The redemptive work of God

2 Samuel 5:1-5; 8:15-9:13 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Amen.

In, Through and Despite

Genesis 37, 39-50

Episode 5: Joseph

This is the story of the family of Jacob” are the opening lines of the 12-chapter novella that wraps up the book of Genesis. It centers around Joseph, Jacob (aka Israel)’s favorite of his 11 sons, (that is, before Ben comes along, making it 12 – the 12 tribes of Israel).  

In 2012, artist Sue Hensel stood at the front of our sanctuary with a large canvas and pastels and drew this image, while I stood at the podium in the back of the sanctuary and read through the entire story of Joseph from beginning to end. 

Every time we came to the phrase, “The Lord was with Joseph” we all stopped and sang it, and then we continued with the refrain periodically throughout the rest of the story.

 

But here’s the thing, every time it’s said, “The Lord was with Joseph” Joseph is in kind of crappy circumstances. He’s sold into slavery, and “the Lord was with Joseph and he became a successful man.”

He’s thrown into jail “but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love, he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer.”

“The Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper – in the dungeon.”

 

Joseph was 17 when he arrived in Egypt, and into slavery. Being falsely accused by his boss’s wife lands him in that dungeon prison for many years – including the two years the baker who had promised to mention him to Pharoah after Joseph did him a solid had forgotten about him, before suddenly remembering, when Pharoah’s dream could not be interpreted by the top magicians, that one Hebrew guy in the dungeon who was good with dreams.  So by the time Joseph stands before the Pharoah and gets put in charge of Operation Outlast Famine, he is 30 years old.

When this all began, Joseph, whom the text is careful to mention is both handsome and good looking, was a cocky kid, the favorite their father, bragging about his crazy dreams to his inferior brothers and driving them crazy with rage.  

But as we follow the terrifying trajectory of his life, from stability to upheaval, from security to volatility, from ease to agony, from recognition to rejection, again and again, the constant through line is The Lord is with Joseph.  And regardless of where he is or what is happening, God keeps working through for the goodness of others. Joseph had no choice in what happened to him, no control over any of it. God did not spare him suffering, that’s not what God does, God comes into suffering with us.  And the Lord was with Joseph.

 

His brothers’ lives went a different way.  After faking Joseph’s death and selling him to slavers, they had to live with what they’d done. They had to go home and face Dad. And Jacob’s grief was crushing and continuous. He would not be consoled. And the brothers must now keep their terrible secret from their family for the rest of their lives. 

 

When they arrive in Egypt two years into the devastating famine, among the desperate crowds, they have lived these past 22 years as slaves to their guilt and shame. But the one they’d sold into slavery, who spent many of those years in captivity, had been made free long ago.  Unburdened by bitterness, outrage or ego, available to God and to those around him, the 39-year-old Joseph is unrecognizable.

 

It’s not just that his boyhood dreams have come true, and everyone is bowing to him, including his brothers, it’s that he has been formed into a person attuned to God. 

 

Later, after they’ve all been reunited and their father’s grief has ended, after everything Joseph does for his brothers - moving all their families and households there, setting everyone up in the good graces of the Pharoah and on vast stretches of land, promising to continue caring for them all through the rest of the famine, the brothers are still trapped in guilt. They still can’t accept the gift that has been given to them.  When Dad dies, the brothers are afraid Joseph will take his revenge on them. 

 

They scheme to tell Joseph that their father’s dying wish was that Joseph forgive them. But when they do, Joseph weeps. Then, using the phrase that throughout our whole scripture is our alert that what we’re about to hear is the good news that pulls us back into the Way of God, Joseph says, “Don’t be afraid!”

He continues, “Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people. No, don’t be afraid. I will continue to take care of you and your children.” So, he reassured them by speaking kindly to them.” (Gen 50:19-21)

 

We’ve talked about this before, but I think about it often, that the Greek word for “forgive” means literally, let go. Just let go. Stop hanging onto something, stop feeding it, clinging to it, holding the weight of it. Just let go.

 

Joseph had forgiven his brothers ages ago, but they hadn’t forgiven themselves. They were invited to let go and they kept hanging on. Set free, they were still living in the Way of Fear. 

 

What are we hanging onto that it’s hard to let go of?

 

It might not be guilt or shame; it may be anger or a story of betrayal. But right now, walking through the world in these days and hours leading up to the US election, it feels like everyone is on edge. And I wonder if what we’re hanging onto is fear itself. Apprehension. Dread. 

 

This week Barb Blue preached to me the gospel/good news that pulls us into the Way of God when she texted after her bible study, “There is no election result that can thwart God.”

 

God is about saving us, which is to say, God is about restoring us to shalom – to wholeness, reconnecting us to our maker and all our siblings on this earth. All creation belongs to God, and God cannot be thwarted. And the story of Joseph tells us there is no arrogance or rivalry, no hatred or jealousy, no horrific betrayal, no appalling violence, no cover up, no great success, no accusation or smear campaign, no captivity or languishing, no faulty memory or failed magician, no famine, or scheming, or shame, or guilt, or fear that can thwart God.

