A Sermon about taking our chances with prayer

Sermons are better when you listen to them!




Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.

On Wednesday night, I went to the Colorado Symphony Orchestra concert of music from John Williams and other movie composers. The second act was 6 songs from Star Wars, which was pretty epic in itself, but the conductor was dressed like Yoda. In between the cantina band song and Princess Leia's theme song, he rattled off a list of top 10 signs you might be a Star Wars geek. One of them was the following: "you're the drunkest you've ever been in your life and you still know that the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1".

You may or may not be a Star Wars fan, but anyone can see those odds are not very good. Generally though, when playing games of chance, the odds rarely are in our favor. We're not likely to win the lottery or get rich from the slots, nor are we likely to get hit by lightning or become as famous as Madonna.

So in a world where chances are almost always stacked against us, Jesus' message in the Gospel story today of "ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you" seems like a pretty good deal.

And after reading the story, I spent quite a bit of time this week thinking about times when I've asked for things in a prayer and the results of those requests. Like the time when I spent a good portion of my childhood asking to not be gay, only to be disappointed every morning when I still had a crush on the hot football player. (and thank God that one didn’t get answered how I wanted) Or when I prayed really hard that I would get into one of the college theatre programs I applied to and really wanted to go to, only to get a rejection letter from the chair of the department. Or when I was a chaplain in a hospital and the grandmother of a young patient asked me to pray for her granddaughter to live when her heart stopped beating, and she wasn't able to be resuscitated. But then I thought about the time when I asked to be your vicar, and...well...here I am.

It got me wondering, what are the odds of asking for something in prayer actually being delivered the way we want. Looking at our Facebook page just this week gave me hope in prayer results, people who have been cured of cancer, speaking engagements that went well, interviews being successful.

So maybe there is something about House For All Sinners and Saints that makes us really good at getting our prayers answered ‘correctly’. But I know that success stories about prayer, while heartening, and joyful, still take a back seat to ones that are answered in different ways than we would like. The prayers of the people often lament at the death of loved ones, or challenge God to give an answer to why someone is not healing from their diseases, or why the asker can’t seem to hold a job.

It’s heartbreaking to hear these prayers not get answered the way the person wants, week after week...to the point where I occasionally want to interject in the middle of the prayers “we pray for the same things week after week, why don’t you do something about it, God?”

When it comes to our prayers being answered how we would like them to be, God seems fickle at best, and certainly nothing like what Jesus is appearing to tell us today in the Gospel story: Ask...seek...knock...and you’ll get it. Which gives us a view of God as a divine gumball machine, or a magician who does fancy tricks to appease us. But the resulting God is disappointing at best....much like a soda bottle that gets stuck in the machine, or Gob Bluth from Arrested Development.

This week, after reading and re reading this story, trying to find a way to get God off the hook, or explain away Jesus’ seemingly false promise with some fancy theological acrobatics, I finally just read the last sentence. Jesus tells the people he’s been talking to “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”

And it hit me that Jesus doesn’t promise a new Lexus to his disciples, or perfect relationships with family members, or the dream job they’ve been looking for (other than being disciples, of course). What he does promise though, is the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks, or seeks, or knocks.

And I think that instead of getting God off the hook for not doing things, Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit totally turns our modern view of God upside down. The prevalent view of God orchestrating the entire universe, controlling our happiness and our sadness, controlling good things that happen and pouring out evil on deserving people gets thrown out the window. As does a view of a God that can be manipulated by enough people asking for the same thing. What Jesus tells us about God in this story changes the odds of prayers getting answered to favor us because he promises the Holy Spirit. When Jesus promises the Holy Spirit as the answer to our prayers, he shows us a God that exists to live with and care for his children.

Just like God showed up in the cross 2000 years ago, in the middle of torture, pain, and agony, God shows up in our vulnerable and painful moments. God shows up through the Spirit in our lives, being present with us in the pain we feel when yet another job opportunity falls flat. The Spirit surrounds us when we stand at the bedside of our parents, or our grandparents, or our friends, as their health continues to fail. The Spirit is present in us in the personal torments we have when try to tell God that we aren’t interested in the sexual orientation we have been blessed with.

