Orphans No More

Easter 6A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Anne of Green Gables. Harry Potter. Peter Parker. Bruce Wayne. Bambi. Snow White. Cinderella. Mowgli. Elsa and Alladin. What do all these famous characters have in common? They’re all beloved. They’re all brave. They’re all orphans. Big media knows how to pull on our heart strings. We immediately connect with these character’s desperate need to know that they belong. When we are infants, we need other people to survive. Care for one another is what allows us to survive and thrive as a species.

On the night of the Passover meal before the crucifixion, as he spoke to the disciples of his coming absence, Jesus words must have been both perplexing and deeply reassuring. He told them, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.” (John 14:15). We are family. We belong to one another. We are never alone. Each of us are always and forever cherished and loved.

This Thursday May 14, Christians mark the Ascension, the story of the risen Christ leaving this world for full union with God. Today’s reading is the conclusion to a long farewell message reminding the disciples that what they experienced with Jesus is trustworthy and true — God is with them, they have seen God, and God loves them.

That’s the message John’s gospel intends for us to hear. Yet, sometimes, modern readers get tripped up by that little word, “if.” “If you love me,” Jesus said, “you will keep my commandments… They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them” (John 14:15 & 21). Love and obedience. According to Jesus, the two are inseparable. We can’t honestly claim to love Jesus if we don’t obey him. And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute! Is that a threat? Is God’s love conditional? God is a bully who extorts obedience by threatening to withhold his love? We’re like little Orphan Annie waiting to be plucked from the orphanage by Daddy Warbucks but only if we’re good enough?’

We have been conditioned by so much bad religion and by mean religious authorities that it doesn’t take much to undo the promises generously offered here in Jesus’ words. So, first, it’s important to notice, Jesus doesn’t say, if you keep the commands, God will love you. Nope. “It is the reverse — If you love God, you will keep the commandments to love God and neighbor…It is only conditional on US! If we fail to keep the commandments — rebelliously, consistently, willingly, making the choice to constrain love and harm our neighbors — that is evidence that we don’t love Jesus. We can turn our backs on community and reject this way of love.” (Diana Butler-Bass, “If-Then and the Grammar of Spirituality,” Sunday Musings, May 9, 2026)

“What exactly has Jesus commanded us to do? Well, in the chapter directly preceding our lectionary reading, John gives us the answer: “A new command I give you,” Jesus says. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” In fact, this commandment — Jesus’s “Maundy Thursday” mandate that his disciples love one another — is the only recorded commandment in John’s Gospel. Everything else we say and do as believers in Christ comes down to this. Prayer, evangelism, repentance, generosity, asking, seeking, alms-giving, truth-telling, honoring, serving, feeding, sharing… all of it, in the end, comes down to love. The essential question, the searing question, is this: Do we love one another as Jesus has loved us? Or do we not? (Debi Thomas, “Love and Obedience,” Journey with Jesus, 5/10/20)

Whether or not we choose to reside in the orphanage is up to us. “Loving Jesus means loving God and loving our neighbors. Period. Loving God and loving our neighbors is the very definition of following Jesus. That’s it…That’s the whole point of the Easter story — love. If you love Jesus, you will love God and your neighbor as yourself…This is the way, the truth, and the life — the way of love. That’s the Easter promise. (Butler Bass)

If I am being honest with myself, it’s not hard to name why I fail to obey Jesus’ dying wish. Love makes me vulnerable and I’d rather not be vulnerable. Love requires trust, and I don’t want to be a sucker. Love spills over margins and boundaries. Love involves me in chaotic situations. I feel safer, less stressed, and holier policing my borders. “Love takes time, effort, discipline, and transformation, and I am just so darned busy” (Thomas).

But Jesus didn’t say, “This is my suggestion.” He said, “This is my commandment.” Meaning, it’s not a choice. It’s not a matter of personal preference; it’s a matter of obedience to the one we call our Lord. (Thomas)

“In one sense, our instincts are correct; authentic love can’t be manipulated, simulated, or rushed without suffering distortion. Those of us who have children understand full well that “commanding” our bickering kids to love each other doesn’t work. The most we can do is insist that our children behave as if they love each other: “Share your toys.” “Say sorry.” “Don’t hit.” “Use kind words.”” (Thomas)

“But these actions — often performed with gritted teeth and rolling eyes — aren’t the same as what Jesus is talking about in John’s Gospel. Jesus doesn’t stop at saying, “Act as if you love.” He doesn’t give his disciples (or us) the easy “out” of doing nice things with clenched or indifferent hearts. (Nor would I want him to; nothing feels as hollow as a “loving” act performed mechanically. Moreover, I doubt that the people who flocked to Jesus would have done so if they sensed that his compassion was thin or forced.) He says, “Love one another as I have loved you.” As in, for real. As in, the whole bona fide package. Authentic feeling, honest engagement, generous action.”
(Thomas)

All this would be impossible for me but for the gift of God’s presence. John’s gospel has taught us to look for God, not up there, but out in front. God is leading, suggesting, prompting, reframing, inspiring, and transforming. “The Advocate is God’s own Spirit, God’s own heart, living within us. This Spirit, Jesus promises us, will be in us, making possible the startling, counter-intuitive obedience which is love. This Spirit will abide within and among us, creating holy places where authentic, self-sacrificial human love can take root and flourish. The Spirit’s resources are inexhaustible. Long after our natural stores are depleted, the Spirit of God will love in, among, and through us.” (Thomas)

As is so often the case in our lives as Christians, Jesus’s commandment leads us straight to paradox: we are called to action via rest. Called to give the love we receive. Called to become the beloved children we are. The commandment — or better yet, the invitation — is to drink our fill of the Source, spill over to bless the world, and then return to the Source for a fresh in-filling. This is our movement, our rhythm, our dance. Over and over again. This is where we begin and end and begin again.” (Thomas)

Love me by keeping my commandments, Jesus says. These are finally not two separate actions. They are one and the same. We love because we are loved. We obey Christ because we are in Christ.” We are not orphans. “The love we are commanded to share is the love we are endlessly given. “You in me, and I in you.” The definition of love.” (Thomas)

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Rocks and Stones

Easter 5A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Death by stoning is a horrible way to die.  Yet despite the violence directed against him, Stephen prayed for his enemies. “He knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died.” (Acts 7:60)

Hatred is a powerful thing.  Cain hated Abel for being more admired by God than himself, so he killed him (Genesis 4:8). King Saul hated David for becoming more popular with the people and tried to kill him every chance he got (1 Samuel 19:19 – 22:23). Saul of Tarsus hated the followers of Jesus because he thought they were blasphemers and heretics. He made a career of rounding up Christians like Stephen to be stoned to death (Act 8:1- 9 :18). Horrible self-deception about our own righteousness can be deadly, not to mention the effects it has on families and relationships.

Human history is a seemingly endless recycling of cities laid to waste. How long will hatred or fear or arrogance or ignorance harden our hearts into doing violence? We throw rocks at what God intends for love. Christ is the stone that causes this tired old world to stumble. Christ is the cornerstone of a new humanity subverting the old Adam and Eve from within. Empire builds community by using and discarding people like Stephen. God rebuilds community starting with the ones Empire throws away.  But exactly how does God do this?

