Third Sunday in Lent
March 8, 2015

¹³The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  ¹⁴In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. ¹⁵Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  ¹⁶He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  ¹⁷His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  ¹⁸The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”  ¹⁹Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  ²⁰The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”  ²¹But he was speaking of the temple of his body.  ²²After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. – John 2:13-22

See also the first reading, which is the giving of the 10 Commandments: Exodus 20:1-17.

Many of you may know CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Four young children find their way through the back of a wardrobe into the fantastical land of Narnia, and find themselves in the midst of a land aching for release from the snow and ice kingdom of the white witch. (It’s not a stretch for us to imagine the desire to be liberated from a seemingly eternal winter!) The Christ-figure who will guide them and be their strength is a lion named Aslan. When the two young Pevensie girls are preparing to meet him for the first time they are asking questions of their new friends Mrs. and Mr. Beaver. They start with the assumption that Aslan is a man, and Mr. Beaver responds:

“Aslan a man? Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion — the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh!” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he — quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

One has to wonder if the Jesus we meet in today’s gospel is altogether safe. Overturning the tables of money changers and sellers of animals for sacrifice and generally causing a riotous uproar in the courtyard of the temple, Jesus is capable here of creating quite a disaster.

There was a standard system in place. People came to the temple, they exchanged their currency for temple currency, they bought the appropriate animal for sacrifice, and went to the priests to perform the required rites. These sacrifices were not just acceptable, they were part of what God asked of the Israelites. It was part of what they were expected to do. It was below the 10 commandments, but definitely a huge part of the other 603 commandments in the Torah. The Hebrew word used to cover all the different religious sacrifices is from the root word that means to draw close or come near. This was the system designed to draw near to God. And whatever dishonesty had entered the process by way of human control of it, John’s gospel actually downplays that part.

This is Jesus, coming into the center of their religious practice and reminding them that this business of drawing near to God is not, in fact, altogether safe. This was the message of the prophets before him who told the people over and over again that completing the sacrifice did not in fact complete their obligation to live lives of justice and mercy. The sacrifice was only the beginning of drawing near to God. The thing that so many seemed to have forgotten, the thing that we most of the time forget, is that drawing near to God was not a simple transaction – buying the appropriate animal and doing the appropriate task. Drawing near to God meant living in the company of a dangerous lion.

Perhaps we, too, like to simplify our religious practice to a transaction. Take the 10 commandments. I think we are too often guilty of assuming they are about transactions. I do and don’t do these things and I get blessings for doing the right thing. Or I do and don’t do these things and God will love me more. Or maybe most subtly and therefore most deceptive of all, I do and don’t do these things and I am more worthy of God’s love. Jesus himself was clear that he did not come to turn the tables on these 10 commandments, though I’m intrigued by the question of how many commandments Jesus broke, if any, in his little rampage through the temple courts. But I do think Jesus intended to overturn any misguided ideas that following these laws was about getting something out of it or getting something from God by doing it. Instead I think they call us to a radical life of turning the tables on our economy which is largely based on coveting our neighbors and their stuff, a radical life of caring for those who are hurting or injured, a radical life of taking rest from the busyness of life and setting aside the idols we cherish as a community and society. To live out these commandments in their fullest expression would overturn a good bit of the world around us, a calling that is far from safe.

And we apply the same to our spiritual lives and our relationships with church. Perhaps if I deepen my spiritual practice I’ll find myself more at peace and happier in my day-to-day life. If I could give a little more or do a little more I’d probably get closer to God. Perhaps if we could just manage to do everything right we could sit comfortably next to God in a pleasant and peaceful existence. But what happens when God reaches into our lives either through those attempts we manage or through something else altogether, is that we do find ourselves suddenly closer to God but that God is not at all what we had expected we’d find. Instead we find ourselves seated next to a lion. Not one who has plans to consume us, but one who certainly has the power to do so and more to the point the power to encourage us to do things that might scare the heck out of us.

It seems to me that more than anything, this table-turning riot was at least as much about reminding people that at the heart of the temple where they stand is a God who is just a little bit unstable. A God who might just do something like destroy the temple and rebuild it again in three days. A Christ who might just destroy himself and rise again in three days.

And it’s that Christ who offers himself to us at this table. I warn you, though, that as good as it might be, it is not altogether safe to approach this table. Because we take into ourselves this somewhat unstable, table-turning prophet. We take into ourselves the call to the cross. We take into ourselves the power of the one discomforts us and sends us out to upend things in the world around us.

To eat at this table is to take into our very being this table-turning gospel. It is to reject an economy that is based primarily on giving and getting. It is to reject that human beings or that any other part of creation are commodities to be offered and exchanged. It is to reject that we can control God or ourselves with simple back and forth transactions. It’s to be fed with an insatiable hunger for justice and mercy, to be unsettled and turned-upside down. It’s to be sent out to be table-turners and justice seekers, offering ourselves to one another.

So, no, it isn’t at all safe. But it is good, because the one at the center who turned everything upside down with the cross and the empty tomb, that one draws near to us and will fiercely lead us forth through our wilderness into life.

-Pastor Steven Wilco (with thanks to Dan Clendenin for the reminder about the passage from the Chronicles of Narnia)

Second Sunday in Lent
March 1, 2015

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.  ²And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”  ³Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him,  ⁴“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  ⁵No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  ⁶I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.  ⁷I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.  ¹⁵God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.  ¹⁶I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” – Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

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 8:31-38

It’s official. Churches are no longer the best place to go to learn morality.

Well, that’s not exactly the headline from the research, but that’s the gist of what some are saying after several recent studies including one from Pew Research which suggest that statistically speaking, on average, a person raised in a secular environment is actually slightly more likely to rate more highly on a scale of moral indicators. Those posting this are mostly secularists who are, with good reason, tired of Christians implying that non-religious people are without a moral compass.

But me? I’m glad to see this research. Because maybe it’s an opportunity for the church to stop pretending that our primary purpose is to make one another better people. To stop pretending that our goal as the church is to be good and nice and happy. Because I’m pretty sure that’s not what God’s call to the church is about.

