Boundaries

Pentecost 10A, 8/17/14

Isaiah 56:1-8; Matthew 15:21-28

Lord, bring your salvation and reveal your covenant. Gather us to you on your holy mountain. Amen.

I’ve seen a lot of articles in the past several days about insiders and outsiders – about who counts and who doesn’t. The news has been full of tragedies, and just about every story describes people who have some kind of power controlling other people who don’t.

White people verses black people.

Police officers versus civilians.

Rich people verses poor people.

Mainstream media outlets and the way they tell a story versus social media and grassroots attempts to tell a different story.

On Thursday night, as a way to escape from all the craziness in the world, my mom and I got together to watch a Lauren Bacall movie.

We searched on Netflix and the only film of hers that was available for instant streaming was How to Marry A Millionaire.

In case you haven’t seen this one, here’s a quick plot summary. Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable are all models, and they move in together to a fancy apartment in New York. Their goal is for each of them to find and marry a millionaire, so that they can live the lifestyle they’ve always wanted and that they think they deserve.

Bacall’s character has some pretty strict guidelines on who the girls can bring in to the apartment – on what kind of men are worth their time.

To start with, no one is allowed who doesn’t wear a necktie.

Also, Bacall apparently has a thing for bad boys – for gas pump jockeys, she says – so she tries her hardest to keep away from anyone who reminds her of the guys she’s fallen for in the past.

You can imagine where the story goes from there.

But the point is, there are strict rules about who is in and who is out.

This is a story of exclusion and inclusion.

So are all the news stories we’ve been hearing lately.

So are today’s Bible stories.

The readings we heard from Scripture today tell us how God responds to people who lie on the edges of society – those bad boys that Lauren Bacall warned her cohorts against.

God welcomes outcasts.

In the first reading, from Isaiah, God is talking to Israel about foreigners, about people who are living on the margins of Hebrew society. God promises to welcome the   outsider      in.

 “These I will bring to my holy mountain,” God says, “and make them joyful in my house of prayer; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. … the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, …will gather others to them besides those already gathered.” (56:7-8)

God has a plan to make outcasts included – to fix the things that separate them from the general population and give them standing in society.

This is a radical, miraculous, rule-breaking plan.

You may have noticed that a few verses are left out of the first reading today. We heard Isaiah 56, verse one, and verses six through eight.

This passage gives us a great overview of God’s plan to welcome all people, including outcasts and foreigners.

In the missing verses, we get a specific example of God’s overwhelming attitude of welcoming.

Listen to what those verses say: …do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. (56:3b-5)

OK, as you probably know already, eunuchs were men who had been castrated so that they could serve as trusted slaves for wealthy families. Eunuchs would pose absolutely no threat to the women in the household, or the lineage of inheritance in a family.

These eunuchs are the epitome of outcast people in Isaiah’s time. They were not allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord, according to a law in Deuteronomy – they were outcast from the faith community. And they were had no standing in society, because not only could they have no families of their own, but their family line would die with them, ensuring that their memory would be forgotten.

In verse 5 God promises the eunuchs an everlasting name – but one’s family name can only continue if someone has children. Impossible! In a radical, game-changing move, God grants the promise of children to the slaves who have been castrated!

We don’t get details – maybe the eunuchs will miraculously be granted children, or maybe God has another way to give them an everlasting name.

But the point is, God promises to fix the very things that separate outsiders from society. God will make the distinctions that we draw between each other completely irrelevant.

This reading seems to be saying, expect the unexpected!

God welcomes outcasts, in ways we could never imagine.

So it seems from this Isaiah reading that we’ve got an answer to the question, What Would Jesus Do? Of course, Jesus would welcome the outcast.

Right?

Well, maybe it’s a little more complicated than that. Let’s look at what happens in the Gospel lesson.

A Caananite woman approaches Jesus in today’s story. She would have been outcast in Jewish society in at least two ways – first, she was a woman, a female in a male-dominated society where men made all the rules. Women didn’t count as full citizens in that society.

Second, this woman was Caananite, not a Jew, not a member of the tribes of Israel but an enemy. She may have been considered a foreigner in the land promised to the Hebrew people.

And yet this woman comes to Jesus for help, asking him to heal her daughter.

The first thing Jesus says to the woman is, “you’re not my problem.” Helping the woman doesn’t fall into his job description, he says – it’s not part of his mission statement.

