Nothing

Text: Mark 6:1-13

There is a kind of story that comes in many versions. They all go something like this:

On a stormy night / [on] a moonless night / a winter night,

an old man / a crippled woman / a starving child

comes to a monastery / [comes to] a country inn / the home of a rich man / a farmhouse / the church

and asks for money / [asks] for food / for a place to sleep / for help for a friend.

But he is treated poorly / [he is] locked out / spit upon / turned away.

Finally he comes to a place where

they welcome him / [they] feed him a warm meal / give him a place to sleep / go with him to help / give him from their own meager belongings.

And it turns out—that he is Jesus!

The point of these stories is that it is not so easy to recognize God when God is in the ordinary—ordinary things or people or events. It seems that we like our God to be big, bold, powerful, awesome, and mysterious. Not so much small, humble. Not too close up.

When the Gospel story that we just heard appears in Mark, Jesus had already performed miracles of healing. He had taught crowds in the countryside. He had cured a woman who could not stop bleeding and restored life to little girl whom all thought was dead. He had cast out many demons.

Then he came home.

The townspeople are of two minds about Jesus’ homecoming. They have heard of his teaching and healings. “What is this wisdom that has been given to him?” they ask themselves. “What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” They don’t deny that Jesus has been successful. They don’t deny the news of his power and wisdom. It is not that they don’t believe he has done these deeds. It is that they cannot reconcile the deeds with the man they know.

Jesus was just a carpenter. On the social scale of the times, about as low as you could get. Unlike even subsistence farmers, carpenters had no land. It was a lowly and low-class occupation.

And yet, this low-class man, son of Mary, had abandoned his family. He had gone off to teach like an educated man. He had gone off curing like a prophet. He put on airs. He gathered a group of followers. The townspeople don’t know what to make of him.

The ordinary familiarity of Jesus trips them up. It is not, in spite of the way the text is translated, that they are offended by Jesus. It is that they cannot see through to Jesus. It is that the power of God in Jesus is obscured for them by the plain, simple, poverty-stricken human ordinariness of the man they all know. He is hidden from them.

Clothing is intended partly to protect us. But its functions just as much to disguise us and portray us in a particular way that we choose. What we wear tells people about us. And all the trappings of our lives are like that. It is nearly impossible for people to know us really. What we own, what we do for a living, where we live, where we come from are opaque layers that people use to figure us out. Sometimes this is aggravating. (Jesus is aggravated by it.) But mostly this is what we hope for. (It is not what Jesus hoped for.)

Right after Jesus finds that his hometown friends cannot see the person that the rest of the world sees, Jesus sends out his disciples to heal people. He sends them out with almost nothing. He ordered them to take nothing except a staff. No food, no luggage, no money. The least amount of clothing possible: a pair of sandals and a tunic. Close to naked as possible. No, no, no, no, no, no, it says in Mark. Six times: no. Nothing.

Everything we carry with us is aggravating. Even when it is great. Everything is its own problem. Clothes require washing and storing, books require shelving and getting rid of, cars require repairs and worries. Things we love lead us anticipate their loss or theft or damage. Things, for all their wonder, are a pain.

But we like to be able to hide behind the things we carry. It takes a lot of time and care to do so. To keep secrets from one another, or particular others. To be careful that we reveal only the right things to the right people. To not expose ourselves and thus become vulnerable. To keep track of who knows us in what way. And to clean up the messes when the boundaries of knowledge we have set up fail and things break loose.

Jesus sends his disciples out with nothing so that they can focus on the task at hand. Which is first of all to free people from demons and to heal them. And which is second of all to give others—people who have houses and food and some things—give others a chance to welcome the disciples and to care for them.

And Jesus sends his disciples out with nothing so that they may be seen without prejudice. So that, to put it another way, they may be transparent to God. So that they may be known as only the people they are and the deeds they do.

And Jesus sends his disciples out with nothing two by two, because it is too hard and too scary to go out naked into the world by yourself.

The things behind which we hide are opaque. So that while we protect our selves we also blind ourselves. And the less we reveal, the less we see. Until, at the end, we hide from everyone and are able see nothing.

The more we spend time looking into the mirror the less we see of God. The townspeople do not see God in Jesus because they are preoccupied with their status and are unwilling to honor Jesus. How will they ever recognize God? They—we—are often enough like the people in those stories who cannot see God standing right in front of them.

Today [baptized child] was baptized into the body of Christ. The church has been called to care for her, to help her to learn to proclaim Christ through word and deed, to care for others and the world, to work for justice and peace, and to trust God in all these things.

We have all been called to help one another to do the same. We follow the way of Jesus. Who has taught us to travel light, and to keep our eyes open. And to see all that there is to see.

