...inside a sound...

A Dios.

2010-08-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

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Sermon for the Celebration of Mary, Mother of Our Lord
for St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

Almighty God, in choosing the virgin Mary to be the mother of your Son, you made known your gracious regard for the poor, the lowly, and the despised. Grant us grace to receive your word in humility, and so to be made one with your Son, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

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I woke up early one morning last week and took a walk to Sunset Hill in Ballard. I did not plan to go that far when I started out, but at some point I got it in my head that I wanted to see the water before I turned back… and then there was no turning back, I had to walk all the way to the bluff. But you’d think I’d have learned by now about Seattle weather.

When I reached the edge of land, I couldn’t see anything beyond the blackberry brambles. It was all shrouded in a thick fog, gray nothingness as far or as near as the eye could see. There really was no line on the horizon. The Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains, the ferries in between, had vanished. I stood there for a moment in disbelief.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw them, slowly coming into view: the ships at Shilshole Bay, just visible in the early morning light. There they were, floating in the grey mist, proof of the water beneath them, and witnesses to a reality that existed far beyond what I could see from my solitary perch, high on the bluff.

Dear friends in Christ, the fullness of time has come. At least, it has come again for Chris and I, as we prepare to move for the sixth time in four years. Call us tired. But call us blessed, too. This week, as we have prepared to leave, I have been thinking a lot about all the blessings I’ve received this year, blessings showered from God through you. And as I thought about those blessings, my heart was glad that today we are celebrating Mary, the Mother of Our Lord.

I’ve known Mary for a long time, but I didn’t really get to know her until I went to Mexico. Our digital banner this morning is the image of Mary called the Virgin of Guadalupe. It’s an amazing thing to see Guadalupe up there next to Thorvaldsen’s statue of Christ, because what this image of Christ is for Danes, that image of Mary is for our brothers and sisters from Mexico.

Anyway, when I was in Mexico City, I went to see the original image of la virgen one day, and when I was there, I picked up a little card with this image on it. On the other side of the card is La Magnifica, the Magnificat, the song of Mary. The words of the song on this little card are in Spanish, so at first I needed some help in the translation. I had to read it slowly. And as I did, I started to realize just what it was Mary was singing about.

My soul proclaims your greatness, O God
And my spirit rejoices in you
You have looked with love on your servant here
And blessed me all my life through.

Great and mighty are you O faithful one
Strong is your justice strong your love
How you favor the weak and lowly one
Humbling the proud of heart

You have cast the mighty down from their thrones
And uplifted the humble of heart
You have filled the hungry with wondrous things
And left the wealthy no part.

I remember when I first read those words, really read them, as if for the first time. Does it really say that God favors the weak and the lowly one? Does it really say that God casts the mighty down from their thrones and uplifted the humble? Does it really say that God fills the hungry with wondrous things? These are words that proclaim God’s good news for the poor and the powerless, for the sick and the dying, for the lonely and the left out.

I was amazed… and then immediately skeptical.

Could it really be true? Mary speaks not of some far off future but as if these things have already begun to happen. But that was all rather hard to believe when I picked up the newspaper.

Violence in the neighborhoods of Chicago. Poverty in the shadows of the Gold Coast. Bickering politicians who seemed to care more about scoring points than doing justice and loving kindness. I wanted to preach the good news, but nothing I came up with seemed quite enough to counter the troubles of the world. Like the day last week when I went looking for a view and found only fog, I struggled to see how God could really be at work in this world.

But God was at work, even in a heavy fog, calling me to new places and new faces. From the hills of Southern Indiana to the corners of the Chicago’s South Side to the barrios of Mexico City to the ranchos of Jalisco, I caught glimpses of Christ, present in the people of God. But they were only glimpses, just enough to keep me going, nothing more… or less. And then I came here.

Here I found God gathering God’s people, at breakfast on Saturday morning with the other amateur men, in the delicious desserts of women’s fellowship, and, yes, finally, at Hale’s Ales where we’d talk God stuff over a few pints on cask night.

Here I found God speaking to God’s people, through the kids as they made order out of chaos at the Sunday School Christmas Pageant, through different generations sharing their experiences with each other at adult forum, and through a people willing to proclaim the gospel in a new way through a U2 Sunday and an organist with the grace and the chutzpah to lead us.

Here I found God feeding God’s people, through a parkway somehow transformed into a flourishing garden in part through the donated dung of elephants. (The Lord works in mysterious ways.) The gardeners in this garden were patient enough to teach an intern the difference between a rose and a weed, and the fruits of their labor flowed into a soup kitchen, where faithful women and men served the hungry in a room where the homeless slept.

And here, finally, I found God sending God’s people out into the world, to love and serve their neighbors. They were sent into a myriad of vocations, teachers and researchers, nurses and engineers, lawyers and bankers, volunteers and, of course, the creatively retired. They were sent to homeless shelters and recovery centers, to soup kitchens and food pantries. And they were sent further upriver, too, to dig out the roots of structural sin. On Interfaith Advocacy Day they were sent to advocate in the halls of power where important decisions were being made, and here they spoke up for peace in the face of violence, justice in the face of injustice. They sang Mary’s song in word and deed. And through them, God made her song begin to come true.

Dear people of God, you have taught me so much. But you have done more than that, too. You have restored my hope and my courage. You have been as Mary to me, singing a vision into life and bringing it to birth. You have been as Christ to me, truly. My sisters and brothers, I have seen the body of Christ at work in you. Thanks be to God. And thanks be to you.

As I met with Pastor Carol for the last time week, I told her how hard I was finding it to say goodbye. She smiled. “Yes,” she said, “but we’re all part of the same body.” Throughout the year, my supervisors, Carol and Paul, have taught me how to put passion into practice, how to live the baptized life. And now here they were again, with a final truth to carry with me, here at the end of things. As the gospel hymn goes, we’re all a part of God’s body, a cloud of witnesses throughout space and time, a holy communion of sinner-saints sent out for the life of the whole world, from Seattle to Chicago and far, far beyond, the body of Christ gathering, speaking, feeding, sending.

You see, dear sisters and brothers, there is a neighborhood out there, a city, a planet yearning for the vision of this table, hungry for a world where there is manna and mercy for all. God has work to do, and our hands to do it with. God has a song to sing, and our voices to sing it with.

So let us be gathered, once again, at this table, that God might feed us and make us one, that we might see the vision and live it, that we might, once again, be set free for the life of the world.

Amen.

On the Road Again

2010-08-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
for St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

Prayer of the Day:

Almighty God, you sent your Holy Spirit to be the life and light of your church. Open our hearts to the riches of your grace, that we may be ready to receive you wherever you appear, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

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Hear again, sisters and brothers in Christ, the words of today’s reading from the book of Hebrews. This is a slightly different translation, but it is the same reading. It begins like this:

The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd. By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.

By an act of faith, Abraham said yes to God’s call to travel to an unknown place that would become his home. When he left he had no idea where he was going. By an act of faith he lived in the country promised him, lived as a stranger camping in tents. Isaac and Jacob did the same, living under the same promise. Abraham did it by keeping his eye on an unseen city with real, eternal foundations – the City designed and built by God.

By faith, barren Sarah was able to become pregnant, old woman as she was at the time, because she believed the One who made a promise would do what he said. That’s how it happened that from one man’s dead and shriveled loins there are now people numbering into the millions.

Each one of these people of faith died not yet having in hand what was promised, but still believing. How did they do it?

They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that – heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.
That is our reading from the Hebrews, as translated by Pastor Eugene Peterson. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear those stories of Abraham and Sarah without thinking of other stories, of forebears in the faith who are not so far removed from us as these Biblical characters. For me, it’s the separate stories of my father and grandfather that come to mind.

When my mother was very young, my grandfather decided that he could no longer make a living farming his little plot of land in the northwest corner of Iowa. And so he and my grandmother sold the farm, packed up their daughter and two sons, and headed West. My grandfather had never been to California, but he had a distant relative there who thought he might be able to secure him a job. It was only a possibility, really – hardly the promise that Abraham had. But it was enough. By an act of faith, he set out with his family for a distant land.

Some years later, on the other side of the country, my father graduated from high school in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia. But there was no work in his little hometown. And so, at the age of 18, he packed his things and moved some 300 miles east from Appalachia to Washington, D.C., the closest city, where he hoped he might find a decent job. It was only a possibility, really – hardly the promise that Abraham had. But it was enough. By an act of faith, he set out and traveled to an unknown place.

Eventually, my father found a job working for the airlines as a flight dispatcher. After a few years, his office was transferred to San Francisco, where he met my mother. A few years later, I was born.

It has not escaped me if these two men had not set out in faith I would not be here. My very existence is the result of these journeys made on faith – not only those of my father and grandfather, of course, but those of my parents, who celebrated their thirty-first wedding anniversary last week. “By faith,” the writer of Hebrews says, “we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.”

Well. You probably know some stories like this yourself. Maybe they are the stories of your own parents and grandparents, moving across the ocean or across the country. Maybe they are your own stories; maybe you have lived them yourself. And if so, then maybe you know that it is helpful, from time to time, to remember these stories for the anatomy of faith they reveal.

Always faith begins with a promise. We often think of a promise as having something to do with certainty and a clear commitment, but it is not always that. God does not begin by telling Abram exactly what will happen at 11am on Sunday the 8th. No, God simply calls Abram outside and draws his gaze toward the stars. “The life I intend for you and for those who come after you,” God tells Abram, “is as full as the sky is full of stars.” That is all the promise amounts to. That kind of promise is long on possibility and rather short on details. The promises of God are often more vision than clear visibility; they are less like photographs of the future and more like looking at the stars and finding constellations.

Abram tells God as much; he’s not thrilled about the lack of detail. But in the end, the promise of possibility, the promise of abundant life for himself, for his family, for all nations, is enough. Hope is kindled, and as its fire grows, faith is forged.

“By an act of faith,” the writer of Hebrews says, “Abraham said yes to God’s call to travel to an unknown place.”
I am not sure where God is calling you, dear people of St John United. But I do know this: You don’t have to travel as far as Abraham did to show extraordinary faith.

Perhaps you are considering a move to a new home, not across the country but across town. Perhaps you are already in the midst of one. Or perhaps you are preparing for a long road trip to see the sights or to visit family, a temporary move for a few weeks, an exercise in wayfaring. Or perhaps you are simply planning a walk around the neighborhood, which can be its own sort of adventure. Whatever the reasons for your movement, dear friends, hear again the words of Christ: Do not be afraid. The God of Abraham goes with you, and has promised you a world of possibility.

You might be a member of this congregation, trying to discern the direction this church ought to set sail for. Into what uncharted territory are the winds of the Holy Spirit blowing this place? What role will this congregation play in this community five years, ten years down the line? What new needs will arise? What new gifts will come to the fore? Where can we already see it happening? Whatever your ideas, wherever you are in discerning the answers to these questions, dear friends, hear again the words of Christ: Do not be afraid. The God of Abraham goes with you, and has promised you a world of possibility.

Or you might be picking up one of these little buttons, and you might be deciding that today is the day you get involved by writing a letter or making a phone call to speak up for ecological justice. The earth is in a state of brokenness, and we are the ones who are responsible. The word on the button says Converted? But to convert in the Biblical sense is to repent, to make a complete life change, to quite literally turn around. The call to give up our addiction to the things that warm this planet, given the state of our politics, given the state of our economy, seems at this point to be harder than anything Abraham had to do. And yet even Abraham’s journey began with a single step, a foot set forward in faith. If you think the situation is hopeless and there is nothing more we can do, hear again the words of Christ: Do not be afraid. The God of Abraham goes with you, and has promised you a world of possibility.

Near the end of Jesus’ exhortation in our gospel reading, he describes a scene in which the master sits the servants down at the master’s own table, and serves them up a meal, a feast akin to a wedding banquet. It is like what God does in our lives, serving up countless graces, day by day, each one ripe with possibility, our Lord showing up in places we least expect him to be. Step forward in faith, God says. Step forward to the table of all creation. Come and eat, come share the feast I have prepared for you and for all the creatures of the earth. Come, taste and see. Amen.

Table Talk

2010-07-21T12:20:00.001-07:00

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
for St John United Lutheran Church

Prayer of the Day:
Eternal God, you draw near to us in Christ, and you make yourself our guest. Amid the cares of our lives, make us attentive to your presence, that we may treasure your word above all else, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

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From the Wikipedia entry for “faux pas:”

A “faux pas” is a violation of accepted social norms (for example, standard customs or etiquette rules). Faux pas vary widely from culture to culture, and what is considered good manners in one culture can be considered a faux pas in another. The term originally comes from French, and literally means “false step.”

The plural of faux pas is, in fact, faux pas, and yes, I had to look that up because we have before us today two such violations of accepted social etiquette. (I will leave up to you whether using an extensive quote from Wikipedia in a sermon counts as a third faux pas.)

In our first story, taken from the book of Genesis, we find our forebear Abraham, sitting under a tree in the heat of the day. It was an oak tree. If you have ever spent a morning working outside – heck, just being outside – when the mercury is high and the there are no clouds to shield you from the blazing sun, then you have some idea of how nice it was for Abraham to be able to sit down under a little shade after a morning of work.

You might also know how easy it is for your mind to wander as you sit there, and how easy it is for someone to approach you without you really noticing until they are right there next to you. It is so easy to lose yourself in a restful moment and not realize that the Creator of the Cosmos has sidled up next to you.

Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near him. He didn’t call them Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but he treated them like royalty all the same. Did he know they were of divine origin? Or was it simply common practice that taught him to offer strangers hospitality?

There is a flurry of activity in the Abraham and Sarah house, and before you know it Abraham is back out under the tree, standing while his guests sit and eat the best food he and Sarah knew how to make. Abraham waits. He wants to see them enjoy the food. And he wants to hear the stories they are sure to carry with them.

But instead of simply telling their own stories, the strangers make themselves a part of Abraham’s. They step over the line, really, setting aside standard custom and speaking directly to Abraham’s deepest fears and hopes. They recall the promise God had made long ago, a dream God had promised to make a reality, a dream Abraham and Sarah seem quite reasonably to have given up on. It was rather odd, really, for the strangers to bring it up in polite company. And then to suggest that the dream could still come true after all these years, realities being what they are, well… it was scandalous, really. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they were just putting their foot in it.

I wonder if Luke has the story of Abraham and his three strange guests in mind when he tells the stories of Jesus and his companions on the road, on foot, as they nearly always are. They walk everywhere. I can’t imagine the blisters on Jesus’ feet from all that walking. At least they try to walk in the cool of the day whenever they can. No sense walking from town to town when it’s hot as blazes out there.

It’s times like this when they praise Adonai for people like Martha, who would welcome them into their homes for a cool drink and a hot meal. The host expected stories, of course, always they expected to hear stories. Martha’s sister, Mary, especially loved them. And this man seemed to tell the strangest ones. Like that story about a Samaritan – a Samaritan! – who helped a man on the side of the road when a priest and a Levite passed him by… so bizarre! Such stories! And so there Mary sat, riveted. She sat there for so long, listening to Jesus’ stories, that she didn’t even notice when her sister got up to clear the table.

I’d rather not repeat what happens next. It is one of those ugly arguments that ends a perfectly good meal. Do we really need to tease out who is in the wrong? Mary fails to do her duty, Martha reacts inappropriately, and then Jesus tells off his hardworking host in an act of shocking rudeness. There is enough blame to pass around, even, yes, to Jesus, whose words clearly break with any reasonable standard of good manners.

And perhaps that is because Jesus is no angel. He is, in fact… human. I don’t mean simply that he makes mistakes, I mean that he is really, truly, fundamentally human. As Paul writes in today’s excerpt from Colossians, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in flesh and blood, that through this incarnation God was pleased to reconcile all things.

But incarnation is messy. It means that Jesus enters into our messy lives, gets involved with the push and pull of our messy relationships, gets in the middle of messy arguments that good etiquette advises we stay out of. But Jesus doesn’t stay out of them. He gets right into the middle of everything. He says rude things. He commits the occasional – ok, the frequent – faux pas. Through this incarnation God was pleased to reconcile all things.

Abraham knew as much. What the three strangers said was ludicrous, borderline offensive in its outright disregard for common sense. And yet contained within the craziness was a promise of new life, a promise God was making a reality through the very presence of these people in Abraham’s midst.

In the story of Abraham and Sarah, in the story of Mary and Martha, in the mystical words of Paul, we catch a glimpse of a God who drew near to us by becoming as human as we are, that through Christ we might meet God at the table here, and at every table of our lives.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Help

2010-07-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
for St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

Since arriving in the Northwest – and especially since the weather has been a little nicer – my wife and I have been doing a little camping. Just last week we camped our way down to Crater Lake and up the Oregon Coast, and I think after several nights of sleeping under the stars we’re finally starting to get the hang of it.

It wasn’t always this way.

The first time we tried camping this year was on the Olympic Peninsula, at the Kalaloch Campground in Olympic National Park. We found a glorious campsite, perched on a bluff overlooking the endless horizon of the Pacific Ocean. If you were to try and nab that campsite on a weekend in July or August, good luck. But we were camping on the first weekend in May. April showers were not just lingering, they were throwing an after-party and they had invited high winds and crashing waves to join them. There were a few other brave souls who had decided to crash the joint, but they were huddled in their cars and RVs, gaping at the storm through fogged up windows. This was no place for first-time tent campers.

But adventure was out there, and so we soldiered on. We stretched out the rainfly over our little tent and tried to stake it into the ground. Except that, despite the torrential rain, the ground was still hard as cement. And I had forgotten a hammer. So I tried lashing it to a tree, to a watercooler, to a picnic table… nothing really seemed to work. All the while the wind and rain and gray sea worked up a frenzy around us.

Suddenly a man stepped out of the RV parked next to us. Under the pouring rain he walked over and stuck out his hand in a friendly greeting. He introduced himself and said he and his family would be staying in the camper next to us all night, that we’d be neighbors for the evening. Then he looked over at our tent, and back at us. And then he asked us a very important question.

“Do ya’ll need any help?”

Nope, I said, we’re good. Got it all under control. Thanks for the offer, really, but we’re doing fine.

It can be hard to accept help when we need it.

Many of us were raised to be good helpers, to serve our neighbor in need. Our gospel story for today is often cited as a prime example of how to serve our neighbor in need; in fact, the idea of being a “Good Samaritan” to a person in trouble has made this parable part of the common lexicon. Sometimes we even put laws into place to make sure this sort of helping happens; Washington State has had a “Good Samaritan” law” for a few years now.

Of course, as a church community we’ve been hearing the story of the Good Samaritan for years. The idea of helping those around us has become so ingrained in us that we’ve come up with all sorts of ways to serve our neighbors in need. We have a soup kitchen, and a garden that feeds our soup kitchen; we have a fellowship hall that we turn over to folks who need a place to sleep for the night; we have rooms that we rent out to recovery groups; we even support a public policy office to advocate for structural changes that might help heal society’s systemic sickness, and not just its symptoms. We are not the only community of faith that does so; in fact, so many churches do things like this that I wonder why there aren’t more congregations in the ELCA with the name of Good Samaritan Lutheran Church.

But here’s the thing: Service is only one side of the parable we hear today.

The story Luke tells begins with someone standing up and asking Jesus a question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
The question itself is a bit comical in its incoherence. The person speaks of an eternal life – in other words, the full life that God intends for us – inherited, received as a free gift, salvation through grace alone. He’s practically a Lutheran, what with his theological training and understanding of God’s grace as freely given to all, inherited, not earned. And yet, like so many of us Lutherans, he still finds himself asking what more he must do to receive it.

And so Jesus tells him a story. It is the story of a man going down the road, making his way through life. For a while things are going okay but soon life takes its toll. Best-laid plans end abruptly; the road map is stripped away. He might as well be dead, for all he has left.

Ah, Jesus’ listener is thinking, this is where I come in. A person in need of help, surely that is my neighbor! And, sure enough, along come a couple of religious folks, a couple of helpers.

Except that they just pass on through the story. Before the listener can raise an objection, another character has arrived on the scene. It is a Samaritan, an outcast, a person living on the margins of society, a homeless person, an undocumented immigrant, a name on the no-fly list, a convicted felon, a drug addict. At worst, the Samaritan is outside the bounds of who we are supposed to help. At best, the Samaritan is a helpee, one to be helped, not a helper.

