Welcome

Disclaimer: I am going to say some things that may challenge you. If you have been with me in Christian Conversations, in the Monday Bible Study, or in our Lenten Book Study, you will have heard me say these things before. As always, I view every sermon as an invitation to further conversation. If you have questions, complaints, comments, or would just like to discuss these issues further, I will be happy to join you at lunch, to make an appointment for coffee or a meal, or to sit with you at the time and place of your choosing. I saw a clip this week of an interview with a young man describing his experience of coming out. The experience was very painful, because it meant that he would have to leave his religion, Mormonism, and as a result, it likely also meant leaving his family. When he didn’t hear from his mother for a few weeks, he assumed that he’d been correct. But then his mom reached out to say she was also leaving Mormonism. He was stunned, and when he called her to hear how she had come to this conclusion, she said that she couldn’t be a part of a church where her children weren’t welcome. In this young man’s retelling of the conversation his mother had said to him, “If you’re going to hell, we’re coming with you.” The fear of Hell has long been a tool of many religions, Christianity among them. Teachers and preachers of Hell have used this doctrine to scare folks into good behavior, or at the very least, into submission to the authority of the institution. Mothers don’t have to be taught to love their children. Mothers do have to be taught to reject their children in order to keep their good standing within a religious community. We kept folks in line by keeping them worried that if they don’t think like us, don’t live like us, don’t worship and pray like us, then they cannot be saved— or, even worse, that we will withhold salvation from them. That word, ‘saved,’ sort of begs the question, “From what? Or, for what?” And we have often answered that question in ways that preserved our power. We said God is coming to judge the living and the dead, sending the righteous into everlasting peace and consigning the unrighteous to everlasting damnation, conscious eternal torment, separation from God— in a word, Hell. We have heard preachers and teachers of Hell tell us that verses like Acts 4:12, There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved— we have heard them explain that we have to make some kind of a decision, that we have to opt into salvation or opt out of Hell, like we are signing up for some kind of spiritual insurance policy instead of being invited into a relationship with the Living God. We heard them warn us that only the church has the truth, and only the church can forgive your sins, and outside the church there is no way to be saved. But I have good news. The Hell you fear does not exist. Hell does not exist in the scriptures, except by mistranslation. It did not exist in the imagination of the authors of the New Testament, except by our misunderstanding. It does not now, nor did it then, exist in Jewish theology. And it does not exist in reality, except by our own making— that is, if there is a Hell to be feared, it is the conditions we create or accept for our neighbors and ourselves. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in the Gaza strip, where children survive a war only to be starved to death. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in Ukraine where tens of thousands of children have been shipped off to foster care in Russia; it is in Tigray where rape and starvation are weapons of war, it is in Sudan where civilians are caught in the crossfire between two warring generals. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in churches where mothers have to choose between loving God and loving their children. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is watching your child suffer through an addiction, or weather a divorce, or fight cancer, or anything else you’re powerless to stop. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sitting in a cafeteria hungry, the air thick with food and the laughter of peers, while your stomach growls because you have unpaid lunch debt. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is miscarrying the child you very much wanted in the bathroom of the ER because it is illegal to treat you until you’re almost dead. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sleeping in the car with two kids, because you job can’t pay for both childcare and a place to sleep at night. So, if we are being saved, what are we being saved from and what are we being saved for? Well, instead of ‘saved’ that word is probably better translated as “liberated” or “delivered. The term does not imply an individual inner sense of spiritual freedom, nor is it the promise of heaven hereafter. Rather it is a real, lived experience of liberation from oppressive and repressive circumstances. Those who would use the name of Jesus to promise you a sense of spiritual freedom in the great by and by while allowing you to remain in oppressive circumstances in the here and now, has taken the name of God in vain. Those who would use the Name of Jesus to promise you individual atonement and absolve you of any responsibility for the hell in which you allow others to live has blasphemed the name of Christ and distorted the Gospel. These preachers and teachers of Hell are hired hands and wolves in sheep’s clothing. No doubt some of the preachers and teachers have preached and taught this bad theology in good faith. But that has not blunted the impact of the doctrine of Hell teaching us, as one preacher put it, that we could “pray our way out of a problem we have behaved ourselves into.” Beloved, if the church wants to preach salvation, we have got to get the message right. Jesus has come to save us, not from some future Hell, but from all the hell we create or endure in the present. God in Christ has already secured the future, already won the victory over sin, death, and the devil, already redeemed all our pain and suffering. God has already saved us from an uncertain and terrifying future. And God has saved us for life and love and community in the present. God has saved us for preaching and teaching the good news of God’s universal, liberating love. God has saved us for the work of deliverance and liberation in solidarity with those going through hell in this life. Peter is in the hot seat in Acts precisely because he has saved a man from his illness in the name of Jesus and his response when questioned by the very people profiting from a system of domination was to declare that in the name of Jesus he had been sent to proclaim and enact liberation from systems of domination. First John teaches us that Love is our common calling, asking, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? Little Children let us love, not in words or speech, but in truth and action. And the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Good Shepherd has descended to the dead, has robbed any idea of Hell of its power, and gives us the power and authority in his name to do the same here and now. The Good Shepherd has seen what the world has done to us, the Hell we have created for each other, and says to us, “If you’re going through Hell, I’m coming with you.” This is what we are being saved for, to love our neighbors, not in words or speech, but in reality and in liberation. Let us love in Hospitality, in Generosity, and in Solidarity. The Good News the church should proclaim is not an individual insurance policy against eternal damnation. Let the message of the Church be this; If you’re going through Hell, in Jesus’ name, we’re coming with you. We are coming to rob hell of its power, to liberate you in this life, and to call you toward the next. We are laying down our bad theology, we are laying down our claim to power, we are laying down any doctrines rooted in fear, we are laying down any need to choose between family and faith; we are laying down our lives as individuals to take up our life as a community. We are taking up the name of Jesus to not only preach deliverance but to make deliverance a reality. We are giving up on every version of church where any of God’s children are not welcome. In a word, we have come to love. Love is the beating heart of the gospel. Love is the very nature of God revealed to us in Christ. Love is our origin and love is our destination. The hell we have feared does not exist. But if you’re going through hell in the here and now, we’re coming with you. Amen.