Us and Dirt

Text: Mark 5:21-43

It turns out that if you put a metal plate in a solution of the right kind of atoms, the atoms will naturally form into chain-like molecules call lipids. The lipids like to hang around together, and when they do, they like to stand side by side, with their heads all facing up, like a picket fence. The fence-like thing is floating in water, and sometimes one end of the fence meets the other end, and when that happens, the lipids all form a ring, with their heads outside and their feet inside. These little donut rings are primitive cells. There are a lot of things they cannot do—like they cannot do almost everything. But one thing they are really good at is keeping their insides separate from their outsides. The lipid wall is a great and selective barrier to things that want to come into these proto-cells. Even at this mechanical, not-quite-life stage, barriers—and their enforcement of what is inside versus outside—are fundamental to life.

In everything from cells to societies, there are insides and outsides. And barriers from cell walls to national boundary walls. We have some general purpose names for the difference between the two. We call the inside “Us.” And we call the outside “Dirt.”

Dirt is something that is in the wrong place or the wrong time. Soil in the garden is good. Soil in your salad is dirt. Oxycontin is good in a hospital. Oxycontin on the street, not so good. Maybe you think a beer would be good; maybe after a few, though, another would be bad. Some folks in Belmont thought that Mormons were OK, as long as they weren’t in the neighborhood. Sometimes things are out of place wherever they are. Cancer is dirt.

Dirt is either polluting or corrupting. When dirt is polluting, it displaces other, more pure things. That is what cancer does. That’s why people are afraid of new immigrant groups. Or new music. When dirt is corrupting, it harms other, more pure things. Guns in the city are dirt.

Not everyone agrees about what is dirt in any given situation. Some people think guns are almost always dirt, and some think almost never. Moral arguments are almost always arguments about what is dirt and what is pure.

What you think is dirt is one sense defines who you are. Your culture, your group, your class are the people who agree with you about what is Us and what is Dirt. We call these agreements “values.” When people talk about a decline in values, they are afraid things are getting dirty. (It is telling that when people first travel from their hometowns, they often comment about how the places they visit, and sometimes the people they meet, are dirty. When they become more familiar with the place, they don’t notice the dirt anymore.)

In humans, in our cells, in our organs, in our cultures, the barriers between Us and Dirt are permeable. Partly that’s because nothing can live by itself. Cells need to bring chemicals in and send chemicals out, and so do organs and organisms, and so do cultures and nations. And partly that’s because cells and so forth are not perfect. No barrier works well all the time. Life is not composed of little perfect parts, but of miscellaneous kind-of-pretty-good parts. Dirt does get in, no matter what.

For that reason, we create rules and codes of law. Laws seem to make rational sense, and in most cases they probably do. But different cultures have different laws, and that is not because cultures that are different from Us are wrong-headed, stupid, and mean. Laws codify what is dirt and what is not. They are barriers that protect against cultural corruption or pollution. It is significant that these laws are sometimes called holiness codes. The word holy means to be separate. Holiness codes separate Us from Dirt.

The woman without a name who touches Jesus is dirty. She has violated the holiness code of her culture. Her constant bleeding makes her constantly unclean—that is, dirty. We need to think a little about how horrible this being dirty would be for her. And to do that, we need to think a little about how horrible it would be for everyone else. They would think her to be disgusting. They would be disgusted. They would find her scary, even, and want to avoid her, and not let her come near them. It was like the extreme squeamishness that we get when we think someone is really sick and we think they are really contagious. Or how we get with really crazy people. She was corrupting. If they touched her, or if she touched them, they would become dirty, too. The woman without a name would have been totally alone, isolated, dirt.

When the woman without a name touches Jesus, therefore, it is a big deal. She has made Jesus dirty by her actions. She corrupted him. It was an aggressive and desperate thing to do. It was impolite. It was crazy. It was inappropriate. To us, perhaps it sounds brave and good and, it turns out, effective. But it would definitely not have seemed that way to the crowd or even the disciples, who should have known better, but never do.

The result of being treated like dirt is shame. Sometimes it is the intended result. You ought to be ashamed, folks say, meaning you just did a dirty thing. Shame on you. Shame is the way you feel when someone makes you feel like dirt. When you have been made to feel stupid, or weak, or cowardly, or foolish, or ugly. To be ashamed is be exiled. To shame someone is to push them outside the barrier of privilege or affection. Did the woman feel ashamed as she came to Jesus?

Jesus does not shame her. Jesus does not honor the distinction between inside and outside. There is no Us for Jesus and therefore no Dirt. It is not that Jesus does not see the barriers that exist. He is not clueless. But he is heedless. Jesus acts here, as he does many times in the Gospels, as if the barriers were fiction. He walks right through them. They are erected by humans; they are not God’s. The barrier that the woman crosses so fearfully is to Jesus nothing at all.

Most of us have felt like outsiders from time to time. Most of us have felt ashamed of things we have done. Most of us have been shamed by others. And probably most of us have made others feel ashamed. It is what people do.

