The Marks We Bear

Sermon preached Sunday, April 14, 2024, the Third Sunday of Easter, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA. 

What marks do you bear?

What physical marks are spread across your skin? Do you have a scar from falling off your bike when you were a kid? A finger that bends a little funny from when you broke it? Are your limbs marked with arthritis? Your lungs marked with respiratory illness? Your eyes marked with cataracts or slowly building blindness?

Maybe your marks are more mental or psychological. The education you received, either long ago or continuous, every day as you work or live, marks your mind. Maybe you are also marked by something more diagnosable. Maybe you are marked by clinical depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or something else that requires regular therapy or medication.

And then there are the ones that are harder to pin down—the spiritual and emotional marks. The marks that can help us grow and be better people: the marks we receive from being loved and cared for and being told we are children of God. The marks that are always just a little tender or downright raw from times we may have been mistreated or abused, or when God’s words of hope were twisted into words of condemnation.

We carry these marks, all of them, throughout our lives. Some are visible, like a scar from a skinned knee, and some are not, like the hurts we carry deep in our hearts. Some go away with time, or at least fade, like a bad breakup; others won’t, like when our body slowly loses one physical function after another. And some of these marks are helpful: they can help us learn and grow and move forward. But some of these marks do nothing but destroy, if they are given free rein in us.

Today’s Gospel is about the marks that Jesus still bears. And that “still” is important. After the resurrection, Jesus Christ is not a spirit. Jesus eats: he asks for something to eat and takes the broiled fish the disciples offer. Jesus has fellowship: he sits with his disciples, teaches them, talks with them. And Jesus still bears the marks of the crucifixion: the holes in his hands and feet. This is no ghost: this is Jesus Christ, in the flesh, among them.

There is a lot of debate about what happens with our bodies when we die and what our bodies will be like when we are resurrected. We say in the Apostle’s Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body. But whose body? Christ’s body? Our bodies? Christ’s body and our bodies?

In essence, this question is: Will we still bear the marks of our lives when we are raised to new life with Christ? And the truth of the matter is, we don’t know, at least not for sure, and we won’t until Christ comes again. I have my convictions and others have theirs.

When I was living in Chicago and going to seminary, I worked as a nanny for my cousin. He and his wife lived out in the suburbs and twice a week I drove out to watch their daughter Grace and, eventually, their son Cooper when he was born the Spring before my last year. I started watching Grace when she was only about fifteen months old and loved getting to see her grow up and explore the world with the kind of curiosity it seems is reserved for those who have not yet learned all the reasons they should doubt themselves.

We talked about lots of hypothetical questions: whether dolphins went to school and who Grace would hang out with on Sesame Street. Some of Grace’s questions were pretty advanced and she stumped me, like when she wanted to know how my phone could send messages to another phone so quickly! And some questions were a mix of both: hypothetical questions that I had no hope of knowing the answer to.

Grace’s grandpa had a dog who was blind. Grace loves all animals and is always concerned about their wellbeing. So, she looked at me one day and out of the blue asked, “Do you think Ralph (the dog) will be blind in heaven? Or do you think God will make him see again?” Deep theological questions sometimes come from the most unlikely places. I didn’t—couldn’t—give her a precise answer, so I asked her what she thought and we wondered together.

The truth is, it’s not about what marks we have now or what marks we may gain in the future because God has those same marks—and not all of those marks are bad. This is a distinction we need to make. Many people who are blind do not want to be told that their vision will be restored in heaven and that they will receive a new, better body because that means that they are less-than now. The same can be said for the Deaf community who tend to see their inability to hear as a difference but certainly not something to be pitied. The same can be said for someone who is born with Down Syndrome or any other condition on a long list of things that the “normal” community sees as needed to be remedied. Certainly, these marks require different ways of interacting and accommodations, but if we believe that God bears all of our marks, then God bears these marks, too.

Disability theologians are quick to point this out. God, in taking on our flesh, takes on every aspect. God bears the same marks we do.

And the holes in the hands and feet of Jesus are physical marks that symbolize so much more that what our bodies tangibly hold. Those holes are stand-ins for the marks Jesus has taken on for our sake: the marks we carry that would separate us from God. In each of those holes, Jesus carries our inability to forgive, our greed, our lack of caring for our neighbor, the sin we live with every day.

The disciples and companions of Jesus were the first witnesses. Jesus appeared to them and offered them peace. He showed them his wounds. He ate with them. He taught them. And then they shared the Good news.

These were the first witnesses, and now it’s our turn. We are the witnesses to a savior who has taken on our marks of sin and shame and guilt. We are the witnesses to a God who has the same marks we do of blindness, Deafness, physical and emotional frailty, depression, and so much more. Whatever we bear, God bears with us. And whatever we might bear that separates us from God, God bears for us, so that we may be reconciled.

This is not a ghost; this is not a God of spirit, but of real, true, bodily flesh. In a couple of minutes you will be invited up to the table. I will take a piece of bread and offer it to you.

Take it. Eat it. It is the body of Christ, which bears all the good and bad marks of humanity, broken and given for you.

Amen.

Unexpected and Mysterious

Sermon preached Sunday, December 17, 2023, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA. 

What comes to mind when you think of Mary, the mother of Jesus?

Do you imagine a Christmas pageant, with a young woman dressed in a blue and white robe kneeling by a wooden manger? Maybe you imagine her in the Pieta, the famous statue at the Vatican with Mary holding Jesus after he is taken down from the cross. Or maybe you connect with this painting by Henry Tanner of a young woman being faced with the forbidding image of a formless angel.

There are a lot of ways the Church has tried to understand her and her role throughout history. In some traditions, she is thought of so highly she almost becomes a deity herself. She is sometimes referred to as “Theotokos,” or the bearer of God, especially in Orthodox circles.

On the other extreme, we have traditions who largely ignore her role. If you think about the names of protestant churches, Lutheran churches, we have a lot named after various saints like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, even Stephen, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one called “Saint Mary’s.”

The Gospel writers didn’t portray her the same way either. In the Gospel of John, she has no name. She is simply called the “Mother of Jesus.” In Mark, she appears in a story in which she and her other sons comes to take Jesus home, to stop his ministry, because they don’t understand what he is trying to do. It’s largely the same in Matthew, although at least in that gospel she appears at the tomb on Easter morning.

In Luke, however, she is vitally important. She has this conversation with the angel Gabriel in which she is called to this unique task. Her conversation with Gabriel is remarkably similar to the call stories of prophets found other places in the Bible.

There is a greeting: “Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.” Mary’s frightened or confused reaction. Gabriel then tells her, “Do not be afraid,” and gives her the commission: “…you will conceive in your womb and bear a son..” Mary objects, or at least questions this by pointing out that she is a virgin and Gabriel reassures her and offers her a sign, the knowledge that her relative Elizabeth, even in her old age, is six months pregnant. Finally, Mary is ready, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

She is presented as an ideal: an ideal mother, woman, and, yes, prophet. So just what is it that makes her this ideal? What makes her the “favored one,” chosen to bear God, out of every other young maiden around her at the time?

