At camp, God shows up!

 For daily scripture, see Matthew 25:31-46

 First, a few things about me: I have a wife, Kate, and two kids, Natalie and Elias, who are both excited to be living at camp and extremely isolated at the moment. I wear sandals when I can wear sandals; I would be preaching in sandals if this were July, but I can’t, so when I don’t wear sandals, I wear trail runners. And I’m a chess master, which I don’t normally tell people, but now that Queen’s Gambit on Netflix has made chess insanely popular, it is finally cool to tell people that. So, I just did.

Anyway, I am thrilled to be with you today in these strange and challenging times. And I think that’s a thing that can unite all of us up-front; we are all living through strange and challenging times. Up until October, I was a pastor in northwestern Minnesota where I saw the difficulty of leading a church in this time when we are being torn apart trying to figure out how to care for our neighbors with our church’s policies and with our politics—and all of it is exacerbated by the fact that we don’t really have a playbook for what we are going through as a society, as a church, and as neighbors to one another.

            We certainly haven’t been immune to this at camp. We’re facing some of the same struggles that churches are—financial uncertainty and the viability of programs and when will things ever return to something like what they were before? But I am inspired by camping ministry in part because it brings us out of our normal ruts, and somehow that makes significant challenges more approachable. At camp, God breaks through boundaries. At camp, God shows up. It is the place where kids meet God perhaps for the first time, but I think more often God simply becomes real to them in way they’ve never experienced before, surrounded by a community of kids and young adults who come together to have fun, to praise and chant and sing and play games and swim, and to experience it all under these big, beautiful North Dakota skies. Camp is one of those rare places that breaks us out of the echo chamber of the ordinary.

            This pandemic has reminded me how we need to venture into these extraordinary places more often. All of us need to figure out how to leave our echo chambers behind.

The covenant that lasts

 Genesis 15:1-6, 17:1-8, 15-22

For my final sermon with you, I want to talk about a covenant. As you probably know, covenants are a promise. The Bible has several covenants between God and God’s people. These bear a kind of weight—like a vow—that God will not break. They are meant to last, but the covenants in the Old Testament also relied on the chosen people holding up their end of the bargain. There was mutual responsibility between God and God’s people, which ended up being a huge flaw in the plan since it was never long before people failed to live up to the standards of the covenant. After all, nothing that human beings get their hands on lasts forever.

            When I was called to Grace-Red River, the call paperwork that the council presidents and I signed was a covenant between myself and these congregations. I want to quickly rehash exactly what we promised to one another. In that covenant, I promised to learn about you, to work to strengthen your faith, to be actively involved in the community, to teach and to inspire this church to walk in faith each day, and to spend time in prayer and reflection. In turn, Grace and Red River promised to welcome and support me, to work together to deepen your relationships with each other and God, to remember me and my family in prayer, to give me space for reflection and time off, and to use our talents for the betterment of one another. Those are the words of the promise we made to one another, and for the best part of a decade we lived into that covenant.

None of us are God—least of all me—so these promises we make to one another always have an expiration date. That’s challenging, because all of this stuff really matters, and if a covenant is more like a wedding vow than a job description, then we set the expectation that this will last until God’s kingdom come. It’s hard to separate the good we accomplish as brothers and sisters in Christ from the feeling that covenants are meant to last!

            Those Old Testament covenants didn’t last forever for other reasons. Inevitably, somebody broke it. There were golden calves and kings put on thrones against God’s will; there was the time of the Judges when the chosen people so consistently forgot about God that nearly ever chapter says that the people “did what was right in their own eyes.” If you read the Bible through—and not just the parts we pick out for Sunday School and Confirmation—the history of faith is marked more often by a lack of faith than an abundance of it. Most covenants are broken.

            But then there was this unique moment in history where everything changed. Mary received a different kind of promise—that she was carrying God-incarnate—and when Jesus came to earth to live and to die for us, it was a covenant of a whole different sort that changed our salvation, of course, but also how we relate to promises of all kinds. In Christ, no longer are the covenants dependent on us. Thank God! Because otherwise today would be way rougher than it is. It would be a day to assess and reassess if we are doing right by the gospel—if we’re being good enough at being church—and if I have done well enough. And no matter how good things have gone, there is always that nagging feeling—that wonder if we did enough, if we are doing enough—if we are enough. Thank God, we have Jesus Christ, who holds our inadequacy. All my faults—all the times I didn’t do as good a job of being a pastor as I should have—all the times you-yourselves have felt unworthy of the title of Christian—all the times the church didn’t act as it should—that’s why Jesus came! That’s why the promise we have on Easter morning is so powerful—it’s not about how good we are; it’s not even about whether we know God correctly; it’s that God knows us, chooses us, loves us, and walks with us. And if we, for a moment, manage to do something together that is beautiful and points to that reality, then we have done something good together.

            The new covenant that is promised through Jesus Christ is a covenant of newness. God makes things new even when we are afraid! In Christ, there is no status quo. There is only new, new, new. And I get how disorienting that can be, because we long to be able to settle into some kind of rhythm, especially when the world is so topsy-turvy, but we have to trust that the promise of newness is better than that.

            The trouble is we are always comparing. We are always ranking. We are always thinking, “Man, that was great. How can the future live up to what we’ve done?” I hear this all the time. Man, you should have seen what the church was like in 1965! Well, you know what, I wasn’t alive in 1965. These Confirmation kids? Their parents were not alive in 1965. We cannot be a church that tries to recreate 1965 or what may one day be referred to as the good ol’ days when Pastor Frank was here. Both the church of 1965 and the church of the 2010s cannot hold a candle to the kingdom of God, so don’t spend an ounce of energy trying to recreate what has gone by and instead set your vision for the church straight ahead. Occasionally, we need to put into perspective what it is that we are doing as the church—not seeking to save the universe (that’s God’s job), and not trying to create the perfect church free from sin and terrible theology (good luck!), but rather, we are seeking simply to

Red River: “be a community…created in the image of God, called to discipleship in Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Grace: “commit our lives to manifest Christ’s love to our families, our communities, our Church and God’s world.”

In case you didn’t know, those words I just read are taken straight from your mission statement. We are saved by grace and thus set free to love our neighbors as God loves us. That’s what we are up to, and we are in this together. We are part of a wider church, and I’m talking about the ELCA, but also about the ecumenical relationships we have with other churches and even the churches with whom we don’t have a relationship. I’m pretty sure God doesn’t care about our silly theological arguments. I bring this up today, because in many ways, I am not like you. I am not from here—I am not one of you by heritage or culture or blood. And, yet, you have welcomed me and my family into this community with an understanding that in Christ we are all one, and it does not matter if you were born in Hallock or Minneapolis. That’s a good start, now take it further.

