Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy, and eat. Come, buy wine and milk. Without money. Without price.

What a strange way to run a market, right? No cash register. No worrying about the budget. Isaiah’s God lays out this giant spread of the good stuff. And then, before you can reach for your wallet, he tears the price tag off.

I’m thinking about this right now, because trying to make a good goodbye is exactly when we start reaching for the ledger.

We start to tally it up. Almost three years of Jonas... Was it a good run? Did I get my money’s worth? Did I say thank you enough? Did he?

This parish made me a pastor, which is a high honor and a kind word. But I’ve always been uncomfy with what the title literally means. Pastor means shepherd. And in a season like this, “The shepherd is leaving” sounds a lot like “The feast is leaving.”

“When he’s gone, does the food stop?”

But here’s how I see it...
I was never REALLY the shepherd.

At best, I’m a sheep who can sometimes point at the real Shepherd where the other sheep can’t. But I’m not the Shepherd.

Sure, I dress the part: the robe, the priestly poncho, the divinity degree.

But what I really am is a waiter. I carry bread from a kitchen I didn’t build to a table I didn’t set, and I set it down in front of you. That’s the whole job.

But back to Jesus, whose world is caving in in the gospel scene. He’s just gotten word that his cousin John has been killed. Beheaded, actually, which is a rough way to go. (Thanks for letting me off easy, CLC. I digress!)

It speaks volumes that even God, in Jesus, needs to grieve. To maybe shake his fist at the sky and bawl, I dunno.

But crowds are crowds, and they find him. Five thousand of them. Hangry and demanding his help.

He had no noise-cancelling headphones, unfortunately. No ‘Do Not Disturb’ setting on his phone. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted FOR HIM.

The disciples run the math first. Five loaves, two fish, for thousands? Doesn’t compute; there isn’t enough. But Jesus, heartbroken and exhausted, ignores the math and feeds them until nobody can finish their plate.

That’s the God we’re dealing with. The one who, on the worst day, still over-caters.

So hear me, church.

You are not losing the feast. Yes, you’re losing the guy who passed the bread for a while. And that’s real.

But the bread stays. The Host stays. The real Shepherd was here long before I was.

I didn’t bring the grace of God to Aptos in the trunk of my car. It was already here. Thick as the June fog. Here in every saint we’ve laid to rest from this room. And here in each of you now.

These last few weeks, so many of you have wrapped my family up in meals, cards, hugs in the narthex, prayers.

But you didn’t switch that on for me. It’s who you are, week after week. Someone lands in the hospital, you show up. Someone new walks through those doors, and your welcome is warm and unforced.

By the world’s math — the disciples’ math — that makes no sense. But you set a place for people who can’t pay you back. You feed each other for no good reason at all.

This is a sacrament of Isaiah’s free feast, made visible. You carry the image of a God who spreads a table and tears the price tag off. Sure, you stray. We all do. But the pattern in you is inescapable, like gravity.

But, though the feast will go on, let me just say: I’m going to miss you. This part stings, and it’s supposed to. Like the band Nazareth said so prophetically back in the year of our Lord 1974: ‘Love Hurts’

You let me into your homes, your hospital rooms, the gravesides of the people you love — some of the hardest hours of your lives. You trusted a green over-enthusiastic first-call pastor with holy, sacred things. You have no idea what that’s done for me. And I’m forever thankful.

I think of Jesus in that boat, grieving and celebrating a feast in the same afternoon. We all get to do a little of both today.

You’ll soon get a new waiter; someone better than me at some things, worse at others, and, thanks be to God, entirely beside the point.

And if you want proof this feast was never mine to give or take away, look no further than baby Ace, who we baptize today.

Ace is a few weeks old. He’s done exactly nothing to earn this. He can’t hold up his own head yet, let alone his end of a covenant. In a few minutes we’ll pour water over him and tell him he belongs to God, without money or price. The water does nothing new to him; it says out loud what’s already true: Ace is God’s own beloved, forever no matter what labels the world hands him later. Our job as church is to remind him of this when he doubts it.

He’s not choosing this baptism. He’s being chosen. That’s how parental love works. We don’t wait for our kids to consent to our love before we love them. We just love them. Before their first breath. And what they do with that love is up to them. Well, that’s how God’s love works. It’s how baptism works. A love that precedes our own consent.

But the hardest thing for us is to accept our own acceptance into God’s embrace. We want to consent and sign off on it. But all we can really do is accept it.

Ace’s dad, Miles, first came through our doors alongside AJ, as his helper. And now he and Daniella and their family are here for this blessing. That’s how the feast works: you come in one door, for one reason, and grace quietly sets another place. You think there’s just a little fish and bread. And quietly, God multiplies everything.

Here’s what I know: next Sunday, and every Sunday after, this room will be full of Christ. Sometimes in bread broken and wine poured out. Sometimes in nothing fancier than the Word read aloud and a hymn sung slightly off-key.

Those loaves Jesus broke on the worst day of his life were pointing down the road to another day: a hill, a cross, his own body broken and handed around. The same hands that fed five thousand were opened with nails and gave everything away.

And remember that ledger this sermon started with? We can all set it down. The account is settled. God didn’t wave the bill away, he paid it himself.

On that cross he condemned no one. He opened his arms as if to say: even the worst of what we could throw at Him can’t stop his love for us. That’s the baptismal promise lived to its fullest extent.

That’s the real feast. God’s own body — the God who grieved and loved and lost — given for you, and for me, in our grieving and our loving and our losing.

So before anyone heads for the patio, come to this table and receive the fullness of God. Without money. Without price.

And then, yes, there’s brisket and ribs after the liturgy. (Non-meat options too, of course!) A small echo of the endless feast.

I will say, I’ve got no grand speeches left. I’m all goodbye’d out. But there’s plenty of room in the tank for hugs.

But before that lunch, come to this meal. Everyone who thirsts. The price tag’s been ripped off and the invitation stands: Come and eat.

Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

So there’s this woman and she’s in a kitchen. She’s got flour out — three whole measures of it! That’s a bushel. Sixteen five-pound bags. She’s not just preparing dinner for a few people. She’s preparing a feast for an entire village.

She takes a fistful of yeast and works it down into the middle of all that flour. Mixes it all in. You couldn’t find it now if you wanted to. Then she covers the bowl, wipes her hands, and walks out of the room.

That’s the story. And to that, Jesus says: this is what God’s reign is like.

I mean, He’d already set the bar low. Somebody asked what the kingdom of heaven is like and He said: a mustard seed. In other words, an invasive weed. And in Jerusalem during Jesus’ day, mustard plants were big, gnarly bushes that gardeners lost sleep over. If you were starting a religion, you wouldn’t talk about how invisible it was, and you definitely wouldn’t go with the example of an invasive bush. But there it is.

Notice that the woman leaves. She doesn’t stand over the bowl, checking it every ten minutes like I would. The dough rises in the dark, in an empty kitchen, with nobody watching.

Now, let’s cut over to Solomon from our Old Testament reading today.

God shows up in a dream and essentially says, “Your wish is my command.” And Solomon (brand new on the throne, his father barely in the ground) says: I’m only a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.

In other words: I have no idea how to lead my people.

I don’t think he’s just being humble. I think he’s super self-aware, especially at such a young age.

And God is delighted and points out what Solomon didn’t ask for: long life, riches, the death of his enemies. Look at that list. Every single item is something you could see, point at, count, and control.

Instead, Solomon asks for a listening heart. And God gives it to him at night, in a dream, while he’s asleep and not looking.

What’s great about this is he never grows out of it. Forty years later, Solomon is still someone who doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. The difference is, he finally stopped pretending he was. That’s the wisdom.

Paul says the same thing: we don’t know how to pray as we ought. He doesn’t say, “We pray the wrong way.” He says we don’t know how. And it’s fine, because the Spirit is doing it anyway, underneath our imperfect prayers, in groans too deep for words. Like the yeast and the buried treasure and the mustard seeds, even our praying is hidden from us. The Spirit moves and works in things we can’t see and in ways we can’t recognize.

How does this hit the ground with you?

Maybe you raised your kids the best you knew how. You brought them to church—a good, loving, grace-soaked place of worship. And now they don’t attend, and you have no idea whether any of it took. You might never know.

Or maybe you’ve prayed for the same person for a decade. And as far as you can tell, the needle hasn’t moved one bit for them.

Or maybe you sit across from a spouse who doesn’t know your name anymore, and you talk to them anyway, and you can’t tell if one word of it lands.

The examples and anecdotes are endless...

You marched. You voted. You gave. You argued with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving. And you turn on the news and you’re seriously wondering whether that arc that everyone says is supposed to bend toward justice is really bending at all.

And, sure, the elephant in the room now: you got a pastor, you started to trust him, maybe even like him :) and he’s leaving.

And the flip side of that, from my end of the story, I got called to an amazing church but the winds of life are moving me on. And I don’t know what kind of church I’ll be called to next.

Right now, I have an 18 yo niece in the hospital in Reno because she was riding her motorcycle on the highway and a dump truck illegally pulled out in front of her. She got care-flighted to the hospital. Concussion. Brain bleed. Broken pelvis. Though she’s lucky to be alive, and the doctors say she’ll come out of this okay, she’s got a lot of healing left to do. She’s still non-responsive for the most part.

Every one of these examples is the same pattern. God working in the dark. The unknown. The uncertain.

We hate this, so we squint. We strain. We take inventory and try to read the tea leaves. We try to calculate the future out of the available evidence, because if we could just see it, we could stop being afraid of it.

That’s what Solomon probably almost asked God for, but didn’t.

And that’s the thing about the yeast. It’s not hidden for now, like a delay before the big reveal. Hiddenness is how God does absolutely everything. You can never see the yeast once it’s in the mix. But the dough was always going to rise in the dark. We don’t know why, but apparently, it’s how God works.

We despair when we try to figure out God’s process. But the good news is captured wonderfully by Paul today in his famous letter to the Romans.

His words take me back to a very specific time and place. A few years ago, I was a chaplain at the Washoe County Detention Center in Reno. My supervisor and I baptized over a hundred people there in that year. We’d go to the shower, a guard standing by, and I’d pour water over their heads and mark their foreheads with oil in the shape of a cross.

And right before the water, every time, I’d say this (I’d slightly edit to the second person to personalize it):

Who will separate you from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things you are more than a conqueror through him who loves you. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

These people were awaiting trial and possibly transfer to prison.

And I don’t know what happened to a single one of them. Not one. I don’t know who got convicted, who got out, or who’s still alive. I poured the water, I said the words, I crossed their foreheads with oil, and then, I went home.

So, I guess... I folded in the yeast and walked out of the room.

We’re not able to see God working. Not in our kids, not in our marriages, not in our prayers, not in this country, not here in this church.

But Paul wants to remind us: There is no charge against us. The prosecutor’s chair is empty. The one person entitled to sit in it is inside the detention center setting the captives free without unlocking one set of handcuffs. The saving work is happening deep in the prisoner’s hearts. But even with that, the most highly sophisticated angiogram won’t detect it. It’s hidden.

Now, please know this. The captives aren’t just in cells at detention centers. They’re sitting on pews and standing behind pulpits. And they’ve been set free, but they don’t even know it because it’s all hidden work that can’t be seen. It can only be trusted. This is faith.

So let me tell you what you actually are, down there in the dark where you can’t see it. You’re not just a captive. You’re the treasure in God’s field that He found and sold everything for. The interesting thing about the treasure is it can’t see itself. Again, we’re back to the theme of hiddenness.

The treasure has no idea a man just sold everything he owns to buy the ground it’s lying in. It just lies there in the dark, worth more than the whole field, not knowing.

In a minute, Jesus will invite you to His table where you’ll be given bread and wine. They look like the most common things ever. Nothing fancy. But hidden in them is the realest thing there is: God’s full presence... His body and blood... Given for you. Working in the quiet recesses of your heart, in the dark, just as it has been all along.

Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Quite the parable we have today, right? The parable of the weeds, as it’s called.

I love the servants in this story. You can picture them in your mind. They walk the field one morning and they see weeds. Everywhere. Tangled right in with the wheat.

The servants come running to the farmer with the most reasonable question in the world: “Do you want us to go pull them up?”

I mean, yeah. Right? That’s what you do with weeds. Ask any gardener in this room. You pull them, and you pull them early, before they seed.

The servants here aren’t villains. They’re the employees of the month. They spotted the problem, they reported the problem, and they volunteered for overtime.

And, to this... The farmer. Says...

No.

Not “Be gentle about it.” Or “Naaah, wait until Tuesday.” Just — no. Let them grow. Both of them. Together. Until harvest.

Which, agriculturally speaking, is insane. Robert Capon, who wrote THE book on the parables, admits this is no way to run a farm. And then Capon points out something I’d never noticed before when reading this story: the weeds aren’t hurting anything.

Go ahead and read it again; the wheat’s fine. The wheat’s growing, bearing fruit, doing great.

Nobody’s crop is in danger. The weeds aren’t a threat.

Sure, they’re an offense. They’re an eyesore. The field doesn’t look the way a field is supposed to look, and the servants can’t stand it.

Now — before we get too comfortable — some of us grew up with the other version of this sermon. The rapture-chart version. Anyone read those Left Behind books when they were younger? The version where the whole point is figuring out who’s wheat and who’s weeds and making very sure you’re standing in the right section.

Maybe you’ve rolled your eyes at that. I have.

But here’s the thing about rolling your eyes at weed-sorters: When you do that... You’re sorting weeds yourself! It’s unavoidable!

We all keep a list. It might just have a brother-in-law on it. A politician. A church that does it wrong. A version of yourself from twenty years ago that you still haven’t forgiven. We walk our fields every morning, same as those servants, and something in us cannot rest until every single weed is pulled.

Some people call this “the compulsion to closure.” The itch to get everything resolved, sorted, settled, so that life can finally start. Get the inbox to zero. Get the country fixed (whichever fix you’re waiting for). Get your own contradictions ironed out, so you can be one consistent person instead of a cacophony of contradictions you actually are. Then, we tell ourselves. Then I’ll rest.

The parable has bad news about that plan, and it comes in one small detail. The enemy who sowed the weeds? He sows them at night, and then he leaves. He doesn’t stick around to fight. He doesn’t have to. Because his weeds can’t do a thing to the wheat, his whole strategy is to get the servants to do his work for him. Get the good people so worked up about the bad seed that they tear up the field themselves, in the name of protecting it.

Every purge in history was run by people who were sure they were saving the wheat from the weeds. Every war, too — including the one running in the background this morning.

These particular weeds were called bearded darnel. They were the notorious wheat-mimic of Palestinian agriculture. Until the heads form, they look exactly like wheat. By the time you notice them, their roots are wrapped around the wheat roots underground. If you pull one, you tear up the other. The servants can’t safely separate them.

