Holy Chaos

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on mark 4:35-41

for a video of this sermon, click here

Brian Andreas is a writer, artist and publisher who started a small art company called StoryPeople a number of years ago. It’s based in Decorah, Iowa, which is the town where I went to college, and which is why I know of Brian’s work. His StoryPeople prints feature colorful, abstract line drawings of people accompanied by short, poetic stories that speak to the core of what it means to be human. When I graduated college someone gave me one of his StoryPeople prints entitled “Illusion of Control,” which now hangs above the guest bed in our home. Beneath the drawing are these words: “’If you hold on to the handle,’ she said, ‘it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it’s more fun if you just let the wind carry you.’”

Try telling that to the disciples! They’re on a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, being tossed around by gale-force winds and waves while their buddy Jesus naps in the back. There’s no illusion of control here, just the utter chaos of being out on the water while a terrifying storm rages all around.

I’ve been thinking a whole lot about chaos this week as I imagine the disciples getting knocked around out on that water. Most of us have set up our lives to minimize chaos as much as possible, and can get the wind knocked out of us when the gale-force winds of life come in strong. Like the disciples, we can get pretty scared when our own illusions of control get swept away by, oh, say, a global pandemic!! – or divorce, or death, or job loss, or a mental health crisis, or any number of things on that long list of stuff that makes life feel a little too life-y, as the writer Anne Lamott would put it. So, what does this passage from Mark have to say about chaos? I’m not usually a 3-point-sermon kind of preacher, but it seems like if you’re going to preach about chaos then it’s probably helpful to organize the sermon into three neat, tidy, unchaotic points, so here we go.

Point One: Following Jesus involves stepping into chaos.

The first sentence of this story from Mark’s gospel seems barely worth a moment of our attention at first glance. “On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’” Except that when Mark talks about crossing to the other side, he’s not just using that phrase to introduce a new scene in the story. He’s talking about bringing us on a pretty serious adventure. Between the 4th chapter of Mark and the 8th chapter of Mark we’ll hear of four “crossings to the other side.” The one we hear about today is the first time that Jesus and the disciples will cross over from the shores of Capernaum – the land of their people – and into gentile territory, a place that the disciples would have understood to be strange, foreign, and maybe even hostile.

Everything is different on the other side – the culture, the ethnicity, the wealth, the politics, the religion, the way of understanding the world. So when Jesus says to the disciples “Let’s go across to the other side” he’s not just saying, “Hey let’s go for a sweet boat ride, maybe catch a few fish along the way.” No, he’s saying, “We’re going to cross some boundaries here. Come along with me in this adventure that’s going to bring you into relationship with all kinds of people from whom you are very different; people you don’t understand and who don’t understand you. It’s going to feel chaotic and even a little scary sometimes, but you won’t be alone. We’ll cross these boundaries together.”

Church, what are the boundaries Jesus is inviting you to cross, in your life, in your relationships, in your work, in your thinking? What are the boundaries that Jesus is inviting us to cross together as a congregation as we come out of this pandemic and take new stock of the needs of God’s people? Following Jesus involves stepping into chaos. Let’s trust that we can faithfully do that together.

Point two: God creates out of chaos.

This story of Jesus and the disciples on the raging sea drew my mind all the way back to the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” The Hebrew words that make up these poetic sentences depict not nothingness at the dawn of creation, but a watery chaos. The Hebrew word translated as “wind” is “ruach,” which also means breath and spirit. God’s wind, God’s breath, God’s spirit, God’s ruach hovers over the watery chaos, eventually calling every good thing into being. I like to think that God’s love was so huge and deep and powerful that it needed somewhere to go, and so it exploded into the chaos to create light and dark, land and sea, sun and moon, flora and fauna, and a diverse human family.

God created everything that is out of the watery chaos, and the chaos of that stormy sea proved creative, too. The terrified disciples wake Jesus as they are frantically trying to keep the boat from being swamped, accusing him of not caring that they’re all about to die at sea. But it’s not that Jesus didn’t care. It’s that he wasn’t worried. Because Jesus, too, can create out of chaos. He stands up and rebukes the wind and the waves. Peace! Be still! These are exorcism words, actually…the same Greek words Jesus uses to cast out demons in earlier chapters of Mark. Jesus silences whatever demonic forces have created this chaos and a dead calm settles over the water. And as he creates calm on the water and calm in the disciples’ hearts, he also creates the conditions for a new depth of faith and a new understanding of who Jesus actually is. He’s not just some miracle worker, or some personal therapist for our individual fears. This man who can calm a haunted sea with just a few words can be nothing less than a revelation of God’s extraordinary, cosmic purpose for the whole of creation.

Church, if God can create the whole of the cosmos from a watery chaos…if Jesus can create dead calm out of a terrifying, stormy sea, and the beginnings of a whole a new world order along with it, just imagine what he might he do with your life. Just imagine how God’s creative purposes are already working even the most painful experiences of chaos in your life, in the church, in this beautiful and broken world. God creates out of chaos.

Point three: Jesus is present in the chaos.

What I’m about to say is completely obvious, but I overlooked it so many times as I studied the gospel this week that I feel like I need to say it out loud: Jesus is just as present in the raging water as he is in the dead calm that followed. Though the disciples’ can’t perceive it through their very understandable fear, there is no point in the stormy night in which Jesus is absent or even distant. Writer Debie Thomas reflects beautifully on this truth. “I think I will spend the rest of my life seeking this one grace,” she says. “ — the grace to experience God’s presence in the storm. The grace to know that I am accompanied by the divine in the bleakest, most treacherous places. The grace to trust that Jesus cares even when I’m drowning. The grace to believe in both the existence and the power of Love even when Jesus “sleeps.” Even when the miraculous calm doesn’t come.”

Church, so much about our lives feels chaotic right now. My prayer this week is that God would grant us the grace to hold a little less tightly to the illusion that we are ultimately in control over any of it, and instead hold on to the calling – and the promise – that following Jesus involves stepping into chaos; that God creates out of chaos; and that Jesus is right there with us in every experience of chaos, even when we can’t see it through our fear.

Thanks be to God.

The Politics of Baptism

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on mark 1:4-11, in the wake of the capitol insurrection
to watch a video of this sermon, click here

Like most of you, Jason and I were glued to the news on Wednesday afternoon as our President openly incited violence over his election defeat. We watched in horror as a mob stormed our US Capitol building, threatening not only the leaders and staff who work there, but also our Constitution, our values, and our commitment to peaceful transitions of power. We prayed as we listened to President-Elect Biden call for the mob to pull back. We prayed as Republican Senators like Lindsay Graham and Ben Sasse stood up to say, “Enough is enough; our duty is to steward and protect the Constitution.” We prayed as we had clumsy conversations with our kids, trying to speak to what was happening in terms they might understand. And we prayed as we later read the deeply vulnerable statement from our own Bishop, Yehiel Curry.

“They would have shot us. If it was us, we would have been shot.” That was Bishop Curry’s summary of the text messages and calls he received from other leaders, friends, and loved ones as they watched Confederate flags – a symbol of white supremacy – be carried freely into a place that is supposed to cradle our democracy. He described many previous experiences of racist violence that Wednesday’s events brought again into his mind and said, “[For Black America,] Wednesday was more than Wednesday. It was trauma, reopened, flooding back in, and forcing us to relive specific moments of pain and oppression, again and again.”

Those are hard words to hear, and for those of us who are white, they might also be hard to understand. But as Bishop Curry reminded me in the text conversation we had on Friday, sitting in the tension of our own messy feelings is holy work. And my prayer is that sitting in this tension will help us honor Bishop Curry’s call to engage in what he calls “courageous conversations” around these issues. Courageous conversations is the right phrase, church, because in a dangerously polarized culture it’s really hard to talk about these things. But we must. We must talk about them.

Some of us feel very strongly that talk of politics doesn’t belong in church. Some of us believe that faith is really a private matter…that it’s about our own salvation; our own personal relationship with Jesus. And of course it is about that. But it is not only about that. One of the things that keeps me in this church body – one of the things that keeps me Lutheran – is our theological tradition’s insistence that, while faith might be personal, it is not meant to be private.

While faith might personal, it is not meant to be private.

