Paul tells us that “God loves a cheerful giver.” Are we going to hear those words as a burdensome requirement that adds to our anxieties about giving – or can we find in them freedom from our fears?

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Day of Thanksgiving, year A
Texts: Deuteronomy 8:7-18; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15

We have so much guilt about giving. What we do or don’t decide to share with those in need has seemingly endless power to trouble our conscience. In our unjust, broken world, it’s hard to know the best way to use the resources that God has entrusted to us. We worry if we’re sharing enough, when we have been blessed with so much and the world’s need is so great. Or we might worry that we’re giving too much away, when we’re not sure how we’re going to make ends meet for ourselves. We fret about giving to the right people and causes, not wanting to be unwise about how we allocate our money, time, and talents. And we’re anxious if we’re giving for the right reasons, if we’re truly acting out of love or if we’re motivated by social pressure, or self-interest, or remorse. We all want to do the right thing with our resources, but that’s a tall order in our world, so many of us live with the guilty suspicion – or perhaps the guilty certainty – that we’re somehow falling short. That’s why stewardship conversations are always so awkward. It’s hard for us to even talk to each other about our giving habits, and that very discomfort reveals our fear that we’re not getting it right.

And then, just add to that stack of anxieties, Paul says that giving is supposed to be cheerful. He’s trying to collect money for the poor of Jerusalem, and he tells the church in Corinth that God loves a cheerful giver. It’s one of those verses that sometimes sticks in my throat, because it feels like it’s asking so much of us. Not only do we need to be generous, responsible, informed, and altruistic with our resources – on top of everything, we’re supposed to be happy about it all. And as every person knows, being told that we should cheer up does nothing to alleviate our stress; often, it just makes us feel more overwhelmed. The weight of our responsibility to the world is so heavy. And it’s hard to hear that we should be happy to carry that weight. God loves a cheerful giver? Why can’t God just love that we’re trying to figure it out?

But there is grace in these words, once we stop listening to our anxieties and start listening to the Spirit. This verse about cheerful giving can be misread as pure law, but what Paul is giving us is gospel. When he says that God loves a cheerful giver, he’s not talking about requirements, or what we need to do to deserve God’s love. He’s reminding us of our freedom in Christ. He says, “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” We might instead translate that word “cheerful” as “joyful” or “free.” Paul tells the people of Corinth: listen, only you know what God is asking of your life. Only you know your full situation. Only you know your heart. And so, he says, be free. Be free to respond as the spirit moves you, and don’t let me, or anyone else, guilt you into pretending to be someone you are not. God isn’t looking for our guilt. God is looking to rejoice with us, and to bless us, and to free us from all that troubles our hearts.

So Paul gives us a vision of how far that freedom can take us. He says that we can use our liberty to find far greater riches and far greater joy than what the systems of our world can offer us. He promises that those who are moved to give will discover far more abundance than they had to begin with: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, but the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.” Once again, this is not an order or a threat, but an invitation to participate in God’s reign. The kingdom of God is already here, transforming our world now, but we can only see that when we choose to be a part of it. When we freely plant whatever gifts God has entrusted to us, we harvest clearer vision about how the Spirit is moving in the world. We harvest deeper relationships with God and with our neighbors. We harvest freedom from our anxieties. We harvest the joy of taking part of part of something eternal, and life-giving, and good. We harvest hope. This is the purpose for which God has made such abundance possible in our lives. We are given our blessings so we might give them away. God has made enough for everyone; no one needs to be hungry, homeless, or lonely. Paul writes, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” God’s abundance is for abundant sharing, abundant community, abundant life. God loves our cheerful giving because it means that we have discovered the joy of living in the promises of God’s reign.

That’s all good for Paul to say, but it’s hard for us to believe in the power of this abundance when we are so conditioned to believe in scarcity. We instinctively hold tight to the things that we deem “ours.” Our natural pose is defensiveness. But Moses tells us we can be free of all that fear because nothing that we have is truly ours. In the book of Deuteronomy, the people of Israel are on the eve of crossing over into the Promised Land after a generation of wandering in the wilderness. Moses describes the land that they’re about to enter with that beautiful list of the earth’s bounty: grains and fruits, abundant fresh water, and even the minerals that God placed in the Earth. With all these marvels at their fingertips, life is at last going to be good. They’re going to live in freedom, and eat their fill, and praise God for their many blessings. But then Moses gives them a warning: when they get comfortable, they’re going to be tempted to forget how they got here. So he tells them, Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God. When your have food, and homes, and riches, be careful that you do not forget God and exalt yourself. Do not say, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth,” but remember the Lord your God, for it is God who gives you the power to get wealth.