Frankly, God didn’t call Abram and Sarai from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans to be a moral family with a suburban home and 2.4 children. Let’s take a moment to review where they’ve been when we meet up with them in today’s reading. Out of the middle of nowhere, God showed up and called Abram at the age of 75 to pick up his wife and family, his tents, his livestock, and his servants, and travel to a far off land in return for the blessing of land, protection, and descendants. When he gets there he has to live side-by-side with the rightful occupants of that land who don’t honestly seem all that friendly. There’s a famine so he travels even farther into Egypt. He’s afraid of outright hostility so he tries to pass his wife off as his sister to the Pharaoh, which gets them all in hot water. When he returns to the land that was promised, he has to rescue his nephew from the hands of the local rulers. Abram does get a blessing from the priest, but gives away a tenth of his wealth in return. When he starts to doubt this promise for descendents, God tells him his descendents will be as numerous as the stars, which, honestly, is a whole lot more than anyone wants to have to handle, especially given God’s delay in getting one to begin with. Then he gets a terribly dark message from God about all the terrible things these many descendants will have to endure. Finally they have been waiting so long, that sometime after Abram’s 86^th birthday, Sarai sends him in to her slave, Hagar, who bears him a son while managing to create, as you might imagine, some difficulty for all their relationships with one another.

So, are they Courageous? Absolutely. Loyal? Fiercely. Bold risk-takers? You bet. Faithful? Beyond belief. But moral? Well…some moments more than others. But God didn’t call them for that. God called them to be God’s people and to trust boldly, even stupidly at times.

You see, this was not the first or the last of God’s call to take up your cross and follow Jesus. A good 3-6 centuries before the Romans invented it, Abram and Sarai were told to pick up their cross in their own way. God didn’t send them out with the purpose of suffering, but God didn’t beat around the bush about it being a part of the journey either.  So when it’s time for the disciples to hear the same message, Jesus isn’t going to shield them from it, either. They need to know what it is they have really been called to do.

The question for us is what kind of cross-bearing is God calling us to now.

Doing good stuff isn’t easy. It’s hard to remember to serve others all the time, to be kind and compassionate in every interaction, to always respect the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual needs of self and other, to care for the earth at every turn in word and deed. It’s not easy, but it’s not cross-bearing. It’s not losing your life in order to save it.

And making the church run isn’t easy. For those involved in the work of the church – that is all of us – it’s hard work. Making sure the building and the finances are in good order, making sure the committees and sign up sheets are full, keeping peace between people and anxiety manageable – it’s all a challenge. But it’s not cross-bearing either. It’s not putting personal comfort and safety ahead of the gospel.

Putting up with minor ridicule for the faith in a progressive community isn’t great, but I’m not sure that’s cross-bearing either. Putting up with any number of ailments, difficulties, sufferings, and annoyances are downright hard, but they’re not cross-bearing either.

Cross-bearing is that calling in you that is deeper than you can identify, that call you’ve been trying to avoid but it won’t let you go, that thing that asks you to pick up all you have and all that you are and go, that thing that calls you to courage and bravery and risk-taking, that clinging to hope in the face of despair, that which calls you forward when you cannot imagine another single step. Cross-bearing is being okay with the kind of grace from God that will break you apart into a thousand tiny pieces such that you’re a whole new creation when God puts you back together. Cross-bearing is submitting to death because you trust the one who says it’s the only way to life

So what cross-bearing is God calling you to now?

Whatever it is, it’s not easy. Lectionary blogger Dan Clendenin puts it this way: “The deist god is remote, safe and silent. He won’t bother you. He won’t intervene in human history or answer your prayers. And he sure won’t speak to you or do the impossible.” The milquetoast God that we more often than not imagine, the one who sits around asking people to be good and nice and happy isn’t the God who calls us to the cross. The problem is, that God also doesn’t call us to the resurrection.

The call from the God of Abraham and Sarah and the call from Jesus is one that uproots us, challenges us, discomforts us, calls us to bold and risky things, changes our very identity, laughs at our rational excuses, and asks us to do the impossible.

So we engage this Lenten wilderness wandering together seeking to be a community not just to support one another in doing works of mercy and caring for self and other, but seeking to be a community that supports one another in taking bold risks.

And that’s ultimately a whole lot harder than being a good person. And maybe, most days not that appealing. But it comes from a God of deep love. A God of deep compassion. A God with the power to pull life from a barren woman and bodies from the grave. A God who bears the cross with us lest we bear it alone. This call comes from the only God who knows that we all end up cross-bearing one way or another and from the only God who knows that it’s the only way to resurrection.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

Memorial Service for Richard Bachtold
February 22, 2015

¹⁷For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
¹⁸But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
¹⁹I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
²⁰No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, 
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
²¹They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
²²They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
²³They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity; 
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD — 
and their descendants as well.
²⁴Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
²⁵The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent — its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the LORD. – Isaiah 65:17-25

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb  ²through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  ³Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him;  ⁴they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.  ⁵And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.- Revelation 22:1-5

It is not many places outside of moments like these that we see death and life present together. We gather to remember Richard, to remember death: its swiftness and cruelty. And we the living stand grieving together. We acknowledge what death has stolen and yet we proclaim resurrection. We cannot stop death and yet we offer the hope of God’s new life poured out for Richard, for us, and for all creation.

But maybe there are more places in our world where death and life come together than we realize at first. Having had these last few weeks to begin reading some of Richard’s poetry, I’ve come to realize how deeply he saw the two intertwined. With a poetic view of the world around him he wrestled with the presence of life and death in all creation, an awareness of the divine infusing and connecting all life even through change and decay. As we struggle to come to terms with death once again come too close to us, we cling to the promise that Christ’s resurrection is real and that Christ’s resurrection is now, mingled among us in life and in death.

But we struggle to see it. We struggle to see Isaiah’s vision of God’s holy mountain. We cannot imagine a place where death does not suddenly cut lives short. A place of peace and justice for all living things.  A vision that is still so far from being realized. A vision of creation restored to wholeness, something Richard was deeply committed in his life and which we continue to strive toward. And yet in the first of his poems we read, Richard’s own words transform every step of life, every twist and turn and change, purposeful or wandering, forward or backward, as a step toward this final, holy transformation. In the everyday world where things change and eventually turn back to dust, there in the very changes taking place is God’s work of bringing all of us toward that holy mountain home, where life is restored and grief is no more. In every difficult moment when things are different now without the one we love, his words remind us of the power of God to make each of those difficult moments a part of our journey, a step toward the holy mountain that Richard is now fully a part of – the promise that resurrection is real and resurrection is now.

