Sunday, September 13

27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
  31Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
  34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” -Mark 8:27-38

Have you ever tried to live into someone else’s vision? Maybe you spent years trying to live into a vision your parents had for you that just didn’t fit for you. Maybe you came into an organization or business and just couldn’t quite match their vision with yours. Maybe a disagreement with a spouse about how you envision decorating your living room. Maybe someone is looking at something that you literally can’t pick out of your field of vision. It’s immensely difficult to get inside someone else and literally see from within them.

In today’s gospel the disciples are trying to understand something about where Jesus sees himself going. It’s partly an identity issue. They are sorting out just who he is. The crowds see lots of different people embodied in Jesus, but Peter brings it all together in calling Jesus the anointed one. Of course, it’s not a given that they all know exactly what the word “messiah” means in terms of what comes next on this journey. So Jesus explains his vision. It involves great suffering. It involves ticking off the religious authorities. It involves being killed. And it involves rising again.

I’m with Peter. I just can’t see it. This is not a good outcome. If the outcome of our congregation’s visioning process last year had been to suffer greatly, annoy our neighbors, and get ourselves killed, I think we would have gotten a very concerned visit from the bishop. I just don’t see how this is going to accomplish anything.

Peter has his own vision. And I don’t think it’s one that is so bad. Peter’s vision, I think, has something to do with all the work that needs doing in the world. Peter’s vision has to do with standing up to the political powers to ensure that refugees are settled quickly and safely as they flee war-torn, poverty-stricken, drought-devastated lands. Peter’s vision has to do with healing all the people with terminal cancer and degenerative diseases. Peter’s vision has to do with breaking down the stigma of mental illness. Peter’s vision has to do with building up churches that have active programs, reach out to their communities, worship with grace, love each other, and balance their budgets for long-term sustainability. Nothing about Peter’s vision deserves Jesus calling him Satan. In fact, Jesus wants most of those things, too, except maybe the balanced budget thing – Jesus never seemed too concerned about that.

Peter is afraid that Jesus is giving up on all those things – he cannot see Jesus’ vision. But Jesus has something else in mind. Jesus sees the only way to address those issues is to face them head on in such a way that it gets him killed. More than that, he sees that the only way for real transformation is for God to get so deeply inside human suffering that every problem before and since is transformed by the presence of God at the heart of it.

We all have such carefully laid plans. Most of us have a vision of where we want to go and what we want to do with our future, in the short-term if not the long-term. But so often that gets interrupted, sometimes by things beyond our control, by the presence of brokenness in the world. Other times it is interrupted by God’s call to something new and different that we did not expect. But most of the time we expend a good deal of energy protesting. Like Peter we get frustrated that God just doesn’t see how good our plan is.

But what Jesus does is to carry forward with God’s vision in the face of human protest, not out of disregard for our admirable plans, but out of deep and abiding love for all creation. Because we have such trouble seeing God’s vision, God comes into our world to look at things from our perspective. Jesus carries through with his journey to the cross in order to help Peter and help us to see the depth of God’s love for us and the ability of God to transform even death into life.

And here’s what really turns things around. Forever after Jesus invites his followers to pick up their cross and follow. Jesus invites his followers to forever after look at the world from God’s perspective, that is from the cross itself. Jesus invites us to see the world not as a problem we can solve but as the place where God meets us on the way. We are invited to look more deeply into the pain and suffering within ourselves and in the humans beside us and in the creation all around us. And we are invited to see God there. We are invited to see the presence of God in the mess we have created. We are invited to see the presence of God suffering beside us.

And by all means along the way Jesus calls us to care for our neighbor in every expansive sense of that term. By all means are we invited to work for justice and peace. But the work of the cross is not to experience suffering and death in order to escape to something better. The work of the cross is the work of entering the suffering fully because that is where God has chosen to reside.

So it is that we make the sign of the cross on our cruciform bodies. We trace the reminder that God is present in our broken selves. We trace the reminder that God is present deep within our daily sufferings, in our daily failures, in our daily dying. We trace the reminder that we have been created to be the place where God has chosen to dwell.

Most of the time we remain like Peter, unable to see what God is really doing among us. We remain focused on other things. Mostly we cannot see the power of God at work in us. But the promise of God even for those of us who fail to see, is that God sees us. God sees the cross we bear on our bodies as a gift of baptism. God sees in us the depth of our broken lives and dwells there among us. And that, even if we cannot see how, holds the power of resurrection for the cosmos.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
     “Be strong, do not fear!
   Here is your God.
     He will come with vengeance,
   with terrible recompense.
     He will come and save you.”

  5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
     and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
  6 then the lame shall leap like a deer,
     and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
   For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
     and streams in the desert;
  7a the burning sand shall become a pool,
     and the thirsty ground springs of water. -Isaiah 35:4-7a

24 [Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice,25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 30 So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
  31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” -Mark 7:24-37

How many of you have ever had a conversation where you had already decided the outcome before you started? I’m guessing pretty much everybody. I’m not saying we’re all bad people or that we aren’t trying, but pretty often I find myself in conversations where I have to fight with my natural instinct in order to remain open to a possibility I haven’t considered.

This happens in somewhat innocuous ways. It happens between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans. The diehards can talk all night long about which team is better and no empirical evidence, no logical argument, no passionate outpouring of emotion is changing the mind of the other. It happens in more destructive ways between people of different political parties. How many conversations about politics have you heard where people repeated the same arguments they’ve both heard a thousand times expecting the other person to change their mind but never considering changing their own? We do this in all kinds of ways all the time.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus engages in a conversation. A Syrophonecian woman approaches him asking for healing for her daughter. This encounter takes place in the region of Tyre. Geographically not that far from Jesus’ hometown, but it might as well be worlds away. The woman is certainly of a different ethnic group, the text points that out to us. Some have speculated that perhaps she is a citizen of the economically privileged port city that was known to exploit the people from whom Jesus came. Perhaps she is a city dweller stepping down to beg from an economically disadvantaged country bumpkin. And her gender was not helping the situation in a culture that held much stronger divisions between men and women. Because of the intersection between race, class, and gender, Jesus had cultural permission to ignore her. No one would really have noticed or cared had he stuck to his position, because it would have been socially acceptable to do so. But instead he stopped and listened, and for stopping to listen not only did this woman’s daughter receive healing but Jesus’ ministry got deeper and richer as a result. Jesus did not enter the conversation already convinced of the outcome.

