Strawberry Jello and Jesus

Maundy Thursday 2017

Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our lord and savior Jesus the Christ, amen.

Family, friends, and food just seem to go together. Here at Family of God, we live this like it is Gospel itself!! Between Dine and Donate, my installation celebration, the 55+ Group, Soup and Sandwich, you just can’t turn around in this church without bumping into a “food and fellowship” related ministry.

Food is how we take care of one another, and also how we celebrate. While both of my grandparents were alive, they would host every holiday many birthdays at their large house, with folding chairs and tables scattered everywhere, surrounding one huge table with leaves to make it huge. Food filled the kitchen, and no family gathering would be complete without Grandma’s strawberry Jell-o with bananas in it. And so, no plate would be complete without a helping. Now, strawberry Jello and bananas aren’t my favorite flavor combination, but eating this special desert was like eating with her, especially since there eventually came a time when strawberry jello with bananas was no longer on the menu.

What are some of your favorite food memories? Perhaps it is the smell of Grandma baking homemade bread, or the taste of fresh marina sauce at your favorite restaurant as you celebrated a birthday or milestone, a Champaign toast at a wedding. And then there are the special food traditions that become staples in our lives for family get-togethers and holidays, like my Grandma’s strawberry and banana jello. Like turkey on Thanksgiving. Mom’s sugar cookies at Christmas. Honey ham and Aunt Marge’s cheesy potatoes at Easter. Ice cream birthday cake from Dairy Queen.

Food makes us remember. The Jewish people used the Passover meal to remember that God had led them from slavery in Egypt to freedom, that God had guided them through years of wandering in the dessert, and eventually gave them to a home to call their own. Each item in the Passover meal jogs their memories of God’s saving acts and faithful presence in the past, to remind them that God will continue to be faithful, no matter what the future year holds.

This is the reason why strawberry Jell-O is actually more than just strawberry Jell-O. And bread is more than just bread and wine is more than just wine Like common Jell-O, here is nothing inherently special about bread and wine. Just walk down the bread aisle at ACME or GIANT sometime. There may be more varieties NOW than were available to Jesus, but really, bread still is just bread and wine is still just wine, no matter where you are. Like a package of Jell-O, neither are hard to find. They are common, familiar, everyday things, nowhere near on par with extraordinary.

And yet, God chooses the ordinary over the extraordinary, the common over the rare, the everyday and familiar over the exceptional - every time. God has a habit of taking what is ordinary in the eyes of the world and making it into something holy, special, set apart for a sacred reason.

Jesus embodied this during his lifetime, and that’s what got him into trouble. Jesus was always hanging out and eating with all the “wrong” kinds of people: lepers, Roman centurions, the demon-possessed, women at wells, children, foreigners, the blind, and the lame – all people who were on the outside of power and status. Jesus chose to be with them, just ordinary folks, rather than to hang out in the halls of power and influence. And in doing this, he showed that God was for THEM too.

But there were those in power in Jesus’ time who could not abide the thought that God welcoming everybody, that God would use ordinary people and ordinary things for God’s holy and sacred purposes. Jesus’ message of God’s extraordinary love for ordinary people threatened the established and excepted order. Therefore, naturally, Jesus and all that he stood for must be destroyed. And they would do so by any means necessary, even if it meant using one from his own inner circle, Judas, to betray him.

But that didn’t stop Jesus, not even for a second. Jesus came to show the world that God’s extreme love does extend to everyone, that God’s extreme welcome brings everyone to the table. Just look around at the people who are Jesus’ closest friends, the people he chose to spend his last meal with: common working men who didn’t always understand him, political zealots and hot-heads, those who would later desert him, one who would later deny him, and one would hand him over to death. And yet, there they all are, sitting around the table with Jesus, sharing a meal together.

And I ask you this night, to look around, to see who is gathered around this table. As Lutheran Pastor and writer Nadia Boltz-Weber (in her book Pastrix) often says about her own congregation: “I am unclear about what all these people have in common.” It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Except, of course, that we know that it is Jesus who has brought us all here to this table of welcome: young and old, rich and poor, children and parents, liars and deniers and betrayers, imperfect people all. All brought to this meal because of Jesus. All are welcome at God’s table.

That night that Jesus shared his last meal with his closest friends, as they sat down to break bread as they had always done, they were expecting this night to be like all the others. They did not know that with them Jesus was making a memory – one that will be passed on, remembered throughout the ages, remembered again tonight.

That night, Jesus took ordinary bread and ordinary wine and gave it to ordinary people, and something extraordinary happened.

Jesus makes a promise with us with eating and drinking, an activity that unites all of humanity to meet a most human need – our need for sustenance, our need for life. We may eat to live and keep our bodies alive and healthy, but through Jesus’ broken body and blood poured we are given life in God’s Kingdom, where Jesus is giving us a place.

Jesus promised to be present with us in the sharing of bread and wine. And this he does boldly, while sin and betrayal and fear are sitting right there with him at the table. Jesus breaks a loaf of bread and shares it with his friends, just hours before his body is to be broken on the cross. Jesus then shares a cup of wine, just hours before his blood pours forth from his wounds, caused by flogging and splinters and nails.

We don’t have to understand it. In fact, most days we won’t be able to wrap our minds around it. But we remember it, believe it, trust it, and grasp it tightly and do not let go. We reach out our hands and receive it – the body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you.

You and me, who are sometimes Peter and sometimes Judas, and sometimes the rest of the disciples, asleep on the job or running the other direction in fear. But still, always welcome.

