Musings from Studio and Pulpit

(This is the text of my sermon for March 15.  The readings referred to are Exodus 17:1-7, and Jn 4: 5-42.  In our readings today, things are more than what they seem.)

“Give us a drink.”

That is what the people cried out to God for, in the wilderness.  They were in the desert, and they were thirsty for water.  This was true, but it was not the whole truth.  It was not the only thing they were thirsty for.   They were thirsty for homeland.  For safety.  For security.  For belonging.

And God knew that only the relationship God was forming with them  would really quench this thirst. Only the ability to trust in God would answer their deepest needs.  They quarreled for the sake of water because they did not yet have this relationship of trust in God, who meets our deepest need.

“Give me a drink.”  That is what Jesus asked for,  when the woman came to the well to draw water.  He was on a long journey through Samaria, and was thirsty from his walking.  But he could not draw water from the well, for he had no bucket.  He was vulnerable.  While the disciples had gone to buy food for him,  he asked a stranger to give him water.

The woman was an outsider to him.  A Samaritan.  Jesus could have walked to Galilee from Jerusalem by a different way.  He could have gone down by the Jordan River valley, as most Jews did.  It was the usual way.  There was water to drink there, all the way, by the river.  But we are told he had to go through Samaria. What was this necessity?  After all, Samaritans had nothing to do with Jews.  The two groups shunned each other.  The hostility went back 500 years.  So why make a journey of several days on foot  through inhospitable territory?  What was the necessity?

Just before this, in John 3:16 and 17,  Jesus’ mission was stated.  “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,  that whosoever would trust in him  would have everlasting life.  For God sent not his son into the world to condemn it,  but rather that the world might be saved through Him.”

Now, Jesus becomes his own proclamation.  He goes to the world.  That was the necessity. And he arrives as a needy one.  Jesus makes himself into the one in need for the sake of the Samaritan community.

Actually what we see is only half of the story.  Jesus is the thirsty one,  but the Samaritans are the ones in need of living water.

“Give me a drink,”  Jesus says to the woman of Samaria.   Jesus is thirsty for water, but not for water alone.  He thirsts for our salvation.  He thirsts for the reconciliation of the Jews and the Samaritans.  He thirsts to offer salvation to all people,  and in Samaria he begins with this “unimportant” woman.

The woman comes to draw water in the heat of the day, alone.  Everyone knew that the hard task of drawing water  and carrying it home  was easier in the cool of the evening. This was a social time for village women.  But this woman comes in the heat of the daywhen no one else is expected to be there.  There is no community of women joining her.  Perhaps her hard life has caused her  to be ostracized by them.  Maybe she does not feel comfortable with them.  And when she arrives, Jesus is there –  a helpless traveler who is thirsty – and he asks for her help  because he has no bucket to draw water  from the well.

Jesus begins by breaking the rules.  Although he is the strong one,  he becomes the vulnerable one.  He has the living water, but he becomes the thirsty one.   Although he is Jewish, he speaks with the Samaritan.  Although he is a man, he speaks with a woman who is not related to him.  He is the great one, but he initiates conversation with one who is a nobody, unnamed in the story because in those times only men were considered important enough to have their names written.

Now, when Jesus speaks with her, she becomes a somebody, a messenger with a message for all her people, as she runs to her people shouting, “come, come, come and see the one I have met.  He knows me through and through.  Could he be the Messiah??”

She opens the door  of hospitality  in an inhospitable place, as God gives her a place in the mission of bringing God’s reconciliation to the whole world, through Jesus.  She has just met Jesus, and already the relationship she has with Jesus is changing her life and the lives of those around her.

When the disciples come back  from finding food in the village,  they try to give some to Jesus, but he replies,  “My food is to do the will of my Father, and to complete his work.” They don’t understand at first  that what Jesus hungers and thirsts for, more than the food and water that keep the body alive,  is to connect with us and give us life, life now, and eternal life as well.

