Scripture - Acts 3:1-19

Acts 3:1-19 (The Message)
3 1-5 One day at three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on their way into the Temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man crippled from birth being carried up. Every day he was set down at the Temple gate, the one named Beautiful, to beg from those going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter the Temple, he asked for a handout. Peter, with John at his side, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Look here.” He looked up, expecting to get something from them.
6-8 Peter said, “I don’t have a nickel to my name, but what I do have, I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an instant his feet and ankles became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.
8-10 The man went into the Temple with them, walking back and forth, dancing and praising God. Everybody there saw him walking around and praising God. They recognized him as the one who sat begging at the Temple’s Gate Beautiful and rubbed their eyes, astonished, scarcely believing what they were seeing.
11 The man threw his arms around Peter and John, ecstatic. All the people ran up to where they were at Solomon’s Porch to see it for themselves.
12-16 When Peter saw he had a congregation, he addressed the people:
“Oh, Israelites, why does this take you by such complete surprise, and why stare at us as if our power or piety made him walk? The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our ancestors, has glorified his Son Jesus. The very One that Pilate called innocent, you repudiated. You repudiated the Holy One, the Just One, and asked for a murderer in his place. You no sooner killed the Author of Life than God raised him from the dead—and we’re the witnesses. Faith in Jesus’ name put this man, whose condition you know so well, on his feet—yes, faith and nothing but faith put this man healed and whole right before your eyes.
17-18 “And now, friends, I know you had no idea what you were doing when you killed Jesus, and neither did your leaders. But God, who through the preaching of all the prophets had said all along that his Messiah would be killed, knew exactly what you were doing and used it to fulfill his plans.
19 “Now it’s time to change your ways! Turn to face God so he can wipe away your sins, pour out showers of blessing to refresh you, and send you the Messiah he prepared for you, namely, Jesus.
Sermon -
Easter is over - the flowers (mostly) have been taken care of, the leftovers from Easter dinner finished, the Easter candy is pretty much gone or squirreled away into hiding. The day of resurrection is done and finished and we can get back to our regularly scheduled lives, which here means desperately waiting for Spring to arrive, watching early season baseball (or, in my house, playoff basketball), getting ready for the end of the school year - and on Chebeague - we’re already getting ready for summer. True, right? May and June might as well not exist, we’re all already thinking about July.

Easter in the church, though, isn’t one day but a whole season. 50 days, running from Easter Sunday - the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, to Pentecost - the day we celebrate the Holy Spirit pouring out over the disciples. In the early church, where Lent was the season for new converts to learn about the faith and prepare for baptism on Easter Sunday, the Easter season was the period that continued the faith formation of these new Christians.

It’s also a season for the church and for us to think about the question - now what? Jesus lived, died, and rose again.  After the resurrection - what does that mean for us? What does it mean to follow Jesus and be his disciples in light of his death and resurrection? How do we live now?

Throughout this season, we’ll hear stories from the book of Acts as these first disciples tried to figure out the answers to those questions.

What I’d like to do is read our scripture passage again - not that John didn’t do a good job, but I’d like for us to really hear what’s going on in this story. So to give you a bit of background here, this story happens after Peter’s first big sermon, and people were joining up with this Jesus movement in droves. They gathered in the Temple for teaching and prayer, ate in one another’s homes, shared things in common...things were really moving along. They’re in Jerusalem and the death and resurrection of Jesus wasn’t a distant memory - it was a fresh reality, within 3 to 6 months, most likely, of these events.

With that in mind, let’s hear the story again.

3 1-5 One day at three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on their way into the Temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man crippled from birth being carried up. Every day he was set down at the Temple gate, the one named Beautiful, to beg from those going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter the Temple, he asked for a handout. Peter, with John at his side, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Look here.” He looked up, expecting to get something from them.
6-8 Peter said, “I don’t have a nickel to my name, but what I do have, I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an instant his feet and ankles became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.
8-10 The man went into the Temple with them, walking back and forth, dancing and praising God. Everybody there saw him walking around and praising God. They recognized him as the one who sat begging at the Temple’s Gate Beautiful and rubbed their eyes, astonished, scarcely believing what they were seeing.
11 The man threw his arms around Peter and John, ecstatic. All the people ran up to where they were at Solomon’s Porch to see it for themselves.
12-16 When Peter saw he had a congregation, he addressed the people:
“Oh, Israelites, why does this take you by such complete surprise, and why stare at us as if our power or piety made him walk? The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our ancestors, has glorified his Son Jesus. The very One that Pilate called innocent, you repudiated. You repudiated the Holy One, the Just One, and asked for a murderer in his place. You no sooner killed the Author of Life than God raised him from the dead—and we’re the witnesses. Faith in Jesus’ name put this man, whose condition you know so well, on his feet—yes, faith and nothing but faith put this man healed and whole right before your eyes.
17-18 “And now, friends, I know you had no idea what you were doing when you killed Jesus, and neither did your leaders. But God, who through the preaching of all the prophets had said all along that his Messiah would be killed, knew exactly what you were doing and used it to fulfill his plans.
19 “Now it’s time to change your ways! Turn to face God so he can wipe away your sins, pour out showers of blessing to refresh you, and send you the Messiah he prepared for you, namely, Jesus.

We start by seeing Peter and John on their way to the Temple, a normal, everyday occurance. It was part of their habit as observant Jews, and part of the emerging life of this new community of Jesus followers. At the same time,we have this beggar being carried up to his habitual place at the Beautiful Gate to beg, a man on a street corner in his usual place. It’s like when you’re driving in Portland - if you are in town with any degree of regularity and your route is the same, you’ll see the places where people pick to stand and panhandle and there are the usual spots that people choose to be to beg. For this man, it was the Beautiful Gate. And I have to believe that Peter and John know this - this man was not unfamiliar to them. His story was probably not unfamiliar to them. He was the beggar who sat at the Gate at the Temple between such and such a time who was there every day. Crippled from birth, having to be carried and placed in that spot to beg. Everyone going to the Temple would have known this.

And that day, for whatever reason, he asks Peter and John for a handout. Presumably he knows who they are too, just like they know who he is. Peter and John are frequent attenders of the Temple, they aren’t unknown quantities.  There are those two guys who are here all the time, talking about that Jesus fellow. But on this day, he begs from them, asks them for money...he asks for the things he’s accustomed to - money and food for survival, to live and eat.

They don’t have anything, but they stop. Peter takes a moment to look at the beggar and really sees him. Peter looks at him - and sees him for who he really is - he sees the beggar how Jesus would see him. And so he stops and has compassion for this man and Peter tells him to look - to look at him, and the man gets excited because he thinks he’s going to get something from them -- and he does, just not what he expects.

Peter doesn’t have money or food to give, but gives of what he does have - and that’s Jesus, the risen Christ. Peter takes his hand and pulls him up and the beggar finds that his ankles are strong, that they can support his weight, that he has been healed in the name of Jesus Christ. He rejoices and dances and draws quite a crowd around the three of them because everyone knew this man’s story, right? This was the beggar, crippled from birth, the one who sits by the Beautiful Gate and here he is dancing around praising God - now what on earth is going on? They aren’t used to this kind of thing - it’s out of the ordinary, they can’t get their minds around it.

When Peter sees that he’s got a bit of an audience, he launches into a sermon, interpreting what happened for those around him. This is his second sermon that we have recorded here in Acts - he’s finding his voice, starting to become what Jesus knew he was - the Rock upon which Jesus will build the church - and we see him beginning to live into that here. He’s here at the Temple, with all these other observant Jews who are there, and so he begins to talk about what happened to the beggar in the light of Jesus and who Jesus was and is and how their God is the one who is in on all of it. He’s quick to point out that the power wasn’t from himself of John...and it wasn’t their piety that made it happen either. I mean, we’re talking about Peter -- Peter, the one who denied Jesus three times as Jesus was on trial. He’s not exactly the picture of faithfulness or holiness here. Peter and John didn’t do anything special, there was nothing inside of them - no prayers or words or attitude - that made the crippled beggar get up and walk. It was Jesus.

He goes on to talk about Jesus as being part of the Jewish Tradition - as the son of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And we may think he’s being pretty harsh with the crowd here with his pointing of fingers, “you did this, you killed Jesus” and in a way he is - but he’s talking to them as an insider. As a fellow Jew - a bit of an internal family squabble. He’s not calling people out for whatever they may privately feel about the Messiah, but about the public rejection of Jesus before Pilate, the crowd mentality that led to Jesus’ execution. He kind of lets them off the hook - saying, “well, I know you didn’t know any better at the time”....but he brings it right back around and says, “well, now you do because God made it a part of what God was doing in the world, so now it’s time for you to change your ways so you, too, can become a part of what God is up to.”

