Serious and not Serious

Text: Luke 1:26–38, 47–55

These are serious times. We are dealing with serious issues. There are many dark places in the life of this world. Things are not working out as we thought they would. Our confidence is shaky, and enemies of spirit seem to surround us.

But we are not the first to find our present circumstances worrisome and our future uncertain. It was so when the angel Gabriel visited young Mary, at first so perplexing her, and in the end thrilling her. She would be the mother of a new age, a new kingdom. Occupied by Rome, oppressed, and maltreated, the people of Israel would be saved, freed, restored under God’s favor. Through Mary and her son.

Mary was not the first, either. Mary’s song is a hair’s breadth away from a copyright violation of the song of Hannah in the first book of Samuel, and it echoes the songs of Miriam (in Exodus) and of Deborah (in Judges). All women who saw and praised a new coming of God that would bring about God’s kingdom. A resetting of the world to conform to God’s design, which means not only power to Israel, but more importantly a world of compassion and justice for all people—men and women, rich and poor, family and alien. A new thing, but not a new new thing. For all, these were times—like ours—times of change hoped for. Serious times.

Theologians debate: who was Mary? Was she extraordinarily pure and good, and for that reason chosen by God to bear and then mother Jesus? Or was she ordinary, and chosen not in spite of but because of that? Are we to be amazed that a flawless person like Mary existed or instead that God would chose any old Mary to bring God to human birth?

Mary is called as a prophet is called. Surprised, at first frightened. Wondering, as all prophets do, why me? Astounded not that a king would be born (that astonishment would come later), but that God would come to her for anything. She is nonplussed by the messenger before she even hears the message. Greetings, favored one!—that is all Gabriel says. Why would God favor her in anything—she, of all the people in the world, she who has nothing.

Surprised, frightened, eventually obedient. Saying yes without knowing—how could she know—what she was getting into. Hard enough to be a mother at all, harder still—painful, it turned out—to be the mother of the restorer of the world. Here I am, Lord, says Mary, the same answer of all those who become prophets, hearing God’s call. Here I am, say the prophets. All ordinary people in hard times delivering God’s message.

The song we just sang, Mary’s song, called the Magnificat, is a song of praise for things to come, but mysteriously wrapped in sentences written as if they had already happened. The grammar reminds us that Mary’s hopes are not for some far-off spiritual future but about the present state of the world, hers and ours.

As all prophets do, Mary reminds us how the world should be. Her verbs are strong, simple, clear. God scatters the arrogant (the King James version says “scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts,” making us think that they only imagine they have something to be proud of). God brings down the mighty, the rulers and leaders in power. God raises up the lowly, the oppressed, the humiliated. The rich are sent away with empty pockets. God feeds the hungry.

Yet here we are, two thousand years later. Where people still go hungry, and the rich still prosper, and the poor remain poor, and the powerful continue to consolidate their power, and are proud of it. We have just sung Mary’s song with energy and feeling. Yet is Mary’s song good news to all? Do the proud and the humble, the hungry and the well-satisfied, hear this song in the same way? Do we hear it as prophecy—or as sentimentality? It is exciting, but can it be real? Does it call us to action, and if so, what kind of action?

My spirit rejoices, sings Mary, who has invited people for centuries to join her in joy. And mostly we accept that invitation. Rich and poor alike. Why is that, when Mary seems to talk about winners and losers. Why aren’t the rich afraid, or at least embarrassed. Why aren’t the poor in despair, or at least annoyed. The song threatens and promises. And different fates for different people.

Yet all celebrate with Mary. Why is that? Partly it is because the song is about Jesus, whom we revere and follow. And partly it is because the inequalities that benefit some and deprive others make all, or almost all, uncomfortable. The promise of Jesus, as you have heard me say before, is not to swap power centers like political parties do when one gets control of Congress, but to change the relationship between people from up and down to horizontal. What would the world be like if that came about? A good world, many would say.

But mostly we all celebrate because we are pleased to remember that God is effective, that God can effect this world. Sadly, it is easy to think cynically that God cannot change things. To think that the stuff Mary sings about is not possible. But this song has the power to thrill us because we remember that it is possible. Mary is filled with enthusiasm. Nothing is impossible with God, the angel says. And when we sing this song, we feel that to be so. Hooray for Jesus, the song says. And hooray for the world, it says. But mostly, hooray for Mary’s proclamation that Jesus can seriously change the world.

My spirit rejoices in God my savior, sings Mary. She dances and sings, which is what the word means here. The times are serious, but not solemn. We can rejoice in God’s wish and power to heal the broken world. My spirit dances and sings.

There is a power behind the words of this song. It is the power of God to use us—to bless us—to make the world better for everyone. To restore justice, to live in peace, to care for each other. And the power of God to change the world, to save it from serious problems, to heal it, to restore it.

To take us from who we are now to whom we might become, and to be who God has called us to be.

To Be Found at Peace

Text: Mark 1:1-8 Other texts: 2 Peter 3:8-15a

The beginning. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, writes Mark. First verse, first chapter, in the first of the four Gospels to be written.

Except that it is not the beginning. It is not the beginning at all. The good news starts long before. We know that Mark knows that, because by his reckoning in the next verse, it begins at least as far back as Isaiah, five hundred years earlier. And in Matthew’s Gospel it begins with Abraham. And it John’s Gospel it begins with the creation of the universe.

Mark’s Gospel, more than the others, is like a video clip of a much longer film. There is no baby Jesus in Mark, no genealogy to prove pedigree, no cosmic stage setting, hardly a preface at all. Here is Jesus, Mark says, all grown up and doing great things. Healing people, and teaching them. And at the end, the other end, at the Easter end, the story ends with an empty tomb, and that’s all. No post-resurrection appearances, no sending out of the disciples into the world, no final words. Just: stop.

The story of the good news in Mark is a snippet. It is a middle piece of the story that is not only the life of Jesus, but the story of the life of the world. By starting in the middle, Mark makes us aware that this episode of Jesus is part of a much larger cosmic story that goes from creation to the end of time.

The story of Jesus is part of salvation history, a churchy phrase that means the history of God’s hand in the affairs of our own human, earth-bound existence. This short and intimate view (the life of the person Jesus here) inside a long and boundless view (the life of the universe) is a distinguishing (though not exclusive) mark of Christianity. Our faith seems to have two ends, represented physically in the Bible, starting with the creation story (another “in the beginning…”) and ending with the new city of light in Revelation. And for some people, these end points are the main points. Creation and the end of time are what it is all about. Even in the story of the life of Jesus the highlights seem to be the beginning—the birth of Jesus at Christmas—and the end—the passion of Christ at Easter.

Yet for all our interests in milestone events, our faith is not primarily one of originations and destinations. Christianity, just like our lives, is certainly full of events and celebrations. But they are signs of a deeper, longer, more satisfying story. Most of our lives, our lives in the world and our lives of faith, are lived in the boring middle, the day to day, the ordinary. When you get on the Mass Pike and it says that you are heading to Natick and Albany, it does not mean that those two ends are the whole trip. Or in the west, when you leave Lincoln, Nebraska and the sign says Denver, 486 miles, it does not mean that there is nothing in between; there is a lot of driving ahead of you.

The markers in our lives are prominent, but they themselves are not the story. We do not live in birth and death, we live in between them. Our lives are full of what seem to be key events. Our children are born, we start school, we marry, we begin new jobs. Momentous beginnings. People we love die, relationships are broken, we are laid off, we lose our fortunes. Discouraging endings. Yet just listing those events tells us little about the richness, the beauty, the suffering that make up most of our hours. It is in these hours which Jesus spends most of his time, in all the Gospels. It is these hours that are filled by our faith and our life as followers of Jesus. These hours are the ones that bring us together in community to pray and worship and eat together.

The lives of many of us here are full of transitions Beginnings and endings all smashed together, it sometimes seems. But though we often characterize the transition by an event—I’m graduating, getting married, moving to Houston, retiring—the transition is in fact the time between. It is all the time except the event, the time around the event. Getting married, say, marks a new part of one’s life. But the transition from friend to spouse started long before and carries on long after the wedding.

In every transition we are leaving something and going somewhere at the same time, and over time. We grieve for the past, whether or not we are pleased to be leaving it. We are anxious about the future, whether it saddens or excites us. What was is known, for good or ill. What will be is a discovery, for good or ill.

The prophet Isaiah joins with Peter in today’s readings to remind us that in the scheme of things we are tiny, fragile, ignorant, and short-lived. People are like grass, the prophet writes, our constancy is like the flowers of the field. We owe our brief lives to God. Peter tells his readers that what is long for us is a moment for God. What seems to be a thousand years to us is as a day to God. We live briefly in a much longer and more vast story, the story of the universe and salvation history. In the end, says Isaiah, God comes to restore the world. In the end, says Peter, all things are to be dissolved (a word which means they will all loose their moorings; things fall apart).

In neither case is this news meant to discourage us or to make us feel that our lives are insignificant. On the contrary, it is to make us think about how we will live in the in-between time. How will our lives go now, while the universe from which we come is here, while we are here, involved between our own beginnings and endings?

What sort of person, asks Peter, ought you to be? While you are waiting, he says, don’t worry so much about what you are waiting for, but how you will wait. Do not be anxious about the future, and do not regret the past.

Peter says to strive to be at peace when God comes upon us. We search for peace. Where can we find it? We look for it in security, in certainty, in keeping control of things. We look for it in power and righteousness. It is not there, Peter says. It is in knowing that our story, though finite, is part of a much larger one, that our story is part of God’s.

