All Saints C 2010

It is impossible for me to think about All Saints Day this year without thinking about the past year. About this time last year I started to feel as if perhaps I should take up residence at one of the local hospitals. So many of our members were being persistently admitted and most were not coming back out. At least not in the way that we had all hoped that they might. It was a sad time for many in these congregations. The cases ranged from surprising and tragic to expected but sad.

At any rate All Saints day last year had me thinking about death even more than usual and those thoughts persisted until after Easter. And it does that doesn’t it? The thought of death persists for us some seasons.

Ecclesiastes, in a passage commonly used at funerals states that there is a time for everything under the sun, a time to be born and a time to die, for each of us and for the ones that we love. A time to live and a time to die but there is a lot more than that to life and certainly a lot more to death.

In the case of last fall through late springtime I saw a lot more than death in the hospital rooms that I frequented. As is so often the case with families gathered around sharing what is most dear and unique to them, the rooms sometimes, surprisingly ended up filled with life. One day in one particular room I met a funny and heartwarming scene. A very old man, who had been just heartbroken since his wife had died a month before was finally about to go home to her. He was in some pain and he had his almost as aged sister beside him each and every day, his kids gathered too when they could. But on this day they were all there and he met me with a great big grin as I entered the room.

The grin was because two things had happened since I’d seen him last. The first was that I had agreed to baptize him. He had been a Lutheran since marriage, attending church and communing every time it was offered but somehow it had slipped the knowledge of myself and several former pastors that he had never actaully been baptized and neither had his siblings. And he desperately wanted to be. So I came ready with water and candles, prepared to turn the hospital room into a baptismal chapel.

Now the other reason for the grin is more amusing and because I know he liked to laugh even up to the end, I think that I can tell you about it. You see he was in a condition and on some medications that made him very uncomfortable, everything that touched his skin was intensely irritating. The hospital gown with its rough fabric, ties, strings and snaps and tendency to bunch up under his fragile skin was especially offensive. The smooth hospital sheets were much more tolerable. So with a chuckle as I walked into the room and the sheets adjusted carefully his son explained to me as dad grinned along, I think a little pleased to make the pastor blush, that he had decided to leave the world just like he came into it, without a damned hospital gown on.

The result then of these two developments, and perhaps the reason for the grin was that then, after some giggling and fidgeting, rearranging and improvising, I got the amazing, breathtaking honor of baptizing a man the age of my great grandfather clad in a toga made of hospital bed sheets, along with his nearly just as aged sister. And in that clean white baptismal garment and the waters of baptism it was clear to all around that he had finally found relief for the deepest physical and spiritual discomfort of his life. And we knew that we were on holy ground, there with doctors, nurses and alarms and bright lights all around us.

It is good that we baptize babies as a sign that it is something that a person can never do for themselves, that God does for them. But babies squirm and cry, babies are sometimes afraid of the water or the sound, or the scratchy white baptismal garment that we make them wear. And their parents are stressed about the party to come and the diaper on the kid and so on. So it is rare that we get so clear a picture as the one in that hospital room of the intense promise and peace, the very relief to our souls that comes with being completely claimed by God. So completely that we die with Christ and are raised again. And it feels good, it is good!

All Saints Day is a time when we celebrate the lives of the saints of God, those we knew intimately and those we never met. And we don’t just celebrate them because we miss our loved ones but because scripture affirms and something in us knows that life itself is a gift from God. Our very breath is breathed into us by God. And knowing this we know that we remain precious to God long after the breath stops.

Frank and Esther, Helen, June, Jean, Mary and all of the others who were here last year and are gone now remain precious to God. And because of that God has taken the sting, the bite, the pain of death away. We know this primarily because we have already died with Christ. And it was anything but painful and hard. We die with Christ, the only death that matters in the waters of baptism. Not a hard death, not a painful one, not a lonely one but a death into new life. Just as God breathed breath into our lungs, new life is breathed into our very death. Christ does this first by his baptism, then by his death and finally by our baptism into him and his everlasting life.

We celebrate All Saints Day each year to remember our loved ones yes, but also to remember what life and death mean to Christian people.

We get the beatitudes as the gospel text for this day, a list from Jesus' lips of who all is blessed, when, why and how. A list of the blessings that we can hope to experience during our time on earth. One of the Blessings it mentions is this:

“Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh."

When those we love die, when we weep and mourn a death, we are blessed not only because the pain will lessen as time goes on and our hearts will heal. And it will and they will.

But, we are blessed because in the memory of each saint we learn about the love and faithfulness of God and because on this day especially we are promised that with all the saints who have gone before, those we knew and loved and those multitudes we never knew we will at the last stand washed clean of all that holds us down and keeps us low in this life. And our new lives in Christ will be complete blessing.

That is why I told you the story about my hospital baptism because it is a great illustration of how even in the midst of physical death, that room, that man, was filled with new life. And not just him but all of us and not just on the day of our death or the day of our baptism but over and over and over again God breaths new life into us until at last with live in joy with him. This good news. Thanks be to God for All of the Saints. Amen

Lent 5 C; Luke 12:1-11

You know the song recorded by Nancy Sinatra: These Boots Are Made for Walking right:

These boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do, one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you...

It is a kind of cute song about a woman standing up for herself in the midst of some pretty bad luck in love. What is most fun about it though is that it is told, at least in part,, from the perspective of a pair of shoes, boots to be precise. Its fun that we get to think about how Nancy's feet play into the whole story.

