March 26, the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Kristin White

The Fourth Sunday in Lent – March 26, 2017

John 9:1-42

Don’t think of an elephant.

Okay, what are you thinking about right now?

That’s actually the title of a book I find pretty compelling, written some years ago by a linguist named George Lakoff. He writes about the way our minds create patterns of understanding, which he refers to as frames. Once that frame is set, all you need is one word or prompt to evoke whatever that frame is. So, my guess, you all have looked at a photo, or read a book, or visited the zoo, or gone on safari, and seen an elephant. Maybe you have even ridden one! When I was growing up, we had Packy the Pachyderm, our beloved elephant at the Oregon Zoo. Packy was born there in 1962, and we celebrated his birthday every year with a peanut butter-flavored birthday cake for everybody who came to the zoo. Whatever your own elephant story, you are very likely to already have a pattern, or a frame, which helps you to understand what that creature is. And that frame is probably so clearly set for you that even as I tell you not to think about an elephant, you’re thinking about one. Aren’t you?

Well, that’s the author’s point. And another of his points is that once you have that pattern of understanding set, it’s very, very difficult to change it. If someone tells you that elephants are tiny, or that they have fins and exists only under the water, or that they are carnivorous…you’re likely to dismiss that information. The more outrageous the statement, the more inconsistent with our version of reality, the more likely that each of us is not just to dismiss the information, but also, potentially, to dismiss the person who shares it with us.

And the more dear that a frame is to you – the more it says something important about who you are, or what is true about your family or the community you have chosen, or about the nature of the God you worship, or the way you live your life – the more likely, the author says, that you are to protect your frame. The more likely you are, and I am, to shut down the person or the thing that might disrupt what we believe to be true.

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The frame of understanding that the disciples have in today’s gospel is that blindness is a kind of sacred punishment. Somebody has to be at fault, someone must be to blame, for this person to exist in this state of being. It makes things more logical, right? Because if someone has done something wrong, then their actions must carry some kind of divinely proportionate response. So, it follows, that if you don’t do something wrong, then you won’t face into that sort of consequence. Right? And so the chaos is managed. Right?

Well, no, actually. The disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus responds, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

Then he goes about the messy work of restoring the man’s sight, with spit and dirt and a pool called Sent. And as the man begins to see, the disciples lose sight of their frame – because the one that would call him a sinner no longer holds.

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The neighbors and other folks in the community have only known this man as blind. They understand him as a blind man who begs. And that frame is so firmly set that they don’t even recognize the man who has received his sight – even when he tells them who he is.

“Isn’t this the man who used to beg?” they ask.

And some say yes, and others say, “No, it is someone like him.”

He says, “I am the man.” He says it again. He says it again.

The people ask, “How were your eyes opened?” And he tells them.

“Where is the man who did this?” they ask.

Without having Jesus there, without seeing the miracle for themselves, will they risk this scandal of trust? Will they trade their old frame for a new one?

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The Pharisees love the law. They believe it to be a gift from God, and they claim Moses’ authority as they interpret those 613 commandments, the commandments that have been handed down from generation to generation. These are the frame that God has given the people Israel, the Pharisees believe, these are a guide and an explanation of how to live righteous and faithful lives.

It turns out that the day that Jesus spread mud made from dirt and his own spit on the man’s eyes, was actually the Sabbath. And one of the most important of those 613 commandments, in fact one of the very special 10 commandments, is the one that calls people to set aside one day every week for rest and worship and study.

But not, apparently, for the doing of miracles.

When the neighbors and those who have seen the man born blind as a beggar bring him to the Pharisees, the Pharisees ask the same questions of the man that his neighbors have already asked. But instead of asking where the miracle-working man is, the Pharisees cast doubt: “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others ask: “How can a man who is a sinner do such things?”

Holy people follow the rules. Sinners are the ones who break them.

The frame is set, and so the chaos is managed. Right?

