YEAR B 2024 feast of pentecost

Pentecost, 2024
Acts 2:1-21
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Psalm 104:25-35, 37

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

As you know by now, I sometimes consult language experts when preparing a sermon.  This usually means checking a particular blog by Mark Davis, a Presbyterian pastor from California.  Most times, there’s nothing that stands out in his word-for-word translation of the readings, but sometimes there’s something that really makes a difference, when compared to the translation we get in the bulletin.

And today is one of those times where I stumbled onto something significant in the reading from Acts.  As we heard, the crowd that gathered around the disciples could understand what they were saying, and they ask, “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”  Our own native language.  Now there’s a perfectly good Greek word that means “language,” and that word is glossai.  Glossai means “language.”  But that is not the term Luke uses here.  Instead of language, he uses idia dialecto, which means idiomatic dialect to you and me.  

So the crowd is actually asking, “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own idiomatic dialect?”  It is specific, personal, tailor-made for each person.

Now dialects are mostly regional, but they can also be class-based, or occupational.  On a regional level, we get things like the “all y’all” of the deep south, and the “gnarly dudes” of southern California.  If we throw in things like accents and vocabulary, Americans living in rural Georgia and rural Vermont could hardly even have a conversation, even though they are technically speaking the same language.  So, for the crowd in Acts to simply hear their native language might still make it hard to understand.  Hearing in their own dialect means they understand what is being said.

And then when we consider idioms, it ramps it all up.  If I say, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” you all know what I mean.  But in other countries they have different phrases for a hefty downpour.  Some make sense to us, like the Hungarian, “It rains as if it had been poured from a basin,” or the Russian, “It is pouring like from a bucket.”  But what would you think if you were in Ireland and heard someone say, “It's raining shoemakers’ knives?” Or, in Spain you heard, “It's almost raining husbands.”  Or, in Wales, “It's raining old ladies and walking sticks.”  I’m not from around here, apparently.

The use of an idiom gathers a community who are all in on the joke.  And that necessarily means you can tell who isn’t from around these parts, right?  If someone says to me, “It is raining young cobblers,” I would say, “You’re from Germany, aren’t you?!?”  So an idiom tells us who’s in and who’s out, while sharing a dialect makes us able to understand what someone is saying.  The crowd asks, “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own idiomatic dialect?”  How can I not only understand, but also know that these people get our idiosyncrasies?  How could everything that usually separates us from one another suddenly be dissolved?  They get me and I understand.

Now let’s go back to the scoffers.  The ones who sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine.” What they have just witnessed, in sight and sound, is the coming of the Holy Spirit.  What the scoffers have seen is the arrival of this Spirit in a very tangible way.  Something like tongues of fire on people’s heads, rushing and violent wind, people speaking in multiple languages.  Assumedly, they do not understand what is happening, and so they scoff.

But actually they do understand.  Because remember how the disciples started speaking in tongues?  They weren’t speaking in some kind of possessed nonsense way; they were speaking in languages.  Real dialects and idioms.  Languages that people spoke, and understood, and wrote with.  The scoffers did understand.  Everyone understood.  So why the hostility?  Why the accusation of drunkenness?  Why would hearing and understanding make them turn away and refuse to listen?

Well, let’s go back for a minute and imagine that the disciples were not speaking in languages that people understood.  What if the disciples were all speaking in, say, English?  No one in Jerusalem would have any idea what these men were saying, and therefore the disciples could be dismissed as some crazy little cult.  Filled with new wine, no threat to anyone, and certainly of no importance to you and me as we walk by.

But what if, instead, we suddenly understand what they’re saying?  And so does everyone else walking by.  Each in our own idiomatic dialect.  In that case, there’s a sudden realization that this message is for everybody.  Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Cretans, and Pamphylians . . . whoever those people are.  What the disciples are saying applies to every possible person in the world, and all together, and all at once . . . And that is what makes the scoffers scoff: The impossibility of everyone.  Every idiom and dialect.

And what is the message they are proclaiming?  Well we hear it from the non-scoffers.  They say, “in our own idiomatic dialect we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power.”  That’s the content of the message: God’s deeds of power.  Why would someone scoff at that?  Why is it that hearing of God’s deeds of power makes the scoffers scoff?  Well, we can only speculate, but here’s a possibility.  Maybe the reason scoffers gonna scoff is because that’s not how life works.  You don’t suddenly become fluent in another language; it takes commitment, and duolingo.  You don’t give credit to God for your achievements; you give credit to your university, or your co-workers, or your own hard work and effort.  The disciples are not qualified, not authorized.

The disciples didn’t do anything to become these brazen apostles in the street.  In fact, they were still hiding from the world.  Since Easter!  The disciples have not been to rabbinical school.  Which means they have no knowledge of God’s power.  You’re going to listen to a bunch of scared losers who thought Jesus was the Messiah?  What are you, filled with new wine? 

Peter quotes the prophet Joel:  In those days, God’s Spirit will be poured out on all flesh, even upon slaves, both men and women.  And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.  Everyone.  All flesh.  Men and women, slave and free.  Even the Elamites and the Pamphylians—though I still don’t know who those people are—but this Spirit is for all people.  This message is for everybody.  Even the scoffers.  And what message is this?  This message for all people?

The impossibility of everyone.  It is a message of unity in the Spirit.  As Paul says in his letter to the church in Corinth: “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”  There are not many spirits giving a whole bunch of different gifts.  There is one Spirit. 

These gifts of the Spirit, poured out on the Church, do not rely on our earning them, or deserving them, or even needing them.  Those disciples huddled in the room that we just heard about in the gospel reading, they were frightened, and grieving, and doubtful, and not expecting Jesus to show up.  But he did.  And he breathed the Spirit onto them, and sent them out to be his witnesses.  And, I don’t know if you remember this from after Easter, but the next week, they were still huddled behind that same locked door with Thomas, when Jesus came back.

My point is, we have no idea if they ever left that room.  This is not exactly the crackerack evangelism team.  Jesus breathes on them, says, "Receive the Holy Spirit.”  And they were like, great.  See you next week Jesus.  Right back here behind the same locked door again.  And . . . take note . . . Jesus does come back.  Even though they did nothing, he comes back to them.  Back to Acts . . .

Notice the setup for this reading today:  “When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place.”  Now I’m guessing here, but I have a hunch they were all together in one place hiding behind a locked door.  And again, they are not out knocking on doors and preaching with bullhorns.  They don’t seem to be doing much of anything.  And still, the Spirit rushes in with all her pyrotechnics, and they are emboldened to proclaim the power of God in languages they have probably never heard, let alone understood.  It is not because of them: it is because of the Spirit.  The Holy Spirit.

And the same Spirit who gives trembling Peter the courage to raise his voice and address that crowd, that same Spirit is in this room today, as we gather in Massillon.  You and I were baptized into that same one body, in the same one Spirit.  This same Spirit who gave courage to those disciples gives courage to you and me.  Gives us the strength to speak a word of love.  Gives us encouragement to minister to those around us.  Gives us wisdom to know when to be silent.

We do not expect tongues of fire to descend on our heads this morning.  We do not expect to start speaking in languages that we don’t understand.  But we do expect God to meet us in this place.  We do expect to be fed with the body and blood of Jesus.  And that same one Spirit is still at work in our lives today, guiding us to do more than we know or expect, to go and proclaim God’s deeds of power.  God is still shaping and guiding the Church, through that same Spirit.

Whether you are frightened or bold, grieving or hopeful, doubting or faith-filled, American or Pamphylian, Jesus meets us here today, and says to us, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Amen.

The Burial of Robert M. Hess, Jr

Robert M. Hess, Jr. 5/13/24
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 23
Revelation 21:2-7
John 6:37-40

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Unlike most of you, I did not know Bob Hess well.  But the two themes that I see running through his life are continuity and faithfulness.  When you look for those two things, you’ll see them at every turn in Bob’s life.  He graduated from Massillon’s Washington High School, and when he returned to Massillon, he continued to be an avid fan of the Massillon Tigers as well as the swing band.  Continuity and faithfulness.

You can see it in his love and devotion to his family.  And there’s even a hint of it in his name.  His father’s name was Robert Hess, as was his name, as was his son’s name, who passed away at too early an age.  There is faithfulness and continuity in keeping the name Robert M. Hess going.

You can see it in his love for gardening.  Some people get excited about a garden for a year or two and then get distracted by other things.  But attentive gardeners know that weeds need to be removed; some plants need to be thinned or pruned; there is mulch and fertilizer and so many other aspects to gardening.  True gardening keeps one eye on the past and one eye on the future.  You know where plants came from, and you know what is going to come up next spring and into the future.  Gardening also requires faithfulness and continuity.

