Sermon: The walls came a-tumblin down (Jan. 31, 2016)

Epiphany 4C

January 31, 2016

Luke 4:21-30

Grace in her playpen

            Every parent looks forward to the big milestones in their baby’s life – first words, first steps, first solid food... Last weekend, Grace met one of them: she can now roll over in either direction, belly to back, and back to belly! Of course, we are very proud parents, boasting about how amazing our child is (as if no other child had ever done this!). But I quickly realized the consequences of her new skill when I took her with me to a pastor continuing education event this past week. I tried to keep her wrangled and maintain some semblance of normal in a strange place, while she, with her curiosity, combined with her newfound mobility, was rolling and squirming all over the place, reaching for things on the table, not staying put on a blanket on the floor, even clawing her way out of her little bassinet. Thankfully I had brought a portable playpen, and could plop her in there when I didn’t want her to go anywhere. She may not have liked it much, but at least with the help of these four mesh walls, I was able to keep her contained while I went about doing what I needed to do.

            We like to be able to keep things contained, don’t we? Putting up walls – whether the mesh walls of a pack-n-play, or a wooden fence between properties, or a stone wall along a border – makes us feel like we have control, like we are safe. They keep what’s inside the wall safe from what is outside of it (a newly mobile infant away from any number of dangerous items in the home, for instance, or a dog from running out into the street). And, they keep what is undesired on the outside from coming in (the neighbor’s prying eyes from our yards, or deer from the rose garden, or strangers from our land). Walls serve a number of practical purposes, but when it comes down to it, walls

Great Wall of China

make us feel safe and in control, because we can choose what to allow to come in or go out.

But Jesus, it would seem, disagrees with this careful logic. Let’s do a little recap of what happened last week, because today’s Gospel reading is a part of that same story. Last week we heard of Jesus’ first public appearance of his ministry, in which he teaches in the synagogue using a reading from Isaiah that says, “The Spirit of God is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good new to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he tells the crowd that today, this reading has been fulfilled in their hearing, which is where today’s reading began.

Naaman the Syrian leper

Now, we get to see the crowd’s response to Jesus’ sermon. At first, they are very impressed! They feel some sense of honor and ownership over this young man, Jesus, who grew up right in their little town. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they say, with admiration. “Well hasn’t he grown up into a fine young man!” But Jesus tells them, “No, you’ve missed the point. What I’m telling you is that all the people you don’t want anything to do with – these are the people I’m telling you God is blessing: the poor, the blind, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the indebted. These people you can’t stand, don’t want to be near, whom you think are your enemies – these are the people to receive God’s favor!” And then to prove the point, Jesus tells them a few stories from their own scripture, their own history, of times when God blessed the outsider, the enemies of Israel, instead of Israel: in a severe famine, it was the widow from Sidon to whom God sent Elijah – Sidon, against which prophets declared judgments, the one-time oppressors of Israel. And of all the lepers during the time of Elisha, it was Naaman the Syrian, another enemy of Israel, who was cleansed. You see, Jesus says, God has a track record of reaching out and blessing the despised and the enemy, and now Jesus was here to do the same.

And the walls came a-tumblin’ down. You see, the people in Jesus’ time felt the same way about walls that we do, and they had built a metaphorical wall around their understanding of God to keep it safe. They tried to domesticate God, to control God, to make God do what they thought was right. They tried to tame God and keep God contained, like I did by putting Grace in a playpen. But Jesus approaches their God-walls, and takes a sledgehammer of grace to their carefully stacked stones, tearing them down, saying, “This is not your God. Your God doesn’t build walls. Your God tears walls down and reaches out to the stranger, to the weak, to those in need.”

“When all in the synagogue heard this, they were filled with rage!” Rage, Luke tells us, that Jesus would dare mess with their safe, carefully kept understanding of God. Rage, that he would challenge them to think, to act differently. Rage, that he would take away their safety and chip so vigorously away at the walls they had put around God, that they had put around themselves. They were filled with rage!

