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Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
St. Peter writes to the church today: “Come to him,” that is, to Jesus, who is “a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” This week I was part of a webcast with some local colleagues discussing the plans of Dallas-area churches to reopen for worship. And one of the pastors said something that stuck with me. She said that she and her church are having to think about what it means to be church, and to do worship, without the four walls of the sanctuary. We are so accustomed to a place and a setting for our work and these last two months have forced us to expand ourselves, in a way.  Gebhard Fugel, "Jesus und der Gang nach Emmaus," Katholische Kirchengemeinde Oberzell (Ravensburg) Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In the whole history of humans telling each other stories, there are certain themes or figures that turn up over and over again. One of the most fascinating, for me at least, is the theme of mistaken identity. In one version of the mistaken identity story, a stranger appears as someone familiar or beloved. This is the doppelganger or changeling story. In another version of the mistaken identity story, a familiar or beloved person appears in a strange or unrecognized form. Something in us loves stories of mistaken identity. At least we find it interesting enough that we keep telling over thousands of years, all over the world. They are uncanny. They make the strange seem familiar and the familiar seem strange. We hear both versions of the mistaken identity story in the Scriptures. The devil, Jesus warns, has the power to appear as an angel of light. In another place he warns his friends that false messiahs, or as we’d call them later, “anti-Christs,” will appear, mimicking the words and actions of the true messiah. People will be tempted to follow the false version. In the New Testament, the devil is Christ’s doppelganger. We also hear stories of the true person being hidden or mistaken for someone else. Joseph’s brothers beat him and leave him for dead in a well, but he survives and makes his way down to Egypt. When the brothers come down to Egypt many years later for food during a famine, and Joseph is a powerful man there, the brothers do not recognize him. On the morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for a gardener. Long before the New Testament times and far away from ancient Israel the Greek poet Homer told the story of Odysseus. He comes home to his kingdom after ten years of war and ten years of terrible journeys, appearing as a wizened old beggar. His servants don’t recognize him. His son doesn’t recognize him. Even his wife, who has pined for him daily and risked her life to wait for his return does not recognize him. Only his dog recognizes him, knowing his master and hearing his voice. In the Gospel story we hear today, Jesus appears to his disciples. But their eyes are prevented from recognizing him. Last week Thomas saw and believed, but this week even seeing is not enough. As God tells the prophet Isaiah, the people will see and see but not perceive; they will hear and hear but not understand. Have you ever had an experience like that? A time when you could not recognize someone right in front of you? Or a time when you were convinced that a stranger was actually a long-lost friend, a family member, or a lover? These moments are uncanny because they tell us that our memories are not truthful and our perceptions are not reliable. They can make our own identity feel unstable. Jesus appears to two disciples in today’s story as a stranger. As a stranger he hears the story of his betrayal and arrest, the failure of his messianic hope, and the empty tomb. As a stranger he teaches them about the Messiah in the Scriptures. As a stranger he is about to leave them for the night. But they plead with him: Stay with us. It is evening and the day is almost over. Why do they do this? In part they do this, I think, because he is not Jesus to them. He is just another fragile traveler in a dangerous world on a long night. They are showing him the basic human solidarity of hospitality, an obligation so profound in the ancient world that to break it would bring a curse on your head. But in part, I think they do this because he is Jesus to them. They have heard something of Jesus in his words and their hearts have burned within them. In the Word Jesus Christ comes to us as a stranger. He is puzzling, surprising, sometimes shocking in his sayings, his miracles, his terrible judgments. And in his Word he comes to us as a friend: loving, comforting, assuring, healing, forgiving our sins. Our eyes are kept from recognizing him at times. Who is this savior who speaks with such severity, who does such implausible miracles? And yet he walks with us in all these words. We hear them over and over. They change for us because we change. But under all of it we believe he is there. The disciples sit to eat. And in the breaking of the bread, which Jesus does for them as if he is the host. In that moment their eyes are healed and he is suddenly revealed. And just as suddenly vanishes. If Jesus may be either friend or stranger in his words, and was to those around him in his own day, Jesus and those around him were always most at home at the table together. If he shocked and astonished and frightened in his words, he brought together, he put at ease, he showed affection around the table. And the breaking of bread is where he does not just speak to us, but it turns out that in all those meals, around all those tables, with all those people he was preparing to give himself to us. It’s also where