What Easter is About

 

Luke 24:1-12 A few days ago, for the first time in 50 years, some astronauts left earth to travel to the moon. At one point on their journey, they will be on the far side of the moon. If all goes well, for nearly an hour they will be completely out of view of earth, out of communication range, in the silent, cold darkness of the universe all alone, further away than any human being has ever been, with no way to connect with any person in the world. If I leave my cell phone at home when I’m heading to the grocery store, I will turn around and go back for it. What must it feel like to be beyond the reach of all that makes us human – other people, communication, the very earth itself?  For astronauts who leave the earth, something really interesting happens with a really boring name, called the “overview effect.” We’re told that seeing the world from outside of it can overwhelm a person with a sense of what the earth as home really means, where all people are together, and everything is connected, and it’s visibly clear that the divisions and boundary lines we live with are all made up. The beauty of the whole thing can feel, dare I say, earth-shaking.   The Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart describes it this way, You realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music and poetry and art and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games — all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize that that perspective has — that you’ve changed. That there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was. Easter can be kind of fraught. It’s both this not-at-all-religious day of egg hunts, chocolate bunnies and maybe ham, and a highly-religious day, where we say and sing a bunch of things most of us don’t entirely believe, and some things we probably shouldn’t.  We’re confronted with death right at the center of our faith, and the ugly story of the cross which carries with it so much baggage, and has been so misunderstood and misappropriated that some Christians have tried to sidestep it, preferring not to talk about things like sin and salvation, until the one week a year the cross is impossible to avoid, and then uncomfortably recite the words and sing the songs, for the sake of tradition and for the larger commitment to loving God and neighbor and trying to live a good life in a world that seems not to care much about any of that anymore, but all the while trying not to linger too long on the messy details at the heart of the narrative. And yet. This is the heart of the narrative. Our whole story hinges right here.  Christmas is easier to swallow – babies are cute, and angels are cool, and there’s less problematic imagery in Christmas hymns than Easter songs, and as scratchy and uncomfortable as hay may be, being swaddled in a manger is WAY cozier than being nailed to a cross.   But the cross and the manger are together in the story that starts with God coming in alongside us to be with and for us, taking on completely everything it means to be human, not just the cute and cozy parts. If we’re honest, being human is largely uncomfortable and confusing, and there is so much suffering involved, and to cap it all off, there is no bypassing that, no matter what, we are all going to die. That is what Jesus comes to share when he’s placed in the manger.  The cross is where Jesus takes on all the world’s evil and horror, injustice, and pain, when he was murdered by those in power—some greedy, some insecure, some hypocrites—and most everyone else who just went along with it. “Jesus died for our sin.” is what we generally say about that. But, wow, that’s a loaded sentence, and people hear it different ways. Since the ‘S’ word gets used a lot today it might be helpful to define it. Human beings were made in God’s image to love one another and this earth-home we’ve been put on. Sin is when that true order of things is violated. Whenever we degrade someone’s humanity or act against our belonging to God and all others, that's sin.  And the helpful thing about the Christian story is that it says aloud that even when we try our best to love other people or ourselves, or be the good we want to see in the world, very often we are the greedy, insecure hypocrites. And that collectively, sometimes humans are lovely, but often, we can be awful. Most likely we will keep hurting each other and ourselves and harming the planet, and if the future is all up to us things are not looking great.  All our fear and dread, all our worry about our country, or our kids, or our jobs, or our health, or brutal, needless wars, or people being crushed under the boots of the powerful or cast aside as worthless, the cross says: it is as bad as you think it is, and it’s ok to call it that.   And, as bad as it is, as bad as it gets, as bad as it might ever be, we are not alone in this. God came in alongside us and took on all of it with us and for us, all the way to the cross. Jesus died for our sin. God is not watching us from a distance; God is where life happens, right here in the world, up close and personal. So the death of Jesus means something. But Easter is not really about the cross, it’s about the empty tomb on the other side of it. And that changes everything permanently. It’s worth noting, that when the tomb was found empty, even the people who most closely followed Jesus didn’t suddenly think the whole world had changed or even believe at first that he had risen. They didn’t magically feel compelled to live in a different way. They were stunned, and afraid, and accused each other of lying. In fact, Mark’s gospel has three endings because people were uncomfortable leaving it alone at the most ancient version, which is, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The most toward faith these first resurrection witnesses can muster is amazement. There is no great epiphany or belief, and definitely no celebration. They simply didn’t know what to make of it. How could such a thing be? It’s not until the living Jesus encounters them that they see things for what they are: Everything has changed. The relationship is no longer what it was. There is no going back. The resurrection means that the pain we suffer and inflict, that horrors we witness or ignore, the damage done by and to us, the powers that dominate and oppress – all these things, in other words, sin and death are not the final word over the human community or this beloved planet.   This world belonged to God already, but when God came into it alongside us, heaven and nature sang. And when Jesus died our death, no longer can anything separate us from love. And when he did not stay dead, the end of the story is decided: life, not death, is what prevails. The relationship between humanity and God, this world and God, has been settled once and for all. The final word is love. Love is where it’s all headed, and love is all that will remain.  You and I are not arbitrarily born, making our way by ourselves through a complicated world, doing our best while things around us crumble and decay, and hopefully we have more moments of happiness and sadness, hopefully we dodge the big suffering, and hopefully we manage not to hurt others too badly along the way. And then one day we die anyway, and in a generation—or two, if we’re lucky—we disappear completely from living memory and that’s the sum of it.  No. We are made for love, each one of us unique, every person part of the fabric of all things held together in love. We are bound to all others who are also here to love, in a world made for love, living inside time, which is made for love. And we participate in God’s loving and healing of the earth and its people, occasionally in extraordinary, supernatural ways that may leave us amazed, but mostly in the absolute ordinary, earthy stuff of life: conversations, tears, laughter, listening, play, rest, work, tending the earth and neighboring our neighbors. The living Jesus is right here, every day, doing this through us and for us. And when our time on this little blue and white ball come to an end, this bond of love that holds us to God and all others still does not break.  If we’re willing to let it, Easter can offer us the ‘overview effect.’ The little window through which we glimpse the big picture of what the earth as home really means, filling us with gratitude and wonder for the bigger reality we often forget or can’t see when we’re living within all the turmoil and conflicts of our made-up divisions and boundary lines. But we can’t do that to ourselves any more than we can shoot ourselves into space to see the world from the outside, or decide to never sin again.   Resurrection doesn’t mean anything until the living Jesus encounters us. What we can do is show up in our lives, however messy or hard, uncomfortable or confusing things may be, because this is where Jesus is now too. But even if we are not showing up in our lives, even if we’ve cut off communication completely, turned our back on what makes us human, and find ourselves somehow in the farthest cold reaches of loneliness, not one of us is ever beyond the love or grasp of God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can do, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus pursues us, has gone to death and back for us already, and will never stop inviting us deeply into our own lives. The Holy Spirit will never stop giving us specific opportunities to live in God’s love with and for the people here with us. God is persistent, and our defenses may not be as strong as we think they are. And besides that, God can bring healing or hope through us when we don’t even know it’s happening, and even seems to delight in doing so.  We don’t get to exempt ourselves from God’s love. But when we are open, when we assume a stance of least resistance to the encounter we cannot make happen, when we surrender to being found, or freed, or forgiven, how much more joyful life becomes to know our lives are participating in redemption and hope!  Mystery invites wonder, the stranger is sibling, and love meets us in the depths of our suffering. “The power that raised Jesus from the grave now works in us”, freeing our hearts to live in God’s grace, helping us love our neighbors, ask for help when we need it, apologize when we’re wrong, forgive when it’s impossible, join together to oppose evil, daily participate in the good God is always pouring into the world, take in the beauty, live awake to the love that holds us all, and die without fear. Christ is risen, everything has changed and there is no going back. Amen.

