The Prayers the Spirit Prays for Us

Text: Romans 8:26-39

The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

This verse is the scriptural basis for the closing of the prayers of the people, when we rely on the Spirit to pray the secret prayers that are deep in our hearts. We assume with these words that there are longings of our hearts that we cannot express, or perhaps even know in detail.

We are not complete without God. If we are complete without God, would we pray? If we are strong, and clear minded, and self-satisfied, it is hard to know quite what we would pray for. Maybe we could pray in a transactional way, like ordering something from Amazon.com. A prayer could be an order, or a wish list. But this is not what Paul is talking about.

Paul is talking about being separated from God. And things that might separate us from God. Things that get in the way of our being close to God. When you hear that neither death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, no height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus—when you hear these words, you might be moved to tears. How could this be? To be alone from God is scary and disorienting and lonely.

Partly it is like being alone from anyone you long to be with. Your lover, or your parent or your children, or a friend who is far away. Or just being alone. But more deeply, it is that God is part of us, essential to our existence. And to be separated from God is like drowning. Suffocating. We are not built to be without God. Perhaps that’s one of the things we mean when we say we are made in God’s image. You might feel this even if you do not believe it. You might find Paul’s words powerful even if you do not even believe in God. It is not about belief.

In these past few days of hot and humid, people have been feeling crummy and confused. Out of sorts and unable to think clearly. Trying to do useful work in the heat feels like when you read the same paragraph in a book over and over again and just don’t get it because your mind is mush.

But it does not require extreme weather to be distressed and disoriented. We are never as focussed, bright, and strong as we would like to be. It is our creaturely nature. Even though we have deep longings, it is not always clear what we want. Not all that we desire is easily expressed. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, the verse says. The word for weakness means “not strong.” It is not a question of failing or not living up to expectations. No one says you are weak because you cannot lift a mountain. You are just not strong enough. The Spirit helps us because it is our nature to not always know clearly how to ask and what to ask for. Even when we are desperate to. We do not know how to pray as we ought, it says. But again, there is no judgment here, no should. The word translated as “ought” that Paul uses means more like: what we need to say to convey what we mean. We don’t even know it, much less know how to ask for it. Or sometimes we just cannot pray. Out of shame, or anxiety and the press of time, or being tongue-tied. We could use some help.

The Spirit helps us, Paul says. It does not help us like someone we hire to help us. We are not paying the Spirit to do our praying for us. It helps us more like someone who loves us helps us. Someone who knows us intimately and respectfully. Who sometimes knows what we want better than we do. The word that Paul uses to describe what the Spirit does when it helps us is a strange one. It appears only here and in the story of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke. The word implies a generosity plus togetherness, or being with. One Bible says that the spirit joins its help to our weakness.

It seems from this passage that God puts the Spirit into us in order that the Spirit can speak our deepest longings to God. The Spirit intercedes—another strange word that appears only here in all the Bible—intercedes with sighs too deep for words, it says. The Spirit says for us what we cannot seem to express. Our inexpressible groanings, as one Bible puts it. As someone said, we have our own personal groaner. And the job of that groaner is to convey to God our ongoing state and desires.

There are many things that might come between us and God. Things that might separate us from God. Paul makes a partial list of them. They are not cosmic but day to day and ordinary. Hardship: that is, the meeting of daily needs in times of want. Not enough food, no shelter, illness. Distress: that is, being without options, stressed and pressured, feeling stuck in a tight spot, no clear exit. Peril: that is, physical danger, risks and hazards. The sword: that is, war and violence.

Fear and worry and anger and suffering sometimes turn us to God, but just as often they keep us away—drive us away. We become silent as far as God is concerned. We are not interested in praying—either to talk to God or to listen. We feel estranged. Perhaps we want to be separate from God. Perhaps we are looking for reasons not to engage with God. Perhaps we really couldn’t care less about God at the moment. But the Spirit continues to keep the lines open, the channel open.

There is nothing in all creation that can separate us from God. Not even our own silence. It is our destiny, as Paul says, to be connected to God. God makes it happen. Not because of our own efforts or desires, but because of God’s. For better or for worse, we cannot mess this up. God will not leave us alone.

Made from God, when separated from God we feel incomplete and homeless. The Spirit resides in our heart, praying for us, so that we might be drawn home, and made whole.

