Are You Taking to Me?

Text: Genesis 11:1-9
Other texts: Acts 2:1-21

It appears that many people like to talk about God. What God has done for them and the world. About their relationship and history with God. On the whole, that seems like a positive thing. If God is good and good for you, then telling other folks can be inspiring and helpful to them. Even life-giving. The Bible is the story of God. It tells God’s story to anyone who wishes to find out about it.

The Bible tells us that among other things, God intends us to tell people about God. God tells Israel to be a light to the nations. Jesus tells the disciples to go out and proclaim the good news and baptize people.

But the two commands are not the same thing. And the difference between the two is a conflict—let’s be polite and call it a tension—that runs through the Bible and people’s practices of faith.

The “light to the nations” camp thinks that the best way to tell people about God is to act good. If we act according to our faith and in alignment with God’s wishes, people will see how that makes our lives and the world better. They will wish to get what we have. They will see that what motivates us is God. And they will then want to know—and to know about—God, too. You might call this the “health club” theory of evangelism. You work out. Your friends all notice how buff you are, and how energetic and happy you seem. They ask why. You tell them you owe it all the your great health club. They rush to join the club, too.

The “go and baptize” camp thinks the best way to tell people about God is to talk good. To tell the story to all who will listen. If we tell the story of the Bible and what it promises, people will see the truth in that and respond. What we say will strike a chord in them, and they will want to be part of the story. This is like the health club doing some advertising, plus the surgeon general telling everyone that if they don’t get 30 minutes of rigorous exercise every day, their life will be short and unhappy. Your friends take note. They rush to join the club, too.

The difference between these camps is like the difference between listening and speaking, which I’ll talk more about in a minute. It also is related to another issue in the Bible: is God for us or for everybody? If for us, who is “us” and can other people become “us” at all? And if so, how? The question is central to the book of Acts, which is the story of the beginning of the church. (Some call the events of Pentecost the birthday of the church.) The early followers of Jesus debated whether people who were not Jews could become Christian. Or did they have to convert to Judaism first? Become us? Did the men have to be circumcised? Did the people have to follow the laws given at Sinai? All of them? Some of them? None at all? Was Jesus even here for the gentiles? He came, he said, to fulfill the law and the promise. Were the gentiles excluded by definition, or by indifference?

If Jesus came for everybody, what does that mean about the boundary between Christians and non-Christians? Maybe “all” means all who become Christian, but not those who do not. That has been the consensus interpretation throughout much of Christianity. Conversion first, then salvation. Not the other way around. But it does make the theology of grace, by which God loves us not on account of something we do, a little more complicated. Can you have grace for some, but not others?

If people who are not Christian become Christian, that will possibly change Christianity. Is that OK? One example: right now in our times the most energetic growth in Christianity is in Africa. The new African churches are bringing something new to Christian faith. Some people think this is great, and some think it is horrible. Another example: some of our sister Lutheran denominations are unhappy at the way the ELCA is fraternizing with other denominations. They feel that such goings-on pollutes pure Lutheranism. Does diversity joined make a better product or a weaker one?

The question is: how does God work? Does God make new things by combining lots of other things? This is the way evolution goes. Diverse organisms combine to yield surprising, and sometimes more sturdy, ones. Sometimes diverse organisms just live together in symbiotic harmony, creating a more sturdy society. Lichen is a common example. Also some kinds of jelly fish. Also: nations. Also: churches.

In the story of Pentecost that we just spoke and heard, there are two miracles. One is a miracle of speaking. The gathered followers of Jesus spoke “in other languages,” it says. Meaning, we guess, other than their own. It was a miracle of tongues. But then “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each,” it also says. So it is also a miracle of ears. A miracle of speaking and a miracle of hearing.

How does this story, the birthday of the church, guide us about how Christians should discuss our faith? Discuss both with others who share a little of our faith and with those who share none.

One way is to use the words that the others use. The poster downstairs says “how did Jesus speak to them? In their own words.” It is our job, according to this way, to translate our ideas and convictions into words that make sense to the person to whom we are talking. No jargon allowed, and no specialty language and no doctrinally difficult phrases. Speak in the language of the listener. We do the hard work. We think of new words to explain difficult concepts. This way honors diversity.

The other way is to use the words that you’ve always used. The words are fine-tuned and honed so that they mean something particular and are not easily translated. It is our job, according to this way, to teach others to speak our language. To define for them the meaning of the words we use. We do some hard work, but they do the harder work of learning a new language. Then we all can speak it together. This way honors unity.

[I should say there is a third way: don’t learn their language at all and don’t teach them yours. Just say the same thing over and over again in your own language. Only louder. This is an unfortunately common perversion. ]

At issue is how the church and the world relate. Is it in the world, of the world, against the world, alongside the world, or some other preposition? We might be monasteries, preserving the one truth. Or we might be missionaries. How does the church relate to people not of the church? Are we called to go out into the world, and to speak about our faith and trust in God? Or are we called to sit faithfully at home and invite others to come inside?

