Last week Jesus calls Peter “the Rock”. He lifts him up, promises him the “keys to the kingdom”, says, “upon this rock I’ll build my church.” Jesus has Peter feeling pretty good, I imagine. This week (only 8 verses later) Jesus calls Peter “Satan.” What happened?
Peter probably wanted to take his titles and honor and blessings from Christ and just enjoy them (just for a second...just 8 verses, Jesus?); Peter wants to “take the money and run,” so to speak.
But then Jesus instructs Peter — and all of us — in the ways of discipleship. This is a calling — once we acknowledge Christ as the Messiah, once we make our bold statement of faith, like Peter, this is a call — to take up our cross, this is a call to come and die. Peter wanted to hinder that. He wanted to block it. “Say it isn’t so, Lord.”
I wondered about putting “Come Die With Us” on our digital sign out front. [pause] I wonder how fast this church would grow.
This Gospel passage from Matthew, that is before us today, is terrible marketing. It does not make people feel good. It’s frightening, and confusing and, frankly, not the way most people are going to choose. “I don’t want to come die with you, Lord. I want to enjoy the Rock, the church. I want to enjoy the comfort of being in your presence. I want to enjoy knowing that my soul is safe with you. I don’t want to suffer.”
"If any want to become my followers [though],” Jesus said, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake [and for the sake of the Gospel] will find it.”
Christ calls us to give ourselves away for this world. [pause]
How are you, how are we, giving ourselves away for this world? In a world and a culture that says, “No, protect yourself and your dearest ones! Don’t give yourself away! That’s stupid.”
But Christ bids we come. We give ourselves up. And as D. Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ bids we come, he bids we come and die.”
[How am I doing here, btw? As I wrote this I found myself wanting to add lots of jokes and humor to this passage. That’s a defense mechanism. A little sugar coating...to take the edge off.]
How is Christ calling you to lose your life, to give yourself away for the world, to take up your cross and follow him?
It always needs to be said, when we reach this passage each year, about bearing your cross, it needs to be said that your “cross to bear” is never to be the recipient of some sort of abuse. [pause] I interject with that, because I’ve heard and met people who say that their pastor or priest told them that they ought to be silent and bear the physical/emotional/spiritual abuse of their spouse or parent or church because that’s simply their “cross to bear”…like “Well, we all have our crosses to bear.” Being the recipient of abuse is never someone’s cross to bear — for that is not giving yourself away for the world for the sake of the Gospel, that is not being the truest you for the world that God created you to be, and that this world, this community, this family needs you to be. God didn’t mold us for abuse and violence — not recipients of abuse & violence and not perpetrators of abuse & violence. Let’s all work to stop that.
Our “cross to bear” is that cross that was traced on our foreheads in our baptisms. It was traced with oil as a symbol of a sealant. And it gets traced again with ashes each springtime, at the beginning of Lent. It is the cross under which we live, and under which we die. [Do you remember that cross? Is it still there? Trace it again, just to make sure you know it’s there.]
It is that cross that says we belong to Christ — it’s a branding — Christ who we boldly confess as Messiah, along with Peter.
And having had that cross sealed on our foreheads, having made that bold confession, we now go, into the deep and pain-filled valleys of this life, into the fear, and the storms that rage all around us. That is, back into our labor — the courtrooms, the newsrooms, the classrooms, operating rooms, the living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms of our daily lives. We seek out the places where there is pain, and we go there, to give ourselves away, to be agents of God’s grace. I had a wise colleague who pointed out when we were struggling together with this text: “You know when God asks us to come and die, you can’t really die just a little bit. When you die, you die. It’s all or nothing.” So when Jesus calls us to come and give our selves away, he’s asking for every part of you! He doesn’t say, I’ll take your 1:30 minutes each week. I’ll take whatever you have leftover in your wallet. I’ll take—if it’s not putting you out too much—your volunteer time for my cause. Jesus doesn’t say that! Christ bids we give our whole selves away, that we die to the things of this world.