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my father’s house there are many dwelling places” (John 14:1-2). Stephen seems to have taken those words to heart. It changed how he lived. It gave him courage to proclaim the gospel to a hostile crowd.  It gave him peace of mind and love for his neighbor even as they slowly, painfully, and tragically murdered.  It sounds crazy.

Jesus explains, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home (monē) with them” (14:23). Jesus says this repeatedly in John’s gospel. In fact, he says it 69 times.  The little verb “meno” means to “stay,” “remain,” “abide,” or “dwell.”  Jesus revealed the hidden source of his glory was that he abided in the Father and the Father in him—and he invited us to do the same.  This is what Stephen knew and trusted. Stephen knew his true home was in God. God is the soul within all souls, the life within all life. God’s love and light dwells deep within you.  This was the living sanctuary that guarded and protected Stephen.  and enabled him to love his enemies even as they stoned him.

No doubt, today’s generation of Christians will hear Jesus’ promise to go and prepare dwelling places for us and think of ‘going to heaven.’ But here Jesus points to something different. Jesus is describing a place created within us of the mutual indwelling of the undying life of God within every nook and cranny of the universe. Jesus revealed a “dwelling place” God has prepared within you that softens our hearts of stone and opens our fisted hands to drop all our rocks.

The crucial passage for understanding Jesus’ promise to make dwelling places (John 14:2), comes much earlier in John 2:16. It’s the only other place that we find the phrase “my Father’s house.”  There Jesus is talking about the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus told those selling doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!” … He said them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” He was speaking, of course, about the temple of his body.

 Scientists now tell us we live in an omnicentric universe.  The center is everywhere. Likewise, the address of the father’s house changed upon Jesus’ death. It is no longer the temple in Jerusalem. It is now the Body of Christ.  Abiding in God through Christ is what Jesus means by “eternal life.”  One scholar suggests it might be better translated as “life in God’s new age.”  (Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary).  This is the way, the truth, and the life to which Jesus invites us.

It should be obvious that this way of life in Jesus cannot be a reason to exclude anyone, whether by race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or immigration status, or religious affiliation. Not even our enemies are denied access to the living sanctuary of God’s grace. Neither can we exclude from grace the natural world. Celtic theologian and pastor, George Macleod used to love saying “Matter matters, because at the heart of the material is the spiritual.” (John Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts, p. 98). What we do with matter, therefore, is at the heart of our spirituality, whether that be the matter of our bodies, whether that be the matter of the earth’s gifts, or whether that be the matter of the body politic.  All matter is holy because God dwells there. (Newel p. 99). What could be more revealing of Jesus’ power to forgive and to heal our bitter, hard-won divisions than the story of Saul who would become Paul?

Scripture says, “The witnesses [to the stoning of Stephen] laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.”  This is the first mention of the great missionary apostle whom Jesus will knock from his horse and claim for himself. In Acts 8:1 we are told that this Saul “approved of their killing of [Stephen],” with the implication that Saul himself may have instigated the entire event. Yet this same man will go on to become the apostle to the gentiles, spreading the gospel message to many “even to the ends of the earth.”  He will author more pages of the New Testament than anyone else.

Jesus Christ, who suffered unspeakable violence, broke the wheel of the endless cycle of violence, enmity, bitterness, and contempt. Christ Jesus returns again and again to us who have rejected and betrayed him with the gift of shalom—peace—this is the seed of willingness planted in us that grows, and blossoms into forgiveness, compassion, and reconciliation so that trust may be restored, loneliness is ended, and kindliness may abound.  Christ is the cornerstone of a new humanity. He is the stone the builders rejected that has constructed a sanctuary of living stones from the stuff of our flawed and finite lives.

Christ the cornerstone is straight and true. Upon it the kindom of God is bound together, stone by living stone. The only rule used by our heavenly architect is love. Do to others as you would have them do to you Jesus said. Religions that are built upon doctrines not as loving as Jesus are false and will fail. How long will we persist in the false gospel of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of rigid gender conformity and sexual orientation, or in the abomination of holy war? How long will the church preach a God more intent upon judging than in loving? True religion aligns with the Golden rule and the Sermon on the Mount.

We are living in the times of Saul, knocked off our horse on the road to Damascus.  Amid bewildering challenge and change, I believe the Spirit of Christ is calling us to begin again with a new name. Something is trying to be born among us, and not just us, but in people of many faiths and of no faith throughout the world. It is a new reformation. A new Pentecost. A new humanity. Something both ancient and new.

Like Stephen and like Paul, we begin this journey from wherever we are.  The heavens stand open before us, and our common humanity is revealed. We dwell in the mystical and living sanctuary of the body of Christ. Christ the true vine, the one body, the temple not made with hands, the living sanctuary of hope and grace in which heaven and earth are one stirs within us.  It gently, lovingly says to us to stop throwing rocks.

We cannot create a world without pain or loss or conflict or hurt feelings, but with God’s grace we can create a world of grace.  We can create a world of forgiveness in which we love even our enemies, heal our losses, repair our lives and relationships, and begin to heal the natural world.  But ultimately, no one can tell you how to live. The gospel, and the Holy Spirit, can only ask.  You and I are invited on this journey.  All of us must walk our own path and go at our own pace to discover the power of the abundant life that transforms your heart and mind and ultimately, is changing the world.

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Ancient Answer for our Modern Malaise

Easter 4A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus is our dwelling place and our guide. Jesus is master and servant. Jesus is host of the Eucharist and our food. Jesus is mother hen and the lamb of God who takes away our sin. Scripture is fond of mixing metaphors. Today we get two more. Jesus said, “I AM the gate.” (John 10:7) and I am the good shepherd (10:11).

These are not throwaway lines in John’s gospel. John’s gospel makes the bold claim linking Jesus with the great I AM—with Yahweh—whom Moses encountered at the burning bush. Seven times in John’s gospel Jesus uses the phrase Egō Eimi, “I AM” in reference to himself. Jesus said, I AM the bread of life (6:35). I AM the light of the world (9:5). I AM the resurrection and the life (11:25).  I AM the way the truth and the life (14:6).  I AM the true vine you are the branches (15:5). Could Jesus be the answer we need now?

The contradiction between the dueling metaphors of “the gate,” and “the good shepherd” is helpfully resolved when we learn that an ancient sheepfold like Jesus describes was a pen without a gate. Once the sheep are safely inside the shepherd becomes the gate. The shepherd lays down at the opening. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” Jesus said (v. 11b).

Still, it seems a stretch to say how these ancient agrarian sheepfolds and gates could be relevant to our modern urban lives? We do not reside in a pen. We are not sheep, are we?

