Pretending and Returning

 

Luke 13:1-9 We all engage in magical thinking from time to time.  Sometimes it’s relatively harmless – if I wear my team’s jersey on Sunday they will win the game.  Other times it’s a bit more toothy – If  I pray the right way, with the right words, I will be protected from danger.  Sometimes it’s based in measurable data – seatbelts wearers survive more accidents, vegetable-eaters have lower risk of heart attack.  So it throws us somehow when our magical thinking doesn’t pan out. How could he have a heart attack? He was such a healthy eater! How could she have died in a car accident? She was such a faithful seatbelt wearer!     We want simple. Clear cut. But life doesn’t give us that. We want guarantees and we don’t get those either.  Nobody wants to talk about this, but the truth is, mostly we want our simple, clear-cut guarantees because we are terrified of dying.  As we pray at funerals, “We forget that all life comes from you and to you all life returns.”  Boy do we.  So much so that we try whatever we can think of to not die – whether it’s the big D that is coming for all of us, or the little d’s we have nearly every day in the form of humiliations, losses and devastations. We want to transcend our mortality in whatever ways we can - look younger, go faster, do more - because we can’t accept that we get this one teeny life and that’s it.   And then we can’t even let ourselves enjoy this one teeny life we do have because either we suspect that by appreciating it we might jinx it (more magical thinking).  Or because in this one moment we are stuck in we are worried we are missing out on something else, something better.  We are so caught up in trying to earn, or prolong, or maximize, or protect our lives, that we often are not actually in our lives.  This week I was talking with someone about all the millions of great books in the world, and he mentioned that if for 50 years you read a book a week, you would read 2,500 books in your lifetime. That’s it. No more. Even a long, full life is terribly, insultingly limited.   So we pretend. We try to control what we cannot control. And if we can’t control it, maybe we can pray the right way to get God to control it in our favor. We employ our magical thinking, put on our blinders and soldier on.     So then, it is terrible news, terrible, that sometimes bad things just happen. Disasters strike, sickness comes, and appallingly unfair things happen to people all the time. Life is full of suffering. Loss and grief are just a part of the package of being human. This news shouldn’t come as a shock to us, but somehow, every time, it still does.    When people bring up to Jesus a current event, a much-discussed atrocity, this horrible, unthinkable act of murder and desecration that has happened, Jesus skips all the speculation and punches a hole right through their magical thinking. Did those who suffered like this deserve it in some way? Did they, by something they did, or neglected to do, bring this tragedy upon themselves? No! Jesus answers. And then he brings up another recent scenario with mass casualties, and asks, What about those people, did they deserve to die this way? No!    But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, but unless you repent you will die like they did.     Then he tells this story about a fig tree that isn’t producing any fruit. It isn’t showing any signs of life.  Maybe it should just be cut down. “Give it another year,” the gardener says. “Let me put manure around it.” The Greek word Jesus puts in the mouth of the gardener, which is so politely translated as “manure” in our bibles is actually the vulgar word for excrement. In other words, in Jesus’ story the gardener says, “Let it sit in shit for a year and see if it doesn’t start living.”   There is no magic formula for preventing tragedy from happening to us.  Death can come any moment, just like it did for those unfortunate and unsuspecting people, and unless you repent, you will die like they did.      Repentance isn’t about feeling guilty or being judged.  Repentance is being reoriented. Exchanging your way of seeing the world for God’s way. In the Greek it means turning around, changing your mind, going in a different direction.  And the Hebrew core of it actually means to go home. Repentance is returning to our home in God’s love. To repent is to be found.     Lent is a time for repenting. It’s a season for actively, consciously, exchanging our messed up ways of seeing this world, trading in our magical thinking, our existential armor, our pursuit of security and stability, our fear of death and weakness, our endless striving and pushing and fleeing and fighting. Instead we let God draw our hearts and minds and lives back toward our source, to steep us in the love that made us, receive the love that claims us, and respond to the love that pulls us to share deeply in this life with each other.  Our Lent theme is “Cease striving and trust that I am God.’  In other words, Stop doing it your way and surrender to God’s way, aka., Repent.   Just like life’s moments of triumph, contentment and happiness, life’s tragedies are no less filled with the presence of God, no less available to God’s activity, no less moments in which our belonging to God and each other is real and tangible. In fact, they are often more so.  God is not apart from death or suffering. Jesus came into our death and bears our suffering. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, nothing, nothing. So we may see, and bear, and not turn away from the terrible injustice or suffering of others, surely not turn them into moral lessons to try to protect ourselves.    Trading our way of seeing for God’s way means that my neighbor’s joy is my joy, and my enemy’s suffering is my suffering. That we are all inseparably bound, responsible for each other, and for the land, sky, air, and water that hold us, and the creatures that inhabit this world alongside us.  And it means trusting that love, eternal and unending, permeates every moment, even the terrible ones.  So we rage at the falling bombs, and grieve at the dying children, and rejoice at the defiant people rescuing, and feeding, and sheltering one another in the midst of it all, and we recognize there the Holy One at work. Always at work. The unwavering force of love, God’s unshakeable purposes for all, cannot be derailed by evil or hindered by death. This world is held in God’s love, infused with God’s justice, moved by God’s heartbeat, drawn into God’s purposes, heading towards God’s peace. And dying is transitioning from the space constrained by time and limitation where we just glimpse this and seek to trust it, to the space beyond time and limitation, where the love and peace of God is all in all. It’s completely returning home.   I don’t want to diss us dear humans for all the magical thinking we engage in.  I think it’s because part of us, deep underneath our conscious knowing, knows that there is more than this. We know we are eternal. We know we are made for fullness of life. More life than this life we are given can contain. But that is the dilemma of being human, isn’t it? We sense this deeper thing, this possibility, and yet we cannot attain it. No matter what we do, we can’t get there on our own. Because it’s not about us and what we do or don’t do, believe or don’t believe.  All of life, every breath, is a gift. Life is an ongoing, never-stopping gift that God is continuously giving, right now, even.  This breath is a gift.. And this one… And this one...  All of life is holy, infused with the very presence of  God.  God is just giving Godself away, every moment, in us, through us, calling us back to Godself, drawing us back into love that outlasts death. Return to me. Repent. Let go of your striving and trust me.    And maybe the way we get there is just by being willing to sit in the shit.  Maybe it’s only when we accept this mess of a life and choose to inhabit it deeply - embracing our own mortality, admitting our own nothingness without God - that the fullness we were made for, life so abundant as to grow fruit in us, and feed others through us, can flourish.  Maybe we just have to be where we already are - deathbound and knee deep in dung – and accept that no magical thinking can protect us, no right beliefs can buffer us, we’re just exposed and wide open, where the sun, and the rain, the elements and experiences can permeate us.  And within the limits of our teeny fragile life, the infinite love of God, the origin and destination of our eternal being, will bring forth in us that which we can’t produce ourselves. And we will be fully alive.   Amen.