But it is not what God does. To be ashamed is be exiled. But to be forgiven is to be invited back in. To be restored. In his turning to the woman who touched him, Jesus shows that for God there is no wrong time and there is no wrong place. In the kingdom of God about which Jesus teaches us, in the kingdom of God for which we daily pray and work, in the kingdom of God into which we have just welcomed [baptized child], instead of exile there is invitation. Instead of shame, there is forgiveness. There is no Us. There is no Dirt.

Boat Ride

Text: Mark 4:35-41

It is easy to imagine the expressions on the faces of the disciples. A mix of accusation, incredulity, and terror.

Why did Jesus send them out in this boat if he knew that a storm was brewing? How could he sleep so soundly when the waves were swamping the boats? Maybe they were like the waves described in the psalm that were so big they ascended into the heavens and the troughs so deep that descended into the depths. The disciples, some of them, were fishers. They knew about storms and seas and danger. The knew about drownings and boats lost and people with them.

Why are you afraid? Jesus asks them. You can hear them thinking: Why are we afraid? Because this is one big storm. Why are we afraid? Because we are going to die. How about you? they might have asked Jesus, Why are you not afraid? That would have been a good question. But they asked him something else: Don’t you care, teacher, that we are perishing?

We call these people disciples. The word means student, or learner. Their relationship to Jesus is student to master, as it is with people today who study under a spiritual guide. But in the Gospel of Mark, they are boneheaded students and poor learners. They forget what Jesus says to them, and they are slow to understand who he is. We are better to call them followers, since they are at least good at that. They follow Jesus around, listening and watching. Perhaps that is enough at the moment. Now they have followed him into danger.

The disciples have just heard Jesus tell lots of stories, or parables—we heard one last week about the mustard seed—and Jesus has spoken to them about the meaning of the stories. He has explained things to the disciples. Now, after crossing the sea, Jesus will begin to cast out demons and to heal the dying. To the disciples he speaks about the kingdom of God, and to the demons he speaks as only God could. Peace, he commands the sea. Be still, he commands the water. What he really tells the water is to be quiet: the words mean “shut up,”and “shut your trap.” Creation, un-insulted, listens to him as it would listen only to its creator.

Mark reports that the disciples are surprised. Whoa, they say, who is this person that even the wind and the sea listen to him? How can they be surprised? How can they have followed Jesus all over the countryside, sitting at his feet as he talked, standing by his side as he healed people, and not have just a little hint that he was a special sort of person?

Yet in their hearts they must have known, for it is Jesus they turn to when the sea threatens them. Maybe they were astonished and annoyed that Jesus was sleeping so calmly. Maybe they, being frightened out of their wits, want Jesus to join them in their fear. But their complaint to Jesus is not that he sleeps while they panic. It is instead that he is cold hearted in the face of their panic. Do you not care that we are perishing? They think in their hearts that Jesus could stop the storm if he really cared about them. They know who Jesus is. They know before the fact that Jesus could speak as God to the storm and could save them. And they are right. He does.

Why? Why does he do that?

There were other boats on the sea, in the storm, with frightened folks aboard. Would Jesus have saved them if the disciples hadn’t pestered Jesus into action? Do the disciples, by virtue of their special relationship with Jesus, get special treatment? They certainly expect to. (And we expect them to). Is that expectation reasonable?

We, like the disciples, are followers of Jesus. We try, as they tried, to listen to Jesus. We pay attention to Jesus as they did. We try to follow the way of Jesus and we try to do what he has told us to do (more or less, just like the disciples). Can we therefore expect special treatment, too?

Jesus hears the prayers of the disciples. On their account he is willing to alter the course of history and the laws of physics. Is God the creator of the universe in any way obligated to hear our prayers and to do the same? What if in doing so someone else is harmed? Do our prayers have power, and if so, do they have more power than the prayers of others? How about more power than the prayers of our enemies?

We teach, having be taught by Jesus, that we should pray and that God will listen to us. We don’t think too much about the logistics of how God might answer our prayers without bollixing up something else on the other side of the universe. We leave that to God to figure out, who after all has a better resume for that sort of thing than we do. But on what grounds does God listen? Do we have some sort of contractual agreement with God that obligates God? Or do we pray on the strength of our relationship with God, as the disciples did, it seems, with Jesus. And if that is true, what happens when our relationship with God is not so good, at least on our side? Sometimes we are embarrassed in front of God, and sometimes angry, and sometimes disappointed. The disciples in the boat were unhappy with Jesus, and they accused him of ignoring their fears. Maybe they shamed Jesus into helping. Is that a good way to ask God for something?