This whole story is about living in this new reality - this reality where Jesus is alive and risen and active in the world. People are going about business as usual and they don’t see what has changed. They don’t know that Jesus is out and about, they live on auto-pilot. The beggar - asking for a handout as he always did, who didn’t even think healing was possible. The people in the crowds going to the Temple as usual -- the place where they understood God to dwell, the place -- if anything special were to happen -- you’d expect it to happen there -- and even the crowds were surprised to see something amazing happen before their eyes, not expecting to see God show up in such a visible, tangible way.

Don’t we, too, live life that way? Living business as usual, going about letting the world dictate our reality, telling us that we cannot be more than the sum of our circumstances, that we will never be enough or measure up, that our brokenness and the broken systems of the world define us and that we are not worthy of God’s attention and love?

And then, God acts, and we have Peter’s question to the crowd - “why does this take you by such complete surprise?”  This event kind of wakes them up a bit to something more - to a world bigger than what they thought they knew. It’s the world ushered in by Easter, where God’s forgiveness and healing and compassion flows in abundance and not a miraculous exception to the norm. And our response? We’re challenged to be more than merely amazed at its in-breaking - we’re invited to be in on it - to be seen as Jesus sees us - as people worthy of love and forgiveness - to turn away from the broken and sinful places inside us and to believe in the life and love Jesus offers to us...and to become a part of what God is doing in the world, to see God’s hand moving through our lives and our communities not as a one-time event, but as pervasive and sustaining and present as the very air that we breathe.

God’s work is everywhere - in the restoration of broken relationships, children in Guatemala seeing a doctor for the first time, meals shared with friends, neighbors stopping to help one another, nations working toward peace instead of war, in communities carrying one another through times of grief, homeless families putting their lives back together, in challenging white supremacy, in standing with those on the edges in our society, in reaching out for help, in people choosing hope over despair and love over fear, in a million different big and small ways we choose to enter in to suffer with one another in the face of all that life can bring.

God’s work is resurrection. The world Easter ushered in is resurrection life. As Easter people - resurrection is normal. Life abundant is normal. God’s action in the world - healing, restoring, redeeming work - is normal - and work that we are invited into as we follow after Jesus and as he seeks to make us whole.

Peter challenges the crowd in the story to change their ways - and that’s the challenge for us as well - to turn away from thinking that brokenness is the norm and toward this resurrection life which is all around us. Jesus is risen and that means we can’t go back to our regularly scheduled lives or business as usual. God is doing a new thing in our midst - redeeming all of creation and restoring us to wholeness. May we go forth this week to discover God’s abundant life all around us - and may we step out to follow Jesus in that work. Amen.

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Scripture - Mark 16:1-8

Mark 16:1-8
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
 
*Hymn - He Lives, UMH 310

Sermon -
2004.  Last game of the World Series.  The Red Sox were ahead 3-0 in the bottom of the 9th against the cardinals.  Keith Foulke was looking to close out the game with one out down and two more outs to go.  Pujols was on first...so anything could happen. The energy and the excitement was high. It looked like the curse was about to be broken.  Foulke wound up to throw the first pitch to Edmonds....and the Emergency Alert System came on.

Ben and I were watching the game together in his dorm room.  The whole campus exploded as everyone checked with neighbors to see if - by some miracle - their television wasn’t affected by the interruption.  People started to break out radios to try and find the radio broadcast of the game so we wouldn’t miss a play. Everyone was worried - what if we missed something?  What if the Cardinals got on base or scored a run? What if we missed the final out? What if the curse was broken while the voice on the screen was telling us, “this is not an emergency”?  (Irony of ironies there -- of course it was an emergency! Riots threatened to break out all over the state unless the game was put back on!) We all wanted to know -- what happened next?

But what if the game never came back on?  What if we were left perpetually in this state of “what happened next?”

This is what the early readers of Mark’s gospel must have felt like.  The ending that Mark gives is abrupt. In the original Greek, the ending is even more sudden.  Our english translations have verse 8 read: and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.  The original Greek reads more like: “They said nothing to nobody; they were afraid for....”

It almost sounds like Mark slumped over, dead of a sudden heart attack while finishing the story.  Or maybe he was attacked by Roman soldiers as he was hastily penning the last few words. Maybe the original manuscript got ripped, the true ending lost and never to be found again.  Or maybe, Mark’s not that good of a story-teller, and just doesn’t know how to end a story.

Whatever the reason, it’s obvious that some people felt uncomfortable with the ending.  Readers wanted to know: what happened next? Later editions of the gospel tack on extra bits of the story - and in fact, you’ll find in your Bibles that verses 9 through 20 are bracketed and that there’s a note about them being added on later, even though all of our earliest manuscripts end the story right where Mark left off.

All the other gospels give so many more details about the day of Jesus’s resurrection.  John places the scene in a garden, and writes in a conversation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.  Matthew includes an earthquake and an angel with shining white robes. Luke has two angels in dazzling clothes with the women cowering in fear before them.  Mark, on the other hand, simply shares a story of an empty tomb, a mysterious young man in a white robe, and a word - go and tell. We’re left with three women who initially kept quiet and who were afraid.

The women expected a body to embalm.  Instead, they encounter the truth that the past is no longer bound by death, the tomb is no longer sealed, and a call into an uncertain future - to go and tell...and their fear in the face of this reality is understandable.  Where do we go from here? What happens next?

The story as Mark tells it isn’t wrapped up in a neat bow.  Jesus makes no final appearances, the women don’t have any conversations with the disciples, there are no final parting words of wisdom from Christ.  It even ends with an incomplete sentence - we don’t know why they were afraid. It’s an unsettling story.

But what if Mark meant to leave the story there?

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an unsettling, open-ended thing -- it’s unsettling to announce that Christ has come back and the future is open.  It means that what you thought you knew, what you expected to be true, all the assumptions you thought you could rely on have suddenly gone out the window in the face of the empty tomb and an unfinished story -- a story with no assurances as to what happens next.

We want the nice, shiny ending.  We want to know what the moral of the story is, we want everything to resolve nicely and neatly, with a final concluding speech and a dropped curtain.  Applause! We know that the story is over, and that we can move on, having enjoyed a good tale and satisfied that the world is as it should be.

For Mark, the good news of the resurrection is so much more than a polished ending.  What happens next? For Mark, it isn’t Jesus appearing to select disciples, it isn’t some final parting instructions or a brilliant ascension into heaven.  For Mark, what happens next is us.

And for the women at the tomb, the first witnesses to see death’s undoing and to experience the reality of the resurrection, perhaps a lot of that fear came from the recognition that they were about to write the next chapter in God’s story -- that they had the responsibility to continue the work that Jesus was about....that the hope and vision they had believed in while following Jesus was actually real, and that it was up to them to take that next step - to go and tell - to spread the news that God really was doing something radically new and different in the world.

We know, despite their fear and initial silence, that the women do eventually tell the others what they saw and heard, that we wouldn’t be here today without that testimony of Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, that they found it within them to break out from their fear and spread the word of this news that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee. We know the story continues to unfold...just as it has been unfolding for nearly two thousand years until this very day.

We are what happens next.  The rest of the story is up to us.  And that’s a scary thought, isn’t it?  We’re used to Easter being a time of comfort and joy, a time to celebrate that because God raised Jesus from the dead, we can brush off our hands, lay back and live our lives rest assured that God’s got everything under control.  We’re off the hook because Jesus already did it all. The story has a nice ending and all we need to do is remember it from time to time.

It is up to us to continue the story that Mark started.  Mark’s gospel starts off with the words, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  What happened 2000 years ago was just the beginning of what God was doing through Jesus in the world...and the ending was open enough to include God’s continuing work - inviting us to step into the story, to pick up the narrative where Mark left off, and to go and tell others  -- inviting them to participate and experience the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. The story isn’t over yet - because now it’s our story.

The story of Christ happens through us together -- we see it where charity and love prevail over injustice and violence; where compassion and hope replace cynicism and despair; where peace and love take root in lives that are empty and lost; where human beings know joy and justice, dignity and delight: there is the risen Christ, beckoning to us, calling us forward to continue the good news, and inviting us to keep writing the story of God’s love in the world.

This week it’s up to you to live out the Easter story -- when you do spend time with the lost and the lonely, you continue the Easter story.  When you feed the hungry and eat with friends and neighbors, you continue the Easter story. When you offer a word of hope and encouragement to someone in despair, you continue the Easter story.  When you choose to love in the face of a world that calls for hate and indifference, you continue the Easter story.

This day, this empty tomb: this has been our destination for the season of Lent. But we see, with Mary Magdalene, that this is not a place to stop. This is not the end toward which we have been traveling.
This is only just the beginning of the Easter story.