To preserve their understanding, the Pharisees need Jesus to be the villain of this story – they need for him to be the problem, the rule-breaker, the sinner…and never, never the hero.[1]

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Even the man’s own parents distance themselves from this miracle that defies understanding. When the authorities call them forward, they claim their son, at least, but not the transformation that now makes him dangerous.

The parents are afraid. They live in a community governed by a frame that says the Pharisees’ authority holds, that living according to the rules of Torah reflects righteousness. They recognize that anyone who calls Jesus the savior will be cast out of the life that they know. So when it comes down to it, they “put their own safety ahead of his welfare.”[2]

“We know that he is our son, and we know that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that he can see now, and we do not know who made it possible. Ask him!” they say.

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Almost everyone fails the man born blind, from the disciples who want to blame him as a sinner, to the community that doesn’t recognize him because he is no longer dependent, to the religious leaders who want to condemn Jesus for transforming in a way that doesn’t square with their practice, to his own parents who abandon him even as they seek to protect their own well-being.[3]

The only two figures who remain steadfast in this story are Jesus, and the man whose sight has been restored. He tells the truth and he tells the truth and he tells the truth again.

“You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” the authorities ask. And they drive him out of the synagogue.

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Chaos is a scary thing. And our frames of understanding become dear to us indeed.

In the end, Jesus learns what has happened. He goes to find the man whose eyes he smeared on the Sabbath, and asks, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

The man whose sight has been restored answers, “Tell me who he is, so that I can believe in him.” Jesus responds, “You have seen him, and the one speaking to you is he.”

“Lord, I believe,” the man says.

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Jesus never promises us that we will not face chaos. Boats find their way into storms, people we love get sick and die, temptation confronts us in spaces of wilderness. There is never a divine promise that we get to avoid the scary stuff of this life; stuff that shows us time and again that we are vulnerable, that we are, in fact, not immortal.

I think that in this story Jesus destroys the frames people have set because, finally, our frames will not protect us from the chaos, either.

But God so loves the world that he comes into it. In the person of Jesus, God comes into the chaos. In this story, he spits into dirt and uses the mud he has made to help a person see. In another, he promises living water. Soon, he will raise the dead.

And soon again, he will pick up his cross.

[1] Deborah Kapp. “Pastoral Reflection,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. 2010: 118.

[2] ibid, 120

[3] ibid, 120

March 19, the Third Sunday in Lent

Kristin White

The Third Sunday in Lent – March 19, 2017

St. Augustine’s Church

John 4:5-42

They’re not supposed to talk to each other.

That rule might be more regularly observed today, right now, even, in this political and religious climate, than it is by Jesus, back in the day that finds him headed to Galilee from Judea, by way of Samaria.

This conversation takes place in the middle of the day, in broad daylight, at a public place. It stands in contrast with the exchange Jesus has in last week’s gospel, which takes place at night, in private. And this time, instead of a respected Pharisee named Nicodemus, Jesus talks with a woman, a Samaritan woman whose name we don’t know.

Conversations change us; or they can, anyway. They have the power to change what we believe – to change our minds, to change our hearts, to build connection. “In John’s gospel, (believing) is synonymous with relationship.”[1] You can’t have one without the other. And conversations pave the pathway to that taking place.

So it’s the middle of the day, and Jesus is tired out from the walk, so he sits down at the well as his disciples go to try to find some food.

The unnamed Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Jesus asks her – commands her, really – to give him a drink.

The text tells us that Jews and Samaritans do not share things in common. So she asks him a question, her own equivalent of Nicodemus’ “How can this be?” from last week. Jesus responds with a statement as confounding as what he said to Nicodemus. His answer draws her farther into a conversation that I can’t imagine she expected to have, when she left home earlier that day with her empty water jar.

He tells her to call her husband. She responds that she doesn’t have one. He answers already knowing that, knowing what she has not shared – that actually she has had five husbands, that she is not married to the man she is with now.

