You are a Super Hero

Sermon 8-24-14

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Please excuse me for a moment, I forgot to put on the most important part of my “uniform.” (Here I put on a makeshift cape and mask)

There. That’s better. I’d like to inform all of you that I’ve decided to change my official title here at St. Paul. As of right now I would like to be known, not as Pastor Lydia, but as Legendary Pastor Lydia of Awesome, or just Pastor Awesome for short, if you so desire. I can baptize faster than a speeding water hose! I’m more powerful than…  And I can leap tall Bibles with a single bound! And now, I am just waiting around for Hollywood to
discover me and make the next big blockbuster movie out of my adventures assisting the good people of East Windsor. But you all already know my secret identity, so I'm going to go ahead and take my "costume" off!

Every good superhero has a good origin story. Some of my fellow superheroes and heroines were born with their special powers. Others got them in all kinds of strange ways – they were bitten by radioactive bugs, exposed to mysterious cosmic space rays or gamma radiation, or injected with strength-enhancing serum. Still others came to be super heroes by using their brilliant use of technology and gadgets. And still others were simply chosen to save the world.

Me? When I was a baby, I had my forehead dunked in water three times in front of a large crowd of people. Then I was sealed with the Holy Spirit, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.

I grew up in a group of other baptized super hero people, being nurtured and encouraged in my faith by my family and other caring adults in our community. And then, when the time was right, I was send out into the world, to let my light shine before others, that they might see the light of God at work in me and praise God. That work is to bear God’s creative and redeeming word of love to all the world, especially to the dark places of the world where Death and Brokenness and all the forces that defy God still have a foothold.

You and I are part of a very special league of super heroes. Many of us have different origin stories. Some of us might have begun our super hero journey in another tradition, or no tradition at all. Some were baptized later in life, when we were older children or even adults. Others in this league left the community of super heroes for a while to find our own way, but eventually found our way back.
We, who are gathered in this building today, and are gathered to worship in communities around the world.

we, who were baptized part of this community of faith and named as God’s children forever and ever,
we, who have been saved from sin and death by the mercies of almighty God….

We are part of the League of the Living Lord.

Also in this League of the Living Lord there have been all kinds of characters with interesting backgrounds and unique super powers. There is Abraham and Sarah, who became the father and mother of God’s people, both by blood and by their example of trust.  Their superpower might be persistence.

Joseph, of the Technicolor dream coat fame, had the ability to interpret dreams, which helped him to save his family from a severe famine.

Rahab was a prostitute who trusted God and went undercover on a secret mission deep into enemy territory.

Samson was given superhuman strength in order to defeat his enemies, the Philistines.

The prophets of old, like the likes of Isaiah and Jeremiah, were given wisdom and prophesy to speak truth to power in the face of injustice.

Mary refused to give into fear and took a bold risk when she accepted her calling to give birth to and raise Jesus.

Peter, disciple of Jesus, bold talker and water walker. When today Peter reveals Jesus’ super hero name of Son of the Living God, Jesus in turn gives him the name of Petros, or little pebble, a chip of the old bedrock of faith that the Church has been built on. Peter, AKA “Pebble Man.”

Timothy, a young man called to be one of Paul’s companions, given the gift of evangelism.
Lydia, my super hero name-sake, was a busy businesswoman who had the gift of listening and became the first Christian convert on the European continent.

St. Francis’s super power was his self-discipline and concern for the poor and ignored.
Martin Luther turned the Christian world upside down with his stubborn belief in a merciful and loving God, and his ability to write his books, including a translation of the Bible in his language, with incredible speed.

Corrie Ten Boom came from a Christian family who hid Jews during the Holocaust, and survived being caught and thrown into a concentration camp herself.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached his dream of a world where both black and white could be free of racism and segregation.

Mother Theresa cared for the most forgotten and unwanted people in the slums of Calcutta.
All these people are card-carrying members of the League of the Living God. This is quite an intimidating list of faithful people who have gone before us. And it’s just a TINY FRACTION of the list. These people have indeed left us some mighty big shoes to fill. But, like all heroes, our faith heroes are have mighty flaws to go with their mighty powers. Abraham and Sarah tried their own fertility treatments quite a few times. Joseph was a stuck up brat when he was a kid. Samson slept with the enemy. Most of the prophets were pretty reluctant to take the job. Martin Luther was stubborn to a fault, and Mother Theresa struggled with spiritual dry spells which lasted years. And even among Jesus’ own disciples there are deniers and power players and deserters and betrayers.
So, I guess, we are in some pretty good company. We are part of this body, with all of its beautiful gifts and flaws, lambs of God’s own flock, sinners of God’s own redeeming.