You’re not in my family, not from my community, you don’t belong to my church, you support the wrong policies… pick your insult.

Jesus calls the woman a female dog. That is not a flattering name, even in today’s society. Think about it. She’s not his problem and he tries to get rid of her with name-calling.

But the woman is persistent. She brushes off his name-calling. In fact, she embraces it. OK, I’m a dog, she says. And you treat dogs with a certain level of care and respect. Can’t you do the same for me?

Jesus is impressed with the woman’s faith. He responded at first like any human would do, but then the woman asked for more.

She reminded Jesus that God treats outcasts differently than humans do. She helped him remember and demonstrate that his mission as son of God is more than a human mission, his mission is to live up to the actions of God.

Jesus is fully human, and he shows it today by designating the boundaries of insider and outsider. But Jesus is also fully divine, thank God, and the Caananite woman reminds him of this.

First Jesus tries to pass the woman off as an outcast, but she won’t just be brushed aside. She won’t go away until she’s been recognized and had her needs met.

Outcasts can be like that in our society, too. We can’t just ignore them and hope they’ll go away. They have needs that must be met, and our calling to help them is divinely inspired.

So Jesus accommodates the Canaanite woman. He gives her what she asks for. He welcomes her as an outcast – cares for the person on the margins of society.

The disciples don’t understand it. As one author writes, “For the disciples, one should conduct one’s ministry by acting in a way that would avoid anything that could displease people; one should avoid disquieting confrontations. But, for Jesus, this is precisely not the way of conducting one’s ministry.”

Daniel Patte (The Gospel According to Matthew: A Structural Commentary on Matthew’s Faith)

Jesus’ ministry, when he’s doing it the best he possibly can, is to embrace all the people of the world as if they are God’s chosen people – just like we heard God promise to do in Isaiah.

There’s enough grace for all people, not just the “insiders.”

Do you remember the miracle of the feeding of the 5000? At that meal, feeding 5000 people with only 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, there were 12 baskets of crumbs left over once everyone had been fed.

There is enough food to feed thousands, with baskets leftover… enough crumbs fall from the children’s table to feed the dogs as well… there is no limit to God’s grace.

Perhaps healing the Canaanite woman’s daughter was outside of Jesus’ calling, but doing so didn’t take anything away from the people Jesus was sent to.

Today’s Bible passages warn against an “us versus them” mentality.

It may show up all over the news, but it’s certainly not what God intends for our relationships with one another. Today’s lessons show us that grace extends to the outsiders in society.

People who are different than us can be included in our communities.

Welcoming others crosses all divisions and boundaries.

God will find a home for all people, so they have somewhere they belong.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Retire

Pentecost 9A, 8/10/14
1 Kings 19:4-15

God, speak to us, your people. Help us turn to you in our hearts. Let us hear what you have to say. Amen.

        

Elijah was the greatest prophet in his day.

He challenged King Ahab, who allowed his wife Jezebel to bring her false gods into Israel.

When Elijah fled the king, he lived on miraculous bread made by an impoverished widow.

When the widow’s son died, he brought the boy back to life.

In a competition with prophets of the false gods Baal and Asherah, Elijah called down fire from heaven to prove that his God was the true God.

He then ordered the deaths of over 800 prophets of the false gods.

Elijah was such an incredible prophet that John the Baptist and Jesus were both compared to him when people were trying to find words to describe what great prophets they were.

But in today’s story, Elijah isn’t all that great.

He has performed all his miraculous tasks. He fled the scene after fire miraculously came down from heaven, because he was afraid of what the people would do to him.

He felt abandoned.

He thought all his work had been in vain, since the worshippers of the false gods were still in charge in Israel.

He didn’t know what else God had for him to do.

Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying,
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"

He answered, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."

God promises Elijah that he will speak to him and help him understand his purpose in the world.

It’s like the promise in the Psalm: the Lord will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.

Elijah turns his heart to God in despair.

Then a whole bunch of powerful things happen – wind, earthquake, and fire – and Elijah doesn’t meet God in any of them.

And finally God appears in the sound of sheer silence.

OK, this tells us a few things about God and Elijah.

Elijah has learned how to listen for the voice of God.

Many people would have imagined that God was present in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire.

When natural disasters occur, we tend to blame God for them. We call them “acts of God” as if God is only present in violent times.

