God Grieves With Us.

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

All Saints Sunday

November 3, 2024

Isaiah 25:6-9

Psalm 24

Revelation 21:1-6a

John 11:32-44

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

If you go online, you will find a lot of people talking about the will of God. They use it to explain away negative events – “Hurricane Milton was the will of God.” They use the will of God to justify their own intolerance. My prejudice or intolerance, they argue, is the will of God, as if they know. Or they acquiesce to evil in the world: “What can be done?” they say. “What happens next is the will of God.”

Ah, the will of God. How many times as a minister have I heard that phrase used to explain all kinds of events. Someone gets better from an illness, and they are told, it’s the will of God, as if they have a pipeline to God, and their neighbor who didn’t recover did not. Or they wait for rescue – from debt, or storm, or other calamity – because it’s all up to God’s will.

In a new show on Netflix, the main character, who is a rabbi, told a version of an old nugget in one of his sermons: about the guy on the roof, with the flood waters rising, who ignored his neighbor, the rescue boat, and the helicopter, and, upon arriving at the Pearly Gates demanded to know why God hadn’t saved him. “I sent you help three times,” God says.” “What more did you want?

Surely, we all see quickly, where that “will-of-God” argument falls down. We become complacent, witless, even blind to the gospel at work in our midst. What happens when the cure doesn’t come? What happens when the flood waters rise? What happens when lousy things happen despite our best prayers that they won’t? Is this also God’s will? Have we somehow let God down?

Let’s not kid ourselves. Lousy things, terrible things happen, and they are not by God’s design; they are not intended to build character. They are just lousy, terrible things. These events - illness, tragedy, misfortune - leave their mark: they destroy families; they leave people carrying deep, deep grief. You know I am no stranger to this in my own family, with the death of my brother. The accident that took his life was not God’s will. But I believe God willingly walked with my family through that valley and onto level ground again. God grieved with us; God wept with us. Our faith in God carried us.

This is all to lead into the famous story we hear today in the gospel: the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Jesus arrives to find his friend dead and placed in a tomb. His sister Mary is despondent: If only you had been here,” she tells Jesus, “Lazarus would have been okay. “

There is a version of that age-old question in Mary’s voice: If God cared enough, would our problems be solved? If God felt me worthy enough, all would be well. It’s hard not to ask that question: don’t we sit here each Sunday, hoping for a better life? Put it in this time, and it is easy to think that maybe we deserve it a little more than the next person.

But how quickly does that go astray? Once we think of God, not as guide, not as a source of strength and comfort, but as a puppet-master, we lose our free will; why should we do anything at all? Why should we strive to makes things better? Once we assume God intervenes, we begin to notice who gets God’s grace and who doesn’t, and suddenly we are ranking people. Maybe you’re thinking, “But that’s an old school understanding of God.” But it’s not that old, and it creeps into our conversations more than we think.

How does Jesus react to Lazarus’s death? The gospel suggests he is deeply shaken by this news. He grieves with Mary. Just as God grieves with us, when misfortune comes our way. And then what happens? Well, we can’t know for sure. We might call it a miracle, we might call it healing. Jesus does not lie in place, praying. He goes to the tomb of Lazarus, as the gospel depicts it, and has the stone pulled away. And then he calls Lazarus out. And Lazarus is unbound. Jesus credits the act to God; “Thank you for listening to me,” he says. But we know that it was not God alone: Jesus was there as well. Just as we are there. Just as we are part of our own stories.

To be our own stories, we must have faith, in God and in ourselves. Faith in our ability to handle life’s crappy times. Faith to know that we are not abandoned by God during them. From that faith comes strength and healing and connection. I have been witness to many families who have found that will - not of God, but from God - to carry them through great trials.

There is another point to all of this, perhaps the most important one for us to remember this day: we are the hands of God. We are the doers who make God’s will happen. We are not subject to God’s will; we are given new life because of it. God walks with us; but we make the journey on our own two feet. We send the neighbor and the rescue boat and helicopter to those in need, and God gives us the strength and resolve to do so.

Lousy things happen for no reason at all. God does not promise to spare us from the difficult parts of life. Just as God’s will is not the reason behind them. Putting our faith in a better way, our belief in a brighter path, the lessons of the gospel that teach resolve, patience, trust, forgiveness, and resurrection, are part of the divine package that makes miracles happen.

