Joseph listened, and responded

God spoke to Joseph.

Joseph listened, and responded.

And maybe that is why we know so little about Joseph. We know more about people to whom God spoke but they did not listen, or they responded in complicated ways. Moses resists God’s voice, pushes back on God’s plan, and so we have a chapter and a half in Exodus about Moses angering God while the thornbush rages in flames. And then we get just two little sentences about the call of Aaron, the brother of Moses: “The LORD said to Aaron, ‘Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.’ So [Aaron] went, and he met [Moses] at the mountain of God and kissed him.” (In a Bible full of sibling rivalry, Aaron immediately embraces his younger brother!) And so we know considerably less about Aaron than we do about Moses.

Are you the One?

Jesus can sometimes be … a disappointment.

But to be fair, we do sometimes ask a lot of him. We want Jesus to save us, but we are not always clear (and maybe not always honest) about what exactly we mean by “saved.” Saved from death? Yes, we want that, even as we all know that each of us will one day die. Saved from sins? Maybe … yes, of course yes!, though sometimes it is hard for us to acknowledge what we mean by sin, or to admit certain sins, to ourselves, to others, to God. From what, exactly, do we want Jesus to save us?

Are you ready?

Our children here at St. Andrew’s participate in Godly Play, which is not a Sunday School curriculum, really. It is a liturgy. It is not a simple series of lessons taught to the children week by week. Like us, here in the sanctuary, the children are invited into an encounter with the Word, that is, an encounter with Jesus, an encounter with God.

To do this, the children need to be ready. And so the storyteller helps them get ready. There is a way for them to sit quietly in a circle, and pay close attention to the story that is being told. Because children are human beings, ‘being ready’ can sometimes be a challenge. (A friend of mine in Seattle, a priest who is also a Godly Play storyteller, likes to say that when the children are not ready here in church—when they are ‘acting out,’ being restless, making noise, causing commotion—adults get irritated not because the children are misbehaving, but because the adults—all the rest of us—are not allowed to misbehave, even though we want to just as much as the children do. It’s not fair! Think about it, and you’ll see this is probably true: sometimes church is boring, or we are singing or praying in a way I don’t like, or I forgot breakfast, or I need to use the restroom, or I’m simply not ready on a particular Sunday, so I want to fidget. But I can’t. Or at least I think I can’t. I certainly feel pressure not to bust out crying, or get up and explore the room, or do all the other things that children have license to do. Adults are supposed to be ready. 

But are we?

Jesus, remember me

What must one do when walking into a room to meet with Queen Elizabeth the Second? If you are not sure, here are the instructions from a member of her staff:

“The protocol is as follows. When you’re announced, bow from the neck. The first time you see the Queen, you say, ‘Your Majesty.’ After that, it’s ‘ma’am’ (rhymes with ‘ham’)... [that is,] until you leave [the room]—then it’s ‘Your Majesty’ again. Don’t sit until Her Majesty does. Don’t talk until she does. Absolutely no physical contact, other than taking her hand, if and only if she offers it. No small talk unless she invites it. At the end, she’ll buzz, and I’ll come and get you. Bow from the neck and walk back towards me.”

Let's talk about sin

It is hard to talk about sin.

We don’t want to offend people. We don’t want to turn off newcomers. We don’t want people to think that this is one of those churches, the churches that love to find things wrong with people. Churches can perversely be better than almost any other institution at identifying enemies, and then mistreating them. Churches can be home to legalists, to humorless scolds, to angry and judgmental people who are blind to their own self-righteousness. And that, we hope, is not us.

Ask, and you will receive

I have four sisters and two brothers. (That seems like too many.) I have never known life without a whole lot of peers. (For this reason, while seminary is not always easy, it is always, for me, deeply familiar.)

My favorite day of the year, even now, is Christmas Day. My father is generous and thoughtful, and he always made Christmas special. Every Christmas morning I would, like all sensible children, awaken at 4:30 a.m. to begin the Great Descent of the Stairs, to see what Santa and my parents brought me. And when, finally, at the mid-morning hour of 6:30 a.m., my parents would give us permission to run downstairs, I would hurry down to find a pile of treasures, some from Santa, some from my parents. My loot pile was flanked by a little banner my dad made, with my name on it. In all of this, I learned important life lessons from my father. I knew even then that the name banner was his idea, not Santa’s, a thoughtful way to make a child in a big sibling group feel unique, special. I learnedthat giving good gifts is a love language.

We want to see you

Human beings are good at hiding.

We have had a lot of practice. We have been hiding almost as long as we have been human. We first went into hiding at the time of the evening breeze, when the LORD God walked through the garden calling out, “Where are you?” We are so good at hiding, we even know how to hide from ourselves. The longer we lurk behind our masks, the more likely we are to mistake those masks for our true selves. The LORD God is never fooled by all of this, but we often are.

"Give me health and strength. We'll steal the rest."

Once I heard a story about a corrupt politician in the 1920’s named John A. McCarthy. He was known as “Fishhooks” McCarthy. He lived and worked on the Lower East Side in New York. Every morning he would faithfully stop at St. James Church on Oliver Street to say his prayers. His same prayer each day was this: “O Lord, give me health and strength. We’ll steal the rest.”