Martin Luther recognized God’s activity in our personal lives – God’s ability to transform our souls through Word and Sacrament, prayer and worship. But Luther also recognized that God is active in the social, economic, and political realms of our lives, working through people and structures and institutions for the flourishing of human community and of the whole creation. In fact, Luther understood government to be one of the most important institutions through which God works in our world. Strange as it sounds in light of our currently fractured system, Lutherans believe that government is a gift from God, because it is intended to protect and provide for the well-being of people, communities, and creation. It is intended to be a tool through which God works to channel love, justice, equity, and dignity into the life of the world. And so when government fails to protect the well-being of our neighbors – especially those who are most vulnerable among us – Lutherans believe that our faith calls us to vigorous engagement with that government.

In other words, for Lutherans faith is about our personal relationship with Jesus. And, it is also about our politics.

Now, hear me clearly. When I say that our faith is about our politics I’m not talking about the politics of the so-called right and the so-called left. I’m not talking about the politics of the Republican Party of the Democratic Party or of any other party. I’m talking about the politics of God’s reign. I’m talking about the politics of baptism.

Today’s scripture from Mark begins with John the baptizer, who appears in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People from the whole Judean countryside come to be baptized by John, and Jesus joins those crowds. John dunks Jesus into the water and as Jesus comes up he sees the heavens torn apart, the Spirit descending on him like a dove.

Jesus sees the heavens torn apart.

It’s the tearing apart that gets me this week, church.

Maybe those words catch me because it already felt like the whole fabric of our COVID lives had been torn to shreds before last Wednesday, and now we have to reckon again
with the ripped-up fabric of our entire democracy,
with the torn-up hearts of those whom our democracy is supposed to protect,
with the split-apart story of our country, where liberty and justice has never actually been for all,
with the rending cries of our Black and brown siblings – including our own Bishop – who are asking white folks to humble ourselves enough to listen to what this America feels like in their skin…who are pleading with us to sit in the tension and awkwardness that their witness often creates in us who are white.

It’s the tearing apart that gets me this week, church.

But here’s the thing about the tearing apart. It separates, disrupts, and divides; yes. But it also creates a space – an opening – for something to move through. And in today’s gospel, it’s God whose on the move. Just days after we witness another violent tear being ripped into the fabric of our democracy, here comes God, tearing apart the very heavens to get at us, to scoop us up out of the watery grave of baptism, to hold us in God’s heart, and to remind us who we are – God’s beloved ones. Even still. Even now. God’s beloved ones.

That’s what happens in baptism, friends. God rips apart anything and everything that would separate us from God and says, “From this moment on, you are mine. I am in you and you are in me and even on the days when you’d rather box me up and keep me distant, I will not be separated from you.” By our baptisms we belong to God.

But you know who else we belong to? Each other.

Today we remember the baptism of Jesus. Allowing himself to be baptized is Jesus’ first act of ministry in the gospel of Mark, and it’s a radical act of solidarity. Jesus had no need for repentance, but he chose to cast his lot with us anyway. He got into line behind the tax collectors and sinners – who look exactly like all of us – and he stepped into those muddy waters, entering fully into the messiness of our human story, binding his reputation and his destiny to ours. And when the waters of baptism were poured over our heads, or when we were immersed in the pool or the lake or wherever we were baptized, our lives, too, were inextricably joined not just to Christ, but to every created being that God so loves. Our baptisms, too, were an act of radical solidarity. To embrace the promise of baptism is to embrace the wild truth that we belong not to ourselves but to each other; that we are connected, interdependent, one.

So what does that mean? How do we live this week as though the promises of our baptism are real? This is a question that I hope we literally spend our entire lives answering together. But maybe, this week, it means we join God in the tearing apart:
– tearing apart the pride or assumptions or simple inexperience that keeps us from really hearing the truths of our neighbors who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color;
– tearing apart the quietism that keeps us timid in the face of pain or injustice;
-tearing apart the “us-and-them” categories that we are so quick to create, even unintentionally;
– tearing apart the temptation to believe that any of us are exempt from taking responsibility for this broken body politic;
-tearing apart the privilege that allows some of us to be shocked at what happened last week, while so many of our siblings know it as just one more chapter in a long, painful history of unchecked white nationalism.  

Yes, church. Maybe we join God in the tearing apart. Because tearing apart separates, disrupts, and divides; yes. But it also creates a space – an opening – for God to get to us, and for us to get to each other.

Amen.

headline photo credit: jose luis magana/AP

Who Are You?

Heidi Torgerson

an advent sermon on john 1:6-8,19-28

Let me start by reassuring you that you are not, in fact, experiencing liturgical déjà vu. This is the second week in a row that we’re hearing about a man named John and his call to make straight the way of the Lord. Now bear with me for a second as we untangle a few potentially confusing details, because there are two different people named John wrapped up in this mix. One of these Johns is sometimes called John the Evangelist – he’s the person who wrote the book of the Bible that we know as the gospel of John. In the verses we just heard, John the Evangelist tells us about a different person who is also named John, and that John is the subject of today’s gospel reading.

This John was also the subject of last week’s gospel reading from the book of Mark. And though John the Evangelist and Mark the gospel writer reference the same verses from Isaiah as they talk about the John who came to prepare the way of the Lord, there are some important differences in how they tell the story. That’s because John the Evangelist and Mark the gospel writer want to emphasize different things as they tell John’s story. It’s kind of like what happens when you ask two different people to describe a friend that they have in common. One might say, “Oh yeah! That Joe Schmo is hilarious! He’s got the quickest wit you can imagine!” While the other might say, “Joe Schmo? You’ll never meet a kinder person. He’s the kind of guy that just notices if you’re feeling off and makes a point to ask you about it.” Undoubtedly, Mr. Schmo is both hilarious and kind, but you’ll hear a different emphasis from each friend depending on their experience of Joe, or on the larger context of their relationship with him.   

So it is with John. Last week we met the locust-eating, camel-hear-wearing, wilderness-living John the Baptizer in the gospel of Mark. I love this fiery version of John with his call to repentance and his dramatic participation in Jesus’ baptism. For Mark, John’s identity as Baptizer is the most important part of his role in the whole salvation story. But this week we hear a very different take on John. The John of John’s gospel is decidedly less wild and fiery, and he’s also never called John the Baptizer in this account. Instead, he is John the Witness, whose most important role in the story of the Christ is not as one who baptizes, but as one who recognizes the true light when it appears – the Word made flesh who comes to dwell among us – and to call attention to it so that others might also recognize it and believe.

John is called to be a witness, but his testimony starts out in a rather unusual way as he responds to the religious officials’ question: “Who are you?” In contrast to the great “I am” statements that Jesus will make in this same gospel – I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the vine – John replies with a series of “I am not” statements. I am not the Messiah. I am not Elijah. I am not the prophet. I am not who you think I am, and anyway, this isn’t about me. Unsatisfied with this response, the religious officials ask him again, “Who are you?” And he replies with the words of Isaiah: “I am the next person in a long line of witnesses. I am a voice crying out in the wilderness.”

Church, this is a man with deep clarity about what his life is meant to accomplish. When asked “Who are you?” he says very little about himself. Instead, he responds with his vocation – with the thing that God placed him on this very earth to do.

“Who are you?”
“I am a witness. I am here to testify to the light.”

At the very beginning of this pandemic a very close friend of mine took up the practice of lighting candles for people and circumstances in need of prayer. Each evening, as darkness settled in, she and her family would light a small tea light for people who are part of their faith community; for friends or family members who were struggling; for situations of injustice and grief in the world. A name was scrawled on a small piece of folded yellow paper and placed next to each candle. When the tea lights ran out, pillar candles from around the house were brought to the table. And when those ran out too, various scented candles in jars became vessels for prayer, wafting a curious mixture of vanilla and pine as they flickered in the darkness. Each of those candles represented a situation of brokenness or sorrow, fear or weariness, injustice or pain. And though each wick produced only the smallest of flames, it was enough. It was enough to communicate to her beloved ones and to ones she would never meet, “You are not alone. I will bear the light for you when you cannot do it on your own.”

“Who are you?”
“I am a witness. I am here to testify to the light.”

Karen, one of Grace’s staff members, shared with me on Friday that she’d had a conversation with John and Kathleen Westberg, longtime members with a deep history in our congregation. Earlier this week the Westbergs took a meditative walk through the lighted prayer path – the labyrinth – that is set up on our Catherine Lawn. Just as they were leaving a family of four approached in order to pray their own way through that same path. The Westbergs called to share with Karen what a spiritually moving experience that was for them, and to comment on the hope they experience in the many creative ways that churches finding to reach out to their communities in this difficult time.

