Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Matthew 28:1-10

In the early 80s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released an album called Milk and Honey that featured a song whose chorus featured these words…

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed!

I say that as I’m aware that you’ll be watching your Easter Sunday from somewhere other than our sanctuary, and I’ll be at home on Easter morning, not knowing what to do with myself. I’m even taping this early, my Easter sermon delivered on Maundy Thursday. I’ve been in pretty close contact with colleagues who, over the past couple of weeks, have held funerals with 4 people standing 6 feet apart, or on Zoom with 70 little pictures up on a computer monitor, grieving collectively and separately all at the same time. I have a wedding to do in a few weeks, likely in a back yard with as few people as possible and only the bride and groom get to touch. And then, for our Jewish friends, a Passover on screens, and Ramadan starts soon, begging the question of how the communal prayer time will look during the holiest of months for Muslims.

Strange days indeed.

The challenge for Easter this year is, of course, to deliver a message to people in exile, a message that is inspirational and hopeful, one that brings all of the glory and majesty we expect from an Easter in the midst of bleak numbers on the news, as everyone holds their breath for the shoe to drop. Do you know someone who…? Do you know someone who knows someone who…?

We’re not alone in seeking such hope from Easter. The Easter message has long sustained people through bleak and hard times. It has buoyed war-torn communities, lifted those in the grips of oppression, comforted the mourning, and inspired those who have lost everything to evil and destruction. The whole of the Lenten season has seemed perfectly timed with our crisis, bringing to us the message of sacrifice and struggle, and launching us into these strange weeks from what feels like a year ago – an Ash Wednesday mantra that says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” echoing in our ears with the sounds of our own fragility, our vulnerability, our limitations. We now see in stark display the underbelly of the world we have created as the virus attacks those we have made most vulnerable and as we seek to protect the economy over people and lean on a healthcare system that has been twisted to perform for profit instead of for people.

Then we march through a Holy Week rollercoaster of celebratory dinners and stark suffering, of bread and wine and crosses, of deep expressions of love on both sides of life. Death lingers on our consciousness, from these stories and, perhaps more importantly, from our own lives. And when we’re trying to get food on the table, worried about the rent or our retirements, getting our kids some modicum of an education, and terrified about what the future holds…not to mention potentially contracting a virus that could kill us, Easter has to be about something more than the exculpation of our sins from the anger of a God who we’ve been told punishes us with things like an pandemic for the sins we’ve supposedly been forgiven for. And to do all of that in an environment lead by people who either don’t understand or have a completely different set of motivators than the ones that could actually help us is just another log on the fire. Our theologies have to get better, and fast.

Even as we approach Easter’s resurrection hope, an anticipated event for us, such optimism may ring hollow in our ears. It might make more sense to follow the road of despair and depression. After all, it won’t really be Easter. I mean, there’s no such thing as Easter pajamas, and nothing to dress up for. We won’t have the big family gathering, maybe just a ham sandwich instead, because escalloped potatoes seem like a lot of trouble at this point. Without the family and church rituals, does Easter even come?

Yes, yes it does. But it does have to be reset, rebooted, remade.

And for that we need only read the story again. For the first Easter has none of the majesty we associate with it. No choirs, no trumpets, no parades, only a couple of grieving women, in Matthew’s version the two Marys – Jesus’ mother and the Magdalene – come, not to anoint the body in traditional practice as in other gospels, but as expectant witnesses. They are seemingly there because they have taken Jesus at his word. It is the women, pay attention now, who frame the Holy Week story – there at the beginnings of Good Friday, when the men have fled, and now here on Easter morning, with expectant hope. So we begin with the Easter lesson that if you want to look for God, look to those who are marginalized for that is where She will be.

Now we can step back and take notice how Easter may have lost some of it’s prophetic punch. Now we schedule Easter, we write it down on the calendar, buy our ingredients, make our plans…whose house this year, and who’s making the rolls? Never anything that would make the phrase, “Don’t be afraid” necessary at all. Until this year. And suddenly Easter is upon us with new messages, new possibilities, new hope. Instead of “Hallelujah,” perhaps we hear the riches of the day rooted in something more like, “en la lucha hay esperanza,” — there is hope in the struggle.

Easter returns to it’s roots in base communities showing radical hospitality and generosity under the threats of political, social and economic pressure. It re-centers us, knowing that this crisis has not created inequalities or defects, it has exposed them. Our systems have been racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic and economically discriminatory forever. It’s just more obvious now. Easter can become known now not just as a cosmic event, but known in our bodies, our earth, our very being. Like the Christmas that begins the story, Easter is God enfleshed, God who knows our suffering, who knows the worst that we can do to one another, and whose life-giving power resonates through us anyway.

In Matthew’s version, there are only four witnesses to the first Easter, no orchestra at all, and not a lily to be seen. Easter is a small event, almost miss-able. Matthew’s version gives us no indication that most of the world even noticed the tomb was empty. And maybe that’s because Easter is not the end of the story. It might be the end of Holy Week, but it isn’t the end of the story. Easter only starts another chapter…

That chapter is us. The directive from the angel, in Greek at least, is written in the future tense – like “don’t be afraid anymore.” Don’t be afraid of death, don’t be afraid of grief, don’t be afraid of the new life that springs from those difficult moments, for the power of resurrection is now revealed. “Don’t be afraid,” is not the assurance that nothing can go wrong, because often things do go wrong. It is not the assurance that everything turns out for the best, because, if we are honest about it, it often does not. Rather, it is assurance that, whatever may happen to us, whatever a day may hold, God has the power to strengthen us and uphold us; that whatever we must face, we do not face it alone; that nothing we encounter is stronger than God’s love; and that we will always know joy and fear together, for human life is this strange mix of things that we think can’t go together.

And let’s be clear – you can’t just shut off fear like a faucet. The directive “don’t be afraid” is really an aspiration, something for us to reach for each and every time we feel that fear. Of course we feel it now, so what will we do with it? Will we give into it, letting us make poor choices or crushing our spirit, or will we resist it? And how do we resist it? The story helps again, for the angel also says, “Come and see.” Inviting the women into the tomb to witness resurrection, or at least to see an empty tomb, to know that somethinghas happened and the future they anticipated is changed. And then, finally, the angel says, “Go and tell.”

Don’t be afraid, but when you are, come and see what leaning into your courage can produce, what picking yourself up and dusting yourself off can bring, what helping someone else who needs to be picked up, our to borrow some of your courage can do. And then, go and tell. Let us remind each other of these stories, telling that good news of God’s presence among us, even in the midst of death. For that is Easter.

Right now the everything is coming alive. If, like me, you are playing the anxious game of “is this hay fever or coronavirus,” you know that the trees are bursting out almost daily. It makes the new walks through the neighborhood you might be taking even more colorful, and maybe, like us, you are getting surprised by bulbs you had forgotten that you planted giving up their beauty to the warming weather. The cycle that is the death of winter is followed by the life of spring. And none of us are afraid of our gardens. I’m afraid we planted our tomatoes too early this year, so I might be afraid FOR my garden, but not of it. It is what we expect, the barren branches of the oak will soon bear leaves. The brown grass will turn green. The silence of the birds won’t last.

Easter morning does not deny death. Jesus died, like we all will die. What it says is that death is not the final answer. That’s an important message for us to hear as well, for Easter does not mark the end of the story, but the middle. There is much still left of the tale of our faith, the courage and dedication that Easter will evoke in the disciples and their disciples and their disciples, all the way down to us.

We have a chance this strange Easter to not be distracted by the glitz and glamour long enough to experienceit, for Easter is best not as something we celebrate, but something in which we trust, something we seek, something we look for. I don’t know what happened in that tomb, whether or not a body was actually resurrected, or took on a different form, or what the physics of all that could even be. What I do know is that Love had a different answer for us than the one we expected. What I do know is that Jesus is alive and well in the community of faith and that the suffering of Jesus was not about God’s punishment for us, but about God’s identification with us, God made flesh to fulfill God’s purposes of justice and peace in a world of suffering and injustice.

Though I know that we still struggle with the seeming dichotomy that is joy and fear, even more so right now, we are Easter people and the voice from God is again to us, “Don’t be afraid. Come and see. Go and tell.” We have a well of courage from which to draw, for Christ now lives within us all and when our well is running dry, we have one another. We can learn from those who are brave among us. We can lean on one another’s particular wisdom, we can practice hospitality and hope where we can. When we know this kind of courage, this kind of collective resilience, when we call one another to it and support one another with it, this is how Christ stays alive in each of us.

And that is the good news today. Christ is Alive. Hallelujah.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 12:12-26

Got your greenery on hand?? Now’s the time!!

Hosanna!! Hosanna!! Hosanna!!

This is what we typically mark at the beginning of our Palm Sunday service – the choir and the kids marching in with palm fronds, lifting up this scene in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. By the time this story takes place, Jerusalem had been the center of sacred geography for the Jewish people for a millennium. It is a city built on a hill with a large wall surrounding it and you could enter through one of two gates, the large, main, ceremonial gates and the back gates, more like a service entrance.

Now imagine that a long time ago, right before Passover started, sometime in the early spring, these gates bore witness to two different parades. Through the main gates comes the flagrant show of Roman military might on horseback, with chariots and spears and swords, a display of imperial theology that claims the emperor as not only the head of Rome, but also the “Son of God,” the “Savior of the World,” titles that were commonly attributed to Caesar…titles we use for someone else. The armies of Rome are coming to Jerusalem during the highest of high holy days, Passover, a day that commemorates liberation to the Jews, to remind them that Rome is still in charge, so don’t try anything.

Through the back gates of the city comes Jesus, riding a donkey, accompanied by poor people and outcasts, in a parade full of symbolism. They don’t have painted banners and silken flags like the crowds at the main gates, so they grabbed whatever they had available – they swung their cloaks and waved fronds torn from the palm trees all around them. Maybe they began to sing, to chant even, this psalm we know as number 118, which reads, in part,

Lord, please save us!

Blessed is the one who comes in the Lord’s name;
God has shined a light on us!

