Asleep or Awake

 

            Here we are, the start of a new church year
—beginning the season of Advent
—our time preparing to meet God in the Flesh!
Time to get ready for that thing we can never truly be ready for
—Christmas
—God with us.

            A time that also starts a new lectionary season
—for the last year we’ve been ensconced in Luke’s Gospel,
with its focus on the universality of the Christian message,
an eye to wealth and poverty,
and a deep heart for the Lost.

Now we move to the Gospel in a different key
—Matthew’s message
—often called “The Church’s Gospel”…
it is a message that insists Christianity is in continuity with God’s past actions,
and a message that doesn’t pull punches when naming conflicts within the Church.
In other words, Matthew’s Gospel is written as good news for
-a Church recently thrown out of their Jewish community
-AND experiencing bad behavior and factionalism within its own ranks.

In the midst of this maelstrom,
we are met with a message:
Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

Let us pray

 

(To be clear I’m being very blunt in today’s sermon
—I’m laying it on thick
—punctuating the big bold points made in Matthew’s Gospel
—so you’ll be able to hear it all year,
when I’m treating the text more gently)

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            Rip Van Winkle slept through the American Revolution, and Matthew warns us of something even more devastating
—sleeping through what God is up to.

Do not be oblivious to God’s doings,
do not remain ignorant of the Gospel transpiring in our very midst!
Do not assume that God acted in the past,
and now everything since is post-script.

            Instead, be aware that God’s creation & God’s saving,
those things celebrated in Hebrew Scripture,
are still happening!
Right in front of our eyes,
Joy and rescue!
Be ready for it! Expect it! Trust God!

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            Asleep and alone, you will not notice
when your cigarette butt falls and catches your couch on fire.
Likewise, you drift off to sleep outside,
and you’ll wake up alone in dangerous woods at night.

            But awake!
You gather for a celebration feast.
Awake, you are the seasoning in the meal, bring out its flavor.
Awake, you are a candle at the meal table, illuminating the goodness of community!

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            Don’t embrace deeds and words—habits
—that are violent, false, or angry,
you will be sleepwalking into a life that is terrible.

            Instead, be awake to the tenderness of existence,
in thought, words, and deed
be gentle, truthful, and patient.

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            If you are asleep, you won’t notice your hypocrisy,
those masks you sometimes put on, will be harder and harder to take off… until they aren’t masks at all.
You’ll turn to outward piety that you can brag about,
instead of the hard interior work that makes right the soul.
You’ll embrace mottos and scruples
—missing meaning and somewhere along the line,
you’ll lose sight of God,
because God is doing a new thing,
and you’re caught snoozing.

            So be awake
—like a father sneaking out of bed and up into the attic to hide the Christmas gifts he bought for the family.
Awake to the gifts God has given you
—prayer, generosity, and moderation
—those hidden treasures that are priceless,
but evaporate if you start to show them off.

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            Be awake, because sleepy people
start puffing themselves up with titles,
and putting people on pedestals,
from which they will inevitably fall.
Call no one Great, aren’t we all siblings?
Call no one Father, because we’re all God’s Children.
Call no one Teacher, because we are all Disciples, student, of Christ.

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            You sleepers—you are like weeds,
growing undisturbed,
but will be heavily disturbed in the end,
when the reaper comes.
You sleepers—you are like rotten fish,
smelling the place up,
you’ll be used for chum and bait on the next fishing trip.
You sleepers—you are like goats,
unfortunately you will be separated out by the Good Shepherd,
so you don’t hurt the least of these.

            Be awake, be wheat,
brought in and made into a beautiful loaf of bread,
served and shared, sustaining the whole community.
Be awake, be fresh fish,
multiplied in our Lord’s basket, feeding the 5,000.
Be awake, sheep shorn to keep the cold warm,
little Ewe lamb, so loved by the Shepherd,
sibling of the Lamb of God, who is taking away the sin of the whole world.

 

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

            Wake up! God is doing a new thing!
Wake up! The Dead are raised!
Wake up! The tomb could not hold him.
Wake up! Our risen Lord is sending us out!
Go! Make Disciples!
Baptize them in the Triune name!
I am with you always!

Keep awake! Stay awake! Be ready!

Amen.

Praying like Our Lord

  

God, redeemer-kin, you of the strange name, who we find in the thin places.

Let us know your presence and your reign.

