Refined and Purified

Second Sunday of Advent, Year C, December 9, 2021

Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the secular world, December is about adding things. More lights! More presents! More parties! More concerts! More decorations! More family gatherings! Everything has to look nice, everything has to be friendly and warm and inviting, even if only on a surface level. There will be guests coming, so everything has to look good, even if nothing substantial has really changed. For some, the spirit of the holidays is deep and true and they experience all the love and joy that we’re supposed to, but for many people, it’s just an illusion. Skin deep. Make believe. Let’s paper over the cracks and hide the stains. We don’t have time to really change things, we don’t have time to fix the fundamental flaws in the foundation of our lives, so let’s ignore them and hope nobody notices. Let’s pretend everything’s good, let’s pretend our relationships are stronger than they are, let’s pretend that everything is as happy and loving as we wish it were. If we’re busy enough, if there are enough presents and cookies and carols on the radio, maybe we won’t notice the problems underneath.

Our readings tell a different story. As we look forward to the coming of the Day of the Lord, the coming of Christ, Malachi tells us that God will remove things. Malachi likens God to a silversmith, who takes rock containing silver ore and crushing it and burning it until the silver is left and the rock has been discarded. We are that ore, and we are filled with both good things—the silver—and bad things—the rock. We are children of God, created in God’s image; we have so much good in us, love and generosity and kindness and joy and hope and creativity and many other things. Even the worst human beings have some of these good things in them. But we are also broken by the sin and death of the world, and so we have things like greed and hate and jealousy and cruelty and selfishness and apathy and so many other things. Even the best human beings have these bad things in them.

And the thing is, those bad things cause us pain, and they cause the people around us pain, and they cause the world pain, and they cause God pain, because God knows our potential and God knows the true cost of our thoughts, words, and actions. We can lie to ourselves, justify every bit of vitriol and vindictiveness, every petty act of selfishness, every moment of indifference to the suffering of our fellow human beings. We can fool ourselves into thinking ourselves perfectly righteous even as we make the world more broken through our actions and inactions. But we cannot fool God. We cannot lie to God. Like a smith, God can tell the difference between raw ore and pure silver. And God can and does work to refine the silver and remove the impurities. Some of that refining work happens now, in our lives in this world. Some of it will happen later, when Christ comes again. Because the thing is, those impurities, those bad things in our hearts and minds, they can’t enter God’s kingdom. All those little evils and self-justifications are the product of this world. They cannot survive into the next. Only the good parts—love and wisdom and generosity and joy and all the rest—can come with us into God’s kingdom. We need to be purified. We need to be healed. We need to be refined.

We need to repent. But when I say repent, I don’t mean the self-righteous and condemning way most people understand that word. It’s not about feeling guilty, it’s not about beating yourself up for all the problems, it’s not about punishment. When a silversmith is smelting ore to get the silver out of it, he’s not doing it because he wants to punish the rocky bits. He’s not putting it in the fire to make the silver feel bad about having impurities in it. The silversmith is removing all the stuff that’s keeping the silver from being most truly itself. The point is not what the silver was, it’s what the silver will be. Likewise, when you’re cleaning something, you’re not doing it to hurt the thing your cleaning, or make it feel bad about being dirty. You clean to get the dirt out, so that it can be good and useful and right. That’s what repentance is: it’s one of the steps of cleaning and purifying your soul and life, so that you can be good and loving and most truly the person God created you to be.

You’ve probably heard pastors say this before, but “repent” literally means “to turn around.” To change. To set yourself on a new path. It’s about recognizing that things are wrong, and figuring out what you need to do and say and think differently so that things can be better. So that you can be better. It’s about acknowledging your own responsibility for doing and saying and thinking bad things, but it’s also about taking responsibility for doing things differently next time. And it’s not easy! Nobody likes admitting they were wrong. Nobody likes admitting when they have hurt people, nobody likes realizing that they have caused suffering, whether that’s their own pain or the pain of others. But if you want to stop doing those things, you have to first realize what you’re doing, and why they’re a problem. It hurts, it doesn’t feel good, but it’s a necessary first step.

The thing is, it’s only the first step. It’s not the end goal! The end goal is a better life filled with love and all the fruits of the Spirit. The end goal is to follow Christ more closely, to be the people God created us to be. The point of acknowledging guilt and sin is not to wallow in it, but to identify what needs to change and why, so that you can throw out the trash and build something better. We tend to get stuck in this step, a lot, because it’s hard to throw things out even when you know they’re bad. So we confess our sins, and we feel bad for them, but we don’t actually do anything to change because that would be hard and we’re comfortable as we are. A textbook example of this is white guilt, where white people who want to look like they care about racism will talk about all the awful things white society has done and continues to do to Black people, Native Americans, and other people of color, but they don’t actually work to change things, or support people of color who are working for change. Another example is someone who cheats on their spouse, and confesses and asks for forgiveness … but still keeps on flirting with coworkers. The point is not to feel bad about what you did wrong, it’s to step onto a new path, a better path. To change, so that you can grow in faith and love.

Change is hard. Growth is hard. Growing pains are no joke. But it’s still better than the alternative. And the thing is, we don’t have to do it alone. We do not have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Because the Lord is with us. In the prophet Malachi’s words, we are not the smith purifying the silver, we are the silver being purified. We are not the one doing the cleaning, we are the thing being cleaned. God is the one doing the purifying, the cleaning. God is the one taking away sins and making people better. God is the one who began good work in us and among us. We are called to participate in the work! We are called to repent and turn around and ask forgiveness and share in God’s grace and let the love of God overflow in us and around us. We are not called to paper over the cracks, we are called to fix them. And, when they are too big for us to fix, we are called to give them into God’s hands for God to fix.

The true spirit of Christmas is not about pasting a smile over our hurts, and using lights and presents and food to pretend things are great when they’re not. The true spirit of Christmas is about doing the hard work to heal what is broken and clean what needs cleansing so that the love of God can flow freely in us and among us. It’s about placing ourselves in God’s hands and allowing God to make the changes that are to big for us to make ourselves. It’s about turning around, and letting God put us on the right path, the path towards love and wisdom and justice and hope, even when it’s hard, even when it requires us to grow and change. May we have the courage and strength to follow the way of the Lord.

Amen.

Not Christmas Yet

First Sunday of Advent, Year C, November 28, 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is not Christmas yet. Christmas is still a month away, and we wait with anticipation for the carols, the services, the family gatherings, the food, the presents, the baby Jesus lying in a manger. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the time of waiting, the time of preparation, the time of waiting for Christ to come. We think of it mostly as a time of waiting for the baby Jesus to be born, but it is also a time of waiting for Christ to come again in glory. Which is why our readings for this Sunday talk about the day of the Lord, the day when the Lord fulfills all his promises and there is justice and righteousness in the land, and what will happen as that day draws near.

I have to say, when I look out at our world and see disasters both natural and political, when I see racism and antisemitism and sexism and all other forms of bigotry flourishing, when I see cruelty and indifference persisting and people of loving hearts becoming exhausted and stopping, it does not seem all that far-fetched that the end of the world might be near. Or, at least, the end of my world, the end of much that I love and hold dear. At the same time, I have a book called the Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse, and one of its chapters is a list of times throughout history when people have believed the end of the world was near. It’s a long list, going back thousands of years, and nobody’s been right yet. And so we ask, how long, O Lord, how long?

How long will people live on the streets because there isn’t enough affordable housing? How long will people die of cold and hunger in the richest country in the world? How long will white supremacists create a culture of violence and hatred? How long will we accept a justice system that is corrupt and filled with double-standards in which bad apples are protected and saved, and good people forced out? How long will families and communities be divided over politics? How long will we have a culture of harassment and abuse which is just as glad to go after the innocent as the guilty? How long will the cries of marginalized people go unheard? How long, O Lord, how long?

And how can we endure, until the promised day comes? How can we stand tall and hold our heads high until Christ comes? The day is surely coming, but how do we live in the meantime? Burnout is a cliché on everyone’s lips these days, but it is real, and I don’t think we understand just how serious a problem it is. People have been pushed beyond their limits; our strength is used up, and along with it our resilience and our imagination and our hope and our joy. Physically, mentally, spiritually, we are worn out. Too many people were barely making it through the day before the pandemic; the extra challenges of COVID and the existential dread of knowing there is a grave danger most of us are helpless to fight has done huge damage. How do we wait, how do we stand up and hold up our heads when we don’t have the strength to make it through each day? How long, O Lord, how long, and what if our strength fails us before that promised day?

We are not the first to have this dilemma. We are not the first to wait for the Lord’s promises to come true. We are not the first to live in times of injustice and suffering. The people in Jesus’ day lived under the heavy heel of tyranny, of Roman occupation. Centuries before that, the people in Jeremiah’s day had been conquered by the Babylonians and sent into exile. Israel and Judah had both fallen because of the injustice and cruelty and abuse in their nations, because their leaders and their common people put greed and fear above doing the right thing. They were conquered, and destroyed, and everything looked like the end of the line for God’s people. That’s what was happening when Jeremiah was writing. And this passage is designed to reassure the people in exile: yes, things are bad. Yes, everything went wrong. Yes, you are suffering. Yes, there is evil and injustice everywhere. But the Lord is with you, and the Lord will not abandon you, and the Lord will restore you and the Lord will give you a good king. And all of that happened. Sixty years after Babylon conquered Israel, Babylon was itself conquered by Persia, and the people of Israel were allowed to return home and rebuild their temple and their nation. It didn’t look like they were expecting, but it happened. God promised he would save them, God promised they would be restored, and God kept God’s promise. Just as God has kept every promise God has ever made. Just as God is keeping and will keep God’s promises to us. We don’t know when Christ will come again, but we know that Christ will come. That promise is as sure and certain as the coming of Christmas in four weeks.

So how do we endure, in the meantime? What do we do while we wait, when it feels like we cannot do anything at all? When we feel overwhelmed by the problems of the world and our helplessness to fix them? The first thing is remember that the weight of the world is not on our shoulders. We can neither make it happen nor prevent it from happening. The Day of the Lord does not depend on us. We can and should give our burdens into Jesus’ care and trust that he will take care of us. God is at work in the world; even when everything seems hopeless and evil seems to be winning and we can’t see how things could possibly be fixed, God is present and God is working to heal and forgive and renew and restore. We trust in the compassion and loving-kindness of God, which is from everlasting to everlasting, and we trust in God’s goodness and his ability to restore us and our world. Even when we walk through dark valleys, we are not alone, for God is with us, working to restore green pastures and still waters. There is a wellspring of life and hope in the presence of the Lord, in his promises to us. The God who brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, who brought them out of Exile in Babylon, has promised to save us, too, and to save the whole world with us. The salvation of the world does not depend on us working hard and making everything right. We wait for the coming of the Lord, in the sure and certain hope that one day it will come, and one day there will be justice and righteousness on Earth and God’s promises will be fulfilled.

But, at the same time, we are not called to ignore the problems in the world, to shrug our shoulders and turn away and accept the world’s problems as “just the way things are.” We are called to keep watch, to keep witnessing to God’s love, to see the difference between the world as it is now and the world as God created it to be, the world as it will be when Christ comes again. We are called to keep watch and, to the extent that we can, participate in God’s work of salvation and love and resurrection. No, the Day of the Lord does not depend on our actions. Yes, we should be working to build a world more like God’s kingdom. It’s like a parent cooking a meal with their kids. The kids are hungry, and keep asking how long before dinner. And the parent invites them to help cook. Dinner will come whether the kids help or not! But it may come quicker if they help than it will if they don’t, or if they get in the way, and the kids should help because it’s part of being a family. In the same way, the Day of the Lord will come no matter what we do, but we should be doing our part. Not because God can’t do it without us, but because we are God’s children and should be participating in God’s work. But even when we can’t help, when we can’t work to make the world a better place, we can still keep our heads up, and keep witnessing, knowing that Christ will come.

Amen.

He Is Coming

All Saints Sunday, Year B, November 7, 2021

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6
John 11:32-44

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

A lot of our common assumptions about heaven and hell don’t actually come from the Bible. The Bible spends a lot less time talking about death and the afterlife than we tend to assume. Christians are obsessed with the afterlife, but people in Biblical times really weren’t. They spent a lot more time thinking about how to live a good, faithful life than they did about what happened after you died. So they didn’t write much about the afterlife, and when heaven and hell do show up in the Bible, they’re pretty much always in dreams and visions and parables, meant to be evocative, rather than a textbook laying out the details. Christians, on the other hand, are really obsessed with life after death. We have centuries of stories and popular culture about heaven and hell, and most people can’t actually tell the difference between stuff that’s floating around in our culture and the things the Bible actually tells us. Most of our understanding of heaven and hell actually come from Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Saturday morning cartoons.

One of those pop culture beliefs is the idea that heaven is distant, far away from real life, otherworldly. Full of disembodied souls sitting on clouds and playing the harp. We think of heaven and earth as completely separate, and the goal of the Christian life is to get out of the earthly life and into heaven. But, as today’s readings show, that’s not the case. Both our reading from Isaiah and our reading from Revelation talk about God coming to Earth, about God’s holy mountain (Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, which the Temple sits atop of) being the center of God’s dominion on Earth.

Both Revelation and this passage from Isaiah are talking about the Day of the Lord, when God comes to Earth and destroys evil and saves the good. But you’ll notice that the faithful are not whisked away somewhere else. Rather, God comes to us. God remakes the world, yes, taking away the shroud of sin and death, creating a new heaven and a new earth. And the former things have passed away. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no connection between the world now and the world to come. Quite the opposite. The world to come is the world now as it should have been. The world to come is the world remade so that things are better, the way they should always have been. Evil is cast out (even from our own hearts), and sin is no more, and pain is healed, and brokenness fixed, and all our tears are wiped away.

You’ll notice that both Isaiah and Revelation include that detail, of God wiping away our tears. Our grief matters, our pain matters. It isn’t forgotten about and shoved under the rug. Instead, God consoles us and supports us and helps us heal. Even in this life, when something bad happens, part of healing from it usually involves learning and growing. We are all the product of the things we have experienced, both good and bad. Heaven is not about forgetting, or erasing, what has happened to us. It’s about healing in a place where we are truly safe and supported and loved, and the pain is taken away.

