First Sunday of Advent
Sunday, November 29, 2015

Listen to the sermon here: Sermon 11-29-15

[Jesus said:] 25“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. 28Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
  29Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 31So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. 33Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
  34“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, 35like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 36Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” – Luke 21:25-36

As the sun sits lower in the sky and night falls sooner than most of us would like, this time of year seems to create more than the usual number of beautiful sunsets. I’ve seen a few myself, but I’ve seen even more that people have posted on social media, including some of you who have captured on camera burning reds and oranges, mixed with the deep blue of twilight. As beautiful as it is, I think back to ancient peoples who had less understanding of the way our planet sits in the universe and how its rotation on a tilted axis and its orbit around the sun create the days and seasons.

Many cultures, even not that long ago, spent time watching the skies for signs. What would they make out of these fiery evening skies? Would they see a hopeful sign of some blessing or a fearful sign at something terrible to come? As they watched the sun and moon and stars as Jesus invites his disciples to do, what would they see there about the God of the universe?

I’m struck by Jesus’ warning about signs in the sun and moon and stars. For even then, despite unusual events that happen only every so many lifetimes, they would have known the heavenly bodies to be on regular cycles, a natural rotation that brought them back again to the same view every cycle of the moon, every cycle of the earth. Most of the signs in the heavens, including our own season of long, slow sunsets to an early nightfall, are signs that reappear every year. Even the analogy Jesus uses of a fig tree blossoming in the spring as a sign of the coming summer is a ground level sign that came and went with surprising regularity, reminding them of the cycle of seasons and the promise of warmth and new life.

And even the violent signs Jesus names on the surface of the earth seem to follow disturbingly regular cycles, as we see again and again events that seem to echo ones before. The destruction of the temple, itself a replacement for one destroyed before it, would have been such a devastating sign in the gospel writer’s own time. For us it is another shooting in the news, another country at war, another plane shot down, another bomb gone off – events all the more disturbing for the way in which they fail to surprise us, for the way in which they are not anything new.

In the midst of these signs that come and go and come again, Jesus bids us watch. Bids us to pay attention. But in the midst of such regularity it is all the more easy to fall asleep and let down our guard. Like the followers of Jesus in Luke’s day, most of us have begun to question the immediacy of Christ’s return. Most of us have ceased to expect radical intervention and God’s bursting forth again into human time in the world-altering way we had hoped for. Jesus calls us to watch, to be ready, to live as if God’s coming is any day now, but I can’t. I don’t know how to maintain that watchfulness when it seems that the deep needs of our world come as regularly as the seasons and the glimpses of God seem small or insignificant by comparison.

In the way that some people look at these texts and try to determine a date for the end of the world and try to put on the calendar this era of terrible tribulation, I think sometimes we get tired of watching because we are similarly looking for one big cataclysmic intervention in our broken world and failing bodies. We get tired of watching because we strain our eyes trying to see into the future of what God will do. We get tired of watching and lose our focus because we are looking for something that so far hasn’t come in 2000 years of watching. We get tired of watching because mostly we are looking right past what God is doing now. By pointing us to the rhythmic signs that come year after year, Jesus reminds us that our watching is not so much for the final transformation of the universe but for the everyday transformation of our lives by God’s incarnation among us in ordinary things and ordinary people – in the sun, moon, and stars, in the blossoming of the fig tree, in healing touch of oil on the brow, in the bread and wine offered in this assembly.

Just as the signs of trouble and tribulation recur season after season, year after year, age after age, so, too, does God’s coming into our world. Were we to see in our watching God’s presence embedded in those who are killed, injured, driven from their homes, persecuted for their race or religion, we might see God tirelessly entering our world with every painful news story. Were we to see in our watching God pouring out love and grace in every moment of pain, terror, and fear, we might see God’s coming with every rotation of the earth, with every new season, in every change of the sun, moon, and stars.

That is the kind of watching this Advent seasons calls us to. Not so much watching for the coming of Christmas, but reorienting our eyes to see God coming in flesh in every moment of our lives. We return to this season as regularly as our meteorological seasons, lighting our candles one week at a time to remind us to watch for God by their light, reconnecting to the tangible sacramental moments that remind us to seek God in the ordinary, reorienting to the day-in and day-out coming of Christ among us. Because the thing for which we wait, the thing for which we watch is already coming among us. It is already being born. It is already here. Come taste and see!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

Sunday, November 15, 2015
25th Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to a recording of today’s sermon here: Sermon 11-15-15

As [Jesus] came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
  When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” – Mark 13:1-8

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”

I suspect most of us do not hear this passage without our minds falling to the terror attacks in Paris this week. I think of the panic of those taken hostage. The fear of those who witnessed others killed. The loss of a sense of safety for all those living in the city. The grief that is only just beginning. An act of violence in a city that is not at war, to people who are non-combatants reminds us that anyone is vulnerable. Our foundations of safety and well-being are shaken.

