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.

In Real Time

 Matthew 1:18-26

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

 

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

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

 

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

The story of Jesus begins somewhere.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Amen.

 

 

 

 

The Game is False

Devotion for Being Apart -
September 27

I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Today's scripture comes just after a rich landowner, who has followed all the religious rules, asks Jesus, What must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus tells him to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor and come follow him. Then Peter, seeing this, asks, Hey Jesus, we’ve given up everything to follow you, what will be our reward?  Jesus answers, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a vineyard owner..."  Matthew 20:1-16.




Jesus’ parables are always designed to expose something about the way of fear and reveal something about the way of God. In the way of fear envy is at play – we envy others and desire to be envied.  Envy is an essential component, actually, a necessary part of the game.  We only know how good we have it or how far we’ve gotten, or how much we matter, if we compare ourselves with others and see where we rank.  

We want to know what we have to do to succeed, to be safe, to be good, to be secure. We figure that out by looking at others and seeing how we measure up. We’re better than some, but worse than others. It’s how the way of fear operates.
 
But in this parable the landowner pays everyone the same thing, no matter how long they work. Forget that they all start out equally in need – some worked all day, and some just a few minutes, and they all received the same thing.  And he made sure that they all knew it too, it wasn't a secret what he paid them. He set them up for envy and then broke the measuring stick. He refused to play the game.
 
The parable could just as easily have been about tragedy. When tragedy cherry picks– through accidents, or sickness, this one dies from covid, that one has no symptoms, these parents have a child with addiction or mental illness, that one’s kids are honor roll athletes – envy comes into play in a huge way. We feel relieved it isn’t us, or we wonder why it’s us and what we did wrong. 
 
But when tragedy is a hurricane that destroys the entire town, or a fire that wipes out the whole region, it doesn’t matter how nice our house was or how hard we worked, or how well we followed all the rules, all that we’ve invested is gone- whether that was a whole lot or nothing at all.  Now we are all equal – we all have nothing. The measuring stick is broken; everyone is out of the game.  (Of course, in real life we’d find other things to envy – like who has better home owner’s insurance, because inside the way of fear we can’t help comparing ourselves, searching for ways to save ourselves.) 
 
But in the way of God there are no comparisons, there is no way to gain an advantage over anyone else.  The reasons for envy disappear. We are all human beings, claimed and cared for by God.  We are all living by God’s grace.  We participate alongside each other and no one is better, or more deserving, worse, or less deserving than any other.  We are not paid by what we have earned; we are paid by the generosity of our God. 
 
This is bad news for when we think we think we’re doing pretty well comparatively speaking, when we’re convinced we’re secure or that we’ve succeeded. When the game is working for us, it sucks to be told it's pretend.  But this is good news when we have nothing to give, nothing to lose, nothing to compete with. The game is false. We are free.
 
We all belong equally to God and to each other, and every one of us is dependent on the generosity of our God.  All of us live in God’s grace. And God invites all of us to join in, no matter how much or little we think we have to give. And this God also makes sure we have what we need, no matter how much or little we think we’ve contributed to earning our keep.
            
I hope that this makes us brave.  We’ve got nothing to prove and nothing to earn.  In God’s Kingdom all people really are equal, each one valued, made in the image of God.  Every single one of us is loved by God completely, whether we think we deserve it or not. No matter our circumstances, each of us meant to share in God’s life and joy. And regardless of how much or little we may think we have to give, each of us is called join in God’s redemption and hope in the world. 

Amen.

(Go here for more on The Way of Fear and The Way of God).
 

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

Envy and Gratitude - a mental, written, or praying exercise

Envy is the currency of the way of fear. Gratitude is the currency of the way of God. 

Envy tells us we are in it alone and against one another, and uses comparison as a way of measuring how well we are doing.  Gratitude recognizes we are all in it together and everything is a gift, and there is no measurement - it's all grace.  

It doesn't work just to try not to feel envy and to try to feel gratitude.  
But when envy arises we might be curious about it and acknowledge it, Oh, hello envy! There you are! Telling me I need to earn my place! I am envious because I am telling myself things would be better for me if...

We might turn toward gratitude by letting envy lead us there.  
The way of fear is telling me I need _____ to be (secure, happy, ok, good enough, successful, safe, etc).  
But here is my life, just as it is.
I know love through ______.
I feel joy when ______.
I am grateful for ______.
God cares (God, you care) for me through _____.
(Thank you).

This whole exercise can be done written, in our head, or as a prayer.

Being Saved

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

Just like all those gathered there on the day of Pentecost, we all hear the gospel in our own language. 

