The redemptive work of God

2 Samuel 5:1-5; 8:15-9:13 

 Handsome and talented, winsome and strong, also deeply flawed, proud and punishing, and then wise and benevolent in his old age, David is the ideal on-screen hero. I am, frankly, stunned there isn’t already a six season Netflix series about him. The bible gives him a hefty portion of Old Testament airtime with 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles, casting for him the perfect villain in King Saul. Predecessor to the throne, this former army general with real main character energy, is both immensely kingly then increasingly mad. He’s super jealous of David and hungry to hang onto power. Dangerous and prone to fly into terrible rages, King Saul is calmed only by the gentle harp playing of his nemesis, young David, which must drive him all the more mad.

Then we’ve got the wise Yoda figure in the prophet Samuel (whose own life is also a compelling show waiting to be made). He anoints Saul to be Israel’s very first king, and then later secretly anoints David when David is only a shepherd boy - the youngest and least likely of his many brothers to be anything but a country bumpkin, but he’s got skills, battling lions and bears to protect the sheep, and he’s a songwriting savant, making music all alone out in those green pastures near quiet streams, so maybe the series could be a musical. 

 

Then there’s the bond of a soulmate, a deep, abiding friendship with a close and intimate confidant, Jonathan, who, as a boy, watches the little kid David slay the giant Goliath in front of two mighty, cowering armies, (thatscene would be the title sequence for sure!) and then introduces himself, and the two become fast friends, and Jonathan loves our hero as he loves his own heart.

 

Jonathan also happens to be the mad king’s son, and he stands between the two to protect David’s life on several occasions. They meet up in fields and caves when David is in hiding from Saul’s fury, amassing a pirate crew of renegades and living off the land. Jonathan tries relentlessly to make peace and bring David back into the king’s good graces, and finally, in grief and sorrow, lets him go when he sees Saul will never relent.  Jonathan and David promise forever to stand by one another no matter what, and then Jonathan and Saul die in a different battle with the Philistines. (Goliath’s side gets them after all).

 

There is the love of a princess, who becomes his wife, and later is horrified by David’s unrestrained public display of emotion. Then another woman, Abigail, who saves her own husband from David’s wrath, deeply impressing him and then marrying him when her husband dies, and more women who become wives as well.

 

And there’s his sleezy, cascading into evil, obsessing over the married Bathsheba and impregnating her, then sending her husband to the front lines of battle commanding the rest of the army to retreat so he would be killed, and David could marry Bathsheba and cover up his shame. David’s greed, arrogance and cruelty are exposed in a humiliating confrontation with the new prophet, Nathan, whom God sends to David to set him straight. Crushed with grief and regret, David repents. And even though that baby does not live, he and Bathsheba remain married and other children follow, including Solomon. And Bathsheba herself rises to power, advising her own son once he assumes the throne.  

 

David’s vivid life is dogged by the threat of death, frequent betrayal, sheer terror and staggering loss, and along the way he builds the city Jerusalem, and unites the tribes and establishes the nation of Israel. He steals, cheats, rapes, lies, kills, and sacrifices those he loves for his own power and well-being. And he is also rules with wisdom and love, and is generous, kind, loyal, trustworthy, tender, and heartwrenchingly vulnerable. He ends his life passing on drawings and plans for the construction of the temple like a mantle and blessing to his son Solomon. 

 

But what’s especially compelling about David is how his heart is laid bare in the Psalms. Trust and gratitude, anguish and wonder, contrition and pettiness, anger, longing and love – half of the book of Psalms is written by him. It’s like having a glimpse of his inner world, his relationship and ongoing conversation with God. David’s prayers became the prayerbook of the Church, and of Judaism before us. Jesus himself was raised praying these same Psalms that we pray. For three thousand years - from sanctuaries to hospital bedsides, at caskets and christenings, chanted by monks and whispered in concentration camps, David’s words have been recited in every language on the planet, and the conversation with God continues. 

 

Now, having reacquainted ourselves with David, let’s imagine this week’s episode of our King David TV series begins with a flashback. A messenger, racing and breathless, arrives at Jonathan’s house, and stammers out to the servant who opens the door that Jonathan and King Saul have just been killed in battle. The household flies into a panic, people race around grabbing what they can and prepare to flee. A nursemaid bursts into an upstairs room where a young boy of five is napping. She snatches him up out of bed and carries him out, half asleep, still limp in her arms. Running to the stairs she whips around a corner and the boy slips from her grasp, dropping over the railing to the stone floor below. She screams and races to his side, and the flashback ends. 

 

We jump 20 or so years ahead to today’s reading. David has been king for some time, and most of the rest of Saul’s family has long been wiped out by David’s side in the ongoing battles for power.  The battle dust and construction dust died down, I imagine David finds himself in a period of relative peace. Perhaps he’s standing at a window on a beautiful sunny day, a soft breeze rustling the olive trees in the garden below. Calm is nice, but it can also bring up sorrow and ghosts, and David longs for his dear friend Jonathan. There is nothing David can do to change the past. But in the quiet of this pause, the question arises, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

And here comes up again that word we learned with Ruth – whose whole story is an illustration of this. The word is hesed, which means something like belongingnesss; here it is translated simply kindness. From the willingness to listen deeply, the song of God’s way rises up, and David summons a servant and asks, Is there anyone left of the family of my enemy who tried to destroy me, that I may embrace in God’s belongness, for the sake of Jonathan who did that for me?

