Letter to Faith

This sermon was preached by Pastor Seitz

Text: Matthew 3:1–12

Dear Congregation of Faith Lutheran Church,

It is under uncomfortable circumstances that I bring this message to you today. The discomfort stems from the fact that this is my last message to you as your Assistant Pastor.

And although it is sad—it is also reason to rejoice. Because although discomfort is unpleasant, it is also a blessing.

I came here under uncomfortable circumstances. I sent here—driven here by the Holy Spirit—really. The proof that I was called to come is in the fact that while I was in college I took a year off to build houses. I decided if I was going to learn a trade in order to earn some money, Carpenter seemed a good way to go. I saved all the money I could for 9 months and I took my earnings and traveled across the country. I had lived in Washington State my whole life and I wanted to drive across the country to explore the West Coast. Being from the Pacific Northwest I decided to head for New England.

In retrospect I think my experience was due, in part, to the liberated attitude I possessed by the time I reached the East Coast. The kind of attitude that comes from taking a risk in order to go exploring and finding that mile after mile and state after state you are more capable than you had previously known.

To make a long story short—Amherst Massachusetts and I did not get along. Upon returning safely to Washington State a few months older and countless experiences wiser, I swore an oath that I would never live on the East Coast. I had a few rowing buddies who lived in Boston and whenever we talked and they shared how great Boston was, I was happy to remind them that although Boston is cool—I will never live on the East Coast. Never.

Had I not broken that oath and lived with the complete and utter discomfort of living someplace I swore an oath I would never live, without a Call in any church lined-up before I moved out here, without knowing whether it would work out or not—had I not through that—I would not know how to rely on Jesus and trust in God the way that I do now.

I would not have the countless blessings of an amazing wife and partner or a beautiful son who has been cared for and nurtured by this community so that church is one of his favorite places to be.

I would not know what it means to put all my trust in God and to know that God is even more present to us when we are uncomfortable. Had I not followed the Spirit into someplace uncomfortable.

In the story of John, when John is baptizing everyone—from Jerusalem to all of Judea and all along the river Jordan—when John is baptizing the masses, it says in today’s Gospel, they were confessing their sins.

It is culturally so radically different from today that it’s virtually impossible to appreciate how different it was in John’s time from today—but just consider life in John’s region as a Jew. A culture and a region where both daily life and religious life were directed by the Law of the Covenant.

John father was a Priest. The Gospel of Luke tells us the story of Zachariah and Elizabeth as one of tremendous faith and obedience to God when God calls us to do things that make us uncomfortable. John was raised in a family that holds the Law of the Covenant up as the highest Law and obedience to the Law as the most effective means of having a relationship with God. The Law would have been the very building blocks of language for John.

The entire Jewish community was focused on the Law of the Covenant and on obedience to the Law. The Law directed not only religious observances but the government and the pulse of daily life. The Law was so strict that just touching an unclean person on the same day you were going to Synogogue made you unfit for the Synagogue. How much more so to commit a sin.

The reality of constant pressure and constant scrutiny is a daily reality in John’s world. The reality of knowing that any sin confessed would require an act of penance, a sacrifice, an offering in order to receive YAHWEH’s pardon.

The act of confessing one’s sins to another person is challenging under the best of circumstances, but in John’s time the act of confessing one’s sins in front of a wild man and one’s entire community would have been painful to point of excruciating. It would have been unheard of, radical, and extremely uncomfortable.

But without the discomfort of going against everything they had been taught and everything that their instincts tell them—without the risk of confessing their sins aloud before God and man and being washed by a wild man in a baptism of repentance—they would not have been transformed by baptism. They would not have known acceptance by God as clean and blameless before the Lord, they would not have known God’s mercy as God’s love.

The Gospel of John the Baptizer is the original Gospel. “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the same message Jesus started his ministry with, his first words when he began preaching—word for word. Jesus preached it and it came from John. The Holy Spirit to me more specific.

Challenge and Acceptance. Repentance means turn away from whatever distracts you from God and turn towards God. Change your life in a way that requires you to rely on God and in turn experience the presence of God. Repent, take a step away from your comfort and be uncomfortable, and receive the blessing of God’s comfort.

Repent, be Uncomfortable, and receive the blessing of God’s support.

The reason the masses came to John is that he preached a Gospel of acceptance. A message of forgiveness. He preached the Spirit of Welcoming.

If someone was in this church 5 years ago and they came back today, they might not recognize too many faces, and they would not recognize the area under the balcony, but I l know they would recognize this congregation.

Because even though many things have changed—the Spirit of Welcoming here at Faith Lutheran Church is the same.

People underestimate the power of being a welcoming church, but have you ever visited a congregation that failed to be welcoming?

And hospitality is one of the most important aspects of Christianity, it is one of the central precepts taught throughout scripture and the throughout the church, and it is a focal point of Jesus throughout his teachings and his direction to his followers.