For those of us who are charismatic Pentecostals, the day of Pentecost is the promise of seeing signs and wonders, of prophesying and dreaming the reality of God. 

For those of us who are social justice Christians it is about caring for the poor so nobody is in need, and for Christian socialists it is about having all things in common, sharing what you have with each other and building a new kind of community.  

For evangelists it is about numbers being added and the good news being spread to all nations.  For the preachers it’s about Peter’s epic sermon – some of which we did not read today - introducing Jesus in such a compelling way that it draws thousands to the good news of God.  For those waiting for the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, it presents Jesus as the culmination of their hopes.  

For some of us it’s all about repentance and the forgiveness of sins that leads to new life. 

For others the baptism of the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to do supernatural things.  

Sometimes it feels like instead of the Holy Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost allowing the singular message of the gospel, given in all the languages for everyone to hear the same thing, this story just opens the door to lots of different messages, the gospel fragmented and parsed out, for everyone to hear what they most want to hear.

But this passage is really about one thing: This is about being saved.  They are being saved. 

When I say this text is about being saved, I am aware that I am opening a can of worms.  A surefire way to light up the divisions between Christians is to talk about the concept of being saved.  Because we hear that through the filters of all our differing strategies, goals and the meaning we assign to the saving, who needs it, who does it, how it happens and what it’s for.  Some people cringe and hear it as condemnation toward those who are not saved.  Others hear the message of eternal security in heaven and being protected from an eternal punishment in hell when we die as the core of the gospel, and find it to be a deep and abiding hope.  And for others, faith and following Jesus is about obedience and action in this lifetime and they don’t even know what to do with the word “saved” so it makes them wiggly in their pew hearing it said aloud today.

But here it is – they were being saved.  Paul talks like this all the time, (and we will get into that this summer, and throughout this upcoming year).  That is what happens at Pentecost – they were being saved.  And it is why we are sitting here today, celebrating the day of Pentecost – we too are being saved.

We’ve been in the season of Easter, telling stories of resurrection, (aka, stories of being saved), leading up last week to the Ascension – the moment when Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain 40 days after his resurrection, gives them some words and vanishes into the clouds, is Luke’s dividing point in the story he is telling.  He gives us that scene twice- at the end of the book of Luke and just before this in the beginning of Acts.  He uses it to end the first of his letters- the one about Jesus being here with us in bodily form.  And then he uses it again to transition us to his second letter, the book of Acts, which is all about usbeing Jesus’ body.  When Jesus’ in body leaves, the Holy Spirit comes and we become the Body of Christ.  Luke has moved us out of the story of Christ in the flesh, to the story of Christ enfleshed in community, from God alongside, with and for, to God in and through and between.  

Pentecost is the very beginning of what we now call the Church.   

And Pentecost is the story of us being saved. 

Being saved from the way of fear for the way of God. 

Being saved for nothing less than full participation in the very life of God.

This also means being saved from thinking the story is about us, about what we do or believe or don’t do or don't believe. The verb, the action, in this story is not human action, it is the action of God – the Holy Spirit is the verb of the love of the Trinity. It is the very energy between the Father and the Son poured out on us and drawing us into that union of love. 

God is saving the world.  The rest are details.

You and I, every one of us, we are made for intimate connection with God – made for this.  We are children of God, which means not only do we belong to God as our very core purpose and source and the relationship that defines us and makes us who we are, but we also belong to each other; we are sisters and brothers in the human family – all of us. 

We are made by love to love God and love each other.  

Bishop Curry talked about this at yesterday’s Royal wedding- (did you really think you’d come to church – any church – today and not hear a reference made to Bishop Curry’s Royal Wedding Sermon?). He asked the crowd to imagine our pained weary world if love were the way of things. And then he painted a picture: nobody would go hungry, nobody would be poor, war and violence would not exist, and the earth would be stewarded with care.  Love is so powerful, he said, that living with its power would transform us so much it would be like discovering fire for the second time.

We are being saved for this, into this.  

God is forging a new community that reflects God’s own being – a community that bears witness to and takes on the shape of the love that makes up God’s own being. 

We are saved into that love, for that love, to find our being in that love and live out that love in the world God loves.

This is the birthing of a new humanity.  And it means the death of the old one.  

It means, as Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr puts it, “life is no longer about you, now you are about Life.”  

This is a losing of ourselves completely.  Belonging fully to God and to others, means that propping up ourselves and pursuing our own causes over against others ceases to matter entirely. 

This is also, therefore, paradoxically, a finding of ourselves utterly.  As we belong to others we find we are most fully alive; as we love and receive love we discover our unique humanity, fully participating in all its uniqueness, not losing its distinctiveness but gaining it.  

