Family Values, According to Whom?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus and American culture have very different ideas about family values? About what families are even for? About what Jesus himself is doing here on earth at all? Sit with that one for a second before you answer it.

Now sit with this one too: why is Jesus (seemingly) picking this fight? Why families, of all things? Why is the nonviolent guy claiming that he's here for division, with a sword in hand?

Take a guess before I tell you what I think. What would need to break open inside a household, a family, for the realm of God to get any closer to happening?


My guess circles back to the same place: hoarding. Resources kept. Power concentrated. Worth assigned arbitrarily and unevenly, generation after generation. And, here's the thing: if Jesus is for nonviolence, and if Jesus is for equity outside of the domineering, controlling systems that treat people like objects and assign their value from the outside, then of course he ends up here, at family, with something that looks like a sword in his hand. Where else would he go? This is the easiest place to start, it's the place closest to each and every one of us, that we most easily would overlook.

The Household Is Never Neutral
Even though the text says "sword" and "family division": Jesus isn't attacking families so much as exposing a pattern that's been sitting in plain view, right under our noses. Ancient households were systems of hierarchy, inheritance, loyalty, property, power. Resources flowed inward and stayed there. Worth and value are assigned (unevenly, arbitrarily based on things like birth order, gender...etc), generation to generation. Nothing like today, right?

And in Jesus' world, the household wasn't some private, sealed-off unit. A family household mirrored the larger systems of domination and accumulation running the whole show socially. Again: nothing like today, right? (I'll let you sit with that one too.)


But Jesus is here for the realm of God, come near. And in his telling, that realm arrives with a sword. Not to start a war, but to dismantle the violent, hoarding architecture built into both the household and the empire architecture it was modeled on. So, he starts by leveling the field (telling us it is enough for students to be like teachers, for slaves to be like lords/masters). And then he shows us exactly how unlevel that field already is— starting with the one place we'd expect to be safest: family. I imagine he starts with family because a significant chunk of his whole point is that you have been taught to measure your worth by systems that were never built to assign it in the first place, and those systems are...creepily sneaky and tough to pick out. Evils masquerading as good, as Bonhoeffer might say. And I don't mean that family is evil- but I do mean that some of the things family might attempt to do in the name of family can be real evil, and I think Jesus was saying the very same thing. Keep reading, you'll get what I mean with examples.

Slave Like Lord, Student Like Teacher
When Jesus says it's enough for the student to become like the teacher, the slave like the lord, he is not handing out a consolation prize. He's making an announcement: the way of Jesus, the way that opens the realm of God, doesn't assign worth by status, productivity, usefulness, or output. Whoever currently gets ranked "below" simply gets brought level with whoever's been ranked "above." And that's it. That's enough. Parallel. Equal footing. Everyone standing on the same ground, equally valuable, in the way of Jesus.

In modern terms, I like to think Jesus might put it like this: it's not a problem that billionaires and trillionaires exist! In fact, EVERYONE gets to be a billionaire and trillionaire!

Lutherans of old in the room might recognize what I'm saying here as something close to Luther's critique, called incurvatus in se — or being "curved in on onself." The problem being, the self, and the systems we build, curving inward on themselves keeping resources, status, and worth contained, protecting the status quo in the process. That's exactly the orientation Jesus is trying to get us to notice, and then move away from.

So, Jesus opens the circle way, way wider. Everyone is inherently worthy. Everyone has dignity. Everyone is valuable and that value holds even in the middle of conflict. In fact, in Jesus' telling, conflict can be (though not always, and not automatically) a sign that you're walking deep in the way of Jesus.

To refuse to be defined by family, by bad theology, or by any other system of control and dominance  is to walk in the way of Jesus. Or, to put it even more plainly: to refuse any system that denies the God-given dignity of yourself or of someone else is to walk in the way of Jesus.