Breath

Daily Devotion - May 27

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays) 

while we are pausing gathering in person. 

- Kara

Our city is grieving, angry, weary.  I have written and erased so many words. I am grieving, angry and weary, and I don't have any words today. 

But my friend, Pastor Jodi Houge, shared this with her congregation today, and it spoke to me. I am grateful for her words.

Breath

The amount of time that we have all spent thinking about breath lately seems staggering. I'm not interested in virtue signaling or an echo chamber because it doesn't lead us anywhere we haven't already been. And I'm tired of the loop.  It's Pentecost this Sunday--and the Spirit blows so hard on those gathered that it feels like everything is coming apart. Perhaps it's time for this to come apart?

We already have a virus that steals breath. And now, we are surrounded by images of a kneeling police officer squeezing the very breath out of a man named George Floyd. While I can't actually find someone to blame for the virus, I do know the collective sin of white supremacy is one I inherited, benefit from and want desperately to be free of. I want things to change because I love your kids and your babies and the expectant parents on the cusp and I want them to grow up without fear. I don't want anyone to have to fight and beg to breathe.

Scripture tells us: "We shall not kill." Lutheran theology takes us to task with a proactive regarding that commandment: "We are to fear and love God, so that we neither endanger nor harm the lives of our neighbors, but instead help and support them in all of life's needs." Baseline: do not kill one another. Next level: help one another live. Racism, church, does not help us live. Not any of us. I have waves of panic when I think specifically of our sweet adolescent boys who are brown or black skinned. George was someone's baby.

Now, there are 10 million actions steps you can take--they are all being heavily circulated right now. But perhaps first we take a minute, a breath, to repent. Because none of those actions steps create real change unless there is change within our own hearts and minds. And as a person of faith, I believe that is holy work. That is the Spirit. That is God-breathed and will bring life.

________

OK, a few words, after all...

When God breathes into dust, life comes where there is no life.  I want to join God in building a world where our belonging to God and each other is the lived reality.  

Our faith gives us two responses, both of which we avoid because they're uncomfortable, and they're honest; they make us face and feel our powerlessness instead of giving us the illusion of power.  But these holy tasks return us to the core of our humanity, and empower us to participate in God bringing life. They are Lament, and Repent. 

When we lament we bear the grief and don't turn away from it. Mouring upholds our shared humanity; it honors the ones who are lost. It keeps us connected to how things should be by bearing the pain that they are not that. 

