Palm Sunday, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

During our Lenten program the last few weeks, I’ve been helping Daniel and Audi with the kids as they prepared to sing for you all today!  One day, when Daniel was leading a conversation about Palm Sunday, one of the children raised his hand and said something along the lines of, “Why do the same people who cheer Jesus on then go on to murder him?  It’s creepy!”

He is absolutely right, the events we read on Palm Sunday are super, super creepy and deeply unsettling.  How do the same human beings go from shouting Hosanna to their king to screaming “Let him be crucified!” And it raises an even more unsettling question.  Does the same conflict lodge in our hearts?  Would we so easily betray our God?

I like to think of this as The West Wing versus House of Cards problem of the human condition.

Stay with me.  For those of you who don’t know, The West Wing was a drama written by Aaron Sorkin which aired on NBC from 1999-2006. House of Cards is currently in its second season and can be found on Netflix.

Both shows are about United States politics and both have quite a bit of focus on the Presidency and the President’s staff.

But the two shows have very different points of view.  The West Wing is largely about the importance of serving the country.  Episodes focus on inter-personal relationships, yes, and there is plenty of romance, but the characters seem genuinely invested in passing policy to make the country a better place.

The fictional President Bartlett was committed to bettering the country even if it hurt him politically.  At one point, when he is about to make a controversial decision, his chief of staff, Leo, gathers the staff and says the following:

We’re gonna lose a lot of these battles, and we might even lose the White House, but we’re not gonna be threatened by issues; we’re gonna put them front and center. We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this Country, and let that be our legacy.

He then asks each of the staff if that sounds all right to them, and they each reply

I serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States.

And not only did characters focus on big, arching policy, they were even interested in the little guy.  Every so often the show would focus on some average citizen who had a specific problem or concern.  The most moving of which was probably when Toby was approached by the police because a homeless man who had been wearing a coat Toby had donated to charity had been found dead.  Rather than simply distancing himself from this stranger, Toby begins to learn about him, and ultimately fights for him to be buried with military honors, when he discovers the homeless man was a veteran. Plots almost always brought the human stories of policy to the forefront.

Even the main characters were shown to serve their country sacrificially.  C.J. Crane gave up a half million dollar salary as a PR flack in California.  Sam Seaborne walked out of a lucrative law firm. Ainsley Hayes gave up becoming a powerful player in Republican politics to serve as a lawyer in a democratic administration, because she believed it was the best way to use her gifts to serve the country.

The West Wing presents a really positive view of humanity.  It shows the hopeful, optimistic, cooperative, joyful parts of our soul that we see displayed by Jesus’ followers on Palm Sunday.  Jesus’ followers have seen the face of God and they are ready to celebrate and honor God.  Unfortunately, humanity is more complicated than the picture presented on The West Wing and on Palm Sunday.

House of Cards, the Netflix political drama, presents the other extreme of humanity.  The main characters are Frank Underwood and his wife Claire.  When the series begins, Frank is majority leader of the House of Representatives.  Like President Bartlett he is a Democrat, but the resemblance ends there.  Frank’s only goal is to accrue power.  And he’ll accrue power using any means necessary.  He bribes, he lies, he has affairs, he blackmails, he even has people killed.  All so that he can move up the chain of power.  At one point he turns to the camera and says, ““For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.”  There is a plot thread about a piece of policy, but the content of the policy doesn’t really matter to Frank.  All that matters is that he can manipulate the situation so that he comes out a winner.  There aren’t very many good hearted people in the show.  Those that are usually end up losing their jobs or their lives.

Honestly, I’m not sure Herod and Pilate rose to the level of Frank Underwood’s villainy.  But they were part of the political machine that was so interested in power and status quo that they were willing to kill God to keep their thrones.

Most actual human beings fall somewhere in-between the worlds of The West Wing and House of Cards.  We are more like the crowd in Jerusalem.  Excited about God one minute, and another minute willing to turn our back on Jesus if it means we can gain more power, money or even more comfort.

We seek to serve the common good, until it makes more sense for us to go into a career that will pay off our student loans.

We care about the downtrodden, but we buy our jeans from companies that force their employees to work in dangerous conditions.

Someone even recently shared with me that their seminary classmates would steal books others needed for papers.  These are SEMINARY STUDENTS!

We are a mixed up people!  We want to follow God, but just can’t seem to stick with it.  How many of you abandoned your Lenten resolutions?  I know I did!

How does Jesus react to this change of mood in Jerusalem?  Does he try to run away when things go south?  No.  Does he turn to the hostile mob and yell at them for their betrayal?  No.  Jesus stays the course.  Jesus continues to love humanity, even in the face of our betrayal.  He calmly journeys to the Cross even with full knowledge of how fickle humanity can be when it comes to loving God.

He knows that we are The West Wing people who will join the Peace Corps and volunteer at soup kitchens and he knows that we are House of Cards people who will betray those closest to us, who will be unforgivably selfish.  He knows all of this about us, probably even before Palm Sunday.  He’s probably learned about it from watching his disciples, from living with a family, from being human.  He’s probably learned this about us from reading Scripture.  Abraham was a hero and a liar.  Moses was a brave leader and a murderer.  King David delighted in the Lord and had his lover’s husband killed.  Scripture is full of the contradictions of human beings.  Jesus has probably felt these contradictory impulses rise in his own spirit, and turned to his Father for help.

In fact, this conflict we have, of being lovingly made in God’s image but also spectacularly sinful, is why God became incarnate in Jesus in the first place.  And even when Jesus experiences this awful tension, he does not abandon us.  He walks toward the cross.  He stays true to himself.  He obeys his Father, because we cannot.

Jesus did not abandon the crowd at Palm Sunday.  Jesus did not abandon the crowd on Good Friday.

Jesus does not abandon us, either.  Whether we are at our most Christlike, selfless and giving, or whether we’re completely horrible and greedy, Jesus walks alongside of us.  But Jesus doesn’t leave us where we are.  Jesus beckons us to follow him, to walk the path he has laid for us, to celebrate our relationship with him by living into our best selves.  And he gives us the Holy Spirit to strengthen our resolve and to give us peace.

We invite you to join us on Jesus’ journey this week, as we remember our rejection of God, and God’s triumphant defeat of our apathy.  The story of Holy Week is your story, your story of betrayal and redemption, a story more exciting than any television drama.  Don’t miss out.

Amen.

(Quotes from The West Wing found in Nathan Paxton’s wonderful article, “Virtue from Vice:  Duty, Power, and The West Wing.)

Lent 3, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

God was doing something new.

Thousands of years before Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the Samaritans and Jews had fallen out.  The Samaritans are the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Jews are the descendants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  At one time, they had been united with a common Torah and understanding of God, but over the generations, they pulled further and further apart.  The Jewish community added other Scripture, like the Prophets to their canon.  The Samaritans intermixed with the various peoples that conquered them.  The Jews worshiped in Jerusalem.  The Samaritans worshiped at Mt. Gerezim.  Jews went out of their way to avoid Samaria.

But not Jesus.  God was doing something new.

Jesus goes out of his way to walk through Samaria.  And then when his disciples are off trying to find some lunch, Jesus walks right up to a Samaritan.  And not just any Samaritan.  He walks up to a woman.  And Jesus doesn’t walk up to a woman Samaritan at some appropriate place.  Oh no, he goes right up to that Samaritan woman at a well.  Now, that would be like Jesus walking into a restaurant, finding the single lady at the bar, and sidling up right next to her.  If you’re familiar with the book of Genesis, the well is where love happens.  It’s where sparks fly, where marriage proposals are made, where first encounters happen.

