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Let's start with the dirt. We are mud creatures, made of stardust. We don't just live in creation; we are the stuff of creation. At the start of this Season of Creation, I said we'd spend these weeks reckoning with God: with who we've made God into, and with what we've taught ourselves to expect. And that reckoning keeps circling back to one question. What kind of God have we made, and what kind of world does that God authorize?

Today Jesus tells a story that may expose just how badly we want God to run payroll. Here it is, fast: A landowner goes out at dawn to hire workers for his vineyard, and they agree on the usual daily wage, a denarius. He goes out again at nine and hires more. Again at noon. Again at three. Then at five o'clock, with barely an hour of daylight left, he finds people still standing around the marketplace and asks why they're idle. "Because no one has hired us." So he sends them into the vineyard too. Evening comes. Everyone lines up to get paid. And the landowner tells his manager to start with the last ones hired and work backward to the first.

Let's slow down right there.
Picture the line. The dawn crew is at the back: sunburned, sore, watching. The five o'clock crew walks up first and gets a full denarius. A whole day's wage for one hour of work. Notice where you feel that in your body. Your jaw? Your chest? A little tightening somewhere behind the ribs? You don't have to do anything with it.

Just notice.

And while you're noticing, a question. How many of us are so used to the logic of that line that we've simply come to accept it? Because, reality check: I spent a HUGE portion of my life simply accepting it. Earlier equals more. Longer equals more. More equals worthier. So let's grant the grumblers their case, because they have one. They worked through the heat of the day. Their bodies are tired. That is real. And let me be very clear: this is not a sermon bosses get to use to shush workers who want fair pay.

But listen closely to what they actually say. It isn't "we were underpaid." They got exactly what they agreed to. What they say is, "you have made them equal to us." Equality felt like a loss.

Same grievance, different text: Jonah famously ran the other direction (all the way into the belly of a fish), and in chapter 4 he finally tells God why: "I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (4:2). He knew. That was the problem. Mercy was going to land somewhere Jonah didn't approve of. So after Nineveh turns around and God relents, Jonah hikes up a hillside in the heat, sits down, crosses his arms, and waits to see whether Nineveh gets what's coming to it.
(We know that posture. Some of us perfected it in toddlerhood.)

Here's the thing, though. I don't want us to turn these grumblers into "those people over there." Merit is the water we swim in. We are very good at it. Some of us got here on it. Some of us are exhausted by it. This is us. Here. Us, who create right alongside God. So before anyone rushes in with "well, of course, we include everyone," let's let that sit. The lines are ours. The ledger is ours. Take a breath with that before you let yourself feel clean.

So, the God we've built? A God exceptionally good at accounting. A God who keeps the books on every person and has a very firm sense of who is in the black. Reckoning means asking whether that God is God, or whether it's just a version of us, with a really nice big office in the sky. Because Jesus isn't telling us the Reign of God is a better-run ledger. He's telling us it's a different creative ground entirely.


So let's go back to the ground. Literally. Genesis 1.
Something wonderful happens in that first creation story, and it's easy to miss if we've pictured God as a cosmic contractor delivering a finished product to spec. Creation participates in its own making. "Let the earth bring forth," God says, and the earth brings forth (1:11, 1:24). "Let the waters swarm," and the waters swarm (1:20). Creation isn't a product; it's a partner in the making, with and alongside God. And at each turn: good. Good before a single harvest. Before a single wage. Before a single résumé. Before anyone or anything had an opportunity to produce.

We can hear that "good" as recognition rather than a verdict. God doesn't stamp goodness on creation after a performance review. God looks, and sees what is already there. Worth isn't a grade. It isn't even a gift God hands out after determining our value, something that could be withheld if we don't measure up. It is simply part of being in the making together.

Nobody earned the ground, and the ground didn't "earn" the right to exist in fullness. Nobody was granted the fullness of the globe, or the skies. The soil, the shade, the stranger who wasn't hired, the water... you. All of it was already valuable and worthy in the very making with God.

Which means being passed over is not a verdict on anyone's worth. Not the five o'clock worker. Not abled bodies, not disabled bodies. Not the child, the elder, the caregiver nobody counts. Value doesn't need a productivity defense, and neither does joy, or rest, or belonging.

And that same logic runs at a much larger scale. The ledger that ranks people by output ranks land, water, and animals by output too. A ledger sees resources. God sees creation, and fullness of life. The thinking that says a person has to earn their place is the same thinking that says a creek only matters if it's useful. Merit thinking is the root of exclusion, and it is the root of extraction.

Look at how Jonah ends. While he sulks on that hillside, God grows a shrub to shade him, and Jonah is delighted. Then a worm attacks it, a scorching east wind rises, and Jonah is so furious he'd rather die. His body knew shade, and his body knew its loss. And God says, more or less: you cared about a shrub you never planted and never tended. Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, "and also many animals"?

That's the last line of the book (4:11). God's final question isn't about Jonah at all. It's about a city, and its cattle. God's concern doesn't stop where Jonah's concern stops. And the book never tells us how Jonah answers. It ends on an open question and leaves it with us: Should I not care?

One honest complication: because I'm not selling you a greeting card. Creation includes loss and predation, the worm and the scorching wind. This is not a claim that nature is gentle or fair. It's a claim that worth is already here, in the middle of all of it.

So, before hands could harvest a grape, grade a paper, change a diaper, or earn a paycheck, there had to be stars, and all kinds of valuable elements. The carbon in your body was forged in earlier stars.

Take a second, right now, wherever you're reading this. Find your pulse at your wrist or your neck, or rest a hand on your chest until you feel your heart beating. You probably did not turn on the ignition on your body to earn your start today. Your heart isn't asking what you've accomplished today, or whether you've earned a whole day's worth of heartbeats. It's just here, alongside everything else that's here, highly valuable, keeping you alive.

Now, back to the vineyard, because I don't want to leave the grumblers out of this. The landowner calls the complainer "friend" (20:13). They are not thrown out for asking questions, or for pushing for what we might call fair labor and earnings practices today. But they are pushed to reconsider their perspective on value, and worth, and what that pay actually means.

And about that landowner: he isn't God in this story. What he is, is someone who blows the system's cover. He exposes the grumblers' biases and expectations. He exposes that a denarius does not measure what the grumbling workers had interpreted it to mean. And if worth is already there, then what we owe one another changes pretty drastically.

If worth isn't earned, then nothing about how we live together should be an entrance exam. The Reign of God looks like enough, for everybody, circulating, within the limits of a living world.

Think about what the denarius actually is. A day's wage: enough to live on. The answer to deprivation in this story isn't a promise that everyone can consume without end. Everyone gets the day's wage. Everyone gets what they need to live. Enough, and there is more than enough, and for everybody. That means shared sufficiency, with room for rest, beauty, and belonging, held within the limits of a living planet.

Scripture has a long memory about enough. In Exodus 16, God feeds the people in the wilderness with manna, and something strange happens. Those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little lacked nothing. Whatever got hoarded overnight bred worms and stank. (Paul quotes this, by the way, when he's urging the Corinthians to share what they have, in 2 Corinthians 8:15.)

Nothing alive stays alive by holding. Water that stops moving goes stagnant. Manna kept overnight rots.
In God's economy, what is gathered is meant to move. And we have piles. In our pews, in this town, in this nation: salaries, equity, property, degrees. Not just "those rich people. out there" -- us, too.

So: what are we holding that's meant to be moving? What should be circulating, or returned, that is presently being held in the name of accumulation, propping up a ledger that serves a made-up system of valuation?

Let me say the environmental piece plainly: If our prosperity depends on someone else breathing the waste, bearing the heat, or losing the water while we keep accumulating, that isn't circulation. That isn't creating with God. That is holding. That is keeping ledgers at the expense of others.

Paul tells the Philippians to "live as citizens" worthy of the gospel (1:27). The Reign of God is a commonwealth, and we are practicing citizenship in it. And in a commonwealth, nobody is asked to prove their value, or prove that they belong.

Want proof? Look at the communion table. Nobody passes a test to receive communion (though I hear we Lutherans did used to do that for things like Confirmation...). Nobody's hands are checked for calluses. Hands open, nourishment lands in them. Nourishment for everybody.

I started this season talking about reckoning with who we create God to be: reckoning with the boundaries we build, with the interpretations that generate the entire world around us, which we then go on to call "God."

The grumbling in the vineyard and the sulking on Jonah's hillside reflect the same issue. Both are operating from the same core assumption, making the same complaint: somebody got included who we think wasn't supposed to be.