Saints and Sinners Both

Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

We are going to start today with a little Bible study.

There is a school of thought that says that the closer things are to us, the more influence they have over us, and the more they affect who we will be in the future. Things that are far away in time and space are less important to us day to day than things that are near. One purpose of the Bible, or one thing it has succeeded in doing, is keeping Jesus close to us. Jesus lived and died two thousand years ago, yet his life and teachings remain in us. The institution of the church has done the same, preserving the story of Christ and keeping it near.

The church and the Bible do an OK job of this, but they are not perfect. We are a long way in years and culture from the time of Jesus, and much more from the time of Jacob, the hero of today’s first reading. Our devices—books, tradition, ceremony—do their best. Though the church claims the Bible is inspired (Lutherans of our sort do not officially insist that it is inerrant)—though it may be inspired, no one claims that all interpretations of it are. And even the translations we read are interpretations. It is a twisty road that runs from the words that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the stories people told about him to the writing down of those stories in Greek by Matthew to the assembling of all the fragments of the Gospel (there is no such thing as the original complete Gospel of Matthew, just little bits), to the translation of the result into English. There are by necessity interpretations all the way, before it even gets to our own thoughts.

Why does this matter? Because everyone in the chain of interpretation has some agenda or other. Everybody has a stake in the meaning of Jesus and his words. Jesus means something, otherwise the people would not even be involved in the program. They cannot help, and they might not want to help, explaining Jesus in a way that makes sense to them in their own time, according to their own circumstances, and in light of their own hopes and fears. We have to remember this because their agenda may not be ours.

Today we look at the agenda of Matthew, the author of today’s reading, in telling this story of Jesus telling a parable. This parable appears only in the Gospel of Matthew, not in the other very similar Gospels of Mark and Luke. It is possible that Matthew made it up, but I’d say that’s not likely. It is likely, though, that Matthew included this parable because it suited his purpose—his agenda—but did not suit the purposes of Mark and Luke. If you want to guess what Matthew’s purpose is, you can refer to the little program guide he includes right after the parable. An interpretation of the parable as an allegory. I suspect this interpretation, even though it is in the Bible, was made up by Matthew. I have doubts that Jesus said what Matthew quotes him as saying.

I say that for two reasons. The first reason is that we know from the rest of Matthew that he was really interested in figuring out why everyone did not immediately turn to follow Jesus. And more to Matthew’s point, why those who did went to a different church than Matthew did and probably disagreed with Matthew. Now, there were not really churches like that in those days, but there were communities of followers of Jesus. And they all had slightly different ideas about what Jesus meant, said, and did. In spite of Jesus command that his followers love one another, by Matthew’s time they probably didn’t.

And the second reason I think Matthew made this up is that in this passage, Jesus interprets the parable. Which he sometimes does elsewhere, but not often. And interprets it as an allegory, which parables were not. Not allegories. Matthew has Jesus saying “this part of the parable stands for this other thing.” But parables are not really told that way. They are intended to be weird little stories that make us think. They are the Christian equivalent of koans. In them, there is usually a shocker of sorts. In today’s parable, the shocker is that the landowner does not weed his crops, but lets a dangerous invasive look-alike plant grow among the beneficial wheat. Why would he do that? That is one of the things that is supposed to make us think.

This does not mean that we can just toss out the allegorical interpretation of the parable. The verses are, after all, still in the Bible. People left them in when they were first assembling and then repeatedly copying this Gospel of Matthew. They could have left them out; they have left out lots of other parts of which we have evidence. But it does mean that we can look at this parable with different eyes than Matthew’s. Which we will do now. (Finally.)

One way to think about parables is that they are like poems. They paint word pictures. They are about deep things in the guise of stories about events. They have points and themes. Matthew picks up these themes in today’s parables, and I’m sure you did, too. (Just because Matthew interprets these themes does not mean they are not in there.) This particular parable is more complex than most, and it has at least three themes. Which are: the existence of evil; the impossibility of human judgment; and a call to action.

[Regarding evil.] Martin Luther promised to spit in the devil’s face. And he wrote that we should share the Lord’s Supper everyday to have the strength to fight evil. In the ceremony in which we welcome new members we all agree to renounce the devil and all his empty promises. What is the cause of bad things, vicious and nasty actions, malevolence? We modern types do not often personify evil. Evil seems mysterious and unexplainable. Often more of a corruption or perversion than an active force, or inherent in creation and life, or sometimes just considered a shortage of goodness.

