Speaker: Steve Watson

Burdens

Glory, glory, hallelujah…

I start us out by singing today because at least for me, it takes me somewhere. Somewhere less burdened, somewhere more joyful, more free. 

I would love for us to go there together, my friends. 

We are burdened people, I believe. We are anxious, stressed, weighed down, carrying a lot of troubles. For some of us, it’s more true than others. 

Some of us are more prone to stress than others. Some of us more prone to worry or anxiety. 

Some of us carry trauma in our bodies. That internalized fear and pain – old or new or some of both – can be a burden. Awareness of others suffering can be a burden. Those of us in the helping professions and those of us who are parents may face this kind of compassion fatigue a lot. But all of us, in our wired up, globalized age know more about more people’s suffering than any of our ancestors did, and that’s a lot to know when most of it we can’t do anything about. 

I’ve talked with women of color in my life about what it means to have both your culture and your gender be frequent targets of violence and frequently experiencing inequity and harm, knowing that there’s generations more of this in your backstory. There is growing research on how the effects of trauma can be passed down through generations. That’s a lot of burden too.

We are a burden-bearing people. 

I’m not an expert on all this. This is also a sermon, not a treatment course in trauma, anxiety, or other specific forms of burden.

So know that I’m not pretending to have the last word on getting free from our burdens today or anything. But I think there is wisdom, there is invitation in the scriptures, in the faith tradition of Jesus and his ancestors and his followers too, that we also easily forget or have never heard or don’t put into practice very much.

So I’d like to tap that tradition a little today, share a couple of stories and tips around what to do with the burdens we carry, how to maybe pick up a few less and lay down a few more, and find more of that Glory, Glory joy and freedom in our days. 

Alright?

I’ve got three scriptures. Here’s the first:

Psalm 55:22 (New Revised Standard Version)

Cast your burden on the Lord,

    and he will sustain you;

he will never permit

    the righteous to be moved.

I first heard that verse when I sang it. In high school, I joined a community chorus with my dad where we sang the choral dramatization of the life of Elijah the prophet. And in the middle of it, there’s this beautiful setting of this verse. 

Cast your burden upon the Lord. It’s beautiful. 

How do you do that, though? How do you throw your burden onto God’s back, so God can carry you, strengthen you?

When I first sang this verse, I was both picking up and starting to put down burdens at the same time. 

I had experienced secrecy and neglect around some trauma in my life, and that was still buried at the time. I was just starting to become an ambitious and driven person to be able to put a life together for myself, one that I love and am proud of but that 25-30 years later, in my 40s, I had to stop and reevaluate parts of. We’ll come back to that, but this was in some ways a season of accumulating burdens.

And yet, the beginnings of laying down my burdens were happening too.

I became convinced in my teen years that God, the creator of the universe, knew and loved me. That spoke to my lonely self, so that was a laying down of burden. 

After I moved out of home, I started to be able to name and understand my trauma story. I got help learning about it, I got curious about what was going on inside me. I was able to see a therapist for a while. And this work was hard but it helped me know more acceptance and love for myself and freedom, helped me let go of some of the shame I carried. So that was a laying down of burdens too. 

I started learning how to notice my feelings when they happen and talk to someone about them – basic I know. But I was learning how to pray and learning how to have better friendships than I ever had as a kid. And this was freeing too. 

And I realized that I was entering my adult life with a ton of fear of failure – fear of career failure and fear of financial failure too. And the spiritual resources I found in my faith community helped me start to lay that burden down.

All these layers of starting to lay down burdens as I grew up, none of them happened by myself. They all happened in relationships with God and friends. 

This laying down of burdens, I think mostly we don’t do it alone. We need partners, people to help us pull stuff off our back and let it go. 

I love this old documentary called Strong at the Broken Places. It’s the story of four people who came of age facing immense trauma. And all four of them find enough healing in their broken places, enough recovery in their trauma, that their very weaknesses, healed in part, enable them to help many, many others find their recovery. 

One of them, Max Cleland, was profoundly disabled during the Vietnam War, and then faced depression and PTSD after returning home before finding the help he needed to heal and to serve others in public life, even becoming a US Senator. He quotes Hemingway, who wrote:

“The world breaks everyone but afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

And Cleland says that’s his story, and it’s a story he’s seen in others, that with the help of God and friends, we can be strong at the broken places.

We don’t do it alone. The help of God and friends is the key. Life’s too hard to be a solo sport. We all need help with our burdens. None of us can carry them, or even give them to God, alone. 

This is one of the reasons this church has community groups – places to know and be known. Grace and I pull together an online group Thursday nights for parents of younger kids. We check in over Zoom, often about our burdens or those of our kids, and pray together. That’s it. Pretty simple. But a place to not be alone in our burdens.

In my Saturday morning Bible study here, we study the Bible but we also each share some way we’ve found life this past week or some way our lives could be better. It’s also a place to not be alone in our burdens. 

Because I’m a pastor in this community, I also have friendships and groups outside of this church where I can make my burdens known. Without those circles of friendship, I wouldn’t even notice many of the burdens I’m carrying, and I certainly wouldn’t have the kindness and empathy and prayer and support that helps me not keep carrying them. 

So, friends, we don’t cast our burdens unto God all by ourselves. We do it together. 

I’ve also mentioned prayer. And I want to say a little more about that. Prayer is a lot of things, but one thing it is is when we offer our burdens and our gratitude to God, and God gives us God’s peace. 

I get that description of one kind of prayer from these powerful lines in one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, the fourth chapter in the letter to the Philippians, where it says:

Philippians 4:6-7 (Common English Bible)

6 Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks.

7 Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

I share this and pray this for others a lot, that they won’t get stuck with their burdens dominating their mind, but that they can ask God for help and as they do remember there’s so much to be grateful for too. Because that combination of gratitude, perspective, and reaching out to our Mother/Father God for help has brought so many of us profound peace, peace that keeps us safe, peace that keeps us well, peace that goes beyond our understanding.

Last month, I needed help remembering this teaching for myself. I was in a lot of conversations with people who were facing high stakes problems – big, big burdens. And normally it is not hard for me to show up as a pastor and a friend to other people’s pain. I feel sad with them, sad with you, each time this happens, but to be a friend, a support, a help in it is actually fulfilling for me. 

But last month, it was getting to me for some reason. I was thinking about other people’s problems at random times of the day, having some of the sadness and stress of other people start to feel like my own, and I was telling my therapist about this, and remembering this way I’ve prayed for burdens, out of this teaching in Philippians.

If I can, I share with God – I say it out loud, or I write it down – here’s something, someone I’m grateful for right now. Gratitude is a great perspective maker – there’s always more than our burden.

And then the burden prayer has four parts.

I picture the burden, and I say I really care about this, God. 

And then I say, if I think it’s true, I’ve done what I can. I’ve done my part. Or if I haven’t yet, I say to God, I will do my part. I will do what I can.

Burden releasing is not an excuse for apathy or irresponsibility. We’re called to do something about our burdens and the burdens of the people we love. But we’re not gods either. We can’t do it all.

So: I care. I’ll do my part. Or I’ve done my part.

And then I say to God:

this is too big for me.

And I tell myself, and I tell God what I can’t do, or what I don’t know how to do.

And then I usually stick my hands out, and I say:

I release this to your care, God.

I was telling my therapist about this, and she was like:

do you want to do that now? 

And so, in front of my therapist, who does not share the details of my faith at all, I named a person I love whose burden felt so heavy and I prayed my way through this, naming to God: 

I care about them.

I have done and I will continue to do my part. 

But also, this is bigger than me.

And God, Abba, Mother/Father, I release them to your care. 

My therapist affirmed the peace she saw this bringing me, and she stretched me a little too. She said:

Steve, you know sometimes you need to release the people you love not just to God but to themselves.

You have to remember that parts of their stress and problems, you can help with, but parts are for them and not for you. You have the trust that they too will own their healing journey. And so, I’m adding that to my prayers, saying before God, you know, God, that this isn’t mine to keep carrying.

The scriptures after all admonish us:

Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

To bear one another’s burdens is one way we fulfill Jesus’ law:

to love our neighbor as ourselves. 

But it says: bear one another’s burdens, help carry them for a while, be a friend, but it does not tell us to hold on to another’s burdens or make them our own. 

A lot of the inner work, the spiritual work I’ve been doing in my late 40s has been about learning to live with less driven-ness and less stress, to live more present, more free and joyful, and with more peace.

This giving God my burdens is part of it.

And rest is too. Rest, what the scriptures call sabbath rhythms. 

We let go of our burdens with partnership and help. 

We let go of our burdens in prayer.

And we let go of our burdens, and pick up fewer in the first place, with rest. 

Jesus said:

Matthew 11:28-30 (Common English Bible)

28 “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.

29 Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves.

30 My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

Jesus reminds us that heavy loads and struggles are never ours to bear alone. We need the help of God and friends. Jesus pictures himself as a leader and a partner to us in our struggles.

Walk with me,

he says.

Learn from me.

And Jesus offers and encourages rest in this. 

Jesus was born into a culture and a faith where this was really important, still is really important. As people whose founding stories go back to enslavement, Jews were commanded to practice regular rhythms of rest, worship, joy, and delight.

God said:

don’t forget you once were slaves, and don’t ever let that happen to you again. Be free people. 

And part of how they did that was by not working at all one day per week. And using that day for connection, for worship, for rest, and for that which brings joy.

In Hebrew, it’s called shabbat, or sabbath. 

And that refers to a weekly rhythm of not working and resting, but also to daily and over the course of years, seasonal times of rest and delight, stuff that helps remember that the earth and the labor of other people is not there for us to always work and exploit. And our own lies are not to always be worked and exploited.

We were made for freedom. We were made for joy. We were made, in part, for rest.

I have the blessing of regular rhythms of this. Even when life is busy, when life feels burdened, I try to practice daily small rhythms of rest. Reading something I enjoy almost every night before I go to sleep, listening to a song I love or taking a five minute stretch walk between meetings, rather than cramming in just a little more email. 

But whether or not I keep rhythms of rest throughout my day, I take a day off every week, where I will not work, and I make sure to for at least part of it, spend more time than most days in prayer, and where I get outside for longer because that brings life to me, or where I do something else I love for at least a little, when I can with a person that I love. 

Lastly, I’m blessed to be in a job that allows for longer periodic bits of rest. Our staff at church all get four paid weeks of vacation a year. And our pastors are allowed to apply for a paid, three month break – a sabbatical – once every seven years. This kind of thing is really rare in our driven form of capitalism. I feel almost awkward announcing it, but this summer, I’m taking three months off. I’ve been granted a sabbatical. 

I’m going to hang out with my kids much more as they start to become adults and leave home. And I’m going to get outside more. And my family got a clergy renewal grant to take a big trip too that we couldn’t afford otherwise. 

I’m aware that this is an immense blessing. I feel incredibly lucky, really grateful for this. 

I’m aware that for many people, these kind of daily and weekly, and longer, seasonal periods of rest can be much harder to find. For people who don’t get paid time off in their jobs, for parents of young kids, for people just scraping by economically, for lots of us, we wonder: how can we take a break? 

And listen, friends, I’d be the last person to ever minimize those struggles. But I will just say, that if we follow Jesus, we do into a tradition that invites and even commands rhythms of rest as part of a flourishing, unburdened life. 

We don’t get joy, and we don’t get freedom without it.

So a few ways I’ve known people to be creative with their needs for daily, weekly, and seasonal rest.

I’ve known people who prioritize their sleep hygiene. Like, maybe my waking life has no breathers, but I’m at least going to do what’s in my power to get better sleep. So they do stuff like not have their phones by their bedside, or at least have them off for an hour before bed, and other stuff that we know helps us sleep better.

I’ve known people who make lists of 5-10 things that bring them joy, because life’s hard enough they can forget those things, and when they have an unexpected break – some extra childcare, an easy day at work when they don’t have to push so hard – they let themselves just have joy for a while.

I’ve known people that when they are between jobs find a way to take a month off to just not be a worker for a season, people who ask for and get short medical leaves at work for their mental health, people make deals with their housemates or families they live with to change the rhythm of life in their household for one day a week.

People that take in less social media and less news, since they realize we’re not called to know everything or have an opinion about everything but to be people who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly – and joyfully and freely – with God. Less exposure, more connection, more action, brings a lot of rest.

You get the idea. We all need daily and weekly and seasonal rest. We’ll never find much joy or much freedom without it. 

Friends, I hope you found this little tour through laying down our burdens through help and prayer and rest useful to you.

Deconstruction: Necessity, Tragedy, Opportunity

I’ve got a weird scripture for us today. It’s not hard to find one. The Bible is really old. Different times, different places, different people. So weird is easy to find. But I think this weird passage might be useful to many of us in the context of our own weird moment we’re living in. 

Our big word for today is deconstruction. It’s a big buzz word in the cultural and religious experience of times. And our weird Bible passage is from the end of the letter called Hebrews. I’ll just read three verses. 

Hebrews 13:12-14 (Common English Bible)

12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy with his own blood.

13 So now, let’s go to him outside the camp, bearing his shame.

14 We don’t have a permanent city here, but rather we are looking for the city that is still to come.

Nineteen years ago, my dad and I were deconstructing a home we’d just bought and that I live in now.

Long story short, insane work ethic + good luck + white privilege meant my grandpa left a bunch of resources to his one daughter and his three grandsons, and so Grace and I had more money than we had any right to have in our late 20s. 

At the same time, Grace’s parents were aging and without savings and owned a two-family house that needed a lot of work. So Grace and I bought the house from them – gave them all the funds we had to live in her childhood home and raise our family there, and provide a place for her parents to age in place without financial stress as well. 

The catch was the house was old and had not been very well maintained, so we borrowed a lot of money to take care of it. We fixated at first on all the paint and all the windows. We had a baby about to turn two and were thinking we’d have more kids and we thought probably this place is bathed in lead paint. And we didn’t want our babies to be full of that lead. So we were like: we have got to get rid of it all.

Now my dad at the time was in his 50s and was unemployed, but he’d worked as a building contractor most of my childhood and still had his license, and he was like: I will give you a few months of my time to do this thing with you. And that whole winter, that’s what my dad did. He labored on that house. I’d join him when I could on the weekends or in the afternoons when I got out of my job as a teacher but he did a lot solo. So much honor to him for this. All that love and service – so much honor. I aim to be this kind of dad for my own grown kids. 

Anyway, we tore out all the window frames first. And then we were like, these windows are incredibly old – they have got to go as well. 

And then with the windows and the frames coming out, we were like why are we keeping all these walls and ceilings. They’re probably covered in lead paint too, and they’re not all that straight either. 

You can see where this is going. We rented an enormous dumpster to put in the driveway, and frame by frame, all by wall, we deconstructed a whole bunch of that house. 

A few things. Don’t. Don’t do this, please.

But seriously, first, maybe, it was necessary. Grace and I loved our kids. We loved her parents. We were trying to love this house to serve all of us. And the more we pulled apart, the more we discovered that had to go. Like that time the electrician came by and was like – woah, shut everything off. I gotta tear all this wiring out cause we’re about to have a fire. And we were like: we don’t think so, it’s been like that for twenty, thirty years. She couldn’t believe it. But she was right, the wiring had to go too. Deconstructing a ton of that house was probably necessary.

But it was also horrible. So messy, I mean, I didn’t wear a mask almost at all and the amount of plaster and all kinds of other stuff that’s been hanging out in my lungs ever since. Sheesh…. So much headache. And my poor dad, laboring away there day after day, mostly by himself, for no pay, and a not always very grateful kid. I’m sure there were times when both of us wondered why we had done this.

And lastly, we needed a better guide. I mean no offense to my dad, who again, was heroic, but I’m not so sure looking back that we really had to tear down every single wall and ceiling. It was a lot of time rebuilding all those, and there were some other things that we really could have done instead. And if we were going to tear down every wall, like why didn’t we make sure we put up proper closets? This mistake has come up just a few times over the past 19 years. We needed a guide, someone who could help us make better choices, who could help us figure out where we were trying to go, and how to get there.

Deconstruction of all kinds is like this really. It’s often necessary, it’s usually tragic, though, and full of danger. And yet it’s a work of great possibilities if we know where we’re trying to go and can get help getting there. 

The word deconstruction comes from postmodern philosophy, where it means something more technical. These days, though, deconstruction has taken on a broader meaning. It’s a word for what we do when we find that some system we’ve lived in isn’t working any more, and we’ve got to pull it apart and find our way out. A lot of the time this deconstruction is about religion. 

You realize the religious house you’ve been living in is going to poison your kids. Or there’s no room in the house for you or for someone you love. Or the house is too small or shabby or it’s got bones in the basement, and you need to figure out which parts of it you’ve got to tear down and renovate if you’re going to stay, or even if you decide to leave all together.

It’s necessary. When you realize your house is toxic, or it feels more like a prison than a home, you’ve got to do something about it.

Also, though, it’s dangerous, it’s tragic. I mean who wants to tear up their house? So much pain, so much loss. There’s nothing sexy about it. 

But if you can figure out where you want to go, it can be quite the opportunity. But you need help. You need guides.

My religious deconstruction, if that’s what I would call it, started around the same time we were tearing up our house. Our first child, as a toddler, told us: Mommy and Daddy, only men can be pastors. Our little girl, something like two years old, had figured this out. And we looked around our church and it was clear why she had come to that conclusion. 

