Never The Chameleon

This is the week when All Things seem to revolve around Mother’s Day, which itself is a day of raucous, rebellious history (someone needs to tell that to Hallmark), and is complicated for those who are mothers but don’t want to be, are not mothers and want to be, are children of mothers who make that challenging to be, or are children of mothers who have been but who now have died, and for those who have no opinion on the day whatsoever.

As it is, I’ve got at least three different takes on Mother’s Day to offer up: below is the first, a revisited sermon on St. Monica, remembered on May 4th as the mother of St. Augustine, which is simultaneously not the whole story, and a story in and of itself.

~~~~~

Monica is the patron saint of girdles, tears, and wayward husbands.

It’s true.

Clearly, by looking at her life only briefly, we see why she is the patron saint of tears and wayward husbands, and how girdles got in there I don’t know, and don’t really care to know, although I am thankful that there is a patron saint for girdles, and that we get one-stop sainting for all three is probably a well-played thing.

Now, obviously, there was more to Monica’s life than the misfortune of the aforementioned adversities in her life.

In fact, she is remembered because she was the mother of St. Augustine.

I have to confess: I spent some time troubled by the reason of her remembrance.

I mean, if you look at other saints whom we recall, we get Philipp Melancthon, renewer of the Church; Florence Nightingale and Clara Maass, renewers of society; Kaj Munk, Danish pastor and martyr, and so forth.

They are all known and remembered for what they’ve done; renewing and pastoring and martyring.

Monica is recalled only because she happened to mother somebody whose name we know better than hers.

My concern stems out of a feminist awareness that all too often women define ourselves and are defined by others via our relationships to others; so and so’s mother, or so and so’s spouse, for example—the latter being an instance where women often even lose their very name: think Mrs. John Doe.

Now, my late mother Marge, she died in 2013. She spent much of her life being known primarily as Pastor George Madsen’s wife.

That wasn’t a terrible thing, of course, but one shouldn’t stop there.

Mom was educator, a flag maker, a hot air balloon flyer, a pottery-baker, a Red Cross volunteer, a caterer, and a very proud avoider of anything that smacked of obligatory pastor-wife-y roles! She would positively spin in her grave if we would one day look in our date books and find “St. Marjorie Madsen, wife of George Madsen.”

She’d much prefer something more colorful like, “Marjorie Madsen, patron saint of girdles, tears, and wayward husbands.”

Not that she bore any of these afflictions, mind you, but she’d figure that somebody must and she’d be happy to help as she could.

So do you see my quandary?

Do you see my concern about Monica’s epitaph?

On May 4, 1999, I preached this piece as a sermon at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus Ohio: my late husband and I had met and earned our M.Div degrees there, and right before my late husband and I were to fly over to Germany for my doctoral studies, I was invited back to preach on St. Monica.

Bill was many things, including being very intuitive, especially when it came to reading my moods. After noticing me harrumphing around the house, trying to write this very sermon, he noticed that I was not happy, and asked why. “Monica is only remembered, “ I grumbled, “because she was Augustine’s mother! It’s only because of her relationship to others that we pay her any mind at all.”

And Bill said, quietly wise, “Isn’t that the point of a saint?”

Isn’t it indeed.

Of course it’s the point of a saint.

That’s why every reading of today concerns not just the needs of one person, but people’s necessary relationship to others, be it in terms of justice and kindness, comfort and mercy, or the celebration that the body of Christ is blessed with many and varied gifts. It’s as if our texts tell us that we are positively supposed to be known by our relationship to others.

Much, if not all that we know of Monica, comes from the pen of Augustine, who speaks very fondly of his mother. Her husband really was wayward—violent and disposed to “dissolute living.” Augustine testifies that she was the sole source of stability in his boyhood home. And she did shed many tears, not only about her husband, but mostly about Augustine, who tended to take after his father, particularly in terms of his fascination, and the number of sexual encounters he had, with women.

Monica was quite concerned with Augustine’s propensity to enjoy the passing pleasures of life, but she was also plagued by the fact that he was not baptized, and when he became a Manichean, she fell into despair. Matters became so strained between Monica and her son that he finally moved out and into the home of his patron.

In 384, Augustine left Africa, intentionally not telling his mother of his departure, and fled to Rome. But Monica followed him. When she arrived in Rome, she discovered that he had left for Milan, and so she picked up her bags and followed him again. There in Milan, they reunited, made amends (after she kicked out two lovers), and the story ends, quite happily as far as Monica was concerned, with Augustine being baptized.

They left Milan together to return to Africa, and on the way home, in 387, Monica died.

To our ears, we might look at this tale and think that Monica maybe had a few ‘boundary issues.” After all, when Augustine arrived in Africa he was thirty years old for goodness’ sake.

Now it is a happy thing to be close to one’s mother. I was very close to mine, and I am so grateful that my daughter and I are as thick as can be.

My mother knew that she was always invited to my home, and I’d hope that my daughter might invite me into hers.

But the operative word, here, is ‘invite.’

However.

It is possible that in our stress on healthy boundaries, we might run the risk of not intervening when we ought, of giving up on our concern, of being afraid to push ourselves onto those who may have lost hope themselves but in whom we never will.

See, Monica understood what we mean when we speak of the Community of the Saints. If we are into sainthood, we are by default into communion, and community.

So, who needs your persistence? Who is wayward? Who needs your tears? Who’s still stuck wearing girdles? And what are you going to do about it?

Not because you have to do something about it.

Not because you feel guilted into doing something about it.

But because on Easter Jesus freed you to do something about it. You get to do something about it.

When he sprung from the grave, Jesus said, “Hey. I may be alive, but there still is waywardness in the world, not to mention tears and girdles. People still live in Good Fridays. Let this empty tomb open you to a little risk, and give you a few boundary issues. Go do a Monica,” Jesus tells us.

May all your epitaphs read your name, and then mother to, or child of, or friend to, or justice-seeker for, or kindness-giver to.

For thanks to Jesus, through our relationship to him we cannot help but be in relationship to others.

And that indeed is good news, and a fine reason to honor a saint.

Texts of the Day are Micah, 6:1-8 and 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

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

So in the early 2nd century, a fellow named Pliny the Younger was a Governor of Bithynia and Pontus. We don’t have much for which to thank Pliny, as you’ll hear, but he did write a now-famous and very valuable letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan—as a little sermonic card-tip here, he addressed it “Lord,” which in Latin was Domine, in Greek kurios: you might recognize kurios as the word Christians used for Jesus. ANYway, his little epistle gives us some huge clues to life as a Christian in the nascent early Church, so thank you Pliny.

See, Pliny had been doing what good political lackeys do: he’d been faithfully persecuting Christians, according to Trajan’s bidding.

Trouble was, once he had them, Pliny wasn’t so sure what he was supposed to do with them—clearly they posed a threat…though they were arrested with no exact named crime.

The trouble with most Christians seems to be that they’d refused to offer the mandated obedience to Roman gods. They refused to pledge allegiance to the ruler, opting instead for some guy named Jesus. Obviously, that could not be tolerated, for it meant that this band of very bad people were collectively subversive, and, because they gathered, it didn’t take a rocket scientist (even though they didn’t have those back then, but work with me) to figure that they were organizing for more subversiveness.

No autocrat can have that.Pliny the Younger considered himself also Pliny the Generous, noting that he gave Christians three whole opportunities to deny their faith before he killed them. “Those who denied being Christians now or in the past,” he said, “I thought necessary to release, since they invoked our gods according to the formula I gave them, and since they offered sacrifices of wine and incense before your image—which I had brought in for this purpose—along with the statues of our gods. I also had them curse Christ. It is said that real Christians cannot be forced to do any of these things.”

See, just being Christian, just following the ways of Jesus, was enough for imprisonment and death, because aligning yourself with any principle or power short of the ruler was considered seditious behavior, and therefore intolerable to the Empire: any hostility to their edicts was considered hostility to the government, to the Emperor’s power, and to the supreme ruler’s intention to govern with his power unchecked.

So the Christians needed to be checked.

Pliny was so dedicated to rooting out these traitors that, in order to gather his indicting intel, Pliny tortured two “deaconesses,” and I’m totally going to take the quick opportunity to point out that this is a clear indication that there were women leaders in the early church. Anyway, exasperated, Pliny said he didn’t learn very much from them other than their “depraved, excessive superstition” in Jesus.

What had became clear, he said, was that Christianity was spreading, both in cities and rural areas.

There were these gatherings, see.

At these common meetings, Pliny said, he’d learned that Christians had a custom “to gather before dawn on a fixed day and to sing a hymn to Christ as if to a god, and to bind themselves by an oath [the word here is sacramento] not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, fraud, and to repay debts. With this complete, it had been their custom to separate, and to meet again to take food—but quite ordinary, harmless food.”

Pliny ruled right around the year 110.

About 20 years before that, a certain John of Patmos—not to be confused with John the beloved disciple, who is not to be confused with the gospel writer John, who also was not John of Patmos—wrote seven letters, bound together.

They became known as the book of Revelation—little aside pet peeve, here, it is not the book of RevelationS, just Revelation.

He had time to write (though that he could write at all indicates that he was learned), because the Romans had imprisoned him on the island of Patmos for refusing to participate in their cult: it was the cult of those who followed their political leader, the Caesar, who at that time was Domitian. Domitian, yeah, he really grooved on public accolades and follower worship: remains of a temple and a huge statue, both built to glorify Domitian, have been found in Ephesus—as in Ephesians Ephesus. When I say that it was a cult, I’m not making it up, you see.

No one knows exactly what John did to annoy the ruler—as an aside, in Revelation, John seems to be referencing not only Domitian, but also Nero, a corrupt, dangerous, and violent ruler: in fact, most scholars believe that the infamous number 666, so scary that some long books even skip from page 665 to 667, is simply code for Nero’s name, according to the Jewish numerology practice of gematria.

To be honest, no one is even entirely sure who John himself was, but for a variety of reasons, the consensus hunch is that he was a leader, a prophet, within the young Christian community. Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse—which comes from the Greek word which means ‘revelation,’ or ‘unveiling,’ hence the name of the book—is even considered by some to be a letter of pastoral care. New Testament M. Eugene Boring believes John felt he had a “pastoral responsibility” to its recipients, people Boring says who faced the same threat—persecution, repression, and forced loyalty to the false god, namely the Roman Emperor and Empire—as he had. John wanted to acknowledge their fear and impart strength.

Upshot: the entire book, that is, is a banger: an encrypted message written in Jewish metaphoric and numerological code—yes, it’s a bit psychedelic, but that’s because it dips out of the tradition of apocalyptic literature, and because John was clever: the Roman goons didn’t know Jewish imagery and numerology, but his people did. He needed them to know, but the authorities to miss the subversive word that God’s promises were true; that only God was worthy of adoration—not some paranoid and needy ruler armed with malice and hate; and that the Christian community was called to gather together regularly so that they could remain strong, buoyed, courageous, connected, and joyful, despite the threats of the beast.

Lutheran theologian Rev. Dr. Barbara Rossing, whose expertise is precisely in the book of Revelation, writes that these early Christians “gathered together and worshiped God, convinced that, as Chilean scholar Pablo Richard describes early Christian ethics, 'Jesus has set up here on earth a community that is an alternative to empire.’ Early Christians ministered to the poor. They visited prisoners. They broke bread together, and they sang hymns to God and the Lamb.”

This is what Christians did.

Trouble was, this Way, being people of the Way really messes with the agenda of an autocrat.

