Sermon on Paul, Silas, and the Prayers of My Mother 17MAI16

PRAYER, politics, compassion, faith, Christianity, judging and forgiveness, they are all in here and this is worth the time reading.

Sermon on Paul, Silas, and the Prayers of My Mother

May 17, 2016 by Nadia Bolz Weber 

A Letter of Apology to Thomas, Faithful Disciple

Audio Player

00:00

00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

(click above to listen along)

When my big sister was 6 she prayed and prayed every night for a baby sister. My mother Peggy had what is called RH factor , which there was no treatment for in the 60’s like there is now. Her blood created anti-bodies against the blood of her babies and it grew worse with each subsequent pregnancy. Peggy had beat the odds with 2 healthy babies and was told she could not have another – also she was on birth control…so every night when my big sister Barbara prayed and prayed for a baby sister my mom was like, “yeah…keep praying”. And then despite the odds and despite the birth control, Peggy got pregnant with me. And despite the odds and despite what every Doctor said, she gave birth to me. And despite the odds and despite fact that the nurses told her not to try and breastfeed me, since I wasn’t going to live and if I did she would only make me more sick, yes despite this all my mother nursed me and while she did she prayed and she sang hymns. When they finally took me home, they basically handed me to my big sister and was like, “here”.

At times I really believe that the only reason I am alive is the prayers and hymn singing of these two women. It is one of those things I believe and yet cannot fully explain.

I don’t think it’s my own faith or prayer that has in anyway saved me…but it is the faith and prayer of others.

Don’t mistake me, I would never suggest that if we pray hard enough we can keep our loved ones from dying. There’s a difference between thinking we can be like God and seeing in retrospect the way God has used the prayers of others to help and save us. But just because we don’t get to decide the effect prayer has in the world does not mean that prayer has no effect in the world. And this week I keep thinking about how perhaps we are being held in prayer, protected by prayer, and loved through the prayers of others in ways we don’t even perceive.

Prayer plays an interesting role in the divine jailbreak story we just heard from Acts, because it sort of feels like something out of a comic book – as if Paul and Silas have obtained superhero levels of faith. Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound and Spiderman has heightened senses but Paul and Silas can cause earthquakes that free them from prison just by praying and singing hymns.

I really really really want to see myself in Paul and Silas kind of in the same way that I realy really want to see myself in Wonder Woman. I want to think of myself as having that kind of super-hero faith. The kind that, were I falsely accused, stripped of my clothing, severely beaten with rods, thrown into the depths of a first century jail cell and shackled, that I too would respond not by crying like a baby or being immobilized with fear and hatred but like Paul and Silas I would respond in the dark of night by praying and singing hymns. I’ve not been in that particular situation or anything vaguely like it and maybe in true hardship I would surprise myself, but given how I respond to even minor irritations, that super hero response feels unlikely.

Because if I’m honest I have to admit that if I pull a muscle and can’t work out for two weeks or even if I just run out of coffee at home, I lose faith.

I’ve never known what to do with messages that tell me to “just pray and have more faith and everything will be fine”. Because those kinds of messages never make me have more faith. They make me have more guilt for not having more faith. And then I just feel more stuck in this feeling of spiritual inadequacy.

My own spiritual inadequacy was in full force this week as I struggled in this campaign season to see the humanity in my ideological “other”. Along with much of the country I feel hopelessly shackled to my own beliefs and ideology and world view – a prisoner with everyone else in this culture war. I found this week that my own ability to access the better part of myself, the part that can see the other side as also bearing the image of God, I found this week that I am so filled with vitriol when I hear certain political figures speak that I can even feel it in my body. Basically if my only hope is my own stingy heart or my own mortal level of faith then I am hopeless.

And then I was tagged in a youtube video.

It was Thursday night and I was standing in the kitchen of a friend’s house when I saw a link to a video featuring a middle aged white guy in a goatee and a trucker hat – apparently a guy named Larry had made a video message to me.

Absolutely sure he was yet another arrogant conservative who felt the need to mansplain to me why I’m a dangerous heretic and not a real pastor I braced myself for a fight. Had I known what was really on this video I would have instead prepared my heart and not my fists.

Instead, I stood in my friend’s kitchen and listened to this self-described “former Marine, Biker, gun-toting, NRA member, conservative Republican” say how Pastor Reagan’s beautiful Sermon on Thomas made him cry….it tore him apart. He thanked us for helping to peel away the callauses on his heart and helping to make him love.

Larry is exactly the kind of person who all week I was feeling spiritually inadequate to love or even see as a brother in any way. And yet it was HIS faith, HIS broken and healed heart, HIS love that gave me the heart and faith I lacked. I didn’t create if for myself and yet there it was.

So, as someone who is not unfamiliar with the feeling of spiritual inadequacy, which character do I really relate to in the story of Paul and Silas in prison? It’s not really Paul and Silas at all, it’s the other prisoners. Verses 25-26 tell us: About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’schains were unfastened.

Everyone’s chains were unfastened. Not just the ones praying and singing. But everyone.

I love that it was only Paul and Silas who prayed and sang hymns and yet it was all the prisoners who were freed. Like somehow the faith of 2 was sufficient for the whole group. And later the belief of the jailer was enough for his entire household to experience salvation.

I relate to being in the dark. I relate to feeling shackled to certain ways of thinking and feeling and acting. I relate to not being able to free myself and yet still experiencing freedom. In other words, I relate to relying on the faith of others, the songs of others, the prayers of others.

So many of us have felt tortured by not knowing if we have enough faith or the right kind of faith. I’ve said this before but perhaps it bears repeating: faith is never given in sufficient quantities to individuals…it’s given in sufficient quantities to communities. Because this thing isn’t an individual competition, it’s a team sport.

God has provided in us all the faith sufficient for our freedom. We just have to take turns being the ones being lowered through the roof to Jesus and being the ones doing the lowering.

There’s enough. There’s enough faith. There’s enough love. There’s enough hymn singing. There’s enough freedom.

And for we who bear the name Christian prayer and love and faith and hymns are our birthright. Even if we don’t always know how to pray and we love poorly and have little faith and don’t like all the hymns…even then all of this is ours just as it has been the birthright of all the people I’d God for millennia. Even when we don’t have enough of our own, there is enough.

Even Jesus’ prayers for us surround us. As weird as that sounds.

Our Gospel reading is of Jesus’ prayer at the end of his ministry on Earth. He prays to the Father not just for his disciples, but for those who will believe as a result of his disciples’ testimony – um, if you’re doing the math at home….that means us. All that stuff we heard about Jesus praying that we be one with him and the father – that’s what all of this is. When we sing hymns we join our voices to those who have sung before us – Paul and Silas in prison and the early Christians in the upper room, and the dessert fathers and mothers escaping persecution and medieval monks carrying the tradition, and the civil rights marchers trudging the path of faith and resistance and Peggy in that hospital rocking chair and us together here tonight.

There is just so much prayer and faith surrounding us all the time and effecting us in ways we don’t even know and for this abundance in the face of my own insufficiency, for your faith and prayer and song which unshackles me over and over and for the God who made it all possible, I give thanks. Amen.

