Signs

Sermon preached Sunday, July 25, 2021, the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, Maryland. 

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a pretty incredible English teacher. His name was Mr. Fey and we frequently referred to him as the “Hawaiian Santa Clause” because he always paired his snow white beard with Hawaiian shirts, khaki shorts, and sandals. In his class, I was introduced to Shakespeare, explored poetry, practiced debate, and read some of my all-time favorite novels.

Mr. Fey had a unique approach to choosing what books his students would read. Instead of assigning one book to the whole class, over the course of the year he chose three books for each student. He personalized these selections based on what he knew about us: our interests, our reading level, what we were passionate about. He picked books that would not only help us develop our reading and comprehension skills, but ones which would also help us learn something about ourselves.

One of the books he assigned me was The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas. Have any of you ever read this book? It was a bestseller in the 40’s, a novel that followed a Roman soldier named Marcellus in the first century. Marcellus was one of the soldiers who was at Jesus’ crucifixion. He was one of the men gambling and casting lots for Christ’s clothes. He was the one who finally won Jesus’ robe.

What unfolds is an imaginative and exciting journey as Marcellus begins to retrace Jesus’ footsteps to learn more about him. Eventually, Marcellus comes to believe in Jesus himself.

What I remember most about this book is what happens when Marcellus gets to the seaside and begins to ask the locals what took place there. They tell him about the feeding of the multitude. They say that everyone was hungry and Jesus called the disciples together to find them food. When the disciples began distributing food to the crowds, individuals began pulling bits of bread and other food out of their own belongings, bits that they had hidden away, inspired by Jesus’ generosity. Their food, which they were no longer selfishly hoarding, was also shared and led to there being so many baskets left over.

I have to say, Mr. Fey always picked great novels for me, and this was no exception. At this point in my life, I was fascinated with finding explanations for miracles and miraculous events found in the Bible. I remember finding a series on tv as I was flipping channels that explained how the Israelites could have crossed the Red Sea when the conditions were just right, or how the walls of Jericho could have come tumbling down because of poor craftsmanship and the acoustics of the trumpets. It’s something that many of us go through—wanting to know the scientific reasonings behind the things that can be hard to take on faith.

During this time, I was excited about this new information. I remember talking to my mom and telling her I had seen a program that explained that under just the right conditions, when the water was low, it was totally, scientifically possible for the Israelites to have walked across the sea! She simply looked at me and said, “That just misses the point. It doesn’t matter if science says it could have happened. It doesn’t matter if science says it’s impossible. These stories aren’t there for us to prove them. They are there to tell us something about God.”

That’s when I realized, it’s not about the “how.” It’s about the “why.” Think about all the miraculous and unbelievable things that happen in scripture. Can we ever know how they happened? I mean, down to the nitty gritty details of it all? Of course not. Only God knows.

But that’s not the point. It’s like Communion or Baptism. We don’t need to how it all works. We don’t need to know how God is present in bread and wine—just that God is. We don’t need to know how baptism joins us into the body of Christ—just that it does.

This is especially true in the Gospel of John. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in any individual Gospel. If you ever get the chance, I encourage you to read each one, beginning to end, as a whole, and discover the unique perspective the Gospel writer has. For John, one of his signatures is that he never refers to the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, or any of Jesus’ healings, or the feeding of the multitude, or Jesus walking on water, or anything else that we might consider “miraculous” as miracles. Instead, they are signs.

They are signs and not miracles, because it’s not about the how, it’s about the why. Miracles are displays of an individual’s power. Signs point to something much larger. It’s not about what Jesus can do—it’s about what Jesus’ actions tell us about God and who God is and what God does.

Let’s look at the first sign we have in our Gospel reading this morning: the feeding of the multitude. Yes, it is incredible that Jesus is able to feed so many people out of so little—and have so much left over! But what does this event tell us about God?

It tells us our God is a God of abundance, who gives and gives, freely, so much so that we do not ever want for more and we overflow with God’s good gifts. It tells us that God often works in community, working through our friends and neighbors to provide for what we need. And it shows us that God believes that our physical needs are not secondary to our spiritual ones.

When Jesus sees this large crowd continuing to follow him, he knows that they must be hungry. Instead of saying that they should go find food and come back, or that it was okay for them to be hungry because he had IMPORTANT THINGS TO TEACH THEM™, he feeds them. He knows that many times the physical needs must be cared for before the spiritual ones can even be approached.

