Very Risky

Text: Luke 7:35—8:3

You might call it balanced: our need for stability and our longing for adventure. You might see timidity, caution, and prudence as virtues that promote our survival—and they do. But we cannot stand in one place for very long. We cannot walk without propelling our bodies forward precariously.

We want to protect and conserve what we have. Risky moves are threatening and cause anxiety. But the things that give us the most pleasure are the most risky. Having a child (or another), leaving home for school or changing jobs, starting a new venture. And in our faith lives, too: entertaining a contrary notion or a unfamiliar practice, praying in the shadow of deep doubt, serving unlikable others, being extravagantly generous.

But while we try to maintain a balance in our lives between security and risk, Christianity is not so balanced. In its commitment to the kingdom of God, Christianity has at its core a preference for risk. We follow a man who risked his life for others and who has called his followers to risk theirs.

The story we heard today from Luke appears in all four Gospels, a rare and sure sign that something in it was at the heart of the experiences of the first Christians. In all the versions, though least in Luke, the act of the woman is considered extravagant. She brings an alabaster jar of perfume, which is sometimes described as worth a year’s salary, and anoints Jesus with it.

This is an outrageous endeavor. In every story, she is uninvited—you might say she barges in—and in Luke’s version she is evidently an outcast because of some publicly-known behavior. In every story, the invited and upright citizens (or authorities) condemn her. In every story, Jesus reprimands them. What the woman has done is good, he says. He celebrates her actions as a joyous event.

The critics in the different versions of this story object to what the woman does for various reasons. But they all boil down to the same conclusion: what she is doing is unexpected and disruptive and hard to figure out. Simon the Pharisee objects because the woman is a sinner who risks ridicule or worse and who appears disturbingly among what Simon implies are a crowd of non-sinners like him—as if there were such persons.

In response, Jesus tells them a parable. A creditor in the parable forgives two debtors. One owes a lot of money and the other owes a very lot of money (about $50,000 and about $500,000 in today’s dollars). In any case, more than either can pay.

One way to look at this is to compare the extremely different amounts. That is how Luke sees it. But there is something odd about that view. Luke presents this parable as a story about people’s response to being forgiven. A great sinner is forgiven more and therefore responds more energetically. But in fact both debtors are forgiven completely. And the complaint Simon has is not so much with the woman—though he does not like her—as it does with the welcome that Jesus gives her (“What kind of prophet is this guy,” he asks under his breath).

It seems, therefore, that Jesus is telling us—as he usually does in his parables—telling us less about the ingratitude of Simon and more about the nature of God. He is telling us that God is as extravagant with forgiveness as the woman was with her perfume.

The woman has a freedom that Simon does not. It is customary to imagine that she is poor, and that for that reason her actions are amazing, but not so helpful to us. She has less to risk, by this reasoning. Unlike Simon who has much. As some of us do. A kind of: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” But that sentimentalizes and trivializes a difficult choice that she makes. There is no reason to assume that the woman is not just like us. With conflicts and responsibilities and a need to be frugal. She just isn’t frugal at the moment. We can imagine her making the same kind of decisions we make when considering risky undertakings.

What gives her—or us—freedom to take risks is not that we have nothing to lose. It is that we are able to deny power to what we do have. It is not that we have nothing to bind us, but that the loss of those things is no longer determining. It is not that we will not mourn for what we give up, but that our grief—though real and powerful—does not paralyze us.

Jesus forgives the woman neither as payment for her actions nor as a cause of them. That is, her gift of expensive perfume was not a fee to buy his forgiveness, nor was it a consequence of his forgiving her. The relationship in time between the two events is ambiguous in the text. He forgives her for the same reason that the creditor in the parable forgives the debtors—Jesus’ and the creditor’s forgiveness are gifts. Given for no reason at all. Or rather, just because that is the nature of God revealed in this moment in Jesus.

Free forgiveness for no reason at all is risky behavior. To forgive another risks being made a fool of. You might be exploited. You might reward the undeserving and unrepentant. You might weaken—as we talked about a couple of weeks ago—the controlling power of shame that you hold. You might have to give up resentments, regrets, and reasons that explain how things are with you right now. Yet, it is Christian behavior.

We are followers of Christ. He is our teacher and example. He has taught us how to forgive others. And he has taught us how to take risks in life, to act bravely for justice and peace, to deny the powers of authority and property. A tall order.