And then there is this place, St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church.  Bob was a lifelong member here, but I rarely saw him in my first three years as the priest here.  After his beloved Beverly died, Bob started coming to church again, nearly every Sunday until the pandemic hit.  Then I didn’t see much of Bob—or anyone else—for obvious reasons.  Once we started opening the doors again, masks were required by order of the Bishop.  Bob came a couple times, but then finally told me that he just couldn’t breathe in “that damn mask,” and he stopped coming again.  Then, when we removed the mask mandate, Bob came back.  Because Bob Hess was a lifelong member of this parish, whether we saw him on Sunday or not.  He knew he was always welcome here, because St. Timothy’s was also part of the faithfulness and continuity that guided the life of Robert M. Hess, Jr.

In the gospel reading we just heard, Jesus says, "Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.  And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”  Do you see the two themes that are also in this section of scripture?  They are continuity and faithfulness.

Anyone who comes to Jesus will never be driven away.  Jesus will lose nothing that is his, and will raise it all up on the last day.  That includes you, and me, Robert M. Hess, Sr., Robert M. Hess, Jr., Robert M. Hess III, and any other Robert M. Hesses out there.  None of us are going anywhere we have not safely been all along.  Which is right in the palm of God’s hand.  We need not fear death, because continuity and faithfulness are also the promises of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  Jesus will lose nothing that is his, but will raise it all—and us all—on the last day.  Thanks be to God.

Amen

YEAR B 2024 easter 7

Easter 7, 2024
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19
Psalm 1

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Many times, when a preacher wants to use a story to make a point, the preacher starts with, “The story is often told,” and then they tell a story.  It’s probably not really a story often told, and it’s probably not really even a true story, but it hopefully gets the preacher’s point across.

So . . . the story is often told  . . . of a priest who had a cat.  And since the rectory was attached to the church, the priest’s cat often wandered around the sanctuary, sometimes disrupting the service.  So the priest asked the altar guild to tie up the cat during services, so it wouldn’t disrupt things.  This worked well for years.  The priest passed away, and a new priest came to the church.  Since the cat outlived the priest, the altar guild took over caring for the cat, and every Sunday morning they would tie up the cat before services.

Eventually, of course, the cat also died.  Shortly after that, the altar guild told the new priest they needed some money to properly do their work.  Thinking they must need new linens or something, the priest suggested they put the supplies on the account like usual.  The head of the altar guild told him they didn’t have an account with the animal shelter, and they needed to get a new cat to tie up before church.

I was reminded of this story when I was thinking about today’s first reading, from the book of Acts.  Peter stands up and announces that they must pick someone to replace Judas, so that they will once again have 12 Apostles.  And I got to thinking, why twelve?  Why not eleven?  Why not twenty?  There’s no commandment from Jesus to have 12 Apostles.  It’s not like they had three bridge games going, right?  As best I can tell, the Apostles are assuming they need to be 12 in number because they had always been 12 in number.  You know, it’s the way we’ve always done things.  Gotta get a new cat to tie up on Sunday mornings, right?  The classic church approach, from the very beginning!

And then, they use the strangest method of choosing the new member.  Since they can’t decide whom to choose, they cast lots.  Which is essentially like flipping a coin, to you and me.  But before they flip the coin, they ask God to “show us which one of these two you have chosen.”  It’s curious, to say the least, and feels a little bit like some kind of magic spell, to our modern ears.  I mean, this is not how we elect Vestry members, right?  Church governance by a roll of the dice?  

But when you consider it, it is kind of how we elect Vestry members.  We pray that God would direct our decision and voting so that we can choose the right person, and then we cast ballots instead of lots.

But here’s the thing about that scene.  It really does mirror what we do as the church—not in the specifics, of course, but in the philosophy.  The disciples decided there had to be twelve of them because there had always been twelve of them, and then they trust that God will guide them into doing the right thing.  In a similar way, we often continue to do what we have always done, trusting that God will guide us into doing the right thing.  On a surface level, there is comfort in continuity, yes.  But on a deeper level, God works through continuity.  We don’t have a habit of shaking things up just for the purpose of shaking things up.  At least not in the Episcopal Church.

In the repetition of the words of the liturgy, in the maintaining of our sacred worship space, in the weekly pattern of showing up at 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock each Sunday morning, that continuity and familiarity is fertile ground for God to guide us into the future.  If every week you came to church and found I had moved the Altar to a different place in the room, or wrote up a new liturgy on the fly, or let my cat walk around on the Altar, or—God forbid—brought in a rock band on random Sundays, you would be distracted, I’m sure.  You would feel unsettled, maybe even untethered.  It is hard to hear the voice of God when your world is all askew . . . and when you’re wondering if you might need to send that rector out of town on a rail.  God works in the familiar, is my point.  When we feel stable, and secure, and cared for, that is when we can thrive and grow.

Which naturally leads me to remind us that today is Mother’s Day.  Now I know--whether biological or adopted--every person’s relationship with their mother is different.  Some have great relationships and memories, and some have nothing but pain and anxiety when they think of their mothers.  But I think it is true that—at least in the ideal—mothers provide stability, security, and care.  Stability, security, and care.  The very things that allow us to thrive and grow.  It’s no coincidence that Christians through the centuries have used the term Mother when referring to the Church.  When we feel stable, and secure, and cared for, that is when we can thrive and grow.  

I want to draw our attention to the prayer from Jesus in today’s gospel reading.  Taken as a whole, it is called his “High Priestly Prayer,” because he is praying for his disciples, interceding for them, something like what a priest might do.  Since Jesus is our Great High Priest, this is called the High Priestly Prayer.  This prayer takes up all of Chapter 17 in John’s gospel, and the whole prayer is on behalf of his disciples, which includes you and me.  And having this prayer fall on Mother’s Day is just the most lovely coincidence.

Notice the mothering tone in these statements, and how you could imagine a mother saying these things to God about her own children:  
I have made your name known to those you gave me. They were yours, and you gave them to me.  Protect those you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.  While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me.  I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.  As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 

It is striking, isn’t it?  Jesus prays for us the way a loving mother might.  And that is so very fitting.  Because in the best situation, in the ideal world, this is what a mother wants for her children.  That they would get along with one another.  That they would be protected from evil.    That they would see that everything they have is a gift from God.  That they would know that their parents consider children a gift from God.  Yes, I know, it doesn’t always work out that way, because our mothers are not Jesus.  Mothers are human, and just as broken and struggling as everyone else.  AND, just as redeemed and forgiven as everyone else.

And, I have to add, ever since humans have existed, one of the things mothers do is feed us.  I’m not big on assigning mandatory gender rolls, and I’m not doing that here.  I’m just talking biologically and historically.  Mothers feed us.  And just as Jesus prayed for us, Jesus also feeds us, and sends us out into the world.  

So, come and feast, at the Altar of God.  And, as Jesus prayed, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  May we all go into the world, feeling stable and secure, cared for and nourished, as God intends for us, and as Jesus prays for us to be.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 easter 6

Easter 6, 2024
Acts 10:44-48
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
Psalm 98

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Today I want us to consider the four “my things” of Jesus in this Gospel reading.  By which I mean, when Jesus says, my love, my joy, my friends, and my choice.  Love, joy, friends, and choice.

Let’s start with the most-familiar one.  The love of Jesus.  We’re all steeped in sermons and bible studies and books about the love of Jesus.  We hear about it and we talk about it all the time.  We have the Sunday school song, Jesus loves me this I know to get us started, and then throughout the rest of our lives we are assured over and over that Jesus loves us.  But we rightly ask, what does it mean for Jesus to love us?  

I think it helps to remind ourselves that ancient Greek has three words for love: 1.  Philia, which is like the love we have for our siblings and friends.  2.  Eros, which is romantic love.  and 3.  Agape, which is unconditional love.  Agape love is the love Jesus has for us, the kind of love we hear about in John 3:16.  For God so loved the world (with agape love) that God sent God’s only son so that we might be saved.  That’s unconditional love.  Agape love expects nothing and offers everything.  As we heard Jesus say this morning, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  When Jesus says, “my love,” that’s the kind of love he is talking about.  Sacrificial love.  Laying down his life for us.  That’s the “my love” of our four sayings of Jesus.

Now, trickier, “my joy.”  We don’t often think about or talk about the joy of Jesus.  Most of the stories about Jesus in the gospels are passionate, and compassionate, and agonizing.  If you’re anything like me, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the joy of Jesus.  A friend of mine has a tattoo on his arm of a painting called “Laughing Jesus.”  Every time I see it, it makes me go, “Oh yeah.  Jesus definitely laughed!”  Fully human means Jesus laughed, along with everything else humans do.  But we don’t often think about that.