And neither can we.

Because the line between wheat and weed doesn’t run between people. It runs through them. Through you. Through me. Every one of us is a mixed field.

And to be clear, this isn’t about staying in harm’s way. Getting yourself or someone you love out of danger isn’t weed-pulling we’re warned about here; it’s what the daylight asks of you. The parable is about something else. It’s about the verdict. Who’s ultimately in. Who’s ultimately out. Who deserves to exist.

If God harvested people the way the servants wanted — pull everything with weeds in it — heaven would be empty by lunchtime today. And if we instituted that weed-pulling policy on earth, no one would be left standing.

So we’re stuck. We can’t stop sorting, and we can’t sort straight. We’re at a dead end.

There’s a strange word in our passage today the farmer uses. Our Bibles translate it “let” — let both grow together. Not to Greek out on you or anything, but in Greek, the word used is aphete. It’s the same word Jesus taught us to pray: Forgive. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Same word: Let. Release. Forgive.

The farmer’s response to the enemy’s sabotage isn’t a jug of Roundup or a counterattack. It’s forgiveness. A letting-be spoken over the whole tangled field, weeds and all. Let. It. Be. (Paul McCartney) And in case we thought that was just a nice sentiment from Jesus. One of those hippy-dippy, airey-fairey quips that gentle Jesus says all the time... In Jesus, God went and did it in public. On the cross, surrounded by the people pulling him up by the roots, Jesus says it one more time: Father, forgive them. And when he rises, he keeps the scars... so nobody can ever accuse him of being wishy-washy or changing the policy.

The field was never in danger. The kingdom grows, the parable says, while everyone sleeps. And the sleeping isn’t a failure. The servants worked all day. They planted, they tended, they did everything the daylight asked of them. Amazing. Well-done good and faithful servants. It’s what human hearts and hands are designed for. Good, joyous work.

And then night came, and the seed grew anyway. In the dark, off the clock, with no one watching.

Some of you have worked that field for fifty years — the family, the church, the country — and the work was real. Good. Honest. Thanks be to God!

But the ultimate outcome was never riding on you. That part was always God’s shift. You can sleep.

And the fire? Yes, there’s a fire at the end, and I won’t dodge it. But look at what gets thrown in that fire: all causes of sin. The stumbling blocks. The tangles.

If every one of us is a mixed field, then the fire isn’t coming for you, it’s coming for everything in you that was never you to begin with. The grudge, gone. The fear, gone. The sorter itself, finally, mercifully, gone. That’s not a threat to you. That’s God finishing the weeding we were never qualified to start. The last thing the fire burns is the list we keep of two columns: wheat and weeds.

Until then, we live in the tangle. The brother-in-law stays on the Christmas list, even though you haven’t figured him out yet. You keep showing up to the church that does some things wrong, because, well, so do you. You look in the mirror at someone who’s generous on Tuesday and petty by Thursday, and you stop waiting for that person to get consistent before you let them be loved.

Because someone with scars on his hands and side has already said forgiven over the whole field. So the weeds don’t get the last word, and neither do you nor I.

Right now, the farmer looks at this field — this room, these particular weeds and this particular wheat, all of us tangled together — and he doesn’t reach for the sickle. He sets a table in the middle of the crop and invites you to supper.

Bread and wine, given for you. He’s not waiting for the sorted-out version of you, the you who finally got the weeds pulled in time. He offers it now... For you, as is, tangled roots and all.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

Jesus might have been great at a lot of things. He was a master of parables. The greatest diagnostician of the soul that ever lived. I mean, he’s the Son of God for crying out loud. But a good comedian? Maybe not so much.

Jesus attempts a joke in this gospel passage and I don’t think anyone laughed.

He looks at the crowd here and says: you’re like children sitting in the marketplace, hollering at each other, “We played the flute for you, and you wouldn’t dance! We sang a funeral song, and you wouldn’t cry!”

You can picture this scene if you try... A pack of kids trying to get a game going, and every time, it fails.

Wedding? Nobody dances.
Funeral? Nobody mourns.

Then Jesus delivers the punchline: John the Baptist showed up fasting in the desert, and everybody said, “He has a demon.”
The Son of Man showed up eating and drinking, and everybody said, “Look at this glutton, this drunk, this friend of tax collectors and sinners.”

You can’t win! Fasting is wrong. Feasting is wrong. Piping is wrong. Wailing is wrong. There’s no move you can make in this marketplace that appeases them.

Now, you might think this is a passage about how judgy people were toward Jesus back in the day. And it is.

But I have to confess where I’ve actually met these marketplace children, and it’s not out there. It’s in here.

I have a committee of them in my head. Maybe you have one too. Mine meets at the most inconvenient time: as soon as my head hits the pillow at night. And lately, with all the goings-on in my life, they’ve been in emergency session around the clock. One of them plays the flute: “Be excited! Big things ahead!” Another sings the dirge: “How dare you feel excited. Worry more. Would it kill you to mourn a little?” And whichever one I listen to, the other one files a complaint.

Hopeful? Wrong. Sad? Also wrong. Hold on tighter? Wrong. Let go? Are you insane?! WRONG.

It turns out Saint Paul sat through the same internal meetings a long, long time ago: “I do not understand my own actions,” he writes. He knows the right song. He just can’t make himself dance to it.

It’s hard being a human.

And notice what Paul does not say. He doesn’t say, “I used to be a mess, but then I got serious about my faith and cleaned it all up.” This is the apostle Paul — planter of churches, writer of half the New Testament — saying, in the present tense: the good I want to do, I don’t do. The thing I hate? Yeah... That’s what I do.

If Paul couldn’t get the committee to adjourn, what hope do the rest of us have?

Here’s the part that snuck up on me, though. When I finally listened closely to my own committee — really listened to all that racket — I noticed something. About half the noise was about me needing to be rescued. Needing X to work out, needing Y or Z to not fall apart, gripping every uncertain thing in my life like a life-preserver in stormy water, white-knuckled, as if my squeezing were the thing keeping me afloat.

But the other half of the noise was different. The other half was me assuming a job for myself.

The Savior job.

I need to save this situation. I need to save that person from disappointment. I need to make sure nobody in my sphere ever has to grieve anything or undergo anything hard. I’ll manage it. I’ll absorb it. I’ll fix it.

Well, I have some news that I learned: that position has been filled. For at least two thousand years now. And the interview process, if you insist on going through it anyway, is brutal. The hours are terrible and the results are always lousy.

Look at what Jesus does with the marketplace. He walks right past it. He skips the argument, skips the counter-performance, skips the whole rigged game; steps outside the entire racket and says what’s probably the most beautiful sentence in the Bible:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

Not: come to me, all you who manage your life perfectly and everyone in it. Not: come to me once the committee in your head (or out there) votes unanimously in your favor.

The invitation is this: Come to me, you tired ones. You heavy-laden ones. You who’ve been auditioning your whole life for a game that was rigged from the start.

Here’s the relief of the Gospel: the audition is over. It was never real to begin with. All that time everyone spent judging the talent show, God was out back throwing a party and your name had been on the guest list since before the foundation of the world.

And then Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you... for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

So, I learned a yoke is a piece of farm equipment. And it’s built for two. You don’t wear a yoke alone. A yoke joins you to another animal, and when one of them is stronger, the strong one carries the weight. You keep walking. You keep pulling. But you’re never, ever pulling alone.

I need this congregation to hear that. Yes, my time here is short. August 2nd will be my last Sunday with you. But know this: Whatever comes in my eventual absence — whatever changes, whatever uncertainty, whatever the future holds for any of us — you are not alone. You walk shoulder to shoulder with everyone here, and you’re yoked to the One whose faithfulness is unwavering. His grip on you is calm. Steady. You can trust it.

And I have to preach that same sermon to myself. Because I don’t walk into uncertainty alone either. None of us do. That’s the whole point. The committee in your head will tell you that everything depends on you: your grip, your performance, your saving everybody. The committee is loud. But the committee is wrong.

The other day, it was all too much, so I took this desperate need to be saved and the need to be a savior into prayer that went something like this:

“Jesus, YOU are the one who does the saving. Not these ideal circumstances I want to happen. And not me. You are the savior. And your work is complete. It is finished.”

I boiled it down to a mantra: “Jesus, you are the savior here.” That became the whole prayer. You can say it at night as your head hits the pillow. Say it in defiance of the committee that stirs in your head (or in your email inbox). Say it in the car. Say it when the flute plays and when the dirge drones.

Which means the main thing in this congregation has never been a program, or an outreach effort, or a building, or any pastor, past, future, or present. The main thing is the outrageous, un-earnable and un-loseable grace of Jesus Christ, and it always has been.

My advice to you, CLC, is this: Keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is Jesus’ radical, active and unwavering love for flawed and fumbling people like you and me. It’s the only thing that ever grew anything here.

So, speaking of the main thing. There’s a table set this morning. Jesus’ table. And in a few minutes we’re going to come to it, right in the middle of all our mess, and our questions and confusion... We’ll look each other in the eye, and eat and drink God’s own life. No auditions at this table. No committee approval required. This is Jesus’ church — it always has been. All you and I do is show up as beggars.

And the good news is that with Jesus, beggars are never, ever turned away.

Come to the table. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

In this meal, you become what you eat. Amen.

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Note: Since the video didn’t take, I’ll leave you with this transcript of the homily. Enjoy!

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

When I read these passages today, I started to realize I’ve spent my entire life as a judge.

Unpaid, unelected, yes.

And it’s a job I didn’t even know I had until looking back, like a lot of things.

When I was a kid, I knew exactly who the “bad Americans” were. The traitors. The ones who didn’t love this country the way my family did.

I could spot un-American from across a room. Sure, I was eight years old, and already SO confident in my verdict.

Then, later, I shifted to the other end of the partisan spectrum. (Now, you might think I’m about to tell you how ‘evolved’ I’ve become. That’s not where I’m going.)

What I want you to see is how seamlessly I kept the job. It’s just that the guilty party became the man in the flag T-shirt tucked into his jean shorts. The truck with the big bald eagle decal. Different defendant. Same judge. Same robe. Same nose, high in the air and tilted at the same angle, just pointed in the opposite direction.

It took me a long time to notice that the one constant in my life — through every political conversion, every so-called enlightenment — was me, judging. I thought I’d been on a journey toward better, each step a wiser me leaving a foolish me behind. But the “wiser” me was doing the exact same thing the old me did. The whole time, I’d been (to use Paul’s word) a slave who kept getting sold to new owners while calling it growth.

Romans 6 is hard to read, because Paul takes away the chair we really want to sit in. You know the chair. The one up on the bench, above it all, where you bang the gavel and nobody bangs one back at you. We think if we just get our opinions right enough, we get to be the judge instead of the judged.

But Paul says: there’s no such chair. Nobody’s up on the bench. You’re down on the floor with everyone else, and your name’s on the docket too.

You’re either owned by the thing that makes you sort and sneer and tally (Paul calls it Sin) or you’re owned by grace.

And all that sorting and sneering and tallying? Paul says it pays a wage, and the wage is death. We can’t see this kind of ‘death’ as a punishment God slaps on at the end, like a late fee. This kind of death is a description of what the judging already is.

St. Irenaeus (who we commemorate today) said (in the 100s): “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” When we judge, we keep ourselves dead.

Ask anyone who’s tried to enjoy a 4th of July cookout while silently scoring everyone’s politics, food preferences, and life choices over the potato salad if they feel truly alive doing so; tallying the bumper stickers in the driveway, sorting the guests into sheep and goats before the hot dogs come off the grill. That’s not freedom. Or even a half-decent party. That’s a prison with a flag on it and some sparklers to wave around.

This is exhausting, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live this way anymore.

And here’s the cruel part: you can’t judge your way out of being a judge. The harder I try to stop sorting people, the more I’m sorting myself. Now I’m the judge AND the defendant, prosecuting myself for being judgmental. We see here how the machine eats its own tail.

In about six days, this experiment we call a country turns 250. And the air is already thick with the language of wages: We earned this. We deserve this. We are exceptional, a city on a hill, set apart by our virtue.

Or... If you’re on the other side of the spectrum: We are guilty, irredeemable, a crime scene with fireworks.

But those are the same prayer.

“God, I thank you that we aren’t like other inferior nations.”

And...

“God, I thank you that I’m not like those deluded people who think we’re great.”

One waves the flag and one prosecutes it. But both stand outside the party that Jesus is throwing with their arms crossed, rendering verdicts, and unwilling to go in.

Both are wages-thinking, trying to earn or justify the verdict. And wages-thinking can never rest. It can never just stop and feast. It can never just receive a cup of cold water from somebody who lives, laughs, loves, or votes the other way.

But hear Paul’s but. The wages of sin is death — BUT the free gift of God is eternal life. Wages and gift. Two different worlds that we occupy (or, that occupy us?). And you can’t earn your way into the second one. You can only stop prosecuting long enough to notice the grace that’s already afoot.

The verdict has already been rendered. It came down at a cross, and the final word was acquittal. For everyone. For the flag-wavers and the deconstructors. For the eight-year-old who called half the country traitors and the thirty-something year old who rolled his eyes at the other half. In my 46 years, I’ve basically judged 100% of the population. How’m I doin’? (God, help me.)

The cross is where the whole apparatus of judgment — including my judgment of myself as a lifelong judge — gets nailed up and killed.

The only one who ever had the right to sit on that bench, the only true Judge, climbed down and took the defendant’s chair himself before his execution.

The Judge took our ceaseless judgement and absorbed it, once and for all, in his body.

We don’t have to render the verdict anymore, because the job’s been abolished. There was a massive layoff. The final judgement already happened. The game is over. It is finished. You and I have been laid off as judges, and though it’s torture for our ego, it’s the best news we’ll get all year.

So. Freed from the bench, here’s what I’m gonna try. This Fourth of July, I’m gonna try to NOT hold this country as someone who’s finally learned to judge it correctly. I’ve been relieved of that post. I’m going to pray God helps me to hold this country as a gift. Which is what it is. Not “great” the way a champion is great.

As a Christian, I have to see that our greatness is in our forgiven-ness. We’re a beloved mess on the road home, still smelling of pigs. And the prodigal Father drops everything and runs toward us anyway. And all He has on His heart is love.

Now, I don’t know if God can love an abstract idea we call a ‘country.’ But God loves you. And you. And all of us who make up this country. And every country.

I’ve heard that if you want to hate America, read the headlines. But if you want to love it, take a road trip across it. Meet people at truck stops, yoga studios, backyards, and dive bars.

