Epiphany 6C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
February 16, 2025
If only Jesus had had more days like this. It was beautiful. Jesus stood among a multitude of diverse peoples from the surrounding regions. They did not come to test him. They were not there out of idle curiosity. They came to hear and see Jesus, and to be touched and healed by him.
Jesus opened new horizons for them. He gave their lives direction and purpose. He gave them to one another as siblings in a large family transcending race, religion, ethnicity and time. He poured out the power of grace upon them. He nourished, emboldened, inspired, and sustained them. They would become, as Jeremiah described in our first reading, like trees ‘transplanted beside water. They are not afraid when heat comes. Their leaves stay green. Even in a drought they are not anxious and do not cease to bear fruit’ (Jeremiah 17:8). Like our ancestors before us we become like an oasis, a living sanctuary of hope and grace in a thirsty land.
“[People in] the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all” (Luke 6:19). Luke says there was something akin to fire in Jesus’ touch. The word, hapto, “to touch,” can also mean “to light,” or “to ignite,” just as we hold candles together on Christmas Eve to spread the warm glow of firelight throughout the assembly. The healing power of Jesus’ touch spread through them like a fire that would ultimately consume them and through them, reshape the world.
From beneath the shadow of Hitler’s Fascism, Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reminded us that this fiery call of discipleship is an invitation to come and die in the waters of our baptism. Yet, this death is not the end but a fresh beginning. Do not be afraid.
Here is the fire of Jesus’ touch in water and the Word; at the table in bread and wine; among us gathered in his name, assembled in the warm embrace of the Holy Spirit. We navigate by way of the compass of love and compassion. This makes us, like the diverse peoples gathered around Jesus in ancient Galilee, a resurrected people, called and gifted to extend our hands with Jesus in loving service of the marginal and vulnerable, the hungry and thirsty, the poor and the oppressed. The very people who Elon Musk in a recent post on X, called the “Parasite Class.” If you’re not a member of the Parasite Class, you have nothing to fear about changes being made in Washington.
Jesus chose a different descriptor for the poor. He called them ‘Makarios’, or ‘blessed.’ “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk. 6:20). This elevated status stands out even within a bible full of admonishments to remember the widow, the immigrant, and the strangers among us. Jesus’ sermon on the plain is the first time in Jewish religious literature that the poor are directly called the blessed (Hengel, Property) [p.76]. In ancient Greece, Makarios, or ‘the blessed ones,’ referred only to the gods, because only the gods possessed a life beyond all cares, labors, and death. What did Jesus think was so special about the poor? God has a preferential love for them. The compass of compassion points directly to them. The fires of living sanctuary are lighted in our embrace with them. According to liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, “God has a preferential love for the poor not because they are necessarily better than others, morally or religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will” (“Song and Deliverance”, in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 1991).
When we stand with Jesus, we step down from our place of privilege. We step up out of our broken past and our shame. We stand on level ground in shoulder to shoulder with people everywhere. We stand together, for, and with all creatures, human and non-human. We stand with Jesus to share our hopes and joys, our pain, and sorrows. We stand on a new horizon as children of a new humanity.
Jesus’ sermon conjures an image of a peaceable kingdom, a way of life together that does not seem at first to compute. We get just a glimpse before it evaporates faster than spit on an Arizona sidewalk. The preacher, Frederick Buechner wrote: “The world says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and Jesus says, ‘There is no such thing as your own business.’ The world says, ‘Follow the wisest course and be a success,’ and Jesus says, ‘Follow me and be crucified.’ The world says, ‘Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own’ — and Jesus says, ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’ The world says, ‘Law and order,’ and Jesus says, ‘Love.’ The world says, ‘Get’ and Jesus says, ‘Give.’ In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.” (Quoted by Debi Thomas, “Leveled,” Journey with Jesus, 2/06/22).
In this Epiphany season, less than a month into a new administration in Washington, we have no illusions about the contrast between the manifestation of God’s dominion of love and the destructive grip of self-serving hierarchical power. The Prince of Peace is born and lives among us, yes. But the reign of love is not a Hallmark card and never has been. Any change to comfortable habits and patterns are met with resistance and sabotage but changes to our way of life which subvert the greedy powers that rule the world will be opposed most fiercely of all.
Yale historian of tyranny, Timothy Snyder, most of the power amassed by authoritarian governments is freely given—that the political space that you don’t use you lose. Don’t cede space. Don’t obey in advance. Religious freedom cannot be just for me and not for thee. Snyder’s little book on Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, offers concrete advice about how to resist. Resist we must and resist we will together with our God. One of the ways we resist is simply by being the diverse and loving community of sanctuary, hope and grace that Jesus summons us to be. And in the ensuing destruction let us not fail to watch for openings to create something new and better from the tragic failures that have brought us to where we are now.
Can we imagine a human economy with a currency which emulates the wise ways of Mother Earth? While lunacy rules in government and greed rules in business can we look for ways to exchange the currency, not of dollars, but of gifts? “Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly remarkable resource” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, p. 14). Can we build an economy on principles of abundance rather than scarcity? This type of circular economy is not so far-fetched as you might think. The little library in front of our church is one example. So are the local mutual aid groups sprouting up around our community—as are countless videos on YouTube in which people take time to teach how to make, fix, and/or operate practically everything.
“This is not prosperity theology. This is not “blessing” as health, wealth, and happiness. This is a teaching so costly, most of us will do anything to domesticate it. Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad, and expendable. Why? Because you have everything to look forward to. Because the Kingdom of God is yours. Because Jesus came, and comes still, to fill the empty-handed with good things. May the God who gives and takes away, offers comfort and challenge, grant us the grace to sit with woe, and learn the meaning of blessing.” (Thomas) The psalmist said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).
Fierce and Motherly Love
SermonEaster 4C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Cattle must be driven, but sheep can be led. They hear the shepherd’s voice whom they have learned to trust. They recognize the shepherd and remember his kindness. Loyalty, trust, and faith forge a bond between them. From ancient times, the relationship between sheep and shepherd are a symbol of the reality and power of love to shape our lives.
Most people first experience unconditional love not through the image of a man, but through the image of a woman—in most cases, their mother. Most often, the mother is the one who first parts the veil and allows us to glimpse what love is, through experiences of grounding, intimacy, tenderness, and safety—things that most of us associate with God at God’s best. (Richard Rohr, “Our First Glimpse of Love,” Daily Meditations, 5/11/25)
“If all we have known of the divine is God the Father, we are walking with a spiritual limp, yes, even those of us who were lucky enough to be raised to see “God the Father” as loving and tender rather than aloof or stern…. The masculinity of God is not the culprit here. Imaging God as male is valuable and good for our spiritual selves…. But left unbalanced, a belief in a God who is exclusively male can lead us down a road of legalism, perfectionism, fear, self-criticism, and a plaguing sense of unworthiness. Sadly, many of our religious experiences have been marked by such things.” (Rohr) “On the other hand, when we integrate the divine feminine into our understanding of God, we find we have an easier time internalizing compassion, inclusivity, radical acceptance, justice for the outcast, and unconditional love.” (Shannon K. Evans, Rewilding Motherhood: Your Path to an Empowered Feminine Spirituality, Brazos Press, 2021, p. 165.)
We learn to trust in love, and how to love, like sheep following shepherds, through the people who show us that love. Most often, if we are lucky, through mothers and fathers—but really—by anyone who steps up and shows up. When a young woman, we’ll call her, Nasreen, heard the call of our shepherd, she could not have felt ready or prepared. Life circumstances thrust her into a situation which demanded that she decide. Could she be compassionate? Would she be kind? Could she be shelter? Would she be love?