“Who are you?”
“I am a witness. I am here to testify to the light.”

In seemingly powerless places in our community and around the world you, the people of God at Grace Lutheran Church of LaGrange, are echoing the prophet Isaiah’s words through your actions: “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…to comfort all who mourn.” You knit prayer shawls that literally wrap our struggling members in God’s care. You pack socks and soap and shampoo and love into bags for veterans experiencing homelessness. You cook or donate healthy meals to BEDS Plus for people who are finding temporary shelter in hotels, and for families who are experiencing food insecurity. You pack backpacks full of food for kids who receive free or reduced-COST lunch at school but who often experience hunger on the weekends. You continue to drop off gifts for the Secret Santa program through Pillars Community Health, and food for the St. Francis food pantry. You send cards and make phone calls to members who are ill or grieving or even celebrating milestones. You take the time to record yourselves and your children praying and lighting candles and singing songs and telling stories so that God might meet us in worship through this whole Advent & Christmas season.

“Who are you?”
“I am a witness. I am here to testify to the light.”

Church, the clear call on John’s life was that he be a very human witness to a very mysterious, cosmic event. The Word will take on flesh and dwell among us, and he will be the light of the world, a light that no darkness can overcome. John’s role in the story of salvation is to call the whole world’s attention to that light – to point us toward the insistent glimmer growing in the dim corners where we do not expect light to be – just in case we happen to be too weary or too distracted to notice it otherwise. On this third Sunday of Advent, let this as our call, too – to keep our eyes open for even the faintest hints of light in the midst of darkness, and to point others to that light:
Light that brings healing and hope and release.
Light that carries quiet joy into places we cannot imagine it.
Light that meets the needs of hungry bodies and the hunger of our own souls.
Light that brings justice into the lives of forgotten peoples and places.
And in the words of Jan Richardson,
“Light that endures in the midst of things that seem unendurable,
and persists even when everything seems in shadow and grief.”

Who are you?
You are witnesses. Testify to the light.

Amen.

the headline photo is of the lighted labyrinth located on our church’s lawn through the advent & christmas seasons. it is intended as a gift of quiet meditation for the whole of our community.

the jan richardson quote is from her poem “Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light.”

Light Up the Night

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on mark 13:24-37

Jason and I took the puppy for a walk after dark a couple of weeks ago, and I was comforted to see how many people had decided to put up their Christmas lights way earlier than usual. It was almost like our neighborhood had come together in some instinctive, unspoken, collective effort to light up the lengthening night at the end of a really dark year. Our wonderful downstairs neighbors and landlords had the tree outside our house completely wrapped with twinkling white lights, weeks before they usually do – its stark, bare branches suddenly glowing with soft luminescence. I love the gently lit evergreen garland that drapes the entire length of the fence that runs along the house on the corner. That, too, has been up for weeks already. Lights twinkle and shine all the way up and down our street, outlining porches and windows and hanging from trees.

During the Advent season at our house, we place a candle in every window that faces the street – a practice I learned in my home growing up where my mom would do the same, offering a bit of warmth and a symbol of hope and welcome to any passersby. Our household is usually pretty adamant that we don’t decorate until Advent but we, too, instinctively turned to the light a bit earlier this year. Instead of using our window candles to mark the first Sunday of Advent this year, we decided to pull them out on the day when Gov. Pritzker announced statewide Level III COVID mitigations. It somehow felt like the only fitting response to yet one more reminder of what a dark place the world seems to be in.

We’re filling our lives with light at Grace, too, gathering over these four Sundays in Advent under the theme, “The Promise of Light.” We’ll light candles, one by one, in our own homes and here in the sanctuary as we dispel the deepening darkness outside. We’ll pull out spotlights and decorate our trees which will glow with warm light. Even our Catherine Lawn will be illuminated with a lighted path of prayer – a labyrinth – that you and the wider community are invited to walk as we prepare for Christmas; BYO mulled wine or hot tea in hand, if you like. And all of that feels right, especially at the end of 2020. When things feel especially dark, we turn toward the light.

I just wish that our Advent readings would get on board. Because while we’re turning toward the light, Mark’s gospel is talking of it being blotted out. “The sun will be darkened,” Jesus says in Mark 13. “The moon will not give its light. The stars will be falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” This passage in Mark is often referred to as the “Little Apocalypse,” which is a whole genre of writing that’s kind of hard for our modern minds to make sense of, except for maybe within the context of movies about the end times, my personal favorite of which is the classic (?!) 90’s film Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. (Say it with me, fellow Gen Xers – “Get off…the nuclear…warhead.”)

Apocalyptic literature has been around forever. People have been foretelling the end of the world essentially since the world began, reading an ultimate end into whatever war or natural disaster or global pandemic happens to be unfolding within their lifetimes. And unfortunately, much of the Bible’s apocalyptic writings have been misunderstood or misconstrued in order to scare people into supposed righteousness. I mean, the promise of escape from a terrible and suffering-filled End Time is enough to force all kinds of behaviors from people made afraid, whether or not those behaviors have anything to do with God. And who am I to say? Maybe the world really will end one day as the movie scriptwriters say – with some epic, terrifying battle between good and evil that punishes the unrighteous with unimaginable suffering. But that’s not really what the Greek word “apocalypse” means. It actually means “revelation,” or “unveiling” – an unveiling of things not previously known, and which are totally beyond the grasp of human understanding until the moment of their revealing.

Understood in this way, apocalyptic writings are hard not so much in a terrifying end-times way, but in a “humans want to know things, and we don’t like being told there are some things we can’t know,” kind of way. Our understanding of God is limited by our language and our experiences, and so we necessarily anthropomorphize God and domesticate the Divine. But these apocalyptic writings remind us that there is a certain wildness to God. They remind us that there is something to this whole gorgeous and troubling universe that is beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to see, no matter how much brightness we try to cast upon it with our window candles and Christmas tree lights.

Our faith is sometimes frustrated by this unknowing – perhaps especially in a year that has felt pretty apocalyptic by all standards, at least in that pop culture sense of the word. Advent anticipates the promise of the True Light of Christ, which…we’ve been anticipating and then celebrating for more than 2,000 years now. So if the Light of the World has already come, why the heck are we still living in such darkness? “Still Your children wander homeless;” we sing in one of my favorite hymns. “Still the hungry cry for bread; Still the captives long for freedom; Still in grief we mourn our dead.” We wake up to another day, try our best to put one leaden foot in front of the other, trudging along these wearying roads while we cry out to God along with Isaiah, “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” Standing as we are in the world as it is, Mark’s words sound almost mocking – “it’s not for you to know the hour or the day when everything will be made whole.”

Our faith is sometimes frustrated by this unknowing. But Church, our faith also rests in it. Just because the fullness of God’s work is hidden from us doesn’t mean it’s not unfolding, even now. There are cosmic movements and divine shifts happening around us all the time. Sometimes this movement of God brushes by us just closely enough for us to feel it – to notice the small opening in a relationship that had once been locked in fear, or to see the shape of a new life taking form when the old one has been taken from us, or to perceive the goodness of justice at work in ways both subtle and profound, in spite of the powers and greed that try to tamp it down. The Light of the World has already come. The work of faith is to rest on the edge of apocalypse – on the revelation and unveiling of holy activity and a divine plan that follows God’s timing, intention, and will.   

It strikes me that the innumerable challenges of this past year might actually give us a chance at a deeper understanding of Mark. 2020 has revealed great chasms sin and pain and death in our world – chasms that many of us who enjoy certain kinds of privilege are often able to avoid having to see or feel. But it has also revealed great oceans of mercy and resilience and solidarity – things that point to God’s movement in the world. This is the holy tension of Advent – we live in the faith that God is at work, but there is so much that we do not know, and cannot know. Instead, we are called to a particular kind of alertness, a particular kind of woke-ness, a particular kind of attentiveness to what is right before us.

“Keep awake,” Jesus says. Because though the fullness of God’s wild and redeeming activity is beyond our grasp, we are also alive in it today. Right now. We are wrapped up in grace, held firm by promise, carried by hope, set free in God’s wildness right now. “Keep awake,” Jesus says, because there is work to be done – work set before us that is necessary for the mysterious, saving power of God to keep finding a foothold in this particular time and this particular space.

