God's Instrument

A sermon for Sunday, March 22, 2020

Would you pray with me?

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

In times of stress, I do my best to be there for other people, but after all the comforting and helping, at the end of the day, I turn to horror stories to unwind. Maybe not the best coping mechanism, but it’s been working for me. And as I’ve been working through Stephen King’s catalog, I found myself thinking about The Shawshank Redemption this week, and one particular storyline in the book. Andy Dufresne, who has been convicted of the murder of two people, including his wife, after he’s found his place in the prison, turns his attention to the prison’s library. He begins writing letters to elected officials to get better funding for the library, one a day for years. After he wears down the officials and gets the first round of funding, he turns around and begins writing two a day so that he can build up the library even more.

It’s a lovely modern parable of doing the good that you can, even in a period of limitations. As we go through this time of social distancing and, in some places, lockdowns, it’s our task to figure out how to do the good we can while still maintaining the distance that we need to. I think our prayer this morning, the prayer of St. Francis, gives us some guidance on the goods that God can work in us so that we are still doing good, no matter our circumstances.

Something that stuck out to me as I was researching for this sermon, though, is that this prayer was likely not one that Francis himself prayed. That’s not really a surprise—our two other prayers that we’ve tackled so far this Lent, a Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition and the Breastplate of St. Patrick, weren’t written by John Wesley or St. Patrick, but are prayers attributed to them or the communities they led. But the reason why this prayer probably wasn’t prayed by Francis is what stuck out to me: this prayer is for an individual. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me bring love.

See, Francis was focused on community. We as Americans are very used to focusing on the individual—we swim daily in the waters of individualism, focused on our individual hopes and dreams. Not so with Francis.

And we likely have something to learn from that stance of Francis’. The spread of COVID-19 has taught us that what individuals do impacts the community, and vice-versa. Reports out of South Korea show that one woman who did not get tested for the coronavirus and went to church spread the sickness to 37 people. What we as individuals do has an impact on our communities, and one way of doing good in this time is reorienting ourselves to be thinking of our communities all the time.

So when we turn to this prayer this morning, I want us to focus on community. If we as individuals are all shaped by this prayer into being those who bring love and hope and joy and forgiveness into the world, how will that shape our community? I believe that if we can be a community full of individuals who are shaped by this prayer, we will be able to persist in doing good in these uncertain times.

So. Let’s turn to the prayer. There are two parts to it, as I’m sure you noticed as I prayed it. There’s this first section, where we pray for God to make us instruments of God’s good works, and the second section of reversals, “It is in comforting that we are comforted,” and so on. The first section reminds me of the Covenant Prayer we focused on two weeks ago, where we prayed to be used by God as God saw fit.

There’s something powerful in asking God to work in you rather than asking God to bless your work, especially in these times where none of us know what the next right thing to do is. Instead of charging ahead and asking God to bless our decisions after the fact, this prayer asks that God be the one to do good through us. If we are grounded in being instruments of God’s peace, not potential peacemakers trying to work out things all on our own, we can trust that the guidance we get from God will produce good.

What might that look like? Turn to someone watching with you or take a moment to write down some thoughts. Have you been able to do any of the things the prayer asks this past week? Have you brought peace or love or hope into any situation? Can you do any of these things in the week ahead?

I want to speak about bringing faith where there is doubt for just a moment before we move on to the second part of the prayer. COVID-19 has us all thinking about what our faith means. I don't think we're doubting God's power by being careful and taking precautions like social distancing. I actually think we're allowing God to use our minds to do the Lord's work, not only for ourselves but for those who are most vulnerable and for healthcare workers. And yet I know, and I’m sure we all know, that there are other Christians who believe that the faithful response to a pandemic is to continue to gather, because God has not given us a spirit of fear. Sowing faith in this time of doubt is a complicated matter. I know for myself what I believe and how it has shaped my actions, but each of us has to wrestle with this question for ourselves. As you pray this prayer this week, allow yourself some time to think about how your response to this pandemic is grounded in your faith, so that God can use you as an instrument of faith during this time.

Now, what I want us to notice in the second part of the prayer is the balance that’s inherent in it. “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand.”

When I first began praying this prayer, I thought that this meant that I should never seek to be consoled and never seek to be understood and never seek to be loved. I thought, as many of us may think, that it was my job as a faithful Christian (and to name it honestly, as a woman) to always be the one who is giving and never the one who is receiving. It created a bit of a compulsion on my part and honestly deprived me of the fullness of some friendships and relationships.

Because the prayer doesn’t assume that relationships aren’t mutual; remember, this prayer is focused in community. The prayer assumes that each person praying it does seek out love and comfort and understanding because we as humans need those things. Instead, the prayer seeks to correct the selfish impulse of always seeking more to be understood than to understand.

If we in selfishness are seeking these things, we won't find them. It's in community with people who practice this way of life that we're able to see the fulfilment of each of these goods: consolation, love, forgiveness, understanding. We all know people who'd rather be loved than to love. We all know people who pour out love with nothing in return. But it's reciprocity that enables the thing to be good. It is in the relationship between people who are able to console and love and do so freely, trusting that whatever they give will come back to them.

It is hard to be in a community like that right now, but it is exactly now that we need to be in community together. What can you commit to this week that will build a community, a community that will reach back to you when you reach out them? Can you commit to phone calls? Emails? Cards? Or will you commit to doing some soul-work so that you can be a giving and receiving part of a community? Spend a minute or two talking that out with those beside you or writing it down for yourself.

I have to admit, in uncertain times, I want to be in charge. Put me in the governor's mansion or in the White House, I don't care, just let me be in the room where decisions happen so that I know that I'm doing all I can, no holds barred. But unless you're an elected official, you're stuck in the same boat as Andy Dufresne. All you can do is be persistent in communicating your needs and what should be done.

And that doesn't seem like anything. For those of us who aren't out there on the front line, the medical care professionals, the essential employees, the cash register clerks, it seems like we're stuck doing not a thing at all. But our prayer this morning is here to remind us that everything we do, as long as we are letting God guide us in doing it, is a powerful act that can bring good into the world. In everything, we can bring peace, love, etc.

Now, I don't mean to make you think that you need to emerge from quarantine a saint. But I do think we have the chance to be, as one of my favorite Avett Brothers songs says, "At least a little better than we've been so far. It's the only way to keep that last bit of sanity."

Amen.

Christ in...

A sermon for Sunday, March 15, 2020

Would you pray with me?

I arise today through

God's strength to pilot me, God's might to uphold me,

God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to see before me,

God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me,

God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me,

God's shield to protect me, God's host to secure me –

against snares of devils,

against temptations and vices,

against inclinations of nature,

against everyone who shall wish me

ill, afar and anear,

alone and in a crowd...

Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit,

Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

Salvation is of the Lord.

Salvation is of the Lord.

Salvation is of the Christ.

May your salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.

Amen.

God’s host to secure me alone and in a crowd.

We can all relate to that today, can’t we. We have learned a suspicion of crowds and the blessedness of being alone as COVID-19, the sickness caused by this new coronavirus, has begun to infect us here in the United States. We’ve watched as schools, universities, the NBA, the ACC, the NCAA, and the MLB, among many others, have cancelled gatherings. God secure us alone until it’s safe to be out in crowds again.

Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe that one of the ways that God has secured us in this world is by giving us the ability to reason and investigate things and that God has graced some people in this world with the vocation of gaining knowledge and wisdom that keeps the rest of us as healthy as possible, and I believe that there is good guidance out there for keeping ourselves and, equally importantly, those around us, healthy. For those of you on the livestream, you’re doing the right thing for yourself and for others around you, and you shouldn’t doubt that. We are all loving ourselves and our neighbors right now by limiting the chance for this virus to spread.

Still, I think we all long for God’s protection and, a couple of weeks from now, we’ll all be longing for a crowd, and the vibrancy of gathering together in community. Sometimes I think that “love your neighbor” is the most difficult thing Jesus could have asked us to do, because love looks so different in different circumstances.

And yet, as we’ve been reminded this week, we can still listen to music and read and sing and laugh and hope for better days, and those things are God-given gifts too. We can step outside, as we’re able. We can call and connect with friends and family. There is a gracious abundance of ways that we can be with one another and with the joyful beauty of creation just waking up from winter, no matter the quarantine. We might be exposing ourselves to allergies, but that’s another story. There hasn’t been a run on Mucinex yet.