But in the Reign of God, the one that is heaven come near (always right here, and not here yet), we receive without earning anything. We live and enjoy life because of ground, water, stars, and so much more, creating our world right alongside and with God. No cosmic payroll. No ledger. Just being, together, with all of creation.

May we celebrate that truth, as we work to make it a reality for all: not just humanity, but all of creation.

with joy,
​Rev. Sam

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This past Sunday we didn't do church the usual way. We had a baptism, a baby named Charlie, and a room full of kids (young, and old) who were not interested in sitting still for a sermon about Matthew 18 and the king who forgives but then takes it back and throws a slave into prison to be tortured. So, we skipped that, and instead I invited the kids over to play with the baptismal water with me.

They did, immediately and without hesitation (which is the correct theological response to a bowl of water, by the way). Little hands went in. Water got swirled, scooped, spilled. One of the kids poured a cupful from the pitcher into the bowl, and we all just listened to that sound for a second, water finding water. I asked what water does. They knew: It helps you when you're thirsty. It helps plants grow. It washes the dirt off. It's what animals and people and trees need to live. None of that is complicated theology and all of it is exactly right.


Then I asked whether anyone remembered their own baptism. Most of the grown ups in the room don't, not really, not the way you'd remember a birthday or a first day of school. Charlie certainly won't. So I told the kids that's part of the whole point: nobody has to hold onto the memory of being loved by God all by themselves. God gave us water. And with that water, we remember all these good things, and can remind one another. That's one of the things this whole enormous, strange, beautiful family of God is for, reminding one another we are loved just as we are, we are never alone. We help each other when we're thirsty. We find each other food when we're hungry. We stay next to each other when we're lonely. We help make things fair when they're not. I encouraged the kids to help their parents remember all these things, too-- and one truly grabbed one of the squirt toys and took it right over to her dad for a quality little splash. It was good, for all of us.


Our texts this week, Paul writing to the Romans and Jesus telling that hard parable about the servant who wouldn't forgive a debt after his own had just been forgiven, are both about people who've gotten so busy keeping score, who owes what, who's right, who's clean and who isn't, that they've stopped noticing what the person in front of them actually needs. Water doesn't do that. Water doesn't keep score. It just keeps moving around between people and creation. 


So we poured some of that water on Charlie's head and welcomed him into a family that is, frankly, still learning how to do that movement and loving behavior. We don't always get it right. Charlie's family won't always get it right. I won't either. But that was never the bar. The water isn't there because we're good at this. It's there because every time we touch it again, washing our hands, jumping in a pool, catching rain on our faces, we get to remember something true whether or not we did anything to earn it: I belong to God. I have a huge family, in this room and well beyond it. And we belong to each other.




A Practice for the Week
Next time you touch water, on purpose or by accident, washing dishes, caught in the rain, a kid splashing you in the bath, let it be a small reminder. Take a second to think: You are loved just exactly as you are, imperfections and all. You, and all those around you, and al of creation. Perfectly, wholly loved.  And if you forget once in a while, that's ok because somebody in this huge, strange family can remind you. And, you can remind remind people in this whole big global Christian family, too. 

So, remember your baptism, friends. And rejoice- baby Charlie has joined the family!


with joy,
Pr. Sam

In the Beginning, Again
The James Webb Space Telescope has been on my mind all week. Some of the light Webb is picking up has been traveling for more than thirteen billion years. That's light that began before there was an Earth to call home. Before there were human eyes to receive it. Some of the stars and galaxies that first emitted it may not even exist in their initial format anymore — but the light kept existing and traveling anyway.

Which means we aren't exactly discovering something that suddenly appeared. We've developed the capacity to observe what was already there, long before us and our beginning.

That seems like the right place to start this morning, because both Genesis and John open with the same phrase: in the beginning. John is reaching back on purpose — pulling us toward Genesis, toward the creative life of God at cosmic scale. Two beginnings, not unrelated.

Which makes this a spectacular pairing for the start of Season of Creation. Because Season of Creation can get a little — cute. Trees! Bees! Maybe some succulents up front! Or we swing the other way and get extra dour about human failure to care for the planet. Both have their place. But Genesis is making a much stranger claim about us than either of those moods captures.

The human creature is ha-adam. Soil is adamah. The human doesn't come from somewhere outside the soil — the human comes from it. Not a ruler dropped onto creation from elsewhere. Not a manager standing above the earth. Not even really a separate category. We are earth that has become human. That's the first thing this story wants us to know about ourselves, before we get anywhere near gender binaries, ribs, or helpers and all the freight later readers have piled on top.
So sit with this for a second: we are creatures inside a universe billions of years old, made from soil — and stardust — reading an ancient story about the first morning, noticing light that's been traveling toward us since before we existed.

Before we can ask what any of this means, I think we have to ask what we've actually been reading.

What the Word Actually Says
Translation is never one-to-one. It's never neutral.

Take the Hebrew word tsela. It shows up about forty times in the Hebrew Bible. Everywhere except Genesis, it means side — side of the ark, side of the tabernacle, side of the hill. Side. Then we hit Genesis 2, and the inherited translation suddenly renders tsela as rib.

Translation isn't a machine where Hebrew goes in one end and English comes out the other. Translation is interpretation, and interpretation—as John Caputo would say—goes all the way down. In Genesis 2, that interpretive choice has taught generations of Christians to picture first a man, then a piece of that man removed, which is what gets used to make a woman. Gender hierarchy enters the story before we've even finished reading it.

But tsela as side? That's a very different story with very different effects. Ha-adam is just "the human," or "the earthling"—not yet "man" in the way English speakers tend to imagine the scene. So God takes one side of the earthling, and from that division emerge ish and ishah — man and woman, in relation to one another. Not original and copy. Not whole person and spare part. Not primary and derivative human.

Which makes "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" sound different too, doesn't it? Suddenly it isn't possession, or a question of giving birth to — it's simple recognition. More like: oh — there you are. You and I, we're made of the same stuff. And that changes what "one flesh" means, too. Not so much two separate people becoming intimate, but a recognition of something primordial: division, differentiation, relationship, and the strange way we come to know a self in encountering another who is both like us and not like us.

Then there's ezer—usually translated "helper," which sounds suspiciously like assistant, or supporting role—the one who hands you the wrench while you do the important work. Except ezer is also a word scripture uses for God. Yes —God. This "helper" isn't the intern. It's the help that's bigger than you, the help that shows up because you can't do this alone.

All of this adds up to something bigger than one bad vocabulary decision in a translation booth somewhere. The issue is that those choices became theology, and that theology became anthropology, and that anthropology became justification for hierarchy — until eventually we forgot anyone had made a choice at all. We just have people saying, "this is what scripture says."

The Word Was Never Only He
Genesis isn't the only place this happens.

Go back to John's "in the beginning." In the beginning was the Word — logos. Grammatically, logos is masculine in Greek. But grammatical gender isn't biological sex. Languages gender all kinds of things; sometimes it's just grammar doing grammar, with no actual image of gender attached.

Here's what's fascinating: John is writing inside a Jewish theological world where Wisdom — Hokmah — has clear grammatical gender and clear imagistic gender, and that gender is female. We don't need a conspiracy theory where John secretly renamed Hokmah "Logos" and slapped a beard on her. It's more interesting than that. John is swimming in this enormous theological universe of word and wisdom and creation and light — and then the English translation makes its own interpretive decision. Logos is "he" before the text has said one word about the Word becoming a human being. Before the Word becomes the male human Jesus of Nazareth, the translation has already decided the Word is male.

That matters. Not because of mustache-twirling translators giggling in a back room about patriarchy — but because we translate from inside our worldviews. All of us do. Worldviews tell us what's "obvious," what feels "natural," and quietly rule out a whole host of possibilities sitting right there in the text. For a very long time, the world doing most Christian translating and organizing was a world built around male supremacy. We shouldn't be shocked that male primacy endured in the Bible that world produced.

This is exactly where we need to resist the deeply satisfying progressive move of saying, that was them, not us — thank God we're not that biased. Bad news: we are also interpreting. We are also making choices. There are things our world makes look obvious that another generation may see entirely differently. The question was never how do we read without interpreting — we can't. The question is what our interpretations do in the world.


What Our Translations Have Cost
Because we know what these particular choices have done. Translate tsela as rib instead of side, translate ha-adam as "man" instead of "human," and it becomes remarkably easy to build a theological world where women's authority is derivative, women's bodies belong to someone else, women's voices are secondary, and women's leadership is suspect. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Ivone Gebara have both pointed out that this logic doesn't stop with women. The theological subordination of women and the theological subordination of the earth share a root system: once something is imagined as secondary, passive, created only for someone else's use, it becomes an "it" — and an "it" is available for extraction.

