Sixth - Reservoir Church

On Saving Your Soul

This past week I had a phone call week with my eight-year old goddaughter. I got to speak to Mari because I’d been talking to her parents about the hard time she was having in school. There are these two other kids in her class who have been mean, and off and on last year and again this year, they’d been really aggressive with my her. My friends had called me to ask for some advice in dealing with the school, and then they’d given me a chance to talk with Mari too.

I thought she’d feel down and maybe I should remind Mari that she didn’t deserve this. So I asked my goddaughter: do you know how special you are? Do you know that God made you smart and fun and beautiful and important? And she said very matter-of-factly, “Yes, I do.” Duh? Of course, like these were the most obvious truths about herself.

And we talked a little more, but this was that moment that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Of course Mari knows she’s special and smart and beautiful and important. She has good parents who have told her that and shown her that a thousand times. No bit of bullying or classroom chaos was changing that today or tomorrow.

Of course Mari knows who she is. You and me, the grownups, we’re the ones that lose track of who we are.

Years ago, the psychologist Mary Pipher wrote Reviving Ophelia, a little book about adolescent girls, and how they take in pressure and criticism and all manner of jacked up stuff in society regarding girls and women, and they take those messages and that pain inward and shrink down as they lose track of who they are.

Thank God none of this is my goddaughter’s story yet, but in a way, it’s a lot of ours, I think.

I’ve been thinking about how we can lose track of ourselves, of our fundamental identities, and about the kind of inner work that grounds us and centers us, helps us be at peace and be at home no matter where we are or what we’re going through.

We’ve got two weeks left in our series On the Brink of Everything. And in the book by Parker Palmer that inspired this series, there are chapters about reaching out and about reaching in. Writing from his perspective as an 80-year old, Palmer has noticed that as we go through life, we can get more and more isolated, thus his call to keep reaching out. But we can also get more and more lost, thus his call to reach in. To keep asking: Who am I? And What can I do with my pain?

These questions have taken me to a particular place in the scriptures, to the big letter in the middle of the New Testament, the one called Romans.

I’ve been reading and reading about Romans a lot the past few years, and this fall, I’ve started studying this letter each week with a few of you. I’m leading a community group right out there in the lobby every Saturday morning from 9:30 to 11 – you’re all invited. There are many other community groups too, of course – they’re maybe the best things we have going at Reservoir, so I hope you can be part of one. I’m loving mine. In my group, each week we spend about half an hour connecting with one another and about an hour talking about a short section of this part of the Bible.

It’s been really fun so far, because if you didn’t grow up with much Bible in your life, Romans is confusing. But if you did grow up around the Bible, Romans was likely misused and weaponized – a religious handbook of who’s in, and who’s out with God, and how to get on the right side of that line. But as we’re reading Romans, we’re finding that it’s something else entirely.

The author named Paul was a Jewish rabbinical student who for a brief time zealously persecuted the early first century followers of Jesus before he became one himself. Then, for about 25 years, Paul became the leading ambassador for the story of Jesus – what he called the good news of Jesus – throughout the Roman empire, writing several letters during that time that eventually became part of our Bibles.

In Romans, he gets what for him is the very exciting opportunity to write to the little house church communities at the very heart of the empire, in what was then the largest city in the world, maybe the first ever million person city of Rome.

These Roman house churches were on the whole pretty marginalized people, for whom the questions, “Who am I?” And, “What do I do with my pain?” would have been really important.

Half of them were women. And as a woman, you couldn’t hold public office, you couldn’t vote. Your education would stop when she was young. You was the property of her father until you was married off as a teen, when you became the property of your husband, to whom you would be expected to be totally faithful, even though the same wasn’t expected of him.

Many of the Roman house church members were also Jews, a religious and ethnic minority in the city. They had been expelled from Rome a decade earlier, which tells you something about the kind of minority experience they lived. Resented, misunderstood, scapegoated.

And then of course many members of the Roman house churches were slaves. Children of parents who had large debts, or captives or immigrants from the edges of the empire, slaves were seen as less than fully human. Cut off from their cultures and religion and language and family, they worked without payment, they were raped with impunity. Their children, if they had them, could be taken from them and sold.

These were many of the people Paul addressed in this letter – people who knew pain, people who struggled to understand who they were now, and how they could be at home.

To these people, Paul wrote about what he called the gospel, or the good news of Jesus. Here’s just a little sampling of that.

Romans 8:15-17, 22-27, 35-39 (CEB)

15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.

22 We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains up until now. 23 And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be adopted and for our bodies to be set free. 24 We were saved in hope. If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already see? 25 But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.

26 In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. 27 The one who searches hearts knows how the Spirit thinks, because he pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.

35 Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,

We are being put to death all day long for your sake.

We are treated like sheep for slaughter.

37 But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. 38 I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers 39 or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.

I’m sure you hear a lot of language of hope in these excerpts, but also a lot of reference to pain.

In Romans, Paul affirms our experience of this world and our lives as incomplete. Much of Romans is a book of lament – sadness and anger over the way things are today. Our violence, our judginess, our addictive compulsions toward what is not best for us, our human and societal divisions, our loss of connection to a beautiful, loving God.

Here, Paul calls our pain groans. Pains and sighs we can’t always even find words for. And the pain Paul alludes to isn’t just human pain but the pain of the whole earth. All of us, all the animal and plant species under threat, marine life gasping for oxygen, overmined mountains, deforested fields, spoiled soil all groaning and suffering, waiting for God to bring new life. Panting as if in labor for God’s new birth renewal.

The good news of Jesus doesn’t seem to first eliminate pain, but draw it out into the open, give it voice and yearning and direction.

I grew up being taught not to do this. I was taught, I think, that it wasn’t good to have pain. No one told me this, but it was taught me nevertheless.

My therapist asked me once, when you were sad as a kid who did you tell about it, and I told her nobody. For many years. My family was really nice in a lot of ways. My mom in particular. She made cookies and cake and comfort food. Once in high school, my dad could tell I was bummed out, and he let me cut school for a day so we could go to a chocolate shop together. (Is it clear yet how deep the roots of my sweet tooth run?) My dad wrote a note I could bring to school that said, Steven was excused from school. He was absent yesterday because he had a low grade fever. Get it, “low grade” fever? My dad still talks about that note, like it was the cleverest thing ever.

My parents were great in many ways, but there wasn’t a lot of space in our house to express pain.

I remember as a teenager, the first time I suffered a major ankle sprain. It was bad – we didn’t have great health insurance, maybe none, so there weren’t MRIs done or anything, but I heard that loud pop, and I was on crutches for weeks and weeks, I know I tore stuff in there. And I’d resprain that ankle again and again for years.

But when I got off the ground, yelping in pain, trying to hop inside to the couch from where I’d been playing basketball with my brother. And what I remember him saying is: what’s wrong with you? Why are you so sensitive? Cut it out.

It sounds kind of awful, but I might have done the exact same thing, if the tables had been turned.

My family knew about being stoic, about soldiering forward, but dealing with pain, not so much. So no surprise, there’s some family history of other channels for that pain – of addiction, of defensiveness, of lashing out, of being emotionally shut down – a lot of that one – but not so much history of talking about our pain.

We carry these habits of not dealing with our pain, don’t we?

The other day, Grace and I were talking about this thing that stresses us both out because it hurts, and I told her, you know that makes me really sad too. And she was like: you should tell me that sooner, because it feels kind of lonely when I’m the only one affected.

And I was like, you know me, I stuff my feelings down before I talk about them. Sorry, I’m working on it. I’ll get there one day.

And I will – I’ve been working on emotional intelligence, at noticing and dealing with my experiences for decades. I’ve been reaching in, as Parker Palmer would say – developing an inner life, trying to pay attention to my soul, for a long time because it’s good for me. It helps me have better relationships, more joy, a more fully alive existence in the world. It helps me get back more to that soulful place where my goddaughter Mari lives. That I know I have pain, but I’m seen and loved, and I’ll be OK.

But sometimes I worry about us all in this.

We live in such emotionally volatile, and emotionally stuffed down times. You may be aware that American life expectancy actually dropped a little recently, which hasn’t happened in ages. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is uneven public health and health care access in our country. But some of it is our opiod and suicide epidemics. We’re seeing people find powerful ways to deal with their pain, but ways that end lives and rip apart communities, rather than building us up and healing us.

Now I know there are a lot of factors that go into our suicide epidemic and our opiod epidemic. Personal stuff, systemic stuff, and as someone that volunteers in suicide prevention, as someone who like many of you, knows people who’ve been ravaged by drug addiction – I’m not going to pretend to explain these epidemics in this space. I’m certainly not going to stand here and cast shade on the victims, as if it’s all their fault.

But one part of the story, in both cases, is people without good ways to express and deal with pain. To numb out, or to just end life entirely, has become the most viable pain management tool for way too many of us.

Part of the good news of Jesus is to affirm that the way the world is ordered includes a fair bit of suffering. That the way humanity has ordered our lives and our world has compounded that suffering a fair bit.

In Romans, Paul is like: women, slaves, fellow Jews – God sees you. God hears you. God cares about your pain. God is angry alongside you, God too is impatient to birth new ways of life with you. Let’s do better.

The “you” in Romans is always plural. Paul is writing to communities, not just to individuals, inviting them to know and hold each other’s pain, to offer solace and comfort, to help one another.

When we bury our pain, when we numb it out, even when we just use our work and our phones to endlessly distract ourselves – which, let’s be real, is maybe the biggest way we’re all numbing out, losing our souls, avoiding inner work, by keeping so busy and so distracted that we’re rarely alone with our own thoughts. When we do this, we bury stuff alive, not dead.

And then it comes back at us.

We get consumed by bitterness and anger. Or we look for escapes. Men my age in particular, if we’re not doing inner work, processing pain, experiencing emotions, cultivating our souls, then most of us are addicted to porn or alcohol or something, or we’re doing something foolish like having an affair. That’s just the odds.

We need something better than this. We want to be fully alive, don’t we?

That takes noticing our pain, giving it expression, and giving it grace – accepting this part of life.

I do this through my daily examen – a prayer practice where in the morning or the evening, I think about and write down the best and worst parts of life that day. That helps me notice, helps me start to talk to God about those things, or respond to them.

I do this by learning to talk with my wife and some other friends about my fears and disappointments. In my weekly community group, one of the questions we ask every single week is either how could my life be better, or how do I need help?

God sees your pain, my friends – the big, big ones and the so called little ones too. Eve the stuff you wonder if it should be such a big deal; pain is pain. God hears your groaning, even the stuff you can’t put words to, Jesus and the Spirit of God turn that into prayer for you.

Your pain is part of the labor pains of all of creation, part of our shared yearning with God for something better in life. For the world that Jesus will co-create with us. So let’s notice our pain. Let’s take the time to tell God about it. Let’s, with people we trust, tell each other about it. And let’s hold our pain as gently and kindly as God does, with the hope that this is part of the process of renewal, not the end of the story.

And in our pain, I want to invite us to remember who we are. This is part of my goddaughter’s secret, I believe, to being fully alive even when life is hard. There’s no doubt in her mind where she belongs, with whom she belongs, and how much she is loved.

This too is the good news of Jesus – that God has called us adopted children. That as with all good adoptive parents, we never need to fear we’ll be rejected or sent back. We’re real children of God, able to speak freely and intimately, heirs to the freedom and blessing that God has for us.

Just as we can count on suffering as Jesus did, so we can count on the life and luminous victory we call glory. We’re God’s kids, the ones God enjoys and loves. Nobody and nothing can take that away from us.

This is who we are.

It’s hard for us to know where we are. In my house, we’re getting ready to send our first child out into the world, and I think about how at times when people in the past were apprenticed into careers, already married and having kids, our kids are still growing up and asking: Who am I? What should I become? We don’t know.

We’re transient too – we move a lot. And all this freedom is great, but it makes knowing who we are so much harder. We get disconnected from our roots, disconnected from our home communities, disconnected from the land and the places we know.

Again, the freedom of our age is great. But it disconnects a lot of us from the usual sources of telling us who we are – home communities, home land and place, home people and roots. Identity – knowing who we are – takes a lot of work.

We end up with a lot of not so great ways of answering these questions of identity. A lot of us find these pockets, these “tribes” people sometimes call them, of identity where we define ourselves by all the things we aren’t.

We’re the people who don’t watch that Fox News nonsense. Or we’re the people who aren’t getting brainwashed by the liberal media. A lot of that these days, right?

When I was growing up, part of my identity that I didn’t even realize at the time was that I wasn’t one of these people I would have thought as having a race or a culture. I was what I considered to be a normal American. You know, a white person, middle class, generations of roots in this country, ancestors long ago from these little places in Northern Europe where I’d never been.

There’s been a lot of reflection and study on this so-called White identity, or this illusion of White normalcy that people with my background often grow up with. Where people of color have a race or a culture, but you’re normal. Where foods that taste good get called ethnic foods, and your food is just food. As if all food isn’t ethnic, which just means from a culture.

This was part of my passive identity growing up, and if you think of yourself as normal, then you think of other people as abnormal. And that kind of white normalcy is a big part of the injustice and division we live with today. It’s not a great identity.

People in the first century had these issues too. There was Roman privilege and normalcy. Roman citizens thought of themselves as people, and people outside the empire as barbarians. There were identity constructs around women vs. men, slaves vs. free, Jew vs. Greek. In many ways, Romans is about dismantling these poor identity formation constructs, empowering people that have been diminished by them, encouraging others to set aside their privilege.

It’s about a better way of answering the question:Who am I? The good news of Jesus says a better way of answering that question for all of us is to say: I am a child of God.

All of me – the parts I show the world, and the parts I hide – all of me is a child of God. All of me – the parts I like, the parts I don’t, the joys and triumphs, the failings and the pain – all of me is a child of God.

I have a so-called race. I have roots. I have culture. I have language and habits and preferences and sex and gender and likes and disgusts and hopes and fears. And my identity needn’t be whether those things are common or not, whether they’re empowered or not. That’s not a great way to define myself, by status. No, but what is true is that all of me is seen and known by God. God loves me, God chooses me.

God loves you, God chooses you – not as somebody else, but as who you are today. God has said yes to you. God has adopted you. God listens to you. God would let you cut school, cut work when you’re struggling, take you to your favorite chocolate store. But God would turn to you too, and ask how are you doing? What’s on your mind? What’s in your heart? It’s gonna get better, you know. There’s a glory coming, a better day ahead. This is just the beginning, and beginnings are hard. But I’m here. I see you. No one can take you away from me. Nothing can make me stop loving you. You are my child.

This is the best way I know to find who we are. The healthiest way for us all too, that we’re God’s beloved children, placed in diverse communities of other children of God, there to learn to love and accept one another, and to birth God’s new creation together.

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Invitations to Whole Life Flourishing

Give pain good channels: pay attention to this symptom, give it expression, give it grace.

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Tell yourself and your friends all the stories about how all of you is God’s beloved child.

Paying Attention to a Communicative God

Steve:

As we’ve been in this spring series on prophetic living, we’ve talked about prophetic living as seeking best as we’re able to feel the feelings and think the thoughts of God in our day and age, and to live as if that matters.

In some circles, though, the word prophetic has a narrower meaning, which is drawn from the source of the prophets of the Bible’s insights, when they claimed to hear and speak the voice of God. The claim or hope to hear the voice of God has both been one of the more wonderful and awful aspects of faith experience and faith communities for me.

On the one hand, to practice prayer as if it isn’t just a one way street, as if God can stir my imagination, activate ideas and thoughts and words I don’t experience as coming from me but from God – well, that’s been one of the sweetest and most powerful aspects of a life of faith for me. To feel that I’m never alone, and that there is a personal, spiritual force is with me, that is responsive to me, that cares. And yet on the other hand, running in circles where people think God is speaking to them has also meant on occasion that I’ve heard people confidently speak for God when I thought they were only working out their own fears and resentments. More than once, I’ve had a religious person with this sense of the prophetic go out of their way to curse me, literally curse me – like pronouncing bad things God will do to me and the people and work I care about. And then they’ve told me that they were speaking on behalf of God against me, but you know they love me and will pray for me. Pastor life. Now I’ll say these experiences, which were odd and unpleasant didn’t seem to be of God at all for me.

I’ve also had people say wonderful things to me that they told me they thought God had spoken to them, encouraging things members of this church have shared with me. There was the time when I was 23 years old, and a stranger walked up to me and told me that when he saw me, he thought God spoke to him that I was to become a pastor. He was like 16 years early, but hey, it happened. That was cool.

But then on the other hand, I’ve had someone say to me, confidently, that God showed them that God was going to heal my hearing loss when they prayed for me, and they were wrong.

So, all to say, the talk about hearing God’s voice today has been mainly awesome for me, but it’s had its weird and uncomfortable sides too. How about for you, Michaiah? When did you come to this hope or faith or experience of people today feeling God was speaking to them?

