Welcome

For these past several weeks we have been discussing some challenging texts that mostly seem to point to the cross as a metaphor for discipleship. Jesus has been teachi ng his disciples what it means to follow him. By and large, this has been a near futile task, since the disciples in the Gospel of Mark are as dense as lead. Now, we can cut them some slack, since Jesus has been laying out a path of discipleship that was so counter to the cultural and socioeconomic structures of his day that it was difficult for them to completely overhaul everything they’d ever experienced in their lives and see the world through a new lens. Especially since that lens was a Roman cross. Jesus keeps talking about death, and humility and service and childlike vulnerability. He’s started including Gentiles in his vision of the coming kingdom of a Jewish God. I’m sure that the disciples are asking themselves why they ever left their boats and nets, their homes and families, to follow a man toward Jerusalem who seems intent on getting himself killed there, who seems to be asking the disciples to die too. As their understanding of the Messiah changes, I’m sure that the alure of following him must have changed too. I have to say, there sure are days in my life when I can relate to that feeling. Days when I wish Jesus would come and strike down my enemies, would exact vengeance on those who wrong me. There are days when I wish following Jesus was more lucrative, more illustrious. Days when I wish that following Jesus was more like Your Best Life Now than there’ll be a better life later. I want some of that justice Amos is preaching about. I want to cry out like the psalmists, “How long?” But like the disciples generally, and like this rich man in today’s gospel specifically, I’m not sure how much I have considered that when God’s justice comes to right the world that I, like this rich man, might be the one doing the grieving. Growing up, we used to sing a hymn called “O How I Love Jesus.” It’s one of those tunes that gets inside of you and the melody and lyrics pour out like a dam break at the slightest prompting. O how I love Jesus O how I love Jesus O how I love Jesus because he first loved me. So much of my faith then was about me and Jesus, about a personal relationship with God. I wasn’t concerned about all the problems of this life because I was worried about the next. That exhaustion with this world and fear of the next drove our desire to tell others about this coming day of justice. We wanted revival, a stirring of the Holy Spirit in human hearts that would draw all people to God and spark the second coming, when this world would get what was coming to it and those of us with a personal relationship with Jesus would live and reign with Jesus forever. So, there was another song we would sing. “Lord Send a Revival.” Lord send a revival Lord send a revival Lord send a revival and let it begin in me. Now because you heard those two songs so close together you may have realized much quicker that I did that “O How I Love Jesus” and “Lord Send a Revival” have the same tune. But I never did. I, like this rich man in today’s gospel, was happy loving a God who loved me and I was spending all my time trying to assure myself, if not assure God, that I was saved and just waiting for that day of justice. So, When I sang that old hymn, “Lord Send a Revival” that last line, and let it begin in me, never seemed to sink in. I never seemed to realize that God might begin that revival, in me, as songwriter Derek Webb sings, by “turning over tables in my own living room.” What Amos prophesied, what the psalmist longed for, what the disciples misunderstood, and what the rich man wanted to add to his coffers, was like one tune with two sets of lyrics. Jesus looks at this rich man and loves him, and yet, sends him away grieving. Jesus loves the rich and the poor together. But justice is like one tune with two sets of lyrics. To the poor, justice is a song of praise, a shout for joy, a hymn of gratitude. For the rich, justice is a song of grief, a tale of woe, a hymn of lament. We American Christians, especially those of us who grew up in middle class homes, in predominantly white neighborhoods, were taught to think of justice as something received. We were taught to read the scriptures as though justice was God’s business, and that we would be on the receiving end of God’s justice. We were taught to read the story of the rich man and think of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Kardashians Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. I am certain that this text has its own message for each of those folks. But, we were never taught to see in this story a picture of ourselves. We like the disciples, start to catalogue all the things we don’t have as proof of our love for God or our need to receive God’s justice. But Jesus teaches the disciples and us that the other side of receiving justice is becoming just. Jesus invited the rich man to grieve his many possessions and Jesus invited the disciples to grieve their desire to be rich. This is the justice of the kingdom of heaven. One tune with two sets of lyrics. If our paradigm for discipleship is the Cross of Christ, then we must see the call to discipleship as the call to embrace grief. Jesus calls the rich to give up being rich and the poor to give up their desire to be rich. Then both are invited to grieve together, to become the justice each longs for. We are called away from self-preservation, from security, from safety, to mutual vulnerability, common trust, and collective care for each other. The faith to which Jesus is calling us, the path of discipleship, the way of salvation is NOT a private, personal, transactional business decision between God and me. Jesus is calling us to community, to mutual care, to collective responsibility… Jesus is calling us to love because he first loved us and to pray that revival, God’s coming justice, will begin in each of us. And because disciples need to be reminded, We are given this meal to teach us that self-giving justice making is the very nature of God. We are given this meal to teach us that self-sacrifice is the shape of discipleship. We are given this meal to teach us that community is the only space big enough or safe enough to hold our grief. We are give this meal to teach us that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. What will we need to give up? What will we need to grieve before we can come and follow Jesus in making justice? How will we need to change in order to become the community our neighbors need us to be? May this song of justice become our prayer… Lord send a revival Lord send a revival Lord send a revival and let it begin in me. Amen. 