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book, A Secular Age tells the story of the last 500 years in the West. We have greater freedom and less concern with supernatural evils than our ancestors did.  We are blessed with advances in technology, medicine, and science which have decreased suffering and doubled life expectancy.  But, Tayor says, this has not come without some tradeoffs. Taylor describes a constant, low-grade, background malaise: an emptiness, a felt flatness, a lack of connectedness to something larger prevalent in modern times. Taylor calls this the “Malaise of Modernity.” Day-to-day modern life seems so thoroughly emptied of any consideration of divine involvement that spirituality can feel like a trite response to the world’s great ills. The natural world, so filled with wonder and awe for our ancestors, rarely rises to consciousness full consciousness in modern life.  (Vince Brackett, An Immanent God for our Immanent Frame,” Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God,” p. 278)

Into this God-sized vacuum of the modern soul, corporations and political partisans’ array all around us pitching their latest and greatest bids for our attention with the help of big data. They provoke our outrage. They want our data, our time and especially our money. Their sales pitch is tailor made for you based on your likes, your swipes, your posts, your credit score, your purchases, your zip code, where you lingered in the aisles of a certain store, and/or where your eyes lingered longest over a post on social media.

These false shepherds manipulate and devour the sheep. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus said, “anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit” (John 10:1).  There are no sheep, no sheepfolds in Chicago today but the same evil powers and principalities are still intent to drive us into the same false pen. Somehow these false shepherds found their way into my pocket. What’s more, I don’t go anywhere, even from one side of the house to the other, without taking these manipulators with me. The dopamine released in my brain from using their platforms is addicting—and that’s on purpose. I wonder, when did I get so trapped in this high-tech sheep pen? I’m talking about my smartphone of course—and my laptop too. I’m surprised when I think how uncomfortable I’ve become whenever I realize I’ve left either one of them behind. Is there a way to trade dopamine for daylight, doomscrolls for detours? How do we reconnect with art, nature, friends, my own heart and mind? Where do I go to find awe, wonder, spirit and God again? How do we recover from this modern malaise?

For an answer, let’s look again at sheepfolds and sheep. I learned that ancient shepherds combined their sheep together in a single pen. When it was time to go, no problem. Each sheep simply answered the voice of their shepherd, sorted themselves out, and followed. This is one of the remarkable things about an otherwise humble farm animal.  Sheep learn to trust. This implicit trust is what John’s gospel has in mind when talking about faith and belief. To believe in Jesus is to love and trust him. Sheep are a good example of what it means to have faith in the good shepherd.

The call of our shepherd is an antidote to our modern malaise because the call of the shepherd comes not from ‘far away’ or ‘up there,’ but from ‘in here.’ It is the voice of Immanuel, of God-with-us. It is deep calling unto deep because each of us is created in the likeness and image of God. “The image of God is the essence of our being. It is the core of the human soul” (John Philip Newel, Christ of the Celts, p. 4).

“Christ [the good shepherd] comes to reawaken us to our true nature.  He is our epiphany. He comes to show us the face of God. He comes to show us also our face, the true face of the human soul…Grace is given to reconnect us to our true nature.  At the heart of our being is the image of God, and thus the wisdom of God, the creativity of God, the passions of God, the longings of God. Grace is opposed not to what is deepest in us, but to what is false in us. It is given to restore us to the core of our being and to free us from the unnaturalness of what we are doing to one another and to the earth” (p. 9).

‘I came,’ Jesus said, ‘that you may have life and have it abundantly’ (John 10:10b). Jesus, the good shepherd, calls you by name, not from afar, or from beyond the stars, but from deep within you now, in solidarity with your suffering and grief.  Jesus calls out from the pens of all the false shepherd who would steal from, use, betray, or provoke us to violence.

The German Lutheran liberation theologian, Dorothee Soelle wrote, “Spiritual freedom occurs when we become aware of our limits through leaving them behind… Only in seeing again do I know that I was blind; that I was squatting in a prison becomes apparent only when the prison door opens.”  (Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry)

The Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, Kahlil Gibran wrote, “When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.'” (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet). Christ is our sheepfold. To be free and to be well again we must look through our shepherd’s eyes.  We must enter and go out again from the sheepfolds of our lives by the Jesus gate to find that way that leads into joyful abundance. 

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God Made Real

Easter 3A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

They recognized him in the breaking of the bread. The Emmaus story is a eucharist story. Jesus “took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them” (Luke 24:30). All three synoptic gospels say the same thing (Matthew 26:26 = Mark 14:23 = Luke 22:19). When Jesus “broke the bread, their eyes were opened” (24:31). Luke repeats this detail a second time: ‘when the disciples return to tell what had happened on the way, and how they recognized Jesus was when he broke the bread” (24:35).

They could have believed what the women had told them. Yet, despite their astounding testimony of that morning, the disciples had tallied it up and concluded the wonderful story amounted to nothing. Cleopas and the unnamed disciple decided to head home. For them, the dream had ended in violence and shame. They had given up when Jesus came along and walked beside them.

On the way to Emmaus, they were walking off their post-traumatic stress. Jesus, under guise of a stranger, joins their walk and patiently listens to them vent about their frustrations and express their pain. Jesus responded with some expert biblical exegesis, yet his testimony is, at least initially, beside the point. Only in “the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35), do they recognize his presence, and everything fell into place. Their hearts burning, they rush back to Jerusalem “that same hour” to share their discovery with those they love most.

Notice, none of it would have happened had they not invited a stranger to join them for dinner. Despite their dismissal, doubt, and disappointment, enough Jesus had rubbed off on them. Something prompted them to ask him to stay with them, although he was walking ahead as if he intended to be going on (vs. 28). Alleluia! Christ is risen!  (He is risen indeed. Alleluia!)  For Christ to be raised from the dead Christ must live in our hearts, minds, and deeds –not merely in our words and beliefs.

In the Eucharist, Jesus showed the disciples how to find him, and how to partake in him, how, quite literally, to be him. We do this not merely with our words, but when we enact the gospel by using our body.  We get up. We follow. We take and eat. We become the body of Christ. We do God’s work with our hands.  Even the expert teaching of Jesus was not enough to reach them. Words must be paired with deeds. The old saying still holds true: ‘Don’t tell me what a friend I have in Jesus until I see what a friend I have in you.’

Communion means “one with.”  It is of Latin origin, a combination of the word cum, meaning “with,” and unus, meaning “one.” But for a Latin speaker there would have been a rich image associated with it. Unus, meaning “one,” sounds like unio, meaning “a great pearl.” When we enter communion with one another, we enter a precious unity. It is like the “pearl of great price” that Jesus uses to speak of the treasure of God (Matthew 13:46). (John Philip Newell, A New Harmony, p. 114)

In communion Jesus teaches that we find ourselves only by giving ourselves away in love. Finding the oneness of God is like finding treasure hidden in a field.  Upon finding it, we want to sell everything we possess to buy the field. “Is this happening in our lives? If not, is it because we have yet to discover the treasure? Or is it because we are unwilling to pay the price? Have we glimpsed the hidden gold of oneness in our relationships yet been dissuaded by our individual ego, or by the ego of our nation or species, from truly giving ourselves?” (Newell p. 117). The Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote that the “ego seizes the reins of power to its own destruction.” (Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 369)

Communion with Christ does not represent a loss of our individuality.  Quite the opposite. Union with Christ is based on a deep cherishing of our distinctness as individuals. The French, Jesuit, paleontologist and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, that this is the great gift of Christianity, “to be united while remaining oneself” (The Divine Milieu, p. 116).  Gathered at this Table, in communion with the risen Christ, we do not lose the unique qualities that make each of us one of a kind. We find our true selves in one another.

