The Heart of the Matter

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 15:34 - 16:13, Mark 4:26-34

My next-door neighbor has a very large, very old maple tree in her back yard. It is all tangled up with the different phone and electrical wires on the corner, so every so often some repairman or other will come through and trim it back. But every trimming seems to cause more shoots to grow up. And every shoot seems to produce more little helicopter seeds, so when the time comes for the seeds to drop in the spring, our back yard, just a few yards from the old maple, gets hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Sometimes I think it’s more seeds in the spring than leaves in the fall.

The seeds mostly fall on concrete or into the grass, and we gather them up and put them with the rest of the yard waste. But some seeds sneak through, and get into my lettuce beds, or the tomato pot, or the other, unused pots that sometimes sit around with nice soft potting soil in them. The ones we collect from the parking pad always seem to be dried out and beaten up in the process, but somehow those ones that sneak through into the good spots turn green and grow like crazy. It makes me wish there were space in the yard for a maple tree. The shade in the summer would be great. But that’s how it goes, I guess.

In 2005, archeologists found some ancient date palm seeds, estimated to be about 2,000 years old, based on carbon dating. They decided to try to grow the seeds, and after carefully soaking and fertilizing them, a botanist was able to coax a new date palm to sprout. At first its leaves were a little unhealthy, but over the next few months, the palm grew and thrived, all from a seed that had lain dormant for centuries.

What is odd to me about seeds is that if you split them open – for example, if you split open a peanut – there are two smooth halves, and a little square nut binding them together. But where is the life? Where is the part of the seed that shows that this little thing could be planted in the ground and then grow? The scientists had to plant the seed to see if it would grow. It must be, then, something only God can see.

In our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Samuel is dealing with possibilities that only God can see. The first king of Israel, Saul, looked like a good prospect to start with – strong and tall, with plenty of courage – but as his reign wears on, the people discover the limits of his abilities. He’s impulsive, paranoid, and jealous of his power for its own sake. Eventually, God decides to intervene, and he sends Samuel to anoint a new king.

Now on the surface, Samuel taking a trip to Bethlehem to find a new king looks like treachery. Saul is the king – the established authority – and he has been put in place there by the will of the Israelite tribes, and a careful selection process. And yet, at the heart of it, Samuel’s motivation is a risky act of faithfulness. He has to go against the established human authority in faithfulness to God’s call.

So Samuel sets out, with an animal offering on hand as cover for the mission, and when he arrives, he calls all the village people together. They’re a little nervous – the country folk aren’t used to a prophet from the city. And a holy man doesn’t always bring good news. But they do as Samuel asks – they prepare for a ritual sacrifice – and as they gather, Samuel feels drawn to the local farmer Jesse. His sons are tall, strong, handsome. They look like natural leaders. He sees the oldest. “Surely it’s this one,” he thinks. But God has other ideas. He sees the next oldest – “Okay, it’s got to be him.” The answer: no. And so on, all the way to the youngest one there. On the outside, on the surface, each son could be a future king, but at the heart of the matter, God is the one who knows. Finally, out of options, Samuel asks Jesse, “Got any more sons?”

Jesse answers, “Well, there is one more, but he’s off tending sheep.”

“We’ll wait until he gets here, then,” says Samuel.

When David arrives, Samuel knows he has found the next king. “This is the one,” God confirms, “I’ve looked at his heart, and he’s the one I’ve chosen.” Samuel rises up and anoints David as the new king.

And yet, what happens next might not be what you’d expect. Instead of charging up to Jerusalem to take his rightful place as king by force, David stays where he is, and goes on with the thankless task of shepherding his father’s sheep. Samuel makes the promised sacrifice and returns to his work as prophet in the big city. And yet, something has changed. A seed has been planted.

When Jesus talks about the kingdom of God in our gospel lesson from this morning, in some ways he is describing the mystery of how God works in our lives. God’s realm doesn’t come about as a storm front so must as a tiny, pungent seed furrowing its roots into the ground and stretching its leaves into the sky. How does a seed 2,000 years old sprout and become a date plant? What is it in a young boy’s heart that makes him a king? When does a hard heart turn from stubborn anger to forgiving grace?

The heart of the matter is that God is the one who knows, and is the one who works these miracles. As followers of Jesus, it may seem sometimes like life is something that can be controlled, that we are the ones who will decide what is good and what is bad. But what Samuel shows us is that the first task of a faithful person is to look beyond the surface and listen carefully for God’s voice. As a community, we can choose to walk by sight, as Paul puts it. We can hold fast to logic, to tradition, to what appears right and authoritative on the surface. Or, we can choose to walk by faith – to step out in risky faithfulness, as Samuel did, always with our ears open, listening for God’s voice.

