We believe in God,
who spoke light into being
before anyone could claim the sun,
who breathed life into dust
in every form it has ever taken,
and called it good.

God's love precedes every border ever drawn.
God's delight has never been limited by nation or tribe. 

We believe creation is the fullness of God's goodness,
and the inheritance of every community,
especially those whose bodies are suffering
what an entitled few have usurped for themselves.

We believe in Christ, born of a woman,
who gathers people across every line
who, without exception, calls people by name,
feeds, heals, and remains.

His insistence that every person bears the image of God
became a direct threat to every system
that feeds itself on human insecurity and fear.
He was executed. He rose beyond their reach.
We believe he rises, still.

We believe in the Holy Spirit
who at Pentecost arrived as wind and flame
and will not allow herself to be held back:
fire that does not recognize fences,
wind that has never waited for permission
going beyond every binary attempting to contain her.

We believe the Spirit moves
toward healing, toward justice,
freeing every place where God's beloved are locked down
by power's certainty that God favors them.

We believe in the church
not a building, not reducible to an institution,
but a wildly imperfect body, 
called again and again back to table.
More enduring than any nation that has ever usurped her words
to raise its flag and label its deeds holy. 

We believe in a holy communion of compassion,
forming and re-forming around the practice of love
the close-by kingdom of heaven.

We are committed to this table,
where the communion of saints gathers across every age,
where we practice making room.
A table so simple, so accessible,
that no empire, no nation, and no oppressor
​will ever fully extinguish its power
to reconstitute the Body of Christ.
Amen.


written for the people of University Lutheran Palo Alto 
by Rev. Sam R. LaDue

​

based on Acts 2:1-21 and John 20:19-23 for Pentecost Sunday, Year A
On Pentecost Sunday, we return to that locked room in John 20 — where frightened people are hiding behind heavy doors — and to the wild scene in Acts where the Spirit lands on all flesh without asking permission first. This sermon sits with the particular kind of locked room that educated, thoughtful, progressive people tend to inhabit without realizing it: the one that looks like wisdom from the inside. Into that room, and into this specific political moment where the word "Christian" is being weaponized to decide whose body counts, Pentecost arrives with breath, fire, and the ancient insistence of the prophet Joel that the Spirit falls on all flesh — not approved flesh, not respectable flesh, not economically useful flesh. All of it. The question this sermon leaves you with is not theoretical: what locked room have you mistaken for wisdom, and what would happen if you finally opened the door and let yourself (or others) out?

​The doors were locked.
John tells us why: fear. These folks were afraid. Specifically, in John's words, of "the Jews" 

...but let me translate that into modern language for our ears today: what John is describing is fear of religious leadership in cahoots with government leadership, willing to kill a totally innocent guy. Judaism is not the problem, here.

So yes. They were afraid.
And for all my joking about these stooges known as Jesus' besties, at the core of things, their fear is completely reasonable. The disciples were not cowards. They were people who had watched someone they loved be murdered for the crime of… well, no actual crime.

So there they are behind their locked door. And there goes Jesus, walking right on in anyway.
Ironically enough, he says: "Peace be with you."

Right, man. Have you seen what is happening out there? Trouble has been brewing for a while, and you yourself were publicly executed quite recently. Peace my butt.

At any rate — then he breathes on them.
Not all that unlike Genesis 2, where God breathes life into the mud creature known as Adam. Or Ezekiel, standing in that valley of dry bones saying: I can tell the truth to these bones, but if they are going to live again, God, you are going to have to breathe. Jesus breathes onto these frightened people hiding behind locked doors  in this room that has kind of become a tomb.
Or maybe even a womb.
Something enclosed. Something waiting. Something probably not meant to stay sealed forever.

And I have been thinking about that locked room-tomb-womb. Not  the disciples' - though-- I've been thinking about ours.

There is a very specific kind of locked room that educated, thoughtful, progressive people tend to live in. And the thing is: it does not look like a locked room from the inside. From the inside it looks like being informed. Wise. Ethical. Up to date. It looks like reading the right (well researched!) things and having the appropriate (logical really) opinions and mostly talking to people who already agree with you because they are intelligent and see the issues at hand clearly. From the inside, this all feels a lot like being engaged and involved and thinking critically, with clarity.

You would never guess we're operating in a room with a locked door. Unless you happened to be someone were standing on the outside. Someone like Jesus. And the Holy Spirit, who don't care about our locked doors.

