Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2024

I heard a story on the radio yesterday that asked the question “what was the worst year to be alive on the earth in recorded human history?” The story originally aired in January of 2022, right on the heels of the pandemic, and the question had been spurred by the hosts trying to decide which year had been worse, 2020 or 2021. The host then wondered which was the worst year of all years, the year it would have been the worst to be alive. After some research, he came to the conclusion that the worst year to be alive on earth was approximately 536 CE. Quoting research done by a team who had discovered concurrent phenomena in about the year 536, and then expanding the research to other civilizations around the globe to see if they were experiencing the same thing. Their research discovered that, in fact, there was a nearly global and simultaneously occurring experience that made 536, along with the rest of that decade, arguably the worst time to be alive in human history. It seems that a chain of volcanic explosions coupled with debris in the stratosphere leftover from Haley’s comet the year before, made the sun appear bluish in color, preventing its warmth, and plunging the planet into perpetual winter from February of 536 to June of 537. Yellow ash fell over China like alien snow. Crops failed from Scandinavia, to Syria, to Korea. The Mayan Empire, in what historians call the classic period, has a smaller documented period called the ‘classic period hiatus’ where in the Mayans stopped keeping records for roughly the same period of time. The world over, crops failed and famine ensued. As fields lay fallow, rodent moved closer to human populations. Without the sun, already malnourished humans produced less Vitamin D, and their weakened immune systems succumbed to diseases. Those who didn’t die of starvation, died of disease. Entire Swedish villages were abandoned en mass. Ireland recorded a “failure of bread.” A Roman official recounts being unable to see shadows at midday. A Syrian writer recounts that the birds died from the prolonged winter and lack of food. Desperate for food, people began to butcher corpses for meat in China. To date, the 530s CE is the coldest decade in the last 2300 years. A time without warmth or shadow, without food or birds, with blue sun and yellow snow. Honestly, is there anything we take for granted more than the sun? A vail of dust which caused a temperature drop between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees Celsius was enough to cause mass death across the planet in just 15 months, with ripples that spanned the reminder of the decade. The sun is a constant, to the point that the likelihood of the sunrise tomorrow is a euphemism for certainty. With the exception of that one decade 1500 years ago, of course. The pharaohs would rule forever until they didn’t. The Roman Empire would last for eternity, until it collapsed. Pompeii counted on Mt. Vesuvius to be a silent constant of the idyllic scenery, until it exploded and killed everyone. The Library at Alexandria was a wonder of the world, until it burned. And the Jewish people would offer sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem, until both Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. The Gospel of Mark is most likely written in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. The Jewish people, already scattered across the Roman Empire, would have to find a new way to worship, to make atonement, to orient themselves in the world. Jewish followers of Jesus, already differentiating themselves from Jewish worship practices, weren’t sure what to make of this development. Non-Jewish followers of Jesus were likely even less sure what to make of this. Mark is writing his gospel to the gentile followers of Jesus, who are trying to make sense of following this Jewish guy who is the son of the Jewish God, whose house was just destroyed. The gentile gods of the Roman pantheon would never let something like that happen. Seems pretty weak sauce for a deity. So as Mark writes, presuming that Jesus must have known what would happen in Jerusalem, he records a conversation to that effect between Jesus and the disciples. This gives Jesus the chance to address the fears and concerns of Mark’s audience directly. What are they to make of the destruction of the house of God? Well, stuff happens, to paraphrase another famous saying. Institutions fail, temples crumble, empires rise and fall, kingdoms rise against kingdoms, there will be wars and rumors of wars, there will be famines and earthquakes, blue sunlight and yellow snow. But this is not the end. If you are even a passive observer of the news, you may be able to relate to the disciples’ sense of tectonic shift in the institutions and individuals they once took for granted. We see in our churches a decline in influence and attendance. We see dysfunction and chaos in our government. We see our children gunned down in school. We see monster hurricanes, devastating wildfires earthquakes from fracking, lead-poisoned municipal water supplies, domestic terrorism, the threat of global nuclear war, and a thousand personal tragedies that never make headlines, but tear our lives apart, nonetheless. When, Lord, will the treatments start to work? When, Lord, will these pews be full again? When, Lord, will my daughter come home? What does it look like, Lord, to pay all of my bills every month? What does it look like, Lord, to be free from addiction? What does it look like, Lord, to live without fear? It is in exactly this uncertainty, Precisely this anxiety, Specifically this foreboding, That Jesus meets the disciples With hope and honesty. Jesus teaches the disciples that stuff happens, and no matter how terrible things look, no matter how much things hurt, no matter how dire their circumstances become, this is not the end. False messiahs will come, This is not the end. Many will be led astray, This is not the end. Wars, and natural disaster, and hunger will all threaten to kill them. This is not the end. In fact, Jesus himself Would be betrayed, and arrested, and wrongly convicted, and beaten, and humiliated, and killed, and buried. This is not the end. No, what feels like death, what looks like destruction, and what hurts like. Hell. Itself, is just. the beginning. Birth pangs, Jesus says, As though he’s trying to tell them The pain means it’s time to push, Because there’s new life on the other side. The promise hidden in this text Is that when the temple is destroyed God is set loose. No stone can hold the God of the Universe. And, In just 6 days from this conversation, the disciples would find that no stone could hold Jesus either. Beloved, when we find ourselves in the grip of fear, when we struggle to find hope in the headlines, when we can’t see past the diagnosis, can’t muster confidence in our institutions, can’t wait for this time, this season, this struggle to Just. Be. Over. Jesus meets us in exactly this uncertainty, precisely this anxiety, specifically this foreboding, and teaches us that no matter how terrible things look, no matter how much things hurt, no matter how dire our circumstances become, this is not the end. Illness may come, But it is not the end. Our system of government may crumble and fail. But this is not the end. Wars, and natural disaster, and hunger will all threaten to kill you, But this is not the end. Beloved, God is redeeming our pain, bringing new life and new creation through Jesus. God remakes us in the waters of baptism, And nourishes us in the Eucharist to remind us that though we are spiritually stillborn and continually given to sin, we are reborn and redeemed from our self-destruction by the self-sacrifice of Christ. We are called to live this life, with all its pain and heartache, in the confidence that for every death we die there is a resurrection. Jesus invites us to be midwives of this new creation, bearing witness to each other’s pain, holding each other’s hands, reminding each other to breathe, and promising that even if this kill us, This is not the end. Birth pangs are the beginning of our work, not the ending. We are the descendants of survivors, resilient men and women who endured the vail of dust and the cold, blue sun. We are the inheritors of the apostles and martyrs, who weathered the collapse of sacred institutions and followed the Holy Spirit from the ruble of the temple to the rock on which Christ would found his church. I have no idea what the future will bring. Likely, we will have no idea just what we are taking for granted until we are standing in the cold, blue sunlight of some terrifying tomorrow. In that day without food or birds or shadows, remember you are midwives of a new reality and the time has come. There is work to do to get to the new life on the other side. Amen.

