Do we really need to wait?

I'm someone who thinks that New Years resolutions are over rated. I always make them and then, two weeks later, they have gone by the wayside never to be heard from or seen again.

So instead of resolutions for 2012, I have some health goals I would like to accomplish that I believe would help me to be a better wife, a better pastor...just a better person in general.

My biggest goal has truly been inspired by my adventure on the scale this morning...the "you have got to be kidding me" that came out of my mouth signaled that something really needs to be done...and maybe, just maybe, the next time my Doctor's assistant asks me to step on the scale, she won't give me the funny look she has given me the past two years. So goal #1, get back down to 140 lbs...that's 23 lbs to say goodbye to.
I have made similar goals in the past but never hit them...the only time I was successful in this was when I lived in Tulsa and there was a nice little pond for Abba and I to walk to every evening once things warmed up in the spring. But, there was no plan involved and, sadly, the pond on KU's campus that I know about isn't that pretty...it's actually a bit gross in the spring and summer with all that algae. I do have a plan this time, though...

Step #1 (in progress) - Plan out menus and stick to them.
I do plan weekly menus and do my best to stick to them...but there are those nights (like last night) when cooking just isn't going to happen so off to Chipotle I go for a burrito for Chris and a burrito bowl with only a half scoop of rice for me...they always look at me funny when I say that. (Note: It's not always Chipotle, but you get the picture)

Step #2 (In progress) - only buy what's on my grocery list.
I'm getting really good at this, and it's amazing how much money you save when you do this!! This has been our guarantee that there is little, if any, junk food in the house...and that makes life a LOT easier.

Step #3 (in progress) - Actually eat the fruit and vegetables that I buy.
I've always had this bad habit of buying lots of fruits and vegetables and not eating all of them. I'm the worst with lettuce...sometimes, a girl just wants tomato and cucumber without the inconvenience of chopping lettuce. I do make sure that Chris and I always have a veggie with dinner and I'm working on him to eat a piece of fruit with lunch, but I'm not always successful. So we're getting there...buying flash frozen veggies helps (no canned ones) because then I don't have to worry about them going bad. One thing I have discovered though, I really enjoy pears. I thought I disliked them for a long time, but my senior year of seminary they added a pear and gorgonzola salad to the menu at the restaurant I worked at and I fell in love. (which was my other discovery, I really like weird cheeses).

Step #4 (meh) - Take my vitamins
I hate taking vitamins. I always have. I have tried multiple varieties of multivitamins, flintstones, centrum, one a day, off brand...and they all make me feel sick...they have since I was a kid. A couple years ago, I actually threw up 20 minutes after taking one with my breakfast. Fortunately, my mom is a nurse and she says that all I really need is a B complex with vitamin C and to spend more time outside to get my vitamin D. B complex I can handle, I don't like the taste but it doesn't make me feel sick so I'm good with it. So we're on our way there. Thanks, Mom!!

Step #5 (ugh) - Exercise
I have a treadmill at my house. You think that would encourage me to use it, right? Wrong! I had a gym membership my first year here in Kansas and was 100 times more motivated to get in my car, drive to the gym and work out than I am to walk the 10 feet to my treadmill and walk on it. It's totally backwards logic but it's true. Eventually, I want to start going to the gym again, when we can comfortably afford it. Until then, I'm setting a goal to walk to church a couple times a week...or at least set things up with Chris so that I have to walk home (having only one car makes this a convenient task). Then, I get to stroll down Mass St. then take on the 9th street hill...a 2 mile trip which I can now complete in a mere 35 minutes (it used to take about 50 minutes with that darned hill).

So I guess I'm well on my way with this goal...the only obstacle is the motivation to exercise...but I'm getting there.

My other goals?
More family time
Be nicer to myself
Take more time to be thankful when I find myself getting frustrated or down

What are yours?

My top 10 of 2011

Recently I have come up with a long list of books I want to read, and I have discovered how much more relaxing it is to lie on the couch and read rather than lie on the couch and watch crap TV (not all of it is crap, but a lot of it is)

And so, with my new found excitement, I was going to post a list of the top 10 books I read this year...but I can't remember if I've actually read 10 books this year, and if I have, what all of them are. So here is the list of books I know for sure I read this year (In no particular order)

1) Love Wins by Rob Bell
While I found the format of this book probably better suited for a book on tape rather than an actual book, I really enjoyed Bell's take on salvation. It was no where near an original interpretation, which he admits to in the beginning...but it was one of the most accessible takes on it I have seen.

2) The Street Lawyer by John Grisham
This was my first Grisham novel. (I attempted to read The Chamber in high school but never got very far) but definitely not my last. I couldn't put it down. It was the first thing I wanted to do when I got home for the evening. A fabulous novel about a lawyer who give up his job at a high powered law firm in DC to become a street lawyer, helping the homeless.

3) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
I remember listening to an interview with the author in November 2009 and was intrigued by the concept of this book. It didn't disappoint. I loved it and can't wait to see the movie.

4) Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Another book I couldn't put down. I read the last 250 pages while waiting for a delayed plane to Chicago. I was actually disappointed that I had finished it so quickly and had to purchase a new book at O'Hare for my trip back to Kansas. Want to see the movie, but don't know if my opinion of the movie will be tainted by the fact that Robert Pattinson plays the main character...we'll see


Books I haven't quite finished yet...

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I've enjoyed it so far (I think I'm only a chapter in). An interesting look at soldiers in Vietnam according to what they carried with them into battle

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
I had a really hard time getting into this book, so I'm putting it on hold until I finish the Wicked Series. I like the concept, though, a young woman from Easter Europe trying to put together memories of her recently deceased Grandfather and the circumstances of his death by the means of two stories he used to tell her when she was growing up.

Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean
I loved the first chapter...but things have gotten in the way of being able to finish it. I will put forth extra effort to get this read, I think there are great things in here.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire
I got the series for Christmas from Chris. I'm already almost half way through the first book and I'm loving it. I hope to be done with this book by the end of the week and through the series by the end of January...but this means that at some point, Chris will probably have to take me to see the musical...


Books on my list for 2012 (in addition to the books I currently am in the middle of)
The rest of the Wicked Series
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Narnia Series (No, I never read this as a kid)
**checks Amazon wish list**
The Hunger Games series
The Time Travelers Wife
Room: A Novel
More John Grisham (the man is prolific!!)
Maybe some of Chris' Tom Clancy novels

I welcome suggestions :)

recapping 2011

This morning I spent about an hour updating my calendar for January 2012, which is only 5 days away, and I got a bit overwhelmed by how quickly my 2012 calendar is filling up (and I don't even have a new desk calendar yet!)

So to combat the overwhelming feelings that came over me this morning...I've decided to take some time and think about some of the awesome things that happened in 2011, the best year of my life so far.

January - Chris and I traveled to Tulsa to witness the marriage of my friends Shannon and Josh, who I set up before leaving my internship there in 2008. It was a beautiful wedding and I was SO glad to see so many of the wonderful people that I was blessed to meet while I served there.

February - I got the opportunity to spend a Sunday morning with the amazing folks at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Valley Falls, KS, the oldest Lutheran congregation in Kansas. It is a small community of faithful and loving people who welcomed me with open arms.

March - I placed ashes on Chris' forehead on Ash Wednesday and found myself fighting back tears from the power of reminding myself and my future husband that he was dust, and to dust he will return.

April - The folks at Trinity, with the help of the folks at Good Shepherd Lutheran, walked the distance from Lawrence, KS to Jerusalem...and then some!!...during the season of Lent. We got off to a slow start, but as the weather got better, the miles poured in!

May - Got to meet Chris' mom and extended family at his cousin, Jessie's wedding in Chicago. They were very welcoming, it was awesome.

June - What a month! Started with synod assembly (my resolution passed!), followed with an awesome ecumenical VBS with the UCC and Mennonite churches, Confirmation camp came after then and I ended the month with a wedding.

July - Spent a week up in Michigan with family for our wedding shower...later in the month I led a mission trip to Booneville, Arkansas, my favorite mission trip so far! (despite all the car trou...I mean, adventures)

August - Like the rest of this summer, August was a blur...the wedding was getting so close! And we had an adventure with chiggers!

September - We got married!!! Then spent an amazing week in Orlando, Florida (I'm totally ignoring the ER adventure at the end).

October - Got to see some of my favorite people in St. Paul, MN; had our first young family event; met Peter Mayer (lead guitarist for Jimmy Buffett) and Dr. F. Schlingensiepen, a Bonhoeffer scholar who lived through WWII and was successful in avoiding participating in Hitler Youth activities...super cool guy!! (and I'm sure he knows Klaus Peter Adam from LSTC!)

November - Got invited to hang out with some of the kids at their school for "Grandparents/Special friends day" at their school.

December - Got to see my sister-in-law, Megan, for dinner while on a whirlwind trip to Chicago. Sang in the choir for Lessons and Carols. Got to lead the Christmas vespers at one of the assisted living facilities in town. Chris and I had our first Christmas as a married couple.

So much for one year!!
I can't wait to see what 2012 brings...(besides 2 trips to NOLA, deer camp, and Theresa's wedding)

Maybe a trip for the Detroit Lions to the super bowl? (a girl can dream, can't she)

The Manger as a cure for holiday homesickness...