We are what happens next.  As we encounter the empty tomb, as we are drawn into God’s larger story, and as we face the unfinished possibilities that have not yet been written - it is up to us to chose to live into the same future the women faced - one that is uncertain, one where the next steps are not yet outlined - but one that proclaims God’s resurrection power goes before us...and that God’s story is not finished yet. Amen.

​

Scripture - Luke 19:28-44

28After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.29When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, 30saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” 32So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. 33As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”34They said, “The Lord needs it.” 35Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. 37As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” 39Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” 40He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

41 As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. 44 They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.

*Hymn - Mantos y Palmas (UMH 279)

Sermon -

These past few weeks we’ve been talking about prayer - the prayer practices that make up this central discipline of the Christian faith and are woven throughout our daily lives. We began with the prayers we say before we eat - table blessings - where we pause and give thanks to God and the most central Table Blessing of the Great Thanksgiving that we pray before we share in Communion, where we recall God’s salvation story and our role in the God’s redeeming work in the world. We then moved to Prayers of Intercession - the prayers we pray as petitioners on behalf of others and ourselves, using the image of a prayer shawl as a way to understand that our prayers are part of how God is knitting the world back into wholeness. Last week we explored prayers of Lament - sharing those honest, vulnerable, and raw emotions with God and how worship is a place where we can bring our full selves.

This week brings us toward the end of Lent with Palm Sunday - the day we remember Jesus entering into Jerusalem to shouts of joy and acclimation as the people looked to Jesus to fulfill their messianic hopes. We envision the crowds lining the pathway into the city watching Jesus and his followers make their way down the Mount of Olives. This scene was prayer in action - a radical prayer for the Reign of Peace to come upon them - for God’s kingdom to be established among them.

Scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in their book The Last Week give a compelling image and context for why this parade was so radically subversive and problematic for the Roman Empire - and why these shouts from the crowd were prayers that put into action a faith that would place them on the edges of both Jewish and Greco-Roman society. I invite you to imagine this scene...

Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year . . .

. . . . One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class. They had journeyed to Jerusalem from Galilee, about a hundred miles to the north.

On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers.

. . . . Imagine the imperial procession's arrival in the city. A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.

Jesus's procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate's proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus's crucifixion . . .

Pilate’s presence in Jerusalem for the Passover festival wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary. It was not for some religious observance - after all, the religion of the Empire was that Caesar was the Son of God. Pilate’s presence wasn’t out of some deference to the local cultural customs, but to be on hand in case there was any trouble - which there often was as the Passover commemorates God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt...God’s saving presence among the people, delivering them from under the hand of the oppressor into a Promised Land where they were their own people.

Pilate’s processional, with all the pomp and circumstance, would have been a strong reminder of the power of the Roman Empire, a reminder of just who was in charge, a reminder of this way of life where you climbed the ladder by currying favor with the Romans, where wealth and status grant power over others, where might made right, where the great Pax Romana had been forged through conquest, oppression, and exploitation.

So when we have Jesus coming into town, with an ordinary robe, riding on a donkey with his rag-tag band of disciples following on foot - no neat rows of tight discipline, no shiny banners but rather branches of palm and peasant clothing on the pathway before him into the city - we see that Jesus is coming as a new kind of king - a king of peace that will break the bonds of war, a king of peace come to challenge and change the kingdoms of this world, a king of peace that refused the temptations of earthly power based in domination and oppression. In Jesus and the kingdom he proclaims, we see a different way of life emerge that causes those in power to tremble because his message threatens to undo the very fabric upon which their whole Empire was built.

And the choice comes - the peace of Christ or the peace of Caesar? To which kingdom will we owe allegiance?

Jesus’ life - and that of his disciples - looked vastly different than the life of those whose identity was wrapped up in that of the Empire.  The shouts of alleluia were prayers that placed hope in Jesus’ radical message of hope and peace, a cry to God for salvation, a witness to the movement of God’s kingdom among them -- a rejection of what the Empire stood for. Their very lives became a way in which God’s kingdom became real - a living witness that life could be oriented around compassion and forgiveness, mercy and justice, reconciliation and redemption, new life and hope and in the love of God.  And we see all of that in Jesus, who healed the sick, ate with tax collectors and sinners, spent time with the forgotten people of his day and who gave of his very self to restore wholeness to humankind.

As we are invited to choose the peace of Christ over the peace of Empire -- our lives are also called to look different - our very lives transformed into prayers of action that call witness to the self-emptying power of Christ’s love and the way of life in the kingdom of God that seeks to look at others the way God does.

Richard Foster wrote, “Each activity of daily life in which we stretch ourselves on behalf of others is a prayer of action.”

Life in the kingdom means that we move beyond ourselves to consider how we are in the world - that we move beyond ourselves to choose the peace of Christ over the values of this world. When we stretch ourselves to forgive someone who wronged us - that’s life in the kingdom and a prayer of action. When we stretch ourselves to ask for forgiveness to someone we have wronged - it’s a prayer of action. When we open our doors to the stranger, to the lonely child, to the people who can’t seem to get it together - it’s a prayer of action. When we intentionally stretch ourselves to include those who don’t have a place at the table, it’s a prayer of action. When we prioritize our time and energy and resources to take note of, include, and engage the people who are forgotten in our world, it’s a prayer of action. When we give up our place at the center - giving away our privilege and emptying ourselves in the way of Jesus - it’s a prayer of action. When we orient our lives around Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed was near, when we choose to live a life following in the footsteps of Jesus, who gave up everything that the world had to offer, we make the kingdom more real here on earth, and our lives join those of the disciples throughout the ages who have worked for, prayed for, and lived for God’s reign of peace and justice.

These two processions are as real today as they were two thousand years ago. One that promises you peace and security paid for by war, that is shiny and respectable, that gives you a ladder to climb, that is full of might and wealth and splendor...the other a procession that cannot give you money or power or status or security or success, but a parade that proclaims the way of self-emptying love, promises peace beyond our understanding, that will join and march with you - no matter who you are or what state you are in - that promises life, grace, and freedom in God’s love.

Which do you join with your life?
Amen.

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Scripture - Psalm 22; Lamentations 1:1-7

Psalm 22 (The Message)

1-2 God, God . . . my God!
   Why did you dump me
   miles from nowhere?
Doubled up with pain, I call to God
   all the day long. No answer. Nothing.
I keep at it all night, tossing and turning.
3-5 And you! Are you indifferent, above it all,
   leaning back on the cushions of Israel’s praise?
We know you were there for our parents:
   they cried for your help and you gave it;
   they trusted and lived a good life.
6-8 And here I am, a nothing—an earthworm,
   something to step on, to squash.
Everyone pokes fun at me;
   they make faces at me, they shake their heads:
“Let’s see how God handles this one;
   since God likes him so much, let him help him!”
9-11 And to think you were midwife at my birth,
   setting me at my mother’s breasts!
When I left the womb you cradled me;
   since the moment of birth you’ve been my God.
Then you moved far away
   and trouble moved in next door.
I need a neighbor.
12-13 Herds of bulls come at me,
   the raging bulls stampede,
Horns lowered, nostrils flaring,
   like a herd of buffalo on the move.
14-15 I’m a bucket kicked over and spilled,
   every joint in my body has been pulled apart.
My heart is a blob
   of melted wax in my gut.
I’m dry as a bone,
   my tongue black and swollen.
They have laid me out for burial
   in the dirt.
16-18 Now packs of wild dogs come at me;
   thugs gang up on me.
They pin me down hand and foot,
   and lock me in a cage—a bag
Of bones in a cage, stared at
   by every passerby.
They take my wallet and the shirt off my back,
   and then throw dice for my clothes.
19-21 You, God—don’t put off my rescue!
   Hurry and help me!
Don’t let them cut my throat;
   don’t let those mongrels devour me.
If you don’t show up soon,
   I’m done for—gored by the bulls,
   meat for the lions.
22-24 Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship,
   and punctuate it with Hallelujahs:
Shout Hallelujah, you God-worshipers;
   give glory, you sons of Jacob;
   adore him, you daughters of Israel.
He has never let you down,
   never looked the other way
   when you were being kicked around.
He has never wandered off to do his own thing;
   he has been right there, listening.
25-26 Here in this great gathering for worship
   I have discovered this praise-life.
And I’ll do what I promised right here
   in front of the God-worshipers.
Down-and-outers sit at God’s table
   and eat their fill.
Everyone on the hunt for God
   is here, praising him.
“Live it up, from head to toe.
   Don’t ever quit!”
27-28 From the four corners of the earth
   people are coming to their senses,
   are running back to God.
Long-lost families
   are falling on their faces before him.
God has taken charge;
   from now on he has the last word.
29 All the power-mongers are before him
   —worshiping!
All the poor and powerless, too
   —worshiping!
Along with those who never got it together
   —worshiping!
30-31 Our children and their children
   will get in on this
As the word is passed along
   from parent to child.
Babies not yet conceived
   will hear the good news--
   that God does what he says.

