Is God With Us or Not?

Text: Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-42

Their fear obliterated their memory and it erased their gratitude. Without water in the desert, they forgot that God had freed them from slavery, had defeated their foes, and had fed them as they searched for the land to which God had sent them. Now, thirsty, impatient, and terrified, they complained to Moses: where is God? Is God among us—or not?

Fear drives out the memory of God’s good acts and intentions. But we cannot escape being afraid. We have had times in our own deserts, parched, exhausted, lost. We will have them again. That’s why we tell ourselves the story of God and us over and over again. That’s why the God of Israel is named “God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Why Jesus is named in the opening worship prayer as “Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.”

It is why we hear these stories Sunday after Sunday for our whole lives. It is why we read the Bible, the story not only of God or only of a people, but of God and us, God’s people, together. It is why the Baptism rite that we will soon celebrate starts by recounting God’s creation, God’s deeds, God’s redemption of Israel, and the baptism, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And it is why we relate the story before we share Holy Communion.

Wandering in the desert, the people demand water from Moses. It is not an unreasonable demand, for without water they will all die. And they complain about his leadership. Has he sold them a bill of goods? Has he brought them here only to kill them, and all they have, and even their children? Moses has promised them freedom and prosperity, but so far the freedom has been the freedom to suffer and the prosperity a mirage. Yet Moses speaks for God in this book, and Moses can see as well as we can that it is God’s promise that they now doubt. Where was God?

Is God among us—or not? It is the mark of the Israelites’ despair that they wondered not only whether God was no longer with them, but—with that last little addition: “or not”—whether God had ever been with them. Have they erred in interpreting all of history? Perhaps, after all, God is uninterested in humans. Perhaps, against all the teachings of their faith, God had turned away from them. And they were alone.

It is a tragic moment. And though quickly turned about when God through Moses brings water flowing from a rock and they all drink, the terror of the moment remains in the minds of the wanderers and the tellers of this story. For Israelites are God’s people and God is their God. There is no story of Israel that does not include God. And the deepest sadness of Israel has been—as it is in this story—to think that God—whose existence is never the question—that God has abandoned them.

Centuries later, Jesus walks to the well in Samaria. It is the heat of the day, and he too is thirsty. The fate of Israel is uncertain in these times, divided within itself and occupied by the Romans. It has been a long and at times a dreary story that has unfolded from the time Moses struck that rock in the desert. There have been ups and downs, and now is one of the downs. The years have not been good to Israel. Things have not worked out well, Israel has been torn apart, exiled, resettled, corrupted, and conquered. The Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed once and, by the time John wrote this Gospel, destroyed again. Is God among us—or not?

This is John’s question in his Gospel, and the woman’s question, too. Once she decides Jesus is a prophet, and maybe more than a prophet, the first thing she asks is a question about God’s presence. I see you are a prophet, she says. So: where is God? Is God up on that mountain—where the Samaritans worship—or is God in that city of Jerusalem—where the Jews worship? None of the above, Jesus tells her. He tells her: God is here, right in front of you. We are longing for the messiah, she says. Jesus says to her: “It’s me!” The one standing here with you.

Jesus in John, more than in the other three Gospels, is God among us. Jesus is here, in this world, staying here. In John, Jesus resides, stays, remains—the same word used over and over. Where are you staying, the first disciples ask him. Come and see. Come and see, the Samaritan woman tells her friends. And Jesus stays with them awhile. And they come to believe him.

For all his divinity—emphasized in John—still, Jesus in this Gospel is committed to this world, and the salvation that Jesus brings is one that affects this world now, at the moment. In John, more so than in the other Gospels, Jesus has affection for the world. He makes wine from water. He cries for his friend Lazarus. He prays emphatically for the well-being of his friends, the disciples. After his death and resurrection, he hangs around with them, and in the end they all share breakfast.

For John, there is no faith if God is not among us. Our faith and trust in God develop over time in relationship, just as they do between people. How can we believe in and trust a being whom we do not know? And how can we know a being who is not here with us? The story of faith is first: presence; then second: experience; and at last, third: belief.

The church is a steward of God’s presence. That is, through common action, and through repetition and rite and testimony we remind each other that God is among us—yes. Even in the face of inevitable fear and doubt. So it is that in the ceremony we are all about to take part in, we promise to “join with others in worshipping God.” All together members of the body of Christ.

We cannot remain free of desert times, but our fear need not destroy our memory of God, who is here, in this body, among us.

Tempted to be Perfect

Text: Genesis 3:1-7

It is tempting to read this passage in Matthew as a call to us to be perfect.

We are all tempted by one thing or another, we think, and in this Gospel story Jesus is tempted by the same things. One view is that we all need food, we all need safety, and we all need to have some control over our lives. So those are the things with which the tempter tests Jesus. A darker view of the temptations is that represent our desire to magically force the world to our will, to be the center of something spectacular, and to have power over all who would thwart us.