Perhaps it’s her willingness to accept what she could not understand—her ability to live with the unknowable and incomprehendable. Mary asks for clarification: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Gabriel answers, “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you…” I don’t know about you, but that’s not quite the explanation I’d be looking for. I’d want to have a few more specifics! “Yes, yes, the Holy Spirit, yada yada…but how?!”

But Mary accepts this mystery. She may not know how the Holy Spirit will do its work, but she trusts it will be done.

For the amount of new and rather alarming news Mary receives, she accepts it all and will later sing of how blessed she is that God has chosen her—that God has done great things for her, lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things.

I’ve heard the fourth week of Advent can be thought of as “Summary Sunday.” The readings for this Sunday speak back to the three weeks prior and give a nice wrap-up of this waiting we have been living in.

So if today is meant to “sum up” Advent, what does that mean? Does that mean that Advent is all about preparing ourselves for mystery? For things we cannot know? What would that mean? Is Advent all about waiting for something we can’t understand?

Well, yes! The incarnation, the amazing miracle of God choosing to come and live among us, in the body of one of us is something I cannot explain. I don’t think anyone can. How was it done? What are the real, hard, concrete facts of the process?

Mary’s story calls us to be comfortable with mystery. Are you? I can’t say that I always am. It’s a struggle. I don’t even like the mystery of Christmas presents. I’m always trying to figure out what people have gotten me! So when I’m faced with accepting a truth without knowing all the process or logic behind it, I struggle.

The truth of it is, there is no way to eliminate all mystery from our lives. We try—oh man, do we try!—but we can never succeed. We try to monitor every aspect of our lives. The internet has made it nearly impossible for someone to remain completely anonymous. And science is finding new information every day to help us understand the world around us.

But I’ve also heard scientists say that for every new discovery they make, for every phenomenon they figure out, they are left with new questions. The questions never end, they only change. They may become more concrete or shift in focus, but we will never have answers to all of our questions.

Which brings us back to mystery. It’s best if we can embrace it!

A Carthusian monk wrote this: “Mysteries are not dark shadows, before which we must shut our eyes and be silent. On the contrary, they are dazzling splendours, with which we out to sate our gaze.” (A Carthusian, They Speak in Silences)

Ignoring the mysteries does nothing but frustrate! Looking at them, holding them, speaking about them, gives our lives new depth and nuance.

When we speak about mystery and God, I often use the phrase “Holy Mystery.” Sometimes I use it in jest, when I have no answer to why a table moved or why a box suddenly appeared in the hallway.

But more often and more genuinely, I use it when I refer to the things God has done and continues to do for us which we have no explanation for.

In baptism we use water and I speak God’s promises. I baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but I  know that I am merely a vessel for those promises God has already made. God is doing all the working, all the acting, and I am representing that.

How does God claim us in baptism? How does our baptism make us a child of God more than, say, splashing around in the lake? Holy Mystery. God has promised to work in baptism and I trust that promise. I don’t need to see charts and formulas.

Same thing in communion. We have bread and wine. I give thanks and say the words of institution, blessing the elements, but I have not made them the body and blood of Christ. God did. How? Holy Mystery.

This might sound like a cop-out: saying “Holy Mystery” to avoid thinking too hard or working to figure it out…but I think that living with mystery is some of the hardest work there is. It’s so difficult for us to let mystery come into our lives and remain with us.

So maybe that’s why this text about Mary’s trust and acceptance of things she can’t understand is so important for us. If the bearer of God can take on that role with little protest, perhaps there’s hope for us yet.

Mystery is how God works. Baptism. Communion. The Incarnation. The Resurrection. Prayer. These are part of our faith not because of concrete evidence, but because we trust that God is present and faithful. God doesn’t abandon us in our inability to understand, but comes again and again to show us that we don’t need to understand to receive grace.

Unexpected and mysterious are the ways of God.

Amen.

Our Place in God’s History

Sermon preached Sunday, April 23, 2023, the Third Sunday of Easter, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA.

I spent several days last week in Indiana at a conference on the campus of Valparaiso University. It’s the Institute of Liturgical Studies and, this year, the theme was “Finding Our Rhythm, In The Fullness of Time.” The plenary speakers, workshops, and worship opportunities all focused around the theme of time: how we keep it, how it impacts us, how it gives meaning to our lives of faith.

One of the plenary speakers was James K.A. Smith, a philosopher who has a way with the intersection of philosophy, theology, and culture. He argued that, in general, we are not great at approaching time in a healthy way. By we, I mean both as Christians and as participants in our current cultural environment. We struggle to situate ourselves appropriately in history, tend to think of ourselves as being a-historical, above time, that somehow we are the only human beings that have ever existed who will not, one day, be relegated to the stories of history.

The danger with this, is that it allows us to ignore the way history and story and our collective past informs the present. It allows us to think that we were dropped wholly formed into our world and that the past of our faith, the past of our nation, the past of our families and communities has had no bearing on our shaping at all.

To be honest, it got pretty in depth. And I am certainly not qualified to regurgitate a hour-long philosophical exploration or even to summarize it in a great way…but it got me thinking. In particular, it got me thinking about this morning’s text, the walk to Emmaus.

We don’t know why Cleopas and this other disciple, whoever they are, his wife, someone else, were walking to Emmaus. The text doesn’t tell us. But they’re talking about what happened.

And I wonder if they’re talking about it all, grounded in the history and time that they’ve experienced, or if they’re talking about it in a more detached, clinical way.

Because when Jesus comes alongside them, they are looking sad, but lay out the facts of the last several days in a pretty orderly fashion, catching this stranger up on what’s been going on. To me, it feels like maybe they aren’t fully letting themselves dive deep into where they’re at, what they’re feeling.

When they finish their recap, Jesus (the stranger) seeks to reinsert them back into the history that has happened, insert them back into the timeline of what has happened, to reconnect them to the larger story unfolding.

And so he does. He interprets all of scripture, going back to Moses and the prophets, and it seems like this is the beginning of pulling the disciples back in, tethering them back to everything that has gone on before. Knot by knot, securing them back into the history of God’s work in the world, until finally, sitting around a table, Jesus breaks bread, and that last piece of disconnect locks into place.

Jesus, through his recounting of scripture and time accompanying them, helps them settle into their place in the story.

It’s not that they weren’t always participants. Of course they were! But they had been able to separate themselves: from both what is currently happening and from all the lead up to it. And it takes this time with Jesus for them to realize or remember it. “Were not our hearts burning within us?” they ask each other. In other words, their bodies recognized their role and position before their minds were freed to do the same.

One of the reasons this interpretive lens struck me so hard this week is that I think this disconnect, this separating ourselves, this notion that we are observing history rather than participating in it, is something that happens more than we realize. And the biggest example of this is pitfall of dangerous nostalgia.

Nostalgia, on its own, is not necessarily a problem. We all have times in our lives that we look back on with fondness. TV shows or music or food that hits us with a flood of memories. The piece of furniture or item of clothing that sticks with us. I always think about a gravy boat that my grandma used every holiday meal—when we cleaned out my grandparents’ house after their deaths, it was one thing my cousins and I all agreed could definitely not get donated.