You desire joyous goodness; please breach the divide between us; let us taste sufficiency, enough.

Bring us into the cycle of repentance: forgiven and forgiving.

Guide us out of captivity and save us from every ill.

You are the weighty one, upon whom all authority and power rests.

Amen.

A New Creation

            When it comes to prophecy, folks tend to take the words of people like Isaiah in one of two ways.
Either they:
turn them into nothing more than poetic greeting cards and aphorisms,
or they focus exclusively on them as predictions of the future.
The former robs them of their power,
the latter ignores that these words needed to mean something to the authors and readers, in the moment.

            Luckily for us, Lutherans are a “Both/And” kind of people.
The words of Isaiah and his ilk both point to Christ,
and help the exiles come out of Babylon and into a new future
—they allow them to hope in the face of a nearly impossible task. These words both inspire us now,
and are heavily seasoned with scriptures that came before.

            Or, to move to a slightly different metaphor—who here is familiar with Improv?
Think “Whose Line is it Anyway”
People are given a situation and props,
and start acting without a script
—the whole thing is improvised.
The best way to keep the scene flowing, is to cling to the philosophy of “Yes, and.” As in,
“Yes, I am indeed a sea captain,
and I’m worried that those aren’t mermaids…”

            When it comes to prophecy, scripture can speak in a multivalent way—both/and, “Yes, and.”

Let us pray.

 

            To those exiles,
Isaiah’s words capture their sorrows and their humiliation
—they are a lost generation:
raised away from the faith,
away from their homeland,
in captivity,
kidnapped people forced to submit and be subsumed by the Babylonians…

            Exiles, so recently freed, so recently returning home…
a home they have never known,
a place packed with promise…
promises they can barely make out and understand.

            They lived with the indignity of exile
—a short and bitter life,
far from home, laboring in homes of others
an uncertain future,
separation from not only the Temple, but from God!
So very aware that Babylonian peace was surely not the same as the Shalom-sort of peace their scriptures speak of…

            Isaiah’s words capture their sorrow, through its opposite
—you are found, freed, a new life,
hope fills the gap created by uncertainty,
and the wide wholeness of peace will pour out beyond simply your tribe,
Pour out as a triumph of a peaceable kingdom,
even the animal world will submit to a new and renewed covenant—relationship—between God and God’s people!

 

Yes he describes the exile, and…

            There is a more universal chord thrumming in the background
—one speaking about all humanity’s experience of curse and cure
—fall and redemption.

            Isaiah writes of the goodness of creation, experienced again.

            I always remember back to when I was 19 and first learning to read Biblical Hebrew,
and I came across the Prophet Zechariah’s description of God’s new acts as a reversal and then re-unveiling of the days of creation (Chapter 14 for those who are keeping score)
—Isaiah points to something like that here,
he’s riffing on the first three chapters of Genesis.

            He describes God’s work of creation
—a new heaven and a new earth
—it is good! It is joyous!
He remembers that fateful walk in the garden,
instead of, “Adam, why do you hide?”
“Before they call, I will answer.”

            He BOTH acknowledges the curse
—our labors will be hard,
childbirth too,
and we are alienated from God’s good creation…
AND he points to blessing instead
—wolf and lion, none hurt,
childbirth a blessing,
labor so very fruitful!

 

Yes he’s promising a return to the blessings of a world created good and very good, and…

            His hope filled words find fertile soil in Christian witness;
these hopes of Isaiah echo across time
and exist in God’s works in Jesus Christ.

            Look, a new creation
—some call it the 8^th day of the week
—six days of labor, one of rest, and then one of resurrection,
joy filled work, renewing God’s good world.

            These descendants who are blessed
—are we not all descendants of Christ,
we who are baptized into him,
adopted into the family of God?

            The garden, called before we cry out to him
—isn’t that how the incarnation works, God with us…
loving us, acting on our behalf,
while we were yet sinners?

            This peace
—St. Augustine famously wrote,
“We are restless until we rest in him.”

 

Yes these words find flesh in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection and…

            These words still speak to us today
—they still name our sorrows and our hopes,
our fears and our joys.

            There is an Exile in us all, stepping into freedom
—frightened and unfettered and focused on the future,
in need of hope!

            There is a desire for the Garden…
Alienation and Yearning,
“Lord we want to walk with you!”

