Hunger

 A Sermon based on John 6: 1-21

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When I was about six years old, my dad, who at the time was a musician, played a gig on the 4th of July in the Northlands of Kansas City. We didn't often get to go to the movies, so while my dad rehearsed, stayed cool in a theater. My younger brother, who must have been about three, found the movie, an early screening of “Honey I Blew Up the Kid” terrifying, and I ended up chasing him up the aisle several times while he tried to run out of the theater because my mom was holding my baby sister, who was sleeping. Later, we rode the escalator in the fancy theater over and over, and then finally, it was time to head down to the river front where we would eat snacks, hear my dad play, and then get to see fireworks. You might think this sounds like a fun childhood memory. You would be wrong.

Here are a few important pieces of information that slightly color how I remember this. First, I am one of four kids, so my oldest brother was nine, I was around six, my younger brother was three, and my youngest sister was barely one. Why my parents thought it was a good idea to bring us out for this I have absolutely no idea. Two, we were very poor, so the movie was the treat of our year. I am not sure how we even got tickets for this movie, because it was a pre-release, and I don't think we paid for it at this fancy theater, but I know that we did not get snacks or drinks. In fact, we did not buy any food all day. My mom packed food, and Diet Coke to drink. Fact number three, when I was a kid I could not drink soda. The bubbles burned my nose. Fact number four, we were having a minor heat wave in Kansas City that summer, and it was 91 degrees that day. You can see where this is going. 

There we were, hunkered down in the grass on the banks of the Missouri River, waiting to watch fireworks, and as much as I reach back into my memory of that evening, I cannot remember anything about the music or the fireworks. All I remember was the excruciating, agonizing thirst I experienced, and the availability of my most hated nemesis, Diet Coke. I remember my mom begging and pleading with me to just take a few sips, and me steadfastly refusing it. Because we were only there to see fireworks and not Jesus, unfortunately, nobody passed around a miraculously refilling pitcher of Juicy Juice. It was the longest night of my life to that point.

Granted, the biblical story isn't entirely parallel to mine. But in a way, the people were out to see some fireworks. It was getting close to Passover, which for the Jewish community is a time of remembering God's liberating power. The Jews were again living under the government of Rome, and people had been talking about Jesus, and wondering if maybe he was the one who had been foretold. Hoping to get a glimpse of him, a crowd of people had gathered and followed Jesus and the disciples. And Jesus, recognizing that the time of revelation was drawing near, took the opportunity to test the disciples, and draw a parallel to another story of salvation—the feeding of the children of Israel in the wilderness. Jesus asks his disciples what to do, and Andrew suggests that there is a little bit of food, a boy with some loaves and fishes. Jesus instructs the disciples to have the people sit, and then he takes the meager portion, gives thanks to God for it, and begins to distribute it to the people. Can you imagine the looks on the disciples' faces as they start passing out bread and fish, expecting that one row would get a few bites, and instead this tiny lunch for one person is suddenly just... not ending?

This link to the story of the Israelites is no accident. It's Passover, and Jesus is to be the new “paschal lamb.” Following the events of the first Passover, where the children of Israel fled Egypt to the wilderness, manna, or bread, fell daily from heaven, and quail obediently landed on their doorsteps, a promise of provision even during a time of wandering and separation from the promised land. Jesus, foreshadowing his own death, becomes the source of the manna and fish, a promise of abundance in the midst of our hunger. It's a beautiful metaphor, and one that is completely lost on the people in front of him. Rather than understanding that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, the people gather up the leftovers and immediately mobilize to try to forcibly install him as a king to overthrow the government. Recognizing that the people are still thinking about earthly things, Jesus returns to the mountain alone.

I'm a priest, but my daytime gig is as a chaplain supporting paramedics and EMTs, police officers, and emergency dispatchers. Recently, I was chatting with a young man about an accident that he worked on in the course of his job. Although he felt good about his own role in the situation, he found himself struggling with bigger questions about suffering in the world. Why did terrible things happen to innocent people? Why was it that, in his line of work, so often the people that walk away from the terrible accidents and tragedies were the ones who had caused them or bore responsibility, while those who were catastrophically injured or even killed, were innocent bystanders? I could see the hunger for answers in his eyes as he looked at me. Hunger for understanding, hunger for comfort, and safety, and assurance, and most of all, for peace.

This is the hunger we all have burning inside of us. The same parched feeling as a kid on a record-breaking July day with only fizzy, yucky diet coke to drink. The same hunger as a crowd of people chasing Jesus on a long afternoon with no goldfish crackers and Go Go Squeeze applesauce pouches in their bags. The same longing as a first responder witnessing the worst that humanity has to offer day in, day out. We all long for these things. Life can be pretty ugly sometimes. From a contentious divorce, to a scary diagnosis, to a long dark tunnel of mental illness, or a world at war, this is our reality. We hunger and thirst for a God who can hear us, answer us, fill us, heal us. We hear about something that might be able to satisfy that hunger, and we chase it down. Sometimes it fills us for a little while—alcohol, or relationships, or social media, or stuff, or busy-ness. But in the end we come up hungry again, always waiting for the next meal, never quite satisfied. The crowds even did it with Jesus.