Which is a pretty good thing for us, because we are all too often by a multitude of dead deities who demand our worship. Like Jesus and the disciples in the town of Caesarea Philippi, the local hot-bed temples to every imaginable god and goddess, we are daily surrounded by statues, real and imagined, that hold sway over us: status, success, stuff, salaries, stocks, sports, schedules, and so much more.
But we are part of the League of the Living God, and we follow Jesus, the Son of the Living God.

Our God is a rock that is alive, dynamic, and on the move. Those other things that claim they have power over us? They are lifeless, powerless, and have been overcome by the mighty and loving arms of God. In fact, we as members of the League of the Living God have been given this mission: to not be conformed by the powers in this world that defy God, but instead to be transformed into living sacrifices of God’s justice and deliverance.

We have been called not just to renounce the promises of the devil and the things of this world that claim to give us life but instead leave us empty, but we have also been given our marching orders, to take the battle right to the very gates of hell itself, for Jesus himself says that we will be victorious. Because the salvation of the Living God will be forever, and his deliverance will never be ended. Amen… amen.. and all God’s super heroes say “Amen!”

This is a real shirt, by the way!

We are all beggars

Sermon 8-17-14
Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Though Hailey won’t remember much of anything that happened on today her baptism day, I still sort of feel like I still ought to apologize for Jesus here. This might be the first time that Hailey has gotten to meet him, and I’m just afraid that he might not be making a very good impression.

As F. F. Bruce wrote his book Hard Sayings of Jesus –– “His yoke is easy and his burden is light, but his sayings are often hard.” And this one is certainly no exception. It goes right along with Jesus’ teaching on plucking out our right eye if causes us to sin, with Jesus saying he wants us to hate our parents for the sake of the Gospel, with Jesus saying he came “not bringing peace but a sword,” with “the camel going through the eye of a needle” having a better chance than a rich person being saved, and also cursing a poor innocent fig tree that was just minding its own business. And here, we have a couple of whoppers like the blind leading the blind, what comes out of the mouth from the heart is what ruins a person, and finally, Jesus seeming to ignore this woman in need and then apparently comparing her to a dog.

So much ink has been spilled over the centuries to explain, soften, or justify what Jesus does here, and I don’t think any of them are completely satisfying. Trust me, this week I consulted way more commentaries than I regularly do, looking for a brilliant key to help unlock this story. This key turns out to be rather elusive, like the treasure hidden in the field and the pearl of great price. Instead of a key, what we need to look for is more like a crumb, or rather, a trail of crumbs, that we follow like lost children through a dark forest, hoping that we will be able to find our way home.

For this Canaanite woman, the hope of just a crumb was enough for her. It was all she felt that she deserved. She was, after all, an outsider in nearly every possible way. She lived on the wrong side of the border; she was from a people who worshipped the wrong gods and was on the wrong side of history. She was likely a single mother in the wrong century, and her only child was the wrong gender, and if that wasn’t enough, her daughter was suffering from a very wrong-sounding illness. Even this woman’s whole approach to getting Jesus’ attention seems all wrong.

And yet, this woman could not have been more right about Jesus.  She called him Lord and Son of David while the religious leaders of Jesus’ own people despised and rejected him. She knelt before him and engaged in spirited dialogue with him, while his own disciples seemed almost totally in the dark. She knew what she needed from Jesus, and was not afraid to do whatever she needed to in order to get it, for the sake of her daughter. Even if it meant adding one more demand when Jesus already had his hands full dealing with his own people. Even if it meant facing a tired and frustrated savior. She knew that in the end, he would not and could not go against his nature. She knew he would do the right thing – that he would “throw her a bone,” so to speak. And she was right. And I think that’s why he called her faith great.

I wonder if Jesus ever thought about this woman and her great faith again. I especially wonder if he thought about her on that dark Passover night, as he prepared to face his passion and death.

I wonder if he remembered her as he blessed the bread and broke it, and watched the crumbs from the broken pieces fall onto the table and roll to the floor.

I wonder if he remembered the look on her upturned face as she knelt before him and so wisely said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” as he looked at the blank and confused stares of his own disciples, who would soon abandon, deny, and betray him.

As Jesus has proven, though, deniers are welcome at his table. Abandoners and betrayers are welcome at his table. Canaanite women, and Roman centurions, hemorrhaging women, the blind, the mute, people possessed by demons or fear or hate or their busy schedules. Liars and cheaters and doubters and selfish people all have a place at the table.