"Pastor, when will you be going home for the holidays?" is a question I hear a lot between Thanksgiving and New Years. "I'm not" is the answer I have given the past three years...though a better answer is probably "I am home" because in reality, Lawrence is home and it has been for the last two and a half years. But for some reason, to not be near the rest of our family this year is harder than is has been the past two years.

Maybe it's because now that Chris and I are married, I want us to be able to share our joy with our families.
Maybe it's because our families are growing with our cousins getting married and having children.
Maybe it's because our grandparents are getting older and I want to get in every last holiday that I can with them.

It's probably a combination of the three with some other stuff thrown in. But my sister, who is a very wise young woman (most of the time, haha), reminded me of something that I mentioned in our text study group a couple weeks ago. We were talking about the traditions related to Christmas worship and why they are important.
Why do we read the same passages every year?
why do we sing the same songs every year?

I argued, and I will argue this until the day I die, that one of the reasons that it is good that we sing the same songs and read the same lessons is that for the people who wander into our doors on Christmas Eve, the manger becomes home.

We live in an ever changing, ever mobile world where people don't always get home for Christmas and so the church has an opportunity to open their doors and welcome people home by offering up readings and songs that people have heard since their childhood, whether it was in church, or at home, or on the radio, the TV or in the movies.

In the incarnation of Jesus as an infant in a manger, God opened his/her arms and created a home for all to come to and be welcomed, whether it is in your home or a home away from home. In hearing Luke 2, in singing Silent Night, you can feel the Holy Spirit at working making the place you are in a home. This is the power of God at work on Christmas. I experienced it 8 years ago in Rome, Italy, in the back of an English speaking Roman Catholic church. Luke 2 was read, Silent Night sung, and I was home for a little bit, because I knew my family was about to do the same thing. It has happened every year I have been away from my family since then. I'm at home in God's embrace in the comfort of the manger.

Taking inspiration and running with it...

It's been another dreary day here in the fair city of Lawrence. The only thing able to cut through the down in the dumps kind of weather is the Christmas lights that so beautifully adorn every tree on Massachusetts Street from 6th St. to 11th St. Like John wrote in the first chapter of his Gospel - "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." That is true on so many levels, spiritual and otherwise...but mostly spiritual.

As I sit in my office this morning and watch the rain fall outside my window, I have taken inspiration from two of my friends for a reflection. So thanks, Maggie and Kendra!

I've decided to do what I can to make this dreary day a cheery day by making a list of things that I am thankful for (in no particular order):

1) Biological family - I am thankful for the family that gave me birth, raised me and has been so willing to walk with me on all my adventures...or misadventures, as the case may be. I am grateful for the love they've shown me, even though I may not have gotten it at the time (working with youth helps shed some light on this, helps you look at things from a different perspective).

2) Chris - I am so grateful that my husband was so persistent in his quest to make me his bride. I am a better person because of him and I am the happiest woman in the world to have him by my side for the rest of my life for all the adventures that await us. He also makes some pretty amazing chocolate cake.

3) Church family - While I write this, the smells of the monthly workday feast are floating down the hallway, reminding me of how lucky I am to be a part of a church family that comes together so often for some of the best food I've ever had (though, my waistline has something to say about that, too). They're also pretty cool people, too.

4) Abba - Abba saved my life in Oklahoma. Not that I was in any danger of anything, but she put an end to the loneliness of internship. She is the nuttiest dog I have owned and the worst mouse hunter ever, but she's one heck of a funny creature.

5) The Kiefer clan - It's so cool to know that I now have some amazing family around the country, from Chicago to Alaska and beyond. I am grateful to have been so warmly welcomed into the family.

6) Friends - I don't know if I've ever said this out loud, but I have some of the most amazing friends in the entire world. And they're everywhere! Oklahoma, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, Michigan, etc, etc, etc. I'm grateful to Facebook the ability to stay connected.

7) My faith - I don't know where I would be right now if I hadn't come out of the faith crisis I had in college. I certainly wouldn't be here in Kansas serving God's people, that's for sure. So I am thankful every day that God found me at just the right time and in the right place (God's really good at that) and that God turned my life upside down and put me on a better path than the one I was on. This is what I am most thankful for.

As Maggie said, it's not the places or the things, it's the people that make life so special (remember, dogs are people too)

And, what do you know, it's time for the workday feast! My favorite day of the month...and it will be followed up by some communion visits this afternoon, then the advent fellowship meal and evening prayer. What a great day!

Questions, comments, concerns...

If you sat with me in math class in 7th and 8th grade at Parcells Middle School in Grosse Pointe Woods, MI, you would recognize that phrase, and probably chuckle a bit. That is how Mr. Ciaravino would end class every day...and as the year progressed, we would join in on the concerns bit. Oh, memories.

This year I began requiring that the confirmation students take sermon notes, one per month. I did this when I was in confirmation and find it a good practice for the youth and it is helpful for my preaching. The last part of the form asks if they have any questions that they would like to ask about God, etc. And they ask the BEST questions. Whether we know it or not, they are thinking about issues regarding faith, but are we giving them the encouragement that they need to voice this?

How can we do better at giving them the groundwork and the vocabulary to speak about their faith, question it, explain their doubts so that when they are in situations in which their faith is tested, they have something to lean on?

“John the Witness”

December 11, 2011
Advent 3B
John 1:6-8, 19-28

In 1970, a musical debuted at Carnegie Mellon University, it was called “Godspell.” Musical was written by Stephen Schwartz and based off of the Gospel of Matthew, with some parables thrown in from Luke. The musical found its way to Broadway and even had a film version made, staring Victor Garber as Jesus. The movie version of the musical begins with a random selection of New Yorkers being visited by a John the Baptist character, who sings “prepare ye the way of the Lord.” After he blows his shofar, a ram’s horn used in the Jewish culture, the group gathers in central park and is baptized in a fountain all the while dancing around the fountain and singing “prepare ye the way of the Lord” aloud for all that could hear. This is not the John that we hear about this morning from the Gospel of John…well in a way it is, but not really.
What I mean by that is this, the John that we find described in the Gospel of John is the same person that we heard about in Mark last week…but John views him in a very different way than Mark, Matthew and Luke do. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, we see meet John the Baptist in the wilderness eating locusts and wild honey, wearing camel’s hair and pretty much looking like a mad man. This John baptizes people for the repentance of their sins, preparing them for the coming of the one greater than he. He is the loud, audacious man with the shofar, baptizing people in a fountain in Central Park, dressed like a circus entertainer. The John that we meet in the Gospel of John, however, is not so much a baptizer as he is a witness. Yes, he baptizes here and there, but that is not his primary function. This John is a much more subdued, humble character who does his work at Bethany, along the Jordan. And he was sent by God to witness to the light that was coming into the world, to the Word become flesh, to Christ.
As we meet John the Witness, we hear an account from him of who he is. “I am not the Messiah.’ And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ Then they said to him, ‘Who are you?... He said, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord” ’, as the prophet Isaiah said.
With the exception of his last statement about his identity, John responds to those who had been sent to him with the words “I am not.” I am not the messiah, I am not the prophet, I am not Elijah. He identifies himself by stating who he is not, the one who he bore witness to used the opposite tactic, saying “I AM”…and when John does identify who he is, he ties his identity to the one who sent him “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “make straight the way of the Lord.” And, as much as it is in his power, he is faithful to his calling to be a witness to the Word made flesh, to testify to the light coming into the world.
Soon after his encounter with those sent from the Pharisees, John sees Jesus and says, Look! There he is! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And again, just a few verses later he repeats this confession of who Jesus is. Behold, the Lamb of God. The witness of John to who Jesus is in the Gospel of John is the earliest witness that is found in the Gospels as to the identity of Jesus as the Son of God. It is John who gives his witness to what happened at the baptism of Jesus when the dove descended upon Jesus and remained upon him. And it is because of the witness of John that many came to believe in who Jesus was.
As we grow ever closer to the Nativity of our Lord, which is just two weeks away, we hear in the call of John the witness a call of our own. A call to be witnesses to the light that has come in to the world and who will come into the world again. A call to testify to the Word made flesh and where we see him at work in the world. We have a call as followers of Christ to join our voices to John the Witness and proclaim “Look! There is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” But how do we do that when some are so ready to shut us down at the mere mention of Christmas? How do we testify to the light when for so long it has been seen as the Pastor’s job…? How do we witness to who we are and how we fit into God’s story and Jesus’ story when, quite frankly, it has become an intimidating task? Am I going to say the right thing? Are people going to take my testimony seriously? Will they think less of me because for some reason, I haven’t seen God this week?
There was a study that came out a couple years ago, called the National Study of Youth and Religion, that became the basis of a book called “Almost Christian.” The study was aimed at talking with teenagers about their faith, or lack thereof, and their feelings toward the church. The study found that while a majority of teenagers they spoke to claimed that they were people of faith and had positive feelings about the church, most of were also very apathetic to the practices of their faith tradition. The small percentage who were not apathetic towards religious practices had a powerful story to tell about their faith and came from faith communities that had a very strong sense of mission that challenged these youth to think outside of themselves. This study has led to the claim that Christianity as a victim to “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a belief in a higher power that we call upon occasionally when we get in trouble and who helps us to feel better about ourselves, but demands little from us in return. There really is no unique vocabulary with which to voice this belief, and it is a belief system that fails to challenge us into deeper faith. And it is something that we, the church, have passed down to the youth of the church after years of missional understanding and teaching being watered down. But it doesn’t have to stay that way…we have some unlearning to do as a church, though.
We have been called by virtue of our baptism, to join our voices with John the witness to testify to where we see the light of Christ shining in the world. We are called to be witness to who the light is. Now, I’m not saying lets all go down to Mass Street and stay there until we have convinced all of Lawrence who Christ is…as exciting as that might seem. But let’s take the time to share with each other our God moments, the times and places in which we have seen God at work, in which we have seen the light shine in the darkness. Spend some time at the dinner table talking to your spouses and friends and children about your faith, about questions and concerns, and pray with each other about them.
God sent John into the world to testify to the light that was coming into the world. God did that to get the attention of humans around John that something wonderful was coming into the world, a light that would shatter the darkness for good. The Word of God was becoming flesh in order to redeem us, to save us from ourselves.
God has called us to the same task, that we may be stirred up by the Word of God and go out into the world and bear witness to Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It’s not just an Advent thing, it’s a lifelong practice…so let’s get practicing!