We have a complicated relationship with our creator, who is small enough to care about each us (he was human sized, as Jesus, after all) and large enough to do something about it. We are often in the position of the disciples on the boat, having mixed feelings about all this. Jesus is human like us, so he should understand how frightened we are. Jesus is God, not like us, and so he should keep us safe from disaster and suffering. But Jesus does not do what we think he should. Jesus does unpredictable things, like sleeping during the storm, and then transforming the storm into dead calm.

This powerful and almost magical action frightens the disciples even more than the storm. The disciples were timid, it says in Mark about the waves, but they were terrified, it says, about Jesus’ ability and willingness to calm the waves. (Maybe it is scary to have God right in your boat. Especially if God does what you ask.)

The story of the Bible is a rich story because it is the story of humans and God trying to live with one another, but we are certainly the odd couple.

God makes the world. In creation, there is an implicit promise. That promise is to be a hospitable place for creatures. The universe is a place that nurtures us into existence. You can think of that as circular reasoning; if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here. Or you can think of that as a great gift. God has given us existence, life. And more, God has given us pleasure and beauty and hungers and the elements and danger and feelings. Everything. God’s promise to us is fulfilled in us, that we even exist. It is, all of it, a wonder. Thank you.

Today we heard from the book of Job. In the fall, we’ll have a Bible study where we read the whole book of Job. But I’m sure you know that Job was not treated all that well by God, and Job accuses God—there is a pattern here?—accuses God and demands an explanation. Today’s reading is the beginning of God’s answer. Which is: Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Is that a flippant or arrogant answer? Or is God saying: I gave you the universe. I gave you creation.

The proud waves, as it says in Job, may be bounded, but they are deadly as well to humans among them. It is only creation, it is not Eden. We come thankful for our lives and fearful of danger to them. We pray sometimes in fear. We pray in hope that we will always be safe. And sometimes the waves are calmed and the storm shuts up and things are at peace again. God is good.

But God is not a magician. Jesus is not a magician. Jesus does not promise the disciples that he can or will always save them from drowning. His gift is not freedom from the elements of the world, but freedom from the fear of the world. Jesus sleeps in the boat. The disciples panic. Jesus sleeps. He cares for them. He speaks not in criticism but in sympathy. “Why are you afraid?” He is teaching his disciples.

The Birds and the Trees

Text: Mark 4:26–34
Other texts: Ezekiel 17:22–24, 1 Samuel 16:1, 6-12

We just heard two of what are called Jesus’ agricultural parables. It turns out that Jesus wasn’t much of a farmer—he was a city boy—and some of these parables show that. For example, the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds, as any gardener would know. But the parables are not instructions about gardening, fortunately. They are ways to help us think about a God who might not think in exactly the same way that we do.

Parables demand interpretation. They are supposed to shake us up, and after being shaken, we are supposed to put our pieces together in a new way. So parables are not about what they seem, which means we have to think about what they are about.

A common way to interpret the parables we heard today, especially the second one about the tiny mustard seed, is to conclude that a little faith goes a long way. See, we say to our evangelistic selves, faith starts small in people but it grows and grows. Or, a small faithful church grows and grows. Or, small faithful movement. And our job, being faithful Christians, is to plant the seeds, to sow them, to scatter them, as it says. And though things look hopeless at first, much will be accomplished in the end. We are the agents, in this view, and the parable charges us to go out and do something. Because we are responsible. We are in control.

This notion, that it is up to us, places a great burden on us. It puts us right in the middle of the chain of salvation. No sower, yields no harvest. But it is attractive because we do like to think of ourselves as controlling the universe. And we try hard to do so.

But in the end, this only leads to suffering. Both in others and in ourselves, as we forcefully and sometimes forcibly manipulate events and people. We want to align things through our clever wills so that things work out the right way.

Out of this comes sorrow. For we are too puny, too ignorant, too mean, too short-sighted, and too mortal to succeed at this for long. We are not in control, and life has a sometimes harsh way of reminding us of that.

God does not think as we do. (I think.) We are made in the image of God, and we therefore share some parts of God’s nature, but who knows what those parts are? God is not totally weird to us—that’s one of the great things about God—but God is constantly reminding us in scripture (and in life) that God has different ideas than we do.

In the passage from the first book of Samuel, God’s prophet Samuel is sent to the house of a man named Jesse. Samuel’s job is to pick out the next king of Israel. “It must be this tall, strong, oldest son,” thinks Samuel. Nope, not him, says God. “Then surely it is the second son,” thinks Samuel. Wrong again, says God. This goes on through five other men, seven sons in all. None are God’s choice. In the end, young David, just a boy, is called in from his job tending the sheep. David is the one. David is chosen, and in the end he becomes Israel’s greatest king. The Lord teaches Samuel that mortals—people, you and me—see things one way, God sees something else.

In Ezekiel, what we think to be high and mighty, God brings low. The poor and despised, God raises up. What prospers, God diminishes. What is impoverished, God nourishes. The things that people do, God undoes. The things people neglect, God provides for.

