Christmas 1C

This is the story of Christ as a child, this is it. The only one in the bible. Apparently it isn't all that important for us to know about Jesus and his first step or Jesus and his schooling or Jesus and his years of teenage rebellion or conformity. We know that Jesus was born a lowly birth in a manger that nevertheless fulfilled the prophecy of the Messiah that was promised in the Hebrew texts. Then, in today's text, we learn that his family went to Jerusalem for Passover, a common pilgrimage for Hebrew people and we are told that he stayed behind in the temple with the teachers, the rabbis, showing great potential and wisdom. Then Jesus is gone and we don't really know much else about him until his ministry starts about 20 years later.

If this is the case then, why this story, why one piece of Jesus’ childhood and life with Mary and Joseph? Perhaps we get this brief glimpse in order to understand that Jesus was really a kid, really the child of human parents, really rebellious and really loved by Mary and Joseph. Maybe it is important to see Jesus as part of a family. We use a lot of family language in church and encounter it a lot in the bible and the even church sets aside today as the feast day of the Holy Family.

Some of you might know that there is a movement in the church to change some of the language we use in church. To remove some of the references to family. The hope is to keep from damaging people's spirituality by bringing to mind painful family experiences. While this is good intentioned and certainly it is a good idea to be more careful and inclusive, I wonder if it isn't slightly mislead because it seeks to smooth things over instead of addressing the truth about families. Many families are broken in many different ways. I would say that every family is at least a little broken. Either by big things like violence, or substance abuse, by things like divorce or death or by more everyday things like anger, mistrust, envy, fear, even just simple lack of communication.

Partly for this reason, I have always been kind of fascinated by the idea of the Holy family. We certainly lift it up as the perfect family. With pictures of mother, father and baby Jesus sitting in harmony, cast in a heavenly light. But really this only an ideal. The holy family had a rough start. As a teenager Mary was pregnant and unmarried and Joseph, according to the law at the time, was legally able to cast her away from him, even to demand her death. So the holy family started out like this: Mary, young and expecting a baby as a single mother at a time when that was positively unheard of and unacceptable and Joseph as a man with a ruined reputation and a very difficult choice to make. Not quite the picture of the Holy family that I got on many Christmas cards in the mail this year.

The Holy family was in a pretty difficult place at the beginning and in many ways Joseph was the only one in the story with much of a choice about anything. He could have walked away or worse. It took great love to reach out to Mary and to her child. But he, nevertheless, held her and loved her and raised Jesus as his own with love and tenderness risking many things for the sake of his family.

This one story about Jesus getting lost and staying behind at the temple gives us some pretty good insight in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph got scared, so scared that they went back to Jerusalem in a bit of a panic. And this going back to look for Jesus was no simple task.

When they went up to Jerusalem they traveled with a large group of friends and extended family from their hometown. These other travelers provided protection and legitimacy. The roads were not a safe place. People who traveled alone were either in danger or dangerous and so setting out alone was not an easy endeavor for them. In addition to the danger this journey caused Joseph to humble himself and to put love over public appearances because having a twelve year old son that defiantly stayed behind in the city was not socially acceptable in a society that expected men to be lords of their houses and to be in control of their families. So, for probably not the second or even the third time in his experience as a father Joseph acted with love, faith and forgiveness and set out with his wife in search of their son.

We hear in so many places in the bible that God is like a father. Not everyone here comes from a perfect home, not everyone here even really knows their father or their mother. Some of us have been hurt by family and the idea of family has failed us. Certainly families today do not look like commercials and television shows make us think they should. So sometimes when we hear that we should think of the other children of God as our family it seems strange at best.

I don't want to liken something as broken as many families are to my relationship with God but perhaps that is just what our relationship should be likened to.

In our story today Joseph isn't some ideal for us to all strive to in family life, while it would be nice if we all could have ideal families. Rather Joseph stands to show us what Jesus knew father to mean. For Jesus a father was someone who, through divine love, moved beyond hurt, broken relationships, social expectations, doubt and fear in order to provide hope, love and safety to his children.

When we use family language in church we often try to keep it very clean, try to make-believe that a family is a group of people who always get along, who fit some kind of norm and for whom nothing is ever disordered.

The people who hope to change the use of family language are right. There is a problem with this use of the idea of family. But the problem is not that families are imperfect and so people can not relate to the idea of a father's love. The problem is that we forget that the whole reason we need this example to help us understand God's love is because families are imperfect, people are imperfect and God loves us and works in our lives anyway, even in spite the brokenness.

The love of God the father is perfect in a way our human fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even selves never are. This means that as broken as we can be as a human family God never stops reaching out for us, never stops pulling us toward him as his children, never stops calling us by name and never stops returning to search for us

Jesus refers to God as his father and it is really only in this little section of the bible that we get any idea of what he is making a comparison to. Today we get an example of what a divine father does. He risks his life, safety and reputation in order to care for his child, his family.

This is what God's love is and this is what Jesus was doing when he lagged behind in the temple. When his parents asked he said he was doing the work of the father. Beginning in the church and moving throughout the world, the work of the father that Jesus was born in a manger to do and that he grew as a faithful child to do, is the work of sharing God's transcendent love with all people. This is what Joseph was doing when he responded to God's call to be adoptive father, protector and tender caregiver to the child Jesus and this is what we are called to do as we live among our brothers and sisters and, even in the midst of brokenness, proclaim God's perfect love.

