Resurrection is coming!

Today was a day to experiment. The whole state of North Carolina is under a stay-at-home order, gatherings larger than 50 are prohibited and larger than 10 are strongly discouraged. Pastors are trying all sorts of things to continue offering worship online. It seemed like an ideal time to try out the idea/yearning I have had for a long time to do the pastor thing out in the community.

I heard about a playground that had been wrapped in Caution tape because a sign would not be enough to keep the children away, and the people who did the tape-wrapping were very concerned that we do everything we can to keep everybody safe. And I am all about safety! But it seemed like a good day to talk about Resurrection. So off I went to Euclid Road Play area in the Parkwood neighborhood, Lisa agreed to be my videographer, and there result is for you to watch here.

The lectionary texts for the day are:
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

God of goodness and grace, who fills the universe with joy and is constantly redeeming and recreating us. Bring us an extra measure of your grace and soothe our hearts with your love and all the promises of Resurrection.  Amen

Those are two big stories today, aren’t they? Even if you don’t know a lot about the Bible, the first story, from the Old Testament, may ring familiar to you. Remember the song “Dem Bones Dem Bones Dem Dry Bones”? That’s based on this passage… “Now hear the word of the Lord!”

It’s quite the story, isn’t it? Ezekiel is in a canyon filled with dry, dusty bones and he prophesies and God knits those bones together back into people, and breathes life back into them. God can and will create life. Even out of dusty old bones. Even, Ezekiel is telling the people of Israel, out of their dusty dry way of living as a community.

And then the second story – known by many a Sunday School child for including the shortest verse in the Bible:  Jesus wept. We tend to think Jesus wept because his friend Lazarus had died, but the passage is quite clear: Jesus wept because his friends were sad. The death of Lazarus was not a barrier to Jesus. He called Lazarus’s name and Lazarus is alive again – not even stinky after four days in a tomb of not being alive.

Jesus was so much about relationship that even though he knew FULL WELL that Lazarus was going to be alive again in a few minutes… he wept. In weeping he shared in the sorrow of his friends.

What do we take from this? Well, there seems to be a pretty clear message that in God’s economy, death will not have the last word. There is also a message of compassion and relationship, of sharing in the pain of friends. A message of RESURRECTION for a people who had gone so far as to be dried up bones.


And as we are here in the Lentiest Lent many of us have ever Lented, I began to wonder why. Why do we do the things we do in Lent? Why do we have these long stories of sorrow, but always sorry mediated by something miraculous?

When my mother was a child, they were not allowed to have birthday parties or weddings during Lent. That was really bad news for my aunt, with her April 15 birthday.

There is always much talk of what we will give up for Lent. Chocolate? Coffee? Cursing?

Or the more recent trend, that instead of giving up something you take on something new, make a positive change. That might be walking, eating more salads, maybe even eating more Cheetos if the idol in your life is pristine dietary practices.


It all seems very behavioral to me. Now, Lutherans are very big on being saved by grace and get a little antsy when there is talk of how our behaviors interact with our relationship with God. God always comes first. Love always comes first. Our behaviors are a response to that loving God, who gives us grace over and over and over.

But even I have to admit that behaviors are important. They will not save us but they can certainly give us perspective. How we behave is a reflection of what we value.

Sometimes looking around it can seem that the only thing we value is happiness and pleasure.

Party all the time, yo! We don’t want to go through the dark times. Even when times have been hard, we don’t want to remember that. We want to have good old days and overnight success, and skip right over the years of trying and waiting and worrying and the long nights of anxiety and uncertainty and wondering what all this means.

But there is another side to that. Have you noticed that everybody complains? No matter how great things are – how wealthy, how healthy, how talented – we all find things to complain about. I wonder if that is because the difficulties are the contrast that show us how good things can be? The complaints do not always illuminate the reality of God’s goodness and grace, but in complaining about what we do not have we see images of what else could be.


And so it is with Lent.

* In recognizing the sorrow that really does infiltrate our lives instead of repressing and denying it, or blaming someone else….
o In admitting that pain and sorrow are real
* In coronavirus pandemics
* Abusive homes
o Poverty
* Hunger
* Isolation
o War
* Loneliness

All of those very real things that we cannot easily fix for ourselves, much less for anyone else or our society as a whole…

It’s all real.

And WOW are we getting a dose of that right now. The reality that the economy really ISN’T the most important thing.

The reality that no amount of money or power can keep a person safe from the virus – just ask Prince Charles, or Tom Hanks, or all the other rich and powerful people who have been affected.

The reality that businesses, and schools, and even playgrounds are shut down in an act of LOVE, to try and protect the most vulnerable among us.

