A message about quirky angles and being God's favorite

Luke 1:26-38

"Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you" (v. 28)

Isaiah 43:1-7

"When you pass through the waters I will be with you, and throught he rivers, they shall not overwhelm you...because you are precious in my sight and honored and I love you." (v. 2, 4)

At the beginning of creation, according to the Genesis story, the cosmos was a dark, empty void until God began to put things to order.   First, there’s light, then seas, then earth, and plants and creatures, and at the end of each day, God took stock and nodded affirmatively: “this was good.”  Finally, a human was created and God stretched in delight and said, “Oh yes. This time, it’s not just good.  It’s really good.”

But then, God says, “wait!! Something is not good here.”

The ancient story explains that after unsuccessful attempts to befriend the animals, the first human had grown terribly lonely. Upon realizing this, God reflected and said, “ahh, this is not good. It’s not good for them to be alone.” 

And out of this first human, God disentangled a help-mate, carved out a partner, sussed out a friend and made two people.  The Hebrew language explains that this person is a counterpart to another and the one to stand opposite. They are the one who won’t turn away when others do. They are someone to challenge you, listen to you, and be with you.  

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There’s an old midrash that imagines that at the end of these humans’ first day in Eden, as the dusk crept in and then darkness began to fall, Adam (human #1) starts to grow alarmed. As the sunlight fades and shadows descend, he starts to panic and then cry in desperation. Eve (human #2) hears him and comes to him. They sit there together weeping through the night convinced it must be the end of the world.  As the endless hours creep by, they are astonished, finally, to see the horizon come into focus and then the dawn brighten as the light returns.  The ancient story says that they learn two things that night:

1. The natural rhythm of the world is that of darkness to light and to darkness to light, and around and around, and so on.

2. They learn to ask: “Who will sit with you and weep with you and worry with you in the night?  Who will challenge you and help you imagine? Who will be with you? (1)

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I want you to hold this story and these questions as we turn to our gospel story today which takes place in ancient Nazareth, with a young woman named Mary, and a visit from the angel, Gabriel.  

Any time an angel steps into a story you know that things are about to go a little outré and Gabriel does not disappoint. He skips straight into left field with his report that Mary shall bear a child and his name shall be Jesus.  (Honestly, this had to have been terrible news.  She’s an young, unwed, woman and this is about to get very complicated for both her and her fiancée, Joseph.)  As she takes it in, I imagine the sun beginning to set. As night descends around her, does she wonder:

Who will sit with her? 
who will weep with her? 
who will worry with her?  
Who will be with her?

Maybe Gabe stayed for hours with Mary trying to help her understand the details, the story doesn’t say. To his credit, Gabriel does entertain a couple of Mary’s questions which is more than I can say for his last earthly visit to the mortal, Zachariah, who he struck dumb for trying to clarify a few things. 

As Gabriel starts wrapping it up and preparing to leave, I imagine Mary standing there with her eyes wide. She wrings her hands as she watches him pack up his scrolls. He test-flaps his wings a few times, and glances over at her desperate face. 

“All right, look” he says adjusting his halo. “I know this news is tough. Crazy even.  I don’t write the storyline, I just deliver the messages.”

“But,” and he hops on the windowsill preparing to take off, “let me remind you of this:” He pulls a shining nugget out of his robe pocket and places it in Mary’s palm. 

“Remember, you are highly favored. (verse 28a). 

Remember God is with you (verse 28b). 
Remember, you’re highly favored (verse 31).”  

And with that he takes off.  As he swoops out into the night, he looks back, cups his hands around his mouth and shouts:  “Did I tell you you’re highly favored?! Blessed! Loved! Precious in God’s sight?! Don’t forget it!” His voice echos in the night as he swoops off like a Marvel character.

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If I were to write a job description for angels, or perhaps just Gabriel, it would be something like this:

1. Shock mortals with sensational news. Use whatever means necessary, burning bushes, choirs of heavenly hosts singing gloria in excelsis deo, rolling stones away, etc. Whatever it takes.
   
   
2.  Remind mortals not to be afraid. Expect them to constantly freak out and think the world is ending. Tell them: don’t be afraid, rinse and repeat, don’t be afraid…
   
   
3. Push mortals to get creative. Have fun with it!  (ie. how do you baptize an Ethiopian man in the desert with no water?) 
   
   
4. Throw mortals into the boxing ring when their ethics are questionable (ie, wrestle with Jacob until he cries uncle, admits to his sneaky ways, and agrees to meet with his twin brother Esau).
   
   
5. Force mortals to hang out with people who are not like minded because it’s good for them (ie. make the fancy-pants Cornelius, invite the blue collar Apostle Peter over for dinner).
   
   
6. Show mortals obvious things that help them out of binds (ie. when Hagar, is parched and withering out there in the desert, point out the well that she’s leaning against that is full of water
   
   
7. Finally, remind mortals they are favored, beloved, precious in God’s sight, etc. etc. Loop that as many times as necessary (like, a bazillion times).

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Angels remind people they are a blessing and that they matter. Their presence clears the air. Their words inspire strength. Their challenges force growth. Their message calls folks to imagine new things.

And here’s the thing: It’s not only are the angels who are imbued with these sacred purposes and callings. All of us are.  

I can stand up here and remind you that you’re a blessing.  You can hear how the angels did this in scripture.  And also, you can do this for each other.  For it is not good for us to be alone.

Gabriel effectively passed the baton to Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, in this story.  After this news descends on Mary and the shadows lengthen, she seeks out an earthly angel to support her: her cousin Elizabeth who showers her with encouragement and support. Elizabeth takes one look at Mary after she comes running to visit and exclaims, “Blessed are you!” (Well done, Elizabeth.) Mary stays for three months and I’m pretty sure Elizabeth reminded her of this Good News every morning and especially every evening as the sun began to set. 

We are meant to be good to each other.   When shadows lengthen in the garden and darkness falls, we need each other. We are meant to sit with one another, weep together and worry with each other in the night. We are meant to channel our inner angels: To remind each other of our blessedness and to lift one another’s spirits. 

If you happen to be feeling pretty certain of your blessedness today, for heaven’s sake, go and find someone else who needs to hear of their own beloveness and tell them, because I promise you, someone needs to hear it. (This world is ruthless.) Let that person who needs to hear your words of blessing pull you out of the trap of thinking only of yourself and your problems and your issues. Go and sit with them in the garden as night falls. Tell them with words. Show them with listening. Tell them by bringing a casserole. Show them by hanging out with them, or checking up on them, or encouraging them, or donating blood for them in the basement after church today. Show them by supporting their housing costs to live here at church.  Remind them: you are a blessing.

And then, receive that Good News from someone.  For you, too, are a blessing. 

And then, remind the next person, 
and receive it from the next, 
and bless the one after, 
and receive from the next, 
and give it 
and receive it, 
and round and round, 
on and on, 
as the sun rises and sets, 
grace upon grace, 
Word made flesh.

(I) I first heard of this Mirash from Rabbi Sharon Braus

Holding on to Hope: A message for dear P. on this occasion of your baptism

Mark 13:1-8 

Our story today begins in the midst of desolation.  

In the year 70, the Romans torched the temple in Jerusalem. Really, it’s staggering how they pulled off such a level of destruction. Herod the great (father of Herod Antipas—the one who features in the Passion story) had started extensive renovations on the temple before Jesus was born. Herod envisioned that the temple would be both a house of prayer for folks from all over and also a tourist attraction. Mission accomplished as the temple was spectacular. The outside of it was covered in gold plates and it was said that at sunrise, the gleaming reflection was like the very sun itself.  

The temple was built of massive stone blocks that weighed many tons each.  The prophet Haggi recorded that stone upon stone the temple had once been rebuilt after the exiled Jews returned from Babylonia.  Generations later, Jesus prophesied that not a stone upon a stone would remain. By the time St. Mark would record Jesus’ words a lifetime later, the beautiful city, and temple with it, would be destroyed.  

The gospel of Mark was written after this destruction—or maybe even during it.  It may have been that Mark himself lived in Rome. Several decades after the death of Jesus, the emperor Nero had assumed the throne of the Roman empire. History remembers the Nero as a maniac and as a selfish and tyrannical ruler. Roman senators described him as greedy and debaucherous. Under his rule, chaos was rampant with massacrers, violence and destruction.

