3rd Sunday after Pentecost
June 5, 2016

Listen to today’s sermon:

Soon afterwards [Jesus] went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” 15The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people!” 17This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. – Luke 7:11-17

It’s a miracle! How often have you heard that phrase about something that wasn’t actually a miracle. In some cases it’s become a nice way of saying something is beautiful or amazing. The glorious sunset over the water was such a miracle. Sometimes it’s even tongue-in-cheek, as when we say the printer is working again! It’s a miracle! And it’s usually something we all want to celebrate. It’s something that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. The family is all together again! It’s a miracle! Surely, all things to celebrate, to notice, to give thanks for.

But the truly miraculous is often much more unsettling. Like when bodies sit up from their coffins at a funeral. My guess is that if what happened to the son of the widow of Nain happened at one of our funerals, no one would be shouting “It’s a miracle.” I suspect most of us would be paralyzed by fear or running for the door. True miracles go against the natural order of things, and they make us feel utterly broken open rather than warm and fuzzy.

Jesus is fresh from another miraculous healing, a healing that reversed all but certain death for the centurion’s slave. He approaches the next town and sees a funeral procession. It is not unlike any number of other funeral processions that Jesus must have witnessed in his time, and not so different from the many funeral processions that we know today. But something is different this time. Though we hear of many deaths around the world from nameless refugees to well-known celebrities. All of them are sad, but sometimes one strikes us more deeply than the others. That, it seems, is what happens to Jesus at this funeral procession in Nain.

The text says that Jesus had compassion on this widow who had lost not only her husband but her only son. A brief word study, which I use sparingly in preaching, but bear with me… The greek word for compassion here is one that comes from a root meaning of having one’s guts were twisted. The experience of compassion is the feeling when your whole body physically wrenches up with emotion for another. Jesus’ gut was twisted to match the gut-twisting grief of the widow. The root of the comparable Hebrew word for compassion means “having a womb.” And what does a womb do but contract when it is time to give birth to new life. It’s gut twisting with the effect of new creation.

That’s exactly what happens to Jesus. His gut twisting brings forth life for this dead son, and life for this widow who is both overcome by grief and left without a means to make a living. But this act also does what miracles are prone to do, it twists the guts of the crowd in yet another way. It makes them afraid. Because this is not the natural order of things. This is deeply unsettling.

There is great joy, I’m sure. But imagine you’re in the crowd. What do you do with all you’ve ever known about life and death? How do you make sense of the world around you now that you have experienced this resurrection? Imagine this kind of thing happening in the middle of a funeral right here in this space. What would it look like to move forward with that new reality? Or imagine if we got the answer to our frequent prayer that war and violence cease. What would we do then? We would joyfully find new uses for our time, energy, and money, but I think first we would be unsure of what was going on, afraid to take that next tentative step forward lest we mess it all up again. Or what if we suddenly had masses of people streaming into church on Sunday? We express a desire to share our faith with those around us that they might also know the power of God’s love and grace that we have come to know in this place. But imagine if suddenly we were bursting at the seams one Sunday. We might be joyful, but also afraid. Because new people in our community change us – not necessarily for worse or for better, but they do change us. Miracles that disrupt the order of what we hope for or expect unsettle us. They don’t always leave us with a warm, fuzzy feeling.

When God has compassion on us, when God’s guts twist at our pain and grief and anxiety and anger, the whole world shifts and the natural way of the earth and its people makes way for God’s kingdom to break into our existence. Although I do firmly believe that God has that tender side and does hold us through all manner of difficulty, the miraculous interventions we hope and pray for will change us and disrupt our lives in ways we have yet to expect.

They may change us as they did the large crowd at Nain, compelling us to go forth full of faith to be even bolder witnesses of what God has done for us. I pray that each of you has experienced something that so filled you with awe of God that you have been just a little afraid but also moved to proclaim your faith. I hope that God’s life-giving miracles have twisted your gut both in holy fear and in compassion for the world.

Because even though most of our faith is lived in the daily events that happen between the miracles we see and notice, these moments tell us about the reality of who God is all the time. The God who speaks in our scriptures, the God who offers God’s self at this table, the God who washes us in baptism, is a God of life-altering miracles. Our God is one who is breaking through our daily existence with more than we ask or imagine. God is one whose guts can be twisted, one who is open to experience compassion and who responds not first out of some preconceived, well-orchestrated plan, or even first out of a sense of justice and fairness, but a God who responds first from compassion, from a life-giving twisting of God’s gut, calling new life out of our pain and weeping.

This story isn’t so much about something out of the ordinary, but a sign of who God is everyday and a promise of where God is leading us as a community, leading us with compassion and grace toward the promise of life in the face of death.

Sunday, May 29, 2015
2nd Sunday after Pentecost

In the spirit of today’s service in which we used minimal printed material, there is no manuscript for today’s sermon. You can listen to the gospel reading and the sermon here:

Holy Trinity Sunday
May 22, 2016

O Lord our Lord,
  how majestic is your name in all the earth!—
 2you whose glory is chanted above the heavens out of the mouths of infants and children;
  you have set up a fortress against your enemies, to silence the foe and avenger. 
 3When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
  the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
 4what are mere mortals that you should be mindful of them,
  human beings that you should care for them? 
 5Yet you have made them little less than divine;
  with glory and honor you crown them.
 6You have made them rule over the works of your hands;
  you have put all things under their feet:
 7all flocks and cattle,
  even the wild beasts of the field,
 8the birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
  and whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
 9O Lord our Lord,
  how majestic is your name in all the earth! – Psalm 8

1Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.- Romans 5:1-5

Every spring we get a few ants in our home and here at church. I get it, things are warming up, the water floods out their homes. They’re hungry and we have food in our house. This year has been particularly bad. After seeing a stray ant or two or ten, I had put out some traps. But then I came home one day to find that they had discovered something they liked in our trash and invited all their friends over for a party. I honestly didn’t think twice about killing them. In theory I believe all of God’s creatures have value. When those creatures want to live in my trash can, theology goes out the window.