This world we live in now, our lives now, they matter. God created this world, and though it is broken and marred by sin and death, though it has become very different from the good place God created it to be, there is still goodness in it. This is still God’s creation. The kingdom of God, as described in the Bible, is an earthy place. There are fields to be tilled and vines to be grown. There is joy, and laughter, and music, and dancing. In fact, the single most common metaphor or vision of heaven is a party. A banquet, filled with rich foods and good wine, as our reading from Isaiah puts it. All the good things in the world made better, and here for us to enjoy. There is food that nourishes us body and soul, and tastes good. There is work to do, but work that enriches our lives, instead of draining us physically and mentally. There is rest, and time to play and rejoice together. And in the middle of all of it is God, here, with us. Not far away on some cloud somewhere. God is present in the midst of the celebration. See, the home of God is among mortals, he will dwell with them and they will be his people.

Likewise, although we are marred by sin and death, although we are very different from the good people God created us to be, there is still goodness in us. We are still God’s people. The Day of the Lord, Judgment Day, Kingdom Come, whatever you want to call it, the coming of the Lord is not about God destroying the world and us going to some far away place. It is about God making this world—and us—what we should always have been. In the same way that God will create a new heaven and a new earth, God will re-create us. That is what resurrection is. It’s not just resuscitation, where you get shocked back to life but still have all of the problems that caused death in the first place. No, resurrection is about being made new, whole, healed, better than you were before. God’s promise of resurrection through Jesus Christ isn’t just a return to the same-old, same-old. It’s a promise of being made better and yet still truly ourselves.

When we look around at the world, and when we look at the worst that people can do, it’s easy to think that there is nothing salvageable, nothing worth saving. The world is on fire, society is crumbling, people do terrible things to one another, natural disasters kill people and ruin lives. There is so much suffering in the world. Every one of us here has lost people we deeply care about. Every one of us here knows that there is evil, that there is suffering, in the world. When we look at how many people are suffering, sick, dying, abused, homeless, hungry, when we look at how many things are screwed up in the world and how often things seem to go from bad to worse, it’s easy to imagine that the only thing left to do is wipe the slate clean and start over.

And yet, just because there are things we can’t fix doesn’t mean that God can’t fix them. The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and those who dwell therein. The king of Glory created this world, and he is coming. He is coming to destroy the shroud of death that is cast over all peoples, he is coming to gather up all people to himself. He is coming to raise the dead from their graves and make all people whole. He is coming to unbind us from the chains that hold us down, the chains others have put on us and the chains we make for ourselves. He is coming to purify our hearts and minds and bodies and make us new. He is coming to wipe away every tear from our eyes. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Not Alone

Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 29, Year B, October 17, 2021

Job 38:1-7 [34-41]
Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

One of my favorite television shows is called Babylon 5, a sci-fi television show from the 90s. In one episode, the captain of an exploration ship gets a vague warning about danger at her next stop. She goes anyway, and when she gets there something happens. Something is there, something powerful and mysterious that her sensors just can’t figure out. It doesn’t even notice her, but the wake from its passing almost destroys her ship. After she gets rescued, the captain goes to the person who gave her the warning and asks him what it was. He shrugs, and tries to explain it this way: he picks up an ant crawling on some flowers in a display next to them. He shows the ant to her, and then puts it back on the flower. “If that ant were to point to the sky and ask another ant, “what was that?”” he asks, “what could it say? How could that ant explain what happened to it? I can’t explain what happened to you any more than that ant can explain what happened to it. There are some things out there greater than us that we just don’t understand.”

This passage from Job reminds me of that scene. God takes Job on a whirlwind tour of the cosmos, all of creation, all the things that God has done and is continuing to do. From setting the stars in their courses to ordering the weather to maintaining the ecological balance, God is very busy. This is not a God who created things and set them in motion at the beginning of time and then stood back to watch. This is a God who is active and present in the very big things and the very small things. This is a God who is vast beyond knowing, pulling back the curtain to let the mere mortal—Job—see just a tiny fraction of what it is God does. And while humans tend to focus on the things God does for us, God is not just the God of humanity. God is the God of all creation. God is great, and we are very small, and the universe that God creates and maintains is greater than we could ever understand.

Up to this point, everyone in the book of Job—Job’s wife, Job’s friends, Job himself—all thought that God’s biggest and most important job was to make sure that human beings experienced a fair life. That God’s main job was to make sure that the righteous get good things in life and the unrighteous get bad things. They want to believe that everything happens for a reason, that God plans everything and the consequences of every action are simple and predictable. They want to believe that the universe is simple and controllable. It’s a very attractive way of seeing the world: if everything happens for a reason, if the righteous are always rewarded and the sinful are always punished, then we can control what happens to us. All we have to do is be righteous, and we never have to worry, because we’ll be safe. Modern Americans believe this, too, even atheists; this is why we put such emphasis on healthy lifestyles. We have this delusion that if you eat the right foods and exercise in the right way and take the right vitamins or supplements, we’ll be healthy. That we can control what happens to us. And, certainly, eating a healthy diet and exercising will help, but there are a ton of other factors, many of which we have no control over. In the same way, being good and kind and righteous will help us live a good life but it won’t guarantee that everything will go well for us. The world is very, very complicated and we are only a tiny part of it. But we want control, so we tell ourselves that we can control things, that if we do the right things and say the right things we’ll be safe and healthy and happy.

 This is why Job’s wife and friends are so sure that Job must have done something to deserve all the bad things that happened to him. They believe that everything happens for a reason, and that everything that happens is God either punishing the guilty or rewarding the righteous. They believe this because it gives them a feeling of control over the world, and even over God: God will do what they want if they say and do the right things. And Job agrees with them! Like his friends, Job believes that God’s biggest job is to reward the righteous and punish the guilty, and he knows that he is righteous, therefore he believes that God is falling down on the job. And so he complains that God is not present, and not doing a good job.

Today’s reading from Job is God’s answer. And according to God, Job is wrong. Making sure humans get what they deserve is a tiny, tiny part of God’s responsibility. Job doesn’t know enough about the world to know whether God is doing a good job or not. And the world is not run on a simple tit-for-tat mechanical basis! The universe is not a clockwork mechanism that God just sets in motion and then observes from a distance. God is actively involved. But neither is God controlling each and every aspect of the universe in minute details. God sets the boundaries, the parameters; God creates, and allows God’s creatures freedom within the bounds of that creation. The universe is a place of mutual relationship, not a place where God has dictated every power and enslaved every creature’s will. This allows for a great deal of complexity in the world that neither Job nor Job’s friends nor Job’s wife understand. God is at work, but God does not control every action and every consequence. Humans have free will; so do many animals. And there are other factors and forces, besides, that we don’t understand. God could not make the mechanistic tit-for-tat everything-happens-for-a-reason world that Job wants without destroying the freedoms that God has given us. So the fact that the righteous suffer is not because God doesn’t care, and it’s not because God is not present.

Problem is, none of this is a very satisfying answer to Job’s cry for help. Job is in pain. Job has suffered deeply and is still suffering deeply. He was right to cry out to God for help; he was right to grieve all that he had lost and suffered; he was right to come to God with everything on his heart and call for help. Job was wrong about the structure of the universe and God’s work in it, but he was right to call on God for help, and right to bring his pain and burdens to God. And greater insight into the workings of the universe are interesting on a theological level, but they are not very comforting or helpful when you are in pain. Many people read this passage and conclude that God is an arrogant jerk who doesn’t care about Job’s pain, just cares about putting him back in his place. And it’s easy to see why people read this passage and go away upset.

But the thing is, if God didn’t care about Job, God didn’t have to answer him. God could have just ignored him. Like all humans Job is so insignificant compared to God that in cold hard logic, it doesn’t matter what Job thinks about God. But God comes to Job anyway, because God cares about Job. Job is tiny and insignificant, and God loves him. And so God comes to Job when Job is upset and pulls back the curtain to give him a peek at the nature of the universe. God isn’t going to remake the universe to force it to work the way humans think it should, but God will be there for us and with us no matter what.

God, that great and indescribable being who is beyond human comprehension, who created all that is, seen and unseen, whose power and understanding is far beyond anything the wisest human could ever understand, loves us so much that he became human for our sake. He became flesh and blood, he suffered as humans suffer, he knows what we are going through even in the worst moments of our lives, and he is with us through it all. He knows, and he cares. The universe is vast and we are small and very little is under our control, and we understand far less than we think we do, but we are not alone. We are never alone. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Hard-Heartedness and Divorce

Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 27, Year B, October 3, 2021

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

A group of religious leaders asked Jesus a legal question about divorce to test him. What answer they were looking for we don’t know, but it may have been merely to see where he stood on the issue. Jewish society in Jesus’ day was diverse and vibrant, with a lot of different groups who all had very different answers to legal questions and social questions. Divorce was the type of question there were many opinions on. Some believed divorce should be easily available; some thought it should be restricted; some thought it should be available only to men; some thought that women should be able to choose to divorce their husbands. By asking Jesus about the legal requirements for divorce, they’re asking Jesus for a legal opinion, but also about which group he belongs to, which eminent authority he will lift up.

The thing is, though, that Jesus isn’t really interested in the question of legality; he isn’t interested in setting forth questions of precedent and circumstances to present the proper procedure for deciding what circumstances qualify as being worthy of divorce and who gets to file for it. Jesus isn’t interested in the question of which particular faction or sect or authority has the right answer. He’s interested in relationships. He’s interested in what marriage and divorce mean for the people involved.

Marriage was created because it’s not good for human beings to be alone. We are created in the image of God, and God’s very nature is relational. God is a trinity—three who are one, Father, Son, and Spirit. None of the three is God alone, but only when they are together. In the same way, humans need each other. Being known and loved by others is one of the deepest needs of the human soul and the human brain. Marriage is not the only relationship humans need, of course—we need parents, we need friends, we need family, and the more healthy relationships we have the healthier we are, as a general rule. But marriage is one of the main relationships, and it’s a very important one. It’s supposed to be a stable foundation in our lives. It’s supposed to be a partnership of mutual aid and support so that both spouses have someone to help them get through the bad times and enjoy the good times. It’s supposed to be an emotional support system. It’s supposed to provide support and care for the raising of children, if you are blessed with them. Marriage is supposed to be a sure foundation you can build a good life on.

Sadly, there is often a gap between what marriage is supposed to be and what marriage is. Sometimes a marriage has problems that simply can’t be solved. Abuse, a spouse who only takes and never gives back, adultery, a spouse who just isn’t willing to put in the work that a successful relationship requires, there are a lot of marriages with problems. And, usually, those problems are caused by a hardness of heart in one or both spouses. Jesus is absolutely correct when he says that divorce exists because of a problem with our hearts. Selfishness, manipulation, disregard, there are a lot of ways that hard-heartedness can manifest. And, if left unchecked, that hard-heartedness can turn marriage into a mockery of what it’s supposed to be. We’ve all seen it: cases where a marriage doesn’t support, only drains one or both spouses. Cases where a marriage is a millstone dragging one or both spouses down, instead of a foundation helping them grow. Cases where a marriage endangers children instead of providing care and support for them. Sometimes, if you catch problems early enough and both spouses are willing to do the hard work of working on their issues together and growing, you can fix things and build a relationship that is more stable and secure than when you started out. Sometimes, people can learn to soften their hard hearts and repent and start on a new path together. And that is a great blessing when it happens.

But the sad truth is, it doesn’t always happen. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes people would rather be hard hearted. Sometimes people just aren’t willing to put in the hard work required to change their behavior. Sometimes people aren’t willing to admit that they have a problem. Sometimes people care more about winning than about finding fair and workable solutions to disagreements. Sometimes a person is so trapped in their own issues and problems they can’t see how their behavior is hurting their spouse or kids. Sometimes a person likes the suffering they’re causing their spouse, or at least benefits from it. A marriage requires both spouses working together to be successful. If one spouse isn’t willing to do that … then you’re going to have problems. Sometimes really big ones. And in those situations, if they go on long enough without change or healing, a marriage can turn into something which actively goes against what God created marriage to be. A marriage which makes a mockery of God’s good gift.

This hard-heartedness causes damage, and that’s why God allows divorce, why God told Moses to put it in the law. Divorce is never a good thing, but it is sometimes a necessary thing. Sometimes it’s the least possible evil. Sometimes, because of human sin and stubbornness, there are no better options. Sometimes divorce is the least bad option available. You will note that Jesus does not forbid divorce. He doesn’t say the law is wrong to allow it. He talks about the brokenness and pain that it causes, that it keeps causing even after the divorce itself is over. He talks about how it shouldn’t be necessary. But he never forbids it. Because human beings were no less hard-hearted in Jesus’ day than they were in Moses’ day, and they are no less hard-hearted in our time than they were in Jesus’ day. Divorce is bad, but a bad marriage can be worse. It’s not about the legalities, about what criteria have to be met to qualify for divorce, it’s about the people in the relationship and whether they can build a healthy marriage together or not.

Jesus compares remarriage to adultery. But let’s remember his reaction to the woman caught in adultery. He forgave her, and shamed the ones who would have punished her for her sin. Because we are all sinners, we have all fallen short of the glory of God, we have all done things that we knew were wrong. We all bear scars from times we have hurt ourselves, or been hurt by others. Jesus did not come to condemn the world, but to save it. Jesus responds to sin not with condemnation, but with compassion, with healing. Divorce is not a good thing, and it should never be an easy thing to decide to do, but it is sometimes a necessary thing, and God knows that. And even when it isn’t really necessary, when the people in the marriage could have made a good and healthy relationship if they’d only been willing to put in the work, even then, divorce separates us from one another but it does not separate us from God. There is nothing that will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

I am not a lawyer. When it comes to issues of marriage and divorce, the law is not my first and foremost concern. Laws are important! But like Jesus, my first concern is for the relationship, and for the people in that relationship, and for the community that surrounds them. My concern is to help people who are considering relationships to have reasonable expectations and make good choices. My concern is to help people have good examples of healthy relationships around them. My concern is to provide support and resources when things are going wrong in a relationship. And, when sometimes a marriage ends, to provide support in helping people deal with the pain and grief and anger and hurt, so that they can heal and grow. And I think that is what God calls all of us to do as communities of faith: to nurture and support healthy relationships, to provide good examples of what healthy relationships look like, to help people heal their marriages when possible, and to help them heal from the damage caused by divorce when saving the marriage isn’t possible.

Amen.

