When my husband Sean and I got engaged, lo these many nine years ago, I started trying to learn my way around the Catholic Mass. You might think it would be easy, because our Lutheran worship service is based directly on the Catholic Mass, and isn’t really very different at all. But part of what made it so hard was that it was just different enough so that every time I let down my guard and thought “Hey, I know this prayer!” I’d miss the subtle wording differences and be right back where I started, the obvious outsider.

And, at least in the Catholic churches I’ve visited, outsiders are pretty obvious. We’re the only ones who don’t know everything by memory … the words, the gestures, when to sit and stand and kneel. We’re the only ones trying to fumble our way through the missal, which is impossible to use, frankly, and just makes things worse.

Can you tell that this still frustrates me?

The linked headstones of Het Oude Kerkhof unite a Protest and Catholic married couple divided by a cemetary wall. http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/het-oude-kerkhof

It’s been nine years, and I still get upset when I think about how alienated I felt and honestly, still feel and maybe always will feel when I go to mass with Sean’s family.

If you’ve never felt alienated and angry in church before, I highly recommend it. Like we talked about last week … it’s character building! And it changes the way you think and feel and understand hospitality in worship. You begin to understand what visitors to any church usually feel, including this congregation, the first time they take the brave step of coming to worship and find all these people doing and saying all this strange stuff and everyone knows what to say or do … except them.

It’s not a fun feeling, and you really have to be a committed sort of person to get over that first alienating experience and come back for more. Or, maybe you experience something or someone in worship that is so welcoming that it gives you the courage to try again.  Something for us to think about here at Redeemer, to be sure.

I keep trying with the Catholic Mass because I love my husband and because I’m stubborn. And because, truly, the greatest impediment to my learning is my own bad attitude.  That bad attitude is rooted in my own sense of hurt and loss every time we get to Holy Communion and I’m not allowed to go up and receive the meal. I stay and sing in the pew, with Sean, and every once and awhile I have the grace and good sense and perspective to remember that Sean’s hurt and loss at that moment is profoundly deeper than my own, because he has lost his access to sharing Communion with his family.

Nine years later, that part hasn’t gotten any easier.

But there is a part of the Catholic Mass, a prayer before Communion that we don’t have at all in our liturgy, which is too bad. That prayer always brings me a sense of peace: the congregation says, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I will be healed.” Actually, that’s what the congregation always said until two years ago, when the wording of the mass changed and that prayer changed to this: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

I like the previous version better, mostly because it’s one of the only parts I had memorized, but I appreciate that the new version makes a more direct connection to our Gospel reading today.

Both prayers accomplish the same thing, I think: it reminds the worshiping congregation of our human limitations and also of God’s power to overcome those limitations. Suddenly, with that prayer, we’re all on the same level: the lifelong Catholics and the obvious outsiders united in our desperate need for grace. We are not worthy, we cannot make ourselves worthy on our own. No matter how hard I try to learn the right words, to memorize the gestures, to make every honest effort to be my very best self, I will fail, I will fall short.

But God doesn’t fail. And God can heal me, and you and all of creation … even with just a word, God can make us worthy and whole.

Just a word … only say the word. The power of that statement didn’t hit me until I started trying to think of examples of being healed just by words from my own life and experience. Can you think of any from your life? A time when you were healed just by a word, not by anything else, not by a touch, or an act of kindness, or a comforting presence. Just a word.

I could only think of one, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. The truth is that words are incredibly powerful but their power is unwieldy. Even people who pride themselves on being good with words find that words fall short at the most crucial times in our lives: when the depth of our joy or our sorrow becomes inarticulate, too much for words to express.

The authors of our Hebrew and Christian scriptures knew that: they had a healthy respect for the power of words and for all the ways humans fall short in harnessing that power. That’s why in the first creation story God creates everything with words: “God said, let there be light, and there was light, and it was good.” God said, let there be … and it was so … and it was good. God creates everything with just words, nothing else. And the Gospel of John picks up on this, beginning with that story of creation, and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God.” The Gospel writer tells us, right from the start, that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, Jesus Christ is the embodiment of God’s most awesome power: the power to create, to destroy, to heal and to forgive with just a word.

“But only speak the word,” said the centurion, “and let my servant be healed.”

If you’ve ever tried to comfort someone after they’ve experienced a tragic loss, you know that healing with words is hard to do. If you’ve ever sought comfort in words after a loss of your own, you know that words fall short and miss the mark more than often than they help. You can imagine that people in Oklahoma who have been through two tornadoes in less than two weeks are pretty much beyond words, at this point.

But the thing to remember about the Word of God is that the Word of God is Jesus, and the Word of God has the power to do anything, to heal anything to bring comfort and love and forgiveness to anyone and any situation.

Because the Word of God is Jesus, the Word of God is present and active wherever the Body of Christ is, so, wherever we are. You and me with our fumbling for the right words, and sometimes our silence, and often in our need to do something, to offer some kind of practical help when it seems like words just aren’t enough.

So, in a couple of weeks I’ll be worshipping with Sean and his family at the New Jersey shore, at this great Catholic church that, after nine years, almost feels like home-away-from-home. It’s a congregation where people sing, really sing, and really participate in worship, and that always makes me feel like I’ve been in the presence of something holy. And as the time approaches for Holy Communion, I’ll probably get sad and a little angry, and wish that the priest would say, as we do here at Redeemer, that this is the Lord’s table and that means all are truly welcome. One bread, one body, all brothers and sisters in Christ.

But even in that moment where the brokenness of the church meets my own brokenness, my own unworthiness and sinfulness, my own deep need for healing, I’ll be looking forward to saying these words along with the whole congregation: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

May God, who is greater and more powerful than our human limitations and our human need give your body and soul the healing you are longing for, through the Word, through our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

These words from St. Paul give me a little bit of emotional whiplash. I’m honestly not a big fan of the first part of that sentence, the part about suffering being character building.  Anytime anyone tells me that suffering is character building, I want to tell them, “You know, I have plenty of character. I don’t need anymore.”

I don’t know anyone who needs that kind of character building. And the fact that it’s true doesn’t really make suffering any easier, or at least, it’s not a helpful thought when you’re right in the middle of it. Maybe years later, somewhere down the road, we can look back and think of our suffering and endurance as being something that made us stronger, something we learned from, something that formed the people we are today. Character building.

But I wouldn’t tell the people of Moore, Oklahoma that their suffering is good for them.  On this Memorial Day weekend I wouldn’t go out and talk about endurance and character building with families of service men and women who have died. It would be insensitive and presumptuous to do that.  And St. Paul comes this close to being insensitive and presumptuous in his letter Romans.

But then he keeps going. He continues his logical progression and takes it out of the realm of superficial platitudes and into the realm of something really meaningful.

“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Hope does not disappoint us. Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Hope does not disappoint us, because our hope isn’t based on superficial platitudes. It isn’t a shallow hope, a hope that hides from the truth of suffering. It’s a hope that knows suffering and yet still persists. It’s real hope.

Hang onto that idea while I take you somewhere else and then back again.