MICHAIAH:

Just to react and give voice to what I think some of us are thinking hearing your stories, is that some of those experiences you had sound yucky and yah, powerful too.

So when did I come to experience the feeling that God is speaking? If you will, I’d like to expand the term “hearing” from God before launching into my history and perspective, just because that word “hearing” lends us toward a sensory experience or particular mode of communication.

And I’d like to swap or replace that word with “experiencing God.” It’s not a perfect word either, but “experiencing”, or “perceiving” or “recognizing” the presence of God, will more broadly capture our various ways of knowing God.

When I was young, there were times when people told me that I could perceive things about people’s lives that I hadn’t been told. People told me that this ability to notice and detect an event or particular difficult situation in someone’s life such as a struggle with an addiction or an affliction, was a spiritual gift. I was told that I had “discernment” and more specifically a gift of “discerning spirits”.

What I wrestled with the most in my young adult years was in understanding what the purpose for me in knowing or perceiving the weight and troubles of others? What was I supposed to do with this gift? I didn’t always know.

I had a long standing regret that I carried for years because when as a teenager I didn’t follow this clear sense I had in my spirit to tell a drunken man in a trench coat that God wanted him to know that he was loved by God.

I’ve learned to ask my questions directly to God- “What is this for? Why are you showing me this? What do you want me to do right now?” and then to wait.

Regardless of the invitation God gives me for each circumstance, I think the big purpose for every moment that we perceive the presence of God is for drawing us further into relationship with God– to hang in the mystery and the uncertainty, and to curiously ask God- what’s this all about? Why am I thinking this? That’s what spiritual growth is all about- this learning to have an ongoing conversation with God.

It was pointed out to me early on that it was God who was communicating with me. Because I am sensitive to people’s personal experiences and struggles, that has built my confidence in seeing the world in a particular way. God speaks to me in the way that I know, and I know that I can access and talk to God through this way.

But the bottom line is that people don’t have to fit their round selves into a square hole- God knows how to communicate with all us- and it doesn’t look the same for all of us. So really the figuring out how God communicates with us is really important in having sustained communication or relationship with the One who knows us best.

Steve: So as I thought about the possibility of us hearing from God, or to honor the language you’re giving us, Michaiah, the possibility of us experiencing and perceiving a communicative God, I’m keenly aware that today in our services, we have people who feel this has been their experience, others who are entirely skeptical that a person could hear God speak, and others that feel curious but inexperienced.

And as I thought of that mix, this passage from the beginning of the work of the prophet Jeremiah, when early in his life Jeremiah also doesn’t find it realistic that any person – or at least not him – could speak for God. And we get this little dialogue…

Jeremiah 1:11-14 (CEB)

11 The Lord asked me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?”

I said, “A branch of an almond tree.”

12 The Lord then said, “You are right, for I’m watching over my word until it is fulfilled.” 13 The Lord asked me again, “What do you see?”

I said, “A pot boiling over from the north.”

14 The Lord said to me, “Trouble will erupt from the north against the people of this land.”

STEVE

Jeremiah is a teenager, and he has this sense that’s he’s supposed to speak for God to his culture that is in huge turmoil and upheaval, but he’s not confident. So he has this training session of sorts, where he’s learning to experience and perceive the presence of God.

It starts with a play on words. My favorite hat was a gift made to me from two Uyghur friends in the Northwest Chinese province of Xinjiang. You may have been hearing of the inhumane treatment the Uyghurs have been going through over the past twenty years, and the past few years in particular. It’s heart-breaking, and personal to Grace and me.

Anyway, these friends gave me a hat with an almond embroidered on it, because they said the word for almond was very similar to a word for something like integrity, so the hat was an affirmation and a blessing as well.

Here Jeremiah is praying outdoors and he’s looking at this branch of an almond tree, and the word “watching over” or “tending” which sounds just like the word “almond” in Hebrew, comes to mind. And he realizes God is tending to God’s words, that they will come to pass. A rich image for him.

Now our very next verse moves on to something different, but we should remember that scrolls in ancient times were very expensive, and writing was kind of a specialty activity, so things get condensed. It’s OK to imaginatively read between the lines – in fact there’s a whole Jewish tradition of doing this called midrash.

Anyway, so I imagine that later that day, after Jeremiah was thinking over the almond/watching play on words, he’d perhaps cooked some stew for lunch, and as he’s looking at that boiling pot, and it looks menacing, and the thought pops into his mind – it’s coming, that army up in the North everyone is talking about. They’re coming to get us.

This passage is written like a dictation – Jeremiah sees this, God says this. But much more likely this is a shortened, simplified version of Jeremiah’s experience, recounted decades later… where he’s praying, sensing within this call to speak for God to his people, feeling inadequate and unclear, when he sees n front of him the branch of an almond tree, and another meaning comes to mind… and later, again, there’s a boiling pot and it comes to mean something more. Jeremiah is experiencing God communicating with him through the objects around him, as the word play and symbolism of those objects comes to life.

I think apart from the details of where Jeremiah is going, there is an invitation to us to imagine that God can speak to many people, and through many means….

Michaiah, I know that you spend some time actually teaching people, training people to try to discern the voice of God, to try to practice or learn God speaking to us? Can you tell us more how you do this, or specifically, how it is God can speak to us through many means?

MICHAIAH:

Sure thing, Steve. The starting point of this conversation usually begins by naming or learning what God’s heart is toward us. We believe that by learning what God’s heart and concerns are we’ll recognize what God’s nature and character, maybe God’s personality and temperament as well.

Many of the stories in the Bible have been helpful to me because they capture qualities and attributes of God that resonate with my own experience with God.

These stories have shown me that God’s heart toward us is of -peace, love, to not leave us alone, God does not come to destroy us, God is for us and not against us, God cares and provides, and the cornerstone of our faith is that God is good.

The content of our various ways we perceive and experience God has the good fruit of – love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness… Even when God is sad, or correcting us…when we’ve turned against ourselves or another person or away from God in our hearts, the message won’t ever hold guilt, shame, or anxiety, but will have this message of deep and abiding love.

I heard before that you could read the Bible and learn God by asking two questions- “Who is God in this passage?” and “Who am I?” So if you read through the Bible asking those questions, you’d come out learning who God is and how God interacts with people.

Learning what God’s voice sounds like and how it’s distinguished from other voices is a good place to start when we’re talking about hearing or perceiving God.

Learning the method or manner in which God speaks to us, individually, is the fun part, because it involves some internal exploration. I read a line that said “Your personality may be a clue to unlocking how God speaks to you.” This is an art of uncovering your spiritual preference pathway, or spiritual personality type, or sacred pathway, or your spiritual wiring. There are many brilliant authors who have written books about this, which is where I get this language from.

Some of us are more relationally oriented, others of us are pragmatically oriented- knowing what your created language is might uncover how God relates or messages with you.

And just to say all of this is incredibly simplistic and if you’re like me you don’t fit into just one category. So a Thinking person- more analytical, theoretical, may be comfortable wrestling with text.Through their thoughts and knowledge from other sources (like books or podcasts or study…)may be their natural way of receiving God’s Spirit. A Feeling person-may experience God through their senses, sights, sounds, smells, images, pictures, metaphors. A Naturalist- may find God in more contemplative or outdoor spaces. They might encounter God in activities like gardening, or star gazing, or hiking or being in silence, or other meditative practices.

But you know many of us have been taught these painfully limited methods of knowing/perceiving/engaging with God. For example, I was taught that if I “read my Bible, pray every day, then I’ll grow, grow, grow”. And while these particular disciplines have been hugely helpful to me and many of our spiritual growth and development- It has also been short sighted in how and when and where our creator God can communicate this message of love to us. One of my favorite verses is Romans 1:20 that says, For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. This has been incredibly freeing to me to believe that God can communicate God’s message of love and existence without words.

I don’t think God only uses a landline phone to communicate. I think God communicates through land, water, sea, through creation, and other people, through dreams, spontaneously, like a lightning quick thought, glimmer. God isn’t limited to one method of transmission.

And figuring out how we receive that Word of life, and power, and love, is simply an act of discipline. Learning God is as important as learning yourself. So I’d suggest learn how to relate to God according to your unique self as opposed to relating to God through another.

STEVE – Michaiah, that is so freeing, so personal, so good. Thank you. As you describe many people learning to listen to God in different ways, I have to say that I used to have a sense that claiming to hear or experience God was for people who were especially faithful or especially crazy (I couldn’t always decide which!) but I’m reminded that our faith teaches otherwise…

Joel 2:28-29 (CEB)

28 After that I will pour out my spirit upon everyone;

       your sons and your daughters will prophesy,

       your old men will dream dreams,

       and your young men will see visions.

29 In those days, I will also pour out my

   spirit on the male and female slaves.

STEVE – So Joel was a prophet from maybe the fifth century B.C. and in this section he’s hoping, imagining a future time when his nation is restored, there’s abundant food and drink, good harvests, military threats eliminated – all the great dreams of an agrarian society. But the hope goes way bigger and broader than that – that all of the earth will be drawn into this big redemption story, that God in mercy will reanimate and heal all people and cultures, in part through the inner renewal I just read about – God’s Spirit being poured out on all people.

There’s a radical expansion of the experience of the prophetic here, one that had been echoed in many other ancient prophets – that people, young and old, women and men, high and low status, even Jewish and not, could be filled with the Spirit of God and an experience of a good and communicative God. Never alone, never liable to despair or shame.

The early followers of Jesus believed that in Jesus, who they called the word made flesh – the communicative truth of God become a person, everyone around Jesus experienced God in this way. And that after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus released his spirit into the world in a new way, fulfilling this hope that God could be present to all people who seek God.

This notion of God present to us in a body, we call incarnational – from in-carnate, meaning in a body. And this experience of God present in Jesus, fully human and fully divine, gives us a pattern – an incarnational pattern – to understanding all experience of God that we can have. That it is all incarnational – fully human and fully divine. 100% us, even when it’s also 100% from God as well.

Michaiah, you’ve shared with me that you think of this process of listening to God as always fully human and fully divine – full of real experience of God, but very much full of our own selves. Can you say more about this?

MICHAIAH:

Sure, yah. We can’t eliminate ourselves from the picture of hearing, interpreting, or even delivering any messages from God. As my friend Dorothy says, it’s never all you/it’s never all God. But you’re a big part of the equation.

This reminds me of a story that I love to tell from my days as youth pastor. I call it the “Hamburger story”. In youth group we had the practice of celebrating birthdays by giving a gift card to an ice cream spot and listening to God for words of encouragement for the birthday teen’s year ahead.

So here we are praying for LIzzy (we’ll call her), and Baron (we’ll call him) was asked to pray (because it was his birthday the previous month). The only thing that comes to his mind was hamburger. So, we’re not going to discount this word, “hamburger” is in fact God speaking. So we press and say, “ok. Hamburger. Okay. God. What else?”

Baron, is pressing in, He begins to describe the burger- “all I can think is juicy, lettuce, tomato, cheese…” Kids start chuckling. He says, “I’m probably thinking about that because we had burgers for dinner last night, and my dad was talking about this book “Dancing with Jesus” …”

All of a sudden LIzzy lights up, and says, “I COMPLETELY forgot- I have a dance recital this afternoon and I’m so nervous about it” (and she may have had a sprain or an injury as well).

LIzzy and I go WILD- completely blown away that we went from someone’s hamburger dinner to someone else’s very personal and very relevant experience. I was ecstatic that God didn’t disappoint. That we trusted that God was speaking through the word “hamburger” and kept asking God. “Okay. What else?”

This experience happens every single Sunday with the prayer team. Many times the team will get a wild hunch and we name it without discounting that it could be our own imagination, or psyches, or any number of things affecting us. We just voice what we get and our group mulls it over in their minds, we talk about it, we ask Holy Spirit to help us make meaning and develop this concept/word or drop it. One time one of us got 4 specific numbers that we shared up front. It ended up being a significant date for a few people, and it was someone’s pin number to their bank account…

We are constantly amazed at what appears like something our imaginations created, but turns into something significant for one of us sitting in service that day. And this team does not hear or read the sermon message before the service- so any parallel prayer words that we share after the sermon is given, we confidently believe that if it’s meaningful to someone sitting in service, that maybe God indeed is trying to get someone’s attention.

STEVE – Those are fun stories, even as they’re still kind of weird, which is what I guess we’d expect from experiences that are entirely us, but filled with something or someone spiritual outside of us as well, right? That our experience would be normal you and me, but with this weird extra truth or hope or presence that seems sort of more and better than what we’ve got just by ourselves.

But I have to say that for me this also begs the question of what God sounds like, what the voice of God is or isn’t, right? As we try to learn to listen to God, what can we chalk up to God, and what to toxic or unhelpful or false ideas of God. Or what’s just our own weird thoughts, all the garbage out there in the media, in the air, in society… And I think Jesus had hope that we’d have a sense for what God sounds like, that we’d learn that God sounds like Jesus… There’s this bit in the gospel of John:

John 10:4,14-15 (CEB)

4 Whenever he has gathered all of his sheep, he goes before them and they follow him, because they know his voice.

14 “I am the good shepherd. I know my own sheep and they know me,15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. I give up my life for the sheep.

STEVE: So Jesus has this analogy, that sheep know the voice of their shepherd. Like dogs know the voice of their owner, it’s apparently a thing. And he’s like that’s how it is with God, you really can recognize the voice of God. It sounds like me.

And for me, through years of this strange but beautiful thing of trying to cultivate a friendship with Jesus, this has become more and more real to me. Where I sit in silence, often thinking about the circumstances of my life – highs or lows – and ask Jesus where Jesus is in all this or if there is anything Jesus has to say to me. My experience of God has been really shaped by the gentle, provocative voice of Jesus. I’ve never read about any person in history or literature that is as deeply gentle and provocative as the Jesus of the four gospels. And the God I experience in friendship as I pray is like this too – asking me great questions, turning my proclivity to avoidance back on me by asking, “What do you think? What do you want, Steve?” This Jesus who speaks to me, the Jesus in my head or heart, the Jesus of my imagination, is just really gentle and more surprisingly true and surprisingly encouraging than I’ve tended to expect of God.

And – you’ll notice – I say the Jesus of history and the Jesus with me and the Jesus of my imagining all interchangeably, not because I don’t think Jesus is real, but because of this whole incarnation thing – that any experience of God we can have is both fully human and fully divine – totally of God and totally of me, so I don’t spend a lot of thought or worry on what parts I’m just imagining and what parts an external God is bringing to me from without, as long as it sounds like Jesus.

So that’s like a micro-taste of my own experience of God speaking to me.

But then sometimes, we want to listen to God when we want to help/pray for others. How does that work for you and for our prayer team, Michaiah?

Michaiah:

Sure, now the practice of praying for others- begins first with the understanding that it’s not about the prayer team members prayers- this takes all the pressure off of our performance or perfectly making anything happen. As prayer ministers we are simply companions to the person asking for prayer and entering together into the presence of God, allowing ourselves to be loved by God- We are part of the equation, but really, it’s about the other person being able to experience God’s sweet and holy presence for themselves.

We normally invite the presence of God to come, and we wait expectantly.

God’s presence may come through a person’s thoughts, a memory or situation, physically, through a song, a phrase…….

In prayer team we try to be as invisible as possible so that whoever is receiving prayer can get what they need from God.

Now, sometimes praying for people requires a companion that intercedes on your behalf with God- joining the other person’s faith, or their hope, and praying to that effect.

Sometimes praying for people might jog a thought that we’ll share with the other person to see if it has any significance for the other person. But our prayer ministry trains with the understanding that the recipient is the final authority, or judge of the word. And as prayer team- we’re fine with that. We could be wrong with what we’re sensing.

Steve: One time, Michaiah, I was meeting with a person who’d visited our church a few times and loved it, but he asked me, “Steve, what’s with the body parts?” And I was like: “Um, no idea what you’re talking about.” And he said, “You know, every week, you say a couple of body parts that someone wants to pray for.” So I told him my answer, Michaiah, but what’s yours? What’s with the body parts?

Michaiah:

HA! Well somewhere along my tenure on church staff, a coworker suggested a great way to generate faith in God is if we prayed and asked God for physical things that God wanted to bring attention to in order to heal or bring a message of love or freedom to in some way. So on prayer team we ask God if there are any body parts that God wants to heal, so that person will respond.

Steve: That’s great. And I know many of us have been encouraged by healing prayer for our emotions but also for our bodies. I was really helped too by the comments my friend Laurie made earlier this year when she and I gave a sermon on Disability and Grace. Laurie, who has lived with a life-long physical disability and also prayed with many people with physical disabilities, said that for some of us healing may involve changes to our physical condition, while others experience healing as God helps bring peace and acceptance to our physical limits and brokenness. That was really helpful for me.

