What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 25, 2011

Season of Creation:
River Sunday

Genesis 8:20-22, 9:12-17
Psalm 139:19-24
Revelation 22:1-5
Matthew 28:1-10

It is River Sunday, the final Sunday in this month's mini-season of the “Season of Creation.” It is a day that we live out in several ways today by connecting God's waters to the waters of baptism—in John's baptism, and in welcoming two new members of our congregation today to live out their baptismal covenant with this congregation.

I'd like to offer a few brief, but I hope meaningful, words that comment on all that is happening today through the lens of a very common experience we have with water.

One of the events that can produce a great many stories about anxious children and parents is that time of children learning how to swim. Today many more parents are taking their children as infants into the pool to become more comfortable in water. But even then, there is still that all-important moment in learning how to swim when a child has to let go of the safety of the arms of mom or dad or the lifeguard, and swim. An essential part of that leap, beyond the techniques of freestyle, backstroke, and treading water, is the basic step of mastering breathing underwater. I can remember a college roommate once telling me about one of his favorite parts of being a summer swimming instructor was teaching kids how to blow bubbles underwater. He said the children always hated trying it at first. It was completely counter-intuitive: breathing underwater? But after that new rhythm became natural—blowing underwater, learning to turn their heads to the side to breathe in, and to repeat: face down, blow; turn, inhale; down, blow; turn, inhale—their faces beamed with excitement. Once that moment came, the waters changed from being the most terrifying thing in the world, to one of the most incredible things in the world.

At each of our baptisms whether they happened today or years ago, we have undergone a similar transformation. These waters have transformed our fear of drowning to our sinfulness into God’s buoyant blessing that frees us to breathe in God’s gift of grace forever. Baptismal waters are waters that will not drown us. We will always be able to breathe in them. They are waters that themselves are full of life-giving Spirit, rescuing us from the power of death and evil, and pouring the promise of eternal life on us. God makes these waters of blessing waters that we can breathe in, even when we cannot seem to keep our heads above the waters we navigate in our lives. Whatever may try to drown us, and keep us from breathing in God’s gift of grace, the oxygen of the Holy Spirit always stands within us, even when it seems we are underwater. All we have to do is breathe.

On this River Sunday, we recall the sign of water that God uses to bless God’s world. We recall the many ways God has blessed God’s people with not just water to drink, and water to bathe, but also water that gives us the grace to breathe in God’s promises, no matter what waters surround us.

All of today's readings point to the gift of God in water, and to our response to that gift. Despite the waters of the flood, Noah was given the life-boat of the ark to continue breathing in grace. God promised Noah that the flood waters would never overcome the Earth again, and that humankind would always breathe in the promise of forgiveness from sin.

The apostle John was given a vision of the waters of the river of life, waters that flowed in a stunning image at the end of his book of Revelation. This vision proclaims that the waters of God—our baptismal waters—flow from the location where the Jerusalem Temple used to be located, the place always associated with the pinpoint of God’s presence in Jerusalem. But the temple is no longer needed for us to come into contact with God: rather it is the gift of the river of life, the waters of baptism, that flow from God to us, so the world may once again breathe with this gift of grace.

Our response to that gift is rejoicing. The story in Matthew of Jesus’ resurrection is a story that echoes Creation's rejoicing with us for the gift that baptismal waters give us. It is the story of an earthquake in response to Jesus rising from the dead. It is as though the whole creation cannot help but shake, move and dance with us in praising God that death is no more. It is the earth, let loose from the prison of brokenness, that now can breathe a sigh, and shout with rejoicing.

We today receive a swimming lesson once again, that here in this boat called the church, this “nave” that structurally represents an upside down ark, God promises us with new life in Christ, and so teaches us how to breathe in and breathe out grace out in the ocean of the world that surrounds this place. Together we blow bubbles in the face of whatever keeps the abundant life of Christ from us. Together God promises that baptismal waters put us in touch with waters that flow to God’s heart—waters that lead to Noah's rainbow vision of an eternal covenant, waters that lead to John's vision of the river of life, waters that rejoice with us as does all Creation at Jesus' defeat of death, waters that transform us to swim our lives surrounded by grace, full of the breath of God to sustain us.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 18, 2011

Season of Creation:
Wilderness Sunday

Joel 1:8-10, 17-20
Psalm 139:13-19
Romans 8:18-27
Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

We do not have to be out in the middle of nowhere to find ourselves in the “wilderness.” Louis Zamperini experienced the wilderness in a place not full of sand or rock. Shot down on a rescue mission in the Pacific during World War II, Zamperini floated to the surface from beneath his downed plane, and found himself in a life raft in the middle of the blazing hot sun. He could have blamed anyone for winding up in this predicament. But as Lauren Hillebrand chronicles in her recent book Unbroken, despite being faced with “wilderness” challenges more life-threatening than what many of us ever have confronted, he never stopped continuing to see the bleakness around him as a way to grow in life and in faith.