he disappears into us, leaving us behind as his Body in the world. Christians have met Jesus and seen Jesus here, together, ever since. Through times of civic strife and violence, through error and conflict in the church, this is where we have gathered to see with our eyes and our hearts, wayward as they may be at every other time, the Christ who gives himself to us. And we have continued here even as we cannot gather as a group. Two are enough, and have been for us for hundreds of years. But we will do that no longer. We should be fasting together if we cannot feast together and I will not do for myself and my household what I cannot do for anyone else. This is a hard thing for me because I have always fled back to the breaking of the bread. When the Word was perplexing or puzzling, when my own journey from one place to another on this road has been vexed or troublesome, this is where I’ve always been able to flee. But it is for all of us, not just those who can safely be here at this moment. So it falls to us to listen for Jesus in his words and to seek for him in those words, in each other, in this world that is under so great a threat for unequal and unjust responses to this crisis. In a world that is so desperate for healing. This will be a time when we let our hearts burn within us. When we let our hearts burn for that justice, that vision of Christ: not simply here in church but in a world that can and must be reconciled. When we can gather again and break bread together again, we will do it with a new appreciation for what God has done for us, and what God may yet do for this suffering world. Amen. As most of you know, in September my family moved here from the Chicago area. Kerry and I had both lived there for almost twenty years, since before we were married, before we even met. Our three children were born there, and we cared for seven foster children there. Chicago was my home in a way that no place else could be. Neither of my parents nor my brother lived in the places I grew up. I turned twenty-one there, in a liquor store on Sheridan Avenue. I became a baseball fan there at the White Sox park, watching Frank Thomas strike out in the bottom of the ninth with two men on. I was ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament there at Wicker Park Lutheran Church on the corner of Hoyne and LeMoyne.
I spent one night on the road between Chicago and Dallas. And almost immediately I got to work. When a person died on a Roman cross he or she did not die of the wounds. He or she did not typically die of exposure. A person on a Roman cross typically died of asphyxiation. Once your legs and arms failed to the point where they would no longer hold you up, you collapsed into yourself and you could no longer breathe.
It’s not the worst way to die. But it is a bad way to die. It was meant to be. Crucifixion was not capital punishment in the way we think of it today. It was a humiliation, a horror, a spectacle. It was meant to show people: we can do this to you and you can’t stop us. It was a kind of political theater. Suffering for show. Suffering for control. Suffering to send a message.  Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I have to admit that I have not done a great job of observing Lent this year. Over the years I have become more ambitious and traditionalist in my fasting. I refrain from meat and sweets from Monday through Saturday--at least I do that early in the season. I fast more severely on Wednesdays and Fridays, following monastic practice. I resolve to stop watching shows about murder and instead read books about murder. In years past I have resolved to stop eating out. If I couldn’t plan ahead or prepare my own meals, I should toughen up and wait until I could. The truth is, I’ve always loved Lent. I loved the fasting, loved the restraint in worship, loved the heightened spirituality of the whole thing. Six sober, watchful, reflective, difficult weeks and then the great festival--champagne and strawberries and chocolate after the Easter Vigil and a roast lamb on Sunday.  Athanasios Vasilikos Adaminos - Κειμηλιακό Απόθεμα σε Ναούς της περιφέρειας Θεσσαλονίκης 1846 There is nothing like the acclaim of a crowd. It is a good thing to have the praise of a teacher or a mentor. It is a special thing to earn the regard of a parent. It is a gift to be applauded by a close friend or a spouse.
But the praise of a crowd is different. I grew up doing my share of singing and public speaking on little stages. But I don’t remember feeling that magical connection between me and an audience until I started fooling around with an electric guitar. I was never all that good at it, but I worked hard at soloing, and when I hit a good one--I can still remember the song, it was that old folk song “Hey Joe” that Jimi Hendrix covered--the reaction of the crowd was, well, electric. In my little band there was me, a bassist, a pianist, and a drummer. We told jokes at each other’s expense. How can you tell that a stage is level? Because the drool comes out of both sides of the drummer’s mouth. How does a guitar player change a lightbulb? He holds the bulb and waits for the world to revolve around him.  Paolo de San Leocadio, "Christ with the Host" Please read with me from Matthew's Gospel, the 26th chapter: While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.’ When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Let us pray. Merciful God, we do not presume to come to your table trusting in our own righteousness, but in your abundant mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat and drink the body and blood of your dearest Son, Jesus Christ, that we may live in him and he in us, now and forever. Amen.