But I can’t help but think about those ants when I read today’s psalm. “What are mere mortals that you, [O God whom we cannot even describe], should be mindful of them, human beings that you should care for them?” I can’t help but think that the gap between myself and God is larger than the gap between those ants and myself. And what pests we must be sometimes when we seek out garbage instead of that which is life-giving. And what kind of God would care about such powerless creatures? We may have the capacity to get together and do significant things, but ultimately we are powerless to solve the biggest problems we face and ultimately powerless to save ourselves from death.

Through the fine work of researchers and doctors we have a lot of cures and a lot of treatments for a lot of diseases – much that can be done to hold ailments at bay and provide relief from symptoms. But finally there is much we don’t know, diseases that we cannot reverse, and many we know who experience the decline of their own or their loved ones’ bodies. We ultimately do not have that kind of power over our bodies.

Today we are being invited to share additional resources with ELCA World Hunger, a wonderful program that has done incredible work to reduce hunger in our own country and around the world. They have worked with local communities to develop programs that give short-term relief and set up long-term change. We can do something, even many things to fight hunger, but the problem is more than we can fix today and more perhaps than we can fix our lifetimes. It’s easy to feel powerless to transform such a fundamental problem in our world.

We are also powerless to control others, too. We cannot always change the mind of our political opponents, whether in the presidential elections or in local debates. We cannot always convince nations to engage peacefully nor make our friends and neighbors act the way we wish. We cannot dictate the outcome of collaborative endeavors by asking everyone to bend to our own will, no matter how hard we try, and, I say this because most of us have tried, that includes church, too. We confront every day in big and small ways our powerlessness against so many things.

And perhaps most of all we feel powerless as ants to explain how God is at work in all of this. On this Trinity Sunday we are called to stand in awe of a mysterious God whom human language cannot adequately describe. We are powerless to name fully the God who created us, the God we gather to worship every Sunday, the God to whom we pray in our moments of feeling most powerless in the face of suffering.

If we listen to Paul’s words, this powerlessness, this suffering, leads to hope: “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.” Except…when it does disappoint – when suffering isn’t redemptive, when endurance just leaves you exhausted, when character is dismissed as meaningless, and hope dwindles. I don’t want to take issue with Paul, especially after we spent two recent sessions of our adult forum wrestling with Paul’s writing and rediscovering the ways he turns empire upside down for the sake of the gospel. But I can’t help but pause when he so neatly wraps things up like that.

Suffering can do this. Suffering can produce endurance, character, hope. People all the time find a way to make the best of the things that befall them. We love stories of people pulling together after natural disasters, families drawing closer as they stand together in the face of illness, people who overcome poverty to become great artists or civic leaders. It happens all the time. But we know, too, that not every story wraps up into a happy ending. Not every story ends in human triumph. Sooner or later every story ends with our powerlessness to cheat death.

And we are back to our question, why is it that God cares for us, these little powerless creatures in comparison to the creator of the universe? And I could almost get it if God simply did God’s very best to help us, if God ran around trying to fix all our problems, if God simply took pity on us because of our powerlessness. If God picked up every last one of our little ant-like selves and carried it outside and gave it something natural to eat and dug a little hole for the colony to live in. That would be the right thing for the more powerful to look out for the less powerful. If more of us lived that way on a consistent basis it would go a long way in transforming the world.

But that is not primarily what God does. The mystery we celebrate today is one of a relational God, a God who has the capacity to pour God’s self out. We celebrate today our frequently failed attempts to describe a God who has not simply helped us, lent us some power to deal with the things we are not powerful enough to do. What we celebrate in the mystery of the Trinity is a God who is capable of choosing to become powerless with us. Not simply to be kind to a tiny, mortal creature, as I might choose (or not choose as the case may be) to be toward a tiny insect, but God chooses to become that tiny, mortal creature.

This day is about the mystery of a powerful God who took on our powerlessness. And there I think is the key to what Paul is trying to tell us. Suffering does not produce endurance, endurance character, and character hope because we transform it, because we find the power we need to persevere, to hold on to hope in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Hope is the end result because God has chosen to suffer with us, to take on our powerlessness to become the tiny mortal creature. Hope is the end result because God endures that feeling of powerlessness in solidarity with us. God’s willingness to take on our character, our powerlessness, is what finally leads to hope.

This is God’s promise to us. That in everything we endure, and perhaps especially when we feel absolutely powerless to change the things that cause us the deepest grief and pain, that God is there. That God chooses to be there. That God chooses to be with us and in us. We cannot always explain how, but we come to this table bringing our hope or our longing for hope or even our having given up on hope that we might touch and taste God’s being poured out, God’s choosing powerlessness to be with us in suffering and in so doing be the hope that is more than we can ever muster on our own. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Pentecost
Sunday, May 15

1Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. – Genesis 11:1-9

1When the day of Pentecost had come, [the apostles] were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
  5Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
  14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
 17‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
 that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
  and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
 and your young men shall see visions,
  and your old men shall dream dreams.
 18Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
  in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
   and they shall prophesy.
 19And I will show portents in the heaven above
  and signs on the earth below,
   blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
 20The sun shall be turned to darkness
  and the moon to blood,
   before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
 21Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ” – Acts 2:1-21

Listen to the audio of today’s sermon here: Sermon Pentecost 5-15-16
As you listen to the audio, press play on the video below (muting the commentary on the video itself) at the words “As the video begins…”

Though I don’t claim to adequately represent his presentation of it and I have used it here in a somewhat different context, credit for the idea of showing this video in connection with the liturgical year goes to The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Stewart, in his presentation at the 2015 Institute of Liturgical Studies. 