So anyway, here comes Jesus through locked doors, bringing breath and Spirit, and effectively shoving people out of the room.

And you notice the direction of the Spirit in both John and Acts is outward, right? Toward the city. Toward the street. Toward other bodies. Toward the messy world outside.

It seems like a lot of spiritual language treats all things Holy Spirit as internal. Private. Interior. Personal. But based on what the excerpts we got today say, the Holy Spirit in scripture is rarely private. The Spirit interrupts. The Spirit gathers. The Spirit sends. The Spirit moves people.
Pentecost is not a story about private spirituality. Pentecost is a story about bodies and fire. Lots of moving, interacting bodies and hot, breathy fire.

There's that line from the prophet Joel in Acts: I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your elders will dream dreams. Even upon those the world has pushed to the bottom — even upon them, I will pour out my Spirit.
All flesh.

We are living in a time where our government is actively using the word Christian to justify deciding whose body-- which flesh--counts. Whose body is legally recognizable. Whose family is valid. Whose gender will be acknowledged. Whose disability is inconvenient. Whose suffering is too expensive. Whose existence can be turned into a political talking point.

And directly into that reality, Pentecost. Mx. Holy Spirit (truly a kween if ever there was one) arrives boldly declaring: all flesh. Not some flesh. Not approved flesh. Not respectable flesh. Not economically useful flesh. Just simply: all flesh. Every body in this room. Every body outside this room. Every body the world has scapegoated, ignored, criminalized, abandoned, or deemed disposable.

The Spirit falls on all flesh. Not metaphorically. Actually.
And that really matters, because Christianity as espoused by people who want it to support governmental initiatives seems to keep trying to be selective about bodies, attempting to control and put limitations on our very human, fleshy, made-in-the-image-of-God bodies.

Meanwhile: the Holy Spirit remains profoundly uninterested in our designs, and keeps landing directly on all flesh, pouring over every single body, refusing to wait for institutional permission.

And then, there is the fire. Think about what fire actually does. Fire transforms what it touches. It does not leave things unchanged. Fire burns. Fire illuminates. Fire spreads. Fire changes the temperature of the air around it. We lean on fire for life. And though we work very hard to control fire, fire is most often not especially interested in our permission or our will.

The disciples did not ask for fire. They were up in their locked room trying to stay safe together. And into that room: Jesus' breath, Mx. Holy Spirit, and good old transformative-won't-leave-you-the-same-fire.

Pentecost is not comfort arriving, unfortunately. Pentecost is transformation beginning, and continuing. And maybe that is why some folks like to reduce fire to metaphor instead of seeing it for it's literal reality. Because metaphorical fire is easier to manage. We can say "What does it mean?" to a metaphor, and get right into an intellectual rabbit hole, justifying all our categorizations and in-groups and out-groups. But actual fire does things. Actual fire changes things. This isn't about wht does it mean, it's about what it does. And what "it" does ("it" being fire, and Mx. Holy Spirit, in this case) is generate the kind of change and transformation that pushes people out of their locked rooms, away from their comfortable echo chambers, and allows people to understand one another and love better. And that-- that changes what is possible.

But here is what I notice about us  (and when I say us, I mean us here and like, the United States US). Us people who are high achievers, who read and assess and strategize and try very hard to get everything exactly right. Us people who calculate carefully, tracking whether the timing is optimal, questioning whether we are prepared enough.

Mx. Holy Spirit is the kween, and she is profoundly uninterested in all of our achieving and optimal condition tracking. Following Mx. Holy Spirit will cost you something. That is not a flaw in Christianity. That is one of its central truths. The manna arrives after the wilderness begins, other side of our locked doors. 

Mx Holy Spirit does not run risk assessments before loving people. She goes right ahead and falls on all the fleshy people and creatures the world has already dismissed: disabled folks, homeless folks, trans folks, immigrating folks, people without status, people without credentials, people our culture has decided are disposable. And, she is moving and kicking up change before respectable institutions have even figured out whether they're even willing to acknowledge her.

So what about you?

What locked room have you mistaken for wisdom?

What fear have you decorated so thoroughly that it now feels responsible?

What echo chamber have you confused with correctness?

Maybe Mx. Spirit has already set something in your life on fire. Maybe that fire is uncomfortable. Maybe it is burning away something you desperately wanted to keep. Maybe you are standing there with your hand still on the lock, desperately (and ineffectively) trying to negotiate with transformation.