I will always love my father

I do not hate my father, and I never will. I love my father. I admire and respect him, too. He is a retired appellate-court judge in Minnesota. He has a lifelong interest in family law, and has written eloquently on the rights and needs of children under the law, an issue that carries great importance during these hard times. He taught me to study the scriptures seriously, and carefully. He was and is a great father to seven children. His generous spirit revealed itself most fully every Christmas morning, but it was always discernible, always present in some form, throughout the year. He loves to read. He and his wife Sandy dote on their sweet little Westie dog, named Finnegan. My father is temperate, balanced, reasonable, just. He loves a good funny story. He honored his parents and was a lifelong friend to his older brother. He taught me how to be a good husband. He inspires my midlife interest in health and fitness. He has spent his life practicing the rare art of skillful kindness: he is kind, but not haphazardly so, not in a fluffy or silly way. He is thoughtfully kind. 

Choose the woman

I typically listen to a couple of different podcasts when I’m walking our dog in the evenings. (Dogs are great, but they are not great conversation partners.) Once a year, one of my favorite podcasts takes a break from its usual topic and drops a “Conundrums” episode. The three journalists step back from discussing the issues of the day to consider fun conundrums submitted by listeners.

A couple of examples... Would you rather be attacked by 20 horses who are the size of ducks, or by one duck who is the size of a horse? Or how about this one: Would you rather stop aging at 30 and live for 30 more years, or stop aging at 70 and live for 70 more years?

Dr. Strange tries to pray

My husband Andrew and I decided to take on a challenge this summer, a challenge posed by me: we decided to watch all 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Iron Man, released in 2008, to Spider-Man: Far From Home, which hit theaters this summer. There are 23 films in the MCU, as it’s called, but really there is just one story, one myth, about a hero or heroine who surrenders to a power beyond herself to discover her identity, and then go on to fulfill her destiny.

Darkness

Judas had gone out.

If this were a stage play, we would see on center stage the table, surrounded by Jesus and his anxious friends, one lonely spotlight trained on them. Beyond a wall, stage left, Judas is … “out,” dimly lit, going about his task, which is to assist the forces of darkness now arrayed lethally around and against Jesus.

Grilled sea beast for breakfast

Listen to the sermon here.

Today we reach the shore of a lake and we see that Jesus has cooked a fish breakfast on a campfire.

(A campfire: This campfire might stir our memory. Didn’t we see a campfire not too long ago? Yes: Peter huddles beside a campfire that is burning just outside the house of Annas the high priest. Peter tries to warm himself on that terrible night when he betrays his friend three times. And so, maybe he is approaching the seashore campfire this morning with a growing anxiety: will the risen Lord mention the unmentionable? Will he name Peter’s betrayal, and hold him to account for it?

Here is the man!

“Here is the man!” said Pilate.

“Idou ho anthropos!” said Pilate, in Greek.

“Ecce homo!” said Pilate, in Latin.

Man, anthropos, homo: this is the Human One.

We have four portraits of Jesus in our holy book. (Five, if you count Paul’s unique perspective.) John, unlike Mark, Matthew, and Luke, does something unique with the trial of Jesus: all four tell us that Jesus was flogged and mocked, but only John places this trauma in the middle of the trial.

"I'm to blame. I was wrong."

For many years I have been a fan of “The West Wing,” a political show that offers a positive view of government, with respect for leaders on both sides of the aisle. Whatever your political views, I wonder if you can appreciate a particular scene in which the president admits that he was wrong, that he simply did the wrong thing. He did this wrong thing not because of his party affiliation or his political agenda, or really for any reason other than the fact that he was a flawed human being, and he listened to his fears, and he messed up. He could have denied his wrongdoing and fought against those who wanted to punish him for his mistake, but he chose to cop to it. And here is what he said:

We shine

Moses had to find a veil and pull it over his face, because his face was terrifyingly ablaze with the glory of God. The people couldn’t bear to look. He glowed with the wonder of his conversation on the mountain with God. For the people, this was just too much. They not only couldn’t stand to converse directly with God; they couldn’t bear even to see the reflection of God on the face of their leader. But when Moses went back up the mountain, and again began to converse with God, he took the veil off. God has no need of such things. God does not hold a veil over our faces, no, God is better known as the One who takes our faces into God’s hand, lovingly, the way a parent would draw a child’s face upward, holding onto the child just below the chin. And then God looks upon us, more frightening still, converses with us, and the terrible, wondrous, wrenching gleam of God’s glory blazes on our own faces. We shine. We radiate the light and the glory of God, we who are but dust and ashes. No frail attempt to hide can shade us from that light. No flimsy piece of fabric can veil us from this mystical connection with the divine.

You must forgive

Do you need forgiveness? Have you done something you regret, and for which you need another person, or God, to forgive you?

Do you need to forgive? Has someone done something against you that grieves you, something for which you need that person to apologize, and make amends? Maybe that person is gone, or unwilling, or otherwise incapable of meeting you in your sorrow about what happened. Then what? Now what?