Defiant Hope that Doesn't Come From Us

Jeremiah 29, 31

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Some of you will remember the Lent we hid Alleluias and then didn’t find them again for two years. I don’t mean a few of them that got mixed up with the next year’s messages. I mean, we didn’t even look for them.  

The theme that year for Lent was Hope. We wore it on bracelets and hung a banner in our hallway that read:

Fear says “what if…?”

Hope answers, “even if…!”

And then, all of a sudden, a what if worse than our fears gripped the entire world and life as we knew it screeched to a terrible and terrifying halt. And what ifs were suddenly the reality we were living in –What if nobody can go to work or school or restaurants or to church or get haircuts or ? What if all the things everybody has been working on suddenly don’t matter –the school plays and tournaments, final projects and work trips, and community gatherings, the goals and plans just disappear, unfinished? What if tons of people are sick and dying and the threat of sickness and death overshadows everything we do? 

Throughout it all, we gathered on zoom – seeing each other’s face and each other’s pets, sharing show-n-tell videos, and delivering advent bags and making mix cds. We prayed every morning and night with a family while mom was dying of cancer, and even had a masked, open windows retreat following directions from her oncologist, and day after day, week after week, we showed up for each other in a thousand tiny ways we’d never thought of before. And behind our backs, while our Fear and Hope banners hung in the empty hallway, and the hallelujahs stayed hidden in corners and under cushions in the abandoned sanctuary, the basement was buzzing with life, transforming into a space for a school to move in to one day even if. 

Through it all, God met us again and again and again, and we felt the presence of the risen Jesus who came into this life to be with and for us when we were with and for each other. Even though we couldn’t often bephysically with each other, nevertheless God kept taking care of us and helping us take care of each other, and redemption and hope were tangible.  

And then came Good Friday, and we came back together into the darkness to tell poignantly the story of Jesus coming into our death. And on Easter Sunday we celebrated the resurrection and found those two-year-old hidden hallelujahs, and Hope’s Even if never rang truer, because we had lived it. 

Even though we were weary and worn out, our trust and the confidence of our faith was unshakable: the God who made and loved this world is redeeming it. And despite all the suffering and loss and death – and many of our people died in those two years –  we trusted that God is still God, life is for love, redemption is afoot, we participate in joy, and share in healing, and Jesus meets us right here when we come alongside one another in suffering. God is holding the world and moving everything toward wholeness, relentlessly and unceasingly. And God is trustworthy.

In our scriptures today the people of God are still in exile. The feeling of abandonment and hopelessness, ripped from home and all that made up their daily lives, the loss of all the structures that gave them stability as a nation and identity as a people had become their new normal. This desolation has gone on and on, for decades, with no end in sight.  

It is into this hopelessness that the prophets speak the promises of God. Promises of hope for a future. I know the plans I have for you – God says – plans for goodness and not harm. When you seek me, you will find me. I will turn your sadness into joy, your grief into gladness.

Hope isn’t when we feel great about how great things are going and project that they’ll keep being great. That’s optimism and positive thinking. That’s not hope.

Hope comes to us in hopelessness. But hope is also not just uplifting platitudes chucked like water balloons at a house fire. Hope does not deny the suffering and pain of the moment. It begins in what is. It starts in our place of need. Hope is always about wrongs made right, always about redemption and new life, so hope starts in what is broken and dead. 

 

One of my favorite explanations of hope comes from David Steindl-Rast: “ Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism.... A far more accurate picture would be the hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism.  We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.
And since patience is as contagious as impatience, it will also be our way of strengthening each other's hope.

 

In order for hope to awaken in a hopeless people, their imaginations must be awakened for the impossible made possible. It’s one thing for the prophets to say that God brings life out of death. It’s another to show it.  Ezekiel paints the vision of a valley littered with forgotten dried-out bones, the most over and done with, past tense, lifeless of things. Is there anything more bleak than sun-bleached bones scattered in the dust?  As the coroner of Munchkin Land famously said, They’re not only merely dead, they’re really most sincerely dead.  

 

But then, at the word of God the dry bones clack and rattle together, and bodies form, and finally,  the breath of God—the same breath that hovered over the waters at creation bringing life from utter nothingness, the same breath that breathed life into clay of the newly formed human in the hands of God, the same breath the dead and alive again Jesus will, on resurrection day, breathe on the disciples, when he gives them the Holy Spirit and says receive my peace—this breath arrives on the wind from every direction and fills these reassembled bodies into living, breathing, moving, vibrant newness, remade people, standing and dancing and laughing and walking freely about, as far as the eye could see.

 

This, the prophet says, is what God does. What God will do.  Wait and Watch.

The prophets awaken our ‘eschatological imagination,’ which means, they invite us to let our vision of a good life be shaped not by what we can see in front of us, but by God’s promised future. Eschatology means the finale of everything, so eschatological imagination means that the coming fullness so fills and animates us that we can live right now into God’s final destiny for humanity. 

 

Love. Restoration. Forgiveness. Peace. Joy. Connection. Belonging for all. No more sin – which is just a fancy word for being separated from God and each other. God will wipe away every tear and bring wholeness to all that is broken. And when death ends, all that remains is life and love. That’s what’s coming.

 

A couple days ago I saw an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the writers of South Park. They said that two important words when writing a good story are ‘because’ and ‘therefore’. A story that of ‘ands’ – and then this happens and then this happens, is just a boring list of events. A good says this happens, therefore this happens, or this happens because this happens. 

