Sermon: Understanding things you can't understand (Mar. 19, 2023)

Lent 4B
March 19, 2023
John 9:1-41

INTRODUCTION

When Israel first formed as a nation, they had God as their king. But this wasn’t enough for the Israelites, and they begged God for a king like the other nations. Finally, God gave in and lifted up Saul. Saul was a good-looking dude, a strong military leader, and a decent king, at least at first, but eventually, he blew it and had to go. That is where today’s first reading drops us: Israel is still grieving Saul, and can’t imagine who could fill his shoes. So, God sends the prophet Samuel, the guy who had found Saul, to the home of Jesse, whose got a bunch of strapping sons, among whom will be the next king of Israel. Against all odds, the son God had in mind was young David, the shepherd boy. David would go on to be one of the (if not THE) most important king of Israel. (Jesus, you’ll remember, is a descendant of King David!)

Today’s Gospel throws us deeply into our Lenten questions theme – in particular, highlighting our human need to know things, and understand things. In this dynamic conversation, there are questions a-plenty, but most of them seek to figure out what exactly happened. Yet the most compelling question of all comes at the end, when the man born blind asks Jesus, “Who is the Son of Man… so that I might believe in him.” Sometimes, we must put aside our desire to know and understand things for certain, in favor of simply experiencing the love and grace of Jesus. 

As you listen, think of when you have experienced faith, beyond a cognitive understanding, and how God’s work was revealed through that. Let’s listen. 

[READ] 

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

This week, I was a part of a conversation with some local Lutheran clergy about evil, demons, and how or whether these things show up in the world. The presenter was a Lutheran pastor in Alberta, Canada, who has done a lot of study in this area. He has had a single experience performing an exorcism, which he said was plenty for a lifetime, and he described the experience for us. Lutherans don’t talk much about these things, a point that was brought up in the conversation. Lutherans tend to be more rational in their approach to faith, and approach these more sensational aspects of life and faith with caution and often skepticism. We’ll ask the questions, and try to be open-minded, but are more hesitant to get fully on board until we can see something for ourselves.

As this group of Lutheran clergy grappled with this mysterious and weird topic, asking at times incredulous questions, I couldn’t help but think about today’s Gospel reading. Here we encounter not evil, but the opposite: a dramatic revelation of God’s work, as Jesus calls it – and predictably, even though they had the cold, hard evidence before them, the witnesses have a hard time accepting it as something beyond their understanding. Surely there must have been a spiritual cause for the blindness, and an explanation for the fact that he now sees. Back and forth, they go over what is known, and try to figure out the pieces that are unknown. They seek to understand in a cognitive way – a feeling we know all too well! In many ways, we still approach faith like this! 

And yet, when we are so focused on knowing things, we miss that so much of faith is about relationship, and experience, and trusting that while God and God’s ways are mysterious, they are no less real.

            In the story of the man born blind, those seeking answers don’t receive the sort of answers they want – the sort that match up with their understanding of the world – but they do receive some answers. Let’s look at three ways this story makes sense of things that don’t make any sense.

            The first way is Jesus’ first answer to the disciples’ question about who sinned, that this man was born blind. Jesus answers simply, “Sin is not the cause here. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed through him.” What a gorgeous light this possibility shines on our brokenness! Like a vase that is cracked, but because of that crack, we can see the light of a candle flickering inside, and filling the cracks and the room with its light.

I remember sitting in my living room after being diagnosed with cancer just one year into my ministry. I was incredibly frustrated, and lamenting to my dad, “Why – when I have such a promising ministry before me, doing what God called me to do – why would God slap me with a cancer diagnosis right now?” In his wisdom, my father responded, “So that you can have such a promising ministry before you.” In other words, God would use even this to make me a stronger, wiser, and more equipped servant. That’s what we see in the story of the blind man: the brokenness of this guy who is judged and looked down on by passers-by meets up with the love of Christ, and suddenly, his brokenness is transformed into an opportunity to witness and to share his story.

            The second way Jesus helps the people in the story and us to make sense of what cannot be explained is in his enigmatic closing line, offered in response to the Pharisees asking, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus answers, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” At first glance, this is a real head scratcher. But I think it is well explained by a bit of scripture, 1st John chapter 1, that often starts off our confession each week: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In other words, Jesus is using blindness here as a metaphor for an inability or an unwillingness to see our own sin. If we say we can see just fine, that we know exactly what is going on (and, too often, that whatever problem you are facing is definitely someone else’s fault), then “we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Because there is always more to see than what is on the surface. There is always more to understand. Like when we see a man born blind and assume either he or his parents must have sinned. Or, we look at someone living in poverty and assume it is a consequence of their own bad choices. Or, someone says or does something we don’t like, and we assume they are in the wrong, without considering why they might have said or done what they did.