In these moments, when we pray and ask God for whatever it is that we want, we receive the Spirit, which will hold us and give us a peace that passes all understanding. Those moments of prayer, when we are vulnerable and in pain is when God shows up to walk with us, carry us, and hold us in God’s arms. And so, prayer, while it might not give you what you want, can give you what you need. It can give you the presence of the Spirit through a group of people who hold you in difficult times, and promise to kick some ass for you if needed, or come and distract you while your family argues, or become a family when yours has disowned you. God’s gift of the Spirit to us can show up when we grieve the loss of employment on facebook and are surrounded with people’s voices of encouragement early in the morning. The Spirit can show up in a friend who makes us sit and breathe for 2 minutes when we are anxious about having to say goodbye to people and places we love.

And the Spirit shows up to rejoice with us in our joys. When chemotherapy works and doctors can’t find any trace of cancer left, we’re not alone in our rejoicing...God is present with us. When we get the chance to go back to college and follow our dreams, the Spirit is present in all the joy and anxiety we experience. The Spirit shows up in the waters of Baptism, joining our voices of praise when Rafi is named by God as one of God’s children. The Spirit comes to be among us at the table, where we are fed and nourished with the body and blood of Christ.

So try it out...ask....seek....knock...the odds are 100% in your favor that the Holy Spirit’s presence will be with you.

A story about grace in the most unexpected places

Sermons are way better to listen to...and it will probably take you the same amount of time to listen!

Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity.  Amen. 

Today we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, possibly the most popular, or at least the most familiar parable that Jesus ever told.  

Which makes it tempting to preach on the other readings, since this story of the Good Samaratin is so woven into our cultural fabric, into our cliches, and into the aisles of Hallmark, Precious Moments stores, and those Willow Tree Angel figurines.  The town I grew up in is pretty famous for its Christmas light displays and one house had an elaborate display of moving lights and a story that you could listen to as you watched the lights change by tuning your car radio to a specific frequency.  It was the story of the Good Samaritan, surrounded on both ends by the birth of Jesus...essentially telling us by the ending line of the script that Jesus was our good samaritan, and would help us with all our woes.  It was schmaltzy to say the least.  

So the Good Samaritan isn’t exactly that revolutionary of a story...since it is a story about doing good things for other people.  

And it has spawned a lot of good – or at least the term Good Samaritan has been adopted by organizations that have done a lot of Good....there are Good Samaritan laws which protect caregivers from lawsuits, there are Good Samaritan hospitals, which do a lot of work for medically underprivileged folks.  There are Samaritan houses which are shelters for folks who don’t have homes of their own.  I even saw on Google that there is a Good Samaritan pet shelter for furry friends who find themselves lost on the side of the road.  

I don’t want to belittle this work, because it is indeed work that is worthy of praise and support, and I don’t at all want to say that this is an incorrect understanding of this parable.  It’s just that Jesus doesn’t tell the story of the Good Samaritan in order to say that to inherit eternal life is to do good. He tell this story in response to the question, “who is my neighbor?”

So, Jesus’ answer to the question who is our neighbor was pretty revolutionary at the time...it meant that your neighbor wasn’t just those in your own community, but your neighbor was simply anyone who wasn’t yourself. People you love and people you hate. It still means that, and it still is pretty revolutionary.  I’d much rather stay at home with a glass of wine and a good book than go out and risk finding a connection with the person who has exactly all the opposite beliefs from me.  And yet, Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, which for me probably especially means that I need to work on my relationship with the GOP.

But, this week, as I was reading the story of the Good Samaritan, a story of  how a guy gets beaten up and left for dead on the side of the road while a priest and a holy man walk past because they can’t be bothered with helping him, before a foreigner finally helps the guy out by taking him to an inn and pays for all of his medical expenses,  it dawned on me that maybe this story is ALSO about something else besides just doing good things for people you’d rather see suffer...or just ignore all together. 

And the beauty with parables is that you get to put yourself somewhere in the story, and I didn’t want to put myself in the shoes of the good samaritan because I’ve heard enough sermons in my life about how this story means I need to go do more things for other people and how bad I am at loving my neighbor that I didn’t want to subject you to the same thing...so that left me with the innkeeper who was paid to help him, the priest and holy man that couldn’t be bothered, the robbers who beat the guy up in the first place, or the man on the side of the road.  

And after thinking about myself in each of these positions, I realized that I at times play the role of each one, but found myself drawn to the story of the man who was left by the side of the road, beaten, and left for dead.  

I’m not attempting to glorify suffering, or any stupid thing like that, but I feel like being left on the side of the road might be a pretty common feeling.  Maybe sometimes you feel like you’re the beaten man by  Churches that have forced you to do all the work and you got burnt out.  Or by parents that have literally kicked you out of the house and cut you off because you came out.  Or by people who have bullied you into not speaking out on Facebook, or in real life.  Or by bosses who give you unfair performance evaluations. 