This is another way to describe what happens when we begin to live the reality of Easter.  In our resurrection we must die to our old, small ego-driven self, and be raised by the grace of God to our higher self. Jesus showed us we truly find ourselves by losing our egocentricity. He showed us that true strength is to be found by loving the other as one’s self.

“To love God, to love oneself, and to love one’s neighbor, as Jesus teaches, is impossible unless and until we realize with the Spirit’s prompting that each of these amount to the same thing. To truly love one’s family is to love the essence of every family. To truly love one’s nation is to enter “genuine dialogue” with the heart of every nation.  To truly love God is to look for the sacred in everything that has being” (Newell p. 123). Easter is not just a holiday on our calendar, nor is it a day to celebrate the events of two thousand years ago, rather it is the occasion of our own daily dying and rising to new life in Christ in communion with one another and all living things.

Celtic teacher and author, John Philip Newell, writes about an American rabbi who was once asked what he thought of Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Surprisingly, the rabbi replied, “Oh, I agree with these words.” The questioner persisted, “But how can you as a rabbi believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life? “Because,” answered the rabbi, “I believe that Jesus’ way is the way of love, that Jesus’ truth is the truth of love, and that Jesus’ life is the life of love. No one comes to the Father but through love.” (Newell p. 119)

How often have we heard these words to imply that “We are the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through us?” No one comes to God except through our beliefs, our sacraments, ourchurch? (Newell)

“We miss the rabbi’s point…Instead of seeing Jesus as embodying the way of love that we are to follow, and the truth of love we are to live, we have turned his teachings into a set of propositional truths about Jesus. We have pretended that the most important thing is to give assent to a set of beliefs rather than to follow the way of love, the truth of love, and the life of love.” (Newell)

The disillusioned disciples encountered Jesus in the breaking of bread after welcoming a stranger to dinner. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have let Jesus walk past without acknowledging him, or how many times you may have pretended you didn’t even know him.  Jesus is ready to walk with you now. We pray this Easter for the gift of new eyes and new ears.  We show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so we may entertain angels unawares. (Hebrews 13:2).

Only love has the capacity to transform the individual parts of our lives and world into a living communion.  All the mightiest weapons of the world put together do not have the power to change a single human heart. (Newell) We do more than meet Jesus here at this Table. We partake of him—we become his very body, walking with those trying to walk off their trauma, patiently listening, mediating Jesus in meals shared, and recognizing Jesus now offered to us at a stranger’s table. “Be my hands and feet, said Jesus, live as ones I died to save” (ACS #939).

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The Week that Changed Everything

Easter 2A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus appeared to Mary Easter morning. She told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”  Yet, the disciples remain huddled in the place where they had shared the Last Supper with Jesus. They locked the doors because they were afraid.

Jesus came among them and said, “Peace be with you. As the father has sent me so I send you,” and he breathed on them (John 20:19).  The word in Greek is “emphusao.” It’s the same word used in Genesis when God breathed life into the earth-man Adam (Genesis 2:7).  It’s the word the prophet Ezekiel used when God breathed upon the slain in the valley of dry bones. The bones took on flesh and lived. (Ezekiel 37:9). Today’s gospel is the only occurrence of ‘emphusao’ in the New Testament.

Later, we know the disciples’ lives will change completely. Later, they will catch the divine breath of the Holy Spirit, ‘emphusao’. They will carry the gospel to the four corners of the earth. They will confidently testify before judges and kings about the Messiah –but that first night, and even a full week later, despite Mary’s wonderful words, despite the appearance of Jesus himself, despite receiving the gift of the Spirit, they remain huddled and hidden. Jesus has emerged from death into life while disciples have entombed themselves in the upper room.

 Alleluia.  Christ is risen! (Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!) It was the week that changed everything. The disciples are asking themselves what just happened? Easter takes time.  Resurrection cannot be rushed. God is patient with us.

“You cannot read the stories of the resurrected Jesus as accounts of life triumphing over death without contending with layers of grief, mourning, and pain. A beloved mother has lost her first-born child; students and disciples are grieving the death of a teacher, confidant, and friend. Everyone has borne witness to the excruciating pain of the cross, the consequences of daring to defy empire, and the cost of declaring Jesus as Messiah…In the chaos of this time, the risen Savior shows up again, and again, and again—not as a ghostly, ethereal being but as wounded flesh. ‘Look at my hands and my feet,’ he says… ‘Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have’ (Luke 24:39).

“By sharing his wounds, Jesus reveals that our wounds are places for God’s healing presence and love: This is a theology for the wounded, for those who are still healing, and even for those who aren’t quite ready for healing. The risen Savior insistently welcomes the doubting, the uncertain, and the grieving to touch and see that he is real and present and here with us. The risen Savior, who had been abandoned, denied, betrayed, and crucified, doesn’t hide his wounds or rush their healing. As wounded people encased in the frailties of human flesh, can we, too, summon enough grace and kindness to acknowledge that our own very human wounds need time to heal?” (Yolanda Pierce, The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 131–132, 133–135.)

“Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually…″ We instinctively recoil when we feel pain. We withdraw into ourselves. And yet, life also teaches that “those who seek to completely avoid painful encounter with the unseen are doomed to live [prideful], boring, and superficial lives. (Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer)

Jesus pries open the tomb we would bury ourselves in. Fresh air and daylight are essential for healing. Scars marking old wounds tell a story. Emotional scars caused by trauma, loss or humiliation reveal a lot about us when, finally, either by courage or therapy, or both, they are allowed to speak.

Once again Easter finds us attempting to metabolize seismic events of the past week.  What the heck just happened? Some point to this Tuesday, April 7, 2026, as another day upon which history has turned. This Tuesday, the US president made genocidal threats against a whole civilization in what was an unforgettable and nearly ridiculous caricature of the folly of war. The same day, the AI company, Anthropic, announced a new large language model so powerful that even its billionaire class overlords were afraid. Apparently, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview can hack any and every computer system in the world and allow any teenager to hijack those systems.  Security systems controlling our water, electricity, airplanes, banks, government data, and whatever are all vulnerable.  We could probably add to the list of seismic shocks we have experienced in the week, and the year that was.

I do not recount these facts to fill you with fear but to point at what finally drew the disciples from the upper room and to what can open the way forward for us now—hope. Is it possible that a war which seized the world’s attention by imperiling the global economy and reaped so much innocent blood could be changing the perception of war itself?  Could the AI revolution force nations to cross the threshold to true global community to build new international rules and norms? Yes? Maybe? Perhaps? (Robert Wright, “The future arrived this week. And boy are we not ready for it!”, THE EARTHLING, April 11, 2026.)

Easter taught the disciples to invest their energy, their creativity, their whole selves in the hope for a better, more just and loving world. Resurrection gave them the courage to run toward the opportunities which inevitably emerge from chaos. They ran toward daylight. They abandoned fear and embraced hope.

A recent poll found 63% of American adults now agree the US is at a significant turning point. (Data via YouGov). It’s been another one of those weeks that changed everything. Easter lifts our eyes to the horizon to search out and follow the signs of hope no matter how improbable. Resurrection means the future is unwritten. Easter means our future is not determined by the past.

