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Snakes in the Grass
4th Sunday in Lent, Year B
Texts: Num 21.4-9; Jn 3.14-21
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that everybody here has heard John 3:16 before, right? I’m going to bet that a lot of us could even recite it from memory. But if you were going to explain what that verse meant to someone who wasn’t a church person, someone who had never read the bible, how would you do that? What would you say?
It’s interesting here to read how Jesus explains it; he explains it in the context of this bizarre story from Numbers that we just read. The Hebrews are wandering in the wilderness, and they start complaining against Moses, accusing him of bringing them out there to kill them with thirst and starvation. Moses is taking them the long way through, and they are impatient. Why can’t they just go where they’re going? Do you remember why God had Moses lead them through the wilderness for 40 years?
In order to become who God was creating them to be, they had to leave Egypt behind. They had to wait for the “sin” to dissipate, for the Egyptian way of being to fade from them so they could be Israel, not Egypt, when they got to Canaan. They wanted a quick, easy way through, but that wasn’t possible. God needed them to wait. And so they complained.
Read more…More Than Commandments
3rd Sunday in Lent, Year B
Texts: Ex 20.1-17; 1 Cor 1.18-25; Jn 2.13-22
When I was in 7th grade, my class did a fundraiser for… something, I don’t really know. All I remember was that we had to sell t-shirts. I hated fundraisers because I was shy: I was not the kid who went door-to-door or set up a table outside the grocery store. That meant I was limited to family and friends; so I took my box of t-shirts to where all my friends were: I set up a display table in the narthex of my church.
I remember sitting there when Pat came up to me and took me aside. Pat was a good family friend, someone we’d spent a lot of time with. He was very upset that I was “turning God’s house into a marketplace,” like in the story we just read. I loved and respected Pat—I still do—and the fact that he was so upset about this made me feel terrible. Not only did I think I had committed some sin, I was also worried that Pat was angry at me, that he wouldn’t love me anymore.
Read more…Who Are We?
1st Sunday in Lent, Year B
Texts: Gen 9.8-17; Mk 1.9-15
Noah’s Ark is a funny story, isn’t it? It’s in all the story bibles because we love to tell it to children. We put images of the ark and the animals and Noah on toys and wallpaper and pictures to hang in nurseries, but it’s a story about genocide. As much as it is a story about God saving Noah and his family and all the animals from the flood, it is also a story about God deciding to kill everything God has made because God has become disgusted with it. And we tell this story to children?
It’s no wonder that some people believe that God changes somehow between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Some people don’t even believe they’re the same God. The God of the Old Testament, they say, is wrathful and judging, easily angered and quick to dole out punishment. This story certainly seems to fit that bill—but what if it doesn’t?
Read more: Who Are We?The book of Genesis was written down during the time of the Jewish Exile in Babylon. The name, “Genesis,” means beginning; and though we might think first of the story of the beginning of the world, the book is really about the beginning of God’s people and how they came to be, all the way from the Garden of Eden to Egypt. Some or all of the stories may have originated before the Exile, but they were collected and written down in Babylon to help God’s people figure out who they were in the midst of pressure to assimilate to a foreign culture; and the stories address that question by exploring first who God is.
As I read the stories of Genesis, I wonder: what if, instead of hard journalism, these stories can be read as a record of people thinking and wondering about God? Here’s what I mean by that: In Genesis, we first learn that God created the world and everything in it, and it was good; but the world in which the story was written was not good. God’s people had been conquered and carried into exile by foreigners who worshiped different gods. Were those gods more powerful than the God of Jacob? How could they explain why this had happened?
The problem, according to Genesis, is sin: our resistance to God’s way. God creates everything good, we learn, but human beings messed it up. The Jews are suffering from the sins of the Babylonians, and perhaps they are in this situation as a consequence of their own sins. So, how should they respond? What did God want them to do in this situation?