The story in Genesis that we heard is usually called the story of the Tower of Babel. There is a tower in it, but that is not really the main point. It is only mentioned at the beginning. What the people in the story want is to have one language and one name and to live in one big city. They honor unity. It makes them strong and excited. But it seems that that is not what God wants. God mixes their language. God stops them from building the city (not the tower, notice). And later in Genesis God names them “God’s people.” The people want to be exclusive, isolated, withdrawn, and pure. They want, I’m guessing here, they want everyone to be just like them. Just like us. God wants them to be fruitful and multiply. God scatters them all over the earth. Go and be different from one another.

The Pentecost story has been called the undoing of the Babel story, but it is not. If it were, all those different languages that people spoke and all the ones in which they listened would be one language. But that’s not what happened. Pentecost does not refute Babel, it confirms it. The people live not in a gray amalgam but in crazy diversity, joined to one another by the Holy Spirit.

People worry, rightly, I’d say, about whether the world is losing cultures as fast as species. The web and English and commerce combine to make the surfaces of people more alike. Is that good? It is not good if in the process we—whoever we are—begin to hope that—and worse, to expect—that others are like us. If we begin to long for Babel in the time before the scattering and mixing. If we only speak and do not do the listening. If we make the others do the work.

Both Genesis and Acts teach us the same thing. Our difference are not a result of God’s punishment, but of God’s design. For that, we give thanks to God.

Feeling Left Alone

Text: Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

Marriage is a covenant. Not a contract, usually, even though we speak casually of a marriage contract. If people have a pre-nuptial agreement, that agreement is a contract, but it does not make marriage itself a contract. A contract requires an offer, and acceptance, and a consideration.

A covenant, though, is a promise. A covenant is sometimes described as an agreement. Two or more people or parties agree to do something relating to each other. In that case, as in marriage, there are two promises, dual promises. In a marriage, the bride and the groom both make vows, which are promises. Strictly speaking, there is no acceptance. In practice, the promises themselves act like an acceptance. If, for example, the groom refused to make his vows after the bride made hers, then probably there would be no covenant.

Covenant—the word—seems religious. That’s because it has become so. A covenant does not have to be religious. But religious people have seized on the word as a good way to describe things about God. God makes covenants, not contracts. God makes promises, not conditions.

Covenant with a capital “C” refers to a promise God made with Israel. “I will be your God and you will be my people,” promised God. This is not a contract. Israel cannot void it, and neither can God. There is no escape clause. There are certain things that Israel, as God’s people, is expected to do. When they don’t, God gets discouraged, occasionally annoyed, sometimes crabby. But God does not go back on God’s promise. God is faithful.

Nonetheless, Israel from time to time loses faith in God’s faithfulness. We read in the Bible that Israel sometimes feels that God has abandoned them. Israel wonders whether it did something so bad that God just walked away from the whole deal. The story of the good times and bad of this covenant, which extends right through Jesus to us here and now, is the story of the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation.

A scholar named Phyllis Trible once described Genesis as a “love story gone awry.” There seems not to be a happy ending to the story of the Garden of Eden, a garden of perfection from which people are exiled. The Bible in its various chapters plays out that love story between God and humans. A friend of mine once said on her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary: “Ah, our twenty-fifth anniversary! Seventeen wonderful years of marriage.” The story of the Bible is like that. A few thousand years of being God’s people. Most of them wonderful, some of them not.

It is in the not-so-wonderful years that the people feel God has abandoned them.

Feeling abandoned by God is the same as feeling abandoned by anybody you love, trust, rely on, and want to be with. The feeling of being abandoned is horrible. It is more than loneliness. Israel, abandoned, lived on, as we all do. But poorly. Not because God was their protector and shield and fortress and things like that, but because people have an intense, deep longing for God.

It is a basic hunger. Being starved for God’s presence generates at best a vague disquiet-ness or anxiety. Being alone in the universe without God for company is tiring. We are so tiny, the universe is so big out there. We do not always admit, or some never admit, that we long for God. Even though as Christians we proclaim to. We call it other things. Ennui. General dissatisfaction with things. Listlessness. Hopelessness lurking in the wings.

A colleague says that in the church, where people talk about relying on God and grace and forgiveness, they are instead just as likely to act as if everything depends on them. “What the heck is that?” he asks. What it is, is a denial of our dependance on God and need for God’s presence. We can deny all sorts of needs, but that does not mean we don’t need them.

It turns out that people whose faith helps them express their longing for God, compared to those whose faith down-plays that longing, are happier, less pessimistic, less likely to be discouraged. This is just one study, and they didn’t really use the phrase “longing for God,” but that’s what they meant. And they didn’t say which was cause and which was effect. Maybe happier people long for God more. I don’t know.

