Text used – John 13:1-17

• “Come on in. Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something to drink? Water? Coffee? Diet Coke? I’ve got some crackers and cheese … some Rice Krispie bars … some freshly-baked cookies … lunch … dinner. The weather’s nice. Let’s sit out on the deck and enjoy the sunshine. OR It’s so chilly today. Can I get you a blanket?” And so, so many more ways we try to extend hospitality. So many ways that we welcome people into our homes – into our most intimate and familiar spaces.
  • We understand the cues that we receive from people here because they’re the cues that we grew up with … but that’s not always the case for others
    • Lots of varied hospitality customs around the world → some counter to each other![1]
      • E.g. – tipping in many industries here in the U.S. (esp. the hospitality industry – restaurants, hotels, transportation services, etc.) is not only expected but those wages are relied upon by those working in those industries BUT in other countries – South Korea, for example – tipping is considered an insult
      • Even more widespread e.g. – pointing → We don’t worry too much about pointing here (as long as you’re not pointing at someone for some obnoxious or disrespectful reason). But in many other places around the world, pointing in some form or another is considered distinctly more rude if not downright offensive.
        • Malaysia and Indonesia: pointing with your finger = incredibly offensive
        • Many countries in Africa: pointing is only done when what you’re trying to indicate is an inanimate object, never used for people
      • Not just actions and gestures that can be difficult to navigate from one culture to the next → Is anyone familiar with Howard Mohr’s book How to Talk Minnesotan[2]? It’s a tongue-in-cheek cultural guide to all things Minnesotan written by one of the original writers and guest voices on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion.” One of my favorite explanations in it is Mohr’s description of waving at someone when you pass them on the road. You don’t wave with your whole hand and definitely not emphatically! That’s far too emotive for us Minnesotans. You keep your hands on the steering wheel and raise your pointer finger … maybe your pointer and middle finger together, but never more than that. And if you happen to pass the same person on the road later that same day, you definitely don’t need to wave again. That’s excessive. And we laugh at things like that, but I have to tell you that when my mom moved to Minnesota from New York more than 40 yrs. ago, many of these cultural standards were completely foreign to her.
        • Funny story: one of Mom and Dad’s first dates → Dad showing up at the wrong time → “dinner” lunch vs. “dinner” supper
  • Sure, we can laugh at crossed wires when it comes to hospitality customs because at least these ones weren’t serious breaches of cultural expectations. But in our Scripture reading this morning, Jesus crosses the wires of a much more serious hospitality custom … but he does so with a definite purpose, a holy intention.
• Today’s story = probably one of many people’s favorites → There’s both a tenderness and a comforting insistence in Jesus’ words and actions in this passage.
  • Gives us some poignant and essential context at the beginning
    • Gives us the time: just before Passover – the last Passover that Jesus would celebrate with his disciples in that upper room
    • Even more powerful – gives us insight into Jesus’ mind and heart: Jesus knew that his time had come to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them fully.[3]
      • Gr. “love” = agape love, love of goodwill and compassion, unselfishness and humanitarianism[4] → This is the love that does for the other – does whatever for the other – not because you have to but because they are human and you are human and that common ground stirs you to action.
        • Rev. Elana Keppel Levy: It is God’s divine love or human love that mirrors God’s love. → And in Jesus’ case – in the case of the Son of God who was both fully human and fully divine – maybe it was even both: God’s divine love and the human mirroring of that love.
      • Gr. “he loved them fully” = lit. “to the end, he loved them” → There is a sense of purpose and completion to this phrase. It tells us that, at least in Jesus’ own mind (as much as the gospel writer could know or guess of it, anyway), Jesus felt that there was no more he could give … no greater he could love … nothing left undone in his relationship with those closest to him.
  • Also provides some dark foreshadowing for us – text: The devil had already provoked Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray Jesus.[5] → Even before Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on what we now celebrate as Palm Sunday … even before that Last Supper when Jesus would call out the truth that one would deny him and one would betray him … even before Judas’ fatal deal with the chief priest and ill-fated kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane that would point Jesus out to those sent to arrest him … even before all that, here in this sacred moment, betrayal was already stirring in Judas’ mind and heart.
• Central action of today’s text: [Jesus] got up from the table and took off his robes. Picking up a linen towel, he tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he was wearing.[6]
  • Rev. Dr. Ginger Barfield, Professor Emerita of Biblical Studies and Theology at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in South Carolina, helps us understand the cultural context of this a bit more: The foot washing as an Ancient Near Eastern rite of hospitality is not an unexpected thing to encounter in a scene such as this. In fact, foot washing was customary. John’s portrayal is not typical, though, because of several factors: the person of lower status should wash the feet of the higher-status guest. Jesus flips this; the foot washing should happen as guests arrive. As the guests are already at the table, another routine is disrupted; this should be a simple and unobtrusive act. Jesus’ washes feet at the table and converses during and after about the act.[7]
    • Let me ask you a question. Does this idea make you feel uncomfortable? Not in the abstract sense, but if you close your eyes and imagine yourself in this midst of this story … imagine yourself sitting there with the disciples … imagine Jesus moving slowly and purposefully from one person to the next, gently and carefully washing and drying their feet before moving on to the next … imagine Jesus finally moving in front of you, kneeling before you, washing your feet, drying your I want you to picture it for a moment. I want you to hunker down in this story for a moment. Feel the water on your feet. Feel Jesus’ hands, steady and earnest. Feel the rough towel. As you sit with that image … with that feeling … let’s venture into a little foot theology.
      • Rev. Kathleen Long Bostrom, prolific author of both adult and children’s books and honorably retired PC(USA) pastor gets right down to it for us with this passage: With very few exceptions, we do not consider feet to be the most attractive parts of our bodies. … Because we use feet every day, all the time, they take quite a beating. … Feet are usually not a very pretty sight. Yet feet are the object of wonder when a baby is born. “Look at that tiny foot!” we say, “Those tiny toenails!” … Barefoot babies are adorable; barefoot adults, not so much. … [Yet] how wonderful it is to have one’s feet washed, after all that those feet have been through. Because the footwashing comes at an unexpected time, the disciples know immediately that this is something out of the ordinary. It is a remarkable act of tenderness at a point in time when the disciples need a little TLC. Like the woman who anoints and washes Jesus’ feet, Jesus pauses at the cusp of his own anguish and tends to his flock. They will not soon forget what he does for them on that dark night.[8] → In this action that to us seems both intimate and strange, both loving and disquieting, Jesus in literally putting hands and feet to his faith. He is embodying his love for his disciples in the most incarnate way possible: by washing the road dust and weariness off their travel-worn feet. It’s not his job. It’s not his place. But it is his testimony. It’s his witness to how great and all-encompassing the love of God is – a love big enough to kneel down and wash even the dirtiest, most bedraggled feet. No matter who they are … no matter where they’ve been … no matter what they brought with them – what dust they carried, what muck they walked through, what callouses they bore … through his actions, Jesus tells them God’s love story for them.
• But Jesus’ testimony doesn’t stop at his actions in our passage this morning.
  • First = Peter’s reaction → You see, by his very nature, Peter is dramatic enough, bombastic enough to point out in no uncertain terms just how counter-cultural Jesus’ act is. Peter objects. : When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus replied, “You don’t understand what I’m doing now, but you will understand later.” “No!” Peter said. “You will never wash my feet!”[9]
    • Peter = trying to be humble (as loudly and ostentatiously as possible)
    • Peter = trying to be a servant
    • Peter = trying to do things “the right way”
    • But as so often is the case throughout the gospels, Jesus has other plans – plans that Peter can’t even begin to understand … yet. Not for lack of trying, though.
      • Peter’s attempt to understand after Jesus tries to explain = both amusing and endearing: Jesus replied, “Unless I wash you, you won’t have a place with me.” Simon Peter said, “Lord, not only my feet but also my hands and my head!” → All we can do is shake our heads. Oh, Peter.
      • Jesus’ response makes it clear that Jesus’ actions are enough
• Passage concludes with Jesus giving the disciples their own charge → Jesus is speaking to his own story but also intertwining his story with that of the disciples. He’s instructing them to carry on his thread of love and humility – text: After he washed the disciples’ feet, he put on his robes and returned to his place at the table. He said to them, “Do you know what I’ve done for you? You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you speak correctly, because I am. If I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you too must wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do. I assure you, servants aren’t greater than their master, nor are those who are sent greater than the one who sent them. Since you know these things, you will be happy if you do them.[10]
  • Rev. Trygve David Johnson, Dean of the Chapel at Hope College in Michigan: In the foot washing, like the incarnation, the method is the message. In the washing of the disciples’ feet Jesus chooses to empty himself rather than to promote himself. This act of humble service and submission is the church’s model of mission into the world, the means by which God’s “glory” will be experienced by all who will follow after Jesus has gone to the Father. The genius of this strategy is that everyone can do it – whatever rank, title, gender, or race – all can serve another. If we did, this strategy would allow God’s glory to shine into every life. Hence this foot washing is more than a humble act of deference; it is a sermon to the world about how to love.[11] → Jesus’ testimony in this moment – the faith story that he tells both in his words and his actions – is a story of humility, a story of servanthood, a story of love, a story of grace. It’s a story that’s true. It’s a story that’s powerful. It’s a story that’s worth telling. Again. Amen.

[1] Lily Cichanowicz. “11 Surprising Customs from Around the World” from Culture Trip, https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-surprising-customs-from-around-the-world/.

[2] Howard Mohr. How to Talk Minnesotan. (New York: Penguin Group), 1987.

[3] Jn 13:1.

[4] Exegesis by Rev. Elana Keppel Levy: https://somuchbible.com/word-studies/annotated-scripture/john-131-17//

[5] Jn 13:2.

[6] Jn 13:4-5.

[7] Ginger Barfield. “Commentary on John 13:1-17” from Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/jesus-washes-feet/commentary-on-john-131-17-3.

[8] Kathleen Long Bostrom. “John 13:1-11 – Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels: John, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 110, 112.

[9] Jn 13:6-8a.

[10] Jn 13:12-17.

[11] Trygve David Johnson. “Holy Thursday: John 13:1-17, 31b-35 – Homiletical Perspective” from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year A, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 275.