But in this parable, the sower of the deadly weeds is an enemy, a force for badness, purposely causing harm and sorrow. Evil is not happenstance. There is a battle in the background between two forces, competing for the world, and in this battle we are at the same time the victims, the pawns, and the fighters. It is not that there are good people and bad people, but that that goodness which we all desire fights against the evil which we all deplore. All are on the same side here.

[Regarding judgment]. Though Matthew hopes to punish evildoers, in the telling of the parable Jesus is more gentle. Good wheat exists, and evil weeds exist, but humans are not called to figure out which are which and certainly are not called to eradicate the weeds. We are not called to judge. That does not mean that judgment is not real. There are lots of stories in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, about judgment. But the prerogative of judgment and the skill it requires are not ours, do not belong to human beings. Just because we acknowledge evil does not mean we can identify it.

In another story near the end of Matthew, the Son of Man sits on his throne, and separates out the good sheep from the bad goats. But in this scene, first, none of the goats or sheep know which ones they are before they are judged. Which one am I? they all wonder. So people are not able to see very well who is what. And second, it is not clear how many folks end up in the goat pile. If any. Maybe none. Lutherans say that we are all saints and sinners. We are weeds and wheat. It is not even possible to be all wheat, all good. We are not qualified to judge one another.

In the parable, the servants ask it they might pluck out the weeds. But the landowner says “No.” Just “no.” You may not. We are commanded not to judge. It is not just that we are discouraged from making such judgments. We are prohibited from doing so.

[Regarding action]. What, then, are we to do? How shall we behave as human beings in the world. There is a call to action in this story. But not a call to arms. We are guided to be humble, patient, and vigilant. Humble, because we know we are not God’s proxy judges. Patient, because we are not so clever that we can know the future. And vigilant because we are mindful of the devil’s empty promises.

To worry about weeds is not only destructive, it is a waste of time and energy. And it limits our gratitude, joy, and freedom—which seem to me to be good gifts not to be squandered.

Following this guidance, we first of all give God a chance to get a word in edgewise and to do God’s work. And second, we open for ourselves—or maybe better to say we leave open for ourselves—a different way of being than usual, a chance to see things go in an unpredictable and surprising way, to have a larger future.

Like all parables, this one is about something. Many have interpreted this parable as being about the church. (Yet another allegory). But that is a narrow view of things. For this is about the realm of God. Jesus is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is like, he says. This parable is one of a series in Matthew, which all seem to say: there is more to the world right now than you might think, there is a different way to be, and better things are still to come.

Evil and good grow side by side, and it is often hard to tell the two apart. Yet people are called to act with restraint, being mindful of being at the same time saints and sinners, and in the end they trust in God to resolve and reconcile, and are gathered into God.

Depending

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

It may seem odd on this weekend celebration of Independence Day to speak about yokes and burdens. After all, did our forebears not free themselves from the yoke of tyranny and the burden of injustice? Aren’t we the home of the free, not the home of the beasts of burden that work hard for someone else’s benefit? Not home of the servant, the reins of our lives in someone else’s hands.

Yet here is Jesus. As usual, making us think some other way than we’d like to think. Jesus seems clearly to be offering a gift here. A positive good. Come to me, he says, all you who are weary and carrying burdens. Come to me, and I will remove the yoke from your shoulder. Nope. That’s not what he says. Take my yoke upon you, he says, and you will find rest. If you wish to find rest from your burdens and your weariness, put on this yoke, take up this yoke.

You might say—as some have said—that Jesus is offering to join us in bearing the burdens we already bear. A yoke is a device that lets two oxen—or some other animal, or people, even—to pull more efficiently by dynamically balancing the load between them. Two animals can pull more, more easily, yoked together than they could harnessed separately. So, the picture that appears today on the children’s blessing cards that we give at Communion shows Jesus and someone—signifying you or me—yoked together. Jesus is helping us.

But that’s not quite what Jesus says here. He does not say, let me give you a hand. He says, take my yoke upon you. Learn from me.

