Welcome

Have you ever seen those quizzes, in magazines or on social media where you answer a few seemingly random questions and it tells you which character you are in a giv en movie, TV show, or book series? I have taken too many of these things, and I never like the outcome. That’s partly because I’m never the main character. I’m never the character I identify with. I’m never the protagonist, moving the story along by my wit or wisdom, my strength or savvy. Nor am I even the antagonist, developing the story by my attempts to thwart the main character’s actions to find happiness, to find love, or to save the world. I’m almost always the eccentric neighbor, the nerdy kid, or some other tangential character, whose two-dimensional story is often incidental to the main plot or only for comic relief. I don’t like the idea that my story might be a subplot in someone else’s epic. That I’m an extra in the movie of someone else’s life. I want to be the hero, the main character, the one who finds love, defeats the bad guys, and lives happily ever after. We learn this very young. Disneyworld has a whole salon for children where you can buy a gown, have your hair and makeup done and emerge as your favorite Princess or your favorite hero. We learn that the bad guys always lose that the good guys always win, that rescue is coming, and that happiness, safety, and peace are achievable and lasting realities. Then we take this understanding and apply it to Bible stories. We want to identify with the characters. We want to know that good will win, that evil will be destroyed, and that happiness, safety, and peace— or what we short-hand as “salvation”— are achievable and eternal. So, we read the story of the Exodus and learn to trust God for our deliverance. We read the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho, and we imagine ourselves marching and blowing trumpets, watching God remove impossible obstacles and giving us the victory. We read the parable of the prodigal son and imagine running home to our Father when we’re in trouble, finding grace and celebration at our return. Today’s gospel lesson, though, presents a bit of a challenge to this way of reading. In this story today, the bad guy wins, the good guy loses, and there’s no one in this story I wanna be when I grow up. What’s in this story for us? Where’s the happy ending? Where is the Spirit of the Lord who opened the prison doors for Paul and Silas? Or the God of the fiery furnace to save John from a gruesome end? Where is the prophet like Nathan that convinces the king to repent? Or, like the book of Judges, where is the skillful assassin who kills the despot, and makes the world a better place? This story doesn’t fit our model of reading for self-appeasement. It doesn’t comfort, or inspire. It doesn’t offer a happy ending, or even a vengeful reckoning. There is no BuzzFeed quiz to tell you where you land in this story because no one wants to find themselves in it. But reading the Bible is not about coddling our egos and finding a comforting narrative to frame the story of our lives. Reading the Bible is about confronting our egos and facing the world as it is, even when our role in it is uncomfortable. We have been taught to see ourselves as the children of Israel, escaping slavery in Egypt by the hand of God. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in Pharaoh, holding God’s people captive because we benefit from an economy built on underpaid labor. We have been taught to see ourselves as Joshua, the conquering hero. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in the people of Jericho, thinking a wall could protect us from having to share our land. For that matter, we have never been taught to see the book of Joshua as a genocidal screed against the indigenous people of the land of Canaan. We have been taught to see ourselves as the celebrated prodigal, repentant and returning. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in the sullen older brother, pouting and prideful when we think God has wasted grace on the undeserving. So, neither have we been taught to see ourselves as John the Beheaded, speaking a disruptive and dangerous truth that will cost us our lives. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in Herod, cozying up to the gospel but caging it before it forces us to give up our way of life. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in the tipsy tyrant, drunk on power and privilege, paying for our luxuries in other people’s blood. We have never been taught to see ourselves as fawners and sycophants, happy for the opportunity to party with an autocrat and bask in the proximity to power. We have never been taught to recognize ourselves in the scheming queen, plotting and hoping for the chance to murder someone we disagree with simply because we disagree with them. But if we are to find ourselves in this story, we will have to read the Bible to confront our ego and face the world as it is, a world where sometimes the good guy loses, a world where sometimes the bad guy wins, a world where it is often difficult to tell the difference between the good guys and bad guys. The good news is that when we read the Bible this way we also find a world where a God of justice is raising the dead and tearing the tyrants from their thrones. A world where God is reconciling the good guys and bad guys, the sinners and saints, forgiving our sins, and creating one new people united in Christ. We find a world where fear is more dangerous than death, because what we lose in death we receive back in the resurrection; what we lose to fear is gone for good. Jesus is calling us to be disciples in this world of present suffering and future justice, reconciling first the good guy and bad guy in each of us, and then reconciling the good guys and bad guys all around us. Sometimes that means we get to be the hero. More often that means we are the ones who need to be defeated. In the story of the Bible we are all a bit player. The Good News of the Gospel is not a story of prevention, but a story of redemption. God is Christ and Christ is us is transforming the world by transforming us, dying and rising in us, speaking truth and suffering defeat in us. Jesus is calling us to a discipleship that recognizes John the Beheaded and Herod the Tyrant in all of us, and speaks the reconciling truth whether it costs us our head or our ego. No matter our part to play we know how the story will end, and we will all live happily ever after. But in the meantime, we can either sit at the autocrat’s table or die in his prison. Only one of these choices is the path to resurrection. Amen. 