Amen

Advent 1C

In the lessons today we hear a lot about trees. We hear Jeremiah refer to the coming of the messiah and the kingdom of God as a branch of David in our old testament lesson. And Jesus talks about a fig tree in the gospel, he says that just as you see the buds of leaves on a tree and know that summer is surely on its way so to there are signs of the kingdom in the world around us today, signs of the Glory of God and the coming of Christ's redemption. So today we start advent, a season during which we take time to look forward to the kingdom of God by thinking about new growth.

I lived for a time in a second story apartment in Philadelphia. In many ways Philly has a climate similar to Spokane, very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. If anything, because of the humidity it is more extreme, the hot is more stifling and the winter is filled with more snow and frost. The winter there was bleak, first there was great flooding, washing away paths and roads and destroying basements and ground floors everywhere. Then there was the freeze, day after day with a wind chill in the single digits and below. As I would sit at the window of my apartment, staring out into the cold I had an intimate view of a great magnolia tree, it was huge and I looked right out into its limbs. It had been beautiful when we moved in in the summer all dark waxy leaves and blooms. Then fall came with great rains and the leaves and blooms fell to the ground a sad wilted mess and the tree was bare like the rest of the maples and oaks on our street. But suddenly one day in the dead of winter the magnolia was magnificent again. One day as I sat wrapped in a blankets cursing the furnace which was shoddy at best I looked out the window to see what I was sure were buds on the tree. Sure enough this tree that thrives in a hot southern climate picked the coldest days of the year to promise that it would bloom again and before we knew it. It wasn't much but it was a sign of hope, an act of faith in the dead of winter.

My tree budding in the deep cold of winter was a sign of hope but it only kept me going for so long. Working as a pastor I got calls often from families who couldn't afford something they needed to be warm for this season, a car battery, money to keep their heat on, the extra food needed for active children who shivered through the day and night. I love snow but many things about this winter made each snowstorm seem more bleak. Was there nothing to do but wait the winter out? Each time I got a call like this I looked around the city, I spent the afternoon on the phone and suddenly I started to notice buds of hope. I found volunteer city employees who took their personal time to walk the poor and lost through the city's aid programs so that they could continue to heat their homes without going into great debt. I found within my own congregation people ready and willing to organize a food program for anyone who came to our door hungry. I found mechanics in the congregation and neighborhood willing to help low income families winterize their cars and stretch the usable years they got out of them. These people, the volunteers, the mechanics and the food collectors were already doing these things right under my nose. But it took a while in the midst of the hustle and bustle of winter and the troubles of many people to notice how this branch of the kingdom was working

All around us in this bleak, wintry world are signs of hope, like buds on the magnolia tree in the deepest part of the darkest season. Here in Spokane, some of you might be familiar with this or following it in the paper, the Spokesman every year does a charity drive to provide food and toys to people in Spokane and increasingly from all over the northwest, as far away as southern Idaho and Montana. They publish articles about it each day and the article for Friday explained that in order to make it work they have to act almost entirely on faith. To make the most of the money given, indeed to stretch it far enough to accommodate all of the need many of the supplies have to be ordered in the summer, before any money is received for the year. Estimates are made about how much they will need, things are ordered and then everyone hopes that enough money will come in during the brief period that money is collected. Every year enough money has come in, it comes from young and old, wealthy and struggling but it also comes from those it was meant to help, children who collect their meager allowances to send and people who come to pick up their food vouchers only to donate them back as they see those around them in even more need and are inspired by the spirit of charity. On the cold snow covered Spokane Fair grounds the kingdom sprouts, grows and blooms in the love and generosity of those who know what a struggle this season can be.

Our lesson today speaks of hopeless things happening, of people suffering and it says that in the midst of this suffering will come signs of the kingdom, words of hope and promises of redemption. Jeremiah speaks of a new time for the people of God, one marked by safety and peace. These things that the people of God longed for are just the same today as they were two thousand years ago and more. The greatest concerns are the desire for peace and the need for safety and security. We share these same concerns now because living in the kingdom means being surrounded by the reality of the world but remaining assured by the loving and redemptive presence of Christ and looking forward to the future glory of the kingdom. We are assured by the words of Christ, by his presence with us here and at the table that each day we are part of the kingdom even as we walk in the darkness of the winter.

Jesus says that like the leaf buds on a tree in the mid-winter we will see signs that the kingdom is near, that it is all around.

Today is the first Sunday in Advent, advent a season of waiting, of reflection and of hope. During the next four weeks as we approach the manger and await the birth of the Christ child be looking around you for those in need, keep an eye out so that you might bring hope to the hopeless this season so that you yourself might be a sign of the kingdom as we live in it here and now. But also take time to notice the buds of hope appearing all around us reminding us that the kingdom of God is with us now and is ever approaching in even greater glory.

Here in this congregation especially you will have opportunity to notice buds of hope. As you begin the call process there must be mixed feelings, some fear and apprehension and some loneliness as you journey through this season without a regular pastor but the call process can be one of great hope as you learn about yourself as a congregation and as you imagine an exciting new future for Zion and for the community. So take time this advent as you think about the future of the congregation to look for signs of how you fit into the kingdom and signs of the glorious hope that is the promise of the coming of Christ.