And we struggle to see the vision of God laid out in Revelation. A vision of a crystal-clear river feeding a city at peace and a tree of life whose leaves hold forth the healing of the nations. When death destroys our daily life it seems too far off to be real. When nations continue to rage against each other, it seems impossible that this tree of life could exist. And yet again in poetry Richard pointed to the old apple tree, which like the tree of life is rooted in earth and stretching to heaven. Reminding us that every tree becomes for us a tree of life proclaiming with its branches the coming resurrection. Whether it’s the old apple tree now gone, or the new one in its place, or the beautiful tree in front of their house that will be a resting place some of these ashes – each tree, rooted in the soil and stretching to the heavens, becomes a reminder that even in our world of death, resurrection is real and resurrection is now.

And in the feast we share of bread and wine, we have one more reminder that in the face of death, God offers a feast of life. In this meal of ordinary bread and ordinary wine, the promise of life is held forth. At this table and every table where bread is shared, God joins us the living to those who live now at the feast of life. And here again, life and death are present together, Christ’s promise of life shared by us who only get a taste and by those who now feast in full. Resurrection is real, proclaims the bread and wine, and resurrection is now.

So maybe it is that death and resurrection are always mingled together, not just when we gather to mourn but in the world around us all the time, refreshing us at every turn with the hope of God’s promise of life to us. All around us there is the power of Christ’s love poured out for us in our sadness and confusion, in struggle and pain, in life and in death. And so these words of another of Richard’s poems as one more reminder for us who mourn that resurrection is real and resurrection is now:

“I Have Faith” by Richard Bachtold

that the guiding light in a faithful poet’s living words
will prevail in their daily struggle with death,
that just one drop of water’s life will eventually revive
all dying oceans,
that one wild white rose will bloom forever beside
an abandoned grave,
that one blade of grass will sing a holy song comparable
to hymns chorused by a thousand angels,
that one poetic word of forgiveness will redeem all that is dying
in a vast sea of raging death,
that one unknown voice of sacred Silence will prayerfully
proclaim the advent of an everlasting Light during
the darkest night
that one compassionate deed will sustain all dying strangers
seeking a final Home,
that each year the last oak leaf will find a Heavenly Home
in the waiting earth as winter approaches,
and that a creative vision of the Unknown will reveal
a thousand resurrections for all that have sung
the Song of Life.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

 

 

 

 

First Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2015

⁸Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him,  ⁹“As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you,  ¹⁰and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.  ¹¹I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”  ¹²God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations:  ¹³I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.  ¹⁴When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds,  ¹⁵I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.  ¹⁶When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”  ¹⁷God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” – Genesis 9:8-17

¹²And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness.  ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. – Mark 1:12-13

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between_your_present_and_future_self.html

In Homer’s Odyssey, there is a brief story about Odysseus and the Sirens. The hero, long delayed on his journey home to his waiting family, heads toward the legendary island of the sirens. These beautiful women sing enchanting songs that lure in sailors who will be so long drawn in that they will die transfixed by the glory of their song. But Odysseus decides that he must hear a song that is so enchanting. He must know what it is like.

So he creates what researchers call a commitment device. Having filled the ears of all his sailors with wax he has some trusted men tie him firmly to the mast of the ship so that he cannot then be drawn in or guide his sailors to their deaths either, so that he will not give in to temptation. He gives up his position of captain, giving himself limitations that he might experience their song without fear of giving in to temptation.

That is what we humans do with temptation. Two competing voices within us – what we want now and what we want for our future selves. The present-minded self wants to hear the song; the future-minded self wants to get home in one piece. And they argue with one another. So our future-minded self sets up these commitment devices – a reward or punishment or safeguard for the sake of the future self. Not that our present-minded self doesn’t find ways to weasel out of it.

We give in to all kinds of temptations. We eat the donut despite our plan for healthy eating. We skip our exercise to get an extra 30 minutes of sleep in on a cold morning. We put aside a paper, a lesson, a work task that needs our attention to go out for a fun evening. Giving in to our short term pleasure over our long-term goals. But those are the easy ones. Things that aren’t really bad as long as they aren’t all the time.

Real temptations are much more complicated. The temptation to make life choices to please someone else or gain notoriety or popularity. The temptation to sacrifice relationships for career or career for relationships when what we really want is the other. The temptation to save money to the point that we forget to live in the present. Or the temptation to live so much in the present that we never consider saving for the future. These are the things that are more challenging to come up with commitment devices for. How can we ensure that we don’t give in to these temptations?

And they get more serious still. What about when things fall apart and the situation is so far gone that we encounter the temptation to throw it all away. To walk away from my job, my partner, my community, my life, rather than stay and work through the challenge. Sometimes the temptation is too much and we need the community around us. A community that is committed to helping bind us against our temptations.

According to Mark’s gospel, we don’t know which of these temptations haunt Jesus in his forty days in the wilderness. Was he tempted to acts of glory and fame? To claim power for himself? To lead a political revolution? To achieve his work at the cost of others around him? To give up and walk away from the whole thing?

But Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness is not God’s first introduction to temptation. In the Genesis flood story, God gives in to temptation to wipe away the mess that has emerged on the planet. Frankly it doesn’t take much paying attention to the news to realize that a lot of things in our world are at that point. Prolonged periods of war and violence? Planetary destruction? Nuclear warfare? There are days when it seems the only solution is to wipe it all out and start over. If you were in God’s place and could wipe it all away, would you be tempted to decide that’s better than the suffering that will otherwise continue? But what we read today is the story of what God does after the flood. Looking at the destruction, God decides it wasn’t worth it after all. As awful as things were there was still something to love in the midst of it. There was still a joy in all living things that could not be removed by the brokenness of those same living things. And so God employs a commitment device, not a mast but a bow in the clouds. “This is it. I hereby bind myself to this sign in the clouds that there will be no flood of total destruction again.” God’s reminder, tighter and more secure than any rope could be, the reminder not to give in to that impulse again.

But why? Why promise this, knowing that things will only repeat themselves? Why promise this, knowing that the future will bring suffering for people and for the planet? I have to think that it’s like Odysseus who so longed to hear the sirens and their beautiful song that it was worth the suffering that he had to endure to do it, worth the self-imposed limitation. In the aftermath of the flood, the temptation for God to experience the song of human life was simply too good to pass up. God had to know what it was like. For all the pain it might bring, it was worth God binding God’s self to this promise. Out of great love for all things living, God promises to put up with the self-imposed limitations, to put up with the pain and violence we create in order that God might see us live and love us through it.

