How do we hear our call, recognize it, and live it out when we are not able to see past challenges ahead of us?

Vicar Mollie Hamre
4th Sunday in Lent, Year A
Texts: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The man’s “blindness” is not the headliner for the Gospel today.  

It’s not an ailment that needs to be fixed or even the focus of the story. Blindness is not a condemnation, something that even Jesus notes in the Gospel. The focus is the way this man’s story grows into a proclamation. This man lives and recounts his story of gaining sight five times. And each time, his awareness and conviction grows stronger. In verse 11 we hear him say “the man called Jesus” and this description of Jesus grows. It turns to calling Jesus a prophet, to stating Jesus is a man from God, and ends with declaring Jesus as Lord. This man from the Gospel does what many of us seek out: hearing one’s call, recognizing it, and proclaiming it. 

Hearing, seeing, and knowing Jesus is not something that is granted upon those who are chosen or just blessed enough. It is like anything else we do, when we compassionately seek and ask questions with open minds, God is there. 

The first time the man born blind interacts with Jesus, he can not see Jesus. 

He can only hear Jesus’ voice giving two small directions: go and wash. When the man returns, being able to see, Jesus is no longer there. Which leaves the man to describe his experience to those questioning around him where this person who helped him gain sight went. His reply is simple: I do not know. What he does know is that something has taken place and his life will never be the same. This man is someone who was looked down upon, who people accused of sinning, and yet, he is the one who teaches in the end. He is the one preaching that God listens and works through those we would least expect. 

So, when we hear this Gospel, we hope to be the man born blind.

The person who hears Jesus’ voice and follows it amidst the confusion. But sometimes we don’t and instead are left with the sinking question: “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Our biggest fear. What if the one’s blind to God’s call is actually us? That we could be the ones not doing enough, ignoring the voices of those that are oppressed, and missing the call to love one another. It is a scary thought that weighs a guilty conscience on us in a world full of turmoil. If only we could fix every problem, every lie in the media, and sweep away the oppression that is happening in our world. And when we ask where Jesus, God with us is, sometimes the answer is: I do not know. And that as a starting point, for all of these daunting questions, is okay. We will sometimes be the blind and yet, we are told that Jesus comes to us to open our eyes.

Notice the places our community is already doing this:

This past month of February 109 families with 163 babies total were assisted with receiving diapers through the diaper packing and delivery program. Partnerships with Align Minneapolis provided rental assistance for families that are at risk of being without homes. And we hear prayers each week for our global and neighborhood partners addressing food insecurity, mental health services, and relief to those around the world. There are many more ways our community impacts those around us that I have not mentioned, and these are wonderful ways God calls to this community. Do not ignore the power of that call. 

With all of these extraordinary things, we know there are places for growth too.

 In this past month alone, 72 people came through our doors seeking help. 13 families were added to the waiting list for diaper deliveries. People in our community here are without homes and affordable housing is hard to find. Our shelters are overwhelmed. Our community knows families seeking out safety and being faced with immigration policies are difficult to navigate. It’s a lot. 

So where do we start?

It makes me think about learning a new language. If I have never spoken a language before, I will not recognize it at first. I will not know how to speak it. But if I talk to those who speak the language. If I seek out understanding and lessons. If I seek out times of growth to be immersed in the language. If I try speaking the language and see how it feels coming from my own mouth, I will learn a new language. It takes time and persistence. These are all aspects of a long-term commitment to immersing oneself in the call that our Triune God has to each of us. By listening to one another. Holding one another’s burdens, vulnerabilities, and listening to each other stories of loss, questions, and worries. By looking to our community and listening to where the Spirit calls us. 

These words and this work are not a light load.

And not one that rests on a single individual’s shoulders either. Discerning where the Triune God calls us as individuals and as a community, all at once, working together. It asks that we recognize and seek Christ in one another. It asks that we listen to the ways God is calling us to love our neighbors, locally and globally. If we are to hear God’s call, in our community and life together, we must begin at listening for the voice of Jesus. To the voices of one another and our neighbors outside these walls. To trust that even if we are walking into challenges blind, that Jesus, God with us, meets us along the way. 