But, I know for me, when other people lay into me, I am able to bounce back up, with the help of the friends, therapists,  and family members...who help me to get back on my feet, psychologically, and move on without too much lasting damage or regret or fear of the person who hurt me.  But that is where I EXPECT that help to come from.

I wonder if the man in the story expected the priest and the holy man to help him.  Since they were supposed to be people who were good and followed the law, and presumably would have compassion...and that's what priests are for, right?  

I had written earlier this week that it was difficult to understand exactly what Samaritans were like in the first century...but I think that is untrue.  Samaritans, like black kids who walk down the streets of white neighborhoods at night, were subjected to false stereotypes, stereotypes that placed them outside the circles of compassion and kept them there.  Samaritans were the people you didn’t want to hang around with because they were different, the people that, as they were walking toward you on the same sidewalk, made you cross the street...and you certainly wouldn’t expect Samaritans to help you at all.  

 And yet, that is who helped the man on the side of the road.  The unexpected person, the man who no one would imagine would help a local.  The grace that the beaten man received came from the last person he would have expected.  

  

Which is the nature of grace, isn't it?  Sometimes grace comes from the most unexpected places, instead of the places we want it to come from.  Maybe you expect  help to come in the form of everyone living up to your high standards...but then it comes when the world doesn’t end when you fail at something.  Maybe you expect help to come from a church that won't let you down and won't disappoint you....but it really comes when you are forgiven by passing the peace with the person you resent.  Maybe you expect help to come in the form of everyone loving you and thinking you are put together and successful...but it really comes when you are loved for who you really, really are instead of for some shiny improved version of yourself.

Maybe the surprise of grace is finally just hearing the voice of God saying "you are worthy of being loved and I will walk through the darkest parts of your life with you so you don't have to do it alone"...instead of running to the fridge when no one is watching or the boyfriend who won’t love you well, or the ‘emergency cigarette’ pack that is your third one this week. Maybe grace looks like eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ and being transformed and feeling something change in you....instead of trying to take on the whole world on your own, discounting that you are created and loved, in the image of God.

You see, the thing about grace is....it often doesn't look like what we want or expect it to look like.  Which is good, because if grace looked like perfect churches, or our own willpower, or other people doing exactly what we want them to do, the world would be less like the kingdom of God and more like the kingdom of us.  Instead, in spite of our expectations for what grace looks like, grace ends up often being like the Samaritan: exactly the opposite of what we are hoping for, and yet more freeing than we could ever imagine.  Amen.

A sermon about a Judgey Jesus who reaches out to us...instead of the other way around.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from the Holy Trinity.  Amen.

I think that sometimes the people who wrote down the Gospels did not have Lutheran Preachers in mind when they did it.  Because Lutherans like to preach law and gospel, that is, the law is stuff that convict us makes us understand our broken nature and the gospel is stuff that points us to the work of the crucified and risen Christ in our lives.  And this story that we just read doesn't seem to have much gospel in it, or even law for that matter...it seems to just be a story of cranky pants Jesus who doesn't like anything that anyone says.  People who want to follow him are shut down, people who don't want to follow him are shut down, people who have some reservations about the whole thing are shut down.

Which isn't that great to hear in a group of people who are gathered around and presumably want to try their best to follow Jesus.  

Even the disciples, who are always around Jesus, and in Luke's gospel sort of understand who Jesus is, and do a pretty good job of following him get told off by Jesus.  Though, that honestly was probably for the best, since the disciples figured the best option for getting back at the town that wouldn't host Jesus was to throw cosmic fireballs at the city and make it burn to the ground...which would have been the first in a long line of self righteous Christians making a mess of things.  

At House, sometimes we talk about gospel stories having the 'Worst Good News Ever' when the good news means loving your enemies or praying for those who persecute you.  and I'm tempted to say that about this story, but at first glance there appears to be no law, or gospel. So, instead of 'Worst Good News Ever', maybe this story about judgey Jesus should be labelled 'no good news ever'

Unless you want to consider it good news that Jesus was exactly like us...sort of cynical, prone to being pissed off at people for no reason, irritated that he couldn't find a last minute hotel room but really being mad because he just should have booked it on Priceline the week before...if that kind of Jesus is good news for you...the one that is exactly like us, then great.  

But I always try to look for a little more in Jesus than just the ways in which he was human and acted like every other human in history.  Because while Jesus was fully human, and experienced human emotions and reactions to situations he was put in, he was also God.  Which is an important distinction between Jesus and myself...because try as I might, I just won't ever get to be divine.  