We do not exist without God, but God’s story is in part made up of our own. Our stories are strands that are woven into the braid that is the story of God. That story stands forever, Isaiah says. It begins at creation and goes to the end of time, and and each of us is forever part of it.

You Don't Miss the Water Until the Well Runs Dry

Text: Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent, as you’ve heard, is a time for reflection. It begins as we ponder where we are in our lives and in the scheme of things. It is in that way like Lent. It starts that way, in any case. But though the church knows that all of Advent is supposed to be time of preparation, it cannot resist getting excited toward the end, as we approach Christmas. It is not surprising. As we think about what was, we naturally wonder what will be and how it will be different. At the beginning is now. At the end is Christmas. Advent is a fast ride from sober reflection to the birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God, Emmanuel, meaning God is with us.

Emmanuel—God with us—is how it ends. Hooray for that. But that is not how things start. It is great to celebrate God’s presence. But sometimes God does not seem present at all. Sometimes God seems far away. Or vague. Or invisible. Or hard of hearing. Sometimes we feel alone. A friend of mine, who is going through a rough patch these days, says it feels like God is here, but a couple of states away. Like a friend who moved to the other coast. Or maybe it was you who moved.

The passage we heard from Isaiah this morning is called a lament. Laments are a proclamation about pain being suffered combined with a call for God’s intervention. Things are not good right now, God, and we’d wish you would do something about it. Laments are common in the psalms, which is one reason they are so appealing to people in daily life. A good chunk of many people’s lives is enduring pain (physical, emotional, or psychic) and a deep wish that God would come fix things soon.

It is this situation that prompts Mark to include this “end of the world” speech of Jesus. It speaks about suffering now (Israel was occupied by the Romans and the people oppressed) and suffering yet to come (about which Jesus has just told his disciples), but with the assurance that God will come soon (before this generation passes away).

Isaiah talks about the same thing, but usefully also talks about how hard it is to wait on God when you are in trouble, and the thoughts that you might have as you are cooling your heels hopefully.

This passage in Isaiah was written in a time that was supposed to be great, but wasn’t. All of Isaiah covers a period of about two hundred years, during which the Israelites are taken out of their land into exile. But by the end of the book, they are back home, hoping that all will be restored to the good old days when Israel was strong and righteous. But it seems it is not happening. Things are not working out. The prophet calls out to God. Complaining, explaining, and seeking God’s help. As with someone whose relationship is in trouble, his remarks reveal conflicting and powerful emotions. They go like this: you (God) were great. But now we are not so sure. You got angry. Ok, we messed up a little. But it is your fault; you made us do it, or at least let us.

The prophet starts by remembering how great God was. How powerful and good. How awesome. How God did surprising things. The presence of God is revealed to us, sometimes in astonishing and sudden ways, and sometimes we are overwhelmed. We turn our hearts and attention to God. No eye has seen any God besides you, Isaiah says.

Yet now, for some reason, we are estranged, Isaiah says. You are angry, God. You must be, since nothing is turning out right. Where are you? Where are the golden days, the sweet days? Where is the God in whom we put our hopes and trust?

Now it is true, admits Isaiah, that we maybe had something to do with this situation. We sinned. Against others and against you. We did stuff that we knew was not good and that would hurt you. We are a little ashamed, he says.

But really, God, he goes on to say, it is all your fault. Because you hid yourself, Isaiah says, we transgressed. We cannot be good without you. Our goodness comes from you. You left us in the lurch, in the muck by ourselves. We are lost without you, and you did not come to save us.

Yet Isaiah does not despair, does not give up on God, resigned to live alone, without God. Rather, he asks that the relationship between God and people be restored. Do not remember our sins, he pleads. Can we start again?

We are joined to God not by our goodness, and we are estranged from God not by our faults. We are joined to God not by what we do but by who we are. We are God’s creatures. God is the potter, Isaiah says, and we are the clay. We bear the mark of God’s hands, and our form is the result of the imagination of God. Our longing for God to be near, and the feeling at times that God is not, is a result of our connection to God, even when it feels like God lives in some other part of the country.

There is for sure a wish in these passage for God to come and fix things. My friend I mentioned earlier would of course like to have all the bad things in his life repaired. But he does not expect that to happen, really. That is not what bothers him. What worries and saddens him is that he feels alone, that God is not there with him, that God is far away. The fixing, though needed and welcome, is superficial. He wants God back.

There is a deeper longing to feel God near us. To be made whole by God’s presence. We are all God’s people, Isaiah says. God is our being. In Advent we, along with Isaiah, recall our past relationship with God, and wonder about the present, and look with hope to the future for Emmanuel, God with us.

In Our Time

Text: Matthew 25:31-46

There are four names for this Sunday. It perhaps is a sign of confusion in the church about the nature of Jesus. Or perhaps more true to say that it is a sign of the many natures of Jesus.

First, today is the last day of Pentecost, the last day of the church year, and the end of the days of ordinary time in the church calendar. It is the day we turn our churchly thoughts to special seasons of prayerful reflection, like Advent, and of celebration, like Christmas.

Today is also called Christ the King Sunday, always this last Pentecost Sunday. This man Jesus who has been living with us and teaching us in sermons and in parables all summer long, is revealed today to be one with the king of the universe.

Today is also called the Realm of Christ Sunday. Jesus brings a new world, a new way of being, to this ordinary world of joy and suffering.

And today is also called Judgment Sunday, reflecting the scene just painted for us by Matthew, in which distinctions are made and actions judged.

This story in Matthew is a parable. It, like the others that precede it in the Gospel, teaches us about what it means to follow Jesus. But it is no ordinary parable. It is the last parable in Matthew, and these words are the last public teachings of Jesus before he goes to his death. In that sense, they sum up or at least add an exclamation point to the stories in Matthew of Jesus’ ministry. It is as if Jesus were saying to his disciples—and as always therefore to us as well—as if Jesus were saying: if you remember none of what I’ve told you, at least remember this. Remember this story.

The different names of the days of this Sunday reflect different interpretations of the parable.

If it is the day of the king, then we have to ask: what kind of king is Jesus? If you are any other king or ruler, the answer is that Jesus is a scary kind of king. Jesus preached about sovereignty that overrode national and ethnic sovereignty. People’s loyalty to God overrode their loyalty to others, and their obedience was to God before others. To God, and not to other kings, or institutions, or even to family. There are many things that demand our loyalty and obedience, but if we honor Christ as king, then those other things are impostors. Charlatan leaders. On this day especially, we reject them. They are not the boss of you. Christ is.

If it is the day of the Realm of Christ, then we have to ask: what kind of world would it be if Jesus were the ruler of it? It would be the kind of world that Mary sings about when she hears that she will be the mother of Jesus. Who expects that her child would scatter the proud in their self-centeredness, remove the mighty from their seats of power, exalt the humble, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. Jesus preached about changing the relationship between the first and the last, making what was up and down to be side by side. This is the Jesus who was so joined to the hungry, the alien, the homeless, and the prisoner that what is done to them is done to him. And that to cause suffering in them is to cause God to suffer. In the realm of Christ, the injustices that we take for granted and as inevitable, are not. When Jesus teaches us to pray for the kingdom—the realm—of God to come, this is what he teaches.

And if this is Judgment Sunday, then we have to ask: how are we doing? Not how will we make out at the end of time or at the end of our own individual times, but how is the world doing right now? How are things going in regards to the bringing about the the realm of Christ? This passage—for all the inspiration it brings to our good hearts—this passage is a judgment. It is a critique. Here is the world as it might be, Jesus seems to be saying. And then asks, how is the world as it is now?

Imagine a world in which there was plenty of food, but some had none and others had much more than they could eat. Imagine a world in which there were medicines to heal people, but some people could not get them. Imagine a world in which people were put into prisons far away and then forgotten. Imagine a world in which aliens were despised. Imagine a world in which some people had too little clothing, in which some people had no shelter. It is, sadly, not hard to imagine. Just as you did not do it to these, you did not do it to me, taught Jesus. As you denied these, so you denied me, he taught.

Where in time is this story in Matthew? On the one hand, it is a story, a teaching, told by Jesus in his time. It is about some other time, in the future for the disciples, but no one knows how far. On the other hand, it is a story in the present of the disciples. It is about the time they are living right now. It tells them, through a story about the future, about how the world is judged now. And in that sense, it teaches them how the world should be in the present. Teaches us.

This is a parable, not a prophecy. It is designed to make us think about what is going on and our role in it. We are right to judge ourselves. Unlike the sheep and the goats in the story, who do not know what God expects of them, we do know. We have the benefit of hearing this story. We know better. As the sheep and goats were, we will not know who we are. But we will know what we do and do not do. When we judge ourselves, our world, we cannot claim to have been ignorant.

There are two sets of criteria given by the man who sits on the throne. In one, the righteous are commended for feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner. In the other, the cursed are condemned for doing nothing. It is hard, practically impossible, to always be good. It is harder, willfully impossible, to never be. We are commended for sometimes righting injustice. We are condemned for always refusing to.

This parable in Matthew is not about salvation. It is not, as some fear, about good works earning God’s respect. It is about sanctification—a churchy jargon word that means “being good, doing good.” Our faith, and the love of God unconditionally given, is supposed to guide us to living good lives. For followers of Jesus, his words and teachings and actions tell us how.

These words in Matthew chapter 25 are the last public teaching of Jesus. The first public teaching, starting in chapter 5, is the sermon on the mount. The sermon is as surprising as is the parable of Christ the King. Do not resist an evil-doer. Love your enemy. Give to everyone who begs from you.