So we were like: we’re out of here. There were other things said in our evangelical church that we couldn’t abide, so many things, but this was the tipping point. We weren’t going to raise our daughter in a church that had these rigid views of male authority and female submission. No way. 

And on it went. As I got space from some of the ideas and people that had so influenced my faith in my late teens and early to mid 20s, I started reevaluating a whole ton of things I had taken for granted.

Some of it was so great! Like realizing, I mean not just in my head but in my bones that our religion should lead to flourishing, like good faith has got to make good fruit, that was so helpful. So if I had some religious notion that made me more of a jerk, more judgy, less empathetically kind, it probably had to go. It probably was never true in the first place! So liberating. Stuff that John Calvin or some other dead Christian made up cherry picking some bit of the Bible wasn’t gospel truth after all. It could go. That felt great.

But other stuff, man, it has been hard. Like when I became convinced that gay people had the right to fall in love without being ashamed, that queer people, people represented in the LGBTQIA spectrum deserve the chance to partner and marry if they want with God’s help and blessing. True confession, it took me a while to get there, maybe longer than it should, but when I did, I was stunned by the degree of anger and resistance around that. Small potatoes compared to the suffering and rejection that queer friends and colleagues have faced, small pain compared to what some of you have endured, my friends, but the curses, the cut off relationships and connections, the implications that I didn’t know scripture or wasn’t serious about my faith – are you kidding me? 

There was a time I was supposed to share about our church at a conference – just one of many dozens of seminars, not a main talk or anything, but it was canceled. I, we, were canceled. But in an effort I kept up for years at peacemaking with people that didn’t want me in their lives, I went to this conference anyway with my wife. And in the opening worship session, people were standing up, singing about their love for Jesus and all, and I noticed Grace next to me in tears. 

And I was like: what’s going on? And later, she wondered: why do these people reject us? I mean, when I became a Christian, I thought I was getting a family, a safe and loving community. But it’s not. 

She was so right, and that made me so angry. I felt the pain too, but the pain in someone I love so much cut deeper. How dare people cut lines of judgment and exclusion like this!

Or to have the experience so many parents have had and have your own child say:

you and your church seem pretty good. But most Christians are bad news for the world. They’re bad news for me. I don’t want any part of it.

That makes me even more angry, more heartbroken. 

I could go on: the dug-in defensiveness of most White Christians around how much racism, how much white supremacy – preference for whiteness – is baked into the American Christian experience, inherited from the European colonial legacy. I mean the fact that this is a thing, and that this is a problem, is not subtle, but the defensiveness, the denial, the angry attacks from some corners when this comes up, it can be unbearable. 

I visited one of our community groups recently, one where I knew a number of people were part of Reservoir’s community as part of their own untangling of versions of Christian religion they couldn’t abide any more. I wanted to listen to their experience a little more, and I heard the same.

Moving on, moving forward, tearing down some of the bad stuff wasn’t a choice. It was a must, a necessity. Even though it was hard. Lost certainties, lost confidence, lost churches – no one wants this if they don’t have to. 

But the other thing that came up was this third part, that moving forward isn’t easy.

  • What do you do with your sadness and your anger?
  • What’s left of your faith after parts of it are gone? 
  • When you’ve had to tear down parts of what used to be your home, what do you build in its stead?
  • How do you not freeze and do nothing?
  • And how do you not just rebuild another version of what you had before? 
  • And how do you not end up like my dad, doing most of this by himself?
  • Who are our partners in this big change?
  • Who are our guides?

It’s in this context I’m drawn to this passage of Hebrews I’ve read. It affirms the difficulty of a journey outside a broken but conventional power system. And it gives us a pointer toward guides we can trust.

It’s a weird text. Like half, two thirds of it is obvious and good encouragement. Be more hospitable. Treat your marriage if you have one like it’s sacred because it is. Visit prisoners, pray for them. Be good to your pastors. Basic Jesus stuff, even if we mostly don’t do it. That’s why it’s there.

But then there’s this weird bit in the middle. Some scholars call it one of the more difficult passages in the New Testament. 

It says don’t be misled by strange teachings. But then no one really agrees on what these strange teachings are. Something to do with food and altars, but not much agreement around what this all means. 

Best as I can tell, there’s a general vibe, though, which is don’t get into weird religious stuff. Like you can take religion too seriously, too far. 

But then there’s this bit about Jesus our teacher. The writer of Hebrews points to the animal sacrifices in the temple, and quotes the temple procedure book of Leviticus to draw a comparison. It says the blood of the animals was shed in the temple, but then their bodies were dumped outside the city, beyond the gates. And then the writer is like: same with Jesus. 

Jesus suffered outside the city gate. They took his body outside the camp, so to speak, and shed his blood there. All the ways that Jesus and his shed blood helps us become holy, the ways that Jesus makes us whole – that’s a bigger conversation for another day. For today, though, let’s take Jesus’ blood as a stand in for the self-giving love of Jesus. 

Self-giving love got Jesus thrown outside the gates. The city, the camp, the establishment – both Jewish and Roman – didn’t get Jesus. They didn’t want him. Instead, they drove him out and killed him there. I’ve visited the two places archaeologists think are the most likely spots Jesus was crucified. Both beyond the city walls. And both visible, rocky areas where people traveling to Jerusalem would see what was happening and mock the crucified or be terrified themselves. That was the point. Maximum shame for the naked, humiliated victim. Maximum intimidation for the crowd. 

And the writer of Hebrews is like, let’s follow him there, pilgrims. Let’s go. 

Brad Jersak leans into this verse in this amazing book on deconstruction. It’s called Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction. 

He’s like: friends, the camp has failed us. He writes,

“American Christianity as a colonial extension of European Christendom has run its course and is no longer tenable.”

Most forms of American Christianity, it makes sense to leave behind. They’ve piled up too much crap around the treasure of Jesus. They’ve failed.

This is one gift of this passage. When human power institutions, including religious ones fail you, do not be surprised. Because human power institutions are almost never built upon self-giving love. They’re constructed around the power and interests of the people who built them. 

Take the forms of Christianity we’ve inherited in our times and place. The whole thing started as a Jesus movement. The way of Jesus, the way of trust in a beautiful unseen God, way of receiving and giving self-giving love. But centuries later, the center of the faith was systematized and standardized and rigidified by power brokers in the Roman Empire, and then parts of it passed down and down by European power brokers, people who came to hate Jews, people who got scared of Muslims and battled them, people with land interests and wealth interests to defend, people that got in mind to colonize and enslave the peoples of the earth as part of their project for global domination. 

The faith we inherited in this country, the gift of European colonizers, had gone through centuries of evolution toward patriarchy, white supremacy, and the interests of the powerful, and away from justice, humility, mercy, and self-giving love. How do we know? Theologian Tripp Fuller puts it this way. He says so much of our religion has gone from bearing crosses to building them. From bearing crosses to building them. Nails in the hand, to hammer in the hand. But you can only trust Christians who bear crosses, not build them. 

So friends, if you’ve confronted power systems you realized you could no longer be part of, do not be surprised. If you’ve confronted forms of religion, including forms of Christian religion you realized you could no longer be part of, do not be surprised. If, like my old home I live in, you’ve found that it needs partial deconstruction, I know that is a pain in the neck. It hurts. God sees and knows this too. But don’t be dismayed. With the help of God and friends, you can build back something better. 

That’s my experience in the home I live in, thanks be to my grandpa and my dad and to God. And that’s very much true in the way of Jesus I’m on. I’m still finding my way, but it’s so much better than it was 20 years ago. It’s a road I’m excited to keep traveling. It’s hard sometimes, it takes discipline. But there’s joy here. It’s a road that compels me to more and more receiving and giving of self-giving love. And it’s a way of invitation to ever increasing freedom. 

How do we get there, though? How do we find our way toward some kind of reconstruction of faith? Who will be our guides? 

Well, Brad Jersak and the author of Hebrews encourage us that it’s Jesus and it’s people of self-giving love who bear his love and bear his shame. Follow Jesus outside the camp, bearing his shame perhaps, but welcoming and becoming his self-giving love. 

I want to end by sharing three ways I’ve been trying to do this. They’re my experiences and convictions, but they overlay with what’s in Jersak’s book and I’ve seen them be helpful for others. Three quick thoughts about following Jesus outside of the worst of American Christianity. Going with Jesus outside the camp.

  1.  Refuse to participate in a whites-only club.

This by the way, is a word not just for white people but for all of us. Refuse to participate in a whites-only club. 

Years ago, I noticed that the great majority of books I’d ever read, ever been encouraged to read that had anything to do with the Bible, with theology, with religion and spirituality were written by white men. Now listen, I’ve got nothing against white men. I love myself. I really do. But one of the failings of the colonial European project is that when it has confronted difference, it has mostly tended to judge and conquer, rather than peaceably and humbly listen and exchange. 

And so there have just been a ton of blind spots at best, violent, narrow-minded rigidity at worst in the echo chamber. 

So when I look at a book on religion and faith, if it’s written by a descendant of Europeans like myself, especially by a white man, I look at the footnotes, and if the only people of color they’re engaging with Jesus and the writers of the Bible, I usually won’t read the book. When I’ve been part of cohorts or communities that study, which is a thing for a pastor, if books like these are assigned, I speak up in protest, sometimes quietly, sometimes not. 

Even here at Reservoir, we are a racially diverse church. We have racially diverse leadership. Our Board is just over half people of color. Our staff just under half. But we’re aware that for our three preaching pastors, two of us are white. So, because it’s who we are, but also in a decolonizing, outside the camp attention, we look to learn from and center voices of color in our learning and speaking around spiritual formation. It’s a way toward constructing something new in our faith with Jesus, outside the camp, something more humble, just, and liberating.

This whites-only club by the way, doesn’t only strictly apply to white voices. More complex here, but colonial Christianity has had such an influence in the world these past hundred years that even people of color can carry on its colonialism. A native American Christian I’m reading says that the Christians these days who most resist the inclusion of certain forms of indigenous spirituality in the way of Jesus aren’t white people any more, but indigenous pastors who inherited an anti-indigenous colonial faith. We just watched several Black police officers, trained in an anti-Black policing system, beat and kill an unarmed Black man. White supremacy dies hard. All of us can make our choices to walk away. 

2.  Find new pilgrimage partners, those who bear Jesus’ shame and self-giving love. 

When I look for authors, friends, mentors, colleagues I can trust in following the way of Jesus, I look not just to people’s ideas, but to people who seem marked by the blood of Jesus, people who have borne crosses, people of deep, self-giving love. 

Not coincidentally, I find that many of them have identities or are part of traditions that have been shamed or marginalized by the power systems of Christianity. They’ve been pushed outside the camp, followed Jesus, bearing his shame. Pretty much to a person, my friends and colleagues and mentors in the faith now are people of color in the way of Jesus, they are queer Christians, or they are allies to them, not just allies in mind but people who have borne some cost from their allegiance. 

It’s not about identity, really, I don’t think, it’s about people that have walked with Jesus in self-giving love, to the point that if they haven’t been forced outside the camp, they’ve walked outside the camp with others, knowing Jesus’ love and joy, but also bearing his shame. 

And lastly, friends, I invite you, I encourage and hope for you to:

3. Engage with Jesus, and the Spirit of Jesus he called the Companion.

If you’ve deconstructed part of your faith and need to figure out your way forward, hey, maybe not just religion, but if you ever finding yourself in any part of your life, needing to reevaluate, to redo, to walk away, to tear down and rebuild, then Jesus knows the way.

The Jesus we meet in the Bible’s four gospels, whose life is self-giving love and whose words are life, and the Jesus who is always with us and within by faith, the Spirit of Jesus, the gift of God Jesus called the Companion. The advocate, the counselor, the person of God who comes alongside. This Jesus knows the way. 

This is why we’re still a Jesus-centered church, anchored in the way of Jesus, the decolonizing tradition of Jesus. This is why I still read bits of the gospels just about every single day. This is why when we can be still and know that God is here, we seek to remember that the Spirit of Jesus is with us, and we seek to pay attention to what the Companion has to say, has to give. 

The way of Jesus is the way of self-given love, of self-giving love. It’s the way of a just mercy, of a wide and beautiful communion, of an entirely liberating love. 

So now, let’s go to him outside the camp, bearing his shame.

14 We don’t have a permanent city here, but rather we are looking for the city that is still to come.

It’s coming, friends. Keep building, keep walking in the way. 

I’ll close in prayer with the words of the Psalm I meant to also include in this sermon.

Psalm 107:33-36 (Common English Bible)

33 God turns rivers into desert,

watery springs into thirsty ground,

34 fruitful land into unproductive dirt,

        when its inhabitants are wicked.

35 But God can also turn the desert into watery pools,

    thirsty ground into watery springs,

36     where he settles the hungry.

They even build a city and live there!

Proleptic: The Significance Of Our Desires

I meet with a retired priest about once a month: a confidant and guide who listens to me, asks me questions, shares perspective, and prays for me. It’s a conversation called spiritual direction. 

We open our times with silence and a time of prayer, before I begin. And one of the times we met last year, during the silence, what came to mind was that I was so unhappy with the state of two important relationships in my life. 

I hadn’t expected to talk about these folks. I hadn’t even realized they were on my mind. But when we sat in silence, this is what came, so I told my spiritual director about these people and about my disappointment with where things were in our friendships. 

And as I told him about this, I found myself tearing up. I was noticing how much this mattered to me. But I also found myself saying that I not only didn’t know what to do next, but truthfully, I didn’t want to do anything at all. I wanted better relationships, but I was tired of trying, so where did that leave me? 

And my partner in this conversation just listened, asked me a few questions, let me know that he could see how important this was to me, and reminded me of a couple other burdens I’d shared with him before, let me know that he could see I was carrying a lot and he felt with me in this. 

It’s so good when someone listens to you like this, isn’t it? What a gift to receive, what a gift to give to listen like this. It’s part of what love looks like, this careful listening.

Yeah, so then my spiritual director asked me:

Could I share a thought with you? 

And I told him:

Of course, please do. 

And he told me,

I think your desires here are proleptic. 

And I was like:

You’re going to have to remind me what that word means.

And he did, and it has made a big difference to me.

A difference I would like to share with you. 

More in a minute, but I’ll say for now that prolepsis has to do with the things we really want.

Maybe not necessarily the little wants, but definitely the big wants underneath those. 

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t necessarily taught that what I want matters very much, at least not to God.

But if that’s the case, it’s funny that Jesus asks people about what they want, even when you’d think it would be obvious.

There’s the time when Jesus is first taking on students as a rabbi, and two young people ask if they can join him. We read:

John 1:38a (Common English Bible)

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” 

Jesus doesn’t start off with a syllabus or an interview or an introduction. Actually, he doesn’t start his relationship as a rabbi by saying anything at all. He listens. And what he’s listening for is what they are looking for. He wants to know what they want.

Another time, maybe a couple years later, Jesus is leaving the town of Jericho, on his way to Jerusalem. Tensions were rising around Jesus’ work. He had more fans and followers than ever before, but also more powerful detractors. All the good, bad, and ugly around his work the past couple of years seemed to be coming to a head. This is an important time for Jesus, a stressful time, and as he’s leaving Jericho, amidst a crowd of people, a beggar who’s blind keeps calling out, trying to get Jesus’ attention.

It’s a hassle, an inconvenience, or it would be to me. But to Jesus, it’s a human being, a brother, a fellow image bearer of God. So Jesus stops and calls him over. And he says this. 

Mark 10:51 (Common English Bible)

Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

Maybe it seemed obvious to everyone else. This is a beggar, of course he wants alms, he wants money. And he might expect that Jesus would give some. He’s a religious leader of sorts, with a reputation to uphold. 

But Jesus doesn’t assume anything, and as usual, he doesn’t speak first, he listens. He wants to know what we want. 

And the man who was begging goes bigger than maybe anyone was expecting. He says:

Rabbi, I want to see. 

And Jesus says:

OK, go, your faith has healed you.

And the gospels tell us he regained his sight and joined Jesus’ students following him to Jerusalem.

What a story, very dramatic, but again, it starts with Jesus listening for what we want. 

Why is this? 

Why does Jesus care what we want?

I think one, he’s a good listener. And what we want is important to us, so a good listener will want to know.

I think Jesus also probably knows that we don’t always know what we want, or at least we don’t pay attention to it.

This was the case for me when I went to meet with my spiritual director. I had these griefs and these hopes regarding a couple longtime, important relationships in my life. But for a number of reasons, I’d stopped noticing how much this mattered to me, until in the silence before a very good listener, and I think likely with the prompting of God’s spirit too, the want reemerged for me to pay attention to. 

This happened to me last fall in a more public way, in my work here as a pastor. I was engaged with our church Board in some planning. We’d been aware of a few financial needs for the church, which is why going into this winter, we were praying for and asking people and households to consider or reconsider giving regularly. Thank you again so much for those of you who sustain this community with your giving. 

We were also looking at a couple of old, delayed maintenance issues on our property that if we didn’t take care of in the next couple of years, would become more of a problem, and wondering how to pay for that. 

And it seemed like maybe we should try to raise a little bit of extra money this year, our church’s 25th anniversary year. So I came to the Board with a plan for a very modest sized fundraising campaign. But later, when I talked to one of our Board members, they said to me:

Steve, you know what you’re doing is fine, but why is it so small? It’s not really inspiring to me at all. Have you forgotten about what you really want? 