But Jesus doesn’t care about convention.  Because God is doing something new.

This poor Samaritan woman gets a bad rap.  When we hear that she’s had five husbands, we think to ourselves, “Oooh, that hussy!”  But Jesus never says that she has sinned, and never offers to forgive her.  For all we know she could have been widowed five times.  Or been left because she was barren.  All we know is that her life has been hard.  Defying all convention, Jesus decides to engage her in a profoundly spiritual question.  He describes himself as someone who can provide living water.  Instead of dismissing him, the Samaritan woman is intrigued and begins a theological conversation with him.

God was doing something new.

The woman starts to suspect that Jesus is something special—maybe a prophet?  But she just doesn’t know how to resolve this fundamental difference between Jews and Samaritans.  She reminds Jesus that his people worship in Jerusalem and her people worship at Mt. Gerezim.  How can this fundamental division be resolved?  Is one place right and one place wrong?  Even if Jesus can provide her living water, what are the long term implications?  The Samaritan woman is very practical.

What happens next is where Jesus blows the Samaritan woman’s mind.  The Samaritan woman will go on to be a legend. In the Orthodox tradition she is called St. Photine—the luminous one—a woman who converted many, many people.  So what does Jesus say to her?  What is so utterly life changing?

Imagine going back in time two hundred years from now.  Imagine sitting down with your great-great-grandparents and explaining to them that in the future, you won’t need to be in the same room with a person to talk with them.  In fact, in the future, you can be anywhere in the world, pick up a plastic box, stare into it, and have a live conversation with someone you love.  Mind blowing right?  No longer are we bound by physical presence.  We can relate to each other wirelessly.

Well, God was doing something new and similar.  Rather than having a certain place be people’s link toward him, rather than making people choose between Jerusalem and Mt. Gerezim, God was going to do something new.  God was going to be liberated from the constraints humans had put on him.  Instead of being worshiped at Jerusalem, God was going to be worshiped in “spirit and in truth”.

The geographic and biological boundaries that had separated Jew from non-Jew were going to be erased.  No longer would God belong to one people or one place. Living water would not just be offered to women like Mary, but women like Photine as well.  Living water will be available to everyone, those who fit in and those who don’t.  Those who have had easy lives and those who have had difficult lives.  Those who have never married and those married five times.  The living water doesn’t just lie still in its cup.  Living water bubbles up, overflows, and blesses all kinds of people.

God was doing something new.  And God is doing something new.

The church is always changing.  We started out as small groups of people meeting in people’s homes in the middle east and now we have congregations large and small scattered all over the world.  You all have seen your own fair share of changes over the last few years.  You have two new priests and half your lay staff has overturned in the last year.  There are kids in church now and the music is a little different and I’m sure Eric and I have different liturgical, preaching and personal styles than you are used to.  That kind of change can be exciting, but it can also be unnerving.  Church is a place where a lot of us feel safe, so when it starts to feel unfamiliar, we feel uneasy.

The larger church is going through changes, too.  In some ways, it feels like we’re at the end of an era.  We are talking about downsizing our national church offices and even possibly moving them out of New York.  The College of Preachers closed, the Alban Institute just announced it was closing, and even the Virginia Seminary Chapel burned down a few years ago.

I’ve seen two reactions to all this national change.  One is to try to put the Episcopal Church in hospice care and mourn what it used to be.  Mourn the loss of our power and social standing. Mourn the loss of our buildings, some of which need to be closed.  Mourn the loss of what felt familiar and comfortable.

However, I’ve also seen people who believe that God is doing something new.  Church is not the center of our culture any more.  Suddenly, rather than being part of the fabric of society, the church exists on the margins of society.  Right where it was two thousand years ago, actually!

God is doing something new, but not something that hasn’t been done before!

In our own diocese, St. Paul’s in Richmond is experimenting with doing things in a new way by hiring a priest, the fabulous Melanie Mullen to be what they call a downtown missioner.  Melanie’s job isn’t to drum up membership or serve the poor from within the walls of St. Paul’s.  Melanie’s job is to be in the community, get to know neighborhood non profits and businesses and individuals and then learn how the people of St. Paul’s can serve them.  Her job is to bring the church into the world.

Like Jesus’ living water, the people of St. Paul’s, Richmond are experimenting with bubbling up and over the line of their property and into the world around them.

We are blessed to worship a God that continually offers us a cup of living water, even in the midst of change.  Where is living water bubbling up in our community?  How is God blessing us? What gifts and energies are we being called to pour over our walls into our community?

May we, like the woman at the well, shine the light of Christ into the world.

Amen.

 

Lent 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

When you were a small child throwing a fit did your mother ever point to a well-behaving child and say, “Look how nicely Johnny is behaving?  Why don’t you behave more like Johnny?”  Poor you!  Unfavorably compared to someone who wasn’t even your flesh and blood! You probably carried on with your fit, thoroughly unimpressed with Johnny.  We do this all the time—unfavorably comparing our bosses to other bosses, spouses to other spouses, our selves to other men and women.

We pull Jesus into this, too.  We read the temptation story and think, “Ah, man, I should be better at resisting temptation. Why can’t I just be more like him?”  We read Jesus’ time in the desert as a kind of morality play.

But the temptation story is not one of Jesus’ parables.  It is not a morality play.  The story of Jesus’ temptation is an epic battle between good and evil.  The temptation story is not a sweet PBS Saturday morning cartoon intended to teach our children morals.  The temptation story is The Lord of the Rings, Rocky, Star Wars.

Jesus is on an epic quest to save humanity.  Humanity is enslaved.  Not by each other, but by death and by sin.  No matter what humans have done, they have not been able to get out of the grip of these evil powers.  Death vanquished every human.  And sin wrapped its claws around people, too.  Sin ruined people’s lives, isolating them from each other and from God.  Jesus is going to go into the world and save humanity from both sin and death, but first he has to get ready.

Jesus has been baptized and is about to enter into his public ministry.  But before he makes any speeches, before he meets his first disciple, he needs to get ready.  In any epic battle movie worth its salt, you get a training montage.  Hermione leads the Hogwarts students in drills Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yoda trains Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.  Mr. Miyagi teaches Danny “wax on, wax off” in the Karate Kid.  All these “heroes “needed time to prepare.

In Jesus’ case, it is the Spirit who leads him into the desert.  The Spirit doesn’t stick around and shadow box with Jesus or make Jesus run laps.  The Spirit disappears and leaves Jesus alone.  For what Jesus needs to get him through his ministry isn’t physical strength, but spiritual strength.  Fighting the powers of sin and death will take every ounce of integrity and steadiness that Jesus has.  After forty days of prayer and fasting, the Devil, also described as the tempter, shows up.  Now the Devil isn’t particularly hostile here, in fact, he’s almost friendly.  After all, the Devil just wants what is good for Jesus, right?  If Jesus is really the Son of God, he should enjoy the perks!

First the Devil tempts Jesus to turn some stones into bread.  After all, Jesus has been fasting for weeks!  And if he is God, he surely has the power to make himself some food.  But Jesus roots down into Scripture and reminds the Devil that the only food he needs for his mission is the word of God.