The gospel spares us from a sorrowful fate: to be alone. We are never alone. Sometimes that divine presence comes from those around us, and sometimes we feel the company of God - just as did Mary, who sat that day, grieving her brother’s death with Jesus. And always, when we empower ourselves, when we are guided by the gospel, God walks with us.

A deep and profound belief can be found on this All Saints’ Sunday as we remember the loss of a loved one. If we truly believe that we are never alone, then there is nothing that can keep us from experiencing the resurrection and being made free and whole and alive. Find the will - not of God, but from God - to roll away the stone and unbind yourself and others. Amen.

Freedom. We all want it. For everyone.

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

Reformation Sunday

October 27, 2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 46

Romans 3:19-28

John 8:31-36

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

Today is Reformation Sunday. And the message is freedom. God has designed us to want to be free and to live free. Spiritually free, so that we are no longer afraid of death and a vengeful God. Emotionally free, so that we are no longer road blocked by our childish ways and personal hang-ups. Economically free, so that we are no longer worried about our own portfolios and the state of the markets. Politically free, so that no political or cultural system is treating us like slaves,

Freedom. We all want it. For everyone.

Martin Luther did not have it. Martin Luther did not know the smell of freedom. The taste of freedom. The feel of freedom. Martin Luther was not a free man. In spite of the fact that he would become the leader of Protestantism with close to one billion members. In spite of the fact that Luther would become the bridge between the old way of thinking in the Middle Ages to the new ways of thinking in the Reformation and the Renaissance. In spite of the fact that recent history would determine that Luther was the third most influential person of the second thousand years of Western history. In spite of all of these grandiose claims about Luther: as a young man, he was not free.

Martin Luther was a slave to his childhood, a slave to the thought patterns of the Middle Ages, and a slave to the religious practices of the ruling Church at that time. Luther was a slave to his childhood when his father beat him so severely with a rod that his backside would bleed. It was common for Germanic fathers to do to their children at that time in history. Fathers would beat their children severely for any infraction, disobedience, or mistake.

Luther thought that God, his heavenly father, was like his earthly father. And like that earthly father, God would punish him severely for any infraction, disobedience, or mistake. His faith was fearful.

Luther was also a slave to the thought patterns of the Middle Ages which ruled the world for a thousand years. Luther thought that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, and that the trees and woods were filled with goblins, witches, and trolls.

And Luther was a slave to his mother church. Luther was instructed to say his prayer beads, bow to statues of the saints, and make pilgrimages to Rome in order to earn forgiveness and salvation. He was meant to believe in indulgences, and that buying them from the religious authorities would save loved ones from the fires of hell. He was told to celebrate that the money from these indulgences, from people who could ill-afford to pay them, was being used to build a monument to his fearsome God, the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Because of all of this -- his parents, the thought patterns of the Middle Ages, the religious practices of the time, his relationship to God -- Luther was not a free person.

Then, his transformation - his personal reformation - began. A seed had probably been growing in him for a while, waiting for the right conditions to germinate, but it truly started when he was a professor of the New Testament in a small German village called Wittenberg. Studying in a tower there, he became engrossed in the Bible, poring over it day and night. It was in his in-depth reading of the New Testament that this seed, this desire to be free, began to grow. Away from indoctrination of the larger church, his reading of the New Testament began to open his eyes.

Luther discovered that God was not punitive like his earthly father, but merciful and kind. He discovered that God was more powerful than the demons and devils that surrounded him and lived within him. He discovered that God’s love and mercy for him was entirely free, that he didn’t need to earn or buy God’s forgiveness.

As Luther saturated himself in the Word, he began to shed his chains, one by one. Luther became free to be the kind of human being that God wanted him to be, the kind that could bring freedom to others of his time.

What is freedom, anyway? Is it defined by action: the freedom to do our own thing, eat out at a restaurant, vote for the leader of our choice? Is it a sense of self, that we are unencumbered by our own thoughts, and able to make our choices? Is it a moral belief, that any righteous society must be free? Is it all of these things?

If Freedom means that we are to become the kind of human beings that God wants us to be, how do we get there? Well, if we are to follow the path of Luther, we must begin with the Bible. Sola Scriptura, Luther said. Scripture alone. I personally don’t buy that. We see that playing out in the United States, where women are now dying because a fundamentalist approach to scripture, and religious intransigence is denying them freedom of choice between them and their doctors. If we rely only on scripture, do we exist in the world, or have we buried ourselves so deeply in the Bible that we believe we are right and Godlike ourselves, with the power over others?