How many of you have had to use the bathroom really badly, but someone stops you to talk?  It doesn’t matter how important that conversation is, you won’t actually be fully engaged until your bladder is empty. You stand there, dancing in place, praying they’ll finish soon and not listening to a word that’s being said. This is something teachers see, too, and lots of teachers who work with kids who are food insecure make sure they have food in their classrooms because a kid can’t be expected to learn when their stomach is growling.

We are not called to ignore our body’s needs in favor of spirituality and instead are called to care for the immediate needs of our neighbor so that they are actually able to hear and enjoy and embrace what God is up to.

And what about the second sign in the Gospel today? How does that sign point to God? It might not be quite as obvious.

In the midst of strong winds and a rough sea, Jesus walks on the water to join his disciples and calm their fear. This sign reminds us where God always is—with us, walking towards us, even when we are scared, even when we can’t even tell it’s God in the first place. We’re never alone even in the stormiest of waters.

Here’s the thing that always comes up when ever we talk about these incredible, miraculous, mystical and magical accounts in the Bible: we always look to our own lives, our own neighborhoods, our present-day world and wonder why we don’t get the same kind of events happening with the regularity they seemed to happen in the ancient world. But that’s where we’re wrong.

If we truly understand these things as signs, and not just miracles, we can begin to see them happening all around us. What are the signs in your life that point to God?

Maybe it’s the neighborhood that comes together to search for missing person. Friends and total strangers dropping everything to try and make a family complete again, pointing to a God who selflessly gives for us.

Maybe it’s the town that recognizes its homeless population is getting larger and conditions on the streets are inhumane and so it works to provide sanitary and welcoming shelters and more abundant affordable housing, pointing to a God who can make a lot happen with few resources.

Maybe it’s the simple act of forgiveness being offered, pointing to a God who holds no account of our offenses.

What is happening in your life that points to God? What is happening in the life of this congregation? Is there a relationship, a ministry, a worship opportunity, that others can look to and see God at work? These are the signs that fill our lives and our world.

Tiny miracles. Ones most of us wouldn’t even see, or think that much of—but these are BIG SIGNS that direct our gaze and focus our minds on our loving God who does more for us that we can understand.

Amen.

God Brings Us Along

Sermon preached Saturday, July 10, and Sunday, July 11, 2021, the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, Maryland. 

Well, there’s nothing like a beheading to start off preaching in a new congregation, am I right?

It’s definitely one of those stories that you finish reading and say, “The Gospel of the Lord…I think? I think there’s good news in there somewhere?”

And, truthfully, when this lectionary text comes up, it’s mostly this part about the beheading of John is the part that tends to draw our focus. That’s the headline. That’s the big take away. But, I don’t know, this time, it hit differently. I meet for text study with a few other pastors and all of us, for maybe the first time, were drawn to the other part of the reading—the part that’s actually happening in real time.

We get a flashback, triggered by the buzz happening around Jesus and his disciples. Herod hears about all these things that the disciples are doing and you can almost imagine the old sitcom blur-out as he remembers John and that night at his birthday banquet. He had John arrested, but was “protecting him,” as the text tells us because he apparently liked listening to him, despite not always understanding.

But, of course, his wife did not. And when push came to shove, Herod’s care for John only went so far. When push came to shove, Herod needed to keep the peace in his home, at this party, and in his kingdom, no matter the cost. And so Herod, deeply grieved, we’re told, but without protest, has John killed and his head brought out.

Yet even in the midst of this violence, John’s disciples were not deterred. They came and retrieved his body and continued his work. The mission continued, despite the efforts of Herod and Herodia.

A similar story is told in Amos. We only hear a snippet of it this morning, but Amos is called to be a prophet, to speak the word of the Lord to a kingdom who doesn’t want to hear it. After many attempts to make people hear this proclamation, he is expelled and exiled and, according to apocryphal accounts, eventually killed by the ones he confronted.

Today’s readings give us just two examples of the ways in which, time and time again, people are called to share the word of God and others reject them because it is too hard a Word. A Word that challenges norms and expectations. A Word that calls for sacrifice and selfless acts. A Word that requires humbling oneself and risking power and influence.

Amos.

John the Baptist.

And, we know, in time, Jesus.