Text used – John 11:1-44

• Stories make up the realm of who we are – our past, our present, and even our future. Stories build meaning. Stories construct our shared experiences. Stories connect us to one another and to the world around us. And it’s been this way as long as humans have been communicating with one another.
  • Oldest known form of written language from ancient Mesopotamia[1] (northern edge of the Persian Gulf → modern day Kuwait/Iraq/Iran) dates back to around 3400 B.C.E. → But long before that, people were telling stories.
  • Oldest known cave painting recently found in limestone caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are at least 45,500 yrs. old[2] → But even before that, people were telling stories.
  • People told stories to explain natural phenomena. They told stories to remember and pass on their history. They told stories to teach and entertain their children. And, of course, they told stories that connected them to the Divine – to whatever god or set of gods they worshiped.
    • Stories of their understandings of the Divine
    • Stories of their worship of the Divine
    • Stories of the actions of the Divine that either they had seen or perceived themselves or stories of those in the past who had seen and perceived the Divine
    • Yes, friends, stories and faith have gone hand-in-hand for millennia – as long as human beings have been worshiping.
  • And as Christians, we are no different. Every Sunday, we read a part of our Story of faith. We try to glean knowledge and insight and understanding from the stories of others’ experiences with God and apply it to our own lives and actions. We base our actions in worship – both corporate worship and our own individual prayer times – on the stories passed down to us in the Scriptures, especially those pertaining to our sacraments. And we share our own experiences of God in our lives and in the world around us – the glimpses and whispers and nudges (sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle) of God moving and working in us, guiding and protecting us. In short, we share our testimonies – our own stories of faith. → 2 reasons we do this according to Thomas Long
    • FIRST, it’s about speaking Truth – Long: Christians believe that we cannot tell the truth, not the whole truth, without talking about God, and if we cannot tell the whole truth, we cannot be fully alive as human beings.[3] → Telling our stories – particularly those parts of our stories when we experience God’s presence in our own lives, those places where the threads of our own stories are so interwoven with the threads of God’s story that we cannot tell them apart … telling particularly those parts of our stories is an integral part of who we are. A part that we cannot ignore if we’re going to live fully into our identity as Christians.
      • Important to notice that this has nothing to do with converting others → If someone else hears your story and chooses or feels led to embark on their own journey of faith or, even more dramatically, to become a Christian, then that’s incredible! But we don’t share our testimonies for the sole purpose of bringing about change in someone else. We share our testimonies because we can’t not share them.
        • Long: Even if every person in the world were already a Christian, we would still need to talk about God in the same way that a mariner needs to talk about the sea. We would need to talk about God to be truthful, to be whole, for life to be full.[4]
    • SECOND, it’s about continually discerning what we believe – Long: We don’t just say things we already believe. To the contrary, saying things out loud is a part of how we come to believe. We talk our way toward belief, talk our way from tentative belief through doubt to firmer belief, talk our way toward believing more fully, more clearly, and more deeply. Putting things into words is one of the ways we acquire knowledge, passion, and conviction.[5] → Our faith journeys are just that – journeys, ongoing and in process, always changing and developing and becoming. And talking through our faith in terms of the ways we see God moving and working in our own lives is a huge part of that journey.
• In their essence, this is what the gospels do. They are the written accounts of people trying to work through their faith – people coming to believe – as they work through experiences of the Living God in Christ Jesus. → particularly the case for John because it was written so late
  • Already some established faith practices and early theology about Jesus as the Son of God by the time John wrote his gospel roughly 70 yrs. after Jesus’ death and resurrection
  • And it’s because John is such a testifying gospel – because John’s gospel is such an inextricable mix of experience/story on one hand and theology/belief system on the other hand … it’s because of this particular combination that we’re focusing so much on testimony throughout Lent this year.
• Today’s gospel story = what I think is the most powerful story of Jesus’ own testimony, his own, personal experience and expression of faith in one of life’s rawest and most difficult moments: a moment of grief
  • Today’s story begins by explaining Lazarus is ill → his sisters, Mary and Martha, send for Jesus → At this point in the gospel, Jesus and the disciples has been in Jerusalem to celebrate the Festival of Dedication – what we know more commonly as Hanukkah. After leaving Jerusalem, they had headed “back across the Jordan [River] to the place where John had baptized at first.”[6] This is where those sent by Mary and Martha find Jesus and relay their message: “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.”[7]
  • Then we come to what is probably the most challenging section of today’s text – this portion where Jesus chooses to linger at the Jordan River for two more days before heading to Bethany. Initially, he tells the messengers and the disciples that Lazarus’ illness will not be fatal, but as they prepare to set out, Jesus reveals to the disciples that Lazarus has, in fact died.
    • Difficult because we all know the worry and desperation that Mary and Martha are sitting in as they wait for Jesus … even as Jesus, himself, chooses to wait a couple more days
      • Sat by the bed of loved ones who have been ill
      • Received news of diagnoses in doctors’ offices and over the phone that has brought our world to a screeching halt
      • Prayed for healing and wholeness with every ounce of our being
      • Wept tears of grief and even anger at funerals of those who have died because of their illnesses
      • We’ve been in those places – in those moments – because of our deep love for the people we were with – a love that spans miles, a love that endures treatments, a love that sparks hope even into the darkest moments of diagnosis and side effects and illness and pain. And because we know just how hard those moments are, we can be frustrated with Jesus in this part of the story – because the “Why, Jesus?” on our minds and our lips in this moment is a “Why, Jesus?” we’ve voiced before. The waiting part of this story makes us uncomfortable … because the waiting part of life makes us uncomfortable.
  • But it’s also in this moment and in the rest of the story as it unfolds that we see Jesus at his most vulnerable, at his most human, at his most personal in John’s gospel. When Jesus and the disciples finally reach Bethany and Jesus is confronted with the grief of Mary, Martha, and all the others who had come to mourn Lazarus, Jesus grieves as well. – text: When Mary arrived where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” When Jesus saw her crying and the Jews who had come with her crying also, he was deeply disturbed and troubled. He asked, “Where have you laid him?” They replied, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to cry. The Jews said, “See how much he loved him!”[8]
• And it’s in this moment – this moment when Jesus allows the grief of the community to overcome him, this moment when Jesus is fully personal and fully present and fully human, this moment when the Son of God, indeed when God Incarnate!, weeps in response to the shock and pain and grief of illness and death … it’s in this moment that we witness Jesus’ own, personal testimony in his actions.
  • Plenty of places throughout the gospel – and even plenty of places just in today’s reading – when Jesus testifies with his words
    • Jesus’ conversation with Martha before they go find Mary: Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.” Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha replied, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”[9]
  • But when Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend – when Jesus grieves in and with the community that surrounded Mary and Martha – we see Jesus’ testimony in his actions. We see him embodying the tender blessing of love and kinship as well as the stinging pain of loss. We see him embodying the reality that steadfast faith doesn’t always mean a life of ease and joy, a life without hardship or suffering. To the contrary, we see him embracing suffering and pain as an unavoidable part of a life of faith as is experiencing that suffering and pain within the loving embrace of community.
    • Rev. Erica Schemper (who led worship here back in January) wrote a daily devotional piece for the These Days publication on this passage: It’s easy to move quickly to the miracle when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. But here, right in the absolute center of John’s Gospel, is this beautiful story of Jesus grieving with a community. He weeps when he realizes his friend is dead. He weeps when he sees the depth of sadness in those around him. We all need the space to sit with our sadness. John 11 reminds us that God came among us not just to raise us from the dead but also to stop for a moment and weep with us.[10]
  • Yes, at the end of today’s story, Lazarus is miraculously raised from the dead – a powerful foreshadowing testimony to what is to come for Jesus himself, especially since this is John’s last account of any kind of lengthy encounter for Jesus before he turns to the Passion Narrative that will lead Jesus to the cross … to the tomb … to his own death and resurrection. And when Jesus resurrects Lazarus – when he instructs those with him to remove the stone from the mouth of Lazarus’ tomb and calls Lazarus forth, when he lifts up a prayer of thanks to God and give the final command to “Untie [Lazarus] and let him go” – Jesus is completing the testimony of his actions. With his own tears and his grief, Jesus testifies to faith in the struggle – in the “valley of the shadow of death.” And with his own act of resurrecting Lazarus, Jesus testifies to the eternal hope and truth that even death cannot defeat the power and presence of God’s love. It’s a story that’s true. It’s a story that’s powerful. It’s a story that’s worth telling. Again. Amen.

[1] Aisling Serrant. “The World’s Five Oldest Written Languages” from DigVentures, https://digventures.com/2013/10/friday-five-five-oldest-written-languages/.

[2] Sarah Cascone, “Archaeologists Have Discovered a Pristine 45,000-Year-Old Cave Painting of a Pig That May Be the Oldest Artwork in the World” from ArtNet, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/indonesia-pig-art-oldest-painting-1937110.

[3] Thomas G. Long. Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 5.

[4] Long, 6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jn 10:40.

[7] Jn 11:3.

[8] Jn 11:32-36.

[9] Jn 11:21-26.

[10] Erica Schemper. “Sunday, October 31, 2021: Good Grief” in These Days, Oct-Dec 2021. (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation).

With everything that’s going on in the world, I decided that what we needed this Sunday was a prayer service – a special time for us to pray for the world and specifically for Ukraine. There were four main elements to this service that I wanted to share this week: Scripture readings, a poem by Ann Weems, a blessing/prayer by Kate Bowler, and a Prayer for Lament from the Book of Common Worship. 

Scripture readings:

Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, the Chief Rabbi for Ukraine, asked Jews and Christians around the world to pray Psalm 31 in solidarity with those in Ukraine who are under attack by Russia. So our First Testament reading this morning was Psalm 31.

Our New Testament reading came from Matthew 25:31-46 – Jesus’ reminder that whatever we do to and for those around us who need us the most, we do for Jesus.

Poem: “I No Longer Pray for Peace” by Ann Weems

On the edge of war, one foot already in,

I no longer pray for peace:
I pray for miracles.

I pray that stone hearts will turn
to tenderheartedness,
and evil intentions will turn
to mercifulness,
and all the soldiers already deployed
will be snatched out of harm’s way,
and the whole world will be
astounded onto its knees.

I pray that all the “God talk”
will take bones,
and stand up and shed
its cloak of faithlessness,
and walk again in its powerful truth.

I pray that the whole world might
sit down together and share
its bread and its wine.

Some say there is no hope,
but then I’ve always applauded the holy fools
who never seem to give up on
the scandalousness of our faith:
that we are loved by God……
that we can truly love one another.

I no longer pray for peace:
I pray for miracles.

written by Ann Weems for Ash Wednesday 2003

“A Blessing for Ukraine” by Kate Bowler

after the prayer (my own words): On her Facebook post that included this prayer, Bowler concluded with these words: “Dear Ukraine, though we shudder to watch what is happening, we will not look away.” Indeed, we shudder, friends. Indeed, we lift up our prayers. And indeed, we will not look away. We will not ignore. We will not forget. We will not excuse atrocities and suffering and injustice. Though we shudder to watch what is happening, we will not look away.

Prayer for Lament (from the Book of Common Worship, ©2018 Westminster John Knox Press)

            Extinguish a candle.

                        In the darkness, O God, we cry out to you …

                        Where are you leading us?

                        How are you calling us?

                        What is your will?

            Silence.

                        Make us one body; reconcile all people.

            Sung response:

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

            Pour sand from pitcher.

                        From the dust, O God, we cry out to you …

                        Why am I forgotten?

                        Why am I forsaken?

                        Why are you so far away?

            Silence.

                        Make us one body; reconcile all people.

            Sung response

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

            Tear cloth.

                        In our pain and division, O God, we cry out to you …

                        Where is my family?

                        Where are my friends?

                        Who is my neighbor?

            Silence.

                        Make us one body; reconcile all people.

            Sung response

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

            Place empty plate and cup on table.

                        In our hunger and thirst, O God, we cry out to you …

                        When will justice come?

                        When will peace come?

                        How long?

            Silence.

                        Make us one body; reconcile all people.

            Sung response.

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

                        Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy.

                        Lord, have mercy upon us.

            God of love and justice, you have made it clear to us that you tire of our church words and religious festivals, and that the worship you want from us is an ethical life lived out in a society that reflects your justice. Hear our prayers for your whole creation, saying,

God of justice, save your world.

            We pray for the church and for all who live by faith, doing charity and advocating for social change.

God of justice, save your world.

            Cultivate peace between nations, between people, and between political parties.

God of justice, save your world.