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus tell the disciples: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” I don’t think Jesus is being condescending or patronizing, here. Like, “Hey you guys who left everything to follow me, endangering your lives and everything you hold dear … there’s some stuff you don’t know, but you’re just not ready for it yet.  Sorry … you can’t handle the truth.”

I don’t read it that way. When I hear Jesus saying, “‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” for some reason, I feel very … relieved. Very comforted. I like knowing that Jesus knows that there are limits to what a human being can bear. There are limits to what we can hear and understand and take in without breaking, or imploding, or shutting down completely.

It makes me think of the way my son Walter shuts down when he’s overwhelmed by a big crowd of people. He gets this kind of blank look and you can tell he’s miles away, safely cut off from his overstimulated senses.

I’ve seen adults get that look, too. I saw it a lot when I worked as a hospital chaplain. There’s only so much a human being can take. There are words we just can’t bear to hear.

I don’t know what Jesus wanted to say to the disciples that day, when he decided not to, when he knew it would be too much for them to bear. But I know what unbearable words can sound like. I can think of a whole list of them. And I’m sure you can, too.

In the wake of a tornado, the words “total loss” come to mind. And “I’m sorry, but your daughter was in the classroom that collapsed.”

This holiday weekend I’m thinking about all the unbearable words heard by mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and children: words that speak of ultimate sacrifice.

There are other unbearable words, too.

“It’s cancer.”

“There was nothing we could do.”

“Your job has been eliminated.”

“This relationship is over.”

“This marriage is over.”

“You have a problem, and you have to get help.”

That last one has been on my mind a lot in the past months.

You’ll remember that after Bishop Burnside from the South Central Synod of Wisconsin was involved in a drunk driving accident, I preached that I felt challenged and called by God to speak with courage about alcoholism, and other hidden truths that might be hard to hear about. I shared that I don’t really know anything about what it takes to reach out to people who are struggling with alcohol and drugs, but I want to learn and I want to try.

After the service, God answered my prayers in the form of Eric and Jackie H. Eric has been sober for more than a decade and I’m sharing that with you with his permission because he is an amazing resource for people who are dealing with alcohol addiction and are looking for a way to get to recovery. And if you’re like me and looking for advice on how to help people with addiction, he does that, too. He’s pretty awesome.

Jackie is pretty awesome, too, as you know, and one of the stories she shared with me about her experience has stayed with me and shaped the way I think about words we can’t bear to hear, and words we need to hear.

Jackie says there was a moment when everything changed and she was able to realize that Eric was an alcoholic and things needed to change. But, before that moment, it was like she couldn’t hear it. Friends would say things, try to get her to talk about it, and she’d brush it off. She wasn’t ready to hear the unbearable words, she wasn’t ready to speak the unbearable words … until, one day, she was. She could hear and see the truth, and she could share that truth with Eric, and the Holy Spirit gave her the words that allowed Eric to hear and see the truth, too.

Jesus says, “‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” All the truth, the whole truth.  Not when we can’t bear to hear it, not when it would just overwhelm us and shut us down, but in God’s time, with God’s love, in God’s way, we receive the truth.

What are the words that you can’t bear to hear, but maybe need to hear, because they are true?

What are the words you can’t bear to say, but maybe need to say, to someone you love, because they are true?

None of this, the unbearable words we hear or say, none of this is ours to bear alone. Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, and as I talked about two weeks ago, having a God that is three and one, Father, Son and Holy Spirit all the time, and one God all the time, means that God is never alone. God is always in community, and so are we.

The Holy Spirit guides us, lovingly, into all truth. The Holy Spirit pours the love of God into our hearts, so that we know, we know, that our hope is not in vain. Our hope is not shallow or superficial. Our hope will not disappoint us.

As St. Paul writes to the Romans: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

May the love of God poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit, and the peace of God which passes all understanding, and the hope of God which does not disappoint us, be yours today and always in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Mother’s Day is not a church holiday, but it has a lot of significance for many of us here in church today. That significance isn’t uniform: some of us are hurting and grieving today, others are celebrating, some are probably doing some of both, grieving and celebrating at the same time.

There was a wonderful blog post making its way around my friends on facebook this week, written by a woman who doesn’t have children and who has experienced some pretty alienating church services on Mother’s Day. Instead of the usual ode to mothers and motherhood, she wrote a poem that acknowledges the wideness of experiences people have with Mother’s Day. And it’s so good, I’d like to read it to you now.

This is from a blog called The Messy Middle, in a post titled “An Open Letter to Pastors (A Non-Mom Speaks About Mother’s Day.)” [Text slightly altered for congregational context; read the original here.]

“To those who gave birth this year—we celebrate with you

To those who lost a child this year, and to all who are missing children who have died– we mourn with you

To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day and wear the badge of food stains – we appreciate you

To those who experienced loss this year through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or children running away—we mourn with you

To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment – we walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don’t mean to make this harder than it is.

To those who are foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms – we need you

To those who have warm and close relationships with your children – we celebrate with you

To those who have disappointment, heart ache, and distance with your children – we pray with you

To those who lost their mothers this year, and to all who are missing mothers who have died – we grieve with you

To those who experienced abuse at the hands of your own mother – we hear you and stand with you

To those who lived through driving tests, medical tests, and the overall testing of motherhood – we are better for having you in our midst

To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year – we grieve and rejoice with you

And to those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising –we anticipate with you

This Mother’s Day, we walk with you. Mothering is not for the faint of heart and we have real warriors in our midst. We remember you.”

This isn’t a prayer, because it’s not addressed to God, but when I read it I really want to say, “Amen!” at the end.  Amen, this is most certainly true.

It is most certainly true that all these experiences of and with motherhood are very real, and very different. Each of us is so different, so uniquely formed by our history and our families and the world and people around us.  Any attempt to simplify us and our experiences into one uniform block feels hollow and untrue.

You’ve experienced that, probably, if you’ve ever shopped for a Mother’s Day card and spent what seemed like hours in the aisle reading each one and thinking, “Nope.”

We’re not all the same, that’s for sure. So what is Jesus talking about in our Gospel lesson today? What does he mean when he prays for unity, when he prays that we should be one?

I think the first thing to know is that unity is not the same thing as uniformity. Being one does not mean denying our differences or excluding people who are different in some way. And that’s a pretty profound thought in and of itself, but even more profound and more challenging is this:  Jesus prays that we should be one, because God made us to be in community. In fact, being in community is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, because God is always in community, God is always three-in-one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So, when Jesus prays to the Father, “that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,” Jesus is praying that we be what we were made to be: that we be in community, which is a holy and godly thing to be.

So far this might be sounding harmless and maybe a little obvious, but trust me when I tell you that the implications of this are really uncomfortable. Because it means that it’s not enough to sit at home and read the Bible with your immediate family, although that is a pretty great way to live out and model your faith in your daily life. And it’s not enough to pray while you fish, or give thanks to God while the sun comes up over the lake, although anyone who has had the privilege of seeing that knows that there is no church building in the world as awe inspiring as the beauty of God’s creation.  Still, it’s not enough.

It means that in order to truly live out our calling as Christian disciples we are called to gather at least once a week with people who are not all biologically related to us, with people who are very different from us in many ways and, in some cases, with people who we don’t agree with on politics or get along with personally.