The good news for us today is that the seeds of God’s kingdom are springing up all around us, and learning to walk by faith is as much learning to see the sprouting seeds as it is learning to hear God’s sometimes subtle voice. Where do you see glimpses of God’s dream for the world coming true? Where is strong love helping people let go of addictions? Where is the stranger given a welcome? Where are hungry people given something to eat? Where are prisoners visited, attended to, and treated with dignity? Where do the poor have good news preached to them? At the heart of the matter, it is God’s will we seek to do on earth. May the seeds of the kingdom abound! Thanks be to God, Amen.

Born into the Kingdom

Scripture: John 3:1-17, Romans 8:12-17

Our Gospel lesson for this morning pivots on a single word, which in the Greek has two meanings. The Greek word is anothen, which means both “from above,” and “again.” It’s like the word bow in English, which could mean “take a bow,” or “the bow of a ship” at the same time. It’s the context that helps you know what it means. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Our story starts with Nicodemus, an important man – a teacher, a leader, an all-round well-respected guy, coming to Jesus at night, when people are less likely to notice. It’s not totally clear what he’s hoping for with this meeting – maybe to pick up a few tips on self-improvement, maybe to report back to his people about Jesus’ particular philosophical positions. He starts the conversation respectfully – Teacher, he says, we know you are the real thing – we can tell by the miracles you perform.

What Nicodemus gets, of course, (you know how Jesus is!) is something more than an intellection to-and-fro dialogue, or a set of five points for maximizing his personal potential. Instead, Jesus takes it way outside the realm of what Nicodemus was expecting. “Believe me, because it’s true,” he says, “No-one can see the kingdom of God without being born….” And here’s that word, “anothen.” When Jesus says anothen he means it both ways – being born again, AND being born from above. The new birth is from above – from God.

Nicodemus doesn’t get the pun Jesus is making though. And to be fair, who can blame him? So far, in the gospel of John’s telling of Jesus’ ministry, this idea of new birth or new life has not come up. In fact, the idea of the kingdom of God hasn’t come up in the gospel yet. The readers are learning about this for the first time, along with Nicodemus. So far, we’ve seen Jesus’ baptism, we’ve seen his miraculous changing of water into wine, and we’ve seen him clean out the temple of all its commercial activities. It’s clear from what he’s done so far that he’s a pretty important person to listen to, but it might not be totally clear just yet why he is important, or what his message is.

The kingdom of God is the message, but the way into it is a very strange and counter-intuitive one, especially for someone like Nicodemus who has some position, some power, some influence. Because the way into the kingdom for Nicodemus is, in a way, to humble himself, to become a child again, to start over, to be born all over again from above. Of course, if you’re already in the position of being humble and broken down, it’s a little easier to hear Jesus’ message of a new life, started over.

There’s something interesting to think about with the word “born,” too, which is that it’s not something we do for ourselves. Someone else bears us into the world – we are borne by our mothers. In the same way, entering the kingdom of God is something that God does. As Jesus puts it – you have to be born by water (that is, the regular way) and by the Spirit, to see the kingdom of God.

What does it mean to see the kingdom of God? Well, one traditional way of talking about the kingdom of God is as somewhere you go after you die. It’s God’s holy city, complete with clouds, St. Peter, angels and harps. That’s the picture you see in cartoons anyway. But Jesus was teaching about a kingdom of God that starts in this world. This new realm is spiritual, yes, but it’s also social – things like who we spend time with and eat with, it’s also political – how our leaders are expected to behave, and how each person is committed to service for one another’s’ good, and it’s also economic – what we receive belongs to God, and is due back to God as part of our way of life. In fact, to say the kingdom of God, in one way, is to say a way of life. It’s the way of life that as Christians we’ve been trying to live out – with varying degrees of success for about two thousand years now.

But Christ’s vision is still very much with us, and Jesus asks: what would the world be like if everyone lived according to God’s vision of peace and mutual care? But his vision is also one about seeing what is already there: Jesus asks: what would the world be like if everyone saw what God is already doing to bring about a reality of peace, beauty and love?

There’s another important way that we can talk about the kingdom of God, which is as the family of God. Just as in regular life, each of us is born into a family of some kind, being born again from above by the Spirit means being born into the family of God, with God as our adoptive parent. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, shares about the freedom and the beauty of living life as the children of God, born by God’s Spirit. 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! It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

I realize that the phrase “children of God,” or “child of God,” can sometimes be used so many times that it starts to lose its meaning. But really it is a very radical statement. The word, “Abba,” which is closer to “Dad,” or “Papa” than “Father,” in English, shows a sense of familiarity and closeness between parent and child. If God is our parent, and adopts us into a new life, then we would hope to see the family resemblances as we grow up under God’s care and discipline. And really, it’s probably good to remember again that there are other ways an all-powerful being could treat its creations – as slaves, or playthings, or robots. But God regards us as beloved children.

Finally, the most important part of this metaphor about our relationship with God is the deep love it conveys. Sometimes you’ll hear parents say about their children, “It’s like my heart is on the outside of my body, walking around in the world.” If human beings feel this way, how much more does God, whose capacity for love is so much greater and purer than any human’s! As the gospel lesson puts it, “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”

Finally, as children of God, one of our joyful tasks is to invite new friends into the family, to encourage new birth into the kingdom of God. How is this done? Through love.