Now as we wrap up, I guess I’ll share a final word and we’ll do a couple quick next steps.

I guess I make of all this that being open to a communicative God, a God who can teach us to listen and experience if we pay attention, a God who pours out the Spirit generously on all people, this is both really weird and an enormous gift. And everything we’re going to experience of God in this life is going to be both fully human – very much of us – and fully divine – very much of a real God, we trust as well.

So it reminds me that it’s worth being attentive and serious and interested in what we can taste and see of a living God while holding it all in good humility and good humor as well. There was a time when wanting to hear or experience God more was clouded by all kinds of anxiety for me – what if it doesn’t happen? What if someone else experience more? And what if I’m wrong when I think God’s saying or doing something? And now it’s more like: hey, there’s no such thing as getting this all right. It’s just that my good and sweet God is open to being a parent and a friend to us and encouraging and leading us into more and more life. We’ve got two final tips to go after this, but first Michaiah, tell us about an offering you have for people that want to learn more.

Michaiah: You can come to a Spirit and Power Class on Sunday, June 23rd right after the 10:30am service. We’ll go into depth on hearing the voice of God for others and praying for healing both physically and emotionally. We’ll offer the entire class again in the Fall- so if you’re interested write a note on your welcome card.

Great, and now our closing tips.

Steve:

Most of humans, for most of human history, have considered this earth to be a god-soaked world, where the divine can be present to us in many places and many ways, and where questions of meaning and mattering and significance are a joyful and special part of what it means to be alive. So, this week, for our whole life flourishing tip, consider this question:

An Invitation to Whole Life Flourishing

What is Jesus gently speaking to me through my life, world, and circumstances?

Michaiah:

The purpose of this suggested practice is on intention and expectation.

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Set aside time for a 1-on-1 with God. Invite the Holy Spirit to guide the time. Where will you go, what will you do together? Tell someone you trust about it. See if you can find more times to be generous to yourself and be with God.

Palm Sunday: Jesus’ Journey into the Wilderness

Good morning, my name is Lydia. I’m one of the pastors here and it’s my honor to share the Word with you today. Let me read for us the Scripture text, pray, and get us started. The reading today comes from John 12:12-13 and John 19: 1-6 and 14-16.

John 12:12-13

12 The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. 13 They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,

“Hosanna!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Blessed is the king of Israel!”

John 19: 1-6, 14-16

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2 The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe 3 and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.

4 Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.” 5 When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

6 As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”

But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.”

14b“Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews.

15 But they shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!”

“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.

“We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.

16 Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.

Let’s pray

Loving God, Our crucified Lord, We pray that we may have the eyes to see and the ears to hear your Word this morning. Spirit of God descend here now. And would you reveal yourself to us, your deep sacrificial love for us, that we may see and experience your comfort and compassion in our lives today, we pray, in Jesus Name Amen.

So, I was driving around Oakland, CA one day. I stopped to get some gas, and while I was filling up, this beautiful car pulls up, a fixed up low rider, shiny with the pastel purple coat of paint, rims and all, and the license plate read, “The Reverend”. The driver comes out of the car, dressed real nice, sharp sunday best, and I said, “Nice ride Reverend!” I had just gotten ordained so I’m like, yeah, pastors, so I walked over and said, “So you’re a pastor?” And he said, “Yup” and named the church nearby. And I said, “I’m a pastor too. Man, I wish my church was cool with me having a nice car like that. Korean churches especially, (I knew this because I was raised as a pastor’s kid in Korean immigrant churches), they love to see a pastor suffer for the Lord. I feel like black churches have some respect for their pastor, you know?” And he laughed and said, “Oh you know folks, they will glorify you, and then, they will crucify you. Like they did to our Lord.” They’ll glorify you and they’ll crucify you. That is what folks do. The human mob mentality. And this is the case yes, for Jesus and his time on this earth.

We’ve been journeying through the season of Lent with the theme of Wild Places, wilderness places of doubt, exile, and uncertain in between spaces. Places where God might surprisingly show up and meet us in the wilderness. We’re reaching the last few weeks of the season, today being Palm Sunday with Jesus’ Triumphant Entry to Jerusalem, and it takes us to the rest of the Holy Week to Good Friday, to the Crucifixion and to Easter Resurrection. So these last few days, there’s a lots packed in here. And today, Palm Sunday starts out with Hosanna! And Glory! But it is the beginning of the end. Jesus’ last few stretches, as he journeys into his own wilderness, where he begins to pray to God to take this cup away from him if possible, a place where he cries out to God, Why have you foresaken me, from a place of skulls called Golgotha. Palm Sunday begins with glory glory, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord and it ends with the crowd calling out, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Jesus too faced the Wild Place. Why? If he’s God, why does he make his way toward that wildest place of all, death?

I went to hang out with the wonderful Youth Group of our church a few weeks ago. To prepare I spoke with Tory the lovely youth director and she gave me a few things that the kids have asked about in the past that maybe I could speak to. So, I’m like sure, I’m game, what they got? And she says, “If God is good and almighty, why is there suffering in the world?” Oh cool, let’s just get right to the hardest question to wrestle with and bang that out on my one time visit with the kids. And when I sat with them, they, did you know that we have teens in our church that are quite amazing? They are smart and KIND, and keen, and curious, and critical thinkers. Because that questions is the correct response to this God we get to know through Christianity. God is good. Okay, then, Why is there suffering. In fact, why did Jesus allowed himself to experience suffering himself and be crucified. I told them, that is a very good question! Let’s break down the question, first of all, the adjective we’ve attached to God, good and almighty, is getting at a descriptor of God and also not fully. Because yes, God is good, and God is almighty, but also, how we define these words can’t capture the truth at all times. For example, when Jesus died on the cross, was that an almighty thing, or an omnipotent thing? It might be seen as a weak thing. So, like, is God weak?

We talked about how any names, or metaphor, symbols for God is that and much more than that. I asked them what are some names or metaphors for God. They called out, Father, Lord, Shepherd. I said, so God is like a Shepherd, caring, nurturing, taking care of us and feeding us. But God is not totally like a Shepherd and we’re not literally sheep. They were like bahhh baaaah and giggled. They thought that was funny. Cuties. They seem to have got what I was trying to say, that talking about God is bigger than what we might say about God with metaphors or adjectives. And I ended with, the BEST metaphor that I love, that is the most all-encompassing descriptor is that God is love. Love is big enough to hold all that is God.

I share this with you because I’m going to offer us some metaphors of God that might explain who God is today, but I want us to remember that God is like that, and also not that, far more than that. When we talk about God, we’re trying to get at it with adjectives, names and words, but words fail and God is so much more complex. And to you as well I say, consider each metaphor with the lense that ultimately God is Love. I’ll give a personally meaningful one, a light hearted one, and a metaphor not from my own tradition but from the African American experience.

Wild places are places of suffering, agony, and pain often. And what is God’s response to the suffering of human kind? Chocolate. No I’m kidding, it’s not chocolate, the answer the one that Sunday School champs know best, is Jesus. God’s response to human suffering is to suffer the human destiny of death himself through Jesus. In Jesus, God decided to leave the divine realm and enter into the realities of our suffering. Jesus’ journey into the wild was to become co-sufferers with us.

To suffer with, next to, someone is a one of the most intimate things you can do. I experienced a stranger leaning into my suffering and accompanying me in such a sacrificial way during my delivery. Nurses. I have so much respect for nurses. Any of you nurses out there? So much props to you. I gave birth to my little girl Sophia 5 months ago and I was so impressed and grateful for the nurses that took care of me. One moment, just as I was starting to feel contractions, I was getting ready to get the epidural, and you have to get in this weird position for them to stick like a wire looking thing into your spine, and the nurse said, “lean on me, I’ll hold you.” and they got me at the edge of the hospital bed and she embraced me as I put all my aching weight on her. I was in pain and afraid of what was happening, and she held my body saying, “breathe, you’re doing great, just a little bit longer, almost done.” They checked in on me at every discomfort I had, and changed the buckets that were filled with my, um, output. The co-suffering God is like a nurse during labor, a midwife to a mother in delivery. One who’ll stay in the room while you scream. One holds your hand and roots for you.

To stoop and become one of us reveals devotion and care. Have you heard of a show called Undercover Boss? Oh it’s great, super cheezy but kind of entertaining, seeing a CEO or the President of a large company, go out to the field. They pose as a regular new employee, get trained, and see what it’s like actually working the franchise site. There’s one where the CEO of Domino’s Pizza gives up his lamborghini for the day to shadow the delivery expert. It’s great seeing these guys in suits gear up in the store uniforms and hat, working the kitchen and the cashier. And then there’s always that scene at the end, when they unveil the cover of the CEO to the employees. People are usually a mix of shocked, embarrassed, and impressed that the CEO would do such thing as working alongside them in the store. And the CEO, having experienced and seen the work on the ground, is touched by the stories of the workers lives, their dedication to pay for college or support their disabled dad. With the newfound empathy and compassion, the Domino’s CEO offers the delivery expert, an immigrant from India who gave up his job as an engineer to move here for his kids, an opportunity to submit his special recipe to make it to the Domino’s menu and a check for $1500. He gives him box tickets to a local game and The delivery expert is beyond himself and cries at the offer, thanking him profusely. It’s an heartfelt show because it crosses boundaries and the experience breaks open both the bosses and the employees to a sense of camaraderie and unity. Hey, a CEO leaving his office to work the pizza line is very much a journey into the wilderness, they always capture the boss getting overwhelmed with the backed up orders, making mistakes and sweating bullets by the ovens. God is like the Undercover Boss, who becomes one of us, taking on the humanity uniform, working the line, feeling the pressure of life on this earth.

Through Jesus, God decided to move into the human experience. Life that is both filled with joys and delights, but also with toil and wanderings, of pain and suffering. God is not afraid of the human condition and moves towards the wild places that we experience. These wild places we face, of work and vocation, the daily grind, of trying to make ends meet and survive, of trying to get through tough times and life pressures. There was a song from a few decades ago, by Joan Osborne, What if God is one of us? Just a slob like one of us, Just a stranger on a bus. If God has a name, his name might be John, who works at Dominos by day and cleans office buildings by night. If God was one of us, she’s be overworked nurse working crazy hours sustaining her two kids as a single mom. If God was one of us, they’d be the one moving about with trauma in their bodies trying to get through an interview without having an anxiety attack. If God was one of us, he’d be the wrongly accused, misunderstood, praise by some but rejected and imprisoned and punished for no good reason, that is what Jesus faced on this earth.

When we talk about who God is, and how we come to know God, there’s a helpful methodology that can inform our theology. Attributed to John Wesley, known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, it says that we know God through 4 sources, Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience. And that all four of these contribute to our understanding and formation of our thinking and knowing about God. Maybe one or more of these have been a part of your knowledge of God. Scripture, include stories of God interacting with God’s people, from which we can read and learn about God’s character and their relationships with God. Reason, allows us to use logic, science, to draw conclusions about our understanding of God. Tradition includes all those who have come before us and their experiences, through which we gain a wider scope of God with many cultures and times throughout history. And experience, personal and individual experience shape many of our faiths, for this is a way to know through one’s own life.

The last metaphor I will share comes from the African American faith and church tradition and through the specific experience of blacks people in America. It’s not my own tradition but it has profoundly impacted and unveiled actually my own experiences and understanding of God. So, let me share, with your grace and mercy, as I attempt talk about an experience that is not my own, of a very tragic history in America. It’s a powerful metaphor and raw in its imagery, so just a heads up of a possible trigger warning. It comes from the notable black Liberation theologian named, James Cone, who keys in in the understanding of Jesus through the lived, visceral, embodied experience of African Americans, in a book title, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Yes, he says to understand the cross, the crucifixion of Jesus, its purpose and meaning, that there is a more modern form of parallel tool of public humiliation and punishment, often used to send a message to the whole society, a display of power, one that is so similar in their form execution, that you can’t help but make the connection to the history of lynching of blacks in America. Because that is what the cross was back then, a lynching tree.

Here’s what he says,

“During my childhood, I heard a lot about the cross at Macedonia A.M.E Church, where faith in Jesus was defined and celebrated. We sang about “Calvary,” and asked, “Were you there?”, “down at the cross,” “when they crucified my Lord.” “Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” The spirituals, gospel songs, and hymns focused on how Jesus achieved salvation for the least through his solidarity with them even unto death. There were more songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies about the cross than any other theme. The cross was the foundation on which their faith was built.

In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.”

Many hymns and spirituals spoke to this:

Poor little Jesus boy, made him be born in a manger.

World treated him so mean,

treats me mean too…

Dey whippped Him up an’dey whipped Him down,

Dey whipped dat man all ovah town.

Look-a how how they done muh Lawd.

I was there when they nailed him to the cross,

Oh! How it makes me sadder, sadder,

When I think how they nailed him to the cross.

I was there when they took him down…

Oh! How it makes my spirit tremble,

When I recalls how they took him down.

—

For black churches, and the African American experience, no wonder the message of the gospel pierced straight through their very lives that the Good News was desperately longed for, Christ’s saving power, clung to, suffering felt in their bones, in their voices, in their shoulders, and hope that better have been true if this is the life they faced, there better have been a greater hope than anything they knew. They identified with Jesus, because Jesus identified with them. Whipped, flogged, slapped in the face, crucified, hung.

The book is rich, because the experience is horrendous, and the metaphor is powerful. Cone goes on to the depth of the tragic history of lynching, what spectacle it was, what it did to the mental emotional state of the blacks, how music and art spoke to realities too dark to put into words. And how real the cross was to them. How it spoke to their wild place they faced. I read it with anxiety and sadness in my heart, praying with grief and lament. It’s a provocative metaphor, because that is what the gospel is, provocative. How so? I don’t know, sometimes, you can’t explain except to just experience it and know it deep in your bones.

Jesus delved deep into the human condition. Deep. To the wildest places. To the most vulnerable places. To the most tragic moments. In our most horrible unimaginable places of pain and suffering, God placed Godself in it, God is our co-suffering God. A crucified God. A wild and crazy reckless God that jumps in right into the middle of our greatest agony. That is the kind of God this Jesus reveals today. That is the God we worship. Hosanna Hosanna in the highest. Which is very peculiar phrase of praise and joyful exclamation because it means, save us. A cry of help. A cry. Help! Help! How could such word be joyful? I don’t know.

And I’m going to end my sermon with an I don’t know. Because that’s where this Lenten season leaves us today and rest of this week. And I don’t want to skip ahead. But Easter is coming, and I don’t know sometimes how all this makes sense. But for now, Let us linger here. A world where we cry out, help, Jesus, help. Hosanna, Hosanna. Save us! Save us! Believing, or trying to believe, that God hears it and moves towards those who cry out in their wildest places.

Let us try staying there this week. Before the Easter bunnies and chocolates comes out. That’s my invitation to you this week, try staying in the wild a little longer. Try moving towards other’s wilderness.

Try the role of co-suffering with someone. When the opportunity arises. If someone is sharing their deep pain with you. Try not interjecting, advising, or even fixing, but just being with. Just feel the discomfort of their pain. Hold that sacred space of their wilderness with your presence.

A Spiritual Discipline Practice: Adapted From This Week’s Bible Guide (available through print outs in the Lobby and Podcast online)

Consider for a moment a great fear of yours [Or consider for a moment a great fear of someone else, imagine what they might face in their lives and experiences that you may not] – a failure, a loss, or trouble you might face, perhaps even your own death. Ask Jesus to assure you that Jesus will be with you should you face this fear. Ask Jesus: how will you be with me in compassion and strength? After a few moments of imaginative prayer, welcoming Jesus’ presence with you, close by praying this short excerpt from the ancient prayer, The Breastplate of Saint Patrick:

Let me close us with that prayer

I arise today

Through the strength of Christ’s birth with his baptism,

Through the strength of Christ’s healing with his laughter,

Through the strength of Christ’s teaching with his feasting,

Through the strength of Christ’s crucifixion with his burial,

Through the strength of Christ’s resurrection with his ascension,

Through the strength of Christ’s descent for the judgment of doom.

What Do You Think?

I’m so glad that Kaiti and Steph were able to share this morning about Soccer Nights. I’ve got to say that Soccer Nights is one of my all time favorite weeks of the year, and for a lot of the reasons we’ve been exploring in this series of love. It’s such a picture of God’s love, which we will get to a lot more of in just a minute!

But first I’d love to welcome you here in this space right now.

I’m not sure how your weeks have gone.

I’m not sure if they were pleasing, or nondescript, or particularly bad. Or a mixture of all.

I’m not sure how much you want to release, or let go of as you sit here today, or how important it is for you to hold tightly to things that you are cherishing, or that you need.

And I’m not sure why you are here.

Maybe for some of you, you can quickly detail the reasons you are here: the music, the kids’ team, the prayer, community, the amazing sermons ;).