One option was to keep to themselves and try to stay undefiled by Babylonian influence. Perhaps then, they could get back to how God created them at first: innocent and pure. But, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Even within God’s perfect garden, sin found a way in. Why would it work any better in Babylon?
Another option was violent resistance, like the French during the German occupation. If Babylon is the problem, the solution is to overthrow Babylon, right? Get rid of the bad guys and everything will be better? Well, God tried that, too. In the flood, God wiped out all the bad people and saved the one righteous man—Noah—and his family. But that didn’t work either, did it? Sin remained, because even Noah—as righteous as he was—was still a sinner. Maybe that’s why God promises never to wipe out the world again: because it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work when God does it, how could it possibly work when we do it?
It almost seems as if, through the first part of Genesis, God is learning by trial and error how to deal with the problem of sin. Now, I know that doesn’t sound like the all-powerful, all-knowing God we talk about. And that makes me wonder: What if it’s not? What if these stories aren’t about God at all, but about how we are tempted to deal with sin? Maybe God in the stories doesn’t sound much like God because God is sort of acting out our proposed solutions and showing us how they fall short.
In any case, after the failures of Eden and the flood, God responds to the problem of sin with Abraham. Unlike Adam and Noah, God does not threaten or coerce Abraham; instead, God blesses him. God blesses Abraham with the intention that he—and his offspring, meaning the Jews living in Exile in Babylon—will be a blessing to those around them. God’s answer to sin is to answer it with love.
That’s not how the Babylonians would respond. Babylon conquers and defeats its enemies, and their sacred stories reflect that. The Babylonian gods are bloodthirsty and capricious. They have to be bought and bribed with sacrifices and acts of devotion. As I read these Genesis stories, I wonder if they might actually be reactions against the majority Babylonian narrative, imagining how the God of Jacob would respond differently than the Babylonian gods in the same situations. In fact, the Jews may actually have gotten this story of the flood from the Babylonians. It’s very similar to the story of a great flood in the older Babylonian holy text, the Enuma Elish, right down to the main character building an ark and filling it with animals.
Perhaps that is why even in these stories of God’s “wrath,” we can see hints of the grace and mercy of God we’re so familiar with. God refuses to abandon the wayward Adam and Eve, but makes them clothes and packs them a lunch before sending them out of the garden, like a mother sending her children off to their first day of school. Instead of wiping out every living thing according to the initial plan, God waffles and spares Noah and his family and a boatload of animals. This is different than Babylonian gods would behave.
You see what I mean? As these people are struggling to figure out who they are and who God is calling them to be, their origin stories show that they believe that God is love, and God is calling them to be love, too. Perhaps this is why the prophet Jeremiah could write to the Exiles encouraging them to “seek the welfare of the city where [God has] sent you in to exile.” (Jer 29.7) They knew that their God had created them in love in order to share love; that they had been blessed to be a blessing.
I can see the same thing in St. Mark’s gospel story. The beginning of Jesus’ ministry—the “genesis”—is his baptism where he hears God’s voice declaring him a beloved child and heir, well-pleasing even before he’s done anything to be pleased about. It is that declaration of belovedness, along with God’s Holy Spirit that he receives, that drives him into the wilderness in preparation for the ministry that lies ahead—a ministry of overcoming sin and death with love and life, a ministry of bringing God’s blessing to the whole world.
As we enter into Lent, we are especially focused on the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. I wonder what temptations he faced? St. Matthew and St. Luke imagine specifics, but St. Mark leaves it up to us to ponder that. Do you think Jesus, too, might have wondered how best to address the problem of sin in the world? Did he wonder if the best response was to live as a hermit in the desert, keeping himself pure and innocent? Or if he should follow in the footsteps of the other messiahs of his time, trying to organize and armed revolt against Rome? Did he find his way forward by remembering the words he heard spoken to him at his baptism? It seems like this period of temptation and testing was necessary for Jesus to prepare himself for what came next.
