Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:1-8

If you heard my sermon last week, you know that I’ve been regularly watering a garden for the first time, and reflecting on how God’s blessings of grace just pour out on all of us like water and all that. Now I don’t want to be a one-trick pastor, but as I was hanging out there again with the hose one evening this week, I did find myself getting curious about roots, straining to remember what I learned in high school. What is it that they’re doing? And also, what could I possibly say that a congregation of farming families hasn’t heard?

At first, all I was thinking about was how roots hold the plant in the dirt. They make the plant secure in the ground. And that’s true, but then I learned I had been thinking about roots in a shallow way. As I learned—because I’m a growing little plant too—that is just the effect of what they do. More primarily, what roots do is seek water.

Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been just trading one insecurity for another, depending on where I live and who I’m around and comparing myself to. I don’t have as much money as that person, not as successfull as that guy, don’t look as good as those people, aren’t as smart as them, don’t love God as much as them, and even worse, I’ll never be a real Vermonter.

When we try to get roots in things to make us secure, we are really thirsty for the waters of grace. Because God is so gracious and pours out so much grace, we can find little versions of grace in lots of places that can make us secure in lesser ways, and if we are so dry and thirsty, that can feel like the only place God’s grace lives. So to get secure, we set our roots down in money (after all, stocks are called “securities”), or maybe our looks if we have them, maybe our career if we like it, maybe our tribe if we know them. We can get even realer and deeper roots that soak up the real good stuff of God’s grace, the secure roots of family (if we have them), or the roots of a place and being a real Vermonter (if we are one).

Deep down, we know these things aren’t fully securing roots. We know they’re vulnerable, hard to come by, and fragile to be lost again, or we wouldn’t cling to the soil with them. If they weren’t hard to come by and weren’t fragile to being lost, we wouldn’t hold onto them so tightly. Eventually things change. We take a devastating financial loss. We lose someone. Our health slips, then slips again. If we’re graced, we have more roots in Christianity and our church to help us in those hard times.

But even then, in our long journey as disciples, we may find that even our roots as a Christian are more fleeting than we thought. Oh, we know all the lines about living by grace alone and not by works, but sin can be stubborn and sneaky and find ways around our taglines. We might want to make ourselves secure in how joyful of Christians we are, or how hopeful in Christ we are, or how much we’ve studied the Bible, or how we never miss a prayer at mealtime, or we never say a curse word, or we always do the right thing or have the right opinion about what Jesus said. And then, because the devil loves to have us look at each other even when we’re supposed to be looking at God, the insecure comparing creeps back in. Why isn’t my faith as strong as the saints? Why am I not as good a person as these other church people seem to be? Comparing doesn’t always make us look like a shy form of insecure, but arrogant insecurity, too. “How could they think that?” “Why can’t they just get it together?” But eventually this turns back on us, “Why can’t I just get it together?”

It’s a common experience that we might find ourselves in the pews feeling what’s called “imposter syndrome,” feeling like a total phony going to church. But you know what? We’re kinda all imposters. And Christ died for us anyway.

That’s what our brother Paul tells us today in one of the “mic drop” moments of Scripture. “While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” If you were to imagine the Bible as one giant complex classical arrangement, it’s like one of the motifs that has been building throughout the Old Testament all the way through the gospels and keeps coming back around, and finally the strings vibrate the melody again: “While we still were sinners, Christ died for us.”

This is the water our roots are really thirsty for, the most liberating news of it all: there is absolutely no other place our roots can fully withstand and grab onto and really be secure but in the waters of the blood of the Lamb that are poured out for all of us by no merit, for our roots cannot draw the water we need from our own human goodness. We draw living water from the one whose rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike; for this reason, Jesus tells us, you must “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you if you want to be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:44-45)

In the first part of Romans, Paul talks about the sins of those who are ungodly outside of the Church, to where you can almost hear cheering, “Yeah, get ‘em!” But then he twists it all around and says to his friends in the Church, “So what’s your excuse for how you act?” In Romans 3, he quotes Psalm 14 and 53, reminding us, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding; there is no one who seeks God.” (Rom 3:10-11). But now, he says, “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. … God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)

Our security is in his anguish, his scars, his cuts, in the life he gave up. Our security is in how deeply insecure God made himself, completely vulnerable all the way to the cross, and did so for everybody. And because ultimately our God who made earth and is not of it, whose grace is in nature all around us but is not himself natural, we cannot get to him through the natural but through the supernatural doorway of faith. Right before this, Paul has told us how Abraham, our forefather in blessing, is not our ancestor based on his uprightness, for he was not a perfectly upright man; he had no Law to follow, and if he did, he wouldn’t have perfectly followed it. No, Abraham is our ancestor in faith. Faith is the only root system that can connect us to the living water by giving us a relationship with the living God alone. “The promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace.” (Rom 4:16) And this promise is for everybody.

But even then, our faith will struggle. Our roots will falter. And it won’t make a difference to God’s love, because while we still are sinners, Christ dies for us. When our faith is still weak, Christ still dies for us. We think of the Good Samaritan as helping the person in the ditch, and the person in the ditch is always our neighbor and someone who we should be helping whenever we walk by them. But the story of the gospels is that Christ also dies for the priests who walk by the man in the ditch. For when the religious people who walked by the man in need, they didn’t just turn away from a person, they turned away from the water they also needed. And Christ still died for them, “the ungodly,” the Pharisees, the Roman empire, and your enemies too.

We know deep down how radical this is (“radical,” by the way, means “rooted”). You don’t really need me to tell you how radical this love is. “Indeed,” Paul says, “rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” (Rom 5:7) I was thinking about this line, and thinking about how our veterans are so worthy of honor because they have dared to die for good people. They even die in service of people they don’t know, even die for people they know don’t like them. That’s amazing love. And and an even deeper is Christ’s love, for Christ didn’t die for his country, he died for his enemies. And “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, and much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Rom 5:10)

So the next time you are feeling anxious and insecure in the slightest, put out your root hairs for God alone and know that he has always been grabbing hold of you. He is “the ground of all being.” There’s nothing you can do to earn his love and nothing you can do to unearn his love. You are his treasured possession (Ex. 19:5), it is he who made you, and you are his. (Ps 100:3)

When we feel that deep in our bones, and the waters of that grace soaking our roots, then God can do amazing things with your heart. We can even begin to “boast in our afflictions” because we are rooted so deeply that nothing, nothing, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. (Rom 8:39) Rooted in God’s grace, even our sufferings produce hope that is beyond shame, because our only source of pride is that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:5) And his love has been given to every one of us. Remember that with each other when times get hard.

When we live in insecurity, we make moral compromises to hold onto the fleeting securities. But because we have been gifted with the deep roots of faith in God’s grace, we can seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly even when it’s hard and scary because we don’t need to hold onto any of the false securities, as important as they are. We can give from our securities of having enough money, food, or even things like emotional stability to those who can’t make ends meet, don’t know where they’ll eat, and don’t know how much God loves them because nobody has ever really shown them that love. You received without payment, now give without payment. That is our call as Christians, to give from the deep, deep security we have in Christ Jesus to those who need it.

For while we still were who we are, Christ dies for us all. Amen.

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #17 - Third Sunday After Pentecost

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5 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:1-3

And as Jesus sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

Matthew 9:10-13, 18-26

I’ve been learning about gardening this year, by which I mean my wife did all the planning and the digging and the planting and the setting up of our makeshift tomato trellis and the haying, so really it’s more accurate to say that I’ve been learning about watering. As simple as it is, I’m sure I’m not doing it completely right.

It might sound dumb, but I had never really thought about where all the water “went.” Yes, I took science classes in high school, so I have heard the basic geology of water tables and how our wells draw from the saturated waters of the ground. But it wasn’t until I was actually in the dirt each day with our $13 adjustable hose nozzle that I started thinking about the flow of water, flipping through the different settings, like “mist,” “fan,” “jet,” “center,” and (maybe the first one I should have tried) “garden.” My basic instructions were to “water it until it starts to pool,” so that’s what I do. And the first time I watered the hanging basket at head height, I let it get saturated, and the excess water flowed out the bottom of the hole, and I finally realized, “Oh, wow, if you water the dirt enough, the extra water flows out.” I will hold for your slow-clap applause break for this feat of flatlander scientific discovery.

But as I was thinking about that and our readings this week, I thought, what if God has been telling us all along that his grace works the same way? The story of God’s grace goes all the way back to the creation, which we talked about last week, where the breath of God is like a garden hose being turned on, “Let there be light!” Let the trees grow and the water flow. And the blessings keep on flowing from there. Then, of course, humanity comes along and just wants to put our finger on the spigot: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, on and on past Noah until humans start building a Tower of Babel to “make a name for ourselves,” which isn’t just trying to get famous, but wanting to make ourselves great—to think we can actually make ourselves on God’s level on our terms with technological intervention and get all to the way up and up and there’s nothing God’s gonna do but maybe give us a high five from heaven. But obviously humans didn’t get that high five. We didn’t make ourselves great. Our will and our sin made us build the wrong thing for the wrong reasons in the wrong way.

But God does not give up in the face of our evil. He just decides to make the nature of his grace even clearer through this almost-nobody called Abram. What we read today is basically our entire introduction to Abram, apart from listing his family members and that his father had thought about going to Canaan but got to Haran and said, “Eh, this is fine.” Abram is about as nondescript of a human as it gets. He had not done a single thing worthy of blessing, but God turns on the sprinkler and says Abram, I am going to bless you so much that you will be a blessing. Abram’s name meant “exalted father.” But the truly exalted heavenly Father said, “Abram, you are going to be different from those who want to make a name for themselves. I will make your name great.” Remember that when the Bible talks about names, it means more than just what we call them, but something deep about their nature and who they are. So God is not just saying, “Abram, I’m going to make you famous,” no, God is saying, “Abram, I’m going to make you good. I’m going to make you a man who lives up to what you are called. I will even one day change the name you are called into Abraham, ‘father of a multitude,’ because I am going to pour my blessings out so much on you that it will soak down into the roots that will grow from you.” Take it from this seasoned green thumb, that’s how water works. And that’s how grace works.

Like our dearly departed Marvin, the good farmer who was the “great soil,” Christ says we are all spiritual soil in God’s creation, just ordinary people like Abram. We get so arrogant thinking that we can grow without the water of God that is grace. The Tower of Babel is not just about technology; spiritually, it’s when we act like a big pile of dirt that thinks it can grow into a tree. But the story of Abram shows God telling us that his grace is not about us making ourselves great. It’s God making a name of us, forming us in our very being to his character, saturating us with his love and care. God pours his water on us, which has nothing to do with deserving it. As Deuteronomy tells us, “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” (Deut 8:17-18a)

What God also says to Abram is what he says to all of Abram’s children, which by faith, Scripture tells us, is every Christian: “You are not just to receive a blessing, you are to be a blessing.” How? As simple as being wet soil: you become a blessing by letting God’s grace flow through you. Soaked up by the blessings of his love, like water flowing down into the roots, you let the water flow on to the rest of the garden that needs it. It’s like when an artist says, “It wasn’t even me moving the paintbrush, it was just something divine flowing through me.” Live like there is an abundance of grace flowing through you, because through the Holy Spirit, it is! You are already overflowing with grace. Even in pain, even in suffering, even when our mind can’t stop telling us what we lack, when we pray and give thanks to God, we can remember this truth: we are overflowing with grace.

Now in contrast to the good soil of our garden, just a few yards away you have our driveway. It’s a mix of gravel and sand that tires have packed down over and over for years. When it rains, water will be pooled up there for days, sometimes weeks if there’s no sun and it’s chilly, because the soil is packed so tight that water cannot go through it. The water just sits there, not nourishing anything, just something for me to splash through every time I come home. Same with the little rut in Shatney Road which, no matter when I walk down it, always has a pool of water. The water can’t flow down through hard soil, and because it’s shaded, it has no sun to dry it up.

It is a great tragedy that we Christians are so often like packed in soil, that when we get the grace of God, we only let it pool on top of us. We don’t let grace sink into our dirt. It just sits there in excess. That’s exactly what the Pharisees are like, too, soil that gets wet but is so tightly packed together that the mercy and love and grace of God can’t pass through. They still feel the mercy moisten them, like the top of my driveway, but it’s not even running off the angled sides to better grass, it is just pooling up in a nasty muddy rut. Jesus got so frustrated at them because here they were, presuming to teach people about God, and they don’t even know how to let God’s grace change their own lives. And because they don’t know how to let it change their own lives and transform their hearts, they don’t know how to let the grace of God flow on to their neighbors. In effect, their goal was to be so strictly disciplined that maybe, just maybe, God would love them. Their name also meant “the separated ones,” and they sure did make that name for themselves. To be sure, one thing we get wrong with criticizing the Pharisees is thinking that growing in holiness doesn’t matter; Jesus doesn’t say that we shouldn’t be disciplined or intentional about our personal piety or that the Law didn’t matter. But Jesus points out in the Pharisees the dark side of trying to make ourselves holy to reach God’s blessings, the religious version of a Tower of Babel. Jesus is teaching us the paradox that we are called to be a blessing, which we can only do by accepting that we are not that holy. We need grace. And we need spaciousness with each other that looks like true brotherly and sisterly love: the space to make mistakes. The space to be forgiven. The space to be able to confess where we have not been as good as we know we should. The space to say you know what, we all need water, and honestly, I’m thirsty. For it is the people who know they are thirsty who are time and time again the people that Jesus seeks out.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I didn’t come for the righteous, but for the sinners,” he’s saying, “I came for the dry soil, not the water that’s already wet. I came to bring life to those who need life.” And because the Pharisees are like tightly packed dirt, Jesus does what his Father did to the generations of Israelites that didn’t help the downtrodden and speaks a prophetic word. When Jesus is a prophet, he’s giving a word that un-clods the dirt like a broadfork. When Jesus is confrontational, he is usually saying that if you are not letting mercy flow, then I will work on you until my grace flows through you. So Jesus tells them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’” quoting the prophet Hosea (Hos 6:6). Christ is the one who would do all the sacrificing we need. He would become the very Lamb who pours not only water, but the blood of his salvation. And so in the light of all that was done for us on the cross, no, God is not impressed with religious rituals that keep us compact, isolated, separate, and closed off. We have been blessed by grace. It’s not ours to pool up. Let it flow.

And where does grace need to flow? “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” The wet soil doesn’t need more water. Jesus came for the dry soil. And when we are saturated with his grace, we, his body, the Church that is supposed to be Christ in the world, must let his waters flow to the thirsty. To Jesus, his grace flows for the woman who has been ailing for 12 years and not able to enter the Temple, who must have felt so, so distant from God; for the sick child, who they thought was dead; for those who are even doing wrong because they don’t really know God, and are living in ways that you know are wrong, but that’s exactly the kind of soil that needs water.

If the kingdom of God is revealed in all creation, it’s a blessing that God entrusted each of us with our own community gardens to steward together. We are Pharisees when we act like these are just for ourselves, as if the kingdom of God is just our private walled garden. Because gardens are not meant to live for themselves, but to nourish life that begets more life. So though we are sinners, gardens give us a divinely healthy, carefully curated, flourishing, stewarded place of life-giving-life taste of God’s kingdom. Gardens of plants are the same as gardens of people. People need the right conditions to grow and thrive, too: enough space to grow on their own into who God made them to be, some sunlight, and the water of grace that, yes, only God can provide. But Christian love can be as simple as living like a $13 adjustable hose, spreading God’s grace to wherever the soil is dry. All Christians are called to water our community gardens as Christ poured and pours and pours his love on us.

I love the first line of our Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Don’t pack yourselves in so tight that your blessings become a muddy pool. Let your blessings flow. You are saturated with grace. So let his blessings flow. Don’t be a puddle! Let his blessings flow. Amen.

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #16 - Second Sunday After Pentecost

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9 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a

As a sophomore in high school, I became obsessed with Les Misérables, both the book and the musical, and honestly, I didn’t really know why. I mean, I thought I knew why; I was a theater kid brand of dork, and to my ears, the international cast symphonic recording was a holy grail. But there have been lots of musicals with good music. Why did this one grab me and so many people? Why was this story so popular? Was it the main human protagonist, Jean Valjean? Maybe, but there have been lots of great leads, and the story isn’t really about him anyway. It’s an ensemble show and an ensemble story, named for the downtrodden outcasts of society, or as I expertly translated it from French in high school, “The Miserables.” But why is it still the longest-running musical in the history of London’s West End?

I thought I had moved on from my fascination with this show and that relistening to it this weekend would be simply nostalgic. Instead, I found myself asking another why: why am I a nearly 38-year-old man tearing up in the Hannaford parking lot listening to Jean Valjean sing, “Who am I?” I don’t know, but I had to walk my cart with my head turned to the side to avoid eye contact with passersby.

Our Scripture reading from Genesis 1 today gives us another mystery. We are told how God made the world. But why? These first lines of Genesis don’t spell out the reasons God created, just that in the beginning, God created. All we can learn at first about the character of God is that he does not exist for himself. His essence lies in creating things beyond himself. His ultimate being desires to make other beings.

We quickly begin learning more about this God. How does he create? In the beginning, he gave of himself through speech. He didn’t overwhelm with power; he simply let the Spirit leave his lips. And what does he give? Words. The Word. And the Word he spoke, as John tells us, was himself incarnated, first in the created order of things, and eventually the man we call the Son, God in his physically embodied form. And we learn that while God was creating, he was not completely alone; the Aramaic translation of Genesis in the Targum says that God’s Spirit “fluttered over the waters like a dove.”1

And so in these first three verses, early Christians saw that a Trinity was fully present—the Father, the Word, and the fluttering Holy Spirit. From the very beginning, God was a God of relationships, not existing for only himself. After laying the foundations of the earth in the first three days, in the next three days God, speaks into being the other beings that would fill the earth and ultimately culminate in humanity, we beings made in his image, male and female. He honored us the most with not only being made in his image, but gifting us the great gift of stewarding his gifts. He made us stewards of his love.