Well today we have a gospel lesson all about a pair of feet. About Jesus' feet. We start out at a dinner table with some of Jesus' closest friends and then the focus shifts, quickly to a woman who we have seen do all kinds of normal and admirable things doing something very strange. She kneels down on the floor, pulls her hair down out of the nice knot that it is tied in, keeping it respectable and controlled and she starts rubbing strong scented oil on Jesus feet and wiping it off with her hair. Very strange and to understand I think that we need to go back a ways in the story and think about these feet and where they have been.

The first place we ever are conscious of Jesus' feet is when he is a little baby in scratchy hay, he certainly needs to be wrapped in bands of swaddling clothes, like the gospels tell us he was, to get him all tightly bound up so that no skin is exposed to be cold or to be irritated by the scratchy hay. So Mary and Joseph, I'm sure after counting his little fingers and toes, take strips of cloth and start to wrap him up, clumsily, like new parents do, trying to hold his little feet still to get him all wrapped tight, afraid that they might break him and finally they get him all bound up feet and all so that he can sleep peacefully.

Then the next time we see his feet they are being a little mischievous, whether by intention or not. They carry him, twelve years old into the temple. Where he amazes the chief priests and teachers of the law with his great knowledge of the scriptures. He stays behind when the family leaves, and his parents have to come back looking for him a little panicked and certainly with his feet in mind wondering where he wandered off to and what he is doing. Once they find him they are struck by the difference of their child, he stayed behind in the church talking to the priests, this is not a normal kid, he will not have a normal life.

And he doesn't, the very next time we see him is by the river Jordan, he takes his shoes off and his bare feet wade into the cool water where he is baptized and comes up out of the water to hear the voice of God calling him son. In the old testament when Moses heard the voice of God speak it told him to take his shoes off because the place that he was standing was Holy ground, when God is speaking even the ground becomes Holy and wouldn't you want to be as close to that as possible, to soak it up through the soles of your feet?

Well after the voice was done speaking Jesus put his sandals back on and it almost feels like he didn't take them off even for a minute for three years. He went straight out into the desert. Where they got hot and tired and dusty and he was tormented but he remained, preparing himself for all that he would have to endure later on.

He came back and they took him down to the seashore where he called disciples to him. They took him all over the countryside where crowds gathered, pressing in on him, constantly asking him for teaching and healing. Each time we hear in the gospel that he tried to get off his tired feet, that he went to a certain quiet place to pray, people would find him and beg him to look upon them to answer to their needs and he would.

It seems sometimes that he and his disciples crossed the sea so often in their little boats so that they could have a few moments rest and peace and quiet. But even then Jesus' feet weren't still. Instead they carried him out onto the water. He stands there calling Peter, giving Peter a chance to know who God is and who Peter is to God. So Jesus stands on the water, feet ready to hold him up and steady enough to reach out and hold Peter safely too when he starts to sink.

Then in the days nearest to our story for today, the patterns that Jesus' feet walk in start to change. He has stayed away from Jerusalem for a while because the outcry against him is getting louder and louder. Because he knows that there are those who would convict him there. So he keeps preaching and teaching in the more distant lands but then he turns his feet and warns his disciples that the time is getting near that he will have to go back, to allow himself to be arrested, to withstand what is before him.

Then in the midst of that they get a message, Lazarus, their dear friend is sick, very sick. Should they go? Lazarus is in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem, close enough that Jesus will surely be arrested. So they don't go. They wait. They get another message and another, but they are caught up doing other things. Finally they get the message that Lazarus has died and so they turn toward Jerusalem. They go to Bethany, they meet Mary and Martha Lazarus' sisters. When Mary comes out to Jesus she says Lord if you had been her Lazarus would not have died. Then she wept and Jesus did too. And then Jesus walked to the tomb and called Lazarus out. His dear friend, dead four days, walked again. Mary and Martha and Lazarus had their lives back. The world that had fallen around their feet had been put back together...And the religious authorities saw it and they were scared so Jesus' fate was sealed.

By coming back and calling Lazarus out of the tomb and showing his power of new life over death Jesus traded the life of his dear friend, the comfort and peace of Mary Lazarus' sister, the promise of new life for us all, for his own life.

There was a trade, Lazarus was dead and now he is alive. And so when they are all at dinner in today's gospel, Jesus, His disciples, Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha, Mary wants to do something for Jesus. She finds a very expensive jar of oil, one that was left over it seems from the burial of her brother Lazarus. She takes that jar and sets it near Jesus, perhaps as a gift for him? Or for the poor, certainly he has gotten funeral spices as a gift before. But then she pulls her hair down. Something a woman certainly didn't do in the company of men, it was indecent. And then she touched Jesus feet. A single woman touching the feet of a single man, also not done. And she takes the oil and pours it on him. and wipes it with her hair. Everyone in the room suddenly gets very uncomfortable. This was inappropriate, it was against the rules and it was darn right strange.

They protest, Judas points out that she is using oil that costs enough to feed a poor family for a year. The only one who seems calm about it is the only one who really understands it. Jesus. Of course she is doing this because his feet are nearly done taking him places. He traded their freedom for the life of one whom he loved and the only place left for his feet to go is the cross. They will walk him into Jerusalem. They will hold him steady in front of Pilate and Herod, they will walk him under the weight of a cross up a hill and finally they will be nailed to that cross.