Pyramid Scheme

Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 25, Year B, September 19, 2021

Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1
James 3:13—4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s a book about the Bible called Manna and Mercy by Daniel Erlander. It combines a paraphrase of the Bible with cartoon illustrations that dramatize not just stories, but theological ideas that are important and recur throughout the Bible. One of these ideas is the contrast between society as a hierarchical pyramid, and society based on God’s principles of love. So, while the Hebrew people are enslaved in Egypt, there is a picture of Egyptian society as a pyramid. Pharaoh is the very top of the pyramid, of course, with the royal court just below him, and the priests and bureaucrats below them, and then the large landowners, the merchants and tradespeople, the small landowners, the day laborers, and finally, down at the bottom, the enslaved people. The higher up a group is in the pyramid, the more power and wealth they have, but the fewer there are of them. The lower you are in the pyramid, the less power and wealth you have, and the more of you there are. The ones up top have awesome lives. The ones on the bottom have horrible lives. Where you are in the pyramid determines how your life will go, what opportunities you will have, and your identity. And all of this is contrary to God’s desire for us. We are all created in God’s image, and God shows no partiality. In God’s eyes, nobody is inherently worth more or worth less than any other human; nobody is inherently more deserving or less deserving.

That pyramid of haves and have-nots is a human thing, not a thing of God. But that pyramid keeps cropping back up! When the Hebrew people settle in the Promised Land, they have no king, there is no concentration of wealth and power. But eventually they want a king, so they get one, and Hebrew society becomes a pyramid shape similar to that of the Egypt they left behind, with the powerful and wealthy up top and the oppressed masses at the bottom. Injustice reigns, instead of God’s good commands. God has given us a world of abundance, where there is enough for all, yet we have turned it into a world of scarcity where there are haves and have-nots. Over and over, throughout the Bible and human history, we see this. All people are created equal by God, with the right to live good lives free from exploitation and abuse, and yet humans continually concentrate wealth and power so that a few people have great lives and many suffer.

And then we tell ourselves that the reason people suffer is because they deserve it, and the reason people are on top the pyramid is because they deserve it, and that God approves of the whole structure, and that our goal in life should be to work hard and climb to a higher level on the pyramid so we can have more wealth and power and an easier life. Because we assume that the pyramid is normal and right and good, and therefore anything we do to climb the ladder of success is normal and right and good. If you’re not climbing the pyramid—if you’re not hustling to earn a better life and a bigger house and a nicer car—then there is something morally wrong with you. That’s an assumption so deep it’s hard to shake.

That’s why the disciples are arguing about which one of them is the greatest. Life is a pyramid, right? Most of the Disciples started out as working-class people. Fishermen. But now they’re students of a rabbi, they’re moving up in the world! And Jesus is just an itinerant rabbi now, but they probably hope for more. Given the crowds he’s drawing, he could probably get a position at a prestigious synagogue, which would probably also mean good positions for his students, i.e. the disciples, which would be another step up for them. And, hey, he’s a miracle worker who talks about the coming kingdom of God! Maybe he’s going to lead a rebellion and kick out the Romans and make himself king, or high priest! That would put them at the very top of the pyramid, below only Jesus! But the question is, which one of them is going to benefit the most from all they hope Jesus will do? Which one is going to be his right-hand man? It’s not enough to climb the pyramid, you also want to climb it better and faster than your friends and colleagues, right? I mean, you want them to succeed, you just want to succeed more than them. Somebody’s gotta be the best, and it might as well be you, right? We all know how this works; we’ve all seen it. In the 2,000 years since, not much has changed. The specific criteria we use to sort people into haves and have-nots is different but the general structure of the pyramid (lucky few at the top, some in the middle, unlucky many at the bottom) has not.

But God’s kingdom is not structured like a pyramid. It simply isn’t. In God’s kingdom, everyone receives enough and no one receives too much. There is no scarcity and no gluttony. In God’s kingdom, everyone receives both justice and mercy. There is no privilege for some and disadvantage for others. In God’s kingdom, there is no discrimination and no partiality. No one suffers or benefits because of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, education, ability, or any other human category that we have ever used to justify valuing some people more than others.

So when the disciples start arguing about who’s the greatest, they’re missing the point. And it’s the same point we miss, again and again. All those things we use to decide who matters and who doesn’t? God doesn’t care. But God does care how we treat people. And the more we focus on climbing the ladder, the worse we treat the people at the bottom of the ladder. And unlike all those human-made categories, how we treat one another is part of how God judges us. God cares about how we treat those who are different (especially those who are vulnerable) far more than he cares about what those differences are. Which is why Jesus tells the disciples that not only do they need to stop trying to be the best and greatest, they need to start serving the people who are the least and the last. You want to be great in God’s eyes? Well, God could not care less about all the things society cares about. God doesn’t care about your wealth or power or influence or what kind of car you drive. God does care about how you treat people in need, people who are vulnerable. You want to be great in God’s eyes, you better get down off your high horse and start at the bottom, because that’s where the greatest need is. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.

God cares more about the suffering of the oppressed and poor and vulnerable than he does about the cares of the comfortable. And it’s not because the oppressed have some special virtue, or because the poor are morally better than the rich. It’s because the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the people who have been kicked around their whole lives, who have suffered and struggled and never gotten anything to show for it need more help than the people who are doing fine. It’s like in an emergency room. If there’s a busy night with a lot of people coming in injured, they treat the people in the most danger first. If you’re in danger of dying, you go to the head of the line. If you just need a couple of stitches, you’re gonna have to wait until they’ve saved the people who are hurt worse than you. The people who are in the most danger, who need the most healing, come first. That’s the way God operates, too. The people who need God the most—the people who have suffered, who are suffering, who are the most vulnerable, they get special care because they need it. The last—the ones who have been dealt a rotten hand, who have been through hell—will be first, because they need it. The first—the ones who’ve had awesome lives with everything they need at their fingertips—will be last because their needs are less pressing.

Some Christians try to have it both ways. They try to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to be first, to take everything the top of the social ladder has to offer, while still getting credit for being last, or advocating for the last. They give money to charity, but don’t actually try to love their neighbor. Or they talk about issues but don’t actually do anything about them. People are quick to cry “think of the children!” as a political rallying cry, but seldom do they actually advocate policies meant to safeguard child welfare in any meaningful way. Children are just a convenient prop to justify their beliefs and actions. The Christians in question want to look good, to look moral and right, without ever saying or doing anything uncomfortable, anything that might disrupt their lives or their social position. They love their neighbor, they serve the least of God’s children … but only when it’s convenient. When there’s a conflict between their climb up the social ladder, and God’s call to love and serve the neighbor … they choose the world, while trying to look like they love their neighbor.

If we are going to follow God, and live the lives God wishes for us … we can’t be focused on climbing the ladder. Because power and influence and popularity and wealth do not matter to God. Jesus did not die to save the world’s power structures; Jesus died to save the people. Us, and all the rest. And the kingdom that Jesus is building among us is not based on the world’s perceptions, but on God’s perceptions.

Amen.

Virtue Signalling

Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 22, Year B, August 29, 2021

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

When Mark tells us about the Jewish practice of washing things as a form of spiritual cleanliness, he’s a bit misleading. It is true that Jews do have lots of rituals about washing things; they call that “mikvah.” And it’s commanded in Scripture, not as a germ thing but as an identity thing. I mean, it helps keep you from getting sick, too, but that’s only part of the reason for the rites surrounding washing in Judaism. You see, Jews are supposed to be the light of the world, the example that the rest of the world can look at and see how awesome God is. So, there are some practices they keep (some of which are commanded in scripture, some of which aren’t) that are there in order to make a distinction between who is Jewish and who is not, who is a part of the group and who is outside it. But the thing is, different groups of Jews have always interpreted things differently. So, for example, in the case of washing things for ritual cleanliness, there are questions like: how often do you have to wash them? What exactly do you have to wash? Do you have to wash things every day, or only when preparing for Sabbath? Can you wash things together, or do you have to have separate basins to wash different types of things in? Etc, etc. Different groups of Jews answer these questions differently, and they always have.

Now, if you’re sitting there thinking that those sound like pretty weird and nitpicky things to get fixated on, consider groups you’ve been a part of. I bet you’ve been part of a lot of groups where you can tell who the insiders and outsiders are by the way they do things, and a lot of the time “the way we do things” has very little purpose beyond “that’s how we do things in this group.” For example, I once worked at a church in Pennsylvania that had a free hot meal every Wednesday at lunch for anybody who showed up. They fed a lot of people every week, and they went through a lot of dishes and silverware. They had three different silverware patterns, and each pattern had its own drawer with sections for knives, spoons, and forks. They all got used every week, so they all had to get washed and put away. And woe betide you if you put a piece in a drawer that was meant to house a different set! They never had meals fancy enough that it mattered whether or not the silverware matched, and it was all going to get jumbled together again the next week anyway, but when it was washed and put away it had to be sorted into separate sets. It was just the way they did things, and for the people who’d been doing it for years it was obvious. But it also made clear, to anyone new who wanted to volunteer, that you were an outsider who needed to learn their ways before you’d be accepted in.

Now, it’s good for a group to have an identity, a sense of camaraderie, distinctive things that set them apart. Especially when, like Jews and Christians, we’re supposed to be an example to the people around us of what faithfulness and the love of God look like. But it’s also possible to get so caught up in maintaining the boundaries between who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside that you forget why. It’s possible—easy!—for your group’s practices to turn into virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is when your words and actions are chosen not because they’re right or good, but so they’ll look good to people in your group. The right phrases and actions to prove that you’re one of the Good Guys. But when you focus more on looking good than on doing good, that’s a problem. When you focus more on keeping people in their place and separating out insiders from outsiders than you do on following God’s word … that’s a problem. And that’s what these Pharisees and scribes from the big city of Jerusalem are doing.

Remember, everyone present was Jewish. Jesus and his disciples were Jewish, the crowds were Jewish, the Pharisees and the scribes were Jewish. Jesus and his disciples are from a podunk town in the middle of nowhere, but Jesus has made such a stir that people are travelling out from Jerusalem to see him. And these nice religious people from the capital get to Galilee to see this great teacher they’ve heard so much about … and their first reaction isn’t to explore his teachings, it’s to say “you don’t do things the way we do them, therefore you’re not doing them right. Why aren’t you doing them right?” With the subtext that if Jesus were really a wise teacher he’d know that their way of performing the washing rituals was the right way to do it that of course everyone should follow.

There’s a bit of a class angle here, too; Pharisees and scribes tended to be middle class and sometimes even upper class. Jesus and his disciples were working class. In the days before indoor plumbing, it was a lot easier to wash frequently if you had other people hauling water for you. So they’re being a bit snobby. Oh, and rude, too—they’re the guests, the visitors, and they’re grumbling about the way their hosts do things. Now, being generous, they might not realize they’re being snobbish and rude; there have been times in my life where I’ve just assumed that the way I was raised is obviously the best way to do things, and taken it for granted, only to find out that other people do things differently and their reasons for how they do things is just as good as mine. If these Pharises and scribes have spent all their life in their own group, they might not have realized that their particular take on the washing commandments is not universal. Or, they might just be trying to start an argument to prove that their way is best. Or maybe they just want to let everyone know that they do it the right way, not like these country bumpkins.

Either way, they’re missing the point. They’re focusing so much on how to do things the right way that they’re forgetting why they’re there in the first place: to listen to the teacher and learn from him. And the first lesson that Jesus has for them is that they’re focused on the wrong things. Traditions and cultural matters and habits of how to do things are all well and good, but they’re not a useful way to measure whether a person’s actions are good, and they certainly don’t tell you whether someone’s heart is good. They are external matters. Surface things. You want to know a person’s character and actions, you have to look at the core of what they say and do. Are they loving God and loving their neighbor, and putting that love into word and deed? Then the rest doesn’t really matter. Are they acting out of greed, malice, or pride? Are they lying, cheating, stealing, hurting people? Then all the surface stuff still doesn’t matter.

This is something modern Christians have a lot of trouble with. Our whole society has become saturated with this idea that the ends justify the means. If your goal is good, then anything you do to accomplish it is okay. And we are increasingly tribal: either you are part of my group, or you are not, and if you are not, then you’re not really a person. And if your group is at odds with my group, or even just disagrees with them, then you’re evil and a monster, and thus any treatment is justified. This is how you get people who will harass those they don’t like and send them death threats while still believing that they’re a good person and doing the right thing. This is how you get bullies who make life hell for their victims while swearing up and down that bullying is a terrible thing they’d never do—because in their mind cruelty doesn’t count if the person deserves it. These things happen on social media, they happen in person, and Christians are just as guilty of them as anyone else. We honor God with our lips while our hearts are far from God.

But even if you say you’re doing it for Jesus’ sake, it’s still wrong. The Bible says lying is bad, period, even if you’re lying to get people to do and think what you think Christians should do. The Bible’s ethical teachings don’t have an asterisk saying you can forget them if you’re dealing with people you don’t like. If you harbor malice in your heart towards someone, that’s wrong. Period. If you act with cruelty or selfishness, if you purposefully hurt people, that’s wrong. Period.

That’s what God judges us on: how we treat people, and whether we love them or not. God doesn’t judge the surface stuff, like the habits and traditions we live by or the things we put in our bodies or the bumper stickers or the virtue signaling or whether we say the right things or are part of the right group. May we follow God with our hearts and our actions, not just our words.

Amen.

Abide in Christ

Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 20, Year B, August 15, 2021

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

One of the important things to remember, when reading the Gospel of John, is that the first chapter, which we call the prologue, is the key to everything. The prologue—that lyrical poem that starts with, “in the beginning was the Word”—lays out the theology of the book. It gives you the distilled heart, the message, the essence of everything that is to follow. Which is why it’s often useful to look back to that prologue to see how it can illumine other chapters in the book. What perspective it can give. Reading the Gospel of John through the lens of the prologue often helps the reader to focus in on key points. And for this passage we read today, the key verse from the prologue is this: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” In this short phrase are two key concepts that should shape our understanding of this chapter and of the whole Gospel.

The first is an obvious connection: flesh and flesh. The prologue tells us that the Word became flesh, and here Jesus is telling us that we should eat his flesh and drink his blood, and that if we eat his flesh and drink his blood we will be raised up on the last day and will have eternal life. We shouldn’t ignore the literal meaning; as Lutherans, we believe and teach that the bread and wine we share in worship do literally become Jesus’ flesh and blood during Communion. When we join together in the meal, we are consuming Jesus. It’s not just a memory of a long-ago dinner Jesus had once, it’s not just symbolic, it’s not just a metaphor, Jesus is really present in, with, and under the bread and the wine. We may only see the bread and wine, but Jesus is really and truly present within it. The bread is his flesh and the wine is his blood. In eating and drinking it, he becomes part of us and we become part of him. You are what you eat.