So we extract. From women's bodies. From queer bodies. From trans bodies. From the body of the earth. Different histories, different violences — but the same root logic, growing straight out of interpretive choices made in translation.

And this text — this strange, cosmic, gender-refusing text — is being invoked right now to argue that gender is fixed, binary, obvious, "established by God from the beginning." Which is an extraordinary claim to make about a story that begins with an earth-creature who fits into none of the gendered categories Christians have insisted this story establishes. A story with far more cosmic strangeness in it than we've been allowed to bask in is being used to define, distinguish, and eliminate swaths of the image of God in the world. And that costs people — safety, belonging, family, healthcare, and on more than a few occasions, life itself.

The Body Without Shame
There's a small sentence at the very end of this excerpt that usually gets rushed past on the way to the line everyone thinks is about marriage: they were naked, and they were not ashamed.

Shame about our bodies is not original. It's not the starting condition. It gets added somewhere later. Shame and embarrassment over our bodies, in all their variation, came from somewhere else.

We don't arrive at our present moment by accident. Choices accumulate — choices made in translation rooms, choices made in pulpits, choices made in theology classrooms, choices made in legislatures — choices about which bodies matter and what the earth is for, made inside the cultures that produced these texts, until eventually all those choices become invisible. Or we call them nature. Or, worse, we call them God.

Season of Creation as Reckoning
So I don't think Season of Creation is the church's annual chance to celebrate a few trees and bask in nature sounds —though that's part of it. Season of Creation is a reckoning. A reckoning with what we've called "natural." A reckoning with what we've called "biblical." A reckoning with what we've called God.

That might sound like less than good news. I'd argue it's great news, and a real opportunity. We can't go back — there's no "we finally found the correct translation," no clean fix. The damage is done, and it's still doing, all over the place. Maybe the bigger point Genesis actually hands us is that there's no road back to Eden anyway. There is becoming, and growth, and history, with paths forward. There is history, and consequence, and God and creation right here, right now, still creating.

The invitation isn't to get back to some pure source. It's that our source is still here, among us, still sourcing — and we're called to notice that. Wholeness, shamelessness, wisdom — all of it was there with an earthling made from mud. And the creative force of God didn't stop there. The light kept traveling alongside the darkness.

Flesh, Not Escape
Which brings us back to John: the Word became flesh. John doesn't say the Logos became anthropos — a human being. John says sarx. Flesh. Matter. Creaturely stuff. The stuff of bodies of every kind and type.

Christianity has spent an astonishing amount of energy trying to get us off the earth. But Genesis and John are both moving in exactly the opposite direction. In Genesis: adamah to ha-adam — earth created into earthling. In John: logos to sarx — word becomes flesh. God does not move away from matter. God keeps making Godself into matter, placing Godself in matter. God moves toward earth, not away from it.


Which means incarnation isn't only a claim about humans and salvation. It's an ecological claim. God doesn't show up to rescue us from earth. God shows up and joins us in it — as flesh, and breath, and body, and soil, and food, and touch, and living water.

What Are We Still Not Noticing?
Let Season of Creation reorient us. Not toward recycling more, appreciating nature, becoming slightly better environmentalists—but toward something underneath all of that.


A Practice For This Week:

Sit with these, this week...maybe with your hands in dirt, or on skin, or on the body of someone you love:

1. What changes when we understand that the earth isn't a thing below our feet—it's who we are?
2. What changes if another person's body isn't something to classify, control, or explain, but another expression of God's creaturely becoming here on earth—a match, just like us, and also different?
3. What changes if translation and interpretation aren't about possessing the correct meaning, but paying close attention to what our readings make possible?
4. And maybe the biggest one: what are we still not yet noticing that is right here?

A telescope looks into the dark and finds light that's been traveling toward us since before we existed. The telescope didn't make the light. It didn't put it there. Webb simply became capable of receiving what was already there, and still traveling.


We don't need to be people who finally "have the Bible right." We definitely don't need to be people who trade someone else's certainty for our own. We need to become people willing to keep coming back to our sources and experiencing them again—aware that there are things we've been taught not to notice, aware that another generation may see things in us we can't yet detect, and trusting that God is right here with us, now, with creative life bigger than any of our interpretations, waiting for us to step into that force and create alongside it.

Creation isn't finished. Sources are still sourcing. Light is still traveling, right alongside the darkness—they go together. So—what's already traveling toward us, or simply here among us, that we haven't yet made the room to notice?

with joy,
​Rev. Sam

Sources woven into this one:
John Caputo's line about interpretation going "all the way down," and the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and Ivone Gebara on the shared root of women's and earth's theological subordination. All worth exploring more deeply!

Spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — composed into a melody we’ve sung at University Lutheran over a season or two, the lyrics to this song are simple to sing, to some degree. It is much harder to trust those words. Harder still to practice them.

But that is how being Christian can work. We do not wait until we perfectly understand love before we bodily practice. We practice love (and keep practicing it) until it begins to reshape us. We sing the truth before we can completely live the truth. We return to it when we have failed. We must keep repeating the work, in our bodies, allowing it to become the way we move through the world.
Last week, I mentioned the idea that maybe, just maybe, Jesus was and is looking for us to recognize how ridiculously powerful we humans at large are. This week, I think Jesus (and Paul, in our Romans excerpt) are looking to get us to notice that it is our bodies wherein the power, and the real understanding, are alive and bring us to fullness of life.

Christianity is not meant to be primarily an intellectual pursuit of beliefs affirmed. We cannot think our way into being the Body of Christ. We cannot study love enough that we become love. We cannot agree with Jesus enough that we become followers of Jesus’ Way. We learn to be Christian by practicing Christianity: with our bodies, our voices, our money, our time, our courage, our habits, and our relationships. We learn love by loving.

Anyone familiar with the Rocky Horror Picture Show? "Don't dream it, be it" — written by Richard O'Brien, sung iconically by Tim Curry — those words land so close to the Gospel today we could almost ask whether the Holy Spirit is playing a solid drag-inspired joke on us. Not because our faith is about individual self-invention, but because living in the way of Jesus is not an intellectual dream we conjure and admire from a distance. We can’t just dream it… we need to go and BE it.

Jesus calls it taking up the cross. Paul calls it overcoming evil with good. Neither are theories. Both are faithful living practices that require us to put our bodies into the effort.
And every time we choose not to return cruelty for cruelty, we're practicing with our bodies. Every time we speak hard truths with honesty, without seeking to humiliate someone, we're practicing with our bodies. Every time we stand beside a vulnerable person so that they might be given more room to speak up and determine what they need, or when we set a healthy boundary, or actively correct a lie that's been socialized into us, or opt to share what we have, or go out of our way to make room for the stranger whose needs don't align with ours, or begin again after failure — every one of these — we are doing Christianity. We are not dreaming it, but being it.

We will not do it perfectly. But we practice anyway, because violence only leads to violence, hatred only leads to hate, and only love leads to love.

Permission to Be Too Much
This week is a week of grief for many. Dolly Parton has died. Tim Curry has died. Yayoi Kusama has died. Three iconic artists. And it feels, perhaps, like the world has become a little less bright, a little less strange, maybe a little less willing to sing loudly in public.

They were each very different people. They had resources many people do not have, and though I would argue that their sheer tenacity made each of them a saint, we needn't make them out like they were naught but perfection. Each, in their God-given way, offered people a living example (perhaps even permission, in some cases) to choose and actively be love over the violent and hatred-filled options of the world.

Dolly Parton had a way of making generosity visible. She made joy visible. She built a public life full of sparkle, humor, tenderness, willingness to acknowledge harm done and change course with honesety and integrity. And she did it in a culture that is so often suspicious of all of those things, and so willing to hyper focus on her appearance over literally everything else she physically did with her body. She did not pretend that life was easy. Her songs knew about longing and poverty and difficult love. And she kept insisting that tenderness was not foolishness, and that compassion was never weakness, and that trying was better than doing nothing. She held herself to high standards of not just dreaming love, but being love, while also finding pathways for others to be able to love more, too.

And Tim Curry, icon in so many places, especially the famed cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show, helped create a space where being overtly strange, overtly queer, loud, generally socially seen as too much was simply more space for delight instead of shame. For generations of people, Rocky Horror has been a doorway to community, care, and love. While some may find this ridiculous, like I said earlier—- I genuinely think the Holy Spirit hid some core Gospel truth in Richard O'Brien's lyrics sung so iconnically by Curry: "Don't dream it, be it."