            On the other hand, Jesus says, if we acknowledge that we don’t always see everything clearly, that indeed sometimes we are spiritually blind, and confess that blindness to God, then, we might regain some sight. That’s what Lent is all about, right? It is a time of examining those places in our hearts that are not quite clean, times we have fallen short of the Christian call to love and serve God and our neighbor, times when we have been blind – and then confessing them, praying that God would create in us clean hearts. Lent is a time of recognizing our own spiritual blindness, and asking that God would give us sight.

            The third way to make sense of things we cannot understand is to recognize that sometimes experience is far more valuable than explanations. I just love the simplicity of the formerly blind man’s testimony. Everyone wants from him an explanation of who did this and how it happened, and he responds, “I don’t know who he is. One thing I do know is that though I was blind, now I see.” Plain and simple. He has experienced the life-giving love and grace of God. He doesn’t know why or how, just that he experienced it, and it is absolutely true.

            Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about such an experience she had in seminary. She writes, “Suddenly, in that moment, all I could think was: What I am doing? Seminary? Seriously? With a universe this vast and unknowable, what are the odds that this story of Jesus is true? Come on, Nadia. It’s a fairy tale. And then the very next moment I thought this: Except that throughout my life, I’ve experienced it to be true.” She goes on, “I cannot pretend, as much as I sometimes would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God. Even when my mind protests, I still can’t deny my experiences. This thing is real to me. Sometimes I experience God when someone speaks the truth to me, sometimes in the moment when I admit I am wrong, sometimes in the loving of someone unlovable, sometimes in the reconciliation that feels like it comes from somewhere outside of myself, but almost always when I experience God it comes in the form of some kind of death and resurrection.” She concludes, “I have only my confession – confession of my own real brokenness and confession of my own real faith.” (from Pastrix)

            Sometimes it is those experiences that are the only way to understand the mysterious ways of God. Words and reason only go so far. But at its core, faith is a series of stories, of experiences we have in which we were blind, but now we see, when we were lost but now are found, when we were in the darkness of death, but now we are alive. That is the story of Jesus. And it is a story of which we all are a part.

            Let us pray… Mysterious God, we crave certainty and answers. Help us to find certainty in the story of your love, and answers in the profound ways we experience your life-giving love in our lives. Grant us the courage to share those stories with the world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Full service can be seen HERE. 

Sermon: Getting curious to close the space (March 12, 2023)

Lent 3A
March 12, 2023
John 4:1-41

INTRODUCTION

If last week’s texts were all about faith, this week’s are all about longing, thirsting – especially thirsting for God. We begin in the wilderness with the wandering Israelites. At this point, they have left slavery in Egypt, and are on their way to the Promised Land, and they are growing a bit weary of the monotony of their travels. They’re getting thirsty, and testy, and start badgering Moses about it. God responds by providing water out of a rock, of all things, quenching the people’s thirst.

Our reading from John comes right on the tails of last week’s encounter with Nicodemus, and could hardly be more different. Nicodemus was an educated, Jewish man coming to Jesus by dark of night, and now Jesus will encounter a Samaritan woman whose name we don’t know, in the brightest part of the day. You’ll recall that last week Jesus told Nicodemus that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that all who believed in him would not perish but have eternal life.” Now, the text tells us Jesus “had to” go through Samaria, a land of ethnic and religious others – though a look on a map shows he could have avoided it. The need was theological: here, Jesus will show the disciples what he means when he says God loves the world – even this land full of their political and religious enemies!

I’ll give a little more context right before we hear that reading. For now, as you listen, consider where your soul is feeling parched, and what would quench your thirst. Let God’s living Word be your living water. Let’s listen.

[READ]

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

            I belong to several clergy groups on Facebook, which are sometimes a wonderful place to share ideas and support one another… and sometimes, my colleagues’ words or actions puzzle me. For example, a few years ago, one pastor posted that some Gideons had come to her office, wanting to speak to the congregation. You know the Gideons – they are the ones who work to get Bibles in hotel rooms and elsewhere. Turns out, they are an evangelical Christian group of “business and professional men and their wives.” In other words, blue collar workers and women (except wives of members) are excluded from this group. So, in this woman’s post, she wrote, “I told a couple of sexist, classist men that as long as I am pastor here, Gideons will never be welcome to speak.”