A joyful Jesus takes some effort to imagine I think.  And that’s because we don’t talk about the joy of Jesus.  In today’s gospel Jesus says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”  Our joy may be complete because the joy of Jesus is inside us.  The first step in that process is for us to remember that Jesus has joy to give us right?  Think about your own joy at the beauty of a sunset, or seeing someone you love do something amazing, or sharing a delicious meal with your friends.  Jesus surely had joys like that too—except, like—on steroids.  Because he was in on designing those things to inspire joy in us.  And—as Jesus just said—when the joy of Jesus is in us, our joy is complete.  Our joy is fulfilled.  So that’s two of Jesus’ sayings:  My love, and my joy.

And then the third in our list is “my friends.”  We are used to calling Jesus  our Lord, and our Savior, and our God.  But . . . our friend?  Sure, we have hymns like “What a friend we have in Jesus.”  But how often do you actually think of Jesus as your friend?  It might seem like a stretch, but it’s really not.  Because your friends are the people in your life you choose to spend time with.  And—in case it’s not obvious—you have chosen to spend time with Jesus this very morning.  Right now.

Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”  It seems that for Jesus, being his friend means that he has revealed something to us.  Has shown us what he has heard from the Father.  And there’s a crucial thing to notice here.  Jesus does not say, “I call you friends because you hear what I have told you.”  He doesn’t say he calls us friends because we understand what he says to us.  

No, Jesus calls us friends because of what he has done.  We are not used to friendship working this way, are we?  We think of friendship as a mutual thing:  I’m your friend, and you’re my friend.  I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family, in the words of Barney the purple dinosaur.  But Jesus doesn’t say that we are friends.  He says, “I have called you friends.”  The implication is, though you might not consider Jesus a friend, Jesus calls you his friend.  It is different; and it is hard to wrap our heads around, I know.  But we are friends of Jesus because he says we are.  For those keeping score, we now have three sayings of Jesus:  My love, my joy, and my friends.

Which leads us to the final saying—which Jesus doesn’t literally say, but which is more implied—“my choice.”  As we heard, Jesus says, “You did not choose me but I chose you.”  This flies in the face of hymns like, “I have decided to follow Jesus.”  It completely contradicts those who tell you that you must make a decision to let God save you.  And when you combine it with the nature of friendship with Jesus that we just heard, it also negates the idea that you are saved because you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  What makes you a friend of Jesus is that he calls you his friend.  What makes you a disciple of Jesus is that he chooses you to be his disciple.  “You did not choose me but I chose you.”

Now, I know that conjunctions are slippery things in Greek, but I love that the word “but” is in there.  I like to imagine a dramatic pause before it.  Like Jesus says, You did not choose me . . . BUT . . . I chose you!  Because that gets to the heart of the matter.  This is all God’s doing.  All from the initiative of Jesus because it is what Jesus wants for us.  As Psalm 118 says,
This is the Lord’s doing, and it is wonderful in our sight.

My love, my joy, my friends, my choice.  These four things that belong to Jesus are the best news we will ever get.  Because the love of Jesus is unconditional.  And the joy of Jesus makes our joy complete.  And we are friends of Jesus because he calls us his friends.  And the choice of Jesus is that he chose us.  Each of us.  All of us.  The love, joy, friendship, and choice of Jesus.  All these things make us able to love one another, because God has first loved us.

May God remind us every day that we are the love, the joy, the friends, and the choice of Jesus.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 easter 5

Easter 5, 2024
Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

As you surely know by now, I used to play in a band for a living.  And in our band we had a saying: If you have to explain your songs before you play them, you should probably just write better songs.  Truly great songs speak for themselves, and explaining them runs the risk of ruining them.

That’s kind of how the lessons are for this Sunday.  If I stand up here and tell you why the story about Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch is a good story, I honestly think it takes away from how great the story is.  Likewise, if I try to explain the reading from First John about love and how God loved us first and that’s what makes us able to love one another and . . . Well, I think it would only be a distraction from the power of that little snippet of this letter.

And then, there’s this gospel reading.  You know, Jesus and the vines and the branches and all that.  Powerful imagery and--to be blunt--kind of obvious, right?  Branches can’t grow unless they’re connected to the vine.  Jesus is the vine.  Sooooo . . . Amen then.

My point is this:  over-explaining any of these three readings is not going to be helpful, and--in my own view--runs the risk of taking something away from them.  And so, this Sunday, I’m just going to offer a few observations about the lessons . . . and then talk about y’all.

In the first reading, from the book of Acts, the Ethiopian Eunuch has gone up to Jerusalem to worship, and is on his way back home.  An Ethiopian Eunuch would not be allowed into the Temple to worship for two reasons:  He’s Ethiopian and he’s a Eunuch.  A double outcast has gone up to worship anyway, even though he will be rejected from the assembly.  And, in the person of Philip--at the prompting of the Spirit--God comes to him anyway.  And in such a powerful way that he asks to be baptized that very day.  From total outcast to Christian disciple during one short chariot ride.  And all because the Spirit led Philip to the right place at the right time.  Philip’s will was aligned with the will of God.  

In the second reading, from First John, it’s all just a riff on this idea:  God is love.  When we abide in God, we abide in love.  And abiding in love leads to all sorts of great things, like serving our neighbors, and finding that fear has been cast out.  The point is not that we love God, but that God loves us.  And the reason we love at all is because God first loved us.  Any good that we do is because of the love of God working in us.  The Spirit leads us, as the Spirit led Philip, and then God does what God does, because God is love.  Any time we make a promise it is always accompanied by the phrase, “With God’s help.”  Apart from God we can do nothing, which leads us to the Gospel reading for today . . .

Jesus is the vine.  You are the branches.  This is a pretty obvious analogy, right?  I mean, if a branch gets cut off from the tree, it dies.  To stay alive it must stay connected to the tree.  But here’s a case where it’s important to look at the actual words as they’re recorded.  We lose something in English because we don’t have a way to make the word “you” into a plural.  Well, unless we’re from the south, in which case you’ve got “y’all” to work with.  And, come to think of it, let’s do that!  What Jesus is saying here is “I am the vine, and y’all are the branches.  Y’all remain in me and y’all bear fruit.”  

And why is that important?  Because it’s not about individuals having a personal relationship and being hooked into Jesus; it is about the community of believers remaining connected to Jesus.  Jesus says, “apart from me, y’all can do nothing.”  Apart from Jesus, our parish can do nothing?  Well that’s not true, right?  If we didn’t have Jesus we could still gather in this space, and we could have festive dinners together, and we could even collect food and donations for our neighbors in need.  We could still do good works without Jesus right?  The Rotary and the Elks and the Jaycees do that same kind of work, right?

Well, maybe what Jesus is saying is that those kinds of good works, that kind of fruit will be gathered up and thrown into the fire to be burned.  For us, those who have been cleansed by his words—as he says—the value of what we do comes from being connected to Jesus together.  We could spend a whole bunch of time being busy and active and doing things, but if we’re not connected to Jesus, those things are pointless . . . They’ll be gathered up and burned.

And then here comes the amazing part . . . The tricky part . . . The part that makes us go, “What?”

Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”  It’s tempting to take this to mean, If I remain in Jesus, and I ask for a new bicycle, I will get one tomorrow.  If you abide in me, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.  Okay, I wish to win the lottery this afternoon so that I can give all the money to St. Timothy’s Church so we can fix up our building and start new programs so that we can continue to abide in you.  In Jesus name, Amen.

Seems like a slam-dunk, doesn’t it?  Something we want for all the right reasons, rooted in the continued abiding in Jesus?  But what’s missing here is the plural—our old friend y’all.  Doing things on my own isn’t properly seeking the will of God, because it requires . . . y’all.

If we want to do the will of God, we will inevitably run into this nagging question:  What is the will of God?  Every week together, we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.”  Why are we praying for God’s will to be done?  That’s kind of strange, isn’t it?  Praying that the will of God would be done?  This is us, the “y’all,” asking together that God’s will would be done.  And that’s because we find God’s will in community.  With other people.  

Way back before I ever went to seminary, the first step in that process was to go meet with my Rector a few times.  Just the two of us.  Sitting in his office.  And how I hated those meetings!  He asked very hard questions, and he never told me whether I was answering correctly.  But one question came up over and over, because it was the point of our meetings.  And that question was this:  How do I know if becoming a priest is God’s will?  How can I be sure?

The answer—simple, and yet as profound as can be—is this: If my will is aligned with God’s will, then I want what God wants, and God’s will is revealed in other people.  If my will is the same as God’s will, then I want what God wants.  I go where God wants me to go.  I will be who God wants me to be.  And I can only know that in community.  You could say, God’s will is in The Y’all.

If we abide in Jesus, we will want what God wants.  Or, as Jesus says, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.”  Staying connected to Jesus is the key.  Abiding in Jesus leads us to want what God wants.  And so, you’re asking, how do we abide in Jesus?  The answer is, I will with God’s help.  In the promises we make at Baptism, it is spelled out for us.  