What Happens When You Stop Being Afraid
So — guess what happens once you fully realize your own worth? Once you actually believe that your dignity has existed, and always has existed, entirely outside of all the fancy and mundane hierarchies we've built for measurement?

You start refusing those systems and their violence. Because you finally realize you have nothing left to fear.
When you discover that your dignity and worth are inherent, not assigned by cultural norms nor handed down by whoever's in charge in a given moment, the systems built on unequal worth begin to crack. They crack because those systems govern you by getting you to locate your worth inside them: good kid, good employee, good student, good whatever-they-need-you-to-be.

Think of the kid who leaves home because their family can't accept their queerness. Or the person who walks out of an abusive relationship because they have realized in some way finally, that they were never meant to be treated that way, under any circumstances. These are people walking in the way of Jesus.

And families, institutions, economies, and cultures organized around possession and ranking experience that kind of leveling as a threat. Of course they do. And what comes with the experience of threat?

Conflict. Suddenly parents are against children, children against parents, exactly like the text says.
"Wait — we can't ALL be billionaires and trillionaires!" ...Well. That's true, according to any system that needs us to keep competing and vying for value and status. But it's only true inside those kinds of systems. Because a machine that depends on keeping us hungry, afraid, and constantly competing for more cannot keep running once we realize we don't have to define ourselves by any of it. Because, in reality, that machine never could define us in the first place. There is in fact plenty for ALL of creation. The only place there isn't is inside a system built on violence and a scarcity it manufactured on purpose to keep itself alive and keep everyone in that system under-resourced and hurting for more.

Difficult to Manage
And here's where the next issue comes in: once you really believe you are beloved, that you are inherently worthy, that you were never meant to endure the abuses of systems that had you chasing someone else's version of your own soul or your own life, you are no longer finding so many reasons to be afraid and you become difficult to control.

Because you've discovered the only kind of freedom that's actually available: the freedom that comes from knowing, believing, and living in the truth of your own belovedness, and everyone else's, across all of existence.


People who've discovered they're free are very hard to manage inside violent systems (all those pernicious systems that exert control by assigning your value and treating you like a tool, or a product, built for extraction). You can probably see, now, why there's so much invested in making sure you never get here. Because people who know their worth stop needing to prop up those systems, stop being afraid of losing those systems, stop even participating in them. And it gets worse for the systems than that: once you know your own worth, and the worth of everyone and everything else in creation, you do a full 180 and start insisting that there is plenty to go around, and that none of us need to live this way.
Uh-oh....

Taking Up the Cross
I imagine you can guess this generates some waves.

When Jesus says " unless you take up your cross," he's naming exactly how hard it is to live this kind of life— partly because we are already complicit in these systems, and partly because the world responds to this kind of nonviolent insistence on dignity the way it always has: badly. With anger. With every stunt available to pressure you back into the role you were assigned, back into chasing the value and worth that was never yours to chase in the first place. He is also naming that, if you're not doing this work, you can't expect to be of equal worth to Jesus and Jesus' way. It's a simple equation, really (and no, it's not works righteousness, it's just the basics of following through and being a Christian): following in the way of Jesus means a different values system and that is going to generate conflict...and that sure is carrying your own cross.


It is genuinely hard to be in the middle of this kind of conflict. People take it personally. People will tell you that you're the one generating chaos, making problems. And fair enough, you are making problems. You are breaking every problematic ideal those systems rely on. But it's good trouble, in Jesus' own telling. It's actually what he came here to do.

Still, even when it's good trouble, even when we're told we're worth more than the sparrows, it hurts to be in this kind of conflict. It's frustrating to want out and discover you can't fully extract yourself, because the harsh reality is that we still have to eat, house ourselves, get ourselves from place to place. We can't wipe our hands clean of all our complicity, no matter how much we want to.


It is painful to see inherent worth clearly (really know it, in yourself and in everyone) and then watch so much of the world keep devaluing it, harming it, refusing to let creation have what it actually needs.