Mary gives him the only thing that she has to give him, out of love and gratitude. And in so doing, she predicts the events of the next two weeks of the church year for us. She reminds us that because he gave it for us, the life of Jesus is no longer his own. Because he gave it for us, the next time anyone touches his feet will be to wrap them in bands of cloths, swaddling cloths and lay him in the grave. The next time his disciples notice his feet they will be wounded but triumphant. They will have made that same trade that they made for Lazarus for us all. Mary anoints Jesus' feet to remind us of the road we walk with him for these next two weeks and the road he walked for our sake forever. Amen.

Lent 3 C; Luke 13:1-9

March 7, 2010

In today's gospel lesson, there is this large crowd around listening to Jesus and people are asking him questions, picking his brain because he is such a great teacher and seems to know about what God does and feels. So they ask about some people who were offering sacrifices, good people who were killed by Herod, executed by the state. They want to know if these people had secretly done something bad, something to offend God because their understanding was that bad things happen to bad people that any type of premature death, accident illness, public shame or trouble came from a person's sinfulness, it was punishment because they were not good or faithful enough.

And they tell him another story too, about these other people they were building a tower and it fell on them. Surely God did that, to punish them for something? Jesus? that is how God works right Jesus? Bad things happen to bad people, we might not know how but somehow they deserved, somewhere along the way they stepped out of line right?

And Jesus says NO. Unequivocally He says no and then he cautions them about such thinking. He says if you keep thinking like that the same thing could happen to you. The same thing could happen to you?!

Now we know from the bible the Jesus never called down any kind of wrath on people, even the ones who killed him so I think that there is more to this threat than telling people that if they don't walk to line the same thing will happen to them, in fact that doesn't even make sense because the first thing he says, his immediate answer is no, God doesn't punish people in ways like that. God created people for good. God looked out upon creation, people and all and said that it was very good. So why does he say repent, or the same thing could happen to you.

All that we can conclude then is that when he says the same thing will happen to you, He isn't talking about a tower falling but rather dying an empty death filled with fear and surrounded by doubt and shame, with people calling you sinner and an evildoer who got what was coming to you. Parents, children or spouses left behind feeling shame and fear for your and their eternal soul. And even before that, before death going through life feeling like each turn of bad luck was a sign that you weren't good enough. That you just weren't made of the right stuff. That you weren't created for good and that you'll never be able to do anything.

Jesus says turn around stop thinking right now. Stop thinking about life and about death like that. And start by stopping your thinking about God like that. He gets a little bit troubled here, like he is exasperated or maybe even hurt and so tells them a story, a parable about what God is really like.

The story goes like this:

There is this fig tree in a vineyard. Little fig tree, planted lovingly by The Gardener, tended by him, known and loved by him, he had watched its potential and probably had a good sense of what it was going to be capable of. He had watched it and nurtured it, it but it wans't doing very well, it put out leaves, sometimes it looked like it was going to bud. Like it was just about ready to start bearing fruit, contributing to the rest of the garden. But it didn't.

So a man came along, the guy who owned the vineyard, he didn't plant the vineyard and he didn't take care of the vineyard, he probably only had a lot to do with the vineyard when he wanted to and when he felt like it. But he thought it was his right to control what happened in it and in a way he was right. So he comes along and he says that useless tree is taking up so much space and energy in my vineyard and it isn't even giving anything back to me, it isn't even producing fruit, it is a useless tree at best and a wicked tree at worst. You see fig trees take an inordinate amount of water and nutrients, they can pull these things from the surrounding plants, in the case grape vines. They are harder to grow than other things but on the other hand because of that figs were more precious. Either way though this potentially good tree that was unproductive was actually a bit harmful to those around it. So the man ordered the gardener to pull it out and save the nutrients in the soil for something else.

But the gardener steps in and says no. I planted it, I have cared for it so far, I love it and I know what it can do. Let me keep being the one who tends it, but now you can even help, provide manure for it, some fertilizer, give it time and space, those things that it needs most. Leave the pruning and the culling to me.

The gardener, the one who put the tree there, the one who had to most right to get frustrated with the tree being useless and unproductive because he was responsible for all of those vines around it too. He steps in for it, He puts himself on the line for it, he could have lost his job over it and his honor, disobeying the master's orders, but he does so in order to save this one tree. To give one unproductive tree another chance and to help it succeed.

That is mercy and that is how God works, not only with the good perfect people who seem to be nothing but good for the people around them but for the broken ones too, the ones who seem useless at best and wicked at worst. And even for the middle of the ground ones, those people who try to be good in general, who are great sometimes for some people but who just don't quite achieve their optimum potential. Who mess up and fall short and lack what is needed a lot of the time.

Even for the unproductive parts in each of us and in our nations, homes and lives. God steps in. The parts that seem like we'll never quite be able to fix and get right. He steps in for those parts of the world. He stepped in, in the form of Jesus, against the plans and desires of those who thought that they owned the vineyard, who wanted and still want to make the choices about who gets to stay in the vineyard and who goes. And mercifully he called repent, believe that God is a God of mercy who will give his very life so that you might remain in the vineyard, cared for sheltered and bearing fruit. Repent because God is merciful and is calling to you, ready for you to bear good fruit. Amen

Epiphany 5 C; Luke 5:1-11

Dramatic Reading: Simon Is the Miraculous Catch!
I'm Simon, a fisherman, well that is what I'm trained to do, that is what my father did and his father before him. It is how we've feed the family for, well forever, for as long as anyone can remember. Yep, fish, all the time. Fish, fish, salted fish and more fish. Not just us really, our whole community is supported by fishermen. In the morning we all head down to the lakeshore, help each other with our boats and nets, spend a workday fishing, more or less together, in the same area anyway, that way we can help each other if anything goes wrong and let each other know if we find fish in a certain area. Lately fishing hasn't been great so that last part is really important, if no one catches fish no one eats. At least they don't eat much. And we are all pretty close, we even have members of our family in other boats, two of Zebedee's sons work for me, I used to help out an uncle. That kind of thing. So it matters to us that everyone have enough and like I say times have been lean.

