Water Falls From our Mouths

Acts 2: 1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all gathered together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

“When you hear a train coming, and there’s no tracks, run for cover.” As a child of the Midwest, I’d often hear these words of warning concerning the presence of a tornado. Maybe we should warn people in a similar way concerning the presence of the Holy Spirit when they come to church… Or not.

The Spirit of God is not the possession of the church. It blows where it will, loves novelty, and is not as reverent of tradition as we are. It is often offense, a dissonant Spirit traveling through the voices of people we are suspicious of- in the voice of the foreigner, or the odd stranger. Maybe the person’s not even a Christian, at least not in an orthodox sense. Sometimes the religious outsider is the most receptive to the Spirit, and sees with freshness and originality the truths we take for granted. Even when the outsider discourse of the ‘spiritual, not religious’ variety gets stale, the Spirit will seize a different kind of outsider to revel it’s power.

The Holy Spirit transcends sterile language systems. It travels freely from one thread of discourse to another. When one language game becomes rote, the Spirit hops to another box car. When one form of discourse becomes too ideologically rigid, the Spirit will blow upon another, or invent a whole new form of discourse.

The Spirit comes to us when we least except, in a serendipitous encounter, speaking a surprising word that lifts us higher than ourselves. Higher and higher, God’s love for us comes with a clarity that lets us know it’s been there all along. We feel miraculously freed from the burden of our self-concern. But then when even the serendipitous becomes formulaic, the Spirit returns back to the church and works in the most ordinary words of the preacher. So maybe that tornado warning should be leveled after all.

Then with a mix of awe and dread and inspiration we stand with Peter, and find our own voice in the muck. And we take a deep breath, and open our mouth, and speak. We’re not as eloquent as we’d hoped, but the Spirit is in there.

The Spirit doesn’t nuance. It is never ambiguous, because the language of God’s love is never ambiguous. It’s as loud and clear as the roar of a train.  

Cormac's Road and a Final Prayer

 
John 17:13-19

But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, a father and his son journey through the ruins of a post-apocalyptic earth. The world has been reduced to a dismal landscape drained of color. Nothing can grow on earth. No crops for food. The ghastly nature of survival has reduced people to cannibalism. The father struggles to protect his young son from cold, sickness, starvation and evil men. As his health deteriorates, we sense that the father is a doomed man. He’ll eventually die and have to send his son up the road without him. It’s a grueling, but simple and powerful story- the depth of a father’s love, and the depths of hell he will go through in order to keep his son alive.  

In the gospel reading, Jesus’ life and ministry are rapidly coming to a brutal end. He’s going back to the father, and he prays on behalf of his disciples. Like the father in The Road, he’s sending his disciples on up the road without him. He guarded them up to this point, and loves them greatly, but now they have to further the ministry of the kingdom and step out on their own. He asks God to protect them from the evil one. He asks that they be sanctified in truth. In a world hostile to the values of the Kingdom of God, they will need the clarity of truth and the comfort of Jesus’ words.   

And it’s not just the disciples Jesus prays for, but us as well. He sends us out into the world and prays for us, asking the father to protect us from the evil one and to sanctify us in the truth of his love and grace. We journey up the road as witnesses to his gospel. Jesus goes back to the Father, but his spirit is with us. He goes through hell for us, and with us, and then sends us up the road sanctified in the purity of his truth, to reach others in sacrificial love.

Prayer is always most momentous when we pray for those we love. And that’s what Jesus did, for the disciples, and even now for us.

Sentimentality and the Cross

John 15:13

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends."

Many portrayals of the nature of love are laced with sentimentality. Sentimental love goes heavy on emotional indulgence. It’s more navel gazing than neighbor oriented. More ego-affirming than self-emptying. A love that allows us to smile benignly at sin, rather than a love that holds us accountable to each other. This type of love looks pleasant enough on the outside, but has the whiff of death in it. When put to the test, it’s as wispy as air.