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

Pastor Paul E. Hoffman

Third Sunday in Lent A

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

John sets this up as an engagement story. In Israel’s history, the well was the place where marriages were arranged. At this very well, two engagements took place that we know of. It’s where Rebekah’s marriage to Isaac was arranged. Not long after, Jacob finds his future wife Rachel by this well. John tells us that this well belonged to Jacob to remind us that it is a place of wrestling. John also tells us it once belonged to Joseph, reminding us that it is also a place of dreams.

Many engagement stories are like that, aren’t they?  They’re stories of wresting, and stories of dreams.

Here by the well today, John uses the marriage images of commitment, faith, intimacy to invite us to a deeper level of engagement with Jesus.

Our engagement with the Living Christ also begins at a well. In its most robust celebrations, at the baptismal well we are stripped naked and handed into the arms of the body of Christ, to be engaged for life. It is a life that can be lived in the deepest, most tender forgiving grace of God if we will stop wrestling and surrender to it. It is also a life in which the Risen Christ calls us to be deeply engaged in God’s dream of loving the world.

God longs to be known by us deeply and intimately. In Christ, God meets us at the well, inviting us to share all that we have ever done, to lay it all out, and by his grace have it washed away. It will take some wrestling for us to do that, but do not be afraid. This very well, connected as it is to Jacob, has seen wrestling before. It is here that Jacob wrestled with his deepest demons, and came out on the side of God. There’s some verbal wrestling here between Jesus and the woman. All of it meant to give us courage. We may be weary, worn, and sad, but the voice of Jesus says, day after day, “Don’t wrestle with the world alone. Come to me and rest.” Jesus has living water for those who wrestle, who thirst, who long to be seen and heard as this Samaritan woman longed to be.

The plot where Jesus and the woman stand is a place of wrestling. It is also a place of dreams. Remember: Joseph, the dreamer, was there.

God dreams that the well which set us free will also be a well where dreams of living water for all people begin to flow. As engaged as Christ is with us, just so Christ dreams of us engaged with the world. The needy word. The lonely world. The brutal, punishing world.  The world that surrounds us and longs for the sort of invitation to life-giving waters that Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well.  The sort of living water that Christ offers us with the dawn of each new day.

Just one example of how much the world needs our intimate engagement runs parallel to this story of the well. Every day, every single day, 263 million people walk to provide water for themselves or their families. Most of them are women. Their daily walk for water is often frustrated by long lines and polluted wells. When they carry their water home, they are carrying 40 pounds, about the weight of one of your tires on your car. The time and energy that it takes 263 million women to carry their daily water robs them of time with their children, takes them away from their homes, punishes their bodies, crushes their spirits. It seems like we who have so much could do something about that. It seems like one day Jesus might ask us who do not walk, “Did you know the joy of full engagement with the world’s crying need? Did you have the privilege of making someone’s life a little less soul-crushing?”

There are as many ways of engaging with the world as there are people of God and imaginations that inhabit them. Having been given so much, having trust that God will care for us, we can dream of extending ourselves in love to others. And not to only dream, but do. Being a child of God is always lived on a two-way street, is it not?  In the left lane, we’re so grateful for what we receive as a gift from the one who weds himself to us in love on the cross.  And in the right lane, we recognize our call comes with the privilege and opportunity of being the hands and feet, the lips and ears of Christ in the world for all those in need.

The Bible says of the Woman at the Well. “she left her water jar and went back to the city.” She left it because of the confident faith that Christ inspired. When she left that jar behind, she risked everything to answer Jesus’ call. That jar was her life. Without it, who knew what tomorrow would hold? It was a question she was willing to live into, by faith.

Will we leave our water jars? Can we leave our water jars, in trust, and dream with God into a better world for all people everywhere?

We might not be quite ready for such a bold dream just yet. We may still be wrestling, like Jacob: with God, with ourselves, with all our stuff that seems so dear to us and is so very hard to walk away from. Yet every day we hesitate to dream of a deeper engagement as God’s hands and lips and heart in the world, a woman makes another lonely trip to the well. She makes the back-breaking, barefoot journey home. And in our own way, we too grow wearier and more worn down by a call we can’t quite live into, that stymies us by its enormity, that baffles us by its complexity. A call to engage with a world so needy we’re often plagued with compassion fatigue.