The reason for this being that hospitality is not always comfortable. Which is good because, in truth, being uncomfortable is necessary for growth.

So even though it is under uncomfortable circumstances that I share this message with you today, the circumstances are also a blessing.

Pursuing a full time call at MIT is a move in response to the Holy Spirit. I am following where the Lord is Calling me. It is uncertain how long it will take to raise the money to sustain a full time call but I am moving forward with the knowledge and the reassurance that the Lord will be with me and once again show me His comfort, His presence, and His blessing.

And although there are uncertainties in life and in our journey with Christ, I am certain of one thing. I know that I could come back in another 5 years and even though I may not recognize many faces, but I would still recognize this congregation. Anyone could recognize it once they have experienced it, the Spirit of Welcoming.

Regardless of where we are we share the connection in His blessing.

And although there are uncertainties in life and in our journey with Christ, I am certain of one thing. I know that I could come back in another 5 years and even though I may not recognize many faces, but I would still recognize this congregation. Anyone could recognize it once they have experienced it, the Spirit of Welcoming.

Regardless of where we are we share the connection in the Body of Christ, through the Holy Spirit, the same spirit that taught the original Gospel to John, then to Jesus, and to us.

We will all grow as a result of this discomfort. I will grow and so will this congregation. Not because of the discomfort itself; but rather, because this is the kind of risk that invites us and calls us to rely upon God—calls us to trust in God for the unknown future.

Repent the Kingdom of God is at hand. Take risks that make you rely on God and know God’s blessing.

When we cease being able to risk we cease being able to grow.

If my first 5 years here in Cambridge are any kind of indicator, I can’t wait to see what the next 5 years will bring.

My Peace I brought to this congregation when I arrived here and first experienced its Spirit of Welcoming, as uncomfortable and uncertain I may have been. My Peace I leave with you—this congregation of Faith Lutheran Church. Serving you has been a blessing.

Father forgive us, Spirit Guide us, In the name of Jesus, Amen

It Is Not What You Know

Text: Romans 13:8-14
Other texts: Matthew 24:36-44

Paul writes that we know what time it is. Matthew writes that we will never know when the time will come.

Paul writes that we know it is the end of the long dark night and the glimpse of a new day. The time is now to gather up the lose ends, to make amends to those we have harmed—willfully or not. That in light of the coming light, it is time to attend to the commandments God has given us: love one another, do no harm to others. The time is now.

Matthew writes that we—in good company with the angels and the Son of God—we cannot know when the new day will dawn. As with those caught in the waves of the flood that Noah escaped, our world might be changed in an instant. The message is the same as Paul’s: love one another, do no harm to others. The time might be now.

Paul and Matthew speak with the same urgency. Whether we know nothing of the time or know exactly what time it is. And if that is so, does what we know make a difference? What does it matter what we know? Does it matter at all?

The first reading today is from Paul’s letter to Romans. We are reading this book in Bible study after coffee hour, but we are not up to chapter 13 yet. The passage we heard is from verses 11 to 14. But these verses are a little out of context. They are the tail end of an argument that Paul makes about how to live a Christian life. The argument starts at verse 8. Here’s how it goes:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Then it goes on with the verses we heard: Besides this, you know what time it is, and so forth.

What Paul is saying is that the breaking dawn of a new age forcefully reminds us of the importance of the commandments—in the law and reinforced by Jesus—to love one another as oneself. And what that entails is to do no wrong to others. We are not doing what God said to do. We harm other people all the time, intentionally or more often otherwise, mindlessly. We should not. That’s what God said. Remember that that’s what God said. The urgency that Paul feels is not about what is going to happen next. The urgency is about what we should be doing right now. The end of the darkness means that there is not much time, in Paul’s thinking. But whether there is little time or a lot of time, our job is the same. Love our neighbors. Do no harm.

We don’t know, in spite of Paul’s energetic arguments, about the future. Being faithful Christians does not instantly make everything precisely clear. But what we do know about is now. We know how we are behaving right now. And we know how we should be behaving. Nothing is changed about that. That is not new. It is old. We do know what is right. That is something we are very good at. Not that we listen to what we know all the time. We are also good at denying things and excusing things. But that does not mean we don’t know better.

There are voices that advise us to do what is legal, or expedient, or prudent, even. Good for ourselves, our families, our companies. As if that were enough. Yet we know what is right. We are advised not to pay attention to what we know. We are told that as long as it is official and well-considered and does not hurt anyone directly, that it does not matter.

But it does. We are advised to lie to ourselves. It makes us sick. Lying to yourself about whether you are doing what is right makes you sick. Sick at heart. It is a corruption, a wound of sorts. Something ill and malfunctioning. Our bodies and our souls know this. It is another thing we know.