            Tomorrow, I will no longer be your pastor, but I will still be striving for much the same goal—to make God’s love known to a world that needs it. And you will be here seeking after the same goal. So, I will not be your pastor, but I will remain your brother in Christ, forever connected to the shared mission of the good news of Jesus Christ. And that connection ultimately matters far more than the office of pastor, because when we die, there is not going to be a separate super-secret club for pastors. I hope there won’t be anyway, because most pastors are boring. Instead, we will all be one in Christ—none higher, none lower. All the ways you look up to me or down upon me will be rendered moot.

            The covenant that we made together ends, but it is not the end, because we have a better covenant holding us—one that lasts and lasts. Ultimately, it is this covenant that does an astonishing thing—it raises the dead and brings to life all those things that have passed. That’s the covenant I hold to. After all, today marks a kind of death, but death is the only thing necessary for resurrection.

Two weeks left and I'm preaching on forbidden fruit. Great.

Genesis 2:4-0, 15-17, 3:1-8

The Narrative Lectionary and I are going to be having words after this. Two weeks left to preach and you give me the stupid snake in the Garden of Eden? Great.

            So, I guess we’re going to talk about sin?!

            The ol’ forbidden fruit. I suppose it’s worth thinking about what that fruit is. The phrase “forbidden fruit” is typically used to mean a particular kind of temptation—a different kind than what we see in the Garden. Today, we might call the temptation to commit adultery “forbidden fruit,” or the temptation to steal “forbidden fruit,” or the temptation to cheat, whether on a test or a diet. The temptations we tend to label as “forbidden fruit” are issues of control that we can avoid. The forbidden fruit that the snake promotes, on the other hand, is a matter of idolatry.

            The snake tells Eve that the fruit from the tree of the middle of the garden will give her the knowledge of good and evil. The problem isn’t the fruit—it’s the desire to be god. This is where nuance is challenging, because knowledge is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is the endgame of knowledge. We think it will be really good if we figure everything out, and we’re right about that up to a point. Human ingenuity has led us to down a pathway of many incredible inventions and innovations that make our lives more pleasant and longer. But at the same time, we are terrible at rationing our use of power. I think of that great quote from Ian Malcolm in the original Jurassic Park movie where he says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That quote echoed again in my mind a few weeks back when Elon Musk made public that he had implanted a computer chip in a sheep’s brain.

            You see, the knowledge of good and evil is not as black-and-white as we suppose, and it’s very easy to see ourselves as the “lawful good” saviors of the world even when the things we are creating are doing irreparable harm. The knowledge of good and evil inevitably leads to seeing ourselves as righteous, and, therefore, we place ourselves in front of Christ. This kind of knowledge leads only to idolatry.

Why confession and forgiveness is most of our worship

Luke 11:2-4

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

            We say it all the time. In fact, in Lutheran worship, we begin our worship service by confessing and receiving forgiveness. Then, just to make sure we got it good with God, we pray this part of the Lord’s Prayer often right before taking communion where we do forgiveness for the third time—unless we also had a baptism or the sermon is about forgiveness… like today, then it’s 4, 5, maybe 6 times we center our worship around forgiveness. It’s almost like we have guilty consciences in this particular church—almost like we hold a lot inside that we never tell anybody about.

            Now, I’m not going to say that’s any of you necessarily—let’s just say on the off-chance that any of you maybe, possibly hold some things in from time to time, this confession and forgiveness may be an important thing.

            In fact, if you are participating in a children’s sermon, or one of those sermons where the pastor is asking questions of the congregation (which I think I've done twice in my time here because I'm so uncomfortable when other people are uncomfortable), or a Lutheranism 101 class, and the pastor asks you a question and you get that deer-in-the-headlights look that you remember from 10^th grade math class when Ms. Crabapple asked you to draw a sine wave—if you think the answer is not “Jesus,” then the 2^nd best answer is probably forgiveness, because when it comes down to it, so many of our worship and sacramental traditions are about confession and forgiveness. We start the service that way; we baptize with that promise; we commune to experience is viscerally; and just to make sure we really get it, we even have a whole season in Lent where that confession is one of the central themes.

Our daily bread

 Luke 11:2-4

Give us this day our daily bread.

            That simple sentence—the center of the Lord’s Prayer—is both deep and shallow, like water, like breath—the most straightforward and yet deeply important of things. Firstly, bread is food, obviously. We need food to survive, and too many in this world do not have it. Through the years, we have taken many groups from Grace-Red River to volunteer through Feed My Starving Children or a similar organization, and every time we go they have us watch a similar video, which typically shows women in Haiti (or somewhere similarly impoverished) making patties of clay to give their children something to eat when there is no food.

            Across the world, it is estimated that 820 million people go to bed hungry each day—a number unfathomably high in the 21^st century. This is a problem not of scarcity but of distribution and willpower. The human race hasn’t cared enough to make sure everyone is fed. So, when we pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” it is a reminder both that the only sure source of nourishment is God, and also that we-human beings have not done our duty in feeding the world. If you’re hungry, it is all but impossible to hear a word of promise for anything deeper. First you need actual bread, then you will understand your need of something deeper.

            Naturally, daily bread is also not only bread. Daily bread consists of other kinds of nourishment. We need a safe home; a safe job; a chance to flourish; health care; and we all need love. Our daily bread is varied and complex, and each of us has different needs—but needs they are. As people of God, we strive for a better world where these needs are all met. Still, we understand who it is that provides for them, so when we pray, we remind ourselves of our littleness and how everything we have is ours as a gift, surely nothing we have earned.

            Once those basic needs are met, then we can go a level deeper, and understand the primary meaning of daily bread. Jesus himself proclaims that he is the “bread of life.” God’s presence comes to us daily—certainly in the bread of communion—but also in all of our varied nourishment. Once we are fed by bread; once we are safe from persecution; once we are surrounded by love; then we are in a place to receive the bread that will never run out—Christ’s body broken for us—a reminder of the loaves and fish that Jesus once multiplied for a crowd of enormous size.

            This bread requires neither good weather nor good farming.

When we pray 'thy kingdom come'

 Luke 11:2-4

            When we pray “Thy kingdom come,” it may well be one of a hundred religious things we say that we don’t really mean. After all, we have so much life to live here, so much to see and do; not to mention the lives of others we care about—our children and grandchildren. Kate and I have talked a lot about life and our future in the past few months and not once have we said, “You know, now would be a good time for God’s kingdom to come.” And, yet, that’s what we pray every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. Thy Kingdom Come—Thy will be done.

            For most of us, we live our lives in these distinct spheres: The religious sphere where we say “Thy Kingdom Come” and the sphere of the rest of our lives where we try to imagine the best life now. I believe that too often we misunderstand the right place of these spheres in our lives. We treat the religious sphere like the glue that will hold us together when things get hard. I get why we do that. Life here is good. Friends and family are good. We hope for a good life filled with few moments of sadness. Things like Covid-19 might challenge us to see how good things are, but underneath it all, our preoccupation with this pandemic is about the fact that we have a sense of what life should be like for us, and what should not be.