But in today’s story, God is clearly not speaking through these powerful signs.

God chooses to come to Elijah in the silence.

And Elijah is able to hear God in the silence.

Where do you find God?

Shortly after I began serving as your pastor here, I met with all the groups and committees at the church and asked them this question.

Where do you meet God? When do you feel close to God?

There were a few answers that kept popping up again and again.

The members of Cooksville Lutheran Church find God in music, in nature, and in other people. We feel close to God when we are in community, with our friends, our biological families, or our church family. We have seen God in the sunset and heard God in the notes from our organ or the sung words of our choir.

Once we’ve learned to recognize the voice of God, it is easier to feel God’s presence in other times and places. If we feel closest to God when we’re working in the garden, but God chooses to come to us one day in one of those cheesy poems on a greeting card – well, the only reason we can recognize God in the new place is because we’ve learned something about God from the old familiar interactions.

Does that make sense?

The only reason the disciples were able to recognize Jesus on the water was because they knew what he was like on land.

Peter is the only disciple who doubts – he makes Jesus prove his identity to him. The other disciples recognize Jesus’ voice, which they have come to know in a different context, so they believe that it’s him even when he shows up in an entirely unexpected place.

         (You can’t get more unexpected than walking on water!)

Back in the Old Testament story, Elijah is feeling burned out and is waiting to hear from God. Elijah is lucky – he gets a promise that God will come and help him understand his purpose in the world.

When we feel discouraged, God will come and do the same for us, as long as we’re willing to listen like Elijah did.

So let’s imagine that we’re with Elijah on the mountain, waiting to hear a message from God about our meaning in life.

And God speaks through the sound of sheer silence.

A voice came to him, saying, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

He answered, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."

Elijah’s story hasn’t changed.

He has expressed his discouragement to God, God has responded by showing up and trying to help… and Elijah’s discouragement remains.

Elijah’s words after experiencing God’s presence on the mountaintop are identical to what they were when he retreated there out of fear and frustration.

We can be like that sometimes, can’t we? God hears all our frustrations, and we tell God what we want, but when God shows up in a new and different way, all we can say is – this isn’t what I wanted!

It’s not like it used to be!

Elijah’s frustration remains.

So God gives Elijah some instructions.

It’s time to retire, God says.

Elijah, you’ve got two jobs left: go and anoint two new kings.

You see, in order to be a king in ancient Israel, for people to believe that you had the blessing of God, you had to be anointed by a prophet – it was sort of like the divine coronation ceremony.

So Elijah, God says, get off this holy mountain and take care of these two jobs I have for you. Then get some well-deserved rest. Find Elisha, and anoint him as prophet in your place. Your work will be done.

If you’re this discouraged, God says, the best thing for you is to let someone else take over. Give the reigns to someone who still has energy for ministry. Doing so doesn’t invalidate any of the ministry you did at your prime – all kinds of great things happened in the past, and you were the one who caused them to happen.

But your discouragement isn’t helpful right now. You think you’re alone in the world?

Look! There are still 7000 faithful people in Israel, God says, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him. These 7000 deserve someone with a little more energy and a little less cynicism than you have at the moment. So let Elisha be the next prophet.

Elijah goes.

Meeting God on the mountain hasn’t changed Elijah’s outlook on life – he’s still burned out from his exhausting ministry – but meeting God has given him a purpose, which is really what he was looking for.

In fact, Elijah was so excited to be done as the primary prophet in the world, that he went and anointed Elisha first. He skipped over the anointing of the kings, Elisha ended up doing that later in the book of Second Kings.

Elijah was the greatest prophet in his day.

In today’s Bible story, Elijah’s day is ending.

He was faithful to God even when life got difficult – he was a prophet at a time when it was unpopular to follow God – but everyone’s got their limits.

Today, Elijah reached his.

So God gently says, thank you. I think it’s time for us both to move on now.

God uses Elisha to continue ministry on earth – the great prophet Elijah throws his cloak, his mantle over the younger prophet, granting him all the authority that he had carried throughout his ministry.

As for Elijah, a chariot sweeps down from heaven and takes him up to be with God.

That’s why people believe that Jesus or John the Baptist could be Elijah returned to earth – Elijah never died. He was taken directly into heaven, and so the belief was born that he would return someday.

Sometimes God asks us to pass the mantle to the next person.

This is good news.