In contrast, Jesus’ love is much starker. It evaporates the mist of sentimentality through the cross. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." Jesus' execution was no accident. He walked straight into the teeth of death, deliberately, for us. This love is so qualitatively greater than sentimental love that it's hard for us to recognize. In fact, we can't even choose it- it chooses us, which is to say Jesus chooses us.

The witness of the early church of Jesus' resurrection was a witness to this powerful love. Easter faith was energized by people who were pulled so strongly by the cosmic love that raised Jesus. They were pulled out of themselves and staked their lives on that which claimed them.

This was a love that was so powerful it made the resurrection an actuality. Jesus' resurrection was not only a miracle- it was the consequence of a divine love so heart-breakingly strong. Love made the resurrection real. And the resurrection gave love concrete embodiment.

What would a life lived under the influence of such love look like? What kind of fruit would we bear? What would a person do when she surrenders to the irresistible pull that raised Jesus out of the tomb? Fall forward in trust and see.   

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Wilderness Road

Acts 8:26-40

26 Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." (This is a wilderness road.) 27 So he got up and went.  

When I was in my early twenties I hitchhiked across the United States. I can’t explain the exact motivation. I wanted to see my cousin in Arizona, but that’s not why I left. The only way to come close to an explanation is to say that I had a sort of fever, or that I felt like a wild animal with its paw caught in a trap- I’d gnaw my hand off to escape my hometown and to get out onto the road.

I was feeling the desperation and restlessness of my age, the awful yearnings that are most acutely felt during youth. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I had the sense that time was fleeting, and that any hope of discovering something larger than myself, any justification for my living and breathing in this world, had to be found not just now, but NOW.

I was searching for unnamable things. My spirit soared with my thirst and ambition, a desire to reach up higher and higher in search of these things. I knew they were not to be found in my Ohio hometown, but out in the Western Plains somewhere, or out past the Continental Divide, or maybe in Arizona near my cousin. And if they weren’t in any of these places, well, to hell with it, I’d go further and further west until I reached the Pacific. And if what I was searching for wasn’t there either, I’d hitchhike south, maybe into Mexico or something. With the wind cutting through my hair, hitching a ride in the back of some stranger’s pick up truck, I would single handedly wrest these things from the hand of God.

One day I was standing by the side of the road in the Nebraska Panhandle, close to where I-76 and I-80 diverge. I got a couple of offers from people heading down 80 to Cheyenne. But I wanted to take 76 and work my way south towards Arizona. Finally after a couple of hours of waiting, a tough-looking man with a haggardly beard pulled over on the side of the road. He was wearing well worn blue jeans and a black Harley Davidson T-shirt. I was a little hesitant to get in the car with him. He told me he was heading to Colorado, but that he had to stop in Sidney, Nebraska first. I decided to take the ride and we headed west. We rode to Sidney, but when we left town he told me there was a state highway that led to Denver. I didn’t want to leave the heavily populated interstate for some deserted highway. Who knows were he would take me. But what could I do? We left the interstate and we drove out into the wilderness. I gazed upon beauty that I couldn’t see from the interstate. The expansiveness of the west Nebraska plains was awesome. The setting sun in this land was breathtaking.

But as we drove, my travel partner began talking to me about the Bible. It quickly grew bizarre, as he explained his rapture theology. I was a little freaked out, talking about the Anti-Christ and apocalypse, but at the same time I felt safer. He was talking theology. I knew he wasn’t going to harm me. He was a lonely man who wanted someone to talk to about God. Like me, he didn’t have time for small talk. He was, in his own way, searching for those unnamable things. There wasn’t any epiphany, as there was for the eunuch that Philip met on the road. No great revelation. No chariot- just his rusted old Chevy.

But there was, for a short time, fellowship, a human connection, and a mutually felt desire to touch the hand of God. I wasn’t much different from him. I was certainly just as lonely. That’s what searching for things you can never grasp will do to you. On this wilderness road we were both alien travelers in a world we didn’t belong to.     