Really lean, we're starting to feel it, I'm hungry all of the time. It is hard for everyone but there are a lot of people who live under my roof and I'm responsible for taking care of all of them. I have to go without so they can have something and what if even then it gets to the point that that isn't enough? Like a week or two ago my mother in law was been very sick we reserved food for her and everything and she still wasn't even getting any better there was nothing we could do. I hate feeling out of control like that, it is my job to take care of things. In fact, it was really lucky that some traveling rabbi, that is what we call people who teach about God, was staying with us (again with the lack of food, we wanted to take him in and it is really important to us show hospitality but I think he could tell that we weren't exactly flush). Anyway she should have been the one waiting on him and she wasn't so we had to explain that she was ill. Then he insisted that we take him to her, he took her hand and told her to feel better and just *poof* like that the fever was gone! Thank the Lord!

Needless to say, we scraped together a lot of food and let him stay as long as he wanted. Besides he is great to listen to, he has new things to say about God, things I've never heard before. I'm just a fisherman but I like to believe that I think deeply. I'm not an intellectual exactly but the things that he says make sense. He says that God doesn't want to just punish us all the time, that God is about life and living, about love and healing about something bigger and better than each of us and today. I like to think that. It makes me feel a little better about the lack of food.

Ah right, lack of food brings me back to my point, I'm sorry, so anyway, things have been sparse. More days than not lately it seems like we set out, we do everything right and instead of fish all we catch all day are old sandals and branches that tear little holes in our nets, cause the knots to come untied so they don't do any good and fish can swim right out. So each day we go down, we fish, some days we catch something, a lot lately we catch nothing. We even try longer than normal and still don't catch anything, then we pull all the boats out and have a nice time hollering back and forth and watching what goes on at the lakeshore while we mend and clean our nets.

That is actually what I was doing the other day when that rabbi that I was telling you about showed up at the shore, really he was kind of pushed to the shore by this huge crowd, turns out that I'm not the only one who hears something in what he has to say, everyday more and more people are listening to him. This time it was so many that he needed to get out away from them a ways so that they could all hear and see him. Needed, kind of a stage, so we put him up in my boat and took it off shore a few feet so he had a little space and they could all relax on the shore and listen.

After he was done he looked over to where we were preparing our catch, or where we would be preparing our catch if there had been much of anything between us and asked us to get in the boat with him and go out to the deep water and put our nets back down. By this time it was about midday and fishing is usually done by early in the morning, plus we were pretty sure there just weren't any fish nearby to catch and finally, this rabbi didn't seem to understand fishing because you don't fish in the deeps, that just isn't how it is done but he had done great things for us and we could tell that he was exhausted from all the teaching, crowds had been following him for days and he had been healing people left and right.

Honestly I didn't feel much like going home to my family to tell them one more time that there would be no fresh food on the table, no fish to take to the market, no celebrating with friends because once again we were all unable to provide for our families, so a little midday boat trip out to the middle of the lake was okay if he said so.

There was something else too, something about the way he asked us to do it. He used this word catch, I'm not sure how to describe it to you, that word in my language means something like sustain life or restore life. It makes sense, if you think about it, you have to have food to live and if the only food that you get comes from what you catch then your life is sustained by a catch. I thought maybe he just used this kind of awkward term because he was from out of town. They talk different where he is from. So he said take the boat out tot he deep water and put out the nets to restore and sustain life. OK

So out we went, down went the nets and all of a sudden there was a great pull on the nets, like nothing that I had ever seen or felt. They were full of fish and it happened fast, we couldn't even get the net ups ourselves so James and John came out to help and another boat or two. There were so may fish we felt like the boat was sinking. But I didn't feel like I was sinking, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my whole life I felt like I was going to be okay and not just me but the people I loved the most, my family, my friends, the people who worked for me, all the responsibility that I had held on my shoulders for so long from the time my own father had died and left me in charge of everything was lighter, I had help with it, there was hope in it, I felt alive even as seawater rushed around my feet and my little boat swayed from side to side, deeper under the waves, it was the best sinking feeling in the world!

And then all of a sudden I realized what it meant, this man wasn't just a rabbi, he was sent by God. I was completely unworthy of this feeling, it must have come from him, I took his power, I didn't deserve it. So I knelt down at his feet, I must have been crying I told him I was sorry that it was all a mistake that anyone sent by God would come to me. I needed to get him to the shore to get away from him because I was afraid but I was paralyzed because I didn't want to let go of the new life I had just found, and I wanted to be that person who brought new life to all those people. I had felt a catch, as he said, felt my life restored and sustained.

I wanted to keep feeling like there was more in the world than just me. And then I heard his voice, he called me by name. He told me not to be afraid and I felt like I was forgiven for being so unworthy. He told me that from NOW ON, not just today, not just this one time but from NOW ON I would be catching people. Finding them when they are in deep water and restoring their lives to them. Not just their lives but something more, it seemed like he was actually giving part of his life to them and he wanted me to help. When I got to the shore I left my boat and net for someone else who needed to learn how to fish and I followed Jesus the Rabbi!