There is a story about two men riding on a train many years ago. At first, one of the men is very slow to talk about himself, but it’s a long train ride, so after many hours, he tells the other man his story. This young man has been away from home for many years, and has gotten into some trouble with the law. He hasn’t had the chance to write home very much, and he doesn’t know how his family will feel about his homecoming, so he tells them in a letter to make a sign for him that he can see from the train. If they want him to come home, they should tie a white ribbon around the apple tree in front of the house, and he’ll get off the train and come home. But if they are ashamed, and rather he stay away, they should just leave the tree empty, and he’ll know to stay on the train and find somewhere else to make a life.

As they get close to where the family home is, the young man is so nervous that he asks his new friend to look for him. They round the corner, one man looking out for the other whose eyes are closed in fear and hopefulness. “It’s all right,” the older man says, “you can look.” The young man opens his eyes in relief, but relief turns to joy when he sees not just one ribbon in the apple tree, but the whole tree, white with ribbons, fluttering in the wind and welcoming him home.

May our welcome on God’s behalf be as warm and as strong. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Commanded to Love

Scripture: John 15:9-17

The verse that may sound the most familiar to you in today’s reading from the Gospel of John is when Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” It has a nice sound, doesn’t it, and a pleasant message. Yes, yes, love each other as I have loved you. Wait a minute, what? Jesus says in today’s Gospel that, basically, we’re supposed to love each other the way he loves us. That is a pretty tall order. Jesus was an awfully nice guy, you know. And the next verse isn’t much more encouraging, “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Okay, sure Jesus. Sounds great.

The truth is, if I’m honest about it, being like Jesus is something more of an aspiration than a day to day reality. It is helpful to remember that Jesus didn’t always show his love in nice, polite ways. Sometimes he got angry in defense of God. Sometimes he was playful and obscure in his teaching. But still, here is a person who dedicates his whole life to the people he loves, lays down his life for his friends, even to the point of a humiliating death. That is a pretty tall order, and for me at least, there is the potential for a side-serving of guilt, because there’s no way, really, to live up to that. So it can feel a little heavy to hear these words from Scripture: “love one another as I have loved you.”

And yet, reading through the whole passage, Jesus seems to be so sweet and sincere in giving this commandment, that it’s hard to hold onto the heaviness. “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “because I want you to have the joy that I have. I want your joy to be complete.” “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “So that you’ll be able to love each other. I love you, and I want you to love each other.” It’s like even this command is part of Jesus’ love for his disciples.

Our passage today comes from one of John’s farewell discourses, which is to say, one of the many speeches Jesus gives on his way to the cross. He is hoping to impart the most important parts of his wisdom to his disciples. One of Jesus’ key teachings was about the kingdom, or the sovereign realm of God. This is a new reality that God is bringing about – a social, political, cultural, and religious transformation to a world reigned, not by fear or greed, but by love, the deep and abiding love of God. And so, in a way, what Jesus seems to be saying is, here is a picture of what life in the realm of God looks like. You’ll be like branches, woven together, chosen by God, cared for and pruned by God, and bearing fruit that lasts. I’ve chosen you, you didn’t choose me. And this is the life I have for you – one marked by love, by joy, and by friendship with God.

You might be interested to know that in the Greek, even when Jesus is talking about the disciples as his friends, he is still talking about love. He uses the word “philos” to talk about friends, which basically means “one who is loved,” and has the same root as Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love, or philosophy – the love of wisdom.

Many years, someone I know – I’ll call him Paul – was having a difficult time, financially. He had enough to live on, but just barely, and sometimes there was food in the fridge, and sometimes, there wasn’t much. His friends decided, during this difficult time, that it would be a good idea to have a potluck party, and they invited themselves over to Paul’s house to enjoy their casseroles and salads, and the side dishes and whatever else you think of at a potluck. At the end of the meal, there were a lot of leftovers, and the friends left them behind for Paul to finish, which he was glad to do. Only years later, looking back, did he realize his friends’ hidden intention to make sure that he had enough to eat, at least for that week. Paul’s friends loved him, and they loved him in such a way that he wasn’t even aware of what they were really doing at the time.

I think sometimes, it’s easy to imagine our love as being like a bucket full of water – something to be carefully stewarded. To love with abandon, without boundaries is akin to throwing the bucket all at once. It makes a big splash, but then it’s over. By contrast, a slow trickle of love makes the bucket last longer, but in the meantime it’s not very life-giving.

I think what Jesus is calling us to in this passage is to fill our buckets, again and again, in the deep well of God’s love – the overflowing spring of Jesus’ love – the constantly renewed aquifers of the Holy Spirit. Instead of holding onto our bucket, and portioning out its contents carefully and precisely, let’s find a way, instead to keep drawing from God’s deep and infinite well, and distributing the cool, refreshing life we find there – wells and springs springing up to eternal life.