Stop Saying the Church is Dying (a sermon from the Sarcastic Lutheran) 10MAI14

FOR those who worry the Church is dead, and for those who smugly say God is dead, here is a sermon from Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber reenforcing our faith and affirming the Church (and GOD) is alive and well. This was preached at the Rocky Mountain Synod of the ELCA meeting, but it applies to all denominations who are true to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Stop Saying the Church is Dying (a sermon for the Rocky Mountain Synod Assembly)

May 10, 2014 By Nadia Bolz Weber 

Inside a cave church in Cappadocia with Sara Miles.

A week ago I was fortunate enough to be standing near a cliff in Cappadocia, Turkey taking in the view of hundreds of caves carved from volcanic rock in an alien looking valley. My friend Sara asked what I was thinking about. When I confessed that I was worrying about preaching at my Synod’s assembly next week, Sara didn’t hesitate to remind me sarcastically,  “Oh, you mean that little text on how Jesus tells us not to worry?”
So, yeah, nothing like worrying about preaching a sermon on how Jesus says we should not worry to make ya feel like a schmuck.
As today got closer and closer I would tell myself  “don’t worry, just come up with a plan”. I’d read the text, call my preacher friends, pray, repeat. And I am here to say that I did not, by worrying, add a single sentence to my sermon. Not one.
But I did become curious about what worry really is. And I began to realize that, on some level, worry is nothing more than fear.  Fear that either I will not get something I want or fear that something I have will be taken away.  And both of those fears seem to be centered on finitude. The fact that nothing lasts forever.  That everything comes to an end. And Jesus says who by worrying can escape this reality? But also, worry is kind of all about scarcity…. because I don’t know about you, but I have never once worried that I would have more money than I need next month.  I have never once worried that I might be happy and healthy and live a long life.
And we come by this fear honestly in a society in which a perceived state of scarcity is what drives the free market economy.  But I think Jesus points here to a bigger reality than that.  A reality he calls the kingdom of God. A reality he always seems to describe as being like things around us that are common, and small and insignificant and unimpressive.
Which is as good a time as any to talk about the Lutheran church. It’s no news to anyone here that there is a lot of hand-wringing these days about the longevity of the Lutheran church.  And yeah – to be sure, we used to be bigger, more significant and more impressive.  Sure, we used to own more property, have more members, bring in more cash and leverage more power than we do today. It’s hard to argue with numbers. But the thing is, buildings,  numbers, money, power – and other aspects of worldly success may indeed be signs of A kingdom, but brothers and sisters, they are not necessarily signs of THE Kingdom.. I mean, were this denomination of ours a company, then for sure, investors would be scurrying for cover. But, people of God, maybe now is the time for us to take a hard look at the ways in which the church has tended to judge our success on a set of values that perhaps we had no business buying into in the first place.  Namely our society’s free-market corporate American values of what success looks like.
If that is the case, then I repeat – we came by it honestly. Swept up as we were into having banked so much cultural currency in America.  But those days have gone.  They’ve gone.
And so, what are we left with if we are no longer the Lutheran church of 1964?
We in the year of our Lord 2014 have moved our bishop’s office from a fancy office space surrounded by PR firms and media companies in the seat of Denver’s power grid and into a slightly run-down church building in an unimpressive part of town. To some this may a sign that the “church is dying” but to others it is a sign that the church is living. Perhaps our definition of success can shift more toward what is foolishness to the world and yet life to those in Christ. Buildings and budgets and social currency will fall away. But what stands is the kingdom of God. Which Jesus tells us is the Father’s good pleasure to give to us.
Society will still have the Fortune 500 for profits, and non profits for service and day care centers for children and the ELKS Club for socializing and Starbucks for overpriced coffee and many other things we may not ever be. But we should never judge ourselves as the church according to these things because you know what the culture around us will NEVER do? Preach the Gospel, administer the sacraments and proclaim forgiveness of sins. You know why? That’s OUR job.  That’s our main job and while we are free as the church, to participate in any number of other activities in the world that seem bigger and more impressive let’s remember:  We are those who have been, and continue to be, entrusted with nothing less than the Gospel.  And what I’m about to say is a shamelessly prideful (and being shamelessly prideful is, I have been told, “not Lutheran”) but in a world where people are constantly being fed spoonfuls of nonsense and told it is Jesus …we have a better Gospel.
So given what we’ve been entrusted with, we cannot be distracted any longer by a corporate American Empire version of success.
So let me be the first to say, if in your congregation, regardless of size, prestige or property, if the Word is preached and the Eucharist shared and water poured and forgiveness of sins received, then congratulations, your congregation is a success. So when the numbers crunchers and church consultants say the church is dying…may I suggest that we only say this when we forget what the definition of church is.
And when we forgot whose the church is.
Because as the prophet Isaiah said, the Word will do that for which God purposes it and people, regardless of what happens to institutions, and trends and property and budgets…even when the president of the United States stops inviting us to the White House Prayer breakfast – Even if there is never any such things as a White House Prayer breakfast and old church building are more often condos than centers for worship, God will be praised.  God will continue to send for the Word which God has always sent forth.  So let us step back from the worry of how the church is dying, because long after we have gone, the WORD will remain.  Long after the ELCA is gone, even when my beloved House for All Sinners and Saints is gone, the church will not be dead because people will continue to gather in the name of the Triune God, hold up bread, say it is Jesus and that it is for the forgiveness of sins. Just as we will do here tonight so will it forever be done until the time in which we gather around the throne of the Lamb.
But let’s remember this, people of the Rocky Mountain Synod, that the Gospel is not just entrusted to you for you to proclaim, it is, to be sure, also intended for you to hear. So since we Christians are a forgetful people – and need to be reminded of that for which the church was even created in the first place – so…
People of God, do not worry because we have this Word-
That there is a God who created us and all that is, this same God spoke through prophets and poets, claimed a people to be God’s own and freed them from the shackles of slavery. This same God led those people through the wilderness to a land of milk and honey, and told them to always welcome the stranger and protect the foreigner so that they could remember where they came from and what God had done for them. Then in the fullness of time, and to draw ALL people to himself, God came and broke our hearts like only a baby could do and made God’s home in the womb of a fierce young woman as though God was saying, from now on this is how I want to be known. And as Jesus, God the Son kissed lepers and befriended prostitutes and baffled authority. Jesus ate with all the wrong people and on the night before he died, he gathered with his faltering friends for a meal that tasted of freedom. He held up bread and told us to do the same thing and he promised us so much: that he would be with us, that forgiveness is real, that we are God’s, that people matter and that death is done for and that after a tough resurrection, grilled fish makes an awesome breakfast.
Which is to say, God chose to enter the finitude we fear– enter into the uncertainty and danger of mortal human existence in order to point to something bigger.  Bigger than what is fleeting and finite.  In the incarnation God has given us nothing less than a small measure of eternity through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ.  And made us an Easter people – not people who vapidly pretend that everything’s ok – but people who live in the Christ reality of death and resurrection. People who live in the reality of a God who brings live things out of dead things.
I say this as someone who a week ago was hiking in those desolate valleys of Cappadocia, a land that for 1,000 years was populated with Christians and now is not. That is to say, we are not the first group of Christians to worry about the decline of Christianity.
Sara and I would climb up into caves and look around at ceilings filled with Byzantine Christian iconography. A thousand years of Christianity and now only ruins left. Yes, the big, impressive, successful Byzantine Empire fell, and yet the church of Jesus Christ did not die, if it had, how could 2 middle aged women stand in old cave church 600 years later and sing Christos Aneste? Christ is risen. A song that no matter what, will continue to be sung, because worry not, the tomb is empty, and God will be praised. Amen.