And maybe that means you need to rethink everything...I don’t want to shy away from that possibility. Maybe God is calling you, or us, to rethink everything! — to re-shape our whole lives in response to Christ’s call. That’s really frightening for those of us, who are settled, and on track. [Dad’s experience in Norway — freedom of not having roots down, no stakes in the ground.] Maybe God is calling you to rethink and reshape everything in your life. Maybe it’s time for a brand NEW start, a life that is in line with God’s call to give yourself away. Dangerous words today, on one hand.
But I would suspect—and I know—that many of us are not thinking we’re completely off track with God’s purposes for our lives. I would suspect that many of us have been trying to follow Christ in our daily lives...many for a long time.
Then I would encourage you to welcome this message as a wake-up call. Sometimes we sleep through our alarms from God. Let this be a wake-up, “Hey, where is God calling you to give yourself away in what you do, in where you are, in who you are?”
The church has failed somehow, I think, in talking about vocation, in talking about “having a calling” as only something pastors or professional church people get. (Were you taught that somehow? I hope you weren’t.) What’s your calling/vocation?
Martin Luther said that every single person has a calling from God...from the maid scrubbing the floor, to the shoemaker. (Those were Luther’s examples.) God calls us all to do what we do and do it, as well as we can, for the sake of the world, to the glory of God. [pause] Let your dishwashing be a prayer; let your lesson-planning be a psalm; let your tile work, or your lab research or your carpentry or investment baking or your parenting or your caring for a aging parent be a hymn to God’s glory, for the sake of the world. [pause]
Our work can be very hard — we give ourselves away in it, and today we’re given a booster shot to give ourselves away even more. Wash dishes for someone else, give away some of your labor or your research, or your craftsmanship. Do something creative (in the COVID world) to help care for and nurture someone else’s child or aging parent, in addition to your own. Giving ourselves away for this world, in response to Christ giving himself away for you: this is your cross to bear.
A great task for us all, as Labor Day approaches. God calls all of us into this holy labor. Dangerous words today, on one hand. But on the other hand...
Jesus promises us, that in losing our lives — in giving our lives away for the sake of the other — we actually find our selves and find our lives...
Let’s go find ourselves...for we have been found by Christ, buried with Christ. We’ve been imbedded in God’s healing and forgiving love all along! That cross is a tree, you see; that cross of death...is a cross of life. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
August 30 -- Come, Die With Us (Pentecost 13A)
Sunday, August 23, 2020
August 23 -- A Chip Off the Old Rock (Pentecost 12A)
At the beginning of a new school year, however new that looks this unprecedented school year, at the end of August, beginning of September...it’s time to go back to the basics. Can’t start a new school year without going back to the basics, reviewing where you came from – your multiplication flashcards, the alphabet, the writer’s handbook, the periodic table, Gray’s Anatomy, in seminary it was the dictionary of theological terms and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
Pick your level and your discipline, but you can’t start a new year without remembering where you came from. And this week, our lectionary texts are practically synched up with the same idea: We can’t start anew without remembering where we came from. It’s time to go back to the basics…back to the building rocks. Molecules and cells. Letters and grammar. Numbers and formulas. Theories and cases.
And today in church: Who we are and whose we are. Where we have come from…and then who is this Jesus?
Our first church lesson from Isaiah calls us, especially in times of trial, to “look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you.”
Siblings in Christ, we are called back to the basics this late date in August: we are called to remember that we all come from the same rock. What an image: God shaped us and molded us from a common rock, dug us up and breathed into each of us. We trace our ancestry of faith back to Abraham and Sarah, back to Adam and Eve, back to the very hands of God. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.” The mighty fortress, who is our God.
How…we…can…forget…that we came from God. How we can run and hide, and deny and evade. And joke. How our memories can be short-term, tracing our ancestry of faith back only one or two generations (back to Pennsylvania or Iowa or Sweden or Puerto Rico or Sierra Leone)…but not hundreds and thousands of generations.
But let’s get back to the basics today: It is the Living God who chiseled away at our being, and who continues to chisel away at us, who dug us out of the dirt and gave us this holy life, this sacred earth, and who continues to dig us out of the quarry: out of our despair, our guilt, our brokenness and our sorrow. It is the living God who refashions, remolds us, puts us back together (i.e. remembers), breathes into us new life again, and now, today, sets us free. It is the living God who set the heavens in their places and filled the seas with creatures. [We can start sounding like psalmists when we go back and start reflecting on the basics!]