So, feelings of nostalgia are not dangerous in and of themselves. But all too easily, they can become dangerous, when we let that nostalgia block us from seeing things as they really were, and as they really are.

In churches, this means that we look at our congregational history and tend to only remember the times when things were good: when attendance was growing and things were active. Even if there were unhealthy patterns behind the scenes, or even larger numbers of people not actively participating, we paint those times in rose colored glasses.

On a larger scale, we look at religious affiliation in general and pine for a time when many more people belonged to a church, without acknowledging that just because membership was greater doesn’t mean that discipleship was greater or that faith formation was greater or that participation in God’s mission was greater or more impactful.

We look back on certain times in our nation’s history and often zero in on the highlights, ignoring the pieces and parts that were far from beneficial for others. An example given by James Smith was about when he was watching Mad Men when it was first airing ten-plus years ago. He could watch it and think, “Boy, it would have been cool to live back then!” …But he could only think that because of who he is. A woman, a person of color, a person not making lots of money on Madison Avenue, experienced life in a very different, less rosy way. And to ignore that fact is to ignore the actual history.

And when we ignore that actual history, it keeps us from being in real and deep relationship with each other. Imagine trying to form a relationship with someone who had been abused by a parent. And instead of listening, and remembering, and acknowledging that hurtful past, you just said, “That’s not how it was! Think about the good times. It doesn’t do any good to remember the bad.” That person would know pretty quickly that you weren’t someone they could trust.

The story of Emmaus reminds us that we can’t be separated from history, good or bad, that the past plays a vital and pivotal role in how our present is shaped and how our future will form.

Jesus, even as he is not recognized, highlights that history for the disciples, both good and bad, the whole understanding of God’s history with humanity, and ending with the final passion account. Without that historical grounding, the resurrection doesn’t mean the same thing. Without God’s relationship and storied past with Israel and creation, the love expressed through that death and resurrection does not hit the same high mark and deep meaning.

And, it is only after all of this is put in proper perspective that the disciples realize what it all means. And that realization sends them right back to Jerusalem to share what happened with the other disciples and to help them recognize their place in the grand history of God’s salvation.

We are part of that story, too. We read the Bible, sometimes thinking that we are so separate from these earliest Jesus followers and certainly so separate from the figures of the Old Testament, but they are our history. And we are the history of those who will come after us. We are connected to each other, for better or for worse.

As you go about your weeks, your months, your years ahead, consider your role in the larger picture of God’s story, God’s history. Let it remind you of your connection to the company of saints who have gone before us—and let it encourage you to live in a way that will make the saints who come after us proud.

Amen.

What Kind of Sovereign?

Sermon preached Sunday, November 20, 2022, Christ the King/Reign of Christ Sunday, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA. 

A few minutes ago, I explained to our youngest members that today is the last day of the church year. Next week we begin again the cycle that will take us through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter. The history of this Sunday is interesting. For a long time, it was referred to as “Judgment Sunday,” calling to mind the second coming of Christ and the end of time. In fact, it wasn’t until 1925 that Pope Pius XI decided that the name should be changed and other church bodies followed suit.

Think about what you remember about this time period from your history classes or Hollywood historical drama. What was going on in the world, particularly in Europe?

In 1925 Europe is almost exactly between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. Nationalism was on the move in Europe. Benito Mussolini was amassing power in Italy. Two years earlier, Adolf Hitler attempted a coup and his Nazi political party was gaining popularity and influence. What was the message that seemed to be so appealing to the beaten, war-weary people of Europe?

It was a message that was rooted in a nationalist identity, one that blamed others, blamed outsides, blamed people who were different for the ills facing the so-called “normal” people. And it was a message that declared there was salvation and a way forward could be found in only one place—or rather, in only one person. It was a message that focused on the power of humans and downplayed or downright ignored the role of God in human history.

As Pope Pius was watching this unfold he decided to make a statement. In his encyclical Quas Primas, he introduced “Christ the King Sunday” as a response. There is a lot in this encyclical, but boiled down it proclaims that if we say that Christ is King, as our scriptures do, then Christ should be King over our whole being. Christ should reign over our bodies, minds, and hearts, and our faith should be in God, not in our national identity or in any mortal power.

This is a message we continually need to hear because we are continually tempted to put our faith in ourselves or in other human authority. We might come to church on this Sunday and nod our heads and say, “Yes, of course, Christ is King!” …but it’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to feel it. It’s another thing to live like it’s true. It’s another thing even just to know why, exactly, it matters to us.

Christ being king, Christ reigning over us matters to us because of the kind of ruler Christ ends up being. In just about every way, Jesus embodied everything that kings and rulers are not.

Jesus was poor. He grew up as a member of the lower class. He lived in occupied territory under the thumb of an oppressive regime. He traveled from place to place and, in his own words, had no place to lay his head. He relied on other people for food and shelter and by all indications had no worldly possession to his name.

Jesus was loving and generous to people who were considered outcasts. He regularly ate with people other would avoid, like tax collectors. He cared more about the people forgotten by society than the people who were well-off and well-settled. He sought out the powerless and didn’t care if he had the favor of the powerful.

Jesus was peaceful. He called for his disciples to pray for those who persecuted them. He told them to offer up their other cheek if they were hit. When Peter drew his sword at the end of Jesus’ life, he tells him, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword.” He called for justice and righteousness and peace among people.

But even still, Jesus was passionate. He was not some milquetoast Messiah who never raised his voice and never took people to task. He wasn’t afraid to call out the Pharisees for their unfair practices. He didn’t back down when facing Pilate’s interrogation. He even got angry. He flipped over tables and made a whip out of cords in the temple to drive out people taking advantage in the temple.

He was all of these things. All him being all of these things angered people. That’s why we get to the Gospel reading for this morning. He didn’t fit the mold of what a king should be…and so we killed him. He wasn’t like the kings of the ancient Israelites because he wasn’t a military leader. He wasn’t prepared to remove the Romans by force. He wasn’t any king the Romans would recognize because he didn’t amass power by suppressing others.

Even as Jesus is being crucified, most people do not understand who and what he is. The inscription over him says “King of the Jews,” but it is a mockery, not a sincere claim. They are laughing at their own clever joke, because how in the world could a king be killed in such a way? It is one of the criminals next to Jesus who recognizes his authority. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

I want to make something clear about what crucifixion is. First of all, it was not an unusual method of execution. It was used with some regularity by the Roman Empire. Jesus and the criminals killed on either side of him were not the only three to experience it.

Also, crucifixion was not just about killing someone. It was not just about taking someone’s life—it was about humiliating someone and torturing them. People died from suffocation, once they got to the point where their arms could no longer hold themselves up. The cross as mode of death was a particular favorite for individuals who were considered lower class but had tried to rebel against the Empire. The thought was that these people had tried to rise above their station, had tried to lift themselves above their betters…so if that’s what they wanted, the Romans would do that for them. “They want to be lifted up? Oh, we’ll lift them up.” And they were, and often left on display for days or weeks as a public warning about what happens when you defy Rome.