The sermon on the mount and the parable of the king are like bookends, like the introduction and conclusion, of a treatise not only on the nature of Jesus. Not only on who Jesus is. But also instruction—surprising instruction—about who, as followers of Jesus, we are to be.

Re-forming the church

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28
Reformation Sunday

It is fitting that we welcome new members to Faith on this day, Reformation Sunday. For Reformation Day—which is tomorrow, always on Halloween—is a celebration of a particular event of history, theology, and community. We who sit here today inherit the legacy of that event, when the church asked itself: What is the church, anyway, and what should it be?

This is not a new question. But the urgency of finding an answer to that question comes and goes. It has only been recently become urgent again. We are in a strange and changing time now in many ways, and certainly so in the ways of being church. It is an echo of the Reformation 500 years ago, when something was happening—no one quite knew what—with society, with politics, with transportation and commerce and communication, even with the weather (the world was emerging from a centuries long cold spell).

When anyone comes to a church, they come to at least three places at once. An historical place, a theological place, and a community.

First, we come to a long spiritual history.

This is Faith Lutheran Church in Cambridge. We share this church with others in this moment, and also with others of the past (and of the future). This church—as you have heard me say perhaps too often—is you. There is no church you come to that exists without you. And yet, Faith today is continuous with Faith of the recent and long past. Others have shared this space. We hear their voices and see the work of their hands. We sit in the pews that some carved, and we imagine their prayers rising up through the same dark peaked ceiling.

This is a Lutheran church in America, started as an immigrant church. The church in the U.S. is separate from yet part of the worldwide assembly of Lutherans.

And Lutherans everywhere are part of the Protestant tradition that includes many other denominations. Lutherans like to think of themselves as the founders of Protestantism, and that is partly so, but there were many voices of protest besides those of Luther and his buddies. And Luther himself stood on the shoulders of other brave protestors before him.

Protestants are Christians. There are other Christian churches and people who follow Jesus Christ. We think of the Roman church, but Catholics and Protestants are not the only brothers and sisters in the Christian family. And the Christian family is part of the extended family of the people of the book, which includes our cousins Jews and Muslims.

And we come to a history of ongoing reformation.

We celebrate the Reformation today. We call it The Reformation, as if there were only one. But the history of the relationship between people and God is marked by reforms. Jeremiah, the prophet who spoke to us in the first reading, lived in a time of turmoil and doubt. Defeated, occupied, and exiled, the Israelites wondered how they should consider the covenant with God: God is their God, they are God’s people. Was that still true? Had God abandoned them? Was the deal still on? And if so, how could they continue to know God?

Through the prophet Jeremiah, God promises a new covenant. But what is new is not the law but the way the law is carried. A new form of remembering and teaching it. I will put the law within them, said God. It was the same guidance made by the same God, but conveyed in a new way.

The line of our spiritual heritage twists and turns through reformers from long before Jeremiah to long after Luther. And including in our case Jesus, who like all reformers did not consider himself to be radical (I come not to abolish the law, he said). The reform of the church is always a call to repent, meaning to turn back to the basics of our relationship with God. A call to restore the trust and love and joy that comes from knowing God and knowing that we are known by God.

In doing so, reformers seem radical because the current state of affairs has become hateful and unbearable. They cannot help saying so, which makes them unpopular with some who like things the way they are. But the reformers do not intend to condemn the world as it is (I’ve come, said Jesus, not to condemn the world but to save it). Rather, they try to restate what we all knew about God all along, but had lost the words and the ways to remind us.

Second, we come to a theology of grace.

Central to the teachings of Luther, and of the Apostle Paul, and of Jesus as we understand him, and of Jeremiah and the prophets, grace is the essence of the God we worship. The notion of grace permeates the entire Bible. I forgive their iniquity, says God in Jeremiah, and remember their sin no more. God forgives us no matter what. There is nothing we can do that God will not forgive us for.

Lutherans are especially adamant about this, but it is a matter of degree, not principle. Neither Paul nor Luther invented this idea, though they did proclaim it. God is a God of constant and unremitting forgiveness. There is nothing we can do to lose God’s love. The flip side of this is there is nothing we need to do to gain it. No special action, thought, belief, or attitude. We already have it. It is God’s to give, not ours to earn. A corollary is that God’s grace applies to all people, not just us.

Which is a good thing, because Luther reminded us that we are both saints and sinners at the same time. We are generous and sour, kind and selfish, compassionate and mean. What is in us is in others; what is in others is in us. We are disallowed, as Paul writes, to boast.

And, finally, we come to a community of others.

Unlike in other times, no one is culturally required to come to church. We are here in this church because, as we pray, we hope to both be nourished here and to nourish this church. The word for church comes from a word that means called out to assemble. We are called to be here, and we are called to come out of our houses and our jobs and our own private places to assemble with other people also called. We are religious as well as spiritual. We worship together humbly, support each other with intentional respect, companions on the same quest, discovering in each other similar doubts and hopes. We share worries and joys together.

We celebrate the Reformation not because it was something new. It was not. Reformation is a habit of the church. And not because it was unexpected. The forces that led to it had been building for over a century. And not because it was radical. Luther was a Roman Catholic monk who repeatedly defended the church while attacking the way it acted.

We celebrate the Reformation because it reaffirmed that nature of the church as a work in progress. Not one church perfect for all in all times, but an adaptive and vital church that constantly listens to and returns to God.

We come here to this place that is tied to a history of other people seeking to know God; sharing a pretty well developed theology of creation, grace, and God’s presence among us; and formed into a familiar community. That tells us perhaps what the church is, but it tells us little about what it will be.

Our church partners (the Presbyterians, for example), speak of the church as reformed and always reforming. That is both a recognition that the church is always forming itself anew (not only in the official Reformation) and that the church must continue—and will continue to—change. It is easy for us to drift into patterns that seem so comfortable that we think they must be godly. We can forget that God continues to work in the life of the world. We then need prophetic voices then to help us rediscover God.

On this Reformation Sunday we can celebrate that ours is no doubt a time of reformation. We are in a time of disturbance and uncertainty. What will the church be like in our lifetimes? God only knows. It will not be the same as it was or is today. By those who are called to assemble, and with God’s help and guidance, the church will be reformed.

Thanks be to God.

Possible Kingdom

Text: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
Other texts: Matthew 22:32-46

If there were a mission statement of this church, which there is not, we could do worse than borrow the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they ask about the law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. After all, this is the trunk on which hang all the branches of the law and prophets. It is a summary description of the way to a holy and good life, a way to which Jesus subscribed. In this summary, Jesus combines two essential passages and ideas in the Bible from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (which we heard today).

On the pledge cards that are in your bulletin today are three pictures. (They are supposed to represent worship, fellowship, and service.) One of them shows this room, called formally the nave, informally the sanctuary. But it shows it backward, so to speak. It is the way I, standing up here, usually see this space. It is also shows the threshold to this room. There is a doorway. It is bidirectional. We come in to worship together and we go out to serve the world through our daily lives and actions. It marks the two parts of our lives with God. Sanctuary, a place set apart, a place of rest and worship, a sacred place. And mission, our lives in the world, a place of action, mercy, and kindness, another kind of sacred place. Both are a part of a holy life, both subjects of the law about which Jesus speaks.

It is common, and unfortunately especially so by Lutherans, to portray the law as legalistic and nit-picky. But it is a mistake to do so. The laws—the commands and guidance given by God via Moses to the Israelites—are a means of grace. They seek, in the large, to order the universe. To maintain harmony within creation and between people. They are a way—as there are in all faiths—a way of right action. And a way of reminding us that the world was both created by God and that God is here with us in it. They teach us to be holy because, as it says, God is holy. Be holy, says God, because I am.

The law has two approaches to doing this. One approach is interested in purity. Keeping things separate, the enforcement of boundaries, the prevention of pollution, all of which seek to keep the channel clear. To keep us on message. But the other approach—and the subject of today’s reading in Leviticus—is the opposite. It is interested in breaking through or ignoring the boundaries because of the need to do what someone called the “messy, disruptive ethical obligations … to set wrongs right.” What it takes to take care of our neighbor, even if our neighbor is not one of us, is outside of our walls. Even if a stranger, an alien, even if our enemy. To be just and kind and merciful to others.

To love God with all your heart, soul, and mind is first of all to love God with all yourself. Not just your prayerful self, or your generous self, or your good-natured self. Not just your intellectual, clear-thinking or believing self. But with your angry self, your selfish self, your mixed up self. Not just with your self that desires to be good but the self that would rather not. You cannot therefore love God by feeling good about God. It is not about your feelings, which you cannot control, but about your actions, which you can. This commandment does not ask us to like God—although we may—but to be loyal to God. To do what God says, to listen for God, and to put God ahead of all the other things that call us.

The command to love our neighbor works the same way. It calls on us to love other people with the same impartiality as we love God. We are not perfect, but since we know our own motives and inner good will, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. To love our imperfect neighbors is to extend the same benefit to all others. Loving your neighbor as yourself means to put your neighbor ahead of all the other things that you might otherwise like to do in regard to your neighbor. This is unlike enlightened self-interest. It does not say that loving ourselves leads in the end to good things for our neighbors. It is the needs of the neighbor that call us first; whether it benefits us is not the main point of this commandment. This command puts the burden of care and justice on us, not on some other force or system or people.