Keep awake, Church, because God is on the move and we’re already swept up in it. Keep awake, and keep doing whatever you can to light up these lengthening nights and dispel this deepening darkness. And in so doing, together we will illuminate the path for God’s saving work to keep finding its way in the world.

Amen.

Laugh it Up!

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7, as part of the Unraveled worship series

I have a very serious question for you this morning, Church. When was the last time you really laughed? I’m not talking about a little chuckle. I mean, when was the last time you had the throw-back-your-head, tears-running-down-your-cheeks, gasping-for-air kind of full-body laugh? Was it just a few minutes ago? (And if it was, would you call me after worship and tell me the story so I can laugh along with you?!) Was it a few months ago? Was it pre-pandemic? Was it so long ago that you can’t even remember?

They say that laughter is the best medicine, but it feels like reasons for laughter have been in short supply lately.

You know, because of All The Things.

Over the last 10 weeks we’ve been exploring biblical narratives of unraveling. I know that a series like this is new for Grace, so I’ve appreciated hearing from so many of you about how appropriate the theme has felt to the time we’re living in. The news of another stay-at-home advisory stands as a stark reminder to how this pandemic has unraveled pretty much everything about our lives. A damaged sense of public trust in this divided country that’s managed to politicize even this global pandemic adds another layer to the fraying. And we’ve been talking about pandemics and divisions for so long now that I’m honestly pretty much sick of talking about it. We all know. Things are really hard. They might get harder yet before they get better. And when things do get better, they’ll still be different. COVID has changed everything, and there’s just no going back to life exactly as we once knew it.

That’s a lot of bad news to try and process, even though we’ve had 8 months of practice by now. So lemme just cut to the chase and tell you the good news, which comes to us in this delightful little story from the book of Genesis:

When we think things are ending, God is just getting started.

In case it’s been awhile since you’ve encountered the story of Abraham & Sarah – who are known as Abram and Sarai in earlier chapters of Genesis – let me give you a little back story. We first encounter Abraham in Genesis 12 when God calls him, seemingly out of the blue, to leave his homeland and his people and go to a land he’s never seen. Along with God’s call comes a threefold promise: first, that Abraham will be a “great nation” with as many descendants as there are stars in the sky; second, that Abraham and his descendants will inherit the land of Canaan; and third, that they will be a blessing to the whole world. Well, all of that is well and good, but there’s one pretty big hiccup in this whole “great nation” promise. Abraham has no children, and his wife, Sarah, is barren. It’s pretty hard to become a “great nation” if you don’t even have one child.

Well, they can’t produce an heir but they also can’t let the promise slip through their fingers, so Abraham & Sarah take matters into their own hands. They give Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar, to Abraham as a concubine, and Hagar gives birth to a son that she names Ishmael. Abraham and Sarah will later banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert where they almost die. That’s a story for a different day, but their cruel choice is one of a number of pretty crappy decisions Abraham and Sarah will make as they try to follow the God who called them. I mention it as yet one more reminder that God has this habit of using people who are sort of messed up to do some great things which, frankly, gives me some hope for all of us!

Anyway, after Ishmael is born, Sarah gets her own blessing from God, and her own promise, as well. God promises that Sarah will give Abraham a son – a true heir – and that she will be the mother of nations and the bearer of kings. Cool, cool, cool. This is an amazing promise. It just has one problem. By the time God makes it, our sister Sarah is 90 years old. Abraham knew as well as we do that 90-year-old women don’t have babies, so when God tells him this plan Abraham literally falls on his face laughing at the absurdity of the idea. He reminds God that he already has Ishmael so maybe God could just make it easier on all of them and make Ishmael his heir, but God’s like, “Nope. I’m going to make Ishmael a great nation, too, but you’re going to have a true heir and my covenant will be with him – the one that your wife, Sarah is going to bring into the world.”

Which brings us to the part of the story we just heard a few minutes ago. Abraham, wiping his dusty face as he sits outside his tent in the heat of the day, notices three strangers standing nearby. When he sees them he kicks those 100-year-old legs into gear, running toward them and bowing down before them. Hospitality was a big deal in that time, and Abraham spares nothing in making sure that these men can rest and enjoy a good meal made from the finest flour and meat he has. As the strangers eat and drink they ask about Sarah, wondering where she is. Well, she is inside the tent, eavesdropping on this conversation in which one of the strangers tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son. I love, love, love Sarah’s cheekiness as she listens from the tent. I imagine her catching a glimpse of her 100-year-old husband with his thin wisp of white hair, his sagging skin, and his slightly bent, bony shoulders as she laughs to herself. “A son?! Can two old people like us even have pleasure anymore?!” (I’m pretty sure I would have liked Sarah.) The Lord overhears Sarah’s laughter and asks Abraham, “Why did she laugh? Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

Sarah & Abraham’s dream of having a child had been long dead, but God keeps this promise to Sarah. She gives birth to a son and they name him Isaac, which means “laughter” in Hebrew, because, as Sarah says, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears it will laugh with me.” 

Friends I want to remind you that the Bible is not a science book. Rather, the Bible is a book of many books that tells the long story of God’s extravagant love and mercy poured out on the world. Though I wouldn’t put anything past our God, wondering over whether a 90-year-old woman in the ancient world really, actually conceived and bore a child misses the point. The point is that when we think things are ending, God is just getting started.

I don’t know all of the details of what’s come undone in your lives in these difficult days. I don’t know all of the endings, all of the unravelings. But I do know this: we are loved and led by a God of promise. The promises of God might not always be easy to see or touch or understand. They might seem absurd or impossible and they might take 100 long and difficult years to unfold. But they are there.

Next week will be the last in our Unraveled worship series. It will also be our Commitment to Connect Sunday, where we will invite one another to connect – or re-connect – to Grace’s ministries in some specific ways. And then we’ll move into Advent, a season that begins with another unexpected promise of a child; this time, a child whose name means not “laughter,” but “savior.” A child who will be for us God’s ultimate promise that where we see an ending, God is just getting started.

My prayer for you today, dear church, is that this little story from Genesis would fill you with a sense of the promises of God in your own life. Promises that, if we could see the ending, might have us falling on our faces in a fit of laughter like Abraham, or chuckling behind the tent door like Sarah. Promises that fill God’s own heart with laughter because God delights in you, and because God delights in the holy absurdity of unexpected blessing that is always, always unfolding in our lives.

So laugh it up, beloved of God. This is not the end. God is just getting started.

Amen.

Unraveling of the Mind

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on mark 5:1-20, for mental health awareness week in our series, “Unraveled”

We are on the 4th Sunday of our 11-week fall worship series Unraveled: Seeking God When Our Plans Fall Apart. Just like our own lives, the Bible is full of stories in which life seems to just be coming apart at the seams. We’ve heard about Moses’ mother, Jochebed, and the unraveling plans for her son’s life. We’ve heard about how Peter was undone by fear as he sank in the water he was trying to walk on, and about Rizpah’s life unraveling into grief at the murder of her two sons. And today – at the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week – we hear about a man who lived with the daily unraveling of his mind thanks to the legion of demons that possessed him.

Did you catch that? He lived with the daily unraveling of his mind…thanks to the demons that possessed him.

Sometimes I hear myself saying things in sermons or in worship that I would just never say in real life. But somehow when I say them in church they seem, like, totally normal instead of totally strange or totally out-of-touch. “This man is possessed by demons” falls squarely into that category.

Like a lot of things in the Bible, I’m not quite sure what to make of this notion of demon possession. On the one hand, everything I know about the world tells me that demon possession is either the stuff of old-school psychological thrillers like The Exorcist, or a remnant of equally old-school theologies that we’re too sophisticated to believe anymore. On the other hand, I’ve witnessed demon possession. Or at least, I think I have?

Most of you know that I served in the global church for nearly 15 years before coming to Grace. Many of our Christian siblings in other parts of the world believe strongly that demon possession is real. In Madagascar, for example, there’s a whole revival movement in the Malagasy Lutheran Church called fifohazana. The fifohazana movement trains lay people – mostly women – to serve as what are known as “shepherds.” Many of the trained shepherds serve in tobys, which are shelters of a sort that are a haven for people who suffer from what have been identified as spiritual illnesses. Daily worship is part of life in a toby and at each service the shepherds perform public exorcisms, loudly casting demons out of people in the name of Jesus. I was invited to attend one of these worship services on a work visit to Madagascar some years ago. Witnessing these exorcisms and the very dramatic physical responses of those who were being healed was so far outside my own understanding of how the world works that I can still feel the sense of deep unsettledness that experience created in my spirit.

