Red Stuff

July 13, 2014

Pentecost 5

Genesis 25:19-34

This morning, I want to talk a bit about instant gratification.  It’s a pandemic.  If you carry a cell phone of any kind with you, anyone who has your phone number can get ahold of you at any time, day or night.  If you have a smart phone, not only can they call or text you any time, but they can also e-mail you, send you a message via facebook, twitter, snap chat, or Instagram…and, more often than not is it at least hoped for, if not outright expected, that you will respond somewhat quickly.  And it’s not just technology that has us hooked on instant gratification.  Got bad credit? No credit? No problem, we want to sell you something right now.  You know you want it, so come by our store today and drive home with a brand new thing for $25 a month for the next 60 months (plus tax and interest fees).  There was even a commercial that ran at Christmas time advertising an online company that would allow you to buy extravagant Christmas presents on credit and pay it off over the next 12 months…at which point Christmas comes around again and you start all over…but you’re the cool aunt for buying your nephew the ps4 he has been wanting since before it came out. 

The problem with instant gratification is that it wears down on our ability to wait for things and our willingness to work hard in order to achieve our goals.  I once got into an argument with my grandmother because she was boasting about one of my distant relatives who had gotten ordained online so he could do a wedding for a friend.  She couldn’t understand, until I explained it to her, my frustration that she was so proud of him for spending 30 minutes online to get ordained when I was in the middle of a 4 year master’s program which would ultimately result, but not guarantee, my ordination. 

The other problem with instant gratification is that it creates the illusion that we have more control than we actually do. 

As we arrive at this part of chapter 25 of Genesis, we get to a place in the story of God’s people where, if you blink, you will miss something.  We go from Rebekah being barren in verse 21, to Esau and Jacob’s birth in verse 25 to seeing her twin boys as teenagers in verse 28.  These are two boys that never got along, even in the womb.  The Lord tells Rebekah, in the midst of a difficult pregnancy, that her babies would later become two nations, nations that would struggle against each other, but that the older would end up serving the younger.  And when they were born, it was quite apparent that they were different. Esau was born covered in red hair while Jacob was born with smooth skin, though eager to not fall too behind his brother in meeting the world.  As they grew, the differences between Jacob and Esau became more and more pronounced.  Esau, grew up to be a hunter…a real man’s man, where as his little brother, Jacob, preferred a more introverted and refined existence living in the tents where he became quite the cook. 

And the thing that probably intensified the division between the two boys what that mom and dad picked favorites.  Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, whereas Rebekah loved Jacob.  Not usually something that you want to do if you hope that your already feuding kids will get along in the future…or even the present. But so it was.

One day Jacob was cooking some lentil stew and Esau came in to the tent from the fields hungry and demanded a bowl of that “red stuff.”  Jacob consented, but cunningly changes the subject and begins bargaining for Esau’s birthright.  Esau agrees to Jacob’s proposal and, for the cost of his birthright, meaning, his right to double the inheritance and to take the place as the spiritual head of the household after their father died, Esau got a bowl of stew and some bread…but to a teenage boy who thinks he is about to die from hunger, what does that mean when you can have a bowl of lentil stew now? Nothing.

Now, we could do what comes naturally when reading this story and shake our heads and wonder what in the world Esau was thinking for selling his birthright for a bowl of stew…and it must have been some pretty amazing stew.  Esau’s agreeing to sell his birthright for a bowl of stew demonstrated that, in that moment, he cared more about being able to control his hunger right now than he did about his well-being in the future.  He wanted the instant gratification of a full stomach after a day of hunting and farming so much that he wasn’t thinking about the future implications of the deal he made with his brother.  As so he forfeited the privilege of  later becoming the head of the household, of the property and land and wealth that came along with it because he was so fixated on what he could get now that would make him feel better.

Esau is not the only one with issues in this story.  Jacob lived up to the second meaning of his name “the one who deceives” when he took advantage of his brother’s desperate situation.  He knew that Esau was at a weak point due to hunger, and so he took his chance to claim not only the spiritual and material blessing of the birthright, but in this case the promise to Abraham of many descendants and nations was at stake…and who wants to let that go when you have the opportunity to grasp it sitting right in front of you at the cost of only a bowl of stew?

Which begs the question - What’s your red stuff?

 Is there anything that you can think of that you have been offered in the past that offered up so much satisfaction in the here and now that you didn’t even think about the implications for the future? 

Have you ever offered up red stuff to someone else as a way to achieve something that you didn’t think you could get on your own?  No need to answer now…but give it some thought.  We all have our red stuff…the substitute forms of food that feed us immediately and that are within our control…the things that give us that sense of instant gratification.  Things that we are willing to compromise our faith for, for the sake of easier gain. We’ve been offered it…we’ve offered it up to others. 