As I read through the readings for this week, an age-old question comes to mind: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? We ll, yes. Feel free to check my physics after the sermon, but yes, if a tree falls, the waves created by the impact remain the same, even if they are unperceived. In fact, we can assume, that every tree in the petrified forest, the last of which fell 255 million years ago, did indeed make a sound even though it would take another 55 million years before the first ears would evolve to hear it. Feel free to check my paleontology after the fact as well. Further still, the energy released at the moment of creation, secularly known as the Big Bang, is called a big “bang” precisely because it would have made a sound that no one was around to hear. In our modern age, this question has taken on a different form that sounds a bit like: If I had a beautiful meal and didn’t post a pic on social media did it even happen? What about my wedding? Or my vacation? Or our family Christmas? Or my charity work? Did those happen if I didn’t post about them? In internet parlance, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” And lest you think I have come to bash social media while I am preaching to an audience on Facebook, you don’t even have to be on social media to share this feeling. We are all children of the enlightenment, the empirical age. We are a scientifically minded people. When someone makes a claim, we often need or even demand proof. In other words: evidence or it didn’t happen. When this happens we socially stratify ourselves, algorithmically silo ourselves, and partisan-ly entrench ourselves. This causes us to become disconnected from the experiences of others, from lives that aren't like our own. And when this happens, it can quickly move from a simple social understanding and claim to something deeper, more cynical. Rather than pics or it didn’t happen, we demand the right kind of suffering, or it didn’t happen: the cries of the poor become dubious, the stories of immigrants are uncompelling, the frustration of marginalized communities are met with incredulity, dismissed as hysterical fear-mongering. We quickly become deaf to the dissent of those who will have to live with the decisions we have the power to make— all because we don't have any proof in our own lives. Instead, it’s my suffering or it didn’t happen. This week, and in the weeks to come, we’ll begin to hear more from the prophets. We often think of the prophets as fortune-tellers, court magicians, like Hebrew Nostradamus. But the prophets aren't future-seers. They are truth tellers. They don't come to show us the future, they come to show us ourselves and the consequences of our intransigence. The prophets come to speak to us on behalf of the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed, the marginalized, because to do so is to speak for God. The prophets come to call our attention to the suffering of others and the responsibility of God’s people, of Jesus’ followers, to change the systems where we can and to bind up the wounds and fill the bellies in the meantime. The prophets want to give us more than proof, more than pics. The prophets call us to solidarity. The prophets want us to choose to experience the suffering we are causing, to let this experience move us to empathy, and empathy to move us to compassion. This is why God chooses prophets from obscurity, from the margins. God calls the prophets from or from within their own suffering to speak to those in power— political, social, economic. God calls these prophets because the can speak to their experience, they can preach empathy and invite compassion. We might also say that this call to hear the truth requires a posture of hospitality, generosity, and solidarity. More simply still, the prophets call us to love. This is the call Jesus places on those he sends out in our gospel this week – to be prophetic truth-tellers. He sends them to practice the love they preach and to trust that they will be received with hospitality, generosity, and solidarity. And the challenge they face is the same challenge Jesus faces in his hometown and that is that God’s truth is true, even if no one accepts or hears it. God doesn’t promise Ezekiel that everyone will love him. It seems like even God is unsure whether or not the people will listen to his message of Love and Truth. Paul has been sent as an apostle, has planted churches all over the Mediterranean, has witnessed and preformed miracles, and here he sits with a thorn in his flesh sending a second letter to this church in Corinth to tell them to stop fighting and get along. And Jesus sends the disciples out without so much as a water bottle or a stick to lean on, and gives them explicit instructions as to what they should do if one of the towns or villages doesn’t accept the good news of Love and Truth. Perhaps then the original question takes on new shape here; If we go out and tell the truth and no one accepts it, is it really true? Yes. Just as the bursting creation and the falling tree make a sound even if no one hears it; Just as the meal was amazing the wedding beautiful the vacation idylic the family Christmas straight out of Dickens and your charity work benevolent, even if no one likes and shares it, so is the Love and Truth of God real even if no one believes it. God is always sending prophets and disciples to tell us the truth whether we like it or not. God, in love, sent Jesus so that we might know the Truth and Love of God in the flesh, so that we might open our ears, our minds, and our hearts to the Word. And the hard truth about this is: there will be times when we share the Love and Truth of God and no one believes it. We may be tempted to hear that rejection as “Pics or it didn’t happen”? This may feel like our lives haven’t been proof of the Love and Truth of God? But beloved, the good news is that the Truth and Love of God can only have their fullest impact in relationship. God doesn’t send prophets into pulpits and Jesus didn’t send disciples into synagogues, each of them were sent to towns and villages, streets and homes. Because only a relationship can handle vulnerability, accountability, and the transformative power of Truth without imposition or force. This means we need long, slow, loving relationships with folks who disagree with us without “canceling” us, scolding us, or judging us. We need the Church, the people of God, communities where we can walk the path together until the path becomes clear. We need to live in neighbor-hood, a state of intentional relationship with our neighbors as we are becoming the Love and Truth of God, prophesying by our very lives. Because in knowing our neighbors we know God, and in knowing God and knowing neighbor we move from experience to empathy, and from empathy to compassion— that is, we know the way of justice, the way of Love, the way of Truth, the way of prophets and disciples, the Way of Jesus. When this happens we no longer demand proof we simply share the truth – that God loves the world and so do we. Amen. 