Those are tough words for us. We live in a culture that teaches us to proudly proclaim, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” Our nation loves to believe that whatever we have is ours, and ours alone, because are the ones who earned it. It is deeply instilled in us from childhood that a fundamental goal of life is to work hard to build up the pile of what is ours. All of us know what it means to work hard for what we have, and there is nothing wrong with being proud of what our labor has accomplished. But we lose sight of God when we think that we are in any way self-sufficient. We did not make our bodies, we did not choose the circumstances of our birth, and we certainly did not create the riches of this planet. It is hard for us to confess our lack of independence, but once we embrace how deeply we rely on God, we realize that we don’t need to cling so tightly to what we have won in this life. We can begin to let God transform our reluctant, fearful hearts into something freer and more loving. We can stop building higher walls to protect what is ours, and start building longer tables to share it with our neighbors. Paul writes that giving our resources away “not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.” Free and joyful giving is an act of thanks-giving, and it opens us to the fullness of God’s sustaining love.

After worship, many of us will go to our homes to share a meal with loved ones. At its best, the joy of the meal is not in the excess of food, but in the chance to gather together, serving one another and being served in our turn. It’s a celebration of our ability to care for each other using the gifts that God has given us. Our vision of God’s reign is like that festive meal, but with a table at which everyone is welcome, and a feast that never ends. It’s a feast where grace triumphs over guilt, love triumphs over need, and abundance triumphs over fear. There is such abundance in this world, and whenever we share it abundantly, we are sharing the loving reign of God.

Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift!

Amen.

“What we will be has not yet been revealed.” On this All Saints Sunday, how do we live in the mysterious “not yet” of our life together with God? And what do we know about God’s presence with us now?

Vicar Jessica Christy
All Saints Sunday, year A
Texts: Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

Let us pray.  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer.  In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Beloved, what we will be has not yet been revealed. But what we do know is this: when God is revealed, we will be like God.

That seems like a strange sort of promise for us to hear, on today of all days. On this festival when we celebrate the communion of all saints, it would make sense for us to proclaim with as much as much certainty as we are able what it will be like for us to experience full union with God. Mystery is unsettling, especially in the face of eternity. We long for certainty about what awaits us after death. We want a clear picture of what has happened to our departed loved ones. And yet we read 1 John and are confronted with a great mystery of faith. We know what we will become, but the fullness of that has not yet been revealed. Our faith promises the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, but scripture gives us precious few details about how we will experience that fulfillment. In hope, we await perfect peace and joy and praise in God’s presence, but the rest is hidden from our gaze.

For centuries, much of the church has acted as though the purpose of the gospel were to teach us the right way to get into heaven, and what to expect once we make it there. But if that was really meant to be the center of Jesus’ teachings, he didn’t do a great job of communicating that. He seemed a lot more interested in how we live with each other here, how we participate in God’s reign on earth. When Jesus died, he broke open the jaws of Hell, ascended to heaven, and returned to Earth, but he didn’t then grab his disciples to tell them the essential facts they needed to know about the afterlife. Instead, he forgave them, and fed them, and told them to go forth and do likewise. The work of faith is to love God, love each other, and trust that God will take care of the rest. Christ’s promises of heaven light our way, but they do not shine so bright as to blind us to the world around us. It might not always seem that way, but the mystery of heaven is truly a gift. We have been given the gift of mystery so that we can live together more fully on Earth. And we have been given the gift of mystery because we know that what awaits us is more wonderful than we could ever comprehend.