And God is continually adding extenders to the family table, like family thanksgivings when everybody’s home and the normal size of the table would not be enough. And just when we think that the table is full and can’t possibly be extended any farther without completely collapsing, God keeps pushing.

Sometimes we are pushing outward WITH God, participating in the mission we share as baptized children of God, bearing God’s creative and redeeming word of love to ALL the world. Other times, we find ourselves pushing the other way, telling God that the table has gone far enough and surely THOSE people are not welcome at the table. But they are. Because you are.

Hanging above the dining room table at my grandma’s house is a poem copied out by my uncle when he was in school in fancy calligraphy letters. It’s hung there as long as I can remember, and to this day it’s still my grandma’s favorite poem.

It goes like this:

I dreamt death came the other night and Heaven’s gate swung wide.
An angel with a halo bright ushered me inside.
And there! To my astonishment stood folks I’d judged and labeled
As “quite unfit”, “of little worth”, and “spiritually disabled”.
Indignant words rose to my lips but never were set free,
For every face showed stunned surprise --Not one expected me!

The good news is, Jesus expects you. The good news is, Jesus really, really meant it when he gave his disciples his marching orders: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of ALL NATIONS, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

And if you haven’t noticed, that’s exactly what we’ve done today. Hailey Page Green was welcomed with open arms into this community of faith, where nothing has barred her from being gathered into the body of Christ – not gender or nationality or status or anything else that threatens to divide us when we leave from this place every Sunday. From now on, no matter what, she will have a place and a people to belong to.

During his ministry on earth, Jesus began the work of breaking down the boundaries between who’s in and who’s out, between the haves and the have-nots, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes with gusto. In his death, Jesus is our Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Not just the sins of a chosen few in a certain time and place, but for the whole world. And in his resurrection, we all are reborn as children of God and we are all gathered into the Lord’s household. We, as gentiles and foreigners in God’s original promises, are not left to be satisfied with the crumbs from the children’s table. We have been adopted as children in the waters of baptism, and given a place at the table.

Martin Luther once said: We are all beggars, telling other beggars where to find bread. Now that we have been given a place at the table, and been given the life-sustaining bread that is Jesus, how can the smallest crumbs NOT get all over everyone we meet? And how can we deny even the smallest crumbs to the people around us, even to those the world considers to be as good as dogs?

The world right now this world is begging for even just a tiny crumb of hope to hang on to. Together, as Christ’s body here on earth, let’s show them more than a crumb. Let us show them what a place at the table can look like. Amen.

Take Heart

Sermon 8-10-14

Grace to you and peace from God our father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.
Where you able to put yourself with the disciples in the boat? Was the wind whipping in your face and the splashing of the water drenching you? Could you feel the crazy rocking of the boat, and the fear of the disciples as they saw this mysterious specter coming toward them across the water?

Really, I wonder who they thought was coming after them. They had just seen Jesus feed over five thousand people with just a little bread and a few fish. And earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus had already showed himself to be master of storms by calming one back in chapter 8, after being awoken from a deep and relaxed sleep. Had we been in their place, it is natural to believe that we might have been quicker on the uptake, and responded something like this:  “Hey, look, its Jesus doing another one of his miracle things! Heeeeey Jesus! We’re over here!!!”

But despite our active imaginations, we were not in the boat with the disciples that particular night, battling an intense storm for hours and hours. We were not actually there, drenched in water and battered by the wind, literally being tormented by the crashing waves in a small fishing boat, probably wondering by now why in the world Jesus isn’t there to calm the storm, like last time. By the time Jesus DOES show up, it is nearly morning, and these poor guys were most likely in the brink of complete exhaustion from the physical and mental energy it was taking for them NOT to sink.

Few of us have experienced being in the middle of a storm like that. But most of us have a story or two about living through a big storm that came through these parts. It’s been almost two years since Hurricane Sandy. And for the most part, life around here has pretty much gone back to normal. True, for weeks after the storm things were pretty out of sorts – many of us had to wait for the electricity to be restored and for trees to be cleared. But now, almost two years out, the leaves have grown back, and Beau and I have pretty much reconstituted our condiment supply that was decimated from our own involuntary refrigerator cleaning.

But I don’t think I need to tell you that there are people who suffered far worse from that storm, and are suffering still, in different ways. Two years out, it just might be harder to see. It’s easy to spot the collapsed house, but harder to notice the abandoned lot where it once stood. A house may look fine with a fresh coat of paint and new windows, but the inside may be empty, with nothing yet replacing the damaged furniture, making it easy to see the dark stain of the flood line on the walls. For many, the effects of the storm are still fresh.

