In his grief, Jesus wept

John 11:1-45

Grace and peace to you from God our strength and our support.

At the end of last week, you might remember, it snowed.  I know I’ve told this story, but I’ve thought of it since then.  My kids were so excited when it snowed they asked if we could play “Joy to the World” which was the song that they sang for the Christmas pageant at church. I obliged and put on the Nat King Cole version, and wouldn’t you know it, we ended up listening to the entire album.  Clearly in the middle of All The Weirdness that is life right now, we needed a little reminder that God Emmanuel was with us.

When God became human in Jesus, that meant that God experienced the whole spectrum of human emotions.  In our story today, one of Jesus’ best friends, Lazarus, is super sick and the side of Jesus that was fully human was feeling it deep in his bones. When Lazarus gets sick, his sisters send word to Jesus and ask him to come. When Jesus finally does come, he’s too late. Lazarus has already died. So Martha runs to meet him, “Lord, where were you!” she asks.  And then her sister Mary says the same thing: “Where were you! What happened?” By the time he gets to the village of Bethany, the bible says Jesus is “greatly disturbed.”

Sometimes we’ve got to put a little imagination around the words scripture gives.  So when the story says that Jesus was greatly disturbed, did that mean devastated? Heartbroken at what has happened?  Whatever he felt, it was strong, because the bible story repeats it: He was greatly disturbed.

All things considered, I could show you a little greatly disturbed right now. A lot of the world is now affected by Covid-19.  We know this: businesses and people’s incomes are affected. The government in the country of India is mobilizing to deliver basic food supplies so that people simply have enough to eat.  Chicago is preparing for more infections. New York is in crisis. We know of people—we are people--who are starting to get sick. The markets are bouncing all over the place. We’re worried about loved ones and at the same time, we’re trying to hold steady and go through the motions of making dinner, going for walks, and helping with schoolwork.  Some of us still go to our workplaces. Some of us are completely “sheltering at home.” We’ve lost so much of what feels normal like our physical connection with people; and all while the earth is rumbling under us.

Things are weird and unsettled and, to use scripture’s words, we could say that things are “greatly disturbing.” In today’s bible story, when Jesus arrives in Bethany and finds his very dear friend, Lazarus, dead, the truth of how much has been lost just hits him; and in a moment of utter humanity, he breaks down and weeps.  So much has been lost.  And so much will be lost.  The Divine side of Jesus knows that soon, he will return to this very house of his friends Lazarus, Mary and Martha where Mary will anoint him with costly nard.  Soon, he will wash his disciple’s feet. Soon, a warrant for his arrest will go out. Soon, he will be crucified at the hands of the state.  Soon, so much will be lost. And Jesus weeps.

We get that: thinking of the loss that has hit us and wondering about the loss to come. In an interview last week, David Kessler talked about the anticipatory grief we’re all feeling.  Usually we feel this kind of grief when someone gets a bad diagnosis or we know that a big storm like a hurricane is coming. Right now, there’s a virus out there that we can’t control.  We’re grieving what feels lost. And we’re anticipating what could be lost.

David Kessler, actually co-wrote a pretty famous little book about the five stages of grief and in the interview last week, he reflected on how those five stages could play out right now:   “There’s denial,” he says, “which we see a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks, everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.” I recognize all of those stages in me at different times. There is much to grieve for.

In our bible story, Although Mary and Martha are upset and disappointed, they don’t expect Jesus to come in and fix it.  But they do count on Jesus to be their hope and to restore life in a world that is full of death and grief.

You see, it’s just at the point in the gospel when things are going to get terrible, that Jesus gives the people this sign and he raises Lazarus from the dead.  “Lazarus, come out!” he says, and in the midst of the absolute most terrible thing they could have imagined (the death of one of their dearest community members) life triumphs over death and Lazarus comes out of the tomb.