            Protect and comfort those enduring the violence of war, especially those in Ukraine who are in pain, in fear, in hiding, in mourning; those enduring the injustice of crime, or the destructive forces of nature.

God of justice, save your world.

            Almighty God, guide all the nations of the world into your ways of justice and truth. Establish among us that peace which is the fruit of righteousness, that this world may become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

God of justice, save your world.

Preserve those who suffer violence at home or bullying at school. Embolden those who see their trouble to help bring relief, help, and compassion.

God of justice, save your world.

            Grant your healing mercies to those who are ill or facing death, especially those whose worlds have been turned upside-down by COVID-19 today, yesterday, or anytime in the last 2 years. Uphold those who care for them, especially our healthcare workers who are not only physically exhausted but emotionally and mentally and spiritually exhausted as well.

God of justice, save your world.

            Delivering God, through Jesus Christ, you come to us and teach us the way of true worship: doing good, seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defending the orphan, and pleading for the widow. Set us free to serve you, sharing your work in the world, by the power of your strengthen Spirit.

God of justice, save your world.

Holding Space for All Our Prayers:

            If you feel so moved, I invite you now to voice any prayers you may have weighing on your hearts before God. It can be out loud or in your own hearts.

PAUSE

            Lord, in your mercy, hear all of our prayers – those spoken and those that only echo in the quietness of our hearts. We lift them up to you in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, who taught us to pray, saying: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

Text used – John 7:37-52

• It’s always how the story goes – how the story makes its major twist. Well … maybe not always, but it is an age-old story.
  • Think of the Marvel Comic Universe – Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and all the rest
    • Hero’s story is introduced
    • Hero becomes adored by crowds
    • Hero experiences a major setback
      • Loss of a major battle
      • Loss of a loved one – friend or family member or heroic comrade
    • Major setback leads to doubt
      • Doubt of mission
      • Doubt of the power of good in the world
      • Doubt of self
      • Doubt that comes both from themselves and those around them
    • Hero makes a colossal interior effort to overcome doubt just in the nick of time
    • Hero is even stronger on the other side of the doubt
      • Stronger in power
      • Stronger in purpose
      • Stronger in conviction
    • Hero saves the day
  • And while it’s difficult for us to watch those doubting parts – difficult to watch the hero beat themselves up and doubt themselves and wonder aloud if they’ve made any sort of difference at all – part of the reason it’s so difficult for us to watch is because we know how true-to-life that experience is.
    • We know the struggle of being doubted
    • FLIP SIDE: We know the struggle of doubting
    • We know how jarring doubt can be – jarring to our sense of self, jarring to the tenuous and fragile ordering of the world around us, jarring to the beliefs we hold dear. And yet doubt is as human an experience as breathing, especially in this day and age.
      • Live in an era of proof
      • Live in an era of scientific discovery
      • Live in an era of empirical fact over perceived reality → the measurable over the unmeasurable, the head over the heart
      • Often, we don’t trust a theory or proposal until it’s been tried and tested and thoroughly dissected by others, a process that requires doubt in its most honed and zealous form.
  • And certainly, that’s not always a bad thing! Medically speaking, where would we be if both practitioners and scholars centuries ago hadn’t doubted that blood-letting did anyone any good? I shudder to think! No, doubt is surely not always a bad thing … and yet, it makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? We don’t like to be doubted, not by others and especially not by our own selves. And we are especially uncomfortable with doubt when it comes to faith. For centuries, various elements of the Church have tried to squash doubt as quickly as possible – calling it heresy, calling it witchcraft, calling it apostasy, calling it anything and everything possible to drive it from the life of the Church. But how helpful is that, really? And how Scriptural?
• Seems to me that today’s Scripture reading is full of doubt – full of questions not meant to innocently glean information but to reveal a perceived falsehood in line with a particular agenda
  • Context for today’s encounter with Jesus
    • Text begins: On the last and most important day of the festival[1] → backing up to the beginning of ch. 7, we learn this is the Jewish Festival of Booths[2]
      • Fall festival of thanksgiving
      • Reminder of the years when the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness after Exodus from Egypt → thankful for the ways God provided for them in the wilderness
      • Characterized by the building of huts made of branches that are reminiscent of the huts erected by the people of Israel in their time in the wilderness
      • One of what used to be three Pilgrimage Festivals → holy festivals when Jewish males were required to travel to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice at the Temple[3]
      • So for today’s Scripture story, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem to celebrate and to give thanks. But, of course, Jesus is Jesus, and word is spreading fast and furious about all of the astounding things he’s been doing – the good and the not-so-good.
        • Water to wine
        • Healing
        • Hanging out with Samaritans (in Samaria, no less!)
        • Feeding a huge crowd with just a few loaves and fish
        • Walking on water
        • Teaching → all these inexplicable statements about living water and living bread and eternal life
        • Making all sorts of “I Am” statements that come perilously close to heresy  → Jesus’ “I Am” statements = same linguistic formula used by God when Moses was given God’s most holy name at the burning bush
  • Needless to say, when he went to teach in the Jerusalem synagogue during this Festival of Booths, Jesus was far from avoiding being noticed. → made sure of that in the beginning of our text this morning: Jesus stood up and shouted, “All who are thirsty should come to me! All who believe in me should drink! As the scriptures said concerning me, Rivers of living water will flow out from within him.”[4] → couple of interesting things here
    • First, flash forward with me for a minute to Jesus’ crucifixion in Jn’s gospel → Remember that all the gospels have different accounts of what happened at Jesus’ crucifixion. John’s account is the only account in which, after Jesus has died but before he’s been taken down from the cross, one of the Roman soldiers pierces his side with a spear, “and immediately blood and water came out.”[5]
    • Back to today’s Scripture: not exactly sure what “scriptures” Jesus is quoting here → not a recognized citation out of the First Testament
    • Also interesting that gospel writer is helpful for readers with a little explanation at this point (theological hindsight that we get a lot of in Jn’s gospel) – text: Jesus said this concerning the Spirit. Those who believed in him would soon receive the Spirit, but they hadn’t experienced the Spirit yet since Jesus hadn’t yet been glorified.[6] → But remember, John’s gospel was written around the turn of the 1^st century roughly 70 yrs. after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, so it’s definitely not an explanation that those in Jesus’ hearing that day would have received.
• Explanation that would clearly have been beneficial for those in Jesus’ hearing → You see, this is where the doubt starts to seep into our story this morning. This is when the barrage of questions begins.
  • Begins benignly enough with the affirmations of some – text: When some in the crowd heard these words, they said, “This man truly is the prophet.” Others said, “He’s the Christ.”[7]
  • But there are others in the crowd who aren’t convinced. – text: But others said, “The Christ can’t come from Galilee, can he? Didn’t the scripture say that the Christ comes from David’s family and from Bethlehem, David’s village?” So the crowd was divided over Jesus.[8] → Divided indeed! Is this man before them another prophet – revered but not a singular occurrence in the history of the people of Israel? Or is he the Christ, the Messiah – the One sent by God to save the people once and for all? Or is he something else entirely? The seeds of doubt begin to take root and grow.
  • Next part of Scripture reading can be divided into two curious occurrences
    • 1^st occurrence: Some wanted to arrest him, but no one grabbed him. The guards returned to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked, “Why didn’t you bring him?” The guards answered, “No one has ever spoken he way he does.[9] → So clearly, these guards had orders to arrest this rabblerouser Jesus and his followers … but by their own admission, they were so taken in by his words – by the mystery that surrounded and infused the presence of Jesus that they just … couldn’t do it. I hear awe and even a little bewilderment in their response to the chief priests and Pharisees: “Why didn’t you bring him?” “No one has ever spoken the way he does.”
      • See the flip side of doubt in this → Sometimes doubt closes us to possibilities and newnesses, but there are other times – times like this one – when doubt actually leaves us more open. The Roman guards’ doubt in their orders to arrest Jesus not only left the crowd open to the possibilities that Jesus’ words and teachings offered, but it left the guards themselves open.
    • 2^nd curious occurrence = reappearance of Nicodemus (“he of the midnight meeting and desperate questions” → Remember, we read about Jesus’ first encounter with Nicodemus, the Pharisee and Sanhedrin member, about a month ago. We talked about Nicodemus’ questions, and how he was a man seeking more than just answers but seeking God’s Truth in all its glory and fullness and immeasurable grace. And here, in this next episode of questioning and doubt and testimony, we find Nicodemus again. – text (following the guards’ awe-filled declaration): The Pharisees replied, “Have you too been deceived? Have any of the leaders believed in him? Has any Pharisee? No, only this crowd, which doesn’t know the Law. And they are under God’s curse!” Nicodemus, who was one of them and had come to Jesus earlier, said, “Our Law doesn’t judge someone without first hearing him and learning what he is doing, does it?” They answered him, “You are not from Galilee too, are you? Look it up and you will see that the prophet doesn’t come from Galilee.”[10] → This is such a fascinating encounter! The Pharisees attempt to disparage the intelligence of both the guards and the crowd by declaring that they only believe in Jesus because of their ignorance of the Law, clueless to the fact that one of their own (Nicodemus) has in fact already sought out this subversive and problematic Jesus to learn from him and believe in him. And when Nicodemus speaks up in an attempt at a mild but logical defense of Jesus – basically asking the Pharisees to hear him out based on the precedence of the Law they’ve already cited themselves – they scorn him and tell him to “look it up.”
      • Fascinating because I have to wonder what was going through Nicodemus’ head during this whole exchange … and what was going on in his heart
      • Fascinating because same doubt that left the guards open to Jesus’ teaching and Truth has closed the Pharisees to that same Truth
• In a strange, inextricable, and powerful way, Doubt itself is a character in this strange little gospel exchange that John gives us.
  • Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor, senior minister at Old South Church in Boston, addresses the unescapable presence of doubt in this story and the way it speaks to our faith: It is reasonable to assume that in every worshiping congregation there are people who lost their faith in the course of the past week, those who never had faith, and a great many for whom belief and doubt are strangely mixed together. … [In these challenging circumstances, John hopes] to pluck up our courage and equip our minds, hearts, and spirits for the arduous (and not so easy to defend or explain) journey of Christian discipleship. … John urges us to follow Jesus, even when we do not understand him. He aches for us to listen to Jesus, even though Jesus’ words and stories are perplexing. The author suggests that we trust the gentleness and openness of Nicodemus. He asks us to wonder and marvel at the defiant behavior of the temple police. He points to the uneducated crowd who find Jesus exceedingly compelling. … In other words, if we cannot see Jesus directly, we can at least see and experience him indirectly, through the eyes and lives of those who have risked everything, even their reputations, to follow him. Their witness is trustworthy.[11] → It was only after making it through the doubt – wrestling with it, going toe-to-toe with it, slogging through it and coming out the other side, possibly battered and bruised but still making it through that the heroes we talked about found themselves stronger, more convinced of their purpose and convicted in their mission. Maybe … just maybe … that’s the way it is with faith. And if that’s the case, maybe that’s why we do this “faith” thing together – to hold that openness for one another in the face of each other’s doubts and provide the trustworthy witness for one another in the most challenging moments. Amen.

[1] Jn 7:37.

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sukkoth-Judaism.

[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pilgrim-Festivals.

[4] Jn 7:37-38.

[5] Jn 19:34.

[6] Jn 7:39.

[7] Jn 7:40-41a.