She calls him a prophet, and she asks about worshiping in Jerusalem instead of on the mountain that her people, the Samaritans, hold sacred. He calls her to worship in spirit and in truth.

She mentions the Messiah. “I am he,” Jesus says.

Just then, the disciples return. And they are astonished.

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Look at where this conversation begins: “from a place of reciprocal vulnerability.”[2] Jesus is tired and alone. He needs a drink of water, but doesn’t have a cup or a bucket. The woman whose name we don’t know has been left alone five times. She longs for the water that Jesus promises, water that means she’ll never be thirsty again.

Look at the questions she asks. These are not questions with foregone conclusions. These questions reveal a curious mind and an open heart on the part of the woman who asks them. She is willing to ask without knowing. Her questions invite Jesus farther into the conversation. Her questions lead Jesus to reveal his identity to her.

And look at the time they take. Some conversations never even get started, because the rules of convention or engagement or personal protection prevent them from happening. And there is so much evidence to prove that this would have been – maybe should have been – a conversation that never took place. “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans,” the gospel passage tells us. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask of me, a Samaritan?” the woman challenges. The whole thing is as confounding as looking down into the depths of that well. But they take the time it takes. And the scandal of that fact is something we see revealed in the disciples’ reaction on their return. They are astonished, the text tells us. They want to know why he is speaking to her, the text tells us…but the disciples apparently don’t want to know enough to actually ask, because they don’t. That's the conversation that doesn’t get off the ground here.

Finally, look for surprise. The first time that Jesus reveals his identity as Messiah in all of John’s gospel is not to his disciples, or to the high priests, or to the crowds he teaches, or to his family, or to his closest, most faithful friends. The first time in the Gospel of John when Jesus reveals his identity as Messiah is to a woman considered so insignificant by whoever first told this version of the story that they didn’t even bother to find out her name; and not just a woman, but a Samaritan woman; and not just a Samaritan woman, but one who has been married and left and married and left, five times. Jesus shares the good news of who he is, with her. For God so loves the world.

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Think of the conversations that have changed your own heart and your mind, that have created the foundations from which new relationships have grown in your life. What were the ways you found yourself willing to be vulnerable, to hold that space with the other person or other people who were willing to do the same? What questions did you ask, or respond to, without forced or assumed answers? What kind of time did you take? The best conversations can feel like time outside of time, in my experience. Is that how you’ve experienced them too? What surprised you? How were you changed?

It seems to me that we could do with more of these kinds of conversations in our lives and in our shared life, right now. It seems to me that we would be blessed by spaces of reciprocal vulnerability, by questions we really do want to know the answers to, by the gift of time together, by the kind of surprise that we can hold as sacred. It seems to me that there’s not enough of any of those things in our lives and in our shared life right now.

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They’re not supposed to talk to each other, Jesus and the Samaritan woman. But they do, scandalized disciples notwithstanding. And the Samaritan woman is changed, because of it. And it’s not just her – the Samaritan woman’s whole community is changed, because of it.

She leaves her water jar at the well and goes back into the city, where she says to the people, “Come and see. Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done. Can he be the Messiah?” And they do come and see. They believe in him, because of what she says. They ask him to stay, and he does. And as they come and see and hear what he says, more people believe. “We have heard for ourselves,” they say, “and we know that this is the Savior.”

They’re not supposed to talk to each other.

And she is changed; they are changed; we are changed, because they do.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4839 Thanks to Karoline Lewis for the frame she set in her column this week, which informed the structure and content of this sermon.

[2] ibid

March 12, the Second Sunday in Lent

Kristin White

Genesis 12:1-4a; John 3:1-17

This past Tuesday morning, I was supposed to be in the city for a meeting at the Diocesan Center.

But I couldn’t get there. Not the way I thought I would, anyway.

