The King Who Serves

A joint service between Lutheran Theological Seminary Saskatoon and the Southwest Area of the ABT Synod, hosted by Advent Lutheran Church, Calgary.

Christ the King, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Word who was in the beginning and was with God and is God, full of divine power, and what does he do with that power? He could have used that power to cast down the Roman Emperor or to send all the Roman troops to drown in the Mediterranean as he did with the pigs. He could have called down the angels from on high to bring peace and justice in the blink of an eye. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he submitted to death on a cross. He surrendered his divine power and lived fully into his humanity – into the experience of being a vulnerable human who dies.

Now there are many different ways of understanding why he did this, but today I want to look specifically at what Christ’s surrender of divine kingly power means for those of us who yearn to follow him and to be with him. I want us to consider what God wants us to do with the small amounts of power that we humans have access to from time to time, and to remember what God is doing for us in those moments when we have no power at all.

So what we do we see in Christ the King’s use of power? We see service. Particularly, we see service to those who cannot serve him back. Christ uses his power to feed thousands of people who never fed him back. Those people who received the loaves and fishes from him, they didn’t invite him back to their place to host him in return. They didn’t have the means to host a reciprocal feast for him. And so he fed them because they couldn’t feed him. 

We see the same in the miracles of healing that Christ performed. He healed people who were of no use to him. They didn’t serve him in return, most of them didn’t even thank him. It’s true that after he healed Peter’s mother-in-law, she served him food, but she was the exception. For the most part, Christ healed those who were beggars, who had nothing of their own, who had no status or wealth to share with him. He used his immense power to serve those who could not serve him – we hear of unrequited love, for Christ it was more like unrequited service.

This is not how we tend to use power. We’ve seen how people with power use it to increase their own power. They use their power to help only those who can help them in return, and they refuse to help those who can’t help them back. Our whole society right now is built on serving those who can contribute the most in return. We call it finding efficiencies, or practicing good business, or getting a good return on investment. We make decisions based on what is good for the bank account, which means doing whatever it takes to make our consumers, or our donors, or our supporters happy. We take people who are rich out for lunch so they will donate more, even though they have no need for a free lunch. We spend time and energy catering to people who are already healthy, even though they don’t need our efforts to stay that way. We give carbon offset credits to multinational corporations so they will continue to invest in our country, even though they make so much money they can afford to reduce their carbon emissions without going bankrupt.

But power, whether that comes in the form of money, or time, or energy, is, for us humans, limited. Which means that we simultaneously find reasons not to spend money or time or effort on those who can’t give back. We tell people who have no income to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than putting money into changing social structures, we tell people who are too sick to work to stay home rather than putting money into creating medically safe public spaces, we tell individuals to make green choices rather than putting in the time and energy necessary to make the sweeping changes needed to save the global climate.

Can you imagine if Christ used his divine kingship in that way? Multiplied the loaves and fishes for Pontius Pilate, instead of the poor? Spent his time in King Herod’s palace, instead of with Galilean fishers? Told parables that made Emperor Augustus look good, instead of pointing to widows as models for a godly life? He could have. He probably would have avoided death on a cross if he’d done that.

But that’s not what it means to be a king in God’s kingdom. That’s not what it means to have power in God’s kingdom. That’s not how we are called to use our power – our money, our time, our energy, our status. The Spirit of God calls and empowers us to use our money and our time and our energy and our status the way Christ did – to go out of our way to serve people who can’t give back, to take the extra steps needed to support people who can’t offer support in return, to let go of the bottom line so we can grab hold of those falling off the bottom rung.

And thank God for that. Because in God’s kingdom, which means in all those earthly places where Christ is followed as king, everyone who is hungry is fed, everyone who is sick is restored, and everyone who has been pushed to the bottom is raised up, without expectation of what they can give in return. The church, in those holy moments when we are heeding the call of the Holy Spirit and allowing ourselves to draw on her strength, is that place. This is why we are drawn to church, after all. Because we trust, in those moments when we have no power of our own, that we will be fed, and restored, and raised up without being asked to give anything in return. We trust that God’s grace towards us is being granted because we are not able to give anything in return. And we trust that when we have been filled up with that grace, we will be given the strength and the courage to go out and serve others.

Today’s readings are a preview of this Sunday’s, which is Christ the King Sunday. We might almost think of it as another chance to celebrate Good Friday, when we call Christ’s death on the cross good because it is Good News for us. Christ our King served, and in doing so shows us what God’s power, and ours by extension, is really for––for using in service to others so that all might experience the life that God gives. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Freed to turn the world upside down

 Friday, August 19th, 2022 – Luther Congress, CLU Chapel, Thousand Oaks, CA

 

Acts 17:1-9

 

“These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also! … They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor!”