Pastor Rozella Haydee White wrote in the Free Indeed Lent Devotional that the ELCA published for Lent year, “In a world that divides things into sacred and secular, Christianity offers an alternative, one that has the power to bring about restoration… by choosing to become human, God shows us that we are worth restoring.”

In our world of violence and fear, of division and indifference, of tight schedules and frazzled nerves, our God comes to us in a way that we can see and touch and taste. How amazing is that? And together this night we

break bread,

eat,

and remember

that Jesus is here with us. Today we remember the goodness of the Lord, as we look ahead to tomorrow, that Friday that we call good. Amen.

Hosannas and Rejected Stones

4-9-17 Palm Sunday

Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Amen.

Welcome to Holy Week, where up is down, and down is up. Where a crowd shouts “Hosannas” one minute and “Crucify him!” the next. Where bread becomes Jesus’ body and wine becomes his blood. Where a king is killed for not being the right kind of king. Where a criminal walks free and an innocent man dies. Where disciples deny and run away scared and women and soldiers stand witness at the death of Jesus.

This is it. We made it. This week is what the forty days of Lent have been leading up to, the most important week of the Church calendar. This is why we wear purple: the color Jesus wore to be mocked, the color of royalty and bruises. We are about to enter a week where time gets wibbly-wobbly and hours in the life of Jesus stretch out. We are about to enter a week of reversals and transformation: where enemies become allies against Jesus, where a rejected stone becomes the central foundation block, where an instrument of torture and death becomes the very way we are rescued from death.

By artist He Qi

This week begins… with a parade. Jesus comes down the road into Jerusalem, like kings of old, riding a colt and surrounded by his disciples laying their cloaks before him like a royal procession. They are filled with amazement for all Jesus was doing, preaching sermons that are both challenging to the status quo and uplifting for those who are without hope, for his choosing a Samaritan woman to be his evangelist, and for healing a man born blind. So, the people, filled with hope, cry out along the parade route, “Hosanna! Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

Now, the last time we heard those same words wasn’t all that long ago, back in December - when the sky was filled with a multitude of the heavenly host, appearing to some shepherds late at night. These poor shepherds, scared out of their wits, witnessed the first proclamation of the good news of great joy for all the people, the birth of a savior, a messiah, the Lord. That night, the sky was filled with the shouts of angels: ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors!”

THAT night, Christmas night, shepherds bore witness to the arrival of God’s glory being birthed into the world. On THIS day, Palm Sunday, Jesus’s followers are the ones shouting for joy, heralding the time has come, the king has come, to bring peace to heaven and earth.

But not everyone is shouting for joy. The Pharisees, too, have seen these deeds of power that Jesus has done, and they are WORRIED. They asked Jesus, “By what authority are YOU doing these things, and who gave YOU this authority?”

They were worried about this upstart preacher man from Galilee, who won’t play ball and give them a straight answer, a teacher who teaches that God is for the meek, poor in spirit, AND that “shady people” like prostitutes and tax collectors are getting into the kingdom before properly religious people like themselves.  This Jesus person was acting too much like a new kind of Moses, freeing people under a new law of love come down from God THIS TIME in the form of a person, not ten rules on a stone tablet.

And they were absolutely RIGHT to be worried. The Jewish people at this time were under the oppressive thumb of Rome. Whose idea of peace was subduing the people with threats, violence, might of the sword, and death by crucifixion. You don’t mess WITH ROME. Especially by proclaiming that there is another kind of peace out there, another kind of king, another Lord who rules heaven and earth, one that is NOT ROME

So, it makes sense that the advice of the Pharisees to Jesus is for everybody to just chill out, man. Put a lid on it, people. “Ix-Nay on the Osanna-Heys.”

 “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” comes from Psalm 118, verse 26. Jesus quotes from the same psalm to the Pharisees: “²²The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. ²³This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.”

What if what Jesus saying is true? What if the “one who comes in the name of the Lord” says that the Lord is for everyone? What if the people we think of as the “wrong kind of people,” people who are marginalized by societies and nations, are getting into the kingdom of God ahead of us? People like refugees refused entry into this country, people like trangeder kids who don’t feel safe using a public restroom, people like the homeless, those suffering from mental illness, welfare moms and drag queens, the powerless and trampled on? What if the likes of these are first in line in the kingdom?

A Kingdom of POWER, MIGHT, and RIGHT makes sense to us. A hard stone with rules come down from the mountain makes sense to us. Bombing our enemies and making them suffer, instead of welcoming innocent victims into our borders, in the name of “safety” for ourselves, that obviously makes sense to us.

A king who empties himself of his divine and cosmic power does not make sense. A ruler who was rejected in order to save the dejected does not make sense to us. And yet, here Jesus is – on a donkey, then on a cross.

Up is down and down is up. Enemies – the Romans and the Pharisees – team up and become allies to get rid of Jesus. Time is suspended and stretched. The King of the universe comes to die. This king that we welcome, we then abandon and reject. We reject this king, but he becomes the stone on which our very hope is built.

For those us already broken, and in pieces, this is good news. Peter, our favorite “open-mouth-insert-foot” disciple, the same who denied Jesus three times, his very names means “Rock” or stone. And this rock – Peter - would later write about Jesus as a living rock, a living stone, rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight. He says that we are God’s own people, living stones, stones that are at the same time dead and alive. Peter tells us, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (I Peter 2:10-12)

Down is up and up is down. Welcome to the week we consider the most holy of the entire year. And it starts right now.