We find ourselves more fully belonging to ourselves, even as we more fully belong to God. 

Every person standing there that day, in every language, heard the gospel that set them free, whatever it was they needed to hear that allowed them to claim deeply that they were being saved for belonging to God and others, for conscious and joyful participation in this new reality defined entirely by love.

Being saved looks like letting love’s fire cleanse us and burn away what is killing us, and fan to life what wants to live in us.  It looks like repentance of sins and the ways we hurt each other, and forgiveness and new life between us.  And it looks like supernatural power that comes out in courage (which is always hand in hand with vulnerability), and abundant generosity, and inexplicable miracles as the Holy Spirit moves through us.  

We are the community of those whose lives have been lost that they might be found, those who understand themselves as “being saved”- every day saved from our own hatred and selfishness, freed from our own judgment against others and ourselves, saved from patterns of thought and behavior that dehumanize ourselves or others, freed from an existence emptied by apathy, or filled on gluttonous rage and irritation. Saved from the compulsive fear and avoidance of death that ultimately serves death.

We are being saved for Life – as Life truly is, as it is meant to be, that is, intimate connection with God and life-giving connection with others, in the honest and humble acknowledgment of our true selves, so that even while we are dying we know we are being saved, and even as we are being saved, we know we are dying.  

And here’s the power of it all – when we are living in this new reality, when the Holy Spirit meets us the way it did the disciples that day and all the people who heard the message spoken right to them, when we have an encounter with love that sets us free to love more, when something we thought we were dies and what we are becoming is being born in us - 

the result is that some will see signs and wonders and some will prophesy and some will dream dreams of God’s future reality breaking in.  Some will give up all they have and share in common. The poor will be claimed alongside us as our own and together we will work for a reality where nobody is in need. The promises of old find their fulfillment, not only in the embodied Christ who walked the earth, lived, died and was resurrected, but also in the Christ now embodied in, through and between us.  

This “being saved” is timeless and eternal, it is not stopped by death, nor does it begin at death. It begins right now with obedience to Jesus and concrete action, joining in the activity of God here and now, caring for the poor and building true community, and it continues, drawing us into eternity with God in deep, abiding hope.  The good news of this reality spreads from us and to us, from and to all nations. And, it turns out, epic sermons are occasionally preached to millions that draw people to the good news of who Jesus really is.

There are no divisions among us, there is only Jesus Christ.  
We are one in Christ, beloved and bearers of love.  
We are being saved for full participation in the life of God each and every day.  
May we welcome the power of the Spirit, however it comes to us today.  

Amen.

Joining the cosmic shift

Acts 13:1-3, 14:8-18

This week a Pew research study came out saying that Christianity is declining in America – there was a big drop in the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians.

That was followed by a flurry of interpretive pieces-  it’s not declining, there are less closet atheists now, or it is just a shedding of the dead weight of all the churches and denominations that used to be Christian that have left true Christianity.  Or it’s because churches are not doing enough to reach millennials; or because churches are too engaged politically, or not engaged enough politically, or because people are more independent, and less comfortable with labels and membership.  And there are dire predictions of what it means in the future, as Christianity loses ground to other religion and to the “nones”, with some even saying things like “the decline of Christianity in America could lead to a collapse like the Roman Empire.” 

Against this backdrop comes the story of Paul and Barnabus’ almost comedic encounter with the people of Lystra.  Our passage today reminds me a bit of any number of movies I’ve seen where someone arrives washed up on a supposed deserted island only to be lauded as a god by the locals – like the Ewoks welcoming Princess Leia and worshiping C3PO as a golden deity, or Tom Hanks in Joe vs the Volcano, or Garfield in that movie where he goes to Hawaii – (and I know there are many more but for some reason those are the three that come to mind).   After healing a man who had never been able to walk, Paul and Barnabas are assumed to be gods come down to earth. But because of a language barrier, it takes these two a little while to figure out what is happening, and when they finally do it is almost impossible to correct the misconception.  And it gets even more dramatic and funnier when you glimpse the events leading up to and following this encounter.

We are now something like 18 years after Jesus sent the disciples into all the world.  I want to let that sink in for a minute, because in reading these things in the bible, highlights without the spaces in between, they seem closer together than that, and in following something like the narrative lectionary, where we take huge leaps through books, it can feel even faster.

But this is like an entire childhood later; let’s just say that if their “go and make disciples” was born around Pentecost, it could vote by now.  18 years ago right now cds were cutting edge, everyone used paper maps in their cars to get places, and 97% of phones were still plugged into walls. 18 years is a long time, and a lot happened in that time, not all of it worth reporting.

