Tag: salvation

Questions: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 6, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and Mark 10:2-16, where Jesus is asked about the lawfulness of divorce.

I still remember vividly the day that my parents separated. It was Christmas Eve of 1989. I was six.

I have to say, there are some stories that just don’t need to be told in detail from the pulpit. What I can tell you, though, is that it was a story about two good, complex people who had tried really hard, who had faced a number of big obstacles, and who just couldn’t make it work. 

Such stories, when you live through them, leave you wondering: why do good and beautiful things break sometimes in this life? Why, despite all our good intentions, do things sometimes fall apart?

These are big questions. Difficult, honest questions.

One thing that is often said about The Episcopal Church, and something I love about it, is that we strive to be a place where we’re committed to asking good questions, and it’s a place where we admit that we don’t have all the answers. 

For so many of us who have found our way into this faith tradition, especially from backgrounds and communities where over-confident certainties were wielded like weapons, being able to ask and to wonder and even to doubt sometimes…well, it feels like coming up for air.

I’ve shared with you before that I found my way back to Jesus after years of wandering because I realized, finally, in this Church, that I didn’t have to have it all figured out in order for Jesus to love me. He just did. And with that realization, I could breathe. I could ask my hard questions without fear. 

As we study it, we notice that Scripture itself is full of all sorts of questions, too, though we have to admit that not all of them are created equal. Some are honest, and profound, and very brave, like the entire book of Job, which we heard the beginning of this morning. If you have ever read Job, is basically just one long-form, fundamental question: why is there suffering this world, and why doesn’t God do anything about it? 

We’ll be traveling with Job for the next few weeks in our lectionary readings, but I will give you a heads up: the power of this ancient book is not that it has some simple, easily digestible answer to that big question. Its power is that the book is brave enough to ask the question in the first place. It does not hold back. Job demonstrates that for all of us, wrestling with the inevitability of pain and loss is not anti-faith. It is a necessary part of faith. 

Because our salvation is not just a smiley face and a slogan that fits on a bumper sticker. No, true salvation comes to us through the deep questions we are willing to ask of God, of ourselves, and one another. It is born in those moments at 3AM when we have been stripped bare and are left on our knees without pretense–when we are finally willing to ask what we were too complacent or too afraid to ask before. This, as we will see, is exactly the sort of question that Job will ask, and it is the questioning that will transform him completely and save him. 

But in the meantime, today, we are faced with another sort of question—the one that is posed by the Pharisees to Jesus in todays Gospel reading. Yes, it’s the dreaded “divorce reading” that can make a preacher squirm when they realize it’s their turn in the pulpit. 

But here’s the thing about this reading—we can only approach it in a fruitful, truly Christian way when we acknowledge that the question that the Pharisees are asking is not like Job’s—it is not a thoughtful, bold, or honest one. They are just playing games. They are trying to lay traps for Jesus, guided by their own definitions of power and wisdom. 

The Pharisees already know the law about divorce. One of the only reasons they’re asking this question is because they hope Jesus will say something to offend the King or the Emperor and get himself in trouble. 

And with that it mind, it’s incredibly sad to me, infuriating even, that there are some corners of Christianity where this whole passage has been interpreted through the very same Pharisaical lens of power and control, as if purity were the point of the Gospel rather than what the Gospel actually is: solace for the vulnerable and the lost.

So we have to keep this in mind when we listen to Jesus’ response—we have to understand that he is turning their manipulative question back on them. He knows what they are up to, and so he responds with something they cannot argue against. It’s not a legal argument or a political claim, but a statement about something much more fundamental: a reminder about creation and its heartbreaking complexity. 

Jesus knows the reality is that in marriage, as in the rest of life, love can bind us together and it can also cause us to break and make mistakes. And when it does, it is a very sad and difficult thing, because God has always desired for us to find wholeness in our relationships with each other. But God also knows all too well the risks that love requires and, yes, when things go wrong, the damage it can do. But he seeks to console us in the wreckage, not pile on.

So Jesus, by undercutting their ploy, is, in effect, dismissing the Pharisees’ question and asking a far better one: you, who are so concerned with getting everything right, and with everyone else getting it right—when did you stop being honest about life? When did you forget that life is full of inexplicable pain and unkept commandments and unanswerable questions? When did you forget that the only true answer is to love each other as best we can, for as long as we can, until we can’t anymore?