There is no negotiating with a flamer like Mx. Holy Spirit, I hope you know. Nothing stays the same. Not even Jesus stayed with the disciples in the same form forever. Everything that is the Gospel keeps moving toward transformation, toward resurrection, toward release, toward becoming. Mx. Spirit is not going to let our locked room-womb-tombs stay locked forever.

So maybe Mx. Holy Spirit is asking you to let something go.
Or maybe she is simply standing there insisting that you open the damn door already.
Christianity is not about theoretical intellectual discussions held safely behind locked doors and in comfortable echo chambers. Christianity is about becoming people who dance and sing right along with that holy flamer, Mx. Holy Spirit, into the world with our actual bodies — forgiving, releasing, refusing to retain what needs to be let go, so that everyone might be free. Jesus did say, afterall, whatever sins we forgive are forgiven...whatever sins we retain are retained.

The Spirit and fire are here, beckoning us to own our power and get to work.
So, make like the disciples and quit wasting time and effort on trying to keep yourself locked up in one of those womb-room-tombs, refusing to let yourself — or others — out.


with joy,
Pr. Sam

based on Acts 1:6-14 and John 17:1-11 for the Sunday after the Ascension, Year A
On the Sunday after the Ascension, we find the disciples doing something entirely reasonable: standing there, staring up at the sky after watching Jesus disappear into clouds. Two figures in white show up and ask why they're still standing there looking upward. This sermon takes that question seriously. Not as a scolding, but as an invitation to think about what it means to hold both the vertical reach toward transcendence and the horizontal stretch toward one another at the same time. Drawing on Acts 1 and John 17, this reflection proposes a move from theology of the cross to ecology of the cross: a framework that insists God shows up at the intersections of active awe, wonder, suffering, and joy — and that the cross is not a past event but a pattern that keeps forming, without end, wherever love meets the cost of love in a world that resists love.

Two figures in white. Everyone standing there, necks craned upward, watching Jesus disappear into clouds. And then these two strangers arrive and ask: "Why are you looking toward heaven?"

…<side eye> because someone just made like a helium balloon and floated on up into the sky? What were they supposed to do? Look the other way and pretend not to notice?

But my real point here: has anyone ever been asked something in that tone? Not those words, but that energy — the "you're looking in the wrong direction, you're stuck, why are you standing there?" kind of energy. What does it feel like to be asked that — especially when what you're doing makes complete sense from the inside?

If one of the disciples had piped up and said "leave us alone! We just saw something extraordinary!"  Well, frankly, I wouldn't blame them. It's not a wrong response at all. It's pointing at something true and important and wonderfully human, but also innately more-than-human in all of us. The vertical pull is real. The upward reach toward transcendence, toward wonder, toward something larger than us — that is not naivety or escapism.

There's a professor and psychologist over at UC Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, who has spent years studying awe. Not the dramatic, Guinness Book of World Records kind — the everyday kind. The thing that stops you on a walk kind of awe. What his research keeps finding is that awe is not a detour from being present to the world. Awe is what makes us more present to the world. It recalibrates us. It shrinks the ego's grip just enough that we can actually see what — and who — is beside us. Awe and wonder make people more generous, more connected, more willing to act on behalf of others.

This is not soft new-age spirituality. This is peer-reviewed data: wonder is so powerful it is world-remaking.

So the disciples standing there, stunned, necks craned upward, with two fancy divine messengers questioning their posture? They are not failing. Even if it seems like they're being scolded a bit. What they are doing is engaging awe and wonder. And honestly, the challenge is that the stop for awe and wonder can't be the only thing they're doing. And it wasn't. Eventually they went and did exactly what people do when they've been stopped by something enormous: they gathered, they prayed, they tended one another. So in this Acts excerpt, there is a really strong vertical axis (looking up toward heaven in awe and woder)— and a really strong horizontal axis (going on, eventually, to pray with one another).

And because this is real life and not a diagram, these things also go the other way. Sometimes looking vertically is not where you find awe. Sometimes looking up, reaching for transcendence, asking where God is in all of this — is the place of unanswered prayer, unresolved grief, the exhaustion of frustration with God's absence. Sometimes vertical is where you go and nothing happens and you come back emptier than you left.

Conversely, sometimes a few horizontal glances (like an ordinary Tuesday, the meal with someone you love, the small ridiculous joy of something that just worked out, a text from a friend at exactly the right moment) is where simple, uncomplicated awe and wonder actually lives. 