What does being stewards of his love look like? God reveals it to us throughout Scripture. We are not merely landlords for cattle and sheep as in the Garden, but God invites us to help him cultivate his world over and over, continuing the work of his creation in freedom. God invites us to help build the Tabernacle together, then the Temple together, each of which not only reflect creation,2 but teach us about how we build up our spiritual bodies, the tabernacles and temples that we are called to be. As Pope Leo described earlier this week in his treatise about AI (which was really a treatise about humanity), we are called to steward creation in all its complexity. We steward not like the Tower of Babel, but like rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, praying to God in repentance and guidance while serving each other in mutually sacrificial, collaborative love.

And so we steward his creation not simply by caring for land, but by caring for each other in the same self-giving love with which God made everything. In the story of Les Mis—I won’t give every spoiler away, but also, you’ve had a good 164 years to read it—Jean Valjean emerges out of decades of imprisonment an embittered man, seeming destined to be branded as a criminal his whole life, number 24601, until he is taken in by a bishop. Just as promptly as he receives this grace, Valjean robs the bishop of his silver. When the police catch him and bring him back to the bishop, the bishop tells the police no, there’s been a mistake; he had given this silver to his friend, and actually, he forgot the candlesticks. Once the police leave, the bishop tells him, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul…and I give it to God.” Valjean is forever changed by this encounter with mercy, and he begins to become who God was calling him to be.

When we encounter pure grace, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to enter into a process of discipleship that we might call “becoming.” When Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19), we must first make disciples of ourselves by becoming more and more conformed to the pattern of self-giving, creative love revealed in the fine grains of creation. Take the third day, when God said let there be fruit. Fruit is not something the tree itself needs, but it’s something of itself that the tree gives away. Think about what that means: we know a tree is a healthy tree based on how well it’s giving itself away. Likewise, the fruits of the Spirit are signs that we are healthy because they show we are also giving ourselves away.

Genesis tells us all the gifts of creation act the same way: light does not exist for itself, but to point towards other things in illumination. The sky exists not for itself, but to give shape and structure to the waters. The waters gather together not for their own sake, but for the sake of dry land. And it just keeps going and going as creation keeps on giving and giving—the dry land exists for the sake of trees, which exist for the sake of fruit, which exist for the sake of all creatures, including the human creature. And finally, and here is the rub, the teaching of the rest of the Bible is that the human creature is not meant to live for the sake of itself. We live for God, and we live for God by living for each other. We know this because God lived for us so completely that he died for us as one of us. This is the triune Way. And our discipleship of “becoming” grows the more we walk in it.

But there is a great paradox of “becoming”: we can be so focused on self-becoming that it is, well, unbecoming. I know “unbecoming” sounds like a word your disapproving grandmother would use, that you’re “acting unbecoming of a Christian,” but I like it, because if “becoming” is to grow more and more into resembling God’s self-giving love, we are un-becoming when we do things that go against the pattern of creation, usually through self-centeredness. So the paradox of our development as disciples is that we don’t become better disciples for the sake of being better disciples, as Peter learned many times the hard way. The deepest nature of “becoming” cannot have our personal development as its goal, because we humans were not created to live for ourselves.

And so a big challenge of our discipleship lies in how temptation so often creeps back in to get us to live for ourselves. In that temptation, we live more and more out of fear that God’s grace is actually insufficient, that if we give ourselves over to God, we will not have what we need and will lose what we love about ourselves. This is what Thomas Merton feared before he went to the monastery: “Am I going to lose what makes me me by submitting myself to God’s will? Am I going to become less of who I am? Am I going to lose the things, the pieces of God’s love that I love about who I am, by saying, ‘Not my will, but thy will’?” But what he found, with fits and starts with his own sin, was that we actually become more of ourselves the more we submit to the eternal becoming of God, which we only do by living in the way the Trinity lives, for the sake of the Other.

So the invitation on Trinity Sunday is the invitation in creation: listen to where God is asking you to steward his world in its becoming. As long as we’re in this world, we always have opportunities for becoming by moving outward in love. The triune God so created the world and everything in it, especially you, because he so loved it. He clarified on the cross just how much he keeps on giving and giving and giving of his own spirit for us.

But before I close, I want to confess to you now that I actually do think I know why Les Mis is so good. It’s not because of the music or the human characters. In fact, it’s so good because the humans aren’t the main characters. Sure, it may be called Les Misérables—the poor, the dispossessed, the downtrodden—but the main character is the grace of God, humming beneath the surface, redeeming the outcasts in love and teaching them to better love one another. And the reason this life and creation are good is that, for as magnificent as we humans can be in God’s image, we are not the main characters of creation. The main character of this life is the One who exists not for himself, but whose very Triune being is a self-giving grace that all life is born from.

Jean Valjean’s character arc is just one powerful story of a much more amazing God. His story is powerful because he is a sinner whose journey is a process of becoming—not becoming like anyone else, not like the man society made a criminal, nor like a false image of a local hero, but becoming more and more Christ-like, which he does by becoming more and more like himself, which he does by becoming more and more invested in others. In other words, Jean Valjean only becomes Jean Valjean by caring less and less about Jean Valjean.

As the last song of the musical goes, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” And as the first song of creation sings, “The face of God exists for the sake of loving every other person.” The reason why existence exists is not for itself, but to love beyond ourselves, because love cannot love for itself. May we go and not only make disciples of all nations, but be disciples of his self-giving love for all nations. Amen.

For more discussion of this week’s texts:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #15 - Trinity Sunday (Featuring the Pope Encyclical)

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15 days ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

`In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Acts 2:1-17

It is Pentecost today, “the Church’s birthday,” and what a party it was, with the Holy Spirit and the wind and the fire and the speaking in tongues that somehow everyone understood. And it’s all vibrant and wonderful. But there is a temptation to look at the ecstatic revival of that day and think, well, where is that for us? Or perhaps there’s a different temptation to look at the people with the most exciting gifts of the Spirit and say wow, how can we all be like that? Just a few years after the Church’s birthday, when the Church was not old enough to drive, we see that’s one of the problems emerging in the early Corinthian church when Paul writes them in 1 Cor 12, our other reading today.

Growing up, I wanted more than anything to be a professional athlete. Didn’t matter the sport, football, baseball, basketball, I loved them all. Like many boys, my idols were mostly professional athletes. For a kid in North Carolina, there was no greater legend than Michael Jordan, and part of the legend of Michael Jordan was that he was cut from his varsity high school basketball team as a sophomore, then worked and worked his tail off and eventually became, well, Michael Jordan. As the son of a teacher, I mean no offense when reporting that this single story of Michael Jordan convinced more young North Carolina men to work hard than anything any teacher could have told them. We all wanted to “be like Mike.”

So even though I was never that athletically gifted, and even though we had a weird, lopsided, half-paved-half-gravel driveway, I asked my parents for a basketball goal so I could practice. And for several years from about 8 years old, underneath the orange street lamp, I would head out there and practice every kind of shot, free throws, layups, three pointers. And after working my tail off, when it finally came time for middle school basketball, I discovered: I was not Michael Jordan. And no, not because I made the team on my first try. It became clear that I just did not have the gifts of my peers, and that they could not be fixed by any amount of late-night free-throws. I’d go on to repeat this pattern with other dreams I had, chasing them for sometimes months, sometimes years, whether it was actor, musician, comedian, whatever.

The point isn’t that hard work doesn’t pay off. Honestly, I probably didn’t really work hard enough at all of these things. Nor is the point that I just am devoid of anything to offer; as it turns out, I did okay at school. But I didn’t care about school. I didn’t think of anything like that as being gifted. The athletes, the musicians, the famous actors, now they had gifts. I could do well at our Sunday School Bible Jeopardy, but as a preacher’s kid, it’d be kinda embarrassing if I didn’t.

I think it’s far easier for us to see the things we can’t attain as gifts than the real ones God gave us. There’s an old observation to this point: every rock star really wants to be a comedian, and every comedian wants to be a rock star. Maybe because when you’ve been given something by God it may not even feel like a gift. You may think, “This is just who I am. It’s just what I can do. I mean, how else could I be?” Even with deeveloped skills, someone might compliment you, “Oh you’re such a good carpenter,” and you might think, “Yeah, well, just cause my dad showed me how.” Or, “You’re such a good pianist,” and you think, “I don’t even really like piano that much but, okay.” Or someone could even say, “I’ve had a lot of friends but you, you’re such a loyal friend,” and you might think, “Well, how the heck else are you supposed to be a friend if you’re not loyal?”

There are so many ways to envy so many gifts we don’t have. But this robs us twice: first, robbing us of seeing that we do have gifts, and then robbing everybody by failing to use them to the fullest. Multiply this across a whole subculture and an even weirder thing happens, where only a couple of types of gifts are seen as truly valuable gifts: athlete, musician, comedian. And then you really have a bunch of unused gifts, and a bunch of people trying really hard to make themselves have a couple of gifts they don’t. After all, we saw what happened when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball (and, to be fair, he still made the minor league team).

Why am I saying this on Pentecost? Because of all the wonderful outpouring of spiritual gifts on that Pentecost day, something strange started to happen in churches that still can happen in churches to this day: Christians started to think that the gifts of the Holy Spirit that really mattered looked a certain way. For the Corinthians, it was miraculous tongues, big pizzazz, an emotional fever pitch. You can imagine them hearing the reports of Pentecost and wanting to say, “Well we want our Pentecost,” and then everybody wanted the glory of being the tongue-speaker, and suddenly more and more Corinthians were speaking in tongues than, frankly, could have possibly been gifted by the Holy Spirit.

And so Paul says hold on now—every gift is spiritual, and it’s all from God, and they all can be used to build up the church (or drive churches apart). If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit indwelling in you, and the Holy Spirit has given you a gift that is just as valid as any other, and more than that, Christ’s body needs you. “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.” (1 Cor 12:4-6) From wisdom to knowledge to faith to healing to power to prophecy to discernment to tongues to interpreting the tongues, and this isn’t a complete list, “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” (1 Cor 12:11-12)

So first and foremost, on this Pentecost birthday celebration, do not be jealous of another church’s celebration, and don’t be jealous of another’s gifts. We should rejoice and recognize how it all glorifies God, absolutely yes, but don’t be Michael Jordan playing baseball (or me playing baseball). Look at what God has given you and glorify him with that.

And I don’t want to embarrass her, but if I were to think of someone who has magnified God today, today I’m thinking of Elsie.1 I can’t think of anybody who has done more for the quiet work of the Holy Spirit that we should lift up on this Pentecost Sunday. All the emails, all the little things, all the preppings of communion, making sure tablecloths are clean, the livestream is doing okay…I mean, I know she says she retired from being a church administrator, but I don’t know if you could really retire the church administrator out of her. An old Methodist bishop said, “Sometimes the Holy Spirit wills us to do things we wouldn’t want to do, or else it wouldn’t require the Holy Spirit to get us to move,” and based on how many times she had to email me to get the bulletin right, I can tell you the Holy Spirit was at work where she was tired of going!

But it’s not just Elsie. I think of the way the Holy Spirit has moved in folks like Lisa, the dedication and willingness to show up and be the point person for our organ playback—thank you Lisa.2 And thank you to our organists who have recorded our hymns, whose gifts pour through those pipes even though they’re not here, just as the gifts of saints gone by hold us up in these pews and this pulpit and this communion table they carved. The Holy Spirit has been at work in the unsung work that’s not listed in our bulletin, folks like Keith, Woody, and Natalie helping people cross the street and doing a thousand other things over the years. I don’t know what else needs to be said about what Tom does for the livestream and keeping our building functioning, or Jenny for the work of the Spirit has kept her going another year as clerk when she is well due to retire there, or Jane for her gift of beautifying the church, or Vicki’s gifts of testimony and interpersonal love, or Sandy’s gifts of technical support and emotional support, or Dave’s gifts of patient wisdom, or our other Dave for all you’ve done for this church, or Bruce’s gifts of historical memory, or Kay’s gifts of lightheartedness, or Valerie’s gifts of faithful dedication, or Jane’s work at the 4C’s and ongoing friendship, or all Neil and Kristin have done for our community through the library, or how the Spirit is moving in Lori to pick up where Elsie has left off, or Paige’s passion for the poor in our community, or Anne Page’s dedication as our treasurer, or how I see the Spirit at work in the kindness of Joyce, Ernie, Sally, and Yvonne each week at the 4C’s, and I feel bad that I know I can’t list everyone, because the Holy Spirit is busy!3

So we may not have tongues of fire appearing anytime soon. But if you’ve stuck around, you’ll see that Pentecost did happen and is here, because the Holy Spirit has been at work this whole time. Because part of the point of this wild firey event happening on Pentecost was to show that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not only for the apostles, who had already received the Holy Spirit from Jesus (John 20:19-23), but were being poured out on the whole church. Ordinary folks who had traveled from far and wide to be there for that Pentecostal festival, what they called shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, and suddenly felt that God had gifted them all. Not just the musicians or the prophets, but the people who just did good, humble work, who cooked meals for their families, who kept the shop running another year, who harvested another crop after another year of working in the fields.

Today, we celebrate that God has blessed all of us who are gathered in Jesus’ name, all of you, with spiritual gifts. We celebrate that yes, the Holy Spirit is in you! Do you believe it? Do you know that the Holy Spirit is in you? And now what are you gonna do about it?

If you don’t know, there’s a way to find out. In fact, I may have made a mistake in this sermon, because we don’t find out what to do with our gifts by looking at each other. That’s not why we gather here each week. Looking too much at each other is the disease that had me shooting free throws at 9pm on a school night. We gather here as spiritually gifted sinners who look not at ourselves for inspiration, but at Jesus Christ, who had every spiritual gift imaginable, and did not hoard those gifts for himself, but emptied himself and gave up everything for his beloved children.4 Don’t look at each other’s gifts. Look for the ways you can give the gifts you already have—the gifts that you may have forgotten or never realized were gifts—and use them to glorify God and bless your neighbor. As your pastor, I bear witness that you have already done so. If you have forgotten, remember your gifts. When we forget again, let us remember the cross. And may we all go and do likewise. Amen.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we, too, are his offspring.’

“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Acts 17:22-31

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

John 14:15-21

“I will not leave you orphaned,” he said. It is Mother’s Day, and if your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits differently today. If you never knew your parents, then his promise will really hit different.

It is Mother’s Day, and I can remember a time when I did not want parents. Embarrassingly, this lasted longer than high school. When I moved to Los Angeles in my early twenties, I was so happy to be my own person. I was so happy to be my full, authentic self. I had left the church, left my family for the other coast, left my ideas of God, left everything but that red Toyota Tercel that couldn’t make it past Texas without breaking down. After years and years of being a product of social systems I didn’t ask to be born in, I was so happy to do what Carl Jung called individuating, becoming my truer self, my own man. A struggling artist but a free bird.

My relationship to Christ was non-existent, and where it was existent, it was resentful. I remember actually thinking that I’m not gonna let myself be the prodigal son, not gonna be me. If I had ever gone to church, and if I had actually heard Jesus say, “I will not leave you orphaned,” it would not have been good news to me. In some ways, I didn’t want to be a son at all. If I didn’t have to worry about my parents feelings, then I could really live how I wanted, completely be me, no longer worrying about disappointing them. I used to think this was just a me thing or a twenties thing but some of us carry this a long time. Maybe you still do somewhere. If your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits in a different way on days like today.

So I did the next best thing and lived like I was an orphan. We California transplants, we who move there, we either desperately remind ourselves we come from somewhere else, finding other transplants who carry deeper connections to us than the entertainment industry, or we desperately don’t want to come from anywhere at all, and sometimes it depends on the sunny afternoon. We all live on the internet now, and Los Angeles is almost like living on the internet in person—the most glamorous nowhere, the blank slate perfect weather with open-top possibilities for personal expression and fulfillment. It can feel quite alive, vibrant, in touch with truth. No real obligations to you, you don’t have real obligations to me, we’re just equal beings man, tolerating each other but not going out of the way for each other, climbing ladders, fully discipled in the bleeding edge of culture. Just spiritual orphans figuring it out. And it’s not just a California thing; because America has been fully Californized, we all live in the age of self-discovery, individual meaning-making, and if we don’t know that we come from somewhere, we live as if we were orphans with minimal responsibility to anyone.

This can seem to work well enough for many people, because at least it’s “free.” But underneath it all for me was loneliness. All the freedom, all the individuation, all the not wanting to be a product of a system or a church or a nation or God, it let me do what I want, but the price was loneliness. And I don’t know how lonely you have ever been. I don’t know if you feel lonely now in your life, including on this Mother’s Day. But there is a level of loneliness you can hit where you start to really believe it. You can be so lonely that it doesn’t even feel like belief, it just feels honest. It feels true. It feels real. That you are nobody to nobody.

But “I will not leave you orphaned,” he said.

I don’t know how many of us here have seen the movie Good Will Hunting, but there is a famous scene in it where Robin Williams is a therapist talking with a young Matt Damon, a janitor at MIT who grew up in the foster system, still wounded over the abandonment of his father long ago. In the most famous scene, Williams says over and over to the young man who has never lost the wounds of being a foster kid, “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And it’s a beautiful scene because it’s sometimes the best the world can give us, simply telling us that when other people abandon us to pursue their own individualism, that it wasn’t our fault. We aren’t to blame for our pain. So many of us carry deep wounds around this. And no, we aren’t at fault for being abandoned. The even better miracle is that we aren’t abandoned at all. For he said, “I will not leave you orphaned.”

Last week we talked about commending our spirits to God in the same way Christ commended his spirit to his father on the cross, “Into your hands, O Father, I now commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46) But before he commended his spirit to his Father, he was here, in a living room with his closest friends and followers, saying first, I commend my Holy Spirit to you. And as long as you are with me, you are also with God, and you are also with each other, and we are all together. And when all this is too long for Christians to say, we summarize it in a single word that we forget about its full meaning: communion.

Communion isn’t only when we partake in the Lord’s Supper. We are always in communion with the living God. He has never abandoned us, and he has never abandoned you.