It has been very difficult to watch TV, to peruse social media, to listen to the radio to have a conversation with a friend, or the person behind us in the check-out lin e, that doesn’t turn to the news. What a week it has been. A community divided, swirling rumors, some locked in their homes from fear, others giddy with delight. In case you haven’t heard,… 43 monkeys escaped the Alpha Genesis research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina, and are still on the loose. [1] The facility says all the monkeys are healthy females, bred for use in research facilities across the country. An employee left a door unlocked during feeding time, and eventually the whole family group escaped into the surrounding canopy. The facility assures the public that they are not a danger, but highly skittish, and will flee if approached, making them harder to catch. The Associated Press quotes a long-time researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder who begs to differ. She says these monkeys, rhesus macaques, are dangerous in groups and will turn violent to defend their family group. The facility has been fined by the USDA several times, partly for previous escapes of 26 monkeys in 2014 and 19 more in 2019. For that matter, the facility is home to some 6700 rhesus macaques while the town of Yamassee is home to only 1100 people. The AP characterized a conversation with University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestriperi, author of Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World, as follows: “The animals are very family oriented, siding with relatives when fights break out. And they’re adept at building political alliances in the face of threats from other monkeys. But they can be painful to watch. Monkeys with lower status in the hierarchy live in a constant state of fear and intimidation.” “In some ways,” Maestripieri said, “they kind of represent some of the worst aspects of human nature.” This is likely because we share 93% of our DNA with the rhesus macaque. It is only the other 7% that separates the human from the beast. And it’s in that 7% where things get messy. When we hear reports of desperate men, women, and children fleeing their own country to seek asylum in the United States, on the one hand, we are moved with pity that these people are fleeing such terrible circumstances, and on the other we are scared of what this will mean for us, for our country. We tend to be inundated with these types of heart-wrenching stories and moral conundrums to a point of emotional fatigue. This is where that 7% kicks in. Compassion fatigue affects healthcare workers, and social workers, and counselors, and the clergy; all of the “helping professions.” Meeting wave after wave of terrible stories and inconceivable circumstances can cause a person to sort of go numb to their own emotion and it becomes much harder to empathize, to see the people and not just their situation. Then the other 93% kicks in, and we become inseparable from the beast. Perhaps, you have found yourselves there. It is terribly easy to shut off one’s emotions, to become invulnerable, or, at least to convince ourselves that we are invulnerable. We seal the boarders. We buy more guns. We convince ourselves that the poor are not our fault and not our problem. But then, lest we be thought heartless beasts, we send our thoughts and prayers, we bow our heads for a moment of silence, and then we go about our business of making sure we are safe and secure. We spiritualize the teachings of Jesus and convince ourselves that, somehow, we can leave our secular selves at the sanctuary door and put on our church selves for an hour like Mister Rogers’ cardigan and sneakers, and somehow fool Jesus— if not ourselves— into thinking we love our neighbors with a simple costume change. So, when we hear passages like this one today, we glide right over Jesus’ warning to the scribes, thinking that, clearly, Jesus is talking to someone else. I know in my own head I think of the Creflo Dollars and the Kenneth Copelands and the Jesse Duplantises who prey on the economically depressed and promise that if they will help pay for a new jet then God will reward them. These folks have covered themselves not with robes, but with self-assumed titles, as though calling oneself Reverend makes one deserving of reverence. But we tend not to examine our own lives, and the ways in which we have spiritualized the words of Jesus in order to avoid self-sacrifice. In today’s gospel, Jesus warns his hearers of those scribes who would use boisterous displays of public piety to cover up their greed and self-aggrandizement. These scribes would use their religious authority as a pretext for the exploitation of the most vulnerable members of their society. As this passage continues, we see Jesus sit down “Opposite the treasury” drawing a contrast between the contributions made by the wealthy and the contribution made by a poor widow. Jesus says the widow gave “all she had to live on,” whereas the wealthy had only given out of their abundance. At a first read, This passage probably feels all too familiar. Jesus says, “Your religion is neither a status symbol nor a free pass to do as you please.” Jesus says, “These rich folks gave their leftovers, but this widow gave everything she had.” It’s really easy to think, “this doesn’t apply to me.” It’s really easy to intellectualize this into a theological maxim, or over-spiritualize the passage until it has no bearing on how I live my everyday life. Jesus sits down in the middle of this passage And invites us to sit with him. Jesus sat down “opposite the treasury” This is probably better translated “in opposition to the treasury.” Jesus opposes and exposes the system that allows the scribes to “devour widow’s houses” while widows are left with nothing to eat. Jesus points out that these “religious folks” are little more that macaques in Mr. Rogers’ cardigans. Jesus is opposed to the temple treasury, having spent the entire day prior preventing anyone from buying or selling in the temple and follows this teaching in the temple with a teaching about the temple, telling his disciples it will be destroyed, stone by stone. Jesus is opposed to the system that made the scribes wealthy and well-respected without caring for the widows. Our first reading tells us how God cared for the widow of Zarephath, her son, and Elijah, by calling all three to trust that God will provide. The appointed Psalm for this morning, Psalm 146, tells us directly, “Do not put your trust in princes,… the LORD… gives justice to those who are oppressed, And food to those who are hungry. … the LORD sustains the orphan and the widow.” Beloved, This is the good news for us this day, too. Just as Jesus did not extol the system that asked the woman to give all she had, Jesus lifts up the faith of this woman whose desperate dependence on God for her “daily bread” freed this woman to give all she had. Jesus is calling us by his own self-sacrifice, by his body and blood on the table to pour out our lives for the most vulnerable among us. This means we must examine the way we participate in our political and economic systems, asking, ‘Does this politician or this party support caring for the most vulnerable among us?’ ‘Does this politician claim to be a Christian as a pretext for taking the food out of the mouths of the most vulnerable in our society?’ It means examining our investments. ‘Is my money tied to systems that profit from foreclosing homes? ‘Use of prison labor? ‘Abuse of the environment? ‘Propagate mistrust and anxiety? ‘Rob my neighbors of dignity and bodily autonomy?’ It means asking ourselves ‘Am I practicing a desperate dependence on God, Or am I giving God my leftovers?’ By our baptism, God has swept us up in God’s plan to care for our neighbors. We are practicing an intellectual dishonesty if we presume we can love God without loving our neighbors, or that we can love our neighbors and bear no responsibility for their well-being. Further, we, like those scribes, are risking the greater condemnation, by participating in systems that marginalize or commodify people for profit. We are like macaques in Mr. Rogers’ cardigan, hoping we can make up that 7% difference by at least appearing to be human. Beloved, we are called by our baptism to share in the humanity of Christ and our neighbors by devoting everything we have in service to the solidarity of God to give justice to those who are oppressed, food to those who hunger, freedom to captives, and care for the most vulnerable among us. This is what separates us from the beasts; a common humanity, shared with Christ and neighbor, and which transcends any familial or political bonds. It is animals, common apes, who will follow a misguided leader toward what feels like freedom without knowing the danger ahead. But we have the good fortune of that other 7%, the good fortune of a humanity shared with Christ, if we will only use it. Amen. [1] https://apnews.com/article/monkeys-escape-alpha-genesis-south-carolina-640eb78119c66b88a418ccd1e361318e 

