Number in Series: Sixth

A Time for Growing & A Time for Rooting

Welcome, everyone.

We’ve been in a sermon series called Something New, reflecting on what it means to live like new life is still possible, and to make it so together. Inspired in part by poet and theologian Padraig O’Tuama’s reminder that the making of something new is often found not only in art, but in the vulnerable and risky work of cooperation itself: in communities learning how to care for and sustain one another, and imagine new ways forward together. 

And this series has been inviting us not just to think about faith as an idea, but to live it more fully embodied and enacted in our everyday lives. Trusting that as we participate in love, creativity, courage, and connection, our lives widen toward one another and toward the making of a more just and life-giving world. 

And because of that, today’s service will be just a little different than usual.  

The hope of any sermon, or scripture study, or church service… is not only to listen or take in what is put out… 

  • It is to participate in the movement of God.
  • To pay attention to our own stories, both personal and collective.
  • To let ancient words meet our real lives with guidance and wisdom and provocation.

So this morning, Pastor Lydia and I will share the stage and there will be a couple of moments where we invite you to share with people around you. Nothing polished, just from the heart, an opportunity to notice what resonates, what season you might be in, and what God might be stirring among us together. *For folks on-line we’ll join you in the chat for those moments!*

We enter into this time trusting that the Spirit of God is very much alive and moving among us.

  • Still unsettling what has grown stagnant in us.
  • Still nurturing what longs to grow.
  • Still helping us loosen roots that no longer give life, and planting new ones more deeply in love. . .love of neighbor, love of self, love of this world.

So today, we’re running with the theme: “A Time for Growing, and a Time for Rooting.”

Some of us arrive here eager for something new.
Some of us arrive exhausted by change.
Some of us are longing to be uprooted from what confines us.
And some of us are simply longing to belong somewhere again.

Wherever you find yourself this morning, we hope this service can be a space of freedom — participate as much as you feel inclined. But also a space that invites curiosity, and connection, a space where we can find God in scripture, in story, in one another, and maybe even within ourselves in new ways. 

About 12 years ago, I started a small nonprofit called The Planting More Project. At its heart, it was about helping communities grow food and grow connection at the same time … Building outdoor classrooms, partnering with schools and food pantries, creating spaces where neighbors could nourish one another in tangible ways. Fresh produce for families. Garden beds that “seeded” student’s wonder and awe at growing things from tiny beginnings into something that could feed people.

And in the beginning, so much of that vision — so much of me getting that project off the ground depended on me utilizing a greenhouse. We found one at Costco, put it together and set it up in our backyard. 

The greenhouse was so essential for all I needed, for new life to take off. It offered warmth, protection, consistency, light. It created the perfect environment for seeds to grow (become seedlings), and hundreds of them at once. These delicate little shoots of life that would never have survived the cold spring on their own . . and yet suddenly had what they needed to begin.

There’s something beautiful about that kind of container. And perhaps we all need them at certain moments in life. The beginning of a relationship. A new job. A spiritual awakening. A community that holds us while our roots are still fragile. Places where growth feels possible because the conditions are carefully tended and we are protected from the harshness outside — a shelter — a reprieve — a sanctuary.

During Covid — when the greenhouse wasn’t being used for its intended use, our daughters turned it into a “she-shed”, they set up all these fairy lights and got a rug and a couple of chairs. It was a haven in the midst of scariness.

“A time for comfort in the midst of a time of disorientation.”

And maybe especially right now, when the world can feel exhausting and unpredictable, there’s part of us that wouldn’t mind what a greenhouse can provide.

  • Somewhere where the environment is controlled.
  • Somewhere we understand the rules.
  • Somewhere insulated from the wind and uncertainty and grief of the wider world.

But the truth about greenhouses is that while they are meant for beginnings, not permanence. Eventually, if a tomato plant is going to bear fruit, it has to leave the greenhouse. It has to be planted deeply into the ground. It has to learn the wind. The rain. The instability of weather. It has to strengthen roots that can hold in real soil, not just in a crowded/sheltered tray.

Because there is a difference between being kept alive… and truly growing.

And sometimes growth requires reimagining the containers we’ve been living in, not because they were bad or unnecessary, but because the life inside us has begun asking for more space, more depth, more sky.

“Maybe there’s…“a time for staying safe and a time for risking new growth.”

So my story is… not all of our containers are chosen. 

I was uprooted when I was nine years old, from South Korea and placed anew, to the United States, specifically in a small town in Georgia. Disorienting doesn’t even begin to describe my experience. In this way, these days I am feeling like a potted plant. I was placed, as a child, into this container. A rigid, full of rules and regulations. After school I had a lovely tutor who helped me with English. We worked on my accent. Long ee vowel sounds were the hardest.

“Have a sit.” “Have a seat.” “Would you like a piece of gum?” “Let’s go to the beach.”

My parents tried to make us stop speaking Korean in the house, because they knew the more quickly we learned English and spoke it fluently, the better life we were going to experience. I lost my Korean accent and I miss it. Why did I have to contort my mother tongue so much, to have to lose the vowels and sounds and shapes that my ancestors carried? 

and now…… and now that I am getting older, I’m starting to wonder, where, where was I rooted before? What did the land and the earth feel like? And what is this hard plastic that’s encompassing me? Where are other plants like me? Why are my roots all wrapped and tangled up unto itself? 

“Potting up” means moving a plant into a larger pot so it has more room for its roots to grow. This is different than just re-potting. “Potting up” means specifically that you are moving it to a bigger container.

You generally “pot up” when:

  • Roots are circling the pot (root-bound)
  • Soil dries out very quickly — no more nutrients left
  • Plant growth has slowed

Sometimes the world has already confined us – without our choosing.

And nowadays, after I’ve tried hard to be perfectly American, shedding as much of Korean as I could, as the detriment of my loss, grief, and sense of severing. When I have been so loyal to the American Dream and bought into it all from capitalism or Christianity, memorizing past American president names for the Citizenship Test I took when I turned 18.  Now, I am hearing that those who were not born in the US, might have their citizenship taken away? 

So as an immigrant, I feel like a potted plant. Growing, contained, and now dreaming of more, even with fears, because I miss being rooted, not just by myself, but to others. What does it look like for me to be potted up?

“Sounds like a time for reclaiming what was severed… and a time for becoming more fully yourself” 

Sometimes when we talk about growth or “something new,” we imagine it as constant upward movement. Clear. Certain. Predictable. But maybe growth is less about perfection and more about learning when the containers that once held us — whether chosen or imposed, can no longer contain who we are becoming.

IVY: Because some containers shelter us when we are fragile.
LYDIA: And some containers shape us before we ever had the language or power to choose them.
IVY: Some keep us safe.
LYDIA: Some keep us small.
IVY: Some do both at the same time. 

And spiritually, we can do this too. We can spend so much time trying to preserve how faith once felt — the clarity of it, the certainty of it, the greenhouse moment of it –– that we resist the very thing faith has always asked of us. Transformation. movement. reimagining.

And sometimes growth means asking harder questions:


What have I outgrown? What has outgrown me?

Because growth asks us to keep reading the world around us. To respond to new realities with courage and imagination. To let our roots deepen instead of remaining tangled in the same small spaces forever.

And that’s the hard part… not starting….but evolving.

There are seasons where things are growing…and seasons where things feel uprooted.
Seasons where we feel alive and expanding…and seasons where we feel stunted,  grieving, stretched thin.. .

Which is part of why we were drawn to the familiar verses in Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3 — because they do not try to flatten those experiences or rush past them. It simply tells the truth, that being human means moving through many seasons. And maybe those rhythms are part of what remind us that we are alive. That we are still growing, still changing, still becoming. 

So as we read these words together, I invite you to notice what resonates with you…
Notice what season feels close to your life right now.  

Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (Common English Bible):
There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens:

    a time for giving birth and a time for dying,

    a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted,

    a time for killing and a time for healing,

    a time for tearing down and a time for building up,

    a time for crying and a time for laughing,

    a time for mourning and a time for dancing,
 

    a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones,

    a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces,

    a time for searching and a time for losing,

    a time for keeping and a time for throwing away,

    a time for tearing and a time for repairing,

    a time for keeping silent and a time for speaking,

    a time for loving and a time for hating,

    a time for war and a time for peace. 


So take a moment for yourself, and just consider what season feels close to your life right now? (Or if none of the verses resonate — what line would add yourself?
“A time for _____ and a time for _____.”)

Now we invite you to turn to a few people near you (4-5 folks) and share what came to mind as you reflected on: What season feels close to your life right now?

Last summer I, along with Reed and his friend, and Scott physically walked our large greenhouse down the middle of the parkway to the local elementary school. Its long-standing spot in our backyard, now vacant.

The move had been coming for a while. Despite the greenhouse being a bumper-spot for incredibly healthy seedlings in those early years, I started noticing that year over year things weren’t growing as quickly or as vibrantly as they once had. Not because sunlight, warmth, or rich soil no longer mattered, but because over the years, the environment around the greenhouse had changed. The trees that line our backyard grew over those 10 years! –their branches and leaves started to block more and more sunlight from reaching the greenhouse. And little by little the conditions that once made growth possible in that exact spot no longer worked in the same way. 

So we excavated the whole structure and moved it somewhere new — not because growth no longer mattered, but because it still did!

There are seasons in life where we need containers, structures, beliefs, distinct rhythms that help hold and shape us while we are becoming. And those containers can be beautiful and necessary. But sometimes there also comes a moment when what once nurtured growth can no longer hold all the life that is trying to emerge.

Whether I stepped away from faith entirely for a few years in high school and college, or whether I was more lovingly inspecting and deconstructing parts of my faith journey later on, I realized I still longed for the things that nourish me…rootedness and community.

Growth it seems is not only about becoming larger or freer as individuals– but freer together, discovering the people and communities where our roots can deepen alongside others. Where nourishment is shared. Where we remember we were never meant to grow alone. 

Plants don’t grow alone– their root systems intertwine. Nutrient networks are shared. Ecosystems depend on each other, interdependence.

After finishing seminary, having learned all that I learned, studying alongside queer colleagues, studying to be pastors, learning about feminist theology and womanist theology and liberation theology, and historical critical method of approaching the Bible, in a predominantly White institution, I started to wonder, where my Asians at? There weren’t that many 2nd generation Asian Americans like me. I knew of a few other older Korean-American female pastors, but aside from that, all my Asian friends were generally attending conservative churches, working in tech or sciences, but theologically narrow, in my opinion, and the gospel was so much more expansive and liberative that most of grew up in. I wondered, are there others? Are others as frustrated as I am about Trump getting elected in 2016 backed by Christians? I wasn’t sure. 

I started seeing on Facebook (back then when Facebook was hot) FB pages or groups like ex-evangelicals or progressive Christians. I wondered if there were progressive Asian American Christians. I didn’t find anything. So I started a group named, Progressive Asian American Christians.

A few weeks later I was having coffee with another seminary grad Asian woman and we shared many political and theological ideologies. She wrote an article a few weeks later called The Loneliness of being Progressive Asian American Christian, it got picked up by the Huffington Post and our group got 300 people in one day, thousands in a few weeks. I had found my people. That was 10 years. I actually found this role at Reservoir on the PAAC Facebook group eight years ago! 

These days I’m finding Asian spiritual care practitioners who guides me through prayers called “Holy Hot Pot” (which I totally want to do here at Reservoir, so if you want to help me do it, reach out, Asian or not!) and we share liturgies inspired by Korean ancestral rituals. It’s given me access to roots that I didn’t even know existed. And leaning on their tree has given me rest and release from the tension I had been holding on all tangled up on my own. 

If we keep going in Ecclesiastes we see that it doesn’t stop at naming the seasons of our lives. A chapter later, it reminds us that we were never meant to move through those seasons entirely alone.

In Chapter 4 it says:

9 Two are better than one because they have a good return for their hard work.

10 If either should fall, one can pick up the other. But how miserable are those who fall and don’t have a companion to help them up!

11 Also, if two lie down together, they can stay warm. But how can anyone stay warm alone?

12 Also, one can be overpowered, but two together can put up resistance. A three-ply cord doesn’t easily snap.  

Creation itself reflects that same wisdom. Living things aren’t meant to stay sealed off forever. Roots intertwine underground. Nutrients are shared across ecosystems. Trees shelter one another. Growth happens through relationships, through belonging.

And maybe the best parts of faith are like that too. Rooted, yes. But still growing. Still reaching. Not abandoning what once helped us, but reimagining it and deepening it together. Allowing ourselves to keep reaching toward what gives life.

Because none of us grows well completely alone. We need people who help us stay rooted while also making space for new growth, people who nourish us, challenge us, accompany us, and help us imagine what could still be possible.

  1. Take a minute to reflect individually —- Where are you finding your roots — or longing for them — right now?

  2. Now share with a few people around you — Where are you finding your roots – or longing for them, right now? 

We are going to move to a time of communion and also a time where the prayer team is available at the rear of the Sanctuary if you would appreciate 1:1 prayer.

As we move toward communion this morning, we come carrying all kinds of seasons with us. 

Communion reminds us that faith has always been something shared at a table. On the night before his death, Jesus gathered with his friends and took ordinary things, bread and a cup of wine, and gave them new meaning. Bread broken as a sign of his body, broken in love for the world. A cup poured out as a sign of a new covenant — a new way forward shaped not by domination or fear, but by love and relationship.

And maybe that’s part of what we remember each time we come to this table, that God is always making something new among us whenever we remain connected to one another, through all seasons…. Whenever we forgive one another. Whenever we make room for people to bring their whole stories, histories and hopes to the table. Whenever we create spaces where people no longer have to grow all tangled up on their own.  

So this morning, as you come forward to receive communion — (a gluten free cracker and grape juice), we also invite you to take a small plant from the tables behind the communion stations and place it in a basket along the wall installation.

And if you’d like, you can also splash a small bit of water onto the plant before you place it there, a small prayer of hope for what is still growing among us. 

In this participation may you remember that we belong to one another, and to this living, growing world God continues to nurture among us. Come and receive nourishment, embody nourishment for one another and together may we tend what is still growing among us. 

Benediction: May your days ahead be filled with a season that offers you life to the fullest. A time for rooting and a time for growing in the love of God, among one another, and with this living world that continues to nourish us all, with the Spirit of God.  

Life Can Be a Joyful Surprise

One of the joys of my life the past couple years has been reconnecting with an older couple who were important to me as a teenager. 

Jean was my high school class advisor, and I was in student government, so we spent a lot of time together, and Ken was my sophomore year English teacher and made a big impression on me at the time. 

We had lost touch for decades, but recently, through the power of nostalgia and social media, we’ve been communicating again and the past couple of years, Grace and I have shared meals and conversation with them. 

The other week, I was telling one of my brothers that I was back in touch with them, and the first thing he said about Ken was: that man has known so much sadness. 

And he’s not wrong. 

Before Ken was my English teacher when I was 15, he had been divorced for years and one of his two children had just died of an illness she contracted while studying abroad. 

And then in the middle of the year I had him as a teacher, Ken’s second child was killed in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

So my brother was right, Ken is a man who has known so much sadness. Life can be a killer sometimes.

But it can be so much more than that too.

My brother’s words – that man has known so much sadness – jarred me at first. Because I thought – that’s not how I think of Ken at all.

Even in high school, he was the first teacher I felt took a real personal interest in me. I’d write the daily and weekly journals we were required to do to get us writing more words with more ease, and he’d write little notes back to me. Not correcting what I’d said or how I’d said it, but just responding to whatever I had taken the time to express. As if it mattered.

Ken got remarried the year after his two children died, to that really kind and wise class advisor of ours. And during my senior year in high school, there was an evening when I was one of the people invited to their home for these dinner parties Ken would plan.

And I remembered a moment when I was sitting alone with Ken in the living room of the house he had moved into in my hometown after his remarriage. And he looked around a moment, at the house, the furniture, the pictures of his wife and step children on the walls, looking around really I guess at the new life he was living, the new memories he making, and he said:

Sometimes, Steven, I can’t believe all this has happened to me, that I’ve come into this life I have now. How did it all happen? It’s so good. 

I was really moved by that. I didn’t come from a world where grown-ups talked with teenagers that way – openly, authentically, and honestly about the deep things of life. And I guess I’m not sure I had known someone that was embracing a second chapter in life so fully either.

Just a couple of years earlier, near the end of that awful year of death, Ken gave a speech at a ceremony during my older brother’s graduation week. And I remember him gripping the podium as his hands shook and saying:

Here I stand bereft of children, but not of hope. 

And the line shook me – with its tragedy, its honesty, and also with its courage. And two years later, as we sat together, I guess the message I was hearing was: maybe hope is real. Maybe hope doesn’t disappoint you.

Maybe life can be a killer sometimes. But it can also be a joyful surprise.

And that’s pretty much the good news of Easter, isn’t it? That even though one way or another, life breaks us all, there is also so much more to life than that.

  • Hope can be born out of loss.
  • Resurrection can follow crucifixion.
  • Second chapters can be glorious.
  • Life can also be a joyful surprise.

Our Bibles have four versions of the life of Jesus in them. They’re all called good news, and spoiler alert, on the big picture, they all end the same, with Jesus risen from the dead, to the shock and joy of his friends and followers. 

But in the details of how they tell it, they’re pretty different. Like me and my brother, they have different memories of the stories from a generation ago. 

And in many ways the weirdest and most intriguing of the four is the earliest of them all and the shortest of them too, the final chapter of the good news of Jesus according to Mark. 

Let’s read it and see what it’s got to say.  

Mark 16 (Common English Bible)

16 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they could go and anoint Jesus’ dead body.