You may also like -

Sermon for the ordination of Matthew NickoloffSermon on Why the Gospel is More Wizard of Oz-y than the LawSermon on Jesus Rolling His Eyes (and also divorce)

Sermon on Jesus Rolling His Eyes (and also divorce) 16FEB14

FOR those who have suffered at the hands of the Church, from Rev Nadia Bolz Webber.....

Sermon on Jesus Rolling His Eyes (and also divorce)

February 20, 2014 By Nadia Bolz Weber 

2014-02-16 NBW Sermon<—–click here to listen along (sermons are spoken events. So much of the meaning comes from the hearing of it.)
Years ago there was a project undertaken by Bible scholars whereby they were trying to ascertain what was really knowable about Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure.  The scholars would take the Gospels, verse by verse and vote as to which things they thought Jesus actually said and which they thought were made up later. They wanted to determine the historical accuracy of Jesus’ words and actions. Now, there was more to it and perhaps this is a legitimate academic endeavor –  it’s just not a question I personally find at all interesting.  I could care less what fancy Bible scholars say is more or less historically accurate when it comes to Jesus’ teachings.  What I would be game for, is if scholars started voting on which of Jesus teachings were more or less done with his eyes rolled.  I mean there are just some texts where I feel like I can almost hear the annoyance in his voice.  Like when on the way to Jerusalem, he tells his disciples that he is about to be betrayed and handed over to the authorities, and condemned, beaten and die and then after 3 days rise again and they are like, “so when you come into your kingdom will I be seated at your right hand or will it be Steve?” – you know the guy was like…really?
I mention this because I wonder if this section from the Sermon on the Mount didn’t have an undercurrent of “I can’t believe I even have to say this to you” to it.
But he does.  He does have to say these things to us. Because we, like those who first heard them, are a forgetful people.  We need to hear what it means to uphold the 2 commandments that matter the most:  Love the Lord your God and Love the neighbor as yourself.  Because we so easily get bogged down in details, we can fail to see the big picture.
A couple weeks ago we were studying the 10 commandments in the catechumante class.  The Thou Shalt Nots of the 10 commandments are pretty recognizable to even the least religious among us.  Growing up I was taught that the law – especially the Ten Commandments – are there because they are God’s prescription for our lives.  People would say that the word Bible stood for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Basically the importance of the Bible is that it gives us all the rules we have to keep so that we are right with God.  God gave us these rules (and a bunch of others that the church added along the way) and they are there because God loves you and wants you to be happy.
But now I see it differently. Now I think the law is less about God loves you and wants you to be happy and more about the fact that God loves your neighbor and wants to protect them from you. And God loves and wants to protect you in so far as you are also someone’s neighbor. That is to say, that this strange God we have who created this world, and spoke through fiery prophets and freed a people from slavery and gave them a law and said they were his…this same God who came to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and loved people so completely, this God is strange, but what God is not – is distant.  This God does not create the world, give us some rules and then leave us to it. Because what we see in the teachings and life of Jesus is that people matter. Human relationships matter to God.  The way we are treated matters to God. So some laws are established for that.
But Laws are made for us, not us for laws. That is to say, there is a spirit behind each law that at times trumps it’s letter. I know that may sound like slipping dangerously into moral relativism, but so be it.  Our obsession with moral absolutes comes from clinging to the letter of the law as though it can love us and save us when really that’s what Jesus is for.
And you know who got in trouble, like all the time, for breaking the letter of the law? Jesus. Hey Jesus, your disciples are not washing their hands.  Hey Jesus, why are you eating with sinners? Hey Jesus, we saw you heal a guy and it was the Sabbath. And as we see over and over again, Jesus had no patience for this. The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath, he would say. And that usually shut them up.  You know, until the next time.
All of that is to say that: what Jesus seems to be doing in our text for today is reminding us of the spirit of the law so that we know how to love one another.  That insulting people and being mean to them may not be murder, but it certainly does not uphold their dignity.  And again, Jesus rolls his eyes and is like, “I can’t believe I even have to say this”
What Jesus seems to be doing here is reminding us of the spirit of the law so that we know how to love one another.  That sexting and flirting and lusting over someone who is not our spouse may not be technically committing adultery but it certainly does not uphold our dignity, or that of our spouse or the object of our lust.
Jesus seems to be unfairly raising the bar on us, but in reality he’s just insisting that we not do violence to each other through loopholes. That we not put our relationship with the law above our relationships with our neighbor. And if that seems harsh and unnecessarily strict, know that he says all of this so that violence is not done to you as well. God loves you and wants to protect you.
Which brings us finally to the dreaded divorce text. This week I asked for your stories about how this text has shown up in your lives and on two occasions, the responses caused me to tear up in public, which as I’ve mentioned before is not exactly my favorite thing.
Now, I really try to not yammer on and on about the historical reality in the 1^st century. But what is important to understand is that at the time (if my memory of seminary serves), if a man divorced a woman it was often a death sentence. She relied on him for security and income.  It’s not like today when she could just go back to teaching or work in a shop to make her way.  She often would not be welcome back in her father’s home. So the reality of divorce for many women was that it sentenced them to a life of poverty and possibly begging or prostitution. So for Jesus to say, look, just providing a certificate does not get you off the hook, her dignity needs to be upheld – well, this was a way of saying that God loves you and your spouse and desires that cruelty and violence not be done to either of you. Jesus was wanting to protect women.
So, this week, as I read your stories, stories of being violently yelled at and slapped and choked and having church folk stand over you and say that God loves you only if you stay with the man who does this to you, when I read about another of you being a 24 year old woman who was literally abandoned by your husband and then how your church would no longer give you the Eucharist, when I heard of the shame felt by one of you as a divorced man who felt like he wore a scarlet letter D in church, when I heard of loveless marriages that went on for decades…I thought how the hell is it that the church can manage to take a text meant to protect people and make sure violence is not done to them, and then use this same text to do violence to so many for so long?
I don’t know what to say. I just know that it is real. And if Jesus rolled his eyes when having to re-orient his disciple’s understandings of things, I can only imagine his reaction to what has been done with his teachings about protecting people.
And so tonight, from this pulpit, and under the yoke of this stole and from the office of a clergy person and with whatever authority that still manages to hold in this world… I want to offer an apology. As a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ, please hear me say I am so sorry this happened.  If you are someone who has had violence; emotional, spiritual, physical or otherwise done to them in the name of Jesus Christ (of all names under heaven), if you have been shamed or excluded or denied what is only God’s to give, if you have been made to stay in a situation that denies your humanity or kills your soul because someone said that’s what God wants for you,… on behalf of the church, I apologize.
And let me say this one thing more: We do not serve a distant God, but one who actually cares about how you treat people and how you are treated. People matter. Relationships matter.  The diginity of human beings matters. May the church, of all institutions, uphold this truth and ask forgiveness when we do not.
Amen.

