A pattern of life, a pattern of God (a message from 5.7.23)

John 14:1-14

"Jesus said to him, 'I am the way’" John 14:6

The dance known as Salsa (which is awfully easier to demonstrate than write about) is a pattern of stepping forward for three steps and back for three steps. This pattern repeats itself over and over, often in tandem with another person moving the same way. When you’ve got the pattern down, you can make the dance fancy by adding twirls and fun arm movements on top of it.  But, however you spice it up, underneath it there is always this steady foot pattern. 

I’d compare it to a heartbeat in our chest that is always underneath whatever we’re doing: walking down the street, scrolling on our phones, or eating lunch, it’s always there underneath us as a pattern thumping away. If you put your hand on your chest, you can feel it: Lub-dub, lub-dub…

In the gospel of John, there is no traditional Christmas story. There’s no stable and manger or shepherds and Magi.  Instead, in the beginning was a pattern. The scripture verses say in English in the “beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) Word is how we translate the Greek word Logos into English. But, Word does not explain the breadth of what Logos means. The Greek word is so big and broad and evocative that we have to toss all these little words in English at it trying to shine a light on its’ significance.  

In the beginning was the word 
The thought
The reason
In the beginning was the pattern
The way

The disciple Thomas is worried in our bible story today.  Actually, all the disciples probably are. Jesus has just explained that he is preparing to leave. They’ve really attached a lot of hope to him that he’s going to be the one to shake things up and even turn this world upside down. Now, it turns out, he’s going to die and his death will be ugly and heartbreaking. They’re confused. 

In their defense, Jesus can be a little obtuse in the gospel of John. Everything he says seems to have some other poetic significance behind it.  For example, there’s all this talk about abiding with each other which I’d liken to being on the same wave, or in this magnetic, soul-searching relationship with God. It’s deep. The disciples, always seem to be a more concrete in their understanding of Jesus’ poetry.

When Jesus says to them in today’s story with heartfelt intensity, “you know where I’m going,” I imagine them all looking at each other quizzically and whispering: “what’s he talking about? he didn’t mention anything to me about going somewhere, did he tell you?” 

It’s Thomas, ever the straightforward one among them who says, “um, Lord, we don’t know where you’re going.  We don’t know the way.” 

Jesus replies with that same sage sincerity: “I am the way…if you know me you know the Father.”   

His explanation doesn’t seem to land with them and Phillip replies, “Okay, I’m still not totally tracking here. Could you give us some coordinates, or draw us some sort of map, so we’re sure to get to the Father’s house…you know, the one with all the many rooms?”

And Jesus tenderly replies: You already know the Way. I’m not a guide on the path, “I am the way.” Keep walking the way. 

I am the way, 
the pattern.
The way we’ve been walking
The truth we’ve been absorbing
The life we’ve been breathing and living together,
I am the way the truth the life
The pattern

This is the point in our gospel story where God is about to kick it up a notch and take the church to another level.  We think sometimes, that it can’t get much bigger than Easter Sunday, but this is the point in the story where Jesus is headed out to God just as the Holy Spirit is on her way in to us. Remember: soon, Jesus will die, then he’ll be resurrected. After his resurrection, he’ll ascend to be with God. As Jesus ascends and leaves his beloved disciples he will pass the baton to them—to us!—to the Church. The Church is about to be born and we’ll hear this awesome story on Pentecost in a few weeks. 

This Church that will be born, Jesus explains, shall do even greater things than He has done. (v. 12)

How will the Church accomplish this? By following the pattern and by walking the way.  By abiding in Jesus, vibing with him, learning from him and working to become one with him.  Jesus’ disciples are worried about what the future holds and Jesus speaks to that concern and explains they must stay on this path. Dwell with me, he invites them, in one of these magnificent rooms in my Father’s house. Dance to this pattern. Follow the way. And our connection will grow and deepen.

This Way or pattern of living flows like living water under how we live our lives (John 4).  It’s like the heartbeat beneath us that guides us in how we show up in the world, how we make decisions and how treat people. It directs us in how we spend and give our money. It pulls us to love people and to question worldly ways of power and status.  This Way thumping beneath us influences how we live our lives. 