An ecology of the cross — yes, I said ecology, not theology — does not assign permanent meaning or relationship type to a vertical or horizontal axis. An ecology of the cross doesn't claim, for example, that vertical is always the place of wonder and horizontal is always the place of difficulty. Instead, the ecology of the cross claims that both axes are alive, both move, both are operating with us and with God, and neither one cancels the other out.

This fluidity, the way joy and frustration and wonder and grief migrate between the axes depending on the week, is not a sign that the system is broken. It is a sign that the system is alive. It is relational. And honestly, I think it's a big part of what Jesus has been trying to show us all along.

But why are you standing there?

The excerpt we received from John today takes place before the ascension. It's well before anyone was standing there staring up at the clouds watching Jesus float away. In fact, people will be looking up to see Jesus shortly after this but  that look up in the timeline on this excerpt will be seeing Jesus on a cross, not floating into heaven. So here is Jesus, and he is praying, and what he is praying is enormous. Frankly, it should be striking some awe into people: All mine are yours and yours are mine. All of them. Everyone who comes after them.

This is not a small or private prayer. This is a performative moment. Jesus doing this rather loudly, so they all hear and see, reaching outward in every direction. Upward, downward, laterally... across time, across difference, toward people not yet born, toward communities not yet formed, toward everyone sitting in a room two thousand years later (that would be us).

There is a principle in art and geometry: a line, once drawn, has no end. It just keeps going. Sure, we might look at it and say "well the end is right there, where the ink stops" but the theory is that the line never actually stops. It's now implied. It keeps on keeping on.

Jesus, in this excerpt from John, is drawing two lines at once. Kind of like what we saw in Acts, there is a strong vertical axis and a strong horizontal axis — but Jesus uses different words for them.

Vertical: I came from you. I return to you. You are in me.
Horizontal: They are in me. I am in them. And everyone who comes after them too.

And if lines have no end, well, you can see what shape those vertical and horizontal lines make as they inevitably intersecct, right? 

And, notice: Jesus doesn't leave and leave a vacuum in his absence. Jesus leaves, intersections expand.
Whether it's Acts or John, the vertical axis is met with a strong horizontal axis across all kinds of people. Both movements are present. None are abandoned.

Why are you standing there?

Lutherans are devoted fans of Martin Luther's theology of the cross (the concept that says God is most fully revealed not through triumph, power, success, certainty, or glory, but through suffering, vulnerability, hiddenness, and the crucified Christ). A theology of the cross is not wrong, exactly. But it can become catastrophic for anyone living at any marginal social intersection. It can, inadvertently, encourage sanctified passivity, romanticize pain, spiritualize abuse, and (perhaps most perniciously) treat joy, beauty, and pleasure as somehow suspect.

Rev. Dr. Traci C. West, in her book Disruptive Christian Ethics, asks a question that highlights some of the trouble that can accidentally crop up with unexamined language and behaviors around theology of the cross gone wrong. She asks about what we are doing when predominantly fair-skinned communities build their entire theology of salvation around the suffering of a brown-skinned man. What are we doing when we speak of sacrifice of a brown man for our sake, as we approach a communion table--meanwhile, outside the sanctuary, brown and Black bodies are still being subjected to violence that no one is calling redemptive.

Rev Dr. West is not saying: abandon the cross or abandon communion. She is asking in some way however. what is your theology of the cross actually doing in the room and in the world? Who benefits from a framework that centers suffering? Who has historically been asked to suffer more as a result? What does it mean to proclaim the redemptive death of a brown body among people who hold social power over brown bodies in the world outside these walls?

This is uncomfortable. It should be. Discomfort is not the enemy, it is the beginning of honesty. And that honest discomfort is exactly where an ecology of the cross begins. Or, to use a great old Lutheranism: this is where we begin calling the thing a thing.

This is precisely why the move from thinking theology of the cross to living an ecology of the cross matters — not just in our brains, but for our whole earth. An ecology of the cross is an ongoing, ever-moving series of intersections, continuously demonstrating that God refuses to exit, even when the intersection becomes violent.

The cross is not the mechanism of a transaction. It is the shape love takes when it refuses to extract itself from a world that is causing harm. An ecology of the cross is what happens when the vertical and horizontal are both held fully — at cost, without flinching.