But here is where the catch comes in.  We may shake our heads at Esau’s quick willingness to sell his birthright for a bowl of stew…we may even shake our heads at Jacob’s taking advantage of his brothers extreme hunger in order to secure the birth right.  But even in the midst of this family feud and the feud caused when Jacob truly steals not only Esau’s birthright but also his blessing, God’s plan is working itself out. This wasn’t simply a brief exchange in which one brother profited in the long term while the other brother profited only temporarily.  The Lord had told Rebekah directly that her older child would serve her younger child, and in the selling of a birthright for a bowl of stew, the Lord’s will was done.  Jacob would be the one through whom the promise to Abraham would be passed down, not Esau.  And so, in this strange interaction between two brothers that never got along in the first place, God’s work still got done. 

God’s work gets done in the strangest circumstances…in the selling of a birthright for a bowl of stew…in the selling of a brother over some extreme jealousy…in the selling of the location of where the Lord’s own son would be praying the night before his crucifixion.

And so the take home here is the in the midst of the bad situations we get ourselves into, God’s GOOD plan is going to work itself out.  And that’s the definition of the Gospel…it is God’s good news in the midst of our bad situations. 

Faith of our Fathers

July 6, 2014

Genesis 24: 34-67

Pentecost 4A

On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail in regards to the proceedings that took place on July 2nd. It was on the 2nd of July, 1776, that the Second Continental Congress voted on a resolution that legally separated the thirteen American colonies from British control. In the letter to his wife, John Adams wrote: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” Mr. Adams was two days off in his guess at when the birthday of the United States would be celebrated…however, for the most part, the majority of what else he wrote to Abigail has happened and continues to occur when we celebrate our nation’s birthday. 

President Adams was a person of faith living in a time of significant transition as the 13 colonies were moving from being subject to British authority to their own autonomy as a country.  What is interesting about this letter to Abigail is that while he was realistic about what declaring independence would mean in the future, he had faith that ultimately the ends would justify the means and that God would grant his blessing upon this new nation.  He continues “You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. -- I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. -- Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even although we should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

Last week we heard about the story of the binding of Isaac.  How Abraham and Sarah had become so enamored with the child that they had waited so long for, that they placed him above God, the one who had provided for their every need.  So God put Abraham to the test, and without questioning, Abraham proved his faith and his trust in God.

That faith and trust carry over to today’s lesson.  We pick up in the middle of the story in which Abraham sends his servant to Abraham’s brother’s house in Haran to find a wife for Isaac. 

Sarah has died and Isaac was nearing 40, which was well passed the typical age in which folks got married at the time.  Abraham did not want Isaac to take a wife from the women of Canaan, the land in which they lived, and he did not want Isaac returning to Abraham’s hometown for fear that he would find a wife there and settle down in Haran, failing to return to the land which he was set to inherit through the promise that God had made to Abraham.

So Abraham sends his servant to Haran, making him promise to bring back a wife for Isaac from Abraham’s brother’s house.  When the servant reaches the city of Abraham’s brother, Nahor, he stops at the well to pray.  His prayer is that God will grant his success in finding a wife for Isaac and asks that the woman that God had set apart for Isaac would come to the well and offer not only to water not only him, but his camels as well.  Before even completing this prayer, we meet Rebekah, who has come to the well to fetch water.  She offers to water Abraham’s servant, as well as his camels. 

Upon completing this task, Abraham’s servant places gold bracelets on her arms and a ring in her nose, which was a way of claiming her for Isaac while also serving to show Rebekah and her family that Abraham would be more than able to pay a bride price for Rebekah.  Rebekah then runs home to tell her family about what had just happened, decked out in the gold that Abraham’s servant had given her.

Our reading picks up here, with the Abraham’s servant’s testimony of God’s enduring loyalty to Abraham by leading the servant to Rebekah, Isaac’s future wife.  His testimony wins the consent of Rebekah’s family and Rebekah agrees to return with the servant to Abraham’s house to become Isaac’s wife.  Rebekah’s agreement to this arrangement is without question, which we will discover later is not surprising considering her decisive nature.  So Abraham’s servant returns to Canaan with Rebekah and her entourage, and she is delivered to Isaac to takes her as his wife and loves her, finding comfort in his love for her in the midst of his sorrow over his mother’s death. 

Faith and trust is an important thread in this story, as it is in many of the stories of Genesis.  Abraham had faith that God would provide a wife for Isaac from the house of his brother.  Abraham’s servant had faith that God would make him successful in his quest to find such a wife, which he saw as a sign of God’s faithfulness to Abraham and wasn’t afraid to tell others about it. Rebekah’s family had faith, upon hearing the testimony of Abraham’s servant, that Rebekah was being called to become a matriarch of many nations and that God would bless her in her travels and into the future.  

