When I was a little girl growing up, the time leading up to Christmas was my favorite time of year. Like most kids, I was excited at the prospect of getting a long break from school, and most of all, I was excited to get presents! My family always had a very strict protocol about the proper time for opening presents. We waited until Christmas morning. My brother and sister and I would wake our parents up at an ungodly early hour and be told to go back to bed a few times before they finally got up. My dad would then shuffle downstairs to get his camera while the three of us waited with Mom at the top of the stairs, until Dad was ready for us to come down. I have no idea what all Dad was actually doing downstairs – but I do remember that it always took foreeeeeeever for him to give us the go-ahead to come down. Maybe it just seemed like an interminably long time because I was so small and impatient (as opposed to large and impatient, like I am now). But I vividly remember sitting at the top of that long, narrow staircase in my pajamas, waiting with my brother and sister, our little butts scooched right to the very edge of the top stair. I remember the electric feeling of excitement in my whole body, like a coiled up spring, just waiting to bounce down those stairs as fast as my little legs could go.
This waiting, this excitement and expectation, is what the season of Advent is all about. We are waiting with bated breath – not knowing yet what exactly we will find at the bottom of the stairs, but trusting that it will be marvellous and worth the wait.
Today the church celebrates the festival day of the Reign of Christ – or Christ the King Sunday, as it’s also known. Hopefully by now you’ve noticed that we’re also celebrating a wedding today! These are actually themes that go together very well. Today we celebrate that Christ is our one true ruler. We remember that our true citizenship is as citizens of his kingdom – we are all citizens of the kingdom here.
The kingdom of God is spoken of throughout scripture as a place where there is no more mourning or crying or pain, where there is no more death, where the poor and the lowly are lifted up, and where all creation lives in perfect harmony and love. And one of the most common images used in scripture to talk about the kingdom is the marriage feast.
Today, we celebrate the marriage feast of Joshua and Esperance. Today they make their vows of love and faithfulness to one another in the presence of this assembly. And the celebration of their marriage actually has a lot to teach all of us about God’s kingdom of love.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed that she only had three hairs growing on her head. “Well,” said the woman to herself, “I think I’ll wear my hair in a braid today.” So she carefully braided the three hairs together, got dressed, and went out and had a wonderful day.
Our texts for today are full of chaos and trouble. There are times of anguish, conflicts with cosmic enemies, destruction, war, earthquakes, famine, and pain. These are texts that point us ahead toward the future unraveling of creation – the end of all things.
These seem like kind of jarring themes for us to be focusing on now. Right now, the rest of the world is gearing up for the bright season of Christmas – with candy canes and silver lanes already aglow! In contrast, the end of the Christian liturgical year – which actually ends next Sunday – is a bit darker and a lot more apocalyptic. As the days get shorter, we are preparing ourselves to begin a new year with the season of Advent. We are still waiting in the darkness for a light to shine.
I joined the Peace Corps when I was fresh out of college. I wanted to travel and see a different part of the world. And I also genuinely wanted to help others, to give some of the abundance of what I have received to other people.
What I didn’t expect about this experience was how much I would receive in return. Over the four years that I spent in the Dominican Republic, I got to meet lots of amazing people. And I found that, more often than not, the person receiving the generosity and help of others was me! I almost had to laugh one time when my community received a bunch of canned food from a ministry group that had come down to the island. I’m sure I probably thought, “Oh how nice that other people are also sending help to this poor community.” Imagine my surprise when members of the community showed up on my doorstep to give me food – because I lived alone and didn’t have any family in the community.
But I think their generosity was most fully on display when my dad and my aunt and uncle came down to visit. We started our visits at one end of the community and spent an entire day going from house to house until we reached my host family’s house at the other end. Every single place we went, a banquet was spread; we were offered coffee and pop and cookies and cakes and sweets. This community that had lovingly accepted me was so eager to welcome my family. But I knew what it must have cost them to offer these things – many of them offered us much more expensive treats than I knew they bought for themselves. It was humbling to receive such incredible hospitality.
I thought of my Dominican friends as I was reading through our texts for today. Today we read a couple of stories that are also about hospitality and about extreme generosity.
In our first reading, we follow Elijah to the town of Zarephath, where he meets a poor widow. Elijah asks her for water and she gives it to him. But when he asks her for bread, we learn that she is literally gathering sticks to go prepare a last meal for herself and her son before dying because they have so little left to eat. Elijah asks her again for something to eat and promises her, “thus says the Lord God, the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” This woman sees that Elijah is a messenger of God – and she trusts in God’s promise that God will provide what she needs. And God does indeed provide! With just her handful of meal and her little bit of oil, she and her son and Elijah are able to eat well for what may have been years! Immediately before this story, Elijah actually prophesied to King Ahab that there would be several years with no dew or rain! So through her act of faithful generosity, this woman goes from preparing for her own death and the death of her son to having renewed life and renewed hope. God saves the lives of three people through her meager offering. And her son’s life is actually saved again immediately following this story. After getting sick, her son dies and God, working through Elijah, raises him to life again. All throughout this story, God brings life and hope where before there had only been the certainty of death.