Nothing in history, in the present moment, or yet to come is bigger than God’s redemptive plan for the world. There is nobody outside of God’s sights. We’re all in this story.

 

We might have trouble tolerating our smug siblings, we might even imagine doing violence to them or fantasize about sending them far away forever.  Or we might be the ones with the arrogance problem, looking down on our brothers and sisters with disdain. Either way, God cannot be thwarted from working God’s purposes in and through any and every scenario we manage to cook up or mess up. Nothing we can do can stop God from loving the world and saving it, from loving us and saving us.

 

We can’t control what will happen. Or what will happen after that. Simply wanting one thing or another doesn’t make it so, just as fearing one thing or another can’t keep it from coming.

 

So what if, instead, we let go?  What if we accept what is, and decide to assume the inner stance of least resistance to the light that no darkness can overcome shining in us and through us? What if we practiced trusting that the Lord is with us?

 

Today we’re invited into the posture of Joseph. Not the insufferable, 17-year-old Joseph with the bragging problem, but the Joseph who had been through it, whose trust in God was deep and embedded, who had learned through two decades of unpredictability and strain to ride out the waves of both constantly changing circumstances and monotonous confinement, with his heart tuned to God. The Joseph set free by forgiveness who used the gifts he’d been given whenever they were called upon. 

Our biblical ancestors are not examples to model ourselves after, so I don’t want to put Joseph on a pedestal.  But the story is not really about Joseph, it’s about God. It’s always about God. God whose purposes cannot be stopped. And Joseph seemed to learn how to practice assuming the stance that offers the least resistance of openness to God, waiting and ready when God called on him to act.

 

Nearly seven hundred years after Joseph, David, fleeing the wrath of a murderous king (don’t worry- we’ll get to that story!) wrote this:

Psalm 36:5-7 (NLT):

“Your steadfast love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths. You save humans and animals alike, O Lord. How precious is your unfailing love, O God! All humanity finds shelter in the shadow of your wings.”

 

What if we choose to simply move into this world today, tomorrow, and the next day, in the shadow of God’s wings? What if we practice assuming the stance of least resistance to the Holy Spirit, who hovers over chaos and breathes life into dust, hovering over our chaos and breathing new life into our world?

 

It’s not up to us to save the world, that’s God’s job.  Don’t be afraid! Are we in the place of God? As we live our lives and make our mistakes, God is not only present in our personal realities, but God’s larger purposes are unfolding in, through and despite us. We can join in on knowingly, with eyes wide open and hearts and hands readily available to listen and respond to God’s call, or we can join in by accident without our awareness or conscious involvement. We can see it and celebrate God’s salvation, or we can miss it. But we can never stop God’s redemption or prevent God’s presence. God will do what God does, and God cannot be thwarted.

Amen.

Where we've been - 

Episode 1: The Beginning

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

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah 

Episode 4: Jacob

 

Either Way and Always

Jacob and Esau Embrace, by Robert T. Barrett

Episode 4: Isaac's Family - Jacob & Esau

Genesis 25-33 (especially 25, 29, 32, 33) 

There are those who are so devoted to something that they seem obsessed, willing to do crazy things, like getting up at 3:15 am every day to pray and sing Psalms for 45 minutes.  This is the first of the seven daily prayer times of the monks of the Abbey of Gethesameni  where Erin and I spent the week largely in silence and solitude (when we praying with the monks or passing notes at meals).  At 3:15 am, while the rest of the world sleeps, the monks file into the unrelentingly well-lit church to chant and pray, and then, in their long, quiet robes, slide out of the church into the cold, pre-dawn, starlit darkness. They’d pause their work and return for one more prayer time and Eucharist before I would be awake, happily joining them for prayers at the much more respectable hour of 7:30 am.

Many of these men have been in this Abbey their whole adult lives, living an exacting rhythm of work and prayer, mostly silent. They came there, and stayed there, seeking to worship God. This is the driving force of their lives, and they’ve given up everything else for this one goal. Last week, fifty or so guests left our own lives and phones behind for five days to sip from their deep well of silence and prayer.

On Friday, I did get out of bed and stumble my way to the way-too-bright church to chant with them at 3:15 am vigil. I made it through 15 minutes of struggling to keep my eyes open and my legs from folding under me. Then I couldn’t take it a second longer and would’ve sold my birthright for a pillow, so I snuck back to my bed for a few more hours of sleep. 

