You Shall Live—A Sermon about Stories

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Welcome back! It’s the first week of spring quarter, it’s the first week of April. Time flies when you’re having fun. With all this happy, springy newness, though, comes our final week of Lent. Tonight’s readings were, umm, lengthy, as well as fairly...odd. Very bodily, right? In Ezekiel, we were in the valley of the dry bones, and there were a lot of words we don’t usually say—like sinew, and flesh, and skin, and bones.

It’s in readings like this—and our Gospel, the raising of Lazarus—that we can go back and forth about whether God really brought a pile of bones to life, or raised a man from the dead, right? And we can argue yes, definitely, and we can argue no, definitely not. But that’s not the point, and that’s not what we’re going to do tonight. Because whether or not these things literally happened, they’re part of God’s story.

The authors of these books wanted us to read these words and know something about the truth of who God is. The first story in the whole Bible is about the creation of our world, because God is a God of creation and of newness. The people who put the book together wanted us to know that, right off the bat. God is a God of life and breath and bodies. Same in this Ezekiel story. God and Ezekiel come upon these dry bones, and, so the story goes, God asks Ezekiel a fairly rhetorical question. “Mortal, can these bones live?” The answer, unbelievably, is yes.

God says to the bones, “I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” God says to us, “you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

When God comes upon dry, dead things that were formerly alive, God does not shrug and turn away. God says no to death and yes to life. And not just this one time! Every time.

In the Gospel tonight, there is one such other time. Jesus has been told that his dear friend Lazarus has died, and has the audacity to go to Bethany and bring him to life again. As we read, this was a very controversial situation. And, again, we don’t know if Lazarus was a man who lived and died and lived again—and, presumably, died again. And if he really did live and die, we don’t know how Jesus made him alive again. But! Again! The people who wrote the book want us to know something about God because of this story. They want us to read of a God who weeps and a God who says no to death and yes to life. Again and again and again. Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when it’s dangerous.

Since we know the rest of the story, we know that it was very dangerous for Jesus to do this. We know what happens next week. But an odd thing about this lectionary reading—though it was approximately 7000 verses long—cuts off at chapter 11 verse 45, before the story is truly over.

In John 11:48, the verse we never read in the Sunday lectionary: “If we let Jesus go on like this, everyone will believe him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”

I am curious about why we don’t get that last little bit. In this story, “the threat of Rome is real, and the author of John knows this, because by the time John is written, Rome has indeed come and destroyed the temple. And Jerusalem. And carried off the spoils to Rome. Jews were also carried off as slaves to the empire. The trauma of this destruction would still be present and felt in this community, and so is present and felt in John’s Gospel.”* It isn’t that the Jewish religious leaders are worried about Jesus being Jewish incorrectly—or making them out to look like they’re being Jewish incorrectly—it’s not a question of right belief or right practice, here. They are afraid for their lives. “The different groups we see in John’s Gospel (Jesus-followers, John-followers, pharisees, sadducees) these are all factions trying to figure out how to survive under Roman imperial occupation, and they don’t all agree on the best way to do that.”* They’re all worried, rightfully, about how much attention Jesus is drawing to himself, and to them by association.

It is easy, though slippery, to want to draw connections between this reality and our present. We in the progressive movement in the United States of America are all trying to figure out how to survive under a burgeoning fascist regime, and we don’t all agree on the best way to do that. “Should we vote? Close down freeways? March every weekend? Kneel during the national anthem? Call people in? Call people out? Make phone calls every day to our senators? Become sanctuary churches? Chain ourselves to pipeline drills?”* We have to be cautious, though. Because “as we read this story from John, we have to admit that as white Western Christians, we have no idea what it is like to live under imperial occupation in the way that Jesus and his community did.”* Our holy places are not under threat in the way that theirs were. We do not live with the trauma that they did.

But we’re still here, in Davis, California, reading the Gospel According to John on a Wednesday night.