The Devil gets really tricky with his next temptation—since Jesus used scripture to deny the Devil the first time, the Devil throws Scripture back at Jesus.  He tempts Jesus to leap off a tall building, telling him that Scripture says angels will protect him.  But Jesus resists the temptation to take a foolish risk and again roots himself in Scripture.

Finally, the Devil tries to make a bargain with Jesus.  He offers him power and wealth and land and all Jesus needs to do is worship him.  But again, Jesus finds within himself the discipline and Scripture he needs to resist.  The Devil flees, defeated.

This story gets sin just right, doesn’t it?  Sin isn’t a bully, at first.  Sin sidles up to us and seduces us.  Have you all been following the story Kevin Roose published in New York Magazine?  He has just published a book called Young Money.  He got to know eight young Wall Street brokers, followed them around and explored their world.  On one occasion he snuck into a secret society event and saw all kinds of crazy skits in which the richest men in the world mocked the 99%. At one point he started filming and was thrown out once they realized he was a journalist.  He didn’t get beat up.  The people who kicked him out got extremely friendly and tried to bribe him into not telling the story.  What a great metaphor!  Sin tells us we deserve it, that it won’t really hurt anyone.  Sin lures us in until it has us firmly in its grasp.

Sin is tricky and insidious and offers us things that appear good.  For Jesus to really minister to the people of the world, he had to go through that experience.  He had to know what it was like, how hard it is, to resist temptation.  Jesus had to learn who he was as a savior.  Was he going to use his power to physically strike down evil?  Did he need to become big and strong and throw his authority around?  No, his authority was rooted in total obedience to his Father.  Jesus would show his power by his humility, by compassion, by wisdom.  His power would be rooted in his deep understanding of Scripture in light of his loving relationship with his Father.

Jesus uses that deep knowledge of Scripture and connection to his Father when he recruits his disciples, preaches to his followers, heals the sick, casts out demons—in short, in every part of his ministry.  Jesus takes this experience all the way to the cross.

Jesus’ ultimate battle with sin and death doesn’t involve him sword fighting the Devil or heroically flying a spaceship into the heart of an alien spacecraft.  Jesus’ final battle has him face our sin and rejection and walk right toward us.  Jesus continues to walk towards us until we kill him.  And then he rises and keeps walking toward us.

In the movie Blood Diamond, a father has lost his son, who has been kidnapped and turned into a child soldier.  When he finally finds his child, the child is pointing a gun at the father’s companion.  The father recognizes the boy and starts to speak with him.  He walks toward him, calls the boy by name and tells him about his mother who loves him and the wild dogs who wait for him.  He describes his home, the place where he belongs, all the while walking towards this boy and his raised gun and then the father says,

 I know they made you do bad things. You are not a bad boy.  I am your father, who loves you.  And you will come home with me and be my son again.

The boy drops the gun and the two embrace.

For generations our sin and the power of death kept us separated from our God.  But God knew we were more than our sin.  He knew that sin enslaved us, keeping our true selves locked away.  And so he sent Jesus, who battled for us.  While it appeared for three days that sin and death won, on that third day Jesus rose from the dead and claimed us for his own.  His was the final word, the final victory.  Death and sin are still present, but they no longer hold dominion over us.  They cannot keep us from God.

A mere five days ago, I preached to you about Lenten practices and how they draw us closer to God.  But the really important message for you to hear is this:  Nothing can separate you from the love of God.  Not your worst sin, not the worst sin someone does to you, not the death of a loved one, not your death.  You can start and break 100 Lenten practices and that will not make God love you less or lessen the power of his victory.

God wins the battle, full stop.

Amen.

 

Epiphany 6, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

In the name of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last Sunday and the next three Sundays Eric, Jordan and I are pleased to offer a sermon series entitled, “For the love of God.”

After hearing today’s Gospel you may be thinking to yourself, “Sarah must have drawn the short straw!”

Today’s Gospel reading is one of the most painful we have.  This reading has been used to ostracize people from their communities, to shame abused people from leaving their spouses, and make people wonder if they were really loved by God if they continued to have angry thoughts and lustful feelings.  My grandmother was not allowed to take communion in the Catholic church the final forty years of her life because her marriage to my grandfather ended.  She became isolated from the church she had loved.

What is Jesus doing here?  Where is hanging-out-with-the-sinners Jesus?  Where is Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know-for-the-bible-tells-me-so Jesus?  We may be tempted to throw out these verses.  We may prefer to just live with a warm and fuzzy Jesus who does not ask too much of us.  But the truth is, Jesus does ask something of us.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which precedes this passage, Jesus has just said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Part of loving God and following Jesus means we should be hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Yes, we are forgiven of our sins through Jesus’ death and resurrection, but even as we screw up and are forgiven over and over again, the arc of our lives should be an arc that moves toward righteousness.  And by righteousness, I mean living like Jesus wants us to live.

The first thing to note is that to Jesus, the assumption is that his followers live in community.  People at the time lived with extended family, with servants or in the homes of the people they were serving.  They didn’t live in isolated suburban or rural houses like we do.  People lived in community. So, for Jesus, living a righteous life, rooted in God’s love means learning how to live in community.

Love your neighbor as yourself could be the overarching theme of our passage today.

First, Jesus tackles anger.  The crowd following Jesus knows they aren’t supposed to murder anyone, but Jesus contextualizes Scripture for them to enlarge their responsibility.  Jesus wants to get underneath the law, to help his followers understand the heart and the meaning behind the law.  As human beings, Jesus wants us to be in respectful relationship with each other.  We are not to be angry with each other, or even insult one another.  Jesus is probably not very happy with the comments sections of the internet, political ads, or any episode of Real Housewives.  More seriously, this means Jesus does not condone any type of abuse—either physical or emotional.  Jesus longs for his people to be in relationship with each other, to face conflict with dignity and compassion.

You may not be aware of this, but every week our liturgy lives out a principle of reconciliation.  The exchange of the Peace is not just a chance to take a seventh inning stretch and check out what your neighbors are wearing.  The Peace happens after confession, but before the offering, so you can live out this verse in Matthew:  “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,  leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” The function of the Peace is for you to reach out to people who have hurt you or people whom you have hurt, so you can present your offering to God with a clear conscience. The peace is intended to maintain a healthy community, where reconciliation is part of our weekly experience.

And while murder and adultery may seem only distantly related, the prohibition against each comes from this same preservation of community.  While a prohibition against holding onto anger can protect the harmony of a community, Jesus’ prohibition against lust and divorce protects the weaker members of the community.  Remember that Jesus was speaking to particular people in particular contexts.  In the time, only men could initiate divorce, and if they did, their former wives were often left in real trouble—without income, without a support system.  I don’t know what Jesus would say to us in our context—we can divorce each other without leaving each other penniless and powerless—but at the very least, Jesus would want us to treat each other with dignity and respect.  I am certain he would allow my grandmother to have received communion those last 40 years.  On the other hand, sexual harassment or abuse, adultery, abuse of power—these can really damage people and the Christian communities in which they live.  These violations can shatter not only the relationship within a family, but can destroy the bonds of trust within the entire community.

And if you weren’t already feeling overwhelmed, Jesus goes on to say that his followers shouldn’t swear or make an oath promising something.  We should just say yes or no and let our answers stand for ourselves.  Does that mean we are disobeying Jesus every time we swear in as a juror?  What about when we click on those terms of service agreements websites make you affirm?  Sheesh!  The culmination of things we are not supposed to do in this passage is enough to make us afraid to step outside our door for fear of disappointing God!