In our increasingly digital world, it is getting harder and harder to avoid being scammed. “You’ve won a brand new car! I just need your Social Security number, a vali d credit card, and your mother’s maiden name to verify your identity.” Or an email from an all-too-official looking address, bearing the seal of a government agency you’ve never heard of, says you have unclaimed property, but they need to have access to your bank account to transfer the money directly to you. We’ve all heard sales pitches, multi-level marketing schemes, and fishing scams to the point that I am genuinely surprised that any of these tactics still work on the general public. One born every minute I guess. As a general rule, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. And maybe that’s what we would have thought, way back in the first century, when someone tried to tell us of the resurrection. Maybe we would have received the good news with a raised eyebrow and suspicious glance at the folks next to us. “Raised from the dead, huh? What do I look like; an easy mark? What’s your angle, anyway? You know they killed him, right? You wanna be next? I don’t!” Each of our lessons for today tell us of the apostles or Jesus himself trying to persuade skeptical onlookers that the resurrection is not some marketing ploy, a publicity stunt, or conspiracy theory. Peter has commanded a disabled man to rise up and walk in the name of Jesus. The crowd is dubious and Peter explains that not only is the healing real, but so is the faith that comes in the name of Jesus, so is the promise of repentance and forgiveness, and they can trust it because they just say it with their own eyes. In I John, we are told that we can call ourselves Children of God, because that is what we are. We are told that we will be righteous when Jesus is revealed, because we will see him as he is— that is, not as we may have imagined, not has we have feared, not in some fantasy, vision, or nightmare, but in reality, flesh and blood reality. Speaking of flesh and blood reality, that is exactly what happens in the gospel; Jesus appears in their midst of those gathered in the upper room, and they are terrified. They saw him crucified, they watched him die. Is this a ghost? “No,” Jesus says, “because ghosts don’t have flesh and bone, like you can see I have. They don’t have empty stomachs, either, for that matter; Y’all got anything to eat around here?” Half scared and half overjoyed, they give him some fish and he eats it. And if we’re being honest, its maybe just as hard to believe all this resurrection business in the 21 st century as it was in the first century. The good news doesn’t seem all that good. It barely sounds like news. The proclamation of the resurrection in our day isn’t met with a “How can this be?” but with a “Who cares?” or “So what?” But the news of the resurrection is real, whether or not we receive it as good. To some folks, even if it is real, it sounds more like bad news than good. Repentance sure seems like bad news if you’re the one being asked to give up the very things that resurrection is bringing to an end, things from which your benefiting in the here and now. Repentance is a call to change our perception of reality and take responsibility for the role we’ve played in making things the way they are. Once Jesus finishes his fish, the gospel says that he explained the scriptures to them opened their minds to understand it, and then called them to preach repentance in his name— that is, to open the hearts and minds of others with this good news and call them to give up all the ways they benefit from the way things are— because they had been witnesses of these things. They had seen these things with their own eyes. They could see reality as it is. With our minds opened and our hearts changed, repentance is simply coming to terms with reality as it is because we can see it as it is. We can call ourselves children of God, because that is what we are. We can grow in our likeness to Jesus because we can see him as he is— because we can see ourselves as we are and through the good news we can see ourselves as we will be. And rightly seeing things as they are, we are called to participate in the making right of the world while we wait for the fullness of justice to come at the resurrection. The good news of the resurrection is not too good to be true. And since the resurrection is true, so is the call to repentance, the call to change our hearts and minds to perceive reality as it is, the call to take responsibility for the way things are, and to participation in God’s remaking of reality into what it will be. The resurrection will confront us before it comforts us. It will scare us to death before it calls us to life. It will raise our eyebrows before it raises our consciousness. The resurrection is not too good to be true. It is not a scam or a conspiracy theory. It is the call to perceive reality as it is and to hope in what it will be. So open your minds and change your hearts and you too will be witnesses of these things. Amen.