Please join us on this road through Holy Week, through the festival of the Three days, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. Come and see what this week has in store:

Come and see Jesus, who comes in the name of the Lord, as he rides on to face his death.

Come and see Jesus, surrounded by people who cheer him on – for now.

Come and see Jesus, who eats his last meal with those who betray, deny, and abandoned him.

Come and see Jesus, who did not resist when he was mocked, beaten, and nailed to a cross.

Come and see Jesus, who was hastily laid in a borrowed tomb.

Then, come and see, three days later, a stone that has been moved,

a grave with no body,

and death that has been turned upside down, transformed into eternal life. Amen.

We Wait for the Lord

4-2-17

Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Amen.

Yikes. Are you feeling the burn? Yet another marathon-length reading from the Gospel of John, our fourth in five weeks.  Even though it’s the year of Matthew’s gospel, during Lent we are treated to a Gospel of John mini-series. So it might be good to do a little re-cap, to review of all the interesting characters that Jesus has met this “season.”

“Previously in the gospel of John,” or on what we could call, “How I Met our Savior”: Jesus had a late-night meeting with perplexed Nicodemus the Pharisee. Next, Jesus talked to the woman at the well, victim-of-gossip turned town evangelist.  Last week Jesus healed a man born blind and created a giant controversy for the whole community. And today, for this last Sunday before Palm Sunday, the season finale, his greatest accomplishment to date: raising Lazarus from the dead. Well, really, for John it would be more like a mid-season finale, because this story is only the half-way mark in the gospel, right in the middle of John’s 21 total chapters. in more ways than one, this story is central to the Gospel of John.

This is the watershed moment that sets into motion the events that we will be remembering during Holy Week – Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection. It is, according to John, the incident that begins the conspiracy by the religious leaders to end Jesus’ life. In John, by raising Lazarus, Jesus is signing his own death warrant.

Jesus had become practically part of the family of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Lazarus was near death, and so they called on the one person in the world that they believed and hoped could help – their friend Jesus. Only Jesus didn’t come right away. He didn’t arrive in town until it was much too late, when Lazarus had been dead for four days. What was Jesus thinking?

Both Mary and Martha, in their grief and sorrow, lay this heart-piercing statement at Jesus’ feet: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Buried in that statement is an accusation: “So, where were you, Lord?” I imagine they were furious with grief. From their point of view, while Lazarus was alive, something – anything - could have been done. He could have been healed. But now? By the time Jesus actually gets there, it’s too little, too late. Death, after all, is final. Death is the one thing we cannot escape.  

Where were you, Lord, they seem to ask, when Lazarus was on death’s door? Where were you Lord, while we waited for you? Where were you, Lord, as we sat by his side as he took his dying breath? Where were you Lord, when we buried his body in the dark, cold tomb? Where were you, Lord?

Martha and Mary say out loud what many of us might be thinking. We may be sitting in our own kinds of dark tombs at the moment.  Tombs that are dark and smell like death. Lord, if you had been there…. We wouldn’t have lost that job, the bills wouldn’t be piling up… Lord, if you had been there, we would not have gotten that cancer diagnoses, or had a tough time with that round of chemo. Lord, if you had been there, gun shootings would not happen and people would not die at the hands of violent people. Lord, if you had been there, our grandkids would still be going coming to church and the future would not seem so scary….

The Psalmist who wrote Psalm 130 puts words to what is in our hearts while we wait in these tombs – out of the depths we cry to the Lord, and we wait for an answer with our very souls, with every fiber of our beings.

Lord if you had been there, our world would not seem so dark and full of death, filling in the news we hear every day. Lord, of you had been there, we would not have to wait here in the darkness of our tombs.

Hospital waiting rooms seem to have a tomb-like feel to them, don’t they? Especially if you have ever waited all day or all night in one of them. When I lived in NJ, I also worked as a part time chaplain at the local hospital, which included a weekly overnight on-call shift. 

Because of the wonders of technology, I didn’t have to stay at the hospital all night – the ER could call me on my cell phone if there was an emergency. So, from 8 PM to 8 AM on Thursday nights into Friday mornings, I kept my phone by my side at all times, and slept with one ear open, waiting and listening for the sound of that special ring I set for the hospital number. When the morning came and my clock showed 8 AM, I would thank God for another quiet night.

But not every night was this way. One night it rang at about 12:30 AM, for the family of a woman who was fine one minute, and in cardiac arrest the next. For the next 5 hours, I sat with that family in the hospital waiting room, waiting for what would happen next, then waiting to hear that she would not recover, then waiting for the last family members to arrive to be present for her last breath… waiting for the sun to rise on the first morning that family would face without their beloved wife, mother, and grandmother.  

Another night I was called, and I arrived after a woman had died, and her husband and her adult children stayed at her side and continued to gently and lovingly touch her face and her hair. They rubbed her hands with scented lotion and brought a little humanity to their loved one in that cold and sterile emergency room cubicle.

I’ve been on the flip side too, waiting all day in a waiting room subsisting on prayers, uncomfortable chairs, and mediocre coffee for hours at a time, just last year while my Dad was in surgery. We waited in a couple different waiting rooms, drank the coffee, sat in the chairs, ate the hospital food, waiting for the surgery to be over, and then waiting to visit my dad afterward. The outcome of our waiting was a good one, of course, but I know first-hand that it is not always true in every case. Where are you Lord, when the news is not good, and the on-call chaplain needs to be called in? Where are you Lord, when the night is dark, and it seems like the dawn will never come?

At the beginning of the Gospel of John, there is a poem about light and darkness. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God… what came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people… the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. … and the word became flesh and lived among us.”

