Sabbath is for Liberation
One of the uncomfortable truths that we, as Christians, need to wrestle with on a regular basis is that our faith has long been used and continues to be used to support anti-semitism. Hopefully we have not been ignorant of the ways in which the gospel message of liberation has been twisted and abused to justify bigotry, forced conversion, and genocide against our Jewish siblings. Each time a passage comes up in the lectionary in which Jesus is seen going head to head with the Pharisees, this history of anti-semitism floats to the surface of my mind, and I get defensive. Remember we’ve talked in weeks prior about how it’s ok to not be entirely comfortable with what we read in the Bible. But, as I’ve said before, the solution to our discomfort is not to ignore or simply discard the parts that seem harmful or that give us the ick. Rather, we ought to wrestle with them, to be in dialogue with them, and to re-examine them through different lenses to see if we can find grace in their midst. So, how can we find grace in this passage, which appears to show Jesus casting aside the Jewish laws regarding the Sabbath, the day of rest?
I don’t think Jesus in this passage is going out of his way to break a rule, a part of Jewish law, simply for the sake of breaking a rule. It’s pretty clear, I think, that he breaks this rule for a particular reason—to unburden a woman who is bent over. What isn’t entirely clear, though, is why this particular act is apparently so offensive to the leader of the synagogue, who grumbles to everyone BUT Jesus about what Jesus has done. In her new translation of the gospels, scholar Sarah Ruden points out that it would have been permissible in Jewish law to break the Sabbath in order to save a life—though she does point out that this exception would not extend to non-humans. So why not offer that same exception to the woman in this story? Perhaps the religious leaders preferred to ignore her. Perhaps they didn’t see her as worthy of help, or as in need as others. Perhaps the Sabbath was their excuse for not helping, for keeping her on the outside of the life of the community. Maybe they had another excuse for each day of the week, so that they would never run the risk of feeling obligated to welcome her into the center.
Or who knows, maybe the synagogue leader was just looking for something to complain about when it came to Jesus.
I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in Jewish law, or in rabbinic teaching for that matter. But it seems to me that Jesus might have been trying to make a point about how we use the Sabbath, and what the Sabbath ought to mean. It seems to me that the very concept of Sabbath is inextricably linked to the idea of liberation. It becomes a part of Jewish law during the exodus from Egypt, the narrative that epitomizes the idea of liberation in biblical tradition. Sabbath came down the mountain with Moses, a commandment that would have God’s people imitate God, the Creator. It was a recognition of the image of God that the Israelites bore, a recognition of the body’s need to rest, and a recognition of the inherent worth of humanity. Sabbath was a radical shift from the slavery from which they had just been delivered, and a sign that God places greater value on people than on endless productivity and ever-increasing profits. Sabbath is a part of the liberation story of Exodus, an act of resistance against dehumanizing economic systems, and an affirmation of the image of God which rests within each of us.
When Jesus sees this woman in the temple, he sees someone who had not been allowed to partake in the liberative aspects of the Sabbath because of her disability, and so he takes it upon himself to offer her liberation. Now, a more traditional—what some might call “plain” reading of the text—might take the position that liberation from disability means returning to the default or the correct state that our bodies should be in. And perhaps for many disabled people, liberation would mean not being disabled anymore. But it also means having access to healthcare to treat chronic illness and pain. It means having spaces and infrastructure that are accessible, and that don’t push people with disabilities to the edge of society. For this woman at the synagogue, it was not her disability alone that prevented her from partaking in the fullness of sabbath rest and the life of the community, but also the passive and active rejection of her disabled body by the worshiping community. Christ calls out this rejection, and continues to call us to examine the ways in which our spaces, our worship, our community of faith are inaccessible.
There are others, too, who are excluded from Sabbath rest. There are workers for whom Sabbath means fewer meals on the table, a missed rent payment, or no heat. There are caregivers, disproportionately women, for whom Sabbath means that no one is looking after children or parents. What does Sabbath look like for them? What does Sabbath mean for the unhoused, for those living in fear of deportation, for queer and trans folks constantly looking over their shoulders? For our Jewish and Muslim siblings living in fear of targeted attacks? In this world where it seems like evil never tires, never takes a day off, never slows down, it is more important than ever that we remove as many yokes from the burdened as we can, and it is especially important that we not contribute even more to one another’s burdens. True, liberative Sabbath can take place only when we recognize the ways in which others are barred from experiencing rest, and choose to do something about it.
All this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t take time to rest. I hope you’ve learned by now that I highly value taking time to rest and not work. What I am saying is that the ability to rest is a part of God’s liberating vision. You may notice that this story is nestled amongst Jesus’ series of mini explanations of the nature of the Kingdom of God. Just before this story, Jesus talks about the fig tree, and just after he compares the Kingdom to a mustard seed and some yeast and so on. This act, this demonstration of the relationship between liberation and Sabbath, is a further exploration of the nature of the Kingdom. It argues that in God’s Kingdom there is room for all—all those who have been pushed to the side, all those who have been told it would be too expensive or impractical to accommodate them, all those carrying burdens both seen and unseen. It proclaims that in God’s Kingdom there is room to find rest—from our work, from our fear, from the evil of this world— simply because we are made in the image of God, and that makes us worthy. And it does not let us off the hook. It calls us out for the ways in which we allow others to go on working, completely unaided, even when they are working just to survive.
The Kingdom of God is a place of rest, a refuge in the midst of a world shaken by sin and bursting with breaking hearts. But it is not a shelter for our complacency and our excuses. It’s a challenge. How can we help others to encounter the liberative rest offered to us through Sabbath? How can others help us do the same? I know I tend to ask a lot of questions from my position in the pulpit, some of which are rhetorical—these are not. We are called to make this world a place where the weary may find rest. May our moments of Sabbath, our days of rest, strengthen us for that task which lies ahead. Amen.
Interpreting the Present Time
Luke 12:49 "I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!
12:50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!
12:51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!
12:52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;
12:53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
12:54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain," and so it happens.
12:55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat,' and it happens.
12:56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret [discern] the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret [discern] the present time [kairos]?
Why do we bother with church?
Better: Why does God want us to bother with church?
To help us align our stories with God’s story. How does church do this?
Worship God: making it clear that God is good and central, celebrate God’s presence. Confidence and inspiration. Acknowledge that core reality and affirm it with energy, gratitude, and joy.
Helping one another clarify what God’s story is by looking at the past and the present and projecting into the future.
Helping one another participate in that story more fully – creating and maintaining structures and practices that invite us into living ourselves into God’s story more fully.
Prayer and other grounding activities
Opportunities for service that widen our circle of compassion
Building relationships of care and trust within our community
Other stuff
One of the principal communal resources we have in figuring out how to align ourselves with God’s story is the Bible. What do we find in the Bible?
The story of the creation of the world and the coming into being of the people of Israel.
Jesus – his teaching and actions, his life and death, his resurrection
The activities and teachings of the post-resurrection communities of Jesus’ followers.
This morning we are looking at a particular moment in Jesus’ life of teaching. It takes place as he is headed toward his crucifixion in Jerusalem.
Maybe you noticed that in this morning’s Gospel Lesson Jesus is profoundly frustrated. I hope you heard that.
First, Jesus is describing division among people as necessary Being nice and getting along is not the goal. Aligning with God’s story is the goal. We’ll come back to this.
Secondly, he scolds his audience for not interpreting the time in which they are living. Jesus is frustrated with the crowd.
What does Jesus mean by “interpreting the time.”
Think of it this way:
Each of our stories are part of a larger story. God’s story. God’s story is playing out in many arenas on many levels:
The human world
Our individual lives: how is within our own minds, hearts, bodies.
Our family and wider social circle: how we are getting along with those around us and how are they getting along with each other.
Our communities: the people we regularly interact with. How things are going in the economic, political, and social institutions which impact us locally.
The community of communities: state, nation, world
The non-human world
The plants and animals and insects and bacteria: all non-human life
The material world
Earth beneath our feet
The air, soil, bodies of water
The weather
The climate
The planets, stars, and galaxies
The Cosmos: all these things, and even what we don’t know about, all interconnected.
It’s actually a bit dizzying when you stop to think about it. There’s a lot going on.