Grief has this funny way of hearing bad news and waiting for the punchline. Waiting for someone to yell “Psych!!” or “JK” or “April Fool’s!!” or “Gottcha!!” and when it never comes, we’re left to our own devices in trying to come to terms with the bad news. Our brains seem to do this on autopilot, hearing bad news with disbelief, shock, and what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called denial; a state of self-protective cognitive blindness to some new, grim reality. Our brains prefer stasis, same ol’, same ol’, routine. Suddenly confronted with loss or change, especially negative change, our brains sort of buffer, lagging to load this new version of reality. Abusers know this about their victims and they try keep them in the denial phase, explaining away the trauma, giving their victims a way to reframe the abuse or to pretend it’s not happening at all. The term for this is gaslighting. This can even happen on a collective level, from institutions, from government and politicians, from corporations and media outlets, even from the Church and her representatives, you can get the message that your trauma wasn’t real, that you should just get over it, that you maybe even deserved it. I think one way that the church has engaged in gaslighting is by giving this morning’s gospel lesson the title “Doubting Thomas.” When the risen Jesus appears to the disciples and breathes on them the Holy Spirit, these locked-in ones become the sent-out ones, and they take as their first mission finding Thomas. We don’t know from the text why Thomas wasn’t there or where he was instead. By the beginning of the next chapter he is on a fishing boat with some of the other disciples. Prior to the crucifixion, the Gospel of John only gives us two other mentions of Thomas neither of them his call story, like we have for Peter, Andrew, Nathaniel, and Phillip. Wherever he was, the others found him. But Thomas has a hard time wrapping his head, and maybe his heart, around what has happened. We don’t know when Thomas walked away from the unfolding tragedy of Jesus’ final hours, but imagine what he might have seen: Was Thomas there for the arrest, and maybe he’s feeling guilty he couldn’t stay awake, or that he abandoned Jesus in the end like everyone else? Was Thomas there for the beating and the crucifixion and maybe he’s just trying not to see that mangled face every time he closes his eyes? Was Thomas there for the earthquake, and the blackened sky, and the spear, and maybe he’s mourning the death of Jesus, the death of the dream that this was the Messiah, that this was their liberation from Rome? You see, I don’t think that Thomas so much doubted as he refused to be gaslit. All the heartache and grief, and guilt, and disappointment couldn’t be undone so quickly by the testimony of someone else. He needed to experience it for himself. He needed the news to be as real to him as everything else he had seen, and heard, and done. And Jesus obliges. Jesus comes to Thomas and says, “Look, Thomas. Put your hand in my hand, put your fingers in my side. Thomas, I know your wounds are as real as mine as deep as mine. Thomas your wounds are mine, and mine are yours. What God has done for me God is doing for you. Resurrection will happen in a moment, but healing takes time.” Beloved, your pain is real, your trauma is real, your guilt and grief, and disappointment, is very real. There is no going back to normal in the face of these things, because “normal” is gone, and anyone who says that your pain, trauma, guilt, or grief is not real, that it shouldn’t hurt like it does, that you should be over it by now, that all you’ve been through is somehow your fault— anyone who says these things is an abuser trying to take advantage of keeping you in denial. And any institution, any government or politician, any corporation or media outlet, any iteration of the Church or her representatives who says you can avoid pain, trauma, guilt, or grief if you just give them the power to shape your reality is making a promise they cannot keep, and quite likely, that they have no intention of keeping. Pain, trauma, guilt, and grief cannot be avoided, only confronted. And the story of Thomas promises that when they are confronted they can be redeemed. Resurrection comes in a moment, but healing takes time. It will feel like crawling out of the grave. It will expose our scars and still-open wounds to sunlight and scrutiny. It will call us out and it will send us out. It will require of us a radical commitment to reality as it is, in all its gnarly, disfigured horror. It will invite us to feel its woundedness— and our own woundedness. It will show up in the places we least expected, behind the very doors we locked to keep it out. But, it will also speak peace into our fear, breathe the breath of life into our hollow cheeks, and turn our mourning into wonder and awe. And Jesus’ words to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe,” those are for us. Those words are for those of us who have not witnessed such a resurrection. Those word are for those of us who must have been absent when everyone else seemed to get it. Those words are for those of us who struggle now to believe what we have heard in the face of what we have witnessed. Pain, trauma, guilt, and grief are real and cannot be avoided, But they are not final. The God of Reality includes our pain, trauma, guilt, and grief, but the good news of the resurrection is that the God of Reality also transcends our pain, trauma, guilt, and grief. No sorrow, suffering, or shame will ever be wasted by our God. Rather, in community with those who have been witnesses, God will transform all our sorrow, suffering, and shame into our own experience of the living Christ, risen yet scarred, speaking peace and breathing blessing. Then we too will become the sent-out ones, telling others the good news, “We have seen the Lord!” Amen. 