Have you ever been in awe? Real awe? Jaw-dropping, stop-you-in-your-tracks, speechless, breathless awe? This is how some folks describe the Grand Canyon, or the firs t time they saw the ocean. Maybe for you it was a sunset, a concert, a mountainside covered in the patchwork of fall colors, the view through a telescope or a microscope. I have felt such a sense of wonder a few times in my life. I remember this sense of awe at the vastness of the midwestern plains. For this mountain boy, the sprawling acres of grain that stretched as far as I could see in all cardinal directs terrified me. It was disorienting to have no visible frame of reference in the landscape. I had no idea that I had spent my whole life geolocating myself in relationship to mountains I had taken for granted. There was a chill in my soul from this sense of exposure before the vastness of the terrain that felt like trying to sleep with a blanket that didn’t cover my shoulders. I remember visiting Moscow and touring Red Square and the Kremlin. What struck me was the churches, their architecture, the soring ceilings, every inch covered in the images of holy men and women like the seraphim encircling the throne of God. The air was thick with incense, the smoke outlining every shaft of light. The gold of the icons caught the diffused light and reflected an other-worldly glow into the space that mingled with the scent of wine and precious oils, melting beeswax candles, and the softly murmured prayers of the faithful, and you couldn’t help but be caught up to heaven in this cloud of holy smoke. You suddenly knew exactly were God was, and it was hard to move for fear of defiling the place with my very being. I couldn’t help but recall the sixth chapter of Isaiah, when he saw the Lord and was terrified because he knew that the Lord saw him too. Isaiah falls to his knees and cries out “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the king, the God of angel armies.” But God seems undeterred. A seraph flies to Isaiah with a live coal from the altar of the Lord and touches his lips, and says, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” And the voice of the Lord calls out, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?” And Isaiah replies, “Here am I; send me.” God, in unapproachable majesty, enthroned on an inaccessible altar, attended by an army of angels, and robed in smoke, has come looking for Isaiah, not to harm, but to heal; not to reject, but to recruit; not to punish, but to pardon. Nicodemus, on the other hand, has found the mystery approachable. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, intrigued by his message and his ministry, recognizing something of God in his words and deeds. Nicodemus has his reservations. He needs more information, needs a few more answers, a little more insight. Jesus offers him vulnerability, an unknowing, questions, and mystery instead. As we take this day of the liturgical year to contemplate the ineffable mystery of the doctrine of the Trinity, we often rely on analogy, metaphor, philosophy, metaphysics, to try and nail down the specifics of what we believe and don’t believe; who belongs, and who doesn’t belong. What if, instead of seeking understanding, instead of trying to be good enough, instead of demanding doctrinal purity, instead of chasing security and control; what if we looked to wonder at the sacred mystery, expected to encounter the inexpressible, dared to hope that the unapproachable might approach us? What if the proclamation of God’s majesty and holiness shook the doorpost of our souls and the train of God’s robe filled the temple of our bodies? What if this is the point of Baptism, where the Word and water collide with flesh and bone to reconcile the saint and sinner? What if this is the point of bread and wine given to us as body and blood, consumed with unclean lips to show us that our guilt is taken away and our sin is blotted out? What if this is the whole point of worship, and prayer, and faith itself? Beloved, this is what we believe. That the unapproachable majesty of God has approached us in Jesus. That the unknowable mystery of God sat down across the table and gave God’s self away in a meal. That the almighty God of angel armies won’t lift a finger in self-defense. That the God of heaven and earth cannot be contained therein. And this mystery still comes to us in our everyday lives!! It comes to us in the love of a spouse, in the love of a child, in the love of a pet, in the love of some patch of earth. It comes to us in the fight for justice, in the non-violent resistance of evil, in the hope of ultimate redemption. It comes to us in the practice of Love. The kind of love before which we can only kneel and kiss the ground. The kind of Love that is God’s very self. The kind of love through which this world might be saved. Amen. 

The Spirit used to scare me to death! Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I grew up in a tradition that called them the Holy Ghost. But more likely, i t was because this Holy Ghost used to seem to possess the people in my church like my grandparents and they would do weird things. Things like Run around the sanctuary, Crying, And shouting, And jumping up and down. This one lady Who always sat in the same place would jump up and down in that same place so often for so many years That the floor is weak in that spot to this day. These people who, on a regular day, were plumbers and chemical plant workers and teachers and housewives, on Sundays, were caught up in an invisible wave that caused them to speak and act in ways that were at once attractive and terrifying. I wanted so badly to know this feeling, this Holy Ghost possession that would make me cry “happy tears” and fill my mouth with God’s praise. That would make me forget all about myself and the world around me so I could tell the old, old story how Jesus saved a wretch like me. But I also lived in fear as each year passed, and I never ran, or cried, or shouted, or jumped up and down, I lived in fear that I would be found out. That these people I loved and admired and longed to emulate would see that the Holy Ghost never swept me up like that. That they would know that my soul was a valley of dry bones longing for the word of the Lord to put me back together and fill me with breath. So, every year when Pentecost rolls around and we hear of that mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire and how those gathered spoke in other languages and everyone heard them speaking in their own language “As the Spirit gave them the ability” I feel this fear all over again. that somehow, rather than being possessed by the Holy Ghost, I’ve been dispossessed by the Spirit. The Disciples in today’s text have really been through a lot. They have traveled all over the Judean countryside, marched into Jerusalem in a mock parade driven the moneychangers out of the temple, seen Jesus betrayed, arrested, tried, convicted, and crucified. They have also seen Jesus’ resurrection, shared meals with him, and watched him ascend into heaven. And now, here they sit, in this room, sad, afraid, confused about what to do next. Surely they can’t take the good news about Jesus into the same world that has just crucified Jesus can they? What will they even say? And what about all of those miracles that Jesus did, and all those miracles they had done in his name? With Jesus gone, surely they can’t keep up Jesus’ ministry. In the fear, confusion, and uncertainty this tiny room in Jerusalem became the womb of the Church. These disciples became the heralds of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Filled with the windswept fire of the Spirit they preached the good news, healed many, raised the dead, young men and women prophesied, young men saw visions, old men dreamed dreams. This was the birth