A yoke is a method for being led, for being guided, a device for those doing the will of another. It is not a device for those who are doing the leading, the guiding, and the directing. A yoke is the answer to the question: who shall guide us and how, not whom shall I guide and how, and not how shall I myself choose the best direction in which to go and how shall I get there. The question to which Jesus supplies the answer is the question we all want to know the answer to. The question is: how shall we live?

How shall we live to most effect our safety and happiness, as the Declaration of Independence puts it? How shall we achieve happiness? How shall we achieve goodness, be good people? How shall we sustain and increase our capacity for love? How shall we increase our ability to have compassion for others who are not like ourselves? How shall we find peace of mind?

The people of this generation, as Jesus calls them, desire to learn, to know, to be shown the answer to these questions. They desire to find a prophetic leader who will guide them and show them the way. They desire this, … and they don’t. They long to be led, … and they don’t. Their wishes are ambiguous and conflicting. They heard John the baptist, who told them how to live. They spurned John, saying that his asceticism was demonic. They heard Jesus, the Son of Man, who told them how to live. They spurned Jesus, too, saying that he was a glutton and a drunkard. They don’t know what they want.

They want to be guided, yet also to refuse guidance. They want to be able to count on others, yet be independent. They want to ask for help, yet reject help. They want to ask for wisdom, yet preserve the right to act in ignorance.

What Jesus offers them—as John before him did—what Jesus offers them is a disciplined way of life. To follow him, which means to be led by him. To put on his yoke. To do what he teaches us to do. To believe in him in the sense that we trust not his existence, or his heredity, but his guidance. Learn from me, Jesus says.

And he says, I am humble of heart. Discipline is by nature a humbling activity. To be humble requires that we acknowledge we are in need of help, that we are uncertain, and that we are not in control. Discipline by nature is a quiet activity. It requires that we listen rather than talk, hear rather than pronounce, that we keep our opinions to ourselves. Discipline by nature is a focused activity. It requires that we put aside distractions, rather than seek them out, and that we strive for a simpler life.

Christianity is religious, not only spiritual, because it embodies practices as well as beliefs. It is a discipline. It requires, among other things, periodic and repeated worship with others, almsgiving to those who have less than we do, regular prayer, and an attempt to love our neighbors and our enemies as we love ourselves and to forgive those who sin against us, and to not worry too much about the future. We gather into communities, churches, both because it is easier to do these things together and because Jesus told us to.

We perhaps have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence was really a declaration of redirected dependence. Not of anarchy or individualism, but a plan to choose how we would be led.

Take my yoke and learn from me. This is an offer of a disciplined life following the guidance of Jesus. This is an offer that, by taking up this way of life, we may find happiness, become good people, have compassion for others. That we will find rest for our souls. That we will know God.

Depending

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

It may seem odd on this weekend celebration of Independence Day to speak about yokes and burdens. After all, did our forebears not free themselves from the yoke of tyranny and the burden of injustice? Aren’t we the home of the free, not the home of the beasts of burden that work hard for someone else’s benefit? Not home of the servant, the reins of our lives in someone else’s hands.

Yet here is Jesus. As usual, making us think some other way than we’d like to think. Jesus seems clearly to be offering a gift here. A positive good. Come to me, he says, all you who are weary and carrying burdens. Come to me, and I will remove the yoke from your shoulder. Nope. That’s not what he says. Take my yoke upon you, he says, and you will find rest. If you wish to find rest from your burdens and your weariness, put on this yoke, take up this yoke.

You might say—as some have said—that Jesus is offering to join us in bearing the burdens we already bear. A yoke is a device that lets two oxen—or some other animal, or people, even—to pull more efficiently by dynamically balancing the load between them. Two animals can pull more, more easily, yoked together than they could harnessed separately. So, the picture that appears today on the children’s blessing cards that we give at Communion shows Jesus and someone—signifying you or me—yoked together. Jesus is helping us.

But that’s not quite what Jesus says here. He does not say, let me give you a hand. He says, take my yoke upon you. Learn from me.

A yoke is a method for being led, for being guided, a device for those doing the will of another. It is not a device for those who are doing the leading, the guiding, and the directing. A yoke is the answer to the question: who shall guide us and how, not whom shall I guide and how, and not how shall I myself choose the best direction in which to go and how shall I get there. The question to which Jesus supplies the answer is the question we all want to know the answer to. The question is: how shall we live?