But the Samaritan is shown to bear the image of a loving God just as surely as any the priest and the churchgoer, maybe even so more, as Jesus tells it. The Samaritan comes near the man in the ditch, perhaps because he knows the ditch himself. The Samaritan is moved with pity. He is moved like the father of the prodigal son is moved when he sees his lost boy. He is moved like Jesus is moved when he sees the widow whose only son is carried out in a funeral procession. Luke uses the same word three times in his gospel, a verb describing a heart broken in compassion, once to describe the prodigal father, once to describe Jesus, once to describe the Good Samaritan.

And then this Samaritan who bears the likeness of his Creator, who shares the compassionate heart of Christ, bandages the wounded man, puts a salve on his cuts and bruises, like aloe on a sunburn. He nurses the man in the ditch back to health.

Jesus concludes the story with a question, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” But here again is a question that reveals even more than its answer. We thought Jesus was going to tell us about a neighbor in need, but instead Jesus shows us the neighbor as one who gives. The one in need in the story, the one in the ditch, the one with wounds in need of healing, is not the neighbor, but us.

It is no accident that Jesus tells this story right after he has sent seventy disciples out into the world to heal the sick and preach the gospel, using words if necessary, and relying on the people they meet for shelter and sustenance. As Pastor Carol preached last week, Jesus sends his disciples out to be interdependent. As they carry out the mission of God in the world, Jesus instructs his disciples to receive even as they give.

Because this inhaling and exhaling of receiving and giving is what it means to live into eternal life, into the life God intends for us. This is what it means to be fully reconciled with God and with one another. Receive the peace of Christ. Then share the peace of Christ you have received.

Perhaps that is why God promises to meet us in the water and in the wine. They are not things we can accomplish, but only gifts we can receive.

In baptism and communion, we become like the man in the ditch. In the water and the wine, salve is put on our wounds, and we are anointed, and given a new life to live. It is a way of life that we inherit from God through a cloud of witnesses, Samaritans and Seattleites alike.

And so we come again, like the one in the ditch, broken and wounded, run down and ready for Sabbath, in need, once again, of a fresh start. In water and word, in bread and wine, in a community gathered, we come to receive the grace, the mercy, and the love of God.

It is only then that we hear Jesus saying, Go. Go and do likewise. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the earth, advocate for justice. Share the grace, the mercy, the love you have received. For these are the gifts of God, and they are given for you and for all the people of God.

Amen.

Common Cup

2010-06-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

The following is my "Intern's Message" for the July church newsletter.

For the last few weeks Chris and I have gathered with others at the Phinney Neighborhood Association (PNA) to watch World Cup matches on the giant screen set up there. Doors opened at 6:30am on most mornings, yet people streamed in, filling the little basement room to the brim with the colors of their countries. Red, white, and blue were popular, of course, but here in our nation – and neighborhood – of immigrants there were also yellow-jerseyed South Africans, Parisians decked out in bleu, sky-striped Argentines, Dutch orangemen, even a white-shirted Slovenian here and there. (Chris and I, we admit, were decked out proudly in a deep green, for our adopted side of Mexican futbolistas.)

It is an extraordinary thing to see people being gathered together, to see their different-colored strands of life side by side. Yet God is doing just this sort of thing at St John United all the time. Our diversity may not lie in the colors of our flags or the colors of our skin – not yet, anyway – but our community is still one marked by many strands, many generations, many vocations, many gifts, many stories. Through word and meal, God gathers our many strands and weaves us together, that we might be a sign of God’s reconciling love for all the world.

Recently I have seen this happening in some pretty amazing ways. In our church garden people have gathered to work and play, to bless and to plant, to sing and – at upcoming neighborhood potlucks – to eat. At a brewpub down the street, people have gathered for Theology Pub nights where we share our stories of faith, our sources of hope, our experiences of divine love – and where every once in a while we even pull the bartender into the conversation. On “U2 Sunday,” people of different generations and different musical backgrounds gathered to sing a few new songs, drawn from the hymnbook of the FM radio, the culmination of several weeks of study and practice together.

What wondrous weaving will God do among us in the weeks and months to come? Some clues can be found in this newsletter, in upcoming events planned and publicized. Other clues can be found in your own heart and head, in the hopes and dreams you have for this place. Over the next several weeks there will be a variety of opportunities for conversation about what God is doing in this congregation and how we can invite more people to be a part of it. Please join us in whatever way you are able, that your strand, too, might be ever more a part of God’s great tapestry, woven from our life together.

May God continue to make and re-make us throughout this season of extra-ordinary time.

In Christ,
 Intern Matt

SJU2

2010-06-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

Sermon for U2 Sunday, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, 2010
for St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

For the last couple of weeks we have been holding adult forums in which we have been looking at the music and words and images in the work of the popular music group U2. In particular we have been looking at the spirituality, and the Scripture, and the theology that is present in their art. We’ve had some really good conversations during these adult forums, so much so that we’ve had several requests for more opportunities to take part in these discussions. So, I thought about that, and I thought that maybe we could it during worship.

In just a moment I’m going to ask you to turn to the person sitting in front of you or behind you. I’d like you to share about music that has been meaningful to you in your life. It might be a favorite hymn or a favorite composer, it might be a particular style of music or even a pop song, just share about music that has been meaningful to you in your life. I’ll give you just a few minutes. Ready, go!

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Ok, so let’s hear about some of the music that’s been meaningful to the people of St John United. If you’re willing to share, go ahead and shout it out. What kind of music did you talk about?

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Ok, so I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we like a lot of different kinds of music. Different music speaks to different people, and I suppose that should come as no surprise. What’s a little more surprising, maybe, is that some of the music that has been meaningful to us is music we have experienced in church, while other music that has been meaningful to us is music we have experienced outside of church.

And the reason, I think, that we find many kinds of music meaningful is because God is actually present in many different places – not only in church, in the sanctuary and in the pews, but also out there, in the world, too.

Now, I know that I’m preaching to the choir here. The people of St John United know that God is present outside these walls. All you have to do is look out the window of the Emmaus Lounge or the Fellowship Hall on a clear day and you know that God is present in the mountains and in the trees, and in the waters, and in the skies… you all know this.

But what if God was not only in the rivers and mountains and trees but what if, what if God was present on the radio, too? What God were present at the concert hall, or on the television, or at the movies? Wouldn’t that be good news? What if we could say, “You want to know God, turn on the radio. No, I don’t mean the preacher on the old-time gospel hour, I mean the FM Station, the one playing Kanye West and Arcade Fire!” What if God were on KEXP?

Well, I might as confess it: I do believe that God is on KEXP, and on every radio station and in every concert hall and in every art gallery and in every piece of literature in which people find meaning. Now, I don’t always know myself how God is present in every kind of music, but if the music is moving you in some way, I’ve got to believe that the Spirit is there. It might take some work to discern her, but she’s there, moving mysteriously through our lives like a song coming out the window of a car driving down the street.

In the case of the artist whose work we celebrate today, U2, the experience of God is expressed not only the sound but in the words, too. In our first song, we sang about Love, we might say love with a capital L. This capital-L Love leaves a mark on us, just like on Ash Wednesday when we take the mark of the cross on our foreheads, a mark of our baptism, a mark of divine love that heals our scars, a mark of divine love that reconciles us, a mark of divine love that justifies us with God and with one another, so that we cannot help but cry a joyful noise. These are the marks of an ancient faith, a Christian faith, even a Lutheran faith – even if they are expressed in a rhythm that is a little different from the one we’re used to.

Martin Luther would have loved the words of a song like “Magnificent,” I think, even if the rhythms might have struck him as odd. Luther loved music, and knew that music could be a vessel for the love of God. Luther once wrote that “the riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them. In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.” Martin Luther said that.

But, dear friends in Christ, Martin Luther lived in a different time. We have access to more kinds of music than Luther did. We have the ability to hear, and therefore to find meaning in, a greater range of musical styles than we have ever had before. And then, on top of that, we have invented these little devices, so that we can assemble our very own playlists, our very own collections of the music that is meaningful to us. You have yours, and I have mine. We no longer need to come into contact with another human being in order to find meaning in music or in lots of other places, for that matter. We can just put in our headphones and find Jesus.

In this new world we are creating for ourselves, will there be any need for a church?

Today we have a gospel story that speaks quite directly to this situation. Jesus and his disciples are sailing on, sailing on through the Lake of Galilee, sailing on through time and space, as Jesus and his followers always do, when Jesus meets a man with a familiar problem.

The man is afflicted by demons, as so many of us are. We don’t usually personify our demons in the 21st century anymore, but we still wrestle with fears and doubts, addictions and destructive habits. This particular man didn’t have just a few of these demons, he had many of them. And they tormented him constantly. As a result, he was tied up with chains and shackles.

But the chains and shackles he could break on his own. He could get free, in a way, to an extent. Somehow that didn’t make him whole. It wasn’t enough, and at the end of the day he would find himself alone with his demons.

Along comes Jesus. When Jesus meets the man, he performs two miracles. First he heals the man, he helps the man escape his demons. He gives him a way out. He saves him. And so the man falls at Jesus’ feet, and worships him.

But this is only the first miracle. The second miracle is when Jesus sends the man back to his people, back to community. Jesus reconciles the man with the people around him, and restores him to community.

At first, the man Jesus saved doesn’t want to go. They won’t accept me, he tells Jesus.

But Jesus knows that the man will never be whole without a community. And Jesus knows that the community will never be whole without him.

Jesus knows that community is not the easy thing. But it is at the very heart of what God is doing in the world. God’s love is gathering us together, with all of our differences, and making us into one new thing, one new body, through which one blood flows. As another U2 song puts it, we have One life, with each other, sisters and brothers. As Paul puts it in his letter to the Galatians, there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, insider and outsider, for in Christ Jesus all of you are one.

One, but not the same. One, but not the same. You see, Jesus doesn’t just send the man back to community so he can sit down and shut up. He sends him there to tell his community about how God had been active in his life. And so, Luke tells us, “the man went back and preached all over town everything that God did in him.”

Several years ago, a group of church people got together, and, in talking with one another, they realized that God had done something in them through the music of U2. And so they said, why don’t we tell people about what God did in us through this music? And why don’t we tell them not just with words, but by actually bringing the songs and the images and the themes of global justice and divine love that U2 speaks of into our worship? And so they did. And they held the first ever U2 Sunday.

So how about you? Where has God been active in your life lately? And how can you bring that activity of God into worship?

Today we shared about music that has been meaningful to us, but that is only one of many places where God is active in our lives, moving in mysterious ways through our work and our play, through our daily commute and our nightly meals, through the people we meet in our neighborhood and beyond. Don’t leave those experiences at the door. All you have to do is look around to see the ways that people have brought their gifts and their stories into worship.

The music we have today is but one example of this. Our musicians and singers today came from different places, with different backgrounds, and different musical training. Coming together to do a new thing wasn’t easy. And yet together we were able to do something we could never have done alone.

God’s love is like that.

It is a love that gathers us together that we might sing a new song together, whether it is a song from our hymnal, or a song from the radio.

It is a love that gathers us together to write letters and to make offerings, to pray and to advocate locally and globally as we live out God’s justice-making, peace-making love around the world and around the block.

It is a love that gathers us together at a table, and gives us a window through which we might catch a glimpse of the world made whole.

So come to the table, to this window under the skies. Share the bread and the wine. Look around, and see what God’s love has done. Look around, and see what God’s love is doing.

Amen.

Life of Folk

2010-06-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, 2010
for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Shoreline, Washington

A few weeks ago my wife and I attended the Northwest Folklife Festival at Seattle Center.

I love the Northwest Folklife Festival. So much creativity in one place!

As we walked around, we saw the usual acoustic guitarists, plumbing their trade, looking for a few dollars here and there; and then their bigger cousins, not far away, the rollicking rockabilly bands set up on sidewalk corners, wearing old-timey costumes, inspiring involuntary hand-claps and foot-stomps.

Walk a little further on, though, and the cultural milieu takes a different turn: belly dancers moving to the melody of a bassoon, two little girls looking on, their eyes wide. In the open, tent-like building just next door there were dancers of a different sort, square dancers taking their turn with Cajun zydeco.

Keep walking and there’s no telling what you might find. Marimba players and country western singers, Irish dancers and rock en español, high school jazz bands and gospel choirs, countless forms of creativity everywhere you look.

It is as if the walls of a great cultural center had suddenly fallen away, and the vibrant activity inside spilled out into the streets and the sidewalks, the parks and the public spaces. In fact, it is as if there are no walls at all anymore, as if there are no limits on what kind of thing can be done, no limits to the heights of creativity that can be achieved, no limits on the diversity of sound and color and shape that can be woven together into the tapestry of the world.

One of the reasons I love attending the Northwest Folklife Festival so much is that the kind of limitless creativity present there can sometimes be hidden in the everyday world we live in. It’s still there, of course, it’s just that sometimes we like to put it inside of neat little boxes. Classical music on this radio station, rock music on another. Lutherans in this building, Roman Catholics in another. Church over here, politics over there. Good people here, bad people there.

Our gospel story for today reflects this tendency we have to create boundaries.

A Pharisee has invited Jesus to dinner. Like most of us who eat with Jesus, the Pharisee didn’t quite know what he was getting into.

“Jesus,” Luke tells us, “went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table.”

Luke’s description is notable for what it doesn’t tell us. It doesn’t tell us that Jesus was welcomed warmly. It doesn’t tell us that Jesus was offered a drink, or a place to hang his coat, or a proper introduction to the other dinner guests. In Jesus’ day the polite protocol for hospitality was different; a guest was to be given water with which to wash his own dusty feet – a different mode of hospitality from ours, but the idea is the same. There are certain things you do to welcome a guest into your home. And the Pharisee didn’t do them.

Maybe he was rushed. Maybe he was distracted. Maybe he was nervous about having Jesus over for dinner – wouldn’t you be? For whatever reason, the Pharisee failed to do what he was supposed to do.

Jesus didn’t say anything. Maybe he could see just how nervous or distracted or rushed the Pharisee was, and so he let it go, and quietly forgave him.

But word got out, all the same. Word got out into the streets. Simon the Pharisee made a huge faux pas! He failed to offer Jesus water for his dusty feet! And now poor Jesus is sitting there with his dirt-caked toenails at the dinner table. How embarrassing!

A woman overhears this while she is standing on a street corner. As soon as she hears what has happened, she doesn’t hesitate. She goes out and buys a jar of expensive bubble bath, and goes straight to the house where Jesus is staying. She walks right in through the open door, kneels at Jesus’ feet, and begins scrubbing.

The other dinner guests are horrified. What is this woman doing? When Jesus does not share their disapproval, they become horrified at Jesus. What is he doing?

But Jesus knows. Jesus knows that this woman can only perform such radical, boundary-breaking service because the love of God, the forgiving and renewing love of God, flows through her life, and moves her to action.

God’s love is like that. As it flows through us, it leads us to do things that don’t fit within neat boundaries. God’s love moves us to color outside the lines, even if it means that things get a little messy, at least by our standards. God’s love is so plentiful it spills right over the boundary walls we set up, carrying us right along with it. And when we experience this love, we can find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d do.

Just ask Nathan, the prophet in our story from 2 Samuel. Nathan is God’s lobbyist, hired to speak up on behalf of God’s beloved people. The rich, Nathan says, have been stealing from the poor, God’s beloved. It is not a truth the rich want to hear, and in a world of boundaries Nathan never should have received a hearing. He might as well have stayed home.

But Nathan is moved by God’s love, moved not only to serve those in need but to advocate on their behalf. Nathan is sent by God to speak to those in power and to tell the truth about injustice. To do so, Nathan speaks a word of judgment about the broken present, and the broken future that will result from it. But Nathan also speaks a word of hope: All is not lost, for God’s love can put away even this sin, the sin of injustice; God’s love can renew even this world, and make it right once more.

And God makes us a part of this renewal. Whenever love moves us, like the woman at Jesus’ feet, to offer radical service to a neighbor in need, God’s love is there, renewing the world. Whenever love moves us, like the prophet Nathan, to speak up on behalf of a neighbor in need, God’s love is there, renewing the world.

This year I have had the privilege of working at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State. In my time at the LPPO, I have seen the boundary-crossing, world-renewing love of God reflected in the lives of God’s people.

I have seen God’s love reflected in congregations engaged in radical service to their neighbors around them, through soup kitchens and community gardens, food pantries and overnight shelters.

I have seen God’s love reflected in community formed across racial, cultural, and economic lines, people brought together to pursue God’s project of a more just and peaceful world.

And I have seen God’s love reflected in people who are moved to go to the halls of power, the city council or the state legislature or the US Congress, by writing letters and making phone calls and scheduling visits to advocate for and with neighbors in need.

God’s love moves people to do these things, to move beyond conventional boundaries and into the very body of Christ, a body that goes out into the streets and the sidewalks, the parks and the public spaces, and makes God’s creative, justice-making love known in the world we live in.

So how about you? What boundaries is God’s love moving you to cross this week?

Maybe God is leading you to write a letter to the newspaper or to an elected official. Maybe God is leading you to make a phone call to your senator or representative. Maybe God is leading you to sign a petition or simply to learn about one.

I cannot tell you where God will lead you next. But if you want to find out, you might begin in the same way our gospel story began today – at a table with Jesus.

There is a table here, and it is almost ready. Come, and eat with Jesus. Come, and discover that you are already filled with God’s love. Come, and discover that you are already have what you need to live it out in the world. Come, taste and see. Amen.

Ordinary Time

2010-06-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

A sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost
at St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

Welcome to Ordinary Time!

Ordinary Time is a time in the church year that is sort of between seasons, or at least between festival seasons. One of the ways we tell the story of salvation in church is through the stories of these seasons, beginning with Advent and moving into Christmas, and then Epiphany, then Lent, then Easter, then Pentecost, and then last week Holy Trinity Sunday. As we tell the story week after week, season after season, we see the larger story arc develop. It’s like watching a serial TV show - like LOST, for example.

Now, I never followed LOST, my geek TV show was – um, Buffy the Vampire Slayer – but is anyone here a LOST fan? If you are a LOST fan, you probably know that if you watched it every week you start to see how the different episodes fit into a larger story.

Well, the stories we hear in church are like that too. When we hear them week after week, we can start to see how they tell a larger story over the course of the season.

So today we kick off a new season, a time we call “ordinary.”

I wonder what “ordinary time” will look like.

One way to get at it might be to think about what our own ordinary lives look like in this so-called “ordinary time.” So let’s do that. Let’s take just a few minutes to share with each other what’s going on in our lives in “ordinary time.”

So, please turn to your neighbor, and share with each other your low point during the week, what was your low light, maybe something you could have done without this week.

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Ok, now, turn to your neighbor again, and share with each other your high point during the week, your highlight, the best thing that happened to you this week.

Well. I don’t know what you all were talking about, but judging from the way the volume jumped up there it sure sounds like there is some stuff happening in ordinary time. Some not so good stuff, for sure, right? Some of our low points can be pretty serious. But, then, too, our high points can be pretty serious, too. Ordinary time is not so ordinary, after all.

Today, we heard three Bible stories that set the stage for what is to come in ordinary time.
We have a story from 1 Kings, in a story from Galatians, and in a story from Luke in which we hear stories that really are not that far removed from the stories of our everyday lives. People struggle to make ends meet. People get sick, and they don’t get better. People hurt each other, and sometimes they hurt the very people they love the most. People get so excited about an idea that they can’t see the trees for the forest. People die, and funerals are held. This is the same world we live in.

And yet, just like the world we live in, there is more going on in these stories, isn’t there? In the midst of all the dirt, there are green shoots of life in places where we least expect it.

In the first of these stories, the prophet Elijah raises a widow’s only son from the dead. Well, actually the Hebrew isn’t clear about what happened. Scholars point out that the ancient text is ambiguous about whether the boy was dead or just seemed dead, looked dead, acted dead, or really was dead. It is as if the writers of this story found themselves tasked with reporting on an event that was so new they didn’t really know how to write about it. Raising someone from the dead? This hadn’t happened before. The thing that God did was so new that it was hard to be clear about what was going on.

In the second story, from Galatians, Paul tells the story of his life. Paul writes, “I was zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” Paul is so zealous about these holy traditions, in fact, that he was, ironically, destroying the church of God. And then, Paul writes, God “called me through his grace.” As if something just happened out of the blue that changed everything. And then, without the proper training, without consulting with the authorities, without going through the proper channels, without jumping through the right hoops, without trusting the process, Paul just starts doing stuff, stuff like talking about what happened to him, he just starts telling people about the grace he’s experienced. He doesn’t need any theological training; he just tells them what happened.