 

Just to be clear, “these people” refers to Paul and his Jewish Christ-following cohort in Thessalonica, a city of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, not anybody in this chapel in Thousand Oaks, a city of the American Empire  state, today. Hopefully that clarification makes you all feel a bit better, especially those of you who are here without the privilege, or protection, of American citizenship.

 

It was, after all, citizenship that protected Paul in his missions across the Roman Empire. This was not the first time Paul had been accused of treason to the Empire. It happened earlier in Macedonia, and then later in Corinth, and again in Caesarea. Each time, the charge was proclaiming things that went contrary to the laws or customs of the Roman Empire, a contrariness that could be translated into charges of treason, for which the penalty was execution. Each time, however, Paul’s citizenship saved him. Nevertheless, this notion that he and his cohort were “turning the world upside down” followed him, and unsettled those around him, wherever he went.

 

So what it is that he was proclaiming that was so revolutionary? What made his words so challenging to those who wanted to uphold the structures of the Roman Empire?

 

It was nothing more than the claim that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, the Saviour of the World, the Lord, the Son of God. Which means it was nothing less than the claim that the Roman Emperors, Caesars Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, or Nero – take your pick), were not the Saviours of the World, or the Sons of God, or the Lords and Fathers of the Empire as they very ardently claimed to be. The proclamation of Jesus the Messiah was a rejection of the imperial cult, an accusation of the falsity of the imperial system, and an attempt to turn the world upside down. While Paul certainly never directed anyone to overturn the Empire, he proclaimed an alternate Messiah, Son of God, and Saviour in a system where there could only ever be one. His proclamation of Jesus necessitated a rejection of all other claims to divinely instituted and justified rule.

 

Paul intended to turn the world upside down, as did Jesus in whose name Paul spoke. Paul, in bringing together followers of Christ, intended to overturn social and economic hierarchies and inequalities that functioned to uphold the Empire. While the groups he brought together were not so different from other “clubs” of his day, and I recommend Vearncombe, Scott, and Taussig’s After Jesus Before Christianity for more insight on that, Paul’s Christ-clubs did bring together people from different social and economic backgrounds into one family whose head was the God of Israel and not the head of Rome, the pater also known as Caesar. The father and head of Paul’s Christ-clubs was the one who protected the poor, the widows, the sick, the foreigners. 

The father of the Empire, Caesar, Son of God, stepped on those people. The Messiah, Jesus, Son of God lifted them up. Paul, like others of his day who proclaimed Christ, was absolutely invested in turning the world upside down, exactly as accused.

 

Can we say the same about our own proclamations? Particularly as scholars? Does our work in academia, in the world of Luther, either explicitly or implicitly reject human claims to divinely instituted and justified authority? Is our work turning the world upside down? Are the Empire’s people even accusing us of doing so?

 

I suspect that most of us would answer in the negative, even as we recognize that God is calling us, as Christians, in our vocation as scholars, to the task of this very proclamation, just as God called Paul.

 

Ah, yes, you heard me – the purpose of our scholarly life is proclamation. Now, I do not mean that every piece of scholarly work should be a sermon, to be clear. But we understand proclamation to be more than preaching from the pulpit. Proclaiming the Gospel, proclaiming that God, whom we encounter in Christ through the work of the Spirit, is the one we can fear, love, and trust above all others happens in deeds, and actually, in just living. The act of engaging in scholarship and in living the life of a scholar can be proclamation, when it is done in such a way that our work and our lives point to Christ’s presence in and with and for the world.

 

So what does it mean for our work and our lives as scholars to point to Christ? It means that everything we produce is for the good of the world. It means that the goal of our scholarship is that it serves the most vulnerable, that it helps and supports our most precarious neighbours - human and non-human - in all of life’s needs. That it serves to help the vulnerable to escape the god of Empire, in whatever forms that god and that empire take. It means that our work aims to turn the world upside down.

 

You see, scholarship is not objective, and has never been. It has always served someone or something, whether that something is “the academy” or “the institution” or “the truth” (whatever that means) or even whether that something is our tenure portfolio or a grant requirement or a publishing opportunity. Scholarship is not objective because it is produced by scholars, and scholars are not objective because while we may as scholars be free to be lords of all, we are also freed to be servants to all. As Luther reminds us, “in all of one’s works a person should in this context be shaped by and contemplate this thought alone: to serve and benefit others in everything that may be done, having nothing else in view except the need and advantage of the neighbour.” (Freedom of a Christian)

 

Ah….. there it is. Scholars who are Christian, and that is the vast majority in this chapel, are also called to be servants to all. We are called in all we do to proclaim the Gospel so that Christ’s work of liberation and new life is felt by those who need it most. We are called to engage in and produce work that empowers others to grasp hold of God’s promise and to push away the devil’s Empire. Even if such subjective proclamation compromises our academic reputation, or our institutional standing, or our vain attempts to position ourselves as objective thinkers. We are called to be subjective. To be subject. To those below us, and through them, to God.

