuff since we were little, but he always breaks it or forgets to return it. I’d say that’s happened at least 452 times in my lifetime – only 38 more to go. My spouse has been doing that little annoying thing every day since we’ve been married, and surely I’m well over the limit on forgiving that one…

It sounds absurd, but in some form or fashion that’s how we’ve learned to live. Counting up rights and wrongs. Weighing always what we’re due from someone else. Even the most magnanimous, the most spiritually grounded people I know fall into the trap. If you read things by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is world-famous for his work on forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of decades of violent and systemic oppression and genocide, he lets it slip that he still finds himself holding on to small grievances and petty squabbles with the people closest to him. We probably don’t actually have a little log where we keep track of these sorts of things, but we know in our heads what we think we’re due.

And at the same time we keep another book, a record of things we’ve done wrong, times we’ve needed to ask forgiveness. A list of wrongs big and small, often from years ago that have lodged in our memories. Our brains have a way of pulling these things up in the middle of the night, or driving along an empty highway, or in the middle of trying to accomplish a big project. And soon our brains are racing with shame through a logbook of our past wrongs. How many confessions and proclamations of forgiveness are needed for us to let it go? Maybe buried in the disciples’ question is a deeper question about how many times will can repeat our own wrongs before we have to give up on ourselves?

We know that Jesus holds us to high standard of radical discipleship, but we tend to express that within the accounting structures of our everyday lives. We have trouble imagining that Jesus might actually have something entirely different in mind. So Jesus tells a story:

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle his accounts with his slaves.” And here things get absurd. Because the king opens his logbook to see that a slave owes him something along the lines of several trillion dollars. No king in his right mind lends a slave trillions of dollars to begin with, and even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t forget about it until he just happened to open up his record book. But with the threat of being sold off or maybe even killed, the slave begs for his life. The king doesn’t just have compassion on him and expect him to simply remain a slave to the debt the rest of the life. Instead the king throws his book of accounts casually over his shoulder into the fireplace with such ease that you get the sense he does this on a pretty regular basis, and says to the utterly surprised slave, “Ok. Just forget about it. Go, your debt has been forgiven.” This not only gives him a reprieve, but it frees him from slavery into new and abundant life. The king has welcomed him into the same generous kind of life that the king himself has been living in all along, shelling out trillions of dollars to anyone who asks and even some who don’t.

But the slave just can’t live there in the king’s world. He’s lived too long in the world of accounting books, and he simply can’t figure out how to let go of his. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t really trust that he’s been set free. Maybe it’s that he can’t forgive himself for the life that got him to that debt in the first place, or maybe he’s just a stingy, greedy, and an all-around less-than-ideal person. But instead of trying out this radical new way of living, he opens up his account book with renewed zeal and makes life hell for everyone around him, the people who owe him a few thousand here and there. But what he misses is that in the process he’s made life a torturous hell for himself, too. Here, in the more distressing words of the parable, I don’t think we’re meant to believe the king goes back into accounting mode so much as he is trying desperately to help this man realize how futile this whole bookkeeping business is.

And it’s sad. Because the gift is so incredible and to realize the fullness of the gift is to be set free not only from a world of bookkeeping but from a world of death and pain, a torturous life burdened with guilt and shame, and the sadness of having missed entirely the profound forgiveness that is already true but not yet understood.

This parable proclaims not just a truth about what the kingdom of heaven is, but also a truth about how devastatingly sad the kingdom we live in every day can be. But through baptism we have been invited into that kingdom of radical forgiveness and absurd generosity. For the baptismal life is not a life in which God is more generous with the accounting of who we are and what we do. The baptismal life is one in which we have already died to a life of accounting and been raised to live in a kingdom without any record books at all. Sometimes we live out of that radical gift, and sometimes we torture ourselves instead. But sooner or later we give up the fight and rest in the one who long ago got rid of the accounting books in order to throw open both arms and welcome us home again to the kingdom of heaven.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

September 10, 2017
14th Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

[Jesus said to the disciples:] ¹⁵“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. ¹⁶But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. ¹⁷If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. ¹⁸Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. ²⁰For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” – Matthew 18:15-20

ELCA Pastor Delmer Chilton tells a story [check out the link to his post here] about a local church in the rural Georgia community where he grew up. “Every spring, when the farmers in the church planted tobacco, the “preacher” would go and see them and read them the section in the church Book of Discipline forbidding involvement in “the tobacco trade,” followed by a recitation of Matthew 18. Then he would inform them that in obedience to Scripture and the discipline he was warning them to cease their sinful behavior. A few weeks later he would bring two elders with him and do it again. And some time before Memorial Day, the women and children of the congregation would gather in solemn assembly to excommunicate their fathers and husbands and brothers, etc. Then everyone would go home to a nice Sunday dinner. Sometime in October, after everyone had harvested their crop and sold their tobacco, the women and children would gather again and vote their menfolk back in, just in time, my father would add with a wink, for the church to collect a tithe on the proceeds of the tobacco sale. Though they followed the Bible literally and carefully,” Chilton says, “the folks at the holiness church managed to miss the entire point of Jesus’ teaching in this matter. They used this text to eliminate sinful messiness from their midst while Jesus meant it as a way to bring messy, sinful people back into the community of faith.”

In other words the people of God, living together in Christian community aren’t called to expunge the “bad” people so that we can live a nice, separate holy life – which is good because there wouldn’t be anybody left if we did that – but rather we Christians are called into the messiness of human community, the messiness of broken people trying and failing and trying again to form relationships of mutual support, relationships that communicate the love and grace of God to one another.

And so Jesus gives us a process, and puts the weight of heaven behind it. He tells us to try to work it out, then bring in the wisdom of other trusted members of the community, then, if all else fails, give everyone some time and space to figure out how to come back together in a new kind of relationship. Which is some of the soundest advice I know for handling conflict, but some of the hardest advice to follow when the stuff really hits the fan. Because what we’d mostly rather do when we feel we’ve been hurt is talk about it to other people, throw verbal or physical punches, kick people out first and figure the rest out later. Or on the other end of the spectrum, we bottle it up, put on a happy face, and pretend everything is perfect. This process instead calls us to deep engagement with others in ways that force us to bare our own weaknesses and place ourselves in vulnerable space. So Jesus calls us to dig deep, to draw on the underlying power of God’s Spirit within us and work hard to build that messy Christian community.