That phrase, “please save us,” is better known by a single word – Hosanna! When they sing Hosanna, they are crying out, “save us!” For this isn’t just a celebration for them, this parade announces the impending transformation of their world! John, and the other gospel writers, all have Jesus acting out a scene that pulls imagery directly from scripture – using the words of Zechariah and Micah to embody an alternative set of values, direct from the language of the prophets, where the Kingdom of Rome, power through domination, peace through military might, protection of the rich and powerful, and justice through retribution is set against the Kin-dom of God, where power is only power when given away, people over profits, peace through justice, and justice through reconciliation. The challenge offered to the readers then is the same one offered to us now – which parade will you follow?

In a briefing just a few days ago, Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator, said that the next few weeks are going to be difficult. She warned that Americans must continue to stay home, keep apart, wash their hands and take the other steps that public health officials have urged. And then she said something that struck me like a sharp cry of “Hosanna” and the slap of a palm across my arm. She said, “It’scommunities that will do this. There is no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just our behaviors.”

It is clear, especially right now, what values have shaped our society. Healthcare comes at a price, and if you can pay it, you can have a COVID-19 test. Affordable housing, good jobs and functional public education are limited, but we’ve got plenty of shopping malls and $250 million dollar parks. If billions are owed in student loans or housing bubble debt, we can’t afford to forgive those debts, but if you’re “too big to fail” then the dollars magically appear. Fault lines of the economic and healthcare systems in which we live are being exposed even more starkly, and the tremors will be felt in many ways for a long time. The values that have long developed and maintained our economy hold up the reward of the few by the work of the many, profit over people. Which parade are we following?

Some have said that an increase in unemployment will tempt people to stay on unemployment because it pays better than their job. And the question that comes to my mind is, why do your jobs pay less than unemployment? If we truly held biblical values, we ought to be pushing a living wage. People who are working 40 hours a week, or more, should be able to live on that work, especially in an economy with more billionaires than any in the world. That’s not an assertion of our politics, it’s an assertion of our faith! Why is there no discussion – from government officials who love to tout their Christian faith at election time – about the VERY Biblical practice of Jubilee, mentioned over 20 times in scripture, where all of the debts are released as a sign of economic liberation? Which parade are we following?

This is not about a magic bullet, a savior coming down from the clouds to change everything. This is about our behaviors. The Kin-dom of God, Jesus said at every opportunity, is not promised, it isn’t coming, it’s not on the horizon. It is already here. It is in your midst, if you have the eyes for it, he would teach his disciples. And it’s a matter of our values, our hearts, our behaviors.

We may all be puzzled at the lack of toilet paper on the shelves and wonder why anyone would want to stockpile that, to hoard more than they can use. Yet we live in a system in which people do that with another kind of paper – money – all the time. They hoard more than they could possibly spend in a lifetime of reckless spending, and we call that success. We call that “winning.” It’s not, this parade reminds us. The parade Jesus leads teaches the Kin-dom of God, where the sick are healed, the prisoners are released, the oppressed are set free, and where everyone has enough. Which parade are we following?

This is a very strange time we’re living in. It is changing many, many things, and has the chance to dramatically impact how we think about the systems we’ve created, for the illusion that we are somehow independent, that we can just take care of only ourselves, that what I do only impacts me – those values are being exposed. We are all interconnected, and the more we accept that the more it compels us to reshape our systems, to think about our economies, our justice, our directives to war and violence and division.

Like those at the side of the road during Jesus’ procession, we may want to just shout “save us!” and look to the skies for the heroic savior. But he has already come, my friends, and he has told us what to do. We are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which starts with loving ourselves and then continues by recognizing that everyone is our neighbor and we should want for them what we want for ourselves – in other words, the right to have enough for their needs – not the needs I imagine for them, but their needs.

This is the beginning of our Holy Week journey and what we’ll see as we travel this road to freedom again is that it is costly. It means sacrifice and maybe even some danger. Power resists liberation, and those who benefit from that system resist it’s change. Sometimes we who can see the injustice and still benefit from that system resist it, too, because it means giving up privilege we might have, or dealing with change.

And change, as we all know FAR too well right now, is hard.

Yet the road is here, in front of us, a road that asks us to consider our values, especially in a time of crisis, and to reach for the Kin-dom, that is right here among us…if we will have the wisdom, and the courage, to see it. Which parade will we follow, Palm Sunday asks us? And Jesus, even 2000 years later is still asking – who wants to travel the road with me?

May God’s Peace be with us all. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Ezekiel 37:1-14 CEB

It is the 6^th century BCE, almost 600 years before Jesus, and Israel is facing perhaps it’s greatest crisis since the Exodus. They have been conquered by the Babylonians and exiled to Babylon. And, as if that weren’t enough, their temple in Jerusalem has been leveled to the ground. Maybe that seems bad enough to you, but I assure you it’s worse. Ezekiel’s vision is a valley full of bones because that’s what the Israelites to whom he is speaking feel like…a pile of bones. They are not only exiled, trapped away from home and perhaps even family, they are separated from God. See, God, to them, lives in that temple. The one now in ruins. They had a really big chair in the temple’s center courtyard for God, that’s how much they thought that God livedthere. And now they are trapped, far away, separated from God. It is a crisis of faith, a shock to the system, it’s the loss of stability and balance with no reasonable idea when the crisis will be over.

That’s what the world felt like for the Israelites exiled in Babylon. And maybe you can identify a little. Right now, in some ways, we are in a similar place, desperately trying to process exactly how we wound up in a world we don’t recognize, whatever illusions of control we had shattered. We’re likely worn out, dried up, tired, even hopeless, like a valley full of dry bones. We are anxious about what is to come and grieving what we’ve already lost as we wonder when this will end. I am grieving my son’s senior year and the likelihood that he won’t have a graduation ceremony, or at least nothing like his mother and I had imagined for him. There are weddings coming up that will have to be cancelled or rescheduled, and there will be funerals. There are already. A colleague of mine gathered a few days ago with just four other people to light candles and remember a loved one’s death…no one could even hug. It was heartbreaking.

And then there’s Easter. It’s only three weeks away, and we won’t be meeting face-to-face for that. I trust we all know that by now, though when I say it out loud my soul hurts. It’s another in a long line of things that we’re losing, and must grieve, as we continue to live into a new normal together…even as we’re not together.

It is a time when we need our faith, not the fragile faith that offers only concrete platitudes, or the judgmental faith that is always litmus testing us for how much we believe, but instead the resilient faith that hurts alongside us, the faith that can be comfortable without control, the faith that knows God can be found in the darkness, too. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once described faith as, “like floating in seventy thousand fathoms of water. If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m in the “struggle, tense up and thrash about” phase right now. I need some reminders of my faith. I need some spirit in my dry bones.

But it’s another Sunday away from this sanctuary. We don’t get to see each other’s faces, at least not all at once, and we don’t get those hugs or smiles…whatever snack time might come after the benediction you’ll have to provide on your own. And though we’re making good electronic effort, it certainly feels like we’re separated from each other. It might even feel like we’re separated from God. After all, this is the place where we likely evoke God’s name most often. This is the place where we have our theology, our “God-talk.” This is the place where we worship, where we experience the love of God manifest in one another, in those hugs and handshakes and smiles, in our voices singing together. And, like the citizens of Jerusalem in exile, we might now feel cut off, adrift, directionless, maybe even a little hopeless?

So, it’s time for some prophesying, which does not mean that I’m now going to ask you to send in $100 for your monogrammed prayer handkerchief because the world is about to end. That word that gets translated as prophesying is, in Hebrew, something more like telling the truth. Telling God’s truth. And telling it out loud, which is what Ezekiel does. These dry bones aren’t the end of the story, they can have life again. But to help give them flesh we have to first have vision for something new, for possibility, then we have to call upon and trust in the Spirit of God, the life-giving animating breath of God, and then we have to let loose the truth in our hearts so our vision, with God’s Spirit, becomes reality.

There is no doubt that the physical crisis we face is real, and that it will become more real with each passing day. It is changing who we are and how we live. It is changing us psychologically, ideologically, even physiologically, maybe even theologically.

The truth that we need each other has long been a theological claim, and now it is time for that to go out in the public, even as we don’t. We need each other, and the theological claim we often make here at Fellowship – that God is a God of Love and that we are the children of that God, all made in God’s image – THAT claim ought to be heard loudly and clearly, shaping who we are and how we live. Seems like that would be a prophetic word to some these days.

I mean, maybe this just be a blip, a mere inconvenience for most on the road back to work. Maybe it’s just a few weeks of Netflix and then all is restored. But do we just want things restored? This crisis is exposing weaknesses in our healthcare system, giant gaps in coverage, our economy, our most basic structures, flaws we knew were there in our heads, but which many of us now feel in our bones. What if, instead of simply returning back to what was, this is actually the start of a whole different kind of living, a revolution of values, an indwelling of the kin-dom of God?

A great theological liberation came to the Israelites in Ezekiel’s time, for during their crisis of faith, new life was breathed into their dry theological bones – bones that limited God to a building in Jerusalem, and they could now see that they were not exiled from God, for God is everywhere. Not only was another Exodus possible with God, but ALL THINGS were possible with God. Not only was God their God, but God was God for everyone in the world. It was a revelation that reshaped their faith. What revelations await us as we reimagine what God is up to, what is possible for the Holy?

Ezekiel’s vision is not one that is trapped in some distant past, but one that speaks in the face of all places of spiritual and emotional exile and death, including the one in which we are currently living. Now, in our valley of dry bones, at our time of existential and real struggle, we can see the Spirit of God moving among us, breathing new life into stale places. Where do you see that happening? I see it in the work of teachers, who stay-at-home conscripted parents turned teachers now realize are dramatically underpaid. They are already reassembling their classrooms into virtual space, learning to teach a whole new way so they can do their calling. I see it in the actions of people reaching out from behind computer screens and cell phones to check on the vulnerable, to provide entertainment, to resource hope. I see it in the arms of the grocery store stocker, the one who doesn’t even earn a living wage, but who loads and unloads so that we can sometimes feed our fears as much as our bellies. I see it in the heroic actions of medical professionals of all kinds, going faithfully to work, sometimes in very difficult situations, maybe even without the gear they need to protect themselves.