How shall we live to most effect our safety and happiness, as the Declaration of Independence puts it? How shall we achieve happiness? How shall we achieve goodness, be good people? How shall we sustain and increase our capacity for love? How shall we increase our ability to have compassion for others who are not like ourselves? How shall we find peace of mind?

The people of this generation, as Jesus calls them, desire to learn, to know, to be shown the answer to these questions. They desire to find a prophetic leader who will guide them and show them the way. They desire this, … and they don’t. They long to be led, … and they don’t. Their wishes are ambiguous and conflicting. They heard John the baptist, who told them how to live. They spurned John, saying that his asceticism was demonic. They heard Jesus, the Son of Man, who told them how to live. They spurned Jesus, too, saying that he was a glutton and a drunkard. They don’t know what they want.

They want to be guided, yet also to refuse guidance. They want to be able to count on others, yet be independent. They want to ask for help, yet reject help. They want to ask for wisdom, yet preserve the right to act in ignorance.

What Jesus offers them—as John before him did—what Jesus offers them is a disciplined way of life. To follow him, which means to be led by him. To put on his yoke. To do what he teaches us to do. To believe in him in the sense that we trust not his existence, or his heredity, but his guidance. Learn from me, Jesus says.

And he says, I am humble of heart. Discipline is by nature a humbling activity. To be humble requires that we acknowledge we are in need of help, that we are uncertain, and that we are not in control. Discipline by nature is a quiet activity. It requires that we listen rather than talk, hear rather than pronounce, that we keep our opinions to ourselves. Discipline by nature is a focused activity. It requires that we put aside distractions, rather than seek them out, and that we strive for a simpler life.

Christianity is religious, not only spiritual, because it embodies practices as well as beliefs. It is a discipline. It requires, among other things, periodic and repeated worship with others, almsgiving to those who have less than we do, regular prayer, and an attempt to love our neighbors and our enemies as we love ourselves and to forgive those who sin against us, and to not worry too much about the future. We gather into communities, churches, both because it is easier to do these things together and because Jesus told us to.

We perhaps have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence was really a declaration of redirected dependence. Not of anarchy or individualism, but a plan to choose how we would be led.

Take my yoke and learn from me. This is an offer of a disciplined life following the guidance of Jesus. This is an offer that, by taking up this way of life, we may find happiness, become good people, have compassion for others. That we will find rest for our souls. That we will know God.

The Spirit in Between Times

Text: Acts 2:1-21

The day of Pentecost in the church calendar seeks to tame the story of Pentecost in the Bible. We make predictable an event which is totally surprising.

People sometimes call the reading in Acts the story of the birthday of the church. This makes it seem simple, pleasant, and definitive when it was none of these things at all. Instead, it was complicated, scary, and fragile. We imagine it to be a celebration of diversity, an inauguration attended by people from around the known world, and an installation address by Peter, the rock on which the new church would be founded.

Yet for those involved, if we are to read it from the inside, so to speak, it was an occasion of confusion. Some people—they, it says; we don’t even know who or how many (anywhere from a dozen to 500, depending on where you look)—some people are “in one place.” Is this place a room (as many paintings show it to be), or outside (where the listeners could more easily hear all the various languages being spoken?) And were those languages a new language, as some think, or the natural languages of the time?

What happened in the place? Not a wind, but the sound like the rush of a wind. Not fire, but divided tongues as of fire. Something like a wind and something like fire touched some number of people who were gathered somewhere, and they began to speak in some way.

We cannot fault the tellers of this tale. It has all the confusion of amazing and unexpected events. Crowds gather and something remarkable happens that in the end changes the world. People’s accounts differ. Each is affected in his or her own way. Some think the speakers were drunks, and some think they were prophets. Each person sees and hears things from their own point of view. Each, as it says, in their own language. Their own culture and individual history and hopes.

Imagine how it felt to be part of this event. How did it sound, that sound like the wind? How did it feel to be touched by that tongue like a flame. Was it loud there? Was it hot? What did it smell like? Could they sense the excitement of others, or maybe their fear? What did they see?

Pentecost and events like it are not so much the birth of something new as a time of extreme transition. The forces on the people and the times are like the forces on the crust of the earth before an earthquake, and the event is the earthquake. There was one way. And now there is another way. At the time of this particular Pentecost, things were changing. Judaism was changing as a result of the occupation of Palestine and the destruction of God’s house, the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jesus movement was changing as a result of the crucifixion of Jesus and his ascending departure. And the lives of Jesus’ followers were changing as they went from being disciples—students—to being apostles—people sent by Jesus into the world to do something grand and dangerous.