An ecology of the cross keeps us mindful that the cross is not behind us. The cross is a pattern that keeps forming, and re-forming, at every intersection of the vertical and horizontal, in every ordinary week, wherever love meets the cost of love in a world that resists love. Every time those two lines cross (vertical- awe, wonder, horizontal- community, one another, creation relationships) the cross is happening again. And because lines have no end — it keeps forming. Outward. Without end.

But, why are you standing there?

The horizontal axis of this whole situation can be really difficult, too. Relationships are genuinely hard. Community is hard. The work of showing up, again and again, in the same room with people who are different from you, who sometimes hurt you, who sometimes need more than you have, who you have to set and re-set boundaries with, who are aging or dying when you don't want to see it happen is really, really hard.

I am not convinced this is a sign that something has gone wrong. I'm not even convinced that the difficulty of the horizontal axis is an obstacle to knowing God. Based on Acts and John today, it seems to me these difficulties and challenges become the primary sites where God is known.

In Acts, the disciples move from their stunned awe to praying with their community. In John, Jesus specifically performs a prayer that speaks of how all his are God's and God's are his, praying for the unity of all in the same way that he and God are united. It's a whole ecology of knowing God and God knowing us.

In a living ecosystem, health requires that everything participate in the upkeep of the whole. Robin Wall Kimmerer (in her book Braiding Sweetgrass) calls this Reciprocal Maintenance. It doesn't have to be done perfectly. Nor without strain. But persistently, reciprocally, with the understanding that your participation matters to the whole even when you cannot see how.

This is what the horizontal axis of the ecology of the cross looks like from the inside: showing up anyway. Tending what is yours to tend. Being a truth-teller (this is also known as prophecy). Accepting repair when it is offered. None of this is glamorous, unfortunately, and none of it moves at the speed of ascension.

In fact, all of this unglamorous work moves at the speed of human relationship and trust, which is slow, and sometimes painful, and absolutely necessary. And yes sometimes this also means knowing when a particular relationship is asking more than is yours to give. The ecology of the cross we see illustrated for us here in John and Acts does not demand infinite self-expenditure. Jesus himself told people to shake the dust off their feet. There is a difference between reciprocal maintenance and unilateral depletion. Knowing when to stay and when to go is not a betrayal of that horizontal axis of care and community-- it is part of tending to the ecology of the cross with prophetic honesty and care. The cross is strong and alive enough to hold that discernment. 

And remember what I said way back at the beginning of this longer than usual reflection: this is real life, not a diagram. The horizontal aspects of the ecology of the cross are not all a downer. Sometimes these are the site of awe and wonder, too. So:

Why are you standing there?

I can't be sure about your core answers and convictions. But I can tell you that I am standing here because this — right here — is where the lines intersect for me. The difficulty and the joy and the awe. The tension of the vertical reach and the horizontal stretch. The frustration and the wonder. All of it.

 This is where God keeps showing up, and so this is where I am also called to keep showing up.

We can't let the weight of the world, the exhaustion of the moment, or even the supposed pragmatism of a worldly "wisdom" that says there's no time talk us out of awe and wonder.

Why not proverbially look up for a while, once in a while? Awe and wonder are not a luxury. Keltner's research shows that clear as day. The disciples standing there, stunned and still, show the very same. Wonder is world-remaking-- it's 50% of the ecology of the cross that Jesus so beautifully illustrated for us, and we need it to keep going. Because living an ecology of the cross includes encountering people and situations across every difference and challenge you can name, and plenty you haven't even thought of yet- and those differences without awe and wonder to help us along, will zap all of our energy and joy and ability to be present to one another, connected to one another (and therefore also connected to God). And, mind that the unity Jesus prays for in this excerpt is not uniformity. It is mutual indwelling across all of our individual particularities. Which is harder than sameness — and more beautiful. All the more reason we need to make sure we take time for wonder and awe.

The cross keeps forming, again and again and again. It has been forming since before we arrived, and it will keep forming after we leave. God keeps showing up at the intersections- in the vertical reach and the horizontal stretch, in the upper room and in the ascension cloud, in the frustrating prayer and the unexpected weekday gladness, in the sufferings and the joys — just waiting for us to join on in.

Why are you standing there?