I think it’s a gift of God that we’re focusing on St. Patrick’s Breastplate this morning, a few days before his feastday, even though there won’t be many parades this year. All of us, I think, could use the protection of God in the days ahead, both within us and without us.

I first really encountered this prayer when the youth choir from my home church, Crossflame, went on tour in 2018. I heard some of the teenagers who I have known since they were in elementary school sing concert after concert, declaring love to anyone who would listen and drawing the circle of care wider and wider with each song. But the heart of each concert for me was The Deer’s Cry, which is another name for this prayer. A beloved child of God who I had watched grow from an energetic but nosy fifth-grader to a beautiful but still nosy high school junior, was the soloist for this song and she would stand and sing this beautiful melody:

“I arise today, through God’s strength to pilot me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me.”

And the choir would swell around her and sing and make a joyful, glorious noise. I remember sitting in an old, old church in Massachusetts, windows wide open in June, no air conditioning, one poor teenager with her head in my lap as she drank water and recovered from the heat, sitting and listening to these teenagers filling this space with beauty. They would soar together in harmony verse after verse and then fade to the background when the soloist sang,

“Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me.

“I arise today.”

God, I wanted so badly to be the kind of person this song sang about.

I wanted so badly to be the kind of person who lived in such a way that Christ would be in the heart of everyone who thought of me, in the mouth of everyone who spoke of me. I wanted to arise daily, daily, firm in the knowledge that Christ had so fully filled my being that the world would be radiant with the love of Christ that dwelled in me. This poem, this song, this prayer named for me what the fullness of my life would be.

Christ before me.

Christ behind me.

Christ in me.

Christ beneath me.

Christ above me,

Christ on my right.

Christ on my left.

Christ where I lie.

Christ where I sit.

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me.

Christ in every eye that sees me.

Christ in every ear that hears me.

Oh God, I pray that those who encounter me would always see Christ before, behind, above, below, within, and around me.

But that prayer takes a little bit of unpacking, doesn’t it. It’s beautiful and powerful, but what does it actually mean for us to live in such a way that Christ surrounds us and is obvious in us?

Well, I would suggest that we think back to Epiphany to answer that question. For those who haven’t joined us before, we followed the lectionary passages in the gospel of John for Lent during our epiphany season. So let’s think back to Nicodemus, poor Nicodemus, the first one to hear, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him may not perish but have life eternal,” Nicodemus who was fascinated by Jesus but struggled to jump in with both feet.

Let’s think back to the woman at the well, St. Photina to our Eastern Orthodox siblings, who heard Jesus and could not believe what she heard and yet ran to tell the village about this man who knew everything about her and loved her anyway. Her whole town came to Jesus through her, the first person to ever know Jesus as messiah, and Jesus stayed with that town because of her witness.

Let’s think back to the Man Born Blind, who did nothing at all to earn his illness, nor did his parents, who was cared for by Jesus even after those around him rejected him.

Let’s think back to Lazarus, and Mary, and Martha, who all had to deal with deep feelings of abandonment in the face of illness and death, and who still let Jesus do what he was always going to do, and followed his instructions when he told them to remove the graveclothes off of the one who had recently come back to life.

If others are to think of Christ when they see us, we should be the first to remove the proverbial graveclothes from others. Check in with one another and with your neighbors, especially your neighbors who are struggling during this time. (For some of us, this might mean meeting our neighbors for the first time, and that is a good and brave step in and of itself.) Drag off the graveclothes of poverty and of difficult jobs and lack of childcare or transportation as you’re able and offer words of kindness and encouragement that match your actions. Do grocery runs for those who need it. Offer to watch kids. Share your toilet paper. Do all that you can for your neighbors who are struggling. If you’re local and able, volunteer with Grace House so that we won’t have to shut down as coronavirus spreads. We can be the shield of Christ for others in this time of need.

Of course, you can only do many of those things if you are healthy, well, not at increased risk of the virus, and if you haven’t come into contact with the virus. But if that’s not the case, if any of us are not well or if we’re at risk, let’s remind ourselves of what Jesus said about the Man Born Blind. It was neither his parents nor that man who sinned that caused his illness. Remember, remember, and remind yourself that God does not desire death. From humanity’s first breath until the coming of Christ, God has never desired death.

The story of the Man Born Blind has wisdom for those who are healthy and well too. It calls us to, without discrimination or judgement, help those who are affected. It can be as small as ordering Chinese food or as big as volunteering to deliver meals or watch children, as long as we’re healthy and well. The discrimination of Jesus’s day is clear to us now but we’re a bit blind to the discrimination these days. Having Christ all around you means letting Jesus heal you from any prejudices you may have.

But regardless of your health and your ability to help at this moment, let’s remember St. Photina and St. Nicodemus. Both engaged Jesus in deep, important, theological questions, and regardless of their background, both received the truth of Christ. All are loved. All are cared for. It doesn’t matter if you have a portfolio that’s taken a hit with the whims of the stock market or if you’re struggling to keep food on the table and to get medication for your little ones. Jesus speaks the same truth. The chains of this world have been broken and we have good news to share with anyone around us:

God is love and Christ is God and Christ is with us.

Love is with us.

Love goes before us and love surrounds us.

Love protects us and names us.

Love guides us and guards us and sets a path before us.

Love shields us and protects us not from the microscopic but from the macroscopic fear and panic that the world is trying to breathe into us. Love gives us wisdom and knowledge and love will be with us no matter what happens.

Love before you.

Love behind you.

Love in you.

Love beneath you.

Love above you,

Love on your right.

Love on your left.

Love in the mouth of everyone who speaks of you.

Love in the heart of everyone who thinks of you.

Beloved of God, will you arise with me as you are able and pray the Breastplate of St. Patrick?

Covenant

A sermon for Sunday, March 8, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who leads us in ways of wisdom and joy, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Make your presence known to us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

When I was younger, I knew, I knew, that there was only one real way to pray. It involved you and the Lord and no one else, because the only real prayer was the honest prayer of the publican, not the prayer of the Pharisee, which was loud and could be heard on the street corners. No, the only real prayer was the prayer that was between just you and God, preferably with you on your knees, hands clasped in front of you, head turned up to the ceiling, eyes open or closed based on personal preference or depth of feeling. You had to pray what was on your heart, using words that only you would use. “God, I’m sorry that I laughed at Justin Thomas when he asked me out. I know you love him, I just don’t. God, I want to be an astronaut. Or a journalist. Or an astronaut-journalist. But I’ll go wherever you send me. Just tell me what to be. Also, be with Jessica—her cat’s not doing well. And be with Uncle Doug and Aunt Caroline as they deal with MS. And be with Sarah and help her to be smart around Robs. Amen.”

That’s how you pray.

Sarah and Robs got married, by the way, after they both graduated from college and found jobs. They have two beautiful children who call me Aunt Jo and who are interested in space and I think they’re a delight. God works wonders in life.

I still pray to God like that sometimes, though not always on my knees. Wherever I am when I pray, God is up and to the right and hears me when I ask for blessings, grace, and healing for other people, but I’m convinced that God will ignore me if I pray using some hifalutin words that I learned in some book somewhere. God doesn’t like it when you put on airs.

But what I’ve found as I’ve grown is that I only have so many prayers that I can pray to God. I can spend time thinking up new ones, and some of those are good and some of those are just okay, but after a while, those prayers all start to blend together. I am caught in my own perspective, after all, and I, unlike God, am not infinite nor omniscient nor omnipresent. I can’t see all there is to see in the world. I’m only one person. And my prayers are limited, in a way, by the fact that I am and will only ever be one person, one person limited by one body and one perspective.

And we know that Jesus shares wisdom when he talks about planks in our own eyes and splinters in another’s. Sometimes, we aren’t aware of our planks and it takes the perspectives and words of others for us to notice the planks on our own eyes, so that we can take them out. Since Lent is a time of self-reflection, of noticing what within ourselves mirrors God and what doesn’t, I want to offer us a new prayer each week of Lent that might help us notice some of those planks and give us the strength to pull them out. I want to give us some new-old prayers to pray this Lent.