But there are others storms that have hit all of us in the meantime. Now, I’m not talking about the Nor’easters or Hurricanes Arthur and Bertha. The storms I’m talking about might not show to the world any external damage. But we can feel the devastation all the same. This kind of storms damage the heart:
The hurricane-force winds of shame and hopelessness that knock you down, all the while shouting in your ears – you are not enough.

Or the driving winds of your hectic schedule pushing you forward, threatening to knock you over if you don’t keep up.

Every day coming like another wave, pounding and pounding your fragile little boat, making you wonder if the next wave will be the one to cause you to sink?

And all the while, the constant rain of stress, or disappointments, or depression beating down on you, mingling with your own tears, blinding you from being able to see what’s ahead.

Wouldn’t it great if our little community in this little boat here would be a safe haven from all the terribly frightening storms raging in the world, and ragingin  our own hearts? Wouldn’t it be great if there was an invisible “Check your Storms at the Door” sign or a “No Storms Allowed” sign somewhere out in the parking lot? Maybe we should get the property committee to work on that one.

Yes, this place IS a safe haven, but NO, the storms are still very present here with us, even on this sunny summer morning. Being Jesus’s own disciples, following orders from Jesus’ own lips did not stop the storm for Peter and the rest that day. The winds still came and the wave still crashed, and the land and the dawn seemed so far away.

But the mighty winds and waves of the storm DID not and COULD not prevent Jesus from coming to their aid.

Let me say that again, in another way: our storms CANNOT and WILL NOT prevent Jesus from coming to our aid.

When the disciples were so frightened that they thought Jesus was a ghost, Jesus said, “take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

When the raging storms of our lives are so frightening to us that we see specters instead of a helping hand, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.”

When Peter’s rational brain caught up with the courage in his heart, and he began to sink, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.

When we listen to the wind, and reason out how inadequate we are, how much we are failures and nobodies and unlovable, Jesus reaches out his hand and catches US.

SO…knowing this, feeling it in our minds and hearts and souls, are we, like Peter, ready to get out of the boat?

St. Paul Lutheran Church in Beachville NJ has a beautiful sanctuary that is shaped like a boat. The stained glass windows are patterned after the waters of creation, moving in blues and greens and even reds and yellows from chaos into the waters of baptism. But the waters are pictured down here, and the boat comes up like this, like you are underneath a capsized boat. Actually there are a lot of churches around the country, especially where I’m from, that have patterned their sanctuaries like upside-down boats, capsized from being willing to be sent out into a stormy and scary world.

So, what was I doing at St. Paul in Beachville? I was hanging out with sixty Lutheran youth, a small segment of three hundred Lutheran youth from the Nebraska Synod. They drove two straight days cross-country through the storm of New Jersey traffic to literally flood the shore with their time and presence: clearing logs at Cross Roads and canvassing entire shore neighborhoods in the hot July sun. Our own Amy Pennegna with Lutheran Social Ministries sent out a call for savvy New Jersey volunteers, and, for better or for worse, I was the one this particular group got.

These young people got out of their comfortable little Nebraska boats about as far as humanly possible. Jesus said, “Come,” and they responded.

The good news is that we don’t have to go nearly as far as they did to get out of our own boats. Sometimes it’s being brave enough to carve out a few minutes of silence to hear a word from our Lord when we, like Elijah, feel completely alone. Sometimes, it’s knowing the difference between our own storms and someone else who is trying to give us theirs. Sometimes even just getting out of the house to come to worship can feel as difficult as walking on water.

But one thing remains the same. Jesus is not going to let us sink, no matter what storms try to get in the way. AMEN.

Today we are cancelling the Apocalypse! Sermon from 7-20-14

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Savior Jesus the Christ, amen.

The Bible is many things. It is a history book – telling us the story of how God has been faithful to God’s people in the past. It is a poetry and song book – teaching us how to pray and lift our praises to God. It is community bulletin board or blog – sharing the hopes, prayers, and concerns of a fledgling Christian community surrounded by a confusing and scary world. It is a story book – revealing to us who Jesus is and how he lived and died and rose again. The Bible is all of these things and much, much more. But one thing it is not: the Bible most definitely NOT a gardening or farming handbook.

Last week we heard about a sower who went out to sow, who just scattered his seeds around willy-nilly, not really caring where they landed. Now if you have had ANY experience with gardening whatsoever, you know that this is NOT a very efficient way to plant pretty much anything. Most of the time, you take the seed out of the package and carefully read the directions: plant seeds in full sun a half inch deep in loose soil, three to five inches apart. Thin plants when two inches tall. Water often, fertilize as necessary. Germination period sixty to seventy five days.