 

The story of life on earth is written with another key word, one we can hear when we live with awakened eschatological imaginations. That word is nevertheless. Every circumstance, experience and situation pulses underneath with this insistent and defiant, nevertheless, moving everything unceasingly toward God’s promised future. 

Nevertheless, even if, despite, anyway, and always. This means that into every single This is not ok comes the prophets’ confident response of hope, so this is not the end. 

 

So how do we 'get hopeful?' How do we feel hope and trust it? 

Like everything else real and permanent, we can’t force hope to happen to us or make other people feel hopeful. And striving for it will surely wear you out.  "Let the bottom drop out of your pessimism" and fall into the motherly care of God. Dry bones don't make themselves alive.

So maybe the question of those languishing in exile is, instead, how do we cultivate eschatological imagination? How do we live in contagious patience? Can we make ourselves available to the hope that only God can give? 

 

Last week I talked with several people about how they are living open to hope, who used the words ‘disciplines.’ “The disciplines are sustaining me,” one said. 

This sounds like drudgery, but ‘the disciplines’ are simply the things we do on purpose that practice living in the way of God instead of the way of fear. That is, whether or not we are feeling it, we practice trust and availability to God.  So how are the disciplines sustaining you? Another way of saying this is, how are you praying these days?

One person I know has started praying by baking bread. Surrendering to the patient attentiveness and gentle miracle of mixing ingredients and letting what happens happen– with all the textures and smells and tastes this involves, creating and feeding, connecting to others in the presence this practice demands is something sustaining her and helping her to be available to God’s hope. So, she’s showing up to regularly do it.

Another person told me the discipline of lament is sustaining her. That when yet another story of injustice or horror came across her newsfeed, she felt like wearing all black in mourning. This was a bit out there, so instead she’s begun putting on what she calls her ‘lament bracelets’ – a series of braided black cords on her wrist, her symbolic sackcloth and ashes. She joins the prophets of old in enacting her holy lament. Her dialogue with God reignites every time she catches sight of the bracelets on her wrist, bearing on her body in the world a marker that this is not ok. And so also, this is not the end.

The disciplines don’t have to be the ways of praying that you first think of, or that you’ve always done. Where in your life are you being invited to turn something ordinary into prayer? 

A lifelong non-gardener told me last week that suddenly she is attending to the ground beneath her feet, hands in the soil, turning her back yard into a butterfly sanctuary and discovering that the earth knows the great nevertheless better than we do and will tell us if we listen.

For me, a new discipline has emerged walking the dog in the morning.  It’s the task I often dread, and frequently try to put off, but I can only delay Bertie’s demands until about 7 am before I am begrudgingly out there on the sidewalk wrangling 75 lbs of curious energy through the neighborhood. But after these conversations about the disciplines, I saw the invitation to for this daily chore to become, instead, a discipline, a practice of prayer.

 By walking alongside Bertie day after day, I am attuning her to my presence and my voice, I am teaching my dog to know and trust me, to listen to me, and respond to my commands. Perhaps her need for this with me could meet my need for this with God.  So, I put my phone on do not disturb, and step into the morning air with this dog, to walk alongside God, so the Holy Spirit can attune me to God’s presence and voice, teach me to know and trust God, help me to listen to God and respond to God’s commands.

Talking to God while loading the dishwasher. Singing hymns in the shower. Memorizing a bible verse and reciting it to yourself in the car. Praying blessings on each little person who climbs into your carpool. What ordinary activity or ritual might become for you a discipline?  Or what disciplines might attune you to God’s presence and voice?

Last week I preached at Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina about blessing. I said blessing something or someone acknowledges their belonging to God and names God’s sovereignty over them. The act of walking around blessing the world and the people in it resists evil and counters fear by refusing to treat the world, or any person in it, as beyond hope. Instead, it places each person or thing squarely back in the arms of God and awaits with anticipation what God will do with it. In other words, blessing is a way of exercising our eschatological imagination, and cultivating a waiting readiness to join in God’s work of healing whenever and however it might arise.  

Living like this is not a solo gig. This is why we are church. We pray for each other, and we pray for the world together.  We tell each other the stories of how God met us and where we saw life come out of death.  We stay rooted in the ancient story of God’s faithfulness to generations gone by, and remember how God sustained us in our own crises gone by.

 We tell each other again and again how God was with us then, and help each other notice what God is doing now.  We recognize struggle as longing for wrongs to be made right, and see despair as the very place where hope is needed, so that’s where we go to await and anticipate hope. Together we stand in the pain and of what is, and practice living from what will be, knowing that the God who arrives will arrive among us again. 

With a patience that is contagious we wait and watch, because always and nevertheless, God is still God, life is for love, redemption is afoot, we can participate in joy and share in healing, and the risen Jesus will meet us right here when we come alongside one another in suffering. Relentlessly and unceasingly, God is holding the world and moving everything toward wholeness. And God is trustworthy.

Amen.

As for you...

 On Tuesday I sent my son an Easter basket, and inside was an Apple AirTag for his luggage. But how fun, I thought, to activate it now, name it “Owen’s Easter Basket,” and watch it travel across the country all week to him!  

At first this was fun. It’s in Toledo! It’s crossing into Pennsylvania! But then it got bad. On Friday: why is it sitting in that building on the port of New Jersey it was supposed to have arrived?  On Saturday, why is it now at that address? Was it misdelivered? Is someone else eating his Cadbury egg?? 

And then the final hours yesterday afternoon were the worst. I watched Owen’s Easter Basket zigzag and crisscross his neighborhood, circling within a mile from him but bypassing his street again and again. And I couldn’t stop obsessively checking on it. This had become zero fun.