So. Our first prayer is A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition, a prayer that John Wesley included with the book he sent over to America in 1784 for worshipers here to use. (If you want to learn more about Methodism in America, you can come to tonight’s Foundations of Methodism study!) The prayer is one that would be used in covenant renewal services, when believers would remember their baptism and remember their promises to God. And it goes like this:

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low by thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

You can pray a more modern version, without the thees and the thous, but the old soul in me likes the original wording. It reminds me that this is someone else’s prayer, from another time, and that I can let it push me and shape me, but I don’t have to hold onto it too tightly.

Which is good, because I have both loved and struggled with this prayer from the first time I read the first line. “I am no longer my own, but thine.”

That’s, uh, not very American, is it?

America is all about independence and self-determination and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and rugged individualism. The whole point of the colonies declaring independence from crown is that we, as the people of the United States of America, wanted to be self-governing, to be free. Leave it up to some Royalist Englishman to send over a prayer to the colonies that’s all about submitting to servitude, am I right?

The first time I prayed this prayer was when I was back at my home church on Christmas break, gathered with the brave group of souls who actually make it to church on the Sunday after Christmas. The Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition was used during Watchnight services, which would happen on New Years Eve, and so the pastor had decided to do a service about covenant renewal on the Sunday closest to New Years. As a college student, I was all about independence, all about figuring things out for myself, all about deciding who I wanted to be and how I was going to be it all on my own. I didn’t want to have anyone in authority over me. I wanted to be my own. I did not want to be God’s.

At the same time, though, I desperately wanted to belong to somebody. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted someone to pick me, to want me to be around them, someone who when they saw me wanted to see me again. I wanted a place and a people to be with. I wanted to know that my friends had chosen to be my friends, not that we were just friends of convenience, and I wanted to belong.

And so, this first line of the prayer sucked me in, and not in a totally healthy way. I wanted to belong so badly, could feel the ache with every atom of my being. Maybe I could belong to God. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe I didn’t need to belong with anyone else. Maybe, if I was good enough, if I was giving enough, if I erased myself enough, I could belong to God and that would be what I needed, what I longed for. I could be a Christian zombie, or a Christian puppet, allowing God to move my limbs wherever he needed them to move.

You have to admit, that first line has its problems.

So when you pray this prayer, I want you to pray the first line with the last few lines in mind. Pair it with: “I freely and heartily yield all things” and with “Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it,” because I think those lines have the key words that keep us from being Christian zombies when we affirm our covenant with God.

I freely and heartily yield all things means that this covenant that we’re entering with God, this agreement that we make with God, it’s a choice. No one is forcing us into it, not the expectations of others, not the fear of punishment, nothing is forcing us to choose God. This is the secret of Paul in Philippians, I think, how Paul has learned to be content with whatever he has. He chose to follow Jesus. He chose to follow Christ. He knew all the alternatives that were out there and the risen Christ appeared to him and Paul chose to believe that vision. Paul chose to believe in Jesus. It’s easy to give up everything you have for something that you really, truly believe in, easy to be content in all things when you know that you have gained the one thing in this world that really matters.

I’m not making an altar call out of this, but this prayer forces us to think about whether we have freely chosen God in our lives, or whether we’ve chosen God because we thought that we were supposed to. Is following Jesus the one thing that really matters in this world to us, and so we can be content with whatever comes our way, or is there something else that matters more? I’ll be honest, sometimes the thing that matters most to me is being right, not following Jesus. I would leave Jesus behind if I thought doing that would make me right.

This is the crux of the prayer to me, this question of freely and heartily yielding all things to God. Can I choose this freely? Do I want this covenant with God? Can I say this prayer with honesty and joy, or do I mutter it with regret and embarrassment?

Now, maybe you all have figured this out for yourselves and you know why you choose Christ and this prayer is an easy one for you. You’re happy to give all things up to God, to belong to God, to do whatever God calls you to do, to be put to suffering, to be laid aside, to be exalted or brought low, to be full or empty, to have all things or nothing. Maybe y’all have learned how to hand all things over to God and to rest in the shadow of God’s wings and maybe it is just the arrogant youth in me that struggles with this prayer.

Maybe y’all have it all figured out. But let me tell you how I figured out how to pray this prayer for myself anyway.

What clicks for me, what makes this prayer pray-able to me, and makes it into a prayer that can shape and form me to make me more like Christ, is to remember, as 1 John tells us, that God is love. God is love. God is goodness and kindness and mercy and truth and everything beautiful. God is love. And if I am ever to let go of my hard-won freedom from the things in this life that have held me bound, freedom that I now know I only gained because of the grace of God revealed to me in Jesus Christ my Savior, if I am ever to freely and heartily chose to hand over the direction of my life to anything at all, it must be love.

In the name of love, I can do whatever I’m called to do. I can be grouped in with whoever I need to be grouped with. I can run for miles and miles or I can rest. I can endure the difficulties of this world. If it’s in the name of love, I can be raised up unabashedly and if it’s for love, I can make do with nothing at all. I can be full or empty, regarded well by others or dismissed by others, I can be content in all circumstances, if I know that I belong to love and that it is in love that I act. I can with integrity give all of myself away if I am doing it in the service of love.

Because, when you give yourself to love, you get everything you need in return. Remember that the prayer declares “And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Thou art mine, and I am thine.” If God is love and if we, in giving ourselves to God, receive God in return, we will always have everything we need. It is not a soul-killing self-sacrifice. It is not mindless obedience. It is not zombie Christianity. Giving ourselves to God and receiving God in return is a vibrant, dynamic, life-filled thing. It is mornings and evenings of prayer, sharing and learning and giving and receiving. It is connecting with all those in whom God lives, seeing the divine love in all the places that it can be found. It is striving and caring and doing wonderful things for others, seeing the beauty of God in their faces in return. The prayer that this covenant asks us to make is a living thing, full of all the light of love come to life.

So friends, I ask that you pray this prayer each day this week. Let it work on you. Can you freely give yourself to our beautiful, vibrant, dynamic God who is love, or is there something in the way? Can you be content in all things or is there a need that must be met first? Do you desire to be in covenant with God or is that something that frightens you? Think through all of these things as you pray, be gracious with yourself, and raise up to God whatever is blocking you from praying this prayer with all your heart. As we’ve said before, this world put things between us and God and God is faithful to remove those things if we let God. And if nothing is blocking you, pray this prayer to remind you of the promise between you and God. You are God’s and God is yours and nothing on earth can change that.

So be it.

Amen.

Ashes

A sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of grace, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I love Ash Wednesday. I love Lent. I love Good Friday. I love this season of the Christian year because it’s the time of year that the church can be honest with itself. We can’t lean on the comfort of Christmas or the glory of Epiphany or the rebirth of Easter or the renewal of Pentecost or even the long growing season of ordinary time between Pentecost and Advent. During Lent, we have to look at ourselves not as we will one day with God’s gracious help be, but as we are right now. During Lent, we acknowledge that even though the kingdom will come one day, it has not come yet. During Lent, we are honest with ourselves.

We’re honest about the fact that, despite all our efforts, there are still hungry, poor, unclothed people in this world, people without what they need to survive, people who are sick who we have not aided or comforted, and people who are in prison who we have not visited. We’re honest about the fact that we have only managed to bind up a few of the brokenhearted. We’re honest about the fact that it’s hard to be peacemakers, hard to be meek, hard to seek after God, hard to love our neighbor, and, especially in times like these, it’s impossible to love our enemy. It’s hard to be a Christian and Lent is our honest acknowledgement that we need help to do it.

What is has been most difficult for me during Lent, though, as I’m engaging in all this honesty with myself, is to remember that being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest. Being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest, and I can be so mean to myself. I think of the hours that I have spent at my house and a voice inside my head tells me that I haven’t done enough to invest in my community. I think of the empty calories I’ve put in my body and that voice comes back telling me that I don’t do enough to take care of what God’s given me. I think of all the hours I’ve spent wrestling with my faith and how to share it and goodness, does that voice in my head have an opinion about that. I have a voice in my head that thinks that I should already be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect and that voice takes Lent as an opportunity to be mean.

But being mean doesn’t mean you’re being honest, and today is about honesty. Being reconciled to God is about honesty, as far as I’m concerned, because God is the truest truth, the brightest light, the most beautiful beauty. God is the one from whom truth and light and beauty flow. So if we’re going to reconcile ourselves to God, if we’re going to clear the air in the relationship between us and God, we’re going to have to do it by being honest, not by being mean.