When our family moved to South Carolina to begin seminary in 2016, we made the decision to send Zion to a Catholic school rather than the school across the street fro m the seminary. We had been advised by the spouse of a fellow seminarian who had taught there the year before that we should NOT send our son there. Her experience was so terrible that she left the profession of teaching altogether. One of the things about this arrangement is that Zion took religion classes from a Catholic perspective, and then he would leave third grade, and come and sit with us in a master’s level course studying the Gospels in Greek at a Lutheran seminary. For the most part this is a wonderful thing, and when there is a disagreement, Jennifer and I have the opportunity to have a conversation about the nuanced differences between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. This is good for Zion, too. He is still in Catholic school, and being the son of not one, but TWO seminary educated pastors, Zion is kind of a rock star in religion class. How many adults do you know who could articulate the difference between the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran doctrine of ‘real presence’ in the Eucharist? Well, our 11-year-old could! Once in the 4 th grade, during a school assembly, the principal made an off-handed comment about her Lutheran roommate in college, telling the students that Lutherans don’t believe that Jesus is really present in the bread and wine at communion. After the assembly, Zion told his teacher that he needed to speak to the principal. Zion took his hall pass, sat down in the principal’s office, and proceeded to explain what Lutherans believe about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and how, by and large, we actually believe the same thing as Catholics, we just articulate it slightly differently. As you might imagine, this raises the bar for the kind of questions Jennifer and I get at home. We missed the sort of questions that children normally ask about faith and the Bible, like, ‘Can God make a rock so big that God can’t lift it?’ Instead, Zion once asked, “Dad, if Jesus died for our sins so that we could have eternal life, why do we still have to die?” Good question, Buddy. We hear some very similar words in today’s Gospel— and maybe even in the depths our own hearts. Mary, repeating exactly Martha’s words from a few verses earlier, says: “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Those standing nearby, seeing Jesus weeping, ask, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Who can’t relate to these huge questions? Who has experienced the death of a loved one and hasn’t wondered why Jesus didn’t show up on time? Who hasn’t borne in their soul Martha’s accusation, Or Mary’s lamentation, Or the bystanders’ consternation At the graveside of one gone too soon. Jesus’s response to Mary, To those grieving with Mary and Martha, Is compassion. Jesus is moved not only to tears, But to anger at the death of his friend. The NRSV says Jesus was “greatly disturbed,” But this word in the original Greek actually means That Jesus was enraged at the death of his friend. Jesus’ tears are not just sadness for his friend but condensing steam from a boiling rage at what death has done, not only to Lazarus, but to Mary and Martha and to the whole community. Perhaps Jesus is even angry at what death has done to humankind. Perhaps he is overwhelmed by the knowledge of his own death, which is coming all too soon. Whatever the source of these tears, This anger, Jesus enters it willingly. There is an old spiritual That goes Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, Lord, rock-a my soul. So high you can’t get over it, So low you can’t get under it, So wide you can’t go ‘round it, You must go in at the door. This slave song speaks a truth about death. The bosom of Abraham is the grave, death, sheol, Hades, and the song teaches us that the only way out is through— through the anxiety, through the anger, through the sadness, through wishing things had turned out differently. God has been bringing God’s people to these thresholds from the beginning. God led creation through the flood. God led the Hebrews through the Red Sea. God led the Israelites through the wilderness. and through the Jordan. God led God’s people through captivity, Though the fiery furnace, Through the lion’s den. And here, at the opening to this cave, Jesus does not go over, under, or around his grief; Jesus does not avoid his anger or try to blunt it; Jesus does not tell Martha to buck up and get over it, nor does he make space for Mary to wallow in her despair. Jesus walks right into the stinking reality of it. Jesus knows what he will do. Jesus knows that Lazarus will live again. Jesus knows that he will raise Lazarus from the dead. But Jesus does not tell Mary not to weep. Jesus weeps with her. Jesus does not tell the crowd not to be angry. Jesus gets angry, too. Jesus is not repulsed by the stench of death, put off by their tears, put out by their anger, Or hindered by their ideas about what was possible. Jesus enters willingly into their grief shakes a defiant fist in the face of death and shouts his name into the darkness. LAZARUS, COME OUT!!! Beloved, The good news for us today is that this same God who saved creation in the flood, brought the Hebrews through the Red Sea, and the Israelites through the Jordan; this same God who brought Daniel through the lions’ den and stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; this same Jesus who cried with Mary and raged with Martha, and woke the dead by calling his name, is the exact same God who speaks into our deepest, darkest tombs and call us out by name. Jesus is not repulsed by the stench of death, put off by our tears, put out by our anger, Or hindered by our ideas about what is possible. Jesus enters willingly into our grief shakes a defiant fist in the face of death and shouts our name into the darkness. BELOVED, COME OUT!!! Our hope is not that God will lead us over, under, or around our grief and anger at all the changes and loss we will endure. Our hope is that God will bring us through it; Through the waters of baptism to new life now, And through the darkness of death to new life at the resurrection. So let us be unbound by the shroud of death and set free to love our neighbors as Jesus loves us. May we refuse to be repulsed by the stench of death, may we enter willingly into the grief of our neighbors, may we shake a defiant fist in the face of death and may we call out to a world entombed in anger and fear, NEIGHBOR, COME OUT!! Let us wipe away your tears, let us unbind you. Death has been swallowed up forever! Let us share the Feast. Amen. 