It also does not ask either us or our neighbor to be good, or likable, or admirable. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan. We can like our neighbor, or be afraid of our neighbor, or be disgusted by our neighbor. It is all the same. Partly this is because we are all made in God’s image, even people we despise. Partly it is because we realize that we could be them and vice versa—love foreigners, the Bible says a few verses down in Leviticus, remembering that you yourselves were once foreigners in a strange land. But in the end it is because we belong to God. Love your neighbor, it says, I am the Lord. The two things are tied together.

Loving God and loving other people are not the same thing. The second command to love others, says Jesus, is like the first to love God, but not identical to it. Yet though one follows the other, they are not separate. The are alike and connected. You cannot love God without loving what God loves. Loving others reflects and is modeled on our love for God.

The reason why this all is part of the law, rather than just something nice to do, is that the purpose of the law—as lived and taught by Jesus—is to create the kingdom of God, the world as God intended it to be and we hope it to be. These commandments on which hang all the others seek to create a world in which all people might thrive. They are like the laws of physics—here is how things work. Or like a recipe—here is what to do to make things be the way you want.

We who gather here in worship, fellowship, and service in the name of Jesus—who come in to this sanctuary and go out from here in mission—we share the idea that such a world is possible, and that we have a hand in helping it come to be. Though we cannot follow these commandments always or easily, being not perfect, we acknowledge that they are the right ones to follow. That they lead to the world that we hope for.

So if we would like to have a mission statement, which we do not now have, we could make it this. So that the world may be as God’s kingdom and that all may thrive, to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds; and to love others as ourselves.

Talking to Caeasar

Text: Matthew 22:15-22

One of Martin Luther’s contributions to the discussion of the church and its role in our lives was the insistence that our faith be grounded in the Bible. Sola scriptura, as he put it in Latin. Scripture alone. Meaning that other guides to our faith were secondary, even if useful. When in doubt, turn to the book. He came to this rule of thumb through his own experiences, trying to figure out what he and what the church should do in a time of crisis for both.

It’s a good start. But as you know from your own experience, what scripture says is in detail not always clear. There are lots of reasons for this, good and bad. One of the not so good reasons is that people like to do the job backwards. That is, they know what they want to think and they find passages in scripture that support their own view. These passages are called “proof texts”—verses that prove our own personal points. This is not what Luther meant. But even if we are careful and open to listening to the Bible, we are hearing with modern ears words that were spoken at least 2000 years ago. They speak to us, but they were not spoken to us in particular. Therefore, we might mistake (or ignore) the context in which they were said or written. We do not live in the time of Jesus, for example, and we cannot assume that people who heard him heard as we do. They probably did not. The words do have meaning for us—the Bible has been a bestseller for a long time. But we need to think hard about how to apply what Jesus said to other people, and apply it instead to us and our time. And as Luther would advise us, we need to do that—as he did—in study, prayer, and hearts open to guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew has long been used a proof text. It has been used to call for or justify the idea—which by now is a modern dogma—of the separation of church and state. But this is not true to its original time, and it is not helpful to us in our current time.

When the Pharisees and the Herodians approached Jesus, Palestine was occupied by Rome. Rome, a foreign empire, had possession of the land and governance of Israel. Though leaving the culture pretty much intact, Rome had installed a vassal king, Herod, and extracted wealth from the land in the form of taxes paid in Roman currency. On the coins it read, Tiberius, divine son of Augustus. The Herodians supported Herod, and argued that the people should pay the taxes. They were the collaborators. The Pharisees argued that to do so violated Jewish law and that people should not pay. They were the resisters.

They came, it says, to entrap Jesus. People interpret this to mean that Jesus was put between a rock and a hard place—forced to commit either sedition or blasphemy, and therefore getting into big trouble. But that is not quite what the passage says. He is not being asked to choose between religion and politics but between two different camps who have adopted two different tactics in the face of foreign occupation. Jesus will not do this. He will not support one or the other.

But he also does not say that some things belong to Caesar and some things belong to God. He does not say we must balance the demands of church and state. The issue is not church or state—in the time of Jesus and for about 1500 years after that, there was no distinction between church and state—the issue was how to respond to the demands of a conquering power. In that sense, this passage does not apply to us at all. Our circumstances are not similar.

It would be a short sermon if that was all there was to it. But there is something in this story in Matthew that catches our thoughts. Jesus’ response—in the traditional version “render onto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”—has mystified and motivated people for a long time. We turn to this story for some guidance about how to behave as faithful people who live in a culture that does not share our faith or our understanding of God’s teachings. Whether that culture is the institution of the church—as it was for Luther—or the state or the secular society.

Until recently, modern Protestant mainline churches in the west—including Lutherans—have considered churches to be separate from but parallel to the secular world. Either withdrawn from or resigned to the goings on in the world. They argued among themselves about whether the church was within, against, or part of the culture. They made the church a place where people could take refuge from culture, think about things of the spirit, and hang around with other Christians. Though that is part of the story, it is not the whole story. (Lutherans sometimes turned to Luther’s notion of two kingdoms. But Luther never argued that the two worlds could be separated this way.)

In this view, when our faithful consciences disagree with the acts of the culture, we have to ponder which way we should turn. People have said about this passage that it is about maintaining dual allegiance to two realms, or that is is about living a balanced life in face of the demands of faith and the demands of the culture, or it is about the hardship in trying to do so.

But Jesus is not saying here that we have a difficult and annoying balancing act between two calls for our allegiance. We only have one allegiance: it is to God. Jesus is not saying “sometimes obey God but sometimes obey Caesar instead.”

Our hope is that someday the world will be the way God intended it to be. Your kingdom come, we pray, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is a prayer and a call for this world to be healed from sins and sorrows and to be saved from fear, violence, and greed. To be for all a good world in which to live.

Jesus teaches us in this passage that our job is to make the world of Caesar be the world of God. To live in the world according to our faith. I do not mean that Christians should convert everyone or to teach dogma in schools or to make Sunday the official sabbath. I mean that for those of us who profess to follow Christ, that his teachings be our guide in the whole of our lives. We who are Christians need to ask ourselves when we think about political action and policies not what would Jesus do, but ask instead: What did Jesus teach me to do.

The passage today in Matthew uses taxes as a way to focus on this question about what to do. So let us do the same. And let us start that by talking about food, which was, along with money, a favorite interest of Jesus.

On Friday, the Greater Boston Food Bank held a luncheon for its supporters and agencies—people like Faith Kitchen. Partly the event was to thank everyone for all they have done to feed people. And partly it was a way to remind everyone that there are a lot of hungry people in greater Boston.

In the past year, the Food Bank has fed over 400,000 hungry people. That represents about one out of every nine people in our neighborhoods. Most of those people go to bed at night not knowing where their next meal will come from. The Food Bank in the last year distributed 31 million pounds of food. Agencies like Faith Kitchen know that that is not enough; in the past few months the meals served here at Faith have been packed with people, many of them new to Faith Kitchen.

Even in our area, which has felt the effects of the financial downturn less than other parts of the country, one in nine people do not have enough to eat.

The Food Bank is truly great, but it does not live on donations alone. It relies heavily on a program called the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program. And money for that comes from the Commonwealth. That is, it comes from taxes. People who are hungry are fed through people’s taxes.

Unlike in the time of Jesus (and unlike in colonial times in this country), taxes are not a way of drawing wealth from one nation to another. Instead taxes are one of the many ways we act together for the common good. (Being law abiding, serving in programs like the military or Americorps, being civic boosters, are some other ways.) We all live together in one nation, and taxes are one of the things that help that work.

The people ask Jesus: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Jesus might have quoted the summary of the law: love God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. In our time, for many things, one way we enact our love for our neighbor is through paying taxes for the benefit of our neighbor. Contributing to the common good is a way we care for our neighbor.

How shall we as people of faith act also as people of a secular culture? Jesus tells us to render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Our call is not to flee from, or be resigned to, or give in to, Caesar. It is to call Caesar to account, to enlist the culture as a means to enact God’s will and hopes.

I’m not saying that you should love to pay taxes. Or hate them. But that you see them through the lens of your faith. I’m not telling you how to vote. Or what to think politically. What I am saying is this: for Christians, the decisions we make in the world must be considered in the light of our faith. That what we do in the world should reflect our faithful understanding. That when we think of the demands of Caesar, of the world, we think about them in terms of the commands of God.

Song for Living

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: Isaiah 25:6-9

A man walks down the street. He is pushing a shopping cart. In the cart are bags and empty bottles. The wheels of the cart go clink-clinks when they cross the seams of the sidewalk. The man’s feet hurt. He rests on the steps in someone’s doorway. People look down when they pass, wishing not to see him. Sometimes he sleeps behind a church. In the winter, his hands get cold.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

A child sits on the curb. He is humming a little tuneless song. The cars rush by in front of him. When the trucks go by with their rattles and groans, the boy’s hair gets blown. Otherwise it is as if he does not notice. In his hands is a disposable camera. He picks it up by the strap, then smashes it against the sidewalk. He smashes it again and again, until the camera opens and little plastic parts spill out. “It’s broken,” he tells his little sister, who is about four years old. Then he calls her a slut.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me beside still waters.

Inside, the man’s voice is gravelly with anger, the woman’s voice harsh with fear. They rise and fall like some modern harmony. There is a moment of quiet. There is a sound of doors slamming and silverware spilling. Something breaks. “We are not fighting,” he says, “this is a discussion.” She says, “get out, get out, get out.”

The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures.

A woman mourns her brother, and she wishes he were here with her now. She thinks: There was no reason for her brother to get so sick. Her brother was the healthy one. The smart one, too, and handsome. He would have been a rich man, everyone always said.