Clench your fists. Feel their rage. When have you felt that sort of rage? When have you reacted in that sort of rage? How have you reacted? When I am filled with rage, I find I often do things rashly, and say things I don’t mean, and spit out vitriolic words and want to hit things. And that is what this crowd did, too. They got up, drove Jesus out of town, and brought him to a cliff where they planned to hurl him off to his death. My goodness, how upset we get when the walls we put up are threatened! How irrational we can be when we feel our control and safety are challenged!

But do you see how Jesus responds? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole story. When someone is enraged at me, I tend to push back, rising to meet the person in their anger. But Jesus does not respond with the same rage. He does not spit vitriol back at them. Standing there, on the edge of a cliff, before an enraged crowd who literally wants to kill him… he merely walks through them, passing through their midst, and goes on his way.

            How brave is his response! I think our human tendency to react to others’ anger with anger of our own is an act of self-preservation. We feel attacked, and so we put up our defenses – more walls – and start fighting back, perhaps defensively, perhaps offensively. It is a fearful response. But not Jesus. Jesus’ response, to meet their anger and fear with peace, is brave. If only we could be like Jesus.

            Pastor Chuck Schwarz tells about the bravest of his five children, the youngest, who has cerebral palsy. This son greets every day with a smile. He lives his life, difficult as it must be some days, with grace and joy. He has a shirt, Pastor Chuck says, that proves the point. “Fearless,” it says

on the front. But it isn’t all one line, “fearless.” It is two: “Fear Less.” Fear less. Maybe I can’t be as brave as Jesus, but this, perhaps, I could do. Fear less. Fear less. And on the flip side of that, not only fear less, but also trust more. Trust more that when Jesus starts chipping away at our walls with his sledgehammer of grace, that what he is doing is calling us out of our safe, fearful stone cells, and into the difficult life of discipleship.

            You see, Jesus does not call us to be nice. He does not call us to be agreeable, or satisfactory, or pleasant. As Christians, we’re not called to keep on going the way we always have, to stay the same, to keep safe and hidden behind the comfort of our walls. We don’t come to church each week to hear, “You’re just great and doing everything right. Don’t change a thing!” No, we are called to proclaim the good news about the one who came to defeat fear and death forever, the one who came to change, challenge, love, move and transform us. There is more than enough rage and fear in the world already. Jesus calls us toward something different from what the world gives. Jesus calls us to respond to fear and walls with grace and peace.

            Let us pray… Transforming God, so often we put safety as our highest good, but you call us toward the difficult life of discipleship: toward loving those difficult to love and blessing those we would rather keep out. Tear down our walls, and give us courage to respond to fear with grace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon: Your life matters. (Jan. 24, 2016)

Epiphany 3C

January 24, 2016

Luke 4:14-21

  

            If you have watched the news at all in the past couple years, you are aware of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This movement is primarily responsible for bringing the issue of racism back into America’s awareness – which has left some people grateful that we are finally addressing this, and others annoyed because they feel that racism, at least as it looked in the 1960s, is no longer really an issue in America. Whatever your particular stance, the conversation has been opened, and this is largely the reason that the ELCA, our national church body, as well as the Upstate New York Synod specifically, have chosen to focus on addressing the question, “How does racism look in 2016, and how should the Church respond to it?” One way the Upstate NY Synod has addressed it is to make the topic the focus of our Synod Assembly, our annual gathering for business and learning. In fact, you’re encouraged to engage in learning about it even if you’re not attending the event. If you are interested in learning more about this, there is information in our February

newsletter, or you can talk to me about it.

            Now, I know that starting my sermon by talking about Black Lives Matter has probably already turned some people off, but stay with me here, because I think it is a helpful entry point for our Gospel reading today. First, some background: This proclamation Jesus offers in the synagogue is Jesus’ very first public appearance in Luke’s Gospel, and first appearances are really significant because they provide a key to understanding Jesus’ purpose. By reading this particular passage from Isaiah, and punctuating it with the brief yet powerful statement, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus is making a powerful statement about who he is and his ministry. Sort of like when a presidential hopeful declares their candidacy, their opening speech sets the tone for their goals and purpose, and what we will see and what we can expect from them from here on out.