Reformation Sunday is one of those times when we read virtually the same texts, if not exactly the same texts, every time the observation rolls around. I would most oft en rather preach on the 23 rd Sunday after Pentecost on some rather obscure text from the Gospels than I would on Easter or Christmas Eve. I preach about the resurrection and the incarnation all the time. I am running out of new things to say. And now we have been commemorating the Protestant Reformation and the remarkable legacy of Martin Luther for 508 years. We have been in talks with the Roman Catholic Church for more than 50 years— which is why we are calling this a ‘commemoration’ and not a ‘celebration’— and we have found in that time that we have such wide theological agreement that a joint statement by both churches declaring our agreement on the doctrine of Justification, the primary point of division at the time of the Reformation, is now 25 years old. So, what exactly are we commemorating? For a lot of us, our heritage. Afterall, we are immigrants to this land, and when our forebears landed here, and set up homes and raised crops and families, institutions and livelihoods, they also brought their uniquely German, or Swedish, or Norwegian, or Finnish, or Icelandic, or Danish, faith with them. Some of us were confirmed in our great-grandparents’ language, celebrating with lefsa, or lutefisk, or a potluck, or copious amounts of beer and sausages, or whatever Icelandic people eat. We throw huge Oktoberfest celebrations, we sing old German hymns and Swedish tunes, even if the words are now in English. We memorize Luther’s words in the Small Catechism, even if all we remember 20, 30, 50 years later is ‘Sin boldly.’ We break out the red shirts, sweaters, sport coats, socks; We don our Luther roses and will spend most of the rest of today singing “a bulwark never failing” and maybe Googling “What is a bulwark?” Dr. Lisa Miller, in her book The Awakened Brain, tells us that her research has concluded that religion is 100% environmentally received, meaning that religion and culture are virtually synonymous. To practice our religion is to practice our culture. We receive from our ancestors and we pass on to our progeny these cultural exercises, expressing where we come from and who we are. Dr. Miller contrasts this religious expression against spirituality, an innate sense of transcendent connectedness to something or someone who loves us, holds us, and guides us through this life. While religion and spirituality overlap to a large degree, they are not the same thing. And I think this is Jesus’ point in our Gospel reading. Jesus is speaking to the Jews, and that word itself would be better translated as ‘Judeans,’ because it is referring to people from the region of Judea who expressed their cultural identity by being from this place and worshiping the One God in the Temple in Jerusalem. Only later, once these people from this place who worshiped in this way, were no long in this place and the temple was destroyed so they could no longer worship in this way, did the term come to mean anyone of this common ancestry and religious heritage. Jesus is speaking to these people, who are from this place, and who worship in this way— and even though he is also from this place and worships in this way, he tells them they might have missed the point entirely. Jesus explains “If you continue in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And these people, who have been practicing a yearly ritual where they reenact God’s deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt, say to Jesus, “We are children of Abraham, we have never been slaves to anyone.” A lot of good all those Passover’s have done? It’s almost as if the seder begins “What makes this night different from other nights?” and the reply came back, “I have no idea. Pass the lambchops.” Were I to ask you, “How has being a Lutheran had an impact on your experience of God?” What would you say? Would you point to the lefsa or the Luther rose? Would you point to the altar or the font? Or would you say, “I have no idea. Pour me another beer.” Jesus doesn’t disparage their place or heritage, but Jesus calls them to see through it to an experience at the heart of this reality shared by all places, cultures, religions. The freedom that Jesus was bringing was larger than any one place or any one time, any one religion or culture. And these Judeans who believed in Jesus were not being called to set aside their Judaism but to include their Judaism in a bigger universe than the one they had been invited to imagine. Jesus was inviting them into relationship with the One God of the Temple who transcends culture and place. I believe that this is the calling of the reformation. If we are beholden to a culture, or a single expression of religion, we too are likely to miss the invitation to relationship with the God who transcends our culture and place. I was not born to Lutheran parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents. In fact, to my knowledge, I have zero Scandinavian blood, and you have to go back several generations to find a German relative. I learned of Martin Luther in my World History class memorizing the date of the Reformation alongside Johannes Guttenberg and the printing press. I grew up in church, hearing of God’s hatred of sin, of God’s jealousy and vengeance, of God’s wrath and terrible recompense. I sang “Jesus Loves Me,” and as soon as I could read, sounded out the tiny plaque on my grandmother’s wall, that promised me “God is Love.” But I also being taught that while God may love me, that love is conditional. If I didn’t accept that Jesus had received on the cross the punishment that I deserved, and if I didn’t ask for forgiveness, if I didn’t ask Jesus to come and live in my heart to shield me from sin and God’s judgement, that this God would righteously and justly damn me to an eternity of conscious torment in the literal flames of Hell. Weighty stuff for a 7-year-old. But the older I got, and the more of the scriptures I could read for myself, the more I learned of this God who is Love, the more I experienced of this God who is Love. Eventually this experience of God’s unconditional Love led me to a break with the church of my upbringing, and I began to search for a tradition that resonated with my experience. When as an adult I read of Martin Luther’s experience of rediscovering the Grace of God hidden in plain sight in the very passage from Romans we read here today, I knew that this was my spiritual home, even though I am not German or Scandinavian. There is a whole movement of folks out there deconstructing their faith of their childhood, unlearning the God who is mad and vengeful. I was lucky that I John 4:8, “God is Love,” was written as plainly on my Grandmother’s life as it was on her walls. I was lucky to have found Luther’s writings online, to have wanted to reform my faith and not abandon it. But so many of our Lutheran churches are far more concerned with maintaining a cultural heritage that by and large, Lutheran evangelism has looked more like colonization. We have not invited people into a relationship with the God of Love and Grace so much as we have invited folks to be German. But until our experience of God’s Love and Grace transcends time and place we will be as bound up in the trappings of our culture and place as these Judeans who thought they were the only ones who knew where to find God. So, what might the Lutheranism of the Future look like if it isn’t all lefse and lutefisk, beer and potlucks, or whatever Icelandic people eat? I believe it will be a spirituality that leads people to a language they can use to express their experience. Lutheran Spirituality will begin in what I like to call “Paradoxy.” Lutherans excel at non-dual thinking. We are simultaneously saints and sinners, bound and freed. We are beholden to both the law and the gospel. Jesus is both God and Human. The Eucharist is both bread and wine AND body and blood. So we can abandon language about what is right and wrong, in favor of what is helpful and unhelpful. God both includes everything and transcends everything. So a Lutheran Spirituality will have to unlearn unhelpful pictures of God and relearn the God Who Is. For this we will need the Cross. Martin Luther says that Theologians of the Cross call a thing what it is, while Theologians of Glory call good evil and evil good. Jesus said that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. The Cross becomes for us the new tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and we eat its fruit in the Eucharist. Then knowing the difference between what is good and what is evil, we can trust God to reconcile both, first in us as saints and sinners, and then in all the world, including all things and transcending them. The truth can only have its fullest impact in relationship, because only relationship can handle the vulnerability, accountability, and transformative power of truth without imposition or colonization. God Loves us by becoming us; that is, in relationship with God we are being transformed into the Love that God is. Grace, then, is the way that Love behaves. We become this Love by practicing this Grace, through Hospitality, Generosity, and Solidarity, by making space in ourselves for our neighbors as God has made space within God’s self for us. We Love our neighbors by becoming neighbors. Luther said, “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.” We need long, slow, loving relationships with folks who disagree with us, without canceling, scolding, or chiding each other. We need church. We need communities were we can walk along the path until the path becomes clear. We also need the church because we cannot do the work of Justice, wrestle with the scriptures, come to faith, or even live our lives alone. We need access to doctors, lawyers, teachers, community helpers in relationship and not just behind a pay wall. We need access to mothers and aunts, to fathers and uncles, to elders and sages, to brothers, sisters, siblings when we have had to escape the culture and place of our birth to survive. We need meaningful work and a place to do it, especially if and when we cannot do what we love for a living. The Lutheranism of the Future cannot be a cultural heritage project, inviting folks to be German, to come and sing our songs or observe our festivals. The Lutheranism of the Future will require us to know the truth through the lens of the Cross and to be set free from all the mighty fortresses we have constructed to prevent change. The Lutheranism of the Future will be a common spirituality more than a common religious expression. So, what are we commemorating here today? What new thing might a preacher find to say? Luther experienced the truth and it set him free. Lutherans of the Future won’t be born, so much as freed— by the truth that the God they feared doesn’t exist and the God Who Is Loves them already. Amen. 

