I am so tired of waiting.
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two--
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

The Artist Who Listened for Something More

There's a story my teacher John Flaherty used to tell about a large church event held in an arena.
It was a big event. More than 500 people.

A couple commissioners had ordered new custom communion ware for the event. They met with an artist and explained exactly what they wanted: cups, a chalice, everything needed for communion in this enormous arena setting. The artist listened to all of their requests. Listened. Nodded.

Then, as the date got closer, they kept contacting the artist. Are they ready yet? No. Not yet. Finally, in the eleventh hour, the artist said the pieces were ready, come and get them.

The commissioners went to pick them up and discovered that the cups and chalice were nothing like what they had requested.

Instead of a chalice, the artist had made a collection of small bowls. And when they used them for communion, they discovered that the bowls could not simply be passed from one person to another by the rim or handed over at a polite distance. Hands had to touch hands. People had to move closer to one another. The way those bowls were made transformed this huge arena into an intimate experience of Jesus at table, into hands remaining open for receiving (rather than grasping at the stem of a chalice, despite the enormity of the room.

The artist had listened to the commissioners. But apparently, the artist had also listened, and noticed the need for something more—like what mattered most for the greater field of people involved in this communion celebration. And those two things were not asking for the same thing. The artist noticed something the commissioners had missed. The commissioners knew what they wanted. The artist was paying attention to what was needed.

And the artist was willing to take on some disruption and conflict to do it. And the room was willing to be interrupted into a new experience. And in the end- well, people enjoyed being at table with Jesus.

So what did the artist notice that everyone else had missed?

What Forms Us
My area of study — Affect Theory — asks a deceptively simple question: *What forms us?* Not just ideas, but relationships, environments, habits, institutions, the spaces we inhabit and design, intentional or unintentional.

Everything is forming us in one way or another. And we are also forming all the things. This is not necessarily an equal playing field — but it *is* an ecological field, and we, and all of our systems and concepts and creation, are all players.

For example: I came across a thinker recently who said, "Capitalism turns autonomy into isolation, then tells us that consent is the only thing that matters."

And if we accept that as an accurate statement, that thinker is saying that capitalism is forming us. It does not just sell us things. It trains us to see our whole ecology, our entire relational field, as a market. It teaches us to ask: What works? What succeeds? What produces the best return? What can I choose? What can I control? What can I buy, once the relationships and support systems that might inhibit my autonomy have been stripped away?

This kind of affective setting, this market-shaped way of seeing and being, can take the story about the artist and turn it into a story of rugged individualism. *The artist heard the muse's call and responded!*

It can take Hughes' poem and turn it into the story of the bleeding-heart poet, continuously wounded by an inherently imperfect world full of pain, willing to wound the world further just to try to understand.
Poor chap.*

This kind of autonomous, isolated setting, where we prize individual choice and then purchase what markets tell us matters, forms us — making it nearly impossible to recognize the inner workings of stories like the one about the artist, or Hughes' poem, or Jesus' rather difficult parables.

Wrong Question, Wrong Gospel
So. This difficult, paradoxical story from Jesus in Matthew.

In a market-driven setting, we lean into the idea that obviously we just need to focus on what kind of soil we need to be, right? Because it's about optimal conditions. And that explanation is literally handed to us in scripture! (Gee thanks, Matthew—though many scholars think this explanation reflects Matthew's community more than Jesus' original telling.)

Or another take: what kind of soil we should cultivate, right? Another obvious recipe for a successful church. Again, optimal conditions.

Or-here's a creative take-skip the soil! What kind of gardener are we?! Again, recipe for a successful church or community. Lots of control and autonomy. Lots of concern about where our efforts will produce the greatest returns.

But here's the thing: Notice the concepts every one of those interpretations is quietly holding onto:
Who deserves?
Who is good?
Where will investment yield?
...They're all centering around an economy of scarcity.

There's not much participation in the ecological field of becoming together with the seemingly frivolous sower of seeds, when you're operating under a scarcity model where we quickly label things and try to predict outcomes. There isn't much attention given to sensing what that sower is actually up to in this economy. What we have, instead, is scarcity and pre-programmed labeling and categorizing as ways of living.

When was the last time you were in an environment where you were told there isn't enough to go around, and there was lots of labeling and categorizing of people, and it *really* helped everyone—you included— generously grow and explore?

...

Yeah. Same for me. That's about what I thought.
Not really productive for any of us. And since Jesus says he's here for abundant life for all, I say all those interpretations are (while historically very present, and apparently important at one point in time) keeping us in servitude to systems that won't set or keep us free, today.

We Are All of It
So then what is this about? Why the artist story and the Hughes poem and the Affect Theory concept on top of the Gospel text?

I think today, we're presented with a field of relationality situation.

Not relativism, mind you, but an issue of faithful, living discipleship that must be open to interruption. Or, in Hughes' words, curiously looking to "see what worms are eating at the rind" —and willingly opting to respond with unanticipated generous disruption, right along with that ridiculously generous Sower throwing seeds all over the place with no concern for potential returns.

