They Stood Up

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Text: Numbers 27:1-11

Friends, can we all admit that this is a very big book and that 99.9% of us don’t know its stories from cover to cover?

We understand the overall arc of scripture… from creation, through the time in Egypt, the exodus and claiming of the promised land. 

We know the big picture story of how the tribes of Israel became a nation with a king and then fell apart and were carted off into exile. 

And we know about how they returned and how Jesus came to continue the story of God’s redemption and form us into God’s people, sending the Holy Spirit as God’s message exploded across the world. 

But every story?  Every name?

We fail to dig deep into the nitty gritty of the text and skim over some of the most interesting… but maybe also most disturbing… parts of our past. 

What we miss when we do so are the bold and untold stories of ordinary folks who have great lessons to teach us. 

We can’t all preach like Peter or pray like Paul or lead like Solomon… but God can use our voices and our actions to make a difference in this world. 

Over the next five weeks as we wrap up summer, we will be diving into the details of scripture as these little known people come alive for us. 

We start today with the daughters of Zelophehad: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.

Their names are so unfamiliar to our tongues today that I find myself stumbling over pronunciation. 

And yet, as Wil Gafney notes in her book, Womanist Midrash: a Reintroduction to the women of the Torah and the Throne, “their story is so important that they are mentioned in five different places… Only the prophets Miriam and Moses are mentioned in more books in the Hebrew Bible.” (page 156)

“They Stood” | Lauren Wright Pittman | A Sanctified Art | sanctifiedart.org

The story of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah is a story about land and inheritance and patriarchy. 

We are introduced to them in the middle of a census that is being taken amongst the Israelites to determine who is available to go to war with Midian as they seek to enter the promised land. 

They come from the line of Jospeh, through his son Manasseh, and their father Zelophehad had no sons.   (Numbers 26: 29-34)

As Gafney notes, Numbers chapter 26 connects the military census with the distribution of land to come.  We are told that the first generation of those who left Egypt will not make it out of the wilderness… only their children and grandchildren will.

But how will this new land that they will take be divided?

The census lists the names of those second-generation families… well, the second-generation families headed by men, who were eligible to go to war.

Gaffney writes: “only males were entitled to inherit the inhabited Canaanite land that God had promised the Israelites under this schema… only patriarchal households counted…” (p. 158)

It was an exclusionary practice that was uncommon among other surrounding cultures, but also meant that men who died during the war and left women as the head of their households would be left out of the allocation. 

As soon as this detailed census and explanation was read to the people, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah step forward.

This is described as taking place right outside of the meeting tent – where the ark of the covenant was contained. 

In front of Moses, Eleazar the priest, all of the chiefs… the entire community… they challenge the distribution and demand to be given land as well. 

They had no rights.

They had no power.

They had no authority.

But they stand up and make their voices heard.

These five women are of the second generation. 

Their father, Zelophehad, was among those who left Egypt, but he has died along their journey.

No mention is made of their mother, but Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah have no brothers.

AND, as the narrative will tell us later, they are unmarried. 

As they heard the census and the names of all of their cousins and other second generation families that would inherit the promised land, they recognized that the lineage of their father was being excluded. 

As Lauren Wright Pittman writes, “The text says the women came forward; they stood, they spoke, they questioned, and they even demanded.  Any one of these actions alone is difficult for the unseen and the unheard.  All they wanted was the receive the inheritance of their father and to keep his name from fading.  I’m sure the pain of their father’s death was potent, but they needed to be recognized, valued, and seen as human beings in order to survive.” (Faces of our Faith Study Journal)

They demanded that their family be given a share, just as their father’s brothers would be given. 

Now, this is in direct contradiction to the instructions that God had just handed down to Moses in chapter 26.

They were not just challenging their leaders, but the very word of God. 

The entire community had just experienced a devastating plague that was blamed on the men of Israel disobeying God by marrying Moabite and Midianite women, which often led to idolatry and the worship of the gods of these other cultures. 

When an Israelite brought a Midianite wife into the camp, the son of the priest Eleazar, Phineas, killed them both and the plague stopped. 

But, you know, killing the daughter of a leader of neighboring people has consequences and the war with Midian was a direct result of the initial disobedience and then later death.

So… maybe this wasn’t exactly the time to challenge what God has said…

To his credit, Moses does not immediately dismiss their complaint out of hand.

It would have been completely understandable for him to say, “This is the word of the Lord.”

Or, “I’m sorry, but this is the law.”

Instead, he listened.

And instead of rendering judgment himself, Moses took their case to God. 

The Lord replies, “Zelophehad’s daughters are right in what they are saying.  By all means, give them property as an inheritance among their father’s brothers.”

And then, God goes on to change the law so that if a man dies without a son, his daughter would receive the inheritance. 

When we look deeper into the text and the language here, what we find is surprising.

Wil Gaffney notes that God doesn’t just say they were right.  He declares that they are righteous in “a powerful affirmation, without peer in the canon for women or men.” (159)

And if you look at the Hebrew, the words God speaks do not imply a passive response by which these women would now have land.   

It demands corrective action on the part of those who would have denied them their inheritance. 

As Pittman writes in her artist statement of her piece, “They Stood,”:

God heard the voices of these women. “They are right,” God said.  The old law was no longer suitable, so God made a way for change.  Though the laws were probably carved into stone, God shows us in this text that the law is living, breathing, adaptable, and changing.  This text invites us to come forward, to stand, to speak, to question, and to demand change when we experience injustice.

A couple of things to note here.

First, when we believe we are experiencing an injustice or are troubled by a law or a command that we find within scripture, the example of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah tells us that it is a good thing to speak up.

Even if our voice trembles.

Even if we are unsure if anyone will listen.

Even if we have no authority or power. 

Second, this scripture is one of many places where God makes a way for change.

From the Lord’s declaration after the flood that there would never again be a complete destruction of the earth in Genesis…

to the new vision of the clean and the unclean that comes to Peter in Acts…

and this text…

we find examples of how the cries of people and changing circumstances in the world lead God to act and respond in new ways. 

Our God is not distant from us, handing down decrees that are unchanging.

God is with us, listens to us, walks with us, hears our cries, experiences our pain, and knows our hope.

God desires abundant life and chooses to act in new ways to demonstrate love and mercy and to create and recreate possibilities within our midst.

God is in relationship with us… and a relationship is a two-way street. 

But the third lesson here is that it is not our job to declare something is right or wrong, unjust or fair.   

We also learn from the example of Moses, who took it to the Lord. 

So part of our responsibility, either as someone who is experiencing injustice or as someone who is in a position to act, is to notice the places that trouble our souls.

Our job is to listen and to explore and understand the problem.

And part of our responsibility is to pray and search the scriptures and to listen for God.

If the ways of God, the laws of God, the commands of God can change in response to human need and action, then we need to be prepared.

As the Lord cries out in Isaiah 43:19: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” 

Our job is to look, to listen, to pay attention and be ready to see where and how God is acting in this world.

And then… to figure out how to get on board.

I mentioned that the five daughters of Zelophehad show up not once or twice, but five times in the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible.

And part of this reason for their continued presence in the life of the people was that this new command of God was not immediately followed. 

God commands a new law for Moses to implement among the people – that women without brothers shall inherit the land of their father. 

Yet when we get to chapter 36 in Numbers, the war with Midian is over and they are preparing to enter Canaan and as the allocated land is being discussed, the daughters come up again.

Only this time, they are not the active participants in their own story.

Their cousins stand up and speak out and are concerned about the distribution of land to these unmarried women, because when they marry, the land will no longer be a part of the tribe of Manasseh.

Moses… without consulting the Lord… modifies what God says in chapter 27 to declare that they are only allowed an inheritance if they marry within their father’s tribe. 

Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah act according to these new conditions and marry kin within the tribe of Manasseh. 

More time goes on.