 

And there is one person left, Mephibosheth, the boy whose tragic fall on the day of his father’s death began this episode. He survived all the killings between these enemy households over the years, overlooked, perhaps, because his disability made him seem unworthy of notice. Certainly, he was not seen as a threat or a player on the political gameboard. So David finds Mephibosheth. And the man must think he’s finally been discovered as the last of Saul’s household, and will surely die at the hand of the king. But instead, David raises him to honor, to eat at the King’s table for all his remaining days, giving him servants and Saul’s former lands. David goes on to care for him as his own son, and act as surrogate grandpa to Jonathan’s grandson Mica. 

He who was forgotten and forsaken, living in obscurity in someone else’s household, is welcomed in, given home, security, and belonging in the loving care of his father’s best friend and grandfather’s mortal enemy.  

 

God’s redemption is relentless and never-ending. In our own places of brokenness and unfinished business, we are met with grace. And from our vulnerability, not our strength, we are drawn into God’s unfolding salvation of the world.  When we seek to live honest and open to God, pouring out our pain and our praise, we’re formed for God’s purposes, and made ready to recognize the nudgings of the Holy Spirit when they come. 

 

Sometimes the task before us is clear and we know what is ours to do. And sometimes the chaos of life’s moment sets the terms and we put our head down and faithfully hang on.  But periodically a chapter ends, or a space opens up, and in the quiet the question may arise, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

When the search for an answer involves surrendering to God’s purposes, we will be drawn into the redemptive work of God, and the belongingness of God that embraces the world will be made manifest in our lives. 

 

God joins this human life with us, in all its fullness and its emptiness too. That Jesus rose from the dead means there is no darkness so deep that he is not there, no peace so restorative that he does not share it with us, no journey so difficult that he does not walk with us, no sorrow so great it will define us, no brokenness so complete that it cannot be made into a source of wholeness and life by the God who brings life out of death. This is the belongingness of God. This what God does and is always doing. 

 

Big-screen lives like David’s capture our attention, but mostly God works redemption in ordinary places like around dinner tables, and through ordinary acts like grandparenting a child who needs it.

 

And the work God has for us to do most often begins in our own impossibility, loss or brokenness. It may heal something unfinished in us, reawaken something dormant, or break us open for something entirely new. But always, it will bring deep joy, because we are made in the image of ministering God to minister to others, and when we participate in God’s world-healing hesed, we’re tasting already the meal that awaits us all at the table of the King forever. 

 

Amen.

Life goes on

 

In Meditations from the Heart, Howard Thurman writes:  

During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that
life goes on.
This we are apt to forget.
 
The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms;
the purpose of life outlasts our purposes;
the process of life cushions our processes.
 
The mass attack of disillusion and despair,
distilled out of the collapse of hope,
has so invaded our thoughts 
that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral.
There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility.
 
This is the great deception.
 
By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion 
without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace.

Let us not be deceived.
 
It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces
by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained.
 
Birds still sing; 

the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields,
and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.
 
There is no need to fear evil.

There is every need to understand what it does,
how it operates in the world,
what it draws upon to sustain itself.
 
We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil.
Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body,
the reduction to rubble of cities;
the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man 
and to give his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.
 
When this happens,
there is nothing left,
the very citadel of man is captured and laid waste.
 
Therefore, the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within.
This would be to be overcome by evil.
 
To drink in the beauty that is within reach,
to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness,
to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God
in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind—
this is, as always, the ultimate answer to the great deception.

AMEN.

A blessing on Inauguration Day

 

On Inauguration Day - a message from 60,000 feet

Hi Church-

i am on my way home to you from a journey spanning 5000 years of history, having witnessed God’s hand in all of it- through the rise and fall of empires, loss and regain of technologies and knowledge, rerouting of rivers and quaking of mountains, civilizations built and forgotten, ancient stories of human might, evil, kindness, ingenuity, apathy and faith, with ripples into our own lives, imaginations and understandings of the world.

I stood where tradition says Moses was pulled from the Nile by the Pharaoh’s daughter, touched the stone of a room where the refugees Mary, Joseph and young Jesus lived for three months of their four year journey into Egypt after saying goodbye to the visiting Magi and being warned in a dream of Herod’s wrath, and saw the 3500 year old mummy of (possibly) Joseph, buried among the Pharaohs after God saved Egypt and the surrounding nations from famine through his dreams and courage. 

We learned of ancient calendars with 36 ten day weeks and annual five day end of year celebrations, shaped around three annual seasons based on soil: Inundation-Nile flooding, Planting and Harvesting, and ate dinner serenaded by residual carols amidst remaining decorations from Christmas which, in that part of the world, is not December 25, but January 7. 