We live in tension as Christians, between law and Grace.  There are certain rules we are expected to follow, but in a modern era we have to think about them really carefully since some make sense in our context, but others make less sense as we learn more and more about the world.  And even if we sort out all the rules we should follow, our minds rebel.  Our neo-cortex may understand that being angry at someone is bad for our souls and our community, but our limbic system is ready to throw a punch!  In the same way, we know in our heads that it is a bad idea to look up that high school sweetheart on Facebook, but sometimes a little online flirting seems easier than facing the challenges in our marriage.  Growing into a Christian who can learn to let go of anger and lust takes time, discernment, and a lot of prayer.

We are all going to make mistakes.  We are all going to find ourselves attracted to someone we shouldn’t be, or unable to let go of an insult.  We may find it easier to be a bully than to admit vulnerability.  But God’s grace is still for us.

God came to earth in the form of Jesus, because he knew we were incapable of living perfect lives.  God’s grace still applies to us, even when, especially when, we are unable to live up to God’s commandments.  We are forgiven, over and over again.

However, we are also given the Holy Spirit.  And that Holy Spirit is what enables us to grow and mature over time. The Holy Spirit gives us the courage to look at ourselves honestly and to keep trying our best, even when we make mistakes.  Christian maturity is not a sprint—we won’t live perfect lives until we are united with God after our deaths.

In a counterintuitive way, our mistakes can be avenues to deepen community and our relationship with God. When we start to understand that everyone around us is broken, and imperfect, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving.  When Ra leads weekly yoga on Mondays, she often says something along the lines of “Offer compassion to yourself and others.  Everyone is doing the best they can with what they know and where they’re from.”  We are in this struggle of life together.  That’s really Jesus’ point here.  He knows we need each other and he doesn’t want us to blow this amazing gift we have in each other.  He doesn’t want us to become fragmented and distant and untrusting.  He wants us to be real with each other and to take joy in each other and to help each other grow.  He wants us to practice forgiveness with each other.  He wants us to practice being friends with appropriate boundaries.  He wants us to practice protecting weaker members of the community.  He wants us to practice honesty and trustworthiness with each other. The Christian Community, the church, is one of the biggest gifts God gives us.  In an ideal world, the church is a place where people from all different walks of life, all interests and political views, can come together and form a new family.  And when you have such a diverse group of people trying to figure out how to love each other, we need boundaries.  We need rules, so we can all be on the same page.  And so, just as God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, Jesus gives us the gift of an expanded view of the law, a law that reaches all the way down deep into our hearts and reminds us that God is not interested in our obedience, so much as he is in our hearts.

This Valentine’s Day Weekend, the best gift you can give God is to do your best to love your community, knowing that you are surrounded by the grace and love of the God who made you.

Epiphany 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Every once in awhile, I wish the Gospels had a really good novelist as an editor.  I want someone to send this manuscript back to its writers and say something like, “Interesting story, but the motivations of Jesus are unclear.  Why does he want to be baptized if he has nothing for which to repent? Why does John resist?  How does Jesus feel when he gets in the water?  Your use of detail is insufficient, please expand.”

The authors of the Gospels are just not interested in giving us all the details.  They are not interested in thoughts, feelings and motivations.  They are telling us a theological story, not a psychological one.

So we’re left with this very brief description of a momentous event.  Jesus’ baptism was so important that each of the four Gospels have an account.  Matthew’s is the longest, and is an expanded version of the baptism in Mark.  The version in Luke is extremely similar to the one in Mark.  And in the gospel of John, we don’t see the baptism take place, but John the Baptist refers to it.

After Jesus is baptized, a dove comes from the heavens, and rests above Jesus’ head.  This dove floating above the waters evokes the Spirit moving above the waters in the Creation story.  God is creating something new.  Some major change is coming.

This supernatural moment is important because by this time in Jewish history, God had pretty much stopped showing up in momentous, visible ways.  When we read the Old Testament, God appears all the time in dreams and visions, even occasionally allowing someone to catch the briefest glimpse of him.  But God had not revealed himself in that way in a long time.  For God to break into our world, to a send a message, however brief, was heart poundingly exciting.

In the three synoptic gospels, the dove is accompanied by a voice from heaven.  In Mark and Luke that voice speaks directly to Jesus, but in Matthew the voice speaks to everyone within earshot.  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Two thousand years later we hear that statement and we think, “Aw, isn’t that nice.  God’s giving his son a little pep talk!  I bet that made Jesus feel awesome!”  But if we keep in mind that the writers of the Gospels are interested in making a theological statement, we take another look at what God says about Jesus.  That short sentence is extremely loaded.  It evokes Psalm 2, which reads:

I will tell of the decree of the LORD:

He said to me, “You are my son;

today I have begotten you.

The Psalms are associated with David, and the Messiah is supposed to come from David’s line.

The sentence also evokes Isaiah 42:1

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations.

In Isaiah, this describes the suffering servant.  Jesus being linked to the suffering servant is really important.  When Jews pictured a Messiah, for the most part they imagined a mighty warrior.  The suffering servant in Isaiah was just a character of his time, not an archetype for a Savior.  But in one little sentence, God begins making the link for people that this Messiah is going to be different.

God’s words also evoke his own words to Abraham.  When he instructs Abraham to bring Isaac on the near fatal walk, he says, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  We can’t help but hear those instructions when God refers to Jesus as his beloved son.  Where God spared Abraham’s son, God’s son will not be so lucky.

Each of these men, Abraham, David, and Isaiah were critical players in God’s salvation history.  He used each of them to further define his relationship with humanity.  God makes a covenant with Abraham that he and Abraham’s descendents will belong to each other.  They will be God’s people.  He will be their God. God makes a covenant with David, too, that kings of David’s line will be the rightful kings until the Messiah comes..  Isaiah was a prophet who urged the people of Israel to return to keeping their side of the covenants they had made with God.

Each of these men, and the covenants made with or defended by them, is a key part of God’s history with humanity. For God to reference them as he introduces his Son, demonstrates that Jesus is part of the same salvation history.  Jesus is deeply connected to these men who have come before him in faithfulness to God.  But God also distinguishes Jesus by so clearly announcing their relationship.  Jesus is not just another human in relationship with God.  Jesus is God’s flesh and blood.  His son.  Jesus is the same substance of God.  And yet, Jesus chooses to immerse himself in the same baptism as ordinary humans, to identify with us completely.  To immerse himself in our experiences, our sorrows and joys.

Today we’ll celebrate baptisms at the 10:30 and during the Celtic service.  While the voice of God may not break through our roof, and we may not see a dove flying in, we do know that the Holy Spirit will be present.  Baptisms are not merely our culture’s version of a baby naming ritual.  Baptisms are a leap of faith, the beginning of a new stage of life, a response to that Jesus who so confidently accepted his own baptism and role as our savior.

Baptism is a reminder of the Covenant that God makes with us through Jesus.  No longer are we bound by sin and death, but through Jesus we are set free and invited to live new lives.  When we say yes to life with God through Baptism, we are letting go of our old ways of life.  No longer are we bound by our accomplishments, keeping ahead in the rat race.  No longer are we defined by cruel words that have been spoken about us.  No longer are we do we need to surround ourselves with people who do not have our best interests at heart.    No longer do we need people to be impressed by what brand we wear or what car we drive.  Baptism frees us from the need to gird ourselves with earthly things, because now we are joined with Christ.  Now we are bound to love and service; humility and patience.  We have moved from darkness into light.