What Jesus hungers and thirsts for is that we come to know the love of God, the love that is given to us for free, the grace of God’s wholehearted welcome,  God’s forgiveness for our past failings,  the grace that can heal memories  and  broken relationships.

What Jesus hungers and thirsts for is that we let Him help us,  so that the brokenness inside us – and among us – can be reconciled.

This grace cannot come through earthly water,  or earthly food.  It comes through receiving  the relationship God offers.  This is what Jesus offers the woman at the well, the living water of knowing God in Spirit and in truth.

It doesn’t matter where we are.  We need not make pilgrimage.  We need not be in Jerusalem, or on Mt Gerazim, where the Samaritans worshiped.  We need not even be at church to connect with God,  if we worship God in Spirit and in truth,  if we are in this life-giving relationship.  God always longs  to be reconciled to us and takes the initiative so that we can have this relationship,  this water that bubbles up unto eternal life, because it is God’s will to embrace us with love through Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is what gives us hope in the present and the future. Even if we think we are nobodies, God knows each of us by name.  It is for us that Jesus comes, bringing the living water.  This is the source of our joy and our hope, even in the midst of challenging times like this time we are in now, when anxiety about contagion abounds and causes normal life to be disrupted.

When we are in relationship to God,  we do not need to let our anxieties become terrors, because God has promised to be our safe place.  God goes with us through our deserts and provides for us.

So in this time of disruption, do not panic. For you have received the Holy Spirit.God is within you, going before you,  walking beside you.  God has your back.  God is with you in quiet and in danger,  wherever you are, now and forever.  Amen.

Luke 6:17-26, NRSV:

¹⁷[Jesus] came down with [the twelve] and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.¹⁸They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
  ²⁰Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
 “Blessed are you who are poor,
  for yours is the kingdom of God.
 ²¹“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
  for you will be filled.
 “Blessed are you who weep now,
  for you will laugh.
  ²²“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
 ²⁴“But woe to you who are rich,
  for you have received your consolation.
 ²⁵“Woe to you who are full now,
  for you will be hungry.
 “Woe to you who are laughing now,
  for you will mourn and weep.
  ²⁶“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”        This is the Good News of the Gospel for us today.

One night, our Lord was up on a mountain all night in prayer, and in the morning he chose his apostles.  These 12 would be those who spent the most time with him, and in the end they would be the ones who were sent out to teach, to heal, and to be ambassadors of God’s reconciliation in Jesus’ name.

It was after that, according to Luke, that Jesus and his disciples come down from the mountain onto a level place.  Here is the beginning of what we think of as the “Sermon on the Mount.”  Matthew, in his telling of the sermon, tells us Jesus preaches from the mountain, so we remember it as the Sermon on the Mount.

But for Luke, this message is given to people on a level place, on a plain.  The message is given, not as words thundering from above, but rather it is spoken by Jesus who is standing right in our midst.  In Luke’s Gospel,  we are told that the Son of God comes down to us from the mountaintop where he has been communing with God, and walks in our midst, and crowds gather to hear him.

Looking around at his disciples and the people from all over who had gathered to hear him, Jesus, we are told,  sees a cross-section of humanity.  People are there from Tyre and Sidon – these are probably Gentiles.  People are there from all over Judea – these are probably mostly Jews.  These people represent rich and poor people and everything in between, all together with Jesus on the same level.  Imagine how, standing together there, they might have heard Jesus’ words: “Blessed are you who are poor, and hungry, and weeping, and who are hated and defamed.  But woe to you who are rich, and full, and laughing, and who are spoken well of.”

That is how we hear these words now – from our various locations in the social landscape of the world.