When we look at the whole thing from where we are – a couple thousand years and a few thousand miles away, it looks like the gospel spread to all the world so thoroughly and effectively that there is no actual global center to Christianity –it truly is in every place.  It might be easy to assume that it went along like a fabulously executed strategic plan, the disciples got their marching orders and obeyed, Paul had his Damascus road conversion, and then went on to convert the world.  From this far away, it’s pretty clean, systematic, even. 

But on the ground, up close and in the moment, it looks a lot messier than that. Like, for example, the fact that Paul and the others are getting beat up repeatedly, even occasionally stoned and left for dead, and it often appears that almost nothing goes as planned.  

Our story of the incident in Lystra is sandwiched right between episodes of beatings, misunderstandings and scuffles, and throughout this portion of Acts we keep seeing a dogged group of religious Jews racing between paragraphs and ducking under page turns to catch up to Paul and Barnabus in each of the places they go, deliberately undoing what they’re doing.  Convinced that Paul and Barnabus are corrupting the true faith, these ardent believers keep arriving in towns right after them calling them dangerous and getting the townspeople to violently drive them off.  So if you imagine that is par for the course for them, then the reception they receive in Lystra must be positively exhilarating.

At first they must be thrilled! Elated! This guy is healed and everyone is responding! This is how it feels when things go well! Look how excited they are! They get how great the gospel is! They’re getting it!  Look how many are getting it!

Through the cheering and the garlands they rejoice, laughing along with the euphoric people right up until it starts to dawn on them that something is not right… that, wait a minute, what’s happening… are they getting ready to slaughter that animal to us?? Oh no, wait, do they, do they think we are gods… ??

And it turns on a dime. Now they’re devastated – how could it have gone so wrong? 

This is pretty much the opposite of what they are trying to communicate!  This is not what God wants at all! In fact, God wants the people to turn away from these practices, and recognize the God who has been revealing Godself to them all along, caring for them and feeding and nurturing them and filling their hearts with joy! Paul and Barnabus are merely fellow recipients of this grace, bearers of good news of the true God who did indeed become human. But despite all their screaming and clothes-ripping and desperate explaining, they still scarcely restrain the crowds from sacrificing an animal to them in worship.

And the verses immediately following this incident show that once the crowds calm down, that group of naysayers hot on their heels catches up to them and convinces the people of Lystra that Paul and Barnabus are shysters, and they once again get driven from the city, (this time Paul is stoned and left for dead).  So they’re back on familiar turf, anyway.

But there is an even stronger thread that runs through it all, and that is this: They continue rejoicing. They keep coming back among other disciples of the way and giving thanks to God, rejoicing together, praying together, seeking God’s direction, celebrating and then jauntily setting out on another journey, joyful and filled with a sense of purpose.

Why?  Well, they weren’t in it for the fame – obviously.  They were horrified by the response of the people in Lystra.  

And they weren’t in it for a scorecard.  They seemed to lose people as fast as they gained them; let’s just say their methods begged for a corporate strategy assessment, anyway.  

But they kept going, forward, and looping back, revisiting communities, supporting those who had joined the Way, building them up with encouragement, receiving their encouragement and care, and moving on to new territory, undaunted by the many troubles and complications.

There is a resilient and enduring dependence on God, a reliance on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a TRUST that God really is leading and doing something out there in the world calling them to come see, come and share, and it keeps them going.  

In the face of disappointment, fear, hunger, rejection, danger, this is what gives them strength.  This is what defines reality for them, not those things.

Every time they return to a community for prayer, fasting and discernment, every time they share their experiences, their joys and struggles, they get grounded again in the real reality, the big picture, the kingdom of God, this force of love that looks really different than the way of fear. They meet at the table and break bread and encounter again the risen Jesus through their shared stories of Jesus, recounting his words and deeds, remembering resurrection appearances, through weeping together, laughing together, praying together, and then, regrounded in the life of God, they head out to each new adventure.  And each new adventure and all the judgments and obstacles they encounter, rather than tearing them down, only served to increase their trust that they are indeed joining in the cosmic shift already underway.

They trust that God who led them there, would meet them there, and would take it from there.  God is doing it. Not them, not their own strength or skill or great cultural savvy or stunning presentation.  And then that kind of trust is exactly what they are inviting others into.

They really, to their very core, believe and trust that this is God’s ministry – and they are just participating.  And they want to give their whole lives to participating in this force of love because God is wooing the whole world, and how could they miss out on this? 