Today, as we renew our own Baptismal vows, we are invited to remember that the Holy Spirit remains with us, and even if we’ve slipped back into old ways of life, the Spirit still dwells within us, ready to help us walk back towards the light.  God’s covenant with us will not be broken.  God’s beloved Son has made sure of that.

Thanks be to God.

 

Christmas Eve, Year A, 2013

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No matter my level of Christmas cheer, there is a moment in every Christmas pageant when I am instantly filled with joy.  Whatever the reason, every year, when small children dressed in angel wings run up to the stage and shout to the frightened shepherds:  “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth!”  a huge smile lights up my face.

The children of course, aren’t actually angels.  They are ordinary children who fight with their brothers and sisters.  Their haloes are crooked.  Their wings get into the eyes of the angels behind them in line.  Some years they push and shove and jockey for position.  They are holy and ordinary in an entirely charming way.

According to the Gospel of Luke, God used angels prominently in the incarnation.  An Angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father.  The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, to invite her to bear God’s son.  And, of course, The Angel of the Lord and a band of angels appear to shepherds in the fields, announcing the arrival of the Messiah.

Biblical angels don’t belong on earth.  They are not sweet and cute like our pageant angels.  They are huge and winged and shiny.  They belong to another kingdom, where glowing with the Lord’s presence is less terrifying.  Nevertheless, angels broke through whatever space/time barrier separates us from heaven.  They burst into our reality, terrifying the humans that witnessed their majesty.

The host of angels came to us in an unusual way. They did not swoop in to a group of priests, or at the temple, or even to the King. The host of heaven revealed itself to ordinary shepherds. The transcendent broke into the ordinary.

This juxtaposition of divine and ordinary is the heart of the incarnation.

God could have remained in heaven, relating to his creatures via a distance.  Instead he chose to become a creature.  He chose to be limited by gravity and time and flesh.  He traded the infinite for the finite.  He became ordinary.

This collision of the divine and the ordinary can’t help but change what it means to be an ordinary human.

In this Gospel, when Mary first is confronted by the Angel Gabriel she exclaims the Magnificat, a hymn that marvels at how God turns everything upside down. Mary has a deep understanding that in choosing her, an ordinary girl, to bear God into the world, God is changing the rules completely.  He lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry.  The ordinary becomes sacred.  The insignificant become significant.

The angels are not announcing a Jesus who is visiting as a tourist, taking in the curiosities of having skin and feet and limited points of view.  The angels announce that everything has changed, our categories are irrelevant.  The holy is here, born to an ordinary girl.

My husband picked up a nativity scene at Ten Thousand Villages this week that depicts the Holy Family as a Peruvian family riding a bus.  I love it because it captures the heart of Christ’s birth in a modern context.  If the incarnation happened now, Mary would probably be the kind of girl who rode a bus.  She probably wouldn’t be American. She certainly wouldn’t be rich.  Mary would be an ordinary girl.

News Anchor Megyn Kelly grabbed media attention this month when she insisted both Santa and Jesus were white.  This is easy to laugh about, but it shows how people who have power—white Europeans and Americans—through art and media have remade Jesus in our image.  He becomes more Swedish than Middle Eastern.  We subtly imply that holiness has to look like us.  We are fine with Jesus being ordinary, so long as he is our kind of ordinary.

Theologian James Cone has written that “God is whatever color God needs to be in order to let people know that they’re not nobodies, they’re somebodies.”

God came to earth and made nobodies, somebodies.  God came to earth to make the ordinary holy.  God came to earth so that children of every color and nation could be in relationship with him.  God’s incarnation in Jesus makes holy our ordinary experiences, whatever our skin color or our income.

Andrea Elliot of The New York Times has written a series of articles exposing New York City’s homelessness problem, by following one child—a middle school girl named Dasani.  The story is incredibly bleak. Dasani’s parents are terrible money managers, their room in a homeless shelter is shared by mold and rats, no one in the family feels safe.  But the story is also incredibly powerful because by shining the light on Dasani, we get the rare opportunity to get to know a young, poor girl.  The Marys of our world don’t get screen time.  You just don’t write thirty page stories about a girl like that.  But Elliot captures this girl—her drive, her desire to do well in school, her hunger, her exhaustion, the love she has for her family.  Elliot focuses our attention on a single girl, and reminds us that children like Dasani should matter to us.  Children like Dasani matter to God.

Our outreach team works their tails off to provide for families around Christmastime not because it is a sweet thing to do, but because they know that we are the hands and feet of Jesus.  By buying Christmas gifts and packaging up Christmas hams and vegetables we are shaking our fists at the powers in the world that tell us that there are some people who don’t matter.  By walking alongside our neighbors in need we are proclaiming that their lives are holy. When we celebrate Eucharist in a nursing home or a prison, we are proclaiming the power of God’s love for ordinary, even marginalized people. When we travel halfway across the world to make relationships in Nzali, Tanzania, we are celebrating that all humanity is united by one miraculous birth two thousand years ago.

Whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, your life is holy.  You may think you don’t matter.  You may think you are too young or too old, too rich or too poor, too jaded or too tired, but God has chosen to make your life holy.  And your life isn’t just holy that hour a week you spend in church.  Whether you’re washing the dishes, or walking the dog; typing up a report at work or in the middle of a boring meeting; on the phone with a friend or going for a run—your ordinary life is sacred.  Because before those angels burst onto the scene, the God of the Universe quietly became an ordinary human being.  A human being who presumably had chores and a job..  A human being who had sore feet and stomach aches and who cried and laughed.  Jesus was one of a kind and he was just like us.  Jesus was completely divine and completely human.

Jesus was born and he lived his life and he died and he was resurrected for you. And for the woman who cleans your office, the man who delivers your mail, and the women who made the shirt you’re wearing today.  Jesus was also born for people you will never meet, whose lives are so different from yours you cannot comprehend their experiences, as they could not comprehend yours.

It seems unlikely that any of us in this room will have the gift of a visit from an angel to wake us up to the miracle of our humanity.  So really all we have is moments like these—prayers and candlelight and hymns we’ve sung a hundred times.  We gather together to remember who we are, and whose we are.

And this is who we are. We are people who remember a poor girl who was brave enough to let God in.  We gather with her at the manger and marvel that the very God who created the universe now has tiny baby toes.  We tremble as we consider the risk he’s taking.  He takes this risk for no good reason other than his love for us.

And so we become his, completely ordinary, completely holy, completely humbled.

Amen.

 

Advent 3, Year A, 2013

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John the Baptist came onto the scene in a big way.  He was a bold and unapologetic man.  He wore camel hair and ate weird things like locusts.  His was so charismatic that even though he preached in the wilderness, people traveled miles and miles to hear him.  The message he proclaimed was as bold as he was.

John the Baptist stared people right in the eye and told them to repent. He called them vipers!  He warned people to get their acts in order.  He warned people someone was going to come after him and that person was going to baptize people with the Holy Spirit and with fire!  This man was going to clear out the threshing floor and separate the wheat from the chaff.

This man, of course, was Jesus.