            Though I can appreciate her gumption, this also rubbed me the wrong way. I suggested in the comments that perhaps instead of telling them wholesale that they were unwelcome, perhaps she could have invited them into a conversation about it, asked what in the gospel supported the group’s rules about membership, and then express her concerns about it. Let’s just say… she didn’t think that was a good idea. “Who has time or energy for that?” she asked. “When has politeness ever changed the system or gotten us any closer to justice? They wouldn’t have been receptive to the idea, anyway.” And then she assured me that she did not regret what she said. Well. Okay then.

            I thought of this encounter as I studied this week’s Gospel text. This woman at the well is about as “other” to Jesus as she can possibly be: a woman, and a Samaritan (meaning, she was ethnically and religiously different). It is remarkable that Jesus is talking to her at all, let alone in the bright noonday light, where everyone can see them! Yet John makes it clear that this was quite intentional on Jesus’ part. Jesus is living out his claim that he has sent by God’s love for the world – that is, the broken world – and is showing his disciples that when he said “world,” this is what he meant: not only people just like them, but people who were across the divide, who differed from them in all the ways they felt mattered. 

There is so much for us to learn from this conversation. Division in our communities, our politics, our churches, even in our families is nothing new to us. When we are faced with such division, I think our inclination is to approach not with curiosity and desire to understand, but with accusations and judgment. We are ready to defend ourselves, or go on the offensive – even though we know that neither tactic gets us any closer to bridging the divide. But this conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well will shows us how to have conversations with people different from us, conversations in which God is present. This interaction shows us that when we can approach each other in the way demonstrated here, we get a glimpse of the very nature of God, and we are thus transformed for mission. 

The first thing to notice about this conversation between Jesus and the unnamed Samaritan woman is that it begins in a place of mutual vulnerability. We know that she is vulnerable – she is a 5-times widowed or divorced Samaritan woman talking to a Jewish male. But Jesus begins the conversation by expressing his own need: he is thirsty. Furthermore, he needs her help to fill that need. It’s not very often that our conversations with others start this way. Generally, I think we go into a conversation with someone who differs from us with the intention of proving we are right, not by confessing that we have a need that can only be satisfied by being in relationship with the other. Yet this is the way God chooses to start a conversation with this woman, and with us. Mutual vulnerability.

The next thing to notice about the conversation is the centrality of, you guessed it, questions – and not rhetorical questions, or questions that will ultimately prove that you are right, or to catch someone in a logical fallacy, like what we heard last week from Nicodemus. Instead, the questions asked here are genuinely curious about the other. They reflect an interest in learning and understanding. The woman is full of questions for Jesus, and Jesus makes space for them. Rather than requiring her to keep quiet, as would be customary for a woman talking to a man in the first century, she becomes a conversation partner with Jesus, asking him her most pressing theological questions – about proper worship, and the nature of God. By engaging in these questions, the relationship between God and the woman is strengthened.

The third thing to notice is that conversations like this, that are genuinely interested in the other, take time. I was interested, thinking back to my exchange with my colleague on Facebook, that her response was, “Do you have the time and energy to develop relationships with every sexist, classist person who comes across your path?” And, well, I suppose the answer is no, because developing relationships, especially with people who are different from you, or with whom you adamantly disagree, takes a lot of time and energy. But does that mean we shouldn’t try? Does it mean we shut it down before it has even started, or after the very first bump in the road? Jesus surely doesn’t. The woman knows she has no business talking to this man; nevertheless, she persists, and Jesus give her all the time in the world to do so. And because of that, when she finally does leave, she goes straight to the city to tell everyone about her encounter with the Messiah. She has been changed by the encounter.

Which brings us to the fourth point: when you have a conversation with or about Jesus, expect to be surprised, and expect to be changed. Expect that through conversation with one of God’s children, God will reveal something important to you, something about God that you had never noticed before. The last thing Jesus says to this woman before she goes into the city, is to reveal to her exactly who he is: “I am he,” he says. It is the first of Jesus’ many “I am” statements in the Gospel of John – the statements that elaborate on God’s revelation to Moses at the burning bush, when God describes Godself as, “I am who I am.” And in this way Jesus revealed himself to the Samaritan woman – and so also is God revealed to us, when we genuinely, humbly, and thoughtfully engage with the other.

            The work of conversation, especially with those who differ from us racially, religiously, ethnically, or ideologically, is terribly difficult work. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable with one another and to let ourselves be truly seen by one another. It requires asking a lot of questions and then really listening to the answers with the intention to learn, not to debunk or refute. It takes a lot of time and energy and practice – we often fail at it (I know I do!). And even when we do succeed, it often results in our being changed – and we all know that change is rarely easy or smooth. But when we listen to one another this way, we also open ourselves to the possibility of listening to and hearing God, and then, to being transformed by God.