Right away, we can recognize that this is different from what we remember from Matthew.  Matthew’s gospel says “blessed are the poor in spirit” and “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” But in Luke, we read, “blessed are you who are poor” and “blessed are you who are hungry now.”  Jesus does not spiritualize things here. These are actual, real,  physical conditions of poverty and hunger, and Luke’s Jesus is saying that the reign of God comes among us to dismantle such concrete economic realities.  Jesus is telling those who are poor and hungry that for them there is hope  in the reign of God, which is among them already, although not yet in its fullness.

But what about these woes?  Matthew’s Gospel does not include any woes, and at first glance we do not like them very much at all, because they make us feel uncomfortable, maybe a little guilty or a little defensive.  Most of us in the West would be considered rich by the world’s standards.  We rarely go hungry for any length of time.  We tend to think that laughter is better than weeping, and we go out of our way to avoid situations of suffering. And we try to protect our reputations – sometimes at the expense of what we believe in – by not speaking the truth when it seems too costly to do so.

Luke’s Gospel is full of these kinds of reversals though, beginning with the Magnificat, where we are told that the hungry will be filled with good things, while the rich are sent empty away.  This is a theme in the Gospel of Luke – that God has a special care for the dispossessed, the oppressed, and the poor. Through the ministry of Jesus, God is leveling the field.

Some of us might ask, “What’s up with that?” Well. to begin with, we know that in the first century, a lot of ordinary people were made poor by the occupation of Palestine by the Romans, while some of those who were wealthy and powerful had gotten their wealth by collusion with the Romans.  Tax collectors, for instance, were known to have skimmed money from the poor in their role of collecting taxes from Rome.  Jesus is speaking truth to power here, letting those with ill-gotten wealth that they won’t get away with it in the long run.  These words are perennial. They are for all times. Jesus is warning the rich that trusting in their riches is like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it.  Riches cannot protect them  if they have gained them (or kept them) at the expense of the poor. Nor will their good reputations hold water before the throne of God, if they have protected themselves by not speaking up and acting on behalf of the oppressed.

Just like those people on the level plain where Jesus is speaking, we too are all on the same level playing field before God – rich and poor; famous, infamous, and nobodies; of all ethnic backgrounds, and God sees through our situations.   For those in need, this passage is a comfort.   But for those who are enjoying their comforts – while turning  eyes away from those among us who are in need – there is a warning in this message; this is not the way of Jesus.

Now, you might ask, “Preacher, where’s the good news in that?  I thought we are saved by grace alone?”  It is true that, at face value, warnings don’t seem to be very good news. But it is good news that Jesus shows us what things will look like when the reign of God comes in its fullness, and challenges us to make course corrections so that our lives move in the direction of God’s reign, which is sometimes called the “kin-dom”, the place where we are all bound together in love and mutual concern.

The woes that the rich hear are warnings to remind them that what we have is given to us in trust, so that we use what we have to lift up those who have little.  The woes that the privileged hear are warnings to them to remember that power is given to us to lift up those who have none, in the service of peace that is based on justice.  And the woes that those who are satisfied with rich food and full pantries hear are to remind them that their excess is given in order for them to feed the hungry.  God intends for us to be compassionate, and to share what we are given for the good of all people.

And as if this were not challenging enough, Jesus goes on to speak about how his followers are to respond to enemies. Again, Jesus’ words challenge us.  For God’s way of looking at people is to look on them with love – even, it seems, our enemies.

Lk 6:27-38 NRSV

²⁷“… I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. ²⁹If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. ³⁰Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. ³¹Do to others as you would have them do to you.
  ³²“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. ³³If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ³⁴If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. ³⁵But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. ³⁶Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
  ³⁷“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; ³⁸give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”   This is the Good News of the Gospel for us today.

Whoa.

This runs counter to our intuition.  I mean, what does it really look like to love your enemies?  Are we called to be doormats? Most definitely not.  Unfortunately, in the past this scripture has been used to support “keeping women in their place,” and all sorts of abuse.   I’m convinced this is not at all what Jesus was up to here. Christ would never condone or support abuse of any kind.