The Lord is my shepherd. He revives my soul.

The man sits by himself, watching. Time goes way too fast. Maybe it is a blessing. The life he thought was his to have never quite came. He wasn’t very lucky. And truth to tell, he did some stupid things. It’s hard. He’s not the person he thought he was. Not everything he has done has made him proud. People ask him how he’s doing. “No regrets,” he tells them.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me along right paths.

We are surrounded by enemies. But they are not the enemies we think. Not terrorists and robbers. Not people eager to harm us. Our lives are a mixture of good and bad, abundance and scarcity, joy and sadness. Things happen to us. We do things, We find that we are not the captains of our own ships.

The twenty-third psalm is about our deepest longing to be saved from sorrows. It is about our profound understanding that we are not made to live in sorrow. We know that we are creatures of sorrow, but we know that we are not made to be that way. There is dreariness and dread in our lives, but we know that God’s expectation for us is otherwise. We know that we walk down dark and scary valleys, but we know that we walk there neither alone nor desperate.

The twenty-third psalm makes us weep to hear it. It is not a sad song, but it reminds us of the sometimes sad songs of individual persons, men, women, and children. People we know and people we are. Songs we sing about us and about the people we love most dearly and the strangers—the mixed-up boy, the freezing man, the mourning sister—whom we see every day. It reminds us of the people we pray for, the things we ask of God. It’s not that we are creatures of sorrow. We are not. We are creatures of joy, beset by sorrows.

The psalm is not a sad song. We weep because it is a song that reminds us of what we wish to be, what might be, what we want most.

To be free from want. Not to have all we want, but to be free from the power of wanting.

To have enough to eat and drink, and which is pleasing and good, perfect as clear cold water.

To see beauty, and to live in, create, and preserve from harm places as beautiful as green pastures.

To have a light heart. To take pleasure in our existence and to make stupid jokes and dance and laugh out loud in inappropriate places. To forgive ourselves and others.

To have inner peace. To be free from apprehension, worry, and regret. To be revived when tired and restored when depleted. To live in trust. To be good.

And finally, to be guided by God’s hand. To be shown the way to these things. To be led along the right paths by God who both is way wiser that we and who forever loves us.

The psalm tells us that though surrounded by enemies, God prepares abundant life for us. Surrounded by enemies, we are served a feast that God lays out for us. The enemies—the things of sorrow—are still there. But we eat, and take pleasure, and laugh. God is with us. And for that, we weep in relief.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to the people of Israel in up until then their darkest hour. He reminds them of the promised life, the life created for them, a life that is possible, that is inevitable. God will wipe away the tears from all people, the prophet says. God will prepare for them a life of satisfying abundance.

A shroud—a veil, a blanket, a fog—a shroud covers them. The shroud is sorrow. They live in sorrow. But that is not their destiny, their nature as creatures of God. God will destroy, the prophet says, the shroud that is cast over all people. These verses move us. They are hard to believe, yet if they do move us, it is because we do believe them. We are drawn to them.

Christians are people of unsentimental hope. We know about the enemies, but we know about God, too. We have heard God’s promises, and in the valley God has walked with us the person of Jesus. God knows about sorrow. And God knows about abundant life. About vitality and beauty and renewal and refreshment and laughter. And God has made it clear which, between sorrow and life, God prefers for us.

In his baptism, Cormac today has been called by name into a community of people—all Christians all over the world, and the particular people here—who turn in hope and trust to the words in Swedish which ring this altar: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Freedom of Little

Text: Philippians 3:4b–14

There is a view of the world that elevates the spirit and despises the body. In this view, the spirit or soul or psyche is perfect and pure. The body is imperfect and corrupted. The spirit is good in essence, and the body is bad in essence. There is nothing good about physical creation. In this view, salvation is a process of leaving the dirty body behind and letting the clean soul ascend. The world is rubbish and salvation is an escape from it.

This idea comes from gnosticism, a philosophy common at the time of Jesus. Though gnosticism was condemned by the early church as a heresy, the notion continued and continues to run strong in people’s view of the moral universe. This view is not, however, something that Jesus subscribed to or taught. Jesus was a healer of bodies, and a lover of good food and wine and interesting company. Jesus was a person who did people sorts of things and, it seems, liked the things that people ordinarily did.

And it was not the view of Martin Luther, who also liked to eat and schmooze. Luther was an earthy person, passionate and a little vulgar.

The world was created good, it says in Genesis. And God loved the world, it says in the Gospel of John. Our bodies are created by God. God feeds and clothes us and the rest of God’s creatures. God is generous to creation, and God promises an abundant life in this world. The world is full of good stuff.

You might think, on hearing today’s readings from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, that Paul would disagree. He talks about rubbish and leaving all this behind. And elsewhere he seems to condemn what he calls the “flesh.” Paul does have an issue in this passage, but it is certainly not about how the world is sour and the soul sweet.

We cannot deny that things of this world—stuff—can be a problem. And by stuff, I mean both material stuff and intangible stuff. Stuff that we carry around with us. Stuff we store away. Stuff we fret about. All the things to which we are so attached. Some of that stuff is material. Material goods. And some not. On Paul’s list are things of success and birth. Status, class, ethnic origin, positions of authority and responsibility, titles, reputation. It’s things and things associated with things.

Stuff can burden us. We spend thought and energy getting it, worrying about it, maintaining it, cultivating it, storing it, and eventually discarding it. It can define us. Paul is the Pharisee, the Benjaminite, the zealous persecutor. We are known by the things we have and the accomplishments we’ve achieved. And it can lie about us, making it appear that what we have—or equally what we do not—is who we are. We are not what we have or do not have or what we have succeeded or failed at. Things steal us, they steal who we are.

I don’t want to be crabby about this, because Paul is not crabby about it. He is not talking about virtue. He is talking about freedom. The problem is not stuff itself. Some of which, after all, is essential. And much of which is good, giving us pleasure and graceful appreciation. Paul’s complaint is not with stuff itself, not with the things of the flesh themselves, but with their hold on us. Which comes from our hold on them, and on our inability and unwillingness to let them go, unable and unwilling to consider them as peripheral, rather than foundational to our lives.

When Paul speaks about regarding all he had as rubbish, he says more literally that he reckons all those things as being dreck. He is talking about how he accounts for this stuff, as an accountant might record assets in a book. It goes in the “this is not critical to me” column. What he has lost, as he says, is how important these things were to him. They used to be in the “totally important to me” column. But though they still may be good and sweet and fine and beautiful, they no longer determine how he sees himself or his life or his work. The are accounted as having very little to do with him.

This passage in Philippians is a story. A story of about Paul himself. It is a salvation story. Paul comes from a culture—a Pharisee, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew it says—that itself is defined by a salvation story. The story is the story of the Exodus, of a people freed from slavery. A people transformed from being slaves in Egypt to being partners with God and a light to the world. A people whose expectations were radically altered by God.

The story of Paul in this passage in Philippians, like the story of the Exodus, is the story of amazing grace. I once was lost but now I’m found. It is not that he repudiates the value—positive or negative—of what he had done before, or the pleasure he took in it, or even the sorrow he had over it. It is that he is now in a new story. Forgetting what lies behind, he says, and straining for what lies ahead. His motives are different, the way he sees the world is different, the climax of the story as he can imagine it is different.

The story is not over when Paul writes to the church at Philippi. He is in the middle of it, as he says. Transformations almost never come all at once. Even for Paul, who was struck blind on the road to Damascus and heard Christ’s voice—even that event was just the beginning of something new. He was changed by the help and guidance of others and by his own experiences after that sudden event. What is calling Paul forward now is different. No longer a closet full of tangible and intangible property, but the call of Jesus.

Paul does not demand the Philippians make the same change as he did. But he does invite them to. We don’t have to live our same old stories. They do not have to control us. It is possible to live in a new way, it is possible for the story to have a different ending than we thought.

Paul’s experience—the way he talks about it—is the experience of one who was held captive but now is released. By telling this story, he invites us to have the same experience. To change what we reckon is good, important, and compelling in our lives. To experience the freedom of a Christian. To be free.

Social Instructions

Text: Philippians 2:1–13
Other texts: Ezekiel 18:1–4, 25–2; Matthew 21:23–32

There are two brothers on the cover of today’s bulletin. You know from the Gospel reading that one is the good brother and one is the bad brother. You can tell who is the good brother. He is the industrious one carrying the shovel. The bad brother is sneaking out to the left of the page to escape. Or maybe I have it backwards. Maybe it is the other way around. The bad brother is all dressed up like he is going to work in the vineyard as his father asked him to, but as soon as he gets out of view he will put the shovel down and sit under a tree. Or just hold on to the handle, looking good, while he chats with his buddies. The good brother does not care how he is dressed. He does not put on airs; he just goes to work. I guess there is no way to know, really, who is good and who is not.

Lutherans are fond of saying the we are both saints [not the canonized kind] and sinners at the same time. This is not because humans are wishy-washy. Being complicated in this way is the nature of humans. Sometimes we do good, sometimes not. Hooray when we do, too bad when we do not. Sometimes good comes because of what we do, sometimes in spite of it. And bad things in a similar way.

But even if we are both saints and sinners, and even though the good that comes sometimes seems to come from God’s hand and not ours—all that does not mean that being saintly or sinful are the same thing. They are not equal. Of the two, being a saint is better.