[8] Jn 7:41b-42.

[9] Jn 7:44-46.

[10] Jn 7:47-52.

[11] Nancy S. Taylor. “John 7:37-52 – Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels – John, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 246.

Text used – John 6:35-59

• The smell of fresh-baked bread. There’s nothing quite like it, is there?
  • Walking into Grandma’s house as a kid after she’d just baked bread
  • Maybe it’s a hobby you picked up during the pandemic, either out of interest (something you always wanted to try but didn’t feel like you had the time for before) or out of necessity (to avoid going to the store)
  • Doesn’t have to be homemade → get that same mouth-watering, warm, yeasty smell when you pop a batch of premade rolls from HyVee or wherever into your oven
  • Even if you’re someone who’s never once baked any kind of bread in your entire life, you know that if you walk into a Subway at the right time of day, you’ll catch a whiff of that wonderful, fresh-baked-bread aroma.
  • Bread isn’t just delicious → it’s elemental to the human experience
    • Some type of bread found in some form in basically every culture around the world
      • Flat breads
      • Risen breads
      • Quick breads
      • Every day breads
      • Dessert breads
      • Fancy loaves and rolls for special occasions/celebrations
    • And you know, one of the most beautiful and most amazing things about bread is that from some very, very basic ingredients – some type of flour or grain, water, and salt … from these incredibly ordinary and humble ingredients, there is truly no end to the kinds of bread that can be made. 
      • Different breads in different cultures
        • Bannock cooked by the Inuit people who’ve made their home in the Artic for millennia
        • Injera – crepe-like flat bread common in Ethiopia and Somalia used as platter, utensil, and meal
        • Pillow-soft Japanese milk buns
        • Crackling crust and soft interior of a French baguette
        • They even found a petrified but fully intact loaf of nearly 2000-yr.-old bread in the ruins of Pompeii![1]
        • Maybe most recognizable here in the Midwest: potato-tinged familiarity of lefse (whether you add butter and eat it with meatballs … or add butter and sugar and cinnamon … which is not a war we will wage today)
      • Different recipes handed down from one generation to the next within the same culture
      • Even variations made on family recipes from one generation to the next! → Maybe Grandma used walnuts in her Christmas loaf, but you prefer pecans. Maybe your great-aunt’s recipe for hot cross buns calls for raisins, but you prefer currants. Or maybe you’ve gone completely off the rails and added crazy ingredients like saffron or a raz el hanout spice blend to your great-great-great grandfather’s favorite biscuit recipe … just to spice things up a bit!
  • The bottom line is, bread is essential to who we are as a people. It both expressed our own heritage and build bridges between cultures because bread – in one form or another, in one flavor profile or another – is something we all have in common.
• It’s no wonder, then, that Jesus spends so much time talking about bread in our passage this morning.
  • Disclaimer before we get any further with today’s passage: reading/contemplating/preaching anything from John = like a game of theological pick-up sticks
    • Handful of major theological themes scattered throughout every passage
    • Can’t pick up one theme without bumping into all the others
    • Also can’t pick up all of them at once
    • Which is my way of fully acknowledging that there’s a lot that we could tackle in this passage, but we just can’t get to it all. But, as always, if you’d like to talk about any of it further, I’m more than willing to sit down with you … maybe over a cup of coffee … and some bread.
  • So let’s dig into this “bread of life” passage a little more.
    • Context w/in the greater narrative of the gospel
      • Comes on the heels of two pretty miraculous occasions
        • Beginning of ch. 6 (vv. 1-15) = Jn’s account of the feeding of the 5000 → Now, all of the gospels include some version of Jesus feeding the crowd of 5000+ people with nothing but a couple of loaves and fish. Only in John’s gospel does that meal come from someone in the crowd – a young boy. But all agree that after blessing and breaking the bread, and after the disciples shared the meal around, there was still an overabundance of bread and fish leftover.
        • Next passage starts with disciples heading out onto Sea of Galilee by themselves (Jesus went up on a mountain to pray after the feeding of the 5000 … today, we call that self-care, y’all … even Jesus did it!) → water becomes rough, and in the midst of the wind and the waves, Jesus walks out to the disciples’ boat across the surface of the water
          • No mention of Peter joining Jesus out on the water in Jn’s gospel à this account just ends with: Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and just then the boat reached the land where they had been heading.[2]
        • Part of the passage directly leading into today’s reading = discussion btwn Jesus and the crowd → crowd had gone looking for him after they realized he was no longer with them following the feeding of the 5000 → Jesus gets a little contentious with the crowd: When they found [Jesus] on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” (Sounds like an innocent-enough question, right?) Jesus replied, “I assure you that you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you at all the food you wanted.”[3] → From there, Jesus launches into his discourse on the Bread of Life.
• And let’s be totally honest, here – it’s a pretty heady discourse. It’s not exactly easy reading, right? – text: “This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats from it will never die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” … Jesus said to them, “I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”[4] → It’s a dense passage. It’s a rich passage. Like I said earlier, there’s a lot there, and some of it could get us digging really deep theologically.
  • Whole “flesh and blood of Christ”/bread and wine idea could lead us down the path of talking about the Catholic theology about communion vs. the Lutheran theology about communion vs. the Reformed theology about communion → If that’s what pulls at your heart and your mind with this passage, I would love to talk to you about it further. Later.
  • Could also spend all sorts of time taking a deeper diver into Jesus’ multiple assertions of his inextricable connection with God and how those who seek God must inevitably do that seeking through the person and work of Jesus himself → Again, if that’s what pulls at your heart and your mind with this passage, let’s talk more … later.
• What really pulls at my heart and mind when I read this passage is how truly and fully embodied God is in Jesus Christ. God took on all that it was to be human in the incarnation in Jesus Christ. God literally put on flesh and bone and hair and eyelashes and goosebumps. God put on coarsely woven clothes and rough leather sandals. God’s own stomach rumbled and God’s own mouth watered at the smell of fresh-baked bread.
  • Rev. Dr. Jamie Clark-Soles (prof. of NT at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, TX): If we are going to experience God, it will have to be in our bodies. This is, after all, the Gospel of Incarnation … John 6 is as embodied as it gets … Ingesting Jesus (a phrase used by Jane Webster who has a book by that name), eating his flesh and drinking his blood makes us commingled with him, and therefore God, in the deepest way.[5] → Friends, it was God who created us – created our bodies in all their beautiful and frustrating and confounding glory, created all of our daily needs to be fed and nourished over and over again, created each individual olfactory receptor that allows us to smell that baking bread and each individual taste bud that allows us to savor it. Remember, it’s in John’s gospel – John 10:10 – where Jesus promises those gathered around him (disciples, crowds, and Pharisees) that he came so that “they could have life – indeed, so that they could live life to the fullest.”[6]
  • And that’s the other really powerful connection that I love about this passage. Jesus is very specific. He is not just bread but “the bread of life,” “the living bread.” Over and over again, Jesus uses these two phrases.
    • vv. 35 and 48: “I am the bread of life.”
    • v. 51: “I am the living bread.”
    • v. 50: “This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats it will never die.”
    • vv. 51 (further in) and 58: “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
    • Also v. 51: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world”
    • Again and again and again, Jesus links himself and abundant life with bread – the most common, humble, varied, and accessible food element throughout history. → powerful for 2 reasons
      • FIRST: wide-spread accessibility of it all → text: Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.[7] → Gr. “world” literally refers to the whole world in the most inclusive sense
        • Humanity
        • Everyone
        • All peoples
        • WHOLE. WORLD. Period. Full stop. God embraced and took on the fullness of humanity in Jesus Christ for the whole world. No exceptions.
      • Also powerful because of that Eucharistic link that we touched on earlier – that distinctly communal element → Every single time we gather together to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together – every time we break bread and share it, every time we partake together and pray together and praise God in our shared presence together here at this table, we participate in and are nourished by that abundant life.
        • Rev. Dr. Clark-Soles: We experience God in the flesh. Our flesh is invigorated by the Spirit. Jesus, God, and the Spirit indwell us; we participate in them in our actual bodies. … For all of us, the eucharist (or communion, or the Lord’s Supper) reminds us we are part of a community, a community of life. Human beings were not made to be alone and cannot attain or maintain abundant life without others. We are in it together. Period.[8] → Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/07/ancient-bread/.

[2] Jn 6:21.

[3] Jn 6:25-26 (with my own insertion).

[4] Jn 6:50-51, 53-58.

[5] Jaime Clark-Soles. “Commentary on John 6:35-59” from Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/bread-of-life/commentary-on-john-635-59-2.

[6] Jn 10:10.

[7] Jn 6:51 (emphasis added).

[8] Clark-Soles.

Text used – John 4:46-54

This sermon was given on the Sunday of our annual meeting in 2022. The tradition in the congregation that I serve – the Presbyterian Church of Oronoco – is to intersperse the business of the annual meeting within the worship service. It helps us remember that all the work we do – the mission work, the compassion work, and even the sometimes-tedious administrative work – is work that we do for the glory of God.

          For the last few weeks, Jesus has been traveling. A couple of weeks ago, we read about that little incident at the wedding in Cana – the whole water-to-wine thing. After that, he and the few disciples who had already joined him headed up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover where he met the Pharisee Nicodemus in the secret of the night, then spent some time winding their way through some of the more remote parts of Judea. Then, of course, we read about Jesus’ adventure into Samaritan territory and his life-changing encounter with the woman at the well last week. All in all, this is the kind of journey that probably took a couple of weeks: probably 4 days or so to walk from Cana in Galilee to Jerusalem, time to celebrate the Passover, and probably a week to make their way back north to Cana (because last week’s Scripture reading told us Jesus and his disciples spent a few days in the Samaritan village). All told, it’s a journey of roughly 80 miles one way.

          Today, we catch up with Jesus as he and his disciples have finally returned to Cana in Galilee. But this isn’t a simple, uncomplicated returning for Jesus. He’s been doing things. He’s been healing people. His disciples have been baptizing. They traveled through – and stopped in! – Samaria! (gasp!) He’s back at that place where he turned simple water into the best of wines. People know him now. So when he and the disciples did finally return to Cana, word got around. Word got around far and wide. All the way to Capernaum, another 12 (or so) miles northeast of Cana, and in Capernaum, word reached a certain royal official whose son was sick. It’s interesting that the gospel writer tells us that this man is a “royal official.” It could mean that he’s a Gentile – a Roman citizen of some sort. But it could also mean that he’s a Jew whose been employed by the Roman Empire. Either way, he’s an outsider, because Jews who were voluntarily in the employ of the Romans – the oppressors – were despised within the Jewish community as a whole. (Think of Zacchaeus and Matthew, the tax collectors!)

          But to this father – this father’s whose son is deathly ill – none of that matters. He would travel ten times as far as those 12 measly miles between Capernaum and Cana if it meant his son could possibly be made well again. But he’s heard all the rumors flying around about this Jesus fellow, and he knows … he knows! … that this man can heal his son. Even though it’s a long shot. Even though his peers all think he’s crazy. Even though the possibility – the hope – is just a mere flicker … even though it’s barely a spark, it is a hope.