Recently, in one online clergy discussion group, someone asked, “So, how do you love your enemies?”  And someone else replied, “From a distance.”  We chuckle at that, but it’s true. We need to be safe.  It’s one thing to extend goodness and forgiveness to someone that has hurt you in principle.  But it’s harder to do in day to day practice when they are in your day-to-day lives.  If you are getting hurt, by all means get to a safe place!

If someone hurts us,  our immediate response is based on our adrenaline, which creates a flght-or-flight response in us.  These survival responses are hard-wired in us, so we wish to get away from enemies, to avoid them, or even to act out in anger or violence against them.  Beyond that, we value defending our own honor and value.  Praying for those who hurt us, or extending goodness to them, is not what first comes to mind when we think of enemies.

Jesus does not condemn us for our adrenaline – based responses. We cannot help these.  But Jesus challenges us to move beyond these reactions.  We are called to become actors, not reactors. We are invited by Jesus to see the humanity of the enemy, while reclaiming our own dignity and freedom of choice, in how we respond to enemies.  Jesus even gives examples of how disciples can take positive steps toward the enemy, as with the situation when a Roman soldier would commandeer a passerby to carry his gear for a mile.  This was a way of humiliating and dehumanizing the occupied people.  Jesus says that the victim in this scenario is to accompany the soldier farther than is  required! – no doubt the last thing he might want to do – and in doing so to reclaim his own personal dignity.

Followers of Jesus are not to hold grudges or curse those who have hurt them, but instead, we are to pray for those who hurt us.  Jesus himself did this, when he prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”   He could have said, “Father, smite them, send them all to hell!”  But thanks be to God, He didn’t!

And that is how we sometimes want to pray – against those who have harmed us, when we have been deeply hurt.  “Smite them.  Send them all to hell.” That is when we have to ask God for the grace to take the next step toward the way of Jesus.  Maybe we can’t make it all the way to begin with.  Maybe we begin with humility: “Father, I really feel like asking you to smite my enemy.  Help me to take one little step closer to the way of Jesus.”  Maybe we can pray, “Father, help me to see this person the way you see him or her.”   We can pray, “Lord, I just can’t let go of this hurt, but I want to follow Jesus – please, help me to want to forgive as I have been forgiven.”  In this way, the Spirit can work the work of conversion within me, so that  I can move into a more thoughtful place,  see my enemy as a human being, and begin to become an actor for peace, an ambassador of the reconciliation of Christ. For the Jesus-Community is to be merciful to all, as God is merciful to us all.

These are deeply challenging texts!

Martin Luther King’s community members in Birmingham were continually victimized by systemic racism.  Their society continually humiliated them and hurt them daily.  In the midst of this suffering, King’s community could have responded with violence, but King was persuaded that only love could drive out hate.  The non-violent protests that he and his people engaged in were intended to draw attention to the injustice they were suffering.  King was jailed for participating in the protests. While in jail in Birmingham, he wrote a letter to Christian pastors who were criticizing King for being too controversial for a religious leader.  They called him an extremist.  Martin Luther King wrote,  “Jesus Christ was an extremist for love, truth and goodness” and was crucified for his extremism.  (Read more about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail and at https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html ).

Jesus, God’s Son, was an extremist for the sake of God’s love.  From the cross, he forgave his enemies.  This did not make him more of a victim.  It was an expression of his personal dignity and freedom that he did not allow what they did to him to cause him to succumb to hatred and vengeance.  In this he represented his Father.  We continually offend God, who has chosen to love us with a love and compassion that are infinite.  Like Jesus, we his followers are also called to be passionate and extreme when it comes to mercy and generosity, if we are to live fully into God’s kin-dom, where we are all “on the level”.

For what is actually at stake is how the world perceives God.  We followers of Jesus are not meant to be just the ethical voice, or even just the prophetic voice, in this world.  Our primary function is to be ambassadors of the love of God, to represent the character of God, through our words and our actions. The question is, “Will God’s nature be visible to the world through us, or not? Is God’s kingdom going to be among us, or not? Will the light of God’s love shine forth in us, or not?”  Jesus teaches us a way of living that makes God’s nature visible in the world.