It was night when he dropped me off in South Denver. I felt a little disoriented, buzzing on the after effects of his strange theology. But I thanked him for the ride and we wished each other well. I zipped up my jacket to protect myself from the cold mountain air and pressed on in the night. The Denver city skyline was at my back. Streetlights were shining above me.

Meditation: Psalm Twenty-Three and the Great Lacking

“The Lord is my Shepard. I lack nothing.”

So says the NIV translation. I love this terse translation of the first verse. There’s a ring of defiance in it. A resistance to evil. What powerful words they are when we feel crippled by a deep sense of inadequacy, or what we could call ‘The Great Lacking.’ We experience the Great Lacking when we feel there’s something missing, some mysterious quality or virtue that other people have acquired, and that we lack. It’s when the voice of the enemy diminishes us, or shames us, and we fail to live into the fullness of God’s love and grace.   

In popular culture dogma we’re also taught that there’s nothing we lack, because we’re inherently so special. Yet, the psalmist is more daring than culture’s adulation of self. The psalmist testifies to a God who is the source of our strength. It is because of God’s outpouring of mercy and love that we lack nothing. 

We lack nothing because the source of all goodness and love and power has called us into being from the beginning of time, and guides us, even when we walk through the darkest valleys. God anoints our heads with oil, and our cup overflows in the holy celebration of life in all its purity and sacredness.  

Meditation on Psalm Four: The Roominess of God

Twisted sheets from a night of tormented sleep. Restless nights stewing over problems we can’t control- health problems, financial problems, resentments that burn in our hearts and minds. We lie half awake and half asleep in a highly charged semi-consciousness dream state, haunted by anxiety. We ask ourselves on such nights, ‘What do I need to do?’ And when we can’t figure that out we cry to God, ‘Do something!’

The psalmist, I think, can relate to these nights. He doesn’t mince words, ‘Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You gave me room when I was in distress.’ I like the phrase, ‘You gave me room.’ The realm of God is broad and roomy, not stifling and rigid. A comfortable room with big open windows and a high ceiling, rather than a stuffy attic. God gives us breathing room. God gives us the distance we need when we feel the heat of distress, yet is close enough to hear our anguished prayers. The roominess of God allows the psalmist to say, “When you are disturbed, do not sin. Ponder it on your beds, and be silent.” Don’t fight, don’t fret, don’t fear- just be silent.

The roominess of God creates the space we need for trust, and even creates the trust itself. Left to our own ways, we wrack our brain with frantic thoughts that whirl in a loop. We trust in our own abilities to solve problems, and in spite of our best efforts to protect ourselves, we end up more insecure, fearful, and vulnerable. Yet the psalmist testifies to a God who hears our prayers, and who puts gladness in our hearts when we cannot. It is trust in this God’s care that allows us to sleep in peace. It turns our heated pleas of ‘What should I do?’ into the spacious assurance of gladness, safety, and rest. 

Meditation: Belief, Doubt, and MRI Brain Scans

The elegance of the human brain,
with its billons of cells,
and complex networks.
Its marvelous connections.

Pretty colors glow against
the black backdrop of an MRI scan.
Red is where emotions are located.
Blue is where language is formed.
We even see a ‘God region’ of the brain.
Is there a doubt region?
What color is it?

No matter.
They haven’t yet discovered the colors
that would illuminate the brain
fully alive in revelation.
It would break the machine.

When we touch your nail pierced hands,
we touch our own failure.
But our failure is yours.
It finds home in your pierced hands and side,
and is transformed in broken glory.

Stop trying so hard to believe.
You can't make it happen.
Step out of your stuffy locked room,
and breathe in the fullness of resurrected life.