To all this weary world, the same voice of the Risen Christ calls one, calls all, to the living water where our thirsts are quenched, our souls revived, and our lives forever live in him. We wrestle. And we dream. God joins us in both, with a hope that does not disappoint us, but allows us to drink deeply of the Living Water that is Christ himself, to have our souls revived, and to engage deeply, deeply, with all this weary world. It is a holy marriage.  And today, Jesus is proposing to us, one and all.

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

God calls us to share the word of God and the Lord’s Supper together to help one another grow–not just for when we start our baptismal journeys, but for our whole lives.

Vicar Mollie Hamre
Midweek Lent Service, Week 2, Year A
Texts: Isaiah 55:6-13, Psalm 121, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Matthew 15:29-39

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There was a young girl in my home congregation who was fascinated by communion. The girl was preschool age or so, having long pigtails in her hair that would go over her shoulders. On Sundays her family would go to the front to kneel for communion, with her looking at them to watch. Watch as they would hold out their hands, watch the way they would receive communion, and then look at the way the Pastor would place the bread in their hands. 

And eventually, this preschooler started to do the same. Practiced quietly waiting her turn, figuring out the kneeling up at front, and holding out her hands. Once this had been all put together, she was ready. Except instead of looking to the Pastor… She turned to her mother with open hands. Surprised, her mother quietly turned to the daughter, broke her communion in half, and then shared communion with the preschooler. 

At last, finally holding the piece of communion in her hands, the daughter looked up and gave her mother an enormous smile. For the first time, this young girl got to be a part of what was happening. 

When thinking about our baptismal lives, I am constantly reminded that children are wonderful teachers. They have genuine curiosity as well as questions that make you stop and think. They are exciting to share and learn with. And I know from my two-year-old nephew, they have plenty to talk about. So, in the baptisms of each child we see, bringing the Word of God and the Holy Supper come naturally. We want to teach, see that development, and be a part of that hope. These are the baptismal promises we make as a community. 

But what about these promises in our lives when we become older? What about when that excitement and curiosity for the world turns into doubt? Into questions? Turns into seeing the parts of our world that have suffering. In baptism, we say the words in such a simple way: bringing one to the Word of God and the Holy Supper. But stating that and conceptualizing it are completely different. What about when we have read the Bible, take Communion together, and then are not sure what comes next?

Our text from Isaiah today reflects on a different angle to this question. The writer speaks about rain and snow as they fall to the ground, coming to Earth. Isaiah specifically notes that the snow and water do not return until it has watered the Earth making it “bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” Bringing growth in the forms of food and nourishment for the creatures of the Earth. I could not help but be amazed because it sounds like the water cycle. We know that when rain and snow fall on our ground, it cycles backup to nourish our world once again. Continuously feeding one another so that the Earth and creation may flourish. 

Take that image and think about the Word of God and the meals we share. God comes to us, each of us, feeding us through community, literal meals, and hearing God’s words through those we do not know. And that community and Word grows in us. Telling us that we are loved, important to this world, and that the promises we make in our baptisms are held. Cycling back as we connect to our Triune God. 

This is not the type of cycle one might expect. 

So often we hear metaphors of faith lives being compared to pouring oneself dry and then having to go back to fill one’s self back up. Giving this image that in order to be filled, we must be empty. But what if we thought about our faith lives as a cycle? The cycle of each week when you enter into this space dipping your hands into the baptismal waters knowing that God moves throughout God’s creation, sending us “out in joy and [being] led back in peace.” Being sent out to live into the Word of God and share in the Lord’s Supper, then returning in peace to be part of those sacraments once again.

This sending out and being led back takes so many different forms today. It looks like telling LGBTQIA folks that in amidst injustice, they are loved, held, and supported. It looks like listening to our students in schools to ensure safe learning environments. It looks like aiding and standing with people in Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, and Afghanistan who are all suffering and in danger. It looks like calling for a greener world with less pollution and more hope for the future. These, and many more, are all ways the spirit moves within us, sending us out into the world and calling us back. Cycling within us the baptismal waters leading to growth and hope.

For the child in my home congregation, these cycles, these movements bring change. 