The lesson of the dry bones is not that God will save us. It isn’t even “Don’t worry” because God’s whole schtick is resurrection, though that is true. The lesson is that life happens, that change and chaos is actually the norm, and our task is to learn to see it, to work with it, and to have the uncomfortable courage that it takes to move through the new stuff, that newness that is frustrating and painful, so we can grow, so we can learn, so we can condition the muscles we need to love our neighbors (and our enemies) as ourselves in an ever-changing world.

How we form community at a distance is how we bring life to dry bones.

How we decide to live from this moment on, deeply reminded of how interconnected we all are, is how we bring life to dry bones.

How we seek the action of God among us, how we tell the story of the darkness and despair among us, and then invite the Spirit to breathe new life, living the vision in our hearts out into the world…that is how we bring life to dry bones.

May God’s Grace and Peace be with us all. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 9:1-7 (+40 verses)

Lent IV

This is a story about seeing. But, like much of John’s gospel, it’s not really about seeing, it’s about “seeing” with air quotes around it. I don’t know if this man is actually blind, and I think that if that’s the question we’re asking, we’re barking up the wrong tree. That’s not how these kinds of stories work. No one asks how if the three mice are totally blind, or just legally blind, or how Humpty Dumpty ever found pants to fit him since he was shaped like an egg. Actually he wasn’t shaped like an egg, the story never says what he looks like. We’re just used to the nursery rhyme storybooks that depict him that way for some reason. We don’t read mythic tales for the factual accuracy. We don’t read them to garner practical details about the world around us. We read them to give us some sense of meaning, just like this story.

And, boy, O, boy…is this ever a time to search for some sense of meaning.

Right away in our reading we get a good Biblical answer for one of the most haunting questions in a life of faith – why? Why is he blind? Again, not a very good question for the real purpose of this story, but let’s indulge for a moment because Jesus’ answer says something profound to one of the more common answersin Christianity…’least ’round these here parts.

It’s not because he sinned. It’s not because his parents sinned. It’s not because of sin. It’s not because of someone or something – so when you hear this called the “Chinese Virus,” know that is just another scapegoating method for someone to try and wash their hands in a negative way – assigning blame. We’re all in this together and God did not start any of it. Period. Viruses exist. They always have and always will, and we develop immunity to them as we get exposed, only this is a new one. So, while we develop antibodies through natural process or immunization eventually, we will contend with the natural process in which we live. If we say that’s God’s judgment, then we enter into an equation where some people matter and other people don’t, and that’s not how God works. That’s how WE work…we just sometimes find it easier and more convincing to pin that on God.

We should note that the disciples have already internalized this broken theology, they know it by heart, for they ask immediately who sinned so that he was born blind. Not did they sin or was it sin, their assumptions have already been made. And Jesus’ answer is that it isn’t sin at all, it’s glory…God’s glory. Now let’s think about that for a second…I mean, let’s think about that right now, where we are.

All of our lives are being lived differently. I could probably argue, and I think that China and Italy would back this up, that we’re not even living differently enough. What we all should be doing is minimizing our contact with one another – our physical contact, not our phone calls, emails, texts…that we should increase as we check on one another and keep our electronic lifelines going. Social distancing is a must right now. And when you think about that in the long term, it can get pretty depressing. So, we often either try not to think about it at all, or we think about it obsessively – neither of which is very helpful.

Then there’s Jesus.

Jesus, as he is fond of doing, turns the whole process upside-down. He answers them with a completely unexpected and kind of cryptic response – This happened so that God’s mighty works might be displayed in him. While it’s daytime, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work.While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” In Greek he literally says this happened so that the acts of God might be manifested in him.

What if we viewed this time in which we live right now, this crisis of viral threat and economic trouble, this massive load of stress and anxiety as the opportunity for God’s acts to manifest themselves in us? The word crisis comes actually from the Greek as well. It means, “to separate, or to sift, to pass judgement, to keep only what is worth while.” There is an opportunity in every crisis and the deeper the crisis, the more profound the opportunity can be. But sometimes we can’t see it.

That’s the kind of “seeing” that this passage is talking about, the kind of vision we need to develop, or maintain, or generate right now. And, for Jesus, it starts with theology. It starts with how he sees God. For Jesus, in story after story in our gospels, blame is not a very helpful, nor holy, activity. The Pharisees, which really ought to just be a stand-in for lots of different groups, it shouldn’t single out a particular sect or tradition at all…those who wield the rules and practice judgment as a vindictive are present in any and all expressions of humanity, we can’t wash our hands of that too quickly. They come from the right and from the left, and from the middle. So, when we say, “The Pharisees” in John’s Gospel, we ought to hear “the ones more interested in some kind of ideological purity” rather than those who respond to the expression of Jesus’ love without exceptions, which doesn’t work very well in a system of purity.

The Pharisees, the “ideologues” in John’s gospel, see God’s work as restrictive. Jesus sees God’s work as liberating. The ideologues see God’s love as a series of punishments and rewards, based on our own actions. Jesus sees God’s love as restorative and filled with grace. The ideologues see social distancing as a curtailment of their freedom, but the vision that we need we can see in the sacrificial love of Jesus, that gives away it’s power and freedom, so that God’s work can be manifest in the world.

The way that Jesus heals this man is quite telling and, at first glance, seems straightforward, but it isn’t. It is loaded, in true John fashion, with symbolism. As Jesus engages in what, for our present moment, is some pretty unacceptable contact, mixing his spit with dirt and spreading the mud on this man’s eyes, and then telling him to, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” – which John tries to make really clear is a metaphor, by explaining the metaphor. “This word means sent,” he writes alongside the instruction of Jesus. And, in Greek, it is actually apestolmenos, the root of which is where we get “apostle,” or one who is sent. Wash yourself, therefore, in a pool of apostleship…or, more clearly said, gain your sight by serving others, which is what the point of being an apostle of Christ is all about. And that has something for us to hear at this moment, doesn’t it?

In John’s gospel, the man’s “seeing” is a process – he sees, then he sees again, then he sees even more deeply as the passage goes along, first seeing Jesus, then calling him “Lord,” then pledging to follow him, as if our sight doesn’t come all at once, but in spurts. This is perhaps a similar time for us, as we live through something that none of us have ever lived through. And I think that in the crisis which is exacerbated, in part, by our strong and systematized dedication to an ideology of individualism, there is an opportunity, a great paradox of an opportunity, that in our time of isolation we might actually be drawn closer to one another…in this time where we are more physically individualized than ever, we might actually develop a stronger sense of how we are all connected, how we need one another.

There are no magical answers. We don’t know how long this will go on, nor how big an impact this will have. The first death in our state recorded as a result of COVID-19 occurred right here in Tulsa and my family has a connection to it, as it was the spouse of a teacher at my kids’ school. Their daughter is in my son’s senior class. And this will not be the last. The testing levels have been incredibly underdeveloped, particularly in our state. As we develop that capacity and test more, the numbers will go up. The impetus for us to stay isolated will grow, and this will get a lot more real in a hurry.

As Jesus tells us, we must learn to see. The rest of the story, the part you didn’t hear in my abbreviated hearing, has the man telling others about his sight, spreading the news that how we treat one another and how we love is critical, spreading that news like a virus, a virus we’d like other people to catch. It doesn’t come without pushback, for there are many who don’t want to let go of their blindness, they don’t want to let go of what they call “freedom,” they don’t want to let go of “the way that things are” because that’s been their foundation, their map for understanding the world. And even when that map doesn’t work, they’ll still cling to it.

We may indeed have much to change, and what could come from this crisis is the opportunity to think about how we’ve structured things, how our medical system responds to those with money, but doesn’t work for those who are sick, which is a problem. We could think about how we’re setup to deal immediately and decisively when the stock market is in trouble, but can’t effectively help the citizens of this country without a means-test we never apply to corporations in trouble, and that’s a problem. We could finally understand that those people working for minimum wage, those teachers and administrators and nurses and techs and janitorial staff…THEY make the world go, they keep us safe, they are the foundation…and we should pay them a living wage. But all of these things would mean that we’d have to learn to see differently.

Jesus says to those ideologically-bound folks, as a response to their pushback, “I have come into the world to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind.” What we see really matters. And sometimes, Jesus reminds us, we must become blind so we can see truly see.

So, here’s to the Light of the World, come to teach us how to truly see. May we gain new vision in the weeks to come, and practice God’s compassion and peace where we are, and with what we have…the GLORY of God’s love painted brightly and vividly across our lives, holding each of us as beloved children of God, even – no especially – at a time of plague and famine and doubt and fear. That is precisely, our scriptures remind us, where God stands with us.

So, as a reminder to us all – we are still connected, Fellowship, connected by something deeper than physical presence, connected by God’s love, by the example of Christ Jesus, and by the Spirit, that resides in, among and with us all. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 4:1-42 (CEB)

I will confess to you that I am suspicious of this story from the get-go. Just about every time the Bible features a woman, named or not, usually not-named, I get nervous. It’s the same way I get nervous when I see a woman placed in a position of leadership because this is a misogynistic world we live in. It always makes me wonder, is this a setup? It’s a misogynistic world in which the Bible was written, where women were property, and the source of men’s sinful temptation. Are we being prepared to heap all of the world’s sins on a woman’s back again? Hi, Eve, how you doing?

I don’t trust it.

In the wake of an International Women’s Day that still witnesses the inequalities visited upon women all over the world, not to mention the campaign for President in our country – now featuring exactly zerowomen, not to mention the endless legislation and trials that are all different kinds of assaults on women’s bodies, very public events where we continue to question the moral agency of women…why would we trust this story at face value?

Well, the first thing we ought to do is try not to read a 1^st century test with 21^st century eyes, though certainly drawing this story back into it’s original context, as best we can, won’t make us feel any better about the status of women.