It is not surprising that the people who were gathered there felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. For times of transition are where the Spirit is both most comfortable and also most helpful. The Spirit, especially in contrast to the other persons of the Trinity, works in what someone called the realm of insubstantial creation.

People in history have had a hard time characterizing the Spirit. There was a time when pictures of the Trinity showed Father, Son, and Mary, thus avoiding the whole issue. And later, the Spirit was shown as a dove (drawn from the baptism of Jesus, where it says the Spirit descended like a dove.) But the Spirit is on purpose vague around the edges. The word for spirit is the word for wind, which is powerful, surrounding, and unbounded. If we were fish instead of mammals, I’m sure the word for spirit would be the word for water. Of the essence and ever-present. Not exactly a thing.

The Spirit is most obviously present in times of change (as in the creation of the world in Genesis, and the creation of endeavors in our own lives). Which is perhaps why it seems so appealing in these days. Change is what it means to be a creature, and probably every generation thinks that its time is the most unstable, but in these times of ours of personal, national, and worldwide change into something who knows what, it is good to have God the Spirit be present among us.

In the face of the people’s amazement and perplexity, Peter explains that this is one of those times. And he mentions the prophets, and quotes Joel who wrote that in these days God will pour the Spirit upon people and that they will prophesy and have visions and dream dreams. Prophets and dreamers and visionaries are our conductors on the train to the future. They tie the past in memory to the future in anticipation. They are always the right sort to have in times of change and transition. But what happens in Pentecost and in Joel’s writing is that everyone touched by the Spirit begins to dream dreams. All the sons and daughters. You and me.

When we are not quite sure what just happened, and when we are not quite sure what is happening now, and when we really not sure about what will happen next, we need dreams to survive. Things are different, and we need a grand vision, going easy on the details. The Spirit is a dreamer of dreams more than a planner of plans.

The colors of the altar today are multi-colored, to signify the variety of people visited by the Spirit on this day in the story and in these days in our city and world. But next week they will be green. The changing colors mark the transition from the season of Easter to the season of Pentecost. We will then be in ordinary time, when we read more about the daily life of Jesus in stories about the daily lives of people.

Our daily lives are full of little Pentecosts. Often not as momentous, but sometimes so. When we do not know what to make of things as they are but we have not yet found out what they will be. When the old order of our lives seems to verge on chaos, and words that we thought we knew lose their meanings. It can be exhilarating or scary, but in either case it is unknowable.

In the end, the story of Pentecost is not the whole story. The Church does begin. The people do go out. Transitions do not go on forever, but are in between times. What is about to happen, does happen. The prophets speak, the dreams unfold, the visions become clearer. And the Spirit leads us, as it led the people who had gathered all together in one place, into something new.

Fear or Faith

Text: Acts 1:6-14

The sudden and unexpected execution of Jesus. His amazing resurrection from the dead. His appearance to the disciples, talking with them and sharing meals with them. Now his being lifted up. Taken from them, the men in white say, up toward heaven. It is a fearful time for the followers of Jesus. Nothing has been what it seemed, nothing has gone the way they had thought or hoped. Still looking for the nation of Israel to be freed and restored—is this the time? they ask—instead their teacher, healer, Messiah last left them, their hopes unfulfilled.

The story at the end of the Gospels shows the disciples gathered, dumbfounded, frightened, uncertain what to do. Shut in a room, safe for the moment. They have a choice: remain huddled, timid, cautious; or to leave, go out, continue the work of Jesus, speaking, healing, confronting and changing the world. Their choice is the essential Biblical choice. I put before you life and death, as it says in Deuteronomy. That is the choice we always must face. Choose life over death, choose love over hate, choose hope over hopelessness, choose compassion over neglect. How shall we live?

Actor Tom Hanks spoke last week to the graduating class at Yale. In his sermon—for that’s what it really was—he talked about fear and faith. He quoted John Paul Jones, who said “if fear is cultivated, it will become stronger; if faith is cultivated, it will achieve mastery.”