In Ezekiel—the first reading today—the people quote a proverb (not an official proverb, not from the Book of Proverbs, just a saying). The proverb says that the parents’ sins (the sour grapes) are visited on the children (setting their teeth on edge). God says through the prophet that God does not want to hear this kind of talk anymore. It is true that we feel the effects of the actions taken by our parents and their parents and so forth. And it is also true that what we do will affect our children and grandchildren. But it is not true, according to this passage, that we are victims of a kind of historical reductionism: that our past determines our present, or that our present determines the future. That we are just bits of life carried downstream by the flow of events. Instead, what we do matters. For better or worse, it makes a difference what we do. Better, once again, to be a saint.

This is not to say that the past does not matter. It might seem that the prophet is describing a kind of death-bed conversion here. When the righteous turn away from righteousness, they die. And when the wicked turn away from wickedness, they live. Repenting—which means to turn—does change things. But it does not wipe out either the effects or the memories of past actions. It does change the present. A life of evil is not rendered good by a change of heart, but the change of heart does make things better. In the present. That is, this is not about judging someone’s moral net worth. It is about what kind of person he or she wants to be, or is, at the moment. It is a better life, a fuller life, to be righteous. It is a worse life, a deadly kind of way of living, to be evil. Changing what you believe and changing what you do changes who you are. Being good is good for you and the world. Be a saint. Everyone will benefit.

If we have a change of heart, what should our new heart be? Presumably, we would like saintly hearts. If so, the Apostle Paul, who is never shy about giving us his opinion, tells us exactly what we must do. Here is his list: 1. Do nothing from selfish ambition and conceit. 2. Regard others as better than yourselves. 3. Look first to the interests of others rather than your own, and 4. Be of the same mind as Jesus. In summary. be humble. Have a humble heart.

It is hard to imagine in the world, with all the striving and grabbing and proclaiming going on, that being humble is high on most people’s list of goals. Rather, being ambitious and self-interested—enlightened or not—is. Being so is our culture’s creed. The path of humility is not one most of us wish to take. We do not value humility, at least in ourselves.

But we are followers of Jesus. Paul reminds us of that and connects what we do to what Jesus did. He quotes a very old hymn about Jesus. Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself. That is not to say that Jesus was timid or diffident. He was passionate, energetic and courageous. It seems like God is hoping for in us, as followers of Jesus, a combination of energy and humility.

When the hymn talks of Jesus’ emptying himself, it possible to hear that as: Jesus strives mightily against his godly nature, but remains true to his human one. But God is a person who, in our experience, does things for us, with us in mind. God does not prefer to strut around saying how great God is. God creates the good world and feeds us in good season. God so loved the world that God came as Jesus. The God of the Bible is overwhelmingly a generous God. Jesus, the human embodiment of the nature of God, is naturally inclined to empty himself, rather than, as Paul says, to exploit his position.

Number four on Paul’s list—be of the same mind as Jesus—could be translated one of two ways. It could mean: have the same mind as Jesus. That is, be like Jesus is. Or, it could mean: let the same mind be in you that you have in Jesus. That is, you are already as Jesus is; go with it. Let the Jesus-mind that is in you be the boss of you. Then being a saint is not a struggle against your nature, but an embracing of your nature. A letting go of some other stuff in you that is keeping you from the energetic humility of Jesus.

Our joy is complete in others, as Paul says. We are in this together, and we know in our hearts that that is true. It hurts to see others suffer. It lessens us, makes us individually incomplete. That is because of the Jesus-nature in us, the image of God in which we are made. We become complete when we are overcome by others’ needs, pain, hope, and desire.

The problem with the two brothers in the parable is not that one worked and the other did not. And the problem is not that they did not do what they said they would. The one brother worked when he said he would not, and the parable clearly favors him. The problem was that other brother was chattering away, making claims that he had no intention of fulfilling. Getting admiration for saying the right thing, but not intending to do it. He was posturing.

He is like those who talk about compassion, but are mean spirited. Who talk courage but who have no nerve. Talk generosity but are miserly. Talk concerned but can’t be bothered. [It seems we are hearing a lot of talk like that these days.]

If you are trying to empty yourself, you can not at the same time be full of yourself. You can not be humble if the thing you are most concerned about is yourself. You cannot hear the voices of others calling to you if you delight so in the sound of your own voice.

When we prosper while others are suffering, we are not prospering. We are not joyful. We are not complete. We are not the Christ in us.

The priests ask Jesus about his authority. As Christians, we claim that Christ is authoritative. David Brooke wrote the other day that a competitive society like ours “requires a set of social instructions that restrain naked self-interest and shortsighted greed.” If we take Jesus as our authority, then we have those instructions.

Be humble. Look not to your own interests. Do nothing from selfish ambition. Regard others as better than you. Be overcome by the call of others. Listen to God and God’s children. For as Paul writes, it is God who is at work in you.

Angry Men

Text: Jonah 3:10–4:11 and Matthew 20:1–16

It is not hard to think that the dark force of anger has taken over the heart of the world, driving out compassion as thoroughly as it did from the heart of Jonah.

As often, the first reading and the Gospel reading are related. Today they are stories of angry people. Angry for different reasons. Angry at God, at other people, at God’s mercy for those other people. In one story, the story of Jonah, the angry person is a prophet and he talks to God. In the other story, the parable of the workers in the field, the angry people talk to a property owner, whom some think stands for God. Each story ends with a question from God.

Jonah was a reluctant prophet, as most prophets are in the Bible. God called him for a mission. The mission was to warn the people of Nineveh that God was planning to destroy the city and the people in it. That’s because Nineveh was evidently a pretty rotten place, brutal and wicked. But Jonah tried to run away from God. He sailed off, but soon was swallowed up by a big fish (which we all think of as a whale). After three days of this, the whale vomited him up (Jonah evidently disagreed with the whale), and Jonah went to Nineveh, where he told everyone that they had forty days to clean up their act, or else.

Which they did. They believed Jonah. They took off their everyday outfits and put on sackcloth, they fasted, and they prayed. They “gave up their evil ways and their violence,” the story says, and said to one another, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” They did these things, and God did relent. God changed God’s mind. Which brings the story up to the passage for today.

You might think Jonah would be thrilled at his success. His preaching saved 120,000 people (and many animals) from suffering and death. But he was not pleased. He was displeased, it says, and he became angry. The word means he burned hot with anger. “I knew it!” he says to God. “Didn’t I say so when you first tagged me for prophecy.” I knew four things about you: 1. you, God, were a person of grace and mercy, 2. you were slow to anger, 3. you were steadfast and patient in your love, and 4. you were eager to not punish people.

Basically, God was as unlike Jonah as you could get. God was slow to anger, and Jonah was quick to anger. God favored mercy, and Jonah favored vengeance. Jonah was committed to punishment and God was committed to finding ways not to punish. Jonah thinks God is just wrong about all this. He knew what God was like—merciful and all that—and he didn’t like it.

Jonah felt that a rule was a rule. If you are brutal and wicked, you have to pay. A last minute apology should not get you off the hook. Repentance should not get you off the hook. Nothing should get you off the hook, including divine compassion. You do a bad thing, you get punished. That is only fitting and fair. (Jonah does not point out that God let him, Jonah, off the hook when he fled and ended up in the whale’s belly.) The text does not say anything about how we all do bad things once in a while, though that would be a good question to ask Jonah.

What God does ask Jonah is: “Jonah, should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” That is the question. “Should I not have compassion for Nineveh?” God does not deny that Nineveh was bad. God does not deny that maybe they deserved to be punished. God does not deny that they violated the rules, the law, the orderly operation of things. What God says is that, in spite of all that, God prefers not to punish. God has a preference for compassion. Is it good for you to be so angry, Jonah? God asks. Should I not be concerned about Nineveh? God asks. And with that question the story and the book of Jonah ends.

A rich man, a landowner, hires some day laborers to work in his vineyard. This story in Matthew is a parable, usually interpreted as a allegory. The landowner hires five groups of people over the course of the day. He agrees on a wage for the first group, but is a little vague about what he’ll pay the others. At the end of the day, when they line up to get what is owed them, the landowner pays all workers the same amount. The ones who worked all day get the same as the ones who worked just an hour.

The ones hired first were angry at the rich man. Presumably they wished he had paid them more—unlikely as they had already made the deal—or paid the others less. But all the workers were poor. They all needed work. None of them was getting paid much. They were all in the same boat. One reason the people are angry is that they are powerless and the rich man is powerful.

But the other reason, the reason they state, is that the landowner has made them—the last hired—equal to us—the first hired. He has not made the last first, but has made the first and the last be the same. They is no distinction between them in his eyes. He treats them equally poorly or well.

Jesus is not trying to tell us, I suspect, that God is arbitrary and high-handed. But that, like the landowner, God has a preference for grace. “Are you envious,” the man asks, because I am good?” And with that question, the parable ends.

Rules—about crime and punishment, about fair pay for work, about agreements—serve people because they try to make things orderly and predictable. Not everything need be negotiated from scratch, some things go without saying, people do not need to be super vigilant about every moment and action. There is a structure to the world in which people move. Jonah’s complaint and the workers’ complaint amount to arguments for good order. They do not like it when God relents (they would say reneges) or is unfairly (as they think) generous.

It is not that order is not good to God. It is that order is not primary. For God, compassion and generosity are. Unconditional grace, as modern Christians would say, is the primary mode of God. Both these stories are examples. Equality and fairness sometimes (even often) align with compassion. But when they do not, compassion prevails.