This Lent our readings will take us week-by-week through some of the ways that God does this over-and-over again binding God’s self for the sake of a people who will not, who cannot respond in turn, until we come to the story where God does literally bind God’s self, not to a mast, but to the cross, where God does not give in to the temptation to escape, that even death might be bound up in God’s promise.

And then one more binding. In baptism, we are bound to the cross. With the cross traced on our foreheads, God says to each of us, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set the sign of the cross on your foreheads just as I set the bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I see it, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again overwhelm you.”

And so we begin this Lenten journey together bound by God, bearing the sign of the covenant on our brow, that we too might know the beauty of the song of life in the midst of the chaos around us, and that we might live and be loved through every trial and temptation we face.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Ash Wedensday 2015

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
²“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.  ³But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,  ⁴so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
⁵“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.  ⁶But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 
¹⁶“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.  ¹⁷But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,  ¹⁸so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 
¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal;  ²⁰but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.  ²¹For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. – Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Just who does God think he is? Does God think she can just come in here and tell us what to do? Sometimes that’s how I react to the readings for Ash Wednesday. It can feel as if God the all-powerful, God the one who supposedly doesn’t need anything from us, is laying out rules about how we’re supposed to do things. Give alms, but be careful to do it just so and in secret. Pray, but don’t do it the way you usually try to do it with your big words and long sentences and certainly not on the street corners. Fast, and don’t bother with all that disfiguring your face business because we all see right through that anyway. Keep it a secret. And if you get into the Joel reading –  God wants fasting, weeping, mourning, the rending of hearts. It’s a lot to get right.

I’m not saying I don’t want to be a good person or that I don’t want to engage in spiritual practices, but sometimes Lent feels like a burden – one more thing to add to the list. One more thing that gets lived out in a far-from-perfect manner. One more set of external expectations. And I’m just a little uncomfortable with the sense of secrecy around it all. Can’t God just be satisfied that I showed up and tried to be nice today? Do I have to add a Lenten discipline? And sure people talk about alternative Lenten disciplines like adding something instead of giving something up. They make it sound like it’ll be fun. And maybe they can be, but I’m not convinced.

Too many of us, semi-consciously perhaps, imagine God demanding these things of us like a tyrant, or at best like a parent dishing out bad-tasting medicine for our sinful nature. We imagine God just longing for us to get ourselves together and get it right for once. Or God laying out the qualifications for relationship with God. Do this and you get to be part of the in-crowd. And in an attempt to please God we do our best to engage in these practices of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer, and carry the burden of trying, unsuccessfully, to be good enough. It seems like God has awfully high expectations of people who are, after all, made of dust and ashes. And I say this as someone who generally understands God as gracious and loving, pouring out blessing in abundance. It’s just that we’re so used to that other model in our world. We are too used to treating ourselves and each other with harshness. We are used to having to live up to standards to get anywhere in life.

As we enter the season of Lent together, perhaps we can find a different way to hear these readings. Perhaps in them we might find the words of life that we long to hear when we come to the scriptures. I wonder if tonight we might hear them spoken by God not as all-powerful creator, or even all-knowing parent, but spoken by God as lover or best friend. How might we hear them differently if they come, as I believe they do, from one whose heart aches to be near to us.

Jesus pleads with us to open ourselves to generous living for the sake of others, to find the freeing openness to relationship that comes with letting go of the things we hold onto. Jesus pleads with us to drop the pretense and be honest in our relationship with God and with others. Jesus invites us to strip away the things we too easily give our energy and attention to that we might be closer in relationship with the one who yearns for us. Not a rule book for wayward children, but a love letter longing for deeper connection.

And the whole secrecy business? I think God wants us to slow down and experience God’s response of love and blessing rather than to be so filled with the response of the world’s all-too-often-false praise and flattery – attention that inevitably fails us. This is not a call to the kind of secrecy that hides in dark corners, but to the kind of intimacy shared between a young couple falling in love.

The thing is that on Ash Wednesday we remember that God yearns for us even though we are dust creatures, even though we are bound to return to the dust from which we came. God yearns for us even though it will mean that God is always the one left caring for us in our pain, always the one aching for us when we are unfaithful, and always the one grieving for us when we die.

On Ash Wednesday we proclaim that we are mortal and broken, dying and too often unfaithful and that God still throws a wedding banquet for us anyway. For ashes and dust God lays out a feast. The body of Christ for you. The blood of Christ for you. God’s offer of love and faithfulness to creatures who will not last.

May this Lenten call to almsgiving, prayer, and fasting be a for us a message of love, a message of invitation, an offer for a deep and abiding relationship filled with richness and blessing from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust, and forevermore.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 

²Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them,  ³and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.  ⁴And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.  ⁵Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  ⁶He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.  ⁷Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved listen to him!”  ⁸Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
⁹As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. -Mark 9:2-9     

Today’s reading ought to stop us in our tracks. Jesus is transfigured into a brilliantly shining figure before three chosen disciples. Two men long since dead are standing with Jesus conversing as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world. And perhaps in the timeless sort of space that these kind of events tend to occupy, the event feels both long and full and at the same time too brief and fleeting. Two of the disciples stand silent and the other tries – unsuccessfully  it seems – to make some sense of the whole thing. But it seems all they can do in the end, especially with Jesus’ injunction never to speak of it until after the resurrection, is stop and experience it. To revel in what God has just revealed to them. And our reading of the text today invites us to stop, stare, and revel in this scene.

But so many other things clamor for our attention and cause us to stop short in a different way. Events in our lives interrupt our normal day-to-day progression of plodding along, one foot in front of the other. Some of those can be positive – things like additions to the family, kids moving on to new stages in life, or big milestones to celebrate. It’s as if everything else stops, or at least we want to make it stop, so that we can focus our time, energy, and attention on the task at hand.

And sometimes what stops us short is not so positive. A reminder of our mortality and how swiftly we can come to face it. When we learned this week of Richard’s death less than a week after a formal diagnosis, what does one do but stand speechless for a moment. Or another story about violence in our news this week, like the one about the three young Muslim students in North Carolina shot and killed over a parking dispute. After all the conversation about gun violence and about inclusion of minority groups, we face one more to add to the growing list. What can we do but stand speechless for a moment. Or maybe it’s nothing so dramatic, but simply the mounding stress of all the little things that pile up – long hours, never-ending lists of tasks – that stop us from being able to carry on as normal.