Zamperini thankfully had two friends with him in his life raft that also survived the crash, Phil and Mack. In this wilderness experience, the men knew they would have to conserve only the food they needed to survive. But on their first night, while the other two men were sleeping, Mack gave into his fears and ate most of what was the only ration they had left--chocolate. Mack’s hoarding not only didn’t ease his fears, it left him with fewer resources to cope after becoming sick, and he died after 30 days.

Zamperini always took as active a role as he could in this situation. He refused to see himself as a victim. He waded through many dangers during his 47 days on this raft with his friend. The worst threat was sharks who at first would simply swim around the boat, and who then, when the men would go to sleep at night, would swim underneath the men and punch their noses up onto the bottom of the boat, as if to let them know the men they were there waiting. Finally as their boat began to deflate, the sharks would gain momentum and try to launch themselves into the raft. But the men kept doing whatever they could to keep the sharks away: from beating them with oars, to hitting their noses with their fists to keep them out of the boat.

As it turned out, that wasn’t the worst of their time of testing in the “wilderness.” Next they were picked up by a Japanese naval ship that took them to a POW camp. Over a series of months they were given hardly any medical care, little food, suffered physical and emotional abuse and lived in beyond primitive conditions. The man in charge of the last camp they were at was so madly set on torturing prisoners there that Japanese royalty tried unsuccessfully have him removed.

But even after surviving all this, even after coming within an inch of his life, even after coming back home to California and suffering terrible nightmare flashbacks, Louis Zamperini found a way to forgive his torturers. Now 94 years old, and without an ounce of bitterness in his body, he continues to live one of the happiest lives that his chronicler Ms. Hillebrand has ever heard of.

What is it that allowed this man to survive such suffering? How could he have made it through an experience that would have broken the spirit of most of us? Call it human will power, call it faith, call it God, but through a mysterious power that touched his life, Zamperini refused to see the desolation of the wilderness around him as a place that intended to break him down. In the midst of a broken situation, Zamperini saw this as his growth opportunity, and he found enough resources in himself and around him to survive--even though he was going through what we would call, “the wilderness.”

It is this testing in the wilderness that I would invite us to reflect on today. What “wilderness experiences” have we been through in our lives--or perahs are we currently in right now--and what resources does God give us to overcome them? The wilderness, for all its wildness and undomesticated qualities, for all the ways that human beings want to find ways to domesticate and overtake it, does serve an this important purpose in Creation. The wilderness is a physical space and a spiritual experience that clarifies, refines and tests our values and our dependence upon God to sustain us. Though it may not enter our consciousness in this urban part of Creation we live and dwell in, the wilderness, as part of God’s Creation, cannot be forgotten nor “thrown away.” Absent of the kind of resources we are more comfortable having around us, occasionally being in the wilderness can connect us to God by placing us in a position of reliance that can make God more real than ever, whether it is Zamperini’s Pacific Ocean, or an untamed area in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, or even one of the prarie grass lands beyond the outskirts of Chicago.

In the Bible the wilderness is a place that serves as means towards teaching and readying people for being a part of God’s mission. The Israelites entered a forty-year “wilderness school” after fleeing Egypt that humbled them a great deal, forcing them to rely for food only on the meat provided by God in the evening and manna that came in the morning. Looking back from the promised land, the Israelites discovered that they had found what was in their hearts during that “wilderness school.” What was there was God’s sustaining presence, physically and spiritually, in the midst of what seemed like an environment that was anything but present with means to sustain them.

Jesus’ testing in the wilderness, which we heard in today’s Gospel reading, proclaims an even bigger message from God to us about the wilderness: the wilderness is the arena where Jesus’ identity as God’s Son gets tested and affirmed so much that he cannot be anything but our Messiah after completing that forty-day journey. Jesus defeats the temptations of self-sufficiency, of grasping for political power and of trying to defy death on his own--temptations that he faced again, but that he overcame for us by doing what he did in the wilderness, relying upon God’s help. The wilderness experience is Jesus’ “Outward Bound” journey that prepares him to pass the many tests that will come in his public ministry--tests that will pale in comparison to what he faced in the wilderness. Jesus discovered that in the wild, God is present--as he was fed and ministered to there by God.