Advent is a time of expectation, we expect the Christ child and we look for the kingdom, we expect growth in our spiritual lives and we look for peace around us, we spend time in silent darkness and we look for the light. This advent may we all take the time to notice signs of new life to come, like watching a tree bud in the midst of winter may we watch the kingdom grow in unlikely and wonderful ways and may we expect to meet Christ in the life of the world around us.

Amen

Matthew 13:24 (wheat and tares)

Sermon for July 17, 2005

We’ve had several lessons about agriculture this month. It seems a funny topic for an urban neighborhood like this, far away from the farmlands of the country. Not a lot of farmers in this congregation so let’s have a review about weeds for a minute. Weeds are anything that grows in the garden of the field that you didn’t plant there and don’t want there. Often weeds look just like other plants. I remember when I was young and weeding the garden with my mother she would carefully tell me what to pull but there were many little sprouts that even she, with her expert eye, couldn’t identify and so we left those things to see what they would become. You wouldn’t want to accidentally pull up a flower mistaking it for a weed… In today’s parable Jesus talks about people as if they were plants. Sometimes a person looks like a weed, they act like some one you’d like to just pull right up out of the garden but Jesus knows better, he says it isn’t our job to pull the weeds out of the field. The farmer has planted good wheat there and we might not know what it looks like.

But as humans we often want to weed the human garden. We want to correct people if we think they are sinning. We get angry at people when they aren’t acting as we see fit. We want to make sure that everyone in our group looks good and acts appropriately. We don’t want too many people who dress the wrong way or who act in questionable ways around. We don’t want anyone who will stir things up, who will mess up what we have set out for ourselves. We like to identify someone who doesn’t fit and be rid of them. But the problem is we don’t always know which of these people will turn out to be wheat.

Where I grew up there is a tree that grows, ugly tree, big long coarse needles that turn brown and fall to the ground, year round, it is an evergreen so it doesn’t just lose it’s needles sometimes, it is in something like constant shed mode. The needles cause endless raking and serious pain to bare feet. It only has branches high up so it looks like a huge brown trunk with a bad haircut. Not pretty at all. It is called the ponderosa pine and it is a weed of a tree if there ever was one. I grew up on a hillside just within what is called the “tree line” of eastern Washington. Just where the desert stops and the trees start growing and my home was surrounded by these trees. If it had been up to people we probably would have cut them all down but there is something special about the scrub pine. It is what is known as a pioneer species. It makes the land livable for other plants. It changes the eco-system little bit by little bit, shading the ground so that some of the brush dies off and new trees can take root, it creates shelter for animals so that they can move from the forest into new land where they spread seeds and eat down the foliage allowing new things to grow. Without the scrub pine the desert would stay desert but because of it dead land is turned into fertile soil that holds great beauty and bears good fruit. So despite our suspicion that the scrub pines were weeds we were obliged to let them be. We even watered them in times of drought and protected them from disease knowing that someday because of them new delicate things would spring up on the hillside.

In the Parable today the field workers want to help the farmer by separating out what they don’t think should be in the field. But the farmer says no. He had planted good wheat and they did not yet know what would bear fruit.

In the story Jesus tells the word that he uses for weed really refers to a plant that looks just like the wheat. Until it comes time for harvest it is almost impossible to tell them apart. So when the workers ask if they can get rid of the weeds the farmer says no. Surely you will pull some wheat as well.

But still we want to weed the human garden to get rid of anything that springs up looking like a weed because we don’t want to be mistaken for weeds ourselves.

Back in the days when slaves were still held in the United States down in South Carolina lived a weed of a man if there ever was one. He was a slave holder and a mean one at that. He was sure everyone had their place. White men at the top descending downwards and ending with black slaves. He had children this man. 14 children, a whole patch of weeds if there ever was one. Amongst his children were two daughters. AS these daughters grew they became strong voices against slavery. They had seen slaves whipped and mistreated while they were growing up and had decided that slavery was the worst kind of evil. Suddenly the girls who had looked like weeds to the cause of abolition were bearing great fruit in the struggle to give equal rights to all. They came to Philadelphia just as the movement here fell under great attack. During this attack they spoke as bricks were thrown at them. They spoke as angry mobs tried to drive them away, thirsty for their blood. They spoke in the smoldering remains of the brand new movement headquarters after it was burned down. They spoke and spoke until finally they outspoke slavery. Imagine if someone who thought they were doing good had decided to pull these two weeds as they were growing up in South Carolina; if someone had taken their voice away; if the people in the north had refused to talk to them knowing where they had come from.

As humans we often want to weed the human garden because we are afraid and we want to stop the evil before it starts, but thank God that job is not our’s to do.

In our lives we want to help the farmer by pushing away those people who seem like they might be harmful to others, who might be a bad influence. The farmer says no, I planted good wheat, it might yet bear good fruit.

Now if the weeds in this story stand for evil they area good analogy because heaven knows that just like we never seem to be rid of weeds the world always seems to have some evil in it. Evil that leads someone to set off a bomb on a busy subway, evil that drives a man to take a gun and try to shoot someone outside of an elementary school, hitting a young boy instead. Evil that causes loving Christian people drive away those most in need. Evil that is sown among us as hatred causing us to turn someone away because of their beliefs, because we don’t approve of how they lead their lives, because of the gender of their romantic interests.