            However, the metaphor is wrong. Our lives are not held together by the glue of God’s kingdom. Rather, God’s kingdom shatters the life that we know. It upends the tyrants; it lowers the powerful; it makes the rich poor and the poor rich. Yet, we live on in a world where the opposite is true—where billionaires add billions while the poor struggle to survive in a damaged economy. Martin Luther famously called this the Two Kingdoms. A Christian must live in both the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God, and as such, we are always torn in two directions at once. Love God; love people. It’s simple but infinitely challenging.

Not what we have but how totally we give it away

 2 Corinthians 8:1-15

One of the things I have long believed is that comparison is the root of sin. Whether it is me looking at other people and wishing to have something they have, or the imagined expectations we levy on ourselves, nothing turns us so in on ourselves (and at the same time away from God) as the act of comparing.

            This takes many forms. You might have less and see somebody with more, leading you to covet what they have. You might even resent them for having it. You start to make comparisons: Surely, you work as hard as them; surely, you deserve what they have. Soon, you feel justified in feeling everything from jealousy to contempt to rage. It is comparison that allows us to feel like we are within our rights to feel this way.

            It also works the other way: You have more and see people with less. You begin to compare and judge them. They must be poor because… they’re lazy… they’re entitled… they’re not as smart as me. Surely, you deserve what you have. You become prideful, resentful, or just plain greedy. This is true of wealth but also of the way we make friends, and how we see our own physical appearance, and our relationships, and our jobs, and you name it. We compare ourselves more than even realize.

            The actual act of comparing is not bad in itself. I’m short, he’s tall; I’m white, he’s black. These are simple observations. The question is both about our prejudices and society’s preferences, which is to say that certain characteristics have been engrained positively or negatively into the fabric of society. This can be useful when society values character traits like kindness and humility, but it is downright dangerous when society also values characteristics that are simply part of a person’s identity.

            It’s a question of equality. In 2 Corinthians, we learn that God values this equal footing and that those who have much are expected to give much. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, since Jesus lifted up this concept of equality throughout his time on earth, and more often that not, Jesus did this by talking about wealth. In fact, throughout the Gospels, Jesus talked about few things more than wealth and money.

One of the most straightforward examples of this takes place when Jesus is watching people give donations at the temple. Out of the crowd, there appears an extremely poor woman with a couple of pennies to place in the till. This doesn’t pass without notice, even though others are giving much more. It is she who Jesus lifts up as the example of generous giving, because she gives not out of her riches but out of her poverty. Jesus flips the script and considers the poorest woman to be the richest, because she is not captive to her wealth to limit her benevolence. She is the only one capable of giving it all away.

            This is the kind of upheaval that Jesus preaches all the time. Even before he was born, there was Mary singing her Magnificat, proclaiming that not only has God put down the mighty from their thrones and uplifted the lowly, but also God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty! (Luke 1:52-53) It’s not that God hates wealth; it’s that wealth is not what we think it is.

So, in another place, when the rich man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him, “Go, sell all your possession!” The possessions have gotten in the way of his faith—they have become his god, since he has trusted in them to give his life meaning. He has made the comparison and determined the best life is one full of things—a calculation that many of us make—and, yet, he finds himself unfulfilled.

            It is so established that more money is good for us that most of us never even step back and consider whether this is true. For all the things that we are able to buy, there comes a point where we know that no things can satisfy. Faced with this reality, those who have wealth often turn toward using their wealth for power. They compare themselves with the rest of the world, treating life like a game to be won, and so they transition from looking for security to looking for power. But all of it starts with comparison.

            This mentality is also why there is so much shame around perceived failures to make money. Folks who see themselves as rich but who fall on hard times (often with little fault of their own) tend to struggle with their identity thereafter. The moment we see ourselves as deserving wealth is the moment we are lost. If we define ourselves by the comparisons we make and the expectations we set, we can only disappoint. God wants for us something better. God wants us defined not by how much we have but by how fully we give it away. And that is something more available to the poor than the rich, to the humble than the proud. Like the poor woman who throws in her two pennies, the real question is how fully are we giving?

            This is about money, for sure; but it’s also about time and energy and commitment. How much are we giving ourselves for the sake of our family, our friends, our church, and our community? What are we doing with ourselves?

            It’s not about what we have but about what we are doing with it. This is the key to ending the comparisons, because when you give freely, you aren’t concerned with what others are doing. The other side of this—the thing that’s surprising to many folks—is that when they give, people actually end up discovering some meaning in the gifts. We were created not to compare our worth based on how much we have but to find fulfillment in freely giving it away. This is what we call joy. Joy is not happiness; it’s not receiving—it is giving! We were created for joy! So, at Jesus’ birth, we sing “Joy to the World,” because God sent his Son into the world as a gift.

            That’s what all this is. Everything is a gift, and comparison robs us of that awareness that we are children of grace, whose only credits to enter heaven come from a Savior who died for us. So, let the comparisons go! Instead, rest in the mercy of God who frees us to give freely in turn—to be the poor woman, to strive for true equality, and to spread the good news that we are saved not because of the comparisons we make but because of the God who chooses us nonetheless.

We don't punch down; we lift up

2 Corinthians 5:11-21

This passage from 2 Corinthians is talking about what you may call a “paradigm shift.” In life, this typically happens to us a couple of times. We are living life one way with a certain perspective. Then, whether because we discover a different perspective, or we realize our perspective is limited, or we learn new information, or something else happens and our perspective changes. With it, the entire way we view the world may change.

            I’ll give you an example. When I was in high school, I didn’t know there were any different kinds of Lutherans at all. Like many young people, I assumed the world was basically full of people just like me.  I was vaguely aware that our church was part of the Minneapolis Synod of the ELCA, but I assumed that that was simply a geographic designation and that Lutherans were Lutherans. So, I was in high school when I learned that some Lutheran churches did not ordain women. This shocked me, because I had grown up with the assumption that women could and would and often should be pastors. So, I learned a new perspective on the world, but that wasn’t a paradigm shift because I simply disagreed with those “other” Lutherans—even if I didn’t have the perspective yet to understand why.

These good earthly tents

2 Corinthians 4:16-18, 5:1-10

I have two reactions to all of this stuff about earthly and heavenly bodies in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. The first is, “Yes, of course, inside of us there is something that is our true nature. Yes, definitely we are made for something more; we are limited here and in need of saving.” But then I that other reaction hits and I think, “Paul, this isn’t very helpful for what we should be doing in the meantime.”

            Honestly, I take issue with some of what Paul is saying, not because it’s not true, but because it tends to give rise to the kind of Christian who is overly eager to leave their bodies behind. Meanwhile, we have a God who created these bodies and called them “very good.” We are not just holy creatures covered in sinful bodies; we are sinful creatures obscuring good bodies. Now that distinction might not seem that important, but our understanding of the body and the soul—the tent that we live in and the God’s building for us in heaven, as Paul puts it—impacts how we prioritize the time we spend on earth. I’ve seen far too many people who excuse human beings from having responsibility for their neighbors, for the natural world, and even for the way they treat themselves out of some over-eagerness to fast-forward to eternity.