“We don’t need to wait for death to experience resurrection. We can begin resurrection today by living connected to God. Resurrection happens every time we love someone even though they were not very loving to us. At that moment we have been brought to new life. Every time we decide to trust and begin again, even after repeated failures, we are resurrected. Every time we refuse to become negative, cynical, or hopeless, we are experiencing the Risen Christ. We don’t have to wait for it later. Resurrection is always possible now ” (Richard Rohr, “Resurrection is Possible Now,” Daily Meditations, 4/10/26).

Yes, Love changes everything.  Love changes fear to strength. Love changes enemies into brothers and sisters.  Love replaces despair with hope. Love is the seed from which Easter springs to life. Love gives birth to resurrection. Doubt and belief—are not opposites. They are soulmates. Questions, conversation, dialogue and collaboration pave the path that lead toward a more hopeful future. Let us arise! Let us arise! Let us arise, step from our tomb, and go forward.

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Truly Human in a Partially Human World

Easter Sunday A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Alleluia! Christ is risen. (Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!) But that first Easter morning, the disciple’s minds remain shrouded in grief.  We follow Mary Magdalene and the other Mary through the pre-dawn air, rushing along the quiet streets as they head out the Ganneth Gate of the great walled city of Jerusalem. Outside this gate is the countryside, except for a large stone quarry, looking like a huge gravel pit, off to our left.  From this quarry many slaves have hewn great stone blocks for building the city. It is to this quarry the two Mary’s go through the morning darkness.

 It is important that we note these women were leaders within Jesus’ small band of followers. They and other women, like Joanna and Susanna, traveled throughout Israel with Jesus. Scripture says they provided financial support out of their own means (Lk. 8:3). In fact, recent scholarship based on examination of the earliest known copy of the gospel of John, suggests Mary Magdeline rivaled Cephas, aka Peter, the Rock. The name, ‘Magdeline,’ refers, not to Mary’s hometown, but is an honorific title. Mary Magedeline translates to ‘Mary the Tower.’

These independent women of means, are going to the place where their hopes were dashed, where their dreams had died, where their worst fears were realized. Where Empire had, once again, quashed human dignity and love. They will be met there with great good news of seismic proportions. Matthew’s gospel tells us stars swooned at Jesus’ birth; and rocks split at his crucifixion. Now the earth will quake as angels announce Jesus’ resurrection.

We tend to get the cart before the horse.  We put emphasis on the wrong syl-LABle. We miss the meaning of Easter when we tell this story by emphasizing Christ’s divinity and neglect the fact of Jesus’ humanity. The way to heaven is the way of Jesus who shows us that suffering through love unto a higher love is the path toward the fullness of life. “The humanity of Jesus reveals the openness of the soul to the infinite love of God. His humanity is our humanity; his divinity is our divinity as well.” (Ilia Delio, “Truly Human in a Partially Human World,” Center for Christogenesis, April 1, 2026)

The resurrection is deep calling unto deep.  Easter is the love which calls us home. It is the call to embrace and inhabit the indelible dignity God plants within you. It is to become fully human in a partially human world. The life of Jesus is not only a way to live in the present moment; it is a way into future life: “I have come,” Jesus said, “that you may have life, and have it to the full.” (Delio)

We all want the fullness of life but often it eludes us. We are constantly distracted by the false self, to use Thomas Merton’s term, the self that I think I need to be to be successful. The cross of Jesus reveals to us the difficult path of becoming truly human: facing the death of the false self, willing to forgive our enemies, and to ask forgiveness of those we have wronged, and finally, to love unto death because the God with a human face can only be realized in love. Love is only an idea, a possibility, until it is chosen and brought into a new reality. (Delio)

The early twentieth century Catholic artist and writer Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) wrote that as “Christ was in the tomb; the whole world was sown with the seed of Christ’s life…the seed of his life was hidden in darkness in order that his life should quicken in countless hearts, over and over again for all time.  His burial, which seemed to be the end, was the beginning.  It was the beginning of Christ-life in multitudes of souls.”  It was the death of death.

Jesus went to the cross to teach us how to be human in a partially human world.  In a world where a U.S. president threatens his enemies with war crimes; in a world where our neighbors are ‘disappeared;’ in a world where the routine of daily life threatens planetary life with extinction, Jesus shows us that it is precisely our fragile, human limits that define our humanity. “We fail, we do bad things, we make wrong decisions — and the tech industry promises to relieve us of these burdens. Yet it is precisely in failure that we begin anew. In the world of capitalism, we are products for consumption and algorithms for manipulation. But the core of our human identity is not appearance, usefulness, or success. It is the true self before God. This is the earth-shaking great good news. Being human is what Jesus was about, and it is what we are called to embrace.

The gospels say Jesus was not the first incarnation of divine love but the second one. The other Mary, Jesus’ mother, whom Orthodox Christians call theotokos, the God-bearer, is a symbol of the cosmos itself. She first said yes to accepting divinity into the chaos of humanity. “Divine love must be received, and receptivity requires space within. Nature does this without complaint, bending its roots toward the life of God. But humans are conflicted, tortured by an ongoing conflict between ego and freedom. To be human does not come naturally; it is a choice for love beyond measure, and such love requires absolute freedom” (Delio).

Ultimately, it was this divinely-inspired love that got Jesus into trouble. He lived into the freedom of the resurrection before he died. He refused the limits of the law that excluded people, stretched the law to include people left out, and showed us that the spirit of love is the highest law to follow. To live, authentically, according to Jesus, is to follow the compass of the heart, even when the direction goes against cultural, ecclesial, institutional, economic, or political demands.

If Mary was the first incarnation of divine love, and Jesus the second, then today we are called to be the third. When we walk the path Jesus walked — choosing love over power, vulnerability over control, forgiveness over vengeance — we do not merely imitate Christ; we become the body of Christ in the world. The divine love that was received by Mary and embodied by Jesus seeks a third dwelling place: the human person who says yes to the fullness of life, even when that yes leads through suffering.

The cross of Jesus is the symbol of this becoming. But the cross is also where God is most fully revealed — not only in the form of love but in the entropy of death itself. Creativity thrives on entropy; only when things break down does life find a way to break through. Evolution is a via dolorosa, suffering through the tragedies of existence into something higher and more wondrous. And we, by taking up this path, become part of that cosmic unfolding — the third incarnation of a love that will not stop until it fills all things.” (Delio)

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A Circle of Friends

Maundy Thursday ABC-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

“He got up from supper, took off his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, poured water into a basin, began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel’ (John 13:4-5). Peter’s rebuke, “Lord, you will never wash my feet!” Sounds like it comes straight from my own mouth. Foot washing is almost shocking in its intimacy.
Washing feet is an act of tender care for physical human needs. For centuries, preachers have proclaimed, “See, Jesus means for us to live lives of loving service.” True enough. But perhaps there is something more than the awkwardness of attending to intimate human needs in Peter’s complaint. Maybe Peter understood what’s at stake here: Jesus is turning the way of the world upside-down.

In the real world, wealthy, powerful people are in charge and the people at the bottom serve them. The way of the world is inequality. In Peter’s worldview, the coming Messiah didn’t change that fact. Instead, the point was simply to have our guy in charge of the inequality. Jesus was signaling a very different kind of world. Peter’s first instinct was that he wanted no part of it.