When the basket finally got to him I was exhausted. But I realized tracking that Easter basket was a familiar feeling. Checking in on its progress every three minutes was not unlike how I have been obsessively reading articles, refreshing my newsfeed, following every breaking story however small. Do I think watching it all so closely will change anything? Why do I keep choosing anxiety instead of presence?

I asked people the other night at Church Chat how they were doing, and we had some fun catching up on the various catchings up, but later one person commented on how it’s hard to answer that How are you? question these days when it feels like every minute there’s a new way our country seems to be falling apart or hurting someone, but I’m good I guess, they answered.

It is not easy to be a modern person in a complex world, with a window to it all in our pocket at all times. It’s easy to feel like the challenges of this time are uniquely bad, and of course they feel that way to us because they’re what we see and are experiencing. But in the scope of human history, we are no different than our human siblings. 

We’re all given a life filled with joy and connection and pain and suffering, in these miraculous, resilient bodies that are also really fragile and complicated, inside particular families and communities with their own blessings and curses, subject to whatever befalls the place and time we happened to be born in. All of us encounter evil, behold marvels, face deep struggles, taste delicious joy, and bear acute loneliness, and we do it all within whatever larger forces are at play in the world at the moment.  Life is hard, and death comes for us all. 

But by golly, I am going to keep tabs on it anyway. With all my monitoring of the world, now adding on a cross-country road-tripping Easter basket too, I don’t have the attention span for Easter.  I am too busy, and worried, and busy being worried.

 

Our Lent theme has been, Be Still and Know I am God

Did you ever play that nerdy grammar game where you emphasize different words in a sentence, and it changes the meaning?

Here is an example:

Let’s EAT, Grandma! Quit working on that puzzle and come to the table! 

LET’S eat, Grandma!  C’mon! Everybody else is already eating except us! 

Let’s eat GRANDMA!  a completely different meaning altogether.

BE still and know I am God – don’t perform stillness, actually just BE, like a baby, the very you-ness of you, unfiltered.

Be STILL and know I am God – quit hurrying, assessing, achieving and maneuvering, stop, and watch what happens next

Be still AND know I am God – don’t just sit there numb and disengaged, let your resistance go and be open to what wants to come out of the stillness 

Be still and KNOW I am God – really trust it, in-your-bones believe it

Be still and know I am God –not you, not anything else around you, not the long arm of the government or the deep voice of your shame, but ME, I am God. 

Be still and know I AM God – not I was God a long time ago in the bible days, or I will be God eventually in heaven after you die, but always right now this is true, in fact it’s my name, AMness; when everything else is trapped in time, I AM and AM and AM

Be still and know I am GOD – not a great idea for you to grasp, a message for you to spread, or a religious concept that needs your defending, but GOD, beyond you and without your say-so, the Divine Source of life and final authority over life and death

And there we have it, Isaiah’s message to the Israelites, living in exile and captivity for decades with no end in sight:

Do you not know this? Have you not heard? Who stretched out the heavens, and filled them with stars? All life comes from me and returns to me and in between, guess who holds all of it? ME. I am GOD. 

The leaders of this age? They’re barely planted in the ground before they’re ripped up by the next storm. But look up to the vastness of the sky - I am the architect of the cosmos.

 Sometimes you say God doesn’t care and God isn’t listening. Haven’t you heard? There is nothing I do not know! When you’re exhausted and afraid, turn to me, wait for me, I give strength to the powerless, you will mount up like an eagle and ride on the wind.

This is GOD we’re talking about. Be still and know it.

This God came into all of it with us. He came weak, and took on our suffering, our pride, our alienation and division, our whole power-hungry sinful structure that sees healing for the sick and freedom for the slaves and good news for the poor as a hostile threat to the order of things. And on Good Friday, we heard the terrible story told so gently and powerfully by so many of you: there is nothing Jesus did not inhabit with and for us—he was taunted and humiliated, he was tortured and executed. 

And when he died, his beloved friends, family and followers were crushed with grief and disillusionment. For all intents and purposes, the world had ended. What more evil and hopelessness for humanity is there than for us to kill our God who came into this life alongside us to save us? There is no turning back from that. Darkness and evil prevailed. Death won. But it wasn’t really over. 

So here we arrive to our destination, Easter morning, to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord.  And it turns out if we shift the emphasis to different parts of story, we’ll hear different things, and all of it is good news. 

 

Our text begins with the words, “After the sabbath…”

which is to say, right in the midst of the greatest, most terrible drama humanity, the earth, the angels and the cosmos has ever witnessed, while the leaders kept scrambling to keep the power and shape the narrative, the followers of Christ, and as Martin Luther points out Jesus himself in the grave, stopped for the sabbath, the great interruption that puts us back in right relationship to God and each other. They paused it all to be still and know that God is God.  Jesus died, they held vigil, then everyone stopped to rest in the obedience of trusting God.  And then, “as the first day of the week was dawning,” the women returned to the work of grieving the dead. 

 

There is nothing so great, so important, so essential, that we cannot stop and rest in the obedience of trusting God. There is no evil or horror, no righteous errand, and no pressingly urgent obligation that demands so much of our constant, vigilant attention, that we are unavailable to our Creator, our fellow human beings, or the whispers of our own souls.  Did you create the sky and the ocean?  No you did not. When the flailing and the scrambling kick in, Be still and know I am God.