Maybe you are here out of obligation, whether internal or external

Maybe you are here and you don’t know why—God, and faith, have been lost on you for quite some time.

Maybe you are here because there are bagels and coffee. Not a bad angle.

Maybe you are here because the love of God is felt and is easy here, and you need easy, because you are tired.

Maybe the best you can say this is morning is— “ya know what? I’m just here, let’s just leave it at that.”

And in all that I want to welcome you here and now.

We are in our 7th week of our sermon series, called Training in the Studio of Love. Next week is our last week in this series, and our pastor, Lydia, will be up to round out the series! Our series was inspired by Brian McLaren, a long-time friend and writer and pastor. He has encouraged churches to take a fresh look at perhaps one of the greatest “calls” for us—not only as followers of Jesus, but a call for us as human beings who walk this earth—the call to love. The fact that he suggests we might need a curriculum of sorts for “love”—might in some ways feel a little elemental and also pretty redundant, right? “Yes – yes – life of love, posture of love, lead with love, etc… I get it, of course.” But I think he’s hitting at something in there, and it’s also something Jesus kept showing us, too, throughout scripture. We can read that he talked and taught a LOT about love— so many of his stories and parables, and also his endless actions, demonstrated this very powerful thru-line of love. He loves the eunuch, the prostitute, the woman at the well, Zaccheus, to love himself, his prosecutors, the vile, the dirty, the cast away, right up until death.

Jesus bombards us with these pictures of love. And in some ways, I can think that we are meant to be taught something new in each setting—some new content. This is likely true to some extent, but I also think that he’s giving us that abundant picture to remind us, to invite us to see just how many opportunities we have to love in our days—reminding us that we have all the content we need, as many stories, and as much parable potential through people and earth, here and now, (as Jesus did), to love.

And yet we have the tendency to compress the greatest commandment to, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. AND love your neighbor as yourself,” down into bite-sized chunks. We are inclined to gather the content in our life that we deem “loveable” and strain out the that which we don’t.

I think I’ve done this unconsciously as much as consciously, as I’ve run up against rifts and division and hate that vie for my attention and heart, as much as our opportunities to love. As I do this, I succeed in augmenting where I see the image of God.

No longer is the image of God as readily found in my neighbor for example. The greatest commandment is now sliced up into short phrases. I “love my neighbor” over here in my week, I make time to love myself on this day of the week, “I love God” during this slice of my day—and it’s no longer this continuous, flowing expression of my life. The commandment has become disjointed in my lived experience.

This is why McLaren and Jesus’ age old call to love is not redundant. It is not elemental, but crucial and necessary. It is what our last few weeks of this series has hoped to call out, that to fully experience the love of God is to push against our tendency to disconnect the love of God from our lived life, and instead be reminded that love of neighbor, selfless love of self, and love of our environment are all one, and are the means to this great love. It’s a whole package deal—one that Jesus calls LIFE and perhaps what he meant when he said,
“I have come for you to have (and live), life – and have it abundantly”. Connected— to see the full stretch of my love—all throughout your lived life.

The challenge in this—and this is what I want to spend more time talking about today—is that we have to keep thinking about why this matters—why love matters. Love can become a word that loses it’s depth—it can fall into disrepair in our human landscape. We need to be deeply convinced at a feet-to-the-ground, face-to-face-neighbor level that love can be readily found in all of our spaces and offer healing and transformation to ourselves and the world.

Relying On Another’s Voice

Thinking is what will keep the love of Jesus expanding beyond the constraints of Sanctuary walls and church systems—preachers mouths and worship sets—and expanding into your much-lived places and much-filled heart, and beyond.

If we can enter into this studio of love (which I think is actually our lives), and train there, then I think we can see this as spiritual formation and growth in its purest and loveliest sense—not for our own measure, but for the measure and reforming and reshaping of the world and people around us in love. Aided by our great Christian tradition with prayer, scripture and spiritual practices, but powered by the life we actually live and experience, here and now.

A couple of years ago I made a tiny tweak in my life for a stretch of time. I stopped listening to podcasts and to some extent stopped reading any books/essays/articles/etc.

I was listening to a variety of podcasts on my way to work —mostly spiritual/faith-centric ones that offered a bunch of unique commentary/thoughts and viewpoints, of course, on a myriad of scripture and theology, and they were mostly great! But I found myself beginning to lean on these voices as a primary means of acquiring knowledge. *(Now there’s many, many ways I think it’s super helpful to integrate/compliment our own thinking with others viewpoints—it’s how we discover our blind-spots and expose our biases). But as a means to knowledge this road I was on started to X-out my own voice, my own thinking, and X-out the value of my lived experiences in life as content and knowledge.

I’d find myself in conversations or meetings saying, “well I heard so-and-so say this pithy thing on a podcast a few days ago.” Or I read this essay on “xyz theology.” And I couldn’t follow up with “and those thoughts relate to my life, in this way” or “that perspective makes me think about my neighborhood in this way.” So my words were more “statements of thoughts” just deposited in a space (but not really alive).

The detriment for me was that I had muted the convivial listening with the world and with Jesus, who I believe is always asking “Well Ivy, what do you think about that?” “why does it matter”? “Who does it affect?” And this is detrimental because “What do you think?” is an intimate question of Jesus to us, and one that is the authentic means to not only knowledge but to love.

And so I started reading poetry almost exclusively.

And after a stretch of time I bounced back, “I read again!” And I had a more refined picture that everyone and everything I encounter on this Earth is an opportunity to love God more. And that what I think of all these experiences only electrifies that love of God.

I was reminded of that season recently as I was riding in a car with a long-time friend over Christmas this year. She was talking about her own journey in her faith community, excited about the idea of forming a “women’s ministry” – and hanging in the air around the conversation was perhaps the (unspoken), larger question of just what a woman’s role in the church should be. Her faith community currently has no women on the Board, as deacons or as preachers. And it was interesting because, our conversation bounced from what her white, male Pastor thought about women in leadership, to the reality that there are a lack of women mentor’s in the community, to the seminary books that she was hearkening back to, that offered her interesting thoughts and truths to wade into her internal process of just what is a woman’s rightful place.

It was clear to me that the question, “What do you think?”, was not a comfortable question. External knowledge found in books and other’s voices was more credible.

I wish I had asked her, “What is your lived experience as a woman?” What do you notice about women who are not given platforms for their voices to be heard? Why do you think there might not be women mentor’s in your community? What do women around you who are pastors (like me in this car, with you right. now.) think? What have they experienced? How have they wrestled with what scripture says?

“What do you think?” is a bold and direct question—slices right to the heart, if we let it, as much as the head. And if we frame it as a question that helps us lift our head and look around and engage with the life next to us, it becomes not a question that rests on a separate doctrine or theology (where we might think only Jesus is found), but becomes a generative question that is born and explored from exactly where you stand – and where lo’ and behold Jesus is too.

Conceptual and Relational Belief

The interesting thing about what we think – is that it can quickly be tied into systems of belief… that can take on a life of it’s own – as well as take on our thoughts as no longer produced out of lived experience, but taken on as an immovable creed or doctrine.

Here, I think it’s helpful to talk a little bit about conceptual and relational beliefs (Spiritual Migration, McLaren 216).

Brian McLaren says that conceptual beliefs are beliefs that are often easily expressed as statements or propositions, and when expressed in a sentence, are often right alongside the word that. My long-time friend in my previous story might say, “I believe that women can not be in church leadership.” Or “I believe that the headship of a church is only represented by the male gender.” Or “I believe that hell exists” or “I believe that miracles can happen” – etc… and it’s a stake, a claim that something is real, true or in existence.

In contrast, relational beliefs are often followed by the preposition in. And they are less statements and more birthed out of a personal authenticity—lived experience that offers a confidence and sense of loyalty which permits thoughts like, “I believe in you,” “i believe in scripture,” “I believe in peace,” “I believe in my kids,” etc.

It can get complicated pretty quickly—religion or churches for example often demand statements of conceptual belief as proof of loyalty or belonging. And furthermore might offer rewards or punishments based on conceptual beliefs (acceptance or rejection—honor or shame—employment or unemployment—life or death, heaven or hell) .

This gets us into the territory of replacing conceptual beliefs as a construct over our own thinking caps. Placing a thin, invisible barrier in our minds between the beauty and the goodness and the value of the world around us, and constricting our own experience of God’s love.

Relational beliefs allow for this question, “What do you think?” In fact to some degree they are built on this, and therefore the freedom and the health that this affords an individual and a congregation if we are talking along systemic lines allow for a foundation of LOVE. It allows us to stay in the car together and see the passenger next to us, sort of speak!

Without freedom of thought, we offer and experience only an impoverished love.

Jesus invites us to love. And much of his ministry is spent trying to expand the systems of his day – beyond the conceptual beliefs that so many of the religious experts of his day rest on. At one point he says to these religious experts – “How terrible it will be for you…. You give to God a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, but you forget about the more important matters of the Law: justice, peace, and faith. You ought to give a tenth but without forgetting about those more important matters. 24 You blind guides! You filter out a gnat but swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:23-24)
Oh, how I love it when Jesus talks about gnats and camels!

Here maybe we can see the conceptual beliefs for these religious experts is to uphold the belief that one should give away a tenth of their belongings to God… but it comes at the expense of a relational belief in people! Where real issues of justice, peace and faith play out.

You can’t have conceptual beliefs and X-out all the relational beliefs and say you are truly “loving” God, lest we choke on our own…

Is love present? Is love felt? In a system that erases the eye for our world, what do you think? And how do we think in this vein if we don’t engage an active, living posture to the world around us?

I think this is what Jesus keeps prompting us with – through all his provoking and quirky words, actions and relations, “Can we imagine a christianity of the future that gathers around something other than a list of conceptual beliefs?” (McLaren) – A question he posed to the religious leaders of his day – and one that he still poses to us now…

Let’s take a look at one of the most beautiful, obvious scriptures that is abundant in God’s love for us – and the world at large:

Scripture: Matthew 17:24 – 27 (NLV)

24 On their arrival in Capernaum, the tax collectors for the Temple tax came to Peter and asked him, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the Temple tax?”

25 “Of course he does,” Peter replied.

Then he went into the house to talk to Jesus about it.

But before he had a chance to speak, Jesus asked him,

“What do you think, Peter?

Do kings tax their own people or the foreigners they have conquered?”

26 “They tax the foreigners,” Peter replied.

“Well, then,” Jesus said, “the citizens are free! 27 However, we don’t want to offend them, so go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a coin. Take the coin and pay the tax for both of us.”

Right? Isn’t this your go-to scripture when you want to be reminded of God’s love for you? Hmmmm… taxes and fish and coins!

Let me tell you there are no pithy thoughts out on podcasts, or scholarly commentary about this coin in the fish mouth scripture.

The context here is that:

Peter has just come down from the mountain with Jesus, where he’s witnessed the transformation of Jesus. He watched as Jesus’ face shone like the sun and his clothes turn white – and a voice from God, booming from the clouds said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very pleased with him” (Peter fell on his face in awe)

It’s a pinnacle moment—confirming his loving relationship to Jesus, the human who he’s walked alongside, and linking it to the mysterious love of God.

It’s a moment for Peter, that maybe is akin to one of your more potent spiritual moments in life—where you have felt as though you are on a mountain top, so close to God and God so close to you, that that love and that experience feels almost unbelievable.

Only of course to be interrupted by the real facts of life—a phone call, a time constraint, someone tugging at you, needing something from you, or, as in Peter’s case, a tax collector.

A tax collector asking for payment to the temple in Jerusalem that most Jewish men are meant to pay for its’ upkeep.

This moment of intimacy and love of God, felt by Peter on the mountain top, likely dissipates pretty quickly.

And we see here in these verses, I believe the dynamic again of conceptual belief and relational belief on the table – with the question at hand – should Jesus and his followers have to pay this tax?

Peter’s impulsive answer is “Yes – of course my teacher pays the tax”. “I believe that all Jewish men should pay the temple tax”.

An answer that Jesus doesn’t seem to disagree with ……. but what follows in the text, I believe is a deeply powerful move, that demonstrates Jesus’ love and value of each of us – to keep THINKING. To keep thinking about the conceptual beliefs that we impulsively answer to …. And to also hold, to not overlook or x-out, the relational wonder-land of Jesus’ love in front of us….

“What do you think, Peter?” It’s an invitation I believe that is going to help Peter see that the mountaintop experience, is available in all his settings – even the most mundane and annoying.

Everyday Sacred Spaces

And the same is true for us.
At the end of the summer, I was watering in an Outdoor Classroom that I teach in – at our local school. And I was feeling mostly tired, hot and annoyed – and I was in a rush to get to an appointment. And of course out of the corner of my eye I could see an older woman, likely in her 70s, coming toward me. I tried very, very hard – in my most loving posture – to not make eye contact with her… She was pretty determined thought to get my get my attention, “Excuse me – can you help me? Excuse me! Can you help me, please?” (insert internal groan)…

I turned and saw that she was carrying a large piece of a lawnmower in her hands. As she’s walking toward me, she’s explaining that she’s trying to get the grass collection bag over the handles, but can’t quite muster the strength. <insert another internal groan>… We wrestled for the next few minutes to get the piece connected and in that short, divine window I gained a more expansive view of who God is and where God’s love can be discovered. I learned about her life, her grown kids (who 35 years ago went to this very same elementary school), how her hands use to be so much stronger, how she mows her lawn every week, how she loves watching kids walk by her house to school, how the guy on the phone from the hardware store gave her a pro-tip, a short-cut to getting this bag on the handles, which was to “turn the lawnmower bag inside out to swiftly get it on” (ummm….. great!).

If GOD’S LOVE, at its core is about connection of all things (neighbor, self, earth) – that this is what allows for our sense of belonging….then my hope is that the intersectionality of where I encounter God and where I encounter people is all the content and all the knowledge, that I need for an experience of God’s love. We are yearning and eager to be seen and known and included. And – as we keep thinking – I believe we are quick to sniff out spaces that offer a system only of conceptual beliefs.

About mid-way through my assembly of this lawnmower with this 70-year old woman, I noticed that we were putting the grass bag on completely wrong (despite the hardware store dude’s advice on the phone). But I didn’t want to stop the process and correct it. I wanted to follow this error all the way through, until we both realized it together and had to re-calibrate and start the process all over again together. I wanted more time to laugh at us struggling to make sense of the plastic snaps, and more time to hear the grunts and groans as we tugged and pulled, and more time to watch our hands together – strong and weak, old and young(ish) – create something together, even though in the end it was completely nonfunctional. I realize again and again in moments like these – on sidewalks, lawnmowers in hand, in the most inconvenient moments of life – that I can find a living, breathing sanctuary in the form of another human being, in the midst of the most expansive sanctuary – our Earth, and this is where I find – I want to keep thinking – where I go for knowledge… in these everyday, sacred spaces.

Paidrag O’ Tuama, an Irish poet says that “belonging creates and undoes us both”. …likely follows I think the same sentiment of love…. It creates and undoes us both.

Jesus wants Peter to be undone by his love… in all of life.

Peter’s quick reply to the tax collector, might have signaled to Jesus that the tendency of his thinking might veer more conceptual than relational and that a mountain-top experience could be compartmentalized in Peter’s mind as a distinct experience, under special circumstances.

It seems by Jesus’ next move, that a conceptual God is not the image that Jesus is interested in putting out in the world.

Not only does Jesus ask Peter this most loving question, “What do you think?” as a way to bridge the conceptual and the relational systems.

He then guides him a bit in how to get to thinking…, “GO OUT”, he says. “Go to the lake, go to the shore – go fishing”. A place Peter, as a fisherman knew incredibly well.

The places we know so well where we work, live and play, it seems, are teaming with not only God’s deep love, but also miracles.

Ok—let me jump to one other personal story and then circle back to flush out why I think the miracle of Peter finding the exact tax needed for both him and Jesus – in the coin in the fish’s mouth is one of the most understated miracles.

Surprised By Humanity

Swim meets are interesting events. You sit in a very, very moist and warm environment – very, very, very close to other human beings for many, many hours. You watch your own swimmer, maybe swim for a combined time in all their races, of 48 seconds. 🙂

It’s a pretty solitary experience as a spectator though – most people have their own racer they are waiting to watch and otherwise mostly disengaged for the majority of the time. Inevitably though there is a moment in a swim season – where a swimmer gets put in the wrong race, or a swimmer’s goggles fall off on the start, or for whatever reason hasn’t been trained well for the race they are in … and the result is often that this swimmer, is far, far behind the rest of the heat.

What I’ve noticed in these moments, is that somehow the collective attention of the entire arena becomes stilled and hushed, as people notice this lagging swimmer.