So what we will be has not yet been revealed – but we know what we are now, and that knowledge is amazing. As 1 John tells us, we are God’s beloved children, now. The great God of the universe, the God who lights the spark of distant galaxies and who breathes life into all the secret places of the earth, that source of all being knows me, and knows you, and calls us child. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” See what love, that in this vast cosmos we should be made in God’s own image and loved as God’s dearest creation. And also we know that, when God carefully created each and every one of us, God placed something of Christ within us, something shining and eternal that flashes forth whenever we encounter the living Trinity. John says that when God is fully revealed to us, we will discover that we are like God, for God has been alive within us all along. We can’t begin to imagine what that will be like, but we know that it is already true, just waiting to be unveiled. And because we know these things, we know that nothing – not sin, not sadness, not even the grave, can separate us from the love of God. We are God’s children now, and we will be God’s children forever.

What we will be has not yet been revealed, but we know that we are embraced by God’s blessings. When Jesus pronounces the beatitudes, it’s the first time in the book of Matthew that we see him really speaking to his disciples. He has called them, and performed miracles in their presence, but these verses are his very first teachings. They eagerly follow this new wonder-worker to a mountaintop to hear what he will tell them, and he says: blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the persecuted, and all those who hunger for a better world.

In the places of weakness, dissatisfaction, and despair where the world sees only curses, Jesus proclaims blessings. He says that the kingdom of heaven is found in the lives of those who live in the service of others. Not “theirs will be the kingdom of heaven” but “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” When we see peacemaking and justice-seeking, we know that God is with us. When we see gentleness and mercy, we know that God is with us. And when it feels like all is lost, Christ comforts us with the promise that our places of helplessness and sorrow and fear are the places that God attends to with the greatest care of all. When it’s joyful and when it’s painful, we know that our life together is blessed.

What we will be has not yet been revealed, but we know that we are members of the risen body of Christ. Not only do we know this, but we experience it every week when we gather around the table for communion. The shared body and blood of Christ knit us together, all of our different lives and bodies into marvelous, divine union. In Christ, all the walls that separate us from each other are breached, and we become one. Here, we find wholeness in each other.

But it’s more than that. It’s not just the people we see here and now around us. The body of Christ transcends all space. At the table we are part of the same body and blood as believers around the world. People we have known for our whole lives and people we will never meet. People who sit beside us and friends who are far away. People we love with all our hearts and people we’d honestly rather have nothing to do with. All of us are part of one another. John’s vision of the faithful gathered before God’s throne gives us a glimpse of the glory of this universal communion, when Christ joins us to every nation and language on earth.

And the body of Christ transcends all time. That same body and blood that Jesus shared on the night he was betrayed is shared here today, just as it is shared each time Christians gather for the meal. In Christ, we are joined to every saint who ever has been and ever will be. The disciples who heard Jesus first say the words, “This is my body, given for you” – they are here around the table. Every martyr, missionary, and mystic enters into our midst through the Eucharist. People of ages past, popes and reformers, farmers and kings, all share the Lord’s Supper with us. Our loved ones who have gone before us are also members of the living body of Christ. Bob, Donna, Ed, Catherine, and all the other beloved saints we remember today – they are truly present whenever we break the bread and pass the cup. And unknown generations to come, they too are here in the mystery of this meal. Across every age, all of us are members of the same body, sharing the same communion. Death is no barrier. We do not yet know the fullness of eternal life, but eternal life is already here. It always has been here for us to taste and see.

What we will be has not yet been revealed. We do not know what we will be, but we know what we are now, and for now, that is enough. We are the beloved, blessed body of Christ. In Christ, nothing can separate us from God, and nothing can separate us from each other. We are one people, knit together in one communion, in the mystical body of Jesus Christ. So come to the table. Everyone is invited – and everyone is here.

Amen.

Our texts today give us the comforting picture of God as a farmer tending to a vineyard, but they also contain ominous words about God breaking things down. What does it really mean for us to be broken by God?

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 27, year A
Mount Olive Lutheran Church
Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:7-15; Matthew 21:33-46

Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It’s hard to find the good news on a week like this.

