Don't worry, be loved

This week's message was delivered at both Springmoor Retirement Center in Raleigh, NC and Atria Southpoint Walk Independent Living facility in Durham. I was going to record it but then forgot to turn on the recorder, so there's just the text. I don't think I followed the text that closely, but the main ideas are there.

The texts for the week are:
Malachi 4:1-2a
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

Come Holy Spirit. Carry these words where they need to go. Let your love be the centerpoint. Amen

You know how they started putting out Christmas decorations weeks before it was even Halloween? And Thanksgiving kind of gets lost in the mix these days?

And how we say “it’s too soon! It’s not time yet! We haven’t even gotten into fall yet – how can it be time for Christmas which comes at the END OF THE YEAR?”

Well… I am bringing some news that might be a little bit surprising to some folks: The year is, in fact, coming to an end!

Maybe not the calendar year so much… quite yet…

But in just two weeks we will be starting a new church year. It will be Advent, the time of waiting until the great festival of Christmas.

So that leaves this week and next week in this church year.

We are just at the end and sometimes the end can seem kind of rough and raggedy. In fact, sometimes that’s how we know it’s at the end.
     The socks with a hole in the toe? The end.
     The slacks with the worn knees?
     Or the shirt with fraying collar?
     Or the chair with that one wobbly leg?
We know it’s at the end because it isn’t right. It isn’t how it was originally created to be.

Our lessons today talk about the end, too. About how things are not how they were originally created to be, and how that tells us something:

Here’s what Malachi says about the raggedy things that will come at the end:
* Burning like an oven
* Arrogant and evildoers will be stubble
* Without root or branch

And then in Luke:
* Not one stone left on another
* Wars and insurrections
* Nation against nation
* Famines and plagues
* Persecution

Well who would EVER want to live in times like that?? It’s tempting to think that maybe we should just give up. Throw it out like that wobbly chair. Or, perhaps if you are a more energetic sort, at least try to fix it?

Apparently the people in today’s lesson from Thessalonians felt a little bit like that. They were so convinced that the bad things were happening that Jesus would be back (quite literally) ANY MINUTE and so they didn’t need to do a thing. They could just hang out and wait.

They quit living into their calls as people – their one unique personhood that only they could fulfill.

But Paul was not having it. Paul said WHOA WHOA WHOA HERE! You can’t just QUIT! You have to keep going. Sure Jesus will come back, but you have to keep living until that very minute.

You can’t just give up. You were not made to give up.

And that is what I want you to hear today: you were not made to give up. You can still live the life you were born to live, in whatever way there is to live it today.

You do not have to be afraid.

For as long as I can remember I have heard these texts read with their laundry list of disaster and thinking (along with other people around me) IT’S NOW! THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW!

But now I am not quite so young as I once was and I have a sneaking suspicion that those words, those harbingers of disaster, are ALWAYS happening – that they always have been happening, ever since The Fall in the Garden of Eden. Because the world simply is not how it was originally created to be.



And OH don’t we love to focus on that? How bad things are?

What we are not quite so eager to focus on is the other part of our readings that are the same today and always:
* Those who persevere
* An opportunity to testify
* Do the work that you were born to do
* DO NOT PREPARE YOUR DEFENSE IN ADVANCE

Somehow, Malachi, and then about 400 years later, Jesus, seemed to be saying the same thing:

WELL YEAH things are going to be hard and scary. But that is not what is important!

Don’t get caught up trying to fix what you cannot fix!

Don’t go down the rabbit hole of academic theology (or whatever other arguments you like – politics, climate change, reproductive rights, whatever). Don’t try to systematize everything and constantly clarify and argue and pretend like it can ever all be ok.

Because it can’t.

The latest political skirmish
Scary weather changes
How women and men and their unborn babies are treated
Even the latest spat you have had with someone you love

Those are not the things that are going to win (or lose) the day. We cannot stop all those things. We cannot put the world back like it was originally created to be.

There is only one thing that matters, and that one thing is

Living in God.
Following Jesus
Living the life you are called to live.

Jesus came and lived a life steeped in all the realities of humanity. All the wars and arguments, and anger, and poor treatment, and anguish.

