November 17 -- Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Sisters and brothers in Christ,

Today’s Gospel, today’s good news is for the tired believers.

It’s for those of us who are a little bit, and especially for those of us who are very tired, and frightened about what the future holds.  (If that’s not you, say a prayer of thanksgiving, and come stand with those who are tired and afraid.)  This is a text for those who look around and see a world that has abandoned the teachings of Jesus and the prophets.  The text I just read, said “you will be hated by all because of my name.”  Maybe that’s true for Christians today in some places, but mostly in our culture, I think the contemporary version of this is not that we will be hatred but rather just treated with apathy or ignorance or misinterpretation, which in some ways is worse.  If you’re hated, then at least your argument has got traction, it’s getting under someone’s skin.  But if you’re ignored, well then you don’t even have a place [“benign”].  Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel once said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.”

Do you ever feel totally insignificant or ignored?  Without a place, a voice?  Not even given the affirmation of a counter-argument.  Just brushed off – perhaps by the culture, perhaps by our leaders and law makers, always by the weather, perhaps by the church, perhaps by your family or friends? “You will be irrelevant because of my name,” Jesus might say to us today.  (If that’s not you...)

Today’s Gospel message is for the tired followers of Jesus among us…feeling unimportant and hopeless…like our work and our words are in vain, and the ship is going down.  “Why bother?  What’s the point?  Who cares?”

This Gospel is for those of us who can feel ourselves being sucked into all that apathy, ignorance and misinterpretation flying all around us, like a hurricane.

It’s easy to just give ourselves to those Category 5, gale-force, hurricane winds of this culture—“take care of yourself, it’s all about you, cover your assets, [whispering] they are not your problem, protect yourself, security, security, personal security, draw your circle of family tight and neat, don’t worry about anyone else but you and yours…’cause the ship is going down.”  Watch for those subtexts in all the holiday ads that are already well on their way in our culture…these messages whipping by us like wind...and sometimes much more impactful than that.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast and, like many of you, have been in a few hurricanes.  I’ve got this image in my head this week of “Christians in a hurricane” when I look at this text:

Christians in a hurricane, can you imagine?  Christians, like any creature, would seek cover during a hurricane.  But then, as they wait for the storm to pass, they toil away together in a safe place—maybe a basement of a church, maybe its a community center or someone’s home.  They would be together and working away during the storm … knitting, quilting, assembling packets, cooking, planning their strategy for reaching out very soon, assisting one another with words of comfort, bandages, hugs and long conversations.  Maybe even laughter and games as the trees bend and branches fall outside.  Can you envision it?  Small teams would even venture out into the storm to gather in those who could not find shelter.  They would risk their lives for a stranger.  And when they returned with a cold, wet, lost child or an elderly adult, all would be greeted at the door and ushered in with blankets and bowls of tomato soup and plates of grilled cheese.  And a cot with a pillow.  Can you see it, in your mind’s eye?

The hurricane pounds, and the Christians wait and work.  And then a time would come for worship.  They would gather in a dark place underground.  No electricity, but that doesn’t matter.  They’d pray and sing anyway.  They’d read scripture by candlelight – they’d hardly have to look for passages about earlier believers riding out storms, lights shining in darkness, life overcoming death, peace in times of chaos...because they’d already know them by heart.  And they’d hang on every word from that Holy Book.  And then they’d eat — Christians in a hurricane – they’d break and eat the body of life, the blood of forgiveness, Christ would fill them – and they would be satisfied…with all physical evidence to the contrary.

Today’s text is about hunkering down together.  Patiently working.  Lovingly watching .  Thoughtfully reaching out.  Faithfully hoping.  Christians in a hurricane.
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The Gospel of Luke is written by the same author as the book of Acts.  And commentaries reminded us that this text, especially the bits about the hardship that’s coming—the imprisonment, the ridicule, the persecution—is of course a foreshadowing of exactly what happens in Acts.