And so as I was considering my place in the universe as someone who is Not God, I sort of stumbled across what I think this story is getting at, instead of it just being some sort of weirdly worded rant from Christ.

A couple weeks ago we had our very first theology pub of the summer at the Irish Snug where we talked about different ways to read the Bible...and how  a Lutheran understanding of scripture is pretty radical compared to what most people here were taught to believe.  And in that discussion, several people mentioned how in their past, the Bible had been used as something that would be like a prescription for how to get closer to God.  In reading scripture and doing exactly what it says to do (or not do, as the case may be) these people were told that they would feel a deep personal connection to Jesus in their hearts.  Worship was supposed to do the same thing, they said.  Going to church meant you'd get on fire for The Lord and know that he was dwelling in your heart.  

Except, as many people noted, that didn't always happen...and they would leave bible study or worship feeling like Jesus didn't love them because they couldn't feel him in their heart .

Church folks had given them a prescription for how to follow Jesus….a single right way to be a disciple, and when it didn't work, it hurt them.  

It's pretty tempting to try to make our way God in any number of ways, and to try to be like Jesus  in all we do so that we are more holy, or more righteous, or perhaps because we want to be better than those people around us.  Maybe it looks like mining scripture verse by verse to figure out how to live.  maybe it looks like a weekly morning hike to see God in the sunrise.  maybe it looks like overcommitting at church and trying to do everything for everyone.  And in an age where Choose your own adventure books were standard childhood reading, we want to be able to just pick and choose the things that will get us closer to God, and pick the timeline on which to do them.

The guys in the story that Jesus approaches and asks to follow him also want to pick the timeline on which they'll follow God.   Of course they want to follow Jesus, but on their own terms.  One wants to bury his father and then come follow Christ, the other wants to get his affairs in order before making such a large commitment.  Both of which are noble causes, and pretty understandable.  

I totally get this mindset of wanting to follow Jesus on my own terms.  I wouldn't say that my first career choice was to be a pastor (it was actually to be a ranger for the National Park Service). And even once I settled down and realized that park rangers don't get a lot of air conditioning, and that people who paint theater sets, like I had studied to do in college, don't really have the best job security, I still wasn't running towards seminary with my arms out wide, ready to embrace the life of following Jesus for a living...and doing it publicly no less. 

Instead I felt like a better use of my time would be to go to San Francisco and work in the visuals department of Gap's corporate headquarters, spending my days dressing bAby mannequins and flying across the country telling people who worked in stores how to dress inanimate toddlers more fashionably. 

And I thought my cause was noble...seminary is expensive and I wanted to not have tons of debt when I was finished....at the time the ELCA didn't ordain gay people in relationships....I thought some life experience would make me a better pastor....

And yet here I am, right after graduation, I showed up in Chicago to study to be a pastor.  

What I learned from my plans to follow Christ on my own terms is that, in spite of my plans, God stepped in and made something different happen.  

Our plans for following Christ,  our plans for being more spiritual, for being more holy, for being better Christians...be they trying to open our hearts so Jesus can come in during worship or be they marrying a man instead of a woman because that is what the church told you to do...be they trying to read the Bible in a year or be they secretly listening to KLove when your friends aren't around....our plans to follow Christ by volunteering at food pantries or being public defenders, helping the least among us because that is what Christ would do...our plans often seem noble to us. 

Our plans seem noble even when our plan is to abandon the church completely and never look back.

Our plans are often worthy, or noble, or have solid reasons behind them, but in spite of all of our plans, God comes in to complete them because only God can do the work of.  Only God can work Gods plans in our lives and God does so in spite of our own plans...plans to follow, or plans to leave.  

In our plans to reach God, we end up being interrupted by Christ who came down from heaven so that God could reach us.  When we try to choose our own adventure toward God we start to try to do the work that only God can do...which is why when we try to reach God, God works in spite of that and reaches toward us.  God reaches toward us in a meal of bread and wine.  God reaches toward us in the words of a stranger at church who makes us feel welcome instead of alienated.  God reaches out toward us and pulls us closer to herself in a conversation that says its okay to come out of the closet or in a conversation that says its okay that you weren't able to be everything for everyone this week.  God reaches out to us in amusement parks and coffee shops, in sunsets and mountains and the beautifully gritty sidewalks of Colfax, in cathedrals and office buildings, constantly interrupting our meager attempts to reach out and be like God.  And in interrupting us and our plans, God is able to be God for us and with us, loving us unconditionally.  Amen.