We are called in our lives of faith to change. God calls us to change, to be different than we are or might be. We are faithful not only to praise God and not only to know God, though those are both fundamental and important. But we look to God to form us to be better, to do good, to change the world if we can for the better. We look to the actions of faith—worship and study and prayer and sacrament—partly to be able to listen to God telling us how. If we believe God to be merciful, slow to anger, persistent and patient in loving, and eager to find reasons not to punish people, then we can lean on that belief to shape our lives and our actions to be the same.

Some people are angry, as Jonah was, that people do not get what they deserve. And they are angry, as the workers were, that people don’t deserve what they get.

We are called to not let anger drive out compassion from the heart of the world. In our angry world, we are called to be voices for compassion instead. In our angry world, we are called to be voices for generosity. God asks: should I not be concerned for Nineveh? Should not God be concerned for all people? And if God is, then are we not also called to be?

Speaking in Concert

Text: Matthew 18:15–20

How does it make you feel to know that if you and someone else agree about anything you ask, God will do it? How does it make you feel to know that if two other people agree, they get the same deal?

Does it console you, knowing that God responds to the prayers of people? Or are you dubious, wondering how well this actually works in practice? Are you amused, thinking that the chance of any two people agreeing on anything substantial is very small? Or are you terrified, knowing the harm that can be done—that has been done, is being done—when humans are given power.

This passage seems to grant us a great power. The power to confer. The power of agreement. And the power to enlist God in our own endeavors. Yet it seems unlikely that Jesus would give us carte blanche, a blank check, to get whatever we ask for, as long as two of us agree. Not only unlikely, but in violation of our understanding of scripture and of human experience.

The story in Matthew starts with two brothers. Our Bible translates this as “another member of the church,” but that is because it wants us to realize that is not just brothers who sin against one another. Sisters do, too. But brothers and sisters are different than church members; they are more closely connected and intimate. This reading is about more than just what to do about a difficult fellow parishioner.

Brothers fight. Siblings fight. People fight with one another. So here’s what Jesus says to do first: talk to each other. Just the two of you. Alone. Sometimes that works. If so, good for you both. But sometimes people don’t listen to one another. Note that the goal here is not agreement but communication. Being attentive to one another. Listening to complaints and fears and hopes. But if he didn’t hear you, it says, bring along some buddies. And finally if he doesn’t listen to them either, then you can bring in the church. And if that does not work … well, we’ll talk about that in a minute.

There is a widening circle of involvement here. From just the two of you at first to the whole community. Fights rarely affect only the two combatants. When parents battle, children suffer. When nations battle, the populace suffers. Violence and anger are corrosive and cancerous conditions that often touch others besides ourselves. Not always, so the first remedy is the least aggressive. But if it is not enough, in the end the community has an obligation to become engaged.

But no matter what, the goal of the process in the passage is not punishment but reconciliation. It is not even redemption—we are not talking here about making people better—but the restoration of relationships. We hope not to shame each other, to embarrass or chastise each other. Not to make people feel bad about what they have done. But instead to bring people back who are lost. Or who we feel have sinned against us. To allow people back who have been cut off, ignored, or condemned, or ridiculed.

This passage in Matthew is sandwiched between the parable of the lost sheep (that’s the story illustrated above the altar) and a story in which Jesus tells Peter that Peter must forgive others 77 times, which means forever (we’ll talk much more about that next week). These are stories of reconciliation. People are lost and then recovered. And not necessarily easily, but through persistence and dedication to the principal of forgiveness. About which Jesus had a lot to say.

Near the end of this passage, after you and your associates and your church have all confronted your brother or sister, when all else has failed to open his or her ears, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Before we think this means that we are being instructed to write this person off, we need to remember that Jesus loved people like that. Earlier in Matthew he is called a friend of sinners and tax collectors. And it is true. He hung around with them and shared meals with them.

With Jesus, there is no end to reconciliation. We work at it until it works. There is no giving up in disgust or dismay. If we have to stay there all night. Or all our lives.

We are not so great at living beyond the fight. We know how to celebrate victory, but we are horrible at living in peace, existing with our neighbors who once were our enemies, and just staying with that. We are not good at what Jesus tried to teach us, which is how to forgive so that we can live beyond the sin against us. Listen to your brother who has sinned against you. And in the end, if that does not work, treat that one as a sinner and a tax collector. Someone you live with.

Jesus tells us that if two agree about anything, God will do it. In the next verse, he tells us that if two (or maybe three) are gathered, Jesus will be there with them. These two verses are not describing two different things. They are parts of the same requirement. If we are gathered and Jesus is there, then we will ask what God can in good conscience do.

The word “agree” in this passage is the basis for the word “symphony.” To agree means to speak together. The power to forgive does not depend on our ability to speak the same words in the same voice. It requires that we speak in concert, led by Christ.

The power of agreement is not a general power. We are not being given the words to some magic incantation. The power is specific. It is the power to forgive (which Matthew in our Bible calls loosing and binding).

It is the power to forgive what is difficult to forgive. It is a power given to us by Jesus to hang in there and forgive what otherwise might be impossible. When we are gathered together, and imagine Jesus standing there with us—can we ever say “OK, I’ve had it. I’ve tried my best. But enough is enough. I am out of here. See you in court. Or on the battle field.” Can we ask God for victory if we do what Jesus does not?

Or can we instead ask God for the power to do what Jesus asks us to do: to persist in forgiveness, and live in peace?

The Man Who Would Not Be King

Text:, Matthew 16:21-28
Other texts: Exodus 3:1-5

Last week we heard Peter name Jesus as the Messiah. “Bless you,” Jesus said to Peter after Peter proclaimed this. Jesus told him that his insight was God-sent. Jesus names him Rocky (from Simon) and tells him that the church of Christ will be built on his stoney shoulders.

What a difference a week makes. Or in the timeline of the story, what a difference a moment makes. For when Jesus gets down to details of what being the Messiah might mean, Peter rebukes him. Jesus talks about the days ahead filled with suffering and fear-driven violence. But Peter cannot stand it. “God forbid it,” he says to Jesus, meaning “I, Peter, wish I could forbid it.” This is not what Peter hoped for for his friend and not what anyone hoped for in a Messiah.

Jesus is tempted lots throughout his short life. First, in the desert, where in some versions of the Gospel the devil offers him food, safety, and power. And at the end of his life, on the cross, where he is tempted to do something—flee, perform a miracle, who knows—to save himself, to escape his coming execution. And here with Peter, to abandon his mission, which anyone can see will lead to a bad end for him. In all these cases, the underlying temptation is the same: to live an ordinary life, in peace, with good friends and daily bread.

But that is not his job. He has come to heal the world, and no matter what you think that means, it entails struggle and grief.

But there is a second temptation for Jesus. And that is the temptation to be the warrior that many of his followers hope for. The Messiah not in the way Jesus describes it here, but the king that the crowds wish him to be. Someone who will conquer the land for Israel and defeat the oppressors and occupiers. A king like great King David, who once ruled Israel. Someone who knows how to fight and to win. Not go quietly to the cross.

In Exodus, God comes to the world to be a savior. God calls to Moses because God sees that the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are enslaved and oppressed. I have observed the misery of my people, God says. I know their suffering, and I have come to free them from slavery in Egypt. This is a story of promise, since God promises not only to free the people but to bring them to a fertile and good land, a land of milk and honey. The story for Israel promises a happy ending.

But there is a story on the other side, which is the story of the people who lived in the land before the Israelites invaded it. Given to Israel, it is taken from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Other people. It is hard to know in real life whether the story really turns out well in the end, for much of the rest of the Bible is the story of battles won and lost, people exiled and returned, cities destroyed and rebuilt. It is still today a violent and open-ended story.

The temptation to turn salvation (which means healing) and redemption into warring, and to turn God, including in the form of Jesus, into a warrior, finds its source not in the divine being but in our own hearts. We want a victory over enemies, freedom from oppressors, bountiful lands. We want to think that God is on our side and no other side. We want our salvation at whatever cost, not wondering whether God works that way at all. We wish to enlist God in our battles.

For some, this is the point of God. The emperor Constantine, who in the fourth century allowed Christians to worship freely and to gather publicly, had a change of heart—or so the story goes—when he won a battle led by banners showing the cross of Christ. For some, the light of Israel to the gentiles was not the example of a compassionate and obedient community, but the rise of a nation in an otherwise occupied land.

At the end of this story in Exodus, Moses asks for God’s name. And God gives Moses two different names. God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” God said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” But then there is another name, given in an identical protocol: God said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’”b This is my name forever, says God. But which name?

This second name is the name of a God of a particular people, the people of the tribe of Abraham and his descendants. But the other name, the first name, is the God of creation, creator of the universe and all that is in it.

In Christ, the savior refuses to be king, becoming instead a victim, true to his teaching, and showing us thereby a different way for the world to be. No wonder Peter says, “God forbid it.” But God backs this plan of Jesus. Jesus rejects our temptations. “Get behind me,” he says to Satan. The longing for a warrior king God is human thing, not a divine thing. We are wise not to be tempted to ask our God of creation to be a destroyer of enemies. And not to think that the destruction of enemies is the work of our own healing God.

The Way of Blessing

Text: Psalm 67

We have been reading Genesis after coffee hour. This is the fifth or sixth book of the Bible that we are reading straight through, guided only by our curiosity and the Holy Spirit. We started with Job, and have since read a mix of Old and New Testament books.

But we have come to Genesis to start at the beginning of things, thinking that not only would we get the foundation stories of our faith, we would get some of the fundamental theology, too. And so it has turned out to be.