Because sometimes God also rewards us with rest.

And if we’re lucky, God even grants us an enduring reputation that becomes the paradigm of what future faithful people should be.

God can come to us in the silence – in the unexpected places.

God guides us through even the most difficult times.

And God grants us rest when we need it.

Amen.

You do it!

Pentecost 8A, 8/3/14

Matthew 14:13-21

Gracious and merciful God, help our eyes always look to you, and give us our food in due season. Amen.

Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a meeting for the camp I used to work at. They are planning to build a new kitchen and dining hall. This building will be used for programs that happen on-site – but for the first time in this camp’s history, the same building will also have room to store all the food and equipment that groups take out on trail when they do wilderness camping.

The current executive director at camp is really wanting the building to be as useful as possible – and he wants as much buy-in as possible from people who faithfully support the camp – so he has been asking for input from staff alumni. Those of us who used to work in the kitchen or who used to work with the wilderness camping program have been contacted and asked for our opinions on the draft drawings of the new building.

The floor plan of the new building looks great.

But since we were asked our opinions, of course, everyone has something to suggest.

One of the biggest concerns at the meeting yesterday was, will there be enough storage space in the new building for all the food that groups take out on trail with them when they go camping in the wilderness?

It’s a fair question, really. When you head away from civilization, you have to be prepared for any situation. Whatever you need – Band-Aids, toilet paper, socks, a pen – everything that you think you might possibly want to use in the wilderness has to be packed in with your stuff when you enter that deserted place.

So in yesterday’s meeting, we discussed all the stuff that you need to pack for wilderness camping.

And there was some disagreement about whether the new building could handle all the storage needs.

What do we do with all the trail food that camping groups take out with them? Where should we store the 90-pound food pack the night before its owners leave for the wilderness and take it with them?

Do we store the on-trail food in the same place as the food for on-site programs? What happens if a staff member accidentally serves up the wrong meal for their kids, and the wilderness camping program is short on food the next week?

What happens if the people don’t have everything they need before they head into the wilderness?

This is the same attitude that the disciples start with in today’s Gospel story. Where are we going to get the food? What if there isn’t enough? They begin with worry and fear. They are focused on the limitations of their situation.

Jesus responds with abundance. He takes the small resources that the disciples offer, and transforms them into more than enough.

It would be nice to have Jesus along on every camping trip that my camp sends out into deserted places – the food pack would be way lighter!

When Jesus is in the wilderness with his disciples and a huge group of followers, and it comes time for the people to eat, Jesus feeds them. There’s not a huge ordeal. He simply takes the food that the disciples can find, blesses it, then makes the disciples distribute it to everyone.

It’s entirely possible, actually, that the people who ate the free lunch that Jesus prepared for them didn’t even realize that a miracle had occurred in order for them to be fed. The Bible reading doesn’t suggest that anyone other than the disciples watched Jesus bless the food before it was handed around. No one probably knew what a small amount of resources there were to begin with.

The other 5000 men, plus women and children, just know that food is offered to them. They don’t know how. They don’t need to know where the lunch came from, all they know is that they won’t have to go to bed hungry tonight.

The disciples initially don’t believe that Jesus will be able to pull this miracle off.

Partly, that’s because Jesus is basically asking them to be the ones to perform the miracle.

You give them something to eat!

Um, you want me to do what?

The disciples have no idea how they are going to fulfill Jesus’ charge to feed the crowds. And yet, the feeding of the 5000 couldn’t have happened without them.

Well, maybe it could have. I mean, we believe that God has the ability to work in whatever way God wants. So Jesus could have miraculously fed this group of people in many different ways.

He could have asked God to rain down manna from heaven, or just turned the grass in front of the people into a nice tossed salad or something.

For that matter, If Jesus was going to miraculously make food appear – why not have it appear in everyone’s stomachs? Couldn’t Jesus have just taken away the hunger pains by filling the bellies?

But Jesus doesn’t work like that. Part of the importance of this meal comes in the serving. The disciples had to serve the gathered people. Being a disciple of Jesus also means being a worker for Jesus. This meal was special not just because of the miraculous amounts of food, but also because of the community in which the meal was shared.

In this way, it’s sort of like the meal we share here week after week. When we come for Communion it’s not a help-yourself kind of meal – everyone is served the bread and the wine by another member of the community. Communion gains meaning as a sacrament because it is shared in community.