W hen I was growing up, there was a cable channel called TLC, which stood for “The Learning Channel.” It regularly aired scientific programs, documentaries, and sometimes even surgeries in full detail, in vivid technicolor. I am not sure what TLC stands for now, since the channel is most famous for Honey Boo Boo, Dance Moms, and 90-day Fiance. But in its transition from technical expositions of knee replacements and face lifts, to reality TV hub, one show caught and kept my attention, even if it was through the spaces in my fingers. My Strange Addiction ran for 6 seasons beginning in 2010, and featured mostly women who were “addicted” to any number of household goods. There was the woman who was “addicted” to eating foam rubber. She had already devoured one mattress and most of her couch. Another woman was so obsessed with cleanliness, that she cleaned her entire home multiple times a week with undiluted bleach, even bathing herself in it. Another woman loved her cats so much she would eat their fur. Another ate chalk, and another tires. But the most concerning and disturbing was the woman who carried her husband’s urn wherever she went, and when no one was looking, she would eat her husband’s ashes. As each of these women told their stories, you didn’t have to be a trained psychologist to hear that each of them was using this strange “addiction” to cope with some unspoken and unresolved grief. Some major change, some significant loss, some deep loneliness, some profound longing had seemed so impossible to bear, so terrible to confront, that each of them had retreated into a level of despair that had robbed them of their sanity, of their grasp of reality itself, and left them sick, and sad, and even more isolated than before. Alcoholics Anonymous defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The goal of both AA and conventional therapy is to help individuals break this cycle of despair and self-medication by confronting the reality we had hoped to avoid and learning how to cope with negative emotions in healthy and productive ways. This may seem like a strange start to a sermon for Palm Sunday, but this Holy Week is largely about the same thing: confronting reality as it is and leaning to cope with our grief. Through this season of Lent, we have been studying The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. These authors point out that the Gospel of Mark, our central text for Liturgical Year B, leads the reader day by day through the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. Most of us were taught that this week is about the passion of Christ, meaning Jesus’ suffering and death as a substitution for our sin and the suffering we deserve in return. But that is not what the Gospel of Mark has in mind. Jesus doesn’t die for our sins, the authors say, but because of our sins. Jesus’s passion was not his suffering and death. Jesus’ passion was the kingdom of heaven, a euphemism for a corrected view of reality in direct contradiction to the alternate reality of systems of domination propagated by the Roman Empire. Jesus called his followers to repent, or said more plainly, to change their way of seeing reality and their way of responding to Rome’s alternate reality. Jesus called his followers to take up their cross, or said more plainly, he called them to consciously and willingly endure their grief, to stare reality in the face, and accept it as it is. The Apostle Paul tells the Philippians to Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,  but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Jesus was in the form of God, exempt from all the suffering and death of the human experience, and yet chose solidarity with the human condition to demonstrate to us that obedience to reality as it is, and not as the Empire says it is, will bring us eventually to our own cross, the intersection of solidarity and transformation. And the church has been avoiding this intersection for a very long time. Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, recognizing that many parishioners were coming to attending Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday but avoiding Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, churches began to call this day Palm and Passion Sunday. In addition to the procession of the palms, the readings would include the entirety of the passion narrative so that folks would not go from the triumphal parade directly to the Resurrection without ever hearing Jesus’ command to love as he loves, or seeing him wash the disciple’s feet. Without ever witnessing his agony in the garden, his betrayal with a kiss, his non-violent resistance of the Empire and its alternate reality. Without ever staring suffering and death square in the face, or hearing Jesus’ forgive his killers, or watching his lifeless body be taken down and laid in a tomb. Without ever grappling with the hard truth that all his male disciples deserted him, leaving the women, even his own mother, to stand helplessly by him in fear and trembling while all their dreams died too. Without learning to sit in the silence of Holy Saturday, feeling all our shame and sorrow, all our grief and despair. Like the subjects of My Strange Addiction, we have tried to fill that silence, that gnawing void, with anything we could swallow. We have filled our bellies with the chalk and foam rubber of personal salvation and cultural dominance. We have tried to whitewash our harmful history and hateful rhetoric with PR and outreach strategies, until all that bleach burns the eyes and stings the throat of the very people we had hoped to reach. And we have clung to the risen Christ instead of facing the dead and buried Christ, hoping that eating his body and blood would prevent us from having follow him to a cross of our own. We have over-spiritualized words like “repent,” “discipleship,” and the “kingdom of God,” so we would not have to change, grieve, or come to terms with reality as it is. But this is the point of Holy Saturday, the Sabbath day, the day God rested from the work of creation and now the day God would rest before rising. Palm Sunday calls us to be honest about all our hopes and dreams. Honest that we want a God to come and save us, not the Christ that came to serve us. We want a god of revolution, instead of a God of revelation. We want a god who will prevent our suffering, not the God who will redeem our suffering. We want a god who will overcome our sin for us, not the God who will undergo our shame with us. We want the Jesus of “All glory, laud, and honor” and we want the Jesus of the empty tomb, but until we can grieve the God we wish we had, we will never know the God we do have, This Holy Week call us to spiritual sobriety, to walk the steps of Jesus through grief, change, and in radical commitment to reality as it is, until we learn that this path is our own path. This Holy Week is not performative, not ceremonial and commemorative. This Holy Week instructive, preparative and demonstrative. The live and death and resurrection of Jesus reveal to us the very nature of reality, prepare us for its inevitable suffering and sorrow, and promise us that death does not have the final say. Jesus does not walk the path for us, but with us, if we will come, take up our cross, and follow. Amen. 