            There are restless hearts…
finding ourself in Jesus our Lord.
He is our hope, our path, our joy, and our Rock.

 

            Yes, and,
Both/and,
a brave wideness to Isaiah’s words…
blessed words, and as such,
please receive this blessing:

 

 

May we be a new creation;

May we notice and acknowledge your providence with joy and thanksgiving;

May our lives contain both a quantity of years and a quality of goodness;

May we be delivered from all temptation, and find peace at the last;

May all your children have a blessed future, united to you and reconciled to your beloved world.

Amen.

Jesus will turn your world upside down

            Before Jesus’ Birth, Mary sings her famous song, the Magnificat,
about God scattering the proud and bringing down the powerful,
about uplifting the lowly and filling the empty stomachs of the hungry.

            Before Jesus’ baptism, John describes repentance as,
the unjust playing fair and everyone sharing.

            Jesus’ parables are peppered with stories of reversals,
and his teaching warns against trusting in religious purity, piety, or societal pecking orders.

            His whole ministry really, is a series of reversals:
a virgin giving birth,
the Messiah crucified,
the dead arising.

Jesus will turn your world upside-down

 

Prayer

Jesus will turn your world upside-down

-Who doesn’t want to be spoken well of?
-Who doesn’t like mirth and laughter?
-Aren’t good and filling meals magnificent!
-Haven’t we built a society around acquisition and gain?

            But Jesus
looks those disciples right in the eye,
and says, “That’s not why you follow me. That’s not the meaning of blessing.”

            He gives these Beatitudes and his “Sermon the Plain” right after a horde of hurt and sick people surrounded him, and he heals the lot of them.

            A miraculous thing that he has done, one that goes completely unnoticed by the well and unwounded.
They, believing themselves invulnerable,
trusting in their own devices and the many ways the dice of fate has landed well for them…
they miss that the savior of the whole world is in their neighborhood.
They miss Christ, because they don’t need him.
They don’t desire what he freely offers,
a life turned upside-down.

 

            But for those who know themselves as vulnerable,
the excluded and abandoned,
the impoverished and broken down,
the folks worried about their SNAP benefits going away,
the people searching for and preparing their dead after the hurricane
—holding back tears,
so they can do the unimaginable.
Yes, Jesus, turn my life upside-down.

            Yes, blessing is most keenly experienced amid need!

Disciples of Jesus Christ
—we his followers who he casts his eyes upon before preaching this message
—are called there,
to those needs,
called to be little Christs.

            It’s been interesting to watch people following Jesus,
as government food assistance is nudged to the brink of disappearance
—brigades of do-gooders swing into action,
packing and
purchasing
and preparing
And people of good will asking, “how can we help?”
I’m emptying our outdoor donation bin daily.
(None of these things are forever solutions, but maybe we can hold the line until the cavalry arrives)

Simiarly, Lutheran World Relief,
and all these other similar organizations,
are on the ball, and on the ground
—and as we know they are last out kind of people,
so they won’t leave until the work is done in Jamaica and beyond!

 

But you might rightly say,
those are moments of emergency,
is there any beatitudes for the rest of us?
Can we be called,
when things are calm?

Well, Luther famously wrote:
“How is it possible that you are not called?
You are always in some sort of position.
 You have always been a husband or a wife or a son or a daughter or a servant.
Imagine the lowest position—as a husband
do you not have enough to do to watch over your spouse, children, workers and property so that all might be obedient to God and no harm comes to any of them?
Indeed, even if you had four heads and ten hands you would scarcely have the energy for such a task.
And I guarantee you would not be thinking about making a pilgrimage or doing some so-called ‘saintly’ works.”

            Our callings come in the meantime,
in the day-in day-out faithfulness
that keeps the least from the worst
and maintains the best for the most,
caring for those closest to us
while not forgetting those far off.
I suppose it’s an upside-down sort of logic,
but, Jesus, turn our life upside-down.

 

            Now, All Saints can emphasize Saint or All…
or both…
that there are folks who, with the clarity of hindsight,
we can point to as clearly
loving,
blessing,
praying,
offering and not withholding,
giving,
and doing good…
truly there are saints of blessed memory…
models of faithfulness that can inspire us on…
(but most likely they were too busy with the day to day to fixate on “saintly work” as Luther calls it…)

 

And also, there is the reality that we’re all beggars
—sanctified, made right, redeemed,
by Christ…
we’re saints on account of Jesus Christ our Lord…
those things people will see in us one day,
“Wow, remember ol’ so and so, how she loved like Jesus!”
“Remember that fella from back in the day, he cared when no one else would.”