And so trusting the Holy Spirit means that they go out in anticipation, that in each place, at any moment, God is bringing them to see what God has been up to, that God is leading them to meet people whose lives God has been stirring, who are ready to hear just what it is Paul and Barnabas are coming to say. 

Here in Lystra, it’s this one man, this man who stops Paul in his tracks, and in whose eyes Paul, when peering intently, sees something he recognizes:  faith, a trust already in God’s power to heal, so Paul goes where God is and meets him in that place of faith.  And God heals the man.  As one biblical scholar explains, “This is the nature of faith in Acts: trust in a God who will keep God’s promises. So also this is the nature of God in Acts: a God who meets us and heals us.” (Eric Barretto)

Is Christianity in America is dying?  I don’t know. But I do know that any time we make it about ourselves, the institutions we build, the work we do, the labels we accept or give to others, the us and them battle where we recruit people for our side and tally our cosmic scorecard, the number of people in our pews or money in our bank accounts or trends on a graph or great skills or cultural savvy, any time we use the world’s rejection and stoning or praise and glory to dictate to us what is true about what God is doing in the world, we are being guided by the way of fear, not trusting in the big picture, the real reality.

God doesn’t care about our thriving institutions, our crumbling traditions, our labels, or our successes and failures.  All of the things we use to make us feel secure, to reassure ourselves that we are on the right track, are simply distractions from the Kingdom of God, which always comes in weak and backwards and upside down and often very messy ways, and will never stop wooing hearts and changing lives and pulling us into trust and hope.  

It simply will not.

The real reality is that Jesus is already out there in the world, doing what Jesus does, and inviting us to come and see, come and share.  That is how the love of God works- it is an unstoppable force that is holding the universe together and bringing new life relentlessly. And every one of us needs to be converted again and again – it never ends, like we saw last week with Peter. God keeps drawing us into deeper relationship and greater openness to meet Jesus in the unexpected places and unlikely people, trusting that God leads us there, will meet us there, and will take it from there.  

This week, another reality was unfolding alongside all the grandiose and distressed predictions of Christian doom.  It was this little thing called a “Love flash mob” – a once a year, online tradition where a small group of volunteers hold up a family or two in need and ask people to pitch in for their need. The rule is that nobody can donate more than $25, because it’s an act of trust in God’s love, and faith that if we all join in a little bit, big things can happen.

This year they dreamed bigger, and instead of one or two families, they lifted up 176 people beginning with three: a large foster family that needs a van, a wounded vet’s family that needs a washing machine and a car, and a little girl that needs legs, yes, legs, because she was born without.  And they kicked off the love flash mob, and the donations and words of encouragement from started pouring in.  After two hours, ordinary people all over the country, giving less than $25, raised $82,000 and those three needs were met.

Then they held up a 9 year old girl who, after a conversation with a homeless person two years ago, began growing vegetables to share with the homeless people in her community, and as she got to know them, began expanding ways she helped until now is part of a movement to build small houses- so more strangers rose up and supported her. Then, for a mama with a spinal injury who uses leg braces and crutches and struggles getting her little kids in and out of the car to go places, who love going to the park together, more strangers bought a yard playset for them. 

And then for an incredibly inspiring bus driver who has encouraged countless kids and families, and who is dying of cancer, people who did not know her provided those families the means to celebrate her and care for her in her final days, and the list goes on and on. 

And it seemed impossible and ridiculous but in a little over 24 hours, over $268,000 was raised to do something meaningful and personal for 176 different people, to show them that they are seen and loved.  The average donation amount from over 15,000 different people was $17. And one volunteer’s young daughter, watching all this unfold, commented, ““Mom, it’s so cool that we already know that in the end Love wins, so we can always make sure we’re on the right team.” 

Sisters and brothers, we already know the end. 

So which reality will lead us? What way we will we live? 

Because whatever the state of the “church” is in America, the Body of Christ is alive and well, the Church – those who live forgiven and free in the love of Jesus and share that love with others - is steadily, messily doing its thing, and every day we get to join in the cosmic shift already and always underway. 

But it’s easy to get distracted from that truth.  So we keep coming back among other disciples of the Way to get grounded again in the real reality, to meet Jesus together by giving thanks to God, rejoicing together, praying together, sharing our joys and struggles, seeking God’s direction, celebrating and then jauntily setting out again on our journey in anticipation, to see what God is up to out there and listen for how the Spirit is calling us to respond. 

And it is my fervent prayer that in all of this we too, really, to our very core, trust that this is God’s ministry – and we are just participating.  And that we will want to give our whole lives to participating in this force of love, because God is wooing the whole world, and how could we miss out on this?

Amen.