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”

This week there was a particularly clear place for our minds to land when we hear these words of Jesus. But frankly before Paris, there were already plenty of horrific stories to choose from. And I don’t think we’re living in some kind of apocalyptic age when things are worse than they were before. I tend to think there are just more of us on the planet, more communication to hear about violence in far away places, and more technology to facilitate it all. But our minds could land on the war continuing in Syria or the refugees risking death to leave their home behind and finding little welcome anywhere else. Our minds could land to passengers on the Metrojet crash in Egypt a two weeks ago. We could turn to the suicide bombing in Beirut this week which got scant news coverage despite terrorizing a whole city. Russia and Ukraine. Recent escalation of ongoing violence in the Central African Republic that has gone almost unnoticed…

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”

If we didn’t have enough with actual violence, there are rumors of wars, too. I don’t know exactly what rumors of wars are except that perhaps they are the echoes of war within my own heart. The smaller scale but no less violent impulses. The violence within me that thinks and sometimes speaks ill toward my neighbor. The violence that bursts forth from minor inconveniences. The violence within me that more readily relates to people attacked in a country of the global north than those attacked more regularly in the global south. The violence within me that hoards resources when people do not have enough.

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”

 

But it is as if Jesus leaves this conversation unfinished. He points our eyes to the signs that we inevitably will witness. Signs that will disturb us to our very core. Signs that will literally and figuratively shake the foundations of the earth. And he says, “This is just the beginning. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” He does not name what will be born. He does not indicate the degree to which things would get worse before it gets better. He simply indicates this is not the end.

I can imagine two responses to this warning, and to the signs themselves. One response is to forget about anything, to detach from the world distancing oneself from anything. Recognize that loss is coming and walk away. Recognize that we cannot stop the things we hold sacred from crumbling to a pile of rubble. Today’s reading comes right on the heels of last week’s condemnation of the temple scribes stealing widow’s livelihoods for their own riches. One might easily hear Jesus’ comment about the crumbling stones of the temple to be a statement of dismissal for what the temple has become.

But I don’t think Jesus takes the crumbling of the temple lightly. Which is the other possible response – take very seriously the fragile gifts we have been given to steward. Take very seriously the stones of our religious structures that house the people of God and serve as centers of mission. Take very seriously the communities we are a part of in all their diverse glory. Take very seriously the ones we hold closest to us. Take very seriously our financial resources, great or small. Take very seriously the earth we live on in all its strength and fragility. Take it all very seriously by tending to it with great care and by sharing it in the ways we are able.

We are called to take seriously our stewardship of those gifts by recognizing that none of those things are what last. Events in Paris remind us that so much can be taken away in a moment. Events closer to home remind us that lives are fragile. We hear reports of so many churches are facing declining numbers that we wonder how long it will be before their stones topple. It is part of our call – our ministry! – to love and cherish things and people which are destined for destruction. And it is our call because we are made in the image of God, who also enters into relationship with us and with all of creation understanding from the inside out that being in relationship with us means experiencing loss and pain. When we weep, God weeps with us. When we cry out in fear, God cries out with us. When we cannot understand the violence and destruction, God wonders in despair alongside us.

But, Jesus says, this is only the beginning. This destruction, this loss of life, these horrible tragedies one after another, it’s not the end. It’s not God’s final plan for all that is. Jesus describes the disasters as the beginning of the birthpangs while mysteriously leaving it unclear what it is that is being born. He leaves the disciples, and us, with the image of their most beloved temple crumbling and their safety threatened. God leaves us without answers to the unanswerable questions about why the things we care about crumble, and why people kill each other, and why people have to die at all. But Jesus does not leave them without hope, because he shows them what mysterious and miraculous things can happen when all is lost by rising again from the darkness of crucifixion and death. And that is our hope – that beyond what we see God’s kingdom is forming and growing and beginning to burst forth into the world as we experience the pain of the world ripping apart to let it in.

We pray and help where we are able. We seek to live in that future kingdom where and when we can. But we look deeply at the suffering around us and remember through our tears and grief and fear that this is not God’s end, but that something altogether new is being born.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

November 8, 2015
24th Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to Sunday’s sermon here: SERMON 11-8-15

38As [Jesus] taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, 39and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! 40They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
  41He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. 44For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” – Mark 12:38-44

This gospel story reads to me like the fatal moment in a horror movie – the moment when the person watching sees what is about to happen as the characters remain totally oblivious to their impending demise. I keep wanting to rewind and watch it over again so that maybe this time the widow will hear me screaming my warning to her: “Don’t do it!” Don’t throw the money away! Don’t give up your life for this! Don’t put your money in with the show-offy rich people. Can’t you see! If you’re going to give everything away and die, then at least give it to some other widow. It may not be worth much more than a small cup of mini-mart coffee, but at least it’s that for someone. But putting it in the temple treasury only feeds the self-interested scribes.

I imagine this nameless widow walking away unnoticed by everyone but Jesus, and she doesn’t even realize that he’s seen her. I imagine her walking a ways out of town and sitting down to wait for the end. Unlike the widow of Zarephath in our first reading, there is no prosperity gospel here. No putting in a little and getting a lot back. There is only giving the last bit away and giving up.