 

Because we are not subject to earthly powers or to any earthly empire. Luther again reminds us, “Through faith every Christian is exalted over all things and, by virtue of spiritual power, is absolutely lord of all things.” Before God, through the citizenship we have been given in that kingdom, we are the rulers of our own lives.

It was that citizenship that freed Paul to speak against the Roman Empire. Not his citizenship in Rome, but his citizenship in Christ. And it is that same citizenship, given to us in baptism, that first frees us and then calls us to speak against the empires of our day. 

 

You are free, then, to be subjective - to be subject to your neighbour - because you are freed. Freed from aspirations to academic greatness, freed from collegial expectations, freed from attempting to leave a scholarly legacy or protect the future of reformation studies. The empires of this day may demand and demand from you that you produce work to their satisfaction, but you are not in the end obligated to them. They do not own you. 

Your work, then, is also freed. Freed from the expectations of your institution, or your colleagues, freed from being accountable to them, because they are no longer your Lord. Christ is. And Christ is pleased, nay delighted, with you and with your work and with your desire to serve and with your secret yearning to bring the empires down.

So as you go forward from this place, turn the world upside down. As you put together the research and papers that emerge from this rich time together, feel free to write with your head and also your heart. Feel free to let your concern for the vulnerable permeate your work. Feel free to allow your subjectivity, to God and to your neighbour, show through. Feel free to allow your work to proclaim, even implicitly, that the empires of this world should not, can not, and will not stand because Christ, whom we encounter when we are with the empire’s most desperate subjects, is our true Lord. Remember, as Luther did, that “…before tyrants and stubborn people you may exercise that freedom with contempt and without ever letting up at all.” You are free, in your life and in your life’s work, to turn the world upside down. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Easter 6 - Do not let your hearts be troubled

 Acts 16:9-15; Rev 21:10, 22–22:5; John 14:23-29

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

I wish it were that easy. As much as I try not to “let” it happen, my heart is troubled. A year ago, as part of my work with the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, I did a deep dive into the membership numbers of our denomination, along with looking at the numbers of pastors, and the numbers of congregations. I knew all these numbers were going down—we all know that, but I wanted how much exactly. And here’s what I found.

From 2015 to 2020, so pre-pandemic, in the four western Synods of the ELCIC—BC, Alberta and the Territories, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba––the number of ELCIC members declined by 3.5% year over year. And math being what it is, the total loss of members for that time period was over one third. We shrunk by a third in just five years.

But membership doesn’t tell us everything, so I looked at actual attendance numbers. Across the four Synods, attendance dropped by 54%. And remember, this is pre-pandemic. I’ve been sitting with these numbers for a year, and they still shock and trouble me.

Now what was interesting, and this is just a side note, is that the number of pastors declined at the same rate as the number of members. But the number of congregations basically stayed the same. It turns out that we don’t have a shortage of pastors, we have a surplus of congregations. Congregations themselves are getting thinner and thinner, but not closing, and so the same number of pastors are still needed, even though the number of actual people they serve is fewer. It feels like a shortage of pastors, because of how many congregations don’t have one, but the ratio of pastors to ELCIC members is actually constant. Not that that is any comfort to members of those individual congregations that don’t have one.

So, like I said, my heart is troubled, and here comes Jesus saying, don’t let it be troubled, I’m giving you peace, it’s all good. I know he’s right, but gosh it still feels hard. I yearn for that peace, but the reality is staring me in the face, and I find Jesus’ words hard to follow.

What I really want is what we hear about in this week’s reading from Revelation. Right on the heels of last week’s beautiful vision of no more crying or mourning or death, we have this glorious promise of the city of Christ, where the trees with twelve fruit means there is no more hunger, the river through the middle means there is no thirst, and open gates because of no night means that there are no wild animals or brigands to threaten the city dwellers. Everyone is at peace, their bodies are at peace, and their spirits are at peace. God comes down to be with them, Christ lives in their midst, and their hearts are not troubled by anything.

That’s what I want. I think that’s what we all want. We want that city, with Christ as its center, to come down and be among us. And it may be that I lack imagination, but it is hard for me to believe this will happen, for real. I don’t know how to hold the reality we live in with this vision that is promised.

When one of my kids was little, like four years old, they asked me, “Mommy, how can Jesus be on the moon and in my heart at the same time?” And I was like, what? And they said, “Jesus is everywhere, so Jesus is on the moon. And Jesus is also in my heart. How?” And I remember being very grateful to their Christian preschool, for making real for them both that Jesus is everywhere and Jesus is in their heart.

I wonder, in this time when our hearts are troubled, if perhaps we might think of the city of the Lamb as in Revelation coming down to dwell, not on earth per se, but in our hearts. Might we imagine, and even believe, that the glorious city of God, with everything necessary to feed and water our spirits, to protect us from clouds of despair so that our hearts can remain open to those around us, and to give us a peace despite our troubles, will come down and even is right now coming down into our hearts?