And when we repent, we confess the brokenness around us, the sin and lies we have absorbed and perpetuated. We come honest to our hearts, so Holy Spirit can cleanse and ready us for the freedom and newness God wants to bring in us and through us.

So today I am returning to breath. I'm lamenting and repenting. 

God, breathe life into the dust of us.
Amen.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

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

Tonight, perhaps we can practice both lamenting and repenting, through speaking or singing these words, until we've felt ourselves emptied out and filled up.

Breathe on me, breath of God.
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love
what thou doest love,
an do what thou wouldst do.

Being Found Again: A Letter to John

Mark 1:1-11

John

A letter to our ancestor, John.

Dear John,

Who are you? Under all that sweat and dust and camel hair? Behind all the drama and noise?  What do you think about out there when the crowds have gone home, and the stars are glowing above you, and the sounds of the desert creatures and the wind are all the noise that’s left? What keeps you awake, tossing and turning?  What gets you up in the morning, for another day of locust-eating and yelling yourself hoarse with passion and fire?  

You are pissing people off, you know.  You don’t live much longer than this – you’ll die soon for telling Herod like it is and calling him out on his adulterous marriage.  And you don’t get much sympathy from the establishment after your criticism of them and your direct competition – baptism for repentance? Really? The people can get that in the temple. The favor and forgiveness of God is already available…for a fee. But you offer it for free? All the while saying something greater is brewing and you’re just the warm-up act?

I’m sure you heard the story over and over in your childhood, in those few short years your ancient parents had left - between all their prophet-grooming, their stories of prophets of old and messages to Israel and encouragement to listen, listen for the voice of God, the surprise of God that would bring life to deadened wombs and laughter to creaky voices, lay mountains low and raise valleys up, bringing hope and wholeness – between all of that I am certain you heard tell time and again of when Mary came to see your mom, the moment your fetus self bumped belly homes with the embryonic Messiah, as you jumped for joy, recognizing already that everything was changing, and there was nothing to do but celebrate it.

And the messages, all those prophets swimming in your mind, taught to you from Torah, spoken in story from your priest father and your devout mother – it must have meant even more to you than to others…

Did you three carry this secret promise, this crazy truth that you had come from impossibility?  Were you always aware that God had broken in, and nobody knew it yet, but the time was coming when they would all see…? 

And did you ever forget, John? We forget all the time.  Did you? Did you ever wake up knowing there was something to remember and then have the truth wash over you in wonder once again? That God was making good on all those promises of old, that God was coming in?

Did you recognize him in the prophesies? Jesus, I mean. When you were kids, did your cousin seem like the one? Tell the truth now – was he just so ordinary? Or did you know all along?  Did you know before he did? Or more than he did? Or did the two of you whisper about it together at sleepovers?

What was it like, by the way, the day he came to the river, the day you plunged him under the water and the sky opened up and the voice of God claimed him? After the elation that it had come at last, were you psyched to retire? Be finished with your message? Or was it anti-climactic? Or even disillusioning? 

Who are you now, once the one you’ve prepared the way for has arrived in our midst?  When the thing your whole life has been about has been accomplished, what is your life for then?  

If you knew then what you know now, would it all have gone the same?

Mark begins all of it with you, you know. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” then he has you bursting out like you couldn’t contain the secret any longer, the message ripening within your young body and mind until you had to get out of the city, flee to the wilderness and give the message room to breathe, give it space to expand or it would swallow you and everything else with its magnitude and power.

The others don’t begin with you – Luke and Matthew, they tell Jesus’ genealogy and his birth, and the book of John starts with the very, very beginning, with the Word of creation, light in the darkness, but Mark starts with you.

Where would you begin the story?– I bet you’d go back to those prophets – your lifeblood, your mother’s milk, your father’s breath in your ear, whispering their messages and hope.

  

You’d begin the story by saying there were those who said it was coming… remember those voices? Remember those promises?  Then you’d say, It’s true. It is coming. It’s already begun. 

You spoke fantastic visions as well—baptized with the Holy Spirit?  The very Spirit that hovered over the water at Creation, is claiming and cleansing us? Now?  It was a fact.  You spoke these things like they were a fact – preached the future with a present tense. Perhaps you had such bold confidence because you yourself had come from the impossibility that was becoming.  You believed it and you made them believe it too.

I heard someone say once that ‘repentance is what happens to us when the truth of who we are and who God is enters our lives and scatters the darkness of competing ideas.’ (Nadia Bolz-Weber)  It’s like being found, being grabbed on the shoulders by love and turned from death toward life, to see it all stretching out before you with a different horizon.  

