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

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:

A Stranger Walks In
So, as those who were with us and using the worship aids noticed, we received our new printer this past Tuesday. This is huge. I am thrilled to be able to print better worship aids that allow everyone to see more clearly! 

The installation went pretty smoothly. I gave our old Ricoh a genuine goodbye gesture that made the folks doing the install awkwardly chuckle, and then I left them to their work as I handled some other things in the office.

Somewhere in there, someone came in—phone blaring some kind of talk radio—and headed straight for the bathroom. I didn't see the face. I assumed it must be someone who knows us somehow.

Eventually, this person came out of the restroom, and he asked whether the tech and I knew the story of Joseph. (Yes, Joseph as in, the amazing technicolor Dreamcoat Joseph.)  This person continued on, explaining to us how Joseph was "promoted" because he was a Strong Man who Refused Pharaoh's Wife's Advances (that evil whore, you know—God rewards manly strength, and punishes the wicked and all). I was nodding and listening.

Then, our new friend moves forward into talking about how Joseph is the ONLY person in the bible held captive, AND promoted. He continues on, making a connection between Joseph's dreams and the book of Daniel, and then makes some connections to the book of Revelation.

I was standing there listening. Nodding. He was regularly saying to me: "You know what I am talking about, right? I mean, this is very simple."

For a brief moment, as he was speaking, I wondered whether I should introduce myself and let him know I'm the pastor here. I had the sense that might bother him, so I just didn't do it. By this point, he was telling me about how he so wants the scrolls of Revelation to be broken open because he wants the world to be filled with good, righteous, Godly people. His desire was genuine. He clearly wanted to see the earth filled with goodness and was pained at the wickedness he's experienced all around him.

He asks me once again whether I'm getting what he's saying, and reminds me once again it's very simple, what he's saying. I take my opportunity here to interject: "You know — for many of us, Revelation isn't about predicting the end of the world. It's about helping us find strength in remaining faithful, even when the world feels like it's ending."

He responded, telling me that he knows what Revelation is about.

So I interjected one more time and said, "We may have some theological differences here. For many of us, the goal is not the end of the world — it's to help God's world flourish—"

He let me know that he could already tell by the "colored" flags outside that this is not a true house of worship, that we're clearly intentionally misleading people—we're part of the wicked problem, because you know what Jesus said about... And before he could finish, the anger in me finally bubbled over, and I spoke right over him, telling him we don't tolerate that kind of speech here, questions are okay, hateful statements are not, and I'm going to have to ask him to leave the property.

As I'm sure you can imagine, our friend did not appreciate what I had to say. He did however respect me enough to head out the door, doing so while telling me what "Jesus had to say about the gays." At that point I wasn't about to shut up, so I stubbornly said, "Uh, not according to anything we've currently got to look at, he didn't"—and then he told me I needed to read the book of Matthew.

I guess he doesn't know it's liturgical Year A, and Matthew is what we're reading almost every Sunday. :) 

Two Jobs At Once
You know, I have replayed that whole scenario over and over in my mind this week. It's been eating at me. Partially because I wanted to do two things at the same time. I wanted to love this guy, that's my job. And simultaneously, I wanted to love the other people in the room. That is ALSO my job.

The two don't play well together in this circumstance.

I was looking for a "third way" —one where this guy could be seen and heard while the other people in the room could still feel pretty secure, and maybe everyone could learn something or experience the Holy Spirit between us.

In the end, like Paul, I did what I do not want to do. I cut him off and asked him to leave.
Ever had that happen? 

That excerpt we heard from Romans today is an example of Paul noticing exactly this in his own experiences.

Paul at 2 am...
Paul has noticed something downright embarrassing. We don't always become the people we know we want to be, the people we're pretty sure we can be. Anyone who's ever replayed a conversation at two in the morning knows exactly what he's talking about.

The struggle, of course, as Paul points out (though brutally full of horrific mind-body dualism that is a product of his time and continues to do harm in some theological traditions to this day) is not that we are evil, nor is it that our bodies are evil, but at the core of things he's saying that we're unfinished. And thanks be to God that's the case, because it seems all of humanity has this significant problem between what we want to do and what actually happens.

Nobody Danced
Jesus, today, began with a critique not too far from what Paul's griping about: "We played the flute, no one danced. We sang the funeral song, no one mourned."

In other words, what he's saying in there is: John the Baptist arrives in his camel hair coat and locust-honey meals—everyone thinks that's gross. Ew. Then Jesus arrives, eating, drinking, chilling with all the people, polar opposite of John in behavior. Everyone thinks that's gross too. Ew. He eats and drinks with the bad people we don't like and don't support because they do bad things.

You see the pattern? John arrives at one end of the spectrum: rejected. Jesus arrives at another: also rejected. The children bring God into the scene —singing, flutes, dancing, mourning— also entirely rejected, no appropriate responses.