You may also like -

Sermon on Secret Codes, Wibbly Wobbly Time and the O AntiphonsSermon on Salome, Herod, and the Beheading of John the BaptistSermon: Field Notes on Grace from 10 days on the Road

A lamentation of sorts for Sunday July 14th, 2013 (the day after the Zimmerman verdict)

MANY have had much to say about the verdict in the george zimmerman trial. I do not agree with the verdict. I believe he wanted to have the "experience" of actually killing someone, and Trayvon Martin was in the wrong place at the wrong time giving zimmerman the opportunity to fulfill his fantasy. I do not believe justice has been served, but I do believe it is important to use this tragedy to promote nonviolence, racial harmony, compassion for all parties involved, and to motivate people to become active politically, to vote for candidates who will review and amend "stand your ground" laws and support reasonable gun control. Here is a great sermon on the trial and verdict and our nation and each of us from Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Sarcastic Lutheran, and I recommend you listen to as well as read her message......

July 14, 2013 By Nadia Bolz Weber 

(My intern, and not myself is slated to preach this evening. But as the pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints, I wanted my voice to be in the room. I’m certain it will be a shaky voice.)

click here to listen along ——> 2013-07-14 NBW sermon on Trayvon Martin

I would like to take this opportunity to “stand my own ground”.

I would like to stand my ground as a voice for anti-racism and non-violence.

For gun control and a justice system that actually hands down justice.

I would like to take this opportunity to say something defiant and super clever and something that would be memorialized for the next 48 hours in Facebook memes.

There are a million reasons for me to want to stand my ground but every time today that I have tried, I am confronted in the following ways, by, of course, myself.

1. I want to be a voice for non-violence but the reality is that this morning on NPR when I head George Zimmerman’s brother say he rejects the idea that Trayvon Martin was unarmed because the teenager was actually armed with a sidewalk on which he broke George’s nose, well, when I heard that, my first reaction was not to reach through the radio and offer that man a sign of peace, my first reaction was to reach through the radio and offer that man a punch in the throat.

2.Yesterday I heard that a Federal Law Enforcement officer at my mom’s church has shown up the last 3 Sundays carrying a concealed weapon. Which is insane and something I would normally want to post a meme about on my Facebook wall for all the liberals like me to “like” except for the fact that that law enforcement officer a) is my brother and b) carried that weapon to protect his family ever since my mother’s life has been threatened by a crazy man who wants her dead. A man who was escorted out of church last week by police.  So when I heard that my brother was armed to protect my own mom I wasn’t alarmed like any good gun control  pastor would be…, I was relieved… and now what the hell do I post on Facebook? What do I do with that?

3. Despite my politics and liberalism when a group of young black men in my neighborhood walk by I brace myself in a different way than if they were white and I hate this but it’s like 44 years of having every message I hear in the media and culture around me say that I am superior – superior by accident of birth well, 44 years of that cannot be erased completely by my university education and progressive beliefs.  So if I said that there is not residual racism in me that I simply do not know how to escape I would be lying. Even if I do have an “eracism” bumper sticker

I want to stand my own ground but this morning all I could do was quite literally stand in my own kitchen and cry. Cry for all my own inconsistencies.  Cry for all the parents of kids with brown and black skin who feel like their children can now legally be target practice on the streets of suburbia. Cry for a nation divided – both sides of which hate the other.  Cry for all the ways I silently perpetuate the things I criticize. Cry for the death threats toward my family and the death threats toward the Zimmerman family.  Cry for Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton whose child was shot dead and were told yesterday that it was more his fault than the fault of the shooter.

His mother Sybrina, is a woman of faith and her first public statement was a prayer

“Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!”

So tonight I want to use her prayer as our own.

Let us pray,

Lord who taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, in our darkest hour help us to not lean on self-righteousness but to lean only into the sweet arms of our loving savior. You are all we have. Help us to believe, even when it is hard, even when it seems like there is nothing but anger and despair, that somehow you are in control. Thank you for those who pray. When we cannot pray for our enemies may the prayers of others suffice. And help us to love. It doesn’t come as naturally as we’d like to believe. But help us to love wantonly, extravagantly, and fearlessly as you love us. And in times as dark as these help us to boldly speak the name of Jesus. The name above all names that demons fear and angels sing. It is in this name we pray, Amen.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/07/a-lamentation-of-sorts-for-sunday-july-14th-2013-the-day-after-the-zimmerman-verdict/

“Do you WANT to be made well?” Man, I Wish Jesus Wouldn’t Say Things Like That (a sermon) 5MAI13

HERE is a great sermon by Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Sarcastic Lutheran, about how God sees us and what he will do for us if we let him. As always, I really encourage you to click the link and listen to her sermon....

“Do you WANT to be made well?” Man, I Wish Jesus Wouldn’t Say Things Like That (a sermon)

May 6, 2013 By Nadia Bolz Weber 

2013-05-05 NBW Sermon <—-click here to listen along.

²Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. ³In these lay many invalids — blind, lame, and paralyzed. ⁵One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. ⁶When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” ⁸Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” ⁹At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. -John 5:2-8

This weekend at the retreat we kept a running list of overheard quotes from each other. Here are a few for your enjoyment.  There was the person who said “I’m totally making my own deodorant now. Come smell my pits. I smell awesome”

And the guy who got the fire going who said “when you’re this flaming, who needs kindling!”

But the one that struck me was when someone said “There’s something satisfying about hating someone.” To which someone replied “Yeah, there’s definitely a pay off.”

I can relate to that.  When we seriously don’t like someone we like to think that we hate them because they are awful horrible no good people – and that might be true.  But if I’m totally honest, I have to admit that there also is a payoff to hating someone. Maybe I get to feel like a better person than them, or maybe then I don’t then have to look at what I did wrong in our relationship, or maybe I then don’t have to look at my own awful, horrible, no-goodness.

It feels gross to admit the truth about the payoffs we get from the things that harm us – because to do so feels perilously close to minimizing the very real pain and suffering that come from things that harm us.  But admitting that there is a payoff to hating someone who hurt me is not the same as saying that what that person did was ok. Or that my pain is not real.

And if we are honest, there are payoffs, not just to hating people, but to so many things in life that hurt us.

I mention all of this because in our Gospel text for today Jesus encounters a man who was ill and had been sitting at the pool of Bethesda for 38 years. And honestly this has to be the most insensitive healing text in the Bible, because Jesus asks him the really harsh question: “do you want to be made well?”  and the guy doesn’t even answer the question, when asked if he wants to be made well he says no one will help me into the water and when I try to get in other people get in the way.

I don’t want to be a jerk, but seriously? That’s the guy’s answer? Not to diminish his illness but it makes me wonder what the payoff might have been to staying ill since when asked if he wanted to be made well he didn’t seem very interested.

This is a sticky issue, but this week I started thinking about how hard it is to be honest about the pay offs we get from things we say we want to be free from.  You can ask any alcoholic in recovery about this. When I was still drinking I’d bemoan my hangovers and the fact I couldn’t manage to keep a decent job. But there was a payoff. I got to live without any real responsibility and do as I like no matter how it effected others and the best payoff was that I got to be inebriated whenever life or basic human emotions or the results of my bad decisions started feeling too bad.

It’s not just drunks though.  Not by far. Some of you spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need which boosts your mood until you get the bills which is then so depressing you have to start the whole damn thing over and shop some more just to boost your mood. All while you complain about how in debt you are in. It’s like clutching our bills by the side of the pool at Bethesda and having Jesus walk by and say “Do you really want to be free from the bondage of debt”. Jesus is just the worst some times.

Being honest about what the payoff is to staying in a situation I say I want out of is just more truthfulness than I feel comfortable with.  But that’s the kind of truth Jesus seems to always be putting up in my face when I read texts like this one.