But let’s be especially clear that this isn’t a passage that suggests we just sit back and make nice, especially when the relationships that need to be mended involve systemic oppression. The other model we have before us today for dealing with conflict is the one hinted at in the first reading. This troubling story of God’s last ditch effort to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt is the culmination of chapter after chapter of a somewhat reluctant Moses standing up in the halls of power proclaiming, “Let my people go!” God’s people are called to go boldly into the halls of power to address injustice and oppression. We are to take Jesus’ words about handling conflict head on not only as guidance for living into messy Christian community, but also as guidance for standing up to the abuse of power and the perpetuation of injustice. To go out and seek reconciliation isn’t about everyone shaking hands and agreeing to live in a tense and uneasy ceasefire, and it’s certainly not about standing in judgment of others waving our Bibles around, but rather about digging in to the hard work of engaging one another in ways that help each of us to dismantle in ourselves the things that stand in the way of living together in peace and justice.

As we begin another academic year in this community, another year of living into messy human community together as a church, as classrooms, as college communities, we do so in the midst of a great deal of conflict and trouble in the world around us. As we engage the work of reconciliation and liberation in our own little corners, we are also called to join with other faith leaders who have stepped up to respond to white supremacists and to racism in its many more subtle forms. We are called to join undocumented immigrants as they stand open and vulnerable, awaiting in fear the day they will be rounded up and separated from family and home. We are called to cross the political aisle to open dialogue and conversation with those who disagree with us. We are called out of our comfort zones to stand in the storm, literally and figuratively, with those whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by wind and water in Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean, called to work with them in this case not to resolve conflict but to restore wholeness in the face of disaster. And all of that work is going to be hard and it’s going to be messy, just like the individual work of conflict resolution, forgiveness, and living together in community.

Yet, the good news for us is that we do not enter that messy and challenging work alone – we cannot enter it on our own. Because Christ enters it with us, enters our broken human community. Christ enters the vulnerable place with us for the sake of reconciliation and liberation. Christ enters the vulnerable place with us so that we no longer stand behind self-created barriers against God’s love and mercy and justice, but are rather drawn into the place where we experience God at work in us. So that we are empowered by God’s Spirit to step forward into the places other fear to go, so that with the power of heaven behind us we are made a part of that boundary-breaking work to bring us together into one body. Not a perfect community, not one that has tidied up all its conflicts, disagreements, and tensions, but one that lives into the messy in-between spaces together.

We began our worship this morning with words of God’s forgiveness in response to our naming the brokenness of our lives. We began with God’s stepping out to become vulnerable to us, to be a part of our messy human community, to engage that work of creating a lasting and just peace through forgiveness and reconciliation. Though we ultimately fail to live out that same uncompromising forgiveness, God continues to be at work in us shaping us into the body of Christ and calling us again through font and table to be God’s holy, boundary crossing people to go out into the world to share the good news, so that we might be surprised over and over again at what God can do in and through us. Thanks be to God.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

12th Sunday after Pentecost
August 27, 2017

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. – Matthew 16:13-20

See also Exodus 1:8-2:10. 

Listen to today’s sermon here:

*Credit for the underlying idea of this sermon goes to Rev. Christina Williams of the Hadley Congregational Church from her sermon at the Ecumenical Good Friday Service earlier this year in which she talked about Peter’s hitting rock bottom. 

I’m not generally into watching construction sites, but I am always fascinated when I’m in a big city and they are preparing the foundations for a new skyscraper. They require by some measures rather large and deep foundations, and yet for the height that is accomplished, the holes in the earth and the steel and concrete pillars seem barely enough to hold a smaller building much less one rising 2000 feet into the air. I am never more aware of the foundation than when standing at the top of one of those super-tall buildings, feeling the slight sway that occurs on the top floors of such buildings. It boggles my mind that we have figured out how to support buildings thousands of feet high on relatively small foundations. But of course it requires a certain kind of foundation. That Manhattan is home to so many skyscrapers is at least in part a result of relatively accessible solid bedrock beneath what has become the Financial District and Midtown. Generally speaking you can’t build a skyscraper just anywhere.

The same goes for the church. Certainly you can plant a church or hold worship or go out and be the church in the world anywhere. But for the community that will grow from Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, it’s metaphorically, at least, going to require a foundation stronger than the world’s tallest buildings.

You almost imagine Jesus pondering just who might be that kind of foundation. “Who do you say that I am?” he asks his closest followers, and sits back to see what they say. A few safe answers, conveniently attributed to someone else, are floated, and at Jesus’ repetition of the question, Simon boldly risks a more radical answer: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” And with that Simon becomes Peter, Petros, Rocky one, bedrock for the church.

But let’s review Peter’s track record before and after this. Peter is the one who just a few weeks ago tried walking on water and failed. Peter is the one who always has something impetuous to say, a bit of a risk-taker. Peter is the one who will deny Jesus three times and desert him in his final hours. Peter is the one who in the early years of the church be part of the disagreements that have to be hashed out in Acts, and it takes a divine vision for him to finally see God’s point about welcoming others into the fold. Peter is a rocky foundation – in the worst sense of the word – and just because he risks this one answer and gets it right, Jesus is willing to stake something as big and risky as the whole church on the foundation of Peter?

Yes. Jesus does. Not because Peter is the best, and not even because Peter gets it right. But because God can build a skyscraper on darn near anything. Tied up in this whole conversation is the underlying truth that none of us is an adequate foundation for the church. If the church depends on Peter, or you or me for that matter, then we might as well give up now. If it depends on our right answers to the questions about Jesus’ identity, or the steadfastness to withstand anything that comes our way, or about our capacity to hold firm in the face of injustice and evil, then there wouldn’t be a church today.

Maybe Peter is Jesus’ choice for a foundation because Peter knows what it means to hit rock bottom. For all the aforementioned reasons and probably hundreds more that didn’t make the scriptural texts, Peter knows as well as any of us do that we aren’t the kind of solid rock we’d like to pretend we are. But it’s when we’ve been knocked flat down to nothing that we’re the most solid foundation for God to start something new.