This last type of evil is the one that so often effects us, the one that makes us want to pull the weeds. It is the evil of arrogance, the evil of judgment. It makes us think that we know the good seed from the bad, the fruit bearing plants from the weeds. It makes us think that we don’t need to listen to the farmer that we should decide who gets equal treatment. Who gets to be taken care of by us, who gets to come through these doors. As humans we always want to weed the human garden but Jesus says no. You might damage some of my precious wheat. Jesus tells this parable to make it clear to all who are listening that while living in this world where some days we see good and some days we see evil. Where some days we do good and some days we do evil. Where some days we are weeds and some days we are wheat, we are not to judge one another on these grounds but instead let us see the good wheat that has been sown in every field and rejoice at the fruit it bears.

Evil is a weed amongst the good wheat. But when we turn to pull the weeds, God the planter knows better and says you might damage some wheat. With Jesus our trowel for pulling weeds was replaced by weapons of love, by the water of baptism and by bread and wine for nourishment. Jesus calls us to sow his love in the garden and to leave the rest to him.

I have learned a lot about weeds in the past few years because my parents bought a piece of property in rural Idaho. There is a meadow on their property and the meadow is full of weeds. They thought that they would spray the weeds to kill them and then plant something else. No, that wouldn’t do the job. They thought that they would use some machine to pull them up. No that won’t do it. It turns out the only real way to get rid of these weeds is to sow good, strong seed right among them, to keep watering it and nourishing it and eventually as the good seed takes roots the weeds will disappear.

If we sow hatred because we think we see evil, hatred will grow. If we push away the people who frighten us how will they ever understand God’s love. If we stop watering the field because the weeds never go away, the weeds might survive but certainly the good seed will wither away. But if we nourish it all, indiscriminately, zealously with the love of God, with the strong word of God the good seed just might overtake all of the weeds.

Good seed is the love that God sows in each and every one of us so for heaven sakes don’t weed the garden. If you don’t like someone remember not to weed the garden, if you are worried about the effect some person might have on the community with the way she looks, don’t weed the garden. If you don’t like the words that come out of some here’s mouth, don’t weed the garden. With water and the word God planted good strong seed in this world. Because that good seed is the love that God sows in each and every one of us then thank God that we are not the ones who weed the garden. Who knows what effect that good seed might have even amidst the weeds.

God planted good, strong seed in this field Reformation. This is good news. Amen

Good Shepherd

John 10: 1-10
Fourth Sunday in Easter (Lectionary Year A)

I worked for a time in a church that had a lay ministry called a "shepherding program". There were about 15 members of the congregation identified as shepherds and each was assigned a "flock," 10-15 other members of the congregation for whom they agreed to pray and with whom they would occasionally communicate through cards, visits or Sunday morning chats. The commitment was that each member of the congregation would have a shepherd and through this program fewer sheep would be left to stray, never to be heard from again. The program worked, it worked wonders, it saved a life at least once (read on) and improved countless others. We singled out Good Shepherd Sunday as a day to honor this ministry and to make it better known to the congregation, this is the sermon that I preached that day believing deeply that sometimes you just have to tell a community about itself!

Shepherding Sermon:

Let's read the psalm for the day. If you could all turn to it, psalm 23 in your bibles on page 464.

Not so long ago one of our members was sick in bed, very sick with an illness that could have killed her and the physical illness that she had was one that leads to a great deal of apathy and depression. So she hadn't seen a doctor and hadn't really told anyone what was going on. No one in the congregation had heard much from her or had the chance to visit. as this woman lay in here bed, prey to the wolves of illness someone knocked on the door, forcing her out of bed. Her shepherd had come to identify the danger and while that shepherd waited in the doorway acting as a gate this member of her flock got dressed and they drove to the hospital where she had a life saving operation.

In our lesson today Jesus calls himself the sheep gate. Do you know what a sheep gate is? Well neither did I. But after some great time spent researching the various herding practices in mountain communities throughout the world

I learned that a sheep gate is a shepherd.

And a sheep gate does a lot more than just letting the sheep in or out. You see at night sheep would be kept in corrals and often the opening didn't have a gate so if there was any sign of danger the shepherd would stand in the opening as a human gate to keep the sheep inside where it was safe and to keep the predators from sneaking in amongst the flock. So when there was trouble the gate provided security. Jesus calls himself the sheep gate in today's text. He will stand in the doorway until we rise up and walk, out to the doctor, into a new friendship etc.

The psalm says: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters, he restores my soul. He leads me in right path's for his name's sake.

There is a young member of the congregation that has cerebral palsy. He can't walk or even lift and arm or leg. He spends most of his time at home with his ever vigilant mother who cares for him night and day with a love and strength that can't be fathomed. For years pastor has been taking him communion at home and he loves it. It makes him so happy to participate in this community feast, and in the church body. For a while mother and son were coming to church fairly regularly but as things became more stressful for the mother they became more isolated venturing out in the community and having las energy and motivation to do so. But one dark, depressed day when she was worried about money woes, saddened by the limited life that her son was leading and heart broken for other families who had lost children to this disease, this lonely mother found her shepherd standing at her door. Now this shepherd had been through some similar stuff. She had also been worked with other children who had cerebral palsy, she knew what this sheep needed and what was possible and she knew the Reformation community very well. She spent hours in conversation and prayer with these special members of her flock and when all was said and done she brought the community to them! She arranged for M----, who owns a barber shop, you know, to have Brain there and give him a haircut, and she enlisted other members of the community, too encouraging them to be extra supportive during this hard time. And finally a few Sundays ago we looked up from the front here and saw them sitting in the back. This great flock was finally able to celebrate communion with two sheep who had been walking in dark valley alone and had found a shepherd with a staff to lead them back into the fold where they are a great, great blessing to us and where the joy on B---'s face to be here lights up the whole church!