One of these events in the book of Acts:  there’s a story of Paul traveling by sea with his comrades and they are terrified because they’re caught in a storm...but Paul speaks to them:
“I urge you now to keep up your courage, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship…'Do not be afraid…God has granted safety to all those who are sailing with you.'  So keep up your courage.” (Acts 27:22-25)

“The ship is going down, and you’ll be OK,” Jesus says to his disciples.   Jesus is unimpressed in this text by the temple, by the building, by the ship.  Bricks and stones and fancy cargo, will all go down.

But you will be OK.  In one sentence, Jesus says, “you will be betrayed and some even put to death,” and in the very next, “but not a hair on year head will perish.”  Malachi: “The sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”  Psalmist: “Sorrow spends the night, but...”

This is a text about hunkering down, faithfully enduring.  “By your endurance you will gain your [souls],” Jesus says.  psuche—mind, sanity, calmness.  Our Buddhist sisters and brothers teach: “Chop wood, carry water.”  Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians:  “Do not weary in doing what is right.”  Hunker down: chop wood, carry water, wash, bake, stitch, weed.  One of the great quotes attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant an apple tree today.”  

Hunkering down, sisters and brothers in Christ, patiently doing what is right.  And we do it, not alone, we endure with all tangible evidence to the contrary, we endure in the glorious company of all the saints—who we celebrated a few weeks ago and each time we gather—we endure together and we endure with Christ.  To the tired followers of Jesus, hear his words again.  “My peace be with you,” he says, even as nation rises against nation, even as nation rises against itself, earthquakes from within and without, hurricanes pounding, Christians don’t deny the realities.  They ground themselves in an even deeper reality:  Christ’s peace is present, enfleshed and moving among us—that peace never leaves us.

And because of that peace of Christ, which passes all human understanding, everything turns, everything changes, and we are filled anew...to love and share and trust and live.
Thanks be to God.  AMEN.

November 10 -- Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Well, we are coming into the ‘season of questions’:  questions around the Thanksgiving table, questions around the Christmas dinner table.  Many times those questions are lovingly asked, as family and friends re-unite and catch-up and check in:  “Well, can you tell us about life in the big city?  How are classes going? What new projects are you working on?”  

You know when you get asked a genuine question, how the asker truly wants to learn and hear more because they care about you and are genuinely interested in you, and what you have to say.  Open-heated questions.  

And then there are other questions...questions that are not bolstered with a backdrop of support or any clear intention of loving curiosity and concern or excitement.  These are mean-hearted questions.

Have you ever been asked a mean-hearted question? — Questions that are meant to “catch” you or point out some shortcoming?  Questions that are really just meant to embarrass you, even as they might be skillfully worded to make the asker look totally innocent, even well-intentioned?  Sometimes ridiculous scenarios are created just to see how you’ll react or respond.  Again, questions that are just trying to make you look bad.  I’m afraid these kinds of questions can show up during the holidays too, during this season of questions, and throughout the year as well.

They could even be the exact same examples I just gave...but the tone is so different.  “So tell us about life in the big city.”  (clear disdain for a location or choice you made to move away)  “How are classes going?” (knowing full well that you’re not in school at the moment, unlike other siblings) “What new projects are you working on?” (hinting at some past failures or a pattern of jumping from thing to think without finishing) 

Some questions, friends in Christ, are just cruel.

Ahhh, pay attention to questions these days, and in this quickly-approaching holiday season.  (And pray for God always to be on your/our lips and in your/our heart, as you/we both ask questions and respond in the coming days.)

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Jesus, once again, is experiencing the latter forms of questions here in our text — the kinds meant to embarrass and “catch”.  And certainly a ridiculous scenario (even to ancient ears).  You can almost hear the cruelty to the Sadducees’ tone.  

But Christ, once again, uses their mean-heartedness to teach us a lesson about God and offer a vision of justice and peace.  Often the asker of the cruel question has no desire to learn, and I wonder if the Sadducees never learned from Jesus’ response.  But we we get to.  Two thousand years later!  We get to look with fresh eyes and consider Christ’s response.

“Whose wife will the woman be?” they asked.