Genesis and the book of Revelation are the beginning and the end of the Bible. In one sense, the plot line of Revelation reverses the plot line of Genesis, and it takes apart all that Genesis builds up. But in another sense, a more important sense, Revelation reaffirms God’s covenant with humanity. In the book of Revelation, God is close to us. God is extremely present in the book. And in the end, there is a resurrected Jerusalem, the historic home of God. And God lives there with all the people. I am your God, you are my people—the promise is fulfilled totally. We heard about that in the readings over the past few weeks.

But in today’s reading we come to the end of the story, and we just heard the final verses of the Bible. In those verses humanity’s longing for God is dramatically exposed. The whole world calls for Jesus. Come, cries the spirit, the bride, and everyone within earshot. And Jesus responds. I am coming! And so the people, hearing this, call to him again. Come, Lord Jesus! These are the shouts of people and God too long separated from one another. Like people in a long distant relationship, or people waiting, waiting for the return home of a friend or companion or a soldier or migrant. Thirsty for it, as it says. The waiting is over. The longing is requited.

The final sentence of the story in the Bible is “the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.” God, who is unconditionally in love with us and true to the covenant, is with us. We turn the last page. We close the book. The love story in the Bible has a happy ending after all.

But the story in these pages is a reflection of the story of humanity and of the lives of individual people. You and me. The story repeats and continues in each of us. When Isaac was baptized this morning, he became part of the story. The covenant becomes part of him and he of it. He will come to know as we do the story of being with God, of feeling abandoned by God, of longing for God, of finding God.

If this all sounds like a lot of personal piety, it’s because it is. The story of Revelation is the reunion of the human and the divine. That union is what piety is: the longing to be joined as humans with God. Whether you see that union in a voice speaking to you, or in a vision as in Revelation, or whether you see it in service to others as in Faith Kitchen. Or whether you see it in Sunday worship and song, or in your own quiet morning prayers, or an unexplained feeling of wellbeing in the scariest moments. Or whether you see it in amazement at the structure of the universe and the quarks and forces that hold things together in simplicity and complexity, or even in the energy of an argument on the street. Or whether you see it in the eyes of your child or lover. In all those things and thousands more, divine God meets human us.

We have no contract with God. But we do have a promise. We are not alone in human time and place. God is with us.

Retirement Party

Text: John 5:1-9

For thirty-eight years the man had the same job. Thirty-eight years of sitting by the poolside. Thirty-eight years of hoping to get into the waters at the right time. Thirty-eight years of unrequited longing to be healed. Thirty-eight years of being pushed aside and passed by. Thirty-eight years is a long time.

Outside of Jerusalem, there was a pool about the size of a football field. There were covered porches around all of it. Down the middle of the pool there was a dividing wall, and there was a porch on that, too. Five altogether. Five porticoes, as it says. Every so often the water in the pool would bubble up or stir around. Some thought it was an angel who stirred the waters. An angel of mercy.

On these porches sat people who were suffering in some way. People who were blind, people who had lost their hands or feet or limbs. People whose bodies didn’t work the same as most. Those people were waiting for the water to move. It seems that the first person into the pool when the water was stirred up would be cured of his or her condition. It was, some might think, superstitious magic. The porches were like the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. People—desperate and resigned—waiting around the pool waiting to be healed.

The man was one of these people. He was not strong; he was without vigor, it says. There were no appointments for the pool. It was first come, first served. The man had had never been able to get to the water in time. Someone else was always faster, pushier, stronger. Or so he says.

Do you want to be made well? Jesus asks him. The man does not answer him directly. The man does not say, “You bet! I’ve been waiting thirty-eight years to be healed.” The man does not say, “Duh! Why do you think I’ve been camped by this pool all that time.” Instead, the man tells a little story of missed opportunities. A story of indignities suffered at the hands of others, of foiled attempts.

Does he want to be made well? The man has a stake in his present situation. His identity as a person is at risk. He is the man who sits by the pool. To be fair, maybe not all those thirty-eight years. It says only that he has been ill that long. But maybe it was thirty-eight. Long enough for Jesus to know that he had been there a long time. Long enough to have a little story about it. Long enough to make it his life. Long enough to become “the man who sits by the pool and never gets in.”

To be made well would have been a blessing. And a problem. To no longer be the person others had known him to be and that he knew himself to be. He would be out of a job. His life would be full of new people, new places, new patterns, new pitfalls as well as new possibilities. Do you want to be made well? In telling his story, the man answers: I don’t know. I’m not sure.

What do you want, Jesus asks the man? This is the world’s second hardest question. The first one being: what are you going to do next (as in: next year, after graduation, after the baby is born, after retirement)?

What do you want? It is a trick question, clean and simple on the surface and complex and messy in the middle. It can be especially scary when the person asking it has the power to make it happen. As Jesus does, as the man detects. Jesus is always asking people this question, and they are often non-plussed and tongue-tied.

“What do you want” hides another question. Which is: Who are you? As with the man by the pool, thinking about what we want forces us to think about who we are. And who we have been, and how it has gone so far. Not only: Would the person I know myself to be want what I want? Am I that kind of person who wants that kind of thing. But also: What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to know myself and how do I want to be known? And finally: do I have any say in the matter?