Lamentations 1:1-7 (NRSV)
How lonely sits the city
   that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
   she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
   has become a vassal.
2 She weeps bitterly in the night,
   with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
   she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
   they have become her enemies.
3 Judah has gone into exile with suffering
   and hard servitude;
she lives now among the nations,
   and finds no resting place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
   in the midst of her distress.
4 The roads to Zion mourn,
   for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate,
   her priests groan;
her young girls grieve,
   and her lot is bitter.
5 Her foes have become the masters,
   her enemies prosper,
because the Lord has made her suffer
   for the multitude of her transgressions;
her children have gone away,
   captives before the foe.
6 From daughter Zion has departed
   all her majesty.
Her princes have become like stags
   that find no pasture;
they fled without strength
   before the pursuer.
7 Jerusalem remembers,
   in the days of her affliction and wandering,
all the precious things
   that were hers in days of old.
When her people fell into the hand of the foe,
   and there was no one to help her,
the foe looked on mocking
   over her downfall.

*Hymn - I Want Jesus to Walk with Me (UMH 521)

Sermon -

What breaks your heart?  What are the deep burdens that you carry - the places where maybe you and God have had a screaming match or two, the wounds that never quite seem to heal, the places where you feel raw right down to your core?  

This week, we’re working with Prayers of Lament - those prayers where we cry out to God and share the places where we are aware of the pain and suffering and doubt that resides in our hearts and out in the world.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

God shouts in our pains to rouse a deaf world.

I believe that it is in our prayers of lament that we are moved to be our fullest, most honest selves before God - to express the anger, hurt, anguish, betrayal, anxiety, bewilderment, pain, doubt, and suffering we feel -- perhaps even directing that anger directly at God. It is the place we mourn and grieve what once was and is no more - taking note of our losses and sadness and aches and frustrations and hurt. It is the place we cry to God, “Why God, oh why is my life this way? Why is the world this way?”

This rich tradition of lament within the Hebrew scriptures I believe has been lost to the church - a church that so often pushes a life and faith that has it all together, that is always joyful and reassuring, that rationalizes tragedy and suffering in the scheme of some larger “plan” that we humans haven’t been clued in on.

I often hear from people - both those who come to worship regularly and those who never come - as to why they chose not to come some particular Sunday or why they feel like they can’t come at all - and most often the reason given for their absence (aside from just falling out of the habit) is because they feel like they were too much of a mess to be there that day - that they were too sad or upset about something, or because they felt like they had to have their life perfectly in order before coming, or they were having a bad day, or a whole host of other reasons that all point to the fact that they felt like there was no space for them in the church for them to be fully themselves, with all their faults, failings, and messes -- that somehow, it wasn’t acceptable to bring that part of them into the building or even bring it before God. I think it’s because we’ve been taught to put on our Sunday best - not just our nice clothes, but our nice selves - checking our hurt and pain and anger at the door - and the church has not done a good job of giving permission for the full range of human expression and emotion..

Reading these psalms of lament - like Psalm 22 - or the book of Lamentations - remind us that our hurt and anger and frustration - at God, at the world, even at one another - have a place in the life of any worshipping community, and certainly a place in our own life of faith.

Our reading from Lamentations points to the heart of the Israelites’ experience of lament. The book was written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE - a defining event for God’s people. The land that they had understood had been given to them by God had been taken from them. Their holy city - the place they understood God to reside - was destroyed. People had been killed as the Babylonians laid siege to the city for 18 months and after the fall, many had been taken captive and ripped away from their homeland. Their whole sense of identity had been taken away from them - all meaning stripped away in the loss of the Davidic monarchy, the temple, their holy city, the promised land. All gone. And so this piece of survivor’s literature turns to poetry in an attempt to give voice to the depth of their suffering.

What we read about in Lamentations is a corporate experience of lament - a people mourning what has passed away, grieving what is lost and naming their honest and raw pain. Our psalm is a much more personal expression of suffering and despair - crying out his feeling of abandonment by God and the misery of his current circumstances, a very visceral description of his state -- “I’m a bucket kicked over and spilled, every joint in my body has been pulled apart. My heart is a blob of melted wax in my gut. I’m dry as a bone, my tongue black and swollen. They have laid me out for burial in the dirt.” --- Anyone ever felt like that? Anyone ever named that before God in prayer?
.
Yet we don’t often do words like this in church, do we?

And yet, church - in the presence of God and our community of faith - is precisely the place to deal with our hurt and pain and suffering. The Israelites understood this -- they took their frustrations, anger, doubts and addressed them directly to God. In the facing of life fully, they name reality and wrestle with it before God. Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and preacher, writes, “Nowhere but with God does Israel vent its greatest doubt, its bitterest resentments, its deepest anger. Israel nows that one need not fake it or be polite and pretend in the divine presence, nor need one face the hurts alone. I the dialogue, Israel expects to understand what is happening and even to have it changed.”

Brueggemann continues on to say, in reference to the church, “If we are dialogic at all, we think it must be polite and positive and filled only with gratitude. So little do our liturgies bring to expression our anger and hatred, our sense of betrayal and absurdity. But even more acutely, with our failure of nerve and our refusal to presume upon our partner in dialogue, we are seduced into nondialogic forms of faith, as though we were the only ones there; and so we settle for meditation and reflection or bootstrap operations of resolve to alter our situation.”

Lament takes seriously the relationship we have with God - all aspects of it - and demands that we are our full selves before God - and that worship is the place where we can bring our fears and hurts, our challenges and struggle - and work them out with God in and among a community of others that are doing the same.

The point of laments isn’t that we are venting our hurt and anger - but that we are doing so in conversation with God - that God takes note of our condition - that God pays attention to our wrestling and struggling - and moreover, that God cares about us and suffers with us.

That is the beautiful thing about laments - that in our suffering, we have a God who suffers with us - who came to be with us as one of us in Jesus and in Jesus experienced pain and suffering, even feeling abandoned by God on the cross. We have a God who knows our hurt and sorrows and anger, our faults and failings and frustrations, and continues to surround us in love. We have a God who is not driven away by these things - by our sin or our lack of faithfulness or our woundedness - but draws ever closer to us, who shouts to remind us of how close God is to us in these places.

We don’t have a God who offers to us a quick fix, or an explanation of why bad things happen - but we have a God who enters in to dialogue and community with us to share our pain and frustrations. It out of this place of dialogue and relationship, of acknowledging the God who bears with us in our suffering, that so many of the psalms of lament end in this place of finding comfort and relief in God - of authentic and real gratitude and thanksgiving - praise that is all the more real and genuine because of the pain that has been carried and witnessed.

That’s why in worship, we need the space for lament - we have a God who suffers with us….and we are invited into each other’s brokenness and suffering. It is why precisely when we feel like we are a mess that we need to be in worship - to be our full selves, to voice - either aloud or in our hearts - the wounds we bear - to the God who bears those wounds with us...and who was wounded so that we might be brought to wholeness. It is in those places of pain where God speaks to us and moves us to attend to the needs of one another.

I invite us - as we continue to prepare ourselves during this season of lent - to consider what it would mean for us as a church to be that space for one another - a church where we could be free to bring all of who we are into worship - the places of authentic joy and celebration, the places of honest grief and lament - a community that felt free to pour our hearts out to God in anger and longing before one another - knowing that as we did so, we were putting everything into the hands of the God who loves us, who listens to us, who suffers with us, and who will never leave us.

May we step into that kind of richer, fuller faith together - trusting in the God who is big enough for our anger, who is always in community with us, who will never leave or forsake us. Amen.

​

Scripture - Psalm 86:1-6, Luke 11:1-13

Psalm 86:1-6
1 Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me,
   for I am poor and needy.
2 Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you;
   save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God; 3 be gracious to me, O Lord,
   for to you do I cry all day long.
4 Gladden the soul of your servant,
   for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
5 For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
   abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you.
6 Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer;
   listen to my cry of supplication.
7 In the day of my trouble I call on you,
   for you will answer me.

Luke 11:1-13 (New Revised Standard Version)
He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
   Your kingdom come.
3     Give us each day our daily bread.
4     And forgive us our sins,
       for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
 
5 And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
 
9 “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”


*Hymn - It’s Me, It’s Me, O Lord (UMH 352)

Sermon -

We’re continuing our Lent series on prayer - it’s centrality to Christian practice and the ways that it’s woven throughout our daily lives. Last week we focused on perhaps the most common of prayers - that of saying grace at the table, and talked particularly about The Great Thanksgiving that we pray as part of our Communion liturgy - the ultimate Table prayer so to speak.

This week we’ll take a look more closely at intercession - prayers of petition - asking God for the things that we want or need - for ourselves or for others.