If God can build the release of God’s people from the hands of slavery under the Egyptians from a story that starts, as we read this morning, with the slaughter of innocents and a baby sent downriver in a basket, then God can build the church on Peter and on us.

God can build a church on top of rocks that have been thrown in hatred and ignorance, or a church on top of buildings crumbled by bombs, creating a home for new life and resurrection on the foundation of the messes we have created for ourselves. Or God can build a church on toppled monuments that were once erected to intimidate others into submission, creating a space for hope and opened hearts. Or God can raise up a church on the flooded towns of Texas or on top of crumbled cities after earthquakes, putting us back together again when the natural world swallows us up. And God can even build up a church on a foundation of tombstones, those markers that proclaim in rocky permanence the grief we bear and the promise that we too will return to dust – on those God builds the great communion of resurrected saints. Because God has built up a church on that foundation – a whole church founded on Jesus’ rock-hewn grave burst open that first Easter.

It’s exactly when all we have and hold crumbles before us – our pride, our success, our accomplishments, our abilities, our anxieties and fears, our bodies and minds, our hearts and souls, our very lives – it’s when the walls that hold us up fall to pieces that the Holy Spirit wells up in us an awareness of the only one who can save us – the Messiah, the son of the living God. And whether such a confession falls eloquently from our lips or whether our sighs and groans speak that truth in ways we don’t always know and understand ourselves, that rock bottom place, the rockiness of our lives, is the kind of place Jesus stakes a claim and builds a church.

So here we are: church. Gathered around this table, nourished by this font, a living testament to the power of God to build a community of resurrected people on rocky foundations. We may not look like the shiniest, tallest, most impressive of skyscrapers, but we live secure, knowing the one who has placed us here can build us up and make us the foundation for the pouring out of grace into this rocky world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, August 20, 2017
Season after Pentecost

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

*Today’s sermon is adapted from a preaching commentary for this Sunday’s texts which I wrote, included for Sundays and Seasons Preaching Year A 2017, published by Augsburg Fortress.

²¹Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²²Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” ²³But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” ²⁴He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” ²⁵But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” ²⁶He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁷She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly. – Matthew 15:21-28

See also Genesis 45:1-15 and Romans 11:1-2,29-32

Do you have room for dessert? No matter how tempting the dessert tray – and let me tell you, the dessert table at the dinner in the Parish Hall last night was extremely tempting – perhaps you know the feeling of at one time or another eating more than seemed ideal, leaving you wondering if you might ever have room for anything more. It’s not a comfortable feeling, exactly, but most of us would take it over the prospect of extreme hunger, especially if that were hunger prolonged not just for a day for months or years of not having enough.

Today’s gospel reading is about things that are too full. In one of the more troubling texts of the gospels, it is as if Jesus says the meal is over and there is no more room at the table and not enough left to share. Maybe he’d share but they had eaten everything and all that was left were crumbs. A woman, an outsider, is hungry for healing for her daughter and begs to Jesus, but the one who has healed so many crowds of people, the one who had compassion on tired, hungry, hurting crowds, now insists there simply isn’t room at the table.

The characters in our other readings are wondering about this difficult question, too – what to do when those who are hungry approach those who are full. Joseph’s brothers, the ones who in last week’s reading wanted to kill their youngest brother but decided to sell him into slavery instead, they are now the ones hungry and begging. Begging to Joseph whose life has become so full with power and privilege that he will not welcome them back. They aren’t sure that he will have room in his full life for forgiveness, room for the brothers who wished him so much harm so many years ago.

And the church at Rome, too, is wondering whether there is room at God’s table, in God’s church, for the people who first heard God’s promises. They have been arguing about what it takes to get a seat at the table. The Jesus followers wonder if the non-Jesus-following Jewish people will get a spot as well. Are they afraid if we open up the doors there won’t be enough room for them?

We know what it is like to be so full in life that we cannot imagine squeezing in one more request for help, one more person in need. Already full of grief we cannot imagine room to bear another loss. Our hearts and minds are filled by the weight of violence and war. We live in a culture that often expresses that there is no room to accommodate those on the margins, whether for reasons of race, religion, socioeconomic status, immigration status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. With all that has been happening in the wake of the white supremacists’ rallies in Charlottesville and around the country, I am worried that we are so full of anger at those who march in the streets that we fail to see in ourselves and our everyday communities the much more subtle and insidious ways we claim the table is already too full to make room for those who do not already have privilege and power. Even in our faith communities we sometimes fail to make room for new ideas and new people out of fear that there will no longer be room for the things we love and hold dear or because our budgets and schedules are already overloaded.

For some our lives are filled with activity and obligations – work, play, volunteering, chores, and errands, leaving little room for quiet and sleep much less anything else. We pack our schedules until there is no room for anything more. This time of year many households are busy with going back to school and gearing up again after summer breaks, schedules filling up faster than we might like. For others our days are filled with depression and anxiety that simply won’t make room for anything else. Some have bank accounts so full that managing the money takes up all our time and energy, while others have drawers so full of bills that there doesn’t seem to be any room to breathe.

We know about being too full.

But the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus recognizes fullness, too. She sees the fullness of God’s table even if Jesus doesn’t yet in this moment. She sees a table so full that there is food falling unnoticed to the dogs. She sees a table that doesn’t have a finite limit. She sees a crumb from God’s feast as enough to fill even her deepest hunger.

And Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers opens their eyes to a way of living that makes room for more. Trembling before him, they feel his fullness open up to envelop them, as well. Those who have been forgiven and welcomed back after long and painful separation know the ways those words and that embrace open up new spaces inside for everyone.

And Paul insists to the church at Rome that God’s promise is big and God’s table indeed does have room for more, room for others to sit and be fed, room to welcome even the people who make us uncomfortable and who make us give up our sense of privilege and power.

I’ve heard it jokingly said that even after a large meal, there is always room for ice cream because it melts down around all the other food that’s already entered the stomach. Probably not true. But what an image for us of grace poured over our busy lives! When we think there is no more room at the table or no more room in our lives, when we think that the pain we carry leaves no room for hope or the mounting pressures will do us in, when we cannot imagine another extension of forgiveness or another undeserved grace a voice from the margins calls out to remind us that we aren’t ever too full for God’s grace, that a crumb from God’s table is enough to crack open our world and make it larger.