Honestly, I have to say that, among other things, I’m still holding onto the hurt that came from my upbringing in the church, hurt that happened decades ago and hurt that I didn’t allow myself to feel until recently. I’m not done being angry about this hurt. In fact, I don’t want to be done being angry about this hurt. My anger feels righteous and powerful, which is the opposite of how the church made me feel, and I’m not ready to be done with it yet. When I was a teenager, the church taught me that my body was bad and that I had caused the abuse I endured and that I would be lucky if God could find me anyone to love me, which was a shame, because the most important thing that I, as a woman, will do is to be loved by a husband and bear his children. In all honesty, I am angry about the shame and the limitations the church put on me. Sometimes I feel like the church put me in a cage and then told me I was weak because I wasn’t flying.

Now, maybe you’re not holding on to hurt from the church, or anger at the church, like I am. Maybe it’s hurt or anger from somewhere else in your life. Or maybe it’s guilt that you haven’t done enough, or guilt over something you know you’ve done wrong, or fear about what the future might hold. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. You all have lived more life than I have and you know more about the ways that this world can come to stand between us and God. But what I do know is that each and every one of us has something that is standing between us and God, something that blocks us from fully knowing God and being fully known by God. For me, my anger at the church is a boulder that blocks almost the entirety of my path to God. I have to dodge around it, climb over it, chisel away at it, in order to find myself back in relationship with God.

But Lent is about being honest.

And being honest with God means admitting that this bolder exists.

Maybe more importantly, Lent is getting to a place where I want the bolder gone.

Lent is about clearing the path between you and God, so that no matter what debris the world has left in the road, when Easter comes, you can run with joy to meet your Lord and there is nothing standing in the way between you and the abundant life that God is waiting to breathe into you. Lent is about understanding that we are only given so much time in this world and that every minute of it we spend separated from God is a minute too many. Lent is about being honest with God about what stands in your way and asking God to help you move it.

You are not a bad person. No one is. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what has been done to you, no matter what you hold on to, you are good. God has said so, and so it is. But each and every one of us has lived in this world of hurt, this world waiting to be redeemed and reconciled to God, and so each and every one of us has something that’s standing between us and God, between us and life abundant. This Lent, be brave. Find that thing that stands between you and God and look it square in the face. You are strong, you are bold, you are good, you are loved, and this thing must be dealt with. Let today be the day you begin to deal with whatever stands between you and God.

I love Ash Wednesday. I love Lent. I love Good Friday. I love these days because we are honest with ourselves. And when we are honest with ourselves, change begins. When we are honest with ourselves, God begins again God’s gracious work within us. Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, these are days of bravery, days of looking into the dark parts of ourselves and our pasts and deciding that God is bigger than our monsters.

My friends, we are called to reconcile ourselves to God, to return ourselves to God. Take this time now, here, today and in place, to begin that reconciliation, that return. In times of reflection, go exploring in yourself and invite God along, so that you might know what stands between you and God. In our litany, listen to ancient words said anew, calling you back to God. During our confession, raise up to God those things that separate you from God and during the pardon, know that our separation is only temporary, and that God is always more willing to forgive and restore than we are to ask for restoration or forgiveness. And as the ashes are smeared on your head, remember that we are all dust and to dust we will return, but also remember that God gives us an infinity within our temporary days, and that these ashes are a sign of God’s great ability to make something out of nothing much at all. How much more, then, can God make out of us?

Amen and amen.

In this time of reflection, I invite you to begin thinking about what might stand between you and God. If it helps you to pray, pray. If it helps you to sit in quiet, sit. If it helps you to walk, walk. Take these few minutes to open your heart and mind to God, who is always faithful to draw us back in.

The Lost Sheep

A sermon for Sunday, September 15, 2019.

Would you pray with me?

God of the lost and God of the found, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

So last week, we talked about Jeremiah and the Potter and how God can not only reshape us as individuals but also as a community. Today, we’re looking at another well-known biblical image that I think speaks to us in several distinct ways: the lost sheep. In the gospel of Luke, the lost sheep comes as the first of three parables about lost things: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost sons, or as we might know the story better, the Prodigal Son. These stories come right after Jesus has had multiple conversations with religious leaders about why he choses to eat with sex workers, tax collectors, and others considered sinners. The parable of the lost sheep is the hinge in this section of Luke, the turning point where Jesus goes from addressing his particular situation to speaking truths for the ages.

The image of the lost sheep is an enduring one. We can all picture it, I think, even though many of us won’t have spent our lives around sheep. Many of us know that feeling of being lost, of being separated from those that we know and care for, that feeling of being alone, and if we’re lucky, we know what it’s like to be found. Jesus takes us on a rollercoaster of emotion in just a few sentences. (And for those of us who don’t know what it’s like to be lost and don’t feel that rollercoaster, there’s the story of the lost sons, where we can learn something from the father’s response to the older brother.)

But I think the lost sheep speaks to us on more than just a personal level. I think we often read it as a story that just relates to us personally, and that’s fine to begin with. We are all inspirited bodies and embodied spirits. Our experience in this life is uniquely and definitively ours; we will always experience things with our own senses first and that’s not a bad thing.

If we stop there, though, then we miss some of the richness of what Jesus’ metaphor has for us today. I think that most, if not all scripture, speaks to us in at least three ways: personally, theologically, and practically. And so this morning, I want to talk about the lost sheep in these three ways, personally, theologically, and practically, in order to help us gain some understanding about who we are, who God is, and what we as a community can do in light of those first two facts.

Let’s start by talking about those sheep, which might help us get some more personal resonance out of the story. Sheep are herd animals, meaning that they have an innate tendency to stick together. That’s handy, because the idea of fenced-in property that is cultivated with grass that is perfect for the grazing of sheep is a modern invention. In Jesus’ day, the shepherd would have to take the sheep out to graze, hoping that they would stick together as they grazed.

Now the sheep, as a grazing animal, has different eyes than you and I have. They’re actually just horizontal slits. These pupils help them see better side-to-side as they graze, so they know which direction to turn to after they’re done with their particular patch of grass. But this means that they don’t see what’s ahead of them so well, nor what’s above them. Because of this, the shepherd has to steer the flock away from danger they might not see.

Sheep are good at one thing and that is grazing.

But if a shepherd takes a herd of sheep into an area to graze that doesn’t have enough for all the sheep, a sheep or two will wander. They’ll look from side to side, see no grass, and they’ll mosey off in search of food. If you’re a shepherd going off to recover that wandering sheep, you’ll most likely have to break its knees in order to bring it back; otherwise, it’ll want to stay grazing where it’s found food. This could be why the shepherd who’s found the sheep puts it on his shoulder. Sometimes when we’re lost, we can’t walk back on our own.

That’s the point of the parable that we sometimes miss when we use this story to talk about ourselves personally. The sheep becomes this image in a larger salvation story: we go from “we all like sheep have gone astray” to “Jesus is the shepherd who saves us” to “now we belong to Jesus’ flock.” It’s original sin to Jesus’ death on the cross to Christian salvation. But that’s not what Jesus meant here. He was talking about one sheep that goes off because it didn’t have enough. One sheep that leaves the herd because it’s not being cared for. One sheep that’s trying to meet its needs but has gone far from the shepherd’s care. Jesus isn’t talking about those of us who were raised in church and have been in church all our lives and have been the backbone of this institution. Jesus is talking about those who left, and the effort it takes to bring them back, and the celebrating that happens because of it.

And that’s where we begin to understand what the parable is saying to us theologically, what the parable is telling us about God. Because any human shepherd wouldn’t go off searching after one lost sheep. For one thing, the shepherd was probably a worker hired by the owner of the sheep, rather than the owner of the sheep themselves, and if the shepherd went off searching for one sheep, he’d come back to fewer than ninety-nine when he returned. Despite their tendency to stay with the herd, they would, one by one, find less grass than they wanted, and wander off on their own. So any shepherd that would want to return the herd with as many sheep as possible would certainly not go off looking for one lost sheep. He’d report the loss to the owner and go about his day.