I ’m sure that many of you are familiar with the Footprints poem. It’s very likely that some of you have a poster or cross stitch or plaque bearing this poem. If you are not familiar, here is the synopsis from Wikipedia: "Footprints," also known as "Footprints in the Sand," is a popular allegorical religious poem. It describes a person who sees two pairs of footprints in the sand, one of which belonged to God and another to him or herself. At some points the two pairs of footprints dwindle to one; it is explained that this is where God carried the protagonist. A much more recent cartoon begins with Jesus speaking the final line of the poem to the poem’s main character, “When you see one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” And in the next frame Jesus continues, “And that long groove over there is where I dragged you for a while.” I think the poem is so popular because it conveys both the anger and frustration we have all felt at one time or another at what seemed like abandonment, while at the same time giving us a mental image to cling to as a reminder of God’s nearness to us in our suffering. And I think the cartoon is so funny because many of us can also relate to feeling dragged around by our left heel when it comes to some matters of faith. Some of us have walked away from church, if not the faith, at one point in our lives, and yet here we are, still attending church regularly, even if it’s in our pajamas and we’re staring at a tiny screen. Something or someone dragged us back here, some of us passively, some of us clawing to get loose. But here we are, still on the rolls, still in the faith, even if we are dubious of some of the church’s teachings, or only here out of some habit we formed to please someone else. Whether you relate more to the poem or to the cartoon, each of us is here, listening to and participating in this service, because, like the Greeks in our gospel reading, we wish to see Jesus. We long for some proof of this abiding presence that Jesus promises us, and the longer we see just one set of tracks the harder it is to feel carried along. Especially when those tracks look an awful lot like my own shoes. In our gospel reading, John says that “some Greeks” come to Philip, one of the disciples and say, “We want to see Jesus.” Philip goes to another disciple, Nathaniel, and they both take the request to Jesus. These Greeks are likely Gentiles who have begun to follow the Jewish customs and worship the God of Israel, but haven’t received circumcision, so they have remained sort of pseudo-Jewish. Philip and Nathaniel seem unsure about including these marginal folks in the movement. After all, if Jesus is the Messiah, he’s the Jewish Messiah, come to free Israel from Roman occupation, and these Greeks are only here because of the Greek occupation. Can they be included in what Jesus is doing? Maybe these Greeks are having that one-set-of-footprints feeling and they need a little assurance that they are being carried too. “Do we Greeks really need to cut off a piece of our flesh, to alter our bodies, just to fit into the promise God made? “And what about the Greek women, who weren’t even born with the anatomy that God seems to need to alter in order to be included? “What is wrong with the way we were born?” “Can his promises be for us?” Philip and Nathaniel take the request to Jesus. And Jesus answers. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me will follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” Jesus goes on to predict his death, and his resurrection and ascension, promising that when he is lifted up from the earth he will draw all people to himself. Jesus makes the cross the mark of the new covenant God is making with all people through Jesus, Jews and Gentiles. As Jeremiah says, No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. When the Son of Man is lifted up we will see in the cross the sign of God’s covenant, God’s solidarity with human suffering, God’s power to redeem us from death, and to raise us up with Jesus. God has included the horror and tragedy of the cross in God’s plan to redeem us and God has transcended the horror and tragedy of the cross in the resurrection and ascension. This is the promise of our baptism, that in this water, God has made your life, your suffering, your sin, your death, God’s own. You want to see Jesus? Look at your own feet. There is a single set of footprints because God has borne the cross in you. God has claimed your life, your suffering, your exclusion, your sorrow, your pain, your very sense of god-forsakenness as God’s own, in the cross, and has made the cross your own in Baptism, whereby God includes the horror and tragedy of your own life and transcends it by bringing resurrection and ascension to bear in your very life. Here and now!! This is what Jesus means by eternal life, the cross, resurrection, and ascension coming to bear in your very life. And that long groove? When Jesus says in the NRSV “I will draw all people to myself” the original language says “I will drag all people to myself.” Jeremiah says a day is coming when all will know the Lord, and Jesus promises that when he is lifted up from the earth he will drag all people to himself. You want to see Jesus? Beloved, look at your own feet. St. Teresa of Avila, a 16 th century mystic, reminds us that because of the cross, resurrection, and ascension Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he sees, yours are the feet with which he walks, yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks and those who wish to see Jesus will see him in you. And no matter how far you run, no matter who or what tries to keep you out, Jesus has already been lifted up and he will drag all people to himself. Amen. 

Sometimes, I read the assigned scriptures for a given week, and I hear such overwhelming good news that I can almost immediately sit down and write my whole sermon right off the top of my head. Other times it comes a bit more slowly, and I have to tease it out, one point at a time, trusting the Spirit that the whole thing will hang together at the end. But there are other times when reading the assigned texts is really hard, when every line feels like bad news, and I spend the week hoping that I can find something hopeful to share by Sunday. Well, this was one of those weeks. When I read the text from Numbers, I couldn’t help but focus on the fact that the text says that it was God who sent those poisonous snakes and killed many Israelites. I know these folks complained against God a lot, and as anyone who’s worked in any form of customer service can tell you, a person can only take so much before wishing they could strike down the next person who dared utter the phrase, “I’d like to speak to your manager.” But, God is not a person. God is God. Wouldn’t you think that God would have a little more patience that a drug store cashier? Sure, God relents and provides a solution, but didn’t God also cause the problem? And if God sent the serpents, why doesn’t God just send the serpents away, instead of making those bitten by them stare at one for relief? Well, then we move on to Ephesians, where we find out we are all, by nature, children of wrath, dead in our trespasses and sins. Sure, we are now united to Christ, saved by grace through faith. But if what we deserve is death and wrath, and grace depends on faith, how can I be sure that my faith is in the right place, in the right things, is the kind of faith through which God saves by grace? And if we must think and believe correctly to have this grace, how much more surely are we damned by a law of the heart and mind than we would ever have been by a law of the body? Well, then we come to the Gospel. John 3:16. Easily one of the most famous verses in the whole of scripture. This is the first verse I ever committed to memory, and I can still quote it in the King James. I dare say that you could even find several persons in memory care units who could still quote this verse along with the Lord’s Prayer