But Jesus didn’t stop there. He told them they would come to understand more fully. He followed foot washing with a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Later, he would elaborate, “No one has greater love,” Jesus said, “than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:13-15).

Relationship among friends is equal. Service among friends is mutual in contrast to the world of inequality and wealth. The kingdom of God is based on friendship. It’s based on equality. It’s based on the fact that all people are created equal. All God’s children have an equal opportunity to flourish. This is the fundamental principle behind the Lord’s Supper as well. There’s always another seat at the table. Everyone is welcome to join in, because we are all created equal.” (Paul J. Nuechterlein, Bethania Lutheran Church, Racine, WI, March 28, 2024)

‘Maundy’ comes from the Latin ‘mandatum,’ which translates to ‘commandment’ or ‘mandate.’ Jesus gave them a new commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you.” Have you ever wondered what the old commandment was? Scholar Frederick Niedner says the answer to this question is found in the sentence immediately preceding verse 31 in today’s gospel which reads, “When he had gone out…” The antecedent to the pronoun is Judas. Once Judas left the table everything became different. (“Proclaiming a Crucified Eschaton,” by Frederick Niedner (Institute for Liturgical Studies, Valparaiso University, copyright 1998, pp. 10-14.)
Upon hearing Jesus’ new commandment and listening to Jesus declare them friends– a circle of solidarity and mutuality centered within the very life of the living God—I wonder—did any one of the disciples go “…out into the night looking for Judas to extend that love to him? Did anyone fear for him, miss him, or try, even after he brought soldiers to Gethsemane, to bring Judas back to talk him out of his shame, his anger, his rapidly deepening hell?” (Niedner)

Scripture does not an answer this question. “My guess is no one found him, even if someone tried. To this day it seems that no one has found Judas. He is still out there, it seems, wandering somewhere in the night, forsaken by every generation of disciples since that ancient Thursday, the night of the new commandment. Every time we gather for our sacred meal, we commemorate Judas and his unforgivable behavior when we speak of “Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when he was betrayed,” taking bread. We speak of his sin, but we do not name him. We have not searched for him, and we have not found him. His place at the Lord’s table remains empty.” (Neidner)

We must confess, we are no strangers to such brokenness, either, or to its accompanying pain. In our generation we have known the pain of broken churches, broken families, broken trust with our heroes and broken communities. We all bear the name of Christ, but there are some with whom we would not eat his meal…Our families, too, know the pain and shame of places at the table where no one sits any more. We ache and we sob over friendships that were put to death with hasty, angry, bitter words. For each of us, at least one Judas wanders about in the night unforgiven. From another perspective, each of us is Judas, slipping about in the shadows, unforgiven, unloved, utterly alone.”

How then shall the community of the towel and the basin, the cross and the tomb, of living waters and new life, the fellowship of friends at table—love one another as the new commandment requires? The very love we need if we’re to love in that new way is given to us as a gift by the one who commands its practice.

“Jesus loved truly by giving himself away, by losing himself. Genuine love always means losing oneself — in another’s arms, in another’s laughter, in another’s tears. But more, to love is to lose oneself and thereby to find oneself, to find one’s true humanity. Such was and is the love of Jesus. He lost himself when he gave himself up for us. And now, risen, he lives. He lives in us who are his body, the baptized who are animated by his Spirit. In us he has found his place for loving. The love that he commands he also gives. It lives — he lives! — restlessly within us, looking for Judas, searching for all the traitors out there in the night.”

The one who calls us friends, who puts an end to inequality, who encourages us to claim our true humanity in service of love, suffered the perverse inhumanity of the world on the cross in solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the sinners, the enemies, the lynched, bombed, poisoned, and discarded who’ve been told their lives don’t matter as much as other lives.

The Three Days, teach us to look evil full on in the face. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, until late Saturday, tell of the triumph of justice, alienation, and violence—all without a word from God. We don’t have to pretend the wait isn’t agony. If it feels like God is silent, we say so. Your doubts, your grief, are safe here. In these Three Days we make space for a pain that doesn’t immediately resolve. How does the silence of God form us? What do you hear in the silence? Sometimes our grief is the most sacred sound. “Help us to understand, O God, that our memory of you becomes more whole when we remember you alongside the injustices with which you suffered in solidarity: the hunger, the abuse, the loneliness of the world.” (Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, Good Friday.)

“The banquet is set before us. We remember once more that night of the new commandment, but also, we look ahead to the day of its fulfillment. Let us celebrate the joy we have in sitting together as family, reconciled to each other, having lost ourselves but having also found ourselves in each other, and living in hope while waiting for the day when every place at our table will be filled. And let the people say, Amen.” (Neidner)

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The Life of Lazarus

Lent 5A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Lazarus was dead. There was no sugar coating it. The scene Jesus and the disciples encounter at the home of Mary, Martha and the dead man is familiar to most of us. The regular routines of life and commerce had stopped. Family, friends, and neighbors are gathered. They sit together in clumps, engaged in quiet conversation marked with tears, probably eating abundant simple food others have prepared.

It should be clear by now today’s gospel isn’t about our happy bright, everything’s going right days. This gospel is for all our horrible bad days. Today’s readings are for those who feel half dead, for people afraid to even to hope. Our scripture invites us who are in mourning now to come worship, to receive the breath of the Spirit, to hear the voice of Christ, to be fed at the table, and to celebrate the life God gives even as we acknowledge we do not always understand it.

Anne Lamott writes in her beautiful book called Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, “The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here.” (p. 81)
Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead to wake us from our own tomb-like existence. Jesus and the disciples walked back to Bethany in Judea. Jesus walked into the midst of murderous enemies and to a dead man’s grave bearing the power –not of wrath or retribution—but of life.

Lazarus’ name means, “God helps.” Lazarus lives in a town named Bethany, meaning “House of Affliction.” Lazarus of Bethany means, ‘God helps those in affliction’. This means ‘Lazarus’ is us. Lazarus is you. Lazarus is me. Lazarus is our church, our neighborhood, our nation, the world around us. This is a story about the ubiquitous reality, opportunity, and pain of resurrection. In the tomb of Lazarus, we confront the painful truth that not everything that lives in us is worthy of our life.
Most of us must learn life’s lessons the hard way. Here is wisdom born of pain, born of loss, born of struggle, born of mortality, and fear of death. When we let the walls go up, the air goes out. It’s all too easy to shut our self in and cut off from one another. While we keep all the doors and windows shut tight so no light or air can get in. It shouldn’t surprise us that our lives begin to stink a little.

Our readings are like a survival kit, packed for us by our ancestors in faith for when we find ourselves shut in our tombs or stuck in the ditch. Scholar and preacher, Walter Wink, has said the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, whom we read today, may be the first in all of scripture to proclaim the promise and power of the resurrected life God offers through the always present power of grace.

Ezekiel’s joyful discovery was born of long suffering. The desolation of war and forced exile into slavery in a foreign land led the prophet Ezekiel to envision the nation of Israel as a wasteland of bones scattered across a desert valley (Ezekiel 37). Bones that spoke of what was but is no more. No more Promised Land. No more Chosen People. Now their bodies were wrapped in chains. Their freedom swallowed in a living death. The prophet Ezekiel testifies to the power of God to rekindle hope even after we have become utterly hopeless.