Again, this is a common way we think about prayer, right? Someone gets sick, we offer to pray for them. We’re going through a tough time in our lives, and we pray for God to help us. Big, scary events happen in the world and we offer thoughts and prayers to the victims.

But I think many of us, at times, struggle with  this kind of prayer. I know I have gone through times in my life where I would sit down to pray and feel like I was talking to empty air. Or I would wonder if my prayers would make any difference at all - some problems seemed just too big, or some people were healed miraculously while others just got sicker. I grew up in a congregation that did Joys and Concerns every week and we did a lot of praying for people who were sick or those who had just lost a loved one. As a kid, I would hear each request named and then the pastor would say her or his prayer and I never really got the sense that this was something we were doing together. It was like the pastor was the one doing the praying and we were being quiet and listening. It was rote and routine - something we did together but I wasn’t able to connect this kind of prayer to prayer in my own life or what it meant to pray with others.

Fast forward a few years to college - I attended a Methodist church in a nearby town - and the spirit was different. Maybe I had changed - I had come to worship there after some time in a church that didn’t have community prayer and I had found that I missed that part of the service - or maybe the community had a different perspective on prayer and the difference it made. What I found, though, was I was in the midst of a worshipping community where prayer mattered. More than that - where prayer together mattered. In the sharing of joys and concerns there was a sense of how we are all part of things together - there was one individual who would always ask for prayers for his upcoming cribbage tournaments, and teens who would pray for upcoming exams, and those who would lift up issues in the world. I remember one Sunday in particular when a girl who was starting her freshman year in college lifted up a concern that she didn’t know if she was going to be able to afford books for her courses. This was a group of people who sensed God’s work in the world and weren’t afraid to take those requests to God in prayer.

It was an attitude mirrored by the Psalmist in our first reading this morning - and indeed, one that is found throughout the Psalms. There’s a boldness to this prayer - in many of the Psalms, there’s no hesitation around asking God for exactly what was needed, particularly when it came to themselves, telling God exactly what they were thinking and feeling and what they wanted God to do. There’s a sense of honest vulnerability before God - the God that knows us inside and out and loves all of who we are - and a bold presence before God in prayer. So many of the Psalms start out as if they were reminding God who God is - you are good and loving and forgiving, you are my God and I am devoted to you so answer my prayer - be there when I call - listen to my supplication. I find that to be such a refreshingly bold statement to make to the God of the universe. There’s a certain degree of trust and security in that kind of relationship to make such a daring request. As I was reading that Psalm this week it reminded me of a lesson that my youth group leader taught me as a teen that God was big enough to take anything that we shared - our anger, our frustration, our sadness, our celebrations - that that kind of boldness in prayer is something God wants and desires from us.

And to pair this kind of boldness with our reading from the Gospel of Luke - where Jesus’ disciples are yearning for him to teach them how to pray...and as we read the passage we are drawn in relationship from the recitation of these words that have been passed down by Christians for generations to the little parable comparing prayer to asking a friend for bread in the middle of the night to the ultimate relationship between that of parent and child and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

There’s a wonderful balance here - the freedom and ability to make our desires known to God - our deepest wants and wishes, our longings for ourselves and for the world, our honest pleas for help and desires for our loved ones to be healed or experience wholeness or for everything to be made right around us -- and these lines in the Lord’s Prayer about a focus on God’s kingdom, God’s perspective. There’s nothing in the prayer about perfect health, material wealth, lack of suffering - but in this small prayer there is a lot about getting just what we need for spiritual and physical sustenance, about asking for and receiving forgiveness, and about asking for freedom from that which pulls us away from God’s kingdom. There’s a lot about the Holy Spirit at work as we ask God to Give us our daily bread, to Forgive our sins, to Lead us and Deliver us - again, direct and bold asks...but ones that God wants to hear from us.

When we gather here for worship we take all of these prayers - the ones that come from deep within us and the ones that we share on behalf of others. We - together - petition God for the needs of friends and family members, of our community and of the world, for those who are close to us and those we have never met. I like to think that when we are doing this, we are wrapping the world, those whom we love, and even our very selves, in our care and prayerful intentions - like we become one great big prayer shawl for the world.

I love that we have a practice of sharing prayer shawls with those who need our love and care - and I’m grateful to Gloria who knits many of them. Prayer shawls are based on an ancient practice that developed during the time of Moses - the word in Hebrew for this garment is “talith” meaning “Little Tent” and came about, according to the story, because not all of the Hebrews could fit under the portable Tent of Meeting during the Exodus from Egypt, so these prayer shawls became “little tents” for the purpose of prayer and worship. We use them now to remind people that they are surrounded by the love and prayers of this church. We usually give them out to those who are undergoing medical procedures, but they can also be given to grieving families, as part of a marriage or baptismal celebration, birthday or anniversary or welcome -- any occasion to help folks know that the church is here to remind them of God’s unconditional love and to hold them before God in prayer.

There’s a reflection by Parker Palmer that appeared in the Journal Weavings that ties together this notion of the image of the prayer shawls and the idea that we are those who wrap the world in prayer - that praying for others is like being weavers who create cloaks in the midst of tattered lives.

[He begins by talking about remembering the death of President Kennedy and how his world seemed to unravel when this happened....]
"... I grieved my loss, our loss, then started to reweave–a work, a life, a world–not knowing what I know now: the world unravels always and needs to be rewoven time and time again. You must keep collecting threads: threads of meaning, threads of hope, threads of purpose, energy and will, along with all the knowledge, all the skill that every weaver needs. You must keep on weaving – stopping sometimes only to repair your broken loom–weave a cloak of warmth and light against the dark and cold (oh, all that dark and cold!), a cloak in which to wrap whoever comes to you in need: the world with all its suffering, those near at hand, yourself.

And, if you are lucky, you will find along the way the thread with which you may reweave your own tattered life, the thread that more than any other weaves in warmth and light, making both the weaver and the weaving true–the red thread they call love, the thread you hold, then hand along, saying to another, 'You.'"

That’s what we are doing in prayer - as we pray, we are part of God weaving this world back together, weaving us one to another - as we petition God to restore wholeness to those who are suffering, to those who are struggling, to a fractured world needing to be knit back together, and even to our own souls.

Prayer for and with and on behalf of others springs out of this deep relationship of love and trust that we have in God - the God who holds us through the peaks and valleys of life, who comes and walks beside us in Jesus, and who binds us together in the mystery of the Holy Spirit.

And although we do this every week, share Joys and Concerns to hold before one another and before God, I invite us to do so this week knowing that our prayer does matter. That our prayers for ourselves, others, and the world make a difference as we seek to live life in the kingdom Jesus came to bring. That through the Holy Spirit, our prayers are woven together in ways that enable us to make God’s presence with us and with others known -- and that we do so with the boldness and trust of being God’s beloved children.

With that, I invite us to enter into this time of sharing of prayers with one another - what would we like to hold before God and one another this morning - so that we can pray here in this place but also take these prayers home with us and be in prayer for and with one another throughout the week?




​

1 Corinthians 11:17-34 (The Message)
17-19 Regarding this next item, I’m not at all pleased. I am getting the picture that when you meet together it brings out your worst side instead of your best! First, I get this report on your divisiveness, competing with and criticizing each other. I’m reluctant to believe it, but there it is. The best that can be said for it is that the testing process will bring truth into the open and confirm it.
20-22 And then I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.
23-26 Let me go over with you again exactly what goes on in the Lord’s Supper and why it is so centrally important. I received my instructions from the Master himself and passed them on to you. The Master, Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, took bread. Having given thanks, he broke it and said,
This is my body, broken for you.
Do this to remember me.
After supper, he did the same thing with the cup:
This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you.
Each time you drink this cup, remember me.
What you must solemnly realize is that every time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup, you reenact in your words and actions the death of the Master. You will be drawn back to this meal again and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed contempt.
27-28 Anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Master irreverently is like part of the crowd that jeered and spit on him at his death. Is that the kind of “remembrance” you want to be part of? Examine your motives, test your heart, come to this meal in holy awe.
29-32 If you give no thought (or worse, don’t care) about the broken body of the Master when you eat and drink, you’re running the risk of serious consequences. That’s why so many of you even now are listless and sick, and others have gone to an early grave. If we get this straight now, we won’t have to be straightened out later on. Better to be confronted by the Master now than to face a fiery confrontation later.
33-34 So, my friends, when you come together to the Lord’s Table, be reverent and courteous with one another. If you’re so hungry that you can’t wait to be served, go home and get a sandwich. But by no means risk turning this Meal into an eating and drinking binge or a family squabble. It is a spiritual meal—a love feast.
 
*Hymn - You Satisfy the Hungry Heart (UMH 629)

Sermon -

During the rest of the season of Lent, we’re taking some time to explore prayer - and how prayer is one of the core practices of the Christian life. In Jesus’ day, prayer was experienced in many forms and contexts - from the family Sabbath prayers to daily prayer in the synagogues to times of corporate worship to the regular rhythm of prayer and ritual at the Temple.