Why are we talking about all of this political stuff? Because our society is where we live. The laws that govern us as residents and citizens of the United States are, in some cases, the difference between life and death. That is not to be ignored, because there will always be an empire to resist. The reason we’re talking about all of that here at the Belfry on this night when we have read of the raising of Lazarus is because “God’s power is far beyond what any empire can muster.”*

To Lazarus, and to Ezekiel, and to the dry bones, and to you, and to me, God says “you shall live.” God doesn’t need to remind us that death is real. We know that. We see that all too often. We need to be reminded, though, that death is not ultimate. Death does not have the final word. Our God, who is a God of life and breath and flesh and bones and creation and liberation, is the one who says no to death and yes to life.

Because God has breathed life into you, and put sinews and muscles and flesh onto your dry and weary bones, you shall live.

You shall live. Thanks be to God!

_________

* I was deeply inspired and this sermon was deeply informed by The Rev. Anne Dunlap's episode of The Word is Resistance, the podcast from SURJ, entitled "3.12.17 Resisting Anti-Semitism in John" (which also featured heavily in this previous sermon) and so every quotation you read here that is not from Ezekiel or John is from that podcast. I've marked them with asterisks, because putting several footnotes to the same thing down here felt silly?

Give Me a Drink—A Sermon on World Water Day

Grace and Peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Sometimes, I start sermons by asking everyone to take a deep breath together. Because it’s finals, I’m going to do that. Ready? Inhale, exhale. Good. Again? Inhale, exhale. Good. But because I’ve just read you the approximately 4,000 verses of tonight’s Gospel, within which Jesus had a convoluted conversation about water, I’m also going to ask everyone to take a drink of water. (Note to my dear readers at home: at this point, I literally poured glasses of water for my students. You should get up and get a glass of water, if you can. Stay hydrated!)

As your pastor, attending to a holistic view of your needs--spiritual, mental, emotional, physical--is my job. That’s why we feed you dinner every Wednesday, and keep a bowl full of snacks on the coffee table. It’s why I pray for you, especially during finals week, or when you’ve let me know there’s something going on in your universe. And it’s why I’ve asked you to drink some water. Your hydration is important to me!

In this week’s Gospel, Jesus goes to a well. We don’t do that anymore, we get water from faucets or bottles or pitchers in the chapel. Living in California, we know a thing or two about drought, and recently we have learned a thing or two about rainfall. In the last several months, we have become more familiar with the idea that #WaterIsLife, as we’ve followed the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Water Protectors. This week, the EPA disbursed $100 million dollars that Congress approved in December to be sent to Flint, Michigan, to repair its now infamous lead-damaged plumbing. [1] And, wouldn’t you know, today, March 22, is World Water Day!

This year’s theme for World Water Day, from the United Nations, is wastewater. What we do with our non-drinking water could use an overhaul. “1.8 billion people use a source of drinking water” that’s contaminated with human waste, “putting them at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio. Unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene cause around 842,000 deaths each year.” On its face, turning wastewater into drinking water may not sound very delicious to you, but “safely managed wastewater is an affordable and sustainable source of water, energy, nutrients and other recoverable materials.” [2] We have the capacity and technology to turn wastewater into life-sustaining clean water.

Since it’s World Water Day, your facebook feed, like mine, may have had a smattering of posts with links to organizations like charity:water, water.org, or religious organizations that focus on improving access to water. In any case, you’ve probably seen photos or videos of people in water-insecure communities around the globe trekking serious distances to retrieve water. These images are usually of women, usually in the Middle East or Africa, with various buckets, baskets, jugs, or other water-holding contraptions. They look a lot like what the Samaritan woman at the well might have looked like—thirsty, tired, and poor.

In verse 7 of the gospel reading, “a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her ‘give me a drink.’”