And Jesus responds with a vision of heaven: In God, that is, in heaven, a woman will not be passed down like an object, from brother to brother.  In God, everyone is valued fully — the text says, they “will become like angels”.  In God, no one is cast aside or passed along crudely.  In God, mean-heartedness and cruelty is no more.  Tears and pain are no more.  In God, dying is no more.  Jesus gives us a glimpse of heaven.  Can you imagine?  I hope that you can!  And that these strange ideas in this text today might even give us direction and instruction for how we live now.  What would it look like to lift others up like angels?!  (And let our selves be seen too...as angels?!)  That’s the image in Luke here!  Do you see yourself as an angel?

Are we capable of seeing and treating each other as angels?  

Each person that walks into this church this next week, can we welcome them as angels?  What if you envision each person who comes into your business or classroom, or sits at the cafe table next to you or waits at the stoplight across from you...as an angel?!  Not just someone to be passed by, passed down, passed over, like the widow in the Sadducees scenario.   But angels.  

(Maybe their example is not that ridiculous, after all, when we think about how carelessly we can overlook one another because we’re always in such a hurry, or suspicious, or actually somewhere deep down believe we’re better than someone else, that they’re not worthy of angelic dignity...)

This text is a wake-up call, friends in Christ.  To see our neighbors, to see strangers in our midst, to see family members and community partners … not just as fellow human beings … but as angels!  Talk about resurrection!  Christ lives (“I know that my redeemer lives”) and so do we...and not just as mere humans but, in Christ, we live as angels, like angels, for one another and for this hurting planet!

Friends, we can glimpse, we can live into a bit-o-heaven even here and even now, even in these mean-hearted days! Our God is a God of life and is calling us to open our eyes and our hearts even now.  This new life is ours, and it’s not just for after we leave this earth!  

Our God is a God of the living, a God of “the now”.  And this God has come near to be with us...in wine and water and wheat and wherever God wants to show up!  This community, this congregational meeting today, this neighborhood, this city, even about this Capitol Beltway!  

This God of the living has chosen to come along side us, and so we start living anew today — Open-hearted.  Interested and caring.  Noticing others, slowing down to appreciate the angels all around us!  This is our call.  

This is grace again, showered down on you and on me.  Thanks be to God.  Christ will come...and Christ is here now.  AMEN.

November 3 -- All Saints Sunday

Got a voice mail message from my friend Edgar the other day:  “Dan, how you doin’ buddy.  Been a long time.  Things are good here.  You know: [chuckle] ‘first world’ baby.  I got first world problems...” He goes on...

But I’ve been chuckling and thinking about his message this week.  And I think about it today as we revisit and are reshaped by this beautiful Zacchaeus story about Christ’s transformative forgiveness and self-invitation.  I think it helps to start all that from Edgar’s angle: “first world”.  In other words, it helps to start by realizing that we’re up in the tree too, with Zacchaeus.  First world problems: can’t get a nice enough view.

I remember when we did some painting at our house in California some years back.  I’m thinking about giving the pastor’s study here at church an accent wall of color too.  I can’t think of a better example of first-world problems.  I mean we stressed out about this, maybe you have been before too — “What if we buy the paint we think we like, but don’t once it’s up on the wall?”  That’s a first world problem!  [I imagine we can argue why the color of our walls is so important.]  But c’mon...first world, baby.

We’re up there with Zacchaeus, friends, looking down on the rest.  Maybe we haven’t intentionally defrauded anyone quite like that dirty, little tax-collector Zaccaeus, but we’re all broken sinners.  And those of us in the first world have certainly squandered more than our fair share of resources over and against our neighbors, sometimes totally unknowingly.  (I remember when I learned what my carbon footprint was, just in eating a hamburger, much less driving a car or flying in an airplane.)  We’ve all defrauded or cut ourselves off from the rest (pretending not to see or just not caring).  Who would have thought that ‘falling short’ (of the glory of God) meant ‘climbing high’?  But we’ve got a perfect visual of that today: Zack up there in the tree.  (Picture from Nats parade.)  

And not only are we separated and isolated from other parts of the world, friends, we’re separated from each other.  And we know we need each other, we know we’re meant to be together, but still we want to climb that tree.   So we’ve tried to get both — we’ve invented the internet and Facebook so that we can have it all — the glorious tree house up high and the ‘connection’ too.  But of course that’s not a real connection; that’s not sharing a meal at home together.  What a difference.  (You should write an essay this week about the difference between spending an evening alone on Facebook (ok) vs. spending an evening at a dinner party with your favorite people.)