We should notice that this story comes right after the story we heard last week – Jesus meeting Nicodemus and talking about being “born from above.” And John is very intentional that we go from Nicodemus to this story of the Samaritan woman. The intentionality is even woven into the story, for the first few lines indicate to us that Jesus is traveling back to Galilee from Judea and, the text says, “Jesus had to go through Samaria.” Well, that’s not true. He didn’t have to go through Samaria, in fact most Jews making that same trip would have taken the longer road to avoid Samaria altogether because Samaria is where Samaritans live, of course, and Samaritans are no good. Everyone knows that. To this day, we humans are very good at dividing ourselves up into clans and making sure that our clan knows which clan is good-for-nothing jerks. Other Jews would have taken the long road, but Jesus had to go through Samaria…not because the road demanded it, or he was short on time, or he left his wallet in Samaria, but for some other reason.

He goes, as Dr. Karoline Lewis points out in her great commentary on this passage, because it is a theological necessity. It is a theological necessity because of what we heard last week – For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s son…” Samaria, Jesus must emphasize, is part of the world. Might seem like you don’t need to do that, but, as we just mentioned, we often need help understanding the difference between our conditional love and God’s love that is without exceptions. Samaria today is what we call the west bank, I don’t need to remind us of the ways that we are not expressing God’s equal love there. And to bring it closer to home, we have kids in cages, selective medical treatment, unequal justice, housing, education, access, etc. to remind us that we have a hierarchy of worthiness, which seems to stand quite in contrast to Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus intentionally goes to Samaria. And not only that, he meets there in this “chance” encounter, a woman at a well, in the midday. And so that we might hear this story like we were a first century Judean – the worstperson you could meet with if you were a rabbi is a Samaritan, for lots of religious and political reasons. The second worst person you could meet with, especially alone, is a woman. The third person it would be problematic to be seen with is a woman who has some kind of tarnished reputation. AND the story takes place at a well, which is ALSO a big deal, because that is the place where people meet. It’s the watering hole, literally and figuratively, the bar, the nightclub, the social setting where matches are made. In the ancient world, the setup of this story would have been incredibly scandalous, like me telling you that Jesus, before he went back to Galilee, had swiped right on Tinder, or that he was expecting that what happened in Samaria would stay in Samaria. This story is loaded with sexual innuendo that we don’t necessarily pick up on, and maybe for good reason because they story plays against all of that typecasting, it goes against the grain, ignoring this woman’s atypical marital situation and the innuendo because that’s not really the point. The point is that John’s Jesus, all the way up to three strikes at this point, does not flinch for a moment, nor does he this person to be anything other than who she is.

The Samaritan woman doesn’t really pick up on this right away, likely not used to being treated with compassion. She calls out the social mores immediately – “Why do you, a Jewish man, ask for something to drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” The subtext that we don’t hear is – this ain’t how this works, dude. Your disciples have left to get you food, and men don’t open up conversations with women here at the well. It’s not how we do things. Then, when Jesus asks for water, she goes all Nicodemus on him, taking everything literally. She asks, where is your bucket? How are you going to get water without a bucket?

This setup, just like the setup with Nicodemus, is a chance for Jesus to say – yes, I know this is how you do things, but it isn’t how God does things. And in John’s Gospel, where Jesus is the most god-like, he asserts to her – I’m not here for the everyday stuff, for what you’re worried about. I’m here to quench a different thirst, to give you living water. To GIVE you living water. And the question that a first century audience would have immediately had is – why would he give her anything? She’s not worthy, she hasn’t earned it, she’s not even clean, or approved, or worthwhile. That’s how we do things…

And here’s this Jesus, welcoming a person who is so marginalized, so discounted in her culture…a person who is doubly, if not triply, shamed…a person who likely never thinks about anything but the water she needs for the day, for she is constantly told in hundreds of ways that she barely counts enough to survive. She has come to the well in the midday heat, avoiding the crowds for fear of the shaming interactions she has likely had so many times before. Going to the well was a necessity for her, something she had to do, not something she wanted to do, and to see this strange man standing there as she approached must surely have filled her not with comfort, but with dread. She came not not with a feeling of stability or confidence, but because she was thirsty and had to get the water to merely survive.

But then something unexpected happens. Jesus meets her at her vulnerability, going deeper with her instead of dealing her the rejection she is used to, telling her all the things that people use to shame and reject her and standing firm, with the same welcome, the same acceptance he would have for anyone else. He knowsher, the text says, he knows everything about her and offers her this acceptance, this gift of living water anyway. He does not treat her with the social customs of the day, he does not respond to the, “this is the way we do things” model. He treats her as a person, a person in need of more than just a drink…a person in need of the truth.

In John’s metaphorical language where Jesus is God enfleshed, we see a God of radical inclusiveness, a God who invites this woman, in the midst of her pain, just as God invites us…because God knows all of our wounds, all of our struggle. God meets us in that hot and dry place and gives us the cool water of God’s love – living water that quenches a thirst we sometimes don’t even know we have.

As we settle into new territory, uncertain about what things will look like tomorrow, much less next week, may we all trust in the God who meets us in our unstable places, giving us what we need beyond our material needs, filling our hearts with the hope of community and the peace of presence, reminding us that while “the way we do things” brings decisions that don’t always take into account the needs of all people, while we invite an atmosphere where a simple cough might bring stigma and rejection, while we deal with a healthcare system that has been driven more by profit than by people, there is something bigger than all of that, something that does not arrive because of a vote, or by the force of a declaration…something that does not operate the way that we have long operated, but calls us to a different path, ALL of us, reminding us of what lies at our very foundations, rooting us in the Love that will not let us go.

May God’s grace AND God’s peace be with us all…and may we be with one another in this time of trial.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Numbers 21:4-9 & John 3:1-17 (Common English Bible Translations)

These are weird stories. I mean, let’s be honest. They’re just weird. And complicated. My goodness, there’s a reason that St. Augustine chose an eagle to symbolize John and his gospel – it’s language and imagery soars high above our heads, swooping in and out of our sight, and maybe poops on us every once in awhile. John’s gospel is incredibly dense and full of symbolic and metaphorical language, not to mention a complex theology that sometimes contradicts itself, as theologies often do. But, this is Lent – not a time to shirk theological quandaries or refuse to dig a little deeper. So, what’s left to us is to approach this as we might a picture of a pile of candy canes made into a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Imagine that for a second…

We’ll start with the corners.

The easiest piece is that Nicodemus is an admirer of Jesus, but an admirer like a person who wears their “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt under a sweater and a jacket and only watches the rallies on Facebook live. He doesn’t really want anyone to know he’s an admirer, especially not his pals – the other Pharisees – who are having a really hard time with Jesus. So, he sets up this clandestine meeting, at night, where he sneaks in to talk with the person he wants to learn from, in secret, because he admires him so much, but doesn’t want anyone to know it. Change is always the hardest part of learning, or growth.

Jesus, as he often does in John’s gospel, knows everything and is expecting this action from Nicodemus. He doesn’t waste any time, meeting his praise with this – “Very truly, I tell you,” – in other words, pay close attention — “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Now, right away some of you might be thinking, did pastor say that right? Isn’t it – “born again?” I’m so happy you noticed. Here’s our first corner piece. The phrase, in Greek, is GennEthE AnOthen, which literally means “begotten from an up-place.” AnOThen is an adverb, and can mean: from above, or from a higher place, it can mean from the first, or from the beginning, or it can mean anew, or over again. Given those options we might think that we should of course translate it as “anew, or over again” because we are used to the choice the King James Version of the Bible made – “born again.” Yet this is not the only option, maybe not even the best option, and it is loaded. It leads us full speed into a particular theology, one that is quite prevalent here in our neck of the woods.

This flavor of Christianity says the Bible is inerrant, that the steps to becoming Christian are – focus on your sinfulness, on Jesus dying for those sins and your need to believe in him or face eternal damnation. Then there’s other things that follow, now including some political positions that one must have with equal certainty as a sort of sign of your “born again-ness.” This, despite its heavy saturation where we live, is a pretty recent theological invention and not representative of the richness of the Christian tradition.

Nicodemus, for his part, responds to this assertion from Jesus that he must have another birth of some kind with literalism, a big mistake with the Jesus of John’s gospel, who is always speaking in riddles and metaphor. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” – a statement that is as ridiculous to hear out loud as it is gross to imagine. C’mon, Nicodemus – have a little imagination. Jesus does not let him off the hook but answers with even more cryptic language about water and Spirit and flesh and wind blowing where it will.

When I read John’s gospel, I am often reminded of the movie, Shakespeare in Love, where Geoffrey Rush plays Philip Henslowe a sort of producer of plays in his day and age, working with Marlowe and Shakespeare creating plays in the Globe theatre. He makes some rather shady business acquaintances along the way as he seeks whatever capital he can to get the plays made.

At one point in the movie, with Shakespeare in a writer’s block, he promises the local gangster, Mr. Fennyman, that the play will go on and he will get his money back. He pleads his case saying, “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman responds, “So what do we do? And Henslow replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?”, Fennyman asks. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

That’s the operative word in Christianity that has been lost in the shift towards fundamentalism. Where is there room for mystery…for stating that the resurrection is a reality, but being thin on details because it’s not something we understand with our heads, it’s something in which we trust with our hearts? How do we acknowledge that we understand there to be some kind of interaction between God and humanity, centered on Jesus and his life, something that involves his death on a cross, but we don’t fully comprehend it? How do we step away from the certainty of Jesus’ impact on what happens to us after we die and live into the mystery of what Jesus means for our lives before we die?