Many of these practices have changed and evolved, but prayer in the Christian life is best understood when we think about Jesus and his context. His teachings and proclamations about the kingdom of God are rooted in the richness of a people at prayer. According to Marcia McFee, “The teaching of Jesus makes little sense and lacks power abstracted from the practices of prayer and community life in which they were articulated. Attempting to follow Jesus today, to be his disciple, living out the baptismal covenant, likewise becomes almost incoherent without a lively, rich set of practices of prayer in many forms and formats of community (family, small group, congregation, personal).

And so together, during Lent, we’ll be spending time re-grounding ourselves in these practices of prayer as we prepare ourselves for the season of Easter ahead -- reorienting ourselves as a church community as a people following Jesus in making real God’s kingdom here on earth.

We start with perhaps the most common of prayers - one that most everyone is familiar with -- that of saying grace.

We didn’t always say grace in my family growing up. My first memories of praying before a meal were actually at the house of a friend from church; I had gone over to her house after worship and when their family sat down to lunch, they all held hands a prayed together to thank God for the food. I thought this was a pretty neat tradition, so I told my parents about it when we got home and asked if we could do it too.  At least - this is what I remember of how we started saying grace together as a family - my parents have a different version of events. In any case, when we sat down to dinner together, it was a different family member’s “turn” each night - meaning that we got to pick which prayer we said or sung as we held hands around the table. A big favorite of ours was singing the Doxology - but not to the traditional tune - but to Hernando’s Hideaway or to the William Tell Overture.

(Sing it?)

We’d then end with a “Friendship squeeze” with one person squeezing the hand of the person next to them and having that passed around the circle - twice - and then we’d be ready to eat.

When Ben and I started dating, his family would sometimes sing “Be Present at our Table, Lord” as their grace. Sometimes, the duty fell to whoever was the hungriest and wanted to eat!

When we started doing grace as a family with Michael before our meals, he pretty quickly picked up on the ritual. Before he started speaking, he’d hold his hands out to each of us and then point to all the people around the table when we asked what he was thankful for. Now he enthusiastically points to all the items on his plate and says “mommy”, “daddy” and “the woof-woof” before raising his arms with a flourish at the end when we say “Amen.”

Saying Grace is all about thanking God for the blessings that we have, remembering God as the source of our being, and reminding ourselves to be grateful. But in the Christian tradition, it is only one of the prayers we say around a table -- the other prayer is the Great Thanksgiving, the one that places us in the midst of God’s salvation story. Our scripture passage for this morning refers to the early church’s practice of The Great Thanksgiving, also known as the Eucharist or Communion or the Lord’s Supper.

In those days, the Lord’s Supper wasn’t taking a tiny piece of bread and dipping it into a bit of grape juice. It wasn’t tacked on to the end of a worship gathering, as an extra or addendum to the service. Rather, it was a full on meal - a feast - and it was the whole point of getting together.

So Paul’s harsh words to the Corinthian church about the divisions around the Lord’s Supper is a big deal. What was happening is that not everyone was able to participate equally in this meal. In order to understand why, we need to know a bit about the culture of Corinth. Greco-Roman culture was highly stratified, and you always knew your social position relative to others -- where you stood in the pecking order - who was above you and who was below you. This spilled over into all areas of life -- practically all social interaction was shaped by this hierarchy of status. The church in Corinth had members of all different social statuses - both high - with its powers and wealth and privileges - and low. How these different cross-sections of social status mixed was a constant challenge for the Christian Church in Corinth.

One of the more shocking ways this stratification showed up in the culture of the time was around meals. For instance, if a host had guests for dinner, it was common for guests of high status to be served more and better food and drink than others, and for guests of lower status to be served less food and drink of poorer quality. Differences in status resulted in differences in treatment. This was just accepted as the way the world worked; people may not have been happy about the arrangement, but no one really questioned it - it was just the way it was.

So when this was happening during the practice of the Lord’s Supper, Paul is rightfully angry, and takes them to task for what is happening because of the way that the Lord’s Supper was intended to be a remembrance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an invitation to be a part of the larger story of God’s redeeming power here on earth. Instead, we had a meal where different people were receiving different amounts and qualities of food based on their background - and some were so drunk they had to be carried out while others went hungry.

This is what Paul is talking about when referring to participating in this meal with reverence - other translations use the word “worthiness”. He’s asking the Corinthians to examine their motivations in participating in this feast -- is it to demonstrate and further highlight the social divisions that existed within the church? Or is it to participate in the greater story of the new covenant Jesus came to make, to show the unity in the body of Christ, and to witness to the new way of life that there is to be found in Jesus Christ? For Paul, of course, there’s only one right answer, and to use the Lord’s Supper to be just another feast was to sin against Jesus.

Now, our practice of Communion is vastly different from that of the early Church - it’s not a lavish feast, but pared down to the essential symbols of bread and cup. There’s no barrier to participation in this meal - in the United Methodist tradition, there’s nothing to prevent anyone from sharing in Communion - no theological litmus test, no requirements for membership or baptism - merely a simple desire to take the bread and cup. And yet, I wonder if we all have our own set of hangups around the Table that we need to work on together.

When we pray through the prayer of the Great Thanksgiving - when we recount God’s history with the God’s people, remember God’s mighty acts in Jesus Christ, and invoke the Holy Spirit’s presence in the bread and the cup, we become part of the Great Story of God’s relationship with the world - from the very creation of the universe to Jesus’s ministry to the hope of the kingdom that is present yet always coming and that great banquet that awaits us all. We take our place with all those who dined with Jesus - with all who shared in this meal before us - and all who will one day eat the bread and drink the cup. In this prayer, we proclaim the radical message of love, grace, and justice that Jesus came to share with all humanity. In this prayer, we reenact the heart of our faith - that we remember Jesus - we remember his body broken - and our brokenness -- and his love poured out in the new covenant - and our love shared with a hurting world.

And isn’t this something to celebrate?

This isn’t a solemn procession - this is a joyful feast! This isn’t about tiny pieces of bread dipped delicately into grape juice, but about great big hunks of bread dunked and dripping - taking in fistfuls of love and grace with every bite.

I love watching children come up to receive communion, because in many ways they get it more than we do. I remember one girl in particular when we were serving in Haverhill - and we celebrated communion every week - who would always come up and ask for a big piece of bread. The kids would sit up in the front row and wait for Communion - and when we prayed the Great Thanksgiving, we had their attention. They understood that what we were doing was something deep and meaningful and joyful and beautiful - They wanted to help serve and they wanted to be a part of what was going on.

The Great Thanksgiving - it’s like the grace we say before meals - it’s about thanking God - thanking God for bringing us into the story; it’s about remembering - remembering Jesus as the one who is with us whenever we eat together; it’s about reminding ourselves - reminding ourselves who we are as the body of Christ, broken and poured out for the world.

But it’s also about joy - about celebration - about our place in God’s kingdom as God’s beloved children. It’s - as Paul puts it - a spiritual meal—a love feast.

And so as we come to the table later this morning, let’s keep that in mind. When we pray through the Great Thanksgiving together - place yourself in the story of God’s redeeming love.  When we examine ourselves coming up to receive, let us consider the state of our hearts. Let us come forward with joy and thanksgiving - for we gather with friends and neighbors around the table of grace - where all are welcomed and none are turned away - where we celebrate and feast together - and where we remember Jesus and his love for us. Amen.

​

​I was invited here to talk about hope because of my story and my work. My hope is that something I say will empower at least one of you to offer hope and love to someone who has none.

Currently, I work for the Westbrook, Windham, Gorham and Buxton Police Departments as the Recovery Liaison. I act as a case manager for people who have a substance use disorder. I work with people to link them to community supports that will sustain recovery. A participant will be connected to things like, housing, physical and mental health care, substance use treatment, employment and a recovery coach to name a few. I am in constant contact with the participants as a support as well.

The program is funded by a state grant and in-kind funds by the city of Westbrook. The state has already reported that they will not renew the grants for the programs like this. There are 8 total police programs in the state that are losing their funding. Since our program has proven successful, we are starting to look for other possible grants and donations. We are hopeful to reach our goal of about $80,000 by June to continue this great work.

Whenever we feel we can no longer go on, hope whispers in our ears and reminds us we are strong
 -Robert Hansel

I love this quote because in my job, I get to be that whisper of hope. People who do the kind of work I do are often the only whisper a person has ever heard. They’ve never had hope. Advocates for people in recovery are often, in recovery themselves. I am in recovery from a substance use disorder.