Here again the farmer in Jesus’ story needs to take some remedial farmer classes. What do you NORMALLY do when you see weeds growing in your garden plot? You get down on your hands and knees and pull those suckers out as soon as possible! Come one Jesus, everybody knows that! It’s just plain common sense.

But this story is not about common sense. It is not a guide to better gardening. And so it has an ending different from what we expect. The weeds are NOT pulled up at their sprouting. Their removal would actually cause more harm than good, so they are left to grow up with the good seed, the wheat. Together the wheat and the weeds are watered by the rain, are nourished by the soil, and shone upon by the sun. It is not until harvest time, many months later, that the weeds are separated out and bound into bundles to be consumed.

But in the meantime, we might imagine the good seed crying out to the master of the field – Lord, there are so many weeds! Look at them all! They are everywhere – right here next to us, sharing our sun and water and soil, their roots becoming intertwined with our roots, their leaves brushing up against ours. O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day? Why can’t they be weeded out TODAY?

The weeds are with us in our newspapers and on the TV nightly news, filling up space and time with BAD news, of shootings in our neighborhoods and drugs on our streets, corruption within our halls of government and depravity done in the name of religious devotion. O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day? Why can’t they be weeded out TODAY?

The weeds are with us in our own communities, cutting in line at the supermarket and on the turnpike, bullying our children on the playground and online, they are with us in our boardrooms and even in our
churches. O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day? Why can’t they be weeded out TODAY?

The weeds are with us even in our own homes…the son who has been to rehab more times than anyone can count, who begs for just one more chance and just one more “loan” of a hundred dollars. The aunt at every family gathering who has nothing good to say to anyone, whose life and children are perfect and can’t understand why you are such a mess. The mother or father or sister or brother for whom nothing will ever be good enough, who will never show you their approval or love.

As the Psalmist writes in psalm 86, “O God, the insolent rise up against me; a band of ruffians seeks my life, and they do not set you before them…. Show me a sign of your favour, so that those who hate me may see it and be put to shame, because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.” O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day? Why can’t they be weeded out TODAY?

But the weeds are also with us …in the mirror, within OUR VERY OWN HEARTS. The root causes of sin and evil and brokenness has been sewn in our own hearts too, and the seeds of the evil one has all too often found that the soil there is rich and ready. Their roots become deep and stuck fast, and their fruit is the fruit of death. The garden plots of our own hearts have been compromised, and so we cry out with the psalmist, “Give me an undivided heart to revere your name.”

Looking at Jesus’ story from this angle, perhaps our cries for the swift justice of the Lord are a bit premature. We may want to reconsider our eagerness to do our own weeding in the name of the Lord.  For such a harvest of justice in God’s kingdom would not leave any of us unscathed. So perhaps it is a blessing that our God seems rather slow, and is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

But God only seems slow because we are living in the middle of the story. It probably took Jesus less than ten minutes to tell this parable from beginning to end, but it has taken, and will take, many lifetimes to actually be completed. We are still in the growing time before the harvest. From our vantage point, we can only see the small little plot of land around us, and we see that there are a heck of a lot of weeds growing big and strong around us, and inside of us too. Which sometime makes it hard for us to figure out which is which. And maybe that also means we are not meant to.

God decided that it might be fun to show me what this might mean during this last week when I was away, to be with my family after the death of my grandfather, my mother’s father.  Every part of the funeral service for my grandpa was perfect to celebrate the life of this perfectly flawed but perfectly loved child of God. This was two Thursdays ago. That Sunday we attended my home congregation, but on Monday night we decided to go to the Monday night service back at Grandma’s church. My grandmother belongs to a church that has some different ideas that my own. This time, the vicar, or intern, was preaching, with the aid of his handy power-point outline and his three-point sermon.

As a preacher myself, it is normally a blessing to get to hear others preach, since it is not a blessing that all pastors have. But this particular vicar was making very challenging for me. He began and ended his message by taking a political and religious stance that I don’t happen to particularly agree with. And it would have felt so much better to judge him for it from my only particularly “self-righteous good seed" standpoint, if not for the middle of his message.” Wouldn't you know it, but somewhere in the middle of his sermon was a message about trusting in God in the midst of the hard stuff, a message encouraging us to let go of our fear because our hope is in God. Gosh darn it, it would have been so easy for me to have completely written him off, to have tuned the rest of the sermon out, to have put this young man directly and solidly in the “weed” camp, and felt the better for it.

Well, it’s a very good thing that none of us are in charge of who is in and who is out, who is wheat and who is a weed in the end.