Either way, in the story Jesus is tempted as we are, by the things we are. But the difference between us and Jesus is that we succumb to temptations and Jesus does not. We are human, after all, and sin. But Jesus, who is supposed to be a model for us, is perfect. We, if you buy this interpretation, are supposed to be perfect, too. But I don’t buy it, and I don’t think Jesus would, either.

Perfection is a tricky sort of thing.

When a couple gives birth to new baby, or adopts one, you hear the parents say, “He’s just perfect,” “she’s just perfect.” The couple’s friends see a wonderful child, but sometimes a little bald or a little flushed or whatever—signs of humanity—wonderful but not perhaps perfect. It may be that the eyes of the new parents are blinded. It may be that they see perfection where the rest of us see only really-good.

It may be that parents see more poorly than others. Or maybe instead they see better. And that perfection is what they see. Their child, though as flawed as humanity can be, is perfect.

When God created the heavens and the earth—in Genesis, before the Garden episode we just heard about—when God created each day, at the end of the day God pronounced it good. God said in Hebrew: It is Tov. Which means a little more than good. It means good like everything is working fine and all the parts seem to fit the way they are supposed to. It means perfect, like when you finish a project and you’re pretty happy about it and you say, “perfect.” God made the world, and God said, “perfect. It’s just perfect.” Perfect for what it is, like a perfect new child is perfect—just so, creation was perfect.

The actions of the man and the woman did not undo that. A child grows and the parents still look and see a perfect child. Even though as people grow up they do things that are messed up, they are no less children of their parents, who see them as at the same time both flawed and perfect. Does God see creation with eyes any less loving?

The story of the events in the garden is a story written from our point of view. The point of view of humanity now. How in the world did we get to this state of affairs? In a sense, the garden story is a story of growing up. And like all good growing up stories, the key moment is the discovery of evil. The story doesn’t so much explain things as name them. We humans feel the force of evil. Something that is greater than our own individual inclinations to be bad. Something more cosmic than that.

The story is a story of discovery. An unfortunate discovery, for sure. The man and woman eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Not just the tree of knowledge: this is not about wisdom. And not the tree of evil. The tree is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What the man and woman know now that they didn’t before is that evil exists, that is causes harm and hurt, and that it is different from good. And different from God. And they discover that humans are somehow caught in the interaction.

What changes is what they know, not what they are or who they are. Which is mortal children of God. This story is not the story of the beginning of sin. We do not learn from this story that sin is brought into the world by the actions of the woman and man, in spite of what the Apostle Paul argues. All we do know is that the are both tempted by a serpent, which most of us, correctly I think, make out to be the devil, the evil one. And that they succumb. They are changed. But they are no more changed in type or nature than we are as children or as our children are.

We often think of sin as some kind of unfortunate add-on. An ugly and burdensome accessory. Or like a few extra pounds that we carry. Something we can get rid of as easily as we can rid ourselves of extra weight by dieting: something difficult but possible. We sometimes look at the saints (or sainted people we know) as we look at the “after” models in diet ads. People who have amazingly prevailed.

But sin is not shed by spiritual diets. That’s what Luther found when he decided that all his good works (all his diet-like discipline) weren’t helping him. Sin is of us. That does not mean we are bad. Only that we are creatures. We sin.

God loves us for what we are. I’m sure you have heard that before. But this does not mean that God loves us in spite of our sins. Not that God loves our clean souls that happen to be covered in mud at the moment. God loves us in our sins, not in spite of them. God loves us because we are still perfect, each still God’s child.

We love one another for our vulnerabilities, not in spite of them. That’s why, I suspect, people love you. People love you for your vulnerabilities. Not because you are so great, but because you are great and also you are not always so great. God loves us because we are great and not so great.

The story in Matthew is not about us being perfect. It is not about us at all. It is about Jesus, who he is, his identity, and the life that he is about to enter. It is a temptation story, but the temptation that he faces in the desert and in his life is not the temptation to be perfect. Which is not a problem for Jesus. Jesus feels in the desert the strong urges that all people feel. Eating when hungry, worrying about being safe, trying to keep things under control. Jesus feels, in this beginning of his ministry, what it is to be human.

And the temptation of Jesus is to give in to his desire to be human. To be like an ordinary human. To be only so brave and not braver. To live a long and happy life in the company of his best friends. To avoid his mission and destiny. To avoid the inevitable suffering and the cross ahead.

When Jesus dismisses the tempter: Away with you, Satan!—he uses the same words he uses later to dismiss Peter. Get behind me, Satan! Peter offers what the tempter offers. Human living. Peter and the tempter hold out to Jesus what only he cannot have: a mortal and flawed life just like ours. Jesus, like earthly leaders, only more so, is alone.