And yes, it sounds weird and a little creepy and a little bit like cannibalism. Jesus told the crowd this knowing that they would find it off-putting, knowing that this would be a challenge to people. But physical reality is important. There is a tendency, and always has been, to spiritualize things. To think about the sweet by-and-by instead of the real physical world we live in now. We separate out the eternal from the present, the spiritual from the mundane, the physical from the mental. But God cannot be separated from the present, mundane, ordinary physical world. God created this world; God is always present in it. God is at work in this world, even through ordinary things like bread and wine. And in God’s hands, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. When we gather together around God’s table, ordinary bread becomes Jesus’ flesh. In this ordinary loaf of bread that anybody could make, Jesus becomes a real, physical presence in our lives, nourishing us body and soul.

But there’s another level to this, as well. Who is Jesus? As the prologue tells us, Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. Therefore, if we are eating the flesh of Jesus, we are eating the Word of God. Now, in some ways, this sounds even odder than the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh and blood; flesh and blood are, at least, physical things that can be eaten, and words are not. But it reminds me of how the prophet Ezekiel, when God called him to be a prophet, was given a sacred scroll to eat, as a symbol of how the words he would speak came from God. You are what you eat. The things that you put into your body will inevitably come out of your body in one form or another. By eating the Word of God, we aren’t just hearing it and having it go in one ear and out the other. We have to chew on it, digest it. It stays with us.

But it’s not enough to eat it once. With any meal, no matter how good it is, no matter how much you eat, you’re going to get hungry again. You can’t just eat once and then never again, that’s not how nourishment works. You have to come to the table again and again to be filled. In the same way, God’s Word is not something to read or hear once and then you’re good. God’s Word is not a textbook where you memorize the correct answer and then forget about it once the test is over. God’s Word is given to nourish us continually, and food for our soul is like food for our body, in that you need to eat regularly in order to be healthy. Christ sets the table before us, a table of his flesh and blood, a table where we can be nourished by his body and by the Word of God. That table is open to all. And we should come often and regularly to receive the nourishment our souls need.

That brings me to the second connection this passage has with the prologue to the Gospel of John. Remember that verse from the prologue, “the Word became flesh and lived among us”? The second connection between that verse and our Gospel reading is hard to spot in English, because the word gets translated differently in different places. There really isn’t an English word that captures it perfectly. The word in Greek is ‘μενω’ and the closest English word is “abide.” It can also be translated “live,” or “stay,” or “remain,” or “dwell.” But those are more passive than the word is. Μενω is an old word to describe nomads who were part of the same band or group. It means you’re pitching your tent together. And the thing about nomads is they move! So it’s not like you just happen to buy a house next to somebody and then your neighbors because neither of you has chosen to move elsewhere. It’s not a passive thing. To abide with someone requires effort and work and choice. With a nomadic group, you have to actively choose to stay together. You have to choose to travel together, pitch your tent together, look after your flocks together, move on together. For two nomads to stay together, they have to actively build and maintain a relationship, and choose to make that relationship the basis of where they go and what they do. That’s what “abide” means in the Bible. The Word became flesh and abided among us. God’s Son became human and pitched his tent with us, choosing to form a relationship with us, a community, to stay with us always and invite us to stay with him.

And that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says in our Gospel reading, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” Jesus is dwelling with us, abiding with us, pitching his tent in our midst. Jesus is initiating a relationship with us that will guide the course of our lives. And Jesus invites us to participate in that relationship, to respond to it, to grow in it, to choose over and over again to pitch our tents with Jesus no matter where we go or what happens to us or anything else. Jesus will abide with us, Jesus will never forsake us or abandon us. Jesus will pitch his tent where we are. And we are called and invited to return that loyalty and love, to abide with Jesus as Jesus abides in us. And that relationship, that abiding, is nurtured and nourished by feasting on the Word. We feast on the Word made flesh, and that Word lives in us and with us and keeps us with Christ just as Christ is in us.

Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.” May we always eat of this meal, and abide in Christ forever.

Amen.

Quid Pro Quo?

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 18, Year B, August 1, 2021

2 Samuel 11:26—12:13a
Psalm 51:1-12
Ephesians 4:1-16
John 6:24-35

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The people said to Jesus, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” This is, of course, just the day after he fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish. And he’s also been healing people. That’s why they’re seeking him out—they want him to continue to feed and heal them. Free food! That’s a pretty great deal, especially for poor people in a time when to be poor meant being constantly on the edge of starvation and/or slavery. Greco-Roman society was designed to exploit the lower classes. Under Roman rule, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and a lot of people starved, or had to sell themselves into slavery to avoid starving. They need food—desperately!—and Jesus has shown he can provide it. Food is one of the deepest needs of all living things. The fact that they are turning to God for help is not a problem. God is always concerned with the bodily needs of all creatures. This is why God provided manna in the wilderness to the Hebrews as he led them from slavery into freedom. This is why “providing for the hungry” has been one of the most basic commands God has had for God’s people since the very beginning. Indeed, one of the ways you can tell there was a problem with society in Jesus’ day was the number of people in dire poverty, the number of people who were starving. The prophets tell us repeatedly that “how are poor people faring” is one of the most important criteria God uses to judge a society. Food is important, and God’s desire is for all people to have a share in the abundance God gives.

So the fact that they are asking for food is not a problem—far from it, under the circumstances, they should be turning to Jesus for help. The problem is their attitude. Food? Great. Healing? Awesome. They’ll take all of that they can get. Any sort of deeper relationship? Not interested. What have you done for us lately, Jesus? Can you do something even more spectacularly miraculous than you’ve already done? If so, maybe we’ll follow you. As long as we don’t get a better offer. Give us what we want, and we’ll follow you—as long as it’s on our terms, as long as the rewards keep flowing.

I like to call this the “vending machine in the sky” theory of God. All relationships in this model are strictly transactional. Pray the right prayer, say the right words, get the right miracle in response. Just like a vending machine. Put in the money, punch the button, get the candy bar you want. And on the surface, it looks fine! People are praying, they’re asking God for help, and those are things we should be doing. Except there’s nothing deeper, no greater relationship, no growth in faith and love, no deep roots in God’s love and in the community of faith. Everything looks very pious, as long as you don’t notice that the relationship only exists for the believer to get something. As if the point of spirituality is a quantifiable benefit. As if God’s only relevance is to dispense the thing you want when you want it and how you want it.

Now, if you’re sitting there wondering, “but shouldn’t we turn to God for help?” you’re missing the point. Consider other relationships in your life: friendships, marriages, relationships with your parents and children, relationships with your co-workers. Were any of those relationships on a strictly quid-pro-quo basis? Where everything depended on the exchange of favors and what you could do for one another? Think about those relationships: were they very strong? Did they last long? What happened when you or that other person had major problems to deal with? That relationship probably crashed and burned pretty quickly. Because that sort of relationship based an exchange of favors only works when both sides have favors to exchange. When one or both people have problems in their lives, that relationship is going to fall apart. And it probably only lasted as long as you happened to be in proximity to that person, too—as soon as you weren’t seeing them every day, it probably ended fairly quickly. Yes, we should turn to God for help, as we should be able to turn to all our other relationships for help when we need it. But if that’s the only basis for the relationship, it’s not going to be strong enough and resilient enough to depend on when we need it most. In order for a relationship to stand up to stress and strain and changes in your life, it has to be based on something more than “what can I get out of this?” It has to be based on mutual affection and trust and care.

Our relationship with God is no different. If your spirituality is based on “what has God done for me lately?” it will inevitably fail when you need it most. It will not last through troubles; it will probably not even last through a major life change. It will not be that interdependence Paul describes in our second reading, where we are one body with many members, united in truth and love. Each body part is different, but together they are much greater than any of them can be alone. Each part has a different role, and in fact if they were all the same it wouldn’t work. The way the Christian life is supposed to work, we believers are the body together, and Christ is the head. And what brings us together in baptism and faith is not the hope of material blessings, or even spiritual blessings. The strongest faith is not based on “God will give me material blessings if I serve him” or even “God will give me spiritual blessings such as salvation if I serve him” but rather, “God loves me, and I love God, and I love God’s people and creation as God loves me.” That is the foundation that will endure, no matter what. That is the good soil that will help us grow in faith and love. That is the relationship the God is calling us into. That is the bread of life that will sustain us, body and soul, through the best and the worst that life has to give. And if we treat God as a vending machine, if we base our relationship with God on a quid pro quo of calculation, we will not have that bread of life, even if we look pious on the outside, and even if God supplies all our material needs.

I think this is one reason why our churches today are so empty and shrinking. Our society is built on the premise of quid pro quo. Of return on investment. Of figuring out what the smartest and most efficient way to get what you want and need is, and then doing it. That’s what consumerism is. That’s what we base our economy on, our education system, our political system, all of it. And it can be very practical and efficient, financially. But if you apply it to spirituality, it is dead and stifling and lifeless. But that’s how our society shapes us and trains us to think. So it’s how people approach God, and the church, and their spirituality. What’s the return on investment of a morning spent in church, or an evening spent reading the Bible? Will it make me measurably happier the next day? Will it be more entertaining than other things I could be doing with that time? Will it do more for my social life or my kid’s college applications than a morning spent playing on a sports team?

The thing is, if you think of your faith life like that, there will always be something that has a greater immediate measurable impact. There will always be something you can do that will be more likely to help your career, or your hobbies, or your kids’ or grandkids’ college applications, or your social life. Problem is, while those other things you do instead might be good, what they won’t do is feed your soul. And your soul needs feeding just like your body does. Your relationship with God needs tending, just like your relationships with others do. God provides abundantly, but we don’t follow God for the miracles or because he’s got something we want. We follow God because God loves us, and wants a relationship with us, and wants to nourish us body and soul and help us grow in faith and love. We follow God because there are things deeper and more important than the world around us acknowledges. We follow Jesus because he is the bread of life, which feeds us and sustains us and gives us a sure foundation and helps us grow. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Lying To Ourselves

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 15, Year B, July 11, 2021

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I remember lying to my mother when I was a small child. It was evening, and she was getting me ready to take my shower; I was too young to shower by myself. And I had done something I wasn’t supposed to do—I don’t remember what it was, I just remember the feeling of knowing Mom wasn’t going to be happy when she knew about it. But I didn’t understand why the thing was bad, so I didn’t feel bad about it. I just wanted to not get punished for it. I wanted to cover it up. So I tried to lie! But, because I was still a small child and small children are not very good at lying, Mom figured it out, and I got in trouble not just for doing the bad thing, but for lying about it.

Unfortunately, as we grow older, we get better at lying to hide our sins. Not just lying to others, but lying to ourselves. Have you ever noticed that human beings only like the truth when it tells us what we want to hear? This is especially true of the rich and powerful. The more money you have, the more connections you have, the more friends you have, the easier it is to just … make unpleasant truths go away. The very rich can lean on politicians or public servants they’ve given money to, to silence those who trouble them. Or they can hire lawyers. On a lower level, pillars of the community can call on friends and allies within the community to block or punish those who say things they don’t want to hear. Sometimes, we’ll enact laws to prevent uncomfortable truths from being said. In the last year, several states have enacted laws which allow protesters to be charged as terrorists, even if the protester in question has committed no crime. We don’t like to hear the cries of those who have been treated unjustly—not if it would require us to change our ways. We don’t like to admit our sin, our guilt. We don’t like to admit the ways our society is flawed and broken—and we especially don’t like to admit it when we benefit from those flaws, at the expense of others.

There is an idyllic little town in Montana, remote and rural, that is much beloved by its residents … at least by its white residents. But things were much worse for local Native Americans, who were constantly harassed in a wide variety of ways. A few years ago, a Montana newspaper wrote an article about this, sharing many true stories about the racism in the town. It wasn’t that every white person did racist things, but those who didn’t do racist things turned a blind eye to the actions of those who did. When the story was published, pretty much every white resident of town was furious, and many harassed or attacked the reporter and the newspaper in question. Not because the article was wrong, but because it was right, and they didn’t want to face the truth about themselves.

And while this tendency to ignore or silence inconvenient truths is easy to see in our opponents and hard to see in ourselves, it is a universal human tendency. So, for example, Evangelical leaders rage against the slightest hint of immorality in Democrats and excuse it in Republicans. At the same time, feminists rush to condemn conservatives who harass women, while keeping silence about liberals who do the same. It’s not that every uncomfortable or unpleasant accusation anyone could make is always true. It’s that whether or not we are willing to listen depends more on who the target is than the truth of the matter. Someone or something we like? Can’t be true, and only a terrible person would believe it. Someone or something we dislike? Must be true, and only an idiot would disbelieve it.

Herod, in our Gospel reading, is a prime example. Note, this is not the same Herod who tried to kill Jesus as a baby; that Herod, called Herod the Great, was dead by this point. This is his son, Herod Antipas. The whole family was messed up. Assassination plots were common, as were various other forms of dangerous intrigue. Herodias was first married to another one of the original Herod’s sons, and had a child by him. Then she divorced that guy and married Herod Antipas, the current ruler of Gallilee. Her first husband’s brother. Oh, and did I mention that Herodias was a granddaughter of Herod the Great? That’s why she’s called Herodias! She was the niece of both her first husband and her second husband, Herod Antipas. The whole thing is really skeevy on multiple levels. And John the Baptist said so. This is not any great moral insight, or complex social matter. It is pretty simple. The family of the Herods was messed up, and did terrible things to one another, and Herodias’s marriages were a part of that, and anybody could see this plain truth.

Herod Antipas knew it was the truth. Herodias knew it was the truth. Everyone knew it was the truth! But Herod was the ruler, and so he could silence people who said things he didn’t want to hear. And so John the Baptist was thrown in jail for telling the truth. Now, Herod was conflicted about this, because he knew it was wrong, and he knew John the Baptist was a prophet, and he even liked John the Baptist on a personal level! He could have admitted that he had done something wrong. And if he didn’t want to admit his guilt, he could have just ignored the whole issue. After all, it’s not like a backwoods preacher like John could seriously threaten a ruler appointed by the Roman Empire. But no, he chose to arrest John to prevent him from telling the truth.

And then Herodias got involved. Herodias didn’t care who was telling the truth, she cared that John was an inconvenience, and she wanted him out of the way. I suspect she may also have resented that her husband listened to a guy who condemned their marriage. And so she plotted to have John the Baptist killed. She used her daughter, Herod Antipas’ niece-and-stepdaughter, to abuse a promise Herod had made. Now, at this point, Herod had two choices: keep his promise and kill an innocent man, or break his promise and not kill an innocent man. And he chose to kill an innocent man! I’m sure he had a ton of reasons to justify his decision. I mean, it’s important to keep your word, especially when you’re a powerful man, and it would make him look strong to his court, to execute someone who challenged him, and a bunch of other justifications. But it was still wrong. I wish I could tell you that this sort of behavior is rare, but it isn’t. It is as common as dirt. And while I doubt anyone in this room has ever had anyone killed to cover up their own sin, we are all of us guilty of lesser forms of this same crime.