The Lord is my Shepherd. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; For you are with me; your rod and your staff comfort me- they comfort me.

Think back to November to the bitter cold, You'll remember when November was if you think about when you started to get those high PECO bills because it was 17 degrees out with the wind chill and you had to crank the heat just to keep from seeing your breath inside. Now on those cold November nights a shepherd called a on member of her flock, a young single mother who was so worried about even making payments on her bills that she hadn't even considered being able to make Christmas special for her little children, she cried just looking at the grocery bills. But a couple days before Christmas a knock came on the door. Her shepherd had called the helping hands committee on the behalf of this young woman and they arrived with a basket full of food for Christmas and enough to last for the rest of the week.

The Lord is my shepherd, [Lord] you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

When a shepherd sets out for the grazing season in the mountains of the Ukraine he doesn't just take his own sheep with them, he doesn't just take all the sheep that look the same or act the same. In fact he doesn't even just take sheep. He gathers all of the sheep and all of the goats of all different colors and shapes and sizes from the whole community and he take them all with him up into the mountains. Sometimes he takes extra shepherds too! He takes disciple shepherds, students who are learning how to be shepherds and owners of the smaller flocks that have been gathered into one fold to help him out for a while. So he gathers this great fold of sheep and trainees and they travel the mountains sides all of late spring and most of summer. They start out slow because the helpers are new and the sheep are weak. Some of them have had very little food to eat during the months of scarcity. Some are recovering from injury and illness, some are just new born, some have just given birth. Some are slightly older and very rebellious, they want to run and play out on the fringes of the herd. And the helpers are unsure of themselves, they don't know how to talk to the sheep so that they will listen and they don't know how to ask the shepherd for help. So the whole group stays close by finding the green pastures that are close to the village but as the summer heat comes the flock is stronger, they know their shepherd and the helpers are more confident. So they go far up into the mountains where there are beautiful cool streams and fields of untouched grass. By the end of the summer they have covered many, many miles of the mountain sides. Our shepherds came to be in much the same way. They were hesitant, unsure, afraid and a wiser more experienced shepherd showed up at their doors and said come on this is the season, I see the way you care for my sheep, its time I trained you to be a shepherd. Follow me.

Early in my time here I went on a retreat with the shepherds. I heard one express great anxiety about being a part of people's lives, you know, "getting in their business". As she has grown and ventured more on her own almost every time I see her she has a new story to tell, often with tears in her eyes about her personal interactions with people as their shepherd.

At this same retreat another shepherd was just learning how to pray out loud, getting ready for one of the healing services we have here where shepherds pray for people who come to them in the corners. She was barely able to consider doing this and now she says praying with all different ages and types of people is her greatest joy as a shepherd.

And the other day, with great joy a shepherd came into the office and said "my flock is growing!" She has been able to use her experience as a teacher, friend, mother and grandmother to support many new parents and growing families in her flock.

Truly these, first hesitant disciples have become skilled and loving shepherds, Receiving goodness and mercy from their sheep everyday as they themselves extend the house of the Lord to all of their flock.

The Psalm says: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all of the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!

Jesus the good shepherd comes to our door to be a gate for us, to protect us and to guide us, to calm our fears and to comfort us. Sometimes he looks like R-----, sometimes he looks like L-----, Or like:

(List of names removed for posterity's sake....)

Sometimes the good shepherd has shown up at a door looking like you. Jesus says he is the good shepherd and he sends us out to lead his sheep beside still waters and give them rest in green pastures and he promises to stand protector, encouraging us at the gate. This is good news Amen

Mark 9:30

I really like this time of year, something about the late afternoon sun in late summer makes me very nostalgic, seeing kids head back to school does the same thing and right now because I am back to the Spokane area for the first long visit in about six years everything is making me nostalgic.

I was in Cheney the other day outside of my old elementary school and I remembered being in the second grade classroom lining up to go out to recess. My teacher that year knew how to make lining up fun. We had all kinds of contests and criteria that helped us select and change the line order. This was important because there were two very important positions, first and last. First because you got to be the leader, you were very visible and without you there was no line, everyone could see you and had to follow you. And last because as the last in line it was your job to turn out the lights and close the door. You had to notice if anyone was lagging or got left behind. It held a lot of responsibility even though it wasn’t quite as visible.

As I think about those positions in grown up life, being first and last hold entirely different meanings. First seems to be the position that everyone is striving for, but unlike second graders we are a lot less willing to share it.

And no one really wants last place, the place where you have most of the responsibility and very little of that important feeling.

In the gospel today Jesus’ disciples seem to be having a reflection similar to this one. They are talking about the pros of being first and how to get there. Arguing a little bit about who has the best shot.

So Jesus sits them down and tells them what he thinks about first and last place. He doesn’t seem to mind that they want to be first in line, in fact he tells them how to get there, he wants them to get there. But it turns out that being first is a little more like being last than the disciples hoped that it would be a lot of the responsibility and not so much of the visibility.