We need not fear the wilderness, whether it be a physical or emotional wilderness. For as God has shown through the Israelites and Jesus, God has a track record of showing us that while the wilderness may seem to be a place that is desolate, there is no such thing as a spiritual crisis where we are in the wilderness. As we affirm throughout our liturgy today, God’s abundant presence fills even the most desolate areas of the planet. The wilderness is a place that is alive, waiting for us to discover all that God provides there, and it is a place that calls upon us to proclaim to others that the wilderness is not a place of crisis. It is a place to be navigated through, an adventurous place--both geographic and spiritual--where God’s provisions are laid out for us, morning after morning after morning.

We do not have to be in the physical wilderness to appreciate and connect with the parts of creation that are--at least on the outside--desolate or wild. But we give thanks for what God purposes these parts of Creation for: to express the sustaining goodness of God through even the scarcest times and places. Now as we continue moving through this Season of Creation liturgy, we move to the table that will fill us with our manna in the wilderness, Christ’s table, so we may go and share Christ’s love with all who are desolate, and who yearn to hear that no wilderness is cause for a crisis of faith in God's abundant provisions.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 11, 2011

Season of Creation:
Land Sunday
Genesis 3:14-19, 4:8-16
Psalm 139:7-12
Romans 5:12-17
Matthew 12:38-40

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

It’s hard to find a family history that isn’t in some way messy. As they say, “Shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall.” If we look back into our family’s past we can often find a “black sheep,” sibling rivalry that never was reconciled, a stubborn parent or a cousin who is always drifting. After all, come on, no matter whose family we come from there’s no doubt our ancestors had “bad heir” days once and a while...or some lifeguard was not on duty at the “gene pool.”

We all carry baggage with us wherever we’ve come from, whether our family story descends from complicated European royalty, or a simple dream of a better life that came through Ellis Island.

It’s no surprise then that the story of the first human family is not without its warts and exposed rough patches. It’s a story of fallen, dishonored and broken relationships all around--between each other, between God, and even with the land. We look back at their story and say, how did God possibly work to bless the world through that family?--even as in the same breath we wonder the same question about our own family, “How could God possibly be at work...with what we've been through, and through what's happened in our past?”

The story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s first children, is the epitome of sabotage rearing its ugly head in a family system. Eve set up Cain for a fall from grace with the words she said as soon as he was born: “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” (4:1) Eve essentially calls him god-like, a “man as Yahweh”, the epitome of a strong, dominating first-born male. Abel’s birth doesn’t get any such praise. Genesis merely states the fact that he’s born. His own name gives him hardly anything to stand on--Abel means “vapor, nothingness, meaningless”. No fewer than seven times in the story does it say that Abel was Cain's brother--but never the other way around. Abel is never mentioned on his own merits. It’s clear who ranked ahead of the other brother.

Cain’s higher status even affected his offerings to God. He brought some fruit from the ground he was to tend to which were probably left-overs. But Abel brings the first animals of his flock of sheep for an offering--the best, the first creatures, given from God who made them and to whom they belonged. Is it then any wonder that God favors Abel's offering over Cains, the weak one, the “meaningless one”, who only has any meaning at all in his family because he is related to his brother? God began to show what is the hallmark of how God works in us--through recognition of the small and neglected ones.

Cain is so disconnected from Abel, so far “above” him, he does not even refer to him as his brother until after he has jealously murdered him. God asked, “Where is Abel, Cain?” and he replied, “What, am I my brother’s keeper?” God could have wreaked vengeance upon Cain, but instead chose to freely send him away from the land he had fed with his brother's blood, instead of seeds.

That’s usually where the story ends when it is told—even though it continues for the remainder of Genesis chapter four, a part which is omitted from today’s first reading. But the rest of the story shows that this is actually a family story that doesn’t end with this game of hunting a “forebear”. If we just look at that crisis--the relationship between Cain and Abel--we miss the larger story of God telling a story of redemption, grace and resurrection that begins with this first family, and reaches all the way to our own.

The seven generations that follow Cain--none of them were farmers. No one took care of the land that had been entrusted to Cain. By the time his ancestor Lamech came along, Lamech was saying things like “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (4:23-24) The same story of Cain and Abel was continuing to become the family mantra. But during all this time, Eve was watching. She saw what happened as a result of this hierarchy that had been set up between her sons. She saw what became as a result of the male who had taken the same kind of fall that she had when she ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree. It couldn’t go on like this. It had to stop. And God found a way to interrupt the way of violence with the way of grace. Adam and Eve birthed new life.