BUT ALL THAT SORROW AND PAIN AND SADNESS WILL NOT HAVE THE LAST WORD.


During Lent we remember the parameters of the story, yes.

We remember that we will all die (hence the ashes on Ash Wednesday).

We remember that Jesus did wonderful things – and was dearly beloved by those who were healed but was not loved at all by the religious elite of the day.

And in today’s stories we remember that

DEATH WILL NOT HAVE THE LAST WORD

Because Resurrection is coming!

Just like the Resurrection of those dry bones, and the Resurrection of Lazarus, and all the other Resurrections in the Bible before the big one: the Resurrection of Easter.


The Resurrection of Easter and because of Jesus dying and not staying dead, the Resurrection of ourselves someday.

Will we be flat broke at the end of this pandemic? I don’t know, because money is easy for God.

Will there be many, many people who died from the virus?  Probably so, but death was no barrier for Jesus – or for the God who reassembled all those bones in the canyon with Ezekiel.

Will our shame and brokenness stop God from loving us? Absolutely not! Never! The God who came to us in Jesus showed that over and over again – that relationship and love of his friends was more important even than death.

Jesus can share our sorrow – because Jesus loved us and loves us still.

God will carry us to the end and even after that – because God loves us.

Money, the economy, power – it’s all so small as to be nothing to a God who would come, and live among us, and get it completely right.

Because God, in Jesus, always chose relationship over everything else.

And so we can bring our shame into the light of vulnerability now. We can admit how wrong we are because we know…

RESURRECTION IS COMING!


This may be the Lentiest Lent ever Lented, but if it is, it will only make the Resurrection brighter and more joyful.

When Easter comes this year, the Feast of the Resurrection, we might be in our churches or we might be at taped off playgrounds.

We might be starting to see signs that the pandemic is abating or we might be even more alarmed at how things seem to be falling apart.

But we need not worry – not now and not then – because Lent will not win. It can’t. Because Love already has.

Amen.

Who gets the blessing?

I'm reading a book by Sarah Bessey ("Jesus Feminist"), and in that book she talks about preaching every sermon so that it is for every person in every corner of the globe. That resonated with me as I was getting this message ready for my beloveds at the Springmoor Stewart Health Center. Some of the people who will read this on this blog have wildly different lives than that congregation and this time I was keenly aware of those differences. Would these words speak to every person? Can I offer the same words to the people with health problems typical of aging and to the young, vibrant, healthy people in other parts of my world?

I don't know. I hope so. Fortunately Jesus - the Resurrection - and the unfailing love of God in Jesus is for everyone. Every single person. And that's the bottom line. You can listen to the delivered message here.

The texts for this week are:
Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Come Holy Spirit. Break up our fear and open our eyes and hearts to know love as you offer it: with complete generosity.  Amen

Abraham is all over today’s lessons but there isn’t a whole lot of context. The reading from Genesis is about Abraham being called by God. The reading from Romans is about how that call from God to Abraham might inform our faith lives (according to Paul, writing to the Jesus-followers in Rome). It seems like there might be a whole lot more story there, though, doesn’t it?

Nothing in the story before the Genesis lesson makes Abram seem remarkable. Why Abram? Why not one of Abram’s brothers, Nahor or Haran? Why did Abram take Haran’s son Lot, but none of Nahor’s children? WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT ABRAM?

Based on scriptural evidence, the answer to that question has to be … nothing. Abram was just one of many.

And that turns out to be kind of good, because if God can choose Abram, then maybe God can choose ordinary me (and maybe ordinary you, too).

Before naming Abram as entirely ordinary, though, let’s see if there is something else that shows something special about Abram:

First of all, he’s 75 when God calls him. Sure, people lived a lot longer then, but 75 is no spring chicken even by standards of that day. In the genealogy before Abram’s call, the babies were being born when the daddies were in their 20s and 30s, so by this point Abram could have had a bunch of children. But he didn’t. Maybe that’s why he took his nephew Lot along?!?

Abram did have a wife – Sarai – and they took Lot and went off to where God sent. And what is the first thing they did? They lied about being married. Because Abram was scared. It doesn’t seem like a very believing thing to do, though.

And how did God respond to that lying disrespect of marriage?

God blessed Abram! No punishment from Pharaoh… just take your wife and go. And here, take all your stuff, too. JUST GO AWAY. Safely.

And prosperity came upon Abram, who then rescued Lot from warring tribes. Melchizadek blessed Abram. Things were going GREAT!

So what did Abram do?