            So what is Jesus saying, then, about his purpose and who he is? Take a look at the reading again – if you had to take a guess, looking at what Jesus read, and his commentary about it, for whom has Jesus come, and what is his intention? [wait for answers]

            ⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
  because he has anointed me
   to bring good news to the poor.
 He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
  and recovery of sight to the blind,
   to let the oppressed go free,
 ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
²⁰And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

            [In conversation, highlight that this passage shows Jesus’ interest in the poor, blind, imprisoned, oppressed, and indebted. Explain “the year of the Lord’s favor” and the year of Jubilee.

Are these people important to society? Not really. Summarize conclusions.]

Now, even though Jesus likely meant this literally, and even if literally, we wouldn’t be included on this list, taken metaphorically we could consider ourselves to be any one of these people as well. We are poor – we feel the loneliness of lack, of feeling like we don’t have what we need and aren’t really sure how to get it; we may not even be sure of what it is that we need in the first place! We are captives – imprisoned by our fears, by our guilt, by our shame, by our nagging feelings of being “not enough” for whatever it is life requires of us. We are blind – unable or unwilling to see beyond our experience, unable to see the beauty even in someone who, on the outside, looks undesirable, unable to see God in all things. We are oppressed – by so many demands that life puts upon us, by the unfair expectations of the world, by the unfair expectations we put on ourselves. We are indebted – we long for “the year of the Lord’s favor,” the year of Jubilee, when all debts and guilt are forgiven, when we can finally let go of all the baggage that weighs us down and keeps us from living lives of fullness and joy. Though I think that when Jesus reads this passage, he means those who physically and literally are poor, blind, imprisoned, oppressed, and indebted, I also believe that we cannot so quickly remove ourselves from the list.

            Whether literal or metaphorical, it seems that Jesus’ interest is in the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. How counter to expectation Luke tells us that Jesus entered the scene “filled with the power of the Spirit,” yet Jesus seems to have no interest in hobnobbing with the other powerful people of the world. No, his interest is in the least powerful. You could even say that Jesus prioritizes, or has a preference for, the weakest members of society.

Now, here is where I see a relationship between Jesus’ proclamation and the Black Lives Matter movement. I was among those, and maybe you are too, who felt a little uneasy about saying “black lives matter.” I mean, they do matter, I agree with that, but so does everyone else’s life! Right? Can’t we say “all lives matter” to the same effect? What changed my mind and my heart about that was an analogy offered by one theologian – one who happens to be a black man who lives in a mostly white neighborhood, and who has various times been pulled over for no reason, and given the explanation from the police that they were “just doing their job.” He describes it this way: in any given neighborhood, all the houses matter. But if one of the houses is on fire, the fire department will come and throw water on that house – not because the other houses don’t matter, but because the

house on fire matters especially right now. He adds, “Right now, our house is on fire.”

            In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is saying something similar. The people he names – the poor, blind, imprisoned, oppressed, and indebted – they are people who, in the eyes of the world, don’t matter. They are weak, or invaluable to society. They don’t contribute. They are moochers, and ne’er-do-wells. They are the people who, at best, are the objects of pity, and at worst are looked down upon, ridiculed, and dismissed. In Jesus’ world, and in some ways, in ours, they don’t matter. But Jesus, in this introductory announcement of his public ministry, says, “Poor lives matter. Blind lives matter. Imprisoned lives matter. Oppressed lives matter. Indebted lives matter. These lives matter to me – and I have come to save them.”

            That’s pretty good news. Really, it’s great news. But the best news to me here is not that Jesus has come to save people, even the people lowest on the totem pole. What is the best news to me is that: our God would do that. The best news is that these people whom society would rather sweep under the rug and ignore – God sees these people. God sees them, and loves them so much that God would send Jesus specifically for them. Those lives matter to God.