The day of the harvest IS coming. The weeds will be separated from the wheat. The oppressed will be set free. All the wrongs will be righted. Sin and death will be no more. All that is evil in this world will come to an end, and the people of this world who truly are evil will get what is coming to them.

But that day is not today. But today IS the day that we do put our hope in the Lord in the middle of the story, in the midst of the hard stuff. Because that’s where God is too. And in the meantime we, along with the writer of the Eighty-Sixth psalm, ask God, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.” AMEN.

Yearly Reflections on Hot Weather in NJ

I admit, I'm a big wuss when it comes to heat. I feel uncomfortable when hot; I don't like feeling sweaty; I feel crabby during times of heavy humidity. Growing up in the Midwest, I used to think that "hot" was anything over 75 degrees. Now I think "hot" is anything over 85. I'm more used extended periods of snow and cold than I am to long periods of humidity and hot weather.

(Why did I like camps so much? Being outside and running around in the heat? In NW WI it is not uncommon for it to still be pants weather until the end of June.)

When we lived in our old apartment in Hamilton, it wasn't a big problem - the AC was awesome. In our new place in Trenton, as much as I love (mostly) everything about the new place, it does have a drawback: no central air. But we have discovered that this is pretty common for the City of Trenton. Most homes/apartments have  AC units hanging from windows and fans in windows, and most people sitting around outside during much of the day. And now we understand why - these old brick homes are great for winter, but hold the heat in so that it feels cooler to be outside. We have a window unit in our bedroom, so we sleep fine and the cats can stay cool, but the rest of the place gets lots of nice, hot sun during the day (again, great for winter, not so much for summer).

Thanks, Mom, for teaching me how to keep a place as cool as we can during these hot summer days (closing windows early in the day, having fans on exhaust rather tan intake function, drawing the blinds against the sun). We also have plenty of cool places to be during the day - church, a friends' place while they're at camp, another friend's as we watch their cats, Starbucks, the mall. But we've also been thinking a lot about the people around the city who are homeless and have no place to be cool except for the train station. It sort of makes our little bedroom oasis seem pretty good.

Faithfully Ever After, Sermon 6-15

Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The prince defeats the dragon and saves the princess.

The ship sinks, but love is unsinkable.

True love’s kiss broke the curse.

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

The End.

No, I’m not accidentally starting with the last page of my sermon. It’s just that most of our readings for today are either beginnings or endings, aren’t they? Because it’s the beginnings and endings of things that we tend to remember – about good books, good movies, good stories in general. And at the end of the very best stories, the ones that stay with us, all of the messy and complicated plot points are all woven together in one giant and satisfying “AAAaaaaah.”

But. how things begin is almost as important as how things end. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was a dark and stormy night. The hills are alive with the sound of music. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. Not to mention, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.”

You’ll notice in you bulletin that there is a very long reading that you did not hear read aloud today, from the first chapter of Genesis, AKA the very beginning of everything. Please, read this on your own sometime this week, and notice the beautiful poetic language that our ancient forefathers and mothers used when describing the love our God has for God’s creation, a love God has for us from the very beginning.

But today we’re going to focus on endings – the ending of the Gospel according to Matthew, to be exact. We are skipping ahead, all the way to the last page of the gospel, to hear the last thing that Matthew wrote that Jesus said – the command to go out and make disciples, and the reminder that Jesus presence will go with them to the end of space and time. Which sounds pretty good, right? But if we look closely, not exactly every plot point is resolved. There’s no satisfying “the end.”

Now if I had my way, the end of Matthew’s gospel might have included the following addendum: And then, after Jesus said that he was going to be with his followers always, he added, “and because of this, your lives will always be exciting but never frustrating, you will always succeed at everything you do, and telling people about me will never be hard, ever.” And the people totally and completely understood what Jesus was saying, and rejoiced.

But this is most certainly not the case, and this is certainly NOT what how Matthew ends his gospel. Even after an earthquake, an angel that looked like lightening, hardened soldiers fainting, and Jesus himself showing up, alive, saying “Hey, what’s up?” and giving instructions to meet up with him in Galilee, EVEN AFTER ALL THIS, some of the eyewitnesses did not quite believe their eyes. “When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.” It seems here that Matthew hadn’t paid attention in his “how to write end of your Gospel” class.

The word that Matthew chooses to describe these doubting worshippers, or worshipful doubters, is “distazo,” which, for once, means pretty much what it sounds like it means – distracted. Or more exactly, to be of two minds about something, to waver, to hesitate, to literally be standing in two places at once. As much as we can fault Matthew for his gospel ending, he might have been on to something: these disciples were distazo when it came to Jesus on that first Easter, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve been pretty distazo about Jesus ever since.