Those are works of the Spirit, that will likely surprise even us.

 

And little M,
we wish these blessings
—these Beatitudes
— upon you too.
We pray that you’ll be sensitive to vulnerability,
your own and that of those around you.
That you’ll be inclined toward the beatitudes,
that you’ll have saints to look up to
and yourself be sanctified by the ongoing love of God,
the Spirit that you will be sealed with,
the life of Christ that you are clothed with,
the goodness of this baptism,
this Christian life.

I pray, and I promise, that in your baptism,
Jesus will turn your life upside-down.  
Amen.

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

 

            This, being one of those Sundays where we’re lifting up this congregation’s 250-year history,
I thought it might be worth taking a walk down memory lane
—peering like time travelers,
at the myriad of works of the Spirit that God is up to, among us Lutherans.
Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

Let us pray:

 

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

It’s all there from the start, you know:

-“Justified by God’s grace as a gift.”
At-one-ment with God “effective through faith.”

-The Word working on us as “The knowledge of sin” and as “The Law of Faith.”

-God’s goodness disclosed in his Crucified and risen Son.

-The tensions between the power of descending from Abraham and being adopted into God’s household.

-Varieties of faithfulness and practicing Christian freedom in the meantime.

In other words:
-Grace & Faith,
-Word Alone—the message of Law and Gospel,
-Theology of the Cross and Two Kingdoms,
-Adiaphora and Vocation.

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

            From the beginning…

1517—Luther questioning the practices of indulgences,
in light of the Word of God,
in light of God’s mercy,
not our works, faith in the promise’s of God.
As unexpected as God on a cross
—academic points of debate shaking all of Europe,
that’s the Spirit for you!

1525—Luther and Katie are married,
Luther’s understanding of Christian vocation widens beyond the confines of the monastery,
into every role, relationships, and responsibility he has.

1530—The German princes present their confession of the faith to the Emperor
—their very lives on the line,
they pry apart a place between Church and State where Lutherans can live faithfully, as our conscience dictates.

1534—Luther, hiding from the authorities in a castle attic and disguised as “Knight George”,

translates the Bible into German,
so the Word might be known more broadly.

1546—Luther’s death, and his final words,
“Pray, let God do the worrying.
We are all beggars, that is true.” Pointing to grace and trust, even in the end.

The various wars and persecutions,
forcing Lutherans to ask what are central things and what are indifferent things
—what of the faith is worth dying for,
and coming up with a rather short list: Word and Sacrament.

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran.

 

            Even before Luther, the Spirit acted in Lutheran-ish ways:

In 400—asking Augustine about being citizen of Heaven and Rome

In 1200—Francis of Assisi attacking the wealth and waste he saw in Rome.

1350—Wycliff translates the Bible into English,
and is burnt for his efforts.

1415—610 years ago this year,
Jan Hus burnt for questioning papal authority,
indulgences,
and clericalism in Holy Communion.

 

            …But we’re here to talk about Lutherans.
Catching Lutherans being Lutheran.

1675—Spener publishes “Heartfelt Desire” and empowers the movement known as Pietism, at its best itbringing the faith into the heart of our day to day.

1696—Continuing the tradition of writing in the language of the people Lutherans translate the Small Catechism into Algonquian and Lenape.

1723—A young fella named Bach is hired as a Cantor, and uses his music to connect worshipper’s hearts to God’s Word.

1774—A group of people meet in the Fritts’ barn and read scripture together…
by 1775 these folk have organized as a congregation.

 

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

1861—Lutherans from throughout New Jersey gather at that same church,
this very church!
and hold the founding convention Ministerium of New Jersey… what will become the New Jersey Synod.

1922—Based on the Lutheran minimalist definition of Church
—Word and Sacrament… Everything else is commentary…
the Anglicans and Lutherans enter into eucharistic fellowship.

Just 3 years later Lutherans leverage that same impulse to organize the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work, that leads to the creation of the World Council of Church.

 

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

1934—Questions of Church and State
—Two Kingdoms,
shock German Lutherans as the Nazis wrest control of the Church from the Called and the Ordained…
only the Confessing Church holds out against the pressure.