First-century Athens was not 21st-century Los Angeles, the city of angels. But they were both cities of gods. Against all odds, Paul has found himself here in the marketplace of ideas, preaching the message he once tried to destroy. And here he is with all these free-thinking philosophers, after being a tent-maker throughout the empire for everyday citizens and their gods. As we heard in our reading today, he doesn’t say, “You have no idea what you’re talking about, you spiritually bankrupt degenerate narcissists” (maybe I sound like that). He says, “Athenians, what a spiritual people you are. I know your poetry. It has truth. And the God that you don’t know? Actually, I do know him. And you are his offspring. You are not orphans. You are part of his family.”

And Luke preserves these words for us and everyone in the ancient world because it’s for anyone who has been on a faith journey, anyone who “search[es] for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17:27). For anyone who feels like they aren’t lost because they’ve never been found, Paul says, “You don’t even realize it, but you already are in communion with him. For as your poets know in their guts, in him we live, and move, and have our being. Just by being alive, you are already in communion with God, and you didn’t even know it. And he has made himself so much more clear.”

Why still study the classics? Why still study the Greek gods? Not because anybody thinks they “really exist,” but because even as dead idols, they are still a strange expression of some part of humanity, still some piece of creation. The gods embody the good and the bad, the vices and virtues, and by peering into how those old Athenians worshipped, we still learn about what we worship. All that our culture worships—let’s be honest, all we worship—all our dead gods include some of these virtues, all things that have truth that is of God but become deformed apart from God and destructive when we crave them. Power, beauty, wisdom, courage, justice, Greek gods had all these things, twisted by power games and capricious whims. You can still see it today. Like the ancient Romans, we still serve these gods unconsciously, forces of spiritual nature to appease and make trades. And we can carry this habit and posture into our faith, making our Christianity transactional, thinking God wants to make a trade with us, my behavior for his love.

But the true God didn’t make a trade with us. He made a trade for us. And in giving his life for you, he gave you the gift of full communion. When we live out of our sin and disobey, it is not about breaking a trade, it’s about living in the lie that we are our own, that we don’t fully belong to him and we don’t fully belong to each other through him. But we are not our own. We belong to God. He did not leave you orphaned.

Jesus taught us that while the Christian life has many “do’s” and “don’ts,” it’s less about “do” and “don’t” than it is living in the truth of relationship. It’s about living in the knowledge that he gave us here in John 14, that if you are in Christ, Christ is in you. He is in God, and the Holy Spirit is helping all of this. The living God is in you, and you are alive because of him; you live because he lives. That is communion. Whenever we sin, we forget the truth of our communion. We forget our father, which makes us forget our brothers and sisters. But none of us are orphans. We are each other’s keeper.

Looking back, I was pretty dumb to go to a place called the city of angels to escape God. And try as I could, I couldn’t escape him. And however many times you’ve tried, you couldn’t either. And neither does your neighbor. Neither does your enemy. Sometimes, it can be hard and weird to be a Christian in an increasingly secular, and especially in a state where we are a minority in our towns. But if you remember that whether people know it or not, they are in communion with you and God, let that change how you see them. Let that shift something in you. Let that move you to curiosity about the piece of God’s truth that they worship. And by showing them the love of Jesus, help them feel the communion that they don’t know they’re a part of. And pray for them, for every time we pray for someone, we remember the truth that is the fullness of our communion.

So hold onto that word: communion. Grow in holiness by growing in obedience to the communion you are already in, in obedience to the love of the one whom you have committed your spirit to, but who first committed his spirit to you. Remember that before we knew who he was, he knew all of who we were, and that whoever we meet who thinks they don’t know him and are just total spiritual individuals, they do already know him in part, for in him we all move and live and have our being.

And no matter how real loneliness feels, do not believe the lie. He has told you, O mortal: “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. And because I live, you live.” Amen.

For more discussion of this week’s texts:

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Our Parasocial Bible Study #12 - Sixth Sunday of Easter

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a month ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

Acts 7:59-60a

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

John 14:11-12

I don’t know how long my car has left, but I had a really hard time letting go of my last one, an over 200,000-mile 1997 red Toyota Tercel. It was not in great shape when I got it, and it was even worse shape when I left it. Once it was beyond any hope of selling, I went on one last joyride like it was a dying pet, then went to the salvage yard for $300 for parts. “Thank you, Terry. To the dump, I commend your spirit.”

On a serious note, I’m sad that I won’t be in town in two weeks for the final graduation of Sterling College. Not only because of the immense loss it will be for our community, but also because even in loss, there are still people to celebrate. For all graduations, there is always that bittersweet joy, a goodbye for us in the stands, a new life for the student. Do you remember your graduation(s)? Do you remember who was there? Do you remember seeing your favorite teacher on graduation day, and suddenly they no longer looked like a cross between a boss and a parent, and you realized they’re just a person? They were always just a person, but now you can see it because they no longer have control over you. Maybe your parents and grandparents were there too, not only to celebrate, but so that the graduate can remember they no longer have control over you either (thank heavens).

We call them “commencements,” as in a new beginning, but really we could also think of them as “commendations.” They are being sent off, no longer in the care of the people and place they once were, for their care is being handed over: they are commended.

When we decide to follow Christ, we not only have a new beginning with our souls, but we also have commended to him our spirits. Luke tells us that Jesus said on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). John tells us that upon death, “He bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30). Jesus was echoing the psalmist saying the same thing, “You are my refuge, into your hand I commend my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God” (Psalm 31:4b-5). It is remarkable that in the midst of intense suffering on the cross, at the exact moment where he could have had reason to say, “God, how’d you let me get here? I can’t trust you anymore,” Jesus did the exact opposite. He said, “God, I fully trust you; I hand myself fully over to you.”

We also hear in today’s reading that what Jesus does is not just something only God can do. Stephen says in his final moments as the first Christian ever martyred, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). Commending our spirits is something any of us can do, especially when it seems like it’s all about to be taken away from us.

If you find yourself in intense suffering, this might be one of the most powerful prayers you can pray. When the hells of the world are around you, your body and mind searing pain into you, your enemies mock and surround you, when it is all simply too much, there are so many worse prayers you can pray than, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” We can pray it even when it’s not the pain the world gives us, but the pain we give ourselves, for it is also one of the best rock bottom prayers. At the moment we realize where our selfishness has gotten us, and we now know for real that we cannot do it alone, and like many people on the first day of AA, we no longer even want to be in charge, so we give over control, and God begins with us again. Like with my old car, or with the prodigal son, it’s like here you go, God, have at this broken-down person, I’ll take money for parts at this point.

While this is the perfect prayer for those moments, we don’t have to wait for intense pain or rock bottom to hand our spirits over. Our whole life with Christ is an invitation for us to let go of more and more control over how things are supposed to be. After all, we do pray “Thy will be done.” God’s people are named after Israel, whose name means “he who struggled with God and endured.” Jacob didn’t live because he was more powerful than God, but because, once he finally believed God was blessing him, he could let go and become a transformed man, from manipulator to grace-receiver. Like Jacob, we also struggle with God for control: control over his creation, control over his children, control over the Holy Spirit. But when we give up control of our lives to Christ—not to Christianity, not to a pastor, but to Christ—we gain so much more back. It’s funny how when we give up control over our salvation, we live in far more grace than when we think it’s in our hands.

For example, think of all the debates you’ve ever been in. How does it feel to need to “win” a debate versus a conversation where you didn’t care if you “won”? Which felt freer? Which conversation explored the truth more honestly? When you feel like you have to win, you feel like you have to control the conversation, scoring points, changing the subject, framing it to your will. But when you have given up control of the conversation, and the idea of “winning” doesn’t even make sense, you’ll find that you’re actually far freer to speak what your spirit feels and more likely to arrive at the truth. As authoritarian powers and persons eventually learn, once we try to control truth, we lose it, because truth isn’t ours to control, it’s God’s.

Earlier this week at the 4C’s, we were talking about forgiveness at our bible study. As we were talking, it became clear that we all had some struggles with it. After that conversation, I would be shocked if there was a single one of us here in this church who, if you thought about it for a minute, had nobody that you still needed to forgive (you probably won’t have to think about it for a minute, or even ten seconds). Why? Because forgiveness is also about letting go of control (I can’t help but notice that Stephen, after letting go his spirit to God, his last words were one of forgiveness: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:60)). In the New Testament, the main word for “forgiveness” is aphiémi, or “to let go,” or “release.” I imagine most of us have trouble letting go of a pain, a hurt, a grudge, a suffering, or a real injustice because we are trying to hold onto control which the pain, the hurt, the injustice took from us. So often the injury and injustice was someone exerting their control over you in a way that was deeply wrong. If they exercised improper control over you to hurt you, a grudge doesn’t get rid of the hurt, but it does let us feel like we have more control again.

To be clear, forgiveness has nothing to do with minimizing how real the injustice is, or how real the pain is, or how wrong it was, or anything like that. It’s about, in a paradoxical way, taking a form of control by letting go control. We’re no longer trying to hold onto the injustice, we just release it back to God. It doesn’t mean that if we do forgive, it will happen quickly, easily, or completely. Imagine you have a boat tied to a dock, and that boat is the anger you have at someone or some group. And it’s a boat that also should probably go to the salvage yard because it just makes you upset every time you look at it or even think about it. To forgive is not to say the wrong wasn’t real, but to simply say, “I’m not gonna keep this boat tied to my dock anymore.” Then if you untie the boat, what happens? It floats away. It may take a long time because you aren’t even trying to push it away. It’s just out of your hands, floating. You have commended the whole thing to God, the hurt and your heart. And being able to do this is no small thing.

Let’s not kid ourselves: to trust and follow Jesus is not a small thing at all either. We are commending all of ourselves to his hands. Grace may be free, but it’s not always easy to accept if when it means I also have to let go. It’s one of the many meanings for us in baptism when we make vows or renew them as adults, the moment we say, “I now commend my spirit to you, God,” like a graduation for the soul. And so is repentance a commendation, where we say, “Lord, I know I have messed up again. Here I am again. To you, I commend my spirit. I’m giving up control.” When you’re exhausted of holding onto your sin and your shame about it, just untie the boat and let it float.

But here’s a predicament: I don’t believe we can fully do this without belief. Six times in our John 14 reading, Jesus says, “believe,” and it’s everywhere in John’s gospel that believing in Jesus is the key. But what if we don’t believe? Can we just make ourselves believe? I know we and many of our friends can get a lot of things from treating Christianity as a metaphor; I did too. But you don’t commend your spirit to a metaphor. You commend your spirit because you believe it. If someone tells us there’s free food at the church on Front Porch Forum, we go because we believe it’s true. If someone says there’s a unicorn farm where you fly to the stars in Danville, you’re probably not driving to Danville. We can’t commend our spirits to Christ without believing that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And we all know that we can tell if someone really believes something if it shows up not only in what they say, but what they do. If we say we believe in forgiveness but don’t actually do so, where is our belief? If we say we believe we should care for the needy and never do, do we really believe in what Jesus told us?

If you feel a pang of guilt at that, so do I. But to the extent that we are all sinners, we all struggle with belief. Maybe we struggle to believe that when we give ourselves to God, not only will he receive us, he will pour his Spirit back out on us; maybe we feel like we’ve tried that and it didn’t go as promised. But just as we don’t need to wait until we are struggling in our lives to commend our spirits to God, we don’t need to wait until we fully believe either. As Christ said to his friends, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:11-12) All throughout the gospels, we see sinners like you and me following before they fully believed in Jesus because they didn’t even know who he really was. Yet they act before they fully believe. Like on the road to Emmaus, they just wondered, “Were not our hearts burning?” (Luke 24:32). So while we can’t just force ourselves into more belief, there is good news. If believing is more than just what we intellectually know, but what our bodies actually do, then we don’t just commend our spirits as an effect of what we believe, but part of how we can come to believe is by commending our spirits. You can grow in belief by walking the walk of faith; it’s not a one-way street. What we do can help us grow in belief, because what we do is belief. We are not saved by works, but also, as James tells us, works are our living faith (James 2:14-26).

I pray you believe in your bones that Jesus is always pouring himself out for you and sending his Spirit for you. But if you don’t feel that, try giving him a little more of your spirit by doing the hard things he taught, so that you may believe that the Spirit is always moving. To commend our spirits to him is like hitting the ping-pong ball back to God that his Spirit already sent to you; no matter how many times you commend your spirit to him, he will send his back. This is a rhythm of Grace, giving ourselves over to the God who already gave himself to us.

And this is why Christian funerals need not be somber, for death is like a graduation. Maybe not by being martyred or by finishing agricultural college, but by living faithful lives until the end, when we become fully commended to God’s grace. But we don’t have to wait to graduate. We can live with commended spirits today by letting go more and more control into more and more of the new life in Christ. For Christ on the cross already commended his spirit to us, and he’s still commending his spirit to you in this very moment. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You can believe in him. You can trust your spirit with him. And you will receive far more than you could ever control. Amen.

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2 months ago · 2 likes · Joe Welker

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John 10:1-10

We were on vacation this past week down in Mexico, where my in-laws generously brought us to a resort. We had a wonderful time, I relaxed more than I usually ever do on vacations, read some books I had meant to read and ate things I didn’t mean to eat. If there was only one thing that I felt an uncomfortable disconnect with, it was the surreality that began in the Cancun airport, where the divide was instant: all the travelers were economically privileged Americans, and all the people who worked and lived there were not so. I’ve since learned that 12 million Americans visit there every year, a solid 3.4% of all Americans visit this one region of another country. Unfathomable. And here’s a triple negative for you: if you go, I don’t know how you can’t not think a little bit of the disparity and gap between you and the people there. It’s overwhelming, totally bifurcated everywhere we went, the vacationers to luxury and the workers serving it up.

I say none of that to be ungrateful for the vacation. I also say none of that to be condescending either, because truthfully, it wasn’t just a language or class barrier. When you are the universal customer in someone else’s home and workplace, you are cut off from each other’s entire authentic inner world. As we were in the white shuttle van driving down the desolate highway, undeveloped jungle between paradise, I would feel this awkward tension between me, sitting behind the driver’s seat, and the driver. We’d start up small talk, but it just felt forced. I thought, I have no idea what his life is really like, and I have no idea how to ask him in a way that’s not condescending. How would I begin to know what’s going on with him? And what if the person I’m talking to actually is doing better than I think? What if (with high likelihood) they’re doing better spiritually?

But this really struck me as a tiny tragedy, this distance that is always between us. We can’t totally close that distance with everybody, and probably can’t 1000% close it with anybody, even a spouse. Do you ever feel that too? Is this not part of our human condition? We can have all the social manners, grace, charisma, charm, banter, all that, but we can’t fully close the gap between each other. And often when we try, we do so in deformed ways—we use each other, we abuse each other, we take each other for granted, we impose our experience onto each other so that it feels like there’s no difference between us, but it’s just us being presumptive. Remember Covid-19? (Sorry to jog your memory.) What did we call the thing we all had to do? “Social distance.” If a preacher could ever find a silver lining from the pandemic, it’s that we all now have a shared metaphor for something that’s real all the time. In the pandemic, we had to keep physical distance, but we relationally keep a social distance from each other at all times.

So how, you may ask, does this have anything at all to do with our readings today, where we remember the Lord is our shepherd? Not only do we remember he is our shepherd, but in John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he’s also the gate. What is that, and what does it have to do with awkward Mexican van rides?

When you think of Jesus as the shepherd leading you, what comes to your mind? What comes to your heart? Probably at least the emphases of Psalm 23—protection, provision, restoration, preparation. Thy rod and staff leading. Much less famously, but in the same register, 1 Peter calls him the shepherd as “guardian of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25). These are all things that are real and important parts of his pastoral leadership of us. Far more than any human pastor, Jesus should be all of our pastors.

But because Christ likes his paradoxes, especially his paradoxes of relationships, he tells us he’s not just the shepherd, he’s also the gate. Come again, Jesus? If that’s your reaction, that was also the reaction of the group he was talking to: “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them” (John 10:6). So he says again, twice, “I am the gate.” There were thieves and bandits, he tells us, but he is “the gate.” The thieves and bandits are those who we might think of as false messiahs, false shepherds, people who present themselves to sheep as a shepherd to earn their trust, only to lead them astray. On the one hand, Jesus is talking to us about his role as our path to God. He is the great Mediator (Heb 9:15), where “the only way to the Father is through me” (John 14:6), he’s our pastor leading us upward from earth. Probably few of us have ever been led by someone claiming to be Jesus, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been led by thieves and bandits. In fact, I suspect everyone in this room has been spiritually led by someone who we trusted, only to find out that they weren’t leading us or caring for us, they were there to devour.

But when Jesus talks about himself as the gate, it’s not just being saved upward, but also in the world, horizontally. The sheep “will come in and go out and find pasture” (John 10:9). Hear that freedom—“come in and go out” through the gate and find pasture, a place that will have lots of other sheep who also come and go through him as the gate. He’s not just the great Mediator with us and God, but with each other.

We don’t often talk about Jesus as the gate. There’s no famous psalms, “The Lord is my gate, I shall not latch.” And so to me this is an underrated part of how we think about what Christ can do for us in our lives as Christians: we pass through him. Every moment, and between each person, from freedom to freedom, we have the invitation to go through Christ.

This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about in his book Life Together, written about the underground seminary he led in Germany. In Christian community, he says, the goal is to go through Christ to one another rather than directly relate. Now this may seem counterintuitive; if we have distance between each other, don’t we want to directly relate? But, Bonhoeffer says, in so many of our worldly relationships, humans devour each other. We might be sheep, but we can be thieves and bandits on each other, wanting to use each other for our own ends, because of the predicament of sin. But when we go through Christ to get each other, he’s not just our mediator between us and God, he’s our mediator between each of us. We can come and go to each other’s pastures. Christ is the gate when we travel through him. As he wrote:

“Without Christ we should not know God and could not call upon him, nor come to him. But without Christ we would also not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way is blocked by our own ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother. Now Christians can live with one another in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one.”