All this to say - human experience ebbs and flows, shapes and reshapes. 

What seems unquestionably the way things are is not the way they always have been or will be, or even may be elsewhere right at this moment.
But  in all things, God is still God.
In all things humans are still human.
The story we belong to is a long one, and it's deep and sure.  
And, as Lisa reminds us in the sermon below, we participate by loving one another and watching for God's invitations in ordinary life. 

In love, hope and gratitude to be in this together with you,
Kara

 

Prayer for Today

God, as our county's leadership once again shifts
from one administration to the next,
pause us here
within the scope of history and future,
to receive your presence
with us now.

Thank you for the ways healing and world-shaping
comes through ordinary people,
in everyday ways:
the flower planters and soul tenders, 
  the music makers and bread bakers,
  the heart holders and art creators, 
  the food growers and poem weavers, 
 the child raisers and story cherishers, 
 the learners and leaders, 
the witnesses and the wise,
young and old, 
 the neighbors who neighbor each other, 
every day, come what may.

God-with-us, Love Incarnate,
may we trust in you.
Keep us open-hearted, brave and kind,
with deep roots and a wide horizon,
able to see this world and all in it,
as your beloved,
and to live that way,
which is to say:
In all things may we remain
guided by your Spirit,
grounded in your love,
and buoyed by Christ's joy. 

Amen

New Beginnings

 

Epiphany: Matthew 2:1-12, Journeying through the Bible: Numbers 27, Joshua 1:1-9, 3-4

So here we sit at the beginning of a new year. New years are funny, because things are no different on January 1 than they were on December 31. But it’s a new beginning nevertheless, because from where we started counting, the world is now 2025 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, instead of 2024. 

Actual new beginnings happen in our lives all the time, tangible shifts that redefine and redirect us, like starting college or a new job, retiring or moving to a new state, being given a new diagnosis or a new grandchild.  And then there are the new beginnings that become a new beginning because everyone treats it as one, like new years. So, happy new year!

Our culture would have us seize hold of this declared beginning; new year new you! It’s a new chance to take control of our lives, to start over where we’ve slipped in our self-improvement projects. To set new goals, buy new stuff and subscribe to new apps. There is nothing wrong with setting goals or using tools to help us meet them. But the story we are sold about what a good life is tells us it’s all about us, and all in our hands, and even newness must be managed and controlled. 

Who wants to hear about what we can’t control? We got the genetics we got, were born to the place and people where we started, affected by whatever is currently polluting the air or water or zeitgeist, and our lives are tangled up in larger systems and structures mostly beyond our say so. And we are each limited, singular humans, with only so much time, only so much capacity, only so much ability. But good grief, what kind of new year message is that? Being honest about limitations is zero fun. Being vulnerable, or needy? blech. So, let’s keep reaching for control instead. And starting over at it every year! Maybe one year we’ll master it all. 

All our scriptures today are new beginnings. And, surprise! They tell a different story about what a good life is, and who shapes our lives and the world. 

It’s Epiphany, so we meet again our regular new year’s visitors: Magi, traveling from afar, bringing gifts to worship God coming into the world. This was never in their life plans or new year’s resolutions. But they lived open to the direction of something outside themselves and responded when the call came. They ventured into the unknown, deferential to the uncontrollable, obedient to the call, and in the home of a peasant woman and her carpenter husband in a nowhere town 500 miles from home, they met God incarnate face to face.  

The magi departed from that place changed. They were set on a new path, with a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and belonging to a new, small and very diverse community of those who had been in Christ’s presence, and who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

Next, we jump backwards 1400 years before the birth of Christ. Where we left off our journey through the bible, the people of God, called to be a blessing to the world, were living in the wilderness, learning to trust God to take care of them, and allowing their identity to be reshaped from slaves who existed to prop up the empire to the people of God called to be a blessing to the world.

We meet up with them today in a new beginning moment. They’re ready to enter the promised land and settle in the new home God has for them. We didn’t read the first story assigned to today, but it is depicted in our picture for the day, so it feels only fair to summarize it. As the leaders began planning for how land would be divvied up once they got to their new home, following the male family lines, 5 sisters with no brothers whose father had died came to them and said, why should our family line die out in the land because our father had no sons? We should be given land too. So, Moses brought their case to God, and God said, They are right. Change the law. When the people entered the promised land, they did so with a law that was more just, because these sisters spoke up, God heard them, and the leaders listened.

So now we come to the threshold moment, the old is ending and the new is about to begin. The people of God called to be a blessing to the world have been living in liminal space, neither here nor there, biding time, learning trust and being shaped by God. And now they will be going home. 

But to go from wandering to settled, they will need to cross the swollen, raging river. They will pass through waters of rebirth, waters of deliverance, waters that remake identity. For us, these waters are baptism. For them, the waters that had released them from the death of slavery and ushered them into new life 40 years before was the red sea, which had parted miraculously so they could cross over into safety in the care of God. This is the story that has shaped them, the experience of God’s saving hand of grace to the generation before them. Their own understanding of God and trust in God has been shaped by their parents’ stories of God’s faithfulness. 

