Guest Preacher: David Conway
Guest Preacher: Dick Burks
Hiding Behind the Truth (John 17:6–19)
My first reaction is to want Jesus to pray for it to be easy. I want him to protect me from the world by installing some kind of force field, some heat shield around me that won’t allow the slings and arrows to touch me.
But he doesn’t do that. Instead, he prays not that there be a protective wall around me to guard against the damage life can cause but that I can endure the damage, that I can embrace the truth that life is full of fear and horror.
Because Jesus knows that if we who follow him can’t speak the truth, everything we have to say will be easily dismissed. If we find ourselves hedging our bets over speaking what’s true, why should anyone take us seriously when we talk about a better world?
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Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (John 14:1-14)
In other words, if you love one another, you’re already doing the works that I’ve done—and you won’t have to question the “way to the Father,” about whether you’re following the step-by-step directions since everyone will already know who you belong to.
If you condemn a system that allows police officers to kill a Black man in cold blood … on video … you and everyone else will know you’re following “the way.”
If you raise your voice on behalf of the unemployed and the undocumented in a culture satisfied to let them suffer unaided by the powers and principalities, you won’t have to question where I’m going—you’ll already be there with me.
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The Trouble with the Folks in Charge (John 10:1-10)
In other words, the people tasked with watching over the most vulnerable of the flock have proven themselves sightless. They care more that the sheep don’t jaywalk than about the fact that the way they run things has created even more vulnerable sheep.
The trouble with the folks in charge is that being in charge isn’t the point; it’s about what kind of world we want to live in. Does it create space for the invisible people? Does everyone have enough to eat, a place to sleep, a means to care for people’s bodies and minds? Does it stand vigil against predators who feast on the weak and defenseless?
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You Call this Blessed? (Matthew 21:1-11)
We heal the sick; we bind up the broken-hearted; we comfort the grieving; we pick up the downtrodden; we fight for justice … not because it makes for good strategy, but because we follow Jesus, which means we’re prepared to walk with him down any dark alley he enters—in search of those the rest of the world would just as soon leave behind.
We do it because it’s right. And because God loves us enough not to let us stay where we are, because we’re the blessed who come in the name of the Lord, and because we don’t know how to do anything else.
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Please, Don’t Let Me Go (John 20:19-31)
“Love your neighbor as yourself," as an ethical system, does have the drawback of relying entirely on me as the reference point—which, frankly, feels like something of a flaw in the system. I mean, what if I don’t love myself very much at all? What if I happen to be self-destructive? Does the golden rule relieve me of any duty I have toward another person beyond what I might expect from myself? The golden rule doesn’t work for nihilists.
That’s a problem, isn’t it?
Jesus, seeing that more is needed for the ordering of a new world, comes up with a different standard. No longer do I get to treat people the same way they treat me or even treat people the way I would like to be treated. He raises the ethical bar on us. According to Jesus, I'm duty-bound now, not to love my neighbor as myself (which is inadequate, given the many ways we fail so often to love ourselves), but to love my neighbor as Christ has loved me.
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When You Can’t Find Words (Matthew 28:1-10)
But the real question to us is, “Now that you’ve got this shiny new resurrection, what’re you going to do with it? Are you going to hang out with it, set up a shrine to it and serve lattes, thinking all the work’s been done two thousand years ago? Or are you going to realize that the freedom the resurrection brings is the freedom to back out of the tomb, walk down the road, and get back to work?”
You see, it’s not that the resurrection isn’t cause for celebration; it’s that we’ve misunderstood celebration. It’s too easy to think that it means release from duty, a time to set down our work and head to the party. But the story of the gospel is that resurrection doesn’t free us from labor; it offers us labor worth giving our lives for. We find our greatest joy, our greatest expression of celebration, in the work we’re entrusted to do.
What work is that?
Why, it’s a continuation of the work that Jesus himself did—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, setting free the captives—remembering the forgotten.
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Who's in Charge around Here Anyway? (John 11:1-45)
Death too often calls the tune to which, sad to say, so many of us feel compelled to take the dance floor.
But I’ve got news for you—regardless of how it looks to you at present or who you think is in charge, Jesus is almost finished with his Lenten journey. And while the path he takes will ultimately lead him to a garbage dump on the edge of town called the “place of the skull,” the truth of the faith we profess is that that dump—which too casually deals in the art of death—is not the final destination.
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What’s Your Problem? (John 9:1-41)
Being born blind is the definition of a pre-existing condition. But according to Jesus, it should never be a pretext for finding an excuse for why helping that person to find healing is wrong.
According to today’s Gospel lesson, if you’re more concerned about who doesn’t deserve help than actually helping, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Jesus has a fundamental problem with how you view the world.
You can talk about having compassion for the most vulnerable. But if you spend more time worrying about who should be blamed for their vulnerability than finding ways to protect them, Jesus is going to be something of a disappointment to you.