 

What about the words of the lightening-clothed angel, who comes down in an earthquake, slides back the enormous, sealed, stone, and takes a jaunty seat, while the military professionals with the boring gig of guarding a dead man, they shake like the earth itself with terror and became like the dead themselves? With a nod at their passed-out bodies the angel says, “But as for YOU, stop being afraid. I suppose you’re looking for Jesus who was killed? Well, he’s not here; he has already risen, just like he said he would. Come see for yourself then go quickly and tell his disciples Jesus will meet them back in Galilee. This is my message for you.” 

 

The powers that be are afraid. This is always true. In fear they hustle, and scramble, and never stop striving to keep power. Money is god, the weak don’t matter, this is the way of fear and sin, and human history has no shortage of stories where it appears that the wicked prevail, those who say otherwise will be silenced, and the dead do not live again. 

But do you not know? Have you not heard? God who rules the cosmos has broken down, torn open, and shaken apart the very foundations of everything. Death itself is overcome, and things are not what they seem. 

So as for YOU, quit being afraid. As for YOU, return to community and together go to the place where you last saw Jesus – because he will meet you again there. The places where the lost are found, and the least are most, and the wrong people are chosen, and the things that do last, like - love and hope and peace - happen, inexplicably, in weakness, and show up in suffering, and the most vulnerable people are the ones through whom the Spirit of the Most High moves, bringing healing and hope, drawing ordinary people into God’s salvation of the world.  As for You, stop being afraid. Go tell the rest of them to meet Jesus where he is already doing his thing.

 

And shifting the focus to just after that, how about when the scared and joyful Marys run right into the risen Lord who seems to be intercepting their mission, like he couldn’t wait one more second to see them? Our translation has him saying, “Greetings!” like he is delivering their mail or something, but in scripture, this word most often means, “Rejoice!”  So, Jesus throws out his arms and shouts “Rejoice!” and the women shriek and embrace him and fall at his feet weeping with incredulous joy at this glorious impossibility. Jesus pulls them up and repeats the same message the angel gave them, “Ok, now, don’t be afraid any longer. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them to go back to living their lives, and there they will see me.”

 

Right now, we could put the emphasis on any part of the sentence of life.  Things are either bad, or they’re good, because that’s always true. Always we could watch and obsess over every nuance of evil unfolding, and we could be available to our Creator, our fellow human beings, and the whispers of our own souls. Our lives are shaped by what we give our attention to. 

This is an invitation.

Christ has risen. 

The God who holds the cosmos brings new life out of death, love indestructible by hate, and hope born from despair - there nothing humans or evil can do that is greater than what God has done and will keep doing until it is complete.  

So as for us, may we quit being afraid, invite each other along, and go meet Jesus in our real lives, just as they are, in this beloved world, just as it is. 

And from time to time, no matter what else is happening around us, let’s be still and know who is God.

Amen.

Hosanna!

Scriptures: Isaiah 11:1-9, Matthew 21:1-11
 

 One week ago, I was at the Hands-off protest in the little town of Lihue, on Kauai. For a couple of blocks people lined the street on both sides, cheering and waving all manner of signs, while music blared over the loud speaker: I get knocked down, but I get up again… We didn’t start the fire, the music mingling with the rhythmic pounding of a group of hand drummers, voices shouting and horns honking. I teared up, of course, picturing us here, on this tiny island way out in the Pacific Ocean, hours after everyone else, sharing in this thing that was happening all over the country. The feeling of collective action and comradery was electric.  It felt like hope, like possibility, like anticipation, like we were part of something bigger, something coming.

 
And then I saw him. The man in the tan t-shirt and fishing hat, bouncing an actual tiny palm tree in the air.  And it stopped me short. Because of course, I thought of this moment.  
 
How different are we, really from those 2000 years ago who lined the streets on Palm Sunday shouting,Hosanna, which means Save us!, protesting an oppressive regime and anticipating deliverance by this one who would restore their rightful place, and take his place as king, and rule them like King David did 1000 years before? 
“Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
 
Those in Jerusalem that day wanted Jesus to save them from the Roman Empire, to make Israel great again, to bring back stability, and raise up the weak, and destroy the corrupt mighty.  And maybe they even had in their minds the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophesy. Because while, for Holy Week, we’ve momentarily jumped forward 600 years to join this crowd and walk this week with Jesus, we get to hear these events with their ancestors in mind.  And certainly, it’s possible that, standing there on their spread-out cloaks with their own palms waving in the air, they were recollecting the same stories we are working our way through. If we think back to Lisa’s sermon last week,we will recall that the kingdom of David and Solomon had crumbled, their homeland was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the people are in exile, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Today’s prophetic message from Isaiah comes to them fifty years in, give or take, when they’ve pretty much settled into their lives in Babylon. Some families in ongoing despair and suffering, others are getting comfortable in the empire. Into that accommodation and apathy, that acquiescing to the status quo of exile, here comes the prophetic promise of a savior who will deliver them from captivity. 
 
And with a scripture we normally read at Christmas time, we hear of the One from the root of Jesse who shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and who is ushering in a kingdom of peace so counterintuitive to the natural order of things that fear is nonexistent – lambs and wolves hanging out, calves and cubs cuddling, children and snakes all safe together.  “No one will be hurt on God’s holy mountain” it promises. “Just as water fills the sea, the whole earth will be full of people who know and love the Lord.”
 
So maybe that day with their palms in hand they remembered the prophet’s promise to their ancestors 600 years before. And maybe, just like we do on Christmas, they’re declaring that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s salvation, and maybe, also like us, they’ve decided what that salvation looks like so they’re making Jesus into who they think Jesus should be for them. Whether we think Jesus should keep us safe and prevent bad things from happening, take away our pain, strong-arm our enemies, or make us into supernaturally good people, however our version of God’s plan goes or our view of salvation looks, they had their version too, and figured he would fulfill it.