And that is always done together, in community, in the y’all.  We renew our baptismal covenant together.  We gather in worship together.  And the baptismal promises we make are together, with God’s help.

You could look at the Baptismal Covenant in your Prayer Book and see the responses, but the answer is always, “I will, with God’s help.”
With God’s help, you and I promise together to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.  Together we promise to persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.  
Together we promise to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.  Together we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Together we will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Always together.  And together we abide in Jesus.  With God’s help.  We—together,  all y’all—have done and will keep doing amazing things, with God’s help.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 easter 3

Easter 3, 2024
Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Psalm 4

“While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Okay, first thing we need to do today is look at the epistle reading from First John.  You’ll recall last week I pointed out the challenge of him saying he was writing these words so that you may not sin, while at the same time saying “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.”

And today we heard, “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.”  John says we abide in Jesus; John also says no one who sins abides in him; John also says, if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.  I’m as comfortable as the next priest with holding contradictions when it comes to our faith life.  But this section of First John the past two weeks makes no sense to me.  Point being, if you find it confusing, you are not alone.  I am right there with you.

Moving on.  “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”  This is a key part of the gospel reading we just heard.  While in their joy, they were disbelieving and still wondering.  Now first we need the context for this reading, because I'm afraid we got dropped off in the middle of a story.  In Luke’s gospel, we go from the empty tomb to the Road to Emmaus.   That’s when Jesus appears to the disciples, but they don’t recognize him as they walk together on the road.  It is only after they sit down to eat together that something changes:  “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.”

Right after that, those disciples get up and rush back to Jerusalem, where they find the 11 disciples gathered in a room.  “Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”  This Road to Emmaus story is one of my favorite stories in all of scripture because of that very line: He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.  Ahem.  [points to Altar]  Anyway, while they were recounting this amazing story to the disciples, that’s the moment when Jesus shows up in the room in this morning’s reading.  And “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”

But let’s back up again, to the empty tomb.  When the women get to the tomb, the stone is rolled away, and two men in dazzling white clothes appear beside them.  And they say, “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.”  Remember how he told you.  And then the women remember, and they run to tell the disciples.  

And as Jesus is walking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he says to them, “how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”  Remember how he told you?  Remember what the prophets said?  He’s been telling them this would happen.  Over and over he’s been telling them.  They knew it was going to happen, and yet, while in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.

This past Monday, April 8th we had an eclipse around here.  Perhaps you heard about it.  Hopefully you were able to see it, because it was amazing!  We’d been hearing it was going to happen for months.  For years in fact.  Here comes the eclipse.  Here’s how it happens.  Here’s how big the sun is relative to the moon.  Here’s what will be amazing about it.  Here are some tricks you can do with a colander, or by wearing red and green.  We knew all about it, we knew precisely when it would happen, as it had been foretold by the . . . scientists.  And yet . . .

While in out joy we were disbelieving and still wondering.  Everyone I’ve talked to who experienced the full eclipse has said they knew it would be awesome, but they didn’t know it would be that awesome!  We knew it would happen, we believed it would take place, but while in our joy we were disbelieving and still wondering.  We all understand the science, but it is still somehow an impenetrable mystery.

Jesus told them over and over that he would be handed over to people who would kill him, and then rise from the grave on the third day.  They heard him say it, many times.  And then when he shows up, well . . . While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.  But maybe after Monday’s eclipse I kind of understand them a little more.  

Because the eclipse was awesome and scary, and beautiful and terrifying, and understandable and mysterious, and light and dark, and every other contradiction you can think of.  Joy, disbelief, wonder.  While in their joy the disciples were disbelieving and still wondering.  

And Jesus.  Still.  Shows.  Up.  

You notice that Jesus did not require their understanding to show up?  He didn’t need their belief, or their faith, or their personal commitment, or even their memory of the words he had already told them.  Just like the first step in experiencing the eclipse is for it to happen, so the first step in a life of faith in the risen Lord is for him to show up.

You and I have doubts, in the midst of our joy.  And Jesus still shows up.  You and I have trouble believing that a person can actually rise from the dead and eat a piece of fish.  And Jesus still shows up.  You and I do not fully understand what happens with the bread and wine on that Altar.  And Jesus still shows up.  While we are in our joy, we are disbelieving and still wondering.  And Jesus still shows up.

Listen again to the collect for this day:
O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

YEAR B 2024 easter 2

Easter 2, 2024
Acts 4:32-35
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31
Psalm 133

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Taken together, these lessons could be called, “Aspiration vs. Everything Else.”  With the subheading: Shouldn’t we at least try?  But first off, we should talk about the Path of Totality!  There’s going to be a big event tomorrow afternoon with a full solar eclipse over our heads . . . if we can see it.  There are those who say, unless I can see the moon blocking out the sun, and endanger my eyes by staring at the sun for a half hour, then I will not believe.  

If you’re unfortunate enough to have spent any time on Twitter lately, you know that there is already talk of conspiracy theories, and false flag operations, and chem-trails regarding the eclipse.  And there are definitely people saying, if I don’t see it, it didn’t happen.  But other people have traveled across the globe for the chance to experience this event.  Some have the aspiration to experience it, and some have the aspiration to be taken away by the rapture that it supposedly foretells.  But, bottom line, even if it’s a cloudy day tomorrow, shouldn’t we at least try to see it?

Which brings us to the reading from Acts.  You know, the radical leftist Marxist utopia of the early church.  How did that reading make you feel?  Uneasy?  Scared?  Skeptical?  Dismissive?  It sure sounds a lot different from the church we know today, doesn’t it?  But I should tip my hand and tell you that in the very next chapter of Acts, Ananias and his wife Sapphira sell some land and give just some of the money to the apostles.  And you know what happens to Ananias?  He falls down dead, that’s what!  This early Christian utopia falls apart one verse after the reading we heard.  It is aspirational, but not practical.  They kind of overshot the goal of living in community here.  But it also raises that same question, shouldn’t we at least try?

And then the reading from First John.  “If we say that we have fellowship with God while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true.”  And, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”  Fair enough, writer of First John.  But then we also get, “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.”  Huh?  You just said if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, but then you say you’re writing to us so that we may not sin?  What gives?  Well, in this case, living a sinless life is aspirational, but with a safety valve.  Like, John is giving us this information so that there is a possibility that we might not sin, but when we inevitably do, we have an advocate.  The idea that we might not sin is aspirational.  And raises that same question, shouldn’t we at least try?

And then we come to our gospel reading, from John’s gospel.  You’ll recall, the disciples are cowering in fear and doubt in a locked room, and Jesus appears to them and says . . . Peace be with you.  They rejoiced when they saw it was Jesus.  But there is no indication in the text that anything changed for them.  They just . . . rejoiced.  Because the next week, they are cowering in fear and doubt in a locked room, again.  But when they tell Thomas about their experience, he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  

I think we automatically hear this as defiance.  Like Thomas is saying, “I am choosing not to believe,” rather than, “I am unable to believe.”  Personally, I take it more as a confessed inability.  That is, Thomas sure would like to believe.  But he knows himself; he knows his weaknesses; and he knows that he needs to have the experience himself because—let’s face it—this story he was just told is hard to believe!  Thomas aspires to believe; but he cannot.  His belief is aspirational, but needs the experience.  What does he need in order to believe?

Jesus.  He needs Jesus.  And the next week?  Jesus shows up, and again says . . . Peace be with you.  And then he gives Thomas exactly what Thomas needs.    “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

Does Jesus throw Thomas out for his lack of faith?  Or turn his back to Thomas for not believing the incredible story about his appearance?  Of course not.  And, perhaps more importantly, he does not require anything of Thomas.  He doesn’t say, “I told you so;”  he doesn’t call him Doubting Thomas.  No, Jesus meets Thomas right where he is and says, “Stop doubting and believe.”  But that’s just our bad translation getting in the way.  Because what Jesus says is, “Do not be faithless, but be faith-filled.”

And just like that, Jesus speaks the faithfulness of Thomas into existence, because the next thing we see is his profound confession of faith:  My Lord and my God!  Jesus tells Thomas that he is filled with faith, and he is.  Thomas does not set out to acquire this faith.  He does nothing apart from hear the words of Jesus, and he goes from being faithless to being faith-filled.  Jesus speaks, and it is so.  And not in a half-hearted way, either.  Thomas hears these words, and immediately proclaims Jesus as his Lord and God.  Didn’t see that coming, right?