And then I imagine those two little coins, her final legacy, crushed by the weight of the larger coins. I imagine them even falling from the box itself or off the table where it is counted to be lost. Just pennies. And the juxtaposition of this woman putting the equivalent of her life in the collection box and it going unnoticed seems like such a great injustice, a tragic end. And I just want to run up and stop her. Tell her that her life means so much more, that there is someone out there who will take pity on her.

So I don’t think you should liquidate all your assets, throw them in the offering plate, and walk away. At least, I’m not planning on doing that. And Jesus doesn’t really ask that either. He speaks very little judgment on this woman’s strange action – either positive or negative. The judgment is reserved for those in power, for those who like to hear themselves pray out loud in long-winded phrases, for those who devour widows’ pennies along with their houses.

There are plenty of ways that we devour widows’ houses ourselves. We participate in systems of injustice that perpetuate poverty in our communities and around the world. We make choices, even when well informed and doing our best, which contribute to the detriment of others. Despite our best efforts we find ourselves blind to the poor in our midst. We idealize poverty as some kind of blessed spiritual state, holding up the widow and her offering as a nice ideal about giving to the church. We do well to heed Jesus’ comments to the scribes and to strive to be ever more aware of this and so many other injustices. And we do well to let this story challenge our giving, because although that’s not ultimately the point of the story, there’s maybe something there for us.

But what I really want is for Jesus to do something about it. I want Jesus to demand justice or at least chase after the widow to let her know she has been seen and known and loved before she goes off to waste away. To be fair, Jesus tried a few days earlier. He tried ranting and raving and turning over tables. He drove out the moneychangers and people trying to make a dime off of vulnerable people in the name of religion, and here is another set of people doing just as badly at living the heart of their faith. I at least want Jesus to raise another scene, call someone out.

But strangely, he does none of that. With just a few more stories and a few more encounters with people along the way, he follows the widow. Instead of shouting and screaming and stopping this injustice from taking place, he follows her example. He hands all he has left over to the temple authorities and prepares for the end. Jesus confronts the whole system by putting himself at its mercy, by putting himself in the offering box, by putting the God of life at the hands of death.

If there’s any kind of moral to this story, I think it might be to notice. Notice, yes, the poor in our midst. Notice the depth of what that poverty really means. Stop and think about what it means to really be down to two pennies. But it’s to notice so much more than that. Stop and notice this action, Jesus tells his disciples, because you are about to witness this giving away of life again. When you see it, think of this widow, who doesn’t so much follow Christ as prepare his way. When you see people giving themselves away, notice God following after them.

And maybe Jesus asks them to notice because at some point they will be at their wit’s end. They will at some point have nothing left to give, and there they will find God giving God’s very self away to follow after them.

Today we have one of those opportunities to notice. At this table Christ is giving himself away. Giving away all he has left, body and blood in bread and wine. Given away to people who are not really worthy. Following in the widow’s footsteps Christ hands over his all to people who devour widows’ houses, to people who fail to see the vulnerable among them, to people who have all kinds of other reasons that make them unworthy. Christ is giving himself away to us.

And when I really look at that, when I see the God of all creation being handed over to me, it is almost too much. It is almost more than I can bear to watch. Part of me wants to scream out and tell Jesus there are better places to give himself away. Part of me is so overwhelmed by the grace of it all that I want to put up a wall, to keep it from happening, to keep both God and myself from being vulnerable. But the other part of me hungers for that gift. The other part of me sees that such a tiny offering, just a bit of bread and wine, so little among all the other things we take in just over the course of a single day, is the gift that changes everything for us. It is the widow’s mite, an easily overlooked gift, and the only offering that can save the world, God’s very self for us.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

All Saints Day
November 1, 2015

Listen to an audio recording of today’s sermon: Sermon 11-1-15

32When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35Jesus began to weep. 36So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

  38Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”  – John 11:32-44

Just a few weeks ago, during the much celebrated visit of the Pope to the United States, the Roman Catholic church canonized a new saint, the very first to be canonized on U.S. soil. His name was Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan who started a chain of missions in the 18^th century in what is modern-day California. The missions were, I believe, very much intended as a way to spread God’s love and mercy to people who had not yet heard the Christian message. It took a lot of guts to be a pioneer in 18^th century California. But here’s the problem, whatever good the missions might have done, and there is genuine debate about how much good that was and for whom, they also did a lot of harm. In what at the time was genuinely but mistakenly considered a benevolent intervention the missions captured indigenous peoples and intentionally or unintentionally initiated the genocide of the people who already inhabited that land.

So what do we do with such a saint? Is Serra a saint? Or take any number of individuals named on our own Lutheran calendar of commemorations who have a complicated legacy. People like our own beloved Martin Luther who, like Junipero Serra, held common beliefs of his time that we now consider abominable. Or people whose past was spotty at best but whose lives took a dramatic turn when they encountered Christ like St. Augustine or Paul. Or people who faltered in faith even as they continued to courageously serve the world like Mother Theresa. Or people whose saintly story is celebrated but whose private bad habits might never be publicly known.