It’s not, of course, a formal Christian creed. But it may be more Christian than some of our Christian creeds. We just can't try to brain our way through these Christian things. We need to actually live it. A Luther parallel might be: sin boldly. And Jesus's way of drawing us to the same reality: "Take up your cross and follow me."
And, I think like Curry and Parton and Kusama illustrated in their own lives- “take up your cross and follow me” is not an invitation to chase suffering. It is not an instruction to let people hurt us. It is not a command for people who are already oppressed to make themselves more available to abuse. It is an invitation to not dream about what's possible, but to be people who shape their lives via love, rather than fear. To live that love even when it is inconvenient, even when it costs us something, even when the world tells us there are in fact easier ways.

And there may be joy in that work. There may be laughter, friendship, music, costume, celebration, and the relief of being fully seen. There may also be grief, conflict, exhaustion, uncertainty, and fear. Often, there is all of it mixed together. That is what it is to carry a cross: not a single mood, not a permanent misery, but a commitment. A way of moving through the world. A refusal to let fear make the decisions.

Get Behind Me
A hefty dose of the world we live in goes with the “dont dream it, be it” carrying of our crosses… in today's Gospel, Jesus begins to tell his disciples what lies ahead: rejection, suffering, death. And Peter reacts as many of us would. Peter says, in effect, "Absolutely not. This cannot happen to you." Peter loves Jesus. Peter is not trying to be cruel. He wants to protect his friend. He wants to prevent pain. Just like any one of us would want to do.

But Jesus turns and says, "Get behind me, accuser." (or, “Get behind me, Satan” as many translations go)
It is a startling response. Why so sharp? Especially since Jesus just told his guy Peter last week that he's the cornerstone of the church! He gets the keys, according to Jesus.

The challenge is, Peter is trying to pull Jesus away from the path of love and into the logic of control and domination. Peter is still imagining safety on the terms of hatred and violence as brought to us via Rome: avoid any avoidable suffering; preserve the powerful person in our midst; find a way to win more control and overturn those who are actively harming us. Peter does not see that the systems capable of crucifying Jesus are not going to be changed by Jesus or anyone else making themselves fit into those systems — by being as big, as strong, and seeking to overturn them via their own mechanisms of violence brought back at them.

And here is the hardest part: Peter probably has no clue that he is inadvertently supporting those systems with his "oh no, not you, Jesus!" That is how domination works. It does not walk into the room with a clear label and say “Hi! I’m here to mainpulate and control you, to confuse your values and do harm.” It announces itself as logical, or even common sense, most efficient, or sometimes even cleverness. It tells us that this is simply how the world works. It tells us that our bodies are dangerous and not to be trusted (brains somehow being not part of our body- we’re told to separate those out in some way and, after that separating practice, consider them more trustworthy than the intelligence of our complete bodies?). It tells us that racism is average, so complex it’s impossible to dismantle or engage in repair, misogyny is inevitable, poverty is a personal failure, queer and trans people are a threat to families, disabled bodies are a burden, immigrants are a problem, and that we must accept and return the violence and hatred of the world in order to protect ourselves.

It trains us to become what philosopher Michel Foucault called docile bodies. Bodies that obey, bodies that intuitively avoid certain questions, bodies that do not resist for fear of suffering, bodies that are always on edge about what kinds of space we can or can’t occupy for fear of some seemingly unnameable “them” who are watching and threatening. (Foucault's concept comes from his 1975 work Discipline and Punish, his analysis of how power doesn't just repress bodies but actually produces them: making them useful, compliant, self-regulating. Worth a read, honestly.)

And sometimes, these powerful mechanisms that exert control and dominance even use religion to do their work. They’ll takes Jesus' words about losing one's life and twist them into an instruction to become lass than who and what our holy bodies are. We’re pushed to opt to be quieter, less visible, less honest, less alive. To encourage certain people (like women, especially women of color) to pour themselves out, and other people to simply endure what God does not actually ask them to endure. It asks the harmed to remain available to harm for the comfort of those who are doing the harm.

But … that is not what these words are about. Jesus does not become a docile body in a world that wants him to adhere to the norms and be that controlled, compliant body. He does not cooperate with the powers that demand his obedience. He does not become less loving in order to become more acceptable. He does not abandon the people at the edges of society to gain more power and "change things from the inside." He does not make peace with violence in exchange for a theoretically easier life for himself or others.
Jesus refuses all of it, and forges a lived-example different way, bringing his besties the Disciples along with him so they can live it, too. And that refusal is costly. A world built on violence has trouble tolerating someone who simply and persistently loves. A world built on hatred finds someone who insists on love to be downright threatening. That person is someone who cannot be bought, frightened, diminished, or recruited into cruelty.

Overcoming Evil with Good
So Jesus refuses to fight violence with violence. He knows that violence only leads to violence. Hatred only leads to hate.

This is what Paul means when he says, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." (Which was written, by the way, before the Gospel of Matthew was written — Paul's letters predate the Gospels, something worth sitting with when we read them side by side like this.)

Paul is not asking us to be passive, either. He is also saying, in his own way, "Don't dream it, be it." Keep going, keep resisting the injustice, minimize the harm, get out of situations where you and others are being abused. Because Love Incarnate showed us clearly (that’s Jesus, by the way): Love tells the truth. Love sets boundaries. Love stands with the vulnerable. Love interrupts violence. Love sometimes walks away. Love says no. But love does not become what it hates.

And that is the hard, holy work of the way of Jesus, it’s the hard holy work of “Dont dream it, be it." Resisting evil without allowing evil to make a home in us. Facing violence without reproducing violence. Insisting on freedom without becoming another person's jailer. And recognizing that we won't do this by just thinking about it. We'll do this because we quite literally throw our bodies into practicing these very things. We elect to take up our various crosses because we’re not just dreaming it, we’re choosing to BE it.

Exactly as We Are
Jesus calls us to let go of the small, frightened selves that have been coaxed into believing that control is safety and dancing with domination is strength. Thus, “get behind me, Accuser” being his response to Peter.
We are asked not to be smaller, but to be exactly as we are in our holy, made in the image of God bodies, in all of our holy, beautiful, God-given differences.

Exactly as we are enough to make room for people unlike us. As we are enough to hold grief without turning it into bitterness. Exactly as we are enough to recognize when we are being pulled into the shitty domineering patterns of fear and control. As we are enough to resist violence and hatred without becoming violence and hatred incarnate, ourselves.

Though I’d love it if things worked out this way, there likely won't be a day when we leave church checking a box, definitively proving that we did it—we found the way to love and only love (though if we do, wouldn't that be terrific?! Please tell Bishop Jeff, for me!). But what I hope, for all of us, is that we come here and go back out into the world each week reminded, and renewed for the cross-bearing, don’t dream it be it days ahead:

A Failed Experiment 
Here's what I tried: I asked everyone to find a partner, face each other, touch hands. Person 1, step toward Person 2. Now, Person 2, step toward Person 1.

It went nowhere. The people who were supposed to step, stepped. The people on the other side...stayed put. People laughed. I laughed. I genuinely expected that, as has happened in most other places where I've done this little drill, people would intuitively move when someone stepped toward them in a close space. Ballroom dancers would recognize this right away and likely make the move immediately (though not always).

Well, what had happened elsewhere didn't happen at all, in this case, and I had to call it what it was, a failed experiment.

The theological point I was reaching for isn't actually about choreography, of course. It's more about how we're bigger than just our physical bodies, and we pretty intuitively will "dance" around and with one another. Like we do when we're moving fast down a busy sidewalk. Or, you know that thing, when you're walking through a busy space, a train station, a full hallway, and your body is constantly and automatically adjusting? Shifting to make room, stepping left because someone stepped right, the whole crowd moving like a single breathing thing? We could claim it's entirely due to literally seeing things, but it's more than that. Many of us quickly and easily sense movement around us without seeing a thing. Nobody calls it out. Nobody directs it. Nobody's thinking about it. And yet somehow it happens, automatic, unrehearsed, all different, and still together. A whole body of being and intuitive movement that is bigger than our individual selves.

That is the sermon, kind of.  Hold that. Both of those things at once: the automatic response, and the variety of it.

Borrowed Choreography

The disciples are with him in Caesarea Philippi. And he asks them something.
"Who do people say the Son of Man is?"

They reach, immediately, for borrowed choreography. The stuff they've been told or heard, categories they already know. John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah. Familiar names. Familiar categories. Moves that already exist, steps they've seen before. And, crucially, Jesus doesn't tell them they're wrong. He doesn't correct a single one of them. All of those answers are, in their own way, reaching toward something real, pointing in the general direction he seems to be trying to orient them.