Jesus offers the man a change. From living one kind of life to living another. In one sense this is an offer for a wider future. Adventurous but also ambiguous. Unfettered but also uncertain. Healing, perhaps, but also scarring. The change from one kind of life to another. It looks forward in hopeful nervousness.

But at the same time, the new future leaves behind the old past. And even when the old past was not so great, it is still grieved. We are abandoning something, or we are being abandoned. We are losing something.

And in between the grief and the hope is a squishy area of confusion. When we are neither one thing or the other. The man picks up his mat and walks away. What now? What does he do. What does he do that very day, that minute? Where will he go? What will he eat? How will he spend his time? He does not know. No one does. The fact that the man seems to have a choice does not make it better or clearer. And for many people, there is no choice. Changes happen to us as often as we make changes.

At the very end of this passage, it says “Now that day was the sabbath.” In the verses that follow in John, people get upset, for it was not legal to heal someone on the sabbath. Jesus did not have to heal this man on this day. And it was not the only time that Jesus did something like that. There seemingly was no rush. After thirty-eight years, tomorrow would be fine. During normal office hours.

But the verse stands also for something else, less political. Sabbath time is a good time for making, or thinking about making, big changes. Sabbath time is down time. The days of sabbath are like movable joints in the track of our otherwise often rigid lives. Sabbath—Sundays—are occasion of transition between one week and the next. In those days, the demands of our identity have a weaker hold on us. And in those days, our ears are more aware of and open to God’s sometimes whispered invitations. Or to God’s insistent demands. Do this.

I said earlier that Jesus offers the man a change. But that is not true. There is no offer here. There is a question, (which we’ve been talking about). And there is a command. Stand up, take your mat, and walk. I suppose the man could refuse. But the deed has already been done. His body has been healed. He is changed.

Change happens to us whether we want it to or not. This is not always welcome. Some changes are harder than others. It would be nice to know the answers to those two hardest questions, but it is not necessary. And it is not really even germane.

What God wants, is. Through today’s story, we understand that God’s desire is that we be healed. That the reason Jesus is always healing people is because that is what Jesus wants. We are not required to know exactly what we want and who we are and what’s next. God does not wait for us to know what we want. I take that to be good news.

Does God know what we need more than we do? Does God know us better than we know ourselves? I cannot speak to that. It does not say.

It does not matter. What we do know from scripture is that God desires us to be made whole. God is the God of life, and invites us, and sometimes pulls us, and sometimes commands us, into the future.

Revelation Reformation Revolution

Text: Revelation 21:1-6
Other texts: John 13:32-35

Jesus was not a Christian. Luther was not a Lutheran.

We know that Luther was dismayed that people were creating a new church in his name. Maybe Jesus feels the same way. I don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say.

Both Jesus and Luther thought of and described themselves as reformers, not revolutionaries. But people were ready for a revolution. It happens a lot with reformers, who see something wrong. But not irredeemably wrong. Something that can be fixed. Something has gone off the tracks in a major way, for sure, but it can be righted and restored.

The book of Revelation is a book of revolution. The old world has passed away, it says, and a new world will replace it. The whole universe will be destroyed, the heavens and the earth, and God will build a new one, re-laying its foundations on the same principles of life, abundance, and justice.

The most scholarly interpretation of Revelation is that it is a response to the Roman oppression of Israel. The land of Israel in the time of Jesus was occupied by the foreign and sometimes cruel power of Rome. In Revelation, the evil Babylon stands for Rome. The destruction of the powers of Babylon in the book are interpreted as the hoped-for destruction of Rome and its entire empire.

This hope for destruction of the world is called apocalyptic, which comes from the word apocalypse, which is just the Greek word for uncovering, or revelation. This book of the Bible has become the archetypical example.

These hopes for the end time, the end of it all, typically arise when people get desperate. It is a kind of “I can’t stand it. I’m out of here” response. Things are such a mess that no one can conceive of a way out. No one can image any solution. No one has any hope in reformation.

People sometimes feel this way about jobs, or relationships, or sometimes life itself. When lots of people feel this way about politics, we call it apocalyptic. These feelings emerge a lot in history among people who are beleaguered to hopelessness in the present. It is not hopelessness altogether, but all hope is directed to a cataclysmic destruction and reconstruction. In our times we have seen such hopes in groups that we mistakenly call cults. The “Left Behind” series is a sweetened version of this thinking. The hope of some Christians for a war in Israel that leads to the end times is a more bitter version.

The book of Revelation is an undoing of creation. The plot of the story, once you get past all the filigree, is pretty much a rewind of the beginning of Genesis. And at the very end of Revelation, in the chapter we just heard, once all has been unwound, a new universe is started. I am making all things new, it says. In one sense, it is the end of the story of a failed experiment. All is thrown in the trash and God starts over.