            It’s a tough line to walk. I believe we were created to live with God forever, and, yet, even if that is true, this is the only life we have—the only opportunity to make life better for our fellow human beings in the meantime. This is where we can make a difference, and if you read Paul as an excuse not to, then I think you are misunderstanding God’s will for us.

            For that matter, I have grave concerns with people who read Paul out of their own self-centeredness. If you are the center of the universe, then it’s entirely possible to read about salvation as personal, individual, and ultimately an excuse to do whatever you please as long as things between you and God are good. The reality is: Life is not about you. I don’t know how to convince anybody of this, really, because selfishness is such an ingrained trait that we fight irresistible currents to try to get any selfish person to become less selfish, and, yet, what can we do but remind one another of this? Life is not about you.

Follow your nose--it's a matter of perspective

2 Corinthians 2:1-10, 14-17

            What does the word of God smell like? Kind of an awkward question. If we’re judging by the churches of our childhood, perhaps it is mothballs, oak pews, grandma’s perfume, and just a hint of mold. But that’s not the question Paul is asking in 2 Corinthians. It’s a question of what the actual words and the people who bring them call to mind. After all, smell is the sense most closely tied to memory.

Paul writes, “We smell like the aroma of Christ’s offering to God, both to those who are being saved and to those who are on the road to destruction. We smell like a contagious dead person to those who are dying, but we smell like the fountain of life to those who are being saved.”
            It’s all a matter of perspective. The dead smell a rotting corpse; those alive smell the embodiment of the fountain of life—the very sweetest smell.

This question of perspective is closely related to wisdom. When we are young and naïve, we assume other people see the world as we do. If we are particularly sour, we assume others are particularly sour. The same goes for happiness. Having seen the world with our eyes, we imagine all of us have the same biases—even God. So, we draw pictures of a God who looks like us, talks like us, thinks like us, and (lo and behold!) this God likes the people we like and dislikes the very people we dislike. Perspective also colors our understanding of sin, because (again, at first) we assume others face the same temptations we do. So, when we lack perspective, we imagine that since we can have a drink and stop drinking, it must be the same for an alcoholic, or since I am not tempted to steal, it must be the same for the person who does so compulsively. Then, we assume that what others lack is simply a matter of will power, or a character flaw I don’t possess, rather than acknowledging that there are areas in all of our lives where willpower is not enough. Some covet power, some sex, some wealth, some freedom. A person can have absolutely no attachment to unhealthy sex yet be a power-hungry lunatic. Another may have the exact opposite problem. None of this is an excuse; it’s simply the first step in understanding our differences.

The end of Job: The problem with the happily ever after

Job 41:1-8, 42:1-17

Happily ever after. That’s what Job got: His happily ever after.

            But why does he get to live happily ever after? That’s what I’m curious about, because there are plenty of really good folks who don’t get a happily ever after. We don’t have to look very far to see evidence that this is often not how the world works. So, what did it take for Job, and what might we learn from this?

            Job’s case is actually fairly simple. He gets his happily ever after once he admits he doesn’t know a thing about God. Then, he confesses and bingo: Things are set right. That formula is a good starting point, but I’ve got to admit it also makes me uncomfortable for several reasons. First, being humble and confessing doesn’t bring people back from the dead, and second, my job is quite literally to say things about God, which is part of Job’s problem. I can try to preach with humility and an understanding that I haven’t got it all figured out, which is very true, but still I am saying things about God all the time. Job’s story reminds me of why it can be very tricky to say much about God without subtly trying to be God.

            There’s an old Latin saying, “Traduttore, traditore” that in English means, “Translator, traitor.” It is often meant in relation to translating the Bible—that whoever attempts to take an idea in one language and translate it into words in another will inevitably be a traitor to the original text and its meaning. This is very true of the Bible, but a level deeper, it’s also very true of our entire experience of God. Every time you attempt to speak of God’s nature you are filtering God through your little perspective. To attempt to give words to God is to be a kind of traitor.

            Every week I preach I am a kind of traitor. And, yet, without talking about God, we would have no shared knowledge of God to form a community of faith. This is a tension in which we live as fallen, broken human beings attempting to name the unnameable, even as we need each other to tell us that greatest of all stories.

It isn't about Job... or us.

Job 31:35-40, Job 38:1-11

The story of Job has been leading up to this seminal question. “Where were you, Job, when the foundations of the earth were being laid?”

I don’t know how many of you have been following along with the book of Job, but to this point, Job has lost everything—his family, his wealth, his land, his servants, everything but his life. His friends have come offering terrible advice, and Job has responded with his own misunderstandings about God, unable to imagine any God but the one who gives and takes away. Job lacks what we might call the “gospel,” he has had no preacher to offer it to him, and so he feels no hope for the future.

All of this is to say that Job may hit a little close to home today. Like Job, we may well be lost, confused, and grieving. It’s almost worse that it’s not completely clear what we are grieving. So, we come back in-person today and in some ways that might feel great, and in some ways, it might also feel awkward, or confusing, or uncertain. You may be wondering when we will get back to normal, but those who have gone through grief—the long road, not the shortcut of pretending it’s all over—know that what we knew as normal is gone and we will have to grieve that.

            Job was looking for normal, but he also knew he couldn’t get it. He knew there was no going back. So, he grumbled and fussed and complained about how unfair it all was, and for 37 chapters, God let him rant, waiting and watching. “Then the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind.”

            I want to talk today about what God didn’t do. God didn’t do theology. God didn’t answer Job’s questions or argue Job’s points. God didn’t explain the nature of good and evil or even respond to any of the demands that Job levied. God didn’t use logic, didn’t cite any studies, or demand that Job follow some kind of formula.

            Instead, God simply asks, “Who do you think you are, Job?”

            “Who created the world?”

            “Who gave you this life?”

            “Where were you, Job, when it all came together?”

Conspiracy theories, fake news, and midrash: What I learned from freshman Religion

In 2004, I was enrolled in a Religion 101 course with Dr. Murray Haar at Augustana College. It was my first religion course of any kind and the first time I ever read the Bible with even an ounce of criticism. I was surrounded by other freshmen, most of whom were not Religion majors, being exposed to ideas few of us had ever considered. The lion's share of us were Christians; Dr. Haar was Jewish. This is probably one of those classes that a certain category of faith leaders warn you about--the kind that could cause a person to question their faith.

Yet, I discovered something different from Dr. Haar's class. One of the ideas we learned about was the concept of midrash, which is the study and interpretation of ancient Hebrew scripture. That may sound boring, but it was really more like wrestling with the Bible in the same way that Jacob wrestled with God--caring enough to never let go. There is a long and rich history of playing with scripture in the Jewish tradition, and you can read this today in the Talmudic literature if you seek it out. But we weren't just supposed to read midrash, we would be doing midrash of our own! If nothing else, this showed that Dr. Haar had a deep tolerance for bad interpretations, because, let me tell you, I know we did some truly poor midrash.