2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb.

3 They were saying to each other, “Who’s going to roll the stone away from the entrance for us?”

4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away. (And it was a very large stone!)

5 Going into the tomb, they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right side; and they were startled.

6 But he said to them, “Don’t be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He isn’t here. Look, here’s the place where they laid him.

7 Go, tell his disciples, especially Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.”

8 Overcome with terror and dread, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

It’s a weird ending, isn’t it? 

We’ve got three of Jesus’ closest students and friends, three women who had stayed by his side while other disciples betrayed him, denied him, hid in fear. They go to the grave for a simple, faithful ritual of love and remembrance. To tend to the body and the memory of their beloved teacher who’d known so much sadness. Whose life had come to a violent, tragic, untimely end. 

  • And a stranger is there – grave robber?
  • An angel?
  • A random occasional student of Jesus whose face looked familiar, but whose name they couldn’t recall? 

He says:

Don’t be alarmed. 

But everything about this situation is alarming. They’re in a tomb. There’s this random dude there dressed in white, just waiting for them. Alarming, if you ask me. And all of the words he starts to say are alarming too. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. 

A missing body you have just buried is alarming.

Crucifixion – the preferred execution by torture of the mighty and oppressive state that terrorized the Jewish people – that is alarming.

Everything about Jesus’ final days – so full of heartache and tragedy – had been alarming. Like having two young adult kids, and losing them both through different tragedies in the same year. Life can be a killer sometimes. 

But the young man dressed in white says: you have made a reasonable but very important mistake. 

You thought the story was over. But it’s not.

Jesus isn’t here anymore. He is risen. And he has gone ahead of you, back home to Galilee, where you’re all from. 

Go see him there, just like he told you. 

It’s not that far. Just a few days walk. But really, he’s there. You might want to get going, though. You’ll want to see him. Don’t miss it. This is really good. 

And they’re like:

I don’t know. This is not what we expected. 

And they take off out of there, saying nothing to anyone, because they are so afraid. They need a minute to take this in. So afraid.

There were two big movies this past year that have incredibly interesting, important things to say about Christian religion. 

One was the Ryan Coogler film Sinners, which exposes white supremacist Christianity ais the sham, religiously coded violence that it is. And more of our modern Christian history is white supremacist than a lot of us want to admit. An important story, but a story for another day.

And the other film is Wake Up, Dead Man! – the third film in the Knives Out series. And this movie was written for a weekend like this. The dead man on the surface is a priest, who mysteriously dies – or so it seems! – during a Good Friday service and on this Holy Easter weekend, they’re all trying to figure out who done it. 

The deeper messages of the film are about much more. Because the real dead man in the film isn’t any one person in particular, it’s the church itself. Which has died a slow and sad death and needs to wake up, be resurrected to new life, if it’s going to be any kind of redemptive presence for good in the world. 

The setting of the film is a small church that like most churches, has seen better attendance and better days in its past. It’s got a culture-warring, angry priest who leads the dying congregation, with a new minister in town who hopes to see something new and good happen there.

And the new minister is talking with one of the younger congregants when he arrives and is meeting everyone. And the guy he’s talking to is talking about the failure of his career as a media influencer and politician and the failure of the church too, and the minister, Jud, says:

Maybe we need to get back to fundamentals, you know, basic building blocks on how to genuinely inspire people. 

And the guy’s like:

The basics, like show them something they hate and then make them afraid it’s going to take away something they love? 

And Jud’s like:

Well, no. 

And it’s one of the many funny, not funny moments in the film.

Because for 1700 years, since a Roman Emperor went to war in the name of the cross, Christianity has had this great temptation. Would the faith of the crucified and risen Jesus center love, forgiveness, grace for all people, and the hope of impossibly good next chapters no matter what the wounds and sins of our past? 

Or would it be a power play, a co-opting of the victory of God for the victory of us and our people, that we can stir up fear of who or what we hate to rally power for us and our friends?

And in our own generation, friends, and in the generation before, the American church has so often taken this latter path. 

A fundamentalist, dying faith looks around the world that is changing so fast. Missing the past, scared over the future, it stakes our enemies, stirs up fear, amasses embattled energy to keep itself alive.

It’s the playbook of religious fundamentalism and nationalism all around the world in our generation, a playbook that’s shaping our century’s world. 

And it’s sad for a host of reasons.

But on Easter, one of the ways it’s sad, is that this faith of fear and nationalism and embattled violence is a perversion of the good news of Jesus.

It’s a way of building crosses instead of bearing them. 

And it’s the steady death of the goodness and vitality of the Way of Jesus in the contemporary church. 

I love the gospel of Mark for so many reasons, but one is because it is the gospel of fear.

It’s written in the context of the brutal oppression of the Roman Empire – the folks who crucified Jesus, the government who taxed the heck out of the fishing region of Galilee, the powers that would one day imprison and kill many of Jesus’ disciples. And because life is hard, the disciples of Jesus are again and again paralyzed in fear. That’s honest.

And so it’s fitting that this gospel of fear ends with the first witnesses to the resurrection overcome with terror and dread, saying nothing to anyone because they are so afraid.

That’s the last word of the gospel here: afraid.

Mark is the gospel of fear, and I love that because it’s real. The world can be a scary place. Life is a killer sometimes. And so the last word here is fear.

But like many words we think are last words, it’s not in fact the last word at all. It’s the end of a chapter, not the end of the story. It’s not a period, it’s a semicolon. A pregnant pause in which we wonder: what might come next?

I also love it because Mark is the gospel of faith in the midst of our fear.

  • Over and over again, people are afraid in front of Jesus, and he dares them to imagine: what would faith look like?
  • What would you do if love was real?
  • What would you do if you could dare to hope again?
  • What would you do if you had faith?

And here that’s the message of the mysterious young man in white. 

Jesus

“was crucified,”

he says. True that, but that is the past. As for today,

“He has been raised.”

What would you do, friends, if Jesus was alive? If life could conquer death? If second chapters could be radically different than our past but maybe gloriously better too. 

After all, the young man says,

Jesus isn’t here.

The grave you came to visit?  He isn’t here.

The big city where you thought Jesus would triumph and all your dreams would come true? He isn’t here.

The hopes you had to weaponize his message and clobber your enemies? He isn’t here. 

The nostalgia and regret and disappointment of your past? He isn’t here.

No, instead these three women, these first witnesses to the resurrection are told: he has gone ahead of you to Galilee, where he is alive. Go and see him there. 

You will see him back home, in the places your mother gave you birth. Go and see him there. 

You will see him where God is doing a new thing. Go and see him there. 

You will see him in every Jesus-like flickering vision, where little things grow big and beautiful, where children matter, where grace can hold your failures, where lost coins and lost people and lost causes are worth finding. Where you can dare to set down the baggage you’ve held so tightly so you can open your arms to a new treasure, where love sees, and love persists, and love wins. Go and see him there. 

Life can be full of joyful surprises. Can you go and see him there? 

And Mark ends with this big wide open note for its next chapter: will they tell their friends? Will they go? 

And down through the centuries the question echoes and resounds:

  • How about us? 
  • Can we look for joy and hope again?
  • Can you believe that through life is indeed a killer, it can also be chock full of joyful surprises?

Don’t laugh, elders in the room, but I’ve been feeling kind of old since I turned fifty a couple of years ago. And I’ve had more than one moment, in more than one arena of my life, when I’ve wondered if my best days were behind me.

But something happened the last time we were with Ken and Jean. 

When I was 17, I was the lead in my high school musical, and Ken was in it too – three of our teachers played the grown up parts in the show that year. And I’ve heard Ken talk about acting the shows they put on at the senior independent living center where they live, so I asked him last month:

Ken, have you always acted since you were young?

And she said:

oh, absolutely not, I was always way too shy to do that.

And he told me that the show we were in together, West Side Story, was his first show ever, because his brand new step-son told him to do it, and how could he say not to that?

And I went home that night, and thought wait a second, Ken’s in his late 80s, and I started doing some math, and I realized that Ken’s first show he ever acted in – the one where I was a lead as a teenager – when he did that thing, and did it so well, and seemed so old to me at the time, he was basically the exact age I am now. And he remarried around the age I am now to.

And I thought: my God, I could try something for the first time this year, and maybe I’d love it, and I could keep doing it for thirty more years and it could become a big and joyful part of my story. That’s what happened with Ken and acting, and with Ken and Jean. 

And that gave me so much hope.

I’m not too old after all. There’s more life, more adventure, more joyful surprises yet to come for me too! 

And friends, that’s true for all of us.

The resurrection really lifts the lid off of what hope can look like. 

Because it extends the horizon of hope beyond the day of our death, extends the reach of God’s redemptive possibilities even beyond the grave. 

So are you too old, or too hurt, or too shy, too tired, too sick, too scared for your next big adventure? 

I mean maybe, faith doesn’t call us to disassociate from reality. Life can be a killer, and no Easter faith just wipes that all away. 

But neither you nor me nor Ken Jones in his late 80s is too old, or too sad, or too shy, or too anything else for joyful surprises, because I like to think that even the day after the day I die might just be a joyful surprise, let alone what’s possible on all the days before that. 

Life can be a killer. It’s true. 

But Jesus isn’t in your or my nostalgia, our regrets, our last chapter, our fails or our missed opportunity from years ago. Don’t look for him there. He’s moved on, and we can too.

Jesus has gone on ahead to Galilee. Gone on ahead to the next adventure. Gone on ahead to the next joyful surprise. Be as scared as you need to be, but go there. Go there.

  • Keep walking in the direction faith calls you to. 
  • Keep walking in the direction hope calls you to. 
  • Keep walking in the direction that love calls you to. 

And if you don’t know where that is, ask the spirit of the risen Christ?

Where are you alive?

Where is your next possibility for life?

How can I join you there?

And go. God’s waiting for you here now and in the next chapter, friends. Go get it!

Back in Love with Jesus

There’s a story of a man, when his son turned 12, they kind of lost their closeness and they weren’t really able to have conversations and finally they stumbled on texting as a way to keep some connection even though he abhorred it. It was in the early days of texting. So he caught on some. His son taught him some abbreviations, but he says the one he didn’t have to teach me. Because it was so self-evident was LOL. And I knew right away that it meant Lots of Love because he put it at the end of every message he sent me. So he says, such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 20th century, like a little arrow of love. You can send out to anybody you know. 

Then he describes the next six months, his infatuation with instant messaging and it’s kind of power of emotional transmission so he sent LOL to everyone. He knew his sister was getting a divorce and he wrote to her, You know we’re all behind you and beside you. LOL. Your brother. He says my father got ill. I sent him lol. Everyone I knew at work, at home, everyone I sent them lol. He said he happened to be texting his son from an airport saying how much he hated being away but he had to travel to make the money they needed as a family and he signed it off, lol. 

And his son responds,

Dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? 

Well Lot of Love, obviously. 

No Dad, it means Laughing Out Loud, and his world kind of crumbled. He went through every message in his mind, all the LOLs sent to people while they were suffering. 

I share this story to start because reading the Bible often can feel like we’re peering into someone else’s text box, without fully knowing what they meant, and honestly applying a whole lot of what we think it means to what we just read. 

So I’m going to read today’s text, Psalm 103, with some contextual edits.

Here’s what I mean. 

Verse 1

Let my whole being bless the Lord!

Okay stop right there. We didn’t even get through halfway through verse 1 and I already have to stop us. Most of you know the “Lord” is referring to God. But also, what do we think of when we hear the word Lord? What is a Lord? 

Lord means 

“someone or something having power, authority, or influence; a master or ruler.”

Use it as a verb and it’s 

“act in a superior and domineering manner toward (someone).”

I’ve never known any Lords in my life, except for a Landlord. It makes me think of Lord of the Rings or some other buff Englishman in movies. I imagine Bridgerton like setting, curtsying in a ball gown, “My Lord.” 

But the original language didn’t say Lord. 

Then why did it get translated as such?

In Hebrew it actually says, 

יְהוָ֥ה

Which says Yahweh…. kind of. Actually the ancient Hebrew texts didn’t include vowels, which are like the little dash, the tiny T looking thing, and the two dots, were vowels that were added LATER, in what they THINK how the word might have been pronounced. 

All it originally had were the consonant letters,

יְהוָ֥ה

YHWH

Some scholars point to these breath consonants י-ה-ו-ה (Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh), that the living God is the breath of life, as close to us as our own breath, who lives in us and through us. 

No one knew the pronunciation because it was the name for God that was too holy to speak, so they literally did not say the name. Instead, they looked at the consonant letters with no vowels and said, Adonai. 

יְהוָ֥ה

YHWH

Adonai – LORD

Adonai, meant something like Lord, or the High One. And yet the word lord does have a modern attachment that many of us presume, even subconsciously. Many Bible translation words are like this because words evolve in meaning and even the feeling of it, all the time, so quickly. So making them contextual to us is a better reading of the text, one could argue, than literal translations. 

Lord conjures up certain things. But we know that God is not primarily like a high official of nobility appointed by King Charles in fancy robes like it’s graduation season. No. That is one imagination. A popular one. A traditional one. 

OK now that we got that out of the way, let me read the rest, switching out LORD with God or my Love. I’ll also be using that for God’s pronouns to expand our imagination. 

Psalm 103 

Let my whole being[a] bless my Love!

    Let everything inside me bless their holy name!

2 Let my whole being bless God

    and never forget all their good deeds:

3     how God forgives all your sins,

    heals all your sickness,

4     saves your life from the pit,

    crowns you with faithful love and compassion,

5     and satisfies you with plenty of good things

        so that your youth is made fresh like an eagle’s.

6 My Love works righteousness;

    does justice for all who are oppressed.

7 God made their ways known to Moses;

    made their  deeds known to the Israelites.

8 My Love is compassionate and merciful,

    very patient, and full of faithful love.

9 God won’t always play the judge;

    They won’t be angry forever.

10 God doesn’t deal with us according to our sin

    or repay us according to our wrongdoing,

11     because as high as heaven is above the earth,

    that’s how large God’s faithful love is for those who honor them.

12 As far as east is from west—

    that’s how far God has removed our sin from us.

13 Like a parent feels compassion for their children—

    that’s how my Love feels compassion for those who honor them.

14 Because God knows how we’re made,

    God remembers we’re just dust.

15 The days of a human life are like grass:

    they bloom like a wildflower;

16     but when the wind blows through it, it’s gone;

    even the ground where it stood doesn’t remember it.

17 But God’s faithful love is from forever ago to forever from now

        for those who honor God.

    And God’s righteousness reaches to the grandchildren

18         of those who keep their covenant

        and remember to keep their commands.

19 my Love has established their throne in heaven,

    and their kingdom rules over all.

20 You divine messengers,

    bless My Love!

You who are mighty in power and keep their word,

        who obey everything God says,

    bless them!

21 All you heavenly forces,

    bless My Love!

All you who serve them and do their will,

    bless them!

22 All God’s creatures,

    bless my Love!

Everywhere, throughout their kingdom,

        let my whole being

    bless my Love!

 

Someone who’s just starting out in the Christian faith asked me this week,

Pastor Lydia, how am I supposed to pray?

One of the homeworks I gave her was to come up with names for God that she feels comfortable with. Actually, not just a name, but a nickname. A pet name, like a pet name you come up with for your girlfriend that you just started dating. 

Because this letter, this prayer, fits more to a loving endearing pet name for a God than Lord 

I mean,

“crowns you with faithful love and compassion,

   and satisfies you with plenty of good things”

I mean it’s not full on Song of Songs, but this is a love letter. This is a love prayer. 

And you know what? This is a love devotion song that comes only AFTER you’ve gone through some really tough times together. Like, getting back together after a big break up. 

I was visiting my aunt in New Jersey a few ago and her two adult kids all showed up to her house for a little family reunion while I was in town. My cousins lived in New York and they both drove at least an hour in traffic to get together. Turns out though, that they get together every weekend. This kind of surprised me. My parents and my siblings live about the same distance in Southern California, at least hour traffic drives they do not want to make unless it’s real gathering that only happens about 5-6 times a year. But my aunt’s family, they get together through this hour-long traffic drive every weekend. “Really Every weekend?” I asked. I asked my cousin, like why? 

She said that there was this one time, some years ago, while they were all living together, the dad had moved out for a few months. They really thought the family was going to break up and that since then they’ve been even tighter and closer than ever. 

I mean, this must be some kind of natural law of attraction. Why is it that the distance makes the heart grow fonder? How grateful you are that you can breathe through your nose after suffering through a cold. 

This is the case for me and Jesus. 

In the passage that was critical to my own calling back in love with Jesus, Luke 7 tells a story about a woman who loves Jesus so much that she poured oil on his feet and wiped it with her hair. The onlookers were confused about this but Jesus tells the story of two debtors saying, 

Luke 7:41-42

“Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii,[c] and the other fifty.

42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

You only know that kind of love, that kind of gratitude for forgiveness and reconnection after the debt. This isn’t meant to be transactional but a hyperbole. It’s meant to describe the feeling, not the transaction with God, sometimes we get too caught up on the transaction language. But Jesus wasn’t saying that God is a generous loan shark, but trying to capture the gratitude of the debtor, and you won’t relate to the story unless you’ve had debt, that’s been forgiven. 

Have you had a debt that’s been forgiven? Have you been in a desperate situation where you had to be indebted to someone? 