And it’s wrong. This tendency of humans to sin, to attack those who confront us with evidence of our sin, to use every power we have to silence those who tell us things we don’t want to hear, is wrong. It’s what lets evil grow, as people escape the consequences of their sin and prosper despite it. If we could change human nature so that we didn’t do this any more, our world would be a much better place. But we can’t. There is only one who has the power to change us, and that is God, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is why our worship services start with a confession. Because we need it. Because we sin, and we justify and cover up our sin, and even with the power of God, we can’t change if we don’t acknowledge that we need to change. If we just cover up our sin and keep going, everything will stay the same: the sin, the brokenness it causes, our separation from God and one another. May we learn to confess, so that God can change our hearts and minds.

Amen.

Great King David

5th Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 13, Year B

July 4, 2021

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

Psalm 48

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen,

Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Humans have a tendency to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. We often remember the stuff we liked, while glossing over the stuff we didn’t. “Back in my day” is a common refrain in conversations about modern problems. Sometimes, if things are perceived to be particularly bad, this nostalgia will focus on historical time periods that we never experienced ourselves. And this is a fairly universal tendency, one you can find in most cultures around the world today and in most historical periods. In the Bible, the period that tends to be the focus of this nostalgic adoration is the reign of King David, because he was the best king Israel and Judah ever had. But, let’s face it, that’s not saying much. David had moments of brilliance when his faith and devotion to God helped him work great deeds and lead God’s people well, but he also had times when he was truly terrible. It’s just that his successors had all or most of the terribleness without any of the good parts. So people lift David up as this perfect paragon. They ignore or gloss over the bad parts, and turn the good ones into these shining mythic moments of awesome. But David wasn’t perfect; David was human, just like you and me. He had good points and he had bad points, times he succeeded and times he failed, just like anyone else. He started off so well, and then couldn’t maintain that great height of faithfulness. Our first reading today is the hinge, the turning point. The greatest of David’s deeds and faithfulness are behind him. His greatest failures are all yet to come. And what happens in todays reading? David becomes king of all the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Let’s recap a bit. When God brought his people out of slavery into the promised land, they didn’t have kings. They had leaders appointed by God known as judges, and they had priests like Eli and Samuel who heard God’s word. But that wasn’t enough to keep people living good and faithful lives, and there were a lot of problems and violence and sinfulness. So the people asked for a king instead, and God reluctantly gave it to them. Saul, the first king, had some problems and didn’t listen to God or God’s prophets, so God anointed David instead. David started out with a bang, killing the giant Goliath who menaced the people of Israel. Saul got jealous, and David had to flee. While he was in exile, he still kept faith with both God and his people, doing the right thing even when it was extremely difficult and nobody would blame him for taking a more expedient route. As Saul became more and more paranoid, David gained supporters, and eventually there was a civil war, in which Saul and his son Jonathan died. David became king of Judah, the southern kingdom, and ruled it for seven years, and then the northern kingdom, Israel, asked him to become their king, as well. The two halves were united. And David started out as a good ruler. (This is the bit in our second reading today.) But by the end of his reign, he had committed crimes of rape and murder and other evils, and was such a bad father that his son Absalom started a literal civil war against him.

So what was the difference? What turned the great, faithful, moral young man into someone who did such terrible things? Yes, power corrupts, but why does it corrupt, and why was David so corruptible? And what protected him from such corruption in his youth? Our reading gives us the answer: young David was a shepherd. That is, his highest duty was to protect and guide and keep safe the ones under his care. That was true when he was a literal shepherd, keeping his father’s sheep while his father and older brothers went off to war. And it was also true when he was first made king, and treated the whole nation as his flock, to be protected and guided and kept safe and cared for. That’s what God called David to do: to be a shepherd over Israel and Judah. That’s why the leaders of Israel asked him to be their king—they saw that he was a shepherd, a good one, chosen by God, to lead them faithfully and well. A man who would choose to be faithful even when that meant doing things the hard way. A man who would choose what was good for his people instead of his own self-interest. A man who would do what was right instead of what was easy. As a young man, David did all of that and more. And that’s why God made him king.

Problem was, the longer David was king, the more he forgot his roots. The longer he was king, the less he acted like a shepherd and the more he acted like a dictator. Instead of trusting God, he trusted political maneuvering. Instead of asking God for guidance, he learned to play the games of the powerful. He started to care more about his wealth, comfort, power, and pleasure than about anything else. Instead of doing the right thing, he did the convenient thing. Instead of acting like a shepherd, caring for his people and protecting them, he started thinking that he had the right to use and abuse them for his own pleasure and convenience. He thought that being anointed by God meant that anything he wanted to do was right, instead of realizing that being anointed by God meant he had special duty to follow God’s commands even more closely than ordinary people. Instead of shaping the royal court to be faithful to God, David allowed the royal court to shape him to be less faithful.

When God blesses people, it’s not for their own sake. God blesses people so they can share that blessing with others. When God frees people it’s not so that they can do whatever they want, it’s so that they can live good and faithful lives. As God’s people, we have more responsibilities, not fewer; a greater call to act with justice and mercy, not a lesser one. We are not called to be selfish; we are called to be generous. We are not called to be suspicious, we are called to be compassionate. We are not called to tear one another down, we are called to build one another up. We are not called to be expedient, we are called to be faithful. We are not called to be tyrants, we are called to be shepherds. When David remembered that, he was an incredible king and leader. When he forgot that, when he let pride and selfishness and expediency and favoritism rule, he was a terrible king who did terrible things.

I think that’s an important thing to remember as we celebrate the Fourth of July. We have a tendency to treat American history like we do the stories of David: ignoring the bad parts and heightening the good parts, instead of looking fairly and honestly at all of it. Even worse, we tend to follow David’s lead in how we think about power and influence and politics in our country. We don’t have a king, but we do have elected leaders. We’re the ones who choose them! And we have a responsibility to choose people who will be good shepherds, and replace them if they stop being good shepherds. And that means good shepherds to all Americans, not just good to us and those like us. God has given us many blessings, and with those blessings, we have a responsibility to share those blessings and use them wisely for the benefit of all God’s children. One of those blessings is democracy. In a democracy, every one of us has a measure of political and social power that we exercise every time we vote, whether on a local or national level, and through other means like contacting our representatives.

Like David, we have power in the world, though on a lesser scale. Like David, we can use it for good or for evil. Like David, we are called to use our power for the good of all God’s people, instead of for our own selfish gain. And like David, it is very easy to let ourselves be shaped by the world around us instead of by God’s call. May we learn to be faithful to God’s call.

Amen.

Does Jesus Heal?

5th Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 13, Year B, June 27, 2021

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I was in seminary, I spent a summer as a trainee chaplain at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. Our supervisor and instructor, Roy, would not allow us to preach about Jesus healing people. He did not believe Jesus was a healer, because he had spent his career as a chaplain in hospitals like that one, filled with people who had chronic illness and chronic mental illness, and who would be struggling with poor health both physical and mental for their entire lives. People who might improve some, but would never be well, without a true miracle. And he had seen very few miracles.

“You can’t give these people false hope,” he would say. “At best, it’s cruel. At worst, it will destroy their faith when it doesn’t happen. And especially those stories where Jesus heals someone and credits it to their faith—some of our patients have a deep faith, and it’s all that’s getting them through their lives. If you tell them that faith can make you well, and they’re never going to be well, then they’ll think their faith isn’t strong enough, and you will have destroyed the greatest support they have. You can’t do that to them. So don’t ever preach about Jesus healing people, don’t bring it up in Bible study or in any form of pastoral care.”

This was really hard for me, because I do believe that Jesus heals people, it’s right there in the Bible. Jesus heals a lot of people, in every Gospel. And in the book of Acts, God heals people through the Apostles. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus heals one woman with a chronic illness that has baffled the medical community, and raises a little girl from the dead. It’s right there on the page, Jesus healed them. But what my time as a chaplain-trainee forced me to grapple with was the question “but what about all the other people who don’t get healed?”

We all know cases of miraculous healing. Times when the doctors give someone a few months to live, and they live for another two decades. Times when the cancer goes into remission when the doctor says there’s no hope, times when that last-ditch emergency treatment leads to healing far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Times when the whole community prays for someone and they make it through against all odds. We all know cases like that.

But we all know cases that aren’t like that. Where there is no miracle. Where a child dies despite all the prayer and faith of the family and community. Or there is a miracle of healing … but it’s only temporary, a reprieve, and the person still dies. Where a medical problem that seems simple and easy to fix on the surface leads to illness and death. Times when people—good, faithful, loving people—suffer and die. Times when the words “your faith has made you well!” sound like a cruel mockery because the one who is suffering and dying—who does not receive a miracle, who just continues to suffer—is a person of deep and genuine faith. So if Jesus heals, and if faith brings healing, why do faithful Christians suffer? Why is that miraculous healing something that only happens some of the time? And yes, we all know that while miracles can happen they rarely happen on cue, but why don’t they? Why can’t we just … pray the right prayer and have healing through faith?

I wish I had a good answer. I wish I could tell you that there was a way to have miracles of healing on cue as needed. But if there is a way, nobody’s found it yet. People have tried, but usually what happens is that they end up assuming that you can tell whether or not someone is faithful or “a real Christian” by whether or not they suffer, whether or not they and their relatives stay healthy. And that just isn’t the case. You can be deeply faithful and suffer greatly; you can be an atheist and be healed. We see it all the time.

So what does it mean for Jesus to be a healer? I am drawn to a detail of this story, that the woman is healed when she touches Jesus’ cloak. Healing her is not a choice Jesus makes. It takes him no effort. He notices when it happens! But it’s not something he chooses to do. It’s a miracle, but it’s not one he decides to do. It happens because she gets close enough to him. Which means that he’s going around spilling miracles as he goes. They just happen around him! Faith plus nearness of Jesus means something’s going to happen! His power is pouring out into the world, flowing from him to those around him even when he’s focused on something else. Like a fountain that just keeps on gushing, no matter what. Jesus is a healer.

The problem is the world. The world, broken by sin and death. The world, in need of healing. It’s not just human beings who are broken; it’s the entire cosmos. Jesus came to save us, and heal us, and to save and heal the entire cosmos as well. A lot of the evil and pain in the world is caused by human sinfulness. When we hurt ourselves and one another, or when we dismiss whole groups of people as not really people, when we let selfishness or self-centeredness guide us to accepting a world in which some people suffer even when we have the resources to save them. Not just on an individual level, but on a cultural level, too. Most social problems, we actually know how to fix, or at least make them better. But we choose not to because we don’t want to spend the money or the effort on people we don’t really care about. Sometimes, when people get sick, it’s because of exposure to toxins or carcinogens. Sometimes, when people stay sick it’s because they can’t afford medicine, or the doctors don’t listen to them. But human suffering is not always the result of human choices on an individual or community level. Sometimes bad things just happen. Human beings are not the only ones broken by sin and death. The world is broken, too. The world is like an engine where some of the pieces are broken, and it keeps running, but it keeps doing more and more damage to itself as it goes on.

Jesus came to heal the world. Jesus came to challenge the powers that keep breaking the cosmos; Jesus came to wipe away the sins and heal people and communities and all of creation. Jesus heals because it is his nature, because it is what he was sent into the world to do. And we are in desperate need of that healing. We don’t always notice the ways in which we need healing, because we take sin and brokenness for granted. We assume that the way the world is now is normal, when in reality it is a broken mess in need of salvation. And that’s what Jesus came to do: he came that we might have life, he came that the entire universe might have life, and have it abundantly. And that’s why he died on the cross. In dying, he destroyed death and broke the powers of sin. Jesus came to heal, and his whole life and death was a ministry of healing.

But the powers of sin and death still have their say. They can’t win in the end, but until Christ comes again, they still have power in this world. In the end, they will be destroyed; in the end, all that is capable of being healed will be healed and all that is not capable of being healed will be thrown into the fire. We live in the between times, in between Jesus’ first coming and his second. We know that he will come again; we know that when God’s kingdom comes all the healing we so desperately need will flow freely for all. And we know that the power of Jesus to heal is in the world right now. But we still live in the world broken by sin and death, and so that healing does not flow as freely as it will one day do. We give thanks for the healing of God when we experience it, and we pray for it to come, knowing that one day it will come for all. May we stay faithful until that great and glorious day, and may we be agents of Christ’s healing in the world until then.

Amen.

Grace and Reconciliation

4th Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 12, Year B, June 20, 2021

1 Samuel 17:[1a, 4-11, 19-23] 32-49
Psalm 9:9-20
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This passage in our second reading is the core of Second Corinthians. Second Corinthians is about two things: grace, and reconciliation. There are two letters from Paul to the church in Corinth in scripture; there were almost certainly others that were not preserved. We have only a one-sided picture of the relationship between Paul and the church in Corinth, and it is woefully incomplete, but here’s what we do know: the church in Corinth was a mess. They were divided along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, theology, and every other possible way to be divided. They fought with one another, and with Paul. On a strictly theological level, if it was possible to misunderstand the word of God, they would do so. They found so many inventive ways to be wrong and hurt one another and turn away from God, all the while claiming they were doing God’s will. That’s why Paul spent so much time writing to them: they needed guidance desperately.

And somewhere along the line, there was a break. A disagreement that united the Corinthian congregation against Paul and his fellow missionaries. We don’t know what the cause of the break was; it could be one of any number of things. Maybe it was a further manifestation of the problems within the Corinthian community. Maybe Paul got up on his high horse and said some nasty things about them. Maybe someone else came to Corinth and started stirring the pot against Paul. Maybe it was all of these things, or none of them. Maybe it was something completely different. At this point, two millennia later, there’s no way of knowing, and it doesn’t really matter. They chose to remember and share the story of their reconciliation, not the story of their conflict.

Paul starts the letter by talking about how much he loves them, and how he stayed away because tempers were still too high and he didn’t want a painful visit full of more recrimination. Then he tells them about the Holy Spirit, and the power of the Gospel, and how that treasure is found in vulnerable places and people, and how the grace of God is present even in the most vulnerable people and places. And yes, there is suffering in the world, but also the promise of salvation, and God is at work bringing salvation and grace. Then Paul begins to talk about reconciliation, about how the power of God is always at work, and how we ought to see people through God’s eyes instead of through a human perspective. Then Paul tells them that this grace of God is present in them, that they have already accepted it, that the time is right for them to embrace the grace of God and mend the relationship between them and Paul.  “Our heart is wide open to you,” Paul writes. “There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return, open wide your hearts also.”