Advent Dissonance

November 27, 2011
Advent 1B
Mark 13:24-37

It’s happened once again, we’ve survived a weekend of Turkey and football and parades and door-buster deals and have run straight into the Christmas season or, as Johnny Mathis refers to it, “the most wonderful time of the year”. The Christmas trees and lights have been illuminated, Christmas music is now playing 24/7 in stores, Christmas movies have been dominating the television… punctuated by the oh so clever holiday commercials…and the holiday flavors are selling like hot cakes at Starbucks. Yes, the Christmas season is in full swing. Soon calendars will be filled with parties and get togethers, counters will be filled with baked goods, mailboxes will be filled with Christmas cards and Christmas trees loaded with lights. Yes, Johnny Mathis, a most wonderful time of the year, indeed. But wait, aren’t we missing something?
As the Black Friday deals fade into Cyber Monday and the Christmas season swings into action, we in the church begin our observation of Advent. It is a time of preparation and active waiting and watching for the coming of our Lord, whose birth we celebrate on Christmas. And while the world around us is singing “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” we sing hymns like “Savior of the Nations, Come” and “Wake, Awake”…hymns played in keys that cause a bit of eerie dissonance when heard. And while the world is reading stories like “Twas the Night before Christmas” and “Frosty the Snow Man,” we hear different tales from the Bible…tales that cause the same dissonance when heard as our Advent hymns. We hear uncomfortable tales about suffering and wars and stars falling from the heavens, the sun being darkened and the moon failing to give light…about prophets praying that God would tear open the heavens and come down so that mountains would quake. Doesn’t really fit next to “Have a Holly, Jolly, Christmas,” now does it?
And yet, as the year grows older, the hours of daylight reach their shortest, and the earth becomes dormant, we break from our cheery secular traditions and take a step back to hear reminders to keep awake, to watch and to hope.
We start Advent off this year in the year of Mark, the shortest of the Gospels. And our Gospel text for this morning puts us smack dab in the middle of a discourse of Jesus that consumes the entire thirteenth chapter of Mark and is called “the little apocalypse.” Exciting huh?
In the first half of the chapter, we hear Jesus speaking with the disciples about things that are to come. He tells of the destruction of the temple, about persecutions and false messiahs, about wars and rumors of wars, nations rising up against nations, peoples against peoples, earthquakes, famines…and I quote “great suffering such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be.” (Mk 13:18). Fa La La La La, La La La La.
“But after those things, after that suffering, the sun will go dark, the moon will not shine, the stars will fall from the heavens and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”
Some, like the writers of the Left Behind series, have co-opted Mark’s Little Apocalypse and have turned it into a prediction of what is to come with the rapture…likewise, when we look at this text, the temptation for us is to think about what is to come, to look at the signs around us and speak about the end being near. But here is the thing, Mark was writing to a people who were living in the midst of the dust that was the temple of Jerusalem. They were living in the midst of the desolating sacrilege that Jesus described in this text…and that’s part of what makes this text apocalyptic, it speaks to what was going on in the world using the language of the faithful.
For Mark’s audience, the end of the world as they knew it had come. The temple had been destroyed, they were being persecuted, false prophets where abundantly present. And yet, even at the heightened state of alertness that comes when the world seems to be falling apart around you, they were charged with the task of keeping alert, keeping awake. Keep awake for signs of God around you, know that in the incarnation, the temple is no longer God’s dwelling place…it is no longer the center of wisdom. In God’s coming into the world in Christ, God made his dwelling place amongst humans, and the center of wisdom is found in the wilderness. In the incarnation, God reminds us that God’s preferred mode of operation is in the unexpected places.
One of the most awesome things that the confirmation students have told me they have learned so far this year in studying the Old Testament ancestors is that God is present and works in unexpected places and people. One of the temptations of being people who live in the world and in sin is that we want to see God in people and places that we expect to see God…and we use human standards by which to frame our expectations of our God become human. And so we have a tendency to put God in a box, assign him or her attributes and stick a picture of God into our pocket so that we have a reference point for when we think we see God at work in the world. But we are Advent people, and as such, we need reminders like the one we have from Mark this morning. Reminders to keep awake and be alert to God’s work in the world where we least expect it. But also, keep alert for ways in which we think that we have figured God out.
In the next few weeks we will be preparing to celebrate the birth of a King who was born in a barn, not in a royal palace. He was a king who exercised his power by going outside of the social norms and boundaries and reaching out to the outcast, the sick, the unclean, the prostitutes. He was a king who showed the world his glory by dying on a cross, a crown of thorns on his head. The king we look for and celebrate a king who doesn’t rule in the way that we expect him to…there are no conventional tactics used by Jesus. And that is why Jesus asks us to keep awake…not just now, in this advent season, but always. Keep awake for the signs of God that you normally would not expect. Be alert and keep watch for a God who has brought an end to the world as we know it, and a beginning to a better world.
As Advent people in a Christmas world, let us live fully into the dissonance, let us look for the fullness of the incarnation around us and let us look for the presence of God in the unexpected places…it’s a greater gift than dreams of a White Christmas.
Wishing you a blessed and dissonant Advent. Amen

“The Kingdom of Subversives” - Sermon for Confirmation Sunday

Pentecost 22A
November 13, 2011
Matthew 25:14-30


How much do you tell people when they ask about your weekends? Are there certain people that you are willing to tell anything to? Are there others to whom your only response is “it was good”? Rachel, Nick and Sidney, what will you tell your friends about what you are about to do this morning? Will you talk about the details of what confirmation is and how God was at work this morning? Or will it just be something you did at church? And what will the rest of us tell folks about what we are about to witness these three young people do and God do in them?
I ask these questions because the stories we tell on Monday morning about what happens on Sunday morning speak volumes to the power of how God is at work on Sunday mornings…that is, if we let them.
When we meet up with Jesus this morning, he is in the middle of a series of teachings that began in chapter 21 of Matthew. There are responses to questions and parables and the further he gets into this discourse, the more and more he speaks of the end times and the quicker he segues from one parable to another as if he knew he was being timed and that time was about to run out so he has to squeeze everything in that he had planned to say into this short amount of time. And it’s near the very end of this discourse that Jesus tells those who are with him the parable of the talents.
For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. When he returned, the slave with the five talents came back with ten, and the slave with the two talents came back with four…but the slave who had been given one talent returned with only that one talent after having buried it in a field to keep it safe so that he wouldn’t lose it while his master was gone. The two slaves who returned with more than they had been given were praised…while the one who hid his talent had it taken from him and was cast into outer darkness.
Some text for confirmation Sunday, isn’t it? Nothing like Reformation Sunday where the texts lift us up, speaking of God as our fortress and our rock and about Jesus being the truth that sets us free.
But, here we are, a master, three slaves and some talents. Happy Confirmation…
Actually, there is a lot of good news in this story…but it’s one of those where you have to dig a little deeper to get to the nugget of the good news that it very present. When the master goes out on his journey, he entrusts these three slaves with gifts…each talent representing about one year’s worth of wages. Just imagine what you would do if you had been given five years’ worth of wages, or even two or even one year’s wages…all in one shot. Now, pull this parable into modern times. Say the slaves who had been given the five talents and two talents played the market…and what if they lost it all?? It would be a totally different parable, but given the times we live in, it would have been a distinct possibility with stocks fluctuating on a daily basis. And yet, they took those risks, played those odds, and came out on top…doubling the gift that their master had given them, and they are told to enter into the joy of their master. The slave who had the one talent, however, was so afraid of what his master would do if he lost the talent, that he played it safe and hid it in a field until his master returned…and it is this one who gets the short end of the stick, as it were, losing his talent and getting tossed into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Is there good news there? There sure is…but like I said, we just have to dig a little deeper to get to it.
You see, if you take a look at Jesus’ teachings as a whole, you will find that there is a certain element of subversion to them…a kicking back against the established order of things…and that’s what gives Jesus’ teachings the power that they have. Jesus wasn’t afraid to question the status quo and then he offers something better. This parable comes right before Jesus’ arrest, his trial, his death and resurrection. He knew his time was at an end when he began his discourse and so he just keeps talking and talking and hoping that someone will soak things up. And so, when read in the context of Jesus’ death and resurrection, this parable oozes good news…it oozes good news because the ultimate gift that we receive as servants of God is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can play the market all we want with our talents, allowing God to use them to change the world…or we can squander them and keep them hidden…but the gift of life through Christ and the joy of our Lord is something that we will never lose.
This is what gives what we do and what God does on Sunday morning its power…and makes us subversives along with Jesus. I mean, think about it…where else do we celebrate a king who gained his victory by dying? Where else do we talk about a Lord who teaches us about the importance of caring for the poor and reaching out to the outcast? Where else do people bring their children so that they can be bound with Christ in his death and, in essence, enact a dying to sin and rising to new life, as St. Ambrose once said “we’d baptize you with dirt, if it didn’t kill you”? Where else to people come to a table to eat and drink the body and blood of their savior and do so next to people that they wouldn’t have anything to do with the rest of the week?
Where else, do teenagers…still at the beginning on their lives…come and stand before their faith family and re-affirm the vows that their parents made at their baptism…vows that join them in Christ to his death and resurrection?
When you were baptized, your parents brought you forward to have you washed in water…but it was much more than that. In that moment you were joined with Christ into his death and brought to new life in Christ, one where you have the freedom to live and trust in God’s love that has been working and will continue to work in you to make you the people that God made you to be.
As confirmands, you will stand before us shortly and be subversives…young people challenging the status quo by affirming the vows made for you the day you died to sin and were made alive again in Christ through his own death and resurrection. The day you were free to live in the joy of your master. This is not the end of something, it isn’t a graduation of sorts…but rather a beginning, where you will continue to grow and be challenged and be changed by the love of God.
So, what story are going to tell tomorrow at the water fountain, the coffee pot, the lockers? Are going to going tell a quick story that hints at what happened today, or are you going to tell the story of the transforming power of the love of God, who has given you the ultimate gift in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, so that you may live as his servants and trust that God is going to love you from death into life and God is going use you and your talents to transform the world?
Amen