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Making Good Choices (John 4:5-52)
He could play it safe—you know, suck up to the religious bigwigs, make friends with the influential political high-rollers. But instead, he seeks out the last, the least, and the lost—because he’s not interested in establishing some kind of stable empire where everybody has to come and kiss his ring because he's so important.
But instead, he drops any ambitions he might have had about being a big shot, walks down the first dark alley he sees, and starts having theological discussions with the invisible folks everybody else would just as soon forget.
But when Jesus ventures down dark alleys looking for those who creep around the edges, he redefines the edges so that the margins are set in the center; and it’s the folks who usually occupy the center who risk finding themselves on the margins.
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Which World? (John 3:1-17)
But because God loves the world—even with all its fear and distrust, God sent Jesus not to condemn the old world, to throw it on the scrap heap. Instead, according to the translation in your pew Bible, God sent Jesus to “save” the world. The word for salvation is probably better translated “healing” here. In other words, Jesus comes to transform the lower world from above and usher in a new reign, a new realm, a new world that looks like heaven right here on earth.
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Where You Gonna Turn? (Matthew 4:1-11)
In Matthew’s hands, the devil is supposed to be a clever stand-in for Caesar and his empire, who argues that all the kingdoms of the world are his to dispose of as he sees fit.
So, the question posed by this story to the congregation at Antioch struggling with where to put its trust, given the annoying fact of all of Caesar’s persistent and humiliating reminders of who’s in charge, is: Where does the church place its trust?
Does the church trust the old regimes and their systems of domination to solve people’s problems, or does it trust the means of producing equity and abundance available in God’s new realm where power remains in God’s hands and never in the hands of the giant babies who holler like scalded cats to let everyone know they get to be boss?
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When It Is Not Good for Us to Be Here (Matthew 17:1-9)
Peering into the dark valley ahead—the one Jesus has just announced—the thought of camping out on the mountaintop with the Palestinian Justice League sounds like a pretty safe place to be, doesn’t it?
Ever feel like that?
You’re getting ready to graduate; the kids are getting ready to leave home, or the nurses are prepping you for surgery. As tough as it was in the past, the future seems way scarier. Even if the past was hard, at least you lived through it. You’re not sure you’ll survive what feels like the Zombie Apocalypse coming at you from around the next corner.
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Guest Preacher: Chuck Lewis
Still Fighting It (Matthew 5:13-20)
And this is a crucial point to make for people whose purpose for existing requires them to live as agents of God’s love. We’re salt and light. We are who we are, not because the situation calls for it or because of how others treat us, but because through the eyes of the God who created us, we’re already everything we need to be because God made us this way.
And through the eyes of an executed carpenter, we’re able to see a vision of a new world that embraces us—all of who we are … garbage heap and unexcavated treasure. No matter how hard we fight it, we can’t crush it out of existence, and we can’t run far enough away from it.
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Not Your Father's Beatitudes
So when Jesus says that those who will be blessed are the poor in spirit in God's kingdom, he’s not talking about the fainthearted. He’s talking about those who are actually poor, those who are so far down the economic ladder that their spirits are characterized by the constant despair that they’ll ever be able to go to bed at night without the gnawing horror of hunger to keep them awake.
When Jesus says that the new world God is creating will bless those who mourn, he’s not suggesting that people go out and find things to be sad about—the people whom Jesus grew up with, and lived and worked with, didn’t have to go searching for sadness. On the contrary, the very nature of their existence meant that sorrow, suffering, and grief had already built an evil home among them. No, what Jesus is angling at is that because oppression isn’t what God intended, it should be mourned. And the people who mourn oppression will be blessed because they’ll be part of a new realm set up with them specifically in mind, one that conquers oppression.
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The Problem with Empire (Matthew 4:12-23)
But this new realm Jesus announces is the kind of good news that appeals to everybody else—the other 99%. In fact, the news is so good that, according to Matthew, "Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in [the] synagogues and proclaiming" it—healing the social, physical, and economic disease in the land.
Because this new realm is best exemplified not so much by Jesus' rhetorical gifts but through his traveling about and “curing every disease and every sickness among the people."
In other words, the “kingdom of heaven” concerns itself with healing instead of domination and violence. It seeks out not the most powerful but the people everybody else walks past without noticing—the sick, the poor, the hungry, the houseless, and those who've lived virtually every day with the fear of what tomorrow holds for them.
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Come and See (John 1:29-42)
The scriptures present any number of images of God—God the Lion of Judah, the watchful shepherd, the heartbroken lover, the vigilant protector, the loving parent who expects more from us than we’re often willing to give, the vulnerable shepherd who places God’s life in our hands. So why focus all your energy on a God who seems perpetually aggrieved, who prefers manipulation to attraction, whose greatest desire seems to be to set down impossible expectations in the hope that nobody will meet them so God can finally do what God, according to them, has wanted to do all along? Lower the boom and send us all to hell.
And if that’s the God you serve, isn’t that the example you imitate? If you believe that a bitter, resentful, and suspicious God is the image in which you were created, is it any wonder when you turn out to be bitter, resentful, and suspicious of everyone else who doesn’t meet *your standards?
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