Take Lazarus for example – we think of him as an upstanding guy. And who’s to say he wasn’t. But…then…who’s to say he was. And what does that even mean? Jesus has a track record of hanging out with a rough crowd, or at least a crowd generally disliked by the societal status quo. While there certainly are indications that Lazarus and his sisters were able to provide generous hospitality, and some indication that Jesus had a kind of friendship with them all, we don’t really know anything about him. Maybe he made money at the expense of others. Maybe he had a secret habit that he was ashamed of but couldn’t let go. Maybe he wasn’t so nice to people when Jesus wasn’t around. Or maybe he just had an ordinary mixture of human emotions and reactions that ranged from generosity to selfishness, from compassion to rage, from acts of kindness to acts of spite.

You see, we have a tendency to gloss over people’s faults after they die. That’s why we call what most people say at a funeral a eulogy, which literally means “good words.” I’m not suggesting we should start airing everyone’s dirty laundry at funerals, nor that we ought to start dwelling on everyone’s bad habits rather than celebrating God’s power of resurrection at work among us. But maybe, just maybe, we could use more reminders that none of us is perfect, a reminder that no one gets to the end of their life without more than a few missteps.

Each of these candles represents the light of God in a flawed and imperfect saint. And yet when these complicated saints are ripped away from us by death, we weep. We weep because we love. And we do not love, generally speaking, based on a tally of rights and wrongs, based on who measures up to the standards. We love and mourn because someone has been an intimate part of our life, because love is a gift that is more than the sum of its parts. Jesus does not stand at the sealed up tomb weeping because Lazarus was a wonderful man, Jesus stands weeping because he loved Lazarus. The real scandal here, if you ask me, is not that Lazarus is raised from the four-days-old stench of death, but that Jesus, God made flesh among us, stands weeping for an ordinary, flawed human being. The scandal is that God in the flesh becomes vulnerable as a result of profound love for all of us complicated saints, that God in the flesh weeps at our tombs.

But Jesus also came to be the truest sign of the coming feast on Isaiah’s mountain of the Lord, the sign of Revelation’s new heaven and new earth. Jesus also came to destroy the power of death. And so in great love for this dear friend, Jesus calls him forth from the tomb. Jesus speaks his name into the shadows of the tomb, and as the God of life speaks his name he is carried from death to life. And Jesus calls him forward, like Christ does at our baptisms, to continue living a life of imperfection, a life that despite the trip to the tomb and back again, will never fully understand the power of resurrection at work in his daily living and dying. But then isn’t that the way for all of us? At baptism our names are called and we are bound to Jesus in death and resurrection, moving through the water to be drowned and raised to life. And we, too, never fully understand the power of resurrection at work in our daily living and dying.

Is it problematic for the church to lift up in such a public way someone like Junipero Serra whose actions three hundred years later we now see in a different light? Absolutely. But is he a sinner-saint, the only kind of saint there is? Absolutely. The scandalous thing isn’t that the church canonized him, but that they failed to canonize everyone else, too. The scandalous thing is that God loved him in all his messed up thinking and that God loved the indigenous people who were impacted in negative ways by Serra’s work. And the truly scandalous thing is that they are all offered a seat next to one another at the table in God’s final feast.

And maybe the next seat over at that feast will be filled with one of us. People who to a one would not be found worthy of sainthood if anyone looked closely enough. And so we come today as beggars to the table, not merely practicing for the feast to come, but feasting today at the table where death no longer has dominion. We come to feast alongside God’s beloved saints who are at rest – saints whose names we will call out in our prayers today, echoing God’s calling of their names out of death and into life. We come to feast alongside saints who are as broken as we ourselves are. We come to be reminded of God’s scandalous resurrection of our complicated selves. And here our names are called out by a God who weeps at our pain, that we might be unbound and set free to live as sinner-saints, blessed and loved by God in all our glorious imperfection.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Thanks to Dan Clendenin’s weekly lectionary essay for reminding me of the story of Junipero Serra in the context of this All Saints Day.

P.S. After preaching this sermon I went home to read the Sunday NY Times and found this article about our own Amherst College’s mascot, Lord Jeffrey Amherst who, not unlike Junipero Serra, said and did some terrible things against the indigenous people of our own region.

Sunday, October 25, 2015
22nd Sunday after Pentecost / Reformation Sunday

Listen to Sunday’s sermon here: Sermon 10:25:15

As [Jesus] and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. – Mark 10:46-52

Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!

One of the largest most powerful hurricanes in recorded history roared into Mexico this weekend. Praise God that the destruction was less than it might have been, but there will still be great need in the wake of this powerful storm. Though we cannot attribute any one weather event to climate change, every storm like this reminds us of the increasing destabilization of weather patterns resulting from our misuse of the earth and its resources. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!

Our presiding bishop reminded New England Rostered leaders this week that a recent Pew study revealed that our own Evangelical Lutheran Church is the whitest church body in America. As a denomination we have fewer people of color than any other church body in this country. One can point to all kinds of reasons in our history and practice, but whatever those are we have to face the fact that somehow we have missed the kingdom of God by our failure to engage across racial barriers. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!