And, finally, there is the faith of Rebekah, a faith that cannot be overlooked, because it is faith with which Rebekah makes the decision to leave her father’s house and travel to a land she has never seen before to marry a man she has never met before all based upon the testimony of a stranger she met at a well.  It is her faith which allows Isaac to be comforted after the death of his mother and it is her faith that helps shape the future for her son Jacob, who will later become Israel.  

It was a faith that, similar to Abraham, allowed Rebekah to lean in on the promises that God would provide.  She depended on God above all else, even when it meant that sometimes it meant taking action to help ensure that God’s promises would be fulfilled. 

As we come to the end of a weekend of celebrating out nations independence from British rule, as we walk through a time in which the words independence and freedom are being bandied about in dangerous ways, as we look out upon a nation that is increasingly divided, we are called to look to Rebekah as an example of faith and of dependence on a God who provides and a God who saves.  To lean in on the promises that whether we see it or not, and regardless of the folks who claim that God has folded to the laws of man and agreed to be kicked out of our schools and places of government, that God is still here, still providing, still blessing.  We are called to walk by faith, to believe in the promises of things that we have yet to see, trusting that just as God has made good on his promises in the past, God will continue to make good on his promises to us now and in the future.  

John Adams was right when he wrote Abigail 238 years ago.  He got the date wrong, but he was right about the celebrations, right about the cost of independence, and right about God’s being present in and faithful to this nation, just as God is in every other nation on earth.  And for this we give thanks. 

The Binding of Isaac

In the Jewish tradition, the story of the binding of Isaac is called the Akedah.  It is a story that has challenged many scholars and pastors, especially in our modern time and it is a story that has caused Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike to be seen as suspect by the atheist community.  One prominent Atheist, Christopher Hitchens, in his book “God is not Great,” uses the Akedah as an example of why religion poisons the world.  He argues that it is appalling to think that faith traditions would lift up the story of a man so ready to take the life of his own child to prove his faithfulness to a deity as a bastion of faith, and that a deity who demands child sacrifice is abhorrent in and of itself.  From a preaching perspective, this text is certainly a difficult one. 

How do we be faithful to this story while admitting that a God who commands a man to sacrifice a son who he waited until he was 100 years old to father is quite troubling? Especially in an age when child sacrifice in and of itself is disturbing and where children are highly valued.  A god who commands such a thing is off putting.  A father who agrees to such an act without so much as a “why?” is distressing. So the easy way out would be to toss this text out the window and move on. 

Except, that there is a lot that we can learn from the story of the binding of Isaac.  It is obviously an important part of the Genesis narrative, or the folks who wrote Genesis would not have included it as part of the tale of God’s relationship with Abraham.

Last week, I mentioned that Abraham was very devoted to his God, following from his home to a land he had never seen before, entering into a covenant with God that required the institution of circumcision, believing in God’s word that he would one day be the father of many nations.  And God made good on every one of his promises…even though the last promise took a little longer than most people expected…so long that Sarah and Abraham laughed when they were told that at 98 and 99 years old, respectively, that Sarah would become pregnant and give birth to the son that Abraham had been promised so long ago.  But though it was later on in life, God made good on his promise and Isaac was born. 

I can imagine that Abraham and Sarah loved and doted on their long waited for son greatly…buying him the finest clothes, the most well-bred camels, making sure he ate the finest foods so that their son would grow up to be healthy and strong.  Spoiled was probably an understatement for this couple that waited until their 90’s to have their first, and only, child.  Nothing was too good for Isaac, the son of Abraham. 

It seems, though, that with the clothing and the camels, the toys and the fine meals, that Abraham and Sarah’s attention shifted away from the God who had called on them and provided for them for so long, to the comfortable life they had as a happy family of three.  They were content, they finally had what they had wanted for so long, and their focus changed. 

So God decided to test Abraham’s loyalty.

God had provided everything that Abraham had, his land, his family…all of it had come through God making good on his promises. And so Abraham’s test was to give something back.  Something that was so precious to him that it had caused God to question Abraham’s continuing devotion to him.

“Take you son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

To us, this seems like a barbaric command, but to those who live in the time that Abraham lived, a time when child sacrifice was common place, it wouldn’t have been an outrageous request.  In the ancient world, it was believed that offering up the first born child as a burnt offering to the gods was an act that showed great reverence to the gods, and it was believed that such sacrifices would garner favor and protection from the Gods.  So this command to take Isaac and sacrifice him to God would not have been shocking to them like it is to us.  What would have shocked them, however, is that, in the end, God sent his angel to stop Abraham from taking Isaac’s life, offering up – instead – a ram.  Abraham’s loyalty to God had been proven in not only attempting to follow through with God’s command, but in having the faith to be confident in telling Isaac that God would provide the animal for the sacrifice. 

