Spirit of Grace

Sunday 11 August 2019
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

The text from Isaiah this morning comes in three parts, and so you get a sermon in three parts. In part one, we are told that worship is worthless if it doesn’t lead to social justice. In part two, God offers to let us talk through our situation. In part three, God offers us forgiveness and a transformed life.

Part One. The majority of this text from Isaiah is concerned with the upside down priorities of the people, particularly the well-to-do and comfortable of society. It seems that the people of Judah are doing everything right when it comes to following the rules of worship and making offerings to God. They are giving all of the proper sacrifices. They are observing all of the appointed times of worship, attending to all of the religious festivals. But for some reason, even though they seem to be doing everything right, God is unhappy with them.

New moon, sabbath, and the calling of an assembly—

I can’t stand wickedness with celebration!

I hate your new moons and your festivals.

They’ve become a burden that I’m tired of bearing.

The first impression we often have of God’s rejection of this Judean worship is to think that the Judeans are worshiping incorrectly, or that God is somehow asking them to move their worship in a new direction. Maybe God is trying to tell them that the sacrifice of animals as a form of worship is wrong. Maybe God is telling them that their rituals are empty. This has often been the view of many Christians, especially Protestants.

But that doesn’t seem to square with the text that we have in front of us today. Yes, God is sick of all of the burnt offerings and the Sabbaths and the new moon festivals. But it is not because these are inherently incorrect forms of worship. Quite the contrary.  It is not the style of worship that God is upset with, it is the result of the worship. The problem that God has with the Judeans is that even though they are putting forth all of this wonderful worship, it is not leading to social justice in the world. God tells them that worship is worthless if it does not lead them to right action, if it does not lead them to care for the poor, if it does not lead them to tend the planet, if it does not lead them to bring about justice in the world.

And that is certainly something that relates to our lives as Christians in today’s world. There are frequently discussions and arguments in churches about worship and worship styles. Do we sing older hymns, or do we sing more contemporary songs? Do we use a hymnal, or do we print the words on a screen. When do we sit, when do we stand, and when do we kneel? Do we use traditional language or contemporary language? What method do we use for taking communion and how often do we take it?

These are all interesting questions, and well worth discussing, but they are not the questions that are raised in today’s text. No, the message that we hear from God today is not concerned with what style of worship we use, but in whether or not our worship is effective. And the standard of effectiveness is not whether or not we enjoy it, it’s not whether or not it makes us feel better, and, surprisingly, it’s not even whether or not it gives us an experience of the divine.

According to Isaiah, the standard for effective worship is whether or not it leads us to act with justice. Does our worship cause us to deal fairly and justly with our neighbors? Does it cause us to look out for the poor and the oppressed? Does our worship lead us to care for the needs of our community? Does it lead us to call for laws that will protect the most vulnerable in our society? Does it lead us to defend the planet that is our home?

According to Isaiah, if our worship does not do these things, then it is worthless. If our worship just makes us feel better on Sunday morning but doesn’t lead us into service in the world, then God finds it repugnant. If our worship makes us think that we are right and well with God, but it doesn’t call us to do God’s work in the world, then God wants no part of it.

Because worship is meant to make us better disciples. It is meant to bring us closer to God, and being close to God means being a promoter of justice. Worship should produce the fruit of faith in the world, not just satisfy our hearts. So if we are coming here just to get our weekly fix of religion, but our lives outside of this sanctuary are not changed, then we are not right with God.

Which leads us to Part Two. The truth is that we are not always right with God. We don’t do everything that we should do. We do do things that we shouldn’t. We are not as good of disciples as we could be. And too often we leave the doors of the church on Sunday afternoon and go about our lives virtually unchanged by the message of God that we shared inside.

But even in the midst of God chiding the Judeans for similar faults, God says something very interesting. The version I like best comes from the New Revised Standard Version: “Come, let us argue it out.” In other translations it is rendered, “Come, let us reason together.” It’s not something that we often think about doing with God: arguing and reasoning. More often we think that arguing with God would be some sort of sin, somehow sacrilegious. After all, isn’t God always right? Wouldn’t arguing with God be rejecting the divine will?

But here God tells us plainly, “Let us argue it out.” God seems to want to give us a chance to state our case on the matter, to give our defense for our actions. God wants to talk it over with us, to give us time to share our side of the story. It’s a truly remarkable image of God, as one who is willing to work with us, who is ready to listen to us and our situation. And it is an image of God that we would be wise to pay attention do. God can handle our argument, our hurt feelings, even our willfulness. God would rather have us be argumentatively engaged than silently detached.