I had an appointment in an office building a few months ago. And as I was looking at the office building directory, I saw a name I recognized. It said, Topper. Hi Topper. Are you here? Could you stand up for a second? So we can see who you are? I don’t know his full story, but I know he’s an elder black man, who’s produced and directed tv shows and documentaries. He’s the one who made that One Love art piece here. He’s done organizing and activism, literally part of the civil right movement. I love that you’re part of this community, so grateful for your presence here. So I see this Topper name cause it’s not a common name. After my appointment, I went to Topper’s door and knocked on it, cause I like the guy. 

There he was, in his overalls, the office  with two huge screens and a video editor editing something. He immediately invited me and said, I want you to check this out, and told his editor,

“play that one part for Pastor Lydia.”

The screen played a scene from a black church. Singers dressed as you do for Sunday Best, jumping on stage, beautiful heart wrenching voices singing Gospel about having joy and hope in Jesus. It’s much more expressive and emotional than my ‘ol presbyterian, what we call the frozen chosen, self is used to. Topper says,

“You see, this is what we need to share right now. The joy”

and he went to explain the singer and this Atlanta church’s impact on the movement. 

I felt so disconnected to the joy that I saw on the screen in the moment to be honest. I’ve been so appalled by the political state I have been seeing in the US and violence around the world that I’ve just been feeling general dread. Joy? Jumping for joy and gratitude is not a natural response for surviving these times for me, although I have heard it is necessary. My disembodied intellectually woke self oscillates from crying to my therapist while talking about political theory and theology to watching liberal stand up comics reels to cope.

The Black church knows joy that I don’t know. 

Yolanda Pierce wrote in a book titled “In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit” 

“The Black church has been a place of refuge as the sons and daughters of enslaved persons and sharecroppers became priests and bishops and evangelists.

The Black church has been a physical sanctuary, with the congregation housing fugitive slaves and serving as stops on the Underground Railroad. 

The Black church birthed and funded the largest and most effective grassroots political movement–the civil rights movement–which challenged Jim and Jane Crow, lynching, segregation, and voting restrictions. How can I say thanks?…

How can I say thanks for a theology not just rooted in eschatological hope but focused on becoming the beloved community on earth as it will be in heaven?”

Thank God for the Black Church in American Christianity. I loved telling my daughter on MLK day that MLK was a pastor, just her mommy! 

Psalm 103 knows joy and praise that can only come from going through it all. 

I read a pastor put it this way, Rachael McClair co–pastor of a church called Highlands Church in Denver, CO

Psalm 103 shouts its gratitude loudly, like the trumpets of a mariachi band. Its rejoicing comes only after the suffering. 

On first glance, it could read like a return to the innocence of the first Psalms, those of orientation; of, perhaps, naiveté. But re-orientation is something much harder earned. This Psalm isn’t an attempt to go back in time to when life seemed so simple, before all the suffering. It is what joy sounds like on the other side of the suffering. 

Rachael McClair, co-pastor Highlands Church in Denver 

As we have been praying through the Psalms in this season leading up to Lent and Easter, we have soaked our spirits with the honesty and the rawness of the Psalmist prayers of outcries, of vengeance, of doubt of faith and questions like,

“What you are you doing God?”

We know the prayers have places of belief, unbelief, and we’re now getting to see this place of new orientation. A place of believing again, after disbelief. 

And that place? That place isn’t just returning to orientation. It’s much more grand. It’s explosive. It’s beyond what you’ve ever known and even more. 

as high as heaven is above the earth,

  As far as east is from west—

And you realize just how small you are. The psalmist is utterly humbled and everything is honestly laughable, cause nothing matters. It’s like all that suffering, who cares? 

we’re just dust.

The days of a human life are like grass:

    they bloom like a wildflower

  but when the wind blows through it, it’s gone;

    even the ground where it stood doesn’t remember it.

In a sense, Who cares because GOD’s faithful love is from forever ago to forever from now. 3 generations from now, and ALL, God’s realm, God’s household cares for ALL, which is my translation of

“his kingdom rules over all.” 

It ends with Bless My Greatest Love! With exclamation marks. Bless God! Blessings upon Blessings just shooting up into the sky like the ending finale of a fireworks, which is always more impressive than I expect. 

This thing we’re going through as a nation, this grief that you’re carrying, this suffering that you have been enduring, is all part of the long and glorious story of love. God’s steadfast love. Not one who Lord over you to make sure you’re doing it right. But one who loves you, with compassion and forgiveness, and endless mercy. 

This kind of prayer of new orientation only comes through the night and in the morning. I’m gonna attempt to channel Black Church mode, I do so much of my own theology through the works of Black theology, why not live, embody it, by singing preaching, 

The Steadfast love of the Lord never ceases

Their mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning, new every morning, 

Great is thy faithfulness oh Love, 

Great is thy faithfulness. 

Whether you are going through getting to know God initially, orientation, or falling out of love with God, disorientation, or coming back to taste the goodness of God again, new orientation– know that others like the Psalms and the Black church have been through the journey. Even if you don’t know it yet, maybe not now, but you will praise. You will praise God at the top of your lungs, maybe on a stage with a mid singing voice, saying, Great is thy faithfulness oh Love. 

Would you pray with me? 

 

Beauty Will Save the World

Christian theology talks about this big, important experience called “salvation.” I think to many of us, it sounds like an outdated word. But today I’m going to use it. Because there’s an instinct in this word. That so much in a human life can get lost, hard, adrift. So much in our human communities, our little human planet, can bend toward cruelty, waste, even evil. So we all need a lot of help. So much in need of saving. 

And in the Bible, the word “salvation” is used in three tenses: the past, the present, and the future.

In the past, we ask:

What saved our ancestors in their greatest trials? What saved me, when my life was drifting off course?

In the present, we might ask:

what is saving you today? What is drawing you away from despair, bitterness, whatever, and toward love, life, joy, justice, peace? What is saving you today?

And we can wonder about the future. Like who or what will save us from this mess we are in? (Whichever one of the many messes you’re thinking about….)

I used to be the kind of Christian that spent a ton of time thinking about salvation in the past tense, and on a personal scale.

How were you saved? was an important question. And it was a religious one, like when did you become a Christian? When – we would say – did you accept Jesus into your heart so that you can have a personal relationship with God? 

I had a middle school Sunday school teacher named Mary Shearer. My family didn’t make me go to church services back then – while my parents went to church and sang in the choir, I’d hang out at my grandparents house down the street, drinking soda and eating chefboyardee canned ravioli my grandma heated up on the stovetop. Little Rascals reruns and Sunday morning football preview shows in the fellowship of my Nana and Poppop was a pretty sweet kind of church substitute for me, a sanctuary. 

But I didn’t talk about that when I talked about getting saved. I talked about Mary Shearer, who was to me at the time a hokey old person (younger than I am now, right….) But then she was a hokey old person who had five kids and she’d play oldtimey hymns on her guitar and sing in her folksy voice –

“Heaven came down and glory filled my soul, when at the cross the savior made me whole….”

And even though we’d make up goofy words for them, she mostly wouldn’t get upset with us, but would tell us again and again that God loves us and that if we invite Jesus into our hearts, we’ll never be alone and God will live with us and love us forever.

And over the next couple of years, when I was lonely and sad a lot of the time, those words sounded good. And I remember I’d get on my knees in my musty basement bedroom and ask Jesus to live in my heart and tell God I would try to have faith and after I turned off the nightly high 5 at 9 on the radio, I’d read my Bible the church gave me, and I’d want to follow Jesus.

It didn’t seem like the best story, really, but it was what I had, how I got saved.

The past five or ten years, though, I’ve come back to this question of how I got saved as a teenager. I’ve been asking that question in therapy of all places, where we’ve talked about the places my life could have gone in those years, and the places it went instead, because knowing what’s saved me helps us know where I’ve come from and where I’m going, and sometimes it gives me some clues on how to keep going to the best places, the most beautiful places I can go.

And now when I think about what saved me back then, I still think about Mary Shearer and Jesus and the prayers I said in my basement. 

But I think about other stuff too. 

I think about my sophomore year English teacher Ken Jones, whose son died while he was teaching me, in a terrible, infamous tragedy. This after his daughter had died a year or two beforehand, and after his marriage had died a few years before that. And it was a small town. We all knew all this. And one of my choirs sang at his son’s funeral right after Christmas that year. And he came back to the classroom in January, and helped me become a writer, and he spoke at my brother’s graduation about the mysteries and terrible pains of life, saying here I am, bereft of children but not of hope.

And I saw before me what moral courage looks like, and I learned that life can go in the most terrible directions, and you can still keep showing up, one step at a time, and I learned that with the help of God and friends, we all can find hope and we all can find a way forward. And that saved me.

Like my crazy high school chorus teach Sonny Prior did when she tricked me into learning that I could sing and that singing felt so good for me, and that singing was a kind of portal to not just finding a voice for myself but finding peace, finding a kind of center, finding where what’s most beautiful and what’s most true are in the same place and speak to one another.

And pretend dying on my high school stage, when I was Tony in West Side Story was part of saving me too, because while my friends who played my fellow Jets bore my pretend-dead body up in their arms at the end of the show, while that super-talented sophomore who played Maria told us we had to put down our weapons and learn to love each other, 17-year old me thought:

oh my God, this is so true, that love and peace are our birthrights and everything we do to make our world a little more just and more humane and less violent is worth whatever it costs us.

And I guess I felt like: man, this may be fiction, but is this what it means to be born on others’ arms, and carried forward when I’ve got nothing left to give myself, and if so, this is so good, to be befriended, and to be a friend, accompanied by love and friendship wherever we go. I want to live in that world. I want to make that world. 

See it turns out that in my teenage years, there was a lot that was saving me. 

And when it came down to it, it was a lot of beauty. After a few tough and sad and lonely and barren years in my life, my mid to late years saw a kind of garden of beautiful things bloom around me. 

And that beauty saved me.

I learned that beauty will save us all, that beauty will save the world, and that’s what I’m preaching on today. 

Let me read one of my favorite stories in the good news of the life of Jesus. This one is from Mark, near the end, not long before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. 

Mark 14:3-9 (Common English Bible)

3 Jesus was at Bethany visiting the house of Simon, who had a skin disease. During dinner, a woman came in with a vase made of alabaster and containing very expensive perfume of pure nard. She broke open the vase and poured the perfume on his head.

4 Some grew angry. They said to each other, “Why waste the perfume?

5 This perfume could have been sold for almost a year’s pay[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

6 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me.

7 You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them. But you won’t always have me.

8 She has done what she could. She has anointed my body ahead of time for burial.

9 I tell you the truth that, wherever in the whole world the good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.”

So there’s a lot here. We could talk about why this woman did something so extravagant and pour her life savings which was invested in this rare Persian nard perfume over Jesus’ head. We could talk about all the symbolic meanings this act of anointing could have in this culture. And why the disciples scolded her, or why Jesus in turn scolded them.

We could talk about what Jesus meant when he said that the poor will always be with you, how he was quoting his Bible where it talked about always having opportunities to share with those who are poorer than you, not accepting this is the way it’s supposed to be.

So much we could talk about.

But I want to talk about where it ends. Why this extravagant gesture of love, this anointing Jesus’ body before his death and burial, is something so important that Jesus says:

wherever in the whole world the good news about Jesus is announced, what she’s done will be told in memory of her.

It’s true. A version of this story is one of the few stories that is in every one of the Bible’s accounts of the good news of Jesus. All four of them. 

Amazing. Wherever in the whole world the good news about Jesus is announced, what she’s done will be told in memory of her. 

What’s so special? What in this story can help save us?

Partly it’s an image of Jesus himself. At the communion table, we remember Jesus expressing the suffering, sacrificial, extravagant love of God, his’ body and blood broken and poured out for the healing of the world. And here a follower of Jesus expresses her own costly, sacrificial, extravagant love, with her life savings broken and poured out for Jesus. 

So maybe that’s part of why her story is shared whenever the good news of Jesus is told. Because she’s another image of Christ.

Maybe. But I don’t think it’s just that – remembered forever just for cospalying Jesus. 

I think she’s remembered forever because this is what love looks like: extravagance, devotion, sacrifice. And love saves us.

And I think she’s remembered forever because what she does is beautiful. Jesus calls it a good thing, and by good he’s not like… meh, pretty good. But more like, this is what goodness looks like. This gesture of love and devotion is beautiful. 

Beauty will save the world. 

This phrase comes from the 19th century novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer of profound brilliance and also a person of profound faith in the God we see in the face and words and life of Jesus. 

And Dostoyevsky puts these words in the mouth of one of his characters.

Beauty will save the world.

On the surface, he’s talking about aesthetics – the beauty we see in the human form and nature, and the beauty expressed in art. 

And as a singer, a musician, I say a hearty Amen to that.

What would we do without our artists – our singers and poets and filmmakers and sculptors and chefs and all the rest of them? 

The other week, I made a trip down to the Fuller Craft museum in Brockton. I’d been meaning to get there for a couple of months, because one of our own community members, the very talented visual artist Cicely Carew, has an exhibit up there. She’d told me about it when she was working on it, and sent me a link to some press about the opening there. And then with the help of one of our pastors Ivy, herself a huge promoter of the integration of arts and faith, Cicely gifted us with a small installation right here in our sanctuary, and I’d been thinking the least I can do is go to Brockton and see her work.

But honestly, I made the trip out of obligation.

And then I got there. 

And my God, it is beautiful. 

I mean the whole Fuller Craft is beautiful – a sanctuary tucked into a beautiful little urban reservoir landscape.

And then walking down the stairs into Cicely’s exhibit Be(loved), and I felt like I was walking into a kind of multimedia, multicultural, immersive sanctuary I hadn’t realized I needed. 

Sometimes we call beauty breathtaking. But what about when the beauty of art gives you back your breath? When it shapes a space that helps you breathe more, feel more? Breath-giving, beautiful, peace-making. 

Cicely installation (Be)Loved is this and more.

I paced around and explored and sat on a bench, and I found my breath and my pulse slowing down. It was a place I could be still, and remember that the sum of the ugliness and evil out there isn’t the truest thing in the world, just like the sum of my stresses isn’t the truest thing about my life. The truest thing is that we are loved, and that we too can be love. 

Art does this, you know. Maybe we haven’t all had this experience in a museum – but at a show, listening to song, reading a poem, you’ve had it, I’m sure, that tasted of art catching you with a beauty that saves. 

This insight is even baked into some of the dustier parts of the Bible, where we get design schemes for ancient temples and religious costumes. We see there a commitment to the saving power of beauty. 

Like this bit in the book of Exodus. 

Exodus 31:1-6 (Common English Bible)

31 The Lord spoke to Moses:

2 Look, I have chosen Bezalel, Uri’s son and Hur’s grandson from the tribe of Judah.

3 I have filled him with the divine spirit, with skill, ability, and knowledge for every kind of work.

4 He will be able to create designs; do metalwork in gold, silver, and copper;

5 cut stones for setting; carve wood; and do every kind of work.

6 I have also appointed with him Oholiab, Ahisamach’s son from the tribe of Dan.

Bezalel and Oholiab are filled with the spirit of God. So they can carve wood and bend metal, and cut jewels. They are artisans, gifted by God, honed by years of practice, and called by their community to the holy vocation of the beauty and art that will help save us. 

I named one of our artists today because of the impact her work had on me this month, but we treasure all the artists of this community – past, present, and future. 

And we’re going to do everything we can in this church to make this a house of beauty, where the songs we write and the art we make inside and outside of the walls of this church tells us the truest truths about God and our world, and shines the light we need to be people of love and hope and wonder in a world that doesn’t have enough of those things. 

When Dostoyevky wrote:

Beauty will save us, though, even more than the arts, even more than aesthetic beauty,

he meant moral and relational beauty.

Not just the visual glory of the tabernacle’s gold and jewels but the beauty and goodness of God and all of God’s creation that they were trying to visualize.

Not just the breathtakingly gorgeous scent and feel of that perfumed oil as it poured across Jesus’ head, but the radiant love and purity of the human who gifted it to him, and the never-stopping, always extravagant love of God that animates the universe which inspired her. 

Beauty, Dostoyevsky insisted, is not just an escape or a reprieve from the usual ugliness of life, but a witness to what is most real and true. 

Beauty transcends aesthetics and inspires all of what is best in us, our aspirations for what is good and true, and what reconnects us to each other. 

I told you a little bit about my high school story at the start of this sermon. I want to end with the high school story of a friend of mine.

My friend entered high school an increasingly angry young man. He was bullied as a kid, and he’d seen adults at school fail him more than once. And so as he entered high school, and learned more about the problems not just in his life, not just in his school, but in the big, wide world we live in, he was disposed to want to speak out about these things and fight.

And one of the fights he took on was in his school and his racial problems, and at one point he lashed out at a teacher publicly, and spread some rumors about them.

There were community discussions, parents were called in for meetings, but the real kicker came when my friend realized he’d misinterpreted a few situations and trusted a really biased peer of his with an axe to grind and that he’d unfairly maligned a teacher who was actually one of the real moral gems of the school.

And the problem for my friend wasn’t only realizing he’d been wrong but that he really wanted to take a class that this teacher taught. And he was like:

shoot, this teacher will probably never let me into their class.

But my friend decided to eat his pride and try. He asked a school administrator if he could be placed in this special class that the teacher he once maligned taught.

And if I’d been this teacher, I know there would have been two easy ways for me to handle this. I could have privately asked a school administrator to not place this student who’d done me wrong in my class, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. Maybe I would have had my way, maybe not, but I could have tried.

Or I could have said nothing, let them into my class, and just hope for the best – let the past be the past, and just try to avoid the conflict and move forward.

But this teacher didn’t do either of these things. The teacher reached out to my friend directly and said,

you can be in my class, but we need to have a meeting before the school year starts.