The word salvation means to heal. One purpose of the law—the commandments that Paul quotes from—one purpose of the law is to heal that sickness of heart. It is like a medicine, or an antidote. Loving one another, doing no harm to others, is a way to keep us from getting sick. And to make us better when we are sick. In the metaphoric darkness that Paul likes to write about, we are sick. He reminds us that we know what is right. It is written down in this book, the Bible, and, as Jeremiah later said, in our hearts.

Paul then summarizes the commandments the same way Jesus did: love one another. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, Paul writes, therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. It fulfills the law because it is identical to the law. That is, people who follow the law and people who love one another do the same thing. Exactly the same thing. There is no detectable difference.

What we do matters. When we do what is right—defined as we are talking about as loving one another and therefore doing no harm—it matters. It matters to the world. It matters to us. I’m not making this up. It is what Jesus taught. When you say to yourself, it doesn’t matter what I do, you are lying to yourself. When others tell you that it doesn’t matter, they are mistaken.

That what we do matters is a gift; it is not a burden. What could be worse than living a life in which what you did, did not matter. What kind of life would that be? Not a good one, I think.

Paul and Matthew talk about a new dawn, a new day, a new age. It sounds so sudden, but it is not. The day dawns slowly. Until that moment, we are in the dark. Until that moment, our faith gives us a way to measure a good life. Do we love one another? Do we do no harm?

Matthew is right. About that day, when all is resolved, about that hour, no one knows. And Paul is right too. We know what time it is now. And though we are in the night, let us lay aside the things of darkness. Let us put on the ways of the light. Let us live as if it were the day.

We Want a King

Text: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Psalm 46

The people wanted a king.

Some time after the Israelites had settled into the promised land, they began to long for a king. You can read about this in the first book of Samuel. God sees this as an issue, and God says to the prophet Samuel, “they have rejected me [God], from being king over them.” Samuel speaks the word of God to the people and tells them all the bad things that kings do. Raise taxes from you, send your children off to war, abuse their power, favor their cronies. The usual list. But the people want a king. “We are determined to have a king over us so that we might be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” And so in the end they get what they want, and Saul, the first king of Israel, is crowned.

In time Saul gives way to David, Israel’s greatest king, loved and feared. Solomon follows David. And shortly thereafter Israel splits into two nations, and a series of kings rule them, each king worse than the last. The final king is Zedekiah—ending a long line of poor and ineffective leaders—who the Bible says “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” as his predecessors before him did. It was just as Samuel had told them it would be. But the lesson the Israelites learned from this was not, as you might think, to get rid of kings and rulers. Instead, they longed not for no king, but for a better king. They longed for a king, in particular, who was like David. Wise and powerful.

Today is the feast of Christ the King. Recently some have started to call it the Realm of Christ Sunday. I’m sympathetic with that. Kings are a little monarchical, anti-democratic, paternalistic, and old fashioned. Plus sometimes abusive, corrupt, and war-loving. That’s not how we want to see Jesus. Maybe “realm” is better. We would like Jesus to be more modern. “The reign of Christ is a reign of peace,” as one commentator wrote. Jesus, this guy goes on, “is a model of radical inclusivity. Someone who sees the value God has bestowed on every human being.” Now you know I think all that is mostly true. But that it is not the whole story. And it is not what the people of the Gospels thought when they thought of Jesus as a king. And it is not what many Christians in history have thought. What they wanted from Jesus is what the Israelites wanted. A powerful king like David, strong, good, and mighty. Christ the King.

People want a leader. That’s because our world seems always to be unraveling. Things fall apart. Martin Luther took today’s psalm, Psalm 46, as his inspiration for the fight song of the Reformation, A Mighty Fortress. In the translation we sing, it says that the forces of the world threaten to devour us. Another version, which seems to me to be more like it feels, says that those forces threaten to undo us. It is the struggle of life over death, meaning over chaos, growth over decay. Information over entropy, if you like.

John Calvin, a reformer like Luther, but a lot more gloomy, thought that in his time the cosmos was disintegrating. It does feel like that sometimes. It is the unfortunate way of things. The psalm compares the wobbliness of nations and kingdoms to the upheaval of earthquakes and hurricanes. The verbs it uses are the same for both. In times like his, in times like ours: What can we count on? To whom do we turn?

People want peace and prosperity. And justice. We hope for those things from our leaders, and when we go without those things it is the leaders that we blame. A leader is supposed to be like a shepherd to us. In the time of prophets like Jeremiah, that is what being a king meant. A shepherd guardian.

Leaders—any leader, in the church, commerce, politics, the academy—leaders are not supposed to be in it for themselves. They are not supposed to line their own pockets. They are not supposed to own everything. They are not supposed to disdain the sheep. They are not supposed to favor their buddies. They are not supposed to risk the lives of the sheep recklessly.