Trading our way of perceiving for God’s way - it doesn’t just happen once. It can happen any and every time we start to drift back to the fear, to hide ourselves in the anger, to barricade ourselves in the false security.  When the truth of who God is and who we are enters in, we can repent, and are freed again. It’s an option available to us at any moment.

It happened to me yesterday.  There was a conversation I’d been dreading, practicing what I’d say in defensive language, couched in self-protection.  Then a friend told me to bring my honest self to it, my sadness and fear, and tell the truth.  She invited me to repent. She’d probably laugh to be told that’s what she was suggesting.  But it was, and I did, and I felt my armor fall away and the fears subside. I found myself feeling hopeful again, and secure in whatever God might do there, because the truth is we all belong to God and each other no matter what, and I could feel that truth again.

  

What did it look like, John, to see so much repentance on people? Could you see it in their eyes? Was it relief? Joy? The darkness scattering, the truth seeping in… Did their faces change as the light entered their lives?  Did their bodies feel lighter coming up out of the water than they did going down? Did seeing it strengthen your own hope and trust?

Did you know how they looked at you? How they saw you? You must have.  You dressed like Elijah, you sounded like Isaiah, you were a prophet, and the people came. They came from far and wide to hear you, to catch a glimpse of that modern day prophet who was just like the ones of old.  But the others thought you were dangerous, crazy, threatening, an embarrassment, a freak show.  Did all that bother you? 

Once someone well-known and respected who speaks in front of large crowds told me that what is hardest is the admiration, being admired.  You feel you either have to live up to people’s expectations or disabuse them of their notions, is that how you felt? Is that why you were always so quick and forceful to point out that it wasn’t about you at all, that you were paving the way, clearing the clutter, making the paths straight, because the one who would bring life to the world was coming -?  

I know what’s ahead for you too, John – when you’re in prison and you hear about what Jesus is doing and you send your people to Jesus to ask if he “really is the one who is to come or if we should wait for another?” when you question if it all really is real.  Even you!  That doubt and fear are such an intrinsic part of being human, such an integral part of faith, that even YOU wondered, faltered.  You, who told everyone else so confidently, that God was doing this thing, you too had those scary secret moments when things didn’t look like you thought they would, and you weren’t sure if you could trust what you had believed. It gives me some comfort to know that.

And when your messengers reached him and asked your question, he answered, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” 

What was it like for you to hear that? Did it put you back inside the cosmic story? Could you trust again that what the prophets had said was really happening when your friends had seen it unfold right in front of them?  

Did you repent then?  Let the light scatter the darkness of competing ideas? Sitting there in prison, just days away from your unexpected and senseless death, did you feel the chains fall away and the trust return? Let the truth of who we are and who God is release you from your fear? Did it bring you peace?  

  

I’ll bet you never heard that right after he sent away your messengers and they were hot-footing it back to you, he told the crowd with conviction in his voice that you were a prophet, just like those of old, actually, more than a prophet, he declared, you were the ‘One who announced the Messiah.’  Then he said, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist;” and then did what he does and added, “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”  

I think you would have liked hearing him say that.  About the least being great, I mean, the poor and forgotten being lifted up that way in God’s kingdom.  Maybe even more than his message to you, it would have affirmed that this is all really happening after all- God’s kingdom really is breaking in, showing how upside down we have it all.  You would have liked hearing him say that, I bet.

When you died, John, it crushed him.  He left everyone to be alone with his terrible grief.  Did that shake his faith, I wonder, bring him to doubt?  That even though the way of God has begun and the light is in the world, the darkness is still here too, for a time?  How did he reconcile that? How can we? What would you say to us now about that, John? 

What would you think of the world right now, John?  

What would you shout at us if you were here? 

You see, we have the benefit of hindsight, we get to see all of this WAY after the fact, so we don’t have to stand on the banks of that river with the mud in our sandals and the insects buzzing around us, listening to you roar out your message and wonder who to believe –wonder whether what you say is even remotely possible, or whether you’re just another fanatic off his rocker. We know who you are and how it all goes down from there. 

So we can ask you now, and we’re willing to listen, what would you say to us? What would you have us do?  

How can we receive our Savior?

Ah, but you’re long gone. You’re silent now.  And so it’s on us.  

See, John, it’s like this every year.  It might have been all new and amazing to you, but we’ve beat this message to death with jingle bells and sentiment and buried it in a sea of candy, carols and wrapping paper and when January comes it is behind us and we’ve moved on.  We’ve put Jesus in the manger and we like him there; he’s so cute and clean.  

So if we really take you seriously, what does it mean for us? 

How does it shape our lives?  

Does God still come?  Is God still coming? We need a little taste of your honey and fervor, I think. A sense of wonder and awe once again. A longing to be stirred enough that it feels like absolute refreshment to be plunged under and feel the water roll off us along with all that keeps us in darkness, to be baptized into a promise that holds us even when we can’t see it.  How should we live a good life, a meaningful life, a life that matters, a life that sees God?  What should we do, John?  