Whether we approach the Eucharistic table today crying out in faith that a crumb will be more than enough to meet the hunger we so desperately feel or whether we approach the table today feeling the fullness of our own life, not sure how to make room for God’s transformative work in our lives, a morsel of bread and a sip of wine are offered. As we take it into ourselves, God’s mercy melts over us again, filling in around all the other things crammed into our lives.

Some days a crumb from the table is all we can find room for, as if to eat any more would require not only a bigger mouth but also a bigger heart. But unlike ice cream, that morsel of bread and sip of wine, that melting grace, they begin to transform the things they envelop, not cramming our lives more full but instead making more room, for in God’s economy there is no finite limit to available grace and no crumb too small to transform the world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

10th Sunday after Pentecost
August 13, 2017

So what a thrill it must have been for Peter, who knew these particular waters so well, to climb out of the boat on such a windy morning and place a foot down on the water. Almost as if he was finally conquering this body of water which had given him his livelihood, but which was also notoriously unpredictable and perhaps even sometimes a source of grief and worry. One solid step and then another. Doing the impossible with Jesus. Until he fell in. I used to imagine that his feet slowly started to ease into the water, but actually I wonder that he didn’t just go crashing through, unexpectedly surrounded by cold water, flailing in the midst of the water he was so accustomed to, the water he thought he may just have finally conquered.

Maybe you know the feeling. I had a panicked sinking feeling yesterday as white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was under no illusion that we had conquered racism, despite the ways in which I continue as a person of privilege to let it slip from the forefront of my mind. But I would have liked to think we were beyond the point where the KKK had rallies in the streets. Yes, thousands of counterprotestors gathered, people of faith prominently among them, which made me feel like maybe we could get a tiny foothold in containing such ugliness. But Friday evening before the official rally even began white supremacists wielding torches had cornered a group of clergy counterprotestors and were angrily threatening them. Yesterday they were throwing concrete bottles and throwing punches with brass knuckles against the people gathered to pray for an end to racism and driving cars into crowds of people. And I felt like we were suddenly crashing through the water and gasping for air and screaming for help. When nonviolent resistance fails, I don’t know where to turn next.

And maybe you know that sinking feeling, because it seemed like for a while we were getting a foothold on nuclear disarmament. There at least was talk, even if the actions weren’t yet enough. Tentative steps on the water. But this week’s news has left us with reminders that, political posturing aside, weapons of our own making capable of destroying life on the entire planet exist, and that our own nation holds exponentially more than most others. It feels like another crashing through into icy waters.

Maybe you know that sinking feeling, when you’ve watched people you love, and maybe even yourself, slowly experience decline. There are sometimes small signs of hope along the way, things that give a few more days or weeks or months or years, things that seem like they are turning around. A tiny step toward conquering the wild and uncontrollable sea of aging and disease. And then it all falls apart again. The longer the journey the more often the moments of crashing into the sea seem to come and go. And ultimately the sea does consume all of us.

Failure. That could be what we focus on in this story. And often we do. “Oh Peter of little faith, why did you doubt?” we hear Jesus say. And we let that rebuke seep into our souls, because we know all too well the feeling of failure, the feeling that we cannot control the uncontrollable, we cannot do the impossible.

But that is who we are. People who cannot walk on water. Maybe it’s our fear and doubt, but frankly its also basic physics. We aren’t people who are capable of taming the sea. We aren’t people who by our own power can defeat evil that exists in the world. We are not people who can conquer death. But that doesn’t mean this story ends in failure.

It doesn’t end in failure, most obviously because Jesus reaches out and lifts him up out of the water, out of the flailing panic of the choppy water and back into the safety of the boat. Even in our most panicked moments we are not beyond the reach of God and not beyond the love and care that keeps us from drowning.

This story doesn’t end in failure, because even though Jesus knows Peter can’t walk on water, Jesus believes in him, and calls him out of the boat anyway. This isn’t a failure because at God’s invitation Peter takes a wild adventure. It may not conquer the sea, but it’s a few steps in that direction. God’s call to us is not to defeat evil and death once and for all but at God’s invitation and with God’s power lent to us, to take some of those steps, to stand with those who are hurting and oppressed, to stand against racism and injustice, to take a few steps alongside those who are failing and struggling and drowning. And we can do it because God believes in us – believes in us more than we believe in ourselves. Jesus’ question to Peter isn’t so much a rebuke perhaps as it is a wondering out loud how it is that Peter doesn’t see in himself what Jesus sees so clearly in him.

And finally this story doesn’t end in failure because Jesus’ story doesn’t end in failure. Jesus’ story looks like it ends in failure and death. It looks like it ends in the defeat of God’s beloved. It looks like all is lost on the cross. And yet God sees there more than we can ourselves. God sees in failure an opportunity for resurrection. God sees already the rescue before we’ve begun to sink and flail and drown. God breathes life into us and extends a hand to pull us up. And offers God’s very self for us – the body of Christ given for you. For you who feel like you’ve got a foothold for now, for you who are sinking and drowning, for you who doubt yourselves, for you who cannot see in yourselves what God sees in you, for you who have been called to something important and felt failure, for you who are still waiting to hear the call. Reaching out in the wind and the storm, an invitation to join in the kingdom of resurrection and to know the power of God at work in us doing more than we could ask or imagine.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

8th Sunday after Pentecost
July 30, 2017

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

³¹[Jesus] put before [the crowds] another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field;³²it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
  ³³He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
  ⁴⁴“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
  ⁴⁵“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; ⁴⁶on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
  ⁴⁷“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; ⁴⁸when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. ⁴⁹So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous ⁵⁰and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  ⁵¹“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” ⁵²And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”  -Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

I grew up reading the Magic School Bus books and later watching the animated PBS show based on the books. If you’re not familiar with this children’s series, it’s about the beloved and sometimes a little wacky science teacher, Ms. Frizzle, and her magic school bus. Rather than simply reading about science, or even doing experiments about science, they go on field trips to experience science. The members of her class, some excited some reluctant, board what looks like an ordinary school bus but they are quickly transported into some pretty incredible situations. These are no ordinary field trips. The bus takes them inside the human body, into outer space, to the ocean floor, and even back in time to visit the dinosaurs. They experience the beating of the heart from the inside, the thrill and terror of walking among the dinosaurs, the wonder of outer space and the dangers it presents. It’s of course a fun way for kids to learn science through an imaginative story.