I don’t think the greatness was ever in the headlines. Never the bombs bursting in air, the exceptional destiny, the city-on-a-hill speeches. That’s the part we keep trying to earn or justify. The part we put on the résumé. The real thing is smaller, and it’s everywhere. I’ve seen it in Little Rock, AR and in San Francisco, CA.

I pray that we can keep our focus on the small cups of cold water given to each other; the welcome scandalously extended across tribal lines. That’s pretty great.

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

But for this to really hit home, we have to realize how in need of cold water we are ourselves! The only people who truly enjoy a cold cup of water are those dying of thirst. Until we see how parched we are, this little Gospel passage flies right over our heads.

Cold water. Welcome. The Gospel is so simple.

It’s the neighbor who’d be your sworn enemy according to cable news showing up with jumper cables when your battery’s dead. It’s two people who live two vastly different lifestyles leaning on the same fence at a Little League game, taking joy in the same kid’s base hit. A cup of cold water handed across a divide the headlines swear is unbridgeable.

That is this country. Right now. It’s messy, but beautiful in a cruciform way if you look through the right eyes. The bummer is that this Divine party was happening on those porches and fences the whole time, and all those years, I was too busy judging to see it.

Because the party Jesus threw before the foundation of the world is already happening. It has a table. And the table is so wide, so vast, that it seats people you and I can’t stand.

So pull up a chair. Enjoy your cold water. And after you shoo the flies from it, pass me some of that warm, crusty potato salad.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

Wow... Quite the gospel passage, huh?
Harsh words, Jesus.

“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
“I’ve come to set a man against his father.”
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

So yeah, uh... Happy Father’s Day?

This isn’t Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild on the felt church banner holding a little lamb. This is a much moodier Jesus we’re getting today.

So let’s not pretend this is a comfortable text. Let’s sit in the discomfort for a minute, because I think we might find a doorway here.

I was in Minden, NV a couple weeks ago visiting family. Alex, Rory, and I used to live there, and it was nostalgic walking around our old neighborhood.

When we reached a certain block, I stopped dead in my tracks and took note. We were in front of the courthouse. And I realized, that’s where I voted, for the first time in my life, opposite my dad.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a homily about partisan politics and who’s right and wrong. It’s about something deeper than that.

Like many of us, I voted exactly the way my most dominant parent did; same party, every time. Not because I’d sat down and balanced the issues and landed there on my own terms, but because my dad was, let’s just say, a man of strong opinions. He was the kind of guy who didn’t just have a favorite side…
He had a favorite side… and several specific and detailed grievances against every other side… and their adherents… (and possibly their families) going back generations.

And when you’re the only child of someone like that, you learn early which way the wind blows. You don’t go against the grain. You just absorb it, the way kids in two different families instinctively know which jokes are okay at their dinner table and which ones get you, ya know, The Look.

My dad died a few years before that particular election.
But when I stood on that sidewalk in front of that courthouse the other day, I remembered the feeling I had when I ticked that box on my ballot...

He’d been dead for years. And I still felt the butterflies in my stomach.
Some old internal alarm going off. As if he were standing right behind me in line, staring right through the back of my neck, seething.

Turns out... Even years after he was gone, I was still performing for that most influential audience of one.

I think this is exactly what verse 36 is talking about when it says “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

It’s the team we root for, the jokes we laugh at, the opinions we keep to ourselves, the version of “normal” we never question.All of it is absorbed so early we don’t even experience it as a choice. We just think it’s... us.

And I don’t think this is only a political thing (even though, let’s be honest, partisan politics might be the closest thing our country has to a national religious war these days).

What we’re talking about here is something more basic to how we’re built.

We’re creatures with mirror neurons wired into our brains. We’re designed to copy each other.

It’s how toddlers learn to talk, how teenagers learn to dress, how all of us learn what’s normal and acceptable and safe. We find ourselves in a group, and without ever deciding to, we start wanting what they want. But there’s an underbelly to this: We also start fearing what they fear and hating who they hate.

Once we’ve latched onto a group, the easiest way to know we belong is to find someone outside the group to define ourselves against.

Houses get divided. Knives come out. And most of the time we don’t even notice it happening, because it feels less like a conscious decision and more like just being our authentic selves.

Jeremiah knew something about this too. He didn’t just disappoint his parent. His whole hometown turned on him. People he’d grown up with were actively plotting against him.

He says, in this brutal, almost embarrassing prayer we read today, “everyone mocks me.”

His own community decided he was the problem, and (as you may know from experience) once a group decides you’re the problem, it’s not easy to convince them otherwise.

He’s not just sad, he’s furious. He wants vengeance on the people who turned on him. The words of Jesus haunt us here...

“...and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

I get it. If my hometown decided I was a traitor for telling the truth, I’d probably want some payback too. I can’t fault Jeremiah for this very normal response, and I’m glad the many editors of the Bible throughout the centuries haven’t smoothed it over.

But here’s where we need to keep it in perspective. To look at this from the other side of the cross. What Jeremiah didn’t have... was Jesus. He lived six hundred years too early. That pivotal verse 39 says,

“Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

So is Jesus saying to just give up?

I think it’s important to remember that he came to GIVE life and life abundant. What he’s talking about here, I’d say, is existential. Ontological, even (at the basis of our being).

The part of yourself that identifies with a tribe, a family, or an authority figure out of safety and fear instead of orienting itself in relation to an eternally loving God... must die. In order for you to truly live.

Jesus isn’t threatening or justifying physical violence. He’s making a diagnosis. He’s saying: the life you’re protecting right now — the one built on keeping the peace, staying in everyone’s good graces, never being a disappointment to those around you or to your own ego — that life is not actually your life. It’s a costume. And it’s exhausting to wear a costume your whole life.

The sword isn’t Jesus attacking your family or handing you a green light for any aggression you may want to mete out.

The sword is what it feels like when you finally stop performing for an audience that’s been running your choices since you were an infant.
A lot of us carry this to our graves, and it’s really a bummer.

This word from Jesus feels like a rupture because, well, it is one. But on the other side of that rupture is something I pray Jeremiah got to experience: actual freedom.

Not just freedom from your dad, your hometown, or former versions of your “#bestself”.

Freedom in Christ is a sturdier kind of freedom, because it doesn’t depend on anyone else changing, dying, or finally approving of you.

In this love, you’re living FROM approval, not FOR approval.

And you don’t have to wait for the funeral. I didn’t need my father to die to be free of the script. But nobody told me there was another way. Baptism already cut that cord. I wish the priest who baptized me had told me that. (Godparents and sponsors, this is your one job!)

Christ already absorbed the rivalry, already took the sword meant to divide us and let it land on him instead. He already opened up a way of being a son, a daughter, a person, that doesn’t run on anyone’s approval but God’s.

You can lose the costume today.

No, you likely won’t shed it entirely. The old loyalty and guilt will probably keep elbowing its way back in — mine still does.

But you can look at the people you’ve been performing for, even the ones who are gone, even the ones still very much alive and still very opinionated,
and feeling, maybe just for a second, something other than fear.

That’s not Jesus bringing a sword to your family. Or handing you a sword and telling you to go, get ‘em. That’s Jesus taking a sword to the chains that bind you and cutting you loose.

Yes, it’s Father’s Day. All the complications and celebrations this day holds are in this room.

My dad was imperfect. Like I am, as a father. And this goes for just about every human dad who’s ever lived.

Families are where the mimicry and rivalry run deepest and cut closest.

But the Father we actually belong to at the very basis of our being doesn’t need your loyalty to know who he is.

He’s not waiting to see which way you vote or which FIFA team you root for, before deciding whether you’re his. He already took that sword and let it land on himself, so you wouldn’t have to keep handing it to the people you love.

With this Father, there’s no audience to perform for, no “us” that requires a “them” just the refreshingly sturdy freedom of being his. Which is to say, beloved, before you’ve proven anything at all.

So today, in a season when it’s tempting to let our loudest tribal voices tell us who ‘our people’ are and who they’re not (yes, gird your loins for more drum-beating from both sides about the 250th birthday of the US of A), maybe the gift is this:

You get to set the sword down too. Because the Father who made you isn’t keeping score the way the world taught you to.

Happy Father’s Day. You’re free.

Oh...
Go, USA! Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

I don’t know about you, but I have some serious whiplash from that Gospel passage today. We’ve got Jesus choosing Matthew, the wretched tax collector.

Then a dinner party full of wretched tax collectors and sinners that the religious authorities can’t stand.

Then a terrified grieving father rushing toward Jesus, to heal his daughter. And not just of a common cough and cold, but... Uh... DEATH.

And in the middle of all that, a woman who’s been bleeding for twelve years reaches out and desperately touches the hem of his robe to be healed.

There’s a lot of action here. But I see one thing these people all have in common: they’re all running head-first into the brick wall of life.

One of my favorite shows is Ted Lasso. Alex and I watched it with much of the developed world during the COVID lockdown. We’d watch it after Rory went to bed (the show is a bit spicey). Now she’s almost thirteen, so we’re rewatching it with her. Alex and I stopped watching part way through the third season and since the fourth season is dropping soon, we’re getting caught up.

Rewatching it now, as an ordained person, one scene really hit me from a pastoral perspective...

Ted has some hangups. He’s a great coach; easy-going and funny, everybody’s friend. But he’s going through a divorce, he has a young son back in the US, and he’s been having panic attacks on the field (or pitch if you’re a true football aficionado) during matches.

The team’s sports psychologist tries to get close to him, and Ted resists. He has a bad taste in his mouth from the marriage counseling that didn’t save his marriage, and he wants nothing to do with therapists. But finally, after a particularly bad panic attack, he hits rock bottom. Shows up in her office curled up on the couch. When she walks in, startled to see him, he says, “Whatcha got for me, doc.”

They get around to talking about Ted’s dad. Turns out his father died by suicide. Ted recalls it. It’s an emotional scene. And then the therapist asks him to remember something good about his dad. Ted says, fighting back tears: “He was a good dad. And I don’t think he knew that. I think if he woulda known how good he was at stuff he didn’t really care about being good at… I don’t think he woulda done what he did.”

And then, tearing up, Ted says: “I wish I woulda told him. I was just so angry. And then he was gone... And I knew right then and there that I was never gonna let anybody get by me without understanding they might be hurting inside. Life is hard. It’s real hard.”

That’s Ted’s vow. That’s his whole ministry, really — this goofy, warm, relentless attention to the person right in front of him. It’s beautiful.

It’s also what Jesus is doing in this Gospel passage.

Life is hard... Real hard... For every single person in this story.

Like Matthew. It's easy to peg him as the bad guy. But if I had to guess, I'd say Matthew didn't get invited to many dinner parties besides the one Jesus threw for him. He was probably pretty lonely. And Jesus walks right up to him and says follow me, and Matthew gets up. Just like that.

It’s as if something in him had been waiting for exactly this divine recognition.

Then there’s the hemorrhaging woman. Twelve years of bleeding. Which means twelve years of ritual impurity according to her religious community, her social world, her sense of belonging. She can’t even approach Jesus directly. She sneaks up behind him, hoping to just touch the hem of his cloak without being noticed.

Now, I know... We get hung up on the transactional part of this story: Have enough faith and be healed. Abracadabra.

But if we fixate on that, we miss what would’ve been the most scandalous moment to a first-century audience: an unclean person touching a rabbi. In public. That’s the story.

But Jesus doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t just snap his fingers, heal her, and move on. He turns around, engages her, and calls her daughter. He restores her, but not just physically. He restores her to love. Communion. Belonging.

I wish I knew the rest of her story. All the text gives us is: ‘From then on, the woman was healed.’ But I think that healing ran far deeper than the bleeding. She could return to her community. She could touch others and be touched.

And maybe you know what this is like. When you’ve been that sick, that isolated, that long, and you’re suddenly called back in? You can’t help but become a blessing to everyone around you. Like Abraham in our Old Testament reading. The blessing isn’t just for him. It’s for the whole world. It transcends lifestyle, culture, tribe, creed. God’s love has to go somewhere. It doesn’t pool or settle or stagnate. It’s always on the move.

Look around you for a second. Every single person in these pews is carrying something. Life is hard. Real hard. And when we see that, it makes sense: God wants mercy, not sacrifice. Or maybe, mercy is the sacrifice. God doesn’t need our piety or zealotry or sacrificial offerings. So with that, we can be merciful. On ourselves and our neighbor.

We can step out of seeing life through the lens of law. We can stop seeing our job as being the final arbiter of right or wrong, good or evil. We can stop obsessing so much on our own identity and tribe and creed. And we can just love in the love that came before us, brought us into being, and will carry us wherever we’re going next. Like Abraham. On the move with God setting up altars of praise and not knowing where or with whom he’ll be communing with next.

So again, look around at your neighbor’s eyes. See what they’re carrying.

Maybe a diagnosis that arrived without warning and rearranged everything. Or a marriage that’s harder than they let on. The loneliness of feeling like everyone else has it figured out (this is universal, btw). The patriarch or matriarch quietly holding the whole family together (financially, emotionally) and lying awake wondering what happens to their kids or grandkids when they’re gone. A young person trying to make their way in a world sprinting towards the unknown.

Nobody’s story here is making the news. But we’re all running into the wall.

And Jesus works right here. In the impossible. In the places where we’ve run out of road. He restores and heals and — as we just watched — brings life clean out of death.

Which brings me back to Ted. Ted Lasso is good at his job and his mission. He really is. But occasionally, somebody gets by Ted. Ted has bad days. He’s going through his own stuff.

But Jesus doesn’t miss anyone.

NO ONE is getting by him. Every tax collector, every bleeding woman, every terrified father, every dead girl. Every person in this room. God knows that life is hard. In Jesus, God bodily experienced this pain. And not one person walks past him without a blessing.

This might come in strange, unexpected ways. It might not look like the kind of healing you or I envisioned. It might not come until after we cross the veil.

But right now, we believe that he’s here. In this bread and this wine. Not grading your personal rightness. Or checking what tribe you’re in. Just turning toward you the way he turned toward that woman. He takes your impurity and gives you wholeness. We are that dinner party of sinners and tax collectors. We are all bleeding and dead in some way. Life is hard. Real hard. But Jesus meets you here. And calls you what you are.

Son. Daughter. Beloved child.

And so it is.

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Drats! Technological issues again! I’ll leave you with this audio re-recording of the homily.

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

How’d you like that Genesis reading?! It’s a long one, right? A very, very long one. We just made it through the entire first chapter of the Bible, all the way from the formless void to the quiet of the seventh day.

You have to wonder: why do we still read these ancient stories?

It’s because creation stories are never just about how the dirt and the sky got here. They aren’t mere historical artifacts. Creation stories are maps of our inner landscape, mirrors of our psychology. The story we believe about how the world began is almost always the script we run to determine how we make our way through a Thursday afternoon. We live out of the origin stories we carry in our bones.