~~~~~

An enormous part of our liturgy comes from the book of Revelation: did the passage from today sound familiar, for example?

‘Liturgy’ stems from two Greek words smushed together: laos, which means people—hence, for example, ‘laity’—and ergos, namely a work, or a task, that sets out to complete a specific purpose—think ‘ergonomics’—so it literally means “work of the people.”

While modern folk are most familiar with word ‘liturgy’ meaning a ritual of worship, the word originally referred to the work, namely the business, the service, and the donations that privileged people in Athens and beyond offered to and for the well-being of the people, (the laity) of the community.

When absorbed into the Christian world, though, laos specifically referred to the people of God; their shared mission—to worship God, to serve only God, and to be representatives of God’s will and ways in the world—became known as the liturgy.

Their entire way of life, that is, rooted in worship, especially the meal and the water and the hymns, was their living liturgy: works by the people of God for the people of God, if you will.

The Romans understood worship very differently, and therefore had a very different liturgy. Again, Barbara Rossing.

”Romans celebrated Victory, but more than that—they worshiped Victory...The Roman goddess of military victory was named 'Victoria' in Latin, or 'Nike' in Greek. Portrayed as a winged goddess, she is the inspiration for the wing-like symbol on running shoes today. 🤯

Victory personified was emblazoned everywhere in the Roman Empire...The message was clear and strong: Rome's Victory--or Nike--in wars was what made peace and prosperity possible. No one ought to dare to oppose Rome's dominance over the world. Even a homemade graffiti inscription scrawled on a rock in rural Arabia at the end of the first century shows the widespread acceptance of this fact: 'Romans always win.’”

Romans always win.

Yeah, well to that threat, Christians said this: We see your Victoria and we—or rather God—raises you a Lamb.

A…Lamb?

Like, if you’re going to make a case that your God is more worthy than some mighty authoritarian god—with not a few victories to make the case—the Lamb is not maybe a person’s go-to.

I can almost see the Metaphor Committee gathered around the table, stumped with how to counter “Victor,” and finally, one sits up and says, “Guys, guys: I’ve got it, and hear me out here: Lamb.”

To make it more confounding, the word John uses isn’t even “lamb:” it’s…cuter. As Rossing says, “it’s more like ‘lambkin,’ ‘lamby,’ or, as a the late Lutheran pastor, author, and illustrator Daniel Erlander said, ‘Fluffy.’ The only other place,” she says, “that this same word is used in the New Testament is where Jesus says he is sending his disciples out into the world "as lambs among wolves" (Luke 10:3).”

But here’s the kicker: John understood that the way that the Christian God becomes victorious is not by violence, not by despotic threats, not by holding power and forcing conformity to it, no: it’s by pouring himself out for the world, what is known as kenosis. As Rossing says, “Lamb theology is the whole message of Revelation."

This message does not mean acquiescence, no: Rossing very much points to Biblical scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who said that the hymns and liturgies in Revelation are actually "for the sake of moving the audience to political resistance . . . If the author would write today, he might say: ‘Don’t salute the flag, salute God’; or ‘Don’t pledge allegiance to the state, pledge it to God’.”If that seems bold now, imagine what it was like to receive John’s letter with your name, with Emmanuel Lutheran’s name, as its addressee.

Which, to be honest, is sort of what it’s doing, insofar as John’s message was found worthy by the early church to be placed in our common texts as a reference point to a life of faith and, well, a Revelation of God.

John of Patmos wrote to people who were afraid, and who had every reason to be so. They knew they had one choice: live according to the Caesar, or live according to the Christ. Be faithful to the Victor, or be faithful to the Lamb.

John understood the stakes. He lived the consequences of his choice.

So in his pastoral letter, John centered worship. Liturgy, he believed, provides hope, reminds people of who and whose they are, and it resists Empire.

With all of this now in your minds, hear again John’s words to us, words full, of all things, of joy, and praise, and, in a word, worship:

Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the heavenly throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!"

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them, singing, "To the one seated on this throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!"

And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" And the elders fell down and worshiped.

They worshiped.

Preparing for this sermon, for the first time I was struck by the explicit contrast that this hymn—the one we sing at every Eucharist, every time we come to the table—sings vs. what Empires want us to sing.

Worthy is the LAMB John sings, and we sing. Not empire. The Lamb.

It made me think of how for some time now when I pray the Lord’s prayer, I pray this way, as a reminder to myself:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,

thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread;

and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us;

and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Only your name, God, is to be holy, only your reign is to come, only your callings matter, and moreover, it’s not just about the heavenly then, it’s about the earthly now. We worship Jesus the Christ now, we engage in Christian liturgy now, we come to the table now, we serve Jesus now.

It’s no coincidence that we are hearing this text in the Easter season.

If Easter doesn’t matter, if it doesn’t fundamentally alter our understanding of God, of creation, of one another, of ourselves, and of the entire shebang’s relationship to God, well I for one would rather be outside right now rather than in this apparently pointless liturgy.

But Easter is the crux (which is sort of funny, because ‘crux’ means ‘cross,’) but it’s the entire crux of our faith: Easter announces that death no longer has the last word.

Death in all its forms refuses to concede that point—either that, or it does concede it, and it positively ticks death off. It rails and it fights and it clamors to maintain all the power it can, and to suppress anything and anyone with a contrary message, a subversive message, a message that devalues not just violence, bullying, threats, amassing power, material wealth, and privilege, but it devalues the empires that worship these illusory and base things.

That terrifies empires, and so empires terrify us. They do.

John totally gets it.

The people to whom John writes totally get it.

Heck: nobody gets it better than Jesus gets it.

And many of us these days get it.

Contrary to what you may have thought about Revelation, the book is a bastion of hope, of comfort, of courage, and of Easter promise:

Weeping spends the night, but joy comes in the morning.

God has turned my wailing into dancing;

  and has put off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.

Victory, it turns out, is not Rome’s.

It’s God’s, and therefore it’s ours.

There will never be a Holy Saturday when I do not say that it’s the most honest day of the Church.

The pathos, angst, and grief of Good Friday gripped those around the cross and then scattered them in fear from it.

The reality of Good Friday is all-too-present now, as people are being plucked from streets, out of hospitals, and even small children from elementary schools; cuts to the arts, cuts to the care of creation, cuts to science, cuts to medical research, cuts to the most vulnerable are not raining down, they are hailing down with a ferocity that also cuts; educational institutions and media are being threatened because of exercising free speech and intellectual freedom; people’s financial security and the broader economic well-being of the country are in real question; 2SLGBTQIA siblings are living in fear simply by being who they are.

Those who engage in protected and peaceful protest are having to be trained in their rights, and taught to bring goggles and milk to protect their eyes from tear gas, and to remove biometrics from their phones.

Genocide in Palestine is occurring with both the past and the present administration’s blessings.

It’s so so much, and all of it apparently insurmountably true.

Equally true, though, is this: to plant your essence only in the joy of Easter commits you less to gladness and more to ignorance: ignorance of the reality of suffering, ignorance of the call to stand in solidarity with those who suffer, and ignorance of the holiness of lament.

To brim with “Life is Good,” or “Keep on the Sunny Side,” or to loop on repeat (to self or others) that there is no need for fear, no need for lament, no need for anger, no need for doubt, no need to change our ways or perspectives and definitely no need to act because God’s got this, God’s in control is, well, to keep up that mental and spiritual charade it’s exhausting in its own right, not to mention damaging, both to those who would benefit from some assistance, and damaging also to the self.

See, to live immersed, constantly cooking in the toxic stew of Good Friday is not a choice—you can’t just…opt in or out of the dire moments of our times, or of past and present trauma—but neither is it sustainable—the wear and tear of despair claims yet more life. We simply can’t cede death and hate more wins.

Paradoxically, then, both Good Friday and Easter are true, but left to themselves, they are patently false.

Holy Saturday, though, it straddles both, one foot in the truth of hate, hopelessness, and pain, and the other in the truth of love, trust, and life.

It integrates the integers of life.

Holy Saturday, then, isn’t just the most honest day in the life of the Church: it is the honesty, and the integrity, of every day in the life of a Christian.

~~~~~

I imagine that after Jesus’ burial, there was silence.

There often is silence after terribleness: shock, fear, unspeakable grief, they settle in, and quiet is all that comes.

But silence after death does, in fact, speak, it does tell: it reveals bewilderment, abandonment, and fear.

We forget, or do not know, that Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t a religious one, it was a political one.

Jesus threatened the systems by redefining the notion of king as a servant rather than a dictator; by pressing narrow borders out to and beyond the margins; by announcing to the misfits, the dismissed, and the wounded that they had worth and were cherished by God; by condemning the values of the wealthy, the powerful, the privileged, for they had reduced their worth, and that of others, to the temporal and the base; and empowering his followers—commanding them, even—to act on behalf of the meek, the lowly, the poor, and the least of these.

Of course Rome killed him.

They needed hope and love silenced.

~~~~~

This past week, I was going back and forth with another person involved in fighting against the evil of this administration.

She said, “Sometimes that I think it is so hard to remember, especially right now, that there are a larger majority of people who do support marginalized communities than there are that do not. It's just that those that do not, seem to have the loudest voices.”

I responded: “Yep. They do have the loudest voices...unless they don't. That the administration and those who support it are actively trying to silence ours shows that they are scared.

Our code, so to speak, is love.

Where you see love, where you feel love, that's how you hear those voices that the frightened ones are trying to silence.”

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

The powers that be, Rome—both past and present—in all its apparent might, might believe, and even seek to get Christians to believe, that it commands silence.

Moreover, Rome, both past and present, believes that forced silence equals acquiescence.

But they are wrong.

Jesus was silenced, but that quiet tomb contained the beginning of a raucous word.

Love, you see, love is the truth of Holy Saturday.

Love is what is trespassed on that first Good Friday, and all consequent Good Fridays we experience.

And love is what is brewing when it seems that anything but love holds sway.

We are in a period right now where it’s all true: the brutality of the regime, and the subversive force of love.

We are living in a constant Holy Saturday.

And tomorrow, on Easter…well, I’ll leave you on the edge of your seat about tomorrow, but I’ll tell you this much:

Rome has a word.

But it ain’t the last one.

Every time I write, Mrs. Rusch, my 8th Grade English teacher, hovers over my shoulder, scanning my work to find each and every dreaded Undefined This.