The people cross the Jordan River and enter the land of Canaan.

Moses, who we are told disobeyed the Lord but not about what specifically, dies before he is able to enter the promised land and the leadership falls to Joshua.

Here is where the rubber meets the road, as the people now are in possession of the land and parcels are being handed out for each tribe.

When we get to Joshua chapter 17, the land for the tribe of Manasseh is being determined and the text tells us that “an allotment took place for the rest of the clans of Manasseh – for the people of Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem, Hepher, and Shemida. These were the sons of Manasseh the son of Jospeh, the male descendants by their clans.” (17:2)

Did you hear it? 

There is no mention of the daughters of Zelophehad.

And once again, Mahlan, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah stand up and speak out.

Once again, they approach Eleazar the priest, Joshua the leader, and the other clan chiefs.

Once again, they fight for their inheritance.

“The Lord commanded Moses to give us a legacy along with our male relatives,” they declare. 

Gaffney notes, “They do not say, ‘Moshe failed to obey God and died.’ There is no need.  The implication is clear.” (p. 163).

Joshua acts where Moses did not.

The tribe of Manasseh is granted ten parcels of land, one of which would belong to the daughters of Zelophehad.

And these daughters are later accounted for in the listing of the family lines in the book of Chronicles. 

But that was only possible because of their courage.

Their persistence.

Their willingness to stand up and speak out. 

In our lives today, we might not always have power or authority.

But we do have a voice.

And when we see something that is unjust or wrong, we too can stand up, stand together, and speak out.

We can let the community know about what is going on so that we can seek God’s direction and act. 

And if we do have power and authority, we can choose to listen, to pray, and to respond. 

May the bold and too often untold legacy of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah guide us for the future.  Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer: Our Holy Father

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Text: Luke 11:1-10

This year as we journey through Lent, we are being led by prayer.

Well, one prayer in particular.

The prayer that Jesus taught us.

We teach it to our children.

We recite it each week in worship.

It is often a prayer that I will recite with families at the bedside of a dying loved one.

We know it by heart…

But has it sunk into our hearts?

I once heard a story about a church and every Sunday when the said the Lord’s Prayer, they turned around and faced the back of the sanctuary.

When a new pastor arrived, she was curious about this practice, but no one could remember why they did it that way.

That is until the church did some restoration work in the sanctuary.

As they stripped back layers of paint on the old walls, they discovered that at one time, the words of the Lord’s Prayer had been painted along that back wall.

In a time without printed bulletins, the church members had turned around to read the prayer from the wall.

Just as that congregation forgot why they said the Lord’s Prayer facing the back wall, sometimes we have forgotten the meaning behind the words that we speak.

We take the words for granted or rush through them without thinking.

Yet, contained within these beautiful verses is everything we need to know about our faith.

It reminds us of whose we are.

It tells us that we are not alone, but a community.

This prayer invites us to place our lives in God’s hands.  

It asks for forgiveness and the strength to forgive others.

It calls us to acts of justice and compassion. 

It is a prayer that can truly transform our lives… if we let it. 

So, throughout this season of Lent, we are going to dive deep into this prayer and learn once again what it has to teach us. 

Richard Foster once wrote:

“Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.” (Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, p.3)

And that is because prayer is a relationship.

The Lord’s Prayer is recorded in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke. 

In Matthew, it is included along with other teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

But in Luke’s gospel, the disciples are seeking guidance. 

As they seek to grow in their faithfulness to God, they ask Jesus how they should pray… and he teaches them. 

But then Jesus expands upon this idea of prayer being a relationship.   

When we pray, we are asking and seeking and requesting things from the one who created us.

Now, this idea that God as our parent is not new.

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets tell us that God thinks of Israel as a child… often a wayward child… but that God’s love is everlasting and unchanging, in spite of what the people might do. 

Yet this prayer is not simply a metaphor.

God is not distant.

Rather at Christ’s own invitation, we join in calling God “Our Father.”

We are invited to approach God in the same way we might our own parent… knowing and trusting that we are loved and cared for and believing that God will respond out of that love.

There is a level of intimacy here, of deep relationship, of ordinary acts of care, that truly is like falling in love. 

And at the same time, we are invited into a sort of paradox, for the name and presence of God is to be revered as extraordinary.

God is holy… and wholly other. 

I am reminded of Exodus chapter 3, when Moses approaches the burning bush and hears a voice thunder around him… “Come no closer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 

Moses hides his face, afraid to look upon the divine presence. 

In the midst of this exchange, God claims the people of Israel as his own.

God has heard their cries and can stand by no longer. 

Like a parent who will rush to the rescue of a child who has fallen, God is acting to bring about deliverance for their suffering.

And yet, when Moses asks the name of this God…

When Moses asks, whom shall I say has sent me? 

God replies – I am who I am.   

A God who is distant, powerful, holy, undefineable…

A God who is close and intimate, full of love and compassion…

Our God is both of these things and more… all at the same time. 

And thank God for that! 

While it isn’t easy to wrap our heads around this paradox, the truth is that we need a God who is more than just an earthly parent. 

The troubles and concerns of this world are far greater than any human could tackle.

The loss of life from tornados…

Deliverance from oppression…

Peacemaking in the midst of conflict – not just in Ukraine, but in Palestine, and Honduras, and Nigeria and in our country and in our families…

Healing and restoration from illness, disease, disaster, and death…

These are not simple requests and are far greater than asking for a loaf of bread. 

We can only approach God in prayer with confidence because God is bigger than the problems we face. 

But at the same time, a holy and powerful being that holds the life of the world in its hands can itself be a terrifying concept.

I am reminded of the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Remember…Moses initially hid his face from God’s presence!

But Moses also came to understand God’s love. 

During his time on the mountaintop in the presence of God, receiving instruction for the people, Exodus 34 tells us that the Lord proclaims again his name. 

But then the Lord continues… The Lord, the Lord, is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. 

Coming to understand God as the one who is intimately concerned for my life, my welfare, my needs, allows me to let go of fear and rest in God’s presence.

We can trust that God truly does care about my needs and we are free to approach God in love expressing the yearning of our heart. 

God is holy.

God is love and acts with parental love.

I am God’s child.

But there is one final piece of this first phrase that we cannot ignore.

While we do not capture it quite so clearly in Luke’s version of the prayer, it is part of the language we carry forward from Matthew’s gospel.

Jesus does not say “My Father.”

He does not ask us to think of ourselves as individual children.

We say “Our Father.”

Not once in this prayer do we say “I” or “me.”           

Victor Hoagland recently shared a story about his close relationship with his eight-year-old granddaughter.   She is the youngest of the bunch and they have had a chance to spend a lot of time together. 

One evening, he and his wife invited all five of their grandchildren to come over for dinner and Hoagland noticed as they gathered that this little one seemed upset.

When he asked her what was wrong, she answered: “I thought I was the only one coming.”

Hoagland reassured his granddaughter of his great love for her… but also how much love he has for all of his grandchildren and that it was such a great thing they could all be together. 

We often find ourselves in the shoes of that little girl.

We claim our relationship with this holy parent for ourselves, but we are not as quick to think about all of God’s other children.

And the truth is that prayer is not just about our relationship with God, but our relationship with one another. 

We are called to consider that others are God’s children, too.

People we love, but also people that we can’t stand.

People we disagree with and people who are actively working to harm us.

People we have never met and those whose values and perspectives are vastly different than ours. 

I have to admit that this concept hits me in a very different way this week.

Last night, my grandmother, my Babi, died from damage caused to her lungs by Covid.

I am navigating how to be present and offer love and care for family.

But it is hard and messy and complicated.

My family has been separated and split from one another by conflict that has gone unhealed for more than a decade. 

And yet, we are all still family.  We belong to one another. 

But even more than that, we are all claimed by God as children. 