They had the real deal right in front of them, and instead of understanding that Jesus was the sacrifice, they took in the miracle that he had given them, and then they tried to forcibly crown him their earthly king, thinking that a political revolution was what they needed and wanted. And sure, maybe sometimes that is what the calling is. But the kingdom of heaven, the bread of heaven, encompasses so much more than our earthly selves and our earthly lives. It is, as the writer of Ephesians wrote, being filled so that we become rooted and grounded in love. It isn't being fed just today, but like the Israelites, being fed every day, abundantly, with baskets overflowing. It is becoming so full of the love of God that bit by bit every nook and cranny and crevice inside of us begins to fill up with this love, and then finally, with nowhere else to go, it floods beyond our bodies and beyond our walls in a tidal wave of love and mercy and justice bearing witness for all the world to see and know who Christ is.

Jesus tells us who he is in the last part of this story when he transports his disciples from the storm, evoking imagery of salvation from a body of water like the parting of the Red Sea. The translation we have here has Jesus saying “it is I,” but what the Greek says “ἐγώ εἰμί” or “I AM.” Jesus is “I AM.” The same I AM who was and is and is to come. The same I AM who spoke the world into being and who breathed into us life and who could create with a word and who is the Word. Jesus is that same I AM. How small-minded for the people chasing Jesus to think that he could ever be only a king over Israel, when he came to be the King, and priest, and prophet for all the universe, past, present, and future. We hunger and thirst, and God didn't give us a sip of Diet Coke or a bite of Ritz Crackers. We hungered and we thirsted, and God gave us a banquet, and a deluge of God's own self poured into our reality. That's abundance.

And so. When we come to the table in a little while, and when we receive the body and blood together, I want you to remember that what we are receiving isn't just a portion of the Holy Spirit. It isn't just a polite little dribble of God's self into this moment. It is all of God, all at once, for you. For us. Forever. Amen.

Mary, did you know?

A Sermon on Luke 1: 26-38

It's been a habit for me since I was very young, every time I moved to a new church, school, or city, to find a choir to join. If you are ever looking for a way to connect socially, I highly recommend this strategy, because it has resulted in some of my best and most lasting friendships. In fact, this habit is so well engrained in me that even by sixth grade I was already utilizing the choir strategy to make friends after moving to a new school. That year, we were slated to participate in a big statewide choir festival, and the song chosen for us was the classic, frequently lambasted “Mary, Did You Know?” This song begins “Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water? Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters? Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?” The chorus then repeats about 600 times “Mary, did you know?” Contrary to popular belief about the bewildered and meek response of a fair, mild mannered, subservient maiden, Mary did, in fact know. And she was skeptical as all get out.

Although I deeply love many of our classic Christmas hymns and songs, including the number one mansplaining hit of the century, much of our popular portrayals of Mary paint her as a silent, passive recipient of the angel's news. Images depict her unrealistically fair face turned down in humility, gaze averted, or cast down upon her silent, sleeping infant, who is somehow miraculously not covered in vernix or spit up. We never see depictions of an absolutely flabbergasted and overwhelmed Mary, or a concerned and tense Joseph, or a screaming newborn searching for a breast that hasn't yet started producing milk. We so often portray only the most beautiful and ideal parts of the Christmas story without hardly touching on the complex emotions and reactions these people are having to this absolutely bonkers situation. It turns out that rather than being quiet and accepting of the news, Mary was skeptical from the moment the angel appeared. The translation we are using says that Mary was “perplexed” but the Greek word here is actually more accurately translated as “greatly troubled”. So here is Mary, a young woman from a little town who is minding her own business doing whatever it is young unmarried ladies do, probably some kind of hard work, and she is interrupted by an angel appearing before her. The angel barely gets out an intro and already Mary is greatly troubled and trying to understand what the heck is going on.

Clearly, the angel can read the look on her face, and says “Do not be afraid” which is a standard angel greeting because biblical angels are actually kind of horrifying, and then he gives her a lengthy list of things that are going to happen. He tells her 1.) you have found favor with God 2.) you, an unmarried virgin, will conceive a son and by the way throw out your baby name book because you will call him Jesus, and 3.) he will be great, and will be the Son of the Most High, and 4.) he will be the fulfillment of the promise God made to David that your people have been waiting for for centuries. She blinks slowly, her jaw dropping...

So Mary's eyes are crossing and her eyebrows have just shot up to her hairline and she has six thousand questions. First of all, what? How have I, of all people, found favor with God? And also why is this happening? And also excuse me, did you just tell me that my son will be the one foretold who will free Israel? That he will be literally God? That he is going to free us from the empire that oppresses us? And that this reign will continue forever? Ummm... But in light of all of this extensive information the question that pops out of her mouth is, look I know where babies come from and there is something missing from this equation. So she settles on the most pressing issue. We often read it in a tone that gently, delicately says “how can this be for I am a virgin?” but if it were me, it would sound more like “HOW can this BE?! For I am a virgin!!”

To understand exactly how scary this must have been, you have to know a little bit about the context of the world this is happening in. Mary was very likely quite young, somewhere between 12 and 16 years old based upon the traditions of the time. She was a girl, which meant that in terms of economic security, most of her value came from her ability to reliably produce heirs that were certain to be biologically the sons of her husband. Turning up several months pregnant before she had even possibly met her husband would significantly impact her prospects. At best, she would be quietly folded back into her family, her betrothal broken. At worst, she would be expelled from her family and left to fend for herself. This good news of great joy probably sounded an awful lot like will I die a sex worker or pretending my first born is actually my little brother? Not just “how can this be?” but also “why is this happening to me?” and maybe a little bit of “can you please find favor with somebody else?”