He says that to be first means to be servants to others and to be loving welcoming hosts, servants even, to even the least among them.

Over time something interesting has happened with the word translated as servant here. It has changed meaning. It has entered the everyday realm. We look for service in many places nowaday and we don’t think of it as very related to God. But the word started out with another meaning. It can be translated as either servant or minister. It is sad that we have lost this meaning but I think perhaps it is helpful too.

In church we do a lot of talking about how we must be ministers in our everyday lives and in other facets of life we talk about how we must get or provide good service. At various jobs you must provide customer or community service. When we aren’t at our jobs we spend a lot of time paying for various services for our car, for our homes, for our bodies we expect excellent service, near perfect service. When the week is over, we have had five days of service, one day of ministry and a Saturday! Even though we hear that we should be servants or ministers of God’s love all of the time

This is where I tend to get stuck. How do we really marry ministry to everyday life? How can we welcome the needy in God’s name in a sincere way. What is genuine ministry and how do we do it in when we are so busy with the service part of life?

I think that perhaps the careful use of a word that can be both ministry or service by this gospel writer was a hint. Perhaps the question that we should ask is what kind of service makes a ministry?

I heard a story about service and ministry a little bit earlier this fall. There was a wheat farmer. I think down by Othello who had died sometime after he planted the wheat this past spring. The wheat had grown. And through funerals and mourning, through first months of his wife’s new widowhood people had quietly continued to care for the wheat as it grew. And as summer ended just like every year the wheat was ready for harvest. Now perhaps some of you farm here and so you know what it is like for a farm family come harvest time. It takes up a lot of time and energy, it is the central event for the family. I know some families where a daughter or son is known to come home more reliably during harvest time even than for the holidays. It is hard work but there is also some excitement in the air, something strong and familiar, it is full not only of urgency but also memory and thoughts about the future.

It must have been very hard to be a widow with the wheat ready to harvest but no farmer around to do so. The community must have thought so to because one morning after a simple prayer and army of combines set out to harvest the wheat of the deceased farmer while an army of loving friends set out to create new harvest memories with a the farmer’s wife. The men driving the combines were not preaching about God’s love, they did not sit down and gather anyone around to hear about what it means to reach out to a neighbor in the name of God. Instead quietly an efficiently they did so. The served this widow when she was most vulnerable and they filled an entire community with the love of God. It only took one morning and a bit of gasoline. They didn’t do it because they thought that they would get a better place in heaven if they did. They did it out of love for a friend and fellow farmer now gone and out of love and compassion for his wife. This is what it means to be a minister it does not have to be foreign or uncomfortable. The best ministry is reflexive. It is doing what you are moved to do and what you are confident about.

In the case of this community the most everyday service was an extraordinary ministry.

So, I ask, what kind of service makes a ministry?

Jesus pulled a little child into his lap to answer this question. A child who was too small and too neglected to go out and preach and teach in Jesus’ name, a child who had no money and could not do her ministry by donating to a safe cause, a child who had nothing and he welcomed her into the midst of great teachers and preachers into the world of the wealthy and the wise and called her the greatest representative of God. And he did it not because he expected anything back and not because he had to in order to achieve salvation, he reached out because he knew that God loved him and he knew how to share that love.

In that moment holding a child was the act of a servant and a minister. In another moment plowing a field was the act of a servant and a minister. In the life a teacher finding a way to give each child a turn at glory and at responsibility is the act of a minister. In the life of a pastor noticing the ministry being done by members of the congregation is the act of a minister. In the life of a parole officer being around before anything goes wrong is the act of a minister. In the life of a child giving a hug to the fellow child or adult that needs at just the right moment is the act of a minister. In the life of a mechanic a bit of advice about keeping a battery going in the cold winter to a family who needs their car to have an income and who can barely afford gas, much less repairs, is the act of a minister.

What is it in your life that could be ministry? Is it something that you do Monday through Friday without even thinking about it, is it a small part of something that you do Monday through Friday that you could emphasize a little more? Is it something that you love doing but haven’t done lately because it seems insignificant?

Martin Luther described the life of a Christian in this way. We are saved not by anything that we ourselves do but by the grace of God and that means that we are free, we can be lord of our lives and subject to no one but it also means that we are bound by the love of God to serve each of our brothers and sisters. He thought that this service should come to us like a reflex, like giving a gift to someone who had given you a great gift. The great gift coming from God and the return gift going from us to the children of God. Be that a gift of teaching or preaching, the gift of reaping wheat, the gift of smiling at the person in the traffic jam next to you, the gift of noticing the child who walks by your home every morning without a coat and being there one morning with one.

Being free to be a servant means that we don’t have to do certain things or minister in specific ways in order to win the love of God, the love of God is much greater than that and we have it when we are first in line, last in line or in the very center of the line. We even have it when we are off in the corner of the classroom, not paying attention to the line. Just like my second grade teacher Jesus came up with some interesting criteria for who will be first and who will be last and just like in second grade it seems that we each will take turns with both. And this is because the gifts that we have, no matter how everyday they seem, are perfect in the eyes of God and we, young or old, educated or not, strong or weak, we are ready made ministers of the love of God and ready made recipients of the same. This is good news. Thanks be to God.