I’d like to suggest that we follow Jesus on a bit of a magic-school-bus-like adventure today as we explore the parables he lays out about the kingdom of heaven. Because faith, like science, is often learned best when it has an experiential component. Too often I think we read these parables as if we are outside of them, as if they are a lesson to be learned or an instruction to be followed. We forget that when Jesus describes the kingdom we are part of that realm, we are inside what Jesus is describing. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to get up or do anything, just to join me in using your imaginations. If it helps your imagination, feel free to close your eyes from time to time.

Jesus put before them another parable: The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field. What is it like to start inside the seed, dry and small, packed tightly, dormant, waiting. And to be planted in rich soil, where the warmth of sun and moisture of rain begin to awaken you. The dormant seed all around you begins to shake and shutter and before long bursts open and growth begins, cells dividing around you. You, from the midst of the seed, are launched out, expanding, growing. You find yourself pushed deeper down as all around you the roots begin to provide strength and protection. You find yourself pushed up into the world seeking new life. The energy of the plant is pulsing around you, growing, expanding. At some point you become aware that this life and energy around you has grown into something that is not only alive within, but sheltering life without as birds make their nests in the branches. That’s what it’s like to be in the kingdom of heaven.

And Jesus put before them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with a giant barrel of flour. What is it like, again to begin dry and dusty, amidst many separate grains, each its own tiny piece of what is about to happen. But soon as the dough is mixed the grains join together such that they are forever united into a single whole. As the dough is kneaded, you feel the yanking and pushing and squeezing and pulling. It is a rough experience, but as it happens the dough around you becomes more cohesive. It all still feels too close around you, but soon, with just the slightest bit of warmth, things begin to expand. What was dry and dusty is alive and breathing. Air pockets form and suddenly there is more and more room to move and live and breathe. This is the kingdom of heaven.

And another: The kingdom of heaven is like a buried treasure. What is it like to be inside the chest filled with riches of every kind? But for what seems like forever, no one knows your great value. You are passed over again and again. Until suddenly you are discovered, you are known fully for who you are, just as you are. And you are not only known now inside and out, but seeing your great value, someone has given everything up for you, now known and treasured forever. This is the kingdom of heaven.

And another: The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. What is it like to be on such a quest? Perhaps sailing on the open seas from port to port, longing for home but spurred on by the desire to find that one thing you seek. One adventure after another, some terrifying, some delightful. The tossing of the waves and the smell of the salty sea day after day, never sure what the next day will bring – hardship or discovery, and always the longing for what you know but have not yet seen. Until the day that you lay eyes on it and it consumes all that you are because it is what you have been seeking since before you can remember. This is the kingdom of heaven.

And one more: The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind. What is it like to be the net, thrown out into open water, splashing through the surface and floating, waiting, until first one and then another is caught. Before long you can feel all around you the straining of the fibers of the net. The sinews squeeze and strain around you with the weight of the catch. The abundance is so great that you feel the net ready to burst open with it, barely able to contain what it holds. That’s the kingdom of heaven.

Or at least that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like. That’s how Jesus tries to open our imaginations to the expansive kingdom, no magic school bus required. Because there simply isn’t much use in talking about the kingdom of heaven from the outside, because these parables keep reminding us over and over again that the kingdom of heaven is widely inclusive and already growing up around us. From within the kingdom we are freed to experience God’s surprises hidden in the everyday and bursting forth in unexpected form without warning. From within the kingdom we are freed to experience the seemingly endless waiting and hoping, the pushing and pulling and tugging, the wild ride on the way as all held within that grand kingdom by a God who enters it with us and loves us through it. Christ has welcomed you inside the world he is trying to describe, and as perplexing and mysterious as it sometimes is, it is a wonderful, beautiful, grace-filled place to be.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 23, 2017

²⁴[Jesus] put before [the crowds] another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field;²⁵but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. ²⁶So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. ²⁷And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ ²⁸He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. ³⁰Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’ ”
  ³⁶Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” ³⁷He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; ³⁸the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, ³⁹and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. ⁴⁰Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, ⁴²and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ⁴³Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!” – Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Just in time for this parable, the weekly e-news from my local farm share was all about weed management. It said this: “Rather than focus on hand weeding every time we see a weed, we try to keep our priorities straight.  Harvesting and planting are maybe the most important jobs, field preparation and fertilizing are not far behind. It’s only the beginning of summer but we’ve already begun prepping our fields for next year.  The better we are able to prep our fields for the following year, the fewer weeds we’ll have to contend with this time next summer…If we were to attempt to pull out every weed on the farm by hand, addressing the symptoms of the problem, rather than the root cause, we’d have weeds three times as big in the first bed we weeded by the time we finish weeding the last bed.”

Just like in the parable, dealing with the weeds is a matter of priority. The workers want nothing more than to go in and rip up those annoying, offending plants. They want to be able to do something about this mess. They want to be able to take action and solve the problem. But suppose they even can identify the weeds from wheat. They’d still spend the whole growing season hunting down every last weed, uproot some good wheat in the process, and miss all the other important things that need to be done to help the wheat grow and thrive.

As hopeless as their plan is to weed the field and rid it of the invading plants, wouldn’t it be nice if solving the problems of our lives and our world were even that simple? We are fully aware of the existence of evil in our world and in ourselves, and this parable, rather than explaining the presence of bad things, simply invites us to accept their existence as part of life – that the weeds grow right along with the wheat. War, violence, hunger, cancer, dementia, depression, fear, anxiety, it all grows in and around us.

There are other parables that invite us into action, stories and teaching that invite us to respond with love and care to our neighbors. That means actively working for peace, transforming food systems to enable all people access to healthy food, developing new ways to treat and cure cancer, accompanying those in distress and supporting stigma-free environments for them to seek help and treatment. But this parable seems to be about simply understanding that the world is not as we always want it to be, that this world isn’t always as God wants it to be, and that, in some form or another God is still tending to us all with great care with a plan for a kingdom where all is made new.