On my 12th birthday I experimented with marijuana. I didn’t like it, but now that I had tried it, I was willing to try alcohol too. Once I drank I felt okay. I felt relaxed and free to be myself. This only increased my desire to try other substances and at age 15 I used heroin for the first time. That was it. I knew right then and there that I had found the relief I had been waiting for all my life.

By the age of 17, my mom and Winky became aware of my drug use and I was admitted to my first rehab with many more stays to follow. I stayed clean for about 2 months. From then on, I was constantly trying to control my drug use while maintaining a life. It was an endless battle that was impossible to win. My mom made my drinking and drugging difficult because she was the mom who would track me down whether I was at Division Point, Long Island, on a boat in the bay or in a field in Pownal, she found me.

I am fortunate though. I grew up on Chebeague. I have my mom, Winky and my brother who loved me unconditionally. I have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who never turned their back on me.  My family constantly reassured me of their love and continued to try to help me. Not only did I have a family that loved me, but I had an entire island that I knew cared if I lived or died. I was also fortunate because I don’t have any major mental illness. I am a minority of people with a substance use disorder. Mental illness can be a precursor to substance use disorder.

Today I am clean and have 2 beautiful healthy children who, God willing, will never see their mother drink or use drugs. I have a loving husband who has carried me into my recovery. He has embraced the island and has agreed to not cut away any of my uncle’s traps when they set over him.  He and I volunteer on the Yarmouth Fire and Rescue and coach our daughter’s sports teams. We get involved in her life and our community; things I wouldn’t be doing if I weren’t in recovery.

 As part of my own recovery, I help other people find recovery. I have an amazing job where I get to advocate and support others trying to recover from a substance use disorder. Some of the people I work with have nothing and no one. They don’t have supportive family or friends and they don’t have an entire community standing behind them like I did.

When someone is in the middle of a substance use disorder they have no hope for their future. Addiction isn’t something someone can just get over or stop without the proper supports in place. It isn’t until a person finds a glimmer of hope for their future that they have a chance to succeed. Their mental health also needs to address in partnership with the addiction to ensure sustainability.

Every day I work with people who have experienced the world at it’s worst. They have been hurt physically and emotionally. They have seen people do things to each other that are immorally and incomprehensible. They’ve been neglected, abused and abandoned. They have never been shown what it means to have a family, to sit down at the dinner table every night or to have their parents help them with their homework. In many cases, parents were the very people who introduced them to drugs and alcohol thus setting up a life of pain and misery.

That said, I also work with people who had loving parents, who grew up in a beautiful home, had family traditions, celebrated holidays, and graduated high school, but those people are few. Addiction is often generational and holds entire family’s hostage. It doesn’t discriminate against age, race, gender, economic status or religion. If you have a brain, you can have addiction because it is a brain disease.

I continue to do this work because I have hope. There was a point in time where I was hopeless. I thought that my addiction was stronger than me and I couldn’t see a way out, but people believed in me and showed me there was hope. Today I get to show people the way out and hold their hands as they take the enormous steps towards recovery. I truly believe that I can take this journey with my people only because I was shown 2 very simple things; Hope and love.

Being part of a community like Chebeague can’t be described to someone who isn’t an islander. Growing up when I did on the island was an experience that every child should have. We were given enough room to run free, but no one was afraid to call our parents to tell them we were doing something we shouldn’t, like skipping girl scouts. We had access to punts and ponds, four wheelers and beaches. We walked through any yard we wanted without fear of being yelled at. No paths were blocked off with boulders and we knew everyone on the boat. I understand times have changed and it may even be for the better, but I can tell you that growing up here is why I was able to enter sobriety.

I moved off the island in 2008 because well, life is much more manageable when you aren’t ruled by a boat schedule. Fortunately, I still get to reap the benefits of island life whenever I want because of my family. Even though we don’t live here, my kids know what it’s like to be able to have your own lobster traps, go fishing at the wharf and skate at the pond. They know what it’s like to spend an entire day at the beach with thier cousins playing in the tide pools and building floats from the Styrofoam, rope and driftwood you find on the beach. They know what it’s like to purposely get stuck in a honeypot and the panic you feel when you really can’t get your feet out. They know what it’s like to drive the go cart down through the dirt pit and they know what it’s like to get a dollar at the store from Roy. They know what it’s like to have a whole community know generations of your family. These are parts of island living that you will never find anywhere else.

​So, with all that said, I would like to challenge each of you to learn something new about alcoholism and addiction because no one is exempt from. It’s in every community and everyone knows someone who has been affected by this disease whether you know it or not.  2 in every 10 people suffer from addiction or alcoholism. Every single day, 100 people die from their drug use. In 2016, Maine lost 1 person every day from an overdose. Over 360 families lost a spouse, child, parent or sibling to a treatable disease. Since there isn’t nearly enough treatment available to address the epidemic we are seeing, we need to act on a personal level every chance we get.  If you can show some compassion, empathy, love and hope to your neighbor, you are doing your part to make a difference in the world.
 

The skies dawn bright and clear over the desert – not a hint of cloudy white stains the horizon.  It’s another blue and sunny day, no chance of rain.


The day wears on; the sun grows higher, brighter, hotter; the heat pounds down to scorch the earth, seeming to suck the very life out of the land.  The barren landscape continues for miles, stretching beyond what the eye can see, seemingly endless – desolate…lonely…and dry.


On the edge of this desert a man appears – John the Baptizer he is called.  A man hardened by years of desert-living, who has survived its perils to bring news to the people of the dawning of a new age.  Crowds gather to hear his message in the heat of the day, people from miles around - people whose spirits have been wandering the desert for years, a people:
-        dried up from unfulfilled promises,
-        scorched by Roman rule,
-        parched from faded dreams and empty passions.
-        thirsting for a word from the God they feel has abandoned them.  

A people ready to hear anything that would give them hope - a lifeline, a future, a glimpse that life could be different.

Here and there a head turns, looking up towards the sky, sensing something on the horizon just beyond perception, praying for the relief to come.


Have you ever been in this place?  Have you felt like you were in the desert?  Dried out by life?  Stuck wandering in a dreary landscape? Thirsty for something deeper, truer, more real?


{Rain Down begins playing very lightly in the background}


The sun continues to beat down as people stream forward, one after another, diving into the Jordan river, coming forward to quench their thirst, drinking in the message of hope John offers – the kingdom of God at hand, God-made-flesh drawing near.  Immersed, refreshed, filled, and made new.  Water splashes and drops filling the air, falling at the feet of the few who haven’t yet made up their minds, giving a taste of the promises that still hold true, that are about to be made real once again.


{Sing Rain Down as solo here - Ben?}


And then Jesus appears.  Jesus, as yet unknown to the people, just another face among the many gathered on the bank of the river.  Jesus, with no disciples, no fame, no glory.  But John sees – and John knows – and John understands that the water he is using to wash these people is nothing compared to what this man Jesus standing before him brings – the living water from the well that will never ever run dry – even in the most barren of deserts.  Jesus – here to bring the reign of God in hearts and in lives; Jesus, here to be washed in the waters that will sustain him through his ministry.


{sing Rain Down again here}


In that moment, as Jesus emerges from the waters, time stands still.  The world holds its breath as the heavens open, the light of the sun washed out by the brilliance of the skies, the radiance of all the stars in all the universe descending from above to rest, like a dove, on Jesus.  And a voice, soft and commanding, like distant thunder, saying "This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life."  And the world knows him for who he is: Jesus, savior of the world, redeemer and reconciler, God’s love incarnate poured out for all.


{Third time through Rain Down - invite people to sing}


People begin to ask, “who is this man?  Who is he to receive such favor with God? Is this the one John was speaking of?  The one to light the fire of God’s spirit within us?”  Some turn away, too blinded by the light surrounding Jesus, too frightened by what such tidings may mean.  Others turn to bask in the spirit of God, opening hearts and lives to receive the love of God that seems to flow outward from Jesus.


This was not a baptism of repentance, of the heart’s transformation, such as John preached.  This was not a baptism from human hands, from human making.  This baptism did not come from a human choice to turn towards God’s kingdom or to prepare the way.  Jesus’s baptism comes from the skies, directly from the God who sent Jesus into the world to be the living water to refresh our souls.


{fourth time to Rain Down}


Living water, raining down – the water of baptism that rained down on the Israelites two thousand years ago, continues to rain down on us today.  Raining down to quench our thirsts, our yearning for God; to fill up the empty wells in our lives, to turn the dry and barren places into gardens full of new life.


But for so many of us, these baptismal waters seem distant – far away.  We can no longer feel the waters that surround us, or the gentle shower of drops on our heads.  We live dried out lives, forgetting that we are a baptized people, that the living water runs through deep within us, deep enough to give us strength and courage to face uncertain times if only we will tap that well within us.  We forget that God’s living water can sustain, refresh, and renew us.