The angel continues... “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and your child will be the Son of God.” I suspect that contrary to the song, Mary did actually grasp the magnitude of this statement. She was a descendent of David, as I'm sure she knew. She would also have known of the Messianic prophecies stating that a ruler greater than David would come, and what that truly meant. For centuries, her people had been overtaken by large empires: the babylonians, assyrians, and now the Romans. She would have known of the promise given to Abraham that her people would be great and numerous as the stars, and she would have learned all about the revered king David and what he did for Israel with God on his side, and yet the people had again succumbed to the rule of empire, and here was an angel standing in front of Mary telling her that the child she was to bear would be the Son of God, which could only mean one thing: that the government will rest upon his shoulders; that he will gather up the diaspora of Judah and unite them; that he will rule over them in wisdom and truth; that he will be the chief cornerstone; that he will be bruised for our inequities and that by his wounds all people would be healed. Mary, did you know?

The angel goes on to explain that Mary's cousin Elizabeth has also conceived a child despite having been assumed to be unable to conceive. Then the angel ends this pronouncement by saying “nothing is impossible with God.” What a comprehensive statement that is. When I read this story, I think of all the times in my life that my world was completely upended and the amount of kicking and screaming I did about it. All of us has a story in our head about how this life thing should go. Maybe the story is that we should make a certain amount of money, or marry a certain type of person, or have a certain kind of family, or that we will have certain career paths open to us, that we will be able bodied, that we will be quiet and not make waves, or that people will see us in a certain way.

We all sort of pre-write our stories based on society's expectations, or our hopes, or what sounds fun or easy or manageable, and I have to say I don't know anybody whose life has gone as they expect. We don't expect to lose a job. We don't expect to lose a loved one. We don't expect cancer. We don't expect to never meet “the one.” We don't expect to be a refugee, or a prisoner, an outcast, a killer, or one who has betrayed or been betrayed by another. Mary's story of marrying a nice Jewish fellow and having a couple of very ordinary children was just thrown out the window, and I think it's important to really think about how disorienting this all must have felt to her, even though in theory she was being given a great gift.

In my experience, we sometimes even rail against the good things presented to us, because they feel like too much, or too hard, or like I am not the right person for the job. Moses argued with God about his calling; Jonah hopped on a boat and ended up becoming fish vomit, a story I very much identify with. Mary, this woman from a nowhere town amongst a nobody people in the midst of a vast empire was faced with the call of the Lord, and right when any sane person would start packing a bag to assume a new name in a new town and get out of this insane situation, the angel assures her that her cousin and friend Elizabeth is also in an unexpectedly miraculous situation, and that with God it isn't all so impossible.

I imagine her sitting for a long time. The Bible never tells us how long these reactions take, but I am imagining a long, forgive me for saying it, pregnant pause. And then she takes a deep, shaky breath, and swallows hard, and somehow, with the courage of ten thousand warriors, this little brand new adult in this little place accepts the call, saying, “Here I am.” Here I am, Lord, I will take it as it comes. Here I am, willing to be your vessel. Here I am, willing to have my future absolutely shift under my feet. Here I am, Lord, send me.

An anecdote I have probably shared before is that moments after waking up in agonizing pain from my first cancer surgery, I opened my eyes and blearily saw the name tag of the nurse taking care of me. It said Emmanuel. And in that moment I knew there was hope. I knew that whatever this mission was that God had handed me, the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of God would be made known to me; the impossible would become possible somehow. We all glimpse our own mini annunciations, through scripture, through the love of our communities, through the words of wise people, and sometimes, for the less subtle of us, through a name badge smacking us in the face.

The story of God with us is the promise that in light of the overwhelming realities of this world: all the tragedy and ugliness and brokenness, and grief; that in the face of the impossible, insurmountable odds, the callings and paths we walk even when we don't want to, we hear this incredible, outrageous, terrifying news that we have been given this child, this prince of peace, the one who will redeem, the one who calls us beloved; the one that calls us from now to not yet. And because he came, we will never be alone. I think Mary DID know. I believe she fully grasped the implications of the angel's appearance, and that is why she was perplexed, or greatly troubled, why she pondered and questioned. And yet, in the end she accepted that this absolutely wild situation would and could be okay, because she wasn't alone. Emmanuel means “God with us.” Here I am, Lord, may it be according to your will. Amen.

The kingdom of God is like...

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

I have a couple houseplants that are giving me a run for my money, but not in the way you would think. The first one, which was a gift from somebody shortly after the start of the pandemic, is a small begonia. Despite a year of benign neglect, somehow this plant began flowering. First, one or two, and then a ton, flowering and dropping their flowers so fast that little wilted buds littered my kitchen counter even though the entire plant was still regularly blooming. After a while, the plant went so wild that I had to clip it off into another, and then another, rooting the cuttings and creating even more full sized plants. The other plant is, I think, a pothos. I got the plant when I was in graduate school, the first of my houseplant collection, and after we moved to the new house, the little fellow exploded. Long tendrils draped over my mantel and hung down to the floor. Periodically one of my kids would roam past and grab a handful of leaves, which I would then throw in water and, you guessed it, get more houseplants. I now have so many baby pothos' around my house that I'm running out of room. Soon, my house will be a jungle of pothos plants and begonias, with no room left for people.