And my life was sustained, thanks be to God. Amen

Lent 1 C; Luke 4:1-13

I Wonder as I Wander

Today is the first Sunday in Lent. We can say a few things about Lent. It is a season of darkness, we've just come from Christmas and epiphany, both joyful,bright seasons now we are in a season filled with many more valleys than mountain tops.

Lent is a season of self-denial, when we are called to live with less, maybe to remind us of what we have, maybe to remind us of what we have and have not done to deserve what we have. Maybe to remind us that what we have comes from God.

It is a time when we are told that we should fast, deny ourselves rich food, when we should repent, examine our sinful ways and return to the Lord. It is a time when we prepare for the painful story of Jesus' death on the on the cross.

Because of that part we often describe Lent as a journey where we travel to the cross. And it is a journey that starts in the wilderness. That is why in our gospel lesson today we find Jesus in the wilderness being tempted. During Lent we are meant to put ourselves in the midst of a wild place. And when you think of wilderness, don't think nice serene forest by a stream but a place filled with snares and dangers. I was recently talking to someone who was telling me about a snowmobile trip that he took where he had maybe ten miles of gas left in his tank, he was lost and he had been wandering so long that it was dark outside and the temp was steadily dropping to well below zero. That was terrifying wilderness.

Or living near the desert like I did for a while growing up, every year there a few stories of some hapless hikers who thought that they could make it through a day with no shade or shelter in the 110 degree sun and only one water bottle, who collapse or get lost from the trail. That is terrifying wilderness. Our text said that Jesus was famished he was tempted, he hadn't eaten or had any companionship for forty days. He was lead out by the Holy Spirit and tormented by the devil, that is terrifying wilderness. And that is where we are meant to begin our Lenten Journey.

So the next question, the obvious question if you really think about it is why? Why would the church which is apparently the instrument of God, who apparently loves us no matter what, want us to travel through this wilderness? I think that answer isn't that it wants us to travel through the terrifying wilderness but that it knows, God knows, that we already do.

Maybe not on schedule, maybe not always the 40 days before Easter. And maybe it doesn't look like you are picturing it, Freezing dark forest or scorching hot empty, dry desert. If it did you wouldn't go there. That is part of the problem it looks like nothing you'd ever know or even be able to avoid. It looks like a hospital waiting room. It looks like a lawyers' office, it looks like the principals office or the police station, it looks like your dining room table, it looks like your desk as work, it looks like the mortgage payment or the electric bill. Maybe it doesn't look like anything but it feels like your racing heart, your short breath, your empty home, your broken heart. All these things that feel like they could overwhelm us, just swallow us up. We don't label these things very often anymore but we could and if we did we could call them satan, evil, the devil in our lives. Our text does. And Jesus encounters them in it.

Jesus is baptized, he hears the voice of God say, this is my son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him. So immediately everyone around knows that he is the Son of God. And then before he has a chance to say or to do anything he is lead into the wilderness. And he stays there for forty days, being tempted and tested. It says he was hungry, he was powerless, he was broken and he is tempted to do all sorts of things to overcome that for himself but he doesn't, he waits it out, he calls on God and ignores the voice of evil. And once he is done he leaves he desert, and he can declare to all people that he has overcome evil.

That he has good news, that he is Good News that he is the son of God sent to be baptized like us, to walk through the wilderness like us, to live and die like us and in the midst of it all to overcome evil for us. He started with the wilderness, and then he got on the road to death. The text says that after tempting him satan departed from him until an opportune time. Well is that what it says? It actually says he departed from him until an opportune time. No one, even still, is sure what Luke meant when he wrote that. There is a good argument that Jesus is the one who departed until an opportune time.

I like that reading better. All that evil, all that brokenness, all that wilderness, Jesus left it until, well scripture tells us until Good Friday. Until the end of Lent, until he died and descended into Hell overcame evil once and for all and was resurrected to tell us about it. Death and the devil, endless wilderness were overcome for our sake. Jesus replaced the death that should come at the end of the deepest, coldest darkness with new life. Overcoming evil for all time. So that we are no longer alone in the wilderness, no longer left to be tormented by the evil one in our lives but rather walking with God, his rod and staff to comfort us, his hand to feed us, his arm to save us from our enemies and finally his love to let us rest in green pastures and beside still waters. Desert is transformed into meadow and pasture and wilderness is transformed to a place of life and refuge where we are reminded that we are never alone even when life wanders with us in its grasp.

That is why we wander in the wilderness during Lent. Lent, believe it or not actually means life, it means spring, the time when all growing things begin to come to life.

At the beginning of this little reflection I talked about what Lent is and why, it is a season that we strive to walk through the wilderness, that we live without, that we live in the darkness, maybe to remind us of our brokenness and need to return to God. But more than that to show us that because God has turned to us, walked through the wilderness for us, we can live through the wilderness. Lent is always a journey. But it is always a journey to Easter. To joy and new life in the living Lord Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Epiphany 3 C Luke 4:14-21

I've talked about money a lot this week to different poeple in different contexts but all in a professional setting, all in the role of pastor, all for the sake of the church on earth. That is never a comfortable thing to do in fact just starting my sermon out this way I can see a few people bristle just a little. It is uncomfortable to talk about money, especailly when the church is an organization that runs on donations and is therefore often in the uncomfortable position of asking for it, at least implicitly, at least by passing out offering envelopes, reporting budget shortfalls or passing the plate around. And believe me it makes me uncomfortable to talk about money I mean who I am to ask anyone to give anything to anyone else? And frankly it makes people unhappy, sometimes downright angry to hear someone else talk to them about their money, especially about using their money in a way that doesn't get them more money. It makes them mad.