Her antipathy for the Undefined This has so shaped my writing that decades later, after a couple of perfectly appropriate parental editing requests, each Undefined This in my daughter’s papers found a definition before they were handed over to me, because otherwise Else knew the report would be returned with This-es circled in scarlet red, a la Mrs. Rusch.

What is an Undefined This, you ask?

An Undefined This is a ‘this’ that dangles in a sentence, one that has no clarifying noun to help the reader understand the very thing the writer is referencing, and that therefore forces the reader to do the author’s work.

Boy, do I wish that Luke and Paul had had Mrs. Rusch for their 8th grade English classes.

In their retelling of the Last Supper, each of them have a bothersome Undefined This, one that we hear every single occasion when the Eucharist is shared: Do This.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” we hear, words that hover in our ears even yet today, on the heels of Maundy Thursday, Commandment Thursday.

So we lean in, totally at the ready to do…whatever it is that needs doing…and…we’re still sort of leaning in.

So it could be breaking bread and drinking wine. Like, that would be the obvious thing, of course: it is the retelling of the Last Supper, after all.

But as we hear from Paul, “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me,” suggests that the “this” here is something other than drinking, something in addition to the drinking.

Which would be…

Well, could be giving thanks: Paul begins this passage by saying “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” Same thing happened when he took the cup: he gave thanks.

I mean, the meal is called the Eucharist, after all, which literally means the Good, or the Great, Thanksgiving.

Luke isn’t far off from Paul’s take here: “Then he took a loaf of bread,” Luke says, “and when Jesus had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them,” and so on and so forth.

So in each case, the “this” could be to give thanks.

But it could also be that the “this” of “do this” is to give thanks, and to eat bread and drink wine. Like, Do This is Do Both of These Things.

Trouble is, Paul doesn’t stop there.

He goes on: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

So the “do this” could refer to giving thanks, and eating bread, and drinking wine, and proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes.

“What,” I can distinctly hear Mrs. Rusch say, peering over her vintage ’80’s glasses, “do you exactly mean, Luke and Paul?”

These Three Days, also called the Triduum, might collectively have Paul and Luke’s back, and all our backs in these holy days in the Church, and frightening days in our nation.

~~~~~

Because we are in the throes of these holy three days, I’ve been thinking about the word ‘kenosis.’ It’s not one that just casually gets dropped into a conversation on the daily, so no troubles if it’s new to you.

It’s a Greek word, and means ‘to pour out,’ or to ‘empty’ oneself.

Typically, it was used in ancient circles when talking about a liquid, but theologians use it to talk about Jesus ‘pouring himself out’ for the world, or giving himself up for the love of the world. It’s not a huge flex for us, because of the passage in Philippians 2:6-8, in which Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.”

I am here to say that these are words that would behoove a certain President to review and reclaim, but there’s a good chance that they were left on the clippings floor before he published a Bible bearing his name, rather than the Lord’s.

But here’s a thing new to me: New Testament Theologian Dr. David Fredrickson informs me that ancient peoples believed that when you fell in love, your insides, well they turned to liquid. We probably can detect traces of that sense even now, like “You make my heart melt,” say, or “I’m a puddle around you,” or “I want to dissolve in you.”

But here’s the kicker: one word for love in ancient Greek is ‘eros,’ which is way more familiar to us than ‘kenosis,’ but which, I just learned, in its form ἐρᾶσαι also means to pour forth, even to vomit.

Insert mind-blown emoji here, I tell you what.

So yeah, we moderns, when we hear about the word ‘eros,’ we jump to eroticism, or the erotic, which is there, sure, but it’s not only about that.

The late theologian Paul Tillich he was onto this truth.

Now, I realize that not everyone is a fan of Tillich (I’ll never forget interviewing with Dr. Stanley Hauerwas once, at Duke, before the opportunity to earn my Ph.D. at Regensburg Germany came up; he said, “If you come here, there’s one thing you need to know: the way we say ‘Sonofabitch’ around here is to say, ‘Paul Tillich!’” Allllrighty then….)

But as for me, I like Tillich, and I think Tillich has some wisdom for us in these days, including, of all things, his views about erotic love.

In his book Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic, Alexander C. Irwin explains that Tillich’s understanding of erotic love has to do with an appreciation of and desire for the inherent beauty, truth, or mystery of something or someone. (ETtW 6).

As far as Tillich is concerned, then, you can have an erotic feeling directed toward a whole range of possibilities, including but not limited to “other humans, to ideas, to natural objects and those fashioned by human skill, even to the divine source of all being,” (ETtW 13).

In other words, erotic love pulls us into participation with that which is beautiful, in an attempt to bond with it, and to create more of it.

Think, for example, of art.  The creation of beautiful art, and the appreciation of it, inspires joy, contentment, and peace.

Think of the delight and thrill of a microbiologist studying a cell under a microscope.

Think of a scholar who has just discovered a new idea.

Think of a canoer floating on the still and quiet waters, settling in to hear the birds, see the moose, catch the fish.

Think of friends, reconnecting over coffee or wine.

And, of course, think of shared love, expressed in either a tender touch as one passes a lover in the kitchen on the way to the fridge, or in the rousing and arousing tussle on the bed.

Each of these examples has to do with an understanding of the Self, and an understanding of the Other, which leads to a mutual understanding built on respect, curiosity, and a quest for the beautiful.

Here’s a great line from Irwin’s book, “Essential eros connects us to the world, rather than cutting us from it,” (52).

That’s not only great; it’s timely.

This administration wants to cut us off from one another, from other countries, and from the groundings of even our basic teachings of faith.

The powers that be seek to cut us off even from the gift of empathy, which quite literally means to be “feeling in” something or someone.

There is no ‘outpouring’ of love encouraged by this regime. There is only the damming up or drying up of it.

But erotic love is built on exactly the opposite: the appreciation and dignity of relationship and the recognition of beauty in relationship.

Much to the chagrin of this administration, erotic love also jars us into a recognition of that which is not beautiful, or of the absence of beauty.

That is, “knowing” (itself a Hebrew word, ‘yada,’ used in Scripture for sexual intimacy, as in “Adam knew Eve,” but which also conveys a deep desire to comprehend, appreciate, embrace something or someone) knowing of the significance and sacredness of beauty in the Other, we are moved not only to notice and value beauty, but to nurture it where it is not found, or where it is endangered.

In this way, erotic love poses, as Irwin says, a ‘threat’ to systems of domination, of exploitation, of injustice.

And it is threatening to live with this sort of love as our mandate—Do This, whatever it means, is a commandment, apt for Maundy Thursday and the rest of the liturgical year too, but it’s a frightening one.

We dare not forget that even Jesus was afraid, and he was crucified for being the very sort of threat that faithful Christian teaching and living pose to the present regime.

See, it’s not acknowledged enough: it’s scary to pour ourselves out for the sake of another.

It’s scary to live kenotically: to be vulnerable, and vulnerable for the sake of the vulnerable.

And it’s therefore scary to be a Christian right now.

Living kenotically, erotically for the world is exactly the thing that can get a person into trouble with this administration, for they are about strength and intimidation.

Make no mistake: they are Rome.

Following Jesus always threatens Rome.

The thing of it is, it’s not only scary to be staring down Rome these days, it’s offensive as well.

It offends Christians to be thrown into a life of fear and intimidation by those who want to forcibly dam up love.

Christians are ticked off.

I found it helpful, then, in a chapter on “The Erotic in Feminist and Womanist Theologies,”that Irwin makes reference to feminist theologians such as Sölle, Lorde, and Heyward, each of whom in their unique way connect the “work of love” with the “power of anger,” (ETtW 135).

These theologians see erotic power as intrinsically subversive power, subversive to the politics and patterns that exploit, that demean, that threaten…the politics and patterns of today, that is.

Here’s, then, another angle on the erotic: the more that we appreciate the beauty and the integrity of the other, the more we respect the gift of their individuality, and therefore of diversity writ large, and therefore the more that we dedicate ourselves to the protection and the fostering of it.

That’s why this administration is coming down hard on the ways of love, because love reveals the ways that God’s world is not reductive, not selective, not for the privileged, not for the few, but is radically and thoroughly expansive.

For God so loved the entire world that the Godself was poured out for it.

Once you absorb this love and this truth, actually, you discover that by participating in erotic, kenotic love toward the world, toward nature, and toward people—all different and distinct from oneself—you can’t help but to experience tremendous joy by way of pouring out the divine love you’ve soaked up.

See, in Tillich’s thought, the opposite of joy isn’t pain, but is detachment and apathy.

That’s the present administration. The opposite of joy. Detachment and apathy.

Erotic love, though, erotic, kenotic love is exactly not that: rather than detachment, it is attachment; rather than apathy, it is empathy; rather than cruelty, it is compassion, rather than sameness, it is vibrancy in motion.

And here, you see, here is where we find the strength of these days.

Here you see the contradictory beauty of a theology of the cross at hand: precisely where there is grief, there is the possibility of hope; precisely where there is abandonment, there is the possibility of connection; precisely where there is fear, there is comfort; precisely where there is ugliness, there is beauty to be rediscovered.

And on this Good Friday, let us be reminded that precisely where there is death, there is resurrection promised and to be had.

Erotic and kenotic love, then, is protest love, it is engaged love, it is joyful love.

Resistance to Rome?

Yeah, it’s scary, but it can also be beautiful, and affirm beauty.

Which, believe it or not, returns us to the Undefined This of Maundy Thursday.

What does the Do This mean?

I’m more or less in the All-Of-The-Above camp.

I think it means: Give Thanks, and then Break Bread and Drink Wine, because when you do that, you also Do This: you proclaim, and you specifically proclaim the Lord's death until he returns, and of course there's no point in proclaiming his death without proclaiming his life of love, mercy, forgiveness, healing, and welcome, which anyway you'd have to do if you are doing any of this "in remembrance" of him in the first place.

“Do This” is thanksgiving, bread, wine, welcome, revelation, promise, sending, and enacting love all wrapped into one.

And if you do do this—proclaim his life, and his death, and that he's coming again—then you're simultaneously proclaiming and inaugurating a new way of being that upends the old way of being.

You aren’t just inaugurating, but you are incarnating kenotic, erotic, love.

https://learn.elca.org/jle/the-kenosis-of-christ-in-the-politics-of-paul/

https://lsj.gr/index.php?title=ἐράω&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

https://a.co/d/iOO31f1

Apologies for the delays in uploading more podcasts!

I have two submissions ready to go, but honestly, these last two weeks have been a bit on the…full side of things, and it turns out that finitude doesn’t negotiate.

However, below is an upload of a sermon I’ll offer tomorrow at a local congregation where I’m honored to be preaching and presiding while their esteemed pastor is away.

I hope to upload the sermon I preached last Sunday, and reflections on Epiphany, on Monday, for they are, I believe, relevant given both MLK and Inauguration Day.

With that, the sermon, more or less, tomorrow, based on John, Chapter 2, verses 1-11.

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

Today we recall a miracle, as it’s been called, namely Jesus changing the water into wine: it’s known as Jesus’ first miracle, and it’s only retold in John.

And tomorrow, we recall Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Believe it or not, there’s a line between the two, and it begins with points anchored in two teesy weensy little Greek words found in our text, nun and arti, both of which are translated into English as ‘now.’

So this last October, my father George Madsen died.

Dad was a biblical scholar, and happily for me today, his nerdy niche was the gospel of John.

In fact he spent all four years of his dissertation on ‘nun’ and ‘arti’; not just where they were found in John, not just where they were found in the New Testament, not just where they were found in Greek translations of the Old Testament, but just…where they were found, anywhere, in ancient history. Talk about a low fun threshold.

Dad lovvveeed details, so this was right up his alley.

I do not love details.

I’m allergic to them, in fact.

So in contrast, my dissertation was on…God.

Dad did ‘nun’ and ‘arti,’ and I did God. And suffering.

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, buuuut it sure did roll a bit!

So Dad’s whole thing, you see, his whole dissertation, and his whole theology, was based on the very biblical notion, especially seen in John, that the in-breaking of the reign of God is happening now.

We don’t have to wait for it.

And in fact, if we do sit around waiting for it, not only have we missed experiencing it, but we’ve also missed participating in it, and I do believe that ticks God off.

A couple of summers ago, I was invited to write on this very text for Gather Magazine, the ELCA women’s mag. I totally depended on Dad’s expertise for that piece, and earned major daughter points for not just lugging his dissertation around, but actually reading it.

I learned that Dad had discovered that every single time that ‘nun’ or ‘arti’ shows up in John, Jesus is on the scene. And almost every single time that a ‘nun’ or ‘arti’ shows up, and Jesus shows up, something happens in the lives of the people around Jesus.

That’s to say that the presence of a ‘now’ is a heads-up that something new is going to happen to those present, and to those to come.

Dad was, and I am, of the mind that the notion of the ‘now’ is the pivot point not just of this passage, but of all of John.

In fact, rather than simply a passing phrase, like “Now as I was saying,” or “Now I understand!” or “Come on now,” John tends to wield a ‘now’ with intention.

How’s that?

Well, Chapter 1 of John sets the stage: John the Baptist is in the house.

He was sent to tell something new: “He himself was not the light,” we hear, “but he came to testify to the light” (John 1:7). John the Baptist was adamant that people understood that he was not the Messiah, but on the other hand, his cousin sure was. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29, also 36).

Here, in other words, is the Messiah.

What the early Johannine community knew, but not all of us do, is that the word ‘Messiah’ means “the one for whom we are waiting,” or “the promised one.”

The Jewish people believed—and still do!— that they have been promised that the Messiah will arrive.

But John the Baptist, and John the Gospel writer, were making the case that the One for whom we have been waiting, the Messiah, is here now.

So right after the story of John the Baptist’s announcements—and right before we hear about his beheading—we hear about the calling of the disciples, and then, then we get the wedding at Cana.

Each word—nun and arti, that is—appears once in the Greek text of our passage today.

Poor ‘nun,’ though, got missed in translation. It’s hiding there, though, right in verse 7: “Jesus said to them, “‘Fill the jars with water now. And they filled them up to the brim.”

Don’t wait. Do it now. Let’s get this miracle show on the road. There is celebration still to be had!

There’s an urgency to his command: we can’t wait!

And Jesus was right. We can’t.

It’s worth noting here that this water, it wasn’t like water that anyone can saunter up to on at, say, a hotel lobby, the kind with lemons and cucumbers floating about in it to offer calm and refreshment in a plastic cup.

No, this was sacred water. Water dedicated to holy ritual.

So when this guy Jesus turns holy water into holy wine, people, well, they took notice.

Which is when we get our ‘arti.’

The ‘arti,’ the ‘now’ in verse 10, surfaces when our groom, after tasting the water-now-wine, says to Jesus, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

My father said that it’s not quite clear what the tone here is, right? Like, was the guy joking with Jesus? “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now…you big lug you!”

Or was the groom super ticked, like ““Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now?????” Like,“Seriously, dude: I coulda used your help here.”

However you read it, though, the ‘arti,’ the ‘now,’ set up a clear contrast to the earlier ‘then’ when the bad wine was served up.

It points to a commencing not just of another hoist with better booze, the ‘now’ points instead to a revelation:

That was then. This is now.

The Messiah is here.