868 million people or 1 in 8 people globally are chronically hungry. 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty. In our own country, at least 50 million people are food insecure. Add to that the costs of health care, child care, and other basic needs, and the problem grows. Locally people still face the stigma associated with asking for help. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!

We are Bartimaeus beggars every time we gather for worship. We cry out at the start of many of our Sunday worship services as we sing a Kyrie together. For peace from above and for our salvation. Lord have mercy. For the peace of the whole world, the well-being of the church of God, and for the unity of all. Lord, have mercy. For this holy house and all who offer here their worship and praise. Lord, have mercy. And if that were not enough we cry out again with our spoken and silent prayers, in the words of our scriptures, and in the songs we breathe together.

We are a church of the Reformation, but we are church always in need of reform living in a world always needing reform. We are individuals desperately seeking healing for the ways we fail to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We are a church desperately seeking healing for the ways we fail to proclaim an inclusive gospel message with boldness and grace. We are a society desperately seeking healing for the inequality and violence we render to one another. We cry out over and over again, sometimes feeling helpless against the forces that seem to drive the world around us.

Bartimaeus is nearly helpless, not because he is blind, but because he lives in a society that has written off blindness. He is permitted to do little more than sit and beg and cry out for mercy, and the crowds even try to take that away from him. But he cries out nonetheless. He cries out until he finally cuts through the noise and the commotion. Until Jesus stands still. Until Jesus calls for him to come forward. Until Jesus asks him, “What is it you want me to do for you?”

Now maybe Bartimaeus had some unnaturally bold faith that allowed him to cry out with conviction trusting that this man could transform his life. Maybe the Spirit stirred up just such a faith in him. But maybe not. Maybe, to borrow the title of Pr. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s recent book, he was more of an accidental saint. Maybe his cry was simply a version of what he cried out every day to those passing by – have mercy on me! Have enough compassion to get me a sandwich or spare change for a cup of coffee. A cry that began from a place of hope, from the belief that there was something to be done to help him, but a cry which now was simply how he lived his days. A cry like ours that we’ve become so accustomed to that we no longer imagine that God will stop and listen, much less transform our lives.

But Jesus has other plans. At our deepest cries for mercy and even at our sometimes worn-out or half-hearted cries for mercy Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” This isn’t so much the genie in the bottle granting us a wish, but a question that invites us to bare our deepest selves to God. And so Bartimaeus does, asking for more than a handout or even a hand up, but a transformation so profound that he will never be the same again. the kind of transformation that takes him to a place of wholeness.

And in maybe the most remarkable part of the story, he throws off his cloak and follows Jesus. Right into Jerusalem. Right to the garden. Right to the cross. Right to the empty tomb. We don’t hear his name mentioned again, but he follows Jesus right into the heart of the gospel story. He becomes part of the ongoing reformation that God is up to in his life and in the life of the world.

So I wonder what that healing transformation looks like for us. I wonder where God’s ongoing reformation of an ever-changing church is taking us. Maybe it’s taking us into new partnerships with people who are working against climate change. I saw nearly 50 students gather just at Amherst College last Friday evening to hear more about what they can do to stop climate change and they invited the church to be a part of the conversation. God might just be doing something we can’t yet see. Maybe while the ELCA tackles its own issues of racism we can look to places that the Lutheran church is already more diverse. Places like Indonesia, a country where there are more Lutherans than the United States. God is reforming the church in ways that our eyes aren’t always open to seeing. Or maybe we’re being called to a new way to end food insecurity in our community in partnership with others who are already doing this good work. May God open our eyes to see what possibilities exist for the future. I wonder what God is already doing in your life that we can’t see.

Because we are Bartimaeus beggars in the way we cry out. But we are also Bartimaeus beggars in the ways that God opens our vision to see more than we could ask or imagine. God opens our eyes that we might see not only God at work in the world but that we might see death and resurrection made real before us. And so in our worship we cry out, and God hears us. And God begins a transformation in us so that we, too, are swept up by Jesus’ path from our brokenness to our resurrection. We, too, are invited to be a part of God’s ongoing reformation of the church and our world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Listen to an audio recording of Sunday’s sermon here: sermon 10-18-15

35James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
  41When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” – Mark 10:35-45

Pick me! Pick me! I can do it – I know I can! Put me in coach!

As I listen to the brothers of Zebedee eagerly ask for places in the kingdom with the confidence they can handle what is coming, it reminds me of my final year of seminary. I had most of my classes done, I had completed internship successfully, and it frustrated me any time someone suggested I had more to learn. It wasn’t that I thought I knew it all, but I wanted someone to let me sink or swim on my own. I figured there were things out there that I wasn’t prepared for, but I was itching to get going. “Put me in the game, I’m ready,” I swore. Of course in some ways I was, but one can never really be ready for ministry. There’s always something new on the horizon and something that an individual isn’t ready for. But I wasn’t alone in my eagerness and naïveté.