of the Church and the Sin, Death, and the Devil would not prevail against it. But here I feel like that kid again. I have never spoken in strange tongues or healed the sick or raised the dead or prophesied And I’m somewhere between young man and old man so I don’t know whether I should expect visions or dreams but I’m not getting either one. Surely I can’t take the good news about Jesus into the same world that crucified Jesus can I? What would I even say? And what about all of those miracles that Jesus did? Surely I can’t keep up Jesus’ ministry. But it’s into rooms like this one that God still sends that Holy Ghost, that Spirit of windswept fire to speak over our dry bones a word of resurrection. A word of power That transcends language and nationality and time and ability and makes rooms just like this one the womb of the Church. In baptism, the Spirit hovers over the waters as at creation calling forth life from the spiritually stillborn. At the table, the Spirit carries our living sacrifice to God and brings us the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in, under, and through bread and wine. And at that door the Holy Ghost is waiting to haunt the world with the Love of God. Now, to this day I am not a shouter or a crier, or a jumper, and I don’t run unless I’m being chased. And maybe you can relate. But we are burning with this Pentecostal fire, nonetheless. We are claimed by God in the waters of our baptism, and filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that descends on this assembly and on the bread and wine on this table to bring us the body of Christ. And it is the Holy Spirit that sends us out into the world to share the Love of God with those in our lives. And it has been my experience that this calling is more often than not far less obvious than tongues of fire and a mighty rushing wind. Sometimes it looks like loving a difficult child. Sometimes it looks like keeping our cool in traffic. Sometimes it looks like working the same job for 30 or 40 years to provide for your family. Sometimes it looks like baking a casserole for a funeral, or printing the bulletins for worship, or visiting a neighbor, or caring for your parents or adult children. Or finding the courage to love ourselves and each other exactly as God made us to be. This is the Pentecostal Fire that will set the world ablaze with the Love of God. This is the mighty rushing wind that blows open the doors of the church and carries the message of the Love of God to those astounded to learn that God speaks their language. You are the Church, a bush ablaze and not consumed, speaking with the voice of God in places you thought God would never go, to people you thought couldn’t hear. You are the Church, And Sin, Death, and the Devil Shall not prevail against you. Amen. 

“It is not for you to know.” It’s hard to hear such a phrase especially in our modern times. We are all the grandchildren of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, fact s, data, science. We are the products of compulsory education, most of us able to read, most of us with access to the internet, the repository of all human knowledge at our fingertips. We even have robots who will find information for us. Want to know how many teaspoons in a cup? Ask Siri. Want to hear Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Ask Alexa. Sure, there are more enduring questions that take a bit more research. Questions like, “Why is the sky blue? “What happened to the dinosaurs?” “What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?” A trip to the library, a good book on the subject, maybe a well put-together documentary, and we feel like our question is answered. Unfortunately, we are also seeing the collapse of the idea of expertise, a demotion of education and experience in a given field of study in favor of what can be quickly googled, especially if the answers we get from social media and internet forums give us answers that are more convenient, fit better into our way of thinking, or provide a sense of control over the seeming random chaos of the universe. But then there are those nagging, faith-shaking, heartbreaking questions that Google can’t answer. “Why do some babies just die while the elderly languish in pain and confusion?” “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” “When is Jesus coming back to fix this mess? What is taking so long?” After Jesus’ resurrection, his followers ask, “So, when are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel? When are you going to throw off the shackles of Rome? When are you going to get revenge for what they did to you? For what they do to us?” Jesus says, “It is not for you to know.” I’m sure they wanted to ask, “Why can’t we know?” I know I want to ask that. Jesus says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” In the original Greek, that word we translated as “witnesses” can also be translated as “martyrs.” Jesus says, “you can’t know when the Kingdom will be restored, but I’ll give you the power to be martyrs.” Worst. Consolation prize. Ever. So much of this life is unknowing. And so much of our time as a species is spent in pursuit of knowing. We want easy answers, or at the very least, some concrete resolution to those deeper questions that linger in our souls like unresolved chords. And we will settle for cliches, like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God must have needed another angel.” Or we opt for intellectual terminus, like, “You should never question God.” What if we saw Jesus’ answer less as the withholding of information and more as a release from the need to know? What if, instead of trying to find answers, we leaned into the uncertainty? What if we allowed mystery to be mystery? What if this unknowing were a fundamental part of our faith? How can we cultivate patience in the unknowing? What practices can we learn to help us to be witnesses, martyrs, of the unknowing? I think instead of thinking we have, or need, or are entitled to, neat little answers that perfectly resolve all our questions, we can admit that we don’t know. Even that some things are unknowable. We can learn to hear the questions of our friends and family, even the questions of our own hearts, less as an opportunity to be an expert, to be the hero, the fixer, and more as an invitation to bear witness to the grief, pain, confusion, anger— at the heart of the question. We can practice our core values, hospitality, generosity, and solidarity, by welcoming the question, giving our time and attention to the questioner, and living in solidarity with the grief, pain, and uncertainty at the heart of the mystery. We can say, “I don’t know, but…” “I don’t know why babies die or the elderly linger, but I believe in a God who is with us in our suffering, and I will stay with you too.” “I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, but I believe in a God who is bending the arch of the moral universe toward justice, and I will fight alongside you until that justice comes.” “I don’t know when Jesus is coming back to fix the mess the world is in, but I believe in a God who comes to us in our very lives, whether in grief or in celebration, and will give us the power to endure this life with patience while we work toward a better one until Christ comes again.” It is not for us to know. It is for us to trust. It is for us to practice the justice and grace we hope for until the kingdom comes in its fullness. It is for us to be free from having to know, from needing to know, from feeling entitled to know. It is for us to live with wonder and awe. It is for us to embrace the mystery. It is for us to give God the right of expertise, to let God be the One who knows. It is for us to be Spirit-filled witnesses and martyrs of the trustworthiness of God in Christ. But, It is not for us to know. Amen. 