We read a vignette from Acts earlier this morning that always reads as so utopian. If there’s anything anyone knows about utopias, it’s that they don’t exist; the word literally means “no place.” Here it is:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”

Acts 2:44-47a

Depending on who you are, this might sound more unbelievable than any miracle of Jesus. But they could do this because Christ was the gate. You can almost feel how thick the Holy Spirit’s presence was in those days. The way our society is structured, the incentives are for us to serve ourselves. Maybe this is how we manage the reality of sin on a mass scale, but it means we usually don’t go through Christ; we go through ourselves. But when we go through Christ to each other—using him as the gate—suddenly, we’re making sacrifices like the Good Shepherd. We can do things that would be impossible if we were only out for ourselves. This is life with the shepherd, the gate, and also him as one of the sheep with us, the perfect lamb sacrificed and spilled as our scapegoat. Let him lead you, guide you, dwell in you, and also draw you out into love.

So I’ve been sad that I couldn’t quite get there this past week in Mexico. I didn’t fully take the opportunity with our van driver, but I know there will always be more chances. Maybe you’ve missed those chances too, and maybe you can start with letting Christ simply be your gate to curiosity—sincere, curious love. Just silently go through Christ in that moment, what’s really going on with this person, Jesus? Who is this child of God in front of me? What is their life really like? Lord, how do you want me to show your love to this person?

This is yet another reason why it’s important that we pray for others, not just for ourselves. Every time we pray for people, we go through Christ to see them. When we do this while also holding onto all of who he was in his sacrificial love that died on the cross and his resurrection power that rose again, we aren’t just going through Jesus to feel more empathy for someone. We might ask for the promise in his resurrection to bring life to relationships that were broken and left for dead, to revive our mercy or theirs, or at least be at peace with what we can’t change. We might even start asking, how can I show the same sacrificial love as you did, Lord, to help them? Be careful though, or we might start selling things we don’t need to help people who do.

Something we heard about Marvin at his funeral really reminded me of my granddad: they took any opportunity they could to talk with strangers. And not just talk, joyfully converse, joke, be curious, question, it was just second-hand. Marvin’s son Jason said every 20-minute trip to the store took four hours. My dad has this too, but this instinct hasn’t fully developed for me yet. What I suspect about Marvin and what I can say about my granddad is something they would probably not say about themselves, and it was probably not something they did consciously all that often: they let Christ not only be the gate between them and God, but be the gate between them and every other person in the world. If we do likewise, we won’t always do it perfectly, because that’s impossible. But when we let Jesus be our shepherd and our gate, when we go through Christ, even in the simple ways, he’s not just showing us the path to God. He’s leading us on the path to one another. Pass on through him, for the Lord is your gate. Amen.

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2 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

Now on that same day two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Luke 24:13-35

Our reading from Luke today on the road to Emmaus is a story that is about the mysterious risen Jesus and is itself a mystery. We have a disciple we’ve never met, Cleopas, and an unnamed friend. We have a road to a place that isn’t mentioned again in the Bible, a place archeologists haven’t precisely nailed down where it was, like a road to somewhere yet nowhere. If we were to try to reimagine the scene in our mind’s eye, we might visualize an arid desert road, dust, hills, and shrubs, but we can’t really see it either. And what could Cleopas and his friend see? Not much. They were, after all, clouded in grief. The confusion and disappointment had overwhelmed them. This wasn’t like a shocking sports upset, this was all they thought they knew to be true being upended. The mystery they were in wasn’t just quizzical or interesting, but a weight. Their hope was dead. The morning came but the soul was in the dark. The chance for redemption of Israel which they were so sure of had fallen apart. The Jesus they thought they knew was now mysterious again, a tragic mystery at that.

Jesus is so mysterious to them that Cleopas doesn’t even recognize him when he’s inches away from his face. So they end up trying to tell Jesus about himself. They are so close to him yet so far, followers yet still foreigners to his kingdom, and they even look at him like he’s an idiot or maybe a spy, “What do you mean you don’t know what’s happened in Jerusalem?” Then they receive the first-ever Christian Bible study in history with the best possible teacher they could have had. And they still don’t get it. Maybe their grief is too heavy.

But maybe because they had been listening to Jesus for some time in the years leading up to the cross, and because there was just enough of the Holy Spirit nudging them, and because while they didn’t know why their hearts were burning, they extended hospitality to the stranger. “Come, stay with us, it’s getting late.” And as Luke describes in words we often say before Communion, “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” (Luke 24:30-31). But then Scripture says a part we often leave out of the Lord’s Supper liturgy: “and he vanished from their sight.” (Luke 24:31)

About ten days ago I had an experience of walking down a road, you’ve probably had one like it before. It was right after our last snowfall, in what might be the last walk through snowy silence of the year. I was a couple miles from the house going towards Shadow Lake on a barely traversible road, and I see this figure from hundreds of yards away, completely still. Dark legs, a thick torso, and two big ol’ ears, a doe standing smack in the middle of the road, frozen and staring at me. I freeze too. Silence. I move one boot at a time. She turns askew, showing off her white tail. Then in three skips, swish swish swish, she flits off into the woods. I follow her tracks down the road, thinking maybe I could catch a glimpse again, but nope. Gone. Nothing more miraculous than a Wednesday in Vermont. But like Cleopas and his friend on their journey, I felt like I was in touch with something comprehensible and mysterious, the sacred beyond my control. A creature that could die, even be hunted, yet was part of a creation that is an ambassador of something utterly timeless.

On our pilgrim roads, Christ is like a deer in the snowy woods: present but elusive, vulnerable yet immortal. Like the disciples, we think we understand Jesus and history, but we really don’t. The second we think we do, if we invite Jesus in with us, he will show us a new part of the mystery, then just as we get a glimpse, he’s gone. We wonder again as the disciples did on the road, who was this Jesus, and what is he up to? And because he is so mysterious, for generations Christians have wondered, should we focus more on who he is or what he does?

This is one of the crucial debates within the last century of Protestantism, that some will frame as a rivalry, a choice we need to make between whether our Christianity is a “religion about Jesus” or the “religion of Jesus.” Some say too much of Christian history has made Christianity “about” Jesus, focusing on worshiping him and who he was as God’s son and our savior. And therefore, some argue, Christianity emphasizes too much about getting the correct beliefs. Instead, the argument goes, Christianity was always meant to be the religion “of” Jesus, focusing on what he did in caring for the less fortunate, loving our neighbors, and so on. I’m sure this resonates with some of us: “Shouldn’t we just get on to doing what he did?”

I think there is some truth to the idea that sometimes our Christianity only focuses too much on one or the other. We might spend so much time learning about Jesus and worshipping him that we forget a way we glorify him is in living lives of service to others, giving generously, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good. But trying to create a rivalry between whether we focus on “who Jesus was” or “what Jesus did” is misguided. We see here on the mysterious road to Emmaus that we can’t separate learning about Jesus and worshiping him and trying to do as he teaches us. I was joking earlier about the “first ever Bible study,” but if we’re going to talk about what Jesus does and follow what he does, here is using Scripture to teach his followers about himself. Throughout his ministry, the gospels tell us how he was interpreting the Law in a way that emphasized a circumcision of the heart (Deut 10:16) to love our neighbors while also teaching how the prophets foretold who he was. In other words, the religion “of” Jesus is at least partially the religion “about” Jesus.

The historian Tom Holland observed that one of the things that made Judaism and then, in turn, Christianity stand out among Roman society was that the Romans separated their sacrificial religions to gods from their elite philosophical discussions. Common people made sacrifices and worshipped their gods to gain their favor, while intellectuals debated the nature of the universe and spiritual life. “What you did” and “how you thought” were separate. But in Judaism and Christianity, ordinary people of all kinds would meet together every week to read Scripture together and discuss theology, while also worshipping God and serving their neighbors. To Jesus, none of these were isolated, but interwoven. Our religious tradition is not just doing, not just thinking, not just worshipping, but a whole way of living with transformed hearts that harmonizes mind, body, and soul.

It reminds me of why I almost don’t like the terms “Bible Study” and “Sunday School.” These aren’t pictures of a full immersion into the Word. Plus, most people don’t get thrilled at the idea of school or study. It sounds like work! Yes, it sometimes takes effort and learning (and I’m not going to try and come up with a better name for Bible study or Sunday school). But pay attention again to all that happens to Cleopas and his friend: they meet Jesus on the road before they knew who he was. Then Jesus, not them, opened up the Scripture they thought they knew. Their hearts were burning. So they invite him in, and they feast together. So if I had one wish today, it would be for anyone who doesn’t read the Bible because it feels like homework to instead believe what can happen when Christ illuminates the Word: it leaves you with a burning heart. It’s not simply “school,” it’s Jesus upending something you thought you knew that leaves your faith a little more renewed and your eyes opened yet again that you may live transformed, doing as he did.

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus is not separating who he is from what he does. Because once we know who he is, that gives us the reason to pay serious attention to what he does. That’s why he begins his ministry in Luke in the synagogue, proclaiming audaciously from Isaiah, “He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” (Luke 4:18). He’s the Lord anointed, the Messiah; that’s who he is. So pay attention! And what does the Messiah do? He sets free the captives of every slavery; that’s what God does. Pay attention.

But Cleopas and his friend aren’t fully there yet. They’re figuring out who Jesus is and what he does in real time, the earliest image of the church that still knows less than we think we know. But they’re still church. Because church is a pilgrimage from the place we know to the place we don’t, journeying from the events and the history we think we understand (but that only God really understands) into the unknown. So don’t read the Bible like you’re in a classroom, but like you’re on the road. Read it as a pilgrim trying to find the map while walking the territory and saying, “Jesus, this doesn’t make sense, show me more.”

The religion “of” Jesus is not just breaking bread with neighbors, but learning about Jesus being God. But the religion “about” Jesus is not just that he’s God, but that God breaks bread and prepares a table in the presence of his enemies. The question is not whether we take or leave the opinions of a popular wise man, but if we believe that God himself came to dwell among us. If we do, listen to what he told us about what it means to live in love, to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to give generously of ourselves to anyone who needs it.

For he’s not just God among us, he’s God within you. This is not so that we can live quietly enlightened in our living rooms, but so that all rooms in this beautiful but broken world become living rooms. You cannot know about Jesus in your heart for too long before he starts to shape you, re-forming you in his Spirit, and bringing you back to the life of the world in charity and service, truth and love, witnessing to persecution and enduring suffering, giving of yourself but no longer by yourself, but within him, all of us with each other: communion.

And so he breaks bread with us. It’s not just what he does, but also who he is—Jesus is the bread that is broken for us in the presence of our enemies. We know him in the breaking. He is God opening himself up to offer himself to we who are estranged to him and estranged from each other. It’s who he is and what he does, what he calls us to be and what he calls us to do: beloved children of the most-high God, redeemed sinners sharing in the love of God with other redeemed sinners. We may not fully know him until the moment we do as he did. Is your heart not burning?

For more discussion of this week’s readings:

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2 months ago · 1 like · Joe Welker

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

John 20:19-31

I don’t like calling him Doubting Thomas. Does he deserve the name? Maybe so; he already saw Jesus raise Lazarus, which must have been the most insane thing he’d ever seen with his own two eyes, and in hearing about the risen Jesus, still his reservations.

But he had seen Lazarus raised with his own two eyes. In the week after Easter, other disciples got to see Jesus, but Thomas hadn’t. I mean, seeing one resurrection in your life is already a lot. Seeing two? What are the odds? Call him Doubting if you want, that just sounds like Rational and Reasonable and Discerning Thomas.

But I also like what Scripture gives us as his name, Thomas Didymus, or, “the twin.” As some have pointed out,1 this means Thomas was an identical twin, and as such, he was familiar with mixed-up identity. This was a real and recurring enough problem in history that it eventually became the basis of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (which a Dartmouth College group toured here last year). So when all of Thomas’ friends insist Jesus, the woulda-coulda-shoulda-been Messiah, had risen, Thomas may not have only doubted because the impossible had happened again. Thomas probably thought the disciples had a case of mistaken identity.

Even worse, Thomas might have thought there was now an impersonator of Jesus roaming around. Thomas’ reservations aren’t just about his disbelief in Jesus, but his self-protection from scam artists. Thomas is really asking, “Is that Christ you saw, or is it just an imposter? Show me the scars.”

Forget mixing up twins, that problem—is it Jesus or is it an imposter—has been with us since the early Church. As Jesus would tell his disciples, “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am the Christ; and shall lead many astray.” (Matt 24:5) For any new people who come into our church or any church, you should check, “Is Christ here, or is it just an imposter?” Perhaps we should be as careful and discerning as Discerning Thomas.

But while critical discernment is a gift from God, and Jesus meets Thomas in his critical discernment, once Thomas is gobsmacked by awe, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus says a line that many Christians have wrestled with over the years: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This has raised the question for generations of faithful: is it good for our faith to use our critical thinking or not? We Presbyterians have historically loved education and the “life of the mind.” Are we mistaken? And what about the imposter problem?

Complicating matters further is that not all beliefs are made equal. One of Christ’s roles is to be our great Mediator, the go-between us and God. But the problem, as the Reformers saw, is that we have too many mediators with our mediator. Too many things act as middlemen between us and Jesus. Our idea of Jesus is shaped by our culture, upbringing, class, and many other biases, and then we package them all together with Christ. Even Thomas, like all of the disciples, had a particular idea of Jesus shaped by his time. It was as direct an experience of Jesus as you can get to walk among him, yet his idea of Jesus was still not fully developed, still shaped by being a working-class first-century religiously devout man from Judea.

Sometimes, these things between us and Jesus may actually help us reconnect with Christ, like a great friend who also loves Jesus and invites you to church, or a gospel song that lifts you up, or a book that helps you rediscover and make sense of The Book here on the pulpit. But you know how a barnacle gets attached to a whale? And sometimes many, many barnacles wrap themselves onto a whale over its life? Imagine if you thought the barnacle was the whale. That’s what we can do with Jesus. Just as the disciples were, most of us were originally interested in Jesus for a reason other than Jesus himself, or at least, for a version of Jesus mediated by something else.

What do we wrap up on Jesus? For me, sometimes it’s been having the perfect theology, the correct opinions, the enlightened view of the world, and if you are cursed enough to have that, you don’t become an evangelist for Jesus, you become an evangelist for “look at how right I am.” But maybe that’s not you. For some of us, we might wrap a specific church around Jesus, a type of worship service, a favorite pastor, or even just a style of music; maybe it’s unclear whether we believe in Jesus or four-part harmony bluegrass. Again, these can all be great things that God works through. But we can still mix up Jesus and God with these human vehicles.

Another problem is that these vehicles break down. What happens if you come to God through your family and then your family hurts you? What happens if you come to God through a church, and you equate the church with God, and then the church abuses you? Or what happens, as it did for the twelve, if your Messiah dies before the revolution starts? Of course we would have doubts about whether Jesus was real. Like Thomas, we also didn’t see the risen Lord directly in front of us. To respond with discernment and skepticism in any of these cases is natural. And we should use what we know from history, sociology, psychology, and more of our rational faculties to tell a barnacle from Jesus.

Yet eventually, trying to understand Jesus through those human academic vehicles will fail too. You may have (and you may yet) walk through many other failures of people and ideas and things you’ve been attaching to Jesus without even realizing it. An understanding of Scripture, a theology, and most often, other Christians. These will all, on some level and at some point, fail. What is our hope? Can we fix it with better theology, a new interpretive understanding, a new program? These may not be bad. But they aren’t what saves us. What if I suddenly became a world-class preacher? Sorry, though it may make your Sundays better. What if we discerned even harder in the “life of the mind”? No, this does not save us either.

Most Vermonters know margarine is not really a substitute for butter. There is also no substitute for the only thing that can actually jump the gulf between Jesus and us: faith. True faith, a gift from God, received in the heart, mind, and soul, which lets Jesus transform your life.

And faith is a grace, a gift, not a work. When we hear this story, we might think Jesus is admonishing Thomas, as if Thomas just wished harder, he would be a better person. But one of the mysteries (and frankly frustrations) of faith is that it doesn’t come from us. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Eph 2:8) It’s grace all the way down from Christ. When we remember faith is a gift, I hear Jesus less rebuking Thomas than giving a loving ribbing from a friend, “So now you believe, huh? Blessed are those who don’t need to see.” It’s less “favored are you” and more “genuinely, you are fortunate if you don’t need to see the wounds.” Blessed are those who already have the gift of faith in Christ.

If doubt keeps us from God, underneath doubt are true gifts of discernment that are from God. Thank God that we have enough critical thinking and skepticism to keep us from cults and idols. I personally know how they wreck lives. But the gift of reason and discernment that God gave us to keep us safe will also break down, like all human vehicles, if we try to drive ourselves in them across the bridge to God. The gift of discernment was Thomas’ vehicle for knowing God and protecting him from an imposter. But it also broke down when Jesus actually was risen and was in front of him. Jesus sees this and doesn’t wait for Thomas. When he sees Thomas in his broken-down car of skepticism, Jesus stops and helps him on the side of the road. Thomas couldn’t save himself from his own doubt. Jesus did.

Faith is not something we can just produce in an AI chat. We can’t just manufacture faith, for it comes from God. It’s also why it is pointless to think of ourselves as better than anyone for having faith. This is not our own doing. If we are blessed to believe, this is one of the greatest gifts we could possibly have—a real, living, authentically true connection to the real, living, authentically true Jesus Christ.

But we still have a big problem: how do we know we have faith in the real Jesus, and not just an imposter in Jesus’ clothes?

Thomas said, “I need to see the scars. I need to see the wounds.” And I think that was the right question to ask. Because that’s how you know. In case you forgot what we heard a week ago, God bleeds with you. The same forces that oppress you oppress our Lord. The same things that bear down on the world bore down on Christ and bore into his skin. If you doubt whether you are dealing with Jesus Christ or an imposter, look into your own wounds. Look into your own pain. I promise you Christ is there.

If you’re ever asking yourself, “Is this church really Jesus, or just an imposter? Is this movement that calls itself Christian really Christian, or an imposter?” Test them: show me the wounds. If a church, movement, thing, or whatever it is is not able to show you the wounds, or worse, protects itself from the wounds that it causes, that’s how you know it is not God, but an imposter. If something claims Christ but can’t deal with wounds and can’t show you the scars and doesn’t care if it gives you more scars, it needs the real Jesus. And if we protect ourselves when we cause wounds, we need to repent of our barnacles and turn back to the real Jesus.