The truth is Jesus’ followers today are living in a pretty distazo world. We are dis-connected, dis-integrated, and distracted.

Too often we are DIS-CONNECTED from one another emotionally and empathetically, even though we are technologically more connected than we have ever been before.

Our relationships are DIS-INTEGRATED within our own lives when we believe the culture’s lie that we are the center of our own universe.

We are a DIS-TRACTED people, literally, knocked off track like a derailed train, by life’s many demands that have become our taskmasters. It’s like the universe is playing a constant tug-of-war between what draws us to God and what keeps us away from God. And WE happen to be the rope.

Think about all the times this last week that you’ve been distazo – actually, scratch that - think about the last time you DIDN’T feel distazo. When was the last time you were fully present in any given moment? Are you even feeling a little distazo right now, in this very moment?

What if the solution to this problem of being of two minds, of being constantly distazo, was to be of THREE minds?

To be of three minds, I think, might mean something like this. We are not more distracted and divided by the tension between what draws us toward God and what draws us away from God. Instead, we are more aware of the presence of God’s three-pronged reality in the world - “the grace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

 We begin our worship with this very phrase, you may have noticed. We happen to be quoting Paul’s words as he ends his second letter to the Christian community in Corinth, who were very divided and very distazo by many things. So Paul reminded his congregation, and reminds us many centuries later, that this three-fold blessing of God is WITH us.

The GRACE of our Lord Jesus, who showed us the lengths that God would go to prove that God is not in the sin-accounting business, is WITH US.

The LOVE of God, our loving Father who created you and knows you and is absolutely head-over-heals for you, is WITH US.

The Holy Spirit’s COMMUNION, which draws us together into a community of love from all corners of the globe, from every language, color, and background, is WITH US.

When Paul first committed these words to paper, and when we speak them into the universe every Sunday from this day into eternity, we remind ourselves that in the end, the distazo cannot win. It does not have the last word. It does not have control over our ending.

We may not always live “happily ever after” like in the fairy tales. But in fact, we have something better than a fairy tale ending – the assurance that no matter where our stories take us, Jesus promises to be with us through its chapters, to the end of the age. And so, what we have taken for an ending in the Gospel of Matthew is actually a beginning, a “once upon a time” in disguise.

Because even if you flip all the way to the end, the very end, the end of Revelation, last page of the Bible, we only have another beginning: “Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.” And that means you. Jesus is WITH YOU. So what’s that going to mean for YOUR story?  What does that mean for you? Now that the sermon is over what is that going to mean for your next chapter?

And so they lived full of grace, full of love, and in the communion of God, faithfully ever after. The end.

 Amen.

Sermon 6-1-14 - "MINE"

Grace to you and peace from God our father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Amen.

Beau and I were at the Quaker bridge mall the other day, frequenting our favorite guilty-pleasure coffee establishment, (cup) Starbucks. Beau stayed to enjoy his coffee while I took mine to go, so I could go shopping – a happy compromise for all. However, after I walked in a store, I realized I had a problem. A full cup of coffee, even with a cover, is not a good combination with racks of clothes that are not yet mine. What to do, what to do… ah! Look there, right behind me, a small table. Great, I can put my coffee right there in easy reach! That way, I can browse with now worries of spilling… I can look all I want…. and then when I’m all finished, I could just pick up my coffee and….

…it wasn’t there. My coffee. My beautiful, delicious, nearly full Starbucks coffee was gone. Likely picked up by a well-meaning employing in that busy store, simply trying to keep the store clean. But still. That coffee was mine. And I wanted it. And now it was no longer there when I expected it to be. And I was very unhappy about it.

But I got over it. After all, there are more important things to worry about than MY Starbucks coffee. Things like how to arrange getting MY car fixed up after a tough winter of Trenton pot holes. Things like - whether or not MY number will be called up for jury duty in a few weeks. Things like - wondering how MY sister, now graduated from college, will be able to find a job.  Things like -worrying about taking care of all the stuff AND people who are “mine.”

You know that old saying about marriage, that “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is ours.”? No? You’ve never heard that? That’s kind of what Jesus sounds like here in this prayer – what’s mine is yours, what’s yours in mine, and him in me and I in him and I in you and God is us and yours and mine and what in the world is Jesus talking about here and can I get a translation or at least a little more punctuation please.
On our last Sunday in Easter, as we wait to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday next week, we again find ourselves in the Gospel of John, with Jesus and the disciples on the night of the last supper, the night he was betrayed, with suffering and death awaiting him. In the midst of this last meal with his closest friends, in the midst of a very difficult conversation where Jesus tries to both explain his upcoming absence and prepare his disciples for it, Jesus prays for them.