It is not, I think, that God is wiser than we are, or smarter, or knows more, or is more just, though all those things are no doubt true. It is that God is freer than we are. God is less burdened by all the things that not only cloud our vision but, even when we see what must be done, make us deny what we see. We bring to every situation a lot of baggage that God is evidently free of.

The parables in Mark tell us, they say, something about what the kingdom of God is like. If that is so, then the rule of God—which is what the kingdom means; the place in which God’s rule prevails—the kingdom is a place, first, of life and growth. These are about living, growing things. And it is a place, second, of provision and plenty. Ripe wheat comes from the harvest. Great shrubs are full with large branches. And it is place, third, of utility, of usefulness. The grain is harvested for nourishment. The branches provide homes for the birds.

And finally, it is a place in which God does the work, not us.

We are the beneficiaries, not the agents. We are not responsible for the useful bounty that comes out of these gardens. It is as if, it says in Mark, as if someone were to scatter seed on the ground and then sleep and rise day and night. How that works, the scatterer does not need to know. The earth produces of itself. And then, after all this happens, that “someone” gathers all the harvest. What these parables say—and they are not alone in the Gospel—is that God provides for us, God’s creatures.

Whenever we hear or read scripture, it is good to pay attention to how we feel. To our hearts. How we feel is a good clue—a better clue than what we think—it is a good clue to what’s going on in the text. And in these parables and in the words of Ezekiel, I suspect, we do not hear yet another burden that God has put on our shoulders. Instead, we hear them with thanksgiving. They comfort us rather than frighten us. That is because the burden is taken up by God. “I, the Lord, have spoken. I will accomplish it,” it says in Ezekiel. I will undo the injustices, I will give water to those who thirst. I will provide dwelling places for my creatures. I the Lord will do these things.

God is the source of all life. We are the living. God gives us life and sustains us. We are the birds. Without the bush, we have no place to nest. We are the tree. Without water we die. God provides the bush, God provides the water. Without God, there is nothing.

The parables are not stories about our power, about how powerful we are. Our power is a joke. A myth. The cause of our sadness. They are instead stories about our dependence, about our powerlessness.

We long for freedom and peace and fulfillment in our lives. Jesus teaches us in the parables that we will not find them in our power to control the world, but in God’s power to provide for us.

Thanks be to God.

Action in Trust

Text: John 3:1-17

Let’s say you want to get to San Francisco. And let’s say you were starting here in Cambridge. Here are some ways you could do that. You could wander around aimlessly, hoping that in time you’d stumble into San Francisco. Probably not going to happen. Or better, you could realize that San Francisco is almost due west of Cambridge, and that if you had a compass you could walk in a straight line from one city to the other. Except you would have to bushwhack, ford streams, cross rugged mountains, and generally have a rough time of it. Or better yet, you could walk on a path already laid out, a path marked on a map and labeled with a sign that said “the way to San Francisco,” a road that without too much bother and in time would get you to where you hoped to go.

Life in the real world is colored with suffering. It is human to be a little lost. To be unsure of what we are doing and whether it is worthwhile. And whether it is good. Sometimes we are desperate and at wits’ end. Sometimes sad or just confused. Sometimes angry at injustices done to us, to others, to strangers. Sometimes we wonder what will happen to the world. Things are out of kilter.

We desire to be somewhere that feels like home, homey, at peace with ourselves and others. We long to be surrounded by beauty and the company of friends and the intimacy of a person to love.

How shall we get from where we are to where we want to be? We can wander around aimlessly, trying one thing or another. Or, we can sort of head in the direction we want to go, blazing our own trail. Or we can follow a way already laid down and labeled. Jesus says he is the Way. He has a big sign saying “this way to peace.” Peace of mind, peace in the world. This way to an abundant life. Those who read that big sign of Jesus, have varying responses. Some say, some of you say, “you bet, I’m already in San Francisco.” Some say “I’m on the path.” Some wonder whether there are other ways, too. And others wonder whether the journey on which Jesus leads us takes us somewhere else, not in this life at all.

This passage we just heard in John is rightly famous. And for some it is the essence of Christianity. Born again Christians (that’s from verse 3) carry signs quoting John 3:16. In this passage, Jesus first talks about a transformed life and then how to get it.

First, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born from above. The word he uses for “above” also means “again.” Nicodemus is confused by the two meanings, and he and Jesus talk past each other, but no matter how you hear what Jesus says, it is clear that you cannot go on living life the way you were before. If you want to have a different kind of life, you can’t go on living the old kind of way. If you want, on a larger sense, a different kind of world, you can’t conduct business as usual.