God is the giver of all good gifts. And as the widow discovered with Elijah – and as I discovered in the Peace Corps – when we faithfully respond to God’s call to give of ourselves and our possessions, it can be an opportunity for God to bless us even more richly. I know we’re veering dangerously close to prosperity gospel territory right now, but I promise that is not where this sermon is heading.
Giving deeply connects us with God and with other people. Like with my Dominican friends, our mutual generosity and hospitality built up strong friendships, even across cultural and language barriers. I mean, I don’t need to stand up here and tell you all about what it feels like to give of yourself to the people you care about. I watch you do it all the time! You visit the sick and the homebound and do service work in the community and share food with one another. And any time there’s a new illness or a death or some other tragedy, at least four or five different people reach out to me to make sure that I know about it, so that the people who need care from their pastor can receive it.
You are faithful givers. And like Elijah and the widow, you have seen that generous giving can lead to outcomes you didn’t even think were possible. I know that’s true – because I wouldn’t be here otherwise! St. John’s definitely falls into the small-but-mighty category of congregations. And I know that when you entered the call process you were looking for a part-time pastor, or to share a pastor with another congregation. But even in the midst of times of transition, and even with a relatively small member base, you continued to give – you continued to generously invest your time and your money and your presence in this community. And I am here – your full time pastor – because of what God did with your faithful offering.
God takes the things that we give in faith and makes amazing things happen – even if all we can offer is a handful of meal or a couple of copper coins. And when we give to the church, and the church gives to the synod, and the synod gives to churchwide, God grows and grows those gifts into something much larger than they ever could have been on their own. Our small gift can open us up and connect us with people all over the world. Generosity opens us up to the reality of other people’s lives and it invites us to be transformed by it, to receive even as we give.
That brings us to our gospel reading. It’s typical for us to read this passage as a story about a poor woman’s noble sacrifice, but that’s not actually how Jesus presents it. This story doesn’t end with a “go and do likewise.” If anything, it’s a cautionary tale. This is a story about a community that is failing to connect with others and to be transformed by their faithful giving.
Jesus has a lot of harsh words for the religious leaders and the wealthy people in this passage. It’s not like they aren’t being generous. They are making their offerings, just like the widow, but they’re missing something. They are oblivious to the need of a neighbor on their very doorstep. The gifts they give probably help keep the temple’s lights on, but they are not allowing that giving to transform their hearts or their lives or to connect them with other people. Jesus denounces them for being more interested in making themselves look good than in genuinely doing good.
Why does Jesus point out this whole little scenario? We might be tempted to think that this is another case of Jesus telling us that we need to sacrifice everything we own and become poor ourselves – kind of like how we often hear the story of the rich man we read a couple of weeks ago. But again, I don’t necessarily think that that’s what Jesus is asking us to do here. After all, we know that God is the giver of good gifts. God has generously given all things to all people, so that no one will be in need. God wants all of us to have enough.
So instead this story raises the question: why do so many people not have enough? If God has given all things to all people, why are some left with nothing but a couple of copper coins or a handful of meal to live on while others have an abundance to give from? Why do some congregations struggle so much to hire a single pastor while others can afford multiple staff people? Why is it that when we assemble the school kits and quilts and health kits every year we never have to wonder whether there will be enough people who need them? We already know there will be. How did things get so out of balance from the way God created them to be?
I think that faithful giving calls us to more than just distant, abstract giving like the wealthy people in our gospel story. It calls us to be truly invested in the lives of our siblings around the globe. It calls us to be charitable and also to wonder why there is so much need for our charity.
Faithful giving is about much more than just giving of our money or our stuff or our time. It asks that we be involved with our whole hearts and invested in the wellbeing of our neighbor, even when it means wrestling with difficult questions of justice. This is the kind of generosity that opens us up to transformation and connection with the whole family of God.
We can give with boldness and faith, trusting that God will provide. And we can live with the expectation that God – the giver of all good gifts – will continue to do wondrous things with all that we give.
When I was in seminary in Chicago, I took an intensive class with a small group of people from all different faith backgrounds. One of my classmates was finishing his studies to become a Catholic priest and a monk. He used to describe the monastery he was going to live in to us. It sounded beautiful, but the one thing that most stuck with me was his description of the communion rail around the table. They had a polished wooden railing – like a lot of sanctuaries do – that ran all the way around the chancel in a big semi-circle. All the brothers could fit around it together as they gathered for communion. Outside the sanctuary, on the other side of the chancel wall, the circle was continued in stone, and it came together to make one big ring around the table. On this side of the circle was the monastery’s cemetery. Every time they gathered for communion, this circle reminded the living brothers of the monastery that they were also gathered with the dead brothers of the monastery. And they remembered that no matter which side of the wall they were on, they were all part of the one, same community.