Now, I want to say that our faith, our confidence, our trust, is that God’s story, the story that God is drawing out or drawing in, or living out through all of creation, is directed toward the fulfillment of love. God’s story is directed toward the fulfillment of love.
And while it may be that we have faith, confidence that this story is moving toward the fulfillment of love, it is also true that God’s story is being thwarted at various levels by various forces – some of them human, and sometimes even you and me.
But despite this, it is our faith/confidence/trust that God is continually at work cajoling, seducing, nudging all that is – including us – toward a culmination of divine love.
Now, if we are to align ourselves with God’s story, we need to have some sense of how God’s story is playing out on the levels that touch our lives – and, perhaps more importantly, some sense of how our lives intersect with the ways in which God’s story is playing out around us.
Or, to put this a different way, in the limited amount of time and attention we have, how can we be aligning ourselves – aligning our attention, intention, and action with God’s story – the story God desires to be unfolding?
What do we do to align ourselves with God’s story of the fulfillment of the creation in love? Where do we focus?
We all know that our attention can be pulled in different directions, and we know that sometimes it is not obvious what our priorities need to be at a given time.
Understanding what our priorities should be requires discernment. But to discern wisely, we need to tease out the story of the present time. Interpret the present time.
If we are going to align our stories with God’s story, then we need to interpret the present time. Discern the present time.
This brings us back to the Gospel Lesson from Luke for this morning.
When Jesus scolds the crowd for not interpreting the signs of the times, he reminds them that they are able to interpret the sky to know what the weather will be, and they will plan and act accordingly.
Yet they are unable or unwilling to set their hearts on what is happening in their midst: namely that God is acting in Jesus in their present moment, and that activity of God’s love, mercy, and power is provoking the authorities to put Jesus to death in an attempt to stop him. That is the fire and baptism that Jesus refers to when he says:
"I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!”
And this brings us back to the division that Jesus says he has come to bring. This division emerges because of who he is and the controversy that brings. People will line up as supporters or opponents. People’s take on whether he is a part of God’s story or whether he is thwarting God’s story will divide families and households.
Discerning whether or not Jesus is a part of God’s story or thwarting God’s story puts you on one side of this division or the other. They don’t want to discern because they don’t want to take sides. But Jesus tells them the time is coming when they will have to come down on one side or the other.
Most of us do not want to be at odds with those in our households and families. Most of us do not want to be at odds with those in our church or communities. For most of us, it takes a lot to stake out a position that sets us apart from those with whom we personally interact. It’s stressful. Most of us put a high priority on getting along and being nice to others.
In fact, I suggest that one of the reasons we may be reluctant to interpret the signs of the times or discern the present moment in our households or in our church is because there is a danger of stirring up division. And that’s uncomfortable. Discerning the signs of the clouds or the wind and knowing how they will affect the weather is not going to stir up division….
Except, oh wait. Now it can. And it does. When we begin to link clear changes in weather patterns and hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and forest fires and micro-particle smoke in the air to greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use to climate change we can begin to see a lot of division.
And when it’s reported that the current government in Washington is considering turning off two satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere, that strikes me as a sign of the times that has something to do with whether the government in Washington is thwarting God’s story moving toward the fulfillment of love.
To align ourselves with that story of abandoning the information from those satellites is aligning ourselves against God’s story urging and nourishing all of creation toward the fulfillment of love. Moreover, to cease getting information from these satellites would be a blow against even our capacity to know what the signs of the times are, let alone how to interpret them.
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Now, let me step back from that a moment so the larger point is clear.
In the last minute or so I made or implied several claims that might be wrong. I may be wrong that:
the current administration is really considering turning off two satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere.
those measurements are really as important as many scientists think they are.
ignoring CO2 levels in the atmosphere is a move to thwart God’s story moving toward the fulfillment of the creation in love.
I should direct our attention toward this today.I might have exercised faulty judgment in raising that issue this morning in light of some other priorities.
But even if I’m wrong about all these claims, the larger point I want to make is this: even though the preacher may get it wrong sometimes, if a preacher is to do their job interpreting the signs of the times and discerning how we should respond, that interpreting/discerning has to be a piece of the challenge of preaching. That’s part of what Jesus is telling us in this passage. Part of our task as the church is to help one another interpret the signs of the times so that we can all better align our stories with God’s story.
Even if it raises the possibility of division, we need to take up the task of interpreting the signs of the times and discerning how to respond. Jesus tells us in this passage that being nice and getting along is not the goal. Discerning the signs of the times to help us align with God’s story is the goal.
Yes, divisions may emerge.
But here’s the thing: when divisions emerge we have the opportunity to nurture and strengthen our tools to deal with them: virtues such as humility, kindness, patience, and charity. To cultivate a life in Christ is to cultivate all the capacities for dealing with division in a healthy way.
Of course, divisions may be uncomfortable, but they offer us the opportunity to flex our love muscles, which is another way of aligning our stories with God’s story. I would go so far as to say that God invites division, in part, to enhance our capacity to live out love in difficult circumstances. We align our stories with God’s stories as we work through the divisions that emerge as we interpret the signs of the times and discern how to respond.
And, as I said earlier: the reason we should bother with church is to align ourselves with God’s story. That’s the point.
It would be pleasant to think that we out here in Fairport are somehow isolated from the stories unfolding in the wider world. But we are not. All the stories are connected. They all echo and reverberate around the cosmos.
A couple of weeks ago I went into the Perinton Wegmans to pick up a prescription and wanted to get some fruit. I could scarcely believe my eyes that the produce section was nearly empty. No berries. No melons. Because one Wegmans employee shot another Wegmans employee at the warehouse, shipments to our store were cut off.
Of course, I could have gone elsewhere to get some berries. This was not a real crisis.
At the same time, I saw it as evidence of the vulnerability, precariousness, the fragility of the systems which keep us provisioned with all the things we have come to expect. With climate change and the incarceration and deportation of agricultural workers what I saw at the Perinton Wegmans may simply be a foreshadowing of what is to come. We need to interpret the signs of the times.
Those who live closer to the margins: those who are poor, those with insecure housing, those without proper immigration documents, those with disabilities, our gay and trans neighbors – those closer to the margins live in a more precarious and fragile space. Interpreting / discerning these signs of the times must surely shape in part how we see our stories aligning with God’s story in our world today and inform how we set our priorities and attitudes.
Now some of you may wonder, “but why do we have to hear about this in church? We’ll just watch or read the news.” And that’s a good question.
So let me suggest a good answer: I think we need to raise these matters in church because for some of us, what we have already heard about on the news has alerted us to what we understand to be cruelty, injustice, or incompetence that hurts our neighbors and ourselves. Some of us are called to respond to these situations and it helps to have our grounding and alignment in God’s story reenforced here in our community of faith, in the same way as when we are facing family troubles, illness, personal economic hardship, and struggles with personal sin or grief need so that we have our grounding and alignment in God’s story reenforced here in our community of faith.
Each of our stories are part of a larger story. God’s story. God’s story is playing out on many levels:
Our individual lives.
Our family and wider social circle.
Our communities: the people we regularly interact with.
The community of communities: state, nation, world
Not to mention the wider natural world.
All of these arenas in which God’s story is playing out have their moment in the spotlight in the life of our faith community because each of us has some intersection with each of them at some point in our lives.
And this is why we bother with church: to align our stories with God’s story as it plays out across all the stories in all the dimensions of creation.
Interpreting the signs of the times in all these dimensions gives us a fuller picture of how God is continually at work cajoling, seducing, nudging all that is – including each one of us – toward a culmination/fulfillment of divine love.
I, for one, am grateful for the encouragement and inspiration and opportunity that I receive here to align my story with God’s story in so many dimensions.
I pray that you agree with me that it is consistently worth the bother.
Thanks be to God.
Waiting and Hoping
Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid? Really, Jesus, that’s the best you can do? How can we not be afraid, in a world that never seems to run out of ways to terrify us? In the midst of souring trade relations, a housing affordability crisis, ongoing wars and genocides, and not to mention a climate crisis that threatens our society as we know it. In the midst of all that, all you can offer is a measly, condescending “do not be afraid, little flock”? I would have hoped for something more. A set of instructions for lowering my heartrate, a way to fix everything that stirs anxiety in me, something. Anything. Certainly something more than that, something besides just “sell everything you have and give away the money.” Because what, something better is coming, and we just have to trust that it will get here before it’s too late? We’re supposed to wait—even as our skies remain hazy with wildfire smoke. We’re supposed to wait—even as migrants are kidnapped and families are torn apart. We’re supposed to wait—even as our queer and trans siblings are degraded, dehumanized, and overlooked?