And he reminded me about some bigger plans and hopes we’d talked about in our Board for the church, plans and hopes that were important to me, had become important to this Board member. 

And I realized, one, I hadn’t prayed about this area of the church recently at all. I was responding to my fear that we wouldn’t have enough money to take care of the church property, and just urgently putting a plan together. So I decided to take a few days to pray about this again.

And then two, when I prayed, I felt like the Spirit of God came to me as a kinder, gentler version of that board member. I felt invited by God to consider this question of Jesus:

  • What is it that you’re looking for?
  • What do you want me to do for you?
  • What do you want?

And as I prayed, I remembered what that Board member was reminding me of, that for years, I’d wanted the church to be freed of our debts and fully released to powerful generosity around all our mission and vision. 

See, when we first acquired this building back in 2004, it was through a powerful, two year period of immense generosity from the congregation at the time. A young congregation, several hundred people in their 20s and 30s, had raised almost four million dollars in a very short amount of time to purchase this property. There were a lot of stories of great financial provision, and enthusiastic and joyful giving. 

And so here we are, in a property that has been a huge gift to this church, to a public school we share it with, and to the community at large. 

But we also took on a fair bit of debt to make that happen, just as any of us do if we’re able to buy a home. But unlike a home mortgage, commercial debt is generally a less friendly thing to carry. So our church has had a great run these past 18 years since then, but we’ve had to divert a fair bit of funding toward debt payments as well.

And I’ve dreamed of the day when we’d be free from all that debt and be able to do some special things together with all that freedom. 

When I came back with that desire I felt encouraged to pay attention to again, our Board members agreed and it seemed like this 25th anniversary would be a great time to see this dream into being. 

See, I’ve said that our desires matter a lot to us. They are by definition important to us, so they’ll be important to any good listener too, God included. 

I’ve also pointed out that it’s easy to forget what we really want, or to stop paying attention to it, even to bury it, especially if it doesn’t come true right away.

But three, I believe that our desires always tell a story we need to pay attention to, and sometimes that story is the truth. 

The community group I lead that meets on Saturday mornings studies the Bible together every week, and we studied part of the book of Hebrew poetry called Ecclesiastes this fall. It’s mostly pretty gloomy, and it was depressing enough that we basically voted to move on after 3 or 4 weeks.

But before we did, we read the chapter with this beautiful line in it. 

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (Common English Bible)

11 God has made everything fitting in its time, but has also placed eternity in their hearts, without enabling them to discover what God has done from beginning to end.

God-sized eternity in our hearts, but a lack of God-sized knowledge or abilities. The glory and the humility of being a human, this gives a sense of that. 

In our center, call it heart, gut, mind, spirit, whatever, in our core desires, is a longing for what’s good, what’s true, what’s beautiful. 

Ultimately, that’s a longing for God, I think. The ancient North African theologian Augustine thought so. He famously wrote, 

You, God, have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

But in saying we long for God, it’s not just God in a narrow sense, like longing for prayer and worship. Ecclesiastes immediately talks about the gift of great meals and enjoying the fruit of hard work. I think this verse speaks to the desire we have for things we could call lasting, eternal, maybe spiritual. 

Sometimes our desires tell the truth, not just about what we want, but about what is yet to come, about what God is longing to bring into being as well.

This is what my spiritual director meant when he told me he thought my longings were proleptic. 

Prolepsis is the representation of a thing before it’s actually so. It can be a figure of speech, like when you see a doomed person and you say: he was a dead man when he entered. People on their way to their execution can be called “dead men walking.” That’s a proleptic figure of speech. The future represented as true in the present.

But prolepsis isn’t just a figure of speech. It’s any time we treat the future as if it’s real, like it’s already on the way to happening. 

So maybe, just maybe, our desires are also important because they’re a window into future possibilities God wants us to see or hope for.

Let me give you two places where we think this way, both of which have their strengths and their problems.

One is in vision and goal setting, like in business or organizational planning. Often when organizations think about their future, they listen to the desires people have for what that future will be like. And they try to translate those desires into words and pictures people agree upon and find inspiring. And then they treat those desires as real and try to make them happen.

Another place is this idea of manifesting. Manifesting is this idea of thinking your dreams into reality. Like: I manifest this new job, or this prosperous life, or I manifest this beautiful, agreeable partner into being. It goes back to an idea in a book that got really popular right after we moved into this building, The Secret, that argues the secret to success is this positive attitude and positive visualization that attracts the good things to us that we imagine. You could trace that back to a 1952 book by the minister Norman Vincent Peale, called The Power of Positive Thinking. That book had a huge impact on Donald Trump’s daddy, and on Trump himself too – who liked the idea that you could get whatever you want if you just want it enough. 

I’m not actually pushing for either of those things at all. I mean goals and planning have important places in life, and positive, optimistic thinking and visualizing can be useful too. In some cases, it probably does make it more likely you get what you want. Optimism and confidence can help. 

Both of these things, though, can be idolatrous. They can exaggerate our abilities, as if we can control the future just by wanting it badly enough. And so they can bring shame to people who don’t get what they want. Like if I get sick or if I have financial problems, is it always or even usually because I just didn’t want to be healthy or wealthy badly enough?

No way!

Prolepsis – treating our desires as important, as worth paying attention to, even as telling us a story that is at least partly true – isn’t magic, and it doesn’t give us control of the future.

A proleptic take on our desires is simply to trust that in our wanting, or maybe sometimes in the deeper want behind the want, there is a truth about the Spirit of God’s moving. There’s truth about possibilities for what both we and God long for. 

So as I talked with my spiritual director that day, and fleshed out what I longed for in these two strained relationships, even though I wasn’t motivated to do anything, I found myself asking my pastor:

So what should I do?

And he was like:

Respectfully, I think that’s the wrong question. You’re not God after all, are you?

He affirmed for me that I’ve come honestly to my lack of motivation. I can’t control the other people. I can’t control the future. I can’t even fully control myself.

Sometimes we’ve tried and tried, and it’s time to stop trying for a little while.

He was like maybe this is an invitation to pay attention, to hold your desires before God, to be open to discernment, to let these desires sit for a while and see what I learn about them – see what’s in the end good and true and beautiful about them, and see maybe if there’s parts I want to let go of as well.

I think this is what the scripture that is most famously negative about our desires has in mind. The prophet Jeremiah says: 

Jeremiah 17:9-10 (Common English Bible)

9 The most cunning heart—

    it’s beyond help.

        Who can figure it out?

10 I, the Lord, probe the heart

    and discern hidden motives,

        to give everyone what they deserve,

        the consequences of their deeds.

Our desires are important. They deserve our attention. They tell stories that are true. But they’re complicated. Not everything we want would we do well to have. I’ve wanted to take things that aren’t mine. I’ve wanted revenge, I’ve wanted to change the past. I’ve wanted a lot of things I’ve been encouraged to let go of. 

Our hearts can be cunning, complicated, full of mixed motives and all. But God probes and sees and discerns. God has a sense of what is really good, true, and beautiful, and what’s worth letting go of for each of us. 

So sometimes not just to not try so hard, but to wait too. 

And to trust that God sees and hears our desires, to get real curious about them, to not just let them go, however likely or unlikely they may seem today, and to humbly see what God and what life can help you learn as you watch and wait.

Eventually, with this kind of humble paying attention before God, you’re likely to know when the time is right for you to do something.

I think this is what the psalms mean, or at least part of what they mean when they say:

Psalm 37:4 (Common English Bible)

Take delight in the Lord,

    and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Trust the God that listens to you. Trust the God that inspires everything good and true and beautiful. Trust the God that will cooperate with you in seeing good futures into being. 

And see how your desires change, and how life around you changes over time. 

For me, with the church project, there was an immediate reaction to my re-noticing my desires and holding them before God. Almost immediately, there were opportunities to ask a few people if they share this desire, and some significant funds have already been pledged and given toward Reservoir’s debt free, generous future. We’ll share more about this exciting opportunity for our church in two or three months. For now, though, it’s been amazing for me and for our Board to be fulfilling the desires of this church as we delight and trust in God.

With those key relationships I talked with my spiritual director about, things have been moving more slowly. It’s been nothing like an instant change. Months later, things are mostly still disappointing. 

But I know what I want. And I pray about it. And I’ve had a few opportunities in past months to do something about it with these folks, which have helped a little. And just knowing that God holds my hopes and that I’m doing the little that I have it in me to do, feels good to me. 

Friends, God cares about what you want. 

The Spirit of Jesus is with you, whispering to you in this new year:

What is it that you’re looking for? What do you want me to do for you?

Neither me nor you have the power to see all that junk into being, which frankly, I’m grateful for! We are not gods, and it’s not always time for us to do something.

But over time, our loving God will help us see what’s good, what’s true, what’s beautiful, and what’s possible in our desires, and if we pay attention, we’ll find the moments when it’s our time to do something about it too. 

Pray with me:

God of Creation, God who made and loves us all,

Help us not despise or ignore our desires, but to notice and value them, 

To hold them before you with openness and curiosity, that in time, you and we can make what’s good and true and beautiful possible together. 

Amen.

Getting In On the Christmas Spirit

Hey Friends, so Christmas is just one week from today, but I’m feeling a little flat on Christmas spirit this year. 

Who’s really been feeling Christmas this year, like you are so into the holiday season?

And who’s like me and just hasn’t really gotten there yet?

I mean in past years, we did this by turning our living room into kind of a Christmas shrine. Our family would get a decent sized tree, and we’d pull out our big box of ornaments and decorate like crazy. My parents are really into Christmas ornaments as gifts, and I’ve known them for almost 50 years, so we have a lot of them. Decorating the tree, smelling it, sitting by it in the evening with some Christmas music on – that’s been a really nice part of this month most years for me. 

But we got a puppy this summer, and he’s still in the sticks are for chewing phase of dog life – and little shiny things like ornaments are for chewing too, so Grace and I were thinking: no way on the Christmas tree this year.

Our kids insisted we get a little one and put it in the basement, which we did, but since we don’t hang out in the basement much, that’s mostly meant a half-decorated baby Christmas tree sits there all by itself, not really stoking the Christmas spirit at all.

When I was younger, I used to sing a lot this time of year. I have all these memories of singing in Christmas concerts in schools and churches and community centers and big concert halls in Boston, and tiny little country clubs and living rooms. I’ve sung Christmas music all kinds of places, and loved doing that, but it’s been a while since I’ve done much of that, and I’m a little picky about what Christmas music I like and haven’t even listened to much of that this year either. 

Anyway, for whatever reasons, here we are, a week from Christmas, and it’s falling a little flat for me. So for me, if nothing else, but maybe for some of you too, I want to talk about how this week, and in the days and weeks after that, we can get in on the Christmas spirit action a little more. 

Today is the the fourth Sunday of Advent, the church’s four week pre-Christmas season that ends next weekend at our Christmas Eve services, in person at 4:30 p.m. and online at 7:00 p.m.

In our Advent guide we produced this year, that you’ll find at our website, we spent the first three weeks looking at the self-giving love of God with all of us. And in the final week the guide invites us to join God in a little bit of self-giving love of our own, to celebrate Christmas by participating in the love of God in our own way. 

Jesus, again and again in his teaching about the kingdom of the heavens, of the beloved community, invites us to participate together in the love of God. Here’s one time he does that, a teaching that has become known as the parable, or the story, of the sheep and the goats. It goes like this:

Matthew 25:31-46 (Common English Bible)

31 “Now when the Human One comes in his majesty and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his majestic throne.

32 All the nations will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them from each other, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

33 He will put the sheep on his right side. But the goats he will put on his left.

34 “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who will receive good things from my Father. Inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world began.

35 I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

36 I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.’

37 “Then those who are righteous will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink?

38 When did we see you as a stranger and welcome you, or naked and give you clothes to wear?

39 When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

40 “Then the king will reply to them, ‘I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Get away from me, you who will receive terrible things. Go into the unending fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels.

42 I was hungry and you didn’t give me food to eat. I was thirsty and you didn’t give me anything to drink.

43 I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me. I was naked and you didn’t give me clothes to wear. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’

44 “Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and didn’t do anything to help you?’

45 Then he will answer, ‘I assure you that when you haven’t done it for one of the least of these, you haven’t done it for me.’

46 And they will go away into eternal punishment. But the righteous ones will go into eternal life.”

Kind of a surprising choice for a Christmas text, I know. No shepherds or stables or baby Jesus, and instead of peace and joy, Jesus talks about a sometimes angry king, dividing up two very surprised groups of people. And in the story, to some he says: Get away from me, you who will receive terrible things. It’s like a bad Santa kind of moment – he knows if you’ve been bad or good – but the stakes here aren’t presents or a lump of coal. The stakes are inheriting the kingdom prepared for you, or unending fire and eternal punishment.

Whoo. Let’s deal with the scary part of this story first. 

Jesus is telling a story. And like every story people tell, including stories Jesus tells, the point is never whether or not it’s all literally true. When people tell stories, we pretty much always know it’s not all literally true. That’s not the point.

The point is whatever truth or truths the story is communicating. The point is how we’re invited to respond to and participate in the story – either for entertainment value, or reflection, or in this case, to shake up our sense of how the world works and how to live in it. 

Here Jesus is telling a kind of story that was popular in the religious culture of his era. These were stories about a judgment throne, where God would evaluate people’s lives and faith. And the point of these stories was more about the present than about the future. 

It’s like science fiction. Science fiction looks like it’s about the future, but usually it’s using a story about the future to say something about the present.

Same here. Jesus tells this story about a time when the Human One – a nickname he used for himself – is going to help God evaluate humanity. And the point of these stories is to tell us how to live in the present – they tell us what kind of lives, what kind of faith God wants for us. The point isn’t so much to imagine what kind of curse or reward might come our way some day – that’s more of a set up for the story. The point is to pay attention to what Jesus is saying about the good life, to pay attention to what Jesus is inviting us to. 

Beyond the rewards and punishment aspect of the story, though, the rest of what Jesus is saying about the good life is kind of surprising too.

I mean, last week I Googled how to get in on the Christmas spirit, and the stuff I found was like: listen to Christmas music, light some candles, drink eggnog, bake some more, wash your hands with holiday hand soaps. I don’t know what a holiday handsoap is, by the way. Do you? 

One website was trying to argue that you get into the Christmas spirit by doing more chores. 

Which kind of nonplussed me, by the way. 

Now Jesus does have this story he tells about baking, but his advice here for the good life – at Christmas or maybe any other time too – is nothing like this. 

Jesus is like:

Go visit the prison. Feed someone. Take care of a sick person.

And not only that, but he says do these things because when you do them, you are doing them for me. Jesus says

I’m the hungry and thirsty person. I’m the sick one. I’m the asylum seeker, the undocumented immigrant,

what in Jesus’ time, they just called the stranger. I’m the naked one. I’m the prisoner. 

Now this isn’t a classic Christmas story, but it turns out that this is actually at the heart of the Christmas story.

The Christmas story Jesus is in doesn’t really have anything to do with candles and carols and baking and holiday hand soaps, whatever those are. 

It’s about God’s radical inversion of the social pyramid. It’s a kind of flipping of the script of where God is and what is the good life. 

All societies have their social pyramids – the kind of masses of ordinary people at the bottom and in the middle and the special people we all wish we were at the top. Now, some of the details change from time to time. Some societies praise the beauty of skinny people for instance and some praise the beauty of rounder people. Standards of beauty change. 

But I don’t think any society has said, you know who’s at the top of the pyramid, the people closest to God – it’s the people without food. It’s the sick people and the imprisoned people, and the outsiders who don’t belong people. 

In Jesus’ context, in the first century Roman empire, they had a pretty clear pyramid. Rich, free, men who were Roman citizens were at the top of the pyramid. They could have whatever they wanted, they lived the good life, and at the very tip top of all those rich free Roman men was their king, their Caesar. 

And when a new king was born, there was a nativity story, a celebration of his birth. They called him the son of God. They shared the gospel of his birth, sending out messengers – in Greek angelos or angels to announce: a king is born, he will bring glory and peace on earth, good news to all peoples. 

It sounds like the Christmas story, doesn’t it?

But in Jesus’ Christmas story, we’re not in Rome but on the eastern edges of the empire in the Jewish town of Bethlehem. And there aren’t candles and holiday hand soaps – gold, frankincense, and myrrh – that’d come later, but there’s just a dirty old barn and a feeding trough, the stench of sheep piss and donkey crap in the air. As Mary nurses the baby Jesus on his first night of life, there aren’t ambassadors and servants to wait upon him, just dirty village shepherds. 

This doesn’t sound much like glory. It’s not what we expect from a king, it’s not where we’d expect to find God either. I mean who meditates on the image of a barnyard? Who lights sheep piss, animal dung scented candles for their prayer times? 

This is upside down, it subverts all our expectations.

Howard Thurman, pastor to America’s civil rights movement, one of the great Christian mystics and activists of the 20th century, wrote a landmark book called Jesus and the Disinherited. In it, he argues that the disinherited – those denied inheritance of wealth or power or honor or privilege – are God’s favored people. Jesus came first, he writes, to those with their backs against the walls. 

And so if we read the story of the sheep and the goats, the so-called greatest and least of our species, we can hear Jesus inviting us:

you want to get in on the Christmas spirit? I’ll tell you where I am. I’m with the sick and imprisoned, the hungry and the stranger, I’m with everyone whose back is up against the wall. Join me there, love me there. And you’ll have your reward. 