For these past several weeks we have been discussing some challenging texts that mostly seem to point to the cross as a metaphor for discipleship. Jesus has been teachi ng his disciples what it means to follow him. By and large, this has been a near futile task, since the disciples in the Gospel of Mark are as dense as lead. Now, we can cut them some slack, since Jesus has been laying out a path of discipleship that was so counter to the cultural and socioeconomic structures of his day that it was difficult for them to completely overhaul everything they’d ever experienced in their lives and see the world through a new lens. Especially since that lens was a Roman cross. Jesus keeps talking about death, and humility and service and childlike vulnerability. He’s started including Gentiles in his vision of the coming kingdom of a Jewish God. I’m sure that the disciples are asking themselves why they ever left their boats and nets, their homes and families, to follow a man toward Jerusalem who seems intent on getting himself killed there, who seems to be asking the disciples to die too. As their understanding of the Messiah changes, I’m sure that the alure of following him must have changed too. I have to say, there sure are days in my life when I can relate to that feeling. Days when I wish Jesus would come and strike down my enemies, would exact vengeance on those who wrong me. There are days when I wish following Jesus was more lucrative, more illustrious. Days when I wish that following Jesus was more like Your Best Life Now than there’ll be a better life later. I want some of that justice Amos is preaching about. I want to cry out like the psalmists, “How long?” But like the disciples generally, and like this rich man in today’s gospel specifically, I’m not sure how much I have considered that when God’s justice comes to right the world that I, like this rich man, might be the one doing the grieving. Growing up, we used to sing a hymn called “O How I Love Jesus.” It’s one of those tunes that gets inside of you and the melody and lyrics pour out like a dam break at the slightest prompting. O how I love Jesus O how I love Jesus O how I love Jesus because he first loved me. So much of my faith then was about me and Jesus, about a personal relationship with God. I wasn’t concerned about all the problems of this life because I was worried about the next. That exhaustion with this world and fear of the next drove our desire to tell others about this coming day of justice. We wanted revival, a stirring of the Holy Spirit in human hearts that would draw all people to God and spark the second coming, when this world would get what was coming to it and those of us with a personal relationship with Jesus would live and reign with Jesus forever. So, there was another song we would sing. “Lord Send a Revival.” Lord send a revival Lord send a revival Lord send a revival and let it begin in me. Now because you heard those two songs so close together you may have realized much quicker that I did that “O How I Love Jesus” and “Lord Send a Revival” have the same tune. But I never did. I, like this rich man in today’s gospel, was happy loving a God who loved me and I was spending all my time trying to assure myself, if not assure God, that I was saved and just waiting for that day of justice. So, When I sang that old hymn, “Lord Send a Revival” that last line, and let it begin in me, never seemed to sink in. I never seemed to realize that God might begin that revival, in me, as songwriter Derek Webb sings, by “turning over tables in my own living room.” What Amos prophesied, what the psalmist longed for, what the disciples misunderstood, and what the rich man wanted to add to his coffers, was like one tune with two sets of lyrics. Jesus looks at this rich man and loves him, and yet, sends him away grieving. Jesus loves the rich and the poor together. But justice is like one tune with two sets of lyrics. To the poor, justice is a song of praise, a shout for joy, a hymn of gratitude. For the rich, justice is a song of grief, a tale of woe, a hymn of lament. We American Christians, especially those of us who grew up in middle class homes, in predominantly white neighborhoods, were taught to think of justice as something received. We were taught to read the scriptures as though justice was God’s business, and that we would be on the receiving end of God’s justice. We were taught to read the story of the rich man and think of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Kardashians Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. I am certain that this text has its own message for each of those folks. But, we were never taught to see in this story a picture of ourselves. We like the disciples, start to catalogue all the things we don’t have as proof of our love for God or our need to receive God’s justice. But Jesus teaches the disciples and us that the other side of receiving justice is becoming just. Jesus invited the rich man to grieve his many possessions and Jesus invited the disciples to grieve their desire to be rich. This is the justice of the kingdom of heaven. One tune with two sets of lyrics. If our paradigm for discipleship is the Cross of Christ, then we must see the call to discipleship as the call to embrace grief. Jesus calls the rich to give up being rich and the poor to give up their desire to be rich. Then both are invited to grieve together, to become the justice each longs for. We are called away from self-preservation, from security, from safety, to mutual vulnerability, common trust, and collective care for each other. The faith to which Jesus is calling us, the path of discipleship, the way of salvation is NOT a private, personal, transactional business decision between God and me. Jesus is calling us to community, to mutual care, to collective responsibility… Jesus is calling us to love because he first loved us and to pray that revival, God’s coming justice, will begin in each of us. And because disciples need to be reminded, We are given this meal to teach us that self-giving justice making is the very nature of God. We are given this meal to teach us that self-sacrifice is the shape of discipleship. We are given this meal to teach us that community is the only space big enough or safe enough to hold our grief. We are give this meal to teach us that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. What will we need to give up? What will we need to grieve before we can come and follow Jesus in making justice? How will we need to change in order to become the community our neighbors need us to be? May this song of justice become our prayer… Lord send a revival Lord send a revival Lord send a revival and let it begin in me. Amen. 