Now it’s their turn. In front of their eyes, the water separates, and God makes a way where there was no way. 
And the presence of God and care of God is known not just in stories now but felt in their own bodies– their feet pressing into wet sand and slimy stones, the smell of the damp river bottom, the hot sun and wind on their faces, the astonishing sight of the water itself participating with God in their new beginning. 
God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. When they came out of the waters they were changed, set on a new path, with a new perception of creation and their place in God’s order.  They were God’s people, called and led, who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

They mark the experience with a symbol, stones from the riverbed stacked up as a signpost, and Joshua tells them, “Your children will ask about these stones, and you are to tell them about God parting the waters here as God did at the red sea. Worship God always.”

Inside an ancient story, the same faithful God is always bringing new beginnings. They don’t come from our efforts or control. They come in our endings, our impossibilities, our stuckness, arriving in our places of death and loss that feel like they might define us forever. Sky and water, stars and rivers, strangers, babies, sisters, leaders, long, arduous journeys and staying still for long, long stretches all are part of God’s work. God’s beginnings surprise us, leading us into the lives of new people, like the watching, ready Magi. God’s beginnings use our vulnerability and voices to change the way forward for others, like the brave sisters. God’s beginnings bring us home with continuity and hope, like the children of God coming out of the wilderness into the promised land. However it happens and whomever it involves, God is always bringing salvation and healing, new life, hope and renewed belonging. Always. 

As we begin this new year, lots will be changing in our country and our government, in the global landscape and in our neighborhoods, in our work places and relationships, and in our lives and even our own bodies in ways we don’t yet know and can’t yet see.  

But hear the words of God to the people of God standing on the brink of a new beginning: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’

Maybe instead of naming all the ways we intend to be strong and courageous because we’re so self-guided and goal-driven and in control, we might admit we’re not really in control, and enter this new beginning honest with ourselves about our vulnerabilities and fears, truthful with each other about needing one another, and open to God incarnate who is with us wherever we go, who leads us where we might otherwise not go, and who will meet us face to face where we could never imagine. 

Maybe we enter this new beginning listening, open, watching and ready, helping each other remember and trust that God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. 

God’s new beginnings are personal, but never individual. When redemption, hope and new life happen to one of us, other people are always involved, and even sometimes creation, and the newness impacts not only us but blesses the world. The Holy Spirit changes us, sets on a new path, gives us a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and we are rooted more deeply in our belonging to an old, vast, and very diverse community of those who have been in Christ’s presence, who are watching together what God is doing in the world, ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

2025 years after joining us in person, how will this faithful God show up this year? 

I can’t wait to find out.

A Christmas Eve Message in Carols

 