          So he goes to Jesus and asks him to heal his son. And he will not be deterred. Even when Jesus tries to put him off – tries to tell him that he doesn’t really believe. He hears Jesus say to him, “Unless you see miraculous signs and wonders, you won’t believe.”[1] He hears it, but he continues to plead: “Lord, please. Lord, please. Come. Come now. Come quickly. Come before my son dies.”[2] And even as he’s standing there shaking and weeping … even as he is silently and ceaselessly praying … even as he is pouring every ounce of his hope and his faith into this strange and miraculous rabbi in front of him, he hears the words he’s been praying for: “Go home. Your son live.”[3] And just like that, the man knows it’s true. He doesn’t have to see it. He doesn’t have to feel his revived and whole and living son in his arms. He knows. He believes. He mumbles thank you upon thank you upon thank you as he swiftly leaves this Jesus man’s presence and hurries home.

          And it is true. Before he can even get close to his home, he sees one of his servants running toward him along the road, shouting that his son is well. His son is well! And not only is he well, but he was made well at the exact moment that Jesus said it. When he finally walked back into him own home … when he finally did feel his revived and whole and living son in his arms … he told his whole household about his incredible encounter with Jesus, and they all believed.

          This is probably one of the shortest but most powerful stories in the gospel of John – powerful not because of Jesus’ actions but because of the man’s belief. Undeterred. Unfailing. Unwavering. He couldn’t know for sure what the future held, but he believed. He believed it not only could be better but it would be better. He believed without seeing.

          Friends, I don’t normally do this. In fact, I’ve never done this, but this morning, I want to read my pastor’s report to you:

          Many of you know that I’ve been working on a doctorate through the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary for the last 2 years – a Doctor of Ministry (DMin for short … and yes, it sounds exactly like “demon” … commence the ironic laughter). More specifically, it’s a DMin in “Pastoring for Renewal: Discipleship, Liturgy, and Catechesis.” The cohort description that appears at the top of every semester’s syllabus says,

“Renewed pastors lead renewed ministries. Renewed communities encourage and support joyful discipleship in Jesus Christ–loving God, neighbor and self–for the life and healing of the world. For renewal to be lasting and vital, it must address the personal and corporate worship life, education in the faith, and practices of discipleship. This UDTS Doctor of Ministry program will offer students the opportunity to explore the relationship between renewal, liturgical formation, catechesis, and practices of discipleship, both personally, as pastors, and within their parishes, congregations, or faith communities.”

          I mailed in my application for this program toward the end of 2019 and began in February 2020. Little did we know at that time what the next two years would look like. I’ve often joked about how ironic it is that I’m studying renewal in one of the least renewing times in history. And yet, I’ve come to recognize that it’s also incredibly fortuitous. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it abundantly and irrevocably clear that the Church is in the midst of deep and significant change. This isn’t something that was brought about by the pandemic. Far from it. It’s a change that’s been on the horizon for decades, but the realities and challenges of the pandemic both shed a harsh and unrelenting light on the need for change and accelerated the timeline of that need.

          And here I am, in the midst of all of it, taking a deep dive into renewal: the theory, the practices, the theology, the roadblocks and pitfalls, the practical steps, etc. I cannot think that this is an accident. This is what my Fun Nuns would call a pretty mighty “showy God” moment. Because, friends, we are in need of renewal.

          Stating the obvious, we are in need of renewal because of how drained and disconnected these last 2 yrs. of pandemic life have left us. But it goes far beyond that. Nearly five years ago, this congregation made the unanimous decision to dissolve the yoke with First Congregational Church UCC in Zumbrota. When we made the decision to dissolve the yoke, we did so because we’d looked at our finances and realized that we had maybe 3-5 yrs. left if nothing changed. Following that decision, we experienced a quick shot of renewal. People were coming or coming back to worship. Our finances became more stable through a couple of significant gifts and some savings in a few crucial areas. We had lots of energy and ideas. More than that, though, we had the excitement and fervor for the mission and work and worship and life of this congregation.

          But over the last few years, that renewal has been waning. After a few years of our budget staying in the black at the end of the year, we slipped back into running a roughly $10,000 yearly deficit. Participating and attendance – in worship but also in our various activities – has gone down. This is not a “fault” thing. It’s not because someone didn’t do something or forgot to do something or did something wrong. But it is still true.

          And here I am, in the midst of all of it, taking a deep dive into renewal. With this DMin program, I’ve reached the point of needing to figure out and propose my final project – my dissertation. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and praying and discerning a project that would be something that speaks to where my deepest heart lies in ministry but also something that would be truly and lastingly beneficial for the life of this congregation.

          And so I share with you “Come Alive!”: Exploring Discipleship through Prayer and Story – my DMin Ministry Focus Paper. Everything that I’ve read so far has made it clear how crucial it is that a congregation experience spiritual renewal before any kind of numerical renewal. Our spiritual bones need to be strong before we start thinking about reaching out and branching out in any sort of outreach. As one of my course books puts it, “A community of people growing up in their faith would never decide that they were not interested in reaching others with the gospel that is transforming their own lives.”[4]

          So we’re going to do some deep diving together into renewing our spiritual lives as individuals and our spiritual life as a congregation. It’s going to involve discipleship. It’s going to involve prayer. It’s going to involve story – God’s Story through Scripture but also our own stories of faith through testimony. We’re going to make a concerted, intentional effort to reconnect to God and to reconnect to one another as this body of Christ here in this particular time and place. Because that’s why we come here, right? I would hope so.

          The thing is, I can’t do this alone. Literally. I cannot undertake and participate in an entire congregational curriculum by myself. I need your help. I’m asking for your participation, but more importantly, I’m asking for your heart. I’m asking for you to take part in this endeavor not because you feel like you have to but because you want to – for yourself and for the life of this congregation.

          Let me tell you a story. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours on a Saturday afternoon sitting on the floor of my office really working on the particulars of this Ministry Focus Paper. I was surrounded by books and papers and pens and a rough (very rough!) outline that I’d already put together. Before I began, I lit one of my candles – something I always do in my office because it reminds me that the light of Christ is ever-present. And I was listening to music … because I am who I am. More particularly, I was listening to Lauren Daigle, a contemporary Christian artist. As I was sitting there elbow-deep in plans, a song came on – a song called “Come Alive.” The lyrics for this song come from Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones in the valley (Ezekiel 37:1-14):

          But we know that you are God, yours is the victory.
          We know there is more to come
          That we may not yet see.
          So with the faith you’ve given us,
          We’ll step into the valley unafraid, yeah …

           As we call out to dry bones, come alive, come alive!
          We call out to dead hearts, come alive, come alive!
          Up out of the ashes, let us see an army rise.
          We call out to dry bones, come alive!

          As I sat there surrounded by and steeped in thoughts and plans and prayers for renewal – specifically the renewal of this beloved little white church on the hill – with this song and these lyrics resounding in my ears and my heart, I was overcome with this vision of what we could be. It was full of hope. It was full of joy and possibility. It was full of God’s Spirit. And it brought me to tears. I hope and pray that you’ll take this journey with me in the year to come.

          Friends, it’s time to believe without seeing. Let’s do this. Amen.

[1] Jn 4:48 (emphasis added).

[2] based on Jn 4:49.

[3] Jn 4:50.

[4] Harold Percy. Your Church Can Thrive: Making the Connections That Build Healthy Congregations. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 31.