By 1945 that Pressure leads to the death of so many members of the Confessing Church, culminating the in Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of Adolf Hitler’s final orders.

 

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran…
sometimes even when they’re Roman Catholics…

1969—The Roman Catholic Church, mirroring Luther’s Reforms,
declares the importance of individual conscience and translates worship into the language of the people, and opens the way for Ecumenical relationships with the rest of the Church.

1989—100s of Lutherans gather at St. Nicholas Lutheran in Leipzig for prayer.
A small act, like posting 95 theses, or God showing up on the cross.
They are beaten by East German police.
A month later 70,000 East Germans return the St. Nicholas.
The next week 120,000.
The next week 320,000.
By the next week, the Berlin Wall falls.

1999—Lutheran and Roman Catholics come together and sign the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.
We admitted the Splitting of the Church was tragic,
and they admitted that Luther’s reforms were necessary.

 

Catching Lutherans being Lutheran

And it is of course harder to discern what’s God at work, and what’s just things that happen,
especially as we get closer to contemporary times…
but if we look carefully,
I think we can still see the Spirit’s work:

Adiaphora and Vocation—
Every ecumenical event laced with it,
every service centered on Word and Sacrament,
every Role, Relationship, and Responsibility done faithfully,
embraced by our baptismal calling.

Theology of the Cross and Two Kingdoms—
We likely won’t see it until we’re on the other side of it, and God chooses to reveal it to us.
God’s cross and God’s Kingdom,
coming without any effort of our own,
and yet there it is! Oh wow!

Word Alone—
Every week I endeavor, from this pulpit here,
to get out of the way and let Scripture kill you and your desires to earn what is freely given,
and make you alive again in Christ.

Grace & Faith—
Every time we trust God’s promises to be true. Every time God reveals that which already is…
mercy and gift,
mercy and gift.

I pray that you will be caught being Lutheran.

Amen.

Flourish in the Meantime

 

                These last few weeks I’ve unintentionally created something of a sermon series.

I preached about Jeremiah’s Sign Sermon
—even as Babylon was besieging Jerusalem,
he went out and redeemed his relative’s field and buried the deed of sale
—and in so doing he planted a sign of hope for his people.

                Then last week, we went from siege in progress, to the horrific aftermath
—the book of Lamentations crying, “How! How lonely sits the city.”
Naming fears, losses, longings—as Laments,
lifting them all up onto God’s grand shoulders,
so that there would still be room for change, hope, a future.

                Now today, Jeremiah writes a letter to those people who have been kidnapped from that now lonely City
—the Royal court, religious officials, scribes, and anyone of import or value
—all dragged off to Babylon (note quickly that Jeremiah was not among such prestigious people)…
he writes a hard letter
—writes what they need to hear,
not what they want to hear
—Jeremiah writes to them and says, in essence,
“Flourish in the meantime!
Flourish where you find yourself!
Flourish faithfully!”

Let us pray

 

                Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet of his time period…
in fact, he wasn’t even the most popular prophet…
there was another prophet (to be clear a false prophet)
Hananiah, who made all kinds of false prophecies and promises to God’s people
—promises of peace that ended in war,
promises of a rapid return from Babylon that never materialize,
prophecies of victory that end in his own vanquishing.

                To all this, Jeremiah tells hard truths
—hard truths about the length and locale of the exile
and what was expected of the Exiles.
Hard truths about Duration, Location, and Vocation.

 

Duration, Location, and Vocation… duration

                The people wanted to hear that their time of exile would be short
—Hananiah said God promised that it would last less than 2 years.

                It was not to be so
—instead of 2 years—70,
a whole generation,
people be born, live, and die in Babylon.

                And Jeremiah told the people as much,
“Live/Plant/Marry/Multiply/Pray… you’re going to be there a while.”

Oftentimes when we hear that famous phrase, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” we skip over the first part—it’s long…
there will be weeks, months, years, lifetimes
where right is on the losing side,
progress might be inevitable, but is sure isn’t easy!

                And to that painful reality, Jeremiah reminds the people, “God’s with you for the long haul!”

 

Duration, Location, and Vocation… location

                The people want to hear,
“don’t even bother learning the street names,
don’t learn your neighbor’s name,
you’ll return to Jerusalem,
the Kingdom will be restored.
Everything will be like it used to be!”