I remain grateful to those Malagasy neighbors for allowing an outsider like me to share in such a profound and intimate experience. And frankly, I remain unresolved in my thoughts about things like demon possession. I see the world through White, Western lenses that have been educated in a particular kind of schooling system, and so though I’ve ostensibly witnessed demon possession and exorcism I still don’t know that I “believe in it” in the way that our Malagasy siblings do, or in the way that the first reader’s of Mark’s gospel probably did. Like, maybe our Malagasy neighbors, like the ancient Palestinians, just don’t know about things like mental illness, or epilepsy, or other similar kinds of diseases. Or, maybe it’s just easier or safer for people like us to explain this stuff away in medical or scientific terms because it makes it seem a little easier to control or understand or something. I don’t know for sure. But I do know this: no matter what we call it, a whole lot of us know what it’s like to have something destructive grab hold of us – or of people that we love – and refuse to let go.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that 1 in 5 adults and 1 in 6 children in this country will experience a mental health disorder in any given year, which means that virtually all of us have been touched in some way by the realities of mental illness – whether it’s a mild case of COVID depression, or a chronic and debilitating dance with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or anorexia or substance abuse. A great many of us know what it’s like to struggle with a mind that feels like it’s fraying a bit at the edges, or is coming completely unraveled. A great many others know what it’s like to walk with someone whose mental health struggles are so crippling that they make our loved one feel as outcast and terrified as the man in Mark’s story, howling in pain as he wanders alone among the tombs.  

Before I go on, I want you to hear something very clearly. By means of this sermon I am in no way trying to conflate demon possession with issues of mental health. I may not know what to make of demon possession, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that science is real and so is mental illness. I thank God for the gifts of research and medicine that help people balance the delicate chemistries of our brains. I thank God for the gift of good mental health therapists who help people unravel the destructive messages that can get knotted up in our minds. If you or someone close to you is struggling right now, please reach out to a doctor, or a counselor, or to one of us here at church. God desires wholeness for you, and we want to help you access the resources you or your loved one needs to be well.

And how do I know that God desires this kind of wholeness for you and for all of us? Well, because the Bible says so.

As soon as Jesus and his disciples pull their boat onto the shores Gerasene country, the man with the unclean spirit comes running toward them. He bows down before Jesus and the demon inside him screams at the top of its lungs, “‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Do not torment me!” Jesus answers the demon with a question: “What is your name?” The demon replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And in an instant, Jesus sends the demons into a nearby herd of pigs as the man’s unraveled mind is knit back together, right there in front of him.

Two things strike me here. First is that, in the gospels, demons are the ones to most reliably recognize Jesus and his authority. The religious rulers argue over who Jesus really is, and even his own disciples struggle over it. The demons? Never. They know who Jesus is, and they’re afraid of him because they know that Jesus simply will not abide the lies that those demons whisper into our hearts; lies that tell us we are not worthy of love or of wholeness.

And the second thing that strikes me is this: Jesus makes a point to ask the demon’s name. Now, this demon’s name is Legion, which what a regiment of Roman soldiers was called. This little detail suggests that the man’s demonic suffering was also connected to what it meant to live under an oppressive Roman Empire, but as I read the gospel this week a more intimate connotation jumped out at me. Jesus asks the demon’s name, which invites us to consider the question of identity.  

The late writer Rachel Held Evans says this in her book Searching for Sunday, and forgive the slightly coarse language here “…[there is a chorus of] voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.”

Friends, I want to be really careful here because though I don’t think this is what Rachel Held Evans is saying, there are a lot of well-meaning Christians out there who will tell you that overcoming struggle of any kind just requires you to believe a little harder in Jesus. And forgive this slightly coarse language, but that’s just BS. An inability to overcome mental health difficulties has nothing to do with a lack of faith. But I do think there’s something to Rachel’s reflection. In an unraveling world filled with all kinds of lying voices that would try and lay claim to us, Jesus shows up. He commands all that would shackle us to step aside, restoring us to beloved community and reminding us over and over and over again, as many times as we need it, that we belong to God. That we are beloved and that that is enough.

Jesus asks, “What is your name?” and the demon says,
“My name is Legion.
My name is Mental Illness.
My name is Fear.
My name is Isolation.
My name is Self-Harm.
My name is Shame.
What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”

And with gentle compassion, and freedom on his voice, Jesus answers:

“Everything.”

A Story of Conversions

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on acts 9:1-20, as part of our fall worship series, “Unraveled”

A handful of years ago now I heard a phenomenal TED talk by the young Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called “The Danger of a Single Story.” In the 20-minute video Adichie describes the powerful impression that the multitude of British and American children’s stories she read as a girl had left on her. She began writing her own stories at about the age of 7, and although at that point she had never been outside of her West African home country, all of the characters in her stories were just like the ones in the books that she had read and loved. They had white skin and blue eyes. They ate apples. They played in the snow. The audience chuckles with her as she reminds them that, in the home she knew and loved, almost everyone had Black skin and dark eyes. They ate mangoes. And she had never even seen snow. She talks about how much she loved those British and American books, and how deeply they stirred her imagination. But she also remarks at how they taught her that people like her didn’t exist in literature, which is why her first encounters with African writers were life-changing. “They saved me from having a single story about what books are,” she says.

Adichie’s talk continues with a mix of poignant and often hilarious anecdotes meant the help the listener recognize that stories are incredibly powerful, and that with their power comes a danger. Specifically, she describes the danger in coming to know just one single story about a group of people. “The single story creates stereotypes,” Adichie remarks, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” 

Because of her Nigerian roots much of Adichie’s talk reflects on the single story of poverty, disease, and conflict that many people learn about the continent of Africa, and how much richness that single story leaves out. To illustrate, Adichie recounts a conversation with an American student at a university where she had recently been a keynote speaker. In that conversation the student tells her it’s such a shame that Nigerian men were physically abusive, like the father character in her novel. Adichie good-naturedly returns his pity. “I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho,” she says, “and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”  

Adichie’s full talk is totally worth your 20 minutes if you have a chance to check it out, but you get the picture. Single Stories keep us from seeing the Whole Story – whether it’s a single story we’ve learned about a group of people, a single story we’ve assigned to an individual, or even a deep investment in a single story about ourselves. Today’s reading from the book of Acts is about exactly that. It’s about two people who held tightly to single stories about themselves and about each other; about how their tight grasp on those single stories begins to unravel; and about how the unraveling creates space for three different experiences of conversion along the way.

The story begins with Saul, who is also called Paul – as in, the person who eventually wrote nearly 30 percent of the New Testament. The writer of Acts tells us that Saul was on the road to Damascus, breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus. Obviously threats and murder are not good, and so the single story I’d always learned about Saul is that he’s the bad guy in this particular narrative. But church history professor Amy Oden reminds us that this was not, in fact, Saul’s story about himself.

Saul was a deeply religious person whose dad was a Pharisee. Remember that the Pharisees were a group of highly devout Jewish teachers, distinguished by their strict observance of tradition and religious law. The earliest followers of the Jesus movement were also Jewish, and their proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah was not in line with orthodox Jewish teaching. It was tantamount to heresy for people like Saul. And so, Saul had appointed himself as sort of a defender of the faith. He goes after those who belonged to the Way – fellow Jewish people who were followers of Jesus. But in Saul’s mind he’s not going after people in order to persecute them. He’s going after them in order to save them from their error and to protect the sanctity of the Jewish faith. Saul’s story about himself is that he is a committed son of the covenant, someone who is trying to do the right thing in order to strengthen and preserve the people of God.

Saul was super invested in this story about himself. He was convinced of his right-ness; certain that his way of understanding God and expressing his commitment to his faith was the Most Correct Way. He was so passionate about it that he went to the high priest and got official authority to basically put any followers of the Way under arrest, to tie them up, and to bring them back to the religious authorities Jerusalem. But as he packs up his zeal for religious purity and carries it out with him on the road to Damascus like a suitcase, he has this completely wild experience. A light from heaven flashes around him and a voice booms out of nowhere, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul has no idea who’s talking to him and so he says, “Who are you Lord?” And the voice says, “It’s me, Jesus. Get up and go into the city and await further instruction.” And then he is thrust into darkness, struck blind on the road while the men traveling with him stood by, speechless.