This is yet another set of difficult texts. Before we go any further, I want you all to hear me say that if you have experienced divorce and been shamed by someone quot ing this or similar passages— that should never have happened to you, and as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. For that matter, if anyone has ever used this passage from Genesis to shame you into submission; or to tell you God designed marriage for one man and one woman; or that God created men and women for certain societal roles to which we must strictly adhere; or that God is somehow offended by people who experience their gender as something other than the sex they were assigned at birth; if you have experienced any of these things, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I promise you that God is not mad at you, you have not violated the scriptures or the law of God, and you have committed no sin. While we are at it, if anyone has argued from the book of Hebrews that God has been displeased with the Jewish people, has chosen the Church to replace the Jewish people as God’s covenant people, or that our Christian faith is in any way superior to the Jewish faith, then as a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ and by his authority, I declare that this line of thinking is dead wrong, antisemitic, and anti-Christ, and should be repudiated in the strongest possible terms. You have sinned, you must confess, repent, and seek reconciliation. God is not mad at the Jewish people, the nation state of Israel is not the same thing as the Jewish people, and our Jewish neighbors are all our siblings in a common ancestry of faith as children of Abraham and therefore as the children of God. Now, with all of those disclaimers taken care of, do y’all remember Fiddler on the Roof? If you aren’t familiar, the show is about Tevye, a Jewish milkman from the Russian village of Anatevka who is navigating life with three daughters for whom he must arrange suitable marriages, while navigating the perils of being Jewish in the pale of settlement in late Tsarist Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. There are a couple of famous showtunes from this work, especially “Matchmaker,” and “If I Were a Rich Man.” But perhaps less famous is the work’s prologue— I mean who reads the prologue, right?! This song, called “Tradition,” tells of the precarious nature of Jewish life under threat of immanent persecution. Tevye tells the audience, “A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our neck. … And how do we keep our balance? That I tell you in one word: Tradition!” [1] After the first rendition of the iconic chorus, Tevye continues, “Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many years. Here in Anatevka we have our traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, how to work, even how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and we wear these little prayer shawls. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you— I don't know. But it's a tradition. Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” [2] Sounds reasonable, right? Tevye just wants what most of us want, stability, predictability, a firm foundation, some unchanging constant around which to order our lives so we can weather the storms of chaos and change. So, we take this thinking to the scriptures, this leather-bound volume with its gilded edges and embossing. Surely this is the word of God and surely God will tell us what to do. We see a world in flux, a changing society, the weakening or collapse of once hallowed institutions and we want some unchanging standard to anchor us as the buffeting tide of vicissitude erodes our sense of place in this world. So, we see a rising divorce rate and younger folks choosing not to marry, and marriages that our parents’ generation would never have tolerated, and we presume this is not simply a rearrangement of priorities or a symptom of unsustainable socio-economic conditions, but rather that this is an attack on the institution of marriage, and our own marriage, and an affront to God. “See?!” we argue, “See, right there in Genesis?! See, right there in Hebrews?! See, right there in Mark?! We’ve always done it this way. God said to do it this way. There is no other way.” We want the Bible, the black and white, unchanging Bible to be the last word, the final arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad, so we know who is in and who is out and what God wants us to do so we can get busy adhering to its rigid precepts… Or maybe exploiting its loopholes. But that is not how the Bible works. Believe me; I spent many years trying to make it work, and it does not work. There is no way to take the Bible literally without choosing which texts are literal, and which texts we would then have to ignore and outright contradict in order to take the other literally. This is why Lutherans do not call the Bible the word of God, but say that the Bible contains the word of God, that is, the message about Jesus (who is the Word of God made flesh), and the truth of the Gospel (which is that God is not mad at you), and is the source of our preaching (the proclamation of who Jesus is and the truth that God is not mad at you). Luther said that the Bible is the manger in which we find the babe. In our Gospel reading, when Jesus is confronted with the question about divorce, he turns to the Hebrew scriptures, asking, “What does Moses say?” and he goes on to interpret Moses’ provision for a certificate of divorce to have been allowed because of “[their] hardness of heart.” Moses then uses mercy to interpret the law, permitting divorce instead of trapping women in an untenable situation of being unwanted and only freed by death. Jesus then follows the same interpretive device, superseding the letter of the law with mercy, to say that it was also wrong to throw away a spouse in an age when doing so would have impoverished and imperiled the woman who had no recourse and would have suffered greatly. To do so, Jesus quotes our first reading, but like a good Bible reader, he backs up a chapter, to read the first creation narrative in Genesis one, reminding his hearers first that both male and female are created in the image and likeness of God before then affirming the cultural norm of the husband leaving his family to make a new one. Jesus reminds his hearers that women are equal to men and that the law should not be exploited to privilege the men over the women. Both Jesus and Moses use mercy to interpret the law, and as the book of Hebrews tells us, we might not have seen this truth in the law had it not been for Jesus. But because of Jesus, we are freed as the people of God from the way we have always done things. We are free to practice mercy, to grow in compassion and justice. The unchanging nature of God and therefore the calling of the Church, is to be about the business of change, moving us from the way things are, through change, loss, and grief— effecting and perfecting our salvation through choosing this suffering— until we come to recognize and trust each tiny apocalypse as the revelation of God’s very self— that is, until resilience in the face of apocalypse becomes our tradition. Over the course of Fiddler on the Roof, we see that Tevye’s tradition is often challenged, and it is precisely his ability to be flexible, to love his children, and his faith, at the same time, that helped him survive the tide of unwelcome change. Explaining to his wife that their middle daughter had found her own match and the pair would be moving to Kyiv to make a new life, Tevye says, “Love, it’s the new style.” Jesus, and even Moses, bring us this good news, too. Love is the new style, the superseding Spirit of the Law, that allows us to love our children and our spouses, and our neighbors, AND our faith, and the Church, and the Bible at the same time. God gives us the law so we can know the character of God. And when we practice love and mercy we practice the character of God. So let love be our style, let mercy be our practice, let love and mercy tell us who we are and what God expects us to do. Let love and mercy be our new tradition. Amen. [1] https://genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-fiddler-on-the-roof-prologue-tradition-lyrics [2] Ibid. 

