Putting our Hearts in Lent

 Ash Wednesday - 2-17-21

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In “the before times,” I feel most of my pastor colleagues – and myself included – often started our Ash Wednesday sermons with some version of “I’m not ready for Lent!” But this year feels different. Because the original lockdown from Covid-19 happened during the season of Lent last year, we joked at first that we were just in one long Lent until we could come back together again. In fact, some proposed delaying Easter (for just a few weeks) to be celebrated when we could all be “back.” How naïve that feels now, almost one year later.

Ash Wednesday is truly one of the “Last big things we did together in the before times.” Everything else from here on out, we will have done before in lockdown. Thank goodness for the gifts of previous experience! But almost one year later, it certainly does feel as though we have had a year of Lent. So, this year, I’m not ready to start a season we really never left. 

But ready or not, Lent happens. Just like life. Like Lent, life arrives like an unwelcome guest. Our lives have been interrupted when we become marked by death, grief, and pain. When we are suddenly not the person we were before, but aren’t yet the person we will become. And this is a very uncomfortable place to be.

This has been the human story from the very beginning, as we heard from the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden. After they had eaten from the fruit of the tree, they were no longer the same. God asked them a lot of questions about what happened – “Where are you? Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree? What is it that you have done?” And, instead of exploring these questions, our first parents chose to blame one another… the snake… God… anyone but themselves for their own actions.

In one of her songs, Sara Bareilles describes the scene in Eden from Eve’s perspective: “Walking in the garden was a serpent-shaped heart and he told” her a lie about God: “What is broken cannot show,” and “less than beautiful is worse than unholy.” She did not trust that God had created her good, just as she was. Like for our first parents, it’s hard for us to see ourselves as God sees us. It’s hard to image that God actually does love us for who we are.

I’m guessing, if you are human and have lived on this planet for more than a few seconds, your heart is not pristine red, shiny, or intact like the decorations for valentine’s day just a few days ago. Of course, we all know that love and other feelings don’t originate with this blood-pumping muscle in our chests. But we CAN feel so full of love our hearts feel as though they might burst. Our hearts can ache with compassion and empathy, or with longing or loneliness. Our hearts can sting from being hurt. Our hearts can get bruised. Our hearts can even get broken.

We have a saying that we “put our hearts into” things that we care deeply about. Some of these things seem innocent enough – family, friends, country, our jobs, living a comfortable life, freedom. But, as Jesus says about what happens to these treasures after a while … these things we think we should love above all else WILL fail us. Our homes and our cars, our careers, our health, all the stuff we bought online out of boredom…. They will let us down.

We are human. We love what is bad for us – and I’m not talking about chocolate or giving up sugar for Lent. I’m talking about how we hang on to what feels comfortable and normal. And how trying to go back to these things is one of the reasons we are still here, almost one year later. We love what is comfortable, familiar, and convenient, because – let’s face it! Change is hard! Altering our behavior is hard! Even when – ESPCIALLY WHEN – it would be for the best.

We’re not in Eden anymore (as if we ever were) but we are definitely in a strange and unfamiliar place. Our efforts to ignore this wilderness only prolong our time here, until we cannot keep it out any longer, and this reminder knocks us off our feet. Like Ash Wednesday, the start of our 40 days in the season we call Lent.

Ready or not, Ash Wednesday is the time to take stock of our dusty, sore hearts. And we often find what we don’t want to find. We find our sinful and broken actions have left scars on our hearts, and left scars in the lives of others. We find we are lost in a wilderness we don’t want to be in.

But we are not left in our dusty, heartsick state. We are not abandoned to the wilderness surrounded by our comfortless treasures. Our damaged hearts are not cast aside and thrown away, like unwanted valentines on February 15th. We can show our broken selves to God and know that Love will find us there. God renews our hearts, minds, souls, our whole being. The good, the bad, the ugly, the parts that feel unlovable and unworthy. All of it. All of us. No matter how long it takes. 