“Remember, Remember”

All Saints Day
Revelation 7:9-17

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

This poem, which originated in the 17th century in England, was inspired by the day in which Guido Fawkes was caught guarding explosives in the House of Lords which were intended to be used by Fawkes and his partners in an assassination plot against King James I. The poem was written to remind future generations that treason was not an act that would be praised. However, the reason that Guido Fawkes and his compatriots attempted to assassinate the King was in reaction to the injustice they saw enacted by the crown. All the members of the Gunpowder plot were Catholics living in a country that, under King James, had become intolerant at the least, and at best, dangerous to Catholics. Priests who remained in England and continued to practice their religious tradition did so under threat of torture or death. The men who engineered this plot hoped that it would bring about greater religious tolerance…the plot failed however, and to this day the 5th of November is celebrated in England by fireworks, bonfires and burning effigies of Guido Fawkes, a man reacting to an injustice of his day.

Today, the 6th of November, is also a day of remembrance…but for a different reason. We remember and celebrate all the saints, the saints who are here now, the saints that have gone before us and the saints who are not yet born. And as we do so, another poem rings in our ears. “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
In our reading from Revelation, John of Patmos shares with us a vision of what is to come in the end. It is a vision of people from every tribe and language and nation gathered together at the throne of God worshiping God and the lamb. A multitude dressed in white and palm branches in their hands indicating the victory of their King. A song arises from this gathering telling of the salvation that belongs to their God and to the lamb. It is a beautiful scene, one that serves as an interlude between the judgment and destruction that come in John’s vision in chapters 6 and 8. In chapter 6, we hear about the opening of the first six seals that secured the scroll of Revelation and the judgments that they release…the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the cries of the martyrs, a devastating earthquake that turned the sun black, the moon the color of blood and caused the stars to fall from heaven to earth. (Anyone who says the bible is boring has not read the book of Revelation)
But before the seventh and final seal is opened, unleashing more judgment and wrath, John sees a vision of the angels of the four winds holding those winds back from destroying the earth…and of an angel ascending with the rising sun with the seal of God ordering the angels of the four winds to hold the winds back until the servants of the Lord have been sealed. John reports of hearing that there were 144,000 sealed…12,000 from each of the tribes of the 12 sons of Israel.
And then his vision turns to that which we heard this morning, a vision of a multitude so big that no one could count of all tribes, all nations…a vision of martyrs who had come out of the great ordeal and had washed their robes white in the blood of the lamb…a vision of adoration of God and the lamb that speaks to the salvation that belongs to God. A vision of a conversation that reveals what salvation looks like in the eyes of God.

Most frequently, we hear John’s description of the multitudes robed in white when we gather together to celebrate the life of someone who has left this life for life eternal. There are words of comfort in this passage that can help us as we mourn a loss of a loved one, words about an end to tears and about streams of the waters of life, all wonderful images to conjure when tears seem endless and waters of life seem far away.
And it seems that words of comfort are what John intended it when he wrote of these visions to the people of the seven churches in Asia. At the time that John was writing, the people were literally going through a great ordeal. They were being persecuted and killed by Rome because they were followers of the lamb. Their robes were soaked red in their own blood and it is quite possible that to these people it seemed as if the sun had turned black and the moon the color of blood. And yet, the members of the seven churches that John was writing to did not cease their worship of God…even if that worship was a little lukewarm at times.
The vision that John shared with them and that he shares with us is one that is totally countercultural to how the world was seen, both then and now. It speaks of Salvation that belongs to God and to God alone and what that salvation looks like.
In its original form, salvation is a word that is not limited to just the spiritual realm, but instead it refers to total wellbeing and wholeness. For the people living in the grasp of the Roman Empire, the “official” source of salvation, of wellbeing, was Rome...but that was not the experience of John’s audience who routinely were the victims of injustice. There is no wholeness and wellbeing when you are being persecuted and slaughtered. So John shows them a vision of God’s empire, where salvation comes from God and God alone.
In God’s empire, there is no room for the injustices and persecutions that the Roman Empire used to dehumanize the early Christians. In God’s empire, salvation means the end of injustice and the restoration of every aspect of human wellbeing for people of all nations and tribes and tongues. In God’s empire, there is no more hunger or thirst…there is no more threat of scorching heat, a wonderful promise for desert dwellers…and God will wipe away every tear, tears of anger, of distress, of sorrow, of bitterness and anguish. Every tear will be wiped away by God himself.
As people who live in the midst of very visible, worldwide, outcries against the injustices of our day and our own great ordeal, we do well to remember, remember the vision of John of a day when there will no longer be room for the things that divide us. Of a day when racism, sexism, ageism and all the other –isms that bring about injustice will no longer have a place where they can thrive and cause people to be seen as less than human in any way, shape, or form. It will be a day in which people of all tribes and nations and peoples and tongues will all come together around throne of God and sing of the salvation that comes from God and God alone and of the victory that has been won for us by the lamb in whose blood we have been washed. And as we remember the saints that have gone before us, the saints with us now, and the saints yet to be born, we remember the song that binds us all - “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Pentecost 18 - Untitled and Incomplete

Pentecost 18
October 16, 2011
Matthew 22:15-22

A rich man went to his rabbi one day in the midst of a personal crisis. So he asked his Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life? The rabbi spoke with him about the commandments, specifically the second table commandments, honor your father and mother, do not steal, do not kill, do not bear false witness, do not commit adultery. At the end of this list of commandments, the young man wiped his brow in relief…he had not broken any of the commandments that the rabbi mentioned. He thanked the rabbi and was getting up to leave when the rabbi spoke up “there is one more thing you need to do…” Hesitating, the man turned around, “Sell all your possessions and give your money to the poor…” The man could feel drops of sweat form on his forehead…the rabbi had never mentioned do not covet because he knew that the man was so possessed by his possessed that to have made this last statement would be a challenge that the young man was not ready to take on yet. And so the young man left the presence of his rabbi, his head hung low in grief over his wealth.
I tell you this story because I think that the interaction between the rich young man and Jesus can help us frame the encounter between Jesus that the disciples of the Pharisees that we just hear about.
It had been a long day for Jesus when the disciples of the Pharisees and the Herodians came to speak with him. It was the morning after Jesus had entered Jerusalem and turned the temple upside down…and up to this point in the day, Jesus cursed a fig tree, had his authority questioned by the Pharisees when the returned to the temple and then he told them the parable of the two sons, the parable of the wicked tenants and the parable of the wedding banquet. Earlier that day, the Pharisees had wanted to arrest Jesus…but they did not do so because they were afraid of the crowds because the crowds regarded Jesus as a prophet. But it seems that now the Pharisees have come up with an idea that they think will entrap Jesus in what he says.
So the Pharisees send their disciples, along with some Herodians (a group that almost nothing is known about except for that they were probably Roman sympathizers) to Jesus to ask a simple, but VERY loaded question. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor?”
Now to those of us living in a society where it has been said that nothing is quite as sure in life as death and taxes, had we been there, we probably would have looked at these guys and said “are you kidding? Taxes are a legal obligation.” And in Israel, there were also taxes to be paid. Each year people were expected to pay the temple tax…however, taxes paid to a civil authority was a relatively new thing.
In the year 6 AD, a census tax was instituted by Rome. It is the tax we hear about in the beginning of Matthew that sent Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. According to Roman law, every adult was responsible for paying this tax, the equivalent to one day’s wages, each year. This tax was the source of quite a bit of anger from the people of Israel, especially the zealots, who had gotten quite violent in their protest.
For Jesus to have responded to the disciples of the Pharisees by saying that paying taxes to the emperor was lawful would have upset the people who had been following him so loyally for years. The zealots who followed him would have especially have taken him to task. On the other hand, for Jesus to have responded that paying taxes to the emperor was unlawful, it would have upset the Herodians, who would have run back to the Roman authorities and reported that Jesus was getting ready to take his “occupy temple street” protest outside of the temple, which the Roman authorities would not have liked very much.
Knowing that they were out to get him, however, Jesus gave neither of these responses. Instead he asks for a coin used to pay the tax. His questioners procure for him a denarius, the currency of the Roman Empire. Whose image is this and what is his title? They answer that the currency bore the head of the emperor on it along with his title, “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, High Priest.” In a few words, it was a coin with a graven image that equated the emperor with a god. This secular currency was very different from the religious currency used by the Jews.
And so, in one of his more diplomatic moments, Jesus responds “The give to the emperor, that which is the emperor’s, and to God, that which is God’s.” In this one short statement, Jesus shuts down the aim of the Pharisee’s and their cronies. Instead of giving them what they wanted, Jesus acknowledged the civil authority of the emperor…but he also reminded them that God’s empire is bigger than the Roman Empire.
So what does this mean for us who live in a time hundreds years after the fall of the Roman Empire? We who live in a time of economic uncertainty considered to be the worst since the great depression, where “occupy wall street” protests have spread throughout the country, and both sides are crying “class warfare”? And what does this all have to do with the story of the young rich man and Jesus?
I would propose that it all connects through a question that is not asked in this encounter with Jesus and the Pharisee’s cronies but that I wish that Jesus had asked.
“Whose image do you bear, and what is your title?”
We live in a time when our civil currency and the currency with which we give our financial gifts back to God is the same. It is a time when we are being blasted with ads saying that we need the newest and the best things now…and if we miss the boat on the newest gadget we’re going to lose significant status points. Me and mine have caused many to become like the rich young men, guilty of coveting more and more things, letting their possession take possession of them and their lives. The almighty dollar is in a competition with Almighty God for loyalty and sometimes it looks as if we have let the almighty dollar win.
…and it makes you wonder what Jesus would say if he came back now…it would probably be something that would make us want to kill him again, even though he is really just telling us the truth about our situation.
“Whose image do you bear, and what is your title?” Jesus asks us