We must be careful what we wish for. Or at least honest about it.

The wish for the end of all usually means the end of all—except not the end of me. And maybe not the end of my good friends. Not the end of people like me. We imagine that we are observers of the end of the world. Like something out of Dr Who. That the new world that comes of this somehow includes us of the old world. “See, I am making all things new.” There is someone left around doing this new seeing. We don’t want us to disappear, or those we love, we want everyone else to. We want the universe to change, but to be there to watch it.

When we hear about the new Jerusalem, we imagine ourselves to be residents. When we hear that there will be no more death and pain, we imagine us, living in a world to be like that. In spite of our fiery and frantic language, we are not really looking for revolution. We are looking for reformation. This is, I think, good news.

One of the last things Jesus said (on Maundy Thursday) and fundamental to the Gospel, was the new order he gives his disciples—meaning he gives to us and all his followers. “I give you a new commandment,” he tells them—tells us—“that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

This is a hard thing to do. Hard for us individually. Love does not come easily in real life. Some people are hard to like. Some people are hateful. Some people do bad things intentionally. It is hard to love someone whom we hate or fear. In fact, one way we define our own circle of friends, our community, is to separate those whom we love easily or at least willingly, from those we do not.

For that reason, it is hard to love one another institutionally. For nations or tribes, for example. So all this talk in Acts about what Peter and Paul do is pretty radical (though still not revolutionary). In today’s reading, Peter has a dream. In it, he is presented with a lot of food that he is forbidden to eat by dietary laws. “I won’t eat that stuff,” he tells God, “you know I am a good person who obeys your godly rules.” But in Peter’s dream, God gives him permission—gives him a command, really—to go ahead and eat what up until now had been wrong to eat.

Immediately after that, Peter baptizes a household of pagans, gentiles, people who were not circumcised, meaning not Jews. Not of the people. The circumcised followers of Jesus criticize Peter, it says, for doing this. But Peter explains that the Holy Spirit has told him: do not make a distinction between them and us. The Holy Spirit in this story is expanding the definition of “us” and therefore those “one-anothers” whom we are commanded to love.

This is something new. To command to love one another opens up the community of the people of God. That is how the early church interpreted it. This is how people will know that you are my followers, says Jesus. The community of God is defined as the people who love one another. The action of loving one another is what creates the community of Christians. It is not that you love the people in your community—your family and friends and what not. It is instead that your loving others is what makes you a community. Christians are people who love one another. And who do so because Jesus told us to.

That is how other people know that we are Christian. If you love one another, people will know you are my disciples, says Jesus. And if you don’t … well, they might wonder who we are.

Christian theology is full of “re-“ words. Starting with resurrection. And also re-birth, re-newal, restoration. These are reformation words. The prefix means “again.” Christian theology is not big on “de-” words. De-struction, despair, default, death. It is not something Jesus taught. There cannot be “Christian warriors,” as the Hutaree militia in the news call themselves. You cannot kill people in the name of Christ. You cannot do that.

God loves the world, it says famously in John. Jesus expects us to do the same. Since the beginning of creation God has called the world good. It is our impatience, not God’s, that longs for the end of things. We must actively resist the temptation toward that longing.

The reformation of Jesus is making do with what we have and restoring its intended luster, not throwing all things out. Jesus asks us to remove the rust, the scales, the barnacles that have saddened our world and our existence. And then he teaches us how to do that.

Jesus was not a Christian, but we are. We claim Jesus as our lord. He gives us a new commandment. Love one another as he loves us. It is not easy. But it is the power that Jesus has instructed us to use to renew the good world.

Psalm 23 and Eternal LIfe

Test: Psalm 23

Note: This sermon preached by Vicar Craig Simenson

Psalm 23 is a favorite psalm. It is a familiar psalm. So familiar and etched into our memories through its frequent repetition—(didn’t we just hear this a few months ago?)—that we may have stopped paying much attention to its nuances. When we do stop to take notice, the different translations that we might (or might not) be familiar with pose interesting interpretative questions for us to make meaning of.

For example, in the end, is that I am to dwell in the house of the LORD forever (as the King James and this morning’s version goes)?

or is it only my whole life long (as the New Revised Standard Version, the Bibles that are in our pews) renders it?

As Pastor Stein highlighted for us in his sermon on the psalm this past summer, attention to the actual Hebrew used suggests that the psalm does not here refer to any notion of an eternal life. Rather, more literally, the psalm here speaks to the length of these days, on this green earth, beside the still waters of this time and place. Psalm 23 speaks to the comfort that is available to us even now in the darkest valleys of this life.

Interestingly, attention to the actual Greek used in John’s gospel this morning poses similar interpretative complexities.

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.

Yet, what is translated here as eternal life, while denoting life that is ever-lasting or eternal (in other words, infinite) can also mean life lasting for a definite period of time: an age, a generation or a lifetime.

Similarly, when John tells us that Jesus says that his sheep will never perish, the Greek literally (and perplexingly) tells us that they will never perish into the age.