But God is not a human shepherd. God is not limited the way a human shepherd is. God can provide for ninety-nine and search out the one lost sheep all at the same time. More than that, these parables of lost things tell us that our God is a God who seeks. Our God is a God of abundance. Most importantly, as we see in Jesus, God-made-flesh, our God is a God who cares deeply for the lost and the least. When the faithful righteous people around him, those who were a part of the ninety-nine sheep who didn’t stray, told him that he was making a mistake by seeking out the lost, he told them these three parables to show them again that human ways are not God’s ways.

This is deeply comforting to us if we’ve ever been lost, if the church has ever been a place of barrenness for us rather than a place of abundance. I know that I’ve had times like that, years of my life where, even though I went to church every Sunday, I was prone to wander in my heart because there wasn’t anything life-giving for me there. Christianity for me had become a penned-in field and the grass I found there wasn’t sustaining me, so I started to look for breaks in the fence. It is deeply comforting to me that Jesus would seek me out anyway, with that abundant love of his, to find me where I was and to see me as I am, with all my needs and all my dreams. Theologically, this parable tells us that our God is a God who does that, who seeks us out and celebrates when we’re found.

And this means something for us practically. As Christians, we are always seeking to be more like Christ, more like our God. If our God is a God who seeks out the lost and the lonely, we should do that too. If our God is a God who celebrates when those who are lost are found, then we should too.

But we have to view our search for the lost as Jesus does. We cannot be self-righteous about it, because any one of us could have been that sheep that didn’t find grass to graze on. In the parable, the shepherd doesn’t send one of the sheep who stayed with the herd out to find the lost one, because sheep don’t see the way the shepherd does. Remember, they only see side-to-side, but it is the shepherd who sees ahead. If we as the church, sheep though we are, are going to be the shepherd in this community, we have to learn to see as Jesus sees and celebrate as Jesus celebrates.

This means looking at the community around us with new eyes. We have to look around at things as they are, seeing things through our own eyes, and we have to look at things as they could be, seeing things through Jesus’ eyes. Where we see a rundown building, Jesus could imagine a community center where we share stories and food and music, feeding those who have felt alone. Where we see a trailer park, Jesus sees vibrant homes where people grow and flourish. Where we an addict, Jesus sees a person fighting addiction. Where we see poverty and lack of resources, Jesus sees a field ready for growth.

And imagine our celebration when we can gather the community of Whittier together from its disparate parts to eat and talk and make music together. Imagine our celebration when we see people whose homes had been in disrepair showing people proudly around their property. Remember our joy when someone with addiction wins the battle. Imagine our rejoicing when we start to see something new growing.

Because for Jesus, it’s not just seeking out the lost for the sake of saving some souls. Jesus seeks out the lost here and now and he has banquets with them, because he knows what has been found. He knows that our rejoicing at being found will echo through eternity. He knows that new life in this world will bring joy in the next. Every life matters to Jesus, not just the lives of the ninety-nine but also and especially the lives of the lost one.

Now, I’m new here. I am still learning where it is that the lost can be found and how we can seek them out. But what I know for a fact after a few months here is that y’all will help me learn and that y’all are ready to reach out. Whether you’ve been one of the ninety-nine throughout your life or whether God has had to go seeking you, you are to go out and find those that God has laid on your heart to seek. Maybe it’s a neighbor, a cousin, a friend, a sibling who you know needs some more love in their world. Maybe it’s someplace you drive by every day and wonder who lives there, who they are, and what they do. Whoever it is, I encourage you, this week or in the weeks ahead, to reach out and say hello. Build a relationship where before there was distance.

Because remember, we are the sheep of a shepherd whose love knows no bounds. We are the sheep of a shepherd who sees things not only as they are but as they could be. And we are the sheep of a shepherd who can guide us out into our world. So let’s start seeking.

Amen.

The Potter

A sermon for Sunday, September 9, 2019

Just before the sermon started, we watched the first four minutes of this video of a potter making a teapot. This sermon relies heavily on this video. We recommend that you take a few minutes to watch it.

Would you pray with me?

God who shapes us all, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Amen. So this week, the lectionary starts leading us through a series of well-known biblical images. We begin with the potter, and then we have the lost sheep, and the balm in Gilead, and then Abraham’s Bosom, in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. I want to take the next few weeks to journey through these images and to see if they might speak to the situations that we find ourselves in today. The Bible is full of enduring truths, both hope-filled and challenging, and my hope is that these enduring truths will shake us up and guide us forward. And we start with the potter, one who might have shaped a pitcher like this.

I was visiting with my parents this weekend, mostly so they could get me to take some of my stuff out of their house. I’m sure those of you with adult children will understand that struggle. I have textbooks and photo albums and some odds and ends that haven’t followed me in my various moves since I left home in 2007 that have stayed in storage at my parents’ house, and they are ready for these items to find a home with me once again. So we sorted through some things, and as we worked on clearing out my grandmother’s hope chest for me to take back with me, I noticed this pitcher on a nearby shelf.

Knowing the passage for this morning, I immediately asked if I could borrow it. Being from a rather nomadic sect of my generation, I haven’t had the chance or the will to purchase much pottery for myself. I’ve lived in five different places in the last five years, one of them overseas. I’m not going to cart around anything heavy and breakable. But my parents have lived in their house since I was two and this pitcher fits right in with how they live their lives.

My mother said, sure, I could borrow it and my dad asked why it had flowers in it. My mother told him that it was because he never let her use it as a pitcher and it got a chip in it and now it was only good as a vase with a handle. My dad didn’t think that was true and off they went into the type of fight where no one’s right or wrong and each party can get to the other side with a little bit of compromise and light teasing. The pitcher was bought so long ago and has been such a fixture of the house that no one can really remember how the chip got there or whether it fit on the kitchen table at the time. So the flowers were removed and the pitcher traveled the two hours back up the mountain with me and here we are.

And what I love about this pitcher, as I love about all handmade pottery, is its uniqueness. The clay gives it color, with little flecks of black here and there. It has lines on it from the potter’s fingers. The clay bunches up at the bottom of the handle in a way that isn’t perfect and symmetrical but still beautiful. If l trace my fingers up it, my thumb fits perfectly in the groove at the top of the handle. I’m sure that many other pitchers like this were made in the shop that my mother bought it from, but no other one will look quite like this one. It is unique.

You all know this, I’m sure. You’ve been going to church a long time and this passage has shown up in the lectionary once every couple years. We live in a part of the state with abundant access to clay and plenty of people willing to throw it, so I’m sure you’ve seen some beautiful pieces over the years, each unique and lovely. You all know how pottery is a labor of love, sitting at the wheel day after day, learning the clay, learning to listen to it and how to shape it. We saw some of that as the potter making the teapot explained what he was doing.

I want to highlight three things this morning to let this image speak:

1.     Clay has to be ready to be shaped

2.     In pottery, there are many stages, and no stage is more important than another.

3.     There is always a chance to be reshaped.

Clay has to be ready to be shaped; in pottery, all the stages are important; and there’s always a chance to be reshaped. I want to use these three ideas that come to us from pottery to talk about not only our individual faith journeys, but also our journey as a community.

The first, that clay has to be ready to be shaped, comes to us from watching the potter, Mr. Pothier. I love that he gave us some pottery chemistry this morning. Clay is made of dirt and water, as we all know, but that dirt is made of silica, or silicon dioxide, and alumina.

Now, silica and alumina are abundant materials here on Earth. We know them as the main components in sand and in your regular dirt, which we have in abundance. The name Earth actually comes from an old English word for dirt, which is a lovely thought when you think about the rest of the planets. Mercury, named for the swiftest of the gods. Venus, named for the most beautiful. Earth, named for dirt. Mars, named for the warrior god.

You get the picture.

But maybe we need to revise our idea of dirt. Silicon is made in the core of large stars, stars that are 8-11 times bigger than our sun. Aluminum is made in the element formation that happens in supernova explosions. (To learn more, click here and here.) Dirt, clay, is stardust that we get to see in our everyday lives, and so maybe it’s fitting that that’s what we call our planet.

So silicon, then, combines with two oxygen to make this molecule, silicon dioxide.

You can see in the picture that it is oblong, like the potter says. It’s not like carbon, which makes nice neat circles. The molecules have to line up in order to form a crystal. Now, I’m not an expert in clay, but what Mr. Pothier says makes sense to me: the clay needs to be worked in order to be ready to be shaped. After all, it’s quite a journey from the stars to the potter’s wheel.