I love preaching parables, because these stories give us images to wrap around our faith life; concrete examples when a lot of what we hear in the gospels is a little abstract. What is the kingdom of God like? It's like a sower, it's like a field with wheat and weeds, it's like a mustard seed, it's like yeast, it's like a pearl, it's like treasure buried in a field. All of these different metaphors are Jesus' attempt to explain something intangible and difficult to understand to people who have a limited basis of experience. In my sermon at Saint Anne's last week, I said that parables can also be tricky, because sometimes in our attempt to parse apart every aspect of the parable we can miss the forest for the trees. Parables weren't really intended to give us concrete answers, but to give us a frame of reference for some of our questions. This set of stories in particular gives us two big questions to chew on: first, what is the kingdom of heaven like? Secondly, once we understand it, what do we do?

Agricultural imagery is particularly useful in parables, because apart from some technological advances, a lot of growing has stayed the same. I may use a grow light now, but the hearers of a story would understand about planting for optimal lighting in 33 AD or 2023. The same goes for bread making. Yeast, it turns out, has not changed much in the last two thousand years. You still mix a little bit in, and with some time and heat your flour and water become bread. Both of these stories, and several of the previous parables we have read the last couple weeks, are seeking to get to the bottom of what exactly the kingdom of God is. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are a few ideas I'd like for you to chew on.

First, the kingdom of heaven is transformational. Like my plants that went from being tiny, half dead little things to a massive jungle in my house, the kingdom of God transforms. Although the kingdom begins as one thing: a tiny seed or a bit of yeast, it becomes something else. Something bigger, something which, when mixed with some other elements, changes its nature and makes all of the other things greater than the sum of their parts. A seed is just a seed, but when mixed with soil and trace nutrients, water, and sunlight, it becomes a tree, something which provides shelter, a home for birds, and food. A little bit of yeast mixes together with flour, water, sugar, and seasonings to become a loaf of bread, more than any of those things are on their own. The kingdom of God, then, is gestalt: it makes us and the world greater, more useful, more nourishing than what we were before.

Next, the kingdom of heaven is directional. By that, I mean the kingdom is moving toward something. It isn't stagnant, like a seed tossed on the ground to wither away in the sun, or a jar of yeast sitting on a shelf losing potency. It is moving toward something, toward becoming something, toward engendering life, toward offering protection, growth, nourishment.

Third, the kingdom of heaven is mysterious. Although through modern science we understand a lot more about what makes a seed grow and what makes bread rise, anybody who has ever baked something the exact same way as all the previous times and had it turn out differently knows that there is a sort of magic to the process. You throw some yeast in a bowl with water and somehow the water activates it and causes all sorts of chemical, bubble releasing things to happen. We don't know entirely why this works, or why sometimes it doesn't work, but I can personally say that I stand in awe anytime I try a new recipe and from a gooey sludge on my counter end up with food.

What else is the kingdom of God? Vital? Inspirational? Hopeful? Powerful? What do you think? The kingdom of God is all these things and more. When reflecting on the reign of Christ and all the ways that we see God at work in the world, I am frankly awe struck. If the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and the kingdom of God is in you and me, what incredible things are happening below our surfaces? What amazing things are we moving toward?? It's pretty cool to think about!

Now, the second two parables in this reading are concerned not with what exactly the kingdom of God is like, but, once we recognize that we have found something special, what do we do? The kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field, that upon recognizing the value of it, the person sells all their possessions and buys the field; or it's like a pearl that a merchant sells all that he has to buy. Jesus has a habit of asking people to leave their families and homes and comforts to follow him, and these parables are no different: these people recognize that they have something special and they risk their stability and livelihood and everything else to stake a claim on this remarkable thing. There has been a lot of speculation about what it means to follow Christ. Do we really have to give up our families and everything we have known in pursuit of this kingdom? Or is it perhaps that once we find this jewel, this incredible thing, we begin to recognize that much of what we put our faith into: power as defined in this world, security, stuff, money, prestige, recognition, these things are actually meaningless by comparison?

This is where my good old Lutheran theological background always helps me wrap my head around these things. The kingdom of God is here, but it's also not yet. The kingdom of God is active, but we have not seen the fruition of it. I imagine that the culmination, the eschatological finale, if you will, will be incredible. It will be the end of all war and violence, it will be valuing all people equally, it will be an end to suffering, to hunger, to disease, to discrimination, to cruelty and hatred. We don't live there yet. But the kingdom of God is out there, and it's also in here, inside you and me. And that's why I started thinking about my house plants. They started out as just one plant, not even very impressive or beautiful plants. And despite not taking very good care of them at first, through nurture and care and intentionality, I've been able to propagate many more plants so that now not only are the original plants beautiful and strong, there are many more of them, in my house and other people's houses as I give away the cuttings and other people nurture them. When I started tending the plants, I certainly did not foresee the outcome, but the care and tending created strong roots and allowed me to break off pieces to give away to others.

That's a little bit like the kingdom of heaven. First, a little seed is planted or a little yeast is mixed in. Then with the right water, sunlight, ingredients, mixing, soon you have so much sourdough starter that it's taking over your fridge! Soon you have so many little pothos plants you don't know where to put them! And so what do you do? You give them away! How could you not? There's more bread than you could ever consume; more plants than shelving. You are standing on street corners with all this extra and soon somebody comes by who wants your plants and maybe it's just a little cutting, but they take it and they put it in water and nurture it and soon it's going wild and they have to start making more shelf space and pawn off their cuttings on everybody they know until the whole world is beautiful; until everyone has bread.