That’s it, that’s the call to reconciliation. “Our hearts are wide open to you, open your hearts to us in return.” But if reconciliation depended only on the personal level, on them opening their hearts, Paul wouldn’t have spent so much time talking about the grace of God and salvation and the power of Jesus Christ and seeing through God’s eyes instead of a human perspective. Paul is not interested in a reconciliation based only on humans deciding to get along. He isn’t interested in a cease-fire or truce in which they agree to disagree. He wants a reconciliation based on the salvation of God in Christ Jesus, and the transformation that it brings.

When you look at the world, it’s easy to see why. There are so many times when forgiveness means letting the hurts continue, when all it means is a temporary halt to hostilities for people to lick their wounds before the next round of fighting begins. In a book called A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, a woman contemplates her marriage with her deceased husband. When they’d fought, she’d always forgiven him quickly and tried to move on. Except they hadn’t moved on, they’d just circled around to having the same argument because neither had learned or grown or changed at all. So all the problems kept happening over and over again. In order to change the pattern, in order to build a new and healthy relationship, opening your heart is only part of the issue. You also have to change … and so does the person you’re in conflict with. This is true of individuals, and it is true of communities, and it is true of nations.

Consider race relations. We’ve spent decades since the end of the Civil Rights era trying to pretend everything is fine, trying to bring about racial reconciliation without further change to our society. And it’s meant that we keep fighting the same battles over and over again, because the underlying problems never get fixed! Or think about Israel and Palestine. When you get right down to it, the conflict is caused by two things: the Israeli government seizing and demolishing Palestinian homes to build new ones for Israelis, and Palestinian leadership that is corrupt and willing to let their own people suffer and die to maintain their own importance and look good for the international audience. Until the Israeli and Palestinian leadership both change their hearts and minds, no lasting peace will be possible.

And the most lasting change comes through Christ Jesus, in the form of salvation through grace. That’s the whole point of following Jesus: that in so doing we are freed from the chains of our sins and brokenness. Jesus will pour out on us the love of God, and that love will change our hearts and minds and make us new. The old sinful, selfish self will die, and we will be born of the Holy Spirit, and God’s kingdom will be among us. It’s not just about getting into heaven, it’s about becoming the kind of people who can live and thrive in God’s kingdom. You can’t stay the same and be a follower of Jesus, you just can’t. Following Jesus changes you. It makes you a better person. As the grace of God flows through you, you become more able to see the world with God’s eyes, even if only briefly. You grow. You heal. You learn to spread the grace that you yourself have received. You become the kind of person who lives a grace-filled life even, as Paul puts it, when you live through “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger.” You learn to live every day with “purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.”

And when you combine that with an open heart … you get true reconciliation. You get relationships where people can learn from their mistakes and not keep making the same mistakes over again. Paul talks about suffering for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel, but the point isn’t suffering for suffering’s sake. The point is to be faithful to God, to love God, and to let the love of God overflow in us. The point is to do the work of God’s coming kingdom in the world we live in now. The point is to grow into the good people God created us to be, even as the world creates obstacles and pain.

And yes, sometimes we hurt each other. Yes, sometimes we have to face painful truths about ourselves and our loved ones and the world around us. Yes, sometimes we are called to open our hearts when we would rather keep them closed and safe. And it doesn’t always work—there are people who are not willing to change, people who are not willing to stop hurting themselves and others, and that’s the painful reality we live with. But sometimes—sometimes, when we allow the grace of God into our hearts and souls, when we are willing to follow the one who is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life, even when it means changing our hearts and minds—sometimes there is reconciliation and hope. And it makes all the difference in the world. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Who Gets Left Out?

Third Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 11, Year B, June 13, 2021

Samuel 15:34—16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-10 [11-13] 14-17
Mark 4:26-34

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Eliab was everything an Israelite could ask for in a king. Charismatic, powerful, a good warrior, tall, good-looking, first-born son of a major player from the same tribe as the current king. Samuel looked at him, and it was obvious. He was the one God had chosen to replace Saul! Eliab was just that impressive. Everyone (except Saul) would have been happy with him as the next king. There was only one problem: he wasn’t the one God had chosen. Sure, he was everything the Israelites wanted, everything Samuel imagined a king should be. But God doesn’t see the world the same way we do; God’s judgment is not based on the characteristics we hold so dear. And so God tells Samuel “not this one, send for the others.”

And Samuel does so. The next son looks pretty good, too, so Samuel thinks, “okay, maybe it’s this guy.” But it isn’t! And it’s not the next or the next. They go through seven sons all told, before Samuel turns to Jesse and asks if he has any other sons? That maybe he forgot to bring? And Jesse says, sure. He’s got an eighth son, but the kid is just a pipsquek. An afterthought. The one who gets left at home to do chores and take care of the animals while his older brothers get to do the fun and important stuff. At Samuel’s request, he goes and gets David, the least and last of his sons, and brings him, and that’s when God perks up and tells Samuel “It’s this one!” This pipsqueak, this runty little thing whose own family treats him like an afterthought, this is the one I have chosen to be the next king of Israel.

And then, of course, the narrator assures us that he might be short but he was really cute. Because, however God sees people, humans care about appearances, and we can’t let anybody think that God’s chosen king was ugly! I often wonder if the scribes added that bit later to make David or his successors happy. Because we get told over and over again throughout the Bible that God judges differently than humans do, and we should see through God’s eyes rather than our own, and yet we still judge by appearances.

Imagine what would have happened if Samuel had let his own judgment rule his actions. Imagine what would have happened if Samuel had looked at David, that runty little pipsqueak whose own family disregarded him, and said, “Well, gee, God, I know you like this boy, but I just think Eliab would be a better choice.” Or what if Samuel hadn’t bothered to ask if anyone was missing. I mean, there were already seven sons of Jesse there, PLUS all the elders and the rest of the important people in the community! Samuel could have gone with his gut, figuring that surely, if there were anyone good enough to be king, the community would have recognized him and included him in this important worship service. And that makes me wonder: are there people we are leaving out? People we dismiss? People we relegate to the dirty, menial jobs we don’t want to do? People we don’t invite or befriend because they don’t fit our vision of who matters? People we overlook because the world dismisses them just like the world dismissed young David?

The Lord does not see as mortals see; God looks on the heart, not the outward appearance. And so should we. “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view,” Paul writes. We are made new in Christ Jesus; we have been re-born as children of God. As children of God, as part of God’s new creation, we should see the world and our fellow human beings as God does: without partiality, without being blinded by appearances, seeing peoples’ hearts and not their outsides. We should let the love and grace and justice of God guide us in how we see and treat one another, instead of seeing things from a human point of view.

If only it were that simple! If only we could just … flip a switch, and see the world differently, without all of the baggage that comes from human prejudices. But it’s not that simple. In the 80s and 90s, when we tried to have a society where we didn’t see color, all that meant was that white people didn’t notice discrimination even when it was blatantly obvious. All trying not to see race meant, was that we didn’t see racism. Our ways of perceiving the world are shaped by our culture on a gut-deep level, in ways we are not consciously aware of. There’s an experiment where social scientists take people who describe themselves as not racist, and ask them to evaluate two potential candidates for a position. One has more experience and fewer qualifications, the other has more qualifications and less experience. One is white, and the other black. You ask people which should get the job and why, and they will usually pick the white person. If the white person has experience but not qualifications, they’ll say experience is more important. If the white person has academic qualifications but not experience, they’ll say the academics are more important. And these are people who genuinely believe that they are not racist! But they’ll pick the white person seven times out of ten without ever realizing that race is a factor in their decisions, and then come up with logical-sounding reasons to justify themselves. And if you do that same experiment with other factors, you get a similar response. Men get picked more than women; able-bodied people get picked over people with disabilities (even when the disability has no effect on their ability to do the job). And these days it’s usually not because people are consciously choosing to be racist or sexist or whatever; it’s those gut deep reactions that we’re usually not even aware of.

So where does this leave us? We don’t see with God’s eyes; we are blinded by the surface of things. Even when we try our hardest, we let the world’s judgments influence our own. And it has led our country to some pretty bad places over the years. Sometimes, we Christians have even used God as a shield to justify our own bigotry. During the Civil War, the Bible was used more often to justify slavery than to condemn it. We remember the Reverend Doctor King and his colleagues using the Bible to call for racial justice during the Civil Rights era, but what we forget is how many White Christians used the Bible to justify Jim Crow. We cannot just wave a magic wand and make all of that history disappear, any more than we can make our own prejudices disappear.

But God gave us brains capable of learning, which means we can look at the patterns and see our biases and learn to compensate for them. And God gave us ears to hear and hearts to love, which means we can listen to our brothers and sisters as they tell us the hard truths about what life is like for them. More than ever before, there are resources to help us learn to see our own biases and compensate for them. We probably won’t be able to eliminate them in this world, but we can make things better. We can do better. And it’s a tall order, it’s hard to learn to see things in a new way. The good news is, we are not alone in this struggle. God has not abandoned us to the worst parts of human nature. The world tells us all kinds of stories about who matters and who doesn’t, and God tells us a different story. The world shapes us, but so does God … if we listen, as Samuel did, and as Paul did. May we hear God’s word, and learn to see through God’s eyes, and not the eyes of the world.

Amen.

Give Us A King!

2^nd Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 10, Year B, June 6, 2021

Samuel 8:4-20
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13—15:1
Mark 3:20-35

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

As you listened to our first lesson, did any of you wonder “why is it such a big deal that the people of Israel wanted a king?” I mean, that was the main form of government in the Middle East three thousand years ago. Small groups of people had tribal chiefs or family patriarchs, large groups of people had kings, really large groups of people had emperors. They might have different names for their monarch—Caesar, for example, or Pharaoh, or any one of a number of different titles in different languages, but regardless of the name, they were all kings. That was just how things were done. They didn’t have any other model for how to govern a large group of people. Everybody in those days had a king. So what’s the big deal that the Israelites wanted one too?

And the big deal is, the people of Israel were supposed to be different. That’s the whole point of the covenants God made with Abraham and Moses and their descendants! They would follow God’s teachings and be God’s people, and be a shining beacon of justice and mercy and righteousness, an example to all the other people of the Earth. They would be different from everyone else; they would have a society based on justice, not oppression; on mercy, not vengeance; on fairness, not exploitation; on good and healthy relationships with God and one another, not abuse. By being God’s people, worshiping and serving only God, choosing to follow in his ways and live as he called them to live, they would have a society which would bless all who lived in it and would bless the nations around them. Instead of depending on human structures of power (which will always break down and are prone to exploitation) they would have God as their king.  And here they are, asking for a king so they can be like other nations. It’s a rejection of everything that they are supposed to be. It’s a rejection of God as their king.

Now, this request of theirs didn’t just come out of nowhere. There had been problems—a ton of problems, if you’ve ever read the book of Judges—all along. They were Gods’ people, but they were just as sinful and prone to stray and sin as everyone else. After they had been freed from slavery in Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, God had given them judges to guide them and tell them what God wanted of them. And then the judge would die, and the people would go astray and society would become corrupt and oppressive, and because of their sin God would step aside and allow one of their neighbors (usually the Philistines) to conquer them, and then the people would realize their sin and cry out to God for help, and God would send a new judge who would drive out the invaders and bring the people back to God’s ways, and everything would be great for a while, and then the people would start sinning again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The people are tired of this, they want a strong military to protect them (instead of depending on God to do so), and a strong military means a king. Just like other nations.

Of course, the problem is that a king may protect you from your neighbors conquering you, but who’s going to protect you from the king? Invaders can be driven out, but the only way to get rid of a bad king is to overthrow them in a civil war, which can be at least as bad as having to drive out invading forces, if not worse. And, you know, while there were bad times when they were between judges, there were also a lot of good times. There were times of peace, and justice, and mercy. But add a king, and whether times are good or bad, you will always have to put up with the king himself. And even the best kings end up taking a lot of a country’s wealth for their own personal use, while the worst kings bring slavery and poverty and oppression to wide swathes of people outside their courts. Having a king sounded like a good idea to the people of Israel, they thought it would keep them safe, they thought it would keep them happy and prosperous and united … and in the end the kings split the kingdom in two and increased poverty, slavery, and other forms of oppression in Israel. And they still had to deal with foreign invaders!

The Israelites had a fundamental question: what will make us safe? What will give us the kind of good life we want? And their answer was, we need to be like everybody else, do the same things everyone else is doing, and focus on becoming more powerful in a worldly sense. That will keep us safe, and give us a good life. All these other people have lives that look pretty good on the surface, and we want what they have. Sure, God’s okay, but if we want a good life we need to be practical and think and act like our neighbors. And what they learned, tragically, over and over, is that the ways of your neighbors that look great on the surface are not actually going to make your life better. Trying to protect yourself by playing the world’s game may work for a little bit, but it’s not going to work forever, and in the process you lose who you are and who God is calling you to be.

Americans fall prey to this kind of thinking, too. We take the example of the world around us and assume that the things the world considers “normal” are always right and good and what we need. Instead of thinking a king will get us the safe, good life we want, we convince ourselves that the right kind of material life will get us that safe, good life. If we have enough money, if we have the right job, if we have a nice house, we’ll be good. And if we want those things for ourselves and our children, then we have to go to the right school. And to get into the right school we need the right grades and the right test scores and the right activities on our application papers, so we have to fill our lives with busy-ness. We have to hustle for it. And we have to look good on social media while we’re doing it all. And if we do all that and we’re still not satisfied, if there’s something missing, then maybe we need to diet and exercise to get a hotter body. Or maybe we need to hustle more, add another activity or hobby that will fill the gap in our lives. Or maybe we need to add a side gig, get a second job or turn a hobby into something marketable, so we can earn more money.

Of course, the problem is, none of these things will actually fix our problems or answer the underlying question: what will give us a safe, good life? What will be a foundation we can actually build our life on? What will make us happy? It’s not that any of those things I just talked about—money, jobs, education, hobbies, activities, houses—are bad. In fact, they’re all good, in their place! But they’re not what gives our lives meaning and hope and joy. And when we’re so busy chasing after all those things and assuming that that will give us the good life, then we may miss the things that truly make life worth living.