                To this Jeremiah insists,
“Live/Plant/Marry/Multiply/Pray! This is your home now!”
But you’re not alone…
this is God’s home too…

                In a different prophetic book
—Ezekiel names this reality starkly and strangely
—he sees the glory of God lift up in something like a:
Space Ship/Wheelchair/Chariot/Meteor
—and leave Jerusalem and go with his people on to Babylon…
God is on the move
—God isn’t a bordered God,
isn’t a regional God,
isn’t a God confined to a particular place
—but a God with wheels
—a God that burns rubber to remain with His people.

                God is in it for the long haul,
and God will pack a U-Haul
to come with y’all
and remain with you in exile!

 

Duration, Location, and Vocation… vocation

                The people want to hear that they should
just throw a pity party,
not engage with the reality they are in,
not imagine their faith’s calling in captivity,
how they ought to live as God’s people in the awful place in which they find themselves.

                But Jeremiah writes and prophecies,
“Live/Plant/Marry/Multiply/Pray! You’re called to be God’s people even in Babylon.
Show them how to live even when lost.
Show them how to love even when they hate you!
Pray for them!
Who knows, maybe their hearts will be healed…
or at least yours won’t be hardened by these hellish times!”

                Our vocations are:
the roles, relationships, and responsibilities we’ve been given,
not for glory or greatness,
but to point to God!
(as Christians we see them as flowing out of our baptism and pointing to Christ)

Our life and work,
our family and all relationships,
our citizenship and our sojourning
—all, God willing, tinged with God’s work in the world,
all witnessing to God’s redemptive power,
all pointing to our collective identity as a sign of God’s ongoing love.

                And there is something old, that becomes new again, for these sojourners in Babylon.

Hebrew Scripture is chock full of admonitions and rules that say,
in a wide variety of ways,
that the stranger and sojourner ought to be welcomed
—over 80 verse by my count
—and the reason given is that the Jews themselves were strangers in Egypt.
Their vocational responsibility toward the resident alien and immigrant,
is shaped by their own experience of being one…

                And now, Jeremiah tells ‘em, they are strangers in Babylon,
and they must wrestle with that reality.
Care for the welfare of those with whom you dwell.

                Isn’t that a beautiful mirror image
—these two requirements:
When among your own people, welcome the stranger.
When you are the stranger, care for the welfare of those with whom you dwell.

                Even there in Babylon,
especially there in Babylon,
Live, Plant, Marry, Multiply, Pray for the wellbeing of those who are your neighbors.

                Yes, Jeremiah tells hard truths about
Duration, Location, and Vocation…
And nestled within each hard prophecy is at least the hint of a promise:
God is in it for the long haul,
God travels with you,
no matter what, you are God’s people!

“Flourish in the meantime!
Flourish where you find yourself!
Flourish faithfully!”

A+A

Lament, the Book of How

 

 

                As I’ve said before, one of my preaching practices is to focus on infrequently read scriptures when they come around on the lectionary.

When it comes to the book of Lamentations, there are 5 times when the book can be read,
and three of them occur on Holy Saturday…
a service we don’t do here…
For that matter, the other two times the book comes up, are optional readings…
So theoretically a Lutheran could go their whole lifetime without ever reading Lamentations in worship.

And that won’t do.
It severely limits our experience of God,
making the Sacred a mere placeholder for important events,
and God a sort of grandfather figure, who slips five bucks into your pocket when mom isn’t looking…

No, God is experienced at the margins and in the center,
during both joys and unjust sufferings…
as Biblical Ethicist and Theologian Marva Dawn once wrote:

“We need to have enough of God to let us lament. In our present world, in spite of the cultural optimism of the United States, we find ourselves facing the realities of loneliness, unemployment, violence, worldwide political and economic chaos, family disruptions, brokenness and suffering, the fragmentation of postmodern society. Keeping God as the subject and object of our worship enables us to deal with the darkness by lamenting it, by complaining about it. The psalms give us wonderful tools to move from addressing God with pleas, complaints, petitions, and even imprecations to the surprising outcome of praise. Throughout it all, God’s presence assures us that we are heard, that something will change—both in ourselves and, through us, in our world.”

Let us pray

 

                This rarely read book of the Bible, titled Lamentations in the English, is also named for its first line: How!