So this begs the question for me of how do we nurture it. Obviously, conditions need to be right. We learned this in the parable of the sower. And to some extent, the kingdom does what it's going to do. But, I think, the beauty of all the agricultural metaphors is that it invites us to take some accountability for what happens. Prayer, reading the Bible, gathering for worship, coming together around the table, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. These things cultivate us; make us a habitable home for that little something that God has planted in us and in the world. And when we keep cultivating it, when we make space for the new blossoms, we are transformed, and in turn we transform those around us.

That's the beauty of these metaphors. Nobody really knows exactly what the kingdom of God looks like, tastes like, smells like. But we know what it acts like, and so we can prepare ourselves for it, and we can open our hearts to its transformational, forward moving, mystical power, and in doing so, we ourselves become the seeds and the yeast. Thanks be to God.

The Parable of the Weeds

 A sermon on Matthew 13: 24-43

When I was in graduate school, I started writing a novel. Set in a universe where multiple worlds were connected by a magical network of roads, and those with the know-how and the power could traverse it, my characters jaunted through many universes, some beautiful, some terrifying, some profoundly ravaged by illness or war, some utopia. As they traveled, they became aware of a deep corruption in the web of worlds, and they began to search for a cure for the brokenness that threatened not only their worlds but all worlds. I began writing this story in graduate school for psychology, at first in my off hours, and then soon I found it to be a consuming project. I scribbled notes for my book in the margins of cognitive psychology and quantitative methods. I typed away over lunch, between classes, pausing in my grading to write down more ideas. Soon it was not one book, but a trilogy, and I was spending hours every day working on it.

During this time, I was also miserable with what I was doing. I was running experiments, doing literature reviews, grading papers, tutoring students, taking classes, the things I had worked so hard to do. And yet I was deeply unhappy and unsure where to go. It took a very insightful friend, who pointed out that all the joy I was experiencing in my life seemed to come from thinking about, writing about, and talking about theology for me to realize I was unhappy because I wasn't doing what I was meant to do. When I go back and look at the stories I wrote at that time, I am struck by the obvious theological themes permeating every scene, every character. Each character represented both virtue and shortcoming, now and not yet; each plot and sub plot wrestled with the reality of sin and the need for redemption.

Our stories reflect things about the story tellers in ways that are probably more honest and clear than the plain histories and texts of the time. Storytellers share, in the telling, their biggest fears, their most authentic needs, their most secret hopes. In writing my story, I was longing to explore the eschatology and sotieriology of my own faith life. Although the stories told a tale, they also told something about who I was at the time, and who I longed to be.

The parables of Jesus are in many ways no different from the stories we tell one another. Fairytales about princesses and kingdoms, heroes and magic, they paint a picture of a world that makes clear what we value and believe to be true. In this chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells not only this one parable but seven parables. In each of these stories, Jesus is trying to put words around a deeper reality, from seeds to trees to treasure and yeast, the theme is Jesus attempting to explain some deeply intangible subject to his disciples. The parable of the weeds is a little bit of a tricky story, even though Jesus clearly explains what each part of the story represents. A sower goes out and plants good seed, and in the night an enemy comes and plants weeds that look very similar to the good seed. In the morning, the servants see what has happened and the sower says to leave the good crops and the weeds to grow together, because uprooting the weeds would destroy the good seeds. Later, when the crop is harvested, the bad stuff can be separated out from the good.

This story raises a lot of questions that I want to draw your attention to. Some of my questions are:

Why didn't the sower do something to protect his field from enemies?

Do the weeds have any negative impact on the good seeds?

Do the good seeds have any impact on the weeds?

What does it mean to be thrown into the fire?

Does this mean that some people are just bad weeds and some are good seed?

The text gives us a little bit more by way of explanation than some of the other parables in this text. Jesus says that the sower is God the Father, the good seeds are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the “children of the evil one,” and the enemy that sowed them is the devil. Historically, this text and the previous parable of the sower have been used to justify a lot of exclusivity within the church. I won't lie, this text and similar ones make me a little uncomfortable at times. I hate the idea that there are some people that are “in” and some that are “out.” I hate the idea of predestination, and worse, double predestination. I very much dislike the implications when this parable is taken too literally and drawn to the seemingly logical conclusions. It's so easy for us as humans to put our own interpretations, usually laced with a heavy dose of self-interest, into parables. We can cast ourselves as the heroes; the sowers or the servants, or more typically the good seed. But one of the beautiful things about the art of parable is that the meaning is ever shifting, as we cast ourselves in the different roles, as we work through one perspective, and then the next.

I will say a couple of things about some of the facts and perspectives in this story. Jesus doesn't actually say that the “children of the evil one” are other humans. The text says that at the end the reaper will come and collect up all causes of sin and evil-doers. I think the way this passage has been used to divide is, perhaps, a bit of wishful thinking on the part of people who want to keep their churches and societies looking in a certain way that benefits them. I also think it might be a mistake to assume that the children of God and the “children of the evil one” are always binary things. Other passages, such as the wheat and the chaff, suggest that we are multi-faceted humans, each with life giving parts and each also with sinful parts that God can and will separate out. I do think there are some interesting conclusions about our faith that we can draw from this text. We do sometimes shy away from thinking about what happens at the end of our lives and the end of the universe. We mainline Christians hate that, but it is a question we can and should ask about our own role and destination in this walk of life. But ultimately, whatever conclusions we draw from stories like this, we must always explore the meaning first, with great humility and an understanding that had Jesus wanted us to take away concrete conclusions, he would have given us unambiguous answers, and secondly, we must do so with the context and heart of the story teller in mind.