A friend once asked me how and when I got into cigars. When I was in college, my best friend and roommate was a pack-a-day smoker. My dad was the same. I worked in a restaurant that opened its doors at 11pm to cater to the after-the-club crowd, most of whom were smokers. So much so, that by 5am, when the restaurant closed, smoke had filled the room from the 20ft ceiling to about my mid-sternum. I would sit down at some point in the evening to role silverware or just to rest my feet, and when I stood up, I would realize I was walking in a cloud of smoke. If you can’t beat’em, join’em. So, I began to have the occasional cigar. Not the Swisher Sweets or some other gas station refuse, but premium, hand-rolled, imported cigars from Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. I even had a few Cubans on my honeymoon in the Bahamas, but don’t tell the Treasury Department. It’s not something I do every day, but about once a week, I will have a good cigar, and listen to the birds sing the wind shuffle through the trees, and find a sacred moment to just be still and reconnect with myself and with God. This friend who asked me about cigars told me about their similar love for craft beers. It’s not something he can afford all the time, but another friend of his will leave him one in the church fridge from time to time only wanting to know what he thought of it in return. Most often, my friend will share a craft beer with his two adult sons, who now live and go to school elsewhere, and enjoy spending time with their dad when they can. Once, one of his boys brought home a beer that cost $35 per bottle. My friend was dumfounded by the price tag, and could hardly bring himself to open the bottle. But this was a gift from his son, and not something my friend would have ever bought for himself, so he opened it, savored it, and was delighted to find it was the best beer he’d ever had. And it was made all the better by sharing the experience with his son. This story reminded me of all those stories in the Old Testament where the saints of old would find a meeting place with God in a wilderness, in the desert, on a mountain top, and they would pour out costly oil or water, also a precious commodity in the desert, to anoint that place, make a pile of rocks, and give the place a name in Hebrew that meant something like “God met me here” or “God provides” or “God is my deliverer.” These folks, flawed as they were, are known to us as saints precisely because of their ability to look at a pile of rocks, a patch of dirt, at craggy hilltop and recognize the presence of their Creator, hidden in, under, and with the common stuff of earth. Or like the woman in the house of Simon the leper who broke open an alabaster jar filled with nard, a very costly oil, and began to anoint Jesus’ head just days before his death. This woman recognized her God in the spindly, exhausted, dusty body of Jesus. In our first reading, Peter has now joined the ranks of these seers of the Divine. Earlier in the same chapter as our reading for today, Peter has had a vision, of all sorts of unclean animals lowered from Heaven in a sheet. A voice tells him to “Rise, kill, and eat.” But Peter is an observant Jew, and even a voice from heaven wasn’t going to convince him to violate the law of God. It took ol’ hard-headed Peter having the same vision three times and the voice telling him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” to stop arguing with a voice from heaven. And while he is still scratching his head, he gets an invitation to come and preach the gospel to a Roman centurion, Cornelius and his family. At the Spirit’s urging, Peter goes, preaches the gospel, and Cornelius and all his household were baptized. Then in our reading, Peter has preached to other Gentiles in the region, and is dumfounded again to find that these Gentiles already have the Holy Spirit, even without being baptized. So, Peter baptizes them too. Peter, like the woman with the alabaster jar of nard, like Abraham spared from sacrificing Isaac, like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, Peter has found God in an unexpected place. And God, like the woman, like Abraham, like Jacob, had poured out a sacrifice. God had poured out God’s very self, and Peter had learned to see through the common stuff of earth to the God beneath the God within the God born through what Peter had always thought profane. And Peter’s response was to reply in kind. Peter’s response was to pour out the gift of Holy Baptism, the water and the Word, to call sacred what God had already sanctified. God had already included what Peter didn’t know he had been given the authority to include. God had moved the boarder, expanded the circle, and Peter was just catching up. And God is still moving the borders. Just this week, The United Methodist Church heard that same Spirit that called to Peter, call to them to embrace the LGBTQIA community and they heeded the call. The assembly voted overwhelmingly to remove from their book of discipline the language that forbade same-sex marriage and LGBTQIA clergy. When the church examined the life and faith of Queer Christians, they, like Peter among the Gentiles, discovered that God had already gone beyond them, had already included these faithful disciples and had already poured out the Holy Spirit. All that was left for the Church to do, was to add the signs and symbols of God’s blessing and rejoice in the expansion of God’s reign. This command to love one another, is the call to find these sacred meeting places in the faces of our neighbors. God is already there, removing all the barriers that we have created to keep us apart. And what we are often called to sacrifice is the barrier of our own pride. Like my friend with the $35 beer. His son already knew that this time with his dad was sacred, a holy friendship, a time and a place not promised forever, but a fleeting moment to be savored, enjoyed, and marked with the sacrifice of something precious. His son already knew, and it took my friend a moment to catch up, to recognize it too, and to share in the sacrifice. Beloved, you are this sacred too. You are the stuff of earth into which God has poured God’s very self. You are the meeting place of the sacred and the profane, a saint and a sinner, the dust of earth and the breath of God. And it is on this meeting place that the Church has poured out water and the word, and given you a name. It is in you, in your very body, that the Church is called to find and to remind you of these holy moments of God meeting God until we all have seen the face of Christ, in the mirror and in our neighbor, and knelt to kiss this holy ground. Christ now invites us to this meal, and raises a cup more costly than we can imagine and yet, more freely given than we could dare to hope to share with us this sacred moment that we might know like the saints of old “God met us here.”  Amen.