When Thomas finally placed his hands in the wounds, it was undeniable. He knew. “My Lord and my God!” You are blessed if you do not need to see the wounds. But Jesus doesn’t want your doubt to keep you from him. When you don’t have faith, his grace will move to you first. Instead, he will use the gifts underneath our doubt—our skepticism, our guardedness, our reason—bringing them into his arms of belief, so that they can be used in service of life-giving faith. These are gifts not to keep for ourselves, but to help any of our neighbors who need it.

God told us in two beams of bloodied wood that there is nothing he can’t use towards the flourishing of life. When all the barnacles we’ve attached to Jesus fall off, and when the impostors expose themselves—and it’s often us who are exposed as impostors—Jesus will always be there, drawing our hands to his scars and placing his hands on ours. May you then believe. Amen.

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Matthew 28:1-10

Maybe it’s hard to believe, but this was a morning of low expectations. They were so low that almost nobody was there. The wisest religious leaders of their time weren’t there. The elders and scribes weren’t there. Jesus’ twelve closest male disciples weren’t there, no gurus, no influencers, nobody who would have had a podcast in their society was there. If you were trying to make up a story to make the halls of power care about your Messiah, nobody was there that could have helped make the story go viral. The only people who showed up were women who loved Jesus.

We don’t know why they were there; they probably didn’t know why they were there. Maybe you don’t know why you’re here. Something in them that morning just needed to see the tomb. Maybe, at best, a small voice in them was wondering, well, he did raise Lazarus. He did mention a resurrection. He did say something about his body being raised up. But….no, that is insane. That cannot happen. That does not happen. Tombs are for dead men and spices, and it’s already got a dead man, so let’s bring some spices.

And then it got weird. Everything was shaking as if the foundation of the universe had been broken apart. Some dude in a blazing white-hot tunic freaked out the guards. They pass out. And this angel in white didn’t have a ton to say—he was not super into explaining himself—but he said one thing they could not forget: “Fear not. He’s not here. He is risen. Tell your friends. You will see him in Galilee.” Immediately they are overcome with fear and joy, awe and wonder, and then, before they get two steps down the road, there is Jesus, really him, alive. “Fear not! Tell my friends. You will see me in Galilee.”

Now hold up. Galilee. Why Galilee? What is that? Is that just where the party is? It wasn’t just where this unlikely Messiah called home. It was the place of no place. The hinterlands. Really, we here in the Northeast Kingdom are probably the Galilee for our own state and country. What would be our Galilee in Craftsbury, maybe Wolcott—the place you go through to get from home to the rest of the world.

But if Jesus walked out of the tomb on Whetstone Brook Road, he’s not going to the Genny, to the Academy, or to the Outdoor Center, he’s telling us, “Meet me in the place the world forgets about.” Jesus is saying, “This resurrection is not for us here in our bubble. This gift of life is for everybody. This is not just about us. This is a world reclamation project. I am bringing everybody home.”

When Jesus says two seconds after having risen, “I’m going ahead of you to Galilee,” he is saying he is going back to the outsiders to bring this message to them—not to Jerusalem and the religious people who just got the state to execute him. But God is going to weave in the people you forgot about into God’s story. Because all who suffer, all who are oppressed, all who are put under the heel, everybody’s pain, everybody’s sin and everybody’s suffering can all be woven together into God’s story.

He didn’t go to the people who thought they were already found and didn’t need saving. Those people didn’t choose him. We didn’t choose him. We still don’t choose him when we mistreat a neighbor, when we ignore the Galilees of our time, the forgotten places, the places and people we think nothing holy can come from. We still don’t choose him anytime we wield the threat of death for power. We still don’t choose him when we think in “us and them,” which never goes out of fashion.

This resurrection morning is not just about going to heaven when your body dies. To be sure, he rose for you and your one life. But when he rose up out of that grave, God was not rising up out of the grave for one life or one people. He wasn’t rising out of the grave for just part of humanity. I mean, if you’re going to upend the very fabric of the physical laws of the universe, you’re not going to do that for just one people. He chooses all people. The whole reason God comes through one people Israel is because the story of Israel was never meant to be for just itself. God’s people are supposed to live for the world, to be a priestly nation, and to help other people understand God. We’re still called to that, now as the priesthood of all believers. There is no “us and them,” we’re us. He chose himself for the cross instead of us and our death, and he chooses all of us in the new life.

He is choosing you despite whatever you’ve done and whatever hell and death you face. The resurrection didn’t come when it was already light, but when it was dark, and there is no darkness his resurrection cannot work in. I’ve seen it, and I know you’ve seen it.

There’s a Vermont band many of us know called Phish. They’ve been my favorite band since I was 16, and the first thing I ever learned about Vermont was that Phish was from there (make of that what you will). Trey Anastasio was the lead guitarist, a musical genius, one of the best guitarists who has ever played the instrument. Phish had become a giant cultural phenomenon, as big as Ben and Jerry’s, but eventually, it collapsed under the weight of drug addiction, ego, and darkness. In 2004, after their last concert ended in a muddy disaster in Coventry, the band was over, done, dead.

A few years go by, and the guitarist Trey is arrested in upstate New York on drug charges. Later, he would say the officer saved his life that night. But he still had a long road to walk. He goes to drug court, gets convicted, and ends up going from being a rockstar to brushing toilets at the New York state fairgrounds. He starts his recovery, and if you’ve ever gone through it as I have, one of the worst things is not knowing what it means to be just normally alive. For Trey, if you listened to him in this period, it almost sounds like he had forgotten how to play sober, this instrument that he had mastered, but seemingly couldn’t access it without numbing himself, and all his fans could hear it. Any musician could understand what prison that would be.

So while he is still serving his sentence, Trey couldn’t leave New York state, but his friend Dave Matthews happened to be playing in Saratoga Springs, New York. What happened is capture in one of my favorite YouTube videos (from the Ice Age of YouTube) on an old, choppy, grainy video from this 2007 concert. It shows the moment where Trey’s friend invites him to play a song called “Lie In Our Graves.” It’s the first time Trey had been on stage since getting sober. And when his fans watch the start of it, knowing what Trey was capable of as a player at the peak of his powers, it’s almost heartbreaking. He is barely expressing himself on the instrument. He doesn’t look confident, and I wonder if he felt embarrassed at how many people knew what he was going through.

But his friends on stage with him trust him. They let him breathe. And he keeps playing. And it’s like you can see him getting his chops back in real time, the light coming back into his eyes. He starts to believe in himself, and the crowd starts believing in him, and he feels the crowd believe in him. It’s like seeing a man come back to life before your eyes. The jam builds and builds into this triumphant roar before quieting back into stillness. The video cuts out, but anyone who knows the song knows the words that come next: “I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.”

In the end, Trey got his band back. Twenty years of sobriety and more than 600 shows later (which I’ve seen about 5% of, I did the math), he’s opened a rehab facility, Divided Sky in Ludlow, and inspired tons of people like myself to get and stay sober and to know that resurrection is not naive, but real. He did not lie in his grave. By the grace of God’s resurrection power, he wove in the pain of the soul that was left for dead into a more beautiful life lived for others than he could ever have imagined in the darkness.

But let me be clear, too, that while this story shows what resurrection power looks like as common grace for any of us, I believe there is something weirder going on. Don’t believe me, believe the women who loved Jesus. Believe his friends who would eventually find him in Galilee, with the outsiders, bringing good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free. And that good news is not just that God loves you. It’s not just that seasons come and go and hope springs eternal. The good news is that death is dead.

Jesus told his friend Lazarus what he tells all of us: get up, for in me you will not lie in that grave, and you will not wonder if you lived well. For the one who chose you said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He is for all of us. Praise be to God. Alleluia! Amen.

And Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. If you have ears, hear!”

“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Matthew 13:3-9, 19-23

Today, on Holy Saturday, our gospel reading is not about Jesus’ death, nor rolled-away stones or angels in white—for that you’ll have to come back tomrrow. Today, rather than his death, we hear one of the great teachings from Jesus’ life, the Parable of the Sower. It’s one of those teachings of Jesus that stuck with his disciples. You can imagine on that Holy Saturday, one of them might have shared it as they traded their favorite stories and sayings from Jesus, not knowing what was ahead. If Jesus were around today, he might have started the Parable of the Sower off with, “There once was a farmer in the northern hills of Vermont…” And today we are, indeed, remembering the Parable of the Farmer; the Parable of Marvin Rowell.

I’m not here to tell you anything about this farmer that you don’t already know. If Georgette wanted one wish for today, it was one word: that it be “dignified”! And I don’t think Marvin would find it dignified for the preacher to focus too much on him in a traditional Presbyterian memorial service homily. After all, this is a farmer who did not work on Sabbaths, who loved singing in the choir and helping however he could, and who respected and loved and trusted the church enough to have his only real wish for his service be that the preacher pick the Scripture (I always said he was a wise man, wise beyond his 95 years).

So yes, I did pick the Parable of the Sower. And if I’m going to preach it faithfully, I must tell you that Marvin is not the star of this story. He’s not the sower, in fact, he’s not the farmer in his own story. Jesus tells his disciples plainly that the seed is the word of God. The only true farmer who can truly sow the Word is not you, not me, or our dear brother Marvin, but Jesus Christ.

No, in the beautiful, incredible story of God, it’s hard to believe, but spiritually speaking, Marvin wasn’t a farmer at all. He was great, rich soil. As Jesus describes, the good soil is that in which the Word took root and bore fruit. Good soil doesn’t produce just a random crop, an independent man standing firm on his own wisdom and prosperity by himself. He came from somewhere; from good soil he came and good soil he has returned. The fruit of that soil was not one great life. The fruit of the soil is all around you in this community, this wonderful, complicated, but beautiful family that Marvin was one part of, along with all the other good soil that y’all came from. This here is what it looks like when some ordinary people from Northern Vermont don’t choke the Word out with thorns or let it get scorched. This is what happens when you don’t let the Word die. And by the grace of God, the church should be and can be a field where good soil is revived by the true farmer of God.

I know it hasn’t always worked out that way. I know a bunch of you have complicated relationships with Christianity. I mean, you think I don’t? How did you think I ended up here? Because I figured out Jesus better than anyone? Because I’m so smart? No, I’m so dumb that I went years letting Christianity keep me away from Jesus. But Jesus was way more concerned about the Pharisees and religious elites giving the wrong idea of the faith with the living God they thought they were protecting, when really they were just protecting their pride. The Pharisees were keeping people from seeing that God was not on a purity project, but a gathering project, a search and rescue mission, and you don’t have to do the searching, you just have to let yourself be found.

Speaking for myself, I’m only here by the grace of God, and I mean that—I have no idea how I got here. Ten years ago I’m in Los Angeles in a drum circle on Venice Beach and the next thing I know I wake up and I’m talking to a bunch of Vermont farmers and their descendants about God. Don’t ask me how. I mean, I can tell you the story of what happened, the events that took place, but I can’t really tell you anything I did to make it happen. Over time, God just walked me back. And everything has been better since I started walking. I don’t know how he has worked or will work in your life, despite of or because of the Church. I just know all the love that’s here in this room, the love in these pews, the love in this building from generations, this is all living proof that there is more good soil from where Marvin came.

And what does Jesus say makes good soil? He “hears the Word and understands it,” which makes him “bear fruit and yield it.” (Matt 13:23). In other words, the good soil is not alone by itself. It receives living water. It bears more and more life of itself. And it knows it needs the farmer. The farmer who, as Psalm 65 tells us, “You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness. The pastures of the wilderness overflow; the hills gird themselves with joy; the meadows clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys deck themselves with grain; they shout and sing together for joy.” (Ps 65:9-13) The good soil is good because it knows God is always, always, always providing for us.

If you’re like me when I was in between smacks on the drum canvas on the beach, you might be surprised to hear some news: your life is not about you. Even your spiritual journey, your enlightenment, your self-discovery…is not about you. If you want a secret ingredient of good soil, that is it. If we were to get inside the head of bad soil—stick with me here—but if bad soil could talk, it would probably say, “I have all I need on my own. Sure, I’ve got my clumps and my clods, but ain’t nobody telling me what to do.” But good soil knows it has a greater purpose beyond itself. Good soil knows the Word when it encounters it. Good soil and a good life knows that your life is not your own. And this is so far from bad news.

Up above you all is one of the best parts of this church, and only the preacher usually gets to see it. It’s the three crosses on Calvary, the place where Jesus was crucified, an important image of this weekend. As the story goes, there were two violent robbers next to Jesus. After mocking Jesus at first, laughing at this supposed powerful man who was looking just as weak as they were, one of the men finally relents. He realizes he has nothing to live for—it’s over. The kind of mindset that becomes a murderer tends to think that you are above the law, above other people, that you can do as you will because you’re the one in charge of yourself. But here, in his last hour, he finally realizes that it’s done. His life is not in his hands as he thought. And he knows he deserves his fate, and Jesus doesn’t. So he says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

That was it. He realized that his life was not his own. He was not in charge of his fate, but like good soil, he knew Life even when it was dying next to him. And that was all the criteria, not himself, his spiritual genius, his good or bad deeds, but Christ’s mercy and invitation. That’s all it is for any of us. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to even be particularly good to be good soil. You don’t have to come knowing theology from a wheelbarrow. He just wants you to come.

Alistair Begg once talked about that thief on the cross. Imagine, Begg said, if the man had gotten to heaven and the angel said, “What are you doing here?” And the man said, “I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know?” “Well cause I don’t know!” The angel, confused, says, “Excuse me, let me get my supervisor.” The angel supervisor comes, “So…are you clear on the doctrine of justification by faith?” Guy says, “Never heard of it.” On and on the tests go, until finally the angel asks, “On what basis are you here?” And he says, “The man on the middle cross said I could come.”

Beloved, the parable of the farmer isn’t about the farmer at all. It’s the farmer who knew his life wasn’t about himself. His life was about the man on the middle cross. And he says you can come. Amen.

His whole ministry, Jesus had been trying to help his friends understand the kingdom of heaven. Once, Jesus said it was like an invitation to a wedding feast. The privileged few who first got the king’s invitation did not want to come. Thinking they were perhaps confused, he clarified: you’re invited to a meal with delicious meat, oxen and fatted cattle—it was all ready! Come, eat, drink. But it was strange: those invited ignored the feast before them. They were too busy with work, marriage, and excuses. Some even mistreated the king’s servants.

So, Jesus says, in the kingdom of heaven, the king has taken another approach. He had his servants “go out into the streets and “bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame,” (Luke 14:21), “go out into the streets and [gather] all the people [you can] find, the bad as well as the good” (Matt 22:10). Come, eat, drink, be full.

The Passover was a night of remembrance, and tonight, we remember another banquet. Tonight we remember when our Lord gathered his friends at his table in the upper room for a Passover meal. They were the bad and the good, the financially poor and spiritually blind. Tonight we are gathered in the upper room of our church building, and we are all invited again to his table.

He invites us knowing that we will betray him, just as he knew his friends would. And they all would—one betrayal by a kiss, one betrayal by a lie, and the others betraying through abandonment. We know he said, “One of you will betray me, the one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me.” But in the rituals of the Passover meal, they all had dipped their hand in the bowl. So yes, while Judas had a particular infamous betrayal, it was not long after the echoes of “Surely not I?” died down that Jesus said actually, you will all fall away from me. And if we say, “Surely not I,” we would be just as mistaken.

But we would be even more sorely mistaken—so badly, badly missing out on the wonderful banquet before us, the wedding between Christ and his church—if we think that just because we betray and fall away from Christ that it disqualifies us from his table. At this same meal, the gospel of John tells us, Jesus says the disciples are no longer servants, rather, “I have called you friends…you did not choose me, but I chose you.” (John 15:15-16) Hear his words again, in the midst of what he knew would happen: “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

Time and again tonight, we will see many of the ways and things we choose instead of Christ. We will see how we choose violence, choose the crowd, choose mockery, choose lies, choose sin, and choose ourselves over Christ. We did not choose him. He still chose us. He still chooses you today.

There is only one place he didn’t choose you that we also remember. He did not choose for you to be on the cross. On the wooden beams outside the city, he chose himself to die instead of you, to be the Lamb on this Passover night. The Passover was the remembrance of the deliverance from slavery, but now the Lord is delivering us from the slavery from which all other slaveries draw their power: death. In Egypt, it was lamb’s blood that marked households safe from death as part of God’s covenant, and tonight, Jesus says, I am the Lamb, and my blood is the new covenant, the fulfillment of God’s love for you from the very beginning. Tonight begins the rescue of all humanity, his people who have been scattered. And rather than putting any of us on the line, Jesus chooses his own body. “Rather than sacrifice any one of you,” he says to his friends, “I sacrifice myself. Take, and eat of me.”

Jesus chose you also as his friend. You are also invited. And tonight, Christ is really here. His Spirit is fully with us. We not only remember him, we say yes again to tonight’s invitation. The invitation into his love poured out for us in blood, in the midst of our betraying him, in the midst of our being in fear. The invitation to all parts of us, for there is no part of you that is hidden to him. There is no secret misdeed or bad thought that you’ve never told another person that he can’t see. He sees all of you and says, “I still want you at my table, friend. I know you’re not going to choose me when the times become impossible. You’re still my friend. I still pour myself out for you. No, you did not choose me; I choose you.”

Tonight, at his table, Jesus does not eat with those who will love him perfectly. Instead, he eats with sinners. He eats with his friends. Tonight, no matter what you’ve done, he chooses you, his friend, for his table. Come, eat, drink, and be full. Amen.

I wanted to announce the new project I’ve been working on, a podcast called . I started it with my friend Nathan Dufour Oglesby, who is a seminarian at Yale Divinity School who also has a PhD in classics and a YouTube channel full of songs and video essays on philosophy, theology and ecology.