The passage today features heavily in the heaven-or-hell theology that fills much of the religious airwaves in our context. First corner is “born again,” and the second corner is, “For God so loved the world.” John 3:16. It’s in the top ten of Bible studies, always part of our memorization collection from Sunday School, and, of course, it’s been plastered all over major sporting events for decades. It is so prevalent that the “John 3:16” sign forms the basis for many people’s experience of Christianity. Many even claim John 3:16 as “the gospel in a nutshell,” as if Jesus’ death is the good news – and our afterlife the only reward, the only meaning that can possibly be ascribed and, likewise, a meaning that most of us cannot accept.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” It’s not even the whole thought, the entire paragraph, which also says in the very next verse, the one that doesn’t get referenced on the signs – “God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” When you add that, it makes it much harder to see the previous verse in the accusatory way that it is often presented. It sets forth Jesus as a cosmic rescue plan, rather than cosmic sacrifice.

This is a highly coded message in John’s time, and it is still coded now, only the codes are different, and working only with a translation doesn’t help this at all, for many of the concepts from the ancient Greek-speaking world don’t translate along with the simple word-to-word transfer. As an example, we read, “For God so loved the world,” and we hear this – “God loved the world so much,” as if the word “so” were a qualifier of degree. We hear it as a precursor to the claim that Jesus dies for our sins as substitutionary atonement, that cosmic sacrifice and it introduces for us this dilemma – dealing with a God whose supposed unconditional love is so big it requires very conditional penance. It makes no sense to claim this word “love” in the name of a God who sends his son to be tortured and killed because we owe God. If that’s love, you might rightly say to yourself, I don’t want any part of it.

But the Greek word outos, here translated as “so much,” can just as easily mean “in this way” or “in this manner”. So this can be read, perhaps ought to be read, “God loved the world in this way, he gave his only Son, etc.” Read this way, we might also see a theological model where God is sending Jesus for some other reason, with some other agenda, maybe Jesus as a messenger to announce God’s actual agenda for us as humanity, an agenda that includes mercy and compassion, the ending of hierarchy and the embrace of diversity. Then, this version of the story goes, WE kill him, not God, because that agenda is too threatening, too revolutionary. And, in the next turn, the resurrection means something else entirely, as well…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ll save that part for Easter.

Except that this much should be said now – there are many different explanations of what happens to Jesus, both on the cross and after. John, for instance, uses this example from what he would have called scripture then, what we call the Hebrew Bible, or the so-called “Old” Testament. It is from Numbers, this reference to Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. The Rev. Carl Gregg, from the Patheos website, describes it this way:

“…the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness following the Exodus from Egypt.
And they are growing impatient with year after year of hiking around the Sinai Peninsula. They don’t like the food and there’s not enough water. And in one of those classic Hebrew Bible moments, God responds to their complaints by sending “poisonous serpents among the people.” It’s kind of like treating a broken arm by smashing the patient’s toe with a hammer. Your arm may not feel better, but you’re too busy screaming about your toe to complain about your arm.

In this case, all those poisonous serpents biting people, gave the Israelites some perspective. They stopped complaining about the quality of the food, and started praying for God to contain the snakes. In response God told Moses to,‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” That is the immediate background the writer of the Gospel of John has in mind: just as Moses lifted up a bronze serpent to cure people bitten by the snakes, so God lifted up Jesus “that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

It is a story about remembering to trust in God for healing and salvation, to not squabble about minor inconveniences and remember the bigger pictures of freedom, justice and liberation. It isn’t confess your sins, say the right magic words and get water on you in the proper fashion. No, faithing is learning to see yourself and the world in a different way. Interestingly, later in 2 Kings, the story is told of King Hezekiah breaking this bronze serpent into pieces, for people had started praising it as an idol, turning faith into a formula, not a relationship…they saw the bronze serpent as an end in itself, disabling the purpose of religious practice, which is not to support orthodoxy, but to bring us closer to God and, therefore, one another.

Jesus calls on Nicodemus to walk away from the power and privilege of his leadership position and join what is seen by everybody as a lost cause for justice and liberation, to cast in his lot with outcasts, to move his believe from his head to his heart…and then to his feet and hands. Jesus is also pushing his followers to understand that new life emerges constantly from the old, that God sends new life from above and new perspectives to interrupt our old habits. This is what Jesus names as salvation, that we will finally pay attention to the ways that God has been trying to tell us that Love and Grace are the ways God intends us to live with one another. Maybe if we look upon Jesus lifted up, John tries to impart to us, we will finally accept that message. God sent Jesus so the world might be saved through him…not as an act of membership in a particular religious tradition, not as a competition, not as an act of exclusion, but through his message of love and the vision he bears an act of incredible inclusion, drawing the whole world to the Way of Jesus…not that we might all believe the same things about Jesus, but rather so we might act like Jesus. For whatever our theology, whatever construction we have created or accepted or internalized to explain to ourselves what happened on the cross or after, even if our strategy has been not to think about it at all, I know we don’t manage to think ourselves into a meaningful encounter with the Holy.

Some might call John 3:16 the “gospel in a nutshell.” I prefer Micah 6:8:
“God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Though we might indeed develop theologies, living our faith is where we encounter God, in the momentary meeting of the stranger, in the chance encounter that slowly seems not-so-chance, in the singing…what wondrous love is this…where our heads may fail, but our hearts know the way. For the mystery is where we find God, in faith we connect to the Holy, in trust we find our way home, our salvation tied to doing justice, loving kindness, (and our neighbor, and our enemy) and walking humbly with God.

May we learn to love the world in this way — as God so loves the world…so much that God gave to us Jesus…whatever that means.
Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Genesis 2:15-17 + 3:1-7

Matthew 4:1-11

We enter into Lent this season courtesy of a lectionary set of readings that are kind of all over the place, an out-of-order, jumbled up mess…like life. It would make more sense if we read today’s passage from Matthew right after we read the baptism of Jesus passage a couple of weeks ago, but instead we jumped way ahead to the “transfiguration” last Sunday and now we’re back, hearing the second part of the story where the Spirit comes down upon Jesus, like a dove, pronouncing him the blessed Son of God, in whom God finds happiness.

The very next line, bereft of it’s drama since we interrupted it with a trip up a mountain, is this – “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit (the same Spirit who just anointed him) into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” The lesson apparently is – if you get baptized, be ready! The devil’s coming after you. And there may be some truth to that, though it’s not the Devil we might have in our heads. We’ll have to try really hard to set aside our sense of Dante and Milton or the Omen movies or TV shows, which work on us as much as anything that’s in the text about a “devil,” which isn’t much. What is important is the sense of temptation…or the tempter, to personify it, or the accuser, or the slanderer…all of which are descriptors of this character that pops up in the Bible, in the book of Job, in the gospels and elsewhere, always playing the role of temptation to misuse power…a temptation that is often present.

What if, for instance, I were to ask you what animal tempts Eve to eat of the tree, you would say? (snake) And if I were to ask you who that snake really is, you’d say? (Satan or The Devil) That’s not at all what the text says, of course. The text just says a snake. But those years of artwork and theological overlay and, if you’re like me, irrational fear of snakes has made the association. Of course the snake is the devil. The devil is gross, snakes are gross, ipso facto snake = devil. Yet even if we’re not talking about a “devil”, the temptation part still exists.

Adam and Eve, in one of the myths of creation in Genesis, are given everything they need. They live lives of plenty in a garden that produces in abundance with no participation from them at all, truly manna from heaven, free from toil, from planting or watering or harvesting. It is simply there for them. And, just like they will in the Exodus story, human beings rebel against this “freedom” that really isn’t freedom, and they seek choice every time, because the tyranny of having to choose all the time is better than the “freedom” found in being cared for like a child. It’s a story about maturation, the kind of maturation we all go through moving from child to adult…at least most of us go through it. The garden has been sold to so many of us as a story about the supposed origins of sin and shame, even the subjugated role of women, but the deeper Jewish and Christian tradition lifts it up as as story about what it means to be human, and what it means to be in relationship with the Divine. It is a story about how we relate to power.

There is the one commandment in the garden – don’t eat from that tree. It is the tree of the knowledge of “the good and the bad”, which seems to be an idiomatic phrase in ancient Hebrew, something that, in other places in the Bible, means “everything.” In other words, don’t eat of that tree that is supposed to let you know everything that God knows, effectively making you a god. And the snake doesn’t represent the devil, the snake represents the temptation of wisdom. See, in the ancient Mediterranean world, snakes were a symbol of wisdom, which is why, to this day, they intertwine on the symbol for physicians.

It is wisdom tempting Adam and Eve. Now, don’t get me or the story wrong, it’s not saying wisdom is all bad. After all, the rest of the garden is open to them, to learn from, to study, to engage with – it’s just this one tree that says they’ll know everything. And guess what? After they eat? They clearly don’t know everything. They use fig leaves to cover themselves after they eat of the fruit, and any listener from that era would grimace when they heard that. Fig leaves are like #2 sandpaper, the worst thing you could choose for loincloths. They’re not like God at all, the story reveals. It’s a humorous take on the willingness of human beings to think we know it all when, in fact, we are all too quickly exposed by our own limitations.

The garden is a deeply psychological and spiritual story that won’t let us stop with “sex bad, women bad, naked bad, fig leaves good.” That’s an easy out. Instead it asks us for something deeper, though it asks us in ancient Hebrew which really narrows down it’s impact here in 21^st century Tulsa. There’s wordplay at work here, the word for “clever,” used to describe the snake, is the same root for the word for “nakedness,” used to describe the couple. Those words are ‘arum and ‘arumim, a point that the hearers of this story in Hebrew would have immediately heard, something like one translator puts it – “The man and the woman were nude, and the snake was shrewd.” And, guess what? It’s also the same root for the word that gets translated as “cursed,” as in the “curses” that God places upon Adam and Eve post-fruit snack, as if all these things were connected.

Our cleverness, the “wisdom” that thinks we can “out-science” nature, is exposed. Our “wisdom” that thinks it can do things like split an atom and then we can control all that power. Our “wisdom” that thinks we can heal ourselves through pharmaceuticals, laying one drug on top of another and never considering the side-effects. It’s a cleverness that always thinks we know more than God, which always reveals a nakedness in us, a metaphor for the ways that we are exposed by our own cleverness. And there’s that curse – the consequences that we face for our lack of wisdom or for trusting too much in our own wisdom, so much that we reject God’s constant call on us to balance judgment with mercy, our knowledge with love and our power with compassion. And when we don’t do those things, when we don’t engage those connections, well, it can feel like we are cursed.