Years ago, Grace and I knew a couple who tried to live this way very earnestly. And every year during Advent, what they did is they gave a Christmas present, a birthday gift, to Jesus. And the way they did that was in light of this story Jesus told. They fed hungry people or visited sick people, clothed people, engaged with estranged or imprisoned people. 

Their names were Cary and Lil, and newly married, in our 20s, Grace and I were like: we want to be like that. So when we had kids, we decided we would not give our kids presents but together we would make a gift to Jesus. Some years, that meant pooling our money for a charitable donation. It’s meant serving food for a day at a local meal center for the unhoused, stuff like that. 

At first, that was awesome, but then as we had a second and a third kid, and they started getting aware of the world, we were like: you know, we like part of this tradition. But we also don’t want our kids to find us stingy and mean, which if we never give them Christmas gifts, that might be hard for them.

So we started to do the gift to Jesus thing together but also to give gifts to our kids too. 

But how do we think about what it means to give gifts to Jesus by engaging in love with the people Jesus especially identifies with: the bottom of the pyramid, so so called “least of these,” the disinherited, those with their backs against the wall.

You could view this as payback. Jesus says God loves you, so love God back, and this is how you do it. Not be getting more religious but by loving the people Jesus especially identifies with. 

And maybe there is something to that, but I guess I also prefer to think of it not just as payback but more like “paying it forward” – God has loved me, blessed me so much, and Jesus invites me to participate in the flow of that love, to continue passing it on. And he teaches how to do so, in a way that also brings him joy. 

Our friends in Asha, the slum development community in north India, are especially and beautifully committed to this “pay it forward” way of life. They teach and practice that everyone needs to be loved. We all have hurting, lonely, needy part of ourselves. And everyone, no matter how sick, no matter how poor, everyone has something to give too. We can all feed and clothe and visit and love someone else, within our own means and abilities. So they teach and practice “pay it forward” loving communities. It’s very powerful. 

Sometimes a problem come up when we try to live this way. I’ll call it the problem of charity. Where you can start to literally see other groups of people as the least of these, lower than you, and serve them in some way out of a condescending pity. Do it for the least of these. 

Grace and I are in a small group with a few others from this church where we’ve had this discussion recently. We’re studying this book I mentioned, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. And there are people in that group whose whole careers are about compassionate service and social justice, and other people in that group that don’t do that for our jobs, but care deeply.

And we were asking:

Is this what Jesus wants from us? More charity? Whether on the giving or receiving of charity, more non-relational handouts? Disconnected, but generous, condescension? 

We don’t think so.

I’ve been watching Breaking Bad the last month – maybe that’s why the Christmas spirit hasn’t really settled in. It’s like the most nihilistic, violent, negative story arc ever. Somehow gripping still.

Anyway, the whole arc of that five-season show turns on a suddenly quite sick man’s lack of interest in receiving charity. He just won’t do it, can’t do it. So he becomes a meth producer instead.

I’ve been there too – not the drug dealer part, but the bad feeling one gets when you feel like you’re the subject of someone else’s charitable handout. Doesn’t feel good. 

So I’ve wondered if the point of this passage, and the invitation to the Christmas spirit too, isn’t payback, isn’t even pay it forward, but is participation.

Later, the apostle John, reflecting on this story perhaps, wrote this in a letter:

I John 4:7-8 (Common English Bible)

7 Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God.

8 The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. 

So simple. God is love. All love somehow has its origins in God. So when we love, we are participating in the love of God. We know God when we love, whether we’re religious or spiritual or not, whether we call it God or not. But when we don’t love, when we don’t participate in the flow of God’s love for all people and all things, the reverse is true. No matter what we say about ourselves or our faith, when we don’t love, we don’t know God either. 

Jesus’ story of the Sheep and the Goats. It’s not about charity, it’s about solidarity. When we ignore or dismiss those who are hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, immigrants and asylum seekers and all, we ignore and dismiss Jesus. Just as when we love God’s image bearers, and especially those whose dignity and needs are neglected and trashed, then we love God.

I take this super-literally for what it’s worth. I’m still trying to give Christmas presents to Jesus in this spirit, including my family when I can. As a pastor to a relatively wealthy, privileged community, I try to let myself be interrupted and inconvenienced when sick or dying or imprisoned people call. 

Our church takes this kind of literally too. We try to prioritize in our church resources a participatory flow of love to Jesus in the faces and bodies of the excluded, neglected, impoverished, and oppressed. And to do that in a dignity-honoring, participatory way, not a condescending, so called charitable way. 

I hope you can find your way into this.

But I want to end with an invitation toward the insight of our friends in India with Asha, the insight we had in my Saturday Bible study that read this passage yesterday too, that this is a call to participation. We all have something to give, something to share. And we all have parts of us that are the least of these too, that are in need. 

So to get into the Christmas spirit this week, I invite you to ask and respond to two questions.

One is, what do I need, and how do I ask for it? 

What do I need, and who can I ask for it? 

My heart was really powerfully awakened by this question last week, and I feel God spoke to me about a need I have to let go of some trauma that has passed by me, to breathe it out, and I’m looking for ways to do that this Christmas. 

How about you? What do you need? And who can you ask for it?

And secondly: what do I have to give? How can I give and love with abandon?

Or as we ask it in our guide:

How this Christmas can you participate in God’s self-giving love? Who will you see? Who will you visit? How will you see Jesus in them, and show up accordingly? 

This is the way into the Christmas spirit my friends – the candles, the songs, even the holiday hand soaps are fine if you’ve got them. But this stepping in the great and beautiful love of God – this is where the magic is at. Let’s join Jesus there. We’ll be glad you did. 

Finding God in Nature, and the Power that Brings

The other morning I was driving home from an errand. I had the car radio on but I wasn’t really listening until I heard someone announce that as of today, there were eight billion people on the earth. Eight billion – I thought, how do we know, like today? Who’s counting? 

We had an interesting conversation over dinner when one of my kids brought this up too – like what would it be like if you knew you were the eight billionth person born? And then what if a half second later, someone else died, and then another half second later another person was born, and then they, and not you, would be the eight billionth person born. How many eight billionth people will there be? 

Anyway, the other thought was – wow, that’s a lot of people. Eight billion people. 

The radio host had the same thought, because they asked the scientist they were interviewing,

is this a problem? Is that too many people for this earth? Should we be worried?

He sounded worried, and maybe surprised that all these people had snuck up on him. I mean, I know when I was born there were only about four billion people. Checking my math, I know that’s… a lot less. 

But the scientist was like: no, not really. The earth can handle eight, nine, even 10 billion people as long as we stay open to this dynamic, as long as we talk about and rethink some things to do with how we all consume, and what we use for energy, and what our immigration policies look like and all. 

And I felt both calmed and appreciative that this scientist has a good plan for us and at the same time, not very optimistic that our governments and institutions are listening to this plan very well. 

But I also wondered: what happens when we all confront realities like this? Rapid change, unexpected growth, strains on our person or collective resources.

Are we like the radio host, and all this change stirs anxiety or fear? If so, that usually gets us denying the news, or listening but hoarding our land, our resources, our privilege for ourselves and those like us.

Or are we like the scientist, greeting big changes with curiosity, with hope, even with joy and gratitude and letting all that give us power to get to work as a person, or get to work as a species and plan accordingly?

Today, we’ll start our Advent season looking at scripture and listening to some wisdom from Native American followers of Jesus as well. We’ll talk about big changes we face in our lives, sometimes scary changes, and a way in all that to remember God is always with us and that there is always more than enough. 

This season Advent is the season before Christmas. It’s a time to remember the unique ways God appeared to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And it’s also a time of longing for God to appear to us still. It’s a season where we’re invited to dare to hope that the Spirit of God can again interrupt dull lives, warm our cold hearts, and draw us all toward greater faith, hope, love, joy, and justice. 

We’re actually launching a four-year Advent project, exploring four aspects of the incarnation of God in Christ, the expression of God in human embodied life. 

This year we’re inviting us all to pay attention to the self-investment of God in all of creation. It’s what theologians call kenotic christology. My mentor Tom Oord calls this the self-giving love of God. Another theologian, Tripp Fuller, captures it this way. He says,

“God didn’t want to be God without us.”

I love that. 

God has decided to not be God without us. God doesn’t want to be God without us. 

With that in mind, we’re calling this year’s Advent: with us. 

In the first week we’ll focus on God’s self-investment in creation, the ways God is known to us in nature, and the power that can bring us. You’ve got today’s sermon, but even better this beautiful guide we’ve prepared for you. It’s meant to be used for about 15 or 20 minutes a day but take a look at it today, in paper form or online, and make your own plan for how you’d like to use it.


What we hope this Advent is that our Sunday services and the use of our daily guide can encourage you to some spiritual and personal renewal in advance of Christmas. 

Alright, here’s this week’s Friday scripture from our Advent guide. It’s three verses from the beginning of the saga of one of the founding fathers of the faith of Jews, Christians, and Muslims all. 

Genesis 12:1-3 (Common English Bible)

1 The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you.

2 I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing.

3 I will bless those who bless you,

    those who curse you I will curse;

        all the families of the earth

            will be blessed because of you.”

We meet Abram as an adventurer, a wanderer, a person in search of a better life in a better land. Abram was born on the Eastern edge of what we call the Fertile Crescent – a crescent-shaped swath of land in the Middle East that both then and now can support an abundance of life.

Long ago, when the human population of the earth was nowhere near four or five billion, likely less than 100 million, Abram journeyed across the Fertile Crescent in the hope, the faith, that God had led him to the Western edge of that land, where there’d be a better life for him and for all his descendants. 

His father, the scriptures tell us, had started the journey when Abram was just a child. But then Abram’s brother died. And his dad is so grief-stricken and just so sad that he gives up on his dreams, settles down where his son Haran died, names that place after his lost son, and eventually dies there himself. 

Have you known anyone who’s given up on their dreams? 

I’m inferring here, but it seems that in his loss, Abram’s father’s outlook has gone from hope and abundance to fear and paralysis. Understandable, really. What failure of life, what grief, like the one he’s faced. Easy to lose one’s faith. Easy to lose one’s hope.

But Abram, who himself had lost his big brother to death, keeps moving. He senses God speaking to him, encouraging him to pick up his father’s dream, to leave the familiar and the secure for someplace, something better, something more. 

The promise he banks on is a promise of blessing. Scarcity, grief, curse, loss, failure won’t have the final word. He will still be blessed. 

There is still abundance. Blessing for him, blessing for all his descendants. 

In our faith tradition, the more ancient bit about Abram’s enemies being cursed is removed or modified over time. But the bit about him being blessed and his descendants being blessed is owned by all the spiritual descendants of Abram, all children of God, some of us feel all peoples of this earth.

Living with Abram in the care of an abundant God. Encouraged to be open to so much goodness that it overflows. 

Blessed to be a blessing.

In the story of Abram, faith that he may have in an abundant God and in a life of blessing, it’s hard for him to hold on to this hope. He wavers often, loses his way again and again. 

So three chapters later, we get this bit, a reminder Abram senses from God one night.

Genesis 15:5 (Common English Bible)

5 Then he brought Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars if you think you can count them.” He continued, “This is how many children you will have.”

Like all of us, it seems like Abram needs a concrete image of hope, a memorable way to remind him to keep the faith. 

So one night, while he’s outside under the dark sky, he has an impulse to look up. And in a darker sky than any of us has ever experienced in our age, Abram would see a panoply of stars, innumerable points of light. 

And the word that crystallizes in his imagination is: this is how big is your blessing. This is how big and beautiful the blessing is, as bright and as many as the stars. 

It’s an old trick, old and good magic Abram is experiencing that truth comes to us through the sacred wonder of creation. Nature speaks truth. It is the first, the oldest word of God, telling us God is with us, and there is more than enough. 

Friends, have you ever experienced truth coming to you, perhaps even God speaking to you in the natural world? 

I’d like to talk about that.

Also, have you ever experienced doubt that your life could be blessed? Ever lost your hope or become overwhelmed by fear? 

Maybe your own grief or loss has stopped you in your tracks. Maybe, as with Abram, a family legacy of pain has seemed more real than your aspirations for something better. 

Or maybe like that radio host hearing about eight billion people for the first time, the data and circumstances of life overwhelm and crowd out optimism, growth, possibility.

All this has happened to me.

When I was in my late 20s, I hit a moment where I was just gripped with fear. 

Grace and I had our first child, a baby less than one year old. 

After a rocky start in my early 20s, I’d found what I thought was not just a stable job, but a vocation – a career where I’d grow and contribute and support myself and my family while being fulfilled. 

I was a newish public school teacher, but I was growing, getting better at it and happier in it, finding my way.

And then I was laid off. The city where I taught was facing budget cuts, and last in, first out was the way of things. So I was told I’d be out of a job when the school year ended, and because my licensure was still temporary, I wasn’t so sure I’d find another teaching job again quickly.

For me, this experience of being laid off surfaced a ton of fears. 

My parents had some big disappointments and many periods of job instability when I was a kid. I have a vivid memory from when I was young of seeing one of my parents, sitting at a desk, papers before them, crying. I knew what it was like for people to feel insecure, like there was not enough, and now, with a new baby, I felt like I was recreating that pattern for my kids.

I felt like a failure, like I’d avoided it to this point, but here was the destiny for my life as a husband, as a worker, as a father – not good enough, not having enough. 

Here’s how I’ve always told the story to myself of what happened then. 

My little family of three was on vacation with some extended family. Others had paid our way because, well you know, we didn’t have enough. 

And I’d been reading the prophet Jeremiah, which is largely grim, but one morning on the vacation, I awoke before dawn with my Bible, an accompanying prayer guide on Jeremiah I was using, and a journal, and sat outside to pray in the early morning hours. 

And as I read the scriptures and sat before the sunrise, something came to mind with the clarity of the voice of God. 

I thought:

my failure, my time of not enough would not be the end of me.

Even at 29, I knew a lot about who I was and who I was meant to be in the world. My values, my hopes were pretty clear. And I thought:

God is going to make sure all these hopes and values find their meaning. Whatever job I have or don’t have, that’s not the key in life. No, the key is I know who I am and where I’m going, and God’s with me in this. 

My life was going to have meaning and purpose in the world. There was going to be more than enough for me and mine. And we were going to have a beautiful story together. 

We were going to be blessed. And we were going to be a blessing.

That’s how I tell the story to myself about what happened 20 years ago. It’s how I’ve told you this story before too, that the Spirit of God worked through prayer and the scriptures to speak the truth to me, to deliver me from a nagging, generational fear of failure, and to help me walk in hope, in promise, and blessing. 

This is how I tell myself the story. And I think it’s true.

But there’s another way to understand what happened for me in that story, what turned me from fear-gripped not enough to hope of blessing. 

To tell that other way of seeing it, I’d like to read one other scripture, Wednesday’s scripture this week in our guide, that offers another way of understanding my story that is also true.

It’s part of Psalm 65.

Psalm 65:9-13 (Common English Bible)

9 You visit the earth and make it abundant,

    enriching it greatly

        by God’s stream, full of water.

You provide people with grain

    because that is what you’ve decided.

10 Drenching the earth’s furrows,

        leveling its ridges,

    you soften it with rain showers;

        you bless its growth.

11 You crown the year with your goodness;

    your paths overflow with rich food.

12 Even the desert pastures drip with it,

    and the hills are dressed in pure joy.

13 The meadowlands are covered with flocks,

    the valleys decked out in grain—

        they shout for joy;

        they break out in song!

The psalmist is outside too, like me, like Abram. Abram saw the stars, I saw the sunrise, the psalmist looks out over fields and meadows with grain and fruit growing, sheep feeding, and thinks:

how abundant is this world. 

Now surely this isn’t the only thought he or she ever had about life. This poet lived in ancient times. She would have known times of famine, empty bellies and skipped meals. Or he would have perhaps known wars and threats of wars, conquest and subjugation, in his own life, or in his family lineage.

But this day, out in the beauty of the natural world, the truth returns, that God is with us, and that this God and this earth is abundant. There is more than enough for us all.

I think it’s no accident that my own breakthrough on this front happened because I got up in the dark to sit along the ocean at sunrise. 

 The ocean before me – so big, so alive – made it hard to think that loss and scarcity were the truest things in this life.

And the sunrise – so beautiful, so able to invoke the new hope and new mercies every day brings – made it hard to think that the best of life was behind us, and that God or goodness had abandoned me.

As much as the scriptures or the prayer brought me to God, the beauty of God’s creation did as well. It spoke the truth to me that God is here, that we are blessed, and that there is more than enough for all our blessing. 

I’ve learned this isn’t an accident. It’s a thing we can lean toward, as have the Native ancestors who first settled and lived among these lands we call home.

Mark Charles is a follower of Jesus and also the son of a Navajo father and a Native American activist. He maintains a spiritual practice of greeting the sunrise in the morning. And sometimes he shares an image or short video of the sunrise on his twitter feed with the exhortation,

“Walk in beauty, my relatives. Walk in beauty.” 

Franciscan Catholics have told us that nature is the first word of God. The Bible, even the person of Jesus come later. God spoke truth through nature first and speaks there still.

I’ve been reading the work of another Native American follower of Jesus, the theologian and activist and farmer Randy Woodley. He’s a Cherokee descendant and a wise teacher who brings Jesus-centered faith and Native American wisdom into conversation. 