And yet. Following in the way of Jesus, heading toward the realm of God, means stepping away from the systems that keep inducing us to do violence in order to maintain violent control over one another. So, to stay close to Jesus, to remain among those who walk his way, we take up our cross, and we keep going.

Losing Your Soul to Find It
And when Jesus says "lose your soul/life to find it, for my sake," he means letting go of a life organized around possession, hoarding, extraction, ranking, and control of other people.

He does not mean losing your soul to uphold the very norms and dogmas that harm you or harm someone else. Remember where this whole text started: Jesus levels the field. Slaves like lords. Disciples like teachers. Everyone brought up into a dignified, abundant life—not flattened back down into someone else's hierarchy.

The promise here, tangled up in all of Jesus' hard wisdom about the conflict that different values systems and change will inevitably bring, is not that freedom is easy, or that the way of Jesus is easy. (You'll hear in a couple of weeks about Jesus' yoke being easy and his burden being light — LOLZ. We'll get there.)

Instead, the promise—the actual good news—is that abundant life is what you find on the other side of freeing yourself from systems of dominance and control. Jesus came to give you abundant life. And abundant life begins the moment you receive what has been true about you, since before you were born: that you are worthy. That you are loved. That you are of infinite value.

So the work, now, is to stop trying to fit ourselves into, or assign, or even possess, whatever this backwards world is trying to convince us could or should belong to us alone.

with joy,
Pr Sam

Next Sunday I'll be out of town, seeing a seminary friend get married. Max Del Bosque will be in the pulpit at UniLu in my place. Can't wait to hear Max's (invariably thoughtful, most often downright brilliant) perspectives. 

The Car Full of the Wrong Things
When I moved to LA, I packed my little Chevy Cavalier  (a 1993 RS, manual transmission) with everything I thought I'd need. I remember the clothing. Most of it turned out to be completely wrong for SoCal. I remember a whole arsenal of bath and beauty products — also wrong. The California climate apparently does not care about your carefully curated New York hair and makeup situation.

I remember accessories, a couple pieces of bedding, my favorite pillow. The bedding ended up being too heavy for about ten months of the year. Thank God for the pillow. Thank God for the car itself. Those were the things that actually kept me alive on the other side of that drive.

But looking back at how packed that little Cavalier was? It's kind of impressive, actually. Impressive that I thought I needed all of it. Impressive that I thought it would help. Because in a lot of ways, all of it became a hindrance as I tried to figure out how to actually live out here.

When I finally got stable housing, I had very little to operate with — what I'd driven out to LA with (much of which was not helpful) and what I picked up along the way. One pot. One fork. One knife. One spoon. One cup. Mattress on the floor. No table — I ate off a microwave box for at least a year and a half. And there are days where I genuinely  long for that simplicity once again. No real opportunity for dishes to pile up, in a situation like that, you know?

Now, every reasonable guide to preparing for a big move would have called what I did dangerous. Reckless. Unprepared. And, it probably was, to some degree.

But here is what I couldn't have known as an early twenty-something, pulling onto route 17 headed west with a car full of the wrong things: The packing to be prepared wasn't the problem. It was a symptom. Because in the end, being prepared just isn't the same thing as being ready.


And Then He Just... Sends Them
This week, Jesus gives it all away. He's been moving through towns and villages, teaching, healing, proclaiming good news of the realm of God being close by. And somewhere in all that movement, Matthew says he looks up. He sees the crowd. And he has compassion for them. Why? Because they are harassed and helpless, he says. Living in the midst of oppressive systems that are harming them severely.... They are "like sheep without a shepherd."

And then he says to his disciples: the harvest is plentiful. The workers are few. Pray for more workers.
And then — before they can process that statement (before we can even process that statement) Jesus turns and sends them.
You besties. You are the "more" workers. You are the answer to the prayer I just told you to pray.

