“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

There are moments in our Holy Book when someone just tells the truth, hard and hurtful as it may be. Nathan confronts David, who had committed adultery and murder, and Nathan—whose name means “he gave,” or “gift”—Nathan gives the gift of harsh honesty directly to his king: “You are the man,” You are the one who did these things. Jesus confronts Peter after the resurrection and does not gloss over Peter’s betrayal. The two friends have a hard talk.

Since the Lutherans in the ELCA are in communion with us, and since I was a Lutheran myself for 35 years of my life, I enjoy reading and sharing the writings of Martin Luther. Luther was not a mellow personality. He did not inspire neutral responses in people. People tended to love or hate him. He was forceful. He liked to fight for a good cause. He was not always moderate in his anger. But he also had a good head on his shoulders, and like St. Augustine—fun fact, Luther was an Augustinian monk—like Augustine, Luther was a prolific writer and he loved to apply the faith, to address the many concerns of his day with the help of Scripture, doctrine, and tradition.

And so today I will share with you what Martin Luther had to say about how to behave in a pandemic. He wrote these words some 200 years after the bubonic plague, a pandemic that killed as many as 200 million people in Europe and Asia. He may have written these words before anyone had trained a microscope on a slide and seen microorganisms. He wrote these words in a time when germ theory—the now universally-held theory that disease is caused by microorganisms transmitted from host to host—competed with “miasma theory,” or the theory that disease is caused by “bad air” or other environmental conditions. You may have seen Luther’s quotation on social media over the last couple of weeks: it is meme-ready. Lots of church folk on my Facebook feed have liked it and shared it. Here is what Luther has to say about how to behave in a pandemic:

Jesus and the Samaritan woman clearly were not complying with the rules about social distancing.

We are well aware of these rules in our own world right now. We have strengthened our literal rules about social distancing, and paid a whole lot more attention to them over the past few weeks. How long does the coronavirus live on surfaces? How far do you need to be from someone who’s been infected and not be infected yourself? If I drop off groceries or laundry at your house, will I get the virus if I just put everything at your door and scamper back to my car?

There is so much we do not know.

In the first hours and days without our brother John, we realize yet again that we do not know “the day nor the hour,” as our Lord says. We do not know the day nor the hour when each one of us will die.

But there is so much more than that, lying outside our knowledge, outside our awareness, outside our understanding.

Can you hear the sound of the shofar? It is the trumpet of ancient Israel. It calls the assembly together on high and holy days.

This trumpet, this shofar … it is sometimes quite hard to hear. You may have to get quiet, and I mean really get quiet. Silence your phone, and your watch. Notice your breathing. Let your breathing slow down, and get deeper. Notice the deep fatigue that makes itself known at the exact moment you stop moving, stop talking, stop multitasking, stop over-functioning. If you sit long enough in silence, you may feel droopy, sleepy. You may want to nod off. You may also feel the urge to check your phone, or just get up and fiddle with something. Notice that fatigue, and that restlessness, and greet them in peace. They are your friends, even if you can’t or shouldn’t do what they want you to do. Try to gently set them aside. Try to sit still for a while.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Maybe we should do that every week. After all, every Sunday of the year is a feast of the Resurrection. Martin Luther said that we should never take the word “alleluia” out of our worship, not even during Lent, because every Sunday is, in its own way, Easter Sunday. We should not deny the joy that is in us because of all that God in Christ has done for us.

I am sometimes angry about a great many things.

And so I struggle with the instructions we hear today from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

We hear four instructions this morning, and they are daunting. They begin the same way, with this formula:

“You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…”
“You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…”

Is there someone in your life who understands things? This is a person you can trust to hear anything you say, and know what they are hearing. You can admit something embarrassing to them, or something that makes you feel vulnerable. You can tell them about a complicated situation, or a vexing dilemma, and they are able to hear what you are saying, and respond without judgment. If you messed up, they can offer you wisdom and insight without asking unnecessary, awkward questions. They are simply there for you.

Almost two years ago, I became a superfan. I met someone and within minutes of knowing her, I decided that she was my role model, my teacher, my guide. She had been a professor on sabbatical when I started at Virginia Seminary in the fall of 2017, so I knew nothing about her until the first session of her Wednesday-morning systematic-theology class in February 2018.

Who is this Jesus we worship? What is his purpose? What is his work? If he is our savior—something we often say that he is—then what, exactly, is he saving us from? Who is he?

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.

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?

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?

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.”

What happens after we die?

This is an important question, and I encourage you to ask it whenever you feel the need, particularly if you’re talking to clergy. It is a valid question; it expresses a natural, understandable concern; it deserves a good answer.

So. Here is my answer.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.