Isaiah 6:2:6-7, John 1:1-5, Luke 1:26-38, Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 2:1-20 Christmas songs are the most eclectic collection of music that exists in the same genre. Streaming Christmas music you’ll bounce through tragic break-ups, saucy hook-ups, light-hearted dust-ups, and adorable mix-ups. You’ll go from anthropomorphized snowmen and catty reindeer to ancient magi, alarming angels, and imagined drummer boys. Whiplashing from glee to longing, wistfulness to punchiness, and superficiality to scripture with ho, ho, hos, fa, la, las, and glory-alleluias, the whole thing becomes backdrop soup that we stop really hearing.   But it’s also true that some of the most poignant and powerful lyrics ever written are sung at Christmas. Christmas songs can preach!   I recently came across all the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Bing Crosby croons a few verses but skip others. I did not know it was a Christmas poem written amidst the horrors of the Civil War.    Listen to what Longfellow wrote:   I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play,  And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men! And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom  Had rolled along The unbroken song Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Till ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day, A voice, a chime, A chant sublime Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South,  And with the sound The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men! It was as if an earthquake rent The hearth-stones of a continent, And made forlorn The households born Of peace on earth, good-will to men! And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said;  "For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!" Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;  The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men."   Every year Christmas comes around, interrupting our human stupidity and hatred, whatever current versions of awfulness we are engaged in this year.    Long lay the world in sin and error pining.   (O Holy Night)   Nevertheless, throughout time, when the bells ring Christians gather on this night all over the planet. In the midst of world wars and regional famines, through times of personal loss and communal tragedy, we take up our candles, our silence, and our songs to share again this sacred story, and trust again that the God who comes in will meet us here.   No ear may hear His coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.    (O Little Town of Bethlehem)    This is a holy act we do this night.  Because if Christmas has any real and lasting meaning, it can’t just be a bubble bath of nostalgia, or a Netflix binge of escapism. But neither can it be positive platitudes or religious head-patting.    Life isn’t messing around. We have 15-year-olds with guns and countries invading each on a dying planet. Right this moment in the very place our little Lord Jesus lay asleep on the hay, people are suffering and dying, their homes and lives destroyed. And in-between our holiday shopping and wrapping, people are logging online to cheer for a murderer,  because we’ve stopped seeing the human in one another, and in the world’s richest country people can’t get the healthcare they need. And millions of our siblings live in poverty because we also happen to live in the country with the greatest wealth inequality. We’re not crushing it, you guys.   We’re angry and lonely, anxious and scared, hurried and stressed, sad and mean. And in an unstable global environment armed with nuclear weapons and massive egos, the future is unknown.    So, if the best of what Christmas has to offer is the warm winter wonderland of fuzzy appreciation for family and friends, and a once-a-year emphasis on kindness, it’s not going to cut it.   For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!     (I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day)   So, also, it seems if we’re clinging to the delusion that we humans are somehow capable of righting this ship, we are not. Let’s admit it right now. We are not capable of restoring our wrongs. This world is broken, and we cannot fix it. We are hopeless. It is impossible.    But nothing is impossible for God.   And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing: O, rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.    (It Came Upon a Midnight Clear)   And now, something must happen that we cannot make happen. Something uncontrollable, transformative, and undeserved must break in and change things. It must be both cosmic and personal, universal and particular. We must be met here and now, by something entirely outside of ourselves that embraces our whole selves and everyone else too. We must be found.    The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee to-night.     (O Little Town of Bethlehem)   And so, a voice from the heavens announces to us – to each of us and to all of us ever –FEAR NOT!      Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing!    (O Come, All Ye Faithful)   Eternity breaks into time! God comes into this life – not as a mighty force overthrowing evil, as much as we may wish that were so, but as a helpless, displaced child into the arms and care of unprepared people in a broken world.    Once in royal David's city stood a lowly cattle shed, Where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed.   (Once in David’s Royal City) Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth.   (Hark, the Herald Angels Sing)   God comes into this life, this darkness, this impossibility, the one we are living in right now. This, here, is what is being redeemed by love, flooded with the light no darkness can extinguish.    Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings!    (Hark, the Herald Angels Sing)   What we are incapable of achieving on our own, the life of wholeness and connection, belonging to God and all others, is given us in Christ. This world, and everyone in it, is claimed for redemption.   For lo, the days are hastening on by prophets seen of old, when with the ever-circling years shall come the time foretold  when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,  and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.  (It Came Upon a Midnight Clear)    History on its inevitable course is interrupted and rerouted by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The whole trajectory now points toward love that will never end.     A thrill of hope the weary soul rejoices, For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!  (O, Holy Night)   We are not on this spinning ball alone fending for ourselves. The destruction we’ve done and keep doing is not our end. Death, in all its terrifying separation, is not the final word. God has come. There is now nowhere Christ is not actively bringing salvation. The middle of the story is messy, but conclusion has already been written. The world is God’s! The end is love!   Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;  The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men."  (I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day)   Christmas calls us to walk alongside each other in impossibility, to watch for God’s in-breaking. This is God’s world, and every one of us has a particular place. We will see Christ when we welcome each exquisite human being here beside us with reverent care. When we tend the complex, fascinating earth with humble wonder. When we join in God’s ongoing creativity, merciful justice, unwavering forgiveness, and potent healing, by accepting all the small moments of connection as invitations into miracle, given by God’s Spirit in our ordinary days.    So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heaven.  (O Little Town of Bethlehem)    We are loved by God, always and no matter what, here briefly to love one another.  We can’t control most of what happens around us, or even to us, but we can receive our ‘one, wild precious life’ in with the defiant delight of joy. We can live in trust, gratitude, and anticipation for what God will do next.   Let earth receive her king; let every heart prepare him room.   (Joy to the World!)   Christmas not a happy distraction from the pain and suffering of life and the darkness and brokenness of this world, it’s the main event. God comes into the brokenness, and through the life, death, and resurrection of God-with-us that begins right here, the world will never be the same.  Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name!       (O,Holy Night)   What we do this night is a holy act. With our glory-alleluia good news songs of great joy for all people, we take up our candles and our calling, to share again this sacred story, so that with confidence and hope, we may go out from this place into the darkness of this night, trusting that the God of light who comes in is indeed redeeming this world, and even now has met us here.   Amen.

What's it all for and how does it happen?

 