But everyone can breath out now, I wasn't talking about money this week to try to fill a budget gap or increase overall giving and that isn't what I'm going to talk about now. I talked about money a lot this week in the same way that I talked about money a lot the month that Katrina hit New Orleans and the week that that the earthquake hit off the coast of Indoneasia causing a giant Tsunami that killed about 225,000 across about 15 countries. I talked about money this week in the same way that I talked about forgiveness and understanding the week of September 11th. I talked about money this week the same way that I talk about new life when someone dies. I talked about money this week the same way that I talk about thankfulness when someone is born.

I talked about money this week because people kept talking to me about the earthquake in Haiti, kept asking what God is doing. What is God doing to help those poor people and the answer is working at incredible rates to bring healing by using Christ's body on earth, us. Using our genorsity, our love, our prayers, our care, our concern, our excess, our abundance, our hearts. And one of the easiest ways for us to give all of that is by donation, hence all the talk of money. People in this country and in a lot of others are doing a great job of giving what they have and it always amazes me, no amazes isn't the right word, perhaps reminds me, that God is at work in the hearts of people when terrible things happen, using us to bring healing to our broken members. God is working through us, right now today, to bring healing to a broken people.

In the gospel lesson today Jesus takes a scroll, as if he were to pick up the bible and he flips through it and he finds a passage from Isaiah and he begins to read. A great passage, filled with hope for a dying people, a people exiled from their homeland, a people who had fallen to the armies of at least two other countries, a passage that promises release for the captive, sight for the blind, protection for those in danger and healing for the broken. Jesus choose that scripture to read. Read it and then sat down to teach the people. And he told the people that that scripture had been fufilled in their hearing. That Day, that day God's annointed was there to proclaim release to the captive, sight to blind and life to the dying.

People were with Jesus up to that point but as soon as he said that he kind of lost them. In fact he didn't just lose them, he made them angry. They were so angry that they ran him to a cliff side with the intention of throwing him off. I think it is safe to say that he offended them or worried them which is odd because as you hear what Jesus is saying, I've come to declare freedom to the captive, sight to the blind and healing to the broken it seems like pure good news, words of life. He is in his hometown here and we often blame that for the strange response but I think if that is the case they really overreacted. They still wouldn't have wanted to run him off a cliff. I think that perhaps their problem with what Jesus said was that it didn't sound like good news to them.

It was a text written for broken people, people with problems, people who had been driven out of their homeland, people who had lost entire generations to war and hunger, people who had incurred the wrath of God and needed to be let back into the promise of the gospel. They were not that kind of people and how dare Jesus, who was one of them, compare them!

This is why what Jesus was saying was radical and different and why it tended to insight such a strong angry reaction. People didn't have a sense that the suffering of someone else mattered to them. As long as they weren't suffering they were content to believe that they already had the favor of God. They believed a lot like Pat Robertson if any of you heard his appalling comments about Haiti, believing that when something bad happened it was a result of some wrong action by the party that it happened to. So in a way Jesus was telling them they were part of the bad things that were happening to other people.

Likewise, Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians that we read today that we are all part of one body. Each of us as Christian people, as people of God, are connected to each other. No escaping it he says, just like your eye can not suddenly declare itself a separate entity from your body and even if it does that doesn't actually make it separate, it doesn't make you stop needing your eye and it doesn't me the eye stop needing the you.

The way this plays out for us it means that if someone is hurt in some way because we are all part of one body in Christ we are all hurt and therefore all responsible for helping to heal the brokenness, just like if a part of your body is hurt your whole body works to compensate and to heal the hurt part. It could be in the case of those who sat around and listened to Jesus teach that the Lord's promise for healing, liberation and wholeness for all, made them think more about this responsibility for others and less about God's love for each of them as individuals.

You see the hard news about being part of a body of believers is that we are always part of the whole body of Christ in all things that that body experiences and it is always our duty to care for our other parts. That is what it means to be people of God. It doesn't always feel like good news. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable like when you ask where is God in terrible tragedy and you are told to look at what your own hands are doing in the midst of that tragedy.

But the flip side of that, the gospel part of it is that we are always part of the whole body. And that means that wherever we are, whatever is happening to us, with us or around us the rest of the body is still connected to us, still holding onto us, so knit together with us that

when we move it moves,

when we hurt it hurts

and when it comforts, we are comforted.

Nothing can ever seperate us from the whole body of Christ and therefore from Christ Himself. This is scary news, this is hard news, this is good news because it is life-giving news for us and for the whole body. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Epiphany 2 C John 2:1-11

In our gospel story today we hear about Jesus and his mother attending a wedding. a wedding feast really. In Jesus' time wedding feasts lasted for at least seven days. There were seven days of celebration with wine and feasting and most of the wine and food for the feast came from guests, for wedding presents a friend of the groom's family would provide wine for the feast. We don't really know why the wine ran out at this wedding, perhaps more people showed up than they thought would or the guests consumed more than usual. Perhaps the guests didn't give as much as was expected. Whatever happened the wine gave out and this was disgraceful for the father of the groom, for the groom himself, and for the whole family involved in the wedding. And it was worse than just a bad sign for the bride and groom. And in a time when community and connections were what defined a person this lack of wine that was supposed to be provided by friends, in short, made it look like they had no friends, like they were abandoned by their friends.

So, when the wine ran out Jesus' mother begged him to do something. Then she left the scene. She told the servants to do whatever Jesus told them to do (in faith that he would do something). And he did, he with seemingly little effort, transformed a great deal of plain water into wine he saved the celebration.