We can do that by looking at the character of the sower, and more importantly, Jesus himself. In the story, the sower seems mostly unsurprised by the attack upon the field that resulted in the weeds. Although he planted good seed, he seemed to have a sense that the weeds were just part of the agricultural process and could be dealt with by the professionals. The sower also stops the servants from making premature judgments. In that part of the world, there was indeed a particular type of weed that closely resembled the wheat. Although pulling the weeds out with the young wheat would result in destroying the healthy plants, leaving them together to be harvested was safest. This is such a beautiful truth and one that we as a church would do well to remember: we don't know the hearts of those around us. The harvest is in God's hands alone, and any attempt to “weed out” people based on our own assessments will be clouded by our own misconceptions, assumptions, and inability to see the future. The sower is saying that the right thing to do is to protect everyone because things may not be as clear as you think. This is a bit of a radical idea at the time, and an even more radical idea now given our massively divided culture. The other interesting thing I noted is that the sower is actually not the one doing the reaping and neither are the slaves of the house. The “Son of Man will send his angels” to the harvest, and therefore not only is it not safe for the slaves or even the master to do the reaping, it's downright not their job. The job of the sower was to plant the seed, the job of the seeds was to grow, the job of the servants was to watch over the field. I don't want to presume to understand all of what this means, but overall from the story, my sense is that the sower, who here represents the divine, is most concerned with engendering and preserving life, not with the harvest or subsequent destruction of the weeds.

Lastly, I think we are meant to connect Jesus' own story and character to the sower and to the tale. Jesus, although he definitely shared his understanding of how to be a servant of God, also very much lived this idea of seeing people as multi-faceted and capable of being nurtured into something other than what they were before. Jesus recruited the least likely people to be his followers. A woman of ill repute, some stinky fisherman, a tax collector. Jesus himself transformed people from sickness to health, from sin to service, from death to life. I think if we get caught up in, excuse the pun, the weeds of the passage and draw too many strict conclusions, we miss who the story teller is. The story teller is one who is preaching humility in not judging those around us; the story teller is encouraging prudence and thoughtfulness in our cultivation of the world around us; the story teller is trying to reveal the importance of certain ways of being and living, not for his own sake but for ours, to help us live better. And so when we read this parable and others, it's important to remember that the story teller is one who loves us. Who plants good seed to feed the world. Who encourages valuing that which is eternal over that which is fleeting. Who came down from on high to be among us and with us.

When we look to the character of the sower, we understand just how valuable and loved we are. And that is what I hear when I listen to these parables. Here is one who seeks to grow us, who wants to guide us from darkness into light, from slavery into freedom. Here is one who wants to reveal to us the power and glory of God so that we don't stumble around blindly harming when God's intent was for life. What I see in the parable is a world of imperfect people who can only be known ultimately by the one who sees beyond surfaces, who calls us into a different reality, and who cares very much for the whole field. And so, I refuse to draw simple, moral conclusions about this parable and others, because that's not what parables are for. Parables are there to make you question, to think, to wonder, to cast yourself in one role one day and another role the next. And ultimately, what matters most in these stories is that the one who told the story told did it for our benefit, because we are so loved. Amen.

Moana and Hearing the Call of the Broken

Once we were voyagers, brave adventurers forging ahead to new lands, to explore unknown lands and meet unknown people. To follow the call to meet new people, washing them with healing waters and teaching them who we were once meant to be.

This could be the beginning of the story of Moana, or almost. That story begins with a young woman who lives in a safe little island community but who from a young age is called beyond the shores of her safe land to new places, to a mission greater than leading the familiar faces and solving the familiar, daily problems of those around her. This is also the beginning of the story of a church, who began by baptizing people, all people, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And somehow ended up in a very different place.

For me the last seven years have been full of ups and downs, of self discovery, frustration, joy, pain, and just about everything in between. I came to this journey toward ministry with a path set before me to do as others have done, but in my heart have always felt a different call and a different path, not one full of pews and hymns, but full of blood and guts and fist fights and kids throwing things at my head some days. One could say I've felt a call to adventure.

I was watching Moana last night for the second time, and it hit me what a wonderful metaphor for the church it is. Moana's people were once adventurers, until they found their safe island Motunui, and then somehow they stopped exploring. Soon their lives became about preserving the little haven they had created. It was lovely, and life giving for many, but it was also dying. Because outside of their little paradise the world was dying. But Moana's father, the village chief, was scared of what might happen if she followed the call of the ocean and the call of her heart, and forbade her from leaving. After her grandmother became deathly ill, in her grief she fled to a secret place and discovered that her people had once been explorers of the ocean. Reassured that this voice inside her was not insanity but a deeper call to her true identity, she escapes Motunui to restore the heart of Ta Fiti, the goddess whose heart was stolen long ago by the demigod Maui.

The heart of the world is broken, and it's no longer something we can address only within the walls of our churches. That's not to say that the broken aren't within our churches, but like Motunui, the church, too, is dying. An old, clunky, irrelevant institution struggling to demand its inhabitants stay on the island is nonetheless bleeding members, closing doors, and soon will die as well. The world is out there, beyond the reef, and demanding that leaders stay and grow coconuts on a dying island isn't how to solve the problem. This only delays the inevitable. Moana strikes out and in so doing finds herself, singing "Who am I? I am a girl who loves my island, I am a girl who loves the sea, it calls me..."