After all of that arguing and reasoning and settling of things with God, we are led finally to Part Three of our story. Even though we have fallen short of what God desires of us, God is willing and ready to forgive us.

Though your sins are like scarlet,

they will be white as snow.

If they are red as crimson,

they will become like wool.

God can wipe our sins and misdeeds away and make us clean again. God can take out the stains of our guilt and make us pure and holy again. God can forgive us, make us God’s children once again. It is a wonderful mystery of faith that even when we make the worst of mistakes, God is always waiting, always ready to forgive us, always ready to welcome us home.

But God’s work in our lives does not end with forgiveness. It isn’t just about cleaning up our old messes and washing away our sins. God’s grace for us extends beyond that. God offers us a transformed life. God will not only blot our old sins, but God will also walk with us so that we don’t we do better the next time. God will set us on the right path. God will inspire us to do God’s work in the world. To care for the poor and the broken. To be good stewards of the created world that God has granted us. God will make us into better disciples. God will help us to do the work that we were unable to do on our own.

God’s grace is not just a get-out-of-jail-free card. God’s grace doesn’t leave us as parolees. No, God’s grace continues to work on us, to transform us into faithful servants, and even into beloved children. If we are willing. If we are willing to be transformed, then God is ready to do it.

So to wrap things up: God wants more than just good singing and nice prayers from us when we come here to worship; God wants our worship to send us out into the world to serve and to call for justice. When we do miss the mark, though, God is ready to talk it over with us, to argue it out, to reason through our situation and to settle things. And when we are ready and willing to follow God’s way, God will wash us clean of our sins and empower us to be better disciples. God is there with us every step of the way, leading us out of sin into a transformed life, and offering us grace all along the way.

Sunday 28 July 2019
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 17C

Luke 11:1-13

Jesus’s disciples ask him, “Teach us to pray. And Jesus responds to them with words that sound somewhat familiar, and also a little off. I’m going to read it again from Luke, but from a translation that is a little closer to the version we use each week, from the New Revised Standard Version. “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

The Lord’s Prayer. We recited it together every Sunday. We’re going to pray it together in just a few minutes. The version that we use on Sunday mornings is not the version that most of us grew up with. If you grew up in a Methodist or a Lutheran church, you probably grew up with an older version that included the phrase, “forgive us our trespasses.” And you may have noticed that if you go to a Baptist church you have to say “forgive us our debts.” If you worship with Episcopalians, you have to say “forever and ever.” And if you go to mass with Catholics, you’d better be sure to stop before “for thine is the glory” or you will find yourself singing a solo. The version that we use in worship on Sundays was translated by an ecumenical group called the English Language Liturgical Consultation in 1988. I’m not sure how long Lutherans have been using it, but the Methodist Church has been encouraging congregations to use it since 1989.

The Lord’s Prayer is nearly universal. Christians all of over the world use it as a part of their worship. And we all seem to say it a little differently. There are two different versions of it in the bible. Matthew records it in the sixth chapter, as a part of the Sermon on the Mount. Luke records it here in the eleventh chapter, still recognizable as the same prayer, but a little bit different. But neither Matthew’s version nor Luke’s version is the one that we use in church. We get our version from another early Christian text called the Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.

It may also surprise you to know that even if we only look at Matthew, or even if we only look at Luke, there are still differences in how the Lord’s Prayer is recorded. The books of the New Testament were written in Greek, but none of the original manuscripts have survived. Instead we have copies of copies and fragments from centuries after the gospels were written. And even if we go back to our very earliest copies of the New Testament, they don’t agree with each other, and sometimes they have some pretty major differences. If you look in your own English bibles at this passage, you’ll find some evidence of those differences, because different translators have decided to trust different early Greek sources when making their translations. Most of the best, earliest sources have something close to the version I just read for you. Some sources have a version that has probably been edited by scribes to align more closely to the version found in Matthew. Some early versions even contain a line you’ve probably never heard in the Lord’s Prayer before: “Your Holy Spirit come upon us and purify us.”

To put it directly, even from the very earliest times, there were a lot of slightly different versions of the Lord’s Prayer circulating around, so it might be best for us not to get too worked up over something as trivial as the difference between debts, trespasses, and sins. Instead, let’s take a closer look at the version we have in front of us, a little bit simpler, more direct version of the prayer than the one we learned in Sunday school.