Enter our first midrash assignment in November of 2004. For some reason, I ended up with the story of the rape of Dinah from Genesis 34. I don't know if I chose that scripture (if so, I was an idiot) or if it was assigned. Either way, I could hardly have ended up with a trickier story to interpret. Not only did I know next-to-nothing about Genesis or the Jewish tradition, I also knew next-to-nothing about sexual violence or, frankly, women. What followed was predictable: I wrote something embarrassingly bad.

I won't explain what I said, except to say that I still have the original and I can barely read it. It was that bad. Mercifully, I did one wise thing that changed everything: I had someone else read it. Naomi was an academic tutor for our dorm, who read papers for dumb freshmen like me, and in this case, she pulled no punches. She graciously pointed out not just the interpretive flaws but, more importantly, the assumptions I was making about women and violence. In response, I did one last wise thing: I listened to her. Dr. Haar never got the original paper; in fact, what he got was a paper lacking any of the original claims. The midrash I turned in was still bad in the way that freshmen papers are bad, but it set me on a course that made all the difference--all because I let somebody in to reveal my glaring blind spots.

I thought about this paper today as I saw another in a long line of conspiracy theories come across my social media feed. I suspect this jarred my memory of the Dinah midrash because I recognized the same kind of assumptions undergirding those "fake news" articles. People who post these claims often say something like, "This is interesting," or "I don't know if this is true but worth thinking about." I can imagine thinking something similar about my Dinah midrash. My interpretation was interesting, but it was also wrong and damaging. It was worth thinking about, but only to understand why it must be rejected.

Unfortunately, I see the opposite reaction from so many who share these ideas. When confronted with the factual inaccuracies in their posts, they too often say something like "Well, who can really know what is true?" I get it: it's embarrassing to be wrong. It's easy to say, "I didn't really believe it. I was just posting it because I found it interesting." But we know the truth: You found it interesting because you wanted to believe it. In fact, maybe you wanted to believe it because it was interesting. I certainly wanted to believe my interpretation of the rape of Dinah, because it demonstrated I was clever enough to see beyond the scripture. That would be interesting! That it was also damaging wasn't really my concern; after all, I wasn't trying to be damaging--I was only after the truth, and who knew what that may be?

One of the bits of wisdom that Dr. Haar often said was that "you need the community to tell you when you're crazy." I believe this is the breakdown we are seeing in this conspiracy-driven landscape. We surround ourselves with like-thinking people who agree with whatever we post, people who coo, "Ooohh, that's interesting!" right back at us. Then, when others are critical, we feel emboldened by the support of those first like-thinkers who reinforced our initial beliefs. Soon it doesn't matter what is true, because the initial idea is still interesting.

I thank God I found Naomi first--that I didn't send the midrash to somebody who would also have found my interpretation interesting. If I had been emboldened to believe whatever I was writing was correct, then I may have been emboldened enough to think that any criticism leveled by Dr. Haar would have been elitist--and what did he know anyway? It's a very slippery slope, which is why I'm so thankful I ended up where I did.

I've never thanked Naomi for this before, though we are still in touch thanks to the wonder of that very same social media that so easily leads us astray. This gives me a good deal of hope, actually--hope that we can be better. I share this today in the hope that you can find the same kind of honest critique. It is a tremendous blessing for somebody to care enough to tell you that you are wrong.

Bad theology and the book of Job

Job 7:11-21

In preaching Job, especially these passages today, I think it’s incredibly important to point out that Job’s friend, Eliphaz, doesn’t understand God at all. It’s one of these challenges reading the Bible out of context when we pick up a chapter and read someone like Eliphaz saying, “Isn't your religion the source of your confidence; the integrity of your conduct, the source of your hope? Think! What innocent person has ever perished?” and it’s real tempting to think, “Well, that must be biblical wisdom!” The problem being that Eliphaz is simply wrong and Job, God, and the reader all know it.

            Job’s friends probably mean well. That might be me putting on my 8^th commandment hat and believing the best of them, but I’ll try it out here at least. Let’s say that Job’s friends actually believe that they are helping him; that Job has some terrible, secret sin that is the reason God took everything from him—never mind that we already know from the story that this isn’t true. If we can put the best light on Eliphaz, we might believe that his understanding of God is just as likely as Job’s. After all, none of us really have met God and been able to interrogate the divine about these matters of theology. Karma makes logical sense; so does an eye for an eye.

            But this story should demonstrate pretty clearly that all theology is not the same, and all of us do theology, whether we think we do or not. If you say, “God is love” then your understanding of what that means is theology; it is using a particular scripture to explain God’s relationship to us. Likewise, if you quote from John and say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and none come to the Father through me,” claiming that Christianity is the only faith that holds water in light of this verse, you are doing theology. Some theology is good; some is bad; much is unclear.

Racism, a pandemic, and the island of Job

Job 1

This week we begin five weeks on the book of Job. Five weeks on the story of a man who had an incredible series of calamities hit him all at once. It might feel a bit like 2020.

But before we see ourselves in Job too clearly—and before we make ourselves out to be blameless as Job was—we should be clear from the start that Job failed miserably at understanding God. For one thing, Job clearly felt that when tragedy strikes it is God who takes away. It’s that oft-quoted verse that I just read (1:21), “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” but the story itself reveals that this isn’t true.

It’s probably the most famous verse in all of Job, but 1:21 is clearly a failure of Job to do good theology. God didn’t take anything away from Job; Satan did. I mean God did allow Satan to test him—with conditions—so you could blame God, I suppose, and that is supposedly what Satan is testing, but God didn’t take away anything in this story. Furthermore, the idea that God gave Job what he had is not supported here either. This is one of those tricky sticking points of theology where the question of why some people have material blessings and some do not is not easily answered, and the implied answer about blessings following faithfulness can be extremely damaging and is most often simply a lie. In the real world, the poor are often more faithful than the rich. The moment we use our blessings to prop up ourselves as more faithful is the moment we have jumped the boat.

If you find it easy to place yourself in Job’s shoes, perhaps it’s because he represents the fears of those who have much. If you have a lot, you know a lot can be taken from you. Boy, are those fears poignant right now! As we struggle with an uncertain economy and our nation struggles to come to terms with our complicity in systemic racism, whose causes are so deeply embedded in our history that we hardly know where to start, it becomes easy to ascribe everything that happens to God—the good and the bad. Yet, God’s handiwork is not revealed in Job’s disasters. God has yet to play a role in the story. It’s coming! Oh boy, is God going to take a role in this story, but it’s not yet. God cries with Job; God does not rob Job of his loved ones.

After all, our faith is a faith about taking up our crosses. God doesn’t need to send crosses for us to bear; the world gives them to us! Racism is not something God created; it just happens. Poverty, disease—they happen ultimately because of sin—but God’s role lies further ahead.