And that journey, for the clay he used, includes being brought together from all over North America. It’s good, solid clay and its mixed heritage is an asset, not a problem. Bringing together clay that formed in different creek beds and river beds all around results in a strong clay, good for practical uses.

Now Mr. Pothier knows when he’s got the clay in his hands whether it’s ready or not. And when the clay is ready, it’s easy to work with. He can feel when the clay, each unique ball of it, is ready.

Jeremiah tells us that God is like a potter. God knows us with the intimacy that a potter knows their clay. God is aware of the wonder that we are, that we, like clay, are everyday stardust, and God knows that it takes some time to get our molecules in alignment too. None of us is exactly like another and so there is individualized work that happens even before we begin to be shaped. As Methodists, we know that as prevenient grace, the grace that goes before, where God reaches to us before we’re ready to reach back to God. (To learn more, click here.)

For some of us, that grace came to us in bible stories and Sunday school and years of worship and growth within the church. For some of us, we found that grace in trees and oceans and the beauty of the sky. For some, it was in other people, whether in church or in not, who taught us what it means to love. But in all of these things, God was preparing us to be shaped. And when we’re ready, God can work with us.

And this brings us to our second point: in pottery, there are many stages, but none of them is more important than another. We can’t be impatient with one stage or another. It might take more time than we anticipated for us to be ready to be shaped by God. We might have come from particularly difficult clay, or we might have been set aside for a while and not taken care of. We can’t be shaped until we’re ready. But that doesn’t mean that someone who is being shaped is more important, or better, than another. After all, Jeremiah tells us that the clay on the wheel, clay that was already ready, spoiled, and that the potter had to rework it. Even when we’re ready, even when we’ve been justified by God’s grace and are ready to be shaped for our lives as redeemed Christians, we still have the potential to spoil on the wheel.

Which may seem odd to us. After all, God is reaching out to us always with prevenient grace. Our psalm this morning, Psalm 139, which we read part of as our call to worship, tells us that God is everywhere. No matter where we go, to the heights of heaven to the depths of the grave, God is there, and God knows it all. The rest of the passage in Jeremiah talks about how God can shape Israel any way God wants, can shape the nations that will rise up against Israel as God sees fit. It seems that God has this whole world, all this dirt and water, in the palm of God’s hands.

So why, then, does the clay spoil?

Surely God, the maker of the clay, would see the clay spoiling and be able to prevent it, instead of having to rework it.

I think this is one of the great mysteries of life, something to do with the glorious messiness of creation and with the beautiful unpredictability of our human selves. We are malleable, shaped by the environment that we grew up in, but we also have wills of our own and some ability to choose our own way. Jeremiah uses a perfect metaphor here for us as humans. We are clay in the potter’s hands and any potter will be able to tell you that clay, even prepared clay, has a mind of its own. There are many stages in pottery, and each is important, and in each, the potter has to consider the clay at hand, working with it, not imposing their will on it.

And so we have to be prepared. We have to be ready to be shaped. We have to be shaped, and then, before we are ready to be put to use, we have to be fired and hardened.

And here we come to the paradox of the last point. Even if we have been glazed and fired, with God, there is still a chance to be reshaped.

Now for me, I can’t wait until I’m shaped into what God wants me to be. I have yearned for that for years. I have waited as the potter has spun me this way and that, molding me through school and work and family and friends, occupations and relationships of all kinds, and I still don’t feel finished. Sometimes I feel like the lid we saw being made, or the spout of the teapot. I’m upside down or maybe there’s just some extra clay that needs to be cut away. Or I feel as if I have spoiled in the potter’s hands and my job now is to be patient and to see what God makes of me. This is particularly frustrating for someone who is used to the idea that she makes herself.

But you may not be in the same malleable place that I am. Remember, each of us is unique, formed from unique clay and shaped by the world and by the Potter in ways that can’t be repeated. Many of you have been shaped by careers and families that have been a part of your life for decades. You have been shaped by your understanding of faith and of your church that has also been with you for decades. God has shaped you and life has glazed and fired you and you have found yourself as one of many vessels that God can use in this world. You may, just like my parents’ pitcher, have a chip or two, and have found yourself used in ways you didn’t expect.

Now, as we learned before, every stage in pottery is important and none is more important than the others. Being sanctified, being shaped and formed into who God wants you to be, is a wonderfully important part of the Christian journey, the part of our lives, that we hopefully, by God’s grace, spend most of our time in. But for most of us, we will not be fully sanctified, fully alive in Christ, a fully complete work of God, until the end of this life or in the world to come. And that means that no matter how life has hardened us, there is still grace for God to make us anew.

We may find ourselves like Philemon, in today’s epistle lesson, asked to do something unexpected, something requiring forgiveness, something that may cost us, and something that goes against what the world around us tells us. Sometimes the story of Paul’s letter to Philemon slips past us in the Bible-ese of the verses, but Paul is asking a leader of the church to free the person he had enslaved, Onesimus. Not only that, but Paul is asking Philemon to free Onesimus even though he owes him a great debt. Philemon has every right to take Onesimus back into service, to punish him, to extend his slavery, and to profit off his labor, and yet Paul is asking him to do none of those things. Paul is asking for freedom.

Remember, as we talked about two weeks ago, a word from the Lord is a word that unbinds people.

Philemon is likely clay that has already been glazed and fired. He knows who he is, how he fits into society, what his role is. And yet Paul is asking him to be reformed. How can this be?

By the grace of God, even that which is firmly shaped can be remade. God can bring new life and new malleability.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve heard it from some of you. There was a need in the community and even though it was a new thing that you were unaccustomed to, you built a food pantry. You sorted through clothes. And when one of your own went through a struggle with addiction, you learned a new way of seeing. You allowed yourselves to be shaped with new compassion and now, we read letters from and send letters to this dear one in recovery. You thought that God had shaped you as a vessel into which compassion was poured. You realized that God had given you a spout, so that your compassion might be poured out.

Here, I went to the pitcher and poured grape juice into the cup for communion.

Friends, this morning, I want to you to take home three questions.

Are you ready to be shaped by God?

Will you be patient with how God is shaping you and others, each in their own way?

How is God reshaping us here at Whittier?

I’ll be honest, these are difficult questions for me. I don’t have straightforward answers. But I look forward to hearing your answers and I trust that God is guiding us and shaping us as we move forward and I trust that if we’re ready to be shaped, and if we’re patient as God works with us, God will make something beautiful here, within each of our hearts and within our community as a whole. We will be covered in grace and we will find a way to pour that grace out into the world.

Amen.

Provision

A sermon for Sunday, August 18, 2019

Would you pray with me?

Creator God, Gardener of us all, be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Last week, we talked about passages from the books of Hebrews and Isaiah, about how reading different passages in the Bible can cause us to challenge our definitions, and about what we mean when we talk about faith. We talked about how both patience and endurance, and accountability and action, are faithful responses to the world we live in. We did a lot of work understanding the context of the biblical scriptures, and how that changes how we read them.

Today, we’re still in Hebrews and Isaiah, so we won’t need to talk context as much for each of the scriptures. This means that we can talk a little more about our context. See, I follow three basic steps as I learn about what the Bible is telling me:

1.     I learn about the context of the passage.

2.     I figure out who I am in the passage.

3.     I discern how to apply the passage to my context.

It’s a context sandwich. It’s also a lot like a conversation: I figure out who’s talking to me, who they think I am, and what I should do with the information they’re sharing with me. This method is how I actively listen to what God is saying to me through scripture, in the same way that I actively listen to those around me. Because when you engage in conversation with another, it’s not enough to just listen to the words that are being spoken. You have to pay attention to who is saying them and what your relationship is with them before you can decide how to respond.

In many conversations, the work of listening is pretty easy. It’s come with practice. If you’re talking to a friend, a family member, a significant other, or someone you’re close to, you already know who they are and who they think you are. You know whether someone’s just teasing you about your tendency to be fifteen minutes late to everything or whether they’re actually concerned and you need to make a change.

A similar thing happens with the Bible. We feel like we know Jesus and we know that Jesus is talking to us in love when he tells us to remove the plank from our own eye before getting the speck out of our neighbor’s. There are some verses in the Bible that have a pretty clear application for our context.