And then, in the final story, from Luke, Jesus and all those who are travelling with him come upon a woman who is mourning the death of her future. Luke tells us that her only son had died, and she was a widow. Her grief must have been deep; that would be easy to assume even if the first words Jesus says to her didn’t acknowledge her tears. But in the first century, there would be even worse hardships to come. As a widow, she was already one of the most vulnerable people in society. This woman was facing a very uncertain future, if one could say she was facing a future at all.

But when Jesus shows up and starts doing crazy things. He breaks the religious rules by touching a coffin. Then he raises a dead person to life, and in so doing raises the widow to life, too, raises this family to life. And when the bystanders see what has happened, it changes the way they see the world. “God is back,” they say, “looking to the needs of his people!” Jesus lifts up first one person, then a family, then a whole village, until, Luke tells us, “the news of Jesus spread all through the country.”

Well. All well and good for Bible stories, but can the same be true here, in our ordinary lives? Can God do a new thing among us?

Last week the (RED) campaign released a film on HBO and YouTube called The Lazarus Effect. It’s about a new class of antiretroviral medications for HIV/AIDS patients. These tiny little pills are so effective that witnesses have been talking about a Lazarus Effect, after the man Jesus raised from death to life. These people are near death, and they are coming back to life because of pills that cost 40 cents a piece. This is a new thing happening in the world.

Last fall our neighborhood saw a series of arson fires put an end to local businesses, restaurants and gathering spaces. And now, less than a year later, several of those businesses are preparing to reopen once again – new life, right in our neighborhood.

And right here at in this congregation, new things are happening. Babies are being born. New garden plots are being divvied up. Plans are being made for summer potlucks with the neighbors. Concerts are being organized. All sorts of new things happening, like green shoots coming up out of the ground.

What will our green shoots look like in the days and weeks and months to come? I can’t say, but given the things that happen in ordinary time – the things that have happened in your life this week, the things that happen in our Bible stories, the things that are happening in the world, in the neighborhood, in our congregation, given all of these things that happen in ordinary time, well - if you’re wondering what’s going to happen next, you might just want to be prepared for anything.

Welcome to ordinary time.

Amen.

Thanks and have fun being the Body

2010-05-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

An Advocacy Sermon for Ascension Day, 2010
for Luther Memorial Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

About a year ago an organization called 826 published a collection of letters written by kids to the president. They called the collection: Thanks And Have Fun Running the Country: Kids’ Letters to President Obama.

The subjects covered in these letters are comprehensive and offer the president advice on everything from what kind of pet he ought to get for his family to detailed suggestions for changing the tax structure. For example:

Dear President Obama,

You are just like a big me, because I am from Chicago and I am biracial and have curly hair. I live in Seattle now, but I’m still from Chicago.

How do you feel about being president?

My advice for you and your family is be yourself and you will change the world. If I were president, I would try and make the world a better place.

Sincerely,

Avante Price, age 7
Seattle

Dear President Obama,

My name is Eli. I’m ten years old. I live in Seattle, Washington. I am the oldest child in my family. I have one sister named Mahala. I have two dogs named Maggie and Roger. My favorite series of books is Harry Potter. It’s the best series in the world!

Now that you’ve heard about me, I want to give you ideas about how to make our country prosper. I need to bring up a huge problem, the economy! I have a chain of events that you could trigger to lower the economy. First, get a green design company to design a new environmentally safe piece of technology. Then, create new jobs to install the new piece of technology. Finally, from the new jobs people will have more money, there will be less homeless people, which will end in a better economy.

I am very lucky to be writing to you like this. I hope you enjoyed my idea for a better country. It was very enjoyable writing to you like this, President Obama.

Yours truly,

Eli, age 10
Seattle

Dear Obama,

I like you because you won. We saw you on TV. I hope I am your friend.

Sincerely,

Edwin, age 6
Los Angeles

When I read these letters again last week, I was floored by what these kids had to say. In these letters you see their clear-eyed sense of what is broken in the world, their hope in the possibilities of the future, and, maybe most of all, their boldness in seeking to make friends with another person, even if that person happened to be the president of the United States. It is truly amazing.

And yet as I marveled at these things, my heart sank, because the spirit of these letters is so different from the more, shall we say, “adult” rhetoric that is being hurled about in the public square these days.

Some of the things that have been spoken over megaphones recently have been so awful they are not repeatable in polite pulpits. We hear them at rallies and on television sets, over the airwaves and over the Internet, in statements from elected officials including even, yes, from time to time, from the president himself as a new election season swings into high gear.

Of course I am speaking about the extreme poles of the political landscape, but none of us are immune from such things. We catch the same disease whenever we say things that went maybe a bit too far into personal attack. And we show the same symptoms whenever we have just kept silent when a word of truth, a word of peace, a word of love needed to be spoken to a person – even, yes, to an elected official – who needed to hear it.

Of course, we don’t mean to be this way. We often think we have good reason for either digging our trenches or staying out of the fray. A mighty fortress is our God, right? A sword – or a shield – victorious? That’s how the hymn goes, isn’t it?

But what if we humans have, by some horrible mistake, misjudged things? What if, instead of building a fortress around ourselves with a sword or a shield, what if we are actually building ourselves prisons, and locking ourselves inside their cells? What if we have jailed ourselves?

Today we remember when Jesus prayed for the apostles he had chosen and prepared them for mission in the world. In carrying out that mission, they would face consequences. When Paul and Silas, two apostles of the early church, carried out their mission in the world, they were thrown into jail for it.

Most of us don’t often face this problem in twenty-first century America – though, from time to time, our mission does get us into trouble with the powers that be. But we are no strangers to being held back by chains of other sorts. Too often, for us, they are chains we have made for ourselves – and chains we have made for others, too. We are jailers and prisoners at the very same time.

What a mess. Is there any hope for a people like us?

Three little words provide the answer.

Christ is Risen.
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Christ is risen indeed, from the earth to cross, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to sky, so we lift his name on high.

But there is more. For having risen, Christ now lifts our names on high, praying on our behalf, interceding on our behalf, acting on our behalf. On this Ascension Day, we remember when Christ rose not to escape the earth but pray, to intercede, to act on its behalf. On this Ascension Day, we remember when Christ became our advocate.

Because of what our advocate has done, we are freed from our prison cells, free to go and do likewise, free to go and free others from the cells they have built for themselves and for the cells we have put them in. The prisons of our world are many and varied.

Some are shackled by hunger and poverty. Others cannot shake the chains of unaffordable housing or healthcare. Many are behind the bars of a broken justice system. In faraway countries and on our own Gulf Coast there are those who find their freedom threatened by changes in the environment brought about by unsustainable practices. There are young people who yearn for quality and equality in education. And there are those, even in our day, who still struggle for civil and human rights.

The chains are many. But Christ’s advocates are many, too, and they are making the love of the Risen Christ known in the world by speaking up for justice and peace, for freedom and for risen life, for the neighborhood and for all the earth. Christ is clothing his people with power from on high. The same power that raised Christ from the dead is being placed on us to go and do likewise in the world, to go and do God’s liberating work with our hands.

In my internship at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, I have seen God’s people doing God’s work with their hands in so many different ways.

In congregations across the state, I have seen God’s people fold their hands and pray on behalf of those who are imprisoned by injustice.

In congregations across this city, I have seen God’s people lift up their hands to hold signs and banners at marches and rallies.

And in congregations across this synod including, yes, at Synod Assembly this past weekend, I have seen God’s people take into their hands a pencil and a piece of paper and write letters to representatives, to senators, to the governor of Washington State, and even, sometimes, to the President of the United States.

Through writing letters, through marching at rallies, through praying on behalf of others, God’s people, God’s witnessing, serving, advocating people, are not looking up toward heaven for a Christ in the clouds. For we have heard the words from Ephesians, and we know that Christ is here working through us, his body in the world.

Come to the table. Receive the body. Become the body.

In Jesus’ name,
Amen.

Our Quilted Future

2010-05-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Mother’s Day, and Lutheran World Relief (Quilts) Sunday, 2010
For St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

Dear friends in Christ, it is still the season of Easter. Therefore:

Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

A prayer before preaching. This prayer is one I heard from Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he prayed it in an interview on public radio this week. I know it’s an old prayer, a traditional one, but I’ll always hear Archbishop Tutu’s voice when I hear it. Let us pray.

Come holy spirit, fill the hearts of they faithful people, and kindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy spirit and they shall be made, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth. Amen.

I had a friend in town last weekend. When he arrived, he told me he had never seen mountains.

He had never seen mountains! I said, “Oh-ho! Well, my friend, you have come to the right place. This is one of the best places in the country to see mountains. You can stand in one spot, look to the west and see mountains, the Olympics, a jagged earthen fence between the Sound and the ocean. Then you can turn around, look to the east, and see more mountains, the Cascades, dotting the landscape from here up to Canada and down to Northern California. Then you can look to the south, and there’s the biggest mountain I’ve ever seen, the greatest of the Cascades, Tahoma, Mount Rainier! Seriously, dude. You want to see mountains? This is the place.”

But do you all remember what the weather was like last weekend?

We never did see any mountains.

Late on Saturday we took a ferry ride across the sound, and at one point I pointed west and I said, “Look! You can kind of almost see a shadow of the mountains, behind the clouds there!” He said, “Yeah… I guess I can kind of see it… sure.” He couldn’t see it. My friend came to Seattle, a place surrounded by mountains, and he went back home never saw having seen one.

Sometimes it is difficult to see what lies on the horizon.

One of my spiritual companions, Bono of U2, has a phrase for the kind of faith required to live into what God is doing even when we can’t always see it from day to day. Bono calls this kind of faith “vision over visibility.” Vision over visibility. Holding on to the vision of God’s future even when our ability see that vision becomes obscured.

In our reading from Revelation today, John of Patmos is given a vision of God’s future for all creation. Visibility had become obscured in his world, and so he needed a vision to keep him moving forward. And on one holy day long ago, he saw it: God renewing the face of the earth! A river of healing flowing through his city, washing away all the brokenness. A great tree growing up beside it, with plenty of life-giving fruit for all of God’s hungry people.

If John were writing in our day, God might have taken him to the top of Mount Rainier and given him a telescope to look down on Phinney Avenue, right down on this neighborhood around Woodland Park Zoo, and John would see the new creation coming alive in our neighborhood, a wild western river of healing and a big Red Cedar Tree with so much fruit there wouldn’t be any need for a soup kitchen anymore. “High heaven’s kingdom come on earth,” in the words of Wendell Berry.

On some holy day long ago, the author of Revelation could see it. No more hurting, whether from surface wounds or deeper ones. No more hunger, whether for bread or for more than bread.

But some days it’s difficult to see the vision of God’s future. Grey clouds move in, obscuring the glorious mountains beyond, with their green trees and wet snows. Some days a fog comes in so thick that from up here on the Ridge I can barely see the waters of the Sound.

Of course, those are just weather patterns. Fog dissipates, clouds break up and move on. What’s worse is when our visibility is obscured by painful events that make it hard to see God’s vision of a brighter tomorrow. Life can dis-illusion us, un-vision us, take away the vision that just yesterday we really believed was possible.

I think of the oil spill on the Gulf Coast. I think of racial profiling and discrimination not only in the Southwest but across the country. I think of the people in our neighborhood who are still dealing with the aftermath of buildings burned down in last fall’s devastating arson fires. And this week, I think of Sam Malkandi deported, and of a family torn apart. The visibility of God’s future can grow dim very quickly.

Jesus knew this was going to be a problem. In our reading from the gospel of John, Jesus is speaking to his disciples about a time when the memory of the resurrection will fade and the vision of God’s coming future will seem to be too far off. Jesus will eventually leave – in a physical sense, at least. And the new creation will seem further and further away.

But God has more than two ways of being with us. In this passage Jesus begins to prepare us for Pentecost, preparing us for the arrival of the one who will remind us of the vision when the visibility gets bad, who will make sure we’ll remember that Mount Rainier and the Olympics and the Cascades are still there even when clouds roll in, who will make sure we remember that the path into a brighter future is still there, even when the lights grow dim.

Maybe that’s why the Spirit is so often referred to with feminine pronouns. God has no human gender, of course, but if we are to use human concepts to make sense out of God, we might do well to use the image of a mom to imagine the Spirit’s work.

Moms can bandage our skin when we fall down and scrape a knee. They can bandage our hearts when they are broken by hurt feelings or a horrible injustice. They hold out a hand when the lights grow dim.

Our mothers – and all those who are like mothers to us: grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, friends, mentors, fathers, and yes, even sometimes kids when one day they become mothers of a different sort caring for their own mothers– these mothers of all kinds show us how the Holy Spirit works.

And at its best, this is what the church does, too. It’s no coincidence, after all, that our brothers and sisters in other Christian traditions refer to a “Mother Church.” The church is propelled out into the neighborhood, to remind the world that God is here, working for a brighter tomorrow. Through our hands, God feeds and shelters people. Through our hands, God nurtures the gardens of creation. Through our hands, God moves the clouds aside to show us the vision of a future we can’t always see.

And through our hands, God is making that future vision a visible reality. That vision becomes visible, for example, in the quilts that our Fabric Fantasy group has been making and sending. Pieces of cloth have been sewn together into blankets, and then they have been sent abroad, to faraway places. And in that very sending, a new sewing takes place. God sews the fabric of the world, connecting people across continents, mending the brokenness and making the vision – making us – whole again. Through quilts like these, God is making us one, so that what happens to others there affects us here, and vice versa. God is making us one, so that there is no separation between us and them – no borders, only a common thread. God is making us one people on our way to a common future.

Hear again this passage from Revelation:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

God is producing leaves for the healing of the nations. Do you want to know what one of these leaves of healing looks like? I have one to show you.

(Ask the a few people to help display one of the quilt for all to see.)

This is but one sign of what God is doing. Each of us here has our own pieces of different-colored cloth within us, our own creative gifts God has given us for the purpose of being added to cosmic tapestry. Come now to the table, that God might knit us together.

Let us pray again the prayer of Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

Come holy spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful people, and kindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy spirit and they shall be made, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth. Amen.

Under the Sea

2010-04-22T14:09:00.001-07:00

The following is my "Intern's Message" for the May 2010 church newsletter.

The day after Easter, Chris and I took a mini-road-trip (a viajito, if you will) to the Olympic Peninsula to visit friends in Port Angeles and to check out the Tongue Point Marine Life Sanctuary, a collection of tide pools on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

We’ve seen miniature tide-life before; the photos we’ve taken of barnacles, bull kelp, rockweed and their watery friends that plaster our apartment walls are proof enough of that. But we’d never seen anything like what we found at Tongue Point.

Anemones that transform their dull above-water appearances into incomprehensibly vibrant colors, hot pinks and electric greens, when submerged in water. Starfish – huge starfish! – in oranges and purples Crayola couldn’t rival. And an endless carpet of mollusks – a mollusk planet, really – we eventually got used to walking on top of.

What worlds lay just beyond our horizons? What colors have we yet to see, to paint with? What thriving ecosystems are already at our shores, just waiting to be discovered?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Phyllis Tickle lecture at a nearby church in north Seattle. Tickle writes about “emerging” forms of Christianity, new ways of being and doing church that are part of an already-underway global shift that she believes will be as important as the Reformation.

As I listened to her muse about the future of global community and the future of the church, I thought about those tide pools and the vibrant worlds that flourished within them, worlds I’d never imagined could exist. Yet here they were, only a few hours from home. I wonder whether a discovery like our discovery of the tidepools is something like what God has in store for all of us in a future nearer than we think.

On May 2nd, Jerry Buss with be with us to lead a conversation during adult forum and to preach during worship. Jerry is the Director of Evangelical Outreach and Congregational Mission for the Northwest Washington Synod. I hope his visit will be one spark for an ongoing conversation about the vibrant discoveries God has in store for us here in this place, this year and in the years to come. Please join us.

I pray God’s blessing on all of us as one season of new life gives way to another.

In Christ,
Intern Matt

h2o

2010-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

So, the theme of this blog was to be "finding grace in the pacific northwest," but aside from occasionally posted sermons it hasn't really turned out that way....until now!

Last week, Chris and I were poking around the Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia, really for no other reason that (a) we have this deck of Seattle neighborhood walks and we had a Magnolia walk we hadn't done yet and (b) the Magnolia walk had a bookstore and a bakery on it. We like both.

In the bookstore I stumbled upon the April issue of National Geographic. Pretty much the entire issue is devoted to water. There's even a section on "Sacred Waters" with photos of a Greek Orthodox baptism and a Mexican cenote among other examples. But of course, the coolest thing was the fold-out map, seen above, which now hangs in my office.

We call Earth "the blue planet" because it is so covered with water, but when we think of the vastness of Earth's water we usually think of the oceans. This map is different: it charts all the river systems of the earth, the veins of the earth. When depicted this way, we can see that even most of Earth's land is saturated with water!

Ok, so all this is obvious, I know. But the map hangs in my office now as a reminder that the same water in which I was baptized, the same water countless other people of myriad faiths have held sacred, have held to be a place where the divine omnipresence is especially present, that that water is EVERYWHERE.

So what does this have to do with the Pacific Northwest? Elsewhere in the NG issue there is a mapping of the relative water-stressed-ness of different regions of Earth. Guess which area has almost no water stress (relatively speaking)? Yep. Right here in el pacifico noreste.

I suppose it's unfair, and theologically suspect, to conclude that there's more divine presence here simply because there's more water here - though many a soul who has spent an afternoon gazing at the Puget Sound, with the frozen-water-capped Olympic mountains beyond, has been sorely tempted to do so.

But I will conclude this: If you want to find a reminder of grace in the Pacific Northwest, you don't have far to look, in almost any direction. Including, but not limited to, up.

Easter Breath

2010-04-18T14:49:00.000-07:00

An advocacy sermon for Central Lutheran Church in Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington
on the Third Sunday of Easter, 2010

Acts 9:1-6
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

Eternal and all-merciful God, with all the angels and all the saints we laud your majesty and might. By the resurrection of your Son, show yourself to us and inspire us to follow Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

+++

Christ is Risen!

I love that we speak those words aloud throughout these seven Sundays of the Easter season. Of course, it would have been impossible to celebrate Easter for only one Sunday, because the more we hear about the resurrection, the more we see that while it begins at Christ’s empty tomb, it cannot be contained there.

New life overflows, spilling out of the tomb and into the lives of the disciples, spilling out of their locked doors and into the most public of spaces, spilling out of their little fishing boats and into all of creation. In today’s gospel Simon Peter even dives into the sea, as if he is going to share new life with the fish and urchins and bull kelp… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

For what interests me as much as the water Peter dives into is its cousin, the air, that invisible gaseous mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and traces of argon and carbon dioxide and other rarer and obscurer molecules that we are usually oblivious to but that we spend our lives swimming in, breathing it in and breathing it out.

The air moving in and out of us is one of many signs that we are alive. As the air moves in and out, so many things happen. Oxygen flows through our bloodstream and into our muscles, making it possible for us to move through the world. Those muscles can do a variety of things, including the manipulation of even more air to create sound in the form of speech and song. Breathing, speaking, singing, signs that we are alive.

Our Scriptures reflect this centrality of our respiratory system. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the very first thing the Creator does after forming humanity from the dust is to breathe into the new creature; only when it has breath and is able to breathe and speak in the world does the creature become “a living being.” Jesus does a similar thing in our gospel text last Sunday, when he breathes the breath of the Holy Spirit into his disciples, and sends them out of the locked doors to proclaim the gospel out there, in the world.

There is an awful irony, then, in the beginning of our reading from Acts this week. In it we find the movement of air, a respiratory system at work. But is if this life, well, it does not seem to be quite what the Creator had in mind.

Our reading tells us that Saul, this wild child of God, is “breathing threats and murder.” It is a deathly breath. Saul gives this deathly breath voice, and asks the high priest for search warrants, powers of arrest, the right to lock up God’s living, breathing people. This is what Saul does with the air, moves it in and out of himself for a deathly purpose. Saul is breathing… sort of. Saul is alive… technically.

And yet, and yet. Saul is in a world that is beginning to overflow with Easter. He is about to become caught up in the resurrection of all things.

For as he was “going along,” the Scripture tells us, as he was “going along” somewhere between the high priest and the lowly disciples, as he was “going along” somewhere between the powerful and the persecuted, as he was “going along” as so many of us go along, Saul suddenly sees the light. Well, he doesn’t so much see the light as he is surrounded by the Light, overwhelmed by the Light, knocked off his high horse by the Light.