One of his books is a new one, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth. It’s a really practical invitation to honor and learn from the practices and wisdom of the Native Americans, whose ancestral lands we live upon. 

Woodley teaches the way Native Americans lived in conversation with the land, in a kind of humble, learning presence upon the land, trusting in its abundance, and listening to its stories and truths. 

Like Mark Charles, he too encourages us to be outdoors, to learn from what we perceive there, to return for instance again and again to particular places in nature we consider sacred. 

I think that happened for me 20 years ago in the sunrise along the ocean. The truth of God’s goodness and abundance came to me as a sacred word in that spot. And the hope of my own life’s blessing, overflowing enough for me and my family and for the blessing of others, became clear.

It happens for me still. It can happen to us all. It is the birthright of all eight billion living members of our human family.

Life’s hard. We lose. We grieve. We get anxious and afraid. Our problems grow and we shrink before our own eyes. And that anxiety and fear troubles us, and sometimes it doesn’t just scare us but it makes us smaller in all kinds of ways. We stop dreaming. We stop moving. We start hoarding, resenting, getting the little we can take. 

But then sometimes we lift our gaze again. We pay attention. 

We still see a few stars still in our electric light-brightened skies.

We get out early to walk our dog or go to work and catch the magnificent promise of a sunrise. 

We look out our window and see the last browned leaf floating down from a maple tree bracing for the cold of winter.

We listen to the ocean, which is always big enough, or before our evening meal, whatever we have to eat, we stop to pray and say:

thank you, God, that again, no matter what it is, I have food. Thank you God that there is more than enough. 

And maybe then we get a little calmer. We remember we are blessed and we are thankful. Maybe we dare to hope again.

And that starts to give us power to get curious, to wonder about the possibilities yet ahead with the help of God and friends. 

And knowing God is with us, knowing we are blessed, remembering there is more than enough, we can rest easy for a moment in the goodness of that blessing. We can walk in beauty for a little while. And we can get to work in faith, in hope, in love, joy, and justice again.

Get outside, my friends. Listen to how God is with us there. Pay attention to the truth of abundance, the hope of blessing, the promise of the good that is and is yet to come.

Water

Earlier this fall, someone from our community – Meredith – was baptized down the road from here in Mystic Lake. She hadn’t been baptized before and really wanted this ceremony, this blessing, before launching on a big new venture in her life that would take her away from this community and this city…at least for a while. 

For some reason, this had me thinking about another need to get baptized moment I experienced years ago. I was helping lead a weekend retreat off site by a different lake. It was winter time, or close to it, and we didn’t really go outside at all, let alone down to the waters. But someone at the retreat that I knew told me:

Steve, my friend wants to get baptized. Can we do that? 

And I said:

Sure, I love baptizing people. Let me talk to them and we’ll set something up back at the church in a few weeks.

And he was like:

No, he needs it now. And there’s a lake outside, can’t we do that?

At first I thought: It’s too cold. You know how cold it is, right?

And I asked:

What’s the rush? It’s baptism, not a trip to the hospital. 

But my friend explained a little, and later that day his friend much more why this was important. This guy’s life was a mess at the moment. There’d been some pretty big failings and he was trying to make things right with his spouse and some other people, and getting baptized was a way he felt like he could try to make things right with God and with himself first.

That made sense, so we talked and prayed, and walked over to the nearly freezing lake, took off some clothes, and in we went to those bracing, cleansing waters. It was fun. It was memorable. 

That memory has gotten me doing something quirky. Once a week, I’ve been going to one of our local lakes in my bathing suit, and throwing myself in. I don’t own a wetsuit. I don’t stay in long. But for reasons I can only partly explain, I’ve been drawn to the waters, as some kind of self-baptism if that’s a thing, a kind of bracing, cleansing, immersive experience of God. 

Today, I ask what’s behind all these experiences.

  • Why are we so drawn to water?
  • How does it speak to us and connect us with the divine?
  • What does it mean when scriptures say that God is water?
  • And are there ways we can more regularly be aware of God’s revitalizing, watery powers for us all? 

This is the 4th of 6 weeks where we’re exploring parts of my friend Rabbi Toba Spitzer’s amazing book God is Here. It’s so good. If you read books, you owe yourself a chance to read this one. 

Let’s take a tour through three of the many Biblical passages Toba highlights. 

We start at the beginning.

Genesis 1:1-2 (Everett Fox)

At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and earth, when the earth was unformed and void, darkness over the face of the Deep, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters.

This is a very literal translation by Everett Scott, a Hebrew scholar and poet who captures the feel of the language of the Hebrew Bible. We’re invited to imagine the primordial earth, long before humans, long before dinosaurs, long before there was any life at all. 

The earth, it says, was watery chaos – the deep waters from which we know all life emerged. And God was like a mighty spirit-wind flying over and through and out of that watery deep. It’s a reminder of the waters and the depths from which we come. And there’s this image of God hovering over the deeps, calling for life to emerge. 

Water is the source of life. And God is in the water. 

Maybe this is why I feel God with me whenever I dunk myself in each week. In that buoyancy of the water, I’m always reminded I’m not alone. Like a little kid in my mum or dad’s arms, I feel upheld, supported. God is with me. And that feels good.

We skip forward a couple of books to Leviticus, and the beginning of ancient Israel’s priesthood. 

Leviticus 8:6 (Common English Bible)

6 Then Moses brought Aaron and his sons forward and washed them in water. 

The priests are there to pray for the people and help them pay attention to God, stay connected to God. And part of the way the priests are set aside for what they do is that they are washed ceremonially in water. It’s not a bath so much as a spiritual cleansing. 

This ritual cleansing has morphed over the centuries and millennia in Judaism. In Christianity, it became the ceremony we call baptism. 

When I baptize adults, I always ask them privately, in sacred confidence, if there is any sin they want to confess – maybe a big shame or regret they hope they can carry lighter, knowing God’s forgiven them and can empower new life in them.

Sometimes they’re like: naw, I’m good.

Which is fine, in our tradition you this kind of confession to another human is always voluntary, never required. Usually, though, people appreciate the opportunity. They talk about mistakes or regrets, sometimes unburdening very big things, a huge moral failing as a spouse or a friend or parent or any number of other things.

Sometimes, it’s not their sin they want to confess, but wrong done to them, a huge hurt they want to know more healing from God in. Either way, it’s a rare chance to be really honest and to be assured that a God of new life and second chances is with us. Which is always good news, right, because life’s long and hard, and we need all the love, all the healing, all the chances. 

When I go into the waters each week, I try to make a confession first too, to tell God where I need cleansing. Sometimes it’s a word I wish I hadn’t said, a thing I wish I hadn’t done, but it’s broader than this too. I call to mind all the crap and muck that litters my mind and heart – a hurt here, a regret there, an anxiety or a ruminating thought I just can’t shake, and I’m like God:

Could you bathe that out of me. Wash my mind, my heart, help me walk more free?

You know how usually you take a shower just out of habit or part of your regular hygiene and all. But sometimes you take a shower to shake off a bad feeling or a bad experience or state of mind, right? And the shower helps you clear your head, you sometimes come out unburdened, more free. That’s what’s happening to me too. 

So with the priests, who needed their heads and their hearts clear to serve God and the people. Cleansing waters. 

And then the last book of the Torah, the book of speeches along the Jordan River, before entering the promised land. Moses says:

Deuteronomy 8:7 (Common English Bible)

the Lord your God is bringing you to a wonderful land, a land with streams of water, springs, and wells that gush up in the valleys and on the hills;

Water’s God’s abundance and vitality. It’s the sign of what I say almost nightly at dinner:

Thank you God that there is more than enough. 

Here the water is the source of crops to eat and wells for drinking. It’s hope for life for these tribal people as they cross the Jordan, filled with hope. 

This past summer, I went to the Jordan River too.

A mentor of mine had encouraged me to think of my trip to Israel and Palestine as a pilgrimage, to ask myself what am I bringing to this land and what am I hoping to find there?

And in asking that, what came to mind were all these sorrows in my life I was carrying. A couple of the sorrows were particular to me and to relationships in my life, different forms of grief and loss. And then many of the sorrows were those of people I love, but that I knew close and well enough that I felt the weight of them too.

And I thought, I need to bring my sorrows on pilgrimage with me, and I need God to meet me in them. Maybe I don’t need God to take them away, like trying to use God to not feel pain or grief that is right and healthy to feel. That’s called spiritual bypassing, when we try to use God or faith or religion to avoid hard things, and that doesn’t make us lighter people or bigger people, just shallower. 

What I wanted wasn’t pain relief, it was integration, it was hope. I needed help in carrying these sorrows. I wanted a deeper faith that God was in the sorrows too, that God was on the scene to help.

So I filled a prescription bottle with tiny bits of paper with a couple of words on each representing these sorrows. 

And while the other pastors I was traveling with were busy getting ready to rebaptize themselves in the Jordan River, I waded up to my knees downstream, and one by one, I held those little slips of paper underwater, kind of baptizing the sorrows, you could say. And I asked Jesus, hold this one, and hold this one, and hold this one. We all need your help. 

And you know what happened? Nothing. It was an act of faith, and sometimes with acts of faith, you feel something and sometimes not at all, and this was one of those not at all moments. But I was like:

Well, I’ve done what I wanted to do, so I said thanks, God, and went and watched my colleagues have fun dunking each other in the river.

A few days later, though, when I was praying up at the temple mount in Jerusalem, something broke open in me. And on my knees by that ancient wall, I just wept and wept, like I haven’t in years.


Like a purging of grief or something, tears pouring out as I thought of myself and all these other people in my heart, all these sorrows. I felt connected, like I stand with a large and mighty community of faith, running back through our spiritual ancestors all the way to Jesus and beyond. And I felt too:

God, you’ve got it, don’t you? You’re here with all of us, all these sorrows, and you are very much for us all. One way or another, we’re gonna be alright, aren’t we?

I feel a bit of that energy and strength each week as I get out of the waters I’ve been throwing myself into. Not pouring tears again like that, but still, feeling cleansed and connected and strengthened. Maybe it’s the presence of God, maybe it’s just the cold water submersion, but I feel more alive every time I do it. 

I’m not alone. In our last Board meeting, we talked about this God is Here series. I shared that we’d be looking at some of the Old Testament’s non-human metaphors for God. I named some of them – rock, place, voice, fire, cloud, water, and so on – and asked them which spoke to them most about God. And the most popular was water.

One person talked about going to the ocean to see just how big and beautiful it is, just like God. The ocean is always big enough, my therapist tells me. It’s true, and so it is with God. 

Another person talked about how different it feels to be under water – swimming, diving – and how those are the times he most experiences God. 

The scriptures tell us we come from water. We are cleansed by water. We owe our lives to water, and in so many ways, we are revitalized by water too. In all this and more, God is with us. God is with us in the waters. 

And maybe that’s the sermon… that all the best that water is, God is too. And the water helps us know it. 

But here’s the thing. One more bit. Some part of us knows all this already. And yet the experience can be hard to access.

I know that when I’m tired or low on energy, the best thing to do next is drink a tall glass of water. Because unless you’re one of those obsessive hydrators who carries around your own half gallon jug, who of us drinks enough water? 

I know this, but when my energy’s a little low, I’m more likely to grab one of the Halloween candy bars lying around, than I am to hydrate. 

Am I alone?

And I know that for me – may not for everyone – but for me, my days go best when they start with prayer. I have some scriptures, some written prayers I like to read slowly. I meditate on bits of the gospels and the psalms. I hold my own needs before God and the needs of a whole bunch of people in my life and people in this community. I review my day behind me and my day before me, asking God for insight, direction, vision. 

I’ve been praying for decades, and this way of connecting with God is familiar to me. It centers and grounds me, gives me more hope and purpose, in other words, I like doing it. It feels good. It helps me.

But many mornings of my life, I make my coffee, and sit down, and half an hour later, I realized I’ve checked three social media sites, and two news outlets, and my email and my online banking balance, but I haven’t prayed at all. And it’s time to get my kids to school and get on with my day. And I don’t feel energized at all. 

Do you have this version of this, I wonder. Knowing what brings you life, but not going there? Or knowing specifically what helps you connect with God, but settling for substitutes?

The scriptures name this phenomenon really well too, and they associate this too with God as water.

Jeremiah 2:10-13 (Common English Bible)

Look to the west as far as the shores of Cyprus

    and to the east as far as the land of Kedar.

Ask anyone there:

    Has anything this odd ever taken place?

11     Has a nation switched gods,

        though they aren’t really gods at all?

Yet my people have exchanged their glory

    for what has no value.

12 Be stunned at such a thing, you heavens;

    shudder and quake,

        declares the Lord.

13 My people have committed two crimes:

    They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.

    And they have dug wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.

The prophet is so confused. It’s like, well, there’s this God we call the Spring of Living Water. Yeah, fountain God, so good, that you drink from God and you are glorious – more alive, vibrant with inner beauty and joy. 

And then people are like,

Oh, yeah, but I have this plastic toy god I kind of like playing with instead.

Or like,

Oh yeah, spring of living water is over here, but I’m going to dig a ditch in this bit of sand and see what I get there instead. 

It’s odd, but it’s also just what we do. 

We’re drawn to habits of living that don’t satisfy us and make us alive. And we’re drawn to what the Bible calls idols, stuff we look to for God-sized security and help, that increasingly demands our time and devotion, while decreasingly rewarding us at all. 

Addictions are famously like this – clinical addictions of various kinds but even sort of addiction-lite, like compulsively scrolling on our phones, or distractedly numbing ourselves out with food or fantasy or whatever. Our obsessions with money, with stuff that we think will make us secure or happy are like this too. 

We’re habitually drawn away from God because idols have advertisers – like buy more, eat more, consume more, save more, worry more, whatever.

But you know what’s cool? Even in the busy, weird, distracting world of ours, and even in these times where drinking from God can seem abstract or hard, Spring of Living Waters hasn’t gone anywhere. 

The Deep still calls to us. Springs and wells still gush up in the valleys and the hills. God of the Waters is still here, eager to enliven, to cleanse, to revitalize, and help us follow God’s flow into lives of greater faith, hope, love, joy, and justice. 

Two practices I commend to you that can help, both drawn from Rabbi Toba’s wonderful chapter. 

The first is so easy, and you can do it several times a day. The second will take a little time and intention. 

The first is water blessing. Anytime you make contact with water – when you drink water, when you wash your hands, when you shower, or even when you jump into a cold lake, or walk by the ocean, or drive on a bridge over the river, you see the water and you say:

Thank you, God, for the water that gives us life. I bless you, Source of Life and Spring of Living Waters. 

That’s it – thank you, God, for the water that gives us life. I bless you, Source of Life, and spring of Living Waters. And you see what that prayer does in you, what it grows in you. 

The second is called Going with the Flow. In this practice, you recognize that life is like a flowing stream. It’s somewhere now, and it’s going somewhere too. And we can make choices about how we navigate the flow of our present, and the flow of our future too.

And God has a flow too. In one of the many water scriptures we didn’t get to today, the prophet Amos cries out:

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

The flow of God is toward greater love and greater justice, not just for me and mine, but for all of us. 

And so in going with the flow, we pay attention to the flow of our lives. We ask if it is aligned with our own values and hopes, and if it’s aligned with the best of what we know of God.

We take some time to ask:

Where am I? 

  • How am I spending most of my time, money, and attention?
  • What fills my schedule, fills my heart, fills my thoughts?
  • And is that aligned with who I believe myself to be or hope myself to be?

And if not, you can have a chat with God or with yourself about that and see what you want to do.

And then we ask ourselves:

Where am I going? 

  • What do I want to be true in two months, at the end of the year?
  • How about the end of this decade?
  • How about the end of my life?
  • Will my life as is get me there the way I’m going?
  • Or do I need to make some different choices?

When I did this exercise, I had two very specific things I wanted to be true by the end of this year. And they weren’t going to be in reach the way I was going. So I’m making some changes to my time to make one of them possible, and I’m stretching my deadline a bit on the other.

And that was just looking at the next two months. Looking at where I’m going further out yields even more insight, more hope, more ideas and prayers. 

Life’s too good and too short to set ourselves up to live with regret. Better to find our best flow, God’s flow sooner rather than later.

And God’s too good. The spring of living waters is too good to not turn and drink. My friends, the water is good. It’s there within reach. Take hold, drink deep, dive in.

Becoming

The other week I caught a show at the planetarium at the Museum of Science. I hadn’t been there in years, maybe decades. If you’ve never been, Boston’s Museum of Science is just a wonder, famously so for kids but for grownups too. And the Planetarium is where you can see shows about astronomy and what you can see in the night sky and other stuff. It’s really one of our city’s treasures.

I was back there because I’d been invited along with some other clergy of different faiths for a pre-screening of a new Planetarium show that debuts next month, one on religion and science. It tours you about the earth’s cultures and creatures – past, present and future. And it asks many of the big questions that both religion and science pose about the origin and nature and meaning of things, why the earth and the universe are the way we are. 

If you can’t tell, I was spellbound. Highly recommend this show. Anyway, there were a couple of moments in the film that were particularly breathtaking for me.

One was when the show visually represented the changes in human culture and science over the millennia. You visually sweep through time, from the first human use of fire a couple hundred thousand years ago down to today’s lightning speed changes in culture and technology. And you feel both like: woah, what an ancient human story we’re part of but also a kind of awe and delight and fear at how fast that story is changing right now. 