There are many things that we can take away from this text, but I’d like to touch on two of them.  The first is that human sacrifice has no role in our God’s plan.  There are many other gods out there who demand human sacrifice of one form or another, the gods of war and violence demand the sacrifice of not just young men and women who serve their country in the military, but also of our children, of the elderly, and of people of all ages, on the altar of fear and increased gun sales.  The gods of greed demand the sacrifice of the well-being of children at the hands of rising food prices, human trafficking, neglect, cuts to education funding, homelessness, etc,.  These are not sacrifices that our God demands…in fact, scripture tells us that they are contrary to our God’s plan. 

The second thing I wanted to touch on is that sometimes our God does put us to the test.  We don’t like to talk about it…in fact we like to talk about it so little that there has been at least a generation raised up in the church that believes that the sole point of religion is to make them feel better about their lives.  But the truth is that when we faithfully follow God, we are going to asked to do things that don’t make us comfortable, we are going to be challenged to be better at loving our God and loving our neighbor by being called to be honest when we confess the things we have done that we shouldn’t have and the things we should have done by failed to do. We are called to make sacrifices of time, talent, and treasure for the sake of God and for the sake of his gospel. We are called to provide for the needs of others on God’s behalf and to help others to stand up when they have been laid on the altar of sacrifice to other gods.  Sometimes being a follower of God is as far from comfortable as we can get because it means admitting that we are not in control.  And we pray that God will not lead us into temptation out of fear that our lack of faith will be found out, that the curtain we are hiding behind will be pulled back and it will be discovered that we have chosen to seek out a less demanding alternative to God.   

There is a need to return to being honest about what being a descendant of Abraham and a follower of Christ means.  It means that God will test our loyalty to him from time to time…it means we will be asked to make sacrifices of our own time, talents, and treasures…and it means that other, more “fun” and “easy to please” gods are going to come our way and try to take our attention and our loyalty away from our God. 

And we can remain confident in our God, because unlike other gods, our God will not demand human sacrifice, our God makes good on his promises, and our God has shown us the ultimate power of his love for us by giving up his own son so that we could receive the promise of abundant life and of a future with him in paradise.  It is because of these things that we can have confidence in the face of other gods when they come knocking on our door.  For we know that our God provides for every need, even if it means calling on us to be the ones to do the work on God’s behalf, and while sometimes our loyalty to him comes into question, God’s loyalty to us never fails.  

Father Abraham

Pentecost 2a

June 22, 2014

Genesis 21:8-21

Father Abraham, had many sons,

Many sons had father Abraham

I am one of them and so are you

So let’s all praise the Lord. 

And so the song goes, right arm, left arm, right foot, left foot, turn around, sit down.

But the problem is, I don’t know if I want to be all that closely associated with this father Abraham.  I mean, he sounds great at a glance.  He believed God and got up to leave his home land for a land he had never seen before, whose location he wasn’t to know until God placed a big, flashing neon arrow above the place and said “here you go!...but I forgot to tell you about the famine.”  He believed God when God entered into a covenant with Abraham that required that he circumcise himself and all the males in his camp as a visible sign of the covenant. He believed God when God told him that his descendants would number as many as the stars in the sky, even though he was getting on in age and Sarah was barren.  He believed at age 99 the promise that God made to him that Sarah, who was still barren and now 98, would give birth to a son.  He pled for the sake of Sodom and Gomorrah, talking God into sparing the city for the sake of 10 righteous, who sadly were nowhere to be found. I can get behind this Abraham.  I can happily claim this Abraham as an ancestor and praise the Lord for his faithfulness.  

That’s only half of Abraham’s story.  The rest isn’t so great. 

When Abraham and Sarah arrived in Canaan, the land the God had promised them, and found that there was a famine there, they took an extended vacation over to Egypt where conditions were much better.  It seemed to Abraham, however, that the couple had a slight problem.  The problem was, though, that Sarah was quite beautiful…so beautiful, in fact, that Abraham became afraid that upon seeing her, Pharaoh would become so taken by her beauty that he would kill Abraham and take Sarah to be his own wife.  So he made Sarah agree that if anyone asked, she was to say that she was his sister and basically was cool when Pharaoh believed them and took her for his wife anyways.  This wasn’t the only incident like this.  It happened one other time, only the second time, they played Sarah off as Abraham’s half-sister.  