Alleluia! The Spirit is among us!
The Spirit is among us indeed! Alleluia!

The whole earth breathes. In and out like you and me. Carbon dioxide and oxygen exchanged back and forth, nourishing plants and animals alike. Breathing in what is needed for life, expelling what is not. Divine breath, divine spirit flowing in and out of creation.

In the words of today’s psalm: “When you [God] hide your face, they [all the creatures you created] are terrified. When you take away their breath they die and return to their dust. You send forth your Spirit and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth.”

It is the work of the Spirit that we celebrate today to renew the face of the earth. Sometimes we take that too philosophically, and so I want us to watch a depiction of what I call the earth breathing. What you’re seeing is a visualization of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere shown in greens and blues for low concentrations and yellows, oranges, and reds for higher concentrations. [Begin video.]

As the video begins, we are in winter in the northern hemisphere, home to a high percentage of the world’s plants, many of whom are now dead or dormant, the fallen leaves and other dead material decomposing contributing to the CO2 levels without the living plants to transform it into oxygen, accumulating along with our natural breathing and our pollution.

As we approach Ash Wednesday it is clear that our death and decay and our pollution of the earth are choking us and that we are in desperate need of the repentance of Lent, especially as humans from some of the richest and largest countries contribute disproportionately to the carbon dioxide levels.

As we pass Easter, the plants are coming to life again, but we do not yet see the results. A transformation has taken place, but we do not yet understand. We live into the Easter season trying to make sense of resurrection while the chaos of the world swirls around us still.

It is as we come to Pentecost that the plants begin again to breath in the carbon dioxide. It is at the coming of the Spirit that we see the divine breath transform our world.

And as the church enters the long green season, a season of growth for us as individuals and faith communities, we see this divine breath transform what is waste from us into life for plants and through the deep interconnected breath of creation, life for us as well. It does not undo our damage to the climate, but I think we do feel in this rhythm a fresh chance to try again.

But as time marches forward, we know that fall comes again. We know that things will again die and go dormant. Our push to burn more fossil fuels only pushing this natural breath cycle beyond its limits. Our failure to live fully in the life offered by the Spirit confronts us again.

And it is here in this moment that the church looks with deep longing to the birth of Christ. It is here again, just as it becomes clear that we cannot breathe on our own, that God enters the world again to live among us as we long for the Spirit to breathe again.

It is in this cycle of divine breath that we are made alive and renewed. But it is not only through a cycle of carbon dioxide and oxygen that gives our embodied selves life, but through a cycle of our brokenness made whole again. For that, too is the Spirit’s work.

And it’s the dynamic we see in our parallel readings today. For it is the Spirit’s work to undo the destruction of Babel, where the people came together and used whatever unity they could muster to construct a monument to their own success. Their common language, their common breath, became a means for self-aggrandizement and us vs. them language. “Let’s make a name for ourselves,” they said to one another. Not unlike some political slogans today, that was code for let’s live under the pretense that we are better than others, that our individual success is what really matters. They wanted Babel to be great again. They build for themselves a great tower, not unlike our great fossil-fuel-consuming towers. And so, the story goes, God’s breath scatters them and divides their language.

And in the mirror image of Babel, the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost unites them not in one language, not in sameness, but unifies them through their many languages in the message of grace, in the message of a vision of a world living by God’s breath. Their scatteredness, their brokenness, their pollution of self, other, and creation, is transformed by the breathing of the Spirit. They are given yet another fresh start, another breath of the Spirit to be God’s people in the world.

But this is not a once and for all reversal, but the promise that the Spirit is breathing us anew over and over again. Pentecost is not the once-and-for-all kind of event we often make it out to be, but the celebration of the divine breath renewing and restoring, hour by hour, year by year.

It happens when our churches move from mission-minded and diverse groups of people into institutions and structures, we find ourselves unintentionally building our own towers of Babel and seeking sameness rather than unity. It is then that the Spirit breathes anew by blowing us apart. And then when our communities become scattered by our inability to communicate with one another and when in our isolation we can no longer hear the good news, the Spirit breathes a fresh start again drawing us together to be one church hearing together in diverse tongues.

When our pollution of the natural world, our pollution of our relationships, our pollution of ourselves overwhelms, the sprit breaths in us again. And when our bodies fail us and our inability to overcome the world’s problems leaves us in despair, it is the Spirit’s breath that continues to breathe a fresh start for us.

This is the Spirit’s messy work – to breathe in our decay and our waste and in doing so connect us to one another and to all living things to the very breath of the earth that we might breathe free again, that we might be renewed and refreshed and given a new season of life to live, that we might enter again into the struggle of our baptismal vocation to “proclaim Christ in word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.” So we enter together this season after Pentecost, having seen God come among us, having died, risen, and ascended. And now that resurrection life breathes in us and in the creation of which we are a part. This day calls us to enter that life abundant, and with the earth itself enter a season of growth and refreshment as the Spirit breathes us into the body of Christ for the world.

