The trees on Easter morning

 John 20:1-18

Jesus Christ is risen today! Alleluia!

And far be from me to cheapen anything about this day, but there is a little secret you should be aware of: Jesus Christ is risen every day! This is merely the season when we feel it most acutely—when we celebrate Easter, and when the green shoots rise from the earth, and COVID-19 vaccines show us hope for a better tomorrow, and the long winter (which wasn’t that long this year but it’s North Dakota, so, hey, it feels that way regardless) gives way to spring, and the birds fill the skies on their way north, and the ice breaks apart, and the trees start to show their buds. It is a season of resurrection.

Now, about those trees…

You can trace trees through all of scripture if you want to. In the beginning, there was the tree of the life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—one tree to give life and one that was a harbinger of death. A few chapters later, there was the ark—God’s salvation in the form of Noah’s advanced woodwork—and then in the prophets we hear whispers of a root of Jesse—a reference to a royal “family tree” foreshadowing Jesus. Moses had a staff; Psalm 23 mentions a staff and a rod; the ark of the covenant was acacia wood; and Jonah hides under a shrub to protect himself from the elements. There are ships and bows left and right. You will not get very far in the Old Testament without running into a tree or the product of a tree, but it is the New Testament where the importance tree really comes into relief.

Two days ago, we remembered Jesus crucified on a tree. The cross is the tree that stands in the gap created by Adam and Eve tasting from that first tree long ago; it stretches back to the tree of life and the garden where we were created to roam. And let’s be clear here: it was not just Adam and Eve that put us in this predicament. Each of us tastes of that fruit—every day—all of us yearn to be like God, to become God, and that’s why Jesus had to come in the first place. If not for us, the tree of the cross would be unnecessary. That is the weight we feel on Good Friday; I suppose it is also the reason so many do not worship on Friday and skip ahead to Easter. It is much easier to imagine it is all fluffy bunnies, especially when the world out there is so full of brokenness and loss and grief.

But God knows us better. God knows what is required to bring us to Easter morning with a heart and a mind open to the resurrection. The only thing in the world required for resurrection is death; it is the thing we fear, yet the very thing that gives Easter its power. The cross should be preached not only on Good Friday but also on Easter morning because on this side of Eden, the bridge to the tree of life is the tree of the cross.

A new covenant: God will show up

 Jeremiah 31:31-34

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors… a covenant that they broke… but instead it will be like this: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

            God goes on to say, “You don’t need to teach one another about me anymore, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest.”

            Wow! This is the God we worship—a God who is always doing new things. When the covenant was once only for those in power, God came on to the scene and said, “Now, it is for the powerless.” Later, when the covenant was only for those of pure blood, Jesus came along and told a story about a Samaritan who showed mercy. And when the covenant was still only for those who could claim a little Jewish ancestry, God came on to the scene and said, “Now, it is for Gentiles, too—for all of us here today, I imagine.” Then, in the centuries since the Bible was written, God seems to be up to the same business—taking those we believe to be outside the covenant and welcoming them in, not as subservient but as equals. This is the God we are dealing with here—a God who makes all things new, who welcomes in the lost and least and the ones we have rejected.

            I come to you this morning representing Red Willow Ministries, and I can tell you that right now it feels like a new covenant moment. We spent the better part of a year, alongside churches like yours, assuring that the least and the last are remembered and cared for, and it hurt because we have rarely had clear answers, and we are missing so much of what we feel we once had. At Red Willow, we come back to camp this coming summer thirsty for what we have been missing, longing for something familiar but also for something new, because the pandemic has also revealed many of the ways that things have been broken. God is going to do a new thing and it always starts now.

            I love how the new covenant in Jeremiah is simply a promise about knowing God, because that is exactly what we are about at camp. Camp cannot be the arbiter of good theology; we are not here to delve deeper into Luther’s catechism or to spend a lot of time talking about church practices and rituals. Rather, we are a place where God is made known to us. We are a place where you go to meet Jesus on the way, and this happens to the least and the greatest of us, each in our own way. And we have one tremendous advantage at camp both in the days of COVID-19 and as we seek to be a place where people meet God: at camp, we spend so much of our time outdoor. Outside, God’s presence comes alive. The Christian faith is a faith open to the skies (a “hypaethral” faith). We are a faith that comes alive outdoors where the miraculous does not seem so miraculous anymore; where the yearly migration patterns and the green shoots rising, where campfires and songs bear witness to something magical.