This is yet another set of difficult texts. Before we go any further, I want you all to hear me say that if you have experienced divorce and been shamed by someone quot ing this or similar passages— that should never have happened to you, and as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. For that matter, if anyone has ever used this passage from Genesis to shame you into submission; or to tell you God designed marriage for one man and one woman; or that God created men and women for certain societal roles to which we must strictly adhere; or that God is somehow offended by people who experience their gender as something other than the sex they were assigned at birth; if you have experienced any of these things, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. While we are at it, if anyone has argued from the book of Hebrews that God has been displeased with the Jewish people, has chosen the Church to replace the Jewish people as God’s covenant people, or that our Christian faith is in any way superior to the Jewish faith, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ and by his authority, I declare that this line of thinking is dead wrong, antisemitic, and anti-Christ, and should be repudiated in the strongest possible terms. You have sinned, you must confess, repent, and seek reconciliation. God is not mad at the Jewish people, the nation state of Israel is not the same thing as the Jewish people, and our Jewish neighbors are all our siblings in a common ancestry of faith as children of Abraham and therefore as the children of God. Now, with all of those disclaimers taken care of, do y’all remember Fiddler on the Roof? If you aren’t familiar, the show is about Tevye, a Jewish milkman from the Russian village of Anatevka who is navigating life with three daughters for whom he must arrange suitable marriages, while navigating the perils of being Jewish in the pale of settlement in late Tsarist Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. There are a couple of famous showtunes from this work, especially “Matchmaker,” and “If I Were a Rich Man.” But perhaps less famous is the work’s prologue— I mean who reads the prologue, right?! This song, called “Tradition,” tells of the precarious nature of Jewish life under threat of immanent persecution. Tevye tells the audience, “A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our neck. … And how do we keep our balance? That I tell you in one word: Tradition!” [1] After the first rendition of the iconic chorus, Tevye continues, “Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many years. Here in Anatevka we have our traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, how to work, even how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and we wear these little prayer shawls. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you— I don't know. But it's a tradition. Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” [2] Sounds reasonable, right? Tevye just wants what most of us want, stability, predictability, a firm foundation, some unchanging constant around which to order our lives so we can weather the storms of chaos and change. So, we take this thinking to the scriptures, this leather-bound volume with its gilded edges and embossing. Surely this is the word of God and surely God will tell us what to do. We see a world in flux, a changing society, the weakening or collapse of once hallowed institutions and we want some unchanging standard to anchor us as the buffeting tide of vicissitude erodes our sense of place in this world. So, we see a rising divorce rate and younger folks choosing not to marry, and marriages that our parents’ generation would never have tolerated, and we presume this is not simply a rearrangement of priorities or a symptom of unsustainable socio-economic conditions, but rather that this is an attack on the institution of marriage, and our own marriage, and an affront to God. “See?!” we argue, “See, right there in Genesis?! See, right there in Hebrews?! See, right there in Mark?! We’ve always done it this way. God said to do it this way. There is no other way.” We want the Bible, the black and white, unchanging Bible to be the last word, the final arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad, so we know who is in and who is out and what God wants us to do so we can get busy adhering to its rigid precepts… Or maybe exploiting its loopholes. But that is not how the Bible works. Believe me; I spent many years trying to make it work, and it does not work. There is no way to take the Bible literally without choosing which texts are literal, and which texts we would then have to ignore and outright contradict in order to take the other literally. This is why Lutherans do not call the Bible the word of God, but say that the Bible contains the word of God, that is, the message about Jesus (who is the Word of God made flesh), and the truth of the Gospel (which is that God is not mad at you), and is the source of our preaching (the proclamation of who Jesus is and the truth that God is not mad at you). Luther said that the Bible is the manger in which we find the babe. In our Gospel reading, when Jesus is confronted with the question about divorce, he turns to the Hebrew scriptures, asking, “What does Moses say?” and he goes on to interpret Moses’ provision for a certificate of divorce to have been allowed because of “[their] hardness of heart.” Moses then uses mercy to interpret the law, permitting divorce instead of trapping women in an untenable situation of being unwanted and only freed by death. Jesus then follows the same interpretive device, superseding the letter of the law with mercy, to say that it was also wrong to throw away a spouse in an age when doing so would have impoverished and imperiled the woman who had no recourse and would have suffered greatly. To do so, Jesus quotes our first reading, but like a good Bible reader, he backs up a chapter, to read the first creation narrative in Genesis one, reminding his hearers first that both male and female are created in the image and likeness of God before then affirming the cultural norm of the husband leaving his family to make a new one. Jesus reminds his hearers that women are equal to men and that the law should not be exploited to privilege the men over the women. Both Jesus and Moses use mercy to interpret the law, and as the book of Hebrews tells us, we might not have seen this truth in the law had it not been for Jesus. But because of Jesus, we are freed as the people of God from the way we have always done things. We are free to practice mercy, to grow in compassion and justice. The unchanging nature of God and therefore the calling of the Church, is to be about the business of change, moving us from the way things are, through change, loss, and grief— effecting and perfecting our salvation through choosing this suffering— until we come to recognize and trust each tiny apocalypse as the revelation of God’s very self— that is, until resilience in the face of apocalypse becomes our tradition. Over the course of Fiddler on the Roof, we see that Tevye’s tradition is often challenged, and it is precisely his ability to be flexible, to love his children, and his faith, at the same time, that helped him survive the tide of unwelcome change. Explaining to his wife that their middle daughter had found her own match and the pair would be moving to Kyiv to make a new life, Tevye says, “Love, it’s the new style.” Jesus, and even Moses, bring us this good news, too. Love is the new style, the superseding Spirit of the Law, that allows us to love our children and our spouses, and our neighbors, AND our faith, and the Church, and the Bible at the same time. God gives us the law so we can know the character of God. And when we practice love and mercy we practice the character of God. So let love be our style, let mercy be our practice, let love and mercy tell us who we are and what God expects us to do. Let love and mercy be our new tradition. Amen. [1] https://genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-fiddler-on-the-roof-prologue-tradition-lyrics [2] Ibid. 