How are we supposed to do that? How are we supposed to wait for the Kingdom while people we love are dying, while the world is ending, and nothing seems to be getting any better? As difficult as waiting can be, it’s astounding to me how good we are at putting things off. I can speak from experience on this, as I was a terrible procrastinator in school—although I must admit, some of my best work got done at 6 in the morning the day a paper was due. We’re great at putting things off, at embracing distraction rather than truly encountering and wrestling with the realities of the world around us. Sometimes it’s willful ignorance that helps us steer clear of the scary parts of the world. We’d rather look at the rosy picture, the hopecore videos, the jokes and memes. Anything but what’s actually going on in the world. Other times, we might acknowledge what the world is facing, but we’d rather not get involved. To do so would be too risky, too disruptive, would require too much from us. It would require that we have hope—that we believe that change is possible and that God’s Kingdom will be recognizable in our midst.
The year I started seminary, they had also just hired a brand new dean of the Theological School, Rev. Dr. Edwin Aponte. As a part of his installation celebration, Dean Aponte hosted a panel discussion on restoration and justice with three of his colleagues from other theological schools across the country. Two of the panelists were Dr. Miguel De La Torre and Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas. I don’t remember a lot from the conversation, but I do remember a rather heated exchange between these two theologians on the topic of hope. Professor De La Torre, when asked, said that he has no hope, but that his drive to pursue justice as a part of his vocation as a follower of Christ was driven, in part, by his view that we have nothing left to lose. When facing the irreversibility of climate change, the rise of violence in our communities, the reality of Christian nationalism, his thinking is that we ought to push back with all that we have because we have nothing left to lose—not even our long-gone hope.
This sense of hopelessness was not unfamiliar to me. For people my age— who grew up in post-9/11 America, who entered adulthood during or after the Covid-19 pandemic, who have never known a country at peace, and who have seen in our lifetime the very real impact of climate change—hopelessness is pretty normal. There are pockets of hope here and there, sure. But so many have become jaded by institutions that value their own power, profit, and preservation above their concern for justice and transformation. Whether it be the Church, the government, or the economy, the fickleness, self-interest, and lust for distraction has repelled many who yearn for a new world. For some, this void is filled by those who, despite not having any real hope, would rather go down swinging, joining social justice movements and community organizations. Others seek to fill this void with right-wing, alpha-male influencers who prey on those who feel hopeless, like they’ve already lost it all.
The other panelist, Professor Stacey Floyd-Thomas, took a different approach. She talked about her identity as a mother, saying that she has to have hope because she has everything to lose. She talked about the fear she lives with on behalf of her sons, young Black men, with whom she’s had to have the talk about what they can do to deescalate confrontations with police. We have everything to lose, she says, and so we have to have hope because hope is the only thing that carries us through when we are paralyzed by fear. It’s what allows us—forces us—to push on, even when our present reality makes it seem like believing in something other than what we’ve always known is just fantasy, just a temporary salve to keep us from falling into total despair. But hope isn’t just an intellectual belief. It’s not just something that we think or say or hold in our hearts. Hope is not a passive waiting. It’s not letting go of action and expecting God to take the reins and right the world. It’s more than sitting back and waiting for signs or simple assurances.
Hope is active, and it demands things from us. It demands that we look beyond the distractions and the white noise that we produce and enable. The distractions with which we engage in the world, as well as those that we manufacture here. It demands that we know our neighbors—not just the neighbors out in the world, like I talked about a few weeks ago, but the people who sit on the other side of the sanctuary. The people you may never have seen before, whether they’ve been here six times or six hundred times. Whatever it is that distracts us from embracing one another and engaging one another, that is what hope demands we let go. But it’s not just about what we abandon. Hope demands that our waiting takes on a different form, so it looks less like the waiting that Martin Luther King wrote about in his letter from a Birmingham jail—the kind of waiting that delays, and therefore denies justice. It demands the kind of waiting that shares God’s dissatisfaction with performative worship, and God’s call to seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow. That is what hope values—engagement in the face of distraction, action in the face of apathy, and resolve in the face of fear.
Where do you look for hope? Where do the young look for hope? Is it here? Ask them. Ask each other. Are we living out this command to wait, to look and speak and act as though we are, in fact, confident that transformation is possible, that a world renewed is coming? Or are we trapped in the same cycle of waiting…and waiting…and waiting, without anything to show for it. Our call as the Church, as people of faith, and those called Methodists, is to live out the resurrection hope we profess—that change is coming. That change has come. We are to be that hope, for the queer and questioning, for the mournful and broken-hearted, for the disinherited and dispossessed, for the disabled and chronically ill. If hope is something we value, let us live into that hope, waiting earnestly and actively. Let us not be distracted any longer. Let us turn our attention to what God is calling us to be for the world. Amen.
Things Above and Below
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
Christmas Eve, 2021. My sister and I had stayed up late—like, really late—so that I could finish wrapping the gifts that I would be giving to my family in just a few hours. As we sat together on my bedroom floor where I was hastily throwing the things I’d purchased into gift bags and loosely covering them with tissue paper, my sister looked me in the face and said “hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’m actually a woman.” I like to think that I responded as well as you can when someone comes out to you as transgender, especially when you have the honor of being the first person in their family to know. I smiled, said something like “dude, that’s awesome!” and we hugged it out. She cried. I cried. A lot. She explained how scary it is to carry that inside, even in a family that she knew would be affirming of her. But I could tell that she also felt a sense of relief, having told someone else, and in the months, and now years, that followed, she really did become a new person.
She’s still the same witty, charismatic person I’ve always known, who despite being almost three years younger than me is definitely smarter than I am. But she is visibly freer, more comfortable with who she is, and happier. She knows who she is, probably more so than many other people in the world who have never had to do the level of self-reflection that she has done. And she has chosen to live into that self knowledge, having been clothed with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator, as the author of this letter to the Colossians puts it. Because being transgender, or being gay, or bisexual, or queer in any way is not to say that God has made a mistake, or that those who identify in these ways are rejecting God’s role as creator. On the contrary, living out these identities, or however it is that you are as your authentic self, is evidence of God’s grace. The ability to claim who you are in a world that sets a different standard, a different default way of being, can only be something divine. To come out into the fullness of who you are called to be is not hubris, but an act of co-creation, and a realization of the transformation to which each of us is called.
It also takes courage that many do not possess. I remember when my sister sat down with the rest of the family to catch everyone else up. To no great surprise, she was met with resounding affirmation, which is not the experience of everyone. And while that support has never wavered, our parents have acknowledged that they’re afraid of her existing in a world that seems to constantly be looking for ways to stop her from existing. In the midst of a federal pressure campaign against hospitals and doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth. A pressure campaign that has led many healthcare providers, even in states where trans people are legally protected, to stop offering gender-affirming care for fear of losing their jobs, their credentials, or their funding. This is a campaign that is driven by fear—fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of self-realization. And it is fear, too, that drives complacency. Fear of risking our own well-being, fear of being judged for our association with those on the margins, fear that we might actually learn things about ourselves or others that we didn’t know—or didn’t want to know. Or perhaps it’s the fear of losing status in society, the same fear that drives many white supremacists and many of those seeking to completely close off our country to refugees and immigrants.
The same fear that leads some to build bigger barns, because someday we might need that surplus grain. Even when we try to reason with ourselves that it’s just good, common sense to have great big reserves stored up, because we know even in times of abundance that another famine is just around the corner. Still Christ tells us, over and over and over again, to not be afraid. He tells us to take a step back and gain some perspective. To fix our sight not on our human means of trying to stave off fear, but on Kingdom means of overcoming fear. He doesn’t tell us exactly what the Kingdom looks like, but he does tell us what the Kingdom values: abundance, selflessness, fearlessness, and, in all these things, living contrary to the ways in which we are taught by the world that we ought to live. We are called to live fully and vulnerably, to love recklessly and in ways that don’t always make sense for our position in the world or our net worths. To be rich towards God, though, is to live fully into the transformed life to which we are called. Lives that authentically and fully show off who we are and how we have overcome our fear. There is nothing about this that is incompatible with Christian teaching—it’s actually at the very center of the resurrection faith that we proclaim.