What lasts and what doesn't

Mark 12:38-44

On Friday, after completing a successful battle with cancer, a family friend went in for an all-clear scan and instead it revealed a couple of new spots on his liver. The future he was ready to step into vanished and what lays ahead is more upheaval and unknown. 

Two days ago, Afghanistan and Pakistan declared war on each other, and yesterday Israel and America began bombing Iran. All air traffic across the entire Middle East is suspended because the risk of commercial planes being hit by missiles and air defense systems is “extremely high.” 

I may not have paid much attention to all of this on my Saturday except that my son is in India. Next door to Pakistan, with Iran in between him and me. Will it be safer for him to fly home in 6 days when his trip ends? Or will it be more dangerous? I have no idea. And I have no way to protect him or myself from this world’s risks and dangers, or from reckless actions of those charged with caring for the welfare of others, whose decisions have consequences.  

It’s an outrageously precarious thing to be human. We are fragile and mortal, tossed about by things we can’t control and scrambling always for stable ground and a sense of security and well-being.  

And when we get some, we try to get more, we invest our money and tend our good health and build on our reputation and carefully curate our identity and try to store it all up and stretch it all out, because who knows when our security could be lost or who might try to take it from us. And those with more power and control keep gaining and those with less power and control keep losing, and pretty soon the haves and the have nots are so far apart we aren’t seeing each other anymore, and we may not be in dire straits like the generous widow but at least we’re not arrogant and oppressive like the villainous scribes, and we’ve forgotten that every one of us dies, and none of us can take any of it with us when we go. 

For generations, the widow in this story was used as a morality tale of selfless generosity – give all you have even when that’s nothing, because your everything is what God deserves. We compared ourselves to her and felt convicted to give more, give our all (subtext: in order to be a good person and secure our stability with God and in heaven).

Then, for the last couple of decades, the scholarship flipped. Now the story became about the self-important scribes, and the broken system that is supposed to take care of widows and orphans instead bankrupting their households, and an impoverished woman who puts everything she has into the coffer, while the leaders parade around making themselves look good and their own temple giving costs them nothing.  

But when we center human beings and behavior, not only do we, ironically, end up dehumanizing the people—both the woman and the scribes—but overlook the main character by forgetting that the bible is the story of God. So, I want to look at Jesus today instead. 

Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem, the temple he rode to on Palm Sunday and raged through the following day, driving out moneychangers and flipping over tables and yelling that what is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations has become a den of robbers. 

He has now been teaching in the temple for several days. The leaders keep trying to corner him, and he keeps wriggling out of their rhetorical traps by turning attention back to God. Over and over, they spar.
Then one scribe asks Jesus what the most important commandment is, and Jesus answers, “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.”
The scribe replies, “You’re right – this is much more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
And Jesus,  recognizing his wisdom, says, ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of heaven.” And, we’re told “no one dared ask him anything after that.”

So by the time this scene unfolds, there’s been some history between Jesus and the temple leaders – he has praised one for seeing to the heart of things and now calls out others for missing the whole point. And now here comes this widow – whose security and identity in society is just about the lowest and most precarious it could be.