It means that we’ve gotta go to church.

All of you here today know this already or you wouldn’t be here. But I don’t think it’s something we talk about enough, or at least, we don’t talk about it directly enough.

I know the subject makes me nervous in part because of my own history with churchgoing.  It started in high school, and if you know anything about teenagers you know that sleeping until noon becomes a biological imperative.  In high school, I dragged myself out of bed and went to church because people were counting on me to be there: I had to teach Sunday School, assisting minister, etc. In college, no one was counting on me anymore, and I was relieved.

When I did manage to get to church, I was always glad I’d gone.  Not because the preaching was great or the music was inspiring … there was something else.  A feeling I couldn’t quite articulate at the time, except to say that it was a good feeling.

Honestly, I can think of at least 20 really solid, good reasons not to go to church on any given Sunday, all of them better than just wanting to sleep in: anything ranging from being sick to going out of town to visit family to having to work on Sunday mornings.  And the teenager still in me is grateful for a church and a theology that doesn’t use guilt to force us to come to church, or really, to force us to do anything.  We won’t go to hell for not going to church.

But none of that changes the basic truth that God made us to be in community, and God made us to need each other in order to fully experience what it means to be Christians.  That’s where that feeling comes from, the one you get when you go to church, the one that’s good but hard to describe.  And that’s what I mean when I say we need to go to church .. I mean that we need to come together at least once a week to worship in community: to hear the word of God read and sung and proclaimed in a sermon, to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion which is the tangible, taste-able sign that God loves us unconditionally. We need to hear that our all of our sins are entirely forgiven, and most of all, we need to be in community with people with whom we may share nothing in common except that we are one in Christ.

“Go to church” is kind of a misleading thing to say, because we are the church, wherever we go, whether we’re in this building or not. But if you are not in this building worshipping with these people on a regular basis then you are missing out on something really important. You’re missing out on something that’s vital to sustaining a Christian life. You’re missing out on a part of what makes you made in the image of God, a part of what God created you to be.

And again, you’re here today, so I’m preaching to the choir. But as the weather gets nicer and summer holidays and vacation times come, this is a message I think is worth saying and repeating clearly and directly: when you are able to come and worship here, please do. Regular worship is what builds Christian community and connects us to each other as the Body of Christ. It’s what builds our relationships with each other so that when one of us in trouble, we know it, and we can mobilize ourselves to help and support each other in every way we can.

When you aren’t able to come and worship here, please find a way to worship in community wherever it is that you find yourself.  Going to worship while you’re travelling can be a really awesome experience, and even if you feel a little odd going to worship in an unfamiliar congregation, you will hear the Word of God read and sung and proclaimed in a sermon, and you will hear that God loves you and your sins are forgiven, and you’ll interact with other brothers and sisters in Christ who you would never have had a chance to meet, otherwise.

Here at Redeemer we tend to talk about our summer attendance drop off like it’s an inevitable fact of life. And it probably is, to a certain extent.  I can tell you there is one weekend in June when Sean and Walter and I won’t be here because we will be going to Catholic Mass in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. And I’ve got to say, that time with Sean’s family is pretty important to us. And, later this summer, I’ll be on maternity leave, which is rather important family time, as well.

But as much as I value that family time, I also know that the time I spend here at Redeemer is family time. It is important family time, too, and it is time well spent with my big, extended family, the family of God. You are my brothers and sisters. You are my daughters and my sons. You are my fathers and mothers.

And that’s important for us to remember every day, but on Mother’s Day in particular. Part of what makes Mother’s Day so hard for so many of us is that it creates this ideal of motherhood, this ideal of family, that is unrealistic and unhelpful and impossible to achieve. The perfect mother, the perfect children, the perfect family, none of us are any of these because that ideal isn’t God’s ideal. That’s not what God made us to be.

God made us to be one, to be community, to be part of something much bigger than ourselves and much bigger than the people we usually think of as our family.

As I was preparing for this sermon today, one of the thoughts I kept coming back to was that I’d really like to ask you all, you know, as a Mother’s Day gift to your pastor, to keep coming to church this summer, especially while I’m on maternity leave. I really want to stand up here and plead with you … please, please please please? Because I can kind of handle the thought of attendance being down over the summer, but the thought of worship participation going down because I’m not here as pastor really bothers me.

But you and I both know that this is not about me. And coming to worship at Redeemer, that’s not about me, either.  It’s about us.  Not just the us in this room today, but us … the big “us.” The “us” that expands to include our brothers and sisters in Christ in every congregation all around the world.  It’s about community and unity. It’s about being who God created us to be.  Amen.

Think of a time when you felt welcomed.

Not just the usual polite, basic hospitality, but hospitality that changed something in you, that made you feel completely at home in a place that was not your home.

If you have more than one memory like this, choose one and focus on it.

Where were you?

How far from home did you feel at first? How far outside of your comfort zone had you gone?

Try to remember what you felt like before you were welcomed.

Now, think of the person who welcomed you.

How did it happen?

Was it something they said or did?

Did you share a meal with them?

What did the welcome look like?

What did it smell like and taste like?

What did it sound like?

Remembering it now, how do you feel?

Hang on to that feeling while we talk and think about the story we heard from Acts today, our first lesson. It’s a story about welcome and hospitality.

Paul has vision that takes him far from home and outside of his comfort zone. The vision tells him to go to Macedonia, so he goes, seemingly without doing any kind of advance planning, or research, or just thinking about the logistics of such a trip. He doesn’t know anyone in Macedonia. He doesn’t really know where to go or where he’s going to stay. When he arrives he heads to the river, reasoning that where there is water there will be people.

There are women by the river, and as Paul speaks one of the women, Lydia, is moved by the Holy Spirit working through Paul’s words and so moved that she asks to be baptized. The baptism involves not only her, but her whole household. A household at this time probably included three generations of family members, along with servants, and they also would have been baptized with the household and with Lydia.

After she’s baptized, Lydia invites Paul and his traveling companions to stay in her home. I love this part of the story, the last line we read today: “And she prevailed upon us.” It makes it sound like Paul had to be convinced. And maybe he did need some convincing. Remember that the first Christians were Jewish and continued to think of themselves as Jews, which meant keeping kosher and not eating or drinking with Gentiles, with foreigners like Lydia. And yet, Paul finds himself led by the Spirit, called so far from home, and without any plans for lodging, and encountering this insistent hospitality. Hospitality that won’t take “no” for an answer. For Paul, welcome came in a country that was foreign to him, in the form of a foreign woman, a Gentile, a woman who insisted and prevailed upon him with kindness.

In a lot of ways this story reminds me of my time in China. Any of you who have been on mission trips in this country or abroad will have stories of the remarkable hospitality you received there. I’d heard a lot of stories like that before I went to China so I went kind of expecting it and still managed to be completely surprised and taken aback by my experience of welcome there.

Part of what made it so surprising was that I got really sick right in my first week of teaching, which is not something I’d been planning to do. Going to the hospital in China made me feel about as far away from home and as far outside my comfort zone as I have ever been.  But, after my trip the hospital and the IV antibiotics, when I was beyond exhausted and just wanted to go back to the hotel and hide, our group’s translator, Xiao, invited me to her house for dinner.