Change that needs community, nourishment and continued growth, even into adulthood and past that. These promises made in baptism are not just for the ones being baptized in order they know the Bible or consistently take Communion, but that they know our Triune God continues to be present. That they know the spirit continues to move through them as well as through each person in the community. God continues to work through us. God calls us to share the word of God and the Lord’s Supper together to help one another grow–not just for when we start our baptismal journeys, but for our whole lives. Calling us to the table, to the baptismal font, and to one another. 

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

Pastor Paul E. Hoffman

Midweek Lenten Eucharist, Lent 1

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the hallway by the main office, there is a piece of art, a gift from the estate of Paul and Ruth Manz. It is flanked by a simple placard that says, Mary and Elizabeth, artist unknown.

There they are, faithful women, in near-fetal positions, nestled like twins in a womb, held in a circle of God’s enveloping love. It turns out that this is a case of mistaken identity.

Today’s texts, as well as the first promise of the baptismal affirmation liturgy, call us into just such a circle of God’s enveloping love. It is a simple, though not easy, invitation: to live among God’s faithful people. It is an identity we are invited to embrace, and there is no mistaken identity about it.

Each text in its own way gives witness to both the joy and the task of living among God’s faithful people. Ruth is challenged by a trial too great for her sister-in-law, Orpah, to leave her own land and people and strike out in a way that she perceives is faithful – the way of care and compassion for an elder whose prospects are as good as dead.

The psalmist paints a cheerier picture of life among the faithful. It is almost a dance – a joyous and messy frolic – oil running down the beard and robes of Aaron.

Paul being Paul gets more cerebral, comparing our kinship with one another to a human body, driving home the point that we are not clones, but more like complimentary organs whose individual functions contribute to the health and well-being of all.  And then Paul, again being Paul, adds a coda to his body-symphony reminding us that whether we are a hand or a foot, a heart, a lung, or maybe even an armpit, it is always a gift to let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another, and so on.

Finally, Jesus comes in like a closer. Love one another as I have loved you. That’s all. Actually, not quite. Bear fruit that will last. There you go. Love one another a Christ loves you. And bear fruit that will last.

Do you intend to continue in the covenant God made with you in holy baptism? To live among God’s faithful people? Think carefully. Because while one day it may be as joyful as a dance of oil running down the beard and onto the collar of one’s robe, the next it might be as complicated as being ripped from your home and people to follow a relative that you hardly know but who seems to have some sort of hold on you. Living among God’s faithful people can be as beautiful as a body working together in perfect harmony and as disastrous as fruit you thought would last that is rotting on the vine.

The Bible is a great book and all, but one of the things it continually lays before us is the bane and the blessing of life together in the body of Christ. It might be everlasting. But it’s not always beautiful. Or accurate. And rarely what we planned.

Just last week our administrative assistant, Cha, discovered – through some research on the Internet that that really isn’t Mary and Elizabeth in the artwork that hangs outside her office at all. On the artist’s website, it clearly identifies the women as Ruth and Naomi.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if it’s Ruth and Naomi or if it’s Mary and Elizabeth. Because either way, they are part of a larger story. They are part of the story of living among God’s faithful people. And so are you. So are you.

That picture is the picture of all God’s faithful people. You’re in that loving womb-like bubble of God’s unending love. And I’m in there, too. And whether that is Mary and Elizabeth or Ruth and Naomi, the grace of God is surrounding them like the oil that runs down the beard of Aaron and onto the collar of his robe. In that amniotic grace of God, the waters of baptism pulsate with life that is as ancient as Eden and as recent as the morning news.

To promise to live among God’s faithful people, as Ruth and Naomi did…

To promise to live among God’s faithful people as Paul imagines us doing as a body working in perfect harmony with itself….

To live among God’s faithful people, as Jesus calls us to do in deep and abiding friendship with one another and with him…

To live among God’s faithful people is not so much a commitment that we are expected to try to live up to as it is a way of life into which our baptism invites us.  God desires so deeply that we come inside the picture where Ruth and Naomi are recalled, where Mary and Elizabeth are, where Esther and the woman at the well and Aaron, Moses and Miriam, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Augustine, Luther and Calvin, the hymn writers George Herbert and John and Charles Wesley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, George Floyd, the faithful of this and every place whose songs still resonate deeply from these walls each time we lift our voices to join them…

That is the picture into which God invites us. And it is an amazing picture of an even more amazing grace, where charity and love prevail, if only we will let it.