I think the brothers of Zebedee get a bad rap in this story. Jesus’ response to the arguing of the whole group leads us perhaps to think that their vying for a seat in glory is about a power play or some kind of desire to be over the others. And I’m sure there’s a twinge of that – most of us have some momentary delusion of grandeur from time to time. But I think underneath it is an eagerness to jump in. They’ve been traveling with Jesus for some time now. They’ve already been sent out on their own and seen and done more than they thought possible. Jesus has reshaped their whole worldview. In the passage immediately before this, which we read last week, it was pointed out that they have left everything to follow Jesus. Of course they are eager for the kingdom to be in place, eager to finally wrap this thing up. And if that means stepping up to be Jesus’ right-hand and left-hand people, then they’re ready.

Or so they think. In Mark’s short, but action-packed gospel, the very next chapter is Jesus leading them into Jerusalem. And they enter in royal procession with palms waving and shouts of “Hosanna.” The disciples must be thinking back on this conversation and wondering whether they’ve convinced Jesus that this is the time. And in the back of their minds each of them is still thinking that maybe he will be at Jesus’ right and left. But they still haven’t figured out what Jesus is trying to tell them, they still haven’t figured out what is coming.

I don’t think we ever really get it either. Many of us have heard the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection and all the pieces that surround that and we don’t get it. Intellectually we do. We have our theories about how Jesus’ action saves us. And yet we still fail to live, even as a church community, in a way that acknowledges the reality of a God who loves us that much. We fail to live in a way that acknowledges in our every action that death is coming for all of us.

Often we fail to take seriously Jesus’ invitation to drink the cup of suffering, Jesus’ invitation to literally be a slave to others. We take that as a directive to be nice and kind and generous, but we fail to give it all. At least I do. I stop short before giving it all up, giving it all over for others. But that’s what Jesus is asking of the disciples today. At first he seems to say, “Look. You can’t do what I’m about to do.” Even in Mark’s gospel where Jesus seems to know less about what is coming than in other accounts, Jesus is pretty clear that the cross is coming. Jesus wants to spare them that fate. But then in their eagerness it’s almost as if Jesus has a revelation. They will face that fate. If we believe all the stories that got passed down, most of those disciples did face persecution and death at the hands of those who wanted to shut the movement down. But there’s a moment of recognition from Jesus that he is not the only one who has to face death. You may not know what it means, but you will drink the cup, he admits.

We may struggle, each of us in our own way, with giving ourselves over to the kind of self-sacrificing, self-emptying, cross-bearing mission that Jesus calls us to. The invitation to give everything is as real as it is impossible. Except that in the end we have to let go. In the end we do have to give up everything. We pray that we will not face the violent death of crucifixion, or even a painful and prolonged suffering at the hands of illness. But all of us must hand it all over to God sooner or later.

And so Jesus admits that they will face the same difficult fate as he is about to face. In their eagerness they may be just naïve enough to jump in head first after Jesus, not having any idea what is coming next. Pick me! Pick me! Put me in coach! I can do it, I know I can! The truly amazing thing is that God transforms their eagerness for the kingdom, their strong desire to be a part of making it happen, and their total ignorance of what is to come into the beginnings of a church. Jesus, too, must trust that the divine work will continue in these eager and naïve disciples after he is gone again from them. It does not take fully formed disciples, or disciples who are always good. It doesn’t even always take disciples who are eager. But God chooses to work so often through people.

Jesus models God’s ultimate self-giving, but God then uses ordinary people like you and me to serve one another. God calls us from beginning to end to serve one another in community. We may not always be very good at understanding what is going on. We may not always get it right. But together God uses us to be the church for each other and for the world.

And so we gather at the table, ready to receive the cup that unites us with Christ – in life, in death, in resurrection. We take it perhaps with a bit of naïve eagerness, we take it perhaps with a deep desire to see God’s kingdom come, we take it perhaps with trepidation at the call it issues within us to become slaves of one another. But we come to eat and drink at this table to be united with the one who goes ahead of us to the place we all must one day go. We eat and drink not to seek the best place at the table, but to be reminded that by God’s self-giving we have already been assured an equal place at the never-ending feast.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Though the manuscript is below, hear the sermon as preached by clicking here: Sermon 10-11-15

17As [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’ ” 20He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” 21Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
  23Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 26They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” 27Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
  28Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” 29Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, 30who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” – Mark 10:17-31

Have you ever played the old arcade game called whack-a-mole? In case anyone might be unfamiliar, one takes a satisfyingly large padded mallet and the object of the game is to hit each little plastic mole as it pops up from its hole. Though I harbor no malice toward actual living creatures, bopping the plastic version is quite satisfying. But the trick comes when they get faster and faster, then they start popping up two or three or more at a time until it is nearly impossible to get them all. It’s frequently used as an analogy for the things around us that happen too quickly or are too overwhelming for us to address them all.

I feel like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole with all the issues we face in the world. I’m outraged and then numb and then outraged again seeing news reports of more gun violence this week. More of the pain and suffering. Feeling like the problem is popping up in too many ways in too many places to do anything about it. But even if we did gain traction there, the issues of racism, of poverty, of hunger –  they pop up again, and looming always in the background the ongoing climate crisis. So many issues to keep track of and every person has his or her own opinion about which one is first. While they all end up intersecting, where to we begin and what on earth do we use instead of a padded mallet?