He doesn’t pause the conversation. He doesn’t say - hold that thought, I’ll be right back, and then go off on his own. He doesn’t close his eyes and pray silently. He prays – out loud – in the middle of their conversation – so that they are able to hear him as he prays. This prayer is not private. Jesus WANTS us to hear him as he prays to his father.

And during his prayer, he reminds those of us who are listening of two things – the first, which he mentions last, in typical Johnish “Yoda-like” fashion, is that those of us who follow Jesus belong to God, and God calls us his. The second thing, which Jesus mentions first, is the reminder that eternal life is not just about what happens to us when we die. It’s about knowing who we belong to (which is God) and knowing the one whom God sent (which is Jesus). Eternal life is about living into the fact that God calls you “mine.”

Two different Pixar movies have shown us what being so claimed by God both IS and IS NOT. God calling us God’s own is NOT like those really annoying seagulls in Finding Nemo - you know, the ones who say to everything in their line of sight MINE. MINE. MINE. After all, that’s how we treat things and people when they are simply a means to an end. Instead, God’s claim on us is more like in the movie Toy Story, where the boy Andy loves his toys so much that he writes his name on the bottom of their feet in case he loses them. Andy, however, did NOT know that his toys were alive and sometimes looked at the bottom of their feet for encouragement when they experienced their own toy version of “dark night of the soul.”

I showed a clip from Toy Story at this past year’s Winter Youth Assembly, and compared Andy’s care for his toys with the love God has for us and the promise that we belong to God no matter where we are and no matter what state we find ourselves in. The theme for the event, after all, was “MINE.” Later I found out that some of the girls from one church had taken a sharpie and written “God” on the bottom of their feet. As silly as that sounds, I realized they GOT IT. They GOT that God calls them his own and has claimed them and has promised to be with them, and wanted to show this in a way that made sense to them in that moment.
So what if we all lived as if “God” was written with a sharpie on the bottoms of our feet? What might our lives look like? Would your lives, in fact, look differently? For this promise – that God has written “MINE” on us – is both a gift and a charge. It means that God is going to be with us no matter what. But it also means that God might ask us to go places that we wouldn’t normally go, places that might frighten or surprise us. We are not just HIS. We are to be HIS witnesses.

On the night before his death, Jesus prays for the protection of all who belong to him, knowing that they will be called to some pretty scary and surprising places. And again, in the days before the Holy Spirit arrives on Pentecost, Jesus tells his disciples that they will be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all of Judea, and Samaria, and to all the ends of the earth.”

A witness tells others what he or she has seen or experienced. We, as Jesus’ followers, are his witnesses in all that we say and do. And this is definitely a most daunting task. And I can at least say for myself that many times I am not a very good witness. At the mall that day I felt more outrage over my missing cup of coffee than the fact that the nearly three hundred kidnapped Nigerian girls are still missing. And at our New Jersey Synod Assembly yesterday I felt more concern about where to get my next cup of coffee than the rising prevalence of food insecurity; as Pastor Sara Lilija from the Lutheran Office of Governmental ministries pointed out, using an illustration that also involved coffee.

In fact, sometimes I feel that I am what they call on Law and Order a “hostile” witness. When a witness is not cooperating in the way the lawyers expect, they often ask the judge in a very serious tone: “your honor, permission to treat the witness as hostile.”

Fortunately for us, Jesus will never treat us as hostile witnesses, even though we often DO let him down in our witnessing. Too often we forget that belonging to God is a life-long calling. Too often we forget that the mark of the cross on our foreheads given to us in baptism is still there. When the pastor said the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” God was writing on you a big ol’ M-I-N-E. And perhaps, God was writing it on our feet, too.

Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter. But it is also June first, and all too soon summer will be upon us. And before we know it, we will be pulled in all the many directions that summer takes us – sports camps, summer vacations at the shore, trips, family reunions and obligations – and it’s gonna feel like these things OWN you. It’s gonna feel like you are at their mercy, that you belong to the business of your schedule, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Or is there?

God doesn’t take a summer vacation from claiming you as his beloved child. We do not stop belonging to God, and we don’t stop being his witnesses, even if we many find ourselves in some pretty scattered places. Because you can bet that if Jesus says you will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth, Jesus is going to be with you to make sure you get to your destination. And, UNLIKE my coffee, he's not going to disappear on you. AMEN.