I did NOT want to go.

I was very tired, very sick, and very done with China. I didn’t want to have to be polite anymore, to struggle with communicating and feel like I had to be “on.” But she insisted, and I was really too weak to argue with her.  She prevailed upon me.

When we got to her house, her mom offered me a peach. I took it, still being polite, and then completely forgot all about politeness and decorum: it was the greatest peach in the entire universe. I was so sick that I could barely speak, and Xiao’s mom doesn’t speak English, anyway, but I managed to communicate very quickly that this was the most wonderful peach I’d ever tasted, and moreover, I would like another one. She actually only had two peaches in the house, but gladly gave me the other peach, too.

Later that night I realized that my enthusiastic response had violated several basic Chinese cultural taboos, and I was embarrassed. The next day, after my treatment at the hospital, we made our way to Xiao’s house and I resolved to hold it together and make a better impression this time. She opened the door and the first thing I saw was a bowl full of peaches on the table.  It was overflowing with peaches.  Xiao’s mom met my eyes and we both laughed. I relaxed and, for a moment, I was home.

Many years later, my friend Xiao was baptized on Easter morning at my home congregation in Park Ridge, Illinois. She was about as far from home as a person can be, but I’d believe that moment was a homecoming for her, an experience of radical, insistent, abundant welcome.

That’s what baptism is all about. That’s what Lydia and her household experienced in the river in Macedonia when they were baptized by Paul. That’s what Stephen , who is getting baptized at the second service, will experience today.

In baptism, we experience the persistent, abundant, overwhelming welcome of God. And in baptism we are called to live out that welcome and hospitality, in our everyday lives as disciples and missionaries. We are called to be the welcome of God to everyone we meet.

I know that’s something I say a lot in my sermons. In fact, sometimes I worry that I say it too much, and that it starts to lose it’s meaning. Yes, yes, Pastor Annie.  We are called to live out our baptisms by being disciples. We are called to proclaim Christ with everything we say and do. Whatever that means.

What does it mean?

Go back to that memory we started with today: the memory of a time you felt truly, completely welcomed.

Now think about who God is calling you to welcome, today.

There are people all around you in your daily life who are feeling very far from home. They are exhausted, they are sick, they are fed up with life and all they want to do is get away from the world and hide. Or maybe they are out there, searching, looking for something or someone to show them that experience of welcome, that feeling of coming home.

The Holy Spirit, the Advocate who is always with you, has given you everything you need to be the welcome of God to the people you meet.

Who is God calling you to prevail upon, to extravagantly and insistently welcome?

How is God calling you to live out your baptism today?

Amen.

One of the (many) things I missed while traveling was getting to preach at Redeemer.  This was especially hard given all that was going on in the news that first week in particular–the bombings in Boston, the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, the earthquake in China, all happening at once and making me long for the opportunity to worship and pray with my congregation.  The story that follows may show up in a sermon someday, but I wanted to share it with you now while it’s still fresh in my mind and on my heart.

On Thursday, April 18 I made my way to the Central Wisconsin Airport, feeling nervous and excited about my first solo trip since my son, Walter, was born.  In the car on the way there, I listened to some of the interfaith memorial service in Boston. Governor Deval Patrick’s speech hit home, with powerful honesty: “In my faith tradition, scripture teaches: ‘In every thing give thanks.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:18) That isn’t always easy to do. On Monday afternoon, I wasn’t feeling it. What I felt, what so many of us felt then, was shock and confusion and anger. But the nature of faith, I think, is learning to return to the lessons even when they don’t make sense, when they defy logic. And as I returned to those lessons this week, I found a few things to be thankful for.”

We come back, again and again, to the “idle tale” of Easter morning.  It defies logic; it doesn’t make sense.  Bad news overwhelms us.  And yet, we have hope.  And yet, we give thanks.  Not because we are ignorant of all the bad news in our lives and in the world, but because we know that the Good News is stronger.

Governor Patrick introduced President Obama, who focused his remarks on the remarkable resilience of Boston, and on how even those of us who live far away have been touched by these events.  After the Governor’s humble and heartfelt words, the tone of the President’s remarks and “claim” on Boston didn’t sit quite right with me.  But, at that point, I couldn’t quite say why. I arrived at the airport, turned off the radio, and turned my attention to getting to my gate.

I didn’t really need to hurry to the gate, it turns out.  There was snow in Minneapolis, Chicago was flooded and there were tornado warnings in Detroit.  My fellow travelers and I settled in for a long wait: none of us were going anywhere.  We packed into the one tiny gift shop, which I was surprised to find offered a couple of hot meal options.  I would live to regret that chicken bratwurst, but in that moment, it hit the spot.  I read a book about funerals, propped my feet up on my roller bag, and enjoyed some lively in-womb activity. Baby Sally has just recently moved from the “gentle flutter” to the “persistent internal organ pummeling” stage, and it’s early enough in the pregnancy that I delight in every one of those punches and kicks.  It was nice to have some quiet time alone together so I could really focus on her movements.

As our mother-daughter bonding time in the waiting area dragged on, however, I started to think about my options.  Minneapolis is only about a 3 hour drive from the Wausau airport.  I’d decided against the driving option when making my travel plans because rest stops are not super plentiful on the route and I figured my pregnant self would need bathroom proximity.  Knowing that the weather would get nasty as I headed west gave me pause, too.  But when the flight had been delayed 3 hours, I started getting antsy.

“I could have been there by now!” I thought, and many of my fellow passengers started thinking and saying the same thing.  They were all trying to get to Minneapolis on their way to somewhere else, and were rightly worried about missing their connections and getting stuck overnight.  I eavesdropped on their conversations with our increasingly harried, but very kind, gate agent.  He assured each one that no flights at all were getting out of Minneapolis–their connecting flights weren’t going anywhere without them.  He tried to keep us updated, but that just added to the confusion, as the story coming out of MSP changed and changed again.  Small signs of hope (“One of the runways is open! We’ll board in 10 minutes!”) were followed immediately by discouragement (“Nevermind. The airport is closed. I’ll  give you an update in 20 minutes.”) Hope and woe, hope and woe.  It was a bit of a roller coaster.

In the midst of this, we were all aware of the news unfolding on the televisions all around us: the FBI had released grainy photos of the bombing suspects.  We peered at the blurry pictures, our own very minor troubles suddenly put into perspective.  We talked to each other a little bit; the friendly, lighthearted commiserating of people who are in it together.  I started to get a sense of who my plane-mates were and where they were going: the two ladies headed to Vegas for a conference, the very tall man and his teenage son going to Atlanta, the young mom on her way to Wyoming via Denver.

The young mom and I ended up being seatmates on the plane.  We discovered pretty quickly that we’re both from Stevens Point, and that her son goes to 4K at Redeemer.  As we talked, the plane made its way from gate to runway … and then stopped.  And turned around.  Back to the gate!  MSP was closed, and they were estimating another 2 hour delay for snow removal.  Our wonderful flight attendant, who had bonded with us during the delays in the waiting area, tried to rally our spirits with spirits: “I have wine and some ingredients to make cocktails,” she said. “Tell me what you want as you’re leaving the plane and I will hook you up.  I also have juice and snacks. We can do this!” Laughter and applause.  We made our way back into the waiting area and called our loved ones with the latest.