To understand just how radical this Genesis creation poem is, we have to look at the story it was written to defeat.

Thousands of years ago, the dominant global superpower was Babylon. They had a famous creation myth called the Enuma Elish. In it, the universe begins with a bloody civil war among the gods. The king of the gods slaughters the chaos monster, Tiamat, rips her body in half like a dried fish, and fashions the sky and earth out of her carcass.

Then, he creates human beings out of the blood of the defeated rebel god, purely to act as slave labor so the gods can take a nap.

It sounds bizarre, but if we examine ourselves honestly, we carry that Babylonian script inside us every single day. It’s wired deep into our survival-driven, tribal nature. We act as though the world is a violent arena where resources are scarce, and the only way to survive is to conquer a monster. Look no further than how our 250th will soon be celebrated by a human bloody cage match.

But this absurdity is no new thing. For at least forty years now—and probably more like forty thousand!—long before smartphones, our television screens and kitchen radios have run this exact script. Media outlets realized that keeping us afraid of a monster keeps us tuned in. We’ve been conditioned to watch a world divided into neat, hostile boxes, told that to figure out who we are, we must first know who we are against. Partisan politics became our identity; our media habits became our practicing religion.

The internet came along and put this on hyper-drive, turning a morning or nightly habit into a twenty-four-hour pocket-sized obsession. It’s a brutal, exhausting law: Prove your loyalty. Defend your tribe. Defeat your rival. Or perish. It’s killing us with division, leaving the body of Christ broken and lonely.

And it’s precisely into that exhausted, battle-weary world that the poetry of Genesis drops... like a piano in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

When the priestly poets wrote these words, they were sitting as captives in Babylon, hearing these violent myths every single day. This poem was their quiet, subversive response:

“No. That’s not how the world works. The world is not born from violence. It may have gotten there eventually, but the world... is born... loved.”

And God saw that His new creation was beautiful and good.

Look at what is not in this story. There’s no monster. No rival. God doesn’t have to defeat anyone to be God. God isn’t an engineer frantically inspecting factory output...

God is an artist stepping back to savor the canvas. God looks at the light, the rolling seas, the swarming fish, the green grass, and all the complexity and life and death that they contain... And God pauses, savors, and calls it beautiful before humans even show up to do a single day of work.

Divine goodness comes before human effort. God isn’t waiting for creation to earn God’s pleasure; God’s pleasure is creation’s very origin.

And then, God says this: “Now let Us conceive a new creation—humanity—made in Our image, fashioned according to Our likeness.”

This isn’t the “us” of a political coalition forming against an outside threat. This is the “Us” of the Trinity—the very pattern of beingness—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—an eternal circle dance of self-giving love, overflowing generosity, and pure relationship. The Triune God has no enemy. Beingness has no rival. The Trinity has no “other” to fight, because nothing exists outside of it.

It’s not up to you to make yourself good; you have been spoken good by a God who cannot stop delighting in you.

This is the scandalous gospel that blows our cultural identity games right out of the water. The good news of Jesus Christ is not a self-help program to make us adequate or pure. The church’s job is not to be the bouncer at the door of the kingdom, checking credentials and sorting the deserving from the undeserving.

The job of the church is to fling the doors wide open and announce that the party has already begun.

Look at the gospel story. The eleven disciples go up to the mountain in Galilee. And The Voice translation includes this wonderfully honest, comforting line: “When the disciples saw Jesus there, many of them fell down and worshiped... But a few hung back. They were not sure (and who can blame them?)”

These are the pillars of the church. The resurrected Jesus is standing right in front of them. And yet, they simultaneously worship and waver. They believe, and they don’t believe. They’re full of faith, and full of doubt.

And what does Jesus do? Does he demand an algorithm-approved statement of absolute certainty? Does he tell the wavering ones to leave the mountain until they get their acts together?

No. He walks right toward them. He commissions them in their complexity and nuance and doubt and faith. He plunges them into the name of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—which is to say, He plunges them into grace all the way down.

Jesus has absolutely no trouble working with broken, wavering, complicated people (meaning you, me, and all our neighbors).

Your doubt doesn’t disqualify you. Your exhaustion doesn’t disqualify you. You are held within the life of God, and you always have been.

So what do we do with this? How do we live inside this relationally Trinitarian shape in a world that wants to tear us apart?

Ultimately, this is a God thing. We trust that God is working healing and wholeness in our individual souls and our collective life. But practically, we start by refusing to let the digital arena consume our physical, relational world.

Listen to Saint Paul’s final words to the Corinthians after serious trauma and conflict: “Finally, brothers and sisters, keep rejoicing and repair whatever is broken. Encourage each other, think as one, and live at peace... Greet each other with a holy kiss.”

That word Paul uses for “repair” is not abstract. It’s the tactile word the fishermen of old used for mending their torn fishing nets. It’s messy, hands-on work. You can’t mend a fishing net over the internet or via an AI chatbot. You have to sit on the dock, shoulder to shoulder, feel the coarse twine in your fingers, and untangle the knots together.

The Trinitarian life is community repair, embodied in how our actual physical bodies come together. It means looking at the person sitting across the aisle—the one who drives you crazy, votes differently, or watches the other news channel—and realizing that they, too, were spoken into existence by the sheer, unthreatened delight of God.

And the ultimate antidote to the arena is right here, at this altar. We don’t come forward as a political caucus or an ideological club. We come as a beloved collection of complex, nuanced people who worship and waver all at the same time.

We take real bread, and real wine. Physical things. And we receive the radical, unearned, unconditional grace of a God who refuses to play our little rivalry games. At this table, there are no insiders or outsiders. Only hungry people being fed by a God of infinite generosity. And made in the image of that generosity.

So leave the old stories at the door. Come to the table, taste and see that the Lord is good. Because that’s the true story. The story of us... God-breathed dirt creatures. Delighted in by a God who takes joy in all creation.

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Since the video didn’t take, I’ll leave you with this audio re-recording of the homily. Happy Pentecost!

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Click here for assigned Scripture readings

I want to start with something the late Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde used to say — and I’m paraphrasing him here, but it went something like this: If you assume people are free, you’ll grow to resent them. But if you realize they’re bound, you’ll have a heart for them.

I think this might be one of the most pastorally useful things I’ve ever heard.

Because here’s what we all do. We walk around assuming that everyone around us (and ourselves, too) is basically a free agent. Making clear-eyed, rational choices. Fully in control of what they do and why. So when someone blows up their own life, or keeps making the same devastating mistake, or hurts the people who love them, we quietly simmer. What is WRONG with them?

There’s a writer named McKay Coppins who spent a year embedded in the world of online sports gambling as a journalist trying to understand what it does to people. And what he found was less about gambling specifically and more about what he calls the “casinofication” of everything.

Picture a sports bar. Full of people watching a game together — cheering, groaning, arguing with strangers. There’s community here. The collective groan creates bonding. All good stuff.

Now picture the same bar. Same people, same game on the TV. But now everyone is on their phone, playing their own private game that no one around them can see. They’re not simply betting on who wins. They’re betting on micro-events only each one, individually, cares about. It’s wild: Apparently, you can bet on whether a Venezuelan drug boat gets blown up between June 1st and 10th. Whether Tom Holland and Zendaya will split up in 2027. Whether famine hits North Korea by winter. (These were real examples Coppins provided). A thousand tiny private games, running simultaneously, in a room full of people who should be together.

Coppins found something in his own experience: when a player he’d bet on fumbled the ball, he didn’t just feel disappointment. He felt hatred. Personal, visceral hatred for a stranger he’d never met. His affections were being quietly reordered by an algorithm, without his consent, and he hadn’t even noticed it happening.

The numbers are staggering. Seven years ago, Americans wagered less than five billion dollars on sports annually. Last year?... A hundred and fifty billion. Nearly half of all men under fifty now have an online sportsbook account.

It gets bleaker: one in five people with a gambling disorder will attempt suicide (a higher rate than most substance addictions). Experts are calling it the next opioid epidemic, and say we’re a decade behind in understanding what’s happening.

This is one specific example of endless examples of what being bound looks like.

The ancient theologians have a Latin phrase for it: incurvatus in se. The will curved in on itself. Turned away from God and neighbor, obsessed with the self and simultaneously the self’s own worst enemy.

We didn’t choose this. But here we are. And you can’t get yourself out of it from the inside.

Look at Peter. Three years walking with Jesus sharing campfires, walks, endless meals. He left his whole former life for this. He knew Jesus. (Can you imagine?) And when the cost finally came — when following Jesus meant risk, exposure, and arrest — Peter saved his own neck. Three times. Not because he was a villain. Because he was us. Even proximity to the most compelling human being who ever walked the earth wasn’t enough to unbind his bound will.

We can’t bootstrap ourselves out of this. We can’t lather up enough sincerity or moral resolve to free ourselves from the inside of a locked room.

Which is exactly the room they were in on that first Easter evening.

The disciples, gathered together. Doors locked. Fear of arrest. Trauma they hadn’t processed. The worst week of their lives, barely behind them. And out of nowhere comes Jesus. Standing in the center of the room. Saying, Peace be with you.

And then he shows them his wounds first. Before anything else, the wounds. He doesn’t show up pretending the bad thing didn’t happen. He shows up wounded, and present, and real.

Then he draws close and he breathes on them. The word John uses here appears in only one other place in all of Scripture: Genesis 2, when God bends down to the dust and breathes into the nostrils of Adam and he becomes a living being.

John isn’t being subtle. This is that moment, again. New creation. The church is born the same way humanity was born: by divine breath, unasked for, unearned, given freely into the face of something that could not give it to itself.

Fast-forward fifty days. Same disciples. Same city. Something happens that nobody planned or manufactured. Violent wind. Flames. These Galilean fishermen begin speaking languages they’ve never spoken, and every person in the crowd (Parthians and Medes and Egyptians and Romans and Arabs) hears it in their own tongue.

Do you remember the Tower of Babel? Humanity was unified; one language, one people. And they decide to build a tower to heaven. This was more about self-assertion than it was architecture.

We will make a name for ourselves. We will close the gap by our own effort.

And they’re scattered. Because how can a project like this maintain any sense of unity? To become self-important, you have to be more-important-than-THEM.

One language becomes many. The community shatters. The will curved in on itself, grasping for its own glory, destroys the very love it was embedded in.

That’s casinofication. That’s being bound. Everyone making a name for themselves. Everyone scattered. We’ve been building that tower for a long time, and we keep ending up in the same place: alone and speaking languages nobody else understands.

But at Pentecost the direction reverses. The human project of Babel goes up and fails. While the divine project of Pentecost comes down to the rubble and restores.

And the crowd’s reaction? They must be drunk.

Peter stands up and says: No... This is what the prophet Joel promised. God is pouring out the Spirit like a libation — like a holy intoxicant — on all flesh.

The western church has spent a long time branding itself as very serious, very sober, very responsible. We’re known as being stagnant and drab; a buzzkill!

But the Spirit isn’t stagnant or drab. The Spirit is not a buzzkill. When the Spirit moves in us, we look like people who’ve been invited to a party with such a generous host that it’s SO good, so undeserved, so liberating, that the only way to describe it from the outside is:

Hey... Are they hammered?

This isn’t enthusiasm you can manufacture. You can’t cure your own casinofication by trying harder not to be casinofied. You can’t unbind yourself from wanting to build a tall fancy tower of some sort.

And before you think this only applies to the wealthy or the addicted, not so fast... The monk in his cell builds the same tower. The activist who has given everything to the cause builds the same tower. The super religious person who never misses a Sunday builds the same tower. The direction and the form of the tower looks different. But the project of self is identical.

What must happen is that you finally, somehow, in your body, believe that the forgiveness is for you. That God’s breath is for you. That the party you assumed was for other, better, more together people... was always already for you. And that belief, when it lands, makes you bold in a way that nothing else does. So bold that you might appear to others as... intoxicated.

So hear this, for whatever your locked room looks like right now.

Maybe it’s debt and shame you haven’t told anyone about. Maybe it’s a private game you’ve been playing that’s hollowing you out. Maybe it’s grief, or fear, or a faith that’s mostly just going through the motions. Maybe you sat down this morning not quite sure why you came.

Welcome to church. And I mean that. Because apparently more people are finding their way back here than anyone expected. After decades of decline, church attendance has stopped falling. And the generation leading the comeback is Gen Z. The young people most saturated by algorithms and apps are now showing up to church more than any other generation. One researcher says it’s because they’re “fed up with a virtual world” and “seeking something real.” I think we’re all tired of casinofication of everything; especially them, since they grew up on it.

So yes, welcome to church.

Jesus sits in this room. Not as an abstraction or a good, heady podcast. But really. In water, word, and wine. He shows you his wounds in the breaking of the bread. He doesn’t pretend the hard thing didn’t happen. And he exhales his eternal, cosmos-creating breath into your lungs.

Peace be with you. Not as you should be. As you are.

Again. And again. And again. However many times the room gets locked.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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I know we’re a long ways from it, but Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday... And I have a recurring fantasy that I’m not particularly proud of.

It hits me every year, right around the time the turkey gets cleared and, yes... the football comes on.

It’s not that things go badly. Nobody fights anymore. We’ve all gotten wise enough to steer clear of politics and religion, given that the left-right and atheist-Christian divides in my extended family are both, shall we say, robust. So we keep it safe. And for a while, it’s genuinely lovely.

But then, at a certain point, the conversation just... kinda stops. With a gentle, collective exhale, as everyone turns (almost by gravitational pull!) toward the large screen hanging on the wall. And what follows is a liturgical movement to the sofa and surrounding sitting areas around the altar of the TV. The room filling with, not alleluias and amens, but rather cheers and grunts directed at athletes none of us know personally, punctuated by observations about a referee’s competence that I am in no position to evaluate.

What I want is to make it past dessert... Together. Having a rich conversation. Into the part of the night where someone says something true and unexpected. And then someone else says yes, me too, and a new story gets told. Connection is sparked. And we leave at midnight knowing more about each other than we did at noon.

So I try... I’m not an extrovert. But I’m a feeler, and I care, and every year, at this moment where I feel the connection start to break, I anxiously compose something in my head and lean in and say it. A question. An observation. An overshare. Something to crack the surface just a little. And it typically lands with the conversational equivalent of a soft thud.

That’s when the fantasy kicks in. If I could just snap my fingers three times and teleport somewhere people actually commune with each other. Like Ireland, where a lot of pubs don’t even have televisions, just sad songs and Guinness: the perfect petri dish for honest conversation. Or anywhere in the southern hemisphere, where people do life together loudly and late. Where we introverts don’t have to work so hard to start a genuine conversation.

I tell you this not because I’m proud of it. But because I am the disciples.

And so (I’m sorry to inform you) are you.