~~~~~

Tomorrow we remember Martin Luther King Jr.

Had he been sitting on Dad’s dissertation committee, although he probably would have had a couple of decent quibbles, I’m pretty sure he would have liked what Dad did with the notion of the Now.

Why?

Because King knew how to wield a Now too, just like John.

I want to read two excerpts from his speeches.

The first is from the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall in Detroit in 1963, just two months before the March on Washington. 125,000 people showed up, the largest rally in the Civil Rights movement up to that point. While it stood on its own—King called it “one of the most wonderful things to have happened in America”—it was also a bit of a warmup for DC, not least of all in terms of King’s speech.

Here’s a small section of it:

“And so we must say: Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to transform this pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our nation, now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of racial justice. Now is the time to get rid of segregation and discrimination. Now is the time.”

These words are set in the context of King noting how whites were saying that civil rights for blacks were moving just too fast. Wait, they said. Slow down.

King? Yeah, he was of a different mind. The time for civil rights, he believed, was now.

The intervening months before the March on Washington did not change his mind.

Here he gave his famous I Have A Dream Speech, and he is all the more committed to the sacrality, and the urgency, of the Now.

“We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God’s children.”

~~~~~

Sisters and brothers in Christ.

We Lutherans do some mighty fine work teaching the world about justification.

We are justified, we preach, teach, and believe, the key message of a different Martin Luther, one who revolutionized the world in a different way 500 years ago.

There is nothing, he taught, nothing that we can do to earn God’s grace, for grace is a gift.

Works, we Lutherans preach, teach, and believe, are in vain, and in fact indicate vanity, because they presume that our efforts are somehow mightier, heftier, worthier than God’s abundant mercy and love.

This teaching is most certainly true. Jesus is risen, after all! This is the good news: not our capacity to “be moral,” or “live right” or “do good things,” but that death no longer has the last word!

But allllssssoooooo, what’s also true, alas, is that we Lutherans have therefore an unfortunate knack of dissing works, and dismissing them.

Anything that smacks of works tends to at least get the theological stink eye, it might even be called heresy, because (insert stamped foot) we are saved by grace, and not by works.

Which is true, yeah…but left there the focus of our belief system is only a) on us and our lives, and b) on what happens after our deaths.

It’s about me, and then.

Rather than we, and now.

I know you’ve heard me say before, and you will hear me say again, that the Greek word which we translate as “salvation” is “soteria.” It means heath, healing, and wholeness now.

It does not mean what will happen then, when we die. It means what will happen now, when we live.

So sure, we aren’t saved by works.

But our works can, by the grace of God, and do represent, usher in, offer up salvation, as in health, healing, and wholeness to those in need now. Second to last thing:

I realize that tomorrow we are inaugurating a new president, one who will preside over a new era of US politics.

But our text from John announces that now, Jesus has inaugurated the reign of God, a reign defined by justice and peace, grace and mercy, abundance and not scarcity, joy and not fear, welcome and not exclusion, and salvation: health, healing, and wholeness.

As with all presidencies, our faithfulness is first, foremost, completely, and only to that inaugurated reign.

A last thing, a related thing, and very much not a small thing:

We dare not forget that Jesus’ mother Mary in this passage had words for the steward, and words for us.

Do what he tells you. Or, to put the emPHAsis on a different syLAble,

Do what he, no one else, but rather what he, Jesus, tells you. Now.

When studying in Palestine two years ago, my daughter Else got a tattoo on her wrist.

It simply says “bodacious.”

Now, I understand that for those of us with a certain vintage, that word primarily brings to mind an Excellent Adventure dude.

But to Else, ‘bodacious’ is the *chef’s kiss* word to describe Mary, this mother of Jesus, and as always, she is spot on.

Mary is so often portrayed to be taciturn, gentle, obedient, but even at 21 Else’s over it.

Instead, she knows that Mary was bold and audacious, the two words that when smushed together as German does on the regular but English not so much, create this glorious thing: ‘bodaciousness.’

Mary’s song, the one that we heard just two days ago, on last Sunday, it’s revolutionary, a cascade of convictions that these days get a person labeled a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a traitor, no patriot, and certainly a trouble maker.

I mean, come on: listen to them:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

My daughter Else, she up and got ‘bodacious’ emblazoned on her wrist to remind her, when she’s writing, or shaking someone’s hand, or getting dressed in the morning, or any other daily garden-variety-or-bold and audacious action move to tap into her not-so-very inner Mary, and be bodacious in her engagement with the world.

I love that.

I love her.

And I love Mary’s words—and my daughter’s bravery—so much that I also got a tattoo, the one you can see on my Substack and Facebook profile, inked on my left arm, to be raised as Mary’s is in the image from Ben Wildflower, so that I’m reminded to tap into my inner Mary when the time calls for it too.

Spoiler alert: the time calls for it.

It’s worth noting here that it bothers me to no end that certain Christians and Christian groups—the same ones, as an aside, which have successfully taken away a woman’s right to bodily autonomy—say that of course a woman may bear a child in her belly—Mary, bore the Word of God in hers, after all.

And of course a woman may bear down and ex-press a baby from her vagina—Mary bore down and expressed the Word of God through hers.

But hold up, hold up, a woman bearing the Word of God through her mouth from a pulpit, never mind that Mary bore the Word of God when she sang the Magnificat: we can not have that.

Oh no.

These paradoxically powerful but weak people know that a woman’s words have power, and if her capacity to speak is limited, as the Christian tradition has limited Mary’s, then they and the forces which benefit from them have a fighting chance.

And I do not digress here.

But here’s the thing, on this Christmas Eve Day.

While it’s true that Mary is filled with righteous subversiveness in the reading we had for the last Sunday in Advent, in today’s texts, we hear different words describing her, ones more contemplative: Mary was amazed at what she heard, and she treasured and pondered what she heard and saw and experienced that holy evening.

She took a moment, and she took it all in, and allowed herself to be blessed by the magic, the majesty, and the mystery of it all.

You see, there is so much wonder to behold in this holy world of ours.

It’s overwhelming to recognize all that is simultaneously liminal, both beyond us and yet present in our every day lives, and were we to take the time to notice, to be in awe, to stand in amazement at it all, we too would be compelled to stop everything and treasure it, ponder it, too.

Mary was not either/or—we see women so often depicted as virgin or vixen; obedient or abrasive; homemaker or professional, and so on and so forth with this nonsense.

But Mary was not both/and.

She did root her beliefs in a deep knowledge of and conviction about God’s salvation history—often called God’s Heilsgeschichte—of course, never losing either her commitment to the God who gives and who demands preferential treatment to the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, and the forgotten; or her clear indignation at the injustice in the world, where the rich and the powerful forsake the meek and the lowly.

She did refuse to be silent about her faithfulness to God and only to God, and in the whirlwind of fear and uncertainty she sang.

That’s what she did: she sang a defiant tune.

But Mary is not only knowledgeable, principled, and defiant.

Nope.

Mary also is imbued with a sense of wonder and of humility.

She breathed, she paused, and she took it all in with gratitude and awe.

This year, many (most?) Christians who purport to worship the very Jesus whom Mary bore most definitively did not, with their recent vote, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry, and send the rich away utterly empty.

Given that, and what is to come, I am not ashamed to say that this season, I have found myself snarkily singing, “Oh come ON, all ye faithful.”

I do believe that Mary in her Magnificat would approve.

But I also believe that tonight, without losing the identity we share with the holy heritage about which Mary bearing Jesus sang after meeting Elizabeth bearing John, I do believe that tonight we can also cherish other elements of Mary, ones which these first two chapters of Luke reveal—one oriented more to joy, to hope, to trust, to wonder, to humility, to gratitude, to pause, and to unabashed, unfettered, unlimited love.

So please do come, all ye faithful, and may you all have a very Mary Christmas.

Twenty years ago in Germany, at the time of his brain injury, my son Karl was only on the cusp of three, but the boy could talk.

Like, boy could that boy talk.

Karl’s language skills in both German and English were well-beyond his few years, and I am self-aware enough to recognize that I was therefore an impossible mother to be around.

For example, my son could instinctively tell whether he was speaking to a German or an English speaker, and Karl would flip that neural switch so fast that in a nanosecond his thoughts were translated into the language of the moment.

I’ll never forget a play date when he and his little friend Jan were up to some sort of game, and they wanted the adults’ attention to show off their Spiel, so Karl waved excitedly to the German parents sipping Kaffee and eating Kuchen auf dem Sofa, and said, “Warte! Warte!” and then to my late husband and to me, who were entirely savoring the sweets and the scene, “Wait! Wait!”