I called Sean and told him I was going to get in the car and drive.  At this point, the flight had been delayed 6 hours.  If I left right now, most of my drive would still happen during daylight hours.  I went to find the gate agent to find out what I needed to do to get off the flight without penalty.  When he appeared, it was with another update “We are cleared for take off!” he said, “Everybody come back right now and get on the plane!  Boarding all rows, let’s go!”

“I have a good feeling about this one,” I told my seatmate. “We are definitely going to get to Minneapolis this time.” She wasn’t as confident as I was, but she seemed hopeful, too.  And a little tired.  We were all a little tired.

The flight from CWA to MSP takes about 30 minutes.  You basically just take off, ascend, prepare for landing, and land.  Not long into our short flight, we hit terrible turbulence.  The bumps and rolls went on for what felt like a very long time.  This is when I began to regret that chicken bratwurst.  I looked in my seat pocket for an air sickness bag.  Nope. My seatmate checked hers, as did our immediate seat neighbors.  No bags to be found.  The very tall man caught the attention of our stewardess, way at the front of the plane.  The turbulence was so bad she couldn’t get up to help me, so she got on the PA and asked everyone to look for bags at their seats and send them my way.  Passed quickly from hand to hand, about 10 bags immediately arrived in my lap.  ”I hope I don’t need any of these,” I told my seatmate, “But just to be safe.”  She nodded, looking quite green herself.

We leveled off for a moment and I took the opportunity to scoot across the aisle where there were two empty seats, left open by fellow passengers who’d given up and decided to drive.  I settled in and thought about not throwing up.  Soon, we had an announcement from our captain explaining why we’d leveled off.  ”We are flying over Menominee right now, and we just got word that the airport is closed.  We’re going to circle up here for another 20 minutes or so, and then we’ll hopefully get to land in Minneapolis.” The captain sounded deeply depressed.  My seatmate and I exchanged looks of despair.

As we circled, our flight attendant made her way back to my seat with a bag of ice to put on my neck, a can of ginger ale (“Just little sips!” she warned,) a pile of paper towels and kind words of concern and encouragement. The ice helped a great deal, but I was still worried.  While pregnant, once you get nauseous it’s pretty hard to recover.  The stomach acid isn’t easy to call back.  But I kept breathing and thinking positive, non-vomitous thoughts.  Soon, we started our descent into MSP. As we hit the runway, I looked across the aisle and my seatmate gave me a huge smile and two thumbs up.  ”You made it!!” she said.

And that’s when I threw up.

With my head firmly ensconced in airsickness bag #1, I became aware of a very large presence suddenly filling the seat next to me.  It was the very tall man.  My first thoughts ran along these lines: “Very tall man, you are sitting very close to me.  I am kind of trying to have a private moment with my bag, here.” But within seconds he had cleared away my coat and other traveling debris, giving me more space and air.  He took the bag of ice and held it up to my neck.  When I was done throwing up, he took away the bag, sealed it, and passed it to the flight attendant who took it away.  He dabbed gently at my face with the paper towels and offered me some tissue, some water, and some ice.  ”This happened to my wife when we flew and she was pregnant,” he said.  ”It seems like just yesterday, but look!  He’s seventeen.” I looked over and saw the very tall man’s son sitting by the window, looking a little green himself. “Yeah, he’s not feeling too good, either. I was watching both of you,” said the very tall man, “and I figured at least one of you was going to need my help!”

We arrived at the gate and everyone got up and gathered their things.  I was the only person on the plane who had arrived at my final destination, so I stayed put to let everyone get off and get to figuring out their connections. The Vegas ladies gave me a breath mint and big smiles. A beautiful woman traveling with her granddaughter patted my shoulder and said, “You did very well.”  My seatmate and I wished each other luck and exchanged looks of mutual exhaustion and encouragement.  The flight attendant came back and helped me clean up some more, all while making sure I was feeling better and had a way to get to my hotel.

When I got to the hotel and collapsed in a heap on the bed, my first thought was: “People are basically good.”  I went to sleep full of faith in the basic goodness of humanity.

As I reflected on it more the next day, though, I revised that thought.  People are basically complicated.  People are basically saints and sinners–all of us, we are both saints and sinners at the very same time. We are living paradoxes traveling about and behaving in all sorts of contradictory, illogical ways.  That’s why Governor Patrick’s speech touched me in a way that President Obama’s didn’t.  President Obama’s speech was just one story: the story of a mighty and resilient city.  Governor Patrick’s speech was about paradox: about faith and confusion, thankfulness and despair all at the same time.

At our meeting the next day, one of my colleagues said, “The public narrative about Boston right now is about amazing courage, about the people who ran toward the blast and helped people.  But most people did not run toward the blast.  They ran away, or they froze … they didn’t help anyone.  They are trying to make sense of all this, too, and they are struggling.”

Any human story has to be about more than the public narrative, more than courage and resilience and helpers. Any human story has to be about humans, and humans are about paradox … a story that can’t be easily told.

The final verses of the Gospel of Matthew are my favorite example of this. “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Face-to-face with the risen Christ, the disciples worship him … and doubt him, too.  You’d think the situation couldn’t get any clearer than this, but they are human beings, and anything involving human beings is not going to be easy or clear. Jesus looks at these human beings–these confused, doubting, conflicted sinner/saints–and says, “Good enough.  I can work with this.”  Jesus sends all of them–even the doubters–out, commissioning them with all the authority of heaven and earth to baptize and make disciples, to be messengers of the Good News.  It’s not their basic goodness that makes them disciples.  It’s the goodness and the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, which works through them, and through all of us, in amazing, surprising ways.

We never travel alone.  And when we reach out in kindness to our fellow travelers, we don’t do that alone, either.  Thanks be to God for traveling with us, for embracing our full, complicated, paradoxical selves, for sending us out with our doubts and our faith to be disciples in our daily lives.  Amen!