Unable to see a thing, his men have to lead him by the hand all the way into Damascus. A man named Judas puts him up and Saul sits in darkness for three days, not eating or drinking anything during that time. The first part of the story is so dramatic with its flashing lights and voices that we sometimes miss this piece – this part where Saul is sitting in the dark, suddenly stripped of power and self-sufficiency, completely vulnerable to the people around him. We can’t know for sure, but I imagine that his soul is also reckoning with the shadows of darkness as the story he had always believed to be true about himself comes unraveled. I have a hunch that this is where Saul’s conversion to faith in Jesus actually takes place – not in the flashing lights and booming voices, but in the quiet uncertainty of coming to terms with the reality that his entrenched views had narrowed rather than expanded his vision for what God was up to in the world through Jesus.

As Saul tries to find his way through the literal and metaphorical dark, our story pivots to another person who is on the brink of a different kind of conversion. Ananias was a disciple of Jesus and when the Lord came to him in a vision, telling him to go to Judas’ house to look for Saul, he was like, “Umm, no thanks. You know that everyone’s been talking about this dude, right? You know that he’s been arresting people who follow the Way, right? You know I’d really rather not risk going to hang out with him, right?” And Jesus is like, “Yep, I know. Except that I’ve chosen this man to bring my name before the whole world so I’m going to need you to get over yourself and go find him.” (Okay, so those weren’t his EXACT words, but you get the point…)

Ananias had a single story about Saul, and the story is that Saul was dangerous – a persecutor of anyone who followed Jesus and thus someone against whom he’d need to defend himself and his community. Frankly, it’s a completely understandable story. But just like Saul’s story about himself, Ananias’ story narrowed rather than expanded his vision for what God was up to in the world through Jesus. It made him afraid and defensive, and it made him skeptical of the notion that someone like Saul could have a central role to play in the liberating story of Jesus.

I don’t know how long it took Ananias to get to Judas’ house, but apparently it was long enough for him to experience a conversion. By the time he enters the house where Saul has taken refuge, Ananias’s single story about Saul has unraveled enough that he greets Saul not as “Persecutor,” but as “Brother.” My own humanity makes me wonder if Ananias really meant “Brother” when it came out of his mouth or if he had to kind of cross his fingers behind his back until his heart could catch up with the words his mouth was forming, but maybe that doesn’t actually even matter. Maybe what matters is that Jesus could see beyond the single stories that Saul and Ananias believed about themselves and about each other. Maybe what matters is that Jesus aided in the unraveling of these single stories, so that their lives could be woven together in witness to God’s vision for a reconciled world.

There’s one more conversion in this story, except this one isn’t an individual conversion. It’s a communal one. The writer of Acts tells us that Saul, after being baptized, remained with the disciples in Damascus for several days as he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues. Now you know those other disciples had learned the same story about Saul that Ananias had learned – the story that would have led them to be fearful and on the defensive when presented with someone like Saul. But the saving power of the gospel is too important to be held in the hearts of a few individuals. In order for it to spill out into the world most effectively, it needs a community. Which is why Jesus has been calling us into unlikely relationships with each other for literally thousands of years now.  

Friends, you know that this call to community isn’t easy. The church can be a messy place because, well, it’s filled with messy people. Like Saul, we can get so entrenched in our own ways of thinking that we become closed off to the ways that Jesus might be made known through another person’s perspective. Like Ananias, we can get so caught up in the single stories we’ve heard about other people that we put ourselves constantly on the defensive, not believing that Jesus could be revealed in anyone who thinks or acts or behaves or believes or votes “like that.” Whether it’s our politics or our approach to this pandemic, our ideologies or the way we live out our faith, a too-tight grip on the stories we tell about ourselves and each other can narrow rather than expand our vision for what God is up to in the world.

And so, I want to leave you with a question this week. Or rather, with a couple of questions. What stories about yourself or about other people are you holding on to a little too tightly? And how might those entrenched stories be hindering your ability to see the fullness of God’s activity in this broken and beautiful world? Maybe this is a week to let our grip on those stories unravel a bit. Because the truth is that we need each other. And we need to be converted again and again – not necessarily to one another’s viewpoints, but to lives that reflect the story of Jesus’ loving, healing, freeing purpose for this world. And that story is just too big to tell on our own. Thanks be to God.

Eternal Hopetimism

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Most of you know that I grew up in rural North Dakota. My sisters and I were officially town kids. We lived in a community of about 1800 people, with parents who worked in agricultural insurance and as a nursing professor, respectively. But both of my parents grew up on farms, and my grandparents continued to farm – as their parents had – until I was well into college. I loved visiting my grandparents in the summer when we’d hop in the truck and drive around the country roads for hours as we “checked the fields.” Even better were the early days of harvest, when we especially loved to climb into the back of the grain trucks after they’d been filled with harvested wheat or barley. My sisters and cousins and I would play in those full grain trucks as though they were sandboxes. (Well, sandboxes are decidedly less itchy and dirty than full grain trucks, but still. Fun.)  

The whole of my grandparents’ generation on my mom’s side is gone now, but as I read the parable of the sower and the seed I recalled a sweet conversation between my grandpa, Norman Rudel, and his younger brother, my great-uncle Arlyn, whom everybody called Rudy. It was the weekend of my ordination, actually, 15 years ago now. They were talking over whisky Manhattans about one particular summer from their youth that yielded one of the biggest crops their family could remember. The durum wheat, in particular, had grown thick and strong that year, with full heads of grain that came as a reward for their good care of the soil, but also thanks to rain that came at exactly the right times and in exactly the right amounts. Rudy and my grandpa were remembering the work they did alongside their dad that weekend. They were up as early on Saturday and Sunday mornings as they always were, preparing equipment and grain storage bins for the harvest.

As they remembered it, the weather was perfect early that Sunday morning, but the forecasts for later that day were a little iffy. Rudy and my grandpa urged their dad to take a Sunday off from church so that they could get as much of the crop in as possible while the weather was in their favor. My great-grandparents were deeply faithful people, however, and the suggestion that they miss church was a non-starter. So, the family got cleaned up and headed into town to give thanks to the God of the harvest. And as they joined their community in worship, it began not only to rain, but to hail. Menacing, pounding, golf-ball-sized hail.

If you’ve never seen hail damage on a field of wheat, it’s something to behold. Stalks of grain that once stood tall and proud are battered to the ground in minutes, leaving the field looking like a wayward giant had stomped through it at random. The congregation full of farmers looked at each other warily across the pews as the hailstorm raged. They knew that their bumper crops were all but being destroyed as they sang and prayed together.

When worship was over, my great uncle Rudy remembered overhearing a conversation between his dad and another member of the congregation. “I just can’t believe it. You lost your crop because you came to church, Ed. I’m so sorry.”

My great-grandpa’s reply? “No, sir. We didn’t lose the crop because we came to church. We lost the crop because it hailed.”

Where I come from, it’s often said that farmers are eternal optimists. But I think there’s actually something much deeper at work in people like my great-grandpa, because optimism is tied to outcomes. Optimism implies an expectation that things will somehow unfold in a way that’s favorable. Certainly there’s some optimism – and maybe also a little stubbornness – involved in working the land, whether you’re a High Plains farmer or a backyard gardener or a tender of potted herbs on the windowsill. But optimism fades quickly when the outcome looks like hail smashing your family’s annual income in an instant, rather than the bumper crop that was right in front of your eyes just hours before. In that moment, hope needs to surface. A deep, resilient hope that has nothing to do with the outcome of the situation at hand, and everything to do with the character of God.

A sower went out to sow, Jesus says, and as he sowed, he threw some seeds on the path, where the birds came and ate them up. He threw other seeds on rocky ground, where they sprang up quickly, but didn’t last for lack of strong roots. Other seeds the sower threw amongst thorns, where the life was quickly choked out of them. And other seeds the sower threw on good soil that yielded abundant grain, as much as a hundredfold.