Up to this point in the gospel of John Jesus had not yet performed any miracles, at least none that we know of, no healing, no walking on water, nothing...So why this one? Turning some water into wine for a party seems kind of trivial. Kind of like a small thing for a first miracle, very much a human concern.

Something unique about this miracle, though, is how it is done. Jesus tells the servants to fill up several large clay jars with water. And so the servants went and filled these empty jars with water. Normal everyday water. In the area and time that Jesus lived in most of the water was unfit to drink. So the servants filled up the jars with water that was even unfit to drink.

Now we don't hear anything else about what happened in or with the jars except that suddenly there was wine to serve and it was good wine, great wine, wine fit to be served at the beginning of the celebration when the best wine is brought out. Through the power of the Holy Spirit the plain unfit water was transformed into the most fit wine.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit.

This sounds familiar to us because we profess the transformative power of baptism, claiming that great things will come simply from water and the Holy Spirit. We faithfully bring infants up here to the font and using water as a sign of God's love wash away the brokenness into which they were born and declare to them a new and transformed life in Christ.

At its core baptism is really an affirmation that through the love of Christ, through his baptism, death on the cross and resurrection we have already been transformed.

When I think about transformation and baptism I think of birth of a baby that happened here, very, very long ago. 150 years ago in fact, long before any of us were here.

I don't know many details, almost zero really, this happened to a family who long since moved on from Castleton but it was in the records, our record books were recently translated and computerized, a mostly straightforward job but in just a few places were little notes , extra information about a birth, baptism, wedding or funeral.

So we know a baby was born here back around 1860. But not just a normal baby, a baby born out of wedlock, a little bit of a scandal in present times but a punishable event 150 years ago when the note is from. At the very least a community could certainly shun a mother and child born under such circumstances. The could be kept out of churches and homes, left out of the community. And at least if you pushed away the family member who brought this shame you could be separated from it a little, keep your good name for the most part.

So the family, specifically the grandparents of the baby, heads of the family has a choice to make. And it had a lot to do with how they were going to handle something at church. Baptism. Baptism for a child in such circumstances wasn't a given. In fact in some churches it still isn't. They could have just stayed away and kept their shame from being very public. And so in the midst of what must have been some pretty intense family drama, as time grew close for the child to be born as they had to start sharing the news with people, as the pastor came to visit about how they would handle the whole thing publicly, Grandma and Grandpa had to do some soul searching while their daughter waited in fear, standing to lose the only family she had and with a very difficult road ahead of her.

Wondering if they would distance themselves from their shame and her? If they would publicly reprimand their own daughter and not claim their grandchild? Wondering if she had locked herself and her new baby son out of their love and God's forever.

It came time for the baby to be baptized.

So there on a delicate old baptism page in our book, written in old german, barely legible is a little group of words after the mother's name and in place of a father's name. It is written in the handwriting of the pastor but the words didn't come from the pastor alone.

It says:

though the child has no father, it is the desire of his grandparents, mother and father to his mother that the record show that he is welcomed into the family and into God's family with love and forgiveness. And his mother is held in that same love.

The family came to the conclusion when it came time to baptize that God's Love wins out over all. But they didn't stop there, they had a note entered, one of a handful over the nearly two century history of this church, pretty rare. And a tiny note but one that, because baptism was an issue, affirms for all the world now and ever, love and forgiveness and we have to assume healing:

The wanted the world to know that despite all the circumstances this child is welcomed with love into our family and the family of God.

This transformational love is the promise of the gospel, the reason for Jesus' acts of power and mercy and it is what we proclaim in each baptism that we perform and in every child of God that we welcome in the name of Christ.

Because of the promise of their own baptisms a community of God was able to welcome a child born in shame and because of the declaration of God's love in his baptism this little child, forgotten by history now, unable to talk, walk or even hold his own head up yet had spread the good news of God's love and forgiveness to his grandmother and grandfather, aunts, uncles, his entire church.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit.

Turning water into wine seems like a funny miracle to mark the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. No one's life depended on it, no one in the affected family even asked Jesus to be involved. It was a family problem with, hopefully, a family solution. But that is what makes this the perfect first act in Jesus' ministry. The family didn't somehow try to make it worth Jesus' while to provide for them. They didn't have to prove themselves, Jesus saw that they were in crisis, that their relationships were in question and with great mercy he shared God's grace with them.

Jesus' ministry was defined by transforming peoples lives through the gospel, by healing the sick and calling the faithful. This is the continued ministry of the church today, of us here at Trinity and of all children of God. To spread the free gift of transformation in the form of water and the Holy Spirit.

How great it is to know that whatever our concerns, be they great or small, whether they seem trivial or earth shattering we are loved and blessed by the Lord who was concerned with an everyday wedding feast and the birth of a child out of wedlock.