Today we’ve heard two amazing stories: one about how Peter, Jesus’ disciple, became an apostle, and one about how Paul, a persecutor of Christians, became an apostle. An apostle is someone who is sent away, sent out to carry the message of Jesus wherever they go. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear me say that you and I are called to be apostles, too. We talk about that a lot, here. That’s the whole idea behind the blessing I give you every Sunday, the sending words that tell you to Go and serve the Lord. Our congregation’s tagline is “Gather. Grow. Go!” and we put a lot of emphasis on the “go” part, the part about living out our faith in daily life, not just on Sunday morning, not just when we’re in church, but every day and every place, seeing every interaction as a potential opportunity to serve God, werve our neighbors, and share the Good News of Jesus with what we say and what we do.
So, we’re pretty comfortable with this idea, I think. And I spend a good amount of time trying to make it an accessible goal for each of us: maybe not an easy goal, but certainly not impossible. Today I’d like to make this idea of being an apostle a little more uncomfortable for us, and I’d like to talk about what makes it so hard to do, so challenging to actually put into practice and live out in our lives.
On Wednesday night we had our long-awaited confirmation movie night and we watched the movie “Pay It Forward,” which is a favorite of my co-teacher, Sue. The movie came out back in 2000 and I’d never seen it, but I thought I knew what it was about. I thought it was about a little boy who tries to make the world better by encouraging everyone to do little random acts of kindness: when someone does something nice for you, you turn around and do something nice for someone else. Like the insurance commercial from a few years ago, where you see the ripple effect of people’s days being improved by small acts of kindness from strangers (holding the door open for someone, helping them carry something heavy, etc.) A cute idea, pretty harmless, I thought.
Well, the movie is much more meaningful than that. It’s about alcohol addiction. It’s about domestic violence and abuse. It’s about bullying, and suicide, and despair, and families torn apart, and young children who have to deal with all this brokenness, hurt and sorrow. It’s not cute and harmless, it’s real. It’s about real life and real life challenges that we wish no child would ever have to face.
And in the midst of these real challenges, Trevor, the 12 year old main character, decides that it’s worth it to do something difficult to make someone else’s life better. The “pay it forward” idea isn’t about holding the door open for someone or returning a lost umbrella (although those things are nice.) It’s about taking the time to identify what would really change a person’s life for the better and then taking the huge risk of trying to make that happen.
“It has to be something difficult,” Trevor says in the movie. “That’s the whole point.”
It had to be something difficult, something challenging, to turn Saul, the Christian hater into Paul, the Apostle for Christ. The usual angel appearance, which is usually very impressive and fear-inspiring and effective wasn’t going to be enough in this case. For Saul, it took a blinding light and the voice of Jesus himself.
But even more than the light and that moment of revelation, it took the three days he spent praying and fasting in the dark. It took the healing touch and words of Ananias, the Christian, to convert Saul into Paul. Can you imagine how difficult it was for Ananias to do that? To trust God enough to put himself and his family in danger by revealing himself as a Christian to a man who turned Christians over to be tortured and killed? Ananias took a huge risk when he laid his hands on Saul and healed him in the name of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit. He risked his life, and by doing so, he changed Paul’s life forever. Ananias showed Paul what it means to be an apostle: you will risk your life, eventually you will even lose your life, it will be difficult, and you will suffer, but it will be worth it.
It has to be something difficult, Ananias shows Paul, that’s the whole point.
In contrast, the story of Peter becoming an apostle seems like a walk in the park, or literally, like breakfast on the beach. There Peter is, enjoying the fruits of another miracle, spending time with the risen Christ, who is cooking for him. It’s an idyllic scene. But it’s about to get difficult.
In some ways, Jesus challenges Peter even more than he challenges Paul. At first it seems just like old times: Jesus asks a question, Peter responds, Jesus tells him what to do about it. “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” Not too tough, nothing out of the ordinary, kind of nice exchange between a teacher and his disciple.
But Jesus keeps repeating himself, and Peter starts to realize there’s something else going on, here. As Jesus repeats his question and command for a third time, we all begin to realize that Peter is being confronted with his failings as a disciple: the way he denied knowing Jesus three times while his teacher was on trial for his life. The way he abandoned Jesus in the garden. The way his courage and love seemed to fail him at the most important moment.
“Do you love me, Peter?” It’s not an easy question, it turns out. It’s an uncomfortable question, it’s a challenge. And with it comes the even more uncomfortable and challenging news that Peter the Apostle will be put to death for his faith. Jesus’ challenge to Peter is direct, it is firm, it is difficult and uncomfortable, and it clearly comes from a place of love. And for Peter, the wayward disciple turned apostle, it changes everything.
This conversation has to be difficult, Jesus shows Peter, that’s the whole point.
I’ve been thinking a lot about difficult conversations this week, ever since I heard the news on Monday that Bishop Burnside, the ELCA bishop for Madison and the area around it, was involved in a terrible car accident over the weekend. Bishop Burnside was driving drunk, and he hit and killed a pedestrian. More details have been coming out in the news all week, and I’ve read the articles and had a hard time keeping myself from jumping to conclusions or reading my own interpretation, my own assumptions into what happened. I don’t want to get into all of that today, because ultimately, my speculation isn’t very helpful.
But I’ll tell you that one source of sorrow and frustration for me this week has come from wondering if there was anything anyone could have done to prevent it. Or rather, if there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Because it did occur to me to wonder, in the past year, how the Bishop was doing, and if he was dealing with recent challenges in his life in a healthy way. It didn’t occur to me to say anything to him about it, though. Why not? Well, he doesn’t really know me, I don’t really know him, I just know about him, or think I know about him, because he’s a public leader in the church. He’s not my bishop, and even if he was, how awkward and uncomfortable would it be for a pastor to randomly ask a bishop such personal questions.
Even if you take away the power dynamic, having that kind of conversation with anyone is just not something we do. It’s rude, it’s presumptuous, it almost inevitably puts the other person on the defensive and might end conversation or even end the relationship… and, in this case, it might have changed a life. It might have saved a life, really more than one life.
Now, I know that these kind of “might haves” and “what ifs” aren’t very helpful. As a pastor and a chaplain I’ve seen people get stuck in the “what ifs,” tormenting themselves with things no one can change and no one can know … you can’t know if anything you did differently would have made it turn out differently. And I know as well as anyone that, with matters of drugs and alcohol, it is ultimately up to the person who needs help to get help … you can’t make someone get help.
So I should know better. And I’ve prayed a lot about it and I’ve decided not to drive myself crazy wondering “what if.” I know I can’t change the past, and I can’t change things for Bishop Burnside or for anyone involved in the accident, but I can change myself.
And I can tell you that my attitude toward difficult, awkward conversations about important things like alcohol abuse: that is changing. I’m feeling called to be bolder than I have been, to take the risk of saying something difficult because, if I’m saying it in love, it could possibly be an opening for the Holy Spirit to do something powerful, even to change a life, even to save a life.
It take a lot of courage to be an apostle. What we are being called to do today is difficult, and that’s the whole point. It is difficult, but not impossible; it is possible with God’s help. It is risky, but it is worth it, because with God’s help, real change is possible, even and especially when it seems too hard. I know it from my own life, and I’m guessing you’ve experienced in your life, too: times when something or someone you thought would never change did change in a profound way.
With Peter and Paul, we are called to be apostles. Let’s go out there and do the difficult, life changing work of the Spirit, knowing that we never, ever go alone. Amen!

Whenever I read the story about Thomas, our Gospel lesson for today, which is always at least once a year, I think of that phrase “seeing is believing” and how true that is. And it’s strange that it’s true, right? Have any of you ever been to a magic show, or looked at a book of optical illusions, or had problems with your vision in some way? Even though we know that our sight, just like any of our other senses, can be easily fooled, we trust it. And we seek visual confirmation, we want to see it for ourselves.

Sean and I went to our 20 week ultrasound on Friday, and we found out that we’re having a little girl. I told Sean that I wanted to include this in my sermon today, and he said, “Why? Because you doubted that it was a girl, even when I told you months ago that’s what we were having?” That’s not exactly what I was thinking.

Having an ultrasound on Friday made me think about how much we want to see the unseeable, to know the unknowable, to use our senses to give ourselves a sense of certainty, even thought that certainty is an illusion.