May we be psalmists this week as we begin anew, even if you’re not getting back into the virtual classroom, like our children and teachers will be very soon, may we be like little psalmists singing God’s praises and wondrous deeds with our thoughts and actions. We have been resuscitated by the living God, brought to life again and now again!
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And now, having been brought back, this God asks us a question. “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus probes his followers.
Kind of a timeless question. People are still talking about Jesus today, saying/writing who he is, or who he is not, or at least who he was. [Albert Schweitzer] Pick your context and your camp, and off you can go with things to say about Jesus. I think many, many people in our post-Christendom, post-modern American culture today believe that Jesus was just a prophet, like the disciples said, just a radical activist—who was executed for advocating love of the poor and the outcast, violating Jewish laws and undermining Roman authorities. Compelling stories, but he lived long ago, and is pretty much irrelevant today, other than being yet another inspirational role model who we could never fully imitate. [Temple of Self Realization in Malibu]
Others think he was just a super-nice pastor who wants to be your best friend in spirit. Not so sure about how radical his activism was, the point of Jesus, some say, is just to have a personal relationship with you. “I just want to be with you.” I had some friends that used to call that “Jesus is my boyfriend” theology.
If you can replace the word “boyfriend” for “Jesus” in your songs or your prayers, and it starts to sound like a love song, you might be in danger of “Jesus is my boyfriend” theology. “I just want you to be with me, Jesus. I just want you all to myself, Jesus. Don’t leave me, Jesus.” Where, it’s only about a personal relationship.
Meanwhile I had a professor in seminary who really disliked the song, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” because he thought it had misled generations of Christians to shortchange the Church’s confession about who Jesus is. (Peter didn’t confess Jesus as his friend.) Of course Jesus is a friend, and I don’t mean to undermine or make light of that relationship. But as disciples of the One who came to earth to take on our flesh—who ventured through the pain-filled valleys of our existence, offering both life-giving healing and life-changing challenges, who suffered death, not just for his friends but for this whole world, and then rose from the dead to have the last word over death and evil—we must stand and confess a whole lot more than “he’s just my special friend” or just an inspirational figure in history! Amen?
Friends in Christ, we join with Peter, and confess Jesus as the Messiah, the anointed one—THE ONE, sent from God, AND YET VERY GOD, God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God (as the old Nicene Creed helps give us words for what is beyond words).
Sisters and brothers in Christ, we join with Peter, and go back to the basics today, as we too confess Jesus, the rock of our salvation, yes friend, yes radical activist for the poor and the outcast, yes Son of the Living God, yes God in the flesh before our eyes in this Word, in this Holy Communion, in these holy waters of Baptism! In you. Yes Jesus lived long ago, and yes Jesus lives now.
Our confession is great, like Peter’s. And in making this bold confession that we do, do you know what we become?
A chip of the old block.
A chip off the old block is what we are, people of God! A chip off the old ROCK. A chip off the old rock that is God. We are a chip off of God. Broken and shared for the sake of the world, that’s what we are: fractured and forgiven, but sent out for many. [Imperfections on the rock you’re holding? Fractured and forgiven.]
Siblings in Christ, lest we forget who we are and from whence we come: WE ARE THE CHURCH, THE BODY OF JESUS CHRIST, and we’re about to chip off into this world! That’s not a bad thing!
Peter’s confession becomes our confession, and so Jesus is beyond just friendly, relevant or inspirational: Jesus is necessary! For without him, for us who are of his flock, his disciples, his followers, we have no life…
Without him, we have no life. Our life is in Christ. That’s lesson number one, back to the basics. Except this is more than a lesson, this is a gift! And this gift is ours for free! Nothing you can do to earn it, or precede it, for that matter. All we can do is accept it. All we can do is put out our hand and receive it. God’s grace, life in Christ, poured out for you. Let’s start with that.
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And so now what? God’s done the work, given the gift, now we just get to be the church. And Paul’s letter to the Romans speaks to this and gives us further instruction: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Don’t be [chiseled, molded into the ways of] this world, but [continue to be chiseled by God], be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
Is it God’s will that children go hungry or get separated from loved ones...or is God chiseling away at us when we see that? That refugees be rejected? That species go extinct and air polluted, that communities suffer with illness and isolation, that wars drag on? Is it God’s will that you continue to live in fear, burdened by anger, guilt, sorrow, or resentment? Or is God chiseling away at us? Molding us, fashioning us to be a chip of the old block that is God.