Every time we say the words of this prayer, we are speaking into being the reality that we are connected to one another.

Our loved ones… our friends… yes… but even those who have caused us pain… even those we might sometimes think of as enemies… even those we struggle to understand or forgive. 

We are all children of God. 

And just as my own heart is full of concerns and fears that I bring before this Holy Parent, so too are others. 

As the words of “This is my song” remind us:

“this is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mind.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.” 

Our. Holy. Parent.

This opening phrase of the prayer that Jesus taught us invites us to claim three truths:

God cares intimately about what happens in our lives and responds in love.

God is holy and powerful and has the capacity to act and transform.

And we are called not just to think of ourselves, but to recognize that we are connected in one family.

Over these forty days of Lent, we will continue to explore this prayer and learn more about what it teaches us.

But we are also invited not just to intellectually process these words, but to allow them to transform us. 

And to that end, for this holy season, I want to invite you to claim a practice with me.

I want to invite you to pray this prayer with me not once per day, not twice, but three times every day.

I want to invite you to make it a part of your living and breathing as you go through your life.

I want to invite you to allow it to fall into your heart and settle in your being. 

May it be so. 

UMC 101: The Local Church & Membership

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Text: 2 Corinthians 3:12-13, 3:18-4:1, 5-6;   Book of Discipline 201-204, 214-221

Over the last seven weeks, we have explored together some of the foundational beliefs and practices of the United Methodist Church. 

Our focus on grace and faith put into practice.

The call to reach out and share the love of God with all people.

A charge that makes room for difference and invites us to use our brains and celebrates diversity. 

All grounded and centered in the core of Christian tradition… praising the God of all creation who became flesh and lived and died so that we might truly know life and who continues to empower us by the Holy Spirit. 

As we come to the close of this series, we also come to a transitional date on the Christian calendar:  This Sunday before the season of Lent is Transfiguration Sunday. 

It is the day that a few of the disciples retreated with Jesus to a mountain top and witnessed the glory of God. 

They experienced for themselves the very presence of God, radiating with light, in the person of their rabbi, Jesus. 

He shone like the sun and they could hardly take it in… much like Moses before them. 

Moses, too, had been to the mountaintop. 

He had spent time in the presence of God and for more than just an afternoon. 

In the account of Exodus 34, Moses spends forty days and forty nights with the Lord learning about the covenant God wanted to make with the people.

Exodus 34:29 tells us that when Moses came back down from the mountain, his face was radiant.  He shone and reflected the glory and the presence of God.  But the people were afraid and so he put a veil over his face (34:33). 

The Apostle Paul picks up on this idea in his second letter to the church in Corinth. 

He describes the law of Moses as a ministry of condemnation, because as individual human beings we couldn’t live up to what it asks of us. 

That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a reflection of God’s glory… it was!

But Paul believes that the ministry of righteousness we receive from Jesus through the Holy Spirit is even more glorious, because we are set free to truly reflect God’s glory in all that we say and do. 

We are transformed by God’s glory and Paul describes the church in Corinth as Christ’s letter… written not with ink, but with the Holy Spirit. 

They are the reflection of Jesus Christ to the world and all who see what they say and do will come to know the glory of God. 

That local community and its members reflect the light of the knowledge of God’s glory to everyone they meet.

And so do we. 

As our Book of Discipline proclaims, “The function of the local church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is to help people accept and confess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and to live their daily lives in light of their relationship with God” (¶202, p. 147).

It goes on to say that the members of the church gather for worship, to receive God’s grace, to be formed by the Word, and then we are sent out to do the work of Christ.  (¶203)

Or as that familiar song from our childhood reminds us: 

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…

Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine…

That light, however, it isn’t my own light. 

It isn’t your light.

It is the light of Jesus Christ.  

I was thinking about the solar lamps that I installed in my garden last summer. Every evening they light up the path.

But the lamp has no light of its own… it simply captures and stores up the energy from the sun.

The more time it spends soaking up those rays, the brighter and longer it will shine.

Much like Moses shone radiantly after those forty days and forty nights in the presence of God’s glory.

And to keep our lights shining…

To fill up our lamps…

We need to continually spend time in God’s presence.

So as United Methodists, we don’t believe that membership in the local church is simply a box that we check. 

It is a commitment and a covenant we make together with God and with the other members of our congregation.

In the coming weeks, our confirmation students will be exploring these vows deeply, but maybe it is good for all of us to get a refresher. 

Membership Vows

  • Renounce, Reject, Repent
  • Accept God’s freedom and power
  • Confess Jesus as our Savior
  • Serve as Christ’s representative to the world
  • Strengthen the ministries of the UMC
  • Participate with our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness
  • Receive and profess the Christian faith

Just as John Wesley brought classes and societies of people together to focus on their spiritual life with one another, our membership vows are a commitment to “a lifelong process of growing in grace.” (¶216.1).

We turn away from sin and evil and turn our lives towards Jesus.  Then, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we become ambassadors of Jesus to the world.  We see each member as a vital part of the church and we have “method” for helping one another to keep these vows.

First – a local church provides opportunities for a member to grow in their discipleship. From small groups to worship, from mission events to our stewardship campaign, this local church offers ways for you to go deeper in your faith and to discover the will and grace of God. Each one is an opportunity to spend time in the presence of God.

Second – we share a mutual responsibility for one another.  We need you, just as much as you need us, and together we shoulder burdens, share risks, and celebrate joys.  We encourage one another along in this journey. After all, the people that make up our church are the body of Christ and we also experience the presence of God in one another.

Third – each person is responsible for their own participation.  We can have all the opportunities in the world, but ultimately, you are the one who prays, who shows up, who gives, and who reaches out to share God’s love with the world. 

However, as part of our Wesleyan heritage, we are called to hold one another accountable to these commitments.  Those early Methodist class meetings were designed for members to keep one another on track, it is the responsibility of the local church to reach out in love to invite people to return and to nurture people back into community. 

Sometimes that might look like a call or a note from the pastor, but this is the responsibility of all of us. 

It is the phone call you make to invite someone to join a small group with you. 

It is the note you put in the mail to let someone know you have missed them in worship. 

It is the way you speak up if someone in a meeting has said something harmful. 

It is the advice you offer when someone seems to be taking a wrong turn in their journey.

We do all of this, because we believe that through these ministries and this community, the glory of the Lord is transforming us more and more everyday into the image of Christ… and that we reflecting that glory to the world. 

In Sara Groves’ song, “You are the Sun” she writes:

You are the sun, shining down on everyone.

Light of the world giving light to everything I see…

I am the moon with no light of my own

Still you have made me to shine

And as I glow in this cold dark night

I know I can’t be a light unless I turn my face to you. 

The work of the local church and our responsibilities as members of that church is to turn our faces to the Light of the World and let God shine through our lives.

As the Book of Discipline says:
Each member is called upon to be a witness for Christ in the world, a light and leaven in society, and a reconciler in a culture of conflict… to identify with the agony and suffering of the world and to radiate and exemplify the Christ of hope” (¶220).

And we don’t do it alone.  We do it together. 

The work of the local church is only possible because all of us have gathered our resources and our talents and our time together so that we can reach out to the people in this community, and work to help one another grow.  And we also are part of a larger connection, so we partner with other local churches – like inviting students from Windsor UMC to join us for confirmation.  We work to be stewards not just of our resources, but of God’s creation as we participate in the mission of the larger United Methodist Church.  (¶202, p147-148)

Let us keep soaking up the light of God so that in all of these things, the glory of God might shine through us. 

Amen. 

Partially Rendered Heroes

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Text: John 13: 12-17

Today, with the images of four of our nation’s greatest presidents before us, we turn in the gospels to a story of a biblical model of leadership.

Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, gets down on his hands and knees and washes the feet of his disciples.