John put himself out there, ignoring social convention, probably losing friends.  Does anyone really want to hang out with a hairy man eating bugs? John took a huge risk, which finally paid off when he met Jesus face to face.

They had a brief meeting in which John baptized Jesus.  Can you imagine John’s excitement?  He is a prophet who gets to actually experience that about which he prophesies!

Unfortunately, soon after he met Jesus, things went downhill for John.

This fierce Jesus about which John told people didn’t materialize.  Well, Jesus materialized, he just didn’t do what John expected him too.  Instead of kicking tail and taking names, Jesus went around healing people.  And John himself got arrested and put in prison.

When in prison, John had lots of time to think.  Maybe he started to get nervous.  Maybe he started doubting his whole ministry.  How ridiculous would you feel if you spent years dressing like a crazy person and baptizing people in the middle of nowhere shouting about this mythical person who is supposed to come restore Israel to its rightful place… and then you start thinking you’ve been scammed?

In any case, he sends a note to Jesus via one of his disciples.  “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”  Ouch.

You guys, John the Baptist had a moment of doubt.  John the BAPTIST!  Is there anyone in the bible who sounds more confident and full of faith than John the Baptist?  Every Advent we get at least two weeks on him because he is such a hero of faith.  Yet, even John the Baptist’s faith fails for a moment.

St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand puts on these little videos with their kids.  One of them is an adorable Christmas pageant that takes place in heaven as God makes the decision to send Jesus to earth.  In it this little blond boy wearing glasses dressed like an angel keeps saying, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Whoever wrote the script gets the incarnation just right.  John the Baptist was not expecting the Jesus that showed up.  His imagination was too small.  John the Baptist, and many who expected the Messiah, expected someone fierce.  They expected someone powerful.  They expected someone who could overthrow the status quo.  Jesus is fierce and powerful, but in spiritual ways, rather than political ones.  Jesus is not who they expected.

In the Christmas pageant video, the angels keep trying to figure out what God is doing.  When God wants to straighten things out on earth, they assume he’ll send an army of angels.  When they learn he just wants to send one person, they assume he’ll pick someone big and strong.  When they learn he plans to send a helpless infant, they assume he’ll send the baby to a powerful ruler who could protect him.  When they assume he’ll send a normal baby, he tells them instead he’ll be sending the Prince of Heaven, his son.  Every time God corrects their assumptions, the small angel repeats his line, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Jesus rarely meets expectations.  But he certainly exceeds them.  Jesus doesn’t directly answer John the Baptist’s question.  Instead he points to his activities that line up with Scriptural descriptions of what the Messiah will do with his time.  Jesus says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus’ legitimacy doesn’t come from physical, political, or military power.  He doesn’t need to overthrow a government to start bringing about the Kingdom of God.  In Christ’s incarnation, God shows us who he really is and what his interests are.  In the video the child playing God says, “When the Prince is done, nothing will get between them and my love.”

In Jesus, God comes alongside humanity.  God restores people to themselves and to community.  He reverses deafness and blindness and leprosy.  He changes the narrative about wealth and poverty, reassuring the poor that their poverty is not a punishment. He forgives sins. He even restores the dead to life. He wants people to be able to fully participate in life.  He wants people to be able to fully participate in a relationship with God.

The tables are turned even for what it means to be holy. Prophets have always had an exalted position, but Jesus tells his followers that “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.“  He is not denigrating John the Baptist here.  He goes on to talk about how important John the Baptist is.  He’s just saying Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are so going to change the rules that even the least significant person included in the Kingdom of Heaven is going to have an incredibly special place with God.  Because in the Kingdom of Heaven there is no significant or insignificant.  We are all united with God and therefore incredibly important.

At the same time, we are ALL united with God, so none of us are more important than any other.

This is important for us to hear.  We are so driven in this little part of the world. My favorite example of this recently is the controversy over whether to keep class rankings at Western.  There are so many students pushing to do well that you can have excellent grades and not be in the top ten or even 25% of your class!  These same students are encouraged to play school sports and club sports and do mission trips and develop interesting hobbies.  They are expected to do hours of homework every night while also getting plenty of sleep.  It’s all impossible!  And we who parent and grandparent them aren’t much better with our striving to make more money and dress nicely and volunteer with every board that asks us.  We forget that we are enough not because of what we do, but because of how God loves us.

Jesus turns things topsy turvy for us too, you know.  We expect Jesus to be a certain way.  We excpect Jesus to stay out of the way, mostly, except for when we need a little comfort.  We don’t really expect Jesus to show up when we’re making decisions about our kids’ schedules, or about whether or not to take the promotion, or in the middle of a fight with someone we love.

But Jesus is in our lives, too.  In unexpected ways.  All the time. He calls us constantly to join him in the work of making the Kingdom of God a reality.  He calls us to examine our culture critically and decide what parts of it work and what parts need be rejected for us to live holy lives.  Jesus is intrusive in only the way someone who really loves us can be.  And the angels in heaven are quite possibly looking down and chuckling as they say to themselves.  Brilliant!  They weren’t expecting that!”

Advent 1, Year A, 2013

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You may have caught on to this already, since Target has been draped in tinsel for weeks, but Christmas is coming! Today we begin a new church year and the season of Advent.  Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, is a season of waiting and preparing for Jesus’ birth.

But Advent isn’t just about getting ready for the baby Jesus.  The first Sunday of Advent always begins with an apocalyptic text.  I don’t know about you, but when I get to church in December I want to hear sweet stories about Mary and Joseph getting ready to welcome baby Jesus.  Instead, we get stories of women disappearing while minding their own business.  That doesn’t usually show up in Advent Calendars, does it?

No matter how uncomfortable they make us, these kinds of apocalyptic texts are pretty common in the New Testament.  They understand Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as part of an as of yet incomplete journey for human kind.  Jesus has already done the work of saving us from ourselves, but the work of completing the Kingdom of God—a time when peace and justice will mark humanity’s relationships—is still to come.  Theologians call this time we are in the parousia:  the already, but not yet.

We are already saved by the incarnate, resurrected Jesus, but our world is not yet fully redeemed.  Our world is still marked by human brokenness.  In Advent, we are called not just to remember the infant Jesus coming into the world, but we are also supposed to prepare for his return.

And how do we prepare?

We stay awake.  Not literally awake, of course.  Jesus doesn’t want to come back to be greeted by delirious believers clutching bottles of “5 Hour Energy”.  Jesus wants us to stay awake spiritually.

There are Christians who believe if you compile all the parts of Scripture together that reference Jesus’ return, you can map out roughly when he’ll come back.  But our passage today refutes that notion.  Jesus reminds his listeners that Noah’s contemporaries could not have known that there would be a great flood.  In the same way, Christians cannot know when Jesus’ return will happen.  We don’t need to obsess over it.  We don’t need to try to predict when it will come.  We just need to stay awake.

In our culture, we are experts at doing anything but staying awake and alert to our present.  Our culture has trained us to long for what is next.  Our next meal out, a fancier car, a better job, a more elaborate home.  We think about the future all the time.  We worry about the future. Will we get married?  Will we be able to have kids?  Will we have jobs we love?  Will we be able to afford retirement?  We can even put off our own happiness, thinking that our happiness will come at some point in the future—when we make a little more money, when we lose the weight, when we meet Mr. Right.

In the same way we can put off our own spiritual lives.  Oh, I’ll start going to church when I have kids.  I’ll start studying the Bible when I retire.  I’ll go to that fellowship event once my work settles down a bit.