Exodus 15:22-16:36, Exodus 19:1-20::21. Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Leviticus 25 David Brooks recently had an article in the Atlantic where he said he’d been obsessed with two questions: Why are Americans so sad? and Why are Americans so mean? He says, there are lots of theories, most of them at least partly true. But, he opens, “The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” He writes that restraining our selfishness, welcoming our neighbor, disagreeing constructively, and finding purpose in life are not things our culture is currently intentional about learning and passing on. We don’t collectively address the question, what is life for? Humans need practical guidelines for a meaningful existence. We need moral formation -  to be formed into something and for something.   In our ongoing narrative, the Israelites have been led out of slavery into wilderness. These are the descendants of Abraham and Sarah: blessed to be a blessing to the world. But for centuries they’d been formed as slaves, for the benefit of the empire. They were disposable, existing for work by a system that stripped them of personhood and gave them daily patterns of living that reinforced this definition. They were slaves. They knew how to do this. Now they’re free. How do you be free?  They’ll need a new understanding of what life is for, and some practical guidelines for a meaningful existence.   The first time I preached on the Ten Commandments at Lake Nokomis, Owen was four and Maisy was one. The day before, in a fit of frustration with his baby sister, Owen threw a Star Wars action figure at her.  “No throwing things” isn’t a rule we’ve needed in our house for a long time, and time-outs are a faint memory (except for self-imposed ones), but back then, throwing things led to an immediate time-out.  After Owen’s grueling four minutes on the time-out chair, I knelt down in front of him and asked him if he knew why he had to sit there – my line of the often-repeated script. He avoided looking at me and parroted his line of the script,  “Because I threw something at Maisy. Sorry.”  But something stopped me this time, and since I had his attention, I asked him, “Owen, do you know WHY we don’t throw things in this house?”  He looked at me, big eyes and pensive stare, “Why?”  “We have that rule because we want this house to be a safe place for everyone to play, a place where everyone is protected and free to have fun.  You, Maisy, Mommy and Daddy, and even people who visit us.  If people were allowed to throw things here, nobody would be safe or protected or be able to play without being afraid.  That’s why we can’t have any throwing.   Do you think that is a good rule for us to have?” And he paused, then he nodded.  Then he said, with a very concerned face, “Mommy, that’s a good rule. But I forget! I forget what to do when Maisy touches my things! So I just throw things at her!”   And I promised that next time she touched his things, I would help him remember to tell her NO, then ask me to help get her away.  Because just as we don’t throw things, we also don’t take other people’s things without asking.  And he left satisfied.  That first year this blew the Ten Commandments wide open for me. Because the ten commandments are not actually grammatically commands  - they are descriptive – they portray the way life in the household of God works. In this house, we do not throw things at people, we don’t take other people’s things without asking. Here is what life looks like when people are honored and respected, all people, in a safe place where everyone can grow, and play, and not be afraid.   This is not just a list of rules, it’s not even just helpful moral formation, it’s a relationship upheld by God. You are no longer slaves, you are children.  So first, before even the words themselves, God claims them as children by caring for them in the wilderness. The first story today is about how God gave the Israelites manna for breakfast and quail for dinner, and provided water where there was none. Every day God gave them just what they needed for that day, and no more. If they tried to save it up it went rotten. But every seventh day was for rest, so the food from the sixth day could carry over. We’ve called this period in their lives “Trust training school.”  For 40 years they practiced being cared for, received belonging to God – I am trustworthy, I will take care of you. And then, in that place of upheaval and unknown, God gives them a word. Like the word that spoke creation into being, and the word that will become flesh and dwell among us. God’s word always brings life.  The majority of the Ten Commandments address Who is this God and what is God up to? “I’m the God who saved you and called you my own and cared for you and looks after you. I give you your name and identity and freedom. I am trustworthy and I expect you to trust me. I can’t be possessed or controlled, only encountered. I am who I will be, and I say who you are – not anything else that would enslave you or totalize you. So respect me. And then God says, you’ll forget you belong to me, and forget who you are for each other and what life is for, so every single week every single person stops working, to enjoy life and rest, just like I did when I created the world, because life is for joy and connection. You are not slaves defined by endless production, you my are children held in my love and called to bless the world. And then the commandments turn to, What is a good life and how do we live it? The moral formation part, practical guidelines for a meaningful existence. And with simple “We don’t throw things here” language, they talk about how to treat each other: in this house we hold one another as sacred and valuable, we uphold other’s dignity and personhood and treat people with respect, honesty and fairness instead of jealousy, greed or envy. In this home, God says, everyone has what they need, and we practice belonging to each other. But to notch it all up a level and really hit the message home, we’ve got another story from the law where God commands that every 7th year is a big, year-long sabbath for the soil, and every 49 years this sabbath thing becomes a mega sabbath jubilee celebration year. The whole gameboard gets wiped clean and reset. Master and marginalized, insider or outsider, generational wealth or poverty, it all disappears. Momentum crushed, balance sheet zeroed out. Only God can tell us who we, not what we’ve achieved or lost, not how people see us or our role in society, not our smart investments or poor choices. We are children, not slaves. And the earth is God’s beloved creation, also not meant to be endlessly worked. So in case we begin acting like what we do is more powerful and permanent than it is, God writes in a reset button. Come back home. You are my children, here to bless the world.  When God gave the law, God said, Here is what life is for. Here is how you live it. This is not hypothetical and idealistic. This is concrete and practical. The only way to life fully human, fully alive, fully who you are made to be, the only way to be free, is inside the perimeters of God’s love and order. Anything outside that makes us into slaves, steals our joy, binds us in patterns of destruction and division and isolation. For 16 years I’ve loved the ten commandments and insight I received from the experience of Owen’s time out.  But this time through I hear something different in that story. I hear a four year old's honest cry of anguish, how he knows it’s wrong to throw things, but when she takes his stuff, he forgets.  And I feel that part.  We’re sad and we’re mean. And we can wish we weren’t sad and try not to be mean – but most of the time we forget what to do. We agree they are good rules: let’s be kind and forgiving and generous. Let’s restrain selfishness and disagree constructively and welcome our neighbor. Yes, yes to all of it. Let’s do those good rules. Let’s practice them and be formed by the practice. But I still forget. I forget when a stranger is short with me, or something doesn’t work like it should, or people say dumb false things, or when I feel judged, or even when I’m just in a hurry.  I forget when I’m insecure or afraid, and I forget most often with those closest to me. When I’m interrupted or impatient, when I get stressed or anxious about things outside my control, when life feels overwhelming, I forget.  We need moral formation. Thank God for the places we learn to practice kindness and civility. Seriously, thank you, God. How will we ever remember unless we practice? But more than practice, I need a savior. I need someone to bring me back home, because sometimes I can’t find my way. I’ve practiced striving and self-protection so much for so long, that it’s hard to just choose to live what I know to be true. I forget.  But God gives more than good moral formation. God gives God’s very self.  To the Israelites God said, I will care for you, I will lead and guide you, and you will care for others. You are no longer slaves, you are my children. I make that so. You are those whom I am with. We are children of God in the household of God. We are those whom God is with. And Christmas is the concrete promise come to fruition in flesh and blood, God is with us. GOD is with us. The word made flesh to dwell among us. Jesus comes to make us fully at home in love. And when we are fully at home in love, that feels like joy.   Joy is a gift, we can’t make it happen. Jesus said that the point of all his teaching is that we have his joy. His joy – not that we try to act joyful or produce joy out of thin air. Jesus enters our death, our impossibility, our deep, existential forgetting, and takes it into himself. And Jesus give us his life. Jesus is fully at home in love, and the inner life of Christ’s own complete belonging to God and belonging to the world is for us. We can be at home in love. Even in pain and suffering. Even in disappointment and confusion. Even in our failure to live up to the values we believe. We drawn into life that doesn’t come from us and will not end with us, that is beauty, and wonder, and mystery, and awe, and delight and sorrow shared, poignant and powerful. And those moments when life eternal breaks through tangibly grabs us, we taste joy. We forget to forget. And we are remembered into life by God who is with us. So together we will practice. Freedom instead of slavery. Rest instead of relentlessness. We will turn our hearts to our creator and seek to trust in the I AM who holds the world, and we’ll help each other with the  kindness and generosity and peace too. But we will undoubtedly also forget.  So, Jesus, God with us, be with us here and set us free again. Speak a word that brings life. God who comes in, come into our places of stuckness and forgetting, remember us into life and bring us back home into love. Amen.