This is one of those weeks when we share stories that confront us with judgment and violence. In both Isaiah and the psalm, we read about the Assyrian invasion of the Promised Land. The psalmist cries out for help, begging God to save Israel from a terrible foreign power: “Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; preserve what your right hand has planted!” But we know from history that God didn’t show up to save Israel. The northern kingdom was conquered. Its tribes were lost forever – and many of the people of Judah were also killed or enslaved. So we look to the Gospel reading for some comfort, but in Jesus’ parable, we encounter a tale of greed, betrayal, and murder. And just to make matters worse, Jesus’ explanation of the parable has been misused for centuries to hurt our Jewish brothers and sisters. There isn’t a lot of hope shining out of texts like these.

And this is also one of those weeks where it’s hard to see the good news at work in the world. Our nation has been hit with a series of heartbreaking disasters, but it’s not just the human suffering that’s hard to bear. It’s the fact that none of this is inevitable. We don’t have to live in a world with so much injustice and violence, but it’s the world we keep choosing for ourselves. From where we stand this week, it looks like storms are going to keep getting worse, and our responses are going to be insufficient to meet the needs of those most vulnerable to a changing planet. It looks like guns are going to maintain their chokehold on the spirit of our nation, and they’re going to be used to end human lives. It’s hard to find healing when we have every reason to believe that we’re going to let all of this happen again. It’s one of those times when it rings a little too true when we read that God “expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.” It’s hard to find the good news on this kind of week.

But there is good news here. There is always good news here, and we see that in the faith of Isaiah, because as disaster looms, Isaiah tells us that God is a gardener. The prophet is staring down the world’s most fearsome army, and even though he believes that the coming invasion is a sign of God’s anger, he describes God not as a judge, nor a warrior, nor a king, but a humble tiller of the earth. And he calls this gardener his beloved, and sings about God’s marvelous works. Isaiah is sad and scared and full of fury about how things have gone wrong in his nation, but even then, he addresses God with a love song. He tells us that God looks like a farmer who sweats and toils in the hope that life will emerge from the promise of the fertile soil.

And the psalmist goes even further than Isaiah. The author of Psalm 80 doesn’t just talk about God preparing and tending a vineyard; he remembers how God once brought the vine of Israel out of Egypt. It’s this beautiful, intimate image of God’s hands gently holding the beloved community. God, the creator of the universe, personally carried them out of slavery so they might flourish in peace and freedom. Even on the brink of losing everything, the psalmist reminds the people of the promise that they are carried in love.

We too are like that little vine. We are so fragile, so very vulnerable to the elements and to those who would harm us. The good things we create together are so easily destroyed. All too often we don’t produce the good fruits that we hoped to make for the world. But God holds us in love, and cares for us, and gives us all a chance to grow. We feel our gardener’s love in the richness of the soil. We feel our gardener’s love in the unfurling of tender leaves. We feel our gardener’s love in the sun and the turning seasons, in the world’s abundant beauty that surrounds us and sustains us and brings peace to our troubled spirits. Because we have a God who gardens, we know that we are never alone.

Now, that promise doesn’t magically erase the fear that these stories carry for us. We can’t escape the fact that Isaiah, the psalmist, and even Jesus all use some violent words to describe God’s work. Today, we hear of God tearing down the wall around the vineyard, leaving it vulnerable to the world outside. We hear of God’s cornerstone breaking those who stumble on it, crushing anyone who gets in its way. Those are hard words. It’s much easier to sing about a God who heals than a God who breaks.

But what does it really mean to be broken by God? To answer that question in faith, we must look to the cornerstone, to Christ. When Jesus broke those around him, did he bring justice down on the heads of his opponents? Did he kill, or injure, or seek revenge? No! He broke down the self-righteousness of those who thought they were without sin. He broke open the lonely, corrupt lives of tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus. He shattered the worldview of the Roman centurion, who could look at a criminal hanging dead on a cross and proclaim, “truly, this was the Son of God.” He broke down the divisions between male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free. He gave up his own body to be broken, and in the end, he broke open the tomb, freeing us all from the jaws of death, forever.

In Christ, we see that even the boundary between God and humanity was forever destroyed, for when God became human in Christ, we learned that God is not just the gardener, but also the true vine that abides in us every day. Christ is with us and in us, teaching us that brokenness is how God brings life. The spirit breathes hope into the world’s most broken places, and breaks apart its callous triumphs. Like a farmer tilling the unyielding earth, God is at work in us, turning over our hard, unforgiving places until they are transformed into gentleness and possibility. When we try to close ourselves off, to harden our hearts, God is cracking us open to new realities, new relationships, new ways to live.