Then he turns and asks them directly: "But who do you say that I am?"

And Peter (who has literally said almost the exact same thing just a few chapters back, mid-storm, mid-miracle) just. dives right in and says you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

He doesn't know any special theological dance moves here, as far as I can tell. He's just present. Something comes at him, the full weight of the question, the full reality of the person in front of him, and his body answers. No choreography. Just response.

And I suppose we could stop there. We could say Peter stumbled onto Truth with a capital T, thank you God, let's go home happily knowing that Jesus came here to save us.

But that's not actually good news for us today. Not unless we want to remove our own responsibilities from the full picture. Which, honestly, is a very popular move for people who have co-opted Christianity for things like nationalistic purposes. Handing everything to a divine figure so that you personally never have to account for anything is a very convenient theology...if avoiding accountability is what you're going for.

So let's sit with what else might be happening here.

Bar Enasha: What Are Humans Actually Capable Of?

What if Jesus isn't, initially, asking about himself at all?
He does already know who he is, after all. And, ego stroking doesn't really strike me as his kinda jam.

The Aramaic phrase he uses in that first question, bar enasha, is a tricky one. It's got the potential to be used as an idiom, not just a title. It could mean something like "a human being like this." It's the kind of phrase you could use when you want to point at yourself while also opening the question wider than just you.

So what he could literally be asking is something like: "Who do people say a human being like this is? What do people think someone like this, like me, like us, is actually capable of?"

Now, some scholars will argue he's referencing the Book of Daniel, where a "son of man" like figure appears as something almost beyond human, coming on clouds to receive divine power. That's a real reading. And well supported in plenty of places.

But here's another possibility, especially given that Daniel's own text says "one like a son of man," using that word like to signal something resembling but not quite an ordinary human being: what if Jesus is asking his closest friends what they think your average, ordinary, humble human being is capable of? Based on what people say. Based on what society tells us.

Notice that he's also asking these question in Caesarea Philippi, in Caesar's city. A city built to honor the Roman emperor. A place where the official answer to "what is a human being capable of?" if you were not Roman, was: not much. You've been conquered. You are a barbarian. And we'll remind you of that, lots.

The disciples (who grew up with that messaging in their bones) don't go where Jesus seems to be potentially pointing. They hear "son of man" and go straight for the external, the elevated, the exceptional. The book of Daniel version. Surely he must mean someone especially holy? Someone like the Daniel figure? Because we need someone to take on Rome, and we need someone who's exceptional to do that, right?

I get it. Genuinely. When you've been told your whole life that ordinary people like you are worth very little and capable of even less, when someone uses a phrase that could mean either "ordinary human being" or "exceptional divine figure," you reach for the exceptional interpretation. Because the more ordinary one carries too much weight and gets into how people are actually feeling... It asks too much of you.

But what if Jesus is trying, gently, to pry that story open to get them to consider another possibility?

Tiny Gods in Caesar's City

Think about the other readings that showed up for this particular Sunday (at least, the ones suggested for us in the Revised Common Lectionary). 

Isaiah: Look to the rock from which you were hewn. Not "look to a messiah coming to save you." Look to your origin, the same stuff God created within creation...Which, by the way, is divine.

We are imago Dei. Made in the image of God. Each of us tiny gods, created and becoming alongside the God who is always becoming with us. That is not a metaphor. That is a theological claim about what you actually are.

Paul in Romans: We are many parts, many gifts, but we make up one divine body, a body whose sum is so much greater than its individual parts. All different. All distinct. Still together. Still creating something between us that is larger than any of us alone.

Go back to those answers the disciples gave. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. What if they're not wrong, just partial? Each one names someone extraordinary. Someone known for recognizing the divine moving through ordinary human life. Each one is a thread of genuine recognition, a different move toward the same I-AM-ness, the same divine reality. 

And now Jesus is pushing them further. He wants them to think beyond those socialized limits of who's holy and who's ordinary. Beyond who gets to matter and who doesn't. And goofy, often-misunderstood Peter (who by himself certainly does not have the full picture) gets told he gets a key. Whatever he looses or binds on earth is loosed or bound in heaven.

Note: Jesus doesn't just say this to Peter. A little later, he says it to everyone. The key gets distributed. The power does not stay in one place.

That is not a small thing. That is Jesus saying: the capacity to participate in the reign of God is not located in one exceptional person. It lives in multiplicity among all of us. It moves through the whole body- individual, and larger mystical body.

So maybe, just maybe, we're being asked  here not to fixate on Jesus's separate and individual power. Instead, maybe we're being asked to hold up some mirrors. To notice how, like those bodies in crowded spaces, we move separately and yet collectively. And to recognize, in a more intimate way, our own being made in the image of God, and just how powerful that actually makes us. Contrary to everything the current power machine would have us believe.

Take that one in. Really sit with it for a second- because I think we too often don't or avoid thinking about this.

You are made in the image of God. Not egoic, fear-driven, small you. Your fullest, whole-self you.
You are, inherently, as God made you, extraordinarily powerful. Not because you did something special. But because you simply have been made this way.

Despite all the messaging designed to make you keep yourself smaller and manageable and believing that if you just have this one other thing you might be enough.

And we, together, reflect that powerful made-in-the-image-of-God divinity.

The Turning We Can Do

Paul in Romans pushes us to recognize this through words about different gifts, different moves, one body. We are not required to have the complete picture. We are required to bring what we actually have, which is already so much more than we think, and often far more native to us than we've been taught to believe.

Because what we loose, joyfully, lovingly, energetically, even here, even in the shadow of highly controlling forces, is loosed in heaven. Bit by bit. One turn and move and collective response after another. One thread at a time, loosing the reign of God, right here and right now.

There's a song, Canticle of the Turning, whose refrain begins: My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
I am betting that most of us tend to hear that "you" in there as the day God brings. And yes. Absolutely. That's part of it.

But I want you to hear something else in that "you," too. What if the "you" is not only God? What if, when we gather like this (this specific room, this particular collection of imago Dei) we are the "you" who helps bring the day? What if that "you" you're singing is as much the person across the room from you, as it is God? What if the turning comes just as much through us as God, when we show up with our fullest imago Dei selves?

The next part of the refrain goes "Wipe away all tears for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn."

Not only because God wills that turn from above. But because you, all of us, this world full of tiny gods becoming, loosed it. Moved it. Brought it. (Note: the "tiny gods becoming is a direct quote from Franciscan nun Sr. Ilia Delio- look her up if you're not familiar. It's a fansatic and important point she makes about our relationship with God, and one another).

The world turned, and turns yet again, in part because we moved.
 
That's the good news. Bring what you have.
We aren’t left to rely on any ol' persons claims about who they say Jesus is.
WE are part of that body, WE are a reflection of who Jesus is. The turning comes through you, me—- us with God.

That's the good news. Bring what you have. We aren't left to rely on anyone else's claim about who Jesus is. We are part of that body. We area reflection of who Jesus is. The turning comes through you, me, us, too.

Go look up and sing Canticle of the Turning, and each time you encounter the word "you"-- think about specific people in your life. See if it illuminates the lyrics in a new way for you.

with joy,
Rev Sam

The reading of bar enasha as idiom rather than title draws on downright contested scholarship by Geza Vermes and Maurice Casey.  I chose to go there via theological imagination, and that's valid, even if it's not historical critical real. We all get to use our theological imaginations, it's a great means to getting to know God better. Also, as I noted above, the phrase about us being tiny gods becoming alongside God is indebted to Sr. Ilia Delio's work on evolutionary theology and imago Dei. 

In the beginning of Matthew 15, just before our passage today, Jesus challenges the prevailing norms around purity among community leaders. What defiles, he says, isn't what enters our bodies and then heads into the sewer, it's what comes from our hearts, through our lips.
Hold that thought.


Because if I asked you right now to fill in this blank:
"Jesus' initial response to the woman in this story is ___" what word would you choose? Mine is offensive.
His behavior is offensive. He ignores her. And then he calls her a dog.

Those are some significant revelations from someone who literally just told people that what comes through the lips is coming straight from the heart — and is, in fact, what defiles.