With this in mind, we come to an important interpretative question:

What age exactly does John refer to here?

My own guess (for what it’s worth) is that behind John’s words is belief in an age that is to come. An age, a world, a new way of life that Christians continue to speak about, when in the words of the Nicene Creed, we say that we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Importantly, this notion of ever-lasting life that we find both in John’s gospel and in the Creed does not seem to be a life that we can necessarily wholly abstract from our experiences of this life: a life lived within and bound to a particular world and a definite period of time. There is the life in this world, and there is the life in the world to come—each life bound to a particular, though apparently different, kind of world.

Yet, picking up the puzzling language used in John’s gospel would also seem to hold open the possibility this morning that we each re-examine and reflect on the ways in which we, as Christians, might often—and mistakenly—go too far in distinguishing our lives in this time and place from the ever-lasting life that is to come.

When John tells us that Jesus’ sheep will never perish into the age, the use of the preposition here suggests not a disconnection between this world and the next, but a certain continuity. Rather than abstraction, John’s language here would seem to suggest that those who follow Jesus now already live into the age that is to come.

This morning, Jesus speaks to us of an ever-lasting life that does not exist wholly beyond the length of these days, on this green earth, beyond this time and this place:

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.

Importantly, Christian faith cannot be limited only to the life that awaits us. For Christians, ever-lasting life is not apart from, but inclusive of the lives that we live into now. Inclusive of who we choose to listen for and follow now.

Importantly, for Christians, the life in this world and the life in the world to come are bound together.

Importantly, for Christians, the resurrected Christ who appears to us this Easter season is the Christ whose resurrected body still bears the marks of his former death. This life and the life of the resurrected world to come are bound together.

In our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, even the Christ already gone away into the clouds in chapter 1, already seemingly passed into the world to come, is the Christ who is still present among us—the Christ who is still healing the sick and bringing the dead to life.

Importantly, the Easter storyline is not one in which ever-lasting life stands wholly removed from this life. Rather, Easter is the story of resurrected life breaking into this one.

Even Revelation, a book often characterized in over-simplified terms of future happenings, arguably offers Christians not a picture of the life that is only to come, but also a vision of who we are already becoming. A vision of how God is already shaping us.

From every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, crying out in worship, singing to our God, Revelation reveals to us who we are when we gather together every week. Revelation’s words are our words.

Blessing, honor, glory to the Lamb. Holy, righteous, worthy is the Lamb.

Revelation’s words are our words.

And the Easter storyline is our story. The story of the slain Lamb who has already overcome death, who—by his resurrection—shows us just how expansive life is. The God who is and who was and who is to come. Who reveals to us ever-lasting life stretching out in every direction, in every time and place, in every life and lifetime.

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.

Christ, speaking to us still, speaking to us always. Who leads us in right paths, but not necessarily always easy ones.

The Christ who, instead of eternal safety and security, promises ongoing relationship. I know them, and they follow me.

The resurrected Christ who leads us beside still waters, where God wipes away every tear from our eyes that they might become the water of life. Where even betrayal, violence, and criminal execution are turned into empty tombs, resurrected lives, healing, and hope for this world and the world to come.

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life—life that does not end, life in these days and in the days to come—and they will never perish.

May we keep on listening for that shepherd’s voice.

May we keep on following this resurrected one in our midst calling us to love one another.

To give our lives to one another without fear.

To live abundantly into the ever-lasting life already here.

Acting Praisy

Text: Psalm 150 and John 20:24-29

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise God all creatures here below. These words are no doubt familiar to you. We’ll sing them in a few minutes as we collect offerings. You may know this song as being called The Doxology. It is really just a doxology, a word that means “words of glory.” Doxologies praise God.

Hallelujah! we sing around this Easter time. It seems like it should be translated “hooray!” Jesus Christ is risen today, hooray! But the word Hallelujah means “praise God.” Praise our God, the one we know by name. Hallelujah is a word of glory.

Hallelujah! Praise God in God’s holy temple. So begins Psalm 150. Praise God for God’s mighty acts. From whom God’s blessing flows. Praise God, all things that have breath. Praise God all creatures here below. Praise God with music and dancing and loud clanging cymbals. Hooray!

This is the last psalm. The final psalm in the book of psalms. After all the laments and songs of the earlier psalms, what does it come down to? When things are good, praise God. And when things are bad, praise God. Praise God, all the time.

Praise and sacrament are the backbone of our worship. We come here to praise God and to be fed. Lutherans have a pretty good understanding of the feeding part. But are more suspicious of praise, thinking we might have to act “praisy.” You know, waving our arms around and, as the psalm says, dancing and otherwise carrying on. We should do a little more of that, I suspect. But even for Lutherans, praise is central to our relationship with God. In one sense, praise is pure prayer.

Praise is not necessarily a religious term. But when it is, it has five characteristics that I want to talk about today. A kind of top-five list of things about praise. So we’ll do a countdown, as people do, back to front.