That is a wild move. He doesn't ask if they feel prepared. He doesn't wait for their confidence and supply levels to be optimal. He just sends them with a delightfully, alarmingly light packing list.


What You're Actually Carrying
No gold. No silver. No copper. No bag. No extra tunic. Just... go.

It's easy to read this as Jesus being severe. Maybe even recklessly sending people out with nothing into a world that can be dangerous, inhospitable, and violent. But I don't think that is what is happening here.
Because what I've learned about packing the wrong things is that the things were never really the problem, but they did generate and maintain more than a few problems.

Here's what I mean. When I was cramming that Cavalier full of New York Sam's New York things  (the right outfits for the right occasions, the particular products, the accessories that communicated something specific about who I was) I wasn't packing for California and who Sam was becoming. I was trying to transport a static identity across the country in a 1993 Chevy Cavalier.

Note how I still have to tell you what kind of car it was. It's surprising I haven't also told you what color and whether it was a coupe or sedan.

At any rate: those things I had with me were, theoretically, doing something for me. Not necessarily helpful things. They were providing cover. A way to hide behind a version of myself I already knew. A particular kind of comfort that kept me from actually engaging with where I was, who was around me, what and who God was asking me become. When you're carrying that much stuff (literal, or proverbial), you can't really see where you're going. You're too busy making an attempt at maintaining what you've already got.

So when Jesus looks at his group of besties and says take nothing, I don't think he's being harsh. I think he is being mercifully intelligent and setting them up to succeed.  I think he knows the things will become a stumbling block  preventing them from seeing the baggage that can (and will, most likely) prevent them from participating in God's mission in the world. The packed things, the preparedness becomes... the need for control. The need to look competent. These things can support narratives they've already written about what this is "supposed" to look like and how it is "supposed" to be. The security of having enough and having packed and being fully prepared becomes an issue, the issue being that they won't need to depend on anyone they meet along the way, and can just bring people what they already know. IE "Dont worry, sit down and listen to me, I have things to tell YOU"... pretty colonizer-ish, in terms of behavior, no?

But Jesus gets right in the way of all of those issues before they get a chance to take root, and tells the twelve: put it all down and do not bring it.

Because the participation in God's mission begins not when we are fully prepared — but when we are willing to discover that we never were, never are, never will be...and maybe most importantly, that we never needed to be.

A Word About Sodom, Gomorrah (And Who Actually Gets It Right)
Now — I want to sit with one more thing in this text. And it's a bit painful. Jesus, at the end of this passage, invokes Sodom and Gomorrah. And if you are queer (or if you love someone who is) your stomach probably turned a bit. Those two cities have been weaponized against queer people for so long. Wielded alongside Paul's letter to the Romans (Chapter 1, especially) to justify violence, exclusion, and all kinds of sexuality-based hatred. The wound from that is real. It is deep. I am not sure it will fully heal in this age of the world.

But hear and notice this, too:
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with sexuality. And if it wasn't clear enough in the Hebrew Bible where Jesus got the reference, Jesus makes it even more explicit here in this telling from Matthew. He is not invoking these cities to condemn any particular kind of person or love. He invokes them because what brought them down was the utter refusal of hospitality. The abuse of strangers. Violence toward the vulnerable. As the prophet Ezekiel names it plainly: Sodom had pride, excess food, prosperous ease, and did not aid the poor and needy.

That's it. That's the sin. That's what Jesus is naming at the end of this passage: people's failure to be hospitable, to embrace strangers, to reject violence will result in their own destruction.

And then he is saying to his disciples: when you are met with violence, rejection, the withholding of basic human welcome, don't stay there and put up with the abuse. Get out. Shake the dust from your feet. That kind of inhospitality carries its own consequences. You don't need to take responsibility for any of it.

And I'd also like to point this out: think about who in this world has learned extraordinary hospitality because they've known extraordinary rejection. Who has built chosen family, often out of nothing. Who has learned to really see one another, to really hold one another — especially when everyone in the group is massively lacking what's needed to be prepared, and everyone has to stick together just to get by.