And then there was this other moment, when the film is putting life on earth in the context of the vastness of the universe. And the panoramic view sweeps out from some kind of subatomic particle to a single human’s eye perspective and then on out to a view of the whole earth, and then the earth’s place in our solar system, and our orbital life that sweeps around the sun in the context of the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and then how many billions or even trillions of galaxies there are in the whole universe.

And Friends, breathtaking doesn’t do it justice. 

How does one think about, feel about, talk about the smallness of our little blue planet in the context of our massive and ever expanding universe? 

What a time to be alive, to begin to be able to peer into the tiniest intricacies of matter and at the same time to gaze out into the inconceivably enormous universe we’re part of. And for our jaws to drop in wonder.

And what a time to be a person of faith in someone or something we call God. An everlasting spiritual being who is creative force behind all this, who is creative, loving presence amidst all this. 

In light of all we are beginning to know about this wildly complex, breathtakingly beautiful, and ever expanding universe, how do we think about and talk about God and worship and pray to God? 

The next few weeks we’re going to explore this question with the help of the work of a friend of mine named Toba Spitzer. Toba is a prominent rabbi in the Jewish religion, a practitioner and a teacher of a form of Judaism called reconstructionist that seeks to help Judaism change and evolve to meet the context and needs of a modern era.

I like Toba for a lot of reasons but one of them is the kindred religious spirit I see in her. Because my calling as a pastor, and Reservoir’s calling as a church, is also within our own tradition, a kind of reconstructionist calling. We want the Christian faith to stay rooted in its origins while also evolving, being large enough, flexible enough to meet the contexts and needs of our times. 

So, from now through Thanksgiving, our Sunday teaching will be drawn from Toba’s work in her new book, God is Here. I highly recommend the book if you want to get it, read it with a friend, with your community group. That’s up to you.

But we’ll draw from a few of Toba’s chapters the next few Sundays in some different Old Testament, non-human metaphors for God. 

This week, I speak on God who is engaged with our universe in its ongoing process of change, God as Becoming. 

Our scripture is from the book of Exodus, chapter three. Moses is called in the wilderness to lead his tribal people out of slavery in Egypt, and he has this encounter with God who names Godself to Moses in a new way, as the ever Becoming one. 

It goes like this:

Exodus 3:11-15 (Common English Bible)

11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

12 God said, “I’ll be with you. And this will show you that I’m the one who sent you. After you bring the people out of Egypt, you will come back here and worship God on this mountain.”

13 But Moses said to God, “If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they are going to ask me, ‘What’s this God’s name?’ What am I supposed to say to them?”

14 God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am. So say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’”

15 God continued, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever; this is how all generations will remember me.

So at first Moses is like:

I can’t do this big thing. I’m not good enough. I stutter. Whatever.

And God says:

I’ll be with you, and I’ll show you that in various ways.

But then Moses is like:

who are you, anyway, God? What will I call you? What is it that I can say about you? 

Deep questions, questions we all ask in a journey of faith, right? What is God like? How do we talk about and talk to this god?

Well, for Moses, and for the first time in the history of the people of Israel, there is divine revelation of this holy, unique name for God. In our English translation, God says,

you all can call me: I am who I am.

And later, that’s shortened just to

“I am.” 

This one word, this one name: Yahweh, or Rabbi Toba tells us Ehyeh, it shows up all over your Bibles but you don’t see it. Every time in your English Old Testament, you see the name Lord for God, but Lord is written with all capital letters, it’s the translators’ attempt to do something with this name that they don’t really know how to translate: Yahweh or Ehyeh. It’s everywhere.

Rabbi Toba tells us you most literally translate this as:

I Will Be that I will Be. Or

“I am Becoming that I am Becoming.”

There’s a lot going on here. 

Moses is learning that this God can not be limited by its name, can’t be boxed in, or controlled. Humans have often named their gods to give them familiarity, the familiarity of a divine being you can appease, and you can hopefully get to do your bidding.

But in Exodus, this God – this God that later on Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all agree is the Most High God, the creator of the universe, the one real divine being – this God can not be named like that, does not want to or need to be appeased, certainly can not be controlled.

No, this God is Being. Or better yet, this God is Becoming. 

If God’s name is Becoming, there’s two subtly different ways we can read this. 

One is that God isn’t changing or growing, but to us, God is ever becoming. Because we are always seeing and learning new things about God. God is so large and beautiful we can never stop learning and seeing more.

The other way to see this is that God is still becoming. Like the universe itself – infinitely large, but at the same time is still expanding. 

If God is like this, then there are aspects of God’s nature or character that never change. The New Testament defines God in a word only three times.

God is Spirit.

God is Truth.

God is Love.

Those things are always true about God. God is always spirit, always true, always loving. And you could add others, like God is just. God is kind. You get the idea. 

But in addition to this constant, everlasting nature, God is also becoming. Because God is in relationship with everyone and everything, God has new experiences, and those experiences affect God and shape the ideas God offers back to us for the future.

For what it’s worth, friends, this is the stuff I study about God in my doctoral program in theology. It’s called process theology, or open and relational theology.

I think that in the 20th century there were three marvelous breakthroughs in Christian theology and experience. They are pentecostal, liberation, and process theology.

Pentecostal theology was born in urban Los Angeles in 1906. People were experiencing the presence and power of God in their emotions and in their bodies, and that seemed to open up power in people’s lives, power for healing, power in their sense of intimate connection with God in prayer, and power to overcome injustice, like to be in interracial communities amidst segregation. The Pentecostal and charismatic movements born of this are the most rapidly growing forms of Christianity in the world. There’s a lot of mess and abuse and unhealth that hangs out in these spaces, but there’s beauty too. Our church, many of us, live in the legacy of this Pentecostal theology and experience. 

Liberation theology was born in the 1950s through the 1970s as colonial global empires and racist segregationist states like the United States started to break up and change. Alongside the movements for freedom in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and within Black America, there were movements of liberation within Christianity that said God is not on the side of oppressive colonists and racists. God is not only interested in eternal life in heaven. God is interested in humane, just conditions in this life, on this earth. And so God cares about the healing and freedom of oppressed people groups. In the US, there was Black theology. In Korea, minjung theology. In Africa and Latin America, this was often called postcolonial or liberation theology. Super-important, that God is in solidarity with those who suffer, and that God cares about justice and wants us to do justice as well. Our church’s vision for Beloved Community is deeply influenced by Liberation theology.

And then lastly Process theology. This was born amongst philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead who were responding to scientific insights like Einstein’s theory of relativity and what became quantum physics, that the only constant in the universe is change and movement, that there are no unchanging substances. You and me and the air around us, and even the chairs you’re sitting on are all collections of matter in relationship. Process theology has the insight consistent with our scripture that God too is always in relationship, that God has experiences that have an affect on God. 

And so God is everlasting and aspects of God like God’s loving nature may never change. But in other ways, God is a creative partner with us all in life. God too is still becoming.

Now at the very least, our view of God keeps widening. Most Biblical authors if pressed would have told you that the earth was the center of creation, and that somewhere above Jerusalem, maybe a few miles up, just over where the birds fly, and over the moon and the stars, God has a throne in the heavens – far enough away that we can’t see it, but close enough that God and any other spiritual beings can see us.

Just about no one thinks that any more. We know that the moon itself is 239,000 miles from earth, and that in the scope of our solar system, that’s still really close. So we know now that the whole “throne of God in the heavens” thing is a metaphor. 

Our view of God has widened. Throne is a metaphor for God’s worth and power. And heavens is a metaphor for God’s omnipresence. God is spirit and God is everywhere. Heaven is just where the good life of God is manifest. 

At minimum, our view of God needs to keep expanding. In our religious traditions and beliefs, we need to be humble about what we know and open to ongoing growth and discovery. This is why religions change. And it’s true for each of us personally too. People change. In our own faith and views, we can be humble and open to discovery, to becoming.

Let me dial this down super practically into two ways of being spiritual I want to commend to you.

The first is called apophatic spirituality. I gave a couple sermons on this a few years back. But here’s the quick version. Kataphatic spirituality means with words – it’s about the things we can affirm about God and know about God with words and images, relating to God through reading holy scripture and verbal prayers and song lyrics and pictures of God in our imaginations. Awesome stuff.

But apophatic spirituality is the necessary, moody cousin to all that. Apophatic means without words. Apophatic says every word and image we use about God may be partly true, but it’s also partly not true. 

God may have a throne, but God doesn’t really have a throne.

God may be like a shepherd, but God’s not really a shepherd. God’s not a person at all, and it’s also rude to people to treat them as if we think like sheep.

God’s always bigger and better than any words or images we put around God. God will be who God will be. God is becoming. So apophatic spirituality encourages mystery and humility and silence.

In our postmodern age of deconstruction, apophatic spirituality affirms some of our impulses. It’s good to be like: I was taught or my parents were taught that God is Father. And that may be true in some ways. But dang, it can end up being limiting, even abusive to get it in our heads that God’s a man. 

So we need to both speak and unspeak that God is Father. God is more than that. God will be who God will be. We can’t contain or control God or put God in a box. God is Becoming. 

That’s apophatic.

The other practice is one Toba commends in her book. It’s a regular practice of radical humility and curiosity about the Becomingness of God and of everyone and everything in the world.

It’s called, “What is this?” The idea is that throughout your day, when you encounter things and experiences both familiar and unfamiliar, you ask with open curiosity, “What is this?”

I read a verse in the Bible about God. Maybe it’s something I think I understand, or maybe it’s something that confuses or troubles me. Either way I ask:

What is this?

And through that question be open to the new becoming of God to me.

Or like Moses before the burning bush, we look at any object in the natural world and ask with curiosity: what is this? And that question can open us up to see the possibilities of becoming in all things.

Like my dog. My family’s trying to train a puppy, and it’s a kind of puppy known for being whip-smart and wonderful but also kind of hard to train. So when my puppy is standing his ground and not wanting to go where I want him to go, I can get frustrated and impatient and yank him around because I’m stronger than him. 

But that’s mean, and it’s bad training too, won’t get us where we want to go. So I ask, “What is this?” What is this dog? And what’s happening here? And I see then: oh, this dog is super smart and has an interesting will of his own. And I’m trying to persuade this dog that I’m wise and trustworthy, that I’m a person worth following. And I’m trying to do that too across this cross-species language gap, which is both challenging and fun. But if we can do this well, if we can learn to communicate to each other, and I can be worthy of his trust and he trusts me, then we are going to have a beautiful relationship. 

Or like my procrastination. I’m working on a big writing project, or more often I’m not working on it. Because it’s long and hard, and so it draws out my insecurities and frustrations and procrastination. And my natural instinct when this happens, as it did for instance on Thursday morning, is to get frustrated with myself and then get restless and give up, which means I don’t get any more writing done and I also feel worse about myself later.

But when I can get curious instead, I can ask:

what is this? What is happening in this experience?

And even ask that question in light of faith and wonder:

God, how do you see what’s happening here? And is there a way that you can help me move forward with more freedom and joy in this? 

And when I tried that Thursday, I remembered that even though I’m 49, I’m still growing. I’m not done yet. And I remembered that God is compassionate for me and patient and not frustrated with where I am today but glad to help me grow.

And I thought:

what if I could be patient with myself too? What if I can just do these one or two parts of the project today rather than worry about the 100 parts I don’t have the energy or insight to do yet? 

And that helped me do the bit I could do on Thursday, which got me one or two steps closer to where I want to go. And maybe more importantly, it was another step in knowing God loves me and is for me, and another step toward self-compassion and owning my own growth too. 

That question of curiosity:

what is this? 

Well, friends, we open our God is Here series with the holiest, most important name of God in the Old Testament, the name that tells us God is Becoming.

God is still experiencing new things in relationship to you and me and all creation. And there is more to God than we yet know or can put to words. There’s a big-eyed, childlike wonder that this Becoming God calls for – a wonder that lets us keep learning, keep growing, keep discovering. God is here. And God will continue to be ever more big and beautiful and loving than we’ve yet seen.

Humility-The Gifts of Imperfection

So I’m walking into Boston’s Prudential mall the other day, and I see this art on the staircase beneath my feet. All the bright colors and the phrases: You are strong. You are capable. You are enough. 

You are strong. You are capable. You are enough.

How do you react to those phrases? How do you react to them as artwork at the entrance to a high-end shopping destination?

I asked about this on social media this week and got kinda the same range of reactions I had. 

On the one hand, I cringed. Honestly, I thought: this is corny. And I wondered what the intent is here for customers walking into a mall. Like it’s trying to amp us up to think, I am awesome, I am enough, and I deserve it. So we can smile while dropping eight hundred bucks for a new phone while sipping eight dollar cups of coffee. Some of my fellow cynic friends on social media felt the same way.

But on the other hand, I was like maybe this is just great. And to be honest, this was the reaction of more of my friends, to say:

Hey, don’t we all need encouragement? I mean, life can just beat us down. And if a little stairway art can lift our spirits, isn’t that a good thing?

I grew up in a family, myself included, that could tend toward critical, and so even though I was pretty strong and capable when I launched out into my adult life, it wasn’t always easy for me to own that.

And this phrase “you are enough” is one I’ve wrestled with over the years. The Christian faith I came into in my youth did so much good for me, but it also mostly encouraged me to feel the opposite of this.

I am not enough. I am unworthy, I was taught, just riddled with sin that merits my guilt and shame. But thanks be to God, I have been loved by God in Christ, so if I confess all my not enough-ness, I am accepted, forgiven, adopted as a beloved child.

And I actually believe exactly what I just said, word for word. But the way I received this faith seemed to often leave me still feeling less of the acceptance and connection and beloved-ness of adoption and more of the guilt and shame of never enough. Still not enough.

So I’ve come to appreciate this phrase: you are enough. Maybe by myself I am, maybe I’m not. Depends on the situation. But with the love of God and the help of friends, I am. Maybe not enough for some weird idea of perfection or sufficiency I got in my head. But with the love of God and the help of friends, enough to be good. Good enough. Every time. 

Today, we’re talking about Reservoir Church’s core value of humility. It’s the second to last week of a month we do each year called We Are Reservoir, inviting our community to consider who and what this church is and is still becoming, and inviting everyone who’s interested to a joyful belonging as members of the community.

I think this value of humility is one of our most important. I think it’s a critical value for the future of the Christian faith too, and as a personal way of being, it also helps us live fuller, more joyful lives.

So this matters a lot to me.

If you’ve been around for a bit, and I say a couple things that sound familiar, I’m recapping parts of one of my favorite sermons, a talk I gave in 2019 about four phrases for wholehearted living, those phrases being…

  • I don’t know but I’m learning
  • I’m sorry
  • I’m beloved
  • I am enough

We’ll get back to these phrases in a bit.

But first we’ll look at a bit of scripture together and why humility is central to following Jesus and central to the future of the Christian faith, if that future is going to get any better than it looks these days. 

Our passage is from this little letter called Philippians. We’ll read a few verses from the second chapter. 

Philippians 2:5-8  (Common English Bible)

5 Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:

6 Though he was in the form of God,

        he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.

7 But he emptied himself

        by taking the form of a slave

        and by becoming like human beings.

When he found himself in the form of a human,

8         he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,

        even death on a cross.

So like a good Marvel superhero story, the writer of Philippians gives us a Jesus backstory, told here in a poem. 

It says that once upon a time, his spirit, his essence was God himself. But he emptied himself. He became one of us. He humbled himself. Even to the point of a brutal, undignified death.

There are different ways to read this.

One is that the whole “form of God” thing is an exaggeration, that Jesus was a pretty great person but not really divine. The early churches rejected this view as unworthy of how Jesus embodied and revealed God to us.

Two is the idea that Jesus was indeed son of God but was kind of faking it as a human, sort of like the Greek gods in their temporary earthly visitations or like Clark Kent just hiding his Superman superpowers. The early churches also rejected this view because it was clear to them that while Jesus was a special human being, he was still very much a human. 

In fact, Jesus is the kind of human we aspire to be and who with the help of God, we can indeed become.

Calm, curious, clear, compassionate, confident, courageous, creative, and connected. 

Those eight C’s are actually the image of human goodness, the fully present, fully developed self. They’re not a bad description of Jesus either. 

The good human life isn’t superhuman. It’s not a Marvel superhero-like striving after god-like powers. Unlimited wealth, power, skill, opportunity – that’s not a good human life, it’s a myth, a sham, a chasing after the wind. Jesus’ biographers tells us that at a key moment in his young adult years, someone or something called the satan, the accuser, tempted Jesus to strive for this kind of superhuman perfection. And Jesus said:

no way.

Or as Philippians puts it, Jesus didn’t try to exploit divinity. He didn’t strive to be more than he was as a human. He accepted the path of humility.

This meant serving others, not using others to suit his own needs for sure. The passage focuses on that.

But it also meant experiencing a beautiful, humble, human life. 

Growing and learning throughout his life as we do. Asking lots of questions all the time, so many questions, because asking questions, being curious, is a great way to grow and deepen relationships, but also because Jesus didn’t know everything. 

Jesus did know where he came from – he never doubted how valuable, how beloved he was. But Jesus also had limits, he suffered, he could not do and chose not to do everything he wanted and still knew that within all those human limits, he was enough.