Yet that is what they too often do. Jeremiah’s rant in today’s reading is about bad shepherds, bad leaders. Jeremiah condemns Zedekiah and his predecessors. Under their so-called leadership, the nation falters and the people are aimless. You have not attended to my sheep, God says in the reading. I’ll do it myself, God says.

God in Jeremiah promises a king like David, from David’s line, wise and just.Those who heard Jeremiah prophesy imagined a forceful, fine-looking, valiant king as they imagined David to be. A king of all Israel who would restore it and its people.

And a few centuries later there were those who hoped Jesus might be that king. But it did not turn out the way they hoped. They were disappointed.

When Christians speak of Christ the King, they see in Jesus a hint of Jeremiah’s promise. But our hope is no longer for a new and redeeming king of Israel but of a king for the world.

We expect that kings of our nations will be good (not corrupt, cowardly, and so forth). But we do not want our own kings to be nice. Or rather, we want them to be nice to us sheep, but not nice to the wolves. We are not all one flock, we are scattered into nations, and we see other nations as wolves in disguise. As they no doubt see us. So it will not be by our own devices that the realm of Christ will happen. Not by kings of nations.

Nations make much ado, it says in the psalm. God seems uninterested in all that. God in the psalm brings desolations on the earth—[that’s how the pew Bibles put it]—but what gets dissolved are things long overdue for it. Arrows and spears and shields. War. And weapons. All gone.

Luther, writing A Mighty Fortress, saw a battle, a struggle between forces. But for Luther, the enemy was not us, other sheep. For Luther, the enemy was Satan, or evil, or “this world’s tyrant.” The devil and all his empty promises. Luther, who always spoke in earthy terms, was said to wish to spit in the Devil’s eye, and said that the Lord’s Supper gave us sustenance to fight the Devil. He gave evil personality. That feeling we have that the world is coming unravelled, Luther described as the result of a divine agent.

The people want a king. But not for the same reasons that the Israelites badgered Samuel. We want a king to heal the world, to knit up the unravelling. To fight the evil one. To redo what chaos undoes. To lead us. To teach us and to guide us and to make us courageous. To be a model for us. We want peace and prosperity and justice for all of us. We want protection against the corrosion that fear creates. We cannot do this ourselves. We turn to Christ to be our king.

By honoring Christ as King this day, we remind, comfort, and encourage ourselves that the future of the world is not finally in our hands. That God continues to be intimately concerned with the world and us. We are not alone. God is in the midst of us. The lord of hosts is with us.

Working and Eating

Text: 2 Thessalonians 3:6–13

This sermon preached by Katie Wilson, vicar this year at Faith

I would like to begin by thanking Pastor Stein and the community of Faith for the opportunity to stand before you all and share with you from my heart. The honor and the privilege of standing here, today, is an honor and privilege that I never expected to have; I am deeply grateful.

Today I would like to speak about food, and community, and what it means to work and to eat.

I am a new face here at Faith Lutheran, and I have come to stand here in church because of the work I do with Faith Kitchen. Twice a month, beneath the very floor beams on which your feet currently rest, the basement of this building is transformed into a hub of energy and exchange. Food that would have been thrown away has been reclaimed, processed, and redistributed by a fantastic entity that deserves our great respect: the Greater Boston Food Bank. Hundreds of pounds of food come to us: frozen fish, canned fruits, dry goods, meat, pasta, ice cream. This food is overflow or overstock from the FDA, from the co-op, from grocery stores. It was unneeded or unwanted in the eyes of its previous owners and thus was designated as a donation.

Our work in Faith Kitchen begins with this food: we defrost fillets of fish and slice pungent onions, we boil rice and simmer soup, sometimes we peel and chop individual potatoes like precious jewels before they are boiled and drained and mashed by hand—sometimes we open a cardboard box and mix flakes of dehydrated potato product with enough hot water to reconstitute it, to make it food. Sometimes the minestrone is made from scratch with garden grown greens floating in a savory broth coaxed from onions, garlic, tomatoes, oil, and time spent simmering slowly on the stove—sometimes my job is to open one prepackaged box after another and pour the standardized contents into a pot to heat. In either case, whether we are cooking from scratch or embracing convenient shortcuts, cooking is an alchemical process. When we are in the kitchen our business is the transformation of raw material into caloric value that not only satiates hunger and fulfills nutritional needs, but also satisfies the human need for love, attention, care and a place within community.

So now we are getting into the real business of Faith Kitchen. While food is the bedrock of this program it is the people participating that make it what it is. I am not speaking only of those who come week after week to volunteer their time and energy cooking and cleaning and serving, though they of course are essential. At every meal the doors of Faith Kitchen are metaphorically thrown wide open and all are welcome to join us and eat. All are invited to the table. It is reasonable to assume that our demographics reflect a portion of the local homeless population, the disadvantaged and the underserved. Many guests do have homes and jobs, however, and yet are living on a budget that is getting tighter and tighter—so tight they cannot afford the nutrition they and their families need, despite their work and effort. Ever increasing numbers of people who never expected to find themselves hungry may find themselves short this month, and might find respite in a free hot meal. But there is no doorman at the entryway to Faith Kitchen checking off a list of qualifications. There is no judgment, no requirement to be there. All are welcome. All are welcome.