Most of the time, we identify with these prophetic voices—or at least we want to, right? We want to be the ones on the front lines proclaiming God’s Word! We want to believe that we are taking the risks, that we are being vulnerable, that we are on the right side!

…but I think it’s more accurate to say that sometimes that’s us. And sometimes, too often, we are like these folks who run scared, who react defensively or violently, who only believe that something is God’s work if it already aligns with what we believe to be true. I’m not saying that any of us have had someone beheaded, but it’s not always that extreme. When we are faced with something new or something that confronts our own weaknesses or that challenges us to look at something differently, we push back.

How many times to we reject something because it would upset our status quo? And before we get our defenses up, let’s talk about some of the ways in which this plays out, particularly in congregation life. Some might ring true for Grace. Some might not.

How many times do we say, “Well, we tried doing that once fifteen years ago, but it didn’t work, so we shouldn’t try it again.”?

Or, “This is way music has always been done here.”?

Or, “We can’t use that space for that new ministry because it’s always been used for this other ministry, even though this other ministry hasn’t really been very active in recent years.”?

Or, “We’re already welcoming, why do we have to be explicit about who is welcome here?”

Or, here’s a big one for us right now, “As long as they don’t change my worship time, it’s fine!”?

Did any of that resonate with you?

Now, let me be clear, not everything new or different or disruptive is automatically God’s will. That would be unfair and untrue to say. But it would also be unfair and untrue to say that it is God’s will that things be constant forever, that they grow stagnant and stale and that we clutch on to them to the detriment of where the Spirit might be calling us.

No, our God is a moving God, a changing God, a God who is always in conversation with what has been to shepherd us into the remarkable possibility of what could be.

We need look no further than scripture, where we are shown account after account of God leading God’s people into something bold, something new, while never fully abandoning what God has called good in the past.

Even God’s most destructive action, the flood, did not fully wipe out what had been! Humanity and every living creature was carried in safety on the ark.

When it’s put this way, it might be easy for us to get on board, because we know that, in the end, it works out: the dry land reappears after the flood. The Israelites make it to the promised land. The exiled people of God return and are restored. Jesus rises from the dead. The early church and the message of Jesus spreads quickly and takes hold in pockets far and wide.

But we cannot pretend that these things all happened in a vacuum, in a tidy, sanitized bubble that did not require sacrifice and bravery and trust in God. We can’t forget that the flood happened. We can’t forget the wandering in the wilderness and the desire to return to the known quantity of Egypt. We can’t forget that before the disciples began sharing the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, they huddled together in a locked room because they were afraid.

Because there will always be resistance, from within as well as from without.

There will be people who are not part of our community who might deride our efforts, or mock our beliefs or say that we’re overstepping into things a church shouldn’t be involved in and that we should “stay in our lane.”

And there will be people within our community who will worry about how much it will cost. Or who we might offend as we seek to include more in the mission of God. Or who will be more concerned about losing their perceived position of power than with whatever the Holy Spirit has in store.

Yes, there will be resistance, as there has always been.

But we know that we have a faithful God who doesn’t give up on us and who is with us every step of the way—even when we are like Herod, seeking to keep our peace and power at any cost. God will challenge us, comfort us, cajole us, and care for us wherever we find ourselves on this path.

God is always moving forward to new life and renewal and toward the fulfillment of God’s mission—and God desires to bring us along. Sometimes joyfully, sometimes dragging our feet or kicking and screaming.

God is faithful and is there every step of the way.

Amen.

It’s Been a Minute…

Oh, boy. Where to begin?

The last time I uploaded anything here was March and a LOT has happened since then! I resigned from my call at St. John’s in Littlestown, PA as of April 30th and had a break of about two months.

In that time, I travelled to California to see my family and Pittsburg to see dear friends. We hosted several folks at our home and I enjoyed time by myself while my son was at daycare and my husband was at work.

Leaving St. John’s was complicated and I really treasured this time to relax, regroup, and reflect on my almost five years with that congregation.

Not working couldn’t last forever, either for our bank account or my quickly-approaching-boredom mind, so I was excited to begin a new interim call at Grace Lutheran in Westminster, Maryland. It’s a different synod, but only about forty minutes from home–and I’m actually glad to have a commute to listen to my audiobooks again! I’m part of an interim team with a pastor I’ve known for several years and I am looking forward to working with him and the people of Grace. It’s a larger congregation than I’m used to, and that makes this challenging and interesting!

Now it’s back to work!