Pandemic – Heidi Torgerson

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 4^th chapter of Mark and the 8^th 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.

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.

Tag: Pandemic

Holy Chaos

Fearless Discipleship