As the words of Tom Colvin’s hymn, “Jesu, Jesu” remind us:

“Kneels at the feet of his friends, silently washes their feet, Master who acts as a slave to them.”  (UMH #432)

Our Master humbles himself in service to others.

Our Master doesn’t demand praise and monuments and glory… but finds glory in loving and serving those who are lowly. 

And calls us to do the same.

But even more than that… this act of love and hospitality and service was not just meant for those who were righteous and perfect and had it all together.

Simon Peter, who would soon deny Jesus three times was there. 

Judas, who was about to betray Jesus was there.

Jesus knew them fully.  Completely. 

And Jesus loved them and asked them to do the same for the world.  

What does it mean for us to live in this world not seeking our own glory, but seeking to humbly serve others? 

What might it mean for us to know others fully, completely, and love them anyways?

Let’s pray:  Gracious God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts and minds be holy and pleasing to you, O Lord, our Strength and Redeemer.

At the end of this spring when I put Mount Rushmore on the list, the location evoked nothing but nostalgia for me.   Summer, vacations, grand vistas, and playing games in the car. 

Remember that photo from the start of summer where my brother and I were handcuffed together?  

A close up of a rock

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Well, that same trip also included a stop at Mount Rushmore.

As we arrived, we noticed that my hair was a strange shade of green. Our campground the night before had a pool and my light blonde hair had turned green from the chlorine. 

Then, when we got out of the car at the national monument, we were suddenly surprised to discover just a few cars away my childhood friend, Matt, and his family! 

I was so embarrassed.

But I got over it and we all enjoyed the grand majestic views of these spectacular presidents.

As the summer has gone on, I must admit that those iconic men carved into a mountainside have taken on a different tone in our national discourse. 

Our country is grappling in new ways with the systemic racism that underlies every institution.

We are questioning practices that currently exist and looking at our history with new lenses. 

And that has not only included the monuments of Confederate generals, but also the full legacy of great American heroes like Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt and the land upon which this monument is built itself. 

I have to admit… when President Trump scheduled a big celebration there for the Fourth of July, I thought nothing of it. 

But all of a sudden there was controversy because someone from the DNC had tweeted that Mount Rushmore was connected with white supremacy.

What?! I thought.

That’s bonkers… it is divisive for the sake of being divisive…

It is a simple patriotic monument.

And then I took a breath.

I’ve made a commitment to myself that when I find myself outraged at something, I try to research instead of react. 

My first impulse is not to repost it, but to google it.

Sometimes, the information is flat out wrong.  Sometimes it is intentionally misleading.

But sometimes, there is truth to be discovered there. 

Sometimes, my anger or outrage is a defense mechanism because the way I had always thought about something is being challenged. 

Do you know what I learned early in July about Mount Rushmore? 

It is a sacred site for our Lakota siblings. 

This mountain is called Six Grandfathers, named for the Earth, Sky, and four directions that had been carved into the granite by the elements.

In 1868 this land was promised in a treaty to the Lakota people. 

Yet the discovery of precious minerals like gold and tin brought miners and prospectors to the area in a breach of that treaty. 

There was conflict and the U.S. sent in more calvary to defeat the Lakota and their allies. The Congressional Act of 1877 forced Native Americans onto reservations and our government took over the Black Hills. 

In July of 1980, nearly 100 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that these lands were illegally taken from the Lakota people, but the land has still not been returned. 

That rush of prospectors brought to the area a New York lawyer named Charles Rushmore.

In his own words, Mr. Rushmore explains how the land came to be named after him:

“I was deeply impressed with the Hills, and particularly with a mountain of granite rock that rose above the neighboring peaks.  On one occasion while looking from near its base, with almost awe, at this majestic pile, I asked of the men who were with me for its name.  They said it had no name, but one of them spoke up and said ‘We will name it now, and name it Rushmore Peak.’ That was the origin of the name it bears…” (https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/historyculture/charles-e-rushmore.htm)

We ignored our treaties with indigenous people for the sake of our own prosperity.

We erased their legacy and names and stories from the land.

And then we gave this place our name and carved the faces of our leaders upon it.

It is a far cry from the humble service that Jesus calls us to embody with our neighbors.

But in the minds of those at the time, such acts could be justified because native people were seen as savages, less than, unequal to their white counterparts. 

The only way our ancestors could rationalize genocide, enslavement, and colonization wasto believe that there are innate differences between the races and that non-white people were inferior. 

That is white supremacy at its core.

The four men whose faces we now see carved upon this mountain were not perfect. 

They were heroes and champions and they made our country what it is today, but they had faults as well and they lived and breathed and upheld systems that supported a belief that white people were somehow different and more worthy of this land than people of color.

George Washington led us to freedom from Great Britain, but that freedom was not extended to his own slaves.  When his wife’s slave, Ona Judge escaped, Washington went to great effort to recover her, fearing she would inspire their other slaves to seek freedom as well. 

Thomas Jefferson literally wrote our independence into existence and doubled the size of our nation.  But, also, the sexual exploitation of his slaves is so well-known that there is an Ancestry.com spoof about it.

Abraham Lincoln helped to preserve our nation and abolished slavery.  However, that freedom was not extended to Native peoples and during his administration, land was stolen and native people were executed and massacred. 

Theodore Roosevelt was chosen for the monument to represent the growth and development of the United States through incredible social policies.  Yet he also say Native people as an obstacle towards settlement and once said, “the only good Indians are dead Indians.”

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You know, when Borglum began to carve the faces of these men into the face of the cliff, the design included the figures from head to waist. 

He intended for a fuller image of these great American heroes to be portrayed. Not the full story of their legacy, but at least a greater rendering of their persona.

Borglam died, the country was at war, and the project ran out of money so this full realization was never completed. 

Only their faces were ever finished.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the midst of the national debate about whether monuments or statues and the like should stand not about these figures… but about Jesus… kneeling at the feet of the disciples.

He knew them fully.

He knew them completely.

He knew their faults and their triumphs. 

And he loved and had compassion and offered forgiveness to them anyways.

Here is the thing about not only Jesus, but the entire biblical witness.

Our scriptures don’t shy away from telling the full story of our leaders. 

We know that Moses led the people out of Egypt, but we also know that he was a murderer and we know that his own grumbling with God prevented him from seeing the promised land.

We know that David was a man after God’s own heart and his line was chosen for the redemption of all of Israel, but we also know that David was a rapist and murderer and stood idly by while assault and division happened with his own family. 

We know that before he was Paul, Saul persecuted Christians and oversaw their executions and that even later in life in the midst of his ministry, there was a thorn in his side, a temptation that never quite eluded him. 

For so much of our national history, we have focused only on the parts of the story that we like.  The parts that hold us up in a good light. The parts that demonstrate our worth and our glory and invite others to follow in our footsteps. 

Just like Mount Rushmore remains unfinished… a partially completed rendering… the story we tell ourselves about our own history and these figures is incomplete.  It is not the full picture.

And it has ignored and diminished other voices and stories and hurts for too long.

What we are experiencing in our nation right now is a lot of pain, and conflict, and tension… but in the midst of that woundedness, perhaps there is for the first time in a really long time we also have the possibility for healing and new steps forward.

When Jesus knelt at the feet of the disciples, he knew they would harm him and washed their feet anyways.

I think about how a wound often has to be cleaned out and debrided before it can properly heal.

That is what we are experiencing right now.

Systemic racism and white supremacy have wounded our nation and our people and our relationships with one another. 

And there is a lot we have to clean away and bring to the surface, so that the wound can properly heal.

It is painful.

It is ugly.

But it is the only way healing can ever be possible.

Because you see, only when we allow God to see us fully – with all of our faults and all of our sins and all of our mistake and all of our faithful attempts to do the right thing – can we truly accept God’s grace and mercy into our lives and share it with others. 