This is the feeling of defeat with which the rich man walks away from Jesus today. This man has been playing whack-a-mole with the ten commandments and all the other laws that govern their religious practice and their society. We’ll take him at face value that somehow he has managed keeping all those commandments in all their particularities. He’s really good at the game. And so he comes to Jesus for reassurance, or perhaps a genuine fear he hasn’t done enough, a fear that he’s missed something. And Jesus says, “One more thing…”

I imagine the man getting out his notepad and pen, ready to write down the task, write down the law he’s missed. And Jesus invites him to do something that isn’t written in any of the law books. It’s not written in society’s codes. It’s not written in practical self-help manuals. Jesus says, “Give it all up, sell everything you have and give it away.” He’s played the game so well up to this point, but this is too much. He is too tired from all the careful attention to the laws – one after another after another – that this upending of his life is too much. And he walks away in shock without another word.

So, for Jesus and for the rich man, it is about the money and it isn’t. It’s not about the money insofar as it’s only one thing in a long list of things that pop up over and over keeping us from loving God and neighbor. It’s one thing in a world full of potential idols, full of potential distractions, full of things that hold power over us in ways that separate us from God. It’s not about the money insofar as Jesus doesn’t make a blanket statement that all people are to give up all their wealth and distribute it to the poor. It’s not about the money insofar as if this man were to go and do what Jesus says – and maybe he does! – that in his poverty he would still discover something else standing in the way of earning eternal life.

But! – As people in one of the largest economies of the world, as people who live near the top percentages of the world’s wealth, even if we feel terribly distant from the super-rich one percent. It is also about the money. It’s about the ways in which one of the games of whack-a-mole most of us play is the constant need to accumulate something new when our needs and wants are satisfied. It’s about the way we let money control our decisions way more than we want to admit. It’s about the way many of us hold onto money even when we know that it stand between us and God and neighbor. It’s about the fact that Jesus is right, it’s harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle – yes an actual camel and an actual needle – than for a rich person to live fully in a kingdom where there is no longer a distinction between rich and poor.

It is tempting to equivocate. It’s tempting to say we’ll give more but not everything. It’s tempting to say that it makes no sense to give it all away because then we’ll be poor and someone else will be rich. We worship a God of abundance but recognize that we live in a world with finite boundaries. This is the heart of what this congregation’s council is already wrestling with in early preparations for next year’s budget: how do we find ways to be generous and still meet all our commitments? How do we reach out to all those places doing good work to care for neighbor and also maintain a building and staff and programs here that also seek to reach out to care for neighbor? And with the rich man that is our question as individuals, too. How do we live in this world and God’s kingdom at the same time, especially when there is a never-ending stream of new problems popping up faster than we can manage?

Jesus gives the disciples the answer. After the rich man has already walked away in shock, Jesus tells them it is, in fact, impossible. It is impossible to keep up with the constantly emerging demands. It is impossible to live fully in God’s kingdom while still living in the world. It is impossible…for us. But not for God. It is not impossible, we proclaim in the person of Jesus, for God to bring the kingdom to earth in human form.

Jesus calls us, all of us, to the impossible work of giving ourselves, our time, and our possessions away to find ourselves trusting only God’s embrace. But Jesus knows that this man, even if he gives away all he has to the poor, will still be need to do more to make the world right and to experience the fullness of the kingdom of God. There will always be one more thing that needs to be done, one more thing that we cannot do. And this, I think, is why Jesus looks at him with love. He sees his eagerness, his desire for the kingdom of God, not just on heaven but on earth, too. And Jesus looks with a compassionate love because he knows the disappointment that will come. The anger, the fear, the frustration.

But God also always has one more thing. One more moment of grace, one more in-breaking of the kingdom, one more offering of bread and wine. When this man wanders off shocked and grieving, when the disciples realize the hopelessness of achieving the kingdom they are seeking, when death finally claims Jesus, God has just one more thing. One more surprise when we thought the game was over. Death is not the final word, our Easter story proclaims. Walking away in grief and despair is not the final word for this rich man. This impossible task given to him and to us is not the final word. Because nothing is impossible for God.

So we seek the kingdom. We play the game, chasing after opportunities for peace and justice, sheltering and feeding and clothing the neighbor in need, divesting ourselves of the things that keep us from God. But we do so embracing the promise that all things are moving toward God’s resurrection. And that as things continue to emerge that demand our attention that God’s kingdom is already popping up in ways that we cannot keep up with. That’s God’s grace is emerging too fast for us to beat back with our equivocating. That God’s love conquers all the games we try to play to earn the kingdom. And so we rest in the midst of our labors, in that moment when Jesus turns to the rich man and to us with compassionate love, and we dwell there even the moments of shock and grief at the seeming impossibility of it all.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

18th Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2015

13Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. 17Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.
  19My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, 20you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. – James 5:13-20

38John said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
  42“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
  49“For everyone will be salted with fire. 50Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” – Mark 9:38-50

 

Just over a week ago many of you know that I ran in the Reach the Beach relay to benefit Camp Calumet. It’s interesting as an athletic event because given a bit of training it’s fairly accessible for people of varying levels, yet challenging even for pretty advanced athletes. Many people, myself included, were looking a little worse for wear as they crossed the finish line. Whether it’s an injury, sore muscles from the distance and the hills, sleep deprivation, or the odd timing of meals, many people, at least those crossing later in the day are in one way or another hobbling along when they join their team’s final runner on Hampton Beach for one last stumbling sprint across the finish line.