To the ground Saul goes. From the heights of the high priest he is brought low until he meets the dust. Dust: the source material out of which his creator formed him. Dust: the common thread he shares with the high priest and the disciple alike. Dust: the land swirling around in the air, bringing Saul face to face with the heart of creation itself.

Amid the dust arising around all around him Saul hears the voice of the crucified and risen One. Amid the dust arising the crucified and risen Christ speaks to Saul by name and tells him the truth about his deathly existence. And then, amid the dust arising the crucified and risen Christ brings Saul to life.

“Get up,” the voice commands him. The Greek word here for “get up,” anAstethi, might be more accurately translated “Arise.” It is the same word Peter will use in our reading next week when he raises Tabitha from the dead. Arise. Saul is not converted so much as he is resurrected.

Soon Saul is breathing again – but this time it is the breath of life, a breath resurrected.

For soon he finds himself in the presence of crucified people, and in their presence he finds himself filled with the windy and wild and life-giving air molecules of the Holy Spirit.

Soon he finds himself washed clean with still more molecules, hydrogen and oxygen joined together into water for a holy bath that makes him one with all of God’s crucified and risen people.

Soon he finds himself sharing a meal with these crucified and risen people, he finds himself sharing a meal with the very body of Christ.

And from that meal they goes forth together to live their new life, a new life which of course includes the continued movement of molecules through the air, breathing, speaking, singing. Saul now breathes the breath of life and out of his mouth will now come the good news of resurrection for all creation.

Saul will bring this good news, Christ tells us, this good news of creation-wide resurrection, to the most public of public places; he will bring it before the nations, before the rulers, before all of God’s people.

This year I have had the privilege of serving at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State. And in this work I have had the profound privilege of seeing new life everywhere: in communities, in the halls of power, and in congregations like this one, where faithful advocates like you carry out amazing advocacy ministries by taking the side of the marginalized and joining your voices to the chorus of those speaking the good news of justice and peace for all the earth.
 I recently had one of these opportunities to see resurrection life taking place in the public square.

A group of faithful advocates had joined together at a rally for immigration reform in Occidental Park. We gathered with people who had streamed in from Walla Walla and Yakima and the Tri-Cities, from Vancouver and Anacortes and Bellingham, from White Center and Shoreline and Capitol Hill to breathe, to speak, to sing out in a chorus of voices calling out for the good news of justice and peace for all the earth.

One of the pastors who had gathered with us joined a throng of people on the stage who had lined up to offer greetings and to call for justice and peace in over thirty different languages. We can move the air in so many different ways yet still be breathing that same Holy Spirit air, still be speaking the truth about the deathly life we see all around us, still be singing the good news of the new life that God is raising up in all of creation.

It was for this that we have been raised, after all.

We may seem far from Saul and his radical resurrection. But we, too, can find ourselves on our knees, confronted by the reality of a world gone wrong. And so we come together here, in this place, where we are gathered together through a holy bath, where we breathe and speak and sing a holy word together, where we share a holy meal together with all of God’s crucified and risen people. From this place we, too, go forth, to bring the good news of a new life of justice and peace to the nations and the rulers and all of God’s people.

For it is not just Saul but all of us who hear the voice of Christ speaking to us and to all of creation in this Easter season:

“Arise.”

Amen.

sermon fragments for easter 3c

2010-04-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Acts 9:1-20
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

Christ is Risen!

I love that we repeat those words throughout these seven Sundays of the Easter season. For seven Sundays, a week of weeks, we hear about the resurrection. And the more we hear about it, the more we see that while it begins at Christ’s empty tomb, resurrection cannot be contained there.

New life overflows, spilling out of the tomb and into the lives of the disciples, spilling out of their locked doors and into the most public of spaces, spilling out of their little fishing boats and into all of creation. In today’s gospel Simon Peter even dives into the sea, as if he is going to share new life with the fish and urchins and bull kelp… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

For what interests me as much as the water Peter dives into is its cousin, the air, that invisible gaseous mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and traces of argon and carbon dioxide and other rarer and obscurer molecules that we are usually oblivious to but that we spend our lives swimming in, walking through, falling through, sometimes flying through if we have the right equipment but always, always, always breathing in and out if we want to stay alive.

Our Scriptures reflect the centrality of our respiratory system. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the very first thing the Creator does after forming humanity from the land is to breathe into the new creature; only when it has breath does the creature become “a living being.”

Formation, breath, life: It is the same pattern used in our gospel text last Sunday, when Jesus re-forms his band of disciples with his own wounded hands, breathes the breath of the Holy Spirit into them, and sends his apostles out to proclaim the gospel of resurrection life to the principalities and powers.

There is a dark irony, then, in our reading from Acts this week. Last week, we found Peter and the apostles, breathing the breath of the Holy Spirit, standing before the high priest to proclaim the gospel of resurrection life. This week, we find the photographic negative of that story. Saul is “breathing threats and murder,” the breath of death, and he stands before the high priest to ask for search warrants with which he might stamp out the new life that is spreading throughout the land...

a song for acts 9:1-20

2010-04-15T15:21:00.001-07:00

The Resurrection of the Body

2010-04-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

A sermon for St John United Lutheran Church
on the Second Sunday of Easter, 2010

Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

O God of life, you reach out to us amid our fears with the wounded hands of your risen Son. By your Spirit’s breath revive our faith in your mercy, and strengthen us to be the body of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

+++

And I believe in the Holy Spirit
The holy catholic church
The communion of saints
The forgiveness of sins
The resurrection of the body
And the life everlasting.
Amen.

Last week Pastor Carol suggested that Easter might well mean more than just the resurrection of one man or even more than just life after death for individual souls. It’s fitting, then, that our Word for this week takes us even further into this theme of an Easter season with extraordinary ramifications far more far-reaching than they at first appear.

To see what they might look like, I invite you to imagine, for a moment, that you are with the disciples, “later that day,” when this story takes place.

They have locked the doors. They are terrified. And they have good reason to be – though the reason John gives is not quite it. I imagine the Roman secret police were just as if not more frightening than other Judeans. Roman foot soldiers, acting under orders, had executed Jesus just three days prior. The disciples’ grief was still fresh, no doubt – but their fear was fresh, too, and it seems the very real fear that one of them might be next was so pressing that it caused them to lock all the doors of the house.

Yet locking the doors could not keep the community safe. Fear crept inside, an insidious disease seeping under the doors and through the cracks in the floor. Once inside, fear bred into paralyses of panic, bruises of betrayal, and the dull numbness of despair.

They had given up everything for a new kind of life, a new way to live. But now the lynchpin upon which everything depended had snapped, had broken – like their leader, who was treated like a criminal and executed. They kept hoping for a miracle, but none came. So he died. He died, like so many others, as if there was nothing special about him. And now it was over.

What could they do but gather together and share their grief?

It was then that it happened.

He was suddenly there, among them.

Present.

And that is when several things happened, in rapid succession. If you forget what they are, you need only remember the creed, for the whole story is contained right there, in the third article. You can say it with me, if you know the words and feel so inclined.

And I believe in the Holy Spirit
The holy catholic church
The communion of saints
The forgiveness of sins
The resurrection of the body
And the life everlasting.

On the same day that his own life and mission triumphed over the grave Jesus went to perform the first miracle of his risen life: He went to resurrect the body. The body: the holy catholic church, the communion of saints that is his very body in the world. At that moment the body of Christ was as good as dead, disciples huddled inside a room whose deadbolt locks kept them so firmly inside, so firmly underground that their little locked room might as well have been a tomb. The body of Christ had given itself up for dead.

Enter the newly risen Jesus, through the locked doors. Like Yahweh breathing life into Adam with his own God-breath, Jesus breathes new life into this lifeless body of disciples with the Holy Spirit, the very breath of God, the very oxygen of the church. Jesus lives again, earth can breathe again – so pass the Word around before loaves abound!

And what Word to pass around? A word of peace, perhaps, a word of shalom – shalom, this word with which Jesus greets his beloved body of disciples. Peace to you, he says, shalom, three times, as if to be sure that we get it.

Then he does what the dumbfounded disciples needed him to do at that moment: He showed them what Peace to you, shalom meant, through his actions and through his words.

He showed them his wounds. And then he spoke to them about forgiveness.

Let me say that again: He showed them his wounds, wounds he still carried even in his risen life, visible wounds inflicted by Roman soldiers and less visible wounds inflicted by his closest friends. And then he spoke to them about forgiveness.

If you forgive anyone’s sins, they’re gone for good. But if you don’t forgive sins, what are you going to do with them?

For a people paralyzed by panic, for a people bruised by betrayal, for a people dull with despair, these are words that can spark hope, words that can begin healing, words that reveal the first steps of new life. Peace to you, shalom.

In this little Easter story we find Jesus resurrecting the body through the reconciliation of God’s peace, God reconciling the world to Godself. It begins in the body of Christ, as the disciples are reconciled to Jesus, and then reconciled to each other, and then reconciled to the one member of their group, Thomas, who was not with them the first time. One by one Jesus begins to find the lost sheep, all those whose panic paralyzes them, whose betrayal bruises them, whose despair leaves them numb and unable hear good news.

Jesus resurrects them by reviving their faith, our faith, and reconciling us all to the beloved community. He does this not just for our own sake but for the sake of the world outside our locked doors.

Just as the Father sent me, he says, I send you.

Jesus sends us, that we might go forth, out through our locked doors for mission, the mission of reconciliation in all the myriad forms it takes.

Those who are hungry being reconciled with those who are full through meals served and shared.

Those who are homeless being reconciled with those who are sheltered through shelter given on cold spring nights.

Those whose rights are stripped from them being reconciled with those whose rights are so far protected through advocacy and prayer.

A ravaged creation being reconciled with those created to be its caretakers through community gardens, environmental cleanup days, and policies that protect wild life in all its forms.

This is what the body of Christ has been resurrected for, after all, this sending out for mission in the world.

And this life of living out the mission of forgiveness, reconciliation, shalom for the whole world – this is the life everlasting.

And it is, finally, what we proclaim when we say that

We believe in the Holy Spirit
The holy catholic church
The communion of saints
The forgiveness of sins
The resurrection of the body
And the life everlasting.

Amen.

Intern's Message for the April 2010 Newsletter

2010-03-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

Last month, as you may recall, I decided to take up bike commuting for Lent, in part as a way of returning to something that once gave me life. But life is a funny thing: It rarely looks the same tomorrow as it did yesterday…

Some things remained the same. Riding a bike still makes me more aware of my body: I discover again just how powerful legs and feet and muscles and tendons can be in getting me from point A to point B. And I discover again just how vulnerable skin and bones and pounding heart can be, outside the protective shell of an automobile, struggling mightily to climb steep hill after steep hill at a snail’s pace. I am humbled by the vibrancy and vulnerability, the deep physicality of it all.

But some things are quite different: Four years ago, I biked through the streets of a college town in southern Indiana, to a job where I wore tennis shoes and a baseball cap. Now the details are different: I need to carry (surprisingly heavy!) dress shoes, and arrive at work presentable and professional, ready for a whole host of different tasks than I was involved in four years ago. I have to figure things out all over again.

New life is like that. And that might be worth remembering as we enter this Easter season, a time when we’ll notice again the presence of new life: the new life God springs up in nature, and the new life God springs up in us, too. It will be new life with all the vibrant and vulnerable beauty we remember, but it will be different, too, and we may have to figure things out all over again.

Thanks be to God that we don’t do this alone! One of the reasons bike commuting in Seattle is so doable – and so much fun – is that there are plenty of bike lanes and bike trails and respectful cars. Why? Because there is a whole community of bike commuters out there who have made it that way over time. It’s a little like our church community, making our paths out into the traffic of the world doable – and fun.

I pray God’s blessing upon us all in this season of new life.

In Christ,
Intern Matt

A Prodigal Son Playlist

2010-03-13T19:10:00.000-08:00

1. Wander This World / Jonny Lang
2. The Wanderer / U2 & Johnny Cash
3. Wild Night / John Mellencamp
4. Last Night On Earth (Live from Mexico City) / U2
5. My Father's Gun / Elton John
6. So Far Away / Dire Straits
7. Forgiveness / John Mellencamp
8. Cedars of Lebanon / U2
9. Highway Patrolman / Bruce Springsteen
10. Family Business / Kanye West

An Advocacy Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, 2010

2010-02-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

An Advocacy Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, 2010
For Bethany Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

The holy gospel according to Luke.

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to Jesus,
“Get away from here, Herod wants to kill you.”
He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me,
Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow,
And on the third day I finish my work.
Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way,
Because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
The city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!
How often have I desired to gather your children together
As a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
And you were not willing!
See, your house is left to you.
And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say,
“’Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

The gospel of the Lord.

+++

Olympia, Washington hugs the shore of an inlet of the Puget Sound.

Perched over the water, overlooking a little bay and a rather pretty little shoreline park is Olympia’s center of gravity, a gleaming gray-and-white columned structure topped with the largest self-supporting masonry dome in the country and filled with an extraordinary amount of marble. This is the Washington State Capitol building.

Like its counterpart in the other Washington the state capitol building in Olympia is a temple to freedom. In creating a place for common deliberation by the people of the state, deliberation in which everyone has, ideally, an equal voice, the capitol building illustrates the great virtues of our democratic society.

On the other hand, in creating a place for endless bickering, less-than-truthful speech, and the vicious game of seeking the upper hand in all things, the capitol building simultaneously illustrates the great vices of our democratic society.

It is easy enough to see these vices. Turn on the nightly news during the state legislative session, for example. A member of my congregation recently confided to me that she can barely stand to watch it anymore: It makes her physically ill to see what is happening – or not happening – in the political realm these days.

It is easy enough to be tempted to tune out and to turn away.

It is easy enough to relate to the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, is it not?

Luke’s Pharisees are, after all, not the scheming single-minded mafia of Matthew’s gospel. Some of Luke’s Pharisees are actually quite protective of Jesus. They mean well. They know just how ugly – and dangerous – the centers of power can be. “Jesus, you do not want to go to Jerusalem. Do you know what happens there? They will eat you alive.”

But this is not news to Jesus.

He sees the bickering, the lies, the vicious game of seeking the upper hand in all things. He sees the way in which a center of power can become a den of foxes. And it makes him sick, too.

Yet Jesus goes one step further.

As much as we want to locate the fox in a single villain – like Herod, or some other politician we might know better – and as much as we want to locate the den of foxes in a single place – like Olympia, or in the other Washington – Jesus won’t let us get away with it.

He turns our words back on us, placing the blame right at our feet. “See, your house is left to you.” Your house is left to you. You have made this world what it is. Own up to it.

We are all foxes, after all. In a democratic society like ours, we are as much to blame as any Herod for the injustices of our world. Either we are like little Herods, hoarding God’s gifts and consolidating power, or we are like the overprotective Pharisees, who have lost all hope that engagement with the centers of power can really bring about anything good. Both routes lead to a world filled with foxes – foxes like us.

 So God sends help.

But it is not the kind of help we expect. You see, God does not send a farmer with a rifle. God’s farmhouse fable is much stranger than that. Into this fox-filled world, God sends a hen. A hen! Hear again the strange words of Jesus:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem! How often have I desired to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.

Gathering.

It’s a strange thing to do with a bunch of foxes. And yet: It is God’s way. Though Jesus is clear in his lament of our repeated rejection to engage with the world, to engage with each other, to engage with the kingdom of God, he is also clear in his promise that he will not be deterred from completing his work.

Even today we can see it happening, the great gathering of God’s people. Through holy baptism God gathers us under the wings of a covenant – a covenant much like the one God made with Abram.

Look up at the stars, Abram. Look at them gathered in the sky. See the vision I have in store for you. Look up, and see it surround you like the wings of a mother hen.

Like the covenant God made with Abram, God makes a covenant with us, too. It is a covenant that leaves no room for turning away or disengaging. Each time we affirm our baptism we hear the words of the covenant God made with us. In this baptismal covenant, we are:

To live among God’s faithful people
To hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper,
To proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed,
To serve all people, following the example of Jesus,
And to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

Gathered under this covenant we come together to hear the good news and be fed at the Lord’s table, and then we are sent out, into the neighborhood, into the world, and yes, sometimes even to our very own centers of earthly power.

This year I have had the privilege of serving at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, one of the eighteen state public policy offices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As a ministry of church, our mission is to be one way the people of God live out their baptismal covenant, a covenant that includes striving for justice and peace.

In the halls of the state legislature, we strive for justice and peace by advocating for more just and peaceful policy.

In communities, we strive for justice and peace by advocating alongside of a variety of coalitions who are also seeking a more just and peaceful world.

And in congregations just like this one, we strive for justice and peace by offering support to congregational advocates like yourselves who are gathered through the waters of baptism into a holy covenant.

I recently had the opportunity to see congregational advocates in action.

A few weeks ago people of faith from across the state gathered in Olympia for Interfaith Advocacy Day. They were gathered for worship, and then they were sent out.

They walked out the doors of the church, across the street, up the hill and into the gleaming white capitol building, that temple of democracy. Gathered into one by the Holy Spirit, they filled a room under the great rotunda and were led by children in the singing of hymns and freedom songs.

They spilled out into the halls surrounding the House and Senate chambers and met with their legislators to speak up for policies that protected the most vulnerable in their communities. They were striving for justice.

And when they met legislators who were tired and weary, they prayed for them. They were striving for peace.

These advocates were living out their baptismal covenant. It was for this that God had gathered them, after all.

Have no fear. Jesus will not be turned away from the completion of his journey.

Even today he is at work, gathering us together, here in this place.

Under his wings he gathers us and feeds us, that we might be sent out again for the life of the world.

Come to the table. Be fed by the mother hen.

Amen.

Lenten Journey 2010

2010-02-21T22:17:00.000-08:00

For Lent 2010, I'm blogging my way through Dean Brackley's book The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola for St John United Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington. Check out this Lent-only blog at http://lent2010.blogspot.com.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, 2010

2010-02-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, 2010
Preached at St John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret,
and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God,
he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake;
the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.
He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon,
and asked him to put out a little way from the shore.
Then he sat down, and taught the crowds from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon,
“Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”
Simon answered,
“Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.
Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
When they had done this,
they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.
So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them.
And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying,
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
For he and all who were with him
were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken;
and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee,
who were partners with Simon.
Then Jesus said to Simon,
“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”
When they had brought their boats to shore,
they left everything and followed him.

-Luke 5:1-11

Of all the boats, in all the beaches, in all the world, he stepped into mine.

We were living in Capernaum at the time, James and John and I, Simon Peter, fishermen in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Galilee.

We had had a rough night.

From dusk until dawn we were on the water, letting the nets down, hauling them in, letting them down, hauling them in, again and again and again. On this night it was all in vain. What we brought in was as good as nothing. By the time the sun cast its first rays over the water, we were spent and had little to show for it. We laid out our nets on the shore, and prepared to scrub them down before the heat of the day set in.

I must have lost myself in the scrubbing, because I didn’t notice all the commotion until there was already a crowd gathered. They seemed to be jostling for position, pushing and shoving to get closer to this spot on the beach where something was happening. I shielded my eyes from the sun, but I couldn’t see what it was.

Someone squeezed his way out of the crowd, and the crowd seemed to follow him. He hurried over to where our boats lay on the shore. He stepped inside of my boat, and turned to look at me.

It was only then that I saw who it was. It was him, the itinerant preacher they called Jesus.

I knew him better than most. He had been in my house, after all. He had eaten at my table. He had healed my mother-in-law! But I never thought I’d see him again. Until now.

“Simon!” he called, in a friendly voice. “Will you put out a little ways?” The crowd was already moving to surround him again, and more people were coming down to the lakeshore every minute. Word traveled fast.

I got in. James and John grabbed the nets, and then they hopped in, too, and we left the shore. The boat scraped the sand until there was no more sand to scrape, and then it was free and floating, rocking back and forth as the waters splashed up against its sides. Jesus steadied himself and sat down. “This is far enough,” he said to us. And then he raised his voice, and spoke to the crowds. It was as if the whole world was his synagogue, and the pulpit was my little boat, as it rocked between the waves.

The Sermon on the Lake is forgotten to history, but if he didn’t preach about the Call of Isaiah he must have been preaching the same message, because the Call of Isaiah is all I can think about when I remember that day. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord…”

I saw the Lord, alright, I know that now. He was not sitting on a throne, high and lofty. He was sitting in my boat, small and rickety.