Maybe you don’t want to teleport geographically, but chronologically. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that 14% of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; while nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past.

We are the disciples.

Let’s look at them (us?) in our passage from Acts. Jesus has been raised. And they’re standing on a hill outside Jerusalem with this impossible fact in front of them, and they have two requests.

The first: Take us with you, Jesus!!! Get us outta here!

Because Jerusalem is the city where everything went wrong. Where they all ran. Where Peter said three times, I have no idea who this Jesus guy even is.

If Jesus is going somewhere the vibe is unswervingly harmonious and nobody betrays anybody, yes — take us with you, Lord. Please.

The second: So, Jesus... This is when you fix it, right?

Is this when the kingdom comes the way we’ve been imagining: visible, organized, justice executed according to the blueprints we’ve been drawing up for all these years?

So, two options:
1. Get us out. Or...
2. Make it go our way.

I look at this country and I feel both of these exactly. Right now. I want a church that isn’t corrupt. I want good people in power. I want everyone to have a fair shake. And when none of that materializes on schedule, the Thanksgiving fantasy kicks in. Surely, there’s gotta be somewhere better. Surely, we can execute the right plan.

So we can’t blame ourselves. Neither can we blame the disciples.

Jesus doesn’t rebuke them. He says something that is either the most frustrating or the most liberating thing ever:

Stay.

Now, with Jesus, there’s never just an instruction manual. His words always carry more nuance than we think. He’s saying to stay, but he’s leaving.

Stay, not because nothing is going to happen — everything is about to happen! But you don’t ‘receive power’ by leaving, and you don’t receive it by getting your plan approved. You receive it when you stop managing the outcome long enough for the Spirit to move.

Now... There’s a difference between staying and being stuck. Staying and hiding out of fear.

Between staying and the paralysis of comfort, where you’ve arranged your Jerusalem into something pleasant enough that you’ve stopped noticing you made a choice at all.

Or pure inertia: you’re not here because you chose to be, but because choosing is hard and the couch is right there.

Jesus is not telling anyone they have to stay in danger. He’s not baptizing the endurance of harm as spiritual virtue. You can flee a genuinely dangerous Jerusalem and carry this groundedness with you.

The life of faith is a pilgrimage with real movement, real displacement, real leaving and arriving. Sometimes at the worst times conceivable.

But to them, he says, stay. This is what THEY needed to hear.

Because underneath all that movement travels something that doesn’t depend on the zip code or the political climate or whether genuine Thanksgiving conversation can ever make it past dessert.

The ancient monastics called it stabilitas: a stillness at the center that holds when everything outside is shifting.

It’s important to note that the opposite of stabilitas isn’t leaving. It’s the restless refusal to be anywhere fully.

True staying is active. A choice you keep making, eyes open, trusting the Spirit knows where you are and what to do with you there.

And then, the resurrected Jesus is gone. Lifted up. A cloud, taking him from their sight.

Now, this seems like the sad part. The part where the credits roll.

But what the mystics eventually saw is that what looks like divine departure is actually the revelation of divine saturation. What looks like Jesus escaping upward is Christ being revealed inward.

It’s not that Christ was absent from creation and is now present. The Ascension unveils what was always already true. Christ — the anointing, the ground of all that is — was never absent from anything. The cloud doesn’t take him away. Nor does it change anything about reality. It reveals Christ as the One who was always everywhere, filling all in all, in whom everything has always been held together. The disciples’ eyes are being opened to something eternal they had not yet had eyes to see.

The blessing with raised hands as he ascends doesn’t stop when the cloud rolls in. It was never not happening. The Ascension is the end of his limitation, not his presence.

This is what Paul is praying for in Ephesians: that the eyes of your heart would be opened. The ‘eyes of your heart’ is what the ancient world called your mind.

Christianity is not anti-mind. The mind is not the enemy of faith. It’s actually the primary organ that faith sets out to heal and make fully alive. Paul is asking for a deeper mode of perception entirely; one that sees the world as it actually is: saturated, Christ-soaked, held, carried from within by a love that cannot be contained.

Yes, the Holy Spirit is sometimes like a gentle dove. But more often, it’s more like a big ole’ rusty crowbar. Prying the heart’s eyes open at least every Sunday, more ideally every morning, to the reality we keep forgetting: the party... the cosmic eternal wedding feast... is already underway. It was underway before you and I breathed our first breath.

When this hits the heart, it’s impossible to resist announcing this. To say out loud, to anyone who will listen and a few who won’t, that the bill they’ve been working their fingers to the bone to pay has already been covered. That the love they’ve been striving to earn from life itself was never conditional. That the cross was not a transaction that needed completing before God could tolerate us, but the revelation that God’s love never had fine print.

The work is done.

So we throw this party every Sunday with the barely-containable joy of people who found out the tab was picked up and cannot stop telling strangers.

And then we do something stranger and more wonderful than talking about it.

We eat it. We drink it. We become what we receive: the body of the One who fills all in all, sent back out into a world that doesn’t yet know how loved it is.

Thanks be to God.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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If I had to guess, I’d say that most of us walked in here this morning already tired from a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time with people who aren’t even in the room.

You know... The one that loops in the background while you’re trying to fall asleep. Or rehearsing what you shoulda said, bracing for what someone might think, or scrolling through a feed and feeling more diminished when you put the phone down than when you picked it up.

This is a natural result of any conversation, internal or external, with... (drumroll, please) bad shepherds.

And today, of all days, that conversation gets louder for some of us. Mother’s Day (like Father’s Day) is a complicated holy day. It’s a little gratitude mixed with at least a little grief, or longing, or the frustration of a relationship we can’t seem to patch up.

I invite you to hold all of this gently this morning knowing the love of God is wide enough for all of it.

Ezekiel knew the bad shepherds. Twenty-six hundred years ago, he stood in exile and called out the leaders who fed on the very people they were supposed to feed.

You have not nursed the weak. You have not bandaged the injured. You have not gone looking for the lost.

The shepherds ate the sheep. The sheep scattered. And the most heartbreaking line is probably this one: not a single shepherd went looking for them.

Again, 2600 years ago... This is a tale as old as time.

What’s NEW is that it’s been monetized and optimized. Ezekiel was complaining about a handful of kings. Which is bad enough... But nowadays, we have a whole cast of kings (or bad shepherds) (thousands of them) in our pockets.

And the worst of them have moved off our screens entirely. They live in our heads now: the voice of the parent who couldn’t see you, the teacher who shamed you, the friend who ghosted you, the inner critic who sounds suspiciously like someone you knew in the sixth grade...

We’ve internalized the bad shepherds, and they’re running the night shift in our minds.

But here’s what we need to understand...

The bad shepherds are only the symptom. The real wound is older and more subtle.

Underneath every voice we cannot stop listening to, underneath every performance and every spiral and every 3 a.m. replays that make Sportscenter jealous, is the fear every child has a visceral experience of in the dark: Am I alone? Will anyone come for me? Does anyone even notice or care that I’m alone?

We listen to the bad shepherds because we’re afraid of being neglected. We perform for them because we’re afraid of being unloved. We let them feed on us because on a certain level, we are still the scattered sheep of Ezekiel 34, drifting on every hill, hoping someone (anyone!) will come.

This is the wound the gospel meets this morning. Hear how directly Jesus names it. On the night before he was betrayed by his terrified friends and the world about to come apart, he looked at them and said: I will not leave you orphans.

He didn’t just say, “I won’t leave you sad,” or, “confused.”
Orphaned.

He named the deepest fear of the human heart by its actual name, and then made this promise: I will come to you. The Spirit will be in you. I am holding you.

Which is why Peter can write what he writes. Don’t be afraid of what they fear. Don’t be intimidated. Peter is preaching to people who’ve already been found, and inviting them to finally live like it.

The hope that is in you is the hope of the un-orphaned: the hope of those who know (or at least remember, from time to time), all the way down, that the Shepherd came looking. And finding. You.

And then Peter says the wildest, most wonderful thing in the whole letter. Christ, after his death, went and preached to the spirits in prison. AKA ‘hell.’

The early church called this the Harrowing of Hell. I make sure to leave the word ‘hell’ in when we say the Apostles’ Creed (“He descended to hell” instead of “He descended to the dead”)...

On Holy Saturday, Jesus... Descended. He went DOWN. He broke into every dark place, every locked room, every underworld of the human experience, and spoke his life-giving voice into it. He waited for nothing. He waited for no one to qualify or improve their way out of their own hell. He went, and he spoke the voice of life into it, and he set the captives free.

And as some of you know... Hell doesn’t wait for us to die. A lot of us pop in and out from time to time throughout our waking lives. And it’s only God who can get us out.

The prisons Christ entered are also the prisons inside us. The grief you’ve set aside. The shame you’ve locked in a back room. The place where one, if not THE, very first question of your life was asked — am I held? am I safe? will someone come? — and wherever the question was unanswered, Christ has gone there. Every orphaned corner of your own soul is, by design, attuned to this Word like a child’s ear is attuned to her mother’s voice.

Yes... On this Mother’s Day, I want to say something the tradition has always known and sometimes been embarrassed to say out loud.

The voice of God we hear in Christ is, yes, the voice of a Father. But it is also — and maybe first — the voice of a Mother.

Hear it in Ezekiel’s verbs: nurse the weak, bandage the injured, gather the scattered, bring the strays home.

These are not the verbs of a king. These are the verbs of someone who has held a sick child to her breast through the night.

Hear it in what Jesus says: I will not leave you orphans.
In the ancient world, an orphan was the child without a mother; without the one who holds you, covers you, comes when you cry.

Hear it in the Spirit. Ruach, in Hebrew, is feminine. She hovered over the waters at the beginning of the world, brooding the way a mother bird broods over her nest.

1700 years ago, The Syriac fathers called the Holy Spirit Mother. She is the one who comes alongside you, dwells within you, refuses to leave. Pinches your cheeks, hangs up your horrible artwork on the fridge, brags about you on social media, and laughs at your awful jokes.

The Christ who descends into hell to bring forth the captive is doing the most ancient maternal work there is: laboring in the dark, drawing life out of the deep. This is mothering work.

Julian of Norwich said it plainly 700 years ago: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.” Today we lean hard on that second clause.

So whatever your relationship is like to the mothers of your life today — present, absent, complicated, beloved, painful — hear this: you are mothered. You always have been. The voice that has been looking for you is the voice of a Mother who will not be swayed from her mission.

The bad shepherds WILL keep talking. The voices in your head WILL keep their schedule. The world WILL keep charging you for the ache it created. But know this...

They are not your shepherd. Never were. The Liberating King has taken her seat at the center of your soul, and from that center, you can stop defending yourself. You can stop performing for a peanut gallery of bad shepherds you never gave permission to in the first place.

The Spirit has been given to you. Christ indwells you.

So go from here lighter than you came. Let the bad shepherds keep talking. It’s just what they do. But YOU have been given a love you did not earn, and from that love... you can finally let yourself be mothered to the fullest.

Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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In 1945, a young Soviet artillery officer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing a letter. In the letter, he had made some unflattering remarks about Stalin. For this offense, he was sentenced to eight years in the gulag.

Before the arrest, Solzhenitsyn was — by his own later admission — insufferable. For example, he ordered old men out into shellfire so his superiors wouldn’t scold him. One of those old men died. Solzhenitsyn forgot about it for years.

He’d earned his officer’s stars in the war and had, as he put it, developed “a tigerlike stride and a metallic voice of command.” He believed, with the full confidence of a young man on the right side of history, that he was (and these are his words) “a superior human being.”

In light of our Gospel passage today, we might say he was a builder. He thought he knew which stones fit and which didn’t. He had the schematic.

And then, after that letter was ill received... he wasn’t. He found himself on rotting prison straw in a Siberian camp, where it often reached fifty degrees below zero, watching people die for nothing.

He was a rejected stone.

Not a cornerstone. Not even one of the good-enough stones the builders kept in the pile.

He was a stone that his own fellow builders had thrown away. Because the line he’d drawn so confidently between the good people and the bad people, between the comrades and the enemies — that line, he wrote in his later years, “passes right through every human heart. And through all human hearts.”

Including his own.

This is when, in his memoir, Solzhenitsyn writes one of the most shocking sentences in twentieth-century literature: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”

Bless you, prison.

This is the gospel. The place of rejection becomes the place of mercy. The pile of discarded stones turned out to be the quarry where God builds a different house entirely.

Peter says this to a community of Jesus-following nobodies scattered across the Roman Empire:

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received it.

Solzhenitsyn was a “not-a-people” in that gulag. Before that, he thought he’d belonged to the great Soviet people, to history, to the future. But in the gulag, he was floating. Unclaimed.

And then... mercy found him. In the place where he was most rejected.

And the moment he stopped being able to pretend the line between good and evil ran somewhere outside himself, he became, by the grace of God... a people. Claimed. Named. And held.

This is what Christ does. Christ is the cornerstone the builders rejected. Christ is the one whose own body was thrown out of the city as garbage on a Friday afternoon.

And precisely because he was the rejected one, he becomes the praise-maker of every other rejected stone. (You and me. We’re all rejected stones in one way or another.)

Solzhenitsyn wrote that the hardest step in his whole conversion wasn’t surviving the gulag. The hardest step was this (and I quote): “Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought.”

Not what was done to you. But what you did. The sins you have arranged to forget.

Until you face that, he said, you remain — and this is his phrase — “sharply intolerant.”

He wrote this after remembering that old man he ordered into battle who died. Though he probably did countless violent acts like this, THIS was what stuck in his mind as the catalyst to confession and healing.

I know this in myself. I know what it is to have my knives out. To be quick with a verdict and slow with a blessing. To carry around a comfortable certainty that the trouble is out there (in those people, in that institution, that circumstance, whatever) and meanwhile, to not look very hard at the small daily ways that I’m part of the same wounded human story everyone else is part of.

The propensity in me to muck things up. To choose the result over the person. To reach for the snark before the prayer.

That cuts far deeper than a list of naughty things I did this week. Sin is a condition. A malady. One we’re all caught up in together; the whole tired human pattern of violence and condemnation fueled by self-righteousness and justification.

This has personal and communal implications. Right now, we’re living in this illusion that there’s a line that divides two sides: us and them. And our side is the right one. The algorithm is attuned to it just as the human ego is. This is nothing new. It’s been cooking for a long time. But it’s calcified and hardened all our hearts. Which is why these illusory “two sides” can’t even talk now. Can’t be the body of Christ. Activism isn’t battle. It’s relational. Cruciform. Self-emptying. Especially Christian activism.

Here’s what Solzhenitsyn discovered, and it’s something I’m still learning, and what I think Peter is trying to tell us this morning: the moment that this condition is exposed and named and acknowledged inside us... something breaks open.