The TBI has taken many a thing, but thankfully, the accident did not steal Karl’s capacity to understand German.

Now, when my son proudly if slowly teaches someone “Schmetterling,” or “Schluckauf” and, of course, our family’s motto “Doch,” his German skills create not just a defiant thrill within me (perhaps crassly almost a celebratory middle finger to all that that horrible day took).

Instead, Karl’s German has been also like a precious tool salvaged after a fire: a bit scarred, but nonetheless nostalgia and function rediscovered and repurposed.

His brain injury, like that of many others, means that he has fewer “neural highways” for communication to traverse. So when he and I are, say, in a public place with lots of noise, or several conversations around him are going on quickly at once, or there is commotion at home (although we’re generally quiet folk, we do have four large and effervescent dogs, and my husband and I might simply be existentially compelled to rock an occasional 70s/80s throwback jam in the kitchen), it’s easy for Karl to feel overwhelmed by the extraneous action and noise.

However, I can read this son of mine, and I’m well-wired to be extra alert to his needs, so when I perceive that he’s feeling snowed by all that’s whirling around him, I’ll simply speak to Karl auf Deutsch, and the novel Sprache will cut right on through everything.

Karl will immediately recall the German, recall my voice, and recall himself in the midst of it all.

He’s reminded of what he knows, he feels again grounded, and all the rest is relativized by that.

Advent, I’ve decided, does precisely the same thing.

The abrasive texts for which this season is somewhat famous, why they cut through the cacophony of December like a hot shovel through blizzard drifts.

Capitalism and culture have made this month noisy, drowning out the quieter Advent summons of waiting, wondering, and preparing.

We can barely hear the tradition calling to us, “Warte! Warte! Wait. Wait.”

But when one inclines an ear—perhaps rather opens one—Advent re-verberates with its own clarion to re-call us to who we are; to re-collect our otherwise distracted, disparate selves; and be re-minded of who we are and whose we are and how these truths interplay with the present moment, whatever it may be.

The call of repentance especially, that unequivocal demand that threads itself through the texts of this season?

Well, I do believe it serves a purpose like the German which calls Karl back to himself when there’s so much surrounding him that’s superfluous to his well-being.

This year, as I’ve read and heard and pondered the assigned texts of this season, I’ve been especially struck by the harshness of John the Baptist’s words calling us to repent.

John sounds not a little irritated.

After this election, when so many people—people that Luke most especially seems to lift up as cherished precious ones of God—are exponentially more threatened, I’m feeling more than irritated too.

In fact I’m fearful. Incredulous. Indignant. Furious.

I’m so very bewildered and angry at siblings in the faith—and in the name of their faith—who voted for a candidate so brazenly antipathetic to the ways of Jesus.

Just this week, in this very season when we recall that the refugee Jesus and his family had to flee to Egypt because of political persecution, we hear that our next president, this hawker of base power and policy and piety who has the audacity to even hawk his very own Bible—you’d think he’d have read it—is promising to enter churches—churches!!—and clear from these self-declared and Spirit-led sanctuaries modern-day families of Jesus.

People who voted for him knew that he intended to do such a thing.

They did.

And while clutching their pearls and their crosses they voted for him anyway, betraying the consistent message in all of Scripture to welcome the stranger; betraying Matthew 25 where we hear Jesus say that we are called to minister to the Least of These; and therefore they are betraying Jesus himself.

Repent! I want to scream with the energy of brother John. Repent, you brood of vipers!

But, sigh, that rage takes so much energy, exactly the thing of which I don’t seem to have much in store.

Instead I do have grief.

I do have grief.

In fact, two weekends ago, my family and I went to the St. Olaf Christmas Festival with my daughter, a student there.

I found myself weeping through the whole show.

I was a blubbering mess.

My family and I were in the accessible row, the last one on the main floor, which meant that the choirs assembled directly behind us at the beginning and end of the concert.

After the lights went on, and the audience stood to clap and cheer, I tried to turn around to the singers to thank them, but simply couldn’t: their Advent and Christmas tunes cut too close to the core of my heart, and were so far away from the reality of this present moment that I could hardly bear it.

Clap, wipe a tear, stifle a sob, repeat: that’s all I was good for.

Weeping in that darkened space, it dawned on me that I don’t have the energy this Advent to express the anger that I feel, but mourning and worry?

They are totally at the ready for those who cause harm in the world, and those who suffer the harm, not only because so much pain is in play, but because the very movement that is sent to alleviate it—Christianity—is rather the very source of it.

In my snarkiest of moments, when I see what is being done in the name of Jesus, I feel Holden Caulfield stirring in my soul, that glorious character in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (a book which MAGA of course has banned), who said while watching a nauseously gaudy Rockettes Christmas show, that “…old Jesus probably would have puked if he could see it.”

But in my more generous moments, I’ve come to realize that the word I’m feeling compelled to cry out in the wilderness that is our nation these days is less “Repent!” than “Recall!”

I feel compelled to beg people, especially Christians, to please, please recall who they are.

“Recall,” I believe, is “Repent;” just in a different key.

When we implore someone to recall themselves, we’re telling them that we know them.

In fact, if we are in a position to cry out “Recall who you are!” we probably know them better than they presently do.

I think that’s the urgency we hear and feel behind John the Baptist and Jesus these days: the word “Repent” and the way they each express it in the texts that tumble out from the preachers’ mouths these Advent Sundays is passionate, desperate, and angry.

It’s as if they are saying, “You’ve forgotten yourself!” “You know better!” and even “You are better than this.”

They are angry, but (and psychologists and linguists back me up here, because both albeit in different manners recognize the overlap between anger and grief) I believe that John and Jesus are also mourning the loss of the identity of those who once knew the Way.

They are saying, “We know you better than you do. Recall who you are.”

Now, who among us does not need to be invited—or cajoled—to repent, to recall.

We certainly need more than a season for it, that much is true.

But Advent understands the assignment.

The essence of Advent is to remind us of the essence of who we are.

Even if harshly, Advent jolts us into remembering that we are baptized; it reminds us that we are intended to serve the least of these and the outcasts; it reestablishes the Christian definition of power which is one of humble service rather than authoritarian might; and it restores our identity as yoked to Jesus rather than to the Herods or Caesers of our day.

And we have our share, that’s for blame sure.

Advent re-calls us, and helps us recall ourselves.

It’s been said that in German, with its relatively harsh tones, even the words, “I love you,” make a person feel like they’re in trouble. Ich liebe dich!

But they say “I love you” even so.

Please, then, despite the clanging of premature Christmas and the barking of our own Herods and Caesers, please hear the Word of the Lord:

“Repent!”

“Recall.”

And, with a tip of my hand to the season yet to come:

Rejoice.

This week inaugurates the Advent week of Gaudete, Joy.

Exactly when we get closer to bleakness, we are summed to somehow, find joy.

Words uttered in anger and dismay are nonetheless words uttered because even if we have forgotten ourselves, Jesus has not.

You are baptized in my name, he says.

I know you, and you once knew me.

Ihr werdet geliebt.

You are beloved.

So yes:

Warte, warte.

Wait, wait.

Emmanuel knows you, calls you, recalls you, and he is on his way.

Rejoice.

Below is a mashup of some musings I’ve shared in blog, book, sermon, and presentation form about the martyred Danish Lutheran playwright, poet, and preacher Kaj Munk.

Needless to say, he’s a hero of mine.

It’s he, as a matter of fact, who is the source of the moniker for this Substack place and podcast, “Never the Chameleon.”

Given that, and that today we celebrate Christ the King, and that we are bracing for both the anniversary of Munk’s assassination and the inauguration of Trump, a man who has threatened to quash voices and even lives which object to his rhetoric and policies—exactly as did those who killed Munk—it seems like the post is apropos.

Please allow me, then, to repurpose and reshare, albeit in new form, these words in honor of Kaj Munk: Minister, Martyr, and Mentor in the baptized faith.

~~~~~

What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer: “Faith, hope, and love”? That sounds beautiful. But I would say—courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature…we lack a holy rage—the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth…a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth, and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian Church have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish…but never the chameleon.

Call committees, when sketching out a profile for their next pastor, are awfully drawn to words like these: kind, available, comforting, pastoral, articulate, flexible, intelligent, dynamic, wise, knowledgable, organized, trust-worthy, confident.

Good, solid, wholesome, reliable words.

‘Reckless,’ though?

Reckless never gets scratched off the brainstorm list, because it never gets on one.

Ever.

Nor does ‘rage-filled’ show up as coveted-pastor adjective, even with the word ‘holy’ tacked on.