Yet we are able to take these risks and to forgive others because Jesus has shown us how. We are compelled to because he has commanded us to. We desire to because of the joy it brings us. And we are free to do it because we are promised that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

A Powerful Imagination

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Preacher: Paul Stansifer.

A while ago, I watched an episode of a goofy defunct television show that struck me as weird, even weird in comparison to the kind of goofy defunct television shows that I tend to like.

Usually on TV, the person who’s in trouble this week has been designed to be totally sympathetic. But the focus of this episode was a sour, ungrateful, whiny teenager, who has been confined to a wheelchair and a life of misery by a bad heart. A cheerful – Oh, and he’s a bit of a poser, too. A cheerful and energetic employee of the “Wish-A-Wish Foundation” has been assigned to make him happy, which turns out to be a completely futile task.

I’ll skip past the murder and the raising from the dead of a couple of insurance adjusters and ruin the ending for you: a van driven by a pet monkey runs over the Wish-A-Wish Foundation employee, and in accordance with her wishes, the teen gets her heart as a transplant.

I kind of liked the episode, because it made a happy ending out of saving the life of a completely unlikeable person.

The story that Luke tells is weird in the exact opposite way: unlike most of the people that Jesus helps, the widow of Nain is surrounded by a crowd of people who already sympathize with her.

When the widow’s only son died, her life was essentially over. In her society, a woman without a household had no work, no income, no purpose in life. The crowd of mourners knows this. They know that the scriptures repeat over and over again how despicable it is to cheat or deprive widows and orphans. And they also know that it gets repeated because people disregard even that. She couldn't have been a more heart wrenchingly helpless victim.

When Jesus walks into the story, and raises up the widow’s son, the crowd immediately celebrates and declares Jesus to be a prophet, and says that God has come to save his people. They are correct.

But it is rare for Jesus's actions to receive universal approval this way. Jesus tended to get a lot of flak for working his miracles. He did them on the Sabbath, he did them to people who deserved their illnesses, he put lepers and lunatics back into a society that didn’t know what to do with them.

When a miracle of healing occurs, those onlookers who who see the recipient in a abstract, dispassionate way are able to stand around and have a debate about details of the law. But the people who before the miracle were weeping over the tragedy now feel an overriding joy.

And so, the mourners ignored minor issues such as the fact that Jesus became ceremonially unclean when he touched the boy's coffin (contact with the dead was the most serious form of uncleanliness). Did Jesus is properly purify himself afterwards? The widow could not possibly care, and, as for the crowd, they gave up their chance to be sticklers for the law when they joined her in mourning.

I'm not trying to say that all actions taken to comfort someone who's suffering are necessarily good actions. The murdered insurance adjusters in that television episode would probably argue, with good reason, that murdering an insurance adjuster is wrong, regardless of whether it might cheer up a wheelchair-bound teenager.

What I am trying to say is that Jesus viewed the suffering of the people he met as a legitimate crisis regardless of the form that the suffering took, what caused it, or who the sufferer was. You could say Jesus has a powerful form of imagination called "sympathy". The people Jesus meets in the Gospels, and the people Jesus meets today, are often alarmingly deficient in their ability to imagine how others are feeling. This miracle was an easy test, and the people pass it. But usually, we don't do so well.

A few verses later in Luke, Jesus will be criticizing the people who fail to accept John the Baptist as a prophet, because John shuns worldly things and lives alone in the wilderness, and who fail to accept Jesus as a prophet, because he eats and drinks with dishonorable people. Jesus says “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance; we sang funeral songs but you wouldn’t cry.’” If those people could have imagined the urgency of carrying a message from God, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable to them to either separate oneself and stand as a beacon in the wilderness, as John did, or to go and seek out the people most in need of the message in their native habitat, as Jesus did.

The Pharisees Jesus is talking about have a lot of the same beliefs as Jesus, but as long as they see him as a freak, as someone they don't have to sympathize with, they will never learn anything from him.

To fail to sympathize with someone—to fail to regard their feelings as legitimate—that is the fast track to getting on with one's life and not learning, not helping, and not caring.

I like to think that the crowd in today’s story won’t be making that mistake any more. They’ve fallen into Jesus’s trap. He showed up when their compassion had rendered them completely vulnerable to his compassion. Now, when Jesus drives the demons out of the man who called himself “Legion,” they’ll see past the disruption caused by the death of all the pigs, and try to see the man, and feel his relief not to be hurting himself any more.