Helpless and hopeless is exactly how Mary and Martha felt upon the death of their brother (John 11). Our bible does not offer an antidote to the very real painful realities of life. When Jesus saw Mary weeping, the King James says simply, “Jesus wept” (v.35). With his tears, Jesus assured Mary and Martha, not only that their beloved brother is worth crying for, but also that they are worth crying with. He acknowledges the grief that must inevitably accompany love. He acknowledges his own mortality. By raising Lazarus, he will seal his fate in Jerusalem. With his tears Jesus kindles the fire of hope in believing this old world that so grieved Israel, that provoked the psalmist, that still vexes us, can yet be changed for the better.

He calls us out from our tombs. Anne Lamott writes, Saint “Augustine’s insight that to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality. A radiance is inside us, just as it is visible outside us, and to seek it is maybe to catch a glimpse from time to time of a light within, of a candle at the window of our heart, of a home somewhere inside.” (Anne Lamott. “Stitches.”)

In this light we glimpse the truth, all people are one. Stumbling from the tomb we breathe in a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. We find within ourselves a new mind, a new heart, a new consciousness of life’s interrelatedness. We are living once again in a new age of Lazarus. There is new Pentecost stirring in the human soul bolstered by new science and the ancient witness of our ancestors. All things are one.

Such resurrection implies transformation and transformation begets both hope and fear. Fear begets fundamentalisms that pop up like dandelions in times of in profound change. Unquestioning, incurious, rigid, and violent fundamentalisms of religion, of culture, of racial hierarchies, of gender, sexual orientation, and you name it, are attempts to return to the relative peace and predictability of our tombs. Tragically, they do not, they cannot yield peace but lead to further fragmentation and strife. We are right now fighting a new war started by fundamentalist Jews against fundamentalist Muslims alongside fundamentalist Christians who all claim God is on their side.

“The word ‘revelation’ is from the Latin ‘revelare’ which means ‘to lift the veil.’ Jesus is our greatest gift of revelation.” We step from the tomb into the light of day. Jesus rolls away the stone. He lifts the veil, not to show us an exclusive truth [belonging only to Christians], but to show us the most inclusive of truths, that we and all things are made of God. We can humbly share Jesus with the world. We can offer our treasure in love. (John Philip Newell, “A New Harmony,” p. xxv).

Jesus reminds us of what we have forgotten. Jesus, our epiphany, discloses to us what is deepest in the life of all things, the sacredness of everything that has being. (J. S. Eriugena, “Periphyseon,” p. 692). Jesus reveals the hidden ground of our buried in the depths of our consciousness (C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 89). The gift of resurrection and new life is not opposed to the wisdom of other traditions. It is given to serve the wisdom of other traditions. We do not have to compete with one another. We complete one another.

Thomas Berry called this a “moment of grace.” (T. Berry, “The Great Work,” p. 198). It is a decisive moment in which we are being offered a new-ancient way of seeing with which to transform the fragmentation of our lives and world back into relationship. (Newell, p. xxvi). It is the way of Lazarus. It is the way of love. It is the way of peace. It is the way.

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No Heroes but Us

Lent 3A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus and the disciples pass through Samaria on their way from Jerusalem north to Galilee.  They took the shortest route –yet no self-respecting Rabbi would take this short cut.  Jesus and the disciples are walking themselves into enemy territory. Their relatives in Jerusalem regarded Samaritans contemptuously as half-breeds, who were contaminated by intermarriage to idolatrous pagan religions.

Jesus sent the disciples into town to buy lunch. He is sitting beside Jacob’s well when he meets a Samaritan woman and strikes up a conversation. It may seem unremarkable to you and me, until we realize this is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the bible.

Typically, Christians cite this passage to prove a unique claim of Jesus — “I am he” — that Jesus is “living water,” a name that identifies Jesus as divine. As he and the woman talk, Jesus layers spiritual metaphors for water: liberation, yearning for salvation, hospitality, healing, and renewal of life. And wisdom, like a spring, bubbles up through his words, his poetic and symbolic insights. Jesus himself drinks water, he gives water, and he is water. I am he, Jesus said. (Diana Butler Bass)

The encounter is an interesting parallel to the story of Eve. In Genesis, the devil tempts the woman to eat forbidden fruit to gain divine knowledge. At the well, Jesus invites this woman to drink God’s water to gain spiritual wisdom. The entire story is a reversal of disobedience; here, Jesus and the woman re-enact Eden with a different result. The woman’s eyes are opened; she understands. (Bass)

Jesus sees her. And in seeing her, Jesus does not pity her or berate her or reject her, rather he engages with her in a theological conversation. Jesus does not condemn her for having had five marriages and for living with someone who was not her husband. In fact, as bible scholar Caryn Reader (The Samaritan Woman’s Story) points out, this long passage never mentions sin. When Jesus refers to her “five husbands,” Reader suggests, he likely was not referring to her sexual history but to her economic story.  Jesus is saying to her, “I see you. I see how you’ve been tossed around like a sack of grain. I see what that must have done to your heart.”

This unnamed Samaritan woman became an evangelist.  She becomes an example of discipleship in stark contrast to Nicodemus, the powerful, educated, religious leader whom we read about last week.  The fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom pointed out she does not bring only one or two disciples to Jesus like Andrew and Philip, she brought a whole city.

“In fact, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Samaritan woman comes to be called “Photine,” the illuminated one. She is celebrated as a person who, after meeting Jesus and telling her neighbors about her discovery, traveled around the Mediterranean world preaching the gospel. According to legend, she ended up in Rome, preached to Emperor Nero, and died there as a martyr. Lost in the western tradition is the fact that this woman was called the first evangelist and “equal to the apostles.”” (Amy Frykholm, “Living Water: Third Sunday in Lent,” Journey with Jesus, 3/01/26)

Let’s pause for a minute to let this story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman soak like water into dry ground.

  • Here, the Son of God is tired, weary and thirsty.
  • Here, the Messiah, despite that weariness, listens with understanding to an outsider of an enemy people.
  • Here, Jesus breaks through the barriers of nationality; the political separation between warring factions; the social barriers between a man and a woman; and the religious divide between a woman and her God.
  • Here Jesus is challenging the barriers of orthodoxy and what it means to find solidarity between people of different religions.
  • Here is the beginning of the universality of the gospel.
  • Here, grace is poured out like water.
  • Here, God acts through Christ Jesus to love the world, not in theory, but in simple words and actions.
  • Here Jesus’ core message once again turns the normal dominance pyramid on its head.

Who are the Samaritans—the outsiders—the enemies—whom God in Christ Jesus would have us love and listen to today?  They are all around us. Close at hand. The marginalized, the targeted, the powerless. What would happen if we, like Jesus, chose to love our enemies rather than bomb them? For centuries, governments have pursued a policy of peace thru strength, but war and the threat of war do not create peace. It creates a lull, l-u-l-l, a temporary pause between wars and conflicts. We are not naïve to the reality of evil in the world. Yet Jesus has shown us a better way. The kin-dom of God begins with listening and builds, person to person, through relationships of trust, solidarity, and love.  Peace comes through non-violence rather than the threat of violence.