Ever.

~~~~~~

Kaj Munk, the man who wrote the words above, he was a pastor.

He was a Danish pastor, and playwright, and martyr of the Danish resistance, and according to author Shane Claiborne, Munk wrote these words for a community newsletter not long before he was killed by the Gestapo on January 4, 1944.

On December 5, 1943, Munk preached a sermon about the complacency of the Church.

By this time, he’d stirred so many German hornets with his righteous and courageous preaching that the Nazis had declared it illegal for him to preach at all.

However, with crazy and quiet risk, the pastor of the Copenhagen Cathedral permitted Munk to preach, had him sitting incognito in the congregation, ready to slip into the pulpit when the moment to preach came, and, as soon as Munk was done with his sermon, arranged to have him spirited away before the Gestapo could get him.

Just three months before, Denmark’s government began resistance in earnest. On that morning, August 29, Germany had imposed martial law, confined the beloved Danish king and his family in the palace, and insisted upon the death penalty for any resister.  In response, Denmark sunk its own ships rather than allow Germany to commandeer them.

The entire Danish government, including the king, resigned in protest of the Nazi aggressions.

Munk was exhilarated by and proud of the Danish response, and was not about to hide it under his alb. Instead, he preached regularly and openly about the threats of fascist Germany, which made him all the more a threat to the Gestapo, and therefore all the more a Gestapo target.

Although Munk was admired for his integrity and for his solidarity with the threatened Jewish Danes, not all Danes, and not all Lutherans were pleased with him.

Why?

Because Munk did what good Lutherans do, and he up and called a thing what it is.

Example?

On the day that he preached, in the Copenhagen cathedral for God’s sake, he boldly and baldly said this:

“Let’s keep politics out of the church, some say, we hear enough of politics on the radio, and we read about it in the newspapers.  Let’s be free of that in the house of God…But perhaps we should hear about it in God’s house, but in a different way than we are used to.  In God’s house we should hear about politics judged in relation to the word of God.”

He went on to say that if politics began to lead people in a direction that we know is against the ways and will of God, then, Munk said, “the church is not the Church of Christ if it remains silent…God forgive us if we don’t understand that the church is exactly for this: to make, at any moment, eternity relevant.”

To make eternity relevant.

It’s a funny thing, that word ‘eternity.’  People talk about eternal life on the regular, but almost always tethered to what happens after we breathe our last.

But if God’s time really is eternal, then it is happening right. this. very. moment.

We are already experiencing eternity. We are smack dab in the midst of it. We don’t have to wait for it. We’re in it.

One month after this Copenhagen cathedral sermon, on New Year’s Day, 1944, Munk stood before his tiny congregation in Jutland, along the west coast of Denmark.

It turns out that my father’s uncle and Munk were dear friends: I imagine that he sat in the pews on this day.

As it happened, the day coincided with the anniversary of the 20th year of Munk’s service to this parish.

It was all the more noteworthy, then, that contrary to custom, on this day Munk wasn’t garbed in the typical stole and collar.

Instead, he showed up in his overcoat with a scarf, wearing what anyone else on that Sunday might have worn.

It seems, from the text of this homily, that he had learned that there were Nazi collaborators in his pews.

This news in hand changed everything for him, and, he told his congregation, on this day, “I realized that I could not ascend to the pulpit.”

Instead, he stood among his people.

Straight away, in his sermon, Munk spoke out against Germany. He asserted that any Dane who helped the German cause was nothing short of a traitor to country and a traitor to God.

In the pulpit he did that.

Talk about calling a thing what it is.

Still, he didn’t come to preach hate, Munk said, not even against Hitler.  It is impossible for a Christian to hate.

But he did admit he was afraid. “For months now,” Munk said, “I have not been able to sleep at night without wondering: Will they come for me tonight? That thought is not pleasant for one who loves life, and has enough to do in his calling, and loves his wife and children. And still, I cannot hate, because the Savior has taught us the prayer: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

With all due respect to Munk, I can’t help but think that sometimes, actually, people know exactly what they do, and then they do it—like, say, a vote.

To that point: despite the passage in the Lord’s Prayer where we proclaim that “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,” sometimes Christians do put some other ruler, some other power, some other loyalty over against their allegiance to Christ.

Someone else becomes their king, someone who very, very much wants to be a king.

Or a dictator.

Even for a day.

That truth devastated Munk, because he saw the devastation when Christians refuse to resist the kingdoms on earth in the name of the kingdom of heaven.

It’s mind-boggling, really, because Christians have one job, really, and it is to resist and denounce sin, death, the devil, and all its empty promises, and instead announce life in the risen Jesus.

“Today,” in the conclusion of that sermon, which would be his last, “today it is the twentieth anniversary of my first having ascended the pulpit here; and I now stand here below it…I don’t know the names of those who align with Hitler, and I don’t want to know them. I can only pray to God that these parishioners will wake up to the truth, look into their own hearts, and find their place as good Christians among us once again.”

Three days later, on January 4, 1944, Munk’s fears came true.  In the dark of the night he was pulled from his bed and assassinated in a ditch.

~~~~~

I grew up hearing about Kaj Munk.

My father’s uncle Søren was a good hunting buddy of his.  They, along with a mess of other men, regularly traipsed about in the land—a plantage, in Danish—of the western shores of Denmark, rifles in hand, hope in heart that each would bring home some tasty creature for their respective tables.

Munk might be best known as an author of several plays, but he also served a small parish in Vedersø, until the night of January 4, 1944, when the Gestapo broke into the parsonage, dragged him away from his wife and children, shot him, then callously tossed his body in a nearby ditch.

The body was found on January 5th.

Resolutely defying Nazi threats, 4,000 townspeople gathered for Kaj Munk’s funeral, and De Frie Danske Newspaper dedicated page after page to Kaj Munk’s life and murder.

When my father was but a schoolboy in Brookings, South Dakota, he and his parents (who had emigrated from Denmark to the US in the early 1900’s) traveled back to the homeland, back to Jutland, back to the lands near the North Sea.  There they passed some time with Søren, a rugged farmer and a gentle, good-humored ox of a man, according to Dad.

One day, Søren, this man with hands as big as hocks of ham, brought my father into the beloved old hunting grounds, through the woods, and to a clearing.  He had something he wanted to show this young American boy.

And finally, there it was, in the clearing: a stone, a Mindesten.

Here stood a monument that Søren and others of Kaj Munk’s hunting clan erected exactly in the sacred space where the men passed countless moments together in glad friendship, in trust, in apparent safety.

Søren, said my father (himself no small man, and his own eyes moistening just enough for this daughter to notice), Søren, this hulk of a farmer, began to sob, tears pouring onto the stone and into the ground where once walked his friend and his pastor Kaj Munk.  And then they went to have lunch in the parsonage garden with Kaj Munk’s widow Lise, who told more stories to my father and his family about the courage of her late husband.

~~~~~

Munk believed with the conviction of his very life, a passion which threaded through all his sermons, that Jesus didn’t ascend to some otherworldly place, centered in the above and beyond as if a capricious and mostly MIA Zeus.

No.

The risen Jesus ascended to the future.

He is not gone.

Instead, the risen Jesus has injected the freedom and audacity and hope of the future into our present.

We all have access to it, because we are Christ-ians, believers in the very resurrection which confirms that Jesus’ earthly, earthy ministry is God’s, namely, as the late Rev. Robert Farrar Capon says, to center the least, the last, the little, the lost, and the dead.

And the resurrection also confirms the church’s calling to represent this same ministry and centering in everything that we do.

My mentor, the late Rev. Dr. Walter Bouman said of the life of the church: “The Acts of the Apostles is not the story of the community after Jesus, but rather the story of the community under Jesus.”

In contrast to the incoming president, Jesus, and his reign, and those who claim his name, are defined not by hubris but by humility.

We know now, literally in the biblical sense, deeply and intimately, that the reign of God and our allegiance to it has to do with power, yes, but the power of life and not the power of death.

It has to do with service not authoritarian might.

It has to do with an allegiance to the cross and resurrection rather than an allegiance to a flag when it flies for ways that defy the generosity of God.

It has to do with truth rather than lies sold as truth.

It has to do with forgiveness rather than spite, mercy rather than revenge, grace rather than retribution, courage rather than fear, and love rather than hate.

Hallowed be Your name, we say.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done.

Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.

Proper emphasis matters, and it reminds.

Likewise, in the texts for today:

From Daniel 7:14: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.”

His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Or Psalm 93: “The Lord is king, robed in majesty and armed with strength…”

Or Revelation 1: “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, is the ruler of the kings of the earth.”

Or John 18:37: “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

See we know that the risen Jesus has removed the power of death, we know therefore the future, and we know therefore that Jesus is there, holding it and sharing it with us.

We know therefore not only is he the ruler of the world, he redefines what it is to rule.

As followers of this Jesus, we anticipate—a word that literally means ‘to take beforehand’—we anticipate his rule by living as if the future—eternity—is already here.

Pastor Munk had the audacity—a word which literally means ‘boldness,’ and in this case, a boldness which was born out of his belief in the freedom found in baptism—to write and preach against the danger, the lies, the intimidation, the cruelty, the threat of the German regime.

Munk had nothing but a holy rage for the Danes and the Lutherans who were complicit or remained silent.

These days, alas, Kaj Munk raises any number of questions and conversation points for us in the church, both laity and clergy, not least of all as we stand on the cusp of Donald Trump’s rule, one which he would very much like to consider his reign.

Munk’s words, which I quoted above, were clearly timely then.

But clearly, and discouragingly, they are still timely now.

Many Danish and Lutheran people took Munk’s words to heart.

For that, Munk was killed.  

Because words not only have power, you see, but so do the speakers and the do-ers of words.

Kaj Munk was not oblivious to the threat: the Nazis were not known for equivocating on their principles or mandates.

Given the clear potential cost, however, of speaking up, Munk could well be forgiven had he protected his life, his station in life, his way of life.

He is remembered, of course, because he didn’t, and because he found the courage—actually, the recklessness and the holy rage of which he preached—to speak the Word of God, a Word which surely impacted his circumstance, and he hoped would impact the circumstance of his parishioners and those persecuted by the politics of the day.

~~~~~

Pastors today don’t tend to have Nazis eavesdropping on their sermons and pouring over their newsletters, but there are signs that Trump loyalists soon could.

Even before this threat looming after Inauguration Day 2025, leaders in the Church have had understandable reasons to avoid speaking directly, to not name conflictual issues, to leave for the newspapers what could be written about in parish newsletters.

Many have stayed silent.

But Munk spoke, when the threats were far heftier, as they might become here.

Preachers are called to serve the Gospel, namely to serve the living God who bids us to speak honestly, to resist, to act recklessly, to trust in grace, and to engage in holy recklessness and even rage where all but God is manifest.

Holy recklessness refuses to be tamped down by fears, by avoidance of conflict, by ducking the facts of injustice and suffering, by questions about timing or process or appropriateness.

Holy rage is a righteously indignant fury that we would feel if our own children were hungering, if our own children were floating the waters, if our own water were polluted, if our own children were shot for the color of their skin, if our own religious group were profiled, if our own parents were sleeping in boxes, if our own families were denied health insurance, if our own families were separated and deported, if our own loved ones were rejected, scorned, maligned, threatened, killed.

To say nothing is to blend into the reality that should not be.

To ignore, to tolerate, to excuse, to be silent, to blend in with the powers and the ways of the world is to be nothing other than a chameleon.

Trouble is: whatever you can say about the followers of Jesus, we are never, ever, a chameleon.

We are Christians.