When the city of Jerusalem was overtaken by the Roman armies around the year 70, the temple was looted, ignited, and destroyed.  On the other side of the sea, Rome itself was on fire. The stench of death was in the air; and, in the middle of all of this, Christians recorded the story of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. 

When Mark wrote this gospel, it must have been as if the old, steady and trusted world was vanishing before everyone’s very eyes and as they squinted into the future, they couldn’t quite see the shape of what was coming at them. Whatever it was, seemed like a threat. (1)

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Have you ever felt like you can’t wrap your head around what is unfolding? It’s as though reality doesn’t match your expectations.  “Things,” you say to yourself, “were not supposed to be this way.“

Maybe it’s meta—like we see in the gospel of Mark—and as you watch the story of a people, a culture, and a nation unfolding, it makes you gasp for air.

Or, maybe it’s personal: How could your family struggle like this? Or, you weren’t supposed to feel so alone or blindsided. Or, how could you have been rejected like that or have failed before you even got your foot in the door? 

Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. As you try to wrap your head around it all, it’s like you’re grasping at sand.

Six hundred years before Christ, the prophet Jeremiah wrote:

I looked on the earth, and it was complete chaos,
    and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and they were quaking,
    and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and there was no one at all,
    and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert,
    and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord

The gospel of Mark feels these words of Jeremiah deep in its’ bones and takes us right into the unsteady middle of it. In Mark, we’re plopped right into the rubble and the pain where we find ourselves sitting with our head in our hands. The community that wrote this gospel story down tells it from the bleakest of places and we have to transport ourselves there and listen from a place of our own bleakness. Or, if we’re not desperate ourselves, we must listen to the story right alongside the one who is barely hanging on.

Listening carefully, we recognize that old story of Jesus. It is a spark that glows deep down in the fractures of our hearts, the watery shadows of our souls, and in the ripped social fabric around us.  

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I wish I knew more about those early Christian communities that recorded this gospel. What were those people like? You know, the ones that kindled that spark in the shadowiest of times? We have the letters that Paul wrote to some of them which offer some clues about the type lives they tried to lead. In one of those letters, Paul counseled them: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you look to the interests of the others.

The letters and gospel stories of these very, very early Christians survive them. We know that these folks were tenacious people and imperfect. We know that they weren’t so powerful by worldly standards, but we know that they tried to walk in the way of love.

How did that spark burn, in such times of desolation?

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In June of 2020, a colleague of mine, Ingrid, who pastors a church in North Minneapolis told a story of a man named Brian Dragonfly.  Brian approached her in the days of unrest in North Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd.  He was an employee of the indigenous organization MIGIZI that had a building across the alley from the church and the day he came to her, he carried a lantern that was lit with fire.  MIGIZI, had recently finished constructing their new building. Luckily, it survived the first night of unrest in North Minneapolis. But, the second night, in spite of so much goodwill and effort, no one could stop the fire from spreading to MIGIZI’s building and it burned. The structure--and much of what was inside--was destroyed.  

When Brian had arrived that morning at the site he found the fire still smoldering. Standing there, he told Pastor Ingrid, “I decided to capture the fire,” and he held up his flickering lantern.  He asked her if the congregation might help them tend the fire and keep it until they could rebuild.  He thought that the fire might bring some comfort to his community.  Ingrid dipped a candle into the lantern and later wrote of the conversation and hope they shared: that out of this ashy moment there might someday be an opportunity for new life. 

It was as if the old world, the one they trusted was vanishing before their very eyes. And they couldn’t quite see the shape of what was coming at them, It seemed like a threat. How could they hold out hope for new life?

“We will tend the fire with you,” Pastor Ingrid said.

The prophet Isaiah wrote:

“do not remember the former things 
nor consider the things of old. 
I am about to do a new thing; 
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” 

Then Jesus said,  
nation will rise against nation, 
and kingdom against kingdom; 
there will be earthquakes in various places; 
there will be famines. 
This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

Where there is loss, there is a promise of restoration. Where there is death, there are birth pangs, and the promise of new life. And as we walk towards life and salvation, we tend the flame that sparks in even the shadowiest corners; and somehow in that shadow, God is mysteriously with us. Tending the flame and holding on to hope, albeit with our laments and griefs and struggles on our lips, is part of who we are as people of faith.

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Ancient baptism, and baptism today, was the initiation into a community that proclaims the way (John 14:6), and the path to a better world. Something about this way seems unexpected and reversed. While it might seem like force or domination should win, in this way of Jesus, love has the final say.  It is a way that is characterized not by power over, but power alongside.

Hannah sang of reversal in her song we heard today when she proclaimed that the bows of the mighty might be broken to pieces, that those who have stumbled might be now strong. 

Mary riffed on Hannah’s song generations later and sang of this God who cast the mighty down from their thrones, who filled the bellies of the hungry with good things. 

Baptism brought folks and brings folks formally into a community that proclaims this Way characterized by mercy, generosity, companionship and love. The way can be tough and when the night seems endless, we keep our eyes set on the long view of God’s shalom.  We witness with hope to love that struggles to be born in our midst and, you better believe we hold the flame close.

To P., and all our youth that are gathered here around you on this very special day:  I wish I could promise you that everything in your life is going to be okay.  I wish I could tell you that the good and honorable people will always win, and that hatred and division will cease to be. I wish I could soften hardened hearts and eliminate all the bombs and machines of war and greed and selfishness with the snap of my fingers. I wish I could tell you that life with your family will always be easy and that our society will always work together to seek out the collective good.  I wish I could tell you that all of your friends, especially the nerd kids, the queer kids, the awkward kids, and the worried kids, that they’re all going to be okay. I wish I could snuff out anything that might cause you despair or hopelessness or anguish. I wish I could make sure your hearts will never break on this mysterious journey of life that we are on.  

But I can’t.  

The truth is that in this life, P., and all of you, there will be moments that unfold that make you feel unsteady. There will be times of profound disappointment. At times, you’ll feel afraid.  There will be durations where it feels like the world as you know it is vanishing  and the future before you is unclear. 

But just like the prophets before us, just like Jesus and the ancestors of our faith who wrestled for that blessing, we will hold onto that promise that God will make all things new and that God will wipe every tear from our eyes (Rev.21:4). That God will be with us, just as sure as the morning sun rises and just as true as God is here with us right now.

The path and the pattern of Jesus is never promised to be easy, but it is true. And as we walk—whether in the wilderness or the promised land--we will practice the way of generosity, forgiveness, compassion and love and we will reach for a world where all people are cherished—in fact, we will create it.

Our story begins in the midst of desolation.
Our story begins when we turn towards each other.
Our story begins as we step out together in God’s love.

(1) I have heard Walter Bruggeman speak about this idea. He also explores it in his book "The Prophetic Imagination."

Unsettling Tenderness

Acts 10

In my last pastor job before I came to Luther Memorial, I coordinated a young adult international service program through the Lutheran church that was based in Mexico City.  In this position, we lived in Mexico City and we placed young adults in social service agencies for a year of service. We were always on the lookout for new placement sites and over time, we formed relationships with a couple of great shelters for migrants where our volunteers served.  

Given the nature of things around 10-12 years ago, immigration was becoming an increasingly contentious and politicized issue.  The more our young adult volunteers learned about it, the more fired up they became; and their newsletters home to their sponsoring communities began to show it.  Not all the sponsoring congregations shared the same passion for immigration that these young people did.  In some cases, both sides dug their heels in.  

Each winter, Omar and I traveled with the young adults up from Mexico City to the US/Mexico border for a week long retreat.  We stayed in Tucson and spent time on both sides of the border learning about things.  We met with non-profits, churches, and public defenders.  We also met with the DEA and the Border Patrol.  Before meeting with a group we might be quite ideologically different from, and particularly when we went into the actual the border patrol station and detention facility, I would gather my group around me and say, “Look, you may walk into this place with strong opinions, but we are here to learn and we must be open-hearted and respectful.” And they were. (if you know me, you’ll know I was saying this as much to myself as to them).

On one hand, the border patrol agents were what our group expected: they supported the policies and procedures that our young people thought were oppressive.  But what always caught our group off guard was realizing that many of these folks were often profoundly compassionate and had saved more lives of people dying of dehydration than any of the rest of us and that they had all recovered countless bodies in the desert.  

What also caught our group off guard was that these agents were folks with families, making an honest living, coaching sports, going to PTA meetings. One year, I remember, we met with an agent who was single mom who told me, as we walked through the parking lot, that she had a teenage child who was struggling in high school.