And my friend was like:

shoot, what kind of trouble am I in?

But to his credit, he had the courage to show up to the meeting, and when he did, the teacher said:

I need you to know three things about how you treated me last year. One, I need you to know that it really hurt me. It didn’t feel good and you could have ruined my reputation. But two, I also want you to know that I forgive you. It’s hard being a teenager, and we all make mistakes, and I don’t believe that mistake is all you are. So we’re going to show up together and start something new between us, and let that go. I forgive you.

And my friend tells me he was speechless when the teacher said this because it was the last thing he expected. But then the teacher said,

the last thing I want you to know is I’m really curious why you were so angry last year, and what’s happened in your life in school so far to make you feel the way you do, because we all are who we are for a reason. 

And that opened up my friend, to think about the difficulties he’d faced, to start talking about those things too, and to start getting free from the effect they’d had on him. 

Not only did this teacher teach him that year, but they developed a really precious relationship, one that produced a great college recommendation, and a desire in my friend to work with youth himself as an adult, and one that even more than all that, started to rewire my friend’s sense of what he could expect in this world of ours. 

It was my friend’s Ken Jones moment, where he caught a taste of what grace and courage and real moral beauty look like. And it saved him. 

Because that’s what beauty can do. 

Beauty in a broken, often ugly world is a signpost.

It helps us see what’s true again. 

You know, when someone claims to tell you the truth about something in the world – like what’s true about Israel and Palestine, or what’s true about what should happen in Gaza. One way back to the truth is to ask:

  • is what this person is saying beautiful? 
  • Is revenge beautiful? 
  • Is dispossessing your neighbor beautiful?
  • Is bombing your neighbor’s children, is starving your neighbor’s children, beautiful? 
  • If not, then it’s probably not true, is it?

And if someone claims to tell you the truth about God, well even more so here, you can ask: is what this person saying about God beautiful? Because if not, it’s probably not true at all, and I don’t need to take them to heart. 

Because beauty is one of our portholes to what is true, and the truest truths – even when they are hard – are always beautiful, as is our Creator God, Mother and Father to us all. 

And friends, don’t just pay attention to beauty but make it, receive it, reward it. 

Because beauty helps us find our way to ourselves, it helps us find our way back to one another, and it helps us find our way back to God.  

Whether it’s in the food you cook or the pottery you throw or the songs you sing or the houses you clean, whether it’s in the product you sell or in the way you treat your customers or in the way you talk with a hurting kid who’s done you wrong, try doing something beautiful. 

Make something beautiful.

Be someone beautiful.

Notice, welcome, take in all that’s beautiful, friends, because beauty will save the world.

Why I Love Jesus

Today I’ll start by reading a couple of scriptures that will anchor our time. 

The first is from the old Hebrew prophet Zechariah. He lived in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. His people, ancient Judah, the leftover part of Israel after their Civil War, they had gone through decline and war and loss of temple, loss of homeland, loss of life – so many devastating losses. But then in Zechariah’s lifetime, the exiles were given permission under Persian rule to return home to Jerusalem and rebuild their lives and their community. And here’s one of the things Zechariah was inspired to say and to write down. 

Zechariah 9:9-11 (Common English Bible)

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion.

        Sing aloud, Daughter Jerusalem.

Look, your king will come to you.

        He is righteous and victorious.

        He is humble and riding on an ass,

            on a colt, the offspring of a donkey.

10 He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

        and the warhorse from Jerusalem.

The bow used in battle will be cut off;

        he will speak peace to the nations.

His rule will stretch from sea to sea,

        and from the river to the ends of the earth.

11 Moreover, by the blood of your covenant,

    I will release your prisoners from the waterless pit.

The second scripture is two bits from the 26th chapter of Matthew’s memoirs of the life of Jesus. These two little stories are both in the final week of our guide to this Lenten season called “Air.” So if you like this sermon, or even if you don’t, I’d encourage you to take a look at the guide this week. It’s on reservoirchurch.org, and we’re entering the 6th and final week in it. Here is how Jesus spent two of his last nights before his arrest and crucifixion. 

Matthew 26:6-13, 26-30 (Common English Bible)

6 When Jesus was at Bethany visiting the house of Simon, who had a skin disease,

7 a woman came to him with a vase made of alabaster containing very expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus’ head while he was sitting at dinner.

8 Now when the disciples saw it they were angry and said, “Why this waste?

9 This perfume could have been sold for a lot of money and given to the poor.”

10 But Jesus knew what they were thinking. He said, “Why do you make trouble for the woman? She’s done a good thing for me.

11 You always have the poor with you, but you won’t always have me.

12 By pouring this perfume over my body she’s prepared me to be buried.

13 I tell you the truth that wherever in the whole world this good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.”

26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take and eat. This is my body.”

27 He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from this, all of you.

28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many so that their sins may be forgiven.

29 I tell you, I won’t drink wine again until that day when I drink it in a new way with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

30 Then, after singing songs of praise, they went to the Mount of Olives.

A few years ago I gave a sermon called Why I love Jesus. It’s one of my favorite sermons I’ve ever given. I’m not going to give the same sermon I gave four years ago. But I’m going to give another “Why I Love Jesus” sermon because I tried on some other ideas this week, but this is what my heart’s calling me to say. 

So why do I love Jesus?

I love Jesus because he loved the Bible in a way that was good news for the people around him, and for all of history. 

Plenty of people say they love the Bible but they do weird things with it, or things I at least don’t understand, or they say they love the Bible but they don’t even read it, or they use it as a weapon.

But Jesus, well, there are a lot of things we don’t know about Jesus. We don’t know how tall he was, although he was probably very short. We don’t know what his laugh sounded like, how high or low his voice was when he sang. We don’t know his birthday, or his favorite color or lucky number. We don’t know the names of all his brothers and sisters, although we know there were a lot of them. But we know that Jesus loved the Bible. Like he knew it really well. It helped him find his way again and again. And it led to better things around him too, radically better. 

So when it was time to walk into Jerusalem for the final time, Jesus thought of these lines from Zechariah and thought – this is how we do it. I need a donkey. And he told his friends to go to the nearest village and steal him one. “Borrow it,” I guess. But I love that Jesus stole the donkey. And he climbed onto that donkey and rode into Jerusalem on the biggest weekend holiday of the year, when there’d be tons of people to see. 

Sidenote: like 15 years ago, at the high school I went to as a kid, a guy rode a horse to school. It was around Halloween, and his family owned a freaking horse, and why own a horse if you’re not going to use it? So he dressed up as a knight and rode the horse to school, and he managed to do one full lap around the school parking lot, before the assistant principal ran out there, and told him to get off the horse and go home. He was actually suspended for two days for “causing danger on school grounds,” which is ridiculous, but that kid is taking that story to the grave with him with a smile, which I love. 

Anyway, here’s Jesus, on the stolen donkey, and he thinks:

this is my time, I’m going to act out this scene from Zechariah and ride this animal into Jerusalem like I’m the king of this place.

He thinks:

I’ll look like the shabbiest, weirdest king ever, and my big platform for my kingdom will be to defund and destroy the entire military apparatus and empty out all the prisons and proclaim an eternal age of peace on earth and freedom for all peoples. 

I love that Jesus wants all the weapons destroyed. I want that too. I’m so tired of the billions of dollars we spend on bomb-making, bombs that these days are killing kids in Gaza. I love Jesus for daring to take a principled stand against war.

And the people love it too. They can’t stop cheering!

I love that the Bible gave Jesus the most delightfully weird vision for his life, and I love that it shows me the way, that this big old set of books is a way the Spirit speaks to us still, pushes us to plant gardens, and love enemies, and bless the children, and honor our elders, and to disrespect the fools and tyrants, and stand up for the little people and turn over tables and be fearless and hopeful in face of our fears and despair. 

And I love Jesus because he threw the best protest.

I don’t really like protests and marches very much. The crowds bother me and the noise and the wondering if they’re doing any good, but protests are part of what we need to show each other that the way things are is not OK. And I love that Jesus staged the funniest, boldest, most raucous of protests. 

Because the Roman governor was marching into Jerusalem with his war horses and armies, his boots and swords and bows and arrows and chariots and shields, and horns were blown and the war cry shouted the big lies: the glory of Rome! The peace of Rome! Good news for all people! 

And the crowds were supposed to give fake cheers or at least their very real fearful attention and respect to their masters who would rule them and tax them and control them as they wished. 

And Jesus didn’t go to that march. It bored him, maybe it even disgusted him, we don’t know. So he threw his own march. A braying donkey his friends stole in place of a horse, a rag tag collection of rabbinic students in place of an army, an old prophecy of broken and banished weapons in place of the tools of war – nothing to intimidate, just boldness and vision and love that drew the crowds and then their cheers, as they thought: this is what good news looks like, this is what glory looks like. 

Jesus was funny and creative and knew what he stood for and stoked a vision for a truer, more peaceful, more beautiful world, and I love him for it. 

And I love Jesus because he loved it when the crowds sang Hosanna, Hosanna!

We’re told that the authorities said to Jesus – get the people in line. Quiet it down. Make them shut up. They’d be suspended folks for a couple of days if they could. And Jesus was like – no, no, no, don’t bother, because even if they stop cheering, the rocks beneath their feet will cry out. We could use some laughs and we could use some full-throated cheers for a change. Hosanna, hosanna – this old Hebrew word which was a shout of praise!

Hosanna Shouts

People called out:

Hosanna to the son of David – that’s a line for royalty, they’re like, we’ll take this donkey-riding, peace loving rabbi for our king. 

Now that word Hosanna – it’s a cry of praise. But what it literally means is:

Save us.

Save us. People who cry “Hosanna” aren’t just playing dress up and yelling. They’re saying:

help. Save us.

People who cry “Hosanna” have their backs up against the wall. We say “hosanna” when we’re sick and when we’re dying and when we’re scared. We say “hosanna” when our neighbors have gotten scooped up by ICE and taken away. We say hosanna when we’ve lost our jobs or lost our rights or when we fear for our country. 

And so “hosanna” is a sad song and it’s a hopeful song all at once, and I love Jesus for listening, and I love him for all the ways he hears us and helps and shows us the way in our times of trouble. 

HOSANNA singing

I love Jesus because he cares more about people than principles. 

If you have no principles, you’re a fool or a coward. But if you care about principles more than people you’re dangerous, and not in a good way. 

And look at Jesus with this woman who pours all this perfume over Jesus’ head because she loves him, and his disciples have their principles about what to do with money and how much it costs and what’s prudent, but they’re missing the moment. 

And I wonder sometimes, how many moments do we miss when we’re dug in on our principles, or our fears, or distractions, and I love Jesus for paying attention and not missing the moments, like this one where someone had so much goodness, so much love to give. 

I love Jesus because he told the truth and he loved it when other people told the truth. I say this with my therapist a lot, some other people too, I guess, like why bother doing this if we’re not going to tell the truth.

And Jesus knew he was going to die. A lot of people knew that if they were paying attention. Jesus had been telling his friends he was going to die. He’d made a lot of enemies amongst his own people. And he’d been busy pissing off the Roman establishment who’d come into town on their war horses. But everyone’s pretending things are normal, except Jesus, and except this woman. 

And Jesus says:

leave her alone because look at this beautiful thing she’s done, anointing my head, preparing me for burial. 

We have such a hard time telling the truth. In our politics, in our public life, of course, most people don’t care very much about the truth anymore. We’re such suckers for con men and conspiracy theories and outsized fears and stupid arguments. 

But I think we struggle with the truth in private too. And I love Jesus because he says the truth will set you free. 

The truth about the things we don’t want to accept will set us free. 

And the truths we stuff down and can’t talk about will set us free. 

Yesterday, we had a memorial in this space for Marianne Snekvik, and there were two or three hundred people here remembering and honoring a beautiful life we miss already. And one of Marianne’s grandkids stood up here where I stand, talking about how good of a grandma Marianna was, and at one point he was trying to say just how much he misses her already, and he started crying, and he couldn’t speak and just kept crying for a minute, while his cousin stepped up and put his hand on his back and gave him love and gave him time. And after a while he finished.

And I know the cousin, but I don’t know the teenage boy who stood there crying and saying he missed his grandma already, but I know that I was so proud of him for standing there and feeling the truth and telling the truth, and I hope he remembers that moment for the rest of his life, that there is room for all his feelings, and there is room for things that are worth saying that are hard to say, and that when you need it, someone will wait with you and put their hand on your back to steady you. And even when they don’t, Jesus will, because Jesus loves the truth – all the truth – and he loves it when we tell the truth, about everything we can. 

And I love it that beautiful things can happen when we tell the truth, like letting out our grief, and preparing someone for their death, and getting free. 

I love Jesus because he was safe. A woman could touch his head and pour perfume on it, and not worry that he’d think she was coming on to him, not worry that he’d touch her back, or try to make some kind of play when no one was around, because Jesus knew the difference between a sister and a friend and a lover, and he had control of his body and his sexuality so you could trust him to be safe.

And I love all the safe people in the world, and all the people that helped me do the work to be safe too. 

I love Jesus because he gave his friends wine and said it was blood and it sealed a new covenant.

This is such weird and intense language and to leave behind a ritual that would get your followers accused of weirdo love feasts and cannibalism and all kinds of other bizarro stuff is a bold move, Jesus, and I love that. 

I love the language of covenant too – the language of a sacred promise, a sacred deal. I guess I love Jesus for having one for us. 

And I think this covenant language, and this meal of bread and wine, and blood and body, is Jesus’ answer to all our Hosanna cries and songs, all our spoken and unspoken prayers of “Save us.” 

Because we think we want Jesus on a big old horse, rolling into town with all his armies of angels, and opening up a can of whoop-ass on God’s enemies, or at least on our enemies. Find their enemy, and destroy them. 

But Jesus said that is not the way of his kingdom. Not doing it. God’s all about destroying the weapons, not destroying the enemies. And so Jesus rolls in on a donkey and tells the truth over and over, and sits at tables where people are broken and poured out in love, for the healing of the world. 

Jesus wants all of us to know all of God – all the truth, all the encouragement, all the love, all the abundance. Jesus wants us to know all the forgiveness, because our lives are so full of crappy things we’ve done and crappy things that have been done to us, and Jesus wants these things to be beginnings and not ends. 

And Jesus did this for his friend Judas who was about to sell him out and betray him. And Jesus gave the wine of the promise to his other friend Peter who’d be so scared he’d deny he ever knew him. And I love that Jesus gives me this wine every week, again and again, no matter what people have done to me, no matter what I’ve done, no matter how many good things I could have done that I sat on and did nothing about. I love Jesus for still knocking at my door and saying:

want to eat again? Want to try again? Want to live again? If you do, I’m here for you. I’ve got your back.

We’ll never reach the end of God’s love for us all. And our bread sharing, wine pouring, crucified and risen Jesus will never stop loving us all and never stop calling us to this kind of love that saves and heals all things. All things. 

Friends, you, me, our friends, our enemies, we are all called to this table of Christ with all our love, all our hurt, all our shouted and crackly whispered prayers of “Hosanna” to be seen, to be told the truth, to be loved, and to be part of the body of Christ that is died and risen, that is broken and poured out for the healing of the world, and the renewal of all things.

“See Here,” Sowing Seeds of Truth

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve taken up walking to a coffee shop very early in the morning. I timed it so that I would arrive just as the place is opening. And on two mornings a week, I usually run into an old friend of mine who is also trying to get a coffee before she heads off to her therapy practice.

Our moments of catching up are brief. I mean, both of us haven’t had any caffeine yet, so there are only so many coherent words we can string together. But recently she asked,

“So how are things in your world?”

and for a few seconds, I just paused—doing the mental checklist of ALLLLLLL the things happening in my inner world, in my personal life, and in the bigger world around me. And after a moment, I landed on,

“You know, we’re getting by—we’re standing up.”

And she—being a therapist—read that pause (and the panic and the attempts to de-panic that raced across my face), and she said,

“See here. When the macro is as dark as these days, the micro needs to be softer.”

We “cheers’d” our coffees, with that prayer hanging between us, and went on with our day.

We began this sermon series on Radical Hospitality on January 5th—just a few weeks ago, but it feels like January could have been a full decade ago! The world around us, the “macro,” has felt (in part), like a tornado of chaos. We don’t know where it will land, but we know it’s touching down and wreaking havoc, kicking up debris, dust, and uprooting good things—good things in us and around us.

And this is why this series on Radical Hospitality has felt so timely and timeless. It’s not only about welcoming people into our homes or churches; it’s about actively sowing truth into the landscapes we inhabit every day—in the micro and the macro.  It’s about directly combating the forces of division, fear, and dehumanization that threaten it. It’s about recognizing the vulnerability of being alive and the need for compassion in a world that’s often hard and unforgiving.

To be alive is inherently vulnerable, isn’t it? Knowing that whatever storm is brewing, could touch down right in the center of our own lives—just as much as it does someone else’s. Radical Hospitality isn’t just a good idea—it’s an essential practice. It’s an active practice of sowing truth and mercy into the soil of our everyday lives, where we remember that the truth of who God is — our center, our core —  is unshakeable, un-uprootable.

And when I think of the tension between chaos and truth/peace in our world, I’m reminded of a beautiful set of words by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said,

“God has two outstretched arms—one is strong enough to surround us with justice and move us toward justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with tenderness and grace.”

This balance of justice and grace is what radical hospitality embodies—it’s the strength to face the storms of injustice and the tenderness to offer compassion to one another  in the midst of it.

  • So, how do we live this out?
  • It’s what we’ve been exploring these last few weeks. How can we practice radical hospitality in a world determined to sow division and fear?