It’s an ok good view from up here, in the tree.  That is, until Jesus comes walking into town, stops at the foot of our tree...[pause] and then our view gets even better...

Sisters and brothers in Christ, God didn’t create us to live up above the rest, or apart from one another.  Isolated.  God made us for community — both in our neighborhoods and across our globe.  Community is at the heart of this passage.  Zacchaeus is being restored to the community, and that restoration of community is at the heart of his salvation:  “Salvation has come to this house today.”  Even with all our defrauding one another and grumbling about each other, we are meant to be together.  God made us for community.  God made us for each other.  And that’s at the heart of salvation.  Salvation is not just for you to get across the finish line, forgetting all the rest; no, salvation looks like a dinner party!

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Jesus walks up to our trees this day, looks up at us, and calls us down too.  Each of us.  We can all get caught up there…not just because of our first-world problems, but because of our human problems: our pride, our self-centeredness, and our fear.  We can retreat up the tree and want to live out our days up there, but Jesus walks up to our tree and says, “Come down.”  In fact he says, “Hurry and come down.”  What are you doing up there?  What are you doing locked up there apart from the neighborhood?  What are you doing walking on other peoples’ backs?  Come down from there.”  Jesus gently calls us down.  Not with a lecture about wealth and poverty, and money, or a guilt trip about our first-world problems, but with another surprise: the self-invite.

Biblically-sanctioned intrusion (just for when you feel like you might be barging in on a friend.)  “I’m coming to your house today,” Jesus says.  Didn’t see that one coming.  Like later in John’s Gospel — “Do you have anything to eat?” — our Lord lovingly intrudes and, in so doing, empowers, even the most unlikely of characters — the tax man!  Even you...even me.

All of us, called out, called down, called back to the earth.

This story is amazing because, notice the order here: Jesus didn’t offer forgiveness and salvation and then Zacchaeus came down and invited Jesus over to celebrate.  First, Jesus just invites himself over, tells him to come down.  First there’s the intrusion.  And then Zacchaeus makes this incredible statement -- “Half my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor.  And anyone I’ve defrauded, I’ll pay back 4x as much”!!!  Jesus didn’t ask for any of that, but Zacchaeus just couldn’t help himself.  He had been flung by God’s grace out of that tree...and just went crashing into a new life of radical generosity.  And that’s when Jesus says, “Salvation has come to this house.”  Zacchaeus has been restored to the community.  He’s come back to the earth.

Maybe there should be a St. Zacchaeus Lutheran church!  (I’m always thinking about church names.)  Why don’t we have that?  Because Zacchaeus was one of those turn-around saints.  In some ways that’s way more inspiring than all the saints who were always willing to share what they had in radically generous ways!  Zacchaeus let himself be flipped, cold-turkey, from incredibly stingy and conniving to radically merciful and generous.  St. Zacchaeus.
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Jesus is so bold, sisters and brothers in Christ, that he invites himself into our homes!  I don’t know about you, but my home’s a mess right now (especially in the middle of Oct-Nov busyness, my study’s a mess right now here at church).  The last person I’d want to invite over is Jesus.  But we don’t get to invite him, he invites himself.

This is where I don’t understand the language of some of our siblings in Christ, who say, “All you have to do is invite Jesus into your heart.”  No, he invites himself, ready or not!!

And as a result, everything changes!  It’s grace, it’s God’s arrival, that turns our lives around, not guilt or shame about our first-world lifestyles.  It’s love and relationship that changes our ways, not lectures about our self-centeredness and isolationism.  Do you see?  It’s grace, it’s love that brings us down — back to the community, to share all that we have.

Salvation, friends in Christ, comes to your house this All Saints Day...as the bread and the wine intrude, as the rain waters of our baptisms cause us to slip right out of the trees of our self-congratulatory exploits and carry us back into the muddy village.  Back to the table.

It was a bird’s eye view of Jesus.
But now, thanks be to God, we’re sharing a meal with him.  Now we’re across the table from Christ and therefore from each other.  Now everything changes.   AMEN.