Mary and Martha spoke face-to-face with the flesh and blood son of God. They were speaking with Jesus, the man who walked and talked, and taught and healed. Jesus, who got thirsty, and who felt sadness, pain, and rejection. And who wept with anger and sadness as his heart was breaking over the death of his friend Lazarus and the pain it caused his friends. Jesus, who broke down and cried.

How unbelievable, how daring, how incredible of Jesus to then shout at the cold, dead tomb: Lazarus, come out!

Until, that is, Lazarus, did just that.

Lazarus lives.

“Where were you, Lord?” We ask. He is there, in our tomb with us. He is God with skin and a face, and has experience all that we have experienced, even the dark dead tomb of Good Friday.

He is also there, calling us out of the tomb. He is there, calling the light of life out of the darkness of death, just as he did that day at Lazarus’ tomb. Even though it will cost Jesus his life.

Lazarus died again, eventually. Every one of us will have laying in real tombs someday. Everything around us may die away and change into until the world becomes strange and unrecognizable. Even Jesus was given into the power of death and the grave, and was shut away in a cold, dark tomb for three days.

But Jesus lives.

After waiting for three days, other Marys who followed Jesus discovered that this place of death now stood empty. The dark night was over, and the light of dawn had arrived.

Death does not win the day. Because we believe and hope and trust in the one who is the Resurrection and the Life, we can look through death to see the coming life that is emerging, like sun after a long day of hard rain.

It is true that death, and tombs, and waiting is always present in our lives, and Good Friday is on its way,

But after that, always comes Easter and Resurrection and Life. AMEN. 

Mud in our Eye

3-26-17

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

Congratulations on making it through another long and memorable story from the Gospel of John! Though I should warn you that we aren’t quite out of the woods yet. We have one more reading from John this Lent, though I promise you that this is the longest reading from John we have. And John is not all that easy to get through sometimes. John is full of double meanings and conversations happening on many levels at the same time, enough to make your head spin.  John likes to speak in code, which we’ve already seen much of this at work already, with Nicodemus and the woman at the well. Nicodemus talks to Jesus in the dark, Jesus meets the woman in the light. Nicodemus struggles to believe, while the woman at the well gets her WHOLE TOWN to believe. For John, those who don’t believe in Jesus are in darkness, and those who do are in the light.

So it is for most of scripture – God created light, and it was good. Those who walk in darkness have seen a great light. Jesus is the light of the world. The darkness shall not overcome it. The dark is full of the unknown. Scary things happen in the dark.

But does darkness and night deserve this kind of reputation of so much fear and avoidance? Pastor turned Seminary professor and writer Barbara Brown Taylor doesn’t think so. She embarked on a project to explore our complicated relationship with darkness, to prove that darkness and night have value. In her exploration, she has done a lot of adventurous things. She sat in a cave all by herself with no lights. She ate at a restaurant in Germany that serves their food in the dark. She even went to a completely dark exhibit in Atlanta that imitates what life is like for a person who is blind.

 She and a group of sighted people were led through a life-like simulation by a person who is blind in real life. They crossed a fake street with real traffic sounds, navigated through rooms, and all the while running into walls and bumping into each other. When Dr. Taylor ran into the man in front of her, she “did not know if he was old or young, white or black, pleasant to look at or not.” She had no visual information to judge him, or any of the other people stumbling along in this terrifying new world of noise and darkness and pretend danger. She only knew that he probably felt just as lost as she did. This experience left her with a question: how is it that seeing makes us blind?

Jesus had just finished teaching in the temple, and he and his disciples were walking along the road, when they came upon a man who had been born blind. The man existed outside of his community because of his disability, and he might have been begging along the road to support himself. When the disciples saw this man, they instantly judged him and his parents as sinners. Surely someone is to blame for this man’s blindness. In their minds, his disability was an outward sign that someone did something wrong, and this man was being punished for it. Therefore, this man was pushed to the margins of his community. To many, this man was invisible.

But Jesus did something that the disciples didn’t expect. Jesus refused to participate in the accepted culture of victim-blaming. Instead, Jesus saw the man with something more than just his eyes. He saw him through the eyes of God, the one who sent him, and viewed him as a created child of God, worthy of his attention and love, instead of judgment and rejection.

What did this man DO to EARN Jesus’ attention and healing that day? This man didn’t have extra strong faith. This man didn’t “pray hard enough.” He didn’t do extra community service or was an “extra good person.” He was in need. He was on the outside. And Jesus found him.

This is what Jesus is in the habit of doing – finding people on the outside of the rules that we are so good at creating for ourselves. Those of us who are able to see rely – perhaps too much – on the visual. We are really good at making judgments about what’s on the outside – skin color, biological gender, difference in dress because of religion, cultural values or economic status, weight, height, athletic ability, physical differences or visible disabilities.

We are really, really good at finding ways to separate ourselves from other people, making divisions between one another, whether physical or emotional walls, fences, or barriers. And once we are divided, we can judge and weight the importance and worth of US verse THEM. THEY do things because they are lazy, less smart, or loved less by God because of what we perceive as their deficiencies.

I recently saw a picture on Facebook that shows a group of people with pencils drawing lines between each other, and Jesus following right behind with his eraser, erasing all the lines. Because that’s what Jesus is actually all about. Erasing the lines we have drawn between one another. When we make lines and rules to keep people out, Jesus is always with the people on the outside. Which makes the people who are the ones drawing the lines very angry.