This is not a moral or even a spiritual judgment. It is not saying you have to come to some crucial decision in your life, or to make some impassioned declaration, or anything. It is saying that if you follow Jesus you had better expect something new to happen. There will be surprises. Who knows where the wind blows? cautions Jesus. Walking the way of Jesus will change your life. That’s what we are hoping for, right? To get from where you are now to where you hope to be. Where you hope to be will, you hope, be different from where you start out. Another way to hear what Jesus say: be prepared for a change. Following Jesus will disrupt things.

Then, Jesus promises, according to the Bible verses we just heard, that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. We’ve talked a lot in the past about what John means by eternal life. To summarize: for John, eternal life is not something you have to die for. Eternal life is abundant life, starting here and now but not diminished by death. Eternal life is the San Francisco in our metaphor. What we hope for.

Lutherans make much of the difference between grace and works. Grace is God’s free gift. Works are things people tell us we must do to earn the gift. Grace: free. Works: earn. So is what Jesus says about belief a grace-statement or a works-statement? Is it something we have to do before God loves and forgives us and gives us abundant life? Whenever we have a Bible study here at Faith someone always says: but isn’t believing a work? It’s a good question.

I usually answer that it is better to translate the word Jesus uses for “belief” as “trust.” It is the same word in Greek, the language of the Gospels. And I say that God makes us an offer, which if we trust God, we accept. Sort of like someone promises to pick you up at the mall, but you don’t trust that person and you walk home anyway. The gift is offered, but you never get its value because you don’t trust the giver. Jesus says, this is the path to San Francisco, but you don’t believe him and you end up in Houston instead. Whose fault is that? If the answer is that is is your fault, then trust is a work, too. By grace you get to the destination even when you wander about aimlessly and refuse to stay on track. That’s what grace means. You get what you don’t deserve.

Part of the problem here is that the words “belief” and “trust” sound like things we can do sitting on our couches. Some little thought-thing, a minor change of mind. What does the Gospel passage mean when it says “believe in” Jesus? When we use the phrase in normal discourse it implies affectionate admiration. Something we might say to a friend. You can do it, Sally, I believe in you. Is that what Jesus means? Or, are we to believe something about Jesus (like, he is God’s son, which is an article of our creed), or are we to believe something Jesus says?

Or does Jesus expect, as I think he does, that we take him to be our leader. That we are followers of him. That the path which he lays down is the path we walk. Very rarely in the Gospels does Jesus tell us what to believe, meaning what to think. Very often he tells us what to do. Jesus has written, by his words and example, a user’s manual for, or a tour guide to, the abundant life. In it he has told us what to do if we want to get to the destination we hope for. If we trust his leadership, then we are disciples, his followers. He leads the way to abundant life. In this sense, belief is action taken in a realm of trust.

Jesus says: if you want to follow me on this path to abundant life, then you actually have to follow me. Perhaps this, too, is a work in the Lutheran sense, but if so it is a subtle one. It is like saying, if you want to go to the store, you actually have to go to the store.

The picture of the ministry of Jesus in John is a picture of change in the world and in people. It is not a picture of new doctrine. It is rarely about convictions. It is often about transformation. Water into wine. Sickness into health. Death into life. Suffering into abundance.

That is usually how it works: transformation first, conviction later. That is how it worked for Martin Luther; though he wrote pages and pages of learned opinion, it all started with a transforming experience he had. Our understanding of things—our doctrine—comes after the stories in our lives. The stories don’t illustrate the doctrine. The doctrine—such as the doctrine of the Trinity we celebrate today—is a way to make sense of the stories. What we think comes from what we do.

We seek in our search for God a way to stand in the world. For some organizing center to what interests us, how we behave toward others, who we hang with, how we deal with adversity, how grateful we are. Having Jesus in our lives gives us a chance to get from here to there. It means being able to do things, to be someone, that you could not (or would not) before. To have a new life.

Praying for the Home Team

Text: Acts 1:15-26

There seem to be some verses missing in the reading today from the Book of Acts.

Here’s how that could be. There is a committee that chooses the readings for each Sunday. On the committee are people from lots of Christian denominations. Sometimes they leave out some verses in the middle of the reading. As they did today. Sometimes they do that because the middle verses are distracting, or include some verses that seem out of place. But I’m convinced that sometimes they do that because the left-out verses give them the creeps.

Here is what they left out today. In the story in Acts that we just heard, the disciples are picking a new leader. That’s because one of the old disciples is missing. He’s missing because he is Judas, the disciple who gave Jesus up to the authorities to be executed. He’s not missing because the remaining disciples were upset with him and didn’t want him around, though that might make sense. He’s missing because he is dead. And the verses that are missing tell us what happened:

[vv 18-20] Now this man bought a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakel'dama, that is, Field of Blood. For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his homestead become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’; and ‘His office let another take.’

This is a little gruesome. A little violent. A little creepy. But it is germane, for it explains both what happened to Judas and why they were anxious to replace him. Because it was written in scripture that they should. The scripture had to be fulfilled, it says.