Today in particular presents at least three major arenas where I think we are being called to listen more deeply and more openly. At the invitation of the AME, CME, and AME Zion churches, our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is joining others in a Sunday of repentance for racism and commitment to working to dismantle it. These calls come because despite Ferguson and Baltimore and Charleston and all the other events in which the destructive power of racism confronts our nicely ordered picture of the world, most of us fail to sustain the conversation. We have failed to listen in such a way that we are transformed. And too many people are outright refusing to do the kind of deep listening that is required to move forward together. As followers of Jesus and as human beings we are called to be in conversation with one another across boundaries.

The second opportunity we have to listen more closely is right in front of us as we worship outside today. We as a church community have the opportunity to stop and listen to the voices of the people in our community. You can hear the incoming UMass students cheering in the parking lot beyond those trees. We see and hear the cars and people going by. I wonder how often we on the inside of the church community make assumptions about what the people outside our church community have to say. I wonder what we would discover if we had more open, deep-listening conversations.

And the third opportunity to listen more deeply comes as we hold our worship outside in the natural world.  Most of the time we fail to listen to the voice of the natural world. We see it, we enjoy it, and yet it takes constant reminders for us to engage in the difficult work of caring for a creation which we humans have been destroying for our own gain. Over the most recent centuries we have failed to listen deeply to the song of creation. And we have not yet listened deeply enough if we hear only the song of praise that the birds chirp and the squirrels squeak and the dogs bark, and not also the song of lament made by the winds of increasingly unstable weather patterns and the groan of the earth moving more frequently in places subjected to fracking, and also the song of silence of habitats destroyed, species made extinct, and once babbling brooks left dry.*

To have the conversations we need to have, we must be as open to listening as Jesus was with this woman in need. Whatever her ethnicity, economic status she was a person in deep and desperate need. And her cries for help expanded the kingdom. Jesus, whom we profess to be just as human as divine, was in his humanity as much a product of the systems of power into which he was born as anyone else. But in the course of his ministry, through Jesus’ encounters with the despised, outcast, poor, hungry, sick, and abandoned people, in genuine conversation with them, the kingdom grows ever bigger, conversation by conversation. Until it reaches the point at which to get any larger requires such a challenge to systems of power that those in charge send him to death.

But every conversation along the way in which Jesus stops and hears changes him and changes the person he encounters and changes the people who are privileged to overhear it. And one-by-one the world is transformed. As we listen to one another and most powerfully as God listens day after day, week after week to our pleas for peace and justice and for restoration of creation and for wholeness and wellness. Today we join our voices with all in need and with all of creation, pleading, begging for transformation. We do it most explicitly in our prayers of intercession, but we do it in our songs, our scripture, and our other prayers, as well.  And as God listens the world is transformed over and over again.

And the end of the story is proclaimed long before Jesus brings it to birth in the world. The promise Isaiah lays out for us today is a world where those who have failed to listen to the cries of the poor can now hear and those who have failed to see fully can envision the dignity of all people. It’s a vision where humans silenced by oppression are given voices to shout and where dry land once again sings with flowing water.

We will fail and mess up, and we will continue to have conversations where we don’t ever really listen. We will continue to be subject to systems that oppress and silence, systems that enable us to carry forward as if nothing is wrong. But because God hears the cries of those in need and listens deeply, we trust that God will find a way in our complicated world to open our ears and open our eyes to those whose voices will transform us and invite us to in turn transform them. And God’s kingdom will continue to break forth until all creation sings in praise.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

*With thanks in this paragraph to Mary Louise Bringle and Benjamin Stewart for their presentations at the 2015 Institute of Liturgical Studies and they way those presentations have shaped the way I hear the voice of all creation inside the church and out.

Sunday, August 30, 2015
14th Sunday after Pentecost

1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around [Jesus], 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 
   ‘This people honors me with their lips,
     but their hearts are far from me;
  7 in vain do they worship me,
     teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
  14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
  21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” – Mark 7, selected verses

See also James 1:17-27.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” to explain why he and others were breaking the rules. Besides being a fine example of King’s writing with some oft-quoted gems like “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the letter is written from jail as a defense to the other “upstanding” clergy who thought his timing was bad and who questioned his breaking the law, especially when he was at the same time demanding that the authorities would uphold the new civil rights laws. It shouldn’t require the hindsight of 50 years later to realize that King and so many other less famous individuals broke the law because it was already too long to have been waiting for justice and because the laws themselves were inherently unjust. But at the time, it was certainly controversial. King, in his patience and wisdom, carefully lays out his argument for breaking the law and the difference between breaking segregation laws in nonviolent protest and their simultaneous call to uphold the new federal laws supporting equal rights. However, though the unjust laws had to be changed, I think King was aware that changing the rules was only a step toward something greater, toward a goal that we have yet to fully realize. King’s breaking of the rules had a goal beyond the law.

Now, Jesus and his disciples are not so much bucking an unjust law, at least not one to the extent of the segregation laws of 1950’s America, but they are calling into question the blind following of rules without awareness of what they are there to accomplish, without recognizing what is beyond. In response to their criticism, Jesus invites the Pharisees to consider what their rituals are really all about. There’s nothing wrong with rituals, but the ones that continue unquestioned, the ones that become more about orthodoxy than about inviting us deeper into the mystery of the divine are no longer serving their purpose.