But the seraphs were right: The whole earth was full of his glory, charged with the grandeur of God. Holy, holy, holy, everything was holy, the sand and sky and trees, even our worn clothes and our empty nets, all of it had always been and would ever be holy, and we had simply forgotten it until his words, on that day, washed over us like water and reminded us.

I was lost in my reverie when I suddenly realized that Jesus had finished speaking. I blinked my eyes, embarrassed, and shook my head awake. He had turned away from the crowds, and was speaking to me, and only to me. “Now,” he said, grinning as he spoke, “put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.”

Now? He wanted us to fish now? We fishermen were nocturnal beasts; our thick nets only worked at night, when the fish couldn’t see them. And of course, there didn’t seem to be any fish in these waters, not right now. Maybe he didn’t know. We had heard he was a carpenter by trade, after all. He probably didn’t know about fishing.

“Master,” I said, “we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.”

He just kept looking at me, expectantly. And as he looked at me, I began to wonder. Maybe…

James and John stared at me. We had worked at sea together for so many years they knew what I was going to say before I said it. Their eyes spoke for them: You can’t be serious.

“Yet,” I said slowly, “if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

The shore grew further away, and the people on the beach faded from view. We lifted our nets, and cast them into the water.

Fish. Fish everywhere! Never, in all my years of fishing these waters, had I seen so many fish in my nets. We clapped our hands with joy and prepared to pull them all in, our night’s work not in vain after all.

But the fish kept coming. More fish, more fish… more fish?! James stared at the hordes of fish gathering in the water, his eyes wide. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

And then I remembered the nets. The nets! Our nets won’t hold this many fish! We rushed to the side of the boat, and pulled, hoping we could get the nets in before too many fish piled on.

We were too late. Our nets strained at the weight, and then the ropes started to fray…

In a panic, I waved my arms wildly to our partners on the shore, and they came out to help us. Together, we managed to pull the fish-filled nets into the two boats.

But it was more fish than even two boats could handle, and soon both boats started to sink! We stood stock still, in real danger now, but the boats stopped sinking just before the waters could rush in and send us all to the bottom of the sea.

Fish. Fish… everywhere. The only sounds were the sounds of their wet bodies flapping around inside the boat.

No – there was another sound, too. It was… laughter. Jesus was laughing. He seemed to think the whole thing was terribly funny. Did he not see the danger? Did he not see how close we had come to breaking our nets and sinking our boats?

It was too much for me. This time I wasn’t watching the miracle as a spectator; this time I was in the miracle, and it was a very different experience. I collapsed at his knees, exhausted. I looked up at him, pleaded with him, pleaded like a man terrified out of his wits, but even as I spoke I knew who I sounded like, and Jesus did, too. They might as well have been the same words Isaiah used as the winged seraphs flew over his head. “Go away from me, Lord. Leave me be! I am in over my head. This is too much for me. I am only a sinful man!”

Jesus wiped his eyes, and looked at me sympathetically. Then he grinned again. “Don’t be afraid,” he told me. “You won’t raise up any more fish. From now on, you will be raising up people.” Then he started laughing again, and I let my head fall back to the floor of the boat.

I dreamed of Isaiah, standing in the throne room of the Lord.

Except it wasn’t Isaiah, it was me, standing there. The call came from the voice of Lord, my holy vocation spoken aloud, just like it had been spoken to Isaiah, in the year that King Uzziah died.

But the Lord wasn’t sending me out alone on a hopeless mission. He had come down from his throne, and was standing beside me, in my little boat.

And then he was leading the way, going out first, before any of us, to open eyes and ears and minds and hearts, shining the light of Epiphany into them, in the hope that the world might one day turn and be healed.

There was nothing for it. We left everything, and followed him.

May he ever lead us.

Amen.

An Advocacy Sermon for the Second Sunday After Epiphany

2010-01-17T16:43:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: This is a sermon I preached as a representative of the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State. Once a month I visit another congregation for the LPPO-WA, and this Sunday I visited Ballard First Lutheran Church, which is actually the church where Chris and I live! So I guess I preached in our basement. :)

Sermon for the Second Sunday After Epiphany
Preached at Ballard First Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

+++

The holy gospel according to John.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.
When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him,
“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?
My hour is not yet come.”
His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Now standing there were six stone water jars
for the Jewish rites of purification,
each holding twenty or thirty gallons.
Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.”
And they filled them up to the brim.
He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.”
So they took it.
When the steward tasted the water that had become wine,
and did not know where it came from
(though the servants who had drawn the water knew),
the steward called the bridegroom and said to him,
“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.”

Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee,
and revealed his glory;
and his disciples believed in him.

The gospel of the Lord.

+++

“They have run out.”

On Thursday morning I woke to this message, drifting out of my clock radio. There was the voice of the morning news, reporting that only 24 hours after a massive earthquake, the Red Cross in Haiti had run out of medical supplies.

There was, it seems, only this relatively small amount to begin with, and the overwhelming demand had already exhausted it.

As reports continued pouring out of the radio, I soon learned what so many already knew, that this report about the rapid depletion of medical supplies was only one sign pointing toward Haiti’s much larger story.

The story of this island nation over the last four hundred years is the story of a people exploited into scarcity by our world of abundance, battered by a series of their own brutal dictators, and now shaken to the core by the sudden scraping of tectonic plates – an unnaturally cruel disaster for which there are no adequate words.

In our Gospel reading for this Second Sunday After Epiphany, we find ourselves at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. At first it seems far from the events of recent days, but it soon reveals itself to be closer to our world than it at first appears.

The story takes place in a wedding, an event where we would expect to find feasting and celebration, a time to share in the abundance of creation’s many gifts. Yet where we would expect to find abundance, we find instead scarcity, a sudden need that threatens to derail the entire story: The wine has run out.

Now wine at a wedding is not the same as medical supplies in the midst of a natural disaster, but in Cana of Galilee in the first century, wine is the very lifeblood of the wedding event. If there is no wine, there is no wedding. If there is no wine, there is no gathering of the community to celebrate common gifts. If there is no wine, the story ends.

Thanks be to God, then, that the mother of Jesus was there.

We first heard her voice during Advent, when she opened her mouth to sing of the hungry being filled with good things, to sing of abundance flowing in the direction of need, to sing of the ancient promise that the wholeness of shalom would one day be restored.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a woman steeped in this tradition would lift up her voice when the wine ran out. It should come as no surprise that she would lift up her voice on behalf of a community in need. It should come as no surprise that she would lift up her voice to advocate for others.

Like so many acts of advocacy, her first request was not met with immediate results. Jesus’ first answer to her petition was enigmatic at best. But like Isaiah in today’s reading from the Old Testament, the mother of Jesus would not keep silent.

And before anyone could understand what was happening, God’s abundance broke in. More than one-hundred-and-twenty gallons of everyday water were transformed into much-needed wine, filling the empty places, filling them right up to the brim.

Sometimes God’s work begins when we speak up.

This year I have the privilege of serving as a seminary intern at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State. As a branch of the church, we engage in advocacy on behalf neighbors in need.

In the halls of the state legislature, we represent the church’s interest in a just and compassionate society. In communities, we cooperate with a variety of coalitions. And in congregations just like this one, we offer guidance and support to all those who are called through the waters of baptism to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

It is a difficult time for any of us to be advocates. It is a time of scarcity, of need, a time when everywhere we look, resources seem to be running out. The Washington state budget currently faces a 2.6 billion dollar deficit. If those funds are not made up through additional revenue, critical social services will be cut – direct services that principally affect the least among us.

And yet, even in a time of apparent scarcity, God’s abundance is breaking in, through advocates who, like the mother of Jesus, speak up.

On Feburary 16th Lutheran advocates from congregations across the state will travel to Olympia with other people of faith for Interfaith Advocacy Day. By speaking up on behalf of neighbors in need, they will be living out their baptismal calling and following in the footsteps of the mother of Jesus, who spoke up at a wedding so many years ago.

It may be difficult to believe, that advocates living out their baptismal calling can make a difference in a time like this, when the needs seem so overwhelming, from Seattle to Haiti and in a million other places.

But God is at work, and God will not rest until all of creation shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a burning torch for all to see.

This weekend we commemorate the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, renewer of society and renewer of the church. In a 1967 speech titled “Where Do We Go From Here?” Dr. King spoke words that continue to ring out when justice seems scarce. These are the words that he spoke near the end of that speech.

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out.

Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. ... When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Today we share the bread and wine of Jesus Christ, signs for us that God’s abundance is still breaking through in the midst of scarcity, that God is still making a way out of no way, that God is still transforming dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, from Olympia to Port-au-Prince. The arc of the moral universe is long, but the good wine of justice has been saved until now.

Come to the table. Taste and see.

Amen.

The Intern's Annual Report

2010-01-13T13:20:00.000-08:00

Dear faithful reader,
I'm copying my annual report into this blog to give those of you who are interested a sense of what I've been up do this fall. Enjoy!
Matt

Annual Report of the Seminary Intern
September 2009-January 2010

This report is based on the five months I have been with St. John United (SJU) and the shared site of the Lutheran Public Policy Office (LPPO). My internship began at my installation on August 30, 2009, and will continue through mid-August, 2010.

My standard weeks have been organized similarly to those of past interns: On Tuesdays and Fridays I am at the LPPO offices, and on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays I am here at SJU. Saturdays are a wild card, depending on the ministry needs of each site that week. Monday is my day off, and my day with Chris, and usually a day for us to adventure somewhere in Seattle or its surrounding outdoor wonderland.

As a pastor-in-training, I’ve been encouraged to understand my ministry throughout the week as flowing out of the Word and Sacrament we share each Sunday morning. Most Sundays here at SJU I serve as a worship assistant. This is the first time that I have had a leadership role in worship on a weekly basis, and it has been a tremendous gift to me. Once a month I preach during worship. Sermon preparation has been deeply challenging and difficult for me since my first preaching class two years ago, but over these last five months your warm and encouraging feedback has helped me mature in this process, calming my nerves and giving me the confidence to try new things in my preaching.

In September I attended a theology conference at Holden Village – my first visit to this remarkable place – and joined an impromptu hike to Holden Lake with several other area clergy. I also began attending a text study on a weekly basis at Ballard First Lutheran. These activities allowed me to begin and develop relationships with professional colleagues, and have helped deepen a growing sense of my own vocation and what it means.

By October, I had attended two Garden Work Parties, both eye-opening experiences, truly. At the first, I learned that what I guessed was an irritating weed (it pricked me, after all) was, in fact, a wild rose – good to know. A few weeks later I gathered with a few hardy souls at Woodland Park Zoo for their annual Fall Fecal Fest, where we shoveled great steaming piles of Zoo Doo, carting them over to the garden, where in the months to come they’ll help sprout tasty vegetables and pretty flowers. These are the kinds of rich learning experiences not found at seminary.

When I arrived at SJU I assumed leadership of the just-born SJU Young Adult Group, and through November the group was continuing to grow. Eight twentysomethings attended Theology on Tap night on November 11, and on November 25 four other young adults joined Chris and I at Qwest Field for the Annual MLS Cup soccer championship. In December we started a Facebook group, and this spring we’re hoping to plan more field trips and pub nights to continue building a sense of fellowship and community among the young adults of St. John United.

In December I was charged with directing the annual Sunday School Christmas Pageant. I can honestly say that, to put it mildly, I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, with the help of Nathan’s inspired script, Pastor Carol’s guidance, and the amazing creative talents of SJU members, I watched as the kids overcame chaos, strengthened their own script, tore into their roles, and on December 20 brought an amazing seriousness of purpose to their telling of the Christmas story. I can honestly say that the Christmas Pageant was one of the absolute highlights of my first five months here, and I am so grateful to you all for allowing me to be a part of it.

Throughout the fall I took part in the Men’s Ministry activities of Wednesday Bible studies and Saturday breakfasts each month. In November I proposed that we read together the book Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon, and in January I led the first of these book club discussions. I look forward to more fellowship activities with the men of SJU in the springtime.

These are but a few of the many activities I have had the privilege of participating in at SJU over the last few months. Others include: singing with the kids at Sunday School; participating in a wedding and a funeral; making pastoral visits; attending Church Council meetings and committee meetings; attending the LYONS kick-off event; enjoying a potluck and a movie night; attending the SHARE Christmas Party; attending special worship services like the Lilejuleaften, the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, and the September celebration of full communion between Lutherans and Methodists; teaching adult forum; writing Eagle articles; and more.

I have especially appreciated the fellowship time I have spent with SJU members this fall. Your hospitality and willingness to include us – not only myself but Chris as well – in your lives has meant much to us, more than we can say. Over the next few months I hope to take the initiative in visiting some of you I haven’t gotten to know yet. I am deeply grateful for the time we have spent together and for the gifts of food and fellowship we’ve shared.

Finally, I want to share just a few of the activities I’ve been able to participate in at the LPPO. One of the highlights of working at the LPPO is the opportunity to visit and build relationships with a wide variety of Lutheran churches in Washington State as we invite, nudge, and assist them into their advocacy ministries. In September I joined the LPPO staff on a visit to Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, and two months later I was invited to preach in the campus chapel at PLU during their observance of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. In October I accompanied Paul on his visit to Celebration Lutheran Church in East Wenatchee, and we had a wonderful visit with these Lutherans on the “other side” of the Cascades. Also in November I led an “Introduction to Advocacy” adult forum at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Bellevue. Beginning at Ballard First Lutheran Church on January 17, I’ll be visiting an average of one church per month on a Sunday to preach and teach as a representative of the LPPO. Besides congregational visits, my main project at the LPPO – and my overall Internship Project for the year – is the work of congregational organizing. Building off the work of previous seminary interns, I have – with the help of the LPPO’s Congregational Relations Committee – set about implementing a systematic strategy for inviting congregations into advocacy, supporting their advocacy ministries, and building their relationship with the LPPO through the Advocating Congregations Network.

In closing, I offer my deepest thanks for this congregation’s support of the internship program. You are shaping the identity of pastors-to-be, giving them deep wells of experience, confidence, and grace for their future life and ministry. For that I am grateful beyond words.

I thank you for the first five months, and I look forward to our next seven months together!

In Christ,
Seminary Intern Matt Keadle

Thoughts on Avatar

2010-01-12T15:15:00.000-08:00

It's sort of surprising that a movie prompts my first non-sermon blog entry in a long time. But Avatar was just that compelling - to me, at least.

Here are three things I loved about this movie.

1. It's all about baptism. From the ending to the opening premise of being "reborn" as a new creation, this entire film was about rebirth. The fact that the protagonist, Jake Sully, was reborn as a seven-foot-tall blue humanoid with a tail makes things more colorful, yes, but what was more interesting was that Jake had a complete change, a turning around - a metanoia - of his worldview. Previous worldview: Follow the rules of your society, which just so happen to be Militarism and Capitalism. New worldview: The Divine is in everything, and the needs of all creation are more worthy of your life - and death - than a quarterly report. Most gratifying to the catechumenate crowd: Before being reborn Jake must undergo training and completely subsume his own life into that of the community.

2. It's anticapitalist and antimilitary. Does that mean it's oversimplistic? A bit, yeah. Maybe it should have acknowledged that capitalism has its uses, especially on a very small scale, and many good people have served their fellow citizens through service in the military. (Maybe in the sequel? I smell a trilogy...) But the human propensity to destroy things through the unbridled pursuit of profit above all else is a fact of our world, and the use of the military to serve the pursuit of capital is a tradition that has been repeated again and again through distant and recent history. To have this truth about our world depicted in light and sound and color (in 3D!) was akin to reading apocalyptic literature - creative storytelling that pulls back the curtain to reveal what some already know and some don't want to admit.

3. Spiritually, it emphasizes Eastern panentheism over Western obsessions with kings and kingdoms and kingliness. Some conservative Christians have criticized it as pantheism, but it needn't be construed that way. To say God is present in everything is no heresy - and is probably closer to the truth than the idea that God is present in us humans but not in the trees we cut down. What I really love about Avatar's spirituality is that in some ways it's more interesting than that depicted in The Lord of the Rings. As an immersive film experience, I loved the Lord of the Rings more than Avatar. But as a theological thought piece, I found Avatar more compelling. It leaves the obsession with A King behind. It's true that the protagonist must assume a leadership role, but it's clear that the kind of leadership role he assumes is only temporary, as-needed, and not some kind of permanent king role.

And one response to negative critiques:

While my wife enjoyed the movie as well - more than she thought she would - one of her first critiques was that it was of the white outsider imperialist coming in and saving the day for a bunch of indigenous native peoples. I acknowledge that this is a problematic storyline. Still, I think the movie actually did several important things to offset what could have been far more problematic.

1. The white dude didn't save the people from themselves, he helped lead them to victory over the imperialists.

2. He wasn't a Savior so much as a person who - after learning from the Na'vi - had something of his own to contribute. And why wouldn't he? That's what it meant for him to become a full-fledged member of their community.

3. He didn't lead the people on his own - he joined the Na'vi to co-lead (with the help of the Na'vi leader and Jake's Na'vi girlfriend) them to victory over other imperialists.

4. Jake Sully had lost the use of his legs, leaving him wheelchair bound and a "minority" within his own community/society. These sorts of minority vs. non-minority categories suck because they're so oversimplistic, but it's worth throwing into the mix, especially because no one else seems to be mentioning it as a relevant part of the data set.

Well - that's my visceral, initial reaction, thoughts off the top of my head. Challenge away!

En fin: I remain grateful to have seen the first movie since Up that's had me thinking big thoughts through light and sound and color (in 3D!) on the silver screen.

Sermon for the Baptism of Our Lord, 2010

2010-01-10T14:01:00.000-08:00

The heavens are opened quite often around here.

Now, I know it doesn’t rain as much as everyone says it does. Today, for example, yet another beautiful clear day. But on Friday afternoon, it was raining again.

On Friday afternoon, I was driving through downtown Seattle to the Church of Steadfast Love. The Church of Steadfast Love is housed at the Compass Center and is a congregation that, in its own words, “seeks to break down the barriers that separate housed and homeless.”

On this particular Friday the congregation was holding a Service of Remembrance, a time to remember, honor, and pray for those who in the last year had died on the streets or who had died as a result of being homeless.

I was running late to the service, and I parked my car in a lot under the Viaduct, which provided a partial shelter from the pouring rain.

It really was only a partial shelter. I stepped out of the car and into a puddle of water. I paid for my parking and got the receipt all wet. I walked down the street and narrowly dodged the waterfalls created by gaps in the awnings.

By the time I made it to the chapel, the service had already begun. The sanctuary was full, so I stood just outside the door with some other latecoming stragglers and watched the service unfold.

Two men stood up, and performed an Irish folk song. We recited a Psalm and read part of Paul’s letter to the Romans. A guest preacher gave a homily. We prayed.

And then the names were read aloud, the names of those who had died, read aloud one by one. As each name was read, one of us would get up, walk to a table full of candles, light one for that person, and then place the candle on the altar.

Nothing else was said during this part of the service. No songs were sung; no gentle music played. Just candles lit, and names read aloud.

Outside the heavens were opened, and water fell from the sky, like a voice that was trying to tell us something.

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For the last few weeks we have been reflecting on seeing. Not merely seeing with our eyes, but perceiving the world in a new way. On Christmas Eve, the shepherds saw an ordinary sky lit up with the blazing lights of the heavenly host. On Epiphany, the magi saw an ordinary star shining with such light that they crossed a continent to follow it. Ordinary people seeing ordinary things in a new way, their vision made new by the light of Christ.

Today we change senses, slightly, from seeing to hearing. In today’s Gospel reading, the light of Epiphany comes not through the eyes but through the ears.

We first hear the voice of John the Baptist. His words might sound familiar to you. We heard them only a few weeks ago, on the Second Sunday of Advent. On that Sunday the focus was on the Baptist’s message to the people: “Prepare the way!” he said. “Bear fruits! Share your coat! Share your food! Be fair! Live justly!”

But now, as the light of Epiphany grows, John the Baptist’s voice fades. Or rather, John the Baptist’s voice is shut up.

In the verses that are curiously left out of our reading for today – they would fit right there between verses 17 and 21 – something dramatic happens. In these invisible verses John provoked the ire of the ruler Herod, and Herod – this is a direct quote – “shut him up in prison.” John does not merely fade away, he is silenced. But, as Luke will tell us later in his gospel, “if you silence these, the stones will cry out.” The stones… or the sky.

As the prison bars slam on John the Baptist, the camera pans back to the people, a great mass of ordinary people. And there Jesus is, among them, praying.