Since it was written in scripture, we might ask how and how much God was involved with Judas’s explosive death. Did God cause it? Or did God allow it? Or did God just observe it? To what extent and in what manner does God interfere in the actions of humans—Judas in this case?

You might answer that God extracts justice here. Judas did a bad thing, God punished him. In the psalm for today, we sang that the life of righteous persons is wonderful. Happy are they. They take delight in things. They are like fruit trees that are planted by streams of water. Everything they do will prosper. They are not like the wicked, for whom nothing is wonderful. The wicked are chaff, blown about here and there. The wicked cannot stand in the face of judgment. The wicked are doomed. The good get the goods and the bad get punished. It all works out.

Except that that’s not how it seems to work out in real life. People who do bad things can get off scott free, live prosperous lives and are delighted. People who do good things can suffer, get jerked around, and bear sour fruit.

Is this God’s will? Or is this God’s doing? Or is this God’s nonchalance? Is it God’s anything?

We, the people of the Book, the people whose religion comes from the Bible, hold that God is active in the world and in our lives. The Bible is a collection of stories of that activity. God knows what is going on and God has a hand in what is going on. God interferes in the daily lives of people, or if not daily then at least from time to time. Time measured on the short scale of people’s lifetimes. God does not always approve what is going on. Which means that God does not interfere in everything. Sometimes God is sad about what is going on, sometimes happy, sometimes annoyed. Which means that there is a certain intimacy between God and people.

On a case by case basis, though, it is hard to tell exactly how God is working. We have to interpret it. Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, interprets the death of Judas as a fulfillment of a prophecy of great King David and a fitting punishment for bad Judas. But some have interpreted the actions of Judas not to be wicked but instead to be an example of obedience to the directions of Jesus. Judas was the one whom Jesus could trust to advance the plot that leads to the crucifixion and thus to the resurrection of Jesus. Judas was the brave and obedient soldier. I’m not sure whether this is a good interpretation or not, but it does show that we humans don’t always know what God is doing at the moment.

What is God doing when Judas dies so horribly? Does God allow this? Does God watch curiously? Does God make it happen? And if God does make it happen, does God orchestrate the whole thing, or just nudge things a little this way or that on the margin? Where is God’s motivating power? Does God make Judas do something against Judas’s will, or does God make Judas will something—change his will—to take his own life? And did Judas pray to be delivered from his death or did he pray to be led to it?

When we pray, these questions are relevant. What do we hope for when we pray to God? Our prayers are often petitions, requests from God. We pray for ourselves. For our health and happiness. For blessings that we hope to appreciate, for success in an endeavor. My sister prays for a good parking spaces. My colleague prays for home-team victories.

Or we pray for others whom we love or worry about. We pray that someone will get better, that a friend will find a companion, that our neighbor will have safe travels, that a relative will not die just yet. We pray for the world, for an end to war, for an end to abusive relationships.

We pray that all we hope for will happen and that nothing we fear will happen. Chances are, in the particular we will be disappointed. Not necessarily, but based on experience, probably.

That does not mean that we pray only to hear ourselves talk. Prayer is not just some coping thing we do in the face of limits and uncertainty. We don’t pray just to make ourselves feel better. And though I’ve spoken here about prayer also being about listening, I’m not saying we shouldn’t speak up. The same Bible that tells us God likes to hang around with people tells us that God also likes to talk to and listen to people. What God does with what God hears, that’s hard to say.

Prayer is like a pathway. Praying keeps us on the path when we drift off into the brush and the weeds and the rocks. But the path is not one that someone, not even God, has laid down for us. It is not like a railroad track, with a fixed start and a fixed destination. Prayer not only keeps us on the path, it creates the path. It makes the path.

Prayer is motion toward God. God’s revealed interest in us keeps us moving. Our experience of God’s interest in humans convinces us that walking toward God is not a fruitless or aimless waste of time and hope. The path is not random, though it may seem twisty. It is a result of a complicated mix of all the things that are part of our prayers.

When we pray, we rightly expect something to happen. But who knows what? We pray over and over, and we come to worship over and over, because this is all a work in progress. In prayer, in worship, in whatever kind of faith life we have, there is the possibility—even the expectation—of a new future. The pathway goes somewhere. We pray that God will interfere in our lives. That something will be different. That we will be transformed.

Baptism: Members of One Another

Text: Acts 10:44-48

Welcome, T___. The readings for today align nicely with your baptism.

Today we heard the second of two baptism stories from the book of Acts. The two are similar. Last week a member of the Ethiopian court was baptized. He talked to the disciple Philip about Jesus, and after hearing what Philip had to say, asked him “Look, here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?” So Philip baptized him. And today, some folks were listening to Peter, moved, the story says, by the Holy Spirit. Peter this time does the asking: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people?” And Peter baptized them.