            And going back to my earlier suggestion that, taken metaphorically, we could all be considered poor, blind, imprisoned, oppressed and indebted… that means that God sees you, too, and knows you, and loves you. Even when we feel overcome by shame, or buried in doubt, or stuck gazing into the abyss of our own navels, or completely unlovable, Jesus says to us, “Your life matters.” It matters so much, that Jesus would come to earth and die on our behalf, so that we could be raised up again with him in new life.

Today, this message is fulfilled in your hearing, and in your seeing, and in your living, knowing that this is most certainly true.

            Let us pray… Seeing God, we thank you that our lives matter to you, even when we don’t feel like they should, and that you came to earth specifically for those who need you the most. Open our eyes to see our neighbors as people who matter truly and deeply to you, and help us know how to love and serve them as Jesus did. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Four months of Grace

January 22, 2016

Dear Grace,

Napping with teddy

The other day, I went into your room in the morning to watch you sleep a while. Your dad had already gotten you up to feed and change you, and now you were peacefully sleeping once again. Standing there watching you, listening to you breathe through your cute, perpetually stuffy, snot-covered little nose, I nearly burst into tears, for how much I love you. Every night, your dad and I say that to each other: “I love her so much!!” We can hardly contain it.

In every way, my dear, you live up to your name. We can’t believe how lucky we are that you are our daughter. You continue to be an “easy” baby, almost always happy, only crying when you have a legitimate need that needs tending to. You sleep well and eat well. Now, at four and a half months, you are at the delightful stage where you are playing! We can put you on a blanket on the floor surrounded by some of your favorite toys, and you will stay there happily for 15-30 minutes, talking and squirming and stretching and finding ways to move yourself around the blanket. If we sit there with you, you’ve been known to go on like that for an hour.

Of course, Klaus always stands guard. He is your favorite toy of all. He is fond of licking your feet and hands and sometimes face (until we see him and make him stop!). You are fond of grabbing his ears and petting his soft fur. You are always happy when Klaus is in reach, and he is always sure to stay nearby you if we ever walk out of the room. You’re quite a pair!

Ready to walk to daycare, cheeks and all!

You’ve started going to daycare fulltime now, and they love you there. You have acquired the nickname, “Cheeks,” because you have the fullest, most beautiful cheeks, which always have a rosy hue. You love watching all the other kids there – there is so much to see and take in! Every day when we pick you up, Miss Kerri tells us, “She had a good day! She always does.” Daycare is only 1/4 mile from our house, so you and I often walk there, even this week in the snow! You were very interested in the great big flakes that were falling, turning your face up to watch the fluffy, “lake effect” flakes come down. Eventually, though, you turned your face sort of grumpily into the carrier, finally tired of the cold water on your rosy cheeks, I’m sure!

You make an abundance of sounds. Each time you discover something new to do with your voice, you relish in it, repeating the sound and grinning. One of our favorite things about you is the stories you tell yourself. After we put you to bed at night, you usually stay up a few extra minutes, babbling away. Again in the morning, you don’t wake with a cry like one might expect from a baby with a very full diaper and a very empty belly. Instead, you start chatting again. Sometimes your

Ready for snow!

stories even have a clear arc to the storyline, with a climax that wanes into snores. I sometimes just stand at your door, listening, and chuckling with delight, thinking, “She is her parents’ daughter.”

I think morning is your favorite time of day. Dad usually wakes you around 7am to feed and change you, and these are his favorite moments of the day, as he engages with you, his very refreshed daughter suddenly having all her needs tended to at once. My routine is that when I wake you again around 8:30, I come into your room singing “Morning Has Broken,” and you whip your head around to see me, and offer me a great big grin and immediately start wiggling with excitement. While I wash your face, change your clothes and diaper, and get you ready for the day, I sing all our “morning songs” – first Carole King’s “Beautiful” (“You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart!” – and you happily oblige!), and then Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feeling Groovy” (you especially love the parts that go,

Grace's faces, at 4 month

“doo-doo-doo” or “na-na-na” – they never cease to elicit a grin and a giggle). On workdays, we walk to daycare (bundled up in your warm snowsuit!). On Fridays, when I have the day off, we play, and read, and sing. Today I introduced you to my ukulele, and of the songs we sang, your favorite was “This Land Is Your Land.” I also sang you “The Way I Am” (Ingrid Michaelson) and cried most of the way through it because I love you just so much.