These are some heavy texts. Moses is suicidal from trying to deal with God’s people and their constant longing for the way things used to be. James prescribes what we should do for the sick and suffering, for sinners and backsliders. Jesus speaks of severed limbs and being thrown into hell, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies, before promising that we will all be “salted with fire.” Maybe it would be helpful to take these passages one at a time to see what each of them mean before we try to hang them all together to see what the Spirit might have to say to us in our present context. The Hebrew people, led by Moses, have been freed from slavery in Egypt. God gave them the ritual of the Passover— eating bitter herbs and unleavened bread— to remember the bitterness of their bondage and the suddenness of their deliverance. But in the wilderness between slavery and the promised land, they have had to subsist on manna, an unknown substance that fell on the camp like dew each morning. This meant that they had to eat what they had, while they had it, and trust God for more when it was gone. But they wanted meat. Instead of remembering the bitterness of their time in Egypt, they longed for the fish and vegetables, onions, leeks, and cucumbers. They forgot the promise of a land of milk and honey and yearned for garlic and melons. And Moses despaired of life itself, begging God to reward his faithfulness with death, right then and there. Instead, God appoints some help, calling 70 elders of the people, filling them with the Spirit, and making them responsible with Moses to be attentive to the needs of the people. In the epistle of James, hearers are advised to call for the elders of the people when they are sick. These elders are called to pray and lay hands on the sick. But they are also called to anoint them with oil. We have somewhat ritualized this practice, to be a sacramental symbol of the unctuous grace of God on those for whom we pray. But in James’ day, this was just what the practice of medicine looked like. These oils and ointments, unctions and salves, would be infused with herbs and minerals, tinctures and analgesics, both curative and palliative. To call for the elders to pray and anoint, was to call for prayer and medicine. The elders are to pray and forgive sins, but also to provide access to medical care for the sick and dying. And then we get to the gospel. This week’s reading picks up right where last week’s left off. Jesus has taken a child, placed it among the disciples, and they are told, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.” Then John, who either wasn’t listening or had been waiting for a lull in the conversation so he could ask a question— maybe both— pipes up and says, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” Jesus said not to stop him, because “whoever is not against us is for us.” And then, ostensibly with the child still on his lap, Jesus launches into this business of strapping oneself to a millstone and being thrown into the sea. Now, normally I would advise that the New Revised Standard Version is a good, scholarly translation of the original texts. But my oh my; they really just jumped the shark on this one. Where verse 42 says “put a stumbling block before one of these little ones,” Greek here says literally, “but if any of you scandalizes one of these little ones.” That is less of a translation and more of a transliteration, like the word baptize from the Greek or cul de sac from the French. We took the whole word— scandalize— and its meaning to cause moral horror or ethically revolting— into English. But the mistranslation continues. Where verses 43, 45, 47, and 48 all speak of “hell,” the original Greek speaks of Gehenna, a literal burning trash heap teeming with maggots outside the city of Jerusalem. If you lost a limb, through amputation or some misfortune, that limb would be thrown on the pile. So, Jesus is saying that it would be better to lose a limb that to jump head-first into the flaming, teeming trash pile. To be “salted with fire,” then, is to purge oneself of all the things that might scandalize one of these little ones, in the same way one might severe a limb to prevent an infection from taking the whole body to Gehenna. Now, how do these all hang together and what might the Spirit be trying to say to us now? Well, to start, I’m not sure much has changed among the people of God since that long wandering in the wilderness. We are sick and tired of this wilderness and we are fed up with this ‘waiting on the Lord’ business. We remember the way things used to be. We remember leeks, onions, and cucumbers. We are happy to pray for the sick, but we aren’t so much interested in providing access to healthcare. We are grateful for the chance to express our grief over natural disasters and to write checks to relief organizations, but we are less interested in taking responsibility and action against manmade climate change. We vote to protect our pocketbooks and our portfolios but we aren’t interested in voting to protect our neighbors or our children. And all this time, thought we haven’t been paying them much attention, these children that have been sitting in the lap of Jesus have been watching us. They have been listening to our complaining. They have seen that our priorities don’t match the priorities of Jesus. And they are scandalized. They see our hypocrisy as a moral horror and ethically revolting. The but the good news is we can cut off our hands and feet and gouge out our eyes. That is, we can amputate the things that keep scandalizing younger generations. We can repent, we can take responsibility as the elders of the people of God, as the Body of Christ, and we can not only pray for solutions we can take radical action to address the rot within before we lose the whole body. We can become the congregation and the Church that our neighbors and our children need us to be. The hard fact is that the Hebrew people wandered in the wilderness for so long because God was waiting for the previous generation— the generation that was griping and complaining, the generation that remembered the past so fondly, and forgot the reality so completely— God was waiting for this generation to die off. None of the feet that walked through the Red Sea to freedom, walked through the Jordan to the promised land. Not even Moses. It was the new generation, who had no memory of the sweetness of leeks and onions, a generation raised on a diet of manna in the place of purging; it was this new generation that passed through the waters into a land flowing with milk and honey. The younger generations aren’t here, or in churches most anywhere, because we don’t share their priorities. They don’t remember our past and they imagine a different future. To a large degree, they have amputated us, keeping Jesus and cutting off the Church. Will we be more concerned about the good ol’ days, or will we be able to let go of our precious memories in favor of the freedom to which God is calling us? Can we listen to those in the lap of Jesus when they speak to us of a future we never imagined? Or will we allow the whole body to be a septic moral horror, tossed onto the trash heap of history? The Spirit is falling on those outside our walls, outside our self-interests, outside of our history. We have the opportunity to draw near to those on whom the Spirit is falling, to listen to their needs and concerns, and to become the elders of the church, welcoming Christ in each new generation until we all walk through the waters into the promised future. Amen. 

