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GOD IS GOD AND WE ARE NOT

2/28/2021

Mark 8:31-33

Jesus warned them to keep it quiet, not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He then began explaining things to them: “It is necessary that the Son of Man proceed to an ordeal of suffering, be tried and found guilty by the elders, high priests, and religion scholars, be killed, and after three days rise up alive.” He said this simply and clearly so they couldn’t miss it.

But Peter grabbed him in protest. Turning and seeing his disciples wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus confronted Peter. “Peter, get out of my way! Satan, get lost! You have no idea how God works.”

And suddenly, here we are in the hard core part of Jesus’ ministry—the part where he is starting to try to teach his followers that this journey they are on is not going to end in skittles and beer for everyone. So far in this new lectionary year, which began with Advent, the stories have all been reader-friendly. Even last week’s temptation in the wilderness wasn’t really frightening, because Jesus didn’t appear to be frightened by any of Satan’s efforts.

But now comes the cold, hard reality that when you stand against those who hold all the power—when you speak out against their immoral positions, there will be a price to pay for your stand. So far it has all been good — Jesus is welcomed wherever he teaches and heals people, but the authorities are noticing and they don’t like what they hear and see, and Jesus is not as naïve as his followers. He knows it’s not go to continue being this easy.

So, Jesus faces a decision. He can either continue to do what he believes he is here to do and face the inevitable backlash — or he can quiet things down and slide back out of their notice. We already know his choice. But his followers are still caught up in the euphoria of being with this wonder-working Jesus and they can’t conceive of it ever going wrong. When Peter tries to say nothing bad can happen here, Jesus barks back at him with, “You have no idea how God works.”

And this is why Peter is the Everyman straight person to Jesus’ star-power. Because he, like most of us, really does not have any idea how God works. After getting exactly the right answer to the question of “who do people say I am?”, Peter now manages to get it exactly wrong by trying to shut Jesus up with this frightening news.

We just don’t know how God works. We think we know—we think we have it all figured out—and then something happens that we don’t like and we are all, “God, how could you let this happen? Why didn’t you do something?” Even Jesus reached this point when he was hanging on the cross.

The truth is, in most cases, I suspect, that we don’t honestly try to understand how God thinks. We try for a while and then end up convinced that God must think just like us.

Unfortunately, we’re wrong. God is God, and does not always think like us. God’s thoughts are above us. For us there is only trust. We either trust God’s ways or we do not. Jesus trusted. Even Jesus didn’t always understand, but he didn’t argue – he believed and he trusted. If God said do it this way, he did it that way.

One of my all-time favorite movies is “Godspell.” I watch it every Easter. I love this story of a caring, vulnerable Jesus and the rag-tag group of followers that he loves so very much and the love they have for him in return. You can feel the love they all have for each other. The first part is a real feel-good movie – much like the euphoria of the disciples when everything was going well for them all.

I cry every time I watch this film. I start crying half-way through the thing because I know where it is going (I’ve read the book, after all) and I really, really don’t want it to go there this time. Every year, I don’t want Jesus to die – I’m so caught up in the feel-good--I want a different ending.

I can imagine that this is how Jesus’ followers felt, this is how they loved him, and why they ignored the signs and refused to see the end that was coming. And I understand why they think like humans think instead of thinking like God. I suspect thinking like God is way too hard for us to bear.

No, I don’t know how God works. And I don’t want to know. I am content for God to be God and take care of the God stuff. But I believe God and I trust God. And I know God is with me, and with you, and I know God loves me, and loves you. And I try not to argue with God, too much.

So where is the love we’re supposed to be finding in our Lenten stories this year? This happens to be a pretty easy one. The love here is found in the choice Jesus made to continue doing the right thing instead of choosing the easy thing. To continue teaching and healing God’s lost and broken people because they so need to hear this truth — that God is on their side. He chose this path—even knowing where it would lead—because of love. That’s the truth we all need to hear – that Jesus loves us -- God loves God’s people—always and forever.

Thanks be to God. Amen

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LOVE IN THE WILDERNESS

2/21/2021

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Mark 1:9-13

About that time, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and John baptized him in the Jordan River. While he was coming up out of the water, Jesus saw heaven splitting open and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down on him. And there was a voice from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I am well pleased”

At once the Spirit forced Jesus out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among the wild animals, and the angels took care of him.