We will explore this together today — as we do, let’s ask ourselves:

  • How can we bring softness to the chaos?
  • How can we embody radical hospitality in our own lives today—no matter how stormy the world may BE and feel?

Prayer: God help us to call to mind the truth of who you are. The shelter from the storm — a refuge in turmoil — rest and peace in uncertainty.

To help us answer these questions, let’s turn to the wisdom of scripture. The prophet Isaiah spoke to a world in chaos and turmoil, much like the world we experience today, offering a vision of leadership and a just future. Let’s read together from Isaiah 32:1-8 as we look for guidance.

SCRIPTURE | Isaiah 32:1-8 (Common English Bible)

1 See here: A king rules to promote righteousness;
    rulers govern to promote justice,


2  each like a shelter from the wind
    and a refuge from a storm,
    like streams of water in a wasteland,
    like the shade of a massive cliff in a worn-out land.


3 Then the eyes of those who can see will no longer be blind,
    the ears of those who can hear will listen,

 

4  the minds of the rash will know and comprehend,
    and the tongues of those who stammer will speak fluently and plainly.

 

5 Then a fool will no longer be called honorable,
    nor a villain considered respectable.

 

6 Fools speak folly;
    their minds devise wickedness,
    acting irreverently,
    speaking falsely of the Lord,
    leaving the hungry empty,
    and depriving the thirsty of drink.

 

7 As for the villain, his villainies are evil.
    He plans schemes to destroy the poor with lying words,
    even when the needy speak justly.

 

8 But an honorable person plans honorable things
    and stands up for what is honorable.

 

CONTEXT

There are a couple of points I want to draw out of this scripture this morning. The first of which is the simple phrase, “See here,” that starts us off.

It’s a phrase that immediately demands attention. In the midst of all that is swirling — God calls the people to pause, to stop, and to encounter the truth clearly. It’s an invitation to look beyond the chaos and the distorted narratives around them and to fix their gaze on what is just, true, and honorable.

I appreciate this because it becomes easy to absorb and be overwhelmed by the distaste in our days — to give focus and energy to that… . And harder to identify what truths might be getting lost in the noise around us. This phrase “see here” asks us to recalibrate.

During the period when Isaiah was prophesying, Judah was facing both internal and external pressures. The kingdom was under the threat of invasion from neighboring empires like Assyria, and internally, it was experiencing a decline in righteous leadership. Kings and rulers were often corrupt, and just horrible. 

And there were just widespread injustices — the rich were exploiting the poor, and those in power were more interested in their own gain than the welfare of the people.  

The ‘villain’ and the ‘fool’ mentioned in these verses of Isaiah were not just those who acted immorally in personal (micro) matters — they were political figures, leaders, who had distorted God’s vision for justice and love. As the passage puts it, they

‘spoke falsely of God.’

This false narrative of God—one that justifies oppression and exploitation—only deepened the pain of the marginalized.

When the kings of the time, when the rulers of the day distort the image of God, it doesn’t just lead to poor decisions, it activates harm, it compounds harm, it is violence. It creates a storm of confusion and despair, leaving people without hope or the resources they need to thrive. This is why, for those who were oppressed — Isaiah’s words were not only a rebuke to corrupt leadership but a hopeful vision for what true justice and righteousness could look like—when the truth of God — one who promotes good things(!) — is held at the center.

When the truth of who God is is distorted, all hell breaks loose. Sickness and despair take root, and systems of injustice become entrenched, keeping the vulnerable in bondage. The kin-dom of God here on earth becomes a quest to dismantle these systems of oppression and to restore the brokenness that false images of God have caused. It’s a radical invitation to participate in God’s kin-dom, to be the hands and feet of God’s love and justice in the world, and to embody that…..

“See here —

It matters how we talk/what we say about God, it matters what we believe of God, it matters how we embody the truths of God. 

1 See here: A king rules to promote righteousness;
    rulers govern to promote justice,


2  each like a shelter from the wind
    and a refuge from a storm,
    like streams of water in a wasteland,
    like the shade of a massive cliff in a worn-out land.

 

Julia

Last month I attended the funeral of our 20 year old neighbor. She died unexpectedly of natural causes – home on Christmas break — at an unnatural age. The ripples of such unimaginable loss, disrupted life, and searing pain are now an unwanted part of the fabric of our neighbor’s household.

Death is its own horrific injustice. Grief its own perfect storm. One that whips up without warning, ambushes the rhythms of ordinary life. And, as I sat in the church pew at her funeral listening to story after story of friends and relatives and close family — her brother, her mother, her father, I braced myself for the final words of the pastor. I’ve been to many funerals where the opportunity taken by the pastor is to command everyone to

“Get right with God! Before your day comes!”

A grief-stricken audience, shaken by their own vulnerability and mortality, often becomes the perfect prey for a version of a God who seeks to threaten and control —  rather than comfort and restore.

But this pastor got up and shared a few words I don’t remember fully —  encouragement to the family and love for the family —  and then, in much a way that mirrored the opening of these Isaiah verses, he simply said,

“See here.” “See here.”

With such a gentle and confident cadence he went on,

“Our God is unshakeable,” “we serve a good God.”

“We serve a loving God, a God of comfort.”

“Our God will not leave us, our God is with us.”

Words I’ve heard and have SAID many a time before. But that morning, those words landed differently — they reverberated in my spirit as undeniable truths even as my mind and body in grief couldn’t fully absorb them. No one in that room could deny the grief, the overwhelm of what felt night-marish — yet, there was also a force of comfort and truth that was roused in our spirits as he said those words.

The truth of God can not be nuanced.

We need that truth — sown into our hearts. And WE need to actively sow that truth in the world around us. Because life does not often come to us in a nuanced fashion. It often comes with stark, unfiltered reality.

“See here. See here. Our God is unshakeable.”

These are the truths // the seeds we sow when we practice radical hospitality.

Point #2:

With the truth of God at our center, comes clarity. 

A parting of the fog and bombardment in a storm.

And with clarity comes restoration and transformation.

Isaiah 32 doesn’t just promise righteous leadership, but also restoration of the entire social order. It promises that the

‘eyes of those who see will no longer be closed’, and the ‘ears of those who hear will listen.’

This speaks to a future clarity, a time when people will be able to discern truth from lies, and live with truth.

Many of these people had never experienced a world that wasn’t infused with oppression, injustice and violence. So familiar was this pain and suffering, that these evils became the very air they breathed. A people exhausted by deception and manipulation, by false prophets and misleading leaders.  

So these words in Isaiah would have been an invitation to hope—a reminder that God’s justice is coming to set things right, and it is also about a radical transformation of society that plans honorable things and stands up for what is honorable — for a just society where the truth of God’s love becomes a guiding force for social transformation.

JESUS

In Jesus, the promise of Isaiah is realized:

the blind see, the deaf hear, and the oppressed are set free.

In three of the gospels we read the story of Jesus and his disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee in a boat to escape the crowds.. Where they become caught in a literal storm — threatening to sink the boat and threatening to sink their belief in Jesus. The disciples had known Jesus to be a teacher, a miracle-worker, a healer, a prophet of sorts  — but here Jesus reveals himself as the one who surrounds them with an unshakeable force of love. The one that says,

“See here” — “I am with you in the midst of upheaval and scary-things. “A shelter from the wind — and a refuge from the storm.”

 

Jesus’ dynamic presence in that story and storm —  interacts with the disciples in real time, in real circumstances. His words and actions in the storm are not predetermined or scripted but showcase God’s responsiveness to our human needs and emotions. God is constantly working toward clarity, healing, and restoration. The storm on the Sea of Galilee is not only about Jesus calming the wind and waves, but about God revealing the truth of who God is—both powerful and compassionate—and inviting the disciples, and us, to partner in that restorative work as well. Calling us to be the good leaders who promote righteousness and promote justice.

 

Toward the end of this passage, in Isaiah 32:17-18, we hear a promise:


“The fruit of that righteousness will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever. My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest.”

 ALL OF US

When Isaiah speaks of peace, security, and undisturbed rest, it is a picture of the world as it is meant to be….. And Jesus’ invitation isn’t only for us to DREAM of that peace, or receive this peace, but to be agents of it —- to engage radical hospitality.

Jesus’ invitation to us is to help clarify the air.

YES — to mourn. Yes, to break out into tears when confronted with the absence or rupture of God’s truth and to use that ache, to disrupt and dismantle what is evil and breathe new life into beloved community.

And it’s why in part I believe we gather together here each week — to dream and gather strength to act –for a world we believe for, but don’t yet see. To still hope. To not give up on the God we think God is. To know God. To grow a deep knowing of God that becomes written in our bodies, our souls and our hearts as unshakeable truth.

See here. The practice of radical hospitality of sowing seeds of the truth of who God is— is not about stepping out of the motion of life and curating the perfect table or house or church meeting or whatever. It’s about embodying the love of God and stepping deeper INTO the fullness of our VERY REAL lives (whatever they might bring),  WITH God —  To know so deeply the love of God with such clarity — that we  see it, hear it, speak of it — we can PRACTICE it wherever we go. 

Howard Thurman says, 

“The evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within. Drink in the beauty that is within reach, clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, keep alive a sensitivity to the movement of the spirit of God. This is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.

Just because “a lie is elected does not mean the truth disappears.” — Andrea Gibson

Don’t give up gathering with one another, encouraging one another. Engage in chit chat in line at the coffee shop, take pound cake and soup to grieving neighbors, say “hi” to a stranger — whatever it is — don’t give up on seeding the

“micro with the softness of God’s unshakeable truth.” 

Radical hospitality puts our spirituality into practice — the truths of what we know, believe, experience, and hope of God — into the real world around us — storms and all.

The spiritual practice of radical hospitality is how we are called to live our lives.

It’s how we grow our capacity to love.

It’s how we grow stronger to love. 

It’s how we grow more tender to love. 

Again, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his book Strength to Love says,

“God has two outstretched arms, one is strong enough to surround us with justice and  [and move us toward justice], and one is gentle enough to embrace us with [tenderness] and grace.” 

Divine justice and mercy are inseparable. And in our lives, this intertwining of strength and tenderness, justice and grace, wrapped in the truth of who God is —embodies the very essence of radical hospitality.

It is the call to extend God’s love through our very bodies and arms to others. 

After years of driving in and around Boston I’ve developed what my kids call a “mom arm” — where I throw my arm across the passenger seat when we hit an unexpected stop or bump, or sideways threat — whether someone is sitting in the passenger seat or not. It’s an instinctual, protective-even, loving response in the midst of danger and uncertainty. I think it’s how God invites us to show up for people, how we offer care, and compassion—without hesitation, instinctively, because we know the truth of God’s love so deeply. This is how we sow seeds of truth, it’s how we become  honorable people, who plan honorable things, and stand up for what is honorable….

And here’s where I want to close with an invitation to a tangible way of sowing truth *and peace* into the world around you — in your neighborhoods and city. 

One of the ways we sow truth is by empowering others to know their truth, their inherent worth and dignity. To know their rights, their civil rights. And in a landscape right now where many citizens and non-citizens alike are feeling threatened, scared, confused we produced 10,000 Know Your Rights cards.

If you haven’ seen these cards before — they are small, RED informational cards that outline the legal rights of individuals, particularly immigrants, in the United States when interacting with law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They provide clear, easy-to-understand guidance on what people can and cannot do in various encounters with ICE or other authorities. We have them printed in Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian-Creole, English, Vietnamese and Chinese.

I know many of you work directly with immigrant communities in health, education, and shelter programs. In a conversation with one of you this past week, it became clear that these cards are running out in hospitals and other community settings. Given the widespread radius that the Reservoir community reaches —we have a unique opportunity to help distribute these cards to businesses, organizations, and individuals who need them most.

So if you want to please grab a stack on your way out today — drop them at your local public library, take an envelope of them to a local restaurant, or daycare, or health clinic — wherever it feels helpful in your neighborhood and community. 

1 See here: A king rules to promote righteousness;

    rulers govern to promote justice,

2     each like a shelter from the wind

    and a refuge from a storm,

    like streams of water in a wasteland,

    like the shade of a massive cliff in a worn-out land.

3 Then the eyes of those who can see will no longer be blind,

    the ears of those who can hear will listen,

4     the minds of the rash will know and comprehend,

    and the tongues of those who stammer will speak fluently and plainly.

5 Then a fool will no longer be called honorable,

    nor a villain considered respectable.

6 Fools speak folly;

    their minds devise wickedness,

    acting irreverently,

    speaking falsely of the Lord,

    leaving the hungry empty,

    and depriving the thirsty of drink.

7 As for the villain, his villainies are evil.

    He plans schemes to destroy the poor with lying words,

    even when the needy speak justly.

8 But an honorable person plans honorable things

    and stands up for what is honorable.

17 The fruit of righteousness will be peace,

    and the outcome of righteousness,

    calm and security forever.

18 Then my people will live in a peaceful dwelling,

    in secure homes, in carefree resting places.

Prayer:  God, I ask you to surround us with your arms of justice and grace now.  Help us to know the truth of who you are, that you are always at work in the world. Help us to embody your love — teach us to live in such a way that this is reflected through us in the smallest and the largest of ways. May our lives be an act of radical hospitality, a witness to the truth of your love that is always inviting, always healing, and always present.    Amen.   

Green Jesus, Wild Things, Abundance, and Freedom

Friends, Grace and I drove yesterday from Central Pennsylvania to here in Eastern Massachusetts. I was reminded of three things. One, I love my wife. No one else I’d rather road trip with than her. Two, I have a back injury still, so maybe fewer literal road trips. And three, this is of course the election, and this nation is all over the map in terms of what we want. Here we’re worried, many of us in this church, many of us in this nation too. 

And I’m wondering as an American, as a follower of Jesus, as a pastor here at Reservoir, when it’s all over, how will we show up in the world together?

  • How will we find some center, some peace?
  • If things go as we would view poorly, how do we keep moving forward?
  • How do we keep the faith?
  • What do we do?

Friends, for me at least, my start with those questions is to look to the way of Jesus. To wonder, what does it look like now to participate in his vision for public life, for beloved community? To wonder how do we believe, during this set of circumstances, that God is not far off but is our creator and our mom and dad, that God is good, and that there is more than enough of everything that matters for us all.

Friends, I hope this means we keep showing up together. Obviously, small scale. Call your friends this week. Come next Sunday, so we can be together. But deeper too, I hope we won’t retreat into private withdrawal or fear. That we won’t wait for someone else to do the work. Even if we’re afraid. Even if we’re angry. 

Today I want to talk about one inner path toward living this way. Toward peace and grounding, a way of keeping the faith in hard times, so we can be people of love and courage.

Four short scriptures today. Here’s the first.

Luke 3: 21-22 (Common English Bible)

21 When everyone was being baptized, Jesus also was baptized. While he was praying, heaven was opened

22 and the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove. And there was a voice from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”

We had a baptism in today’s in person service. One of our congregation’s children claimed our faith, her parent’s faith, as her own, saying: I’m God’s child, and I will follow Jesus. Sarah, we’re all here for you today. I’m so excited! This is God’s word for you too and for all of us at our baptisms. You’re God’s kid. God loves you. You make God – and us – so happy.  

Baptism isn’t just for us, though, it’s for God too. Jesus got baptized. And look at what the text says God did.

God became a bird. Seriously, that’s what the text says:

the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove.

OK, I know it says:

like a dove.

It’s a comparison, a simile. We shouldn’t read everything in the Bible so literally, yeah, I teach that. But in this story, I think people actually saw a bird land on Jesus. That’s a noticeable thing, when a bird lands and perches on someone for a minute. And it probably happened to Jesus as he got out of the water, and people were probably like: look, it’s a sign. God is with him. 

Mark Wallace has this extraordinary book called: When God Was a Bird because that’s part of how God is present to us all, through the natural world. For Jesus, his first encounter in the Bible with the embodied God happened when God became a bird. Second scripture.

Luke 4:1-2 (Common English Bible)

4 Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.

Right after the baptism, Jesus is off to the wilderness. 

Jesus didn’t spend most of his life in cities or climate-controlled buildings. He spent it on lakes and in gardens, in open air workshops and breezy dining rooms, walking on dirt paths with his friends, and on retreat in the wilderness. 

Friends, people talk about white Jesus. The blue eyed, yellow haired Jesus of the European colonial imagination, the one who still shows up on church walls and Christian art and film and all. White people, claiming the Palestinian Jewish son of God as their own, making him look like them, claiming the faith of Jesus as belonging to their white, Euro, Western civilization and then trying to conquer the earth in his name. One of the great religious scams of the past several hundred years. Nothing wrong with us so-called white people. God loves us too. But white Jesus is a violent scam, it’s gotta go.

So we talk about Black Jesus, and that’s a good corrective. Jesus came from dark haired, dark eyed, olive-skinned peoples, where Africa and Asia meet. He was poor, part of a colonized people, executed by European colonizers. So Black Jesus is infinitely better and closer to reality than White Jesus.

But let’s take a moment today and notice what I’ll call Green Jesus. Jesus lived close to the land. He knew nothing about big cities and modern technology but he knew a lot about growing things and how God could show up in the form of a bird, and how God could teach us through all of creation that surrounds us. 

Third scripture:

Luke 6:43-44 (Common English Bible)

43 “A good tree doesn’t produce bad fruit, nor does a bad tree produce good fruit.

44 Each tree is known by its own fruit. People don’t gather figs from thorny plants, nor do they pick grapes from prickly bushes. 