But you would never really say, would you?  When we plead for some direction, Tell us how we navigate all of this, desert prophet! You’d just point your finger again at him and tell us God has come.  In the flesh.  Right here.  

“I’m just using water, people,” you’d say, “he’ll immerse you in the Holy Spirit, you’ll be surrounded and filled by the life-creating breath of God.  

So get ready. Be ready. Live ready.  God is coming.  God has come. Repent.”  

And you’d leave us to it, this holy exchange of our way of seeing for God’s, that scatters the darkness of competing ideas, and welcomes us back to the impossible that is becoming.

So, because I’ve not said it before, John, thank you.  

Thank you for your words and your life. Thank you for preparing the way.  Thank you for reminding us what’s real. Thank you for pointing us back to Jesus.

Sincerely,

Kara Root, and your sisters and brothers at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, MN, 2020 AD.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)

We begin here

Lofoten Island, Norway

Psalm 46:1-3

When I was in college, I spent the large part of one summer sleeping on a 3 foot round papason chair cushion on the floor of an apartment five friends were renting in Dinkytown.  At one point, we ran out of toilet paper and went through all the napkins, coffee filters and finally, Far Side comics, before someone finally bought more.  But whatevs. We were young.

When Andy and I graduated from seminary, we were in our mid-twenties, and were willing to go anywhere in the US to start our next life chapter. Coast? Desert? Mountains? Big City? Tiny town? Sure! Why not! Andy applied to programs all over, and when we moved to Princeton, New Jersey, we packed up all our things in a u-haul and drove from LA for five days across the country, each day listening to Harry Potter cds and eating sunflower seed and drive-through food; each night parking the truck with everything we owned in the world, towing our only car, strategically where we could watch it from our motel window so it wouldn’t get stolen.

There are times in our lives we anticipate change. We expect it; invite it, even. We are totally open to upheaval, happy to cooperate with a little chaos.

But I think we think that is supposed to stop.  That you go through your change and chaos phase, and then after that, things are supposed to be predictable and secure.

But life never stops changing.  Children, homes, illnesses, adjustments, they just keep coming.  That first friend to get divorced becomes one of many.  That dream job you pursued falls through, that church you loved falls apart, and that person you trusted falls away.  And they take your favorite show off the air, and stop making your favorite ice cream, and tear down your favorite diner to put up another Starbucks.  The president you loved is replaced by one you can’t stand, and that woody place you found silence and solace as a child has become a crowded, rowdy resort.

And instead of settling down, the changes seem to speed up.  More friends move away, drift away or pass away. Your doctor retires and your phone becomes obsolete, and every ten or so years, your body seems to have become a completely different shape than the one you’d adjusted to last.  At 62, you discover, a job loss is nothing at all like it is at 22.

And these are just the little changes, the everyday, ordinary, constant upheavals.  That is to say nothing of global crises, natural disasters, or community violence, of catastrophes, bankruptcies, life-altering diagnoses and devastating deaths.

Change doesn’t restrict itself to phases, and chaos doesn’t play by any rules.  Trouble, tumult, seismic shifts happen in our lives and in the world all the time.  From birth until death, living with the unexpected and in the midst of constant change is part of what it means to be human.

Also part of what it means to be human is to try to diminish change. We like to act as though we have more control than we do; we mitigate risk and bolster security however we can.  We depend on all sorts of things to make us feel safe and stable, because, as it turns out, we are dependent beings; we can’t do this life thing all on our own.  We need to find our strength and security somewhere.

So we rely on our intellect or our bank accounts, our health history and insurance policy. We trust institutions and governments, leaders, pastors and teachers. We depend on the climate, community and culture to give us predictable ways of living in the world, and then we act like they can’t, or at least shouldn’t, change. 

But they do. It turns out that none of these things, ultimately, can do a thing to protect our lives. They can make us feel secure for a time, but anything can change at any moment.

So what are we to do?

Our Psalmist, in this opening line, sums up the theology of the whole book of Psalms in these words: God is our refuge and strength.

God is the One we are to depend upon. God is our safety.  A very present help in trouble.  Not a helper in the midst of trouble, but Help itself.  Very present help.  Right here.  Right now.  Right in the midst of it.

Therefore we will not fear.

Therefore. 

Even though the earth changes. And mountains fall into the sea, and tsunamis and storms and whirlwinds roar through our world, and the very ground seems to shake beneath our feet and turmoil and tumult overwhelm us.  Even though.  Not because these things don’t or wont happen, but because they will, and do. 

Still. We will not fear.