How do we do this? Abide in me, Jesus says. I am the vine, you are the branches. Live in my love, make it your home, just as I make my home in God, my loving Parent. Live in my love, and love each other. Don’t hold onto your little bucket, but pour and draw and pour again, and live in the joy of being the vessel of God’s light, the Christ-bearer, the source and receiver of love passing through you, the joy of bearing rich fruit, fruit that lasts.

In Reasons of the Heart, John S. Dunne writes, “Our minds’ desire is to know, to understand; but our hearts desire is intimacy, to be known, to be understood. To see God with our mind would be to know God, to understand God; but to see God with our heart would be to have a sense of being known by God, of being understood by God.”

God knows you, God understands you, God chooses you, God loves you. Abide in that love, now and always, that you may bear much fruit. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Sustained by God's Love

Scriptures: John 10: 11-18, 1 John 3:16-24

Good morning, friends. Today we have the opportunity to reflect on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In the United Church of Christ, we recognize our unity by agreeing together that Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Jesus is our leader and our organizer, our pastor and our guide through our life together as the gathered people of God. A very old metaphor for that leadership, dating even from the time of David in ancient Israel, is of the king and leader as shepherd of the people. I hope that today we will be able to reflect on what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know it, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our Eyes, Lord

I have to admit at the outset that the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one that gives me some trouble. First of all, none of us here, so far as I know, have a lot of direct personal experience with sheep and shepherding. I went to the Maryland State Fair a few years ago and watched the 4-H kids present their sheep for judging. I had no idea how loudly and frequently sheep do their bleating. And it sounds just a little bit human. It’s weird. The kids were maybe 10 or 12 years old, and their sheep had a tendency to get away from them. So if you want to control a sheep, you kind of grab it around under its mouth, and then it gets real still. One boy in particular tried to do this with his sheep, but it ignored him, and wandered around, barely under control. When one of the judges came over, though, to grab the sheep under its chin, it stopped dead in its tracks. The judge was clearly experienced in dealing with sheep.

So I think that if we were rural folks, living day to day with sheep, knowing how much it costs to buy a sheep, or when they have their lambs, just like we know where the nearest Farm Store or Wal Mart or grocery store is to our house, or how to use the telephone, then I think the metaphor of a Good Shepherd would make a lot more sense, and help us understand intuitively what God is saying to us through the gospel lesson today.

I also don’t like the idea of being called a sheep. As I mentioned, the sheep I saw at the state fair were obnoxiously loud, not very disciplined, and jumpy. Rumor has it that sheep are kind of stupid, too. For example, they can’t drink water out of a running stream, and they follow the herd whether or not the herd is going in a good direction. They go wandering off, they get lost, and they can’t defend themselves against wolves. I know it’s Jesus saying it, but it’s kind of a blow to the ego to be identified with a sheep, even if they are kind of cute.

Finally, the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, in my mind, somehow seems to go hand in hand with tame, nice, white Jesus. This is the Jesus who never gets angry, never starts a fight, is always polite, and would be a good person to bring home to meet your mother. This is the Jesus of the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets, since I’m guessing that the answer to that question – What Would Jesus Do? – for those wearing the bracelets, isn’t usually to upset authorities, confront hypocrisy, or call for the inclusion of outcasts in society. The truth is, though, that if you read the Bible, there’s a lot more to Jesus than being nice. Jesus wasn’t white, he wasn’t always polite, and sometimes he even got angry. In the gospels, Jesus is full of life, filling the pages with his wisdom and his wittiness, and his spirit of BOTH love AND challenge.

So I think when our metaphors about Jesus as the Good Shepherd obscure Jesus and tame him, making him into a kind of a blank wall of niceness, then there is a problem. Jesus is more than that, and we lose out if we forget that.

We can see some more of what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd in this morning’s gospel lesson from John. First of all, Jesus is the Good Shepherd as distinguished from a hired hand. The shepherd is the one who owns the sheep. The shepherd has skin in the game. The guy they hire to watch the sheep, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same investment. “Hey, I just work here,” he says as he runs away, leaving the sheep vulnerable to the attacking wolf. It’s the difference between a homeowner and a tenant, a business owner and an employee, a parent and a babysitter. “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says, “and you belong to me.”

Second, as the good shepherd, Jesus knows his sheep. I don’t know about you, but when I’ve driven past a field of cows beside a highway, I wouldn’t have the first clue about telling them apart. They all look the same to me. And yet, I could pick my cat Tuesday out of a crowd any day. If you have a pet, you know – they have their own personalities, habits, and moods. In the same way, we’re not just part of an indistinguishable mass for Jesus. Jesus knows each one of us – our personalities, our fears and weaknesses, our hopes, strengths and joys.

Third, as the good shepherd, Jesus lays down his life for his sheep. And I think this gets at the idea of nice Jesus versus real Jesus pretty clearly. In verse 18, Jesus says, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” Jesus has power and strength to lay down his life for us, and to take it up again. Jesus is not tamed or cowed by the powers of the world. Instead, he is master of them and of us as well.