People of Hope

Exodus 7-15 

Episode 7: Moses & The Exodus

On Wednesday I attended the funeral of a woman who died of cancer, a mother of two sons, the youngest 13. Her devastated husband was shaken to the core to lose this love of his life. Who am I now? he asked, without her? Impossible. This thing he must do now, to live into a future without her? It’s impossible. 

Today begins Advent, a season of waiting for the arrival of our Savior. This first week of Advent is framed by hope. Hope is trusting in a future we can’t see right now.  Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King’s closest friend and advisor, said “I don’t know what the future may hold, but I know who holds the future.” This is hope. 

When our story opens, Moses is an 80 year old shepherd, who fled Egypt decades ago after murdering an overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave. After a dramatic childhood, he has lived out most of his days in the relative quiet and obscurity of the wilderness, tending sheep. When, from the bush that burns without being consumed, he is addressed by the God of his ancestors, and told that God has heard the people’s suffering, that God will be sending Moses to the pharoah to demand their freedom, and draw them into them a different future, Moses asks, “Who am I to do this?’ 

Who am I to do this? Who are we to bring about the future we think needs to happen? Or to stand against the future we dread coming?  Who are we to move forward in impossibility and make a life of it?

God answers Moses’ question with God’s own name, “Tell then I AM Who I Am has sent you,” and then, what gets translated “I will be with you,” God’s next statement is actually more like, “You are the one I am with." Then God says, "Watch what I can do." 

I Am Who I Am, and you are The One I Am With. Watch what I can do.

The baby whose life was spared by Shiprah and Puah, and saved by Jochebed and Miriam, who was first named “Drawn Out of the Water” by the pharoah’s daughter, is now called “The One Who I Am With” and summoned by God to join in as God delivers God’s people from slavery. 

Moses is not the protagonist of this story. He is not the savior, he’s the sidekick. What is about to happen is not from anything Moses can do, it never has been, not with Moses or Joseph or Jacob or Sarah and Abraham – it’s always been God’s work -  God’s choosing and God’s equipping, God’s plan and God’s action. Moses’ work is to surrender in obedience to God – to join in God’s work and trust that God will bring it about. Moses is called into a future he can’t see and can’t possibly make happen. But he must first know who it is who holds the future.

So God gives Moses God’s name. 

This name, Yahweh, is ambiguous in that it is both outside time and timefull – past, present and future are all wrapped up at once in the word. It could be, I am who I am, I am who I will be, I am who I was, I was who I will be. God is always present, past and future, outside of time, but fully entering time with us.