These are some heavy texts. Moses is suicidal from trying to deal with God’s people and their constant longing for the way things used to be. James prescribes what we should do for the sick and suffering, for sinners and backsliders. Jesus speaks of severed limbs and being thrown into hell, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies, before promising that we will all be “salted with fire.” Maybe it would be helpful to take these passages one at a time to see what each of them mean before we try to hang them all together to see what the Spirit might have to say to us in our present context. The Hebrew people, led by Moses, have been freed from slavery in Egypt. God gave them the ritual of the Passover— eating bitter herbs and unleavened bread— to remember the bitterness of their bondage and the suddenness of their deliverance. But in the wilderness between slavery and the promised land, they have had to subsist on manna, an unknown substance that fell on the camp like dew each morning. This meant that they had to eat what they had, while they had it, and trust God for more when it was gone. But they wanted meat. Instead of remembering the bitterness of their time in Egypt, they longed for the fish and vegetables, onions, leeks, and cucumbers. They forgot the promise of a land of milk and honey and yearned for garlic and melons. And Moses despaired of life itself, begging God to reward his faithfulness with death, right then and there. Instead, God appoints some help, calling 70 elders of the people, filling them with the Spirit, and making them responsible with Moses to be attentive to the needs of the people. In the epistle of James, hearers are advised to call for the elders of the people when they are sick. These elders are called to pray and lay hands on the sick. But they are also called to anoint them with oil. We have somewhat ritualized this practice, to be a sacramental symbol of the unctuous grace of God on those for whom we pray. But in James’ day, this was just what the practice of medicine looked like. These oils and ointments, unctions and salves, would be infused with herbs and minerals, tinctures and analgesics, both curative and palliative. To call for the elders to pray and anoint, was to call for prayer and medicine. The elders are to pray and forgive sins, but also to provide access to medical care for the sick and dying. And then we get to the gospel. This week’s reading picks up right where last week’s left off. Jesus has taken a child, placed it among the disciples, and they are told, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.” Then John, who either wasn’t listening or had been waiting for a lull in the conversation so he could ask a question— maybe both— pipes up and says, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” Jesus said not to stop him, because “whoever is not against us is for us.” And then, ostensibly with the child still on his lap, Jesus launches into this business of strapping oneself to a millstone and being thrown into the sea. Now, normally I would advise that the New Revised Standard Version is a good, scholarly translation of the original texts. But my oh my; they really just jumped the shark on this one. Where verse 42 says “put a stumbling block before one of these little ones,” Greek here says literally, “but if any of you scandalizes one of these little ones.” That is less of a translation and more of a transliteration, like the word baptize from the Greek or cul de sac from the French. We took the whole word— scandalize— and its meaning to cause moral horror or ethically revolting— into English. But the mistranslation continues. Where verses 43, 45, 47, and 48 all speak of “hell,” the original Greek speaks of Gehenna, a literal burning trash heap teeming with maggots outside the city of Jerusalem. If you lost a limb, through amputation or some misfortune, that limb would be thrown on the pile. So, Jesus is saying that it would be better to lose a limb that to jump head-first into the flaming, teeming trash pile. To be “salted with fire,” then, is to purge oneself of all the things that might scandalize one of these little ones, in the same way one might severe a limb to prevent an infection from taking the whole body to Gehenna. Now, how do these all hang together and what might the Spirit be trying to say to us now? Well, to start, I’m not sure much has changed among the people of God since that long wandering in the wilderness. We are sick and tired of this wilderness and we are fed up with this ‘waiting on the Lord’ business. We remember the way things used to be. We remember leeks, onions, and cucumbers. We are happy to pray for the sick, but we aren’t so much interested in providing access to healthcare. We are grateful for the chance to express our grief over natural disasters and to write checks to relief organizations, but we are less interested in taking responsibility and action against manmade climate change. We vote to protect our pocketbooks and our portfolios but we aren’t interested in voting to protect our neighbors or our children. And all this time, thought we haven’t been paying them much attention, these children that have been sitting in the lap of Jesus have been watching us. They have been listening to our complaining. They have seen that our priorities don’t match the priorities of Jesus. And they are scandalized. They see our hypocrisy as a moral horror and ethically revolting. The but the good news is we can cut off our hands and feet and gouge out our eyes. That is, we can amputate the things that keep scandalizing younger generations. We can repent, we can take responsibility as the elders of the people of God, as the Body of Christ, and we can not only pray for solutions we can take radical action to address the rot within before we lose the whole body. We can become the congregation and the Church that our neighbors and our children need us to be. The hard fact is that the Hebrew people wandered in the wilderness for so long because God was waiting for the previous generation— the generation that was griping and complaining, the generation that remembered the past so fondly, and forgot the reality so completely— God was waiting for this generation to die off. None of the feet that walked through the Red Sea to freedom, walked through the Jordan to the promised land. Not even Moses. It was the new generation, who had no memory of the sweetness of leeks and onions, a generation raised on a diet of manna in the place of purging; it was this new generation that passed through the waters into a land flowing with milk and honey. The younger generations aren’t here, or in churches most anywhere, because we don’t share their priorities. They don’t remember our past and they imagine a different future. To a large degree, they have amputated us, keeping Jesus and cutting off the Church. Will we be more concerned about the good ol’ days, or will we be able to let go of our precious memories in favor of the freedom to which God is calling us? Can we listen to those in the lap of Jesus when they speak to us of a future we never imagined? Or will we allow the whole body to be a septic moral horror, tossed onto the trash heap of history? The Spirit is falling on those outside our walls, outside our self-interests, outside of our history. We have the opportunity to draw near to those on whom the Spirit is falling, to listen to their needs and concerns, and to become the elders of the church, welcoming Christ in each new generation until we all walk through the waters into the promised future. Amen. 

I remember when Jennifer was working on her teaching degree she told me that one of her professors had advised never to argue with a child, “because they have all day a nd you don’t.” There is a pragmatism here that is thinking of classroom management, pacing, state standards, and those ever-looming state tests. Teachers are busy, even when school is out, planning and preparing, gathering resources, submitting reports, recording grades, and meeting professional standards for continuing education and mandatory trainings. Teachers don’t have time to argue with a child. But on another level, this is a lesson in maturity. Arguing with a child is not productive. You are likely able to comprehend more information and logic than this child is developmentally capable of, and it will not be long before the argument on the adult’s end lands briefly on “because I said so,” on its way to the realm of “unh huh!”—"nuh uh!” Maybe this is why an article on CNN.com this week tried to answer the question of why people seems so annoyed by children. The article suggested that as fewer people have their own children and therefore have less interaction with children the less we understand their behavior and the more we tend to avoid children. I would suggest that the less we are exposed to children the easier it is for us to pretend we have actually grown up. Sure, we can vote, buy a drink, and rent a car; we might grunt a little when we stand from sitting, prefer our restaurants ‘not too loud,’ can’t tell if our arms aren’t long enough or we need a new prescription, and know the balance of our 401k, but most of us, deep down have been playing dress up for a very long time and hoping that no one would notice. Children open up in most of us a younger place, and if we haven’t paid this inner child much attention, they have likely not matured very much in the time since we last acknowledged they were in there. And when that first grader, all freckles and missing teeth, picks a fight with you, or points out your love handles, or calls you ‘mean’ for holding a boundary, you suddenly have to deal with the reality of your vulnerability, and who was time for that? Best to avoid the kids all together, then. All of our readings today seem to point toward this level of vulnerability. Jeremiah is beset by enemies plotting to kill him, and he wouldn’t have even known if the Lord Almighty hadn’t been the one to tell him people were talking behind his back. James speaks to a community in conflict, identifying the source of this in-fighting as their unwise behavior— that is, their immature behavior, wanting what they don’t have, and resorting to violence, even murder, to get what they want. James tells them to be wise, or to grow up, and act like the children of God. The Gospel of Mark gives us a story that begins with Jesus predicting his death and resurrection, again, and calls the disciples to stop jockeying for power and to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable among them. And most of us can’t stand the thought of this kind of vulnerability. It sounds like weakness, this gentle Jesus, the defenseless Son of Man, bound for the cross with a child on his lap. But this is the difference between a child-like faith, and a childish faith. A childish faith wants a strongman, someone who can vanquish the monsters under our bed instead of telling us “Do not fear.” A childish faith wants a rich and powerful Jesus who can guarantee us all our hopes and dreams instead of the meek and humble Jesus who teaches us to ask and trust for our daily bread. A childish faith wants a conquering warrior Jesus who can make us great, who can bring back the way things used to be, who can help us avoid grief and death, instead of a crucified and risen Jesus who asks us to follow him. But Jesus is calling us to a child-like faith of vulnerability and care, of growth and maturation, of wisdom, gentleness, and peace, of death and resurrection. Death and disaster cannot be avoided. Our hope is not in rescue, an escape from all the bad things that could happen to us. Our hope is in resurrection, the redemption of all the bad things that could happen to us. A child-like faith is that of resilience, a faith that can endure and mature, a faith that can become gentle and grow wise, a faith that does not attempt to avoid death, but hopes in resurrection. As Jesus took a little child and placed it among the disciples, so the Spirit has centered our attention on a child here today. We don’t ask what she can do for us. We don’t invite her to this water to add to our rolls. We don’t charge the family a fee, or suggest a donation. We don’t claim her as ours; We claim her as God’s. We make promises that we are going to be the kind of community that centers the most vulnerable. We are brought back to this font where most of us first came as children, and we are reminded to return to this child-like faith as many times as it takes. We are called to support each other as we continue to grow in wisdom, gentleness, and righteousness. We come to this font to remember that we are all the children of God. We can come away from this water with a childish faith that death and grief can be avoided, a faith that lusts after power and prestige, that is obsessed with getting revenge, and believes in a strongman to come and save us. We can have childish faith in make-believe. Or we can believe. We can come to this water over and over and over, as many times as it takes, to cultivate a resilience, a child-like faith, a faith that can endure and mature, a faith that can become gentle and grow wise, a faith that welcomes the weak because we are acquainted with our own weakness, a faith that welcomes the sinner because we have been honest about our own sin, a faith that centers the vulnerable because we have embraced our own vulnerability, a faith that does not attempt to avoid death and grief because we have accepted our own death and placed our hope in the resurrection. There is another reason that you should never argue with a child; you cannot argue and welcome at the same time. If we cannot welcome the most vulnerable— or that which is most vulnerable in us— we cannot welcome Christ. To welcome Christ is to welcome the child and the child-like in each of us. Then the child will have become the teacher. Amen. 