We know this is true of God because Job had everything and he was faithful—blameless, the scripture says—but the mark of a God-follower is not how good we are to earn blessings but how we respond when it’s taken away—and it’s not that God is testing us; the world provides plenty of tests without God deciding it’s time to throw another lightning bolt from heaven. Through the next several weeks we will watch the rollercoaster that is Job’s response to tragedy. He begins down an impossible pathway of theological gymnastics to explain what happened to him, because as much as he resists his friends who argue he must have done something wrong, nevertheless Job continues to view the world as if God gives and takes away, and, ultimately, Job cannot get away from viewing wealth as evidence of doing something right. He can’t get past it.

In many ways, Job never stops to realize he is nothing special; that everything he has is a gift not because he is faithful but because God is. He never pauses to consider how the stacked deck benefited him to achieve what he did—just like we rarely pause to consider our own stacked deck. Thankfully, most of us haven’t lost everything, and we may still consider our own privileges more carefully right now.

We aren’t Job, but there are some things we can learn from Job’s story. One thing I take away from Job immediately is that there is no playbook for grief and no hierarchy of grief either. Job has quite a lot and loses everything; other folks start out with little and they, too, may lose everything, and both experience grief profoundly. All the possessions can be replaced, we imagine, but his sons and daughters cannot. When you lose loved ones, nothing else matters.

I think that’s actually a great place to begin, whether you are looking to understand Job, or a pandemic, or the effects of racism. When you lose something you can’t replace, nothing else matters. For too many in our nation, they have lost their dignity and their humanity and their lives because of their skin color. That cannot be replaced, and it is their grief they carry day by day.

The power of story

1 Corinthians 15

Four years ago, when this scripture last popped up in the lectionary, I preached a sermon on Harry Potter since a verse of this scripture reading is quoted in the final book in the Harry Potter series. In 2020, with everything going on in the world, I feel pretty much like doing that again. But rather than talking about my own journey in coming to see the Harry Potter story as a reflection of the Gospel-story, which might mean something to some of you but probably means nothing to many of you, I thought it would be more useful to talk about why these themes from 1 Corinthians are so powerful both for the Gospels and in stories in general.

The line that appears on the gravestone of Harry Potter’s parents in Godric’s Hollow is 1 Corinthians 15:26, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” For Harry (and, I think, for many of the rest of us), this is a bit of a confusing verse. We know that death is bad, and we understand the importance of death being defeated, but we might wonder: Hasn’t that part happened already? Wasn’t that the point of the cross? And if that part has happened already, then shouldn’t we view death more like a necessary rite of passage—certainly not as an enemy? Harry questions this too, because in his world, the bad guys are the ones trying to conquer death. The villain, Voldemort, has a name that literally means “flees from death,” and he surrounds himself with folks he calls Death Eaters. The good guys, by contrast, understand that death is but the next great adventure (Dumbledore).

So, it’s all very confusing. It’s much like our own tenuous relationship with death. As a Christian, we might well wonder how we are supposed to feel about this thing that seems to have all the power, and, yet, our faith says something different. “Death, where is your sting?” says the scripture.

Well, if we’re being honest, the sting is that death ends the only life we know. That is a very real sting. Even more broadly, death is not just physical deaths. At this moment, we are experiencing the death of expectations, the death of plans, the death of normal, even the death of hopes and dreams. The sting of death is that things are just not right.

I have found that when the world is upside-down, the best cure is a good story. However, I say this not as a means of escape. Too often, we treat stories as if they are either unreal or distant from our lives, especially when we are reading fiction. I believe this is a mistake. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

Love in a time of division

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

            We most often read this at weddings for couples who are quite obviously in love. When it’s read that way, it feels like sappy wisdom, like a toast at a wedding. Perhaps that’s what Paul is doing in this scripture, we might imagine—writing for lovers. But that’s not the truth at all.

            The church in Corinth was a community of believers that have forgotten how to love one another. They were a community torn by disagreement and strife. It’s a theme lifted up chapter after chapter. Paul isn’t preaching to the choir; he is telling them to get their ducks in a row, because they don’t look like a loving community of believers. He’s reminding them what it looks like to love.

            We need to be reminded how to love one another. It’s about being honest with our hopes and fears and dreams, being honest about all the ways we are grieving right now, and all the emotions we are feeling. Love is also remembering that we are all in different boats at the moment. Some folks are financially secure but physically vulnerable; others are financially vulnerable but physically secure; others are both or neither. Love considers the place of the other.

            The last couple weeks I’ve talked some about meaning-making in light of the pandemic, especially that one of our great weaknesses in this moment is that we don’t know how to wrap our heads around this one. When we find ourselves confronted with meaninglessness, it is all the easier to fail to see the humanity in others. We need to feel secure first; then we can consider loving others.

Still, we need to love.

            Love is the greatest—even greater than faith and hope—because love is both for right now and for eternity. It is not faith that once realized is no longer needed, and it is not a future hope that is always elusive; it is available to us in this moment. But this also means that love is the easiest to lack, because there is counter-evidence to living a life full of love everywhere you look. There are people to disagree with, people who just don’t get it, and other people who seem to get it but, worst of all, willingly choose to treat us with disdain nonetheless.

            Love persists through these things, because it is the ultimate; it is not dependent on anything, not even agreement. Loving someone is not weakness; it is not letting others off the hook. Love is the strength to understand the actions of another come from a place that we will never completely understand. Love is believing that even though I don’t get you, nonetheless you are a beloved child of God. You don’t need to like other people to love the humanity in them, and you don’t need to hang out with them on weekends.

            At the end of the day, loving people is a reflection of God’s love for us—love we don’t deserve. Which is great! Because most people don’t deserve our love either. We are truly all in it together, because none of us are good enough to earn love.

            We need to remember these days that most people are doing what they are doing out of love. Those who would like to see everything stay closed are operating out of love for the most vulnerable. Those who would like to see everything reopened are operating out of love for businesses, workers, and their families. Both are incomplete pictures; both are also necessary pictures. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to love one another. We’re just in different boats.

            I had a professor in undergrad who used to often say, “Think that you might be wrong.” I have found this to be good advice for important moments. In situations like these, we tend to dig in to positions. We become certain when we should be the opposite. We should realize that the problems facing us as a society are so big and varied that we can’t possibly hope to wrap our heads around them, so we should approach the problems humbly. The more serious the difficulties, the more cautious we should be to assume we are right. This might feel backwards, but it is important, because the moment we presume that others are out for the worst for us, then we will have divided ourselves in a way that is not easily reconciled. We need to admit that we don’t know.

            Uncertainty is the fertile ground for love. We are all just human beings who don’t know. That’s doesn’t feel comforting, of course. It’s much easier to believe in miracle cures and simple narratives to make sense of things. And it’s not to say that there aren’t those who will use uncertainty for malice—they will. All I’m saying is that there is power in staying united even especially in our uncertainty. Love requires vulnerability.