The author is writing after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, both palace and temple,
throwing the common folk into thralldom and kidnapping and dragging off anyone who could read, write or seemed even vaguely important.

                To this tragedy the author wonders and exclaims: How!?!

                How can I continue on after seeing the death of innocent children?

How can my heart hold such contradictions within it,
both a desire for God to avenge us
and also a recognition that the siege itself was God’s wrath against us!

                How could they steal all those sacred things from God’s temple,
from ornate candelabras to delicate draperies?

                How! How before the last wall of the city fell, I’ve already fallen into nostalgia,
fallen into a vacuous pit emptied of meaning,
what of my culture, my politics, my theology, all of it collapses
—my nation obliterated!

                How is it that I can witness all of this suffering,
and still have hope,
still see a future out there ahead of me!

               

                Now, as Candy and Karen can attest, I sketch out sermon directions about 6 months in advance
—so I had no idea of the local laments we’d be having this week.
We go for months on end without needing to name the recently dead in our prayer petitions,
but this week there are 4, including the former Pastor here’s wife, Ginny Ettlemyer.
For that matter, a couple families had close calls this week,
our prayers could easily have contained 6 names…

                Unnamed lament can turn to fear,
fear of loss
—and in so fearing
we can lose faith in a future.
Possibility can get eaten right up, if we don’t lament.
Nostalgia will drag hope into a corner
and smother it,
if we let it.

                All change, even good change, comes with grief.
Think of it, you quit an awful job and get a new one,
but you still miss that customer who would come in at 2:30 every Thursday,
or the way the sun hit the window when you closed up shop.
Surely you’re in a better place now,
but the change still involved loss.

 

Now, a truism in the New Jersey Synod,
I think we’re quoting Pastor Schanzenbach whenever we say it,
is “A leader’s job is to change things at a rate that people can handle.”
Lament is one of those tools that let us see our losses and our longings,
and consider what they might become.

 

                Laments are not only found in the book of How,
but are their own genre
—they fit into a particular pattern.
When the Psalmists lament, they:
addresses God, complains, confesses need, asks for help, affirms that God is trustworthy, and end with a promise of praise.
We too can lament:
Good God, I can’t believe they are gone,
I can’t do this alone, help me to keep on in the face of everything falling apart,
I know you are faithful and on the other side of this I’ll be able to thank you again!

 

                Speaking of patterns, the book of How is structured in a strange way,
one that walks you through these 5 poems,
and ultimately points you back to the central one
—one that not only asks, “How can I have hope, how can there be a future,”
but also,
“God’s compassion has not come to an end.
Great is Thy faithfulness.
I will wait for the Lord!
The Lord is Good!”

 

                Lament takes us through what therapists and counselors call the tasks of grief:
1. Accepting the reality of loss,
2. Experience the pain of it,
3. Adjust to new world,
4. Re-invest emotional energy.

                Or to use the frame of the book of How:

-How is this true?
-How does this hurt?
-How do things look when the dust settles?
-How do I reconnect to reality?

 

                I was hearted in Bible Study on Thursday. At one point I asked a way too big question for the small venue:
“Who are the people with whom you feel the flow of God’s New Creation
—when do you feel everything being made new?”
And the first two responses were both about Lament,
about grief work:
-people gathered together at a Grief Group,
-being with a relative at a yearly event marking and honoring the sad situation of parents losing a child.

 

                Marva Dawn might be onto something
—God is big enough for our laments.
When we’re able to ask and plead “How”
God might just surprise us,
we might find ourselves in a posture of praise.
Change. A New Creation!
The thrumming wave of resurrection pointing to possibility!
No longer limited by our fears,
there is a future,
there is a next step,
there is hope.

Amen.

Buy the Field

 

                It’s good to see everyone here today, I guess no one got raptured…

For those of you who weren’t following the young people on TikTok, there was a Rapture Panic this last week
—As your Pastor, I’m your Theologian in Residence, so it is worth naming that the Rapture is a modern misreading of 1^st Thessalonians chapter 4, invented by a Long Islander named Scoffield during the First World War, popularized by some Baptist Texans at Dallas Theological during the second.

                At any rate, folks were behaving atypically this week, with the assumption that the world as they knew it was coming to an end…

                We’ve seen this sort of thing before
—Harold Camping in 2012,
the Left Behind series in the ‘90s,
The Late Great Planet Earth in the ‘70s…

                And these impulses don’t come out of nowhere
—both revival and eschatological speculation
—speculating about the end of the world
—are often signs that something ain’t right in society…
that to a critical mass of people,
it feels like the end of the world.