“Father,” it begins. Just “Father,” no “who art in heaven.” “Father.” What does it mean to address God as “Father”? In the Ancient world, father had quite a different meaning than it does for most of us today. The father, or pater familias, was the oldest and highest-ranking male in any given family. If we were living in ancient Palestine today, I would not be the father in my family, it would be my dad. And as long as he was alive, he would literally own everyone else in the family—my mom, me, Melissa, Karthik, Kaylah, Kiahla. If I had any brothers or unmarried sisters, he would own them too, and any children they might have. In addition, he would own any slaves that might be in our household. Whatever the pater familias said was the law. If he wanted to, he could sell me, or anyone else in the family, into slavery. He would decide what we did with our lives. He would decide whom we married, where we worked, and even whether our children would live or die. I like my dad, but I have to admit, I’m glad times have changed. I wouldn’t really want my dad making those kinds of decisions for me, and I certainly wouldn’t want the responsibility of making those kinds of decisions for the family once he was gone.

Because you see, the father did not just have the power over the family, the father also had responsibility for the family. The father had to provide the economic means and opportunities. The father had to arrange for suitable marriage partners. The father had to promote the family’s interests in the community and uphold the honor of the family.

To call God our father is to give full power and responsibility for our lives into God’s hands. It is to release our own desires and to do with our lives those things that are pleasing to God. It is to trust that God does have a plan for us and that God’s plan is better than our plans.

And calling God father also means that we take on the responsibility of children of God. We recognize that our actions, whether good or bad, reflect on God. If we feed the poor, clothe the hungry, heal the sick, then that reflects on God, because we are God’s children. And if we hoard our possessions, if we are consumed with greed, if we hurt our neighbors or are indifferent to the needs in the world, then that also reflects on God. It’s been said that “the greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and walk out the door, and deny him by their lifestyle.” Calling God our father doesn’t just mean trusting God to provide for us, it also means living in a way that brings honor to God.

“Hallowed be you name.”  It cracks me up that even in most of our modern translations of the Lord’s Prayer, we still say “hallowed.” Sometimes we even use the Elizabethan pronunciation, hallow-ed. Does anyone actually know what hallowed means? I think in my entire 40 years of life the only times I have ever heard the word hallowed is in the Lord’s prayer or in the phrase, “the hallowed halls.” I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I know it sounds pretentious.

The world in Greek, ἁγιασθήτω, is actually much more straightforward—it means to make something holy. Father, may your name be made holy, may it be sanctified, may it be set apart. It acknowledges that God is different than the rest of the world. God is unique. God is the creator of the universe, not just a part of it. And as such, God is holy. The hallowing of God’s name means that we, as God’s creations, lift up God, set God apart, as the source of our very being.

But it is also a call to God, a request that God reveal Godself as holy. That is to say that the hallowing of God’s name means that God will reveal God’s own uniqueness to humanity. God will reveal Godself to be God, the one and only God, the creator of the universe.

“Your kingdom come.” Kingdom probably isn’t the best word. For one thing, most of us are not very familiar with kingdoms in our everyday lives; we live in a republic. Furthermore, when we think of a kingdom, we typically imagine a man with a crown in a medieval European castle surrounded by knights in shining armor and ladies in long brocade dresses—a scene that was unlike anything anyone in Jesus’s time could have possibly imagined.

It makes a little more sense to talk about the reign of God, or even of the Empire of God. The political system that would have been familiar to Jesus’s first audience was the Roman Empire, and the Greek word that we translate as kingdom is the same word that would have been used to talk about the empire. Thus, when we talk about God’s Kingdom, God’s Empire, we are talking about it in direct relation and in opposition to the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus.

May God’s Empire come. Jesus preached a lot about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He wasn’t talking about something that happens after we die. His message was always, “The Kingdom of God has come near.” “God’s reign is very near to you.” Jesus was talking about a new world order. He was talking about a sort of revolution, in which the Empire of God was breaking into the ordered world and would supplant the power of the Empire of Caesar. In a sense, Jesus’s followers had a choice; they could choose what their reality was. They could either live in the world around that everyone could see and taste and hear, the world of the Roman Empire. Or they could live in a different reality, a more true reality, a reality the recognized the ultimate sovereignty of God; they could live as citizen’s of God’s Empire.

Living in God’s Empire meant living by a different set of rules. It meant following God’s laws first, over and above any other laws. And when God’s laws disagreed with the Roman laws, it meant breaking those secular laws, even at the risk of torture or death.

In God’s Empire, the poor and the weak are blessed and the rich and the powerful are brought down low. In God’s Empire, a person’s worth is not measured in the abundance of their possessions. In God’s Empire, citizens humble themselves in service instead of seeking after fame, wealth, or glory. In God’s Empire, justice reigns, not just justice for those who can afford it, but justice for the last and the lost and the least.

