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!

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.

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.