But if we want to learn, and be pushed, and grow, then we have to reach out beyond familiar conversations and easy listening, in life and in the Bible. We have to listen to the stories of people who are different from us, either by talking to the people we encounter in our day-to-day life or by seeking out books, music, movies, and articles by people who don’t share the same background that we have. We grow by seeking out these interactions.

And we grow by digging into unfamiliar texts in the Bible, or by reading familiar texts with fresh eyes. This is when I apply my context sandwich, my three steps: I learn about the biblical context, I find my place in the passage, and I discern how to apply it to my context.

For me, this makes the Bible come alive. It’s no longer a book written primarily by men who lived a long time ago far away from me. It’s a whole library of stories and sermons and poetry and history and prophecy written by different people in different times, yes, but who still have something to say to me today, even though I’m separated by continents and centuries from them. I can sit down with Hagar or Rahab or Deborah or Tamar or Bathsheba or Phoebe or any of the Mary’s and learn from them, hear my story reflected in theirs and be encouraged or challenged by what they have to say to me. I can struggle alongside Cain or Jacob or Joseph or Jonathan or Nathan or Peter or Paul or Jesus. I can listen in wonder to what Isaiah or those who followed him had to say. I can weep along with Jeremiah. I can pray and praise and mourn and rebel and sing along with any of the psalmists. But I only get to experience these things if I listen to where the biblical writers are coming from, figure out who I’m most like in their stories, and then discern how what they’re saying applies to me today.

So, with all that in mind, let’s turn to Isaiah and see what he has for us this morning.

As we know from last week, Isaiah is a prophet in a nation on the brink of crisis. He’s seen the Assyrians conquer Israel and he’s worried that the Babylonians are coming for Judah. When he speaks a word from the Lord, he’s speaking it to those in power, those who have the capacity to turn things around. And this morning, he speaks a love song.

This is actually a common tactic among prophets, starting off with a story that draws the listeners in with pathos. Nathan does this with David. Amos does this with the entire nation of Israel. And Jesus actually does it, most notably in the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we, like Isaiah’s listeners, are drawn into this story. A man has planted a vineyard and he has done everything he should do: he picks the perfect place with the perfect soil, he clears away the stones that would inhibit growth, he even sets up a watchtower, so no one can come and raid his vineyard. He hews out a wine vat, so that he can press his wine on-site. He’s ready for this vineyard to yield. He’s invested in it.

And then, the bottom drops out. The grapes aren’t useable. They’re wild. The Hebrew here is בְּאֻשִׁים (be-oo-sheem), which can also mean stinking, worthless things. It’s not just that these are grapes that aren’t cultivated (after all, you can eat wild grapes if you find them out hiking, as long as you don’t confuse them for moonseed); it’s that they’re stinking, rotten on the vine.

The man pleads his case before the gathered listeners. “What am I to do?” the man says. “I did everything I could and yet my grapes are worthless.”

We, as the hearers in the court of public opinion, are meant to shake our heads. Must have had some bad seeds, we’re meant to say. You did everything right. Time to tear out that old growth and plant something new.

And the man reacts to that anticipated response. “I’ll tear this whole vineyard down!” the man says. “I’ll make it a waste. I won’t care for it at all. In fact, I’ll command the clouds not to rain on it!”

This is when you’re meant to start squirming in your seat. Who is this person, who says that he can command the rain? Maybe this isn’t the simple story we thought it was.

Isaiah comes out and says it. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”

Oh. Oh no.

The Lord has cared for Israel and Judah and they have not yielded what they were meant to. The Lord looked for מִשְׁפָּט֙ (mispat, justice) but got מִשְׂפָּ֔ח (mispah, oppression); The Lord looked for צְדָקָ֖ה (ts’dah’qah, righteousness) but heard instead צְעָקָֽה׃ (ts’a’quah, a cry for help).

Isaiah, in telling this story, is doing all he can to get his hearers to understand that they have not done what the Lord has asked them to do. He’s told them this heart-wrenching story. He’s even made a catchy saying, playing on words so people will remember them. He’s got a slogan. Mispat, justice, not mispah, oppression. Ts’dah’qah, righteousness, not ts’a’quah, a cry for help. It’s a speech that’s meant to send his listeners away with sorrowful hearts, hearts ready for change.

And now comes the difficult part for us. Who are we in Isaiah’s tale? Are we the planter? No, that’s God. Are we the storyteller? Well, not unless we’re feeling pretty prophetic. No, in this story, we’re meant to be the grapes. God planted us. God provided for us. And yet, we have not grown the fruit God needs. We participate in oppression, not justice. We drive people to need, not to righteousness. We were cultivated and cared for and we still grew up wild.

“No, no,” you might say. “I’ve been a Christian all my life. I can show you good fruit from my ministries. I’m not the one God wants to uproot. Isaiah’s talking to someone else.”

And this could be true. It could very much be that you, in your life, have earned your place among the cloud of witnesses that Hebrews talks about. God has made a different provision for you than what Isaiah is talking about. God has seen your faithful work and God will see to it in the eschaton, in the world to come.

But friends, today, I invite you not to rest in the assurance that you are already among the saints of God (not least of all because the writer of Hebrews tells us that even they do not receive their promise in this world). No, I invite you to sit in the uncomfortable knowledge that you have the potential to be wild grapes.

I know that there are parts of my life where God intended to grow goodness but God’s intentions weren’t cultivated in me. For many years of my life, God planted friendships, but I grew emotional distance instead. God planted patience, but I grew demanding. God planted justice, but I grew anxiety. God planted joy and endurance, but I grew despair.

It is up to you to figure out what God has planted in you that hasn’t grown. As people who live together in a community, a state, a nation, and a world, it is up to all of us to figure out what God planted in us that didn’t grow, and to change our ways accordingly. The story of the vineyard is a story of repentance, but repentance can only come when we’re aware of the problem. Our first reaction to hearing Isaiah’s prophetic words should be introspection. We have to look inside ourselves and see where what we have grown is outside of God’s desires for us. What grows in us that stops either ourselves or another from life and life abundant?

Now, it may also be that I’ve misread who you are in Isaiah’s story. You might not be the grapes planted that did not grow. You might be the people that suffered because the grapes didn’t grow. You might be the workers that didn’t get paid. You might be the wine seller who had nothing to sell. You might be the spouse or the children of those who could not provide for their houses because the grapes grew up wild. That is, of course, part of Isaiah’s story. Isaiah is raging at the leaders because there is suffering in the land, and suffering leads to weakness, and to being conquered, which only leads to more suffering. You might be the off-stage person that Isaiah is sticking up for.

There are many sides to every story.

But if you are, then the passage from Hebrews is especially for you, even if it broadly applies to all of us. Take encouragement that God has been faithful to others in the past, even as they have been faithful to God.

We can all take the message of Hebrews to heart, even as we investigate where we have not grown as God intended. No matter what, we are not alone. God never leaves us alone. Just as the saints who have gone before us, who have endured more than we ever hope to endure, God is with us. Not only that, but we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, including some who have charted the way from wild grapes to flourishing vineyard. It is up to us to listen to them, learn from them, and allow God to change our lives.

Amen.

By Faith

A sermon for Sunday, August 11, 2019

Would you pray with me?

God who is with us before, during, and after the great changes in our lives, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

These first few verses from Hebrews are astounding, aren’t they? “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

“Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.

“By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.”

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And we should have faith, the writer of Hebrews argues, because faith is how our ancestors in faith received approval from God. If we want to live life as God would have us live it, we need to have faith. Faith that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Faith that there is something more to this universe than the things that are seen. And faith like Abraham, who obeyed God’s call and who, because of his faithfulness, received an inheritance. It’s a powerful text, one that is challenging and dense with meaning.

As a student of physics, I love dense and challenging things. I am trained to break complicated things down into understandable pieces. Give me the parameters for a rocket launch and I will break that bad boy down into propulsion, air resistance, gravitational drag, wind speed, and orbital velocity. What I mean is that if you tell me where you want a rocket to go, I’ll look at every single thing affecting the rocket in order to make sure I understand what it will encounter along its journey. Not only that, but give me enough data and I’ll work on a theory that explains how every rocket launches.