Number five: praise is thanksgiving. It is appropriate that we connect it with our offerings, which are, as we say, signs of God’s gracious love. Praising God is an expression of gratitude. For God’s mighty acts, as the psalm says. Hallelujah, thank you, God, for all you have done.

But praise is not transactional. We don’t praise God in exchange for the goodies God has given us. Praise is not payment: You be nice to me, I praise you. So, the fourth characteristic of praise is that it is not useful. That is, its utility is not germane. As one writer said, this psalm with all its praises is “an extreme case of inutility.” It asks for nothing, it makes no claims. It is not churchy or religious: it does not speak about judgment, covenant, or promise. It is just praise. God, you are great.

Number three: praise is naive. We praise God without knowing all that much about God. Just as you can praise, say, a hero for her bravery or a saint for his compassion, without knowing that person very well, so we can praise God for what we see, whether or not we understand it or can make sense of it. God has, as the psalm says, excellent greatness. That’s sufficient.

Number two: praise is not about us. Whether we are in fact thankful or bitter or whether our tears are from laughter or despair, it does not matter. We do not have to prepare ourselves. We do not have to be especially good or contrite or anything. We praise God in exactly the same way as we step up to the altar rail for Holy Communion: without qualification. We praise God without apology.

Praise is a way of seeing things. So, the number one characteristic of praise is recognition. Not recognition in the sense of reward. “I give you this certificate in recognition of your outstanding service blah blah blah,” kind of thing. Not that. But recognizing God as you would recognize a lover or a friend. Seeing them as they are (or as you know them to be). Embracing them. Admiring them for no good reason. Just because you love them. (As the father of the prodigal son does, who spies his wayward son on the road home and rushes to greet him.) Excusing them, even. Because they are your friend. This is the kind of recognition that reminds us, when we are in the middle of fight with our partner—that reminds us who he or she is, and interrupts our angry blindness. The person is not just anybody, but a particular somebody we love. Praising God is recognizing God in that way. God, our lover.

Now, what does this all have to do with Thomas? Thomas calls out to Jesus. “My Lord and my God.” These are words of praise, not of belief. Thomas recognizes Jesus, a friend Thomas had thought to be dead. We cannot call Thomas “Doubting Thomas,” for doubt and belief were never the issue. It is not that Thomas does not believe the other disciples. He comes back to the room—in which the disciples are strangely still shut up one whole week after they have seen Jesus—he does not come back for more evidence.

He demands to see Jesus not because he is short of faith. He has to see Jesus because he needs to recognize him. The disciples had seen Jesus. “We have seen the Lord,” they told him. But Thomas had not.

Luke writes that Jesus offers evidence. Touch me, Thomas, says Jesus. But Thomas never does touch him. He does not need any evidence of that sort. Thomas sees Jesus. The heart of Thomas recognizes him. Thomas praises Jesus: My Lord and My God! It has nothing to do with belief in some fact or doctrine or miracle, even. Thomas is in love with Jesus.

The language of worship is the language of love. We come to this place, this church, over and over, not because we need to learn something new, though maybe we do and maybe we will. We do not come, that is, for more evidence. We come to be fed, and we come to be with God. Sacrament and praise.

The words we use in worship, the songs we sing, the prayers we recite, are powerful because they remind us who God is, who we are, and who God and we are together. In one sense, they are boring. They are the same thing, more or less, each week. We do not need them in order to be healed; we believe that God heals us out of grace, not out of obligation. And I suppose that God does not need them either. They are boring in the way old stories are boring between friends, or little nothings are boring between lovers. Powerfully boring. They serve no purpose other than praise.

Not all praise is God-talk. You can praise all sorts of things and people. You can praise a soldier, or a nurse, or a president. But most God-talk is praise. That is because like most of the talk of friends and lovers, it all says the same thing.

You are my Lord and my God, says Thomas. When we talk to God, when we gather in worship, when we pray in our houses. And even when we complain to God and speak in anger and disappointment. We all say in other ways what Thomas said to Jesus. I praise you. God, you are mine. God, I am yours.

Praise the Lord.

The Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead

Text: Luke 21:1-12

Grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

Having heard the story told by Mary, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, Peter ran to the tomb to see for himself. (Typical Peter: rushing in where others would not.) And having seen nothing in the tomb but a pile of body-wrapping linens, he went home amazed.

If that were the end of the story, we would not be here today. If all the witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus had been as flummoxed as Peter was, there would be no Christian faith. If the story of the three women had continued to be treated as nonsense, there would be no Jesus movement, no Gospel stories, no church. There would have been resurrection, but no Easter.