When I tried to turn onto Sheridan Road from Evanston, it was blocked. So I turned another way, couldn’t get through to the main roads by that route, either. There were police officers everywhere, it seemed, and helicopters pulsed the air overhead. Every place in Edgewater was jammed up. I tried to keep going and turning where I could, gave thanks for the fact that Siri has a better sense of direction than I do. I wondered and wondered again what was going on.

Eventually, I learned, as you likely know, that it was a bomb threat. It was a bomb threat against children at the Jewish Day School…a bomb threat against the teachers and staff who serve there…a threat against everybody in that neighborhood and in this city who expected to be able to go about their everyday lives on a Tuesday morning.

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We don’t know much about Abram in the time before God calls to him in today’s first lesson. The twelfth chapter in the book of Genesis picks up after a long genealogy that includes explanations of who lived where and for how long, who their children were, and so on, all the way down to Abram. So we know Abram has family, and we know he lives in a place called Haran, which, it turns out means “crossroads.”

And we know that God tells Abram to leave all that.

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” God says.

To the land that I will show you?!

“I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the ones who curse you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

“So,” the text tells us, “Abram went.”

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Nicodemus goes to Jesus at night, in today’s gospel reading. The time of day matters, in John’s gospel. Maybe it’s because Nicodemus is a Pharisee, and so he approaches Jesus on the sly in the hope that no one will see him go. Maybe it’s about the symbolic confusion of darkness, as opposed to the clarity of light. Or maybe it’s as simple as the fact that evening is the traditional time to study Torah. Whatever the reason, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. And what follows is a conversation that involves Nicodemus – who is clearly a smart guy – basically saying, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. How can this be?” …And it involves Jesus says a series of things in response that are perhaps not super-helpful in moving Nicodemus toward that understanding he seeks.

After that comes this well-known and frequently-memorized verse, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” That verse is followed by another, not-so-well-known or well-memorized verse: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

So we have the first reading, in which God calls an unknown and imperfect man named Abram, standing at a crossroads, who will be known as Abraham and celebrated as the father of faith. God calls him to give up what he knows in favor of the blessing that God promises.[1]

And we have a gospel story between a smart Pharisee and the Savior, in which Nicodemus asks: “What are you about?” and Jesus responds: “Love. God’s insistent love for you and for the whole world.”

Even though John 3:16 can get used to generalize, or as a litmus test about who’s in and who’s out, God’s story of love is always particular. “For God so loved the world…” happens person by person by person. God loves Adam when he breathes the first breath into him. And God loves Eve and Adam, offering them clothes as protection when they have to leave the Garden. God loves Noah, and his family, and all those animals as they board the boat. God loves David, the youngest son out taking care of the sheep, who will become a great king. God loves Mary, who says Yes. And God loves Martha, who fusses over dinner. God loves the disciples as they come, one by one, to follow Jesus. God loves the paralyzed man by the pool with nobody to help him in. And God loves the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. God loves Peter, even as he swears an oath and says for the third time before dawn: “I do not know the man.” And God loves Mary Magdalene, who stands confused at the tomb, until she hears Jesus say her name.

God loves them all. God blesses them as a blessing.

And so I hold these passages, and the lessons that they have for us. I claim their authority for a world that needs to know right know that God’s repetitive and insistent message is not condemnation, but love…that God’s pervading promise is blessing and salvation.

I hold these passages in trust that God’s story of love is every bit as particular right now as it is throughout the stories of the Bible.[2] Because if it is, then “For God so loved the world…” means that God loves the refugee dad doing everything he knows how to do, to help his family survive as strangers in a new life. It means that God loves the lesbian student who is living into her identity. It means God loves the woman who was shamed by a judge in court. It means God loves the man who used to get by doing construction work, and can’t anymore. It means God loves the Lakota Sioux chief who chants today, right now, even, in front of the Washington Monument.

“For God so loved the world…” has to mean, this week, that God loves every single child who had to leave their classroom at the Jewish Day School in Edgewater on Tuesday morning, and that God loves every single officer who ensured their safe return.