Each day I love you more and more, my dear Grace. I want you to stay this way forever, and also I can’t WAIT to see what tomorrow brings! I love you my daughter, my “sweetest pea,” my love, my heart.

                                                                                                Your Mom

Sermon: Do whatever he tells you. (Jan. 17, 2016)

Epiphany 2C

January 17, 2015

John 2:1-11

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            This week I got a long email from a friend. She is a Christian, and we've talked a couple times about our respective relationships with God. This email was a long account of her faith journey, finally leading up to some recent revelations about her faith and her relationship with God and some steps she has decided to take in her life to be more dedicated to discipleship. Throughout the email were phrases like, “I felt God saying to me…” and, “I listened to what God is telling me…”

            Perhaps this is why, when I read this week’s Gospel lesson, the line I noticed this time around was Mary’s: “Do whatever he tells you.” That’s good advice, don’t you think? Whether it comes from the mother of Jesus or not, “Do whatever Jesus tells you” is certainly advice to take to heart.

            The trouble is, how do you do that? At that wedding at Cana, it was a bit easier, at least a bit more obvious, because Jesus was there in the flesh, giving concrete instructions about filling stone jars with water. Now, filling those jars with gallons upon gallons of soon-to-be wine was not an easy

job physically, but at least those servants had a clear direction. There are many times I would love to have Jesus right at my elbow saying, “Johanna, do this. No, don’t do that. Do this instead.” Though that wouldn’t necessarily make life easier – because, let’s face it, discipleship is hard – it would at least make knowing how to live a life of faith clearer!

            So how can we, 2000 years after Jesus walked the earth, still “do whatever he tells us”? How can we know? It’s an important question to ask ourselves, again and again, as we encounter ever new stages of life.

            So here are some ideas. The first way to listen to Jesus so we can do what he tells us, is to read Scripture. Seems pretty clear-cut, right? But the thing about reading Scripture is that it isn’t like any other reading we do. First of all, you can’t really skim it, like you might a magazine. It’s not always very entertaining, like you might hope for from a good novel. It’s not even really like non-fiction, like the presidential biographies my dad loves so much, or even like theology, which is most of the reading I have done in the past 10 years. Although it may be any of these things at any given time, none of them really capture the way the Bible should be read. Those of you who are participating in our Daily Bible study, in which we are reading through the entire Bible in one year, can attest to this. Right now we are still in Genesis, which is mostly stories and is about as close as we’re going to get to thrilling drama, jealousy, romance and deception. (In fact, that basically describes Genesis!) But even there – Genesis doesn’t read like a history book or novel, nor is it meant to, and even with the stories of sordid family drama alongside stories of great faith, it is not really my first choice to curl up with alongside my cup of Earl Grey for a nice relaxing evening.

            No, reading the Bible is a very different sort of reading. Though you may read it for history or entertainment, this is not the way to read it if you are hoping to hear Jesus’ voice. In order to hear what Jesus is telling you, you must read the Bible as if it is being written just for you. It’s more like a letter from a friend – even, a love letter.

            Do you remember, back when people used to write letters? I was an avid letter-writer when I was younger, keeping in vigilant contact with all my friends from summer camp. Now, of course, email is the more common mode of letter-writing. I recently came across an email thread between Michael and me. It didn’t take long before I realized what it was in reference to – one of the most painful and sad moments we’ve had in our relationship. As I read our pained responses back and forth, I remembered the emotions of that conversation, and I could hear his tone of voice and could sense his emotion as well, because even though these emails were a part of the difficulty of

relationship, it was a relationship with someone I know and love so much, and who knows me and loves me so much.