Maybe because it's time to move to the next intersection.
Maybe because it's exactly where you need to be.

with joy,
Rev. Sam

This sermon is inspired by, and built in no small part on the brilliant work of: 
Dr. Dacher Keltner: his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a genuine gift.
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass is an outstanding read for any and every person who wants to live life well.
Rev. Dr. Traci C. West, whose book Disruptive Christian Ethics is brilliant, and full of questions and challenges the church desperately needs to face and wrestle with.

based on John 14:15–21 for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A

A few of you have asked me about my thing with the bees. Bee jewelry makes it onto my jacket every weekend, and there are a handful of reasons for that, but one of the biggest comes from the Easter Vigil liturgy, the Exsultet.
There's this line about the Paschal candle being produced through the work of the bees and human hands together. And I love that image because the production of the very first that comes into our darkened sanctuary after Good Friday is presented not as ressurection magic, but as collaborative effort betwen us, and the bees. Tiny creatures. Human labor. Repetitive work that, brought together, creates the first light in the room otherwise left like a tomb.
Bees do incredibly small work. Almost invisible work. Tiny flights and movements. Tiny acts of pollination.
And yet? Lose the bees, and entire ecosystems begin collapsing.
We so often buy into this myth that meaningful change happens in one giant dramatic moment. But most meaningful change does not work like a lightning strike. It works like mycelial networks underground. Like roots cracking concrete. Like the work of the bees. Even the movements we think of as rather sudden — Civil Rights. Stonewall. BLM in 2020 — those were visible peaks of much longer accumulated labor. Deep community organizing. Conversation. Protest. Feeding people. Acts of art. Presence. Refusing disappearance or silencing.
Tiny, repeated acts that eventually changed entire landscapes. Sometimes with a hallmark moment we all name and remember, like Stonewall. Sometimes without one — which is its own kind of reckoning, like the slow-built pathways of Christian Nationalism that we're watching now. Those were also built one tiny act at a time.
We are in this passage again — a continuation of what came last week, all of it building toward Jesus' official taking of leave. Ascension is coming. Pentecost is coming.
The disciples seem anxious as hell. Those exact words are not written down — but come on. You can hear it in the text. Jesus keeps saying things like do not let your hearts be troubled and I will not leave you orphaned. Nobody says those things when everyone's feeling great. These are the things we say when fear and anxiety are already filling the room.
And it makes sense that the disciples would be fearful. These were people hoping for something clearer. Stronger. Faster. They were living under empire — violence, occupation, exploitation. Their expectations had been wrapped up in a militaristic response to a militaristic regime, and what they received instead was a guy on a cross who then seemed to come back to life. Awesome party trick — but not exactly the thing that feels like it's going to bring down the soldier with the threatening sword when he's demanding more supplies, more money, more compliance from your family.
Any of us would want certainty. Okay, Jesus, sure — God in all of us and in you, but… when do we win?
They wanted specific dates. A clear plan. An underdog victory story. They wanted something to cling to that might make them stop being afraid.
Jesus does not give them a single one of those things.
Instead, he gives them commandments. And if you want to get really technical, he gives them a commandment: love one another as I have loved you. Which honestly sounds deeply unsexy compared to the underdogs taking over and coming out on top. But the wisdom someone thought worth writing down for us to receive is: keep my commandments. Love one another.
The disciples want a conquering system. Jesus responds with an ecology.
They want domination. Jesus responds with pathways for relationship.
They want certainty. Jesus responds by giving them practices. Tiny, repeated acts of love — just the minuscule daily work of the bees.
I think this excerpt from John is easily distorted because we hear if you love me, you will keep my commandments as moral pressure. Like Jesus is standing there with a clipboard. But in John's gospel, commandments are not a list of rules to follow. And in fact, commandments aren't even a list of rules to follow in the Hebrew Bible — they are suggestions for how we live better together, and with God. The commandment here is: love one another as I have loved you. That's it.
Which means Jesus is not saying: prove yourself spiritually impressive. Be some kind of saint. In fact, it's quite the opposite — Jesus is saying: when you participate in love, you participate in God. If you are loving, you know me and you are doing the thing required of you.
This whole chapter is soaked in mutual indwelling language. I am in God. God is in me. I am in you. You are in me. This is ecosystem language. Relational language. Love circulates. Care circulates. Courage circulates. God is not the distant emperor somewhere above the clouds. This is not far from what Luke is writing in Acts: in God we live and move and have our being. God with us via connection, truth, nourishment, courage, protest, mercy, song, bread — through showing up for one another again and again and again.
Zero words about perfection. Lots of words pointing toward participation and collaboration. Like the work of the bees, and human hands.
I also think we can easily distort this passage when we hear I will not leave you orphaned and interpret it as just a line of comfort. In fact, I think this might be the central line of the whole excerpt — but maybe not for the reasons we were first taught.
Because notice: Jesus does not promise the disciples will stop feeling afraid. He does not promise that empire and its overbearing problems disappear tomorrow. There is no promise that the hurts and frustrations and pains will go away. He does not promise certainty beyond this: certainly they will continue to see him and experience him — God — via loving one another.
Maybe I will not leave you orphaned is way less about comfort — and in fact, making it primarily about comfort might be what makes it lose its teeth. Maybe I will not leave you orphaned is more an instructive reminder: you are not orphaned when you remain bound together in love. You are not orphaned when the work continues. You are not orphaned when people keep feeding each other, protecting each other, telling the truth, tending wounds, making art, singing songs, blessing what is breaking, refusing to disappear or silence one another — faithfully continuing on, even when we don't feel like we're getting it quite right.
The world teaches us that power comes through domination.
Jesus skips all of that and insists that abundant life comes through stubborn, ordinary, repeated acts of love. The basic, everyday work of the bees.
And honestly? Bees themselves are not perfect little symbols. Bee colonies operate with hierarchy. They've got their own disagreements, chaos, and problems. They are strange little creatures — just like we are. But they keep participating in the work that sustains life beyond themselves.
Maybe that is the core of discipleship too. Because a lot of us — whether we'll admit it or not — believe that the best way to live well and abundantly is primarily to get things correct, to ensure we entirely dismantle the problems as we go. But that doesn't really work out. All we end up doing is either avoiding the simple everyday work, or reifying the very systems of destruction we claim we're trying to dismantle.
No human is perfect. We are all horribly inconsistent. There is no moral purity among us — and honestly, the more certain someone is, the more suspicious I become.
So maybe that's the invitation and reminder this week. Not perfection. Not moral purity. Not certainty. None of these are necessary.
Just: keep practicing love anyway. Keep participating in courage anyway. Keep telling the truth anyway. Keep blessing what is breaking anyway. Keep on keeping on in the way of Jesus.
Tiny acts. Tiny mercies. Tiny bits of courage.
Because the kingdom of God doesn't come in like a military coup. It comes in more like tree roots cracking up a cement sidewalk. It's the little in-and-out, every-day work of the bees — that eventually becomes that collaborative first light, in a world filled with fear and anxiety, but aching for hope.