It is easy to be discouraged today.  There are days we may even feel hopeless. The backlash against a world of equality, accountability, and openness is significant.  Backlash is one way of measuring how much progress has been made. The backlash we see is not comprehensive or global.   Our elected leaders are racist.  They are authoritarian. They are misogynistic.  They are homophobic. They are destructive. Their power, therefore, is brittle, shallow, and dumb.

Form where is our help to come?  Photine, the illuminated one, showed us that leadership mobilizes the shared strength of the whole community rather than one man.

Writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit, recently said something Photine and Jesus would have agreed with. “One of the great weaknesses of our era,” Solnit said, “is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort.”  Solnit points to the Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said before he died that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. According to Solnit, “The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump[ism] always has been and always will be civil society… Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war… I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.” (Rebecca Solnit, “The Interview,” New York Times, 3/07/26)

Water is very heavy, but the living water of the gospel is light.  In nature, water that does not flow soon becomes stagnant and unhealthy to drink.  Religion that does not open our hands, hearts and fisted minds to welcome the stranger as we would welcome Christ is no longer healthy religion. Only water that is flowing out is “living water”.  This is the invitation of the gospel, to become a Beloved Community that sees each other in our success and struggle calls out our shared strength.  We are invited to a collectivist, rather than individualistic, approach to life.

Some years ago, at worship with our friends at Emanuel Congregation on Sheridan Road, flipping through the Jewish hymn book there in the pews, I noticed one prayer that could be a re-statement of how Jesus and Photine call us to be the living water of the gospel which flows freely among us, through us, and from us. The prayer reads:

May the door of this synagogue be wide enough

to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship.

May it welcome all who have cares to unburden,

thanks to express, hopes to nurture.

May the door of this synagogue be narrow enough

to shut out pettiness and pride, envy and enmity.

May its threshold be no stumbling block

to young or straying feet.

May it be too high to admit complacency,

selfishness and harshness.

 

May this synagogue be, for all who enter,

the doorway to a richer and more meaningful life.

(Mishkan T’Filah: A Reform Siddur, p. 124)

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Spirit of Restlessness

Lent 2A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Sometimes change comes when we, like Nicodemus, start to ask questions. Sometimes change simply knocks us off our horse like Paul on the road to Damascus. Less often change comes when we, like Abraham and Sarah, have a radical new vision of what’s possible. More often we resist change with a combination of recrimination and denial.

It took nearly 250 years after the invention of the microscope, from 1590 to 1850, to convince doctors to wash their hands and their surgical instruments to prevent infection. It took nearly as long after the invention of the telescope, from 1608 to 1835 for the Church to admit Copernicus and Galileo were right. The earth is not at the center of the universe.

Civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights, mass incarceration, health disparities parsed by zip code, and cell phone videos have repeatedly exposed the ugly original sin of America that we refuse to fully reckon with. Add to this the violent history of gender equality and sexual orientation. Christian nationalism has brought us face to face with the fact that our religion is more concerned with protecting patriarchy, privilege, and wealth than with the gospel teaching of Jesus. We are all of us, bound up in a culture and economic system of extraction, exploitation, and extinction.

We don’t know what we don’t know, so can hardly be blamed for our ignorance. But once we have seen the truth, how do we unsee it? Willful ignorance is but another name for our sin. But God does not live us in our brokenness. Nicodemus, Abraham, Sarah, and Paul are hunted and haunted by the Holy Spirit to reach for something new they struggled to name that called for change, promised liberation and demanded sacrifice.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “…no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3). “Teacher, we know,” Nicodemus replied. People who want answers to fit in with what they already know are operating within what psychologists call confirmation bias: they only want to hear what conforms to and confirms their current thinking. Like many people today, he is focused on protecting the superiority of his in-group. (Brian McLaren, “Seeing the Word in Radically New Ways,” Sunday Musings, 2/28/26).

Nicodemus is operating on what we might call a conventional and literalistic level, unaware of his biases and the limitations of his current perspective, so he asks questions that demonstrate his cluelessness. Jesus keeps challenging him to break out of his childish thinking and to join him, not in working for himself alone, or even for his own little group or clique, but to work toward everyone’s welfare, everywhere, no exceptions.
We still struggle just like Nicodemus today. Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus includes everyone. Yet many people have used Jesus’ words to exclude most of humanity, shunting them away among those who don’t believe, or don’t believe properly. This, according to British theologian, Lesslie Newbegin, has become the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism. You can’t claim God’s blessings for yourself, your race, your culture, or your religion, Newbegin says, and leave out and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God’s blessings are not exclusive, but rather instrumental.

The profound image of being born again is not about getting a free “get out of hell” card. Jesus wasn’t teaching Nicodemus how to be saved in order get to heaven,’ but to liberate or set people free from the current corrupt kingdoms of this world. The people are ‘perishing’ not by ‘going to hell’ but quite literally by dying through war and oppression. Jesus pointed Nicodemus toward ‘eternal life’ not in heaven’ but to “life of the ages,” in sharp contrast to “life in this present age or regime.” Life “from above,” is life lived on a higher level than life within the current economic, political, and social systems of our human civilization. ‘Eternal life’ becomes a synonym for what Jesus later calls “abundant life.” The “kingdom of God” is not the afterlife where souls go after death, but “what the world would be like if God were sitting on the throne instead of Caesar and Herod.” Imagine a world in which Jesus gave the State of the Union Address. What would the applause lines be? Who would stand and who would remain seated if equality, justice, and restorative love animated public policy?

When we are born from above, we are re-born to the perspective of the oneness of God and humanity. “Being born again,” suggests to us the image of the mother. Historically, the church as faith community, described itself as this mother and the font as the womb from which birth in God arises. What God is bringing to life in us is a new mind and new heart, new eyes, new ears, new hands, and voices. See all has become new. Anyone in Christ is born a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

We see but do not see. We hear but do not listen. The way to abundant life comes by way of seeing and living according to the mind of God in Christ. The story of Nicodemus is the first of four intimate portraits of followers of Jesus that we will read from John’s Gospel in coming Sundays this Lent. They are the stories which the ancient church chose for those preparing for baptism at the Vigil of Easter. (With joy, we prepare with three of our siblings here at Immanuel who are On the Way and will affirm their baptism at the Easter Vigil—Saturday April 4th, at 7:30 PM.)
Martin Luther once wrote, “faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, untried and unknown goodness of God.” Jesus, the incarnate Word, enters the dark and fearful world with grace like a mighty wind, or a stirring breeze, or a calming breath of fresh air.

The Spirit of Christ confronts the rejecting, unjust world with an invitation and a decision, to believe or not to believe, to see or not to see, to wager or not to wager, to love or not to love. Today Jesus bids us enter the goodness, the otherness, the awesomeness and the mystery of God that surrounds and moves among and within us. The Spirit takes us beyond our words, our understanding. Leave behind what you know or think you know. Like the turbulent winds of March, the winds of the spirit signal that change is coming. See, a new church, a new humanity is being born. Let us be carried by Christ ‘to a new land that God will show you’ (Genesis 12:1)—a land flowing with milk and honey—where “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

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