Baptism is particularly, but not uniquely, a Christian rite. It seems to have been invented around the time of Jesus. Maybe it was adopted from existing conversion or cleansing rituals. Maybe not. But from the very beginning of the early church, baptism and Christianity went hand in hand. It is the final instruction of Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew: “Go ... and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”—the words we used with T___ today and which are always used.

Baptism is sometimes imagined to be some kind of miracle consumer product. When I was growing up, Colgate toothpaste came with Gardol, a made-up secret ingredient barrier between your teeth and the world. In ads, Gardol was shown as a big invisible shield; cavity germs could not get through. For some, baptism is like that, a protective layer that keeps sin away. For others, it is more like detergent, washing away all previous sin. The emperor Constantine, who in the fourth century made Christianity politically and socially acceptable, waited to be baptized until just before his death. He wanted to die sinless, so he didn’t want to have time to sin between his holy bath and his presentation before St. Peter at the gates. He wanted to make sure he got in.

Lutherans are adamant about lots of things, but two of the most important are that, one, we are all sinners and, two, that it is not by our own goodness or effort that God favors us. The Gardol can’t keep us from sin. And St. Peter doesn’t care what kind of sin-filled baggage we bring.

When Peter, before he got the job of gatekeeper, baptizes the folks that we heard about in the story in Acts, he hangs around a bit afterward. They were all baptized, it says, and then they invited him to stay for a few days. And I guess he did. Kind of like a long coffee hour.

Baptism is an introduction into a community. It is something done in the community, with God’s presence. Though it is a sacrament, and in our denomination clergy must preside at sacraments, it requires the presence of the assembly. That is, all of you. Both who you represent—you speak for all Christians today—but also you in particular, you as an individual. You just made a promise to support T___ and pray for him. You are on the hook.

That’s why baptisms here are usually on a Sunday. Because that is when the community gathers. That’s why the church frowns on private baptisms. That’s why godparents or sponsors are an important part of the ceremony, since they are usually part of the wider community.

We are members, as the Apostle Paul seems to say, one of another. It is better than being a family. Family ties are complicated and sometimes ornate, and not everyone in a family is good to everyone else. But in the membership in the body of Christ—that is, in the membership of the followers of Jesus—that is, in the membership of one another—we are good to one another, or we are supposed to be.

This is my commandment, we heard once again today, that you love one another as I have loved you. It is no accident that in the season of Easter (and in Holy Week before Easter, too), we are reminded of this commandment over and over. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another as I have loved you. We are members of each other. We are here because this commandment of Jesus, and the person Jesus who commanded us, are important to us.

Our thoughts about Jesus and about this commandment are in us. In all sorts of different ways and in all sorts of different understandings and beliefs and doubts and experiences and resultant actions. But in all the members of the followers of Jesus, those thoughts are in us.

The admission requirements of this association are low. There are no special exams to pass and no special grades to get. Anyone who is called by the spirit can be baptized. In years past the church has spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that people were worthy of baptism. But there is no human being in the church who has the right to say whether we are worthy or not. The Ethiopian court administrator says, “What is there to prevent me from being baptized,” and Philip answers: Nothing at all. Peter asks, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,” and he answers himself: No one at all.

This community of which we all members is a practical community. Not just a theological one. In the most simple way possible, we are with one another. We worship together, we eat together, we tell funny stories and we tell sad stories, and we laugh together at the funny ones and comfort those who tell the sad ones. Or try to. We are interested in each other, or try to be. We are compassionate, or try to be.

Someone wrote recently that in hard times people usually come together to support one another. But that instead, in these hard financial times, people have been inclined to isolate and exile one another. By shame them and by blame. But we in the church, the body of Christ, are by the commandment of our teacher not allowed to do that. Our compassion is not supposed to depend on circumstance. We know that people’s lives can be changed in a second. For ill or for good. We are with them no matter what.

Martin Marty, a contemporary Lutheran theologian, warns that we have to beware of thinking of ourselves as agents. By that, he means thinking that we are virtuous, powerful, and wise when we are rarely any of these. But especially it means thinking we are independent of one another. He wrote that one of the reasons we are in a mess at the moment is that we forgot we are members of each other. “We pretended we weren’t,” he said, “and that is where the great immorality lay.”

Lutherans recognize Baptism and Holy Communion as the two sacraments of the church. Both of these sacraments are rites of humility. They are antidotes to hubris. To pride. They are signs of obedience and dependence. In both, we humble ourselves. As we come forward to the altar rail, we admit to the world that we need this spiritual food. When we come to the baptismal font, we admit that we need each other.

So, we assemble today in humility and love for one another. We assemble to welcome T___. We welcome his as a fellow worker with us in the kingdom of God, a child of God, and a member of the body of Christ. Thanks be to God.