For us who share in Jesus’ baptism and in his identity as beloved and well-pleasing children and heirs of God, Lent is our 40 days in the wilderness; a time to prepare ourselves for life in our world, for considering how we will confront the evil of the world. It’s a time for us to ask on the same questions the Jewish Exiles pondered, to reflect on who we are based on who we know God to be. How should we respond to sin and evil? Who is God calling us to be in this moment of our lives? What can we learn from God—and from God’s Son—to help us as we move forward?
As we enter into our own “wilderness time,” I wonder if this story invites us to remember that we do so grounded in our baptism and in the love of God revealed to us there, and we have Jesus as our guide through this wilderness. Like him, we face the temptation to respond to evil by ignoring it or holding ourselves back, or to conquer it with violence; but he shows us another way forward: the way of God’s love and blessing. He shows us what it looks like to love our enemies and to bless the world with the love God freely gives to us to share.
With Jesus’ help, even a story as dark and gruesome as Noah’s Ark can shine with the light of a loving and merciful God who promises at the end that destruction is not God’s Way, and neither is it our Way. And yet, they can also help us to see that when we do find ourselves surrounded by destruction (like Noah, or the Jews in Exile), God promises that the destruction is never total. We can also find in that destruction the seeds of our renewal and resurrection if we follow the Way of our Father in heaven—the Way walked by Jesus. Even a world-ending flood can become a baptism, declaring our belovedness and sacredness in God’s eyes as we look through the lens of the rainbow.
Missed Pronouns
Ash Wednesday
Texts: 2 Cor 4.6-11; Matt 6.1-6, 16-21
We went to St. Paul to visit family for Christmas. Stephanie’s younger sibling and their wife live there with their two children, Noah and Mo. Noah is also our goddaughter. While we were visiting, the subject came up of Mo’s baptism. Mo hasn’t been baptized yet, and, from the looks of things, probably won’t be, because the family has fallen away from attending church.
Read more: Missed PronounsThat’s pretty significant, because they were pretty dedicated. When Lisa and Kelsey got together, they were both Christian—even with all the challenges that come with being Christian and queer. When they married, it was a big church wedding in an open and affirming Lutheran congregation in St. Paul—the church they still attended until they stopped. Noah’s baptism was a big deal, and we made a special trip out to serve as godparents.
As I spoke to them about why they’ve stopped attending, Lisa shared with me why. Since Noah’s baptism, Lisa—after a lot of contemplation and therapy—came to the realization that they didn’t see themself as either male or female. They “came out” to their family a second time—which caused another big stir and heightened some already tense family dynamics. I don’t know how each of you thinks or feels about such things, but it doesn’t really matter; the point of my story is that, after all the work it took them to come to this understanding and work to make it a reality, the wonderful, loving, open and affirming Lutheran congregation they had been attending failed to use Lisa’s pronouns.
It wasn’t an intentional thing, they just couldn’t remember. And Lisa is not strict about it; they realize that some people have a hard time and are very forgiving of mistakes. What they told me was that it was the fact that it took so much work for them to remind people all the time. It just wasn’t important to the people at church, and so they didn’t remember, and Lisa spent so much time either reminding people or trying to look past the honest mistakes that going to church became work; too much work for them to want to continue going.
When we as Christians confess our sins, it isn’t because we need to feel appropriately bad about them. The point of confession isn’t to wallow in guilt or shame, or to deepen our understanding of the immensity of God’s grace. It’s to admit that, like the folks at Lisa’s church, we make mistakes, and to recognize that, even when we don’t realize it, those mistakes cause harm, whether great or small. We confess our sins to remind ourselves that, no matter our intentions, our actions have consequences, and sometimes we hurt people. Sometimes we hurt God.
God’s love and, hopefully, the love of the people around us are greater than the hurts we cause, but that doesn’t mean those hurts haven’t happened. Confession is a way to acknowledge those hurts so that they can be forgiven rather than forgotten.