There are many aspects of the work of a pastor that prompt folks to ask me, “How do you do that?” One of those is preaching. Some people would rather lose a limb than to stand in front of a room full of people, let alone talk to them for 15 minutes. Another is listening with genuine interest and concern to prolonged narratives of medical procedures in gruesome and intimate detail. And if you think the narratives are bad, sometimes folks accompany the stories with show and tell! Working as a chaplain, one gentleman in the trauma recovery unit described having fallen while cutting tree limbs and straddling a branch below on his way to the ground, whereupon he exposed himself to me to show me the damage. In his defense, he was on quite a lot of pain meds. I, however, was stone-cold sober. I’ll never un-see that. But by and large, the aspect of the work of a pastor which elicits the greatest recoil, is certainly a pastor’s proximity to death. Pastors see a lot of death; Accompanying families through prolonged illnesses where death arrives all too late; Sitting in the wake of tragedy when death has arrived without warning; Holding the hand of the bereaved, when death has come and gone but still haunts the home with lingering scents, empty chairs, and aching hearts. Death is always heavy, like moving a mattress; you can’t lift it on your own, and you shouldn’t try. Its weight is awkward, asking for the help you need feels like an imposition, and sometimes it is just easier to call in a professional. That is often where a pastor comes in. We are here to help you move your emotional mattress. But in addition to caring for grieving loved-ones, pastors care for the dying. And much of the time, this looks like speaking again the promises God makes in baptism, tracing again the sign of the cross, applying again the oil of anointing, and against every human instinct, encouraging them to give into dying. To give up the fight, to stop the struggle, to allow the body to stop and the spirit to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” I cannot say that this proximity to death is my favorite part of the job, but it is the greatest privilege and my profound honor to be invited into such holy spaces, where the vail has become so transparent that I might be able to prepare the very body of Christ for his burial. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus tells of his own death. And if this were not jarring enough to his disciples, he tells them that if anyone wants to be his disciple that one must take up their cross and follow him. It’s no wonder Peter takes him aside. We don’t get to hear their conversation, but a ‘rebuke’ is no ‘friendly reminder.’ Maybe Peter told him “You can’t talk like that, Jesus! You have to stay positive! We are manifesting victory!” Maybe Peter patted his concealed sword, and said, “We won’t let that happen to you, Jesus. They want you, they’ll have to go through me first.” Maybe Peter said, “The Messiah will sit on the throne of David, not hang on a Roman cross.” But Jesus rebuked Peter in return. Jesus will die, and asks the disciples to join him. And all these years later, there is no new path of discipleship. If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, we will have to take up our cross and follow him. For the first audience of the Gospel of Mark, this could easily have meant a literal death, since following Jesus could have gotten you killed. But for most of the followers of Jesus in our own time, this will mean the crucifixion of our egos. That is, we will have to die to our own needs, our own desires, our own dignity, and we will have to adopt as our own the needs, desires, and dignity of our neighbors. This crucifixion of our egos means we are no longer beholden to what our neighbors are able to do for us. Instead, we can ask what our neighbors need, and in the absence of our ego we are able to become what and who our neighbors need us to be. This is standing in solidarity with our neighbors to whom we have become a neighbor. We will have welcomed the other, we will have sacrificed our egos, and we have become our neighbors. When Jesus told of his own death he also told of his own resurrection. The death of our egos leads us to resurrection, to transformation, to salvation. The world needs transformed disciples to transform the world. By crucifying our egos and raising us as neighbors God is transforming us into the Love God is that we might sustain the weary with a word, that we might hold our tongues from judgement and ceaselessly wag our tongues for justice and peace; that we might fill our mouths with prayer and guide the whole body, the whole weary world, to salvation. Dr. Atul Gawande is a palliative care physician and author. As folks are drawing near to death, and decisions must be made about what sort of measures will be undertaken to prevent death, Dr. Gawande asks two fundamental questions: What makes life worth living? What are you willing to give up in order to keep living? One patient responded that as long as he could eat chocolate ice cream and watch football he wanted to be kept alive. As we draw near to the death of our egos, maybe we could reframe these questions. What makes our faith worth keeping? And what are you willing to give up in order to keep the faith? As a congregation, can we die to the memory of who we used to be? Can we die to having 400 members and two services? Can we die to a bustling children’s ministry? Can we die to who we think we need to be so that we can be resurrected as the congregation that our neighbors need us to be? And if all of this feels too hard, too much to ask, too high a price, then let me speak again the promises God makes in baptism. Let me trace again the sign of the cross, apply again the oil of anointing, and against every human instinct, I encourage you to give into dying. There is no new path to discipleship. We can rebuke Jesus in any way we choose. We can make every effort to avoid this death. But those who want to save their lives will lose them. And those who let go of their lives, those who crucify their egos, those who know what they are willing to sacrifice in order to keep the faith, those are the ones who take up their crosses and follow Jesus; these are the ones who will forfeit the whole world to gain their life. These are disciples. Amen.