I think it goes without saying that we are good at coming up with rules and getting a little too caught up in our own way of doing things. We do it as people who move through daily routines we’d rather not have interrupted. We do it as churches that have “never done it that way before.” We do it as societies that are sometimes sluggish to make changes to accommodate changing realities. We know we like our rules and traditions. They are a comfort when things get tough. They help give us direction when we aren’t sure where to start. All well and good. Rules help us find order in life, know when to cross an intersection, remind us how to behave toward others when we feel angry. Rules shape our days.

But the reality is that we encounter a great many things in our lives that do not play by the rules. The segregationists of King’s era weren’t playing by the new federal rules. Cancer doesn’t play by the rules. Natural disasters don’t play by the rules. Acts of gun violence that are committed in public places and land mines left where children play don’t follow any rules. Refugees fleeing drug gangs and extreme poverty in parts of central and South America or fleeing discrimination in Palestine or fleeing war-torn northern Africa, Syria, and Iraq, they demand of us going beyond the rules we have in place. And finally, what Jesus knows and what we have come to know, is that death doesn’t play by our rules either.

You can take this passage to be a scolding of the Pharisees for being strict about religious practice without the compassion or faith to accompany it. And that’s a message we probably need to pay attention to. We’re all guilty of that from time to time, myself included. But I think this passage is about more than that. More than a reminder to engage our spiritual practices in a way that is life-giving. I think this passage is about a God who is willing to go with us into the place where the rules no longer apply. Because all our traditions and even all of God’s good and helpful commandments, do not have the power to take us to the place where life emerges from death.

Religion, James reminds us, is not about figuring out what I’m supposed to do, about getting caught up in the conversations that only focus on ourselves and our own religiosity, but about getting up out of ourselves and dealing with the reality in front of us. Orphans, widows, strangers, refugees, vulnerable people. It’s about engaging, like Martin Luther King, Jr., the places where the rules have failed us. It’s about engaging a God whose mercy and love are not rule-bound. It’s about engaging a life of faith that takes us beyond the realm of rules.

Today we offer anointing for healing because too much of what we experience is beyond our control. We offer anointing because we do not have a set of rules to make you and this broken world well. We only have the power of God to work among us through prayer and oil, through conversation together, through fellowship around the coffee urn, and in study together of God’s word and world, in bread and wine and water.

The life of baptism isn’t about doing all the things you or your parents promise to do at your baptism. It’s about the promise of God to lead you through the places where there is no longer any guidance for what to do or how to be. It’s about the promise of God to lead us through the places of pain and grief and incomprehensible violence, through the cross and the tomb and the descent to the depths of human suffering, to lead us to the place of resurrection, which more than any other place throws all our structure and organization and rules right out the window.

It’s unsettling at times to have a God who doesn’t always follow the rules, but think we easily forget the mess that our world of rules gets us into and how desperately we need a God who will go with us into that mess and lead us through it. And so I’d like to close with a well-known poem by Shel Silverstein, which I think reminds us of our need to go beyond the realm of order and rules to experience the liberation that God is leading us to:

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright,
and there the moon-bird rests from his flight
to cool in the peppermint wind.

“Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.

“Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.”

-Pastor Steven Wilco

13th Sunday after Pentecost
August 23, 2015

[Jesus said,] 56 “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” 59 He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
  60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” 61 But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. 65 And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”
  66 Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. 67 So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” – John 6:56-69

Twenty-two. That’s how many people are officially running for President of the United States for the 2016 election. At least I think so. That’s really a lot to keep track of. They rise and fall on a daily basis. Surely one of them will save us, right? Surely one of them must have all the right answers. One of them must be able to know both the future of domestic and international economics and politics and be able to please our whims in the moment.

No? Probably not. I guarantee you that all of them will make mistakes. And the lucky one chosen to be president 15 months from now will make mistakes in office. Probably even some big mistakes. And the crowds will fall away and the news will report polls demonstrating low popularity, as if popularity were always a sign of good leadership. But for now, all twenty-two of them put on smiling faces and tell America how they can save us.

For a while the crowds have been gathering behind Jesus. With every encounter the crowd grows larger. He is a healer, a wise teacher, a worker of miracles. And there was probably a decent field of 21 others out there doing much the same. But for this crowd Jesus was their candidate. They had purchased their lawn signs and bumper stickers. But they have begun to be concerned in this extended conversation about the bread of life. They are not so sure this candidate has what it takes.

Because Jesus begins to suggest that it won’t be all loaves and fishes for the rest of this journey. Jesus begins to suggest that it won’t be all happy miracles of abundance and nice teaching. I’ve read this over many times this week and I’m not exactly sure what the people are most offended by. There are several possibilities. It could be the oblique reference to the cross, which the crowds wouldn’t have known but John’s readers would have. There’s the suggestion that faith is not so much up to them as it is to God, something we still struggle with today. And of course the main part of the discourse we’ve been reading about eating Jesus’ flesh and blood. Whatever it is that sets them off, Jesus says this is about to get hard.

“This teaching is difficult,” the crowds say, “who can accept it?” Fair enough. Not much of what Jesus says is easy, actually. Jesus is not a great candidate if you read through his typical campaign speeches. He asks us to believe the impossible. That God would come as a human being. That economic gain is the not standard by which we are meant to operate. That every person has worth and value and ought to be treated as such. He deftly avoids the questions of those in power and spends his time with people who have no likelihood of increasing his popularity. All the while something about abounding grace that supersedes our present reality. This teaching is difficult, and Jesus doesn’t gloss over it or try to paint a rosier picture. So many turn away. And Jesus turns to his closest group and asks them, “Do you also wish to go away?”