It all reminds me of Paul’s letter to the Romans when he said I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.Some things are so true they hurt a little

But that’s the whole point, I think. Jesus said that we will know the truth and the truth will set us free. I like David Foster Wallis’ take on that.  He said sure the truth will set you free, but not before it’s done with you.

Here’s the problem. In this day and age we are understandably sensitive to the dangers of what we call blaming the victim. And I get this. There are things that happen to us that are surely beyond our control.  I didn’t have much of a part in having an auto-immune disorder when I was 12. Richard does not contribute in anyway to his own deafness. And to imply so is cold hearted.

So don’t mistake me.  What I’m talking about is situations like this:  there were a few months of my life I came down with a “touch” of hypochondria. We were living in Longmont and I was a stay at home mom with a baby and a toddler. I was exhausted all the time and got sick a lot that Winter and I started to think that something was seriously wrong with me.  And secretly, without being totally conscious of it, I really hoped something was wrong with me. Nothing fatal. Maybe like, a totally treatable form of cancer. And then I could kind of get a hall pass.  A break from everything.  A hospital stay started to look awesome.  Someone else would bring me food and I could lay around all day watching tv and taking narcotics. What’s not to love? After ending up in my doctor’s office for the 3^rd time in 6 weeks demanding that he run tests on me since I was sure I was sick…my doctor looked me in the eye and said Nadia, nothing’s wrong with you.  You just have to deal with your life.

As a side note: I was so humiliated that I actually never went back to that doctor. But I also have never since then feared OR hoped that something was wrong with me.  I picked up my mat and walked out of his office.

Of course it’s not always like that. I wonder if that day when Jesus was walking along the pool at Bethesda  if there were many other people who were legitimately sick and lame and beyond help. There must have been.  I wonder if he saw this one guy. I mean, really saw in him what he could not see in himself.  I wonder if Jesus knew that this man had given up and knew that he could be made well. See, it’s a weird healing text because not only does Jesus say “do you want to be made well?” he doesn’t do the normal healing thing he just says “stand up – take your mat and walk”  Stop waiting for someone to carry you. Stop waiting for other people not be in your way.  Why? Because you can. I wonder if Jesus said: nothing’s wrong with you.  You just have to deal with your life.

In the face of Christ this man was confronted with the truth.  And that truth may have stung, like truth so often does, but it also set him free. But the fact that he was able to take his mat and walk away obviously had very little to do with his own desire to be healed. What it had to do with is God’s desire for his healing.

That’s God’s thing. Seeing us. Offering the truth. Restoring that which is broken.  Pursuing our healing long after we’ve given up. Loving us into wholeness. And wanting us to be made new, to be made whole, to take up our mats and walk.

So come to this healing place in front of you– no one has to carry you to this table of grace. And here there is no one to get in your way. Come to this table tonight and bring the mats you think you are stuck laying on and lay them at the feet of your savior who bids you walk and be free. Amen.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/05/do-you-want-to-be-made-well-man-i-wish-jesus-wouldnt-say-things-like-that-a-sermon/

“This teaching is HARD, who can accept it” – a sermon on the Eucharist by Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber 26AUG12

I was just having this kind of conversation with one of my coworkers after work yesterday (and I told her about Rev Bolz-Weber's sermons and that she should check them out) about how I am thankful, as a believer, that I was raised in a Church that doesn't restrict access to communion or salvation. She said she was going to check out Rev Bolz-Weber's site, I hope she does and this is the first of the good reverend's sermons she reads...

The Last Supper – made by House for All Sinners and Saints 2011

NBW Sermon 8-26-2012 <CLICK HERE to listen along.  Sermons are a spoken event!!
 In the last couple weeks, many of us here have been lucky enough to see a musical called The Book of Mormon.  It’s an irreverent and profoundly funny look at the culture of religion in general and the origins of a distinctly American religion in particular.  I personally thought it was hilarious and found myself snickering at what feels like some of the crazier ideas of Mormonism – things like, and I could be wrong about this, but the belief that good Mormon men get to eventually have their own planet.  But it didn’t take long for me to stop snickering and lean over to my husband Matthew and say…yeah but the thing is, we claim to eat the flesh and drink the blood of a guy who lived 2,000 years ago.  Who’s crazy now?  I mean, all religions are weird, we’re just used to ours is all.
Every 3 years the assigned readings during the Summer include 5 weeks working our way through the 6^th Chapter of John and what is called the Bread of Life Discourse. And let’s just say that if Trey Parker and Matt Stone wrote a musical called the Book of John they’d have plenty of material from just this chapter alone.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve gone from the feeding of the 5,000 to Jesus walking on water in the middle of a storm at sea, (by the way, Jesus walks on water during a storm at sea so often in the gospels that I’ve started thinking it was less about being miraculous and more about just getting in some cardio), anyhow, then the crowd chased him down demanding more bread and then he goes and says that he is the Bread of Life come down from heaven which angered the nice religious folks, and rather than backing off he makes it even weirder by saying whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life.  Which is where we pick up today when some of his disciples are like “Uh Jesus, That teaching is HARD…who can accept it?” And many of them leave.  And I have to say, I don’t really blame them.
This teaching IS hard. But honestly, Jesus had a lot of sayings that were HARD.  Sayings like, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, You who are without sin cast the first stone, sell all you have and give it to the poor, The first shall be last and the last shall be first and if you seek to save your life you will lose it. I totally understand the reaction of these disciples who say these teachings are hard, who can accept them.
But this week I started to wonder if maybe those disciples didn’t have to leave Jesus…I mean, when we make the accepting of hard teachings the litmus test for being a follower of Jesus I wonder if we are perhaps missing the point all together. Recently I was describing how many different types of people come to this church and was asked by a colleague what it is that unites all the people here at House for All Sinners and Saints. Is it a certain belief, they asked?  I looked at them and was like, What, in a doctrine? Of course I answered No. I mean, I have a very clear and perhaps shockingly Orthodox Lutheran theological perspective, but honestly, you guys believe all sorts of stuff.  Trust me on that. A few of you are theologically Lutheran, but the rest of you guys are everything from Agnostic to Evangelical and strangely I think some of you are both at the same time.  So while we are pretty Christocentric here, I mean, pretty into Jesus, accepting a certain doctrine is ultimately not what unites us. /// I think what unites us isn’t a doctrine, it’s a table – a table that is open to all in which we receive this Bread of Life come down form heaven.  The body and blood of Christ is what unites us and makes us a church. Hopefully not in a prideful see how inclusive we are way, but in a Lord to whom shall we Go? You have the words of eternal life way.
We are all welcomed each week with the news that we have an open table at House for All and that means that everyone without exception is invited to receive the bread and wine which for us is the body and blood of Christ. And some of us have perhaps grown so used to this that we don’t realize how radical that is given the history of Christian practice.  For as much difference there is in the Christian church…Roman Catholicism, snake-handling Pentecostalism, polite Presbyterianism, emotional Evangelicalism, Intellectual Lutheranism – for as much as we differ, the one thing most Christian traditions actually have in common is some form of communion… which makes it all the more ironic that the very thing we all seem to have in common is the thing that so often divides us.  A lot has been spilled in the history of the church over issues of who gets to take and serve communion…a lot of ink and a lot of blood.
Sadly, the way we as Christians have historically responded to the gift of the Eucharist is to make sure that we understand it, then to make sure we put boundaries around it and then to make sure we enforce both the correct understanding and the correct boundaries. But on the night Jesus was betrayed he didn’t say “this is my body broken for you…UNDERSTAND this in remembrance of me….he didn’t say ACCEPT this or DEFEND this or BOUNDARY this in remembrance of me he just said do this in remembrance of me.
It IS a hard teaching.  That God would be made human and walk among us, that this Christ would offer his own flesh for the sake of another world, that he would do this knowing what scoundrels sat around his table the night he was betrayed and that he would do it anyhow saying take and eat this is my body broken for you do this in remembrance of me.  And when we at House start to feel even slightly self-congratulatory about our inclusivity, we might do well to remember two things. One: the 12 disciples who sat around that table included Judas the Betrayer and Peter the Denier and the reason Judas and Peter makes us cringe is that there is that of the Christ betrayer and the Christ denier in all of us and it is precisely THAT part of us which Jesus seeks to make whole with his own broken body.  And 2, every time we enter this space we pass that mural of the Last Supper that we created last year and that the disciples in the mural were created out of images of people or that within ourselves that we wish were not invited to the table.
This teaching is HARD.  Who can accept it.
It is hard to accept that our enemies receive the same forgiveness and grace and redemption as we do but sometimes it’s even harder to accept not just that God welcomes all, but that God welcomes All of me, all of you. Even that within us we wish to hide: the part that cursed at our children this week, or drank alone, or has a problem with lying, or hates our body, that parts within us that suffer from depression and can’t admit it, or is too fearful to give our money away, or is riddled with shame over our sexuality or cheats on taxes …all these parts of us we wish Jesus had the good sense to not welcome to his table are invited to taste and see that the Lord is Good….all of who we are is welcomed to his table to see that the gifts of God are free and for all and for all.  This teaching is Hard…who can accept it.
As your preacher today, please hear that I am not asking you to accept it.  I’m only asking you to do it. Because here at this table, you can bring the most broken pieces of your life, here you can bring the most broken pieces of this world, here you can bring the most broken pieces of yourself, and you can receive with no payment or worthiness on your part, the equally broken body of Jesus Christ. You need not understand it or accept it.  You need not put boundaries or defenses around it.  You need only do it. So come with all of who you are and receive the living bread come down from heaven. Receive life and forgiveness and salvation with all the other broken saints and gleaming sinners for it is this that unites us in the love of a powerful God.  Amen
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/08/this-teaching-is-hard-who-can-accept-it-a-sermon-on-the-eucharist/ 