Nasreen found herself thrust into the role of guardian of her niece and nephew Aisha and Amir. Their birth mother was one of the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens who worked as interpreters, translators, and in other key roles during the U.S. military’s two-decade mission in Afghanistan. In return, the U.S. government issued them Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan allies, including Amir and Aisha’s parents.
A week before the family was set to leave Afghanistan, Amir and Aisha’s parents were murdered by the Taliban. When threats of retaliation put the children’s lives in grave danger, Nasreen stepped forward to protect them, even though she was just a young adult herself.
There are many ways to define what it means to be a mother. For Nasreen, it meant rising to meet the needs of two grieving children in the face of unimaginable loss. She became their protector, advocate, and caregiver—in many ways a mother figure—when they needed it most.
After the fall of the Afghan government, Nasreen courageously fled with the children to Pakistan while their U.S.-based family worked with the Global Refuge Legal Services team (a ministry of the ELCA) to navigate the immigration process. The family’s turbulent journey came to a happy and emotional ending with the safe arrival of Amir, Aisha and Nasreen on United States soil. Today, Nasreen and her family find themselves in immigration limbo after the new administration moved to revoke the legal status of some refugees who were allowed into the U.S. for urgent humanitarian reasons. Nasreen doesn’t have children of her own, but she characterizes the call of our shepherd to love and to love fiercely. She embodies the true spirit of Mother’s Day.
The internet will tell you Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—began decades earlier in the 1870s, in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War that left so many families grieving the dead. Writer and reformer, Julia Ward Howe, composer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, urged women to take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society [and to promote world peace].” (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 11, 2024).
The Civil War and Mothers’ Day was the springboard that launched the Woman Suffrage movement. Fifty years of advocacy and struggle ended with the right to vote in 1920. We proudly point to that human dynamo, Emmy Evald, the daughter of the first pastor and the wife of the second pastor of Immanuel, who took part in the movement in Illinois and in Washington D.C., and famously hosted Susan B. Anthony in the church parsonage. And yet, it took another fifty-five years, in 1975, that Mildred Nelson would become the first woman at Immanuel to serve on the church council.
The early church embraced and affirmed the servant leadership of many women. One of them, named Tabitha, is explicitly identified as a disciple in our reading from the Book of Acts. She is the only woman in scripture called a disciple. Elsewhere, another woman, Junia, is called an apostle. Many other women were leaders, financiers, and pillars of their communities. Yet sadly, it wasn’t long before the voice of Jesus our shepherd became muted and covered over by the patriarchy of the dominant culture.
Jesus prayed that we may all be one. According to St. Paul the early church was eclectic and inclusive, “neither Jew or Greek, slaver nor free, male and female, but all are one in Christ” (Galatians 3:28). Even so, the persistent, insistent, and pernicious power of patriarchy remains a core teaching of many, if not most, Christian churches throughout the world today. Many Christians today walk with a spiritual limp.
So yes, on this Mother’s Day, let’s be nice to our mom. The counter-cultural egalitarian and inclusive Christian community of the early church was breathtaking—but that’s what Easter looks like when we respond to the call of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Christ is our shepherd and our sheepfold, a living sanctuary of hope and grace. The only absolute law among the Jesus’ sheep is the law of love—including love of our enemies. “Partners in [Christ’s] new creation, seeking peace in every nation, may we faithful followers be” (“Praise the Lord, Rise up Rejoicing,” ELW # 544).
Pass the Peace
SermonEaster 2C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
What do you do after the worst has happened? After hope is lost? The disciples are having a really bad no good day. They are still where we left them last Sunday, hiding in fear and confusion behind locked doors somewhere in Jerusalem. Their dark little room was as lifeless as the grave. They are not yet aware how they are like seed sown upon soil, already in the process of transformation to bring forth new life. They believed they were at an end. Yet God had prepared a new beginning.
Alleluia. Christ is risen (He is risen indeed, alleluia!). Our gospel is a graceful reminder that we are not the first followers who struggle with what the resurrection means. John’s recounting the story of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples and then again, one week later to Thomas, is not to scold us into a style of believing that is afraid to ask questions, but just the opposite.
Abraham, Moses, and Elijah; the Psalms, and most of the Prophets, remind us that biblical faith is confident enough in relationship with God to ask any question. Questions and the confidence to ask them of ourselves, each other, and God, is not a recipe for weakening faith, but for strengthening it. Wherever you are, whatever your background, regardless of your doubts and questions, you are welcome in this community of faith.
The crucifixion was tragic and stupid. I don’t believe crucifixion was ever really God’s plan. It was God’s expectation, maybe. It was everyone’s expectation. Even the disciple’s expected the authorities in Jerusalem would put Jesus to death. Yet, putting Jesus to a cruel, painful, humiliating death was not God’s plan. It was ours. The human response to the incarnation of grace in God’s son could have been different. Imagine, what if it had been?
Here is my body, Jesus said. He showed them his hands and his side. See, my body is wounded and broken. Many of you carry scars in your mortal frame, some may never heal. Yet I still live and so shall you. Blessed are you for the wounds you endure for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, Jesus says.
On that Easter night, when Jesus appeared, you would expect that it would not be good news for the disciples. You would expect Jesus to be angry for abandoning him, or in Peter’s case, for denying even that he knew him three times. “But that’s not what happened. There were no recriminations, no anger, no condemnation or judgment, not even an understandable ‘venting’ of disappointment and hurt. Instead, the first words Jesus offered were both greeting and gift: “Peace be with you”” (Kate Huey, Sacred Seeds).
Jesus breathed on them. The Greek word emphusao, used here in John’s gospel, occurs only once in the entire New Testament. It means “breath or breathing.” Just as at creation, when God modeled a statue of clay, breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and became a human being (Genesis 2:7); just as when God breathed on the dry bones of the slain and brought them to life (Ezekiel 37:9); Jesus gave the disciples the gift of God’s breath, and said to them receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22).
Emphusao carries the same root as the English word, infusion. Jesus’ gave them a Shalom infusion. This is the peace we pass every Sunday before communion. We pass this peace throughout our bodies in prayer to find rest, to be made whole, and to come alive. Emphusao. Breathe in God’s peace in your lower back. Breathe God’s peace into your throat to release tension in your neck. Breathe the peace of God’s shalom in your forehead to relax your mind. Pass God’s peace to each other to open pathways of forgiveness and mercy in our relationships. Receive the vital life-transforming breath of God in the dead zones of our lives –into the places in our minds and hearts which have become weighed down or walled off by fear, exhaustion, hopelessness, and/or confusion.
“It’s a great temptation in the life of the church to huddle behind massive, beautiful doors, to hide out from a world in pain and great need, and to make our faith a personal, private thing that has nothing to do with that pain or that need” (Kate Huey). “Jesus comes again and again to these scared and confused disciples. The disciples have not warranted a second visit by Jesus, but they get one, and a renewed gift of his peace” (Gail O’Day). In the same way, if we long to see Jesus, he offers us the same gift of himself, not just once, but over and over.
Howard Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, Christian mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. He had a unique way of describing what it means to come alive to our full humanity. Jesus called it the Holy Spirit, or the Advocate. Thurman called it the voice of the genuine. “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls” (Howard Thurman). “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
“So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you. Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music” (Howard Thurman, 1980 commencement address at Spelman College).