The desire to be perfect is Satan’s call. He tempts Jesus and us with the prospect of ignoring, escaping, or dismissing the world. His call appears in many voices of the world suggesting that we can be perfect. They are, as we say in baptism, the devil’s empty promises. They call to us. But God’s voice is not one of them.

Ups and Downs

Text: Matthew 17:1-9 (Transfiguration)

Life has its ups and downs.

On the upside is upbeat. Things are looking up. It’s uplifting because we’re flying high. Up is where the penthouses are and the desks of the big-shots. Upgraded.

And up is where the heavens are. Up is where Jesus went when he ascended, and Elijah went up, too. Jesus rose from the dead and now Jesus is up there, sitting at the right hand of the father. Up on the mountain is where Moses went to get the law. And up on the mountain is where Jesus went with a couple of his disciples to meet with Moses and Elijah. Up is where the word of God came from: up is where God spoke from the cloud and up is where the Spirit came from like a dove. Up is the direction in which we lift our hearts in thanksgiving and hands and voices in praise. Up is where God lives.

On the downside is downtrodden. In the dumps. Where we hit bottom before we turn up again. Down is a downer. Down is where the mailroom is and the basement apartments. Down is the dark underground. Down is where we get down to work and down and dirty.

And down is the place of death. Down is where Jesus went after being crucified. It is where he went when, as we say in the creed, he descended into hell. Down is where the story goes after the mountaintop. Back down to the world of flesh and suffering and joyful desire. Down is where Moses came to find his people worshipping a golden calf idol. Down is where Jesus came to walk to his death. Down is where we live.

Matthew, the Gospel writer, is interested in high places and highfalutin ideas. In Matthew, Jesus’ great sermon is made from a mountain—known therefore as the sermon on the mount. In contrast, in Luke’s version, Jesus preaches down on the plain. In Luke, the ones who are blessed are poor and the hungry. In Matthew, they are poor in spirit and hunger for righteousness. In Luke and in Mark, the followers of Jesus call him master or rabbi, meaning teacher. In Matthew, they call Jesus Lord.

Is Jesus an up kind of person or a down kind of one? Is he mostly a divine creature who lives in the clouds, one who even in his lifetime hung around with the likes of a timeless Moses and Elijah? Or is he mostly immanuel, God with us, down here in an earthly and earthy way? Which is primary?

The dogmatic answer to this is that Jesus is 100% divine and 100% human; that is what we teach. But the dogma is a knife edge from which people—who are not easy with mysterious paradox—tend to fall to one side or the other. As even the early writings—the Gospels—demonstrate.

The centuries have not settled the issue. Five hundred years ago Martin Luther and his contemporaries were arguing about where Jesus was now that he had ascended to the right hand of God. The context was a debate about whether or not Jesus was in the bread that we eat in Holy Communion. There were those who said that if Jesus was sitting next to God, then he was up in heaven and could not be down here on earth, in the bread. But Luther said, first, that Jesus could be anywhere he felt like, as often as he felt like it, even if it meant two places at once. But more, Luther had a very down to earth view of Jesus. Jesus was a friend of the earth, of us, poor earthy creatures, and was glad to continue to be with us down here, in whatever form.

This up and down business about Jesus and God is not inevitable. That is, the position of God and us does not have to be along a vertical axis, God high and we low. This notion is not something that is in the nature of things human and divine. It is just the way our imaginations picture it. The home of God could just have easily been off to the unreachable left or right. At the end of the earth, for example, beyond the edge of the sea, as gods sit in some other faiths. Or in a secret cave. Or in the middle of the earth, or an emerald city, or in an alternate reality.

What we think about God is that God is hard to reach in normal life by normal methods of travel. God is separate. Up in the heavens is a good spot because we cannot travel up by our own means. We cannot fly. Gravity pulls us down again. When we try to fly, as Icarus did, we are destined to fail, as Icarus did, a sign of hubris, thinking himself to be above the life of mortals. We cannot fly to heaven on our own.

You may wonder why today’s Gospel story—called the Transfiguration—should merit a Sunday of its own. In the three-year cycle of readings, it appears every year, along with only a handful of other special days like Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. Every other story has to wait three years before it returns. The Transfiguration does appear in each of the three first Gospels, which means that in the earliest Christian tradition the story was considered important and widespread.

The story doesn’t really add much to our or the disciple’s knowledge of Jesus. They already have decided and declared that he is the Son of God. It does not provide decisive new evidence. It does not advance the plot. Jesus has already established that he comes from the spiritual line of the Moses (the law) and Elijah (the prophets). At best, it confirms Jesus’ provenance, his pedigree, his class of people. So maybe evidence is not the purpose or the point.

People find the transfiguration story to be disturbing and confusing. That is because it seems magical and mystical. It has ghosts in it, and clouds, and bright lights, and voices from God that speak directly to some humans. And Jesus seems comfortable with that. It’s the disciples who are freaked out.