There’s an age-old truth about folks in the South. We have no idea how to handle the snow. A forecast of even flurries sends folks scrambling for milk, bread, and egg s. Many have tried to make sense of this phenomenon. You’d think there was an old wives’ tale that said if you just make enough French toast you’ll survive the snowstorm. Now, we southerners know that what separates us from our Yankee siblings when it comes to snow is the state and local infrastructure to handle the clearing of roads, and the social infrastructure to equip every home and business with a snowblower and deicer. And being stuck at home without staple food items seems unwise. Much of the way I learned the Christian faith operated by the same mentality. There was a coming catastrophe and you’d better make the necessary transactions to weather the impending storm. “Get right, or get left” the saying went. Make peace with God while there’s still time or you’ll be left behind in the Rapture, and condemned in the judgment. The majority of the theology the hymnody, and the sermons sounded like crazed meteorologists warning of impending doom and pleading with you to take cover by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Sermons on today’s gospel would have focused on the pruning of branches and the burning of branches, a dire warning for those who refused to abide, that is those who did not accept Jesus as their personal savior. Those are the ones God will cut off, gather up, and throw in the fire. So, you’d better turn or burn. In college, I joined an evangelical movement on campus where this fear was more underground, becoming the subtext for evangelism and not the pretext. We didn’t lead with fear, we led with love. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” was the beginning of our pitch. You catch more flies with honey, after all. But. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but… you are sinful, damned by a righteous God to an eternity of conscious torment as punishment for a state of being you inherited from great-grandparents so distant we only know them by myth and legend. We told folks, “God loves you, but you are sinful and cannot know God’s love or plan for your life unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior, and remember, if you don’t, God has a second plan for conscious eternal punishment.” We would have read our first reading from Acts as a blueprint of sorts, studying it after the fact, like a football coach analyzing a winning game for clues on how to replicate the experience. I went to training after training, year after year, long after I was a student at the college, trying to understand how to follow the Spirit’s leading, how to help “unbelievers” understand the scripture, how to explain the “plan of salvation” and why folks needed Jesus to save them. All of my theology was based on fear, fear that time was running out, that some would die without knowing Jesus, that I might be responsible for their unknowing if I didn’t work harder, wasn’t bolder, didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to share God’s love and God’s wrath. But, then I found Luther. Once I started reading Luther, and his explanation of the scriptures, it was our second reading that became the frame of my theology. God is love. That’s it. From this simple yet universal principle, I could reread John 15, and know that we already are branches, and what God prunes from us are the already dead, unhelpful, unfruitful pieces of our lives that keep us from knowing that we are loved and that keep us from loving each other. Jesus’ exhortation to “abide” is an exhortation to give up our fear, the fear for ourselves before God and the fear for others before God, for God IS love, and there is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear, and God abides in us and we abide in God. Further, we can see that Philip’s obedience to the Spirit didn’t so much win a convert as help someone on the margins of God’s people find a place in the center. This man was a eunach, a third gender in Hebrew thinking and theology, excluded from ritual participation in Jewish life. This man is Black, a Gentile from Ethiopia, not a Hebrew descendant from Judea. Yet, this man had traveled from Ethiopia, to Jerusalem to worship at Passover. This gentile traveled some 1600 miles by chariot, knowing he was not allowed in the temple, happy even to stand outside the gates to worship the God of Abraham. And here he is reading the scroll of Isaiah. the very prophet who promises in chapter 56 that eunuchs and foreigners who hold fast to God’s covenant would be given a name and an inheritance in the house of God. From the frame of Love, this gender-non-conforming Black man, who loved God enough to ride 1600 miles just to be able tailgate at the temple during passover, became the fulfillment of prophesy himself. He couldn’t receive circumcision, for obvious reasons— and if they’re not obvious, ask me after worship and I’ll explain it to you privately— so, despite being a believer in the God of Israel, he could never really be Jewish. But when he sees water and asks Phillip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” the obvious answer is, nothing. Nothing would prevent him from being baptized! This African man from a sexual minority who had been excluded from temple worship and full participation the Jewish life, was already included in the heart and mind of God. He returned home to became the father of the Ethiopian Church, and we still retell his story in ‘the house of God’ to this very day. God is love. We do not have to worry about whether we are abiding in God, because God is abiding in us. We do not have to be afraid because God is love and perfect love casts out fear. We do not have to “accept Jesus as our personal savior” because there is not such thing as a “personal savior” and, as I John tells us, “in this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” We aren’t saved by accepting, believing, trusting that God loves us. Rather, because God is love, we are already included in God’s work of salvation, and all God asks of us is to accept, believe, trust that this is true. In other words, we are to abide. to rest, to relax into the good news that God is love. A love we can give away without proposition without transaction. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. We are freed to share the good news of the Love God is, with no ifs, ands, of buts. We are free to find those folks still on the margins of God’s people and love them right into the center because God first loved us. And Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as Jesus is, so are we in this world. You are already branches of the true vine. You are already loved, because God is love. We can rest assured that there is no coming storm, for which we had better be prepared. We don’t have to get right or get left. All that is left to do is abide, to relax into the Love God is until we become love too. Amen. 