In fact, the cross was so horrifying a symbol that it took Christians until over a hundred years after Jesus’ death for it to be used as a widespread symbol. We’ve sanitized it now, but for a Jesus-follower two thousand years ago, it would be like worshipping with an electric chair or guillotine in front of us.

But our king is crucified. Our king is unexpected. Our messiah, our savior, our sovereign is, by all accounts, a criminal executed by the state…and that doesn’t sound terribly kingly to most people. But we didn’t need God to come into our world as the king the world expected…We needed God to come into the world as the king that is so desperately essential.

We need a ruler who leads with abundant love instead of only caring about those who are deemed “worthy.” We need a ruler who relentlessly pursues peace and justice instead of vengeance and looking out for number one. We need a ruler who is generous instead of one who either hoards or squanders resources.

And this is what we have: not in any mortal in power or in control anywhere in our world…but in our incredible God whose sovereignty is not limited by national boundaries, ethnic identities or cultural differences.

When we look around and wonder where our trust belongs, it is in the one who has claimed us and named us in baptism. It is the one who feeds us with his very body and blood at this table. It is in the one who forgives us and loves us unconditionally. This is our king. This is our God.

Amen.

When Institutions Crumble

Sermon preached Sunday, November 13, 2022, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Chesterfield, VA.

You can always tell it’s close to the end of the church year because the readings get pretty intense. It starts getting apocalyptic here and it’ll carry us straight through the first Sunday in Advent—only two weeks away!—when we hear about people being taken and left.

But today, we get “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” And cautions about natural disasters. And warnings about coming persecution, arrests, and betrayal. And to kick it all off, some commentary on the temple itself: “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”[i]

It’s hard for us to understand the radicalness of this statement. It’s tantamount to blasphemy. As modern Christians, we know that the temple has, in fact, been destroyed. It never had the same place or piety around it that it did for the Jews of Jesus’ time or even, in memory, for the Jewish people of today.

The temple was the center of religious and political life. There were so many rituals and faith practices that could only be done at the temple. After carrying around the Ark of the Covenant for so many years, this temple was finally built as a real house for God, a place where God would dwell and where God’s people could be sure to be in God’s presence. It was the holiest of holy places and the mere notion that it might not last forever was the same as implying that God might not be around forever.

So, yes, we don’t have a temple to look to in the same way that those first-century Jews did.

But we have a whole bunch of other institutions that we put our faith in, don’t we? A whole bunch of other institutions that we put our faith in above even our faith in God. And it’s not necessarily the same institutions for all of us.

For some, it might be a community group or organization.

For others, it might be their school.

It could be a job, a company, a professional organization.

It could be our local, state, or federal government.

It could even be, bear with me, the Church itself.

The Church is an institution like so many others. Unlike others, God has promised to be present, but it is still an institution full of people who make mistakes, who have prejudices, who want to protect themselves, who are occasionally misguided, and who are subject to sin just like the rest of us. It does great things. And it has done and continues to do some really…not great things.

But when we think of these institutions that shape our lives and shape our way of thinking, we usually take comfort in them staying the same. We know, for the most part, what we can expect, or at least what our history has taught us to expect.

…So how do we react when things change?

When the temple was destroyed less than a century after Jesus made these remarks, it required a fundamental shift in the way that Jewish people expressed their faith. There were so many things that could only be done at the temple! So what were they to do?

What resulted was an incredible rise in the rabbinic tradition and the further influence and significance of synagogues. These were no longer just local places for the faithful to gather when it was not a pilgrimage festival, they became the center for Jewish life.

As we look at the institutions around us, what does it mean when things change? How do we react?

I’m going to look at it from an angle that is relatively low stakes: sports.

There are a lot of different sports. Team, individual, professional, races, games, scored competitions. All kinds. And each and every one of those sports looks different today than it did when that sport was first invented. Rules added or adjusted. Clarifications passed. Procedures to protect athletes.

And, you can bet, that with every change and adjustment, there was outcry. “You’re changing the game!” “That will make it too hard/too easy/too confusing!” “Why can’t we just do what we’ve always done?”

The example that comes immediately to mind for me is in Major League Baseball. Since the game’s inception, it has relied on a home plate umpire to decide where a ball crosses the plate: is it a ball or a strike. Now, however, every TV broadcast and sports app has their own strike box up that can show, almost instantaneously, where that ball landed. It’s led to one site that gives umpires a scorecard after each game, rating their accuracy. Sometimes it’s quite high, sometimes it’s abysmally low. Sometimes it seems to impact the outcome of a game, other times it doesn’t.

All of this is to say, in recent years, there has been a push to have strikes and balls called with technology, not with a person, to eliminate the human factor. I’m not here to debate the merits of one option or the other, but the amount of people who simply eliminate the idea all together without even considering why someone might thing it’s a good idea because it would “ruin the spirit of the game,” is astounding.

We don’t like it when our institutions change in ways we don’t expect or that we don’t like.

But change is a constant. No institution can remain the same forever, at least not without dying and embalming itself in nostalgia.

Aside from the pilgrimage festivals that were celebrated at the temple every year, the other reason the destruction of the temple hit the Jewish people so hard was because this was God’s dwelling place. The place they had built for God and the place God promised to meet them. And so when there was no more temple, they had to seek out God in other places…and God sought them out, too.

In time, those faithful mourning their temple, embraced finding God out in the wild. What was a horrific loss led to some inspired new ways of living.

As we look at our institutional church, we can look at all the change that has come about in the last two and half years.

I remember back in March of 2020, when I thought we were only going to be out of our sanctuary for two weeks, I remember being terrified and anxious about how in the heck we were going to do worship together.

But I livestreamed on Facebook from my dining room table with a five month old Owen in my arms and we made it work.

And then we figured out Holy Week, with a dinner devotional Maundy Thursday, pre-recorded Good Friday, and Zoom Easter Vigil.

And, we just kept figuring it out. Did I like the change? Absolutely not. But it needed to happen and we made it work.

And now, I can look back and see some of the benefits that forced adaptation brought:

Folks whose only communion and main connection with their church home had been coming from visits from their pastor and maybe a lay visitor? Now they could join back in!

The parent with a small child who wanted to join the midweek evening Bible Study but couldn’t because they needed childcare? They could hop on Zoom when their child went to sleep!

The college student or young adult who moved away from home and hasn’t found a new community but wants to stay connected? Easy to do!

And that says nothing about the technology learned that continues to impact and improve our communication and ministry in a variety of ways.

And so, when faced with change and uncertainty, we can wring our hands, worry, despair how the institutions around us aren’t the same as they once were…or we can listen to Jesus and focus on what matters.

Because Jesus tells us it’s going to be okay, in the end. After all his dire words, even admitting that some will be put to death, he comforts us: “But not a hair on your head will perish.”

We can be challenged, pressed, mixed up, lost, even put to death, but God will have the last word. When the stones tumble down, God will hold us fast.

Amen.

[i] Luke 21:6.

We are Made Saints

Sermon preached Sunday, November 6, 2022, All Saints Sunday, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Chesterfield, VA.