While in athletic competitions there are a select few who can manage to finish without stumbling – including, I’m sure, some in this congregation – when it comes to getting through life, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t cross the finish line with some pretty pronounced stumbling. “If your foot causes you to stumble,” Jesus says, “cut it off!!” If we were to take seriously and literally Jesus’ words today to remove the parts of us that cause us to trip over ourselves, if we were to take seriously and literally the injunction to tie a millstone around our necks and jump in the water every time we led someone astray, then none of us would make it much past infancy with anything left, much less to the finish line.

Jesus suggests that it is better to cross the finish line missing a few essential items than to cross the finish line wasting away inside. Better perhaps to remove your eyes than to use them to eye what belongs to someone else. Better perhaps to cut off a hand before it snatches greedily or strikes out in anger. Better to cut off a foot than to allow it to carry you into a place you shouldn’t be standing. But I think Jesus is aware of just how ridiculous this sounds. But perhaps his hyperbole has a point. Once he has them imagining people missing most of their parts, maybe they’ll begin to think about just how much they are missing that cannot be seen. In other words, everybody is stumbling through life one way or another and if you think losing an eye and a limb looks bad, it’s nothing compared to the stumbling that results from the invisible wounds that we carry through life, nothing compared to the brokenness inside.

Our prayer list is full of physical illness and injury. People having surgery to literally cut out or cut off cancerous cells or to repair or remove malfunctioning organs. People receiving treatments for painful limbs and broken bones. These are wounds that, scary as they might be are easier to identify, easier to talk about, easier to give space for the stumbling of recovery and healing. They are concrete and often visible.

But as full as our prayer list is, I think it only scratches the surface of the stumbling that is taking place in our lives. Only a few brave souls name publicly their struggle with mental distress – depression that creeps in and takes over, brains that are prone to rapid cycling between extreme, people who process information differently than most, those who see and hear things that most of us do not.

And perhaps even fewer of us name the deep wounds we carry – things others have said or done to us from the mundane to the horrific, or the wounds we carry from losses suffered, from guilt over things done or left undone, or the shame we bear because of who we see ourselves to be.

Today’s harsh-sounding teaching in Mark’s gospel seems to me to be Jesus’ acknowledgement that all of us are stumbling and in pain. All of us have some part of our lives that needs the healing prayers of the community. All of us have landed hard in the hellfire and brimstone of the lives we create for ourselves and our communities. So what are we to do?

Jesus’ instruction simply isn’t practical. You might start by removing the eyes and the hands and the feet, but pretty soon no one will have any hands left to remove our stumbling heads and hearts. But James offers another possible path for our stumbling selves. In his instructions to those limping souls who have managed to gather in Christian community, he suggests this: prayer, singing, anointing, confession, and reconciliation.

Because the same eyes and hands and feet that cause our stumbling, the same invisible wounds that leave us with limping souls, when accompanied by the power of God at work in us become extensions of grace. There is no getting around that every one of us is going to stumble and fall every step of the way, and yet every one of us becomes an instrument of grace.

Whether it’s the people doing deeds of power in Jesus’ name without his consent, or whether it’s the person next to us whose brokenness we know all too well, the stumbling ones become the healers. They become the ones that break the bread and pour the wine. They become the ones who bear the healing oil to the sick and the weary. They become the eyes to see the poor and lonely. They become the mouths that speak words of blessing and encouragement.

Our worship gathers us together every week to become that community, to transform our stumbling bodies into vessels of grace for each other. It is the power of gathering us together and placing our broken bodies next to water and word, bread and wine, next to the broken and stumbling body of Christ that our stumbling becomes for others a healing presence. And we are sent again stumbling out these doors to be that healing presence for the sake of the world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

September 20, 2015

Today we were joined by the Rev. Laura Everett, executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, the state ecumenical network of 17 Orthodox and Protestant denominations, congregations and individual Christians working together for a vibrant, hopeful witness of our oneness in Christ in our local churches, on Beacon Hill and with our neighbors of other faiths.  A graduate of Brown University, Ms. Everett received her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. A pastor in the United Church of Christ, Laura blogs about denominational identity, Christian unity (and disunity), and social media at www.RevEverett.com and on Twitter at @RevEverett. Connect to the ministry of the Massachusetts Council of Churches at www.facebook.com/Masscouncilofchurches .

Read her sermon from September 20th here: http://reveverett.com/2015/09/22/childish-a-sermon-on-mark-9/