So this dense and challenging passage from Hebrews fascinates me, especially since it falls in the same week in the lectionary as the Isaiah passage, one that contrasts it so completely. It brings up three questions for me:

·        What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

·        How can we break that down to find a definition of faith that works for both Hebrews and Isaiah?

·        What does it really look like for us to have faith here today, in the world that we live in, in 2019?

I’d like to tackle these three questions this morning because I think that, if we get through them, we’ll have not only a better idea of what faith means but also what we’re doing when we read the Bible. We’ll explore more about how we read the Bible in next week’s sermon and in the week after that, where we’ll continue to look at some contrasting passages in the lectionary.

So. What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

Well, the first thing to recognize is that Hebrews, even though we call it a letter, is actually a sermon. It’s not like the letters of Paul, where he writes to address specific issues or situations in specific churches, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Philippi or Ephesus. Hebrews is meant to be a single theological argument about what it means to be a Jewish Christian living in Jerusalem, someone who has a deep connection to the Jewish scriptures and also believes that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. The church in Jerusalem was being persecuted, as many of the early churches were, and the sermon is meant to encourage them to maintain their belief in Jesus.

Hebrews 11 and 12 is the climax of the sermon. It’s what we in the business call the Come to Jesus Moment. The author has built up an argument about how Jesus mediates between us and God, as a priest might, and that though Christ is no longer with us, we can still have faith in him and in our continued relationship with God. Faith, after all, is the conviction of things unseen.

And we know that we can have faith because we have seen what faith looks like in the lives of those who have gone before us. The writer of Hebrews leans into the story of Abraham and Sarah, and the other patriarchs and matriarchs, to show them as exemplars of what it means to have faith in things unseen. And it’s hard to find a better example than Abraham, who followed a God he could not see into a country he did not know in hopes of forming a family he didn’t think was possible. In all things, Abraham believed in what he had not seen, but what he hoped for.

Now, the writer of Hebrews is using rhetoric here to make a point. They’re telling part of a well-known story in order to get others to follow along with their point. The writer of Hebrews, writing to a persecuted community on the verge of losing faith, asks them to remember a hero of their faith.

But Abraham, as we all know, wasn’t always a paragon of faith. He trusts that God will give him an heir through his wife, Sarah, all the way until their journey led them to Egypt, where Abraham traded Sarah to pharaoh in exchange for his safety. (Genesis 12) He trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until Sarah reminds him that she is unable to have children and gives him her slave, Hagar, to make heirs with in her stead. (Genesis 16) Abraham trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until God asks him to kill Isaac, his son with Sarah. (Genesis 22) Abraham over and over again through his saga, fails to believe that God is faithful to fulfil promises and instead takes things into his own hands. Sure, in the end, he trusts God and, in the end, the promise is fulfilled, but along the way, Abraham’s faith falters, and Sarah, Hagar, and Isaac are hurt because of it.

Still, Abraham does have his moments and the promise does come through in the end, and so the writer of Hebrews uses him as an example. Abraham hopes in a promise that will be fulfilled, even if that promise has no evidential proof, and that, for the author of Hebrews, is faith.

Hoping in a promise without physical proof is a fine enough definition of faith, but the writer of Hebrews adds another stipulation into our theory of faith: We know our faith is true because it is confirmed with the faith of those who have gone before us.

Now, an easy way to test a theory is to push it toward its edges. We do this in physics by seeing how a model trends as it approaches infinity or zero. If there are problems with your equations or how you've conceptualized, how you've thought about, the problem, they might show up when you push a theory to its limits. And out of our lectionary texts this week, Hebrews and Isaiah are at opposite edges. Hebrews is meant to exhort people who are going through a difficult time into continued faith by making a dense theological argument. Isaiah is... yelling at the people with power because it's clear they're not doing what they're supposed to do.

Isaiah was written during one of the most crucial and chaotic periods in the history of Israel: the Babylonian Exile. The whole book is actually likely by three different authors, with the first writing before the Exile, the second during, and the third after the return from exile.

Now, how many of you have heard of the Babylonian Exile before?

I didn't hear about it until I took a Hebrew Bible class in college, but it's deeply important for understanding the Old Testament. A quick history:

·        King David unites all the disparate tribes in Israel into one kingdom. That lasts through his son Solomon's rule, and then Israel splits into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.

·        All is fine, more or less, until the northern kingdom of Israel is taken over by the Assyrian Empire but the southern kingdom of Judah still stands.

·        However, having just seen Israel conquered, people in Judah are able to see the signs of history repeating itself, only this time with the Babylonian Empire instead of the Assyrians. (This is where our passage comes in today.)

·        Judah ends up conquered by the Babylonians and the elite are taken into exile in Babylon. Most of the Old Testament is written, organized, or rewritten during the Exile.

·        Eventually, the Persian Empire comes in, defeats the Babylonians, and allows the exiles to return to Israel.

(For a full timeline, with links to descriptions of some of these events, click here.)

The Babylonian Exile is a tragedy that affects the whole Old Testament. It'll come up again and again as we seek to understand the biblical authors, which is why we’re talking about it now. But our passage this morning comes from before the Exile, as Isaiah is seeing the signs that tragedy might happen again.

And so, Isaiah speaks a word from the Lord to the people in charge: don't think you're comfortable because you have the faith of those before you to rely on. The living faith that Abraham had is, in the time of Isaiah, reduced to ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem. The most vulnerable amongst them, the orphan and the widow, aren't being cared for. And Isaiah tells those in power that God is weary of what they’re doing. God despises it.

Here's the thing about Isaiah: in Isaiah’s tine, they have the land. They have the inheritance. The promise that Abraham was holding onto faith for, it's completely fulfilled on their time. And Isaiah thinks they're squandering it.

For Isaiah, it's not just enough to "keep the faith" of those who went before. It's not enough to do the right things in the ceremony. (As a pastor who just preached for a month on liturgy and how we do our ceremonies, I feel convicted right now.) You can't just believe right and worship in the temple right: you have to live right.

Our definition from Hebrews needs some refining. Our faith is not only hope in things unseen, confirmed by our having faith like Abraham. We must have that hope and work to make it a reality.

See, Isaiah still has a hope for things unseen. Isaiah is speaking by faith about faith for his time, just as the author of Hebrews is for theirs. In Hebrews, the author tells her or his audience to have faith, that they might see what it's like when God reign is on earth as it is in heaven. Isaiah is hoping for that same kind of future, where God's peace reigns over all creation and all promises are fulfilled. For Isaiah, though, we don't have to wait for those promises to be fulfilled. We don't have to wait for anymore restoration. We can choose to live now as if God's reign were already here.

(To be totally fair to the writer of Hebrews, he or she also believes that our actions matter, but there are other, more immediate concerns for that community.)

So, then, faith is believing in things not seen, specially trusting God to fulfil God's promises. The faith we have is the type of faith evidenced by those who came before us in the faith and lived out in our lives. By faith, we play a part in God’s promises coming to life. 

Where does that leave us, here today?

Well, I think it opens some doors for us to look our lives and the lives of others in a more complicated way. Our theory is more robust, we might say. Because we expanded our definition, it can apply to a wider variety of situations in order to help us understand them. We can see other Christians living out their faith differently than we do and still trust that they have the same faith we do.

Sometimes, faith looks like clinging to promises. Sometimes that's all we can do. When life is overwhelming, when the world has taken more than it gave us, we hope for and trust in God's promises as we endure, as the early church in Jerusalem did.

But sometimes, faith looks like action. By faith, Abraham went. By faith, Abraham followed God to a land of promise, not just for him, but for the people who came after him. And no, he didn't always get it right. He wasn't always as faithful as we would hope that he would be. But he acted. And, if we're listening to Isaiah, action looks like caring for the least and calling for leaders to do the same.

Both are faithful paths. Sometimes God comforts us and sometimes God challenges us. But the paths are faithful to God only when the thing unseen that we are hoping for is the reign of God, where justice, goodness, and wholeness are the order of the day. Centuries apart from one another, Isaiah and Hebrews look toward that same future, when no one can claim domination or supremacy over another, when all are restored to their promised inheritance, and when everyone loves God, their neighbor, and themselves. They respond to their faith in that future however they can, either simply in hope because of their need or in action because of their ability.

There will come a day when, as Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is not here yet, but we have faith in it, hoping for this thing unseen, working for the day that it will be visible to all.

Amen.