When we stop to listen to the truth that Jesus has for us, there is some good news…and the good news is that even with the broad grip that civil authority seems to have, God’s authority is bigger and better than civil authority. And not only that, there is good news in the reminder that the image we bear is the image of God…and the title that we bear is child of God. With everything going on in this world, it is the perfect time for us to be reminded we are not defined by our things, we are defined by the image of God that dwells in us. We have been created and claimed by God to go be caretakers of the things that we have been given, but more importantly, we have been called to be caretakers of one another.




This sermon is unfinished in it's written form. In my process of crafting it, I became so frustrated with coming up with a good ending that I decided that it was time to walk away and let the Holy Spirit take over. I have never done this before, but it worked. God is Good.

God's Crazy Love

Pentecost 16A
October 2, 2011
Matthew 21:33-46
Isaiah 5:1-7

It’s kind of unsettling, isn’t it? A man sends some of his servants to collect his share of the harvest from the tenants that he has leased his vineyard to…when the tenants kill the servants, the landlord doesn’t send in an army to retaliate but instead sends more servants who meet the same fate. Again, the landlord doesn’t seek revenge or send army or guards or even a small gang of men out to the tenants to deal with the tenants and collect the landlords share of the harvest…instead, he sends his son. The tenants foolishly think that if they remove the son from the scene, they might be the recipients of his inheritance…the vineyard…so they throw him out of the vineyard and kill him too.
But why is this story so unsettling? Depressing even? Is it because of the actions of the father to send more servants to meet the same fate as the first servants? Is it because he then sends his son into that dangerous situation to meet the same fate as the servants? As a land owner, he was obviously a wealthy person, being able to lease out land and then go to a distant country…he could have just as easily hired an army or at least a small group of intimidating men to go to the tenants and collect what the landlord was owed. He didn’t have to send his son, or even the second group of servants. Or is it so unsettling because the tenants have an all too familiar attitude.
The behavior of the landlord is definitely hard to accept because of how easily he was willing to sacrifice his servants after the first group had been killed…and it’s even harder to accept that he was willing to send his son into the mix after seeing what had happened to the servants. The attitude of the tenants should be the behavior that gives us the wakeup call, though. The tenants have entered into a lease agreement with the landlord and then, between entering into the lease and harvest time, they become convinced that the vineyard that they are leasing is theirs to do with as they please. They begin to believe that this absentee landlord doesn’t deserve his cut of the harvest…but maybe, just maybe, if they remove his son from the picture, they will be rewarded with his inheritance and be able to live high on the hog from here on out.
But what do these tenants have to do with us that would give us a wakeup call? We certainly are not tenants in a vineyard. Well, this may be so in a literal case…but if you were to think of this world as God’s vineyard, then yes, we are tenants in a vineyard…and because sin has entered into the picture, we have come to believe that this vineyard is ours to do with as we wish. Over the years, we have polluted the water, the land and the air, we have brought on greater disparity between the rich and the poor and have denied justice to the most vulnerable among us. And when God sends prophets into our midst to help us see where we have gone wrong, we either ignore them or send them a painful message that we’re in charge now and we don’t need anyone’s help to get us out of the mess we are in. That was certainly the reality for the prophet Isaiah, the apostle Paul and it was also what we attempted to tell Jesus. We don’t like God’s servants, his prophets, coming and telling us what we do not want to hear…that we have forgotten the truth of God’s reality, either because we chose to forgot it or because it is so hard to carry out that we ignore it until it seems to go away. But in order for that to happen, those prophets need to go away too. And so we cut the Isaiah’s in two, we behead the Paul’s and hang the Dietrich Bonhoeffers…because when their voices are silent, we can live in blissful ignorance running things the way we want them run…giving to our landlord only when we see fit and how much we see fit.
But the parable of the wicket tenants didn’t end with the death of the landlord’s son, it ended with a question. Now when the owner of the landlord comes, what will he do with those tenants? And we are offered two suggestions. The first suggestion is that the landlord will come and deal those tenants a miserable death and then rent out his land to other tenants. Notice that this suggestion is not offered up by Jesus, but by the Pharisees…the very ones whom this parable is aimed at. Retaliation was a very real reality then, just as it is now…which is why in the old testament we hear about eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth…this text actually limited the level of retaliation that could take place…so if someone knocked out your tooth, the most harm you could do to them would be to take that same tooth from their mouth.
Jesus, however, offers up another solution. One in which the landlord does not give up on the tenants or sink to their level. The solution that Jesus offers is that it was necessary for the son to be rejected so that he might become the foundation of what is to come. He takes his words from the Psalms “the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; and it is amazing in our eyes.” What Jesus is offering up is an alternative to what comes naturally to humans…an alternative in which the landlord so desires to have a relationship with his tenants that he is willing to risk everything, his servants, even his own son, so that he can reach out to them. Retaliation is not an option to the landlord, only love…crazy, unreasonable, unfathomable love.
These texts from Matthew that we have heard in the last weeks and will be hearing in the next few weeks are incredibly dangerous…they invite the temptation of self-vindication…they invite an attitude of “you got what you had coming.” But that’s not what Jesus is about, it’s not what God’s about…that’s not what the Gospel is about, even if we have to do what Martin Luther said is necessary sometimes…squeeze a text until gospel leaks out of it. Jesus cannot help but share the good news of the Gospel, even in challenging texts like the one for today.
As inhabitants of God’s vineyard, it is incredibly tempting to forget that we are just tenants and that can lead us to behavior that is self-serving and dangerous. It can lead us to hoard the gifts that we have been given by God and it can lead us to want to silence the prophets among us to remind us of the hard work that comes with being God’s people, the tenants of God’s vineyard. But as people of God, we are called to do the hard work of tending God’s vineyard and producing good fruits, justice, righteousness, equality, love. We are called to never give up on this work because we have a God who has never given up on us. God is willing to give us an infinite number of chances, knowing that we cannot be forced into anything. God has a crazy, unreasonable, unfathomable love for us, a love that is willing to risk anything to have a relationship with us. A love so strong that God was willing to destroy his choicest vine in order that life may become available to us.
As Christ hung from the cross, God stood at the foot of that cross with dirty, blistered hands, holding a wilted vine and hurting from the pain of his son, knowing that the rejection of his son by the people was not the end of the vineyard…it was just the beginning.

Michaelmas Eve (is there such a thing?)

Tomorrow is Michaelmas, or as we know it today, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Here are some of my thoughts.

I find it interesting that this year, Michaelmas falls on the same day as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. St. Michael is a figure that is revered by Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions and appears in the scriptures of all three traditions. Beyond God and the patriarchs, this is rare.

In scripture, Michael is an archangel and appears as one of the "chief princes" and the "chief leader of the army of God" He is mentioned by name in the book of Daniel (in chapters 10 and 12), in the book of Jude (1:9) and in Revelation (chapter 12). He also appears in the Koran in Sura 2 (verse 98). In all of these references, Michael appears as a military leader who is constantly engaged in a battle as the protector of God's people (it is only in Christian scripture that the Devil or Satan are named explicitly). Rabbinic tradition takes Michael's role a step further, placing him as the rescuer of Abraham from the furnace, the messenger who tells Sarah that she will have a baby boy, an advocate for Israel before the Exodus...these are all different ways in which the Rabbis have identified the work of the angel, Michael, within the story of the people of God.