They birthed a son named Seth. This time Eve did not just speak about Abel, that forgotten, humble, servant-son. She spoke on his behalf, saying, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel.” Seth’s birth was their redemption, resurrection and new life, all rolled into one. Seth, which means “survival of the unfit”, became grace for this family that had thus far seen hierarchy creating death. With this new birth, the relationship of humanity with God was restored as Genesis recalls that God then was worshiped as the one to whom all were subject to. The relationship between humanity and the Earth was restored: the soil that had been filled with Abel’s blood had now been redeemed with the seeds of one born in his stead. The relationship of this first family and our ancestors was also restored. Thanks be to God that Seth is our ancestor, rather than Cain, for as Seth’s name testifies, God’s providence works even through families with checkered pasts, who are unfit—even through us who thrive but only for the new life given to us by God.

How is such a story of a second chance, and redemption possible? How can God continue to make way for us to rekindle our connection with one another and creation? The answer, I believe, lies hidden in the question that Cain asks God when God comes to him after Abel's murder. Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Within this question is a deeper question: who are our brother and sister? Are we their keeper? We are, because we have been kept by the One who keeps us all--by God, whose keeping of us draws us closer in relationship, to God, to one another and to all Creation. Even going back to Adam, Eve and Seth, God “keeps” us as children. God does not have grandchildren. God only has children. For just because our parents were people of faith does not make it necessarily so for us. God adopts each of us, each successive generation, to keep us as children, no matter what birth order, or hierarchy, or earthly rank we want to impose on each other. We are our brother’s and sister’s keeper because God has made all of us brothers and sisters, every one--even with brother moon and sister stars, brother creatures and sister land. Here at United Lutheran we are one another's keeper—even across hierarchies of age, class and ethnicity—even between someone like Sam Richardson who can call a newborn baby like John Podolak a brother in this place!

On this day when we recall our brokenness that was exposed on 9/11, and the mix of emotions that still flood us ten years later, has the human family system siezed this opportunity to expand who we see as our brother and sister? Has it made us more interconnected with those brothers and sisters of our country and of our world who are different from us--or has it insulated us in reactive, fearful isolation?

With Adam and Eve who gave birth to Seth, we can be the answers to our prayers for peace, reconciliation and wholeness in the human family that we lift up this day. We too can dismantle the hierarchies in the world that keep our kinship anything other than as brother and sister. For that is how God manages to continue working God’s way of grace through a human family as messy and as quirky as us. We carry with us the promise this day that no matter how many strikes our family history puts against us, from the very beginning, God has left no family system beyond redemption, nor from claiming us as keepers of one another as the brothers and sisters God has made us.

Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, September 4, 2011

Season of Creation: Forest Sunday
Genesis 2:4b-22
Psalm 139:1-7
Acts 17:22-28
John 3:1-16

It can truly be an exciting and fascinating thing to incorporate Earth into worship, as we are doing today. I am presume that there has been some moment, some experience we have all had of being amazed by God’s Earth--whether it be an experience of the weather, or a particularly beautiful place we visited, or maybe an animal that we grew to love. There’s an aspect of appreciation and thanks to God for these moments and experiences that I think all of us can appreciate honoring in worship.

However, there is also an aspect of this drawing together of creation and ceremony in our worship that seems odd, strange and out of place. It seems so far removed from this insulated, brick and wood edifice. In many ways our discomfort stems from ways in which Creation has been taken out of and even segregated, we dare say, from Christian thought and practice. The Christian message, after all, is for us, isn’t it--for humans? The Christian story is a human story, not an Earth habitat story, isn't it? Nature is beautiful after all—God created it—but what could God possibly have to do now with the non-human world: trees, plants, animals, skies, mountains and all the rest? Don’t those all exist to serve us?

We can hear the roots of a human-centered worldview of Christianity through a story told by Wangaari Maathai, environmental activist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Growing up in the highlands of Kenya, Christian missionaries came to her people and saw theses Kenyan natives’ deep reverence for fig trees, which were considered a place of worship. The missionaries cut these trees down because, they said, God was worshiped in a house called church, not under a tree. This was devastating not just for Ms. Maathai’s people but also for the trees themselves. Because they were worshiped with such reverence, the fig trees had never been cut down, and therefore their roots went down extremely deep into the ground. They went so deep they broke rock that then released water up into the below ground water system, providing irrigation for their local crops. These deep tree roots also prevented the soil from eroding—soil that grew their food. What was presumed to be “correct” Christian belief that separated God apart from the natural world only served to undercut these very trees, causing landslides and extensive damage to these locals’ ecosystem and livelihood, and eroding also the relationships to those whom these missionaries wanted to serve. (Speaking of Faith, April 30, 2009)

In recent years the Christian church has been awakening to the dangers of segregating Creation from our imagination and thinking about God. In no small way have the vast and urgent crises of the Earth’s degradation contributed to our awakening: from global inequalities, to climate change; from the loss of species as well as safe water, to urban growth; from resource depletion, to the loss of biodiversity, and many more. We are now beginning to reach back into the vast trove of resources in the Christian tradition and discover that there is a God who affirms humans and the created world together in an interdependent rather than exclusionary relationship.