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In 2004, Gerard Baker became the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore and has worked to establish the Heritage Village there to share the history and customs of the land before Custer and Borglum left a mark on the area.  Baker said:

“it’s not just a teepee here.  We’re promoting all cultures of America.  That’s what this place is.  This is Mount Rushmore! It’s America! Everybody’s something different here; we’re all different.  And just maybe that gets us talking again as human beings, as Americans.” (https://blog.nativehope.org/six-grandfathers-before-it-was-known-as-mount-rushmore)

Mount Rushmore is the story of America. 

With all the things we have done right, and all the ways we have gotten it so wrong. 

As we think back upon our history, our story, if we find a way to tell it in all of its fullness, with all of its diversity and triumph and tribulation, maybe… just maybe we can remember that we are all human beings. 

That none of us are greater than our Master. 

And that God calls us all to another way, a better way, of being in this world. 

As we sang together in our opening hymn:

“Cure thy children’s warring madness, bend our pride to thy control; shame our wanton, selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul.  Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, UMH #577)

As we engage in these tough national conversations, help us to be humble.  Remind us of your call to serve our neighbors rather than promote ourselves.  Give us wisdom and grace to speak the full story.  And bless us with courage to do the right thing.  

Getting Off the Mountain

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Text: Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9

There are a number of places in scripture where the divine is revealed in those thin places where heaven and earth meet. 

I think about Elijah hiding on the side of the mountain. 

Or when Moses heads up the mountain and receives the word of God for the people.

Or our reading from the gospel today when Peter, James, and John travel up to the mountain top with Jesus. 

You know… I was thinking about Moses’ time up on the mountain and this renewal leave that I just finished. 

Moses took this time to head up the mountain and spend some time with God. 

This is actually a story that we’ve looked at this past fall with our Bible study groups on Wednesday’s and one of the things we discover if we read ahead a few chapters is that the people started to get worried that maybe he wasn’t coming back!

Forty days and nights go by and for all they knew, Moses had been engulfed by the cloud and the darkness on the top of the mountain and they were on their own!

In fact, Moses only comes back in chapter 32 after they discover that the people down below have begun to rebel – forming a golden calf and offering sacrifices. 

Well, good news friends… I’m not back because I’ve heard you were misbehaving!

But these mountain top experiences were all surrounded by something really hard. 

They came in the midst of stressful and difficult times of ministry.

Persecution.

Exodus.

The first prediction of Jesus death and suffering.

They are transition moments that remind each of these people who God is… and who they are.

They remind them that God is there.

They remind them they still have a job to do. 

And in many ways, that is what my renewal leave has been about.

In the midst of the mounting pressure and stress of our denominational life…

In the midst of staffing transitions…

In the midst of some personal relationship struggles that I needed to focus on…

This set-apart time to breathe, and sleep, and focus on God and finding a new balance and rhythm in my life has been so important.

So many of you have been asking already, and so that I don’t repeat myself a hundred more times… my work on renewal leave was pretty simple.

I completely disconnected from email and the constant call of social media.

I spent time every morning reading – scripture, books, resources to help ground myself in God.

I spent hours talking and cuddling with my spouse. 

I hiked in the snow. 

I didn’t set an alarm for an entire month.

I laughed a lot with friends.

I listened to the birds.

I made some really good homemade bread.

I had the opportunity to really drink deep from the living water and to fill my cup back up for the season ahead.

And I am so grateful that you have been supportive of this time away. 

But in some ways, I also have a new insight into how Peter, James, and John felt at the top of that mountain. 

They had been following their teacher for quite some time now and they had witnessed some pretty amazing things. 

But they also had just learned how difficult the journey was going to be. 

They were starting to experience push-back. 

And Jesus had just shared with him for the first time that he expected to be executed. 

He was calling them to lose their lives, too.

This trip up the mountain must have seemed like a welcome respite from the stress and strain of this work. 

As they get to the top of the mountain, Jesus changes before their eyes! 

His whole body radiates with glory and even his clothes shine… brighter than the sun!

And as their eyes adjust to this brilliance, two others appear… Moses and Elijah. 

Our text says that Peter reacted in this moment.

He reacted by wanting to bottle it up and capture it right there, just like that forever. 

He interrupts Jesus and Moses and Elijah and offers to build some shrines where they can sit down and get comfortable and just stay right there.

None of this talk about losing your life.

None of the persecution that was happening back down in the valley.

None of the stress.

Just this perfect presence of the divine.

Light.  Life.  Glory.

If you encountered it… you wouldn’t want to leave either.

When you have a chance to catch your breath and rest in God’s presence it’s awfully hard to not want to just stay right there forever.

Trust me… I’ve just had four weeks to dwell in this beautiful space. 

And while I’m excited to be back, it was also really, really hard to let go of that precious time away. 

I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit that a part of me imagined what it would be like to just leave it all behind and stay in that place forever. 

During Lent this year, as a church, I’m challenging you to participate in one of our small groups focused around the book, “Unbinding Your Heart.” 

I think this particular study is so important right now, because in some ways, I think we have got a little comfortable.

We’ve taken rest in the familiar and the holy and everything we know about God and the church.

We get into our patterns and routines and sit in the same seats on Sunday mornings and like Peter and James and John have built a little beautiful shrine around everything we believe about God and church. 

This holy place is amazing and we want to stay right here in our comfort zones.

But on the mountain top, the voice of God quickly sets things straight.  Out of the clouds, the glory of God rumbles:  This is my Son, This is my Beloved!  Listen to him!!!!!!

Just as quickly as it appeared, the clouds and fog dissipated and three bewildered and terrified disciples opened their eyes to find their teacher Jesus, standing before them alone.

It was time to head back down the mountain.

It was time to get back to work. 

You see, the mountain top is not a destination.

It is more like a rest stop. 

It is a place to fill up your tank, to pick up some snacks for the road, to take a nap if you need to…

But it is not the be all and end all of the journey.

This mountaintop transfiguration comes at a key transitional moment in the gospel.

It is framed in Matthew’s gospel by these two predictions of his suffering, death, and resurrection.

Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem.

The disciples were being called to leave behind the healing and teaching and instead to head straight for the seat of power.

They were being called not to violence or revolution, but a display of righteous love that would “refuse to play the world’s power game of domination, exploitation, greed, and deception.”[1]

In the church year, it is also a moment of transition.

We, too, are setting our faces towards Jerusalem as we enter the season of Lent.

This Wednesday, we will remember our mortality when a cross of ashes is placed on our foreheads.

We, too, will live together the last week of Christ’s life.

We, too, are called to live out God’s righteous love in a world that doesn’t always accept or understand it. 

As people of faith, we were never called to build tents and tabernacles to enshrine these moments forever. 

We can’t say – oh, well, we accomplished that, look how great we were, and be done.

We can’t neatly wrap up our faith with a bow and put it on a shelf.

We have to set it free.

We have to keep working.

We have to keep seeing what changes need to be made.

We have to keep following the guidance of the spirit.

And that means getting off of the mountain top, rolling up our sleeves, and getting to work.

We do it all, because Christ has already gone before us.

He is the one we are following down the mountainside. 

Jesus showed us you can take a moment for affirmation and to rest in the glory of God, but then we have to be on the move.

We have to let the good news out.

That light that overcame Jesus on the mountaintop – the glory that transformed him into a dazzling visage – wasn’t meant for him alone. 

Christ is the light of the world and he knew that in order for that light to dwell within each of us, he was going to have to shine even in the darkest places of the world.

He was going to have to confront evil powers.

He was going to have to withstand betrayal and abuse.

He was going to have to carry his cross and enter the grave of death.

And we can’t stay on the mountaintop either.

We can’t rest for a moment longer. 

We have to come down and let that light of Christ shine through our hearts. 

If you haven’t already signed up for one of our Lenten groups, I urge you to do so today. 

They will be starting this week and next and the discussions we will have as part of them will help us learn what it means to get out of church… to get out of these shrines and tabernacles we have built… and go out there to where people are waiting and hungry for the good news of God.