“I will bless those who bless you,” God says. “And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

People of St. Augustine’s Church, I call you to live as the theologians you are.

I call you to look for the God Sightings in your lives that show forth divine and insistent actions of blessing and love.

I call you to claim those moments, and witness them to a world that knows too much of condemnation and terror and isolation and sneering cynicism.

In your words and in your actions, I call you to proclaim release from those things we know too much, from all that would separate us from one another and from God. I call you to insist on God’s promise, with us and for us.

Because God so loves the world. Because in you all the earth will be blessed.

[1] Donald P. Olson “Genesis: Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 52.

[2] Thanks to Karoline Lewis for her column this week that framed the idea for much of this sermon: http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=4835

March 5, The First Sunday in Lent

Deacon Sue Nebel

The first Sunday in Lent.  A new season in the Church year.  New colors.  New patterns in the liturgy. The changes in Lent are particularly striking.  Not only do we change colors—from the bright, bold green of the Epiphany Season to the plainer, simpler beige and oxblood.  We strip the worship space down.  Everything is simpler.  o altar hangings.  No flowers.  Less music. For communion, glass chalices instead of silver.  And, of course, we put the joyful Alleluias away.  We will not hear them again until Easter.  Most of the seasons in our Church year begin with the celebration of a significant event in the life of Jesus and the life of the Church: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost.  The seasons then continue for several weeks, or in the case of Pentecost, a long stretch of months.  Not so with Lent.  Lent begins in the middle of the week.  Quietly, without fanfare and celebration. Ash Wednesday. A simple service.  The mark of ashes on our foreheads.  A stark, gritty reminder of our beginning and our end: dust. With that, we enter into this season of forty days—actually more than forty, when you add in the Sundays.

In the Ash Wednesday liturgy, the priest invites us into the observance of a holy Lent. A time to focus on ourselves.  Ourselves in the core relationship of our lives: our relationship to God. It is a relationship marked by movement.  Closeness and distance.  Drawing near and pulling away. Lent is a time when we acknowledge the things that draw us away from God.  We make intentional efforts to turn away from them.  We try to simplify our lives.  Perhaps moving at a slower pace, maintaining a simpler diet.  Making an effort to get rid of unneeded things, clutter.  Resolving to spend less time on the Internet or social media. Lent is a time when are intentional about drawing closer to God. Strengthening and deepening our faith.  Carving out periods of quiet time and space in our daily lives.  Trying a new spiritual discipline..  Engaging in study and reading.  

On this first Sunday in Lent, we are a starting point, the beginning of a new part of our journeyOur readings for this day give us stories of other beginnings, other starting points in the human story. The first reading takes us back to Genesis, to Creation.  God has created the first human beings, man and woman, and placed them  in the Garden of Eden.  There, God tells them, they may eat from any of the trees, except one: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  It starts out so well.  These new beings, in harmony with God, surrounded by abundance and goodness.  Then the serpent intervenes. He convinces the woman that, if she eats the fruit from the forbidden tree, she will become like God.  Heeding that voice, she eats and then shares the fruit with the man.  In that moment, they see themselves with new eyes, as naked.  They feel shame and cover themselves. The close and harmonious relationship with God has been broken. They listened to a voice that was not God. A power working against the purposes of God.   

We hear the voice of temptation again in the Gospel lesson. This time it is the voice of the devil himself.  This encounter takes place in the wilderness, a place where Jesus has gone immediately after his baptism.  After forty days of fasting, he is famished.  The devil appear, ready to test Jesus and, no doubt, stop him before he can begin his ministry.  He begins by hurling challenges at Jesus.  First, appealing to his weakened, famished state, the devil commands Jesus to turn stones into bread.  When that doesn’t work, the devil dares Jesus to throw himself down from the high pinnacle of the Temple and trust that God will send angels to rescue him.  No, Jesus responds, he will not test God. Finally, the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain where he can see the kingdoms of the world.  Worship me, the devil tells him, and all this is yours.  Once again, Jesus refuses.  He will not listen to this voice.  He will remain faithful.  He will serve only God. 