What does this mean for us today? Jesus as our Good Shepherd offers us both comfort and a challenge. In the epistle reading we heard from 1 John this morning, there is the comfort of knowing God’s tremendous love for us. It starts, “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us.” Jesus gave us everything – his ministry of teaching and healing, his message of the good news of the kingdom of God, and then in the end, his very life, his death, and his resurrection. This is the model of love for us.

And in our day to day lives, we continue to live sustained by God’s grace. God leads us into green pastures day after day in the food we eat, the friends and family we meet, in the rising sun and the falling rain. God calls us to still waters of rest and refreshment, and God walks with us through the dark and dangerous valleys of our lives.

At the same time, there is a challenge in the image of Jesus as the good shepherd. We are no longer our own – we belong to Jesus, and we’re called to follow where he leads. The full verse of 1 John goes on to say, “And we ought to lay down our lives for one another,” through the service and ministry God calls us to. This may feel like a tall order sometimes, to love not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And yet, even in this challenge, God is the source of our love. Love comes through us in response to God’s love. Like so much wool, from well-fed sheep, I suppose. It’s not like sheep sit around trying to grow out their wool: “Edna, I can feel it growing!” “Are you sure Angela?” “Yeah! I’ve been working really hard on my wool-growing exercises!” I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.
That’s fun to imagine, actually. Anyway, my point is that the key to learning to live in God’s love and learning to share it is to abide in the graciousness of God’s gifts to us. Even the gift of human love is, ultimately, from God, our Good Shepherd, our Maker, and our Guiding Spirit. We are sustained, now and always, by God’s grace. Thanks be to God, Amen.

New Life in the Kingdom

Scriptures: John 3:1-21, Ephesians 2:1-10

Nicodemus was kind of a big deal. He was a local religious leader – on all the important committees, with a good reputation for common sense, competence, and reliability. If you needed something done, he was a good guy to go to – he’d know the best approach, if it was a good idea, and he’d know how to break it to you easy if it wasn’t a good idea. People respected Nicodemus and looked up to him.

So in some ways it was a surprise that Nicodemus came to see Jesus and to learn from him. Here’s someone who’s supposed to have it all together, and he’s coming out to the edge of town to meet a radical new street-preacher, someone on the outside with nothing to lose, who’s making big promises and talking about God and God’s work in a new way. You can tell Nicodemus isn’t sure about it himself, because he comes to Jesus at night, instead of during the day when everyone would be able to see him going. This is a meeting he’d prefer to keep private.

With all that in mind, it’s understandable that Nicodemus starts out with a compliment, rather than a strong statement of what he’s hoping for or what he wants from Jesus. “We can tell,” he says, “that you are from God, Jesus. The signs that you do could only be done by God’s power.” You might think Jesus would respond with an answer affirming that assessment by Nicodemus. Something like – “Congratulations! You’re right! I am from God, and now I’ll give you all my wisdom so you can take it back to your people.” I imagine that’s something like what Nicodemus was hoping to hear.

Instead, Jesus comes right back to Nicodemus with some confusing ideas about the kingdom of God. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “You won’t be able to see the kingdom of God, unless you are born from above.” What’s particularly confusing about this is that in the original Greek writing, the word for “again,” and “from above” are the same. So Jesus could be saying, “until you are born all over again,” or “born according to the way of heaven above,” or both those things at the same time. It’s a kind of a clever word play. But Nicodemus hears it pretty literally as meaning that your mother has to give birth to you all over again. Which understandably sounds ridiculous, and which most mothers most likely wouldn’t be willing to go along with.

But what the church has understood for many years is that Jesus is talking about a different kind of rebirth. It is learning to let go of what was before – death in its many forms – in order to hold fast to the new life that Jesus promises us – eternal life, the life that lasts, new life in the eternal kingdom of God. Baptism is the sacrament that shows that change in a person’s life. One moment you were outside of the life God gives, now you are part of the family. One moment you were caught in traps of bitterness, hopelessness and despair, but now there is resurrection, redemption, a chance to begin again. One moment you were dead to the Holy Spirit, but now you are alive.

Jesus goes on to explain this new life and God’s hand in it, and we hear one of the most famous verses of Scripture: “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.” Here is the heart of the gospel – death is not the final answer, eternal life through God’s love is.

What does eternal life look like? It starts on earth, with our baptism by the Holy Spirit. Our old life is washed away, and the new life begins. For some of us, we don’t necessarily remember our baptisms. I was baptized as a baby in my home church in Iowa. About a year ago, I was going through old papers at my dad’s house, and I found the bulletin from the Sunday I was baptized, along with my certificate of baptism. It was so exciting to find these artifacts from long, long ago! Well, maybe not THAT long ago. At any rate, it may seem strange for some of us to try to imagine a time before we were baptized, a time before we lived as part of God’s family in the church, a time when we didn’t know who Jesus was, a time when we didn’t pray. These are hard to imagine.