Text used – John 4:1-42

• Old Faithful. Probably the most famous geyser in the world, right?
  • Located in Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park
  • Blasts 200˚F water and 350˚F steam anywhere from 100-180 ft. into the air every 60-110 mins. (ends up erupting 20 times a day)
    • Hot enough that early pioneers actually used the water to wash their clothes before Yellowstone was made a national park
  • Evidence surrounding Old Faithful and around the rest of Upper Geyser Basic speak to the long and established history of Native Americans with the land[1] → Old Faithful “discovered” by Washburn Expedition (i.e. – white people finally found it) in 1870[2]
  • But of course, Old Faithful isn’t the only geyser in the world. → in general[3]
    • Geysers are hot springs that erupt under geological pressure
    • Geysers made from tube-like holes that run deep into the Earth’s crust → tube fills with water → magma near the bottom of the tube heats the water → water begins to boil and is eventually forced upward as super-heated water or steam
    • After the eruption, water slowly seeps back into the tube and process starts all over again
  • Geysers also found in other parts of the U.S., Russia, Chile, New Zealand, and Iceland[4]
  • Truly, y’all, geysers are an awe-inspiring force of nature! How many people here have seen a geyser in person?
    • Geysers are powerful
    • Geysers are somewhat unpredictable
    • Geysers come from a deep, deep place
• Today’s Scripture story = another story of amazing, awe-inspiring water → water that’s a lot like those geysers: powerful, somewhat unpredictable, and unfathomably deep → I have to say that, although I know it’s a long portion of Scripture to read on a Sunday morning, I’m so glad that the Narrative Lectionary highlights this entire story because it’s such a powerful witness. I think this story – another one that’s particular only to John’s gospel – gives us a really interesting insight into Jesus.
  • • Both interesting and important that our text starts off by telling us that Jesus “had to go through Samaria”[5]
      • Jesus is traveling back to Galilee – back to his home territory – after spending some time in Jerusalem and Judea → makes me wonder why Jesus “had” to go this way
        • Gr. = literally “it was necessary to go through Samaria”
        • And yet, this is an area that would have been diligently and deliberately avoided by faithful Jews. Samarians were those with mixed blood – part Jew and part Gentile. More specifically, part Assyrian. After the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, the Assyrian rulers planted some of their own people among those left in Israel, and some of the remaining Israelites intermarried with some of those Assyrians.[6] The Samaritans were the result of those marriages, and for that transgression – for daring to marry outside God’s chosen people – the Samaritans were completely and wholly despised by the Jews. So why did Jesus have to go through Samaria?
          • Maybe it was geographically shorter … but surely Jews at the time were used to skirting this scorned territory
          • Or maybe it was necessary for a reason that had absolutely nothing to do with physical distance and travel time.
• And from this route divergence, we get what might be my favorite exchange in all of Scripture! Jesus and this Samaritan woman have this incredible back-and-forth discussion in which she plays, not the part of the subservient woman but the rhetorical counterpart to Jesus.
  • Jesus asks for a drink → Samaritan woman’s response = spirited, not subservient: “Why do you, a Jewish man, ask for something to drink from me, a Samaritan woman?”[7] (I like her already!)
  • Jesus begins to tell Samaritan woman about living water → But this woman is having none of this crazy Jewish man’s ramblings! – text: The woman said to him, “Sir, you don’t have a bucket, and the well is deep. Where would you get this living water? You aren’t greater than our father Jacob, are you?”[8] → So not only does she attempt to call his bluff, but she also takes the time to remind this Jew – whose people have looked down on her people for centuries – that, in fact, they have a shared history … a shared ancestry. Truly, this is diplomatic discourse at its best!
  • Jesus extolls the eternal and plentiful nature of this living water → Samaritan woman comes back with a fabulously practical reply: “Sir, give me this water, so that I will never be thirsty and will never need to come here to draw water!”[9] → Drawing water from this well for cooking, for washing, for household chores, and for everything else is no small task that needs to be done every single day. This is a practical and pragmatic woman who knows she has other things she could be doing with her time! C’mon, Jesus … help a busy girl out!
  • Jesus turns the debate tables a bit when he pulls out the “husband” card[10]
    • Instructs the woman to go and get her husband
    • Woman’s response: “I don’t have a husband.”
    • Jesus: “You’re right to say, ‘I don’t have a husband. You’ve had five husbands, and the man you are with now isn’t your husband. You’ve spoken the truth.”
    • This part of the exchange piques the Samaritan woman’s interest, at least a little bit … but even in this interest, she holds her own, using her response to first flatter this Jewish stranger a bit (“Sir, I see that you are a prophet.”) before taking a bit of a jab at one of the things that separated the Jews from the Samaritans: “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you and your people say that it is necessary to worship in Jerusalem.”[11] → Can’t you just hear the ”What do you think about that?” that goes unspoken at the end of this exchange? This woman has guts, and I gotta say I cannot help but admire her for that. But we also have to admire Jesus in this exchange. He doesn’t get angry. He doesn’t get dismissive. He doesn’t get self-righteous. He doesn’t get up and leave. He stays in it. He stays.
  • Jesus finally drops his ace in the hole: The woman said, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one who is called the Christ. When he comes, he will teach everything to us.” Jesus said to her, “I Am – the one who speaks with you.”[12] → Now, we’re not really used to Jesus declaring his identity because he doesn’t really do that in any of the other gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it’s everyone else who declares Jesus as the Messiah – the cast-out demons, the sinners, the Gentiles, those who have been healed. But not Jesus. But here in John’s gospel, Jesus is clear … clearer than we may even realize.
    • Jesus’ response – “I Am – the one who speaks with you” = same language that God used when giving Moses God’s own name at the burning bush: “I Am Who I Am”[13] → This is that most precious, most revered, most sacred name of God – the name that isn’t even spoken or written in Jewish culture, both then and today. And Jesus is applying this name … to himself. It’s a name the woman would have absolutely recognized. And in that moment, she believes.
      • Runs to tell the rest of the villagers about this life-altering Rabbi
      • Bring them all to the well to see this Jesus
      • Text: Many Samaritans in that city believe in Jesus because of the woman’s word when she testified, “He told me everything I’ve ever done.”[14]
      • Jesus stays in the city – in this Samaritan, despised, Gentile city for two more days – text: Many more believed because of his word, and they said to the woman, “We no longer believe because of what you said, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this one is truly the savior of the world.”[15]
• We said that geysers were powerful, and in this incredible exchange between first Jesus and the unnamed Samaritan woman and later between Jesus and the entire Samaritan town, we see just how powerful the living water of God can be.
  • Powerful enough to grab hold of this Samaritan woman and quench a thirst she may not even knew she had: a thirst for acceptance and community → I remember reading somewhere once (probably in one of my commentaries, though I don’t remember exactly where) that the fact that this woman was coming to the water by herself indicated that she was something of an outcast.
    • Most of the water-gathering was done in a group → time for the women of the village to come together and chat/catch up with one another/gossip → And yet, this Samaritan woman shows up to the well alone. She isn’t part of the group.
    • Most of the water-gathering was done in the early part of the day before it got too hot BUT Scripture tells us this woman showed up around noon, the hottest part of the day → indicates that she deliberately went to the well at a time when it was unlikely that others would be there
    • Also important to point out what the text doesn’t say here – scholar: The text does not say the woman is a prostitute; it says she had husbands, not customers. We have no idea if the husbands died, if she was divorced, if Levirate marriage was involved. The text does not say. … The main point involves Jesus and this woman having a deep, rich theological debate that allows them to form an intimate connection across real and perceived differences such that the woman receives the first theophany (manifestation of God) in the Gospel of John and then evangelizes her community.[16] → Through this discourse with Jesus, she becomes so overwhelmed by her belief that she runs back to her village – the village that has shunned and excluded her – to share the news with them. And in that sharing – first, her intimate sharing with Jesus, then her public sharing with her village – she finds that community that quenches her lonely spirit.
• We also said that geysers were somewhat unpredictable, and this whole story is somewhat unpredictable.
  • Unpredictable in that Jesus, a faithful Jew, chooses to not only journey through Samaria but to stop in that despised territory, first for a drink of water, then for a few days so he could teach this village about God’s love and grace – about God’s living water
  • Unpredictable in that the focus of this sophisticated political and theological back-and-forth is not a fellow Rabbi or even a Pharisee … but a woman → hear the unpredictability of this in the disciples’ sole (short) appearance in this story: Just then, Jesus’ disciples arrived and were shocked that he was talking with a woman.[17]
  • Unpredictable in the outcome that the majority of this Samaritan village – this Gentile village – come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah after just two short days
  • At the same time, this story is wholly predictable in that it shows us once again that indeed, God’s living water – God’s unearnable grace and unquenchable love – are available to all.
• And we said that geysers came from a deep, deep place – the kind of place that brings the Incarnate God, the Messiah and Savior of the world, to a humble well for a life-changing interaction … the kind of place that births profound revelations of faith … the kind of place that inspires an ostracized woman to witness to her whole village … the kind of place that can renew our faith again and again and again.
  • Brings up the major difference between geysers and this living water that Jesus presents in our story today: Geysers are rare. They need exactly the right geological conditions to occur. They need hot rocks below, an ample source of groundwater, a subsurface water reservoir, and fissures (those tube-like formations) to deliver the water to the surface. The confluence of all these conditions is so rare that there are only about 1000 geysers around the world.[18] But God’s living water? God’s living water is not rare. God’s living water of grace can wash over us no matter the circumstances. There is no heart too distant, no spirit too broken, no person too alone, no life too lost for God’s living water to spring up in you with all the power and hope and transformation of a geyser of grace. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from. No matter what you bring with you. Let God’s living water flow! Amen.

[1] Richard Grant. “The Lost History of Yellowstone: Debunking the myth that the great national park was a wilderness untouched by human hands” from Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lost-history-yellowstone-180976518/.

[2] Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan. “About Old Faithful, Yellowstone’s Famous Geyser” from the Yellowstone National Park official website, https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/geysers-hot-springs/about-old-faithful/.

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/geyser/.

[4] Hobart M. King. “What Is a Geyser?” from https://geology.com/articles/geyser.shtml.

[5] Jn 4:4.

[6] Alyssa Roat. “The Samaritans: Hope from the History of a Hated People” from https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/the-samaritans-hope-from-the-history-of-a-hated-people.html.

[7] Jn 4:9.

[8] Jn 4:11-12a.

[9] Jn 4:15.

[10] Jn 4:16-18.

[11] Jn 4:20.

[12] Jn 4:25-26.

[13] Ex 3:14.

[14] Jn 4:39.

[15] Jn 4:41-42.

[16] Jaime Clark-Soles. “Commentary on John 4:1-42” from Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/the-woman-at-the-well/commentary-on-john-41-42-3.

[17] Jn 4:27.

[18] King, https://geology.com/articles/geyser.shtml.

Text used – John 3:1-21

• The scene opens on a dark side street. One man stands there alone, apparently waiting patiently, but he’s soon joined by another man. The newcomer seems nervous and uneasy. He keeps looking furtively around like he’s afraid someone will see him with this patient stranger. There are no streetlights around, so the only light that illuminates this hidden meeting is the light cast by the moon above. One of the men comes with questions. The other comes with more answers than his companion even knows to seek.
  • Sounds like it could be the opening scene for all sorts of different blockbuster movies, doesn’t it?
    • International spy thriller … a lá James Bond or Jason Bourne
    • Explosive-packed action movie … a lá “Die Hard” or “Air Force One”
    • Strikingly similar scene toward the beginning of “Star Wars: Rogue One”
  • And yet it’s not a scene out of any such script. It’s a scene straight out of our Scripture reading this morning – the scene in which we meet Nicodemus. → Nicodemus = really interesting character in Jn’s gospel
    • Today’s passage = 1^st of 3 appearance made by Nicodemus throughout the text
      • 2^nd appearance (which we’ll read in a few weeks) = ch. 7 → Nicodemus speaks up on Jesus’ behalf in the midst of some controversy after Jesus taught in the temple[1]
      • 3^rd appearance = with Joseph of Arimathea at the tomb following Jesus’ death but before his resurrection → It’s Nicodemus who brings the necessary items for ritual burial – the myrrh and the aloe, “nearly seventy-five pounds in all”[2] – to prepare Jesus’ body.
      • And it all begins with today’s encounter – this moment when Nicodemus seeks out this new and radical rabbi from Nazareth in the middle of the night.
• Rev. Dr. Patrick Hartin (in Exploring the Spirituality of the Gospels): Jesus’ dialogues with many individuals lie at the heart of John’s gospel. In each encounter, Jesus challenges the individual to enter into a spiritual relationship with him. In illustrating these encounters, John shows the level of their faith relationship.[3] → As today’s encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus is just such a dialogue and relationship – the first that we find in the gospel, in fact – let’s talk a little bit more about Nicodemus as a character this morning.
  • Only in Jn’s gospel that we meet Nicodemus at all → isn’t mentioned or named in any of the other three gospels
  • Who Nicodemus was in society = given at the very beginning of today’s passage: There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a Jewish leader.[4] → These two titles – “Pharisee” and “Jewish leader” – may not seem like much to us, but they indicate that Nicodemus was a rather powerful person within the Jewish hierarchy.
    • Pharisee = experts in Jewish law → scholars who knew and interpreted that law for the general population
    • “Jewish leader” = tells us Nicodemus was one of the Sanhedrin → sort of like the Jewish Supreme Court at the time → It was up to the members of the Sanhedrin to not only interpret the law but dole out judgments and appropriate punishments according to that law when it was broken. Ultimately, it is the Sanhedrin that will accuse and convict Jesus and demand that Pilate crucify him.
  • Who Nicodemus was as a person = two important insights that we get from today’s text
    • FIRST: Nicodemus was conflicted – text: [Nicodemus] came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.”[5]
      • On one hand, Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness
        • Can’t be seen
        • Can’t be recognized
        • Sure seems to indicate that he’s concerned about this meeting – that he’s worried about it
      • On the other hand, Nicodemus addresses Jesus with respect
        • Calls Jesus “Rabbi” (cultural and respectful way to address a learned teacher)
        • Also admits that “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God” → pretty significant admission, partly because of Nicodemus’ role as a Pharisee and partly because of how early we are in Jesus’ ministry → At this point in John’s recounting of Jesus’ ministry, not much significant has happened.
          • Jesus has been baptized by John the Baptist
          • Jesus has called a few disciples[6]
          • Jesus has performed the miracle of changing water to wine at the wedding of Cana[7] (which we talked about a few weeks ago)
          • Jesus has overturned the tables of the merchants and money changers in the Temple[8] (which you read with Rev. Erica Schemper last week) → passage that ends with a vague reference to “the miraculous signs” that the people in Jerusalem saw Jesus do[9]
          • That’s it! Being the omniscient observers that we are – the ones who already know the rest of the story, know the other miracles that are coming (including the ultimate miracle of Jesus’ own death and resurrection) – we know just how amazing Jesus is and the salvation that will come through him. But at this point, Nicodemus doesn’t know any of that yet. And still, here he is! Who Jesus is and what he has done has already been powerful enough for Nicodemus, the Pharisee and Sanhedrin member, to seek him out in the dead of night to learn more.
    • Leads us to 2^nd insight we get from our text about Nicodemus personality: he is a curious man, a man who seeks answers
      • Initially comes to Jesus under the cover of night because he has questions – questions he knows only this rabbi sent from God can answer
      • Continues to question Jesus further every time Jesus gives him a new answer: “How is this possible, Jesus? How is this possible? How are all these things possible?” → In these questions, we see the Pharisee in Nicodemus coming out. As far as we can tell, he’s not asking in any kind of challenging, contentious manner. But he’s been trained to understand even the smallest, most insignificant elements of the law – understand them inside and out so that he can interpret them for others. Like a lawyer, it is engrained in him to ask questions, not just from one angle, but from all angles so that he can best understand whatever problem or situation is in front of him.
        • Scholar (describing Nicodemus): [One who keeps] the rules but [knows] something is still missing.[10]
      • And in this way, are any of us so different from Nicodemus?
        • Probably one of the most relatable characters in the whole of Scripture for this reason → In the course of this strange midnight encounter, Jesus tells Nicodemus some incredible things – things about needing to be born anew, about being born of water and the Spirit, about earthly things and heavenly things, about God’s own Son being sent into the world, about darkness and light, about truth … enough incredible things to fill a whole year’s worth of sermons! Things that we’re still wrestling with … still trying to understand … still unsure about … still asking questions about 2000 years later! So when Nicodemus asks Jesus over and over again, “Jesus, how is that possible?” we feel like we could be standing right behind him nodding and voicing our agreement. “Yeah, Jesus. How is that possible? Please … please … explain it to us. But in ways we can understand.” Because we are desperate to understand. Our hearts and our minds and our spirits are yearning to understand. Society is pushing us to understand – even to understand to the point of being able to “prove it.”
          • Rev. Dr. Karoline Lewis (Lutheran pastor, author, chair of Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul): Believing for the characters in the Fourth Gospel is a verb and is subject to all of the ambiguity, uncertainty, and indecisiveness of being human. Having an incarnate God necessitates an incarnational faith: believing is just as complicated as being human.[11]
• And that’s the really hard and challenging part of today’s Scripture reading: John gives us all of Jesus’ flowery, theologically dense explanations … but it’s still not super clear, is it? Not as clear and concise as we’d like it to be, anyway.
  • Jn = challenging gospel to read and study and preach because it is so theologically entwined → Remember, John was chronologically the last gospel written. It was written around the turn of the 1^st nearly 70 years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. There was a lot of doctrine and dogma that had developed within Christian circles by the time John was written, so there’s a lot to unpack even within this gospel.
  • That being said, there’s something that stuck out to me at the very beginning of Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in today’s reading – something seemed to sort of shelter a lot of these theological ideas under one unifying theological umbrella: seeing God’s kingdom. – text: [Nicodemus] came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it’s not possible to see God’s kingdom.”[12] → From the outset, Jesus makes it clear to Nicodemus that The Point – the whole point of all of it: birth and baptism, ministry and miracles, teachings and trials – the whole point is seeing God’s kingdom.
    • Point of “being born anew” – text: Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.”[13] → Being born anew in the Spirit allows us to tune our hearts and our lives and our souls to the moving and working of God’s Holy Spirit in the world around us – those thin places where we feel God moving and see God’s kingdom shining through in the people and interactions around us.
    • Point of Jesus life and death to come – text: No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Human One. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Human One be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.[14] → Jesus alluding to sort of obscure story out of Numbers in which God instructs Moses to mount a bronze image of a snake on a pole so that any Israelite who had been bitten by just such a snake in the wilderness could look upon the bronze serpent and be healed … Turning eyes to the One lifted up in order to be healed … to be saved … to be made whole. Resting our hearts and our hopes on the One lifted up reveals God’s kingdom in salvation and extraordinary grace.
    • And, of course, seeing God’s kingdom in love … that familiar text that, while so many know it by heart, few remember that it’s part of Jesus’ secret nighttime conversation with a Pharisee who believes – text: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.[15]
• Jesus knew that Nicodemus was a man seeking answers. But more than that, he was a man seeking Truth – the kind of Truth that would help him not only see the kingdom of God breaking through all around him but also embody that kingdom of God in the ways that matter most: through an openness to the Holy Spirit, through faith, and through God’s unending love and grace. Jesus gave Nicodemus all that he sought and more. Jesus opened his eyes before he even fully understood how and why they needed to be opened. So where is Jesus inviting you to open your eyes … to open your hearts … to open your faith and see God’s kingdom today? Amen.