The name is an action word, exist, cause to become, and come to pass are all wrapped up inside of it.  We don’t know what the vowels are so we guess, and say Yahweh, or Jehovah, but to speak it alone almost sounds like breathing. It’s shortened Jah, like Hallelujah! Or, Praise God! The angels announcing God’s coming into the world sing their hallelu to Jah with the startled shepherds. The crowds waving palm branches shout their hallelu to Jah at the man on a donkey, praising the God who was, and is, and always will be right there in their midst. 

Even though the name Yahweh is written 7000 times in the Old Testament, it was not spoken aloud from even shortly after the Exodus. It felt too intimate, too sacred, so it is instead translated Adonai, and everywhere it appears in our bibles it’s instead written “the Lord” in small caps. It seemed too easy to exploit, to manipulate the name of God for our own purposes, to act as though the power is ours rather than God’s. Access to God is on God’s terms, not ours, and not to be taken lightly, made into a platitude, or assumed for our own ends.

God sees the people’s suffering; God opens up God’s own self to share the suffering and makes Godself vulnerable. When God gives Moses God’s name, God says, I am for you, and you may address me, I will be here. God invites relationship. Invites trust.  God comes into our broken places as God’s self. Not a nameless king or pharoah lording power over us, but I AM Who I Am, here in it with us. 

“I will teach you what you are to say,” God tells Moses, who is so worried about speaking. And I will give you someone to speak with and for you, your brother Aaron. In other words, Show up. I’ll take it from there. And you are not in it alone.

So God makes Moses into a minister, as God is. Then, God invites the pharoah to minister as well, which is to say, to come back to his humanity. We are made in the image of a ministering God, and we live that truth out when we minister to others. Again and again, God commands the pharaoh to let the people go, and again and again Pharoah resists. His heart is hardened, whether by God, or his own stubbornness, or both, and he does not submit.  

He will not win. God will prevail. Pharoah is used to power and control, but his power is nothing against the maker of the universe - it was no match for the trust and obedience of the lowly midwives through whom God spared the Hebrew babies and set Moses on his path. The pharoah can’t stop any of this from happening. He could help it happen, but he chooses not to, so it happens over and against him instead of with him.

When the people have fled Egypt - when the story of the Passover that becomes the meal that feeds them with memory and gratitude for centuries to come, turning their hearts to who God is and what God is up to and helping them watch for God’s coming, when the frantic departure has happened and they’ve begun the journey, hemmed in from before and behind, protected and guided by Yahweh, and it seems like they’re in the clear - then the real terror descends.

Suddenly they’re pinned between the watery chaos of the sea that is the death in front of them and the raging armies bearing down that is the death behind. Now the impossibility is stark – What are they to do? Nothing. They can do nothing. Only God can act. 

When we are trapped in impossibility, when death is all we can see, there is nothing we can do to pull ourselves out or to save one another.  There is nothing we can say to fix or change things for someone in that place. Who are we to make anything happen? 

The command comes to them there, in that utterly hopeless place, Do not be afraid, Be still. Be still and see what God will do for you.

And then God acts. God parts the waters of death and leads them into new life. And when they’re safely across, and the impossibly powerful force of destruction that is the entire Egyptian army is utterly destroyed in their wake, sister Miriam, the now-elderly prophet, leads the people of God in singing their hallelu to Jah and praising the God who saves.

The future, and our futures, are held by I Am Who I Will Be, who calls each of us One Whom God Is With. 

God comes in to be with us. Both cosmically, to save us all, and personally, to lead us through all the deaths of our lives into new life, again and again. The one who brings being into being, has come, is here. Jesus Christ is God with us. Born into this life of dying, Jesus takes our impossibility into the very heart of God.

In Christ, we are made bearers of hope in the world, and for the world. We become people through whom God brings about God’s future.  People who go into impossibility alongside others as those God is with and we wait there for God to act.  

We are drawn into the timefulness of Yahweh. With eyes wide open, we see the world as it is -  without hiding in denial or fleeing to optimism - but we also know that what is is not all there is or will be. Trusting this, as Rev. David Wood said so beautifully a few weeks ago in his letter about hope: instead of reactive we become responsive. Instead of anxious, we become available.  And instead of distracted, we become attentive, watching the one who holds the future to be now who God has been. 

Our story is not our own, it is God’s. It is the story of those gone before and those to come, it is memory and gratitude, water and naming, impossibility and deliverance. It is the story of the God right here with us, who sees and bears our suffering, who sends us to be ministers to one another and receive the ministry of others, without knowing how we will do this, only promising to be with us and to tell us what we are to say. It is the story of the God who is turning the world around in hope and can be joined but cannot be stopped. 

Who are we to bring about the future we think needs to happen? Or to stand against the future we dread coming? Who are we up against death and despair?  When all is lost and we can’t see our way forward, when the impossibility is most stark –we can do nothing. Only God can act. And God says, Don’t be afraid. Be still and watch what I will do. 

Together, for others and for this world, we trust in a future we can’t yet see, because we know who holds the future. We are people of hope.

Amen.

Where we've been - 

Episode 1: The Beginning

Episode 2: Noah (conversation - so this sermon is from 2014)

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah 

Episode 4: Jacob

Episode 5: Joseph

Episode 6: Brave Women of Egypt