When Even God DisappointsThis is a story that, among many possibilities, forces us to confront the fact that even revered figures (even God incarnate) can sometimes disappoint us. Can sometimes fail to be who we need them to be.
And I hate that. I hate it when someone I love disappoints me. I hate it when someone I look to for guidance turns out to be just as human as I am, just as imperfect, just as impossibly full of contradictions. Being human is complex, and painful. And even now, looking around at the complexities of being human especially at our current social and political moment I find myself fully ready to say:


Hi. Help. Are there any adults who can help us with (waves hand at entirety of the globe)... all of this?
No? No adults in the house? Well. I guess we're all going to have to put our big kid pants on, then.


You know what else bugs me about this story? How often people remain focused on Jesus (I know how odd that sounds coming from a pastor, but hear me out). Specifically, focus on Jesus to justify his behavior. It's such a classic move to center the identified male presence in the story, making their behavior completely okay one way or another, and in so doing, reify a whole set of dynamics we could all stand to live without. Rather than just saying he did a crappy thing to another person.


On to This WomanThis sermon isn't necessarily going to center the identified male presence known as Jesus. So — on to this woman who won’t quit. She gives us a remarkable display of humility and persistence. She shouts. She shouts more. She eventually places her body physically in Jesus' path, AND she gets her sass on and talks right back to him when he insults her.


Her behavior brings to mind something from Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman was reflecting on how in Jesus' time, Rome and the Romans were the ruling class. Israelites were very much in the mix of things. But they were no majority, and had lost their own national independence. Thurman wrote:
"Jesus had to resent deeply the loss of Jewish national independence and the aggression of Rome... resentment, anger, humiliation would all be natural feelings. Humiliation was hurting and burning, every single day. The balm for that burning humiliation was — humility. For humility cannot be humiliated."


This woman is that balm. Through a combination of persistence and a humility that cannot and will not be humiliated. Not that she wasn't wounded by oppression, mind you. Clearly she was. These things are not mutually exclusive. And yet she doesn't turn humility into a self-improvement exercise. Instead, she exposes prejudice and insists it not be allowed to become limitation, which is precisely what you'd miss if you kept centering Jesus.
And I’ve got to admit that right about here is where all my own wounds begin to fester. I am mad on her behalf when I read this text, because I am so tired of the ways women are treated and understood in society at large. And I am so tired of excuses being made for Jesus' poor behavior. Because those excuses aren't just excuses for Jesus. They're excuses for all kinds of people who are identified as male, and behave as though the world revolves around them. They're building blocks for the manosphere, and I dare say, this is precisely not what Jesus nor our author Matthew hoped we'd get from this story.


What I do think Jesus and Matthew hoped we might notice is this:
she — the Canaanite woman no one suspects — is the most Jesus-like person in this story

Through her, we encounter another one of those great surprises God always seems to have up God's sleeve: the one on the outside, who physically plants herself in Jesus' path with so much humility that both prostrate herself and she'll keep shouting until she is heard and seen exactly as she is, is also the one showing up, insisting that the reign of God is more accessible than even Jesus seemed to have initially thought.


The Woman Crying Out NowAnd I can see why it's easier to focus on Jesus and make excuses for his behavior. Because by doing so, we also make it easier to miss the very same woman crying out to us now.

You know who I’m referring to, right?

The women who are talking about the inherent racism that needs continuous unpacking and repair. The ones who are shouting about how entire communities are losing their land and the natural resources they need to live, due to the climate crisis. The ones who, while crying out, pack their few belongings and take huge chances trying to cross oceans and land masses on whatever vehicle might have a chance of getting them to the other side, a chance at life less violent for their children. The numerous trans women of color who have told churches, legislators, doctors, and journalists what makes their lives dangerous and what they need to live equally with everyone else, only to be discussed as an issue rather than recognized as neighbors whose voice and presence we need in our lives.

There are so, so many women who, with dignity and humility, are crying out just like this woman does in this story. And, much like Jesus' own behavior, it is so easy for many of us (especially us fair-skinned types) to sigh, acknowledge, and then shrug it off with a "not my monkeys, not my circus."
It's bizarrely easy to shirk our own body-of-Christ role while thinking we're doing exactly what we're supposed to be doing. And we need someone to hold the mirror up so we can see what it is we're actually doing.

The Violence of Looking AwayI worked for San Francisco Night Ministry for some time. Night Ministry provides community chaplaincy to folks who are struggling and need support on the streets of San Francisco during the nighttime hours. When we talk to people about what we do on the streets, we often use Lisa Gray-Garcia's term to describe one of the major problems experienced by many we encounter: the Violence of Looking Away. People will act as though the folks on the street are not there. They'll walk by like the unhoused or underserved person doesn't even exist, no eye contact, nothing. It's hugely dehumanizing. It brutally damages people's sense of self and being when they are treated this way.


And I wonder whether Jesus knew he was committing the Violence of Looking Away? We've got no way to know for sure. But we can know that this woman was not going to allow the looking away to determine what happens next.
Jesus, despite his initial attempt to ignore and avoid this woman, eventually cannot look away any longer. Because he is met with her physically placing her body in his path, forcing him to, at minimum, slow down while his companions suggest sending her away.


What the Text Actually SaysAnd while many a commentator likes to say it was her extraordinary faith in Jesus that healed her daughter, I keep coming back to what the text actually says:
"Woman! You have great faith!"
"As you desire, so let it happen to you."
I do wonder, in that moment, whether Jesus also thought to himself: ooops.


In the end, we don't know. What he said, after finally acknowledging her, was simply: "As you desire, so let it happen to you." Which is strikingly resonant when, in chapter 18, he goes on to say "whatever you loose on earth, you loose in heaven; whatever you bind on earth, you bind in heaven."
It seems there is more agency here among us, and within us than we are typically inclined to acknowledge. And today, we get some clarity on that from one Canaanite woman who is way more Jesus-like than anyone else in the story.


The Good NewsSo where's the good news? Now that we've turned this whole thing upside down?
The reign of God is already pressing against the boundaries erected around it. That is the nature of the reign of God.
The Reign of God arrives not intellectually, but in body, voice, desire, and persistence of the person we have been taught to overlook or deem an exception. The Reign of God, based on this story, even pushes God Incarnate to reckon with that constant presence and demand, pressing us to draw the circle wider.
Meanwhile, we are caught up in encounters where divine and human agency meet, interrupt, resist, and reshape one another.


Our call and responsibility is not merely to receive grace and then hopefully behave better. Jesus said it outright: as you desire, so let it happen to you. Our call is to recognize where the reign of God is already insisting upon itself in each of us and to join it, and move it outward, so that the whole of creation might benefit.
So I pray that what our hearts desire brings us faithfully to the humility Thurman speaks of — humility that can't be humiliated — where actions and intentions and impacts reflect the divine love that walks beside us in joys and sorrows. I pray that the incarnation of God we find thriving in the Canaanite woman today helps us to embody the divine presence that continually widens the circle, and co-creates the reign of God right now, with less human-imposed limitation.
Amen.


with joy,
Rev Sam


A few thinkers whose work shaped this sermon: Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited is essential reading. If you haven't picked it up, now is the time. The framing of "the Violence of Looking Away" comes from Lisa Gray-Garcia, whose writing about unhoused communities and the harm of erasure has stayed with me for years. And San Francisco Night Ministry — you can learn more about their work by going to their website.

Loaves and Fishes | David Whyte

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

I read that to the adults in the room and let them chew on it, while I headed off to discuss the Gospel for the weekend with the kiddos.

Then I walked over to where the children were, sat down on the floor, and set a big round loaf of banana bread between us — no simple banana bread. I did a bit of a test, and tried baking it with homemade caramel at the bottom of the pan when I tossed it into the oven. I asked the littles if they would help me with the bread, if they many would help me eat it, or at least wanted to try some. I told them I needed help with this snack.

They agreed it looked pretty good. And then I floated an idea: maybe we don't need to worry about the other people in the room. There wasn't a lot, after all. So maybe just us should eat. The adults over there can go get something at coffee hour. They'll be fine. They have the ability to do that, afterall.

The kids paused.

You could feel a little moment of *yes, actually, that sounds fine*...and then the sense that I might be setting them up. Something pulling them back just a bit. (Perhaps, impressive energy reading of the adults in the room influenced this one.) But the eldest in the group came around, and she suggested that maybe, we needed to share.

Yes. Exactly that. Maybe we should share.

So I told them a story. About Jesus and his friends, who had snacks — not too different from this banana bread — and there were a lot of other people around, kind of like all the other people in the room with us. Jesus's friends were hungry, and they wanted their snacks! They also didn't feel like they had enough for everyone. And if we're being honest, they didn't particularly feel like sharing what they had. But Jesus saw things differently, and he told his friends that they had to help feed all those people anyway.