None of us want to be broken. In a world that demands success and strength, we hate the idea of letting ourselves be torn down. We are taught to hate the way of the cross. We might say we love the cross, but our world tells us to despise it, and we are very good at listening to the world. We want to keep our walls high and strong. We greedily hold on to the parts of ourselves that we know need to be pruned. Even when we can barely live with ourselves, we are afraid of letting go of what we have and living into what we could be. Change is a fearful thing, so when we hear that God is transforming us, we’re tempted to hear that as a threat and not as the promise that it is. We think that, in changing us, God is going to take things away from us, but that’s not right at all. The Gospel tells us that God is giving us the chance to give ourselves away. We want to flee the cross, to flee weakness and loss, but it is only in losing ourselves that we will find Christ growing in us. God is inviting us to see that the cross is the tree of life.

When we feel God tilling our hearts, we are being given a chance to let go of our defensiveness, to be free of our fear. We can hold tight to our hardness, we can choose to produce bitter fruit, or we can become the garden we were meant to be. We can delight in this beautiful vineyard Earth that God has planted for us. We can rejoice in the abundant mercies that sustain our every breath. In the living vine of Christ, we can grow fruit to feed the world, and in giving ourselves away, we can be fed with all our souls desire. We can let the good news burst through the life we have known, and nurture us into something more wonderful than we could ever imagine.

Sometimes it is hard to find that good news, but we know that, no matter what, we have a gardener who is making all things new. Out of our brokenness, God will let us grow. Out of our brokenness, God is already growing.

Amen.

Shame tells us that something about us is unworthy of life and love.  Human beings wield shame as a weapon to control one another, but Jesus teaches us that there is no room for shame in the body of Christ. 

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 23, year A
Texts: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

Let us pray.  Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer.  In the name of the Father, and the + Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Shame is a powerful weapon.  It tells the shamed person that there is something about themself that they should hate.  When we wield shame against someone else, we tell that person they are somehow unworthy of belonging, respect, or even life itself.  And we are living in a golden age of public shaming.  Our world loves to use social media to subject wrongdoers to the judgment of millions.  On facebook and twitter, we define ourselves and our values by the objects of our scorn.  The internet has made this easy, but the cross, the pillory, and the scarlet letter all testify that human beings have long known how to use humiliation to control each other.  The history of the church shows how often we try to demonstrate our righteousness by what, and who, we reject.  We’ve long acted as if we could exorcize our own sins by pinning them to a scapegoat and casting that person out of our midst.

But Jesus says that shame and rejection have no place in the church.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus recognizes the power of people to hurt one another.  We might be knit together by the Holy Spirit, but we too often treat each other in ways that have little to do with patience, humility, and love.  So Christ says that, when someone in your community hurts you – because someone in your community is going to hurt you – you shouldn’t air your grievance with them in the court of public opinion.  You shouldn’t avoid that person, or gossip about them, or work to drive them out.  Your sacred responsibility is to approach them in private, and to lovingly try to repair the hurt together.  If the other person won’t accept what you are saying, then invite in a few other trusted people, who can help the two of you discern the nature of the problem.  If the other person truly is doing harm, and if they still refuse to acknowledge it, then you need to engage the church to try to fix things.

That all sounds great, but then Jesus drops this scary-sounding line: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  Historically, that’s been read as though Jesus is telling us to kick the unrepentant person out of the church.  In living memory, we have used this text to excommunicate people.  But Jesus doesn’t say anything about exile or excommunication.  He doesn’t say anything about public humiliation, or the severing of ties.  He says to treat the wrongdoer as a Gentile or tax collector.  And how did Jesus treat Gentiles, tax collectors, outsiders, sinners, and everyone else whom the world said he should reject?  He reached out to them.  He ate with them.  He healed them, and he loved them, and he died for them.