There are no un-sacred places--only places where we fail to pay attention

 A sermon for Atonement Lutheran Church, Jamestown

John 2:13-22

I got into camping ministry as a 20-year-old college student, who loved the outdoors and Jesus and finally discovered there is this little slice of heaven where those two worlds intersect. I worked as a camp counselor in northern Idaho at Camp Lutherhaven where I found my temple under the ponderosa pines on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and it was a temple, because it was a holy place and a holy space—like a church but different; like a pilgrimage site but different. Beautiful, set apart—a place where the holy intersected the lives of countless individuals who called it camp.

      

      In some ways, that camp would become my pilgrimage site—the place where I would be sure to find God—and it still is that way. However, I have also discovered that camp is all of those places—not just the camp that I am most familiar with but also Red Willow and all places outdoors and in where we are attentive to God’s presence. I now firmly believe there are no un-sacred spaces; there are just places where we are not paying attention.

            Jesus gets at this in a roundabout way in our Gospel reading today. This is the story of Jesus whipping folks out of the temple for making it a marketplace. The holy place that was supposed to be set apart had become the local Walmart; it became impossible to see the holy because of all the boring, normal bustle of daily life. So, Jesus literally forms a whip and starts whipping the shopkeepers out of the temple grounds, which is pretty startling if we stop and think about it, because it’s not like Jesus was the chief priest. To the temple authorities, he was nobody. This is why they ask what sign he has for acting in this way. Hey buddy, show us some ID, they are saying. And what ID does Jesus give? A strange response: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Suddenly, since we know who Jesus actually is, this scene reveals an amazing truth. It is not the temple-church that has been profaned. No, that is what the temple elites think; that is the arena for the debate they want to have, but this is not the temple Jesus is concerned with. That temple is Jesus’ body, which is to say that the temple has been profaned because the people are too busy buying stuff to see Jesus Christ, God-incarnate, standing right there.

            This is so important for us today because it is tempting to believe our job is to protect the holiness of church buildings and our camp properties lest they lose their sense of holiness when they no longer feel set apart. Of course there is something truth in this; these are places made holy by the intention of our worship. However, our physical temples only matter if they provide a lens to see Jesus. The point of the temple is that it is set apart, but since we are all part of the body of Christ, all of us can follow Jesus toward the cross wherever we go. Again, there are no un-sacred spaces, just spaces where we fail to pay attention.

It's all about the cross

Mark 1:29-39

I love preaching on the Gospel of Mark, because the Gospel of Mark is a lot like camp. It starts with a bang; it moves at a crazy speed; it never really lets up; and it never loses sight of the point of it all. You may notice that this is Mark, chapter 1, and already a lot has happened! Jesus has been born and named and baptized; we’ve met John the Baptist; Jesus has called some disciples; he has exorcised some demons… and it’s only verse 29. By contrast, in Luke’s Gospel at this point Mary is just about to hear she is going to have a baby, and Matthew has barely moved past telling us Jesus’ genealogy. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist sees Jesus for the first time in verse 29.   

            Mark is like my six-year-old when she is excited about telling me something that happened at school that day. I learned to tie my shoes, and then I tripped, and then I had to tie them again, and then that other girl laughed at me, and then I told her that wasn’t nice, and then, you’ll never guess what!, she fell, and then I laughed at her… and then… and then…! Hold up, kid, come up for a breath! But this is a lot like camp, actually. Kids arrive at camp and we start the ball rolling and then there are games and singing and dancing and meals and swimming and Bible reading and how on earth did that week go so fast?! For the counselors, it is more like “How did summer go that fast?!”