One such resource that is only beginning to be untapped is the second account of creation heard in Genesis. Most of us are more familiar with the first account of creation in Genesis 1 that starts “in the beginning”, where God takes 6 days to form the earth, and where at the end of each day God declares “it is good.” That story, for all its grandeur, has for so long distanced us from the Earth, namely because of God’s command in it for humans to “have dominion” over Creation. This has more often been interpreted as reason for humans to exploit the earth rather than to be stewards, care takers and custodians of the world--which is truer to the original Hebrew word that was translated “dominion.”

The second creation story in Genesis--yes, there are two of them!--is being resurrected for the deep, connected relationship it places us in with God’s creation. Here God forms us out of the very “stuff” that the Earth is made out of--dirt. Adam, in fact, gets his name from the Hebrew word for topsoil, adamah. God places adamah-made Adam into God’s first garden, Eden, “to till it and keep it” (3:16)--to care and tend to this very ground--this very stuff from which he came.

This second creation story shows a God who is fond of the Earth, who longs for us to live in close relationship with Earth. This stood in stark contrast to other creation myths at the time that Gensis 2 was written. In one myth of that time, the junior dieties have to dig irrigation channels, and get so tired of it, they go on strike and create slave laborers so they can rest forever. The God of Genesis, however, gets involved with the earth. The second creation story begins with an earth that has nothing in its fields, but God gets busy by rolling up God’s sleeves and getting God’s hands dirty. God plants trees, irrigating them with four major rivers, and then supplies those trees with a full time steward to care for them: Adam, born of adamah. Adam, caretaker of that which he is made of and where he came from. Like Adam, trees are not just for us to care for. Because they are made of the same stuff we are, they also give us life.

There is another tree besides that one in God’s first garden that Christians have begun to reclaim from an Earth-perspective. It is something that we may not even think of as a “tree” at all, even though it was made of wood. Our tree of life, the tree that does not just give us redemption, but the tree that also gives birth to us as creatures who are forever interwoven with this Creation God has given us, is the tree of the cross of Christ. The cross does not just redeem us, it offers God’s forgiveness to us that restores us into a relationship with all the earth--all the adamah--that is not dead, but that lives. On the cross God transforms a tree that was full of death into a living tree for us, a tree supported by living adamah—a tree that has roots deep enough to defeat the power of death, and strong enough to uphold our tree of life as our source of protection, sustenance and steadfast love.

Today as God sends us from this place, I invite you to look at the trees that surround us on our streets, in a local park, or even the one planted right outside this wall of the church--a tree that was planted in honor of a deceased child of this congregation whose life was cut tragically short. As we look at these trees we do not just see them as nice decorations, or beautiful ornaments. God intends for them to come alive to us by the story they tell of Jesus‘ presence offering us life. As we look upon them we are drawn to trees because they reveal to us that God’s Creation is not dead, it is alive. We are made of the same, alive, redeemed stuff as these trees. We both have a common partner, Jesus, who has come in our form--we as a mammal, and trees as adamah.

As partners with these trees who speak of the life given to us through God’s tree of life, we tend them. We tend to trees just as we would to anything that is precious, and vulnerable. When we care for them, we care for the one who died to give life to all the Created world, the cosmic Christ. We join together in Creation care just as Nicodemus cared for the broken Christ; Nicodemus, a nighttime inquirer of Jesus who questioned him about why one must be born again by Jesus being “lifted up” on a tree for many; Nicodemus, who cradled the crucified Christ in his arms after Jesus' decent from his throne on a tree; Nicodemus, who like us was made of adamah and who like us found redemption in God’s grace working its way through the stuff we find in God’s created world, even stuff as simple as dirt and trees.

Today we do not just thank God for nature. Today we reconcile that which has been separated from Creation for too long. Christ transforms our relationship with Creation--a relationship that goes beyond just recycling paper, stopping junk mail and printing double sided copies, though those are are a part of that relationship. The gift of this relationship is that through Creation we are all drawn deeper to Christ--Christ whose home is the whole world; Christ whose wounds in Creation cry out to us for care; Christ whose resurrected adamah has turned him into a tree of life for each one of us.

Amen.