These are stories about how we use power. Our knowledge and wisdom are not things we possess, or things we own, or things we always have. They are fleeting characteristics which we must exercise and train ourselves in, gifts from God that we must be appreciate and hone, lest our tools fall into disrepair, or we lose them altogether. That’s the foundation of the idea of a covenant between God and human beings, an acceptance that the source of our power – all our different kinds of power – is, ultimately, God. Such a covenant begins with a humility, even a vulnerability, that we seldom practice as humans, particularly in our culture. We tend to do strength. And by strength, seen at especially high levels during an election cycle, we mean power, control, assertiveness, umph.

Yet, this is not what these stories model for us. The Eden story tells of innocence lost, and the move from vulnerability that is cradled in protection to vulnerability that is exposed and must be accepted by these first humans. And when Jesus is tempted in the desert, we ought to pay close attention to what he is tempted with, because this story also speaks of power. The accuser, the slanderer, this “devil,” does not tempt a man on a 40 day fast with bread, per say. He tempts him with the making of bread from nothing, the power to turn a stone into bread, the control of bread. The lesson for us, as theologian Douglas John Hall suggests, is beware of a theology which promises glory without sacrifice, resurrection without crucifixion, and cheap grace. Then, when Jesus refuses, he tempts him with spectacle, highlighting Jesus in the show of power, with angels lifting him high, for all to see. Beware of placing your trust in things that are all flash, but no substance. Finally, the adversary pulls out all the stops and promises power in that political sense – ruling over everything like a king. Beware of placing your trust in political power, which is all about domination and winning. Jesus’ way, this story reminds us, is about loving and forgiving. So we see in stark contrast – the way of empire is about consolidating and controlling power. The way of Jesus is about an emptying of power.

The way of Jesus is far more vulnerable than the way of empire. And right now, in the middle of a very pivotal election, with the strain of a potential worldwide pandemic on everyone’s radar, economic uncertainty, the chaos of climate change making weather not seem “right”…it feels like a good time to ask, which way are we going to follow?

The popular researcher-storyteller, Brene Brown, says that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness…that’s what the data has shown her across her many years of studying it. But, she says with equal certainty, it appears that it is also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. This was the beginning of her ow personal journey that the research led her to, not by her choice at all. She says, you know how there’s people who when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, they surrender to that and walk into it? She says, “A – I’m not that person, and B – I don’t even hang out with people like that.”

This is how I think the disciples felt as they encountered Jesus, the whole-hearted person who walked toward vulnerability and tenderness, who embraced the struggle and the pain, who sought encounter with the things he did not understand and the things that were completely uncomfortable. And they watched with marvel and awe and maybe, at times, a little revulsion. What are you doing, Jesus? Don’t you know how things work?

For the next few weeks of Lent we will be moving through a section of the gospels that we could call, “Jesus and friends.” Today it’s Jesus and the Adversary, then it’s
Jesus and Nicodemus,” “Jesus and the Woman at the Well,” “Jesus and the Blind Man,” and finally “Jesus and Lazarus.” All of these will be a chance for us to discover Jesus again for the first time, with an offer for us to embrace the vulnerability he gives to us, to surrender those feelings of shame, fear and the struggle for worthiness to the way of Jesus, which offers us joy, creativity, belonging and love.

We will also begin studying The Book of Forgiving by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his Daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu on Wednesday nights, which will be a journey in and of itself. More than a book, it is an exercise, a workout on forgiveness, that will likely leave us a little out of breath and with some sore muscles, for we are not conditioned for this framing of our world. Yet, I’m pretty sure that in God’s wisdom this Lenten season is perfectly timed. As we witness a sea of ads promising all kinds of messiahs come to save us, the cacophony of promises and the litany of plans and strategies and legislation, as we wrestle with an impending viral spread that will threaten our social fabric, it is good for us to remember that we already have a messiah, and he has taught us that if we have all the political power in the world, if we’ve worked super hard to look good (and kind of ignored trying to actually be good), even if we have absolute control over the basic necessities of life, but we don’t cultivate trust and forgiveness, if we can muster all of the needed things for ourselves and our family, but don’t have love and compassion…then we are being tempted, my friends, tempted by something that may be compelling and enticing, but it isn’t the gospel.

So, let us study together, so that we might remind ourselves where we are going.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Exodus 24:12 + 15-18 AND Matthew 17:1-9

It is Transfiguration Sunday – a high holy day in the Christian tradition, though you wouldn’t know it. There are no Transfiguration Sunday dresses or ties, no special Transfiguration bonnet, and no one, I suspect, is having the family over after this for Transfiguration ham. Or maybe you are – no judgment. We have poinsettias at Advent and Lillies at Easter, but what flowers do you choose for the bright radiance of this Sunday? What best symbolizes the blinding light of this mountaintop experience for the disciples? Maybe we just set this decoration on fire?

In the flow of the gospels, this story stands next to Jesus’ birth, his baptism in the Jordan, and his resurrection as the moments we are told, in no uncertain terms, who he is and, quite specifically, that we should listen to him. It may not be a parable, or a miracle, there’s no feeding of thousands or healing of a child, those are things we can grasp. Yet, it’s clear that for the gospel writers it is one of the markers of his importance as messiah-figure, made gloriously clear in this remarkable and mysterious encounter on a mountaintop, the seminal place in Bible-speak, for an encounter with God. But it’s just a weird story full of strange images and improbable experiences.

However, we really must begin the mountaintop story before they go up on the mountain, for the events in the previous chapter reveal a very odd scenario that we could help us see the transfiguration in a new light, pardon the pun. It is chapter 16 in Matthew’s gospel that finds the disciples gathered around Jesus and he asks them – who do you say that I am? And when Peter answers, “the messiah”, Jesus tells him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah…And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Then he warns them not to tell anyone else about this whole messiah business, which seems strange since he’s just praised Peter and given him the “keys to the kingdom”, as it were, for his announcement of something that he now wants to keep silent.

Then, Matthew says, Jesus begins to show his disciples that he, “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And Peter – you remember Peter, the whole “rock on which I will build my church” guy – Peterpulls Jesus aside and rebukes him for this news, saying, “nope – can’t happen to you, Lord.” And Jesus jerks back, hand up and says, “Get behind me, Satan!” And in about two sentences, Peter goes from being the foundation of the church to being the antichrist.

My, how things change.

It is into this context that we hear that just six days later Jesus takes his three most trusted disciples up onto the mountain, including Peter, who is now out of the dog house apparently. And they experience this amazing, bizarre, even downright freaky thing. Supernatural, glowing light in the middle of the night…famous people like Moses and Elijah come back from the dead like Yoda appearing as a “force ghost” alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi…a voice speaking from inside a cloud, standing the hairs on the back of the neck straight up. It all makes, at bare minimum, for a pretty weird Bible story, supernatural and ghostly. Oh, we can recount it here, quoting the Bible, but don’t go saying that this happened to you on the top of Turkey Mountain, because you won’t get amazed interest from this congregation, you’ll likely get intervention. Things like that are best left to another kind of Christian, not us rational, intellectual types who know the difference between supernatural and real. We’re more likely to explain it away – much more probable that it was just a meteorological phenomenon, or maybe last night’s Thai food.

We rush to explain, to rationalize this story. But, like many in our Bible, it resists that. God comes to people in a cloud, obscured from clear vision often in our scripture. The bit from Exodus that we just heard, where Moses is also taking a trip up a mountain, and God comes to him in a cloud…everything is socked in for 6 days. In 1 Kings, Solomon dedicates the temple in Jerusalem and it is filled with a great cloud, so thick that the priests couldn’t see what they were doing, as if God’s presence didn’t require the priests’ ritual mechanics. Ezekiel has his visions of God’s presence surrounded by clouds with brightness and fire surrounding them. God digs the clouds. And if you have ever been on a mountaintop before, camping, and you wake up at a high enough elevation, stepping out of your tent into an actual cloud…not fog, but a cloud…you know what a powerful moment it is. It does feel “otherworldly,” like something else has arrived in camp, while you’re trying to get the fire going.

Again and again, our stories tell us that this is what God’s presence looks like – an indistinct, formless thing that obscures rather than revealing, light that blinds instead of illuminates, and an encounter with the holy that is upsetting, even scary, before it’s helpful, challenging before it’s transformative. We seem to think in so many ways that we have to know before we do, that we have to completely understand in order to move forward. Dr. King once wrote, “faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” This from a man who was entrenched most of his adult life in a terrifying and confounding struggle for something that had never been in our country, literally making up strategies as they went along…actively trying to set aside their fear in favor of purpose.

That’s why I think this experience in the cloud can only come after the disciples have experienced the things they have on the ground – the Sermon on the Mount, the healings, the feeding of the five thousand, the embrace and the denial. Living the way of Jesus is very difficult, and I’m not sure we understand our way there. At best we experience Jesus’ upside-down teachings. I’d hazard a guess that most of us here can accept the rationality of “love your neighbor,” but living it is a challenge. We can intellectually accept “love your enemies,” until someone – you know the someone – replies to our Facebook post. Oh, the cloud is a distant memory then, the mountaintop giving way to the deepest valley, as far from the presence of God and holiness that we might be able to get, for knowing is one thing…but doing is another. And, Jesus reminds us again and again – doing is better. Doing, not understanding, is how we build faith.

Jesus has to take the disciples a few thousand feet up to pray and be subjected to a laser-light, fog machine, special-effects show in order to get them to some small measure of faith…he also immediately removes them from that experience, taking them back down the mountain, and telling them not to tell the others about it at all. This, Jesus is saying without saying it, is the center of faith…it comes without knowing. If you know, you don’t have any need of faith. And we need faith, especially in these days.