When I read that this week, I thought, you know, some days, yes. Some days the alternatives seem easier, simpler. Some days Jesus’ call to discipleship – to grace and care for neighbor and forgiveness and all the other things. Yeah, maybe I’ll follow the path over there with that other guy who promises health and wealth and happiness on the journey. Sure it probably won’t last, but it sure sounds better than this pessimist.

But somehow I think God understands that impulse. I wonder even whether Jesus speaks the question with a sense of compassion. “Look folks, this isn’t easy, and I get it if you need to bow out now.” And I wonder if going away is always such a bad thing. This crowd in particular has feasted on the loaves and fishes. They have taken in God’s abundance. God’s presence goes with them as they walk away. And perhaps God is doing something else in their journeys.

But Peter, who so often speaks much more than he even realizes he is saying, suggests that there is nowhere else to go. This road may be hard, but we trust your promise, Jesus, that in going there is eternal life. He doesn’t know any more about what that actually entails than any of the 22 presidential candidates do about what the next four-year presidential term will entail.

Nor do we know. We do not know what our baptismal journey from the font to the grave will confront us with. The church for all its research into emerging trends doesn’t know what the best way to do church in the 21^st century is. We do not know the answers to how best to live as people of faith in the complex world we face. We do not have all the answers to fix the big problems. But perhaps the question before us is whether follow the hero of the moment who promises everything we want or the one who preaches power in weakness and the master bowing in service to others and the one offering himself for our participation in eternal life?

I cannot promise that following Jesus will be easy. I cannot promise our work will transform the world’s problems. I cannot even promise that this church and this pastor will never let you down. I don’t think we say that enough – that failure is a part of our story. The way of Jesus is the way of failure. It’s a path that is marked by our inability to succeed, our inability to find full and abundant life on our own. But with Jesus that failure is not the end. If we choose to go away, I believe God still comes alongside, but we risk missing the previews along the way of how the story ends. We risk missing glimpses of the incredible power of resurrection in the failure that inevitably comes.

With compassion, Jesus lets much of the crowd go. With compassion he acknowledges that this teaching is difficult and the road ahead even more so. But with the promise of eternal life he pulls his closest followers along until in the midst of the worst they can imagine, new life emerges. And in doing so God gathers all those who wandered off, sweeping them up into the new world that emerges.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, August 16, 2015
Sermon for Vespers at Rockridge Retirement Community

[Jesus said,] 51 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” – John 6:51-58

Anyone ever played poker? I was never much good at it myself. I always have trouble remembering all the combinations and which one is better than the other. And I was never much into the gambling part of it, unless there was no actual money involved, in which case I was quite willing to gamble with chips that had no value outside the game itself. Gambling, of course, can be serious and risky business. Some people avoid it altogether while others advocate only in moderation. But there’s a gambling phrase that has carried over into other parts of life. If you want to bet with everything you have left, you say, “I’m all in!” You believe so much in the hand you’ve got that you’re willing to risk everything to prove it.

Jesus makes an invitation in today’s gospel reading for us to be “all in.” He’s been engaging in a theological debate with the people around him following his miraculous feeding of 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. They are skeptical at best of his claim to be God in the flesh. They are skeptical that God could come in the form of human being. They are skeptical that God could be present in something as ordinary and everyday as bread.

But now! Now he has crossed the line with his invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Those in most Christian traditions have become accustomed to the language used in communion, in the sharing of bread and wine and the way in which that action done together draws us into the presence of God. But to those who first heard this incredible statement, it must have come as quite a shock to them. But Jesus makes the invitation all the more strongly – eat and drink, it is the only way for you to be “all in” with God.

It’s a big risk to go “all in” with someone. Whether it’s marriage or a deep friendship or love for family members, we know that when we go “all in” with our love for another person it’s risky. It’s risky because people will inevitably let us down in ways big and small. And we know it’s risky because life is fragile and doesn’t last forever.

Still Jesus wants us to go “all in”. Eat and drink he says, make Jesus a part of your life in such a way that you can’t separate him out again any more than the dinner roll you ate with your evening meal. Take Jesus’ offer to go “all in”, to give oneself over to Jesus. And if you think about it, it’s awfully terrifying to let go of control that much. A risky proposition, no matter how much we trust God, to give up the control we think we have on life.

But here’s the thing. For this whole thing to work, Jesus has to be “all in” before we are. We may like to think it’s all about us jumping on board with Jesus, but before that’s even possible, Jesus is “all in” with us. For us to take Jesus in like bread, Jesus has to give himself up first. God has to offer his body for the life of the world. And it’s a risk. Because God knows how much we mess things up. We fight over everything from petty squabbles to international war. We hurt one another. We fail to respect ourselves and one another. We break promises. Our bodies break and fail. And all of us one day face death. We are not a good bet. But God takes a risk anyway. God says, “I’m ‘all in’ with you.” Jesus offers himself as living bread for the life of the world. Whether we muster the courage to cast ourselves “all in” with Jesus or not, God bets on us and goes “all in”. There’s no going back from the pouring out of life for all from the cross and empty tomb.

And most of us have learned to hear this as a promise of life forever after death. But it’s so much more than that. God being “all in” transforms our life with each other today. If God is “all in,” then my pain, grief, and sickness is born by God as well. If God is “all in,” then my broken spirit and broken relationships are part of God’s story, too. If God is “all in,” then my failures and weaknesses are part of God’s life. Which makes eternal life, God’s life, a reality today. Eternal life is a gift offered to us now because God is already “all in” with us.

And that is the heart of Jesus’ long theological argument about bread. That God has thrown every last bit of God’s very self into this world to bring eternal life into our present reality and to raise us up again on the last day.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday, August 16, 2015

[Jesus said,] 51 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
  52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” – John 6:51-58

I can’t say I’m a big fan of the kind of reality television shows where people do gross things to win money, but my father is a big fan, so I’ve seen them on occasion. People will get in a box with snakes or bugs. People will crawl through mud or worse. People will eat things that just shouldn’t be eaten. And the prize that is held out in front of them is an ever-growing pot of cash, sometimes literally waved before their eyes to motivate them. If that’s you’re thing, go for it, and with gusto. But most of us probably aren’t going there.