Unlike the other Gospel writers, Luke tells us no story of John baptizing Jesus, no words exchanged, no formal passing of the torch. Jesus is simply baptized with everyone else, bathing in the river with all of the other ordinary people seeking a fresh start in the cleansing waters.

After his baptism, Jesus prays. Maybe he is praying for a fresh start, like the others. Maybe he is praying for the others. Maybe he is simply praying. And as he prays, the heavens are opened.

Who knows what this looked like? Maybe the heavenly host returned in their blazing lights and appeared like they did to the shepherds. Maybe the clouds parted for a moment to reveal a brief ray of sunshine. Or maybe it just started to rain.

A pigeon flew by. Pigeon: the word we use for dove when the dove is ordinary. The pigeon descended to earth, maybe just to peck around, as pigeons do. The Holy Spirit: Present in the ordinary creatures of the world.

And there was Jesus, in the midst of the ordinary creatures, praying.

And then, suddenly, a voice.

We should be clear about what kind of voice it was, what words it said. It wasn’t a voice that told Jesus to do something, good or bad. Those temptations would come later.

This voice was less like an order, and more like a simple truth dawning, like the sun over a darkened sky.

The truth the voice said wasn’t new. Luke has already told us, a few Sundays ago in the lectionary, the story of Jesus as a boy, sitting in the temple and calling it his Father’s house. For man who was once a boy like this, what the voice said wasn’t news so much as a reminder, a reaffirmation, a rebirth into a truth he knew but needed to hear again.

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Put it another way, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, from our Old Testament reading for today. Isaiah is speaking to a people who long for the return of their estranged Creator. Through Isaiah, the estranged Creator finally speaks. “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

They are simple words, really. Nothing special, on the face of it. We might hear them fly past our ears a hundred times a day, on the bus, on the radio, at the coffee shop, at the movies, in the rush of the wind, in the fluttering wings of an ordinary bird. They are simple words, really! Ordinary, everyday words.

But when you have come looking for a fresh start – to a new year, or to a new day – those words can mean everything. Even if you have heard them before. Maybe especially if you have heard them before.

Martin Luther once wrote that “a truly Christian life is nothing less than a daily baptism once begun and ever to be continued.” A fresh start, every day. Every day, hearing the words again, and letting them wash over you like water from above:

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At the end of the Service of Remembrance at the Church of Steadfast Love,

after we named all the beloved of God who had died on the streets in the last year,

those of us who had gathered made together

a Declaration of Recommitment.

We used different words, but essentially we recommitted ourselves to the covenantal promises of our baptism.

To live among God’s faithful people,

To hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper,

To proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed,

To serve all people, following the example of Jesus,

And to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

They were just words, ordinary words spoken by ordinary people.

Outside the heavens were opened, and water fell from the sky, like the Spirit of God descending to earth in bodily form. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Christmas Eve: The Night with the Lights in It

2009-12-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2009
Preached at St. John United Lutheran Church, Seattle

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“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them.” Luke 2:8-9

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Many years ago the author Annie Dillard wrote a collection of essays on nature that she called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In one of the essays she writes of an experience of seeing as if for the first time. “One day,” she writes, “I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.”

“I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”

Annie Dillard’s experience of “the tree with the lights in it” is, I imagine, in a similar category to what was experienced by the shepherds on that holy night so many centuries ago.

They were out in the fields. Had they lived in the city, they might have known about the decrees of Emperor Augustus, and of the census being taken, and of the towns so full of pilgrims that there was no room in any inn. But they lived in the fields, out in the country. Not knowing the goings-on in the urban areas wouldn’t have bothered them, I don’t think. They knew their Scriptures: Nothing good ever came from a city. Wretched places, they are, full of scum and villainy. Better to stay in your own fields.

And in the fields, they kept watch. Not over the skies, mind you, but over the earth, and over the things of the earth, over the living, breathing creatures that were entrusted to their care. This was enough to occupy them, to fill their days and to fill their nights and to almost – almost – fill their bellies. It was certainly enough to fill their eyes. Or so they thought.

And then it happened. Then, Luke tells us, then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them.

They suddenly saw it, saw everything, as if for the first time: The skies with the lights in them, the fields with the lights in them, even the sheep with the lights in them. There were no words to make sense of this. Only the words that seemed to well up from inside them like tears filling your eyes, words they couldn’t have made up if they tried: Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.

A moment of revelation that came suddenly out of the everyday, the everynight, one moment when they saw clearly, as if for the first time, when they heard clearly, as if for the first time.

And then they were on the move, swept along by the moment toward the city, the place out of which nothing good could come. Before they could change their minds they found themselves on the road, on a doorstep, on their knees.

There he was: The child. He shone like any other child, really, like any other person when the lights are shining through them. Legs kicking, arms waving, body wriggling, and in the center of it all, the eyes. The lights shining in his eyes. I imagine the shepherds with Annie Dillard’s words in their mouths: It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen.

For a moment they stayed there, together, strangers and friends, gathered together as they were, most improbably, most unpredictably. Two or three were already finding themselves gathered in his Name, gathered around a place meant for food: a manger, a feeding trough, a table for creatures of the earth. A motley crew it was, strangers and friends, shepherds and carpenters, people of the fields and people of the streets, on very different journeys, all mixed up together, and all drawn together by this child who was making the world shine with light.

What could it all mean? I don’t imagine that at that moment the shepherds had the slightest idea. The words washed over them, announcing the new thing that had begun with this birth, that this child was somehow a king, that this child would somehow overthrow the world as it was, that this child would come out of an unexpected place to turn the world upside down, putting mangers and tables at the center and throwing imperial decrees overboard. They heard all of this, and no doubt the words already began to do their work.

But on this night there was no sense in making sense of it. On this night, I imagine, the shepherds were simply overwhelmed with the giddy wonder of seeing the world with the lights in it, lit up by the child with the lights in him. They had been their whole lives bells, and never knew it until at that moment they were lifted and struck.

“When they saw this, they made known what had been told them.” Their voices rang like bells through the night. I imagine them running through the dusty streets, shaking the hands of every person they met, like Ebenezer Scrooge after the holy ghosts helped him to see his life in a new light. “Merry Christmas!” said Scrooge, and I imagine that whatever the shepherds said it probably made about as much sense as that.

And then it was over – or at least, a part of it was over. The shepherds returned – to their fields, one assumes – and they were “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” Take note: As they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. The experience was already past. They might have lived their entire lives glorifying and praising God for the memory of that one experience, the night when they saw the world with the lights in it, lit up by the child with the lights in his eyes.

Annie Dillard writes that after that first vision,

“I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

Well. That’s Annie Dillard’s experience of the incarnation. Maybe yours is different. I expect all of us have different paths to the manger, to the feeding trough, to the table for the creatures of the earth. The Spirit of the Lord moves in mysterious ways.

But every once in a while, she lights up the night. And on one night, many years ago, she lit up the world through the birth of a child, and struck humanity like a bell, gathering the unlikely together and making them ring.

We are still ringing, from mountain to mountain, and everywhere in between.

Amen.

Advent 4C, Friday

2009-12-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. With your abundant grace and might, free us from the sin that binds us, that we may receive you in joy and serve you always, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Prayer of the Day for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 2009

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File under: Things that God frees us for.

Click here to see what I'm working on at the LPPO...

Advent 4C, Wednesday

2009-12-16T12:07:00.000-08:00

advent blues: a playlist for december

1. Stumbling To Bethlehem / Patti Scialfa
2. When I Look At the World / U2
3. The Waiting / Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
4. If God Will Send His Angels / U2
5. Sitting, Waiting, Wishing / Jack Johnson
6. Hey World (Don't Give Up Version) / Michael Franti & Spearhead
7. White As Snow / U2
8. That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! / Sufjan Stevens
9. Joseph, Better You Than Me (feat. Elton John)
10. I Believe In Father Christmas / U2
11. Light a Light / Melissa Etheridge

Advent 3C, Sunday

2009-12-13T21:18:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent, Year C
for St. John United Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington, 2009

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The holy gospel according to Luke.

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him,
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruits worthy of repentance.
Do not begin to say to yourselves,
‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’;
for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;
every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”
In reply he said to them,
“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none;
and whoever has food must do likewise.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him,
“Teacher, what should we do?”
He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.”
Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?”
He said to them,
“Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations,
and be satisfied with your wages.”

As the people were filled with expectation,
and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John,
whether he might be the Messiah,
John answered all of them by saying,
“I baptize you with water;
but one who is more powerful than I is coming;
I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary;
but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

So, with many other exhortations,
he proclaimed the good news to the people.

The gospel of the Lord.

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There is a scene in the Lord of the Rings…

Ok, so I know just saying those words for some people will cause eyes to glaze over, ears to tune out, but hear me out here, just hang with me for a moment. If I promise not to speak in Elvish, can you hang with me for a moment? Ok. Here we go.

So there is this scene in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that always gives me the chills, and always makes me think of Advent.

Gandalf, the white wizard, is waiting and keeping watch in a city under siege. He has no allies, no friends with him, save one little hobbit, Pippin, who, in a sudden fit of conscience signed up for the king’s personal guard but who really has no skills to offer, has no business being there.

The skies above them have darkened. The air has grown unseasonably cold. The people in the city are afraid, and huddle in whatever they shelter they can find. And the leaders of the city, the stewards, those given the task of protecting the people, are lost in a mindless despair and are no longer able to see the task at hand clearly.

The situation seems hopeless. Gandalf tries to rouse the people; he is the only one who seems to see things clearly. He pushes the paralyzed leaders aside, bypassing them entirely, and goes straight to the footsoldiers and common people, urging them to live up their calling, to be the people they are supposed to be.

But he has no illusions about what they can accomplish on their own. He knows it can only get them so far. And so he turns to little Pippin and tells him to light the beacon.

The beacon is a great pile of combustible wood, a pyre sitting at the top of the highest point in the city. Little Pippin struggles, stumbles, scrapes his knee, hides from those who would try to stop him, and then, finally, he lights the beacon that is much bigger than he is.

The camera pulls back and reveals just how small the beacon is in the wide-angle lens. At the top of a mountain it looks like nothing more than a candle, just a little spark of light, just one little tongue of fire in a vast, vast world.

And then, off in the distance on the farthest mountain peak, another tiny flame suddenly flares up, as if answering the call of the first.

The camera pans up over the mountains, and again off in the farther distance, another flame answers the second, and then another, and another, and another, until the final beacon is lit in the midst of another city faraway over the mountains, and the people in that city see it and know.

The beacons have been seen. The call has been heard. Help will come.

Gandalf, the faintest sign of wild joy in his eyes, says simply this:

“Hope is kindled.”

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Today, on the third Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist preaches his hardest words yet. Last week Pastor Carol described history that takes place far from the centers of power. Now John preaches to the people who live there, people who live in the far corners of the empire, in the far corners of their society. They have no business changing the world. What could they possibly have to offer?

Most of them, stumbling up to the River Jordan to hear this hard-edged prophet, have barely enough clothing to keep themselves warm on a cold night, barely enough food to fill their own stomachs. They struggle simply to stay afloat.

Even those among them who have stable, decent-paying jobs – the soldiers, the public servants – are hardly in a position to make big changes in society. They struggle simply to get it right, day after day, in jobs that make them little more than a cog in an overpowering machine. Empire. Conquest. Profit. Success. If you don’t want to fall in line on one of these ships that you are lucky enough to be on in the first place, then you are free to get off the boat. Good luck in the water.

Any self-respecting world-changer would not start here, with these people. But they are exactly the people to whom John the Baptist goes first.

When he opens his mouth to speak to them, he doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t beat around the bush, or treat them with kid gloves, or patronize them.

He names their brokenness, their weakness.

He reminds them of God’s power, a power that can bring life to stone.

And then he tells them that the ax is lying at the root of the trees. He tells them that the ax is lying at the root of the trees.

As if the ax-wielder, the great lumberjack, were already there.

As if, in the words of the prophet Zephaniah, the Lord, their God, is right there in their midst.

No wonder the crowds ask John, “What then should we do?”

Light the beacons! he tells them. Be the lights of hope! Not just with fire and water, but with the light of your very lives!

John the Baptist isn’t worried about how unimportant these people are in the grand scheme of things. He gives everyone a role to play, everyone.

And then he gives the most important role precisely to those who seem to have the least to offer – at least by the standards of empire and conquest.

He calls the crowds, all the most unimportant people, to light their beacons. Oh yes, they have beacons. Their lives, too, can be a light. John calls them to share their meager clothing and food with one another.

Of course, the important people think, this is not possible. They have nothing to share, nothing to give.

But John the Baptist knows better. The Lord, their God, is in their midst.

And so they will break bread together. They will share their warmth. In the sharing and the caring, they will form community. And they will light the way for the world. They will light the way for us.

They are followed by the tax collectors and soldiers, cogs in the machine of empire. These are asked simply to live justly, but that is not so easy at it sounds.

It requires them to swim upstream, against the current that pushes back against them at every moment, always threatening to overwhelm. Surely no one could survive, always swimming against the current like that.

But John the Baptist knows better. The Lord, their God, is in their midst.

And so they will be fair. They will tell the truth. They will give thanks. They will not hoard what belongs to others. And in living this way, amid the counter-current, they will form community. And they will light the way for the world. They will light the way for us.

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Is this possible? Is there really any hope for this?

I find it hard to believe sometimes, when harsh words speak painful truths, awakening our worst fears, opening our eyes to the wrath that is already here.

A winter chill. A silent injustice. A casual act of violence. The everyday struggle to get it right. Our sickness unto death.

But then I look around, and I see them. I see the signs of a gospel that is so wondrous, so incomprehensible, so nonsensical, so foolishly wild that the peace it brings passes all understanding.

I see the signs of the season of Advent – signs that the Lord, our God, is in our midst.

Beacons of light in the hour of need:

Hands held under a streetlight,

Food shared under flickering fluorescence,

Rooftops strung with glowing bulbs,

An open door lit by a porchlight,

A cold street warmed by a hidden bonfire,

An evergreen wreath anchoring four candles,

Signs of a hope kindled.

Advent 3C, Saturday

2009-12-12T21:56:00.000-08:00

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day

a poem written by John Donne in 1627

Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

Were I a man, that I were one

I needs must know; I should prefer,

If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

At this time to the Goat is run

To fetch new lust, and give it you,

Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

Advent 3C, Friday

2009-12-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

I was doing time
In Salvation Park
Up on the high rope me
Your ace of hearts
Just when I thought
I was so special
I thought I had it all
You take a wrong step
Before you fall and you're

Stumbling to Bethlehem
In this absence of light
Stumbling to Bethlehem
Don't worry darling
Yeah, don't think twice

Now there's this man
On the corner
In a long black sweater saying
"Sinners they will burn forever"
Well
I must be guilty of something
Some price I forgot to pay
I must have done somebody wrong
Somewhere along the way
That keeps me

Stumbling to Bethlehem
In this absence of light
Stumbling to Bethlehem
Don't worry darling
Yeah, don't think twice

Now you can count up
All your blessings
You can count up every curse
But you never really know
Which is better
Or which is worse
So you try to do right
But it gets so rough
There's always someone
To remind you
That you're just
Not good enough
And you're

Stumbling to Bethlehem
in this absence of light
I'm stumbling to Bethlehem
Don't worry darling
Yeah, don't feel twice
Don't worry darling
Yeah, it's alright

Advent 2, Saturday

2009-12-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

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In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us.

-Luke 1:78, from the appointed Psalm for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009

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Our Psalm for the week is actually from a Gospel - Luke - which would be weird except that it is indeed a song, the song of Zechariah.

Remember Zechariah? He was the father of John the Baptist, whose ability to speak was taken from him when he couldn't stifle his skepticism that God could bring new life from two elderly people. This song, our appointed Psalm for the day, is the first recorded thing that comes out of Zechariah's mouth once the silence-spell has broken.

It is also the Gospel Canticle for Morning Prayer, what we sing as a response to the gospel during daily prayer in the AM. (Come to think of it, the Gospel Canticles for Evening Prayer and Night Prayer are also from Luke, all of them coming from the mouths of people standing on one chronological side or another of the birth of Jesus.) In short, the Song of Zechariah is the Morning Prayer song. Liturgically speaking, it is for us as for Zechariah the first song that comes out of our mouths when they are reopened for a new day.

Here in Seattle we've had several mornings of heavy fog. When I looked out the window this morning I couldn't see across the street. After an hour or so, though, the sea level cloud began to dissipate, and by the time I left the apartment it was clear enough to see... what?

People. People chattering about happily, hanging green boughs and garlands everywhere, along the railings, along the windowsills, along the rooftops. I waved hello to those I knew and continued to our car, which was covered in the most beautiful paisley-patterned frost. (I know what you're thinking, but frost really can be a happy thing when you're moving at a leisurely Saturday-morning pace!) No snow yet, but as I turned down Market Street the snow-capped Olympics came into gorgeously dramatic view, the perfect backdrop for the little neighborhood shops of Ballard.

I guess what I'm really trying to say, with all of my 21st-century words, is this:

In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high is breaking upon us.

Advent 2, Wednesday

2009-12-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

A reading from Malachi.

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me,
and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.
The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight -
indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who can endure the day of his coming,
and who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap;
he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,
and he will purify the descendants of Levi
and refine them like gold and silver,
until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD
as in the days of old and as in former years.

Word of God, word of life.

First Reading for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009

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The Mountain was out this morning. We could see it on our drive to work. As we turned right onto 15th Avenue, there it was, a grey shadow towering over the Seattle skyline, making the Space Needle look like a toothpick beside it. It was breathtaking. The Mountain is out so rarely these days that you almost forget it is there.

When I arrived at work, and turned to see if the Olympic range was visible, I gasped. There it was, clearer than it has ever been, and topped with majestic snow like a vertically stretched and inversely colored ice cream sundae. Most mornings here, you must understand, are so overcast that you give thanks for the good rain and and the plentiful inland seas and leave it at that. But then, every once in a full moon, there are mornings like these, mornings so filled with beauty that you just want to stand there grinning like an idiot, taking it all in for as long as you can. Today, I thought, today is going to be a very good day.

Now, hours later, the sun sets. Was it a good day? As usual, I didn't accomplish nearly as much as I'd hoped. I still feel more restless and unsettled than I'd like to. I've decided to retire the word "frustrated" for at least the season of Advent, which should tell you something about how often I've been using it lately.

And yet, despite it all, it was a good day. It was a beautiful day, a gorgeous day, filled with good conversation and good work. Despite it all.

Is a good day a sign that the Lord of hosts is coming? Is a fleeting view of the Mountain a messenger, at least for today? Did it confirm the covenant that God is still here, and that grace incarnate is on her way?

Maybe. And maybe that is enough, for today. Satis est.

Advent 2, Monday

2009-11-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

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Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming give to all the people of the world knowledge of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

-Prayer of the Day for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009

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Stir up our hearts, Lord God, stir up our hearts. Stir up our hearts, even on a day with skies as gray as this one. Part the clouds of our lives, and make a way for your holy light. Open the pores of our skin and draw in the breath of our lungs, that your holy freshness might fill us up anew. Disturb our waters and form new eddies within us and around us. Clear the debris from the streets of our hearts and the streets of our neighborhoods, and remove all obstacles to the way of peace and justice, the way of creativity and liveliness, to the places we yearn most deeply to go. Stir up our world, Lord God, and stir up the world inside of us. Part the clouds of our lives, and make a way for your holy light. Stir up our hearts, even on a day with skies as gray as this one. Stir up our hearts, Lord God, stir up our hearts.

What I made for Sunday School today...

2009-11-29T20:49:00.000-08:00

... to teach the kids about Advent.

Advent 1, Sunday

2009-11-29T20:06:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: Even though grace travels outside of karma, I still love this song. Biblical prophecy can be rough around the theological edges... but sometimes with good reason. Shine on, John, rough around the theological edges or not, shine on...

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Jesus said,

"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars..."

Luke 21:25-36, Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent, 2009

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Advent 1, Saturday

2009-11-28T22:07:00.000-08:00

How can we thank God enough for you
in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?
Night and day we pray most earnestly
that we may see you face to face...

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, 2nd Reading for the 1st Sunday in Advent 2009

Advent 1, Wednesday

2009-11-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Show me your ways, O LORD,
and teach me your paths.