Many of you know that, before I moved to Schuyler, I spent a year living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, doing my final year internship at Peace Lutheran Church. Las Cruces is in the way south part of New Mexico, just north of El Paso, Texas, which makes it less than an hour from “old” Mexico. It was an awesome and eye-opening experience to get to live in the borderlands for a whole year.
One of the most important things I got to do at Peace during my year there was to help develop a refugee hospitality ministry. We welcomed some of the many, many people from Central America who have come to the US seeking safety from dangerous situations in their home countries. These folks presented themselves to Border Patrol for asylum, and after processing them – getting their information, contacting their sponsor, and giving them an ankle monitor and a court date – ICE actually would actually drop them off right at the door of the church. And we’d take it from there. Continue reading “Sermon: Blind Healing the Blind”→
Our gospel text for today seems to illustrate the old saying: There’s no such thing as a stupid question… but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots. James and John ask Jesus to let them sit by his side “in his glory,” and even Jesus is like, “buddy, I don’t think you really know what you’re asking.”
“Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
I think that this verse from Hebrews is a pretty accurate summary of all of our readings for today. From Amos’ dire prophetic warnings to Jesus’ disturbing conversation with the rich man, these are all very challenging texts. And like a sword, our gospel text for today cuts us open to our very core. Mark has been pulling no punches – we’ve been working our way through some very difficult passages together over the past few weeks, on hell and death and divorce, and the hits just keep on coming. Let me just say again for the record – I did not pick these texts!
This morning, we continue our journey through the gospel of Mark. We’ve been walking with Jesus and the disciples on the way to Jerusalem and the cross. And it seems like the closer we get, the harder Jesus’ teachings become. In the last few weeks, Jesus has told us we must be last of all and servant of all; he’s told us that we must lose our lives in order to find them; and just last week, he told us that if our eyes or hands or feet cause us to stumble, we should cut them off!
This is a rough, rough gospel text for today. With a text like this, instead of, “Praise to you, O Christ!” it kind of feels like a more fitting gospel acclamation would be just, “Wow, O Christ,” or even, “WTF, O Christ?”
And some of us may have already come to worship today carrying some pretty rough feelings. This has been a very difficult week in our nation. Many folks who have known the horror of sexual assault have been reliving some of their worst trauma this week. Many people have seen in these events their own experience of not being believed, whether it be about the truth of their experiences, or about their innocence in the face of harsh accusations. And I think all of us have probably been discouraged with the reminder of just how viciously divided our country has become. To those of you who are struggling, who are feeling raw and vulnerable today, I see you.
As I was reading our gospel for this week, I found myself thinking back to what it was like to be in elementary school. Do you remember your school days? (I know it was longer ago for some of us than others!) Did any of you ever get in trouble with any of your teachers? (of course not; I’m sure you were all perfect little angels!) I’ll admit that I sometimes got in trouble with my teachers, mostly for daydreaming and spacing off — and for doodling all over my homework. And every once in a while, I’d get an assignment back with those four dreaded words written at the top: “See me after class.”
In order to dig into our gospel reading for today, I want to first start out with a little history lesson. Please don’t fall asleep! This is kind of a puzzling story that we have before us – and I think that digging into the context a little will help us to better understand it.
Our gospel lesson for today starts off with kind of an odd-sounding argument between Jesus and some Pharisees. The Pharisees notice some of Jesus’ disciples eating without having washed their hands first – and so they go to Jesus to make a big stink about it. Now, as someone reading this in the 21stcentury, it can be kind of hard to see what the big deal is. I mean, yeah, that’s kind of gross I guess, but there’s no need to like make a federal case out of it.
Today is the last Sunday of a whole month full of bread. We’ve finally reached the end of the sixth chapter of John, yay! I mean, it’s good stuff, all of this teaching from Jesus about the bread of life, but these are kind of tricky texts to preach on. I have to admit that I resonate a little bit with the people in our gospel reading for today – the ones who whine to Jesus that his teaching is too difficult. This passage starts in the same place we left off last week: Jesus is once again telling people that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Even if you can get past all the cannibalistic images that this brings up, it’s still painfully clear that truly being a Jesus follower is something demanding and all-consuming – no pun intended.