It’s not just the stillness in my experience… it’s then the eruptive cheering, clapping and screaming that is explosive in the space – that has pulled people’s attention out of their books or knitting.

We have NO idea who’s kid this is – or what team they are swimming for… and it doesn’t matter! Your sweaty shoulders – and this person’s sweaty shoulders – are leaping from our seats – CHEERING this kid on to their finish.. Like they have just won the Olympics.

Everyone becomes awake and alive again to what is infront of them! And I look around and think “i’m not crying – you’re are crying”.. .and then I look around and I see – “oh jeez, you are crying”… “and you are crying, too”! Etc…

What is this? What is this sensation of being swept off of my feet into goodness and beauty with 100’s of strangers, in unassuming spots and being surprised by humanity?”

Jesus I think says – “oh yeah, that’s the treasure… that’s the coin/treasure in the mouth of your EVERYDAY fishing zones”.

As we THINK, As we become awake with our hearts, and minds and souls – with lived experience as our data and content…. We start to perform the miracles of today…. BECAUSE we transform ourselves and the way we see and engage with the world around us… that it can not be merely just a place to inhabit, but instead the world around us is this living sanctuary, breathing and pulsing with Jesus’ deep love.

Sanctuaries free of walls – FULL of GOd’s love – found on pool decks and in gardens and at desks and hospital rooms, and found through the human sanctuaries in our midst at every turn.

Here disconnection and judgement crumbles.

And these ways of thinking about and experiencing God – don’t come with a risk of compromising Jesus or Scripture… It doesn’t suggest that we need to have a wholesale rejection and replacement of any prior system. Each new discovery of God – “includes or integrates its antecedents, even as it transcends or expands beyond them. When Moses is given the Ten Commandments, he doesn’t say that Abraham’s religion was wrong because he didn’t have them. And when Solomon builds an elaborate temple of stone he doesn’t say Moses’s religion was wrong b/c he only had a tent of cloth…and so on is the pattern throughout scripture… which suggests that religion should expand, evolve and learn and grow… the same is true with Jesus – right? He came not to eradicate the law – but to fulfill what came before him “ (p. 103).

God’s love takes care of all that, as we see it in its expanse—it creates and undoes at the same time.

Jesus, I believe sends Peter out to fish.. To show just this – that Jesus can still operate within the constrains of everyday life, taxation included – and with conceptual beliefs present… But his love and intimacy expands beyond systems, won’t be threatened by law – and is EVER-EXPANDED as we think, move and live our lives.

HOW DO WE DO THIS? How do we keep thinking? How do we know if we’ve stalled? Or are caught up in compliant responses?

Peter gives us the shining hint….in his move right after he answers the tax collector….as compliant and impulsive as it is – … it seems he has this relational twinge within himself.. And it says he “went into the house to talk to Jesus about it”.

HECK YAH!

That’s the bridge right there… that’s the lightning moment “Jesus I have to talk with you about something”.. IT KEEPS US CONNECTED TO THE SOURCE OF ALL LIFE.

And likely, most times he’s going to say “What do you think?”, and point us right back to our very life – but boy, oh boy, you better be ready for a miracle in the middle of it…

After these two stories I just told, it could be easy to walk away and say “wow, that was a sweet moment, with a sweet older woman – I’m so moved, I’m so grateful”. “Wow, what an incredible collective response in an ordinary setting, a swim race”. And call it a day. Maybe share it with a friend or two.

OR I could walk away from those ordinary encounters (that by the way are abundant in their opportunities)… and say “HOLY JESUS”! “HOLY, HOLY LOVE of JESUS”!

And that’s the coin in the fishes mouth, my friends – THAT”S the miracle of today. Truly.

To think – to talk to Jesus about it – and to see THAT JESUS LOVE IS IMMERSED IN EVERY. EVERY think we touch – -the earth, the people, ..

This lawnmower woman undid me. The pool moment undid me.

All of our moments have the Jesus potential to create and undo – it’s His specialty, I believe. He invites us again and again, “what do you think?-IT IS THE underlying QUESTION OF LIVING”. Roam around in that question my friends… feel joy… feel strength, feel perplexed, feel awkward, feel connectedness… feel time sharpen and slow….. But above all be prepared to FEEL Peter’s mountaintop experience of God’s love.

“What do you think?” It’s a blunt question – one that doesn’t beg for devotion, but one that drives straight to the heart……. To your true self, a question that demands authenticity. It’s a question, that I wish my friend could have asked me in the car. “Ivy what do you think about the role of women in the church?”

Maybe we could have discovered the treasure//the miracle in the midst of us.. The bridging of our conceptual and relational viewpoints..and see that Jesus is big enough to cover us both.

Maybe I might have answered, in concrete ways from my lived experience and maybe, I might have invited her to look at Scripture too, to see the Bible, not just as an “answer book”, but as a book that invites us to think and to explore the world around us – here and now.

A rich text that encourages us to deepen our moral imagination so that we can co-create a new future – in partnership with so many for this next generation! For the youth that are watching her move and think and live ….

As Jesus continues to teach us – may we strive hard to bombard this next generation with stories, parables, actions, invitations to think … of Jesus’ great powerful, mysterious and altogether wondrous love.

And may we implore our next generation to think from their own vantage points on the mighty words of Jesus, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

An Invitation to Whole-life Flourishing:

Ask yourself, “what do I think of that? What does that mean, and why does that matter?” as a regular practice of love; love of neighbor, self and God.

Spiritual Practice of the Week:

Practice the prayer, “here”.

Word “here”.

“Here”. I’m here, God. You’re here. We are here together”.

Staying awake to God’s presence and love—which is above me, before me, behind me, beside me, beneath me and within me, as the old Celtic blessing puts it.

Full Prayer of St. Patrick:

I arise today

Through the strength of heaven;

Light of the sun,

Splendor of fire,

Speed of lightning,

Swiftness of the wind,

Depth of the sea,

Stability of the earth,

Firmness of the rock.

I arise today

Through God’s strength to pilot me;

God’s might to uphold me,

God’s wisdom to guide me,

God’s eye to look before me,

God’s ear to hear me,

God’s word to speak for me,

God’s hand to guard me,

God’s way to lie before me,

God’s shield to protect me,

God’s hosts to save me

Afar and anear,

Alone or in a multitude.

Christ shield me today

Against wounding

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in the eye that sees me,

Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today

Through the mighty strength

Of the Lord of creation.

Our Problem with Personhood: The Face of God in the Face of Another

Early this year I got an airplane to go visit a friend of mine. I took the trip afraid I’d lose that friend, but I ended up seeing the face of God.

I was nervous because there were a few things my friend and I hadn’t spoken of in years, a couple of important topics, which I knew we had come to see differently. We’re like most friends – after ten, twenty, in this case nearly twenty-five years, both of us have been learning and growing and changing. We’ve been alive, which is great, but what happens when all that life and change ruins the friendship? What if we drift apart? What happens when a friendships collapses under the weight of difference?

I didn’t think this particular friendship was at risk. I was going to see the guy who’d been best man in my wedding. We’re godfathers to some of each other’s children. We’d logged dozens of hours of phone calls in the many years we’d lived in different cities.

But then, not long before my trip, I’d heard a story from another friend of mine, of a life-long best friendship she had lost because of how their views had changed on a single controversial issue. And I thought, uh-oh, what if I’m next? What if one of my best friends will no longer trust or respect me?

So I get on the plane, I land, my friend picks me up from the airport, and we stop at a park to take a walk and catch up a bit on the way back to his house. I think his youngest kid was taking a nap or something and we had a bit of time to kill. So I said, hey, can we clear the air a bit. I’ve got something important to talk about. And I was far more nervous than I expected to be. I’m a grown man with an old friend of mine, but my hands are in my pockets and I’m having a hard time finding the words, and I think, wow, the stakes are high for me.

Eventually, though, I bring up the stuff I knew we didn’t see eye to eye on any more. And I tell him, I need to bring this up, because I’m not sure what I’d do if we lost our friendship over this.

And he says to me, well, there’s a long answer, let’s talk more about this. But the short answer is my God, no. We’re friends, right? We can handle being different.

So obvious, and yet, woah, it was like the air went back into my lungs. I was so relieved. I thought: this is a taste of some of the best in life. Loyalty, acceptance, peace that can handle time and difference. So good. I looked at my friend and thought, To see your face is like to see the face of God.

These words aren’t mine. They come from an old, old story in our scriptures – when one man sees the face of his brother and in a space of trust and reconciliation also comes to see embodied in his face the very presence of God.

This moment is from the third quarter of the Bible’s first book of Genesis. Genesis is four long stories woven into one. Each story centers around a person chosen by God. All four stories deal with loss and death. The family at the center of the story, sometimes all of humanity as well, is threatened. And the stories ask how God can be faithful to advance goodness amidst all of this mess. They ask where God can be faithful too, often with surprising answers. Each of these four sections in Genesis also includes a vivid sibling rivalry. And the rivalry at the center of the third section is between the twin brothers Jacob and Esau.

Jacob and Esau are competitors since birth. Younger brother Jacob has consistently had the upper hand. And with the help of his mother, he’s managed to steal the favored son and favored inheritance status from Esau. And then from that event until the moment when we’ll meet them today, about fifteen years have passed. Fifteen years of no contact between these brothers, fifteen years of Jacob thinking his brother Esau wishes him dead.

And now Jacob, along with his very large family, is preparing for a reunion, when he hears that Esau is coming to greet him not with his own family, but with a large group of armed men.

So Jacob plans on sending his servants and family members ahead of him with gifts, as you do, hoping to appease his brother. Here’s what happens. I’ll read a couple excerpts from the Schocken translation which we’ve printed in your programs. It’s a great modern translation by the Jewish scholar Everett Fox. It keeps the poetic feel and flavor and of the original Hebrew, so it’ll sound a little different.

Jacob here is Yaakov and Esau is Esav. Jacob says to his servants:

Genesis 32:21-22, 26, 31, 33:8-10 (Schocken)

“You shall say: Also – here, your servant Yaakov is behind us.

For he said to himself:

I will wipe (the anger from) his face

with the gift that goes ahead of my face;

afterward, when I see his face,

perhaps he will lift up my face!

The gift crossed over ahead of his face,

but he spent the night on that night in the camp….

This whole section is like a meditation on the word “face.” Yaakov thinks Esav’s face is angry. So he wants the first thing Esav sees to not be his face but his butter-up-his-brother gifts. He sends them ahead in the hopes that when they eventually come together, face to face, something good might happen. Yaakov doesn’t dare hope for peace or reconciliation or anything – he just wants to live.

And Yaakov was left alone –

And a man wrestled with him until the coming up of dawn….

This is unexpected. In the middle of the night, camping by himself along the riverbank, Yaakov is attacked. Perhaps a thief has heard of the whereabouts of this wealthy man? Perhaps his brother has found him and come for revenge? In the end, Yaakov comes to believe that the person he’s wrestling with is no man, but an angel, or some embodied presence of the living God. Yaakov hangs on for dear life, seeking the blessing of God, until it’s given to him.

Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel/Face of God,

for: I have seen God,

face to face,

and my life has been saved….

The meditation on the word “face” continues. In this strange mystical encounter, Yaakov believes he has seen God face to face and lived. Henceforth both he and his ancestors are now renamed Yisrael – God-fighter, which is a name of power – people who are able to struggle with God, interact face to face with the divine. And it’s a name of vulnerability, because Yisrael walks with a limp. He’s wounded in this encounter, as a reminder that to be face to face with God is to be both blessed and to also be profoundly aware of your own limits and weakness. The legacy of Yaakov’s ancestors, both biological and spiritual, is this blessing of exalted, vulnerable personhood – to be able to see God face to face, to be made profoundly resilient and strong through this encounter, and also to be made profoundly vulnerable and humble.

Wild and dramatic as all this is, though, it is not the climax of this story… The climax comes when the next day, Yaakov limps away from the riverbed and sees his brother again, hoping against hope he might survive. Only to discover his brother wants peace. Esav has enough, he simply wants to be brothers again.

He said:

What to you is all this camp that I have met?

He said:

– to find favor in my lord’s eyes.

Esav said:

I have plenty, my brother, let what is yours remain yours.

Yaakov said:

No, I pray!

Pray, if I have found favor in your eyes,

then take this gift from my hand.

For I have, after all, seen your face, as one sees the face of God,

and you have been gracious to me.”

I have seen your face, Yaakov says, and it is as one sees the face of God. Jacob would know, right? He has just had this profound spiritual experience – he knows a thing or two about seeing the face of God. And he looks at his brother, face to face, and thinks that is what is happening. To see you accepting me, for us to be at peace – without walls, without fear, person to person, is for me to see in your face the face of God.

For Jacob, this proves to be too much. The intimacy of full personhood, brother to brother, is somehow so unfamiliar, so threatening, that within a day, he’s moved on, perhaps never to see his brother again. We don’t know. But for a moment, he had that connection, that peace to see the face of God in his brother.

This is what I got with my good friend. For us, it wasn’t the result of reconciliation per se. It was more the relief of not losing a precious friendship, made precious by years of vulnerable trust, years of being there for one another, decades of support. But still, it was to not lose that friendship, to reclaim our peace, and in that to have God with me.

What do you think about this, that our best chance of seeing God is to see God’s love and presence reflected in a human face?

In churches, we talk a lot about our personal attempts to experience God, to encounter in some way to face of God in our personal practice. So we encourage shared worship. We encourage patterns and habits of prayer, of reading the scriptures, of spiritual practice and exercise of all kinds, which we promote weekly in our sermons. And this is all valuable. We are a faith community – we promote trust in God, encounter with God, experience of the love and power from which all of us and everything is born.

But the scriptures teach that the word of God, the one perfect revelation of the divine to humans is the person of Jesus. And they also teach that the face of God, the image of God, is seen in human personhood, on one another’s faces.

So again, what do you think about this, that our best chance of seeing God is to see God’s love and presence reflected in a human face?

And that similarly, our deepest human connection comes when we see the full glory of a human – as an image bearer of our God.

My own experience is that we’re not getting this enough these days. We don’t often enough see the face of God on our fellow human’s faces. And we rarely see the full glory of our fellow humans – that we are all image bearers of our God.

We have a problem with personhood.

I heard a talk recently by an old colleague of mine who’s gone on to big things as a speaker and an author. His name’s Andy Crouch, and he gave a talk recently entitled “Overcoming Our Greatest Affliction.” Most of the rest of my material comes from that talk – it took my breath away. So thank you, Andy. And the link to his talk – if you’re curious – will be in the sermon notes on line. I’ll quote it several times, and you can listen to it if you have time:

Andy discusses three revolutions that make the world we live in:

The Financial Revolution – wealth from land primarily to money.
The Industrial Revolution – when work shifted from labor we do with our bodies to primarily work we have done by machines.
And the Computational Revolution – when knowledge shifted from wisdom to information.

I’ll skip the details on these revolutions. Andy has more to say about that. But the idea is that these and other revolutions of the modern world have brought humanity great wealth – ordinary Americans have access to goods that some royalty in other ages could have only dreamed of, and a smaller and smaller percentage of humanity lives in abject poverty. Modernity has also brought us great health – longer lives, less sick lives. And by some measures, all this has brought us greater happiness.

And yet we are also lonely and anxious and depressed like never before. Because in most of these revolutions that have given us life as we know it today, we’ve traded personhood for power.

Most of the people I see each day don’t really see me, aren’t really seen by me. Most of the people I see each day don’t even know my name. And most of the people I see each week that do know my name don’t know where I come from, they don’t know my story.

In the Jacob and Esau story, conflict and pain ruptures personhood. But now the whole world does.

We live, Andy Crouch says, in a “lonely world of engines and machines and information.” “Modernity is a great place to have power. It’s not a great place to be a person.”

I think of a friend of mine, for instance, who was trained as a social worker, eager to launch a career helping vulnerable people experience more goodness and dignity in their personhood. In his first placement, though, he was overwhelmed and discouraged by the bureaucracy – by modern institutions’ habit of prioritizing abstract principles and procedures over people. And he was overwhelmed by some of the technological and administrative demands of the work.

So he quit, people called it burnout. And he sunk into depression. He found work later in wholesale supplies. But the work hasn’t felt meaningful to him. Like many people who work with their bodies, he has aches and pains that have aged him beyond his years. So he feels like a tool more than a person. He’s depressed sometimes still and he’s chronically anxious about his health and his finances.

And yet his story isn’t all that unique – this is modernity for the economic losers of the 21st century.

But all the winners – we’re pretty stressed out too. And we’re pretty lonely. We hardly go from day to day seeing the face of God in ourselves and our fellow humans, do we?

Andy, in his talk on personhood, argues this has happened before. He argues that the Roman empire experienced its own revolutions that increased power and diminished personhood. So that the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus produced incredible prosperity and abundance, for the people whose names we know. But in their society, the distribution of personhood was profoundly unequal. Very few people were fully persons, were recognized with the full standing of a person. Only the patriarchal heads of households had the full benefit of personhood.