Annie Dillard writes about the importance of a pattern like a schedule. Every day, she explains, we count on waking and sleeping at certain hours. We count on 3 meals a day. Perhaps we read a the news or a devotional at a certain time. Whatever you’re schedule is, Dillard writes, we use it as a base or a scaffolding to build our lives on.  (1)

This way or pattern that God Is to us is the scaffolding that we that we build our lives into. We build our families, friendships and careers into this scaffolding. We build our hopes and activism into this design. Giving structure, support and life-animating essence to each thing we do is this pattern underneath. When we’ve got the pattern down, we add twirls and flair on top of it. We adjust the tempo and add our personality.  When we trip, we listen for that sacred rhythm and we sync up to again. 

Today, we celebrate the baptisms of Bernadette and Miles.  When we talk about baptism, picture this Way that we walk with God.  Baptism is a mile marker or, perhaps, an on-ramp into a relationship with God.  (Mind you, it’s not the only on-ramp, Jesus cautions us against excluding people when he says things like “I have other sheep that are not from this fold”).

The experience of faith is a journey of a curiosity around who Jesus is, how God moves around us, how we live our lives, and how we walk through this world as people of the Way.  With baptism, that living water and that essence of God flows through us like a heartbeat. In baptism, we’re called to live our lives in sync with God and abide with the Pattern of Love.

We sync up with God’s pattern when we do things like showing up for friends or people in need, through exploring the curiosities and questions of our faith, and through worship.

In our own congregation, I see us syncing up with the pattern of God’s love as we’ve helped the migrants who are sheltered police stations this last week.  We walk to this rhythm of God’s love through making meals, through offering our loving presence, and, for example, through giving haircuts to all the little boys living at the 17th precinct police station a few days ago and even bringing hair gel so they can feel just a little more normal. (Somehow, I think the gift of hair gel for these little boys who have had such a hard go of it is particularly a part of the pattern of God’s love). 

I will head to my sabbatical at the end of this church service and I will be resting in God’s love this summer which is also part of this pattern and Way.

*********

Now, in case you are one of the people who heard me mention salsa dancing at the beginning of this message and said “oh, that is not me, I am nothing close to a salsa dancer,” maybe the dancing metaphor isn’t for you; but I notice that the life of faith is the same as learning to dance: It asks us to participate and practice. It challenges us to learn to walk to a distinctive pattern and in a particular the way. And, with time, steady as our own heart beat we realize—wow—we’re in sync with God. 

In fact, we’ve been held in God’s love all along.

(1) "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order -- willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."   --From "The Writing Life," by Annie Dillard

A spark of glory and hearts ablaze in connection (an Emmaus message about despair and hope)

 Luke 24:13-35

Last weekend, I drove with my family down to southern Illinois. I am originally from Springfield and when I was a kid, my family used to camp down at Giant City state park.  We were on the lookout for spring and as we drove south, you could see the green starting to creep up the trees. Everything was in full bloom.  This meant that, poor Omar sneezed his way through the woods while the kids and I skipped.  
It was a really simple beautiful weekend where we hiked and ate sandwiches and connected with an old friends. But enough of a reprieve to shake the dust out of my head and feel refreshed.  

Not long after returning back to Chicago, the news cycle did a number on me when I heard about the teenager Ralph, who is Black who went to pick his brother up at the wrong house and was shot on the doorstep by the man who was White inside.  Thankfully, he lived. The rush of other news articles to take in this week didn’t help. 

I felt indignant. It was madness. I experienced that flood of frustration that flows in from the overwhelm of everything that’s wrong in the world. Will things every change? It was despair. 

Our bible story today tells of two friends walking together on the road to the town called Emmaus.  They are talking about all of the things that have happened in the last few days: Jesus’ arrest, his torture, his crucifixion at the hands of the state and now the fact that, although he was buried, the tomb now appears to be empty and people are saying he was raised from the dead which is just about more than they can bear.  

Unbeknownst to them, Jesus appears as a stranger walking along side of them. He asks them what they’re talking about so emphatically and they tell him about everything. "We had hoped," they said, “that he would be the one to redeem us, to fix this mess of a world we live in, to make all things right.” Jesus walks there with them for a while listening to them as they explain.  We had hoped. They are despairing. 

Researchers say that a lot of people are feeling despair right now. Theologian Rob Bell defines despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.” While it's stronger for some than others, there’s this pervading sense of worry or anxiousness or pessimism about the future that a lot of us have. Some people point to current trends to explain this. They blame it on the state of our economy or how the pandemic did a number on us or things about the way society is structured. But, research shows that people were feeling this way before the pandemic and when the economy seemed to be doing well so those reasons can’t explain the whole story for the despair. 

Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General names a couple of reasons that he thinks feed this feeling of despair. He mentions four things: 

1. The extraordinary pace of change we’re living in.  The ways communicate are changing, how we think about ourselves is evolving. How we think about our work or happiness or retirement or success is changing. And things are changing fast. It’s hard to keep up.

2.  The environment around us where we get our information is profoundly negative. What we see or hear or read in news stokes these feelings of upset. Sometimes, it can seem like just about everything is broken in the world. (This is the one that particularly hit me when we came back from our magical little weekend away.) 

3. Our ability to talk to one another is broken. Unless we’re with like minded folks, we hesitate to bring things up because we don’t know how people will react. We get hung up on people’s words instead of their intentions. That gets tricky because how we work things out when times are stressful is to talk it through. So, we’re not talking about stuff.

4. Loneliness and isolation and in that, more than ½ of Americans feel lonely. More than ½ young people feel lonely. 

All of these factors combine together to create a recipe for despair. 

I can’t say what the specific factors were for those disciples on the road to Emmaus 2000 years ago, but I know that wrapped up in there was a strong sense of hopelessness for the future. 

I find it curious that in this bible story, God comes up along side of these friends walking on the road to be close to them and accompany them in their time of distress.  They don’t sense Jesus there, but he is there in the form of a stranger.  He asks questions about their anguish, he listens closely. He walks, he waits. He connects with them and shares words of hope with them. As this mysterious stranger talks with them, their hearts begin to burn with the promise of what could be.

 Ukranian artist, Ivanka Demchuk painted this scene with the two disciples as these brown figures on the road with their hearts blazing gold and radiating out from their chest.  

As the story continues, after they all have arrived in the village of Emmaus they convince the mysterious stranger to stay with them. Only later, when the stranger breaks bread with them in the house are their eyes opened and they recognize Jesus Emmanuel is with them.

Jesus then dramatically vanishes, off then they head to Jerusalem, to tell people that they have seen the Lord and build a new world. 

Today we will baptize little Sebastian Jude into the life of faith which is such great reason to celebrate! I wish...

I wish I could promise sweet Sebastian, and all of our children here this morning, 

    that they will not despair on the road that life sets out before them.   

I wish I could quell anything that might cause him to feel hopeless. 

I wish I could make the kids that will be mean to him kind.  

I wish I could make sure that his friends will never betray him. 

I wish I could assure his safety 

    and make certain that any of his friends that ring a stranger’s doorbell will be safe.  

I wish I could tell all the kid that everyone’s family and marriage will be harmonious 

    and that our society will always work together to seek out the collective good. 

I wish I could re-freeze the polar ice sheets 

    and desegregate the cities 

    and eliminate the machines of war with the snap of my fingers. 

I wish I could tell him that all of his friends 

    that might be the nerd kids, or the trans kids, or the lonely kids, that they’re going to be okay. 

But I can’t promise that. I cannot promise that his heart will not break on this mysterious journey of life that we are on. 

But I can promise, as Jesus showed us, that the antidote to despair is connection and when we connect with one another, that spark that God ignites in us can set the whole world ablaze in glory.

Now, about connection: We are so often told that we can go it alone. We’re told that it’s each individual’s responsibility to manage their own despair and pain, but we are social, communal creatures and we depend on each other for healing.  Jesus shows us this in how he continually reaches out and sparks connection with people. The very act of getting out of ourselves and gathering, for example, in a church on a Sunday morning with people that are different from us, and talking about how we care about this other world that God is calling us to is counter cultural.  

God creates culture here through us and through our worship. Then, this culture ripples outward to all the people folks interact with when they leave this church.  Connection is powerful.

We have a world to rebuild and what can get in our way is despair. We’re called to be much more than spectators to suffering. While we can’t always eliminate that despair completely, God does open a way through it by guiding us to rebuild our connection to each other.

What does that connection do?  

Well, in the bible story, this spark of intimacy deepens that blaze of glory the disciples feel in their chests and gives them courage to go back to Jerusalem--to the place that seemed dangerous--right to the pain points to connect with their community. There, they will about God’s love and to build a new world together with those around them.

In just a short while, we will baptize Sebastian Jude.  When we gather around the baptismal font, we will renounce the powers of this world that would try to divide and demean us.  We will renounce powers that justify mass shootings and ideologies of supremacy and inferiority based on race or gender. We will commit to living in a such a way that brings about this radical kingdom of God even when it feels like the world is on fire around us.

Death will not prevail, for God will strike it down, and new life will rise.

Because we are beloved, forgiven, cherished, we participate in this building of a new world, even when our hearts are breaking.  

Thanks be to God.