This passage from Colossians is also a statement on how the early church understood baptism. It ends with a phrase similar to one that we also see in Galatians, that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!” Many scholars believe that this is part of a first- or second-century baptismal liturgy, and is still present to some extent in our own liturgy, when we describe the church as something which Christ has opened to people of all ages, races, and nations. Through the sacrament of baptism, we become a part of the church. We covenant with one another and with God, to care for those in the community as we grow in faith together. Not erasing the identities that we bring with us to the community, but embracing them as a part of the Body of Christ, which transcends our human ideologies and fears. It is a call to live differently, to reject the ways in which we are told we ought to live and exist and identify. And to embrace fearlessness and wholeness in community. Because coming out is a lot easier when you have a community that will be brave with you.
In our baptismal liturgy, in this covenant we make, we also say that we will “accept the freedom God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” This part might sound a little more familiar, since it’s the line that makes it onto t-shirts. We are called, and we covenant, to resist, to struggle. Not to let fear or hatred rule, but to embrace in loving-kindness and in sacred solidarity. We are called, and we covenant, to put all that we have and all that we are on the line—each of us in community. We are called, and we covenant, to create the space that our siblings need so that they don’t have to hide who they are, but can proudly be clothed in new selves, according to the image of the creator. That is who we are called to be as a community, as those who share in this universal baptism as a part of the community of Christ.
So on this day, and all days, remember your baptism. I was 11 when I was baptised, so mine is a little easier to remember. Remember the call to new life in Christ that is placed on each of us. Cast off your doubts and fears, and claim the courage to live authentically—in the fullness and vulnerability that that entails. And may we live into our shared covenant to live in the struggle for new life, until we are living the Kingdom values that we profess. May we do so this day and all days. Amen.
Pray Like This
I spent this past Friday night out at Hamlin Beach State Park with the Youth of this church for part of their annual Bike Trip. Bike Trip was one of the first things I heard about when I first met with the Staff Parish Relations Committee back in March of this year. It was a great experience overall, and I got to spend some time with a group of incredibly thoughtful, creative, and energetic young people, that I would really encourage you all to get to know, if you haven’t already. I won’t go into too much detail about what goes on at Bike Trip, but I will share one of the mantras that got thrown around a lot: trust and obey. Now, in this case, this phrase “trust and obey” was applied not to God, but to Mary-Beth Rumble, whom the youth had been told they should trust and obey. In my time at Bike Trip, this mantra was repeated several times, usually during meal prep and when there were complex instructions being given. While it is certainly fair to say that, if you are a teenager on a church camping trip in the woods, you ought to trust and obey absolutely, this doesn’t necessarily seem to be the example set in the exchange we witnessed this morning between God and Abraham.
Abraham doesn’t seem to be down with the whole “trust and obey” concept. As soon as God tells Abraham what the plan is for these cities, Abraham seems immediately put off. He jumps in, though much more politely than I might be if I had just been told that two whole cities were about to be carpet-bombed, leveled, and systematically wiped out by a much more powerful force. Abraham, in that moment, failed to reconcile these plans with the God who had been lecturing him about becoming the father of many, and about upholding justice and righteousness, and about how many nations would be blessed through him. Maybe he saw God as being a little hypocritical in that moment. God, this powerful force that claimed to stand for justice and mercy, was now looking out at an entire people ready to erase them from the Earth—every adult, every child, every infant.
It’s probably a good thing for God in this story that the Geneva Convention wasn’t a thing yet. Not that prohibitions against collective punishment or targeting civilians really make a difference today, but still.
Maybe God knew that Abraham would push back against this plan, and maybe that’s why, just a couple verses before the start of this reading, God has this internal debate with Godself about whether or not to tell Abraham about what was going to happen. Maybe God wanted to be challenged, talked down, told off. The Book of Genesis is full of God trying to teach Abraham lessons, to varying degrees of success. But I feel like this particular instance is one in which Abraham maybe starts to get it. Each time he lowers the number of righteous people it would take to keep God from destroying these cities, God seems to be coaxing a little more out of Abraham, leaving the door open for him to ask for more. What if there are fifty? Forty five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? And that’s where he stops. Now, I did think about doing something with our faith stopping at ten, ten percent, tithing…but I’ll save that for stewardship season. Why does Abraham stop at ten? If there were only nine righteous people in the cities, would that have been palatable for him? What if there were five? What if there was One righteous person in either city, and because they happened to live in one of those cities, they had to suffer with the rest of their people—even if they were actually on the ground trying to change things.
And before anybody who knows their Bible tries to counter with the example of Lot and his family being saved from Sodom, go back and read their story. If they’re an example of righteousness, then the bar is pretty darn low.
And what about the children? Are they counted the same as the adults? Are women counted the same as men? Are all of these really guilty of the sin of Sodom, which the prophet Ezekiel tells us is trampling on the poor and refusing hospitality to those in need? What are the limits of God’s grace? What are the limits of Abraham’s faith?
I don’t believe that God personally tests us, though there are certainly things that happen that test our faith. Maybe hearing the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of those things. Something I do believe, though, is that stories like this one can help us understand how people in the past have thought about God, and can help us to evaluate how we think about God today. In this sense, I see a couple of valuable pieces of this story. The first is that God seems to welcome pushback. We often think of obedience to God as submission to God. But I believe that we can be people of faith and still argue with God. God can take it, I promise. And God is the perfect argument partner, because we know that, even as we argue, there is nothing we can do or say or think that will cause God to leave us or stop loving us. In the midst of a polarized world, we often don’t bother arguing, or we don’t argue with one another in constructive, good-faith ways. Because we don’t always trust that our relationships can endure disagreement. This breakdown of our ability to argue, to disagree and have a productive back and forth contributes to apathy, distrust in one another and our institutions, and has left for our young people a poor example of how to exist in community beyond the superficial. So let’s learn how to argue, starting with God.
The other thing that I take away from this passage, is that pushing back when we see injustice is obedience to God. These two passages today, both the Genesis and the Gospel, teach us how to pray. In each prayer, there is a form of advocacy. We’ve already looked at length at Abraham’s advocacy in Genesis, even if his demands don’t go quite as far as we or God might have liked. The gospel reading, though, is a little more subtle. Hopefully this passage sounded familiar, as it is what forms the base of our Lord’s Prayer that we say at least once a week. And it’s full of demands. “Your Kingdom come,” give us our daily bread, forgive us, “do not bring us to the time of trial.” These are all demands—not just for ourselves and our own personal flourishing, but for the community. The pronouns are plural: us, our, we. This prayer, unlike Abraham’s individual lobbying on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, is the manifesto of a people crying out to have their basic needs met and to see the good community realized in its midst. When Jesus teaches his followers how to pray, he teaches them not only how to approach God, but that prayer is collective action, it is speaking together, and it is speaking out with those in need. Not only that, when we organize to advocate for justice, our letter, our chants, our songs—these are prayers. Not because those in power are God, but because God hears those cries and stands with those who cry out.
To pray is to protest, to argue, to make demands. To pray is to be heard—by those in power and by the one who truly listens and will never turn us away. When you pray, when we pray together, may we pray ourselves to action, may we pray together in boldness, and may we pray God’s kingdom be revealed in our midst. When you pray, pray like this. Amen.
The Better Part
While this morning’s gospel reading certainly isn’t the most terrifying text in the Bible, and not even the most terrifying text in the New Testament, I have to admit that I always kind of dread when it comes up in the lectionary. It makes me a little uncomfortable to witness this interaction between Jesus and Martha. When I hear Jesus’s words, about how Martha is too worked up and is worried about the wrong things, it sounds kinda condescending and mainsplain-y to me. Does anyone else hear it that way? Hearing it that way makes me squirm a little because it makes it harder for me to forget that, while Jesus isn’t just some guy, he also is a man who was surrounded by all the cultural expectations and shortcomings that that brings.