Because if we're willing to be honest with ourselves:
We're all the different kinds of soils.
We're also all the birds and creatures picking away at those seeds sown.
And we're all the different seeds — even (maybe often) the ones who gave up when the going got rough.

None of these is a permanent identity. Yet, we have all played every role in this story, and all of it-- the roles we've been told about, the interpretations we carry, the ways we label ourselves-- this whole big interdependent relational field of us and everything else? All of it is forming us. All of it is shaping how we think and act and go about being in the world. We may not even be noticing. We may even be formed to not notice in more than a few cases.

In the face of that (overwhelming, honestly) reality, what is this environment doing to faithful discipleship? How might we be the faithful disciples we proclaim we intend to be?

It's a sticky situation. Just think again about that list of interpretations we looked at. Every one of them is rooted in an economy of scarcity. Winner/loser. Every one carries some variation of more life for some than others based on more correctness or less, more profitability, or less, more attractiveness, or less. All of which lines up beautifully with the logic of markets. But it does not line up with this wildly generous, even somewhat embarrassingly irresponsible seed-sower who disruptively, frankly, tosses their seeds all over the place and lets what happens happen.

The sower refuses to calculate who or what is deserving. The sower refuses to limit possibilities. The sower doesn't look for ideal market trends. The sower seems to know that simply scattering the seeds will have its effects on that relational field, and so the sower goes along, ridiculously tossing out plenty of seeds all over the place with abandon.

The point here isn't self-classification and a confirming pat on the back, or a needling until we can back-pat ourselves for following the ideal rules and achieving the ideal labels (like we could, anyway, in this context?).

The point is attention: "Let those who have ears hear"

Attention to what is actually happening in the relational field we're living in. Attention to what we are receiving. Attention to what we are choking out. Attention to what we are picking up and devouring before it even takes root. Attention to the wildly generous Sower's scattering, everywhere.

Everything is forming us. Faithfulness is choosing the kind of attention that allows us to join God's absurd, disruptive generosity—attention to what draws us out of isolation, attention to what deepens communion, attention until we notice all the little changes and interruptions and disruptions rippling throughout this relational field we live in, welcome and unwelcome. And then choosing to generously join in.

Generous Disruption, Rippling Outward
I think so often of that artist who defied all the requests made of them and changed a whole arena's worth of people's experience of Jesus in the process.

Attention to what was needed, what mattered, to the disruption the Sower was sowing resulted in generous disruption further down the line, right alongside the Holy Spirit, via simple bowls with (consecrated) liquid in them, passed between human hands.

That artist changed my teacher John (who was one of the commissioners, and told me the story), and me through John telling me the story. I can't even tell you how many more, considering how often John —and now I— have retold it.

The artist paid attention to the commissioners and the whole relational field they were situated in. They were attentive to the needs, and they noticed the opportunity for disruptive generosity, and were themselves willing to take on that chance of engaging in more generous disruption. And then that little generous disruption became an even more generous disruption, rippling outward—for the sake of deeper communion that changed people.

We need this. This world *needs* this.

I would say this world is even begging for this kind of faithful discipleship. Discipleship that is not only willingly interrupted by what matters, but then willingly responds with (admittedly costly) generous disruption right along with that ridiculously generous Sower who doesn't seem to give a damn about the rules of wisdom concerning where we will get the best returns, or where it would be most wise to plant the seeds. The sower who keeps tossing the seeds out there all over the place, refusing calculation because they seem to trust that generosity and relational fields are far more fertile than what a market can predict.

God is scattering possibilities throughout the whole entire field of relationality that we're living in. We can't even escape it if we want to.

So perhaps faithful discipleship begins with refusing to wait passively for the right soil and optimal conditions. And instead, faithful discipleship begins with embracing the disruptions God is already throwing our way — responding with generous disruption right along with that absurdly frivolous seed-Sower.

As for me? In the ever-wise, and truly inspired, words of Langston Hughes:

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. 

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

On Matthew 5:13-20 | from Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026

Let's start in a spot that's a bit strange-- With a woman whose name we aren’t even given, from a story that isn’t even part of this past Sunday's lectionary excerpts.

You know the story in Genesis, the one where Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt?

She’s fleeing a city that is being destroyed. But she looks back. And she becomes salt.

For generations, this story has most often been told as a cautionary tale. When God tells you to go, don’t hesitate- get up and go. Follow the directions. Don’t look back, lest you too become a pillar of salt!

But that interpretation doesn’t sit very comfortably with what Jesus later says about salt, or about fulfilling the law. And I think we actually need to think about Lot’s wife in order to hear what Jesus has to say, today, clearly.

Because here’s the thing: Lot’s wife didn’t refuse to leave. She left the city. God said it was time to go, and she went, right along with her husband and other folk.

What she refused to do was make a clean break, as if the people she was leaving behind were disposable. She went ahead and looked back toward where her life had been. Toward the people who shaped her. Toward the neighbors, the children, the relationships, the losses. Toward the destruction. Toward the truth of what had happened.

And in that act of looking back while still moving forward, she became something valuable-- salt. A monument to a woman stubbornly clinging to exactly who she was created to be: Rooted in both her past and her present, holding the two together, difficult as that may be.