But do you know what Jesus never did?
* Jesus never worried
* Jesus did not argue with the Pharisees and Sadducees, even when they asked him foolish trick questions.
* Jesus did not even (as far as we know) argue with his parents!

How did he DO that?? Did you ever wonder how Jesus knew what to say to the people who tried to trip him up?

Well, of course Jesus was God.

But even though Jesus was God, he spent time reading Scripture and studying in the Temple. He took time to pray. He spent time being with alone with God.

He did not study and pray to out argue scholars though, or to get his own way. Jesus spent his time studying and praying in order to be in the company of God – of the Trinity.

Which is pretty remarkable, given that Jesus IS ONE OF THE TRINITY.

But that’s what he did. He spent time with the other two members of God. So when the questions came he knew what to say. He knew how God thought. He knew how to fit the foibles and weaknesses of humanity with the ultimate love and yearning of God.

Remember those stories where Jesus would be in trouble with the Temple officials for something or other, and he just walked through the crowd and left? Why was it different at the crucifixion?

How did he know when it was time to stay and die?

I believe it is because he stayed close to God.

He had prayed and learned as a human, listened and believed. So when times got really hard, Jesus knew what to do.

I am pretty sure that is what our texts want us to know today.

There are always going to be terrible, scary, destructive things happening, right up to the time Jesus returns.

We are at the end of the church year and we are somehow at the end of time, waiting for Jesus. And someday this life as we know it will end. But it will not end up tattered like an old sock or frayed shirt.

Someday it will be like it was originally created to be again. And God will be the one who makes it so. Not you, or me, or a bishop, or a president. Not a king or a doctor. But God. That is the promise. God will take care of the world and everything in it, and it will be restored.

If you have spent your life praying and listening and learning and loving God, then you do not have to worry.

If you are new to praying and listening and learning and loving God, then you do not have to worry.

If you know God even a little bit, you do not have to worry.

None of us is called to worry.
None of us is called to fix things on our own.
None of us is designated as the person to focus on how wrong everything is

We are called to live the life we have now.

We are called to spend time with God. To learn to know God: Father, Holy Spirit, and our beloved Jesus.

That’s it.

And when the time comes we will know what to say – much like Jesus did – because we will be who we were born to be, and we will know exactly and perfectly what God wills.

We will know that we are loved – just like Jesus was.

AMEN.

You are a treasure

This sermon was written for and delivered to my beloveds at the Stewart Health Center at Springmoor Retirement Community in Raleigh, NC. I go to visit and lead vespers about once/month, usually on the second Sunday of the month, and I have grown to love the people with all my heart. They do not always remember who I am - memories being tricky things, especially when there are more years on a body. But we all love each other. Sometimes we laugh. We sing. And I get to tell them that Jesus loves them. Ever single time.

I recorded the message and you can listen to it here. One of the congregants was very excited about singing, so you might hear her comments in the mix. Don't worry, though, there was lots of singing!

The texts for the day are:

Job 19:23-27a 

Psalm 17:1-9 

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 

Luke 20:27-38 

ON THE SURFACE, today’s lessons seem to be all about the tragedy.

First, Job. God loved him so much and was so confident in his faith that disaster fell all around his ears. So much for prosperity, right? Job started out as a rich guy, and ended up losing everything… because God thought he was absolutely the best.

But Job was adamant. Job, which is some of the oldest literature in the Bible.  WAY BACK THEN Job was saying what the Sadducees in the Gospel lesson did not want to hear:

Job said, essentially, that his Redeemer LIVES, and that he will live too.

Job said that God is about life.

So it was not a new thing that Jesus brought to the story. LIFE had been there all along.


But then along come those Sadducees who had decided that, well, sure, life was lovely but NO WAY could there be a Resurrection. Nuh-uh. And they were going to trick Jesus. Prove that resurrection doesn’t even make SENSE.

Their story had all the elements: the rule of Law in the form of a woman and some brothers who were all following the rules set down by Moses.

The rules were about taking care of women in a pretty restrictive society…. They were to protect the woman.

But that’s not exactly how the story went when the Sadducees told it. They took a law that was meant to protect vulnerable women with no means of support and turned it into a game. They turned it into a legal exercise for them to sit around and debate.