Friends in Christ, BACK TO THE BASICS: we are the church, and God is still chiseling. Still working, still calling us, molding us, still tapping away at this world…
Sculpting a way for peace…the peace that passes all human understanding. Praise be to Jesus, the Messiah. AMEN.
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Our hymn of the day is “Goodness is Stronger than Evil” — back to the basics, and yet, far from elementary, it’s the heart of our faith, and it carries us. These words come most directly from the pen of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who cuts through the static, and all the ugliness of apartheid and racism, and gets at the heart of the matter. The melody comes from a Christian monastic-style community on an island in Scotland called Iona. A composer in that basic and harsh setting—rocks, wind, sea, sky—set the Archbishop’s powerful words to music for us to sing.
Sunday, August 16, 2020
August 16 -- Preaching Up Here, Living Down There (Pentecost 11A)
Especially when our kids were younger than they are now, there were some words in our house that we just didn’t say. This is still true to some extent, but they’ve learned and understand a lot more now. But back in the day when they were little…we taught our Micah and Katie that they are words we don’t say under our roof: We don’t say hate. “But Daddy other people say ‘hate’ all the time,” Micah questioned, “and my teacher said it’s not a bad word.” That may be true, Micah, but we don’t use that word. We don’t say ‘stupid’. And we don’t say ‘idiot’. We don’t say ‘shut up’. And we don’t say ‘fat’, either.
Somehow, Heather and I in all our parental omniscience from up here came to the conclusion that canceling these words out of our household vocabulary is good thing down there.
The problem is, when we slip. When I’m watching a Cubs baseball game and blurt out, “Uh, I hate AJ Perzinski!” When I’m reading the newspaper in the living room, while Katie is doing her homework in the kitchen, and suddenly I completely lose all awareness of where I am, and shout “I can’t believe it! This guy’s an idiot; I wish he would shut up! He so stupid, I hate him.” OK...a bit of hyperbole there. But you know I slipped up...
And in each of these circumstances we/I then had to engage in the tricky parental activity of explaining ourselves, probably apologizing, maybe making amends or exceptions, but always-always including an affirmation that they’re right, “You’re right, I shouldn’t have said that.” I said we shouldn’t say those words, and here I am saying them myself...
Great is your faithfulness to what we said, Micah. Great is your faithfulness to what we said, Katie. But here we are: sloshing about.
It’s one thing to preach it. It’s something much different to live it. Good teaching can trickle down from up here. But great faith sloshes around down there.
Our Gospel passage today starts out with some great teaching from up here: Jesus again is crumbling up the Pharisees’ neatly sliced world…this time with a lesson on purity. It’s not what goes into the mouth that’s unclean. It’s what comes out of it. Words.
But Jesus isn’t just teaching us not to swear.
Let’s not get too caught up with just bad words like stupid or idiot or fat, and whole bunch of others that unfortunately we all know.
I’ve known people who “swear like sailors” (some of them are sailors...and have hearts of gold. [pause] Their words might be foul but their hearts burn with purity. Their intentions are compassionate. Maybe you’ve known people like this too. While others, proud of their purity and squeaky clean mouths, shoot daggers and explode gossip with their curse-less words. Sure we should watch our language, but Jesus isn’t teaching us here not to swear.
He’s teaching about heart surgery.
The heart, you see, in that culture, was understood to be the source our thoughts and our decisions about how to live in the world. Jesus is teaching us about slicing away all that harms us and our neighbors and our world. That’s a good teaching from up there.
But it’s one thing to preach it. It’s something much different to live it. The story goes on, in our text today, and it says that Jesus left his pulpit. He left that place and went away to a different region. He left the pureness-of-heart-lecture notes on the stand, came down to another region, and this is where it gets sloppy, sloshes around:
A woman approaches, who is not from his tribe. A strange woman, a Syro-phoenician. Jesus grew up a neighborhood where such women were despised.
They were hated, stupid, idiots who needed to shut up, who were always encroaching on his people – the real chosen Jews, not these half-bred aliens. Do you see what’s happening here?