We cannot let fear prevail. Fear wishes to rule us. Hanks said that fear lurks in the darkness at the edge of town. Fear captures our hearts and softens our brains. That’s why people who wish to seize or hold power use fear to move us. And why people who wish to possess our time, our money, or our passions—those who wish to sell to us or recruit us—seek to create fear within us.

C. S. Lewis once said that we fondle our hatreds. He might have said the same about our fears. We take our fears out and touch them, keeping them alive. We work on them. When it seems they are subsiding, we wake them up. We keep them excited. We nourish them, as Jones said, so that they might stay strong. It is wicked, but we do it.

Fear is destroying the nation, corrupting and perverting generosity and bravery into greed and violence. Destroying the world. Fear drives us to war. Fear drives us to pull back from helping people in need. Fear drives us into our locked rooms and locked nations, seeking safety, and being diminished.

The sovereignty of fear, its voice, its authority, comes from us. We give it. We do not have to do that.

For against fear stands faith. This is a battle. It is one or the other. Faith is the counterforce, the antidote. Faith puts us in context: remember that we are creatures, that we are mortal, we are small, yet we are blessed. We are children of God along with all other people, making them our brothers and sisters. Our fate is out of our hands; it belongs to God. Everything is possible. The worries that we plot are only fantasies, guesses. New life is possible. Faith makes us free to act surprisingly, with courage. That courage fights against fear.

Courage is not a result of will. We cannot just wish to be courageous. Courage is fed by faith. And faith is fed—cultivated—by two things. One of those is gratitude. The other is forgiveness.

Gratitude is a skill, a tactic, it takes practice. Give thanks for your blessing. Speaking as if you were grateful makes you grateful. Wake up in the morning and say thank you for your life and all the good things in it.

And forgiveness is likewise a skill, a tactic, requiring practice. Speaking as if you forgive others helps you forgive them. Say you are sorry. Accept the apology of others. Tell people you forgive them, even when you are not so sure. You will start to forgive them. Tell God you forgive them.

Thanking God and forgiving others generates courage, nourishes faith and defeats fear.

This past week the yearly assembly of the New England Synod gathered in Springfield. Most of the meeting was going to be devoted to community service projects in this hard-time city. A couple of days before the assembly was to convene, there were as you know tornadoes which destroyed property and took lives. Many people wondered whether the assembly should be cancelled. Tornadoes are scary and dangerous. The city was in disarray. Would we be OK? Perhaps we should all stay home, we thought, where we were safe and things were familiar. Fear spoke to us. But faith called louder, and the assembly was held.

When a disaster like the Springfield tornadoes strikes, people check the news on TV or online. We look at same few dark videos over and over again, and we watch the same slide shows of destruction and suffering. This is not, as I once thought, obscene and voyeuristic. Those pictures and videos and voice recordings call to us because we are trying to figure out how we can help, what we can do. We are built to watch out for each other, to care for each other. In Springfield or Haiti or Japan; in places of famine or drought or disease. The suffering people call to us to defeat our fears and come help. Don’t be afraid, they say, give us some help, they say.

And so in our case about 400 Lutherans showed up this weekend to feed people, raise money, clean up the mess, repair homes, entertain the discouraged. A small victory over fear, but a triumph nonetheless. That’s how it works.

When Jesus ascends to the heavens, the disciples fear they have been abandoned. But Jesus tells them here in Acts, as he also does in the Gospel of John, that the Holy Spirit will stay with them.

And in the end they remember that Jesus has prepared them by praying for them, by teaching them how to pray, how to praise God, how to forgive others. He has taught them how to serve those in need, to heal, and to love even their enemies.

Christians cannot continue to cultivate fear. And we need to resist the world’s efforts to cultivate fear within us and within others. We have been given the tools of faith, instruction in their use, and the power of the Holy Spirit to fight the powers of fear. Before us, as before the disciples, have been set fear and faith. May faith prevail.

God's Restless Heart

Text: Acts 17:22-31

Standing on Mars Hill, called in Greek Areopagus—meaning the rock of the war god Ares—Paul is impatient. He has been driven out of Philippi and Thessalonica and the city of Berorea, and has been spirited away by his friends to cool his heels in Athens. But Paul, who cannot sit still for long, starts to chatter away in the market square about one thing and another, where one thing is Jesus and the other thing is God. He makes an impression: the Greeks, it says in the book of Acts from which this story comes, call him a babbler. The word in Greek describes the noisy chattering of flocks of small birds. So that’s how some saw Paul. But others think it’s worth a listen, and they gather on Mars Hill to hear him.