Children, women, slaves, all were viewed as less than full people. In fact, for slaves, given you didn’t have the chance of being a person, you didn’t even get a real name.

You might just be named for your birth order – Third, Fourth, fifth… Tertius, Quartus, Quintus. Or for some productive quality you could lend to the economy. You could be named Useful… in Greek, Onesimus.

Which brings us to these remarkable lines at the very end of a letter in the New Testament. In Romans, we’ve heard from that famous faith entrepreneur, the apostle Paul, for 16 chapters, and at the very end get this.

Romans 16:22-27 (NRSV)

22 I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.

23 Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus, greet you.

Who is this Tertius? He’s a scribe, the one who’s written all of Paul’s other words for him. He may or may not be a slave, but he’s of very low status, there to take down the words of other, more important people. Tertius, third. Paul says – you speak, you’re a brother. Tertius, you take a turn. And then there’s Gaius, this wealthy man, the one whose household hosts our community, the benefactor of their local church – the top giver, you might say. Tertius says, my friend Gaius says hello. As does Erastus, the treasurer of the whole city. And our brother, Fourth, Quartus, maybe Tertius’ brother by birth, perhaps a slave himself, sends greetings too.

Can you hear what’s happening? Two of the most powerful, wealthy men of Rome – known to their culture, known to history by their names, share friendship and connection and meals in their home with Tertius and Quartus – known to their culture and history as nobodies, the very low status “Third” and “Fourth.”

And yet they are family. They are known to one another. Paul looks at their face and sees the face of God. This is a good news miracle. Tertius and Paul finish from here:

25 Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages 26 but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— 27 to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.

The psychologist Kurt Thompson says that from birth, we are looking for a face that is looking for us. What it means to be human is that to want to see and know someone who is looking for us.

Part of the good news of Jesus is that God has become embodied in a human face. That God is eager to reconnect us, both with God and one another. And to do the will of God – what Paul calls the obedience of faith – as we trust and follow Jesus with our lives, is in part to see the face of God in the personhood of all of humanity.

All of us, we are looking for a face in whom we can see the face of God, looking to have our face seen in this way.

We sort of have a million chances at this, and sort of have only a few. Here’s what I mean.

A Tip for Whole Life Flourishing:

Think of the 5-10 people you are most connected to in your life. How might you be the face of God to them? Is there a relationship that needs reconciliation? Do you have room for a Tertius – to better validate the personhood of someone outside of that full experience?

5-10 people. Because every day, we encounter people. We do have so many chances to look at a human face and to believe that we can see the face of God there, to be so present, and so marked by faith, hope, and love, that they might see the face of God in our face. But we also, most of us, have precious few people whose lives we are deeply embedded with over many years. So start with those people. How for the very closest people in your life might you be the face of God? Does someone come to mind where things are estranged, where you need reconciliation?

And do you have room in your life for a Tertius – for someone outside your own band of privilege?

Spiritual Practice of the Week:

As a consumer, a worker, and a user of technology, look to see and affirm personhood. Look for the face of God in more human faces.

Stop Giving Your Money to Bad Systems

Credit to David Borger German, associate pastor of one of our sister churches, Sanctuary Church in Iowa City, for the great majority of this sermon – many of its insights, and much of the text, word for word sometimes.

Imagine with me for a moment that you have just won $10,000,000! But there’s catch. You must give it all away. To whom or to what would you give that money?

I invite you to turn to someone next to you and discuss it, in groups of 2-4. If there’s someone nearby that’s not in a group, ask them to join you. Introduce yourselves if you don’t know each other. And then share where you’d give away $10 million and why.

This morning we’re going to talk about money and our use of it. I’ve titled this “stop giving money to bad systems,” which is where we’ll land. I wanted to start with that exercise because I wanted to get us all in the mode of thinking about ourselves as empowered, responsible agents of the money and resources entrusted to us by God.

$10 Million may be a vastly different sum of money than what you deal with on a day to day basis, but you still have money, at least some of it. You might say not quite enough, but you have some money, some resources.

According to the Christian tradition, God created us and has entrusted us with real power, real agency, real freedom to choose what we do with the money and resources entrusted to us. And we are invited by God to remember and claim our agency, our power, and decide how we will use our resources: Will we use our money as God invites us to, in ways that wisely contribute to our own health, the health of others, and the health of the earth? Or will we use our money to prop up systems that take advantage of people and contribute to the ill health of creation?

There are larger systems of which we are beholden to, that shape and limit our freedoms. For example, we all pay taxes. At the very least there’s a state sales tax so that if I go to the store and buy a new HD TV, I will pay state sales tax. I’m free to purchase a TV or not, but it’s not in my power to choose to pay the sales tax or not. Or I can drive to New Hampshire to get away with not paying the sales tax, but then I have to drive to New Hampshire. I suppose I could choose to not pay federal income tax, but our federal government frowns on such practice and will promptly arrest me and try me and then I’ll owe much more money and be thrown in jail. So you know, choices.

And actually, if we go further down the rabbit hole on our choices, we won’t go deep here but let’s just uncover it, many philosophers and sociologists would eagerly point out that our sense of personal freedom is really an illusion. They would say that while we believe we are free agents, acting under our own volition, we’re all actually quite captive to the influences and systems around us. You only think you’re freely buying that car, but actually, you’ve been influenced by countless marketing attempts and your own proclivity to imitate and copy what everyone else is doing. The Matrix has you, they would say.

That may be very true. But to whatever extent we’re not free, the path to freedom is the same: we can learn to listen to Jesus and step into the agency and empowerment that Jesus leads us into. When we truly listen and reflect on what’s going on, our imaginations are shaped by God’s vision, and we receive God’s power to courageously act in ways that are consistent with God.

In the end, that’s what I hope to accomplish today – I want to gain a better sense of our own empowerment over our own resources. We can remember who we are – created and called by God to live empowered lives under God’s care. And we’re going to claim whatever agency we have to shape a better world. If that’s using $10 dollars or $10 Million dollars, we’re going to figure out how to do it well and courageously.

This is the last week of our passion and courage series. Next week, Ivy begins a five-week series about Jesus’ example as a conversationalist. I think that going into the summer, it’ll be timely and practical and great!

We’re going to look at a story in which Jesus talks about money, its use, and the systems that influence our use of it. The story takes place in the final week of Jesus’ life. Jesus is in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus taught

Mark 12:38-13:2 (NRSV)

³⁸“Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, ^{39>/sup>and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! ⁴⁰They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”}

⁴¹He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. ⁴²A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. ⁴³Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

13 As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” ²Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

There are three pieces to this short story:

Jesus’ warning: Beware of the scribes.
The poor widow.
Announcement of the temple’s destruction.

Each one contains a different lesson, but they all fit together.

First of all, the scribes. Jesus tells his audience to beware of them. Who were the scribes?

Well, they were political and religious teachers/leaders, who carried a lot of influence and were generally well respected by the people

It’s a lot like today’s politicians, you know – minus the respected by the people part, sometimes.

Jesus has some harsh words for these leaders, and there are essentially two major critiques:

1) The first is that they focus a lot on external signs of wealth and prestige: they wear long robes, they have the best seats in the synagogue, they choose the places of honor at banquets. They’re driven by their own egos, and they think that the good life is achieved through external signs of wealth and power – how they look and perform in front of others.

2) Second critique is worse than the first one: Jesus says that they devour widows houses.

There’s some debate about what this means, but one plausible option goes like this:

Women had very little social power at this time, some 2,000 years ago. And to be a widow meant you had even less power. If you were a widow and you were fortunate enough to have some property with your husband, once he died, you were not technically permitted to own the property. The scribes, the religious/political leaders, created a system in which they became the trustees of your estate because you couldn’t own anything. So you could still live in your home, but it wasn’t really yours anymore. And to manage that estate, the scribes charged money, a portion of what the estate was worth. So every year, you would be giving to the scribes a portion of your home’s worth or value because they were supposedly helping you manage your own home.

And what were these scribes doing with their money? Well, they’re having nice banquets, living lives of luxury and influence. You get taken advantage, your house literally being devoured, so they can look good.

Behold! these scribes, these politicians, your leaders and rulers, Jesus says. Watch out!

So after this sobering warning, Jesus sits down in the Temple right near the treasury dropbox. It’s like he pulled up the chair right there near the back of the sanctuary here near our own offering drop boxes. And he just sits and watches as people drop their offering in. Which is kind of an awkward thing to do.

How many of you would be comfortable with some random person just sitting near the drop boxes watching all of us throughout the morning, watching what we put in, or don’t put in.

Now most of us who call Reservoir our church home give through weekly or monthly automated giving out of a checking account or through our online giving system, PushPay, but there were obviously no systems like that at this time. It’s all physical, metal currency, so people could kind of make it into a show of how much they’re putting in. The rich would take their time because they have so many coins to put in. It’s heavy. It’s loud – it makes a lot of noise when you drop all those silver coins in. The Temple was an enormous stone building. So the sound of the coins going in would be bouncing off the stone walls and make quite a sound. So when the rich come in, it sounds like a slot machine cashing out.

Whereas other times, for other people, it’s just the sound of 1 or 2 small coins.

As Jesus watches, a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. (How does he know how much it is? He can hear it. So can everyone.)

Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Now I have realized that there are two radically different interpretations of what Jesus is saying here. I want to share both interpretations.

Option 1 is that Jesus holds up the widow as a model of sacrificial giving. According to this option, it’s a lesson in contrasts. In contrast to the rich who give out of their abundance, the widow gives out of her poverty.

She’s seeking to do the best with what she’s got – it’s a very PIOUS ACT. Even though she doesn’t have much, she’s giving sacrificially to God, even to the point that it really costs her, and that’s a sign of her faith. On this read, the takeaway is to be like the widow – give sacrificially to God, even if it costs you, because that’s what faith is, and Jesus will honor it.

The expectation is that Jesus’ disciples and the people reading this story will continue to give sacrificially to God, like the widow. And that is what the Christian faith is all about.

So that’s option 1. It’s admittedly the more common one, and one I’ve heard in one form or another many times.

Here’s the thing, though. One part of the job of a Bible teacher like me is to keep reading what scholars say about scripture, to listen to the most common interpretations but also to pay attention to other streams because – as you and I both know – in all spheres of life, the majority isn’t always right. We have so much to learn by listening to a diversity of voices.

At the top, I mentioned my friend David Borger German. He went online and to his local university library and read 15 commentaries on this passage in Mark, and only one of them mentioned the possibility of another interpretive option. But it so happens to be one that I’d also recently read about. And it’s one I want to share with you today because it so struck me.

In this interpretation, Jesus is offering praise, but underneath it, he’s also offering – with some irony – a lament, because the widow is being taken advantage of by an unjust system.

In this option, Jesus points out the widow not as model, but as a tragic figure. It’s a lesson about the degree to which this system oppresses the poor.

Best as I can tell, there is more evidence for this interpretation. After all, Jesus just talked about how the scribes devour widows houses, so this is another example of their oppression. Additionally, the word “offering” does not appear. Instead, the word “treasury” is used. The emphasis here isn’t on free will but on a bloated public savings account. And finally, Jesus goes on not to praise but to announce the destruction of the Temple: “Not one stone will be left. All will be thrown down.”

The takeaway in this reading is that generosity may be a beautiful thing, but it turns tragic when our money is flowing to people and systems who are moving against God’s good purposes in the world. Stop giving money to bad systems.

It’s important to note that with this option, Jesus isn’t blaming the widow for her participation. He’s talking to his disciples at this point, so he doesn’t go over to the widow and say, “You’re not doing this right.” Her participation may be beautiful but is also tragic, and Jesus wishes it wasn’t so. So Jesus goes to the men, his close followers, the people with more societal power and agency, and the ones who’ll be carrying on his work in just a few months.

And Jesus calls his own followers not to perpetuate any systems. They are to create and build up systems that don’t take advantage of the most vulnerable of our society. In fact they’re to uplift the downtrodden and empower the most vulnerable among us.

Just for fun, let me point out the crazy irony in these two interpretive options.

In option 1, the emphasis is on the widow’s agency and sacrificial giving —> it encourages people to do what they are told by the system: Give sacrificially! says the preacher, says the church, says the politician, whoever stands to benefit by the sacrifice. Spend sacrificially, says the company that wants to sell you more of their stuff so they can profit.

Option 2 puts an emphasis on the widow as a tragic figure —> it empowers all people, and maybe poor people in particular, to claim their agency and become more discerning.

So, as I said, I lean towards option 2. If you like option 1, that’s fine. I would just encourage you to do what Jesus says: Beware of the scribes. Watch out for religious leaders and the politicians and corporations and the unjust systems that are trying to take advantage of people, using a veil of goodness or righteousness or fancy marketing to hide how the few are benefiting off of the oppression of others.

This is sort of an unusual stance for the senior pastor of a church to take. Religious leaders have all kinds of perverse incentives, after all, to try to guilt or trick you into giving more money to their institutions. My wife works a job as well, but my family is supported by this congregation’s giving. As this church grows and prospers, it’s also likely that I – along with my other pastors – will get more credit for that than we deserve. After all, a church isn’t a leader or a building, it’s a community – in Reservoir’s case, a community of amazing, beautiful, generous people trying enjoy the love of Jesus and the gift of community and the joy of living. All of us are the church, so all of us are how this community flourishes or doesn’t.

But again, it’s been typical for religious leaders to do whatever we can to incentivize, maybe to guilt people or trick them into sacrificial giving to our institutions.

But here’s the thing. We practice what we call centered-set faith. We believe that God is at the center of all reality, and that God is immeasurably good, and that God isn’t interested in manipulating or controlling us, but releasing us into greater and greater freedom, in all areas of our life, our finances included. And God invites us to use that freedom to pursue the greatest possible flourishing for ourselves, and for others, and for the world at large.

So if you think it’s important for a diverse Jesus-centered faith community to flourish, and to nurture healthy spirituality and connection to God, and you appreciate the existence and the mission of this faith community, then go all out – give as part of your investment in the flourishing of this community, and the flourishing of our mission, in this city and region and beyond.

But if not, then don’t.

And the same to all the other ways you spend and give and invest your money. Do so with freedom, with purpose, and knowing that every dollar you give and spend and save is supporting a system that you’re backing with your money.

My family’s been giving a tenth of our gross income to this church for well over a decade now. And on top of that, we’ve been giving money to other people and to systems that inspire us with all the good they are doing – empowering poor communities, rescuing abuse victims, doing spiritually beautiful things in unlikely places. And sometimes around the dinner table, we tell stories about what this money is doing in these really good systems.

I’m not proud of this or anything. It’s frankly pretty normal behavior around here, and this has been our family’s way of trying to invest our money is good systems, and

Now if we were to have all that money back tomorrow, at least for us, it would be a lot of money, more money by leaps and bounds than I’ve ever seen at once. We could pay an awful lot of bills and buy a boatload of stuff with all that money. But to me, there’s no way. Because I couldn’t do better with that money than we’ve done.

And our kids complain about a lot of things – they ought to, I suppose. Life’s not fair, and they deserve better parents sometimes, at least a better father! But they don’t complain about this giving, because it’s pretty rewarding to give your money to good systems, after all!

On the other hand, I’ve spent more money than I want to count buying food that is convenient, but is unethically sourced, bad for my health, hurts one of my favorite hobbies, which is running, and is produced by companies that harm the health of whole communities and do harm, not good to our environment. So I’m starting to wonder what it would mean to stop plowing my money into bad food systems.

Because after all, part of moving toward God for me is increasing awareness of how I’m empowered to use all I am and have – my money included – for the flourishing of my life, and of others, and the world. To plow myself into where God is and what God is growing, not the places God is not and what is fading away.

So now we come to the final part of our story. We started with Jesus’ warning to us: Beware of the scribes. Then we listened to Jesus talk about the poor widow and we considered those options. And now we’re walking with Jesus, leaving the Temple.

And he says this:

“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

If you want to have some fun today, take 5 minutes and read chapter 13 of Mark and talk about it with a friend. It’s quite a chapter. Jesus goes into full apocalyptic prophet mode, like the language we read this winter in Revelation. He starts using a lot of figurative and very bold language to talk about destruction of the Temple that’s coming.

This would have been utterly shocking news to the disciples, making them very, very uncomfortable. They walk out going, “THIS IS AMAZING!” and he says, “Yeah, it’s not going to last.”

It’s like you’ve just taken an awesome tour of the capitol building in Washington D.C., and then your tour guide announces it will be destroyed. It’s that kind of anxiety and fear and insecurity. Whoa.

I don’t think Jesus talks about this lightly. Jesus does not delight in destruction. But he’s very realistic about the natural consequences of building a system that oppresses other people. It’s untenable. It’s not going to last. Because it’s not with God.