Sometimes it starts to seem that in our day-to-day lives, all we have to stop and stare at is filled with pain or suffering, tragedy and loss, fear and anxiety. Our untransfigured, unbleached world all too often leaves us staring and speechless. Let me be clear, though, that I don’t mean to criticize us for that. It’s simply part of our reality. It’s what leaves us longing for today’s wondrous image, vision fair. It seems to me that we who are so often stopped short by life, are desperately in need of this little vision of the coming Easter before we enter Lent, this vision of God’s reality as we continue to live mired in the reality of our world.

And so it seems to me that at least as much as Peter, James, and John, we are in need of something else to stop us short. In the face of all these things that consume our attention, we need Jesus to show up and transfigure before us. We are in need of God’s pulling back the veil just for a moment to see the reality of what God is doing, to see God with us now, to see the presence of God with us, which is all too often hidden. And sometimes, sometimes we get glimpse of it.

At yesterday’s council retreat we together mapped out the leadership for the ministries at Immanuel to better understand what is going on, and it felt like a pulling back of the curtain to see God doing some really amazing things through all the individuals, working hard in the congregation. Something that is easy for us to lose sight of when we get bogged down in dealing with things that aren’t coming together or working hard to keep the momentum going. God’s shining presence is among us

Even in the midst of the illness and grieving, there is an awareness of the presence of the holy. It is a gift that those who are sick and who are dying give to the rest of us – an  invitation to a holy space and an awareness of God at work. Maybe I get to see more of that on a more regular basis in my role than some of you, but I trust it happens for you, too. Not just in ministry with those who are seriously ill, but also in all the places you minister in your daily lives. I trust that in the work God has called you to – caring for your families, caring for your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, your students or clients or patients or whoever else it is that you minister to – I trust that in that holy work there are those moments, too, when what had at first seemed ordinary is transfigured in the moment forcing you to stop and notice the power of God working in and through you. God’s shining presence is among us.

And here today we celebrate this meal together. And some days despite all we believe it seems like just bread and wine. And yet for me, and I pray and hope that for you as well, there are times when the power of that simple meal demands my full and complete attention and all I can do is stand speechless at what God is doing. Whether it’s the realization of the connection with others physically present at the table, or the connection with others who feast with us at the heavenly table, or a word of grace made real by the offer of the bread and wine – Jesus is transfigured before us here. God’s glory shines among us.

So rather than trying to understand it or explain it, let’s leave that for another time and instead let us gather on the mountain with Peter, James, and John. Let us put aside for a moment all the other things that demand our attention, and let us rest in the beaming glory of God shining among us. Whether in silent awe with James and John or in rambling praise with Peter take the time to soak in the power of God revealed to us. Let us take the time to enjoy this glimpse of Easter before our sojourn together in the wilderness of Lent. For God is always among us, but sometimes, sometimes we get the full glorious view of it laid out before our eyes.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

²⁹As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  ³⁰Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.  ³¹He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
³²That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.  ³³And the whole city was gathered around the door.  ³⁴And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.
³⁵In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.  ³⁶And Simon and his companions hunted for him.  ³⁷When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.”  ³⁸He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”  ³⁹And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. – Mark 1:29-39 

The snow is getting deep. I’m stating the obvious, of course. Berut have you ever stopped to think about how many individual snowflakes make up the mounds of snow that have accumulated by this time in the winter? Take one individual snowflake away and you haven’t made a tremendous difference, and yet you cannot have a pile of snow without individual snowflakes that together comprise the whole. And together those individual flakes can create avalanches powerful enough to destroy everything in their path or glaciers capable of moving mountains, if only slowly, bit by bit.

            In today’s gospel we see both an individual and the masses in need of healing. As Jesus’ ministry is emerging in Galilee and fresh off of last week’s healing of the man with the unclean spirit, he comes with his disciples to the house of Simon’s mother-in-law, who is in bed with a fever. So far Jesus has healed one man, and now he is presented with a single woman, the mother-in-law of one he has chosen as a close companion for his ministry. And so Jesus does what he does – he is moved to compassion and raises this woman up – not insignificant wording that will later be used to describe what happens to him on Easter morning, having been raised up from the tomb. And she is healed and restored that she might once again resume her place to serve those around her – as we are all called to do.

But it does not take long for this news to get around. Depending on who you think “they” refers to, perhaps it is the disciples themselves who go out and begin to gather those in need of healing. Or maybe it’s simply the nosy neighbors who spread the word. Either way, before long Jesus’ healing ministry has gone from two individuals to snowballing out of control as the crowds gather at the door. The whole city is gathered at the door of the woman who has just herself gotten out of her sickbed. And Jesus has compassion on them, too. He cured many and drove out demons til long into the night.

But in the morning he went off to pray. And when the disciples interrupt his prayer, they have already got people lined up waiting to be healed. And here is where Jesus’ response may not be what we want or expect. Because his response is not to rush back to begin a day full of healings, or even to remain in prayer a while first and then return. No, it is time, Jesus says, to move on to the next town to proclaim the message, for that is what he came to do.

Well of course the message is important! But there are people here who need healing, who need their lives transformed. There are people standing outside who are sick, who are dying, who are hurting, grieving, confused, anxious, stressed, alienated, in broken relationships, in poverty, hungry, without shelter. What does the message have to say about that, Jesus?

As we as a congregation become aware this week of serious illness affecting members of our community and death once again beating down our doors, it’s not too much of a stretch to see ourselves pleading with Jesus, lining up that which needs healing before the presence of Christ here among us now. What does the message of the kingdom have to say to us, Jesus? What does it say to our bodies – our selves – who are in need of raising up?

The thing is that Jesus could sit and heal them one-by-one until everyone in the world was lined up outside his door. And even with a much smaller world population, he’d have died at a ripe old age without having healed the world. Especially because one figures that Simon’s mother-in-law wasn’t healed once and for all, but would be back in line herself one day. Jesus’ work was simply not to heal the world one person at a time. It was about something much larger.

And yet, I’m not sure Jesus’ work was complete without the compassion that moves him to heal the ones he can in the moment. As if the coming of the kingdom of God is an avalanche waiting to happen. With each healing the kingdom accelerates, already rolling unstoppably forward. Without the snow accumulating flake by flake, there is no kingdom, and yet at a certain point the whole thing begins to shift, and then a force that cannot be stopped rolls over anything and everything in its path.