But this one Sunday a year it is my job to say this to you:  Wake up.

Wake up!

You don’t know what time you have left.  Jesus could come back tomorrow.  You could get hit by a bus on your way home.  Our time on this earth is short and unpredictable.

Would you be ready if you had to give an account of your life today?

Have you checked in lately with God to find out where he is calling you to serve? Have you been paying attention to the needs of your neighbors?  Are there widows, orphans, or other people on the margins in your life who need attention?

These kind of questions make us feel vulnerable and nervous.

In her book Daring Greatly, Brene Brown tells us that we numb ourselves to avoid feeling vulnerable.  We put ourselves to sleep to avoid the pain of our lives. We put ourselves into a stupor by endlessly checking Facebook, by watching TV, by drinking every night, by stuffing our faces with brownies or queso.  We would rather sleep walk, than live fully awake.

We only have this one life.  We only have this one life to feel the joy and pain of what it means to be human.  We only have this one life to take emotional risks.  We only have this one life to love and serve other people.

When I yell “Wake up!” at you, it may sound like a nag.  Like something your mother used to do when you were just exhausted before school and all you wanted was a few more minutes of rest.

But I really mean to yell “wake up!” at you as an invitation.  Jesus invites us to live a full, rich life drenched with meaning.  Jesus invites us to live lives in service to God and other human beings.  I want you to wake up, not so you can check off a checklist of “good deeds” you’ve done.  I want you to wake up so you can feel the exquisite joy of being a human being made in God’s image.  I want you to wake up so you experience the human life that God made holy by his incarnation in Jesus Christ.

Your life is ordinary and extraordinary.  Just as it is now—with the same job, home, marital status, friends, pets—your life is really something special.  You don’t have to sell everything and ditch your life to follow God.  Your path to a meaningful, holy life is right in front of you.  So wake up!  And live!

Proper 27, Year C, 2013

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What is heaven like?

I get that question a lot, but since I haven’t experienced the afterlife myself, I never have a great answer.

The Bible never speaks extensively about heaven—but there are clues here and there.  Our passage today is one of those hints.

Ironically, the people asking Jesus the question about what happens after the resurrection don’t even really care about his answer.

Some Sadducees come up to Jesus, trying to outwit him.  Sadducees were the Jewish sect that was in charge of keeping up the Temple.  They came from wealthy, respected families.  And they did not believe in the resurrection.

To try to prove how illogical the resurrection is they pose the question about the widow that we heard today.

This poor hypothetical woman!  In the law of the time, if your husband died, it was his brother’s responsibility to marry you.  This was meant to protect the widow, but it also reinforces how women were treated like chattel—passed along from one brother to another.  This poor woman has not been able to bear children, and she goes through all seven brothers.  You can only imagine how much she and her mother in law loathed each other after all this!

The Sadducees want to know:  Who does she belong to in heaven?  Who has the right to be her husband, if she’s been married seven times and has no children?

Jesus’ response set the Sadducees back on their heels.

To the Sadducees, this woman is just hypothetical, an intellectual exercise.  But Jesus has known and loved women in really difficult circumstances.  Remember his loving response to the woman at the well who had been married five times.  To Jesus, women weren’t chattel to be passed along.  A barren woman wasn’t the object of derision or deserving of shame. Women were integral parts of God’s kingdom.

Jesus tells the Sadducees that in heaven, no one is given in marriage.  Each person comes to God on his or her own terms and worships God as a whole person.  In community, yes, but not tied to any individual person.

What good news this is for us!  We are in this rare time and place in history in which we understand that women and men are equally valuable members of society and the church.  We understand that a woman’s value is not based on her ability to produce an heir for a family line.

On the other hand, we in the church can do better!

Church can be a very marriage and family centered place. When I was single in church, people kept trying to set me up.  When I was newly married, parishioners felt perfectly free to ask me when I was going to get pregnant.  We treat single and childless people as if they haven’t quite arrived to adulthood.

And I am not innocent of this!  One of my goals as your priest was to minister to the women I don’t see at my women’s bible study:  women who work during the day, who are busy with other responsibilities, including children.  So, I planned this “Mom’s night out” for next week.  After we had already advertised this, I had a revelation.  There were fabulous women I really wanted to be there who did not have children. I found myself running around individually asking them to join us.  We’ll rebrand it the next time we meet, and please, if you want to join some of the young and middle aged women of St. Paul’s Ivy next week, read your bulletin for more information!

This is just a small example of the way churches treat being married with kids as the default position for adults.  But be reassured, even if your clergy get mixed up about this, Jesus never does.

Nancy Rockwell wrote a gorgeous blog post about this passage this week in which she writes,

… the Christian church has so venerated women as childbearers  that it has been unable to imagine other roles for women,  even though Jesus never praised childbearing or motherhood, and did imagine other roles for women:   Mary has chosen the good portion and it will not be taken away from her, he said, when Mary chose to sit among the disciples and learn, rather than work in the kitchen.  And perhaps most importantly, in this argument with the Sadducees over the barren woman, Jesus opened the gates of heaven to her, saying that in the resurrection, life is not as we know it here on earth, there is no owning or belonging to one another, for in eternity all are children of God.   Thanks to Jesus, the barren woman does what is unthinkable:  she steps into heaven on her own.

Jesus was never interested in anyone’s societal status.  He never asked a tax collector if he was the best tax collector in his company.  He didn’t ask Peter whether where he ranked among local fishermen. He didn’t keep nagging Mary Magdalene about finding a man and settling down already!

Jesus was interested in the hearts of human beings, not any of the outward categories by which we humans judge each other.

In heaven, and now, we are loved by God for who we are in all our individuality.  There is no one way to be a woman.  There is no one way to be a man.

Heaven is a mystery.  But God is not a mystery.  God has revealed himself to us in Jesus and we can trust that Jesus’ compassion for humanity will extend itself into our experiences after we die.  And for those of us who are happily married, who grieve the idea of no longer being married in heaven, we can trust that while the legal bonds of marriage may be dissolved upon our deaths, the bonds of affection between two people, the love between two people remains.   After all, those bonds are part of who we are.

In our community, may we strengthen and widen those bonds of love so that everyone, no matter their life situation, may feel welcomed into our little corner of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.

Proper 24, Year C, 2013

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This is the story of how God loves us.

Billions of years ago, in the middle of nothing, a hot mass explodes.  The debris flings outward, turning into atoms, neutrons and protons.  The mess becomes planets and suns, black holes and mysteries we cannot imagine.

And on one of those planets, the God of the Universe decides to conduct a holy experiment.  He moves into the chaos and holds the waters back and makes sure the sun’s light and warmth hits the planet in just the right way.  This planet has just enough carbon and light and water and warmth for really interesting things to begin happening.  Bacteria and amoeba start to swim in the waters, grass and small trees start to burst forth from the ground.  God thinks to himself, “Well, that’s good!  What should we do next?”  And suddenly there are fish and mice crawling and birds flying around.  Cows and horses and goats chew on that new grass.

God thinks to himself, “Well, that’s good, too!  But you know what I really want?  Someone to talk to; someone to love.”  And so humans begin to walk the earth.  And God comes down and talks with them and they have some good times.  And God says to himself, “Well that is very good!”