Why? Because God is our refuge, our strength, a very present help in trouble.

What does it look like to trust God? To find refuge in God?

What does it look like to trust or find refuge in anything, really?

We believe things will make us safe. We act as though it is so.  It soothes us to depend upon something or someone else for our ultimate stability.  It completes our dependent selves to depend on something outside of us.  

The question is simply, what or who will we depend on?

We’ve been talking these past two weeks about repentance. 

Repent! Jesus says, For the Kingdom of God has come near! Turn around, change your mind, look at things differently! For God’s reign and God’s way is already unfolding among you.

Repentance has been a primary focus of Lent for centuries, so I think we should keep talking about it these next five weeks.[1] Repenting is setting down your way of seeing things to take up God’s way of seeing things.  

And so, first, it exposes the things we turn to for refuge that are not God: the flimsy counterfeit security we find in camping out with those who are just like us and shutting out those we don’t understand. The sense of well-being we get from a well-paying job, or a well-spoken compliment.  The measuring and comparing, are we more or less secure than those others are?  And the soothing lies and half truths that ease our conscience or pacify our egos.  The protection we feel from hatred, blame and anger.  We find refuge in all sorts of voices, places, and things that cannot ultimately save us or make us any safer or more whole, and mostly just make us trapped by the trouble we are seeking to escape.  Repenting helps us turn from those things back to our true source of life, God.

And then, repenting leads to confession and forgiveness, or confessing and forgiveness lead us to repentance, in either case, it causes us to recognize our sin, that is, the places in our life where we have, either on purpose or accidentally, put up barriers between ourselves and God or others.  Because when we repent and see things from God’s perspective instead of our own, it reveals where we have brought pain, suffering and harm on ourselves and others, so that we can reach out for healing and forgiveness, and let God make us whole.

But repenting is hard.  

And we avoid it because it brings trouble.  

Did you take something that didn’t belong to you? 

Did you say something about someone else that caused them embarrassment or pain?  

Did you cheat on a test, or your taxes, or your spouse? 

Who among us would jump at the chance to come clean for any of these things? 

We tell ourselves that maybe we’ll avoid trouble if we avoid repenting.  If we hide our violation and move on, pretending we’re secure, maybe that’s almost as good as being secure.  

But to repent?  That’s just walking into trouble.

But, wait, this God of ours is found in trouble. Is very present there, in fact! 

For those who’ve had trouble brought down on them by others, and those who bring trouble upon themselves, God is Help itself.

Will you spend your life trying to avoid, diminish or escape trouble? 

Or will you find refuge in the God who is a very present help in the midst of trouble? 

Will you wall yourself off ineffectively from chaos and guard yourself unsuccessfully from change? 

Or will you rest your being in God who is our strength and our refuge?

When we repent, we are brought out of self-protection, judgment, blame and fear, back to the trust and dependence on God that the Psalms invite.

We are set free from pretending chaos isn’t chaotic or changes stop changing. 

We are released to speak honestly about trouble and walk into trouble by speaking honestly.

We are allowed to acknowledge how tumultuous it all is, and how vulnerable we sometimes feel, that we hear the roar of the storm and see the shaking of the earth and sometimes tremble with the constant change and threatening chaos, and still, still we find our refuge and strength in God.

God is our refuge and strength. A very present help in trouble.

Therefore, we will not fear.

Not because trouble doesn’t find us or find others because of us,

Not because the chaos dies down, or the earth remains tranquil,

or our lives stay stable and unchanged.

But because right in the midst of trouble, chaos and change, God is our refuge and our strength.

The psalm pauses here, as it will at the end of each of our three stanzas in our Lenten psalm, with the word “Selah.”

Selah is written right in, part of the text, and while it is never clearly explained, it is thought that it means something like: Pause. Breathe. Take it in. And Praise God.

Pause, Breathe, take it in, and praise God.

So here are our Lenten practices, my friends:

First, Repent.

Second, Pause, breathe, take it in, and praise God.

God is our refuge and strength. We begin here.

Amen.

---

[1] Lent has traditionally been for fasting, repentance. 40 days of preparation for Easter (minus the Sundays, which are always mini-Easters, celebrations of the resurrection).  But both of these are incredibly useful practices. Fasting, is to refrain from something that is ordinarily part of your life for a set period of time, most commonly food, in order to turn that attention normally given to that thing, to God instead.  It shifts your perspective off of yourself, by breaking you of your routine and patterns, and requiring you to sacrifice something, notice the emptiness of it, the space it occupied in your consciousness, and opens up that space and attention for God.  It is a physical act of repentance.

Something Essential is Happening

Matthew 4:12-23

O God,

says the poet Ted Loder,*

let something essential happen to me,

something more than interesting

or entertaining

or thoughtful.