Peter, as he witnesses this magical apparition in front of him, surrounded by this glory, wants to stay there, enclosed in this cloud. He wants to build tents and stay as close to that Presence as he can, because it’s a close to understanding as he’s been. It’s a familiar feeling. We all want God to be clear and present and relevant – a tour guide for our lives who tells us precisely where to see the good stuff and also where the bathrooms are located. Neither Peter nor we get that. Instead, we get mystery. We get presence, but presence that only shows up in the corner of our eyes, before disappearing when we turn to look at it. We get support, as much from one another, we followers of the lit-up cloud, as from the cloud itself. For in my mind’s eye, the disciples don’t come down off the mountain and never speak of it again…they talk of it often, sharing with one another their deep rootedness in the presence, the stories of God being with us from generations past, of the interconnectedness of the human and the Holy, granting a peace that passes all our understanding.

It is our last Sunday before Lent begins – Fat Tuesday is a couple of days away and then we gather for Ash Wednesday this Wednesday. This marks the final moments of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, this time of joy replaced with a time of reflection.

I’ll be here in the sanctuary to mark you with ashes from 7-8am on Wednesday morning, again from noon-1, and then we’ll have our full service at 7pm that night, with ashes and communion. Why invest so highly in this? Well, because, like the cloud, the ashes mark us with God’s presence, which is something we never fully understand. The ashes help us to hold onto what Paul set forth when he wrote that, “now we see through a glass, but dimly.” Not only do we not see God clearly, we don’t even see ourselves clearly. This Wednesday we remember our mortality as a way of reminding ourselves we aren’t the be-all, end-all. We are limited, even on our best days. Such humility is not meant to belittle our humanity, or to make us feel bad about ourselves. It makes us feel small in the very best meaning of that word – part of a a much larger whole, like witnessing the stars in the sky on a clear night, when you feel a tiny part of a vast universe. We say, “You are dust and to dust you shall return” because it brings some strange comfort to embrace our finitude, it centers for us how much we don’t understand, and that our forward movement isn’t dependent on our complete understanding, just like we were standing on a mountaintop surrounded by mysteriousness and hearing the voice of God telling us exactly what we should trust in.

The story today reminds us that we are to go back from our moments of connection with the Holy, to take those moments with us, remembering them when we have the more frequent encounters with the less-than-holy. It helps us remember that God’s presence is not something we can tie down, or control, or bend to our will, and that there’s no way to walk through life without fear. Life is scary…as the famous Breton fisherman’s prayer says – O God, your sea is so great and my boat is so small – which awakens in us our sense of faith, of holy dependence, of the good and meaningful need for one another. The voice in that cloud reminds us to listen to Jesus, who tells us in so many ways, almost as often as anything else – don’t be afraid. It is the same message of Joy – we sing the Christmas classic “Joy to the World” not because it mentions the birth of Jesus, it does not, but because it announces his world-transforming presence. By singing it we sing away the fear, embracing the teachings of Jesus, even beyond our understanding, welcoming in a whole kind of way, with truth and grace, Jesus showing us the wonders of God’s love.

As we enter the season of Lent, I hope that we find ways to focus on this, to remember, or even make room for, our own mountaintop experiences, and that we seek the one who stands in that great cloud of unknowing with us – for he is God’s beloved, and you are his, and whatever comes next, God is with us, our faith is strong enough, and we are up to it. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 119 & Matthew 5:21-37

Often in our Bible study class on Sunday mornings we wrestle with the scripture because of what we have inherited. Some of us come from a more legalistic background, some of us were raised memorizing scriptures but not really studying them, and almost all of us were raised in an atmosphere where the Bible is the “word of God,” infallible and without error, a claim that holds a lot of water, until you actually read the Bible. Then you find things that are troubling, even appalling, written in it’s pages. You find contradictions and rules that seem, at best, archaic. And so many take the option that seems most logical – they throw it all out. Oh, they may still attend church, even read the Bible, but it’s power has been stunted.

Still, I don’t think that we can just jettison scripture. Jesus, after all, uses scripture.

Like any other rabbi of his time, Jesus holds to Torah, the “Law” as it is sometimes referred to in Judaism, and the Prophets. He quotes them and even says that he is not here to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And fulfilling the law, it would seem, means changing it to some degree. Jesus consistently and openly flouts seemingly sacred taboos, like not working on the Sabbath, not meeting with women, not eating with sinners and non-Jews, not touching lepers, and many of the so-called “purity codes” in general. He minimizes or even replaces commandments, as when he tells a rich young man that it is good that he has obeyed the Ten Commandments, but what he really needs to do is sell everything and give the money to the poor. And Jesus feels free to reinterpret the Law—like here, for example, when he says, six times in a row, “The Law says . . . but I say…”

It is a direct rebuttal to those in his own day and time who would say to the people that every line and word of every law must be explicitly and unwaveringly obeyed, or you have failed in God’s intricate and nearly impossible goal for your life. We, too, know of those who make such a claim today, even in the name of this same Jesus. They hold up the Bible as a rulebook, a measure, which they are only too happy to use as judgment against you and your “lifestyle” choices, wielding the scriptures as if they were a prosecutor in a trial lifting high the statutes of the district.

But before I totally disparage that approach, let’s take a moment and give some benefit of the doubt. If you have no rulebook, how do you play the game? It’s like trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture without the directions, it is really hard…heck, it’s hard to put it together with the directions. Living by a set of inflexible rules may seem oppressive to some, yet can we allow that it might be seen as easier than living in the dynamics of relationship? If you have to feel your way through building that furniture – well, that’s just too challenging for some to imagine. Just think for a moment about a close relationship you have. Wouldn’t it be easier if you knew what to expect, if there were clear boundaries on everything and you didn’t have to spend time and energy communicating or interpreting, if you didn’t have to negotiate things because the rules were completely dictated? It would be easier. Not necessarily better, not more fulfilling…perhaps much more boring…but easier. And, Jesus tells us with his apparent disobedience of the Law, easy may not be our charge as disciples.

This living “outside” the law, or by the “law of love,” isn’t unique to Jesus. In many ways, Jesus is carrying on the rabbinic tradition, encapsulated by a famous saying of Jesus, that isn’t his at all. It is traceable to story from the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish rabbinic commentary. In this story, two first-century-BCE rabbinic sages, Hillel and Shammai, debate. Hillel is the Jewish archetypal tolerant “loose interpreter” of the Law, while Shammai models the exacting and inflexible “strict constructionist.”

A gentile comes to both, intending to provoke them, and asks to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one leg. Shammai is indeed provoked and gives the man an angry whack with a measuring rod. Yet Hillel replies, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — now go study.”

This is not a dismissal of the Torah, not a belittling of the Law. Quite the contrary, it is asking for deeper study, for reflection, for an absorption that brings the law beyond a wooden rule into a deeply lived experiential guide. The letter of the law gives way to the spirit of the law in a maturation that is a critical part of spiritual development.

What Jesus offers us here is not oversimplified into spiritual anarchy – there are no rules!! Let’s go crazy and God’s Grace will cover us all. God’s Grace does cover us all, but not to release us from responsibility or consequence. At a time in which laws and traditions are being very publicly and visibly bucked in the name of personal ambition, we ought to make sure we understand what Jesus is modeling here.

In his brilliant letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. King wrote, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The trick, of course, is in the discernment. How does one know when a law is unjust? What is unjust to you may seem perfectly reasonable to someone else. And what is the disobedience meant to produce? Is it ignoring boundaries that are inconvenient or limiting to you personally, or disobeying unjust laws to facilitate the dismantling of systems that oppress and control entire groups? Those are very different things.

This, of course, presents us with a particular challenge. Psalm 119 couldn’t be any clearer –

“Happiness comes to those whose way is blameless,

who walk in Your law, Holy One.

Happiness comes to those who keep God’s decrees…”

The tradition seems to tell us unequivocally to obey the law, to be sticklers for it’s observance. If you read this alone, without context or interpretation, it might seem like the best way to be loving, since if you love someone you want them to be happy, is to enforce the rules, to get into the business of “sin management,” checking off the list and seeing who’s naughty and nice, like a sanctimonious Santa Claus. Yet that same tradition is full of stories of people who don’t follow the rules. Genesis has many accounts of the great heroes and sheroes of antiquity disobeying the standard practices, ignoring the traditions and rebelling against the rules that have been supposedly laid down by God in the name of God. Jesus is another in a long line of folks who see God leading them away from the tradition, expanding the limits of the time with the blessing of a God who is always saying, Behold! I am doing something brand new! Do you not perceive it?!

All of this brings to question the authority of scripture. Jesus is actually setting that authority aside, or at least taking it down a peg. And in our world of “The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it,” this is a major stumbling block. Jesus has a willingness to claim scripture not as an ending point that “settles it” but as a beginning point from which we pull base-level values, and re-form them in our own context. Biblical authority then is not slavish devotion to a written word, but a dedication to the inspirational process, the engagement with the Holy Spirit, in our language, that began when that scripture was first uttered, but doesn’t stop there.

Here in the UCC one of our slogans is, “God is still speaking.” It is a quote from the famous theologian, Gracie Allen. Just to be inclusive in the references, Gracie Allen was once the comedic foil to George Burns, and his wife, for many years on radio, stage and TV shows. What it means has many layers. It means that we don’t just take the King James translation – itself a work of process and interpretation – and act as if that is the written word of God. It means that we understand that the Bible is a human product, or at least a divinely inspired product interpreted through human eyes, which means we have to approach it with care, study, discernment and humility about it’s authority. And finally, “God is still speaking” means that, like Jesus, we believe that God’s Grace and Power does not end with the Bible, it is at work right now, urging us to expand our own vision, to take the principles our ancestors left us and advance them when and where we are – right now!

What our slogan claims for us is that the Bible might indeed be the final authority if God were dead, or somehow removed from the lives of humanity. But we don’t see it that way. In fact, we see God as active and participating in our lives, and God’s Love as the creative and moving force that compels and inspires us to act in the world. We don’t reject the authority of scripture, we simply want to re-evaluate it’s position on the authority hierarchy. If we, “have prophetic powers,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and…have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, [we are] nothing.” Love must be the operative law, the one that moves us forward, expanding the previous boundaries. Jesus’ words still ring true – “The point is not to be faithful to the Scriptures, but to be faithful to the living God who continues to be present among us.”