Sure, we learned about border policies (and believe me, it was always eye-opining), but it was also a structured encounter with someone with a very different perspective and we would often leave with this unsettling tenderness for the person we had been with. 

Last week, I shared with you the story of the ancient pilgrimage ritual that people would participate in where they would climb the steps to the temple complex in Jerusalem and, after entering the doors, turn to the right and begin to process around the entire temple complex counterclockwise. 

After processing around, folks would then exit close to where they had entered.    Last week, I told you about the twist in the ancient writings: that if you happened to be a person who was suffering: a person who had experienced something awful, someone who was brokenhearted or in pain, you would walk through those same porticos, but instead of turning right with the masses, you would turn to the left and then process. As you walked against the current, people would meet you; and each person who passed would ask, “what happened?” And you would tell them of your worry or your pain and then receive their comfort and specifically, their blessing. 

There is another group mentioned in that text. Another group that must turn to the left with the broken and bereaved, the lost and the lonely, and walk against the current. That was the socially ostracized.  

Our world is so different to the world 2,000 ago.  At the time this Mishna was written, the “ostracized person” was considered to have endangered the community in word or action. They had to physically distance themselves from the rest of the community by 6 feet. Sharon Braus suggests that a contemporary analogy might be a person who is incarcerated here in our society today.

If you can let your imaginations zoom out a little to consider this gap between yourself and some other person who might be on the other side of The Breach: Some of us here in this room have experienced the cracking of our times. Maybe all of us have. we know folks who have different perspectives on science. People who have fractured with family members or friends.  In our congregation here, we have some level of ideological diversity and some occasional irritation with each other around a few things that are political, but we find our forward.  Sometimes, we even talk about it.  

But zooming out to folks who aren’t quite as homogenous we typically are, more and more, as we dig our heels in we see folks with different positions as not only impossible to understand but morally repugnant.

We do not want to bump into each other in the sacred circle.  Let alone bestow any unnecessary blessings…

First, we mark a boundary around how we’re different. Next, folks become ideological foes. Then, folks become existential threats. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, centuries ago, that “It's not hard work to distance yourself from another person. The real work is to draw him close and lift him up.”

In our bible reading from Acts today, you had two people, Peter and Cornelius, who were very different people. Peter was a Jew, from the working class, and observed certain customs and rituals that defined him.  He was a Jesus follower and had been in that room on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit had rushed in like a mighty wind and ignited tongues of fire on the heads of those gathered.

Cornelius was a gentile. He was a man of financial means, a military captain, and a man of great power and wealth. The two men were—by many measures—profoundly different.  

Peter has long standing boundaries that have been internalized since childhood. Yes, there are the dietary laws, customs, purity rituals, But there are also ideological differences.  Peter has experienced the ruling class to be oppressive.  Cornelius, however, has benefited from his status in society.  Though these two men are geographically close, in many ways, Peter and Cornelius are worlds apart and probably each comfortable in their group. On one hand, this isn’t a bad thing. We find meaning together and purpose, and a sense of belonging in our groups. But, the stronger those internal bonds are, the weaker the bonds can be to folks outside of our group.  

In the case of Peter and Cornelius, God steps in and orchestrates this meeting between them.  The bible story doesn’t detail their conversation but something in them certainly shifts and Peter famously realizes and then says that, “God shows no partiality.”  

As the story concludes, the Holy Spirit rushes in again and falls upon Cornelius and all the and the church begins to burst out into the world.  

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In that temple processional ritual, The ancients had a ritualized way of encountering one another that illustrated that we are bound up together.  All the folks entered into that holy temple. Everyone entered at the same gate.  Everyone circled.  And when people encountered each other, even those who ostracized or deemed to be a social hazard, people asked them, “what happened?” And all of them were blessed.

When I stood with my young adults in the parking lot out side of the border patrol station in the blazing Arizona sun, I said to them, “You can have your opinions. You can have your feelings. I’m not asking you to surrender them or even compromise. But we are here to learn. We are safe here and we are here to be curious.”

Many folks have said that curiosity is the birthplace of compassion. Research has shown that our stereotypes about people actually reinforce neural patterns in our brains.  We have these engrained neural paths in our thinking. When you are genuinely curious about a person you may hold a deep stereotype about that is like neurological off-roading in our brain because you are pushing off of those established pathways. Sharon Braus says that we “Need a spiritual rewiring that helps us see one another in our pain, fear, joy, yearning, humanity.”  

Thinking of that ancient pilgrimage circle, one rabbi reflected that “the hearts of the ostracized are blessed so that that he hearts of the community might open to them. So that the community might understand their anguish.”  So that everyone might understand.

This kind of vulnerable, open-hearted engagement is counter instinctual.  We are actually not wired this way. I’m not saying that each adversary is righteous.  But I am saying that we long for healed hearts and a healed world and that means there must be space for all of us. As St. Peter said there, face to face with his foe, Cornelius, “God shows no partiality.” God loves us all.

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Omar and I took groups back to that border station several times over the years we lived in Mexico.  By the time our last year rolled around and I reached out for a meeting for my group, I was told that they were no longer making appointments with community groups. And no, we were no longer welcome to visit the border patrol station.

It is not easy to find this kind of encounter. Maybe it’s easier for you than it is for me. Ideological bubbles are real, though we can challenge our stereotypes. We can also subtly train heart muscles, we can quietly fine-tune our ability to love, through small habits and practices that we repeat. We can train ourselves to see holiness in the random people we encounter in a day. In the grocery store, at the stoplight. We can open ourselves to curiosity and seek to learn about folks who are different from us. 

The rebuilding of our broken world—in fact, the redemption of creation--begins between you and me. Between you and the person bumping into you in the circle. It happens one relationship at a time. And, there is room for all of us.

A sermon on ancient rituals, evolution, and bumping into each other

A few weeks ago, I ran across an ancient legal text that was referenced in a book I was reading. It was captivating (I know, legal texts are often captivating. There’s nothing quite like settling down in the evening with a nice cup of tea to read a cell phone contract or HIPPA disclosure…)

This particular ancient rabbinic legal teaching from 2,000 years ago spelled out the details of a particular Jewish pilgrimage ritual.  

As the story goes, thousands of years ago, folks would travel to the temple in Jerusalem.  If they were to travel for one of the big religious festivals, they would be in the company of hundreds of thousands of people and the city would be uniquely alive with celebration.  Imagine, in this case, a pilgrim arrives in the city and eventually heads to the temple mount.  They would climb this grand staircase, pass through an arched entrance with elaborate, decorated porticos and stunning ceilings.   We may not think of it this way, but the temple complex was very big--probably over 35 acres in size.

Upon entering, the crowd would flow into something like the courtyard, and the people were to turn to the right and begin a processional around the entire temple complex counterclockwise.   (This would keep everyone moving in sync: ancient crowd control at it’s finest!) After processing around, folks would then exit close to where they had entered.    

But there was a twist, the text goes on. If you happened to be a person who was suffering, a person who had experienced something awful, someone who was brokenhearted, or in pain, then you would walk through those same porticos, but instead of turning right with the masses, you would turn to the left and then process. As you walked against the current, people would meet you; and each person who passed would ask, “what happened?” 

You can imagine the counter-current folks answering things like: “I lost my sibling, I miss her so much.” Or, “my wife left me.” Or, “the doctor called with bad news.” Or “my kid isn’t doing well and I’m worried.” Or “I just feel so lost—I can’t seem to find my way.”  

Folks would look into the eyes of the broken and bereaved, the lost and the lonely and, according to this legal mandate, they would say, “may God comfort you.” Perhaps, they would add more to their conversation and say things like, “may you know the love of this community that surrounds you.”

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There is something profoundly insightful in this ancient wisdom.  Rabbi Sharon Braus explores it as she explains this ancient ritual. How many times have you experienced some sort of grief or pain or suffering and really, what you want to be able to do is hole up or retreat and not tell anyone about it?

After all, what is there to say when the one you love is in hospice hovering between life and death? What is there to say, when you feel lost and trapped and it takes all the energy you have just to get up each morning? 

According to the ancients, you entered this sacred circle knowing that you would be cared for and seen and loved.   In this pattern, one person’s humility and brokenness bumps into another person’s love. One person’s vulnerability bumps into another’s person’s sacred responsibility to care for them. Both sides show up in the sacred circle.