There is something about Paul and his words that draw them in. Why would these learned Greeks bother to listen to this noisy Jewish/Roman/Palestinian bird, aside, as it may be, from idle curiosity about some new idea? It may be that they, as Paul later says, are fumbling in the dark, as we all are, looking to touch God with their own hands. They wish to fill, as someone described it, an existential abyss. There is a emptiness that we all feel, a cosmic longing for something that completes us. Saint Augustine, who so strongly influenced Martin Luther, said of God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” This restlessness, plus I’m sure Paul’s charisma and his way with words, open their ears to him.

Unlike Peter’s speech at Pentecost, which we’ll hear in a couple of weeks, Paul’s cannot call on the salvation history of the Jews to convince the Athenians. It is not their history. He cannot use jargon. He cannot assume sympathy. Instead, he gives a speech that lays down the fundamentals of his faith. This is a tiny treatise on monotheism—a foreign concept to the Greeks. Paul describes a single, timeless God, cosmic and intimate at the same time. He tells them three things about his God: who God is, what God does, and what we do in response to God.

Who Paul says God is.

God is creator of the universe. All things were made by him. Without him there is nothing made. God is very large. All the substance of the universe, all those stars and all that energy, all that knowledge that is embodied in the heavens—God made all that. God spoke the world into being: let there be light. God took chaos and made some things out of it. The order of the universe and the laws that govern it are embodiments of God.

But more than creator of the universe, God is an enthusiast. God is a fan of the universe. After creating each part, it says in Genesis—a word that means birth—God pronounced it good. We exist in a universe which at its core, in its DNA, in its essence, is goodness.

God does not live, Paul says, in shrines made by humans. God does not live in little boxes like temples or churches. God does not reside in idols or in symbols or even in words. These things can lead us to God and remind us of God, but they are not God. We do not worship them. By the same token, we do not need to maintain God, to feed God, to bring offerings to God, to appease God. We do not have to please God—as though he needed anything, Paul says.

Yet even though God is big and old and self-sufficient, God is at the same time small and spirited and intimately connected with the lives of people. God is not far from each of us, Paul says. God is neither standoffish nor condescending. God is as close to us as our parents, our family. We are, it says, we are God’s offspring.

What Paul says God does.

God gives life and all things. God takes creation and animates it with life. God organizes substance and energy into biology and consciousness. God takes time and organizes it into history. In other words, God takes things and organizes them into stories. Jordan Mueller, a member of Faith, did a research project a few months ago in which he counted the occurrence of each word in various Bible versions. In all cases, the most common word was—no surprise here—God (or Lord, or Jehovah). And the second most common word was “says.” God said, the Lord spoke. God, as Paul notes, allots times and boundaries by talking about them.

What Paul says we do in the face of this creating, speaking God.

We try to find God. We search for God. We try to fill the abyss, the empty space inside of us that seems to belong to God. It is as if we were created with this spot in us just so that God could fill it, reside in us. We search for God, Paul says, and we grope for God. A word that is perhaps better translated by other versions of the Bible as “feel after” or “reach out for.” As someone who is blind might reach ahead, generally and imperfectly seeking something specific and necessary.

And in the end, finding it. Finding God. For all the mystery and majesty, God can be found. This is a radical notion, meaning that it is at the root of our faith. This God, who is big and little, far and near, awesome and intimate. This God, who organizes existence, and creates patterns out of chaos and stories out of moments. This God to whom we owe our existence and our breath. This God wants to be found. God likes us, and God wants us to be near. God longs for us to be near as much as we long for it.

We live and move and have our being in God, Paul quotes a Greek poet to the Athenians. The Athenians agree with that much. But it is more than being like some mortal fish swimming in a Godly sea. In the experience that changed his life, that made him an apostle and missionary, Paul learned that God and humans desire each other fervently. God may be unbounded by space and time, but God is not without passion. It is as if God also knows an emptiness which is filled only by God’s creatures, and that God and creation, God and we, live in each other. Our reaching out is matched by God’s.

I am in my father and you in me and I in you, Jesus says to his disciples. We dwell in each other. Perhaps God’s presence among us means that God’s heart is restless, too.