And like his very first journey on a donkey in the womb of his young mother Mary, when the world had no idea know what was coming, once again, he will take the cosmos by surprise.  Because beyond everything we think salvation should be, God’s way of love flips things upside down and inside out, it is unrelenting and quiet, foolish and strange. Jesus wasn’t there to lead the revolution at all, he was there to die. The things the people projected onto him were not going to happen. And just a few days later this whole crowd will join in collective chanting again. This time, instead of ‘Hosanna!’ They’ll chant ‘Crucify Him!’ without even a bit of irony or self-awareness. 

But the prophetic beauty and power of this moment is that, even though they’ve got messed up motives and confused ideas and false assumptions, what they are saying is completely true, part of the fabric of all things most true. Jesus does save us. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the lord. 

So I return to that fellow in the bucket hat at the protest last week, bobbing his palm up and down in time to the music. He didn’t bring a sign that said one thing; he used his foliage to affirm everything, to say ‘here, here!’ to it all, a bouncing exclamation point to every the messages surrounding him on cardboard, to all the stop doing this, bring back that, cruel and mocking jokes, heartfelt pleas, clever slogans and desperate longings, held by people joining together and projecting our desires, despairs, and prognostications into the air alongside one another, all of us shouting all our various Hosannas and Save uses into the atmosphere. 
 
Who were we aiming them all at? I guess we were aiming them at each other, at the collective consciousness, the universe, the far away government on the other side of the ocean. Perhaps at all those people in all those other time zones who did this before us, like some kind of call and delayed response. 
But mainly, to be honest, we were aiming them at the passing cars. If they honked and gave us the hang-loose hand out their window, the cheering got louder. We got a response! They agree! They’re with us! It was like facebook “likes” and Instagram hearts in real life -the literal thumbs up right to our faces, a feel-good echo chamber of our shared discontentment and frustrations, elevated by peppy music and comforting companionship.  And that is not a bad thing – making our voices heard matters, and it felt good. And then it pittered out, and eventually we tossed our signs in the back seat of the car to be recycled later and wandered off to a noodle house for lunch.
 
But it made me realize that as heartening as that was, it only goes so far what I was really craving was thisrally. The one where the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee when God incarnate meanders on a donkey through the middle of people’s expectations and projections to bring us the salvation we need, and not the salvation we think we want.  
Because if our salvation is up to us, to shout it back and forth to each other, to cajole and persuade other selfish, broken human beings to do the right thing, we have no hope. Left to our own devices, we’ll just grasp onto stability enough, a sufficient status quo of empire apathy that lets us turn away from our human siblings, slowly destroy this beloved planet, and perpetuate cruel injustice and dismissive division with maybe a veneer of civility.
We’ll wave our Yes at whatever makes us feel heard and seen, and fear will keep being our driving force. We’ll keep hating our enemies, and flapping our competing signs and propping up our conflicting causes and getting a thrill from the responses we solicit and calling it progress. We’ll elect good people, and bad people, and good people again, and if we get our way, life will go on pretty much the same with a few tweaks, while the threat of death looms as large as it ever has.  We need something from outside ourselves to do the saving.
 
Palm Sunday can feel a bit weird and superfluous, like a mini-Easter. Hooray! Jesus is the coming King! But really, Palm Sunday the culmination of Lent. It's the false finale that draws out all our counterfeit redemptions.  We wave our palms and shout our hosannas and save uses, thinking This is it! It’s going to happen like we want it to! and take all our self-deception and salvation projections—all we think we want and need, who we think God should be for us and what we think God should do for us—and we aim it right at Christ. We load all our misguided intentions, our self-centered solutions, and our sureness of what will save us, onto his shoulders, while he rides by us, perched atop that little donkey.  And Jesus welcomes them into himself, absorbs all of them, and carries these sins to the cross. There our cries for salvation will be answered, just not how we think they should be. 

There God incarnate submits completely to the human experience of suffering and death, so that nothing can separate us from God’s love. God has come, God is here, God loves this world and everyone in it far more than any of us do, and despite us, God is redeeming it all. As Lisa and the prophets reminded us last week, “we live in hope, because we know that God will act. We don’t know the why, nor the how, nor the when. We cannot predict God’s miracles, but we live in the certainty of God’s redeeming power.”
 
However, our hosannas get shouted, or whatever our palm branches represent for us today: God is breaking in, that God has come to share this life with you and me, and something irreversible is about to take place.  
Salvation is what God does and will keep on doing until it is complete. We don’t compel it, and we can’t thwart it. God is saving the world. So, bring your needs and longings and ask away. The Holy Spirit will translate our prayers, and God will bring the saving that we need. 
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the Highest.
Amen.
 

To Hold and Uphold

1 Kings 17:1-16

One unfortunate thing about being human over, say, a bird, or a dog, is that humans tend to forget whose we are and who we are. The prophet’s job is to remind us. They create a kind of the hammock of trust suspended between recalling God’s faithfulness in the past, and premembering the future God is bringing. The is essential, because there is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings who’ve forgotten their belonging to God and each other.

The prophet Elijah appears out of nowhere, bursting on the scene fully formed, ready to show the people of Israel who is the real God. In those days, in the other lands, prophets were a dime a dozen. People who delivered messages between the divine realm and the world of humans camped out in temples near idols like buskers with their hat on the ground.  