​with joy,
Pr. Sam

based on Matthew 28:16-20 and Genesis 1:1-2 for Trinity Sunday, Year A


Before we go anywhere, watch this ridiculous video. It's three minutes, it's St. Patrick, and it's the best little summary of why we should all be nervous when Trinity Sunday rolls around: Lutheran Satire — St. Patrick's Bad Analogies.

Every year at least a few preachers (why, I genuinely do not know) attempt to blaze a brand-new trail and explain something Christians have spent two thousand years failing to explain. Father. Son. Holy Spirit. Three. One. One. Three. At some point, every Trinity sermon becomes a hostage negotiation with mystery. The preacher backs slowly toward the analogy that's going to set everybody free, and the analogy turns out to be a heresy. Foiled again!

So, I don't think explaining is the point of Trinity Sunday. Wondering is. Noticing is. Maybe even just plain ol' protesting, is. So this past week at church, I didn't preach at anyone. I asked the room to wonder and notice with me, and then tossed in the protest idea on top.

Here's what we did: People found a couple of buddies and everyone had a set of questions with about eight minutes to (quickly) move through the questions and share with one another. The invitation was to think about transformation. About the experiences that actually change us. And then to listen to each other for themes, for patterns, for the kinds of places and situations that seem to be generative. The kinds of places that teach us something. These were the questions:

1) Tell a (short) story about a time when you changed your mind
about something important. What happened? What made that change possible?


2) Where have you learned the most important things in your life? What kinds of places seem to teach us things we could not have learned otherwise?


3) When have you encountered something that did not fit your expectations? Something that forced you to rethink what you thought you knew.

If you weren't in the room, sit with those questions yourself for a minute before you keep reading. What did you notice? What showed up over and over? Were there patterns in the kinds of experiences that changed people? Patterns in the kinds of places where that change tended to happen?