I remember when Jennifer was working on her teaching degree she told me that one of her professors had advised never to argue with a child, “because they have all day a nd you don’t.” There is a pragmatism here that is thinking of classroom management, pacing, state standards, and those ever-looming state tests. Teachers are busy, even when school is out, planning and preparing, gathering resources, submitting reports, recording grades, and meeting professional standards for continuing education and mandatory trainings. Teachers don’t have time to argue with a child. But on another level, this is a lesson in maturity. Arguing with a child is not productive. You are likely able to comprehend more information and logic than this child is developmentally capable of, and it will not be long before the argument on the adult’s end lands briefly on “because I said so,” on its way to the realm of “unh huh!”—"nuh uh!” Maybe this is why an article on CNN.com this week tried to answer the question of why people seems so annoyed by children. The article suggested that as fewer people have their own children and therefore have less interaction with children the less we understand their behavior and the more we tend to avoid children. I would suggest that the less we are exposed to children the easier it is for us to pretend we have actually grown up. Sure, we can vote, buy a drink, and rent a car; we might grunt a little when we stand from sitting, prefer our restaurants ‘not too loud,’ can’t tell if our arms aren’t long enough or we need a new prescription, and know the balance of our 401k, but most of us, deep down have been playing dress up for a very long time and hoping that no one would notice. Children open up in most of us a younger place, and if we haven’t paid this inner child much attention, they have likely not matured very much in the time since we last acknowledged they were in there. And when that first grader, all freckles and missing teeth, picks a fight with you, or points out your love handles, or calls you ‘mean’ for holding a boundary, you suddenly have to deal with the reality of your vulnerability, and who was time for that? Best to avoid the kids all together, then. All of our readings today seem to point toward this level of vulnerability. Jeremiah is beset by enemies plotting to kill him, and he wouldn’t have even known if the Lord Almighty hadn’t been the one to tell him people were talking behind his back. James speaks to a community in conflict, identifying the source of this in-fighting as their unwise behavior— that is, their immature behavior, wanting what they don’t have, and resorting to violence, even murder, to get what they want. James tells them to be wise, or to grow up, and act like the children of God. The Gospel of Mark gives us a story that begins with Jesus predicting his death and resurrection, again, and calls the disciples to stop jockeying for power and to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable among them. And most of us can’t stand the thought of this kind of vulnerability. It sounds like weakness, this gentle Jesus, the defenseless Son of Man, bound for the cross with a child on his lap. But this is the difference between a child-like faith, and a childish faith. A childish faith wants a strongman, someone who can vanquish the monsters under our bed instead of telling us “Do not fear.” A childish faith wants a rich and powerful Jesus who can guarantee us all our hopes and dreams instead of the meek and humble Jesus who teaches us to ask and trust for our daily bread. A childish faith wants a conquering warrior Jesus who can make us great, who can bring back the way things used to be, who can help us avoid grief and death, instead of a crucified and risen Jesus who asks us to follow him. But Jesus is calling us to a child-like faith of vulnerability and care, of growth and maturation, of wisdom, gentleness, and peace, of death and resurrection. Death and disaster cannot be avoided. Our hope is not in rescue, an escape from all the bad things that could happen to us. Our hope is in resurrection, the redemption of all the bad things that could happen to us. A child-like faith is that of resilience, a faith that can endure and mature, a faith that can become gentle and grow wise, a faith that does not attempt to avoid death, but hopes in resurrection. As Jesus took a little child and placed it among the disciples, so the Spirit has centered our attention on a child here today. We don’t ask what she can do for us. We don’t invite her to this water to add to our rolls. We don’t charge the family a fee, or suggest a donation. We don’t claim her as ours; We claim her as God’s. We make promises that we are going to be the kind of community that centers the most vulnerable. We are brought back to this font where most of us first came as children, and we are reminded to return to this child-like faith as many times as it takes. We are called to support each other as we continue to grow in wisdom, gentleness, and righteousness. We come to this font to remember that we are all the children of God. We can come away from this water with a childish faith that death and grief can be avoided, a faith that lusts after power and prestige, that is obsessed with getting revenge, and believes in a strongman to come and save us. We can have childish faith in make-believe. Or we can believe. We can come to this water over and over and over, as many times as it takes, to cultivate a resilience, a child-like faith, a faith that can endure and mature, a faith that can become gentle and grow wise, a faith that welcomes the weak because we are acquainted with our own weakness, a faith that welcomes the sinner because we have been honest about our own sin, a faith that centers the vulnerable because we have embraced our own vulnerability, a faith that does not attempt to avoid death and grief because we have accepted our own death and placed our hope in the resurrection. There is another reason that you should never argue with a child; you cannot argue and welcome at the same time. If we cannot welcome the most vulnerable— or that which is most vulnerable in us— we cannot welcome Christ. To welcome Christ is to welcome the child and the child-like in each of us. Then the child will have become the teacher. Amen. 

