This is a special musical presentation of I Can Only Imagine sung by Deb Borton at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

Faith Lutheran Church (Okemos), Pastor Julie Winklepleck

Pr. 7A, L12, P+4, June 25, 2023

Matthew 10

Grace, mercy, and peace are yours, through God our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I begin this morning by quoting that great princess, Carrie Fisher, who said: “Stay afraid, but do it anyway.”

We are going to be afraid. That’s human. Someone who is brave…it doesn’t mean they are not afraid… it means they hold their fear in tension with their ability keep moving, and to do what they need to do.

Jesus is sending us out to proclaim God’s love, to proclaim the kin-dom. Last week, God told us through Jesus to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. That means to go out, and share God’s love, and be prepared for anything. You can’t prepare yourself for anything, right? But God can prepare you for anything. God prepares us for the jobs God gives us to do.

This kin-dom, which God forms out of us, it is an upside-down world in which sparrows matter, and we are valued even more. Even though the word “trust” does not appear in this passage, the concept of trust is shot through it, the idea of letting God use us, letting God hold us, as we do the things that we need to do, trusting that God will guide and direct us. Our work may not be flashy; we’re not building kingdoms, or nations, like Isaac and Ishmael did; but we are creating love in our corners of our world. In those places, in this house, in this community, we are making God’s vision come alive.

Our passage holds many surprises. It begins, A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master [v. 24] … that is in response to last week’s reading about going out, being wise as serpents, innocent as doves… the idea of running into trouble. Running into people who aren’t going to listen to you, who are going to reject you. Jesus is saying, don’t worry about them. If they have called the master of the house Be-el’zebul, how much more will they malign those of his household [v. 25b]… Jesus is saying, you have to go to the people who are going to listen to you. Larry Foster, who was a pastor, who died recently, he taught Healthy Congregations, what we also call Family Systems, which Pastor Ellen may have talked to you about. He used to say, Work with the motivated. He would say, don’t worry about the people who aren’t with you. Work with the motivated, the people who get your vision. When you have visions, as this congregation does, for the work you do with refugees, the work you do feeding people, and through your personal needs pantry… if someone isn’t on board with that vision, don’t worry about them. Just go ahead, carry on, carry out your vision.

I love when Jesus says, What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops [v.27]. Jesus doesn’t operate in secrets. Jesus makes himself known. And God makes God’s love known. If someone says to you that they have a secret, something they know that you don’t … don’t worry about it. Trust the knowledge that comes to you from God.

I’m avoiding talking about the hard part, which is this sword thing [v. 34]. This is not what we expect to hear from Jesus, right? that he has come not to bring peace, but a sword. Because I think this is a difficult-to-understand concept – what is Jesus talking about here? I am going to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr., who in a speech given in 1961, called “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” talked to Southern liberal whites about the student movement, the Freedom Riders, addressing the question, why are they coming to the South? Martin Luther King talked about the students’ responding to a negative peace that had encompassed the South.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice and brotherhood. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said, “I come not to bring peace but a sword.” Now Jesus didn’t mean he came to start war, to bring a physical sword, and he didn’t mean, I come not to bring a positive peace. But I think what Jesus was saying in substance was this, that I come not to bring an old negative peace, which makes for stagnant passivity and deadening complacency, I come to bring something different, and whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated, between the old and the new, whenever I come a struggle takes place between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. I come not to bring a negative peace, but a positive peace, which is brotherhood, which is justice, which is the Kingdom of God.

[from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 50-51].

This sword that Jesus brings has the potential to divide us; it also has the potential to reveal where our work is, to reveal where oppression is, to reveal where hunger is, to reveal where God’s people need to be shining God’s light and love.

Jesus says, don’t be afraid. Even though the devil may come after you… all right, he doesn’t say the devil, but he talks about those who can destroy both soul and body in hell. I think of that as the devil. Jesus says, do not fear this. God has your back. God, who loves sparrows, and values you even more.

Our thread is always love. Our thread is doing God’s work, which we are called to do. I think about… as the end of Pride month is coming… I think about division, those things that can divide families, and I think about all the lgbtq persons who have been isolated from their families. One of the blessings of the AIDS crisis, back in the 90s… there were many stories… obviously of the gay community coming together to take care of their own. But there were also stories of families who had thrown out their queer kids… bringing those queer kids back home to nurse them… and learning, in the midst of a crisis, to look beyond their fear, and to look beyond what they had been taught, to learn something new. These divisions that can happen… it breaks my heart how much they happen in the church, because of the church. How many faithful people rejected their queer kids because they thought that was somehow pleasing God… and I know that’s not what you believe here, I know you are a Reconciling in Christ congregation… I know that you are very supportive of the lgbtq community and indeed have lgbtq members. Therefore, I feel safe talking about this, talking about the ways the church itself can go astray, and the way that we as church can learn something new, can listen to the voice of God’s love bringing us back together.