“God who rose, resurrect us! We’ve belonged to communities, workplaces, and spiritual spaces that have demanded our death far more than they ever advocated for our life…No longer will we mirror the hands of neglect that the world uses daily. Let joy find us today… A joy that is not quick to forget the agony of Good Friday or dismiss the doubt of Silent Saturday. May we remember and rise to meet hope nonetheless, knowing our liberation is whispering up at us from its empty grave” (Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, p. 263). Emphusao. Receive the shalom of the Holy Spirit. Receive the sound of the genuine. See. We are an Easter people. See. We are a new creation through the gift of God’s grace revealed in Christ Jesus.
God Took a Selfie and Gave Him to Us
SermonEaster Sunday C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Alleluia! Christ is risen (Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!) Yet that first Easter morning, despite the fresh bloom of early spring, everything looked dead. Mary Magdalene and the women made their way to the tomb at early dawn. As they did, the ribbons of color spreading through the eastern sky were not beautiful. The budding garden was not fragrant. The singing birds could not be heard. The women went to the tomb shrouded in grief. All their senses were silenced by the crushing weight of loss.
Throughout the Northern hemisphere the natural world testified to the promise of new life. Yet, neither these women, nor anyone else, expected anything but death. Springtime comes to grass, trees, and living things but bodies stay put where they go into the ground. Jesus had told them—that he would die, and on the third day, rise again— despite this—Mary Magdalene, the women, and the rest of Jesus’ followers, still lived in a Good Friday world filled with the shock and horror of the cross. They were like many of us who have lost a loved one, lost a job, lost a relationship; many of us who feel our future sinking behind the lawless, capricious, self-righteous, and tragically destructive will-to-power and greed.
We greeted Easter last night, and again, this morning with jubilation and with trumpets. But here, walking with these women, we are confronted with something quieter, more mysterious, and perhaps more resonant with our own lives. That first Easter morning it was hard to be sure what you were seeing. Those Jesus-followers stumbled in the half-light on that third day after Jesus’s crucifixion, confused and afraid. The details didn’t compute. Where was the stone? Were those angels standing beside them in that unlit tomb? And where was Jesus? Are they sure the tomb is empty?
It was “…the first day of the week, at early dawn” (Luke 24:1). That’s when Easter begins. “It begins in darkness. It begins amidst fear, bewilderment, pain, and a profound loss of certainty.” Perhaps you know the place? The creeds and clarifications we cherish today will come much later. What came first were variations on a theme that sound a lot like our own lives—like a woman I heard sing about Jesus who struggles with cancer and must carry her own oxygen—or another woman I visit who testifies to the power of God from her sagging nursing home bed. Easter is what happens when ordinary people brush up against the surprise of an extraordinary God. Easter looks like people of a broken, hungry humanity who encounter a bizarre and inexplicable Love in the half-light of dawn (Debie Thomas, I Have Seen the Lord, April 14, 2019).
Alleluia! Christ is risen (Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!) This was the disciple’s great discovery. Our gospels tell the stories of individual people having profoundly individual encounters with Christ. These encounters are not identical. Last night we read when Peter saw the empty tomb, he ran away and returned to his home. When the beloved disciple saw it, he believed but did not understand When Mary saw it, she ran to tell the disciples who promptly dismissed her story as an idle tail. In other words, we come to the empty tomb as ourselves, no better or worse.
What they discovered is that everything they heard and saw in Jesus is a message about all of us, about humanity, and indeed, about all of creation. They learned that had God accomplished something extraordinary and decisive in Christ Jessus. It was as if God took a selfie and handed it to us in everything Jesus said, did, and endured. God took a selfie and look—God is smiling! God is waving and inviting us in to become part of the undying life together with all humanity, and all life in Christ. “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We have seen the glory of God in the glory of the one and only Son, Jesus, who came from the creator full of grace and truth”. (Jn 1:14).
“Today is the feast of hope, direction, purpose, meaning, and community. We’re all in this together. The cynicism and negativity that our country and many other countries have descended into show a clear example of what happens when people do not have hope. If it’s all hopeless, we individually lose hope too. Easter is an announcement of a common hope.” (Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, “A Universal Message,” 4/20/25)
The first disciples discovered that the resurrecton is not so much a proposition to be believed or not believed as it is a way of living. Resurrection is a way of seeing. Because we have seen the living God in Jesus, now we can more easily see the presence of God already at work everywhere and always in everyone, including ourselves. Joined to this loving presence of God fills our world with color again, fills our heart with hope again, gives us reason to love again, gives us courage to stand again in solidarity with all victims who are being thrust onto crosses fashioned by the principalities and powers today.
I invite you to turn to page seven in your worship folder. Do you see the small image there? Do you see the bunny? Or, perhaps, you see something else? Do you see the duck? With a little practice, maybe you can see them both? Resurrection is a way of seeing that changes everything. Easter doesn’t divide us into rabbit people or duck people. That is the way of the world that leads to violence and the death of hope. Resurrection seeing is not either/or. It is both/and. Easter is about seeing the whole duck/bunny. This way of seeing is everything. It is as precious and life-giving as it is fragile.
Easter seeing comes like a lamb before wolves, with a word to shatter hard won common sense. Easter living comes like a dove into our Good Friday world. It is a dog-eat-dog dog; only the strong survive; white makes right; if you want peace prepare for war world. But here comes Easter, telling its idle tales again. Here comes Easter whistling a different tune. Easter makes promises like those we heard from Isaiah, God is doing a new thing: a new heaven and a new earth. “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” No longer must we consume one another to survive in this new world.
Easter says hope never dies. Easter says all your tomorrows can be different from your yesterdays. Easter says life is stronger than death; light conquers darkness; love is stronger than hatred. Easter does not a return to the past but moves always toward the future. When false expectations, flawed speculations, wrong theologies, or hateful ideologies threaten to wall us off from grace and each other, God’s Easter is going to break through that wall.
Since ancient times Christians have called Easter the “first day.” From Easter comes our practice of worshiping on Sunday morning. It is the first day of the week. It is also the first day of a new creation, sometimes called the “eighth day”, because on it, Christ restored the image of God in humankind and in so doing also brought restoration and renewal to all creation. We are an Easter people. We are a new creation through the gift of God’s grace revealed in Christ Jesus.
Of all the things Easter promises this may be the most preposterous—that we are now members of the resurrected body of Christ. Within you are seeds of hope to renew the hope of the whole world. The cross reveals the depths of cruelty, violence, and immorality to which we can sink, at the very same time it marks the path God has opened to lead us forward. The cross is a Tree of Life with leaves for the healing of the nations. ‘When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain…see, how, the green blade rises from the buried grain! Love is come again like wheat arising green.’ (ELW #379)
No Holding Back
SermonLent 5C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Artist Lauren Wright Pittman created the image printed on the back of your worship folder entitled, “Anointed.” The original work, painted with arcylic on canvas, was inspired by today’s gospel, John 12:1-8. Pittman wrote, “When I was little, I would run around my grandparents’ yard barefoot, playing tag, basketball, or intense battles of tetherball. All of the residue from my adventures would stick to the bottoms of my feet until they almost became one with the ground. I would come inside, and my grandmother would quickly call me to the bathroom so she could wipe my feet off with a warm washrag. I loved the feeling of the warm water against my feet, the texture of the washrag scratching away the grime of the day, and the hands of my grandmother lovingly squeezing my feet.”