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Now, let’s fast forward a couple of millennia: Charles Darwin was beginning to explore the mystery of science.  While Darwin was at odds with traditional, literal views of creation, something about him was impressively in sync with these ancient rabbis.  He wrote that sympathy (what we would today be called altruism, empathy or compassion) is our strongest instinct. He wrote that sometimes this instinct is even stronger than self- interest.  

Think about this: our human babies are very dependent on us. They are born very early compared to other animals.  Chimpanzees can sit up when they’re born. Horses can stand.  Our babies are so physically vulnerable and if we don’t take care of them, they won’t survive. Over time, our need to care for them has rewired us toward compassion.  Our need to nurture our babies and children has actually formed our brains and rearranged our nervous systems towards caretaking. 

Neuroscientists show that if I see you stub your toe, the pain center of my brain will light up. I actually feel your pain—ouch!--and I wince. There’s also a deeper, older part of our nervous system that lights up way down in the center of our brain that is associated with nurturing. I want the pain in your foot to go away—is there something I could do to help this? 

It turns out that we are hardwired to care for each other.  

A few years ago, I read a book called “Awe” written by neuroscientist, Dacher Keltner.  (Keltner is the neuroscientist who consulted on the Pixar “Inside out” Films.)

Keltner has collected and studied the data over the course of decades and he says that, “we are born to be good to each other.”   I imagine God, that life animating force, looking down at us right now and winking: Yes, dear children, you are wired to be good to each other. God, our Great Electrician!

So, why aren’t we good to each other? Why don’t we run toward that sacred circle? 

There are so many reasons.  Here’s a few: 

First off, I’d say that sin breaks us and disconnects us. In our confirmation class a few days ago, we talked about all the things that captivate us like money, body image, grades, popularity—even resentment can magnetize us. All of these things pull us away from God’s goodness and from each other. 

It’s not only material things that pull us apart. A love of power also breaks us and makes us not care for each other. Researchers have shown that the brains of people who are under the influence of power are actually remade  to be less compassionate. When folks are intoxicated with power, They act like they’ve had some kind of traumatic brain injury. Something in their heads is actually remapped away from compassion and empathy and they became less able to see things from other people’s point of view.  

Why else don’t we care for each other?

I’d also say we have a cultural tendency to self-isolate.  You know that idea of rugged individualism?  This is in the air we breathe. I get this. I relate with this!  My go-to is not reaching out and sharing or letting people take care of me.  We curve inward on ourselves and the “blessed ties that bind us” weaken under the weight focusing on ourselves.
  
Our religious traditions push against those tendencies. In fact, there is a spiritual mandate—or call it a moral command--that is built into so many of our faith traditions including, most certainly the Christian tradition, to take care of each other.  

Look at our bible stories today: 

Job had lost everything, his wife, his children, his livelihood, even his home. When his friends heard about this, they showed up, tore their clothes and sat with him in the ash heap.

Look at Paul, reaching out from prison to his friend, Timothy, he writes: I need you. don’t forget to bring me my coat I left at Carpus’ house, my books, and some more paper for writing. Also, bring my friend Mark. I need that friend. 

Look at the bleeding woman last week who reached out her hand to touch Jesus’ cloak, she needed him and the people were stunned when Jesus turned around and saw her.

It’s built into our tradition. And it guides us to care when so much around us says not to. And we live it out—or do our best to live it out in real life today:

Look at the community meal here at church where folks show up and share in some laughter or explain what has been going on with them.

Look at the groups of musicians or youth who showed up for each other week after week to be together and hear about life and talk about God.

Look at those of us who show up to work as teachers or health care workers or in all sorts of professions and care about the folks we interact with.

Look at this congregation who, while walking counter clockwise with the masses around the courtyard last year, bumped into three migrant families in the police station walking the other direction who spoke and said: “We’re exhausted, we need help.” And we brought them home to church here where they could get their feet on the ground, register for school, apply for work permits and asylum and drivers licenses—little did we know how these folks would change us.

There is a timeless wisdom of entering the sacred circle.  

************

You might default to walking counterclockwise with the majority. You might be most comfortable holding your grief close or trivializing the hard things in your life.  

Or, on the other hand, you might default to that position of walking against the grain lost in pain, and you find a hard time turning your direction around to care for someone else.

What happens if you turn against the direction you are most comfortable with?  

We all need in turn to say, “I am broken.” And then, we all need a turn to say, “I see you. May God comfort you.” This is what it means to be human. 

St. Francis of Assisi said that our highest mission is to be of service to one another. 

But Why? 

Why do we do this as people of faith? Why do we do this as a congregation? Why do I teach this to my kids? Why do I feel this Godly pull to teach them to look at others? Why was this so important that Jesus came to illustrate this for us in full, vivid color?

It’s not a novel comment, but it’s true to say that our world is broken. Our world is a little disoriented. And knowing that, I say that the healing of our broken world, and of our broken society begins here.  

You may have chosen to join this church, but you don’t necessarily chose every member in here, (that’s how chosen family works, right?) but we reach out to one another.  

Here, we train our hearts to step towards pain, not away from it.   The healing we need so very much begins right here between you and me, between you and the person down the pew from you. The redemption of creation begins one relationship at a time. And then it spreads out of here, And works its way into the overculture: a balm in Gilead. 

To be religious doesn’t mean to pray all the right prayers or sing a lot of praises.  It means to emulate the heart of God, or try to! To step into the circle. To comfort the grieving, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the imprisoned, yes, of course to celebrate with one another. it means to abide with God together to turn towards one another. to open our hearts to each other.

Life is so fragile and so precious and we were created to be good to one another. We were created to walk this road together.

May you find a light to guide you home

John 1:35-51

I had this unexpected moment on Wednesday.  And it had to do with being summoned to jury duty.  I had already postponed a couple of times and when I got the summons three weeks ago, I figured I’d better respond. 

I walked into the juror room down at 2600 S. California Avenue on Wednesday.  The room looks a little like an enormous waiting hall at O’hare, and sitting there at a table in front of me, I did a double take and recognized a friend, E.  E is one of those friends that I cross paths with at parties or synod events now and then.  We share a close friend. We sang in this pub choir thing together once.  

He took one look at me, shut what he was reading, and we proceeded to talk for four and a half hours. There wasn’t anything else to do.  Lucky for me, I didn’t realize I could bring a computer, so I didn’t. 

I can’t remember the last time I talked to anyone for 4 straight hours except to my spouse while we were on a road trip.  We talked about our work, about the presidential debate, about what we had for dinner the night before, about our families, and I drove home that evening with this unexpected lightness. 

In our gospel reading today, a couple of guys spend the day tagging along after Jesus and later that day, they say to Simon Peter, “we’ve found him. We have found the messiah.”  The next day, we read about Jesus who finds Philip. Then Phillip finds his buddy Nathaniel. The gospel storyteller could have said that they “crossed paths” with each other or they “saw” each other or “encountered each other” or “discovered” each other but, instead, they use the word “found.”

In fact, in the gospel of John, there’s a whole lot of finding that happens. Jesus finds the woman at the well. (She also seems to find him.) He finds the formerly blind man who was cast out of the synagogue and makes him a disciple. 

The only time I use the word found is if something (or someone) has been lost: I’m at the park and can’t find my kid. I walk into a restaurant and I can’t find the person I’m looking for. I was at a football game and on the phone with the person I was meeting trying like crazy to find them.  

Outside of the gospel of John, another place where this word is used is when Jesus tells the story of the woman who lost her coin and searches the house top to bottom until she finds it. It's also in story of the shepherd who loses a sheep and searches until he finds it. 

To be found goes hand in hand with being lost.

Lost. I’ve felt lost plenty of times.  Sure, I feel lost when I can’t find someone at the ball park. But, more often than that, I am lost when I walk into a space, and I feel like I don’t belong there and want to turn around and run right back out. We get lost when we lose our capacity to trust someone and we can’t see our way forward with them. We get lost when all the familiar landmarks are gone, and the expected order of thing is all mixed up. Sometimes we get lost when the fog of illness descends on our lives and all of the sudden, God, who is supposedly all goodness, starts to seem...not so good anymore. 

