Month: January 2022

²¹ Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²² All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” ²³ He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” ²⁴ And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. ²⁵ But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, ²⁶ yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷ There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰ But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Luke 4:21-30

My sermon from the 4th Sunday after Epiphany (January 30, 2022) on Luke 4:21-30.

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So last weekend was a really amazing weekend for football. Every game was close, exciting, and required a last minute field goal. My favorite articles this week were full of quotes from Kansas City Chiefs fans who chose to leave Arrowhead stadium when there was only 13 seconds left in the fourth quarter. If you’re a fan of one of those teams that played or will play today, I’m happy for you. But if you’re a fan of another team, you might have spent this last week wondering how yours will stack up twice a year against Patrick Mahomes now that he’s entered his final form. As a devoted fan of the Denver Broncos, I have no idea how we’re going to win in the future. But I’m hopeful the team can figure it out and they started that process this week by hiring a new coach. Now, I’m getting used to the fact that, every two or three years, the Broncos fire their head coach and go find a new one. A good coach is hard to find and I don’t know all the details of what it takes for that to happen. But the whole process, from the outside, can be a bit frustrating because it feels like the same small group of people are interviewed every year. It seems like most have been a coach on each other’s staff and the whole adage – it’s not what you know but who you know – is on full display. On some level, it makes sense to hire people you already know because, in theory, you understand their strengths, weaknesses, and how they work. Yet when the same group of people keep hiring each other, a kind of bubble forms where their conversations, thoughts, expectations, and points of view reinforce the status quo. And once we’re in a bubble, our world becomes really small. This kind of network of relationships can be a life-giving place where we experience love, care, wholeness, and a sense of purpose. But when our network stays small, we end up limiting who we are because we act as if we already know what we can become. 

Today’s reading from the gospel according to Luke is a continuation of what we heard last week. Jesus had just started his ministry and was wandering in and out of the towns around the sea of Galilee. He made a pit stop in the town he grew up in, taking the opportunity to see his folks, do his laundry, and eat his mother’s food. He wasn’t in Nazareth for very long but Jesus, being Jewish, made sure to head to the synagogue on the sabbath day. When he walked through the door, I imagine people nodded their heads and came over to say hello. The community knew about his travels and they wanted to ask about his mom, his siblings, and what life was like being on the road. He was among the people he grew up with and that included his friends, his classmates, his neighbors, and everyone who had their own story about interacting with Jesus. They had, over the years, attended each other’s weddings, helped build each other’s homes, and brought their version of a 1st century casserole when a neighbor was in need. As neighbors in a small town, they created their own small network of people who had invested time, energy, and care for each other. They were their own kind of community and Jesus was a part of them. So when they handed him a scroll containing words from the Prophet Isaiah, Jesus was simply their Jesus. And after he announced he would be the one who’d make the oppressed go free, give sight to the blind, help all captives be released, and bring good news specifically to the poor, the community was amazed. Their Jesus was becoming a big deal and they turned to each other to speak. 

Now our story  records one thing they shared but I imagine that wasn’t the only thing they said. They already knew Jesus was doing new things and they got excited about what that might mean for them. In a world where who you know matters a lot, having a miracle worker in your in-group would be pretty awesome. We don’t know exactly what the community thought Jesus might do but they were excited about the possibilities. Their minds raced because they knew Jesus before he was cool. They assumed he would stay close to his friends and offer them the good news they specifically wanted. Yet what Jesus had in mind was a bit bigger than anything they expected. The good news he was bringing into the world wasn’t meant only for them. It was meant for everyone – which meant his words and his ministry were going to be a bit complicated. The good news one group wants to hear might not be the good news others need. Yet God’s love is always God’s love – and it works to constantly expand our imaginations about what is possible in our world. It moves us to break through the bubbles we build because the limitations we place on our relationships will not limit the work of our God. When we stay primarily focused only on the people around us, our imagination becomes a bit stagnant since the stories we share, the situations we find ourselves in, and our assumptions about what it means to live well in the world remains the same. It’s difficult to be new when we can’t see new and we sometimes don’t even realize how limited we are. We need a gentle or not so gentle nudge from Jesus to show our bubbles are not the limit of what it means to be with God. There is always more and that more is going to build bridges through, around, and over the walls we build that keep our relationships small. 

Now those kinds of relationships are never easy because what works among one group of people might not work with someone else. We have to grow in how we communicate with each other and that requires learning each other’s history, values, hopes, and dreams. This work invites us to listen to stories that might challenge who we know ourselves to be. And it expands our sense of what good news actually is because what’s good for a Bronco fan might not be what the Rams need when they take the field this afternoon. The good news of God is a very particular kind of news because it speaks to who we are right now. It challenges us in ways that require us to love and serve and see the world differently while giving us hope that God’s promises are actually true. The limits we place on what’s possible with God are limits that God will always break through. And that’s because by the very nature of our baptism – of our being brought into this body of Christ that includes people from all places, all walks of life, all genders, all nationalities, and even from different time periods – we are already connected to a web of relationships that can never be small. We are part of an inclusive and expansive in-group that breaks through every smaller in-group we set up that invites us to do one one hardest and yet most essential things we can do in our lives. And that’s to just love. Love the people we’re with. Love the people who know us and who claim us as their own. Love the people we don’t know and those who God brings into our lives. And when we feel the urge to keep our network of relationships small, we need to let the limitlessness of God’s love show us how big God’s kingdom actually is. Now we’re always going to have our own in-groups. And it’s okay to have our own network of people that nourishes our body, mind, and spirit. Yet these networks are not meant to be the limit of our relationships because the Son of God connects us to so much more. We can, through love, keep ourselves and our communities open to the possibility we can change and grow. And even though we can’t fully know what that growth will look like, the Jesus who has made us part of his network of relationships will be there to carry us through. 