This seems to me to be an invitation to make peace with the existence of evil and all that threatens our life and livelihoods. It’s not meant to invite us to complacency or inaction. It’s not meant to say that the bad stuff in and around us doesn’t matter. But it is to say that we are not always so good at labeling what is good and what is bad. As soon as we label one thing or one person as the problem to be removed, we start down a road where eventually we have to point the finger back at ourselves. And when we start trying to excise the weeds, we end up ripping up perfectly good plants, too. And I daresay we sometimes intentionally and unintentionally water and fertilize the weeds in our lives.

But if this parable is about what we shouldn’t do and cannot know – the solution to evil, the labeling and sorting of good from bad, what the somewhat frightening sounding talk of end times really means – then we need to also consider what it is we can do and what it is we certainly know.

What we can do is to seek ways to tend well that which we want to see flourish. It’s human nature to dwell on the things that we regret, the things we wish had never happened or to dwell on the times we have been hurt or excluded – the times we have experienced pain and suffering. But we might instead train ourselves to focus on celebrating that which is growing and flourishing in us and around us. We might train ourselves to pause to give thanks that God has planted us where we are and that we have been given life and breath, roots to nourish and support us, and the opportunity to bear fruit for the sake of the world. We can turn that invitation to our communities and to our congregation, too, where we tend to spend a lot of time and energy both in our thinking and our acting on the areas where we see challenges and problems, things that genuinely do need attention. Yet we sometimes fail to spend as much time celebrating and nourishing that which is growing well and bearing fruit. That kind of tending our own gardens, nourishing the healthy, life-giving plants, as advocated by Jesus and your local neighborhood CSA, might guide us into a new way of looking at our lives and it might help us grow more aware of the one who plants us, the one who waters us, the one who enables us to live.

But even more important than what we can do is what we know. Even in the face of the existence of evil and suffering, in the face of pain and hardship, in the face of fear about the future and regrets about the past, we have God’s sure and certain promises. We have the promise of baptism in which God waters us into life and shares the light of Christ to allow us to grow. When evil sprouts up in us and around us, that promise is not revoked. It is renewed every time we hear God’s words of forgiveness spoken to us, words which are without a doubt the proclamation of the already enacted forgiveness of God. Though evil continues to grow, God’s forgiveness never waivers. And with that forgiveness we are invited to the table where we have the assurance of Christ’s presence with us in bread and wine and in the gathered community. Christ is here today in us, around us, with us.

We do not have a full explanation for the presence of evil and suffering. We do not have an easy answer for how to deal with its presence. But we do have the assurance of a God whose love for us is beyond measure, who tends us with care and grace, focusing on ways to raise us up to flourish and bear fruit for the world, and a plan to one day refine us and all the world into the kingdom of God.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

4th Sunday after Pentecost
July 2, 2017

¹God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ²He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” ³So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. ⁴On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. ⁵Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” ⁶Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. ⁷Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” ⁸Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.
  ⁹When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. ¹⁰Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. ¹¹But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”¹²[The angel] said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”¹³And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. ¹⁴So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” – Genesis 22:1-14

Listen to today’s sermon here:

There is no satisfactory explanation for the story of Abraham and Isaac. We must start there. A God who sits around coming up with way to test people’s faith is problematic. A God who tests people’s faith by encouraging them to sacrifice other human beings is unacceptable. But let us pause to consider some options for looking at this troubling story.

Jewish interpreters have often focused on the provision of God, the ram in the bushes at just the right moment. When all seems hopeless, when violence is about to be committed, when there is no other way out, what is needed is provided.

Christians have long considered this some sort of prefiguring of Christ, the child of God offered up or perhaps Christ – the ram – offered in place of us. That rests on a particular interpretation of Christ’s work, but there are some interesting connections.

Author Mary Rakow reimagines that this was not the first time Abraham sacrificed a child out of some combination of fear, shame, duty, and madness.[1] Over and over again, he had done this until finally God steps in and says, “Enough! Stop the cycle of violence.” That perspective matches how some have interpreted this story as one to counter the religious rites of nearby peoples of the time who did, from time to time offer child sacrifices. This then becomes another of God’s absurd prophetic object lessons speaking out against what is happening in the culture around God’s people.

For Paul this story is about the faith of Abraham – his willingness to unquestioningly follow God’s commands. But I tend to be very concerned when people act, especially with violence, and claim it in the name of God, claiming God has spoken personally with them to give a mission no one else knows about.

Finally, Kierkegaard famously proposed 4 possible scenarios,[2] all ultimately unsatisfying:

• Abraham acts in response to God’s command, but does not tell Isaac that it is God’s command. Better, Abraham thinks, that Isaac should forever lose faith in his father for the sake of maintaining faith in God.
• Abraham silently follows the commands up through the command to take the ram in place of Isaac, but Abraham can never forget that moment of his willingness to kill his own son and lives out the rest of his days with darkened eyes, and never again knows joy.
• Abraham realizes it was sinful to have considered sacrificing his son and spend the rest of his days ruminating on his past and falling on his face before God begging forgiveness.
• Abraham fails to follow through. They go up, but he trembles, then hesitates. They both return not quite sure what this means for them and for their faith in God.

Kierkegaard imagines that Abraham struggles with all of these scenarios and it is in this dark and complicated struggling that his faith emerges.

These intrigue me. They open up the story for me in interesting ways. But none of them gets around this as a horrendous story in which, according to the text as we have it, God not only condones but commands interpersonal violence.

While I will unequivocally say that I do not profess belief in a God who does this, even as some kind of extreme test of faith with a plan all along to save Isaac, I recognize in wrestling with this story the challenge of a world and a God that I cannot understand.

There is no question that things as terrible as this go on every day. They go on not only in far off distant places but in our own homes and our own communities. Children are sacrificed every day to hunger and poverty, abuse and neglect. Children are sacrificed every day by military actions of our own and other governments in the supposed aim of achieving peace. Children are sacrificed when parents send them across international borders in the hopes of a better life perhaps never to see them again. And at the risk of making light those previous examples, we sacrifice the child within us all the time, losing touch with our sense of play and wonder, joy and freedom. And we must grapple with what faith means in the face of it. We must grapple with what our own actions ought to be as people of faith when these terrible things go on, perhaps especially when they go on in the name of the God we claim to worship. We must grapple with what faith means when we are the ones laid out for sacrifice or when we are the ones wielding the knife.