Sermon about Mary Magdalen, the massacre in our town, and defiant alleluias 22JUL12

THIS is the most sincere response to the horror of last Friday's (20JUL12) mass murder in Aurora, Colorado I have heard or read. Don't miss the real feeling and meaning of the message by just reading it, take the time to listen to it, to hear the emotion, the tears of Rev Bolz-Weber and the voices of the congregation, and if so moved, share this with others. You may also want to see my post on the reaction of the Amish community of Nickel Mines, PA to a mass shooting of children and how they were able to forgive the killer at AURORA, CO & NICKEL MINES, PA MASS SHOOTINGS AND FORGIVENESS 26JUL12 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/aurora-co-nickel-mines-pa-mass.html
From The House For All Sinners And Saints' Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber....

by Brother Robert Lentz

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look^* into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,^*‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her. -John 20

NBW Sermon 7-22-2012<—–click here to listen (i sing, and cry…seriously)
As a woman preacher, I can’t help but love St Mary Magdalen.  She was the first witness to the resurrection.  When I first discerned my call to be a preacher I got a tattoo of her on my forearm – it’s from a rare depiction in ancient Christian art – of her proclaiming the resurrection to the apostles.  I felt that when I needed to I could borrow her strength. And since today, July 22^nd is her feast day we decided weeks ago to ditch the normal Sunday readings and celebrate her as an important saint to us.
But then Friday happened.  I was still in New Orleans when I saw the news of the shooting.  After praying that you were all safe I soon thought “we can’t really hold a celebration of a saint today…it just wouldn’t make any sense”
I had gone to New Orleans with an idea for a sermon on Mary Magdalen – a sermon about who gets to speak in the Bible and who gets to be named and blah blah blah.
And just as I was about to ditch it all and go with the regularly assigned reading for today I went back and again read this story of Mary Magdalen at the tomb and realized, given the violence and terror thrust upon our community this week, that maybe Mary had more to say about it than I could.  I decided again to borrow strength and voice from her.  So were I a pastor who titled her sermons this one would be WWMMP – What Would Mary Magdalen Preach?
I think Mary would not shy away from naming the darkness and despair of an event like Friday’s massacre.  She was familiar with darkness after all– Luke tells us that it is from Mary Magdalen that Jesus cast out 7 demons.  Then having been freed from her demons she followed Jesus and as the text tells us, even supported the ministry from her own pocketbook. And at the end it was Mary Magdalen who did not deny Jesus nor betray Jesus nor high tale it out when things got rough but she with just a couple other faithful women stood at the cross.  And after Jesus died, it was Mary who came to his tomb, as we are told, while it was still dark.
My Bishop Allan Bjornberg once said that the Greatest spiritual practice isn’t yoga or praying the hours or living in intentional poverty although these are all beautiful in their own way.  The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up.
And in some ways Mary Magdalen is like, the patron saint of just showing up.
Because showing up means being present to what is real, what is actually happening.  She didn’t necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think….but none of that is nearly as important as the fact that she just showed up.  She showed up at the cross where her teacher Jesus became a victim of our violence and terror.  She looked on as the man who had set her free from her own darkness bore the evil and violence of the whole world upon himself and yet still she showed up.
I think St Mary Magdalen, were she your preacher, would be braver that I.  She would not shy away from the dark reality of innocent people slaughtered while it was still night.  She would show up and name the events of 2 days ago exactly what they were: horrific, evil, senseless violence without a shred of anything redemptive about it.
And I think that were Mary Magdalen here she would have very little tolerance for the platitudes and vapid optimism of so much overly-churched Christianity.  Those are simply luxuries of people who’ve never had demons.  But equally would she abohor nihilism or the idea that there is no real meaning in life – ideas present in so much of post-modernity…that too, is a luxury but it is one of those who have never been freed from demons.
I think she would show up and tell us that despite it all despite the violence and fear that it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people and always, always it is worth it to sing alleluia.  For surely the devil hates the sound of it.
Speaking of which, I thought for a moment of cancelling Beer & Hymns on Friday night.  We have so much fun at that event and I though that perhaps it wasn’t the right thing to do that night. Thankfully that thought only lasted a moment.  Then I posted on Facebook that that night we would still gather to sing praises to God, for, as the funeral mass says even as we go to the grave still we make our song alleluia.
And then after Beer & Hymns we sat in a noisy Denver bar and sang Vespers together, we sang our prayer to God, and in our singing I heard a defiant tone.  The sound of a people who simply will not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking each of our names drowns out all other voices.
It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties and the deafening uncertainty – because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name. Because in baptism we are a people marked by the cross of Christ.  Upon our foreheads is the mark of violence and death but this violence and death has been overcome by the love of a God who in the 3 days between Good Friday and Easter reached into the very bowels of hell and said even here I will not be without you.  //This is the God to whom we sing.  A God who didn’t say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone. A God who shows up.  In the violence of the cross, in the darkness of a garden before dawn, in the gardener, in a movie theater, in the basement of a bar.
In 2010, on that first evening after the earthquake in Haiti, news reports came in that said that when night fell on the streets of Port AU Prince people were singing hymns and psalms. Blessed be God, they sang.  People were singing praises to God amidst their entire world destroyed.
It’s important to note that to sing praises to God amongst destruction and violence is not the same thing as saying Hey God we think you’re awesome for allowing these horrible things to happen.  To sing praise to God amidst destruction and violence is to simply put evil in it’s place.  It’s to draw a line and say here and no further.  For the devil surely hates the sound of alleluia.
This is why here at House on the evening of Good Friday we took the purple tulips that we had laid at the cross during the liturgy and we drove to where a teenage boy had shot and killed another teenage boy the week before. We laid those holy flowers at the site of the murder and we sang Holy God Holy and Mighty Holy and Immortal have mercy upon us.
Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples like Mary Magdalen.
Because to be disciples like Mary Magdalen is to show up.  It is to be a people who stand – who stand at the cross and stand in the midst of evil and violence and even if we are uncertain we are still unafraid to be present to all of it.   We are unafraid to name the dark demons of evil and to call a thing what it is. And to be disciples like Mary Magdalen is also to be a people who weep. A people who show up to the tombs and weep.  Weep for ourselves and weep for each other and weep for our city and weep for dead 6 year old girls.  And to be disciples like Mary Magdalen is to be a people who listen and turn at the sound of our names.  Amongst the sounds of sirens and fear and isolation and uncertainty and loss we hear a sound that muffles all the rest: that still, small voice of Christ speaking our names.  And finally, the very reason we can do these things is not because we happen to be the people with the best set of skills for this work.  Trust me, we are not.  But the reason we can be disciples like Mary Magdalen – the reason we can stand and we can weep and we can listen is because finally we, like Mary are bearers of resurrection.  We know that on the 3^rd day he rose again.  We do not need to be afraid. Because to sing to God amidst all of this is to defiantly proclaim like Mary Magdalen did to the apostles, that death is simply not the final word. To defiantly say that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness can not will not shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
Amen.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/07/sermon-about-mary-magdalen-the-masacre-in-our-town-and-defiant-alleluias/ 