Queer folk. That's who.*

And these are exactly the people God sends. "These" being the folks who weren't prepared, whether through their own choices, or through the choices the world made for them. These are exactly the people through whom God builds something that lasts. That is not a coincidence.

God doesn't seem to call on people who are or feel fully prepared. Moses had a stutter. Jeremiah was a child. Mary was an unmarried girl in an occupied country. The disciples were fishermen and tax collectors and people who repeatedly didn't seem to understand. Nonetheless, they were all called. 

It seems God calls and sends the ones who say yes, with empty, open hands.

The Question For Us This Week
So the question Jesus is pressing with this peculiar, sparse, slightly aggravating packing list is not: Am I adequately prepared? Am I educated enough? Am I resourced enough? Do I have the right equipment?

The question for us this week is: What are we carrying around and coveting that is preventing us from doing the healing and loving and building God is already inviting us into?

Is it a need for achievement? Expertise? Respectability? Productivity? A need to know how everything will turn out, right, and that we'll maintain our image? Any of that sound... creepily familiar?

Here is the terrible and liberating news: we don't actually have control over how these things work out anyway. Kind of like how we think death is the end, but Jesus goes and proves otherwise with Easter, so we don't need to be afraid? Well, this time it's like this:

We don't ever have the control we think we have. We will never maintain our image anyway. Things will not go the way we plan them. And God incarnate — the one who could have arrived with every resource imaginable — chose instead a gal named Mary, a ton of tables (hardly any of which were his own) set with bread and wine, a borrowed tomb, and not much else.

He ended up on a cross because he was more committed to people than to image and success strategy. 

We are the disciples, friends. We have always been the disciples. And this mission God invites us into does not need us to be fully prepared. We just need to be ready to say yes.

So what might it do if we choose to set a few things down, in favor of being ready with a yes over trying to hang on to things for preparedness?  We could set down attachment to outcome. Appearing to have it figured out (fake it till you make it- oh I detest that line). Or maybe even just letting go of one of the many fears that manifest/whisper in your head when you're trying to go to sleep at night: you're not ready, you're not enough, you're not the right person for this, you're not prepared for what's to come...

Scripture is full of the unprepared. I think that is a huge chunk of the wisdom so many people across time are attempting to communicate to us via the Bible. Being well-resourced and fully packed was never required, nor was it ever the point. The point is participation. Right now. With the people who are all around us. Being in and with the circumstances that are actually here. Choosing the moment that is actually happening now.
Building trust. Offering hospitality. Caring for one another. The simplest way to say this is: Loving one another the way Jesus loved us.

We are called across two thousand years, through time and space, by the same Jesus who sent those twelve out into the dust and heat with nothing but authority and the instruction to go.

And the going? That is how hope gets made. That is where love takes root. That is where growth happens — not in the planning, not in the preparedness, but in the being ready to just show up.

Things will get hard. For many of us, they already are tough. Shaking the dust from your feet when you're met with violence or refusal is real, and real painful. Jesus named it. Discipleship has always included it.
But let's remember that we do not do this work alone. We do it together, with one another, and with the God who does not need us to be prepared, only to be ready and willing to say yes.

with joy,
Pr Sam

*Please to note: Queer folk are not a perfect communion of folk (other than perfect in our colorful and sparkly imperfections!). And, many other folk who have experienced the pain of rejection, who build chosen family and have had to learn to really care for one another despite the world's behaviors also build and maintain beautiful hospitality and care at the core of their communal lives. It just so happens it's Pride, and that means I'm highlighting the queers!

This sermon is for the person who's been hurt by religion and isn't sure what to do with that. It's for the one who's tired of performing faith, or who suspects the loudest versions of Christianity they see right now aren't the whole story. It's for anyone who needs permission to just... reach, or keep reaching.