Today we meet someone with this kind of singular dedication, someone so important to the scripture story that his life takes up half the book of Genesis. At the beginning of today’s glimpse into his life, he is called Jacob, a name that, depending on how you point your vowels, means “heel,” or “cheater/usurper.” He is the second-born twin, who came into the world literally grasping onto his brother’s foot like he wanted to pull him back inside to be born first.  They fought so much in her womb that Rebekah had it out with God, who told her she had two nations wrestling within her and the oldest would serve the youngest, and indeed their descendants would go on to become the Israelites and Edomites.

Jacob was aptly named. Shrewd and clever, he always had an angle, a play. There are those who see life as a constant battle or game to be won, and Jacob was one of them. 

Deep inside us all, where the most vulnerable and unprotected part of us lives in profound, wordless silence - in the deep, dark, soundless part of us far beneath the bright and noisy surface, most of us don’t actually trust we are loved.  We don’t really believe we belong. We don’t accept that our lives have value. So we try to earn it, maybe by striving to be good or humble, or by disappearing the parts of us we’re ashamed of. Or, we pad our lives with distractions and protections.  Or maybe, like Jacob, we scramble and struggle and fight our way through life, believing if we don’t grab our place, it will be lost. We will be lost. Falling back on our original sin, we don’t really trust God to be God, so we take on that job or ourselves. 

In the opening retreat talk on Monday, at one point Father Carlos looked at all of us sitting there silently staring back at him and gave us a jolt when he blurted, “What? Is the love of God not enough for you?”

For all Jacob’s insecurity about his own unworthiness, and his restless antagonism with the world, he is lasar-focused on one goal. Like those monks, (who are also riddled with faults and foibles, because every human is), Jacob’s life is set toward one thing: the covenant blessing of God to his grandfather Abraham. While he may not trust his own place within it, he absolutely believes the promise of God. He’s devoted to it, pursuing it so doggedly that he’s willing to lie, cheat and steal for it.  He longs for God’s blessing to the point of obsession, to the point of struggling nearly his whole life with other people and with God for something that God had already decided would be his and that God would bring about regardless.

To the more concrete Esau, this blessing is obscure and theoretical. After a long day hunting, food sounds better to him than some far-off blessing, some bigger story he is meant to carry on or future gift he is destined to receive.  And Jacob takes advantage of his brother’s weaknesses and tricks him. Like a kid selling the family Nintendo to his little sister, knowing it’s only a matter of time before she’ll forget and it will be his again (Andy), Jacob has a long-term plan. And when the time comes, with the help of his mother, he follows through.  The blessing Jacob is after is more important to him than his relationship with his brother, more important to him even than his dying father who bestows it. He believes, at this point, that in order to belong to God, he must violate his belonging to others. Jacob against the world! Jacob in pursuit of God’s blessing “which,” as one scholar puts it, “he can never possess as fully as it possesses him.” 

Perhaps the blessing has become an idol, and Jacob has forgotten that it is not something for him to acquire, but for the living God to bestow. 

The night before Jacob goes to meet Esau, what we don’t see in today’s telling, is that he sends his family with all his remaining possessions just ahead of him to camp on the other side of a stream and he stays, the text says, “by his lonesome.”  A stranger approaches and fights with Jacob, wrestling with him all through the dark night. In the thrashing, chaotic hours of darkness Jacob’s lifelong struggle is given a concrete form and foe. When the opponent sees Jacob will not relent, he strikes him on the hip, wounding him, and still Jacob does not let go.  

As dawn begins to break the stranger tells Jacob to release him, and Jacob says, “Not until you bless me!” The figure asks his name, and Jacob answers, a confession of his person, “I am Jacob (the Heel, the Trickster).” The man responds, “You shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel” - which means One who Wrestles with God - “for you have striven with God and humans and have prevailed.” And still, this one refused to answer when Israel asks for a name in return.  

At the end of the week at the Abbey, Father Carlos told me, “God doesn’t come to us unmediated. Only through other people can we know God.”  Jacob doesn’t know his assailant; in the darkness, locked in battle he cannot see the face. And when it is all over, we’re told, “Jacob called the place Peniel” - which means, ‘face of God’- “saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been spared.’” But though God has engaged him on his terms, he hasn’t really seen God, not yet. But God sees him. Instead of expecting him to be someone he is not, God blesses who he is. Like the parent realizing that when you say to the kids, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” that one beloved child of yours will always, always, pick the hard way, God says, You, my child, shall be called, One Who Wrestles With God. 

But also, through blessing, injury, and new identity, God reminds Jacob-now-Israel in no uncertain terms that God cannot be grasped, controlled, or claimed; God does the claiming. Indeed, the unknowable Divine let him live, but now he must face the wrath of his betrayed twin brother who may not.  

When the sun rises, Jacob, limping from having tangled with the Almighty, goes forward to confront whatever may await him. But instead of the fate he deserves, he finds forgiveness. In on the open arms and weeping embrace of his brother, God is revealed to him. And Israel, overcome, says to Esau, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.”