And so, Jesus – JESUS, the prince of peace, the one who just got done preaching about purity of heart – calls her a dog: “It’s not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” A dog! Do you know how dirty dogs were then? Not adorable, housebroken, little pooches that we bless when we do the Blessing of the Animals...dogs as glimpses of God. No, dogs back then were mangy, flee-bitten mutts, that were as irritating as flies. And calling a person a dog, that as offensive as a white person calling a black person a word that we won’t even print in the paper. A dog, he calls her.
It’s one thing to preach it. It’s something much different to live it.
What do we do with this text where our precious Jesus himself is falling for the same old racial slurs, the same old arrogance, the same old self-righteousness, the same old divisions, the same old hatred that has plagued generations and cultures throughout history, and still plagues us today?! Words escalate to threats; and threats to violence; and violence to wars. There’s nothing new there.
This is a side of Jesus, that many are tempted either to ignore, or rationalize away, or defend…as if the Savior of the world needed saving. I can’t explain Jesus out of this offense, out of his calling this woman a dog.
But I can share with you what I see happening, ultimately: [sloppiness, thanks be to God, even if we don’t want sloppiness—and none of us do, we want neat and tidy, clear cut, like the Pharisees, where life is a set of rules to keep and roles to fill. But the gift is sloppiness.] I see Jesus, fully Divine and fully human, coming down from on high…to be in the mix of it all. Good teaching can trickle down from up there. But great faith sloshes around down here. It’s one thing to preach it, it’s another thing to live it.
And in this case, God surprises us again, as a Syrophoenician woman, calls Jesus out. Watch how she responds; not by hitting back; not by going away: “Yes Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the bread from the master’s table.” I might be a dog, but I’m still hungry. I’m broken alright, which is why I need the bread that only you can give. She doesn’t fight back with hateful words, and she doesn’t back away either.
She stands up strong and demonstrates faith. She makes a statement of faith: Only you, Jesus, offer the bread that I need, the healing that I need, the salvation which you have prepared.
And something must have snapped in Jesus, for immediately his tone changes and then he affirms her. (Forget the tricky explaining, like when my child catches me using a word that’s off limits—I can’t explain that.) We’ll just have to jump to the affirmation. “Woman, great is your faith.” In a way, I’m not sure who’s helping/forgiving/blessing who. What is clear, is that Jesus is with her. Not up there. He’s in the mix, down here as sloppy as it all can.
And that’s the heart of the Gospel.
Sisters and brothers in Christ, it’s not always neat and clean unfortunately, but we have a Christ who gets close, who plunges into the mix.
We have a Christ who kneels down, who takes our hand and we take his. We have a God who doesn’t stay up there, but who always enters into the sloshiness of life down here. Good teaching can trickle down from up there. But great faith sloshes around down here.
It’s one thing to preach it. And I pray daily that we can preach a good thing up here, up at the church. (But we/I don’t always—sometimes the preacher’s words from up here are winded, or fake, or confusing or sometimes just wrong.) Good teaching and preaching can trickle down from up here. But the real action is down there, down in our living rooms and kitchens and basements, down in our offices and stores and on the roads. Great faith is down there, sloshing around. And man, it sloshes, it’s sloppy, and messy and soggy. It ain’t easy— this practice of purity of heart, this discipline of choosing words of compassion not violence. It ain’t easy staying in touch with each other, in relationship with one another and with the stranger and with the world. It ain’t easy, remaining faithful, coming back, giving ourselves to the rhythms of the church and nudgings of the Spirit. And as soon as I’m finished preaching up here, I’m right back down there, sloshing around…and thank God we slosh around together.
And thank God we slosh around with Jesus, who enters the sloppiness of this life and stays, maybe even more than we wanted. Who banters back and forth with us, albeit sometimes a struggle. Who names and commends our great faith: “Women, great is your faith. Men, great is your faith. All siblings in Christ, great is your faith. Remember that I’m down here with you, and I’ll never leave.” AMEN.
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HoD: ‘O God Why Are You Silent’ from the Lament section of our hymnal. Woman calling Jesus out, asking for what we need. Great is her faithfulness and ours too as we sing this with our hearts, and demand Christ’s healing in our lives and our world. And Christ responds.