[1] Jn 7:50-51.

[2] Jn 19:39.

[3] Patrick J. Hartin. Exploring the Spirituality of the Gospels. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011), 67.

[4] Jn 3:1.

[5] Jn 3:2.

[6] Jn 1:35-51.

[7] Jn 2:1-12.

[8] Jn 2:13-25.

[9] Jn 2:23.

[10] Brett Younger. “John 3:1-8 – Homiletical Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels – John, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 59.

[11] Karoline Lewis. “Second Sunday in Lent – John 3:1-17 – Exegetical Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year A, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 73.

[12] Jn 3:2-3 (emphasis added).

[13] Jn 3:5-6.

[14] Jn 3:13-15.

[15] Jn 3:16-17.

Text used – John 2:1-11

• There’s a show that I used to watch with one of my roommates during my senior year of college. Friday nights were laundry nights for us, so we’d sit there folding our laundry and watching this show.
  • Show on TLC called “What Not to Wear”
    • 2 fashion experts would ambush someone (with the help of their friends and family) and present them with a choice: you can have this $5000 gift card for a shopping spree BUT you have to …
      • Come to NYC with us
      • Bring your entire wardrobe
      • Let us throw away anything we want to from that wardrobe
      • Shop by our rules
    • Before getting to the shopping, though, they would do this part of the show where the person receiving the makeover would put on a couple of their favorite outfits, then stand in what they called the “360˚ mirror” – literally surrounding them with an octagon of mirrors. → hosts would point out things about what they were wearing that were undesirable: poor fit, clashing colors/patterns, clothes that weren’t age appropriate
    • Shopping
      • Short time of shopping with the hosts following their “rules” (mostly about finding the right fit or finding different cuts and styles that flattered that person’s particular body)
      • Short time of the person trying to shop on their own (always ended disastrously)
      • Finished up with the hosts swooping in → helping correct some of the mistakes made during the person’s solo shopping excursion → all 3 of them finishing out the shopping spree together
        • Clothes that were appropriate for the workplace
        • Clothes that were appropriate for a night out or a special event
        • Clothes that were appropriate for hanging out at home
    • Makeover portion → new haircut/color and makeup
    • 1^st reveal = person showing off their new look to the hosts
    • 2^nd reveal = person showing off their new look at home to their friends and family → It was always fun to watch that last part – the looks of shock and amazement on the faces of the person’s friends and family as they showed off their new look and the comments that their friends and family often made:
      • “She looks even more like herself now than she did before!”
      • “It really seems like his appearance on the outside matches his personality on the inside now!”
      • And those comments really get to the crux of it – of why we enjoyed watching the show so much. In the end, it wasn’t about making everyone who appeared on it a cookie-cutter copy of the fashion plates of the day. It was about helping them express their uniqueness and individuality – helping express what was special about them – in ways that made them look and feel their best. In the end, it was always fun to see the people simultaneously the same but changed at the end of each episode.
  • Today’s gospel reading from the beginning of Jn = interesting story of Jesus who begins the story in one way but ends the story changed
• We’re pretty near the beginning of John’s gospel at this point, so not much has happened yet.
  • Sun. before Christmas → read beginning of John – “the story of the Word,” as the CEB Study Bible[1] titles it: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.[2] → This is as close as John gets to any kind of birth narrative in his gospel.
  • Following that = story of John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus → culminates in Jn’s account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River[3]
  • Then story of Jesus calling first disciples: Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip, and Nathanael[4]
  • And straight after that calling, we come to today’s story: The Wedding at Cana.
• I love this story because it’s such an odd little story within all the gospels. I think it presents such a human side of Jesus. → begins the story as just another guest at the wedding
  • Come to celebrate
  • Come to enjoy the day
  • Come to be with his community – just another member like any other
  • As far as we can tell, Jesus doesn’t come to this wedding with any miraculous, divine intentions. As far as we can tell, this was a pretty normal wedding. – text: On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the celebration.[5] → There are so many spaces left for wonder in this story – so many places I want the gospel writer to pause and fill in some details for us.
    • Whose wedding was it? A cousin, perhaps? A neighbor? Or a friend from Jesus’ childhood?
    • What was the celebration like? Was it a days-long affair of hospitality and dancing, feasting and blessing?
    • Were Jesus and his disciples having fun?
    • I know these aren’t necessary details. The gospel writer’s task is to move the story along to the “good part” – the miraculous part – but when we open our imaginations into this Scripture story, we still have to wonder, don’t we?
  • The problem of this story – the main issue or conflict that our main characters are up against – is presented in short order. Just after telling us that Jesus, his disciples, and his mother are all present at this wedding celebration, we’re also told that the wine has run out. Sure, this sounds like a problem at any celebration – running out of refreshments.
    • Have to remember what a big deal this would have been in that culture – culture that places the highest emphasis and importance on hospitality → Yes, running out of refreshments at a wedding before the night was over would be sort of embarrassing today. But back then, it would have been shameful. It would have been dishonorable to your guests – an insult, even. It’s an oversight that would have been unforgivable – one of those occurrences that would have haunted the entire family for generations to come, that people would have talked about and talked about and talked about.
    • Brings to mind for us all the times we have “run out”
      • Run out of something physical that we’re trying to provide, sure à run out of food or drink at some sort of gathering or event
      • Run out of ideas or inspiration in the middle of a project
      • Run out of energy or drive in the midst of some large undertaking → story of Jen and I walking the 3-Day almost 7 yrs. ago and running out of stamina after the 2^nd day
  • Text makes it plain that even in the face of such a social catastrophe as this host who has run out of wine too soon, Jesus doesn’t expect any sort of out-of-the-ordinary experiences at this wedding → Jesus’ mother (who’s never actually called “Mary” throughout John’s gospel) approaches Jesus and informs him that the wine has run out, and Jesus’ response is more disinterested than we are used to hearing from Jesus
    • No proclamations of who he is
    • No promises of God’s goodness and faithfulness
    • No lesson wrapped in the narrative folds of a parable
    • Just a simple dismissal: “Woman, what does that have to do with me? My time hasn’t come yet.”[6]
      • Important to note that, while this may seem like an odd response to us – even disrespectful in the way that Jesus speaks to his own mother – it is, in fact, a fairly colloquial way for the two to converse → This is one of those bits of Scripture where the nuance has been lost to us through the work of translation and the passage of time. Jesus addressing his mother in this way is not nearly as disrespectful and dismissive as it sounds.
      • And yet … pastor, author, and scholar Rev. Gibson “Nibs” Stroupe puts a finger on the challenging aspect of this exchange between Jesus and his mother: There definitely is tension in this conversation. Jesus’ mother … has an idea about her son’s power, and she is hoping that he can rescue the situation. Jesus seems hesitant or irritated (or both) at this request. Perhaps he wants his first sign to be a bit more glorious or controversial … Maybe he is even beginning to imagine how long the list of requests for action will be, once the word gets out that he has special powers. His answer to his mother – “my hour has not yet come” – indicates that this miracle is a bit premature for Jesus.[7]
  • But despite Jesus’ reluctance, his mother’s faith never waivers. – text: His mother told the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Nearby were six stone water jars used for the Jewish cleansing ritual, each able to hold about twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water,” and they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Now draw some from them and take it to the headwaiter,” and they did.[8]
    • The expectations (or lack of expectations) of those around them didn’t matter to Jesus’ mother
    • Even the lack of Jesus’ own expectations didn’t matter to Jesus’ mother
    • All that mattered to her was that she believed in her son. She believed in his ability to bring aid in the midst of a difficult situation. She believed in his purpose to help and to provide and to embody the goodness of God. She believed in all that her son was and all that he would be. Jesus’ mother believed, and her believe was met with breathtaking abundance.
      • 6 stones jars that held 20-30 gallons each
      • 6 stone jars that, even when empty, would have taken more than one person to move them
      • 6 stone jars that the servants filled with water all the way to the brim
      • 6 stone jars that Jesus turned to wine à Without a word. Without a gesture. Without any recorded movement or hint from Jesus, all that water was suddenly and inexplicably turned to wine. And not just any wine, but the best
        • Abundance of quantity
        • Abundance of quality
        • Abundance that left even Jesus changed – a different man, at least in perception, than he was when he and his disciples walked into that wedding
        • Abundance beyond expectation … well, almost all expectations, anyway. – scholar: The mother of Jesus is a woman of remarkable faith and insight. Her words to the servants indicate her own trust in the words of the one who is the divinely-human Word. They are words for us today to hear and to ponder: to build our lives upon.[9]
• And so, friends, let us look to Jesus’ mother in this story. In the face of all that appears and feels and is lacking in the world around us and even inside ourselves, let us hold tight to the faith of Jesus’ mother.
  • Not a directing faith
  • Not a conditional faith
  • Not a faith restrained by caveats and “what ifs”
  • In preparation for the abundance, Jesus’ mother doesn’t give the steward contingencies – no Plan B or Plan C. She doesn’t micromanage either his actions or Jesus’ actions with her own ideas or directions or micro-expectations of what is to come. Her faith in Jesus is open-ended and full and sure: “Do whatever he tells you.” And that is our call still today. To come before God. To kneel before Jesus. To open ourselves up to the workings of the Holy Spirit with the words of Jesus’ mother as our surest hope and motivation: “Do whatever he tells you.” It’s daunting. It’s uncertain. It’s full of the unexpected. But through that openness, miraculous things can happen. Amen.