I made sure to say to the eldest who thought we might need to share that Jesus seemed to have the same idea she did. That it wasn't okay to keep it all, that maybe more had to go around to all the other people. (Kids did let me know they were very interested in the gluten free blueberry muffins also on the plate, though...) :) 

Then, as I asked the kids if they'd help me (with mom's assistance, of course) pass out this bread so everyone could have some, I re-directed my commentary to the adults in the room:

Please reflect, as you receive this bread: when in your life have you received something freely at no cost, with no requirement, no strings? When has something just been given to you?

And as the kiddos started doing the work of sharing bread, with their mom's help, I brought myself over to the piano and started singing John Foley's Come to the Water. The words are practically straight out of Isaiah, and they floated around, just moving through the room while the kids shared some fresh baked banana bread on a Sunday morning.

When I saw the bread go back to the altar-- impressively, there were slices left over--I stopped playing.

I asked people to share what came up for them in their reflection time. And they did. Several reflections, honest ones, about moments of unexpected gift, about receiving grace they hadn't earned or asked for.

And then I said something I'd been sitting with all week:

I wonder if we focus on the miracle in this story partly as a way of not having to sit with what it's actually asking of us. Because the miracle is comfortable, in a strange way. The miracle keeps the story safely in the category of divine intervention, not in the category of choice. If Jesus fed five thousand people by multiplying bread, that's something that happens to people. Not something people choose.

But what if we read it differently?

The disciples' instinct was pragmatic: Send them away. They need food, we don't have it, let them go get what they need. That is a completely reasonable, sensible, economically coherent position. It's also exactly how we navigate most of the world. Assess your resources, assess the need, find the gap, make the responsible call.

Jesus says: No. They remain, and you feed them.

The disciples don't dissolve the crowd. They don't pass the responsibility to someone else. They do need Jesus' help. AND- they remain present to the need they're standing inside of. Something happens there in the staying, in the refusal to send people away, that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I want to be clear that this isn't a critique of any particular community. But, one of the larger conversations happening around churches and church leadership right now is about exactly this choice: whether we cut a check and walk away, or whether we find ways to actually be and remain together with people. Charity has its place, and providing the resources for independent choice also is important. But there is something that happens when you stay—when you don't attempt to manage need from a distance but enter and remain there—that checks simply cannot do.

Afterall, like Whyte seems to point out in his work... information is not​ what feeds the thousand. No matter what we're being told via other mediums.

How This Worked

Matthew 13 is dense. In a single chapter we get the Sower (which we sat with two weeks ago), the Wheat and the Weeds (last week), and then, in rapid succession this week: the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, the Treasure Hidden in a Field, and the Pearl of Great Price and then more talk of old and new treasure. That's a lot of Reign of God in one sitting.

Pete Rollins is an Irish philosopher and theologian whose book The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales (Paraclete Press) does something strange and valuable: it writes new parables in the spirit of Jesus. They're short. They're disorienting. They don't resolve neatly. They're designed to interrupt the way you thought you understood something. 

So this week, instead of me standing up and explaining what these parables mean or do, I chose four of Rollins' parables that pralleled the parables presented to us by Jesus in the Gospel reading for the day, broke into groups, asked each group to decide how to share their parable with the rest of the room, and then reflect on a couple brief questions to help them gather some noticings about what the parable might be highlighting for us today. While reporting back, I took some time to write some of their highlights down on our Altar. A Collective sermon, taking dimension, at our shared table.

Below: What each group worked with, and some of what emerged.

 
Group One: The Invisible Prophet and the Yeast 

Rollins' "Invisible Prophet" (No. 9 in *The Orthodox Heretic*) follows a prophet whose messenger and message is so beautiful that the hearers admire the beauty without actually receiving the message. The word is present. People are "drenched" in admiring it. Yet, it is simply not visible as word to people not yet prepared to hear it that way, and in the end people joyfully dance their way into destruction.

Jesus' Yeast parable places a small amount of leaven into an absurd quantity of flour. Matthew specifies three measures, which works out to roughly sixty pounds. Sixty pounds. This is not a dinner party. This is a transformation so large it becomes hard to picture.

What came out in the wash: The prophet's message alone won't do it. The yeast alone won't do it. What makes the Reign of God perceptible in both instances is the interdependence of what is small and hidden with what is large and ready to receive it. Rollins, in his commentary: "we hear the word by living it out, rather than merely rejoicing in its eloquence." The leaven has to meet the flour. The prophet has to be heard by people willing to be changed, not just moved. Otherwise you get sixty pounds of flour sitting there, admired, and unchanged. Or, people dancing to their destruction, joyfully, and utterly without the transformation that would provide abundant life.

Also notable: a couple of my members resonated with the challenges of being a woman in the workplace, and the struggles of how or whether you're beautiful, or beautiful enough. This is a whole other sermon I would have loved to have preached... ah, another day!

This group told us Rollins' parable via words, with a brief overview.

​Group Two: Translating the Word and the Mustard Seed

Rollins' "Translating the Word" (No. 3) follows Sophia, who received a vision and whose dream was to print literal copies of scripture for all. However, she does so much work raising money for this project and is, twice over, met with catastrophe. She chooses to spend the raised money on people in need, each time--materially providing relief, care, and sustenance to those around her. Finally, just before she dies, she manages to print hard copies of scripture. But, people say that the most beautiful versions of scripture all along were the first two. The theological move: the word is not transmitted through speech acts alone. It becomes visible only through transformation and relationship.

Jesus' Mustard Seed does something similar. A tiny seed, source of flavor, potentially medicinal in use, grows and transforms into many things over it's lifespan. The Reign of God visible, not through announcement, but through transformation, through interdependence and being many different things at different points in time.

What came out in the wash: ​what begins as an idea or an intuition has to become materially experienced to be real. Rollins writes: "it is impossible to affirm God's word apart from becoming that word." The mustard plant does not announce its sheltering capacity. It just grows, does what it do, and the people and birds find it useful. Is it useful if no one is using it? Manifesting the Reign of God is not a speech act or strict following of one singular idea. It is a participation, diversification, and again interdependence. 

This group told us the story as one member used physical movement via her own self to illustrate. It was quite engaging!

Group Three: Mansions and the Treasure Hidden in a Field

Rollins' "Mansions" (No. 27) catches the disciples dreaming about the beautiful rooms promised in the Father's house. Most are oriented toward those rooms, dreaming about them. But, one person on the outer edges wonders whether there's room for them in this scene. They ask Jesus, quietly, about this- stating tha they dont need or particularly care about mansions. This person discovers that there is space, in fact the space that's there for them is right alongside Jesus. Everyone else missed this, busy seeking and dreaming of their various mansion rooms.

Jesus' Treasure in a Field is the parable I find most confrontational in this set. A man finds treasure buried in a field, reburies it, sells everything he has, and buys the field. He is not divesting for the sake of the poor. He is divesting to acquire new treasure, hopefully more valuable than what he had prior. And this new treasure is literally buried in the ground. Seemingly, he's interested in keeping it for himself, as he doesnt tell the land owner what he's found- he just purchases the land with the intention of personally benefitting. The whole operation is possession-oriented, with no opportunity for those inchoate bits of the Reign of God to take off beyond this individual owner.

What came out in the wash: Particularly noticeable was the sense of being the one on the outside. We fall so easily into what you might call a poverty of affluence, a kind of loneliness that comes not from having too little but from spending all our energy acquiring and possessing. The disciples in Rollins' story, asleep and dreaming of their rooms, miss the simple and enormous thing: there is room for you, and that is where Jesus is. Not in the room you've acquired. In the room that has already been made. But being that one on the outside, with Jesus or no, is also tough.

This group drew pictures to illustrate Rollins' story.

Group Four: Pearl and the Pearl of Great Price

Rollins' "Pearl" (No. 6) gives us a Jesus telling the story of the merchant who acquires the pearl of great price by selling everything to purchase this pearl. A woman listening in the back of the crowd, notes that this is a pradox. Once the pearl is aquired, the purchaser has removed themselves from the entire economy in which the pearl has value. No resources for any food, housing, etc. It's all been spent on aquiring the pearl. The merchant is holding something beautiful and useless.  They can either have the pearl, or have all these other things by continuing to engage in this economy, but they can't have both at the same time. So. they've (intentionally? unintentionally?) divested themselves from the whole entire existing economy, in favor of one pearl being simply enough.

Jesus' version does something similar. The merchant sells everything for one pearl. But a pearl only has value if you sell it. This merchant is done selling. Which means they have walked out of the entire market. The treasure is not the next best asset. The treasure is the transformation that happens when you pursue it with everything you have.