Which brings us to the overarching lesson for you and me from these texts.  The aspirational side of our life of faith together.  Those first disciples aspired to live in a world where no one was hungry, where no one went without.  And with what happened to Ananias and Sapphira, we can see that world is not possible.  Because some people are going to end up dead!  But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

And in the reading from first John, we heard that if we say we have no sin the truth is not in us, but he’s telling us that so that we may not sin, which we will certainly do, as he just told us.  To be without sin is aspirational, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

And with the story of Thomas, we can hear that he truly wants to believe, but he knows himself well enough to know that he is unable to believe without the physical proof in front of him.  His desire for faith is aspirational, but he needs Jesus to give him that faith.

All of which leads me to the Baptismal Covenant, which we just renewed at the Easter Vigil.  After the part that sort of reworks the Apostles Creed, we come to the outlandish promises that we can never keep, but which we say anyway.  Together we promise to

Continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the Prayers.
To persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
To proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
To strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Every time we attend a Baptism, and several other times throughout the year, we make those impossible, beautiful, lofty, aspirational claims . . . and they come with a safety valve: the phrase, with God’s help.  That’s what gives us the gumption to make these promises together.  With.  God’s. Help.  All these promises are indeed possible, with God’s help.

Thomas freely admitted that he could not believe without Jesus, without God’s help.  And Jesus shows up, and Thomas says, "My Lord and my God!”  He’s the only disciple who makes this profession of faith.  The one we often call Doubting Thomas turns out to be the most faith-filled disciple, with God’s help.

Lots of things in this life are aspirational rather than practical, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  And with God’s help, we might find we actually can do the impossible.  To paraphrase from the Rite of Ordination, May the Lord who has given us the will to do these things give us the grace and power to perform them.  With God’s help.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 festival of easter

Easter, 2024
Isaiah 25:6-9
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Mark 16:1-8
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Happy Easter to you all!  I am so grateful that you are here this morning.  Last night we lit the new fire and the Paschal candle, this morning we shared a delicious potluck breakfast, and when we’re done today we’ll have an Easter Egg hunt after this morning’s service.  There’s something for everyone.  And speaking of something for everyone, did you know that there’s more than one ending to Mark’s gospel?  

Fair warning:  If your faith is based on the inerrancy of scripture, turn away now.  If you don’t know what “inerrancy of scripture” means, then stick around.  But, yeah, there’s an alternate ending to the gospel of Mark.  It’s not really called an “alternate ending,” though.  It’s called “the longer ending.”  And that’s because the shorter ending of Mark is the part we just heard.  It ends with, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  So, to sum up, there was an empty tomb.  The end.  Happy Easter!

It takes a certain amount of faith to let the story end there, doesn’t it?  Jesus was killed, placed in a tomb, and when his friends came to anoint his body with spices, we was not there.  It takes a lot of faith to be satisfied with that ending.  Which is probably why there is also now that longer ending, where Jesus shows up and talks to people.  The story felt unfinished.

It would be like stopping the Wizard of Oz with Dorothy still stranded in the Emerald City and trusting that she wakes up in Kansas.  Or like the prince not finding Cinderella to have her try on the shoe.  People really want to know how the story ends, and it’s quite a cliffhanger to end the gospel with, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Now, just because that longer ending exists doesn’t mean it is not also true, of course.  The physical resurrection of Jesus is kind of a key feature of our faith . . . obviously.  And that longer ending does line up with the other gospels, so it’s not like somebody just made it up.  But it takes the gift of faith to believe the resurrection at all, and especially when it just ends with the empty tomb.

And it’s really not fair that we get this shorter ending right now, given all the uncertainties in the world.  It feels like we deserve the longer, more certain ending from Mark.  The one where Jesus actually shows up.  Physically.  In person.  Eating fish, and lighting fires on the beach, and telling Peter to feed his sheep, like we have in John’s gospel.  Reminding us that it’s not just an idle tale.  But this year, we get this short ending, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.”

But here is the good news:  If we only have Mark’s shorter ending to work with—the gospel reading we just heard—we don’t really know where Jesus is.  But we do know where Jesus is not:
In. The.  Tomb.  It’s empty.

And that really is the most important part of the whole story if you ask me.  This shorter ending of Mark really hits on the thing that matters most.  Because Jesus could be many places right now, but we know the one place Jesus is not . . . in the grave.  He is risen!

And that is the good news for you and me.  The news we need to hear right now.  Because as any honest preacher will tell you, we don’t really know where we go when we die.  Yes, yes, of course we trust and we believe in the promises of God in Jesus.  That’s why we call ourselves Christians.  But any certainty about the beyond is . . . beyond our knowing until we get there ourselves.

But what we have heard this morning is the key:  The tomb is empty.  And that means that death is not the last word.  The tomb is empty.  And that means death itself has been destroyed.  The tomb is empty.  And that is why we have faith that we also will rise from the grave on the last day.

And when that happens, on that last day, we will be reunited with all those whom we love, and see no more.  We will be pulled up from our own graves by the one who was the first to rise up from the grave.
All because the tomb is empty.

Alleluia, the Lord is risen.  The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 good friday

Good Friday, 2024
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

When we lose someone we love, someone who means the world to us, people often try to make us feel better by saying the only things they can think of saying.  Things like God needed a voice for the choir, or a rose for the garden.  Or that somehow God needed our soulmate more than we did.  These things don’t help, to say the least.  But people don’t know what to say, and they feel like they have to say something.

But they don’t have to say anything.  And in those times of painful grief, it is usually better to say nothing.  There is no positive way to spin having someone ripped out of our lives, having our hearts broken, losing someone who means so much to us.  There is no upside, and there is nothing you can say that will make things better . . . except, “I am here.”

And this is where we sit today on Good Friday.  We have heard once again how Jesus has been killed in a most horrific way.  We have listened to everyone trying to justify their own complicity in this gruesome execution.  We have watched as most of his friends and companions have deserted him in his final hours.  

And in this moment, we want to say something, at least to ourselves.  To remind ourselves that Sunday is coming, because we’ve read ahead in the book.  We want to tell his devastated mother Mary about the rose in God’s garden and the voice in God’s choir.  We want to tell Judas about the redemptive power of forgiveness.  We want to acknowledge to our Jewish brothers and sisters that centuries of anti-semitism and genocide come from this version of the story—from the gospel of John.

We feel like we have to say something.  Just as people throughout history feel like they had to say something.  Find some words that will make everything better.  And that is why theologians come rushing in with all their fancy atonement theories to explain why this horrible story is actually a good thing, or is a necessary thing, or that God’s ways are not our ways.  All of which are just fancy ways of saying God needed another angel for the choir and a rose for the garden.

Sometimes, it is best to say nothing.  Let the story speak for itself.  Ponder our own place within what has happened.  Bring a bag of spices and wrap the body and place it in the ground.  And then sit in silence and wait for God to say something.  Because God will say something.  And if we’re so busy talking and explaining things, we might not be able to hear what it is God is saying.  So for now, let us sit and wait and listen.  Because God will indeed say something, and we don’t want to miss it.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 maundy thursday

Maundy Thursday, 2024
Exodus 12:1-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Psalm 116:1, 10-17

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Maundy Thursday.  We get the word Maundy from the Latin word, maundatum, which is also where we get the words mandatory and mandate.  It’s related to com-mand and commandment.  All these words give us the notion of being told what to to.  What is required of us.  And in the gospel reading we just heard, Jesus gives us a commandment.  He says it’s a new commandment.  

What is that commandment?  Is it to wash one another’s feet?  No.  Is it not to eat pork?  No.  Is it to reject people who don’t think or look like us?  No.  The new commandment from Jesus, the maundatum of Maundy Thursday is to love one another.  Just love one another.  And a necessary part of that commandment is the “one another” part.  Because you cannot do what Jesus commands without other people.  It requires community.  There is no me and Jesus in this commandment.  It requires us.  Together.

Four days ago, on Palm Sunday, when we got to the final verse of our closing hymn, I was suddenly overwhelmed by it all, my eyes teared up, and I had to stop singing.  I just couldn’t do it.  And though I could not sing, the song did not stop.  Because of the community.  Congregational hymns are not solos, thank God!  We sing them together.  And if the priest or anyone else has to stop singing, the song goes on.  When you cannot sing, the community sings for you.  When you cannot pray, the community prays for you.  When you cannot believe, the community believes for you.

Last Sunday, I could not sing, but the song did not stop.  And when one voice stops, the song is changed, though it still goes on.  In our community, in our worship, in our singing, you add a part that only you can add.  A certain flavor, a certain tone, a certain shakiness, a certain wrong note even.  The song is different because you are there!  When you can’t sing, or when you stop singing, the song changes, but it keeps going.  The song goes on, and it was made different because you were there.