It is a chance to spend some time listening to God, listening to Christ, listening to the cries of our neighbors. 

It is a chance to push ourselves out of complacency and into the harder and more beautiful realm of real ministry.

It is a chance to unbind the gospel… to set it free from those quiet mountaintop moments so that every moment can be filled with the good news of God.

Friends, it’s time to listen to Jesus.

It’s time to let God’s light shine through us.

It’s time to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God everywhere we go.

It’s time to get off the mountain. 


[1] Rodney Hunter, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 1, page 454.

The Wilderness: God Provides

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Text:  Deuteronomy 29:2-6, Mark 1:12-14

A few years ago, I was asked to plan worship for our semi-annual clergy gathering. My team had everything arranged and ready to go. I just had to make sure to arrive early enough in the morning that I could meet with the technical engineer to set up the microphones and other electronics we would need that morning.
At this point in my life, I was not a morning person. And in order to get halfway across the state, I had to be out the door of my house by 5:30 am.
The alarm went off at 5:00.
I turned it off and promptly pulled the covers back over my head.
Every fiber of my being wanted to go back to sleep. So I did.
Notice, I didn’t hit the snooze button. I turned the alarm off, and fell back to sleep.
Ten minutes later, something woke me up.
Whether it was the rustle and squacks of the birds in the tree, or a cat pouncing on my legs in the bed or just some kind of internal switch – I woke up.
And I remember very distinctly taking a deep breath and saying – thank God.
I didn’t mean it in an offhand, irreligious kind of way.
I was grateful to God that I had woken up.
I was grateful to God that although my body was not ready or willing, God was making sure I was going to be able to answer the call I had received.
I was grateful to God, because God provided.

How many of you have heard of the word “providence”?
What exactly does “providence” mean?
The word originally comes from the Latin providentia – and has to do with foresight, prudence, the ability to see ahead. So when we talk about God’s providence – we think of God’s ability to provide for, to direct, to shape the future.
Martin Luther understood providence to be both the direct and indirect work of God in the world. Not only does God provide the good things we need for human life – but God also works through family, government, jobs, and other people. “We receive these blessings not from them, but, through them, from God.”
John Wesley in his sermon “On Divine Providence,” speaks of the care that God has for all of creation and claims, “Nothing is so small or insignificant in the sight of men as not to be an object of the care and providence of God, before whom nothing is small that concerns the happiness of any of his creatures.”
It is intimately related to his idea of prevenient grace, in that God has already laid the foundation for all people to come into a saving relationship with God.
And so, providence is the way that God cares for the universe – upholds the universe – and also the special ways that God extraordinarily intervenes in the lives of God’s people.

Throughout this journey through the wilderness, God’s providence has been all around.
We have remembered together that our ancestors were a stubborn and rebellious people.
They witnessed miracles!
They were released from bondage in Egypt…
they passed through the Red Sea…
they were led through the desert by cloud and light…
they were fed by manna and quail…
they drank pure clear water from rocks in the midst of the wilderness…
and yet they doubted and tried to go their own way.
Yet they did not, could not, would not believe that God would continue to provide.
God did.
The words shared with us in the book of Deuteronomy come from the end of a forty year journey through the wilderness.
For forty years… longer than I have been alive… God led them. God fed them. God provided.
As Moses reminds the people on the edge of these promised land:
You couldn’t make bread or ferment wine because you were not in a place where you could raise grain or grapes… you had to rely upon God and God provided.
The clothes and sandals that you are wearing come from the same fabric and resources you had when you fled from Egypt… and they have protected you from the elements for all of these years.

I meant to bring it today because this piece of clothing is a sermon in and of itself, but my husband still has a t-shirt from elementary school that he wears.
We think the shirt is just over twenty-five years old, but since it hasn’t fallen apart completely, he refuses to add it to the rag pile.
When he worked in the Amana factory, he cut the sleeves off making it sleeveless.
The fabric itself is so worn that it is nearly see-through.
Now, it has become a staple of our summer adventures on the boat and we joke that the shirt has a Sun Protection Factor of 15.

When I think about the wear and tear on that one item of clothing that is worn only a dozen or so times a year, I am astonished by the way God provided for the Israelites all throughout that journey in the wilderness.
There were not laundromats or department stories in the Sinai.
No places to trade or barter for the raw materials.
Just the cloth and creatures they had when they fled from Egypt.
What little they had sustained them for forty years.
God clothes the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:25-34) and God clothed the Israelites in the wilderness.
Why do we doubt God will provide for us?

For most of our season of Lent, we have explored how Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness echoes the journey of the Israelites. Faced with some of the same trials and temptations, he shows us how to trust in God and not seek our own way.
Mark’s account of this time is very different however.
The entirety of his journey is summed up in one single verse:
“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (1:13)
Matthew, too, pulls out that final detail in his account, tell us that when the devil left, angels came and took care of him.
God shows up again in the wilderness.
And God provides.
God cares for and tends to every need of Jesus during this liminal time.
Food, water, protection from those wild creatures, companionship.
God provides.

And as our Palm Sunday account reminds us, God is providing at the end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem as well.
Before they even get to the city, the colt is ready.
It is tied up just where Jesus tells the disciples it would be.
And the strange and wonderful part of this account is that when they tell the owner that it is the Master who needs it, there are no more questions!

As they enter the city, the disciples break into song, shouting “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
And when the Pharisees grumble and complain, begging Jesus to tell them to be quiet lest they make a scene and disturb the Romans, Jesus tells them that this awareness of God’s blessing and providence in their midst is so powerful, so noticeable, that if the disciples closed their mouths the very rocks of the earth would start to shout!

And we cannot forget that this entrance into Jerusalem is the beginning of another act of providence in our lives.
For the rest of the journey this week takes us through the gates, to the upper room, the garden, the trial and ultimately to the cross.
In the very life and death of Jesus, God has provided a way for us to be reconciled… to our sin, to one another, to creation, and to ultimately, to God.

Over and over again in the Psalms, we are asked to tell the coming generations about the glorious deeds of God.
We want them to set their hope in God and to know that God will provide for their future.
But I think this act of proclamation is also for us.
When we remember how God has already provided, we find confidence for our future.

Our denomination, the United Methodist Church is wandering through the wilderness right now and we aren’t sure where the end of our journey will be.
But this past week, I gathered with others in Atlanta to celebrate that we have been in mission together for 200 years.
200 years ago, a free black man named John Stewart was a drunk and penniless and falling apart. But one night on the way home, he heard singing and he stumbled into a Methodist revival happening in the woods. His life was forever changed.
And then he heard God call him to head northwest and share to share the good news.
He found himself among the Wyandotte Nation and our first Missionary Society was formed on April 5, 1819 in order to support Stewart and those who would come in this work.
For 200 years, people have set out to share the love of God with complete strangers, and God provided.
They made mistakes along the way, but God provided mercy and forgiveness and we have learned from their journeys.
They encountered opposition, racism, sexism, the death of loved ones, hunger… but they kept going because God provided them strength.

As I heard their stories this past week, it was a reminder that even in times of uncertainty and change, hardship and conflict, God is in our midst.
Even in the wilderness…. Maybe especially in the wilderness… God is providing us with the things that we need to keep going.
When we remember all of the ways that God has worked in the past, we find the ability to have faith and to trust that God will continue to be there providing for our future.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Wilderness: Trust and Manna

Text: Exodus 16:1-8, Matthew 4:2-4, Deuteronomy 8:1-8
This week, as we continue our journey in the wilderness, we come to the first of three temptation stories.
Three trials.
Three decision points.
Three opportunities to be shaped by God.

The first is about a basic necessity for life: food.