Amen

Doubting Thomas

John 20: 19-31

Second Sunday in Easter

In the Spring of 2006 the Lutheran Church lost a great servant in Robert Smith and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary lost an amazing faculty member. As he was dying of cancer Dr. Smith wrote about the story of Thomas in a new, deeply intelligent and throughly touching way. Dr. Smith concluded that: “The Easter Jesus still bears in his hands and side the marks of his cruel wounding. Indeed the wounds will never go away. The Thomas story announces that the universe is upheld in wounded hands of unimaginably deep love and compassion.” This was the witness of a dying man.

Sermon For Doubting Thomas Sunday:

Poor Thomas.

This day is the Sunday that the church marks as doubting Thomas Sunday.

The Glorious first Sunday after Easter, the Sunday of the appearance of our Lord to his disciples, the Sunday of when Jesus finds his way into a locked room filled with terrified people and tells them, The peace of the Lord is with you, now get out of here and start letting the people of the world know that I am risen, that peace is theirs and that all of their sins are forgiven.

The Sunday when Jesus appears to Thomas wounds and all and Thomas is heard to proclaim with all the clarity in the world, my Lord and My God.

This Sunday we call “doubting Thomas Sunday” and everyone inside the church or out hears something familiar. “Don’t be a doubting Thomas” that is the lesson we are meant to take with us form this Sunday right?

Well I hope that today you come away with the message: Go ahead, be a doubting Thomas!

Thomas wasn’t so bad. I’m not even sure that Thomas had a crisis of faith. I wonder if the problem with Thomas was that he had the right kind of faith. Thomas had the kind of faith that knew Jesus to be the kind of Lord who would still bear the wounds.

What we forget when we ridicule poor Thomas and hold him up as an example of poor faith is that Jesus had appeared to everyone else in the story already. Of course they didn’t doubt because they has already seen.

First Jesus appeared to Mary who was weeping and yelling at the Tomb angry that something had happened to the dead body of Jesus. She wanted the body back. Her heart was broken and all she could do was accuse the people around her. But Jesus appeared to her. He gave her proof. For Mary the proof was in the calling of her name. She recognized her name when it was called by Jesus and so she knew it was him and she was freed to spread the message. Peace has come, Jesus has risen. And she said nothing about Jesus’ wounds

After we hear this story we see the disciples. They are afraid and hiding in an upper room. The poor disciples could think only of the danger posed to them by the same forces who had put Jesus to death. They thought “if we dare say a thing we will be next, they will crucify us, they will kill us”. So confused and full of pain and anger and great, great fear they had gone back to the upper room to hide in pain and fear.

This is where we find them today, well some of them, not all of them, someone is missing. Thomas is missing.

When he finally returns to the upper room. The place where everyone else was cowering in fear. He finds out that they had seen Jesus there as well. But there was no mention of the wounds.

There was something bothering Thomas about these accounts and we assume that he is unable to believe that Jesus was raised without seeing it. Maybe the proof that Thomas needed was that Jesus had been wounded and then raised. He wanted to see the wounds.

This proof came for Thomas in just one week. Jesus shows up while everyone is gathered in the upper room and he shows Thomas the wounds. And Thomas is ready. He looks at Jesus with utmost awe an joy and says “My Lord and My God” he calls Jesus what none of the other disciples had called him.

Why did Thomas need to see Jesus’ wounds in order to make this confession of Jesus as Lord? Why did he want to see wounds that had lost their power?

For Thomas Jesus needed to do something new, something different. He needed to show his vulnerability. So Jesus appeared wounds and all and held his pierced hands out to Thomas who had doubted. It was in the wounds of Jesus that Thomas found comfort.

The wounds of Christ comfort us

I’m not sure that we ever see anything good in wounds. For the most part we try to hide our own wounds. And I think that we can all agree that wounds are bad. That is unfair and painful to live in the world with sickness, with death, with war with anger, and divorce, with fear and shame. We are ashamed of our wounds so most of the time we hide them.

What we forget is that these wounds are the force that binds creation together. Wounds are what prove and test our humanity. Through wounds the brokenness of Humanity was overcome. Though wounds the healing work of Christ commenced.

Through wounds the healing work of Christ continues. Humanity is famously good at acknowledging difference. But also famously good at understanding suffering at feeling the pain of other people’s wounds.

Wounds, while we hide them and deny them are true signs of our humanity. God’s power to overcome the wounds of Christ for our sake is a true sign of God’s gracious love for us

Working with youth and living in close quarters with a great number of soon to be ministers I have a vast knowledge of servant work that has been done by youth groups across the country. This work almost always stems from the desire to heal some wound. A friend of mine recently went on a servant trip to Mississippi to help some of the people who had been hardest hit by Katrina. She went into the work angry that not enough people were helping, that not enough was being done by the government, that the media was focused on New Orleans and Louisiana when all of these people in Mississippi had lost everything as well.

She told me one story of a man whose home was destroyed. He was not allowed back in because his health was poor and the mold was thick. The frame of the house was really all that was salvageable. The cleaning crew cried as they tore down and threw out rotting pictures of his deceased wife and then even the very wall that held the pictures.

When the house was finally gutted they brought in a table and he was excited to provide dinner for them. Albeit it was ordered in, because there was no kitchen to prepare it. As they ate he told them stories of his home, now simply beams and foundation that had housed his new marriage, his children, their first dates, his wife as she had died, the life of an entire family all of which the crew had seen evidence of that they had to throw out.