We yearn for God’s love to rain down upon us again, to pour over us, and to fill us.  We look to so many things to fill us – our jobs, success, our friends, what people think of us, money, addictions – and all these things leave us empty and dry, yet we continue searching and searching for the one thing to satisfy our souls.  We yearn for God to rain upon us when we read the headlines about war and injustice in the newspaper and know that this is not the world as it should be.  We yearn for God to rain upon us when we pass a homeless person on the street and have compassion.  We yearn for God to rain upon us when we know that there is something more to life than what we have seen and experienced.
And so today we have an opportunity to remind ourselves that we have been blessed with the gift of living water,
 water that flows freely for all who will receive it,
 water from the streams of God's saving power and justice,
 water that brings hope to all who thirst for righteousness,
 water that refreshes life, nurtures growth, and offers new birth.
Water that rains down God’s love on a thirsty world.

{5th time through Rain Down?}

When we gather around the table for communion later this morning, we will have the opportunity to remember that these waters are available to us, that they run within and through us, as we reaffirm and remember our baptismal vows. Some of us may not remember our baptism...but at some point we made the decision to live fully into those promises that were made on our behalf when we were infants.  Some of us may not yet be baptized….and if passing through the waters is something you are yearning for in your life, come talk to me. Yet all of us are here for a reason - we are all in this place, asking God to rain down love upon us once again.

I ask you, then, this morning - where are you thirsty for God’s love in your life? What are the parched and barren places in your soul that need a fresh rain of God’s Holy Spirit? What feels dried out in your life? What pieces of yourself are lost in a desolate wilderness? Where do you need need the cleansing waters or the refining fire of the spirit? Let us take a moment in silence to hold these places before God in prayer.

{silence….then last time through Rain Down}

God of life, rain down your love upon us yet again. May we step into the healing waters ready for our heart’s transformation….ready for our souls to be quenched by living water….ready to be reminded that we are a people showered by God’s love each and every day. Amen.

​

Scripture - Luke 1:26-56
26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
 39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
 46 And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
56 And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.
 
Sermon

How many of us could use a little more peace in our lives?

I did a quick Google search this week - and we’re not alone in our quest for peace! The search turned up lists like: “9 Books To Help You Find Inner Peace, No Matter How Crazy Your Life Gets”, “11 Books To Read For Peace Of Mind For Times When Things Get A Little Fuzzy”, “17 Books That Inspire Inner Peace and Happiness”, a list of 40 “Best Inner Peace Books” on Goodreads, and so much more. The Self-help market is flooded with texts promising an empowering journey toward fulfillment and happiness through discovering your identity in 5 easy steps or less.

Sounds compelling, right? I mean - who wouldn’t want to find inner peace and wholeness that way?

The problem, though, with many books like this - even though they may contain truths about peace - is that the solutions they offer are often temporary. They promise happiness...which isn’t always peace. They offer pain-free living...which isn’t always wholeness. They give a quick solution...which isn’t always transformation.

In our story today, we see Mary’s conversation with the angel Gabriel - a conversation that leaves her with a host of problems that any self-help book would love to address. Seeing visions and hearing voices? Check. The potentially adulterous nature of this pregnancy in a culture that executed unchaste women? Check. Delusions of grandeur as one highly favored by God? Check.

It is certainly enough to merit Gabriel’s message of Do Not Be Afraid.

Last week, Zechariah freaked out when the angel appeared. Mary, however, doesn’t seem alarmed, but is perplexed at Gabriel’s coming to a common girl such as she, pondering his incredible message of favor. Yet instead of turning away from the news the angel came to bring her - that she would bear a son by the Holy Spirit and that he would reign over God’s kingdom - she faces her fears, accepts her reality, embraces her purpose in God’s great story as told to her by Gabriel and replies with a simple “Let it be so with me according to your word.”

I find Mary’s trust and faith and courage pretty remarkable in the face of what saying “yes” to the angel would mean for her and for Joseph and for the child she would carry. There is such peace and acceptance of her reality, of her place in what God is doing. She comes face to face with her true identity in God, with her purpose, with what the future will bring - and is at peace within herself...which leads to the joyful song she shares with Elizabeth about what God will do in the world through the birth of Jesus.

I don’t know about you….but I know I’ve struggled with finding purpose and being at peace with it. I’ve struggled with finding more peace in my own life and in my relationships. I wish I could be more like Mary - who had this direct encounter with the angel and immediately aligned her whole life around that message from God. For whatever reason, my method of discernment seems to be a bit more based around holy anxiety or the wrestling match back in the Old Testament that Jacob has with the angel. So if you hear God more like Mary does - more power to you - there is immense blessing in that. If you tend to find yourself in a wrestling match with God more often than not - I am right there with you...and there is blessing to be had in that struggle as well.

This past year where Ben was struggling with his health while I was trying to balance parenting and work and caring for the needs of the household and my own needs and community commitments  -- I can say that peace wasn’t something I had in abundance, especially at first. I was wrestling so much against the idea that this was not how I envisioned parenting with Ben, this was not how I pictured ministering and living here on the island, that this was not how life was supposed to be going. I couldn’t accept the reality of my situation and what that meant for me and how I needed to spend my time and energy.

As I continued to wrestle and struggle, a message from God started to come through - sometimes during prayer, sometimes in the middle of the night when I was up with Michael, sometimes in the middle of ordinary activities or conversations with friends. I can be pretty dense, so it had to come through a lot of different channels...but the message was “you are enough”...and in those places where you feel like you aren’t enough, I’m right there with you.”

“You are enough.” These three simple words were enough to shift my focus from the swirling chaos of my life this past year to the core of my identity as someone loved and cherished and gifted by God - just for who I am...not for what I do. All those other things - the sermons to write, the diapers to change, the meals to prep, the constant attentiveness to Michael’s safety, the mound of correspondence that had been accumulating or worry about Ben’s health or all the things I felt like I should be doing to be “super mom” or “super pastor” -- they all weren’t as important as this identity of being enough in God’s eyes. It was that fact that gave me the ability to accept the reality of how things were and that gave me the courage and strength to be at peace with my role for this season of my life. It’s not easy...and I’m not perfect...but I’m learning to live more as someone created by God to be enough for the people God has placed around me.   

Perhaps that sense of identity, of rootedness in God’s love and grace and mercy is what enabled Mary to so quickly be at peace with her part to play in God’s story. Mary was able to recognize her own belovedness, her own favor with God, with the message the angel brought to her. Certainly, such a proclamation of favor, of worthiness, of being beloved by God can be such a startling one - and the truth of our identity being centered in God’s unconditional love can feel scary and threatening to us because it means that the centers of identity we’ve built for ourselves - around work, family, status, education, our communities, our accomplishments, our wealth, our politics - have to change.

The truth of it is that we don’t have peace when we build ourselves around all these other things - if we define ourselves by what we do, what happens when we lose our job, or when we have a difficult situation at work that disrupts us? If we define ourselves by what good parents we’ve been, what happens when our children chose a different path? If we define ourselves by our accomplishments, what happens when we are unable to achieve what we’ve used to or when the health crisis comes and we can’t do all that we were once able to?  All these other sources of identity aren’t permanent; they don’t give us the foundation to develop lasting peace in our lives.

But if we are firmly grounded in our identity as a child of God, one who has been created by God and who is loved by God simply for existing, that there is nothing we can do or be that would ever change that fact...that kind of identity gives us the strength and courage to be at peace no matter what life brings our way. It allows us to respond to the unexpected news, the difficult conversation with a friend, the change in political climate, the hard day at work with a sense of peace that is not borne out of resignation or passive acceptance - but with the hopeful peace of knowing and trusting in God’s promises that no matter what, God is present and at work and that God has a part for me to play in whatever is unfolding in my life or in the world.

Peace comes when we have a sense of who we are in God and live that out in our lives...which helps there be more peace out in the world. In this season of Advent, I invite us all to be aware more fully of our grounding in God, to surround ourselves with reminders of our true identity as God has created us, to find ways to shift those centers of identity that the world would have us build to bring it back to God’s love for us, for others, and for the world.

For some of us, that reminder might come through the words of Scripture, or other spiritual reading - I’ve been going through Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak recently and recommend it for those of you who might be continuing to wrestle with that sense of identity and what it means for how you live out your life vocationally. Others might find that peace in poetry or music, or in nature -- whatever it is that brings you back to that place of peace and strength in God’s love -- create space for that this season as we anticipate the birth of Jesus and as we seek to have more peace in our lives and in our world.

Because we all know and feel the fear and anxiety increasing in our world, in our communities, and that creeps over into our own lives. So let us stand fast against the tide of fear with the words of the angel echoing in our hearts and in our minds - Do Not Be Afraid - as we stand with Mary, a people who are beloved and favored by God, to share the promise of hope...and the promise of peace to a broken and hurting world. Amen.

​