Jesus has been fasting for forty days and nights and Matthew’s gospel tells us that he was starving. And so the tempter comes and whispers in his ear, “You’re God’s son… tell these stones to become bread.”
It would be so easy wouldn’t it?
For God I mean, not for us.
But for the Son of God, the one who could turn water into wine and multiply loaves and fishes, the one who was literally the Bread of Life… wasn’t this an opportunity to demonstrate that miraculous life-giving power within him?

“No,” Jesus replies, and he looks back to the scriptures of our faith… “We live on more than bread, we live on the word of God.”
He is actually quoting from Deuteronomy 8:3.
Moses has reminded them about the ten commandments from God and now is expanding upon what it means to live them out.
He tells them that this long road through the wilderness has been working to humble them, to test them, to discover what is really in their heart and if they were capable of truly following.
God humbled them by making them hungry… and then by feeding them with manna… so they could learn that life was sustained by more than basic necessities – whether we live or die is in God’s hands.

This is not an easy lesson to learn.

It wasn’t easy for the Israelites and it certainly isn’t easy for us.

Imagine, that just a month and a half ago, the Israelites were still in the land of Egypt.
Already they were looking back upon their days in captivity with rose-colored glasses.
They were fondly recalling that at the end of the day, they could sit by the fire and their pots were full and bread was plentiful. They were stuck in a system of injustice, but at least they knew what to expect.
What they were conveniently forgetting is that during their time in captivity, their life was not their own. Whether they lived or died, how many bricks they had to make, what materials they had to do so with, whether they had food in their pots or not, was all based upon the whims of Pharaoh and their overseers.
Their life was not their own.

There are two pieces of this lesson that we need to wrestle with.

First… when your entire life was controlled by another person, how are you supposed to act when you are suddenly free?
Like livestock or equipment has to be fed and fueled and maintained, the Egyptians knew that if they didn’t provide for the people, they would lose their labor.
When the people cry out – where is our water? where is our food? part of the reality is that these basic necessities had been provided by their masters in the past.
Many didn’t know what it meant to provide for themselves and those who did found themselves in a barren wilderness with no access to streams or game.

But we shouldn’t rush too quickly into the flipside of that coin.
You see, we live on that other side.
As citizens of this great nation where we have freedom, we imagine that every single person has the opportunity and the responsibility to provide for themselves.
We believe in the American Dream, that if everyone just pulls themselves up by their bootstraps that they will have a house with a white picket fence and 2.5 children who will grow up and go to college.
We do have a sense that life is sustained by more than just basic necessities like bread and water… but sometimes we overreach and in our striving for unessential things, we limit the access of others to basic needs.

What we forget, whether we are suffering under the oppression of others or we believe we are free to provide for ourselves is that either way, in both situations, our life has never been our own.

When Jesus is tempted to turn bread into stones he says no.
And that’s because Jesus knows, as Melissa Bane Sevier writes, “where bread comes from. It’s a gift from God through the acts of nature, farmers, and bakers. Any other process – especially one that only pretends to be miraculous – shortcuts the involved process that is part of what makes it a gift…”

“Bread takes time. Place seed in the ground. Wait for sun and rain. Weed and harvest. Thresh and preserve. Grind. Add ingredients. Knead. Bake. Serve. Enjoy.” (https://melissabanesevier.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/of-stones-and-bread/)
Every drop of rain and ray of sunshine. Every person tasked with tending the earth and forming the loaves. Every piece, every part… it’s all a gift and it is all from God.

It is easy to follow when, like the Israelites, we see God’s power manifest in might acts like parting the sea or leading them with cloud and fire.
But that daily sustaining trust and reliance upon God’s grace?
That’s much harder.

This decision point, this temptation, it is all about daily bread and the Kingdom of God.
It is about a daily commitment to turn to God first.
It is about our daily trust in the one who sustains life.
This is a story about life and death.
This is a story about salvation.

Our culture tells us that if we work hard enough and we are good boys and girls and if we are generous with our time and our money that we will be rewarded. If we keep our noses clean, there is a place waiting for us somewhere in heaven. A place we earned by our actions.
We think it’s all about us, and so why wouldn’t Jesus use his power and turn some stones into bread.
But God’s ways are NOT our ways.
And God says, NO.
My Kingdom has nothing to do with what you have done and everything to do with what I have done.
Life depends on God.
Salvation depends God.
Freedom depends on God.
Daily bread depends on God.
Every breath that you take depends upon the God who created you.

When the Israelites found themselves in the middle of nowhere, utterly dependent upon God, it terrified them.
But that is precisely when God steps in and reminds them… I am enough. I will provide.
And just like the rain gently fell this morning, bread rained down from heaven.

Like those Israelites, we, too, struggle to remember this simple truth.

But when we are pulled away from that temptation to focus on our jobs and the competition and the battle to get what is ours, we, too, discover everything depends on God.
It is all grace.
From the rising of the sun to the rain that falls… it is all grace.
From the bread on the table to the money in our pockets… it is all grace.
We didn’t create it and it wasn’t ours to begin with.
We are nothing but cells stuck together and formed into amazing bodies – and even that is a gracious and generous act of God.

No… it is all grace. It is all a gift.

And God reaches out to us and says, come my children.
Come and walk with me.
Come and work with me.
Come and be a part of what I am doing.
Turn to me every single day, and I will provide everything you need for life.

Bible 101: Quantum Mechanics, Elephants, and JEPD

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Text: Selections (interwoven) from Mark 1, Matthew 3, Luke 3, John 1 on John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus

In Western Christianity, we want to know the right answer.

We have been conditioned, educated, by our schools, our philosophy, our churches, to look at facts and to believe there is only one truth.

2+2=4

Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States.

This is a glass of water… well, I supposed you are taking my word for that one… but at least we would agree it is a glass.

And, this book, the Bible, is the word of God for the people of God… thanks be to God.

We open up its pages and read a single verse or passage of scripture and because this book is true, we think – “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

 

But embracing only one right answer, only one perspective is not the way other cultures around the world or throughout history have approached the truth.

Consider the Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant.

Six blind men thought they were very clever.  One day, an elephant came into their town.  Now these blind men did not know what an elephant looked like, but they could smell it and they could hear it.  “What is this animal like?” they said.  Each man reached out to touch and feel with their own hands.  Without realizing it, they each grasped a different part of the elephant.

The first man touched the elephant’s body.  It felt hard, big, and wide.  “An elephant is like a wall!” he said.

The second man touched one of the elephant’s tusks. It felt smooth and hard and sharp. ‘An elephant is like a spear’ he said.

The third man touched the elephant’s trunk. It felt long and thin and wiggly. ‘An elephant is like a snake’ he said.

The fourth man touched on of the legs. It felt thick and rough and hard and round. ‘An elephant is like a tree’ he said.

The fifth man touched one of the elephant’s ears. It felt thin and it moved. ‘An elephant is like a fan’ he said.

The sixth man touched the elephant’s tail. It felt long and thin and strong. ‘An elephant is like a rope’ he said.

The men began to argue.  But a little girl heard them and said, “Each of you is right, but you are all wrong.”

In the parable, it is only when each person’s experience and perspective is combined with that of the others that the truth is discovered.   They were each right… and they were each wrong.

Or, as the Apostle Paul later put it in his letter to the Corinthians “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Cor 13)

 

What I find fascinating is that we have traveled a long way from the way Paul saw the world to the way that we have been taught to see the world through a modern, Western lens.

Western thought has led us to believe that there is only one objective reality and therefore only one answer to be found for the questions we seek… but modern science is beginning to shatter those understandings and in fact take us back to ancient was of understanding reality.  So… we are going to take a quick dive into the field of quantum mechanics.  Now, I LOVE science.  I was a physics minor in college and what I discovered with nearly every class I took on cosmology or space-time relativity is that the deeper I got into the science, the more faith questions I had.  The more I discovered just how awesome and complex and mysterious the world is.  The deeper I went in my understanding of God.