She refuses the lie of the clean break. She refuses to act as though the city and people she’s leaving behind are simply expendable. And in some ways, that refusal costs her-- everyone else leaves her there. (I guess Lot didn’t fully appreciate the potentialities of a literally salty wife.)

So--A woman so rooted in who she is that she refuses to let even God’s command to flee and not look back shake her loose from herself. So rooted, that she becomes salt itself. Hang on to that image and those values, and now let's turn back to Jesus, according to Matthew 5:13-20.

Jesus, speaking to people gathered around him on a mountain, says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Not you should be. Not try harder to become. Just… you are.

The thing about salt and light is that neither has to decide to do its job.
Salt doesn’t work up the courage to be salty. It simply is. Light doesn’t psych itself up to shine. It shines. That’s its nature.

Now, what I'm about to say next may feel a little heretical to our Lutheran sensibilities, and it may go against our Protestant work ethic, but try to stay with me:

What if being salt of the earth and light of the world is not about serving others, directly.
What if being salt of the earth and light of the world is something closer to what Lot’s wife has shown us?

Being salt of the earth may be about refusing to be anything other than who you are. Refusing to forget who you’ve been. Refusing to be diluted, flattened, or hidden in favor of what’s easier or more socially acceptable.

Now, we don’t want to become monuments like Lot’s wife. She’s already got that role covered.
And yet, we are salt of the earth and light of the world.

Which means we are called to be so grounded in the image of God stamped into us that the upside-down kingdom of God comes closer simply because we are being so fully, so exactly who we were made to be.

Take that in for a moment. Because it carries some weight.

Lot’s wife looked back. She insisted on remembering. And she became something incredibly valuable: pure salt. And then everyone else walked away.

Being rooted in our salt-of-the-earth-ness, our light-of-the-world-ness, doesn’t always play nicely with maintaining the status quo.

Systems that oppress, exploit, and uphold illusions of goodness are not especially afraid of kindness, per se. Kindness is pretty easy to overcome.

But those systems, they are afraid of integrity. Of character. Of grit. They fear people who know who they are. People who remember where they come from. People who insist on carrying their complex histories instead of erasing them for convenience (hello, lies of race, lies of whiteness, lies of white supremacy-- all of which ask us to break from our ancestral bodies of self in favor stories that make us far easier to control and manipulate to the detriment of many and gain of an elite few).

Oppressive systems and the people who perpetuate those systems are terrified of people who refuse to become flavorless or hide their God-given light in order to survive.

To live from the roots of who God created you to be will draw attention. It will provoke criticism. It may stir anger in those who benefit from things staying exactly as they are.

After all, have you heard what they did to Jesus of Nazareth? To John the Baptist?

And yet-- and yet

Living this way also brings sanctuary. Joy. Freedom. Energy that doesn’t burn out but keeps replenishing itself. This kind of life draws from divine energy itself, magnifying and refracting wherever it goes, especially when others are walking this path alongside you.

And that line about salt losing its flavor? That’s a joke, you realize, right? I often picture Jesus in this scene with a knowing nod and smirk, twinkle in his eye while he watches folk in the room realize the absurdity of what he's saying and the obvious parallel:

Salt doesn’t lose its flavor.  Sodium chloride is sodium chloride. It doesn't go stale. And neither do you. The only thing that can happen is that salt can be diluted, mixed into or compromised or replaced by things that resemble salt. But at the end of the day, you are being told that you are salt- and if you are salt you simply cannot be anything other than what you are: salt. Therefore, you cannot lose your salt. And if you are being told that you are light, then you cannot be anything other than what you are, light. You cannot lose your light.

You are salt. You are light. Made in the image of God. Valuable. Powerful. Grounding. Guiding.

Over the last few weeks, those of us who gather in person at University Lutheran have been doing some small simple practices.

We’ve been checking in with one another. Naming feelings. Listening carefully to one another and to our bodies. Writing beatitudes for one another, reflecting back. 

Yes, these practices are connective and relational. But they’re not just social.

They’re practice, too. Practice in following Jesus. Practice in becoming a little more fully our salty, lit selves together, here.

When we tell the truth about how we’re actually doing and invite the same from others, we are being who we are: salt of the earth. And when we receive someone as they are, without fixing or correcting, and reflect back their brilliance and inherent goodness, we are being who we are: light of the world.

And when we do this together, the effects multiply. This is how the kingdom of God comes near. This is how we build collective strength. This is how justice, peace, and equity begin to take on flesh.

These small, honest connections grow over time into bold interruptions that redistribute power and reshape futures. One salt-of-the-earth, light-of-the-world human being at a time. One conversation at a time.

This is how the law is fulfilled. The law Jesus insists will not be discarded but fulfilled down to the smallest detail is ultimately about loving one another well.

As Lot’s wife loved enough to refuse erasure, to refuse to completely throw away any part of herself. As Jesus commanded of us, to love one another as he loved us.

We are salt of the earth and light of the world. Jesus is telling us it's in our DNA to love, and to love well. One connective, elemental act at a time. So refuse any dilution. Refuse attempts at dimming. Remain rooted, remembering, living firmly exactly as who God has created us to be.

with joy,
Rev. Sam