If I’m being honest, I don’t always love the beatitudes, especially Luke’s beatitudes, for All Saints Sunday. With the blessings and woes, it seems to steer us into a direction I don’t want to go, pitting us against them, saint against sinner, blessing against woe, now against then.

I don’t believe this is Jesus’ purpose here. In Luke, Jesus is always talking about reversing the current order of things, toppling power structures and flipping things on their head. Just look at the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise after she becomes pregnant with Jesus: God casting the mighty down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly.

I think these beatitudes are almost another example of that.

Whenever I read passages like this, these harsh words from Jesus, these woes sound like threats—ominous ones. “Watch out!” they say, “This could happen to you!” But I wonder if they are more a naming of reality…two realities, really.

One reality that states that when one lives as a disciple of Jesus, their life will change. When they share what they have, they might individually have less, but the collective will have more. When they advocate for justice, they might lose the goodwill of people who profit off other’s oppression. When they can no longer ignore the suffering of others, their hearts will be open to feeling that communal pain.

And there’s a second reality, a reality that states that nothing is permanent but God. Everything else can fade away, can be lost in a second, cannot be counted on, cannot be taken with us…everything but God who loves us and has claimed us.

And so the challenge begins in verse 27, to everyone who is listening, not just those who might have the blessings or woes directed at them. To Everyone.

And man, the bar is set so high! It may be that we’ve heard these so many times that we don’t feel their full impact anymore, but these are hard things! Praying for people who pursecute us. Giving away additional clothing to people who have stolen from us. Offering up ourselves in a nonviolent way when someone strikes us. Love your enemies!

Dang. This is not easy.

It’s All Saints Sunday, the day we remember those who have gone before us, who have passed along the faith to us, those who have lived holy lives…right?

The tendency, when we think of the Company of Saints, is to think of them as paragons. As perfect. As disciples who were so faithful they never faltered. That’s not reality, is it? No person is perfect, and I can think of lots of people who fell quite far from perfect who are counted among that host.

And yet, we trust and believe and know that they are with God because God keeps God’s promises.

In 2014, a few months before I was ordained, my grandfather died. He was my mom’s dad, also a Lutheran pastor and a great carpenter.

What he wasn’t, however, was always easy to get along with.

He had strong ideas about what was right and what wasn’t right, which meant that there were a lot of topics our family had silently decreed were forbidden to bring up with him.

We didn’t talk about education, because inevitably that would lead to a discussion about how terrible the education system had gotten.

We didn’t talk about politics, because no one wanted to hear how the politicians he didn’t like were ruining the country.

And we didn’t talk about religion, if we could help it. My grandpa was not comfortable with women in leadership roles in the church, which meant that my mother’s work as a rostered leader was difficult for him to swallow and when I was planning to go to seminary, he told me that “Jesus called twelve disciples and not one of them was a woman,” leading to a blowup that ceased communication between him and my immediate family for months.

This was my grandpa. I loved him, but our relationship was marked and broken by all the things we couldn’t talk about and the things he sometimes decided to say.

My grandma died a couple years before he did. Less than a year, actually, after that blow-up that causes such a break in our family. She had always been the one to smooth things over when conflict arose in the family. She was the one who made sure we knew how much we were loved. And when she died, my grandpa came to a realization.

He had been reading her journals. She had been keeping a journal since my mom was in her twenties. In reading her words and her thoughts, he realized that been pushing everyone he loved away. He realized that if he wanted to have a relationship with his children and grandchildren, he needed to make a change, because my grandma wasn’t there to make things better anymore.

He did make a change. He made an effort to tell my mom that he was proud of her, something he had never told her before. When I graduated from seminary, he gave me this cross (point to cross) which my grandma had given him years earlier. Some of the things we could never bring up around him were now able to be spoken.

It wasn’t that he changed his mind overnight about his long-held beliefs, but he now knew that relationships were more important than being right and showing everyone else how wrong they were.

By the time he died, my family was thankful that we’d had at least a few years of being in relationship with him. It didn’t erase all the difficult years, the hurt and pain that we went through, but it was important for us at least to know that he wanted to know us and support us.

It was troubling, then, to attend his funeral. The sermon preached at his funeral ignored all of the difficulty. It painted my grandpa as a man he wasn’t—or at least as a man he wasn’t always to us. It lauded his ministry and his dedication to the church, which were true, but it was a funeral sermon for a pastor without fault, and not the man who I remembered both denigrating my call as pastor and acting out the story of the three little pigs to make my siblings and I laugh when I was young. He did both.

To add to this, the pastor giving the sermon and leading the funeral never once referred to my grandpa by his name. He never talked about Emmett Schmitt, the father, the husband, the son, the grandfather. He only talked about Pastor Schmitt, the paragon of religious virtue.

As I’ve said, this is the problem sometimes when we talk about saints. When we call someone a saint, we only want to look at their positive qualities. We only want to pay attention to the “holy” things they did, and ignore the rest.

But a person’s actions aren’t what defines them as “saint.” “Saint” doesn’t necessarily define someone by the life they lived, but by their status as a child of God.

Pastor Schmitt is not a saint because he was ordained, or preached the Gospel, or fed people with the body and blood of Christ. Emmett Schmitt is a saint because God claimed him in the waters of baptism and worked in him throughout his life. Being a saint and a sinner aren’t mutually exclusive: they go hand in hand. Grandpa had his share of sins, but still, we call him “saint.” And we still count him among that communion that praises God without ceasing, along with so many others I have loved and who have died.

All Saints is often emotional or even said, especially for anyone who has lost someone recently or for whom the grief is still fresh.

But All Saints is also a day of celebration: a day to give thanks for these people we’ve loved. A day to acknowledge the reality of their lives and their status as child of God. A day to remind ourselves of all the ways we are still connected to them.

If you ever need a reminder, you don’t need to look any further than our communion liturgy. Each week, during the Great Thanksgiving, I say some version of this:

“And so, with all the choirs of angels,

with the church on earth and the hosts of heaven,

we praise your name and join their unending hymn:”

And then we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and in that moment we are joined with that communion of saints who are already with God and who offer praise without ceasing.

Saints in heaven. Saints here in this room. Saints because God has made it so.

Amen.

Have Mercy on Us Sinners

Sermon preached Sunday, October 23, 2022, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Chesterfield, VA.

Most of the time, we hear the parable Jesus tells today and are pretty sure we have a handle on it. I mean, it’s pretty cut and dry, isn’t it? The Pharisee is bad for being proud. The tax collector is good for being humble. Done. End of story. Parable interpretation finished!

But that’s not the way parables work. I’ve been making this point all summer as we’ve heard parable after parable. They are always open for more thought. They are designed to make us think. They are meant to push back against our preconceived notions and teach us something about God we may not have considered before.

When we read this parable and go with the simplest, most obvious interpretation, we are prone to fall into a trap: an us vs. them mentality or a superiority complex. It is incredibly easy to look at the Pharisee and immediately start pointing out the ways we are different, the ways we are more humble, the ways we might be more faithful. We’re nothing like that haughty Pharisee who looks down their nose at others.