Later on, when Sarah and Abraham realized that their biological clocks were not ticking any slower, Sarah presented Abraham with Hagar, her hand servant, with instructions to take her as a second wife and sleep with her in hopes of producing a child.  This was not a show of Sarah’s lack of faith, but rather a regular custom of the time.  You see, if a woman was married and then found to be barren, she could be cast off by her husband and seen by the community as cursed and disgraced.  So women in situations of infertility would often give their husbands other wives or concubines so that an heir might be produced for her husband and that she might remain married to him. In Sarah’s case, the plan worked a little too well and a little too quickly, it seems for the result of Abraham taking Hagar as a wife was the birth of Ishmael, and a very jealous Sarah, who was so mean to Hagar when she was pregnant, that Hagar ran away from the house.  Hagar eventually returned, but Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar and Ishmael persisted, even through the birth of her own son, Isaac. No child of a slave woman would share an inheritance with her son, Sarah thought.    

Abraham and Sarah were certainly no Holy Couple.  They were certainly faithful to the promises made to them by God and we should hold them in high esteem for that.  When it came to human relationships, however, they were extremely flawed self-preservationists.  More worried about themselves than anyone else, even each other.  Notice how Abraham is more concerned with his own death than Sarah being taken as the part of Pharaoh’s harem?  And Sarah is more concerned with her own offspring than about Abraham’s love for his other son.

I don’t think that this story is ultimately about them, however.  Well, in a way it is, but in a way to points to the fact that when we are left to our own devices, we often act just like Abraham and Sarah when it comes to human relationships…flawed self-preservationists. 

But we cannot ignore the fact that the story is also about these two small role characters, Hagar and Ishmael, the wronged woman and her son.  And as much as this is about Hagar and Ishmael, it’s really not about them, either.  It’s about the actions of God within this story and within the human experience. 

In the midst of the mess that Abraham and Sarah have caused on account of trying to make God’s promise of a son come to fruition by pulling Hagar into the midst, and then casting her out on not just one, but two occasions, God comes through and meets Hagar where she is.  In fact, Hagar is one of the few women in the bible to have direct conversations with God.  The first conversation occurs when Hagar has run away from Sarah.  The angel of the Lord finds her off in the wilderness and instructs her to return to Sarah.  Then he makes a promise to her that her offspring will be greatly multiplied and that she shall name her child Ishmael, which means “God hears.” And what is incredible about this first interaction is that Hagar gives God a name “El-roi” which means “God sees.”  The second conversation that Hagar has with God takes place after Sarah has demanded that Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out.  God hears the cries of Ishmael and comes to the aid of the boy and his mother by opening her eyes to the presence of a well in the middle of nowhere. 

Earlier, God had assured Abraham that he would be with Ishmael and make of him a great nation.  And God made good on his promise.  God heard Ishmael’s cries in the wilderness and came to him and remained with him as he grew. 

So what we see in this story of a flawed patriarch and his equally flawed wife, both called and chosen to be the ancestors of many nations, is God’s unwavering compassion in spite of, and often despite of our own human failings in tending well to human relationships.  We see a God who not only hears, but also sees through the midst of our own failings and comes to the aid of those who crying out in the wildernesses that they have been abandoned in.  This is a God who doesn’t just swoop in in the moment of need, but remains along the entire road of the journey. 

Ultimately what it comes down to it is this.  Sometimes we are the Abraham and Sarah’s, focusing more on our own self-preservation than the needs of people around us.  Sometimes, when left to our own devices, we needlessly cast others out so that we can feel comfortable.  And sometimes we are the ones whose needs are overlooked and feel cast out for the sake of others feeling better about themselves. 

But in the midst of the brokenness of human relationships, God is still at work.  Meeting us where we are, hearing us when we cry out, opening our eyes to the resources that we need, and sticking with us along the journey.     

Trinity

June 15^th, 2014

Holy Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:3

Did you know that the word Trinity never appears in the bible?  From Genesis 1 to Revelation 21, not once does this word appear in scripture.  Yet, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a living and vital part of what we confess as a part of our Christian faith.  The doctrine has its origins in the Great commission found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus commands the disciples to go out and baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Later on, Paul used a Trinitarian formula as a salutation in his writings. The Grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.  Sound familiar?  It comes from Paul’s 2^nd letter to the Corinthians.

Even though the word Trinity doesn’t appear anywhere in the bible, lots of time, energy, and God only knows how many trees have gone into attempts to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. Many church fathers and scholars have made attempts to explain the Trinity.  I even have a video which makes an attempt to explain it away, but only ends up as a complicated mess.  In the end, the best that scholars and video editors alike can is throw our hands up in the air, say those words that scholars hate to say “I don’t know”, and let the mystery of the Trinity remain, acknowledging that the closer we think we are to figuring it all out, the further and further away we actually are.