I knew going in to that ultrasound that the grainy images on the screen can only show so much and that it’s very different from seeing that baby in person. When Walter was born Sean and I were both shocked by how real he was. The ultrasounds had not adequately prepared us for the real thing. And yet … I’ve been looking forward to those grainy images for weeks. And we both cried tears of joy, as we got to watch, to really see, that new life taking shape.

We are going to name her Sally. She’s named after my great-aunt Sally and we’ve had the name picked out for a long time. Finding out that we’re having our Sally was especially poignant on Friday, though, because earlier that morning we got the news that Sally’s middle son, my mom’s cousin, John, died in his sleep sometime Thursday night.

John was young, in his mid-fifties, and in good health. He was a husband, a father and a grandfather, and a devoted son to my Aunt Sally. Sally has terrible arthritis and gets great help from all three of her sons, which allows her to continue to live alone in her own home. Sally told my mom how John comes and makes her oatmeal every morning at 7:10. On Friday morning, she woke up to the sound of an ambulance siren, and when John hadn’t arrived to make her oatmeal by 8 am, she started to worry. Sally said, “It’s really going to hit me tomorrow morning, when I wake up and he still hasn’t come to eat breakfast with me.”

What we see and what we don’t see is a huge part of our experience of living and dying, of birth and death. Seeing an empty chair at the breakfast table or a grainy ultrasound image carries emotional weight and significance beyond second hand news … when you see it, you know it in a different way.

For Thomas, Jesus’ absence—the empty chair at the table which he could clearly see—that absence was much more convincing than his friends’ second hand stories, their crazy tales about having seen Jesus again, alive. He wanted to see it for himself.  Can you really blame him? The other disciples got to see. He wasn’t asking for anything special or different from what they experienced. He just wanted to see for himself.

You can’t really blame any of us for wanting the same thing, even though it’s tempting to pat ourselves on the backs when Jesus says that those who haven’t seen and still believe are blessed. That’s us, right?

But all this thinking about new life and death, of birth, and death and resurrection, all of this makes me think about how Thomas didn’t just ask to see Jesus … he asked to see and to touch his wounds.

Thomas says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Can we, you and I today, see and touch the wounds in the Body of Christ?

In some ways we can, and we do. As a congregation and as individuals hardly a day goes by when we don’t encounter the suffering of the people around us, sometimes the people we know and love the most. When we hug someone who has just gotten bad news, when we reach out to help someone in need, we are surely touching and seeing the wounds of the Body of Christ.

And yet, we can’t rely entirely on what we can see and touch, because so much of the woundedness around us can’t be seen and isn’t known.

Until Sean and I lost our first pregnancy back in 2010, I never realized how many women I know have had miscarriages and children who have died. Most of the time, that loss is silent, that wound is invisible.

Last night I learned that Pastor Rick Warren’s son, Matthew, took his own life on Friday. Pastor Warren is the author of The Purpose Driven Life and many other books, which makes his family loss and grief a public thing. I’m imagining the letters and emails and calls he’s getting from all over the world right now from people saying, “My son struggled with mental illness, too,” or “I miss my daughter every day.” Most of the time, these wounds are invisible, these stories untold.

Most of the time we have no idea of the hurt that’s going on all around us, the secret sorrows, the wounds we can’t see or touch.

Blessed, then, are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Blessed are those who care for the wounded Body of Christ even when those wounds aren’t clearly visible.

Blessed are those who care for wounded brothers and sisters who live and die far away from here, people we may never see or touch in person.

Blessed are those who have the courage to share the story of their grief, and loss and woundedness, so that people who have been suffering in silence and isolation realize that they are not alone.

We call him “Doubting Thomas,” but out of his mouth comes one of the most direct and most profound faith statements in the whole Bible. Thomas sees the risen Christ and cries out: “My Lord and my God!”

We don’t get to see Jesus the same way Thomas and the other disciples did, but in our experiences of birth and death and everything in between we do encounter the risen Christ. We touch and see his wounded body, we have come to believe in and care for and serve him and our neighbors even when we can’t see those wounds very clearly, even when all we have to go on is a grainy image on a screen or an empty chair at the breakfast table. “My Lord and My God!” we say. Amen.

The sermon begins with an update on a houseplant I bought as an illustration for a children’s message a few weeks ago. Brief notes similar to what I said: “[Hold up dead plant] … just kidding.  Old one, kept because I thought it would be a good sermon illustration. But you probably were not terribly surprised … many of you know that I don’t have a particularly green thumb, and all of you know that plants are prone to dying.  So, it wouldn’t have been totally unexpected.  Certainly not an unbelievable Easter morning kind of surprise.  [Hold up live plant] … not really a huge surprise, either. It shouldn’t be beyond expectation to think that I could keep a plant alive for a month. Especially when I promised the kids I would try to do that. Raised the stakes. It’s nice that the plant is alive, but it’s not an unbelievable Easter morning kind of surprise.”

Honestly, I had trouble thinking of an illustration that would work this morning because there really isn’t anything in our regular, everyday life that even comes close to the unbelievable surprise of Easter morning. This plant would have to start producing apples to even come close. And that’s the point of today, really: nothing comes close. Nothing in our normal, everyday experience could prepare us for the Resurrection. It’s not an event within the grasp of our human wisdom, experience, or reason. We forget that, because we get used to hearing the story, close to the same story every year, with some slight variations depending on which Gospel lesson we read.

The story of Easter in the Gospel of Luke is interesting because Jesus just … isn’t there.  There are two mysterious men in dazzling clothes, messengers who remind the women about everything Jesus said before he died. There’s an empty tomb, there are discarded grave clothes. For the disciples, there’s the story the women tell, which they dismiss as an idle tale.

You would and I would, too. We’d dismiss it, in part, because in those days the testimony of women was considered highly suspect, and not admissible in court or for any official reason. So, we would have dismissed the women because they were women. But we also would have dismissed them and what they said because it was unbelievable.

Everything we know about life and death and the way the world works tells us that when living things die, they stay dead. End of story. The world as we know it bears little resemblance to the new heaven and new earth that the prophet Isaiah described. In our world, babies do die after just a few days, and even the old sometimes die too soon. We plant trees we might not live to see bear fruit. We bring children into the world knowing that we’re bringing them into a world that can be cruel and harsh, knowing that they will experience pain, and knowing that someday they will die. The wolf and the lamb don’t live in peace and the lion doesn’t eat hay like an ox. And no one who dies comes to life again after three days.

Most of you know that every month I answer questions for the “Ask a Pastor” section on LivingLutheran.com. One of our questions this month was this: “The basic beliefs of Christianity go against everything we know about the laws of nature. How can an intelligent person be Christian?”

I have to admit, my first reaction to that one was a little defensive. I think I’m pretty smart, you see. But being smart has nothing to do with it, and you don’t have to be an intelligent person to be a Christian. To be a Christian, you have to believe that “idle tale.” You have to believe that Jesus died and, after three days, came back to life again. That belief is not something you can get to with human intelligence. That belief comes from faith, and faith comes from God.