Case in point – just in case you were thinking that surely Good Protestants like us were beyond such things. This last week at Princeton Seminary, affiliated with a branch of the Presbyterian church, it was announced that a well-known preacher named Tim Keller was to receive a prestigious award. There was one problem though. Princeton Seminary represents a branch of Protestantism that affirms the ordination of women and also those who are part of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, as does our own denomination, the ELCA. The Reverend Tim Keller does not. When a public outcry came from both current students and alumni, the seminary decided to rescind the award but still allow Keller to speak. The most surprising thing, though, was the counter-outcry that came from some male heterosexual pastors, who minimized the legitimate calling of women and whose who identify as part of the LGBT community. Their pencils were sharp and full of lead, ready to redo the lines that Gospel has erased, blind to the inclusive power of the message of Jesus.

The man born blind in today’s story had not sinned, but the sin of the Pharisees and those in power trying to stop Jesus made them blind. And what was that sin? It was the certainty of the Pharisees that God was on THEIR side – the side of rules, walls, and dividing lines.

In their minds, Jesus was doing this Messiah business ALL WRONG. He healed the wrong person – a blind beggar. Jesus healed on the wrong day – on the sabbath, the day that no “work” was to be done. Jesus hung out with all the wrong people – women at wells, fishermen and tax collectors, revolutionaries, and outsiders. Jesus was doing this “God thing all wrong.” And so, Jesus must be stopped. The people in power got angry too. Angry enough to take matters into their own hands. This made them blind to all the amazing things that God was doing in their midst.

“How has seeing made US blind?” as Barbara Brown Taylor asks. How have WE too missed out on what is God is doing in OUR midst? How have we missed seeing Jesus at work because he uses people we don’t expect?

In fact, could God be doing amazing things in our midst RIGHT NOW, just as we are?

We may look around at ourselves and think what we see not enough for God to use. We may feel like we are on the outside, looking in, compared to others. We may look around and feel like we are incomplete as we are and not fit to be useful for God’s kingdom. Right now – TODAY -  Jesus sticks mud in our eyes and washes us in the pool called Sent, revealing to us that we are worthy to be claimed as part of God’s family and worthy of doing God’s work. NOT when we are more of this and less of that. But right now. So, we go out following Jesus’ lead – erasing the lines, breaking the walls, ripping up the fences that come between us and those the world says are not worth our notice.

Like Jesus, you are the light of the world. But you are also the erasers of the world, too. Amen. 

Living Water for a Parched Life

3-19-17

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

Today we again find ourselves reading from the Gospel of John and meeting a very memorable character along the way. Last week we met Nicodemus, a prominent religious leader a powerful Jewish group called the Pharisees. This week we meet a woman with no name, a member of the wrong religion and ethnic group, a person who the disciples would never want to be seen with. And yet, we see Jesus do something shocking. He talks to her.

Lately I have been reading a great novel called “Wonder” by R J Palacio. It’s about a memorable character named August who was born with a severe face deformity. When we meet him, at age 10, he has endured many surgeries, and has been homeschooled by his mom. Until now. August enters directly into the anxiety of middle school, you all remember what that’s like! Only August faces his peers with the added disadvantage of a face that causes people to stare, making him a person that no one seems to want to be friends with.  

On his first day, he enters the cafeteria with his lunch, looking for an empty table and praying to be left in peace. But after he sits down, someone joins him. Her name is Summer, and together they decide that the only people who can sit at their table are other people who have names that are associated with warm weather – you know, like Summer and August. This conversation is seemingly about nothing important, but there is something else going on beneath the surface. Wonder of wonders, on his first day of school, August makes a friend.

by Chinese artist He Qi

The Gospel of John also has a lot going on underneath the surface. And today is no exception, with Jesus and his surprising encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Surprising because it was not acceptable for respectable men to talk with women unless they accompanied by their husband, brother, or other male relative. And yet, Jesus strikes up a conversation.

She was also a Samaritan, “strike two” against her, since Jews did not interact with Samaritans, because of a long history of bad blood. Samaritans were related to the Jewish people but had intermarried with other groups and worshiped God in different ways. 

If that were not enough, this woman has a third strike against her in being married 5 times and living with a man who was not her husband.

Was this woman sexually immoral, promiscuous, or “loose,” as centuries of male theologians and preachers have led us to believe? Or was she actually more of a loser in her own culture and society? This woman lived before no-fault divorce. She lived before women could vote, or have jobs outside the home, or control their own bank accounts, or have much say at all over their own lives. We can never really know what her life was like, but there are other options besides being “loose” woman. She could have been widowed five times and now considered cursed. She could have been unable to have children and so cast off by each husband through divorce. Perhaps she lived with the sixth man because, by then, no one else would take her in and take care of her, since she would not be allowed any kind of job to support herself on her own.

In any case, she was judged by the other people in her community, so much so that she would prefer to carry her heavy water jar in the heat of the day – alone - rather than face the whispers and stares of the other women who came when it was much cooler, in the morning of evening. By doing so, she could avoid the shame of knowing no one wanted to associate with her. But even that didn’t help. She is still being whispered about and stared at, two thousand years later, by preachers and theologians who continue to hang the label of “loose” on this woman like a scarlet letter.

When this woman came to the well that day, she was not just physically thirsty, but emotionally and spiritually parched too. Her relationships have failed her; her culture has failed her; and historians and preachers throughout the ages have failed her. She might have wondered if God had failed her too. Her world had become a harsh desert of shame. 

So the last thing she expected that day was to have a conversation with the savior of the world. The last thing she expected was to be a part of the longest theological discussions with Jesus in any of the Gospels. The last thing she expected was to be offered living water to quench her parched life.