Sermon on Fear, Self-centeredness and the Storm at Sea 24JUN12

DO yourself a favor and click the link to LISTEN to this sermon by Rev Nadia Bolz-Webber.....
 
NBW sermon 6_24_2012 <——- Click here to listen along. Preaching is a spoken art form!
This might come as a shock to all of you, but I have not always gotten everything I’ve wanted.  And I’m sure unlike all of you…sometimes I blame God for that.  As a matter of fact, there are things in life that I prayed like hell to either get or to keep – because I knew if I could have them I would be happy and all would be well.  And yet, I did not get them.  Some of these were slightly more critical than others.  When I was 9 I wanted a ventriloquist’s dummy I saw in the Sears catalogue and didn’t get it, when I was 14 I wanted my disfiguring auto-immune disorder to go away and it didn’t, When I was 22 I wanted to be able to drink like a lady and I couldn’t.
I had reasons, good reasons for God to do these things for me. I had a certain way I wanted things in my life to work out and when God didn’t make these simple things happen, things I deserved, things that would make me happy, I wondered why God was not doing what I wanted God to do.  I wondered why God didn’t seem to care. And by the way, why has God abandoned me?
Here in this church in the last few months things have happened in your lives which you desired and things have happened in your lives for which you have suffered.  you’ve buried one of your own, gotten new jobs, endured the death of your parents, birthed your babies, lost your jobs and finalized your divorces and announced your engagements.  Some of these things you would choose and some you would not.  Some of these things made you happy and some made you miserable and yet ….God was still present in all of it. Not just the stuff that felt good but also the stuff that felt awful.  God’s presence with us and love for us simply cannot be judged on the basis of how things feel to us.
I think that’s one of the issues in our Gospel text today about the storm at sea.  The disciples assume Jesus doesn’t care that they are in peril.
But maybe that’s where feelings can get us into trouble. I feel close to God therefore God must be close.  I feel abandoned therefor God must be far off.
I’m more and more convinced, not that how we feel is unimportant, but that how we feel is not the gauge of reality we’ve been told it is.  A lot of time when I meet people for pastoral care and they are in the middle of a storm I end up saying to them “I think you’re actually doing better than you feel”
See, when our faith in God is directly correlated to how we feel about our life maybe it’s a bit askew.  Because we can so easily think God is indifferent because God isn’t doing what we think God should do if God really loved us and we totally mis that fact that at least God’s in the dang boat with us!  Jesus never left them, he just didn’t act the way they thought he should. And that made them feel bad.
God caring about us doesn’t always end up looking like God doing for us what we think God should. Because sometime the faithfulness of God actually looks like the fact that there is a better story than the way you want things to work out.
This week I started to wonder about the role fear plays in all of this.  Because in the end, it is my desire for the story of my life to unfold in a certain way with particular casting, props, setting and storyline that creates fear in me – since fear is usually about either not getting something I want or something I love being taken away.
And fear is what the disciples experienced in the boat that day when faced with a storm and a messiah who didn’t act like he cared.
In our Gospel reading we heard that after a day of teaching, Jesus and the disciples left with some other boats to go to the far side of the Galilean sea…there was a great storm and they were afraid and to top it all off Jesus was being useless.  So useless in fact that he was actually napping…on a cushion. (just parenthetically for you Bible nerds: this story appears in varying forms in all 4 of the gospels, but God bless him, Mark is the only one of his fellow gospel writers who mentions that there was a pillow involved) Anyhow, the disciples are freaking out thinking they are going to die.  They look at their situation and see that the cast isn’t acting how they are supposed to and the script isn’t unfolding the way they thought it should if Jesus really loved them.  So they wake Jesus up saying “don’t you care we are perishing?”.  Jesus then stilled the storm and said “why are you afraid?”
Why are you afraid? Is an eternally valid question.
Sometimes we are afraid because we think we are not going to get something we want and other times we are afraid because we think that something we have will be taken away.  And there are many things to explore about when fear is good and healthy and when it’s total bondage but the one thing I kept thinking about this week is how fear is almost always small and self-centered.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve read this storm at sea story from Mark but it’s a lot, and I’ve read tons of commentaries on it and I have never seen anything written about this one thing that that I now think might be important, and that is this: verse 26  And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. So here’s my question: What about the other boats? I mean, the text says that there were other boats with them, which means that the people in those boats were experiencing the storm too.  So maybe in their fear the disciples forgot about anyone but themselves.  They wanted Jesus to help them, to act toward them in a certain way.  But is God not the God of those in the other boats as well?
What I mean is this: sometimes when we get so wrapped up in how we think the story of our lives should look: the cast and setting and  plot, we forget about the other boats.  Maybe we think God’s faithfulness to us has to look a certain way when the fact is that sometimes God’s faithfulness looks like the fact that there is actually a better story than the way you want things to be.  And that better story is always a bigger story.  A story with a lot of boats other than ours.
We can easily forget about God’s ability to use our storms, our struggles, our disappointments to help others.  I know for myself that despite my fears and desires, that it is not my blessings and strengths and skills that have been of use to others nearly as much as my recovery from addiction and my difficult medical history and my failings. Yet if I had gotten what I wanted, if God had acted at the time in a way that I deemed to be loving and faithful toward me, so little of what I have to offer now as a person and a pastor would be available to others.
To be clear, this is not the same as saying that your fear and crises and loss are not real in a totally painful way.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t feel bad when there are storms in your life, it’s just that God’s redeeming action in the world involves a lot of other boats. I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of how God should act.  I can’t imagine that God doesn’t reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of my understanding of what is happening in my own life.  And even though it doesn’t feel like it in the moment, In a way that’s actually good news, because you need a God who is bigger, more nimble and mysterious than your ability to understand God.
We may want our own personal Jesus for our own little private boats, but God’s dream for the wholeness of all of creation is a dream that we are drawn into through the Gospel and through the Eucharist and through the water of baptism and it’s a story that includes a lot of boats and for sure it’s a bigger, better story than any of us could come up with on our own. So good people of God,  Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Amen.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/06/sermon-on-fear-self-centeredness-and-the-storm-at-sea/#comment-7289