It seems to me that in these troubling times, when Jesus tells us not to let our hearts be troubled, he isn’t telling us to ignore or deny that times are troubling. Instead, perhaps he is calling us to let him come into our hearts, bringing his peace—God’s peace—with him, to be there in the centre of our troubled hearts. He is calling us to let him in, not as a denial of the seriousness of the situations we find ourselves in, not so we can go around saying, “everything is fine!”, but so that he can face our troubles with us, so he can nourish us and give us strength to live with them, so that he can protect us from being overwhelmed by them. “My peace I give to you, I do not give as the world gives.”

So let’s take the opportunity right now, for the next few minutes, to open our hearts to let Jesus come in. Now, I know this isn’t very Lutheran, we prefer to let Christ come into our heads, not so much into our hearts, that’s more of a Pentecostal or Pietist thing to do, but I think we can try. So I’m going to invite you to sit up straight, shoulders back, chin up, (and of course, you don’t have to do this if it’s too much). Wherever you are, whether you’re at home or here in the church, go ahead and just kind of settle into that position. And if you’re at home, you are more than welcome to get down and lie on the floor. (You can do that here in church too if you want, why not?) And now I invite you to take a big breath in and out. And as you breathe out imagine the troubles in your heart just settling down, calming down, and then breathe Christ in. And we’re going to sit here for a moment. And remember that we’re all doing this together, and we’re imagining the beautiful city of God, with Christ in its center coming into our hearts. And Christ is filling up our hearts, and shining so brightly that there is no more night, and feeding all those tiny pockets that are yearning for peace, and Christ is building up some protection against hopelessness, and despair, and evil, so that they can’t enter. With every breath in, just keep imagining your heart opening up and Christ coming in.

If you feel at peace, even for a small moment, know that this is the peace of Christ, the peace that passes all understanding. This is the peace that Jesus gives to you, that Jesus leaves with you.

And if you didn’t feel any peace, that’s okay. I invite to keep trying, every day this week, even just five minutes a day, wherever you find yourself (maybe not in your car waiting for a red light to change), but really anywhere, and let Christ into your heart, and eventually, sooner or later, he will come. This I believe.

The peace of Christ doesn’t mean we deny the reality we live in. But this peace does let us live with the facts of our reality without being troubled. Which frees us to act in hope and trust to create a new future. I’ll remind you, since we are in Easter, that resurrection life never looks like the old life… Christ’s future that we are acting for is not going to look like what it did before, we are never going back to pre-pandemic times or to the good old days … but again, do not let your hearts be troubled by that. Because Christ is here, in the heart of every person here and at home, and Christ will bring us through this moment to the next, and the next, and the next. But we don’t have to wait for the glory of Christ to be revealed, it is revealed now, in our hearts, and it is also real. Thanks be to God, amen.
   

Easter 5 - Creation’s Visions of Resurrection

Easter 5 - Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
Advent Lutheran Church, Calgary

What visions we are given today from Scripture! In this fifth Sunday of Easter, when we are over a month past that glorious Easter Sunday, it’s a blessing to be reminded, once again, of the new life that Christ’s resurrection has inaugurated. To be reminded, as the visionary of the book of Revelation says, that “God will dwell with [us] and be with [us] and wipe every tear from [our] eyes,” that “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” And to be reassured, through the story in Acts, that God gave Peter a vision of radical inclusion through Jesus Christ and the blessing of the Holy Spirit on all peoples, a continuation of the miracle at Pentecost. And even in our Scripture from the Gospel of John, to hear Jesus, who knows that Judas is about to betray him, continuing to proclaim that love is the way, and that this love is the glory of God. All together, our Scripture readings remind us that resurrection life is real, and that God calls us to live and love in that resurrection world.

It’s inspiring. But I confess that it has been hard to live into this resurrection world. I read the stories from Acts and think, Where is my vision? Where is my voice from heaven? I receive the words from our second reading, the wonderful words about death being no more, and I think, “How long, O Lord?” The vision in Revelation was given when the Christian church was being persecuted by Roman Emperors, but that was almost 2,000 years ago - we are still waiting for God’s city to come down among us. In just this year alone, it seems we have moved even farther away from “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” than ever: more Canadians are dying from fentanyl poisoning than ever before; the medical journal The Lancet estimates that we are approaching 20 million COVID deaths (Volume 399: Issue 10334); American legislators are rolling back women’s rights to decide what to do with their own reproductive systems, nevermind attempting to criminalize people like myself, who actively support our transgendered children; more than fifty percent of Ukrainians have been displaced in just two months by Russian invaders; murderous white supremacy is on the rise as the people of Buffalo, NY experienced just yesterday, and, of course, there is the ever-increasing concern of climate change and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s April assessment that we have already blown past restricting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius and are well on our way to blowing past restricting it to only 3 degrees. 