The love of God is enough for all of us, indeed enough for this whole world. If we really, really trusted the love of God, its enoughness would fill us up and spill out of us to everyone around us. It would sweep us back into our belonging to God and each other, wash away all fear and guardedness, coax our tender selves out of our dark hiding, and quench all of our hot striving.  But this trust! It’s hard! For most of us, nearly impossible. As impossible, perhaps, as willingly forgiving someone a terrible wrong they’ve done to us. We need God’s help as much with being loved as we do loving. We need God’s Spirit to hover over our dark chaos and breathe into us new life and speak over us with joy, It is good!  And some of us will need to wrestle it out.

But God will always work in and through our circumstances and our choices to return us to God and one another, because that is where God determined we all belong.  And God will always work God’s purposes for this world in and through broken and imperfect people.

Amen.

LNPC Bible-Read Journey:

Episode 1: Creation & Sin, Adam & Eve

Episode 2: Flood & Promise, Noah (conversation - no sermon)

Episode 3: Covenant & Calling, Hagar, Abraham, Sarah

It needs to said

 Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Paul can be really esoteric and theological, with paragraph long sentences that strain the brain. But then suddenly he’ll get really practical, punchy and concrete. All that to say, I wonder what was happening in the community that Paul felt the need to specifically address the thieves in the church. 

A few decades ago, we had some thieves in this church. I called Gary for the story and he directed me to Dick. Dick was on the counting team and began hearing from folks that their offering checks weren’t being cashed out of their bank accounts. This went on for a couple of weeks, and he asked Warren to look into it. Warren had heard that a few kids had been spotted going into the bathroom during worship. So he went to investigate, and found a stash of checks stuffed behind the radiator. 
 
For these details, I called Warren. The boys had been pocketing the cash from the offering plate and ditching the checks where they thought they would never be found. 
They were called into a meeting with the pastor. She told them if they’d amend their ways, she would not turn them into the police. They agreed to give up their stealing. But things were tense for a while. They’d taken some $1500 of the congregation’s money. And their parents were prominent members, embarrassed by their kids’ behavior. 
Warren had the kids do things around the church building, like yard work, cleaning the toilets, and miscellaneous painting jobs inside and outside the building. He set the number of hours that they had to work off and tells me he thinks they learned a lesson. Those kids presumably grew up to lead productive lives. 

The congregation showed those boys kindness, and the kids themselves learned they were not defined by their violation but claimed by the community as beloved children of God. 

This letter to the Ephesians says Christ has broken down all dividing walls and made us one new humanity. Our personhood is upheld in the upholding of each other. We’re not apart and alone, we’re in this life together. And our worth and place is not determined by what we do, but by what Christ has done. 
 
“Thieves must give up stealing,” Paul says. Fair enough.  Seems like good advice. But Paul doesn’t say “Don’t steal because it’s wrong.” Or “Have a little self-respect.” Or, “Do some good, honest work to make something of yourselves in the eyes of others.”  Paul says, “Give up stealing, do honest work with your hands, so that you have something to share with those in need.” 
We are not restored to our humanity and belonging by reclaiming some individual, personal dignity. We are restored to our humanity and dignity when we can act for one another in belonging.
 
The way of life Paul is describing is counter-cultural. It’s counter-intuitive. He’s just gotten finished saying we’ve been given new life in Christ, so live like what’s true is true. And here’s what a good life looks like. Then lots of concrete, even ordinary advice, plus a word to the thieves.
 
So, if Christ has made us free for a life of connection and fullness, how do we live this life?
First, Paul says, it’s putting aside falsehoods and telling the truth in a falsehood peddling world.  It’s normal for us these days to tolerate and spread rumors we know are not true to cut people down (as J.D. Vance has discovered).  We regularly claim complicated things are simple, and treat complicated humans like they’re simple. With photo filters and curated posts, we make our lives look sparklingly authentic and perfectly genuine, while hiding our weaknesses and hiding behind our politics or our labels.  
Paul says tell the truth. Why? Because we belong to each other. When the world says we’re apart and against, and we need to be thick-skinned and self-sufficient, we tell the truth of our belonging and our vulnerability, we live the truth of our shared humanity. 

Second, and not unrelated, Be angry, Paul says, but don’t sin.  My friend Jason is a pastor. After the death of his grandparents his family was feuding over the inheritance. On the way into church one Sunday morning, he got a call that his uncle had burned his grandparents’ farmhouse to the ground.  When he arrived at church Jason was full of anger and sorrow. 

But instead of hiding his anger behind religious platitudes and pretending everything was fine, he told the truth. He stood in front of his congregation and shared about the phone call. Then he said, “Right now I am really, really angry. If you need pastoral care this week, here is another pastor you can call.” 

To smother anger is to take it to bed with you, to bring it into your next day, and the day after that, to feed it until it grows so large that it turns around and smothers you. Don’t make room for the devil, Paul says, which is to say, don’t entertain temptation. Don’t indulge the craving for revenge or control. 