You can subscribe to our Substack to get new episodes, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Nathan and I have been working on this throughout Lent and have now put out seven episodes. Essentially, the format is reading the same texts each week that I preach from, which come from the Revised Common Lectionary. We will record and upload every Tuesday with minimal editing and preparation, just reading the Bible together to draw points of connection that we hope will be helpful for you.

If you are a regular reader of Indwelling, think of this as an accompanying conversational piece early in the week while I’m still working on my sermon, and a chance to marinate in the texts with us as the Church moves through the week.

Here is the episode we recorded today, which gets into our Easter Sunday texts:

Our Parasocial Bible Study

Our Parasocial Bible Study #7 - Easter Sunday

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2 months ago · Joe Welker

Okay but one question — why “parasocial”?

For the unaware, “parasocial” is a word that often describes our asymmetrical relationships over the internet (it was Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 word of the year, defining it as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence”).

The title came together as an attempt to poke honest fun at the limitation of podcasts that we all experience, where listeners typically know much more about the hosts than vice versa. Yet we actually hope that this will erode somewhat over time and that we get to know our audience. We plan to do this podcast whether a bunch of people listen or not for our own biblical edification and spiritual formation, but it would be way more fun if this got more collaborative. For now, we’d love for you to comment on episodes or reach out to us directly at ourparasocialbiblestudy@substack.com.

Actually, a second question — will you be automatically signing me up for this against my will when I just wanted Indwelling?

No. Thank you for asking. If you’d like to keep up with the podcast, subscribe on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Peace of Christ,

Joe

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

“Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Matthew 21:1-11

Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna, they cried. “Deliver us, save us!” We might have pictured this scene in our heads a thousand times and seen it in a movie or two. What was it like to be there, in that old city on the hill? What was it like to be at the start of a revolution? Dirt underneath your nails and your sandals—really, where couldn’t dirt get to in those days—each day a battle for survival, hungry for bread but starving for hope. And there hope was, riding the beast of burden and its baby colt like a sidecar in a motorcade. A panoply of cloaks lining the road, needed not for anything practical, just fulfilling the finally-here prophet, the true righteous heir to David’s throne, the teacher, the Master, the king. It wasn’t a hard day for Jesus to find believers. If you put your thumb on a garden hose and sprayed anywhere inside the walls of Jerusalem, the “city of peace” that had seen centuries of war, you couldn’t count how many Jesus fans you’d hit. Some of the city was just learning who he was, but the crowd knew, at least, they thought they knew. They chose their king. They chose Jesus. So they thought.

Jesus chose this parade on this day knowing what was going to happen to him. We know he knew he was surrounded by people who didn’t know they would betray him. He knew that the rainbow road of cloaks and palms was a road into darkness. How could anyone but him know that the sound of the trot into hell would be donkey clops?

But because the Son of God is, among his other roles, a lover of the prophetically poetic, he chose a donkey. He chose this day to paint this scene into the minds of those who would only later understand its meaning. And he chose his friends despite themselves; he would tell them during their final meal together, a meal we will celebrate and remember again later this week, “You did not choose me. But I chose you.” (John 15:16)

If you can hear it, he says this to you too. You might protest, like the crowds might have had he been so blunt, “Jesus, we do choose you as king!” They thought they were choosing Jesus. But they chose an idea of Jesus. When Jesus did not live up to their idea of a Messiah, they turned on him. The crowds here, his biggest fans, shouting, “We choose you, prophet of Galilee!” That’s one part of him, but not all. “We choose you, Son of David!” Another part. But not all. “We choose you, the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” “We choose you, king, save us!”

They picked part of him. We pick part of him. We pick our favorite ideas of him, but we don’t pick all of him. Again, Jesus tells his closest friends, “You didn’t really pick me. I picked you.” And he did choose you. He even chose the part of you that would kill him and leave him for dead today. Jesus chooses the part of you that is ready to abandon him the second you go back into the world.

If it is not clear by now, Palm Sunday is one of the most delicious ironies of our whole church calendar. I don’t know if you’re like me and you grew up with Palm Sunday kind of feeling like an Easter trailer, like “Pre-Easter,” or “PrEaster.” You got the greenery, the sun’s coming out, the warmth. But there’s a delicious irony baked in here: today, we celebrate in pomp and circumstance to echo the crowds that celebrated Jesus and who would betray him. Really, it’s a day where humanity’s fickleness, our capricious lust for attaching ourselves to power, and the hypocrisy of all Jesus followers are on display. Our thirst for being the winner in the story, for being on the hero’s side, is on display today.

When we came to faith by grace, we might have chosen the idea of Jesus that we liked. In Holy Week, after the crowd’s palms and loyalty have been blown away by the first breeze, if we read with honesty and humility, we will see more of ourselves than we might like in these gospel pages. Maybe we won’t see ourselves in every sin along the stations of the cross, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will sit with and meditate on the story of our Lord and confront in ourselves how much we haven’t and still don’t choose Jesus once the stakes become real.

We will also learn that we are not alone. After all, it was a crowd. Peter didn’t choose the real Jesus. None of the twelve could—at least not before they saw who he was. Yet we do know their lives were changed afterward. We do know the apostles would go to their graves for this man they didn’t choose at first. While many of us have had seasons of doubt about the Resurrection, the people who were there and knew him didn’t have any seasons of doubt after a dead man showed up and blessed them with fish, bread, and living peace three days later.

But we’re getting too far ahead. We’re still in the joyful parade into darkness. And in fact, we can be joyful, not at how great we are, but in marveling how our God is bringing his mercy and deliverance and salvation hosannas we sing in the world. Just not how we expect it.

However big the crowd was that day, almost everybody would be gone by the time it was all over. There’d be a couple of women at the cross with him, the women who knew and loved him. There’d be a few Roman soldiers who didn’t know what they were witnessing until it was too late. A couple of thieves, only one of whom begged for mercy as Christ’s spirit cried out in agony. But the parade crowd was gone with the palms.

Earlier this week, I shared a poem in our newsletter by G.K. Chesterton, a strange poem about today called “The Donkey.” When you hear it, you may even recognize yourself:

When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

If only we could see how God sees this whole order of creation unfolding, year after year after year billions of times. What would you see if you go through every single cosmic step, one molecule and volcanic eruption and ice age and explosion of life at a time, all through the living God who is in all and through all and for all things, and it is all building to an afternoon when the God who we will kill would choose to ride on the back of a donkey. What if you could see every single breath that has ever been breathed in the history of the universe had led to this moment: the God of all creation now chooses to be in the full, sins-and-all child that you are?

As Christians, maybe all we can really be is donkeys. If so, our Lord will still find a use for us. Even though you will fail to choose him many more times before all is said and done, Jesus will still find a holy use for you. He will always choose you.

There are many mysteries of our faith. You may not know why he blessed you with your life or with believing in him at all. Today, the mystery we sit with is that God chose us even when we were enthralled with the wrong ideas of him and ourselves. For God still chooses us even knowing we will betray him. And he will again. Amen.

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

John 11:1-44

I was at a peace vigil earlier this week, and I almost don’t want to say it because it feels like praying in public, which Jesus tells us not to do. It might sound like the only reason I went was so that I could say in a sermon, “I went to a peace vigil.” But running that risk, I testify I was at a peace vigil. There was singing, there was a poem, but mostly there was a lot of silence. A vigil is a “watch,” and we were silently watching for peace. Peace has not come.

The thing about a vigil for peace, which might sound obvious, is that we only hold vigils for peace during war. When there is already no conflict, when things are quiet and still, you don’t have to watch for peace because it’s already here. There’s no trouble to address, nothing that needs to be glorified, it just is peace. It’s already glorified.

That biblical word, “glorify,” what is it? It means to “reveal God’s glory” through something. Beautiful music glorifies God when it reveals his glory; a parent’s sacrifice glorifies God by pointing to his sacrificial love. You don’t need to glorify peace because the peace God gave us is already glorious. It’s not the already glorious things that need glorifying, it’s the horrible things. Of course, nobody would say, “We should have war so that we can have peace vigils,” or, “Thank God we had this war so that we could get together and pray for peace.” That’d be nonsensical. We don’t pray in the midst of war to make the awfulness of war glorious, but to make God’s glory appear where it seems impossible.

Today in John’s gospel we have another vigil, this one from Mary and Martha. They are waiting and waiting for Jesus. Instead, they get death.

Sometimes we might wonder, why didn’t God create the world without suffering? Why did God make the snake that tempted Adam and Eve? Why did God allow a world where people could die? But I don’t think this is the clearest way to think about it. Remember that it is from a place of nothingness, emptiness, that God created everything that is. Death, while we have a name for it, actually is an absence: a return to nothingness. We are subject to it because we split ourselves off from God to join the world instead of staying in communion with God. Without God, dying is less an active process and more the cold machinery of entropy back to nothing. God didn’t create death, but rather, he created life—all life—pushing constantly against death. He made the life that is the only reason we can perceive death at all.

But this side of the Fall, death is the default. Nothingness, emptiness, nihilism, zero. Without God, things decay towards it. Plants grow, but then they die, get destroyed, burn out, and burn up, all exploding from the Big Bang, that moment in time of God’s creativity exploding into light, water, and life. Eventually, he rested and called it good. But Sabbath is temporary. His work was not done. The patterns of life he laid continue.

And if there is one chief, central pattern we need to understand about the life that God created, it is resurrection. If we need to understand one thing about the Creator, it’s that his very essence overcomes death over and over, and he will. As John says at the very start of his gospel, in the beginning was Christ, for he is light and life.

This is the backdrop for John telling us this story with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Good friends of Jesus whose passion was caring for the poor and sick in their community. Now it was Lazarus who was sick. So they tell Jesus, who says something strange. “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” He doesn’t say this casually or flippantly; he loves them. But after this strange thing, he then does another strange thing: he waits. And waits. And finally, after this delayed start, when they reach Mary and Martha, they hear news that was utterly not shocking to Jesus, “Lazarus is dead.”

The danger in this passage is hearing that strange saying, seeing Jesus waiting, and saying, “God is fine with death because it gives him an opportunity to look good.” No. The whole reason Jesus is here on this earth is that God is not fine with death. He is overcoming it. Mary and Martha kind of know this, but only in part. They are like, “Yeah yeah, we know Lazarus will rise again on the last day when we’re all resurrecting, but he’s dead now. We are hurting now. You could have saved him now had you been there then. Where were you?” Jesus, in the most loving and authoritative way possible, doesn’t say where he was, but who he is: “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am. The name God gives to Moses, I am. His very name and being is resurrection. He is life.

So no, God is not fine with death. God is so not fine with death that Jesus, even though he is overcoming it, utterly confident that he will, knowing it, he weeps. He is not only sad about death, he is even angry about it. When English translators take John’s words as describing Jesus as “greatly disturbed” and “deeply moved,” or “troubled,” they are underselling it. The words here are more like angry—he’s angry at death. There is a great irony in how we often have trouble sitting with God’s anger in the Old Testament, because it seems against life. But if we drill down to why God is angry in Scripture, if we were to fully understand why, we could see it’s because he is angry at death. He cries when we sin because sin is death. And he weeps every time, whether through sin or disease, death takes another one of his children. He doesn’t shame us when we feel sad and angry about death in our grief. He doesn’t tell us to just get over it. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?”

We’ve been reading these long stories in John, and the thing about them is that they all end up in the same place: belief. Why is belief so important? We can really fixate on the intellectual side of it, that belief is primarily “I need to sign off on a set of unprovable hypotheses, and anyone who doesn’t intellectually sign off on them is cut off from God.” Don’t mistake me—theology is important, and getting beliefs right is important because beliefs have consequences. Theology is how we grow in our relationship with Jesus into more and more truth. But when Jesus is face to face with us, like he is with Mary and Martha, belief is about the connection between our hearts and his. A relationship we didn’t know was possible. We Presbyterians have traditionally held that belief is not even something we do, but a gift God gives us, for none of us can “decide” to believe, we either do or don’t. And so belief is the heart of your heart saying “yes” to a relationship—a gift from God that he opens our eyes to see and hearts to believe—with and in and through Jesus to the rest of the world. A relationship between Jesus and yourself, a relationship with yourself in Jesus, and a relationship to the rest of the world through Jesus. The path to all these relationships is belief, and the core to all of them is the rhythm of resurrection.

To believe in Jesus is simply to say “yes” to the new life that God already embedded in your soul, the life that has overcome death, is currently overcoming death in a million ways in a life of faith, and will totally overcome death in the end. As we see with Lazarus, the blind man, and every person Jesus heals and raises and encounters, it is a life where pain is not erased, but included, sanctified, and glorified.

There’s that word again, “glorify.” Jesus says it a lot in John. To “glorify,” to “reveal God’s glory through” something, is done whenever we lift something real up before God. As Jesus told Nicodemus, the Son of Man will be glorified just as the bronze serpent was, physically lifted up so that even mortality can show God’s glory. His body was human so that it would be directly touched by death and thus show God’s glory even in death. Through belief, any of us can bring anything before God that it may be transformed by his glory. You can bring your heartache, your pain, your backache, your bruises, your aging, your embarrassments, your regrets, anything, lift it up before God, saying, “God, I know you are going to work through this somehow, and I don’t even know how yet. Here is something awful, here is something that is not working. Here is even war. Show me how you will reveal yourself through this, Lord.”

Jesus does. His friend Lazarus, “the dead man,” so dead that the stench is bleeding through stone, comes out. But do you see how you can be Lazarus too? Whether you have an illness, your body’s breaking down, your mind’s not working right, you can’t remember stuff like you used to, you can’t work how you once worked, you don’t have the family life you dreamed of having, these all bear the stench of death on them through your bandages. But the question that really matters is: do you believe?

Do you believe that he loves you? Do you believe that he is the resurrection and the life and there is nothing he can’t work through? Do you believe God’s resurrection power just decides to stop before he reaches your neighbors or do you believe that he came to be savior for all? Do you believe that his glory can be revealed in absolutely everything?

Some of us feel that being born into this world is deeply unfair. We were born into a world that, if left to its own devices, would keep returning towards oblivion. But in the midst of oblivion, God did not say, “Well, it’s a cosmic joke, c’est la vie.” God looked at oblivion and said, “I will not abandon my children to nothingness.” To make sure we knew it, he came in the form of one of us so that you would know he feels everything you feel. He walked your walk, not just talking his talk. And he just wants you to believe that sin and death are not in charge, because this transforms your whole way of life so that resurrection love is working through you in all that you do.

No matter how much you believe it, no matter how real it seems that death is in charge, that awfulness is in charge, that our nation is hopelessly corrupt, that our society is becoming more and more immoral, fear not. Believe. Especially if there is a stone of doubt between you and Jesus that cannot move, believe. Not because God wants you to trick yourself into agreeing to something untrue. But because the truest thing, the deepest thing, the realest thing is the glorification of even the thing we thought could not be glorified. Jesus says, “Bring all of your suffering, all of it, to me. Bring it through me and I will show myself through the places deep in the caves you thought were too dark for life. Believe in me. Roll away the stone. Come out.” Amen.

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

John 9:1-41

The Oscars are tonight, and even though the ratings are down and people don’t go to the movies as much anymore, it remains such a key cultural touchstone. Why? If you think about what the Oscars fundamentally are, yes, they’re about movies, but even more, it’s our annual cultural check-in asking, “What were the best stories this year?” Because every movie is trying to tell a story, we judge a movie either by how good the story is, how well the story is told, or both, because the craft of how you show stories directly shapes not only the audience hears the story, but even shapes the story itself. Where you edit a story, the details you highlight or omit, and a bunch of techniques which fall under the #1 rule of storytelling, “Show, don’t tell” (and though the rule is “show, don’t tell,” for some reason we don’t call it storyshowing). Showing a story instead of just telling it is what makes it a story and not a lecture. Unfortunately, preaching can be a lot of telling.

Why do I say this? Because all throughout Lent, we’ve been reading John, a master story-shower. John’s read at least some of the other gospels, and a couple of times he tells the stories again. But John uses the craft of storytelling a little differently than the other gospels. Instead of the entire journey of Jesus’ ministry, he gave us a series of very detailed moving pictures of Jesus, more like a movie that is an anthology of scenes rather than a long continuous epic. In each of these vignettes, he wants us to see a different side of God’s glory.

Why do we even need stories? Why can’t we just receive a list of facts? Why are the gospels told as stories, and why does Jesus himself use stories in the form of parables? I believe one reason is that if we didn’t hear the truth in the form of a story, our pride wouldn’t let us hear it otherwise. If someone simply tells you what is true, especially if it goes against the story you’ve already told yourself, you aren’t going to actually even hear it as true; you will hear it as a lie, even if it’s fully true. Stories are sticky that way. Many times, you can only let go of an old story when you finally hear a better, truer, fuller story. And here at the start of this story in John of Jesus and the blind man, baked into the story is hearing the other competing stories that disciples and Pharisees and maybe even the man have been telling themselves. But Jesus has a new story.

The disciples’ old story is familiar to anyone who has gone through a hard time and then had someone, who means well, give you terrible theology; some terrible explanation for your problems or the problems of the world that are so dire, God must be involved. It’s a story embedded into much of human history, something like: “if bad things happen to you, you somehow deserve it.” They weren’t asking “why do bad things happen to good people,” they were asking, “Okay, so since he’s disabled, how is he bad? Was it his fault or his parents’?”

From our vantage point, we might easily see the absurdity here, and I wonder if John is even pointing to it, because the implication of their question is that they are so convinced the man did something to deserve being born blind, maybe he did something in the womb. But as absurd as it is, I actually want to give them some credit. Can we understand where they were coming from? These were devout believers in God who wanted to make sense of God’s justice, God’s goodness, and God’s glory in light of a tragic situation. They didn’t want to undermine God’s justice; I mean, have you considered God’s servant Job, who once questioned God’s justice? Yet as the Book of Job shows, when you can’t make sense of injustice, the mind often turns to blaming the person who is harmed (as Job’s friends erroneously do). Anyone who has worked with abuse survivors is familiar with the phenomenon of blaming the victim, which can happen in every single kind of subculture. So it’s not that hard to believe that the disciples would look at a man born blind and say, “Well, he deserved it,” because people have not really changed that much.