                And to all that, I would point you all to a saying attributed to Luther, “If the world was to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree.”

                Or, thinking about Jeremiah’s actions we read about in the first lesson today: “If your world is coming to an end, still redeem that property, buy that field.”

Prayer

 

                Jeremiah, and many of his fellow prophets as well, are known for something called Sign prophecy—I think about it as similar to what I do with the Children’s message—they play with props. Sometimes its big deal stuff, distressingly weird even…

                For example, Jeremiah once threw fresh underwear into a stream and left them there until they got moldy, slimy, and disgusting, then he marched them around Jerusalem telling the people that they were just like moldy underwear…

Or right before today’s reading, he shackled himself to a yoke and wandered the streets warning everyone to shackle themselves to the Babylonian yoke or face God’s wrath…

Imagine that—the Babylonians seen as the vile pagan enemy, an empire threatening to overawe and overpower Judah and their coalition partners…
                Imagine that—the city besieged, the enemy at the gate, and Jeremiah out there blubbering about the Babylonian Yoke being God’s will—it was treasonous…
prophets…
so often their words sound like treason, because they love only God…

 

                And then Jeremiah calls his lawyer
—poor Baruch, always pulled into these situations on account of his friend, the Prophet Jeremiah
—Baruch, Jeremiah’s Right-hand-man is called over to complete another sign prophecy—in this case called over to make something nice and legal; a land deal even as it became clear that the land was no longer any Judahite’s to control… Jeremiah buying and selling property at a time when it was obvious all property was going to belong to the invaders…

                Such prophetic audacity… doesn’t it draw you in?
What the heck is he up to,
God’s city and Jeremiah’s country collapsing…
and he writes a deed of sale! Don’t you want to know why?

 

                Besieged and everything collapsing…
It reminds me of a story from Sarajevo, during the Civil War there… during the 4 year siege there a man found himself in a bombed out building, alone there with nothing but a goat, and hear heard in the distance the cry of a child.

It reminds me of the families of those murdered after the shooting at Mother Emmanuel, of Erika Kirk in the wake of the assassination of her husband…

                But also, those smaller collapses, that are much closer to home.

-A terminal diagnosis and a rapidly contracting future.

-The loss of a job, or even its threat
—the brittleness of vocation and uncertainty of meaning that it brings.

-Hitting rock bottom and recognizing that you’re an addict and can’t get out on your own…

 

                What is Jeremiah up to, “Write me up a deed of sale.”

                In the face of famine, and the crushing power of the most powerful nation in his world—overcoming armies, occupying land, pressing against the capital city’s walls so hard they start to bow inward.

In the face of Jeremiah’s own prophecies of “doom, doom, Doom!”

He redeems a relative’s field… fulfilling a law of God, doing right by his kin.

He did the right thing when it was hard, impossibly so… if you only have ethics when it is easy, you don’t have an ethic, but a hobby… He does the right thing…

But much more than that, he did the right thing, even at a time that was hopeless and the property was worthless. He did the right thing and it became more than an action, it became a sign of something more—a message from God.

 “God says “Take these deeds, both sealed and open, and put them in earthenware jars, so that they’ll last a good while, for thus says the LORD, the House and Fields and Vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

In the face of immense evil, a couple of legal documents, sealed in a jar, buried in the back yard.

A small thing that proclaimed God’s Word:
“All is going to go to hell, but have hope!
“I will bring them back to this place and I will settle them in safety!
I brought disaster, so I will later bring good fortune!
Fields shall be bought in this land and deeds signed and sealed again, for God is the restorer of fortunes!”

 

That man in Sarajevo, milked that goat for weeks and months and years on end, bringing the milk to neighbors who could feed their little child.

Erika Kirk, and the families of the Emmanuel 9, did the impossible, they forgave their spouses murders.

I think of a strange wedding and funeral I once did—a marriage in the face of a quick killing cancer—and a funeral just days later. Certainly, there was something of Jeremiah’s deed of sale in that.

Those smaller, more personal, collapses too—unemployment and holding on to your core self. Hitting rock bottom and reaching out for help.

It might be an end, but it is not THE end. When the world is roiled all around you, redeem the field.

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