Green Jesus was a teacher of trees and fruit and grapes and vines and dirt and figs. When Jesus wants to convince us of our possibilities for peace and abundance in a stressful world, he says – look at how the lilies grow. 

Jesus believed that nature is our teacher. Like the Franciscan tradition in the Catholic church, which says that nature is God’s footprint. Or like the Franciscan priest St. Bonaventure, who taught that the natural world is the first book by which God is revealed. 

Friends, how do we find God in hard times? How do we find peace? How do we live less of a scarcity mindset, withdrawn, afraid, alone, leaving others holding the bag because we’re not showing up for each other. 

One way is we read the first book. We get out and join Jesus among the trees and gardens and wild things. 

Ninety year old Wendell Berry, one of the great naturalists and Christian writers of our time, wrote about this in his poem The Peace of Wild Things. It goes like this:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grew in me as a kid, long before I’d heard this poem, I spent a lot of time walking alone in the woods. I remember the woods as a lonely place, it can still make me sad. But I remember it as a peaceful place too, a place of escape, a place where I was free. 

A friend of mine, a Christian leader in West Virginia, has started an order of Appalachian followers in the Way of Jesus, and one of the things they’re doing is wilderness retreats, maintaining contact with the particular land they steward and honor as a place where God is with us.

I do this still. One morning this past week, when I was thinking about something sad in my life, I took twenty minutes to walk in a small park, where I could look at the leaves and the sky, and touch trees with my hands, trees younger than me but already so strong, trees older than me that will still be here long after I’m gone. And it didn’t take the sad away, but it steadied me. 

There are a lot of reasons why this works. Beauty moves us. Walking and sitting and breathing among natural environments, even looking at pictures of them, steadies us. We didn’t make any of this, nature and time and God did. But it feeds our bodies and souls, makes the oxygen we breathe. It’s a sign of the great abundance of God, that there is more than enough for us if we don’t screw it up.

So friends, this election week, when despair for the world grows in you, and you wake in the night at the smallest sound, in fear of what your life and your children’s lives might be, look at the leaves and sky. Touch a tree for a while. Take your shoes off and let your feet touch the ground.

I didn’t make this up of course. The Japanese art of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) is on trend. The media titan Charlamagne tha God has been talking and writing about mental health and the value of walking barefoot. It’s called grounding or earthing, letting your bare feet touch the earth again. 

And friends, this is not just for ancient people like Jesus, or rural people or suburban people with yards and forest reserves nearby. It’s for all of us. Quite a few of our members here work in environmental protection and stewardship in different ways.

I think of Nate Proctor and your political advocacy for abundance mindsets and environmental stewardship. I think of Mike Orr, running Cambridge’s recycling program. And on this point, I think particularly of Mardi Fuller, who’s now on the Board of the Appalachian Mountain Club and has been doing amazing work as an advocate and activist in equitable access to natural environments. Insisting that connection to the earth in the US is not just for white people either, even though white people have regularly claimed greater access to and ownership of our mountains and beaches and forests. 

This peace and grounding and God-soaked presence among the wild things is for all of us. And so friends, even if the tree you’re touching is one on a tiny strip of earth between a sidewalk and a busy street, even if the way you get your feet on the dirt or the grass is for three minutes in an urban park, where you’ve checked carefully first to make sure there’s no broken glass, God’s creation is our birthright, all of ours. Touch it this week, ask God to fill you with peace and a spirit of abundance, that you can keep showing up for a fuller life and a fuller community and a better world.

The other invitation I want to make, this one more of a long-term one, is to live on the earth as a steward, not a master.

Live on the earth as a steward, not a master. 

Final scripture:

Genesis 1:28 (The Message)

God blessed them:

    “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!

Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,

    for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”

I co-lead a Saturday morning Bible study, and we’ve been reading parts of Genesis this fall. When we read this line from the first creation story there, it inspired us but it also troubled us. Because that phrase “be responsible” and “take charge” is often translated as dominion. 

And so our Christian ancestors read this as a charge to master the earth. Take charge, bend it to your will. And our economic ancestors have read it as an invitation to dominion. Take charge of the earth, and take everything you want from it. Use it up, burn it down, extract what you can. Because one, it doesn’t matter. People are what God cares about, not the rest of creation. And two, you can get away with it. Kill off the buffalo. They’re fun to stuff and show off, and there seem like there are plenty of them. Burn that gas, and drill, baby, drill, because we need that energy. 

But this is wrong. Because the earth matters. God didn’t only make people. God doesn’t only care about people. God cares about trees and terrains and figs and fish and buffalo and bugs and all of it, because God lives here too and nature is ours in a sense, but it is ours to learn from and to take care of and to take responsibility for, that we can preserve it for the generations to comes. 

This isn’t ownership or dominion, it is stewardship.

A steward is not above something but a part of something

A steward doesn’t claim possession but takes care of something for its rightful owners.

A steward doesn’t use and extract but enjoys and preserves.

Friends, I believe it’s a timely and critical aspect of the Way of Jesus for all of us to actively participate in the environmental justice movement, to join Green Jesus in honoring and preserving the health of the natural world for future generations. 

Please vote like this matters. Please consume like this matters. Please lead and advocate like this matters. 

It’s critical to our call as a species, to steward creation with God.

And it’s critical to our spiritual well-being as well.

I’ve read the author and critic Andy Crouch write that one of the great spiritual crises of our age is our general lack of access to truly dark night skies.

Kind of a weird comment to read at first for an urban person, until you get way, way out of the city and look up on a clear night, and it takes your breath away.

One of our kids is going to college in rural New England, and we were together recently, and we’d been talking about some heavy things, and we were driving where he lives right now, on a rural road with no streetlights or house lights around, and I said:

hey, let’s stop for a minute. 

And we pulled over and got out of the car, and just looked up together for a few minutes.

And man, did it take our breath away.

Neither of us knew what we were doing. We couldn’t name all the stars and constellations and all. We could barely sort out the light of a plane passing by miles above, from the hundreds of stars we could see. 

But those hundreds of stars, shining their light we could see across trillions of miles and years of times. Zeke was like:

Wow, if something happened on one of those stars right now, we wouldn’t see it for years and years, if ever. 

That’s perspective for you. 

Two men, father in son, each walking around with our burdens and fears, but here, arms on each other’s shoulders, showing up together in this beautiful universe

Willie James Jennings writes:

God is everywhere waiting for us to arrive.

We often wonder: where has God gone? Why is this happening? And fair questions. Life is hard.

But the beautiful truth is that God is everyone waiting for us to arrive. 

Friends, I gave this sermon to bless your participation and our church’s participation in the environmental stewardship and justice movement. Green work is God’s work, since we’re stewards of this earth, called by God to responsibility and care, not dominion.

And I gave it because I want you to touch the earth and look at and learn from the natural world this election week. Anxious times are going to drive us to scarcity mindsets – to fear, to withdrawal, to greed and resentment and separation. When what we most need are abundant mindsets. To show up for ourselves and each other. To show up for the world together, trusting that a good God is showing up for us still, here everywhere, waiting for us to arrive.

So I want to end on a small moment of beauty and artistry. Several years ago, our own Kaiti Jones wrote and recorded a song inspired by this Wendell Berry poem. A few of our kids sang backup for her on this album. So we’ll end with her song. 

“Wild Things” by Kaiti Jones

I’ve never been too good at letting go

I keep letters that you wrote me in a box under my window

And I sometimes read them in the dim light of the evening

Wonder what it was that made you feel like leaving for the wild things

 

I’ve got a neighbor she is 85

She said honey I don’t feel like I am living life

I’m just existing

Waiting on the next big snow covered morning

I said Barbara don’t you lean into despair

I have come in through the garden and there’s signs of life out there

among the wild things

 

I’ve never been too good at growing old

Every turning of the year feels like it creeps in with the cold

But you remind me that there’s beauty in expanse

Will I remember how to free my legs to dance

among the wild things

 And when I’m old and when I’m grey

When I’ve all my days behind me and I’ve all my words to say

Would you lay me down to rest among the meadows

Watch me smile as I leave you and I’m headed for the wild things

And when the darkness comes

Tell me where I’m from

And how I might return to the peace

of the wild things

 

And when my body’s in the land

And my soul has burst wide open with its unfettered plans

I will know I was somebody that was loved

And I’ll rest easy knowing I have seen enough

of the wild things

Friendship

John 15:9-17

9 “As Abba has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Abba’s commands and remain in their love.

11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

14 You are my friends if you do what I command.

15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Abba I have made known to you.

16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name Abba will give you.

17 This is my command: Love each other.

In Brene Brown’s book Dare to Lead, a book about developing brave leaders and courageous cultures, she tells a story about her daughter, Ellen, and a difficult experience she had related to trust with her classmates in elementary school.

One day after school Ellen came home crying, distressed, and Brene asked her daughter what happened. Ellen told her that she told a few of her friends something embarrassing and asked them to promise not to tell anyone but later in the day her entire classroom was laughing and talking about the thing. The teacher took out a bunch of marbles from their marble jar. When the class collectively makes good decisions they put marbles into the jar. When they collectively make bad decisions, marbles come out. Ellen said to her mom,

“I will never trust anyone ever again in my life.”

During the summer we don’t have a particular preaching series, but the Kids Church and Youth theme for the summer has been, “I Am the Church,” thinking about how we are the church and who am I in this community. They’ve been doing show and tell and tracing their bodies on butcher paper and decorating them, and making friendship bracelets. So I wanted to bring the friendship bracelets over to the grown ups and talk about what it means to be the church here. 

As I was thinking about our church community and today’s text about love and friendship, this story from Brene struck me. Brene Brown, a research and data based expert on vulnerability and shame, translating really what love and belonging is for the work environment and leadership, made me wonder what her book would be like if the title was Dare to Church. I think it could help translate a little bit of what Jesus was trying to say here in the Book of John in the modern day context. 

For the ancient near East context, the metaphor for God, the father in heaven God, moving from master-servant to friendship is a provocative one. The societal system was set up in a hierarchical manner, where status, title, social connections and means determined how you related with one another. A part of me wanted to say, yes back in the day, the caste system really was so strict and absurd, but I find myself that it isn’t too different to today.

I mean we’re able to quite subtly give cues with what brands we are able to afford and wear, or where we work, what we do, pretty immediately being able to place one another in the pecking order of our society. No, we don’t do this in our church at all but everyone else does it out there all the time.  

That’s what I do love about the church. I’ve been in ministry for a few decades now, and grew up in church as a pastor’s kid. One of my favorite things about growing up as a pastor’s kid is that I knew all kinds of people and their lives. My dad, the pastor, and our family would be invited to a church member’s house. One that had literally pillars at their front door, winding down staircases, a room of mirrors for their ballroom dancing practices, and a backyard with a swimming pool in one area, a babbling brook in another, and even a little safe haven enclosed by hedges with ornate bench for your morning meditation, they owned a few pharmacies in town.

In the same week we’d visit another church member, who runs a bargain fashion store in a strip mall next to the grocery store. She’d give me and my sister a bag of clothes to take home. We knew professors, doctors, dentists, and laundromat, liquor store and bargain fashion store owners. Because the church was an equalizer. At church everyone, whether you are rich or important or poor and disregarded the rest of the week, on Sunday, we all got into our Sunday best and we sang together, we ate together, we prayed for each other. Not all churches are like this. Some churches are more… segregated. But you didn’t really have a choice in Korean immigrant churches. 

Our church, Reservoir, is more diverse than any church I’ve been in. More diverse than a Korean church. And I see us connecting with one another with those in any other setting may never cross paths. I see us do it. And also we’re all creatures of comfort, going to the same people we know and already feel comfortable with. 

And I just need to share with you, so many of you I meet with, tell me you’re lonely, that you don’t know many people at the church, that you feel disconnected. And I’m sitting there just knocking my brain, you two should know each other! 

Some simple reasons may be, sure, our church has changed a lot through Covid and coming back together. We’re in Boston, it is actually a quite transient place, with grad/PhD/med students coming and going. And we have had many new families and folks join us in the last few years. Even folks who’ve been at Reservoir for 10+ years are like, “I don’t know anyone!” And also, I think there are some hard reasons that some of us, many of us are still not feeling connected. We’re afraid. 

Like Brene’s daughter Ellen,

“I don’t ever want to trust anyone again!”

Maybe some of us feel this way. After all, we are a church that is trying hard to be an opening and welcoming place for, especially for folks who have been hurt by the church. One of our most attended classes is called Unpack, unpacking our church baggage at a church for crying out loud. We’ve got some hurt people, cautious people. We’ve got people. Who are not perfect. Who will disappoint you and make mistakes. Heck, there are some of you that I’ve personally offended by something I said or did. So how are we supposed to love? 

We’re naturally drawn to people who have acted in such a way that would put marbles in and in again in the jar. People who have listened to you, honored your pain, remembered your important day or event. When people are mean, disrespectful, or judges you, the marbles come out. Brene asked her daughter if she had a friend who holds a full marble jar. Ellen said

“Yeah, Hannah and Emma are my marble jar friends.”

And she asked her how they got their marbles. Brene expected her to share some heavy lifting stories of friendship and connection. Instead she shared that at a soccer game Hannah saw that Umma and Oppa were there (those are Brene’s mom and step dad). And Brene said,

“and what happened?”

Ellen said, that’s it, she got a marble for just seeing her grandparents. And then she said,

“and Emma always does the half butt sit with me in the cafeteria.”

That’s when the cafeteria tables are all full and there aren’t many seats left and Emma scoots over to share a seat with her so they’re both sitting on half butt. Brene also shared her marble jar people and at first said, well I think it might be a little different for grown ups but then she thought about that same soccer game and how Aileen came up and said,

“hey David and DeAnne”

and Brene recalled how much it meant that she remembered their names. 

Brene makes the point that she might’ve thought that trust is built through grand big gestures, but from this story and backed by much of her research and looking for trust earning behaviors and found that trust is in fact found in the smallest of moments. It made me begin to wonder how marble jars are filled or not filled in our relationships. 

I really want to know how it is exactly that we should love. I mean, Jesus is summing up all that God commanded into one call:

Love one another.

So we have to ask ourselves,

  • what does it mean to love one another?
  • What does it mean to be a friend?

Such simple questions and we can easily wave it off like, yes yes, love, duh.

  • But what does it look like?
  • Is that really even what we’re trying to do here?
  • If so, can we, like Brene Brown, think critically and strategically about how to do this well, how to do it better? 

I’ll be honest, verse 13 doesn’t help me much.

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

I don’t get many chances to lay down my life for a friend. I mean you only get one chance to do that literally. And this line gets very quickly connected to Jesus’ death of course, helping us to conclude that Jesus is the greatest friend of all who laid down his life for us, according to one way of looking at the atonement theory, why Jesus died and what Jesus dying did.

But look, that’s just a theory, one very helpful, or had been very helpful at one time or another, way of thinking about what Jesus accomplished. It’s also a very literal implication of all that Jesus did into one act. Jesus didn’t die just to die and do the deed of dying for someone. He died because he did many things, like touch the leper, see the sinful woman, eat with outcasts, and call out injustices.

Not only so that he can appease God’s wrath of needing to bring punishment down on someone and Jesus took the fall for all our sins. That’s, again, one way to put it, and if that theological thinking has helped you understand God’s love, that’s really beautiful, it has for me too. (Steve actually has a really great blog post on atonement you can look it up on our website, search, Why Did Jesus Die?) But the metaphor is beyond that. There’s more metaphors to describe and get at what Jesus was doing, what God was doing, than just this one thing. 

There’s another text that Jesus talks about, of “taking up your own cross” or death in

Matthew 16: 24-25

“24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

25 For whoever would save his life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

So since the whole laying your life down for a friend is only a one time deal, I wonder how else we could think about what it looks like to love one another every other day aside from your death day. So not grand gestures or big dramatic acts like Brene was thinking about in building trust, but the small things. What small way can we lay down our lives? 

I can still think of some big ways, that’s smaller than death, but that many people have put their lives down for friendship. I know people who have lost their whole livelihood, community, family, because they decided to come out and say that they support their gay friend. They were excommunicated by their church and their small group leader, and pastor, and many of their friends because they decided to not say that being gay is a sin but instead that God loves them just as they are and in fact God delights in them for who they are. And because of that they’ve lost jobs, had to find another career path, moved to another community, lost connections, even family. 

But even smaller ways, I can think of, are big moves. When we let go of our egos and let the other person speak and listen deeply even if you completely disagree with them. Or when we let go of the need to be good and helpful and be honest and humble with vulnerability and ask for help from someone you didn’t think could help you. Maybe lay down your life long work in defending a particular kind of theology to hear and listen to someone’s hardship that cannot be made sense through what the church has been teaching. 

It tore my heart the other day, when I heard someone say that they were afraid to share what they had been through because they didn’t want to offend anyone or get them upset because very powerful and influential voices in the church in the last few decades had decided that they are against a certain social political issue. When the reality is the church, I mean the Christian church tradition hadn’t always thought that. Look, we can believe different things, we obviously do.

Look at us. We’re a mix. We’ve got a fetal cardiologist and administrative assistant. We’ve got Harvard PhDs and no college degree grandmas. And you know what, we all work hard to make our lives work and we all have big audacious hearts of hope and faith in God. Actually, some of us are struggling even as we move billions of dollars in the financial industry with addiction problems. Some of us are struggling with heartbreak and loneliness at home while leading a whole company. Some of us are barely making ends meet and struggling with debilitating health issues. And I see all of us, gathering together here, humbled, saying,

“Jesus I need you.”

Saying to one another

“hey I need you”

and we’re deciding to be a community together because we know that you can’t do this alone and you need a friend. 