We get lost with unexpected news or when someone close to us dies too soon or too unexpectedly.  We spin into lostness when we are trapped in the grip of anxiety or addiction or in the bitterness that will not let us forgive. We get lost when our children break our hearts, or the dearest person betrayed us, our marriages dies, or we retire from or lose the job that defined us. We get lost in wanting our lives to mean something and fearing that maybe they don't.

Then there are those of us who get lost very close to this church space… We take one look around this big room or this community of faces and we can’t figure out how to read the roadmap.  We get lost when the prayers to fall empty, when the liturgy clangs in our ears, when the bread crumbles like dust, when we feel abandoned or bored or irritated or just out of sync. We get lost when it seems like someone is steadily drawing the threads out of the very rug of belief that we stand upon and we look down at the threadbare patches trying to figure out where on earth we are.

In the gospel of Luke, we have those stories of the sheep that has wandered off or the coin that has gone missing. We could read into these stories that it is God who goes and does the searching. It’s God that returns with the sheep over Her neck or that sweeps His house top to bottom until he finds that coin.

In the gospel of John, however, sometimes it's Jesus who finds people in the stories. But, sometimes, it's the people who find each other. 

I have had an unusually busy and stressful last week.  For a bunch of reasons, it was the kind of week where I was losing sleep and waking up at 4:30am with my mind racing. 

When I encountered my friend at jury duty, it was as if God had turned on a magnet at home base and drew me back home. It was like God sat me down on the chiropractor table and clicked all my bones back into the right place.  As I shared with E some of what was keeping me up, the dust in my head began to settle.  

I had been lost. 
But then, I was seen.
I was heard. 
I was listened to and known. 
I was found.

In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, to be a disciple is to follow Jesus. In the gospel of John, to be a disciple has to do with being found. Or, finding the one who formed us out of the dust and has called us by name: The woman at the well is found. The man born blind is found. Nathaniel is found. Phillip is found. 

To be a disciple is to be found, and then, it’s to abide in God’s love. It’s to go out and find the one who is lost and steady them with that age-old story (or presence) of God’s sacred love. It’s to trust that you will be found, that your name will be spoken, and that you’ll be offered an arm to steady yourself when the light grows dim. It’s to know that God’s very essence is right there abiding with you.

This series that we’re starting today is called “I’ve been meaning to ask.”  It was born out of an interaction that one of the artists, Lisle, had when she was poking around in her back yard a few years ago. She was relatively new to the neighborhood and her, neighbor, who she didn’t know that well came up to the fence.  At face value, they were from different generations and they had pretty different flags and yard signs in front to their house.  The neighbor came up to the fence and called over to her, “I’ve been meaning to ask…where are you from?” They talked for all of 10-15 minutes and then went back to their yards, but it created a subtle shift for the better in their relationship.

Sometimes, we become disconnected and lost from each other. Sometimes, it can really be a lot to keep up community and social ties--life can be so hectic and full.  More and more, I think that the act of community building, which we see illustrated all over our scriptures, is a sacred practice of finding one another.

Our call is to step into a space or into the pause and to find one another. It’s to be the hands and heart and face and feet of Love to one another. To abide in God together. To be found.  

May you find a light to guide you home. 

The art of training (a message on gardening, steamships and love)

John 15:1-8

1 John 4:7-21

In the year 1914 not long after the Titanic sank, Congress convened a hearing to discuss another tragic ship accident.  Earlier that year in January, there was thick fog off the coast of Virginia.  A merchant vessel named the Nantucket rammed into the steamship Monroe. The Monroe tragically sank and 41 sailors lost their lives in the freezing Atlantic waters that night.  

The captain of the Nantucket, Osmyn Berry, was brought to trial.  But during the trial, Captain Edward Johnson of the Monroe was also grilled for over 5 hours.  In the cross-examination, they learned that Captain Johnson (of the ship that sank) used a compass that had not been adjusted in more than a year. The NYT reported that the compass,  “deviated as much as two degrees from the standard magnetic compass. Captain Johnson said the instrument was sufficiently true to run the ship, and that it was the custom of masters in the coastwide trade to use such compasses.” 

While the compass had seemed to be sufficient to navigate his ship, it was eventually (and tragically) proved otherwise.  

The Times reported that “Later the two Captains met, clasped hands, and sobbed on each other’s shoulders. The sobs of these two burley seamen,” the times wrote, “remind us of the tragic consequences of misorientation.”

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In today’s gospel reading, Jesus describes himself similar to a north star  the homing device, the magnet that pulls us onto the course of life.  At the same time, he’s the one that nudges, when we’re off kilter, to fix that course.

He’s the dance instructor that gets us to move in time with the music. He’s the coach that gets the team to play together. He’s the gardener that prunes the vines and gets them to grow in a certain fashion.  Jesus emphasizes the need to orient our hearts towards him. But it’s not a one and done process. It’s a watchful process where the branches of our hearts are trained and pruned. In this, the unhealthy suckers or excess branches are trimmed off so that we direct our energy to cultivating the good stuff.

“I am the vine.” Jesus says. “You are the branches,” You have been pruned by my teachings. You have been shaped by my words.

*****

In the gospel of John, Jesus is famously talkative.  On the night he was betrayed, Jesus grabbed the mic, and he didn’t give it back for a very long time.  He had a lot to say, especially in this final night with his disciples.  His teachings are many and those teachings are a north star. We orient our lives by them.  

I mean, theoretically…

…right?

****

It was the philosopher, Renee Descartes who said “I think, therefore I am.”  Ever since he said this about 500 years ago, we have been really good at thinking. And we love thinking about the good ideas of Jesus. 

Have you ever experienced a gap between the things you know and the things you do?  Maybe the doctor tells you that you need to watch your cholesterol.  But… you’re one of those people that agrees with me that butter is truly one of the finest foods on earth. (That’s to say nothing of bacon.) 

And there you have it.  You get it. You know you need to adjust. But you don’t. 

****

A couple of years ago, I ripped the facia in my foot. To this day, I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was kind of an unusual injury and it took almost a year of PT to fix it.   Eventually, the doctor traced the tear back (in part) to an old skiing injury from when I was 19 years old.  It turns out that for many, many years, I had been almost imperceptibly favoring one of my legs so much so that I walked, ever so slightly, off kilter. 

It was very subtle, but I had trained my body to walk, jog, jump, etc in such a way that I was unconsciously protecting one leg and stressing the other one out until something in my foot ripped.  

When I realized I needed to change how I walk, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do that. In fact, before the excruciating rip in my foot, I didn’t even know there was a problem. Fixing this problem was easier said than done. It wasn’t as easy as taking my ship’s compass to be recalibrated. In my case, it involved a wise physical therapist who guided me in lots of  maddening little movements with exercise bands to intentionally retrain my leg and slowly rebuild that muscle. Turns out I had to train, rinse, repeat, train, rinse, repeat… until it was second nature and I walked, jogged and jumped the way I was designed to.

I had to do it until it became a habit. 

*****

Maybe you really long to be like Jesus  (here’s hoping that’s a little of the case given that if you’re sitting here in church this morning). Maybe you even drink up biblical ideas, and love learning reflecting about God.  Great!

Captain Berry of the Nantucket knew he needed that compass adjusted.  He knew he was sailing slightly off kilter.  But, knowing wasn’t enough. After all, he couldn’t think his ship back on to the right course. He needed to adjust his compass.

We might have the best of intentions.  

We might love all the right things on paper.  

We might think Jesus’ ideas are great, smart and inspiring. 

But we can’t think our way into holiness. 

Just as you can train a plant to grow in a certain direction by pruning certain branches, we can train our hearts to grow in a certain way. We do this by practicing subtle exercises that will train and strengthen the love muscles of our souls. 

If you want to learn to play the piano, you can read about music and even about music theory until you are blue in the face, but only by practicing and actually playing will you get there.

*****

I cannot say what exactly the daily patterns of your life are.  But I do know that there are patterns—or let’s even call them rituals—to how we live our lives that subtly form us.

There’s an old secular parable that says “there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?;”  

So often, we don’t see the habits of our daily lives (good or bad!). We don’t see the skiing accident from when we were 19. We don’t see the magnets that pull us off course and teach us to worship other gods.  We have to intentionally identify the patterns (the rituals) we’re immersed in and then work towards cultivating different ones that teach us to love.

Maybe you practice love through the way you approach people in your daily life, at the grocery store, at school, on your work team or on the corner where all the neighbors hang out with their dogs talking.  Maybe you have a habit of eating dinner with people you love at least a couple times a week.