This story is only the beginning of what will become Jesus’ total transformation of the world as it is into the kingdom of God. And it is not the kingdom without compassion and healing, but it’s also not the kingdom if it doesn’t start rolling more and more powerfully into the world.

What Jesus leaves behind, however, is a community of people transformed. People healed and people who have witnessed the power of healing. This is now a community of people in Capernaum-by-the-Sea who have seen the power of the gospel. This is a community that might now have the kind of renewed hope that will turn them toward ministry with one another, finding ways to reach out with healing touch to their neighbors. They will be there to remind one another not just of the power of the healing, but the power of the coming kingdom of which that healing is only a tiny snowflake in the sea of winter snow. Because when they experience brokenness of every kind – injustice, fear, hatred, sickness, death – they will need to gather together both to be healers for one another in grief but also to be proclaimers of the coming kingdom.

Because what Jesus moves on to the next village to proclaim is that the kingdom is hurtling forward with a force that cannot be stopped. The gospel is in motion to such a degree that it is even now, sweeping up all those before and since who have not experienced healing in this life in the way we want into the resurrection of the cosmos. And each one, healed now or not, is vitally important. Because the resurrection of the cosmos is not possible without them.

So we as the people of God are here to remind one another that the kingdom is coming. We are called by the healing power each of us has experienced both to reach out to heal one another in our grief and to proclaim for one another the unstoppable coming of this kingdom. We are the community into which Jesus has already come to bring healing and wholeness, and we are the people who are still longing for healing, in either case we are the very people for whom Jesus moves on in order that the resurrection of all things might be made known to the farthest reaches of time and to the ends of earth.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

4th Sunday after Pentecost
February 1, 2015

²¹They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught.  ²²They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.  ²³Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit,  ²⁴and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  ²⁵But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”  ²⁶And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.  ²⁷They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching — with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”  ²⁸At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. – Mark 1:21-28

It would be easy to talk about today’s gospel reading as an exorcism and the man in the story as demon-possessed. That may have been the gospel writer’s intention, and I do not want to deny the forces of evil that exist that we sometimes have trouble naming. But I’m not convinced that this story is about the exorcism of a demon-possessed man.

I think this might actually be closer to home for us, because Mark identifies this man as someone with an unclean spirit. Someone in the local community of faith no less. And I suspect we are all familiar with people of unclean spirit who show up at church, by which I mean all of us, myself included.

We are Lutherans after all. And we so often begin our worship with a confession that names in broad strokes the ways in which we come to the community of faith carrying the burden of our own brokenness – things we can control and things beyond our control, things we do and don’t do, systems we participate in that perpetuate injustice.

Like the unnamed man who encounters Jesus in the synagogue we are broken people. We find ways to hurt one another if not physically, then with our words. We find ways to hurt ourselves with our anxiety, worry, fear, and self-loathing, telling ourselves things we would not dare say to someone else. We find ways to hurt our world from failure to engage in efforts for change to outright harm done to the world around us. And that’s just the things loosely and possibly somewhat in our control. For we also have bodies that are broken with illnesses that cannot be cured. We come grieving the losses in our lives – these pews were filled at a funeral just yesterday. We are people who are broken. People who come with an unclean spirit stirring within us.

And so we gather in church, as they did in the synagogue, and our unclean spirits have two questions for Jesus, who comes into our midst.

The first is “What have you to do with us?” It sets up a division right away. We are here and you are there. You are clean we are unclean. We do not have anything to do with one another. We have our own ways of doing that. When we tell ourselves or each other that we are not holy enough to have a place here, or that we are too broken to be healed. Or we say something like, “The problems in our world are so large, where is God?” God is there and we are here dealing with the mess. Or we do it in our communities when we set up an “us” and a “them.” Whichever side we put ourselves on, we like to have categories for clean and unclean just as much as the people of Jesus’ time did. Jesus, “What do you have to do with us?”

And the second question: “Have you come to destroy us?” The only way the unclean spirit knows how to resolve the tension of difference is to annihilate the other. The presence of the Holy One appears at first as a threat to his existence. And so, too, do we try to eliminate difference and division by eliminating the other. Even as we acknowledge the ways in which many in our world are too quick to end lives – whether on the streets, within our homes, in the midst of war, or by state-sponsored killing – we also have to acknowledge the ways in which we tend to write people off when they disagree with us. Even families sometimes cut off members of their own for reasons that we have trouble understanding. Or the way we try to annihilate ourselves by suppressing who we are to make it by in the community, as if we must destroy ourselves to resolve the difference we see between us and the world around us. In the presence of the Holy One, “Have you come to destroy us?”

But Jesus refuses to play the unclean spirit’s game. What seems to strike the crowd is that they do not enter into some kind of cosmic battle right then and there. Instead it is the authority that Jesus claims that everyone is talking about on the way home. From the beginning it is no question in anyone’s mind who’s in charge, least of all for the unclean spirit. Jesus makes it clear that he has everything to do with the unclean spirit. Jesus is not going to run away, give up, or set himself against this man and his spirit. He will refuse to be set up as clean apart from the spirit’s uncleanness. Jesus is simply going to command it with the authority that is his. Jesus refuses to acknowledge a division between himself and our mess.

AND Jesus makes it clear that he has not come to destroy the unclean spirit, but to release it. The greek word for unclean is a-katharto, that is, to jump languages back to modern English, not having had a catharsis. It seems to me that what happens here is not so much exorcism as catharsis. The presence of the Holy One carries the kind of strong authority that provides a safe and strong container for all that needs to be named and brought out into the open, including but not limited to the challenge of that very authority.

This is a story about God coming into the world to remind us that all that has been, is, and will be are held by God, including the things we label unclean. That is the essence of what we do here in worship – our unclean spirits longing for catharsis come into the presence of God in the bread and wine, in word, in gathered assembly. And we argue, and wrestle, and push back, and cry out. We try to set ourselves against it and cry out to be spared. We let difference divide us. And still God holds us – a container for all that we are and all that we wrestle with.

And the same goes for when we leave these doors – when our unclean spirits go out and encounter the divine there, too. And we kick and scream and cry out. We try to set up our labels of us and them, we seek to destroy or be destroyed. And God holds us there too, including the darkness within and the darkness we see around us.