Psalm 25

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image copyright daniel w. erlander

Advent 1, Tuesday

2009-11-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

The days are surely coming, says the LORD,
when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
In those days and at that time
I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David;
and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
In those days Judah will be saved
and Jerusalem will live in safety.
And this is the name by which it will be called:
"The LORD is our righteousness."

- Jeremiah 33:14-16, First Reading for the First Sunday in Advent 2009

A righteous Branch that will spring up... for David. Leave aside for the moment what a "righteous Branch" might be and look at that concluding prepositional phrase. "For David." A Branch for the king, for the governor, for the leader and caretaker of a people. For a person whose primary duty is to care for the needs of others.

Which leads right into the payoff: Thanks to this mysterious "righteous Branch," the one who has been crowned a caretaker "shall execute justice and righteousness in the land." It is not the righteous Branch who executes justice and righteousness - though of course the execution would not be possible without this Branch. No, it is David who plays this part; it is David for whom the branch has been sprung, and it is by David that the justice and righteousness will come to be.

It is, in fact, the primary purpose of the king, the governor, the leader, the caretaker. Not conquering foreign lands. Not acquiring a great wealth of treasure. Not even keeping everyone happy and content so that the king's opulent living can go merrily on. No: The primary purpose of the one who has received the great gift of the righteous Branch is to carry out justice and righteousness. It is why the Branch has been given at all.

Of course, we do not have a David, nor a king. We live in a democratic land, where we share the kingship with each other; we are all governors, all caretakers of each other. We are all Davids.

So if we were to find ourselves living in those days and at that time, if by some heavenly miracle we were to be given the gift of the righteous Branch, if the day were to come and the promise were to be fulfilled, well, then, the next thing to happen seems pretty clear.

Advent 1, Monday

2009-11-23T22:23:00.000-08:00

Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

-Prayer of the Day for the First Sunday in Advent

Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.

Stir up... your power? A comforting thought, at first, and then a terrifying one. I imagine the ways that Holy Power has been stirred up in generations past. Noah comes to mind, a world destroyed. Jonah, too, swallowed by a whale and an inescapable destiny. And Job - poor, miserable Job, who, when he finally stands up for himself, is flattened again by Your voice in a whirlwind.

But then the other stories: The first story, Creation - the first time your power was stirred up, the first time in the story we share with You, anyway. Exodus, too: your power against the powers that be, and a people were set free. And not freed and then abandoned, no - after that your power was stirred into a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, visible signs of a power stirred.

So you will, I hope, forgive me if thoughts of stirring up your power leave me with less than clear feelings. Tremendous excitement! yes, but also a fear of a power I cannot fathom.

And so it is with care that we pray that the advent of your stirred power in our time be one of merciful protection; of the imparting of knowledge, wisdom and courage; of, yes, a justice that redeems this broken and fearful world. It is more comforting to put it that way. Comforting at first, at least. And then a little more uneasy, once the sharpness of mercy, once the brightness of vision, once the instability of justice-making starts to happen, then it begins to be, just a little, terrifying. And yet we pray it all the same.

Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.

What I Preached for the 24th Sunday After Pentecost, 2009

2009-11-15T13:11:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), November 15, 2009
Preached at St. John United Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

The readings for today are
Daniel 12:1-13 // Hebrews 10:11-25 // Mark 13:1-8

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This month Sesame Street celebrated its 40th anniversary. I know this because for several days last week anytime I used Google – which is a lot – colorful characters would show up against Google’s white-as-snow backdrop. First it was the orange, vertically striped legs of an 8-foot-tall yellow-feathered creature. Then it was a furry, grumpy little green monster poking its head out of a garbage can. And then, finally, the entire word Google was transformed into a collection of chocolate chip cookies and eaten by a furry blue mouth with googly eyes (no pun intended).

Now if you clicked on any of these fantastical images, you would be taken to a list of news stories about Sesame Street. And as I began to read these articles, I not only remembered all the times I spent watching Sesame Street with my dad, but I began to realize just how visionary Sesame Street has been.

Forty years ago, when the show was developed, the television landscape was still radically segregated, and featured overwhelmingly white characters, largely preferring not to address the difficult issues of the day. Ok, so not a whole lot has changed in that regard. But in 1969, the world was changing. Dr. King had been assassinated, but his dream had captured imaginations.

Sesame Street decided to take the dream and put it on television. The basic intent of the show was to bring a preschool education into the homes of poor children in urban neighborhoods who didn’t have access to good schools.

But in addition to teaching the alphabet and numbers and colors, the world presented on Sesame Street sought to instill tolerance, racial pride, and equality. Sure, it did so with fantastical creatures – I’m looking at you, Mr. Snuffleupagus – but that didn’t change the deeper truths contained in its vision. Sesame Street took the dream of racial harmony, economic equality, and religious tolerance, and sought to make it real, even if only on the television set, and even if the world around that television set still had a lot of catching up to do.

It’s a little bit like our Scripture readings for today. Today’s Gospel reading is from the 13th chapter of Mark, a passage sometimes referred to by Biblical scholars as “the Little Apocalypse.” Now, when we hear the word “apocalypse” we probably think of things like the ads for that new John Cusack movie, where the world is coming to an end through a variety of earthquakes, explosions and floods. And it’s true, when we hear today’s Gospel reading we do hear Jesus speak of wars, earthquakes, and famines. But this kind of disaster movie shtick is not really at the heart of what the word apocalypse means. The Greek word apocalypses is often translated as “revelation,” which is where we get the title for that “colorful” book at the end of our Bible. What the word apocalypse literally means is “a lifting of the veil.” A lifting of the veil. A pulling back of the curtain, to reveal some deeper truth about the world and where it’s going.

And if we think of the Little Apocalypse, the Little Revelation, in that way, then we might see something a little different in Jesus’ words. Jesus speaks of wars and earthquakes and famines, yes, but we know about these already. That part is no revelation. All we need to do is read the newspaper to learn about that; we don’t need a revelation from God to learn about the famines and the wars and the earthquakes. What we want to know is what they mean. Will they ever end? Is there anything beyond them? Or is life just one long tumult of earthquakes and wars and famine?

And Jesus, thanks be to God, gives us an answer. Jesus is, in fact, an answer to the question in his very incarnation, in his very existence on this earth. God made human, made vulnerable, sent to rescue us from a neverending cycle of famine, earthquake, and war, a neverending cycle of death. Jesus is God’s answer.

But we live in the meantime. We still live amid the famine, earthquakes, and war, and that seems odd, if Jesus was sent to end those things.

And so I wonder whether this is why Jesus gives us these words today. I wonder if he anticipates that confusion. I wonder if that is why Jesus tells his disciples the following Little Revelation:

This is only the beginning of the birth pangs.

This – by which Jesus means not the famine, earthquakes, and war, but his own life, death, and resurrection – is only the beginning of the birth pangs, is only the beginning of a much larger process. There is so much more to come. God’s great healing of the entire universe has had its beginning in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, truly. But those events are just that – a beginning.

And in order to remind us that this is only the beginning, and that the end is much, much greater, and definitely much, much greater than any large stones and large buildings, much greater than anything we could accomplish on our own, in order to remind us of this, God gives us a Little Revelation from time to time, a little hint of the end of the story, lest we mistake the present for the end. God gives us a little vision of the world as it could be, as it will be.

Now these visions – like the one in the Book of Daniel – are sometimes full of strange shapes and colors and even, yes, fantastical creatures, but underneath them all is God’s holy dream of a world of compassion and curiosity and creativity and, most of all, love, a world as it could be, a world as it will be. The visions show us where we are going, where God is taking us. They are a little like Sesame Street, actually. The biggest difference between Sesame Street and Shalom Street, though is that no one has to tell us how to get to Shalom, because God’s giving us a lift.

And so what do we do while we ride in the backseat of God’s cosmic cab, as we surf God’s teleological timeline with the rest of creation? Well, we might take a cue from the author of the letter to the Hebrews in our epistle lesson for today. The author proposes that we not only lift the veil but walk right through the curtain to begin living the vision today, just like Sesame Street did 40 years ago. Eugene Peterson’s translation of our reading from Hebrews goes like this:

So, friends, we can now – without hesitation – walk right up to God, into “the Holy Place.” …So let’s do it – full of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside and out. Let’s keep a firm grip on the promises that keep us going. God always keeps God’s word. Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out, not avoiding worshipping together as some do but spurring each other on, especially as we see the big Day approaching.

Let’s do it. Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out and worshipping together and spurring each other on. Let’s see how inventive we can be.

I know the Sunday School kids are already being inventive. They’re starting a campaign to buy a cow for their brothers and sisters in Kenya, and I think they’re going to tell us more about it next week.

I know Meridee is helping our Social Ministry Committee be inventive and think up new ways to live out our calling as an Advocating Congregation.

I know that several congregations, including our own, are being inventive as we prepare to join with other Seattle churches and synagogues and mosques to share an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, a witness to that future day when all of God’s creation gathers around the eternal feast and gives thanks to one God, Father and Mother of us all. (Eat your heart out, Sesame Street.)

So let’s keep doing it. Let’s keep encouraging love and helping out and worshipping together and spurring each other on. Let’s keep dreaming out loud, let’s keep living the vision in the month of November, the month of All Saints, as the church year nears its end and God gathers us up and walks us right to the cliff of the kingdom and we peer over the edge into a vision of the holy communion of all people under their cosmic creator, a vision, as Daniel imagines it, of a sleeping dust awakened and transformed into a sky of shining stars, a vision that is the very Reign of Christ.

And so let us approach the table with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Amen.

What I Preached for Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week

2009-11-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week
Preached at Pacific Lutheran University Chapel, November 9, 2009

A reading from the book of Exodus.

But Moses said to the LORD, “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Then the LORD said to him, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” But Moses said, “O my Lord, please send someone else.” Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses and he said, “What of your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently; even now he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and I will teach you what you shall do. He indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him.”

Word of God, Word of Life:
Thanks be to God.

I picture Moses at the burning bush, alone.

He stands there, barefoot, and I imagine that his legs have turned to something roughly approaching the consistency of raspberry Jell-O. Moses is overwhelmed, and he is overwhelmed not just because there is a bush that burns without burning and a voice that comes from out of nowhere. The greatest wonder, really, is in what this voice is saying.

First of all, God: I am God, the voice says. Listen up.

Second, the Israelites: They are suffering in Egypt, this place that is not their home. They hunger for justice, they cry out for it. And God says to Moses, these people, these hungry and homeless people are, God says, my people. These hungry and homeless people are God’s people.

Third, I will come down. God has not only seen the hunger and the homelessness of God’s people, God is doing something about it. God has come down to bring them up into a new home. This is about as good as the good news gets: God has heard the cry of God’s people, God’s hungry and homeless people, and God is acting to save them.

Now, if God were to stop here, Moses might well have sang a song of praise and continued on his way except that then God gives Moses this last part, and it’s this part that turns his legs to Jell-O and dries his tongue so that he can barely speak.

So come, I will send you to Pharaoh.

So come, I will send you to Pharaoh. So come, I will send you to the President. So come, I will send you to the Governor. So come, I will send you to the Senator, to the Representative. So come, I will send you to the Mayor… of Tacoma. I don’t care what you call him or her, Moses, I am sending you there, to speak on behalf of my people, my hungry and homeless people, to be their advocates.

Oh my Lord, please send someone else.

Oh my Lord, please send someone else. Have you read my resume, Lord? I don’t have the right skill set for that. It’s a public speaking gig, right? Yeah, that’s not for me. Moses looks at his own talents, looks down at his hands, sees his reflection in the flickering flames, and he says, “This is not going to be enough.”

And he's right.

Fortunately for Moses – and fortunately for us – God doesn’t expect it to be enough. God’s work doesn’t depend on our skill sets, it depends on the One who created them. And then, having created us, having sustained us, having sent us, God sends people to help us, people whose talents complement our own, people who speak and in so doing teach us to speak.

And sometimes these people are the very people we thought we were helping. That is what happened to Moses. Aaron, Moses' brother but still one of God’s own hungry and homeless people, is the very person God sends to help Moses. The very people we think we are rescuing end up rescuing us. Look, Moses – even now he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad.

Together you will walk to Pharaoh; together you will speak; together you will walk to freedom. You and your brothers and your sisters. For you there will no longer be us and them, only us. No longer will you walk alone. Your journey and their journey will become one. Your journey and their journey will become one.

For the last few months I have had the privilege of working at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State. As a branch of the church, rooted in the church, we go to the halls of power, in the state capitol, to plead the cause of the least among us whenever and wherever important policy decisions are being made. As representatives of the church, we urge lawmakers to fund food banks and shelters, to improve childhood nutrition, to increase the availability of low-income housing, always in pursuit of a more just and compassionate society.

But we do not do this alone. When we go to the halls of power, we go with coalitions of social service agencies and community partners, including organizations of the homeless and the formerly homeless. And we go with faithful advocates in churches and missions and universities across the state, advocates whose journeys once upon a time intersected with the journeys of God’s hungry and homeless people, and whose journeys were never the same.

I recently heard a story from one of these advocates.

She had gone to speak at a public hearing, where policymakers were deciding whether or not to fund a network of homeless shelters. She was very nervous. There was a large crowd, and she had to face a panel of powerful people. But she drew up her courage, and she pleaded with the policymakers not to cut the funding for those who needed it.

As she finished her testimony, there was a burst of applause and loud cheering. She turned around. An organization of the homeless had gathered to support her, and they let their presence be known. As she left the hall, they thanked her for speaking up for them. She never forgot it, the day that their journey and her journey became one.

In our hymn for today we will sing: Un pueblo que camina por el mundo, gritando: “¡Ven, Señor!” Un pueblo que busca en esta vida la gran liberación. The people walk throughout the world together, and cry out, “Come, O Lord”; the people who long to claim the promise, God’s liberating Word.

Amen.

What I Preached on the Feast of St. Luke, Sunday, October 18, 2009

2009-10-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Feast of St. Luke, October 18, 2009
St. John United Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

St. Luke. The Physician. And, it should be noted, St. Luke the Ox.

Yes, it’s true: Just like St. John, the Eagle, St. Luke has an animal symbol, his very own patronus charm, extrapolated from a few obscure passages in Ezekiel and Revelation and handed down through the annals of a wilder and woollier Christian history than we Protestants like to remember. An Ox. Which is why St. Luke is also the patron saint of butchers. Yes, it’s true: St. Luke is the patron saint of both doctors… and butchers. The man casts a wide net. These are just good things to know.

Anyway, the truth is we don’t know much about St. Luke – who he was, where he lived, when he was born or how he died. The name Lukas only shows up three times in the entire New Testament, when Paul mentions him in his letters to first-century churches. Paul and Luke, it seems, were traveling companions, friends in the faith.

We first find Luke mentioned at the end of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, when Paul passes along greetings from those who are with him. Here’s how Eugene Peterson translates the letter.

Aristarchus, who is in jail here with me, sends greetings; also Mark, cousin of Barnabas (you received a letter regarding him; if he shows up, welcome him)… Epaphras, who is one of you, says hello. What a trooper he’s been! …Luke, good friend and physician, and Demas, both send greetings…

Later Paul writes a letter to his colleague Philemon, and again he sends a list of hellos.

Epaphras, my cellmate in the cause of Christ, says hello. Also my coworkers Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke…

In these letters you can imagine Paul with his friends around him. “Oh, you’re writing to Philemon? Hey, tell him I said hi, would ya?”

Paul, Mark, Aristarchus, Epaphras, Demas, and Luke. It’s quite a little gospel gang they’ve got. And it has to be. They’re constantly under threat, marked for death by their involvement with the Christian Underground.

And when we read Luke’s Gospel, we can feel the influence of these fierce friendships, forged in a furnace as fiery as anything Daniel faced. The words are soaked with the love Luke has for his companions. The other gospel writers address their work to a general audience, but not Luke. Luke addresses his gospel as if it were a letter written to a particular person. For you, Theophilus.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus finds the bonds of love everywhere. When the sun went down, Luke writes, everyone who had anyone sick with some ailment or other brought them to him. One by one he placed his hands on them and healed them.

Did you hear the crucial detail? It isn’t simply that sick people streamed to Jesus, but their loved ones brought them to Jesus. And through this faith Jesus heals. Listen to how this is detailed in just one of Luke’s healing stories.

Some men arrived carrying a paraplegic on a stretcher. They were looking for a way to get into the house and set him before Jesus. When they couldn’t find a way in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof, removed some tiles, and let him down in the middle of everyone, right in front of Jesus. Impressed by their bold belief, he said, “Friend, I forgive your sins. Stand up, take your bed, and go.”

It’s crucial to note here that when Jesus heals the man, he commends not his faith but their faith, the faith of the friends. Jesus looks at human friendship and he says, This is good.

Throughout Luke’s gospel, these human relationships are a crucial way that God works healing in the world.

It is Mary’s visit with Elizabeth that brings forth her prophetic Magnificat, her song of good news for the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry.

It is when the shepherds are gathered together in the fields that a messenger speaks to them, sending them to wrap the Holy Family in a swaddling cloth of community.

It is a group of faithful women who together provide resources for Jesus; they pool their finances to support Jesus’ ministry.

And it is, finally, these same women who find the tomb empty, and who run to tell the others the best good news.

Again and again, God works through the fellowship of God’s people.

In Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice, author Stephanie Paulsell tells a story of how God heals through a people gathered together. Paulsell writes:

A group of friends responded when one of them became terminally ill.

As he grew sicker, his body first became a stranger and then an enemy to him, a source of nothing but anguish. In the last months of his life, he told his friends of his feeling of having been abandoned by his body.

They began reading about and training themselves in therapeutic massage. They began to gather regularly in his home, to stroke his hands and feet, to touch his skin, to offer his body back to him as a source of comfort, not of pain alone.

Through these sessions of therapeutic touching, he found himself more able to speak freely about his illness and his inevitable death. Through the practice of touching, his friends found themselves able to respond with compassion rather than fear, with openness rather than denial. And when their friend died, they found comfort in the healing touch of one another.

That group of friends challenged me to enlarge my understanding of healing. How wonderful it would have been if those friends had touched their dying friend, and his sickness had disappeared. But that didn’t happen. He remained sick. And he died. But there was healing in the midst of his illness, healing in a deep sense. Before he died, he was able to experience his body as a good and holy creation. His friends returned his body to him, broken, yet beautiful, a temple of the Holy Spirit still.

Paulsell’s story confirms something true about the way God works, the way God heals: through people, working together, on behalf of one another.

But Luke knows the flipside, too. That fellowship fails. That friendship fractures. That the ties that bind, even when they are bonds in Christ, can fray and leave us hanging, alone.

The neighbors of Elizabeth and Zechariah grow afraid, and spread gossip throughout Judea, isolating the parents who have a strange son.

When Jesus begins his ministry by echoing the words of his mother, proclaiming good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed, he is rejected by those closest to him. The people of his hometown, the people he had grown up with, desert him.

So Jesus makes new friends, disciples who travel with him throughout his ministry. But they, too, desert him at his hour of greatest need, first falling asleep when he asks them to be vigilant, then leaving him altogether.

Peter’s betrayal, how he denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed, is a story told in all four Gospels. But only Luke mentions the devastating detail that after the third denial, Jesus turns and looks at Peter, and allows Peter one vivid, horrifying moment to linger over the terrible truth that the bond between the two men had been torn apart.

It’s no wonder, really, that Luke would give us this particular detail. He, too, knew the pain of a broken relationship.

The last time Luke is mentioned in the Bible is in Paul’s second letter to Timothy, from which our Epistle reading for today is taken. Throughout the letter, Paul’s mood is upbeat, but the details betray his situation.

He is in jail, again. But this time there is no list of friends sending their greetings. Here at the end of his life, Paul is almost entirely alone. Do your best to come to me soon, he writes, for Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me. Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you… There is not even mention of Aristarchus or Epaphras. The fellowship has fractured.

And yet, and yet. Somehow Paul still writes to Timothy, encouraging him to keep the faith. Somehow Luke still writes his gospel, reaching out to Theophilus.

And the reason, I think, is that Luke knows that God’s healing power does not rest on our faithfulness. Earlier in 2nd Timothy, Paul writes something that he tells Timothy to repeat over and over.

The saying is sure: If we are faithless, he remains faithful.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful. No matter what we do, Jesus remains faithful, still gathering us together, still healing our brokenness, still sending us out to give good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed. I work, God says through the mouth of Isaiah, and no one can hinder it. No one.

Near the end of Luke’s gospel, Jesus dies. But God’s work does not. Within days of the cross, Jesus is back on the road, making friends. He gathers people together. He breaks bread. He sends people out. And God heals again.