In his words and in his life, Jesus teaches us that change has to grow out of relationships.  It is only in love that we can become something new.  If we go about it in any other way, if we try to bludgeon someone into repentance, we will only further wound the body of Christ.  There is no room for humiliation, isolation, or expulsion in the church.  If we act from a place of judgment and shame, instead of a place of fierce, persistent love, we will destroy ourselves.

Because we see in Ezekiel that shame is paralyzing.  When this passage takes place, Ezekiel had already been a prophet for seven years.  For seven long years, he had been trying to convince his people that they were headed down the wrong path, but they weren’t ready to listen.  They didn’t want to believe that they bore some responsibility for the way that things were going terribly wrong in their world.  They covered their ears to Ezekiel’s hard truths.  But in this passage, we see the reality finally sinking in.  Ezekiel’s people at last acknowledge that they have sinned.  But then, they get stuck there.  They cry out, “our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”

How then can we live.  The weight of their shame is destroying their very will to go on.  They feel so ashamed of themselves that they aren’t working to change their lives, they aren’t trying to return to God – they just want to curl up and die.  Ezekiel has finally achieved his goal, he has finally opened the eyes of his people, but his long-awaited victory rings hollow.  He witnesses that shame doesn’t work, because a message of shame is a message of death.

Shame kills because it tells us that there is something about us that can never be fixed or accepted.  It tells us that we have something to hide, that there’s something that could reveal that we’re not really worthy of life or love.  Shame is that thing that, when we face it, makes us cry out, “How then can we live?”  Shame chokes human spirits, and shame has ended far too many human lives.  It leads us only to death and despair.

So God gives Ezekiel a new message, a word of love to temper his words of judgment.  When God’s people are hurting, God says, no, I don’t want you to hate yourselves.  I don’t want you to suffer for your sins.  I don’t want to lose you.  I want you to return to me and find abundant new life.  Because God’s forgiveness is so much bigger than our shame.  The terrifying, wonderful truth about grace is that there is nothing about us that God finds irredeemable.  There is nothing about us that God finds unlovable.  God sees both our shining goodness and our ugliest, most secret places of shame, and God loves us in our entirety.  God doesn’t want us to keep making the same mistakes, but there’s nothing we could ever do to make ourselves the least bit more or less worthy of God’s love.  And that means that shame has no place in our relationship with God.  In Christ’s resurrection, we are free from the power of death, and so we are free from the power of shame.

This is the way that the gospel calls us to love one another – for if God does not shame us, then how could we ever shame each other?  As Paul writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  God’s law may call on us to change, to confess, to repent, but the entire purpose of that law is love.  Only love has the power to truly transform us.  Only love brings healing and wholeness to the body of Christ.  This means there is no room for shame in our shared life in Christ.  There is no room for shame with God, and there is no room for shame with each other.

Christ says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”  We encounter the good news in each other.  When we witness to the saving love of Christ, we have the power to free one another from shame.  When we love each other in all our sinful humanity, we loosen our bonds of death and despair, and bind ourselves together into a community of life.

And that is what it means to live as the body of Christ.

Amen.

 

We might feel like hiding in fear, but God is calling us to step out of the cave and out of the boat for the sake of our neighbors, to bring Christ, in us, to the world.

Vicar Kelly Sandin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 19, year A
Texts: Matthew 14:22-33, 1 Kings 19:9-18

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We learn to fear through our life experiences, and each one of us has a different story. And while we all have fears, we try to hide them from most everyone. Being vulnerable doesn’t happen much in our society. This is why I take great comfort in the characters of the Bible. This basic human condition of being afraid isn’t kept hidden, but is openly shared throughout its pages.

In fact, fear is the first human emotion mentioned in Genesis. Adam and Eve were pretty happy go lucky until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Then, everything changed. After doing that God called out, “Where are you?” And Adam replied, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid…so I hid myself.”

I relate to this theme of fear because it’s not new to me. For much of my life I’ve been followed by a shadow of fear in one form or another. Fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being ridiculed. Fear of an accident. Fear my child will be harmed. Fear of standing before all of you with the task of speaking a word from God. And then, there are all the other fears I have from simply living in the world today.

And do you know what Jesus says to that? “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” More precisely, “Be courageous because I AM present. Do not fear.” I’m with you always.