Those are likely good habits that cultivate love in your soul. I hate to break it to you, but you most certainly have some habits that are less charitable than these.

Maybe, you’re habitually cranky with your family in private but no one knows it because you’re a gem in public.  Maybe, you are skilled at complaining about people behind their backs.  Perhaps you have a pattern of, every time you leave a social event, picking everyone apart with your spouse or friend.  Or, every time you read news about politics that differ from yours, you rage against people on the other side. 

Whatever it is, that habit of loving (or not loving) is going to work on your heart.

I’m hoping you all can see that participation in a religious community like this one, or a regular practice of worship, or even serving in this sanctuary on a Sunday morning, is also a habit that forms us. 

*********

In the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, God tells the Israelites, through Moses, to trim, shape and fashion their hearts so that they might be fruitful in the land.  Today, most of us read the Old Testament in English but the apostle John read it in Greek.  When he wrote about Jesus’ vine and branches recap in his gospel, John lifted out this quirky Greek word from that 30th chapter of Deuteronomy and he used it to say that our hearts are "pruned" by God. 

God works on us, shapes our hearts, forms and fashions us so that, just like the ancient Israelites, and generations passed, we too might bear fruit in the land.

As people of faith, as disciples of Jesus, we have to work on loving and fine tune it until it becomes habitual or as the letter of 1 John says until it is “perfected” in us. We do this until it becomes a part of our subconscious and bubbles up without even thinking about. 

The way we weave love as a lifestyle into our subconscious is through practicing. Through training, retraining and recalibrating our hearts.

What are the habits you have that do something to you?  What kind of person do those habits want you to become (for better or worse)? What practice is God calling you to cultivate in your heart?

Go find your gardening tools. Take your compass into the shop. For God desires abundant life for us. In fact, God desires abundant life for all of creation.

Tune My Heart, Ash Wednesday 2024

 

Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; 13rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. --Joel 2:12-13

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

    and put a new and right[a] spirit within me.

11 Do not cast me away from your presence,

    and do not take your holy spirit from me.

12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

    and sustain in me a willing[b] spirit. --Psalm 51:10-12

A tuning fork is an instrument that This sound is the anchor, the plumbline, the drum major, the standard that you measure the other notes to. Each note is a perfectly positioned distance from this sound.  With any string instrument, you tune it, then, as as you play, with time, the piano, the violin, the guitar or whatever, slips out of tune here. It is a constant process of tuning the instrument back to the standard. I’m not a physicist but apparently the way a tuning fork works is that when you hit the device with a rubber mallet, the two metal prongs vibrate and create a sound. In this case, the metal prongs resonate at middle C.

One of the problems with our previous piano is that it would no longer hold a tune.  The holes where the strings screw into the sound board had become so stripped and worn that the tune wouldn’t hold.  This meant that any other instrument that played with the piano needed to tune to the piano instead of a standard tuner.  So, the guitar had to tune to the piano, so did the violin, and so on.

In the opening song, we sang “come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.”

Our lives can be a little like the strings in a piano. Sometimes our hearts slip out of tune. Sometimes our world slips out of tune. We have to recalibrate, pause, and listen for that center chord. We listen for the one who is our center of gravity, our perfect pitch, and our tuning fork. Then we have to draw our lives back into harmony.

In just a short while, we’ll invite you to come forward and you’ll be marked by dust.  It’s this visible acknowledgement that sometimes things in our lives which we try to keep fine tuned crack, crumble, or even break. After the breaking, when the dust settles, we’re left with a little pile of dirt or sand or rubble that slips right through our fingers when we scoop it into our hands.  Usually, we try to sweep this dusty reality under the rug a little like it doesn’t matter.  We pretend that we’re not anxious or lonely or overworked or harried or brokenhearted.  We pretend like the ashen problems of our world are not a big deal. We pretend like everything around us is bright and shiny. 

But not today.  

Today, we acknowledge that the air is full of ashes, hearts around the world are full of ashes.  Today we remember we are human, mortal and, as scripture says, “that we are dust.”

Why do we do this? Why do we make a practice of remembering all of the ashen failings of our worlds and the crumbled corners of our hearts? We are certainly surrounded by enough worry and pain, disappointment, stress and despair already: What if my health doesn’t rebound?  Why is life so fragile? Why do I feel so alone? Why is the world such a mess? Why do we go over this again on Ash Wednesday? Why focus on the dust? Wouldn’t it be better to just march forward with our chins up, all polished and bright, so we can rise up and shine and succeed?

*************************

We often feel a pretty strong sense of control over our lives: we have unprecedented access to food, water, shelter, medical care.  We can make choices about clubs, sports, activities we’ll be involved in, or about our careers or where we’ll live.   It often seems like we can get around any uncomfortable feeling or experiences if we just build our lives the right way: we can soothe sadness away through apps, we can quell our boredom through streaming.  In this, we think we control our outcomes and somehow avoid suffering. There’s this fantasy that money or science or violence or whatever shiny object before us will somehow save us from death. But, it doesn’t. 

Ash Wednesday is the most honest day of the year.

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

This is the day where we publicly admit it: “nope. we don’t entirely have it all together. we are not actually in control. We are not the gods of our own lives. “ 

The truth is that as human beings, we all crack and crumble sometimes.  We break. We are all fallible and imperfect. We fall out of tune with the one who created us. Our tone slides flat next to the richness of God’s love. Tonight, we admit that together.   It’s a profoundly countercultural act to publicly admit this.  When we admit this together when we visibly see this on each other, we realize that we are human together and we give each other courage and hope.

*************************************

One of the ways that you keep a piano in tune—especially in a room like this that fluctuates between very hot and very cold--is that you schedule regular tunings.  They say we should tune a piano 4 times a year.  

Lent is a time of attunement where we return to God, and we tune our hearts to sing God’s grace. We do this through an honest inventory of which chords in our lives are frayed and playing sharp or flat and through listening to God through study, music, prayer and reflection.  Tonight, we open our hearts in honesty and we remember we are made of dust, we’re finite, we’re human, and flawed.

************************************

You, young people, so many of you who are leading the service tonight, give me courage and hope with your bravery towards the way you look at challenges in the face, you bravely manage your own dusty pain, and the way you call us not to turn away from the ashen places in this world. 

You church members, church grandparents and neighbors and aunties and uncles and friends.  Your steady, clear-eyed presence in this moment of honesty reminds us of God’s faithful presence in our lives.

God, who is stronger than we are will hold us close. For even in the ash of this world, we are kept safe in the promise of God’s eternal love.

A Christmas sermon about living nativities, piano players, and our purpose in it all

A Christmas Message based on Luke 2:1-20 with reference to Maya Angelou's poem, "Caged Bird."

My grandfather was an exquisite pianist. His favorite was Chopin and we had a leather bag full of his music in our house.  While I took piano lessons and learned to play some simple music years ago, Chopin was obviously a whole other level. As a child, I would open the books of music and flip through the pages, but to me, the lines and dots and notations on the page didn’t mean much.  

I never did hear my Gramps play, he died before I was born. However, years later, I heard Chopin played in a recital I attended while in college. Though I had heard recordings in the past, they didn’t compare with sitting in the recital hall and hearing my friend play the music.  Without my friend, all that music was a bunch of dots and squiggles and lines on a page.  Add a musician to those sheets of music and all of those mysterious markings were brought to life.  Suddenly, a musician--a person--gave it all form.  

Year after year, we flip through our bible to the second chapter of Luke and we read this old, old story of shepherds and starry skies, of donkeys and mangers, of a little holy family looking for shelter.  It is a story of letters and words and verse and chapter numbers all strung together on the page.  But it is also something more than that. 

Certainly, it is a story worth treasuring for so many reasons--most of all because it is the story of God’s love for us made human in the person of Jesus. 

The greatest stories connect powerfully with a place in our heart.  The Christmas story has a lot of angles that touch our hearts.  

Sometimes, the thing in the story that we tap into most keenly is nostalgia. It’s a story that brings up memories of childhood magic or closeness with the ones we love.  But, the story also connects us with a place in our heart much bigger than the nostalgia. 

**********************

There is a beautiful little line from the Christmas story that reads “the time came” for Mary to deliver her child. “The time came” is a translation of the phrase that could also be read as “the days were fulfilled.” As in: the days were fulfilled as Mary gave birth.