            That’s how it is to read the Bible. It is like a letter from someone who knows and love you, whom you know and love, and it is addressed directly to you. Just as Martin Luther asks repeatedly in his Small Catechism – “What does this mean for us?” – this is the question we should be asking when we read God’s Word: What does this mean for us, for me, at this moment, at this juncture in my relationship with God? What is the message that underlies these words on a page?

            Another important way to listen to Jesus and do whatever he tells us is, of course, through prayer. But prayer is not just talking! As my elementary school teachers used to say, “You can’t listen if you are talking!” And if we are to listen to Jesus, then we need to not do all the talking. I wish I could tell you from experience how to do this, but this particular aspect of faith is not my strength. Listening is hard, especially when God doesn’t really seem to be talking.

When I was doing my internship as a hospital chaplain, I met regularly in small group with the other student chaplains, and together, we set goals for ourselves for the summer. One of the goals I made for myself was not to be the first one to jump in with something to say in our small group sessions. I hated silence so much, I would always be the first to break it, but others really needed that silence to process. So I made the goal to count to 6 before I said anything. “Six!” my colleagues laughed. “Why not 10?” Honestly, because six seconds was all the silent listening I could fathom! I couldn’t believe they would actually want 10! It became very clear to me in that moment that practicing silence would be one of my most important goals that summer.

            Shiela Cassidy writes about one of her break-through discoveries about prayer: that it is “wasting time” with God. For a culture so focused on productivity, I love this image for prayer. There needn’t be a definite outcome. There need only be time spent together. Last week a friend of mine, a fellow pastor in a different part of the country, called me in tears, asking if I had time to talk. The truth was, I didn’t – it was 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon and I hadn’t even started my sermon! But I said sure, I had time. For nearly two hours, she poured her heart out to me about her struggles with her church, and the fear that she might have to leave her call. I’ll tell you, even though I had so much to do and accomplish that afternoon, it was so clear to me that this was the most important place to be, “wasting time” with my friend. Prayer is like that: it is putting aside the need to accomplish something, and simply listening, for as long as it takes.

            One last way we can listen to God is through our relationships with God’s people. This one is tricky – how can you be sure what you are hearing is from God and not from somewhere else? But God has a way of making you aware of when this is something you need to hear. My dad tells a story about when he was considering retirement. The decision was wrought with fear and uncertainty, as major life decisions often are. He talked about these fears with his friend, before eventually moving on to other topics. One of those topics was the story of how my dad ended up in the call in which he spent nearly 30 years. He had announced his resignation at his previous church, and was leaving June 30. He lived in a parsonage with his wife and two young kids at the time, so resignation meant that by June 30, they’d also be homeless. Yet, he had no other call in the works. He had interviewed with Peace Lutheran in May, but by June, he still hadn’t heard anything. And so, stepping out in faith, they rented a storage unit and arranged to housesit for someone for the month of July. Two days later, they received the call to Peace Lutheran Church.

As he recounted the story to his friend, it hit him like a ton of bricks – they had stepped out in faith then, and God took care of them! Why should the decision to retire be any different? As he described it, “In the loving, supportive context of simple conversation with a faithful friend, in this process of ‘Christian conference,’ suddenly it was Jesus who was talking. And the overtone was there: ‘Do whatever he tells you.’”

            Listening to Jesus can indeed change our lives. This simple advice from Mary, “do whatever he tells you,” is easier said than done. But as we embark on a journey to learn how to do this, we can also trust that when we fail at it, Jesus won’t leave us to drown in our mistakes. He will keep talking, sometimes gently, and sometimes by such extraordinary means that the abundance of joy and grace is as unexpected as it is incomprehensible. However his voice appears to us, may we have hearts open to hear it.

            Let us pray… Abundant God, you will always guide us toward your voice and your will, if we but listen. Teach us to pray, to read your Word, to listen to the ways your voice comes in to our lives, and give us the courage to do whatever you tell us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.