A sower went out to sow and just look at the way that sower handles her work. There’s no planning, no scheming of nice, neat rows, no evaluation of the soil and sunlight, no fences that are strategically placed to keep unwanted creatures away from the growing plants. No, the sower goes out to sow, and the sower flings the seeds everywhere. Everywhere! The sower does not wait for soil to be ready, or for the soil to look promising, or for the soil to have proved its ability in the previous harvest. The sower simply flings upon all the soils of land and life, even the ones that look the most grim. She sows the seeds of love and justice and possibility, of which there is always abundant supply. Some of the seeds grow. Some of them start growing and then wither away. Some of them immediately die. And yet the sower keeps on going, tossing seeds wherever she goes, no matter the result; no matter the outcome.

I can imagine my great-grandpa turning in his grave upon hearing about this kind of reckless approach to planting. I mean, who the heck would throw out seed so extravagantly, so haphazardly, so wastefully tossing it on soil that could never produce a harvest?

It turns out, God would.

In Matthew’s description of the sower we learn what God is like. God is like a sower who tosses seeds of love and justice and new life upon the whole earth, upon all of humanity, without discretion. This love of God is sprinkled everywhere. It lands on fields and meadows, thorns and rocks. It lands in back alleys and sidewalks, school playgrounds and parking lots. It lands on living rooms and grocery stores, jail cells and corporate office buildings. It lands on Black Lives Matter protests and law enforcement offices, COVID wings in the hospital and funeral homes. It lands on addiction recovery centers and church sanctuaries and downtown pubs and everywhere in between.

There is not a corner of this world where seeds of love and possibility are not scattered about by our gracious and generous God. Sometimes that love materializes. Sometimes it’s rejected. Sometimes it shows up in the most surprising of places, the way greenery shoots forth out of the cracks in a sidewalk. But here’s the gospel, here’s the point: the human response to love doesn’t change whether God is pouring love into the world, into each one of us, every single day. That’s just what the Sower does. That’s just what God does. All day long. All the world over.

This love of God is not a sentimental love. It is a deep, powerful, world-altering love. God’s love looks like the lowly being lifted up. It looks like the hungry feasting on every good thing. It looks like souls freed from the confines of sin and self-centeredness and fear and self-doubt. It looks like a table that grows exponentially as people of every race and nation stream toward it; a table overflowing with bread and wine and laughter in the gentle company of the faithful. It looks like restored relationships between God’s broken and beloved people – relationships characterized by justice and humility and a commitment to each other’s thriving. It looks like the unbreakable promise that we are worth loving, worth investing in, even when the soil of our hearts is too rocky to let that love move us; even when our faith feels as battered as my great-grandpa’s wheat fields that summer long ago.

Farmers where I come from are often called eternal optimists. But when the favorable outcomes of a plentiful harvest are beaten down in the span of a church service, optimism withers away like a plant with no root, bending in defeat like a hail-damaged stalk of grain. That’s when hope needs to surface. A deep, resilient hope that has nothing to do with the outcome of the situation at hand, and everything to do with the character of God.

Our whole human family is in the midst of a season of deep uncertainty, marked by pandemic and protest, anxiety and utter exhaustion. Even the most optimistic among us have had to reckon with how little control we actually have over the outcomes of our individual lives. But even now – especially now – God is still God, sowing the seeds of love and justice and the promise of new life as wildly, extravagantly, and recklessly as God has always done. May this enduring faithfulness of the Great Sower allow tender shoots of hope to keep springing up in the soil of our lives. And may that hope grow roots in us that are strong and deep, reaching beyond our attachment to expectations and outcomes and into the richness of God’s own eternally hopetimistic vision for the whole of this created world.

Amen.

I am so grateful for my dear friend and colleague, Pastor Sarah Rohde, and for her assistance with portions of this sermon.

Rest for the Weary

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on Matthew 11:16-19; 25-30

(singing)
Rest for the weary…
Rest for the weary…
Welcome everyone…
To the love of God.

I first learned the simple song Come Let Us Worship God, by Ray Makeever, at the opening worship service of a Summer Missionary Conference many years ago now. The particular verse I just sang has been lilting its way through my mind all week. Friends, there’s a lot going on in the gospel text from Matthew that I just read. But truthfully, all I could hear this week were Jesus’ words at the end, which feel like the kind of grace that pours itself out as cool water over our parched souls.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by this pandemic.

If my count is right, it’s been 107 days since Governor Pritzker issued the first stay-at-home order for the state of Illinois. So much of what once grounded our lives and our relationships and our routines became unavailable to us literally overnight. Public health somehow became a partisan political issue and the onslaught of news and information became almost too much to take in. COVID-19 distress became so intense for so many people that the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines for protecting mental health in the midst of the outbreak. The uncertainty about how long this will last and what life will look like on the other side puts us in a constant state of disorienting anxiety. There’s really no way to measure the depth of all that we’ve already lost, nor the complicated feelings of grief that have taken up residency in our spirits as COVID has taken up residency in our world.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.  

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by your responsibilities.

Life asks so much of us, even in normal times. We are trying to work full-time and parent full-time all at once and we’re certain we’re not doing either thing very well. We are caring for aging parents who don’t understand why we can’t visit them, or whose frustration over loss of independence comes out sideways in ways that sting. We are supporting family members or friends who are managing significant health issues, or childcare crises, or job losses. We ourselves got laid off, or our gigs were all canceled, and the hustling required to find a way to pay the bills is almost enough to knock us flat. Our country seems to be crumbling around us and we care deeply about civic and community issues. We want to be involved, but then also we feel guilty, because even though we know it’s critically important we can’t fathom how we could possibly take on even one more thing. We can’t keep up with the housework or the laundry or manage to get the oil changed, and seriously? These people in our house need to eat yet one more meal?! Didn’t they just eat, like, hours ago?!

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by loneliness.

I have a friend who lives in another state, far away from her family of origin. She’s a young, single professional with a strong social network, and she happens to live alone. The other day she remarked that it has been 92 days since she has physically touched another human being. Some of us know that same kind of loneliness. And some of us are lonely for other reasons. Our marriages are stressed, so we feel lonely in our own homes despite the fact that they’re filled with people. We’re new to a town or church or job or school community that we can’t really get to know because everything’s shut down. We pretty much always feel like we don’t fit in. We struggle to make friends or have trouble being vulnerable with the ones we do have. Our most beloved person has died, or has moved away, or is living with memory loss. We feel alone, and we ache.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by injustice.

Economists and social scientists have begun to refer to the coronavirus not as the “great equalizer,” but as the “great revealer.” Here in the United States and across the world, the sudden stop to the global economy has put the ever-growing gap between rich and poor into stark relief. The realities of access to food – the most basic of human needs – give us just one glimpse into what life is like for people who have been made poor in our current world order. I’ve been in touch recently with several pastoral colleagues who serve Lutheran congregations in poorer parts of the greater metro Chicago area. The food shelves that their congregations host are often completely empty within just a couple of hours of opening because the need for food is so great. One of these colleagues is in deep grief over the fact that most of their church’s food shelf clients right now are actually members of that very same congregation. That congregation is the spiritual home of many Mexican and Central American immigrants who work in food processing plants and other blue-collar jobs in the far west suburbs – plants whose workers have experienced exceedingly high rates of coronavirus infection because of the close physical proximity the work demands. The plants can’t figure out a way to keep people safe and still make money, and the immigrant community is paying with their lives and their livelihoods. Beyond our borders, chief economists at the United Nations’ World Food Program are looking at the impact of the coronavirus and forecasting a global food emergency on a scale that the world has never seen before, estimating that more than 265 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of the year.  

The promise of Jesus belongs first to such as these: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by divisiveness.

Black lives matter vs. blue lives matter vs. all lives matter. Protestors vs. police. Republicans vs. Democrats vs. the Completely Disenfranchised. Teachers vs. parents. Science vs. individual choice. Rich vs. poor. Mask-wearers vs. those who loudly refuse to use them. Open our State proponents vs. those who advocate caution. We receive a constant bombardment of messages fueling the lie that our identities are primarily about belonging to one supposed side of an issue or another, rather than the truth that we first belong to God, and then to each other.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by grief. By shame. By our inability to gather as a full community of faith. By the feeling that you aren’t measuring up. By your sense of powerlessness in the face of so many challenges. By depression. By anxiety. By fear. By hopelessness.