At the close of this service, after we have set aside the reserved Sacrament for tomorrow, we will adjourn for a time into the parish hall for an Agape’ meal.  The word “agape’” means love.  Unconditional love.  And the reason churches have that meal on this Maundy Thursday night is to remind ourselves of the commandment we have received.  That we love one another.  As Jesus said, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

There will come a day when each and every one of us stops singing.  But the song will go on, because we love one another, just as Jesus loves us.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 palm sunday/passion sunday

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday 2024
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 15:1-39
Psalm 31:9-16

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

There is not much a preacher can say, after what we just heard.  Let me start over.  There is not much a preacher should say, after what we just heard.

This is the most bifurcated day of the church year.  Or, maybe it’s the fullest day of the church year.  Because it shows us the full range of the fickle nature of who we are.  Sometimes, we start by saying something encouraging, like Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, and we just keep talking and talking until we find ourselves saying, “Give us Barabbas.”  We might shout “Hosanna,” and we might then shout, “Crucify!”  And the words we choose to shout in this story—and in our lives—really do make a difference.  Because words matter.  And sometimes, what we all need to do is just. stop. talking.  As I said, sometimes, a preacher can say too much.

Everybody in this story has a lot to say.  And the more people say, the worse things get.  They just keep saying things that make the situation more and more dangerous, and no one says “STOP!”  All talking, and no peace.  Give us enough space and we will talk ourselves to death.  

In Mark’s version of this story, the one we just heard, nobody seems able to stop talking.  And once he gets sent to Pilate, Jesus speaks only two times.  First, when Pilate asks him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answers him, “You say so.”  And then all that horrible stuff happens because people can’t stop talking, and . . . Jesus remains silent.  At the end, from the cross, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22 and says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Those are the only two times he speaks.

The 22nd Psalm opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And that psalm ends with, “They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that God has done.”

A people yet unborn.  That’s us.  We are those people.  And God’s saving deeds have been made known to us, because people have used their words to make those deeds known to us.  Those are the words we need to hear.  All of us.

When you and I speak, may God give us the wisdom to choose words that are doing that same thing: Making known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that God has done.  Let’s stop with all the words and speak only of this: The saving deeds that God has done.  To God be the glory.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 lent 5

Lent 5, 2024
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Psalm 51:1-13

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Well, as you can see, this week we have another fine example of John being John in this gospel reading.  There’s a lot of mystical-sounding language that we’re not quite sure we get, and—just like we had a couple weeks ago—John feels the need to explain the one metaphor we do get: that is, Jesus’ being lifted up indicates the way in which he is to die.  But let’s jump in at the beginning . . .

The scene is the Passover Festival, and people have come from all around to celebrate, or to watch the Jewish people celebrate.  (In the same way you don’t need to be Irish to go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade this afternoon.)  It’s, you know, a festival.  So people of a different faith—or of no faith—want to come and partake in the celebration.  That’s why “some Greeks” are there.  And they come to the one disciple who likely spoke Greek, Philip who was from Bethsaida, and they tell him that they wish to see Jesus.  Phillip goes to Andrew, and then they both go to Jesus.  End of story.  Poor Greeks.\

We never hear whether the Greeks got to see Jesus.  It’s like they’re just left in the waiting room and the story moves on.  Strange, right?

And in typical John’s gospel fashion, after Jesus hears that these Greeks want to see him, his answer has nothing to do with their request.  Instead, Jesus starts telling the disciples something else: The hour has come.  To us, that sounds disconnected from the request from the Greeks, but that’s because we forgot about the rest of John’s gospel.  So let’s leave the Greeks reading their magazines in the waiting room and think back to what “the hour” means in John’s gospel.

Early in the second chapter of John, Jesus is at a wedding in Cana, and they run out of wine.  His mother, Mary, asks him to do something about it.  And Jesus says to her, “What concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”  In the 7th chapter of John, Jesus is teaching at a festival and the religious leaders are worried that he is winning over the crowds, and they try to arrest him, “but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come.”  And then in the 8th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus is teaching in the Temple, and the Pharisees are challenging his authority on technical grounds, “but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.”

And then today, in the 12th chapter of John, Andrew and Philip go and tell Jesus about the Greeks who wish to see him. And Jesus answers them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  This is it, you see?  It’s a turning point in the gospel of John.  Twelve chapters in, and the hour has finally come!  Great!  So . . . um, what exactly does that mean?  We’ve been waiting for the hour of Jesus to get here, and now it’s here, but now what? 

Well there’s the second half of that to look at: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  The Greek word doxazo is the one that gets translated as “glorified.”  (You can probably see that it’s where we get our word, doxology.)  Doxazo.  This word comes up in John’s gospel 23 times!  It is an important concept in John.  Doxazo: Glorified.

So, the hour has finally come for Jesus to be glorified.  But what does that mean?  What does it mean for Jesus to be glorified?  Jesus tells us, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  So it sounds like to be glorified means that Jesus has to die.  But that is certainly not how we think of someone being glorified.  We think of glory as being full of life, with winning and adulation, right?  Gold medals in the Olympics and stuff.  But here we have Jesus saying that he will be glorified by dying.  It’s not right.  You bring honor and glory by living, not by dying.  At least to us.  To be glorified is to grab hold of life, to love life.

But, Jesus contradicts our view: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  But that’s kind of an unfortunate translation, because it misses the sense of the present tense.  When put that way, it sounds like, if you sacrifice now, some day you will have life.  Which suggests a cosmic retirement account.  But in the original text it is all present tense:  That is, those who love their life now lose it now, and those who reject their life now keep it forever.  But here again, it’s some of that tricky metaphor stuff that John likes to give us.  We’re not sure what it means exactly.  

I like to think of it as a call to turn away from focusing inward.  To be open to others rather than focusing on ourselves.  Not, lay down your life for others so that you will have eternal life some day.  But more like, lay down your life for others right now, because in doing so you will experience the glory of God today.  If you want to truly live, stop focusing on living.  If you want to know how to be alive, well . . . remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  

Have you ever known someone who collects toys simply for the purpose of the monetary value of them?  Closets full of toys still wrapped in cellophane that no one has ever played with.  It’s kind of like that.  You don’t know the true joy of a toy until you are willing to unwrap it and hand it to a child so they can play with it.  And you can’t know the value of truly living if you are sitting in a box on a shelf, afraid that you might lose your life.  Take your life down off that shelf and give it away; then you will know what it means to truly live.

And speaking of sitting in a box on a shelf, let’s go get those Greeks out of the waiting room where we left them.  Back in the 7th chapter of John, there’s this interesting exchange after they fail to arrest Jesus because his hour had not yet come.  Jesus tells them, “You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” They say to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?  What does he mean by saying, ‘You will search for me and you will not find me’ and ‘Where I am, you cannot come’?”

And right after the gospel reading we heard this morning, the crowd says to Jesus, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah  remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”  Jesus responds with some metaphors about light and darkness, and then, “After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.”

Jesus hides from the crowds.  Jesus hides from the Greeks.  Those who seek him cannot find him.  He goes with his disciples to share a final meal, and then he is handed over to the authorities to be lifted up . . . on the cross.  “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  The Greeks had come to Phillip and said, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  Do they?  Well . . . has Jesus been lifted up?  Yes, and he draws all people to himself.  You, me, Greeks, Pharisees, Phillip, Andrew, and the family that keeps toys wrapped in their original cellophane in the guest room closet.  Jesus draws all people to himself, because his hour has come.

And since we’re all floating around in John’s metaphors and deeply symbolic language already, let’s go ahead and press forward.  If someone comes to you and says, “Sir, Madam, I wish to see Jesus,” what should you do?  You should point to Jesus, who has been lifted up, and draws all people to himself.  If someone asks, “Madam, Sir, where can I see Jesus?”  You can point to the places where he is lifted up: where relationships are restored, where the outcasts are welcomed, where the good news is preached, and at the Altar, in the moment where the bread is lifted up and you say AMEN, which means, let it be so.  All caps.  In italics.  That’s the point where you are saying, “We wish to see Jesus, and by God’s grace he is here.”

Jesus draws all people to himself, because his hour has come and he is lifted up.  Lay down your life, and God will lift you up.  Kneel down in Confession, and God will lift you up in forgiveness.  Go down to the grave, and God will raise you up in glory.  God is always lifting us up, so that God’s name will be glorified.  This is all God’s doing, and it is wonderful in our sight.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 lent 4

Lent 4, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

So, how about that story we heard from Numbers today?  You know, with the snakes and the pole and everything?  You gotta admit: it’s a little bizarre.  The people have been freed from slavery in Egypt, and they’re out wandering in the desert, and they start whining again to Moses about not having food or a decent place to sleep.  I mean, I get it.  But they’re not remembering what they’ve been freed from.  They were slaves under the Egyptians, and now they’re free.  But they are grumbling.

And so, God seems to say, “You want something to grumble about?  Well here are some snakes to bite you.  Try those on for size!”  And the snakes come and bite the people, and they cry out for mercy, and God tells Moses to make a snake out of metal and put it on a pole, and everyone who looks at the snake is healed. 