All of a sudden, we start to sound like the Pharisee, even as we protest any similarities. Like the pot calling the kettle black, we are only digging ourselves in deeper as we describe how much better we are. In the words of one commentator, this might lead us to say things like:

“Lord, we thank you that we are not like other people: hypocrites, overly pious, self-righteous, or even like that Pharisee. We come to church each week, listen attentively to scripture, and we have learned that we should always be humble.” (David Lose, WorkingPreacher.org, Commentary on Luke 18:9-14)

Get it? It’s so tempting to laud the ways we are not like the Pharisee that we might end up resembling him. It’s so tempting to announce how humble we are that we end up distancing ourselves from the real and honest plea of the tax collector and don’t show any true humility at all.

Truth be told, we’re fine with aligning ourselves with the tax collector when it comes to this parable and being humble. What’s wrong with that? Humility is a virtue! But the tax collector’s humility comes from his acknowledgement of his sinfulness and we have a little more trouble with his admission: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

As Lutherans, our theology frequently admits that we are always both saint and sinner. We are redeemed children of God, but we are still prone to push God away and rely on our own ability. It’s something that is so commonly talked about that it’s easy for us to say. It’s easy for us to joke about. Saint and sinner! No problems here! Little errors become funny incidents to point to as our “sinful” side.

It’s much harder, though, to truly live into the reality of that statement. We are sinners. We are redeemed, we are forgiven, we are loved by God, but we are still sinners. This isn’t a surface designation that refers to white lies or not giving as much to someone in need as you could. This is a soul-deep, real designation.

We hurt people. We participate in unjust systems. We can be unfair, unkind, or cruel. Our indifference can negatively impact others. We can even let ourselves down by not loving who we are as God’s children.

Frankly, we don’t always like to admit just how deeply ingrained our sinfulness goes. If someone calls us a sinner in a non-joking manner, we bristle and try to defend ourselves. If we are asked to confess our sins, we immediately go for the “easy” ones, to try avoiding admitting to the ways we have turned away from God and our neighbor in very real ways.

There are so many ways that we sin. Sometimes it’s in obvious ways. A lie here, a caustic comment there. Sometimes it’s in institutional ways, like the tax collector. He is a sinner because he is colluding with the empire. He is working with the Roman Empire against his own people to collect taxes for an oppressive regime. He is stuck. He says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” but he doesn’t indicate that he plans to change his line of work. He is caught up in a systemic structure of sin and doesn’t have an easy way out.

That can happen to us, too. We may sin because we are unable to see the ways in which our actions hurt others. We may sin because our culture has always told us that something is okay, even if it harms the human family. It’s hard to understand the repercussions of even seemingly innocuous things. Something being legal or permissible doesn’t necessarily mean that it is just. In fact, it is a challenge and a struggle every day for us to recognize the ways in which our actions are complicit in the larger system of sin.

It might be the products we consume which exploit workers at different levels of the supply chain. It might be habits we’ve never examined that lead to excess waste and harm our environment. It might be an attitude of “I succeeded on my own, anyone who doesn’t isn’t working hard enough” that ignores the collective impacts of poverty, discrimination, and just plain bad luck.

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” We share this plea with the tax collector. We echo his desperate prayer. “God, be merciful to us, sinners.” This is our prayer. This is also our hope: hope in God’s promise to be there for saints and sinners alike.

God’s forgiveness and God’s love is for people who follow the religious expectations and for people who cannot even bring themselves to look up to heaven out of shame. This open welcome is evident in scripture and offered freely in our worship here.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus encounters all sorts of people who others would consider unclean, or outsiders, or “too sinful.” What does he do? He talks with them, heals them, forgives them, shares meals with them, encourages them, and loves them. He offers the Samaritan woman at the well living water. He heals the ten people with leprosy. He welcomes children, who weren’t looked at as full people. He calls uneducated fishermen to be his disciples. Over and over again welcome, understanding, and love is offered.

We in turn pass that welcome on. There is no entrance exam or righteousness text to be a part of God’s community here. It doesn’t matter if you worship every Sunday or if this is the first time you’ve ever found yourself in a church. It doesn’t matter if you give ten percent of your income or one percent. It doesn’t matter if you have a strict devotional life or if you tend to pray more sporadically.

What matters is that the water in this font is for you. It is cleansing water that unites us with Christ forever. What matters is that the bread and wine on this table is for you. This is the body and blood of our God who welcomes us to the great feast.

What matters is that all of us, Pharisees and tax collectors alike, are saints and sinners, are redeemed and simultaneously in need of forgiveness. God, be merciful to us, sinners. That is our prayer. That is our hope.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

God’s Persistence

Sermon preached Sunday, October 16, 2022, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour, in Chesterfield, VA. 

Persistence is the name of the game today. After wrestling unknowingly with God, Jacob persistently holds on until God blesses him. The widow comes before an unjust judge over and over again until she wears him down and he finally relents and grants her justice.

Do you remember when, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that that there was one summer I worked at camp and our theme was justice? That one of the parables we had for one of the days was the parable of the unjust judge? Well, another lesson from that same summer’s theme was this morning’s reading, the parable of the persistent widow. Another parable…and another parable that I think just doesn’t work as an allegory.

If we approach it as an allegory, we’ve got to assign roles, and it’s tough to do that unless you really want God in the position of the unjust judge—which I certainly don’t! But remember, parables are not required to be allegorical. No, parables are there to teach us something about God…and so, when we read this parable the question isn’t “Who is God in this story?”…but “What does this story tell us about the nature of God?”

Jesus ends this parable by pointing to the unjust judge and how he finally gave in because of his annoyance and frustration at the widow continually coming to him. “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” Jesus asks. In other words, if even this jerk of a judge will finally relent to get this woman to go away, won’t our God who loves us, cares for us, and wants the best for us grant us justice without our needing to exhaust ourselves with continual pleading?

That’s where I think this week’s lectionary texts can be a bit unhelpful. At the most surface level, we hear this parable and the reading about Jacob and we just think, “Okay, I’ll just be persistent and God will give me what I want.”

That’s not the way it works, though, is it? That’s not the way God works. God is not a wish-granting genie or some other mythical creature that will give us our greatest desires if we’re only smart enough or cunning enough or, in this case, persistent enough with our asking.

When we read these texts, there is more to consider. For one thing, the context of our reading from Genesis. Do you remember the stories of Jacob from Genesis? In this passage, he has been on the run from his brother, Esau, after using trickery to take the inheritance that should have been his. Esau has been hunting him down but finally, Jacob thinks that enough time has passed that maybe, just maybe, it might be safe enough to come home. So first he sends his household to test the waters, if you will. See how Esau will treat them. And he plans to come afterwards.

It is at this point that God comes to Jacob, though we know Jacob doesn’t realize it is God. And they wrestle until daybreak.

This reading always puzzles me a bit because I always wonder why God chooses to wrestle with Jacob. Why bother? Especially because God tries to get out of it as soon as dawn begins to break? What was God’s purpose?

And this year, as I read the texts, I wonder if the purpose was God’s persistence—not Jacob’s.