There are many aspects of the work of a pastor that prompt folks to ask me, “How do you do that?” One of those is preaching. Some people would rather lose a limb than to stand in front of a room full of people, let alone talk to them for 15 minutes. Another is listening with genuine interest and concern to prolonged narratives of medical procedures in gruesome and intimate detail. And if you think the narratives are bad, sometimes folks accompany the stories with show and tell! Working as a chaplain, one gentleman in the trauma recovery unit described having fallen while cutting tree limbs and straddling a branch below on his way to the ground, whereupon he exposed himself to me to show me the damage. In his defense, he was on quite a lot of pain meds. I, however, was stone-cold sober. I’ll never un-see that. But by and large, the aspect of the work of a pastor which elicits the greatest recoil, is certainly a pastor’s proximity to death. Pastors see a lot of death; Accompanying families through prolonged illnesses where death arrives all too late; Sitting in the wake of tragedy when death has arrived without warning; Holding the hand of the bereaved, when death has come and gone but still haunts the home with lingering scents, empty chairs, and aching hearts. Death is always heavy, like moving a mattress; you can’t lift it on your own, and you shouldn’t try. Its weight is awkward, asking for the help you need feels like an imposition, and sometimes it is just easier to call in a professional. That is often where a pastor comes in. We are here to help you move your emotional mattress. But in addition to caring for grieving loved-ones, pastors care for the dying. And much of the time, this looks like speaking again the promises God makes in baptism, tracing again the sign of the cross, applying again the oil of anointing, and against every human instinct, encouraging them to give into dying. To give up the fight, to stop the struggle, to allow the body to stop and the spirit to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” I cannot say that this proximity to death is my favorite part of the job, but it is the greatest privilege and my profound honor to be invited into such holy spaces, where the vail has become so transparent that I might be able to prepare the very body of Christ for his burial. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus tells of his own death. And if this were not jarring enough to his disciples, he tells them that if anyone wants to be his disciple that one must take up their cross and follow him. It’s no wonder Peter takes him aside. We don’t get to hear their conversation, but a ‘rebuke’ is no ‘friendly reminder.’ Maybe Peter told him “You can’t talk like that, Jesus! You have to stay positive! We are manifesting victory!” Maybe Peter patted his concealed sword, and said, “We won’t let that happen to you, Jesus. They want you, they’ll have to go through me first.” Maybe Peter said, “The Messiah will sit on the throne of David, not hang on a Roman cross.” But Jesus rebuked Peter in return. Jesus will die, and asks the disciples to join him. And all these years later, there is no new path of discipleship. If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, we will have to take up our cross and follow him. For the first audience of the Gospel of Mark, this could easily have meant a literal death, since following Jesus could have gotten you killed. But for most of the followers of Jesus in our own time, this will mean the crucifixion of our egos. That is, we will have to die to our own needs, our own desires, our own dignity, and we will have to adopt as our own the needs, desires, and dignity of our neighbors. This crucifixion of our egos means we are no longer beholden to what our neighbors are able to do for us. Instead, we can ask what our neighbors need, and in the absence of our ego we are able to become what and who our neighbors need us to be. This is standing in solidarity with our neighbors to whom we have become a neighbor. We will have welcomed the other, we will have sacrificed our egos, and we have become our neighbors. When Jesus told of his own death he also told of his own resurrection. The death of our egos leads us to resurrection, to transformation, to salvation. The world needs transformed disciples to transform the world. By crucifying our egos and raising us as neighbors God is transforming us into the Love God is that we might sustain the weary with a word, that we might hold our tongues from judgement and ceaselessly wag our tongues for justice and peace; that we might fill our mouths with prayer and guide the whole body, the whole weary world, to salvation. Dr. Atul Gawande is a palliative care physician and author. As folks are drawing near to death, and decisions must be made about what sort of measures will be undertaken to prevent death, Dr. Gawande asks two fundamental questions: What makes life worth living? What are you willing to give up in order to keep living? One patient responded that as long as he could eat chocolate ice cream and watch football he wanted to be kept alive. As we draw near to the death of our egos, maybe we could reframe these questions. What makes our faith worth keeping? And what are you willing to give up in order to keep the faith? As a congregation, can we die to the memory of who we used to be? Can we die to having 400 members and two services? Can we die to a bustling children’s ministry? Can we die to who we think we need to be so that we can be resurrected as the congregation that our neighbors need us to be? And if all of this feels too hard, too much to ask, too high a price, then let me speak again the promises God makes in baptism. Let me trace again the sign of the cross, apply again the oil of anointing, and against every human instinct, I encourage you to give into dying. There is no new path to discipleship. We can rebuke Jesus in any way we choose. We can make every effort to avoid this death. But those who want to save their lives will lose them. And those who let go of their lives, those who crucify their egos, those who know what they are willing to sacrifice in order to keep the faith, those are the ones who take up their crosses and follow Jesus; these are the ones who will forfeit the whole world to gain their life. These are disciples. Amen. 

Tony Campolo is an Evangelical writer, academic, preacher, and social activist. He has spent much of his career trying to convince his fellow Evangelicals that loving their neighbors requires that they be as concerned for their neighbors’ physical well-being as they are for their spiritual well-being. Campolo used to begin his talks this way: I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a sh*t. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said sh*t than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night. Campolo used this tactic to expose a hidden truth, that most of his audiences would care more about cultural identity markers, like what is socially acceptable language in public spaces, than they would about the common humanity of 30,000 kids dying from lack of food. In the decades since Campolo became famous for this tactic, and for enduring a heresy trial by his ordaining body for insisting that the gospel compels us to social action, we have seen this concern for identity preservation only grow stronger. We have siloed ourselves into enclaves of isolation and insulation, echo chambers where we believe confirmation bias counts as “keeping up with the news.” We avoid certain conversations with friends and family in order to “keep the peace,” and when this isn’t possible, we don’t speak to those friends or that family. Our social media feeds algorithmically separate us like Hogwarts’ sorting hat, into competing houses, and the more we engage with this curated content the more isolated and insulated we become. And even if we are not on social media, cable news has done to my parents’ and grandparents’ generations what social media has done to my son’s and my generations. What we believe is entirely a product of what we have experienced,. Religion is 100% environmentally received, and the more we are able to constrict and restrict our environment, the less we experience and the more indurated our beliefs become. Eventually, even the exposure to new ideas and beliefs, as they challenge us to include new information, new experiences feel like a threat to our very identity. And so, as most of you go about your daily lives, scrolling TikTok or Facebook, watching your favorite cable news hosts, and interacting only with people who agree with you, and then you come here, hear a sermon that challenges your beliefs, and you’re upset that the bubble has burst. And now it is September of a presidential election year and it is easier to imagine civil war than it is to remember civil discourse. There was another school shooting less than 30 miles from where we are sitting. And we have begun to repeat an exhausting civic liturgy, a call and response, where some say we have to do something to protect our children and others say we must do nothing to protect our rights. And before we could even complete this cycle, a gunman opened fire on on both lanes of traffic on I-75 in the mountains of Kentucky last night. We each draw our own conclusions, and we retreat further and further, angrier and angrier, demonizing the other, and sanctifying ourselves, and trying to imagine a world in which this other doesn’t exist. Our readings this week are challenging, as challenging as our surroundings. The epistle of James tells us that God doesn’t show partiality, or, in some translations, favoritism. But this word, at least in our particular context, might be better translated as partisanship. God does not show partisanship. As Gen Z might say, that hits different. We would like to render that word as though God doesn’t play favorites, but a comprehensive reading of the whole of scripture— to say nothing of a comprehensive reading of James— tells us that would be incorrect. God consistently exercises what some have called a “preferential option for the poor.” We also want to render this term as though God doesn’t care about our politics, but it sure seems like James is calling us to take sides. “Is it not the rich who oppress you?” James asks rhetorically. That sounds awfully political to me. James goes on to say, that to encounter the poor and to wish them well without actually meeting their needs is a violation of the law to love our neighbors as ourselves, and a violation of the law in one point, makes us a violator of the entire law. James asks, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works?... Faith without works is dead.” Or, as Zion put it this week, “thoughts and prayers without action is dead faith.” God does not show partisanship, but that does not mean that God is not concerned with our politics. A non-partisan God will not be riding an elephant or a donkey, will not be draped in a flag or ermine and velvet robes. God does not choose a party or endorse a platform. But you’d better believe that God is coming to judge how we treat each other, how we distribute our wealth, how we defend the vulnerable, on whether our thoughts and prayers become voice and action; on whether we let our partisan affiliation have a greater hand in shaping our identity than our baptism. And these concerns about how we live with and care for each other, or fail to do so, is the very definition of politics. I cannot preach an apolitical sermon that is faithful to the scriptures. If you have heard here today that your partisan allegiance might be out of step with the values and actions of the gospel, there is good news. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is exhausted and looking for a rest, but he is followed and accosted by a gentile woman. This woman has no name in the Gospel of Mark, she is only identified by her nationality, a nationality at odds with the people of Judea, a culture and religion to be avoided by people of the Jewish faith. This foreign woman of another faith wants Jesus to rid her daughter of a demon. Jesus calls her a dog as he refuses to help, before he seems to change his mind and heal her daughter. Jesus goes on to heal a deaf and mute man but then tells him not to speak, and despite this warning from Jesus, he won’t shut up about it. Where is the good news in all of this? If Jesus can change his mind, so can we. We can open our eyes to the problems and the people we have refused to recognize. We can open our ears to the cries we have refused to hear. We can stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. We can, like Jesus, refuse to make our nationality, partisan interests, and religious differences so fundamental to our identity that we are blind, deaf, and dumb to the humanity and dignity of our neighbors. Jesus does not ultimately let identity divide. Jesus does not demand that either of these two become Jewish or become his followers. Nor does Jesus become a gentile or abandon his ministry. But when the foreign woman of another faith insists on her dignity Jesus recognized their common humanity and changes his mind. Another word for changing one’s mind is repentance. If we are incapable of repentance, what good is our faith? God doesn’t practice partisanship; can we challenge our partisan allegiance? Will we lend our neighbors our voices and actions or will we just send our thoughts and prayers? Will we be more worried about protecting the second amendment than we are about keeping the first commandment? Will we be blind, deaf, and dumb to the cries of Palestinians while we continue to supply weapons to the state of Israel? Or will we refuse to challenge or own thinking, retreat into echo chambers, practice dead faith, pray hollow prayers, and wallow in wishful thinking? That is, will we refuse to repent? Can such a dead faith save us? If Jesus can change his mind without changing his identity, then so can we. But we will have to do what Jesus did. We will have to refuse to retreat from relationships with the very people who challenge our own experiences, our own way of thinking. We will have to keep the whole of the law by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Amen. 

In one of the myriad jobs I had before I went to seminary, I worked as a prep cook and a line worker at a small quick-service restaurant. The owners were fairly hands off, and the shift I usually worked was not overseen by the general manager, but by a cadre of shift managers, with varying degrees of… professionalism, shall we say. As you might imagine, with the cat was so often away, the mice had a tendency to play with impunity. As this was not my first restaurant job, or even my second, I was well aware what was expected of me, and as an oldest child, I was grateful for a bit of self-governance. This did not seem to be the case for many of my co-workers. I watched one employee roll a joint in the same place we normally prepared food. I watched one of the shift managers take a call, pull a sum of cash from the register, walk out to the parking lot, get into a car that had arrived at about the same time the phone had rung, and return a few minutes later as if nothing had happened. I also witnessed a co-worker try to play rock-paper-scissors with one of the less shifty shift managers when he had asked her to mop the dining room floor. She had said no, he had insisted, she had said no again, and when he insisted still, she offered to play the game to decide whether she would in fact have to mop the dining room floor. I was a bit surprised when he seemed to acquiesce. They squared up, fist to palm, she counted, “one, two, three!” I don’t remember which hand