That’s how the crowd takes Jesus’ invitation today to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Those who eat and drink, Jesus says, have eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day. They weigh their options, and despite how great that offer sounds, they’re not up for what is to them not only gross, but unlawful. They know better as faithful Jewish people that one is forbidden from consuming the blood of any creature, the blood that contains, many say, the life force of a creature. And lawful or not they know it’s just wrong to eat other people. They may be dissatisfied with life as it is, but this does not seem like it’s going to make things any better.

But Jesus is talking about much more than doing this disgusting if not impossible action as means to an end. Because fundamental to their concern is that Jesus will not survive their eating and drinking. To take him up on his offer, Jesus will first have to die. The gospel writer some 70 years later knows what lies ahead for Jesus. We know the Jesus gives his life up rather than compromise his proclamation of God’s radical love. But to this gathered crowd the idea that someone who is claiming earlier in the conversation to be God in the flesh could then give up that flesh for others is beyond their comprehension. The idea that death was not the final word and the idea that abundance of life was possible in a broken world, these ideas, too, were beyond comprehension.

Because we come to the table week after week, we have grown used to the language that once offended and disgusted. We have accepted this profound offering as normative, even – the thing we do when gather together. And each time it may touch us deeply, but I wonder if we remember to stand in awe of the fact that in this feast God offers God’s self to us. Do we recognize that eternal life is not our reward for eating and drinking, but the participation in God’s sharing of God’s self with us?

We are people who grieve, especially this week the Urch family and those closest to Dorothy, but all of us grieving for losses experienced. And God does not offer to take away the pain of grief. God does not offer another day or week of life. Instead God offers God’s very self. God offers to die with us. God offers to be consumed and given away to anyone and everyone.

We are people who are overwhelmed by worries and responsibilities. We have full schedules and can see the school year rolling in, the sign of another summer coming to a close. We feel the weight of so many things. And God does not offer a quick fix or an easy way out if only we just feast at the table. But God does offer to give God’s self away, to join us in the ways we know depletion and the passing of time.

We are people who long for an end to violence, hatred, division, oppression, abuse, illness, depression, war, and all the other things that go along with it. We are overwhelmed with it all and would, most of us, take on something icky if we thought it offered a fix for even a large part of any of that for the world. But that is not what is offered at the table. What is offered is life, eternal life. What is before us on the table is the source of life itself pouring out from an endless store, over and over again the riches of life that sustain us in the present, that invite us to live in eternal life now, today, to live in the presence of a God who gives life away to everyone who comes, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death on earth.

So what we do at the table is not a transaction – eating flesh and blood so that we win a ticket to heaven. Instead it is the participation in God’s being broken and given away for the life of the world. And we call it Eucharist, from the Greek word for “to give thanks.” We prayer week after week in praise of God’s mercies of old, God’s mercies in Christ, God’s mercy in offering us the bread of life and cup of salvation, and we invite the Spirit to fill us again, and unite us in God’s ever-flowing life and send us out as food for the world. That’s eternal life, to participate in God’s life today.

There is the promise of resurrection on the last day, but first there is the offer of eternal life now, in the midst of the things we face. There is hope and healing now even when there is not a cure. There is the presence of God even while kingdoms rage and bodies and minds fail.

So come, again, to the table. Be taken aback once again at the wondrous thing that takes place here. Not just the transformation of bread and wine that brings us the presence of Jesus, but that God has and continues to give life away freely to all who hunger. Not in exchange for our participation in a ritual that seems strange and even abhorrent to those who do not yet understand it, but because the source of life can do nothing else but pour it forth for a hurting and dying world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday, August 9

35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.  41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” -John 6:35, 41-51

Have you every tried to be somebody you weren’t? Most of us learn somewhere along the way that to get along in life we actually are supposed to do that in public – be some false self to get through. There are occasions when it’s not a bad skill to have for sticky situations, but it’s way overused. There are moments we try to come off as more intellectual than we really are. There are moments when we pretend to agree with people in order to get through a conversation. There are times we try to fake being happy to hide the things we won’t or can’t name. Many LGBTQ people have tried to pass as straight either to get through a particular situation or to survive for years in communities and families where it isn’t accepted. In some times and places women wrote novels or published research under a male pseudonym because it was the only way for it to be respected in a gender-biased culture. People of color have tried to pass as white in physical appearance or behavior or speech because of the messed up system that suggested that was somehow better and that continues to allow for violence against those who don’t measure up. Whatever it is we are pretending to be, it’s utterly exhausting.

So I’m a little hesitant about Paul’s invitation to be imitators of God. And you thought trying to pass as a put-together, upstanding, polite, middle-class citizen was hard. It’s a tall order indeed. Most people think imitating God has something to do with wearing fancy robes. And a vocabulary free of profanity. Some people think imitating God is strict physical and sexual morality. Some people think imitating God is about serious expressions, deep, booming voices, and fancy language that recalls Elizabethan England. Some people think imitating God is about being something we’re not.

That’s exactly the problem that the people who have come crawling after Jesus have. They complain, the NRSV translation says. They get upset because this ordinary person they have seen grow up, this ordinary person who walks around on two feet, albeit sometimes on water, this ordinary person who talks and eats with them, this ordinary person claims to be God. Or at least claims to have come down from heaven. Don’t be ridiculous! He didn’t come from heaven. He came from Nazareth. If you’re going to go around imitating God, actually claiming to be God they say, you’d better do a little more than multiply some loaves and fish and do a little walking on water trick. If you’re going to imitate God, don’t you think you’d better start out at the synagogue or better yet at the temple?