It is not that Jesus does something extraordinary. In all the Gospels he has already presided over some major miracles, healing people, feeding multitudes, raising people from the dead. The transfiguration is not more miraculous.

But it is less earthy. This is not a man of the people doing things with divine assist. What happens is way beyond people-things. It makes Jesus, who seemed to be down here, up there. That’s one reason that Peter wants to build those booths: he wants this experience to be made more mundane, daily, attached. And in the end, Jesus does come back down here. Not only is it not his time to stay on the mountain, as some argue, it is not his job.

The story of the transfiguration says: there are parts of Jesus that are not human, in a major way. We cannot elide this or ignore it. The story of the transfiguration is put right smack in the middle of the Gospels, up on a mountain. It is in the way. We cannot get from the ministry of Jesus to his passion without going through the transfiguration.

There are many who see Jesus in daily things. Luther did, and likewise Lutherans do by tradition and teaching. Jesus is earthy, a person of the earth, as we are. People discover Jesus in events of their lives, in compassion, in stories, in teachings.

But many discover Jesus in a moment that cannot be explained easily, not connected to daily events. Mysterious moments. Those discoveries are powerful. They can support one’s faith life for a long time. Sometimes, when things get rough and dubious, the memory of that moment is all that keeps one faithful and true. It can be all that one has to keep one trying to know God and to praise and thank God. It can sustain us when the life of this earth is too hard, or vicious, or disappointing, or crazy.

We are creatures of the earth, down here. But we need the food of the heavens, up there. We made in God’s image are persons, as Jesus was, of divine and mortal ancestry. Mystery is as essential to us as pragmatism.

We, like the disciples, abide in two worlds. After hearing the voice in the cloud, the disciples fall down in fear. But Jesus touches them. Rise up, he says. And then he says, come back down with me.

Pulled This Way and That Way

Text: Matthew 6:24-34
Other texts: Psalm 131

The season of Lent is nearly upon us. Ash Wednesday is ten days away. On that day we are reminded of our humble origins in the dust of the earth, given life breathed into us by God. It is a day of humility that begins a season of humility.

Lent, like Advent, is a time reserved in the church year for soul-searching contemplation. It is a time to look hard at ourselves, at how things are going, at how we are doing. And it is a time to pray and think about how we would like things to be, how, maybe we would like things to be different. It is a time to get back in sync if we are out of sync, to be restored if we are bone-weary, to be quiet if we live in a cacophony. It is a time to be sane if things seem insane.

A longing to be at peace is an ancient longing. So there are disciplines, actions, that people perform during Lent that help them come to peace. Some of them—alms-giving, for example—have fallen into disuse. But “giving up” something for Lent remains. People give things up during Lent.

You might think of this as a chore. Or you might think of it as a great relief. An opportunity to lay down some of the burdens, obligations, and desires that you always carry with you. These burdens can be a distraction, making it impossible for us to think as clearly as the season of Lent asks us to. They are like little buzzing bugs that keep us from being mindful of ourselves and of God, keep us from loving those we love, from seeing the gifts and beauty in the world and in people around us.

We are invited by today’s readings to think about the things that rule us, that rule our lives. Perhaps you think that there are no such things. That you are not ruled by anything other than yourself. That you are the boss of you. Perhaps that is so for you. Perhaps you never feel the need for comforting by someone outside yourself. Perhaps you never look for direction outside of yourself. Perhaps you are self-assured; you never need reassuring.

Or perhaps instead you feel that you are small and the world is big, and that there are forces that draw you and push you—more or less—and that you are subject to them.

Last week Katie reminded us in her sermon that it is not our job to judge. We were invited to give up judging (and not just for Lent). It is God’s job. This week the Bible reminds us that it is not our job to provide for ourselves. It is God’s job. This seems harder. We can imagine that we can go without judging (though I doubt we can). It is harder to imagine that we can go without toiling and reaping.

Jesus in the Gospel is not suggesting that we do not need to eat and drink and be sheltered. God knows you need these things, Jesus says. These very things are the things God says we must provide for one another in the “goats and sheep” last judgment episode later in Matthew. We are animals; we need sustenance and security. But are we to let our striving for them rule us? And if not, what will? Which is the master, Jesus asks, that we serve?

Psalm 131 captures our deep longing for Home with a capital “H.” A place of total peace. Of safety. Of soft embrace. Like a child with its mother. Still, my soul, and make it quiet. Put aside pride, haughtiness, overwhelming matters, things too hard. Let my soul be still.

But in the psalm the child on its mother’s breast is not nursing, but is weaned, no longer totally dependent. It is not naive in the ways of the world. It is experienced. It has, we can imagine, come back to its mother after having been away on adventures, discovery, and struggles.