“When I was preparing to paint this image,” she writes, “I propped my phone up against a wall, started recording, and knelt down on the ground pretending I was washing Jesus’ feet. My face was close to the ground with all the dust and dog hair that clings to my rug and I began to run my fingers through my hair, washing an imaginary foot. My dog Rumi came over, plopped herself down in front of me, and I began to pretend wash her paws. I giggled to myself and called to my husband, asking if he’d lend his feet to the scene. I quickly said to him, “But please don’t take your shoes off.” I didn’t want to experience his feet that close to my face; after all it was winter and feet tend to be a little more ripe after a long day in wooly socks. I began to rub my hair over his booted feet and I felt this profound sense of vulnerability and discomfort. The image of me kneeling as my husband sat in a comfortable chair was a difficult one for me to see reflected back at me on my phone. I wasn’t even willing to fake wash my husband’s bare feet. The amount of love it took to do this act willingly seems astronomical to me. I then asked my husband to take his shoes off. As I rubbed my hair on his feet I felt like crying. This is the posture that Jesus calls all of us into; a profoundly uncomfortable, shockingly reverent position; coming face to face, intimately engaging with the residue of Christ’s footsteps to smell and almost taste the journey of Christ.” (Lauren Wright Pittman © A Sanctified Art LLC | Sanctifiedart.org)
What does love smell like? What does hope look like? What does resurrection feel like? On this fifth Sunday of Lent, as we draw closer to Jesus’s final week, we prepare to contemplate his suffering, and the invitation to follow the way of his cross which transfigures death into hope. Today we take the measure of the gospel from deep within our own body and by deploying all our senses. Here is the Christian gospel enacted in fragrance. Here, is love as demonstrated in tender human touch. Here is courage and consequence unfolding within the bonds of intimate friendship.
All four Gospels tell this story — the story of a woman who kneels at Jesus’s feet, breaks an alabaster jar filled with precious perfume, and dares to love Jesus in the flesh. Hands to feet. Hair to skin. Soaked fingers to soaked toes. Each writer frames the event differently, to suit their own thematic and theological concerns, but the story at its core remains one of the most sensual, tender, and provocative in the New Testament.
In John’s version, the woman is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and the newly resurrected Lazarus. The two sisters host a dinner party for Jesus, and it’s during the festivities that Mary breaks open her jar, anoints Jesus with spikenard (a scented oil worth an entire year’s wages) and wipes his feet with her hair. As the musky fragrance of the oil fills the house, Judas — the disciple who “keeps the common purse,” rebukes Mary for her scandalous generosity: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” But Jesus silences him: “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (Debi Thomas, Beauty and Breaking, Journey with Jesus, 3/27/22)
We should pause here to comment on Jesus’ response to Judas’ criticism of Mary’s loving act: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:8). Perhaps no verse has been quoted more often to shirk our Christian duty towards those who are poor. What was Jesus saying? That poverty is unfixable or somehow part of a divinely orchestrated plan?” No. Commentators suggest that Jesus’s reference was to Deuteronomy 15:11: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be openhanded.” In other words, the call to care for the poor is constant. It never ceases. In fact, if we are called to love Jesus, love the poor, love ourselves, and one another all in the same way—without limit or calculation.
Mary leaned into embodiment. Mary’s example shows us that our discipleship is not what we do only with our thoughts and prayers, but ultimately, about what we do with our hands, our feet, our bodies. Love of the stranger, care of a friend, compassion for those who are suffering. Simple actions offer their own reward. Our hearts and minds become open to God. This is how we become one human family again. This is how we now see. Just be like Mary. She knows the way.
Mary’s example teaches us “The work of God is revealed in the person of Jesus—precisely in what he said, did, endured, and continues to say, do, endure, and transform through the spirit.” (Tripp Fuller, Divine Self-Investment, p. 155). Just as Jesus later washes his disciples’ feet to demonstrate what radical love looks like, Mary expresses her love with her hands and her hair. Just as Jesus later offers up his broken body for the healing of all, Mary offers up a costly breaking to demonstrate her love for her Lord.
Rather than shunning Mary’s intimate gesture, Jesus receives her gift into his own body with gratitude, tenderness, pleasure, and blessing. The holy sacraments here are skin, salt, sweat, and tears. The instruments of worship are perfumed feet and unbound hair. This is not an abstract piety of the mind; this is deeply embodied gratitude and worship. (Thomas)
Mary anoints not Jesus’ head (as in Matthew 26:7 and Mark 14:3) but his feet. Next Sunday, Jesus will enter Jerusalem as the Anointed One, but anointed not on his head, as was expected for a king, but on his feet. He is anointed not by the high priest but by a woman. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and his identity as Messiah did not fit neatly into any preconceived expectations. Jesus’ way unfolding now in these chaotic days is truth stranger than fiction.
As we set our faces towards Jerusalem the week after next, will we choose the measured risk or the extravagant gesture? Will we celebrate “useless” gifts as sacred to God, or will we hold our hearts back in judgment and cynicism? What will guide us as we contemplate the cross — the theological platitude, or the fragrance of Christ? That very important jar we’re hanging onto at all costs — when and for whom will we break it? (Thomas)
Mary recognizes the importance of meeting the world’s brokenness, cynicism, and pain with priceless, generous beauty. Even as death looms, she chooses to share what is heartbreakingly fragile and fleeting: a fragrance. A sensory gift. An experience of beauty. Her perfume is her protest. Her scented hands are her declaration. In anointing Jesus in beauty, she declares that the stench of death will not have the last word in our lives — the last word will belong to the sweet and sacred fragrance of love.” (Thomas) Amen.
Prodigal God
SermonLent 4C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“The younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant region, and there he squandered his wealth in dissolute living.” (Luke 15:13). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Nothing can be done.
As if on cue, today’s gospel offers the antidote. In the parable of the Prodigal Father Luke’s gospel portrays a God who runs to meet us in a healing embrace as we return from our self-imposed exiles. Who else but God can welcome us back from our most devastating screw-ups, who is so happy that, as [the psalmist today] proclaims, “you surround me with shouts of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7) (Michaela Bruzzese, Sojourner’s Magazine).
The young son is so full of himself he cannot see how his desires will inevitably lead to his ruin. Management consultant and author Peter Drucker once wrote, “There is nothing so useless as the answer to a question we haven’t asked yet” (Peter Drucker). Sadly, there are some lessons we can learn only through personal experience and failure.
Listening to this story through the ears of Jesus’ ancient Jewish audience, we realize how the young son’s choices have landed him in unimaginably obscene and defiling circumstances, desiring even to eat the food fed to pigs. If anyone is unworthy and beyond redemption it would be this guy!
I wonder. Do you think the father should have cut him off? Should he have told his son, ‘No’? Why did he put up with being humiliated before the entire village? Why did he let him take half the estate? Should he have run after him? Should he have tried to rescue him?
Notice, the father in Jesus’ parable does not chase his son. Neither does he disown him. Instead, he waits, he watches, he scans the horizon. He runs to meet him on the road. “Bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet” (Luke 15:22). A robe, a ring, and some sandals were not for fashion or comfort or even for hygiene—although they imply all these things. More important, these gifts restored status, ownership, and authority. The wayward son is welcomed home with more than a lavish party. The Father awarded him a new share in the estate he squandered by half. The older brother has reason to be angry.
Yes. This father is a prodigal. That is, he is foolish, wasteful, extravagant with his love. The young son is also a prodigal. He has been immoderately callous and careless. He is an outright failure, when finally, he realized the error of his ways. On the long road home, he rehearses what he will say to his father again and again, but he doesn’t have time even to say it before his father, runs to meet him, and restores him to full belonging.
What are we to say about this story? Do we recoil or celebrate? I suspect there are many times we find ourselves in the heart-space of the older brother. God sets a higher priority on forgiveness than on being right. God places a higher value on reconciliation than on saving face. Better to be humiliated than estranged God shows us. God has done what many of us would not.