And in remembering her name, Moana is empowered to help the goddess Ta Fiti remember who she is, to heal her broken heart and ultimately heal the world.

Ironically, it was in leaving her safe little world for unknown danger that she saved the world and  herself, because so much about our suffering is about how we have forgotten who we are. We are not the sum of where we live, or our church buildings, or the things that have happened to us, though those things shape us. We are not our failures or our trauma, and we are not what others have said we are or what we can be. We are not defined by the lack of imagination of old, boring people who would put us in boxes, and we are not the the stories others have told about us. This does not define you: you know who you are.

Who is that? The daughter or son of the most high, child of the one who created everything. You are beloved. And if you can remember that you can stop being so scared of losing your safe island, and you can stop being scared of those hurts and scars, and if you can remember that, you can stop being scared of not getting the attention or respect of the people you think you need it from, and if you can remember that everything changes.

So remember. This does not define you, church. This does not define you, broken one. This does not define you, mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother. This does not define you, criminal, hated or victim. This does not define you.

But now thus says the Lord,
    he who created you, O Jacob,
    he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name, you are mine.

-Isaiah 43:1

Addiction, Bondage, and Affliction

This past week, myself and many of my peers were shocked by the news that rock legend Chester Bennington, singer for Linkin Park, ended his life by suicide at the age of 41. It's always so hard to see talented people in the prime of their lives take dramatic measures, but particularly given his long struggle with drug addiction and alcoholism there is an especially bitter edge. In my work, I frequently walk with young people dealing with the same issues. The day after I found out about Bennington's death, I was talking to a 19 year old young man and the way he described his addiction as a conflict between the love in his heart and his mind's desire for a high reminded me strongly of Paul's passage in Romans 7: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me." This passage is a classic description of what Martin Luther would describe as the bound will. Luther would say that the idea that our will is free is laughable, because if it were free, would we not, knowing better, choose to do the right thing all the time? But our will is clearly not free, because again and again we choose to do things that hurt ourselves and others? We choose the addiction. We choose to take advantage of others. We choose greed, selfish ambition, lust, and more. Like Bennington and this young man, in many of us this creates a painful sense of shame and self-loathing. Why do we do that which we hate? Why can we not do what we want? How can we receive God's love when we fail fail fail fail?

I have never personally struggled with addiction, but I have felt the weight of the law or some version of it my whole life. Because I so often failed to live up to society's measures of me as a woman, being too fat or too ugly or too girly or not girly enough too dumb or too smart or too opinionated or not opinionated enough or too prudish or not prudish enough that the idea that I could freely be a recipient of God's grace was hard to come by for me. It wasn't that I didn't understand it intellectually, but somehow in spite of hearing "God loves you" over and over, this message somehow failed to really sink into me. Even now when I know my salvation is assured, I frequently find myself needing the gospel declared to me. Most often I find this in the liturgy, when I confess my sins and the forgiveness of Christ is declared to me, and when I take holy communion and hear that it was given for me. Because the people that I work with are so often broken in many ways, I usually feel like what it means to hear the gospel is to have our worthiness declared. This is a very Lutheran thing, probably because Luther himself was kind of a neurotic who usually felt himself unworthy and his biblical study is what led him to understand this doctrine of salvation by grace.

On Sunday my husband and I went to check out a new church. There were many lovely things about it, and I can see it becoming my church home in the future, but my husband immediately pointed to the sermon as a central piece of importance for him. Ironically, I had found the sermon to be about the least useful thing to me in it, because it had been primarily about teaching. Lately, I have not been feeling very worthy. Left out in the cold by my denomination, struggling to feel loved and wanted and worthy as a person, I needed a declaration of belovedness, and I didn't get that there. I received it through the beautiful music, and the forgiveness of sins, and the eucharist, and the warm welcome of the people there. It was a fine sermon, it was just peas when I really needed potatoes. But after some discussion, I realized that it had not occurred to me that not everyone walked around feeling broken all the time like me and my patients. Part of me had always assumed that to be the case, or that if people were saying they weren't broken then they were probably lying about the places where they hurt. 

But then I thought about the story of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32). In the story, a young man demands his inheritance and after squandering it on partying and irresponsible living, crawls back to his father who then greets him with open arms and joyful tears. Meanwhile, his older brother who was with his father working hard the whole time gets mad at his father for throwing the irresponsible younger son a big party. Rather than telling the older son that he was right, that he should also get a big party for always being right and doing the right thing, he reminds him that the reward was being with him the whole time, and that a lost child's return should always be celebrated. I always imagine the look of shame on the older brother's face at the father's words. Who could really argue with a father's joyful relief? The older brother serves as the perfect illustration for the "unbroken" among us. Some people never left the father, or never questioned their birth right. For my husband, the gospel for him is often hearing a word that helps him to live his life better within the assurance of his salvation that he already has, a gospel like Jesus' teaching which directs feet and shapes lives, "Because you are made worthy, here is how to walk with me.." For me and those who struggle to believe that worthiness again and again, that word is simply: "You are loved."