Yes, Jacob wrestled all night and refused to let God go without a blessing…but I wonder if God’s initiation of this struggle was God wanting to meet Jacob where he was and wanting to remind him that he is better than someone who runs away from the consequences of their actions. Maybe God was concerned that Jacob wouldn’t follow through and approached him to create some extra incentive—incentive that was eventually gained through the blessing Jacob demands. A blessing that doubles as a reminder of who God is and the relationship God has with God’s people.

Persistence, not just on the part of Jacob, but from a God who doesn’t give up on us.

And again, I see this same idea in the reading from Luke. This parable is frequently referred to as the “Parable of the Persistent Widow,” and it is. She is. She wears down this judge until he finally agrees to grant her justice in her complaint to get rid of her.

But in Jesus’ remarks following it, about how much more God will grant justice to God’s people without delay. In other words, God is persistent in God’s pursuit of justice.

Like I said before, it’s not as if God is waiting for us to wear God down with our pleas and requests. On the contrary, God is eager and ready to support us and act in our best interests. The problem is, we want this action to happen in our way and on our timeline.

We always think we know best and we know the beset way to make things happen…but, of course, God knows best.

We might look at our world and point to all these things that we wish God would fix or that we think God isn’t doing enough to address, but then we’re missing the point. God’s justice is not our justice and God goes about things in ways that may seem foreign or confusing or unimpactful to us. But God reminds us that our view of things is not as expansive or as full as God’s is.

After all, God’s first effort at creating a just world was to put a tree in the Garden and tell Adam and Eve not to eat it and then kick them out when they can’t resist. Not too much later in scripture, God looks at the world, sees that things aren’t going well, and floods the world and wiping out all but Noah and his family—an attempt at recreating that original just world.

One of my professors in seminary used to say that in these early stories, God is “learning how to be God to God’s people,” and that means that God’s just nature is learning as well. Eventually, God realizes that the only way to bring about a fully restored relationship with humanity and full reconciliation is to come among us in human skin. To literally put skin in the game. True justice can come from no other place.

And so, if we want to know what God thinks about justice with Jesus in the mix, what God’s plans are for God’s people, especially through the lens of the Gospel of Luke, we need look no further than the Magnificat, Mary’s song that she sings to her relative Elizabeth after sharing the news that she is pregnant with the savior. Here’s what she sings:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”[i]

What were the highlights?

• Scattering the proud.
• Bringing down the powerful.
• Lifting up the lowly.
• Filling the hungry with good things.
• Sending the rich away empty.

In essence, turning the world upside down from the normal order of things. This is what God’s justice looks like. It doesn’t happen on our timetable. It doesn’t always happen the way we think it should. Heck, at the time, there were lots of people who didn’t believe God’s justice could come from someone like Jesus—that God’s justice could only come from a powerful military force that could oust the Roman occupation.

All of this is to say that God’s justice is a mystery to us in a lot of ways. We know the “what”: the fulfillment of God’s promises and the reign of God casting down the powerful and lifting up those who have been oppressed. But we don’t know the “how” or the “when.”

The “why,” though? That one’s easy.

 

Why can we count on God’s justice?

Because God is persistent.

Amen.

[i] Luke 1:46b-55, NRSV

Taking a Risk to be Made Whole

Sermon preached Sunday, October 9, 2022, the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour, in Chesterfield, VA. 

This morning’s readings give us two pretty familiar texts. First, we hear the story of Naaman, the army commander from Aram, an enemy of Israel. He has been struck with leprosy and is seeking a solution. A enslaved girl, taken as a prize of conquest from her homeland of Israel has the solution: seek out a prophet of the God of Israel and you will be made clean. This story shows up in our lectionary three times, which is pretty unusual for a story from 2 Kings. It’s a somewhat comic tale about a man who thinks he knows better than the prophet Elisha how God will bring about healing. It ends with Naaman proclaiming faith in God and giving thanks for his health.

And then there is the story of the ten lepers. This is a story many of us know, one many of us have heard over and over again throughout our lives. Perhaps some of you could tell it yourselves, no text needed. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross and he comes across ten people with leprosy. They call out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus does, and sends them on their way to show themselves to a priest. Ten leave. Only one returns. When we hear it, or when we read it, or when we think about it, we think of Thanksgiving. We think of gratitude. We think about how often we have been lax in our own thanks or have forgotten that everything we have is a gift of God. We think of how only one of these ten people came back to give thanks for being healed…and about how that one just happened to be a Samaritan.

These are two stories about how outsiders, non-Israelites, a Aramite and a Samaritan, experience God’s grace and God’s healing and praise God in gratitude. These are stories about the ways Jesus expands the kingdom of God to include more people in the Kingdom than the religious leaders of the day would like. That’s the way I’ve typically read it.

I have a confession to make. It might come as a shock. Pastors can still learn new things about the Bible. I know! I’ve probably scandalized you.

But a couple years ago, I felt my mind explode when I learned something about leprosy and the Bible I had never heard before…and I’d venture to guess it might be new information to many of you, too, unless you like to spend your free time exploring obscure verses in Leviticus.

Several years ago, I was in a text study with other pastors and all of a sudden one of these other pastors mentioned a verse in Leviticus about leprosy that I had probably read at some point in my life but couldn’t recall. As you may know, Leviticus, along with some other books in the Bible, carry all of the purity codes for the Jewish people. These codes tell people what they can eat and can’t eat, what they can wear and can’t wear, and, especially, how to be “made clean” in the event they are ever exposed to something that would make them “unclean.”

People with leprosy were considered to be unclean. This isn’t leprosy as we might understand it today, the word “leprosy” gets used to describe all sorts of skin maladies. Anyone with leprosy was considered unclean and had to announce that fact to anyone who might get too close. If someone was approaching them, they had to cry out, “Unclean! Unclean!”

The purity codes in Leviticus talk about how to determine if one is clean or unclean, but there is this very interesting caveat for people with leprosy:

“But if the disease breaks out in the skin, so that it covers all the skin of the diseased person from head to foot, so far as the priest can see, ¹³then the priest shall make an examination, and if the disease has covered all his body, he shall pronounce him clean of the disease; since it has all turned white, he is clean.” (Leviticus 13:12-13)

Hear that again: “But if the disease breaks out…so that it covers all the skin…[the priest] shall pronounce him clean of the disease.”

It might sound counterintuitive, but in a lot of ways this makes total sense. It’s about wholeness. If someone is whole, they are clean, regardless of that wholeness is disease-free or disease-filled. It’s about wholeness, not about a diagnosis.

These two verses from Leviticus were new for me. I looked it up for myself and read through it a couple of times to make sure I had a good grasp of it. Truth be told, it changes the way that I understand this Gospel story. All of a sudden, it’s not ten people with leprosy just crying out for mercy. It’s ten people with leprosy taking a risk. It’s risky for them to ask to be made clean, because they don’t actually know what they’re asking for…will they no longer have leprosy? Or will they simply be made whole and have leprosy cover their whole body?