So, maybe Jesus did do some mainsplaining. And I’m a little sorry if that’s not the way that you heard it before and now you can’t unhear it. But that’s a good reminder that we’re not always going to be entirely comfortable with all of what we hear in scripture. We’re going to hear things, or have heard things, that are unequivocally disturbing. And we’re going to hear things, or have heard things, that strike a particular nerve because of our own experiences and how we view a particular text. We may hear things differently—and that’s ok. That’s part of what makes biblical interpretation so fun. We bring our whole selves to the process, and I think that’s beautiful.
Reading this passage with that condescending tone in mind, it can be easy to think that Mary has it all right and Martha is getting everything wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. That might be true in the moment, but I think that there is a false binary present in the notion that a good disciple is like Mary and not like Martha. And I’m not just saying that because the folks who prepare Sunday Dinner or who provide mercy and hospitality in countless other ways here at Fairport lean more in the Martha direction. The Church is a place of activity. It’s a place of doing, of moving, of making a difference. Welcoming the stranger and providing hospitality is a part of our calling—whether they’re from down the block or halfway around the world. Would we still be living our call as a community of faith if we weren’t doing that? If we were just a social club? We have people to feed, goals to accomplish, deliveries to make, programs to organize. We should be busy, we should have many tasks, right?
So what, then, do we do with Mary. The do-nothing, the less busy one, the one not pulling her weight. Supposedly the one who has chosen the better part, whatever that means. Mary does a couple of things in this text for us. First, she forces us to redefine what we mean by hospitality. Tradition would have us see hospitality as making sure that the house is clean, the table is set, the good wine is brought up, and there is plenty of food for everyone. It’s the material hospitality that is vitally important, that makes sure that bodies are cared for. And it’s the kind of hospitality that is usually associated with women and with femininity. That’s what Martha provides. Mary provides her own kind of hospitality. She greets the guest, listens to what he has to say, makes him feel heard. While the text doesn’t say so, I find it hard to imagine that Mary would just sit there soaking it all in without saying anything back. She was a good disciple after all. So in my mind there’s an exchange taking place here between Jesus and Mary. Are they talking about anything serious? Is Jesus telling her parables in response to questions that she’s throwing at him? Maybe. Maybe they’re discussing current events, or the state of the fish market, or local goings on. This is hospitality in its own right, and it’s hospitality that is usually associated with men and with masculinity. That’s what Mary provides.
The other thing that Mary does in this text is she disrupts this idea that to be faithful is to be endlessly busy. She disrupts this idea that in order for us to be successful or for us to prove that we are fulfilling our mission we need to keep moving without stopping. We get this idea from somewhere that if we take time in between projects, somehow we’re not doing enough, even though Christ himself takes time to rest as he travels from village to village preaching and performing miracles. Even Jesus took breaks. He would go off for a while, by himself usually, to pray and just be apart. And yet we, often, end up living like Martha, whose value is, whether by societal expectations, personal expectations, or a combination of both, tied to her constant busyness. Constant busyness which we know, all too well, isn’t something that we see only in the church. We as an American society are terrible about work. Despite the insistence that no one wants to work anymore, which is a statement that has been thrown around as long as there have been workers, Americans work a lot.
While in the past five years the average number of hours that a full-time employee works per week has actually gone down slightly, the average work week for full-time workers is still over 40 hours a week. And that’s just paid labor which doesn’t include caring for children and other family members, it doesn’t include cleaning and housework, and any of the other necessary tasks included in the second shift—the work that traditionally falls on women. While there has been a push towards the prioritization of worker well-being more recently, a push that has been spear-headed by workers under the age of 40, Americans still perpetuate this harmful idea of the grindset or hustle culture—the idea that we ought to be working more in order to drive career advancement and greater productivity. It’s a culture that discourages vacations and taking care of yourself or others when sick. It discourages and even prevents new parents from spending time with their children. And now with the ability to work from home and be available 24/7, it discourages healthy boundaries and a life beyond work. And it leads to burnout, poor mental health, and further isolation from our communities.
It’s a modern embodiment of Amos’s criticism of those who can’t seem to wait until they can get back to business when the Sabbath is over, so they can keep on harming themselves and others by their practices.
You all may have thought you’d escape this week without a mention of John Wesley. At this point I really just want to see how long I can keep this streak going. One of John Wesley’s best-known sermons is his sermon on the use of money. You may be familiar with the Wesleyan adage that we ought to gain all we can, save all we can, and give all we can. We can unpack the second and third parts of that trio when we get to stewardship season. But I want to call out specifically the first part: that we ought to gain all we can. Wesley wasn’t opposed to us earning money. What he was opposed to was earning money at the expense of our own well-being and the well-being of others. That includes slavery. That includes over-working, although Wesley himself wasn’t always great about not overworking. That includes not buying and selling goods and services that are harmful to yourself and others. And it includes anything that might harm our own health and ability to rest, as well as others’ health and ability to rest.
Whether in body, mind, or soul, the ways in which we live and work ought not to harm us or our neighbors. So our call to live differently, our call to be different from the rest of the world, or at least the rest of our society, includes a call to resist the hustle, to resist the grind. It includes a call to now get consumed by all the many things that we have to do. And, it includes sharing one another’s burdens, a callback to my first Sunday. Rather than being in competition, rather than sectioning ourselves off or leaving others to fend for themselves, we are called to create space for one another to rest. There’s a whole community of people here—lean on one another. Hold one another accountable to resting, to not doing too much. If you’re Mary, maybe trade off with Martha once in a while. In a culture that ties our worth to our work, may we resist that impulse by sharing the load together, not trampling on one another. And not by trampling on ourselves. Sharing the load, resting in community, rejecting the notion that our worth is dictated by how much we do—that is the better part. Let’s choose that. Amen.
Digging In
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Luke 10:25-37
Well, I warned you all last week about how important Methodism is to me. More specifically, Methodist history is a big part of who I am and what I do. Some of you may know that I currently serve as the chair of the Upper New York Commission on Archives and History, and as a board member of the General Commission on Archives and History. But you might not know that I also spent more than a year volunteering at the United Methodist Archives at Drew University, and I have co-taught a course for the Upper New York Local Pastor Licensing School on United Methodist History. So, if you’re not a history person…well, I’m not going to say that I’m sorry, but I will warn you now that I like to sprinkle in stories from our ancestors of faith every now and then.
One of the stories that even the most devout and serious Methodists don’t always know is about a man named William Morgan. William Morgan was a member of the Holy Club, the student group led by John and Charles Wesley at Oxford that became the first Methodists. This group started out looking like many other campus ministries. The students would meet up frequently, study the scriptures, take communion as often as they could, talk about their faith, and fast regularly. Ok, so maybe the fasting part isn’t typical in a campus ministry nowadays, but the rest seems pretty standard. Anyway, William Morgan thought this was all great, but he wanted the Holy Club to do more for the community outside the university. So after weeks of prodding John and Charles, William Morgan was finally able to convince them to go with him to visit some people who were incarcerated in debtors’ prison. He dragged them along with him and…it went great. The Wesleys kept going back to visit the inmates at least once a week, and started raising funds to help those in debt get out of prison. Then, William Morgan realized he was onto something. So he took the Wesleys to visit a group of orphans that he had been educating and taking care of. And the Wesleys started to spend part of each week with the orphans—tutoring them, feeding them, and even hiring a caretaker for them. Her name was Mrs. Plat.
It got to the point where the entire Holy Club, not just William and the Wesleys, was spending a good portion of their time together each week with those on the margins—the orphans, the incarcerated, the elderly shut-ins. This became an integral part of who the Methodists were and how they lived their theology. I touched on this last week, when I talked about social action as a part of the Methodist theology of connection. And it all started when this man, William Morgan, took John and Charles to meet the people who had been forgotten or ignored by the rest of their society. It all started when they stopped crossing the street, and started acting like neighbors to those lying beaten in the gutter.
That’s not always an easy thing to do. It takes a conscious effort on our part to go out and meet the marginalized in our communities, especially since we have been so deeply conditioned to avoid eye contact and to not respond when we notice people sitting on the sidewalk or walking towards us while we’re stopped at an intersection. We keep our eyes pointed straight ahead, keep our windows rolled up, and keep on minding our own business. And even if we do stop to give someone a dollar, do you ask them their name? The disconnection in the world feeds and is fed by the distance that we put between us and others. Distance going back decades, created by white flight, the interstate system, and the rise of individual transportation as a replacement for mass transportation. We, as a society, have made it so much easier to cross the street, to keep our eyes fixed straight ahead, and to keep on walking—even while others lie bleeding in the gutter.