So for me as a preacher, the question becomes how to declare it? That's hard for me, because I think the beginning and ending always needs to be 'blessed assurance.' But I know I often forget that the law serves a function too, to drive us to the cross and guide us to live in community together, and the as Bonhoeffer would say, resurrection without the cross is cheap and gospel without the law is incomplete. There is a saying about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and I think that's pretty apt here. The gospel is not a single thing which speaks a single word, but is a massive, transformative, changing, living thing which speaks many words at many times. We so often see the pharisees as the butt of the joke in the stories of Jesus, but what if the pharisees and sadducees are also recipients of a different kind of gospel? What if, like the rich young man who goes to Jesus and asks how to be perfect, the gospel sometimes means being told that we are too comfortable and in order to truly follow we need to get a little bit uncomfortable too? You are worthy, and also as a recipient of this worthiness how are you being transformed? Maybe the gospel looks like giving your time or money in a way that pinches you a little more than you might like? Maybe it means getting up close and personal with the reality of police brutality or poverty? Maybe it means giving something up that you want for the sake of your spouse and marriage? Maybe it means devoting more time to God and family and less time to pleasure and work? How is God afflicting you? Because despite the reality that many of us are broken, and many of us are surely broken, many of us are simultaneously infected with complacency and comfort and God also calls us to be the church, to usher in the kingdom, and to lose our lives. Not to addiction or depression as Chester Bennington did, but to lose our lives to that which keeps us from being servants to our husbands and wives, children and parents, friends and neighbors, and all the world. You are loved. And because you are worthy, and because you are important, you are also called to grow, to learn, and to follow.

Broken Pieces: A Reflection on Grief

This piece was originally written for the Intranet Blog at Fairview Health Services, but I thought it might serve as a reminder to those who are carrying grief as caregivers or loved ones that you are not alone. We honor your pain.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comfored." -Matthew 5:4

When I was a girl I had a doll. My parents told me that on Christmas morning my little feet scampered into the living room where she sat under the tree, and I shyly asked my mom, “Mama, who is that dolly for?” I very creatively named her Gwendolly, and she got appropriately beaten as I dragged her everywhere with me from the age of three until her untimely demise. When I was seven, my parents took in two abused dogs, one whose horrible abuse left her blind in one eye, with an at-home docked tail. The other had not been as physically tormented, but was behaviorally just as bad. A friend of my mom's had seen them tied outside in the hot Kansas summer one too many days before finally spiriting them away in the night and begging my parents to take them in (as we lived far enough away for the owners to not come looking). They were awful. They destroyed everything, and had to be confined when we were away because they peed and pooped on everything. One Sunday morning, we left them enclosed in a room to go to church, and when we returned we found that they had tunneled through a wall out a closet and right into my bedroom, where they destroyed most of my favorite toys. Among the casualties was Gwendolly. I was crushed. My mom promised she could fix Gwendolly, and packed her away in a Price Chopper grocery bag with words of assurance that someday Gwendolly would be okay again.

Although this is perhaps a silly example, this story has come to my mind as I have found myself in the middle of several weeks of irreparable tragedy. The week began with a difficult on-call visit, where I ministered to family of a dying child, and the staff who were trying desperately to make it better for them. I then received a slew of bad news from friends and family members that left me reeling and struggling with how to care for those directly affected, and for my own feelings as well. I have spent some time attempting to wrap words around the depth of grief and pain that these experiences have awakened in me, not because these losses are my losses, but because private and communal tragedy raise such complex questions and emotions and I am left feeling like a child trying to understand senselessness and compassion and hope with a mind too frail to grasp it all. Being a caregiver is very much akin to this at times. Walking with patients and families through illness and death, though a gift, has unique challenges. It raises questions of cosmic justice and purpose, it can incite anger and remind us of our own trauma, and it raises our own fears in the midst of our pain for another. We not only hold our friends and patients when they grieve, but we wonder if we could be next; if their pain could be our pain, or when it will be.

And I think of my tattered and destroyed doll, and I think that even then I knew she couldn't be repaired. There is no healing from the digested destruction of canine teeth. Maybe she could have been some kind of Frankenstein's monster doll, but she wouldn't have been mine. And nothing can replace the children who are lost, and nothing can fill the holes which are left when the families of our patients leave the hospital with a teddy bear, or an old coat, or a wedding ring. And what of our hearts as we watch the tattered remains of lives moving in and out of our walls day after day? My heart was tired this week, and I suspect your heart has been tired at times. I have seen the weary faces of doctors, nurses, therapists, radiology technicians, psych associates, and more. We gather up remains of lives in our hearts, like my mom's grocery bag. And what to do with these things?

I like the biblical image of humans as “clay jars” because it adequately communicates our frailty, and something about how serendipitous our lives can be. My purpose in writing this is not to offer a nugget of wisdom for how to move beyond grief and let go of those stories which touch us, but instead to honor the broken pieces which we have lovingly gathered up into our arms and hearts. I don't think this is quite about hope, because I always have hope, and I grip it with fingers that are sometimes raw and bleeding from sheer determination as life and death pull me further from it. But even with hope in the palms of our hands, we are still carrying the heavy things.

Right now, as I grieve with my friends and co-workers, I am trying to put these things in a safe place. Not to abandon them, or forget them, but to entrust them to something bigger than me, whether that be God, the universe, the community, or something else entirely, because not one of us can bear such heartbreak alone. Like a seven year old nodding while her mom carefully places the bag on the upper shelf of her bedroom closet and gently reassures her that things will be okay, we must in time learn to lay these pieces to rest, trusting that somehow, someday, we, and the lost, and the ones who grieve will be whole again. But in the meantime, we honor the shards, and we weep over them, and we let our hearts be broken for a while.