What then do we do with a passage such as the one we read today in Thessalonians, a passage that states “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat”? Reading this passage literally we hear a voice of unequivocal judgment: those living in idleness, those busybodies, and those unwilling to work should not eat. Reflecting on this passage, however, I am called to ask of myself, and of us: What does it mean to work? And what does it mean to eat?

I can say that my work at Faith Kitchen is to cook and to clean, to order food, plan menus, set up tables, even lead the community in prayer. In the other aspects of my life my work is to read, to attend lectures, to write intelligent papers that may or may not have any relevance to my daily life. Perhaps you are a teacher, an accountant, a waste disposal expert. Perhaps you are a musician, a mother or father, the director of an organization, a gardener, or a sales clerk. What I would like to suggest is that however you earn your living, whatever work you do, there is another strain of work that we are constantly presented with. Each and every one of us is presented with the opportunity to do this work every day of our lives. No matter how much or how little money we make, no matter how prestigious or not our title or description or lack thereof may be, I suggest that each day we are faced with the work of bringing attention, and integrity, into every one of our mundane and individual interactions.

What does it mean to work? The work that I am speaking of is paying attention to the attention that we are giving to the task at hand, to the person in front of us, to the prayer being spoken in our hearts. Paying attention to how we pay attention helps us uncover the motives underneath the actions that we take—we may find, for example, that we are peeling potatoes with resentment for being stuck with the dinner shift or with envy for the person making chocolate cake and licking batter off the spoon. Pay attention to how you listen in your next conversation with a family member, close friend, or co-worker: to what extent are you able to purely listen? What does it mean to listen without injecting your own judgment even silently, to listen without interruption, without planning the next thing that you want to say, without waiting until it is your own turn to talk? Pay attention to this.

It is not attention alone that is the work, however. I am often extremely aware that I am making a fool of myself or acting with my own self-interest at heart. Cultivating awareness of intentions and actions is a crucial practice but it is an empty practice if we are not also cultivating integrity and compassion to match this attentive awareness.

What I am most interested in is the way that every minute interaction, every mundane chore and event and relationship, every choice made and word spoken is what constantly creates the world and the community that we inhabit. The means that we employ to bring about our ends are, in fact, constantly creating further means and ends. We are constantly engendering the world around us, and that creation is enacted for better or worse based on each interaction we have. Our work is to make the world around us a better and more beautiful place, and I believe that we do so every time we bring our full attention and full integrity into a relationship, an interaction, a project, a meal, or even a brief and fleeting moment of prayer. This is what it means to work.

But what does it mean to eat? When we eat we are feeding our body fuel, we are giving it the calories it needs to physiologically propel ourselves through the world. But eating is also nourishment, and nourishment happens on many levels. Our hearts and souls and minds must be at rest to enjoy a good meal. The company will hopefully be good or the silence pure and sweet. Pausing for a moment of prayer before beginning helps us to appreciate the food, to take it in more mindfully and gratefully. Pausing for prayer in this way is a means of bringing intention, and attention, to the act of eating, and is a way to acknowledge that the act of consuming food is far more significant than simply loading up on calories as a means to an end. In a communal space, such as the bustling and boisterous basement of Faith Lutheran on meal nights, this act of communal prayer acts as much to unite the community as it does to quiet and center the individual mind. When we pray together, even in silence, and then eat together, we are sending the message to ourselves and to each other: we are in this together. We are not alone. Knowing this is nourishment. Sharing this is nourishment.

When we eat we are nourished by the gifts the earth has heaped upon us. Our attention to the food and our intentions to nourish the community indeed do transform donations that were once considered waste into vital nourishment for many people. But more importantly, it is the intention and integrity of the individuals at Faith Kitchen—volunteers and guests alike—that transform the space from a basement into a community. This community is what enables us to eat, to truly eat, to be truly nourished.

When Thessalonians states that “those who do not work should not eat,” I do not believe this is a condemnation of those guests that we so happily open our doors to each month, and invite in for a free meal. Rather, I would ask if it is possible to be nourished without doing the work of showing up in presence and attention. If one is not able to work—to be present and compassionate with others, to bring attention and integrity to their most mundane actions—is it even possible to be nourished by mundane meals or by the community that surrounds us?