I don’t feel like I’m very skilled at mourning with those who mourn; it's pretty easy for me to think about the suffering of other people as a problem to be solved if the cost is not too high, rather than as an offense against the humanity of someone who might as well be me.

But Jesus is thinking about the sufferers. In order to make them well, by the end of time or sooner, he is trampling all over cute notions and pure principles. He's making a mess of things for those of us who are already doing fine.

But let us look at this a different way: blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted! Those who suffer and those who mourn with them understand the oppressiveness and evilness of pain. In an instant, that can become a full-hearted commitment to the joy and the goodness of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Mindful God

Text: Psalm 8
Other texts: Proverbs 8:22-31

It is partly a question of scale.

In the scheme of the universe, from the very largest, oldest thing we know, to the very smallest, most ephemeral thing we know, we are somewhat closer to the smallest than the largest. Yet the range and quantities above and below us are incomprehensible. There are sextillion stars in the universe. And there are a thousand times as many atoms in a human body—that’s one octillion—than that.

So we wonder with the writer of the psalm: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what are humans that you should be mindful of them?” How can God even know about tiny us?

But mindful is more than being aware of. How can a God who created all things—galaxies and stars and atoms and quarks—understand our thoughts? The taste of coffee, a comfortable chair, fear of thunder, remembering the smell of the soil where we grew up, knowing that a friend is safe, picking tomatoes in the summer. Plus grief at bombings, tornadoes, factories in Bangladesh, warehouses in Texas, and fears of war and poverty.

We know so much more now than when the eighth psalm was written about how big the universe is and how small its parts. Even if God can comprehend it, we cannot. And even if God can comprehend our worries and pleasures, how can we be more than one piece of data in a huge store of it?

Yet we understand that God can, and does. We understand even more—that God is near us, with us. Even more—that God comprehends us because God exists in Jesus, a human being on this earth. And that God inhabits us in the Spirit, breathed into us, breathing life into us, and praying our secret prayers.

The Trinity is often considered to be a way to characterize God. God is three-in-one, God is triune, God is inherently relational, and so forth. When we start doing that, we get into arguments about proper ways of thinking—and talking, and praying—and generally get tangled up at some point. But we should always be suspicious of statements that begin “God is …” God is such and such. Even when it is we who are saying them. It is hard to know whether we ever have enough information to make “God is” statements.

But we can say what God is for us. Especially for us individually, but also things we might agree with others about (which sometimes thus becomes dogma). In this way, the Trinity is not about the nature of God, but about how God seems to us. And about how the universe that God made seems to be. We can speak then with authority. And we can use all the sources we have that reveal God to us, including scripture and Jesus and the Spirit felt within us.

And we can also use ourselves as sources. The delight we take in things, our appreciation of beauty, our love for others. This is all useful information. So is our urge for justice and peace. We can see these things as our nature—in God’s image—or as gifts from the creator, or the presence of the Spirit within us, or fortified by our trust in Jesus.

It seems like there are a few portraits—three, what a coincidence!—that people paint of the world in which we live.

First, the world is created. You do not have to imagine God’s fingers actually forming the world out of clay piece by piece to see it as organized, beautiful, and awesome. There seems to be order in things, rules that we are learning about. Amazing structures seem to emerge from first principles. It is majestic. At the same time, it is incredibly complicated—maybe even beyond our knowing (how smart can we be, after all?)—and very mysterious. It is an object of and occasion for wonder.

Second, the world is intimate. Or maybe personal would be another word for it. Though we seem to ourselves to be independent entities, we also know that we are fundamentally interconnected. That is, we cannot exist physically or spiritually without the amazingly elaborate network of things—maybe even the network of all things—of which we are a part. So in one sense we are just one of many. But in another sense—in our own sensations—it is all about us. Individual humans matter. The universe creates more than humans in general. The universe creates me. God is not vague. God comes in a particular person unlike any other but connected, as all are, with others.

And third, the world is lively. Everything moves. Matter is waves. We are not all one blob of universal stuff, because objects zoom around suns and particles zoom around (or wave around) nuclei. Locally, all this motion seems inevitably to produce life. Things love to grow all over the place. Bacteria and plants in the sidewalk and tubes at the bottom of the sea. Nothing is static. No Platonic inanimate perfection.