You’d think this would lead to despair. But on the ground, it leads to relief. Because you no longer have to defend a self that was never going to hold up anyway. You can finally let that failed endeavor go. And you can finally be loved.

And on the other side of that — only on the other side of that — does real love and praise become possible from you.

Speaking of praise... Peter calls us a royal order of priests. And your priesthood is praise. You are called to be praise-makers. And I want to be very specific.

He means today! The grocery checker. Your spouse over coffee. The kid in your house who’s trying so hard to become someone and doesn’t know if anyone sees it. The person at church you’ve been mildly annoyed with for three years. The version of yourself you catch in the mirror and have a hard time looking at.

One personal interaction at a time. The smallest possible ways. Cruciform praise. Praise that costs you something. Praise that doesn’t expect to be returned. Praise that names what is actually true and good in this person, not because you’ve manufactured it, but because God is a good creator. And since God already put it there, your only job is to notice it out loud.

Imagine how different the world would be if Christians re-membered Christ in other people? Called it into being by recognizing it and praising it underneath all of the surface division and fear.

The biggest role of being a priest... Is to bless. Not a shallow Hallmark-ish affirmation, “You’re doing great!” And not a thumbs-up to awful behavior. Something deeper, more real, and specific. People respond to genuine, cruciform praise. It allows space for them to be their beloved selves. Not legalistically perfect. But softer. More honest. More vulnerable. They feel safe. Not judged. So they don’t need to harden or justify. It’s not a tool for manipulation and no one is promising a 100% success rate in the moment.

This is mysterious work, this priestly work.

It hardly ever feels natural. The ego speaks first and loudest. The fear (and subsequently, the attack) speaks first and loudest.

But underneath all of that... is praise. Because God is a good Creator and everything God has made is good. The goodness is just often sleeping. In them. In you. In the whole tired world.

So, go. Wake it up.

As a priest freed in Christ, this is what you are free to do.

And know this... Whatever praise you can muster for others falls hundreds of eons short of the praise God already holds for you.

So come to this table. Come and taste, and find that the Lord is good. The stone the builders rejected has been broken open and laid here, and a strange, mercy-drenched, “once-not-a-people” people has been gathered.

The line running through the middle of your heart and mine is the opening that God uses to bring us all together and shape the new heaven and earth. It’s not out there. It’s in here. With God who redeems all. Amen.

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There’s a version of this morning’s gospel that a lot of us have heard before, and some of us have run away from. It’s a version that goes like this: Jesus says “I am the gate” and what he means is: I am the toll booth. Pay the toll (the right belief, prayer, moral performance) and you’ll get through to safety. Don’t pay, and you’re on the outside, with the goats and the wolves and the unfortunate.

In this version, the gate becomes a credentialing checkpoint. Jesus becomes the bouncer. And Christianity becomes, basically, a lifelong anxious negotiation about whether you’ve paid enough.

Most of us in this room would say we’re past that. We’d say we left that Christianity behind. Or we were never really in it to begin with. We’re mainline. Progressive(-ish, at least). We’re the ones with the Welcome Statement who use inclusive language and believe God’s love is bigger than any toll booth. We’ve deconstructed, and we’re proud of it, and we’re not afraid of this passage anymore.

Amen to THAT!

And now... (You knew this was coming...) I want to invite you to look in the mirror anyway.

Because the gospel has a way of not letting us off the hook just because we’ve figured out somebody else’s bad theology. Luther said the Law is a mirror. And the mirror doesn’t care what denomination you belong to. The mirror just shows you what’s actually there.

And if we look honestly, I think most of us would have to admit that we’ve simply traded in the old gates for newer, more tasteful ones.

The first one that comes to my mind is the gate of political righteousness. The gate we pay tolls at every time we scroll, every time we seethe, every time we tally the political rightness of ourselves against the people around us.

There’s the gate of family, where we ache to have done it right by the people we love, to leave behind children and grandchildren who are okay, and we lie awake at night counting the tolls we couldn’t pay.

There’s the gate of self-acceptance, that lifelong project of trying to be okay with the person in the bathroom mirror, where the inner critic is waiting with a clipboard and a rap sheet.

Those gates vary for each of us. But at the bottom of every one of them — if we keep digging — we find we share the same gate, and it’s the one none of us want to talk about at coffee hour: the gate of mortality.

Death awaits all of us, and worse, it awaits the people we love. Every surface anxiety we carry is finally fed by that underground spring. The political dread, the family grief, the diagnosis we’re waiting on, the phone call we’re dreading... Press any of it hard enough and it bottoms out in the same place: we are going to die, and so is everyone we love, and we don’t know what to do with that.

That fear is the thief’s favorite weapon. Every stranger-voice in our culture is feeding on it, monetizing it, turning it into clicks and outrage and purchases and votes. The thief doesn’t need you to believe in hell. The thief just needs you to be afraid.

The thief comes, Jesus says, to steal and slaughter and destroy. And the thief’s business is booming these days, in every zip code, at every gate.

This is where we are. We thought we’d left the toll booths behind. But it turns out, all we’ve done is just built quieter, more tasteful ones, and we’re standing in front of them, paying and paying, and still exhausted.

And into that exhaustion, this morning, the Risen Christ says: I am the gate.

He doesn’t mean: I am a better toll booth. He means: I am the opening. I am what allows you freedom of movement. A gate in an ancient sheepfold was not infrastructure for extracting payment. It was a living aperture — a place where the flock moved freely, every day, between shelter and pasture. In and out. Back and forth. When Jesus says “I am the gate,” he is saying: I am the way your whole life opens up. I am the going in, and I am the going out. I am what makes pasture possible.

He doesn’t promise a walled compound where nothing bad ever happens. He promises pasture. He promises, in the phrase The Voice translation gives us this morning, “liberation” and “life with joy and abundance.”

The thief’s economy is subtractive. Smaller. More afraid. More compliant. More exhausted. The Shepherd’s economy is additive. Overflowing. More than enough. Not the minimum viable Christian existence, but the feast.

The gate is already open. It was never closed. Every toll booth you’ve ever built in your imagination — or every toll booth you’ve allowed other voices to build there — fundamentalist or progressive, theological or political or familial or private — every one of those gates is a hallucination. The Shepherd has walked through the rubble of all of them, and he stands there, calling your name.

Because the Shepherd’s answer to the fear underneath all the fears isn’t a political program. Or a self-improvement plan. Or even a better ideology. The Shepherd’s answer is his own body, laid down between us and the abyss. The Shepherd’s answer is: I have already walked through the valley of the shadow. I have already been to the bottom of it. And I came back calling names. Yours is next.

This is what the Risen Shepherd is doing in the world right now, this Eastertide. He is walking through every locked door, every gated community, every toll booth we keep trying to pay at, and he’s calling us out to pasture. Again, not out of danger. But out of smallness. Out of the diminished and terrified life the stranger-voices want us to settle for.

He is the gate. And the voice you’re hearing, underneath all the other voices, the one that knows your name... that one is his.

And it will follow you forever. Just like a good shepherd does.

Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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They were walking away... On that road in Emmaus, the two disciples aren’t heading toward Jerusalem; toward the tomb, the community, or whatever might come next. They’re heading out of Dodge. Fleeing.

And who can blame them?! The man they’d put all their chips on was dead. But the tomb was empty, which was actually worse than if they’d found him there. At least, if they could just see a body, they could grieve. Have some closure.

Humans need incarnate (bodily) hope. Incarnate closure.

They were walking, talking, and rehearsing the catastrophe when a stranger falls into step behind them.

“What are you discussing?” he asks, which means he’s oblivious. He clearly doesn’t understand how bad things are.

They stop. Stare. Probably give him what my 12yo daughter calls the ‘bombastic side-eye.’

Cleopas, one of the motley crew, answers the stranger: “You must be the only one around here who hasn’t heard the news.”

The stranger asks them to please, say more. So they do. They lay out the whole sad story. The execution. The hope they’d had (past tense). They HAD been hoping. But they don’t do that anymore.

I think we all know that walk, right?

My dad was born in 1944 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When he was 6yo, he lost his father (my grandpa, Jewel Ellison) to colon cancer. My grandma Modean remarried a few years later, and from what I hear, the Ellisons didn’t take kindly to the new arrangement. There was tension; the kind that builds for years in small towns and tight families.

When my dad was about 10yo, there was a graveyard cleanup day. Those little family-owned cemeteries in the rural South, where the local families tend the grounds themselves. Something was said. And a fight broke out. Not just an argument. It was a family feud. The stuff of Southern Gothic stories. That primal, tribal ping in the hive mind had triggered. It was the Ellisons vs. the McKelroys. But only the women were there (with the kids). It was a lady-fight (ugly). And because it was a graveyard cleanup day, there were shovels and pickaxes involved. No joke. It got ugly. My grandpa’s sister had my grandma on the ground. It got so bad that someone had to flag down a passing train to break up the fight (no cell phones to call 911 in the 1950s).

My dad was there. He saw the whole bloody, traumatic, shameful thing. And shortly thereafter, my grandma packed up the family and headed west with her new husband to California and never looked back. My dad carried that gaping wound of that day for the rest of his life. He never saw a therapist, just held it in the way men of his generation held things: silently, and at a huge cost.

Years later, right around the time I was born in the year of our Lord 1979, there was a family court hearing about some land back in Hot Springs.

My dad flew back, hoping he might inherit a piece of it. But he didn’t. He told me the land he thought he’d get went to the aunt who attacked my grandma. Old wounds were reopened.

So on his way out... On the road out from Jerusalem (or Jessieville, AR in his case) — fueled by grief and resentment and whatever else moves a person to do things like this — he went to that graveyard. Found his father’s grave. And took his gravestone home to CA with him.

A small marker, maybe forty pounds, with the initials J.E.

He was done. Once and for all. And he took what he could to remind him of what he was SURE, this time, he’d walk away from forever.

When I was a little older, he pulled that stone out of the basement and handed it to me. Told me the whole story. And then he said, with intense sadness in his eyes, “Jonas, this stone belongs in Hot Springs, not here in California. It’d be great if you could return it someday. It’s beautiful there.” But he had no idea where that cemetery was.

If you’ve been to the South, you know that those winding backroads are dotted with little family graveyards. The idea of finding one specific plot seemed impossible. Google brought up nothing. I did some searching, but ultimately gave up. And I’ve been lugging this blasted gravestone around with me ever since. Alex and I have moved 156 times, I think. And every move, I pack this thing in the van.

But then... a couple months ago... I got an email. From a woman named Lynda. She asked if I was Johnny Ellison from Hot Springs’ son. She’d found me on 23andMe. I replied: Yep, you got the right guy... I told her my dad died a few months before my daughter Rory was born in 2013. It’s one of the great tragedies of my life that they never got to meet. Who are you, I asked?

She wrote me a long email, which I read, and wept... Said she’s my dad’s cousin. In her mid-80s. And she’d been there that day in the graveyard with the pitchforks and fists and shovels flying.

She described what she’d seen:

Said my grandpa’s sister had a hunting knife on her belt when she had my grandma on the ground. Lynda (who was a child at the time) had the foresight to go up and take it. Hid it. She didn’t want anyone getting stabbed. (When I called her the first time, she told me about it again over the phone - her voice shook as she recounted the details.)

And... She told me the graveyard is right across the street from her property in Jessieville, Arkansas — outside Hot Springs, in the Ouachita Mountains (claim to fame: Mountain Valley!). And then she told me I had extended cousins (kinfolk, as she puts it) back there. Dozens of them!

Resurrection works in the weirdest ways, doesn’t it?

Before that email exchange, I thought I had two living blood relatives. Neither of them carry my last name. I never knew any other Ellisons besides my dad (my two uncles on his side have a different father and last name). Now, suddenly, I had an army of fellow Ellisons I never knew existed.

Alex and I flew out to Arkansas a couple weeks ago. I shipped the gravestone in advance. On the first day there, I hiked up above Hot Springs to the Mountain Tower. The tower was closed, but there was this beautiful overlook. I was alone. But I wasn’t. I felt my dad’s presence and said out loud, “I finally made it here, dad.” And as the sun set over those mountains, I thought about the generations of Ellisons and McKelroys those hills have held.

The next day, I went to Aunt Lynda’s property. I call her Aunt Lynda now. When I looked at her face, I saw my dad’s eyes looking back at me.

Resurrection works in the weirdest ways.

Rory got to meet her. When Rory hugged Aunt Lynda, something snapped back into place. A missing piece. Rory was connected incarnationally (in the flesh) to her ancestral Ellison line.

And then, the big event... We went to the graveyard. We passed headstone after headstone with the Ellison name. And finally, we found it: Jewel Ellison. November 14, 1920 - October 16, 1950. I dug a small hole at the foot of the grave (are footstones a thing out here??). Rory helped me lower it into the ground and put it back where it belonged.

What had been broken years ago was finally redeemed. The weight of that moment was immense.

Resurrection works in the weirdest ways.

That night, we had a big gathering at my newfound cousin Charley’s beautiful home (she’s technically a cousin, but because she’s in her mid 60s, I call her ‘Aunt Charlie’). I met so many Ellisons that night - they all live near each other. On the way to her house, we passed Ellison road. That cemetery is at the base of her property.

The next day, we drove up to Little Rock to visit my dad’s other cousin, Dwayne, who, of course, I now call Uncle Dwain. He and my dad were childhood friends before my dad moved to CA. He’s also in his mid 80s, but still very sharp. Plays golf multiple times a week and is VERY active. When I walked in and hugged him for the first time, I wasn’t just embracing a guy I’d never met. I was embracing my dad, in a very real way. He smelled like my dad. My dad, who died 13 years ago... Who I never thought I’d lay a hand on again... Was present bodily in Dwayne. His eyes welled up. Those eyes looked at me like I was someone they’d been waiting a long time to see. I had to fight my tears back.

His daughter, Anndra, and her daughter, Clare, were there. Clare is 13, Rory’s age, and they hit it off. Rory now has a little cousin BFF.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus had it exactly right: something was over. Something had ended. They weren’t wrong about the facts on paper. They just couldn’t see what God was doing with those facts.

My dad took that stone in a moment of grief and fury, and he was not wrong to feel those things. He just couldn’t see what God was doing with his brokenness. How the very act of breaking—of taking that stone, of moving to CA, of dying before his only grandchild was born—was somehow the thing that sent me back with such a burning heart. Sent me to Aunt Lynda’s email. Sent me to those mountains. Sent me to that graveyard with an awesome kid named Rory and a 40lb stone.

That’s the Easter claim.

Resurrection. Works. In very. Weird. Ways.

God has this stubborn habit of working resurrection precisely through the things that look most like endings. You have your own endings. But the Easter proclamation is they do NOT have the last word.