To Jesus, she is not defined by her past, what she has or hasn’t done; she is not defined by who she’s with; she is not defined by gender or race or creed. To Jesus, she is a thirsty person in need of living water.

To Jesus, WE are not defined by our past, or by what we’ve done or haven’t done, or by who we’re with or our race or gender or if we believe the “right” way. To Jesus, WE are thirsty people in need of living water.

Jesus didn’t offer this woman living water once she’d gotten her life “straightened out” into something more socially acceptable. He offered her living water at her moment of greatest need.

Likewise, Jesus won’t wait to give US living water once we’ve gotten our lives all in order, because, frankly, that’s never going to happen. We’re too weighed down by the past, or too overwhelmed by the present, or too afraid of the future. We desperately need Jesus and the living water he provides.

That living water is a relationship with Jesus and a place in the community that Jesus has been called to save. It is a gift that will never expire, a well that will never run dry, a light that never goes out. And WE, just as we are, are invited to be part of this community, this family.

You are enough. You are loved. You have a place here in the family of God. That is news that the world desperately needs right now. That’s exactly where Jesus meets us, at the deep well of our need, and offers to us something way better than anything else out there. And that’s also exactly when Jesus turns us into bubblers.

Now, what’s a bubbler? Its what people like me from Wisconsin call “drinking fountains.” A bubbler does what it sounds like – water bubbles up out of it for us to drink. That’s what living water does, too. It bubbles up in you, sometimes quietly, sometimes with gusto, and always spilling out onto the people around you. This is the joy that Jesus gives us, that he called us as his beloved children and followers, and THEN send us OUT into the world to splash other people.

And that’s exactly what happened to this outcast Samaritan woman. She leaves her water jar at the well in her haste to tell others about this man who just might, maybe be the Messiah, the savior of the world. She became an evangelist, a preacher for her community. In fact, she converted her entire town! All because she left her jar at the well and splashed the entire town with living water.

The Samaritan woman didn’t have all the answers. But instead of being paralyzed by confusion like Nicodemus last week, this woman invited people to wonder with her. She invited everyone she knew to meet Jesus for themselves.

Like the woman at the well, we are invited to lay down our empty jars, so that we can be filled with living water. Like the woman at the well, we become the vessels Jesus needs to carry this water to a very thirsty world. Like the woman at the well, we all get to be bubblers by sharing the living water from Jesus.

That’s right – we may not be back in middle school, but I’m giving out homework.  

Tell one person this week about where Jesus has met you at your well and gave you the living water to sustain you. I

t can be someone you know well, or it can be someone you don’t know. 

Be a bubbler during coffee hour. 

Be a bubbler in ACME to a cashier having a hard day. 

Be a bubbler at the dinner table with your kids or grandkids.

The world needs us. It’s time to be bubblers for Jesus. Amen.

Nicodemus Might Have Been A Lutheran

3-12-7

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

One summer my sister babysat for our neighbor’s daughter, who was three at the time. All day every day, she would point to everything within reach and ask “what’s that?” ‘What’s that?” Driving us all up the wall. I’m sure none of you has EVER known a toddler to do that, right??

The story goes that Martin Luther’s toddler Hans was running around the house, pointing at everything and asking “Was ist das?” What is this? (This story is in the introduction to the Small Catechism by Augsburg Fortress). And probably also driving his parents up the wall. But questions are how we learn. And so Luther used his son’s question to teach his students about the basics of Lutheran teaching. And so the Small Catechism was born.

So you might say that our Lutheran faith is built on asking questions. There is space for questions here. Questions are part of our DNA, in our most formational Lutheran documents like the Small Catechism. And things that happen in worship can cause us to ask questions too. For example, why are we reading from in the Gospel of John so much during Lent when we are in the year of reading Matthew?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for you. But I can say that it is only in John that we get the stories about Nicodemus, the woman at the well, a man born blind, the raising of Lazarus, the foot washing, and the post resurrection conversation between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in garden. A few of these stories we get to hear this Lent -  the woman at the well, the blind man, and Lazarus, and Nicodemus.

Who was Nicodemus? He was a member of a group called the Pharisees, and a leader of the Jews. Wait, leader of all the Jews? What does that mean? Well, most scholars agree that “the Jews” was John’s shorthand for the Jewish authorities who later opposed Jesus, not the whole nation or religion of Judaism.

But why would this leader of a group who opposed Jesus try to meet with him? And why might Jesus agree to such a meeting?

Perhaps Jesus has hope when Nicodemus admits his fledgling belief that Jesus comes from God. But Nick – from now on I’m going to shorten up his name – has trouble tracking with Jesus after that. Once Jesus starts in with the birth and spirit and wind stuff, Nick gets totally lost. He seems to stop asking questions, throwing up his hands, and exclaiming “How can this be?” in complete confusion.

Now if Nick had been Nicole, it might have been obvious to her that the tricky Greek word Jesus uses was not meant to be taking biologically. This word could mean many things, including born “from above,” born “again,” or born “anew”. We know, even if Nick didn’t, that Jesus was talking about another birth that most of us have experienced AFTER our physical birth. Water is still involved. But for this birth, it is God who carries us to term, and pushes us out into the world to be born. Jesus was talking about baptism.

Was is Das? What then is baptism?

Baptism is our rebirth into the family of God. In our baptisms, God chooses us as beloved and chooses us to be that love in the world. We no longer are defined by what family we are from, how much we make, or what orientation, gender, or race we are. We are defined only by the power of that love, reborn by water and the Spirit of God.