A Palm Sunday Sermon on Why We Don’t Go Straight From Hosanna! to He is Risen! from REV NADIA BOLZ-WEBER 1APR12

WHAT a beautiful sermon, a beautiful way to start Holy Week! 

(On Palm Sunday I had the honor of preaching at Highland’s Church in denver.  Highlands is an open and affirming Evangelical church and I’m good friends with their incredible pastors)
Palm Sunday Sermon at Highlands Church <——- Click here to listen along!
Well, here we go.  It’s Palm Sunday. And so Holy Week begins.
Palm Sunday used to be just Palm Sunday in Lutheran churches.  But now it’s Palm slash Passion Sunday.  We felt we had to do that because people weren’t showing up for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services.  It was kind of sneaky. They were going from the triumphant “Hosanna” of Palm Sunday to the glorious “He is Risen” of Easter Sunday without going through the horrifying “Crucify him!” of Good Friday.
So Lutheran churches started making today into Palm –slash- Passion Sunday so that we were sure people would hear the scriptures readings of the Passion of our Lord otherwise known as the betrayal, denial, insulting, spitting, beating, suffering death of Jesus of Nazareth.
And hey, I understand the impulse.  Who doesn’t want to go from glory to glory and just skip the messy embarrassing condemning stuff in the middle.
It seems reasonable to me that people choose to go from the Big Parade to the Empty Tomb and skip the stuff that makes them uncomfortable: stuff like how Jesus ate his last meal with the people he loved most, all of whom (perhaps like me) would betray abandon or deny him, that these friends (perhaps like me) couldn’t even stay awake while he prayed in the garden, that the crowd (perhaps like me) would strike and taunt him for not living up to their expectations, that the people would (perhaps like me) shout crucify him! And twist him a crown of thorns, that passersby would (perhaps like me) shout “for God’s sake, save yourself”.  Because we would save ourselves.  And the fact that Jesus got himself killed in a totally preventable way never once showing enough self-respect to fight back or get himself off that damned cross…well maybe he had it coming.
So if we can just go from the Palms of the parade to the lilies of Easter we can avoid feeling bad about ourselves, and avoid feeling more than a little embarrassed for Jesus.
That’s the problem with the cross it feels either senseless or condemning and sometimes both.
I know for myself that at the fundamentalist church I was raised in I was taught that the cross was about the fact that, because I was bad God had to send his little boy…and he only had one,  and God had to send him to suffer and die a horrible death because – well,  someone had to pay for the fact that I’m bad.  And therefore being a Christian meant feeling bad enough about all of this that you would then try much, much harder to be good.
So almost every Sunday growing up we’d hear readings about the crucifixion and my 12 year old self would be tortured by how the sins I’d committed that week were why God was angry enough to kill his own son. Sins which generally involved things like, you know: using swear words and eating the banana my sister was saving for her breakfast.
I’m not sure which is worse about what I was taught: the fact that we had somehow made God out to be a divine child abuser or that we had made God out to be an angry loan shark demanding his pound of flesh.
Either way, I don’t think that’s really who God really is.  But I do think that whole mess is what we get when we think the cross is about us and not about God.
No wonder people want to go from glory to glory and skip the cross.
But when we think the cross is about us, the only view we can have of God is of God standing in heaven with folded arms looking down at the cross in judgment. Judging us, and punishing Jesus.
But the thing is, God isn’t standing above the cross.  God is hanging from the cross.
The problem starts when we think we can know who God is by just looking at who we are and then projecting that up really big.  We’re vengeful so God is vengeful.  We are power-hungry so God is power hungry.  We want to smite our enemies so God wants to smite our enemies. That’s why it’s hard to imagine that God would willingly choose to be poured out for us on the cross because, well, we’d never do a thing like that.
Yet in the end, it’s like that quote from Einstein “the same thinking that created a problem cannot solve the problem.” We cannot be saved by a God who is just like us but bigger.  A bigger badder version of the worst parts of us or a bigger better version of the best parts of us can’t save us.
But the good news is that there is a reliable way to legitimately know about the nature of God. And it’s never to look at ourselves.  And it’s always to look at Jesus.  Jesus is God’s self-revelation.  Jesus is like God saying This is how I want to be known. It’s like God is telling us: will you stop your projections already and just listen to Jesus, watch Jesus, follow Jesus so that you can really know who I am.  The way to know the Father is through the son, anything else ends us being about us and not about God. And what’s wild is that we most notably can see who God is in how God chose to reveal God’s self in a humble cradle and on a human cross.
Because on the cross we don’t see a legal transaction where Jesus pays our debt.  We see God. The Word made flesh hangs from the cross as though God is saying “I would rather die than be in your sin accounting business anymore”.
From his rough hewn throne of a cross Christ the King looks at the world and no one escapes his judgment…those who betray him, those who execute him, those who love him, and those who ignore him. He judges us all. From the cross the pronouncement is made and the judgment is ….forgiveness. Forgive them Father for they know not what they are doing is an eternally valid statement. From his cross Christ loves the betrayer, the violent, the God killer in all of us and despite our protests he will not even lift a finger to condemn those who put him up there.  Because it is finally only a God unlike us- a God who enters our human existence and suffers our insults with only love and forgiveness who can save us from ourselves.  It is only a self-emptying God walking among us as Christ Jesus, who, in the words of St Paul, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,  humbled himself to the point of death— even death on a cross – only this one can save us.
And, I would contend that it is only through the cross that we know that God isn’t standing smugly at a distance but that God’s abundant grace is hiding in, with, and under all this broken stuff in the world around us.
Because while the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross is not about you.  It is certainly FOR you.
In fact, God is so for you that there is no place God will not go to be with you.  Nothing separates you from the love of God in Jesus….not insults, not betrayal, not suffering, and as we will see at Easter – not even death itself.
So don’t go from glory to glory and skip the cross, because as Christ’s broken and blessed body you move into this week with only one certainty:
that as you enter it, you do so in the company of a self-emptying God who pursues you and saves you with relentless, terrifying love and who ultimately will enter the grave and the very stench of death in order to say even here, even here I will not be without you. Hosanna in the highest indeed. Welcome to Holy Week.  Amen.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/04/a-palm-sunday-sermon-on-why-we-dont-go-straight-from-hosanna-to-he-is-risen/