But then it turns out human beings are a little more complicated than God intended.  Or maybe we are exactly as complicated as God intended.  In any case, right from the beginning humans turn out to be pretty selfish.  In fact, some are beyond selfish.  Humans can be wicked. Some humans choose to really hurt one another, even murder one another.  God does not think this is good.

So God searches humanity for one good person.  And he finds Noah.  He tells Noah to build a boat and then in a moment of horrifying editing, God wipes the slate clean.   All the animals, all the humans drown.  Only Noah, his family and the animals on the boat remain.

This is how God loves us.

God promises Noah he will never destroy humanity in a mass flood again.  He loves humans, he doesn’t want to destroy them.  He wants to make this relationship work. And he gives us the sign of a rainbow to reassure us.

But over time, the same wicked, murderous, greedy impulses come back into our behavior.  God has promised not to destroy us, so he tries to find a new way to be in relationship with us.  For now, he gives up on the idea of being able to relate to all humans, and he decides to choose one family.  He goes from family to family asking them if they are interested in following him.  Most people, ask, “Where?”  And when God tells them “Wherever I tell you.”  They say, “No thanks, I really like my tent right here, thank you very much.”  But Abraham and Sarah, they are up for an adventure.  They follow God on a long journey.  God promises to establish a kingdom out of their little family, which is laughable really, since Sarah is barren.  But against all odds, after many missteps, Sarah has a baby, Isaac.  And out of Isaac, the Jewish people are born.

God has his people now.  Finally.

This is how God loves us.

Even when God has his own special people, now called the Israelites, they still act like jerks.  And on top of that his people have been enslaved by the Egyptians.  So God decides they need some liberation and some structure.  He asks a man named Moses if he is up for the job of freeing his people from Egypt and Moses says, “No thanks, I don’t really like public speaking.”  God takes a deep breath and says to himself, “I can’t believe I’m about to negotiate with this guy.”  But God does negotiate with Moses and agrees to let Moses’ brother Aaron do the public speaking for him.  Against his better judgment, Moses agrees and goes into Egypt and argues with the Pharaoh for a long time.  Frogs fall from the sky and rivers run with blood, but the Jewish people are freed.

It doesn’t take long before the people following Moses start to get crabby.  The Israelites don’t much like wandering around in the wilderness.  God tries to use the time in the wilderness to shape his people.  He realizes he’s never really told his people what he expects of them, so God gives Moses ten pretty sensible rules for his people to follow.  No more murdering or coveting, worship only the Lord.  Basic stuff like that.  The people following Moses follow the rules.  For about five minutes.  But then there is calf worshiping and more grumbling and so they stay in the wilderness a long time.

Eventually God leads these people onto some nicer property, but not before Moses dies.

This is how God loves us.

Several generations pass and the Israelites start noticing how other groups of people around them have kings.  They tell God, “You know what would be awesome?  If we had a king!”  And God says to them, “You do have a king!  Me!  I am your king!  Have you not been paying any attention?”  And the Israelites said to God, “You are adorable, but we mean a king-king.  Like a crown-wearing king.  Get us one of those guys.”  And God rolls his eyes, and gets them a king.  The first one, Saul, doesn’t work out, but eventually God chooses David.  And David is not the kind of guy you want to marry, but he’s a pretty good King.  For a long time the presence of God has been carted around in a little ark and David decides to bring that ark into Jerusalem and it is a pretty big deal.  The Israelites are really happy about having a city to call their own and eventually David’s son builds a temple for that holy presence.  God really, really likes David, and he promises David that his descendants will always be the kings of Israel.  This is nice for David, because David’s personal life is a disaster, so at least he has something to look forward to.

Well, David’s son Solomon was a pretty good King, but after that, surprise, surprise, things go downhill.

The kingdom splits into two, and the kings are the worst.

This is how God loves us.

God is not happy with how the kings are doing.  The kingdoms are now called Israel and Judah and God sends them both various prophets who say things like, “You guys!  Shape up!  Why are you being such jerks?  How hard is it to be just and be kind to widows and orphans and worship me alone?  Get it together!”  And because Israel and Judah are not following God’s laws, he allows them to be taken over by other kingdoms.  The worst of these are the Babylonians.  When the Babylonians took over Israel, they forced Israelites to leave Jerusalem and move to Babylon.  This shook up the whole self identity of the Israelite people.  Who were they if they weren’t in Jerusalem?  Who was God if God allowed them to be uprooted in this way?  What about the covenants God had made with his people?

And God thinks to himself, “This really isn’t working. I need to try something new.”

So God sends this prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah wasn’t really a people person.  He was crabby, really, but he had some good news for the Israelites.  He told them that God hadn’t abandoned them.  They were still God’s people even in Babylon.  And that God had something new in mind.  God was going to make a new covenant with Israel.  No longer would Israel be judged and punished for its ancestor’s sins.  God was going to offer forgiveness to Israel and change their hearts so they would follow God out of love.

This is how God loves us.

God realizes that changing hearts isn’t enough. God wants to be in relationship with us.  God knows we won’t change.  We will still be selfish and murderous and kind of awful.  And so the God of creation, the God of Noah and Abraham and Moses and David decides to come to earth.  He comes to earth as a little baby and he experiences our suffering.  He learns what it means to lose people you love.  He learns what it means to be sick.  He learns what it means to be betrayed.  And he loves people.  Not in an abstract way, but in a hands on, healing way.  He still thinks everyone should be kinder to one another, but he actually comes down and lives that out.  He shows us how to speak truth to power and lift up the lowly and makes us realize God loves every kind of person.

And then we kill God.  We reject him again, in the most absolute way we can reject a person.  But God comes back to us. God comes back to us from the dead. Despite being rejected again and again.  Despite our inability to be good, our inability to climb our way to God, God comes back to us and loves us and invites us to be with him in a new way.  For eternity.

This is how God loves us.

The people who followed Jesus are pretty gobsmacked by every thing that has happened, so God sends them another part of himself:  the Holy Spirit.  That Holy Spirit moves in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ friends and helps them to love each other and tell the story of Jesus—God coming to earth.  In fact, the Holy Spirit helps these people become the very hands and feet of Jesus.  Now that Jesus has ascended into heaven it is up to these people—the church—to be Jesus on earth.

They are very brave and tell their story and soon it spreads across the world. Thousands of years pass and home churches turn into the Catholic Church and then the Eastern Orthodox Church splits off and then the Protestant reformation happens.  All because people are trying to follow God the best way they know how.

And now we are here, in Ivy, Virginia, in one very particular church, with a few hundred particular people.  We are a very blessed part of the church.  We aren’t persecuted.  We have beautiful liturgy.  We have a beautiful building.  We have a community of people who love each other.

This is how we love God.

We look around and think “Oh my goodness. I am part of a huge, incredible, epic story.  The God to whom I pray is the same God who created the stars in the sky.  The God I worship by singing hymns is the God who called Abraham and Moses and David.  The Holy Spirit who breathed on the first Christians breathes on me and helps me to grow and change and become more like Christ every day.”

And we realize stewardship is the holy responsibility to play our part in the story.  Who are we in the kingdom of God?  Where are we supposed to be acting as Christ’s hands and heart?  How can we work together as a congregation to make the world a little bit more like the place God envisioned when he created those first humans years ago?

Our lives matter and the choices we make matter.  We are part of a story that is more powerful than our minds can comprehend.  We are part of the greatest love story ever told.

Thanks be to God.