and the first verse of Amazing Grace. And this easily sounds like good news. But this is one of eight verses we read this week. In the other verses, we yo-yo back and forth between contingent redemption and our well-earned damnation. Verse 15, “whoever believes may have eternal life…” Verse 16, “God gave [God’s] only son, so that everyone who believes… may not perish but have eternal life.” Verse 17, “in order that the world might be saved…” Verse 18, “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already” Verse 19, “And this is the judgment…” This hardly feels like a message of hope. This feels more like spiritual extortion; “I’ve already condemned you, but if you’ll just give me what I want, I’ll save you from condemnation.” Surely this is not the gospel. This is no good news at all. This sounds like the gaslighting of an abusive relationship. How can we trust the God who heals if this is also a God who wounds? I think the answer lies in our first reading. In the passage from Numbers, we see God through the eyes of the Israelites who are recording their own story, first in the oral tradition, and then written here. What the Israelites experienced felt like God’s punishment for the offense they knew they had made. In repentance, they cried out to God for help and God helped, by making them face the source of their pain. To borrow the language of our gospel, God did not send the serpents into the camp to condemn the camp, but that through the serpent lifted up, the camp might be saved. Numbers is written as though a toddler had a tantrum and you asked the toddler their side of the story. The toddler might say, “Momma is mean. She won’t let me eat what I want to eat. She won’t let me drink what I want to drink. And now my throat and head hurt from crying about it, and Momma just left me here.” But, you see, Momma knows tantrums only work when Momma is looking. God loves God’s people like a mother with a screaming toddler. While we wail, and scream, and writhe in existential angst against the power that dares to impose upon us a will contrary to our own, Momma walks away, runs a bath, makes a snack, and waits with open arms. Once the tantrum has stopped, and the child has turned again for comfort and consolation, Momma scoops up the exhausted and defeated tyrant, pulls them too her chest, and they both forget all the nasty things said and done in the heat of the moment. And this is the grace that save us. Even while we are children of wrath— even while we were screaming toddlers— dead in our trespasses and sins, God loved us, prepared the meal for us, drew us to the font, and waited with open arms, so that when we are done kicking and screaming, God might show us the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness toward us. And this is the judgment! If we turn our defiant backs to the light, to the serpent, to the cross, we live in our own shadows, like sulking toddlers too stubborn to seek comfort in Momma’s embrace. But if we turn to the light, the bath and the meal await us, signs of Momma’s unbreakable love for us. When we can turn our eyes upon Jesus, when we can see through the cross both the horror of our own behavior and the open arms of God, then we can know and trust that this is judgment. For Momma did not send the son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. And beloved, Momma always wins. Amen. 

I h ave a question for you: “Can men be good pastors?” Laura Robinson, a PhD candidate in New Testament at Duke Divinity, asked this question on social media. You can imagine the response. Well, as a man who, after sensing a calling, waited 10 years to finish a bachelor’s degree, worked for 3 years at getting a Masters of Divinity, spent a year as a pastoral intern, served two separate congregations as a Synodically authorized minister, met the requirements of our denomination and was ordained to receive your call to be a pastor, a role I have held for 2 ½ years, well, I really, really hope so. Robinson goes on, “It’s weird people aren’t asking this. I think they definitely can [be],” she say, phfew— “but realistically, the deck is very much stacked against them in a culture that encourages them to think of themselves as the heirs apparent to money, power, and sex instead of a cross.” Ouch. I guess, given our track record, this is a very good question. Quick on the heels of the #MeToo movement was the #ChurchToo movement, wherein a great number of women and even a number of men, felt empowered to speak out about the abuse they had suffered at the hands of clergymen. In one of my first history classes in college, the professor told us to remember the adage “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And in short order, as we moved through our course, without fail, every movement, every leader, every ideology, no matter how righteous, how just, how altruistic, once they gained any amount of power, it was almost immediately wielded over and against some other group, inflicting the same level of anger, suffering, and oppression from which the now ruling group had fought tooth and nail to escape. And this is even true of the Church. Christians went from being the victims of Empire to being the Empire. Protestants went from being persecuted by the Churches in Europe to being witch-hunting, native-murdering slave owners in the new world. This begs an expansion of Robinson’s question; “Can Christians be trusted with power?” In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus marches into the Temple in Jerusalem and disrupts the whole franchise. Jesus made a whip of cords and drove out all the cattle and sheep. Then he turns, flips over tables, and dumps out all the moneychangers’ coins. He shouts at those selling doves to get them all out, to stop making his Father’s house a marketplace. Now, Jesus seems to have planned all this, because the passage begins, “The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” Going up to Jerusalem was what you did at Passover, and it’s pretty likely that this wasn’t Jesus’ first trip to the temple. Jesus wouldn’t have been surprised that there was a marketplace in the Temple. Roman coins, the currency of the realm, had to be exchanged before you paid the Temple tax, because you couldn’t bring the image of another god into the Temple and Roman coins all bore the image of Caesar, who called himself the son of god, and demanded to be worshiped as such. Further, not everyone raised their own animals and making the sacrifice meant purchasing the offering, and purchasing it at the Temple meant you didn’t have to travel with an animal. So, if Jesus wasn’t surprised to find a marketplace at the Temple, especially a marketplace that helped folks gain access to the place God had promised to meet them, what was Jesus so upset about? The crowd in the Temple ask Jesus basically the same thing. “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Said more plainly, they asked, “Hey, Man!! What gives? We are out here trying to do the Lord’s work, and you come in and wrecked the place. What do you have to say for yourself?” Jesus speaks a parable and just makes matters worse. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” You can almost hear them snickering. “Listen, this temple has been under construction for 46 years and it ain’t done yet, and you’ll raise it up in three days?” And then, you can almost hear Morgan Freeman as John’s gospel switches to the narrator’s voice, “But Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.” Now, it’s probably important to note that in the minds of those on the temple grounds that day, especially those who followed Jesus there thinking he just might be the messiah— in the minds of all those present the messiah was coming to make this temple the seat of power. The messiah would come, and throw off Roman oppression, and sit on the throne of his father David. But Jesus claims a Father greater than David. Jesus says his father’s house is not the house of David, but the very dwelling place of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And yet, Jesus doesn’t come to claim power, to sit on the throne of David, and lead a revolt against Roman occupation. Jesus comes to divest power, to give away the sheep, and cattle, and birds. To scatter the coins of both the Emperor and the Temple. To give away authority over even his very body to the ones who would tear it down and to the One who would raise it up. Jesus knew what my history professor knew: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Jesus did not come to establish an empire, to sit on a throne, to accrue money, to wield power, or exploit his body. Jesus came to show us what to do with money and power and our very lives. We are to give them away. We are to spend our money, wield our power, and employ our bodies in service to God and to our neighbors, trusting that the One who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us up too. Can men be good pastors? Can Christians be trusted with power? Yes, but it requires that we understand that we are heirs to the cross because power corrupts. Our sister pastors know this, because power has been wielded against them. Our LGBTQIA+ pastors know this, because power has been wielded against them. And our work is simply that of all those baptized into the priesthood of all believers. Our work is to take up the cross and follow Jesus. To give away money in solidarity with the poor, to give away power in solidarity with the powerless, and even our very lives in solidarity with the dying. Culture warriors demand power and the entitled desire impunity. But we proclaim Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Christian Nationalism and foolishness to the patriarchy. The very power of God given away is what makes us incorruptible. Can men be good pastors? Yes, with boundaries and accountability. Can Christians be trusted with power? Yes, with humility and deference, with divestment and solidarity, when we, like Jesus, wield power to empower others, and not ourselves. There is no such thing as a Christian nation. Neither are men inherently bad pastors. We are heirs to a cross and not a crown, to poverty and not privilege, to self-giving love and not self-loving power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But Love redeems, and absolute Love redeems absolutely. Amen. 

Today is the first Sunday in Lent. Traditionally, during this season, we recommit ourselves to discipleship, to our baptismal covenant, to renouncing all the forces that defy God, in the world and in us. We usually mark this season by committing to a fast, or adopting a new practice hoping that sacrifice and service in the small things will give us greater discipline in the larger things. But I think most of us we are just tired. Too tired. Deep-down-in-our-bones, teetering-on-the-edge, cracks-in-the-foundation tired. Maybe the thought of taking on something new right now, seems like too much. And giving something up? We are closer to just giving up. It feels like we have been in perpetual Lent for quite some time, and this just feels like doubling down. Our texts for today, seem to be an odd way to start this redundantly sorrowful season. We start with the Flood, and God promising that never again will God destroy every living thing, setting the rainbow as a sign of the covenant. We jump to 1 Peter, were we hear again a synopsis of the flood story and God’s promise. Peter makes the connection to Baptism; as Noah and his family were saved through water, so now are we saved through water, as an appeal to God for a “good conscience.” Then we come to the Gospel. We hear again the story of Jesus’s Baptism, the voice from heaven, the Spirit descending. But this time we see something more. We see that this Spirit immediately drives Jesus into the wilderness, where Jesus is tempted by Satan for forty days, surrounded by wild beasts and waited on by angels. After this, Jesus comes to Galilee and begins to proclaim the kingdom. This reading from Mark highlights a pattern in the story of God. A pattern of Waters Wilderness, and Word. And this pattern starts at the very beginning. “In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1 starts. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while [the Spirit of God] swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light.” and there was light. Then God sets the Garden of Eden between two rivers, and when the first humans violate God’s command, they are exiled to the wilderness. But God speaks a promise over them to redeem them and all humankind. We have already seen that God saves Noah and his family through the Flood. They emerge from the ark into an empty world they will have to cultivate and populate, and God promises that never again will God destroy all flesh. Moses is set adrift in the Nile to save his life from Pharaoh, he flees into the wilderness to avoid the consequences of his actions, and there he encounters the voice of God. God uses Moses to lead the Hebrew people to freedom across the sea and into the wilderness where God gives God’s people the law. God uses Joshua to lead God’s people across the Jordan into a hostile territory, and promises them the land. These waters in the Hebrew scripture are supposed to remind us of those first waters, the waters over which the Spirit swept and God spoke the world into being. When God’s people go through the waters they are going back to the beginning, back to the sweeping Spirit and God’s declaration of our original goodness. And in the Gospel, Jesus goes back to the waters, wades into the Jordan and the Spirit descends, and God speaks goodness and love over this Son of God. And the pattern repeats. Jesus is driven into the wilderness, where he is tempted as Adam and Eve were to believe that relationship could never be repaired. Tempted like Noah to believe that the world was beyond redemption. Tempted like Moses to believe that God couldn’t speak through him. Tempted like the Hebrews to believe that God had led them out of slavery only to let them die in the wilderness. Tempted like the Hebrews to believe that God couldn’t give them the land with so small an army. But something about the struggle between what these folks could perceive with their senses and what God was promising in spite of it, led these folks to trust that God would save them through what looked and felt like death. Jesus goes from the water to the wilderness and comes back as the Word, preaching the Kingdom of God. This pattern of Waters, Wilderness, and Word is the pattern of the Christian life. We like all creation, like our forebears, like Jesus himself, start in the waters, where the Spirit still sweeps and the Word still speaks. We are God’s Beloved, God’s Child, and God is well pleased. But we come out of those waters into a wilderness that would tell us otherwise. We are tempted to believe that God’s promises can’t be for us, that we can’t speak God’s truth, We are tempted to believe that what we thought was freedom was really just abandonment. We are tempted to believe that God can’t use our little effort to defeat big evil. But something in this struggle will teach us otherwise. So, let this struggle be your discipline this Lent. Let your prayers be honest, give God your exhaustion, your doubt that this can be redeemed, your fear that you aren’t enough for this challenge, your frustration at being left to your own devises, your desire to just give up on the whole world the church, faith, and God. Maybe what we give up for Lent this year is avoiding temptation. Maybe the disciple we take on this year is choosing to stay in this wilderness until God leads us out. Because like Adam and Eve, like Noah and Moses, and Joshua and the Hebrew people, and Jesus, God will lead us out with a story to tell. A story that is the gospel in our lives. The good news that darkness and chaos are but the womb of God, birthing a new world in our very bodies, the Word of God writing the gospel on our lips. You are God’s child, God’s Beloved, and with you God is well pleased. Amen.