The issue at hand isn't that God is absent for us (oops — I mean, *them*). The issue is that many have already decided what God is "supposed" to sound like and act like and look like. Which means sometimes God could be singing right in front of us, and we wouldn't recognize the melody. Wouldn't even notice its effects.

Which brings me back to the scene during our printer installation.

What Songs Were Present
I didn't mention it super clearly earlier, but there were two other witnesses to the whole scene on Tuesday. I wasn't there by myself. Two techs were quietly watching and listening from the new printer. And while I was wondering how to love one person well, these two were probably wondering something totally different: would this church do what that line of progress pride flags outside seems to say it will do?

It wasn't until days later that I realized there were several melodies present in that situation: One tune was total certainty. Another was exclusion. One felt very secure in knowing exactly who and what God is and demands of us. And another insisted that vulnerable people—people historically ostracized by so many mainstream Christian groups—are also made in the image of God, entitled to safety and dignity, without question.

After I set the boundary, the atmosphere in the office changed. Two strangers who were just trying to do their jobs, while someone shows up with increasingly hateful rhetoric didn't experience theological brilliance, but they did experience brave space, and safety.

The room probably didn't need another argument or theological talking point. Maybe all that it needed was someone to amplify a particular melody. And that one went something like an assertive: No. Not here.

I did what I do not want to do, and in the aftermath I likely made us a bit of an enemy on Tuesday.* But two new friends were also made. Those techs exhaled audibly, and new camaraderie was found in the aftermath of the whole scene.

Not What They Mean by Freedom
Yesterday, the US celebrated 250 years of independence. And we've all heard the phrase: freedom isn't free. That's a true statement. Just, maybe not in the way we've sometimes been taught.

By the witness of our scripture, Jesus never once suggested that freedom can be purchased or claimed via armies and governments and empires. Rather, he seems clear: freedom costs. It costs us comfort. Freedom costs us certainty. Sometimes, freedom costs us relationships. I think Jesus and Paul were deeply aware of the pains of that cost and still committed their lives to freedom for all.

Which Song to Sing?
So real freedom, for us Christians—involves learning which song or melody shapes our lives, knowing it by heart, even when every other melody around us seems like it would be easier.

And this song can be a tricky thing to learn. It seems to skip beats and do all kinds of wild, unanticipated stuff. But at the core, we're asked to keep listening carefully for it in the midst of the noise, while we're simultaneously already singing, dancing, and playing along. Not an easy combination. And you know, that's the thing about "My yoke is easy, my burden is light" being placed right after Paul's "Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ the One Who Frees!"

Sometimes our voices fail and our dancing falls out of rhythm. Sometimes we find only silence where the flutes should be. Sometimes all we have is grief, and we miss the lament completely. Sometimes we realize, with a jolt, that we've been singing the wrong song all along. And sometimes, others are carrying the melody for us until we can find our way back in.

Maybe that's what Jesus means. His yoke isn't easy because discipleship is easy. A yoke is a burden of its own. Perhaps the way he might say this today would be: *my* yoke is easier, and *my* burden lighter — because we're yoked together, never carrying it alone, always doing the costly work of more freedom for all together.

Learning this freedom song also means learning how the song asks to be sung.

Sometimes quietly — a lullaby.
Sometimes through tears, a lament.
Sometimes with joy, full celebration.
Sometimes with righteous anger, a protest.
Sometimes with simple, assertive strength: boundary-setting.

And sometimes at the top of our lungs, because the world is so noisy and cruel that anything softer simply disappears into the machinery of fear, and we are called to throw up heartfelt cries for the sake of the restoration of all, no exclusions based on categories we humans make up.

And, thanks be to God—even when we're getting it wrong, the song never dies. The Spirit never stops singing. The invitation is always there for us to pick that freedom song back up, once again.

with joy,
Rev. Sam

*A note of genuine gratitude to the unexpected visitor who stopped by on Tuesday. I hope the road is kind to you, and that you find not only what you're looking for, but what you need—even if we'd likely disagree about what those things may be.

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

with joy,
Pr Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queer folk. That's who.*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don't ever have the control we think we have. We will never maintain our image anyway. Things will not go the way we plan them. And God incarnate — the one who could have arrived with every resource imaginable — chose instead a gal named Mary, a ton of tables (hardly any of which were his own) set with bread and wine, a borrowed tomb, and not much else. He ended up on a cross because he was more committed to people than to image and success strategy. He didn't have all the things, and he didn't maintain an image- but he was ready.

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

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

Scripture is full of the unprepared. I think that is a huge chunk of the wisdom so many people across time are attempting to communicate to us via the Bible. Being well-resourced and fully packed was never required, nor was it ever the point. The point is being ready to participate. Right now. With the people who are all around us. Being in and with the circumstances that are actually here. Choosing the moment that is actually happening now.

Building trust. Offering hospitality. Caring for one another. The simplest way to say this is: Loving one another the way Jesus loved us.

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

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

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

with joy,
Pr Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with joy,
Pr. Sam

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


So let me ask the real question:


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


with joy,
Pr. Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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