            Just look at what happened to the woman. She comes to him as a shamed and ashamed person in her society. After her genuine, vulnerable, thoughtful conversation with Jesus, she goes back into the city and witnesses to her experience with God. She tells others how she has been touched and changed by the encounter. And because of her witness, many others come to believe in Christ. Could that happen also with us? Might we find that when we engage with one another in this way, and they with us, we also experience more deeply the love of a God who came into the world to save the world?

            My hope and prayer is that when we follow the example of this remarkable conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, we will not only know more deeply the love of God and be changed, but that by our being changed, God might also change those whom we encounter. God’s love has the power to transform this broken world; let us go out to share that love with the world.

            Let us pray… God on the margins, you love and engage with even those we have no interest in. Embolden us to be curious, and to open our hearts to be touched and moved by our encounters with those who are different from us in race, gender, or creed, so that we would be empowered to share your love with the world you came to save. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Full service can be viewed HERE. 

Sermon: Knowledge, or belief (March 5, 2023)

 Lent 2A
March 5, 2023
John 3:1-17

INTRODUCTION

Today’s texts are all about faith. In Abraham’s case, he trusts a God who is basically a stranger to him and his kinsfolk, doing something that likely seemed ridiculous to everyone he cared about simply because this stranger God told him to. In John, we will hear the story of Nicodemus, a devout teacher of the law, who comes to Jesus by night with his questions. This text will include the most famous thumbnail expression of the Christian faith: John 3:16. Psalm 121 and Romans 5 will offer us commentary especially on Abraham’s remarkable faith, but also on the practice of faith in general.

Faith. It’s something we all claim to have, or at least try to have, though some days may be better than others on that front. And yet, it is also something notoriously difficult to understand or describe. As a pastor, I hear a lot about people’s joys and their struggles with faith, as you can imagine, and most of the time, people have more questions than answers about their faith. If this describes you, today’s readings are for you! Whether you are a lifetime believer and practicer of faith, like Nicodemus, or someone very new to encountering God, like Abraham, or somewhere in between, there is something here for you today. 

We will hear our questions theme show up loud and clear today. As you listen, think about which of the many questions you’ll hear resonates most with you and your heart today. Let’s listen.

[READ]

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

Remember these? [show baptism drop] We handed these out in January, on the day we celebrated the Baptism of our Lord. The sermon that day was about how God draws near to us, especially in baptism, but in any number of other ways as well. You were challenged to watch this year for how God is drawing near to you through the word on your water drop (water to recall your baptism). Remember that?

The word on my baptism drop is knowledge. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t thrilled with it when I got it, and I’m still not. Not because I don’t love and value knowledge, but because I sometimes think I love and value knowledge too much already! I come from a long line of highly knowledgeable and educated people, in which degrees of higher education are the norm. I have a hunger to learn, and even in my faith, I tend to approach it head-first. I have shelves full of books to prove it! In fact, my team of mental and spiritual health professionals have urged me to branch out a bit from my constant interest in gaining knowledge and leading with my head: my counselor once told me I needed to stop reading self-help psychology books and read more fiction. And my spiritual director has told me more than once to give my busy brain a rest and let myself “drop into my heart place,” approaching God with heart open and soul bared, rather than with an intention to figure something out.

All this to say: I really relate to Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, meaning he is highly educated. He is committed to the law, to the ways that law is expressed in the Torah, and he can see that there is something compelling, if unnerving, about Jesus, who claims to be a rabbi. Nicodemus doesn’t completely understand, but knows that this Jesus is worth paying attention to. Now, if this were 2023, maybe Nicodemus would have stayed late in the office, after everyone has left, so he could privately Google this conflict, typing into his search engine key phrases like “signs and miracles,” “powers and God’s presence,” and, “is it scientifically possible to turn water into wine.” He was curious, and wanted to learn more, yet he could not let his colleagues know of his interest in Jesus. So, he approached his questions in the next most secretive way: by going to the source, but doing so by the shadow of night, so he wouldn’t be seen.

I should add here, though, that while this may have been Nicodemus’s motivation for coming to Jesus by night, St. John has a different motivation in telling us the time of day. In John’s Gospel, darkness and light have deeply symbolic meanings. In short, with Jesus, there is light and belief and understanding, and without Jesus, there is only darkness and lack of understanding or belief. You remember back on Christmas Eve, when we turned out all the lights and lit candles and we heard from the beginning of John’s Gospel, “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it”?  That set the tone for John’s purpose in writing this Gospel. So, whenever John mentions darkness, what he is really saying is, “This is a situation that lacks true understanding of who and what Jesus is.” 