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
August 9 -- Even in the Heaviest of Storms (Pentecost 10A)
Grace to you and peace from Jesus the Christ who never stops coming to find us. AMEN.
Let me set the scene. We’re in Colorado. Way up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about 13,000 ft.. Two days up from our trailhead, and about 15 or 20 miles from Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp, our base out of which this whole adventure is organized and led. Heather and I, and a small group of high schoolers from the last church I served, our 2 guides Cody and Savannah (who everyone called Savage), and 2 random Welsh Corgis that just started following us and living with us on the trail...and toward whom we had quickly given much affection. (we had even named one Jeffrey and the other Oreo.)
All nine of us packed under a small tarp, stretched out and hung from 4 trees, eating dinner. And it’s raining. Strike that: it’s pouring. And we’re actually getting along ok in our rain gear sitting on trash bags, shoveling in pasta from our little metal sierra cups, which act as both bowl and mug. We kept lowering the tarp to protect ourselves, as the wind was blowing the rain under our cover, I remember the tarp got so low that it pressed against my head so that I could feel the raindrops through the tarp tapping on my head. Yet we’re still having a pretty good time! Until it starts coming down even more...it was beyond pouring.
And suddenly, we see and feel the water rolling down the slight slope we’re on...it’s starting to wash us out, from under us! Not just pounding down on the tarp above us, but now also under us! And it’s all rushing to what we guys had dibs’ed/claimed as the most scenic place to put our tent, overlooking this beautiful mountain lake. All this water is rolling toward the guys’ tent, which was our only hope of anything staying protected and dry. And it’s getting dark, as if every drop of rain is like a tiny light switch in the sky turning off! Uhhhh......
(*BTW, I spoke briefly when I first arrived about taking a trip like this with our high schoolers at Bethlehem. Crickets. I can’t imagine why :) I’ll ask again. *When I got back from that backpacking trip, people actually kept asking me how my “vacation” was...uhhh.. a) high schoolers [who were awesome, but still] and b) rain.)
Anyway, all of this, of course, is a metaphor for life, right? Trying to do everything we can to protect ourselves (tarp, rain gear), maybe making some hasty, greedy decisions to secure the best for me and mine (tent site), only to wind up learning that we probably should have been both more thoughtful and more careful, and that there are some things over which we absolutely have no power.
So when I read our texts for this Sunday, I couldn’t help but laugh — first reading about Elijah: “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord...now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting the mountains and breaking rocks in pieces.” And then this Gospel text: Jesus goes off by himself to pray, but it says, “the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them.” Where are you in those stories? Ever feel tossed and rocked in the boat? Terrified. Waterlogged. Windblown. Shaken and soaked from above and below? [pause]
I’m not going to move on to the punchline just yet (which is Jesus). Let’s just sit with this; let’s just sit in the downpour, in the storm.
You know one of the gifts of that backpacking trip, was having to sit in the downpour. We worshiped that week also...at two different Lutheran churches in Colorado: one before the backpacking adventure, when we first arrived in Denver, and another one at the end of our adventure. We prayed in those services for the poor and those who have no place to lay their heads both times, just like we do every week. But after sitting in the rain a night or two, we heard that prayer very differently the second time. Experiences like that make us feel small, mortal, helpless...and more compassionate.
Many of us are well aware of our mortality, but we sure do try to avoid reflecting on it in our culture...
We Christians find ourselves a death-denying culture.
So to be battered by the waves, to sit in the downpour, to endure the storms — this is where we can only place ourselves in God’s arms. Many know far too well, these days, what I’m talking about.
It’s important to note: Elijah didn’t find God in the storm itself; neither did the disciples. (Nature, as we know, is indifferent.) Rather God shows up in the tiny places during the storm, the “sheer silence”. Disciples thought they saw a ghost — that’s one translation of “phantasma” — also “a blurry vision.” God does not always appear clear and booming and powerful like thunder. Rather as a blurry vision amid the storm — a friend who reaches out, a sliver of light through the clouds, a warm drink from a stranger, a blanket or a sleeping bag that miraculously stayed dry...