Disclaimer: I am going to say some things that may challenge you. If you have been with me in Christian Conversations, in the Monday Bible Study, or in our Lenten Book Study, you will have heard me say these things before. As always, I view every sermon as an invitation to further conversation. If you have questions, complaints, comments, or would just like to discuss these issues further, I will be happy to join you at lunch, to make an appointment for coffee or a meal, or to sit with you at the time and place of your choosing. I saw a clip this week of an interview with a young man describing his experience of coming out. The experience was very painful, because it meant that he would have to leave his religion, Mormonism, and as a result, it likely also meant leaving his family. When he didn’t hear from his mother for a few weeks, he assumed that he’d been correct. But then his mom reached out to say she was also leaving Mormonism. He was stunned, and when he called her to hear how she had come to this conclusion, she said that she couldn’t be a part of a church where her children weren’t welcome. In this young man’s retelling of the conversation his mother had said to him, “If you’re going to hell, we’re coming with you.” The fear of Hell has long been a tool of many religions, Christianity among them. Teachers and preachers of Hell have used this doctrine to scare folks into good behavior, or at the very least, into submission to the authority of the institution. Mothers don’t have to be taught to love their children. Mothers do have to be taught to reject their children in order to keep their good standing within a religious community. We kept folks in line by keeping them worried that if they don’t think like us, don’t live like us, don’t worship and pray like us, then they cannot be saved— or, even worse, that we will withhold salvation from them. That word, ‘saved,’ sort of begs the question, “From what? Or, for what?” And we have often answered that question in ways that preserved our power. We said God is coming to judge the living and the dead, sending the righteous into everlasting peace and consigning the unrighteous to everlasting damnation, conscious eternal torment, separation from God— in a word, Hell. We have heard preachers and teachers of Hell tell us that verses like Acts 4:12, There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved— we have heard them explain that we have to make some kind of a decision, that we have to opt into salvation or opt out of Hell, like we are signing up for some kind of spiritual insurance policy instead of being invited into a relationship with the Living God. We heard them warn us that only the church has the truth, and only the church can forgive your sins, and outside the church there is no way to be saved. But I have good news. The Hell you fear does not exist. Hell does not exist in the scriptures, except by mistranslation. It did not exist in the imagination of the authors of the New Testament, except by our misunderstanding. It does not now, nor did it then, exist in Jewish theology. And it does not exist in reality, except by our own making— that is, if there is a Hell to be feared, it is the conditions we create or accept for our neighbors and ourselves. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in the Gaza strip, where children survive a war only to be starved to death. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in Ukraine where tens of thousands of children have been shipped off to foster care in Russia; it is in Tigray where rape and starvation are weapons of war, it is in Sudan where civilians are caught in the crossfire between two warring generals. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in churches where mothers have to choose between loving God and loving their children. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is watching your child suffer through an addiction, or weather a divorce, or fight cancer, or anything else you’re powerless to stop. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sitting in a cafeteria hungry, the air thick with food and the laughter of peers, while your stomach growls because you have unpaid lunch debt. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is miscarrying the child you very much wanted in the bathroom of the ER because it is illegal to treat you until you’re almost dead. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sleeping in the car with two kids, because you job can’t pay for both childcare and a place to sleep at night. So, if we are being saved, what are we being saved from and what are we being saved for? Well, instead of ‘saved’ that word is probably better translated as “liberated” or “delivered. The term does not imply an individual inner sense of spiritual freedom, nor is it the promise of heaven hereafter. Rather it is a real, lived experience of liberation from oppressive and repressive circumstances. Those who would use the name of Jesus to promise you a sense of spiritual freedom in the great by and by while allowing you to remain in oppressive circumstances in the here and now, has taken the name of God in vain. Those who would use the Name of Jesus to promise you individual atonement and absolve you of any responsibility for the hell in which you allow others to live has blasphemed the name of Christ and distorted the Gospel. These preachers and teachers of Hell are hired hands and wolves in sheep’s clothing. No doubt some of the preachers and teachers have preached and taught this bad theology in good faith. But that has not blunted the impact of the doctrine of Hell teaching us, as one preacher put it, that we could “pray our way out of a problem we have behaved ourselves into.” Beloved, if the church wants to preach salvation, we have got to get the message right. Jesus has come to save us, not from some future Hell, but from all the hell we create or endure in the present. God in Christ has already secured the future, already won the victory over sin, death, and the devil, already redeemed all our pain and suffering. God has already saved us from an uncertain and terrifying future. And God has saved us for life and love and community in the present. God has saved us for preaching and teaching the good news of God’s universal, liberating love. God has saved us for the work of deliverance and liberation in solidarity with those going through hell in this life. Peter is in the hot seat in Acts precisely because he has saved a man from his illness in the name of Jesus and his response when questioned by the very people profiting from a system of domination was to declare that in the name of Jesus he had been sent to proclaim and enact liberation from systems of domination. First John teaches us that Love is our common calling, asking, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? Little Children let us love, not in words or speech, but in truth and action. And the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Good Shepherd has descended to the dead, has robbed any idea of Hell of its power, and gives us the power and authority in his name to do the same here and now. The Good Shepherd has seen what the world has done to us, the Hell we have created for each other, and says to us, “If you’re going through Hell, I’m coming with you.” This is what we are being saved for, to love our neighbors, not in words or speech, but in reality and in liberation. Let us love in Hospitality, in Generosity, and in Solidarity. The Good News the church should proclaim is not an individual insurance policy against eternal damnation. Let the message of the Church be this; If you’re going through Hell, in Jesus’ name, we’re coming with you. We are coming to rob hell of its power, to liberate you in this life, and to call you toward the next. We are laying down our bad theology, we are laying down our claim to power, we are laying down any doctrines rooted in fear, we are laying down any need to choose between family and faith; we are laying down our lives as individuals to take up our life as a community. We are taking up the name of Jesus to not only preach deliverance but to make deliverance a reality. We are giving up on every version of church where any of God’s children are not welcome. In a word, we have come to love. Love is the beating heart of the gospel. Love is the very nature of God revealed to us in Christ. Love is our origin and love is our destination. The hell we have feared does not exist. But if you’re going through hell in the here and now, we’re coming with you. Amen.