This scene is one of several times when Christ rejects this explanation. He utterly rejects the idea that those who are harmed deserve it. The poor, the downtrodden, those failed by society, you name it, he utterly rejects the idea that they were uniquely bad. In fact, blessed are they. Still sinners in need of grace; still in need of salvation. But for all their struggles, blessed are they who life has unjustly humbled, for not only will God’s justice one day reign, but blessed are they who today know they need God. That is at the heart of this new story of Jesus.

Jesus does miraculously heal this man’s physical eyesight with mud, which is the very dust of the earth from which God made humanity, mixed with water, that is, his water, saliva. But this blind man and his story are really not even about physical blindness as much as spiritual blindness. The man knew he was utterly blind without Jesus. Then even after he was healed, he still knew he needed God. And because he had this innate humility from the tragedy of his birth, innately humbled by life, when he encounters the glory of Jesus, he is utterly transformed by his glory. As Jesus tells his disciples, the man is not how he is because of anything wrong he did, but in fact, he has a special role of revealing that glory to the world. Blessed is he.

Then, on the other hand, you have the Pharisees. We get to hear the story they tell themselves, and it’s something like: “God has laid out the exact time and place and ways in which he works to us, and so now, in fact, we share the perfect vision of God. And we act accordingly.” Does this sound like us Christians sometimes? It’s the other side of the coin from the disciples’ story, the flip side of “people in pain deserve their pain.” The story of the Pharisees is, “people who are blessed did something to deserve their blessing—they earned God’s favor.” This story is so subtle, so common, and so full of the deadliest poison: spiritual pride. The reason pride is a deadly poison is shown, not told, by the master storytellers Jesus and John. But I will be a bad storyteller and just tell you: if the blind man’s humility is what makes him available to be transformed by glorious grace, the Pharisees’ pride makes them totally unavailable to be transformed by grace.

The Pharisees are not ready for that story. And so instead of being available for grace, they interrogate: “How’d this happen? Who is this guy? Why did he do it on the Sabbath? Where are his parents? I mean surely he’s making this up.” The man says, “I don’t know exactly who he was, a prophet, or exactly where he was from, all I know is I was blind, and now I see. And God had to be in the mix somehow.” To which the Pharisees say, “You were born entirely in sin—obviously or you wouldn’t be blind—and you want to teach us? Don’t you know anything about God or justice or theology? Hilarious.” And they drive him out.

Where do the proud drive people? Certainly not towards their own worldview; he didn’t leave that conversation like, man, I can’t wait until Pharisee try-outs open up and I can get on the list. No. Praise be to God that all the proud can do is drive someone straight to Jesus in one form or another. So Jesus finds him again. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he?” “You have seen him. You are speaking to him.” “Lord, I believe.”

We all know the paradox of humility: you can only have it if you think you don’t have it. It’s the joke we all know, the guy bragging, “I’m the most humble person in the world.” The most insufferable I’ve ever been had nothing to do whether I was right or wrong, but whether I was self-righteous, taking myself too seriously and feeling a need to be perfect. When you feel like you need to be perfect, and you try really hard to be perfect, you often self-justify. You often become the reference point of your own salvation. You might think God is your reference point, as the Pharisees do, but really, it’s yourself.

If you you could see yourself as God sees you, you would see you still have sin you just can’t shake. But! The realization that you can’t fully see clearly, and that you can’t fully see yourself as God sees you? That’s realizing you’re blind, even with some sight that Jesus has given you, even after encountering his glory, still realizing you still have limited vision, and we always will…that is the kind of blindness Jesus can work with. If you say, “I see myself and the world totally clearly,” well, then you’re blinder than ever. But if we show up again and again to God in humility, he will transform us, not with more pride, but with his glorious humility.

In our own humility, we can sometimes take the log out of our eye as Christ tells us to do. But glorious humility before God is realizing that there are always going to be logs up in there that only God could remove, and that we truly depend on God. That is a hard pill for so many of us to swallow: dependence on God. We have a hard time with this precisely because of our pride. Being independent and not needing anyone is so endemic in our culture and to our sense of self, the belief in us deserving what we have, which breeds a sense of righteousness. This is the pride in the old stories of the disciples and the Pharisees: “If they are that way, it’s because of them, and if I like the way that I am, it’s because of me.”

But leaning into utter dependency on God, as this once-blind man does, is what opens up his vision. The formerly-blind man’s reliance on God never becomes a posture of “I’ve got it figured out” or “I now have all the answers” or “I am totally correct” (actually, John shows us that his explanations aren’t totally correct). But he knows what we all need to know: that we need to encounter the glory Jesus. Everybody in this story had a chance to encounter glorious grace. But only the humble one was transformed by it. So when you go out from here and see the person who is struggling, hurting, and needs help, a call to help them is not just an opportunity for God’s glory to be shown in their life; it’s an opportunity for you.

So I don’t know who’s going to win tonight. I just know the best sports movies are always underdog stories, and we have an underdog God. This is one of so many underdog stories in the gospels, but it’s not about pitying someone who has a disability. Rather, it’s about giving thanks to God for how God works in the unlikely places. Praise be to God that even if you have no vision, there’s an opportunity for you to see more clearly.

If pride is like putting mud over our own eyes and thinking it makes us see, humility is knowing that Christ’s mud is something else entirely, a mix of earth, water, and the Spirit. And when we open ourselves fully to him by realizing just how blind and dependent on him we really are and always were, there is no telling how he can transform you. For no matter how broken you are, you are someone who Jesus sees fit to show his glory to the whole world. Amen.

Watch sermon below:

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Exodus 17:1-7

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

Romans 5:8, 10

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

John 4:5-151

A voice of many crying in the wilderness: “Is God with us or not?”

This is what God’s people ask. They didn’t only ask it in our Exodus reading. No, this question lies in the hearts of God’s people across time and place, a question God’s people have asked in all kinds of droughts and famines. It’s a question we might ask not only in hunger, but, like the author of Ecclesiastes, amid decadent feasts that somehow feel like famines in their emptiness.

This is the question that tells you you’re in the wilderness, spiritually barren. Like a cold wind across years of built-up sand dunes, where suddenly your life has become too quiet, too many people missing.

But your wilderness may not be that quiet or empty. Your wilderness might look like a digital blitzkrieg. I open up my computer to streams of war, then I take a break from the big screen of my computer with the little screen of my phone, more streams of war (but apparently it’s not a war, according to the Department of War). Wilderness can be an onslaught of information, of endless scrolling, the weight of bad news getting worse, helplessness in a world spiraling out of control.

At its core, wilderness is a place of alienation from God and the world. Estrangement, isolation, distance. It is not hard to feel alienated in a cold New England winter in the woods by yourself, but we can be alienated even if we never lack people. As Carl Jung famously said, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” Many people feel that kind of loneliness. It only makes matters worse if you cannot communicate what you really feel to God, trying to hide with fig leaves from the Maker for eating the wrong apple.

Wilderness is in far more pages in the Bible than nomadic life outside of Egypt. Tim Mackie has described the “Exodus Way” in Scripture, even before we get to the Book of Exodus. In fact, we get two whole chapters in Genesis of being fully connected, unalienated, united with God, where there is no question that God is with us, for we are fully with God as he desired in creation. But we split ourselves off from God before we could even get around to naming the zebras (they’re at the end of the alphabet).

So begins our long distance relationship from God. After that first bite of the apple, God’s very first words were calling to us humans hiding ourselves: “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9) After breaking God’s heart, we then leave the Garden for the first exodus that we have never fully returned from. While it is a pure coincidence that the “Wilderness of Sin” mentioned in Exodus 17 shares the same word as the English word “sin,” which comes from a totally different origin, it is striking that both describe alienation.

What is a key feature of our human condition of sin, alienation, and estrangement? A word that we know too well, a phenomenon we must have named right after the zebras: war. While we get two chapters of the whole Bible where we are fully united with God, we only have three chapters before there is violence. It seems our war against God makes us at war with each other, and war marks humanity almost as much as being in spiritual exile. For the Israelites, the wilderness included war, and it includes war in our world once again.

War, even for good causes, should not be lusted after, worshipped, or championed, but mourned and respected as an awful fact of our human condition that is in the wilderness away from God’s rest. When we are barraged with information about barrages of bombs, it is not hard to wonder, “Is God with us,” along with its flipside, “Is God with them?” Is God with the ordinary people of Iran in a war they didn’t choose, like the girls killed in the primary school in Minab? Is God with our troops who have sacrificed themselves for this cause? Is God with us when we feel helpless to do anything about it?

So when the Israelites are in their wilderness, in between wars with different tribes, thirsty, and afraid, is it any wonder they would ask, “Is God with us or not?”

What does God do in response to this question? He calls on his servant. He strikes the rock. Paul would later say, “This rock was Christ,” (1 Cor 10:4), and he doesn’t mean Jesus of Nazareth was teleported into the desert; he means that Christ, the eternal Word made flesh as God’s very being, was already at work, split open to sustain and provide for his wilderness people. He did so even when they were in total amnesia about all God had done for them, and he did so even though they would go on to sin and sin some more in the Wilderness of Sin.

But there it was, living water. It was not the Israelites’ wars over tribes that liberated them. It was not their own wisdom that sustained them. It was the protection of God, the movement of the Spirit, the saving Grace before they understood how deep their need for a savior was.

Why did God do this? Because our entire time away from him, God has been trying to get us back in his arms. His “where are you?” is still echoing as he seeks us, and his living water has never stopped flowing. You might think of the love of God in Jesus Christ like one of those “endless stews” you hear about on the Travel Channel (when we still had that) or YouTube now, when restaurants have the same broth going for decades upon decades that just keeps getting ingredients added in, perpetually serving people over and over. This is the love of God, a never-ending pot of life-giving, life-nourishing, sustaining water mixed in with the flesh of Christ, eternal life.

Jesus hints at this to the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan woman, an enemy to the Jews, an outsider also living in the wilderness along with her people. She comes to the same well that God brought their shared ancestor Jacob to all those years ago. And she encounters Jesus. She is just as confused as Nicodemus was when he snuck to see Jesus in the middle of the night,2 and just as confused as Jesus’ disciples in broad daylight,3 but unlike these men who puffed themselves up on their piety, this Samaritan woman is the only one who is offered living water by Jesus and actually drinks from it without waiting to fully understand. How could she understand? How could we? But in encountering the living water, even though she didn’t fully understand, she dropped her jar to be a jar of Christ’s water, sharing it with her town, becoming known as the “first evangelist” in Scripture. For something in her knew in that moment, even if she couldn’t fully explain it, that God was with them, even their enemies.

War continues to rip people apart. We are still enemies to each other, which shows we are still enemies of God, as we have been from the third chapter. We continue to be enemies to God when we continue to be enemies to each other. Perhaps this is why the greatest commandment is two in conjunction: love God and love neighbor. And you don’t need me to tell you that we don’t always do either so well.

But—and here we get a great “but” of grace—as Paul says, “While we were still enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” (Romans 5:10). God did not wait for us to be at peace with him or each other. While we were still enemies, Christ died for us. God did not wait, and will not wait, for this war to end. He will not wait for leaders to come to their senses. He will not wait for wicked men to be good. He will not wait for humanity to stop being awful, or else I imagine he’d be waiting forever.

God does not wait in vain. But “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8). While we were asking, “Is God with us or not?” he said again and again and then once and for all on the cross, “Yes. Believe it or not—and you often won’t believe it—I am with you.”

He has always been our water in the wilderness, even when we did not know it. He is water even in the brutal wilderness of war that too many people we have prayed for in recent years have known. I guarantee you that the people of Iran who are caught up in this war are being given grace by God. They are receiving in ways that may be totally foreign to us and in horrible moments most of us will never have to experience, because his grace is hidden in the cracks of tragedy and human depravity. That’s what he does: he is a grace-giver to those who are dying, a helper in times of trouble, with them and us in life and death. They may not know God like we know God, but neither did the Samaritan woman, and at any rate, many of us who follow and claim Christ have no better love of God or neighbor than anyone else.

But Christ died for us all. He did not wait. He struck the rock—he struck himself—so that the living water of grace is offered to all of us. He offers us living water to be transformed by his glory when we lack it. This living water is a river from the desert all the way back into the garden of God’s true rest, the intimacy of his being that all humans call home. We drink of it not by proofs, signs, or AI, but by faith.

While we are in the wilderness, if there is anything we can do to drink from that living water, to grab the hand reaching out to us, it is to grab the cup God offers through prayer. It is to keep praying to extend that cup back out to our neighbors and to do so in our actions. When we pray for everyone in war, we may not know exactly what all we are praying for, especially if we are praying for both sides of a conflict—can one pray for our own servicemembers and for Iranian mothers grieving their children? It depends on what we pray for. If we pray for domination, conquest, victory, and the triumph of our violence, we cannot pray for everyone. But we can pray for everyone when we pray prayers of mercy. Prayers of mourning, for a quick end to war, for the innocent, and even prayers for the guilty who truly need Christ’s mercy.

So, back to the question: “Is God with us? Is God with them?” There is only one answer. For while we were thirsty, God offered us living water. And while we were still sinners, still enemies, still wielding death upon each other, Christ died for us all. May you drink from his waters of mercy, and when you get a cup, run to share it. Amen.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

John 3:1-17

In these tribalistic, chaotic times, I’ve turned to one of the most reliable, tried-and-true things in our culture: old James Bond movies. Is it because they’re good, deep films? No. Are they Christian? Also no. But do my wife and I bond over them? Again, no, she doesn’t watch. But don’t tell me you don’t miss the comforts of suave, witty spies sneaking around for the stability of the Western hemisphere in the clean “us” and “them” of the Cold War.

Oddly enough, the most famous passage in the Bible, John 3:16, comes during what is almost like an ancient spy movie scene, with the neither suave nor witty Nicodemus, a Pharisee, sneaking in at the cover of night. What was he doing? Was he trying to get top secret intel on the popular rebel threat to the social order? Was he trying to persuade Jesus that he was wrong about something? Was he trying to better understand? Did Nicodemus even know why he wanted to see Jesus?

We don’t really know why he wanted to see Jesus, but we know Nicodemus did not want to be seen with Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees, the so-called “separate ones.” He’s religious, he’s diligent, he’s committed, he’s faithful, he attends synagogue every week, he properly washes before meals, he lives within the limits God has provided. He doesn’t like to intermingle with the other tribes of his neighbors, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try to give an “innocent” explanation to his Pharisee colleagues why he sought counsel with Jesus. But the question for us “good,” God-fearing Christians, is why do we act like the Pharisees are so different from us?

For what parts of the gospel do we have to sneak to talk to Jesus about? If you want to figure out this answer, perhaps we can look at our tribes and look at what we can’t admit to our tribe.

The gospel is scandalous in at least two directions. But the first scandal to our ears is one that was not scandalous to the ancients: God judges everyone. Naturally, we don’t want to believe God judges my tribe, my politics, my self-righteousness. The scandal of God’s judgment is offensive when we are always the good guys in our personal spy movie. It also may be offensive to us who only see God as one-sided in his love, that his love is not complex in holding and dealing with evil, that he is just a chill hippie. But Jesus will say just a few verses after our reading today, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)

If this scandalizes us, this was not a scandal to the ancients. The idea of humans being deeply sinful and tribes deserving of mass deathly punishment in contrast to the pure goodness of God was not a controversial part of the Bible. Today, we often find ourselves disturbed by Old Testament texts, often because of our Christianity. More widely in society, our default post-Enlightenment humanism says, “Man, God could have figured out a better way to deal with bad people.”

In the Numbers 21 story that Jesus alludes to with Moses and the bronze serpent, Moses only lifts up the serpent after snakes had been the vehicle of God’s judgment, killing many of his repeatedly rebellious people. Jesus isn’t apologizing for this. After all, he is the One who judges.

Ancient readers did not have to be convinced that God really judged people; no, they had to be convinced that God really saved people. The New Testament authors did not have to justify God’s wrath. Instead, they had to justify and reconcile God’s grace.

This second scandal of the gospel for the ancients is also still the scandal for us: God judges everyone, but God saves everyone. This was the scandal for which Nicodemus had to slink in darkness on padded footsteps. God saves everyone, including our outgroup, “those” people, our enemies, whoever you can’t stand. This offends us when we know that “they” are so clearly deserving of judgment—and when we think that, we aren’t even totally wrong about it.

Into the darkness, then, this piercing light beams into the heart: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God didn’t so love “us” over them, he loved the world, that whoever believes in him is given grace.

This was the scandal that the gospel writers and the epistle authors had to spill their expensive ink on expensive papyrus to share, spread, and explain. We read John 3:16 today like a bumper sticker, but it really functions as an argument in John, an emphasis that God really does love you. Jesus in John 3:16 blasts open our tribalism by saying we all stand condemned, but we all are given a lifeline to light. As this scandal of grace spread in the hearts of Christians, some then started to wonder whether God’s wrath in the Old Testament was necessary, a troubling mystery that is still hard to work out.1

But as we wrestle with why God’s judgment is so violent in the Old Testament, pay closer attention to what Jesus is saying when he says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14) The comparison Jesus is making is that what was once the means by which God judged his people became the means by which he saved them; the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses became a site of pilgrimage and healing.2 Moses would repeatedly pray to God for forgiveness of his people, even to those who wanted Moses killed.

So here, Jesus is saying that he, the Son of Man, the One who judges the world (a world that wants him killed), who is, in fact, the only one capable of judging the world, is not the tribalistic warlord we often prefer. What does the Judge do? He chooses to sacrifice himself. The Judge becomes the vehicle of our salvation. He will be lifted up and subject himself to undeserved judgment to blow open the darkness that we lust for. And this was who he really was all along; however we may judge the actions of “Old Testament God,” his name and his place was always primarily in mercy. After all, the utmost dwelling place of God in the Ark of the Covenant was called “the mercy seat.” He was faithful and loyal again and again when his people were faithless, his judgment slow, his steadfast love enduring, offering a chance for his people over and over to be in a relationship with him.