Jesus has come to save us from sin, death, and the devil.  An important part of this mission is to teach us the way of life here that leads to abundant live. He teaches us the way of discipleship that will make God’s radical love, mercy, and generosity visible to the world through us. When we begin to practice extreme mercy and forgiveness and generosity,  God’s mercy breaks into the NOW,  into our neighborhoods and our living rooms and our workplaces, and God’s peace begins to break into this fractured world.  This is what Jesus invites us to in our readings today.  May we ask him humbly to help us to see how to walk this walk.   Amen.

I love rocks.  In fact, my house is full of baskets and bowls full of rocks from all sorts of places, and wherever I go I manage to squirrel away a rock or two in my suitcase to bring home.

I have here a plain ordinary rock.  I picked it up off the beach at the lake house.  This time of year, the lake water recedes a bit from the shore, and it’s possible to get a better look at the rocks that usually are under two or three feet of water, so when I walk on the beach I pick up stones and look at them and put them down again – unless I keep them.

This one is really not a particularly fancy rock, but instead it’s a simple object that a person might spend little attention on.  It appears to be a plain old rock, like other rocks.

And yet, if I put my attention on this rock for a long enough time, I might just notice that it is shot through with tiny garnets, little jewels embedded in its matrix, and when I notice this it becomes a little more unique, a little more special. What has seemed ordinary has taken on a bit of what is rare, extraordinary, and precious.

You might ask me, “Pastor, what does this have to do with All Saints’ Sunday?”  I think it has a lot to do with this day.

In the Lutheran tradition, the feast of All Saints today reminds us of those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. We might think of some of them as special, like Katie and Martin Luther, and the four evangelists, and Mary the mother of our Lord, and the apostles, and Mary Magdalene.  If we were to think of them as stones,  we might imagine that they were diamonds or sapphires, sparkling in the light of Christ, great examples for us.  Others that we might think of are more ordinary saints,  ordinary like plain stones from the beach. But what seems ordinary to us is actually extraordinary, rare and precious if you have the eyes to see, like this rock that almost anyone, even a naturalist, might think of as – well – just a rock.

So why did I see what others might not see?  It is because I love the rocks of Maine, and I have been picking them up and putting them down again ever since I was a little girl.

What helps us see that the apparently ordinary thing is in fact extraordinary, is love.  When you walk in a big city you may see a great many people on the sidewalk, and you might just think, that’s a lot of people.   Sometimes, they might even seem like walking objects to you, and you to them, and sometimes they might even think of you as an obstacle and push past you, if they are in a hurry.

But when the loved ones of each of these people look at them, that is not what they see.  They see the beautiful look in the eye, the shape of the smile, and their hearts are warmed, because they love. That is how we see our own relatives and friends that are ordinary saints; they are extraordinary to us, because we love them.

God loves us.  To God, we are all diamonds in the rough, and precious.  So God sent Jesus to show us that love.   He looks on us, who are little bits of clay that God has filled with the breath of life,  with love greater than we can imagine, and to Him, we are extraordinary, not because of anything we have done, but simply because He loves us.

Now, whether we are thinking of the great saints of old, or our own local saints, like Shirley Morrison, who died this year, or whether we are thinking of countless other apparently ordinary saints, we have this in common with all of them.   We all die.

Most of the time we don’t give this mortality of ours much thought.  But now and then, we have a brush with this knowledge, some sort of twinge or some sort of news that brings it a little to our attention.  And in those moments when we realize that our days are limited, something that is usually thought of as ordinary, like the quietness of the early morning,  or the color of the sky,  or the look in the eyes of a friend,  may take on a preciousness that otherwise we did not pay much attention to.  We become aware, at these times,  that we love.