This was the last of three sermons I preached last summer, all offered at the same congregation while their pastor was away.  The texts were based on Proper 23, Year B, and can be found here. The texts include 2 Kings 4:42-44, which tells of Elisha feeding 100 people with little food; Psalm 145:10-19, which tells of God’s constancy; Ephesians 3:14-21, which tells of the fullness of Christ’s love and abundant power; and John 6:1-21, which offers the story of Jesus walking on the water after feeding the multitudes.

It contains the final summary of faith terms and claims which ground our calling and our capacity to preach and teach about justice, systemic change, and yes, even politics.

Perhaps the notions in this sermon as well may be helpful to those called to preach tomorrow’s texts, considering last week’s election, tonight’s anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the theme of scarcity both in the passages slated for tomorrow, and in the fears within our country now.

~~~~~

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Siblings in Christ, it has been such a pleasure to be here with you for lo these three weeks.

I am so honored to have had the opportunity to worship with you, and to offer you the Word while your mighty and righteous Pastor has been away. Sincere thank you.

Because in my vocation I am not yoked to a specific church, but rather to a specific call to serve the wider church, through fairly regular supply preaching I have the super cool chance to see little congregational quirks that I otherwise wouldn’t.

So, for example, when I preach and preside at Emmanuel Lutheran in Two Harbors, they have this sweet ritual after Holy Communion—never seen it done before—in which after the Eucharist has been offered, those who served it return the elements to the table, and then they gather in a circle before the altar, and they hold hands, and they offer this gentle prayer of thanksgiving for the opportunity to have shared the bread and the wine with God’s people. It is one of the most tender sincere organic traditions I have ever beheld in a worship service.

So I love this rare experience of noticing what different gatherings of God hold dear as a way to honor God and deepen their faith In their context

You, too, have one that I caught on the very first Sunday here.

Typically, at the close of a service, the pastor or assisting minister will say something like, “Go in peace, serve the Lord,” and the congregation will respond “Thanks be to God.” And it’s right and good, and reminiscent of the benediction I have sometimes seen in a sanctuary hanging over the exit door: Worship has ended. Let the service begin. Also, right and good.

But here, you are accustomed to a different blessing.  Here, the pastor says “Go in peace. You are the body of Christ.”

You are the body of Christ.

It’s so lovely.

You are sent out to be Jesus.

Fed with Jesus, you become Jesus to feed other people.

These last two Sundays, I have given you some faith vocab I cherish: words and concepts that especially inform my theology and therefore my preaching and way of life. All of them, in one way or another, flow together to culminate in the single focus word of this Sunday.  So a quick review:

There are a zillion different ways to think about God and one’s Christian faith. Some, frankly, are more faithfully rooted than others, though none has it all right and you should be wary of those who say they do. Among the frameworks most consonant with orthodox Christianity, and the one with which I resonate most deeply, is the system of faith that begins its thinking about God with Easter, with the news that Jesus is risen. The Greek word that we translate as ‘gospel’ is most literally translated as ‘Good News.” News is an event, something that happens that makes a difference or has an impact on our lives. Jesus resurrection is an event which we, 2000 years later, assert still affects our lives. In contrast to bad news, it offers Good News, and at its essence it’s this: death no longer wins. Death, in any form, does not have the last word. Death manifests in, of course, the expiration of breath, but it also shows forth in our lives by way of regret, loneliness, loss, addiction, brokenness, hate, and fear, and also broader deaths that occur in our acquiescence or acceptance of unjust systems.

Sometimes these forms of death do deserve a word: grief and lament and even anger can be holy, for example. Sometimes fear, for example, is legit—look at our Gospel text for this morning! Sheesh!  A storm and someone who looks for all the world like an apparition over the waters in the night? But what did Jesus say? I’ll tell you what he didn’t say: “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” There are so many things in life to fear, legit things in life to fear. The gospel message isn’t that they don’t matter, or are illusions—apparitions, if you will.  Instead, it’s don’t be afraid! That which is grasping you, claiming you, immobilizing you is real but it is not real-est!  The thing you fear or grieve is not enduring, and is not more powerful than God’s promise of life. The resurrection reframes daily deaths, and our physical death, and allows us to live according to the promise of life rather than the threat of death.

It is thanks to the resurrection that the early believers began to bestow the title of Christ to Jesus.  Christ, of course, means ‘the messiah,’ as it’s a translation of the Hebrew word ‘mesach.’ Identified as the divine Christ, the life and ministry of Jesus is put into proper perspective.  He was not just some good man doing good things—then, as arguably now, there are any number of miracle doers and healers. But because the early Christian community—and now we—believe that Jesus did not stay dead, we see the resurrection as confirming Jesus’ agenda as God’s agenda, Jesus’ ways as God’s ways, and insofar as we identify ourselves with Jesus by way of calling ourselves Christ-ians, they are now our ways too.

His way is that of offering salvation—a word that in biblical Greek does not primarily mean that which one receives upon dying, but rather that which one receives while living! It means health, healing, and wholeness: that’s what Jesus came to offer the world: health, healing, and wholeness, and it is also what faithful Christians offer the world in his name.

Woven throughout Scripture are revelations of God’s essence and God’s vision for the world, consistently identified as being in solidarity with those on the margins: the exile, the stranger, the excluded, the hurting, the poor, and the hungry.  God speaks again and again to rulers and the ruled alike, insisting that the systems of order and power in the world be both just (mishpat) and righteous (tzadek), namely oriented to the principles of God’s commandments, and to God’s grace. With the crescendoed ministry of Jesus, we see what he is about, and via the resurrection we look back and, in an haha moment, we see that that’s therefore what God is about, and it clicks that that is what Christians are therefore about too.

With that, we can now turn to the single word with which I leave you in today’s sermon, and the one which ties together all of these notions, and our readings for today, and this congregation’s blessing at the end of its worship: Hospitality.

So it turns out that the word ‘hospitality’ and ‘host,’ and the word ‘guest,’ come from the same Indo-European root word -ghosti.

How cool is that, I ask you.

So when you are a host, you hospitably welcome guests and their stories, and spread the table of food, shelter, and safety. But you also become yourself a guest, sitting at the feet of your now-hosts to hear their life and story. It’s a reciprocal relationship, one of mutual vulnerability, trust, and tenderness, and right up there with economic equity is one of the key themes coursing through Scripture, baked into God’s expectation of God’s people: “Welcome the stranger,” we hear again and again, as in Hebrews “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it,” or Romans, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers,” or Leviticus 19:34, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” or Luke 10, “‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? How do you read it?’ And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” 

Like, I’m not making it up. 

Hospitality—going both directions, a dynamic relationship of serving and being served—is a core value of God and therefore of God’s people.

Of course, we see it in action in both our text from 2 Kings and from John.  In each text, you see hungry people being fed bread, and being fed abundantly, even though there were abundant hungry people hanging around.  In 2 Kings, we hear “They shall eat and have some left,” and in John we hear that “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.” Twelve baskets were left over. Twelve.

Where there was reason to assume scarcity, instead, we have abundance, and not just for a few, but for all. Not a bad summary of the gospel’s primary take-away, and that of what the Christian life looks like in motion.

Two things, then, to which I want to draw attention before this sermon and my time with you wraps up.

First, notice the language John uses for this sharing of the bread. “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them…”

Wait a minute wait just one little minute: we’ve heard those words before: oddly, perhaps, though, not in John.

In John, the Last Supper—at least the words of institution—isn’t recorded—only the washing of the feet is, a supreme act of service. 

In a moment, we’ll get to what we do hear John say, but for now, it is enough to say this:

Not only Jesus’ ministry but the entire Jewish tradition in which he is embedded is about hospitality: welcome to the hungry, to the forlorn, to the sinners, to the rejected, to the refugee, to the wayfarers, to those in need of health, healing, and wholeness.

And again, if we align ourselves—remember, the word for ‘righteousness’ in Hebrew is tzadek, which also means to be properly aligned—if we align ourselves with God (think First Commandment) we are fundamentally about hospitality too.

The words we hear Jesus say as he feeds the 5,000 obvious hearken to other words we’ve heard Jesus say:

In the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread, and gave thanks; broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying:

Take and eat; this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

Again, after supper, he took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it for all to drink, saying:

This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this in remembrance of me.

It’s exactly this connection, see, that has gotten me choked up at the end of every service here.

Jesus has fed us with his body by way of consecrated bread.

And what then?

We disperse from here, made again part of the body of Christ, to be the body of Christ in the world, feeding others as they have need of immediate salvation. We are hosts at the table spread for the world. No one is unwelcome, and all are fed.

We are veritable ministers of abundance, fed by bread to feed the hungry, serving up Jesus to those who have need of the health, healing, and wholeness which he brings.

We might not hear the words of institution in John, but later in John 13, we do hear this: “Whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

“Whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

If you incline your ear, that right there is Jesus saying “I am God.” John, of course, sprinkles these hints all throughout his gospel, especially in the “I Am” sayings: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the door, I am the good shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way and the truth and the life, I am the true vine.

That’s what’s called a Big Deal, and a heck of an allusion to boot, because in Exodus, God self-identifies to Moses as I am who I am, or I am who I will be, which sounds a bit like Popeye, but it actually comes from the Hebrew root verb “To Be,” which is, wait for it, YHWH. I am.

If they tell you who they are, as the saying goes, believe them!

So if we receive Jesus, we receive God, and if we receive one who acts in the name of Jesus, we therefore receive God too.

When we receive communion, we receive God, and when we go out and serve others bread in any form—actual food, or housing, or welcome, or forgiveness, or our voices of comfort, encouragement, or advocacy—we serve them God.

You are, to hearken to the parting words of this congregation’s worship, the body of Christ, incarnating the Good News that death does not win.

Here filled with bread, we become bread.

Here guests at the table, we now become hosts to the world.

This sermon, preached first on July 21, 2024, continues using these texts from Proper 11, Year B: Jeremiah 23:1-6, which offers God’s dire warning to the shepherds tasked with caring for and protecting their sheep; Psalm 23, which promises God’s steadfastness both through the threat of death and beyond it; Ephesians 2:11-22, which celebrates the unity of all humanity in God; and Mark 6:3-34, 53-56, which references Jesus’ compassion on those who were “like sheep without a shepherd.”

I post it as another example of how we have resources, if not the mandate, within the faith to preach and teach biblically and politically—which, of course, is different from preaching in a partisan fashion.

Perhaps the notions in this sermon may be helpful to those called to preach tomorrow’s texts, in light both of last week’s election, and tonight’s dreadful anniversary of Kristallnacht.

You can find the podcast/audio version to it here:

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Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It is so good to be here again. Thank you.

So as a refresher for those who were here last week, and as a crash course for those who weren’t, I’m going to do a quick return to the “verbal glossary” of sorts I pitched out from this pulpit last week.  You’ll recall that since you didn’t know me other than a vouch from your Pastor, and since I’ll be with you all for a total of three times, I figured that it wouldn’t be a totally bad idea to introduce you to words and to concepts that I use on the regular!