But this is what I like most about the archangel Michael...his name says a lot about his identity. Michael is from the Hebrew "Mikha'el" which means "who is like God?" In the Talmud, this is considered a rhetorical question and connotes a humility before God. And we see that in the scriptural references to Michael. In Revelation, Michael and the angels win victory over the devil, but it is God who gets the glory, not Michael.

In an age of awards and achievements and people yearning to be known famously throughout the world, we have an example from biblical history of the leader of God's army, whose victory caused praise and glory to be given to God. What a world we would live in if that happened more often...if everything that we accomplished ended with praise and credit being given to God. The world would be an incredible place!

One of my closest friends is a crew member for a professional racing team. I have had the privilege of getting to go see them race on a few occasions, and though I haven't been there for an overall win, I've been there for round wins and I have seen overall wins broadcast on television. What does an archangel have to do with racing, you ask? The driver (who, ironically, is named Michael) always gives glory to God first after they have succeeded on the race track. Mike's humility has made him well known at events as one of the classiest drivers in that particular pro circuit...and I believe that it's all because his perspective is based upon a focus on what God has blessed him and his crew with. And it makes sense, because in the end, everything we have comes from God. And when we hit hard times, God sends us a protector to help us get out of the mess into something better.

Thanks be to God for St. Michael.

“Turn, then and Live”

Pentecost 15A
September 25, 2011
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

On September 11th, I was scrolling my Facebook feed on my iphone while waiting for the flight that took Chris and I to Orlando, Florida on our honeymoon. While doing this I came across a comment posted by someone I’ve known since high school. The post was about how proud she is in regard to how this country has been unified since the attacks on America 10 years prior. My first thought was yeah, we did pull together for a little bit, but then we fractured big time. It wasn’t two days after the attacks when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were blaming the attacks on the Gays, Feminists, the ACLU, Pagans, etc. In the years that have followed we have blamed this person and that for the attacks…some saying blaming all muslims, others saying that the CIA must have known something was up…others still blamed the Bush administration, claiming a relationship between the Bush family and Bin Ladin. The list goes on and on…and still, 10 years later, as we enter another election cycle and the third possible occurrence of a major budget crisis in a year had appeared, it is clear from news reports, facebook and twitter, that as a nation, we are still pointing fingers, blaming this person and that person for the state our nation is in, rather that putting in the effort to come together and seek ways in which we can do better for our nation and the future of our nation.
There was a lot of finger pointing going on among the Israelite exiles in Babylon, too. Instead of pointing the finger at others among them, though, the fingers were pointed towards the ancestors and towards God. Our reading from Ezekiel this morning was written around the time that the first group of exiles had been taken from their home in Israel to Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had ordered the capture of 3,000 people from Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel…as well as the removal of the King of Judah from the throne. The rest of the people were left to be workers for the Babylonians in Judah. The exiles were not too thrilled with their situation in Babylon, mostly because they didn’t think that they had anything to do with becoming exiles and therefore there wasn’t anything they could do about getting out of exile. Their thinking comes from a couple of sources.
First, there is a writing in Exodus that appears again in Deuteronomy in which God says that God will visit the sin of the fathers on the children and the third and fourth generations of those who hate him…in addition to this, the writers of the books of Kings and Chronicles had made it abundantly clear that by re-instituting pagan worship during his reign, which took place about a hundred years earlier, King Manasseh had sealed the fate of Israel for generations to come. A final element that needs to be noted for the context of Ezekiel and his audience, is that they lived in a poly-deistic society…for them, the God of Abraham or the other gods like Baal, let you know how pleased they were with you by how things went. To them, drought which yielded bad yields of crops, floods, damaging winds, and other natural events of the sort, were all acts of the gods to get your attention.
And so, when you add all this up, the visiting sins up future generations, the well known sins of Manasseh and their beliefs about natural phenomena, the 3,000 Judean exiles in Babylon decided that it was unfair that they had been taken from their homes, their livelihoods, their families and been taken to this place. And we can all agree with them on that…it isn’t fair when people are forcibly taken from their homes, families and livelihoods. But in their eyes, what made it even more unfair was that they felt that they were completely innocent and had done nothing to deserve the situation that they were in. God had exiled them, taken them away from everything they had as punishment for what their ancestors had done. So why bother doing anything, we can’t fix the situation we’re in…so the exiles spent their days repeating an old proverb “the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It was a proverb that expressed their feeling that their situation in exile was completely the fault of the parents and grandparents and, for them, absolved them of any guilt involved with the exile.

And this is where Ezekiel steps in.

Ezekiel had been taken into exile with the rest of the group…but Ezekiel was also a prophet who had a message to bring to the exiles. It was a message from God that called them out on the finger pointing and showed them a different way of looking at things. First, God forbids the use of the proverb used by the exiles and in the verses that are missing from this passage, God uses Ezekiel to explain to the people that they have wrongly interpreted the passages form Exodus and Deuteronomy. Ezekiel tells them that when God looks at an individual, he doesn’t see the sins or the righteousness of the parent or the grandparent, but God looks at the person him or herself and judges everyone accordingly. But if there are generations after generations of folks who hate God, then yeah, there might be consequences.
In general, however, who we are in the eyes of God is not defined by the past acts of our ancestors, but by who we are…and going further, who we are is not defined by who we were before, but who we choose to be and what we choose to do now. This is how God works! We can think that we are storing up righteousness for a rainy day…or think that all the bad things we’ve done in the past will be held against us…but that’s not how God works. God gives us a chance every day to choose who we are going to be and how we are going to act. The past does not define us, nor the future, only the present.
And yet, along with the Judeans in exile, we are often tempted to look out at the world and see how things are, throw our hands up in the air and say “why are you being so unfair, God?” When we do that, though, we are ignoring that there is a difference between the worldly order of things and God’s order of things. In the worldly order of things, everything that we do affects the people around us…if I don’t go grocery shopping regularly, my husband and dog will have nothing to eat…if we as a congregation don’t join together to serve with LINK, Family Promise and the food pantry, people who really need our help won’t get that meal or that place to sleep. If we as a nation don’t peaceably work out a solution to our economic problems, our children and children’s children will be affected by this. This is the worldly order of things, the cause and affect of physics is very much how the world works. As Homer Simpson once said “how come my actions always have consequences?”
Fortunately for us, God knows all to well how the world works. God has been looking over us from the beginning but because he is an all loving God, God knows that he can’t force us into anything…not into loving him and not into choosing to do the right things every day. But that’s why God does give us a choice every day…God allows us to choose every day who we are going to be and what we are going to do. We can choose to follow God and listen for what God has for us to do, or we can choose to ignore it and go the other way. But with that choice comes and admonition, to get a new heart and a new spirit, to turn and choose life! To try every day to be better people for God and for the world…it’s not easy, but we know that it’s possible. We know this because we have the example of the one who was in the form of God but chose humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. Jesus wasn’t afraid to call out the Pharisees when they pointed fingers and he’s not afraid to call us out, either. Sure it’s uncomfortable…but in the end, it what helps us to grow and thrive.
And so we have a decision to make today and every day…in this world of fractured people, finger pointing and unfairs, who are we going to be? Are we going to be the people who throw our hands up in the air and give up? Or are we going to be a witness to the world of how God does things?

“God Doesn’t Charge a Baggage Fee…He Passes Over It”