We all know that our body is made of cells. Those cells are in turn made of atoms.  And atoms are made up of even smaller particles – neutrons, protons, and electrons.  And there are also subatomic particles like photons, quarks, and neutrinos.

What we have discovered is that these quantum particles refuse to be put in a box.  Sometimes they act like particles… other times they act like waves.

In fact, there is an experiment that was designed to try to figure out once and for all what these subatomic particles are.  They took a photon gun and shot individual photons at a slit to determine how it interacted with the material behind it.

I’m going to use an illustration of this that I heard from Science Mike on the Liturgists podcast.… Imagine if you had a large 8’ by 8’ metal plate with a gigantic slit down the middle and shot a golf ball at it, you would expect to see an indentation the shape of a golf ball on the other side.  If you shot a hundred golf balls at this plate, some might bounce off, but others would hit that slit and you would end up with an impression the same shape as the slit on your surface.  That’s the way any particle behaves when it is shot at a sensor with one slit.

Now it is hard to imagine how a wave might make a different impact, but imagine this… IF however, you filled the room with water and dropped a bowling ball in the space, it would create ripples, waves, and that same slit could be used to measure the pressure of the incoming waves. You won’t see indentations… you’d see the impact of the energy from the wave instead. Same metal plate, same slit, but the measurement you get looks very different because what you are tracking is a wave.

Waves and particles act differently and create different impressions. So you can use the exact same device and determine what is being shot at the plate.

Now… imagine there were two slits.

Do the same experiments again and you would discover with the golf balls, our scaled up particles, that you would have two identical impressions left in each of the two slits from the impacts.

But… with the waves, what you would instead see is an overlap as the waves interact and interfere with one another.

 

So what has happened when we have done the same tests with photons, with these quantum particles, is that in a single slit experiment, it acts like a particle.  It leaves an impression.  But when you add a second slit, they act like waves and you see interference.  When you add more sensors… they begin to act like particles again.

In fact, physicists today are running these sorts of weird quantum experiments and are now starting to wonder if what we think is reality doesn’t really exist in the way we think it does until we start to measure it.   It’s like that old saying, if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?   Well? Does it?   And the more measurements we do, the more solid and real and identifiable any particular quantum particle becomes.

It’s the story of the blind men and the elephant all over again. The more data, the more observers, the more perspectives, the closer to reality you come.

This is actually a way of thinking about the universe and existence and truth that has been shared by Eastern cultures and philosophies for millenia…. We learn more about reality by sharing perspectives.  Each person, each sensor, each perspective gives you a point of information, but it is the intersection of multiple points that gives us insight.

Or as Science Mike puts it in the Liturgists podcast, “literally, additional observers make the universe exist in Quantum mechanics.”

 

The cultures and peoples that were inspired by God to write this sacred text were comfortable embracing many perspectives.  To be honest, the authors of scripture were not really concerned with the details what really happened.  They were not seeking one singular answer to the questions they were asking but were trying to explain how God showed up in their lives and their experiences.

And, the Bible did not arrive on the planet as one pre-packaged and published manuscript.  All of these stories and writings and teachings were arranged and put together by later editors and chroniclers.  They recognized the limitations of human knowledge and understood that truth comes out of the wrestling that happens as we seek to find meaning in a multiplicity of perspectives.

 

One example of this is the composition of the first five books of scripture: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  The Torah… or the Teachings of Moses.

As biblical scholars have wrestled with how to make sense of some of the contradictions and repetitive stories within these books, there became a theory that rather than these five books being one composite teaching, all written by one person, Moses, it is likely a combination of different traditions, from different perspectives, all woven together at a later time.  While we love the idea that Moses sat down with a quill and a scroll and wrote all of these words himself, what we know is that many of these stories were passed down through oral traditions.  And just like different members of the family might tell a story differently… same story, same truth, but slightly different perspectives, our scriptural stories were passed down the same way.

At some point, those stories were all woven together. And while we might prefer a neat and tidy compilation where each tradition and perspective is clearly identifiable, that wasn’t important to people in the past.  It was how they were woven together that made the scripture come alive.

And so there is this theory that tries to pick back apart those different strands.  This is the JEPD theory…  Where each letter identifies the source and the background.

The Jawist (Yahwist) story begins in Genesis 2 – and it includes much of Genesis and parts of Exodus and Numbers.  God is personal and reaches out in the lives of people.

The Elohist describes God not as Yahweh, but as El or Elohim.  This is like Aunt Sally’s version of the same events, but she uses a different name for God.

The Priestly tradition likely comes from around 500 years before the birth of Christ and the stories that it tells often relate to worship and order and the temple.  Genesis 1 is understood to be from this tradition… as are the parts of the story from Noah and the ark that talk about not two of every animal, but seven pairs of each of the clean animals… Because you need additional animals to sacrifice!

And the Deuteronomist is responsible for the final book of the Torah.  The name literally means, second law, and it was a rediscovering or a retelling of the law for a later generation of people.  The stories are often told, as a result, with the knowledge of hindsight.

So… how was the earth created?  It depends on if you are looking at the Priestly writer in Genesis 1… or the Jawist in Genesis 2… and what about John chapter 1 “In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was with God and all things came into being through him?” … but in the Jewish understanding of scripture, that wasn’t the question they were asking.  They didn’t want to know one concrete answer and objective truth… they simply wanted to know who they were and how God wanted them to live… and it is all of those stories, woven together, both a cosmic, orderly God and a deeply personal and intimate God that gets us closer to the truth of the mysterious nature of it all.

 

But maybe the most easily identifiable example of this, are our four gospels.

Four stories.

Four perspectives.

Each sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the world.

And yet, they tell that story in completely different ways.

The facts are different.  The timeline is off.  The people who are important vary.

Believe it or not, aside from the events of what we know today as Holy Week – Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, and resurrection – there are only two stories that all four gospels share in common:

The baptism of Jesus and the feeding of the five thousand.

And as we heard this morning with the four voices reading this shared narrative, each gospel writer has their own take on the events of the day.

Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience and does his best to connect everything that happens with what has come before.  “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Luke’s gospel is meant for people who are outside of the Jewish context and so his connection points are more personal as he invites Gentiles to change their lives in light of Jesus’ actions.

Mark is a short, fast-paced telling of the life of Jesus, probably designed to make it really easy to memorize and share.

And John? Well, John is totally different from the other three.  In fact, Matthew, Mark and Luke are often called the “synoptic gospels” because they see through a common lens.  But John cares less about the details of the narrative.  John focuses on the divine, on miracles, on the difference Jesus makes for the world, rather than in any individual life.

 

One way to think of these four gospels is to imagine them as four different cable news networks.  Each has a different audience.  Each has a different bias.  And each approaches the way they communicate the truth with those things in mind.

And there came a day when religious leaders sat down and tried to figure out which of the stories about Jesus were the ones that really captured the truth.  And they had a choice to make.  Do we include just one version?  Do we include two?  No, they included all four of these gospels… those who were inspired to put them together in this particular way into our Bible knew that it was only by holding all four of these perspectives together, in tension, looking not at the parts, but at the whole, that we would even begin to be able to grasp what is True (with a capital T).

We can’t point to a single verse and capture “the answer” to the questions we ask anymore than in the parable any one of those six blind men’s experience would have captured the fullness of what an elephant is.

Like soundbites and talking points today, on their own they will never contain the fullness of the story or the complexity of the truth.  But when we read it all together, when we seek to balance out our own biases, then like the blind men in the parable, or the scientists measuring from different perspectives, we can start to recognize the bigger truths.

That is why we need to read scripture.

That is why we have to read ALLof scripture.

That is why we need to take the time to balance our perspectives and not search for quick and easy answers.

God does not fit into a box.

And the truth of God is more complicated and awesome than any verse or chapter or book.

And that is an amazing, beautiful, and holy thing.