Alleluia! The Spirit is among us!
The Spirit is among us indeed! Alleluia!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Seventh Sunday of Easter / Ascension of Our Lord (transferred)
Sunday, May 8

Listen to the audio of today’s sermon: Sermon 5-8-16

[Luke writes:] 1In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning 2until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; 5for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
  6So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” – Acts 1:1-11

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

This week the White House announced that Malia Obama will attending Harvard, but not until after taking a gap year first. The news coverage was politely supportive, but underlying it was the need to defend taking a year off. Not that any of us have any business commenting on her personal life, but I think there was an unspoken question hanging in the air about whether taking a gap year was an okay thing to do or at least wondering what it was all about. Perhaps it’s because we are mostly a society that doesn’t take breaks well. We tend to be people who are pushed from within or by others to do more and more. And that doing is usually supposed to follow set standards. You go from one school to the next school or on to the workplace. You are expected to be attending school or contributing to the GDP. One person suggested it was because of the name – “Which parent would raise his/her hand to send their kids into a gaping hole?” – She prefers “bridge year” or “launchpad.” But there were several thoughtful responses about how transformative a gap year can be, including statistics that suggest students who do a gap year are overall more successful in college.

It strikes me that this odd ten days of the church year between Ascension and Pentecost are gap-time. The disciples have been experiencing the resurrected Jesus for 40 days, according to Luke. They had been through a terrible ordeal, blown away by Jesus rising from the dead and living among them off and on for several weeks. But now he leaves them again. Is it easier this time because they have seen what is possible, because they have seen the dead raised? Or harder because they have lost again the one they love so much?

And mysteriously they are commissioned to be apostles, to spread the good news to all the nations, but they are told to wait for the Spirit. It’s not as if the Spirit has been absent – it was hovering over the deep before the formation of the world, and disrupting people’s lives with God’s grace and God’s call to ministry ever since. So what’s the hold up? What will be different about the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost? If it were me I’d be eager to get up and go, deal with the task at hand. Instead Jesus imposes a break. Only 10 days in this case, but a break – a gap week – nonetheless.

We simply don’t know what to do with this unstructured gap in time between Jesus’ leaving them and the coming of the spirit. Just like we are so often unsure of what to do when these breaks are imposed on our lives. There are times when certain things demand that we pause from our normal busyness and wait. Like the wait between knowing a child is on its way into ones family and the time that child arrives. Or like the in between time when a move to a new place or a new job or a new commitment is decided and the time it actually happens – living with one foot where you are and the other in the air getting ready to land in a new place. Or the pause required by deep loss – after a death, a shattered relationship, a dream given up on – we need time between the immediate busyness of the event itself and the time when we will be able to transform our grief and take the next step forward – a pause the world often doesn’t make space for. Transitions are rarely quick and easy – whether we plan for it or it is imposed on us, transitions often require gap-time, moments to become more aware of the liminal space in which we stand between the already and not yet. These gap times demand our emotional energy and often require that we set aside the many details we tend to on a daily basis.

Yet many of us resist. We listen to the subtle, often unspoken messages that we must always be doing, we must always be pushing, we must always be producing. I imagine the apostles already wanting to tally up how many converts they’ve baptized and how many miles they’ve traveled, how many churches they’ve started. Or maybe put more positively they are full of Easter joy and are bursting to share it, like so many of this weekend’s graduates fully trained and credentialed eager to offer what they have to the world. It seems like it breaks the momentum of the story to pause.

And yet, that’s often what happens in the history of God’s people. Noah and his family spend more time on the ark between the end of the flood and the time the ground is dry enough to walk on than they do actually during the 40 days of rain. Abraham and Sarah wait years between the promise of a child and the birth of Isaac. The Israelites spend 40 years between their escape from slavery and their entry into the promised land. The prophets promise God’s redemption that they wait generations to see realized. It’s the rhythm of God’s very self, who rested on the seventh day of creation and invited us to do the same every seventh day, every seventh year. In the nature of the created world, in our human nature is the need for pauses to rest, to reflect, to prepare, to gather ourselves together before we launch ahead.

I wonder just how the disciples spent those ten days. But I suspect they had learned in all that they had experienced in the previous weeks that the time was better spent in community with one another. It was, I imagine a time they spent in personal reflection and communal conversation. Our whole lives are suspended between the promise God makes to us through baptism and the fulfillment of that promise for us and for the whole world. Through individual times of transition that come and go we live always in the already but not yet of God’s transformation of creation. Washed again and again by the reminder of that baptismal promise and fed by the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood we are freed to enter those times of waiting, those times of transition, those times of preparation, with the confidence that we are surrounded by the community and that our waiting is an opportunity for God to work in us what is needed for going forward.

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

 

Sixth Sunday of Easter
Sunday, May 1, 2016

10And in the spirit [one of the angels] carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.
  22I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. 26People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
 22:1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. – Revelation 21:10, 22 – 22:5

1After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
  2Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. 3In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 7The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” 8Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 9At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. 
  Now that day was a sabbath. – John 5:1-9

Listen to today’s sermon here: Sermon 5-1-16

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

Some of you know that I have a weakness for watching home improvement TV shows, some of which have inspired home projects that grew larger than I had anticipated. In one of the shows I watch, called Property Brothers, a realtor takes a prospective home buyer through older, run-down houses and promises to get them a good deal on the house allowing them to undertake a major renovation, with the help of the show’s contractor, the realtor’s twin brother. Now on these home improvement shows, as a rule, besides granite countertops, there is one other thing that no one can possibly live without, and that is an open-concept living space where there are no walls between living room, dining room, and kitchen. Inevitably the older homes they begin with have these pesky walls between all the rooms. The prospective buyer almost never has the imagination to see the vision that the property brothers see of walls being knocked down, and the homeowners are constantly skeptical about the possibility of transforming these homes into what they want, despite it happening in every single episode. They walk around listening to the property brothers tell them how they will knock out a wall here and there and it will look amazing, but they simply don’t have the creative vision to see it.