One of these things is hard enough to live with, but when we take all of them together, along with those things that weigh on our hearts that I haven’t even mentioned, and it becomes difficult, if not almost impossible, to wait with genuine hope for the resurrection kingdom to come. And we don’t even need to be following the latest news on any of these issues to feel exhausted by this period of waiting for the Lord. Across the world, there is a general feeling of hopelessness about the future. Maybe you’ve noticed an increase in societal anxiety, polarization, divisiveness? Or maybe the opposite - an increase in cynicism, apathy, exhaustion? These are two sides of the same coin—these are two different manifestations of hopelessness. If you have noticed in yourself a tendency towards grumpiness, or exhaustion, know that you are not alone. This is what hopelessness can feel like, this is what it can feel like when we lost hope that the resurrection world will be a reality for us.

And today we have these Scriptures calling us to live in hope, and more than that, to live as if our hope is real, no matter how long the time between that moment in Acts two thousand years ago and that moment when the new heaven and new earth will finally arrive in fullness. And I confess that while I do find them inspiring, there are many times in these past few years when I have found that gap between two thousand years ago and the fulfillment of the vision in Revelation really hard to live in. The Word of God remains the most important revelation of God that we have, but the written words are not always as alive for us as they were for those twenty centuries ago.

I have been reading and learning a lot about Christian Indigenous theologies over the last two years, particularly about how our Indigenous siblings receive the Word of God and understand God to reveal God’s self to them. One of the most helpful things I have learned is that Indigenous people believe that God is revealed not only through the stories in Scripture but also through the world around us, through Creation. The animals, the plants, the rivers, even the rocks reveal God to us, because they, too, are made in the image of God. They, too, are recipients of God’s Holy Spirit, proclaiming as much to us about the resurrection world as our Bible does.

And so this spring, I have been looking to nature, to the plants and animals that share this Treaty 7 territory with us, to experience the resurrection of Christ in the here and now. And here is the vision that I have been given, the blessings of the Holy Spirit that I see flowing upon us all as we wait:
I see that the grass is pushing its tiny blades of green through last year’s straw. I see that the trees are sending out their tiny leaves to receive the sun’s rays. When I drove back from Saskatchewan last week, I saw that baby cows are wobbling though the stubbly fields next to their moms. (Yes, I know they’re called calves, but ‘baby cows’ sounds cuter.) I see that the prairie sage in my garden has tripled in number from what I planted last year. And these plants and animals are saying to me, “We will continue to live and to grow, despite what the climate change reports predict about life ten years from now. We will continue to live and to grow in this moment, with this spring that God has given us.” I see them moving into spring trusting that these next few months will unfold as God has intended them to.

I see the little kindergarten children running out of their classroom to clamber on the school playground behind my house, and I hear them laughing and shouting with joy. I don’t know any of them personally, but I have seen their bodies grow from those awkward and timid September days to smooth and confident almost-Grade-1 bodies six months later. And their lengthening, strengthening muscles and bones say to me, “We will continue to grow and strengthen, despite the continuing and even worsening COVID pandemic. We will continue to laugh and rejoice in this sunny day that God has given us.”

I feel the sunshine getting warmer and the days getting longer as the earth continues its yearly circling through the solar system and continues its daily turning on our wobbling axis. I saw pictures from the new JW Space Telescope of galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies, saturated with stars and presumably planets. I saw just this week an actual picture of the centre of our galaxy, of the supermassive black hole, and was reminded that the Milky Way, created by the Word of God that was in the beginning and is now and ever will be, is over 13 billion years old. And these metereological and cosmological wonders say to me, “God’s ongoing acts of creation and new life have continued for billions upon billions of years, and will continue, despite the death and war you humans wreak on one another. We will continue to give birth to new stars and new planets and new life in this cosmic moment that God has given us.”

God continues to give us visions and experiences of the living Word in the here and now, in addition to the visions we receive from Scripture. Indigenous theologians are teaching us that God gives us the living Word, the experience of the resurrection life of Christ, in this very moment, in the world around us. God has not ceased bringing new life to us, it just looks different than what we expect, as all resurrection life does. 

God continues giving us, as God gave to Peter in Acts and as God gave to the writer of the book of Revelation, ever new visions and experiences of resurrection, not to deny the pain and death in our world, but to proclaim that this pain and death is not the end. We will not be stuck with it forever. And as we wait, inspired and refreshed again by these new visions, we can indeed act for life and newness and resurrection for all of Creation, we can indeed live with hope, because we—and all of creation—have been and still are the recipients of God’s new life. Thanks be to God, Amen.

March 31 - A Sermon on Trans Day of Visibility

 March 31, 2022 - LTS - Trans Day of Visibility (Preaching for LTS Worship)

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; John 12:1-8 (Lent 5)

Mary and Judas. The one who sees and accepts, and the one who refuses to see and accept. Mary, blessed with strength, is able to accept what Jesus has been saying to everyone for so long - that he is going to die. Perhaps she’s willing to accept this because she‘s already seen in her brother Lazarus what death looks like, and more importantly, that death is not the end. Whatever the reason for her willingness to see, she takes the nard, one of the oils used to prepare bodies for burial, and she anoints Jesus with it. She accepts that he is going to die and she cares for him while he is still alive.