Then she asked, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” to which Jesus replied that she ought to have asked him for “living water” for he would have given some to her, had she asked. Reasonably, she is perplexed by the idea of living water, and that Jesus doesn’t even have a bucket. And then verse 13 is where we—and the woman—come to understand that Jesus isn’t talking about water from this well, because he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

This living water is the water of our baptism, and the coming of Jesus the Christ quenches our thirst for God. And to speak in poetry and metaphor like that is beautiful and comforting and true, but it is not all that this story offers us. It may seem odd and vague to you, or weirdly specific in its details and numbers and circling back to this whole ‘living water’ thing. In his exchange with the unnamed Samaritan woman, “Jesus does what he often does: Jesus crosses every conceivable boundary, Jesus sees the lines that are drawn in the sand and specifically walks right over them. The specifics are everything in this story.” [3]

It matters that the person Jesus meets at the well is a woman. It matters that she’s from Samaria, and that Jesus isn’t. If that wasn’t part of the point, the story would just say “a person.” And this would still be a good story but it wouldn’t be the same story. If we didn’t already know why these specifics mattered, the Gospel author reminds us, by saying that “Jews did not share things in common with Samaritans”. This stems from an old disagreement about which mountain—Zion or Gerizim—was the right place to meet God. Speaking with her is a pretty serious break from his previous conversation partners—usually men, usually Jewish religious leaders; not usually women, not usually non-Jews, especially not usually “enemy” Samaritans.

Jesus knows it, and she knows it. “Jesus’ journey to Samaria and his conversation with the woman demonstrate that the grace of God he offers is available to all. Jesus and his ministry will not be bound by social conventions.” [4] Jesus offers this living water to you, and to me, and to all of us. In this story, he illustrates the universality of the gift by giving it to someone who nobody else considered worthy.

On our earth, water is a precious resource. Each and every living thing—including each of us in this room—needs it, and a lot of it, to survive. But hoarding water is not the way to live. We know that it is possible to provide plenty of clean water to everyone we share this planet with. We know that plenty of water is wasted every day, instead.

The same is true for the grace of God. Keeping silent about what God has done for us, what the living water provides, is not the way to live. Sharing the good news of Jesus the Christ opens the floodgates for all to share in the beloved community. We know that plenty of people are shut out from the church every day, instead. All who are thirsty are welcome, here. All who are hungry are welcome, here. All are welcome, for it is Christ who does the inviting.

Thanks be to God!

________
[3] The Rev. Jason Chesnut, sermon “Specifics Matter” soundcloud.com/jason-chesnut
[4] Gail R. O’Day, “John” in Women’s Bible Commentary, 384.

History is Happening—A Sermon on Abraham, Nicodemus, Jesus, and Us

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Here we are in week 2 of Lent, in week 10 of the quarter. If you’ve been keeping up with a Lenten discipline that involves fasting—giving up meat, perhaps? Coffee? Sugar? Chocolate?—you might be feeling a little...tense. You may be wishing you’d given up finals for Lent.

Whether you're fasting or not, in the season of Lent, we take time to reflect on our sin, our shortcomings, our growing edges, the things we’ve noted in the margins to remember to do differently or better next time. And yet, we do this every year. We know that, over and over, we will need to return to this season of reflection. The new goals we set, the new selves we envision, the patterns we try to unlearn are so precarious that we just pencil in six weeks of “reset” every year. Hey, at least we’re honest.

This self-awareness does not always extend to the collective, though. As a church, as a society, as a nation,  we have a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again, with no recognition. But we even have a little catch phrase for when this happens: “history is repeating itself,” we say. “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it,” George Santayana philosophized.

So we turn to the lectionary, our system of studying our history. The gospel reading for today is a pretty famous exchange between Jesus and a pharisee named Nicodemus. He comes to see Jesus under cover of night, asking his burning questions. I love Nicodemus for this. I can just imagine that he has been lying awake at night for days. He has heard that this man, Jesus, is called the Son of God; he has heard him declare forgiveness of sins; he has heard him proclaim freedom from the systems that oppress. Nicodemus has probably tossed and turned, wondering how this could be. As a Pharisee, it’s his job to know everything there is to know about God and about God’s relationship to the Jewish people, and how they are to be in relationship with one another. Everything that Jesus says throws him for a loop, because it challenges his knowledge and his assumptions. Jesus speaks of new ways of being children of God.