God heals through friends who gather to care for one another.

God heals through communities who come together to face common problems.

And God heals, finally, through God’s people, gathered, fed, and sent.

Just ask St. Luke.

God's Dirty Work. Our Dirty Hands.

2009-10-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

The following is a post I wrote for my seminary's blog. They're celebrating "Earth Year" for 2009-2010, and my post is a response to one a friend of mine wrote kicking off the year.

The clearing rests in song and shade
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.

We join our work to Heaven's gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy of widest worth.
High Heaven's Kingdom come on earth.
Imagine Paradise.
O dust, arise!

-Wendell Berry, "The Clearing Rests in Song and Shade"

A few weeks ago Zach Parris challenged his fellow SS bloggers to think and write about our next steps during LSTC’s Earth Year. In classic Zach fashion, he urged us, as we seek to join the growing green movement, not to shirk the strengths of our theological heritage, nor to skirt the messy nature of ethical choices in a sin-soaked world.

Zach is right. If we fall into the trap of thinking that voting for a Democratic president, eating organic food, and buying a Nalgene bottle is all it takes to save the world, we will indeed build up a "works-righteousness bubble” that will be punctured as soon as we encounter a political headwind, read Michael Pollan, or see REI’s new BPA-free Nalgene bottle. As the air rushes out, we finally realize that no cobbled-together cure-all, taken on its own in increasingly desperate doses, can save us. We are grateful for Luther’s rediscovery of this crucial truth, and we Lutherans would do well to carry our forebear’s insight with us into the future.

Yet our goodly heritage has, unfortunately and for a variety of reasons, too often been used to justify an all-too-typical Lutheran quietism. The story of Lutherans in North America – and in Europe, for that matter – is ripe with examples of our church giving short shrift to the world-changing work God has called us to do. Trapped halfway through our paradox, we have sat out too many social movements. Oh, we have our heroes, and rightly so – our Dietrich Bonhoeffers and our Jon Nelsons – but as a church we have too often been inactive enablers of evil, often with our theology as an excuse.

But – thanks be to God! – we are sinful and forgiven, sinner and saint, dust and yet arising. It is well past time that we claimed our full Lutheran heritage, the one that declares the great paradox that we are sinners, yes, truly, but we are also saints, yes, truly, empowered by God through our baptism to, as Zach puts it, “act and move” for justice. And though we, the sinner-saints, work in “what is left” of a world – indeed, a creation – already devastated by sin and its brutal effects, we are freed by the cross and yes, called through our baptism, to, in the words of Wendell Berry, “join our work to Heaven’s gift.”

So, in answer to Zach’s question, what’s next in Earth Year for me? It is the work of joyful discovering that - much to my surprise - this sinner-saint work-joining is already happening!

I am blessed this year to be on a pastoral internship in a place where I am seeing God working through our hands every day through communities of faith in the Pacific Northwest. Three-fifths of my time this year is spent at St. John United Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington, a congregation already engaged in innovative Care of Creation ministries. (The other two-fifths is at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, but I’ll say more about my Earth Year discoveries there in a future post.)

Several years ago St. John United, together with its then-intern, decided to reclaim a sidewalk and adjoining parkway in a residential neighborhood in the heart of urban Seattle. Over the past few years God put their dirt-covered hands to good work: They planted crops, from green beans to bright yellow sunflowers, adding new varieties every year. They invited others in the community to join in planting, nurturing, and harvesting. They built an irrigation system to run through pipes under the parking lot. And they grew more and more wild plant life to beautify the neighborhood, and produced more and more good food to donate to their weekly soup kitchen ministry.

Of course, the harvest is still small by most standards. We often bring in only a shoebox full of veggies – a harvest that pales in comparison to the one reaped by Celebration Lutheran Church in East Wenatchee, Washington, where I am visiting this weekend. They regularly cover several fellowship-hall sized tables with food (big orange pumpkins this Sunday!). And if I were to compare our crop to the big industrial farms that stock the Safeway grocery store, well… let’s just say the economists would tell us to give it up. But, as we well know, they’ve been wrong before. And so we press on, confident of what God can do with a few loaves and fishes – or a few green beans and sunflowers, for that matter.

As for me, I still have a lot to learn about gardening. On my first garden work day, I pointed at an ugly-looking plant that had pricked me and asked whether it was a weed.

“No,” a fellow garden steward told me. “That’s a wild rose.”

I stepped back to marvel at the mystery of God’s creation, and to marvel even more at the mystery that God can do such work through such clumsy, dirty hands as mine. Heaven’s gift, indeed.

Back from Holden

2009-09-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

Had an amazing time theologizing, hiking, conversing, basketballing, singing, wildlife-spotting, and enjoying Holden Village immensely. We can't wait to go back... and stay longer next time.

And of course, you can find more photos. Click here for the Facebook photo album (should work even if you're not on Facebook).

Holden Village Week

2009-09-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

This week Chris and I will be in Holden Village, up in the Cascade Mountains, for a theology conference.

Well, I will be there for a theology conference; Chris will be there to write; and we'll both be there to enjoy what everyone tells us is a really cool place - mountains and lakes and rivers, oh my!

But: There's no cell phone service and no internet service there. So we're incommunicado until Thursday evening.

Until then!

What I Preached on September 20, 2009

2009-09-20T12:12:00.001-07:00

Sermon for Bible Sunday, September 20, 2009
St. John United Lutheran Church, Seattle, Washington

Gospel: Mark 9:30–37

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again." But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the way?" But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all." Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me."

*****

Today we celebrate Bible Sunday. In a few minutes, we are going to have our Bibles blessed. And we will recommit ourselves to another year of reading the Bible – in Bible classes, in homes, in worship. And in each of these settings – class, home, worship – we read the Bible together.

Together. It’s more difficult than it sounds. Being together can be hard. We gather with the best of intentions, but before long we’re irritated. Some people talk too much; others are too hesitant – or too proud – to speak at all. Inevitably a pecking order develops.

I don’t mean like Robert’s Rules of Order, I mean the kind where I begin to believe my job, or my experience, or my income, or my education, or any number of other things about me somehow makes me a better person than you.

I confess that I have fallen into that trap, more than once in my life. And I’ll probably do it again. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I begin to believe that these people are ok, but they’re not like me.

And I begin to crave the status I deserve. And so I push my chair away from the table. And maybe I seek another table, one with people more like me, but that doesn’t work and so I do it again, and again, and again, until I am sitting alone at my own little table.

It’s not far from what happened in our Gospel text for today, where Mark tells us a story of status-craving among Jesus’ own disciples.

Their conflict has been growing for some time, long before the passage we have before us today. The Twelve have been together for months, following this strange teacher who had invited each of them to come along with him. They had a special thing going, this little band of traveling healers. But then things began to break down.

In the chapters that precede today’s Gospel reading, Jesus had handpicked a select few of his disciples to climb a mountain, and to be witness there to a mysterious and highly secretive revelation, the Transfiguration.

Meanwhile, the others, mystified at being left out of this special trip, try to keep the mission going on their own, and they offer to heal a man’s sick daughter.

But they fail, and now the crowd has turned on them. Fortunately Jesus comes back just in time, but the deeper damage has been done.

Before long the disciples are engaged in a back-and-forth dispute over pecking order. Jesus is leading them on, but who is second-in-command? They whisper in hushed voices.

Is it Peter, James, or John? It’s got to be one of those three, Jesus chose them to go up the mountain!

The others scoff. Peter? You can’t be serious. They roll their eyes, but inside their pride is wounded, and they are hurt and confused.

Jesus, seemingly oblivious, keeps on trucking. He pulls his disciples away from the crowds and tries to teach them. But instead of explaining everything that just happened, he begins speaking again about his imminent death.

Some of the disciples, especially those who went up to the mountain with Jesus, nod their heads solemnly, as if they understand all this death and resurrection talk. He chose us for the special trip, he must think we’ll get it. And so they nod their heads as if in agreement, but really they have no idea what’s going on.

The others avert their eyes and shuffle their feet uncomfortably. We already messed up the healing, we don’t want to start messing up the teaching, too. If he learns how clueless we are, maybe he’ll kick us out. Just keep quiet, they tell themselves, and try not to draw too much attention to yourself.

Jesus leads the way back into town, but he walks far ahead of the others, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. As he walks, the murmurs behind him grow louder. It’s the pecking order argument again, and this time it gets heated. Voices raise, and then are shushed again. Nobody wants Jesus to find out about what they are arguing about.

But alas, it is the first thing he asks them when they are settled indoors again. Had he heard everything? Or just enough to know? Either way, everyone begins to prepare for a rebuke. After all, they’d seen what happened to Peter. “Get behind me, Satan”? Ouch.

But Jesus, rather than getting angry, sits down, takes a deep breath, and begins again to teach. They are different words than before, but the message seems somehow the same. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

That is so not what they wanted to hear. And so they don’t hear it.

And then, as Jesus is speaking, a little boy walks in. I imagine him dressed in ragged clothes. He hasn’t bathed in days.

The boy walks up to one of the disciples with his hands out and his head bowed, mumbling something robotically, as if he had his lines rote memorized.

He goes to each of the disciples in turn, pausing only long enough to see if the man will give him a few coins before moving on to the next one. Some hands dig around in their coin purses, other heads shake dismissively.

Jesus stops talking. He is riveted by the scene. He calls the boy over. The boy’s head is still bowed. Jesus gives him a piece of bread and speaks softly to him.

The boy stuffs the bread in his pocket and looks at Jesus, but his eyes are dull. He waits to see if the strange man will give him any more. But all the while, his eyes stare ahead, dull, as if he were numb to the edges of social interaction, his intent focused: Get money. Get food.

The disciples watch, some of them annoyed at this interruption, others waiting for one of Jesus’ aphorisms to explain what is going on. But Jesus keeps talking with the boy, softly and quietly.

And then, all of a sudden, Jesus hugs him. The disciples watch, wide-eyed. Some of them are scandalized. Most men they knew wouldn’t embrace their own child like that in public.

But Jesus just holds this boy tight. As if that explained everything.

*****

Conflicts and disputes: they can make us miss everything. James, in today’s epistle lesson, knows the feeling all too well. He diagnoses the problem like a good nutritionist: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?”

Cravings: a shallow word posing as a synonym for hunger. We crave, and we grasp for status. We crave, and when we do not get the recognition we deserve, we make a move for the door.

But Jesus knows that we are more than cravers. We need more than the junk food of a cheap solitary victory, a few minutes in the winner’s circle. We are more than cravers. We do more than crave. We hunger.

And that, finally, is why we turn and re-turn, again and again, to the Bible. Not because it is a tool to gain the upper hand in life. Not because it is a vessel to help us escape from the world – no, this book is not that.

No, this book, our Book of Faith, is more like a table. Like a great big table around which we gather, seeking food. And God feeds us there, in this book, at this table, with the bread of teaching, with the bread of life.

It’s not that we always experience it that way; there is much that can taste bland or even bitter. But somewhere, while lost in the pages of this book, we each taste something we can’t forget.

Maybe we taste it often, maybe rarely; maybe we tasted it yesterday, or maybe a long time ago. No matter – the call of that taste keeps bringing us back, back to the Book, back to the Table.

But here’s the catch. We do not eat alone. We do not even eat only with our friends, or those we agree with, or those we like. There is no greatest table and no least table. Just. One. Big. Table. For all of us.

At God’s table there are many chairs. There are even chairs for people we don’t like very much. And there are especially, especially chairs for the poor. For the lonely. For the desperate. For the hungry. We get in line behind them. Or rather, we serve them.

Those with more serve those with less, until those the world sees as the greatest are serving those the world sees as the least, and the wisdom of the world breaks down, and the very world itself is turned upside down. And is, against all odds, set right.

But where to start? Maybe we could start with this Book of Faith. In a Bible study here at St. John United. At home with our family. On Sunday morning at worship. And then we would hear the words again:

Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me.’

Come, Lord Jesus. Be our guest.

Amen.

The Keadles Invade Seattle

2009-09-19T14:47:00.000-07:00

Last weekend my parents came for a visit - and, as usual, we took pictures. Here are a few of our favorites...

Mom & Dad Visit Seattle

Starting Blocks

2009-09-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

Two weeks in, without about ten days of work under my belt.

At this point, by “work” I mean figuring things out and feeling clueless a lot of the time. It’s more work than you’d think, that whole working-while-clueless thing. Our friend Elisabeth put it best, writing about her first week on internship: "I think I am supposed to be working, but as to what and how I am supposed to be working I haven’t the foggiest idea." Ok, so E’s exaggerations aside, we probably have a foggy idea of what this job is supposed to look like, but you get the idea, a fairly consistent feeling of: All right, so I’m here: Now what?

As for starting blocks for you, dear readers, I should probably explain a bit about what my week looks like – so far, at least.

My week begins on Tuesday at the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, whose office space is located inside Denny Park Lutheran Church in downtown Seattle (just a few blocks from the Space Needle). I spent a lot of time on Tuesday morning checking my new intern email account, clicking around through old emails, trying to get a sense of things. In the afternoon my supervisor came in, and we spoke briefly about the job description and what I’d be doing. In the evening Chris and I tried to make it to a town hall meeting with our local US Representative on the University of Washington campus, but we, um, got lost in our new city and missed it. Sigh.

Wednesday morning I’m at St. John United Lutheran Church. I’m often the first one there in the a.m. – my supervisor lives an hour or so away and works at home in the morning, coming into church after the traffic dies down. We meet for an hour or so when she arrives, and then we’re off to a gathering of six or so Lutheran pastors whose churches are in northwest Seattle. There are a lot of Lutheran churches in Seattle, and therefore a lot of opportunities to meet other Lutheran clergy. Afterwards, in the afternoon, I worked on planning the first meeting of a new young adult group at St. John’s. (We’ll be at Hales Ales pub on Wednesday at 6, everyone’s welcome!)

Thursday is at St. John (known around here as S-J-U) again, where I spend the morning in contact with members of various church committees. By 11 o’clock my supervisor and I are on our way to a text (Bible) study with another, different, group of Lutheran clergy, this one held at the church Chris and I live inside of, in a fellowship hall just underneath our apartment. We spend a little more than an hour here, and then we’re off to a lunch meeting with other folks from the public policy office who are in the early stages of planning the annual fundraiser, to be held in May. After the fundraiser planning meeting, I spend the rest of the afternoon writing the Prayers of Intercession for Sunday morning. In the evening Chris and I try to make it to a Health Care Reform Rally downtown, but get confused about the bus schedules and end up arriving too late. Again. Sigh.

On Friday I’m back at the Public Policy Office, and this time I’m the only one at the office, all day. The office manager/administrator is working from home, and my supervisor is off somewhere – he’s often in Olympia, the state capitol, doing work for the office – and thus, I am alone. All day. I spend the entire day working on a project of database searches and cross-references that my supervisor had suggested. I learn a lot, but worry whether I’m doing what he had in mind. At the end of the day, I email what I have, hopeful that I’m on the right track.

Saturday mornings will normally see me busy with church or policy office work, but this Saturday I had an empty schedule, so Chris and I took advantage of it. We unlocked our bikes and rode them down 32nd street to find a dedicated bike trail that wound its way along the locks and then along the Puget Sound, spitting us out finally at Golden Gardens Park, one of Seattle’s best. We spent a few hours walking the park’s pebbled beach, Chris taking hundreds upon hundreds of photos of all manner of nature-y thing. (That’s right, folks – Chris is the photographer this year!)

Truth be told, the little tide pools and eddies of the Puget Sound’s pebbled shores are pretty awesome, and we feel blessed to live so close to them. On the way home, we stopped for lunch (pulled pork sandwiches!) at a BBQ place across the street from our apartment, and ended the day by going to the local Goodwill store to pick some used books on the cheap.

Finally it arrives: Sunday morning. I’m at church early, printing and posting a resolution our ELCA national church body recently passed endorsing a fair and equitable health care bill. During worship, my supervisor preaches on health care and mentions our advocacy work. I won’t preach for another two weeks, but I do robe up every Sunday, writing prayers, reading parts of the service, and assisting with communion. After church I shake everyone’s hand – gotta get used to this weekly receiving line – and then it’s off to coffee hour and Sunday afternoon meetings. Chris walks down the street to a bakery/coffee shop and reads for a few hours while she waits for me to finish.

By Sunday evening I am done with my week. We enjoy a quiet Sunday evening at home. I flip on the television, but, sadly, the Bears aren’t on – this is Seahawk country, and I’ll have to adjust. Sigh.

And Monday is my day off. We spend the morning getting a tour of Seattle from a member of our congregation, and then we have lunch with him and his wife. In the afternoon I bike down the street to a coffee shop – Cupcake Royale! greatest name ever! – and now I’m writing this, right… now.

Whew! One minute you don’t know where to start, and the next thing you know you’re off and running…

Photo Gallery: Westward Ho! Road Trip

2009-09-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a whole bunch of photos - some of the beautiful West, some of us clowning around - from our Westward Ho! Road Trip. Enjoy!

Westward Ho! Road Trip 09

First Week

2009-08-31T21:26:00.000-07:00

Week one. Done.

On Monday, a mere seven days ago, we burst through the last bunch of evergreen mountains and came down – literally, came down – to the waterfront city of Seattle. The days that followed were a blur of new things: new (and friendly!) people, new (and confusing!) streets, new (and oddly located but somehow very likable!) apartment home, new (and awesome!) central tourist sites like the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, new (and even more awesome!) walkable urban neighborhood, and – of course – new job.

I really love my new job. There are a million little reasons for this that are adding up to a situation I couldn’t have dreamed up for myself, but maybe the best example is in my experience on Thursday morning at my first Lutheran Public Policy Office (LPPO) event.

It was a Faith-Labor Breakfast, a meet-and-eat where religious leaders and labor leaders gathered together to organize. We prayed. We ate and drank (coffee, of course – this is Seattle, after all). We listened to a variety of speakers discuss everything from the plight of local hotel workers to the current status of the federal health care bill. We committed to several specific actions. And we planned the next meeting.

Those of you on Facebook might have some idea of why this kind of a meeting would get me so excited. For weeks now I’ve been posting – often way too much, I know – about the health care bill and how important it is. And now I suddenly find myself in a job where I go to work in the morning and I get to work on connecting others with ways they can get involved with the health care bill. That’s right, folks: I don’t have to wait until I get home to work on the things I really care about; I get to do it at work. For someone who used to work at a Subway, this is a big deal.

At this point I imagine some of you may also be asking whether the health care bill is really what a seminary intern ought to be working on. It’s a good question, and one I hope to address better in the coming weeks and months on this blog. But for now I’m just content to sit back stupefied, full of exuberant gratitude that, wonder of wonders, I get to work on what I care about.

Besides the stupefied wonder, there’ve been other notables this week. Most notable of them all was a visit by Chris’ mom and sister, Erica, to help us move in. Actually, they took the train and passed us along the route West while we were sleeping in Spokane and ended up welcoming us to Seattle. Their early arrival allowed them to show us around a bit on our first full day in our new city, giving us the 411 on the public transit system and giving us a tour of the Pike Place Market. It was a short trip, with only a few days here, but just long enough for us to share some of our first experiences of Seattle with them.

Which is to say that, thankfully, amid all this newness we weren’t really alone. In a new apartment, we unpacked familiar things. At a new job, I remembered old training and dug up old passions. In a new place, we explored unfamiliar territory with familiar people. And on Sunday morning, in a new church, we worshipped the same God who’d walked with us all the way here.

Thank heavens. New growth, after all, is always supported by its roots.

Moving Eve

2009-08-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

It’s raining again.

Tomorrow we leave for Seattle and, it seems, another new life. It will be our third new life in four years. Our life, lately, has been a nomadic life, one that leaves us excited and exhausted at the same time, nearly all the time.

We are, of course, thrilled at the prospect of new things, even as we carry the past with us.

We can see that past with our own eyes as we pack it into the backseat of the car, and we think: if only we could leave more behind.

And we feel that past in our hearts as we remember the whirlwind month we’ve spent with our family and our friends, and we think: if only we could take more of it with us.

And this rain that is coming down again, this rain: it feels so ominous. Or maybe it’s just a harbinger of rainy Seattle, some God-sent sign that our future is already here, right outside our windows, at our doorstep.

Now the sky clears up again, just as suddenly as it arrived. The future is here and it is not, back and forth, sometimes both at the same time. Maybe this is how new life starts.

So start.