When Pastor Jason confessed his pain and anger to the people of God, he leaned into the belonging that holds us. And in doing so, he both invited care, and also showed those who might have been afraid of their own anger or sorrow, that if they shared their pain they would be cared for too. He trusted that God would move him through the anger and out the other side, though at the moment he didn’t see the way, so he let himself be where he was, where Jesus is, where Christ can us.

Third, in this life of new humanity in Christ, Paul goes on to remind us that what we say has power. How we speak to each other matters. Our words can tear people down, our words can build people up. 
 It’s like the Rumi quote Kristen always has at the ready:
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?” ~ Rumi

Cruelty is lazy. And can even be momentarily thrilling. It’s rewarded these days too. To let fear rule us, to turn off our hearts and brains and let the reactive part of us be in charge for a minute is just easier. It feels good to be the windshield and not the bug.
But then, if we’re paying attention, it feels terrible. Because to act with malice toward each other is to act against our own humanity. When we try to unbelong others we deny the very belonging that defines us. 

The currency of the Kingdom of God is kindness. Like the kindness the congregation and pastor showed those little Lake Nokomis thieves 30 years ago, and the kindness Paul calls the thieves in Ephesus to show to those in need by giving up stealing and working hard to make a decent living in order to care for others. 
 
Our words, Paul suggests, can give grace. Astoundingly, this means that the God of the universe can speak to people’s hearts through our mouths. People may hear the truth of their own worth and place because of what you and I say. And if our words, and our actions, can participate in the activity of the Divine claiming and healing the world, what is a good life if not that? 
 
The underlying, irrevocable fact Paul is trying to get across is we are all in this together. Kindness is living our belovedness with each other.
But lordy, it takes a beat. A pause to shift there. Thank God Paul says all this, because it all needs to be said. The way of belonging to God and each other needs to be remembered and practiced together. I need to remember and practice it. I need to be pulled out of myself to truly see others, even sometimes those others I love most in the world. We need a confession-repentance kind of deep breath moment of realizing we’ve slipped back into living the bondage we’ve been freed from, and turning our hearts back to God. Because in our own power we can’t muster the kindness, or brave the truthfulness, or extend the forgiveness, or do the not slandering, especially if we’re angry, or scared, or just plain tired. And we’ve had plenty of practice at the spite, apathy and lies.
 
But Paul just got finished saying we are being rooted and grounded in love. Like plants, with roots nourished deep below the earth, and sun shining from above, you and I are being actively tended and cared for, so that what comes from us and lives through us is love. So that we live in love, and for love. This is what Christ did, and the power of the Holy Spirit does, in us. 
 
And the deeper we are rooted and more we are grounded, the more love invades our cells and whose we are comes out in who we are. We find ourselves trusting belonging, welcoming others in and leaning in ourselves to the love that holds and upholds us all.

Christ has already made us one; that part’s not our job. Our job is to practice living what’s true. And we do it in really concrete and ordinary ways. So in this practicing, trusting, honest kind of life, may we be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us, and be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. 
Amen. 

Let Go

Matthew 18:21-35

I don’t like letting go of things; it doesn’t come easily to me.  In order to let go of something, the story has to change. I have to decide that since I only used it once, I don’t actually need the tea light fondu set.  I must choose to recognize that nobody in my house is clamoring for the Scooby-Do ‘Learn to Read’ books, so we’re probably done with those. Maybe that dusty basket of bleached seashells from that trip to Florida when the kids were in preschool no longer represents for me what it once did? And perhaps, with every bathing suit I’ve owned for 20 years folded neatly in a bin under my bed, instead of being armed and ready for any possible future, I could risk living in the now, and only own swimsuits that currently fit me. 

But letting go of being right? Letting go of how I know things should be?  Letting go of regrets and disappointments? Letting go of something unkind or unfair that was done to me? These are harder. If we can’t control the circumstances, at least we can control the narrative. If we can’t control what happened in the past, at least we can control what we do with it, learn from it, not make the same foolish mistakes again.  Control is a strategy we use to feel secure, to reduce anxiety, to combat fear, to give us a feeling of protection. Letting go of control? No thanks. 

The Greek word we translate as “forgive” means simply “to let go.” Sometimes we see forgiveness as giving up control, letting someone get away with something, or acting like what happened didn’t matter. We feel loyal to our pain. We stroke it and stoke it, longing for our injury to be recognized as unjust and wrong, and act as though to forgive someone else is to somehow betray ourselves. 

Peter has been listening to all Jesus’s teaching about conflict and forgiveness, and thinks to himself, Over, and over, and over again I go through the work of forgiving someone who hurts me. So when is enough? When can I stop? How much am I expected to put up with? 