And I don’t mean just nice friends who say oh hi how are you, good, thank you, and you. That’s not good enough. As Brene Brown would say, you got to lean in with more courage and vulnerability than that because people can smell fake miles away. And if you really want to do the work of deeply connecting, you can’t stay on the surface level. She says

“daring is not saying, okay I’m willing to risk failure.”

Daring is saying,

“I know I’ll eventually fail. And I’m still all in.” 

Have you failed with a relationship with someone, maybe with someone sitting here in this room? Yes? Good. Hey we don’t all gotta be BFF’s. If you haven’t, if you haven’t gotten a text from someone saying,

“hey we got to talk”

or had to apologize for a misstep to someone, then you’re not stepping. You’re missing out. 

The definition of vulnerability as the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure has been described in her studies as these, when asked tell me about the time of vulnerability: first date after a divorce, talking about race with my team, trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage and so on. These are the moments that come up that actually bind us, make us trust one another, how we love one another in these moments. If we’re not doing such moments, then we’re not doing love, we’re just being nice. 

C.S. Lewis says,

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

I hung out with a new friend the other day. We did a playdate with the girls. Her house was so cute and well designed, she has a great eye. And I stepped up my visiting someone’s home game by bringing a fun summer drink. It had pureed strawberries and blueberries, with slices of oranges and lemon, mixed with some cranberry juice and ice. I was proud of myself and she was so impressed. I was sad that I didn’t not bring a cute straw and basil with it. And a full cup of that beautiful pink and red drink with all kinds of fruit juices in it, was spilled by my daughter onto their living room rug. I got on my knees and dabbed and rubbed. She felt bad that I was on my knees. I felt bad that I ruined her pretty house. I still think about that rug and want to text her and say,

“sorry about that rug again!”

but haven’t because I don’t want her to make her feel bad for making me feel bad and text about stupid things that she probably moved on from that I’m obviously still caught up on because I’m neurotic and crazy and I don’t want her to know that just yet cause I want to hang out with her again. 

You know what? I’ve been talking about how to be vulnerable. How to be a good friend. How we should lean in or take charge. But this is not a TedTalk or a self help book. There are some helpful tips but, the thing is none of this matters. We try so hard to be good little Christians, good church goers, good friends, a good community. None of these trys and efforts don’t really matter if you don’t know the good good Friend Jesus. 

9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.

11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

Do you hear Jesus saying to you, I love you? 

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.

Do you hear Jesus saying to you, I am your friend?

I chose you, I approached you, I initiated, and I made you my friend when you didn’t even know it. I pursue you again and again. I text you. I call you. I come by your house. I make sure that you know my love, my joy. SO THAT YOU MIGHT GO AND BEAR FRUIT. And spill fruit juices all over someone’s house and they still call you for a next hangout. 

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 

I can’t tell you to go now and work on your friendship with vulnerability, because without knowing that God is your friend, it’ll be a fruitless effort. 

God is vulnerable with you. God came to us as Jesus to just sit next to us at the well, to call us down from climbing a tree, so that we can come over at night to discuss urgent things, to feed us bread and wine. God is your friend. 

Let me pray for us. 

Hey Friend, thank you for loving us first, when we knew nothing of it. Help us to find your love again and again. Help us to hear your voice and listen to your heart with our hearts. Help us to grow our friendship with you and with those around us. Help us our most dearest sweet kind friend who loves us beyond our own understanding. Give us your wisdom to know and understand this mighty love we have from you. We pray, in Jesus name Amen.

The Wisdom of Shiphrah and Puah

The Wisdom of Shiphrah and Puah

We are coming to the end of our “Wisdom” series – with one more week to come. Where we’ve been dipping into some of the wisdom literature – Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms — to mine these books for wisdom – to line the pathways of our real lives. In hopes of helping our lives “work.”

When we started this series, I didn’t realize we’d be finishing up right around the end of the academic year. It’s when the energy in this Cambridge/greater Boston area shifts -*relaxes*- a little bit. With finals, and dissertations being submitted, with graduations — and celebrations — marking of another year complete.

More drops of wisdom in the wisdom bucket.

I was talking with my college student, Elle — who is home for a bit — and I was like,

“Can you believe you’re officially a Junior?”

And she was like

“shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh — don’t say that too loud –it might be real…”

And between the shushing — was the tenor of things I’ve felt before – that I feel now – the expectation of being wise/er. The realization that with advancement (whether study, or years in a job, or age ), there should be a parallel “up and to the right” trajectory of wisdom.

And we give plenty of accompanying questions that set up that tenor over a span of a life — like:

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“What are you doing with your life?”

“What have you done with your life?”

I like to imagine how Wisdom herself would respond to those questions? Likely very directly.
“My life?” — well, I plan on living it. Or I’m currently living it, or I have lived it.

And to offer those answers not smugly, but with clarity, with a deep immovable knowing.

Wisdom, as we’ve been talking about these last few weeks, is to live our very life as it comes to us, and as we come to it…. with the spirit of God alongside.

Wisdom is a nurturer, a cultivator of all life. Wisdom isn’t choosy or selective — it asks us to partner with her in ALL THAT IS this “wild and precious life” — and to take on courage as we do. Because “wild” doesn’t mean linear and predictable and “precious” doesn’t mean we get to choose what is “precious.” A life that “works” is to believe that we can and we will live ALL of this life (as many as the days we have), —  with all of who we are and with all of who God is — and it will matter to all who we encounter. This is wisdom.

I want to offer a story from the Bible today that I revisit again and again in my own life — especially when I feel void of wisdom. It’s a story where courage and wisdom kind of go hand in hand (so you’ll hear me mention both sometimes interchangeably throughout the sermon)  — because it is almost always courageous to embody wisdom. 

This story is found in Exodus and it is of these two women.

Two midwives.

Whose names are Shiphrah and Puah.

They break open a whole host of helpful ways to think about wisdom – anchored to their utter belief and embodiment of the way they live their lives WITH God. 

Prayer

Thank you God for this new morning – – for your love that embraces us just as we are. Thank you for gathering us here — promising us that you have something in store for us — whether we recognize it, can name it — or not… could you help us to feel your presence. .. your comfort today, your rest, your joy, your peace — could you nestle it deep in our hearts, in our bones — and remind us that no one can take away such love. In the strength, the courage, the resistance, the creativity and the wisdom you give, Amen.

Lessons From a Bird

A couple of weeks ago a few of us from the staff went over to Wilson’s Farm and picked our own tulips. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and the rows and rows of these flowers blooming in every possible color was stunning. So much beauty, so much budding life.

And oddly, kind of right in the middle of all these rows was a square area roped off that said “bird nesting here”. As a couple of us drew closer to inspect — there she was this small bird, called a killdeer standing over three speckled eggs.

In the past I apprenticed on a farm for a few years and I knew this bird immediately. Killdeer love to lay their eggs in fields, Actually they aren’t picky at all they lay their eggs in patches of gravel wherever they can find it – sides of tennis courts, corners of driveways, parking lots (they prefer the ground) – and it often coincides with where there is a lot of human activity.

I don’t know about you — but this seems pretty unwise, not wise – without wisdom.

There’s so much potential for danger. So much potential life at stake.

Seemingly a consistent source of fear and threat.

And yet I stood there watching this bird — standing so still — with three of us looming over her nest, her eggs, casting huge shadows.

And she was so Calm. Steadfast. Unflappable.

So convinced she seemed of her role to be with her eggs, to stay… to stay so close.

I said out loud:

“Good job momma.”

It was kind of moving to me — this immovable tiny bird.

The Midwives’ Courageous Choice

We often enter the story of Shiphrah and Puah through a more well known story  — the story of Moses. Many of you probably have heard the epic story of Moses – this Hebrew baby who was drawn from the water and raised in Pharaoh’s courts and becomes not a prince, but a liberator of his people. These people, the Israelites,  who have been enslaved and considered less than human by the Egyptians – it’s the story of the great exodus from Egypt into the promised land.

This story of Moses is the one we know… But we don’t as often visit the story of  Shiphrah and Puah –  the story that sets the stage for baby Moses to grow up and live, and a story that in some ways determines the fate of an entire people.

So let’s read the story together:

Exodus 1

8 Now a new king came to power in Egypt who didn’t know Joseph.

9 He said to his people, “The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are.

10 Come on, let’s be smart and deal with them. Otherwise, they will only grow in number. And if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and then escape from the land.”

11 As a result, the Egyptians put foremen of forced work gangs over the Israelites to harass them with hard work. They had to build storage cities named
Pithom (Pye-thahm) and Rameses for Pharaoh.

12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they grew and spread, so much so that the Egyptians started to look at the Israelites with disgust and dread.

13 So the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites.

14 They made their lives miserable with hard labor, making mortar and bricks, doing field work, and by forcing them to do all kinds of other cruel work.

15 The king of Egypt spoke to two Hebrew midwives named Shiphrah and Puah:

16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women give birth and you see the baby being born, if it’s a boy, kill him. But if it’s a girl, you can let her live.”

17 Now the two midwives feared God so they didn’t obey the Egyptian king’s order. Instead, they let the baby boys live.

18 So the king of Egypt called the two midwives and said to them, “Why are you doing this? Why are you letting the baby boys live?”

19 The two midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because Hebrew women aren’t like Egyptian women. They’re much stronger and give birth before any midwives can get to them.”

20 So God treated the midwives well, and the people kept on multiplying and became very strong.

21 And because the midwives FEARED GOD, God gave them households of their own.

Understanding the Context and Their Calling

A little context to where we pick up here – The Israelites had moved to Egypt during a time of famine and starvation. Joseph had been sold into slavery in Egypt as a result of his jealous brother’s action and had helped the Israelites land here. Joseph’s time in Egypt was blessed by God – and he worked his way into high standing in Egypt – and the Israelites fared well. And for a while the Israelites and Egyptians coexisted without (that much) trouble.

Soon though, a new King came into Egypt – and it says “He did not know Joseph”. This means he didn’t know Joseph’s people or his God – and therefore he looked out at the Israelites with fear and suspicion and saw them as a threat, as the “other.”

He attempts to limit the growth of the Hebrews – who only seem to grow in number, by dehumanizing them in systemic ways – by slavery, and forced labor and oppression. These attempts however don’t seem to make a difference.

So Pharoah enacts a fear campaign,

“What if we were attacked by our enemies and these growing number of Israelites –  join sides with our enemies?”

“We would be crushed!”

And this fear messaging –  starts to shift the opinion of his people – and there’s more of a widespread buy in – to oppress and segregate.

Pharaoh’s xenophobia pushes him to take drastic measures to ensure these “outsiders” do not one day take over the land – and his latest attempt as we see here – is calling forth these two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah. Under government sanctions Shiphrah and Puah are enlisted to participate in the extermination of Hebrew baby boys. To bring death to the world around them.

Now the text reads that these women were Hebrew midwives… and yet there’s a lot of conversation among scholars that suggests that these women were in fact Egyptian – but attended the birth of Hebrew women. So they were midwives TO Hebrew women.

I’m inclined to agree with this take – it makes sense to me that Pharaoh would want his own “people” to carry out this decree…

This means Shiphrah and Puah likely attended both Hebrew and Egyptian births. And midwives were often thought to be women who couldn’t have children themselves, so they were often pushed to the edges of society. Shiphrah and Puah, are thought to possibly be Nubian midwives, from now Northern Sudan — meaning that their relationships, throughout their vocational lives – spanned cultural and geographical lines.

A midwife’s primary role is to usher in life, regardless of status, race or any other defining division… To stay close, to assist, guide and protect life.

So Pharoah’s quite strategic with his newest attempt to limit the growth of the Hebrews. He knows that these midwives are the touchpoint to life or death.. And he decrees, “choose death.”

I can imagine Shiphrah and Puah wondered what wisdom would say here —-  Because the options seem so stark — EITHER we are courageous and 1) we refuse to follow Pharoah’s orders and we likely die and likely our friends and families also die.

OR

We aren’t courageous and 2) we follow Pharoah’s orders  –  and we promote the sovereignty of our state – and by the work of our own hands, bring death to the next generation of Hebrew males.

Thankfully wisdom’s favorite spot seems to be in these perceived “either/or” scenarios… it seems to be the very spot that wisdom cries out! Right in the middle of this gritty life — with threats all around wisdom surfaces in their path — in an unimagined way.

The text here says that Shiphrah and Puah

“fear God.” 

They revere and love and trust God. Their belief in God – seems to be a way of harnessing wisdom and courage… and it seems as though it isn’t only found in this one high-stakes moment with Pharaoh – but it’s been built and developed over their WHOLE lives… 

Fearing God – helps them imagine beyond the binary – to reframe wisdom beyond having to have a “right” choice – a  “yes or  no” to Pharoah  – it’s instead about saying “yes” to LIFE with God. *And here opens the field of new possibility — right? — the birthing ground of wisdom*

These midwives – are courageous! They are divinely defiant! And they are wise. They’re heroically brave in their refusal to kill baby boys, they’re clever in their explanation to Pharaoh of why baby boys keep being born,

“these Hebrew women are so strong and vigorous that they birth their babies before we can arrive!”

… the wisdom in that response – isn’t just an excuse to buy them time – it’s a subversive move to uphold the strength and dignity of the Hebrew people to Pharoah.

As I mentioned, Shiphrah and Puah were likely midwives who attended their own people’s births- -but also the births of their “perceived enemies.”

These midwives were involved deeply… deeply at the center of women and their community and family stories. To just go in and assist at a birth – is not the way of the midwife. A midwife is one who sits and STAYS steadfast with people in pain and confronts spirits that are full of despair and want to give up.

Day after day – birth after birth they came along-side the “other” – these Hebrew women, who they should hate … and they take their hands and rub their backs… And they say  again and again … there’s a way here… “God is here”….  This breaks open a deep belief that courage and wisdom well up from inside of us…. That it’s not only found in taking on a piece of armor for a moment of courage or a moment of wisdom at a crossroads. Their God is one who sits alongside of them too – is in their reality – A God who doesn’t just go to the margins to serve someone else – but ONE who LIVES at the margins.”

These midwives do this, they live at the margins…. And in their vocation, take on a calling, an oath to “in all ways attend to all of life”… And the courage they dip into – is God’s, because they believe that God is truly with them. And they greet pain – the pain of childbirth and the pain of injustice and the pain of not being seen… with these virtues of God. A living God.

I can wonder if those questions —

“So what are you planning to do with your life? Or what are you doing with your life?”

grate on us sometimes because we wrestle with deeper ones already —  does what I do matter? Does it touch real life? Has it brought forth anything new or wise into the world?

Wisdom in Everyday Life

These midwives seem to encourage us that “yes” – wherever we are – whatever we do, whoever we talk to – matters. That if we do it with kindness and generosity and equity, backed by a God that is real… It all matters.

These 1,000’s of moments where they offer their laboring and birthing mother’s – cool washcloths to their foreheads… where they gently turn babies inside of wombs – where they listen closely for heartbeats … where they root for life! With their encouraging words, “yes push”, “you are almost there”… “life is coming”…

These times of being so intimately close to life – and so close to God –  rewire our pathways to see the movement of GOD AND the movement of all of our LIFE as one… beyond political/authoritative decrees OR external circumstances or opinions or power – that try to inject fear.

For Shiphrah and Puah – these moments compile and develop a courageous heart – and whether Egyptian or Hebrew – male or female …the passion for justice and care for all of humanity – becomes a non-negotiable with a real, good, and living God close to us, who stands with us in the threats, the war zones of this wild life.

Omid Safi (a Duke University professor of Islamic studies) said recently that this closeness (to God), is what allows us to see that the

“love we recognize in other people — people who love their babies and their community —  is the same love that we love our babies and our community with… AND when we recognize this same love in one another, we will not stand for having something happen to other people’s babies and community that we wouldn’t want to have happen to ours. That is simply what we call justice — and this work of justice is BIRTHED out of a heart wrapped in wisdom, courage and love. (Onbeing reference).

The courage and wisdom to say “justice and love” must go hand and hand.

This is the powerful picture of wisdom that Shiphrah and Puah give us today, one that they still invite us to!

It turns out when killdeer feel as though their nest is truly threatened they put on what’s called a “broken wing act.” If a human gets too close to their nest, a killdeer will splay its wing out awkwardly and appear hurt, dragging themselves across the ground — moving away from their nests. It’s a subversive / distraction tactic that often lures humans away from stepping on their nests. Humans of course thinking they could help a tiny bird follow the killdeer — until they are a safe margin away from the nest — and then magically the killdeer flies away.

Their dedication to nurturing life is full of wisdom after all.

Perhaps it’s bird instincts, primal — perhaps it’s this specific species genetic make-up — it’s been in their design, in their DNA — for centuries.

So is true for us my friends. The wisdom of Shiphrah and Puah and the spirit of God lives in our bodies — in our DNA — too.

I’m slowly beginning to realize that the question at hand isn’t either

“Am I with wisdom?”

OR

“Am I without wisdom?”

Because likely on any given day – I am both Wise and really not wise. The question is,

“can I harness the wisdom of a God that is always with me?” 

That’s a helpful reframe for me because life is hard… 

And otherwise – I think the threat of disparaging thoughts can take over –  Am I only destined to be a prisoner to the pharaohs of my day? Will I ever witness something other than pain and heartache?

But the words of Paul in Ephesians, fill out my truncated thoughts – with the power and realness of Jesus…

He reminds me that,

I am not a prisoner of anyone else  – but of JESUS who wraps me in humility and gentleness and patience – who gives me the wisdom to continue to lean toward people with love – with an eagerness of heart that seeks to maintain the unity of the Spirit – this powerful Jesus who makes a way –   for the bonding posture of peace. … This is the power of Jesus.