That’s what children do (it is built in; even monkeys do it). That’s what people do. We march out confident, curious, eager. Later, maybe frightened, maybe confused, maybe just tired, we hope to come back to a source of life for us. We need a base camp, a home base. An “all in free” safe spot. The place in which our souls can rest quietly.

But what if there are two such places? Competing places. Two masters, as Jesus calls them. Two mothers to which we might return. What then? Can there be two rocks on which our lives stand? Can there be two foundations? Can there be two mothers? In particular, can one of them be God and the other of them be money (and the stuff that money is good for)? Can we hang precariously balanced between the two, like between two poles of a magnet? No, Jesus says. You will hate one and love the other, Jesus says. They make different demands for the same you. They provide different comforts, different hopes, different guidance.

How will we know which to choose? For it seems that Jesus is giving us a choice to be made. We know in our brains, since we are faithful people, we should choose God. But in our hearts? What does our heart tell us?

Imagine you have two sweethearts vying for your affection and that you must choose only one. You ask yourself: to which are you more attracted? Or which would you rather please? To which do you turn when afraid? Or which are you most afraid of losing? What if the two are God and money?

Which is home to you, with a capital “H”?

If this were an easy question to answer, they wouldn’t be talking about it in the Bible like they do. If it were easy to trust in God instead of money, Jesus wouldn’t be telling us so energetically to choose God. He wouldn’t be making elaborate arguments about lilies and birds. He wouldn’t tell us as frequently as he does not to worry (the most frequently stated of all the commands of Jesus).

If this is a good time for soul-searching, as it might be for you, it is a good time to ask ourselves: what draws us most strongly? For you, which makes a better mother? If this is a time to get back in sync and to restore our weary bones, which master best shows us the way?

Which has brought you life and sanity? Which has brought you comfort? Which has been more reliable? Which stills your soul and brings you peace? Which, when you go there, feels like you are home?

Open Hands

Text: Matthew 5:38-48

Preacher: Katie Wilson, vicar at Faith.

Thank you all for having me here. Thank you All for being here.

Today I would like to speak about equality, and inclusivity, and what those words mean to me in light of our gospel reading: to “give to everyone” and to “Love your enemies.”

I have preached before about the work we do in Faith Kitchen, providing hot meals and a shared community, and the way that the doors of Faith Lutheran are “metaphorically thrown wide open, and all are welcome.” In a way, on these meal nights, we are trying to put into practice the words of the Gospel, the words we have read today in Matthew: “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow.”

Give to Everyone. Do not refuse Anyone. This is a Big task that we have at hand.

When we make the statement at Faith Kitchen, or in worship at Faith Lutheran, that All are Welcome, we are aligning ourselves with this same sense of radical equality that Jesus exhorts us to in the gospel. We will not refuse anyone. Every Sunday, you will find printed in your bulletin these words: “All are welcome. Christ invites all to share in his holy supper. None will be turned away from God’s table.” These words, printed again and again, do more than communicate to a new visitor the inclusivity that Faith offers. While some might gloss these words over or simply expect them and take them for granted, for others—those who have been marginalized or turned away in the past—those words “All are Welcome” might be the hinge on which their whole world swings. Yet these words do more than inform the new comers, these words, if we let them, can inform us again and again of our commitment to equality.

I have been reflecting, though, on this notion of “equality;” on what assumptions we carry along when engaging it as a concept, and on how far we are willing to extend it to others. It is easy enough to say that All are Welcome. Or to say that every human being on earth deserves equal rights, human rights, equal treatment, God’s love. I think it is even easy enough to believe in this wholeheartedly.

My question, then, is about the specifics of putting it into practice: day by day, minute by minute, and keeping it in practice even when facing people who do not make it easy, even when facing people that make it very, very hard. When we say or believe that everyone deserves equality and that everyone is included in the spectrum of the Gospel’s commandment to give and to love, then that means we must maintain that commitment throughout the myriad challenges of our lives. It means that we must include the disruptive and threatening guests in our picture of who is welcome at our table. It means, on a communal and global level, that we must include even the people that make it excruciatingly Hard to do this practice: because total inclusivity includes the violent, and the cruel, it includes the worst things we can imagine inhabiting our world.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”

Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. This means to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute others, who wound others, this means to pray for the ones who make hate and fear boil up in your throat like black tar. Pray for them, and meanwhile, ask yourself if they are Welcome. Are they included in your vision of God’s table? Do they have the equal right to God’s love?

We are running up now against the edge of “equality” that’s been troubling me. When we say “All are Welcome” it is not just an invitation to others. It is not a performative act with lines of small print hidden at the bottom saying “All are Welcome—unless you are angry, mean, scary, hateful, hurtful, of this race or that sex, wearing an atrocious coat, or too noisy when everyone else is quiet.” When we contemplate deeply the notion of equality, or the statement “All are Welcome,” it is a challenge to ourselves to examine our innermost landscapes, our own most subtle aversions, our deepest beliefs. It can be a call to put these beliefs into action, to practice what we think we believe.