God’s Empire is still breaking into our world. And we can choose to be a part of it. We can choose to reject the materialism and the greed and the racism and the bigotry and the violence around us, and to live by a different law: the law of love. Dear God, may your Kingdom come.

“Give us each day our daily bread.” We ask God to provide for our basic needs. Give us each day the food that we need for that day. We don’t ask for extra. We don’t ask for a surplus, for extravagance. It’s not give me today the champagne and caviar and prime rib that I want, give me enough food today so that I’ll never have to worry about food again. No, it is give us each day the bread we need for today. Not just for me. Not just for my family alone. Give us, all of us, the food that we need for today. That is enough.

“And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” We are human beings. We make mistakes. We fall short of what God wants for us. Using the word sin can confuse the matter sometimes. We usually try to reserve the word sin for only things that we think are really, really bad. What sin really means is to miss the mark. That’s all, to miss the mark. We were trying to do one thing, or we should have done one thing, but we didn’t quite make it. We missed the mark. And if that is what sin is, then my friends, all of us are sinning all of the time. It is only in very rare and very brief moments that we live completely into the perfection that God intends for us, and even then we usually spoil it by becoming overly proud of ourselves.

We need God’s forgiveness. We need God to help us get over our shortcomings so that we can try again. We need God to release us from the debilitating guilt that can so often keep us from doing anything good at all. We need God’s forgiveness. And amazingly, God is willing to forgive us.

But Jesus suggests a sort of a bargain for us. We owe an incredible amount to God, we are in need of so much forgiveness. And yet when we ask, God forgives us. So, Jesus suggests to us, when you’re asking God for forgiveness, and when God grants it, why don’t you do your best to do the same for people who need forgiveness from you.

Forgiving is hard. When we get hurt by someone, it’s really difficult to work up the grace to forgive them. I think that we tend to think that if we forgive, then we are denying that the wrong ever occurred. We have to pretend like we never got hurt or like we are not still hurting. But that isn’t what forgiveness is. Forgiveness acknowledges the hurt, it acknowledges the offense, but it has the grace to say, “I am not going to let this hurt destroy us. Yes, I was hurt. Yes, there may even be consequences for that hurt. But I am not going to keep punishing you or myself over it again and again. We’re moving forward from here.” That is the nature of forgiveness, a forgiveness that does not wipe away or erase, but a forgiveness that heals. We have been forgiven. Let us also forgive.

“And do not bring us to the time of trial.” Don’t test us unnecessarily. Don’t overburden us with things that we simply will not be able to bear. If we must face temptation, then help us to overcome it. In other words, don’t abandon us when things get tough. Walk with us all the way. Help us to follow the right path and not to get lost along the way. Do not bring us to the time of trial.

The Lord’s Prayer sets out Jesus’s program for our prayer lives. Certainly, it is a rote prayer that we can recite together, and that is a wonderfully valuable thing to do. But it is more than that. Jesus’s prayer gives direction to all of our prayers. In our prayers we should praise God. We should acknowledge God as unique and holy, as our only God, and we should live our lives as children of God. We should call upon God to bring forth the divine kingdom in our world, and we should commit ourselves to living as citizen’s of God’s kingdom. We should ask God for the things that we need and trust that God will provide everything that we need, if not always everything that we want. We should ask God for forgiveness, and having received it, we should have the grace to extend that forgiveness to others. And we should ask God to walk with us, to carry us through the hard times, to help us to face any challenges that might come our way. This is the prayer that Jesus has taught us. May God give us strength to pray it with all our hearts, whenever we pray. Amen.

Sunday 14 July 2019
The Fifth Sunday of Pentecost

Luke 10:25-37

The scene opens on Jesus as he is on his way to Jerusalem. He has sent out his seventy disciples already to spread the good news and heal, and they have returned with their reports. And now something happens that seems a bit strange to us, but it must have been quite ordinary for people at the time.

Someone comes up and asks Jesus a question. Most bible translations call him a lawyer or a legal expert., and that is accurate to some degree, but it is also a bit confusing. What he is is an expert in the bible. He knows the words of scripture inside and out, and it’s his job to know the bible and interpret it for the people in his community, in his village.

So this bible expert comes up to Jesus and asks him a question. Luke tells us that he asks the question in order to test Jesus. That’s the part that seems a bit strange to us modern readers. Why would someone who is otherwise a stranger come and ask Jesus a question in order to test him? He must be one of the people who is trying to bring down Jesus. Maybe he is even part of the conspiracy to get Jesus killed. It’s difficult to think of any other motivation this lawyer would have to test Jesus, and so we often jump to cast him in the role of villain.