God is not, as one person said, a “nondescript sustainer.” The world is spirited. Life-bringing. Full of wind and fire, moving us this way and that, we not knowing where to next. But forward, it seems to us. Not progress, necessarily; not purposeful, necessarily; but in a direction. God is not timeless, meaning only that the God we know lives in time, too. God to us is a story that has unfolded over time and that we are convinced continues to unfold. God is a god of memory and of hope.

We can say that the lively, intimate, creator God is different faces of God, or manifestations, or elements, or appearances, or persons. But we cannot—we do not—say that they are three separately-wrapped gods. The God we see exposed in the universe, from tiny to tremendous, from impossibly far away to intimately within is, is a continuous person, with a continuing memory of creation, and a willingness to be affected by things and therefore open to surprises.

The God we know—and we can say nothing about the God we do not know—the God we know is a kind of ongoing tale which we read about in the Bible and which we experience in our lives in the world.

What we mostly know from this tale is that God really likes us. As it says in the first reading from Proverbs: God rejoices in his inhabited world and delights in the human race. The creation of the world—which is described in that reading and also in the psalm—is closely connected with that delight. Proverbs seems to say that the nature of the world is a result of God’s joy in it and, amazingly, in us. God is mindful of us.

The Trinity is therefore primarily an expression of grace, praise, and gratitude resulting from our observation of what God is. For us. It represents thanksgiving for our existence, for wonder and awe; thanksgiving for being intimately connected to each other and to God through Christ; and thanksgiving for the vitality of a universe in motion. And an acknowledgement that all this is so because of the love of God.

Sweet Abiding

Text: John 17:20-26
Other texts: 1 Corinthians 12

Regarding unity, Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth: “The body is not one part but many. … If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? If they were all [the same] part, where would the body be?”

It is the absurdity of the metaphor that makes it effective—imagine a body made up only of ears, a body made up only of eyes. There is a unity among the people of God—just as there are many parts, Paul says, but one body. But unity does not mean we are duplicates.

Yet we are not independent. The ear, Paul says, cannot complain that, because it is not an eye, that it is not part of the body. There is no ear that is not part of a larger body. A body is not a democracy. A body is not a federation. A body is one thing, made by God. This making, this creation, defines us, and it also defines God. We are creatures. God is creator.

We just overheard Jesus pray in the Gospel of John. This passage is the last part of a long section called the Farewell Discourse. Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for the time when he will leave them. A time coming soon for them, for in the next passage in John, Jesus is betrayed and arrested. And he has prayed for them, that though they are in the world, they may be cared for by God. Now he prays that his followers might be one. Not just his disciples, but all those—meaning us—all those who through the word, the story, have come to follow Jesus, that they—we—might be one.

This sounds nice. In a kind of sentimental way, we all think unity is good. Yet this powerful petition by Jesus to God the Father has been used to argue on the one hand for increased ecumenism and cooperation among faiths and on the other hand for increased isolation and the erection of barriers between faiths. Evidently it is not clear to all what or whom Jesus is praying for.

What makes us one? Do each of us feel at one with our neighbors in these pews? We do not share doctrinal unity here. Even in a small community—Faith, this single church—is a church of disparate views on God and Jesus. On the way we are called to serve in the world. On how we enact Jesus’ teachings and commands. Is that OK? Can we still say that we are one?

Who makes up the “them” that Jesus talks about? “I pray,” he says, “on behalf of these”—meaning his followers at the time—“but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” How wide a net is Jesus casting? All Christians? People just learning about Jesus? How about baptized people who have recently become full of doubts? How about Christian denominations with which Lutherans are in theological conflict? My energetically evangelical sister once prayed that my other sister—who is a pastor, a Lutheran pastor—would become Christian. Did her wish conform to or conflict with the spirit of Jesus’ prayer? Maybe “be one” really means “be like us.”

Who is the judge of Christian unity? Perhaps it is the various Christian institutions. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is the people whom Christians serve, people in need and suffering who receive God’s grace from followers of Christ. Or who are denied it. Is our declaration that we are Christian sufficient to make that so? Or is it that our actions as declared Christians confirm or refute our claim to be?

Jesus calls for unity of some sort among his followers over all time. If we are in fact one, as Jesus hopes, what distinguishing characteristics would enable someone to know that? That is, how could they tell whether one of us is like another? To be one, to be unified, there must be something we all share. Do we, and if so, what is that?

There is. And we do.

Jesus describes in today’s reading what we might call a chain of spirit. A series of links. Or maybe a conduit of spirit. Or maybe better an ecology of spirit. Which relates and connects God the Father, Jesus, and us. There are two aspects to this.