A classic example of this wrestling is Dietrich Bonheoffer, whose poem we will sing in a few moments as our hymn of the day. He found himself in the church in Germany under Adolf Hitler. He helped form a church that existed outside of the national church which more or less went along with the prevailing powers. And he eventually found himself working on a plot to assassinate Hitler himself. To the day he was executed in prison he wrestled with what it meant to be called as a person of faith in such a time. Was violence necessary to stop one of the worst atrocities in history? Did that make it ok to commit violence as a person of faith? How much was enough for the church to do in the face of evil? Did anyone come out of that without a lifetime of deeply complicated questions about God and faith?

And if we listen to the voices that are crying out, the voices of the Abrahams and Isaacs of our day, we can find those same complicated questions in any age. There are always atrocities, there is always violence, there is always hatred, and no one escapes life without in some way or another being both a recipient and a creator of violence. It lives within us as it did in Abraham and Isaac. It intersects our ideas about God and church and life. It affects our concepts of good and evil. It leaves us with a lifetime of complicated questions about God and faith and life.

And every step of the way, every plodding step up our own Mt. Moriah, every trembling hand, every fearful child, every draw of the knife, every last minute pardon, God walks with us. We who are confronted with a world beyond our control and stories that trouble us deep in our being. God enters that with us. God who willingly takes the role of Isaac in our world of violence and death, all the way to the cross, where no alternative victim is offered, where God’s very self is offered to enter fully our human experience of violence and death.

So if there’s a lesson about deep faith here, it’s a lesson that there are no easy answers to what it means to be faithful. There are no easy answers to what it means to try to understand God and God’s hopes for us and God’s deep love for us in the midst of a world that does not always reflect that love. And so we plod forward, carrying our sometimes misguided understandings of God, carrying our history of boundaries crossed and actions regretted, carrying our well-founded fear of what others in our lives are capable of doing, and we wrestle out a path of faith in the face of it all, with God standing beside us all the way to the worst of it all promising us life even at the point of death. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

[1] Mary Rakow, This is Why I Came (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2015), p. 24-33.

[2] See Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard.

3rd Sunday after Pentecost
June 25, 2017

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

⁸The child [Isaac] grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. ⁹But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. ¹⁰So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” ¹¹The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. ¹²But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. ¹³As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” ¹⁴So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.
  ¹⁵When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. ¹⁶Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. ¹⁷And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. ¹⁸Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” ¹⁹Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.
  ²⁰God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. ²¹He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt. – Genesis 21:8-21

  ³⁴“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…³⁹Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”- Matthew 10:34,39 (from the Gospel Reading Matthew 10:24-39)

Sarah just wanted peace in her house. She caught the anxious stares from Hagar. She caught the subtle insubordination from the woman whose child claimed the rights of the first son over her own newly-born miracle child. People with small children who wake up at all hours of the night are not always the most rational in reacting to stress. Sarah just didn’t want to put up with it anymore. She just wanted Hagar out of her house.

You see Sarah and Abraham had waited and waited for the child God promised them. They got so tired of waiting for God that they – together mind you – decided that Abraham should have a son with Hagar, a servant in their household. And so Hagar’s son, Ishmael, was Abraham’s firstborn and with that came an elevated place for the servant-woman who bore him. This was after all, God’s promised child. Or so they thought until Sarah had a son, Isaac. That’s when the trouble started.

And like so many others, Hagar was considered disposable. She was a servant. Her role was to make their life manageable without being too much of a presence in that life. Like the people who clean the public spaces we go in and out of every day, the people who construct our homes and our streets. She was disposable like the people we lock away in prisons or who we imprison with hunger and lack of housing. She was disposable like the people who pick our produce or who make our clothing in far away places. She was disposable like the ones caught up in today’s industry of global trafficking. These are people who make our quasi-peaceful lives possible, and in many cases we can’t or don’t get to know them too well lest we let their stories shatter our sense of well-being. They are disposable not because we would be willing to do the work ourselves, in most instances, but because there are others who will take their place – other nameless, faceless people who will help our lives move smoothly along.

And so Abraham and Sarah together throw Hagar, along with young Ishmael, out into the desert. To die. Abraham is upset, but not upset enough to stand up for what is right, to stand up for this girl and her boy they are sentencing to death. In trying to save his life, he loses the very life he wants to save. But he has to admit they have a certain kind of peace back in their house again. They can go back to living the life they dreamed about. But we who get to see the whole story know that it is not real peace, because it is not peace for Hagar and Ishmael, who are thirsty and distraught, alone and afraid.

Perhaps that is what Jesus is talking about: “Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Jesus does not come to make life easy and nice, because easy and nice is not peace. The God who counts the hairs of your head and who minds the sparrow grieves at every pain and distress present in creation. This is a God who weeps over the tiniest of creatures lost, and therefore a God who does not willingly send Hagar and Ishmael out to die. A God who refuses to grant peace unless it is peace for everyone. Jesus comes not bearing niceties but bearing the power of God to transform our disposing of people, our satisfaction with easy answers and unjust peace.

And for the moments when all we want is peace for our own aching and distressed hearts, this story of Hagar and this harsh-sounding message from Jesus sound like anything but Good News. This Jesus who comes not bringing peace, this story of people disposed of for the sake of convenience, they make us uncomfortable, they shatter the world we construct for ourselves to make it through the day. The story of Hagar reminds us that we sometimes treat other people as disposable.

Which, to be honest, we do in part because we fail to honor the fullness of humanity in ourselves. We fail to consider ourselves worthy of love. We fail to consider our gifts as valuable. We fail to acknowledge the power that we have within us, thinking of ourselves as too small to make a difference, too small to matter. We carry our own wounds of having been made to feel small or unimportant, times that we have been cast aside and left empty and alone.

But the God who counts the hairs of your head and who cares for the smallest of sparrows does not leave you alone. In the wilderness, in the moment of despair, the voice of God’s messenger: “Do not be afraid. You matter to God. You who have been rejected by your own family, who are considered disposable by others – you matter to God.” And with the message of love, water appears where there was none before. And with it life and hope and possibility and a promise. God had promised to make of Abraham a great nation. Now from this disaster and despair, from our human brokenness, our failure to treat one another as valued human beings, a new promise emerges to make of Abraham not one nation, but two. Out of human selfishness God finds an opportunity to double what has been promised.