Her offering is 1/32 of one day’s wage; it wouldn’t buy her even a bite of one meal. If her two coins had been laying visible in the dusty, dung-filled street, you yourself wouldn’t bother to pick them up.  But Jesus lifts up her offering as worth more than all the rest of the money combined. Even, perhaps, more than the temple itself.

Immediately after this incident the disciples are leaving the temple with Jesus, and they pause to comment admiringly on its stunning architecture and massive grandeur. Jesus sighs, “‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”

There are things that last and things that don’t, and we mix up the two terribly.

This whole story has taken place in that temple, the house of prayer, where the God of the whole world, of creation and all nations, of future and past, who cannot be contained within walls, will nevertheless be with God’s people. God resides with the people themselves; it is in them whom God’s Spirit dwells. But instead of the holy people meeting God in this holy place, this has become a space of grandstanding and showdowns, ostentatious wealth and crass comparisons, with access to God doled out to some, and withheld from others.

And yet, here in the middle of all that mess and sin, sits God with us. In the noise and bustle of the temple world, amongst all the busy, impressive people, he locks in on this disregarded woman. He sees her. He invites the disciples to see her. And then, to their surprise, Jesus praises her trust and her faithfulness above all others combined. 

When she gives her all she is living in the real reality the others are forgetting or overlooking. In gratitude, she gives what she has, because she belongs entirely to God. Her life is not her own to protect or preserve. She will be upheld by God by the hands of her neighbors, through the love and care of those around her – this is so foundational to the identity of the people of God and the commands of God that it is written into the law that these same scribes taught to others: “true religion is this: to care for orphans and widows.” This is the way of God. To love God and neighbor, which the wise scribe has just laid out helpfully so that we have it in mind when we witness this moment. Whether the rest of the embodied people of God in the temple that day are living in obedience to that or not, she is. She brings all she has to God and entrusts herself completely to God’s care. 

We can turn our gaze from the widow back to the pompous scribes and make the story about them, feed off the outrage about what should be happening, relish the criticism of the evil, stoke our disgust that those in power would abuse it, that the systems and structures are so broken, and that corruption is so rampant and that we can’t trust the people in power. 
And, certainly, we will always have plenty of material in front of us for that kind of project.

But Jesus points out – justice comes for us all. Cruelty, idiocy, empire, and even stability and temple, will crumble. But that’s not where the truth of life and living is to be found.
Because this is God’s story, not ours.  In God’s Kingdom there are only human beings, interconnected, all, taking turns in need, taking turns having something to give, and most often, all of it at the same time. And our short time here alive in this way is for something more than avoiding pain and dodging death. It’s for a deeper kind of relationship to the planet and everyone around us and can’t be taken or made, can only be received and shared.

The widow just has fewer delusions than the rest of the bunch. There is less standing in the way of her dependence on God and connection to others. She doesn’t have the resources or capacity for self-reliance to pretend this is about what she can do. She is more available to the truth that is true of all of us: Our wellbeing and identity were never ours to construct or protect to begin with. There is someone greater looking out for us all and leading everything, always, toward redemption. 
She is living how we are all called to live, a life of sacrifice and worship –our whole lives, which were not even ours to begin with, lived back toward God, in response to the love of God that claims and sustains us all, trusting God to take care of us and to be the community through whom God works. 

Governments topple and temples crumble. Bodies get sick and stock markets crash and world orders falter and systems are broken. All people do selfish things and some people do evil things, and everything that we lean into for security and safety will eventually disappoint and undoubtedly disappear. 

Only love continues – love eternal that broke into time and invaded our lives. Love is the breath of the Spirit that moved over the waters, and voice of the Almighty who speaks it all into being, and the vulnerability of the human one who crept in beside us, and who, on that particular day, sat there watching all the beloved ones in the temple, and pulled back the veneer to show those who were paying attention that things are upside down and inside out from how we think they are, and there is far more going on than we can see. 

When Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew the world was ending, he answered, “I would plant an apple tree.” And when the widow reached the coffer, she dropped in her last two coins.  The world is held in God, and our future is God’s in love alone. 

And right in the midst of the chaos and the fear, Jesus is here, holding both the terrible injustice and the deeply faithful sacrifice and inviting us to pay attention. He sees us plainly, in our own self-absorption and reaching, and in our gratitude and dependence. May we see him too, and may we trust.  
Amen.
 

Check on your Minnesota friends and family members

Please:

Check on your Minnesota people. (including college students and others away from home)

Lay aside all you are reading, hearing or watching, and be ready to simply listen. Give the people you love a place--outside of the friends, neighbors, and coworkers right in it--where they can be seen and heard and held. And if they don’t have words or feel like talking, I promise that your having reached out (without expecting a long conversation from a drained person) means so much. That people elsewhere are paying attention, caring, praying, or thinking of us is important to hear.   

Pray.

You don't have to feel you know the whole picture, or the correct picture, or the picture that aligns with your beliefs or perspectives. Just pray. God's way is not our own, and is not directed or hindered by our views, labels, or divisions. God knows what needs doing. 

If it is hard to find words, one way to pray without telling God what to do or how to do it is simply to say to God, 

"Here now, with you, for _____". 

Repeat with as many different people or groups as you feel led.  

Help.

Here is an organization that, for years, has mobilized volunteers from faith communities into schools to provide take-home, weekend, meal ingredients to food-insecure families of children who rely on school-provided breakfasts and lunches during the week.  With their massive infrastructure and strong local connections, they are working now to care for families whose needs are exponentially greater in this time. A donation here immediately becomes food reaching children and families who need it.

Light in Darkness

Matthew 2:13-23

This weekend some of us were on a confirmation retreat. We talked about theology – which is just a fancy word for asking, What is going on here? Or, in LNPC speak, Who is this God and what is God up to? And, What is a good life and how do we live it?

 

But these questions are not just hypothetical and theoretical. They come out of real situations where life is turned upside down, that make asking them a pressing need. All throughout scripture and church history, we read, an extraordinary experience would happen that would shake things up so much that just going on as usual would not work anymore.

In these moments the people who seek to point their lives toward God, and goodness, and hope, come together and ask, what is going on here? How do we make sense of this? Where is God in this and how should we live as a result? 

Specifically, on our retreat we named some of things that send us seeking, like uncertainty, suffering, fear, helplessness and injustice, and these words too are not just hypothetical or theoretical, because another word for injustice is when your best friend can’t come to school for fear for his safety, but you still can go anywhere you want.

 

A wise person said to me this week, “There are two sides to the Christmas story. One, the coming of the light and two, embracing the dark, for God’s presence is there also.” We like to tell the Christmas story in the coming of the light way. But the story itself has the darkness part too, and that too must be embraced if we are looking for the presence of God.

 

After Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph stayed on in Bethlehem. They settled in to make a life and raise this child among extended family and neighbors they’d come to know, near the shepherds who must’ve been like a collection of uncles to Jesus by now, not too far from Aunt Elizabeth, Uncle Zechariah and baby John, learning to talk and walk to walk together, perhaps. Life might have just begun to feel a little normal, (whatever that is when you’re raising the Messiah), when the bubble is popped by majestic and exotic visitors from afar descending into their town. 

They give Mary and Joseph gifts, not only gold, frankincense and myrrh, but also their far away and deeper insight that God has come for the whole world, and everyone in it belongs to this story and this story belongs to everyone in it, by embodying their own story of God telling them what God is up to and how they’re shaping their lives around it.  And then together, they’re all doing theology – asking now what? How do we make sense of all this now?

 

Eventually they say their affectionate goodbyes and the Magi are on their way, when an angel messenger invades Joseph’s dreams again, like happened three years ago when he was told not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, and says, Right now, take your family to Egypt. It’s not safe here, Go!

And from one moment to the next this little family goes from being settled to unsettled, certain to uncertain, from hosting strangers from a foreign land to being strangers in a foreign land. 

 

This time they’re not going to a home town of Joseph’s ancestors where they have friends and relatives like they did when they moved to Bethlehem, they’re going to the far reaches of the vast Roman Empire where they know nobody, and don’t share the same customs or even speak the same language.  From a life comfortable and familiar they are thrust into to absolute uprootedness. 

 

But, when they arrive, people there take them in and give them safety and welcome, hospitality and care. Why? Because strangers are really siblings in the human family, because we all belong to God and each other. And this truth must become deeply embedded and embodied in the human life of our Lord and savior in order for it to mean anything in our own human lives. Jesus is right here when we are with and for one another. 

(By the way, it doesn’t even settle down when the ego-maniac leader dies. The holy family returns to Bethlehem but Herod’s son is in charge there and so it’s still not safe, and only then, when Jesus is like a first-grader, do they finally go back to Nazareth, where their ordinary lives were first interrupted by God’s declaration of coming in to share this life with us all). 

 

Meanwhile, many families did not escape the violence and horror brought down upon Bethlehem because of Herod’s fragile ego and fear of losing his power. Darkness is real. Evil is evil, and we participate. Human beings are capable of great cruelty and brutality. Human beings are capable of profound compassion and courage.  Both are true, and it is in the darkness that we discover so. 

We can’t depend on the greatness of human beings to save us.  We are cruel and kind, brave and cowardly, right-intentioned and off base, all of us. Let’s be honest, we haven’t the stamina or attention spans to be the source of real transformation, not to mention our terrible tendency to turn each other into enemies and vent our sorrow and anger at evil in one another’s faces and to one another’s destruction. If saving the world and each other is up to us, we are doomed.

 

Almost two weeks ago I was in Assisi, standing on a foggy mountainside learning about St. Francis in the early 1200s, who started out life a spoiled rich kid, but gave up everything he owned to serve his fellow human beings and live close to the earth, because Jesus spoke to him and awakened him to the profound reality that rather than reaching for God and striving for a good life, this whole world is held by God and every person and creature in it is already completely loved by God, and so is meant to be loved and cared for by us. Our lives are not our own, they are for one another. And other people’s lives are not none of our business, we are here to care for each other. And this earth is not to be taken for granted, it is the home God has given us all to share, and brother sun and sister moon and the rabbits and the birds and the people behaving badly and the people in need of help are all ours and we are theirs, and everything and everyone belongs, and this is not hypothetical or theoretical. 

 

The darkness we are living through right now is real and tangible and can’t be ignored and makes it impossible to keep living as usual.  But we recognize that where there is darkness, the God who comes in is here, Jesus is here, Jesus who came into death to bring us life, and is doing so even right now, inside the real encounters and between regular, human lives. In the middle of despair, uncertainty, fear, suffering, helplessness and injustice, are people embracing each other with compassion and care, hospitality and welcome, experiences that shake us up with hope, and strangers discovering we belong to each other because we’re all really siblings in this human family. 

 

Evil is real and not to be trifled with. But its strength is in fear, and it can not prevail over love that leaks in and rises up and persists, and one day will be the totality and the fullness of life for all, because love comes from God and returns to God taking everyone and everything into its healing hold. The tastes and glimpses of this we experience now come when we surrender our lives into God’s hands, and we find ourselves praying with St. Francis, “make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred let me sow love.” 

I could list examples of this Kingdom of God light in the darkness, but all week long you all have been proclaiming the gospel to me, and any stories of hope or trust I would share today are coming from your lives, and moments in your neighborhoods and schools. 

So it feels like what we need right now is to do some theology together—not hypothetical and theoretical, but simply to ponder with all the saints, What is happening? Where is God in this? And how are our lives being shaped in response? 

So I am going to open up the space for ‘Kingdom of God sightings,’ so we can do the work of the church, and share where we have seen God at work, and where we have participated in the Kingdom of God as it is unfolding among us. 

 

(We passed the mic and stories included teachers driving kids home who don't have a safe ride, grandparents in traffic vests walking school grounds all day, a church paying the rent of their neighbor’s temporarily closed business, a middle school kid’s story about interpreting the events of the day with each another during a special assembly, seeing someone at a frigid protest give her down mittens to stranger with flimsy gloves, switching around carpools to protect Somali parents, messages of solidarity from other states and countries and across political spectrum, etc.)

Empire vs. Hope

I am in Sicily. I awoke this morning to images of vigils and protests in Minneapolis and the news that federal investigators were barring MN state officials from investigating Renee Good’s murder, and to messages from friends all over the world – Norway, Canada, California – of prayer, love and solidarity. The news from Minneapolis is reaching around the globe, and I want to share with you how it is meeting me today. 

We headed out our door and made our way to the site of ancient Greek temples, where we spent the day exploring a sprawling city of ruins of an ancient empire.  Last week, in Rome, our guide (with a PhD in history) spent three days unpacking for us the Roman Empire, explaining in the process the mindset and mechanisms of empire. We stood at the same entrance into the Colosseum where for 450 years, 500,000 people, one at a time, were forced into the arena to meet their death for the entertainment of the empire. The dehumanization and stratification of society, the mentality of dominance and conquering through might and power, the pursuit of domination and invincibility expressed in the building of grand things and promotion of your own name to be remembered and praised, the practice of absorbing peoples and lands into your realm – all of it was laid out for us in stark detail. 

We see stories of Egyptian and Babylonian empires in the Old Testament, empire's mindset of conquest, power and domination in the 20th century played out in the regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, among others. And now we can vividly see empire, undisguised and bold, in our own nation - our own neighborhood.  

This is an old story, a human story. 

But the ground I stood on today held two other stories, and I want to tell them to you. 

When Paul arrived in Sicily in 61 AD (Acts 28:12-13), the Christian community began here. In the first and second centuries the Greek temple and surrounding land beneath it became a graveyard for an early Christian community.  To reach the impressive ruins I walked through caves and graves of our ancestors in faith, and then through “The Garden of Peace,” a symbolic olive grove planted last year, with trees from 21 different countries and counting, symbolizing global harmony and coexistence.

And then, right in between the hulking remnants of a crumbled empire is this: a collection of metal plates coming out of the ground, with names carved through them, and stories written underneath.  A kind of shrine, called “The Garden of the Righteous of the World.” 

A simple 'cemetery' of monuments to ordinary people in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, who gave their lives upholding the humanity of others. Poets and popes, neighbors and mayors, teachers, priests, diplomats, physicians, scientists, civil servants, farmers, writers. 

I stood there, reading name after name, story after story of people who acted locally, but who are now remembered on this hillside in Sicily as part of the same story of loving neighbor, and upholding community, and sustaining shared humanity in the face of various expressions of empire.  And in the ground on which these markers stand, 2000 years ago were laid to rest the bodies of the same living community that they, and now we, belong to, those whose lives are shaped by this unstoppable reality that endures and prevails. The Church has always opposed empire by standing for neighbor and building community from underneath. (Where it has failed to do so is where it has adapted to and adopted empire itself).

In Spirit of Hope, Byung-Chul Han writes, “Only in the deepest despair does true hope arise. The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope.”  Then Han describes the very lives and spirits of all those I read about this afternoon, when he says, "Those who act with hope act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life. However, there is also something contemplative about hope. It leans forward and listens attentively. The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.” He continues, “The temporal mode of hope is not-yet. Hope opens itself up to the coming, for what-is-not-yet… When we hope, we become creditors to the future.” (from pages 2-5).

In the shadow of crumbling empire, I stood among tributes to people who lived their now-lives led by God’s future, with beauty, grace and tenderness, in their own specific circumstances. With the people they were living alongside, they joined Christ in bearing others’ suffering.  They acted audaciously, driven by hope. Their participation in God’s love spread hope into lives that spread hope into more lives, and more, and it is still spreading, in lives still participating, because we are all connected in a belonging deeper than empire and stronger than death.

Empires always fall. 

Sometimes they last centuries or a millennia, sometimes just 12 terrible years (Nazis). Empires seek to be eternal and never are. They’re held together by fear and fragility and force. 

What is eternal and unbreakable is the Kingdom of God. Jesus came into this life alongside us, under the shadow of empire that feared and killed him, and broke the power of death, flipping the world upside down. The steady pulse of life hums in, underneath, despite, and through it all, creating, renewing, redeeming, resurrecting. The presence of Christ is felt when we are with and for one another, in the love that binds us all together and holds us through and beyond death. 

Our lives are part of this story.  We are part of this community. As Bonhoeffer would say, we are here to be with and for our neighbor. In the concrete relationships and situations we’re in. 

When empire is spreading lies and tear gas, flexing might and rattling sabors, loving and caring for our neighbors might seem weak or ineffectual. But it speaks a deeper language and knows a deeper truth than power and force. Praying, singing, giving one another food, rides, warmth and shelter, caring for each other and upholding one another's humanity, these don’t seem able to defeat evil, but they are the only thing that does. 

I am grateful to be in the community of people throughout the world - now living, gone before and yet to come - shaping our lives toward love and practicing being guided by hope.

When I awoke on Thursday here in Italy, this message was waiting for me:

“It is almost 3:23 in the morning, and I am awake and writing my pastor. I want her to know that a little more than eight blocks from something horrible this morning, her faith community gathered this evening - to see Christ’s presence in one another. We shared a meal and then our stories. Before departing into the darkness of the night . . . we sang. The evening was reverent, somber- for sure, but no one felt alone.”

Our story is long. The refrains repeat. The call is consistent. 

I want to leave you with some glimpses of our siblings and forebears in the Kingdom of God that I spent my day giving thanks for.  Maybe spending a few minutes among them will invite you into hope too.

 

 

What Christmas can't do

Maybe this holiday season so far has been joyous, gentle and kind for you, filled with good will and cheer, and if so, I am glad. To me, this year it feels like Christmas came on like a freight train. I couldn’t keep up, and maybe I also didn’t really have the bandwidth for it – in the end, I didn’t even get the ornaments onto my tree. But I couldn’t just admit defeat - there is actually a red and green bin still sitting unopened in the corner of my living room. 

I love Christmas, I absolutely do. But also, if I’m honest, it can be big let-down. Along with all the shimmer and warmth, for most of us Christmas is also usually awkward and exhausting, and, except for, maybe, like 4 years in middle childhood, Christmas is almost never how we remember it was or how we hope it will be.  
 
This year many of us are walking around with the collective burden of sorrow for our communities, and our nation and world, anger or helplessness coming in waves that don’t just subside when bells start jiggling and chestnuts start roasting. 
Some of us have lost a job we loved and don’t know what’s next. Others here are wrapping our heads around a scary diagnosis - our own or someone close to us. Some of us have kids that we can't talk to, not really, no matter how much we try. Or we’re spending the holiday season overwhelmed with the grief of missing someone who isn’t with us anymore. 
And plans change, people are sick or have to work, and the dinner will have fewer place-settings than it is supposed to have. Tonight or tomorrow, some of us will drink too much, or silently worry about someone else drinking too much. And some of us will spend the next couple of days trying to ignore the gnawing loneliness, or suppress the persistent anxiety, and just be happy like we’re supposed to on Christmas because, hooray! It’s Christmas.
 
When it comes down to it, Christmas is just not big enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto it.
 
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got it wrong. Christmas is not a happy, hollow celebration; Christmas is a reorientation to the future. Christmas is the beginning of God’s joining us in this life - in every single ordinary, beautiful, scary, sad, unholy, joy-filled, and disappointing part of human living.
 
In fact, after the exciting events we are about to recount tonight, the Christ-child’s story will become so ordinary, so commonplace, so representative, that Luke will sum up the next dozen or so years of Jesus’ life in one line: “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”
 
His next years will be full of absolutely ordinary things –cuts and bruises, stomach flu, temper tantrums, baby sisters, making friends, being teased, doing chores, laughter, anger, gladness and tears. And like every human life these years will also be full of tragedy and loss and fear and surprise. Politics and violence shaped the world when Jesus lived in it too. His early years are as a refugee in a foreign land, during his teen years many Galileans are killed in political uprisings. Throughout his childhood, Roman atrocities continue happening in the villages around his. And before Jesus turns 30, Mary will bury Joseph. His dad doesn’t get to see his son’s ministry begin. And then she will have to helplessly watch her son die.  Because Jesus lived an ordinary human life.
 
Our traditions and rituals are not strong enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto them. But God-is-with-us.  This One can bear it. He’s here to go into the darkness. He’s here to go right toward the pain and the suffering and bear it for us all. That is why he has come. 
All the strained relationships and lost opportunities, all the people we hurt and those whose hurt we can’t release. All the rage we feel at the world’s injustice, all the love we have and don’t know how to show, and all the places where we are just disappointed—we are called to confess them, in pain and sorrow, to this child, this God in here with us now, who has lived it all alongside us.  
 
To feel the brokenness, the incompleteness of it all, and pour it out to God is not some kind of failing; it’s brave faith. Telling God the truth of our sadness, anger, worry, and unfulfilled longings is an act of trust. Trust in the one who knows the longing, who is bringing the healing, who can handle our sorrow, and who will make the world whole. 
 
Christmas isn’t actually for jolly and cheer. It’s for laying our vulnerable hearts open to the one who came vulnerable among us to save us all.  
 
Tonight we will glimpse the future that is coming. Together we will sing carols of God’s in-breaking in the present tense and be returned to the deeper, ancient, eternal and ongoing redemption that can’t be stopped, and keeps on going, even when we’re distracted, or exhausted, or evil feels strong, or darkness seems especially dark. 
 
That’s all the preaching I am going to do – now the rest of you will join me -  all of us will take up the prophets’ promises, and the angels’ songs, and the shepherds’ awe, and Mary’s defiant predictions, and the Joseph’s brave obedience, and by song and story we will bring our whole selves to this glorious mystery, And however you come is how you’re meant to be.  

As we are present here to the presence of God with us now, may our hearts be open, for the next hour, may we be pulled from the ordinary into an eternal truth that pierces the darkness with light.
 
Settle in, and let’s begin.
 
 Lessons & Carols:  Luke 2:1-20
 
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. The light has come into the world. INTO the world – the very fabric of it. Inseparable from it. Tangled and tied and mixed up and stirred in, so that it cannot be extracted. The ordinary is now infused with the holy; Christ is in the world. God is irreversibly here. 
 
In this fast-paced, urgent, pressing era of shorts, reels, and loud, relentless breaking news, we may not have the attention span for the deep, quiet, steady, long game of God.  But this is why we’ve gathered here, to soak in this truth together, and surrender to the bigger picture for a time. 
When we leave tonight, we may still be weary or strained, the future will stay foggy, and the present is not magically made simple. But the end of the human story is written when the Christ child took his first breath: death will not prevail. And now, even the hard and confusing parts of our own ordinary lives are part of a cosmic upheaval of hope that we don’t control and the world can’t escape. 

Christ has come; the world belongs to God.  

Christ is here; we are not alone.  

Christ is coming; the future is God’s.

 

Let us pray.

God-with-us, 

thank you.

 Receive, our disappointments and longings, 

our desires and our failings, 

our prayer and our praise. 

And help us receive your peace, your love, 

your joy, and your hope. 

May we be hushed by the beauty of your world, 

and seized by the joy of our belonging.

May we embrace our humanity in all of its complexity, 

and embrace one another with grace and generosity. 

Root us and ground us in your enduring love, 

make our words and actions join your healing, 

and our ordinary lives contribute 

to your peace and life for all people. 

We pray these things trusting in your promises 

and resting in your love, 

Amen.
 

 

 

In Real Time

 Matthew 1:18-26

My dog can tell time.  She’s just not very good at it. She’s off by like 25 minutes, usually. 25 minutes or so before it’s time to wake up she shimmies up next to me in bed and puts her paw on me, or nudges me with her nose. 32 minutes or so before it’s time to eat she sits next to her  food and stares at us like, what’s wrong with you, don’t you know what time it is? And she’s generally pretty close on when it’s time to take a walk, but if I leave the house to get something out of the car, she thinks I’ve been gone for hours.

 

We can tell time too, but we’re not too good at it either.  We think time has to do with what we have to get done or how far ahead or behind we are. We make time about efficiency and productivity, about competition and scarcity. For most of us, if you ask what we wish we had more of, we’d say “time,” and if you ask us how we’re doing, we’d probably say “busy.” 

We might be conscious of minutes, or even seconds, but we’ve often got no sense of real time, time as God created it, time as God invaded it, time as God is redeeming it, time that gets shared in the meantime with past, present and future, with all those who exist for something other than using up time.

 

On Wednesday, Christmas Eve, we will gather together to share again the story of the beginning of Jesus.  A moment that changes time, that fills time with eternity and resets the trajectory.

The story of Jesus begins somewhere.

 

Each of the four gospels begin the story of Jesus differently. John begins in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, all cosmic and poetic, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And then jumps to grown-up John in the wilderness explaining he is there to prepare the way for the Messiah who is promised.  This story, John is saying, is transcendent and ungraspable, and even when it’s right in front of us, we miss it, and the first words Jesus says in John are “Come and see.”

Mark starts with John the Baptist too, “the Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” and gives us a prophecy from Isaiah, about the messenger crying out in the wilderness to all of us, “prepare the way of the Lord,” because he’s coming now, and John appears all camel hair and locusts and wild honey, and by verse 9 he is already baptizing Jesus in the river Jordan, and by verse 12 Jesus is already in a wilderness of his own, facing hunger and temptation and being prepared himself to inhabit time with us.

 We’ve spent most of Advent in Luke, who begins the story of Jesus with Zechariah and Elizabeth and the surprise announcement about John, and moves to focus on Mary, who melds past and future in a prophecy of her own. And in a resonant pocket of time God brings these people together into a timeless community pregnant with the truth that God is about to invade the world in human form, and that, for no reason they can conceive of, they’ve been chosen to bear this great mystery.  By angel pronouncement they’re brought on board, and then through silence, song, blessing and mutual support, their lives shift into a new reality.  

But they’re not taken out of real life or real time. Not only are the stakes enormous, and the confusion undoubtedly palpable, but the regular daily chores don’t stop for this strange and profound reality they must now get their lives around. Maybe after the greeting and the Magnificat, when the days and weeks go by, Elizabeth and Mary might even forget this is all going on, till they ask Zechariah a question and oh yeah, he can’t answer, or the baby within one of them kicks and it all comes rushing back. And in time marked by grape-sized, avocado-sized, grapefruit-sized, the growing promise that what is coming can’t be stopped. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation, and they can’t do anything about it except to keep living in it and see what happens next.

Today we move to Matthew’s beginning, literally, it begins “the genesis of Jesus.”  And after 17 verses of laying out the genealogy of Jesus going back to Abraham through the line of David, placing the Christ in context of all the people, prophecies and promises in God’s ongoing story, he ends with  ^“Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.”
Then he begins again, ‘the genesis of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way…’
And he tells us how Joseph is brought into God’s great scheme of salvation.  

We are all living inescapably in the time when all will die.  We see it all around us, the nations tremble and kingdoms totter, cruelty, selfishness and power, hunger and pain, the capriciousness of death that doesn’t care how hard we work to avoid it, that comes unannounced to children and ultimately to us all, we’re here and that is what it means to be human beings. We live, we die. 

But now, we’re told, there is one coming from outside the time when all will die. Jesus comes from the time when all will live, invading the time when all will die, coming in alongside us, with us, for us, to bring us with him into life that will not die.  And when he comes, he brings that timeless, deathless life with him, and redeems time itself, so that no longer is time for measuring and using, for wasting or succeeding. Time is for what time was made for since God made time and God made us: time is for love.

When God comes to Joseph in angel and dream telling Joseph that there is something beyond what we can see and hear and touch that is impossible but real, Joseph is called to step into a different reality from here on out. He is now claimed for love, and his life in time is for another purpose. But that purpose will unfold in the same ordinary way life always does for humans, he will do an ordinary and extraordinary thing, he will claim Mary, love her and, claim this child into his family line and raise him. Joseph’s job is to name him Jesus, literally Yeshua, or, God saves, and then to spend his life practicing trusting that this is so.

When Joseph gets up from this sleep, he will obey. The Joseph who laid down the night before will be gone. The plans he’d made, the reputation he’d built, and the terrible choice he was about to act on, which was the best of his bad options – all of it is gone. 

This is a new beginning, and from this moment on, he is a new person, defined now by love and inhabiting the eternal belongingness of God that is clocked in grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, an abundant reality where everybody has enough and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise. God-is-with-us is coming into his care, and Joseph will live present in a future that God is bringing into the world through his ordinary life. 

 

When the good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world, each person is called in as they are, from where they are. They’re called to live in trust and obedience, to surrender their lives, to be reoriented and drawn into the God-with-us project that is redeeming the world. Their clock is reset toward time, to presence and anticipation, where story and tears and laughter and trust and forgiveness mark the moments, and even in the midst of dying, lives are for participating in life that will not end. In this new reality, God gives them one another, and shows them just the next thing to do. And then when they’ve done that, the next thing will become clear when the time is right. 

This is how God has done it with all the patriarchs and prophets gone before, and how God will keep doing things with Joseph too.  After the Magi visit with gifts and a warning, Joseph will be told in another angelic dream to evade Herod’s wrath and protect Jesus and Mary by fleeing with them to Egypt, where they will live as refugees in exile for four years.

Matthew’s gospel will tell us this part too – revealing time folding in on itself, an evil king trying to kill the Jewish babies again, just like happened back in Egypt, when God plucked baby Moses out of danger by the hand of an outsider with the cooperation of those who trust God. And so, in the very place his ancestors were enslaved and from which they were freed, Jesus will find safety and refuge, and his own childhood, and Mary and Joseph’s parenting, will be shaped by walking the land of exile and exodus, where the promises of God that are coming to us in him were first spoken.

This past January my family traveled to Egypt.  We stood in temples and tombs that dated 3000 years before Christ.  And when we knelt in an ancient church and peered through glass in the floor into a small stone room atop which it was built, a room two thousand years ago Joseph, Mary and Jesus stayed for
three months, while they were living and traveling in Egypt, I felt like my solid grasp on the world, space and time, was shaken. When I saw the niche carved in the stone wall where the toddler Jesus is said to have slept, on the only remaining Christian street in Egypt, where seven churches crowd atop one another holding relics, story, and the faithful worship of our Christian siblings and forbears through a history my own imagination might not even stretch wide enough to grasp, I understood then that the same story of Jesus, God-is-with-us, is told very, very differently there than we tell it here, and that I, and you, and this congregation, is bound together in living, breathing community with every follower of Christ who has ever lived, summoned in and held by something far beyond ourselves, and all we can do is receive it and watch for what happens next.

 

Right now, life, as modern American people, feels urgent and hard, and tiring, and often sad. The world feels dangerous and confusing. But perhaps it helps to hear that we are not exceptional. That our own story is both unique and completely the same as nearly everyone who has gone before in this time when all will die. That in bodies that die, alongside children that grow up, inside buildings that crumble, and structures that collapse, on a planet in crisis,  the God who creates keeps creating anew, and the God who comes in keeps on coming in. And from time to time we taste the truth that time has been invaded by eternity, and now and then we feel ourselves in the hands of the time-keeper, where love is the purpose and the measure.

 

Maybe this week it happened for you in a Moroccan man noticing you were cold, and inviting you into his shop and offering you tea, or by the feet and voices of those alongside you with the bright sun on your heads and the sharp wind on your faces as you marched for your immigrant neighbors through the streets of our city. Maybe it was in watching another person take care of someone you love with patient tenderness, or wrestling with deep questions over coffee, or sharing with others laugher and pizza, or silence and stillness, or in being enthusiastically received when you shared your wisdom and power point for the hundredth time, or in resting your head on someone’s shoulder, that time seemed to stop passing, or passed in a blink, and you felt the truth of your life, for a moment, unbound and free, near to the God who comes and is even now here with us.

 

The good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world again. Always. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation and includes us all. So let’s help each other to obey, and trust, and pay attention, and to join in. And together we’ll see what happens next.

Amen.