In Christmas season we greeted the infant Jesus, and in Epiphany season we were introduced to the adult Jesus, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan and proceeding through the calling of his disciples and his first public teachings and healings. But for some reason, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is skipped over in Epiphany, even though chronologically it comes immediately after his baptism, and then we circle back to it for this First Sunday in Lent.

This story is told in all three Synoptic gospels. Both Matthew and Luke give us basically the same story of the temptation in the wilderness, (because Luke borrowed heavily from Matthew), but both versions are expansive, filling in all the details of Jesus’ interactions with the Tempter, while Mark gives us only the scant two verses I just read.

I extended Mark’s reading today to include the baptism scene, not because it hasn’t already been covered, but to give the last two verses—those ones about the temptation in the desert—a chronological setting. It’s those two verses I want to focus on today.

We are still at the barest beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. There have been no healings, no public sermons or teachings as of yet.

Though Matthew's and Luke’s versions of the time in the desert give us much more detail, Mark’s is the more evocative version because it is such a blank slate. His spare text forces us to fill in the blanks with our own imaginations and places us more firmly into the story. UCC pastor Martha Spong, in her meditation piece for today, emphasizes the emptiness of this picture — the nothingness, the waiting — the aloneness that we have all known at some point or another—that aloneness that can force us into finally recognizing that God is very much with us even in the seeming emptiness.

I said last week that we would be sticking with the lectionary readings for our Sundays in Lent--which we are doing--and that besides the obvious lessons to come from the readings, we would be looking for where and how love is to be found in each story.

Here, Jesus has gone into the desert to be alone, to spend time with the One he called Father, to reckon with what had just happened to him at his baptism and to figure out what it all means for the rest of his life. He is most likely hot and parched and hungry, and he is perhaps more alone than he has ever been in his life — and then Satan, the Tempter, comes along to harass and tempt him. We would most of us see this as an extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant time — so where in all this is there love to be found?

The story tells us that, uncomfortable as it undoubtedly was, Jesus came out of that wilderness knowing for certain who he was—the Son, the beloved—and knowing who he was called to be—the one who would teach the world to live in God’s kingdom ... and knowing the One who called him. Not only knowing, but trusting his Father-God enough to set the rest of his time here to doing his will.

Is there any one among us who has not at some time felt alone and abandoned, unloved, and bereft of all comfort — and feeling that no one anywhere cares? We can feel this story of Jesus because we have all lived this story in some way or another – at least parts of it. And apparently love did eventually find us—lost as we may have felt then--because we are, hopefully, not still wandering lost in that wilderness. Even if we occasionally feel we are still there, we are still trusting that God is around somewhere, else why are we here, listening for God’s word?

The same love that was with Jesus in those 40 days was also with each of us when we faced our own time in the desert. And if we ever face such times again, that love will still be with—holding us through our desert times. This I believe. We are never truly alone no matter how barren the world around us may look.

We are loved and we are never separate from the love of God. Thanks be to God.

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LOVE: IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT HEARTS AND FLOWERS

2/14/2021

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John 15:9-10, 12, 16-17
9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love....
12 This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.....
16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Today is Valentine’s Day. That’s why I chose to begin today, not with a story, but with some words from Jesus on the subject of Love.

Valentine’s Day not on the lectionary calendar, of course, but it is a day that is almost impossible to ignore because of all the marketing that is attached to it. This year, because it lands right next to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, it has me thinking of Love and Lent and how they intersect.

The story we will be reliving through Lent is not about the Hearts and Flowers kind of love, not the romantic love of a Hallmark movie, but a love that is much deeper, more earth shattering, more life changing—the love of God.

So much that passes for Christian thinking in the media these days appears to have completely lost the message when it comes to love. What we seem to get instead is a perversion of what Christian love should be— a “love” that preaches hell and damnation, a love that closes doors, shuts people out, demands allegiance to a particular dogma—and one that too often overtly preaches hatred against God’s “other” children. And I do say “other” in quotes here because it is always the “other” who is the recipient of this vengeful, exclusionary, perverted form of Christianity.

