Trinity Sunday

Romans 8:12-17

The current issue of the ELCA’s magazine Living Lutheran showed up in my mailbox this week, and as I skimmed its pages, I saw a familiar face. Pastor Emily Norris who once was my daughter Emma’s youth leader at Augsburg in Winston-Salem was ordained a little over a year ago, during the pandemic, on Zoom and the magazine was telling the story of the community she leads now.

The community, called The Dwelling, is a collaborative effort between the Lutheran and Moravian churches in Winston-Salem to create a community designed for people experiencing homelessness. When Emily was serving at Augsburg she was part of their ministry of providing overflow shelter in the winter, accommodating people when the other shelters filled up. And now the Dwelling provides free mobile showers as its anchor ministry but they also provide clothing and toiletries and now they are also helping renovate affordable housing units in the city for those in need. And in 2020 they rented a space where they now have regular Sunday worship. (Read more at Living Lutheran.)

It’s a great story, but it was a story I already knew. I had participated in Emily’s ordination online and have watched the ministry there grow.

What was new to me was John Whitely’s story. Johnny had been one of the men who stayed at the overflow shelter and he had met Emily there. And when he was found in the shelter’s restroom after an overdose and revived, he thought he’d burned yet another bridge and he wouldn’t be welcomed back.

As an aside, I hear this a lot from people in our community right here. Sometimes they have behaved badly and for the sake of good order and boundaries, they are banned from returning to the feeding ministries or shelters, but not always. Sometimes soured relationships with others create barriers that keep them isolated. Sometimes shame cuts them off from the very places that might provide a meal, safety and maybe even a community.

Anyway, when John saw Emily the next winter she asked if he’d be back at the overflow shelter, and he was surprised he was welcome, or even wanted there. But he was and since the Dwelling opened, he’s been involved there, even serving on their council, and John was baptized last year. As Pastor Emily says in the article, [The Dwelling] is creating a community that accepts the messiness of being human.”

The welcome that John found at the shelter and at the Dwelling was a welcome that he wasn’t entitled to have by birthright or by his own efforts. He hadn’t earned it. In fact some places would have written him off. Instead, what he received was unmerited grace born out of the ‘spirit of adoption’ that Paul writes about in our reading from his letter to the Romans.

There he says,

you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, (Romans 8:15-16)

The desire for belonging is universal. God created us for relationship and forms us for community, and by faith, baptism and the power of the Holy Spirit, we are joined into God’s family, becoming God’s own children, co-heirs with Jesus Christ, God’s Son. We no longer see God as a distant deity, or an aloof clockmaker who has set the world in motion and watches from afar. Instead, I imagine that God watches us like we watch a beloved child riding a bicycle without training wheels for the first time, playing a sport they love or reading a poem they’ve risked sharing with us. God delights in each of us.

In addition to belonging in God’s family, Luther said in his explanation of the Lord’s Prayer, that “calling on God, our Father” means we “come to believe God is truly our Father and we are truly God’s children, in order that we may ask God boldly and with complete confidence just as loving children ask their loving father.”

Love doesn’t always mean saying yes, but it does mean listening. God promises to hear our prayers - our rejoicing and our sorrow. We are not crying into an empty void. When we pray, out loud or silently, with words or with sighs, we are in the presence of a loving parent who knows us and wants good for us.

And not only us, but also for our siblings in Christ, in our congregation and also in the world around us.

I met a woman last week who shared a story of the one time she heard God speak to her audibly. She worked in Gaffney, and, like many of us, she drove a regular route to and from her workplace. She remembers seeing one man at one of the crossroads or intersections whenever she passed through. You know him. Well, maybe not him exactly, but he’s the person you see with the cardboard sign at the corner of Earl Road, the one who stands across from Chik-Fil-A at the corner of 74 where the traffic from Walmart comes out or the one who stands at the offramp from the interstate. Anyway, this man was always there when she passed by, and as she drove, she’d say a prayer for his safety. And then one day he wasn’t there. And she was worried for him, and feeling the burden on her heart for him, she spoke to God, asking, “God, why do I feel so anxious for this person I have never met?” and she said she heard God say, “Because he’s your brother.”

A person she’d never met, and never did meet, but a person loved by God all the same. In the same way we are called to love and extend God’s welcome to one another, seeing each other as siblings in Christ.

Let us pray…
God, our Father,
Thank you for making us your children, co-heirs in your Kingdom with your Son. Help us embrace this spirit of adoption and the belonging that comes from being in your family. Empower us by your Holy Spirit and open our eyes to see every person first as your child and our sibling. Place the burden of their welfare on our hearts and help us live our lives in ways that reflect your grace and mercy to the world. Amen.

Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

As a hospital chaplain, occasionally I meet a patient who doesn’t speak English and usually when that happens, the hospital has already placed a computer monitor in the room where I can select the patient’s language or dialect and call a translator. Without the translator, the patient and I wouldn’t be able to understand each other. Our differences would be obstacles. The translator brings understanding. And because of that understanding, the patient and I both receive the gift of the visit.

In Scripture, we have many different names for the Holy Spirit – wisdom, advocate, helper, spirit of truth – but today I want to think of her as translator. In the scene from Acts, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples, they begin speaking in tongues, and crowds who are drawn to the noise witness their speech but instead of hearing nonsense, the people each hear their own languages being spoken. And in that moment, God’s people understand the power of the Holy Spirit’s presence among them.

And while we celebrate this appearance of the Holy Spirit, it’s important to remember this isn’t the first encounter God’s people have had with God’s Spirit or ruach. This same Spirit blew over the earth in Genesis 8, causing the flood waters to subside; it fell upon David in First Samuel 16 when he was chosen to be king; and it knit together the dry bones in Ezekiel 37.

And the Acts story isn’t the first Pentecost either. Pentecost already was, and is, in Judaism, a celebration of God’s provision - of the harvest and of the Law that was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. God appearing in the Holy Spirit adds another dimension of God equipping God’s people with all we need.

We celebrate this story as God doing something new, because in Jesus we have known the brokenness and sin that hung him on a cross, the joy of his resurrection and the hope promised at his ascension. Jesus promised we would not be left alone.

Like the Pentecost church in Acts, the Holy Spirit helps us understand how God works among us in surprising and sometimes hidden ways. As we have persevered through the pandemic, we have experienced anew death and resurrection. There were ways of being together that died; there was division and there was grief. And yet, in the midst of it all, God was at work. There were places where death did its work, and places where new life was being nurtured to spring forth.

Today we celebrate that one of the ways God has been at work is in shaping Emily Richards and Ford Turner as disciples or followers of Jesus. At Ascension, confirmation follows three years of students attending worship and serving as acolytes, and meeting with me to study the Bible, Martin Luther’s catechism, and how our Lutheran faith frames big questions we encounter in our lives. We were interrupted in March 2020 but then we regrouped and learned alongside other youth in our synod on Zoom and in person with Pastor Mike Collins and some of the youth at Emanuel Lutheran in Lincolnton. Today Emily and Ford will make for themselves the promises that were made at their baptisms, as we pray over them and anoint them.

In the Lutheran study Bibles that we gave Emily and Ford this morning, I wrote the words of Jeremiah Chapter 29 Verse 11 on one of the front pages. There the prophet says, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

As we celebrate their confirmation, by the Spirit’s power in and among us, our whole community is renewed and empowered to be God’s witnesses throughout the world.  We are invited to live into the new thing that God is doing, instead of trying to erase or forget the past, or to recapture or return to what was. The Jesus story isn’t archived history; it continues in our lives today and in our future.

Especially on this Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is our visible reminder that we have this hope alive in Christ.

Amen.

Ascension of our Lord

Luke 24:44-53

Thursday was the fortieth day of Easter, which we celebrate as the day of Ascension of our Lord. It is the day that we hear about in today’s readings from Acts and the gospel when Jesus leaves the disciples and, in the three-tier world of the Bible, ascends to heaven or as we say in the creeds, to the right hand of the Father.

Luke says,

Then he led [the disciples] out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. (24:50-51)

In Christian art, there are many images of this scene.[i] The earliest image, from the 4th century BCE, shows Jesus grasping the hand of God as he marches up a mountain and out of the frame of the landscape and the presence of the disciples.

In Rembrandt’s painting from the 17th century, the disciples are looking up at the illuminated Christ whose nail-scarred hands reach out in prayer or blessing of humankind. His feet are obscured by a cloud, but winged cherubs surround the hem of his robe and his feet, and the faces of the heavenly host surround his.

And in the scene that Salvador Dali painted in the 20th century, you see the dirt-stained soles of Jesus’ feet, as if you are standing with the disciples from the Acts text, looking up at the sky, watching Christ ascend into a brightly lit orb as a female figure gazes on the scene from above.

However you imagine the scene, Christ’s post-resurrection ascension is the end of the Easter season and the beginning of ten days of waiting for the mystery and miracle of Pentecost when God’s power in the Holy Spirit comes to us. Ascension invites us to be open to God’s presence among us and to learn to see Jesus with our hearts, instead of with our eyes.[ii]

Jesus does not abandon us. Jesus leaves us with God’s blessing. In fact in the ascension account in the longer ending of Mark’s gospel, Mark says,

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them …. (16:19-20)

While Eastertide and the resurrection appearances show us how God’s love for us conquered even death, and that God’s love is not only for us who already believe but for the world, the Ascension gives us our commission.

Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite [geet] has written sonnets, or poems, for many of the Church’s festival days and in his verses for Ascension he says,

He took us with him to the heart of things,
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and heaven-centered now…[iii]

Jesus blesses the disciples, and us, and then continues to work alongside us as we tend to the broken-hearted.

The prophet Isaiah calls on God’s people to loosen the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, and let the oppressed go free (58:6); to share bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into [our] house; and when [we] see the naked, to cover them. (58:7) And in Matthew 25 in one of his parables, Jesus tells the disciples, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

So, who are the broken-hearted you encounter?

Perhaps it is the wife or husband who has been left alone by the death of their beloved. Perhaps it is the person whose mental illness has isolated them and made them angry and difficult to be with. Perhaps it is the young couple whose pregnancy recently ended in miscarriage or the parents who have had to bury their child. Or perhaps it is the person who loves someone who is suffering from an active and destructive addiction. It may even be you.

And if it is, hear these words for yourself. God’s love and blessing are for you, too.

In this post-resurrection world we are asked to remember that the heart of the gospel is to love one another as we are loved by God. We are asked to let our lives speak, that we would be witnesses to God’s love for the world.

We begin this work here in worship, praise and prayer and then, like the disciples, we go out into the world, confident God is working alongside us where we are asked to see Jesus with our hearts and not just our eyes.

Amen.

[i] https://aleteia.org/2018/05/15/analyzing-art-the-iconography-of-the-ascension-through-the-ages/

[ii] “Soul of the Preacher” Janice Maclean.

[iii] Malcolm Guite. Sounding the Seasons – Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year. 45.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 15:9-17

This week’s gospel picks up where we left Jesus and the disciples last week near the beginning of his Farewell Discourse.

Dr. Mary Shore, the dean at our ELCA seminary in Columbia, compares what Jesus is doing here with conversations her father had in the last days before he died. He would share memories and stories with her mother and then he’d give her instructions about how to take care of some detail – what to do before she started the furnace when the cold weather came, or where to find an important document. And then he’d return to reminiscing.

Jesus is saying, “Listen, it’s important that you know these things before I leave you.”

And he says,

You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. (John 15:14-15)

The command Jesus is referring to is the one he repeats in verse 12: to love one another as he has loved you.

Reading his words today, we hear that “if” in verse 14 as a conditional phrase. We flip his words and add an unspoken “then” to them: “If you are obedient, “then” you are my friends.” We turn it into a test that’s about what we do, and that’s not a test we can pass, let alone ace, because in our human condition, we are sinners, we fall short and the relationship falls apart.

But that’s not what Jesus says.

Our obedience is not a test; our obedience flows from being loved by God.[i]

Because we are loved by God,
because Jesus chooses us and calls us friends,
therefore we love others the way God loves us.

Because/therefore. God always acts first.

Jesus calls the disciples friends without them doing anything to earn that friendship.[ii] They’ve questioned him and shown a lack of understanding and, within hours of this conversation, they will desert him. And yet, Jesus calls them friends. So this friendship must be grounded and rooted in something other than their efforts and achievements.

Jesus also tells the disciples that this relationship is different from others they have. Even though they call him Rabbi, this relationship is not merely one between a teacher and student. Even though they call him Lord, theirs is not the relationship of a master and servant.

This friendship has its foundation in the love of God. And that makes it radically different, from the beginning.

The late author of the The Ragamuffin Gospel Brendan Manning said,

If John were to be asked, ‘What is your primary identity in life?’ he would not reply, ‘I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels,’ but rather, ‘I am the one Jesus loves.’

Being “one whom Jesus loves” means each one of us is a beautiful child of God, loved and forgiven, with mercies that are new every morning.

What would it mean if each of us could see ourselves, first and foremost, as “one whom Jesus loves”?

This weekend the Sierra-Pacific Synod had its virtual synod assembly, which included a bishop’s election. By Friday afternoon, the ballot was narrowed to seven candidates and each of them was given five minutes to address the assembly, and I’m enough of a church geek that I watched some of their statements. In his address, the now Bishop-elect Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer who serves in San Francisco as a pastor and a police department chaplain enthusiastically described his love for the Gospel because he knows that the Good News saved his life when he was a child witnessing what he described as “a rough and tumbly divorce” between his parents. Knowing God was with him in that time of his life made all the difference. He knew he was “one whom Jesus loves.” [iii]

God’s friendship is not the way of relationship or friendship we learn in the world. As children, friendships change as rapidly as the direction of the wind. And even as adults, friendships remain fragile. We are human and fallible, and relationships are hard. It doesn’t help that “friend” is used so broadly today that its meaning is lost. Online, you can have hundreds if not thousands of “friends”, but that one category includes people you have known since childhood, right alongside acquaintances and even those whom you’ve never met. Regardless of where the relationship began, when a disagreement, misunderstanding or judgment becomes a wedge, or a confidence is betrayed, pride or ego get in the way of reconciliation and the relationship is broken and ends. But divine friendship is different.