We could try to explain the Trinity using analogies…something concrete as an attempt to explain something so abstract.  

When I was in confirmation, our teacher used an apple and an orange to explain the Trinity.  Apples and oranges, we were told, have three parts – the rind, the flesh, and the seed.  Each are a part of the apple or orange, but each is also distinct in form and function.  The flesh of an apple cannot become the seed, and so on and so forth.  When Chris was in catechism in the Roman Catholic Church, he was taught that the Trinity is like the different states of matter in Water.  Ice and water and vapor are all made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but they are in different forms. 

At some level the analogies are helpful…but when it comes down to it, they all come up short in trying to capture what the Trinity is. That’s ok, the analogies are supposed to come up short, because human reason cannot wrap itself around what the Holy Trinity is because the Holy Trinity is what it is…a divine mystery…and sometimes letting a little mystery permeate our lives of faith is ok.

So why do we spend a Sunday torturing preachers and parishioners alike with a topic that is beyond human comprehension and always leaves us tied in knots? What the point of assigning a Sunday to something that the more we realize and admit that we cannot understand, the better of we are?

Well, let’s take a step back for a moment and worry less about trying to figure everything out about the trinity and let’s take a look at some things that we do know about God, who is the Trinity.

And I think a good place to start is the question, what is God like?

If you turn on the TV you can easily find televangelists that love to give you their take on God.  God wants you to be rich, if you have enough faith and give enough money to the church, God will reward you…God is angry at this group of people or that group and that’s why natural disasters have happened around places where those people live.  God hates you and me and our children and our whole country…God has let innocent children die in school shootings because we have systematically kicked God out of our schools.  Have you heard these messages? 

There are a lot of folks out there preaching them. 

And, I’m not going to lie, there are some very troubling passage in scripture, particularly in the Old Testament that may lead us to think that these things are true.  In Exodus, God repeatedly hardened Pharaoh’s heart when Moses approached him about letting the Israelites go.  In Job, God makes a bet with a member of the Holy court that Job would not sway from his faith even if he lost everything.  People are struck by lightning for worshipping improperly, the list goes on.  And as these stories become piled upon one another we do start to see an image of an angry and jealous God, a God who pulls on the puppet strings and zaps people with lightning on a whim.

But the problem when we look only to these troubling passages in scripture, when God starts to take on a form that only shows one side of God’s story, the question arises - is the story of God and God is like being told by folks made in the image of God? Or is it a story told by folks who have made god in their image?  Writer Anne Lamont once wrote that you can be pretty sure that you have made god in your images when god hates all the same people you do.  And she’s right.

There’s another side of the story though, one that begins with the beginning of our scriptural witness to who God is. 

The creation story in Genesis 1 tells us a story of a God that exists beyond time and beyond space.  A God not created, eternal, and incomprehensible.  A God who is all powerful…who commands something to come into being and it happens.  A God who calls those things which he created “good” and blessed them and tells them to be fruitful and multiply.  A God who made you and me and the rest of humankind in God’s own image. 

What specifically this means, we aren’t sure. But we can say with absolute certainty that being made in the image of God means that somewhere within us, each of us carry the mark of God.  And though we may try to change it, deny its existence, cover it with tattoos, piercings, different hair colors, it always has been and always will be there.  From our first breath until our last…and then some. 

We were not created out of some whim one day, as is the case in other creation stories of that time.  We are a deliberate creation of God, each carrying the mark of God in us. The mark of a God who cannot be measured by time or space, a God who was not created but created everything, a God in three persons who, though they are individuals, co-exist in a divine dance whose beauty defies our human comprehension.

Each created, as my theology professor in seminary put it, to pray and to play.  To be open to the mysteries of the faith but to trust in their promises.  I don’t know and couldn’t tell you specifically how bread and wine become body and blood in Holy Communion.  But I believe it because Jesus makes that promise to us, to be present in bread and wine at the table. 

I don’t know and couldn’t tell you how the Trinity works.  But of the words of Jesus Christ to baptize in the name of the father, son, and Holy Spirit, I believe in the Trinity.  I believe most of  the words of the Athanasian Creed which speak of an almighty God, three in one, one in three.  Who are three persons and yet one in divinity and glory and majesty.  My faith tells me that this is true, even if trying to understand it means throwing my hands in the air and saying “I don’t get it...and that’s ok.”

An open letter to the President and Congress

Dear President Obama, Vice President Biden, House Speaker Boehner, members of Congress, 

My name is Jennifer Kiefer.  I am an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), I am also a wife, a mother, a gun owner, and a very concerned citizen. 