And Judas berates her for it. Now, the writer of the Gospel of John was a little cynical in his description of why Judas did this, and we are always warned as preachers not to ascribe intentions to people, but whatever the reason, Judas refuses to see and accept what Mary does for what it is. He’s heard all of the same words that Mary has, that Jesus has uttered about his death, and about his resurrection, but he rejects it. He does not accept that Jesus will die, and so he does not accept Mary’s death-associated ritual. 

Instead, Judas attempts to redirect everybody’s attention. He tries to stop others from seeing what Mary is doing, from seeing that Jesus is, in fact, on a journey that takes him through death to new life. He says, “Why was this perfume not sold and the money given to “the poor?” He refuses to even acknowledge the purpose of the perfume. He attempts to hide what Mary is doing by pointing elsewhere - don’t look at this act of accepting Jesus’ death, look over here, look at the poor! “The poor” – Judas is not particularly interested in people who are actually poor, in the widow and the orphan, he just waves over in the direction of some generic “poor.” He will not let go of this Jesus he is currently following, and thereby refuses to allow the process to unfold whereby Jesus will be fully transformed into who he has come among Israel to be. Judas refuses to bear witness to Jesus’ death - perhaps he doesn’t trust that Jesus will be resurrected… and he redirects everyone’s attention “over there.”

But Jesus does not allow that. Jesus calls out Judas’ redirection. “You always have ‘the poor’ with you.” This is not Jesus saying Judas shouldn’t take care of the poor, or making some point about the eternal condition of poverty in this world. This is Jesus saying, Judas, you are using “the poor” as an excuse to ignore what is happening right in front of you. You are using “the poor” as a reason to hold me back from ne life. You always have “the poor,” you do not always have me. Jesus is chiding Judas for refusing to see and accept what Jesus has said over and over again. He is going to his death. He was not sent to earth to continue on living the way he had – to be with them, and heal them, and feed them in a constrained way, limited to this particular part of Israel for this particular set of years. Jesus was being called to die to this finite existence, as life-giving as it was for some, and to be transformed through resurrection into the eternal Son of God who would heal and feed and give life to all people, in all places, for all eternity. God did not take on flesh and become incarnate in order to stay in the way his followers had encountered him up to now. The “old” Jesus that he was needed to come to an end to make room for the new resurrected Jesus, the incarnate Logos who was and is and will be the life of all Creation. Jesus was trying to prepare those who loved him for his leaving, for his death. He wanted them to accept that this Jesus whom they knew and loved would soon be gone. He wanted Judas to do what Mary was doing - anoint him, honour him for his life so far, and let him go.

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility. It’s a day when we are called, like Mary, to see and to accept. Particularly, we are called to see and accept that there are people among God’s beloved, within our communities, within our families, who are being called to transformation. Who are on a journey of dying to whom we have known them to be, and transforming into whom God has always intended them to be.

At times like Mary and at times like Judas, I have witnessed this journey because I love someone who is transgender. My daughter. My daughter is a wonderful almost-16-yr-old who is proud of being trans, who is a light to those who know her, a wise friend to her peers, and a proclaimer of the Gospel that “God loves you no matter what” to the church, and who has read this sermon and graciously encouraged me to preach it.

But she was not always my daughter. For 12 years she was my son. My gender-nonconforming, dress-wearing son, but my son nonetheless. I raised two boys, both of them he/hims, and although my eldest son was “different,” I still knew him inside and out.

Until the day I didn’t. That is, until the day my child came to me and said, hey mom, my pronouns are she/her.

Now I knew the statistics. I knew that 65% of youth who are trans experience mood disorders, and that 45% of them have attempted suicide. I’ve known that number since my child was 4. And I knew that a supportive family and community makes a huge dent in that statistic, and that being supportive means letting children dress how they want to dress, and using the pronouns that align with their gender. I did not arrive at this moment ignorant. I knew that for transgender people, being seen and accepted as the gender they wereare rather than the gender they have been assigned, is necessary for their well-being and even for their life.

And yet I still behaved like Judas. I prevaricated. “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not they/them? I mean, you’re still a boy in some ways.” I described her to others as gender non-conforming, gender queer, nonbinary. I couldn’t hear her words that this old life that I had loved her in was death for her. I refused to accept that I had to let that old person I knew go. I focused on other things. I talked about how gender identity wasn’t that important anyway, that it was better to focus on being kind, or a good Christian, or compassionate for others. I introduced her to others as “my oldest child,” or sometimes “my oldest,” leaving her gender out completely. I was happy to introduce her as a kind, caring, wise child. But not a girl. Not my daughter. I couldn’t quite let go. I couldn’t see that the path she was on would lead to new life, or resurrection.