Family is family. All people are created in the image of God. Therefore, regardless of past actions, religious or political beliefs, none of us have the right to treat any one differently. We have no excuse to exclude or condemn a person whom God does not view with unkindness or condemnation. This is the great good news that can also be a tough pill for us to swallow. This is strong gospel medicine to cure the sin of bothbrothers—an antidote for hard heartedness and for selfish foolishness.
We urgently need this medicine. The contagion of sin has so multiplied and taken root it seems the whole country is hell-bent on squandering our American inheritance propelled by the selfish fever dream of making things great for themselves at the expense of others. Our Christian siblings have exchanged the gospel for the anti-gospel called Christian nationalism. Like our forebears who first heard Jesus’ parable, we are astonished and mortified at how deep and wide human sinfulness can go. We need gospel medicine.
“After all our religion, higher education, reformations, and revolutions, it seems we’re still quite capable of full complicity in deeds of death. Religions, governments, corporations, and organizations are all highly capable of evil while not recognizing it as such, because it profits us for them to be immoral. Evil finds its almost perfect camouflage in the silent agreements of the group when it appears personally advantageous.” (Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? (CAC Publishing, 2019), 46–47, 48.) People are being disappeared from our streets by secret police for their political activism. Migrants are being deported to for-profit prisons in a foreign country without due process of the law. Christian Zionism roots for war, not peace, in Israel and Palestine. Lawyers are targeted for advocating for the wrong political party. In the birth of autocracy, it’s not where deportations and unlawfulness begin, but where it ends that matters most.
“Such deadness continues to show itself in every age. This is what the multifaceted word “sin” is trying to reveal. If we don’t see the shape of evil or recognize how we are fully complicit in it, it will fully control us, while not looking the least like sin. Would “agreed-upon delusion” be a better description? We cannot recognize it or overcome it as isolated individuals, [we cannot fight such stupidity by ourselves] mostly because it’s held together by group consensus. We need to be in solidarity with alternative communities and minority groups to see it. The dominant group normally cannot see its lies—in any country or context. It’s the air we’re breathing, reaffirmed at every gathering of like-minded people.” (Rohr)
“When even two or three of us gather in the name of truth, honesty, and love, in the name of courage, compassion, and kindness, we find ourselves feeling joined by another presence—the presence of Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. We listen to one another with compassion and curiosity. We speak to one another with wisdom and wonder. We turn together toward the light. And that helps us create islands of sanity in a world that is losing its mind.” (Brian D. McLaren, “Islands of Sanity,” ONEING 13, no. 1, Loving in a Time of Exile (2025): 9, 10.) We can be confident that this same Spirit fights with us now in the hearts and minds of all people bending toward justice, greater love, and understanding.
In the face of such collective stupidity Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised friends to find delight in their private lives: throwing dinner parties and writing letters to friends; turning away from the newspapers and radios (today we might add social media) to read more books and engage with art. Resistance, he advised, looks more like finding our way back to stillness and silence — practices of contemplation.
We need gospel medicine to renew our strength and give wings to hope. As Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.’ Like the prodigal father, let us welcome all for the sake of reconciliation and renewal after the fever dream of sin has broken. “So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! We have become ambassadors for Christ. Be reconciled to God. Be reconciled to one another. Then we shall be a living sanctuary of hope and grace. A living sign on the roadway that will lead all people to the Beloved community.
Eat, Drink, Breathe
SermonLent 3C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live” says the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 55:3). “Unless you repent you will perish,’ Jesus said (Luke 13:1-5). These words invite us to relationship and to wholeness. Yet often our hearts and minds spin these words into an implied judgement and use them to sow fear.
If God is good, why do bad things happen to good people? Which of us has not felt the pain of isolation, humiliation, failure, tragedy, or illness and wondered why? We seem almost hardwired to search for answers. As pastor, it’s one of the most persistent questions I deal with—that you struggle with. Of course, it doesn’t help that fear of God’s wrath has so often been cynically manipulated by religious leaders to fill pews and offering plates.
We are not alone in this fear. For two thousand years, questions of theodicy have plagued Christianity, and for two thousand years, we Christians have failed to find answers that satisfy us. Everything in us longs to make sense of the senseless. This question also haunted our Jewish ancestors in faith. In our gospel Jesus addresses an audience wondering aloud about whether the victims of a recent tragedy might have done something to deserve their fate. Was God punishing them for their misdeeds?
The stories are ripped from ancient headlines. Pontius Pilate ordered Galilean pilgrims to be killed in the courtyard of the Temple. It was a shocking defilement of both those poor Jews and the Temple itself. Pilate gets sympathetic treatment in our gospel. Yet hated Pilate was so brutal that the emperor Tiberius removed him from office and recalled him to Rome. He put Pilate on trial for a genocidal attack on a Samaritan village.
The tragic tower collapse, Jesus mentioned, which killed 18 people, might have been related to Pilate’s great public works project at the time — the construction of a new aqueduct. Pilate stole from Jerusalem’s treasury to build it and had (mostly likely) used slave labor to make it happen. The people in Jerusalem rioted. Historians suggest the tower collapse was an act of sabotage—either by Pilate himself (to keep the workers in line) or angry citizens attempting to stop the entire thing (in which case, it would have involved political suicide). (Diana Butler Bass, “Graveyard or Vineyard,” Sunday Musings, 3/19/22)
The little child we always carry in us supposes the answer that explains every tragic event must be personal. Did victims deserve their fate? Did I cause my misfortune because I was bad? The answer of course is no. No one who dies tragically, or who suffers an illness, or is the victim of an accident is more or less of an offender than anyone else.
Jesus reframed the question. Poet and healer Pádraig Ó Tuama, wrote a beautiful book of narrative theology which helps free our heart and mind from the well-worn groove leading to recrimination and shame. The title echoes our mission statement. It’s called, In the Shelter: Finding Welcome in the Here and Now. Ó Tuama describes the Buddhist concept of “mu,” or un-asking. When we ask a question that’s too small, or confining the answer is this word mu, which means, “Un-ask the question, because there’s a better question to be asked.” A wiser question, a deeper question, a truer question. A question that expands possibility, and resists fear. “Stop. Take a beat. Catch your breath. Stop your mind, your prayers of endless words, and listen. ‘Mu.’ (Debi Thomas, “What Are You Asking?” Journey with Jesus, 3/13/22)
Jesus helps us interrogate our suffering with better questions. There’s a deep hunger and thirst in all of us, says the Psalmist (63:1) for this week, a palpable longing for human nourishment that no amount of power or money, or success can satisfy. We return to Jesus’ warning: “Unless you repent, you will perish.” The word is metanoia. It means doing a 180. It is a turning around. It is a transformation of heart and mind through participation in the body of Christ.
Mu. To reframe the people’s doubts with better questions, Jesus tells a story contrasting the murderous reign of Pilate with a garden containing a certain unfruitful fig tree. The owner orders the gardener to cut it down. But instead of taking an ax to it, the gardener begs, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down” (Luke 13:8-9).
Let anyone with ears listen. The landowner threatening your life with an ax isn’t fate, and it certainly isn’t an angry God. The landowner is all earthly tyrants. The landowner is Pilate. The landowner is Herod. The landowner is Caesar. The landowner is anyone in authority destroying people and trees, anyone who undermines the rule of law, anyone who seeks to profit at the expense of God’s creation. (Butler Bass). It is the bitter legacy of such tyrants to make us less safe; less wealthy, less fair, less free, less truthful, less innovative, less happy, less just, less creative, less resilient, less healthy. less knowledgeable, less competent, less efficient, and less great.