The fact that the unbelievable surprise of Easter morning fills us with the joy of the women at the tomb and the amazement of Peter: that’s a gift. That comes from God.

The fact that the prophet Isaiah’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth fills us with hope: that’s a gift. That comes from God.

The fact that we have hope at all, not just in this life, because, as St. Paul wrote in our second lesson today, if we only have hope for this life, we should be pitied. No … we have hope for this life and for the life to come. And that is an amazing gift. That comes from God.

Believing in something as unbelievable as the Resurrection is a gift, because it gives us the courage of the women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning: courage both to face the reality of death and to share the amazing, unbelievable good news of eternal life.

Belief in the unbelievable liberates us from the shackles of not only our sin, but our smarts, our work ethic, our wealth, our goodness, and anything else we might be tempted to worship instead of God.

Belief in the unbelievable, in the idle tale of the Resurrection, makes it possible for us to be God’s hands and feet in the world: serving God and neighbor, reaching out beyond ourselves and beyond, the limits of human compassion to care for each other in profound ways, to be the risen and moving Body of Christ, to be the church.

Today and every day, let’s give thanks for the gift of faith, the gift of belief in an idle tale, the gift of the grace of God, the love of Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the gift of the joy of Easter morning, which is summed up so perfectly in these words:

Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Amen.

The title of my sermon today is: “The Problem with Good People.”

It’s a title that should make everyone in this room, including me, alittle nervous, because we all remembered to set our clocks ahead and we all came to church this morning which is pretty darn good.

And even if you forgot all about the clocks, and even if you hadn’t come to church this morning, you’d still be a pretty good person, I’m guessing. Decent, caring, loyal to the people you love. And that should make our Gospel lesson today an uncomfortable one for you. It should be uncomfortable for all of us, really.

The way we get out of dealing with the difficulty of this text is by identifying with the younger son, and with the Father’s message to that son. The message is so clear, so comforting and wonderful, a message of pure grace: my dear son, my precious daughter, my beloved child: I love you and I forgive you no matter what. Now come on in and let’s have a party.

It’s a great message. I try to make it the ultimate message of every sermon I preach because it’s the Gospel, it’s the Good News: through Jesus Christ God loves us and forgives us no matter what.  Amen.

… Pretend that sermon is over…

Just kidding.

That’s not all there is to it because there are two sons in this story, and the father’s message to the older son, the “good son” is a little different and a little more difficult: my dear son, my precious daughter, my beloved child: get over yourself. You’re not going to get special treatment because you’ve been good. Now lighten up and come enjoy the party!

When I was a teenager and wanted to stay out late on a school night or something else that my parents wouldn’t let me do, I always found myself making the same, totally ineffective argument: I would tell my parents how much better behaved I was than my peers, and then argue that, being better behaved, I should have the same privileges as them, or really, more than them. Because I was such a good kid.

This argument never, ever worked. Not even once. But I felt like it should, and I think most of us still feel that way on some level: we feel like good people should get good things and bad people should get bad things and everything should be … fair. We feel that way even though we know that the world isn’t fair.

And it’s a shock, I think, to hear the story of the Prodigal Son and learn that not only is the world not fair, but God’s not fair, either. The bad son and the good son both get to go to the party. Saints and sinners alike get to go to heaven.

When my mom was the editor of Lutheran Woman Today they ran an article about heaven and hell, and the author pointed out that it’s not our goodness that gets us to heaven, it’s God’s goodness and God’s grace, and that’s a free gift given to all people. One of the angry letters my mom got after that article ran included a very memorable line: “If all these terrible people are going to heaven, why have I spent my whole life being good?”

Why have I been good? Asks the older brother, the responsible one. You killed the fatted calf and threw a party for my no-good brother. Why have I been good?

The problem with good people is that we worship our own goodness. We put faith and trust in our own goodness, faith and trust we should be putting in God. And turning our own goodness into a false idol is just as dangerous as idolizing wealth, or sex, or power… any of the gods that the younger brother went off to find.

In fact, worshipping our own goodness is more dangerous, because we’re less likely to end up in a pig sty realizing the error of our ways, and more likely to go through life feeling terribly self-righteous and holy, and better than all those other people, you know, the bad ones.

There was an opinion piece in the New York Times this week titled “The Good, Racist People.” Recently the Oscar-winning black actor Forrest Whittaker was accused of shoplifting and frisked by an employee in a New York deli. When he found out what happened, the owner of the store apologized and also defended his employee: a good, decent man who made an honest mistake.

The problem with that is how hard it is for us to believe that a good, decent man could also be racist. The author of the article writes this:

‘In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”’

If we believe that racism only exists in the hearts of really evil people, we fool ourselves into believing it is not in our own hearts and in the heart of our most beloved institutions and in the heart of how this nation and our society and our culture all work. Worshipping our own goodness allows us to fool ourselves into thinking that other people are the problem. Those people. Not you, not me. We’re good people.

Last week we talked about unrepentant sin, and how sin works to destroy us and our relationships with God and with each other. Clinging defensively to our own goodness for salvation does the same thing. It messes up our priorities and turns us against each other.

And, ultimately, it turns us against God. “Why have I been good?” we cry out in anger and frustration. “If those people get to go to heaven, well then I don’t want to be there. If my no good brother gets treated with forgiveness and love, I either want more forgiveness and love, or I want none of it.”

When we worship our own goodness, God’s love for us seems lessened by God’s love for our enemies. When, in truth, we’re not getting any less. The older brother gets his full inheritance, he’s invited to the party, he could enjoy the fatted calf right along with his brother. The Father doesn’t love the older brother less than the younger brother. But he doesn’t love him more, either, even though he’s been loyal, and decent, and responsible and good.

So, good people, can we rejoice in this?

Can we put aside the false god of our own goodness and give thanks for the abundant, overwhelming love of the true God who made us and claimed us in baptism?

Can we be glad for that younger brother and even see ourselves in him?

Can we go dance and enjoy ourselves at the party?

I hope so. With the Spirit’s help I think it is possible. That’s why we need baptisms, not just our own baptisms, but the baptisms that we get to witness and be part of, like Michael S.’s baptism today.

Baptism gives us a glimpse of the party yet to come. The guest of honor is celebrated and rejoiced over and welcomed, and it has nothing to do with his goodness. Now, I’m sure Michael is a very good baby. But that’s not the reason we’re celebrating today. We’re celebrating because God is good. And God loves baby Michael completely and forgives him entirely no matter what.

What a great message.

What a great reason to party.

And it’s no less great just because it also applies to the rest of us, too, even though most of us aren’t cute babies anymore and we’ve done a lot of sinning since our baptisms. Even the sin of thinking we’re better than other people, that we deserve God’s love more than other people, or that our own goodness will save us. God forgives even that sin, too.

As Michael grows up he’ll carry the message and the promise of his baptism with him and, hopefully, every time he witnesses a baptism he’ll be reminded of that message. And it won’t matter whether he ends up identifying more with the wild younger son or the righteous older son. My guess is, like most of us, he’ll have some younger son days, and some older son days ahead of him.

Regardless of all that, the message he gets from God today is the same: my dear son, my beloved child: you are loved and forgiven no matter what. Now come on in, and let’s have a party. Amen.