Over and against whatever expectations or experiences we have from our human relationships, Jesus calls us friends and asks us to see each other the way God sees us and love each other the way God loves us.  

Our actions toward others aren’t grounded in our human understanding of relationship, but in what God has already done for us. And it makes all the difference. It means that the place I begin is love, not judgment. The place I begin is love, not aggravation. The place I begin is love, not envy. The place I begin is love, not resentment.

This way of love is the way of Jesus.

Let us pray.

Gracious and loving God,

Thank you for sending your Son Jesus that we would know what love is.

Forgive us when we fail to love, as we are already loved by you.

Teach us to love with kindness, patience, compassion and mercy.

We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

[i] Raymond E. Brown. The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. 682.

[ii] “6th Sunday of Easter.” Pulpit Fiction. (podcast)

[iii] The Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer, Sierra Pacific Synod assembly, May 7, 2021.

Fifth Sunday of Easter

John 15:1-8

In this part of John’s gospel, Jesus is talking to his disciples at the beginning of what we call “The Farewell Discourse”. Here Jesus is trying to prepare the disciples for the time when he will not be physically with them. And he begins by saying, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.” (15:1)

I was thinking about those words on Friday when I heard a friend describe her excitement about getting to plant the tomato plants she had grown from seeds. I’ve heard the same elation from other gardening friends when the bulbs they planted in the fall push up through the ground and show off their bright colors. 

God is a vine grower, gardener or farmer. Listening to my gardening friends, I imagine God’s own delight and anticipation, as the One who creates us and watches us grow and live. 

Picturing God that way makes me wonder,
What is the picture of God you carry with you?

I don’t have much of a green thumb. The plants I’ve managed to keep alive are hardy but I have learned some things that help fill out this picture of God as the vinegrower or gardener. 

Gardeners don’t plant spoiled seed or cultivate weeds. They don’t sabotage the plants they tend. They collect vegetable waste, egg shells and coffee grounds for compost that turns into rich soil. They don’t delight when a plant starves for nourishment – sunlight or water; instead, they carefully watch to see that the plants are thriving and they change and adapt to care for them when they aren’t. When a frost threatens, gardeners raid linen closets for bedsheets to cover tender plants, and when there’s drought, they use rain barrels and sprinklers to keep them quenched.

When we see God as a vinegrower, a gardener or farmer, we can picture God tending the vine and the branches, wanting them to do what they’re planted to do  ̶ to bear fruit. After all, there’s no other reason to tend a vine. They grow wild and untamed all on their own.

When Jesus says that God removes the branches that don’t bear fruit and prunes those that do, it’s easy to hear harsh or unyielding judgment, especially if the picture you hold of God is the all-too-common picture of God as an angry judge or a demanding task master. A God who is watching for our failures or mistakes. A God whose love depends on our efforts or accomplishments. 

But Jesus isn’t talking about judgment, so much as identity. God is the vinegrower, Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. Branches exist to flower and leaf or bear fruit. If branches wither, they’re cut off so that the branches that are still living can flourish. Deadwood can trigger fires, spread disease and attract harmful insects. Pruning strengthens the living branches, making sure they get what they need.

Remember in Luke 12 where Jesus says, 

27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.  28 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you… (Luke 12:27-28 NRS)

God the vinegrower has planted each one of us, tends to our needs and clothes us in baptism. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the picture of God you carry with you is different. Seeking to understand God’s love, we Christians often put all kinds of limits on God. The free gift of grace sounds like foolishness to us. I’ve met a lot of people who have been told they have disappointed God or that God doesn’t love them because of something they’ve done or failed to do; people who are afraid of God and cannot believe God loves them. 

But God is a loving Creator who delights in you, who calls you good and wants you to flourish and bear fruit. 

God wants you in the vineyard so much that God sent Jesus to the world that we may know how much God loves us. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s love and forgiveness. No amount of toiling or spinning or striving matters. God the vinegrower tenderly and lovingly cares for us, giving us this grace because God knows we cannot live without it. 

Let us pray…
Good and gracious God,
Thank you for your Son Jesus who grafts us onto the vine that we will live;
Help us trust your care and provision, believing your love and forgiveness are for us;
Strengthen us that we may thrive and bear fruit, showing others what life in Christ looks like.
We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Amen.