I certainly know people who have had dramatic experiences of God’s transforming power in their lives. When addiction claims a person’s life, for example, but through trust in Jesus’ healing power they find the strength to make a new life, we have seen a person escape death and receive life in the kingdom of God.

Our reading from Ephesians closes with this verse: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” In The Message translation, the verse reads, “God does both the making and the saving. God creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

What this says to me is that whatever way God’s grace comes to us, whether through the church we grow up in as our extended family, through a slow change that takes months or years and that we may not notice ourselves, or through a long hard fall that forces us to make a hard choice to live in God’s presence, whether we come to God in any of these ways, it is really God coming to us, rather than the other way around. First there is God, sending the Son in love and catching us up in the divine embrace. Later, we respond as we are able, accepting the gift of new life.

So what does this new life look like? It is a life of both joy and service. The joy of it is learning to see, as Jesus did, the kingdom of God all around us here on earth. The service is in finding out what those good works are that God has prepared for us to be our way of life. Every baptized person has a calling. Some of us have gifts for compassion and understanding. Some of us have gifts for hospitality and friendliness. Some of us have gifts of wisdom and thoughtfulness. Some of us have good business sense, or good hands for fixing things. But all of us have gifts, and God calls each of us to use them to bring about the kingdom of God - day by day as our way of life. We are called to be Christians every day of the week, not just on Sundays.

There is a secret about following God’s call, which is that only by following Jesus and living out our ministries do we get better at seeing what Jesus was talking about. I know a man who for many years struggled with alcohol addiction. He got involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, but never seemed able to get past about a month of sobriety before he got drunk again. One time his sponsor said, “look, you’re not going to be able to really get better until you start helping someone else.” At first, the man thought, how can I help someone else when I can barely keep it together myself? But he tried, and started to support someone else who was in an even worse spot than he was. And it wasn’t the perfect solution, but it made a big difference, and now the man has been sober for many, many years, and he has started a non-profit agency that helps other people start their lives over in recovery. Who would think that a man who couldn’t stay sober for a month would now be doing God’s work to affect so many people? But his personal experiences with alcohol give him tools to help others that he never would have had otherwise. So God called him to this ministry, in spite of, and in fact because of his weaknesses. And answering that call helps him find the wholeness he could never find at the bottom of a bottle.

One last thought, which is this: baptism is, underneath it all, a sign of God’s love for us. God has created us for good. We face suffering, we face disappointment, and we face our own mistakes and wrongs. But through all of it, God is creating and re-creating us to be the people of the realm of God. This is the gift we celebrate today. God’s gift of love in Jesus to us, and God’s continuing call to us to live that new life, that eternal life, that deeper, truer, more beautiful life, in the kingdom of God. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Meal in the Kingdom

Scriptures: Exodus 12:1-17, Mark 8:31-38

Good morning, friends. It is good to be here with you this morning. This morning, I’d like to take some time to reflect on the meal, the sacrament, the ritual that we’re about to take part in together – the service of Holy Communion. Communion is a gift to us handed down from the very earliest Christians, handed down from Jesus. What we actually do is very simple, but the meanings and the symbolism are very rich. I know I’ll only be able to touch on a few things today, but I hope it will be enough to spark your own reflections as well. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know the song, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our eyes, Lord

Jesus leaned back from the table. He and the disciples had been celebrating the Passover together, here in Jerusalem, remembering the escape into freedom by Moses and the Israelites. They had passed around flat, unleavened bread, a reminder of how the Israelites had eaten that night – in a hurry, with sandals on and bags packed, ready to escape into freedom. They had shared roasted lamb in memory of the roasted lamb the Israelites had eaten on that last night, the lamb whose blood painted on the doorways kept Israelite children safe from the plague God was sending, the lamb whose blood marked them as Israelite and not Egyptian. And they had eaten bitter herbs, a reminder of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.

The Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples was a meal reminding them of how, a thousand years before, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, had remembered the people of Israel, caught in slavery to the Egyptians, groaning under the weight of their oppression, their very existence threatened as the Egyptians tried to keep them from having sons. God remembered them, and staged a tremendous intervention, sending leaders – Moses and his brother Aaron – and plagues to convince the Egyptians to give up their power and their profits from the Israelites. And, once freed from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites lived in a new reality, one in which their allegiance belonged, not to a Pharoah, a human leader, but to God. They ate manna in the wilderness, and lived by trust in God.

All this, Jesus and his disciples remembered in their Passover Meal. And then Jesus added just one more thing. “Listen,” he said, “Tomorrow, I’m expecting trouble from the authorities. I’ve been teaching you about a peaceful kingdom, but what they’re hearing is war. I’ve been gathering the sick to heal them, but they see me gathering supporters for a violent revolution. I’ve been giving good news to the poor about God’s reign here on earth, but they’ve heard it as bad news for them. So, I’m expecting trouble tomorrow, and I don’t expect to make it out alive. And I want you to remember me whenever you eat together.