So when God calls prophets in Israel, one scholar says, we can think of God ‘using the technology of the day’ – people understood the idea of prophets. But the prophets of Israel weren’t street performers; they were honored guides, whose words were collected and recorded (the Israelites basically invented scripture). Messengers of Yahweh who spoke truth to power, the prophets reminded the kings that God’s covenant calling and the law of Moses applied equally to all people, kings included. 

Also, just to be clear, the prophets were weird. Pretty much all of them. The stories are wild, all performance art and poetry, confusing and disruptive. Not really the buttoned-up lawyer-type, they were more the off-the-grid, loud and raving type, the blunt objects God uses to break through the status quo and tear it all down when the people of God lose their way, imaginations dulled and senses numbed into accepting the unacceptable. This story of unbuilding and rebuilding repeats again and again.  So, the Hebrew prophets were both revered and a little bit feared, because they were unpredictable and a little bit dangerous, not quite housebroken, demonstrating Yahweh couldn’t be domesticated either. 

There are 133 named prophets in the bible, 16 of them women. Many spoke God’s words, but some of also performed miracles, these were known as ‘men of God’. Elijah, and his apprentice Elisha, were the most well-known ‘man of God’ types, conduits of the Divine who demonstrated God’s power with works of wonder.  

Elijah is most famous for two incidents that follow today’s story– one is a face-off with the prophets of Baal Hedad, a Mountaintop Battle of the Gods that lasts a whole day, during which Elijah taunts them relentlessly, and the Baal fails to deliver even a spark. Yahweh and Elijah come out on top when Yahweh’s fire from heaven vaporizes Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice, altar included. Then Elijah takes things too far and slaughters the prophets of Baal. He immediately goes from speaking for God to cowering from the empire when Queen Jezebel threatens him and he flees for his life, bringing us to the second story Elijah is most known for. Wandering desperate and terrified through the wilderness he ends up in a cave, crying out to God. God sends a great wind, and a storm, and an earthquake, but God is not in the wind, or the storm or the earthquake, and then there is the sound of sheer silence. And this is where God meets Elijah. Speaking to him in the still, small voice. 

Those seem like significant stories, and the public showdown between Yahweh and Baal is a real boon to Elijah’s prophetic reputation. But the story we have today seems minor and unimportant. A miracle, for certain, but why is it recorded in the annuls of Kings? Why is it placed alongside stories that shaped the direction of history?

It helps to know something about the Ancient Near East. That there were many gods was simply accepted as fact, there was no alternative to polytheism, that’s just how it was for all peoples everywhere. When people groups mingled, they welcomed in each other’s gods and added them to their own collections. Different gods for different things, hierarchies of gods or their exact names—you might quibble about those details, but you would never question the array and assortment of deities. Scholars tell us that shifting from worshiping many gods to worshiping only one God was gradual – going from worshiping many gods to acknowledging them but worshiping only Yahweh, to not mentioning other gods at all, to finally saying only Yahweh is God and always has been, and there are no other gods—that process takes time, like, hundreds of years of gradual shifting.

So, Elijah is part of this shifting, moving people from worshiping many gods to worshiping Yahweh alone. King Ahab loves worshiping Yahweh, but he just mixes Yahweh up into his collection of other gods and can’t see what’s wrong with that. Only the Israelite kings did this, by the way. Outside of Israel, Yahweh was wildly unpopular, because a god who claims to be the only one does not play well with others.

So when God tells Elijah to tell King Ahab it won’t rain for three years until Yahweh says so, Yahweh is stepping into the realm of the Canaanite god of rain, fertility, growth, and increase- Baal Hedad.  In the way of the empire, the peasants work the land, the king reaps the benefits, and everyone behaves, accepting the way things are, and staying in their proper place. The temples to the rain god are in the cities where it matters, so the rain will fall specifically on the farms of the king, to feed his crops and increase the wealth of the wealthy.

But Yahweh is the God of all, with no distinction or preferences – except perhaps for the overlooked and undervalued. So, Yahweh turns off the faucet.

The law of Moses says God has called each person to know and follow God. All shall be given land, and if they don’t have it, then land and resources should be redistributed so everyone has what they need. People are commanded to look out for each other, and especially to take care of the oppressed and those on the margins, lifting up the poor, the widow and the orphan. Every person is part of God’s story and God has claimed them to be a blessing to the whole world.

But this empire structure King Ahab slides into props up the few by oppressing the many, consolidates power, tramples the weak, plunders the land, dehumanizes human siblings in the insatiable pursuit of more and more in a structure of fear and dominance, competition and scarcity, what we’ve called the way of fear. 

Not only is the one true God too big to be just one of many self-serving deities of the empire that we capitulate to, but the way of God is is in direct opposition to the whole empire thing altogether. Humans are made in the image of God to care for one another, to steward and tend the earth and its creatures, to enjoy life together in the presence of God, in an intricate and astounding world of interdependence, held in a relationship of trust and promise. Yahweh alone is God.

So, against that backdrop, here comes this little story.  After delivering his message of drought to the King, Elijah is sent by God to hang out by a drying up wadi (or creek), and told God will provide. And indeed, God does – never without a sense of humor, using ravens, an unclean bird, to bring food to him, because, remember? God is Lord of all, not even captive to our ideas of God, and is free to do what God wishes. So why not shake it up? Ravens it is! When the creek dries up God sends Elijah some 50 miles away to find this one, particular widow, whom God says will provide food and water for him. 