Jesus loved Lazarus of Bethany.  Lazarus was a beloved friend of our Lord, along with his sisters, and Lazarus died, as we all will as well.  His life left him, and they wrapped his body and placed him in the tomb.   And his sisters grieved the loss of him –  his smile, the way he laughed, the light in his eyes, the person he was.  They wept.  He was precious and beloved to them, and then he was gone.

But he was not gone from our Lord.

God intended for us that we experience life, life, abundant life.  But Scripture tells us that when sin entered the world, death also came.   Christ came to do battle with sin and death for us, and our Gospel says to us, He is victorious.   Christ is victorious.  And it is important in these days of mass shootings and other violence to remember:  God’s love has conquered death forever.  We get to see the end of the story, even as we struggle in the middle of it.  There will come a day when the tears are dried from every eye.

This is the other thing we have in common with all the saints of all times and places – we believe in resurrection. We believe that in Christ, all will be made alive.  And That is because God’s love is stronger than death.  It is because we are so precious in the eyes of the God who loves us that God simply will not allow death to have the final say.

Maybe you have sensed, after a loved one dies, that they are still with you.  I sometimes have.  Love never ends, and the love that you share with them causes them to remain a part of you.  You notice that there is an unbreakable bond between the saints. There is an unbreakable bond between the saints.  Death cannot break this bond.  We are called into this bond by Christ himself in our baptisms, as we become part of his body with him as the head, and even as Christ was raised, we shall be also.  And so we celebrate the saints of all times and conditions and places that have died, with confidence despite our grief,  because Christ’s love binds us together.

But we who celebrate the saints who have gone before us are also called to pay attention to the precious saints who still walk here among us.  If we celebrate the saints of all times and places that have died, we ought to see and celebrate those saints still among us who still struggle in this place.  For in whatever place, whether they are in our own homes, or in some poor shack in Sudan, or in a nursing home, or in some conflict area like Jerusalem or Gaza, or in prison, or gathered in a group of desperate people approaching our southern border, our Lord looks on them and sees them as precious and beloved. We are bound to these brothers and sisters in love.  They are not objects to be hated or feared, used, or pushed aside.

When Jesus raised Lazarus, He raised him to this earthly life.  It was a return to living here, not in the great beyond.  Not yet.  And at that time, he gave three commands.  The first was, “Roll away the stone.”  And so they did.  We, the church,  also are to go to the places where people are living in the valley of the shadow of death, and we must remove the barriers that keep others from life, life, abundant life.

The second command was to Lazarus himself: “Come forth.”  Jesus is always calling us out of death into new life.  When we hear this call, we must choose to respond, rise,  and reach out to grasp the new life that is offered, just as a person who has had surgery must get up and go to rehab and do exercises.

And finally, there was a command to those who were bystanders.  “Unbind him, and let him go.”  It is the church’s job, our job,  to participate in the unbinding of those who are bound, that they might simply and fully live – to undo whatever is holding back our brothers and sisters from this full life.  These can take various forms – to name a few, some are bound by fear or hatred directed against themselves or others, and some are bound by unjust laws.

Jesus commands us to do these things because He sees us as precious and beloved, and we are to see ourselves and one another as precious and worthy of the effort, as though we were not just ordinary stones picked up off the beach, but precious stones filled with jewels.

As it is in heaven, so may it be among us.  May God give us the eyes to see each soul as He sees, not as plain and ordinary and therefore not worth the time, but as precious, extraordinary jewels to be cherished and cared for, polished by his love until we shine.  And may he give us hearts to see as He sees and to love as He loves. May he trouble us with dissatisfaction with the brokenness around us, until we have come to love with the active and effective sort of compassion with which Christ loves each of us.  Amen.

Watersource, Watercourse,

cloud pregnant with rain,

fill up the riverbeds,

fill the wadis, overflow the cisterns,

carry us the water

even the water

of justice

and peace.