The promise of Jesus is for you, too: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

Bring your weary and burdened souls to Jesus. Lay at his feet the crushing weight of all that you carry, remembering that he knows exactly what it feels like to walk in human skin. And as you lay down your own burdens, don’t forget to look on either side of you. Because when you do, you will see other people just like you – and still others who are not at all like you – who have also come to the feet of Jesus looking for rest and renewal. Notice as they, too, lay down the weight of all they carry. And then watch what happens when all of us, together, suddenly find our arms freed from burden and renewed in strength to be Christ to one another, and to the whole of this weary world. Feel yourself breathing a bit easier as you lean into the strong arms of the communion of saints, and let that breath support songs of life.

I’m going to ask my daughter Kate to join me to close this sermon, because the verse I sang to open this sermon is actually written as a call and response. We invite you to join us in singing.

(singing)
Rest for the weary…
Rest for the weary…
Welcome everyone…
To the love of God.

Amen.

Fearless Discipleship

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on Matthew 10:24-39

So, my sermon title for today is “Fearless Discipleship.” I’m guessing most of you don’t ever think about how sermon titles work, but in order for our colleagues to create the online bulletin each week without pulling it all together at the very last minute, the pastor who’s preaching has to submit a sermon title pretty early on. Pastor Ben & Pastor Leland might be more on top of this than I am, but I often end up submitting a sermon title based on just my first readings of the text, before I’ve even drafted out what the sermon’s actually going to say. Which means that I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this sermon how ironic the title would turn out to be. Because after a week of praying through this gospel text, I find myself feeling pretty afraid to preach the message God has placed on my heart.

I didn’t choose this text today from Matthew’s gospel. It’s the assigned text from the Revised Common Lectionary, which is the cycle of Bible readings that mainline churches the world over use each week. This text chose us, and it’s a hard one. It’s a text about slaves and masters. It’s about truth-telling and terrifyingly bold proclamation. It’s about persecution and divided families. It’s about Jesus’ difficult words that he didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword. This text chose us on the weekend of Juneteenth, the day when we commemorate the final end of slavery in this country. And this text chose us in the continued unfolding of an uprising and an awakening around race in this country, the likes and scale of which we have not seen in a very long time. This text chose us because it is a word for our time, and God had some pretty clear things to say to me about how it should preach.

But as I sat down to write this sermon I remembered how the last sermon I preached, which was about our Trinitarian God of relationship, also talked a whole lot about race. And I remembered how two of my last three video messages to you touched on race, and about how 80 or so of us are going to be talking about race all summer as we study the book Waking Up White. And I remember acutely, every single day, that COVID and social distancing means we don’t know each other well yet; that we don’t yet have the kind of pastoral relationship that helps you feel confident in my deep love for you even when the Bible asks us to wrestle together with a word we might rather not hear. And suddenly I wanted to throw out that “Fearless Discipleship” sermon title and instead preach a feel-good message on the Psalm or something.

But then a trusted colleague gently reminded me that I’m a white pastor, serving a mostly white congregation in the whitest denomination in the country, and that my strong desire to back off this difficult text and preach a feel-good sermon is the very definition of the privilege that I carry in the world as a person who is white. It’s the privilege of getting to decide when we talk about these issues and when we’d rather just not; the privilege of getting to decide when we engage and when we just need a break; the privilege of thinking that preaching about issues of race in a time like this is a choice and not a gospel mandate. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I really wanted to invoke that privilege today. Because I mean, good grief, we’ve been talking about race for weeks now. And also we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and we’re all tired and mostly at the end of our ropes. And also I am afraid. I’m afraid to bring up race again because I’m afraid of inadvertently become a preacher whose parishioners can no longer hear her.

But I’m even more afraid of becoming a preacher who isn’t faithful to the gospel. I’m even more afraid of becoming a preacher who is presented with a hard text and chooses to say, “Sorry, God; this is too much for us this week” instead of modeling for you the courage to wrestle with it.

So here we are.

The 10th chapter of Matthew is sometimes called Jesus’ “mission discourse.” It’s all about Jesus sending the 12 disciples into the world to proclaim God’s coming reign. And this sending? It’s no joke. Jesus sends those disciples out in complete vulnerability. They’re to take no pay, no extra clothes, no staff for protection, not even an extra pair of sandals. He grants them remarkable powers; powers that flow from God and allow them to heal people from every kind of suffering; to cast out the demonic forces that destroy people’s lives; to cleanse lepers and restore the outcast ones back into community; even to raise the dead.

But Jesus knows that this kind of faithful proclamation and practice of the gospel will put the disciples on a crash course with the powers of this world. He knows that the gospel is disclosive in nature; that it brings into the light the kinds of things that powers and principalities would rather keep hidden. “For nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered,” Jesus says, “and nothing secret that will not become known.” In order to bring hope and healing to those who are beaten down, vulnerable, discriminated against, and marginalized, the gospel’s saving power must also uncover and bring into the light the death-dealing kind of power that defies God. The kind of power that builds racial violence right into the systems of our life together. The kind of power that fills its lungs with the breath it chokes out of others. The kind of power that divides with lies and fuels itself with threats of force. The kind of power that does whatever it can, to take what it can, from anyone it can.

Jesus knows how the world works, and he knows what the disciples will encounter in their mission to proclaim God’s reign through word and deed. And so he pulls no punches in telling them what they can expect as they shout God’s power from the housetops; God’s power which stands in direct opposition to those who are invested in the death-dealing powers I just described. It’s so intense that the lectionary actually skips over some of the harshest parts, perhaps rightly assuming it might be a little too much for us to handle. Jesus tells the twelve that, because of their practice of the gospel, they’ll be handed over to powerful religious authorities and publicly beaten. He tells them that they’ll be dragged before governors and kings on account of their ministry. He tells them that their families will rise up against them – that members of the same household will betray each other even to the point of death. He tells them that they’ll be subject to persecution and hatred by pretty much everyone as they carry out God’s mission. It’s astonishing to me that the disciples said “yes” to being sent out, because in the going they risked literally everything.

But friends, it’s not just those first twelve that Jesus calls into a risky life of discipleship. He’s also called you; and he’s called me too. I trust that you have experienced the deep comfort and peace that comes through following Jesus. But a life of discipleship is not only a source of comfort and peace. It can also be a source of deep conviction and challenge. Today’s gospel text is more about the latter, even if I kind of wish it wasn’t. It reminds us that following Jesus involves helping to uncover the things that abusive powers want to keep hidden. It involves holding up the gospel like a mirror for ourselves and for the world so that it can reflect back to us the truth of who we are.

And facing that truth can be difficult. It can be downright terrifying. Because this kind of uncovering, this kind of truth-telling, will require us to face some things we might not want to face. It will ask us to do some deep, internal work of the sort that makes us feel tired just thinking about it. It will ask us to re-examine some of our most deeply-held beliefs and assumptions. It might result in the end of relationships we once held dear. It might call us to speak out in ways that are new for us and make us pretty uncomfortable. And all of that, frankly, is more than a little scary. But it’s a whole lot harder for Jesus’ saving power to heal what is kept hidden and so in spite of the personal and public risks, Jesus keeps calling us together and sending us out…calling us together and sending us out…to join in the holy and difficult work of uncovering all that hinders God’s loving and freeing purpose for the world.

I think Jesus knew that fear can be paralyzing. And I think he knew that a paralyzed people are ineffective messengers of the gospel of life. So even as he is telling the disciples – and us – about how a life in service to God’s mission will sometimes be difficult, he also tells us not to be afraid. In fact, he says it three times in just these few verses we read today. Have no fear of them. Do not fear. Do not be afraid.

But how do we live into Jesus’ call to fearless discipleship when everything around us and inside us feels so chaotic and hard to grab hold of? It might be different for you, but the thing that helps me cast aside fear and engage the work of the gospel is the reminder of just how much God adores us; of just how valuable we are in the eyes of God. Not even a sparrow can fall from the sky without God taking notice, and if God pays that much attention to little bitty sparrows, how much more does God pay attention to us…to our fears and our hopes and our needs and our dreams. The Bible tells us that our lives matter so deeply to God that even the hairs of our heads are all counted. I love that image so much. It makes me think of what it felt like as a child when a grownup who loved me would come into my bedroom at night before they went to sleep, just to lay a gentle hand on my head one more time before morning.

That’s the way that God loves you, dear ones.

May you experience that deep, deep love in your bones this week. May you feel the fiercely protective, gentle hand of God upon your blessed heads as we move through these days. And may it strengthen and embolden you with a spirit of fearlessness as you carry the gospel of Jesus into the world. Amen.