But when he finally gets there, famished, the lady seems not to have gotten the message. She’s willing to give him a bit of water, but when Elijah asks for food she says, (more bluntly than the Peace Table puts it), “I have enough oil and flour to make my son and me one last scrap of food and then we will lay down and die.” And Elijah has the nerve to ask her to feed him first. He promises the ingredients won’t run out. So, she does, and they don’t. 

And when I hear this, I don’t think, how wonderful! I think, how dare he ask her for that? She’s poor! She needs it way more than he does because she has a kid to feed too! There is only so much to go around! And to give it to some you must deny it to others. If he were really a good person, really from God, he would never demand something from someone who has so little!

And there is the voice of the empire within me! The empire imagination that keeps the peasants in their place and views the world through scarcity and competition. Exactly what the prophetic imagination comes to confront and expunge.

Why does this story matter? Here’s why: Because we too have been coopted by the empire to accept the unacceptable. We’re terrified when the status quo gets rocked and shaken, and the built gets unbuilt, because while it might not be perfect, at least it feels stable. It may be rotten with injustice and inequality, but at least we know how much eggs will cost. And the many gods we worship – gods of security and protection, gods of image and achievement, gods of wellness and longevity that we sacrifice to to keep the world from shaking so we can eek our way forward without much tumult or upheaval – when they fail us, and our 401Ks plummet, it’s terrifying.  We don’t want an unbuilt and rebuilt reality. As much as we call ourselves Christians, we don’t actually want a death and resurrection kind of God, a God who comes in weakness and shares suffering and invites us to see one another and share life with each other come what may and trust that God will meet us there and hold us fast. We want the empire, plain and simple. 

But this little story calls us back to the way of God, not by the prophet’s bold declaration but by his hunger and need. Yahweh is a God who provides. A manna in the wilderness God gives enough for the next meal, and the one after that, if we share it with one another. Not enough to increase and hoard, to rely on our own strength, power or cunning over and against one another. But enough to keep us operating in the currency of covenant, that is, trust and promise. 

The widow must trust Elijah, and must trust the promises of Yahweh through him. Elijah must trust God to provide and the kindness of this woman. He must entrust himself into God’s hands by entrusting himself into her hands. And she seems an unlikely source of security, indeed, not who you’d expect to provide for your needs because she apparently can’t even provide for herself or her son.  But when Elijah asks ‘the least of these’ for help, he elevates her from irrelevant object of pity to Provider of Hospitality. He comes to her in need of care, and sees her as able to care for him, even if she can’t at first see herself that way. And suddenly they are both freed from the empire. They are living the law of Moses, where all are neighbors, siblings in the human family, looking out for each other, and Yahweh is God of us all, promising to hold us and uphold us.

And so, Elijah gets to live the message he will go on to proclaim: There is only one God, this one, Yahweh, alone, who provides all we need and brings life out of death. This is whose we are. And we are called by this God to be a blessing to the world in our mutual care for one another. That is who we are.

There is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings forgetting our belonging to God and each other. And very often we just mix up Yahweh into our collection of other gods and get on with our empire-living. But we are the prophetic community, called to recall God’s faithfulness in the past, premember the future God is bringing, and join right now, from our weakness and need, in the kingdom of the living God unfolding here among us and between us, trusting the God of resurrection to meet us in our places of death. 

So, dear ones, may live the message we proclaim, hear within the silence the still, small, voice, and rest in the hammock of trust.

Amen. 

Remembering how we do this

Our faith in the present is shaped by remembering God's faithfulness in the past. We are sustained by the same God who has sustained us before, and all those before us.  We modern folk are always looking forward. We forget that at any moment we could receive again the gifts and lessons we've been already been given. Here is a glimpse back at our own journey where God met us in difficult times. This God meets us again, here and now.

 Repent: lament, return, remember, rest
A sermon from June 2021 (mid-pandemic lockdown, post George Floyd murder)

 

Psalm 4

Answer me when I call, O God of my right!
   You gave me room when I was in distress.
   Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer. 

How long, you people, shall my honour suffer shame?
   How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?
          Selah
But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself;
   the Lord hears when I call to him. 

When you are disturbed, do not sin;
   ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
          Selah
Offer right sacrifices,
   and put your trust in the Lord. 

There are many who say, ‘O that we might see some good!
   Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!’
You have put gladness in my heart
   more than when their grain and wine abound. 

I will both lie down and sleep in peace;
   for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.

 

There’s a desperate vigilance and awful heaviness about the world at the moment. I think even if we aren’t paying super close attention, many of us are still feeling it. A shared, psychic weight to the world. Even as we are hurriedly vaccinating people, the case numbers are rising toward a global highest point, and what, another mass shooting? Wasn’t there just one yesterday? The pressure feels audible, the tension palpable. So many people I know have commented on how utterly exhausted they feel. But at the same time our sleep is fraught and spotty. We are alert, restless and exhausted.

 

It feels like we’re given two options, and neither one is tenable. One is to watch every minute of the Derek Chauvin trial, read everything we can about little Adam Toledo, break apart the video of Daunte White’s killing, stay up late watching national guardsmen teargassing journalists a few miles away from us, track the vaccinations, stay on top of the politicians, check in on the suffering children at the border and the conflicts simmering all over the globe, worry about the threat of climate change, and compulsively wonder what more we should be doing. And if we are not out marching or speaking out then we are following those who are, because we need to feel like we are doing something, like something is being done that can stop all this, or fix all this, and Lord, it’s all so awful how can we ignore even a moment of it? 

 

The other option we’re given is to go numb and limp. To shut it all off, and block it all out, and take in nothing but our own lives and desires. And maybe we occasionally feel a teeny bit guilty, but that’s better than helplessness and rage with no outlet. And sometimes we just bounce wildly back and forth between the two.

 

But there is a third way. And I think this Psalm gives it to us. 

 

It starts with lament. When the tears feel close, and sorrow claws up the throat, and anger and rage are right here next to us, we aim all of that right at God.  We moderns are pretty scared of lament in church, preferring the more palatable confession, but lament is an integral part of our faith. And this particular lament of David, we know, was sung in community, all the voices crying out together, Answer me when I call to you God! How long will this go on?

 

There is a mystery word here that shows up 71 times in the psalms and twice in Habakkuk, Selah. Because it’s very close to the word for pause, and also the word for praise, throughout the millennia it has come to be seen as a kind of mix of both - pause and praise God. Take a beat and turn your attention back to God.

So built right into the song is a pause, everyone stopping, silent, shifting focus back to God. And then continuing on in unison.

 

So hear the Psalm again, in this paraphrase:

 

O God who knows me, answer me when I call!

When I have been confined in anxious misery before, 

you’ve opened up expansive space for me to breathe, 

please hear me now; give me your grace again.

 

How long will our humanity be torn down? 

How long will lies be elevated, 

and people spread vitriol, delusion and exploitation?

 

Stop.

Take a beat. 

Turn your attention to God.

 

God has drawn us to God’s own being, 

those who seek God are claimed for God’s purposes.  

When you are worked up and distraught, 

don’t turn to division and blame; don’t tear down others.  

Instead, sit in it with God, 

be silent in a restful space. 

 

Stop.

Take a beat.

Turn your attention to God.

 

Lay everything before the Almighty in vulnerable honesty, 

and trust God with it. 

So many people say, “There is no goodness that we can see!” 

Oh Lord, let your love and truth shine on all of us!

You have filled me with deep joy, 

more happiness than when they have all the wealth 

and satisfaction they desire.

 

I won't stay up babysitting the world,

I will sleep soundly and deeply

because this your world, God, 

and my life is held in you.

 

Lament. Return to God. Then remember.  

This earth is heavy with sorrow and need. 

And at the same time this planet turns slowly in the utter silence of the vast cosmos, nestled amongst the great lights of burning stars, held in orbit to the sun. And within this planet, while one hemisphere is nestling down in winter hibernation, here the green shoots push up through the soil, and trees are awakening. And all over the planet new babies are born, and broken relationships are mended, and people are tending to each other, and there is laughter and joy, and tears of deep connection, and healing, and hope, and love remains the most powerful force in the universe, always at work, always, always, always.

 

But oh! We forget. So quickly, without realizing it, even when we’re trying to remember. 

This happened to me yesterday. I was remembering, and then I was completely derailed when I read in a commentary from 2012 (Shauna Hannan, Working Preacher) that in the first verse, where it says, you made space for me it originally alluded to “release from a tight noose at the neck,” the opposite of the word for when I was in distress, which is used for “a constricted larynx.”  And I stopped hearing the promise of God’s deliverance and the invitation to trust, and all I could see was that God did not make space for George Floyd when he was in distress, and how could I preach this text in the shadow of that? 

 

All day long I spun out, all day long I fixated on my words, the overwhelming sorrow and brokenness of this world, the pain of our city.  I did not lament. I obsessed. I did not take my anguish and sit silently before God. I logged onto the news and social media and started babysitting the world again. I did not come in honesty before the Almighty. I got caught up in blame and frustration in the country, and became controlling and edgy in my own house. 

And then I looked at the clock and realized it was time for evening prayers.[1] So I sat down on zoom with those who meet together every evening.  

Stop. Take a beat. Turn your attention to God.

 

And suddenly there was joy, in sharing about a day spent with happy little cousins, and our delight and horror at a ridiculous amount of accidentally purchased bananas.[2] Suddenly God was meeting us right there in our humanity, in our need, in our coming together. Then one of them repeated back to me that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and I was invited back into trust.

 

We are meant to stand with one another and for each other, to hold each other and fight for life for each other and us all, for this whole beautiful and broken world. We are made for love. God calls us into God’s purposes; we are drawn into God’s own being. We get to share in the love God is already, always bringing.

 

And then, at the end of the day, we sleep.  

To sleep is to yield to our most essential humanity – our creaturliness, our need, our soft, vulnerable, universal humanity, the warm breath, closed eyes, heavy limbs of us. 

 

Sleep is trust. It is pure being. Sleep is admitting we are not God. Sleep returns us to the humility of our own humanity. Only from here can we be fully in this life, with and for each other. 

 

We belong to God. This is God’s world. God made it. God came into it to bear our suffering and share our pain and take on our death so that death cannot, will not define us, will not have the last word, will not prevail. 

 

So stop. Take a beat. Turn your attention to God.

 

There is a poem by Pablo Neruda that I love, called Keeping Quiet. It goes like this:

 

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

 

For once on the face of the earth

let’s not speak in any language,

let’s stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

 

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines,

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

 

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would look at his hurt hands.

 

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victory with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

 

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.

 

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with 

death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

 

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.” 

 

Christ has risen. He is risen indeed. 

Death does not get the last word, and love is the most powerful force in the universe. 

May we join in fully. And may we sleep soundly.

Amen.

---

[1] At this time, Pastor Lisa and I were praying every morning and evening, and the congregation every Sunday night, over zoom, with a family navigating mom's cancer.

[2] In my first foray into online grocery shopping, rather than 14 single bananas, I’d inadvertently bought 14 2lb bunches of bananas.