Mu. Ask a better question. “In what ways am I like the absentee landowner, standing apart from where life and death actually happen? How am I refusing to get my hands dirty? Where in my life — or in the lives of others — have I prematurely called it quits, saying, “There’s no life here worth cultivating. Cut it down.” (Thomas)
Or ask yourself, in what ways am I like the gardener? Where in my life am I willing to accept Jesus’s invitation to go elbow-deep into the muck and manure? Am I brave enough to sacrifice time, effort, love, and hope into this tree — this relationship, this cause, this tragedy, this injustice — with no guarantee of a fruitful outcome? (Thomas)
Or ask yourself, in what ways am I like the fig tree? Un-enlivened? Un-nourished? Unable or unwilling to nourish others? Ignored or dismissed? What kinds of tending would it take to bring me back to life? Am I willing to receive such intimate, consequential care? Will I consent to change? Have I forgotten that the same patient God who gives me another year to thrive will also someday call me to account?” (Thomas)
Mu. Repent –turn around. See what I have shown you. See, I have prepared a new mind, a new heart, and new way to live with each other. It is the way of abundance to enjoy the fruit of the garden. This isn’t a moralistic judgment. It’s a tragic statement of fact. Yes, this bad news is actually good news. It’s good news because the warning comes with Isaiah’s invitation: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live.”
The Wilderness Road
SermonLent 1C-19
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
The first Sunday in Lent feels a long way from the cherished stories of incarnation we read this Christmas. Mary spoke to Gabriel. An angel counseled Joseph in a dream. Wise men followed a star, and the shepherds were led by a choir of angels to Bethlehem. But for me, it’s not the manger, but the wilderness, where the Word becomes flesh and Jesus becomes someone I can trust.
This wilderness story is familiar. I bet you know what it feels like to be where there is no clear path ahead. I bet you know what it’s like to be terrified. Moments when your mind is flooded with conflicted, inarticulate feelings and thoughts. Times when you struggle to know what the choices are. Most of us, I think, can relate to that.
Jesus is still wet from baptism when, as Luke tells it, the Spirit took him by the arm and thrust him into the desert. It’s as if God couldn’t wait a moment longer. Jesus is about 30 when he is drawn into battle with himself and the Devil. He goes there to be credentialed. Jesus goes to the DMV, the Department of Mission Validation, to get his Messiah’s license. In the wilderness that Jesus demonstrates he understands the proper use of divine power. Guess what? It’s not the unilateral power like that wielded by Lords and tyrants throughout history. It is the relational, persuasive, persistent, beckoning power of grace that comes wrapped inside each new moment purely as a gift from God.
In the wilderness, Jesus proved he is not a fickle or self-serving friend. This truth inspired Martin Luther to write A Mighty Fortress. God is like a tireless friend who fights beside us to vanquish those who would wish us harm. God is like a wise counselor who helps us dispel our small mindedness and hardheartedness. “Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child, or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day, the kingdom’s ours forever!” (Martin Luther, ELW #504)
In the wilderness, Jesus showed us how to be human, not divine, and that in becoming more human, God’s glory begins to shine through us. He showed us that being human is enough. Like us, Jesus had to cleave to love in a bleak and lonely wasteland of rejection and lies. He had to trust he could be beloved and famished, precious and “insignificant,” valued and vulnerable. He had to learn how to find God’s indwelling care within his mortal flesh-and-blood humanity. He had to learn to distinguish truth from empty promises.
We were marked with a cross of soot on Ash Wednesday to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever in baptism. We are frail and resurrected, dead in sin and beloved of God.
It’s easy to tell the truth when the truth is welcome. It’s easy to be generous when you have enough. Easy to be compassionate when you’re not desperate. In the desert, Jesus models for us how to make faithful choices even when our life is at risk, to speak the truth when the truth is not welcome, to choose compassion while we are drowning in fear, to be filled with life and love when the world is empty.
If you haven’t experienced hell already due to real life circumstances, then Lent is your invitation to take a 40 day walk with Jesus in a metaphorical hell and emerge with him, the victor. ‘The goal is to sit with our hungers, our wants, our desires — and learn what they have to teach us. What is the hunger beneath the hunger? Can we hunger and still live? Desire and still flourish? Lack and still live generously, without exploiting the beauty and abundance all around us? Who and where is God when we are famished for whatever it is we long for? Friendship, meaning, intimacy, freedom? A home, a savings account, a family?’ (Debie Thomas, Human and Hungry 3/3/19)
This Lent, we are in the wilderness. And it isn’t just a spiritual wilderness, like heading off to some retreat center. The three temptations — of bread, power, and protection are sparkly facets a single lure as ancient as time. The devil enticed Jesus to make himself a new Caesar. But Jesus said no. “Jesus showed it all to be a lie, the ultimate human deception, the great sin of humankind — these dreams of every Caesar, every authoritarian, every oligarch, every king and emperor who ever lived” (Diana Butler-Bass, “Wilderness—the Temptation of Empire,” Sunday Musings, March 8, 2025).
“Jesus said God provides bread; the only “empire” is a kingdom of humble love and gratitude to God; and God is “I AM,” the essence and being from which all creation has life. We are fed by bread. We live in a sabbath community of thanks. Only God is God. That’s what Jesus was all about. That’s the purpose of his life, ministry, teaching, miracles, and death. That’s the Kingdom of Heaven” (Butler-Bass)
This Lent let’s learn how to be loved and hungry at the same time; how to hope and hurt at the same time. “In some ways, Jesus’s struggle in the wilderness brings the ancient story of human temptation full circle. “Can you be like God?” That’s the question the snake posed to Adam and Eve in the lushness of the first garden. “Will you dare to know what God knows?” In the wilderness, the devil offers Jesus a clever inversion of those primordial questions: “Can you be fully human? Can you exercise restraint? Abdicate power? Accept danger? Can you bear what it means to be mortal?” The uncomfortable truth about authentic Christian power is that it resides in weakness. Jesus is lifted up — Jesus is exalted, but he’s lifted up on a cross.” (Debie Thomas)
Lent isn’t just about repenting from our private sins or getting our individual souls in shape for heaven. It is about standing with Jesus over and against the satanic enticements of empire that call us to worship any Caesar who sets himself up as God.
Like I said, the wilderness is relatable. In any life, there comes a time, or two or three, when we wander in the wilderness of loss and ashes and struggle with what it means to be human. In another way, we are all living inside this story—only the context isn’t ancient Rome; the context is now.
We walk the way Jesus not knowing where it leads but knowing that it is the right road. The road through the wilderness is the way of the cross. For each of us, following this winding path is not so much a choice, but a matter of life and death, a means of survival, a way of flourishing in the summer’s heat like a tree planted beside water. Look! What joy there is to discover so many companions along the Way following our Lord and Savior, and knowing in our bones, we can trust him.
On the Mountain and in the Valley
SermonTransfiguration C25
March 2, 2025
Jesus got up early. He took with him Peter, James, and John. It was a day like any other. It was a day just like today. What happened next sounds like a scene from a Hollywood movie. He led them up a high mountain where Jesus’ face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightening. Moses and Elijah appeared. They spoke with Jesus about his departure, literally, about his ‘exodus,’ which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. They were overshadowed by a dense terrifying cloud from which they head a heavenly voice saying, “This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9: 28-30; 34-35)
Perhaps Peter speaks for all of us when he suggests they build someplace nice to linger there in comfort. Wouldn’t that be the perfect Hollywood ending to Jesus’ story? Popular religious imagination dictates that our faith journey will lead upwards. We strive toward the mountaintop of glory until we arrive at the pearly gates to sit around and shoot the breeze with Moses, Elijah, and all the other saints in light. Peter’s instinct, upon experiencing this spiritual high, was to hoard it. His plan to “make dwellings” sounds like so many other misguided attempts to contain, domesticate, protect, and possess the sublime. But God had other plans. God has a more excellent way, the way of love.