With that in mind, let’s look at this dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus. Here is Nicodemus, with his apparent intellect and knowledge about the things of God, coming to Jesus by the dark of night. His first statement seems respectful enough, and seems to acknowledge that Jesus is a teacher from whom he could learn something. “Rabbi,” he says, “we know you are a teacher who comes from God, for no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” The words are right, but he grounds that belief not in who Jesus is, but on what he does. In other words, he is basing his assertion on evidence, not relationship. 

Still, Nicodemus is feeling pretty good about himself right now about: he has started off the conversation by proving that he is someone who Knows Things, a worthy conversation partner. He finds comfort in his knowledge of these things. Jesus’ response to him is, shall we say… a bit cryptic. It seems like a non sequitur. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above, born anew.” Huh? Nicodemus, trying to keep up appearances, accidentally lets show his lack of wisdom about God by taking what Jesus says literally. With a laugh he scoffs, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Maybe he’s trying to joke with Jesus. Maybe, by means of a rhetorical question he is challenging Jesus’ statement. Regardless, the fact remains: Nicodemus has shown himself as one who has all the knowledge the world can offer, yet he lacks what it takes to step into the light that is Christ: he lacks belief. 

So Jesus explains again: “You must be born from above, born of the Spirit, not dwelling in the worldly ways of the flesh. You see, there are some things that you just can’t know with your brain. You have to know them with your heart. But, that’s how it is when you’re born of the Spirit.” I can’t imagine Nicodemus liked that answer much – the suggestion that there was something that he couldn’t or didn’t know! Knowledge hadn’t failed him yet, after all! Yet he has to admit, that he is no further along in understanding, and so he offers a question that has niggled at all of our hearts at some point: “How can these things be?” With this, Nicodemus reveals that the knowledge he has counted on and trusted in all his life is failing him in his effort to grasp something that he surely realizes is very important, even life-giving and life-changing. This cannot be explained. It’s a realization that can leave us, too, feeling uneasy, with nothing to hold onto, floating in a vast space of un-knowing. Our brilliant human minds have limits. We cannot depend upon knowledge alone, at least not the sort you can read in books. “How can these things be?”

I’ll admit that Jesus’ response to this aching question has never been one of my favorite Jesus moments. “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” I have felt with Nicodemus the shame around being called out for his lack of knowledge about something clearly important. 

But this time, I’m reading this question not as one meant to insult (because that’s not the Jesus we know and love!), but rather, a question offered with humor and compassion, intending to remove one of the barriers between Nicodemus and God, so that he might draw closer to the God of life. Almost as if Jesus is saying, with a twinkle in his eye, “Ah, you see, all the books you’ve read and studying you have done are not enough to let you understand the ways of God. That, my friend, takes a different kind of knowledge. It takes not knowing about God, or even about me. No, it takes knowing me, directly. It takes being in a relationship with me. And by this relationship, by this faith, this belief – that is how you will be renewed, reborn. That is how you will truly come to know God.”

Now, I still love knowledge, and gaining knowledge, and reading all different sorts of books and studying the Bible, and I’m as prone as anyone to falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I want to know things. And I want to be clear that human knowledge is not a bad thing, nor is it unfaithful. On the contrary, study can open our minds, and prepare us to ask the sorts of questions that open us to different perspectives and experiences, help us to think more deeply and compassionately about our neighbors, and even ripen us for an encounter with God in the world, like it did for Nicodemus. 

But knowledge like this is also not everything. Because the truth of it is, that God is bigger than all the human knowledge in the world. My shelves full of books and my fancy degrees will not, in the end, show me who God is, and if I think they will, then I have made knowledge into a kind of idol, just like I think Nicodemus did. 

What will bring us closer to God, out of the darkness of night and into the brightness of day, is relationship. It is trust in the one who made us and loves us and gave Himself to save us – trust even when our brains want to ask, “How can these things be?” It is suspending our need for hard evidence, instead leaning on a knowledge that is apart from the knowledge of earthly things. When we can find that balance – seeking human knowledge even as we know and trust that God exceeds it – then we can surrender our hearts and our minds to the One who came that we may have life, and have it abundantly.

Let us pray… Omniscient God, we long to know things, to understand things, and most of all to know and understand you. As we seek you out through our questions and our learning, make us also content simply to trust in you and your marvelous ways, even when we don’t understand. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Full service can be viewed HERE.