First, God is in us. God abides in us, as John says throughout his Gospel. You, Father, are in me, Jesus says. And I, Jesus, am in them, my followers. The glory that you gave me, Father, I, Jesus gave to them. The love of the Father for me is in them.

It is clear that people saw God in Jesus. He spoke with the authority of God, he forgave sins, he hung around with the prophets, demons recognized him. It was more than that Jesus was a good, charismatic, powerful personality. It was that God was clearly in Jesus somehow. When you know me, Jesus said, you know the Father. God is in all of us, but God was more revealed in Jesus. Jesus was transparent. You could see through Jesus to see God inside of him. Theologically, we say that when we see Jesus do something we see God. Jesus, as one scholar said, draws aside the curtain to reveal God.

Jesus is in us as the Father is in him, he says, so that—for this reason—we may be made one in the same way that Jesus and the Father are made one. I do this, he says “so that they be one, as we”—Jesus and the Father—“are one.”

So, the first way that people might tell that followers of Jesus are in unity—are one, share some special characteristic in common—is that they are transparent to God that is in them. More or less, we have to add, because we are rarely if ever as transparent as Jesus was. This is not such an odd concept. You know that when you see someone who is especially compassionate and self-giving—saintly, you might say—that God seems visible in them (and working through them).

You might have known, also, when it seems like God is in you and working through you.

The second part of the ecology of the spirit is that we are in God. You, Father, have given them to me. May they be with me, Jesus says. They are in us, Jesus and the Father, he says.

So the second way people might tell that followers of Jesus are one is that they are not alone but with other people. And as important, that they act as if that was true.

We are all part of the body of Christ—as Robin said the other week, this is more than a metaphor. We make up the body of Christ in the world. People not only see Christ within us, but the image, the character of the Christ they see is revealed by the followers of Christ, by us.

We are each one of many. We share the habitation of God. We are not just individual souls being spiritual, or even being good. We are no less connected, being parts of the body of Christ, than the eye that Paul talked about is from the ear, the hand from the foot. We are none of us more valuable than the other. We are no less responsible for one of us than for another.

The unity of Christians is an ephemeral gift. We are sometimes opaque to God in us and it is therefore sometimes hard to see God in us. That does not mean that God is not there. We sometimes act as if we could do without our sisters and brothers in Christ. We are sometimes mean and indifferent. That does not mean they are not in God with us. Our unity is sometimes fleeting, but it is persistent.

Paul finishes his instruction to the Corinthians saying this: The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you! And the head cannot say to the feet, I do not need you! … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Because God is in us. Because we are in God. Because we are one.

A Scary Moment

Text: John 5:1-9

We might ask: what is wrong with this man? Why is he such a whiner? Why has he been so patient, waiting—it seems—for thirty-eight years? Why has he let more aggressive others cut in front of him? Why has he not asked for help? Our compassion is sadly mixed with disdain. Would we, we think, have acted as this man has? We think not, or perhaps we hope not. We have more gumption.

We might ask also: what is wrong with those other people? Why have none of them given this man a hand? Why have they time after time crowded him out, denying him a chance to be healed? Our disdain is thankfully tempered by compassion. Would we have acted as these people have? We think not, or perhaps we hope not. We are kinder.

What would Jesus do? What did Jesus do? He berates neither the crowd nor the man. This is not, evidently, a moral tale. Not a commentary on the character of the man nor of the crowd. Not a teaching about ethical behavior, self-reliance, or the energetic pursuit of progress in the face of difficulties.

Jesus asks the man: Do you want to be made well? The man has been ill for thirty-eight years. Though maybe not for all those years, he has been sitting by the pool for a long time, and Jesus knew that, it says. Do you want to be made well? This is often a trick question that implies some kind of disapproval, as if the man were ill by his own fault, laziness, or ambivalence. But Jesus is not judging him. He is warning the man that something might happen if the man agrees. If you want to be made well, Jesus seems to say, I can do that, but I want to make sure that that is what you wish.

The man realizes in this moment, I’m convinced, that Jesus has the power to heal him. Jesus has a tendency to elicit from us our true desires. (Confronted with pure compassion, we feel things clarify.)

This is the moment of the miracle in this story. It is a thrilling moment. It is a scary moment. Scary to be in the face of such life-changing power. Scary to think what that change might entail.