Generally speaking, we are all for forgiveness, most of the time, but there’s a limit, right? So, Peter suggests a good, large, and even holy-sounding number: How about seven times? Surely that is a beyond-generous amount of times to forgive. Right, Jesus? I mean, let’s not go crazy. Surely, some people don’t deserve forgiveness.  

But forgiveness isn’t in the same zip code as deserve. They are completely different languages, contradictory accounting systems. Forgive and deserve are more like opposites, since forgiveness frees us from a system of gauging and measuring, and puts us instead into the realm of boundless and unlimited love. 

So Jesus answers, Try seventy times that. In other words, Forgive infinity times, Peter. Just keep on going till you lose track. There is no end to forgiveness. No point at which you’ve reached the limit. No lifetime maximum out-of-pocket amount. 

Then, to drive the point home, he tells one of his trademark parables with absurd extremes to reveal how we’re living trapped in the way of fear instead of free in the way of God. The servant in the parable is forgiven more than he could repay in fifteen lifetimes and then immediately and violently demands someone repay a tiny debt, and when he can’t, throws him in jail. This is like celebrating sobriety with a drinking binge, like running back into the burning building you were just rescued from, like scrapping the Ten Commandments for the golden calf and pining for the slavery of Egypt. 

He sticks with his old identity instead of the new one offered him by the king. He says, “Thanks, but no thanks.” to a life of freedom and generosity, and chooses instead captivity to a life of debt and indebtedness, where it’s all kept track of, and there is no forgetting, no forgiving, no letting go, ever.

Which currency will you use? Which way will define you and shape your life? If you choose a world without forgiveness, you stay chained to the suffering of the past. You repeat old hurts and live them current, you nurse your pain with no chance of release. Hanging onto wounds, insults, and offenses, practicing and spreading this pattern of deprivation and resentment, traps you ever more tightly in a misery of your own making.

So I can’t help thinking Jesus told his parable to Peter with a twinkle in his eye, his words like a shove on Peter’s shoulder, to highlight the absurdity of Peter’s question: 

How much forgiveness is enough, Jesus, before I can stop and be done with it already? How much freedom from injury do I have to endure before I get to be imprisoned in bitterness? At what point am I allowed to quit living in a future shaped by love? Is seven times a sacrificial and generous amount of letting go before it’s appropriate to throw in the towel and go back to hanging onto betrayal and stoking anger? 

Peter doesn’t know what’s coming—that Jesus will die and take into himself all suffering and betrayal, all pain and injustice; that none of it, ever, goes unseen, untended, unmet. God incarnate will bear it all, all that has been and all that will be.

 And as the last breath leaves his human body, Jesus will look out at his murderers and whisper, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34).
And they will cease being those who are killing God and instead become those on whom God has poured unending love. Jesus will die in freedom, and release his killers—and all of us as well, taking into the heart of God all the terrible things we think and say and do to one another, everything, every one of us. 

Setting aside deserve and debt, punishment and payback, Jesus will open to us mercy, grace, forgiveness, and freedom. All that is dead—between us, within us, around us—is swallowed up by resurrection. Our brokenness is now the ground from which new life is born, green, beautiful, and eternal. 

But how in the world do we forgive? How do we let go? 

 
Several years ago, I heard Dr. Fred Luskin speak. He’s a world expert on forgiveness and director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project. His work began out of frustration that most faith traditions speak extensively about the need to forgive but don’t tell us how to forgive. And we can get so trapped in unforgiveness. So, he began to study forgiveness. And by the time I heard him speak he had dedicated twenty-five years of research and work to teaching people how to forgive, and to measuring scientifically the effect it has on people’s bodies, minds and relationships. And do you know what his team has discovered is at the very root of all forgiveness?

Abiding in God’s love. 

Of course, they wouldn’t say it that way in the laboratory. Instead, they would talk about finding that place of peace within, about living from that place. But the way you get there? Love. 

He walked us through it. “Think of someone you adore,” he said. “Get a good picture of them in your head. Remember what it feels like to be so loved by them, so known and valued. How they delight in you! Breathe deeply. Let your heart even get warm right now as you think of this person. Hold that feeling within you. Now open your eyes,” he said. “Five minutes of this every day is more effective than psychotherapy in helping people to forgive.” 

Love drives out fear and frees us to forgive, because all forgiveness, all love and mercy and with-each-other-ness, come from God’s own love, God’s own being.  Love unclenches our heart. When we are no longer defined by our woundedness, but by our belovedness, it changes the story. 

I’m learning something right now about loving and letting go.  After 18 years of raising a person, looking out for them, looking after them, you just send them away to fend for themselves and that’s that. Of course, I know that’s not that and all that, but still, there’s a lot of letting go involved. There’s an uncomfortable surrendering that makes life feel precarious and precious all at once.  And how similar the captivity can feel, between regret and fear! Not unlike anger, resentment, harbored pain, or the obstinate need to be right. How much my worry can keep me from being present in love to those I love! All of it ties us up and keeps us chained.  