And so, we wear the sign of the cross in ashes on the outside to remind ourselves of the work that God is enacting on the INSIDE Of us. The confessing our sins. The accepting and embracing of our brokenness and trauma. Acknowledging and processing the ways that we have been marked by death and loss in the last year. Beginning the slow and painful process of the transformation of our dusty and broken hearts into ones that are healed and whole…. All so that we might be better able to love the other dusty and hurting hearts out there in our lives and in the rest of the world.  To love one another with our whole hearts… with hearts that are broken AND beautiful. 

We know that will likely take more than forty days. It might take more than a year. It will likely take our entire lives. But together, trusting in Jesus, we will get through this Lent-within-Lent, hearts intact and ready to love, beautiful broken bits and all. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

The First Actual Disciple

 2-7-21

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

During this time of “Coronatide Winter,” I’ve noticed so many things being turned into Hashtag Challenges. Some are fun – go look up #TargetDressChallenge, you won’t regret it! But some are also serious.

I’ve seen my pastor friends doing the #danglingerringchallenge, which I assumed was for fun – until I heard the story behind it. Turns out, last year an African American woman pastor in the Methodist church named Chenda Innis Lee was repeatedly harassed by one of her members for wearing dangling earrings during their Zoom worship, and that member wrote multiple letters saying that her choice was “too distracting.”

As women in public ministry, myself and my female colleagues over and over again have been forced to defend our calls to other people. All women I know have experienced inappropriate comments about how much we weigh, how we do our hair, the clothes we wear, how young we look. I personally have been mansplained, stalked, harassed, and called names online and in real life. Our calls are belittled when the culture automatically assumes that the ONLY acceptable pronoun for “pastor” is “he.”

The words we use are very important. The Gospel of Mark isn’t wordy, but Mark knows what he’s doing. He’s painting for us a picture of Jesus who is a man of both words AND action. Jesus chooses his words carefully. He means what he says and leads by example. And when he calls us to follow, he expects us to do the same.

It's actually a little amusing to me that we are STILL in the first chapter of Mark, but there is so much going on here – healing one person, then healing a lot of people, then Jesus needs some down time. Then Jesus preaching and heals some more. But it all began with one person – the mother of Simon’s wife. I think it’s pretty cool that they told Jesus about her fever right away, and that Jesus got right to it and healed her.

And then she got up and began to make everybody some sandwiches… oh wait, what? That’s NOT cool! The feminist in me rankles a bit at first to her response to the gift of new life…. as she seems to repeat the broken systems in place in her old life.

But maybe, just maybe…. Simon’s mother-in-law does something in chapter 1 that none of the other disciples get around to doing in ALL of the chapters of Mark. She was the first disciple of Jesus who actually behaves like one.

This woman was healed and restored, to respond out of her gratitude as a mode of true discipleship, following in Jesus’ (Future) footsteps. Though Simon, Andrew, James, and John were CALLED first, SHE is first to live out her call. SHE, who was not even given a name in Mark’s Gospel. SHE is the one who shows us the way – opening her home and her doorstep to be the staging ground for the healing of an entire city in need.

She was the first woman in Mark, who followed Jesus, as arguable the first diaconal minister, and she certainly would not be the last.

Jesus is on the move, and these women keeps pace with him, more so than their male counterparts. Women ministered to Jesus and even stood vigil at the cross. Women were the first to witness the empty tomb on Easter morning. Women like Priscilla, Tabitha, Junia, and a pretty cool one from Greece named Lydia, and also many, many others worked solo or side by side with their male counterparts to help be midwives at the birth of God’s kingdom here on earth.

Female bodies are sacred, blessed, chosen to for this holy work, when the rest of the world, even in the church, would rather not acknowledge this, or even recognize all the ways we harm one another by not honoring this call from God comes to all kinds of bodies.

Jesus came to earth in a body. Jesus healed bodies – cast demons from them, restored them to health – and also fed them. …. And by the way, he also took care of his body with rest… all still within the first chapter in the Gospel of Mark. Not a bad beginning.