Look at this bread. It’s just regular bread. But now for you it will be my body when I’m not here. And when you eat it, I will be here. Thanks be to God! Look at this cup of wine. It’s just regular wine. But now for you, it will be my blood, my life which I’m giving up for you and for the sake of God’s kingdom on earth. Whenever you eat and drink, friends, remember me. I have tried to teach you about a new reality – about God’s reign here on earth – and I don’t want you to forget. Sometimes the world can look like just the regular world. But now for you it will be infused with God’s grace, God’s presence, and God’s beauty, just like the bread, just like the wine. Thanks be to God!”


Throughout his time in public ministry, Jesus taught about the kingdom of God. Sometimes we might think of this kingdom of God as being in heaven – something we don’t get to until after death. But what Jesus is talking about, this reign of God, is something that he saw the beginnings of here on earth. “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like yeast that a woman hides in a bag of flour. It’s very small, but it makes loaves upon loaves of bread rise.” “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like a mustard seed. It’s very small, but it grows into a tremendous, flavorful bush that the birds themselves rest in.”

And today, in our gospel reading, we get a taste of what that realm of God will look like, based on what Jesus, its anointed King – its Messiah – says and does. He has just asked the disciples who they say he is, and Peter gets it. “You are the Messiah,” he says. And then Jesus starts teaching that this will mean his suffering, death, and resurrection. Peter gets very upset, because to him Messiah means the guy in charge, the guy who gets waited on, who makes the important decisions, who commands the army, and, incidentally, whose friends get influential political appointments as well. But as soon as Jesus admits to being the Messiah, he gets it all wrong about what it means to BE the Messiah. “Not you, Lord, surely!” Peter rebukes. “Get in line, you tempter!” Jesus answers back. “You are thinking about human things, not divine things. You don’t have your eyes on what God is doing in the world now.”

In the United Church of Christ, we talk about communion as a symbol and as a sacrament. It’s a symbol in the sense that we recognize that the bread doesn’t literally become Jesus’ body, the wine is not somehow changed into blood, while still physically having the properties of wine. But at the same time, communion is one of our two sacraments, which is to say, we recognize that God is present in it in a special way. This is a place where we meet God, not just in our minds or our spirits, but physically, with the taste of the wafers on our tongues, and the wine in our mouths. Through communion, God feeds us a meal in the new world God is creating. This is a meal in the Kingdom of God.

Because of that, this is a meal that reminds us of what the realm of God is about. It is a meal that brings healing and forgiveness, as Jesus brought healing and forgiveness. It is a meal that brings a radical equality – people from all stations of life, men and women, young and old, powerful and weak: all are welcome at the table. This is a meal in which we remember that Jesus was our leader and our teacher, and he lived that out, not by taking advantage of his powerful position, but by serving his disciples, stooping to wash their feet, and stretching out his arms to conquer sin and death.

This is the meal we eat today, a gift from God to the people of God, thanks be to God. It is a meal that creates a new community – a new communion – connecting us to people all around the world, from the past up to the present and into the future, through Jesus. And it is this community, the church universal, created by God, that works together, first to see and then to encourage, the growth and indwelling of God’s holy and beautiful realm on earth.

There is another name for communion, which is Eucharist, and which means giving thanks. Let us give thanks today and every day for God’s gift to us in Jesus, and God’s vision for us which we remember in this meal eaten in the Kingdom of God.

Wrestling with God

Genesis 32:22-31

In our reading from the book of Genesis, we hear about Jacob wrestling with a stranger, or an angel. This is a key moment in his life story. It is an experience that changes his body – he always walks with a limp, afterwards – and it is an experience that changes his very way of being a person. After this holy wrestling match, Jacob’s name changes to Israel.

To see the importance of this, I’d like to go back earlier in the story and remember what has happened to Jacob up until now. First of all, we have that name, “Jacob,” which means “heel” in Hebrew. Jacob gets this name because he his born grabbing onto the heel of his older twin brother, Esau. I don’t know if you can go so far as to say Jacob is a heel, but on the other hand, he’s pretty grabby, especially when it comes to things that by right and custom should belong to the oldest brother.

So for example, one day Esau is coming in from the field after a sweaty day of hunting. Jacob is there, simmering some lentil stew in a big pot. He’s just added a little more salt and cumin to bring out the flavor, when Esau tramps up, as impatient and impulsive as ever. “Gimme soup,” he says, in his charming caveman way.
Jacob has some choices here. He could just hand over a bowl of soup – be nice to his brother – and let the moment go. Or say no, and let Esau find his own food. But he knows that Esau thinks with his stomach, not with his head. So he offers up a well-timed trade. “I’ll give you soup,” he says, “If you’ll give me the privileges of being the oldest.”
“Okay,” says Esau, “Doesn’t help me if I starve to death.”
And so Esau gives away his rights for practically nothing, and Jacob helps him do it.