Here's what almost always surfaces when we do this:
Very few of us changed because someone handed us a perfectly correct formula. Most of us changed because experience interrupted our certainty. Because reality turned out to be larger than our categories. Because of some encounter (with creation, with another person, with a moment we didn't see coming) and not because we sat down and reasoned our way, ex nihilo, from nothing, into a new self.

And here's what's interesting: I'd argue that is exactly where scripture keeps trying to point us, too. Not toward certainty. Toward noticing that our growth and transformation comes through experiences that showed us our understandings are far more multi-faceted than we initially thought. Nothing in scripture is static. Everything is in a state of becoming, and comes with all kinds of fluctuations. And the becoming doesn't happen inside the safe house of certainty—it happens in the wilderness, in threshold spaces, in the places where co-creation is actually underway, in the encounters where entities are being made and remade together.

Start at the very beginning. Genesis begins with co-creation. It is not God alone, conjuring out of a void. We're told there are already waters, and there is already spirit--ruach—hovering over the face of those waters. Which is kind of wild, when you sit with it. There's no doctrine here. No neat categories. No proof of correctness offered up front. The very first thing this creation story hands us is mystery and movement: God, co-creating with elements—water, and mud, and words, and Spirit. God who, at one point in these stories, is even referred to as they. There is a multiplicity already inherent in the text. (And to be clear, I'm not reading that "they" as a tidy Trinitarian proof tucked into Genesis for us to find later. It's stranger and more interesting than that. It's the plurality that's just there, in the text, before we Christians showed up attempting to tame and colonize.)

And that multiplicity carries forward, too. God met in many experiences, many modalities, mostly in wild and in-between places. In fire (burning bush, anyone?), in wind, etc. The Israelites receive the commandments while wandering. Moses meets God in the wilderness, and then on a mountaintop. Hagar meets God in the face of death in a desert. Elijah meets God in the wilderness. Desert. In-between. Threshold. These spaces keep becoming revelation spaces—and maybe that's precisely because certainty and comfort let us build neat categories, and the neat categories become cages, and the cages let us... relax so much that we stop paying attention.

Then Matthew takes us to one more threshold, one more creation moment. A mountain top. (Nice parallel to Sinai, no?). The risen Christ (yet another form God is showing up) now turning to the disciples and saying, essentially: it's all you, folks!" And listen to the line that comes right before he says it: "they worshiped him; but some doubted." Uncertainty stays in the frame. Nobody graduates into perfect clarity. And yet Jesus (God- three in one, one in three) commissions these doubting, faltering, full of terrible ideas and ill-conceived notion people to go and do the work of co-creating the close-by realm of heaven anyway. With God. Just Aas they are.

So let me ask the real question:

What if Trinity Sunday is less about pinning God down, and more like a little tricky protest weekend that is in actuality asking us to show up with our little protest signs that say "free God." What I mean is, free God of the cages and the assumed constancy and the never-changing-ness and the doctrines we have built around God for centuries. 

Because here is the thing: the cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Every time we decide in advance who God is and what God will and won't do, we are not only shrinking God, we are shrinking ourselves, and shrinking all of creation. We are shrinking the very possibilities, the potential, the hope for what we might yet come to be in more alignment with the realm of God.

The cages we build for God become the cages we build for ourselves. Let me say that twice, because it's the whole sermon. Trinity, Genesis, wilderness, the Great Commission-- all of them keep telling us the same thing: God exceeds our categories, and God keeps inviting unfinished people into the ongoing work of becoming, with God, in a world that is in an ongoing process of becoming.

So you see, I think maybe Trinity Sunday is not primarily a doctrine to explain, but a protest against every attempt to reduce God to a fixed category. Because God exceeds our categories, human beings and creation remain unfinished, invited into ongoing co-creation and transformation with God.

The disciples leave that mountain unfinished. Still wondering. Still becoming. Still uncertain. The text literally says they were doubting—faltering—and it does not seem to have been a problem for Christ. They don't leave only with their doubt. They leave with a responsibility: to keep walking with Jesus, with God, to keep becoming and to help others come along.

And the same is true for us. The future is still open. The kingdom of heaven that is so close at hand is not quite here yet. And God entrusts that unfinished future to this unfinished creation—that Genesis story does, after all say "in the beginning" -- not "in the end"... which means we are somewhere gloriously in the middle, for now.

So here's where I'll leave you, in the in-between, where the becoming is still happening: What might grow among us—if we just freed God, and let the collaboration really take off?

with joy,
Pr. Sam