In fact, he is not a villain, and people at the time would have had no such confusion. They would have immediately understood, without even thinking about it, what was going on. It was quite common, and is still common today in cultures that highly value honor, for men to engage in these sorts of verbal battles. Scholars today call them “challenge and riposte.” It’s a sort of game of wits in which the two participants put their honor on the line, and the winner comes out with more honor, the loser with less.

When the bible expert comes up and asks a question of Jesus in order to test him, he is making a challenge to Jesus’s honor, but it isn’t necessarily hostile or malevolent. This is simply what people did. It was a sort of game, and anyone who thought they knew the scriptures well might have come up and challenged this traveling rabbi with a question simply to prove which one of them had a better command of the bible.

So let’s get into what they actually say. The bible expert challenges Jesus with the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus accepts the challenge and counter-challenges by turning the question back on the questioner, “You’re a bible expert. What does the bible say? What do you read there?”

You see, now our young lawyer thinks he’s got the upper hand in this argument. He has a textbook answer ready to go and once he gives it, Jesus won’t be able to say anything back. He will have won. So he gives his flawless answer, quoted from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all you mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Nothing Jesus can say to that, or so he thinks.

Jesus concedes that the bible expert has gotten it right. Normally this would mean that Jesus had lost the battle of wits. But instead, Jesus counter-challenges not with a technical question, but with a call to action: “Do this, and you will live.”

The bible expert is caught by surprise. He had been on top in their little competition, but now Jesus has upped the stakes by implying that he, an expert in the scripture, has not been living out the scriptural call to love God and neighbor that he has been preaching. He can’t leave it at that. He’s got to respond. And so he asks Jesus another question, “And who is my neighbor?”

He seems to be trying to trip Jesus up again. Whom will Jesus include as neighbor, and who will Jesus leave out? According to the bible, it’s other members of the household of Israel who are neighbors, and maybe sojourners in the land of Israel, but no one else. Foreign merchants and tax collectors weren’t neighbors. The Roman soldiers and government officials weren’t neighbors. And certainly those heretics in Samaria were not neighbors. They were enemies, and there was no need to love them. They should only be hated and resisted.

Jesus, of course, has a very different answer. But he doesn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he tells a story. A man is traveling the sometimes dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho when he is robbed, stripped, and beaten half to death. A priest goes by, a levite goes by, but a Samaritan stops and helps.

Now, priests and levites were at the top of the Jewish religious hierarchy. They were people set apart to be pure and holy for God, and as such, they had several purity laws spelled out in the bible that they were bound to keep. They had to stay holy and undefiled so that when they served in God’s temple, the offerings they made would be pure and undefiled. They were not allowed to come into contact with human blood, and they certainly were not allowed to touch a corpse. The only time a priest could touch a corpse would be to bury his own parent, and even then he would be made ritually unclean and would be barred from serving in the temple for some time until he was purified. It would have been a major breach of protocol for a priest or a Levite to approach what would have looked to them like a naked corpse. It would have been an abomination before God to allow one of God’s priests to be defiled in such a way.

A Samaritan, on the other hand, would not have had the same concerns about staying pure, but no self-respecting Israelite would have wanted to be touched by a Samaritan. They were believers in God, and they read the bible just like Israelites, but both Israel and Samaria considered each other to be hopeless heretics and enemies. The last person this man on the roadside would have expected to help him was a Samaritan.

Jesus rejects the premise of the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and instead proposes another question, “Who acts as a neighbor?” Love in the spirit of God is not about asking, “Who is worthy of love?” It is about asking, “Who has the grace to love another, even an enemy?”

It’s easy for us to put up barriers between ourselves and others. It’s easy for us to draw lines between those who are inside and those who are outside, those whom we are willing to love and those whom we are not. This person isn’t religious enough. She’s too liberal. He’s too conservative. He’s too old. She’s too young. They look different than we do. They speak a different language. They have a different religion. They come from a different country. They aren’t worthy. They don’t belong. They are outsiders. It’s easy for us to say, “I’m willing to go this far, but that is simply too much.”

But if we are to take Jesus’s words seriously, then we have to challenge those ideas. We have to challenge the idea that there are some people who are outside the love of God, some people whom we can simply discount, ignore, or marginalize. For those who seek to follow Jesus, that simply is not the case. Jesus calls us to love God and to love our neighbors—all of our neighbors, even the ones we don’t like very much. As Jesus tells us, we are to love even our enemies.

And is that easy? No, it’s not. There are some people that we have good reason to be wary of. And we each hold prejudices that we have collected over a lifetime, some of which have been handed down to us from generations past. It is not easy to love people whom we find different, or offensive, or even dangerous. But with the help of God, we can go beyond tolerance, we can go beyond acceptance, and we can love all of God’s children with the love of God, just as we ourselves have first been loved by God.