Later, as their father Isaac is dying, Jacob outmaneuvers Esau again. Blind old Isaac calls to Esau, asking him to bring some of his favorite wild game. Rebekah, the mother, hears this. Esau is Isaac’s favorite, but Jacob is hers, so she calls Jacob and tells him to hurry and cook up some goat for Isaac. On his deathbed, Jacob fools his father into giving him the best blessings. When Esau gets there, game in hand, Isaac has eaten already, and given the blessings he had to give. All Esau gets is the leftovers.

Since Jacob has taken the blessings by trickery, and Esau can tend to have a temper, he decides its time to leave town. He flees to his mother’s brother in the East – his uncle Laban. On the way, he has a surprising experience. One night, he’s about to fall asleep, when he has a vision of angels climbing up and down a great ladder. Who remembers the song “Jacob’s Ladder?” On waking, Jacob says to himself, “God was here in this place, and I didn’t even know it.” He builds a pile of stones, and makes a deal with God. “If you bless me, I’ll worship you,” he says, intent to keep grabbing the heel of that thing he wants.

Jacob settles in to working for his uncle, and he makes the herds prosper. But Laban also gives Jacob a taste of his own medicine. After seven years of working to pay the bride-price for the beautiful younger sister he’s in love with – Rachel – Jacob wakes up in the morning to find that Laban has switched the older for the younger, and given him Leah as a bride instead. When Jacob confronts him, “Hey, we had an agreement!” Laban responds, “Oh, don’t you know our customs? The older daughter has to be married first before the younger one can marry. I can’t believe I forgot to mention it.” To marry the woman he originally wanted, Jacob has to agree to work for another seven years. Which he does. I would guess – not happily.

When we meet Jacob in today’s Bible reading, he has finally finished his fourteen years of service and has moved out of his uncle’s house. He is on his way back to face his brother, to face his past, and with a different perspective on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of switched siblings.

This time, on the return journey, Jacob doesn’t meet God as angels going up and down a ladder to heaven. Instead, he meets God as a man he wrestles with all night. Just as a side note – in Hebrew the word for angel and the word for messenger are the same. An angel would not necessarily be obvious, but could look like anyone, so Jacob might not know right away who it was who was wrestling with him. As they wrestle, the man realizes he’s losing and tries to get away, but Jacob is tenacious. He holds on until morning, demanding a blessing. “Tell me your name,” he says, but the messenger of God won’t do it. Finally, the man says, “your name will be Israel, not Jacob, because you have wrestled with God and humans, and have won.”


I think sometimes it’s easy to get caught in some of the traps that Jacob is caught in. When he is first on his ways to his uncle’s household, he thinks of God as being kind of like a divine Santa Claus, not that there was Santa Claus back then, but, he thinks of God as someone he can make a deal with, like Esau, or fool, like his father Isaac. I’ll give you an altar if you give me money and children. The ends justify the means for him a little bit. You may have heard the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Guess what? It’s not in the Bible. Benjamin Franklin said it. But if it were, it would be here, and it would be coming out of Jacob’s mouth.

In today’s story, when he’s at the river crossing, Jacob is left alone, without any of his accomplishments or possessions, and he has to come face to face with God. And he does pretty well. He doesn’t get overpowered by the angel, and he doesn’t let go, either. Instead, he wins a blessing from the man. But in the process he sustains a permanent leg injury. Jacob comes through the encounter changed, in other words. He has met God face to face, and it has altered him, body and soul. He has wrestled with God, and it has been costly, but it has brought him a blessing.

There are times in our lives when we might feel a need to wrestle with God. For Jacob, it comes when he is about to face his past and meet his brother for the first time in many years. For us, it may be something else that jolts us out of our sense of comfort with God, that God is someone that we can understand and make deals with. It might be a difficult loss that challenges our faith, a time when prayers seem to go unanswered, when a struggle lasts so long and we are not sure when the dawn will come. It could be an addiction, mistreatment of a loved one, or just a strange dry spell in our prayer lives. It could be a past that we would rather leave behind than face. There are times when God seems distant and unconcerned.

The question is, then, can we hold on to God as Jacob did? Can we hold on in the wrestling? Can we trust, when the evidence seems to stack up against it, that our God is a good God? Can we let that goodness shape us?

There are people out there who don’t realize that what they learned in Sunday School as children isn’t the whole picture of what it means to be a Christian. To be in a situation that causes us to question God, to wrestle with the meaning of God’s work in the world, can tear down a faith that is childish and brittle. Not that wrestling with God is easy. But sometimes that is what is required in a mature faith. The ability to challenge God, and to be ready to be changed by the experience, body and soul.

Hear this good news. God is not distant; God is near at hand. Even in those moments when having faith seems most foolish, God is with us, holding us close, ready to meet our challenges. Wrestling with God is part of the life of faith, and if we can hold on to God’s goodness, God will bless us. Today in our gospel lesson, Jesus feeds thousands with a few loaves and a few fish. The Son of God has come near and dwelt among us, bearing blessing upon blessing. We are not alone. We live in God’s world. Thanks be to God. Amen.