We may prop up our bad systems a little while longer, but their time will end.

So what do we do this? What’s the invitation for us today? Very simply: I think we’re invited to listen to Jesus and to do what Jesus invites us to do. He warns us about leaders who benefit off the oppression of the most vulnerable. And he invites us to do what he does: to build real, authentic community. Community that:

recognizes the inherent dignity of every person
and that empowers every one of us to claim the agency that God has given us, to participate in the renewal and the flourishing of all people and all things.

This is hard. This is the life-long invitation, to continue to learn from Jesus, to continue to go to God to receive the power and healing that God makes available to us so that we are not beholden to fear. But we are emboldened to step into creative alternatives in our lives and economic practices.

We’re always invited to grow. I’m certain I am blind to all kinds of ways that I participate in and perpetuate unjust systems. But I’m committed to growing. And I think that’s the invitation.

If this is attractive to you, here are three things you might consider.

TRY THIS:

Make a review of your personal finances this month, looking for the story they tell about your freedom, your empowerment, and your values.
- Bank statements, credit card statements, if you want help, I wrote about this when I gave a talk on personal finance last year, we’ll republish that blog this week.
- Highlight the beautiful but tragic story Jesus saw when he looked at this widow and her money.
- Jesus’ line – where your eyes are, there your heart will be.
- This isn’t about pride or self-criticism, but curiosity, what do you see?

And then ask two questions:

What’s one system you want to stop supporting with your money?

What flourishing, what good system, do you want to put more money into?

Come Out: Repentance as Resistance

The Lie of an Empire

Revelation 18:4-5 (New Revised Standard Version)

⁴Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,
“Come out of the city, my people,
so that you do not take part in its sins,
and so that you do not share in its plagues;

⁵for their sins are heaped high as heaven,
and God has remembered their iniquities.

I know a little bit about the lie of an empire from being born in South Korea and hearing about North Korea, our long lost brother and neighbor that was split off after the Korean war in 1945. I grew up learning about the state of North Korea as a totalitarian regime that’s filled with propaganda about their leader and their nation. I hear that for the most part people are happy and proud of their nation there; they’ve been taught to think so in every way. There are miracle stories people who escape the country to find a better life. But for the most part, the whole nation pretty much have a specific way of thinking that keeps people insulated and that’s just the way things are there. It deeply saddens me to know that they can’t even have the choice to leave a country.

North Koreans and South Koreans are essentially the same people, same language, but the context, the culture, has drastically parted ways in their way of thinking and way of life. So, It’s easy for me to see that there is a possibility, that a nation can create a world that determines how you think and how you come to be. We Americans, I think, take this for granted and also assume that we’re of course not so ignorant, not so rudimentary in our thinking, so primitive. We’re free! And we are, compared to many other nations. But any nation, any government system, every culture in history, telling us that that is secure for us, is naive, because the human condition, the human propensity is empire thinking. This has been so, through rise and fall of many empires in history, time and time again. It’s almost too familiar of a story that resonates with every generation. That a way of being, a man made system, a way to control the masses to keep power in place, the empire mentality seeps in to operate the human society, and it numbs us, it makes us just stimulated enough to be comfortable and we buy into the status quo.

The story of the empire of an age old story, and this is what the writer of Revelation is getting to now, in our journey through the book during Lent. As we have been learning, John is pretty imaginative with metaphors. It’s a brilliant literary device that drives his purpose, straight through, with a sharp arrow. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Twilight ain’t got nothing on Revelation! My personal favorite of such dystopian genre is the TV show, Walking Dead. Ugh, I hate zombies and I loved the show. Such great storytelling! I hated all the blood, but it’s so epic and compelling. Like, what would you do, at the end of the world, if you have to go out and fight zombies and find food, or stay in one place and starve or be food. What would you do?! The fighting and the zombie scenes are ridiculous, a lot of ketchup was used. Sometimes we gotta bear through the metaphors to get to the story. And we have to do the same with our text today as well to do it honor. Male and female theologians have wrestled with this point and so it’s important to mention.

So, John is telling the story of Babylon as a representation of the empire, not only literally, but it represents of all the “babylons” of time, like Egypt, or Rome, or whatever power lure of the time. He juxtaposes this city to New Jerusalem, as the true city where God is the center of life. To get at this, he uses the derogatory term of (Trigger Warning, I’m going to say this a few times during the sermon, because it’s in the text) “whore” to describe Babylon, and “bride” for New Jerusalem. The point of this is that the seduction of Babylon is real, but New Jerusalem is the ultimate reality. That’s the message. But the method should be pointed out, that it is objectifying language of female bodies. Patriarchy runs deep, people, and we have to start with words, because they shape ideas and reinforce identities. And to not critique the metaphors we use has real consequences in how our boys view women, and our girls see themselves. So I’ve chosen to not reinforce the feminine pronouns for the cities and instead look carefully beyond the metaphors to get to the meaning of the passage.

So my talk today is going to be about: what does it mean to see “babylon”, the empire, for what it is — that it is only a twisted caricature of the New Jerusalem that represents the real world that God invites us to live in? And once we’ve seen it, how can we follow John’s calling to “come out” of the Babylon of our day? John invites us to repent and resist to the empire, that we may see the reality of the New Jerusalem at work right here right now.

So first, what is Babylon? Part of the issue with Babylon and empire thinking, is, at its core, seductive and insidious. “The fish doesn’t know that it’s in the sea.” And, “seductive”, not necessarily meaning and alluding to sexual immorality, but that much of it actually sounds pretty good. Like who wouldn’t want to build an empire that is powerful and strong, and great, who wouldn’t want to secure its walls and protect its people at all cost? Who wouldn’t want a thriving economy? Who wouldn’t want to be a part of great Babylon? But what is so wrong with Babylon, John calls it a “whore”? This word, again, isn’t specifically pointing out sexual deviancy of the city at all, but the word in Hebrew, zana, is translated in Greek as “to be a market”. To be objectified. To be commodified. The sin less about sexual immorality, and more about the critique of the city’s socio-economical state of mind and thinking. I think sometimes we focus on sexual immorality more than greed in church, because greed kind of serves all of us. Greed gives us financial stability and growth. And sexual immorality, that’s the worst kind of sin! (btw, Jesus didn’t have measurements for which sin is greater, we do.)

Let me move us along the text. So John tells us to come out of this city. And goes on to explain what’s wrong with the city. The text continues, chapter 18, to verses 12-13. It lists off these things. Gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, scented wood, ivory, bronze, iron, marble, cinnamon, spice, incenses, wine, oil, flour, cattle sheep, chariots, slaves, and human souls. → these are, luxury items, and staple goods that build the economy. Market. Trade. The list is about all the ways and its goods are evidence of Economic pride and Affluence. Greed. This is empire thinking.

A Bible commentator put it like this, “Babylon referred not to a city-state or a long-fallen empire, but had become a living archetype of the human propensity to organize ‘civilization’ in opposition to God.” Empire, is a way of life we’ve figured out apart from God.

We get into our little methods and attempt to orchestrate our lives according to our own wisdom without thinking once about God, or table God for this particular area of my life. Finances, well finances, God doesn’t really understand the modern market, I have to do this this way. Or I’ll do good things after I gain this status, prestige, get to a certain level. What is your Babylon? Are you aware of the ways that the world system lulls you into thinking this is how you have to do things?

Maybe some of you might be thinking, oh not me, I’m an independent thinker, I don’t let the Man tell me who I am! Good for you, but also, I’m sorry but we’re all products of our times. You may say, “I’m totally objective!” — it’s the very misconception that keeps us blind. We’re all subjective. We’re all subjects to this time in history, this period of post-enlightenment thinking, I’m sorry, but we’re all caught up in it. The fish doesn’t know that it’s in the sea! Unless you’ve been that fish that’s been dropped out of water, and you’ve had to gasp for air, and that does end up happening to most of us, if not yet, it will. Reality check sets in sometimes. Usually through a kind of suffering we get to see what really matters. But for the most of us, for the most part, we are heavily influenced by the world around us.

What sea are you in that you may not be aware of? What Babylon permeates throughout your life? What empires do you have rising and taking a hold of your life? John cried to the people, “come out of there!” Repent and resist the empire. The book that Steve lent me on reading Revelation, called Unveiling Empire, puts it this way: “This departure from Rome is not understood in the physical sense, but is to be economic, social, political, and spiritual; the idea is to resist, to refuse to participate, to create alternatives.”

This, I think, begins with seeing that we are a naturally drawn to the empire, to repent the way you’ve participated and even contributed to the building of the empire, and resist its way and come out. How do we do this? It begins with you. I want to focus on the concept of “repentance as a form of resistance”. But I want us to talk about those words a bit, because both repentance and resistance carry a lot of different meanings these days.

Resistance

First resistance. The term RESIST! has gotten to be a complicated thought and have gained some bad rep. To fight and protest. We’ve seen angry or militant resistance. It’s become a overused term of, rah rah, resist, fight the power, question everything! It’s like the opposite of what Steve was talking about last week, listening with compassion and civil public engagement. But Resistance doesn’t have to look violent. It doesn’t have to not be civil. What does it look like for Christians, for Christ followers to resist in a different way than everyone else? What does holy resistance look like? To come out of our babylon, I’d like to offer us repentance as a form of resistance.

Repentance

Again, words are powerful And sometimes they take on the cultural connotation more than the definition itself. Repentance can be a loaded term these days. It’s been used on picket signs and shouted at on college campuses. REPENT! Many of us have might even have PTSD with the term in the context of american religiosity. It’s had focus on feeling bad, guilt, and feeling shame for wrong things we’ve done. A lot of sin focus, in modern Christianity, is on personal sin. I think this is where the western individualism has sometimes failed us in realizing, that sin is more than just about living a morally clean life by not drinking, smoking, or whatever the modern day issue might be. The issue of sin and repentance for John in Revelation, of Isaiah in the prophets, and for Jesus as well, was covering a much higher bar of sin than our bad lifestyle or wrong decisions. It was about the whole system of empire that lives in an ethos of injustice and exploitation. Jesus talked about the kingdom of God and seeing that and being a part of that, more than himself being your personal Lord and Savior. It’s about the kin-dom, the family, the whole system that operates in harmony with God. Not just your life, the whole thing, the whole world, your family, your country, your society, your philosophy, everything will be new. Isaiah wasn’t just talking about how to live a good Christian life, it was about systemic economic justice.

Isaiah 1:16-17 says:

¹⁶ Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong. (what is the wrong doing? What is the right thing?)
¹⁷ Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

Think about the word, righteousness. It’s used in the Bible alot. And to us, when we think about the word righteousness, we think of a good person, a righteous person. It’s commonly used and understood as someone who is religious pious. Both the hebrew (tsaddiq) and the greek (dikaiosuné) definition of the word, it’s usually translated as righteousness, but their definition also means “justice”. And to us, they seem more nuanced and different, righteousness and justice, but they are actually more synonymous! The ancient near east context is also much more wholistic and communal than our American individualistic mentality. Righteousness isn’t only about you being a better person, personal salvation, but being a part of a more just world and participating in the justice of God: that’s justice. It’s not about personal correctness, but justice in the sight of the Lord in all manners of life, in every aspect of life.

Maybe you’ve been told to repent for things in your life before from church that weren’t really about the justice of God, but more about getting in line and following the rules, like throwing away rock music, or kissing dating goodbye. I can see how “repentance” could conjure up a visceral reaction for you. But it simply means, “to turn”. To turn from where our eyes are set, from the seduction of the riches, or security, of comfort, of safety. We trick ourselves into thinking that we can achieve the success the world has promised us so much. Work hard, save up, get what’s yours, work the system to get as much as you need and you can, cause everyone’s doing it. It’s turning our eyes, from what captivates us: like your phone, instagram has so many pretty pictures, and facebook girl jump-roping with her dog is so fascinating, but turn your heard and face the reality, the real world, turn to Jesus who is the ultimate reality.

I think Michael Jackson had it right:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change, nana nanana.

Sorry I subjected you to that. But I practiced – I had to do it. Look at yourself in the mirror.

This past week’s Bible Guide Monday ended with the reflection, “Today, ask God to reveal some aspect of violence or injustice in your nation, your city, or your ethnicity that you participate in through your actions or thinking. Ask God for ideas on how to turn away from that and for the courage to do so.”

What injustice do you see?

What do you think is wrong with the world? What injustice do you see? Racism? In what ways have you contributed to racism? Or turned a blind eye to it or stayed quiet in the face of it? Or maybe it’s the disparity between the rich and the poor? How have you participated in economic injustice? Blame the big banks and excuse yourself as, I’m just trying to get what’s mine. Or degradation of our environment and endangered species? Recycling or using less energy only when it’s convenient for us. Or exploitation of human bodies through porn, “harmlessly” participating in an industry of billions of dollars that perpetuate dehumanization of human sexuality.

I’ve been so sad and angry at the violence of the world, especially guns. And I hope that we can make changes systematically to make our world a safer place. But also, I think we need to look into ourselves and ask, how have I harbored violence in my life, in my own heart? How do I perpetuate violence from one place to the next person? I’ve had to search myself and realize, that I’ve used violent words or attitudes. I get into fights with Eugene, metaphorically but with very much guns blazing. And even, I’ve talked to myself with anger and violence against myself!

The New Reality

Let us repent. If we’re resisting the empire, then what are we leaning into? We are leaning into the New Jerusalem. Turn to the New Jerusalem. And what is the New Jerusalem? It is the place that is the reign of God, the way of Jesus: The place where God and People Live Together.

Revelation 21:3 describes it like this:

“Behold, the dwelling of God is with people, God will dwell with them, and they will be God’s people, and God’s self will be with them”

A little more difficult to explain. Because you can’t always see it. The empire is easier to point out. It’s like, remember the movie the Matrix. They were living in this world that wasn’t real, only a figment of their imagination that they were programmed to live and see. But then, Neo, finds the real world. And couldn’t live out his real potential in the fake world. The New Jerusalem is the real world. Babylon is only a gross counterfeit of that reality.

We’ve been learning that Revelation uses a lot of the Old Testament symbolism and metaphors. John’s description of New Jerusalem is again, Similar to Ezekiel’s vision, of restored Jerusalem, reconstructed temple, where ritual purity welcomes people into the temple: everyone’s welcome.

But the difference is, for John, there is no temple, and everyone’s a priest. He says, “I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb is its temple” Temple language has been central to Old Testament imagination of the divine. But rather, John sees, “the entire people who resist empire as a nation of priests”

New Jerusalem is a place where we reign with God as heirs. Like The Chronicles of Narnia! Little children becoming kings and queens of the nation. Unveiling Empire described it like this:

“Empire’s economic exploitation is reversed in New Jerusalem. Rather than stealing wealth and resources from the world, people and nations will freely bring their glory to the Holy City. The traditional image of nations bringing tribute to Zion is democratized to express people’s universal sharing of God’s gifts with one another. The residents of New Jerusalem live in an economy of gift, not of wage slavery or measured rewards. Abundance provided by God overflows on all without hoarding or greed.”

That is the New Jerusalem. And the big news is, the New Jerusalem has already begun. Jesus has already begun doing this. John wouldn’t be inviting us if that were not the case: it’s already happening, we just need to catch up. It is easier to stay in the Empire. But he proclaims, he announces, you must see this new kingdom coming! See it and join it. It’s happening all around us and Jesus Christ has begun it! Like in the Matrix, Neo couldn’t have figured everything out if he didn’t have Trinity and Morpheus helping! We can’t do it by ourselves. We know that God has already begun it. It’s not on you. The New Jerusalem is here. The kingdom of God is near. The kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of God is within you! John’s big statement is that the New Jerusalem is the new real reality, that Jesus has already unveiled this reality, we only need to open our eyes to it.

So what are we to do? Go resist, repent and come out. That’s a lot of things, and I know John in Revelation and I both invited you to do this. But the main new is, the good news isn’t, that you have so many things you need to do. The Good News isn’t: get busy, Jesus is coming. If I just gave you more things to do this week, well that wouldn’t be the gospel. Because grace. Whatever you do, go with grace. And don’t do it alone.

This is what I want to leave you with today:

The New Jerusalem is already here. Do you believe that? Can you see flag of the God’s reign planted here and there? Do you see it?
And our job is that, We only need to welcome and usher in this reality. Buy into it. Join in. Welcome to New Jerusalem.
And who rules the New Jerusalem? Jesus leads us in ruling this new reality. But, Jesus is a King unlike any other king, who lives with us and among us. That’s the kind of king we have.

Will you welcome this king? Will you welcome Jesus? On this Palm Sunday, we celebrate the welcoming of this king on a donkey by the same way the people did back then for Jesus, with palms. In the Roman culture, palms represented victory. They would wave palms around after war victory when welcoming the king and the soldiers back. It’s like the way we lay out red carpet for our highest honor nowadays, which I guess are mostly movie stars?