The disciples had a great amount of fear in our gospel story today, but this isn’t the first terrifying boat and storm scene in the gospel of Matthew. There seems to be a progression of learning experiences Jesus puts his disciples through to get them to realize that following him wasn’t going to be smooth sailing and they were going to need some practice to work through their fears and gain trust in him.

The first time this happens, the disciples follow Jesus into a boat. In this scene there was an incredible storm. The boat was being filled with water and the disciples were panicking. Meanwhile, Jesus was fast asleep! “Lord, save us!” they cried. And Jesus responded with a simple question, “Why are you afraid?” Can you see Jesus slightly shaking his head and saying, “Look, I AM right here in this boat with you.” But, Jesus calmed the storm and the disciples were completely amazed by this. And they began to wonder who this Jesus really was.

Fast forward to this morning’s lesson. This time Jesus makes the disciples get into the boat without him and their boat gets battered by the waves or, better translated, tormented by the waves. But, interestingly, the disciples aren’t described as being afraid of the storm. Perhaps they already worked through this fear. In this scene, though, Jesus isn’t asleep during the storm. He’s up the mountain praying, but awake, and fully aware of where his disciples are and what they’re going through, like watching your kids from afar, ready to step in, if needed, but wanting to see how they’ll handle things when the playground gets a little rough.

And then, at about three or four in the morning, Jesus decides to walk toward them on water. Certainly not something you see every day! And even scarier in the dark! But Jesus seems to keep pushing the discipleship envelope. So, of course, they cry out in fear.

And what does Jesus say, “Be courageous because I AM present. Do not be afraid.”

And I love Peter’s response. He’s bold. He knows after all he’s experienced with Jesus, all the miracles he witnessed, that if it is, in fact, Jesus, he could do anything with his help. He wanted to trust. He wanted to believe. He wanted to be more courageous with his life. And so, Peter wasn’t testing Jesus as much as he was begging Jesus to command him to do something that he knew he would never do or could not do on his own.

If you think about who you are today, was there someone who encouraged you or inspired you or believed in you to do more than you ever thought you could? And with them in your life, you gained confidence. You stepped outside your comfort zone. You tested the waters and found out you could do it, and with them in your life, you did.

Jesus was that person for Peter. His life was changed the day Jesus walked along the shore and saw something in Peter that made him say, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

In the time spent with Jesus, Peter gained confidence and started believing in himself and knew if he tapped into Jesus’ power there would no limit to what he could do next. So, what Peter was asking Jesus might have been more like “Lord, I really want to be more than I am right now. Please help me to live into the potential you have for me and command me to come to you.”

The drive in Peter to overcome was greater than his fear. And, although things didn’t go perfectly, Peter learned that when his fear got the best of him, Jesus’ hand was right there to catch him and pull him back up.

These experiences helped shape the disciples for their future life without Jesus. A life that promised to be filled with persecutions and fears they had yet to encounter. So, they had to go through these discipleship challenges with Jesus in order to move from the place of simply wondering who Jesus was, to making the claim that Jesus was, indeed, the Son of God. If Jesus could get them to proclaim that he was the Messiah, like Peter eventually did, then maybe their fears wouldn’t paralyze them from the work God was calling them to do and calling us to do.

Because right now, beyond the shadow of my own personal fears, the media coverage every single day brings me great fear. We live in a world full of violence and hate. But, I am also frightened and shocked at what’s happening in our own country, like what took place yesterday in Charlottesville, VA. And I’m still coming to terms with the bombing of the Dar Al Farooq mosque a half mile from my house. This hate and disregard for human life is in my neighborhood and in yours. We need to come together in solidarity to confront evil with our collective love. God will be with us. It takes courage, but imagine the fear of the specific groups being targeted regularly. We, as God’s people, are called to work for justice and peace – to carry out the disciples’ mission. We might feel like hiding in a cave like Elijah or in the garden, like Adam and Eve, but hiding in fear will not end it. God is calling us to step out of the cave and out of the boat for the sake of our neighbors. To come forward one frightened step at a time, being seen, in numbers, and bring Christ, in us, to the world.

Let us end in the prayer that seems perfect for today and one I’ve come to love.

“O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”      (ELW, page 317, from Vespers)