The passage we read from Thessalonians closes with the words: “now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” Likewise I would like to exhort all of us to do this work, quietly and constantly, in each relationship and friendship and task at hand. Lest I sound too much like a “preacher in a pulpit” I would also like to say that these are goals that I aspire towards and to which I constantly fail. Our work is not to be perfect, but to remember the kind of person we would like to be, the kind of world we would like to live in, and to help create it. Each interaction, each meal, each moment, presents us with the opportunity to do this work, and thus to eat, and to be nourished. May we all work. May we all eat. And may we “not be weary in doing what is right,” little by little, step by step, word by word, and meal by meal.

How Will I Look in Heaven

Text: Luke 20:27-38

At the center of Christianity is renewal. Jesus brings renewal to the world and to each of us. Things that are bad will become good. What is broken will be fixed. Jesus teaches about living a good life, about being a good person. But those teachings guide us to change ourselves and thus the world for the better. Through Jesus, things will be different. That difference is a cause of and also a result of our trust in God and in Jesus. Jesus saves the world and saves us by changing us.

When people talk about the effect of being Christian, their sentences are full of words that mean renewal: return, reborn, refresh, repair, restore. And resurrection. These words are so full of life and joy and hope that they seem about to pop. All those “re-“ words inspire us for two reasons.

First, they make us realize that we are made for better things. We are not created broken and needing to be whipped into goodness (as if that were possible). We were created good and became broken. Inside the potential of the world and inside the potential of our souls is God’s goodness. But it has somehow been corrupted, become cloudy, distorted. So the evil in the world is a mistake, not fundamental. Or if you were to speak like Martin Luther, done to us by Satan, the Evil One, the Lord of Darkness. Or like the apostle Paul—who taught much to Luther—by the power of Sin. Paul and Luther are trying to describe the same thing: innate goodness perverted. We are not designed to suffer, but to live contentedly and joyfully. That is what God intended and does intend.

And second, these words give us hope that what we were designed to be can in fact someday be. We can be renewed—made as intended again. We can be restored—made whole again. We can be refreshed—made vital again. We can reborn—start again.

Things sometimes do not go so well for us. Circumstances, chemistry, poor choices, natural events, forces in and out of our control—for whatever reason, our lives are sometimes not so great. Something happens that shouldn’t; something does not happen that should. We feel beaten down for a moment, or for much longer, and cannot escape. Sometimes things look bleak. In these moments, it is easy to think that the way we are now will be the way we are going to be forever. That the future will be today all over again. In those times, renewal seems to be a bad joke. Rebirth, longed for, seems unattainable. No joy. We imagine God to be powerless to restore us, or maybe just uninterested.

In today’s Gospel story, the Sadducees try to make a fool of Jesus. They do not believe in the resurrection of the dead (unlike the Pharisees, as I said earlier, who do). They want to trip Jesus up, so they invent this far-fetched story of a woman marrying seven brothers in a row. If they are all resurrected when they die, then to whom will she be married, they ask Jesus. This is a joke. You can imagine them congratulating themselves on their sneaky, clever example. High fives all around. That’s a good one, they all say. They are laughing at Jesus.

But Jesus takes them seriously. Their question is a variant on a more modern version: What will I look like in heaven? Heaven being, in this view (as in the Sadducees’), like earth only better. Which of the many ways I’ve been and seen in my life will I be in heaven? Will I be old and creaky? Young and foolish? Will the extravagant part of me, that I like, be diminished? Will my rough edges, only some of which I don’t like, be ground away? What clothes will I wear, if any?

What Jesus says to the Sadducees—and what we hear for ourselves in this story—is that they are thinking that resurrection is just like here and now, only longer. That the eternal future is just like today—more or less—over and over again. But Jesus says it is not. It is different. The Sadducees think of God in a tiny, constricted sort of way. They see God’s options as limited. They lack imagination.

The strange thinking of the Sadducees is not that different from ours when we feel stuck in the present, when we are out of hope, and see the future as an extension of the present. It represents a kind of cosmic discouragement. The Sadducees’ absurd story of the brothers and the widow is designed to shut out the future. They are doing what we do when we tell ourselves that forces in the world or in ourselves make a different future unlikely, impossible.

Jesus teachings, and especially in the Gospel of Luke, counter that discouragement. Jesus teaches that the last shall be first, that the lowly shall stand, that the hungry will be filled, that the poor will be satisfied. These are stories of new futures. Captivity will be freedom, enemies will be as family, greed will be generosity. Sadness will be happiness.

Jesus encourages us—as he did the Sadducees—to expect more, to expect much, from God. Christianity teaches hope for a transformed world. A world not in which the poor get riches, but one in which there are no poor and rich. Not one in which the wounds of war are healed, but one in which there is no war. Not one in which the hungry are given food, but in which no one goes hungry. The goal of the ministry of Jesus is to transform the world. The effect of the ministry of Jesus is to transform each of us, and thereby transform the world.