Our Romans reading calls for unity, and I struggle with it, because there are going to be as many kinds of churches as there are people… I don’t think there will ever be one great church again. So perhaps this is a cliché, but I would say we are being called to unity but not uniformity; that’s the distinction, that we are called to unity in Christ, Christ who loves us, who died for us, who shows us how to live and serve… how to form a new family. Hopefully it includes our old family. But what is important is the work we do together. What is important is the support we give one another and the witness we take out into the community, of who we are, who God is, and how that love shapes and directs us.

Fear not, Jesus says three times in this passage. I think he’s trying to normalize the idea that there is fear. I think he’s saying, together, find the strength and fortitude to conquer that fear, to hear God’s voice, louder than the voice of our fears. To hear God’s voice… telling us to love, telling us to embrace people who are different… telling us that his eye is on the sparrow… so we have no fear, and we know that God watches us (and not in that creepy stalker way, in the good way). God undergirds everything we do. God’s love surrounds and fills us; God’s love makes everything possible.

In the name of the Creator, the Child, and the Comforter, Amen.

This is a special musical presentation of Heavenly Sunlight by the Faith Lutheran Singing Sinners Summer Choirat Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan.

Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 11, 2023

Faith, Okemos

Hosea 5:15-6:6, Psalm 50:7-15, Romans 4:13-35. Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Grace to you and peace…

It was Friday morning.  Lola lay in her bed at Independence Village in Grand Ledge crying out, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”  Lola, now in her mid-90’s, is dying.

Author Anne Lamott has written, “Here are the two best prayers I know:  ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”

When I read the scriptures to Lola like the 23^rd Psalm and Psalm 46 and Matthew 11 in which Jesus says,  “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest…”  she both haltingly and forcefully said them with me, totally by memory.  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard those passages spoken more powerfully.

Then seemingly out of the blue she began to speak the words of an old hymn, “I Need Thee Every Hour.”

I need Thee every hour

Most gracious Lord

No tender voice like Thine

Can peace afford.  

I need Thee, O I need Thee

Every hour I need Thee

O bless me now, my Savior

I come to Thee.

That was the beginning of our little concert together which also included “What A Friend We Have in Jesus.”  In the midst of this, Bruce, one of Lola’s children arrived, together with a granddaughter Jennifer, her husband Tom, and their little son.  Amidst abundant tears and hugs, a trio was formed, Jennifer joining Lola and me in “Jesus Loves Me” and “You are My Sunshine.”  Then with hands joined we prayed the Lord’s Prayer.

Over and over, Lola said, “Thank You.”  She said that to us, but I thought in my heart that in those moments we got to be Jesus for her and with her.

I think both Anne Lamott and Lola capture the essence of prayer.  It is “help me” and “thank you.”

Five years ago I was with my sister, Jean, when she died.  We were together in the ICU  in Cleveland Clinic much of the last two weeks of her life.  I know we both talked a lot and were silent a lot.  We prayed together.  But in hindsight I wished I’d have thought to sing with her.  Jean had a beautiful voice and was an accomplished pianist and organist. I just didn’t think of doing that.

Mindful of that regret again, I returned to visit Lola Friday afternoon with an old Service Book and Hymnal.  We sang hymns ‘til I sensed that maybe now this was more for me than for Lola. Amidst a coughing spelling she said “this has been so fun” …and we sang one more hymn.  I asked if she was ready to sleep.  And after quiet prayers for help and words of gratitude, she closed her eyes in sleep.

Afterword, I thought about Lola and her family and about the gospel reading for today.   I think Lola’s repeated cry for help was also the cry in the hearts of the hated tax collectors who collected money for the Roman Empire and often kept more than was legal for themselves.  I think her cry for help was in the hearts of the morally despicable, the sinners, who together with the tax collectors sat with Jesus and his disciples for dinner at Matthew’s home.  Unlike the Pharisees, a spiritually elite group living always on the edge of self-righteousness (They may have often thought and sometimes said “We are the good, law-bidding people”)…Unlike the Pharisees the tax collectors and sinners they knew they were corrupt and immoral.  But as Anne Lamott also writes, with God there are sometimes experience beyond the fervent, anguished need for help and sometimes another experiences beyond our expressions of thanksgiving for the grace Jesus so freely gives.  Anne calls those experiences moments of “wow.”  My “wow” on Friday was when Lola kept amazing me with her vivid memory.  When I told Lola how amazing she was, she quietly responded, “Well, not that good.”  But for me it was a ‘wow.”