            This is how most meaningful things in life go, whether it is a week at camp or raising children, falling in love or starting work at that dream job. Things move at a breakneck speed and, yet, we linger in the most meaningful of moments. You see, the Gospel of Mark does contain within it a multitude of incredibly meaningful moments, even if Mark himself does not stay there. Jesus is on to the next thing and the next thing like Santa Claus delivering presents on Christmas Eve. There is simply not time to stop, but this is not because Mark is a poor writer. Mark is hurtling us toward the cross; in the Gospel of Mark, it is all about the cross. And at Red Willow, this is not a bad summation of our ministry either, because here it is all about the cross; it is all about Jesus meeting us in the midst of a crazy, fast, exciting camp week in the middle of busy lives and breaking into our routine to proclaim a new thing that changes us. At Red Willow, we focus on the essentials, like the fact that because of Christ dying that death, you who were once outsiders have been brought in by the grace of God. It is so simple and powerful. Don’t linger on the next most important thing because you might miss the real bread and butter.

Where our normals become extraordinaries

Luke 6:1-16

Thank you for the opportunity to bring the good news of Jesus Christ from Red Willow to you in Grand Forks and surrounding areas!

  That is really what we are all about here at Red Willow—we create an atmosphere where the good news of Jesus Christ oozes out from the most unexpected of places, often in the places you least expect it. Here at Red Willow, the good news gets preached in the gaga ball pit, on a pontoon ride, and in front of a campfire with singing and dancing. If this past year of the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the good news should be preached in places and times we least expect it—like to a computer for you all to see, even when you live not that far down the road. This proclivity for the good news to show up in places we least expect it is something that happens at camp, but not only at camp. After all, camp is not just a place, it is an attitude; it is the promise that God meets us on the way when we put aside our normal for the sake of something better.

That is universal, isn’t it? We have a God, who we know in Jesus Christ, who rarely acts as anybody expects. He is born in a barn; he recruits a gang of ragtag dropouts he calls disciples, who manage to only ever ask the stupidest questions; then, he goes and gets himself crucified an enemy of the state. This Jesus we worship does not according to the script, which should bring us some comfort in unprecedented times, because these are times desperate for the good news of a Savior who contradicts our expectations. One such example of this occurs in the Gospel reading today. Jesus shows up on the road not preaching about the law, but in fact breaking the law. Now, that is not what a nice, cozy, comfortable savior-of-the-world does, now is it? Sabbath was (and is) a hard-and-fast law that is not to be broken. You don’t pick grain; you don’t heal; you don’t do any work whatsoever. In the Jewish tradition of the day (and in several traditions still to this day), this is absolute—you simply don’t do it.

And not for a bad reason, either. We are commanded to keep sabbath to remind ourselves that we are not, in fact, God. This is the tradition; this is wisdom; this is the way that it is. You don’t touch that tradition—that is, unless you are Jesus. You see, the Gospels show us that Jesus was not a fan of normal. If Jesus had the choice between normal and extraordinary, he chose extraordinary every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

On the other hand, we tend to like normal. We spend of our lives fighting for normal, especially when facing adversity. Normal is comfortable; normal feels good. But Jesus didn’t come into the world for people who thought that normal was good. Jesus came for the least and the lost and littlest, the persecuted and the decimated and the dying; and if you aren’t one of those, then Jesus isn’t preaching to you, because you don’t need the good news nearly as desperately as your neighbor who is suffering, who is persecuted, who is hurting. But don’t you worry, because your time will come!

It is little surprise, therefore, that those of us who grow up to seek after comfort and the feeling of normalcy also grow up and out of camp. Camp becomes like Santa Claus or Sunday School—a thing that we value for the next generation or the generation after. And when we feel this way, we begin to lose ourselves—not because of camp specifically but because camp points us toward something that is true—the very Savior of the world that we once felt so strongly in our lives but perhaps not today. We all need that break from what is normal in order to feel the extraordinary coursing through our veins. God doesn’t show up in the routine; God shows up in the extraordinary. And the extraordinary is what camp is all about. This is the place to break out of your routine, to burst your bubble, and find that God is the God of the abnormal, the extraordinary.

But you might be thinking, Oh, great, that sounds wonderful, but, let’s be honest, this is just a shtick asking for money. Ah! Now here’s the zinger: Remember, camp is not just this place; it is an attitude. At our best, we can lay the groundwork for the extraordinary in any moment of our lives in any place where we are grounded. You should support any ministry that is a seedbed for the extraordinary. In fact, it starts in your own home.