Sunday 16 June 2019
Trinity Sunday

Romans 5:1-5

One of the great moral philosophers of our time has said, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” That philosopher, of course, is Master Yoda. He tells about something like a slippery slope. One thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, and before you know it, things have gotten a whole lot worse. So if you want to avoid suffering, then you should avoid hate. If you want to avoid hate, then you should avoid anger. If you want to avoid anger, you should avoid fear. It is a lesson in mindfulness. Beware of where your thoughts wander, because when your mind becomes comfortable with fear, it will more easily move to anger. And when it becomes comfortable with anger, it will more easily move to hate. And when your mind becomes comfortable with hate, it will be comfortable with suffering, more specifically, with inflicting suffering on others. So be mindful of your hatred. Be mindful of your anger. Be mindful of your fear.

In the reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans today, we hear about another kind of progression. And interestingly, it starts in the same place that Yoda ends. Hate leads to suffering, Yoda said. Paul begins with suffering. The translation we read this morning uses the word trouble. We even take pride in our sufferings, Paul says, because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Rather than sliding down a slippery slope, Paul finds that suffering and trouble actually lead, step by step, to something better. How does he make it to that conclusion?

He starts with trouble, suffering. The Greek word is θλῖψις. It literally means pressure, like physical pressure. The feeling of something weighing down, something pressing in. From that sense of compression, it has a metaphorical sense of oppression. It is generally something that comes from outside. It’s not an interior strife. It’s something from outside that puts pressure on your life. For Paul, it probably meant the added pressure that came along with being a Christian, or with being a missionary, in his time—the threat of persecution from the government, the pain of being excluded from family and friends who don’t understand, the suspicion from neighbors.

Some of those pressures are still relevant today. Here in the United States we aren’t under any threat from the government for being Christian. But we do still run the risk of looking strange, looking foolish for our faith. We live in a culture in which participation in a faith community is not the norm. And living by our Christian values, standing up for justice for marginalized peoples can land one in prison. Several of our Lutheran and Methodist sisters and brothers were arrested recently, protesting for humane treatment and access to legal services for those who are being indefinitely detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They put their own freedom on the line to fight for those whose freedom has been taken away altogether. Living out your Christian values can be risky. Living your Christian values can put you at risk. Living your Christian values can put you under pressure.

But pressure, suffering, might come from other sources. The suffering of grief, the suffering of medical issues, family strife, poverty, prejudice, discrimination, intolerance, hunger, homelessness. Any of these can add weight to your life, can add pressure. Pressure that splits a family in two, puts people on streets..

Paul knows that that kind of pressure can be destructive. He does not encourage people to go out looking for suffering. He does not suggest that people should remain in a state of oppression, but that they should struggle against it.

But he also knows that, by God’s grace, sometimes even suffering can be redeemed. Sometimes suffering can lead to something good.

And the next step on that road of transformation is endurance. Suffering produces endurance. This is a tough one. Endurance. Does it mean simply that you endure suffering, that you survive even though you are in a state of suffering? Does it mean quietly putting up with oppression?

I don’t think so. The Greek word is ὑπομονὴ. It literally means remaining behind, but it is commonly used as endurance, patience—those both sound pretty passive. But it also means perseverance, patient expectation, even obstinance.

Endurance is not passive. It is not simply taking pain. Endurance is about seeing the struggle through to the end. Endurance is not about laying down in the midst of struggle. Endurance is about standing up in the midst of struggle, getting up every time you fall down, moving forward, forward, forward, even in the face of opposition.

When you are in the midst of the struggle, it might not seem like endurance is a good thing. You might feel overwhelmed. You might feel as though no good could ever come out of your situation. You might well feel as though you wish you weren’t in the situation. And like I said, you shouldn’t go out looking for suffering just so you can develop endurance. But when you are in a situation of suffering, it just might be that your endurance is strengthened. It just might be that God pulls good out of the situation of your troubles, in the form of endurance, perseverance, even obstinance.

Struggle produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Doesn’t that sound like something a parent would say when their child complains about whatever it is that they are frustrated with? Oh, it builds character. Talking about character-building can be a bit dismissive of what it is that someone has endured. But Paul agrees with the common wisdom that persisting in the midst of suffering can produce character.

The Greek word is δοκιμὴ. It actually refers to a test or a proof, and then comes to refer to something that has been tested. It is the character of someone who has been proven because they have endured an ordeal.