Life persists over death. It does all the time in so many small ways. In the way we bring joy to people. In the way the community cares for one another. I mean, you can’t cancel church the way you cancel a basketball game.  The church goes on being the church.  Even on a normal week, we gather together as the church and then we scatter out into our various worlds that God blesses us with.  To take care of our neighbor, to bring life to places of death in Jesus name.

Taking care of our neighbor looks differently today than it did a month ago. But it’s still our call as church. It’s in the person who calls and says I’m going to the grocery store, what can I bring you?  It’s in the texting and calling and zooming and checking in with people.  It’s in the positivity, kindness, the encouraging word and the hopefulness.  (It’s also in the sharing when we’re not okay and opening a space for people to be encouraging or supportive.) It’s in the extravagant tip to the person who brought your groceries.  It’s in the financial generosity for the people who need it in our midst.

A few members of the praise band recently recorded a version of “Great is thy Faithfulness” that is posted on our social media.  The chorus sings, “beginning to end, my life in your hands, great, great is your faithfulness.”

I’ve been thinking of this. You see, Jesus never promised that bad things wouldn’t happen. But Jesus did promise to be with us in the good and the bad, in the storm and the sunshine, in the grief and anxiety.  Jesus promises to be with us. God is faithful. Beginning to end, our life in His hands.  God grieves with us, wraps Her arms around us, works through us for healing, and is quietly working to coax life out of death. For nothing, nothing, nothing  can separate us from the love of God. Amen

Lead me, God

Maybe I shouldn’t admit as a pastor that I’m actually pretty used to being in control of my life. Perhaps this is the place where I should write something like “From the moment I wake up each day, I surrender everything to God and ride the holy wave of my day (smiley face!!).” Yeah, no. Let’s be honest, I plan a schedule for my family that involves preschool, work, church, going to the park, hanging out with friends.  I organize, plan, orchestrate and get things done. 
 
These days, control over my life and schedule are unsteady. There are a lot of unknowns and a lot to be fearful of. Unexpectedly, our assigned Psalm for this week in church is Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The psalm talks about being led and guided by God who leads us to “lie down in green pastures” and to walk “beside still waters.” “Even though I walk the darkest valley,” the psalmist writes, “you are with me.” As I think over these words, I remember that I am led by God. I can’t lead myself through this wilderness. Although I follow the advice and edicts of health care workers and government officials to socially distance myself, it is God who leads me, who leads us.
 
“God is love” (1 John 4:8). I already see so many instances of LMC being led by love. Our decision to close the church was informed by Love of our community. The kind and encouraging posts on FB are evidence of God’s great Love that is leading us. (It was probably nothing but the Love of God that told me to cool my stack and step out of my twins room last night when there was passionate fighting over who’s turn it was to sleep with the tiny plastic Olaf figurine from the Disney movie “Frozen.”)
 
As we walk through the unexpected, and even through the darkest valley, may Love—the light of the world—guide us to practice kindness, to seek patience, to seek the lonely. And when we are unsteady, may Love lead us to reach out. Take heart and remember that God deeply loves this world, loves us, is working for healing, and is here with us in the midst of it. 
 
Grace, peace, strength and patience to you

Living Water in the Wilderness

John4:5-42

"Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

Greetings from God, our peace that passes all understanding.

It has been quite a week. 

You know, when we started this Lenten wilderness series a few weeks ago, I didn’t anticipate it being quite this bewildering.  With good reason, many of us are modifying our schedules to take care of children or grandchildren who will be home from school starting next week.  Some of us are worried about our health or the health of our loved ones. Others of us are anxiously thinking about how we will make ends meet as we see our hours or gigs cut. 

With this week’s bible story, it almost seems like God is sitting us down and saying, take a beat. And let me tell you a story about the wilderness.