The reading:
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And Matthew got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread through all that district.

Take a moment and ask yourself: Who is Jesus, to you?

Before we read this Gospel together on Sunday, I asked everyone the same question.

Maybe he’s a healer type. Maybe he’s a prophet. Maybe he’s more of a community organizer. Or maybe, for you, he’s truly divinity walking the earth, emanating light wherever he goes. My answer doesn’t matter here. What matters is who Jesus is for you.

The Jesus Who Doesn't Quite Fit
Now — and this is the hard part — read the Gospel excerpt again, and see if you notice a Jesus who is not quite like your Jesus.

You know what I mean, right? If your Jesus is the one doing miraculous healings, it might strike you that here he tells a woman it’s her own faith that heals her. Or if your Jesus is the one who dies on the cross to wipe your sins away, it might snag you that here he’s telling the Pharisees he’s come for mercy, not sacrifice.

Hold onto whatever didn’t quite agree who Jesus is for you. It will matter, a bit later on.

As I sat with all three of our readings this past week, I found a thread running through them, and it’s a strange one for a religion with such a loooong history of altar-building. Hosea, speaking for God: I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Paul, to the Romans: the promise comes not through the law but through faith (through trust, through relationship) and so it’s guaranteed to everyone, not just the people who got the rules right. And then Jesus, sitting at a table with tax collectors and sinners (the “wrong” people) when the religious professionals start asking their scrutinizing questions, he quotes Hosea right back at them: Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. You gotta love Jesus with a pithy response, quoting scripture to the scripture professionals. 

So God is not asking for sacrifice. No need for the burnt offering. (Though I do love me some incense.) No need for the performance of religion—and not just the temple-or-church kind. I mean the kind we still do, inside the building and out. The self-sacrifice that hollows you out and calls itself holiness. The exhausting project of being good enough, clean enough, sure enough, perfect enough, caring enough, etc., etc., etc. God keeps saying, across centuries, in three different readings on this one ordinary morning: that’s not what I’m after. I’m after you. I’m after a thing between you and me.

Thing is... This is also the famous weekend where Jesus says, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have come for the sick. We love this verse when we get to be the ones welcomed in. Or when we're quoting it as a justification in the face of our (many, and quite human) failures. And we should. This is good news. Jesus didn’t come only for the wealthy and the perfect. 

The Sickness That's Easy To Miss
But I want to turn it slightly, because I think there’s a sickness here that’s easy to miss. The sickness I mean has to do with our Jesus. Remember that little exercise we did, listening for the Jesus who didn’t quite line up with the one who is “ours”? The gap between the Jesus you brought with you and the Jesus who is showing up in the text?

I don’t need you to tell me what your gap is. That gets to stay private. I didn't ask for share time because I genuinely want you to think about this and be honest with yourself about it. Consider what the Jesus in this story actually does, or doesn’t do:

The woman with the extensive bleeding reaches out and grabs his clothes. And Jesus doesn’t perform a miracle according to this text. He doesn’t wave magic hands. What he does, according to this story, is turn and say: Take heart, daughter. Your faith has made you well. Except the Greek doesn’t quite say “made you well.” It says sesōken se, or, your faith has saved you. The reaching saved her. The trust saved her. Jesus is saying: this was you.

That is not a powerful "I did it for you" Jesus, by the world’s measure. That is a Jesus who tells a woman her own desperate reach was the thing that healed her. And that is very different from the version of faith on the loudest stages of our country right now.

Jesus’ version, the one we find here, is frankly kind of timid. Supportive of people who are afraid and willing to try anyway. The versions of faith we tend to encounter on the loudest stages is strong, certain, armed, and frequently very sure of who’s in and who’s out. It supports golden statues and all kinds of agendas, some we easily name as a problem, and others that even our proud, educated selves are oddly fine with, because they might benefit us one way or another. 