But, we watch the news. We stay up to date on the issues, who’s doing what, what the statistics are. But if that’s all we’re doing, just watching from afar while asking God, “who will go and do it for us, who will cross the sea for us—who will dig in, get closer, and make a difference?” Then we’re only halfway there. While we’re looking far away for answers and solutions, God tells us that they’re right here. The way to fulfill God’s call for us to live out our love for God and neighbor, which is all one and the same, is to look closer and to step closer. Surely that’s not too hard for us, nor is it too far away. There are people right here in Fairport, right here in Rochester who have been left in the gutter, those whom the institutional leaders seem comfortable passing by. Our call is to be different. Our call is to see each person at the margins not as a project or a person that we can save, but as those for whom we can be neighbors. And that starts with getting closer.
Because that’s what Christ is. Christ, the divine incarnate, is the God made real to us by getting closer to us. By taking on a human body, talking with people—with women, children, lepers, with criminals, and even the imperial occupiers. By experiencing anger, love, exhaustion, and even grief at the loss of a friend. By sharing the experience of working really hard at something and feeling like no one is listening to you and you haven’t really accomplished anything. And, ultimately, by being stripped, publicly humiliated, beaten, and left for dead. Christ is God, our neighbor, whose love for us is so great that it moved God to see those in the gutter and cross over to help. And, in so doing, provided us with the moral example, and the clarification that to fulfill the ancient commandment to love God with all of our heart and soul is to love your neighbor, and to love your neighbor requires you to go and be a neighbor. It requires us to get in closer, to build relationships. Because “neighbor” isn’t just defined by proximity. But it’s not, not defined by proximity either. It’s about standing with.
I would be remiss this morning if I did not mention Rochester Pride, which, as I mentioned in the announcements, is coming up this Saturday. As an aside, could someone explain to me after the service why Rochester Pride is in July and not June? Was there just a scheduling conflict with the entire month of June or is there some local history I’m not keyed into? I’d really appreciate that. While today Pride is largely seen as a celebration of community and identity, it has always been an act of neighborliness. It is an act of solidarity within the queer and trans communities, and also between allies and members of the community. It’s an organized way of showing up for those who have been and are currently being beaten, humiliated, and left lying in the gutter—whether by their family situations or by social and political violence. It’s a way for those who are queer, and especially those who are not, to break their stride and get down in the gutter. It’s a way for us to get closer, and to act a little more like neighbors.
So, how are you going to neighbor this week? How are you going to love your neighbor, to get to know your neighbor? How are you going to build those relationships, not as some salvific figure, but as one seeking true solidarity? Listen to the pestering of William Morgan—visit the incarcerated, the homebound, the orphaned. Connect with refugees and immigrants. Go to Pride! Allow yourself to be impacted by the hurt around you. Get in close, and dig deeper. As Christ has done for us, may we go and do likewise. Amen.
Don’t Carry It All
Galatians 6:1-10
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Hello, again. I’m Pastor Sam, or Sam is just fine. I want to begin by thanking everyone who has made me feel welcome so far, everyone who sent me a card to celebrate my recent graduation from seminary, and those who I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting. I also want to take a moment to say a special welcome to my parents, who are taking a week off from my dad’s church to be here, and my brother who is visiting as well. My fiance, Anna, is here, as are her parents and sisters. My own sister couldn’t be here today, since she just moved to New Jersey yesterday to start at Drew Theological School, but I’m pretty sure she’s watching the livestream. I know that some information has already gone out in the newsletter about who I am and how I got here, and as we spend more time together you’ll get to learn more about me and I’ll get to learn more about all of you. But if there’s one thing that you should know right off the bat, it’s that being a Methodist is a big part of who I am and how I have chosen to live out my call to ministry. There are a lot of things I love about Methodism, but one of the things I love the most is that, at its core, Methodism is all about connection.
That’s what made Methodism special in the first place. John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Movement, was not a systematic theologian like John Calvin. He was much more concerned with how people were living their lives than he was about explaining away every mystery there is. Wesley’s greatest contribution to the Methodist Movement, besides his theology of Grace which we’ll talk about another time, was how he organized people. He didn’t start churches, he started societies and class meetings. He started communities that would hold one another accountable for their transgressions and ask each other each week “how is it with your soul today?” When was the last time you asked someone how it is with their soul? When was the last time someone asked you? That’s how Methodist society leaders would begin each meeting: by asking the gathered community how it is with their souls, and the community was supposed to respond “it is well with my soul.” Can we try that right now together? Let's do it: How is it with your soul today? Then they would ask the harder question: “what sins have you committed this week?” I won’t make you answer that—this time.
But that’s not all they would do together. These societies and class meetings would be places of social action. For almost three hundred years, Methodists have been collecting money for the poor and fixing homes for those in need. We’ve been feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those who are sick and in prison. We’ve been providing education—not just the Christian kind! — when public access to education has been restricted and made accessible only to the very wealthy. Since the beginning, the whole point of the Methodist movement has been to build communities that supported one another—whether that be materially, spiritually, emotionally, or politically. To be a part of a Methodist community meant, and ought to mean, supporting one another as we travel this road together.
When the Apostle Paul writes his letter to the community gathered at Galatia, this is what he calls them to. He calls them to be accountable to and for one another. He calls them to bear one another’s burdens. I’m not interested in being some charismatic cult leader. I’m not interested in “do as I say, not as I do.” I’m not interested in sitting up in my office while all the action is happening elsewhere. I’m not even interested in being right all the time, because I know that I won’t be. What I am interested in, is building and revealing connections between and amongst us. What I am interested in, is living together as a community of people that cares about one another enough to share our whole selves, to share our resources, and to share our burdens. I’m interested in getting my hands dirty—and I hope you are, too. Because this is what we are called to: to bear one another’s burdens and see God in each person we meet.
We live in a world that is hurting. We live in a lonely world that longs for greater connection. And we live in a world that is repeatedly facing new challenges to connection. Just this past week, our federal government passed an obscene piece of legislation that will drive millions deeper into poverty, leave millions without any access to healthcare, and make our communities less safe by funneling over 160 billion more dollars into immigration and customs enforcement. And that’s just what made the headlines this week. My friends, there are plenty of burdens to go around. Some weigh on us more than others. But Christ does not send us out alone. He sends us out, as our Gospel this morning reminds us, in pairs. He sends us out, telling us to be totally reliant on one another. And he never promises that everything we do will pan out just the way we want it to. And he certainly never says that it’ll be easy. But the only way that we might even come close to realizing the Kingdom of God in our midst, is by leaning on one another. By sharing our burdens, so that none of us carries it all.
I’m not going to make any promises about what this community will look like in a year, or five, or ten. I haven’t really gotten to know you yet. I haven’t had a chance to hear your passions, to learn who it is for whom your heart breaks. Whatever we become, though, whatever we do, wherever we go—may we do so together, holding each other tenderly, and bearing one another’s burdens. And, I just want to be perfectly clear—this goes both ways here. I will share your burdens if you will share mine. I will hold you accountable with grace if you will do the same for me. I will be mindful and protective of your need to rest and take time apart if you will do the same for me. I know I’m young but hey, I get tired too, ya know? I will challenge you to think and act if you will do the same for me. And I will share in your joy, your sorrow, your pain, and your journey, if you will join in mine.
We are here to serve together, connected by the Spirit and called to a particular way of life. It may not make sense in a world that prefers us isolated and self-sufficient. But that is who we are called to be—an interdependent, vulnerable, burden-sharing community of faith. So let us dream Kingdom dreams together. Let us be honest with one another. Let us grow together into who God is inviting us to be. Amen.
My Sheep Hear My Voice
I have a Bible Study tip for you this morning. It is often important to ask who is being addressed in a particular passage.
In our passage from John’s gospel this morning we encounter two parties who are at odds. On the one hand we have the people John refers to as “the Jews” and on the other hand we have Jesus.