Thi s Wednesday is Valentine’s Day, in addition to being Ash Wednesday. It also happens to be the 18 th anniversary of my engagement to Pastor Jennifer. As I have thought about this passage from the Gospel of Mark, I have been drawn back, again and again, to a day just weeks before Valentine’s Day. Jennifer and I had spent the winter break apart. We had been in touch, by phone and text, but in those days before Facetime and Zoom, we had not seen each other. We had gone into this break on an uncertain note— which I will freely admit (and if I didn’t, Pastor Jennifer would tell you) was my fault. I could tell that she was far more certain about the future of our relationship than I was. I didn’t what to lead her on if this didn’t develop into something more on my end. So, trying to do the right thing, I told her about that uncertainty and asked for a break. Man, was I stupid. When we finally met up again after winter break, the second I saw her, I understood why poets and artist talk of sparks and fireworks. In a split second, I knew in my bones that I was looking at my wife. I made my amends, and as love keeps no record of wrongs, we picked up right were we left off. But that moment had changed how I saw Jennifer, how I saw the rest of my life. It changed how and what I dreamed about the future. It changed how I saw everything I had been through up to this point. Eighteen years, one son, 5 degrees, 2 ordinations and 8 zip codes later, knowing what I know now, not only would I still ask, I would ask sooner. So, what does any of that have to do with Mark, Chapter 9? Good question. “Six days later,” says the text. Six days earlier, Jesus asked his disciples who people say he is. There were a lot of answers, John the Baptizer back from the dead, Elijah, or one of the prophets. Jesus asks who they say he is, and Peter makes his famous confession, “You are the Christ!” Jesus then predicts that he will be handed over, killed, and on the third day, rise again. Peter rebukes him, and Jesus returns the rebuke. Now, six days later, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain alone and there he was transfigured. Now, many of the other feasts of the liturgical year seem to carry a clearer story. Christmas, sure, I understand birthdays. Annunciation; well, I know what an announcement is, so that makes sense. But transfiguration is not a word we use very often, if ever. Even if we break the word down to its parts— “trans-” means to change, “figure” means a visible representation or form, “-ation” means the action or process of— so the action or process of changing one’s visible form? Yeah, still not much help. Even the other texts don’t provide much insight. Elijah is carried to heaven in a chariot of fire? Really? II Corinthians talks about the god of this age vailing the gospel to those who are perishing. Thanks, Paul. What are we to make of all of this? If we look closer, both the story from II Kings and the story from Mark include disciples who don’t want things to change. Elisha refuses to leave Elijah’s side, despite the foretelling of his impending death, until a mysterious light envelops Elijah and he is gone. Peter refuses to believe that Jesus will die, but Jesus begins to shine with a mysterious light, flanked by Moses and Elijah, and an overshadowing voice calls Jesus “the Beloved” and commands that they listen to him. Jesus seemed to them changed, somehow, different in this new light. For Peter, James, and John, I wonder if this was the moment when they understood what all the Law and the prophets had been writing about. I wonder if in a split second, they knew in their bones that they were looking at their God. I wonder if that moment had changed how they saw Jesus, how they saw the rest of their lives. Did it change how and what they dreamed about the future? Did it change how they saw everything they had been through up to this point? Was if transfiguration not a changing of one’s visible form, but a change in how the beholder sees the visible form? I know that Jennifer for me that day was changed, not in herself, not in her form, but in what she was to me. For Elisha, his beloved teacher did not die, but was swallowed up in light, carried out of his sight in the white-hot embrace of God’s own Love. For Peter, James, and John, their beloved teacher suddenly became more clearly visible to them in a way that it changed how they saw everything else. For them, Jesus became the light by which they could see everything else. The Transfiguration is not a change of what we see; the Transfiguration is a change in how we see. Jesus has come to reconcile heaven and earth, body and soul, matter and spirit. This is the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ Jesus,” the light by which we see everything rightly, as it is, for what it is. Jesus is the light by which we come to understand the law and the prophets, heaven and earth, body and soul, matter and spirit, sinners and saints, are all reconciled to God in Christ Jesus. And if Jesus is the light by which we can see that God is reconciling all things to God’s self, then we no longer have to worry about what God might exclude. Nor do we have to worry about what God might include, like suffering, like the Cross, like death and our sin. Instead, we are free to rest in the overshadowing presence of God, that great cloud of knowing that surrounds us from without and arises from within, that assures us that we too are God’s Beloved, and calls us to listen, to await the transfiguring of this reality until by God’s great Love and great Suffering we arrive at the transformation of this reality. Amen.