Okay, now I have to tip my hand about the snake story.  This is one of those times where we can’t let the facts of the story get in the way of the truth of the story.  I mean, I’m as willing as anyone to say that this story might have happened exactly as we heard it today . . . I mean, God can do anything, right?  But it is definitely one of those times where if we look too closely at the details, we’re going to get a seriously messed up image of God.  Because we’re tempted to come away thinking that, if we complain to God, a lot of us are going to have snakes in our cars tomorrow morning.  And if God sent fiery serpents every time I complained, well, I’d be covered head to toe in snake bites by now.

So, my point is, we can’t get bogged down in how the snakes got there.  Sometimes, in order to make a point, you’ve got to add some details to the story.  You can’t just start off with, “One time, there were these snakes.”   Otherwise, everybody’s first question would be, “Wait, where’d the snakes come from?”  And then you’d have to say, “The snakes are not the point.”  And then people would say, “But snakes don’t just appear all of the sudden like that.”  And then you have to say, “Okay, fine!  GOD sent the snakes.  You happy now?  Can I get back to the point of the story I’m trying to tell you?”

And I know that some people will definitely want to argue about the snakes.  Some people will say that if you don’t believe that God literally sent those snakes, then it’s just a slippery slope till you’re saying Jesus didn’t rise from the grave.  There is no good response to that kind of argument, because . . . it isn’t an argument . . . It’s a lack of faith.  But that’s a story for another time. 

And that’s why we’re now going to leave this story about the snakes and go to today’s Gospel reading . . . Where Jesus also talks about snakes!   You can’t get away from these things, I tell you!

Today’s Gospel starts right out with Jesus recounting the story we were just talking about, saying, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” so it was necessary for the son of man to be lifted up.  Why did Moses lift up the pole with the serpent attached?  For the healing of the people, right?  That their suffering might be ended.  So that those who stop dwelling on the snakes at their feet—who look to the one lifted up—would be saved.  The point is to look at the one who has been lifted up, not the snakes at their feet.

But, we also want to ask, “Where did the snakes around my feet come from?”  Or, what we really ask is, “Why me, God?  Why am I suffering?”  And here is where I want to say, WHY you are suffering is not the point.  The point is to look at the one who is lifted up, the one who can heal you, the one who brings life and forgiveness and salvation.

But I also know that someone will come along and tell you that you are suffering because God is punishing you.  People will tell you that the reason you are suffering, or are in pain, or are losing a loved one is because God is tired of hearing you whine.  And I will tell you, plain and simple: THAT, my friends, is. a. lie.

How do I know?  Because as we just heard in John 3:17, God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  God does not send snakes to torment us.  God sends us salvation through the cross, through the one who is lifted up.  Jesus said:  Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so it was necessary for the son of man to be lifted up, in order that the world might be saved through him.

That’s John 3:17.  John 3:16 has been called “the gospel in a nutshell.”  You’ve seen it at sporting events; you’ve seen it on signs from street preachers.  John 3:16 has a life of its own, because it seems to sum up the Christianity.  Most of us know it by heart, or at least some pieces of it.  How does God love the world?  In this way . . . so that people may not perish but may have eternal life

But . . . we still want an explanation for those snakes around our feet, don’t we?  We want an explanation for why we suffer, and why we have to watch those we love suffer.  And it’s easy to pin it on God, because we expect to be punished, for one reason or another.  In the back of our minds, we think it makes sense to say, “These snakes are biting me because I complained about leaving Egypt.”  We just update it to our present lives, of course.  “I failed that test because I haven’t prayed lately.”  Or, “My kid got sick because I skipped church last week.”  For some reason—and I don’t know why—it helps us make sense of the world when we pin our tragedies on God.  For some reason, we take comfort in thinking that our suffering is from the hand of God.  That God shows love by making our lives miserable.  I hope you can see how ridiculous and terribly sad that is.

John 3:16:  For God so loved the world that . . . God sent snakes to bite people who misbehave?  Nope.  For God so loved the world that God sends tornadoes and cancer to people who forget to pray?  Nope.  God sends mass shooters to punish countries that somehow “take prayer out of the schools?”  Nope again.  For in this way God loved the world:  that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.  God sends the savior, not the snakes.

And then Jesus says, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not judged; but those who do not believe are judged already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And you know what I think that last part means?  This idea of being judged already?  I think it means that spending our time looking at the snakes, fearing the serpents, rather than looking to the one who saves us from them.  Those who believe in him are not judged.  But those who do not believe are judged already.  Jesus did not come into the world to judge us.  He is not the snake who bites our feet and causes the sufferings of this life.  He is the one who is lifted up—like the serpent on the pole—to bring healing to the world . . . To all people, in every time and every place.  God sends the savior, not the snakes.

And this same one who is lifted up for our healing is also the one who is lifted up at every Altar where the sacrament is being celebrated.  As the bread of heaven, Jesus comes to heal us.  And, maybe for a few moments, in this time outside of time, God grants us the grace to stop looking at our own suffering and to see the gift of healing that comes through the power of the cross.  For God did not send the Son into the world in order to judge the world, but in order that it might be rescued through him.  God does not send the snakes around our feet.  God sends the one who is lifted up for our healing from those snakes around our feet.  May God give us the strength to believe, and to keep our eyes on Jesus, the one who is lifted up, the one who heals us.

Amen

YEAR B 2024 lent 3

Lent 3, 2024
Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
Psalm 19

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I think one way to understand today’s gospel reading is to view the anger and frustration of Jesus as being about the breakdown of community.  It looks like he’s mad because people have money and animals in the Temple.  But I think we have to look beyond those externals and look at how we got here.  And I think how we got here is because the people forgot that they are a community.  So, to understand that, we have to go back to the beginning of the community.  By which I mean, to the Passover.

If you think back to the stories you learned in Sunday school, or to movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt, you’ll remember that God meets Moses in the burning bush, and sends him to Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go.”  And then there’s a bunch of plagues used as leverage until at last the angel of death sweeps over the city and kills the first-born sons of everyone who doesn’t have blood on their doorposts.  And where do people get that blood for their doorposts?  From the lamb at the Passover meal.

In the 12th chapter of Exodus, God tells Moses and Aaron how the people are to eat the Passover meal:
Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat.

If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor.  You see how this includes everybody?  No one is left behind here.  If I have a lamb and my family cannot eat the whole thing, God requires that I invite in the neighbors, as many neighbors as it takes to eat the entire lamb.  And what does this do?  It creates community.  There are no leftovers, and no one goes hungry, and the people form a community by bonding over food.  We think the point of the Passover meal is to avoid death, but a case could be made that the point is to form a community.  To teach God’s people how to live together as one body.

And then let’s consider this morning’s first reading, also from the book of Exodus.  I’m sure you recognized what we heard as the Ten Commandments.  At first glance, these commandments seem like a hodgepodge of rules, just sort of randomly thrown together.  They certainly don’t seem to carry equal weight: don’t murder . . . and honor your parents?  But here again, it’s not about the specific rules for specific individuals.  No, the Ten Commandments are about community.  God is giving God’s people a set of guardrails for living together.  If you want to be God’s people living in the world together, following these commandments is the way to start that community.  

I mean, just look at how they are structured.  Off the bat, you get instructions for how to gather around the same God.  No other Gods, don’t make idols, keep God’s name holy, keep the sabbath.  And then all the rest are about community.  Don’t kill people (duh), don’t steal, don’t lie about other people, don’t commit adultery.  And then the outliers: honor your parents, and don’t covet your neighbors stuff.  Following these rules together builds a community.  It’s not about individual morality; it is about having a community.  The type of place where, “If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor.”  Nobody is left behind.  We’re in this together.

And, as an aside, I must say that this is why it makes absolutely no sense to post the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms and public spaces.  Because the Ten Commandments are not the basis of the legal system in the United States of America.  And it would be bizarre if they were.  Honoring your father and mother is not part of the Ohio Revised Code.  And, don’t make any idols . . . have you heard of social media influencers?  Don’t work one day every week . . . have you met any Americans?  Don’t covet your neighbor’s possessions . . . do you understand how capitalism works?  Our entire economy is based on coveting what other people have!  If we didn’t covet our neighbors’ goods, the whole system would fall apart!  And then what would we have?  Well . . . community.  We’d have community.  We may want to rethink the idea of putting the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms, is all I’m saying.

So we know that the Passover established a community of people, and we know that the Ten Commandments were intended to teach that community how to live together.  Now flash forward 1400 or 1500 years—depending on how you date things—and we go from the Ten Commandments to this scene with Jesus in the Temple.  A lot has happened in that time.  The Jewish community stopped wandering and built a Temple for the Ark.  That Temple was destroyed and then rebuilt and rebuilt again.  All the commanded sacrifices were now done at the Temple.