But she persisted, like Jesus. (Not that my daughter is like Jesus, just to be clear, she’s a teenager…) But, like Jesus, she continued to remind me, she continued to proclaim to me that the person I knew and loved was leaving, was dying, and that I had to say goodbye and prepare for her transformation, for her new life. I had to allow her “him” to die.

And by the grace of God, truly by the grace of God’s Spirit, I was able to see and accept that. Perhaps it was because I, like Mary, have been given the strength to trust that death is not the end, that resurrection is real. And so I accepted the death of this son I loved. I stopped using he/him pronouns. I stopped referring to my son, or even my non-gendered child. I began using her pronouns, I began calling her my daughter, I supported her in hormonal transition, and I will support her in surgical transition, which permanently ends her capacity to reproduce. As the oldest child of the oldest child of the oldest child going back twenty generations, I accepted the death of that genetic progression, so that she might move into the new life God has waiting for her.

And with the proper pronouns, with the proper hormones, and with the promise of gender-aligning surgery, my daughter is experiencing new life. She has become the wonderful, light-giving, life-giving girl she is today. The way that I introduced her in the beginning, as a light, a wise friend, and a proclaimer of the Gospel? All of that emerged after she began transitioning. After her old self died. Yes, the son I thought I had for 12 years was a delight to us, but this daughter I have now is a delight and a blessing to the world. She speaks up for those who are bullied, for the oppressed, for victims of racism, for victims of sexism, for victims of religious discrimination. She has a keen heart for justice and now she is bold in proclaiming that God’s love comes in the form of justice for all.

“Thus says the Lord … do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? … for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, that they might declare my praise.” (Isaiah 43:19-21)

In this period of Lent, I lament that I was too often like Judas, refusing to allow the promise of resurrection to be real. I lament that I tried to make invisible my trans daughter. And I give thanks that on this day, and every day, Jesus calls us to be like Mary. To see and accept transgender people in our midst, to let their old selves, their old pronouns, their old names, their old bodies die as they move into the new life that awaits them. As they are resurrected, as they receive this new thing that God is doing in their lives, as they fully and truly become the people whom God has formed for God’s self. I give thanks that even when we act like Judas, God acts like Mary, who not only allowed Jesus to go to his cross, but was the first to witness his resurrection. I give thanks for the witness of trans Christians who offer their praise that death is not the end, that resurrection is real, that God is constantly bestowing new life. I give thanks that in their resurrection, they give us hope for new life for all. Thanks be to God. Amen.

An Anti-colonial Gift of the Land

 Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Luke 13:31-35 - a sermon preached for LTS Chapel

“On that day Adonai (the LORD) made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.””

In 1984, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible introduced us to “Texts of Terror,” stories of abuse of women in the Bible that, because of their place in the Bible, were used to support the continued abused of women in communities that consider the Bible an authoritative text: the rape of Dinah, Amnon’s rape of his sister, Tamar, the fatal rape of the Levite’s concubine at the end of the book of Judges. Trible exposed the ways these stories terrorized their women listeners. 

I would like to suggest this morning that what we have here in Genesis is a different kind of text of terror, one that has been used, along with texts from Exodus and Joshua, to support the colonization of lands in Canada and internationally, and to displace Indigenous peoples. It has been heard with terror as it has been used to foster colonial attitudes toward the land that have done violence to the non-human inhabitants of the land, not just the human ones. Christans in particular have used these texts to argue that God has given land to us, as spiritual inheritors of Abraham, and that God intends for us to take control of that land. Christians, working together with colonial powers, have used these texts to argue that God has given this land to us, to us Christians, to control and use. This is one of the theo/logics behind the ideas of manifest destiny, the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, the exploitation of the environment and its resources, and the tangled mess we find ourselves in today.

But notice the conflation in this theo/logic of what are actually three separate ideas. The gift of the land itself, that the gift is to us alone, and that the gift bestows not just the land, but control of it and its inhabitants. In this text, leaving the stories from Exodus and Joshua to the side, this conflation is imposed. It is not inherently there. This passage can, in fact, be read as an anti-colonial text, an anti-ownership approach in which God gives us land to live with, rather than on, in which land becomes a gift for all, not just some.

Shai Held, a Jewish scholar and rabbi, helps us to see this when he points out that this promise of the land and descendants to Abram is immediately followed in Genesis by the story of Sarai and Hagar, wherein Sarai takes her Eyptian slave-girl Hagar and forces her to be a procreational surrogate, and then “deals harshly” with her. Held points out that the word for “deals harshly” is the same word God uses to describe the oppression that Abram’s descendants will experience in the land that is not theirs, and he goes on to note that God does not support Sarai’s behaviour. Rather, the angel of the LORD makes a promise to Hagar, similar to the promise to Abram, that Hagar will be the mother of multitudes. 