When you sit down and think about yourself, about who you are as a person, as you think about what constitutes your character, your personality, what is it that produces that character, that personality? Perhaps some of it is just innate in who you are. But some of it comes from your experiences in life. And does your character flow from the experiences in your life that were easy? Or does your character flow from the experiences in your life that were hard? Some of both, I imagine, but likely the strongest parts of you were developed through your struggles, were the parts that were broken and then grew back stronger, like a bone or callus. There may also be tender places within you, the residue of old wounds, but even those tender places can be a source of strength. It is out of our own woundedness that we develop compassion. Sometimes enduring hardship can toughen you up. Sometimes enduring hardship can soften you up. Either of those might make you a stronger person. 

So suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character. But what comes next? What is the point of all of this suffering and persistence and character-building? What makes it all worthwhile? What does character lead to?

It’s not victory. It’s not dominance. It’s not safety or security. And it’s not resignation or apathy or despair. Paul tells us that character leads to hope.

And that may seem a bit unsatisfying. After all, hope is not fulfillment. Hope is not completion. Hope is still open and expectant.

Because the truth is that we can never ultimately fix our lives, and we can never ultimately fix our society. We can make progress, but there will always be more. There will always be another illness. There will always be another death. There will always be another broken relationship. There will always be another injustice.

And that can be very deflating. It can be very discouraging. Sometimes we feel so overwhelmed that we begin to think that nothing is worthwhile any more. Why even try if things are never going to be right? Why even try if things are always going wrong?

The why is, if we don’t try, things will never get better. But it’s also that if we don’t try, things can get a whole lot worse.

This is where the idea of the devil can actually be useful. Most of us probably don’t have a particularly strong sense of there being an actual being or person that is the devil. It’s not an essential part of the faith. It’s something we can disagree about and still be church together. I tend to think of the devil as more of a metaphor than an actual being. But that also means, especially in a society that is as stable as ours is, that things are always getting better. Technology advances, scientific discoveries advance. So should ethics and justice, right? But that also gives the impression that if we just leave things alone, the world will stay about the same.

If you believe in the devil, though, that doesn’t make any sense. The devil is intent on stirring up evil. The devil is working every day to make things worse. And that means that every day, people need to be resisting, need to be working to undo the evil that the devil is doing. And the truth is, new evil is always being stirred up in the world. If we just give up and do nothing, things won’t stay the same, things will get worse.

It’s a bit like laundry. No matter how hard I work at it, I can never get all of the laundry done. I can never make it so there is no dirty laundry. But if I get discouraged and start to think that there’s no point in doing laundry because the laundry never gets done, things won’t stay the same. Things will get worse. Things will get a whole lot worse, and very fast.

When we struggle to overcome suffering, injustice, and oppression, there is always going to be more work to do. It’s not like writing a paper or earning a degree, something that you can finish and it’s done. It’s like tending a garden or maintaining a house. The work is never done, because there is always something new to do. We can make things better. But if we stop the struggle, things won’t stay the same, things will get worse.

And that’s where hope comes into the picture. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. The Greek is ἐλπὶς. It’s hope, but it’s not always positive. It can mean anxiety about the future. But it can also mean exception and the prospect of something new. Character produces hope, and hope gives us the strength to keep going. Hope inspires us. Hope gives us reason and purpose. Hope trusts that even when we cannot see it, the things that we do make a difference. Hope is the grace of God, the good that God draws out of suffering.

And it is with God’s hope, God’s expectation, that we live. It is in God’s hope that we are transformed. It is in God’s hope that we are made new. It is in God’s hope that we face whatever it is that we have to face. It is in God’s hope that we overcome. Thanks be to God.

Sunday 2 June 2019
Ascension Sunday

Luke 24:44-53
Acts 1:1-11

The lectionary readings from today present us with a unique situation: the same event, described by the same author, in two separate books of the bible. The Gospel of Luke and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles are actually written by the same person.  In fact, they are a two-volume book, a history, written for a patron named Theophilus. The first volume, Luke, is about the life of Jesus, and the second volume, Acts, is about the birth of the church. And what we encounter in our readings today are the very last verses in Luke and the very first verses in Acts. It turns out that they both tell the same story: the story of Jesus’s ascension.

We know with certainty that these books were written by the same author. Nevertheless, if you look closely at the stories, you’ll see that they are a little bit different from each other. In the first version it sounds like the ascension happened on Easter evening in Bethany; in the second version it sounds like it happened forty days later in Jerusalem.

But despite the small differences in these two accounts, the core of the story is still the same. Jesus appears alive to his disciples. He tells them that his death and resurrection were all a part of the plan, that everything was to fulfill what was written in the Torah. He tells them that they are going to be his witnesses in all the world. And he tells them that the promise of God is about to be fulfilled; they are about to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But, Jesus says, they are going to have to wait. Don’t leave Jerusalem. Wait until you are clothed with power before you do anything else.