Because—obviously—it is extremely difficult to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It is entirely appropriate that as we ponder these words and contemplate this type of complete inclusivity, that we ask ask of ourselves: How? How do I practice this, how could I refuse no one, how would I love and pray for someone who persecutes, who hurts my family? This is a never ending question and I do not propose to answer it definitively. In contemplating it, I recalled a poem I have long loved that doesn’t answer this question either—but it helps to keep me asking. It was written by the 16th century Spanish Carmelite Nun, Teresa of Avila:

Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

There are many venues in which we can practice letting our hands become the hands of Christ. Giving to those who beg from us, turning the left cheek if someone strikes the right, offering our cloak to one who takes our coat—these are actions that keep Christ’s actions alive in our world. And we can practice such awareness while serving meals, sweeping floors, while watching the violent news of war and protest in distant lands and close to home, while bearing the burden of our own deepest wounds, fears, and concerns. We have been told that the sun rises on the evil and on the good; the rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike. It is not that there is no difference between evil and good: just that We are not the ones to judge it. That is not our work. That is not our job. And speaking for myself—the realization that I cannot judge another comes as a huge relief. My work, then, is to welcome, to include, from my highest theory to my smallest moments; in the times it is easy and the times it is very, very hard.

It is helpful for me to remember this poem in moments when my hands are struggling to give, when there is a shadow over the ability of my eyes to shine compassion on the world. I remember that Christ has no hands to do this work, but mine; but then I catch myself, and remember that it’s not about my hands, my body, “mine.”

What I want to say is that Christ has no body now but OURS.

So not only can I allow myself to see my hands as the hands of Christ, I can re-affirm my commitment to equality, and inclusivity, every time I see your hands and your feet as the hands and feet that Christ has to work with now. We do this any time we look into the eyes of a stranger and know that somehow Christ is looking back at us, shining compassion on the world.

To be egalitarian and radically inclusive is not about me deciding that I am kind and good and educated enough to accept the equality of everyone around me. It is about acknowledging that everyone around me is Already Inherently Included in God’s love. Just as it is not my job to make the sun shine or the rain fall, I have no ability to determine who is good or evil, righteous or unrighteous. Where would I draw that line? Equality and inclusivity is about deciding that I have no right to judge who is, or who isn’t, who might be or who might not be, doing Christ’s work in the world.

We are all flawed as humans, we are complicated and moody and we frequently fall far short of our highest ideals and goals. The point is that we are In Process, we are moving towards the self that we would like to be. When we move towards the inclusivity, the compassion of our own heart and when we shine that back to others, we move towards “God.” It is not alone that we do this, but with a community: our community is what reflects God to us, what shows us that Christ is moving through our own flawed and tired hands.

And Here—right here—is just such an opportunity.

Every Sunday, as part of the service, we greet each other in fellowship; we look into each other’s eyes, take each other’s hands and with all the presence and the sincerity we can muster, we wish each other Peace, Peace be with you. You may not know every person whose hand you have taken or whose eyes you have looked into. You may, in fact, three days from now be stuck behind them in line at the grocery store as they slowly unload 12 items in the 10 item express lane; you might be cut off in traffic by them later this afternoon. But you have looked into their eyes in presence, you have wished them well. You have transformed them, and they, in turn, transformed you. These are the eyes of Christ that Teresa of Avila refers to: your own eyes.

Perhaps it feels like a big leap from transforming the frustration we feel in traffic to my attempt at a theological inclusion of those who wreck violence into our vision of who is welcome at God’s table. But I believe that the seed is the same and that it is important to make the connection between them: to reflect on equality not as an distant status but as an intimate and constant process, to acknowledge the unending and difficult inner work that a commitment to inclusivity asks of us, to honor our not-knowing and our inability to judge or draw the deciding line between good and evil, even as we strive to see ourselves, and everyone we meet, as the hands and eyes and body of Christ working compassion on the world.

So if I ask Who am I to judge? Who are we to judge? Then of course I also have to ask of myself “who am I to preach this to any of you?” I have no connection that you do not have. I have no purchase on this text, or on these words, which is not also right here, waiting, and available to you. This is an invitation to practice the words of the Gospel, to participate in Teresa of Avila’s poem. We are all invited, we are all essential; we are all included.

Getting in the Way of Life

Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20

I set before you life and death, says Moses, blessings and curses. Choose life.

I should carry those words of Moses on a card in my wallet. I should have them as my screen saver. I should tattoo them on my arm. At some of the most important decisions of my life, these words have been a guide, a prod, a test of motivation and validity. They are like the room with two doors. Which door to take? Which way is life, life-giving, listens to life calling? Which way is death, life-draining, listens to fear?