These are people who see God up there. Or over there in Jerusalem in holy of holies of the temple. God is something above and beyond. Anyone who goes around claiming to be God is certainly full of himself and maybe outright delusional. And Jesus doesn’t say they’re wrong that God is dwelling there in the temple and above and in fancy finery. But Jesus does point them back to the bread and to the God-made-flesh among them. Jesus refuses to accept their premise that God is not in the ordinary stuff of life.

God does not claim to be alive in fancy food set on fine china, but in the ordinary bread of the people. God does not claim to be alive in an elite group of people at the top of the political, social, economic, or theological pyramid. Jesus claims to be alive in the flesh of an ordinary human being with parents and siblings and a barely memorable childhood in an out-of-the-way town. The people are not angry that Jesus suggests God is present among them. They are angry that Jesus suggests God is present in himself and in the bread which they have eaten and digested and yes, perhaps by this point in the story excreted the remnants of. Maybe they are afraid that God’s presence in ordinary things will change them in ways they don’t want to be changed.

Be imitators of God, Paul says. If we listen to the crowds we will only exhaust ourselves. We will only run around putting up a false self that becomes more and more distant from who we are. The real, embodied person we are gets hidden away under pretense. But if we listen to Jesus, if we boldly eat the bread of life set before us, our call to imitate God is a call to be more truly ourselves. The call to imitate God is to trust in the wisdom of the one who created us as flawed and fallible human beings. The call to imitate God is to stop imitating anything at all and live in the fullness of who we are.

Paul’s list of do’s and don’ts are clue perhaps of some of the ways we might fall into the trap of putting up a front. Stealing instead of creating for others those things which God has given us the individual gifts to create. Not seeking reconciliation with our anger. Using our mouths to spew the things that encourage us and others to hide our true selves, rather than using them to draw out the true self from behind all that. Feeding our bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander, and malice until they eat away at us from inside. These are things that draw us away from the people God has created us to be, the things that might signal to us when we are not trusting the presence of God in the most ordinary of things, when we fail to trust the presence of God in ourselves and in one another.

It is in the bread that we recognize the presence of God already at work within us. It is in the incarnate God held in the cradle of our hands and squished between our teeth that we recognize who and what we are in all of our ordinariness – the body of Christ in the world. And it is in the bread that we recognize we, too, have been given to others, bearing God to the world around us in and through the ordinariness of our daily lives.

Sisters and brothers, be imitators of God. Seek to love God, self, and neighbor, but above all seek to recognize God dwelling in you. In your flesh and bone in your bread and wine. Know God’s presence transforming your ordinariness into something extraordinary. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

August 2, 2015

24 When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were [beside the sea,] they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
  25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 26 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 28 Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30 So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” 32 Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
  35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” – John 6:24-35

 

12 basketfuls! That’s how much was left over from the meal. Everyone had their fill and just to prove it, Jesus had the disciples pick up the leftovers that people were simply too full to eat. Last week we heard the first part of this chapter from John’s gospel. Jesus gathers a crowd on the hillside and then suggests they all have a meal together. Except all they have are 5 loaves of bread and two fish. And so Jesus does the well-known miracle to make that food enough for the crowd of 5000 who had gathered. And really that should have been the end of the story. They came to Jesus to be amazed by his words and actions. Perhaps they came to eat, and if so they have gotten what they came for. So they really all ought to head home content.

But they don’t. They chased after Jesus in last week’s reading and when they wake up to find he has literally walked across the lake overnight, they jump into any boat they can find and take off across the lake. The meal, the one in which they ate their fill and then some, has actually made them hungry. Having eaten the bread they now know a hunger that will not let them go. The energy of this story reveals a kind of desperate search – a need to find this Jesus who has fed them.

When they finally get to Jesus, they ask what is actually an odd question for the line of conversation. They don’t respond directly to what Jesus has just said, but seemingly out of nowhere they ask, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” The bread of life digesting inside them has made them hungry for the work of God’s kingdom.

This being John’s gospel, Jesus’ answer is a bit opaque but also an invitation to relationship with God through relationship with Jesus. It’s an invitation to recognize the body of Christ in the world around us and to serve others and the world God made. And even though Jesus doesn’t elaborate much, Paul does in his letter to the Ephesians. The hunger that being a part of this meal awakens is a hunger to use the gifts that God has given us. “To each of us,” Paul says, “was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift…the gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.” This meal awakens in the crowd these gifts that demand to be shared. This meal makes us hungry for the work of ministry.

I spent the past week at Camp Calumet trying to help the campers and counselors to unpack exactly that. What is God’s love all about? And how does that love compel us to love of neighbor? We hit some obvious examples. Kids talked about serving in food pantries in their home congregations and the way they reached out to include others who were lonely or bullied. They talked about doing simple acts of service for one another in the course of daily living – getting a glass of water, holding the door, saying hello with a smile. But the hunger that stems from this meal is more than the everyday kinds of things that civility and kindness require, more than the campers had words to express. This is a deeper hunger. This is a hunger to upend the world as it is. This is a hunger for the full presence of God’s kingdom. I think most of them left with that hunger, thanks more to the ethos of the place than the chaplain’s morning and evening devotions, full of their experience of a place that lives out God’s radical hospitality and abundant love and grace. And they left hungry to carry the love of God and neighbor home to their daily lives.

And this meal makes us hungry for daily ministry. Those of you who hear me preach regularly know that I firmly believe that a huge part of that ministry is outside the walls of this building and the auspices of this congregation. Ministry that is embedded in your daily lives from conserving energy at home to parenting your children to doing whatever it is that fills your day to the fullest. This meal makes us hungry for that kind of ministry. This meal awakens in us the gifts that each of us has been given and compels us to use them.