O God, let something essential happen to me,

something awesome,

something real.

Speak to my condition, Lord,

and change me somewhere inside where it matters,

a change that will burn and tremble and heal

and explode me into tears

or laughter

or love that throbs or screams

or keeps a terrible, cleansing silence

and dares dangerous deeds.

Let something happen in me

that is my real self, God.

O God, let something essential and passionate happen in me now.

Strip me of my illusions and self-sufficiency,

of my proud sophistications,

of my inflated assumptions of knowledge

and leave me shivering as Adam or Eve

before the miracle of the natural –

the miracle of this earth

that nurtures me as a mother

 and delights me as a lover;

the miracle of my body that breathes and moves,

hungers and digests,

sees and hears;

that is creased and wrinkled and sexual,

shrinks in hurt,

and swells in pleasure,

that works by the most amazing messages

of what and when and how

coded and curled in every cell

and that dares to speak the confronting word.

O God,

let something essential and joyful happen in me now,

something like the blooming of hope and faith,

like a grateful heart,

like a surge of awareness

of how precious every moment is,

that now, not next time,

now is the occasion

to take off my shoes,

to see every bush afire,

to leap and whirl with neighbor,

to gulp the air as sweet as wine

until I’ve drunk enough

to dare to speak the tender word:

“Thank you;

“I love you”;

“You’re beautiful”;

“Let’s live forever beginning now”;

and “I’m a fool for Christ’s sake.”

Tonight we hear of something essential happening to these people.

Our text from Matthew opens after Jesus has been in the wilderness, and after John has been arrested.  Jesus has been around, as abrupt and urgent as this text sounds, it’s not entirely out of the blue.  People have seen him, they’ve heard him preach, in this small town, he was most definitely on their collective radar.  Whether these particular fellows had ever contemplated attaching themselves to him or his message in any way before or not, they’ve at least come across him a time or two.  Whether they had longed for something to happen to wake them up and plug them in, we are not told.

On this day they are doing their own thing, their normal thing, they are at work.  And Jesus calls to them.

Now in John, in the text we read last week, there was a gentler invitation, given to those already curious, initiated, in fact, by them. Come and see. Jesus answers them. Come find out. Come and discover for yourself.

Here it’s a bit different. Repent! He walks around declaring, The kingdom of God is near!

And then right to them, they don’t even see it coming, he shouts from the shoreline, Follow me and I will make you fish for people!

This week a vanfull of clergy talked about how harsh that sounds, how it seems to invite an aggressive form of evangelism that seeks to hook people for God (or, as one person said it, “guts them alive and consumes them”). 

So, upon hearing this text people either feel motivated to get out there and get cracking, catching folks for God, or they cringe and shudder at the invitation.  Either way, putting these stories side by side, John’s calling story sounds much more appealing and soothing to our tender Presbyterian sensitivities. 

But let’s talk through this a moment.  First of all, that word that John the Baptist belts out on the edge of the Jordan to all who come to hear his wild message – REPENT!, Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is coming near! 

That word is now in the mouth of the one John said was coming.  Repent in the Greek means a changed mind, a total change of view, all of it- it affects social, spiritual, psychic, moral – a full shift of perspective that impacts all aspects of life and personhood.  Wake up! Notice! Let something essential happen to you!  The reign of God has begun!, Jesus declares, in that “place of deep darkness, on whom the light has now shined.”

What is it to be in deep darkness?  When it feels like nothing can reach you, and there is no clarity or perspective at all? When it’s foggy and fearful and you feel desperate for some indication that there is something beyond this moment? 

When the light comes to that place, when hope shines in, or love breaks through, when someone reaches you and you know now that you are not alone, when something opens up to indicate there may be a way forward – what is that like? 

It just make you leap up and drop whatever you’ve got going, because whatever it is, it’s nothing compared to this light pierces into your darkness, illumining your life.  This is the sense of Jesus’ impact on that region; and there were certainly those for whom his message and his promise - that God’s rule was near, that a different kind of everything was just on the horizon - must have felt like air to a suffocating world.  Sometimes the call of Jesus feels like just that.

But then, there are those who are just sitting in their boats on a Tuesday morning. Mending their nets. Drinking their coffee.  Doing what they’ve always done, and their fathers, and their father’s fathers before them. Filling their role in the world, taking their place, not really drowning in darkness but not really shining brilliantly with light either. Just sort of plugging along the best they know how in life like we do.  And of all the beaches in all the world, Jesus strolls onto theirs and says to them this: Follow me. Follow me and I will make you fish for people.

Follow me, and I will reorient your whole life. Lift your head from your work and raise your face toward others. I am calling you to participate with me in what’s happening here. Put down that net, Get out of the boat, and let something essential happen to you.