The story is familiar to some of us.  Jesus and his disciples are leaving Jerusalem after the Passover festivals. They have decided to take the road less traveled back to Galilea and journey through the foreign land of Samaria.  They stop to rest outside of the city of Sychar and the disciples head into the city to look for some lunch.  Jesus rests by the well and when a Samaritan woman arrives, Jesus asks her for a drink of water.  

History has not been kind to the Samaritan woman especially with regards to that painful truth that Jesus brings up about her having five husbands and currently living with a man who isn’t her husband.  There are a number of choice words and phrases that have been tagged to her over the centuries.  Folks have mentioned that she was “no angel” had a “checkered past” was a prostitute and was “living in sin.”

Honestly?  The Samaritan woman would have had little control over how many times she had been married.  Maybe she was first married very young, who knows?  It very well may have been that the Samaritan woman was infertile and couldn’t conceive a child with any of her husbands and was subsequently and continually divorced because of it. We don’t know why she had been married so many times. But husband after husband divorced her or died until she was finally left with the brother of her late husband who basically took her as a pity-wife because the law said he had to.  

Who knows what the stories were that the people told about her, she scars that she carried, the heartbreak she endured. And there, on a sunny afternoon, in her own personal wilderness, she goes to the well alone to fetch water.

At the well Jesus sees her.  As they talk, it’s clear that Jesus doesn’t just know basic information about her but the most painful part of her wilderness story that she carries, and Jesus loves her just the way she is.  God sees her whole heartbroken story; and because “God so loves the world,” He sends her living water in Jesus.

In my sunroom where I sometimes write my sermons, I have a bunch of plants and one of them is this peace lily. My peace lily has a lot of personality.  She is pretty dramatic because when she is thirsty and needs water, all of the leaves droop and spill over the sides of the flowerpot almost like cooked spaghetti.  When I water the plant, I have actually seen the leaves begin to perk up over the course of an hour or two. As the leaves fill with water they begin to reach and extend upwards towards the sunny window.

The Samaritan woman was the same way. She arrived at the well, wilted.  As she talked with Jesus, you could almost see her start to perk up as she began to feel loved and accepted and known and connected.  And that—being known, being seen and loved--was living water to her soul. After that conversation with Jesus there at the well, she was so filled with joy that she ran back into town to tell all of the people about what had happened.

As we hear this story of the Samaritan woman in the wilderness, I’m thinking about the fact that in these next weeks, daily life will probably change.  For some of us it will change a lot.  To love our community will mean to stay home and keep our germs to ourselves. Our routines will be disrupted.  We won’t be at work or school, at the gym or playing basketball. We won’t be able to drop our kids off at daycare.  We won’t have Sunday worship or youth group or choir.  We may be anxious. We may be bored. We may be unsettled.  We may have to firmly argue with ourselves when the time has come to turn off the cable news or close the news app.  Some of us might get ill and we will have each other’s backs if that happens. We may miss our colleagues, our friends, our families, our coffee shops, and hugs from friends.  To call this just “a big change” is kind of an understatement.

It may be, over the coming weeks, that we begin to feel and look a little like the peace lily in my sun room when it needs to be watered.  Wilted, out of sorts, not our best selves. My daughter, Isabella calls “not being our best selves” “letting your hyenas out.”  For the record, yesterday, I was clearly and sternly told to put my hyenas away by my four year old (and she had a solid point).

As we walk into this change, I remember that God always comes to us in ways that are contrary to our expectations.  We expect a prince in a palace and it’s a babe in a manger.  We expect a mighty and powerful ruler, and it is a still small voice.  We expect a formal religious teacher and it’s a woman looking for a lost coin under her bed.  We expect an answer and it is a whirlwind that tells us that life is mysterious.  As we walk into this change, I know that now, Jesus, our living water, is with us in ways that run against the grain of our expectations.

While we often expect that church is a place where we come for living water, church will be differently.  It will still very much be here, but it will look different.  Here’s the thing that has me thinking: while church is a place where we encounter God, something about the current situation is calling on us to change the energy or the flow of God’s living water. 