My dear friends, you can probably live without an open-concept living space in your home. But I think our increasingly walled off world is in deep need of an open-concept culture. Walls and fences divide Mexico from the United States in some places, with promises of more from some leaders. Walls divide Israel from Palestine, walling off families from one another, separating people with cancer from treatment centers, preventing workers from earning a living. Walls divide those in prison from those who are not, and our justice system creates less visible walls even when people have served their time. Mostly invisible walls divide people of different economic situations. Well-meaning communities of faith with heartfelt “All are welcome!” signs end up creating invisible walls that keep new people from breaking in. I feel like I’m in one of those shows looking at an old house full of walls and lacking the vision to see how any of them could begin to come down. We are so used to walls staying put that we cannot imagine a world without them.

The man that Jesus meets by the pool of Beth-zatha has been living with his walls for 38 years. That’s a long time in case anyone is counting. Longer than I have been alive this man has been sitting beside the pools waiting for healing, waiting to walk again, waiting to be a part of the community again. But something else has happened to him. He has not only lost the use of his legs, but he seems to have lost his connections to family and friends. The story does not explain why it is that there is no one to carry him to the waters. Maybe at one time there were, but they have long since tired of carrying him back and forth to no avail. Maybe tragic circumstances have left this man all alone. Maybe he just isn’t the nicest fellow sitting on the portico waiting for healing. Whatever his reason, I think he has become so fixated on the barriers preventing him from getting to the waters that he has ceased to imagine any other possibility, any day when healing might come. When Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?” his response is to explain why that’s not even an option, despite the reputation Jesus has been building, despite his having healed people in other episodes. This man cannot imagine his walls coming down.

And who can really blame him? It’s easy to look around and see only a world of walls around us and fail to imagine anything different.

We have John’s vision in Revelation promising a holy city with no more darkness. A city with God’s vision for humanity at its core. A city in which the evil within us and around us has been purged. A city where kings and nations bring their glory and lay it down in service to others. A city that offers springs of life-giving water in abundance. A city with trees whose leaves hold the power to heal the nations. And if Jesus walked in right now and offered us the chance to move in, I’d respond as the man at Beth-zatha, with a list of excuses for why that isn’t even possible. How we’ve tried diplomacy, so I’m not sure planting trees will do any good. How as soon as we rid the world of one evil another or three seem to be waiting in the wings. How clean, fresh water is anything but abundant in many parts of the world and only getting more scarce. Offered a holy city by Jesus himself and I can’t see past the walls I’ve hastily built and the barriers I’ve long stopped questioning.

Walls, the ones made of drywall and 2×4 framing, for all their appearance of permanency aren’t that hard to take down. Sometimes one must reinforce the other parts of the house to take the wall down. But either way it only takes a sledge hammer and less time than one would think to reduce it to nothing. Homeowners are usually reluctant at first to take a swing, but soon realize that by knocking out a wall the ceiling won’t actually come crashing down. That which seemed permanent is quickly reduced to a pile of rubble in a few easy steps. What could not be imagined becomes a reality.

Most of our real or imagined walls that divide people one from another aren’t actually as strong as we think they are. But often we are using them to prop up our reality. We’re using them to hold up some semblance of safety or comfort. When Jesus heals this man, it blows his conception of what healing means and how it happens. It bursts his assumptions that nothing about his walled-in existence was as permanent as he thought. But this excerpt just hints at the trouble coming because Jesus has not only healed on the day of rest, but commanded the man to carry his mat, something dangerously close to working on the day of rest. His imagination is opened to new possibilities, but he is also exposed to new challenges from a community who cannot let down their walls.

I don’t have an answer about how to bring down those big and seemingly permanent walls at the Mexican border or in the Holy Land. I don’t know how to dismantle the walls of an unjust justice system. I don’t even have all the answers to make this or any other congregation fully open to those who are new or different or not just like us. But I trust that Jesus does. I trust that when I answer with excuses, Jesus answers with healing. When I am comfortable inside my walls, Jesus knocks them down and invites me to courageous conversations with those who wait on the other side. When I cannot believe God’s promise to take this run-down and broken old world we live in and resurrect it into a holy city with God’s life as its heartbeat, I turn to this community to be reminded that it’s happened before. That God has always been about knocking down our walls and welcoming us in. That the Easter life is flowing already around our failure to see what is possible allowing us to begin to see the resurrection life coming into being.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

5th Sunday of Easter
April 24, 2016

31When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” – John 13:31-35

Listen to the audio here: Sermon 4-24-16

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

Last month our book club read A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Told through the eyes of one man describing his boyhood and adolescence, it is the beautiful and often gut-wrenching story of a family navigating the regime changes through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s  It’s a glimpse at one family’s daily life in the midst of world-changing events. We’ve been pretty informal about our book group discussions but should we get stuck one of us usually brings along the official book group conversation questions that publishers or others put out. Several of the questions for this book revolved around whether this book altered our perspectives on the people of Afghanistan. They were worded as if they assumed, maybe correctly, that many people might have negative views of Afghan people or associate them all with terrorism and extremist groups.

None of us around the table thought that. But we all admitted it hadn’t really occurred to us to have any conception at all of ordinary people living in the place we hear so much about on the news. We didn’t think good or ill of them because we hadn’t really thought of them at all. Had someone asked me if I loved the people of Afghanistan in the sense of broad Christian love for all people I would have said yes. But it occurs to me reading Jesus’ commandment to love one another that love without knowing people isn’t really the kind of love we’re called to.

Of course we should make decisions individually and communally keeping in mind care for all people of earth. We can’t know everyone and are still called to act in ways that care for all people. But love, the kind of love Jesus is talking about in this passage requires a deep knowing. I don’t claim to know the author or his family after reading his memoir, but it’s at least a start. If someone were to ask me now if I love the people of Afghanistan I would at least answer with an emotional connection.