And that seems to me to be a very strange message to be coming from God. We usually think of God as declaring things, right now and for eternity: start immediately and keep doing it for all time. But in this case, God says, I have a great plan for you, a wonderful mission. This will be the very fulfillment of your lives… but just hold your horses a minute, don’t get ahead of yourselves. You’re not ready yet. Let’s take this nice and slow.

Now, much of the time we in the church don’t have any trouble taking things slow with God. Bureaucracy, committees upon committees, study groups, Conferences, Assemblies, and a two-millennia tradition of just waiting to see how things turn out haven’t made us the most nimble of organizations. Change seems to be a four-letter word in many congregations, and one of our most sacred creeds seems to be these seven words: “We’ve never done it that way before.” Of course there are exceptions to this, moments of radical response to God’s call. But much of the time God has a hard time getting us going, has difficulty getting us motivated to do something new, has to work really hard to get us to reach outside of our comfortable sanctuaries and into the world around us. Evangelism, mission, outreach, prophetic witness—can’t someone else take care of those things?

So since we are so used to hearing God say, “Hey, get up and do something,” it does seem a bit odd to hear this message to the first disciples: “Hey, sit down and don’t do anything.”

Last we week I told you the story or how I stopped being a music student and ended up on the road to ordained ministry. It started with a feeling of unease, and then with an experience of failure. My failure to be accept for composition school shook me up enough to make me reevaluate everything and head in a new direction.

But I didn’t tell you the whole story. In the midst of all this, in my sophomore year of college, while I was trying to figure out the direction of my life, I had one of the most profound spiritual experiences that I’ve ever had. One evening, looking at the sunset, everything seemed suddenly clear. All of the worries and the hang-ups and the insecurities that I had been cradling suddenly seemed silly. I truly felt God’s presence, and I knew that I wanted to turn my life over to God, to let God set the direction, to turn myself over completely to a life of service. At the time, I interpreted that as a call to international mission. And I was ready to go right away. I was ready to discontinue college, pack up, and travel to some distant shore where I was sure that everything would make more sense and be more meaningful.

But things didn’t work out quite the way I thought they would. God had a different plan. And the truth is that I wasn’t ready. I was enthusiastic. I was willing. But I didn’t really have much to offer in the mission field.

When I didn’t immediately become a missionary, I felt horrible—disappointed, guilty that I was letting God down or somehow evading God’s call, inadequate. But that was all a part of the process. I couldn’t have made the journey without taking each turn along the way. It took the moment of failure. It took the profound experience that re-inspired me. And it also took God saying, “Wait. It’s not time yet. You’re not ready. Be patient.”

For those who have heard God’s call, who seek to respond in faith, these can be very hard words to hear. It can feel like a betrayal or an abandonment. It can feel like somehow we are not good enough or strong enough to do what God is asking. If only we had the endurance, the determination, the faith, then maybe we could see it through.

But the truth is that God’s ways are not our ways. God’s time is not our time. And every time that we try to make God conform to our time schedules, we end up being made the fools. At least that’s been my experience. Maybe some of you have had better luck getting God stick to your timeline. If you have, let me know your secret. Sometimes God says, “Wait. Not yet. It’s not time. Be patient.”

That’s what Jesus said to those first disciples, “Wait here in Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from the Holy Spirit.” They could have ignored that and set out on their mission anyway. But they wouldn’t have been ready. They would have been trying to do God’s work on their own, instead of letting God work through them.

Or they could have gotten discouraged with Jesus’s rebuff and given up on the whole thing. If God doesn’t think it’s time now, then what is the point? But then they would have been missing out on all of the remarkable things that God had in store for them: Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit, huge crowds flocking to the Gospel message, and a church that has grown now to encompass two billion people all around the world.

We have the same choice when God asks us to wait. We can go off, half-cocked into the world trying to do it all ourselves, and we will end up burnt out and discouraged. We can give up on God because of our impatience and miss the miracles that God has in store for us.

Or we can take the middle way. We can listen to God’s call, and seek to follow, but still have patience with God’s timetable and methods, continuing to listen for God’s prompting and leadership. It is a more difficult way. It requires us to meet our anxiety with radical patience and perseverance. It requires us to think outside of ourselves. But it is the only way that we can hope to be co-workers with God, to be laboring on God’s side.

Listen to God’s call. Be inspired. And do not be discouraged if God says, “Wait. Not yet. Wait until you are clothed with power from the Holy Spirit.”