A word of course must be spoken here about what is meant by the term “the Jews.” Remember that Jesus and all of his close followers during his earthly ministry were Jews.
As this word occurs in John’s gospel, it means those Jews who have not been open to Jesus’ teaching and do not accept what he says and does as evidence of God’s fullness in him. They were not open to John the Baptizer’s preaching either. In the other gospels, these folks are generally referred to as “the scribes and the pharisees.” I.e., Jewish leaders.
Let’s be clear: It is wrong and dangerous to negatively identify Jewish people of today with Jesus’ adversaries as John tells this story about back then.
But to return to the Bible study tip, let’s ask the question of who this passage addresses. This passage describes a conversation. Jesus and 1the scribes and pharisees are talking to each other. But who is the gospel writer talking to?
The original hearers of John’s gospel were members of precarious communities spread across the Mediterranean. This storytelling is addressed to them.
These precarious communities had come together over time as followers of an executed man accused of blasphemy and sedition. As their number expanded their members included a variety of ethnic groups, both Jews and Gentiles. They included to some extent different social classes who were admonished to treat one another equally, regardless of economic status – and were even told that in Jesus there was neither male nor female and neither slave nor free.
We are told in John’s gospel that Jewish followers of Jesus were cast out of the synagogue, and so they no longer had their traditional connections with their religious community of origin.
Throughout John’s Gospel, John highlights the divisions between those of the darkness and those of the light and the writer emphasizes that as Jesus enters history a great division emerges between those who are drawn to him and those who reject him: Those who are his sheep and those who are not.
So, John’s gospel is written to the precarious communities who are trying to stay together despite social differences in uncharted territory. John emphasizes Jesus’ words to inspire confidence in the unity of those who DO hear his voice and see in his signs the revelation of the fullness of God that dwells in him.
One of the reasons they are precarious communities is that they are receiving a different message from the rulers, powers, and institutional systems around them.
John writes so that these precarious communities will overhear this conversation and take what Jesus says to their hearts, for their encouragement, to strengthen their confidence – despite their vulnerability.
Jesus is the shepherd of the way, the truth, and the life. “Hear my voice over the competing voices that urge you to greed, fear, and cruelty.” Jesus’ voice is not the only voice speaking. And it’s not the loudest voice. Then or now. And there are those who claim to speaking his message who are deceivers.
I’d like to linger on this notion of “precarious communities.” I want us to take that very seriously – not just in thinking about the first audience of John’s gospel, but of us.
I used to say that if you have health insurance, and Wegmans nearby, you pretty much don’t need God.
What I meant was that for most of us in Fairport, we could mainly take care of ourselves without any extraordinary help from God.
Around here we normally aren’t living precarious lives day to day. Of course, each of us have moments of coming to grips with our vulnerabilities, but, on the whole, most of us live relatively confident of our social and material position.
But be that as it may, as I think about it now, I’m not at all confident that this will continue.
When I think about the extraordinary economic and political uncertainty that we face today and as I think about the growing, unrelenting effects of climate change and all the other environmental threats that are challenging us and will increasingly challenge us, I invite us to seriously overhear Jesus’ words as one of those early precarious Christian communities.
Let’s hear this passage today with the ears of a precarious community so that we begin to prepare ourselves to have the confidence we will need in what are likely increasingly difficult days ahead. Let’s hear it with confidence that Jesus is the shepherd of the way, the truth, and the life. Let’s hear it over the competing voices that urge us to greed, fear, and cruelty.
Again, Jesus’ voice is not the only voice speaking. And it’s still not the loudest voice.. There are still those who claim to be speaking Jesus’ message who are lying.
In our passage this morning the text makes four important points as these precarious communities overhear again the words of Jesus through the Gospel. Let’s listen so that we hear them as well.
1. These precarious communities are reminded: You hear my voice.
I have not abandoned you. Through the HS you remain in touch with me as much as the original disciples were in touch with me. This is an ongoing relationship. Jesus’ voice is inviting these precarious communities to share their life with him and to take his life into their own.
John’s gospel is often said to be the most mystical of the Gospels. It speaks of a deep connectedness and transparency between God and the world through Jesus. To be in touch with Jesus is to be in touch with God.
Even when they cannot make out clearly just exactly what Jesus means, Jesus’ followers are continually invited into the conversation to listen more deeply, to cultivate the capacity to pay less attention to the distracting voices and noises of the world and be more deeply attuned to the voice that invites them more and more deeply into love. To conjoin their experience with the experience of Jesus and the conversation among Jesus’ followers so that they are more and more faithfully following the shepherd.
Today this passage gives us assurance that we can hear the shepherd’s voice. We can hear it. We can open ourselves to the fullness of Jesus’ guidance.
We can let go of excuses that it is somehow not yet clear enough. We can unplug ourselves from the ego-driven messages of consumer, comfort culture and ego-driven messages of status and ambition, regularly enough and long enough to hear the shepherd’s voice?
2. These precarious communities are reminded: You have eternal life.
Your life is no longer bound by time and space. Your life is in time and space, but no longer bound by it. Your life now extends/opens up beyond the limits of the time allotted in this world.
Moreover, the life we live now is continuous with that eternal life. So Jesus’ voice is inviting us to live into eternity not just in the future but in the now. Jesus’ voice calls them into eternal communion, eternal connection with the love that is the source and being of all that is. Jesus tells them: your life can never be called small, insignificant, meaningless, or worthless. It is eternal. It has no end. Your life is unbounded and precious to the Shepherd. No limits in God’s love.
We, too, can have the confidence to embrace eternal life. We can look at the particulars of our own lives in this world and discern how they fit into God’s purposes. Our decisions can fit into God’s larger call on our lives. Our priorities can line up with God’s priorities.
Or another way to put this: We can practice the eternal language of love in this life so that we will be fluent in love in the life to come.
First: You hear the shepherd’s voice.
Second: You have eternal life.
3. Thirdly, these precarious communities are reminded: You have been given to me by the Father and you will not be torn from me.
Yes, you have been disconnected from your original communities, religions, and fellow worshippers. You have no place to go back to. And you are not getting any encouragement from those around you who are following other paths, but do not focus on the tenuous worldly connections that bind you together.
What brought you together to be my followers is deeper than that. It is the very grace and love of God that has called you together. Despite all the difficulties and fragility you might encounter, I assure you that this call to follow me is bigger than you. Bigger than your desire or preference. Bigger than your past or your future. It is based on the breath of the Holy Spirit which is ultimately more stable than the mountains. It is based on the bond of love that is as firmly fixed as the roots of the sturdiest tree. This is why my new commandment is that you love one another.
We, too, are invited to be drawn more deeply into connection with Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and with one another. Our ability to hear more clearly the voice of the shepherd only depends on our attending to the relationship. We can intentionally spend time with the Shepherd – devoting ourselves to prayer and to worship and to paying attention to what Jesus says.
4. Fourthly, these precarious communities are reminded: I and the Father are one.
Just as you and I cannot be torn apart, I and the Father are not to be separated. To see me is to see the Father. To hear me is to hear the Father. I do everything according to the will of the Father. I do not blaspheme the Father in saying this, but those who say that I am insulting God are the ones who are opposed to God. To be caught up with me is to be caught up with the Father. To be drawn to me is to be drawn to God.
Have confidence: We do not live apart from God. We live embraced by God, always and everywhere. Like it or not, that is the truth of the cosmos revealed in Jesus, God has entered humanity in Jesus Christ, invited us to be a part of God’s loving and reconciling action in history, in our world, and blessed all of creation in that earthly, flesh and blood reality.
You hear my voice.
You have eternal life.
You have been given to me by the Father and you will not be torn from me.
I and the Father are one.
The precarious communities of Jesus’ followers needed to hear these words in the face of those who would deny or distort them. And the same is true for us.
The loudest voices around us may be those calling us to stray from the path of compassion, peace, and mercy.
As we in our time may face challenging circumstances, as a precarious community, let us live, serve, and love with confidence and courage, always attuned to the voice of the Good Shepherd.
Hear again the psalm of the shepherd. Hear it confidently as a reality that is always unfolding in your life. May its words be like noise-cancelling headphones that drown out the cacophony of distraction and distortion:
Psalm 23
1The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
In these moments of quiet, let other voices give way to the voice of peace, the voice of the Good Shepherd.