It’s not that I don’t care about places I haven’t been or people I haven’t met, but I don’t have the same visceral reaction when I hear about things happening to people and places I haven’t known in person. For many years the talk about climate change was focused on doing something for nameless, faceless generations to come. Could it be that the global concern is finally gaining more traction as we realize the effects are happening now to us and to people and places we know? The concern for refugees, which we discussed in this morning’s forum, picked up traction when a particularly painful photo went around the globe, a photo that many commented on as part of the photos displayed in this room during Lent. That day was no worse than the one before it, but it was a day that a lot of people started thinking about what had been going on in a new way because there was a face, or rather in that case a body, on the nameless, faceless problem.

Every congregation knows on some level that it is called to be a church that loves the community. And I think that Immanuel is a congregation that does genuinely love the community. But I wonder how often we stop to make sure that we know the community we are trying to love. When we put food in orange bags and leave it as an offering at this altar, who gets the food we share? What do they look like? What is their story? Maybe it’s easier to put a face on it when we talk about sharing food with the community at Cathedral in the Night or the Northampton Cot Shelter. When we talk about campus ministry, who are the people we mean? What’s their story? Or really what are their stories because I assure you it is not one.

Jesus never waved a magic wand over villages to heal them, he didn’t multiply the food in every field he passed. Jesus for the most part healed people he met. At least one account has people lined up one after another for healing, perhaps suggesting to us that Jesus accomplished whatever healing meant in that moment one at a time with a conversation. Jesus gives this command to “love one another as I have loved you” on a night that he is saying goodbye to the people he has been walking with, eating with, sleeping beside, for at least a year or three. These are people he has known deeply, people whom he has come to love in a very particular way.

This is Jesus’ supposedly “new” commandment. It is frankly, unclear to me about what could possibly be new about “love one another.” This has been God’s plea for God’s people from the beginning. And from early on, God expressed not a generic love for all people, but a love for particular people. It was through Abraham and Sarah that God initiated a covenant promise to bless not just them but the world. It was through particular prophets and kings that God shared a message to the people of Israel. It was through a particular young girl that God entered the world in Jesus. God’s love is one of knowing who we are.

Many days I think we go through life imaginging divine love as an abstraction, a blanket of love that falls on everyone as a whole. Perhaps it is just too much for us to fathom that God’s love is one that begins not with an unthinking commitment to love everyone, but rather it begins with knowing us in all our particular faults and humanness. It’s why we don’t baptize crowds with firehoses, but instead we invite everyone one at a time to the waters to hear that particular promise of God. To hear that each human being is known and loved by the God who created all things. To hear that each human being is promised life in spite of death and love beyond any hurt or pain or hate that we encounter in our world.

It’s only in that kind of love, the kind of love that knows us intimately, that we find the courage to live into Jesus’ command. It’s in knowing who we are as beloved individuals of God, that we can be rooted enough to open our hearts to know another, to know our friends, and our enemies, and the people we hadn’t ever stopped to think about. It’s in that love that God is ushering in a new creation for all the beloved children of God.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 17, 2016

22At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” 25Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; 26but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. 27My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. 30The Father and I are one.” – John 10:22-30

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

Supposedly sheep are quite good at following as long as you actually lead them rather than trying to prod from behind. And I am told from a reliable source that sheep really do know the voice or at least the call of their shepherd, such that when multiple flocks gather at a watering hole the shepherds don’t worry about keeping their flocks apart, for when each shepherd gives his or her own distinct call, the right sheep will soon gather and follow along. But sometimes it feels as if I’m in the middle of the muddled up herd and wondering if I’ve missed the call of the shepherd.

That’s where the questioners in today’s gospel passage find themselves. “If you are the messiah,” they say. “Tell us plainly.” Call out to us so that we know. We are feeling adrift in this sea of voices and afraid we have missed the call. John writes this conversation with a bit more of an edge, addressing tensions happening in his own community several decades after the time of Jesus, but I’d like to think there is a genuine question there, a genuine searching. “Who are you?” they ask Jesus. His reply gets much closer perhaps to the uncertainty they really feel. “Who are you?” Jesus responds. Do you know your identity as one of the sheep?

And many of us might say confidently, “Yes, I’m one of God’s sheep.” We might rightly point to God’s promise in baptism that names us as children of God, or more broadly our trust that the creator of the world holds all human beings to be members of God’s flock. We might simply say, “We’re here today in church, so there you go. A member of the flock.”

But I suspect that many of you are like me and there are moments when in the crowded confusion of life pushing in all around us, we begin to worry. Have we missed the call of the shepherd? Am I part of the flock?

Our confidence is easily undermined by the confusion that comes with cycles of anxiety and worry and second-guessing our decisions. We question our identity when we realize we have also been listening to other voices that have led us astray for a moment or a series of moments or for decades of moments. We bear the burdens of shame that shakes our conviction about our identity as children of God. Or death comes to us and our loved ones, shattering our ideas of security and begging us question what we know. Or the earth literally shakes beneath our feet as it has in southern Japan this week, disorienting us, crumbling what is familiar and taken for granted.

So many things make it difficult to listen. And sometimes we hear what we think is the voice of the shepherd and it’s such good and welcome news of love that we have a hard time believing it’s true. And sometimes we hear the voice of the shepherd calling us to do something so difficult that we try to drown it out. Sometimes we convince ourselves that the voice of what we want is the voice of the shepherd. And then we aren’t sure what to listen to, which shepherd to follow, to which flock we belong.

Whatever the reason for it, have you, fellow sheep, ever worried that you have lost your way, that you have lost your shepherd, that you might not be part of the flock? Have you ever wondered if the path you’ve chosen in any moment really is following the Good Shepherd and not wandering off alone? If so you are not alone.