Have you ever visited one of the beautiful conservatories here in the city?  You may know that while yes, conservatories house plants during the winter, they also take care of plants and make them strong so that they can be transplanted outside.  

Church is a greenhouse where God works on us and transforms us. It’s a place where we are filled with living water and made strong so that we can go out and share this Living Water of Jesus with those who need it.  While we will still be connected, in the absence of our physical church gathering, we will be called, like the Samaritan woman to go and be the church to our family, neighbors and friends.  

Think about it.  We will be called to give living water through the wonders of technology:  calling and face timing people. We can post things to social media that bring joy. We will share Living Water through a commitment to kindness when stress rules the day. We will share Living Water through our financial resources for people who need it.  Now, more than ever, while we will still fill up with Living Water, we will be called to share it with each other and to a terribly thirsty world around us.

As we walk in this unexpected wilderness, take heart, dear ones. God is steady and abides with us.  Just like the seasons that faithfully change from winter into spring, God is faithful and is with us. May God bless you and keep you.

Letting go in the wilderness

John3:1-17

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with some folks here at LMC who were reminiscing about the first time this congregation called a woman pastor.  Pastor David Miller, who many of us here knew, had served this congregation for several decades and before him, Pastor Bruno Nueman for many, many decades.  When Pastor Miller retired, the candidate that the call committee put forth and eventually called now over 15 years ago was that of Pastor Susan Swanson, a woman.  While the congregation was deeply faithful, the idea of calling a woman pastor was unsettling for some—not all—but some folks.  On paper, people of course knew that the church had been ordaining women for many years, but in practice, it was an unsettling step to take to think of calling a woman pastor.

In our gospel story today, Nicodemus is unsettled. He is a pharisee: a religious leader, a respected, successful and confident man in the community.  He is curious and spiritually open. He is also logical and orderly in the way he thinks.  And he is unsettled. 

Late one night, in the anonymity of the night, he goes to find Jesus.  Jesus has just had a very public and furious argument with the pharisees in the temple where he threw a bunch of tables over and dumped coins to the ground during the Passover festival.  Not long before that, he had turned water into wine at a wedding and everyone was talking about it. As a religious leader, Nicodemus would have known all of this…and as a religious leader he was probably expected to tow the party line.  The party line which said that Jesus was bad news. None the less, Nicodemus is curious and unsure and he secretly goes to find Jesus in the dead of night. 

Was he provoked by the scandal Jesus had caused in the temple? Maybe, I don’t know. But he starts asking questions. Jesus answers him by saying that he must be born again. Nicodemus is like, “What do you mean born again?  I am an old man. How am I supposed to re-enter my mother’s womb?” I kind of imagine Jesus coming back at him like, bro, that is not what I mean. You come asking me these heavy questions in the middle of the night, what kind of answer do you expect?

That retort aside, I think of Nicodemus’ comment, “I am an old man.” Yes, clearly, Nicodemus cannot be literally be born again, but I wonder if a part of it also had to do with old age being the best part of life. Especially in Jesus’ time, the wisdom of age was so very valued.  “Old” was the best. Nicodemus is established and mature.  He is settled. God is orderly in his head. Why would he want to dump it all out and start over? As they continue to talk there in the dead of night, it is clear that something about who Jesus is and the miracles he has done are pushing Nicodemus to the edge.  He is unsettled.  Although Nicodemus might have already had a foot out of bounds when he came to find Jesus, as they talk, Jesus starts pulling him into uncharted territory.  Wilderness territory. Nicodemus’ final comment to Jesus in the story is, “but…but, how can this be?!” It’s like Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Wait a minute. I’m settled. I finally have it figured it out and you’re asking me to think again? Yes.  Precisely.  After all, isn’t this what Jesus is always asking people to do?   To think again?