And as we are held, we are transformed by the presence of that strong authority. Not all at once, and not always in the ways we want or expect. But in the arms of God we are at once released from the unclean spirits that bind us and at the same time held so strongly and so tightly in God’s love that we will never be let go.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying,  ²Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.  ³So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across.  ⁴Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”  ⁵And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
¹⁰When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.- From Jonah, Chapter 3, Read the whole story of Jonah here. 

Also referenced briefly below is today’s gospel reading about Jesus calling fishermen as disciples.

We so rarely get an opportunity to hear the whole story of Jonah, that I’d like to take a few minutes to retell it from beginning to end.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Jonah. Now Jonah might just as easily have been a young woman, but for the sake of our story we’ll say he was a young man. He was living his life quite happily for the most part, tending to his daily work. He got up and got himself ready in the morning, he went to work, went out with his friends, came home to bed. Day in, day out. Until one day he got a call from God.

Now Jonah knew this meant trouble, or at least a deviation from his comfortable daily life. God asked him to go to Ninevah, that is to modern-day Mosul Iraq. Now he would have had about the same reaction, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, as if God called you up and asked you to go prophecy to the people in Iraq. This was not exactly a safe assignment.

So Jonah did the only logical thing he could think to do, which is flee to Tarshish, in modern day Spain, trying to get as far away from God as he could. But, as many of you know, a great storm arose while he was on the ship, and Jonah confessed that he was fleeing his God and his shipmates promptly threw him overboard, that they might be saved. But God had already decided Jonah was going to Ninevah, so he sent a giant fish to swallow him up. And after three days and three nights, the fish spit him back up on dry ground.

At this point, Jonah didn’t want to know what God would do if he tried to flee again, so he went dragging his feet to Ninevah, where he half heartedly proclaimed, “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown.” Despite his lackluster proclamation, he didn’t even make it a third of the way through the city before people’s hearts were turned and they started repenting and putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes. They even dressed up their livestock in clothing of repentance as if that might somehow help matters. And this, this changed God’s mind. The destruction did not come.

But now Jonah was really ticked off. He railed against God saying, “I knew you’d do this, spreading your stupid mercy all over the place. Why did I have to bother to get out of bed and travel all this way just to have you spare them anyway? For all my trouble you could have at least shown a little fire and brimstone!” God asks if he has a right to be angry about the salvation of people he did not know and for whom he had not labored and in one of my favorite lines of the Bible Jonah responds, “Yes. Angry enough to die.” And God reminds Jonah that all people are people that God cares for, and that God is just going to keep being merciful despite Jonah’s objections. And Jonah lived begrudgingly ever after. The end.

Now lots of people ask if this story is true. To which I respond, what could be truer than the way that God calls ordinary people, the way we struggle and resist God’s call, the way God’s love and mercy pours out anyway, and the way we often begrudgingly respond? It’s a story that’s honest about how most of us engage discipleship. I somehow find that Jonah’s story rings more true for me than Jesus’ calling of the disciples who at two words from Jesus drop everything they’ve ever known to wander off with a stranger. Maybe you, too, take comfort in knowing that not every disciple was quite so willing.

Today we have witnessed another new disciple being called. Finley, despite being a wonderful 6 month-old, is, like Jonah, not particularly qualified to be a disciple of Jesus, much less a prophet to the nations. And yet this morning God claims him and calls him to a life of proclaiming God’s love in word and deed and working for justice and peace in all the earth, starting today, or maybe more accurately starting even earlier. Today he becomes a prophet. Unlike Jonah he’s not old enough to run in the other direction. Though any of us who really stopped and thought about what baptism calls us to do might consider it. He will have opportunity to love and serve others and he, like all of us, will face challenges and sometimes falter. But today’s promise is that God will equip him for what he must face and love him no matter what. And that God will lead him and that God’s love will shine through him even in the moments when he has trouble understanding the grace the God pours out for him and for all.

Today we as the church have a great opportunity to surround him and his whole family with our love, prayers, and support. And we who are gathered today have an opportunity to remember, too the ways in which we are called. To acknowledge the ways we try to run from our call. We let ourselves stay comfortable when our baptism calls us to go out of our way to work for justice in our community. We let ourselves be distracted by things that are not important. We sometimes even let ourselves resent it when God’s grace is made abundant. And yet we are called over and over again to love and serve Christ in the world, despite our sometimes inadequate skills and unwilling hearts.

It’s easy to forget that we are a church full of Jonahs. As we at this particular time of year worry over annual reports and budgets and the vision for our congregation. It’s easy for us to get caught up in those conversations, by which I mean it’s easy for me to get caught up in those conversations, and forget that the church has been surviving for two thousand years of God calling unqualified, reluctant, and sometimes resentful people, including infants and backwards fishermen and Jonahs of every kind. So while we do our due diligence in administering our resources – human, financial, and otherwise – (that is, yes, you should come to our annual meeting next week) we do well to remember that it is not by our own doing that the church survives or by our own enthusiasm and zeal that the message of life and transformation by God’s gospel gets out to change the world. But rather that it’s by God’s having called us through baptism that the church survives and the message of God’s love goes out to all.

And all because we are welcomed into the body of Christ, the one who went boldly forth for us. The one whose journey was not away from his call but into it. Into the belly of death for three days to be spit back up again among us, not with resentment but with greater love and the hope of life for all. Whether we find ourselves eager and ready like the fisherman called by Jesus or running the other direction or even a little cranky and begrudging like Jonah, we proclaim in water and word today that God’s love for us is forever. That God will go to the greatest lengths to keep us safe, and that God will find a way to use us, broken and imperfect, to be the messengers of God’s never-ending mercy and salvation for all the world. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany
January 18, 2015

¹LORD, you have ^| searched me out;
   O LORD, ^| you have known me.
²You know my sitting down and my ^| rising up;
 you discern my thoughts ^| from afar.
³You trace my journeys and my ^| resting-places
and are acquainted with ^| all my ways.
⁴Indeed, there is not a word ^| on my lips,
 but you, O LORD, know it ^| altogether.
⁵You encompass me, behind ^| and before,
    and lay your ^| hand upon me.
⁶Such knowledge is too wonder- ^| ful for me;
     it is so high that I cannot at- ^| tain to it.
¹³For you yourself created my ^| inmost parts,
    you knit me together in my ^| mother’s womb.
¹⁴I will thank you because I am mar- ^| velously made;
your works are wonderful, and I ^| know it well.
¹⁵My body was not hid- ^| den from you,
   while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths ^| of the earth.
¹⁶Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written ^| in your book;
     my days were fashioned before they ^| came to be.
¹⁷How deep I find your ^| thoughts, O God!
How great is the ^| sum of them!
¹⁸If I were to count them, they would be more in number ^| than the sand;
     to count them all, my life span would need to ^| be like yours.   -Psalm 139, selected verses

⁴³The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.”  ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”  ⁴⁷When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!”  ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.”  ⁴⁹Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”  ⁵⁰Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.”  ⁵¹And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” -John 1:43-51

See also 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. This passage is part of a larger context. Be forewarned that this passage and others like it have been misused to shame individuals and to perpetuate abusive and controlling behaviors.Because we read it aloud in worship as part of our schedule of readings, it is commented on in the text below.