Pentecost 12a
September 4, 2011
Exodus 12:1-14

One of my favorite websites to peruse every now and then is OldLutheran.com. They have a wonderful selection of products full of puns intended for Lutherans. You can get socks that say ‘Here I Stand’ or get shorts that on the left side of the back say ‘Left Behind’ and any number of other things that help you boldly proclaim your Lutheran heritage in a lighthearted manner. One year, after purchasing some items for a reformation party, I received a free gift from Oldlutheran that I now carry my knitting stuff in. It has the words “this is my Lutheran baggage” on it. And while I thought the pun was funny, it also got me thinking about the baggage that we carry…and I’m not talking about the baggage that Delta airlines charges you $20 a bag to check when you go on a trip, I’m talking about life baggage. We’ve all got life baggage, good and bad, things we’ve done, things we didn’t do, things that people have done for or to us or have just plain forgotten to do. Some of our life baggage lifts us up while some of it weighs us down.
The Israelites in Egypt were certainly weighed down by the baggage of the slavery that had been imposed upon them by the Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph. For generations, the Israelites had been oppressed, worked to death and been tread upon by the Egyptians, who had taken them as slaves because they feared that the Israelites would rise up and defeat the Egyptians by use of military force. And now God is going to set them free.
Before the point where we enter this story, God has raised up Moses and Aaron as leaders of the Israelites and has sent them to Pharaoh with demands to let their people go. Even after nine plagues, Pharaoh has still not had a change of heart. However, now that we have entered the story, we see God instructing Moses and Aaron on how to make preparations for a meal that will take place the night of the tenth and final plague, a plague which will claim the lives of all the firstborn of Egypt, from the house of Pharaoh to the livestock. Now, if you read the narrative of the plagues, which begin in chapter 7 of Exodus, you will find the details a little bit lacking as far as specifics of the plagues themselves…and that’s what makes our passage for this morning so important.
The writer of this portion of Exodus wanted to make sure that the details of the Passover meal were laid out so that his readers could grasp the importance of what was going on at this moment in time. Freedom was at last in their line of sight and now God was giving the people instructions as to how to celebrate and remember their liberation from the hands of the Egyptians. And God is very specific as to how they were to go about this. On the 10th of this month, every family is to take a 1 year old male lamb from the sheep or the goats…if a family is too small for one lamb, they are to share it with their neighbors. On the 14th of the month, at twilight, everyone is to slaughter their lambs and put blood from the lamb on the lintels and door posts. Then roast the lamb over fire, organs and all, and serve with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. If anything is left over in the morning, burn it. And, by the way, eat the meal quickly, and be dressed as if you would be ready to leave at any moment. All of this was to happen on the night that God was to send the tenth plague upon Egypt, striking down the first born, with the exception of those in houses with lambs blood on the lintels and doorposts…them God would Passover.
The details of this narrative are very important to the writer of this part of Exodus, because they tell us about the beginning of God’s giving the Israelites a new and fresh start. People have said that the reason they had unleavened bread was because there was no time, but there were at least 4 days in which to make bread…and here’s the thing about yeast…it carries over the old with the new. So if you want to make bread that is totally new in character, without any traces of the old, you leave about the yeast. And if you want to cook something in a manner that leaves nothing of the old when you’re done, you use a fire instead of boiling. God was giving Moses and Aaron instructions of how to signal to the people that they were going to get a totally new start.
But what about this whole lamb’s blood on the doorposts and lintel deal? Seems a little gory, doesn’t it. Think about the rainbow from the story of the flood in Genesis, though. God told Noah that the rainbow would be a sign for both Noah and God that would help them both remember the covenant that they had made together. In a similar manner, the lamb’s blood on the doorposts of the houses of the people of Israel, while not as pleasant as a rainbow, served that dual purpose, to remind the people that they have received life and to remind God to Passover those houses, leaving those first born untouched by the plague.
The story of the Passover is considered to be the climax of the Exodus narrative and one of the most important and celebrated stories in the Jewish heritage. It is the story of a God who sides with the slave, the outcast, and the downtrodden…a God who does not leave God’s people behind but seeks ways in which to bring them something better. Each year on Passover, our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community gather to remember the night in which God liberated the Israelites from their oppressors.
Around that same time, we in the Christian community gather to remember the night in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was betrayed and what happened in subsequent days with Jesus’ arrest, trial, death and resurrection. But we don’t just remember the events of Holy Week during holy week, every time we come to the table and celebrate the Eucharist we remember how God has passed over our sins and liberated us from the sin that oppresses us daily. There may not be blood on the doorposts, but the blood in the chalice still is enough to remind us of the life we have received. We remember how God looks at the baggage that we carry, especially the stuff that weighs us down…the things we didn’t do that we should have; the things we shouldn’t have done, but did anyways; the times we didn’t follow Jesus’ instructions to hold our brothers and sisters accountable when they have sinned against us, but instead either made it public or held grudges…God looks at that baggage and then passes it over, freeing us to live in ways that Christ would have us to live, released from the bonds that sin has over us.
When we were baptized, as Reed and Natalie will be today, we were marked with the cross of Christ. It is a mark that we carry with us on our foreheads for the rest of our lives. It is a mark that reminds us of who we are and whose we are. It’s also a reminder that we have been given life. We are God’s beloved children, called and claimed and washed…the baggage that weighs us down has been removed so that we can be free from sin and free to live. And so today we remember, we remember the day of our baptism, we remember the sacrifice that Christ made for us when we come to the table, eat of his body and drink of his blood, we remember that God has given us a new start, totally from the from old weights that drag us down so that we can live and be free to love, to loose and to live. Amen.

Who is the future of the church?

As a young pastor who came to Trinity fresh out of seminary, I fell into a role that many young pastors who are called to serve program size parishes do, ministering to youth and young adults.

In my first two years here, my priority went to the youth as it seemed that they were the most in need of organization and of being fully re-integrated into the life of the congregation. In that time, a few really strong leaders have emerged and while there have been struggles, there has been amazing ministry done by these youth and a lot of re-integration has happened. And so, after updating the Sunday School roster for this year, I realized that there is a critical mass of young families in this congregation (by the end of this year there are going to be 28 children age 2 and under!!!) and so I am implementing a plan to use those strong leaders from the youth to take on more of a leadership role for me to oversee while I shift more of my direct efforts to young adults and young families. This way, I will be able to give more equal attention to both youth and ya/yf while raising up leaders from both of those groups.

Then about 10 days ago, someone told me how happy there are they I am shifting my ministry focus to the ya/yf population of the church. "Youth aren't really the future of the church, you know...it's the young adults who are returning with their young children." I responded to the person that I disagreed because both groups represent the future of the church, but in different times and ways. I didn't have the time to give rationale, but I've been digesting this interaction for the past few days and wanted to share some thoughts.

I do firmly believe that youth are the future of the church...I have believed this for a long time.

I also believe firmly that young adults are the future of the church and have believed this for a long time.

Youth are most certainly the future of the church, they are the ones providing leadership in places that we don't often see. Very few adults have the blessing of being able to see youth at work on mission trips, at synod assembly, in youth group and confirmation. They are willing to take on tough issues, face down adversity and frustrations and persevere through disappointments. The youth of this current generation, for the most part, love better than we adults love and they are more accepting that most adults are. They see through the bull&*^& that we produce when we say that folks should behave one way and then we ourselves act another way. But they are also under attack...from bullies, from a sex saturated culture, from colleges that tell them that they need a certain number of extracurricular activities to be able to think about applying to that college, from their own doubts and questions, and sometimes from their churches. And so to make sure that the youth remain the future of the church and become those young adults who bring their children to church is to engage them, invite their questions and doubts and tell them they are allowed to struggle. Give them a place to rest and re-create both physically and spiritually. Help them to see that God loves them no matter what and put scripture in their hands and a language of faith into their hearts so that they can profess what they believe when people challenge them...and so that they can profess what they don't believe or what they are struggling to believe in. And most of all, drop the fake crap, stop pretending we're cool when we're not and just love these youth for who they are, for who God made them to be.

Young adults are also the future of the church. They are the ones that are getting married and having children, thus, increasing the membership numbers of a congregation. There are strong leadership roles that these folks play too, Sunday school teachers, ministry team members (I don't like the word committee, sounds boring), event planners, bible study leaders. But this group is also faced with its challenges...wedding planning, working overtime, finding work, going to school, sick kids, kids who don't sleep through the night, kids school and sporting functions living in a different city or state than family, finances, etc. Like the youth of our congregation, the young adult/young family set is also over booked. I remember when I was in high school, my mom had a dry erase calendar by the door and it was constantly packed with events that the three of us kids had between Sarah's softball, Chris' rowing and my band and choir stuff. And they are struggling with the same questions youth face, but they look at it with a different lens than youth do as they are at a different place in their lives.
We need to find how to engage these young adults and young parents...how do we as a church provide them with a safe space to discuss the parts of scripture they question? How do we as a church provide them a place to discuss the struggles that young people face with finding jobs and managing finances? How do we as church help provide sabbath to young parents so that they can have time for themselves and/or for their significant others/spouses? How do we engage them when they are tired from not having slept the night before because of crying children or working on their dissertation or any number of other things that keep young adults burning the candle at both ends?

Youth and young adults/young families are all the future of the church...

Strike that...they ARE the church! They are the church now and here.