This is what it means to be humble. It’s to not try to play the status game of curating our image to impress for sure. 

But at a more basic level, it’s also just being who we are, no less and no more. It’s growing, learning, and making joyful peace with our limits, that we are beloved and more than enough not as gods but as humans, not as cocky and certain and arrogant, but as calmly confident even with our doubts and limits.

That’s Jesus, and with the help of his Spirit, it can be us too. 

You’ve got to wonder, though, if Jesus is so humble, why can’t the church founded in his honor be as well? 

Christians, and the Christian religion, are not known – either historically or in our own times – as humble. 

Reservoir chose humility as a core value of the church because it says something important about how we do faith community, but also because it’s a little surprising for a Christian church. 

Christians have had a thing with power and control, getting aligned with empires and colonizers and political parties to advance their influence and get what they want in the world. 

And sometimes a hangup about perfection too, like we need to hide our faults and pretend we’re perfect, or like God sees how imperfect we are, then God will be angry or disappointed. 

I don’t think this is the way of Jesus, though, who let God shine in his true humanity. Jesus, the humble one. Jesus, the one who said:

Blessed are the meek, the humble, for they’re the ones who will inherit the earth.

What if Jesus’ followers didn’t strive to be perfect or in control but to, like Jesus, be of maximum service to the well-being and flourishing of others?

And what if Jesus’ followers didn’t worry about perfection of faith – being always certain, or free from doubt or error? And what if instead they, or we, accepted doubt and error as a no-big-deal part of confident faith? 

This past week, I had the chance to speak with Brian McLaren for the first time. Brian is one of the elder statespeople of a healthy, evolving Christian faith. He visited this church in our early days in the late 90s, and remembers us fondly. He’s published loads of books since then, including his latest I’m reading now: Do I Stay Christian? It’s really good.

To the students in my theology doctoral program, McLaren was talking about the difference between goodness and perfection.

He said that

perfection is sterile and stagnant, but goodness is growing and fertile. And so goodness is so much better than perfection.

This idea of perfection wasn’t part of the earliest Christian faith, born in the humble, earthy thinking and experience of Middle Eastern Jews. It came in through the Greek philosophers, who had a notion of perfection they associated with the divine – never changing, never feeling. And so the idea of a perfect human and a perfect society would be the same – unemotional, unchanging, always powerful, always in control.

McLaren was like: not only is that not achievable, it’s not desirable. It’s stagnant, static, sterile. He reminded me of Christena Cleveland’s comments years ago to another group I was in, that perfection is a figment of the colonial imagination. 

People who are so insecure they always need to be right, people who are so power-hungry they always need to be dominant, they’re into perfection, and whatever illusions, whatever control, whatever dominance of conformity it takes to get there.

People who are secure, who know they are beloved, don’t need to chase some illusory idol of perfection – we know that’s pointless, it’s vapor. We can grow into greater goodness instead, growing, humble, but fertile. 

This is at the heart of Reservoir’s experience of Christian church, or Jesus-centered faith community. One of our values is humility, defined like this:

 Humility

We are wholeheartedly committed to pursuing the truth of Jesus through multiple sources, including the Bible, reason, culture, and experience, and we take the posture of learners, recognizing that our understanding of God’s truth continues to unfold.

I promise that this church will never pretend to know everything or have all the answers. We’ll keep on our steady, humble pursuit of God and pursuit of truth, trusting it will keep unfolding for us over time. And we hope you’ll have the freedom of doing the same, not striving after status or certainty, and not worrying about your imperfection, but seeking God, seeking truth wherever you find it, and letting a good life unfold within your imperfections. 

Reservoir’s not a perfect church. But I think we’re a good church. 

And neither you nor I are ever going to have a perfect life. But we can have a good life. 

I think this humility thing isn’t just a value of our faith but a pretty big part of the good life, a joyful and fulfilled human life.

This past week or two I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with quite a number of people from this community who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. And I didn’t tell them this, but I was keeping an eye out for the ways they are aging well, continuing to live a good life as the years march on.

And I noticed that in their own way, they’d all been leaning into these four phrases the sociologist Brene Brown associates with what she calls the gifts of imperfection, these four phrases I’m connecting with Jesus’ way of true humanity through deep humility.

  • I don’t know but I’m learning
  • I’m sorry
  • I’m beloved
  • I am enough

One of them shared with me about how after the attacks at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh a few years ago, he realized he had never really explored the Jewish roots of his Christian faith, or thought about how as an anti-racist person of color, he could also stand against anti-Semitism.

So he visited a synagogue that week, and he kept going back, visiting every week for a full year, eventually becoming a member of that community as both a participant and an ally, even while remaining Christian.

He did something similar after a prominent hate crime against Asian Americans, visiting a series of Buddhist temples and saying:

I’m learning regarding the cultures and experiences of East Asian Americans.

I’m learning for him led to I’m sorry too, as it often does, as he started to reckon with what he called his “ignorance, implicit bias, and complicity” regarding Asian Americans. 

What a beautiful thing, as a community leader in his own right, to now be in his 60s and to be able to say:

I’m not finished. I’ve not arrived. I’m still growing. I’m still learning. That’s humility.

And that’s part of a good life, in my book.

I met with another person in this same phase of life whose: I’m not done. I’m still learning, was taking other forms. This person was talking with me about their faith journey, which for them is a healing journey. She was sharing how at last, deep into middle age, she finally started to learn that God really loved her.

She was like:

I would have said that earlier, but mostly I was just saying that. My faith was really just skimming the surface of my life.

And she talked about the insights and help that eventually let her see she didn’t need to be anyone that she wasn’t to be enough, to be fully loved. 

Her journey had a lot of connections with mine, which I shared, and we talked some about how to help others reach a deeper, quiet confidence in their beloved-ness.

I spent time with an older couple last week too and got them talking about their history as a couple and what was bringing them joy or challenge these days as well.

Mostly, it was joy. They shared their stories of how life was going, including the things they were still learning after many decades of life on this earth. But the most striking thing to me was the ease with which they talked about some hard patches in their lives – painful memories from their working lives, regrets in parenting, rougher patches in their marriage. 

Their lives have been imperfect, and are imperfect still. But in the midst of those imperfections, they had an ease with saying I’m sorry and I’m still learning. And they had gratitude for how good their lives have been and how good they are still becoming.

One of them even used the word humility to capture this. They weren’t complimenting themselves, saying look how humble I am, that famous oxymoron of non-character development. No, they were saying:

my life is humble – it’s small in its own way, it’s imperfect. I still need God and friends. But I’m beloved, and my life is so good, and that is enough.

How beautiful. 

I’m only on the verge of 50, but I hope to move through the decades to come like my friends – not chasing certainty, control, security, the sterile figment of the colonial imagination that is perfection.

I want to be able to keep saying

I’m learning, I’m sorry, and I’m so beloved. So this good, good life of mine is enough.

Freedom

Dancing feel so good! It’s been a while…

There is a good feeling we get when we find freedom, isn’t there? 

The capacity to move as we’re meant to move, to be as we’re meant to be, to learn and grow and love as the deepest parts of us know we need to.

Yeah, a free person shines like the stardust we’re made out of, like the lights that we are. 

But woah, it’s hard to get there and stay there, isn’t it? 

Real talk – how many of you had fun a minute ago? 

OK, and how many of you were like: what is happening? 

Do I have to get up? Do I have to move? Who’s looking at me? What in the world is Steve doing?

Don’t worry, it was my idea and I was thinking every one of those things. Everyone, don’t worry.

Yeah, we have a lot of resistance to freedom. We want to not be constrained by conventions that don’t suit us. But man, we also don’t want to be that weird person who’s unconventional. 

We want to dare to live by our deepest convictions, to flow in the world in consonance with our deepest truths and hopes, but can we? Is it safe? Is it normal? Will it work?

Freedom and resistance – resistance to our own freedom, sometimes resistance to others’ freedom – tend to show up together. 

Freedom also isn’t just following every one of our instincts without impediment. Freedom is nuanced. Freedom lives within constraint. With great freedom comes great responsibility, they say. It’s true. 

But freedom is really important to us and our flourishing. It’s important to God too. And it’s important to this community you’re in right now. 

This month, in our We Are Reservoir series, we’re preaching through our five core values – Connection last week, Everyone, Humility, and Action yet to come. And freedom is up this week.

Here’s how we defined this years ago when we changed our name to Reservoir Church. 

Freedom 

We encourage honest exploration of faith over conformity of belief or behavior, trusting that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.

This is a really important value of this community. I think it’s a really important value of Jesus’ whole Beloved Community, what Jesus, in his teaching, called the

kingdom

or

the family or the commonwealth of God. 

And I think all of us don’t just prize whatever freedom we have, we’re kind of longing for more liberation, yearning to be more free. 

So today, we take a glance, from a Jesus-centered perspective, about what freedom is or isn’t and how we get there. 

Here’s our text, from one of the earlier letters in the New Testament, written by Paul of Tarsus to the little house churches in Galatia, a region of the Roman Empire that’s now part of Turkey.

It’s kind of the climax of the whole letter. Here we go.

Galatians 5:1-14  (Common English Bible)

5 1 Christ has set us free for freedom. Therefore, stand firm and don’t submit to the bondage of slavery again.

2 Look, I, Paul, am telling you that if you have yourselves circumcised, having Christ won’t help you.

3 Again I swear to every man who has himself circumcised that he is required to do the whole Law.

4 You people who are trying to be made righteous by the Law have been estranged from Christ. You have fallen away from grace!

5 We eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness through the Spirit by faith.

6 Being circumcised or not being circumcised doesn’t matter in Christ Jesus, but faith working through love does matter.

7 You were running well—who stopped you from obeying the truth?

8 This line of reasoning doesn’t come from the one who calls you.

9 A little yeast works through the whole lump of dough.

10 I’m convinced about you in the Lord that you won’t think any other way. But the one who is confusing you will pay the penalty, whoever that may be.

11 Brothers and sisters, if I’m still preaching circumcision, why am I still being harassed? In that case, the offense of the cross would be canceled.

12 I wish that the ones who are upsetting you would castrate themselves!

13 You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love.

14 All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself.

You don’t have to, but I want us to remember this line I’m about to say, so if you’re willing can you say this line with me, say it after me:

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

Here’s what’s going on. 

A number of people in this region have heard about the way of Jesus, and they are in. Listening to the words and stories of Jesus before they were even written down. They were learning to worship and trust the God Jesus loved, pray as Jesus taught us to pray, live in love and live by faith the way Jesus taught us and showed us. 

And then some people told them:

there’s more.

They were like:

there are customs. There are rules. There’s a whole tradition you need to uphold, to fall in line with to be Christian.

Maybe these were visiting teachers from another church, maybe members of their community that had picked up these ideas, maybe their own local pastor, we don’t know. 

But we know that one of the customs, one of the rules, he/they were insisting upon was male circumcision. Male Jews had their foreskins of their penis removed at birth or conversion – it had been so for centuries. It was so for Jesus. It was so for Paul. 

And these teachers were like:

you need to do this too. It’s part of the system. You want to be Christian, you want to follow the way of Jesus, getting circumcised, or getting your son or husband or boyfriend or whoever to get circumcised, is one of the things you have to do.

Now I mean, I hate, I hate the way some Christians talk about this text. They call these teachers the Judaizers and act like having Gentiles pick up a few Jewish customs would be this awful thing. It sounds totally anti-semitic to me, and I’m not having that. 

And on the surface, it’s no big deal, I would think. I mean what’s wrong with a few rules? Nothing. What’s wrong with giving respect to the ancient faith tradition from which Jesus himself came? That seems beautiful to me, even if it were to involve a painful medical procedure for the men. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Who cares?

Well, Paul, one of the people who ended up writing bits of our Bible cared, and he cared a lot! He himself is Jewish. He loves his culture, his ancestry, the faith from which he came – he’s proud of it. But these teachers of the rules and customs required for belonging, they anger him. He’s like:

brothers, if you want to circumcise these folks, you ought to go ahead and castrate yourselves instead.

Not polite words. 

Here’s my take on this. 

I think what’s at stake is not at all about Jewish or not Jewish, not at all about rules or no rules. We all need some rules to live by, after all. No, here what’s at stake is at the heart of what God wants for us in Jesus. What’s at stake is freedom.

Jesus set you free so you can keep getting more free. For freedom Christ has set you free.

But we keep putting yourselves in prison, and that is a tragedy.

I want to talk about two sets of ways we tend to imprison ourselves, that Paul uses as sort of the opposites of the freedom for which Christ set us free, OK?

They’re the imprisonment of tower, and the imprisonment of field. 

Now this whole prison/slavery language… it’s hard, it’s loaded. 

We’re in a country whose real practices of slavery and imprisonment have been brutal and violent and racist, physical horrors we need deliverance from. So we can’t use language like this casually. 

On the slavery front, the same was true in Paul’s Roman empire, for what it’s worth – common and brutal and violent then. Some of the members of the Galatian house churches were slaves, and it was awful. 

So I don’t think Paul used slavery as a metaphor casually. He was trying to convey the desperate violence and entrapment of all the ways we fail to walk in freedom, saying we need deliverance from the literal imprisonment and enslavement of humans by humans, and we also need deliverance from the metaphorical, internal imprisonment and enslavement of persons by the systems we swim in and by ourselves as well. 

So there’s the metaphor. Let’s talk about our two big opposites of the freedom for which Jesus has set us free.

So the first I’m calling the Prison of Tower. 

The prison of tower is the need to be correct, stable, and secure. It’s the belief that you’ve got to always be right and better than. 

It’s often, the prison of tower, born out of insecurity or pride or both. The idea is: mark out your territory, your safe zone, build your tower, your fortress of superiority and protection, and the resist and judge everyone outside. 

For Paul’s opponents, they were like: morally, religiously, spiritually, this is a dangerous world. There are the Romans and the Pagans and the Persians and all kinds of people and beliefs and cultures and customs in the world, and they’re not good. They’re not true. 

Uphold the customs, follow the rules – circumcision included – that set you apart, that make you right and pure and pleasing to God. This will protect you, protect you from assimilation, protect you from the displeasure of God and the judgment of your community. 

But Paul’s like,

this is not the point of the way of Jesus. Faith in Jesus is not a better moral system to set you apart from the world or make you better than anyone else.  

Faith in Jesus is walking with Jesus in a relationship of trust, not a code of certainties. 

Faith in Jesus is a living, breathing relationship with the Spirit of God that leads you into right ways in all circumstances. 

Faith in Jesus is grace, the gift of knowing you’re loved by God, you’re a child of God, that God is always with you, never giving up on you, and can always guide you into greater goodness, greater joy, greater truth, greater freedom. 

Prison of tower still shows up in religious rigidity and superiority. When people say believe the codes we’ve taught you, obey the Bible the way we read it, follow the rules the way we teach them, and you will please God, you will be well, that’s an insecure prison tower. It claims righteousness and honor and safety and superiority, but it’s just smug superiority. 

Nationalism is the same. Loving your culture or your country because it’s home and it’s meaningful to you, that kind of pride is cool if you’ve got it. But confidence that your country or your culture are the best, the chosen, the ones deserving the most power or wealth, that’s prison of tower again – pride that builds walls and props up our little egos, but doesn’t bring us or our communities freedom. 

Put these two together with religious nationalism, in this country, Christian nationalism, and you’ve got a doubly toxic idolatry, claiming God’s backing and favor for our own petty, selfish, violent project. Paul’s like:

curse that kind of attitude. It will estrange you from Christ, lead you away from God It’s no good.

Now friends here at Reservoir, some of us have left prisons of tower. We were once part of Christian cultures, churches, ways of doing faith that we now see as fence-building, wall-building, narrow, rigid, smug, or judgmental. In our honest exploration of faith, we’ve walked away from conformity of belief or behavior. Maybe we believe the Holy Spirit is revealing some truth to us as we seek God. 

I believe that the Spirit of God has been revealing truth to this church, for instance, about inclusion, about good fruit in our lived experience as an important litmus test for healthy, liberating faith. I celebrate the paths of change and renewal going on here and in other places in the Body of Christ. 

But if we’ve left behind prisons of tower. Or if we’re offended, scandalized, angry about other systems of tower we maybe were never part of, I think we’re encouraged to two things, though.

One, spend our energy on our own journey of love, faithfulness, and freedom. Don’t get caught up judging the places we come from, or the tower-making, fear driven projects we were never part of.

Once on Twitter, I made a comment about the really bad behavior and imprisoning tower thinking of some American Christians. And the phrase I used was “so-called Christians.” And one of you messaged me, and you were like:

Steve, that so-called Christians language is smug and judgy, and you’re better than that, and our church is better than that too.

And I was like:

thank you. You are right. And I try not to do that. Judge not, lest you be judged.

And then two, don’t trade one tower for another. Don’t trade white supremacist Christian nationalism for rigidity or fundamentalism in more liberal convictions, for instance. Speak your truth, live by your convictions, follow the way you believe God is leading, but stay generous, stay loving. Be curious, not judgmental, you know. 

And don’t trade religious rigidity for rigidity about your diet or exercise or politics or whatever. It’s good to have convictions, it can be great to have rules to live by – I have mine. But don’t make the rules with the truth, your way in this moment with the way. None of us ever sees all truth. None of us has a God’s eye, complete perspective. We all see in part. We all live by grace. We all find our freedom best when we stay humble too, when we seek to live in love.