When I was 15, our world was rocked when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire in Columbine High School.  Just a few days later, I sat with the rest of the student body at Grosse Pointe North High School on the bleachers of the football field after someone had called in a bomb threat to my school. Just a year and a half ago, I stood in a Dunkin Donuts in Lawrence, KS, watching children being led out of Sandy Hook Elementary school wondering what in that world I was doing bringing my unborn child into a world that is so apathetic to violence that not even elementary school children are safe.  The worldview that I and my generation possess, and that of the generations that have come after us, is one in which there is a very distinct reality that we will go to school, or work, or a house of worship, and never come home.  Because we live with this worldview, because we live in a time when there is such apathy whenever an act of domestic terrorism takes place, those who died at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and all other shooting in this country have died in vain.  This shouldn't be.  

As leaders of this country, you have a difficult task.  The task of upholding the Constitution of this great country.  You must do this in the face of lobbyists who believe that what they are selling is the most vital to your re-election to office.  A difficult task indeed.  

As an ordained member of the clergy, I believe that your first task as a governing body of this nation is to protect the unalienable right to life of all this countries citizens, not their gun rights. 
 The preamble of the Constitution states the following: 
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

We are at a juncture in which domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare are no longer being promoted with the current gun laws and mental health resources present in this country.  

Today, June 10, 2014, is the date of the 4th mass shooting in this nation since the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.  

Mr. President, you made a promise on December 19, 2012, to do everything in your power to prevent an event from Sandy Hook from happening again.  From my vantage point as an everyday citizen, I've only seen the gun laws become more lax.  

In Isaiah, the prophet speaks of a time in which swords will be turned into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ tells his disciples that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.  We have become a nation that is living and dying by the sword, but in our case we are living and dying by the gun.  

Now is the time, now is the time to make moves that will make this country and, in particular, the children of this country, a safer place.  I do not want my daughter to grow up with the knowledge that she could go to school one day and not come home, or that she may come home but she may have to watch her best friend be killed.  

How many more innocent people have to die before you stand up to the gun lobbyist and 1) change gun laws and 2) reform the mental health care system in this nation?  

You may lose donors, you may not win re-elections, but you will be able to sleep at night knowing that your children, your grandchildren, and children all over this nation are safer.  And for that you will have the thanks of grateful parents around the world.  

In God's Peace, 
Jennifer L. Kiefer

Take chances, make mistakes, get messy

June 8, 2014 
Acts 2:1-21 
Pentecost 

I wanted to start my sermon this morning by asking all of us to pause for a moment. Now take a deep breath in…and exhale. Another deep breath in…and exhale. One more…breathe in…exhale. 

Congratulations, you have just participated in a conspiracy. 

Pentecost is the perfect day for us to participate in breathing together, for it is a day in which we celebrate the birthday of the church and commemorate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in wind and flame, in the speaking of various tongues…and yes, even in water. It’s a day in which we look back at the history of the church and see the ways in which the Spirit has been at work, but it is also a day in which we look forward towards where the Spirit is moving us in the days ahead.
The feast of Pentecost is not a creation of the Christian church. As we hear in the book of Acts, Pentecost was already going on before the church was born. The word Pentecost is something that the Christian church borrowed from Greek speaking Jews who used that word as a renaming of sorts of the festival of Shavuot, or the feast of Weeks. In the Jewish tradition, Pentecost is an observance of the day that Moses received the law from God on Mount Sinai. It is also end of the celebration of the grain harvest, a seven week season of gladness that began with the harvest of barley and ended with the harvest of wheat…we read in the book of Exodus that folks were to observe the feast of weeks with the first fruits of the wheat harvest.  As a part of this celebration, folks were to bake two special loaves of bread from the first fruits of their harvest and bring them to the temple in Jerusalem in thanksgiving for the harvest.  This feast got the name Pentecost because it falls 50 days after the end of Passover. 
It was on this feast day that the disciples were all together in Jerusalem and were probably out observing the festival. It had been about ten days after Jesus had ascended into heaven and the disciples had obeyed his command to remain in Jerusalem until the arrival of the Holy Spirit. During that time, they decided that it was unsuitable for there to only be eleven disciples so they cast lots and voted Matthias in as the twelfth disciple, to replace Judas Iscariot.