But it has helped me to recognize in my learning this letting go, that there is a kind of fundamental forgiveness to it all, a gentleness with myself, a grace for each other, an acceptance of life as it is. The truth is, none of us can go back and redo anything differently, and none of us can control what will happen in the future. Right now, these two facts could paralyze me with sorrow or anxiety. But I am forgiven, and I can forgive, which is to say, I am released from keeping score, and I can be free from illusions of control.  

Letting go, and letting in the delight, the wonder, the incredible privilege it is to love, and the awe I feel at being loved by, these particular, quirky and astonishing humans my life gets to be tangled up with, I find myself unclenching. I discover I am being set free to receive the unearned, undeserved gift of my one, limited life, bound inextricably to dear people I can only love by letting go. 

To let go, the story has to change. Life’s not about what anybody deserves or doesn’t deserve. We’re loved and held in a boundless and unlimited love. We no longer need the anger. We can let the pain go. The worry is not serving us. The story of regret, recycled over and over, no longer represents what it once did. What was may no longer fit us, and it’s time to release it so we can receive what is. Instead of living fearful and guarded, armed and ready for any possible future, we can live in the present. Instead of grasping for control we will never have, to feel a security we will never reach, we can let go, and find we are already held secure by love. God’s healing, forgiving love meets us where we are and flows through us, and we abide in the love that holds us all.

Amen.

Again, For All

Matthew 15:29-39

There is a skill to storytelling. A way of drawing on what people know or suspect to build suspense, working with the element of surprise, saving the exciting part for the end, not telling the same story less impressively just a few minutes later... 

So maybe it’s not a surprise that after having been ordained for 17 years, and a Christian my whole life, I was this week old when I realized that there are two separate feeding a multitude stories. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention, and assumed one gospel told it with 5000 people, one with 4000, they had their reasons, but it was the same basic event.  

But no. The feeding of the 5000 appears in all four gospels. But in both Matthew and Mark a few chapters after that story, there is a whole second feeding-a-hungry-multitude-with-a-few-loaves-of-bread-and-a-couple-fish story. 

Why in the world would you tell it all over again, with less impressive stats? Even if it actually happened twice, why say, oh, and then he did that whole thing again.

Perhaps that is how Luke and John, the lectionary folks, and every Sunday school teacher I ever had felt, because nobody ever retells the 5000 story with 4000 people.  

Except the bible does.

 

Why?

 

We are going slowly through stories of Jesus this summer, so we can linger here a bit.  Several weeks ago, when we talked about the feeding of the 5000, we saw how it came fast on the heels of the news of cousin John’s (the Baptist’s) murder, and Jesus was devastated, and tried to go be alone but the crowds sought him out and in a day of connection and healing, abundance and hope, they were all reminded that far beyond the power of a petty and murderous king is a kingdom of love without end unfolding even now among us.  

 

Then Jesus went off by himself- and found his solitude and space to grieve, as one deeply grounded in his belonging to God and all others. He met up early the next morning with the disciples, who went directly from an exhausting day of impromptu, large-scale event-hosting to an exhausting night fighting to stay alive in a raging storm until dawn when Jesus walked out to them atop the choppy waves.  After the failed water-walking attempt by Precocious Peter, Jesus quieted the storm, and they complete their journey,  pulling up their boat onto gentile shores, where the preaching and healing begin again. 

 

Then we met the Canaanite woman, who, with whopping courage and a witty comeback, refused to take Jesus’ rude no for an answer, and after praising her persistent faith Jesus heals her daughter.  

 

That catches us up to this moment.  We are three days into another mass healing event, when Jesus—who must have an impish twinkle in his eye when he says it—tells the disciples he wants to feed all these people out here in the middle of nowhere because he doesn’t want them “fainting from hunger on their way home.”  And the dear disciples, who are nothing if not predictable, respond, But Jesus, where are we to find food for so many when we are so far away from everything?

 

Gospel means “good news.” And every part of scripture is oozing with it. Good news is leaking through the details, rising up between people and reaching out to you and me even thousands of years later. 

 

And the gospels apparently want us to know that, no, this feeding 4000 right after feeding 5000 no memory slip, or sloppy second-telling, this is its own event, and Mark and Matthew both see it worth telling.  But to be honest, I almost skipped it. We just heard a story just like this.  

 

I had planned to jump to the next chapter, where Jesus gets into it with his disciples for not getting a clever bread-related analogy he is making about the Pharisees, except in that chapter, he says, basically, What is up with you guys? How can you think I am speaking about actual bread right now when you’ve just witnessed me feed 5000 people with a couple fish and five loaves of actual bread, and then shortly after that, 4000 more people with some fish and seven loaves of literal bread? 

 

What IS up with those guys? And what is up with Jesus doing an encore show? Is it because it went so well the first time? Were the people clamoring for a greatest hits moment? Did Matthew and Mark lose their storytelling chops?