The man’s answer, in spite of what must have been a lifetime of longing by the man, is slow in coming. Instead, he tells a story about his past life, about obstacles and setbacks, and about the wrongs done him. He never answers the question that Jesus has put to him.

What is he thinking? Why does he hesitate?

Maybe the man was afraid of hoping. Of getting his hopes up, only to have them sink again. Maybe he had become cynical, tired of making plans that never worked out, or believing in others who were not trustworthy. Maybe he was exhausted by disappointment.

Or maybe the man did not trust his own ability to survive in a future different from the past he had known. What skills did he have? A resume that reads Experience: 38 years of frustration on a porch by a pool. When we are called to unknown journeys, there is no guarantee that we will have the abilities we need; we might not be good at what a new future requires of us. It might be confusing, or shocking, or dangerous. We might not be able to cope. Perhaps we will fail.

Maybe the man was ready to say Yes. But he hesitated to answer because he was overwhelmed by grief. His life’s work, the focus of his day, the preponderance of his thoughts must have been—seem to have been—how to be the ill person he was. Now, that would be gone. Freed from it, you might say, but maybe he would say instead taken from him. No one leaves the past without looking back. There is no dark life so black that there is no light in it. We cannot simply set aside years and memories as if they never were. There is sadness in every leaving.

The man grieves, perhaps, that his identity will be lost. We confuse who we are with what we have and what happens to us. I am the athletic person, the artistic person, the wealthy benefactor person. I am the responsible person, the socially adept person, the good-looking person. I am the struggling person, the person who acts out, the unlucky person. I am the sick person. Who will this man be once he can stand up and walk? How will others see him? How will he know himself? He will be a stranger to his friends and to himself.

And maybe the man did not answer because he was uncertain whether all this real loss would be worth some undefined gain. Even if he trusted Jesus to heal him, and even if he was able, how could he know that his new life would be better than his old one? Maybe this was jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Better the devil you know. Counting chickens. And so forth. This situation is ripe for proverbial advice. We cannot know the future for certain. And just because our hopes are fond does not mean that they are right. What we think will fulfill us may not.

It is not helpful for us to judge this man as being of poor moral character. His fault is timidity and fear of the unknown, characteristics we all share with him. We are all timid in some way. We all shun adventure sometime—or most of the time. Change is hard. Transitions are hard. Even the ones we have sought. Even at the brink of the most longed-for changes in our lives, we balance joyful anticipation with secret dread and with real grief.

Jesus knows the man. He speaks without hearing the man’s answer. These imperatives—stand up! walk!—act more like offers. Which the man accepts. The man, it says, is made whole. What was broken is restored.

Today after coffee hour we—those who wish to—are going to talk about baptism. Central to baptism is that God has both the interest and the power to bring us to new life. This new life is not a thing of the moment, any more than the man’s healing was. It is ongoing, continuous. Even in our anxiety and grief, the uncertain future becomes a new future as the man—as we—live daily in new ways. God makes the promise of baptism to us constantly and also the power to accept this promise.

We are not able to nor are we required to live the same moment over and over. Jesus makes us an offer of new life. Stand up, walk.

Something might happen.

Do I Know You

Text: Acts 11:1-18 Other texts: John 13:31-35

What God has made clean, you must not call profane. Three times God says it. Three times God warns Peter in a vision. Three times Peter shows his reluctance to trust in God’s judgment. Three times God overrules him. What God has made clean, you must not call profane. What I, God, have said is clean, you, Peter, must not deny. If God has made it clean, then who are we, as Peter asks, to hinder God? You must not—you are prohibited from—calling profane what God has announced to be good.

This is a command, not advice. God is not giving Peter permission to accept the gentiles into the ministry of Jesus (as we’ll talk about in a moment). The voice from heaven is not merely giving Peter an OK to minister to the gentiles. To Peter, these gentile people are strange and foreign. Those who heard about Peter eating with the gentiles would have been disgusted. It would have been viscerally disturbing. This is not advice. Rather, this is an order. Peter must minister to those whom he might fear and despise.

It is not our prerogative to choose whom to favor and whom to detest. It is God, not us, who decides. It is certainly not in our power or charter to constrain God. It is not for us to second-guess God’s blessings.