Instead, I am a proponent of Prima Scriptura, or Scripture first. Scripture informs the world, but also exists within it.

Let us look first at John 8:31, which has four parts: “If you continue in my word…you will truly be my disciples…the truth will make you free … and you will be free indeed.”

Part I: “If you continue in my Word.” At the heart of being a follower of Jesus is to continue to live in the Bible. That is where Martin Luther began to find his freedom: in his immersion in the Bible. Now I know most of you don’t spend your days thumbing through scripture. Some of you may even believe that it’s my job to do it for you. In some ways that is true. But ultimately, I cannot make you live free. Each of us must do that on our own. We don’t have the luxury of locking ourselves up in a castle for months on end to do it as Luther did, but we can sign up for a daily passage online, we can sign up for Bible study, we can read a verse before we eat or sleep or download a biblical podcast while we walk or drive to work. There are many ways to continue in God’s word. As Christians, we are supposed to be in the regular habit of daily eating and consuming the Word of God into our inner spiritual fiber.

Then, Part 2 of our reading from John says: “You are truly my disciples.” Jesus says that to be disciples, we continue to live in God’s word. The word, “disciple,” means pupil. We are pupils of Jesus. In confirmation, we discuss what a good pupil or student is. We talk about the three Ls of a good student: “listen, learn, and live out.” A good student listens carefully to the teacher. We all know when we listen carefully such as at a visit to the doctor’s office to hear about our prostate, our lungs, our breasts, our heart, the beat of an infant’s heart. Sometimes, when we visit a doctor’s office, we bring “another set of ears” with us (our partner or friend) so we can hear even more clearly.

It’s the same thing with the Word of God. We listen, learn, and live out what we know to be consistently true for Jesus. And we spend our entire lives going through this thought-action process. We do it as individuals and in community. And every time we do it right, we get a little closer to who it is that God wants us to become.

“You will know the truth,” says Part 3 of our reading from John. When we immerse ourselves in the Word, we will know the truth about many crucial values in life. We will know the truth about death, that we are not to fear it, that death is not the last word. We will know the truth about forgiveness, that the forgiveness of Christ is as essential as bread and water, sunshine and rain, for life in its fullness to exist. We will know the truth about suffering, that suffering can build character and community. We will know the truth about a loving God and our neighbor, and that our neighbor is all life on this planet. We will know the truth about wisdom - wisdom for loving our partner, wisdom for loving children, wisdom for daily life. We will know the truth about Christ, that Christ is the Heart and Mind and Spirit of God, God in human form.

And finally John says, “The truth will make you free.” When we know Christ, we will know what it means to be free…even when we are politically enslaved, even when we are broken and markets crash, even when we are hung up on our own selfishness, even when we are afraid of God and dying. Even when we are fully human and bound by wrongdoing, we will find freedom in faith.

This morning, we want to be free. We want to taste the flavors of freedom, smell the aromas of freedom, touch the feelings of freedom. Because we are made in God’s image, we want to be free. And because our relationship to God is defined by Grace, we can be.

Happy Reformation Sunday! Amen.

Be defined by deeds

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost

October 20, 2024

Isaiah 53:4-12

Psalm 91:9-16

Hebrews 5:1-10

Mark 10:35-45

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

One afternoon, a young man stood on the Brooklyn Bridge, contemplating his own death. He was stopping traffic, and people were getting angry: Come on! Jump already! one cyclist called to him. On the catwalk of the bridge, an NYPD detective named Peter Keszthelyi, carefully stepped over to the young man. “I am not here to hurt you,” he said. The young man told him that he had no job and no place to live. He wasn’t even 25 years old. “You might seem like you are alone, but you are not alone,” the detective reassured him. Below them the cars kept honking.

This story still stays with me years after first reading it, and I want to return to that scene on the bridge, but first: How do you feel when you hear it? For my part, I feel sadness for the young man, and admiration for the detective. I struggle with the frustration of the people in the traffic jam, with their own concerns and life demands – but perhaps my struggle is guilt. Who among us hasn’t reacted first out of our own convenience without considering the needs of another? There are three characters participating in that desperate moment on the bridge - all acting in their own way: the young man so despairing he can’t see any other way out; the bystanders, hostile about being put out by someone else’s pain; and the detective compassionately trying to save the man on the bridge. I know which character I want to play, and I certainly know who I don’t want to be.