When Jesus picks grain on the Sabbath, he shows us that the farm is a holy place, and the authorities grumble. When Jesus heals the same day, he shows that the marketplace—the grocery store—is a holy place, and the authorities scheme. The point of this scripture is not to tell us that the law is bad or that we need to do away with it; the point is that Jesus is extraordinary, and every place in our lives might be extraordinary as well. The great news about this? We live in an extraordinary time already! And that is scary, because lots of scary things have happened in the world; scary things are still happening. Yet, scary times create the garden bed on which the extraordinary is planted. Will you run from it in search of what is normal or tend to it and watch the extraordinary bloom.

Camp is one of those places where this happens for so many; it is where it has happened for me. Probably it has been that for some of you as well. We plant the garden bed and the extraordinary grows out of it. Therefore, is it any surprise that this scene today shows Jesus plucking wheat from the field.

The agrarian author-poet, Wendell Berry, once called the Bible a hypaethral book. This is your Greek lesson for the day, and it is a great lesson because odds are your pastor does not know this Greek word either so you can throw out all that seminary knowledge and meet each other on equal ground. Hypaethral means “open to the skies.” The Bible is a book that is best read underneath the open skies, not secluded in some office somewhere. I have found that my faith comes alive in the same way—not secluded on my own but under the skies where I am reminded of the bigness of it all.

We get stuck on the minutia of daily life. Can you believe what she posted on Facebook? I can’t believe he or she got elected! I’m so annoyed by so-and-so for doing such-and-such. Our lives are so often spent moving from one little track to another, often frustrated, rarely open to possibilities. Meanwhile, we have a God in Jesus Christ who picks the grain and heals because that is what a God who is bigger than the boxes we construct for her will do.
 
Jesus meets us on the hills we climb and the roads we drive,
Like a speed bump that we curse, but is it worse
           To stay safe but lose our purpose?
The lilies out our doors preach
           To remind us that we are human, that we are little, that we are fragile;
          And that we are protected by mercy that breaks from on high.
But that speed bump also begs that we slow down
          To honor the sabbath-rest that Jesus-himself breaks
          Only for nourishing and healing.
This is ours, too, when the pace of life slows, and we breathe in the crisp, clean air.

 See, you think I am bringing camp to you, but there is nothing here that you do not possess at home. Camp is in the eyes of your children and grandchildren eager to step out in faith into something exciting and unknown, and it is not just packing bags and coming to Red Willow. No! It is the first day of practice and the first day of school, and all things being made new; it is the changing of the seasons and the end to the long winter. God meets us where our normals are turned to extraordinaries, where kids pray for the first time, sing for the first time, dance for the first time, even in front of their much-too-cool friends. And our normal is shattered when we remember that we can do it, too; perhaps not for the first time but for the first time in a long time.

We are more than our fears, more than our worries.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. After all, Jesus healed on the Sabbath; he didn’t attempt to heal; he didn’t give it a good shot. He changed a life forever by breaking through what was expected. And it was not without risk. We know where the story is heading; we know Jesus ticks off all the wrong people. The extraordinary has the habit of doing that. To a lesser degree, it is also why you can’t really share the experience of the extraordinary with anyone back home; they either took part or they didn’t.

You see, I expect that most of these Pharisees heard about Jesus healing second hand—at least, I like to give them that much credit—because when you come face to face with the incredible, it tends to break through even our hard exteriors. And, boy, do we need some hard exteriors broken down these days! You, me, 90% of the internet—we all need our exteriors broken down by Jesus, who breaks the law for our sake and who meets us contrary to our expectations.

 As a representative of your camp, I want you to know that this good work is happening here. Lives are changed; the ordinary is transformed to the extraordinary, but it didn’t begin here and it won’t end here either. Each and every child goes home changed; each and every counselor reassesses; God moves us through places like these, but the lion’s share of this work is revealed in the ordinary—what we might call the “back home.”

It isn’t normal—nothing about Jesus is—and thanks be to God for that, because we all need a little extraordinary in our lives—today and every day.