That is the life of faith, not one of certainty, but one of asking deep questions and listening for the voice of the shepherd. When it comes down to it, in Jesus’ metaphor we are sheep. We are not in charge. It is not up to us to believe hard enough or right enough, to do enough good or avoid enough bad. It is not up to us to put ourselves in or out of the flock. And I might add here that I think many of us spend too much time trying to set up our own flimsy walls to put ourselves or others out the flock, walls that God just topples with the push of a finger.

In the confusion of this conversation that Jesus is having and in the confusion of our own wandering lives of faith, hear this word that Jesus speaks: “No one can snatch them out of my hand.” No one. No one’s doubt, or shame, or guilt, or their past or their future, not death and the grave. No one and nothing. We might be prone wandering a little, but we cannot wander out of the shepherd’s grasp.

But we forget that certainty. And so we look to the other sheep around us. And whatever we may imagine, most of them are as forgetful as we are – just as anxious, just as unsure, just as worried. But the shepherd keeps us in groups so that we might be there to reassure one another. So that when it is hard for us to remember that clear promise of the shepherd or when we think it’s too good to be true, we have a whole flock around us to assure us it is so. Or when we need to ask the others if we’re hearing the call of the shepherd or not we have a whole flock with whom to discern where the shepherd is leading us.

Wherever your find yourself this morning in terms of your faith, you’ve come to this flock this morning. And here we sing together, voices that are ready to sing out with joy or sorrow carrying those who cannot find their voice. We pray together so that our joys and sorrows are not born alone. We eat together because there God draws us again and again to this community and to the great community of all God’s people. And as a flock we fumble along in our attempts to live into God’s love, caring tenderly and extravagantly for one another and for the world. And whether it is loud and clear today or still far off and jumbled with other noises, the shepherd’s voice calls to us, all of us, bringing us this Easter season from death to life.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

2nd Sunday of Easter
April 3, 2016

19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
  24But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
  26A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
    30Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. -John 20:19-31

Listen to today’s sermon here: Sermon 4:3:16

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

It feels too soon for “Peace be with you.” We always jump the week after Easter to Jesus appearing to the disciples, entering the room with peace and forgiveness on his lips. Just a week ago he was unjustly arrested, tried, and executed. Most of his closest friends abandoned and denied him in the process, with the exception of some of the women who had traveled with him. And his first actual appearance to the well-known 12, down to 10 this evening with Judas gone and Thomas missing, is a message of peace and forgiveness. I just don’t move that fast with forgiveness most of the time.

Some of you know that I volunteer with a community restorative justice program where a group of trained community members meet with people who have become involved with the courts and who have been identified as participants as a condition of probation with the goal of restoring wholeness to all parties involved. It has forced me to wrestle with what peace and forgiveness means in a really tangible way. Our process almost always begins with our reading of a police report and court disposition summary. I know better, but I find myself usually trying to imagine the person that could do the sometimes awful things in this summary, wondering who is about to walk through the door and doubting whether and restoration is even possible.             Our most difficult case thus far in three years of this work took the better part of last year to work through. A student with two of his friends had severely beaten another student and left him on the street. Had things gone a little differently the identified victim might have ended up dead.

We met monthly with the person who threw the punches, I’ll call him Sam, though that isn’t his real name, and separately on a few occasions we met with the parents of the person who had been beaten. For months I could not imagine how we might facilitate transformation in this situation so that both parties could come together in the same room and move forward again with their lives with peace if not forgiveness.

Talk about a doubting Thomas. I did not believe that a resurrection life was possible in this situation. I did not believe, despite having seen it happen before, that peace and forgiveness could emerge from such pain and anger and despair. How does one heal something like that?

And I can be just as doubtful about the mistakes in my own life, the broken relationships, the moments of failure. Doubtful that God is still at work in them. Doubtful that they can be resurrected, restored, forgiven, made peace with. And even more doubtful about bigger things that make international news. We heard this morning in forum about the threat of destruction that nuclear weapons have created. How is forgiveness and peace possible?

It took several months in this particular restorative justice process, but I distinctly remember the turning point in our conversations. We had as we always do, probed through some of the factors involved in the crime – alcohol, choice of companions, small choices that might have made things turn out differently. But it all seemed to be surface level stuff. It wasn’t until we touched the wounded place that things began to transform.  We were pushing Sam on something and he revealed that he could not face what he had done. It was too painful to go there, to imagine that he had done this to someone else. We didn’t ignore those other things, but our conversations changed to providing a safe space for him to touch that wounded place.

It took many more months, but by working to explore the wounds he found the words to communicate what was needed to those affected by his actions and to find a way forward. The parents, too, in their own way found a place to name their wounds and the wounds of their son, physical and emotional, and moved to a place where they could hear Sam’s words.

It took all of us tremendous courage, just as I think it takes Thomas tremendous courage to name his doubt and to touch the wounds. To touch the place that stands for violence and mistrust and execution and pain and betrayal. It takes courage to name and explore those wounds. The text never says that he takes Jesus up on his offer to put his finger in his wounded side, but I like to imagine that he did. That he did so tentatively at first and then more boldly with profound amazement and curiosity. That in feeling and acknowledging what had happened he could begin to take in a new reality. In coming to terms with what had happened to Jesus he could begin to believe that resurrection was possible.

Sam will never be the same, and neither will the person who was beaten or his parents. We stressed with them that we were not pretending this didn’t happen or trying to make things go back to the way they were. Forgiveness and peace are never about going back to what was before. Our grief may change after the death of a loved one, but going forward is always different. Our way of seeing the world changes and cannot go back when we are exposed to something terrible.