Jesus acknowledges to his disciples something we know well: when there is divorce, there is pain and there is brokenness, as any of us who have lived through a divorce or who’ve grown up as children of divorce can attest. We don’t need church authorities to tell us that. We’ve already experienced the flesh of our hearts being pulled apart. We already know what it feels like to not be able to breathe.

But God’s posture in all of this, always, is to meet us in the middle of the mess and to say to us, my love for you is stronger than your broken heart and my dream for you is bigger than your shattered expectations. And if you have been divorced; if you have failed to keep your promises; if you did what you had to in order to survive; if you walked away to save your own body or soul; or even if you just made a mess of it all…so be it. Because Jesus loves a sinner. He invited them to his table. He said, come to me like a child, tear streaked and exhausted and hungry, and don’t ever let anyone tell you, ever, that you don’t deserve love. Even when you couldn’t quite make it all work on your own strength. Especially then.

And so I would say to those churches who use this passage against those who have been divorced, or who use any Scripture passage to condemn or exclude—I would say, God calls us to be saints, not Pharisees. God call us to be honest, imperfect people transfigured by grace. God calls us to stop playing games, to stop thinking faith is about knowing everything, and to ask real, heartfelt questions instead, like,

How do I leave this world better than I found it? 

What does being a disciple look like in this time and place?

When will I let go of all things that have burdened my heart for so long?

Who is Jesus to me, now, at this point in my life? 

Where do I see God’s Spirit at work, every single day, and how do I tell others about that?

God, help us to be a community where questions like this are what guide us more than any simplistic answers. God, lead us into a way of life where, instead, we become the answers to the good questions we ask. 

When we do–even when good and beautiful things break–we will realize once more that we can breathe.

Foraging: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 1oth, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21.

A few years back, while I was finishing up my seminary studies in Berkeley, I did a very northern California sort of thing—I enrolled in a weekend seminar to learn how to forage for wild mushrooms. 

Now, I like eating mushrooms as much as the next person, but I had never really thought much about going out and picking my own. I am by no means a wilderness expert, but I did grow up watching the 1980’s cartoon David the Gnome, which is set in the woods, and from that I had a vague sense that going out into the forest and eating the things you find there is a risky thing to do.

Nonetheless, the idea of hiking through the redwoods and learning more about mushrooms sounded intriguing, (and honestly when I was a kid, I kind of always wanted to be David the Gnome with his little red cap) so I went for it. 

A group of us gathered on a Friday evening in this little lodge in the forest, the foggy ocean air hovering in the trees outside, and we sipped peppermint tea and listened to a lecture about mushrooms—how all those random little growths you see springing up out of the dirt are not standalone entities, but really just one piece of a vast underground organism called a mycorrhizal network—hidden filaments of fungi intertwined with tree roots, all nourishing one another in the soil. 

So when you encounter a mushroom in the woods, what you are seeing is the visible manifestation of a vast, deep, mysterious life force, and it’s true, some are dangerous and some are not, but all of them are connected.

And, as I learned the next day when we went out, field guides in hand, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between the dangerous and the merely delicious. For example, there is a plain white mushroom called the field mushroom—perfectly fine to eat, looks like the kind you see in the grocery store. However, there is another white mushroom, very similar in appearance, and it is called the Destroying Angel, and as the name indicates, you probably don’t want to take it home and put it in your pasta sauce.

Now, I did pick a few mushrooms, and I even went so far as to cook a few of them and eat them—tentatively, prayerfully—but I will tell you upfront, that despite the increasing amount of gray in my beard and my penchant for wearing little hats, I am not David the Gnome, and mushroom foraging has not become a regular hobby. Even with that field guide, I would not trust myself to judge between a good mushroom and a bad one. 

Instead, what I took away from that weekend is that it is better, perhaps, to simply enjoy walking through the forest, to behold all the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. Not everything is meant to be easily digestible. 