My heart goes out to Nicodemus.  I can think of moments in my own life when my understanding of God cracked through some carefully created boundary that I had constructed (or someone had constructed for me).  When one of my very dearest friends came out to me as gay in college, I had just never thought deeply  about the theology of inclusion or exclusion of GLBTQIA folks. But that hours long conversation that I had with my friend blew the roof of my house, and you can bet that I thought deeply and was born into a new space after that.  

When I lost a pregnancy years ago, something in my heart quietly started crumbling and one day I turned my head and realized that I couldn’t sense God.  In fact, I couldn’t quite sense anything.  And I spent a good, long, unsettled while in the wilderness straining to hear something.  My heart goes out to Nicodemus as he struggles to find his way.

I think of the church, the wider Lutheran church on this international women’s day, and our struggle 50 years ago to ordain women and 11 years ago to ordain openly GLBTQIA folks. Before those collective decisions to ordain these pastors were made, there were long periods of wilderness wandering for the church.   I think of the Christian church’s struggles today.  Sometimes, it seems like the wider Christian church can be more set on condemning instead of loving and it’s unsettling.  I think of our society right now where it seems like we are bewildered, edgy, unsettled and in the wilderness. 

What happens when our understanding of who God is outgrows the language or the liturgy or the ideas that we’ve always held close and cherished?  What happens when we leave the feeling of certainty and step into the wilderness unknown?

Artist Brian Andreas, creator of “The Story People,” wrote of two people sitting together and one of them says to the other, “I don't know how long I can do this…I think the universe has different plans for me. [and the friend says] we sat there in silence & I thought to myself that this is the thing we all come to & this is the thing we all fight & if we are lucky enough to lose, our lives become beautiful with mystery again & I sat there silent because that is not something that can be said.”

Jesus asks Nicodemus to let go of something certain and step into the unknown. To step into a space where the mysterious power of God changes water into wine and brings sight to a blind man. A mysterious space where the living word is made flesh and dwells among us.  

In a sense, Nicodemus tentatively wanders in the wilderness for the rest of the gospel of John.  While the first time he first finds Jesus is anonymously at night, he later makes an unexpectedly courageous cameo during a heated moment when some of his fellow religious leaders suggest that Jesus should be arrested.  “Wait a minute!” Nicodemus says, “shouldn’t Jesus have a hearing before being judged?” Then finally, when Jesus is crucified, it’s Nicodemus who brings an extravagant amount of spices and myrrh and helps Joseph of Arimathea bury him.

The happy ending to this story would have been for Nicodemus to totally have gotten it, hook, line and sinker that Jesus doesn’t just do these miraculous things with God’s power, but that Jesus actually is God and God’s full power.  Instead, Nicodemus wanders around the edges, always throwing his big questions at the sky.

What I do know for sure is that out there in the wilderness, Jesus loved Nicodemus.  What I do know for sure, is that here in our wilderness, God so loves us.  God loves the world.  This world—with all of our chaos, and anxiety, and pandemics and personal stress. God is in the midst of it, active, alive and loving it.

God who watches over us will not slumber or sleep

The Spirit stands beside us as our protective shade

So that sun will not harm us by day,

Nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep us

will hold our life.

And will keep our going out

and our coming in

from this time on and forever.

As it turns out, God is a total fool for love who will love us like we have never been loved before. God will dissolve our hearts with love if we let him--even in the midst of our biggest questions and uncertainties. To believe in, to cherish this mystery that we are so loved by God is to live differently.  To live a God shaped life. Marcus Borg wrote that the word “believe” means something like the word “belove.” Belove. To give one’s heart to God. To cherish God’s heart and know that God cherishes ours.  And, though we may be unsettled, to know that God loves this world—this crazy, imperfect world--in ways that are unfathomably beyond our imagination. In the wilderness, may we let go and give our hearts to God.

Prone to wander Lord I feel it

Prone to leave this life I love.

Here’s my heart oh take and seal it

Seal it for thy courts above.