These words were not written to be used like that. They were not proclaimed by Moses so that I could make better personal decisions. They were made for bigger things. They were made for Israel. They were an exhortation disguised as an option. Moses stood before all the Israelites, freed from Egypt, having been given the gift of law, chosen by God, promised land. Moses speaks to them. This speech is his last will and testament. It is a summary of all that his life has been and all that Israel has seen. Now the people are on the threshold of a new land. Moses is near his death. He will not see the land that God has sworn to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I have led you by God’s will out of slavery, Moses tells them. I have given you the law from God, he says. I have brought you with God’s guidance to this land. Before you now you may go this way or that. The doors are clearly marked. There is no guessing. This way is the way of God, doing what God commands, keeping God your God. This way is the way of life. Land, prosperity. That way is turning your back on God, choosing others. That way is the way of death. Wandering, adversity. Choose one, Moses says. No, he corrects himself. Choose this one! Choose life!

So on they go, into the land, choosing to follow the commandments, to be God’s people. But like the book of Deuteronomy itself, the future is open ended. There is not one choice made once and for all. The story of the rest of the Bible is the story of a people who betray and abandon God over and over, choosing death as often as life. And then being—thank God—reconciled, restored, redeemed—forgiven—over and over.

Set before each of us is the same choice set before all Israel. Choose life. And in the end the buck stops here. It stops with each of us. And so the grand choice of Israel turns out to be implemented over the centuries in the humble and routine choices of you and me. Maybe we need those cards and screen savers to remind us of what we are doing.

These bigs words of Moses—life and death—have appeared in the lives of many, including mine, in smaller words. Is what I’m about to do generous or greedy? Am I acting out of love or out of fear? Is it brave or cowardly? For me only or for others? Is it moving forward or retreating? Is it playful or grim?

But perhaps I am misleading you into thinking that this passage in Deuteronomy is mostly about choosing things. Though the effect comes down to that. This passage is a warning. The warning is this: There are things that are deadly. God is not. You’ll stick with God, if you know what’s good for you.

Rather than list a whole bunch of deadly things, I want to mention two things in particular today. I want to talk about worry and about regret. I want to do that because it seems to me that it is possible that worry and regret squeeze God right out of our lives, and in the end there is no life left to choose.

Worry is an attempt to control the future. When we awake at 4:30 in the morning—or whatever that time is for you—when we awake before the sun is up, it’s because we are trying to figure out how to make things work that might not. We imagine conversations and how they might go our way. We imagine tactics that can foil our detractors. We imagine ways to protect things that are ours. We imagine scary scenarios and wonder how we might prevent them.

Regret is an attempt to control the past. We think as if we could relive that shameful event, or undo the hurt, or to seize the opportunity. To say the words or to unsay them. We imagine that those conversations did go differently, we imagine that those scary scenarios we did prevent.

Worry and regret are the same thing. We know that to be so because they make us feel the same way. Helpless. Powerless. Anxious. In our hearts and insides, our guts. They lead our thoughts into little unfulfilling circles.

We cannot control the past and we cannot control the future. We can remember the past. And we do hope for and plan for the future. But in the end, the past and the future are not in our hands. We need to let them go.

We are taught by our faith to trust God. What good is worry? the Bible asks us. Consider the lilies of the field, it suggests. Give away all that you have, Jesus tells us. Do not set up treasures for yourself on earth. Expect the unexpected. Worry fights trust.

We are taught by our faith that God forgives us our sins. God frees us from our shameful past, the hurts we have caused, the good left undone. We are promised forgiveness for all our misdeeds. Regret fights forgiveness.

In our worry, we shove God out of the future. In our regret, we shove God out of the past. We squeeze God out of all the hours of our lives. All we are left with is ourselves.

In choosing life we choose, Moses says, to listen to God. To not hear is to choose death. Worry and regret are too noisy in our brains. They make us deaf to God’s voice. You do not hear, Moses says. God seems silent to us. If to choose if is to walk with God, as the Bible says, how will we know what is life and what is death if our own anxious voices drown out God’s.

Quiet those anxious voices. Stop a moment. Listen for God who forgives your past and steps with you into the future. Choose life.

A Practical Guide to Happiness

Text: Psalm 112
Other texts: Isaiah 58:1-12

A couple of weeks ago social observer David Brooks wrote about happiness. Happiness has been in the news a lot these days. It is trendy to talk about happiness. This is new. Though happiness may have been a goal for people, it was not considered polite to talk about it. Maybe people thought that happiness was not a worthy pursuit. Too self-centered sounding, maybe. Or maybe happiness was supposed to be a side effect of something else: accomplishment, say, or wealth, or a good marriage.

But it turns out that people are not very happy and they are not very happy about not being happy. They are supposed to be happy, but they are not. What’s up with that? It is disappointing. And we do like to talk about what’s disappointing.