And then the Holy Spirit showed up.
While the disciples were out, all of a sudden, from heaven came sound like that of a violent wind and tongues of fire appeared on the heads of each of the disciples. Then each of them, filled with the Spirit, began to speak in different languages so that those around them could understand them speaking in each of their native tongues. We don’t know exactly how it worked and it was probably an event beyond human comprehension…for there were only 12 disciples, but there were at least 16 different languages represented. So how did that work, specifically? Did a couple get to speak in more than one language? or did they think that they were speaking in Aramaic but the Spirit was deciphering what they were saying so that everyone could understand what was being said? The details don’t seem to matter but, however it happened, it is no wonder that a crowd gathered and became puzzled by what they had seen…and it is no wonder that the folks who heard this chaos wondered if the disciples had had a little to drink that morning. 
What the people in Jerusalem witnessed that day was the fulfillment of what had been spoken by the prophet Joel, a pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh. It wasn’t just the disciples upon whom the Spirit was coming to, but everyone…all flesh. There was, in that moment, an increase in understanding between the disciples and those who gathered around them through the speaking in different native tongues by the twelve from Galilee. 
Some scholars have suggested that the Pentecost event is a reversal of an event that occurred in the beginning of scripture…an event that resulted in confusion and scattering…the tower of Babel. In Babel, human pride instigated the building of a tower that the men who were constructing it thought could be built tall enough to reach up into the heavens. The pride of those who built the tower, and their belief that they could be like God, resulted in the tower being knocked down and the languages of the people becoming confused so that they would not be able to understand each other. 
Where at Babel, there was a great scattering because of human pride…in Jerusalem on the festival of Pentecost, there is, in a way, a unification because of the work of the Spirit. And we might want to stop there and sing and rejoice at the work of the Spirit and the formation of the church in this gathering and unification…but that’s not the end of the story and to stop there would be far too easy and ignores the fact that there is still pride and still confusion and scattering. We must keep going because the Spirit keeps going…it did not stop on Pentecost and neither do we. 
The thing about the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is not that our lives will be made easier because she has come, but rather, in the coming of the Holy Spirit, a monkey wrench is often thrown in our plans and our paths sometimes change course from where we think they should go. If the Holy Spirit had not been poured out upon the disciples, I’m sure James and John and Peter and Andrew could have easily gone back to their career as fishermen. Matthew could have gone back to tax collecting.  The others could have gone back to the careers they had before Jesus invited them to follow.  I wonder if in those days of waiting they thought about that possibility. It would have been easy, they knew what they were doing, they had done it all their lives…Zebedee and Sons, and whatever other companies run by the disciples could very well have been restored.  But in the pouring out of the Spirit and the giving of the ability to communicate to people outside of Galilee, the idea that they could go back to commercial fishing was gone. They had a new mission, a mission to go out and spread the good news of the Gospel to the people of all nations and tongues. The Spirit had been poured out upon all flesh and now they had to go and awaken people to the presence of that Spirit. 

And go out they did.  They went out with the task of spreading the Gospel and along the way they ran up against some speed bumps and sometimes they made mistakes, but that didn’t stop them from going or the Holy Spirit from working through them.  In the end, most of the twelve laid down their lives for the sake of the Gospel that they had been sent to proclaim.  So much for going back to fishing and tax collecting. 

As a community coming out of a time of difficult transition…a long period of difficult transition…we run the risk of falling into a dangerous situation.  We have been having a lot of fun in the last 8 months and there is a lot more fun to come.  But it can get dangerous if, after an extended period of transition, we settle down in these pews, in this pulpit, in the office, and get comfortable.  Because if we do that, we are not listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit calling us out of our comfort zones and into places that need us most.  It would be just like if Peter and James and John had gone back to fishing instead of staying in Jerusalem.

When I was in middle school, a cartoon came on the air that was based off of the book series, “The Magic School Bus” and the popular line spoken by the eccentric teacher, Miss Frizzle was the following – “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy” And I think that this is exactly what the Holy Spirit calls the church to do.  To be step out of our comfort zones and sin boldly for the sake of the Gospel.  Following the Spirit’s guidance, there is so much amazing ministry we can do utilizing the facilities that the Schultz fund has allowed us to renovate and utilizing the amazing gifts of the people of St. John. 

We are not always going to get it right.  We are going to make mistakes and mis-starts.  But that’s not going to stop the Holy Spirit from working through us to be an active and vital part of our community.  We already get our hands dirty serving Gods Works Meals, volunteering at Ronald McDonald house, volunteering with care and share, serving with the fish fries, planting our garden whose proceeds will go to support needs in our community.   Where else is the Holy Spirit calling us to serve?  How can we active in the community in a way that people immediately know who we are, where we are located, and what we are about based only on hearing the words St. John Lutheran church? 

As we breathe together on this day, I invite all of us to enter into a summer of considering where the Holy Spirit is guiding us as a family of faith.  We do it together and we do it with the outpouring of the Spirit.

Don’t be surprised if the Spirit sends us in a direction we totally didn’t expect.  She does that from time to time.  Amen.