What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

We can interpret this story in Acts narrowly. We can see it as one of a series of episodes that document the discussions of the fledgling church with itself. Should the Jesus movement continue for Jews only—as it began—or for gentiles (non-Jews) also? And since gentiles were in fact already being included, did they have to become Jews first? So Peter tells of a vision that argues for the inclusion of gentiles as-is, without the need for their conversion. In the vision, Peter is instructed to eat the food that he, a Jew, would find hard to swallow, but God tells him: go ahead. God accepts the gentiles as they are; it is not up to Peter—and more to the point, the leaders in Jerusalem—to deny them. Peter closes his argument with the question: who was I (and by implication, who are you leaders) that could hinder God? The debate ends on that note. In Peter’s favor.

We could consider this story to be an historical tale, and interpret ourselves right out of it. Or, we could interpret it to be a story of the church’s first working out of the commandment that Jesus gave his disciples in the passage we just heard in John.

What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

In the passage from John, Jesus is preparing his disciples for life without him. “I am with you only a little longer,” he tells them, “where I am going, you cannot come.” They will remain here. But their ministry to the world will not stop. It has just begun. What shall they do? How shall they behave? Here is how: “I give you a new commandment,” he says. Love one another. Love one another just as I have loved you.

This is much more than a tip for living a good life. This is much more than a teaching by Jesus about how to behave. It is a blueprint for a Christian life. It is a requirement. Loving one another as Jesus has loved his disciples becomes a definition of a follower of Jesus. In this way, it is a criterion for making decisions, a gauge for judging actions. Are we serving others selflessly (which is what this kind of love is)?

This command of Jesus makes loving God and loving others identical. Subsets of each other. You cannot serve God and not serve others. When you serve others, you serve God. To serve God means to serve others even before you serve yourself. To love one another as Jesus loved us is to love others more even than we love ourselves.

Our beliefs, our theology, even our praise and worship promote this end. They are not ends in themselves. They remind us of our creator; we remember to be humble and not so proud. We are given courage in the face of fear. We are moved to see all people as our brothers and sisters. We are freed to love one another as Jesus loves us.

What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

This story in John appears between two predictions of betrayal by his followers. Just before, Jesus told his disciples that someone will hand him over to the authorities to be executed, and Judas—the one of whom he speaks—sneaks off to prepare to betray Jesus. And just after the passage, Jesus will tell Peter three times that Peter will disown him.

We are called to love not only the easy but also the difficult—those whom we like, our benefactors and admirers, but also our betrayers and disowners. It is not for us to choose whom to love. Jesus does not qualify his command, only except by the provision that if we want a model, we are instructed to use Jesus. This man who forgave his executioners.

On the one hand, we have plenty of reasons not to love all others. We are often inclined—more, we are often compelled—to hate others, to seek revenge, to act in fear. We are inclined to be indifferent to others whom we do not know—strangers on the street or in strange lands. To stand back.

On the other hand, we do know how to do this. We help neighbors whom we do not know. We feed people who are hungry. We visit prisoners. We rush into danger to save the wounded and offer grieving visitors our homes. We have a whole system of care-givers who try to protect and mend all who come in need.

What Jesus commands is not that we do something ridiculously hard. What he asks is that we distrust our preconceptions, our traditions, our instincts—and our notions of what is disgusting or abhorrent—when we act toward others in the world.

It does not particularly matter how we feel or what we believe. It does matter what we do. By this—by what you do—everyone will know you are disciples of Jesus. Loving one another is a hallmark of being Christian. Will the world know by your actions that you follow Jesus? Our actions indicate to the world what it means to follow Christ.

I give you a new commandment, Jesus says. Love one another. We are rarely changed by theological arguments—that’s why Peter tells a story instead—or sermons preached. We are changed by the doing of it. That’s why this is a command, not a teaching. It is as compelling as the command to “go and baptize” or the command to “do this in remembrance of me.”

It is a means of and a sign of grace. To follow it can change the world and it will change us.

The Sins of Any

Text: John 20:19-31

We live in a world governed by conditions that we create. Things have consequences that we wish to promote or avoid. If you do this, then that will happen. Do that so that this will happen. Do that so it will not. If you do this, we caution others, you will be sorry. If you do that, you will earn rewards.

You have to learn, we tell our children, that behavior has consequences. Grades, raises, special privileges exist to guide us into acting one way and not the other. Punishments and restrictions do the same. So do affection, approval, and respect, which we say you must earn. These are moral and behavioral transactions and contracts which depend on meeting certain conditions. To add a little necessary wiggle room, we sneak in some nepotism, corruption, and other forms of cheating. Or we acknowledge extenuating circumstances, and grant leniency.