A lot of people love the Gospel According to John, because it’s so different from the other three gospels, and it has a different way of presenting Jesus. In these chapters, “water is turned to wine, dead friends are raised, feet are washed, women are called by name”—but it is also a very challenging gospel. You know me, I love some both/and Lutheran paradox, and John is just so binary, “so much either-or: ‘I am the way, the truth, the light, the gate, the shepherd, the whatever—believe it, or be condemned.” [1] That’s the general interpretation we’ve had for years and years. It’s hard for me to look at these texts—as someone who knows and loves many non-Christians, especially a particular Jewish man, my fiancé Jonathan—and see any room for anyone else. There is some latent and some blatant anti-Semitism in John’s gospel.

We cannot, as American Christians in 2017, allow history to be repeated like this. We have to treat these stories with extreme care, and we have to treat our history with some of that Lenten self-awareness of wrongness. “We have to tell the truth about this gospel: all that lofty language form a historically dislocated Jesus distracts us from the truth that this gospel is violent. It tells lies about itself. It blames the wrong people….how do we even begin to address this?”[1]

Part of me, and part of you, maybe, just wants to say that these stories are so wrong and so backward that we should just ignore them and give them up. But the trouble is, we can’t do it that way. We have to face our history. We have to acknowledge the way that we have misused the words of Jesus in the past—to hurt Jews, to hurt women, to hurt people of color, to hurt queer people, to perpetuate slavery and apartheid and colonization—and say that we will do so no longer.

In doing this, we can also remember to include our other siblings in our quest for righting historical wrongs. Muslims as well as Christians and Jews lay claim to Abraham as an important ancestor. Our Genesis reading tonight lays out that fundamental claim that Abraham’s faith would make him the father of us all. In our Christian history, we have claimed that Abraham’s faith is proof that it is not the works of the law that free us, but the grace of God. This is true for us, but Abraham’s story is not just ours. An Anglican scholar named Clare Amos wrote about this in her commentary on Genesis. “Surely, Abraham, by definition, cannot be the exclusive possession of any one of the Abrahamic faiths! The portrayal of Abraham in both Christianity and Islam emphasizes that he was….someone who worshipped the One God before the establishment of a specific religious creed or system…’...Abraham was not a Jew or yet a Christian; but he was truth in Faith and bowed his will to God’s’ (Surah 3.67).” [2]

We have one advantage in this change—it’s Lent. We are reading these stories right in the midst of that time we set aside to reflect on the ways in which we have been wrong, and commit ourselves to not being wrong in the same ways again. We can do this. We can read these stories with the whole Jewishness of Jesus in mind. We can read these stories without blaming Jews or Judaism for the wrongs of the society in which Jesus lived and died.

Why is this so critical? In 2017, we are seeing a resurgence in anti-Semitism that reminds us of nearly a century ago in our global history; the events of the Holocaust were so terrible, we pledged “Never Again” as a world community. We are seeing a rise in Islamophobic and other racist violence, too, even here in Davis. The people who perpetrate these attacks—verbal and physical—often identify as Christians, or are bolstered by words they hear from people who identify as Christians. This is where our history can lead us.

Or, we can choose to act from our Christian history of liberation. We can look at Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and know that exclusion and oppression are not the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We know that the words of Jesus can be life-giving, not death-dealing. We know that all are welcome at the table. We know that the Truth has set us free.

In Genesis, God said to Abraham, “I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing" (12:2). For the rest of Lent, let’s give up lazy anti-Semitism, and let’s take on the hard and good work of blessing. History does not have to be repeated. But the blessings of the good news of Jesus the Christ ought to be repeated, loud and clear. Amen? Amen.

_______

[1] The Rev. Anne Dunlap, “3.2.17 Resisting Anti-Judaism in John” on The Word is Resistance, from SURJ.

[2] Clare Amos, “Genesis” in Global Bible Commentary, 10.