We may be baptized once, but its something that we need to remember as often as possible. According to Luther, in our baptisms our Old selves and our old desires are drowned daily and a new person rises daily. We are buried with Christ in our baptisms, and die to sin, so that we may rise to new life in Christ, as he has risen from the dead.

So why then, with all this death talk, do we baptized babies? Well, a baby can’t do anything on his or her own. She can do nothing to earn your love or to earn God’s love. God has already decided on you from the day you were born. God chose you when there was literally nothing you could do to choose God. Before you could even believe in God, God believes in you.

Jesus believed in Nick even when Nick found it hard to believe in Jesus. We shouldn’t be too hard on Nick, though. Nick does show up again in the Gospel of John. A little later, the Pharisees and Chief priests wanted Jesus arrested, and Nick uses his question-asking powers to defend Jesus, by asking, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” (John 7:50-51).

Nick returns a third time, when he along with Joseph of Arimathea, ask for Jesus’ body and brings one hundred pounds of burial spices to anoint the body of Jesus (John 19:39). Here we see that Nick is now “all in” with his faith in Jesus, bringing way more spices than necessary, and doing something that was considered at the time to be “woman’s work.” Imagine, a prominent leader of the Jewish authorities rolling up his sleeves to give a criminal a proper burial. What a “180” for a man who first met with Jesus in the secrecy of darkness, who now is instead drawn out of the darkness as a believer in Jesus.

Somewhere along the line, Nick learned to trust Jesus even in the confusion. Perhaps the conversation that he and Jesus had stuck with him, and Nick saw Jesus live out that famous verse that we all know, John 3:16 – that God loved the world enough to send Jesus to save it. And for those who believe and have faith, Jesus shares eternal life.

The Chinese character for “faith” is actually two symbols put together. The first looks like a stick person if you squint a bit, and the second looks like an open mouth with lines rising like words. When I was in China for a two-week cross cultural trip in seminary, I learned from our guide that this word has these characters for a reason. It looks like a person standing next to their word. You might say that faith looks like trusting that a person will stand next to what they say.

Who does Jesus stand for? And what is God saying?

Jesus stand FOR God’s love at work in the world, by standing WITH us.

Jesus stands with those who are lost in the darkness, those who have questions, and those who don’t have it all together. Jesus stands with those who are misunderstood and abandoned, with the voiceless and the powerless, and those who work to bring them justice. Jesus stands with people that others have forgotten and pushed aside.

We will see at work next week, with the woman at the well. She too had questions, but was at the opposite end of the social spectrum from Nick. She was a woman, a foreigner, cast out by all the men in her life and stigmatized by her community.  But we will see that Jesus spent time with her, took her seriously, and showed her that “people like her” have worth in the eyes of God. This is what Jesus does, over and over again. And Jesus does not stop doing this, even when the people in power would do anything to make him stop, even going so far as to silence him forever by nailing him to a cross. What Jesus said to Nick that night came true. Jesus was lifted up on a cross, so that he might save us all.

The journey of Nicodemus took him far out of his comfort zone. It started in the safety of darkness, but even there in the dark womb of God he was being prepared for his rebirth. Nick knew then that he had everything to lose, but slowly came to realize that this didn’t matter. Because he had everything to gain.

So Nick believed and he trusted. He acted in his life as if Jesus would stand by his word. And so he took chances and put himself at possible risk in order to do live that out. Nick didn’t know how it would work out. But as Dr. David Lose said yesterday at the seminary in Philadelphia to a room full of dedicated church volunteers out to talk about Sunday School on a Saturday: “Faith isn’t about having all the answers.”

Perhaps, faith is trusting God in the middle of all the questions.

What other questions do you wonder about? Perhaps these questions don’t have answers right now. But I WILL leave you with one more question today. It’ is a question I hope you think about, and I hope one that you will ask one another as well. This is a safe space here, and together we can help one another as we put words to how we may feel about God and faith.

So I ask you to think about this question today. What does having faith in Jesus mean for you? 

Temptations in Our Wildernesses

3-5-17, Lent A1

^{(I read from the end of chapter 3 before the usual reading, which began:) 16}And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

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

In light of the announcement that I knew I would make to all of you this morning…. I confess to you that writing this sermon was really, really hard. It is, after all, a PREACHING honor I have received, and so naturally that mean that ALL of my sermons from now until eternity are going to be AMAZING. No pressure! But as I stared at the computer screen, I could feel the blank white space whispering in my mind something like this: “Since this happened to you, you should have no problem composing a sermon to really knock everyone’s socks off. So, you had better be ready to prove that you are the real deal, and that was not just some fluke.”

That voice is going strong today, since last night I read what I had submitted, and found 3 typos! Oy.

We have all heard that voice. It’s the same voice has probably spoken to JK Rowling right after she finished the Harry Potter series, or former President Obama on January twenty-first, or Lin-Manuel Miranda after leaving the cast of his wildly successful musical Hamilton. For all of us, after a big, life-changing moments, we wonder – who am I now? Was this just a big accident? Or did I actually deserve this? And now that this has happened to me, NOW what do I do? How do I live? Do I have to keep proving to the world that I matter? In times like these, we suddenly be experiencing an identity crisis.