Unfortunately, it is this distorted version of Jesus’ love that shouts the loudest and thus gets more attention right now in our history, making it all the more necessary that the rest of us seek for the actual love of Jesus so that we, in turn, can share that love with the world around us.

Love should not ever be a cage that locks us into a single option. God’s love is, like everything else that comes from God, open-handed. We can take it or we can leave it. The choice is ours. In his book, Love Wins, author Rob Bell puts it this way: “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can [if we so choose] have all the hell we want.” The choice is always ours. We can choose the world’s hatred or we can choose to accept and share God’s love.

We’ll be staying with the lectionary readings this Lent, but I plan to spend our time while there looking for love—God’s kind—in each of those readings. In some it will be obvious, in others, I suspect it may be harder to find. I want to find what Jesus’ journey to the cross has to teach us about living and acting with love—the easy kind and, especially, the hard kind--love that stretches us, love that may hurt us--and yet we hold it and offer it anyway.

Blogger/Speaker John Pavlovitz wrote in his blog “Things that Need to be Said,” back in Sept. 2015 in a piece titled, I Want to Do Love Right: “My agenda now is fairly simple: I want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up**.”

Sounds like love to me. This is the love I believe we’ll find as we travel through this Lent with Jesus.

So today, on this Valentine’s Day – on this day the secular world tells us is all about love, may we all commit to continue seeking out and admitting to our wrongs so that we can correct them, and because we choose to live in the Spirit of God’s all-encompassing love – today, tomorrow, and always.

The love of God be with you.

* Rob Bell, Love Wins,: A Book about Heaven. Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Harper Collins, © 2011
** John Pavlovitz, Things that Need to Be Said: I Want to Do Love Right, Sept. 18, 2015

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LEADING BY LIVING

2/7/2021

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I Corinthians 9:19-23
Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever.

I didn’t take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-led life. I did all this because of the Message. I didn’t just want to talk about it; I wanted to be part of living it!

The words above are from St. Paul, written in his first letter to the people of the Greek city of Corinth. Since that moment on the road to Damascus, when Saul, the accuser of Jesus followers, was struck down by a Voice that called him to serve instead of seek out and persecute, Saul had become Paul, the most fervent servant-follower of the living Christ. This new calling would direct Paul for the remainder of his life and drive him to become all things to all people.

The reading today is taken from the Message translation. I found this version to be very helpful in making clear that our calling is to show others the love and grace of Jesus — and to do so using whatever language our hearers might best understand.

Our calling is not to bring others to a specific form of worship or any dogmatic belief. It certainly isn’t to drive them to Jesus through making them fear him. Our calling is to show them Jesus — period. Paul puts it this way: “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews ... to the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I became all things to all people so that by all possible means I might help some.”

Nothing mattered to Paul except to show Jesus to as many people as possible, so that they might also find themselves living in his love. When dealing with Jews, he became as they, in order that they could see and understand his words and his heart. When dealing with non-Jews – those not under the Law as he called them – he became as they, that his words could be heard. When dealing with the weak, he became weak, for the same reason. But, he makes it clear that he himself remains – always and above all else -- under Christ’s Law.

Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the Wrinkle in Time books (among many others) is quoted as saying something very similar, but I love the words she chose: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, or by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” Paul would absolutely get this.

Everyone seems to want to argue about everything these days. Arguing has rarely changed anyone’s mind. Paul could certainly be as argumentative and abrasive as anyone, but he clearly understands, here, that this is not the way to turn people toward the love of Jesus. The way to do that is to live the love of Jesus, to be the love of Jesus — and do it in a way others can see and comprehend.

We can do this. As Paul put it, whether we are talking with the religious, the nonreligious, the meticulous moralists, the loose-living immoralists, the defeated, or the demoralized, we must speak and act so they can see and hear us speaking in a language they themselves understand and can begin to hear. If our desire, like Paul’s, is to reach people so they can come to know the Jesus we know, then we must reach out to them – not sit back and expect them to first come to us.

We are created to do just this. Our Creator made us to love one another, to care enough about each other to do this, to shine God’s light for one another — just like Jesus. Doing it so all can see.

We can, you know. Yes, we can.

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GOD IS GOD AND WE ARE NOT

LOVE IN THE WILDERNESS

LOVE: IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT HEARTS AND FLOWERS

LEADING BY LIVING

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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