To fulfill something means to bring something to life. If we fulfill a certainly responsibility, we follow through. We make it happen, we bring it to life. We live up to it and give it form, almost like fitting into a perfectly tailored pair of pants that are lifeless on the hanger but “filled out” when a person wears them. Almost like bringing to life a gorgeous piece of music which as a score is a lifeless sheet of dots and lines but in the hands of a musician, is a whole new creation. 

The Christmas story brings to life our hopes of a different world. A world where vulnerable families like the Holy family are taken care of and where forgotten people are noticed. A world where the tyrant kings are cast down from their thrones while heaven comes down to peasants. A worlds where loved ones persist and strong and gentle people win. A worlds where strangers show extravagant hospitality. A world where all will be well.

This connection between the story and our hearts is so strong that it cannot help but burst into life. 

Look at Mary herself, who after visiting her cousin Elizabeth and sharing the miraculous news of her pregnancy, burst into song and gave form and verve to an ancient foremother’s poem. Her Magnificat was a remake of Hannah’s age-old song.  Before Mary sang it, Hannah’s song about her son, Samuel, had just been letters and numbers on a page. Mary took that ancient piece of musical scripture that was sung by a joyous woman in praise of God and added her voice to it. She brought the lines of poetry to life in real time. She gave it form. 

We hear a lot about fulfillment in the gospels and how scripture is fulfilled through things that were happening in the ancient world at that time. It was as if the ancient world were crackling with God’s life and spirit around them.  The stories from Isaiah, Leviticus and Jeremiah shimmered with their timeliness as Jesus drew them into real time.

The practice of bringing the story to life continues today.

****************

Centuries ago, St. Francis of Assisi was on his way home from a visit to the Holy Land and he passed through a little Italian town in Greccio around Christmas time. 

The rocky landscape reminded him of the Holy Land and an idea struck him. What if the townspeople played the parts of the shepherd and the angels and the Holy family?  And then, what if they found some animals--like an ox or some sheep--to bring to the little barn?  And then, what if they invited some people to come and experience the wonder and delight of this re-creation of the Christmas story? 

St. Francis did just this. And, in the year 1223, the first living nativity was acted out, exactly 800 years ago this Christmas.

Without the actors giving life to the letters and words and verses and chapter numbers of the nativity story all strung together on the page, the story is flat and neatly tucked away on the shelf. 

The hope was, and is, that if people saw and heard this story acted out, they might be able to see and experience this in their own lives too.   

The Christmas story needs a third party. There is an ancient story, and a holy spirit, and there is you.  

These stories were never meant to just be words on a page. They are meant to be filled out, brought to life, fulfilled and made flesh among us. We’re never quite sure when we will be instructed to play our part in the symphony spinning around us and so very often, it is an ordinary moment in everyday life.

Sometimes, you are Joseph, doggedly persistent and knocking on door after door, barely hopeful, but determined to fight for the ones you love.

Sometimes, you are the innkeeper when suddenly someone knocks on your door and needs help and you extend it.

Sometimes you feel forgotten, unimportant, lonely, like shepherds when unexpectedly a choir of angels appears to you in the starry sky (or maybe it’s just an angelic friend who met you for coffee, but however it turns out) they remind you that you are beloved to God. 

Christmas is a story that we bring to life--God brings to life!--through the way that we carry ourselves, through how we show up in the world, through the projects we get involved in, the places we pour our heart into, through the wild energy of the Holy Spirit that nudges us towards holy spaces.

It’s a song that begins in the shadows, it’s a cry of the caged bird singing of Good News. It’s a song of freedom that sings out persistently, even in the hardest of times.

This ancient song is meant for us.  It’s meant for our neighbors.  The call is to listen carefully, as Mary and Joseph and the shepherds did, to pay attention to God’s music, to fulfill our call, to pick up our instruments and play our part in the symphony.

Searching for a sign

Luke 1:26-47

I think it’s pretty normal to want a sign that we’re on the right path. I’m not talking about a street sign or neon flashing sign, but—especially when things seem confusing or stressful—some sort of symbol or indication that we’re headed in the right direction. Thankfully, God is big on signs, sort of like little love notes sent to people that are in a bind or walking through tough moments.  

For Abraham when he was feeling pretty stressed out, God somehow illuminated the twinkling stars of the heavens and said, “there you go, there is your sign that you will have many descendants.”

For Moses, there was a burning bush that he stumbles upon in the desert which is so overwhelmingly holy that he immediately takes off his shoes.  (Then, lucky him, he gets to dole out 10 signs or plagues to Pharoah that carry their own potent message). 

In the case of Mary of Nazareth, she gets a whole conversation with an angel named Gabriel. Each of these people needed these signs because each of them was facing some sort of big life challenge. They needed a little extra reassurance of God’s presence with them as they stepped into the unknown that was before them. 

In the case of Mary, she had received life-changing news from the angel.  Her initial response was dramatic as she tried to get her head in the game.  She immediately took off “with haste” scripture says to visit someone she could trust. Mary’s village was not going to be okay with this news. Joseph was certainly reeling. So she treks about 60 miles out into the hill country to visit her elder cousin, Elizabeth.  

Elizabeth is so much older than Mary that she is probably more of what we might think of as an auntie figure.  Elizabeth has known her fair share of hard knocks along the way of life, the smile lines run deep into her face, and when Mary comes rushing into her house with news about an angel and a pregnancy tumbling out of her, Elizabeth opens her heart and arms wide and wraps her in love.   

After time with Elizabeth,who is grappling with her own miraculous pregnancy with John the Baptist, Mary is able to face this enormous challenge before her.  Something in her changed while she was with Elizabeth. She made sense of this sign, this visit from Gabriel and she prepared herself for the task ahead.

While Mary responded faithfully to God, this isn’t always the case. Signs can be great and reassuring. The tricky thing is that they can also be misinterpreted.  

Harriet Powers was a 19th century African American quilter.  One of her two surviving quilts now hangs in the Smithsonian.  This particular quilt in the Smithsonian shows different scenes from the bible where signs from God were misinterpreted or even ignored.  In one scene, you see Noah’s neighbors making light of his ark and then refusing to join him—we all know how that turned out.   In another panel, you see Jonah ignoring a sign from God and then ending up in the belly of a whale. Then, in another square, you see the dove descending on Christ in his baptism which all of humanity later ignores when he is crucified.  

I first learned about Harriet Powers’ quilts from African American theologian, Dr. Donyelle McCray. In the bible quilt about the signs, Dr. McCray thinks that, Ms. Powers also quilted the stories of contemporary signs from her time that showed God’s judgement.  

For example, on one day in 1780 there was a creepy dark, dark day where you couldn’t see the sun (this was later attributed to pollution) and she quilted a scene about it. 

She also quilted a panel about a particularly spectacular meteor shower from her lifetime. On that night of the meteor shower in 1833, maybe God had hoped the people with respond with awe that would open their hearts, but instead, animals, horses and cows galloped and ran like wild all over the place. People screamed and hid, they thought the world was ending.  

Ms. Powers' quilt, which is a sermon in its’ own way, might be showing us that, yep, there are signs that appear to us, but what we do or how we respond when we receive these signs is key.  Some people respond to these signs from God in faithfulness, and some people, as Ms. Powers showed us in her quilt, don’t. 

 So what about us today? Have you ever sought some sort of sign you’re on the right path? Do you seek one now? When she was reflecting on Harriet Power’s quilt, Dr. McCray observed that there comes a point where we must stop seeking signs and act on the ones we’ve been given. And, she went on to explain, we have all been given the sign of all signs, man of sorrow, wonderful counselor, prince of peace in the person of Jesus.  While the cross is certainly important, the whole life of Jesus including the way he lived, and healed and blessed and prayed, is a sign to us today that requires a faithful response from us. It calls for a certain way of living from us, that centers grace, compassion, generosity and hope in the midst of a weary world.

Eventually, Dr. McCray explains, something amazing happens to us when we live our lives in response to Jesus this way. When we tune our lives to the life of Jesus, we no longer seek signs, we become them.

Look at Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin: In her gracious and accepting hospitality, she became a sign to Mary of God’s gracious love.

I’m sure many of us can think of people in our lives who have been signs to us and assured us that we are on the right path, especially in those moments of stress or challenge.

Becoming a sign of God’s love might seem like a tall order. Believe me: No one does this perfectly—unless you know how to walk on water—but, God uses the ordinary stuff of our lives to make signs of holy love, justice and joy in the world. 