Amen. 

¹All the people [of Israel] gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. ²Accordingly, Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. ³He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. ⁵And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people, and when he opened it, all the people stood up. ⁶Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. ⁸So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

⁹And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. 

¹⁰Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

My sermon from the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany (January 23, 2022) on Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.

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One of the neat things, I think, about the incarnation – about God’s decision to enter the entirety of our human story by being a real human being – is how it invites us to pay attention to the physical nature of our lives and our world. We are not just a series of thoughts floating around in our heads. We are embodied, moving through a world filled with things to touch, smell, taste, see, and hear. This  physicalness is a big part of our lived story and it’s also a big part of God’s story too. One way we engage deeper with our Bible is by remembering how these stories happened in places filled with dirt, buildings, trees, grass, sand, rocks, animals, and people. The words in our Bible are more than just bits of ink on a piece of paper or shaded pixels on a screen. They show us where God’s story is lived out. 

And that physicalness, I think, is a big part of our first reading from the book of Nehemiah. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one story that was eventually split in two. And they give us a kind of spiritual reflection unpacking what happened in Jerusalem once the Jewish community returned. In the year 586 BCE, the Babylonian empire destroyed Jerusalem and forced most of its surviving population to live hundreds of miles away along the banks of the Euphrates river. For roughly 70 years the community lived in exile and had to learn what it meant to be Jewish without access to their promised land. During their time away, they began to give the Hebrew Bible its shape. Their story – from the book of Genesis through the Prophets – was collected, edited, and written down on scrolls. This process involved a lot of listening, reading, reflecting, prayer, and negotiations over what to include. They clung tightly to promises given to Abraham and to how God rescued them from slavery in Egypt. They celebrated every commandment, every covenant, and the glory they saw in the Davidic kingdom. And when things went wrong, they noticed their God was with them even when their hope was gone. 

Now when the Persians destroyed the Babylonian Empire, they allowed the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem. Some chose to stay where they were while others packed up their belongings and headed west. When they arrived in their former capital city, what they found was a lot of work. Jerusalem was in ruins and the Temple – the place God promised to be – was a pile of rubble. The old rules about who lived where and who owned what no longer applied because those who weren’t exiled had made new lives for themselves in the place where the kings of Judea once ruled. Those who returned knew things had changed but after spending an entire lifetime listening to stories of the city’s greatness, they had a vision in their heads of what the city of Jerusalem was all about. Yet when what remained of the city first came into view, their expectations ran headfirst into their reality. Everything had changed and their hard work had just begun. 

So when the community gathered at the Water Gate, they were doing two things. First, they were celebrating the holy day that would eventually become known as Rosh Hashanah. Second, they chose to also acknowledge that, roughly 65 years since their initial return from exile, the city walls were finally complete. Jerusalem was beginning to look like the city they held within their hearts and they could, in a tangible way, express their faith through an early version of the Torah in their City of David. I can’t help but think that, while standing and listening to God’s story in that physical place, some felt as if things were finally returning to normal. As they closed their eyes, it seemed as if they had gone back to that moment before all this stuff happened. But when they opened their eyes and truly saw what was all around them, they wept because they realized they couldn’t go back. Change had happened. And in the words of Rev. Katie Hines-Shah, “maybe… [they couldn’t] return to [their] normal after all.” 

Now Nehemiah doesn’t tell us exactly why the people wept. But on this Sunday as we return to in-person worship after a few weeks away, I see their weeping as a response to the loss of our so-called normal. We all had our vision of what the church and our lives would be like when this pandemic was finally over. And last summer and fall, it looked like our normal might finally return. But then the uncertainty of this pandemic required us to step away from in-person worship again. And while each of us has been impacted by this current stage of the pandemic in different ways, what I saw and heard and personally experienced was a kind of exhaustion manifesting itself as sadness, tears, anger, frustration, and a desire to just pretend as if we’re already moved on. It’s hard to not be really tired right now. And it’s exhausting being a parent or a grandparent or a caregiver or a teacher or nurse or a doctor or just a plain human being in this moment. Many of our actions and in-actions have been shaped by a longing and a grief for this return to normal. Yet there are days when our weeping and mourning seem to be the entirety of what this new normal is all about. We still don’t know what the future will bring but we do know there’s no going back to the way things were. Everything has changed and it’s okay to stop pretending that it hasn’t. 

Yet, as we hear in our words from Nehemiah, “this day is holy to the Lord your God.” This day – not the one that happened in the past or the one we hope for the future – is holy. And that’s because God doesn’t wait for the city to be rebuilt, repaired, and returned to its former glory before God chooses to re-enter the story. God didn’t despise the Jewish community because things had changed. God didn’t shy away from them because they were gathering and celebrating and doing things a bit differently than before. God was with them in their new ways of being in the world because God had always been with them – even when they were exiled to a place far from their physical and spiritual home. And when it came time to hear God’s story, the bits that were shared came from the Torah – the first five books of the Bible that do not focus on the community’s time in the promised land. It’s a story that’s a little incomplete because it ends before they get to the place where they are going. The story ends with the community still wandering but trusting that God was about to carry them into a new kind of future. The narrative within the Torah wraps up long before the story of the community ends. And that’s because God knew that they had a future and had way more life to live. 

So that means, that even during this time which will never again look like our past, we get to celebrate the goodness of our God because God has already declared we belong. Our story is still not complete but we are completely in our God because, through baptism and faith, we are part of God’s future. That doesn’t mean that today won’t be hard. But it does invite us to trust that what’s changed won’t change the promises of our God. We can, together, use this moment to make sure that our worship, our prayers, and our lives embody the physical presence of the God who is always with us. We will move into God’s future because God’s future is already moving through us. 

Amen.