Now we may not find ourselves lead out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit right after our baptisms, as Jesus did. We may not face a serpent or the devil face to face. We may not have the ability to turn stones to bread or ever be offered all the kingdoms of the world. But we DO have an identity given to us by God, just as Jesus did. Jesus had just come from his baptism, still dripping, when his freshly recognized and newly blessed identity as the Son of God was called into question. And we too have an identity given to us by God, being called Children of God in our baptisms, and we too are under the world’s scrutiny before the water on our heads has a chance to dry.

In the wilderness Jesus found himself in, his was identity tested. On the verge of starting his earthly ministry, Jesus had to define what it meant to be “the son of God.” Here the tone is set for the Jesus administration. Was is going to reflect a kind of power and glory that the world could easily recognize? Or would Jesus set his agenda according to God’s definition of power and glory?

In the end, would Jesus be able to “prove” that he was “good enough” for the job as the Son of God?

The first temptation does seem pretty harmless, though. After all, it wouldn’t hurt anyone if Jesus did a little magic on those rocks so he wouldn’t be so grumpy as he seems to be later. And not just one loaf, which would be plenty for one person, but why not many, as the devil suggests, just in case Jesus wants a snack later? But Jesus tells the devil “No Dice,” and saves his divine breadmaking skills for another time, to feed 5,000 hungry people, later in the Gospel of Matthew.

The same happens with the other two temptations. Instead of throwing himself off a roof to test God plan for him, Jesus instead shows his resolve do follow God’s will, which will result in Jesus being lifted high on a cross and not on the pinnacle of the temple. And instead of seizing the opportunity to rule all the kingdoms of the earth for himself, Jesus instead will open the kingdom of heaven to all who follow him. In the rest of his ministry, we can see how Jesus’ time in the wilderness prepared him to fulfill his baptismal identity. 

In the wildernesses we find ourselves in, be they physical, emotional, or spiritual, we too find our identity tested. We are constantly tempted into thinking that, as we are right now, we are not good enough to be children of God. I would have turned those stones into bread in a heartbeat, and probably added some hummus too, faster than you can say “Hangry.”

Most of us are aware of our limitations and our hang-ups, and the tempter takes every opportunity to remind us where we fall short with a never-ending commentary in our brains – Surely, we are mistaken if we think that God has chosen us in our current state.  Surely, God wants us to work a little harder at being God’s children. Surely, we need to prove that we are worthy of being chosen.

From a mural by Ken Green in St. Paul MN

I imagine something similar going through Eve’s mind while she listened to the clever arguments of the serpent in the garden. When the serpent told her that eating the fruit would make her more like God, to have knowledge of good and evil, she jumped at the chance. Why would she listen to the words of the serpent? Perhaps because she did not trust God to be God. She did not trust that God had created her good, just as she was. Perhaps she thought that she could help God out a little bit, to prove her worth. Both Eve and Adam trusted the words of the serpent more than the words of God.

The Adam and Eve in all of us all too often trust the words of the crafty serpents around us, rather than the incredible promise that we are loved and claimed as God’s children. When the rest of the world tells us the opposite, God tells us that we are worthy, we are loved, and we are enough.

It’s hard for us to see ourselves as God sees us. We look into ourselves and only see what is lacking, and so comes our tendency to reach for too much power, too much security, too much comfort in order to fill the gaps. But God sees us a different way. God sees us in a way that is not unlike how parents see their children when they are born, or how brides and grooms see one another as they say their vows on their wedding day.  

In one of my favorite books I read last year called Lila by Marilynn Robinson, the title character only saw herself through the eyes of those who looked down on her because of things she did in her past in order to survive as a homeless person in the 1930s. All her life she gave into the temptation to see herself as not deserving anything good that happened to her. Somehow, she ends up in a small town in Iowa, and met the local bachelor minister. 

Through their relationship and eventual marriage, Lila starts to see herself as God sees her, through the gentleness and kindness of another human being who saw her with the eyes of love.

On the day that preacher proposed to and baptized Lila, he remembered the day they met: “I expected to continue with [loneliness] the rest of my life. Then I saw you that morning. I saw your face.”

Lila replied, “Don’t’ talk like that. I know about my face.”

But he persisted. “I suspect you don’t. You don’t know how I see it.”

One night during a snowstorm after they were married, the two of them were talking, and Lila’s husband said, “Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.”

Lila, remembering her own baptism, adds, “Baptism is a prayer.”

To that, her husband replied, “No, baptism is what I call a fact.”

Your baptism is a fact. God’s love for you is a fact. God chose you – that’s a fact too.

Lent is the time of the church year that prepares us for the Ultimate Fact. That in Jesus, God’s love is shown to the world. In Jesus, we see that the love of God would go to any length for us, and would travel any distance, and would even go to death and back for God’s beloved children. And for Jesus, no wilderness is to wild or too forsaken to Jesus to travel with us.

Lent is not for us to improve ourselves with sacrifices to become more worthy or more holy come Easter Sunday. Lent instead takes us through the wilderness to reflect our own shortcomings, to remind us to let God be God. Not so that we can feel guilty at where we have fallen short. But so that we can get out of our own way and be nothing less than members of God’s family. It’s been said that when Martin Luther felt tempted to despair by the devil, he would shout in response, “I am baptized!” Not “I was”, but “I AM.” Present tenses. True in this very moment.

The trip through Lent every year takes us from a garden to a wilderness and back again, from human sin and transgression and death to resurrection, from the ash crosses of Ash Wednesday to the shadow of the cross on Good Friday, through the Garden of Eden, to the garden of Gethsemane, to the garden that contained Jesus’ empty tomb. Every year, we tell the story, to remind ourselves who we are and WHOSE we are. “I am baptized.” Present tense. Now and forever. Amen.