And you know, it’s funny, but that memory came to mind this week because I was thinking about how Christianity has, at times, misunderstood its purpose—that we decided somewhere along the line, mistakenly, that our mission was to make the world easily digestible. That we decided our vocation was something like foraging for mushrooms—arming ourselves with the Bible as if it were a field guide, going out into the wild with our little notes to judge what is “good” and what is “bad”, and harvesting whatever is deemed useful to us. And to the extent we have done so, then I think we have missed the point of church. 

Case in point: consider our reading today from John’s Gospel. John’s is the most poetic and mysterious of all the Gospel texts—and yet this one piece of it, John 3:16, has been, in our culture, reduced down to a slogan, a bumper sticker version of the good news, a smiling little phrase employed by those who think of Christianity as a binary system designed to differentiate between the saved and the condemned, the insiders and the outsiders.  

With John 3:16 (and a few other passages) people go out into the world and declare those who conform to their interpretation of it as useful and good, and those that don’t as something dangerous, something poisonous, something definitely unworthy of being brought to the table. 

But I will confess to you, I don’t think John 3:16 is about insiders and outsiders and I don’t think our faith is like foraging for mushrooms. I don’t think Scripture is a field guide, a rule book for knowing what is dangerous and what is not. I don’t think anything that we are up to here is as simple and safe as all that, because encountering God is not simple or safe. 

And if you need a reminder of this, then look at the line that comes just before John 3:16:

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The idea that Jesus is somehow taking the place of that bronze serpent in the Book of Numbers should startle us, unnerve us a bit. 

Because that story from Numbers is itself a strange and unnerving story, one in which the wounding and healing powers of God collide, forcing the Israelites to realize that there is nothing simple or tidy about their salvation—it is not, as they might have assumed, about choosing between the poison of Pharaoh and the benign, edible pleasures of God—it is about surrendering to a path, a promise, a future that defies easy categorization because it is real, it is true, it is of God. 

And God will be who God will be, both mighty and gentle, both tender and wild, and God expects that his people will walk in that fullness of truth, as ones who are wise and brave, not those who settle for simplistic answers and well-ordered oppression. 

God wants Israel—and all creation—to share in his wholeness, to be complete, to be overflowing with all that life has to offer, and, then as now, one does not achieve that by dividing the world into overly simplistic binaries of good and bad, useful and worthless. One has to throw out the notes, so to speak, and face life—all of life—as it is, and love it anyway.

And so Jesus, in comparing himself to the serpent, has come to remind us of the same thing. He has come to embody in himself that same collision of wounding and healing that is real life. He has come to crucify our binaries. He has come to invite us to take part in an existence that is mighty and gentle and tender and wild—an existence that approaches wholeness. 

He is the One who calls us to go out into unfamiliar places, to walk through the forest, to behold the mysterious fruits of the dark earth without trying to consume them. He is the One lifted up so that we will understand—at last, or for the first time—that love is not the absence of danger, it is the thing that survives danger. It is the thing stronger than fear. Love is like the mycorrhizal network that underlies everything—and the purpose of our faith is not to outsmart it, to escape it, but to participate in it. 

And no bumper sticker, no cherry-picked verse of Scripture, will ever suffice to convey this. Only a life lived in the wholeness of the love of Christ will convey this.

God so loved the world that he sent his only Son—his own life, his own self—to show us that everyone and everything belongs, and that all of it is worth saving—the good and the bad, the poisoned and the beautiful, the sinful and the sublime. And not by reciting a formulaic prayer, but by enmeshing our lives into the vast mystery of creation. 

So woe to anyone, to any church, to any Christian, who takes it upon themselves to consult their little notes and declare who and what is worthy, as if the world were ever that simple, as if  the truth about any of us could ever fit such neat categories, as if anyone could ever be sure what is in and what is out.

No, far better for us to toss out the field guide. Far better to go out into the world each day to simply marvel at what we find there, even if we do not understand it. Better to love all of it without discrimination. And better to trust that in doing so, we will live into the one simple piece of guidance that God has ever given for navigating the wild: to see and to proclaim that everything belongs. Nothing is forsaken. And we are all part of of that vast, deep, mysterious life force welling up from beneath the surface of things.

That’s what Christianity is about. 

It may not fit on a bumper sticker, but it sounds like pretty good news to me.