Surely this same Lord is concerned with each of us, with our joy, pain, fear, hopes, gifts and dreams. How great to know that because of this concern we have already been transformed into beautiful, sparkling, worthy children of God who were welcomed at the font and who will be welcomed at the great high feast.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit

Thanks be to God
Amen

Advent 4 C Luke 1:39-55

Several years ago as a student in seminary in California. I climbed into a 15 passenger van with another adult and 13 teenagers and joined in a caravan with two other similar vans filled with all kinds of sleeping bags, water, snacks and pulling trailers filled with building supplies. We drove through the beautiful hills of Northern California, past sprawling vineyards with huge mansions overlooking valleys that look like they came out of someone's dreams. Through Los Angeles with its brights lights and people feeling so entitled that they jog in $200 workout suits in the midddle of the street, past Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm, through San Diego where the beaches look like they are pulled straight out of the movies, across the border into Mexico. First into the touristy parts of Mexico, the parts where Californians go to spend time and money, then the parts where real Mexicans shop and eat and then breathtakingly quickly into the slums. Into a neighborhood where stray dogs wander around looking like skeletons and people live in kind of permanent lean-tos made of whatever they have to make them out of, mostly trash from up north, from Americans, old garage doors are very popular because they are big enough to make whole walls with.

We were there to build houses for two families. We had collected money and building materials for a year and these kids were using their spring break and when we got there the slum stretched as far as the eye could see in any direction. Two houses, two simple 12ft by 12ft rooms really that whole families from grandma on down would live in seemed tiny all of a sudden compared to all of the need and pain and dirt and sickness that we could see.

But we had come so we started to build, our work was magnified you might say, made bigger and more useful by some well trained volunteers who lived in this place year round, and some local laborers who donated their time. My group built for a family, headed by grandma, with three adult women and three little kids (dads travelled around to find work)...we would build our twelve by twevle room for them, with windows to the outside but no internal walls and they would use it as living space and still cook and at least some of them sleep in the hobbled together shack that was already on their tiny little piece of land. I remember being up on the roof sweating with the kids as we nailed shingles down thinking how badly I could use some water, it was HOT there and seeing grnadma, tiny old woman lugging two huge jugs of water into her home and refusing the offer of help from one of our group. Off and on while we were there I saw her doing similar things, certain stuff she just wouldn't take help with.

After about four days we finished the house, it was tiny but tidy and sound and we were proud and amazed at what God had done for us and what we had done for God, maybe a little too proud of ourselves really. And we were going to the house the last morning to do a little service of blessing, I worked with some of the kids who knew a little spanish and together we patched together a little prayer service with very pretty carefully choosen words. To thank God for this house that God had built with our hands.

But when we got there for the service grandma had other plans, she had made food for us and found chairs for us all to sit in, i guess he had borrowed from neighbors. All the water and other thigs that she was carrying in and wouldn't take help with had been to make us a feast of thanksgiving, down to the water that she had had to pay for because though the locals could drink it, the water there wasn't safe for us to drink. So carefully she had prepared a meal that was safe for us and must have cost her quite a lot and as we prepared to eat she waited patiently as we did our little prayer service and then she said she wanted to say a prayer. It was short and in spanish. My spanish wasn't great then and is even worse now but I remember what she said was basically translated to mean: Let us thank God because with you he has made my heart and soul very, very full.

Nothing we could have said would have been a better pray, I thank God because with you he has made my heart very, very full, we heard sitting in an empty room that would be a whole house, in the slums, where people lived on the trash from our country, looking at a tiny grandma who the world couldn't see, would never see because she was just to small to matter to anyone but God and because of that to us. And she prayed for us because God had made her heart very, very full.

In the gospel lesson today after being told that she will be mother to the messiah in the form of a little baby Jesus, a terrifying task, Mary says: My soul magnifies the Lord. This song from Mary is called the magnificat, a latin word that comes from the word that she uses for what her soul does, it magnifies the lord. We don't use the word magnify like this very often in fact we almost only use it now when referring to science and technology microscopes, magnify things, tiny things, things that we would never see otherwise to make them life size, even large, there are huge TV screens in some labs where tiny, imperceptible things, things that would never be seen by the untrained eye, are magnified and then projected up so that everyone can see them on huge people sized screens. Magnification makes tiny things, that would be completely missed, into full pictures, in some cases very, very full just so they can be seen.

Magnify isn't a word that we use a lot to describe what we do or who we are or what it means to be Christian but isn't it really just what we do? Lift up, magnify, the little ones, as Jesus calls them, those who would otherwise be left completely out, not even noticed by the untrained eye?

In fact our job is to look in places that other people might never bother to look and to magnify the Lord by lifting up those we find there.

For Mary I suppose this worked both ways, she was at once very small herself, a young unmarried peasant woman, without a lot of money or an important name, just a girl by all accounts and yet when she got the crazy news that she would give birth to the messiah instead of running to hide or going to the temple, which was in certain ways like a palace and demanding special treatment or rejecting the whole thing and trying to come up with a plan to save her own butt, she welcomed God's son, a tiny baby, just like her, just a boy, who would not even have been seen by the untrained eye. And she sang praises to God for all of it, magnifying His amazing race with her very full heart and soul.

One the other hand God magnified Mary's soul through the words of the messenger sent to her to announce the Good News, through her cousin Elizabeth, through the baby John, still in the womb but a prophet who leapt for joy at her arrival, through Joseph who took her in and loved and cared for her despite his doubts, through kings and wisemen, shepherds and lowly cattle herds. Mary was lifted and held up, She might have gotten the song that she sang wrong, in fact, when she said her soul magnifies the Lord because I think that the Lord and all the faithful servants magnified her soul.

Or maybe it worked both ways. Maybe it still does, our souls, our little faith that would't even be seen by the untrained eye is magnified in the community of the faithful and by Christ living amoung us and then we in turn sing praises and remember the great good that has been done for us in God's name from a cookie after service to miraculous birth death and resurrection of God's only son for us and our hearts magnify the Lord right back for all to see and empower us to fill the hearts and souls of others with God's love. This is great good news. Thanks be to God. Amen!