Held sees a connection between these two stories, not just a sequential relating of events. For Held, Sarai’s treatment of Hagar, told immediately following the gift of land to Abram’s descendants, is meant to be a caution. Abram’s descendants are not to treat those they encounter they way they would be treated by the Egyptians (the grammatical tense gets a bit muddled here because Genesis was written after slavery in Egypt but tells of the time before.) Abram’s descendants are not to “deal harshly” with the non-Hebrews in their midst. They are not to oppress others the way they would be oppressed. More to the point, for Held, they are not to enslave or oppress the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites, onto whose land God has directed them.

This idea that one group of people can live on the same land as other groups without one becoming dominant over the other is not unusual. Indigenous peoples here have done it for centuries. In the time of Abram, “nomadic-sedentary symbiosis,” as Lawson Younger, a biblical scholar specializing in the Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern history, describes it, was a reality. Multiple peoples shared the lands of the Ancient Near East, including the land of Haran, where Abram was before he came to Canaan. Some were nomadic and some lived in more settled habitats, but they lived in patterns and systems that were mutually beneficial to one another.

And so when God says to Abram, I give your descendants this land, the land of all these other peoples, there is no indication in this text that God is saying, I give this land to you alone, to subdue it, to eliminate the other peoples here. That may occur in other places in the Bible, but it is not here.

What is here is that God makes a gift of God’s land to one people among many, within the parameters of God’s covenant, as Walter Brueggemann emphasizes. Which means that this gift of land becomes truly a gift, which is to say a gift for all and not just some, when it is understood as a gift to live with, rather than a gift to live on.

This is a message of Good News that we hear when we pay attention to Indigenous perspectives on this text. Indigenous peoples understand land as something to live with, not on. Land is full of others with whom we live in relation, human and non-human. The Creator calls us to live in mutual life-giving with one another, not conquering or controlling one another, but offering our gifts to them and receiving their gifts in return. The people, the plants and animals, the rocks and rivers, they are all part of this web of relationality that is meant to provide life for all.

And so when we hear these words from Genesis with this deeper understanding, we hear God’s covenant with Abram and with Abram’s descendants promise that God will ensure that they––us––will always find a place to live where God brings us into relationship with other communities and helps us to find our place. This is not a promise about territorialism, or nationalism, or statehood. This is a promise about God gifting us with relationship with all, about being given our place as the one amongst the many for abundant reward and blessing.

We know that God yearns for this mutual relationship with others on the land, and not for us to subdue them, in part because of Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading, that he longs to gather the people under his wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks. As he witnesses the deaths visited by people upon one another, “Jerusalem” on the prophets, the eagle of Rome on the people of Jerusalem, he cries out and laments. This is not the way people are supposed to live. This is not how God’s gift is meant to be received.

Rather, I would like to suggest that God’s gifts are meant to be received with reciprocal giving. That is, that when God gives us something, we are to give of ourselves in return. Now I realize this sounds like a kind of conditional giving, and very un-Lutheran, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that when God gives us something, we give of ourselves to that gift. In other words, when God gives us land, we give of ourselves to the land. More specifically, to the land and all of its inhabitants, human and non-human.

This is, actually, what we see Jesus doing. Jesus understands himself as one of the children of Israel, a descendant of Abram, a recipient of the land. And he gives of himself to the land and the people. He lives with the land, rather than on the land. He gives of himself to the children of Israel, and to the Hittites and the Jebusites of his time––to the Samaritans, the Syro-pheonicians, the Romans. He lives with the land and its inhabitants, not on or over them.

We, who follow Christ, are called to do the same. We are called to be the reason that others say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.” This land we live on, across all these provinces and territories, this land is a gift to us. But not to us alone. And not for us to live on. This land is a gift for us to live with, along with all the other humans and non-humans to whom God has also given this land as a gift. And we are called to follow Christ in making of ourselves and our descendants a gift to this land and to its humans and non-human inhabitants. We are called to give of ourselves in such a way that those who have lived on the land since before we arrived, and continue to live here still, might join us in the words of the Psalm, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”

In a few minutes we will celebrate Holy Communion, the gift of Christ to us. We will each do it from our own land, with the fruits of the land. The prayer that Jesus prayed during his last Passover celebration with his disciples would have included the Hebrew blessing, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min haaretz. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. And then, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, borei pri hagafen. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth fruit from the vine. Jesus knew his connection to the land, and then he went on to give himself to others on the land, by making a gift of himself, “This bread that has been given to me is also my body given for you.This fruit of the vine that has been given to me is also my blood given for you.” Weaving together the gift of the land and the gift of himself, he brings us into a sacred relationship with the land, with its inhabitants, and with one another. And so as we, some of those descendants of Abram, receive the gift of land and of Christ, we give thanks that we are strengthened to give of ourselves in return and to be abundance for all our relations as Christ is abundance for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.