If you look closely enough, I think you’ll see that your life is riddled with the same fingerprints of God working the same events of death and resurrection.

The disciples didn’t recognize Jesus until he broke the bread. And there it is: the breaking is when they finally see him. And by then, he’s gone again. And also, everywhere.

Sometimes it takes a long Emmaus road before you start to see who was walking toward you all along.

The risen one. Alleluia. Amen.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Happy Easter everyone! I’m taking this in. It’s just so good to see so many faces. Our little parish isn’t used to this. If you went to the local megachurch today, they might not be as awkward as I am, but they also wouldn’t appreciate you as much as I do, so...

I want to start by talking about Mary Magdalene. She gets her time to shine today, which I think is awesome, on this Holiest Day of the church year.

And I’m not talking about the Mary Magdalene we’ve seen in paintings or pop culture — you know, we either get the weeping penitent, or whatever scandalous version is currently making the rounds in the Netflix documentaries. Today, let’s try to get in touch with the actual Mary Magdalene. The one in the story.

Here’s what we actually know: Jesus had cast seven demons out of her. So... she’d been through some stuff. And after that, she followed Jesus; all the way to the cross when the disciples ran away, all the way to the tomb on Sunday morning before it was even light.

That’s who she is. Someone who’d been through the worst, been found by Jesus anyway, and then refused to leave.

She’s also, for what it’s worth, the one the other gospel writers tell us was the last one at the cross and the first one at the tomb. The disciples (yes, the men) had scattered. But Mary stayed. I don’t know exactly what to do with that except notice it and say: sometimes the people who’ve been through the most ‘stuff’ are the ones who know how to stay.

She comes to the tomb in the dark. And she isn’t hopeful. She’s actually bringing spices to finish preserving a corpse. This is a grief errand. Maybe you’ve been there... When you’ve lost someone and you don’t know what else to do. So you go where they last were. You just go.

And she notices... the stone is already rolled away.

An angel tells her: he’s not here. He’s been raised. Go quickly. Tell the ones who ran (yes, aka, the guys).

So she goes. And on the road, Jesus meets her.

Note that he doesn’t meet her in the temple. He meets her on the road. An ordinary road. In the middle of yet another errand.

Greetings, he says. Which in Greek is literally rejoice.

The first word the risen Christ speaks to a human being isn’t an explanation, an exhortation, or an abstract theology. It’s: rejoice. Don’t be afraid. Go tell the others.

A woman who has literally been through hell and back in her life... who came to perform a burial ritual... leaves as the first preacher of the resurrection. This is more than a mere accident. I don’t know about you, but I see that God is driving home a point and I’m not sure if we’ve gotten it.

It’s Easter morning. Some of you came this morning and you’re not sure why. Maybe someone asked you. Maybe it’s just what Easter means in your family. And that’s wonderful.

Maybe you used to believe something and you’re not sure you do anymore and you came anyway, which is actually a more honest thing than it might feel like. And by looking at this story, we see that the resurrection wasn’t recognized first by the people who think they had life all figured out. It happened to a grieving woman in the dark. Just doing what she’d do if she’d lost anyone she loved.

We live in a loud and exhausting moment. And life is life. Things are hard and broken and the pace of it doesn’t let up. Easter doesn’t ask you to pretend otherwise.

I’m not going to stand up here and tell you the world is secretly fine. You know it isn’t. Easter isn’t about spiritual bypassing. The anxiety and despair we experience in life is real. But here’s what I’ve staked my life on, and I want to offer it to you plainly: despair is not the most honest response to reality. It just feels that way sometimes. Easter is the argument that yes, despair exists. But it doesn’t have the last word.

Easter says that God has stooped all the way down to be active inside the worst of it — not watching from a distance, but all the way in—redeeming it from the inside out in ways that you and I would never dare to redeem it. We remembered that two days ago on Good Friday at the foot of the cross, the depth of the darkness, and in the stench of death. God went all the way into God’s own despair. And came out the other side. This wasn’t a reversal or a cosmic ‘undo’ button. It revealed a pattern that’s eternal. The lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world. God, not some sky fairy, but the ground of being itself. God as more of a melody than a deity... God as the breath of life. Using the dying as a portal to newness. Upending the old, dead ways to make all things new. This is what’s on full display in Jesus on the cross. Which takes us to the tomb.

Mary didn’t come to the tomb expecting anything. She came to finish a sad task. To bury her friend. And she left that empty tomb with a fullness she never knew before. With a word she didn’t expect and a direction she didn’t choose.

That’s my prayer for you this morning. To be held peaceably in the embrace of a Love far bigger than your own capacities. To be made new by the God who made you and loves you and goes before you always. This God is moving in your life right now, no matter what you believe or don’t believe. This is just what the God of death and resurrection does. We don’t have to acknowledge it, but I can attest that life takes on a whole new depth and vividness and joy when we do.

In a few minutes we’re going to do something very simple. We’re going to come forward toward this table. There will be bread and wine (and if you’re a Methodist, grape juice)... And words that have been said in rooms like this one for two thousand years. All around the world right now, these words are being echoed: Body of Christ, given for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Yes... For you.

There are no tests or dotted lines to sign on. Just a God who wants to be with you right now. You don’t have to be certain. Mary wasn’t certain — she was still frightened when she ran to tell the others. She’d made plenty of mistakes that she was starkly aware of. But she followed her feet. And she was met by Jesus, the God of the Universe enfleshed.

So the invitation stands... Come and be met.

For Jesus is not in the tomb. Christ is risen. Jesus is everywhere. He is risen, indeed.

Rejoice.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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This is the day we’re unable to look away.

Every other day of the year, it’s easier to keep the cross at a comfortable theological distance. To treat it as metaphor, or symbol, or just the unfortunate middle section of a story that ends well on Sunday. We’re very good at this. I mean, we’ve had two thousand years of practice!

But tonight the Church walks us right up to it and says: look.

Not at some abstract theology or atonement theory. Look... at a man. At this man — the one in whom, John has been insisting from the first chapter, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell — hanging on a Roman instrument of torture, in the dark, outside the city walls, abandoned.

This is how low God’s love stoops. This is where God’s love goes.

Not to the mountaintop. Or the throne room. Here. Into the furthest, coldest, most godforsaken corner of the human experience. And the word godforsaken isn’t hyperbole tonight. Jesus will go to the place where God is nowhere to be seen... and he will go there as God... so that there is no longer any such place.

Every prison of the human heart that has ever whispered “God, you are too far gone” — he has been there before you.

Every darkness that has ever said, “No one could love this, no one could reach this” — he has descended into it, all the way down, without an escape plan.

This is not a transaction. Not a legal settlement between an angry deity and a wayward creation. This is a desperate act of love conducted at the cost of everything. It’s messy. It doesn’t make sense. It’s absurd, really. This is what it looks like when Love refuses to leave anyone behind, even in the places love has no business being.

John’s passion narrative is strange that way. Jesus, even here, is somehow in control. He carries his own cross. He speaks from the cross with authority. He says it is finished. Not “it’s over” like a resignation. But finished, completed, accomplished. The Greek word used here is tetelestai. It’s a craftsman’s word. The word you say when the work is done and done right.

So... What is finished?

The descent. The reach. The full traversal of every distance between God and humanity: every wound, every shame, every secret thing you have never said out loud... covered. Entered. Redeemed.

You do not have to have it together to stand at the foot of this cross. In fact, having it together is probably the one thing that will keep you from understanding what’s happening here. This is a place for the undone. The worn out. The ones who’ve tried and failed and tried again and know, somewhere in their bones, that they cannot save themselves.

Jesus knew that too. About you. Me. And all of us.

And he came anyway. All the way down. All the way in.

It is finished.

And the love is just beginning.

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Welcome to Maundy Thursday, the great foot-washing. Like most of the stories in the Bible, over time, we’ve domesticated this story.

We’ve turned it into a tidy lesson about servant leadership. A model for good Christian living. A visual aid of sorts. It’s perfect... We have Jesus, the master teacher, demonstrating the principle: Take notes, class. Then go and do likewise. And we leave with our little to-do list: be humble, serve others, wash some feet. But this, I’m afraid, misses the entire point.

Jesus doesn’t begin this scene as a teacher. He begins (and ends) as a host.

He got up from the table. Yes, He... The one John has spent thirteen chapters telling us is the Word made flesh, the one in whom all things hold together, the one who was with God and was God... He gets up, ties a towel around his waist, and kneels at your feet.

And your only job
in this moment
is to let him.

That’s it. That’s the whole gospel, actually.

But we’re terrible at this. Especially we Christians, who’ve made an art form of busyness and usefulness and spiritual productivity. We’d rather serve than be served. Give than receive. We’d rather be Peter at the beginning of this story — Lord, let me die for you! — than sit still and let someone clean us. Especially in as intimate of a way as Jesus cleans his disciples. He cleans... Their feet. The lowest, dirtiest, funkiest part of them.

Receiving this kind of intimate care requires something harder than effort. It requires vulnerability. Honesty. It requires admitting that we’re tired, worn down, and in need. That we’ve been walking on some really rough roads, accumulating grime that digs into our heels, and we cannot clean ourselves up enough to be fit for God’s table.

Peter’s protest — You will never wash my feet — sounds like humility. But it’s self-protection. It’s the place in us that would rather manage our own need than vulnerably expose it. That would rather stay in control and initiate the transaction.

And Jesus says, If I do not wash you, you have no part with me.

This is very direct. Not a suggestion. It’s the threshold condition of the whole relationship between you and your God. You cannot follow Jesus away from here if you will not first be knelt under, and tended to, and loved in the places you’d rather no one touched.

Whatever that looks like for you tonight — feet, hands, or simply sitting with open hands in your pew, which is also fine — the invitation is the same.

The foot-washing is deeper than a surface-level cosmetic washing. It has a deeper soul-level meaning. It’s about you and me learning to receive from God, from the Source of Life itself. It’s not primarily about what you’re supposed to go do. It is God, on his knees, saying, “Stop. Just stop... Let me.” And everything in us that wants to earn this, manage this, be worthy of this MUST go quiet.

If at no other time, at least for tonight.

At least long enough to feel the water, and the hands, and the terrible, specific, unchosen grace of being hosted by the one who made you.

Jesus asks,

Do you know what I have done to you?

No... Not yet, probably. But tonight, this first night of the Triduum, is where we begin to find out.

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Lectionary readings of the day.

It’s been a hot week! 90 degrees in Northern California in March. Which is its own kind of omen. But I’m glad to see y’all made it through.

Yes, this is me doing small talk. Talking about the weather. Because I don’t want to talk about the real thing. But it’s Lent. So here we go...

Last week we learned that Cesar Chavez — labor icon, farmworker champion, an iconic name on street signs and schools and holidays across this state — was exposed as a serial abuser of women and girls. Dolores Huerta, the woman who built the movement beside Chavez for decades, came forward at age 94 to name what he did to her. Two other women came forward with similar allegations from when they were teenagers.

Immediately, we saw the response from the Latino community. Statues were covered in black sheets. Murals were painted over. They were left holding the crumbled pieces of a story they thought was rock solid.

The grief in this is real. The movement he helped build was real. He changed the lives of countless farmworkers for the better. We can hold all of that. But this week, it feels like sin has the last word. Though the wound feels fresh, the bones are very dry. This is an old story that goes back decades.

It can feel embarrassing to let ourselves feel hope in the aftermath of something like this. And this kind of thing isn’t unusual anymore. We live in an age of relentless deconstruction. Every institution is suspect. Every hero is provisional. Every narrative is waiting to be unraveled.

Now, cynicism isn’t stupid. People lie. And it’s people who make up institutions. But when it happens repeatedly, it gets really old. To continually be hurt by people and institutions that are supposed to protect us. To feel betrayed by stories that are supposed to hold us.

So the cynical response is honest. The feeling that nothing means anything. That old stories are just wishful thinking. That hope is embarrassing, naïve, cringe.

But nihilism is its own tomb. We can’t live there. Deconstruction is honest, but it isn’t a home. We are storied creatures. Homo narrans, the storytelling animal. We cannot survive without a story to live inside. The question is never whether we’ll have a story. The question is which story we’ll have.

And what happens when we keep putting the weight on human beings to hold up our stories; on charismatic figures or anyone or any group made of flesh and blood? It crushes them. And it crushes us when they fall.

So, I don’t think we just need a better hero. We need a better story to have hold us.

So let’s talk about one...

God sets Ezekiel down in a valley. Full of bones. Very dry bones (the text is insistent about the deadness of these bones). This isn’t a fresh tragedy. It’s been going on a long time. This is the Babylonian exile; a nation erased. A temple destroyed, land gone, people scattered. The story isn’t from the comfortable perspective of an empire scrolling sadly through the feeds on their phones like us. It’s written from the wasteland. In the aftermath of invasion. From the place where sin and violence and betrayal have had their way.

“Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost. We are cut off completely.”

And God asks Ezekiel: Can these bones live?

Ezekiel doesn’t offer a cheap yes. He doesn’t perform optimism. He says: “O Lord God, you know.”

That might be the most spiritually honest sentence in Scripture. It holds the question without collapsing it into an answer. It refuses to pretend, and it refuses to despair.

Last week we talked about the man who was born blind and kept saying I don’t know, I don’t know — all I know is I was blind and now I see.

There’s a thread running through this Lenten season: the surrender of needing to have it figured out.

The German Rhineland mystics who inspired Martin Luther called it Gelassenheit (lovely German word), a releasing of the outcome into God. This isn’t defeatism or passivity. It’s just the most honest thing you can say when you’re standing in the valley knee deep in bones. And the love of God in Jesus makes us just that... Honest.

This is what it looks like to move through deconstruction without drowning in it...

Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus knowing what he’s about to do. He’s just told Martha: I am the resurrection and the life. Right now, in his very person.

And then he sees Mary weeping. The crowd wept with her. And the text says he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. And then verse 35, the shortest verse in the Bible:

Jesus wept.

Jesus wept knowing what he was about to do. Which means those tears aren’t helplessness.

I grew up seeing God as a distant unmoved mover in the sky. But that’s not what we get in Jesus.

In Jesus, we see a God who did not have to feel this, and felt it anyway. He isn’t an algorithm. Or a sky fairy dispensing cash and prizes to the sufficiently faithful. He isn’t another charismatic hero climbing to popularity and power. He descends into the valley of dry bones... Walks to the sealed stone... Stands in the stench and the grief. And weeps on purpose.

This isn’t an ideological hero (aka an idol). This is Emmanuel — God with us — in the valley, at the tomb, choosing to feel the weight of it. With you. Right now. Because you have your own dry bones. You sit in front of your own sealed tomb. Whatever that is.

This Jesus is who this story asks you to trust your life to.