So what does Jesus tell Nicodemus he must do? “You must be born from above.” Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so that the presence of God dwells not in the mercy seat of the wooden Ark, but let God’s mercy seat live in your heart and carry it to all you meet. Live as if you know this world is not all that is, and thank God, for it so often loves darkness, and you are going to a place of light. Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so you learn and practice how to sacrifice, love your enemies, and forgive. Now let those with ears hear: this is something that this preacher is constantly trying and failing to do well. I still sneak to Jesus at night, not being able to admit to friends all I question about their tribes. I am still way too sneaky, not like James Bond, but like Nicodemus. I know God judges me for this and many other things. But in him, I still choose to believe.

Why is belief the path that Jesus says in John 3:16? The New Testament tries in different ways to explain why it is faith and belief that saves, and not law.3 Paul passionately argues and explains it. But it is still a mystery to me; I must also choose to believe in “belief.”

Perhaps it is because there is a gap between God and us that is utterly immaterial. If it were just a physical difference between us and God, we could bridge it with physics. If it was just an intelligence gap, we could bridge it with AI (and we’re trying!). If the difference between me and God was morality, then I could be God by just being a moral person. But the difference between us and God is not the difference between us and the highest mountains the Psalmist sings of in Psalm 121. No, the gap between us and God is a gap that is ultimately a gap of the true, pure presence of Spirit. Perhaps that is why it takes faith to be an utterly immaterial and often irrational bridge to the Spirit, a bridge reaching out to us in the hands of Jesus.4

Even if we cannot bring ourselves to fully believe today, whether we’re in church or not, there is always hope for us. There was hope for that hapless religious guy Nicodemus, who, like us, may be “so close yet so far” from Jesus when he first encounters him. But by the end of John’s gospel, we see Nicodemus after the crucifixion tending to Christ’s body. He stopped sneaking around. Maybe it was only because it was safe now that Jesus was dead, when the threat to the social order was removed. But nevertheless, there he was, following him.

The challenge and invitation in John’s gospel is asking, which side of Nicodemus are we? Are we sneaking confused in the dark, or are we ready to live life from above while we’re still here below? Are we going to take the risks of love that we are called to take? Will we keep sneaking to avoid scandal by our tribe, or will we try to love the world in the way that God so loved all of us—giving his life for the sake of another?

We can do this if we believe that we don’t only live once. In Christ, as one Bond movie is so named, “you only live twice”: once in our flesh, but then once again in the Spirit. That one is the one for good. Everybody needs it. And everyone is offered it. May we believe in this wonderful, most infamous scandal. Amen.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,

‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’ ”

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Matthew 4:1-11

We have come back around to the season of Lent, a time of taking honest stock in where we are and where our sin may be in our walk with God. This naturally involves looking at temptation as our readings do today. And if we’re going to look at temptation, we’ve got to also take a look at how Satan works.

Satan is playing the role of the tempter here in our Matthew reading, even explicitly called “the tempter.” While the snake in Genesis is not specifically named as Satan, he still fulfills the role of the tempter in this notorious seduction of Eve. However, the Bible does not name the figure of “Satan” until the Book of Job. There, Satan does not get his name as a tempter, but rather another role, almost opposite to the Tempter: the Accuser.1

If we’re going to take stock of where we are with sin, our mistakes, and how we deviate from God, let’s think about these two big umbrella names for Satan: the Tempter and the Accuser. These roles are more related than we may think, two opposite sides of falling off the Way that are really entwined in the same thing: spiritual pride. Let me explain.

If you drove by our house this week, there is a good chance you saw my car looking like it was in the middle of the Daytona 500, tilted upwards 45 degrees, but instead of a track, my tires were spinning in snow off our raised driveway. This first happened on the right side of the driveway when I was backing up and just started feeling the slip. I thought, this isn’t so bad, I’m only barely off. So, tempted by hubris, I thought, I can just get out of this myself with a little creative mat placement. When that didn’t work, I thought I’d just turn my wheel the other way, go into reverse, and back up right onto the driveway. This only made matters worse, physics sliding my car further off. I dug out some more snow, waited for my wife to get home so I could push while she drove, and I still thought we could get it, but we just got deeper and deeper into the snow and off the driveway. Round one to hubris, saved by the grace of a tow, but deeply embarrassed.

So a couple days later, I clear our driveway, see the large gash on the hubris side, and say to myself that if there’s anything I’m not going to do, it’s get in that same ditch again. So I back up and overcorrect the other direction towards the house and the deceptively built-up snow. And yes, I fall on the other side, caught on the edge and in the air again. If you thought I was mad at myself the first time in embarrassment, this was true self-loathing (this Lent, I’m giving neighbors the gift of hearing the pastor swear). There was no temptation of hubris in this failure.

In both cases, while there was a physical problem of falling off on the side of the road, the real problem was my pride, showing up first as arrogance, then as humiliation. I was so embarrassed from the first failure, so adamant not to be hubristic, I ended up falling in and creating another gash on the other side. Even after a fresh snowfall on Friday night, these gashes look almost like scars in the snow.

I believe most of us carry some of these scars in the snow of our souls, on one side of the ditch or the other. These scars tell stories of pain, the times when temptation, hubris, and arrogance of our spiritual pride got us off the path of God that it caused us to hurt ourselves or other people. These scars tell a story to ourselves that “I must never do this again.” But perhaps this takes us to the other side of spiritual pride, and we become enamored by intense judgment, either from ourselves or a family member or authority figure or in our idea of God. If we become scarred by this judgment and realize it’s a ditch, we might reject the idea that we must ever feel shame, and there we are back on the other ditch of hubris doing what we feell like. One way Satan works is by feeding our spiritual pride on either side, driving a wedge between us and God by trying to create in us the scars of arrogance and the scars of shame.

This is Satan at his worst as both Tempter and Accuser. The Tempter gives us the pride of excessive non-judgment, that we can come up with our own rules, that God’s will doesn’t matter. The snake does this through his famous question, “Did God really say…?” Satan takes this idea further, goading Jesus by tempting him with Scripture, “Look, here’s what God really said. Now go use that power of yours.” Jesus, of course, counters with more Scripture, discerning the higher priorities, holding onto God’s overarching will.

But we are not like Jesus. We twist Scripture to be what we wish it to be and grab that fruit, seeking that knowledge of good and evil, for at least if we break God’s law, we’ll know something more true about the universe, the dark side of human nature. “Maybe,” we might think, “I can really be like God and know how to use my evil for good.” But the tragic irony is that as we keep trying to take more and more bites of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we don’t actually gain the knowledge of God; as Paul repeatedly says, the peak of our wisdom is utter foolishness compared to God’s foolishness in the cross. “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge, but anyone who loves God is known by him.” (1 Cor 8:2-3) And so the devil wedges us away from our love of God and being truly intimate with him, tempted by our own voracious appetite not simply for lusts of the flesh, but power, including the power of human knowledge and human wisdom.

So that’s the Tempter. I think we understand him better than the Accuser. But while the Accuser is Satan’s role in the Book of Job, the Accuser is actually in the snake in Genesis too, embedded within temptation. In Job, Satan plays the role of prosecutor, accusing Job of only loving God because God blesses him so much. But also, implicit in that is Satan accusing God that he is only loved because humans love what he does for them. And so as the story goes, Satan then tempts Job through suffering to curse God, which he never does.

Back to the Garden. In Genesis, the snake is not only tempting Eve, but also accusing both God and Eve through lies (another name for the devil, diabolos, is “the slanderer”). The snake accuses God of envy, saying, “God didn’t give you those rules because he loves you, but because he feels threatened by you. Eat the fruit, open your eyes, be like him.” Quite an accusation. Hidden within this is another accusation, this time towards humans: if you can only become like God by breaking his laws, then the fundamental accusation is that you are not enough for God. You ought to be ashamed at how pathetic you are. You can’t even get your car out of the snow. We religious people should recognize how often we can become the Accuser. The Accuser can be turned just as easily on ourselves as we turn it on other people.

If the Tempter part of the devil says, “Did God really mean that?”, the Accuser says, “You are too despicable for God.” The Tempter, pulling us to the Ditch of Arrogance, tells us that God’s rules are just suggestions, that obedience is unnecessary, and when we fall in that ditch, the Accuser yanks us the other way to the Ditch of Shame, which tells us we are utter frauds, that forgiveness is impossible, and God does not love you after all. The Tempter wants us to seize power by our own rules and become our own gods, while the Accuser says, “What an utter evil fool you were, and your rightful place is there in the ditch.”

Whether the devil is accusing you of being too bad or tempting you to think you’re too good, the goal is to get you off the path of trust and into a ditch of self-obsession by slandering us and slandering God. The very name of Jesus, Emmanuel, means, “God is with you,” and Satan wants us to believe, in one way or another, “God is not really with you. You cannot touch him, and he never wants to touch you.” A deep lie.

There is another option between the two deformed choices, either the Accuser with deformed judgment or the Tempter with deformed non-judgment. In between these ditches, on the Way, is discernment, trusting God’s commandments as reflecting his deep wisdom, receiving his teaching as a beautiful gift for us. In between these ditches is walking with Jesus and knowing he is not disgusted by you but wants to walk with you. In between these ditches is believing no, Satan, God really is with me. He is with all of us.

When we deeply discern, we can’t help but eventually end up at a place of confession. When we realize that yes, we cannot make ourselves like God, we repent of the ways we try to break spiritual laws and instead turn to utter reliance on God. When we realize we cannot perfectly obey the rules anyway, we turn to his mercies, new every morning. We remember that no matter how great or deep our sin is—and it is great and deep—God’s love is even greater and even deeper. It always is.

One of our big mistakes is making the devil too powerful, obsessing over his ditches—perhaps I’ve just done that here. We often end up in one ditch precisely because we’ve obsessed about the opposite ditch; we end up in shame because we’re obsessed with perfection, or we end up utterly depraved because we’re obsessed with not feeling shame. When Jesus faces these temptations and accusations, he simply shifts the paradigm: away, Satan, I don’t want that. I want to be fully with God and to love what he loves. I don’t want to fight your ditches, I want to be with him.

Have you fallen off on one side of the ditch recently? Have you done something awful, or can’t stop doing awful things to yourself? Have you been unkind? Have you been unfair? Have you been inconsiderate or inconsistent? Have you said something you’ve regretted, or held back something you realize you should have said? Have you been the accuser or the tempter? Do you have those scars in your snow? And has it been such a long winter that those tracks gashed into you are a memory that will not go away? Are the scars so deep that even when fresh snow falls, they are still there?

Fear not. The ice and snow will melt under his warmth. Your scars in the snow may still be there. There might still be tire tracks in the spring, there might be a bumper off, or maybe a screw or two loose. But as we carry on in Lent, trying and failing to drive on the path of discernment, never believe the lies of temptation or accusation. Remember that God is always with you. He knows your scars, for he carries his own. Amen.

Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the Israelites. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.

Exodus 24:15-18

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And the Lord said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘the Lord’, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.”

Exodus 33:18-20

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will set up three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they raised their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Matthew 17:1-9

Today on Transfiguration Sunday, we behold a story about a brand new glorious appearance of Jesus. But it’s not only about appearance. It’s also a story about hiding. What do I mean? I mean that the Transfiguration is not only about how Jesus appears to us, but about how we hide from God in plain sight.

Scripture can be tricky for us when it is both familiar and strange, so rather than just read it with our hearts, our brains get into analytical mode. Why does the Transfiguration get its own special Sunday? Why does Peter react how he does? Why does Jesus reveal himself this way and then conceal himself again?

We want to approach it like a puzzle to figure out, rather than being smacked in the face by the awe that the disciples actually felt on that mountain. Granted, it’s hard to have such secondhand awe; we may get more excited listening to a friend’s story about a vacation they just took to an exotic national park than we do hearing this story. And I feel like if I read this story with as much awe and reverence as the disciples felt on that day, some of you might think, “Joe has really gone out to lunch.”

If you do want one clue to this puzzle, take our reading from Exodus 24 where Moses goes up on Sinai and also has an awe-some and awe-full encounter with a new revelation of God. Remember what also happens later in Exodus 33 where Moses wants to see God in his full glory, but God says no, you can’t handle my full glory or it would kill you. You can see my goodness, I will proclaim my name, and I will have mercy on who I will have mercy…but my face? That would kill you. My glory will pass by you to see my back, Moses, but not my face.

Right after, God makes a place for his presence among his people, telling Moses how to build a tabernacle, the special tent that would move with God’s people wherever they went while also keeping them safe from God’s glory.

Why did they need to be kept safe from God’s glory? Because they—we—are sinners. We talked in our Sunday School class about what God’s glory entails, and there’s a lot of ways to slice it. But one way to think of the glory of God is the purest distillation of the creative force at the heart of the entire universe. Could you stand next to the Big Bang and live? Heck, we in Vermont had the eclipse two years ago, and we can’t even look at the sun 93 millions miles away without special little glasses. How are we to possibly see the Almighty who created that?

The Israelites knew that humanity is an impure people. They knew we could never fully and finally resolve our state of decay, which is most embodied in our subjugation to the forces of death. We could make sacrifices to God to ritually purify ourselves before Him, that some of us could be safe enough from his glory in his veiled presence.

So that day when Jesus suddenly transfigures before them into pure white light and a voice booms from heaven with a proclamation, is it any wonder that Peter and the disciples would be terrified? They know what happens when you see God. You die. After Moses merely saw God’s back, he had a glowing face the rest of his life; who wants to walk around with a face you can’t turn off? Seeing Jesus glowing and radiant with old Moses and Elijah, Peter says holy schnikies, we need some tabernacles—stat.

We often make fun of hapless Peter as a disciple. But at least in this story, Peter is merely afraid, not stupid. His response makes perfect sense. He is a sinner, and while he might not know completely who Jesus is yet, he’s now getting a better idea: Jesus is the holy son of God. And what should “good sinners” do with the holy? Hide ourselves. Just like Adam and Eve hid themselves in shame when they became aware of their sin in the garden, the instinct is to put a respectful distance between the Almighty and us. Peter didn’t know that Jesus was changing everything.

Why Transfiguration Sunday today? We remember it at the end of the season of Epiphany, extending the celebration of Christmas, the revelation of God in the world among us. If Christmas made us think that God appears in a beautiful, joyful world in a beautiful package that goes under the tree, the Transfiguration is like another Christmas for sinners—that is, the revelation of God is not to be covered, but to be among us in our impurity. So today we close Epiphany and enter into Lent, the period where we are invited to be reflective and penitent on our sin, by remembering that God really has entered into the world of temptation, of sin, of our ignorance, of our hypocrisy, and he doesn’t want to be cut off from us, but with us.

We remember that’s his name, right? Emmanuel, “God with us.” Sometimes Scripture emphasizes different parts of “God with us.” The Beatitudes we just studied say, “I am with you—the low, the outcast, the persecuted.” The Passion and the Cross emphasize that He is really with us in our suffering; as all of us will, Christ personally experienced slipping away into death in its emptiness. The Transfiguration shows the fullness of God that overcomes nothingness, the radiance of God that overcomes darkness, emphasizing, “I am God, and I AM with you.”

The God with us wasn’t just a political martyr who shares our pain or a nice rabbi ahead of his time. As Peter saw, this is the God who created the sun, the trees, the stars, the very laws of physics. If nature is powerful, imagine the One who made nature, the One at whom nature trembles, the One whom even the wind and the waves obey, who when he says “peace,” the world stills.

This is the God that is with us. This is the God that is with you.

But he doesn’t want us to hide from him. He just wants us to “listen to him.” And if we listen to him, we will come to know that he is among us. That his fingerprints are on all his beloved children. That whoever believes in him carries with them something of the Holy Spirit, and we are in his body together.

Unfortunately, we Christians are very good at hiding. In fact, I used to be less hidden when I wasn’t a Christian. One of the best parts of doing open-mic comedy as I did a decade ago, where you’re bombing to five people in Los Angeles cafes that you don’t know how are paying the rent, was getting to be in a strange, messed up community of people who were very honest about our sins together. Yes, perhaps we were a bit too celebratory in our confessions, but it was a beautiful kind of camaraderie, if not quite a community (it turns out it’s very hard to build a community of narcissists). But as we grow up from being over-honest children and grow older into our adult lives, we get burned for our honesty. Eventually, we are taught by the world and to some extent each other that honesty is not always the best policy. I believe in New England that we culturally affirm that the best policy is polite hiding.

The Church is often not any better at this. It is a place where we come to receive grace, but keep on hiding ourselves from God and each other. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is known most for his opposition to the Nazi regime that led to his death. During that time, he also wrote a tremendous book that is not about Nazism, but about their underground seminary in the 1930s, writing about what it means to live in Christian community. He observed that even our community, which knows we are sinners loved by God, has a hard time reaching true fellowship. He writes:

“The final break-through to fellowship does not occur [if we] have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people [but] do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

But we need not be this way. We can be with one another in true fellowship. We need not have tabernacles between us and God, nor tabernacles with each other. We can seek more and more honest and authentic relationships with one another. We can be more and more honest with God and each other about our doubts, our failures, and our regrets. We are here to practice growing in holiness, not to perform it nor believe we can perfect it. A church building isn’t a place to protect holy people from sinners, but for all of us to be gathered in God’s presence.

Today, this Transfiguration Sunday, God is daring us to be sinners in his presence. God is daring us to be sinners together. That’s the Almighty God, you know, the one who controls the wind and is brighter than the sun. But, as today’s Affirmation of Faith reads,1 his true glory was in the form of a servant—wisdom in a cross, goodness in receiving sinners.

The true power of our Almighty, transfigured God is that he wants to be in a relationship with you. And he loves when we are in a relationship with each other in his presence together.

Over the weeks of Lent that lead up to the cross, whether we’re giving up chocolate or reading the Bible every day for the first time in years, we will remember Jesus’ journey with us. So listen to him: you don’t need to hide from our glorious God. And if none of us are hiding from God together, then we don’t need to hide from each other. So once more: Merry Christmas, sinners. God is with us. Amen.