Alright, so that’s the prison of tower. I’ll be briefer here, so I can wrap up, but Paul also contrasts the freedom for which we’ve been set free with another prison, what I’ll call Prison of Field. 

 I made up this phrase, prison of field, but here’s what I mean by it. Unlike the tower – this fortress of rules and custom and superiority and pride that hides our insecurities, prison of field is like you see the whole field, you see everything you don’t have, and you need it all.

Prison of field is the need to have new and more and better people, experiences, and wealth. It’s like being a good American consumer – I want that, so I’m gonna get it. 

It can be born of lack. Like I’ve had so little, so now I’m going to get what’s mine. Or it can be born of entitlement, like I deserve all that. 

Prison of field is thinking: I’ll be happy when….

I’ll be happy when I have more money or better stuff.

I’ll be happy when I have a new or better job or lover or house.

I’ll be happy when I’m not sick anymore. 

Or even I’ll be happy when my kids are happy, or when my kids have no problems, or when they achieve this or that. I call that notion in myself the idolatry of the perfect child. 

It’s not fair to you or your kids and doesn’t bring us freedom.

Paul says don’t let your freedom in Christ

– your I’m beloved, God is with me no matter what –

don’t let that be an opportunity to be all about your own selfish impulses. 

Instead, serve one another in love. Love your neighbor as yourself. 

Pursue the well being of friend and stranger and enemy as you pursue your own and then you’ll stay free.

Because we’re not free when we’re living by compulsion, when we’re imprisoned by the endless discontentment and hunger for more that all the marketers want us to have. 

And we’re not free when we all can’t get free together.

When my consumption hurts your land, when my need for a new and better phone every two years piles up toxic trash in your backyard, we’re not free. When my ungoverned appetites for food or sex or whatever subject other creatures to my violence or my lustful gaze, then we’re not free. When my never quite enough feeling means I can’t ever commit to a person or a place or a calling, then I’m not free, right? 

For freedom Christ has set us free.

Wherever the Spirit of God is, there is ever-increasing freedom.

Friends, with all its flaws, best as we’re able, we’ve grown this church to be a place where conformity of behavior or belief is not expected. We’ve grown this church to be a community that encourages us all to honestly explore God and goodness and faith, trusting that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.

And Jesus has lived and died and lived again to set you free. To call you a child of God. And to inspire and guide you toward love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against these things there is no law. 

Don’t settle for prison of tower or prison of field. 

Walk with God, listen to the Spirit, live by faith, and love, joy, and peace will be yours.

For freedom, Christ has set us free. 

For freedom, Christ has set us free.

Connection

Last month, we got a new puppy. There were people in my household that have been dreaming of this day for a while. Let’s just say I was the last holdout. But here we are. And it’s not clear yet how we’re all going to feel about this in the long run.

But, man, I will give Pepper this. He’s really cute. And he’s pretty fun. He gets us out of the house more. I’ve met more neighbors, more neighbor dogs the past two weeks than the previous two years. And he’s simple. This toothy little, meddlesome creature just wants to chew on things and get outside and be fed. But even more he really just wants to be liked and cuddled with and played with and then he’ll always be happy. 

Yeah, when he’s not sleeping or eating, this dog’s whole world is like: See me. Talk to me. Smile at me. Play with me. 

He’s just hungering for, always ready for connection. 

He’s not alone. 

The other big new thing in our family life this summer is that one of our parents had a major stroke. And we’ve all been waiting and praying as we see what kind of recovery is or isn’t going to be possible.

We still don’t know what the future holds here, but for over two months, my mother in law has been living in institutions, instead of at home. 

And in a lot of ways, the defining question for her, even more than her physical recovery, has also been about connection, wanting to know:

Who sees me? Who’s praying for me? Who remembers me? Who will visit me? And if I’m losing my mobility and my independence, what will ensure that I am not alone? 

As we age, whether we’re particularly introverted or extroverted, our hunger to not lose relationship and attention and touch, our needs to remain connected, become really important. 

The scriptures of our tradition affirm this fundamental need. One of the first things said about people in the whole Bible is this:

Genesis 2:18b

“It’s not good that the human is alone.”

In the creation epic of Genesis, there’s this joyful litany of celebration about the goodness of the whole created order. Again and again, God calls things good. The Hebrew word is tov. 

Sun and moon – tov

Earth and seas – tov

Plant life, animal life – tov.

Birds and fish – tov

The creation of humanity – very tov. So good. An amplification here!

But then, the idea that a human being would live in isolation, not connected to other humans at all, is not tov. 

It’s not good for people to be alone. 

Now here’s what that doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean you have to get married. Because the creation epic involves Adam and Eve – the man of the ground and the mother of all life – people think about marriage here. Get married, have a family, because it’s not good for humans to be alone.

But not all of us want to get married. And some of us want to, but it doesn’t work out for us. Or we get married, and our partner leaves us or dies. Or the marriage is hard and leaves us lonely more often than not. Or our marriage is pretty great, but we realize that even the best of marriages doesn’t by itself fulfill our needs for relationship, connection, and community. 

Marriage can be wonderful, but it’s not the be all and end all for everyone. You don’t need marriage to not be alone. In fact, you don’t need a romantic partner or a sex life at all either. 

Plenty of people live well and live wonderfully fulfilled lives without sex, without a romantic partner – married or otherwise – either for seasons of life or for all of life.

But none of us live well entirely disconnected. It’s not good for humans to be alone. 

We need connection, and we need circles of different types of connection. 

We need a lot of people to whom we’re very loosely connected, people whose names we’ll mostly never learn – our whole societies, our cultures, our economies in which we find our way. 

And then we need our circles of acquaintances who create networks of belonging for us, the circles of people we work with and live around and share affinity with. These are the people that come and go over time. They’re not intimate, they are loose ties, but they are the networks of giving and receiving that help us understand ourselves and function and matter.

And then we need smaller circles of intimacy, friends and family and partners who don’t just know our names but our stories, people with whom we may have tension and conflict, but where we’ll also experience and offer affection and respect and even love. 

And we even need some sense of connection that stays with us regardless of how other people come and go. We need a fundamental sense that we matter, that we are seen and known and loved, no matter what other people do or say. 

We are profoundly social beings. We are creatures who don’t survive, and certainly don’t thrive, without a lot of connection. 

Today we explore how we can pay attention to and value and engage most wholeheartedly with the people and communities where we offer and receive the most important, richest connection. 

We do this as part of a five week series we call We Are Reservoir. Each week for the next five weeks, we’ll teach scripture and themes related to the five core values that guide our church’s pursuit of vibrant, inclusive, healthy faith. 

These values are connection, freedom, everyone, humility, and action. 

We do a version of this once a year in the fall, so that as a community, we can remember who we are and what we are becoming, and so we can welcome people into belonging and membership in this community and make sure that all of us who want to have opportunities to chip in to the life of this community as well, so we can be a healthy, sustainable church and so all of us who want to can feel connected here. 

Today, as we explore connection, beyond the verse about not being alone, I want to read one other scripture. It’s one of my favorite encounters in the life of Jesus. And it’s a lot of things. But one of the things it is is a story about God making connection and belonging and meaning possible in new ways in a community. 

Here it is.

Luke 19:1-10 (Common English Bible)

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through town.

2 A man there named Zacchaeus, a ruler among tax collectors, was rich.

3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but, being a short man, he couldn’t because of the crowd.

4 So he ran ahead and climbed up a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus, who was about to pass that way.

5 When Jesus came to that spot, he looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, come down at once. I must stay in your home today.”

6 So Zacchaeus came down at once, happy to welcome Jesus.

7 Everyone who saw this grumbled, saying, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

8 Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone, I repay them four times as much.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today, salvation has come to this household because he too is a son of Abraham.

10 The Human One came to seek and save the lost.”

Zaccheus lived a life of achievement, of wealth, of privilege, but also of profound alienation and unhappiness. 

Everyone in Jericho knows Zaccheus is rich, but no one likes him. They dislike, despise, resent this man so much that not only is he not welcome in their homes, they’re troubled that Jesus would enter his home. 

Zaccheus is unwelcome in their community because he’s collaborating with their oppressors. He’s the Jewish face of the Roman taxation system that strains their families to pay for the armies and the glory of Rome. 

And not only that, but they are aware that he’s gotten wealthy himself collaborating with Rome at their expense. See, the only way that the empire could maintain a force of local tax collectors would be to turn away at their overcharging to enrich themselves. Corruption and self-serving schemes are part of every violent empire, and Zaccheus is the face of that greed and selfishness to this community as well. 

So Zaccheus is wealthy, but he is not connected. Rejected by his people, and a tool but not a member of the colonizing society, he doesn’t belong. People who interact with Jesus in the gospels are often mentioned with reference to their parents, their children, their friends or spouse, but Zaccheus appears to be solo. He’s alone, which is not tov, not good. 

Whose fault is it? Well, it’s his fault to be sure. He most likely didn’t have to be a tax collector, could have found an excuse to not serve in this role even if called upon, or could have done it while not ripping off his own community so badly.

It’s the fault of a powerful, dysfunctional society as well. Rome encouraged isolation and alienation to keep its economy and power structures moving the way they did.

Maybe it’s even Jericho’s fault to some degree. Who knows? I’ve always wondered if Zaccheus experienced isolation and alienation before his life as a wealthy, corrupt chief tax collector. Maybe he’d always been teased for being so unusually short. Maybe he’d been socially isolated because of other differences or disabilities. 

 Whatever the reason, Zaccheus is hungering for connection that he’s driven out of his life, or perhaps that has been driven from him as well. 

And Jesus initiates connection and care. He sees Zaccheus, who’s simply been trying to see Jesus, and he invites himself over for lunch. 

I’m coming to your house, he says. And as surprised and angry as the rest of the community is, Zaccheus is honored and thrilled.

And it seems like something of the light of God gets in through the cracks in him. Some part of his underlying pain breaks open maybe, and he can own the harm he’s done in his community. And some part of him, in this new circle of connection and care, lights up. A yearning for connection, a yearning for justice and restoration, a sense of agency returns to him. 

And so over the meal, likely with folks eavesdropping outside the windows, he says to Jesus:

I’m going to make things right. I’m going to make things right. And he makes this extravagant beginnings of amends for the harm he’s done.

It’s justice, it’s the right thing, but it’s also a pathway to restoration of community. 

Restoration of wealth to poor, fleeced community members. 

Restoration of justice to angry, embittered neighbors.

The possibility of restoration of social connection and a place in the community for Zaccheus to. 

And so it’s no surprise that Jesus says:

Salvation has come to this house. 

Salvation came to this house. He’s not just talking about eternal membership in God’s family, even if he is talking about that as well. He’s talking about healing, wholeness, restoration for both perpetrators and victims, reintegration into community – everything we can mean when we say this word salvation. 

God has done it. Jesus has done it. Zaccheus has done it. 

Salvation has come – and while salvation comes from God, it’s always a team sport. 

Jesus is the initiator here. He establishes the community of connection and care. 

But Zaccheus was looking for it too – he was hungry, up there in that tree, looking for God.

Connection and care produce a shift in Zaccheus’ consciousness, as care and forgiveness and acceptance and connection always do. Zaccheus is more free, he longs to do right now. Which is good, because connection can be started through care, but it’s only sustained through safe and just practices in community relationships.

Communities don’t work if people don’t do right by one another. So Zaccheus does the good work to partner with God in his own salvation and restoration, which protects his community as well. 

And then at the end it’s amplified, magnified by Jesus when he says: look at this, this man is a real son of Abraham, isn’t he? He’s restoring Zaccheus to community, calling him a good Jew, one who truly belongs among his people. 

After all, Jesus is the human one who came to seek and save the lost. The human one – Son of Man – is an insider lingo kind of title for Jesus but it also means what it sounds like, like he’s the most truly human one who’s ever walked among us. And he looks for people who are disconnected, alienated, lost, and he longs to restore them, as he does here. 

Man, this is a good news story. And it resounds for me in all kinds of ways in our times too, makes me long to keep seeing more of this.

I think of the nearly one in 50 men who are currently incarcerated in this country. They’re like one in five of the world’s incarcerated men. And if you count the formerly incarcerated too, it’s far more.

And these are like the poor versions of Zaccheus. In most cases, they’ve done wrong to somebody in society, they’ve caused disconnection in communities. But more often than not, their criminality was proceeded by all kinds of alienation in their lives, all kinds of ways they’ve been done wrong and severed from healthy community.

And I think of how our society’s systems of so-called justice and punishment isolate and sever people from community, not just while incarcerated but often for many years afterwards. And I long for more cycles of salvation and restoration in this so broken area of this country.

Or in subtler ways, I think of myself.

Middle aged Americans, especially middle aged men in America, often don’t have many friends. And it’s our own fault, right? Putting career and other stuff over time with friends, awkwardness about affection and need, low emotional intelligence sometimes maybe.

But it’s also kind of not our fault too, right? This late capitalist culture has its demands and expectations and norms about work and family and long commutes and all kinds of other stuff that make it hard for middle aged men to make and sustain friendships. 

There’s a cost, though, to all this – a cost in social cohesion, a cost in risk for what we call deaths of despair – suicide, alcohol abuse, and drug addiction that have driven down men’s life expectancy in recent years. With lack of connection being one of the risk factors in these things. 

Anyway, in a smaller way, a few years ago, I was feeling these costs.

A few years ago, I realized I could really use a couple more friends. I was also thinking I could use another spiritual friend or two, people that would understand my faith and values, and with whom I could pray. I love my spiritual relationships here at Reservoir, but I’m always a pastor here, and I wanted a couple more relationships like this outside this church.

But it’s not like you can order friends on Amazon, right? Like hey, I’ll search for local prayer partners that are available. 

So what’d I do? Well, I thought about the local pastors I knew. And I thought of this one guy, who I’d only had a couple short conversations with before, but I knew him by reputation, and we’d been around each other at a few events and meetings. And I liked him, he seemed like a good person too, someone I could connect with and trust.

So I made an appointment to see him, and I was like: hey, I need another pastor friend, and you seem like a good guy. Wanna be friends?

Don’t get me wrong, it was hella awkward at first, for me at least. But he wasn’t awkward at all. In fact, he was like: hey, thanks for thinking of me. And it turns out that another pastor we both knew had reached out to him earlier in the month about getting together a couple times a month to talk and pray together, and he was like maybe you should join us? 

And I did, and for a few years now, we’ve been friends, meeting up a couple times a month for open, candid conversation and prayer. And these friendships have been great. They’ve been useful – I’ve learned about some great resources through these guys, gotten some ideas professionally. They’ve helped me network, gave me advice on a grant I won. And I think I’ve been useful to them too. 

But more than these instrumental benefits, the connection itself in this circle has been tremendously life giving. It’s been a place to be real, to be honest, to get support and affirmation and sanity checks, and to give the same. 

This making of connection started with God growing an awareness in me that I needed it and a sense of where to turn. And then it took my risk and initiative to do something to connect and open up as well as the grace and kindness of a couple folks interested in reciprocating to make this circle of connection and care. 

And it’s gotten deeper because one of the guys wanted this to move beyond just a light social thing and make this a community of practice too – a place where we talk about what we’re doing to be more healthy, wholehearted people and pastors. And that’s given us more reasons to keep getting together and has made these friendships one of the places where for me too, the light of God can get into the cracks for me. 

In a lot of ways, friends, that’s what this church is here for. 

God values for each of us the life-giving connections that will help us pursue God’s wholeness, love, and leading in every area of our lives. And we like to try to encourage that happening. 

We affirm here that to have a good life and a good faith, we don’t need to be particularly rich or beautiful or favored or lucky in any other way. 

We just need help discovering that we are connected, that we are seen and known and loved by a living God. That the goodness and loving kindness of that God follows us wherever we go. And that these experiences of divine love and connection can be mirrored and reflected in rich human to human connections as well. 

Now this may or may not be your experience of church today, but my invitation today is to see if this can’t be true here, if you’d like it to be.

Our membership agreement at Reservoir is pretty simple. You fill it out online at our website, and you’re a member, period. And it doesn’t start with telling you what to believe or what to do, it starts with connection, with saying I believe God has good things in the life for me and others, and that this community can be one of the places in life that encourages those good things.

The membership invitation invites you to, in metaphorical terms, attend Jesus’ party. In literal terms, it says

“I will simply be there, through regular participation on Sundays and through participation in a community group as able.”

We invite you to participate in these ways because this kind of participation for most people stimulates greater connection, community, and belonging.  Church is a rare place to be a contributing, participating member of a community that doesn’t sort and define us on the terms of capitalism, but of beloved community. 

And it’s a place, particularly in our community groups, where some real depth of connection is possible over time. Many of our groups encourage a community of practice, as our pastor of community life Ivy has talked about – places where we try practices that deepen our experience of God and develop a rich spiritual life.

But all our groups start by trying to be communities of connection and care, places where we can show up authentically just as we are, and find that others are glad we’re there, and glad to be part of the connections that help us not just not be alone, but experience the goodness and encouragement and gift of community that we need. 

Our sense as a church is that after all we’ve been through the past couple of years, a lot of us are eager for a little more connection in our lives. Maybe God is stirring that hunger for you too. If so, I hope you’ll pay attention to that, lean into the opportunities around you. 

It’s not good to be alone. You’re all worth better than that, I promise you. And if this community can be part of your circles of connection and care and practice, know we’re here for that.