But Easter was never about going back to what was. The Easter life is about is going forward into something new – something bigger and broader and fuller than what was before. What this strange resurrected Jesus does for the disciples and for Thomas is to demonstrate that God’s reality, God’s resurrected body now holds our woundedness, our brokenness, our hurt and failure and violence and loss. Courageous Thomas shows us that in an Easter world it’s ok to go there, to touch them, name them, explore them, share them. Because God holds it all in the context of life given new and fresh and free.

I probably will never know what happens to Sam, or any of the others we walk with in the restorative justice program toward something new. And we will probably not see fully what God is doing to transform our world’s wounds into a living, breathing, resurrected earth. But God’s wounded and resurrected body is offered to us here in this place to touch and taste and to connect us together with Christ and give us Thomas’s courage to reach out to touch our own and others’ wounds with healing and grace.

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

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

Easter Day 2016

1On the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the women] came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 6Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8Then they remembered his words, 9and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened. – Luke 24:1-12

Listen to the audio of this sermon here: Easter Sermon 2016

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee?!

That’s what the messengers say to the women who have come to the tomb, spices in hand, to serve their teacher and friend one last time. They have been through a very difficult week, they are away from their quiet Galilean home visiting the bustling city of Jerusalem, they are grieving and exhausted. This is not the time for a pop quiz about what they remember from Jesus’ teaching.

Remember?! Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee?

They are racking their brains trying to conjure up some sentence that will make this strange and upsetting scene of the empty tomb before them make some sense. Perhaps they feel like it’s on the tip of their tongue but not quite there. Others beginning to shoot glances at one another wondering where all this is going and whether they ought to get themselves out of there.

Remember?! Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee?

What they remember, perhaps, is not so much what he said as what he did. They remember the taste of the bread on the hillside when hungry people got something to eat. They remember the lump in their throats the first time Jesus sat down at a dinner table with the undesirables of Galilee and they waited to see the reaction of the religious and economic elite. They remember the friends they have seen healed and the many more they have only heard about. They remember the joyful procession with palm branches and coats strewn on the road as a royal carpet for his entry to Jerusalem. But what does any of that have to do with now, with this empty tomb? Where is Jesus?!

All those things are bouncing around in their heads, a jumble of memories flooding by after the death of their friend. Memories that now are clouded by grief. It is hard to hold onto them in the face of their pain and sadness. Not just the death of a friend, but the death of their hopes for transformation, freedom, justice…love. They put their hope in Jesus, then put him in a tomb, and now he is gone!

But for us the grief and pain is not so different. The memories of what Jesus did and said in Galilee, the message of hope and healing, the awareness of God’s presence with us all clouded by the images of pain and suffering we experience. We come this Easter morning bearing the weight of a broken and hurting world. This week’s terror attacks, the ongoing refugee crisis, the persistence of racism and xenophobia, the constant stream of gun violence. Our aging bodies, our dying friends, our depression and fear and anxiety. It is so hard to remember any words about hope and healing and – dare we say it? – resurrection. No matter how loud we shout it, “Alleluia” does not make our problems go away. No matter how many balloons we fill, or hymns we sing, or prayers we pray, our grief and pain continues to cloud our memories. And yet the question of the messengers persists:

Remember? Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee?

And finally the two dazzling messengers explain: the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. And that does sort of ring a bell…but could it be? If so, where is he? What, then, is next? What does it all mean?

If Jesus can rise again, if the Easter life of mercy and love and justice and freedom and wholeness can triumph over death, what else might be possible? If Christ is risen, then all those memories – the feeding of the hungry, the welcoming of the stranger, the healing of the broken, it all lives. It has a chance again. In the face of the worst we can imagine, there is the possibility of new life, of resurrection life, of God’s life triumphing over our darkness.

And the women don’t so much remember what Jesus said as they are literally re-membered by what Jesus has now done. By Christ’s rising from the tomb they are remade into Easter people. They are put back together from the shattering of grief and death. They are re-created to live in the Easter life. They are re-created to live with the hope of all those things they remember, the hope that God, in the midst of the worst of their pain and loss is making that Easter life a reality.

So they go running from the tomb, those memories suddenly fresh and bright again. They do not yet understand it, perhaps they do not even believe it, but they run to tell the disciples. They run to say that they remembered resurrection. They remembered the ways in which Jesus had been showing them an Easter way of life all along. They remembered the look of new life on the faces of those Jesus had touched. They remembered the joy of hope and promise and life. They remembered that Jesus warned them that it would take death and a tomb to usher in this Easter life forever.

And this, this empty tomb, it means that while we are trying to remember his words, his way of life, while we are struggling to transform our world and come to terms with our pain that Jesus has literally re-membered us, re-made us into an Easter people through the waters of baptism. In our confusion and doubt at the empty tomb, in our tears and weeping for the darkness we have been through, we are freed to live now as an Easter people. We are re-created to live in God’s Easter life now, even as we wait the promise of what is yet to come. We are given the promise that the victory is already won, that God is already turning the cosmos around no matter how things seem to turn out.

We come to worship on this Easter not just to remember the story but so that we might be re-membered. We get wet with the water that drowned us in baptism and brought us to life again. We sing the loud and joyful songs and proclaim the Easter story so that our ears ring and our bodies resonate with the news. We eat and drink the bread and wine at this table, because we need to touch and taste God’s putting us back together again with the saints of all times and places. We need the reminder of all the ways that we have been re-membered into Easter people by God’s rising from the tomb. So that finally, when we at last come to death and we see Jesus reaching out to us, we remember resurrection, because it has been with us all along. So that in our final hour we recognize the coming of God’s Easter life in all its fullest glory, and Christ himself emptying our tomb, saying to us, “Remember? Remember how I told you?”

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!