You know, thinking back on it, that crazy, stormy night — now 6 years ago — was the most memorable and the most fun, of that whole trip!
I didn’t finish telling you what happened: We were being so pelted (oh yeah, it was hailing too) that finally our guides after trying to direct us to clean up our dinner stuff and protect as much as we could finally just surrendered, and shouted “Run for your tents! Let’s call it a night!” (See, we would always have some kind of activity in the evening under stars that included devotions and songs and s’mores...) Not that night. We raced through rain and hail for our tents and jumped inside. Would you believe that it was actually dry in there? There was water literally rushing all around us, but those tents were so waterproof that I had my best night sleep of the whole trip! I mean, that’s as miraculous as walking on water! But we didn’t go to sleep right away. It was only 6:30 (in July) when we ran for our tents. That night we played card games, we still worshiped, and we laughed and laughed — guys in our tent, and we could hear the girls in theirs, laughing and laughing. We were fine — thanks be to God — when you’re that close up against the elements, there’s no one else to thank for keeping us safe.
Sisters and brothers in Christ, Jesus never wearies of coming out to look for us. He even crosses the turbulent seas, walks through torrential downpours. He even crosses death and the powers of hell to come find us, to reach out to us and to say, “Do not be afraid. Have courage. I am here.”
Today, siblings in Christ, you are pulled up, you are rescued, you are saved from drowning. Even in the storms, God has got us.
So let’s not be afraid anymore, as we live our lives.
Let’s have the courage to get out of the boat, to get out of the “nave,” the ship, to get out of the nice, dry, safe church and into the choppy seas of this world! That’s looks a little different these days, and I think we need to pray about what “getting out of the boat,” getting out of the “nave” means in this COVID world. I definitely don’t mean literally venturing out there without masks and safe distance...that’s not what this text is about. No, I think it’s got to do with how we take faithful risks with our words, our money, our time? I’ll be honest with you: starting to say “Black Lives Matter” as a statement of faithfulness (as opposed to taking a political side...which is how it’s being treated culturally), feels like a certain out-of-the-boat risk, out of the nice, safe, dry church. Continuing to give to our camps, as Heather and I have decided to do, with such an uncertain future, personally feels like a certain out-of-the-boat risk...what does Peter-style, risk-taking look like for you?
How is Jesus inviting you out...to take a step of faith — like Peter — and be Christ’s voice in this pain-filled, sheltering children who have no place to call home, feeding the hungry who have no table around which to gather, nursing the sick, speaking out in the face of violence begetting more violence around the world...and in our own backyards. Cruelty, pettiness, selfish ambition and greed. Where is the Church’s voice in all this? How we can just huddle in the nave (even virtually), terrified. What does Jesus say as he’s reading our newspapers? And what would Jesus do? These are our downpours. We are huddled under a tarp. And Christ comes out to meet us in the midst of raging storm, to rescue us, to feed us, to call us out of the boat, and to make us whole.
Today, we are being pulled up, we are being rescued from our fears and saved from our sins. Christ stops at nothing to wade into our humanity, into our downpours, into our sorrow, with a powerful word of peace and hope —“Do not be afraid, be of good heart, I am here” — and then a strong arm to lift us out.
Even in the heaviest of storms, God has got us, and God has got this whole world — it’s not ours to save, only ours to serve.
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Sunday, August 2, 2020
August 2 -- Goin' Fishin' (Pentecost 9A)
-Klamath Lutheran in Klamath Falls, OR
-Shepherd of the Mountains Lutheran in Jackson, WY
-Grace Lutheran in Omaha, NE
2) The disciples didn’t think there was enough. But Jesus turned that which was offered into more than enough.
That being said, one explanation that I’ve heard about this miracle of the loaves and fish, which I do like…is that the bit that was offered by someone for whom that was all they had — 5 loaves and 2 fish — was such an inspiration to all, that everyone began to gladly share, and suddenly blessings abound. Loaves and fish abound, and there are even leftovers!
With the abundance, Jesus feeds us too! ALL ARE FED means you and me – we don’t just empty are pockets and go home hungry and bitter. In this amazing story, messy-spirit-filled-children-screaming-old-people-dancing-everyone-singing-everyone fed-community-in-Christ is the result! Amen? ALL ARE FED, you and me included!