They did not know the first thing about that poor woman!

If they were really worried about her, how could they have listed it as a countdown? It’s a little like that song…

     Ten little ducks went out to play, over the hill and far away...

It reads like a countdown rather than a realization of the horrific circumstance of losing SEVEN husbands in one lifetime.

It completely glosses over her pain and anguish… not to mention the reason for continually marrying the next brother. Where is the part about protecting that woman?  Where is the realization of what that law from Moses was about anyway?

For them, it was just a legal exercise. Not a life.

How often do we encounter that kind of thinking, though?

We turn the real problems in people’s lives into legal exercises. Rules that don’t connect to humanity.

The health care system, for example… it’s all about the insurance rules, isn’t it?

My blood pressure has always run on the high side and my doctor is adamant that something terrible is going to happen to me. I faithfully take the medicines she prescribes, I exercise, I try to eat healthy food. But my blood pressure is always high.

It irritates my doctor, this situation where my body does not act like she thinks it should.

It irritates me, too, though. Because I never hear a single word of sympathy, or encouragement. Just more news about all the bad things that might happen.

My doctor SAYS she is concerned about my life, but she really isn’t all that interested in what I think are the most important parts of my life. All she talks about is how I might die. It does not matter to her that my life might be about more than the numbers connected to my blood work.

Just like the Sadducees.

They did not know that women – she was just a hypothetical case. It’s likely they had never been in a deep conversation or even close around a widow. Around what widowhood means in the life of a real human being.

They did not care about her grief.

They just wanted to prove a point – that resurrection doesn’t make sense.

They were saying, in effect, that there was only death. That only death mattered. Over, and over, and over. Laws and death. Death and legal requirements.

It seems, in fact, that their intense resistance to the idea of resurrection was more important than the life of a poor, grief-stricken woman. They did not want to think about that woman and all those men living a painless, redeemed life. They wanted to win the argument so they could keep their positions of power.

They had wandered so far away from the God that had been spoken in the earliest of stories about Job.

And I think that broke Jesus’ heart.

Because I’m pretty sure what Jesus heard was a grief-stricken family that lost seven sons. The pain and difficulty of the life of a woman who was passed down from one brother to the next as each husband died.

Jesus was all about life for everyone, especially those in the most pain He always noticed the pain because that’s what had to be healed for a fulfilled life.

Jesus was the living, breathing fulfillment of what Job said: I *know* that my Redeemer lives. The shout of joy and redemption that we cry out every Easter.

Jesus came to teach us about life in the present and life eternal. When those 7 brothers would live. When the woman would live, released from the pain and uncertainty of a family with lots of sons and very bad luck in living!


And so it is for us, too.

The Jesus who proclaimed love and life on earth

Who showed us how to live

Also shows us that we are – EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US –

100% valuable.

Jesus, the one who proclaimed that each of us is worthy of living forever.

     The one who took up the cross because we could never do it ourselves

Who was unwilling to sacrifice us, so Jesus sacrificed himself

Jesus, who died and then showed with his own body that Resurrection is real.

The Sadducees were wrong.

     There IS resurrection.

My doctor who can only see a future of disaster for me is wrong.

I can live fully now in body and mind and spirit, and I will live forever in Jesus, regardless of the medical establishment’s averages.

In Jesus, we are all free dto live the life we have been called to live right now.

And if living is hard here today, then we can know there is also a better life:

The life that God gives us in Jesus.

The life that never ends.

     Where every person is important.

Every life is essential

We all have something to share with each other and with the world.

You are a treasure, a gift, alive, and that is how you can be forever, because of Jesus.

AMEN.

ORDAINED!

On October 27, 2019, it happened. I was ordained to be a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

AND HOW AWESOME IS THAT??

When things were difficult, and it wasn't clear where it would all end up, I would say "the Holy Spirit is doing something, and when everybody gets there, it will be beautiful. And it was. It was a magnificent service, but not in a pretentious or fancy way. It was beautiful in the way my life is beautiful because people from every part of my life were there. It's taken me several weeks to come down from the mountaintop state of pure, unadulterated joy, to living in the regular world again.

You can see the service here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nlpM7uMCOQ