 

So I circled back. 

And I found the good news.  First, I want to tell you what some scholars like to say. Then I want to tell you what I needed to hear.

 

Scholars like to point out that the first miracle uses the number 5 – five loaves of bread, 5,000 people – and Matthew’s uber Jewish audience would have immediately thought of the five books of the law of Moses, the Pentateuch, (Genesis, Exodus, and so on) – giving this story some grounding and gravitas. Add to that then, that there were 12 baskets of food left over and they’d connect that to the 12 tribes of Israel, and think to themselves, yeah, this is our kind of story. There’s a solid continuity, a through-line with the God of Israel and the people of this God.  Jesus must be the Messiah, right?

 

But now, just a few days later, Jesus is no longer in Jewish territory, no longer preaching to Jewish people. He’s in Gentile lands, coloring way outside the lines, and not only did Jesus just give faith props to a cheeky Gentile woman who talked back to the Messiah, but, what?!  Jesus is repeating the special, abundant-feast miracle that he had just done for God’s chosen people, here, with these strangers, these others.  They have not grown up on the promises; they were not waiting for Messiah; they have not faithfully worshipped Yahweh through the centuries, and now they are praising the God of Israel too. Do they even have any idea what they are really receiving?  Maybe it’s like knowing you were mom’s favorite and then overhearing her tell the dopey neighbor kid that they’re her favorite too. 

 

Not only that, but (the apparently better-than-I-first-thought storyteller) Matthew decides to throw in some number nods here at the gentile multitude feeding too, with the seven loaves of bread and the seven baskets of leftovers. Not only is it a recollection of the seven days of creation, the origin of all humanity, but for both Jews and Gentiles, seven was the number of completeness. Matthew is telling the story of Jesus to the Jews – Jesus comes from us, is one of us, is here for us – but the story doesn’t stop there, Jesus comes to us all, comes for us all, is here to redeem us all. Nobody gets to claim him as their own personal savior – Jesus is here for the whole world, and through him, all people belong to God.  All people belong to God. 

 

So, yeah, there’s definitely some gospel busting through there. But here’s what’s cool about the gospel, and the bible: the good news we hear is usually the good news we need to hear. And we don’t all need to hear the same thing at the same time. 

 

And what really grabbed me this week is the dummy disciples.

 

What is up with you guys? He asks them later on, in chapter 16. Did you not just see me feed thousands of people?  Twice?  And he might as well add, Did you not watch me walk to you on top of crazy huge waves, and tell a wild storm to pipe down? As person after person for days and days on end has come in desperate need and found healing and hope, have you not been right here by my side watching it all happen? 

 

Oh my goodness, but I can relate. I believe God loves me unconditionally and some people do too, and yet I constantly try to make myself worthy of love and act like my value depends on my competence. I know there is nothing I can do to avoid suffering or prevent pain for those I love, or keep them always safe, and yet I strive for control, and make an idols out of security and the good opinions of others.

 

I love God, and I want to follow Jesus and share in what God is doing in the world.  But I get persuaded by the power of the storm and immediately start to sink. I get frustrated with the annoying stranger and ask Jesus to send them away. I get overwhelmed by the daunting task and the vast need, and wonder how we will feed all these people, with resources, way out here in the middle of nowhere. Even when I have just experienced God’s love, or seen God provide, I get scared and worried all over again like it never even happened. I stop trusting.

 

When faced with our brokenness, our need and our fragile, dependent humanity, we default to self-protection and fear, instead of leaning into our belonging to God and others. The shorthand word for that tendency and the behavior that it produces is sin. It’s the deep internal forgetting of God’s goodness and our humanness and the love that holds and calls us toward God and one another. Sin is inside me, but here I see it in the disciples too.  

And when we recognize sin in us, we to like to think it must disqualify us from participating, or the shame might crush us, or we will lose our belonging, or our place, or God’s love.  But all it gets the disciples here is some tender teasing, and an invitation back to trust. 

 

Because all people belong to God. And Jesus has come to break us free from the grip of sin and the power of death. And where the world is most broken, where I am most broken and in need of healing, where the need feels impossibly huge, that’s where Jesus brings forgiveness and healing.

 

Forgetting, being reminded. Doubting, trusting. Fearing, flailing, then trusting again. That’s how faith lives in us. The disciples were excited and impatient, terrified and skeptical, wobbly and unsure, and that’s how we participate. 

 

Beyond all the forces outside us and within, is a kingdom of love without end, unfolding even now among us. It floods the scene with abundance and hope, and is received alongside stranger and friend in connection and healing. This reality is not created or sustained by you and me, and nothing we do or don’t do can stop it, not even death. And there is no limit to the reach of God’s love and so no end to how often this story can be told: 

Jesus looks on us all with compassion, and will not send us away hungry, but instead becomes for us all the very bread of life. 

 

Amen.