Instead of clinging to God’s promise of blessing and children, he thought maybe God was confused so he went to Hagar and had a child. It was Sarai’s idea, not God’s, but Abram had no problem hopping on board. Once again Abram tripped up…

And what happened?  Did God say “that’s enough, I’m done with you Abram!”?

Nope.

God made ANOTHER covenant with Abram. God changed their names and said “let me be clear… I am going to give YOU a son, and here, you and Sarai will now be Abraham and Sarah. Don’t worry that you are 100 years old and Sarah is 90. You will have a child.

And they did! Baby Isaac was born. God picked Abram – now Abraham – again. Not because he was so good, though. Because those covenants kept coming after Abraham showed some pretty vivid and gross disrespect for what God had promised.

It was a start of a pattern throughout the Old Testament:  God would say

I PICK YOU!

And the people would say YAY! And then go off and act as if they had never heard the promise.

So God would say… ok… I forgive you and I am crazy in love with you so I will PICK YOU EVEN MORE!

Over and over.

The big covenants always came after the egregious indicators of disbelief (at least by our way of seeing things). The things we see as the worst behavior were always followed by an even bigger promise of goodness, love, and grace from God.

Like the man who would later tell Jesus “I believe… help my unbelief” I believe God was looking at something else. I believe that God understood how our brokenness and small capacity to understand exactly what is happening around us made us step away.

I think God also saw the belief underneath. The yearning for something better. The hope that this was the right thing instead of actual willful disobedience.

God knows that love is always a better motivator than anger or punishment. God did get angry… but never as a motivator. For God, love is the only motivation worth offering to people.



And I think that is what God responded to…

I KNOW YOU WANT TO DO BETTER, BELOVED! HERE, LET ME HELP!



In fact, what I take from all of this is stuff like
* God is really confusing and hard to understand
* It is really hard to figure out how God is working in and through other people (not to mention my own self)
* God is not doing God’s things based on anything I can see or comprehend

And the most encouraging thing of all:

God is completely ok with me not knowing and getting it all wrong with surprising regularity.

In other words… God loves me! And if God loves me then God can love anybody!

God loves each of us.  Period. Even if all we can muster is wanting to try. Even if we can’t even manage that.

God knows each of us is doing the best we can – and the best we can do is always going to be riddled with misconceptions, missteps, and even willful error, when we really should know better.

But God also doesn’t leave us in our own muck of brokenness, disability, inability, and fatigue (all things that often seem to be behind my most unloving behaviors.) Just like God didn’t abandon Abraham.

God came to love us firsthand in Jesus. It’s like God said “SO… y’all can’t quite figure out how who I am can fit with who you are, so I will take on your form. I will show you. This is the best way to love you yet, because you will see! You will see what it looks like to be God and to also be in human form. I will show you how my image is actualized in human form.

And what did Jesus do?

Jesus fed and healed, walked outside the rules and laws and customs of human power systems, told stories about humanity that gave a peek into the image of God in each of us. Jesus did not mete out punishment, Jesus just slathered love everywhere. On everyone. Even if they couldn’t receive it.

Jesus highlighted what it looks like when we see each other as God sees us.



Of course, God knew we weren’t really going to be very good at it, this slathering of love. There was such a long history to show that we just can’t get it right. We are hard-wired to be skeptical, to dismiss anything that shows all the ways that we are not being our best selves.

In our broken human state we are more likely to kill Jesus than follow him… and that is exactly what happened.

The people with the most human-granted power could not fathom that God would love them anyway, even if they did not have that power over others.

The men with human-granted power could not accept that Jesus’s inclusion of all the people could possibly be (and indeed was always) enough. Jesus loved everybody equally and completely: women and children, widows and prostitutes, people with mental illness, physical illness, dead people, up-and-coming rulers in the rigidly patriarchal system and old Temple leaders who had been around a long time.

And as a result – because not loving power is the most dangerous thing in our broken world – Jesus died. He absorbed the wrath that the powerful people saved for those most outside of their prevailing systems. They killed him dead in a most horrific manner.

AND IT WAS NOT ENOUGH.

The way of God was stronger and Jesus did not stay dead. We were given the ultimate gift – Resurrection – as the final and greatest indicator that even death cannot overcome love.



I do not know all the ways you might fear or welcome, understand or be puzzled by death. But I do know this:

Jesus loved.

Jesus was a human person like you and me.

Jesus was killed for it and the worst that humanity had to offer did not overcome the love that Jesus demonstrated so perfectly.

And for me, that is enough.

It is enough for me to keep on trying to love more.

It is enough for me to stay focused on Jesus to see that love looks like in action.

It is enough for me to believe… and in that belief to find righteousness that cannot be found in any other way.

AMEN.