 

I’m going to start with a story that has me rather disturbed. I share it at the risk of also deeply disturbing you. There’s something about today’s texts taken together that has the power to both reach deep places of brokenness but also deep places of God’s power active within us.

I learned this week about a news story from Florida. Apparently the North Miami Beach Police department has been regularly training their snipers by using actual mugshots of real people arrested by the department for target practice. This was discovered when the sister of a man who had been arrested 15 years ago was using the firing range for her own professional retraining after the police department and she saw a photo of her brother riddled with bullet holes. Her brother did commit a crime, served his time, and now lives a productive life as a father and husband. (Not that it should make a difference here, but just to give you a picture that this guy is still walking around that community.) Apparently his mugshot was part of a photo lineup of entirely young, black males being used by the department regularly for target practice. When discovered they defended the practice despite other law enforcement agencies not backing them up.

This story gets at the question for me of how we see one another. It strikes me that the officers being trained saw these photos. They stared intently at them. Maybe so much that they could recognize them on the street. But did they really see them? Did they see them in such a way as to understand them as human beings? I hope that some of the individuals did, but at the same time I’m concerned that the whole setup discouraged that. Discouraged those individuals and all of us from seeing them as real people with real lives and real stories. Hundreds of Lutheran pastors are sending photos of themselves to the police department to encourage them to stop and think about how every photo of a person is a photo of a valuable human being.

Today’s texts are about seeing and being seen. Philip is excited having just been called to follow Jesus. He’s on to something really incredible and wants to share it with Nathanael. He runs to him, I imagine, and says we’ve found him – the one! But Nathanael is skeptical – can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good come out of some rural village, some backwards place? And Philip repeats the words the Jesus spoke just a few verses earlier, “Come and see.” Words are not enough this time, seeing will be required. This is God in human form, you really have to come and see it to believe it.

So Nathanael does and when meets Jesus he is welcomed with the words “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael is curious how Jesus would know a thing about him, but Jesus informs him that he has already been seen. Sitting under the fig tree, Jesus has already seen him. But I suspect it is not simply this awareness of where Nathanael had been physically sitting when Philip found him, but rather the deeper kind of seeing. Somehow in this exchange Nathanael becomes aware of being known, of being seen deeply.

Perhaps Psalm 139 comes to mind for him. A song perhaps he had sung many times, one that we sang together today. “Lord, you have searched me out; O Lord, you have known me…For you yourself created my inmost parts and knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Somehow in this moment, in this encounter, he is seen. Maybe for the first time in his life. Perhaps, like so many other in our world, he was used to being ignored. Perhaps he was one of those people who blended in better than he wanted, who longed to be noticed. Or someone who stood out as a loner who desperately wants to be seen.

Because those people are all too common. People who are living on the streets who get ignored as if they are invisible, as if we could will them and their problems away by ignoring them. People who think that they are not worthy of a place in the community. People whose photos end up on police firing ranges. And sometimes people hiding in plain sight go unnoticed and unknown. Perhaps you know someone who puts up a front that says everything is ok, everything is fine, when really it isn’t. Who do you see superficially that might be longing to be really deeply seen. Perhaps that someone is you.

And because I don’t think we can read today’s second reading from Corinthians without a word of comment, let me mention another group of people that go unseen and unnoticed. In the reading Paul is trying to make a larger point about the way in which God honors our whole selves, both physical and spiritual together in one. But to our modern ears the words may conjures up the ways the church at large has all too often shamed people with a disproportionate strictness in sexual morality while at the same time refusing to see or stand up for victims of sexual assault. Too often sexual assault goes unreported or is dismissed when it is. Our own community is one of many around the country that is struggling to address this problem to make it a safe place for people to come forward and safe place for all people, men and women, to live. This passage calls us to deep way of seeing one another as human beings. It calls us to respect one another and ourselves as holy beings, to see each other deeply, in every encounter with other people from a casual wave on the street to more intimate encounters. [Note to internet readers: If you have experienced sexual assault or abuse, there are resources available to help. Locally the Center for Women and Community is available. The national domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-7233. A 24-hour crisis hotline for victims and survivors of sexual abuse and physical violence is available: 413-545-0800 (Local Western Mass #) or 888-337-0800 (toll-free long distance).]

We have a deep call to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, not just to tell others to come and see what church is about, not just to go and see ourselves what God is doing in the world, but to come and see one another as full human beings. We have a call to refuse the ways that our culture encourages us to ignore certain people and allows us to fail to see all people as people who matter. We have a call to stand up and shout from the rooftops “Come and see all people as one knit together in God’s love.” And we can start by making sure that no one goes unnoticed or uncared for in our own church community.

Because we have first been known. Marvelously made and intimately known. When the world cannot or will not see us for who we are, there is still one who sees us and knows us. We, like the skeptical Nathanael, may be reluctant at first to be known so intimately. We may at first resist the call to follow. We may have trouble ourselves seeing God’s breaking in among us. But over and over again God calls to us, “Come and see!” Come and see in water and word. Come and see in bread and wine. Come and see God in the people drawn together around this table and in the people who have not yet heard the invitation to this table. Come, see, and be seen and loved for who you are.

Because we are known before we realize it, before we get it together, before we slow down enough to contemplate it, before we feel it and know it deep in our bones, we have a God who sees us – our lives for all that they are. The secrets we are ashamed to admit, the vulnerabilities we have been trained to keep to ourselves, the longings and dreams we have for the future. Our whole lives are known, which gives us the courage to take another step. The faith to see ourselves in God’s eyes. And the power to live as God’s people made holy by God’s seeing.

-Pastor Steven Wilco