These days, we are obsessed, it seems, with our feelings. How do you feel? We talk about keeping our spirits up, about the power of optimism, about the burdens of our anxieties, about the limitations that come with feeling blue. These last few weeks, we have seen the disciples overcome with their own emotions – jealousy over someone’s healing in Jesus’s name, anxiety about their own needs being met, fear about the future that Jesus is facing. (And last week, of course, Jesus told us not to worry – yet, as we know, even the words of Jesus cannot release us from our worry.) 

There is no doubt that our mood impacts us, and that there is strength to be found in a cheerful demeanour. But have we shifted too far in the wrong direction? We are not defined by how we feel. We are defined by how we act.

Jesus, as I often say, was an action kind of guy. We never have a sense that he spent a lot of time sitting around, contemplating his mood. In fact, if his ministry had been all about giving good speeches and telling interesting stories, without serving, healing, and helping people, what value would it have had?  In this morning’s gospel, we get the same call to action. If we want to be great, we must be a servant.  If we want to feel good about ourselves and the world around us, we must do something: we must shift the gaze from our navel to our neighbour.

First of all, one of the key problems with relying on our feelings is that they are confusing, and subject to change, even from one minute to the next. Something happens and we go from happy to sad, from calm to angry. Actions, however, are concrete - they are the beginning of feeling, not the end of it. 

Science has come around to Jesus’s point of view, finding that meaningful action helps ameliorate the anxiety we feel about climate change or politics. Sitting at home, obsessively churning through social media, only makes those negative feelings worse. But getting out to vote gives us an outlet for our worry. Rallies or marches surround us with people who feel the same and are willing to be examples of action. Doing something – being a servant – doesn’t just make a difference in the world. It makes a difference for us. 

That doesn’t mean, as some popular self-help books have suggested, that we must always surround ourselves with positive people to feel positive. How could we truly be servants if we never risked exposure to unhappy circumstances or people who disagree with us? Believing this, incidentally, would exclude you from doing any version of the work performed by Detective Keszthelyi. And surely, our communities need more people like him, not fewer. 

But that’s the point Jesus makes over and over again: the gospel is tough. We can’t expect to feel good all the time carrying it out, but we can always rely on optimism to charge us up. Doing good takes a long time; the world doesn’t change in an instant. We have to believe in the power of little steps. Because otherwise, frankly, it’s all about us, and our actions are subject to the whim of our feelings.

In one way, it is a circular argument; actions lead to feelings and feelings lead to actions. In psychology, researchers have been using a test called the “Social Interest Scale” to figure out the variables of traits of people who exhibit high levels of empathy for humanity. For instance, one question asks participants to rank which groups the person believes are more important: Africans, for example, or Canadians. Those who score high on the scale ranked them the same. But the people who scored high also knew more about humanitarian issues; they had taken the action to educate themselves about the world. They gave more to humanitarian causes. Their empathy had been fed - and made resilient - by service and knowledge. 

Back to the bridge: In the end, as The New York Times story reported, the young man changed his mind; he came down from the ledge to give life another chance. His feeling was changed by the compassionate action of another. If that police officer had not arrived, you have to wonder if another passerby could have done the same, by serving the needs of another, instead of heckling. Either way, on some days, this detective, who saves people for a living, might prefer that he had an easier job, that he didn’t have to confront so much pain. But this is what Jesus would call a higher calling to action – rather than a slave to our feelings. Instead, we choose to be driven, and defined, by our action.

I always hold onto a wise piece of advice that I was given many decades ago, by all three of my mentors, senior pastors all, when I was just starting out in my ministry. All three have said to me at one time or another, “Joel, when you’re feeling like a pile of [uselessness], go out and visit.  Pick yourself up and go.” In that visit, that action of service, you will find the secret to Jesus’s advice to set worry aside. I have followed this advice over the years, many, many times. And each time, sitting with someone else in need has taken me out of my own head, rescued me from the bondage of my own negative feelings. 

The choice is ours, Jesus says. If we rely on how we are feeling on any given day - exhausted after a day of work, anxious about some personal trial, irritated with our partner - we would accomplish little. But the lesson of the gospel is the power of positive action. And that is the choice Jesus is talking about: To give up or to go on. To be the heckler on the sidelines or the voice of reason. To be slaves chained to feeling and sentiment, or servants defined by deeds. Jesus didn’t just know this, he set the example. It is action that defines us. Action that saves us. Action that frees us. Amen.