Tonight, we will have ash smeared on our heads. Ash is an ancient sign of penitence, a way of acknowledging—like David in his psalm—that we have done wrong and we want to try to do better. Based on what Lisa told me, I think that if the folks at their congregation knew about their mistakes, they would try to fix them, but they can’t or don’t acknowledge that this is important. Tonight, we acknowledge that our mistakes are important, because we sometimes hurt people that we love, and that God loves, and we want to do better because we love.
As we receive the ashes, we receive them with a reminder of our mortality: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” No amount of love or good intention can make us perfect. We are frail, flawed people—and that is not by accident. As Paul writes, we have the treasure of God’s love and good news in “clay jars,” cheap, imperfect vessels, because it reminds us and the world that the treasure is not ours, but God’s.
It is God alone who can love perfectly, and so we ask for God’s help in loving. And that, I think, is by design; because who can love perfectly all by themselves? Don’t you need someone else to love? It’s being in relationship with God that teaches us how to love more perfectly; being in relationship with God helps us to be better people.
And that relationship begins from a place of being loved. The cross of ashes we receive tonight sits atop the cross already marked on your forehead at baptism, the cross with which you were marked to recall that God has called and claimed you beloved and well-pleasing, just like Jesus; God’s child forever. That’s why we do this: because we are loved, and because we love God and the people we hurt, we want to keep trying to do better—out of love.
So tonight, I hope you don’t feel shameful or guilty or morose. I hope we can receive these ashes with hope for growth, with a humble recognition of our own limits and a grateful acceptance of God’s great love, and with the determination to keep following Jesus to the cross, into the tomb, and out again.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return; but from this dust, God has fashioned the clay jars to hold the most precious treasure in the world: the life-giving, world-forming, creation-renewing love that comes from God alone. In this love, even our mistakes and failures can be opportunities to grow in relationship with God and one another, because God chooses dust and clay to hold this treasure.
Can You Not Perceive It?
5th Sunday in Lent, Year C
Text: Isa 43.16-21; Phil 3.4-14; Jn 12.1-8
In two weeks, as we gather to celebrate the Great Three Days of Jesus’ Passion, death and resurrection, our Jewish siblings will be gathering in homes to share the Seder for Passover. While we walk with Jesus through Jerusalem, from the garden to the governor’s mansion to the cross and then the empty tomb, journeying from death into life, they will be walking with their ancestors from the Night of Terror, out through the blood-marked doorposts from Rameses to Succoth, pausing at the shore of the Red Sea and finally passing through the waters from slavery to freedom.
This is no coincidence, of course. The last meal Jesus shared with his disciples was a Seder; the night of his arrest, they retold the story of God delivering them from Egypt through the waters of the sea. In fact, on Maundy Thursday, we will do the same, reading that very story again, reminding us of God’s deliverance from Egypt. That event—the Exodus—is the event that defines what it means to be Jewish, and that Jewishness even now informs what it means for us to be Christian. What happened at the Red Sea is what makes a Jew a Jew, as much as anything else.
That is what makes Isaiah’s words to his Jewish audience is so stunning. “Thus says the LORD, the maker of a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters, the bringer-out of horse and chariot, army and warrior—extinguished, quenched like a wick: Forget what I did. It’s unimportant, not even worth thinking about.” Unimportant he says. Forget it, he says. The defining event of Jewish history not even worth calling to mind.
Read more…Community with a Capital “C”
4th Sunday in Lent, Year C
Text: Josh 5.9-12; 2 Cor 5.16-21; Lk 15.1-3, 11-32
Just like the story we read last week, Jesus leaves his parable open ended. What will the elder son do? What do you think he should do? Should he stand firm and demand some recompense from his brother, or should he let go of his anger and join the party?