Communion and Social Distance During the week leading up to Sunday, March 15 it became increasingly clear to me and many others than celebrating Holy Communion and distributing the Sacrament, however much care we took, would not be safe or advisable. And after that Sunday, we had to cease meeting in person, in our building, altogether. With many other clergy and churches, we had to figure out the best and most faithful way to keep worshiping during a time of mandatory (and entirely justified) "social distancing." And foremost in the minds of many Lutherans and churches in other traditions where the Sacrament is central was the question of how, and whether, to celebrate Holy Communion.  Duccio de Buoninsigna, "The Raising of Lazaraus" (1310/11) Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
A couple of weeks ago in Italy, and then last week in New York City, an alarming detail emerged in stories of the coronavirus crisis: hospitals were asking for permission to create makeshift morgues. There were too many deaths to process in the normal ways. There were too many bodies to store in the normal place. Italy had to suspend some rules about handling the dead, including the right of the survivors to have the deceased person buried instead of cremated. There were too many. Please read with me from the Great Litany, in the prayer resources shared here and on Facebook: P: From all sin, from all error, from all evil; from the cunning assaults of the devil; from an unprepared and evil death: Let us pray.
Almighty God, we pray that you would deliver us from every evil, those known to us, and those we do not see. Help us to know and do your will in all things. Through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen. Around March 13 it became clear that celebrating Holy Communion in church at all--even distributing only the host, as we had previously indicated we would do--would not be wise or safe under the circumstances. We have a provision for non-Communion liturgy, but simply cutting it out seemed inadequate. It occurred to me that we could do the Great Litany to conclude the service. So we ad-libbed and had everyone present in the sanctuary open their copies of Evangelical Lutheran Worship to that curious, under-used piece of our history and we prayed it together. It was a powerful moment. I don't know much about the Great Litany itself. I believe I first encountered it when I visited Wicker Park Lutheran Church in Chicago for the first time in 2005 (I wrote about that day, and that church, in an essay several years ago). It was the first Sunday in Lent, and the pastor explained that the Great Litany was traditionally recited on that Sunday as the congregation processed around the sanctuary. It's a powerful text but not easy to chant, for leader or congregation, and over the years it fell out of use even at Wicker Park. From what I've read, this litany (or some version of it) has always been part of Lutheran liturgy. Litanies of all kinds are a big part of Christian worship (if you pray with us on Wednesday nights you've participated in a briefer, less elaborate litany), a haunting drone of call and response, often chanted in procession, plumbing some very severe depths of human fear and need. But for whatever reasons, it tended to disappear from American Lutheranism. I wonder if this disappearance had something to do with the severity of its language. Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, our worship texts became softer and vaguer on the evils we prayed against and the supplications we made to God against them. The historical roots of American Lutheranism are in Europe, among regular folk subject to terrible turns of fate, and among immigrants to America who were largely poor. But by the time we developed the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), along with a whole warehouse of online supporting material, we were a largely suburban and middle-class denomination. The spiritual battles in our prayers are about apathy and compassion, acquisitiveness and simplicity, altruism and hard-heartedness. The was still a world of plague, famine, and civil strife out there but our role was to be helpful. As it turns out, being helpful is not enough. Reflect: What is your or your family's most recent experience of famine, crop failure, or civil unrest? What does that experience mean to you now? For at least forty years our prayers didn't take much account of the possibility of drought and famine, fire and flood, or an "unprepared and evil death." That's the phrase that stood out to me when I first heard the Great Litany and it's stayed with me ever since. Like it or not, all this stuff is real. It never stopped happening, it happens now, and we should pray about it together. And while this can be alarming and intense, I've found it oddly comforting as well. You have to face the worst things in order to pray for help with them. You have to acknowledge that the grave sorrows and evils of the world are not just "out there" waiting for our resources and good intentions but very close at hand in order to invoke God's aid in enduring and defeating them. One great gift of our Christian faith (and certainly not just ours) is that it gives us language for fears and dangers that we might otherwise struggle to articulate. One thing we discover in a crisis is the extent to which our world runs on wishful thinking and denial, and how far those things have reached into church itself. So join me in appealing to God with this words. I can't claim that they will speed the end of this epidemic (though I certainly will not claim that they won't). But they are fitting words. They will help us face our world honestly. Prayers: Psalm 139 For the sick and those who care for them for the lonely and isolated for all pregnant women and new mothers for those who come before God's throne today for all who have no one to pray for them Lord, have mercy Christ, have mercy Lord, have mercy Our Father, who art in heaven...  Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.” So Jesus tells his disciples today, on encountering a man who blind from birth. His disciples have asked a theological question about the man’s condition: is it the man’s own sins or his parents’ sins that account for his blindness? This may sound like a heartless question to us but it does not sound that way in the world of Jesus. These things require an explanation that preserves the justice of God. So if God is just, someone must have deserved this condition. Either God knew in advance the sins the man would commit, or the man’s parents transgressed and this is the consequence. That wasn’t the only way people looked at this question but it was a common and urgent one. But Jesus turns the question around: What is God’s work here? And what will we do? To answer his own question, Jesus does a small, intimate homage to the original Creation. He spits into the dirt and like God forming Adam out of the mud, gets himself dirty. He puts the spit-mud on the man’s eyes and tells him to wash. His eyes are opened. Let there be light. Today in our series on What Are We Doing Here? We come to Martin Luther’s fifth “holy possession” of the church. The first is the Word of God, the second is the sacrament of baptism, the third is the sacrament of the altar, the fourth is confession and forgiveness. Each of these, Luther claims, are signs by which the true church of Jesus Christ may be known in the world. The fifth holy possession, today’s topic, is ministry. During the Reformation there were many arguments about what ministry was and even whether it was necessary. Luther insisted that the church needed people to serve on behalf of the whole community: to preach, to baptize, to celebrate the sacrament and so on. Otherwise it would be chaos. So the church sets apart ministers for the work of God in the community of faith. Now this in no way diminishes the vocation of the baptized people of God to serve each other and the world. Every Christian has a religious vocation in their work, their homes, the community, and the church. And it is in no way to say that the people who do what I do are special people. We are not set apart because of our holiness. Rather we are set apart for holy tasks that are given to us by God. Look at the story from 1 Samuel today: God does not speak to David or David’s father Jesse directly. God sends the prophet. And the prophet does not speak his own word, but the Word God gives him to speak. The prophet does not choose David, but declares God’s choice of David. God chooses David, but it is the prophet’s hand that anoints him. The prophet here is serving as God’s minister. He is God’s means for accomplishing God’s work. Just like ordinary human words, ordinary water, and the bread and wine that are the work of human hands all serve as means for the grace God wishes to give us. God calls ordinary people to fulfill a work that is not of our choosing or design. We are simply trying to do the work of the one who sent us while it is day. That, anyway, is how I try to look at it. I have tried to preach God’s Word, not Ben’s word, even if it means people get mad. I have pronounced forgiveness when I doubted the sincerity of repentance and administered the sacrament to those whose faith was invisible to me. But that is the job. Samuel would have picked a different son of Jesse to anoint as king if it had been up to him. But I have to admit, I have never done what I am doing right now. And I never meant to. In fact, in the past I’ve been very hard on churches that pipe in a message from one site to multiple locations or into multiple sanctuaries. I get why they do that. You find an especially gifted preacher and you want to make sure that he or she can reach as many people as possible, even if you can’t be in the same room together. But to me, that’s not what the role is. A pastor, I always said, was supposed to look his or her people in the eyes. If I’m going to offend someone or test their faith, I have to look them in the face while I do it. A pastor has to endure the only polite form of protest available to a worshiper: watching them stand up and walk out while we’re talking. Ask me how I know! We were not supposed to be talking heads. Pictures on a screen dispensing wisdom from afar. We were not supposed to be gurus. We are supposed to be servants. We are supposed to be present. The Word we preach is supposed to be God’s Word for you, the people of Dallas, Texas in 2020. If I don’t do that as well as the pastor down the street or across the country, at least I am doing it for you. Jesus spits into the dirt and makes mud and touches it to the man’s eyes. That is how it goes sometimes. You have to be face to face. I think of those moments where I have laid my hands on the head of someone kneeling for absolution on Maundy Thursday. Of the many hundreds of foreheads I have marked with ash on Ash Wednesday. Of the times I have held someone’s hands and prayed with them. I am not an especially demonstrative, touchy-feely person but those moments are some of the most powerful in my ministry. And yet here we are. You’re out there but I can’t see you. I don’t know if you’re nodding appreciatively or politely chuckling at my jokes or falling asleep. Our building was designed for people, not for cameras. I miss you. But all the same: we must do the work of the one who sent us while it is day. I give thanks to God that we can meet like this. When we can’t do what we expect to do, we focus on what we can do. When we can’t do what we think is best, we look for the next best thing. So what I want you to hear, today, if nothing else, is this: I am still here for you. I am praying for you every day. I will pray for you over the phone or by Facebook or by Zoom or however else we can do it. If you are anxious or lonely or your life or relationship is in crisis or you are burdened with guilt, I am still here for you. And this is not because I am an especially kind or generous person. I assure you I’m not. It’s because God never quits on God’s people. God never closes down for the night or the week or the duration. We ministers of the Word and Sacrament are frail creatures who make mistakes and need rest and lead people astray without meaning to. But our only purpose--the only reason anyone bothers to put on these vestments and stand in a pulpit and speak into an empty sanctuary--our only purpose is to bring you God’s grace and mercy by whatever road is open to us. Amen. |
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