That big-stage version of faith is powerful, yes. It is also a sickness. And it would have no idea what to do with this Jesus in the excerpt we got today. The one at the table, the one telling people to go learn what mercy, not sacrifice means, the one who lets himself be touched and then tells people their own faith is what healed them. This Jesus refuses that over-and-above "strong" kind of power. Jesus does not refuse power itself, though. Make no mistake, there is enormous power moving through these stories. But Jesus refuses the power of the sacrifice, the altar, the laws, the empires, the strongmen. He instead chooses the power that moves through bodies and relationships: through mercy, through trust, through the dangerous tenderness of letting someone touch you and then affirming that touch. That’s not weakness, but  it’s also not what the world tends to call powerful. And simultaneously...it’s the only kind of power that has ever actually saved anyone in any lasting way, from what I can tell.

So- at any rate: whatever snagged for you earlier — whatever in this text didn’t fit the Jesus that is "Jesus for you" — I hope you'll hold him gently this week. ​Because, God desires mercy, trust, and relationship rather than sacrifice. And one of the ways we resist that invitation is by clinging to a domesticated, personal Jesus instead of letting the living Christ challenge and change us. So maybe that Jesus who didn't quite fit is exactly the one who is trying to reach you, hoping to be heard and praying to that what he's showing or telling you will work. 

A Different Kind of Power
It's pride month. And, though almost every one of my sermons is incorporating something or someone queer, I'm going to be more overt about it in the coming weeks. So- as if this sermon weren't already queer enough just in its format... are you familiar with the (queer!) artist Spencer LaJoye? They recently moved to California from the eastern side of the US, and they have a song you might recognize: Plowshare Prayer. (That link is LaJoye singing it live — go listen before you read on. Really.)

The lyrics pray that if a prayer was once used as a sword against you, this one might instead become a plowshare — something that breaks you open so you can grow.

And if that line doesn’t bring you to tears, there’s another I can’t get past:
if you don’t want healing, I just pray for peace.

Here’s what I want you to notice: Listen to that song and see if you can hear Jesus in LaJoye's voice. Because to me, that's exactly who LaJoye is channeling. 

To the queer kid wrestling with life in a compulsory heterosexual world, Jesus turns and says, hey- I see you. Your reaching is faith, and it has already saved you. To the trans person who has been denied in entirely too many ways, Jesus says, you are not dead. Even if these fools are out here as if you are. To the one who is exhausted from running the Silicon Valley treadmill and just wants to be done, Jesus says, amen. To the person who got hurt by church and has been circling the door ever since, half-hoping, half-braced for it to hurt again Jesus says, if you don’t want healing, I just pray for peace. He doesn’t even assume a cure. He lets the woman reach. He takes the girl’s hand only when asked. He sits at the table and invites us grow and learn what it means: mercy, not sacrifice.

anyone can try this, you don't have to have been in a church on Sunday...
​
Put on the Plowshare Prayer. Then sit for a moment with the place where "your Jesus" and the Jesus in this story (or even in this song!) don’t line up. Don’t fix it. Don’t resolve it. Just notice it, and ask what the Holy Spirit might be trying to offer you. Maybe it's mercy, not sacrifice.

with joy,
Pr. Sam

A few sources behind this one, in case you want to chase them down: Spencer LaJoye, whose Plowshare Prayer carried the whole back half of this sermon; and the Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine, whose work keeps is awesome about keeping us Christians away from attempting to make Jesus' own Jewish tradition a villain — in this case, as Levine points out, the woman who reaches for his cloak isn’t breaking a purity taboo, she’s a person daring to be seen, and that’s the part that matters. ​

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

This week's sermon is a direct result of the work of Sr. Ilia Delio, who came up with the idea "Free God." In her case, she said in an interview that if she were to show up at a protest, she would just have one little sign that would say "free God." Sr. Delio is a brilliant scientist and theologian, I cannot recommend her work highly enough.