So last week I spoke of the Gospel as an event, namely the good news that Jesus is risen; I grounded the biblical meaning of salvation as health, healing, and wholeness now—rather than what one receives if you believe in Jesus and to be realized only after you die; Christ I yoked to its meaning as a title rather than as last name, and which means Messiah, the One of God for whom we have been waiting, and which was conferred onto Jesus only after his resurrection; and the First Commandment, which Luther defined as God being that in which or in whom you place your ultimate trust, moves us to be mindfully aware of whether the god in whom we say we believe is really the God of our baptized faith.

Yeah, well you may have thought you were safe, but Round Two, words which very much tie into our texts of the day, is coming right up.

First: Public Theologian. I’m an ordained pastor, but my particular role and calling in the Church is to be a public theologian. Public theology is what I do. One of the key elements of my call is to help people not only fuss with what they believe and why, but also to apply their beliefs—their theological framework, if you will—to the broader world.  I worry that too often—and not least of all because the Gospel has been regularly reduced to “Your Sins Are Forgiven,” which is true, but not the whole kit and kaboodle of the Gospel—our faith is seen as an individual matter.  Me and Jesus. But in the Jewish and the Christian tradition, which is rooted in the Jewish tradition, one’s faith is personal and communal.  We are baptized and known by our names, but within a community that promises and renounces together as the communion of the saints.

Not only that, but because we know that salvation isn’t just personal, it has to do with health, healing, and wholeness in the now; and that if we identify as followers of Jesus the Christ, we are therefore ambassadors of Jesus’ salvation—health, healing, and wholeness in the now; therefore we also are constantly alert to where there is death, the threat of death, and the need for salvation which we are baptized, fed, and sent to offer.

Jesus came for me, of course, but we dare not forget that Jesus came for the whole world. So what happens in the world, whether justice is being carried out in the name of righteousness, has a lot to do with power: who is in power, who has power, and whether power is grounded in the goodness and mercy that God intends for this world.

Politics: I realize that these days, this is a dicey one, but hear me out here, not least of all because politics thread throughout our texts today, especially Jeremiah’s and Mark’s, and because I am called to be a public theologian, I am keenly interested in politics.

Because we Christians are baptized, fed, and sent to offer salvation to the world, it is obvious that we can’t help but to pay attention to what is going on in the world, including in the public square, which means Christians pay attention and are deeply invested in politics, because what happens in politics concerns and affects matters of the very things of which God speaks—including in our texts today—that concern access to salvation in the now.

It’s unfortunately newsy that the context of a large swath of biblical texts is political, and that therefore God’s biblical word is political and bears upon the politics of the day, theirs and ours!

Take Jeremiah, for example: his words from today are dour, bleak, and condemning precisely because the kings and priests and purported prophets of the day were acting not in the stead of God.

The very reason we have Jeremiah’s words is because he warned that those who claimed to be faithful to God were not representing God’s will in the economies and the politics of the day, and because his words were seen as a faithful prophetic revelation from God, they were preserved in our Scriptures.

As was common to do in his world, Jeremiah refers to the offending leaders as shepherds, albeit with a caveat: they were super lousy, incompetent shepherds. Not one to mince words, Jeremiah lets it be known that God is not happy not one little bit about the lack of care that these shepherds were offering their dependent sheep.

When God ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, says Jeremiah in effect, but the reason God wasn’t happy is because nobody but the kings, priests, and prophets were happy!

Why? Because to their own benefit, these purported shepherds were being unrighteous, unjust, and therefore unholy.

Why? Well, the chapter immediately before our passage today reveals that these leaders were doing “wrong and violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, and shedding innocent blood in this place.” They weren’t giving welcome to the vulnerable or taking care of the least of these—key priorities of God—and were causing, with no remorse, violence that served their cause.

Let’s bookmark Jeremiah for a moment, and spring to Mark, where we find Jesus attempting to get to the wilderness (I’m here to say that it’s no coincidence that he scurried there after last week’s Marcan text, the one in which his cousin John lost his head for speaking an inconvenient truth—a political act from both John and Herod), and yet, not only were the authorities beginning to look for him—challenges to authorities are always sought out…and dealt with—but so were the people who were needing hope.  We hear that a crowd “like sheep without a shepherd” (echo-bells should be ringing) sought out Jesus, and found him, and brought their sick to him in the belief that he would offer them, well, salvation. Now.

Rev. Dr. Matt Skinner, New Testament theologian at Luther, says that their need—not them, in contrast to the rhetoric we hear today about immigrants and refugees and the impoverished, but their need—was as offensive to Jesus as the people’s need in Jeremiah’s day was offensive to him. These poor hapless and hopeless people were, says Dr. Skinner, “denied well-being and justice…When Jesus heals people of their ailments, his acts are not symbolic of the salvation he provides. They are a piece of that salvation. Jesus devotes himself to ensuring human flourishing in body, mind, spirit, and community. So too should any church that conducts ministry in his name and in the power of the same Holy Spirit that indwells him…

…Giving support to harassed people, feeding hungry people, and healing sick people have consequences,” he goes on to say. “Those actions alter economies in households and neighborhoods. They transform relationships. They urge people to reconsider old allegiances. They give people hope.”

A re-orienting of priorities based on the values of God alter economies and households and neighborhoods, they transform relationships and old allegiances.

Ooof.

That sounds like, to reference an Old Testament theologian named Walter Brueggemann, a subversion of the main version of the way our body politic works.

Faith in action is political. It’s everywhere in Scripture, and to not lift that up as a core element of the biblical witness and in-real-time fidelity to God is to make the words of Jeremiah and the actions of Jesus into nothing more than a mere tale with no traction. In fact, a famous reformed theologian, some of you may have heard of him—Karl Barth—said that the best theologians should have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

See, if we say that the gospel is Good News, and News is something that happened and still makes a difference, then we know that we can’t ignore the prophetic takeaways from Scripture as they reverberate through the present day political turmoils. It would be supremely unfaithful to avoid preaching of the politics of those days, and not draw grounded theological—not partisan, but theological—lines to the politics of this day.

And let me take a moment here to say that Christian nationalism is a Christian heresy wrapped in red, white, and blue, and with the fullness of our baptismal promises to renounce the powers of this world that rebel against God, we must reject it.

A public theologian—and, to one degree or another, every pastor, including your spectacular one, is a public theologian, because they make the theology of their tradition public in their contextually-situated pulpits—wakes up every morning to figure out how to make faith relevant, even in awkward ways.

I want to name a truth, here, siblings in Christ: It’s really really hard, and indeed scary, to be a preacher these days. I want to name that, because you have a banger of a preacher in your Pastor, but to be the best and most faithful preacher she can be, she needs your support, not least of all by way of your trust and your willingness to receive her words, to which she was baptized, ordained, and called to speak. She is a shepherd, with a duty to shepherd God’s sheep. The last thing you want to do is set her up to be at the receiving end of words like Jeremiah’s, or end up like John the Baptist with her vocational head on a platter because she speaks truth here!

See, I have often said that a rostered leader is not called to serve a congregation. That might take a person in a pew aback, right? We say that “so-and-so is my pastor!” And you would be absolutely right.

But the pastor’s primary responsibility is not to the congregation—if it were, then the relationship between congregation and pastor would be more akin to employer and employee, or customer and ware-purveyor.

But that’s not how it works in the Church.

The pastor’s primary responsibility is to the gospel.

Rather than being called to serve a congregation, a rostered leader is called to serve the gospel in a congregation.  That means that the rostered leader is constantly alert to where there is death, where there is fear, where there is grief, where there is unrighteousness, where there is injustice, and where, then, words of salvation—health, healing, and wholeness—can be preached.

That is what being a good and faithful shepherd looks like on the ground.  They might get bawled out by the sheep, but better that than bawled out by God!

Justice and Righteousness.

You hear these words laced through our First and Gospel readings today.

They are often bound together, because biblically, they are entwined with one another.

Justice, in Hebrew, is Mishpat. It means retribution for a wrong.  It means a societally agreed to answer to an assault. It is punishment.

Righteousness, in Hebrew, is Tzadek. The word can also be translated as “alignment,” as in what the late Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler described happening when his bunged up car was brought to a Jerusalem mechanic, and when the repairs were done, the car was pronounced, “Tzadek,” as in properly aligned.  To be righteous, to be tzadek, is to be properly aligned with God.

When coupled with mishpat, you have not retributive justice, which is what mishpat is when left to its own devices, but you have restorative justice, which means not just the punishment of wrongs, but the righting of them.

I often joke that when I’m angry about something, I write the letter when I’m indignant (that is, seeking justice), but I send them only when I’m sure I’m righteously indignant!

Righteousness, you see, when coupled with Justice, creates a culture the likes of which is sung about in the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who spoke of the poor and meek being lifted up, and the hungry being filled, but also the wealthy and the fed being notched down to a place of equity rather than gluttony and hubris.  It aspires to shared dignity, the valuation of all humanity, the restoration of well-being for the lowly and the mighty. It seeks to call out and call in. It calls a thing what it is, and then recalls the person to who they are called to be.

This entanglement surfaces again and again and again in the Bible.

It is the word that God speaks to God’s people, and the word that God expects God’s appointed shepherds to speak too.

Years ago, and I mean years ago, as in about 15 years ago when my daughter was 3-5 years old, we were having a struggle getting to church. It  was a bit of an issue, because Else, who is many forms of magnificent, and excels in ways too many to count, did…does…not like to hurry. And on this Sunday, we had to hurry.

I tried everything: playful challenges, modeling, stern scolding. Finally, I knelt down to her level, and I said to her this:

“Elsegirl, sweet one. We need to get in the car now to go to Church, because if we don’t, we shall be late. Once we do get to Church, my dear girl, you will hear Jesus tell you how much he loves you. And if you listen carefully, you will hear Jesus tell you something like this: ‘Elsegirl, I love you so so much. In fact, I love you so much that I gave you a mama. I gave you a mama who loves you so much too, and because I love you and your mama loves you, I want you to listen to her!”

And my daughter crossed her arms, furrowed her brow, and said, “I don’t wanna hear Jesus say that.”

Siblings in Christ, we come to church to hear that Jesus loves us.

And he does, so very much.

But sometimes he says things we don’t want to hear.

And one of the ways he loves us is by telling those of us who are marginalized, hated, disparaged, and lied about, that they are, no matter what the world and the politics of the day say, worthy and treasured and sheep worth saving.

But Jesus might love others of us by saying things that may challenge, anger, and offend us. Jesus is forever calling us to be more tzadek, more properly aligned with the First Commandment and the gospel and the way of the one we call Lord and Christ.

And he loves us by giving us shepherds, like your pastor, who love us too, and cherish us so much that they preach God’s word faithfully, relevantly, and reverently, with justice and with righteousness, with newspaper and with Bible in hand, oriented to nothing other than God’s revelation of love, faithfulness, and concern for the salvation-in-the-now for you of course, and for the whole world.