As I read this story, it occurs to me that, while the elder son is expressing anger toward his father, I think he is actually angry at his brother. The younger son, by demanding his inheritance early, dishonored and insulted his father; in essence, he said, “I wish you were dead.” Then, he abandoned all his obligations to his family—including his responsibility to care for his father in his old age—and got as far away as possible, leaving his brother holding the bag. In his anger, the elder assumes—or imagines—the worst of the younger and is unwilling even to acknowledge him as family—which may be appropriate, given that the younger brother is the one who cut those ties.
All this makes me pay attention to the context in which Jesus tells this parable. He’s speaking to Pharisees and scribes who are grumbling about the kind of people with whom Jesus spends time. His story is aimed at them, and seems to ask whether they will let their beliefs about morality and holiness and purity keep them from enjoying God’s party. It reminds me that Paul, too, is writing in the context of conflict. Although it’s hard to be certain exactly what happened, he seems to have had some sort of disagreement with the Corinthian church, leaving some of them upset at him. As he’s writing about reconciliation, he’s encouraging them to not only be reconciled to God, but to himself.
Read more…Just Maybe
3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C
Text: Isa 55.1-9; 1 Cor 10.1-13; Lk 13.1-9
What do you think: should the landowner listen to the gardener and give the tree another year, or should he just go ahead and cut it down now? How you answer that question will probably depend on how you read this parable.
When I come to this parable, my first instinct is to want to save the tree. I know that it takes 4 years for a fig tree to mature to the point of bearing fruit. That means this tree, being 3 years overdue, is 7 years old. 7 years is a lot of time and energy invested in it to simply tear it out. But beyond that, if I’m honest, I want to save the tree because I have the feeling that Jesus is telling this story about me; that I’m the fig tree. I don’t want to be cut down; whatever that means, it sounds unpleasant. Is that how you read it? But here’s something to think about: if I’m the tree, and Jesus is the gardener, pleading with the landowner for clemency, does that make God the landowner, ready to judge me for my sins? Does this story leave you feeling worried about God’s judgement?
Read more…Relentless Love
1st Sunday in Lent, Year C
Text: Deut 26.1-11; Rom 10.8-13; Lk 4.1-13
Do the ends justify the means? If you had access to a time machine, would you go back in time to kill Hitler? Why, or why not?
I think this might be at least one of the questions being asked by this gospel story. Here we have Jesus at the very beginning of his ministry, even before his first sermon. He’s just been baptized, just heard God’s unconditional acceptance of him for who he is. Maybe he’s just beginning to think about what it is that God has in store for him. I wonder if he has any clue yet where this road will take him, that it will bring him to the foot of a cross.
Let’s say that he knows his job as God’s Son is to do God’s will on earth. But what is that will? The temptations set before him by this mysterious figure in the wilderness get to the heart of that question. Is it God’s will that he starve to death for his piety? Is it God’s will to rule the nations with justice and peace? Is it God’s will that Jesus entrust his entire life to God, even to the point of leaping from the temple? Each of those questions are about an outcome; but each of Jesus’ responses arise not from a desire to do the right thing, but to do rightly. In other words, for him, the “what” seems to be less important than the “how.”
Read more…The First Word, the Last Word, the Only Word
Ash Wednesday
Text: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; 2 Cor 5.20-6.10; Matt 6.1-6, 16-21
In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, God stooped down and scooped up some mud, and formed it into the shape of a person. “Human,” God called it, made from humus. God formed us in love from the dust of the earth; God created us in love, through love, and for love. Love is the source and the goal of our existence.
Sadly, that love is too often twisted and misdirected, turned against ourselves or one another, transformed into lust or greed or other shadows of love. In the void left by that lack of the love for which God created us, we find ourselves hungering, and we seek to fill that hunger with power, wealth, the praise of our neighbors, the comforts of luxury, the feeling of purpose. Those things become the treasures which we store up for ourselves, trying to fill the hole left by our inability or our unwillingness to love as God created us to.
Read more…
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