But the event of the resurrection turned out to be powerful and compelling. People at the time experienced the resurrection of Jesus in a way that disrupted and transformed their lives. It drew them to one another to establish small communities of men and women who would re-tell the story to one another. And then to tell the story of the life of Jesus and to try to live by his teachings and example, to establish rituals that he implied or commanded. How else can we explain the rise of early Christianity? Prophets then were a dime a dozen. Something happened with Jesus and, powerfully, in the people who heard the story of Jesus, killed but confoundingly risen and for a while physically present. People were enthusiastic, in the sense of the word that means they were filled by spirit, or the wind of God. They were blown away.

Mary and Joanna and Mary the mother of James were not expecting what they saw. None of the followers of Jesus were. When the disciples heard the news, they pooh-poohed it. They called the three women delirious. Partly this was misogyny. Partly it was total incredulity. The women had expected to find the body of dead Jesus. They did not find the body. “Why are you looking among the dead for one who has risen?” a man in bright clothes asks them. But the man is being disingenuous. They are looking among the dead because they had seen Jesus die. Unlike the other, male, disciples, who had scattered, these women had been eye witnesses to his death. It is fitting that they be the first witnesses to his rising. They had come looking for Jesus among the dead because Jesus had been dead.

We who know the story sometimes imagine that Jesus was more like an astral traveler than he was dead. That he was a divine spirit creature who inhabited various realms like a tourist until he was discovered to be not dead. But Jesus was dead. That’s what our faith and church teach us. Not sort-of dead, or faking it. Jesus died and was buried, as we say in the creed. Jesus was as dead as any creature on this earth can be. Jesus was human. Humans die. Jesus rose from the dead. That tells us something about humans. From the dead, Jesus is risen.

We who live on this side of life know next to nothing of death. We have some hints. We have some hints in scripture and teachings. Ashes to ashes. That makes sense. We are creatures of dust: you are dust, we say on Ash Wednesday, to dust you shall return. That is our experience. But we also hear that in Jesus’ father’s house there are many rooms. And we have heard Jesus tell another man that “you will be with me in paradise.”

We have some hints in our feelings about death. The disciples know that Jesus died. They would, I’m sure, have felt what we all feel at times like this. Sorrow, of course. But also anger, not understanding: how could this be? Trying to figure things out: how could this be happening? They might have been angry at God. Angry, even, at Jesus for leaving them. Angry, maybe, at themselves for things they never did, or things never reconciled, or things they regretted. (Peter denied Jesus, we read. How did he feel?) This is how they came to the tomb on Sunday morning.

And we have a hint in our hope in things unknown. And things unknowable. We are not all that smart. That there are things beyond our knowing is an occasion for hope. The fact that we can be hopeful in the face of ignorance seems to me to be useful information: not that we are naive, though we certainly are, but that while we are simple and small, God is big and not simple.

The resurrection of Jesus teaches us something that we did not know. It teaches us how little we know. It teaches us about the power of life—the power of God—in the world. It teaches us that death is not quite so fearsome. Death, where is your sting? asks the apostle Paul, later. Death, though unwelcome, need not be feared.

The resurrection of Jesus is an event, not an idea. Each of the four Gospels tells about it in a slightly different way. There are multiple stories of the Passion, the Resurrection, and the days after. This is not a defect in scripture. It is that the resurrection was an event that was experienced. It requires interpretation. The Gospel writers tried to interpret it. The man in dazzling clothes at the tomb tried to interpret it to Mary and Joanna and Mary the mother of James by putting it in context. “Don’t you remember what Jesus said would happen?” Jesus himself interprets it, both beforehand and afterward, by quoting scripture: This is to fulfill what is written, he sometimes says. Scholars and theologians interpret the resurrection constantly. Is it fulfillment? Is it part of a scheme of atonement? Is it a promise? Is it a sign?

The resurrection of Jesus is an event. It still confuses people and makes them marvel, two thousand years later. Jesus Christ rises from death. People are adamant about the meaning of that. Only they do not all agree about what the meaning is. It does mean something important. Christians, at least, agree about that.

The resurrection of Jesus is an event, but it is not over by a long shot. As we celebrate the particular event, we also contemplate its effect on us and the world. We chew on it, like a hard notion that needs softening. The resurrection of Jesus is an ongoing transformation in us, as it was for the disciples and early followers of Jesus. Paul says that we are certainly united with Jesus in a resurrection like his.

The resurrection of Jesus is an event. It is not a metaphor. It exists as it is. It should not be softened. But is a wonderfully fertile soil for growing metaphors. It reminds us of the rebirth of the world at springtime. Look at the trees budding and the gardens suddenly awakened. It reminds us that things that are broken can be repaired. And also that God can repair them. It reminds us that the end of one thing is the beginning of another. It brings to our hearts the comfort of renewal and restoration.

We are celebrating—and it is a celebration—we are celebrating today something that is way too powerful to take lightly, no matter what we make of it. It is occasion to remind us that the value of faith is to resist, as one person said, to resist the attempt to make God as knowable and dependable as breakfast cereal.

Mary and Joanna and Mary the mother of James were right to be dumbfounded. Peter was right to be amazed.

And we are right to say [with the children at worship] Hooray! Jesus is risen.