signal she gave, but on the count of three, this shift manager had given her a hand signal not suited for general audiences, the ol’ ‘one finger salute,’ and demanded that she mop the floor immediately. That was the end of that discussion. I believe she did in fact mop that dining room, even if a little begrudgingly. But obedience is like that, isn’t it? We hear a law and we want a lawyer, we want to haggle, we want to negotiate the terms and conditions. What are the loopholes, the work-arounds, the indemnity clauses? We think, “What is the least I can give and the most I can get? “Rules are made to be broken, right?! “Luther said ‘Sin boldly,’ didn’t he? “Speaking of Luther, What’s with all this Law stuff anyway? “Where is my grace and mercy, my forgiveness and reconciliation? “What about my Christian freedom? “All this obedience talk sounds an awful lot like works righteousness to me.” And still others tend to go entirely in the opposite direction. They become rigid and cold, exacting and cruel. They train like spiritual Olympians, working tirelessly to shave off a thousandth of a second in hopes of gaining the advantage. They become merciless: with themselves, and with everyone else. But I’m not entirely sure that this is the way we should be thinking of the Law, God’s Law, given to Moses and to God’s people after God rescued them from slavery in Egypt. Turning to our text in Deuteronomy, Moses says that the Law is given “so that [they] may live.” Moses says to observe and preform them to “show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples,” to demonstrate that no other people has a god so near to them as the Lord, nor a Law so just as this law. The Law is given so that they will know and not forget, and so that their children will know, and their children’s children. God has given the Law to Moses and to God’s people to show them, as Pastor Jennifer would say, who God is and how God acts. The Law is not some impossible standard we must meet to show God how good we are— much less, to appease a God who couldn’t love us otherwise. And neither is the Law to be litigated and adjudicated, amended and redacted, overruled and struck down by jurisprudence or prudent jurists. The Law is not some divine middle finger proclaiming God’s distain for our rebellion and demanding our obedience. The Law is given to us not as a path but as a promise and revelation of the destination. If the Law shows us who God is and how God acts, it is Jesus who shows us who we are and how we ought to act. Jesus gives us the Gospel, the bad news of sin and death and the good news of grace and mercy. The Law reveals the character of God and the Gospel includes and transcends the character of humankind. Luther defined the freedom of a Christian in a treatise of the same name: The Christian is the perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. AND AT THE SAME TIME, the Christian is the perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Luther said it another way: God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does. Our neighbor needs our grace and mercy. Our neighbors need us to be just and wise. Our neighbors need us to be doers of the word and not hearers only. Our neighbors need us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Our neighbors need us to rid ourselves of sordidness and rank growth of wickedness. Our neighbors need us to abandon our notions of purity and respectability in favor of practicing a religion of care for the most vulnerable among us. Our neighbors need us to stop looking around for whom to blame for all the evil things in this world and to start looking in the depths of our own hearts. The Gospel may free us but it does not let us off the hook. The Gospel compels us to be ever searching the depths of our hearts, to be subject to the Holy Spirit and the transformation of our truest selves into the very love of God. This is what we have called salvation: that we are becoming the Love God is until the Love God is swallows up the whole cosmos. The Law is not the path to salvation. But in revealing the character of God, in showing us who God is and how God acts and therefore who we are and how we ought to act, the Law and the Gospel show us our ultimate destiny and continue to transform us into the Love God is. For what other people has a God so near to them as to come to them from within? Amen. 

I have to admit that one of the things I appreciate about the lectionary, the prescribed set of readings we hear in worship each week, is that they force me to address passages I would otherwise avoid. Passages I would assume you have heard hundreds, if not thousands of times. Passages that seem more suited to proof text and pretext when taken out of their context. Passages that show up on bumper stickers, door hangers, decorative plaques; embroidered and cross-stitched onto pillows and framed samples. The lectionary forces me to deal with passages that read like a VBS theme pack, complete with the plastic sword and shield, and a stirring rendition of “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” Passages that talk about the “cosmic powers of this present darkness,” and “spiritual forces of evil.” As a Lutheran, I might shy away from choosing as the text for my preaching passages that demand “choose this day whom you will serve,” or passages where Jesus says “no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” But here we are, reading in one Sunday three passages I would have avoided. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to say that there is anything wrong with these passages, or that they aren’t scripture, or something. Rather, I have two main concerns reading such passages in the setting of public worship. First, The reading from Joshua and the reading from Ephesians are favorite passages for the proof-texters and the pretexters. Like indigenous artifacts, these passages have been wrenched from their original context and displayed like trophies or historical curiosities, becoming virtually meaningless and therefore susceptible to projection, revisionism, and appropriation. Like an Egyptian sarcophagus in the British Museum, or a Confederate memorial on public property, these passages have been in this new context so long, it becomes difficult for the preacher to convince you that just because that’s always the context you’ve known does not mean that’s the original context. Second, I fear that in reading these passages the ‘bad news’ is so easy to hear and the ‘good news’ so muted that you’ll be lost in rumination and despair when I tell you the good news. And there is good news. So stay with me. It is true that these passages call us to sacrifice, to service, to endurance, even to a kind of battle-readiness. And if you’ve normally heard these passages from the proof-texters and pretexters, then you, like I do, may bristle at their reading, may resent the call to sacrifice, may avoid the idea of service, you may want to give up instead of endure, may scoff at the notion of a test of faith. You likely have believed— or at least you once believed— and you were confused when your belief didn’t protect you, didn’t make you immune to loss or grief, didn’t prevent your divorce or that diagnosis. And maybe you thought, “What good is faith if I still have to suffer hardship, pain, and death?” Unfortunately, like any one of these passages the word we translate as ‘faith’ has often been taken out of context and misused. The word we often translate as faith is actually better translated as ‘faithfulness,’ as ‘fidelity.’ In her book, The Awakened Brain, Dr. Lisa Miller suggests another word that I think we might use: resilience. Dr. Miller, a researcher in the field of spirituality and neuropsychology, suggests that those who have a regular spiritual practice strengthen the portions of the brain that help us to avoid rumination, guarding us from despair, disillusionment, discouragement and discontentment; in a word, individuals with a lived spirituality demonstrate a greater resilience in times of stress and grief. I think this is what the writer of Ephesians means by the phrase “the shield of faith.” If we take up a spiritual practice that connects us to God, to our neighbors, and to ourselves, we are taking up the shield of resilience to quench the flaming arrows of despair, disillusionment, discouragement, discontentment. Then Joshua’s admonition to choose this day whom you will serve becomes less about avoiding damnation and much more about choosing to take up that shield of resilience. This is the good news: we can choose this day. Maybe we will need to choose day by day or moment by moment. Beloved, the word for that is simply repentance. Choosing again this day, or this hour, or this second whom you will serve. Spiritual practices— meditation, contemplation, or what the writer of Ephesians just calls prayer— are almost always exercises in choosing whom we will serve, in choosing to focus on our connection to God, to our neighbors, and to ourselves; and when we become aware that our attention has returned to rumination and despair, to choose again, and again, and again, and every time, as many times as we must. Faithfulness to this choosing again, resilience in the face of so many opportunities to give up, is what we have called faith. Mere belief cannot withstand the flaming arrows of despair, discouragement, disillusionment, and discontentment. Choose this day. Whom will you serve? Will you give in to your ‘present darkness,’ or will you take up the shield of resilience? Will you walk away— or stay away— because “this teaching is difficult?” Beloved, Jesus is calling us to resilience, to faithfulness, to eternal life— that is, to live the life of eternity in the here and now. This life of resilience is built and sustained by a life of spiritual practice, a life of prayer. These passages from Joshua and Ephesians and John may sound naïve and platitudinous because we are so used to hearing them outside of their context. But the genius of the lectionary is that it forces us to reconsider them, again and again, every time we hear them, and in that way we are practicing the resilience we seek. In the coming weeks, we will be hearing more about spirituality and the spiritual practices that build the sort of resilience we can call a shield of faith. Mere belief cannot protect us. But resilience is like a suit of armor; it will wrap us up in truth, it will guard our hearts with righteousness, it will protect our feet on the path toward peace, it will defend our minds by transforming them, and the Spirit will do our fighting for us. So take up the shield of resilience, and every time you lay it down, take it up again, that you might be able to withstand whatever the day will throw at you, And having chosen again and again and every time, stand firm. Amen. 

I n my family, there are many stories about my great-grandmother Helen. I had the good fortune to have known her as a child. I used to love to sit on her lap after church and excavate the contents of her gold chainmail handbag. It was our little ritual. But there is one story about her that I relate to the most. At family gatherings and church dinners she would make B line for the dessert table. She would scope out the cakes and pies, cookies and bars, deciding what she was going to have first. She would grab one of the small plates from the dessert table and then head over to get in line for the savory foods, where she would usually say, “Well, I guess I better have a plate of real food first.” Then, when she was finished with her obligatory plate of real food, while everyone else was talking and picking the last few bites of chicken off the bone, she would grab one of the dinner trays and be the first person in line for the desserts. Genius. She had enough room in her stomach and on her plate for all the dessert she wanted. As a little kid, I wondered why she would even bother to eat that smaller plate. Why fill up on green beans when you could be eating German chocolate cake, banana pudding, fried apple pie? What she knew that I didn’t was that all that dessert on an empty stomach would probably make you sick. So, if you want to eat a dinner tray of dessert, a little inoculatory nutrition goes a long way. Our readings for today seem to offer us similar choices. Wisdom has built a house and prepared a feast, sending out invitations to the simple and the senseless. So, naturally, we assume that invitation must be for someone else. The reading from Ephesians tells us we can know and understand the will of God. And we throw up our hands and shake our heads, reminding each other that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Jesus offers us his very flesh and blood to eat and drink that we might have eternal life. We think, “Ew, Jesus. That’s gross.” Or we go too far in the other direction and over-spiritualize Jesus’ words, assuming that there is no way he could mean what he said. So, we miss Wisdom’s invitation, assuming it’s come to the wrong address. We give up trying to discern the will of God, assuming it is unknowable. And we waste our lives hoping for the kingdom come with heaven near enough to taste and smell. Thankfully, The Lord takes care of children and fools, as the old saying goes. Wisdom’s feast is for the simple and senseless. The table is set for those humble enough to accept the invitation. All it will cost us is our pride. If we want to dig into Wisdom’s insight, her feast of meat and mixed wine, we just might have to eat a small plate of crow first. If we want to be filled with the Spirit, singing psalms and hymns in our hearts, we can’t be filled up with debauchery instead. The will of God is easy to discern when we are filled with the Spirit, because the will of God is Love, and the Spirit is transforming us into this love. If we want the dessert of “eternal life”— which is better translated as “the life of the Age,” meaning, if we want to life a heavenly life in the here and now— Jesus’ flesh and blood are a small plate of “real food,” green beans on the belly so we can stomach so much dessert. Like the Judeans who ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” we need a bit of insight to understand. But insight comes from Wisdom’s table. Wisdom knows, like my great grandmother, that you will have to have a plate of real food, a dose of nutrition, a helping of green beans to be able to stomach the sweetness we crave. To the folks who first read the Gospel according to St. John, there was no great secret. Jesus had given the apostles a meal with insight, bread and wine as flesh and blood. To eat of this meal is to partake of Christ’s very body. Bread and wine are the plate of real food we consume so we can tolerate feasting on the sweetness of Jesus. Wisdom invites us to a meal of insight, not a scientific or philosophical explanation. We share at this table a mystery, a sacrament, a partaking in the flesh and blood of Jesus at a level beyond our usual ways of perceiving, beyond our seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, or hearing. And from this table, this ‘real food’ prepares us to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear this reality with wisdom, able to load up our dinner trays with all the sweetness this life has to offer. If that feels simple and senseless, congratulations! Your invitation to live the life of the Age, to feast at the table of Wisdom has just arrived. Wisdom has prepared her feast, Jesus has offered his flesh and blood, and the Spirit has come out to find you. Let it be simple. Let it be senseless. Let it remain a mystery. Come. Come and eat this real food. Eat and drink Jesus’ flesh and blood, and live now in the Age to come. It’s just that simple. Amen.