At its best, this network of conditions keeps most of us safe and many of us prosperous. It makes systems like traffic, trade, and finance possible. Citizenship and communities. Marriage. But at its worst, it supports tyranny and exploitation, imprisons people for years (or forever) and treats them harshly. Destroys hope and dignity. Corrodes relationships.

So what? The notion that what happens to us should depend on what we do is so basic that it seems absurd to talk about it. If I do the right thing, people will grant me resources, affection, or liberty. Partly, moral conditions sound like physics. One thing follows another. But also, they sound true, right, and fair. A social and moral virtue. We should get what we deserve. Others should get what they deserve. That is how the world works, has worked, and should work.

When Jesus appears in a locked room in which the disciples are cringing in fear, it is clear that something different than usual has happened. Something new. The resurrection of Jesus is not just some personal victory, to be celebrated by his cronies, though it was that, too—they were thrilled. But more, it signifies a change in the world. His appearance not only confirmed his rising. After an initial friendly greeting—peace be with you, he says in the manner of the day—Jesus gets down to business. This is a meeting to equip his followers for the mission ahead. And the equipment he gives them are his life-giving breath, the Holy Spirit, and the power of forgiveness.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. These words, like similar ones in Matthew, give to all the disciples the power to forgive sins. It is this authority, we are taught, that allows pastors to say at the beginning of most Sundays: As a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by his authority, I declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. And to say, on Maundy Thursday: In obedience to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all your sins.

But the focus here is not on the one who is allowed to say “I forgive you.” Rather it is that the forgiveness of sins by human beings is central to the continuing work of Jesus in the world after his life with us here. Forgiveness of others is an essential part—it is of the essence—of the promised coming of God’s kingdom.

By tradition, this power of forgiving others has been interpreted as spiritual, residing in clergy, in priests and pastors. For example, it is one of the three things mentioned in the ordination rite, along with baptism and Holy Communion, that Lutheran pastors are entrusted with by their ordination. And in that rite, these words in John concerning forgiveness are recited.

But in these words, Jesus speaks to more than just a select few. Throughout this Gospel, when John speaks of the disciples in general (unlike when he speaks specifically of the twelve), he means all the assembled followers. These words of Jesus are delivered here not to some particular priestly ancestors but to spiritual ancestors of all Christians. This is not an attempt on the part of Jesus to grant special clerical privilege. Jesus is conveying a power here, but conveying it to all of us.

This charge to forgive is a hallmark of a new kind of world that God brings in Jesus. It is practical and technical advice. It may have wider and deeper implications, but in the words of this passage this charge is something that the disciples are to do as they live in the world as followers of Jesus. Something we are charged to do. To forgive others.

This is hard to do. Jesus is instructing us to act unconditionally. This goes against the normal ways of the world. Forgiveness breaks the inevitable link between our actions and their consequences. Sins might go unpunished. Wickedness might go without retaliation. Enemies might prevail. Mercy might release people from what they deserve. Someone will get a free pass. An underserved break. We are not sure we want to forgive others. Perhaps it is not a good idea. Perhaps we are not sure we can.

Jesus breathes on the disciples. John uses a word that is a synonym for the breath in Genesis that puts life into the first human. And in Ezekiel for the breath that puts life in those dry bones. It is the root of the word “enthusiasm.” It appears only here in all the New Testament. Jesus is re-animating his followers, giving them new life, as if they were being re-created. Re-born, if you prefer. With this breath they receive the Holy Spirit into them. They are thereby given both motivation and the power to forgive others without condition.

There is a kind of world—a world which we hardly know, but get a glimpse of from time to time when we are forgiven, when someone forgives us for no good reason. Or when we are able to release ourselves from a great burden by forgiving others. Or when we as a culture or nation act in mercy rather than retaining our fear and desire for retribution, or revenge. This is a glimpse of the way of Jesus. The way Jesus sent his disciples on to continue his ministry.

This is not a philosophical virtue but a practical one. May the Holy Spirit that has been breathed into you grant you the desire and power to forgive a particular someone for a particular something. When we forgive others in obedience to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ, we live in the changed world Jesus brings.

The story we just heard about Thomas appears is less about belief than it is about mission. As the Father sent me, Jesus instructs them, so I send you. It is our belief—trust—in Jesus that allows us to follow him confidently into the world, to argue for the forgiveness of sins against us, and to be adamant and courageous in mercy.