This is what Paul’s talking about in our second reading, when he talks about the difference between the things that can be seen and the things that can’t be seen. Things like your paycheck and how much you have left over after paying your bills and how nice your house is and how new your car is and how you look and how your team scored at the game on Saturday and that piece of art you made and that class you took, those are all things that can be seen and evaluated. They’re tangible, easy to understand. And in the proper place, they are important and necessary. But if that’s all there is to your life … well, what are you going to do when you can’t do them any more? When your body and your mind are worn out? When things go wrong? When you fail?

The things of this world fail. The things we can see and measure all pass away. They are not a firm foundation to build a life on, as the people of Israel found, as we find. But there is something greater, something we can’t see, something that will bear the weight of our lives, and that is the grace of God. We were made in God’s image; we were made to love God and one another. It is in that love—in the grace of God made manifest in the world—that we find our deepest joy and hope. We can’t see that love, but we experience it every day. That love will add to our joy when things are going well, and console us when life sucks. And when we share that love with the world, we grow closer to God. God’s love will never fail. The one who created us, who sent us Jesus Christ to save us, who sends us the Holy Spirit to lead us and inspire us, will be with us in good times and bad, through joys and sorrows. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Hearing through the Spirit

Pentecost, Year B, May 23, 2021

Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

When we say that the Bible is God’s Word, we mean that God speaks to us through the stories and writings in it. It’s not just dead words on a page. God uses it to speak to us, here, now, today, if we will listen. This is why we keep studying Scripture all our lives: even with texts that we know very well, there are still new things to discover. God sometimes draws our attention to things we hadn’t noticed before, or helps us to hear them in a new way. Which was the case with our reading from Acts. I have heard that passage every year at Pentecost for my entire life, and I’ve preached on it every year since my ordination nine years ago. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating how the Spirit sends the disciples out into the world, how the Spirit helps them speak, how the Spirit brings faith to those listening. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating what it means to have the Spirit poured out on all flesh, what it would be like if we truly all dreamed and had visions. But until this year, I never noticed that one of the gifts of the Spirit in this story is the ability of the crowd to hear and listen.

It’s not just about the ability of the disciples to speak in various languages; it’s about the ability of the crowd—or at least some of them—to listen to them and hear what they are saying. I used to take hearing and listening for granted, but after the last several years, I don’t any more. Listening to people—really listening and seeking to understand them—is becoming a rare skill in our society. People talk past each other all the time, especially when we’re talking politics or social issues. We make up these caricatures of what people who disagree with us are like, and only really hear what fits that caricature. Or we only hear enough to build a counter-argument on. Or we miss the subtext that would tell us why the other person cares so much about that issue, or what shapes their perspective. And if you can’t hear what the other person is really saying, if you’re not willing and able to listen … you can’t have a conversation. Even if you’re right and the other person is wrong, you can’t help them change their heart or their mind if you don’t hear what they’re actually saying. You can pat yourself on the back for how morally superior or righteous you are, but you can’t understand the other person and you can’t have a true conversation and you certainly can’t build any sort of relationship.

Which is why I find it interesting that the Bible specifies not just that the Holy Spirit gave the apostles the ability to speak in various languages, but that it gave the people listening the ability to hear. Not all of them were willing to hear; some scoffed and dismissed the whole thing as nonsense. But some people listened. They heard the apostles, not just as noise but as meaning and a testimony to God’s deeds of power. They heard and wanted to understand. The Holy Spirit was working on both sides of the conversation, both those speaking and those listening, and it is in that mutual inspiration that the word of God spread.

I find myself going back to last week’s Gospel reading, where Jesus prayed that we might be brought together in unity as a life-giving community. I find myself thinking back to all the readings from 1 John we read this Easter season, and the constant emphasis on love, the love of God for us and our love for God and for one another, as the basis for the Christian life. How can we be one community if we can’t hear one another and listen to one another? How can we love one another if we can’t hear one another and understand one another? We can’t! Plain and simply, the Christian life requires us to be able to listen, to hear the Word of God and be shaped by it, but also to hear the cares and concerns of our siblings in Christ, and all those God has called us to serve. And that’s deeply counter-cultural. America today is based on not listening to anybody who disagrees with you, just shouting them down and assuming the worst about them. In this, our culture is wrong, and deeply un-Christian.

I don’t mean that all perspectives are equally right or valid, of course; some opinions are simply not based in actual fact, and other opinions are based on hate or fear or jealousy or selfishness or cruelty or bigotry. And it’s important to build our thoughts and actions and words on truth and love, rather than lies or hate or fear. But at the same time, if we don’t actually listen to them and hear what they’re saying, we might be mistaken about what they think and why. And we certainly won’t be able to build the sort of relationship which might open them up to different perspectives without listening to them. And sometimes, it’s our own perspectives that are wrong, and if we don’t listen to the Spirit and to others, we’ll never realize that.

And, of course, the most important person to be listening to is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gives us the gift of hearing, and of understanding, and speaks God’s truth to us, and guides us through life. It’s usually not as dramatic as the tongues of flames the apostles experienced at Pentecost, but it’s still present with us today, if we listen for it. That’s what Jesus promised us in the Gospel reading, that the Spirit would be in us and with us, and would speak the truth to us. It takes prayer, and opening your heart and mind, but the Spirit is here with us. It listens, and it speaks, and it helps us to hear God and our neighbor, and it helps us to speak the truth in love.

There are other spirits out there. Spirits of this world. Cultural forces that encourage division and spite and falsehood and selfishness and all sorts of destructive things. And sometimes those other spirits and cultural forces are very attractive; sometimes they tell us what we want to hear. The Holy Spirit is the only one that will always tell the truth; it’s the only one that will always lead to growth in faith and love. As Christians, we are called to listen to the Holy Spirit more than any other, to hear that truth, to follow it and build our lives on its foundations. To open ourselves up through prayer and Bible study and worship to the one God sends us. The Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and awe of the LORD

The Holy Spirit listens to us, it hears our deepest fears and hopes, things we can’t even put into words. It understands us, and brings us closer to God. And the Holy Spirit also helps us hear God, hear the truth about God and the world and ourselves. It helps us walk in God’s ways and follow where God leads. And the Spirit helps us dream, gives us visions, helps us imagine the world as God wants it to be rather than the world we have now. The Spirit helps us hear others, and build relationships with them based on truth and love, even when the world is encouraging hatred and division instead. The Holy Spirit helps us live as God’s people, coming together in the Body of Christ. And the Spirit helps us speak the truth, helps us hear the truth, helps us grow in faith in love, as the gift of God is always with us. Thanks be to God for that gift.

Amen.

We Know Love By This

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 25, 2021

Acts 4:5-12,
Psalm 23,
1 John 3:16-24,
John 10:11-18

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” John said, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” So this begs the question: what does it mean to lay down one’s life? What are we being asked to do here, and what’s at stake? Now, obviously, the greatest example of Jesus laying down his life is in the crucifixion, when he died to save the universe and all of humanity from sin and death. Does that mean that we should be out there trying to get ourselves killed, too? That may sound ridiculous, but it actually happened. In the early church, when people were being persecuted for being Christian, some people heard these verses and rushed to martyrdom. Jesus died, killed by the Roman government, so obviously his followers should also try to get themselves killed by the Roman government. For them, laying down your life meant a bold, showy, literal dying for Jesus’ sake. We may look back on this and shake our heads, but it was a real problem. Many early church leaders had to preach and teach about this to convince people that going out and trying to get yourself killed just for the sake of dying for Jesus was not what Christians are called to do. So it begs the question: what does it mean to lay down your life?

Let’s go back to Jesus’ metaphor of the shepherd. When a shepherd lays down their life, what exactly are they doing? First off, it’s not about dying for the sake of dying. They are there to protect and guide the flock from danger. And if, in the course of shepherding the flock, a wolf or a lion or a bear comes, they will fight the predator off. They’ll start with a sling hurling rocks from a distance, and they have a staff if the predator gets close. Usually, that’s enough; but sometimes the shepherd gets killed in the process of defending the flock. The shepherd is willing to die, but death is not the goal. Protection is. Just as, for Jesus, his goal was not to die; his goal was that we might have life, and have it abundantly. His goal was that the powers of sin and death would be broken and we would be freed. Death was required in the service of that larger goal, and Jesus was willing to die; Jesus’ death was the method by which God’s plan was achieved, not the end goal in itself. Jesus laid down his life on the cross out of love and service, not out of a desire to die. What does that kind of deep love and service mean for us? And, like I said, the shepherd laying down their life is not just about dying. Most of the time when they confront the predator, they don’t die. They do what is needed to protect the flock. What goals and plans and acts of service might God be asking of us? Who needs to be protected? Who needs to be served?

Second, there are more ways to lay down your life than to confront predators. The reason that Greeks and Romans didn’t value shepherds is that it was a pretty terrible job. You spent your whole life out in the middle of nowhere taking care of the flock. You were out in all weather, at all hours of the day and night. And sheep are really inventive at getting themselves into trouble. I saw a video on youtube this week where a shepherd hauls a sheep out of a steep ditch that it is stuck in. The sheep goes right back and jumps in again. It didn’t take thirty seconds after getting pulled back to end up back in the same predicament. It is a frustrating job, a dirty, smelly job, a hard job, a lonely job, to take care of sheep, especially back in Jesus’ day. Just going out there and spending weeks or months out with the sheep was a form of laying down your life: laying down the life you might have had, giving up the comfort of home, so that the flock might be protected and safe and taken from pasture to pasture. The daily grind of caring for the sheep is also a form of laying down your life for them.

Jesus laid down his life in multiple ways, too. First, when he became human. It was a big step down, becoming a mortal fleshy being. He lay down all the power and glory of being God to become one of us. And then he dedicated his time on earth to serving others: teaching and healing and feeding all who needed him. That, too, was a way of laying down his life, a choice he made constantly and consistently. Sure, he took breaks, he took time for prayer and solitude and rest, but then he always went right back to work serving those in need. And then, most obviously, he laid down his life by dying for us. He rose again; death is not the end of the story. But death is part of the story.

All those different ways of laying down his life make a big difference for us. Because he lay down his life on the cross, because he died and rose again, because we are tied to his death and resurrection, we are freed from the powers of sin and death. We will die one day, but just as he rose from the grave, so we too will rise when he comes again in glory. We are saved and healed and made new by his saving death and resurrection, just as the flock is saved by the shepherd driving off predators.

But death is not the only way Jesus laid down his life for us. Jesus also laid down his life for us by coming to earth and becoming human for us. By being present with us in our griefs and sorrows, teaching us, leading us, healing us. Just like the shepherd is there for the sheep, not just when predators come but also day in and day out, guiding the sheep and pulling them out of ditches and going to find them when they get lost. In that same way, Jesus is still with us today. He’s not physically present with us, but he is here. Guiding us, leading us, loving us, and healing us … even when we choose to go astray. Even when do stupid things. Even when our problems are our own fault. Like a good shepherd, Jesus will never leave us alone with the consequences of our own bad choices. He’ll be working to save us and bring us home. We are not alone; we are never alone. We are never abandoned, or written off. We are loved. We are found. We are saved. Because Jesus laid down his life for us, and continues do lay down his life for us.

For Jesus, laying down his life was an act of love. An act of persistent presence. We didn’t earn it, any more than the sheep earned it. Jesus laid down his life for us because he loves us, and we needed it. And now we are called to lay down our lives for others. Not by trying to go out in a blaze of glory to prove how righteous we are, but by serving people in love. Just as Jesus serves us in love. Just as a shepherd serves the sheep in love. This is not a glamorous job, it’s not an easy job, it’s not a job that will bring fame and fortune. But it is necessary, and it does help. As God helps us in our need, as God abides with us and leads us, so we too ought to help others in their need. As God loves us, so we ought to love others.

And it’s so tempting to put limits on that. To say, “yes, we should love others, but only the ones worth loving.” Or, “yes, but only the ones who are good people.” Or, “yes, but only the ones we feel comfortable with.” Or, “yes, but only the ones we agree with.” Or, “yes, but only the ones who have made good choices.” Or, “yes, but only the ones who aren’t weird.” Or, “yes, but only the ones in our own community.” We put all these limitations around who we should love and serve, who God is calling us to love and serve, and telling us that God wants us to. Yet Jesus didn’t come to save only the good and righteous; he didn’t come to save the worthy and healthy ones who always made good choices. He laid down his life for the sick, the outcast, the sinner, the stranger; he laid down his life for us, not because we deserved it, but because we needed it. And others need it too.

“We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

Amen.

The Perfect Christian Community

Second Sunday of Easter, Year B

April 11, 2021

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1:1—2:2

John 20:19-31

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen,

Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Whenever I’m in a Bible study and today’s reading from Acts pops up, I always know that sooner or later someone is going to bring up communism. Despite the fact that this passage was written 1800 years before communism was created, the idea of communal sharing of resources is so fraught in our culture that most Americans can’t really hear what this passage is saying until they’ve been reassured that it isn’t advocating for communism. Which is a worrying statement about the relative importance people place on Biblical teachings vs. their own political beliefs. But, anyway, communism is about government control of resources, and this is more about making sure that everyone in the community has enough to live on. If you read into the next chapter, which is where this perfect sharing falls apart, Peter affirms that those who own property have a right to it, and to the proceeds from selling it; the problem is lying about how much they got, so they look more generous than they really are.

This perfect community based on grace and sharing and the word of God in Christ Jesus didn’t last long; selfishness and dishonesty came in soon enough. Humans can’t maintain perfection, or at least we won’t be able to until God’s kingdom comes and all the dead are raised and all creation is made anew. But there’s still a lot we can learn from this one brief shining moment where, for a short time, Jesus’ followers were actually able to live completely as God calls us to.

First, it’s a reminder that all the economic laws in the Hebrew Bible, what we call the “Old Testament,” are there for a reason. To quote Deuteronomy 15, “Give generously, and do not let your heart be grieved when you do so. And because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything to which you put your hand. For there will never cease to be poor in the land; that is why I am commanding you to open wide your hand to your brother and to the poor and needy in your land.” There are all kinds of laws in the Old Testament about making sure that everyone has enough to live on and being generous to those in need. For example, farmers are forbidden from harvesting their entire crop; some must be left for poor people and animals to glean. For another example, every seven years there was supposed to be a complete forgiveness of all debt, so that those who had fallen into hard times could make a fresh start. For another example, in addition to allowing the poor to glean, everyone was supposed to bring ten percent of their harvest—and the best ten percent, at that—to the Temple, where it would pay for both the running of the temple but would also be given to the poor and needy in a sort of welfare system.