Unfortunate for us, we still seem to be at the very beginning of working on this particular justice issue. It is 2021, and little girls can grow up to be anything they want to be, including pastors, right? We sometimes forget that there are still denominations that call themselves Lutheran who do recognize women’s ordination. 18% of the member churches in theLutheran World Federation do not ordain women, and many ELCA churches still balk and calling a female pastor. In so doing, they are denying and rejecting vital organs in the Body of Christ.

While the rest of the society values only certain types of bodies are worthy, Jesus continues to insist that all bodies are loved and worthy of being seen as holy – bodies of all abilities, ages, colors, genders, sizes, and health levels. And all bodies deserve healing, rest, and care. In fact, Jesus put his own body on the line to get this point across. And God thought all bodies – including your body - are so important, that he raised Jesus up… in a bodily resurrection. Probably the best offering in the #resurrectionchallenge

Whether you wear dangling earrings – or not – you are loved and you are called. Whether you need to step back and make space for rest or are ready to lean in and eager for the work that is to come, you are still loved and you are called. And as we remember that God loves, creates, and calls all bodies to this work, we can create space for all the different ways that we all can follow Jesus. Thanks be to God, amen.

 

"Who is Worthy?"

Wednesday evening prayer - Narrative Lectionary 

2-3-10 “Who is Worthy?”

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh lord, our rock and our salvation, amen.

The centurion – a Roman citizen and military leader - is pretty close to the top of the food chain in Jesus’s time. Toward the bottom were all the people that the Romans had conquered, including Jesus’s people. So here we have this powerful man who answered to very few, ask for healing on behalf of his slave. He might have heard something about Jesus, since Jesus had been to Capernaum before, healing and cast out demons on his previous trip. He could easily have commanded or threatened Jesus. Instead, he asks the Jewish elders to intercede with on his behalf.

Presumably, the elders thought this centurion was a worthy candidate for Jesus because of he seemed like a “good guy.” It makes sense, since proximity to power is the next best thing to having power yourself.

But we know that that’s not how Jesus rolls. Jesus judges the worth of people from an entirely different criteria than that of the rest of the world. Because to Jesus – and to God – all people have worth.

I really like a quote from the show Doctor Who when he says, “In 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.” Afterall, not unlike Jesus, Dr. Who prefers to hang out with “normal” everyday people, and brings those people on their many adventures. Also, must like Dr. Who, Jesus seems to show up exactly at the right place at the right time, as he did for the widow who Jesus encountered next.

Imagine for a moment that you are the woman in this story. Though your husband has died and can no longer provide for you, you were fortunate enough to have had a son who survived to adulthood. It would have been his job to take you in and support you, since insurance policies, pensions, 401(k)s, social security, and Medicare did not exist. Now imagine you are instead attending the funeral of your only son, knowing also that now you are destitute.

When Jesus saw the widow’s grief, his heart went out to this woman who had lost everything. She was the complete opposite in every way to the centurion commander. And yet, she was very much the same in Jesus’s eyes.

Man, woman. Powerful, powerless. Member of the occupying army, part of the population being oppressed. And yet, both have worth, and Jesus helps both. Jesus healed the centurion’s servant long-distance. Then, in the next town over, Jesus got up close and personal, interrupting a young man’s funeral in order to make it unnecessary.  

I think Doctor Who (and Jesus) is right. You are important. But some people are treated by others as “worthless” - worth less than other people. We may not have slaves and centurions in this time and place, but we have questions of worth of our own to ask ourselves if we are paying attention.

Which kind of people have you seen that are treated as having more worth than others? We are seeing the answer play out every single day – some gets paid less for doing the same job. Some have access to getting the vaccine are not the same as those being hardest hit by Covid-19. Those who break the law for different reasons getting different bail amounts and being treated differently in our criminal justice system. While these things continue, we all suffer.

We need one another, because it is only together, we are whole. Together we are complete. Together we are the children of God. Together we are worthy, because it is God, not the world, who has given us our worth, and no one is not important. Thanks be to God. Amen.