            It is hard to love, like most great things. I don’t want to love people who don’t get it; most of all, I don’t want to love myself, who also doesn’t get it. I am not in love with the situation. I often don’t know what to do with myself. I start doing one thing, forget what I was doing, and two hours later I’ve accomplished nothing. This is life right now. Our inability to process things is not a sign of a lack of love. Instead, we should be reminded that God loves us for the scatterbrained people that we are. That we can’t wrap our heads around the vastness of it all is simply a reminder that we are human and therefore in need of love.

            So, it’s funny, but Paul writing to the church in Corinth about love may be much more applicable in this moment than it is for weddings in saner times. We need to be reminded of what unites us—our humanity. We are people who don’t get it, who won’t get it, and who will let one another down, but we are also capable of loving one another and of remembering we are children of God, full of grace we don’t deserve.

            So, let’s work on remembering that together.

United in our Humanity, United in Christ

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

In his essay, Health is Membership, Wendell Berry talks about a hospital scene involving his brother, John, who had a heart attack with his wife, Carol, at his bedside along with a nurse tending to his care. Sitting in the ICU, Carol was distraught, as you might imagine. Berry recounts the scene like this: “Wanting to reassure her, the nurse said, ‘Nothing is happening to him that doesn't happen to everybody.’ And Carol replied, ‘I'm not everybody's wife.’”

            What Carol is articulating is the pesky scandal of the particular, which reminds us that generalities don’t work in the face of the specific, singular pains we feel. One of our immense trials with Covid-19 is this tension between what is happening to “everybody” and what is happening to those nearest and dearest to us. It’s little comfort if relatively few die if one of those relatively few is the one I love, but it all can feel like a roll of the dice. Some people—most people—will come out unscathed and say, “That wasn’t so bad!” while others will not come out at all.

            I’m a bit of statistics junkie, and there are a lot of statistics out there. There is also a lot of meaning-making around those statistics. We are meaning-making creatures, who are trying to make sense of a new and foreign reality. So, we latch on to stories that make sense to us, since everything is so new and the statistics can show pretty much anything. We need some coherence in our lives right now, so it’s only natural to believe whatever helps us get through.

            1 Corinthians begins by reminding us of the dangers of being split into rival groups in a time of crisis. We are united not by the vagaries of our suspicions about systems; we are united not by our political leanings; we are united not by our beliefs in what we should be doing for the economy or for health care. We are united in Christ. Full stop. And if your next thought is “Yeah, but…” then you are human, because we accept that promise of Christian unity as some kind of platitude when it is, in fact, that thing that matters. The scandal of the particular is that Jesus Christ died and rose, which makes the Christian faith not a set of axioms which can be interpreted in light of whatever stories we tell ourselves and whatever made-up theories we believe. Christians are united not in principles but in a person.

            This scandal of particularity plays itself out most dramatically in how we make decisions. Do we consider the numbers? Do we consider the big picture? Somebody should, we imagine, but what is the Christian’s role in the big picture? A few weeks ago, I had somebody lecture me on the value of a human being—that the definition of “value” was how much a person contributed to the economy. In this way, we reduce people to machines and we make decisions about economies based on that big picture that cannot concern itself with particulars. After all, particulars are what make people emotional, as if all of our emotions are signs of weakness.

            The big picture is important to keep in mind, but we are still singular people. And the Christian community (what we typically call the church) is this backwards group that believes that you leave the 99 sheep behind who are well and good to go looking for the one that is missing. The Christian community believes in seeking out those whose value is least according to the economic models, and instead we value them most highly of all. To me, that means that the church is always opposed to large-scale economic modeling. We are always fighting against the tides that reduce human beings to statistics. But it’s hard when we aren’t united.

Trusting in the right story

Acts 17:1-9

A long time ago, not long after Jesus died and was raised, there were these two guys named Paul and Silas. You may recognize their names because they have become part of a story that we have in the form of the New Testament, but in those days, they were just two men with their own story to share with people. However, their story did not square with the story that the people knew and understood. The peoples’ story involved a conquering king restoring the Promised Land to Israel and the defeat of the occupying powers. This was the story around which God’s Chosen People had formed their identity for hundreds of years. It was a story that was not so easily abandoned on the testimony of just two guys named Paul and Silas.

            I want to pause here, so that we might consider, “What are our stories?” What are the things we presume to know? And how do we know them?

            You see, these people already had identities when Paul and Silas showed up. Some of them were Greeks, some of them were Jews, all had their identities rooted in a certain culture and way of life. Paul and Silas came with a hard ask, “Give up your identities, because they are not ultimate. Your identity is in Jesus.”

            For those of us who are born Christian and who are brought into the faith by parents who had us baptized apart from our choosing, this is a foreign story. Our story has always been rooted in Christ. However, in our daily lives, we are barraged by other stories that claim our allegiance. In which stories do you put your trust? And why?

            I believe these are important questions to consider today, because there are countless stories out there. Especially when it comes to new and developing situations, the world is ripe for stories that serve the purpose of the storyteller. And it’s not as easy as seeing through the fake news, or whatever you want to call it, because your own deeply engrained story may also be flawed.

            The question is where to put our trust. What is the story that is worth it all?

Health, Community, and the Body of Christ

Acts 3:1-10

            Well, if this isn’t a fine kettle of fish to preach from this morning. Peter and John, disciples of Jesus, meet a crippled man on the road asking for money. He’s asking for that stimulus check. And what do they give him? Not money but health. One of those things that money can’t buy.

            Today, I’m going to resist the urge to use this scripture as commentary on what’s happening in our country regarding lockdown protests and whatnot. While I think there may well be something to be said there, I don’t want to distract from the astounding good news here. This is, after all, a story about health. Jesus and the disciples were healers of a very particular sort, which is much needed in our Covid-19 era.

            One of the formative quotes for me regarding health is a passage from Wendell Berry’s speech-turned-essay entitled Health is Membership. He said, “I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

            I find that quote so meaningful, because we, as church, are the body of Christ. Many members; one body. When one hurts, all hurt. Our society treats health as an individual enterprise. In fact, you could say there is little difference between going to the doctor or the mechanic; we treat our bodies like we treat our machines. A little fix here,; a little preventative maintenance there. But our bodies are much more integrated with the world than a typical machine. We are not just tools to impact the world, we are part of the world, and Covid-19 is revealing our interconnectedness in many ways both good and bad. Disease is spread within a community, whether by touch or through the air, or in the case of other diseases through an infected water supply, or poorly cooked meat. We are connected to one another and to the natural world in ways we continually undervalue.

            But God doesn’t.

The defeat of normal

Acts 1:1-14

I want to talk this morning about how God works opposed to what is normal.

            There’s one line in particular from the Acts 1 reading that caught my attention and brought me there. It says, “While they were eating together, [Jesus] ordered [the disciples] not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised.”

            Lately, I have a pretty good ear for moments in scripture where Jesus tells us to stay put (for some reason, I’m not sure). In this case, Jesus adds a simple instruction: “Wait.” Wait for it.