No. The gospel did not end on the mountain of the transfiguration. This magnificent scene is not the ultimate but the penultimate, not the end but the beginning. The way of Jesus leads down the mountain to deepen faith. Jesus leads us into the world. He steers us closer to those who are suffering. For reasons only love can explain, though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but came down, was born of human flesh, and lived among us, full of grace and truth. (Philippians 2:6 & John 1:14). St. Paul quotes these words of an ancient Christian hymn and urges us to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
This is the never-ending story of God’s miraculous embrace of the world which now includes our own poor lives and the flow of history around us. In the arms of God, we undergo our own transfiguration, as we journey downward with God and walk the way of Jesus’ cross.
I wonder, what moments come to mind when you knew your life was transfigured? Are there days you found yourself standing on a new horizon? Your life changed in some fundamental way? Perhaps it was upon the death of a loved one? The birth of a child? A new job? The loss of a job? The end of a relationship? Falling in love?
Faith in Christ Jesus is one such transfiguration. Perhaps, for you, faith happened all at once. Perhaps your faith grew steadily over time. No doubt, faith continues to evolve and mature throughout our life. As St. Paul points out, through faith we may remain on the mountaintop and follow Jesus into the valley. Here at the font, at the table, and by the Word we are being remade. Mind and body, body and soul become one. We are becoming the never-before-to exist person God created us to be. Through faith, we follow Jesus down the mountain and into life’s valleys without leaving the comfort of the mountaintop.
Through faith we slowly learn to embrace mystery and awe along with reason and doubt. In the cloud of unknowing we learn that faith is not intellectual assent to creeds or doctrines but rather trust in divine love. To trust in love is to trust in the availability of fresh possibilities relative to each situation; to trust that love is ultimately more powerful than violence; to trust that even the galaxies and planets are drawn by a loving presence; and to trust that, no matter what happens, all things are somehow gathered into a wider beauty. This beauty is the Adventure of the Universe as One in Christ.
Franciscan priest and mystic, Richard Rohr challenges “mountaintop” religiosity. That is, a religiosity that divides the sacred and special from the secular and ordinary: “We have created an artificial divide or dualism between the spiritual and the so-called non-spiritual,” Rohr writes. “This dualism is precisely what Jesus came to reveal as a lie. The Incarnation proclaims that matter and spirit have never been separate. Jesus came to tell us that these two seemingly different worlds are — and always have been — one.”
Here, in the sacred space we create together, God is revealed as both immanent and transcendent—incarnate and mysterious. As close as our next breath, and present in the farthest corners of the universe. Incarnation is the ultimate journey downward. Christ is fully, finally revealed, not on the mountain of glory, but on the cross at Golgotha. The cross is where we learn that nothing, not even our most evil deeds, can break our bond with the indwelling and life-giving grace of God. Not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. God has chosen what we would not. God chose us. Thanks be to God.
In the mystery of faith and the unity of body and soul and of glory and the cross, our life becomes is like a guitar string strung tightly between mountaintop moments with God and daily life in the world. They go together even as they are held apart like the opposing anchors of a stringed instrument. Held in this tension our lives produce such beautiful music.
See, the veil between us and God is lifted. St. Paul writes, ‘we are being transformed by the image of God, from one degree of glory to another by faith. (1 Corinthians 3:18). Our journey with Jesus, is an unveiling of the gospel, so that what is inmost and truest about who we are, may to some degree become manifest in us—upon our faces, in our eyes, our hearts and minds –and in the community we make in family, community, society and the wider world.
This Lent I invite you to journey down the mountain with Jesus while cleaving tightly to the glory and fire of God’s ever-present grace. Let this grace give you courage to choose what God has chosen. As living members of the body of Christ let us with unveiled faces reflect the glory of the Lord Jesus, and be transformed into his likeness, walking in union with Christ following him down the mountain to bear the light of God’s grace into a dark and weary world. Amen.
Looking for Loopholes?
SermonEpiphany 7C-24
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Several colleagues remarked to me this week, ‘Have you seen the lectionary? How are we supposed to preach ‘loving our enemies’ right now?
“Love your enemies” might be Jesus’ most unique and original teaching. It stands at very center of Jesus’ message. Yet, we don’t read this part of the Sermon on the Mount very often at worship. That’s because it falls on the 7th Sunday after Epiphany which is cut out of the worship calendar in the years when Easter comes early. There’s an old joke by comedian, W.C. Fields. Someone caught him paging through the bible in his dressing room. “What are you doing reading the bible?” they asked. He famously replied, “I’m looking for loopholes.” I’ll wager anyone who thinks loving your enemies is easy has probably never had one.
As we look for loopholes here in what may be Jesus’ most challenging command, Jesus doubles down. “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt” (Luke 6:29-30). For modern readers it sounds like we’re just supposed to be doormats. Does Jesus mean to say we should just be pushovers? The short answer is—No!
It helps to have a little context. Jesus lived his whole life in opposition to capricious violence and unjust autocratic authorities. Here Jesus showed us, not to kowtow, but how to overcome evil without becoming evil ourselves and to avoid creating new forms of evil. Bible scholar and theologian Walter Wink made videos on YouTube to dramatize Jesus’ message to better visualize how this worked in each case. By turning the other cheek, a servant could turn the tables on a superior who disciplined them with a back-handed slap. By not withholding your shirt a debtor could shame a creditor who demanded their coat as collateral. These are examples active creative nonviolent resistance.
The question of how to live in a corrupt, dictatorial society was central to Jesus’ ministry. Even when they hate you — even when the wicked do everything they can to enrich themselves and rob others — you are to love them.
In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, we say every week, ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Just as God in Christ freely forgives our sin, so we become like him in forgiving those who violate or hurt or sin against us. This is how we take the next step in our transformation, reclaim of our true humanity on the way to becoming the true human image bearers of God. “Becoming a human being is a grave and weighty task, and to reach that goal we each have to assume that burden. What we do with our lives and with our freedom in the world matters” (Pastor Len Vander Zee).
We heard Jesus say, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (vs. 31). Loving our enemies is nothing but a permutation of the Golden Rule. You might think it sounds impossible until you realize the ways we already take this standard for granted in our daily lives. Every time we go to the doctor we trust that doctor honor the Hippocratic Oath, often summarized as ‘First do no harm.’ Doctors do not portion out care according to their personal moral judgments or prejudices. Likewise, Lady Justice, depicted as a blindfolded woman carrying scales and a sword, asserts the ideal that we stand as equals under the impartial rule of law. Unfortunately, this simple standard is being seriously eroded today by the politics of revenge, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
The Golden Rule proved itself to be a very good foundation for social order, fairness, compassion, and justice. It has also proven itself to be an effective tool, in the form of nonviolent resistance, to disarm our enemies, to put sand in the gears of systems of oppression, and a stick in the self-perpetuating cycles of violence. Like the prophets of old, we are called to speak the truth in love to the powers and principalities on the rise today, of ignorance and domination.