One summer, many years ago, I drove through a terrible, terrible storm. It was the fourth of July. My family and I had driven down to Norfolk, about an hour from my hometown, to go watch the fireworks. The show ended up getting cut short by a tornado warning, so we decided to hightail it out of there to try to get out of the storm’s path. By the time we finally got out on the highway, the rain was pouring down in thick sheets and the wind howled around us as it ripped through the darkness. It was pitch black and almost impossible to see anything, even the road. It felt like all I could do just to keep my car between the fog lines. But up ahead of me, I realized I could just make out two little red lights in the darkness – the taillights of my dad’s SUV. As I gripped the steering wheel of my car with white-knuckled hands, I kept my eyes on those lights and followed them all the way through the darkness to home and safety.
Taste and see that the Lord is good! The psalmist exults in the graciousness and generosity of God. Today is the third of five Sundays that focus on the theme of the bread of life, as we continue our gospel journey through John 6. All of our texts for today are full of stories of the good gifts that God has given to God’s people. It’s a very bready Sunday!
Good morning! It is such a delight to be here with you all on our first official Sunday together!
We have some really good texts to dig into this morning. But I have to admit that one of them in particular just really reached out and grabbed me by the collar as I was preparing my sermon this week.
I’m very sad to say that my time with you all is getting very short. Next weekend will be my last Sunday as Vicar Day. And those of you who’ve seen my anxiety over the past week know that I still have a LOT of packing left to do!
So, naturally, with so much to do, I decided this past week that I what I really needed to do was catch up on my Netflix binge-watching. I’ve been watching the show “Anne with an E” – have any of you seen it? It’s really good. The series is an adaptation of the novel Anne of Green Gables, which many of you have probably read. The story follows an orphaned girl named Anne who is adopted by a middle-aged brother and sister. Anne as a child is, let’s say, precocious. She is a romantic with a free spirit, who loves to use big words. In her words, “If you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them!”
Our gospel reading for today begins with an invitation. Jesus says to the disciples: “Let us go across to the other side.” Jesus had been casting out demons and healing and preaching to the multitudes on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He’d just finished preaching several parables, including the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed. By the time he finished, it was evening, and the disciples were probably pooped and ready for bed. But instead of calling it a day, Jesus decides: no, we need to get in the boat rightnow and sail across the Sea of Galilee. And that’s what he and the disciples do. There is an urgency to this story that we’ve kind of come to expect from the gospel of Mark.
I feel a lot of sympathy for Jesus’ family in our gospel reading for today. Jesus has been wandering all over Galilee, doing God-knows-what (literally, God knows what!). But then reports start to reach his family from other people that Jesus has lost his mind. And not only that, but that massive crowds of people have started to follow him around everywhere, just waiting to see what he will say or do next! And on top of all that, whatever it is he’s been doing has made the religious leaders of the people absolutely furious. So, naturally, Jesus’ family rushed off to check on Jesus, hoping to reason with him and bring him home.
I don’t know what led Nicodemus to visit Jesus in the middle of the night in our gospel story for today. The text never really makes it clear. However, I am pretty confident that that visit did not go as he expected. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, an important leader in the Jewish community; and even only three chapters into John, Jesus has already made a name for himself as a popular folk preacher who turns water into wine and hangs out with John the Baptist. Perhaps Nicodemus came to learn from Jesus, or to try to persuade him to reconcile with the other religious leaders. But he never actually gets to the point of his visit or even asks Jesus a question. He starts off his visit by affirming, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” We know. ‘You tick all the boxes: you do signs and wonders, you definitely know your scripture, and oh man, that water into wine thing was just awesome! Nobody could do that stuff apart from God, so God must be with you.’
Good evening/morning! It seems that one of this weekend’s themes is surprises. In case anyone hasn’t guessed yet, the “surprise preacher” for today is me! Surprise! There are also some surprises in our readings for today. We read a surprising story about Jesus’ ascension, how he was taken bodily up into heaven. Most of us here have been church members a long time and we may not think about this as such a strange or surprising story. But even in a set of scriptures full of all kinds of mystery and miracles, bodily ascension into heaven is not exactly the kind of thing that happens every day. Continue reading “Sermon: Are We There Yet?”→
Good evening/morning! It is such a delight to be here again at Grace Lutheran. I have missed you all. I bring you greetings from the people of Peace Lutheran Church in Las Cruces, NM, and also from Pastor Mike and Kristin Ostrom, who are now at Oregon State University!
It’s so good to be here with you all again. And it seems very fitting that love is such a prominent theme in our texts for this weekend. Grace has always been a community in which I have experienced great Christian love.
Our gospel reading from John especially highlights this theme. This text is part of Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” to his disciples before he is crucified, in an ultimate act of love. And his words about love raise for us a very important question. This question has one, immediate, right answer, so I want to see if any of you know what it is. Are you ready? What is love? Continue reading “Sermon: What Is Love? (Seriously, though, what is it?)”→
This is the Day 