            Somebody should have told Jesus that we’re not supposed to wait for it in Easter. That was for Lent, now we are supposed to be living in the joy of the resurrection. That’s how the church year is designed. Get with it, Jesus! Nevertheless, that routine has never been a given, because in real life, finish lines move with regularity. The church year tells you: 40 days and then you will get to say “Alleluia!” again, but life doesn’t always tell you that. Grief, for example, lasts however long it lasts; there’s no obvious finish line. In real life, we wait in uncertainty more often than not.

            Right now, we are getting an object lesson in what waiting looks like for us as a society. We wait, and we know that there will be an increasingly large contingent of folks banging on the doors to end the waiting, to reboot the world, you might say, but the normal we are trying to return simply isn’t there anymore. It’s up to us what we do next, which is so tough, because we will grow increasingly impatient to find what was normal. The problem—the big problem, really—is that we are discovering, little by little, that normal is over. What was normal is no longer.

One of the Bible stories that has popped up in my head countless times in the last few weeks is the story of the Israelites wandering through the desert, especially I’ve thought of Moses, who led them for forty years but never reached the Promised Land. That kind of waiting is so brutal, because there are no guarantees you will see the other side—not on this side of life. So, I get the anxiety and the frustration, the desire to return to something that seems normal. It wasn’t long in the wilderness before the Israelites were begging to return to Egypt and slavery. Normal is powerful.

            Easter is the opposite of normal. Resurrection is the antithesis of normal. We are not a church of normal. If this pandemic is going to show us anything about ourselves as a church and as a society, it will show us that normal is not what we thought it was.

            Normal favors those in power. Pontius Pilate was a champion of normal; Herod the Great was a champion of normal. All those chief priests and scribes running around in Jesus’ life suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing were champions of normal. You and I might benefit from what is normal too, but that benefit comes at a cost. The vulnerable stay vulnerable; the poor stay poor; the oppressed stay oppressed. Human beings are much more attuned to the Easter story when things are not normal or when we understand that normal is not OK. It’s why people listen closer at funerals. When our normal is interrupted, we notice the God who has been there all along.

            We are all undergoing trauma right now, so it’s hard to argue against that feels normal but normal isn’t what we think it is. The Bible doesn’t say, “Normal is bad,” but the trend of scripture is God doing new things through often terrible circumstances. It’s not about getting back to where you were but about a new day where things are changed for the better. Those Israelites, wandering through the desert, were thinking, “What on earth are we doing?” Those disciples, hiding in their house for fear of the authorities who just crucified their rabbi, were thinking, “What on earth have we done?” Those early Christians, sitting in jail cells for their faith, had to wonder, “Is it worth it?” Those Christians, like Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, who stood up to empire and ended up on the gallows or in front of firing squad, had to ask, “Did it make any difference?” Normal is powerful, because normal takes no chances, but God is God not of the normal but the extraordinary.

            The story of the Bible is the story of God showing up in the ordinary and making it extraordinary. If you tally it up, God shows up far less often in burning bushes than in poverty and mourning places and tombs. In his life, again and again, Jesus walked into a situation where a person was hurting or dying or dead, and he never returned things back to normal. Instead, he demonstrated a promise of a better future—not normal but extraordinary.

            Today, I pray not to return to normal but to be led somewhere better. And I do so realizing that when God moves society it tends to take time. 40 years for the Israelites. We take that as a given, but their entire lives were spent in transition to something better. Generations passed. Our current situation isn’t going to be over in a day, or a week, or even a month. Even when we are back in worship, seeing each other face to face, it won’t be over, and it won’t be normal. Mourn that, grieve it, but also understand that everything God has made new has gone this way. We mourn change, especially dramatic change, but it’s only when we let go of what is normal that we discover that God is moving mountains for what comes next.

            What is normal anyway?

            Throughout history, disease has been normal. War has been normal. Short lifespans relative to what we experience today have been normal. We’re not looking for normal. The resurrection should remind us of that every week. When we come back together to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, that is anything but normal.

            This Easter season, which lasts fifty days, is a chance to embrace the abnormal—to remind ourselves that we will find routines again, but it should never be normal. Resurrection promises better.

We will rise

Mark 16:1-8

            The good news of Easter from the Gospel of Mark is abrupt and open-ended, which makes it stunningly appropriate for a service like this. It is certainly the least popular story of the resurrection from any of the Gospels, because we don’t get to see Jesus at all. He doesn’t meet the women at the tomb and he doesn’t appear to the disciples on the road. It is abrupt and somewhat disorienting.

            Welcome to 2020, never has there been such a disorienting Easter. If we stop to think about this scene that is set in Mark’s Gospel, it is stunningly appropriate for today. The disciples are hiding in their house, socially distanced from society, afraid that something was going to come and get them too. Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome go to the tomb to pay their respects probably because the men-folk were so afraid, but what do they feel when that man in white tells them the good news of Easter morning—that Christ is risen? Fear! The Gospel of Mark says, “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

            You know what happened in spite of their fear?

            Jesus Christ still rose from the dead.

            You know what happened in spite of disciples who never understand a thing that Jesus said?

            Jesus Christ still rose from the dead!

            You know what happened while the disciples were locked away in their homes?

            You guessed it: Jesus Christ rose from the dead!

            The good news of the resurrection does not wait for us to be in an adequate state of mind to receive it. In fact, resurrection is especially for those locked in their rooms for fear of what may be. Resurrection is for those who go looking to mourn at the tomb and discover that something startlingly new has happened, and all they can feel is fear, because new is frightening. Resurrection is terrifying, because the rules of the game have changed.

            As Christians, we are not expected to live free from fear. Instead, our fear does not define us, because it is not the ultimate reality. Even if the worst should happen, even if we lose everything and everyone we love, Jesus Christ rose from the dead for the sake of the lost and dead. It’s OK to be afraid because life offers no guarantees, but the miracle is this: Through Christ, death does offer us a promise. Still, that’s a bit scary, because we’ve never gone there before! It’s normal to be anxious, because life is worth living and we cling to the moments of sunshine that reveal a world that we feel in our hearts to be good. We cling to life because our loved ones are here, because we cherish those who come after us! We are anxious about what is coming, like the disciples—like Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome—because we know how valuable life is, that you can’t put a price on an hour, no matter how much the economists try.

            Easter Sunday puts our math to shame. It does not add up. So it is completely normal to be afraid. But, brothers and sisters, we can’t stay there. Fear is natural and it’s real, but there is something waiting for us that will calm our fears. Together, we will hold one another in those darkest moments. Together, we will proclaim Christ crucified, that God meets us in our despair and holds us with a promise of hope for something more. And then, together, we will proclaim that death is not the end, that disease will be defeated, because its endgame is not the endgame. Death won for a minute, but Easter morning revealed a truth that was more powerful. Death, where is your sting? Because we are a people of resurrection!