Genesis starts with two different stories about the beginning of the world. You are probably familiar with both. The first is the creation of the world in seven days including one day of rest. Let there be light. After each day, God sees that what was there was good. And at the end, God sees that everything God had made was very good. Things are good, very good. The word means perfect, or just right, just as things should be. And that’s how the story ends. God sees all creation as very good.

The second story is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. This is a very different story from the first. It is less cosmic, more local, for one thing. And the events are different and in different order, for another. And in this story, things are not so good. The story is full of procedures and rules. And full of judgment. The first couple are disobedient. And as a result, they lose their garden, and are exiled from it. And that’s how that story ends. Not very good.

These two stories represent two ways to think about the nature of humanity and about God’s relationship with us. These two ways are in tension throughout the Bible, and in our own thoughts and conversations about how things are, how they got that way, and what the future holds.

In one way, people are intrinsically not so good. They do bad things, and the way to make the world work is to keep them in check. I’m going to call this the way of troubles. There is a lot of this in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the other way, people are intrinsically good. They do bad things because they are fearful or cowardly—things get in the way of being good. The way to make the world better is to help them overcome their fears. I’m going to call this the way of blessing. And there is a lot of this in both Testaments, too.

How you think about people affects how you think about God. Is God mostly someone who keeps us all on the straight and narrow through rules and punishments? Or is God mostly someone who helps us to do the right thing by freeing us from our timidity? I do want to point out that in both views, God acts out of love for us and does not abandon us. Someone once called these two ways of God’s acting as God’s saving activity and God’s blessing activity.

The psalm today, Psalm 67, is all about God’s blessing activity. It does not equivocate. It is about God’s blessings, God’s goodness. It starts out first asking for God’s blessing. Then in the middle it gives thanks for God’s blessings so far. And finally at the end it asks that God’s blessing please continue on in the future.

The psalm is strikingly satisfactory. It feels good to read and hear this psalm. It has an atmosphere of rest and confidence. Something that reformer John Calvin called repose. There is a sense here of being so completely blessed by God that we are as we are meant to be, complete in ourselves and married to God our creator.

It seems that there are no enemies here. That is not quite true, but the enemies are off stage, so to speak. In the wings. It is not that the psalm is naive about the ways of the world. It does not deny sorrow and oppression and violence. They have and no doubt will again have their time, but that time is not now.

This psalm is a little treatise on blessing. It tells us four things about the way of blessing.

First, we agree that there are some good things in the world. Perhaps you think this should go without saying, but no one sees good things all the time and some people never do. In times of deep despair and loss, it is hard to see any good. “The earth yields its increase,” says the psalm, but sometimes it feels, or it is, that earth is barren and there is no harvest. To see blessings is to first see good.

Second, we acknowledge that God is the source of all good things. “God, our God, has blessed us,” says the psalm. A blessing is not just something good, it is a gift from God. If you think that the person responsible for the good in your life is you, then good for you, but it is not a blessing. Blessings reveal God, or perhaps blessings are a way for God to reveal God’s self. Blessings are pure grace, unearned, undeserved and often unexpected.

Third, that God blesses us makes a difference to other people. Our mission as a worshipping community is to be a light to others so that they also might see and know God as we do. Others see the blessings we have received, the psalm says, and are glad and sing for joy. “May God bless us,” it says, “so that your way may be known upon earth.” Blessings reveal the nature of a gracious God.

And fourth, blessings move us to be grateful. “Let the people praise you” is the psalm’s refrain. Gratitude for our blessings is not a requirement but a response. It is a benefit. Gratitude itself is a blessing. It is better to wake up feeling grateful rather than sour. Better to go to bed feeling grateful rather than disappointed. God’s blessing gives us a target for our gratitude. As in the psalm, in the same breath we ask for and are thankful for God’s blessings.

We’ve been talking about blessings as if they were things. But they are not things. They are embodied in things: a good harvest, as in the psalm; good friends, music, prosperity, lively energy, contentment. But to see those things as gifts from God, to see them as blessings, to be thankful for them, is more like a lens through which we see the world. Or a framework that organizes our thoughts about the world and what happens to us in it. To see things as blessings is to see in a particular way. When we hear the psalm, it appeals to us because we can admire the writer of it for the clarity and enthusiasm through which he or she views the world.

At one point, in our long-distant past, when the people of God were trying to decide whether to be people of God after all, Moses stood before them and asked them to choose between two ways of being: I put before you blessings and curses, Moses said. The psalm describes a way of living that is available to us, has been offered to us. A way of seeing. A way of blessing.

May God bless us. Our God has blessed us. May God continue to bless us.

Little Steps for Little Feet

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

There are three versions of this story in the Bible, the other two are in John and Mark. But what makes this one special is that most of the action is centered around Peter, who does not even appear in the others. Peter, a man who in all the Gospels is a stand-in for us as we try to figure out how to live a life of faith.

Many people see this passage as a story of a man who starts out in faith but ends up in doubt. They see the faith that Jesus commends Peter for enabling him to step out of the boat into the troubled sea. The implication is that with just a little faith in Jesus we can, with his help, do miraculous things. That may be so, but that is not how this particular story goes.

The disciples are alone on a troubled sea at night. Water, even though the source of livelihood for the people in the area, can be deadly. Just as it is for modern day fishers and other workers on the sea. The waves are tormenting the boat. Surely the disciples must be tired, and it is likely they are frightened, too. That’s even before they see an apparition—not a ghost like a long-dead soul, but a shadowy and ominous presence. And it is walking on the sea, which is pretty weird. But hooray! It is Jesus. “It’s me” he says. Don’t be afraid. It is hard to tell whether that worked for most of the disciples, who we imagine to be cowering in the back of the boat.

But Peter is being Peter, a man who is without fear, because he is so clueless. Not much fazes Peter. Does he first look back on his huddled colleagues? But then he turns to the ghost who claims to be Jesus and says, “if you are Jesus, ask me, Peter, to walk over to you on the water.” What a strange request. Any other test would have been safer. Some authentication password or security questions. “Tell me your mother’s birthday.” Or “Who is Martha’s sister?” Or just ask him to come a little closer. But Peter asks Jesus to ask Peter to step onto the sea. So Jesus does. “Come,” says Jesus. Come Peter, here to me. Come walk to me as I am walking to you.

Peter is in a pickle. He has painted himself into a corner. Do the other disciples tease him now? Nice going, Peter. You are in deep trouble now. Good luck with that walking on water thing.

There is a moment of faith in this story. But this is not quite that moment. Peter steps from the boat. This moment is perhaps a moment of regret at his foolishness. His big mouth getting him into trouble as usual. Or a moment of bravado. He steps from the boat. Thinking, I’m convinced, that he is about to take a cold bath.

But he does not. Imagine Peter, looking down at his feet, standing on top of the swirling waves below him. It is a shocker. This is the moment of faith. When Peter does not sink. When he realizes that he will not sink, when he knows that Jesus is in control of the dreaded sea, that this person ahead of him is Jesus.

Peter walks up to Jesus—how many steps did it take? how long did it take? Long enough for the moment to fade, as faith sometimes does. Fear overcomes Peter, the enormity of what he has done, the violence of the world around him, even with Jesus by his side. He begins to sink, cries out to Jesus, and takes his saving hand.

Ah, Peter, says Jesus. You of little faith, our Bible puts it. But there is no condemnation here. The word Jesus uses could mean that Peter has a little quantity of faith. Or it could mean that he had a short moment of faith, which seems to me to be more true to the circumstances. Jesus is not berating Peter for having too little of some magic substance. It is just as likely that he is praising Peter for having enough faith, even if it only lasted for a minute or two. Good for you, Peter, I hear Jesus saying. Even though you were scared, you did it. Here now, take my hand and we’ll go back to the boat together.

Faith is not so much something you have. But something that happens to you, or that is a part of you, or that colors the way the world looks to you. It is not a thing as much as a way of understanding things. Not a substance, but an action on the part of God.

Faith sometimes comes to us—that is, happens to us—in a powerful blasting moment. An instant transformation that makes our lives different forever. In this moment we lose an old way of being and come upon a new way. So such moments are scary and exhilarating, for they mean a loss of the familiar and the discovery of the unforeseen.

And sometimes faith happens to us in secret. Hidden from us. And one day, we find, like Peter, that we have been acting in faith, trusting in God, and listening to hear God’s voice as we plan our futures and understand our present.

But more often, faith grows in us, like affection or love for another. It is like trust, which as you know is another meaning of the same word. It takes a long time to develop, and the path is often a rocky one, as it is in any ongoing relationship. There are good times and tough times. It develops, rather than progresses. It is less like a wedding and more like a marriage.

When Jesus calls Peter, he does not call Peter to be faithful. He does not ask Peter to feel some way, or even to believe some thing. This is not a call to conviction or devotion, but a call to obedience. He asks that Peter obey him. To do something. It does not matter whether Peter believes Jesus or not, only that he does what Jesus asks him to do.

God calls us, even when we do not know that it is God calling, and we respond even when we do not know to what we are responding. For some reason, we take that step off the boat. The water supports us as it never did before. We are surprised. Maybe later, like Peter, we become confused (Jesus says to Peter: why did you become of two minds). Life becomes more ordinary. We sail on, as the disciples, Peter, and Jesus did.

This is not the end of the story for Peter, but one episode in an ongoing saga, with high and low points yet to come.

A life of faith is full of small steps. Actions—occasionally big, usually little—that sometimes lead to unexpected results. Doing what Peter does—that is: Listening to what Jesus says. Taking him seriously. Trying to respond. Seeing what happens when we do.