“Wow” must have been felt in the hearts and minds of those dining with Jesus at Matthew’s home…wonderful, liberating feelings and thoughts like “With him we are not despised. We are not being judged.  We are not excluded but fully accepted.  Wow, this is wonderful.  This must be what true love looks like. This is a mercy we never experienced before.”  [I could imagine Matthew now posting on his door in Aramaic the words on the banner we dedicated this morning: All Are Welcome!]

Clearly the cry for help was in the heart of the rabbi of a local synagogue who came to Jesus, knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her and she will live.”   The text continues:  “And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples.”

For both the rabbi and Lola, their cries were cries of faith.  As St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, it is the cry of faith, however anguished, this precious gift and promise of God given to people like Abraham who at 100 years of age, as good as dead, believed that God would enable him and Sarah to have a son, that Abraham would truly be “the father of many nations.”  This gift of faith that God could still do this, all the evidence to the contrary, was expressed by Lola when she uttered the words of a hymn she probably learned 80 or more years ago:  “I need thee every hour most gracious Lord.  No tender voice like thine can peace afford.”   This was her faith in the grace and mercy of her Lord.

And then there was the longsuffering woman in Matthew’s story of Jesus:

Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind [Jesus] and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.”  Jesus turned, and seeing her, he said, “Take heart, daughter, your faith had made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well.

Surely her flow of blood made her “unclean” as indicated in the very words of scripture (Leviticus 15:19).  She would have been very much alone, not welcomed, not loved by virtually anyone.  But God loved her and God placed in her desolate heart the faith that by merely touching the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, she would be made well.  (Notice her respect for Jesus, touching his cloak, not his skin, lest, according to the law, he be made unclean.)  Her unspoken cry for help, borne of the gift of faith, was met with mercy.  She was made well.  The instantaneous nature of her healing was surely a “wow” moment in her life and perhaps for those who witnessed this power of God’s love.

This past Wednesday I presided at a graveside service which followed a heart attack and the resulting death of Bryan, a son whose much beloved mother had died just over a week before his own death.  Needless to say, his family and caregivers who supported Bryan in his lifelong journey with cerebral palsy were devastated.  Yet in the scriptures read at this service, we were all reminded of God’s promise given to him in Holy Baptism, reminded that God was and would be with him always, that Bryan would suffer always with Jesus, die always with Jesus, and always rise to new life with Jesus.  His sister, Susan, his devoted brother-in-law, John, and Bryan’s nephew, Nathan, all spoke eloquently of his compassion, his empathy, his tenderness, his sensitivity as expressions of God’s mercy and grace in Bryan’s life. John, a jazz musician, asked me if he could play a recording of “Downtown”, one of Bryan’s favorite songs, at the conclusion of the service.  As I prepared for the service, I had wondered, in vain, how I might include that song in my sermon, but now I said “yes” to John.  As we listened and then one by one joined in singing “downtown”, I thought in a new way about what heaven would be like with words like “The light’s so much brighter there.  You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares…Things will be great when you’re downtown.  No finer place for sure Downtown.  Everything’s waiting for you downtown, downtown.”  Yes, it was a bit of a stretch, but for us it was a “wow” moment, God lifting our spirits in a day of sadness as together we had shoveled earth over the urn of Bryan’s ashes, lifting us through a very secular song, now for us a song portraying a new way of thinking about heaven, about what the “downtown new Jerusalem” will be like for Bryan…and for us.

Following the story about a lonely woman, so long ill, now healed, now no longer needing to be alone, we hear these bold and strong but also immensely comforting words;

When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion.  He said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.”  And they laughed at him.  But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up.

Though he was probably wealthy and highly respected, this little girl’s father humbled himself before Jesus.  He recognized that he had no power of his own, no amount of money, no noble reputation powerful enough to bring his daughter back to life.  But as with Lola and with Bryan’s loved ones, he humbled himself and believed that if Jesus could come, would come, his sorrow would yield to joy. He believed that by Jesus’ hand in his daughter’s hand, she would live. And Jesus did come and Jesus did take her by the hand and she got up.

So for Bryan who sleeps now, so soon also for Lola, what Jesus, the Son of God, has done, living as one of us, suffering and dying and rising for them and for all of us, when we sleep, even in death as earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, when Jesus takes our hand, we will live.

One more hymn Lola knew by heart (though not with exactly the version I’m reading now):

Lord, take thou my hand and lead me

Unto the end;

In life and death I need thee,

O blessed Friend;

I cannot live without thee

For one brief day;

Lord, be thou ever near me,

And lead the way.

Lord, grant us, like the despised tax collectors and sinners, like the chronically ill woman, like the distraught father whose daughter had died, grant us the faith to receive your steadfast love, your amazing grace, and your boundless mercy for us and for all members of the human family.

Amen.

JDS

Listen to today's Sermon by Rev. John Burow.