What came out in the wash: Possession does not make someone wealthy. Possession has the power to transform what wealth even means, if what you end up holding is something that disrupts your participation the whole economy you were operating in as a merchant. The group also spoke of whether or not this pearl is shared among many, versus kept for oneself. Rollins wrote: "poverty is not the first step toward the Reign of God. It is the very place where we find God." Not intentional deprivation, mind you, and not manufactured scarcity, but the kind of poverty that comes from voluntarily divesting from economies built on the accumulation and ownership of other people, other lands, other lives (all of which are also built on variations of oppression).

This group gave us the story via overview. It was the closest to the original parable, so they didn't have to work too hard to get everyone to know the trajectory of the plot. ;) 

What All Four Had in Common

As the groups reported back, I wrote key words and phrases on paper as each one shared. That paper was covering the altar. I want to come back to that in a moment.

But first, here is what I noticed across all four stories:

• Something is embodied but not automatically heard or seen. The leaven is there. The prophet is speaking. More is required for the inchoate Reign of God to take form and transform.
• Something becomes visible only through transformation, growth, and interdependence. The mustard seed. Sophia's dream of making scripture available to people. Aiming for one singular goal only and ignoring the whole of the world in the process does not allow for the Reign of God to take shape.
• Something keeps many locked in a holding pattern of possession and valuation, dreaming about rooms in the sky while missing the person right in front of us. It's the person who's never possessed or experienced that level of possession who questions whether there's room, and discovers that room is right beside Jesus.
• And something disrupts the kind of possession focus, not by taking things away, but by replacing the whole existing method of engaging with the economy with something that, once purchased, has no value without re-engaging in the selling (and therefore losing the thing). So, the purchaser stays out of the game if they choose to keep the pearl.

The Reign of God, in all four of these stories, becomes perceptible through embodied participation and interdependent relationship. Economies of possession and spectacle easily obscure what is already present. Divesting from possessive economies is not the path to the Reign of God, as Rollins points out: It is the Reign of God. Or, to put it differently: words of God or Jesus are just words, lovely as they can be. It's the three-dimensionality of living them that makes them uniquely life-giving.

The Sermon Was Already Happening

Back to that paper on the altar.
It wasn't a facilitation trick. It became the sermon, hidden right there in the flesh of the room, made in real time, requiring all of us and this particular morning together to exist. You could try to take it home. You could try to own it. But without all of us and our various particularities, without the specific presence of that room on that morning, it would quickly lose whatever made it matter. (It does, for sure- it's sitting in my office now as I write this...and...without having been there Sunday morning it's near impossible for it to seem meaningful).

That is what the parables keep insisting on: the Reign of God is visible only through participation, real only through interdependence, and it cannot be possessed without opting to remove oneself from many different systems that establish what is or is not valuable.

There are a hundred potential takeaways from a Sunday like this. As I said to the community gathered on Sunday, I am going to let you pick the one you need this week. At the center of all of them, though, is this: the Reign of God is not just an intellectual proposition. It is something bodily, participatory, and already underway. Inchoate in all, and waiting for three dimensionality to grow. And we are invited to notice it, and join in.

with joy,
​Pr. Sam

The Rule That Started It
A couple of years ago, I heard an interview with two women, one Muslim and one Jewish, both working for peace in Israel and Palestine, amid borders that are sites of grief, memory, danger, and a whole lot of contested questions about rightness and wrongness. At one point in the conversation, they turned to justice. And one of the women said something that really stuck with me:

Work toward goodness. But don't try to enact God's judgment. I think that isn't too far from what we received in today's parable.

The Efficient Solution Nobody Gets to Try
A field, planted with good seeds. Some enemy comes in the night and scatters weeds among the wheat. The plants begin to grow, the workers notice what's happened, and they want to do what seems like the entirely reasonable thing: fix it. Get the weeds out before they ruin the wheat. And there are layers on that impulse worth naming:

Protect what we've worked for. Make our work easier. Weeds slow everything down. Use resources only for the right plants, the deserving ones. Weeds will benefit from everything we're pouring into the wheat, and they haven't earned that.

{Smirk.}

This is logic that sounds a lot like market efficiency, doesn't it? The field owner has a different idea: let the weeds grow. Tend all of it.

Why? Because if you go ripping out weeds, you'll destroy the wheat too.

That's practically wise, yes. Protect the crop. But notice what the workers are actually being asked to do: continue tending a field where they no longer get to decide who receives the conditions for growth. They don't get to reserve nourishment only for what they've already deemed useful.

And let's be clear: this owner is not going for neutrality. "Let them grow" is not permission to abandon the vulnerable, ignore harm, or wait passively for someone else (read: God) to show up and handle it. There is still work to do in this field. The difference is between continuing to work toward good fruit and appointing ourselves the final judges of what is and isn't wheat.

Because here's the brutal part: we aren't always right about what we think we're seeing. Sometimes, we are very wrong. Sometimes, our weed is someone else's wheat.

The Plant That Looked Just Like the Other Plant Gets To Grow
Scholars believe the weeds Jesus is referring to in this parable were darnel, a plant that looks almost identical to wheat when it's young. And the challenge with darnel isn't just visual. Its roots can become entangled with whatever is growing around it. Pull one, you pull the other.

That desire to fix a problem the moment you spot it isn't unreasonable. In our modern world, we actually applaud it. Not wasting time on blame, quickly identifying paths to solutions. That's admirable. It keeps us productive. It keeps the market moving.

But this landowner says: no. Pulling up the weeds is not the way to handle this. Because you might pull up the wheat. You might destroy something that is still in the process of becoming.

You might look at a person in one moment of their life and decide that that moment tells you everything about them. You'd be wrong. The seemingly good may turn out not good at all. And the seemingly hopeless may turn out utterly beautiful.

That's what I find most remarkable about this parable. We are being told that rather than swinging down with swift judgment as fast as possible, we get to grow. We get to keep growing. We are not frozen into a singular moment or place in time.

God does not look at the worst we have done, the cruelest we have been, the moments when fear took the wheel, and declare that nothing new can ever grow here. We get to continue becoming. And in turn, we are expected to extend that same grace well beyond ourselves.

(And yes, I know. Exerting judgment all over ourselves is an excellent warm-up for doing the very same to others.)

What the Christian Church Has Done With Judgement
The Christian church has caused enormous harm every time it has ruled itself and the world with overly heavy judgment, imagining itself capable of sorting these fields. We've named some people wheat. Some people weeds.

We've tried to uproot queer folks and their bodies. So thoroughly. So violently, that now we find ourselves scrambling to say "actually, this is okay." Which is, when you sit with it, a deeply strange thing to have to say. If anything, the 180 we owe isn't "we've decided this is acceptable now." The 180 we owe is a simple, clear and plain: "We were wrong from the beginning. Very, very, very wrong."

We've tried to uproot Indigenous practices. Disabled bodies. Neurodivergent thinking patterns. A whole host of religious differences and theological disagreements. Again and again, laying down our judgments in clever costumes we call things like "justice," "communal wellbeing," "God's will." "fairness."

Claiming to defend God's field has resulted in the destruction of living wheat so many times. And so Jesus gives us a rule of thumb that echoes that interview I heard years ago: work for what is good. Protect people from harm. Tell the truth about injustice. But do not mistake your judgment for God's justice.

The Uncomfortable Question For All Of Us
​I could tie this up here. A gentle close: leave room for your neighbor's growth, even when you'd rather not count them as a neighbor. Because the field still belongs to God, and thank goodness, God is not finished growing anything just yet.

But, as scholar Amy-Jill Levine will gladly remind us, one of the hallmarks of a Jesus parable is that it's supposed to leave every single one of us a little uncomfortable. And in this case, here's one aspect of what we're being asked to sit with:

Look at how generous this field owner is. Resources are not being withheld from the weeds. Whatever their final status may turn out to be, the workers are not permitted to use their own judgment to decide who receives what's needed for growth. Both weeds and wheat will be allowed to grow. The field owner trusts that in the end, things will be sorted as necessary. As things stand now, all receive care.

That command to let the field grow is not permission to sit comfortably by while people suffer. It is, however, a reminder to pay very close attention to what it is we think we're doing, and what we might be camouflaging as we go about it.

So if that's the case:
Where are you and I prepared to uproot, or to refuse the conditions for growth, in the name of righteousness? In the name of judgment dressed up as justice? In the name of our more modern word, *fairness*?

Fairness by whose standards, when the field owner says: we all get to grow?

with joy,
Rev. Sam