Jesus makes way for wisdom that is ever-present, running through our veins,  on the tips of our tongues, in the palms of our hands as we touch life around us – and in our feet as we roam this earth.

We are all called to be wise and courageous. And to believe that our everyday posture of heralding life – in spaces where only death looks apparent – will produce change – somewhere down .. the line…

The outcome that Shiphrah and Puah witness after making their courageous move to not kill these Hebrew baby boys – could have felt disappointing to them….  Because Pharoah just keeps marching on with his plans to wipe out these babies – demanding that all his people throw them into the Nile River.

BUT they did *briefly* prevent a genocide of children! AND what Shiphrah and Puah wouldn’t have seen at the time – is that their story – their WHOLE story of being women who courageously live at the margins, and who so wisely stood against power and oppression –  would and IS continued to be told. That their names will be kept alive – and whispered among the Hebrew women – that their names will be yelled out in the pains of labor, as sign-posts of resistance and hope, (when their land is vacant of it) – and that their courage to say “we fear God”, would give Pharaoh’s daughter, and Moses’ sister and Moses’ mother the courage to protect & hide and find and nurse him to life.

These names of Shiphrah and Puah are recorded! We get to see them written down in the text that we read today! This shows us that a lifetime of wisdom, empowered with the Divine – is worth 3,000 years of remembrance and legacy – and still worth talking about today….While Pharaoh’s fearful acts of dominating power and authority – leaves him nameless and less than 300 years of fame…

Perhaps our role is akin to the role of a midwife – to cherish other life as our own – to regard it as “precious” – to stand right where we are in our jobs and roles and play and live – and reclaim these paths, these places as fields and gardens of abundant wisdom.

Key Lessons From Shiphrah and Puah’s Wisdom and Faithfulness

Some lessons we can learn from Shiphrah and Puah include:

  • Obedience to God over man: These courageous women in the Bible chose to obey God’s law rather than Pharaoh’s command to kill newborn Israelite boys. This act demonstrates that even in difficult situations, sometimes the right choice requires defiance of those in power.
  • Fear of the Lord: They feared God more than Pharaoh, understanding that His power and authority superseded any earthly ruler. This fear led them to act justly and compassionately, even when it put them at risk.
  • Integrity and courage: Shiphrah and Puah demonstrated courage by their biblical defiance against injustice and standing by their actions, and they displayed integrity by not falsifying their reports to Pharaoh.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some answers to some questions about this sermon:

What Is the Wisdom of Shiphrah and Puah?

The wisdom of Shiphrah and Puah lies in their God-fearing obedience and their life-affirming defiance of Pharaoh’s decree. These women in the Bible understood that true wisdom meant prioritizing God’s will and the sanctity of life over the demands of oppressive power. Their quick thinking and strategic deception demonstrate a practical wisdom that allowed them to navigate a perilous situation while upholding their moral and spiritual convictions.

What Does Shiphrah and Puah’s Story Teach Us About Courage and Defiance?

The story of Shiphrah and Puah is a testament to courage and defiance in the face of oppression. Despite Pharaoh’s order to kill all newborn Hebrew boys, they chose to disobey, fearing God more than the king. Their actions highlight the importance of faith, obedience to God and the courage to stand up for what is right, even when it’s difficult.

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We invite you to our Sunday service to discover how faith empowers us in our daily lives, just like Shiphrah and Puah. Visit us in person or tune in to our YouTube channel this Sunday.

A Life Most Fully Alive

Alright, friends, this week we leave the fires of danger, hell, and judgment behind and return to another version of where we started in this season of Lent: God is like fire, and that is actually good news for our lives. 

If we think of a fiery person, we may think of an especially passionate person, or an angry or loving or fierce or intense person. But it is certainly not someone sleepwalking through life. 

Let’s wonder this week about what our version of a life most fully alive might look like. Perhaps a life aflame with passion or energized by beauty and goodness. The God who is like fire does not want to burn us up or make us smaller, harder, or more afraid. Jesus said that he came that we might have life, life abundantly. I wonder what a more abundant life looks like for us all, a life that is larger without ever taking space from someone else, a life that is freer while also focused, a life where our uniquely most loving selves shine bright like stars. 

Can you try something with me?

Think about someone you know about, or that you know personally, who seems fully alive. A life radiant with energy, beauty, goodness. 

  • Who comes to mind?
  • What are they like? 
  • If you know, how did they get there?

The people I think of are not heroes, they are not perfect, if there is such a thing. They are human, but they are perfectly wonderful humans. 

I think of a monk I know. He lives a life bound by many restrictions – vows of poverty and chastity. He is also radiantly present, kind, and insightful. He laughs and smiles and tears up easily. He listens well, tells the truth fiercely and graciously. He encourages people in ways that uplift and empower us. A focused life, a limited one, but also large, free, so good. 

I think of a public school teacher I know who, like most teachers, moves through her days filled with unpredictably chaotic and disordered people and situations and bureaucracy. But she’s also set two of my kids on fire with her work in their lives. She asks really deep questions. She pushes young intellects, keeps her hobby of drumming in a punk rock band going through busy seasons of teaching and parenting. And day after day, she offers passion and presence and grace to her community. Young people like my kids are learning justice and forgiveness, careful thinking and attention to detail, greater hope in themselves and their world through their relationships with her. It’s so beautiful. Her life is beautiful. 

I think of stories I’ve known of elders who visit with their spouses daily, even when their partners no longer remember their names. Their faithful presence, their perseverance in love keeps them and their spouse afloat in what could otherwise be a season of despair. The rest of us wonder at their grace as we learn more about what love looks like. 

Friends, what does your life look like when it’s aflame? Who are you, on fire? 

It has been said that many of us spend enough time thinking about ourselves as descendants but not enough time considering ourselves as ancestors. 

From dust we come and to dust we go. We are limited by our genetics, our circumstances, by all the places – good and bad – that we come from. And we’re limited by the brevity of our mortal lives. We are earth, not fire. And yet we may not wonder enough about the full possibilities of our lives when we are most inspired and set alight by the living, life-giving God. 

Maybe there are still stunning ancestor stories in the making within even us. 

What do our lives look like when they are aflame? Who are we, on fire?

Hear the words of the good news of Jesus. This is a weird and wonderful story, called the transfiguration, from the gospel of Luke.

Luke 9:28-36 (Common English Bible)

28 About eight days after Jesus said these things, he took Peter, John, and James, and went up on a mountain to pray.

29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed and his clothes flashed white like lightning.

30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, were talking with him.

31 They were clothed with heavenly splendor and spoke about Jesus’ departure, which he would achieve in Jerusalem.

32 Peter and those with him were almost overcome by sleep, but they managed to stay awake and saw his glory as well as the two men with him.

33 As the two men were about to leave Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it’s good that we’re here. We should construct three shrines: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—but he didn’t know what he was saying.

34 Peter was still speaking when a cloud overshadowed them. As they entered the cloud, they were overcome with awe.

35 Then a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!”

36 Even as the voice spoke, Jesus was found alone. They were speechless and at the time told no one what they had seen.

I don’t know what your reaction is to hearing this, friends, or hearing it again. What a strange story. So weird and wonderful. No wonder they’re all speechless. What do you say?

I have no idea what happened up on that mountain. 

We know that it was like nothing the disciples had ever seen. Jesus looks like he’s spotlit from the heavens, just ablaze with light. And they see visions of two of the greatest fathers or mothers of their culture, their faith. The great prophets Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. 

It seems like this maybe happened late at night, or maybe at sunrise after they’d been hiking through the night, I don’t know. But it feels like a religious, a mystical experience, so Peter’s like:

I think we should build a shrine, right? 

But then clouds blow through, and they hear God saying, Shutup, Peter. Just kidding, doesn’t actually say that, even if God maybe thinks it for a moment. No, the voice is like:

Jesus is my kid. The one and only. Listen to him. 

Again, no wonder they are speechless. 

The tradition around this text tends to focus on all this scene is meant to tell us about Jesus – how special and wise and important Jesus is, how he too was destined to be among the great leaders of his culture and faith, how like Moses and Elijah, his legacy would not end with his life but would resound for generations, even hinting that Jesus would rise in glory after his death, as we will celebrate in two weeks on Easter Sunday.

And clearly, this mountaintop moment was a big moment, this epic day in the life of Jesus, when his followers and we by their testimony see him most aflame, most fully alive, most revealed for all he is. 

So it’s a weird and wonderful story about Jesus.

But in the Eastern tradition of the Christian faith, the Orthodox tradition, this transfiguration of Christ, isn’t just a story about Jesus, it’s a story about all of us too. 

The Orthodox church teaches that this illumination of Jesus also gives us a glimpse of the transformed state which followers of Jesus will reach in the life to come, and sometimes in part, in this life.

The word for this is theosis, which means deification, or divinization, the process by which we mortal humans become like Christ, where we too become humans who fully embody the glory of God. 

The second century bishop Irenaeus wrote,

“The glory of God is a human fully alive.”

Some people pull this quote out of context as they think about chasing the adrenaline of adventure, like a Red Bull cliff jumping contest. That’s cool, if it’s for you. The thrill of intense experiences can certainly make us feel fully alive, and maybe there’s something of the glory of God we taste in that.

Irenaeus didn’t mean less than this but he did mean more than this. He was writing about Jesus, that in the most fully alive human of Jesus we see God’s glory. But he was doing so inviting both our worship and our participation. He was inviting us to notice how large, how free, how beautiful Jesus is, because he was so fully human and so in touch with the love and purposes of God in every moment. And he was encouraging us to imagine for ourselves and our species a pattern of imitating Christ in this, in our own ways. With the help of God, and with our faith and cooperation, we too can be transfigured. We too have the possibility of being humans most fully alive, transformed from glory to glory, as it were.

This is our best chance at becoming the ancestor people tell stories about after we are gone.

It’s our way toward being the person who comes to mind when someone else is asked:

Who do you know that is most fully alive? 

Let’s think about how this happens, 

First, we’ve got to wake up. 

I think it’s interesting that the text says Peter, James, and John almost missed this moment – we never would have heard about it either – because they just about fell asleep. 

Maybe they’d been hiking all night and just needed a nap.

But maybe it’s easy to sleep our way through some of what’s most important in life. It’s easy to sleepwalk through life in a way, isn’t it?

I was hanging out with a couple of friends this week. And one of them was talking about how he kind of lost it last week after a particularly bad day. He was a little sheepish when he talked about his reaction, like why did I shut down so much? And another one of the friends was like:

hold on, think about all you’ve been through the past few years. Think about how much we’ve all been through the past few years.

And he started naming some of the things we’ve shared about in our circle the past few years – health problems, family crises, impossibly difficult issues at work. But not just our private stuff, but some of the things we’ve all been through by just being alive the past few years – pandemic, and lock down, and bearing witness to threat after threat, violence after violence. He was like:

It’s been a lot. No wonder that you’re tired. No wonder that your tank is empty sometimes. 

Some of us are tired, aren’t we?

Maybe your tank feels empty too. And so you’re just sputtering along. Or sometimes over-reactive to a new problem or a bump in the road. 

The weight of the past is heavy. As we hold our past in our bodies, and receive it again and again in our memories, it’s really easy to assume that the past is always prelude. That the future is going to play out just the same. 

Marjorie Suchocki is a theologian and philosopher I appreciate, who I got to meet online at a conference I was presenting at last month. She talks about how the weight of our past can feel so unchangeable that it becomes demonic. She doesn’t mean that in a spooky, exorcist kind of way, but in the literal sense of that word – accusing, a weight of heavy resignation and despair that there isn’t a better way ahead, that the worst ruts we’re in are just going to stay the way they are or sink deeper.

This happens to us, it happens to me – that our most pressing discouragements and intractable difficulties – personally, collectively – we just get stuck, we feel like things can not change. And we need help to imagine another possibility. 

We need the help of God and friends to interrupt this sleepwalking, stuck in a rut, despairing way of passing our lives. 

It’s a waking up to new possibilities. 

It’s a remembering of what we know from investing, that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. The future is unwritten.

It’s a hope that what the scriptures say is true, that the steadfast love of God is new every morning. Every morning, the steadfast love of God is coming our way anew.

One great way to wake up to love and hope and possibility is through wonder and worship. Wonder and worship.

Peter, James, and John are falling asleep when they catch Jesus out of the corner of their eyes and he’s bathed in sunlight. His clothes, his face look aflame like lightning.

I don’t think they’re sleepy anymore. 

And then even when they try to analyze or control the moment – Peter is like,

hey religious moment, let’s make a shrine,

but the voice of God is like:

actually, hold on, you’re kind of right, Peter, but there’s more. There’s more. Just listen. Keep listening. Pay attention.

These same sleepy fishermen, who have themselves been battered by life, and who in the gospels say and do the stupidest things, keep walking with Jesus. They keep listening. They stick around. And in time, with the help of God and one another, it catches. Their lives are set aflame with passion and purpose. They become the dwelling places for God Peter dreamed of building that morning. They become the leaders of the first century Jesus movement, which is to become one of the largest, most influential movements in human history. 

They are some of the spiritual ancestors that get us all in this room today. 

This is why I pray when I do, in my own personal devotional life. And it’s why I come to church too, to get help waking up as I wonder and worship, knowing this is going to make my life larger, freer, and more loving.

Sometimes it’s in the music, when I’m singing with you all and it gets into my heart that the creator God of the universe calls us friends. 

Sometimes it’s in the taking of communion, when I eat and drink and I remember that God shares everything with us all – love, forgiveness, adoption, second chances, everything. Or I look around at you all beautiful people and think I really am part of this community of love and hope that we call the body of Christ. 

Sometimes in a sermon or a moment of prayer, a word will come to me, a word that feels like truth and sounds like freedom. A week and a half ago, I was sleep walking my way through a wall of stress, just gripped more each day by worry and a sense of doom over one piece of my world I really care about. 

And it came to my mind or soul or spirit – whatever you want to call that deep center of ourselves – that God knew it all, that God was intimate with my concerns and stress, and intimately held the object of my stress too. None of us are alone, none of us cut off, we are all connected to the caring compassion of an ever present Spirit we call God. 

And that broke the stress, broke it entirely. And that’s held.

Wonder and worship open us up. They open us up to the steadfast love of God, in all of today’s new forms. They help us wake up.

Now I want to acknowledge that as much as I encourage worship of the God we meet in the face of Jesus, there are ways that wonder and worship reach people who aren’t religious, or aren’t interested in the Way of Jesus.

It can be nature, art, unexpected or profound kindness, an experience of God or of love that is mediated through any form. And it can do this too. God can come to us through many means. 

There’s science to this too, this awakening that comes through wonder and worship. Sometimes it’s called the science of awe. How apprehending vastness or beauty or kindness interrupts us, wakes us up, kind of stops us in our tracks and widens our gaze, widens our hearts. 

Awe takes us outside of ourselves for a moment. It breaks our sleepy, doomsy rhythms. And then if we can really let it in – not analyze it or control it or walk away from it – but let the awe take hold, we can come back to ourselves with more calmness and compassion. This has been measured. 

Trying new things, paying mindful attention to whatever moment we are in so we notice whatever kindness or beauty might appear, even noticing and admiring the moral beauty of others. All these things bring wonder, they produce awe – and that calms us, deepens us, extends our lives – lights us up. 

So for our lives aflame, we’ve got to wake up, to wonder and worship, and lastly, to welcome. To welcome.

To welcome the life that we are in. And to welcome a larger, freer, more loving version of that same life. 

Jesus and his disciples come down from the mountaintop. They have to. They have lives to live, people to see, work to do. We all have to come down from the mountaintop, into the mundane and sometimes disappointing realities of our lives. 

But what if we can welcome our life a little more each day, not as we want it to be but just as it is? Because our transfiguration, our joining Jesus in becoming the glory of a human being most fully alive is going to happen in our lives as they are. Not in a fantasy version of our life where everything is better, but in our life as it is today. 

So we welcome the good stuff, and we welcome the mess, and we welcome things just as they are today, in the hope that this is good enough for God, good enough for us, good enough for fire. 

And then we welcome the largest, freest, most loving version of that life we can. This is language we’ve been quoting from James Baldwin in this season, that a God worth worshiping is one that will make us larger, freer, more loving versions of ourselves. 

Some of the ways of our lives don’t do that. We play by old rules in our family systems. Or we play capitalism’s rules – thinking our funds or our success define our worth. Or just working and working and working and then when we’re not working, letting big tech corporations make money off of our data and our weary attentions. Baldwin said that when we assimilate to racist, capitalist, violent, white world that is much of mainstream society, it’s being integrated into a burning house. 

There are plenty of ways of living we can welcome that won’t make us larger, freer, and more loving. 

In the way of Jesus, we’re invited back to our own lives rejecting and resisting all this. We’re invited to the purifying power of God within us and in our communities to resist or transform everything there that is small, hard, unfree, and unloving. And instead, we’re encouraged to admire what is best and most beautiful in the world, God included. For we become what we worship. And to welcome whatever vision God gives us of a larger, freer, more loving life, that we can be filled with all the fullness of God, shining with our light and the light of God, growing into the ancestors our future world depends upon.

I want to end by a bit from Ada Limon’s poem “Dead Stars” you’ll find in this week’s guide.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
   of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
   what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
   We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
             if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds…

Let’s pray. 

Light of Christ, Fire of God, burn in me, shine through me. 

Light of Christ, Fire of God, burn in us, shine through us.

That we too could experience and manifest the glory of God in a life most alive.