But to eat this meal in a particular community, to be a part of this feast at this table, is not just a call to ministry in general but a call to be a part of extending this feast from this table and congregation. Each of the people among us whether coming here for years or visiting today have gifts for ministry that enrich and expand the work of God in this place. Some of you have expressed interest in being a part of expanding the healing ministry of this congregation. Some of you have taken on the challenge of justice work on behalf of the environment with our caring for creation team. Others care for our building and grounds as the physical space for us to welcome the community and from which we can be sent out. Still others tend to administrative and other leadership tasks. Fellowship, music and teaching, service to neighbors in need and food for those who hunger. Each person who gathers for the feast has a gift for this place. And filled every Sunday with the bread of life, we go forth from this table hungry to share it.

And this meal unites us with the body of Christ that is larger than any one of our individual wants and desires. It ties us to the peoples who first sang what we are singing today: the Muscogee Hallelujah and Heri Ni Jina. Santo, Santo, Santo, and the Chinese blessing. It ties us to the people who are oppressed and ignored, the sick and forgotten, the stranger and the outcast. It ties us to the members of our community who are absent from us today and those who are present with us at the heavenly table. This meal fills us with an awareness of their presence and makes us hungry anew for diverse community, justice for all people, and hungry for the power of resurrection among us.

By feasting here we are fed with the body of Christ. By feasting here we are filled to bursting with the presence of Christ, and Christ’s promise is true that we need not hunger for Christ’s presence again. And yet being filled by the presence of Christ has its own way of making us hungry, at least as unsettled as we are satisfied. To eat at this table and to walk away feeling altogether comfortable is to have missed something about the meal. It is to have missed the hard work of being drawn together into God’s community. So come eat again at this feast in which Jesus is both host and meal. Be filled with the bread of life. And become hungry again for the kingdom of God coming to birth among us.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

July 26, 2015

1 Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. 3 Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. 5 When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” 10 Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. 14 When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”
  15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
  16 When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. 18 The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. 19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. 20 But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” 21 Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going. – John 6:1-21

The disciples probably didn’t need Jesus to point out the problem to them. If they’re like any other group of people, they were already aware of the problem a gathering crowd presented even if there was enough grass for them all to sit down on. They were probably silently thinking about how to deal with this crowd of 5,000 people or whispering to one another a few complaints about how Jesus just never considers how to deal with things in a practical sense. So Jesus brings it out into the open – and with a question, no less: “How will we feed all these hungry people?”

Philip doesn’t have an answer, but by golly this is Jesus asking and so he’s going to do his darnedest to come up with something. Maybe he says to Jesus, “Just a moment, let me take a look around.” Perhaps he asks Judas the keeper of budget for Jesus’ Galilean ministry program. Perhaps he consults the map for the nearest farmer’s market. Perhaps he calls around to a few caterers to figure out if they can swing at least a reception with heavy appetizers if not a full dinner feast. Coming up short, he returns to Jesus with Andrew, who has a meager offering that he took from a young boy. He’s probably already mentally dividing it in his head. 5 loaves, 2 fish, 5000 people. 5 loaves, 2 fish, 5000 people. Over and over again imaging that if you just had a small enough knife somehow each person might get a crumb. He doesn’t say it outright, but he’s trying to tell Jesus it’s just not going to work. Let’s just give up and go home.

But how well we know the frantic searching for solutions. How well we know the enormity of the need we face. Another week of violent news. Another shooting that drew national attention, and a whole lot of gun violence that didn’t even register in our collective consciousness. Once again we cycle through polarized arguments about how to solve the problem – put more guns in the hands of the so-called good guys or enact and enforce stricter gun laws, knowing deep down that neither of those solutions fixes the problem of violence in our hearts. Like Philip running around for a solution to the need that confronts him, we are at a loss to solve this problem.

And how well we know the continued problems of racism that has once again finally been named as a problem after years of denial. We look for laws to enact or enforce. We look for categories of people to blame. We run around for a solution to the tension that Jesus confronts us with, and we realize the solution is bigger than we can solve on our own. Who are we against so much need?

And how well we know the inadequacies of our own lives. How often we come face-to-face with our inability to transform our own worst habits and our ever-failing bodies. We seek books and programs and mentors. We try spiritual practices and prayer and confession, running from person to person seeking the solution. Do you have the bread I need?  And still we remain broken people.

Jesus, having let Philip and the other disciples run around for a few moments, looks into their frantic and tired eyes and asks for their meager offering. Give to me what you have, Jesus says. And more than likely the disciples hand over the bread and fish but they hold onto their fear and anxiety. I suspect, if they’re anything like me, they sit back and laugh at Jesus’ confidence that this is all somehow going to be alright. They laugh at the notion that the enormity of need that they confront can be met with what little they have.

And in the face of the skeptics, Jesus gives thanks and breaks the bread and begins to feed the crowd. He distributes chunks of bread and pieces of fish. And like the bit at the end of the gospel reading where the boat magically jumps to shore, maybe Jesus is able to distribute this food to 5,000 people before the disciples even realize what is happening. Suddenly they are eating bread and fish, aware now that the need was not only in the people around them but deep within themselves, too. And so with the 5000 they begin to eat.

Now, the idea of a genuine miracle is sometimes, shall we say, hard to swallow. There are attempts to explain it away. But such scientific or sociological rationalizations while satisfying in their own right, do not leave us hungering for more. They do not send crowds racing around a lake to crown someone king. And maybe, best yet, they do not upset the world order.

But our need, our hunger is for the turning upside down of a world marked by violence, division, and death. Our hunger is for the God who transforms our desperate situation before our eyes in ways we cannot understand. Our hunger is for a God who agrees that we are not enough on our own but who then feeds the whole world anyway with basketfuls to spare.

So we gather hungry at this table today, hungry for peace, hungry for safety, hungry for rest, hungry for justice. And we do not have all the answers. We are not enough. And so we say a prayer of thanks for all that God has done for us and all that God has already promised to do for us in the future. And we break the bread and share it together. In doing so we participate in the promise of God’s miraculous transformation of the world.