We do not get to hear the end of the story. We hear only the darkest part of Hagar’s journey and just the beginning of what is to come for them in the future before the story returns to Sarah and Abraham. But thankfully, in that brief moment we see the God who hears the cries of children dying in the desert, the cries of refugees without a home, the cries of people forgotten and disposed of, the cries of the earth longing for relief, the cries of the tiny sparrows, the God who hears your cries and mine. And God responds to those cries with a peace that heals not only our own wounds but the wounds we have inflicted on others. Not only the peace I so desperately long for but the peace my neighbor so desperately longs for as well.

In the moment when we think that all is lost, or in the moments when we come to the realization that we have inflicted that loss on someone else, we find there God coming to us not with peace but with the power to transform our driest, darkest, most despairing places into springs of water that wash us to new life. That is the baptismal promise in which we live. The promise of God to comfort and to make uncomfortable until every last sparrow and every last one of us is part of God’s flourishing reign of peace.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

2nd Sunday after Pentecost
June 18, 2017

¹The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. ²He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. ³He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. ⁴Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. ⁵Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” ⁶And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” ⁷Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. ⁸Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
  ⁹They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” ¹⁰Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. ¹¹Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. ¹²So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” ¹³The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ ¹⁴Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” ¹⁵But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.” ¹The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. ²Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. ³Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. ⁴And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. ⁵Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. ⁶Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” ⁷And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” – Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

³⁵Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. ³⁶When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. ³⁷Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; ³⁸therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
 ^10:1Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. ²These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; ³Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; ⁴Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.
  ⁵These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, ⁶but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ⁷As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ⁸Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. -Matthew 9-10, selected verses

When the pastor of my church when I was in middle school first suggested I think about becoming a pastor, I laughed. I probably was too polite and/or intimidated to laugh right there in his face, but I definitely laughed. “Real people don’t become pastors!” I thought. In my defense, this sentiment is periodically reinforced when I hear poorly reported statistics from church events about there having been, say, a total attendance of 200 – 80 clergy and 120 people. But those words from my pastor were spoken with the knowledge of something I couldn’t yet fully see or understand, so I laughed a kind of nervous, dismissive laughter of one who thinks he knows better.

Sarah, one of the great matriarchs of faith, laughed, too, when three strangers showed up at their tent and sat talking to Abraham. This couple had years before picked up their lives at the call of God to wander to a new land. They tried their best to trust in God’s promise to make of them a great nation which would bless the world. They even kind of believed that there could be descendants, which they now thought would come only from Ishmael, Abraham’s son with Hagar. But in her very old age, these visitors said, Sarah would bear a son, too. Ha! What do they know about anything! So they laughed, too – a different kind of laughter that communicated something more like, “You just wait and see.”

She can’t be blamed for having a realistic picture of the world. She knows 100-year-old women don’t have babies. Just as well as she knows that not every sick person gets well again. And just like she knows that true peace between people and between nations is always short-lived. And just like she knows that the system is always a bit rigged against some group of people. She could have told you that there would almost never be legal consequences for shooting black men at traffic stops. Because she knows how the world works. It’s laughable to think otherwise.

And I have to imagine that Jesus’ disciples laughed, too, when Jesus sent them out into the world. Because they know as well as Sarah what the world is really like. They know justice doesn’t come to everyone. They know there are plenty of inhospitable people who won’t give them the time of day. They know there is simply more need out there than they can meet. And into that world, Jesus sends them with these words: “Cure the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons.” Ha! With what are they supposed to do that? Maybe between them they know something about healing ointments, something about the power of prayer, something about compassion for the outcast and sick. But they know that stuff doesn’t always work. And none of it will raise the dead. So what else is there to do but to laugh right along with sickness, death, demons, and fear at Jesus’ crazy instructions, if not right to his face, then surely as they started down the road. The difference between God’s promise and our day-to-day reality is so large that the proposal we just go out and fix it is more laughable than 100-year-old woman giving birth.

Let me just say this is its own kind of holy laughter. Because it’s laughter born out of the truth of our human experience. It’s the release of the tension we feel between the promise and the reality. It’s a prayer in itself, even the scoffing, derisive laughter that speaks disbelief and lack of hope is a prayer of recognizing what is and what could be.

And in response to our laughter God enters. God makes reality for Sarah what no one thought possible – a son born to her, the fulfillment of the long ago promise, the answer to her laughter and tears. And Jesus gives the disciples the power and authority to do the impossible task that is asked of them, which in and of itself is worth a pause to notice – a God who shares power with us– the power to heal and to welcome the lost and banish evil and even raise the dead.

And we know it does not happen every time at least as far as we can see – not every illness, every death, every demon, every separation is healed. Not everyone longing for a child bears one into the world. But it happens often enough that we recognize in Sarah and Abraham the sound of a different kind of laughter by the end of the story. The kind of laughter that comes when we see before our eyes the miraculous, when we see before us what we thought impossible and we just can’t believe what we’re seeing. We recognize the laughter of relief from years of longing and hoping and wanting and praying. We recognize the laughter because we, too, have seen it. Maybe only glimpses, maybe only in our old stories, but we have seen the transformation of laughter and with it the transformation of lives.

Did you notice the naming of the long awaited son? Abraham and Sarah who laughed off God’s promises name their child Isaac, that is, “the laughing one.” They memorialize their own laughter – their laughter of skepticism and their laughter of relief, their doubt and their hope, their pain and their joy in the name of their long-awaited child. Perhaps to remind themselves in moments of fear and doubt that laughter can be transformed into the awaited promise.

Go forth then with Jesus’ call to you: cure the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, cleanse the lepers. It sounds like an absurd command. It sounds like setting us up to be laughed out of town. But it’s the baptismal call – to go forth healing and raising and casting and cleansing, to go forth proclaiming justice for people whose skin color or immigration status or religion makes them vulnerable to violence and hate, to go forth proclaiming that new life is possible from our broken lives.

And in the presence of our skeptical laughter, God comes as God did to Abraham and Sarah, to be present at our table and there in bread and wine remind us of what is yet to be, to remind us of the coming reign of peace and justice, of wholeness and life. To remind us that God’s vision and also God’s present reality, if not yet ours, is that all life might sit together at that table laughing with relief and joy at the promise fulfilled. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco