Therefore...

  

Romans 12:1-8

When I was ten years old at summer camp, we could earn points for various activities. My favorites were archery, target shooting and memorizing bible verses. I had no idea then that I would become a preacher, but these verses sounded so much like a booming sermon that I threw open the window of our bunkroom, and shouted them down to passers-by until I had the whole thing perfected in the cadence of an old-timey preacher. I still have them memorized.

“I urge you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world!  I roared out the window, jabbing my finger at the sky. But be transformed! By the renewing of your mind! That you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable and perfect!

 

Listen to all the active verbs there! So commanding and directive! All the things we are supposed to be and know and do! Present yourselves a sacrifice to God, do not be conformed to this world, be transformed, Even when the verbs are not technically active, we can make them active by how we hear them: renew your mind, prove the will of God, which by the way, is good and perfect.

 

Even the more gentle version we read today still puts a lot in our hands. Listen to all the active verbs, Use your gifts! (don’t waste them!) Helpers, help! Teachers, teach! Givers, give! Leaders, do a good job leading, and if you’re taking care of others, keep a smile on your face!

 

This striving, active, individual faith that takes it into your own hands and works hard at it may have been what my summer camp was going for, but it’s not what Paul is going for. 

 

All throughout the letter to the Romans, Paul is talking about real life, the Kingdom of God reality, life as God created life to be, life as God is moving everything towards once and for all. He is talking about living no longer in the illusion created by sin that we are apart and against, that belonging is earned and we’re defined by the world’s labels and our own striving, trapped under sin’s ranking, comparing and condemnation. 

He is talking about life in freedom –life where all people are upheld in the belongness of grace, and our identity is secure in God, and God is the primary actor and we are recipients and participants in a life made for joy. This is the life we are given by Christ, in Christ, in fact, in him we have died to anything else and been risen to this new life of belonging, connection and wholeness, so we should be living what is true about us and about God. 

Right before our verses, Paul writes “from God and through God and to God are all things, to God be the glory forever and ever, Amen!” Then our text begins with, “Therefore…”

Because all things are from God and through God and back to God, Therefore, present yourself to God, your whole, living, embodied self.

 

Paul loves run-on sentences where things are all connected back to God. We tend to break those up and lose the thread. Out of curiosity, I spent some time checking the original Greek on all of this, and it turns out that contrary to how we like to hear this, there is only ONE active verb in the whole thing. The one thing we can do and should do, according to Paul, is to offer ourselves to God. 

 

That’s it.  That is the one action we are to do. And it’s no small thing, it’s everything. It’s a sacrifice, Paul says, a holy sacrifice that God finds well-pleasing, or, delightful. (God speaks the same declaration over Jesus at his baptism, “this is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased, in whom I delight). In other words, when we give ourselves to God, our “everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life” God is delighted, and we are doing what Paul calls our ‘reasonable’ or logical worship. What conveys our gratitude and praise, and honors God as God, is ourselves, given to God.

 

When we do that, then all sorts of things happen that we don’t do. The rest of the passage is filled with things that happen to us, or through us, or for us, except for the next two verbs, which I was thrilled to discover are middle passive. This is a verb form we don’t have in English, so we usually just make it active, which is pretty messed up, because the middle passive means we participate in something we don’t initiate.  So, when we actively present ourselves to God – here I am God, just me, just like I am, that’s all I have to give so I give it all- then the ‘being not conformed’ to this world and the ‘being transformed’ are things God does to us and in us, that we join in. We are not the ones making it happen; we are surrendering our will into the will of God who initiates the work in us, and we participate in that work that God will bring to completion.

 

This might sound small, but it’s kind of a big deal.  We are both passive and active at the same time in our not conforming to the realities of this age, and in the being transformed by God, who renews our minds to become more and more able to discern what God is doing in the world, which is, Paul tells us, the good and the delightful, bringing wholeness and completion to world. We begin to see that happening around us. We start to notice what we didn’t notice before. We are being changed, pulled out of the lies and deception that would pit us against each other, center ourselves in the narrative, or let fear or force dictate reality, and we’re pulled instead into God’s relentless and subversive work of healing the world that moves through us to all the others we already belong to in a life made for joy and fullness.

 

Years ago, I got all excited learning about Meister Eckhart and ended up introducing you to a phrase from a quote by James Finley teaching about Eckhart. (For the thousandth time, I apologize,) he says, “Lovers cannot make their moments of oceanic oneness happen, they can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by love. The poet cannot make the poem come, the poet can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to the poem arriving. The healer cannot bring the healing, the healer can only assume the inner stance of least resistance to healing coming through them.”  

 

Actively surrendering our will to the will of God is assuming the inner stance of least resistance to the Holy Spirit; it's this middle voice verb of attentive readiness for what God wants to do in and through us.  Like poets, and healers, and lovers, and artists, and musicians, and friends, we get to participate in the things we can’t make happen, and marvel at the beauty we end up sharing in. 

 

This is all by God’s grace, not because we’ve somehow earned it, or deserve any more or less involvement or attention than anyone else. God gives to each person grace for the life they’re to live—even Paul’s own telling us this, he says, is by the grace of God. 

 

Then he goes on to say we don’t need to reach our minds above and beyond what is a fit for us. There is an echo here of the Psalmist in 131, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not concern myself with matters too great or too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child.” And in Psalm 46, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

Paul says our minds, rather, have been made for sound judgment, and God gives each person the measure of faith we need for the calling we have, (i.e., It’s all very reasonable. Quit overcomplicating it).  We’re one body in Christ, he says, like a human body with many parts that don’t all have the same function but instead work together. And we have gifts, given by grace, differently to each of us.

 

And here is where it gets even cooler with the Greek grammar: everything from here on out is passive, even though we driven, active, moderns who go, go, go, do, do, do, and can’t stop won’t stop don’t translate it that way. 

So, Paul starts listing gifts – prophesy, is in proportion to faith. Service? He does not say, then serve! Teachers? Teach! Do the things! No, he says, in effect, if the gift is service, then you are an instrument of service, if the gift is teaching, the teaching comes through you, if the gift is encouraging, then you are a conduit of encouragement, if the gift is giving, then generosity fills you and spills over, if leading, then you have diligence, if you’re showing mercy, then cheerfulness lives in you.

 

Each action happens not by determined striving, setting your mind to it, trying to be a decent person or good Christian, but because who you are is made already to participate with God’s action moving through you in this particular way, and it will come out in ministering to others.

Can you hear the freedom? The life? The holy sacrifice of ourselves that becomes worship and gratitude to God? Can you see why God finds this everyone-living-who've-they've-been-made-to-be-and-so-working-cooperatively-together utterly delightful?

 

Each person is both entirely unique and entirely connected to everyone else. We are all essential. We are urged to participate with what God has already done for us all, by who God has already made us to be.

 

Last weekend, on our day retreat, we played Poetry for Neanderthals, a fun, ridiculous game that makes you speak only in single syllable words, which turns out to be really, really hard, and sound very, very funny. But in order to play the game you need to get what a single syllable word is. And all of a sudden, there is Wendy, so naturally teaching the group how to hear the syllables, clapping words with her hands and giving us examples that we clapped with her, and the teaching just flowed from her. She didn’t have to put her mind to striving to be teacherly and take up the teaching task, it just happened because she was connected to the rest of us, and the gifts she’s been given by the grace of God poured out of her into the group, bringing everyone in and uniting us in understanding.  

Likewise, Edie, when her friend left the room, went to check on him and make sure he was ok. Compassion and care just happened--her body stood up and out she went. 

And if you have been away for a while, or have something difficult going on in your life, chances are you’ve heard from Kay. Because she is attuned to people and interested in others, and she won’t let you fall through the cracks. 

Jen’s creativity starts flowing for the next hands-on worship project right after this service ends, and she often sparks ideas for me just by sharing her own ideas. 

When Pat fires up the grill, or Kristen drops a line of poetry on us, we’re glimpsing their unique souls, participating with God in the good, delighting God and the rest of us too. And I would venture to guess that no other church has an empty ‘pet chaplain’ job waiting to be filled--we simply named what was already happening through Joyce.

 

All these gifts are not about improving a religious club or even just strengthening our relationships with each other here.  We are each part of the Body of Christ--God’s embodied interaction in the world. God’s life is happening through every person in this room out there in the world in our ordinary, everyday, walking around lives. That’s what it is to be Christ’s Church. But being church together, we get to see it up close in one another, practice and encourage each other in it. And sometimes we recognize in someone else the gifts they may not yet see in themselves. We get to grow together as one body deeper and deeper in the life of Christ for the world. 

 

From God, through God and back to God it all flows. Therefore, the most logical way we can worship God is to present our peculiar, particular selves to God, and God happens to find that delightful. Freeing us and transforming us to recognize and join God in bringing life and wholeness in the world, God makes it so we participate by being who are, with and for each other. 

 

Amen.

The Same Church, until the world is made whole

 Acts 8:1b-3; 9:1-31

 
I shared with my community a few weeks ago how Andy and I worshiped with the Church in Switzerland and found ourselves at home with these siblings in Body of Christ that transcends all languages, and nations.  A few hours ago, my son worshiped with the Church in Berlin, pastored by a Russian married to an American, where the first encounter he witnessed was the baptism of an Iranian. Right now, my daughter is sharing a meal with the homeless and formerly homeless counselors to suburban, middle-class campers coming this afternoon for a weeklong service learning pilgrimage of poverty, to learn from and serve alongside these leaders whose lives have had suffering and joy right on the surface. On Wednesday, right here our little congregation gathered on the patio and shared a meal, conversation and laughter, and split up into groups who listened to each other’s lives, watching for the movement of the Spirit. And I got to tell a third grader how my “thorn” last month that I was sad and worried about is, this month, my “rose” the very thing I am glad and grateful about, and he bore witness to the work of the Holy Spirit in my life with an eyes-wide, big-grinned, Hooray! This is the view I have in this moment of the Church. 

The story we just read is a further back moment in this ongoing story that is told looking backward, knowing the end before it begins. It is always moving through the upheaval toward the inevitable conclusion formed by God, and directed not by human trajectory or tragedy, but by the ongoing love of Jesus Christ living in and through those who trust in him.  So recognize this incident as a pivotal moment, when Paul—who will go on, unbeknownst to him, to write between a quarter to half of our bible, and whose journeys by sea and horse will spread the gospel throughout the middle East to Europe—gets brought into this Church where we are his siblings.  So, I was excited to get to this text! 

Only, all week long I couldn’t shake thinking about this story in this way: 

Imagine if, during Operation Metro Surge, a community of immigrants was hiding, worrying about what would happen if ICE found them. And then God called one of them by name, and said, Hey, right now, in this house on Hennipen Ave, a man named Greg Bovino has just had a vision of you coming to pray for him and him receiving his sight. I want you to go to him. 

A little bit it makes me sick to my stomach. 

We tell this story as Saul’s ‘conversion,’ and it is. And it is also the story of the community of Christ-followers who were minding their own business and still being persecuted, who were absolutely justified to be fearful of Saul and continually wary and guarded.

And suddenly I can see the harsh and impossible, the divisions, the horror, the brokenness of it all, of us toward one another, and it deflates me. Because from where this story opens, I can’t see a way forward that lets me hold onto my righteous anger or reiterate my boundaries and beliefs. 

On one side this tale begins with Saul as the hero. He is a devout, highly educated Jew with an impressive pedigree who also holds coveted Roman citizenship. He was born in Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey), and moved as a child to Jerusalem, where he studied under a famous and highly respected Rabbi, and became an expert at Hebrew scripture and Jewish law.  He is esteemed, zealous, and deeply committed to upholding the true faith. Saul has gained a name for himself for his relentless efforts to stamp out this heresy called The Way, where instead of worshiping the one true God, misled people are worshipping a criminal who was executed six years ago, Jesus, whom they call the Christ. Saul is on a holy mission to glorify God and defend the faith, and he has all the confidence and conviction to go along with it.

On the other side are the people of God sheltering in place, who had heard of the destruction Saul rained down in Jerusalem and been warned that he had his sights set on them next. These past few years after Pentecost, the Church has grown significantly, but Paul’s rampage in Jerusalem caused Christians to flee the city and scatter. The exact description reads, “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house. Dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison…” Then it goes on to describe the  stoning death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, which Saul attended, holding the coats of the other heretic-hunters and cheering them on. 

Now this mission he is currently on, to capture all the Christians in Damascus and bring them in chains to Jerusalem, begins with the words, “Meanwhile, Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord…”

So here hide these Christians, afraid for their lives. 

And there we are. Stuck between two incompatible stories. Both claiming to worship the God of Israel.  

And then God speaks to one of these cowering Christians. Hey, Ananias.
Yes, God, I’m here and ready.
There is a man called Saul of Tarsus praying in a house a few streets over, and he has seen a vision of you coming to him and praying for him to regain his sight.
God, maybe you haven’t actually heard of this guy, but he is a bad guy, he’s hunting us down, just so you know. He’s already done so much evil in Jerusalem and here he has been given carte blanch to use whatever force he wants against us.  So… want to give a different instruction? I’m all ears.
 And God says Go. I have specifically chosen Saul to be my messenger. I have a plan for him and I will handle him. 
 
This story is astonishing. 

It’s also par for the course for this God. 
For two years we’ve been moving through the bible from start to finish and in no stories are the people the heroes, and nobody remains unchanged. Stereotypes get torn down, the lowly get lifted up, and the ideas people hold of right, or good, or even God, get destroyed and rebuilt. Futures are never what people think they will be because people dream too small and selfish. God goes right to the barriers and the impossibility, breaking chains, and parting seas, and opening wombs, and knocking down giants, and closing the mouths of lions and opening the mouths that could not speak, and out of death and finality bringing life and newness. 

And always, always, God is drawing people deeper, wider, into love, into time, into this world, into relationship with one another, and pushing them outward to the stranger, to the outcast, to the enemy, to the other. God chooses a few admirable people here and there, and many ordinary ones, but also a lot of jerks, cheaters, fools, slow-learners and betrayers. And nowhere are people allowed to hold onto their righteous anger or reiterate their boundaries and beliefs. 
 So here God goes again.
 
I can’t imagine, and the scripture does not tell us, what happens inside Ananias, or between him and this little church in Damascus, what Holy Spirit miracle allows him to go to Saul.  I can imagine the fear when he approaches that house. The pleading for trust in God as his hand reaches for the doorknob.

And I can also imagine, because I have seen this sort of thing for myself, the forgiveness and faith of Jesus Christ moving through him despite him, as he steps inside to minister to this man who came to destroy him, the very embodiment of the threat he most fears. And likewise, Saul, utterly humbled and in need on the other side of the door, must now receive ministry from the people he came to destroy, the very embodiment of the threat he most feared. 
 
When Saul was thrown from his high horse by the blinding light and booming voice from heaven, I wonder if at first he recognized the experience – just like the prophets of old from the deep story of his ancestors, Moses, Elijah, the coherent, thrilling, terrifying moment when transcendence calls by name, only, how horribly discombobulating, then, for it to come not as an affirmation or invitation, but an accusation!  

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Who are you Lord?

And the answer shatters everything inside him, I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting!
 
Then suddenly Saul the magnificent is tossed into the wilderness of waiting, the liminal space of loss, confusion, guilt, and unknown, that permeates the story of God’s people again and again, sparing not even Jesus himself. Then, Saul spends three days in darkness without eating or drinking, until, into his tomb, God’s resurrecting love arrives in the form of his enemy standing right here, where he cannot see him and must reach out his hand.
 
 Saul now meets Jesus, in the touch and voice of Ananias, who calls him, against all human odds, ‘Brother Saul” and says, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” Then, we’re told, “he got up and was baptized” from the death of fear and righteous hatred, into entirely new life in Christ’s own death and resurrection, “and after taking some food, he regained his strength.” 
 
And then Saul is welcomed into the living Body of Christ, who, instead of revenge or retaliation, fear or loathing, shares with Saul healing, nurture, blessing and identity. They give him friendship and begin to reshape his story by telling him the resurrection stories and their own stories. Here among them, the voice who called out to him from the blinding light is given hands and faces, sorrows and names, foibles and families, and Saul gets to know the risen Messiah.  And they too are set free from fear and righteous hatred, by receiving Christ in the person of their enemy. Then, Saul who came to capture the followers of Jesus, instead begins proclaiming in the synagogue that Jesus is the Son of God, and everyone who hears him is confounded and amazed.

A few chapters later, we’re told that the once esteemed and arrogant Saul eventually sheds his strong, famous Hebrew name completely, and goes exclusively by his Roman name, Paul, which means “small.”  

And this part of the story of God ends with the words “The churches in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria were at peace and grew through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
 
And here we are now, this little gathering of that same Church, about to bless some of our own and send them to another little gathering of the same Church, inside just one city of this whole, vast world, filled everywhere with little gatherings of the same Church, that is, people called to surrender our lives into the life of the living Christ, who, through us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will love without reservation or resentment, heal what is impossibly broken, and forgive and set free without ceasing, until the whole world is made whole.  

And to that I say, Amen!

As simple and alarming as that

 2 Corinthians 5:14-21

When we moved into our house 19 years ago, we found a stash of letters from the 1940s tucked into the eaves of the garage. They were short, unsigned and cryptic, mostly asking for money and promising not to write again, and in our minds we made up a sordid story a secret affair followed by years long blackmail. The truth turned out to be far more tragic. The man who had lived in our house his entire life had a photographic memory – according to our neighbor who knew him later in life who would ask the man directions to obscure places and he could tell her off the top of his head from having seen a map. During World War II he served as a CIA agent, and when he left the service, they did experimental electroshock therapy on him so he wouldn’t remember the secrets he knew. It worked so well he forgot his family, and his wife and twin daughters left him. He lived alone and reclusive for the rest of his life, every few years a letter arriving, asking for money, and promising it would be the last time. This isolated man hid these letters away in an unfulfilled yearning for reconciliation that never materialized.

I tell this story for two reasons. The first is that reconciliation is the longing within us all. To be in right relationship with God, one another, and with our own selves and the world we live in is what we’re made for. And when we are alienated from this connection, we cry out to be reconciled, whether or not we know that’s what we’re doing.

The second reason I tell this is that having one-sided letters, with gaps between them at that, invites imagining stories. But when the person writing is very long-winded and detailed, like the Apostle Paul, it’s much easier figure out what the story is. Today we read from 2 Corinthians, which is Paul’s fourth letter to the church in Corinth. The first and third are lost; the second we call 1 Corinthians. 

I find it a tiny bit delightful to imagine the other two letters  one day discovered hidden in the cranny of some ancient cave.  Because Paul, who is human, got pretty peeved with the Corinthian church. They’re this savvy, diverse and cosmopolitan group of folks who tended toward arrogance, petty squabbles and blatant misbehavior, after many of them met Paul in person at his first visit after planting the church some years before, their high opinion of Paul evidently plummeted. They insulted him and questioned his authority. Paul was the kids say, “butthurt,” (translation: dramatic, over-the-top, offended), and vowed in anger not to visit Corinth again. 

His missing third letter Paul called his ‘painful letter.’  So, maybe it’s good it got lost. Nobody wants screenshots going around of their text fight with their spouse, or to be caught on film throwing a tantrum at their kid in public.  Let’s just say, only two Corinthian letters ended up in the bible as the trustworthy and authoritative word of God. And we know that at some point – some think in the middle of writing this letter - the Corinthians apologized to Paul, ejected the troublemakers, and they were reconciled. 

 God’s love is what’s real, it’s where our hunger points, our longing originates, and our purpose finds its fulfillment.  But we’re so easily knocked off course from being connected, or reconciled, to God, our deep selves and each other. The desert mothers and fathers from the 3^rd and 4^th centuries were the first to unpack how everything we’d call sin can be grouped into two piles: either aggression or greed, that is, either “a reactive and excluding fear” or “the urge to consume and absorb.”   

If we view the world through resentment and rage, shaped around narratives of victimhood and blame, we will live guarded and hostile, alienated.  If we view the world through competition and self-advancement, striving for bigger and better, or more unique and singular, always trying to be somewhere—or someone—that we’re not, we will live hollow and famished, alienated.  There is no end to ways we can turn the ditches of aggression into yawning chasms, and the potholes of greed into slippery caverns of alienation. 

But, as Rowan Williams says, 

Love is what happens when you stop being aggressive and greedy, and stop to look with your whole self, from the centre of who you are. It’s as simple and alarming as that.

Love has room to flower when you stop either pushing reality away or making reality serve your purpose. In that space, love grows. God…whose life is the ultimate definition of love, has neither aggression nor craving in the divine nature. God is not afraid and God is not greedy. It sounds blindingly obvious, perhaps, put like that; but if we say that the love of God is, in the divine life, the same thing as the absence of aggression and greed, this ought to make us think that perhaps it tells us something of how love works and fails to work in us too. (Passions of the Soul, xxxiii).

God, in love, already claims us and is reconciling the whole world to Godself and each other.  But we humans are wobbly, weak, and easily distracted. And to complicate things, we live in what Williams calls, ‘an entire human environment where, bizarrely, mysteriously, saying no to God feels easier than saying yes.’

So we are to both take sin very seriously, and also have compassion for ourselves and each other around it. Walking this human path, we can’t not tumble into the ditch of aggression and faceplant in the pothole of greed, and striving to avoid them becomes just another way of stumbling into one or the other. What saves us is only God’s grace.  

This is what I kind of love about 2 Corinthians.  Whatever aggression or greed filled Paul's painful third letter, there’s plenty of both left over for this one. But even though he uses parts of this letter to prop himself up, he also admits to it. He keeps throwing himself back on the grace of God and letting himself be reoriented to the real, and then reorienting us there too.  We see him living in real time what he is also teaching: that we have died in Christ and been raised to Jesus’ complete connection to God and all others, and so even though we keep succumbing to these temptations, they are not ultimately what define us or direct our lives. 

It reminds me of the story told by desert fathers and mothers of frustrated demons shuffling dejectedly through the desert, complaining that they can’t draw the monks into sin, but neither can they force them to anguish over their sin. When they try, the “‘great, old men and women’” just say, “‘Of course I’m a sinner! So what! I rely on the mercy of God!’” (Williams, 16) and go back to seeking a reconciled kind of life, that is, praying, serving others, practicing living from and for love in ordinary, unimpressive ways.

So what are we to do? Paul demonstrates in his fourth letter the simple but profound prescription of the desert monks that left the demons shuffling dismally in the wilderness, once we recognize we’ve stumbled into sin we’re to be honest about it, hand it over to God, and get on with our lives. Literally, that’s it. 

We don’t wallow in it. We don’t dwell deeply on our division, examine extensively our fears of one another, ponder relentlessly our selfishness, or probe exhaustively how appalling we’re convinced we are. We have died to sin and been raised to new life. To act as though, by the might of our own understanding, the strength of our own efforts, or the force of our own egos, we could pull ourselves out of sin and alienation, is just to fall back into it.

Whatever exciting or bland ways ‘our reactive and excluding fear’ or ‘the urge to consume and absorb’ is being expressed in us in the moment, we’re to look honestly at it, give it over to God, then we simply get on with it, whatever it is that God would have us get on with. We pick up where we left off, practicing living from and for love in ordinary, unimpressive ways.

God reconciled the world to Godself in Christ, and does not hold our trespasses against us, Paul says. Which is to say, God does not look at us with disgust or condemnation and neither is God convinced to love us because we are so impressive or interesting. God’s view is that we are inherently loveable. Like a new grandma stunned by her tiny grandson who does nothing yet but eat, sleep and poop, utterly loved for simply being and nothing more.  God holds us in love, and transforms us by grace to do the same for one another. 

So from now on we regard no one from a human point of view. When we’re resting in God's affection for us, it’s impossible to view others with hostility or fear. Instead, we find ourselves participating in the reconciliation of Christ, becoming instruments of God’s love, ambassadors of reconciliation. When we know ourselves to be held in love, we will love others. 

 So, we live our lives, in the moments we’re in and the people we’re with. We sin, we confess, we give it to God, and we go back to seeking a reconciled kind of life. Because to be in right relationship with God and one another is what we’re made for. It’s the longing within everyone, and the boundless gift of God in Christ, for us all.

Amen.

(I'm grateful for Rowan Williams' Passions of the Soul for the  direction of this message and insights about the desert fathers and mothers!).

The True Wisdom

Jan Richardson's The Best Supper. You can see her work at janrichardson.com, 
and register for her Advent retreat at adventdoor.org

 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories pops up again every year in the news and social media because it is ongoing.  Six years ago a 64-year-old woman named Wanda Dench sent a text to her grandson inviting him to Thanksgiving dinner. But it was a wrong number, and a 17-year-old boy named Jamal Hinton received the text, and asked, “Who’s this?” She shot back boisterously, “Grandma!” After some sorting out and selfies confirmed they were, in fact, strangers, he asked, “Am I still invited?” And she answered, “Of course! It’s what Grandmas do! Feed people!” So he accepted and went to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. 

Jamal has been at Wanda and Lonnie Dench’s Thanksgiving table every year since. When Lonnie died of Covid, last year’s with Wanda was a table of shared grief.  This week Jamal and Mikeala will be back at Wanda’s table where they belong.  

We all belong to God and we all belong to each other. 

All of us. All the humans. Without exception. 

There is no more fundamental truth than this, nothing more real in all the world, actually. 

But oh, how we forget it, and doubt it and disguise it and deny it.  How we cover it up with layers of interpretation and competition and hedging our bets and building our coalitions and hiding our true selves. 

 

And soon this hunger for belonging - this absolutely core, unshakable reality that we yearn to feel because we know it in our depths as the truest thing, the most real thing - soon it becomes something we commodify. We dole it out in tiny amounts, and sell to the highest bidder, we seek it relentlessly, addictively, in harmful and dehumanizing ways. And we make it probationary or provisional, limited and guarded, shutting out some in order to welcome in others. 

 

We long so badly for this connection to God, this belonging to the very source of life, our identity, our purpose, our human-made-in-the-image-of-the-Creator-core-being –that we set up rules to mediate it, to say who has it, and who doesn’t, and how to earn it, and who can dispense it, and what can make you lose it or gain it. And oh, the contortions we twist and the energy we expend trying to gain or earn what already defines us!

 

We forget- in that deep existential kind of forgetting - that belonging to God and belonging to each other is something hidden before the foundations of the world, decreed before the ages for our glory, utterly true and eternally unchanging. And then once in a while, like unexpectedly sharing Thanksgiving with a stranger, we remember.

 

There are two wisdoms, friends. Paul says. 

There is the wisdom of this age.  At LNPC we’ve been calling it “the way of fear.” This wisdom is built on power and centered on scarcity. It tells us always life is urgent and you must never let up or let down your guard. Each of us is in this alone, other people are competition or threat, and judgment and condemnation are constant companions.  

The way of fear seeks salvation from smart leaders, wise investments and the careful construction or dismantling of isms. It says we can be saved by weapons, or by legislating against weapons, by this candidate or that party, by this act of piety or that specific prayer, by this way of seeing the world or that list of beliefs.  It says you can force others to respect you through violence or through moral rightness, and these also prove your worth or earn you a place at the table. 

And we put stock in that kind of wisdom, we pay money to it, and educate our children in it, and take it in through our televisions and computer screens and phones and car radios, scrolling, listening, reading, soaking in so many words: his words, her words, their words. 

 

And like the dingy beam of a dying flashlight, we hold up this worldly wisdom before us, and we squint into the darkness, letting it guide us. And we’re killing each other. And we’re blaming each other. And we are finding more ways to divide into ever smaller and more homogenous camps, until there will be no belonging left and it will be just me against you – all the mes and all the yous against all the other mes and all the other yous. Despairing. Alone. Afraid.

 

But there is another wisdom.

Ancient and true. Secret and Hidden. Decreed by God before the ages, running like an underground river through time.  The wisdom that spoke the world into being with a single word, the wisdom that bound it all in harmony and order, a delight to its creator, functioning in love and cooperation. The wisdom of the Word made flesh when the Creator of all came to dwell among us. Stupidly. Weakly. Foolishly, to live without power and to die alongside us, on our behalf. 

 

There is no worldly wisdom in this. It is what the Narinians call, “the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.” Unbreakable and resilient, absurd and steadfast, it comes concealed in weakness to stand always with the weakest among us.  

 

Paul was a Roman citizen from a prominent Jewish family, well-established with an impressive pedigree. He studied under the most prominent rabbis of the day, and was fluent in classical literature, philosophy and ethics. Paul was educated in the wisdom of the world. He was a successful, powerful, influential figure, and a zealot.  He knew how to speak the wisdom of the age, in the language of the rulers of the age.

 

But when he comes to the Corinthians, he chooses to leave all that behind. He sees it as a distraction, a shiny diversion that might keep people from seeing the real reality. I did not come with all the methods and the political skills of lofty words or persuasion. He says.  I came in weakness and fear, with much trembling. I wanted you to see God’s actions instead of focusing on my words -  So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.

In other words, he says, I vowed to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

 

Paul uses this language -  “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” “the cross,” “the foolishness of the cross,” again and again, as a kind of shorthand to refer to the whole of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus- that is, that the Almighty came into this world as a helpless a baby, into the arms of those he came to save, to share this life with us. And then died, taking all that separates us from God, all destruction and brokenness, even death itself, into God’s very being. 

Then Jesus rose from the dead, and everything we thought was real about the power of death and division is exposed as utter fraud by the unquenchable light of the world, the wisdom hidden before the ages shining forth, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It’s settled and final: We belong to God, we belong to each other. This is what Jesus trusted, and embodied, what he died for and rose into and referred to again and again as ‘The Kingdom of God.’

 

And yet… and yet we choose sin. Which is to say, we choose self-protection and division and destruction and existential forgetting. We choose to tear others down and to fear, fear, fear that anything, everything, could tear us down. 

 

But here is the free gift of salvation, friends. Right here: You belong to God. You belong to all the rest of the people in this whole big world.  And they belong to God, and they belong to you. Fact. Done. All that is needed is to say yes. Yes, I accept that. Yes, I receive that.

 

And because we’re steeped in the wisdom of the age, bobbing around every day in the way of fear, this is not a once and done acceptance. It’s an, over and over, Oh yeah! That’s right! kind of remembering, a chance to return, at any moment, every day, back to the truth that holds us.

 

Biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore describes spiritual wisdom like a pair of lenses at an eye exam, where click, click, click, suddenly the fuzzy blur is sharp and clear, the chart in focus. You can see what was there all along, only obscured by the various lenses that misinterpreted it for you. 

 

Paul calls this having the mind of Christ. Jesus was both always connected completely to the Father and always belonging completely to the world. Always at home in God, always living in a settled state of trust. And we can enter that, too, at any moment. Christ’s faith is our faith, Christ’s mind is our shared mind now, Christ’s lens is our lens. The Holy Spirit makes us into Christ’s body here on earth so that we embody belonging to God and belonging to each other.

 

There is nothing that happens to us that God doesn’t share.  And sharing it with each other is how we see God, because that is where Jesus is. Bearing with us, already. 

That is the wisdom of the Spirit  - that God doesn’t swoop in and triumphantly sweep away all of life’s pain and heartache. God sets a place at the table of life for each person and sits down alongside us. God offers God’s very self to us, broken and given, so that we might be made whole.

 

Having the mind of Christ helps us see this.  And it makes us brave. Brave to face the truth. Brave to tell the truth. Brave to live the truth with each other. Even when the truth is, This sucks! This hurts so bad! it’s terrible and I hate everything about it! Because we know all sorrow and suffering is embraced and joined by God.  

And also, we know it’s not the end. It’s not the real, final, and true word about all of this or all of us. And right here, in the midst of whatever it is, we keep belonging to God and we keep belonging to each other. And this world is absolutely and forever loved by God, who is, at every single moment, bringing wholeness and love, healing and hope, through all the cracks and crevices in infinite and often unnoticed ways, and who is leading it all toward undiluted and unending love.  That’s the real reality.

 

A few minutes ago, when we baptized little Ohlin, we poured over him this promise and spoke into him this ancient and deep word of life, Ohlin you are held in the reality of God’s love, part of the harmony of all things, from before the foundation of the world and long after you are gone from it.  

And you, First Presbyterian Church of South St Paul, in this mystical and sacred act, promised to teach Ohlin this eternal wisdom, and when he forgets his belonging or the world’s belovedness, you are the ones who remind him. 

And you committed to Ohlin to live out your own remembering alongside him until he begins remembering for himself, and then helps you all in your remembering, and you’ll remember together. And you’ll send him into the world to remember with and for others, and to find Jesus right there where Jesus already is, to see God and join in God’s work of redemption. 

 

That this power was just bestowed upon a baby, that this act that undermines all the might and corruption and brokenness of this world just happened right here is a mystery that can hardly be grasped. 

None of the rulers of this age understand this wisdom, Paul says.

And why should they? It makes no sense. Its logic is love; its awareness is transcendent.

 

There are two short-cuts that I know of back to the true wisdom.  

The first one is sabbath. 

This wisdom tells us to stop and rest every single week. To put down everything, and not do anything impressive or productive at all– it deprives us of all our devices of accumulation, our instruments of efficiency, our tools of measurement and our weapons of comparison, and forces us to just be human beings with each other. Our glorious and pitiful, nervous and intriguing selves are utterly loved by God in all our sagging, annoying, endearing and honest humanity. This regular, intentional stopping doesn’t make us fall behind or miss out; but actually restores our souls, returns us to being human and grounds us in our belonging once again. Be still and know I am God.  

 

The second short-cut back to the true wisdom is gratitude.

 

Br. David Stendyl Rast asks, 

“Is not gratitude a passage from suspicion to trust, from proud isolation to a humble give and take, from enslavement to false independence to self-acceptance in that dependence that liberates? 

Yes. he answers. Gratitude is the great gesture of passage.

And this gesture of passage unites us. It unites us as human beings, for we realie that in this whole passing universe we humans are the ones who pass and know that we pass. There lies our human dignity.

There lies our human task.

The task of entering into the meaning of this passage (the passage which is our whole life), of celebrating its meaning through the gesture of thanksgiving.”

 

Sabbath and gratitude can point us back to the wisdom deeper than words.  

But we do not make moments of awareness and transcendence happen. 

They come upon us. 

From time to time, when we are unprepared and unsuspecting, we are seized by a kind of wakefulness that resonates in our depths. 

Cradling a new baby, swaddled and sleeping, warm against your chest…  

Standing still under a vast, dark and starry sky….  

Pausing, breathless and still, holding eye contact with a deer you’ve just startled while meandering in the woods…. 

Being held in someone’s strong embrace while you weep…. 

Rocking back and forth in violent hilarity with a friend gasping in unruly laughter beside you….

Through the whisper of memory, the glimpses of fullness, the flashes of beauty, and the tastes of wonder, God keeps calling us back to the deep.

The true wisdom will mostly show up in weak, gentle and surprising ways, but it is steady, persistent, unfailing.  Underneath and behind and inside everything is the heartbeat that keeps the whole world alive: 

We belong to God; we belong to each other. 
We belong to God; we belong to each other.
We belong to God; we belong to each other.

 

Here’s the really good news about all of this:

It remains true whether we remember it or not. 

Whether we are actively looking for it, practicing it and embodying it, or whether we’re stranded in fear or lost in exhaustion and all we can see is the next anxious moment in front of us, God’s persistent reality of love, hope, belonging and connection is already holding us all.  

The table of welcome is always set, and every one of us is endlessly invited.

This week, may we accept the invitation.

 

Amen.

 

Both Now and Forever

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

My daughter and I went camping last weekend.  It was beautiful and at night it was cold. I had not slept in a tent in a long time.  It kept out the wind, and the spiders that crawled over the outside of it but could not get in. It kept out the moisture and the dew. It did a little bit to block the cold, but not much. It did not keep out sound. I could hear the train across the lake when it passed by, and the slow crunch of the Park Ranger’s truck tires as she rolled by in the darkness every hour to check that all was well.  All through the night giant splashes erupted in the lake next to us that jolted me awake, and I had a front row seat for the cacophony of morning birds that started their music at 4 am.  And while the tent kept me from seeing the sunrise, it did not keep out the light. So I was up stumbling into the chilly morning fog not long after those birds.  A tent is not a home. It’s a temporary place to lie our head, not meant to keep us from the grace and beauty around us, or the gratitude within, but meant to make it so we can be more fully available to these things.  

Paul’s letters can get so wordy, theoretical and philosophical, so it’s easy to forget that they are written to real communities in real situations, and that Paul is also in his own drama most of the time. In this case, the small Corinthian congregation exists in a fast-paced, extremely stratified society, an environment filled with commerce and prosperity, homelessness and poverty, and clear demarcations between the haves and have-nots.  And the congregation itself includes people from the whole range of society, who know that these divisions have no place in the church – we are all one in the Body of Christ. But when some get off work early and show up to dinner and end up eating all the best food before those who have to work later can get there, the broken, sinful system creeps into the church.  When those with more means, (aka, nicer earthly tents), are given the better seat, or the louder voice, because they are used to it out there, we’re not functioning like the Body of Jesus Christ - those who lay down our lives for one another.  
We are so accustomed to maintaining, guarding and building up our earthly tents that we have trouble leaving them behind when we’re invited into the presence of God in the presence of one another.  And the Corinthians are learning that it takes a lot of faithful and consistent work to uncover their hidden biases, continue confessing their complicity in the brokenness, and practice living in freedom and mutual submission to one another as siblings in Christ. 
 
Add to that, at this point, there has been a rift between Paul and the Corinthian congregation, and Paul is trying to mend a divide. So in this part of his letter he is building up to say we need to be reconciled because we are in Christ, we have died with him and been raised to a new life of complete belonging to God and each other, we already are reconciled, for eternity, so let’s live that reconciliation now.
 
But first he has to remind them of what’s true.
 
A tent is not our true home. It is a cover, a place to rest and keep out of the rain. It can offer some protection, some structure. But it is not permanent.  A good storm can rip the stakes out of the ground in minutes. A curious bear can tear through the wall or a determined raccoon gingerly unzip it with its outrageous opposable thumbs.  A tent in the elements day after day would wear out and become useless.  It’s not made to last forever, and it doesn’t actually protect us all that well from danger.
 
The problem is, we act like our earthly tents, our temporary shelters, are meant to last. We forget that our outer natures are wasting away, as Paul says. Or maybe we don’t want to acknowledge it. We direct our effort into building up the things that can be seen. And there is nothing wrong with pouring energy into our jobs, making our houses comfortable, or cultivating our hobbies and our education.  It’s not bad to invest our money to prepare for the future or take good care of our health. All these things are good things; they make life more enjoyable and more stable.  But, the mystics remind us, we can get overly attached to even good things. And, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, “100% of people die and that number cannot be increased.”  So these things don’t actually save us from death either.
 
But that’s only half of Paul’s sentence. Our outer nature is wasting away, yes, but our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  He redirects our gaze from the temporary to the eternal, from what can be seen to what cannot be seen, and then he puts it all in context, “this slight, momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory without measure.” 
Glory is the energy of God’s nearness, the smudge of proximity to divinity, the residue of the mystery of transcendence that leaks into everything otherwise ordinary in this life. 

There is a quote that I have heard attributed to Amy Tan that says, “a soul can only hold as much joy as sorrow carves room for.”  When we let life in, we can let more life in. Because we have a savior who redeems our very humanity, we can let weakness make us stronger and vulnerability make us braver and loss make love more deeply. Our tents are meant to be permeable. They are meant to keep us accessible to the glory of God whose fingerprints are all over creation and whose presence dwells within our neighbor.
 
A life of faith, a life shaped by grace, is a life that points us not into ourselves, to build up and guard and protect, but out toward one another.  Always.  In our Apostles Creed catechesis this week we talked about how ours is a faith that follows a God who came into weakness as a human being and laid down his life for others, and this rocked the very foundations of all thinking from Jesus onward; for the first time in human history humility became a virtue instead of a shame. Instead of guarding honor, building up dignity, upholding strength and might, taking care of one’s own, here was a humiliated and killed savior, who surrendered to weakness and bore the suffering of others.  

And in exchange for our suffering, Jesus gives us his glory, right here in our humiliating humanity, he draws us into the deep and unbreakable connection with God that Jesus himself has, and makes our very humanity, our weakness, the place where God is revealed.  The faith of Jesus becomes our faith. The life of Jesus becomes our life.  

God’s grace spills over on us and feels inside like gratitude, increasing and spreading, spilling more grace and bubbling up more gratitude, life after life. The grace of God turns people away from our project of self-protective tent-building out toward this wonder-filled world and the magnificence of other humans, to see the glory of God in the very face of one another. 
 
In a wonderful essay called, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis brings this home:
It is…with awe and circumspection … that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. 
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.…Next to the Blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Our true home is in the presence of God in the presence of each other – a deep dwelling of belonging in this momentary life and forever. So we do not lose heart. For this reason, we do not lose heart!  Things fall apart. Yes. Civilizations crumble, institutions end, we must come to terms with the fact that our very own bodies gradually disintegrate around us. But we are not afraid to acknowledge this—in fact, we cannot be free until we do so! Because our earthly tents provide a temporary place to lie our heads, and weather storms, and take in the world’s beauty, music and light. 

But the Holy Spirit makes a spacious and welcoming dwelling within us and between us that cannot be seen, but will last forever. It is secure, indestructible and unending. Right here – faintly all around us and blazing within and between us, shines the glory of God. On this side of eternity we can only bear but a faint brush against, handle the tiniest glimpse, or tolerate the smallest teaspoonful of God’s glory before it overwhelms our senses, but we are even now, being prepared to one day hold the full weight of it. And we experience it paradoxically through weakness and suffering shared, through confession and forgiveness, through mutual submission and lifting each other up. In our true home of God’s grace we are seen and we see each other as none other than bearers of the very glory of God in Christ, guests together at the table of this glorious feast of a life, sharing glimpses of what is to come.  

Amen.