Are you ready to embrace that change, church? it's happening right now

A Canaanite Woman and a Gran Torino - Pentecost 9A

Pentecost 9
August 14, 2011
Matthew 15:21-28

If there was ever a 100% human portrayal of Jesus within the Gospels, there are three main examples which pop into my head, Jesus cleansing the temple, Jesus in the garden, and Jesus in his interaction with the Canaanite woman that we heard this morning. Now many attempts have been made to try and clean up this interaction between Jesus and this woman. It’s almost as if we would prefer that Jesus was not 100% human sometimes, especially where a text like this is concerned, and so we try and create a kinder, gentler Jesus than the one that Matthew portrays in this text. So maybe Jesus was just testing the faith of this woman, maybe he wanted her to act more like a proper woman and not address him in such a bold manner…a manner which was stereotypical of prostitutes of that time. But what if Jesus interacts with the Canaanite woman in this way because he’s just telling it like he sees it at that moment?
When I was reading the text this week, the plot of the movie Gran Torino popped into my head. It’s about a man named Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet from Detroit. He was a widower who neither trusted in the young priest who frequently called on him after his wife died, nor his neighbors, a Hmong family who had recently moved in next door. Walt really wished they would just go away, along with the rest of the people who had caused such a change in the racial diversity of his neighborhood. But things took a twist for Walt when the youngest of his neighbors got caught trying to steal Walt’s car. All Walt asked for as punishment for the crime was that the boy do some chores for him as Walt decided to reform the boy and do what he could to keep the boy out of his cousin’s gang…and as their relationship developed, Walt became more and more involved with the Hmong family that he originally despised. The neighbors became family and in the end, Walt made the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the lives of his neighbors from the gang that threatened their safety.
Within this movie, Clint Eastwood captured very accurately the continued racial tensions that exist within the city of Detroit and its suburbs. But what I like about it is that it demonstrates what can happen when we look beyond ourselves and dare to see our neighbors beyond the stereotypes that seem, all to often, to define us. It is a portrayal of a broadening worldview…one that also takes place in our gospel text this morning.
At this point in the journey, Jesus and his disciples were in the district of Tyre and Sidon, a land formerly known as Canaan. The folks who lived there were considered to be the enemies of the Jews since the time of Noah. The Canaanites, later called Syrophonecians, were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, the son that Noah cursed for having seen Noah naked. They were also pagans who worshiped Phonecian gods and had been slaves to the Jews for sometime, as was promised to Abraham by God. So the fact that Matthew refers to the woman as a Canaanite rather than a Syrophonecian seems to play off the adversarial nature of the relationship between these two groups of people. So, if it is surprising to Jesus, or to the disciples, that a Canaanite woman would approach Jesus and ask for his help while he was in the land formerly known as Canaan, it should really only be because the Canaanites did not take too kindly to the Jews.
It is obvious, though, that this woman knew exactly who Jesus was and knew of the miracles that he had performed. And it would seem, given the relationship between the Jews and the Canaanites that her willingness to cross the divide signifies the desperate nature of her daughter’s situation and the depth of concern that this woman has for her daughter.
The reaction of the disciples and of Jesus to this woman, however, is quite shocking when you think about it. Instead of being warm and welcoming, the disciples wish to cast her off back where she came from and Jesus first ignores her…twice, then he refers to her and her people as dogs, which were at that time seen as unclean in that cultural framework. And this is the part of the story that we wish to clean up a lot of the time. We like the part where Jesus praises the woman’s faith…though she never actually confesses anything…and we like the part where the woman’s daughter is instantaneously healed. But it’s the initial reaction of Jesus to this woman that makes this story difficult to read and to interpret…and so we try and interpret it by seeing Jesus in the kindest light possible and sometimes this leads us to portray the woman as the bad guy.
But we miss the point when we try and clean this story up a bit to locate the kinder, friendlier Jesus in this interaction…Matthew didn’t sweep things under the rug and neither should we.
When we try and clean this story up and look for the nice Jesus in this story, we miss out on the human aspect of Jesus that Matthew was trying to show here…as well as the divine aspect that is also on stage…with Jesus, they are one and the same. In Old Testament times, we see a God who was known to change his mind from time to time. And what we see when we look at this story is a fully human and fully divine Jesus who also changes his mind…a very human Jesus whose figurative sight is broadened to a greater vision of what God’s kingdom really is…who God’s kingdom encompasses. In this interaction we see a man on a mission from God to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel who realizes that maybe more than just the house of Israel needs to be saved…maybe they…maybe we…all need saving.
Two weeks ago, we heard the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 men plus women and children and there were 12 baskets of food left over…one for each of the tribes of Israel…and at the end of this chapter of Matthew we hear of the feeding of 4,000 with there being 7 baskets of food left over…7 being the number of completion in the Hebrew tradition. And in between these two stories is the tale of a woman from a group of outsiders…a woman from a group of people that were considered the enemy, having the boldness to remind Jesus of the leftovers …how there is still enough to go around even after all the children have been fed. And it is because of her testimony that we see a shift in Jesus’ mission…a shift from a mission to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel to a mission to save all of the lost sheep.
When Jesus died on the cross, he didn’t just die for the sheep of the house of Israel, he died for all of us. His worldview broadened to see the grand scope of the inclusive nature of the kingdom of God…his arm open not just to some, but to all.
Jesus may not have been a grumpy old man like Walt Kowalski in the movie Gran Torino and certainly Walt Kowalski is no Jesus, but in the end, both Jesus and Walt were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good…Walt for the family that he had become closer to than his own family and Jesus, not just for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but also for the Canaanite woman and her daughter and for you and for me and for all of humanity.
Amen

It's Not About Us - Pentecost 8A

Pentecost 8
August 7, 2011
Matthew 14:22-33


This summer at confirmation camp I got the chance to traverse the high ropes course at Camp Tomah Shinga. I made it through the course last year with not much of a problem and this year, after the initial climb up the pole to the course, it seemed like I was going to make it through about the same as last year, if not faster. The belay team had my rope tight, the course was steady, and I raced across the first beam like an experienced acrobat…but then we got to the wire I had to cross…which was not that big of a deal…until the wind picked up. Ah yes, I said to myself, that was a factor I had not thought about since last year there was not much wind. I had seen a couple of the youth become almost paralyzed by these brisk breezes that came through that afternoon, but you never know until you experience it for yourself just how much a strong wind can make you question your trust in a rope and the group of folks that are keeping that rope tight.
So when I was reading this text this week, the first thing to pop into my head was this experience and I thought “oh sure, I know how Peter felt when he was walking on water and the wind picked up.” After all, I had experienced something similar. Peter and I had both been walking somewhere that humans don’t normally walk, trusting in something to keep us going until the breeze picked up and then we started to question what in the world we were doing in our respective positions. Though, when I thought twice about my trust in that rope, I didn’t have that problem of sinking as steel wires and water are two very different things.
And that’s when I realized that maybe it’s not about me and it’s not about Peter in this account from Matthew. Maybe it’s about something more.
It can be so easy for us to make it about Peter, to look at this story and say, look how much faith he had in Jesus that he actually got out of the boat trusting that Jesus would give him the ability to walk on water…but when the wind picked up, he took his eyes off of his savior and that is where he got into trouble…that is when he started to sink. So this is our lesson, to be more like Peter when it comes to getting out of the boat…but at the same time be less like Peter when we’re walking towards Jesus on the water. This is a comforting reading for us who live in an individualistic society, we can put ourselves in Peter’s shoes comforted by the fact that even Jesus’ closest companions messed up a time or two or over and over again. They gave it their all but often times they struck out. And you know, this is not a wrong reading of this text, there are multiple ways of going about it.
But where this can get dangerous is that we might start telling ourselves, oh, if I just had more faith and kept my eyes on Jesus, I wouldn’t be in this financial mess…I wouldn’t have been laid off…if I hadn’t taken my eyes off of Jesus, our marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart…if I had just had more faith, Jimmy would have beaten the cancer…if I had just had more faith…the list goes on and on of ways we could beat ourselves up thinking that we should have had more faith…if we had just kept our eyes on Jesus.
But this is why I think that it may be that Matthew’s account of this story isn’t about Peter and it isn’t about us…it’s about Jesus. You see, we could go on and on about the faith it must have taken Peter to get out of the boat after Jesus tells him to. We could admonish one another to have the courage and faith that it took Peter to get out of the boat. But if you look at the words Peter uses when he addresses Jesus, they are the same as the words that the company of Satan, the high priest and the mockers at the cross use to test Jesus. If it is you…command these stones to turn to bread…confess to us that you are the Messiah, the son of the living God…come down off of that cross and save yourself…command me to come to you on the water.
Poor Peter wants so badly to get it right, but in the process things go horribly wrong and he ends up on the bad end of a good deal. And we do the same thing sometimes…if it is you, Jesus, heal my friend…get my spouse a job…find me my soul mate…reveal the winning lottery numbers to me so I can get out of debt…then I will truly know that it is you and will truly be able to trust you.
The older I get and the more opportunity I have to read about the disciples, the happier I am that Jesus chose who he chose. This was not a first string starting line up…maybe third string or bench warmers…but that’s good because most of us don’t do any better than they did…we try and we try and we put all the effort in that we can but none of us fit that perfect model of discipleship. We mess up, we take our eyes off of Jesus when the winds pick up and we get scared, our trust wanes when storms brew and knock us around like a little life raft in the ocean during a hurricane. We are sinful beings, it is impossible, no matter how hard we try, to keep our eyes on Jesus all the time, it is impossible for us to have the mountain of faith that we so desperately want to have. You know what, though, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t matter. We don’t have to be perfect and have an impressive amount of unwavering faith…because it’s not about us…it’s about Jesus.
It’s about the one who came from God to save us from ourselves. It’s about the one who sends us out and then accompanies us on the journey. It’s about the one who comes to us in the middle of the sea ready to reach down his hand and pull us up when we begin to sink and pull us back into the boat. Jesus doesn’t care about the level of faith we have because he knows that we have it through the gift of the Holy Spirit…Jesus himself said that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed we can do great things. Little faith is enough faith for Jesus because it is still faith and because Jesus is the one who had faith enough for us all, who put so much trust in his Father and our Father, that he went to the cross and gave up his life for those of us who struggle along side of Peter and the other 11 disciples. We want to get it right but sometimes we fail and sometimes storms emerge, some that we see and some that are completely unexpected. And when things go awry and when those storms rise up, Jesus is the one who comes to us in them and reaches out his hand to bring us to safety…we might not always recognize it at the time, but regardless that hand is always there ready when we need him.
The most freeing part of a ropes course is the zip line. That’s the part where you put 100% trust in the rope and the line and give up control of what is going to happen in the minute or two that follows. The same freeing experience can be had when we stop worrying about whether we’re good enough and trust 100% that Jesus loves us enough that, even though we might not always recognize it, even though we stand and struggle next to Peter and the other disciples, Jesus will always be there to reach down his hand and pull us up out of the water and back to safety. It’s the letting go that’s up to us.