And they do. Immediately.  They drop what they are doing; and something in them thrills to the invitation, something in them resonates with the calling – a note is plucked in the universe that reverberates within them and they wake up.  They can’t not get up and go.  So they get out of the boat and they follow the light of the world.

We like to think they just strolled out of the scene and didn’t look back, but that’s not really the case.  They cycled back from time to time, itinerant-like – we see Peter in the home of his mother in law in a few chapters, and Jesus comes and heals her.  Now and then they came home for a round of fishing, they connected with their fathers and ate at the tables of their mothers.  They returned to their wives and kids too, I suppose, those that had them.  But something within them had fundamentally shifted. They themselves had shifted. They had repented. They had a surge of awareness, awake to an utterly new perception of it all, now is the occasion to take off your shoes! to gulp the air as sweet as wine – and because of that no part of their life could be the same. 

And it was a radical enough thing, to walk away from their livelihood, their family trade, their actual nets, even. It probably created quite a stir. But it also was deeply true to who they were, that there was nothing else to do in that moment than to answer the call.  Suddenly, immediately, it was the only thing that made sense. Suddenly something had happened in them that was their real self.

Jesus calls us in all kinds of ways, some gentle, some insistent.  

Follow me.  

Wake up to notice the world with the light in it.  

Participate.  

Get out of the boat.  

Set down those things that seem so very central and important, so very vital to who you are and how you contribute to the world, and dare to let your real self reach out to others.  

I will make you stop fishing for fish, and start fishing for people. 

I will take the you that’s in you and plug it in to the thing that connects us to all the other yous in the world- because if you want to know where I am, it’s there.

Some time ago I was on a flight from Minnesota to Los Angeles and found myself sitting next to a woman who was clearly very distraught.

She sat there next to me weeping, her grief palpable and overwhelming. And to be honest, I desperately wanted to ignore her; she was kind of rocking my boat.  I was tired from my own trip, and embarrassed by her public anguish, and also it frightened me.  I didn’t have any idea what to say. 

But I didn’t feel right pretending I didn’t see her, I felt like I should do or say something.  So I took a deep breath and got out of my boat.  Without having any idea where it would lead, I finally worked up the courage to simply put my hand on her shoulder.  On a stranger’s shoulder.  I had no words, no answers to give her, so I just sat with her in solidarity.  After a time, she started to talk, and told me that she had flown to Minnesota that afternoon for a conference, and upon arriving was informed that her mother, who had been ill in the hospital for some time, had crashed, and taken an abrupt and severe turn for the worse.  This lady turned around and headed back to the counter, purchased a return ticket, and was racing time to get back to the hospital in Los Angeles before her mother died. 

I just listened.  I joined her.  Eventually it became a conversation, about the pain of losing someone, and the tragedy of death.  We even talked a bit about God, but only because we were somehow sharing an experience of God.  For four hours, I sat with a stranger and found Jesus. 

Follow me.  See the person in front of you. Reach out your hand. Brave the tender word.

When Jesus calls us to follow, it is always something essential happening to us.  It is a wake up and take notice.  Instead of smothered in darkness, you will recognize that the world shot through with light, and it will illuminate those around you – for you are not in it alone.  

Because also when Jesus calls it always reveals other people as the ones to whom you’re called,

I will make you not just fisherpeople, Jesus says, but fishers of people, 

not just bankers, but bankers of people, 

not just teachers but teachers of people, 

I will make you accountants of people and nurses of people, and baristas of people and parents of people, and sons and daughters of people, and friends of people, and neighbors of people. 

And in those simple and terribly brave moments that you hear and answer the call to be with them and for them, you are part of the light that the darkness cannot quench – the conspiracy of God-with-us.

The invitation of Jesus to you and to me comes to us every day, into our curiosity and seeking, into our deep darkness and despair, and into our very ordinary, routine kinds of days that blend one into another, The Spirit of Godwithus continues to nudge and prod, I came to be with and for the world.  Come be with and for the world with me.  

 So far this Epiphany we’ve heard:

Come and see: experience it for yourself.

Follow me: join me in this thing. 

Repent: wake up and let it all look different. 

The kingdom of God is at hand: the purposes of God are unfolding.

It’s happening.  Get out of the boat and be part of it.  

Let something essential happen to you. 

Don’t be afraid.

Eternal God,

lead me now,

out of the familiar setting

of my doubts and fears

beyond my pride

and my need to be secure

into a strange and graceful ease

with my true proportions

and with yours;

that in boundless silence

I may grow

strong enough to endure

and flexible enough to share

your grace.*

Amen.

(*opening and closing prayers by Rev. Dr. Ted Loder, found in Guerrillas of Grace)