By now, there is a very specific and exacting system of how to do things right, a system that was carried out in the Temple, in Jerusalem.  As we see in Luke, 8 days after his birth, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple to have him circumcised, and “offered a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”  

I bring that up to remind us that Jesus was born into this system of Temple worship.  These are his people and this is his culture.  And—it is important to remember—when faithful Jews came to the Temple, they could not use Roman coins to buy the animals for sacrifice.  So those money changers were a religious necessity, to convert Roman currency into Temple coins.  Like buying tokens at the arcade or something.  You can’t have a Temple system and follow the Law of Moses without having money changers.

So why does Jesus get angry and upend the entire system?  What’s so bad about what he sees on this day?  Honestly, we don’t know for sure.  But look at what he says.  “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  A marketplace.  It sounds like the problem is that everything has become transactional.  Consider how back at the first Passover people were told to take their own lamb, one they had raised themselves, and invite over enough people to eat the entire thing.  That’s very different from bringing some coins to buy an animal you’ve never met, so that a priest can slaughter it in a room you’ll never see.  And what’s missing most of all is the communal element of the transaction.  The poor are left behind.  The lonely stay lonely.  You can do all this without ever talking to your neighbor.  It is transactional, a detached exchange: in the words of Jesus, a marketplace.

And then Jesus makes the turn and refers to his own body as the Temple.  Jesus will restore the community around the Temple of the Incarnation.  Around God in the flesh.  No longer disembodied isolating transactions between the people and God, but rather a community in Christ, gathered together around Jesus.  We are this community.  At our best, the Church is the place where no one is left out, no one is left behind.

And we bring our sacrificial offerings to this new Temple of Jesus Christ.  Our time, our talents, and our possessions.  And God does miraculous things with as much as we are willing to surrender of ourselves.  We have the perfect example of this in the ordinary bread and wine that we set on this Altar.  God takes the seemingly mundane and turns it into the body and blood of Jesus, who has been raised up, just as he said.  We don’t know how it happens, but it does.  And you are invited to this feast, because these gifts from God are given for the people of God.  Jesus creates community wherever he goes, and he is here today among us doing exactly that.

Amen.

YEAR B 2024 lent 2

Lent 2, 2024
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
Psalm 22:22-30

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

So, you’ve heard me preach before.  You know that I am not a fan of bumper sticker theology.  As Will Durst once said, if it fits on the back of a Volkswagen, it’s probably not going to turn the world around.  For the most part, you should ignore what you see on people’s cars.  But there is one exception I think, and it’s the bumper sticker that says, “Let go and let God.”  That’s a good one for us as Christians.  Let go and let God.  I mean, not always of course; it doesn’t apply if you’re hanging by a rope over a canyon.  But when it comes to trusting in God, surrendering to God, letting God do what God does, it is the right approach.

And the reason I bring that up is because I think it kind of fits with the overall theme of today’s lessons.  We’ve got four absolute banger readings here this morning.  Each one could be a sermon in itself.  But let’s start with an interesting thing I learned this week . . .

In the first reading, from Genesis, God visits Abram for the fifth time.  God makes a covenant with Abram to be the father of many nations.  And as a sign of that covenant, Abram’s name is changed to Abraham.  This is the first time in scripture someone gets a new name.  But it’s not just any name.  Adding this “ha” sound to Abram’s name changes everything.  Because God is putting part of God’s own name into Abram’s name.  They are now fused into one.  And when you say the two names together (Abram and Abra-ham) you can see that it is the breath of God that gets added to his name.  This new name not only contains part of God’s name, but it now contains the literal breath of God.  And if Abraham is the father of many nations, then God’s breath—God’s spirit—is also spread out to many nations.  God is enlarging the circle.

And then the Psalm we read together continues this idea.  God “does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty; neither does he hide his face from them; but when they cry to him he hears them.”  No one is left behind, you see?  Enlarging the circle to include the ones we forget or ignore.

And there’s more: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.”  That’s everyone living now.  And, “To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before him.”  That’s everyone who has died.  And,  "They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.”  That’s everyone who has not yet lived.  The biggest circle imaginable, those who were, those who are, and those who are not yet.  It’s literally everybody!

And then we come to Paul and his letter to the Romans.  I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: Paul is doing a little reputational whitewashing when it comes to Abraham’s faithfulness.  Remember how Sarah and Abraham doubted God would provide, and so we got Ishmael, from Sarah’s handmaiden Hagar?  And both Sarah and Abraham laughed when God said she would conceive and bear a son.  Paul makes it sound like Abraham never doubted, never wavered, but that’s not true.  More importantly, even though Abraham doubted, God still came through.  God did as promised, and Sarah bore a son.  They let go and let God.

And that’s part of what bugs me about Paul’s reputational whitewashing.  Because by way of making his argument for faithfulness leading to righteousness, Paul gives all the credit to Abraham, when in fact all credit should go to God.  I get why he does it, but it undermines the more important point of surrendering to God.  Of letting go and letting God.

Anyway, the other point Paul makes here brings us back to the ever-widening circle.  He says that God’s promise rests on grace and is “guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.”  By “adherents to the law,” he means his fellow Jews.  So Paul is saying, God’s promise extends beyond the chosen people, beyond just the Jews.  We’re back to the ever-widening circle of God’s grace to include all people, Jew and Gentile, dead and living and yet to be born.  One way to view it is, the only thing that keeps us from seeing this widening circle is our refusal to let go and let God.

And then we come to our fourth reading this morning, from the gospel of Mark.  This story comes up in Matthew as well as in Mark.  Jesus explains that he must suffer and die and be raised again from the dead.  And Peter tells him this must not happen.  And then Jesus says something like, Get behind me Satan, you are focusing on earthly things rather than heavenly things.  So what does that mean?  Focusing on earthly things rather than heavenly things?

It means different things for different people, I think.  But at it’s core, it is doing the opposite of the one bumper sticker I like.  You could say it is like saying, “Let go God, and let me.”  Focusing on earthly things rather than heavenly things.  Jesus tells the disciples what must happen.  Tells them the only way that will lead to salvation for all humankind.  Explains that the circle can only include everyone if Jesus dies and rises from the dead.  And Peter says . . . no.  This must never happen.

The way things have to be is not acceptable to Peter, because he has a different plan.  And that plan is that Jesus will destroy the people outside the circle, not rescue them!  In Peter’s mind, Jesus has the wrong script you see?  To Peter, God has enemies.  And far be it from Jesus to save those people!  But the ever-widening circle of God’s grace will include all people, Jew and Gentile, dead and living and yet to be born.  And the only way to rescue the dead is for Jesus to go and get them.

If Peter had been in church last Sunday, he would have heard his own words in the Epistle reading when he says, Jesus “was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey . . .” 

In religious terms, this is called the “harrowing of hell,” . . . which would be a great name for a band.  The harrowing of hell is what Jesus was doing between Good Friday and Easter morning.  There are fantastic depictions of this scene in the Orthodox tradition, where Jesus is pulling Adam and Eve and Abraham and Sarah and everybody else up from their graves.  In order to go and rescue those people, in order to widen the circle to include everybody, Jesus has to die.

But Peter says, no.  This must never happen Jesus.  You need to stay here with us!  You can’t die, just to save those other people.  And Jesus says, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  You want to stay here and be comfortable.  You want me to write off those who have gone before.  Peter wants Jesus to ignore what we heard in today’s Psalm:  “To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before him.”  Those who have died are included in this widening circle, and Jesus has to go down and get them.  To say no to that . . . well, that’s satan talking.

And maybe that right there is the lesson for us.  Over and over, the disciples are presented with the option to stay where things are comfortable, like on the mountain at the Transfiguration.  Wouldn’t it be great to just stay right here where we are Jesus?  Just you and us, being comfortable and secure and not having to think about those other people?  And over and over Jesus says, no.  This circle needs to be bigger!  Who else can I find?  Who else can I save?  How can I make this the day where everybody lives?!?

And that’s where you and I can think in practical terms, bring it down to how we live in this world that God loves so much.  When we find ourselves thinking something like that, where we hear a voice in our head saying God has redeemed enough people already, set enough captives free, made the circle big enough already . . . well, that’s the voice of satan talking.  The voice of smallness.  The voice that refuses to let go and let God.  Let God do everything God has planned to do from the beginning of time.  Redeem it all!  Redeem them all!  Save every single person that God loves and treasures and calls beloved.

There is room for everybody.  Don’t let satan tell you there isn’t room.  Because God has drawn an infinite circle of salvation, which includes you and me, and everyone who was, and is, and is yet to come.  This circle is meant for everybody.  The circle includes everybody.  Thanks be to God!

Amen.