It’s that the way healing is, sometimes, though? Isn’t it sometimes a risk, especially when we expand our definition to include more than physical disease?

I think about times when we make an effort to get healthier. When we start working out for the first time—or the first time in a long time! —our muscles have to work pretty hard in a way they’re not used to. Those first few weeks are sore weeks, muscles aching with the changes we are asking of them. Trying to eat more variety in our diet or incorporate more produce means that we might need to work harder to plan our meals, or learn new ways of cooking. It takes work. It’s a risk.

If our healing takes the form of overcoming an addiction, there is almost nothing harder than the beginning. Withdrawal can be painful, scary and, in some cases, even deadly in some cases. Though we know that, eventually, life without addiction is richer and fuller, it is a terrifying prospect for many. It would be easier to keep using. Healing is a risk.

I think about our relationships, too. If we want to heal a relationship, we need to put ourselves out there. We need to be vulnerable. We need to push ourselves to be honest about our feelings and our needs and we need to accept that we have likely made mistakes which we need to atone for. We need to be open to listen to another person and hear their thoughts and feelings. This is tough work. It’s intimidating. It’s risky.

God heals. We know that. But we also know that the process of healing, that the process of becoming whole is full of unknowns and pitfalls and won’t always be easy. It will likely be hard, with ups and towns and too many unknowns. It would be much easier, in a lot of ways, to simply allow ourselves to continue in that unhealthy  or un-whole state.

Yet still, God heals. God provides the strength to see us through and the inspiration and motivation to start. While God’s Word points out the ways we may fail, it also highlights the Good News that Christ never gives up on us. God provides forgiveness for all the ways we will mess up along the way. God provides community to support us, evidenced in the body of Christ created through baptism. God sustains us in the journey with life-giving bread and wine, the flesh and blood of our God.

And so, God makes healing more than worth all the possibly negatives. God puts it all on the line for us, risked it all on the cross, so that we might be made whole and might have the courage to embrace that wholeness.

Jesus, have mercy on us.

We know it will be worth the risk.

Amen.

The Tenacious Faith of a Mustard Seed

Sermon preached Sunday, October 2, 2022, the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA. 

We don’t hear from the prophet Habakkuk that often in worship. He is considered one of the minor prophets and his book is only three chapters long. There frankly just isn’t enough there to warrant too many Sundays worth of texts.  In fact, our Lectionary only has it appear once with a possibility for a second chance if the worship planner opts for an alternate reading.

And because he’s a “minor prophet” we also don’t know much about his life. Based on clues in the text, Habakkuk lived just before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and before the Babylonians exiled most of its inhabitants. The words of this prophet speak to fear and anxiety, not knowing what will come next and crying out to God for help. As the Babylonians power rises and their threat grows, the people of Jerusalem, and the kingdom of Judah as a whole, grew concerned. Habakkuk reminds the people that faith in God is not misplaced or misguided, but rather a life-giving hope.

Habakkuk will stand at the watchpost, station himself at the rampart and will watch and wait for God to act. That is his role. That is his identity: the prophet who waits on God to do as God has promised.

This notion of identity is a bit of a thru-line in these texts. In the letter to Timothy, we hear two identities highlighted, both those of the sender and the receiver. Paul claims his own identity as an apostle and herald. Timothy is reminded that his identity is rooted in his baptism, in the laying on of hands and the gifts that were bestowed upon him in that moment.

In a couple minutes, several people who have been part of our community for a will make affirmation of their baptismal promises and they “officially” join our congregation. Charlene and Chris and Katie will affirm these promises for themselves, and Christ and Katie will also affirm the promises they made on behalf of Mason, Lucy, and Emma when they were each baptized.

These promises are not just nice things to say and then put away until we’re confirmed or until we join a congregation. They can and should shape who we are as children of God. In baptism, we promise to:

• Live among God’s faithful people
• Hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper
• Proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed
• Serve all people, following the example of Jesus,
• And strive for justice and peace in all the earth

These are big things that, when taken seriously, have a big impact on our identity.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus talks about identity, too, although the parable presented is a bit problematic. In the parable, Jesus uses a story of someone enslaved, putting the listener into the position of the slaveholder. It’s not a good look, for the listener, or, really, for Jesus as we hear it now. And enslaved person’s identity is not that of a slave, it is not that of their bondage. Their position and enslavement is not their defining feature.

But I think the point being made here is that if one embraces their identity, the works and actions that flow out of that are natural and expected. So while I don’t think this particular metaphor works with the idea of slavery, I do think it works with the idea of baptism.

So while we know that the identity of enslaved people is not their enslaved status, we can also hear in this parable the truth that there are things we are called to do because of who we are. And if who we are is a disciple of Christ, then there are actions and words and responses that fit accordingly.

This year we’ve been mostly hearing from the Gospel of Luke and I think it’s helpful to go to Luke one more time. When Jesus kicks off his ministry, he does so in his home synagogue. He takes out the scroll of Isaiah, the appointed text for the day, and reads:

¹⁸ “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’”[i]

Then, he rolls the scroll back up, hands it back, and sits down, telling everyone that this reading has been fulfilled in their hearing.

As you all hear me preach and teach more and more over the years, you’ll know that I frequently refer to these two verses as “Jesus’ mission statement.” These are the things Jesus announces that he has been sent to do—anointed to do.

And these are the things we are called to do and participate in as disciples of Christ. And if you weren’t sure, they are echoed in those baptismal promises I just read a minute ago.

It can feel a bit daunting. A lot of pressure. A lot is expected of us. But the good news is that we aren’t doing any of it without God at work in us.

What keeps us going through all of it is our faith, faith that the disciples ask Jesus for more of! “Increase our faith!” they cry. And it is a cry I can empathize with. There’s been more than once occasion when I have wanted my faith increased!

The thing is, though, faith isn’t quantifiable. I don’t think we can ever really say that someone has more faith or less faith, but I do think that faith is something that can feel deep and tangible, but also wispy and frail, depending on where we are in our life and in our journey with God.

Jesus says that, with even the faith of a mustard seed, the disciples could uproot a tree and plant it in the sea. I actually looked up mustard seed and this is what I learned: mustard is an extremely hearty plant. It’s considered a weed in many places and even considered an invasive species in California. It is tough. Not killed off easily.

So maybe this is another way of understanding what Jesus says, not about the size of their faith, but about the heartiness of it, the tenacity of it, the hard-to-kill nature of it.

As Lutherans, we baptize individuals at all ages, and most of the time, that means that infants are baptized long before they can speak, walk, or even hold their own head up!

We baptize in this way because we believe that it is God’s action and God’s action alone working in baptism and that through those waters and through God’s words of promise, God instills a seed of faith and we are grafted into this community of believers.

It is this community of believers that will hold us, support us, love us, comfort us, encourage us, and push us. And it is this community of believers that will remind us where to look when we feel like we need more faith, always pointing to the waters of the font.

When our faith is feeling wispy, we can return to baptism to remind us how tenacious it is, how tenacious God is, in never letting us go. How wonderful it is to have the faith of a mustard seed.

Amen.

[i] Isaiah 4:18-19. NRSV