It does not require magical thinking to trust we can be renewed, restored, refreshed, reborn. Resurrected. On the contrary, to think that anything is static goes against our knowledge of the way things work in the universe and of our own experience. A member of Faith once said that you never know what this church will be like six months from now. The spirit moves this place. And moves in our lives. Even death does not change that. The world is dynamic. We know that the stars in the heaven are not fixed, that all things are in motion, that movement in time is the rule of creation. And we know that is true in our lives.

We do not need to be like the Sadducees. We do not need to let our inability to see how the future will unfold hem in our hopes for new life.

Coming Down

Text: Luke 18:9-14

This parable is not for everyone. Jesus did not tell this parable for all to hear. He told the parable to some, it says. Some who trusted in themselves and regarded others with contempt. Perhaps a small group. Perhaps not.

This story is about two sinners. Two men who sin. And two who are favored by God. Two men who are blessed. The same two men. A Pharisee and a tax collector.

The Pharisee is blessed by being good. The Pharisees were a bunch of liberal, pretty inclusive, religiously observant faithful people. They had the blessings of living a life a faith, the confidence that comes from knowing that you are known by God. The joy of the discipline of a faithful life and the strength that living a life founded on faith can be. The Pharisee is thankful, generous, nearly always mindful of God and God’s ethics. He seems in this story to be content and happy. What we hope for in our own lives of faith.

Yet the Pharisee is a sinner. He personifies the problem in the story. He is the one, we soon figure out, who embodies the two sins that are the point of this parable.

The first sin is that he trusts in himself to be righteous. Which means that he believes his many blessings are a result of his own effort. He is good because of the person he is, the work he has done, his generosity, his careful living. The Pharisee is like us when we think that gifts of body, mind, or character—being smart, or healthy, or kindly—are something that we have been responsible for on our own. God favors the Pharisee, he thinks, because of the way he acts. His blessings in life are proof of that. And in his arrogance he sees—his second sin—he concludes that those who are not blessed are condemned by God. And so rightly—by his own judgment—he despises those not like him. “I thank you, God, that I am not like other people.” People like that tax collector over there.

The tax collector is a sinner. Tax collectors at that time were in general not nice people. They were not government employees, but independent contractors given a license or concession by Rome. They paid an upfront fee to Rome. Their business was to make a profit beyond that fee in any way they could. They were known as greedy, nasty, extortionists. Rogues and thieves, as the Pharisee calls them.

Yet the tax collector is blessed. He is justified, as it says in Luke, meaning that he has it right. He is humble before God. He knows in his heart that it is God to whom he must answer. He acknowledges, unlike the Pharisee, that he has made a mess of things, and he desires for God’s blessing in spite of his deeds, not because of them.

Both of these men seek to be righteous. Righteous is a strange sort of word. It means “fine,” as in “what a fine day.” Or “what a perfect day,” but not “a perfect score.” It does not mean “good,” as in “be a good boy,” but it does mean “good” as in “it is good to be here.” Or “good” as God said when God created the world. It means to be right with God. In that way, it stands for all the ways there are to be at peace, content, “actualized” as people used to say. To be righteous is to be as God created us to be and as we each of us always wanted to be. To be good, to be fine, to be happy.

Most of our lives are a little gritty, and little out of sorts. Things are a little out of key, off color, clumsy. We get tripped up and trip over ourselves. This kind of minor daily suffering is the opposite of righteousness.

Justice, which comes from the same word as righteousness in the Bible, is the setting of things right. To right what is askew, or off kilter. So we have social justice, economic justice, ecological justice. God is righteous because it seems that God’s deeds match what we imagine God’s nature to be. God is just because God’s intent is that things will be made fine.

The tax collector goes home justified because he has given himself up to the way of things as they should be, to the way of God. For the moment, at least. Who knows what he did later. It does not say. It does not matter. The Pharisee, for all his claims of righteousness, is not. Because he has given himself up to nothing. He goes his own way. And we who hear this story feel it to be so. In spite of our knowing that the Pharisee is a good man and the tax collector a nasty one, we can see that in this story, at least, it is the tax collector who is blessed and leaves the story in peace. But the Pharisee just leaves.

In the parable the Pharisee looks up and the tax collector looks down. The Pharisee looks to heaven (though it does not for sure say so), and the tax collector looks to the earth. In our Sunday worship, in the dialog (the beginning of the eucharistic prayer), the minister says “lift up your hearts,” and the congregation responds, “we lift them to the Lord.” A scholarly colleague said last week at a clergy gathering that this is unfortunate wording. He prefers “open your hearts,” and “we open them to the Lord.” So we are going to try that today. His point is that, especially for Lutherans, our job is not to lift ourselves up to God, ascending, sort of, to the heavens. To become divine. Our job is to be creatures of the earth, opening ourselves to the God who comes to be with us. This being with us is what Jesus did. This is what God does in almost all the stories in the Bible. We are on an adventure with God, but the instigator and guide of this divine journey is God, not us.