What we get in this Gospel reading is a bare bones account of this dramatic confrontation.  We are told that Jesus has been in the wilderness for forty days, but we hear nothing about what those days were like for him, except that he fasted.  Three temptations from the devil. Each time Jesus responds with a line from Hebrew Scripture.  The writers of the Gospels are really good at reporting. They are not so great at fleshing out the details.

 The name Anne Rice may be familiar to some of you.  She is probably best known for her novels about vampires.  What is not so well known is that she wrote two historical novels about Jesus’ early life.  Based on solid study of Scripture and scholarship, she approaches Jesus’ struggle to come to terms with who and what he is with the eyes of a story- teller. In Christ Jesus: The Road to Cana, Rice devotes an entire chapter to the encounter between Jesus and the devil.  I want to share a few highlights with you.  .

Rice describes Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness in detail.  It is a bleak, difficult time.  Jesus struggles with physical hardship: cold and wind He sleeps in dark, damp caves.  He is besieged by many voices in his head, all competing for his attention. When the time in the wilderness nears its end, Jesus is bedraggled.  His clothes are rags, his sandals falling apart. But Rice makes it clear that, at his point, Jesus knows clearly, and affirms, that he is God.  The voice he must listen to is the voice of God within him.  When the devil dares him to turn stones to bread, Jesus imagines steaming, freshly-baked bread.  He can smell it.  He can taste it.  He nearly faints, but still resists the temptation to give into his hunger.  In Rice’s novel, Jesus’ responses to the devils’ challenges go way beyond quotes from Scripture.  In fact, the devil mocks him when he uses the words of others.  What the devil gets is engagement in full-blown theological arguments with Jesus.  I will not go into detail. They are quite long.  But I will tell you that the verbal sparring provides a strong sense of what is at stake for the devil. How much he has to lose in this confrontation with Jesus.

What was most striking to me in Rice’s treatment of the encounter in the wilderness is the devil himself.  I had always thought of this story taking place in a sort of semi-darkness.  The devil a dark, shadowy figure at the edges.  Not so in the novel.  The sun is shining.  The devil is a young, handsome man.  Here is what Jesus sees:

He was about my height, and beautifully garbed. . .like the figure of the King.

He wore a linen tunic, embroidered with a border of green leaves and red

flowers, each little floret glistening with gold thread. The border of his white

mantle was even thicker, richer, woven as the mantles of the Priests are woven,

and hung even with tiny gold bells.  His sandals were covered with gleaming

buckles.  And around his waist he wore a thick leather girdle studded with

bronze points, as a soldier might wear. Indeed a sword in a jeweled scabbard

hung at his side.  His hair was long and lustrous, a deep rich brown.  And so were

his soft eyes. [p. 185]

This is a disguise, part of the devil’s strategy.  He comes to Jesus, appearing as Jesus would look as a man at the height of worldly power and riches.  This, he tells Jesus, is what you could be.  The idea of being God is a delusion.  Abandon that.  Jesus, as we know from the Gospel, will not fall for this.  He is solidly grounded in the knowledge of who is: the Son of God. Steadfast and faithful, he is ready to leave the wilderness and begin his journey of ministry.  

As we begin our Lenten journey, individually and in community, I invite you to take these stories with you.  Hold onto them.  Make them part of you.  Embrace yourselves as children of God. Desiring to be in close relationship with God.  Yet prone to desires and actions that draw you away from God.  Claim yourselves as followers of Jesus.  Affirm the belief that God is at the center, the core of each of us.  God at work in the world through us is the strongest power of all.  Let us acknowledge that the life we have chosen, the life of discipleship is challenging.  But we will keep at it.  Step by step.  Day by day. 

And so, this day, as we move forward together into a new season, I wish you a holy Lent.

Lent 1; Year A

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11