He shed a few tears as he spoke because the wounds were still there. His healing wouldn’t be easy in this new place that used to be his home but because others understood what it was to be wounded and what it meant to live as servants of a wounded Christ his first memory in this new, old place was of Christian fellowship and powerful healing.

Christ’s wounds heal us

Thomas needed to see Jesus’ wounds in order to know that he still bore them. So that he could know that through God, Jesus was still and is always tied to wounded humanity. And we are blessed by Thomas’ doubt because through him we too have been assured that the world is held tenderly in wounded hands, Hands that still teach us how to heal and how to love.

Hands that still work assurance in our hearts and minds that peace, hope and healing are with us. This is Good news.

Amen

Mark 6:14

In a week when the papers were full of stories about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon about how one action sparked retaliation from one side which was met by more violence from the other side, we have an appropriate gospel lesson. A lesson about retribution and also about mercy. The gospel today is a pretty disturbing story, a story, unfortunately, with a rather gruesome and very unhappy ending. John the Baptist who at the beginning of Jesus' ministry proclaimed Jesus' coming and called out for people to repent and to look to Jesus and who also baptized Jesus is beheaded because he got in the way of the king. Because John spoke up when Herod was doing dishonest and sinful things he was put at the mercy of the very angry and spiteful queen who tricked her husband into agreeing to behead John, be he a prophet or not.

We come onto the scene in the middle. We don't get to hear a lot about the circumstances under which John was able to talk to Herod or how he came to be in a place to criticize such a high political official. What we do know, however, is that John was clearly making a dangerous move when he spoke to Herod about his choice to marry his brother’s ex-wife. I can't imagine that when John was imprisoned it came as much of a surprise to him. What might have come as a surprise, however, was that he was allowed to continue to advise Herod. Herod would let John preach to him while he was in custody.

I imagine that John spoke to Herod about mercy and repentance and the text says that Herod was interested in what John had to say.

Unfortunately when tricked into agreeing to execute John, Herod does not seem to have thought back or refer to any lessons about repentance and loving thy neighbor that John might have taught him. Herod did not hear the call to mercy that John and Jesus proclaimed in God's name rather he gave into the anger and revenge of his wife and because of that there was great suffering for many people.

The wisdom in this horrible story, however, might be in how John's disciples reacted. Like Jesus, John had disciples with him when he preached and taught. His disciples must have been horribly distraught and angry at Herod for making so light of John's life but instead of reacting with anger, instead of trying to find some sort of retribution, they saw the truth in what John had been preaching. They repented, this literally means they changed their minds or turned, they turned away from more violence, violence that surely would have led to their deaths. Instead some of them buried John and kept to his teachings and some theologians believe that others went to find and follow Jesus.

What an amazing and grace-filled choice to make. It seems like it would have been very easy to live on in anger and hatred, mistrusting God and swearing revenge on Herod, but these were not their values.

How wonderful would it be if we as individuals and as a society could more often choose this kind of grace. Certainly we are called to be loving and merciful in the name of Christ but too often we turn to retaliation instead.

When I think of turning from anger to grace. I am always reminded of a mother I knew whose son was killed violently because he was mistaken for another local boy against whom the shooter had a vendetta. It is hard to imagine the intense pain that this mother experienced. I certainly would have, at the very least, retreated into myself and would have felt justified in lashing out in anger.

Instead through her tears and pain she enlisted the people who came to visit her in her sorrow to help her make a change in her violent neighborhood. She decided to provide mercy to her wounded community.

She teamed up with other parents who had lost children to try to make the neighborhood safer. Over time the movement that she started days after her son died became an organization that provides tutoring, violence counseling, grief counseling and even relocation funds to both grieving families and to those who are involved in gangs and need help getting out.

In the midst of all of this work she also found the boy who was the actual target in her son's murder and personally made efforts to keep him safe.

This type of mercy isn't easy to find and is even harder to meet out, in fact, I would argue that perhaps none of us are capable of it by ourselves. But just like with John's disciples this grieving mother heard a call greater and stronger than the call to anger. It was the call of grace urging her to mercy. In situations like these the grace that is exercised is the grace of God active in the hearts and minds of the children of God and the strength for such acts comes only through the work of the Holy Spirit.

There are many stories in the bible and many more in the history of civilization that end much in the same way as John's story ended. Too many stories end with someone choosing not grace and mercy, but power or revenge.

It is easy to choose the path that provides less grace to our neighbors, sometimes it even seems like the best idea from a self-preservation standpoint but are all called to merciful actions. We are called to spread the love of Christ to those with whom we come into contact, those who hurt us and those who help us . This doesn't always come naturally but we are empowered do it though the grace that comes from the love of God.

The grace of God assures us that there will be mercy in the world. There will be mercy even in the midst of the great violence happening all throughout the middle east. There will be mercy for the poor who sleep on the streets of Spokane. There will be mercy for the children born to abusive and overworked parents. There will be mercy for those who show grace and for those who choose anger.

Mercy is both our duty and our greatest joy as Christians. We are called above all else to act out of love for Christ and for creation but we are also assured that we will be shown great mercy each time we need it and we will be saved from our lack of mercy by the amazing and ever living grace of God. This is truly Good news.

Thanks be to God. Amen