The Rev. D. Mark Davis, pastor at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, says it this way – The accounts of creation, the Ten Words on Mt. Sinai, the stories of the people of Israel, assorted types of Psalms, proverbs, and prophetic utterances, as well as the words that Jesus is speaking in this text, are all ways of “scripturing” – a verb rather than a noun. It is not the written accounts themselves, but the real incarnation of God’s word through God’s people that is the point. “Scripturing” is the act of giving witness to that presence. As such, Jesus’ words here do not signify the ‘final revision’ of old Mosaic laws. They signify a way of “scripturing” God’s presence, which will always be a way of being faithful as long as God is living among us.

When Jesus says, You have heard it said, but I say,” he is not doing away with rules or boundaries. In fact, he just establishes new ones with his pronouncements. He makes the rules more challenging – asking us not to return violence for violence, but to reach for a better way…asking us not to judge others but to recognize the sin in our own hearts…telling us that loving the neighbors we already like isn’t enough – we must love even our enemies. God is still-speaking because God is, through our prophets and our discernment, still asking us to go deeper, to love more fully, to draw our circles wider and to offer the same grace that God offers to us, living our lives as an act of “scripturing,” giving witness to the living God who is still-speaking in our midst, the God who is making all things new.

This is the whole of our Law. The rest is commentary — now go study.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Scripture: Matthew 5:13-16
Contemporary Reading: Walt Whitman’s poem, O Me! O Life!

If you are like me, then this last week has been a sharp slap in the face, reminding you that you are in the minority from an idealogical and political position, and that the values being lived out all around you, in the papers and on TV, are not the values you hold dear. Maybe it’s just been confusing, or off-putting, to see this kind of turmoil and division.  It might bring you here this morning feeling downtrodden, depressed, weathered and beaten up a little and the Gospel has good news for you this morning…
The word that Jesus has for you in the midst of your struggle is – good.

It’s good that you are feeling this way, not because it’s a good way to feel but rather because this is a sign that you have not lost your saltiness. Please remember that just last week in our time together the Matthew reading had Jesus saying…

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,
for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Now, maybe that doesn’t sound like what you wanted to hear when you came to church this morning…maybe it sounds like the exact opposite of what you wanted to hear. I can appreciate that. It’s been a long week and some deep despair about where it feels like things are headed, what sort of actions are becoming normalized, and how far we are drifting from any sense of accountability. On top of that, there is this casting of shade, this gaslighting that appears like it’s designed to make you think this is all in your head and you’re the unreasonable one with all of your talk of bigotry and abuse.
I’m not sure where you are, but I’m in a place where I don’t think that things are going to turn out very well. The faith I have placed in politics and the power of organizing feels spent, and I’m thinking about a future that looks pretty bleak. Then the message I hear from this past week of study is – yep, you probably should feel like that.

Thanks, Jesus. You’re a big help.

That could be the end of this sermon, the unhelpful Jesus delivering us equally unhelpful news about the certainty of our suffering. But let’s recognize that Jesus doesn’t stop there, with the admonition to be joyful for your persecution. He goes on, speaking this “Sermon on the Mount” to people beaten down, to those tired of the status quo, to a gathered collection of folks who understand, even if only subconsciously, that what the empire blesses and what God blesses are very different things and there’s something really wrong with the current state of affairs.

After Jesus has laid out the list of things that are blessed, a list that seems almost laughable given the world in which they live, he then turns (I imagine) and looks directly at those around him. Be joyous when you get persecuted for standing against the existing state of affairs, for you are in good company, with heaven applauding you. You are salt…salt for the earth. And you are light…light in the world.

Jesus uses metaphors that come from the lived experiences of the people he’s preaching to – images like salt and light. These days we use a little salt can bring the flavors of something alive. Chefs say on all those dedicated cooking shows that we’re supposed to season our food in layers, using salt and pepper with every ingredient we add. Meanwhile our doctors tell us to cut down on the salt, once of the two major ingredients that the manufactured food industry has been putting in everything. In Jesus time, salt was not so controversial. In fact, it held a high place of honor as a necessary food preservative, a part of the ritual butchering process for kosher food and even as a medicinal balm, though hopefully not on open wounds. So much more than a convenient source of flavor, salt was essential to life.

So, be the things that are essential to life, Jesus tells them. But there’s another component of salt that is important in this metaphor. Too much of it runs everything. Have you ever been in a restaurant where someone thought it was clever to unscrew the lid of the salt shaker, or have you mistaken the salt for the sugar? Both have happened to me and the meal that followed was…unpleasant.

Be salt – be the essential things. And don’t feel like you have to cover everything…don’t feel like you must be the entire seasoning, all of the essential things for the whole world. According to Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, the go-to sources for New Testament era cultural information, the metaphor comes from stoves in the ancient Mediterranean which used dung for fuel. Palestinians from the first century placed flat plates of salt on the bottom of their earthen ovens to activate the fire. After some years, the salt plates in the earthen oven underwent a chemical reaction due to the heat. The result was that the salt no longer facilitated the fire, but rather impeded and stifled the burning of the dung…the salt “lost it’s saltiness.” Given that information, the people gathered to learn from Jesus might have heard that he was saying – be salt, be the catalyst to get things cooking, but don’t be only salt, or think that all of the cooking has to come from you. You’ll burn out.

Malina and Rohrbaugh also tell us that for first century people, darkness was a constant. We are not used to this at all because we have all kinds of artificial lights all around us…so much so that we forget what deep darkness is like. But then, when the sun went down, that was it. Most households had small lamps that burned olive oil, but produced only a small amount of ambient light. The typical way for such a lamp to be put out was under a bushel basket, since it would trap the smoke and fumes as the family went to sleep. Be light, but don’t hide it, let it shine. That greek word translated as shine is only used once more in Matthew, during the transfiguration, when Jesus is bathed in the light of God and connected, on another mountaintop, to the prophets who came before him. That shine we’re meant to have seems to have something to do with our rootedness, with our sense of being connected to something larger than just us – filled with the light of community, of tradition, and of God all at once.

All of that brings me back to this place – our church – in the midst of the turmoil I talked about at the start of the sermon. So we gather on our own hillside, listening for Jesus, longing for answers, for some solution to the problems that plague us and we have this same unhelpful answer staring right back at us still – be joyful that you are struggling. It means your values are solid. It means your hearts are in the right place. It means your humanity and your connections to the divine are still intact. And, just like 2000 years ago in the Holy Land, this advice follows, advice which I find increasingly helpful. Be salt. Be light. Not so much salt that you are considered “salty,” you know? Not so much that you ruin the stew, but enough to season it. And be light. Not so much light that you are just “lit,” chasing only the latest fad, investing only in things if they are entertaining…and not so much light that you blind anyone who gets near you, keeping them from being able to see their own path. Just enough light to light your own path, to be able to see what’s going on around you, to let it shine enough that you make a small hole in the deep night, whose shadow threatens us all.

I am pulled deeper and deeper into this metaphor because I am profoundly aware of how tired people are around me. Swimming against the current is exhausting, and when you live in a place where you have to swim not only against politics nationally, but politics locally, even down to the act of putting on your mask each day when you go to work, or hiding your opinion, biting your lip or holding your voice down in family gatherings, the board meeting, the holiday party, the table in the big, public dining room of the restaurant…it is relentless. And how, we might feel with heaviness and depth…how can we make a difference? How can we change the whole entire world?

And my answer this morning is not “do more.” And it isn’t “do nothing,” either. Here’s my own metaphor – the parable of the cyclist. We’ve probably all seen cyclists riding in great packs, one behind the other or maybe two abreast as they cruise down the road. There’s a rhythm and a routine to that. The lead rider sets the pace, expelling a lot of energy to do so. The rest of the riders enjoy “drafting,” where they can take the wind block the lead rider also provides and expend less energy. Then a shift happens – the lead rider will signal and drop back, pulling to the side and slowing so the line can pass her and she can drift into the back spot, the second cyclist now becoming the lead. And that’s the routine that follows. The only way that the strongest rider among them can truly have their best race is with the team. The only way that the best outcome can be achieved is if there is action and rest, participation and presence, word and deed.

The lesson we get from this morning is – you can’t change the whole world. At least not by yourself. But then again, that’s not your job. It’s not any of our jobs. That’s God’s job. Our job is to be salt and light. What that means here in our time and place has been made much more clear to me over the past few days. If we are to seek blessing, in the language of the Beatitudes, it won’t be in the regular venues, or using the same tools we’ve used. We can choose retreat into our echo chambers, which are prevalent and prolific, increasing the division by choosing to participate in the recipe that is set before us. We can choose to escape, to numb the discomfort with all kinds of distractions. OR…we can add a little salt to the mix. We can curse the darkness or we can light a candle. And those pinches of salt, those small flames from our single candles…they do matter. Just like the acorn that grows into a mighty oak, God takes the small and makes it the all.

So in this time of great turmoil and upheaval, I’m going to suggest something simple…so ludicrously simple that it may seem trivial to you. Write down the salt and light you see in the world. Like keep a journal where you jot down every instance of goodness and hope that you witness, even the tiniest thing. Or come to church each week and write those things on the gratitude slips that are in your pews and put them in the offering plate. It will serve two purposes – instead of numbing when you get stressed, you can read that journal or remember those slips and be inspired. AND – perhaps most importantly – you will develop your eyes and ears for the salt and light in the world.

Why do we need to develop our sense for that? Well, friends, we’re back to the start…because it is good that you feel this weight upon you. It means you still have a sense of what our scriptures call “righteousness,” an awareness that this is not the way things should be. Blessed are you to be salt seasoning the blandness of the status quo…blessed are you to be light in a time of darkness…ALL of you, because that’s what it takes. All of us, each salt and light where we are, with what we have, trusting that the small things we do bring great changes…

God be with us on the journey. Amen.