Everything (In) Between: Righteousness & Mercy
This year’s Lenten worship series invites us to get in-between black and white binaries. Our series amplifies Jesus’ invitation to move away from paralyzing polarities that obscure, rather than clarify, the reality we face.
We are coming to understand that while these dualistic binaries and polarities may seem to simplify our lives at first glance, they can easily keep us from grappling with the deeper truth into which Christ is calling us.
Today, we consider the alleged polarity between righteousness and mercy. We will come to see that these are not in opposition. Rather, they are parts of a process in which both work together, bringing healing and reconciliation to individuals and communities.
First, however, I’d like to lay some groundwork by asking you to hear two short questions. Ready?
Are you with us good guys?
Are you with them bad guys?
Of course, these questions can be deployed in a variety of situations; much will depend on who’s asking, and much will depend on what the exact context is. But we can distill out of these questions that the words doing the work in them are the two adjectives: good and bad, and the two pronouns: us and them.
As I think about good and bad and us and them, I can feel how closely us and good stick together and how closely them and bad stick together. Do you feel that?
And that’s not crazy. Especially for us upstanding church folks and most people who feel like they want to be good or try to be good. It’s probably a good thing in most situations to feel like we identify with good people. I suspect that if we want to do the right thing it will generally be an encouragement to us if we’re identifying with those we consider good people who do the right thing. I want to be one of the good guys. Don’t you?
And, conversely, again, especially for us upstanding church folks and most people who feel like they want to avoid being bad or who are trying not to do the wrong things, it can be helpful to in all sorts of ways NOT identify with folks who are behaving badly. We don’t want to be among those bad guys.
But here’s the thing, it can lead us into trouble if we can’t separate us and good. For example, we might be mistaken about what is good. And the crowd who are us might just be reinforcing a wrong understanding about what is good and bad or right and wrong among ourselves and it can be challenging to separate ourselves from our friends.
We must always be aware that we are more likely to be convinced of a wrong idea or bad behavior or practice that is considered right, good, and normal among our friends and associates.
I’m reminded of a gay married couple I once knew. One of the couple was estranged from their parents. Their parents were part of a fundamentalist church that thought their marriage was wrong, that they were in a sinful relationship. And so these parents were estranged from their child and their child’s partner. Now, I’m pretty sure that part of what was going on was that the parents could not separate from the us good guys of their church. This was a sad sad sad situation for the child. Their parents cast them as one of them bad guys.
But even if – even if – one conscientiously believes that same-gender marriage or same-gender romantic relationships are wrong, doesn’t it give us pause that the stickiness between us and good can’t be dissolved to allow for parents to affirm an us that includes their child?
And now we’re in a better position to consider the supposed binary between righteousness and mercy.
Again, consider the two questions:
Are you with us good guys?
Are you with them bad guys?
Righteousness has to do with the adjectives characterizing good and bad actions and persons.
Mercy has to do with the pronouns: whom will we bring into mercy? Mercy is the offer to transform them into part of a larger us. Mercy is the offer to transform them into part of a larger us.
I think you can already begin to see how this plays into the story of Zaccheus before us.
Zaccheus was clearly one of them bad guys. He was a collaborator with the oppressive and hated occupying Romans. To be a tax collector was bad enough, but it seems that he was even more greedy than he needed to be. He was a persecuting enemy collaborator.
And so when Jesus pays Zaccheus special attention, honors Zaccheus – one of them bad guys – the bystanders resent Jesus’ engaging him with respect. Going so far as to honor Zaccheus with the opportunity to host Jesus in his home. How can Jesus honor one of them bad guys?
From Zaccheus’ standpoint, he is attracted by Jesus’ celebrity status. But he wants to remain invisible. He’s hiding. Being in the sycamore tree is a way of seeing without being seen. He knows he is one of “them bad guys.”
But we can see what is going on here: Jesus identifies him as one of us – ultimately referring to Zaccheus as a child of Abraham. One of us. Jesus sees him as a lost sheep, not a marginal goat or a treacherous wolf. And in engaging with Zaccheus, the opening for restoration and healing emerges.
When Jesus invites him to come down from the tree, and in inviting himself to be Zaccheus’ guest, he breaks through the them to recognize Zaccheus as one of Jesus’ us. And, as Zaccheus becomes part of Jesus’ us, Zaccheus finds himself empowered to repent back into righteousness.
Mercy is not opposed to righteousness; mercy is a part of the path toward righteousness.
The steps of progression go like this:
They are one of them bad guys. A recognition that they are doing a bad thing.
We recognize that they are still one of us. We offer mercy.
This opens the door to their self-recognition, repentance, and change to righteousness.
They become one of us good guys.
Note that recognizing deviations from righteousness is part of the progression. It’s part of the package. Being a chiseling, traitorous tax collector is bad. Let’s not forget that moral judgments – moral differentiations – are appropriate. People get hurt when people do bad things. Let’s not lose sight of that.
But at the same time, note that righteousness and mercy are not antithetical, both are part of a process. A sequence. Our encounter with Jesus challenges us to participate in that process, mindful of both mercy and righteousness.
In the material that supports this Everything In Between series, there’s a reference to a piece by a popular Christian author, Nadia Bolz Weber, who wrote this in her substack blog in December of 2024, three and a half months ago.
A couple weeks ago as I read so many passionate pleas for people to refuse to attend Thanksgiving with family members who voted for Trump (even if your uncle has loved you your entire life, you were expected out of ideological loyalty to abandon the reality of that love for the dopamine bump of self-righteousness) I found myself wishing we could just shake the etch-a-sketch in this country. And that maybe when the silvery sand settled blank, every one of us who has been incrementally pushed farther apart from each other over the years … could see each other as beautiful and worthy of flourishing: trans folks, gun owners, immigrants, “trad wives”, military veterans, incarcerated folks, prison guards, atheists, priests, straight white guys, Black women. That feels like the Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom of God, like its founder, refuses to be domesticated by our current ideological agendas.
[https://thecorners.substack.com/p/the-case-for-revival-an-announcement]
My original intention was that my message this morning would end on this note. These words are certainly ones I endorse. Ultimately, the division between good guys and bad guys is an illusion. Jesus is always calling us away from finger-pointing into the larger us.
Yet the world has moved on in the three and half months since mid-December when she wrote this and I need to acknowledge that as well, so I invite you to come out on a limb with me. And maybe you will feel the urge to take up a saw.
As the weeks have gone by, the current regime in Washington has operated with an increasing level of callousness, cruelty, and recklessness that I can only characterize as evil. We know it’s evil because of a lack of respect for human dignity and the abuse of power. The current regime in Washington is doubling down on the stickiness of us-good and acting out revenge on those they consider them bad guys. The current regime knows neither righteousness nor mercy.
In the last two months we have moved beyond the level of political and policy disagreement into the realm of moral turpitude. This is not a matter of ideological agenda. It is a matter of identifying evil when we see it.
I can tell you that I preached regularly for 35 years. On many occasions I had political and policy disagreements with the government. Sometimes those disagreements were rooted in moral and ethical positions rooted in the gospel. Yet moral purity is not to be expected in governing, and there are often many competing interests that governments must consider in enacting policies. I get that.
The situation we confront today is starkly different. I am calling on us to recognize together that what’s going on now is not normal. And it’s not right. Again, the current regime knows neither righteousness nor mercy. Some people are doing bad things and other people are getting hurt. And worst of all, the regime pretends that it is standing up for Christianity, adding blasphemy to the indictment.
So, if we good, upstanding church folk are going to be true to our baptismal vows, we need to recognize it and respond.
We have vowed to:
…accept the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
And that is one step in the righteousness – mercy progression. Recognizing bad behavior.
I confess that I am not clear about what the next steps are in actual practice. I’m open to suggestions. I am clear, however, that we are called to proceed with courage, wisdom, and humility, to find our way toward the kind of wider mercy which Nadia Bolz Weber envisions.
In the coming days, let our prayer be that whenever and however this day’s Zaccheuses come down from hiding in their sycamore trees, we can find the way and the place in-between righteousness and mercy. And until then, let us pray for the courage, wisdom, and humility to resist evil, injustice, and oppression.
I invite you to begin those prayers in these moments of quiet.