And there are many more provisions in the Hebrew Bible to ensure that those who have little do not have too little, and those who have much do not have too much. It’s not about making everyone the same, it’s about making sure that everyone has enough to live and thrive on. And, crucially, none of this depends on whether or not you liked or approved of any particular poor person; it’s not dependent on the moral state of the needy. It’s also not dependent on rich and middle-class people feeling generous. Rather, it was set up to be a system that everyone in society followed so that no one fell through the cracks. This was such an important spiritual and social factor that for several of the prophets, the economic state of the poor was a crucial indicator of how well Israel and Judah were doing. If poor people are oppressed, if they are crushed by debt and hunger, if rich people cheat those with whom they do business, if the courts do not uphold the rights of the lowest people in society, then something is very wrong. Today’s reading from Acts is a reminder that while we don’t follow the laws of the Hebrew Bible, the underlying ethics of caring for the poor are absolutely still part of our call as followers of Jesus Christ.

Second, this passage shows us how that perfect community came about. It shows us what the necessary preconditions were for it, however brief a time that it lasted. And there are two conditions: testimony to the resurrection of Jesus, and grace. Those are the two things that allow the community to exist together.

 Let’s talk about what testimony means. Testimony means you tell what you have seen and heard. It’s not about being eloquent, or having the best arguments, or knowing all the deep theological points. It’s pretty simple: tell people what you have seen and heard. In this case, tell people what you have seen and heard about Jesus’ resurrection. Now, I have a master’s degree in divinity, and Lutherans tend to prize education, especially for pastors. There are a lot of things that formal study of theology are important for. But to build a Christian community, the most important thing is not how learned your theology is, but rather how often you tell the story of Jesus. Those first Christians had eye-witness views of the Resurrection and Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances, which we don’t; but we do have their testimony written down, in the Gospels. And we have testimony of our own to give; we are witnesses to the power of God in our lives and in the world. One of the things our conservative siblings do better than us is emphasize the testimony of ordinary Christians, teaching people to see and talk about how they have experienced the presence of God. Such testimony builds faith within the community, and is a good witness to the people outside the community. It makes a difference. It reminds us who we are, and whose we are. It helps us see ourselves as part of the larger story of God’s work in the world. We are not just here because we like each other, and we’re not just here for charity, and we’re not just here because we like music, and we’re not just here because we have nothing better to do on a Sunday morning than show up. We are here because we have experienced God’s power in Christ Jesus. And we should talk about that! We should share the stories of what God has done for us and for all of creation!

The other thing they had, those first Christians, is grace. Great grace. Lots of grace. The grace of God, and grace for one another. Grace as both a gift from God, but also as a truth and reality that they lived by. Grace is love, freely given and freely accepted. It’s compassion for weakness, and generosity towards need. It’s a free gift that is worth more than anything you could ever possibly buy. We receive grace from God, through the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus, and are supposed to extend it to one another. It’s about assuming the best, instead of the worst. It’s about letting our love and hope and joy take the lead instead of our annoyance and fear and jealousy and anger and selfishness.

God is full of grace, and shows no partiality with it, but humans are a different story. How much compassion and love we are willing to extend varies with a lot of factors: how much we like someone, what we gain or lose from it, how much like us they are, how tired we are, and many other factors. We tell ourselves that being suspicious is a good thing, that judging people is what God would want us to do. Yet we are told time and again that the most important thing about how we treat one another is not how we judge others—judgment belongs to God—but how we love others. How much we let the grace of God shine through us, overflow from our lives into the lives of others.

And it’s witness and grace together that bring the believers into such an amazing fellowship with one another. Without love, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is just a story, with no weight in our lives. Without the witness of the Resurrection, love is nice but insufficient against all the evils in the world. Only with witness and love together is transformation possible. Only with witness and love together could the first community of believers live in the sort of harmony and generosity as we see in our reading from Acts. And no, it doesn’t last; the peak they reached was not sustainable. But it mattered, and it made a difference.

Amen.

Surprised by Life

Easter, Year B, April 1, 2021

Acts 10:34-43,
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24,
1 Corinthians 15:1-11,
Mark 16:1-8

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of Mark originally ended in a really weird place. The women find the empty tomb, and are told that Jesus has risen. It’s a miracle so great they couldn’t even imagine it well enough to hope for it. They are told to share the good news of what they have seen, and to tell the disciples that Jesus is going ahead of them back to Galilee. And, in the wake of this overwhelmingly good news, in the wake of this miracle, in the wake of joy and hope breaking in to their world … they flee in terror. They were fine with death. They didn’t like death, they hated it, but they knew how to deal with it. New life? Resurrection? An empty tomb? That sent them home in fear and confusion. And that’s where the Gospel of Mark originally ended, in the place where our reading today ends: with the women fleeing in fear, not telling anyone the good news they can’t bring themselves to trust. It wasn’t until a century or two after the Gospel was written that a happier ending was tacked on, with Jesus appearing to the disciples and them beginning to spread the word of the Resurrection.

But I think there is something to learn from the original ending. It’s easy to say, from the outside, that of course the women should have been joyful. Of course they should have been able to react immediately to the new reality. Of course they should have been able to turn on a dime from the deepest grief of their lives to the greatest joy. Of course they should have immediately begun spreading the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection far and wide. The thing is, most humans can’t change like that on a dime. When you experience a massive change in your life, it takes time to figure out how to respond, how to think and feel about it.

Human beings can get used to just about anything. If you experience it long enough, anything—even the worst things—can become normal. Pain, abuse, grief, fear, suffering … if they go on long enough, your body and mind adjust to it and you stop being able to really imagine what life would be like without those burdens. And then when that burden is lifted, you have to figure out how to live without it. And it’s good! It’s wonderful! But it’s weird, and it takes time. For example, we’re not through to the end of the pandemic just yet, and we won’t be until most of the population is vaccinated and people aren’t dying of covid any longer. But even when everyone is vaccinated, there are going to be a lot of people who don’t take simple things like going to the store or to a restaurant for granted any longer, people who will feel uncomfortable being in public in a crowd even after it’s completely safe. A year of isolation takes a toll and will leave a mark. The women at the empty tomb—they were used to death. They were used to grief. They were used to pain, and sin, and death, and broken lives and broken people. They knew how to deal with death! They came prepared!

And they were surprised by life, instead. They were surprised that the massive stone had been lifted away, the grave-clothes cast aside, the body that should be decaying and rotten transformed into new life. They were surprised to find that what they had thought was the end of the story was, in fact, the beginning. They were surprised to find that evil had been defeated and the kingdom of God was near. They were surprised by hope, by joy, by possibility, by old certainties being overthrown and new possibilities blossoming around them. And so they ran away in fear, and didn’t tell anyone just yet.

Which begs the question: what burdens are we prepared for? What burdens do we take for granted? What does the resurrection and empty tomb look like in our lives? Now, this may look different for everyone; in some cases it might be very personal. Take a moment and think about what burdens you’re bearing. Think about the burdens and fears that weigh heavy on your heart and your body. What problems and evils you just accept because they seem inevitable. And then imagine those burdens gone. Because that’s what resurrection does; that’s what the empty tomb promises. Jesus’ resurrection is the first part of it, and that would be miraculous on its own. But wait, there’s more.

Jesus is resurrected, but Jesus’ resurrection is the first step in the larger resurrection of the world. Just as Jesus rose from the grave, one day all those who have died will rise. The powers of sin and death have been broken, and they will be utterly destroyed. All sin and evil will be banished, all the pain and grief and brokenness and loss will be healed, the entire cosmos and everyone in it will be made new in Christ Jesus our Lord. His tomb is the first to be emptied, but it will not be the last. That’s what the resurrection means! All the old certainties, all the painful, horrible things we’re used to—their power over us is broken. And there is work to do. The messenger in the empty tomb told Jesus’ followers to go home, that Jesus would be with them, and that there would be things to do, because the empty tomb promised God’s victory over sin and death, but the fullness of God’s kingdom is not quite here yet.

We are living, right now, in that empty tomb. We know that Jesus is risen. We know that while sin and death and evil seem really powerful right now, they have already been defeated. Their days are numbered. God has won, bringing life out of death and forgiveness and reconciliation out of sin and healing out of hurt and hope out of fear. God has won, and God’s kingdom is near. It’s not here quite yet, but the seeds have been planted in us and around us, and God will keep growing them and planting new seeds until that day when the harvest comes and all the dead are raised and the living and the dead will be judged.

Like those first women at the tomb, we have been told that there is hope. We have been told that there is new life. We have been told that the power of death has been broken. And yet, a lot of the time we find it just as hard to believe as they did. We are used to injustice. We are used to death. We are used to pain and grief. We are used to fear. And we don’t know how to deal with resurrection. And so we say ‘he is risen’ and continue to live our lives as if sin and death and brokenness are the ultimate powers in the world. We say ‘he is risen’ and go back to our ordinary lives as if the resurrection makes no difference. We see that the tomb is empty, and we don’t understand. We are afraid because we are so used to the burdens we bear that we can’t imagine what it would be like if those burdens were lifted. We are a lot more like those women than we would like to think.

And yet, even in our fear and disbelief, there is hope. Because the women fled in terror, and told nobody what they experienced … but that fear didn’t last. Their silence didn’t last, either. That’s how we know the story, two thousand years later. They worked through their fear and terror and disbelief, they opened themselves up to the power of God, they let the new life of Christ into their hearts, and they told the story. And that story spread, and was handed down, and written down, and treasured throughout the generations. Over and over again, through the centuries, people have experienced the power of the risen Christ, and the new life he brings. There is death in the world, but death is not the final word. There is sin, but the power of sin has been broken. There is fear, but the love and faith and hope of God is stronger. We will all die, but we will be raised as Christ has been raised. The tomb is empty; the kingdom of God is near; Christ is risen, and he is with us, and he is at work in us and in the world around us. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Loving All

Maundy Thursday, Year B, April 1, 2021

Exodus 12:1-14,
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19,
1 Corinthians 11:23-26,
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Preached by Pastor Anna C. Haugen, Chinook and Naselle Lutheran Churches, WA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our Gospel reading has a chunk taken out of the middle of it. This is done for practical reasons; the Gospel of John is very, very long, and there are often times when a whole story is simply too long to read in worship in its entirety. In the Gospel of John, the Last Supper takes up five whole chapters, not including Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. So we condense, we take the important parts, and leave the rest of the story for other worship services and Bible studies. We’ll hear more from Jesus’ Maundy Thursday message in Easter and at Pentecost. But tonight, we focus in on two things: the foot-washing, when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, and the commandment to love one another. After all, the commandment to love one another is what the day is named for. “Maundy” comes from the Latin word “Mandatum,” which means commandment. Jesus commands us to love one another.

The thing is, Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus? He’s included in the footwashing. He’s there, and Jesus knows that he is about to betray him. He gets his feet washed, and Jesus tells him to leave, and night falls, and then Jesus tells his disciples to love one another. Knowing that one of them is a traitor, knowing that one of them has left their fellowship, knowing that death is going to result from Judas’ choices, Jesus still tells his followers to love one another. Jesus doesn’t say “love one another, except for Judas, that rat.” Jesus doesn’t say “love one another, except for enemies and people who betray you.” Jesus says ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

And Jesus doesn’t mean just saying they love others, either; Jesus expects them to put that love into action. Jesus gave them an example of what that love looks like when he washed their feet. It’s a love that means that when you see something you can do to help people, you do it. Even when it’s kinda icky, like washing feet. Loving is not just a think you feel, it’s a thing you do. And Jesus, crucially, tells them to love as he has loved them. Jesus loves them enough to empty himself of pride and wash their feet. Jesus loves them enough to be born in human flesh and become truly human. Jesus loves them enough to suffer and die for them.

And, crucially, Judas is included in that love. Judas does something terrible, something evil. Judas knowingly chooses to leave the community and align himself with their enemies. Judas knowingly participates in the machineries of an unjust and cruel empire. Jesus knows that this is wrong, Jesus says that Judas is wrong. This is not a case of pretending Judas’ actions don’t matter, or sweeping them under the rug, or excusing them. Judas was wrong, period, end of story, and there will be consequences for him and for everyone else. And Judas still gets his feet washed like everyone else. Judas is still part of Jesus’ love … and if the disciples are supposed to love as Jesus does, that means the disciples are supposed to love Judas, too.

What does it mean to love your enemies? What does it mean to love people who have hurt you, betrayed you? To love people who still have the power to hurt and betray you, people who have not repented, as Judas has not yet repented at this point? A lot of times when people say we should love or forgive those who hurt us, what they really mean is that we should allow those people to keep hurting us, or we should just sweep their bad deeds under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is not what Jesus is commanding, here. Judas is wrong, tragically wrong, and it is a deep and total betrayal. Jesus isn’t excusing his actions. But at the same time, Judas is part of the sinful world Jesus has come to redeem.

This is a hard thing for us to grasp. How do we love people who have genuinely done bad things? How do we love people who have hurt us? How do we hold people accountable while loving them? How do we put that love into action in a world which is more prone to hatred and violence and retaliation than to love?

Jesus came to save the cosmos, to save all people. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Jesus came to usher in the kingdom, to show us what life in God is like. God is love; God is truth; God is justice and mercy both. God is a peace that the world can’t give and doesn’t understand. And my God, the world needs that peace, now more than ever. And the way we get that peace, the way we participate in the kingdom of heaven, the way we live out the salvation that is Jesus’ gift to us, is to love one another as Jesus loved us.

The human instinct when we are hurt is to lash out, to take our pain out on other people, to hurt people as we have been hurt. To hurt people more than they have hurt us. To respond to pain by making more of it. But that will not bring in God’s kingdom. That won’t bring the peace and justice and mercy of God. That won’t give us abundant life. You can’t hurt people into being better; you can’t punish people into making the right choices. Fear of punishment won’t make people good and it won’t make the world a better place. The only thing that will do that is love. Love of God; love of neighbor. Love that looks all the evil in the world straight in the face and says “You do not get a free pass, and you don’t get to rule me, and I am not going to react to you by becoming like you. I am not going to hurt you as you have hurt me. I am going to make a better choice; I am going to make the choice that Jesus commands us to make. I am going to love even when it is hard; I am going to choose to participate in the healing of the world rather than in making more hurt.”

That choice is not easy. And it looks different in different circumstances. You can’t just choose to love someone by rote; you can’t just make the choice once and then never think about it again. You have to ask the question constantly and consistently: what is the loving response to this? How do I love this person even when I don’t want to? How do we receive the blessing of God’s love in Christ Jesus, and then love one another so that the whole world can see it and be transformed by it?

May God fill us with his love, and may we live out that love so that all the world will know that we are his disciples.

Amen.