Will you pull out the Red carpet for one who does not adorn oneself in red carpet attire with gold and jewels, not in a limousine, but maybe in a tuk tuk, not on a war horse, but a donkey, not with fame and power, but with humility and sacrifice. Will you lay out your great welcome to Jesus in your life? Will you welcome Jesus?

Looking for God in Hard Times

I don’t know that I’ve ever told you this, but in my high school yearbook, I was voted Class Optimist. It was the peak of Generation X, we were all born during Watergate and at the end of the Vietnam War, smallish high school too – so the competition was low. But still, I’ve on the whole had a sunny enough disposition and I’ve tended to have a hopeful, trusting, optimistic read on life.

Some days, though…

Preachers sometimes have a little Sunday night/Monday morning let down. The come down after an intense experience. And last Sunday’s Speak Out Sunday was good, really good – I’m proud of you all, Reservoir, for what we can do together. But it was intense too.

And so Sunday night in the Watson household, there wasn’t much more going on than playing video games and watching the Superbowl. Which was kind of a downer. Now I know you all who aren’t from around here are probably sick of the Patriots, and I care about football a lot less than I used to, but still, it was a pretty disappointing finish to a great run around here.

And then Monday morning, I woke up to the day’s news cycle, which was pretty much the usual chaos and rage and awfulness – I mean really awful – and Monday morning is Monday morning after all, and getting my kids’ school weeks and our work weeks going had some drain and complexity to it.

So as I drove in to the ministry center Monday morning, my high school “class optimist” self wasn’t shining yet. Really the opposite. I was in a funk.

So I pulled over at Danehy park for a few minutes to take a walk, stretch my legs, maybe pray a little before starting my work for the day.

And at one point, I’m walking along, and I look up, and I see this incredible striated cloud formation – like ripple of cloud, blue sky, cloud, sky, patterned again and again. And the flat morning light is cutting across the whole thing, lighting it up. And I stopped in my tracks and just stood there and for a minute, I knew deep in my bones, that God was there.

I thought, I feel like I’m standing still, even though this park and these clouds and me, we’re spinning at almost a thousand miles an hour. And there’s all kinds of trouble in my heart and out in the world, and who knows how long all this will last, but my God, you made this all, and you are here and you are real.

And as I stood there, arms out, eyes open, I felt, Oh, it’s all going to be OK. We are not alone here. There is nothing to fear.

And then I realized I was probably humanly not alone in this park, and I turned my head a little, and there was someone coming up behind me walking their dog, and I was like, “Hey”, and I went on with my day.

Now, what happened there? One possibility is that my susceptible brain, soaked in spiritual ideas and language, saw something arresting and made up a story, invented a transcendent experience. Who knows? It’s possible.

But another possibility is that I caught a window into something else going on in the universe. A deeper sense, a greater clarity, of God with us. Our age, our natural world as we know it functioning alongside something we might call God’s world. This has been called a lot of things – heaven, God’s kingdom within us or among us or near at hand.

And it’s this possibility that our hard times are not all that is going on around us that I want to explore today in this last talk in our series, Ways We Destroy the World, and how God Brings Good Out of That.

This winter, we’ve been looking at personal problems and also at systemic problems that people create – human choices and patterns and culture that miss the mark (what religious tradition calls sin). And we’ve found many of these present-day problems anchored in the ancient narratives of the Bible’s first book, where we’ve found direction as well for experiences of redemption – of good turns coming out of bad.

And I want to wrap up today not talking about one missing the mark issue in particular, but more our sense that the whole show has gone off script. Our feeling that many people have had before that we live in hard times, in a fractured world. Where so much micro and macro human culture seems irretrievably broken.

We’ll look at this experience people have again and again of sensing that in the middle of that, God is still here. And that God has magnetism – that the hope and presence and love and purpose and voice of God can shape its own good reality and direction right in the middle of the world as we know it.

One night, that happens for Jacob in a dream.

10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” 17 And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
18 So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first. 20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, 21 so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, 22 and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.”

Genesis 28:10-22 (NRSV)

A few weeks back, our pastor Ivy gave a talk about Jacob the scheming hustler learning to find peace with himself and with God. Jacob’s story has also meant a lot to me, so this is a Jacob, part II talk – really a prequel. Because when Ivy picked up his story for us, Jacob was a middle aged man of success. Even though he was still haunted by his past, he was living large. But when we meet him in this story, he’s a young and scrappy loaner. He’s sleeping outdoors alone with nothing but a rock for a pillow because he’s looking for a life partner – and you all know how rough the dating scene can be – true then in its own way. And Jacob is also running away from home.

Because at home, Jacob was part of this jacked up family system where his mom favored him and his dad favored his twin brother, and his parents themselves didn’t have much of a marriage most likely… and so Jacob and his mom conspired to steal his big brother’s larger inheritance, something that Jacob had been gunning for, in a way, his whole life.

And last we see him before this dream, Jacob was nestled in the embrace of his dad, being told that he’s loved and blessed and favored… only because his dad thinks he’s his brother. Can you imagine what it would be like to finally have the affection and approval you want from your dad, but knowing you’re only getting it because he thinks you’re one of your sibling? Like if you were on the phone with your dad and he was going on about how much he loves you and is proud of you but then realizes, wait a second, I thought you were your sister… nevermind…

Well, after that whole sad drama, Jacob’s brawnier brother with a temper wants to kill him, and now he’s on the run…

Jacob’s times are pretty hard. Things are not right in his world – when he goes to bed, and then God appears to him. This is the most awesome of dreams – and it gave both Jesus and Led Zeppelin some sweet lines to work with as they both talked about ladders or stairways to heaven. And for Jacob, this ladder, covered with angels, is a portal to another world. The show Stranger Things had portals to another world, what they call the flip side, or the upsidedown world. There, it’s a portal to something like hell.

Jacob’s other world, though, is a good one, he calls this spot “a gate to heaven.” And names the place Beth-el, House of God, because he says, My God, who knew? You are here.

Scattered around the Bible, here and there, are these portal moments when God shows up and talks with people. Bible scholars call these moments theophanies – appearances of God. And in these theophanies, a few things tend to happen, things that aren’t to be different to be honest, from what I sensed on Monday in the park down the street.

In these moments, people get a vivid sense God is here. Along with that, they hear or feel that God has promises, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. And then usually before the moment ends, people get a sense of direction, like there’s something to do. In Jacob’s case, he isn’t even directly told something to do, but he has this impulse of gratitude, and to be connected with and loyal to this God, with his life and his possessions too.

Genesis again is littered with these portals into God’s world being open to us, there being this gateway to heaven, not just in the future, but right now. Well, in Genesis, they stop at one point, we’ll talk about that in a minute, but up until late in the book, they are relatively common.

And again, these are experiences that many people have still, that we are not alone, that God is with us.

Why is this interesting and hopeful and relevant to me today, not just something I write off as crazy or superstitious?

Well, I’ll start by saying that I think that in 2018, we’re keenly aware we are living in hard times.

I was watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday night, which was gorgeous, if you didn’t see it. I mean there were odd parts – like the ring of women in the pink snow-pants that did those non-stop dance cheers for an hour straight while all the athletes walked in… that was kind of really cheery and impressive and really strange all at once. But mostly it was beautiful. Large animals with symbolism in Korean culture, cute children, magnificently choreographed drumming and dancing, fireworks, gestures of peace between long-divided South and North Korea. It was really wonderful.

But at some point, NBC brought a non-sports commentator into the act and asked him to talk about what this all means for today’s geopolitics. And the guy was like, well, this is really significant. Because this could be the beginning of a new era of peace, or it could be the last calm before the storm, as war breaks out and engulfs us all.

Well, he might not have said something quite so bleak, but I think it was close. And you can’t help but think about the fragile state of our globe while watching this incredible show of culture and athleticism just forty miles from the border of North Korea, which has been isolated from the South and most of the rest of the world for the past sixty-five years.

Last winter our Board member Connie Chung preached in our series on the stories Jesus told, and she talked about a phrase she’s learned about the world we live in, in the context of her work in international education. She says people call it a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. That description of our world has somewhat haunted me this year.

I mean it’s hard to be class-optimist-me sitting watching the Olympics when our president and the dictator of this isolated totalitarian regime are dickering about who’s got the bigger nuclear weapons launch button. Talk about volatile and uncertain!

The trust in our leadership and institutions that was deteriorating when I was born in the early 70s has just fallen off a cliff as so many of our so-called leaders in government and religion and industry disappoint.

And if we’re kids or students, or if we’re raising kids, it feels like a scary world to future to step into sometimes.

There’s a very old, and in some circles, very famous theologian named Jurgen Moltmann. And Moltmann posted something on twitter last week… or given that he’s 92 years old, maybe his people put on twitter, but either way, it was this:

“Anxiety is the reason why many young people are not just afraid of death, but are already afraid of life.”

I read that line and it stopped me in my feet. How sad and how true, that in our VUCA, hard times world, there’s so much to be afraid of.

But what does all this hard times talk have to do with theophanies and portals to an experience of God is with us?

To be clear, as I always say, it’s not that God-with-us removes every anxiety and solves every problem. No. It’s that keeping one foot in our hardscrabble world and planting another where we most experience God to be good and real and present births hope for us. And hope is a powerful thing.

Back to that 92-year-old tweeter Jurgen Moltmann for a moment.

Moltmann is one of the most significant thinkers and writers about God in the late twentieth century. But his life began in hard times, and without any awareness of God with him.

Moltmann was raised in Nazi Germany, and when he was sixteen years old, just after he took his entrance exams for university, he was instead drafted into the German army to help defend his country, just as the war had turned against them.

So at 16, he left home and began life as a soldier. It was a short life, because as the Allies advanced on Germany, Moltmann surrendered to the first British soldier he met. And he was promptly sent to a prisoner of war camp, where he spent the next few years.

In that camp, he was utterly in despair. He had lost his home, his family, and his childhood. He had seen the death and destruction and futility of war. And then as he moved about from prison camp to prison camp, the people in charge would post photographs in their huts, photographs of Germany’s concentration camps. And each day Moltmann had to look at the horrible, horrible things his culture and leaders had done at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Moltmann says he lost all hope in his culture and that he often wished he could have died along with friends who had been killed in war than live to face what their nation had done.

In the middle of his despair in such hard times, Moltmann was given a copy of the Bible’s New Testament and Psalms, most of which he had never read or heard.

And he remembers reading the gospel of Mark, and getting to the point near the end, where Jesus, as he is dying on the cross, cries out, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

In that moment, Moltmann says, he felt, There is a divine brother, who feels the same feelings that I do. He felt: this is a God I can believe in. And that saved him from his desperation and self-destruction. In a time and place where he had no cause for hope, he found it. Actually, Moltmann talks about that experience more as a theophany, as God appearing to him through that thin Bible. He says, I didn’t find Christ, Christ found me.

Jurgen Moltmann’s experience reminds me that there are so many portals around, so many different ways God can capture our attention with awareness that God is with us. It can be a dream like Jacob’s, a moment in prayer or in the natural world like I described at the top, or the Spirit of God catching as we read the Bible. Or lots of other ways.

Each time, though, as with me, as with Jacob, as with Moltmann here, fear decreases, a sense of promise and direction increase.

We call this hope. Restlessness with the world as it is, discontent with our hard times. But hope for the future grounded in God being with us. Which for Moltmann and for me, is tied to our experience of feeling this is so, but also to our hope and belief that Jesus is risen from the dead, and so alive with us still by his Spirit.

This is the hope that moved Jurgen Moltmann out of his nearly suicidal despair in a post-World War II prison camp and led him to become one of the most famous thinkers and writers of his age about God and specifically about hope. Hope called him not just to live, but to become a messenger of hope in his scholarship.

This hope that we are not alone, that God is with us, kept Jacob moving in the wilderness when he had the promise of some future success, but had lost his brother, and lost his father who he never really had. Hope called Jacob to start to trust God, and to commit to generosity, to devote his wealth to a higher good.

This hope I cultivate with one foot in the up and down circumstances of my life, and one foot planted in the presence and promise of God, gives me courage to try to do hard things that I want to do, that I feel my job and my life call me to do.

This is what hope does. It calls us to things. Sometimes hope calls us to courage – to do the hard thing we wouldn’t otherwise do. Sometimes, hope calls u to surrender – to trust God with the things we can’t do anything about, and to find joy and peace in the present.

Sometimes, though, hope can be hard to find. Or the sense of God with us that will birth hope can be hard to find. In fact historically, the more advanced and compelling our world is, the harder it can be to see God’s world, the smaller the portals seem to be. Had Germany won the war, perhaps Moltmann doesn’t get found by Christ who shared his sense of abandonment. If Jacob doesn’t have to go on the run, perhaps he just stays a hustler and a schemer.

In Genesis, the theophanies stop when they get to Egypt… and don’t start again until Moses leaves and is out of empire, off in the desert wilderness…

And now here we are in 21st century America, where the prosperity and peace and comforts our empire offers would embarrass ancient Egypt. And in times and places that aren’t just volatile and uncertain and fractured, but also promise so much, it can be harder to see and stay oriented in God’s world.

So next Sunday, we’re going to look together. We’ll start our annual season we call 40 Days of Faith. It’s our church’s spin on the ancient season of Lent leading up to Easter, when churches have encouraged people to break the regular rhythms of life and together look to God in some deeper way.

Our church first celebrated this season in 2003. Back then, our church needed a building to meet in and then when a building came on the market, needed an impossibly large sum of money to be able to purchase it. During the forty days leading to Easter, people were invited to pray that God would do something extraordinary to make the impossible possible, in the life of the church community and in the big dreams and concerns of individual people’s lives as well. People were also invited to embrace the historic tone of this season, and to interrupt the usual fabric of their life and practice spiritual formation disciplines to go deeper in faith and move closer to God.

Well, it worked – by the end of that season, millions of dollars were raised, a gorgeous church campus was ours, and dozens of other miracles were reported by members of the community. And in addition to all those things that felt like results, people really enjoyed the ride.

Ever since then, we’ve continued the practice of breaking our ordinary rhythms, entering into some spiritually formative practices, and asking God to do some big things on our behalf. The results of the big prayers have been mixed, but it’s been consistently rewarding and often pretty fun too. So next Sunday, Ivy will kick off our season inviting us to wonder whether we’re sitting on a big prayer we’d like to ask of God, or whether we’d rather sit out that part of the season this year.

Additionally, we’re calling this year’s 40 days “Children of God in a Fractured World”. And I’ve written a daily Bible guide in the Bible’s last book, called Revelation, which not a lot of people read these days, and when they do, they tend to read it pretty badly. Because it’s basically poetry, and it’s in this old symbolic genre called apocalypse that not many people understand very well. But when you let it grab your imagination and settle in with a trusty guide – which I hope to be for you – it can actually be a great place to try to peel back the curtain to another world, one of these portals to discover that God might be with us still and up to some beautiful things.

Revelation was written to first century communities of faith to help them find God with them in their own hard times under the Roman empire. And I think we can still find it helpful as part of finding God with us in our own age of American empire.

So on this year’s 40 Days of Faith, we’ll invite you into to step further into a counter-cultural and courageous journey to follow Jesus as God’s child and to find hope and courage to resist the worst of our times, letting Jesus – and not our crazy-making world – center us, and give us hope.

In that spirit, let me close out today with a few things you might consider trying.

Program Notes – Try This:

Go all in on this year’s 40 Days of Faith.

Look for the portals – watch for how God might be getting your attention.

Is there a time when God seemed vividly real to you? If so, remember it again and again – dare to believe it was real.

Give yourself to how hope calls you to live.

(The above is a close, but not exact text version of the sermon from 2/11/2018)

Number in Series: Sixth

On Saving Your Soul

Romans 8:15-17, 22-27, 35-39 (CEB)

Paying Attention to a Communicative God

An Invitation to Whole Life Flourishing

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Palm Sunday: Jesus’ Journey into the Wilderness

What Do You Think?

Relying On Another’s Voice

Conceptual and Relational Belief

Everyday Sacred Spaces

Surprised By Humanity

An Invitation to Whole-life Flourishing:

Spiritual Practice of the Week:

Our Problem with Personhood: The Face of God in the Face of Another

Genesis 32:21-22, 26, 31, 33:8-10 (Schocken)

A Tip for Whole Life Flourishing:

Spiritual Practice of the Week:

Stop Giving Your Money to Bad Systems

Come Out: Repentance as Resistance

The Lie of an Empire

Revelation 18:4-5 (New Revised Standard Version)

Resistance

Repentance

What injustice do you see?

The New Reality

Looking for God in Hard Times

Program Notes – Try This:

Jesus the Conqueror of Death

The Joy of Knowing You’re Doing the Will of God