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

We will not be perfect in the face of temptation and we will mess up–yet we will continue to be loved, and chosen by God.

Vicar Mollie Hamre
1st Sunday in Lent, Year A
Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our readings from today are two different stories of temptation. 

One, coming from the first reading in Genesis. The other is from the Gospel according to Matthew. In Genesis, we hear the story about humanity in the garden. God asks humanity to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and as we know, they do. Trust is broken, the pain of the world is exposed, and our tradition looks back on this story with a guilty conscience. The world that God hoped to shield humanity from comes into full view and it is full of struggle and suffering. Humanity becomes ashamed, full of remorse, and hides from God in the coming verses. 

The other passage, from the Gospel, takes place after Jesus is baptized. 

Jesus is sent into the wilderness and tempted three times. Each time Jesus denies the temptation and answers faithfully with scripture. This sometimes feels like a no-brainer. We know that Jesus will not give into temptation. Might I remind you that the man in question is Jesus, the son of God. So when we hear this Gospel, it feels like a clear ending: Jesus, God with us, will perfectly follow God when tempted. He will have the right answers. The wisdom to see through the tricks. The strength to stand up against corrupt forces. But us, on the other hand, as much as we try, some days we don’t have these same characteristics. 

It feels a little obvious that the response from humanity and the one that Jesus gives are drastically different. We hear the story about humanity messing up big time, while Jesus has the perfect answers. 

The comparison that is set before us is not great. 

We want to walk in the guided steps of God, but sometimes we fail, get confused along the way, and make choices that would have been better with hindsight. So when Jesus does all the right things, what does that tell us about when we do the wrong things? What else is there to this? 

To start with, the big difference between Genesis and the Gospel is not giving into temptation, but the part that involves our connection to God. See, when God creates humanity and begins a relationship with creation, God shows the truth about relationships: they are messy. And in that messiness, that human-ness, is where we connect with God. 

And in response to that messiness, our messiness, God does not abandon humanity, but instead Jesus comes to be human in our world. 

“For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus, who abounded for the many.” In the face of temptation, God chooses to be with us and leans in closer. Jesus, God with us, experiences what it means to be human.

So, when we see Jesus face temptation, his answers are in connection to God. 

Living on the bread that God gives. Trusting in God, not testing. Worshiping only God, not worshiping one’s self. The Gospel today does not tell us that we need to perfectly follow the path of not sinning, but to help us consider what forms of temptation are present today and that we are held amidst them.  

When we are convinced that our guilt and brokenness dominates ourselves more than for who we are: beloved, held, and in relationship with the Triune God. That is the relationship the Psalmist speaks about today when saying they “acknowledged their sin to God and did not conceal their guilt.” 

But it is hard to consider that we can be loved when we mess up. 

Especially when we identify with the ones in Genesis that mess up. The ones amidst the pain of the world. The ones that would rather separate ourselves from the shame of the story. The ones that can easily separate from the suffering in our world today. 

Questions and curiosity are wonderful aspects of our faith lives, but the difference is the way the situations go forward. In Genesis, humanity hides and decides that holding that guilt is more important than being open and vulnerable. This is not a story that we should look back on with disdain, but as a coming of age story. A coming of age story that we all experience in different ways. One that brings into view the first times we witness the pain in the world and have to be brave to see that God is loving us amidst it too. But this kind of life asks us to be honest. To reconnect with ourselves. To awareness to change. All scary aspects of life because it asks us to go outside of ourselves. To see our polluted earth. To see the shootings. To see our neighbors suffering injustice. It hurts. 

And yet, simultaneously believe that we know God is there too. 

That Jesus, God with us, experienced life’s temptations, sufferings, and struggles to understand us. As the Body of Christ, this is our coming of age story–one that can not be ignored, but opened up. Changed. And rising once again to new life.  

The coming of age story that tells us we will not be perfect and still continue to be loved by a God who knows this. We will not be perfect in the face of temptation. You will mess up. But you can not ignore the world that you are called to be open to either. You will be challenged through all of it. You will have a community through all of it. And you are loved, dearly loved, through all of it too.  

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