In our increasingly digital world, it is getting harder and harder to avoid being scammed. “You’ve won a brand new car! I just need your Social Security number, a vali d credit card, and your mother’s maiden name to verify your identity.” Or an email from an all-too-official looking address, bearing the seal of a government agency you’ve never heard of, says you have unclaimed property, but they need to have access to your bank account to transfer the money directly to you. We’ve all heard sales pitches, multi-level marketing schemes, and fishing scams to the point that I am genuinely surprised that any of these tactics still work on the general public. One born every minute I guess. As a general rule, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. And maybe that’s what we would have thought, way back in the first century, when someone tried to tell us of the resurrection. Maybe we would have received the good news with a raised eyebrow and suspicious glance at the folks next to us. “Raised from the dead, huh? What do I look like; an easy mark? What’s your angle, anyway? You know they killed him, right? You wanna be next? I don’t!” Each of our lessons for today tell us of the apostles or Jesus himself trying to persuade skeptical onlookers that the resurrection is not some marketing ploy, a publicity stunt, or conspiracy theory. Peter has commanded a disabled man to rise up and walk in the name of Jesus. The crowd is dubious and Peter explains that not only is the healing real, but so is the faith that comes in the name of Jesus, so is the promise of repentance and forgiveness, and they can trust it because they just say it with their own eyes. In I John, we are told that we can call ourselves Children of God, because that is what we are. We are told that we will be righteous when Jesus is revealed, because we will see him as he is— that is, not as we may have imagined, not has we have feared, not in some fantasy, vision, or nightmare, but in reality, flesh and blood reality. Speaking of flesh and blood reality, that is exactly what happens in the gospel; Jesus appears in their midst of those gathered in the upper room, and they are terrified. They saw him crucified, they watched him die. Is this a ghost? “No,” Jesus says, “because ghosts don’t have flesh and bone, like you can see I have. They don’t have empty stomachs, either, for that matter; Y’all got anything to eat around here?” Half scared and half overjoyed, they give him some fish and he eats it. And if we’re being honest, its maybe just as hard to believe all this resurrection business in the 21 st century as it was in the first century. The good news doesn’t seem all that good. It barely sounds like news. The proclamation of the resurrection in our day isn’t met with a “How can this be?” but with a “Who cares?” or “So what?” But the news of the resurrection is real, whether or not we receive it as good. To some folks, even if it is real, it sounds more like bad news than good. Repentance sure seems like bad news if you’re the one being asked to give up the very things that resurrection is bringing to an end, things from which your benefiting in the here and now. Repentance is a call to change our perception of reality and take responsibility for the role we’ve played in making things the way they are. Once Jesus finishes his fish, the gospel says that he explained the scriptures to them opened their minds to understand it, and then called them to preach repentance in his name— that is, to open the hearts and minds of others with this good news and call them to give up all the ways they benefit from the way things are— because they had been witnesses of these things. They had seen these things with their own eyes. They could see reality as it is. With our minds opened and our hearts changed, repentance is simply coming to terms with reality as it is because we can see it as it is. We can call ourselves children of God, because that is what we are. We can grow in our likeness to Jesus because we can see him as he is— because we can see ourselves as we are and through the good news we can see ourselves as we will be. And rightly seeing things as they are, we are called to participate in the making right of the world while we wait for the fullness of justice to come at the resurrection. The good news of the resurrection is not too good to be true. And since the resurrection is true, so is the call to repentance, the call to change our hearts and minds to perceive reality as it is, the call to take responsibility for the way things are, and to participation in God’s remaking of reality into what it will be. The resurrection will confront us before it comforts us. It will scare us to death before it calls us to life. It will raise our eyebrows before it raises our consciousness. The resurrection is not too good to be true. It is not a scam or a conspiracy theory. It is the call to perceive reality as it is and to hope in what it will be. So open your minds and change your hearts and you too will be witnesses of these things. Amen.