Jesus our brother in grief

When we slap each other’s back in pleasure
When we flatter one another
When we ‘like’ this or that on Facebook
Or say something clever

We then turn and see you,
On the cross,
And sober up for a moment

You gaze through layers of pretense
You see us as we really are
And by some miracle,
Jesus our brother in grief,
You recognize us as your own

Sermon based on Matthew 14:13-21

Jesus knew the transformative power of a meal.
He knew how intimately connected the link was
between food and fellowship and the kingdom of God.

The joy of God’s presence
came upon the crowds that day
in the sharing of supper together.
Not only did Jesus have compassion
for the crowds and heal their sick,
but he goes beyond expectations and offers the crowds
friendship and hospitality in the form of a feast.

Think of the hundreds of ways
in which we use food in order to connect
with friends and family.
We arrange our lives around food-
whether it’s dinner together as a family,
meeting a coworker for lunch,
or the simple joy of meeting a close friend for supper.
Our bonds with each other are structured
around the meals we eat together.
The smells and tastes and satisfaction
we gain from a great meal
is interwoven with the sense of intimacy we share
with those we love and care about.
Meals strengthen the bonds we share with one another.

And food even helps us connect with strangers.
Think of how the meals we eat
cause us to interact with strangers.
My wife and I sometimes eat at
a little breakfast place in Madison.
And I mean ‘little.’
The building itself is tiny
and throngs of people pack the place on the weekends
and it’s hard to move around.
It’s so small, in fact,
that you have to sit with other diners.
There are no private tables.

I’m not used to this.
I like to have the privacy of my own table,
away from everyone else.
Yet, sitting with other diners forces you to enter into
conversation with people you normally wouldn’t talk to.
It allows you to get to know them.
And the delicious taste of the food is so enjoyable
that it sparks something from within
that opens you up to fellowship
with people you’ve never met before.
So the delight of food opens us to others
in ways that would otherwise be closed.

Our central aspect of worship together
takes place in the form of a meal.
At this table we celebrate
Christ’s real presence in the bread and wine.
The Eucharist is the place of radical hospitality.
In it we are offered a glimpse of the kingdom to come.
We literally taste the transformative power of Christ in bread and wine,
and participate in fellowship with him and each other.
Transformation happens within the context of a meal.

And there are other tables here at church
that are signs of Christ’s hospitality.
After worship on Sundays
I’ve noticed that you serve
doughnuts and coffee in the hallway.
And I like doughnuts.
If you ever want to find me after worship on Sunday,
you need look no further
than the doughnut and coffee table in back.
I find the doughnuts so creamy and so delicious
that I am often tempted to take two,
and sometimes I even try to take a second doughnut,
but my wife stops me,
so I only have one doughnut.

But this is an important ministry at Lake Edge.
By offering food for each other
and for the visitors in your midst,
you show the hospitality of Christ.
My wife and I have gotten to know
some of you better through conversation
over a doughnut and coffee.
And we are grateful for it.
Food opens pockets of space
for fellowship, hospitality and transformation to occur.


One of my favorite movies, Babette’s Feast,
shows how fellowship and a great meal
can transform lives.
The movie is set in the nineteenth century
and tells the story of a French woman, Babette,
who comes into the lives of two sisters
living in a rural community in Denmark.
Babette is a refugee who has fled to Denmark
and works as a servant for the sisters.
The sisters’ father was the founder
of a strict, pious Lutheran sect
and the congregation flourished while he was alive.
But the movie takes place many decades later
when the sisters are old,
the father has died,
and the congregation has dwindled
to a few embittered parishioners.

Babette works for the sisters for fourteen years as a servant,
but she finds out that she has won
10,000 francs in a lottery in France.
But instead of going back to France,
she spends her entire winnings
on a feast for the sisters and the small congregation.

The congregation is bitter and cranky
and they hold many petty grudges and resentments
towards one another.
And being a strict community,
they are suspicious
of the feast that Babette has planned.
They have always eaten rather bland food,
and they think there is something rather sinful
about indulging the appetite
in such a sensuous and exotic meal.
But they decide to go ahead and eat the meal,
but they promise one another
that they will not enjoy it.