[1] CEB Study Bible. (Nashville: Common English Bible, 2013), 170 NT.

[2] Jn 1:1.

[3] Jn 1:19-34.

[4] Jn 1:35-51.

[5] Jn 2:1-2.

[6] Jn 2:4.

[7] Nibs Stroupe. “John 2:1-12 – Homiletical Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospel: John, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 47.

[8] Jn 2:5-8.

[9] Dorothy A. Lee. “Commentary on John 2:1-11” from Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/wedding-at-cana-2/commentary-on-john-21-11-7.

Text used – Matthew 2:1-12

• Stars are fascinating, aren’t they?
  • So many stars in the whole of the sky that we can see that we can’t even begin to number them … let alone the vastness of the universe that even our most powerful space telescopes can’t capture!
    • Illustration from Facebook[1]: On Sept. 3, 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope began pointing its camera at a small area in the night sky …
      • “The area, about a tenth the size of the full moon, appeared to be complete blackness with no stars visible to the naked eye.” → PICTURE: full moon in a black sky full of stars with a tiny, completely black box of sky highlighted
      • “Hubble kept its camera pointed there for over 4 months, taking in all the light it could. This is what Hubble saw …” → PICTURE: I’m going to walk this picture around so you can see it for yourselves. And for those of you at home, I’m just going to pop it up instead of our video feed for a few minutes.
        • Each dot in this image is an entire galaxy … ENTIRE. GALAXY. full of stars!! Up to 1 trillion stars each, to be more precise. And if our galaxy is any indication, each star may have a system of planets around it. In this photo alone, there are over 10,000 galaxies.
        • There’s a particularly large galaxy. In the picture, it’s in the bottom right corner. It’s yellowish in color and sort of spiral-y looking. Scientists have figured out that this single galaxy contains 8 times as many stars as our Milky Way Galaxy. “It’s so large, it technically shouldn’t exist according to current physics theories.”
      • And just in case your mind isn’t blown enough already, “These are the most distant objects ever photographed. They’re more than 13 billion lightyears away.” → Imagine for a minute just how old the light from these stars is. Think about it. The light from our own sun takes 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth. Light travels at 3 million kilometers per second, and the sun is 150 million kilometers away from Earth.[2] So the light from the Sun is already 8 minutes old when it reaches Earth. And while looking back in time 8 minutes may not be quite so exciting, when we apply that same principle to the rest of the stars, things get really interesting.[3]
        • Arcturus, one of the brightest stars that we can see from Earth (located just off the handle of the Big Dipper) is just under 37 lightyears away → So the light that we’re seeing when we find Arcturus in the night sky is just under 37 yrs. old. When we look at that light, we’re looking back 37 yrs. into the past.
        • Betelgeuse (makes up the upper left shoulder of the Orion constellation) = 642.5 lightyears away → So when we look at Betelgeuse, we’re looking 642½ yrs. into the past.
        • Rigel (makes up the right foot of the Orion constellation) is just over 864 lightyears away
  • It’s easy to understand why space … the night sky … the heavens … whatever you want to call it has fascinated so people for so long – millennia, really. It’s both concrete and mysterious. We can see space with our eyes. We know that it’s there. That it’s real. With the help of first rudimentary telescopes and eventually infinitely more complicated apparatuses, we can see what’s out there in greater detail. And yet, we also know that even the mind-boggling vastness that we can see is nothing compared to what’s truly out there. We know that there’s so much more that we can’t see. And thinking about space like this – as both concrete and mystical … as seeming to exist, at least to some extent, outside the normal bounds of time – sheds a whole new light on the celebration of Epiphany and Matthew’s story of the magi, doesn’t it?
• Now, I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to read a fairly large passage from one of the commentaries that I was looking at this week.
  • Commentary: Feasting on the Gospels – Matthew, vol. 1[4]
    • Explain what a commentary is – BASIC
    • Explain why I like this particular commentary series
  • This passage: written by Rev. Dr. Susan R. Andrews, now honorably retired in the Presbyterian Church (USA) but served multiple churches throughout her more than 4 decades of ministry as well as serving as the moderator of the 215^th General Assembly in 2003 → Dr. Andrews did such a beautiful, eloquent job of highlighting the mystery and the majesty of this Epiphany passage that I wanted to share it with you.

         When I was in college I fulfilled my science requirement by taking astronomy. Our main assignment for the semester was to study the stars, to carefully draw the changing heavens over a four-month period. So every night, with a flashlight, mittens, and my dog-eared notebook, I would climb to the roof of my dorm and gaze starward. Soon the close and holy darkness began to pulse with wonder. It became clear to me how reasonable the skies are, how predictable the patterns, and how logical the language of those glowing gases inching themselves across the sky night after night after night. It also became very obvious when something did not fit the pattern – a falling star or an airplane light or a meteor streaking across the sky.

          Those wise men from Arabia would have easily spotted the strange star so long ago, and having exhausted the reason of nature, they would quickly have turned to a second kind of reason: the reason of knowledge. What would other wise seers in other parts of the world know about the stars, and what was written down about the truth of the heavens? This is how they ended up in Jerusalem, picking the brains of Herod’s scholars. …

          In order truly to follow the star, the wise med had to move beyond reason to intuition. They had to move beyond science to faith – trusting the journey even though they did not know where they were going, trusting a wisdom beyond their own to take them where they needed to go. Yes, the wisdom of the wise men was a wondering, wandering kind of wisdom that ended up in worship, in their offering homage to the wider and more wonderful Wisdom of God.

          In these postmodern times, many within the younger generations are moving away from the rationalism of their parents and grandparents. Through incense and meditation and experience and beauty, they are seeking mystery and embracing wonder. Rather than doctrine, they seek delight. Rather than ideas, they explore imagination. Rather than rationality, they yearn for relationship. Like the magi, they are willing to take risks and explore the unknown in order to find the Holy. Ask and keep on asking. Seek and keep on seeking. Find and keep on finding. Their faith is a Jesus faith – a journey faith – and like the wise men, their intellectual curiosity and spiritual hunger give them courage to leave behind all that is familiar.

          Biblical scholar Ken Bailey has opened our hearts to a fresh understanding of the Christmas story, based on his own experiences living and studying in the Middle East. Jesus was not born in the cold stink of a barn, rudely marginalized by an insulting innkeeper. Instead, consistent with the ethic of hospitality ingrained in the cultural DNA of Arab and Semitic peoples, Mary and Joseph were warmly welcomed by their relatives in the countryside of Judea. They were invited to sleep in the warmth of a big family room – a gracious, but well-used space commonly shared with the animals of the family. Yes, Jesus was born in a living room – and continues to dwell in the living room of our lives.

          What this means, of course, is that the wise men followed their intuition and their hearts to this same living room – discovering the meaning of the star not in the corrupt halls of Herod’s power, but in the swaddled heart of everyday life. So, in the fullness of time, wholeness was born. Mind and heart, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, powerful and simple: they all meet in the living room of God’s imagination – God fully alive in the fragile familiarity of flesh. Incarnation can be understood only through intuition and imagination, through the real stuff of real living. …

          Albert Einstein captures the necessity of wonder: “The most beautiful emotion was can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. The one to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” – Susan R. Andrews. “Matthew 2:1-12 – Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels – Matthew, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 14, 16, 18.

• Today, friends, I encourage you to remember to hold space for the mystery of faith – for that “beautiful emotion of experiencing the mystical,” as Einstein put it. Too often, we find ourselves feeling like we have to explain everything – every belief, every action, every decision, every movement – in such exhausting detail. We forget just how powerful mystery can be. We forget how moving the unknown can be. We forget how freeing it can be to be completely without all the answers … or even any More than 2000 yrs. ago, a light shined down on a brand-new family in the little, backwater, nothing town of Bethlehem. Knowing what we know about stars, I have to wonder how old that light was. Light from the beginning of time, perhaps? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word, nothing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.”[5]
  • The Word … past, present, and future … then, now, always → The Word that spoke to people then … that speaks to people now … that will always speak to people ready and open to listen.
  • The Light … past, present, and future … then, now, always → Light that drew people to the Savior then … that draws people to the Savior now … that will always draw people in need of and seeking a Savior.
  • The Good News of the Gospel: that God’s Love Incarnate came into the world in Bethlehem that night more than 2000 yrs. ago to make us all children of God, to bridge a gap that we as humans couldn’t bridge on our own → the Good News of the Gospel … past, present, and future … then, now, always. → Good News that changed lives then – the lives of shepherd, the lives of magi, the lives of a simple woman and her husband, the lives of disciples and those seeking healing and those yearning for a new way. Good News that changes lives now – the lives of those seeking hope and those yearning for a new way, the lives of those who have had a relationship with God from birth and those who find their way into that relationship later (sometimes much later) stumbling, crashing, aching, and rejected everywhere else. Good News that will always change the lives of those with willing hearts and eager spirits. Amen.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/Lovebyabhisar/photos/pcb.4144558385647954/4144556648981461.

[2] https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/are-you-looking-into-the-past-when-you-look-at-the-stars.html.

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+far+away+is+the+star+rigel+from+earth&oq=how+far+away+is+the+star+r&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0i512j0i22i30j0i390l3.7678j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

[4] Feasting on the Gospels – Matthew, vol. 1. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), 2013.

[5] Jn 1:1-5.