Another thing: times are tough. But we have lost the sense that if times were better we’d be happier. Being better off has not made us happy. Our values have betrayed us. We do like to talk about betrayal, too.

Brooks writes about this. He says, “many Americans have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prized the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to things that matter most. … When it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.” And he says they don’t know to whom to turn.

But help is on the way from science, who is now willing to talk about happiness. “Brain science,” he says, “helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.”

I love brain science. And Brooks’s article is wonderful and funny and insightful. But I think he should read Psalm 112. Whose subject is how to be happy. A lot of the Bible is about happiness, which is, as I said last week, another word for blessed. We are suppose to be happy. And the Bible is not quiet about how to live a happy life. And it is not vague.

There are two sorts of ways the Bible talks about happiness. One is the crabby way. “If you don’t do things this way, you’ll be sorry.” You will not be happy, you’ll feel estranged from God, bad things will happen, you’ll be confused and feel empty. There is a little bit of that in today’s first reading from Isaiah. (And the prophets seem to like this mode in general). You, Isaiah tells his audience, are greedy, quarreling hypocrites. No wonder things are not working out. No wonder you are not happy.

The other way the Bible talks about happiness I’ll call the Praise the Lord! way. That’s the way of today’s psalm. “Praise the Lord!” is how it starts. And then it goes on to tell everyone how to be happy. The source of happiness is God. And the way to be happy is to do what God says. This should not be surprising if we think, as it says in Genesis, that God was pleased with creation and called it good. Implicit in this is that God knows what is good for us, that God hopes that we will be happy, and that God is unhappy when we are. If we think that God is happy when we are miserable and takes pleasure in our suffering, we probably are thinking of the wrong god.

The psalm is divided into three parts. But before I talk about them, you should know that this particular psalm, Psalm 112, like nine other psalms, is an acrostic. That means each line begins—in Hebrew—with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. You can get the idea in English in this translation:

Alleluia! (A, right?)

Blessed (this line begins with “B”) are those who live in deep awe of God.

Con-tentment and delight in God’s commandments are theirs, and their

De-scendants will be mighty in the land.

And so forth. You get the idea.

Acrostic forms are good ways to remember things. They are a mnemonic, a memory aid. That this psalm is an acrostic means two things. It means first that the ideas in the psalm were important enough that people were expected to learn them. And it means second that everyone in the community shared these same words, word for word. In that sense it is like a prayer we all know—like the Lord’s prayer—or like the blessing after worship, or a well-known hymn.

The psalm has three parts: 1. Blessings for you. 2. Blessings for others. 3. How to live. And also an appendix: too bad for the wicked. (The lectionary suggests we might leave out that appendix, but I don’t think we can do that). All of this is in the context of the first line: God knows how you can be happy; pay attention to what God says.

Here are the ways you will be blessed if you do that. Your family will be strong and you children will be delightful. You will be surrounded by good things. You will find yourself close to God and will never be abandoned. Your life will feel firm under your feet, it will feel solid.

Here are the ways others will be blessed. You will be a light for others, who will be led by your example to be happy themselves. They will be the recipients of your generosity, and they will know they can trust you to be just and fair. They will know you to be honorable.

Here is what you need to do. You need to be generous. You need to be just. You need to give to those who need it. And to care for others and be compassionate. You need to not listen to gossip and slander. You need to be brave.

Here is what the wicked (or the foolish, another way of putting it) will do. They will be angry and upset. Partly that’s because you will be happy and they won’t. And mostly that’s because you’ll be doing things that God says will make you happy, while they will be trying to figure out how to be happy without doing those things. And it won’t work.

That is what the passage in Isaiah is really about. About people trying to live in ways that are not generous, compassionate, and so forth. Trying to fool God, really, or fool the nature of the world. To think that thinking about yourself first is the way to be happy. Then discovering that the world does not work that way.

Why aren’t we happy, the people ask? Because you are fighting me, God says, fighting the way things work. Because in particular you are trying to avoid sharing your bread with the hungry, housing the homeless, protecting the vulnerable. But if you do, Isaiah says, your light will rise in the darkness and your gloom will be dispelled. God will guide you, and satisfy your needs, and make you strong. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. You will be happy.

Matthew in his Gospel speaks of the law and prophets and the kingdom of heaven. This is the psalm all over again, but different language. Those who attend to the teaching of the law and the prophets are those who take delight in God’s commandments. The kingdom of heaven is by definition a place of profound happiness. Those who do as God instructs, who take delight in God’s commandments, have the greatest happiness. Those who do not will be the least happy.

If the Bible is a user’s manual—as I suggested last week—then it is pretty clear about this. The things that the world teaches us to do to be happy turn out to be bogus. They make promises, but they are liars. David Brooks and Isaiah and Matthew agree. Even brain science agrees. If it is happiness that you want, being generous, brave, and obedient to God works better than anything else.

Praise the Lord!