The Pharisee in his arrogance wants—expects, maybe?—to be exalted. To be made more heavenly and pure. The tax collector knows that he is always a sinner, but that God is always with him nonetheless. It is not helpful in prayer to prove ourselves to God, to impress God. God is already impressed. Or not. But to call on God to be present in us.

We come here hoping for something. You might say we come hoping for righteousness. We come for some transformation, some new thing, new way to live and to be. Not to be immaculate. But to be as earthy as God made us and at peace with all things, ourselves, and others. That is a big hope. As in all transformations of this sort, we start by acknowledging that we live in sin and suffering—what the tax collector did and the Pharisee did not—and that it is beyond us by ourselves to transform ourselves—as the tax collector realized and the Pharisee did not. To open ourselves, asking God to transform us, and not to leave as we arrived, unchanged.

This parable is not for everyone. Not all will hear this parable. For those who do trust in themselves that they are righteous, who trust that they can right themselves, this parable is empty of meaning. For those who do not suffer, for those who not sin, for those who are content, this parable offers nothing. But for the rest of us sinners, it reminds us that we may open our hearts to God in expectation of new life.

Striving with God

This sermon preached by Craig Simenson, a leader at Faith Kitchen and vicar at Faith last year.

What does it mean to strive with God? Where does it happen, and who can we expect to be when it’s all over?

Jacob, “the swindler.” Jacob, the one wrestling all his life. Struggling with his brother even within their mother’s womb. Jacob, the one tumbling out at birth, still holding on to Esau’s heel.

Jacob, the one left all alone now on the banks of the river Jabbok. Undoubtedly, agonizing over what daybreak will bring to him, and how he will ever face his twice-swindled brother and live. Jacob, left only with himself. Left only to wrestle in the dark, against the one who refuses to tell us his name. Jacob, the one who will not let go, who will not give up.

The one who prevails and yet cannot walk away from this so-called victory whole. Jacob, who sees the face of God and lives—A better man for the encounter, maybe. But, most certainly, a man who is only able to walk away limping as he goes.

This wounded Jacob, this one now known to us as Israel, offers us a different vision of what it means to strive with God and prevail. A vision that might look very different from how we imagine our lives should go. A vision for ourselves and what it means to not give up—for what it means to be faithful—that might look very different from the way we hope it will work out for us in the end. A different vision that perhaps challenges us to let go of the idea that if we keep on working at what’s wrong in our lives, that if we hold on in the struggle, we will finally win unscathed and completely changed. That we’ll finally become the people we always thought we should be, the kind of people that we thought God always wanted us to be. That, if we’re faithful and don’t give up hope, we’ll finally be able to fix everything that is wrong in our lives—that we’ll be healthy again, that our loved ones won’t be sick anymore, that our once-happy relationships will be just the way they were before, that we’ll be able to leave our nagging doubts behind us, that we can finally just shut all of our problems up and shut them out of our lives.

In Jacob, we are called to let go of the idea that striving with God and prevailing means that our fears and doubts, our grief, hurts and disappointments in life will suddenly vanish. Called to let go of the idea that prevailing in the trials of our lives always means walking stridently forward. Called to let go of the expectation that getting it right will finally mean getting our feet back under us again.

All of this is not to say that transformation and healing does not happen. All of this is not to say that hope does not matter in our lives. But it is to say that, at a fundamental level, transformation does not change our woundedness. We cannot wrestle with God and ourselves, and expect that our victory will mean an end to the struggle and suffering in our lives. We cannot expect that we will endure the trials of our lives to one day find that all of our hurting has finally left us alone.

Rather, Jacob shows us that being faithful, that not giving up in our struggling and striving, finally means finding that we are forever marked by the wounds of that great struggle. Seeing the face of God and living to walk away from it means that our woundedness will most often be more evident than it ever was before. Seeing the face of God is to see that we have always been limping, that we come to victory in life and death already beaten.

This is what it often means to live from day to day. This is what it means to journey with God. For Christians, this, too, is what it means to pray. For we come to our prayers limping as we go. Alongside our joys and celebrations, we pray listening to what cries out in our lives. We pray paying attention to our wounds, to what is hurting, to what is broken inside of us and around us beyond repair. Wrestling with them as we go. Holding onto them even in the dark, even when we cannot name them. Embracing them, holding onto them in love even when they break us.

We pray faithfully limping. In faith, trusting that God’s justice will somehow prevail. Somehow trusting in a love that runs to meet us even as we limp ahead.

Trusting in a victorious God who comes to us already beaten, a God forever marked by the wounds of our great struggle. Christ lifted up before us not on the throne of judgment but on the bloodied tree, a body broken, with wounds that not even resurrection could erase. A God—holes in his hands, wound at his side—limping to meet us, too.

Alleluia.