Two years ago, Kari and I visited the Protestant Church of Reconciliation consecrated in 1967 at Dachau, the infamous prison camp run by the Nazis in WWII. The dedication service was led by the former Dachau prisoner, German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. Niemöller wrote the famous words inscribed on the wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
Pastor Niemöller wasn’t just being poetic. That’s his life story. What is less well known is that Niemöller supported Hitler and the Nazis. He not only did not speak out. Indeed, Niemöller initially supported the Nazis until they went after the church, dictating that the Hebrew prophets could no longer be read at worship. Niemöller was detained several times before he was arrested for treason and sent to concentration camps, including Dachau. Niemöller’s final transformation did not come until he preached to a small ecumenical group of prisoners in Dachau on Christmas Eve, 1944. It signaled the beginning of a profound shift in his outlook — a shift from believing in a German national Protestantism to believing in an international world Church. (Diana Butler-Bass, Sunday Musings 2/22/25)
I tell this story because, thanks be to God, Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies is not a singular command but plural. Y’all must love your enemies. We belong to a community of believers who nurture in us the ability to forgive one another and ourselves. In this place we must help one another to love when we cannot. This week vandals broke the church sign in front of St. Luke’s in Park Ridge that identified the church both as Lutheran and as welcoming to LGBTQIA+ people. At Immanuel we strive to be a living sanctuary of hope and grace. It is time now to help one another reclaim the voice creative nonviolent resistance to hate rooted in the Golden Rule of Jesus.
After 27 years of cruel mistreatment in South African prisons, Nelson Mandela said, “As I walked out the door to the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” Bitterness and hatred lock people in their own dark prison. It’s a place without real love, without mercy. It makes life a dead-end game of constant hurt and retribution. God’s gracious forgiveness is given to flow through us to others, even to our enemy. If forgiveness stops with us, it stagnates and makes us sick. That’s Jesus’ point. (Pastor Len Vander Zee, quoted by Kristin Du Mez, “As We Forgive,” Connections, 2/23/25)
We live in the ending of an age. It is an age fraught with danger and the specter of loss. Yet, at the same time, we are living in an age of new beginnings that give promise of an ecological civilization –that is sustainable and just for all. (Cobb) May God give us grace. May God give us wisdom. May God give us courage to love. May God’s kingdom come on earth as in heaven. Amen.
Just Another Day in the Peaceable Kingdom
SermonEpiphany 6C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
February 16, 2025
If only Jesus had had more days like this. It was beautiful. Jesus stood among a multitude of diverse peoples from the surrounding regions. They did not come to test him. They were not there out of idle curiosity. They came to hear and see Jesus, and to be touched and healed by him.
Jesus opened new horizons for them. He gave their lives direction and purpose. He gave them to one another as siblings in a large family transcending race, religion, ethnicity and time. He poured out the power of grace upon them. He nourished, emboldened, inspired, and sustained them. They would become, as Jeremiah described in our first reading, like trees ‘transplanted beside water. They are not afraid when heat comes. Their leaves stay green. Even in a drought they are not anxious and do not cease to bear fruit’ (Jeremiah 17:8). Like our ancestors before us we become like an oasis, a living sanctuary of hope and grace in a thirsty land.
“[People in] the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all” (Luke 6:19). Luke says there was something akin to fire in Jesus’ touch. The word, hapto, “to touch,” can also mean “to light,” or “to ignite,” just as we hold candles together on Christmas Eve to spread the warm glow of firelight throughout the assembly. The healing power of Jesus’ touch spread through them like a fire that would ultimately consume them and through them, reshape the world.
From beneath the shadow of Hitler’s Fascism, Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reminded us that this fiery call of discipleship is an invitation to come and die in the waters of our baptism. Yet, this death is not the end but a fresh beginning. Do not be afraid.
Here is the fire of Jesus’ touch in water and the Word; at the table in bread and wine; among us gathered in his name, assembled in the warm embrace of the Holy Spirit. We navigate by way of the compass of love and compassion. This makes us, like the diverse peoples gathered around Jesus in ancient Galilee, a resurrected people, called and gifted to extend our hands with Jesus in loving service of the marginal and vulnerable, the hungry and thirsty, the poor and the oppressed. The very people who Elon Musk in a recent post on X, called the “Parasite Class.” If you’re not a member of the Parasite Class, you have nothing to fear about changes being made in Washington.
Jesus chose a different descriptor for the poor. He called them ‘Makarios’, or ‘blessed.’ “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk. 6:20). This elevated status stands out even within a bible full of admonishments to remember the widow, the immigrant, and the strangers among us. Jesus’ sermon on the plain is the first time in Jewish religious literature that the poor are directly called the blessed (Hengel, Property) [p.76]. In ancient Greece, Makarios, or ‘the blessed ones,’ referred only to the gods, because only the gods possessed a life beyond all cares, labors, and death. What did Jesus think was so special about the poor? God has a preferential love for them. The compass of compassion points directly to them. The fires of living sanctuary are lighted in our embrace with them. According to liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, “God has a preferential love for the poor not because they are necessarily better than others, morally or religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will” (“Song and Deliverance”, in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 1991).
When we stand with Jesus, we step down from our place of privilege. We step up out of our broken past and our shame. We stand on level ground in shoulder to shoulder with people everywhere. We stand together, for, and with all creatures, human and non-human. We stand with Jesus to share our hopes and joys, our pain, and sorrows. We stand on a new horizon as children of a new humanity.
Jesus’ sermon conjures an image of a peaceable kingdom, a way of life together that does not seem at first to compute. We get just a glimpse before it evaporates faster than spit on an Arizona sidewalk. The preacher, Frederick Buechner wrote: “The world says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and Jesus says, ‘There is no such thing as your own business.’ The world says, ‘Follow the wisest course and be a success,’ and Jesus says, ‘Follow me and be crucified.’ The world says, ‘Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own’ — and Jesus says, ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’ The world says, ‘Law and order,’ and Jesus says, ‘Love.’ The world says, ‘Get’ and Jesus says, ‘Give.’ In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.” (Quoted by Debi Thomas, “Leveled,” Journey with Jesus, 2/06/22).
In this Epiphany season, less than a month into a new administration in Washington, we have no illusions about the contrast between the manifestation of God’s dominion of love and the destructive grip of self-serving hierarchical power. The Prince of Peace is born and lives among us, yes. But the reign of love is not a Hallmark card and never has been. Any change to comfortable habits and patterns are met with resistance and sabotage but changes to our way of life which subvert the greedy powers that rule the world will be opposed most fiercely of all.
Yale historian of tyranny, Timothy Snyder, most of the power amassed by authoritarian governments is freely given—that the political space that you don’t use you lose. Don’t cede space. Don’t obey in advance. Religious freedom cannot be just for me and not for thee. Snyder’s little book on Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, offers concrete advice about how to resist. Resist we must and resist we will together with our God. One of the ways we resist is simply by being the diverse and loving community of sanctuary, hope and grace that Jesus summons us to be. And in the ensuing destruction let us not fail to watch for openings to create something new and better from the tragic failures that have brought us to where we are now.
Can we imagine a human economy with a currency which emulates the wise ways of Mother Earth? While lunacy rules in government and greed rules in business can we look for ways to exchange the currency, not of dollars, but of gifts? “Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly remarkable resource” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, p. 14). Can we build an economy on principles of abundance rather than scarcity? This type of circular economy is not so far-fetched as you might think. The little library in front of our church is one example. So are the local mutual aid groups sprouting up around our community—as are countless videos on YouTube in which people take time to teach how to make, fix, and/or operate practically everything.
“This is not prosperity theology. This is not “blessing” as health, wealth, and happiness. This is a teaching so costly, most of us will do anything to domesticate it. Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad, and expendable. Why? Because you have everything to look forward to. Because the Kingdom of God is yours. Because Jesus came, and comes still, to fill the empty-handed with good things. May the God who gives and takes away, offers comfort and challenge, grant us the grace to sit with woe, and learn the meaning of blessing.” (Thomas) The psalmist said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).