And then he speaks. Lazarus, come out. The command goes out to a dead man carried along in the breath of Jesus, the breath of God. The same breath (ruach) that animated the resurrected bones in Ezekiel is the same one that moves through the voice of Jesus. The animating breath (wind, spirit) arrives from outside the closed system. The bones have no role in their own resurrection... and yet they aren’t nothing. They’re just dead enough to stop grasping, managing, generating life on their own terms. Empty enough to receive what they were made for. To inhale what the Creator exhales.

I will open your graves.

Not if you believe hard enough. Or when you’ve done the work. Or when the heroes stop disappointing you. Just... I will. First person, unconditional, already spoken over the valley. Over the tomb. Over whatever you carried in here this morning that you haven’t told anyone about. Over every place where sin feels like it has the last word.

It doesn’t. That’s the whole story. That’s what we’re here to say.

Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. We begin the long walk into Holy Week — the arrest, the trial, the cross, the sealed stone. You’re going to be invited, over these next days, to let this ancient and impossible story have its way with you again. Not to believe it the way you believe a news article. And not to dismiss it the way you dismiss a fairy tale. But to do what Ezekiel did: stand in the valley, eyes open, and say O Lord God, you know. To let the story choose you because it’s true. Because it’s honest about the darkness. Because it doesn’t ask you to pretend.

In a few minutes we’ll do what we always do. We’ll come to this table. Bread and wine. The simplest, most ordinary-looking thing imaginable. No spectacle. No hero. Just the promise that the One who wept at the tomb is present here, for you, right now. That the ruach is still moving. That the graves are still being opened.

And you’re not holding this alone.

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I have a confession to make. I’ve watched all four seasons of the show Sweet Magnolias on Netflix.

Yes, I know. I’m a 46 year old male. A grown man by all regards. And I marathoned the entire thing with my wife and daughter this winter. I should be watching cool, edgy shows like Succession or The Bear. But I got totally caught up in the fictional universe of Serenity, South Carolina.

We almost quit watching. Like three times. Maybe more. The script felt artificial. The small-town warmth was ratcheted up to an uncomfortable level. Therapyspeak was unavoidable. The characters said things to each other that no one in my universe would actually say. Yes, kind things... without the escape hatch of a cutting remark or a knowing winking glance at the camera. Nobody was in on the joke because it wasn’t a joke.

So, I noticed, after quite a few episodes, that Rory, Alex, and I would manufacture our own snark from the sidelines of the sofa. We’d supply the irony the show refused to provide. A character would say something genuinely tender and one of us would mutter something sardonic just to release the pressure. It felt like a reflex or a pressure valve. A way that we were saying: Yeah, we know this is super corny. You can’t fool us!

Except... We kept watching. And somewhere around the third season, I relaxed a bit. I stopped fighting the cringe and caught myself thinking: these people are just... genuinely nice to each other. And not in a nothing-bad-ever-happens kind of way. They went through real challenges in the show. But they chose (I know, this is weird, get ready) decency. They said the sincere thing. And the show let them do it without winking, deflation, or an ironic counterweight.

We finished the show a month ago or so and I keep thinking about it. I really became aware of how addicted to snark I’ve become without even knowing it.

And then I stumbled across a concept that gave me a word to describe what I was noticing in my own internal landscape at this moment: metamodernism.

I’ll try my best to summarize:

Modernism - roughly the late 19th through 20th century was the age of naive confidence. Science, progress, reason, and grand narratives about humanity successfully marching forward and upward. Superman and Hulk Hogan are two big modernist characters in my mind. Fundamentalism was born in the modern world as products of the Reformation and the scientific method smooshing together.

Postmodernism - the hangover from modernism. Starting in the mid 20th century and reaching full cultural saturation by the 1990s, it took a sledgehammer to all of that. Grand narratives were shown to be just power plays in disguise. It saw truth as being constructed. And it held irony as the only honest response to a world that kept failing its own promises. Seinfeld is the perfect postmodern artifact: intentionally a show about nothing and proud of it.

I was born in 1979. I remember the last gasping breaths of modernism with movies like Superman and characters like Hulk Hogan. Then, I remember growing into the most snarky phase of life (adolescence) in the snarkiest period in history (the 1990s). Seinfeld was THE show. Then came Friends. Etc. Irony was the water we swam in.

Then, it happened... On July 7, 1996, at the WCW pay-per-view ‘Bash at the Beach’ in Daytona Beach, Florida, Hulk Hogan moved to the NWO (‘New World Order’) after drop-kicking his good-guy buddy, Randy Savage. Above the boos of the crowd, he announced to the fans (well, ex-fans now) that he was tired of being the “good guy.” He called the fans “trash” and “sentimental.” And he declared that he was the biggest name in the business who didn’t need the “Hulkamania” facade anymore. This may have been the defining cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism. The Bash went down at the cultural peak of postmodernism... It was downhill from there with South Park, The Matrix, 90s grunge, and the rest of it.

I gotta say, postmodernism had a point. The grand narratives of modernism were often covering for something. Its certainty was often borrowed confidence masking unexamined power plays. The critique was justified.

But there’s something that cultural theologian (who turned me on to this whole thing) and others have noticed:

We’re exhausted.

Yes, the deconstruction of postmodernism was a natural next step. But it didn’t build anything good, true, or beautiful.

This is where (ready for another fancy philosophical word?) metamodernism comes in.

Metamodernism isn’t a return to naive pre-critical confidence. It’s not modernism with the bad parts scrubbed out.

It’s what happens when a person — or a culture — passes through the postmodern deconstruction and comes out the other side still thirsty for a story to hold them together. Still wanting real meaning. Still willing to say the sincere thing out loud, even knowing how cringey it sounds.

Some have called this “informed naivety” or “second naivety.” I’ve also seen it put “ironic sincerity.” Anleitner calls it “embracing the cringe.” I’m partial to this because it makes more visceral sense. You know the cringe. It’s that feeling you get when someone says something genuinely earnest and you don’t have a sarcastic reply ready. Rather, you just let the moment be real. When somebody says or does something nice or sappy, you bite your tongue, embrace the cringe, and let their kindness… just be. (This is so hard to do!!!)

Sweet Magnolias is basically a Netflix series made of cringe. And somehow it has millions of viewers who, coming from a heavily postmodern world, have very refined cringe detectors (they’re currently working on their fifth season!).

There’s a part of the show that really hit me... Of course, it has to do with the local church (yes, an ELCA church - I actually discovered this show through an article in our denomination’s publication, Living Lutheran), led by a Black woman pastor. Attended happily by teenagers who seem neither traumatized by religion nor performing their liberation from it. The congregation is warm, traditional, and grounded. The Pride flag is visible in one quick shot in one scene that I noticed, but you had to be looking for it. No one makes a speech about it. The show doesn’t pause to congratulate itself.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the pastor to deliver a monologue about anti-right justice. For a teenager to have a crisis of faith that a progressive adult would stoically deconstruct. There are gay couples in the show, but no one postures about how ‘welcoming’ they are of them. They’re just part of the friend group and church community. No biggie. The church in the show is just... A church. A good one. Doing what churches are supposed to do, without needing us, the viewers, to applaud (but applaud, I did).

That, too, felt like a pressure valve releasing. Not the irony valve this time, but the exhaustion valve. The one that builds up every time something wholesome gets conscripted into a culture war. Every time inclusion has to performatively announce itself as a shot across the bow to count. Every time a church has to perform its welcome so loudly that the welcome itself gets lost in the battle cry.

The show just... included. And then it moved on. As if a Black woman leading a thriving, welcoming, traditional congregation with happy teenagers in the pews was simply normal. As it should be. Which it rarely gets to just be, on screen or off, without becoming a statement against something else.

The show was making sincerity and inclusion un-cool. On purpose. And I think this is the most honest way to portray it. Because it really should just be the most old-hat thing ever.

Here’s what I think was actually happening on our couch as we watched the show...

The irony we added from the sidelines of the sofa wasn’t just cheap rejection. It was a decompression chamber. A way of saying yeah, we know this is uncool so that we could safely keep watching anyway. The snark was like the antibody, but the sincerity was still getting into our bloodstream, doing its work, feeding something in us that the antibody was supposed to defend against.

We’d been so marinated in postmodern irony; in the assumption that the knowing smirk is the only honest response to earnestness; that unmediated sincerity triggered an emotional immune response. But the show kept being sincere. And we kept watching. And eventually, my immune system got tired and allowed something else to get in.

That something was the possibility that people might actually be decent to each other. That kindness isn’t just naivety. That you can speak it and mean it.

I agree with Anleitner and others who say that the culture is shifting in a way that makes sincerity palatable again. Maybe the long postmodern exhale is coming to an end (for now, at least). It seems that people are starting to breathe in again, cautiously and with appropriate self-awareness. But genuinely.

Maybe what we need isn’t less earnestness now, but more. Offered without apology and with full awareness of how unfashionable it is. Given with enough warmth that the immune system eventually lowers its defenses.

In Joy,
Jonas+

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Assigned Lectionary Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:1-13 | Ephesians 5:8-14 | John 9:1-41

Note: Again, my lav microphone didn’t pick up the audio, but here’s the manuscript and re-recorded audio… Enjoy!

When was the last time you said (to someone else, out loud)...
I don’t know?

Not “I’m not sure.”

Or “that’s a great question.”

These are the polite hedges we use. I’m talking about the real thing.

I. Don’t. Know.

Because the world tells us that our “I don’t knows” must be resolved before we’re allowed to experience anything that looks like a blessing.

You might’ve come in here today with some “I don’t knows” of your own, like...

I don’t know if AI is going to take my job. Or my kids’ or grandkids’ jobs.

I don’t know if what I’m watching on the news is the beginning of another endless war or just another atrocity that’ll be buried under next week’s atrocities.

I don’t know why I faithfully sip out of paper straws while the world’s militaries torch more fossil fuel in one airstrike than I will in my entire lifetime.

I don’t know why I got the diagnosis I got, or why I’m still here when someone else isn’t.

I don’t know why my political party — or, the political system itself — seems to have gone off the rails entirely.

I could go on. But you get it... The little voice in our head — echoed by little voices in our world — tells us: settle all of that first. Then you can receive something good and be justified for that blessing.

So... Into this world comes a man born blind, sitting by the side of the road.

And the first thing the disciples do (bless their hearts) is ask Jesus whose fault it is.

Which is a very human thing to do.

We want a ledger. We want Sin to explain suffering, fault to explain failure, moral logic to sort out the chaos. It’s just how our brains work: Give me the ledger, Jesus. Tell me who or what to blame. Is it this or that?

To which Jesus says: neither.

And then, before anyone can ask a follow-up question, he spits in the dirt, makes mud, and smears it on the man’s eyes.

This isn’t a dignified healing. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay for this service at Esalen (some people might; they pay for all kinds of things at Esalen).

This is spit. And dirt. On his face. It’s gratuitous and absurd and entirely unconcerned with whether he’s earned it, understood it, or even asked for it.

He’s not catechized. He doesn’t even seem to know who Jesus is. He’s just... got a muddy face now. And sent to go wash.

But this is what grace looks like. Excessive. Undeserved. Messy.

This is the cross in miniature. God getting into the dirt with us. Refusing to be the cosmic accountant from on high. Absorbing the world’s desperate need to make the ledger balance.

The resurrection is God laughing at the ledger entirely, as if to show us it was never real in the first place.

So the man goes and washes. And he comes back seeing.

And then, the next thirty-four verses...
are the world trying to argue him back into the darkness.

First, the crowd: Is this even the same guy?

Then the Pharisees: This Jesus is a sinner.

Then his own parents, who don’t say a single word in his defense because they’re afraid of what it’ll cost them.

Then the Pharisees again, but more desperate now.

And every single time, the man says some version of this:

I. Don’t. Know.

Three times, John puts it on his lips. (This is deliberate.)

I don’t know where he is.

I don’t know if he’s a sinner.

I don’t know.

But in this story, his not-knowing isn’t a weakness. He’s the only honest one in the room. Everyone else is performing certainty as a defense mechanism.

You might see this a lot if you look around the internet: performative certainty...

But this man refuses to claim more than his experience gives him.

One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see.

That’s it. That’s all he’s got.

And it’s everything.

In our Lenten devotional, Madeleine L’Engle (Wrinkle in Time) writes about a moment on her 40th birthday when she got the rejection letter that seemed to end everything. She thought she was done. She covered her typewriter. Walked around the room crying. Defeated. And then she noticed... Her subconscious was already working out the next novel... About failure!

She realized her defeat wasn’t her punishment. It was the fertile ground that God was working with.

She uncovered the typewriter. And she wrote: when the decision is made in the abyss, it is quite clear that it is not one’s own decision at all.

Grace was already moving before she knew it. It’s always already moving before we know it.

The Pharisees, I want to be clear, are not the villains of this story. They are us. They are the best that religious seriousness has to offer. And it’s precisely that false, stodgy certainty that makes this healing intolerable to them.

Jesus says: those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.

The problem isn’t darkness. The problem is insisting you can see just fine without light. Because that’s what closes you off from the blessing.

As L’Engle put it (if any of you are looking for tattoo ideas, this is a good one; she says): “Logic goes no further than dust to dust.”

We all come into this sanctuary with our own dusty “I don’t knows.” But we also each come in with countless blessings we don’t know why we deserve. Or where they come from.

The other day I drove up the coast to San Francisco for lunch with a friend. The wildflowers are starting to bloom. Pigeon Point lighthouse looked better than any postcard I’ve seen. The whole drive was one stunning vista after another. What a blessing to behold. To just exist... And be able to take in this gratuitous beauty. But then the little voice crept in. Wait... War is looming. Bombs are dropping. Innocent people are dying. Markets are failing. Knock it off, you Pollyanna!

But I have to remind myself... Jesus never waited for the chaos to stop before he healed and blessed. He did his work while the world was still a mess. He didn’t wait for the man to justify his own blessing. He did his healing work in the middle of the chaos, uninvited, excessive, and absurd, as always. That’s just how Jesus operates.

Paul tells the Ephesians: once you were darkness.

Not in darkness. Were darkness.

And now... you are light.

Not near light. Or moving toward it. You are it.

The ground under your not-knowing is already lit by grace. Right now.

When you come forward in a few minutes to receive Communion, I’m going to make mud with my spit and smear it on your face.

Just kidding!

But not entirely. Because what happens at this table is not so different. Jesus is here. In the middle of the bleakness in our world. He uses simple earthy elements to become one with us. He offers something mysterious, absurd, undeserved, and really hard to explain. And he says: receive this. Before you have it figured out. Before the ledger in your head balances. Before you know.

Come forward not-knowing. And receive.

Because, as the blind man taught us... that’s the only thing we can do. And it’s everything.

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