Some of the characters in the movie have regrets.
An old general comes back to the village for this feast
and sees for the first time in many years
one of the sisters whom he loved.
One of the most poignant scenes of the movie
shows him getting dressed for dinner
and looking into a mirror.
He is old and melancholy
and dressed pompously in his uniform.
But in the mirror he sees his younger self
in the reflection staring back at him-
a reflection of him when he was a young officer.
He had his arms crossed,
and looked so stubborn and ambitious.
I don’t remember what exactly the actor said,
but his eyes were mournful
as he looked at his younger self.

‘What for?’ he seemed to be saying
as he looked back at that young man.
‘What for?’
He was in deep regret
for the way his life turned out.
The old general had achieved the success
he desired in life,
but at a great cost.
He lost a life with the woman that he loved.

At the dinner Babette serves dish after sumptuous dish-
thin pancakes and caviar,
quail smothered with delicious sauces.
Wine and champaign and chesses and cakes.
The actors’ faces magically light up
after each bite of food.
As the meal progresses,
grudges melt away.
Petty rivalries are dismissed.
Resentments are overcome.
The General stands up
and delivers a moving speech.
He says that “mercy is infinite,”
and declares that “righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another
and the love of Christ will illuminate the world.”
In the feast fellowship happens.
Transformation happens.
The dinner guests come to not even regret the past,
seeing their lives in the larger,
more magnificent framework of God’s grace.

I like to think that this is what Jesus had in mind
in the feeding of the crowds.
He wasn’t just going to cure people of sickness
and send them away.
He was going to transform them
through the power of a meal together.
It was not just a meal,
but a feast that transcended itself,
developing higher and wider
and lower and deeper circles
of friendship and fellowship.
The kingdom of God was happening
in that meal between
Jesus and the disciples and the people.

And the miracle happens today.
The Holy Spirit works in the spaces between the meal-
in fellowship with one another,
in the actual smell and taste of the food,
in laughter and friendship and grace.
All these elements of a meal come together
and transformation happens through them.

So when we offer hospitality to one another
and to the stranger through the sharing of a meal,
remember that it is not just a meal we share.
We are sharing the hospitality, love and presence of Christ.
And as we hunger this Lenten season
for the presence and righteousness of God,
let us recognize the mysterious presence of Christ
among us in our shared meals.
Trust in the One who transforms
our merger scraps of bread and fish
into something much larger
than we could ever hope for or imagine.

lenten devotion

Mark 8:31-38 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the angels.

Meditation: This lonely band of outlaws, the disciples, huddled together around Jesus. They were so optimistic about their future ministry and ambitions. They were going to Jerusalem, and (who knows!) maybe change the world. Yet, now they were confronted with this stark, almost fatalistic, message about suffering and the cross- and any message that diverted Jesus from the way of the cross was not only a misunderstanding, but a satanic temptation. Surely the disciples now worried about their own safety, not to mention Jesus' mental stability- A religious fanatic with a death wish.

In our context Jesus' message of the cross has become a spiritual metaphor for inward suffering, or as the means by which we surrender heart and mind to God. Yet, the disciples didn’t have the luxury of considering the cross metaphorically. They weren’t taught by brilliant exegetes- all they had were Jesus' own words. And Jesus himself. Peter was shown that there was to be no pragmatic compromise with the satanic powers in the world. Only a lonely journey to the cross, one frightful step at a time, would transform history. A broken God, who in the humiliation of crucifixion wasn't afforded the dignity by which he could cover the shame in his face with his hands, willed our salvation.

Prayer: Forgive us God, when we treat our callings as career opportunities. Forgive us when we are tempted to forfeit our souls for the sake of approval. This is not what drew us to ministry. But you, O Lord, called us to witness to the power of your cross and resurrection. Teach us anew the cost of discipleship, for our neighbor's sake, and for the sake of the eternal and living beauty of your kingdom come. Amen.