In the eating we become what we receive, the body of Christ. And so it is that our desperate searching for answers is interrupted. The burden we so often carry of the world’s deep need is lifted. And God transforms us into food for the world. God uses what is not enough to satisfy the hunger. God uses people who cannot see the answer, who cannot solve the problem, who cannot manage to trust God despite all that they have already seen and heard, God uses us in the feeding of the world.

So come, you who do not have enough, you who feel you are not enough, receive from God the bread. Participate in this feast of abundance. Be transformed into the body of Christ.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sunday July 12, 2015

⁷This is what he showed me: the LORD was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.  ⁸And the LORD said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the LORD said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; ⁹the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.” 
¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words.  ¹¹For thus Amos has said, ‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.'” ¹²And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there;  ¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”  ¹⁴Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees,  ¹⁵and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ – Amos 7:7-15

³Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,  ⁴just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.  ⁵He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will,  ⁶to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.  ⁷In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace  ⁸that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight  ⁹he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ,  ¹⁰as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.  ¹¹In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will,  ¹²so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.  ¹³In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit;  ¹⁴this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory. – Ephesians 1:3-14

In Ephesians, Paul makes reference to a word of truth. But I wonder how we know what a word of truth is. I recently saw a somewhat unscientific but nonetheless disturbing representation of how truthful certain television news outlets were. Some were more truthful than others – I won’t name names – but the disturbing thing is that none of them had a particularly high rate of truth. The best ones, at least in the very small sample size, were just over 50% of their stories being true or mostly true. How are we supposed to know the truth?

Though I haven’t heard as much of this lately, for a time there was a great deal of concern that our society was moving to a place of moral relativism, and people decried what might become of us without a firm moral standard for all people in all times and places. Though no such standard has ever really existed, there was a concern that we would not be able to find the truth. With so many people in so many cultures with so many diverse views on the world, how can we define the truth?

So as we turn to our readings for today, which are admittedly in competition for the most unusual choices in the whole 3-year cycle of the revised common lectionary, we ask what the standard is by which we judge what is true?

Is Herod’s truth real? In some ways we know the truth of this story. People in power use their influence to wine and dine others. People in power find themselves trapped between what they know to be right and what they know to be politically expedient. People in power use violence a little too freely. The story of John the Baptist’s beheading, inserted here as a rare flashback in the gospel narrative, is one kind of truth. Truth about the world as it is. And not just the truth about political leaders but the truth about who we are.

This story reminds us of our own capacity for violence. It reminds us of the ways in which we sometimes naively trust others to makes decisions for us. It reminds us of the ways we do damage to others with words and even sometimes with fists. It reminds us of the capacity we all have within us to violate what we know is right when the opportunity seems like a good one. It reminds us that political movements still literally behead people. Herod and his violence are one truth of our world – the truth of what is.

But what about the truth that the prophet Amos speaks about? It’s a little hard to catch what’s going on here on a first read of this short excerpt, but Amos, the country shepherd, has come to the center of political and religious power to speak out about the injustices against the poor. He has ticked off both the official temple prophet and the king, who are afraid that Amos is upsetting the apple cart. Amos’s message in this particular passage is that God is holding a plumb line to the people of Israel and finding them less than upright.

In Amos’s overall message is another truth: the truth of what could be, the way of justice that God has laid out for God’s people. Caring for the widows, orphans, and strangers. Leaving some grain in the fields to be gleaned by the needy. The forgiveness of debts on regular cycle. The provisions for rest and renewal built in to their lives. This is the way we are to live, Amos reminds Israel and reminds us. And we need Amoses in all times and places to point out the ways we are falling short, to remind us of the truth of what could be.

A word of caution: there are those who misuse this truth by running around holding it up as a way to blame, accuse, abuse, or shame individuals who aren’t living up. Whether it’s moral shaming on hot-button social issues, or political mudslinging about whose policies are worse for the flourishing of society, or simply using it to win an argument, all of us are guilty in one way or another of holding up the truth of what could be as a weapon or using it in judgment of others when we fail to hold ourselves to the same standards. Which is why I’m not sure the truth of what could be is the ultimate final forever truth of God either.

Because there is yet another truth. It’s the truth poured over us in the waters of baptism. Newly-baptized Ellie, like all of us, will soon enough discover the trouble of the world as it is. And she will grow in her baptismal calling to strive for justice and peace in all the earth – to work toward the truth of what could be. She will be a reflection of God’s divine work in the world, and she will fall short of perfection. She, like all of us, will straddle the line between what is and what could be for most of her life.

But what is true for us through baptism is not the world’s plumb line, and not even God’s plumb line of a just and peaceful world, but the plumb line of the cross. The measure of the God’s self-sacrificing love for the world. The truth of the way that God sees us and the way that God loves us. The truth of what Paul expresses in today’s reading from Ephesians: adoption as God’s children through Christ, a plan for the fullness of time to gather up all things in him, marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit as the pledge of our redemption as God’s own people.

This truth is love that sees what is and just how short we fall of what could be and yet remains love for us. It’s as if God holds up the plumb line and seeing how terribly far off we are calls us straight enough. Not excusing us from the hard work of justice and peace, in fact sometimes urging us all the more toward that work, but loving us and calling us children of God in spite of it.

I have a good friend who likes to say, “God draws straight with crooked lines.” That’s what I think today’s texts are all about. People who go astray and who get folded into the saving and redeeming work of Jesus Christ all the more. The powerful waters of baptism hold us up not to the world’s standards or the standards of justice and peace but to the love of God for us. And they propel us on a wild and wonderful journey with this rich and diverse community of faith filled with people from every place under the sun. Thanks be to God for this incredible grace.

-Pastor Steven Wilco