Those of you who have shared Communion with me in a hospital or in someone’s home know that I always ask someone else to serve the bread and the wine to me. I don’t just take it. We don’t take Communion, as if it were something that belonged to us. We receive it, as a gift, every time it’s offered.

It’s in the serving and the sharing that we actually experience God – this is where the miracle happens! That’s what the disciples discovered in today’s Bible story – joy came when they served others, sharing their limited resources, because Jesus commanded them to do so.

The miracle of the feeding of the 5000 men plus women and children happens because Jesus blesses and breaks the bread, and gives it to the disciples – just like when we share Communion.

But the miracle spreads to the whole gathered community because the disciples follow through on it – the disciples are the ones to share the food with the crowds. Jesus almost hides in the background. He’s the reason behind the feeding of the 5000, but not the focus of it. He lets the disciples be the messengers.

There are 12 baskets of leftover food at the end of the meal. There are 12 disciples. Pointing this out is just another way that the Gospel of Matthew emphasizes the fact that the whole serving process was the work of the disciples. The miracle couldn’t have happened without them.

We can learn from the disciples in their role as servers in this meal.

At the beginning, the disciples have a mentality of scarcity. They are afraid. Their resources aren’t enough to cover the job at hand.

But Jesus turns scarcity into abundance, and he uses the disciples to do it.

That’s what happens when we let God use the gifts that we bring to the table – wonderful, miraculous things can happen!

You know, the camp that is getting ready to build this new dining hall used to operate out of a mindset of scarcity, like the disciples.

About 15 years ago, they started a capital campaign to do some major improvements to the camp, including building a new dining hall.

But camp was struggling to make ends meet. They couldn’t cover their operating expenses. At some point, they ended up borrowing money from themselves. The camp spent all of the money that had been raised for the capital campaign in order to cover the regular budgeted expenses of running the organization.

Obviously, this is not OK. And they knew it wasn’t ideal when they were doing it. But they didn’t know what else to do – they were stuck, thinking that they didn’t have enough resources, and they didn’t know when or how they would ever have enough.

In the past two years or so, the executive director at this camp has worked really hard at paying back all that money that was borrowed from the capital campaign.

He got in touch with the people who care most about camp – the ones who would be likely to encourage their friends and relatives to join in the cause. He sent out emails, printed brochures, and posted information online, trying to let everyone who cared about camp know that the capital campaign was back on – we were going to finally build this new dining hall.

To get to the point of actually having that meeting yesterday, talking about the details of what the building might look like, a lot of leaps of faith had to be taken.

The folks at camp started by believing that there wasn’t enough. And then, with the involvement of many other people, they started to believe that maybe God could provide what was needed.

And God did. Last year, all the debt was eliminated and new money raised for the capital campaign. People stepped up to help. They believed in the mission and decided to let go of their own possessions in order to support the common good.

You know, that’s one theory about how this miraculous feeding miracle took place. Some people believe that lots of folks had brought lunches with them when they went out to follow Jesus that morning. But no one had enough for everyone. So no one was willing to share. Maybe they didn’t want others to be left out.

But once the disciples started to share the first loaves and fish, other people started sharing their food as well. They realized that, while none of them individually had enough, they still had something valuable to contribute. And once everyone’s contributions were added together, there were 12 baskets full of leftovers.

I don’t know if this is really what happened. Maybe the miraculous meal happened because everyone shared out of what they had, and the miracle was really in turning people from being selfish to selfless. Or maybe the more traditional understanding is true – the miracle happened because Jesus multiplied the food.

What I do know is that God chose to use the disciples to carry out this miracle. We can’t just wait for Jesus to do it all – like the disciples, we have to be willing to step out in faith when Jesus tells us to do so. We don’t know what will happen, but we know that Jesus will be with us when we take the risks he leads us to.

When we recognize the gifts that God has given us, we share those gifts with others. So like the disciples sharing bread with crowd of thousands, we realize that God has given us blessings in our lives – our family or community or belongings – and we want to share those blessings with others. In miraculous ways, Jesus will spread our gifts so that they continue to multiply the more we share them with others.

That’s what happened in the miracle of the feeding of the 5000.

And that’s what happens in our world, in our communities, when we follow the example that the disciples give to us today.

And God will bless our efforts and spread the love to more people than we could ever imagine.

Thanks be to God. Amen.