Even in times of great trial, when we are completely unraveled and barely holding on, even then, God still somehow uses us as signs to reflect a holy light to those around us. 

Today, we will baptize Florence Dahlia into the life of Christ.  Florence already is a sign of God’s gracious love in the world. It’s easy to see this in her as a beautiful baby. But in time, as she fixes her eyes on Jesus, she will deepen in her ability to become a sign of God’s gracious love in the world she will learn this through her loved ones and through you all. Any number of us in here today can assure her that she will certainly mess this up and fail at being God’s light at some point. Any number of us could tell her that this broken world is imperfect: sometimes systems fail and people are cruel and stingy.  Sometimes, the shadows seem overpowering. And any number of us will come around her in precisely those moments of shadow and pain as signs of God’s gracious love. 

Our lives with God are a conversation of listening and responding, of living and dying and rising again. For everywhere that Jesus went—that Love went—the world was not just reimagined, but remade. Just when we least expect it, God will use us as signs that remake the world one moment at a time.

Lift your voice, even if it's a little rusty at first (we all feel like dead grass sometimes)

Isaiah 40:1-11

Mark 1:1-8

On the corner of Halstead and Polk not far from UIC sits an old mansion. In the spring of 1898, two friends stood in front of it discussing their plan: it was in such decrepit state that the owner had agreed to let them lease it for free.  They would start small: they would move in to the house and offer some classes on basic life skills for folks from the surrounding neighborhood. This was the turn of the 19th century and Chicago was rapidly industrializing. Thousands of people were flocking to cities from the countryside and along with them, a steady stream of migrants was flooding in. There were Greeks, Italians, Russian Jews, Bohemians, Irish, and Poles.  This was the first time cities had seen so many people living together in crowded spaces like these ethnic enclaves. Most houses didn’t even have running water let alone plumbing—my great-great grandparents immigrated around this time to this part of the city from Poland and this was their story.

The two women, who stood there that day, eventually moved into the house on the corner of Polk and Halstead and the project quickly took off.  One of the women’s father had died and left her a little money.  She set to work. 

By the second year, they were serving 2,000 people a week. There was a kindergarten, a day care, English classes, social clubs and art classes. There was legal aid, employment counseling and momentum continued building. Within 10 years, there were 13 buildings with a coffee house, a theater, Chicago’s very first public playground and a kitchen.  The complex even included a space for 20 women to live. 

Jane Addams had started a settlement house in Mr. Hull’s old mansion, but she had also started a movement. 

In the coming decades, living and working conditions in Chicago would improve. Chicago had led the way with this groundbreaking idea of settlement houses for migrants. In the coming years, Ida B. Wells would begin the famous settlement house a few miles away in Bronzeville called the Negro Fellowship League which served African Americans migrating north in the early 20th century. 

Eventually, the social work movement would grow out of these seeds of Jane Addams work through the Hull House.

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Hopeful movements begin with just a few small sparks: with two friends standing outside an old house at the corner of Halstead and Polk dreaming of what could be. 

In today’s scripture, we meet Jesus’ advance man, John the Baptist. His role was to “prepare the way” for Jesus and call other people to prepare it with him. God had a dream that John had caught on to. But that dream wasn’t John’s to fulfill. It was God’s dream to fulfill.

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A few days ago in our council meeting, we were discussing how we pass hope on to each other. Who were those people who came before us and brought hope when we couldn’t see the road in front of us? Who taught us how to hope?

For John, his parents, Elizabeth and Zachariah were certainly two of those people, but also in that mix was the prophet Isaiah.

In the scripture reading from the book of Isaiah the people are hopeless. Jerusalem had been sacked by the Babylonians and the people were enslaved and carted off where they had lived for decades in exile far from their homeland, their traditions, and their their temple. The prophet Isaiah is one of these Jewish people sitting by the waters in Babylon far from home. He is an unlikely person to launch a period of change and transition, but one day, he happens to overhear a conversation between God and some heavenly host in the divine council up there.

Comfort, O comfort my people,” God is saying
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem 
and cry to her that she has served her term.”  (Is. 40:1-2)

Tell them that their war is over, God will reign in peace forever.

Isaiah’s ears perk up—is change on the horizon? God goes on:
 A voice cries out:
 “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
  make straight in the desert a highway for our God… (Is. 40:3)

God pauses in the conversation with the heavenly host: “Isaiah!” She claps her divine hands!

“Are you listening down there!?”

Isaiah snaps to attention: "Who me?!" He croaks. 

“Cry out!” says God.

Isaiah’s voice is rusty, creaky, way out of practice (it has been decades since he last used it). He clears throat: “Oh, God, what shall I say??” (Is.40:6)

What?--I imagine him thinking--could I ever say, Oh Holy One? have you seen what it’s like down here?! The people are like grass, actual dried, dead grass, Oh God! We are like withered flowers, despondent, depressed. There is no sparkle, no joy! (ref. Is. 40:6-8)

As Isaiah goes on, this funny thing happens: his voice seems to grow steadier, stronger, and more confident. (I don’t know if that has ever happened to you: once you get the words out about what you hope for, or what you long for, something in you starts warming. Something in you starts to wake up. Like Hull House that slowly added a kindergarten, and then art classes, and then a shelter, and then, and then, and then…the flame quietly grew brighter.)

Isaiah lifts his head. He straightens up.  “…the word….” He says slowly “The word of the Lord… will stand… forever…” (Is. 40:8) It’s like the very act of speaking is awakening the spirit and something in him starts to stir and gain momentum. His voice strengthens! The candle in his hand brightens! And before you know it, he calls out to the city: 

Everyone!: "Get ye up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings!; (Is: 40:9) 

His flame roars as he tips his candle outward to light those candles around him. And now you!: 

 ”lift up your voice with strength,
  O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
  lift it up, do not fear;
 say to the cities of Judah,
  “Here is your God!” (40:9)

For as it turns out, change is on the horizon. Those people in exile will soon head home to Jerusalem.  And this time, the path will not be winding and confusing like the last time they were stuck in the wilderness searching for the promised land. This time, every mountain and hill shall be made low and every valley shall be lifted up.

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Christmas begins with hope against hope.  

We stand at the edge and look out to what could be: 

A neighborhood in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century full of migrants hoping to make a new life for themselves.

An ancient people in exile longing for a way home.

A group of early church Jesus-followers—who had been persecuted by the Emperor Nero and were despondent, hopeless, like scorched grass and faded flowers—who  wait for the Prince of Peace who will soon come to be with them.

John the Baptist holding a single candle of hope, lighting the flame of each person who came to him seeking baptism, all the while crying out to prepare the way for Jesus, Light of the World, who would soon come to be with them.

Isaiah passed hope on to John and the people in the early church and that hope grew into a blaze as God sent Jesus to come to be among them.

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Who holds out that hope to you when you can’t see the road in front of you? How do you receive that light of God when your own candle is barely burning or even burnt out?  

Who is God pointing you towards and encouraging you to pass your own flame to in your life?  Maybe it’s a friend or a family member. Maybe it’s a whole people or a land that is faded and dried out that yearns for the love of God.

The long arc of God’s love stretches towards justice and will redeem and remake the whole world—and us in it.  As the psalmist said, one day, righteousness and peace will kiss. (Ps. 85:10) 

But we’re not there yet. 

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This season is not always the easiest. So many times, right along side of the razzle-dazzle of Christmas is some sort of pain or regret.  It could be grief for someone who has died, pain for some broken situation in our own lives, or sorrow for some place in our shattered world. 

That is exactly where Christmas begins.

This voice cries out—maybe it’s rusty at first, maybe it’s crying out from deep loss—but there in the night or even in the tomb, something stirs. This hope flickers bravely out from the profound shadow. This story of hope against hope is part of our heritage and even our DNA as people of faith. Generation after generation remembers this story that longs for a different world and for the promise of healing where all will be made well. This is the story of the One who will come to mend us and be with us in the midst of it all.

If you are one of the ones who is hurting and searching for the path forward right now, you are not alone. 

If you are one of the ones full of hope and assurance, and wondering where you can tip your candle outward and wish “comfort, comfort o, my people,” you are called.

This glowing good news of God’s gracious love sings in us and, to riff off of the Maya Angelou, poem we just heard, we lift our voice and share the good news 

with our brother, 

with our sister, 

with our city, 

with our soul.