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Acts 8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

     The Fifth Sunday of Easter

I don’t know about you, but I am, as a prayer in our worship book says, wearied by the changes and chances of life(ELW 325).  Three deaths and three funerals preceded by months of struggle have left us all, I think, feeling swept under.  In addition, there are those of you with serious illness and questions about tomorrow.   Abide in me, Jesus says.

Other discomforts may have walked in the door with us and sat down in the pew with us.  Maybe you have carried with you a sense of not being good enough, or even of failure.   Or maybe you still feel the slap of those harsh comments made by someone who will never apologize for them.  It could be that you are feeling disconnected from people.

You might be able to relate to the main person in our reading this morning from the Book of Acts. He was out there on the margins of society.  So much so that no one bothered to tell us his name.  You can bet that he was never the guest of honor if he was even invited to any parties.  He was not allowed to go inside the Jewish Temple because he was an Ethiopian eunuch, a man who has had a procedure that leaves him non-functional in the procreative sense.  (See Deuteronomy 23:1.)  There is little doubt he was weary. When we meet him, he is reading about the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah.

He was reading about a sheep led to the slaughter, a lamb unable to speak as it is headed to be stripped of its wool, both humiliated and denied justice.  No wonder the eunuch was drawn to this passage. “Who is this?” he wanted to know.  Philip told him about Jesus. As they came upon some water, Jesus whispered, Abide with me. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” the eunuch asked, and then he and Philip both went into the water to drown all those things that were not of God.  With water and the Word, Philip baptized him.

This morning, Andrew Francis Stahl was baptized.  Andrew’s parents, Chris and Kristin, and sister Charlotte, brought him to our font where he will, through water and the Word, be forever joined to Christ. Andrew will later affirm his baptism, as Jaina, Caitlin, and Casey will do on Pentecost.  These young people have come to their decision because at home their families have encouraged them, and their church family has shown them the love of Jesus.  They have been learning from teachers whose ultimate goal is that their students fall in love with God in three persons, as they have done, and are still continuing to do.

We are baptized incommunity.  We are baptized intocommunity. God’s love calls us into relationship with people who are different than we are, people who need our help, people who may not always be kind, with those who are struggling, and those who are dying.  We are called into relationship with the unnamed Ethiopian, and with sweet baby Andrew.

In The Divine Dance, the book some of you are studying, Richard Rohr quotes Miroslave Volf:

Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion.  One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the triune God—a “foursome,” as it were—for the Christian God is not a private deity.  Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God.  Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.[1]

We are forever joined not only to Christ, but to all the saints who were, and who are, and who are yet to be. All of life is lived within the grace of God’s love.  Come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest.  Abide in me as I abide in you, Jesus says.  Dwell in me as I dwell in you. Sit down, right here, next to me. Stay with me.  I will never leave you.

On Holy Saturday, at the Easter Vigil, the Paschal candle,–the tall candle by the baptismal font—was lit. It was the light in the darkness of the night.  If you look at the candle, you will notice the cross in the center.  You will see five nails, for the ones put into Christ’s hands, and through his feet, and the spear that pierced his side.  You will see two stalks of wheat at the bottom, for Christ is the bread of life.  Imposed on top of all these are the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, for Christ is the beginning and the end.  During this evening service, we hear the stories of salvation. We are brought with Christ from the darkness of the tomb into the light of resurrection, from death into life.  We become part of a story larger than any one place or time, into life beyond the boundaries we humans set.  The light of this Paschal candle is the light of Christ which no darkness can overcome. This is the light we receive in our baptisms.  This is the light from which Andrew’s baptismal candle was lit as Christ whispered, Abide in me as I abide in you.  Share my light. 

We who are wearied by the changes and chances of this world come this morning to pray with each other, to invite peace among us, and to simply be with each other.  Here, in the flames of the candles, the light of Christ, and through his broken body and poured out blood, the bread and the wine given and shed for us, in the reading of the word, and the singing of our hymns, we live into our prayer for God’s kingdom to come among us here.  Abide in me as I abide in you, Christ invites us.  Thanks be to God.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1]Rohr, Richard.  The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation.  New Kensington, PA:  Whitaker House, 2016. p. 97.

John 20:13-23   

Second Sunday of Easter  

When it was evening, on that day. You know the day.  It was in the dark of the morning that Mary Magdalene discovered the empty tomb. Jesus stood beside her, unrecognizable, until he called her name.  That evening, the disciples gathered together in a house.  They shut the door, and slid the deadbolt into place until they heard it click, and then locked the doorknob with a key.  Just in case, they slid a dresser in front of the door.  Then they drew the blinds and turned off the TV and the lights.  They spoke only in whispers, just in case,–just in case the authorities who nailed Jesus to the cross and hung him up in the heat of the day to drown in his own breath were after them, too.  They holed themselves up because they were afraid.  Fear is costly, and it seems their fear overwhelmed their grief.

Deadbolts could not stop Jesus. That his closest followers, those he loved had abandoned him at the cross, did not deter him.  He stood in front of the disciples and his first words were, Peace be with you. In those words were absolution. The Risen Christ’s first words were his gift of grace.  His didn’t ask where they had been through all of his suffering and death. He didn’t say, “You failed me.” He didn’t even say to Peter, “I told you so!”  He didn’t call in a different crisis response team.  He gave them his peace, his forgiveness, and his blessing.  That is the first thing that Jesus did when he met his community of disciples.

Thomas was not there with the others when Jesus came the first time.  Doubting Thomas.  We all know him.  We know this story.  Or at least we think we do.  When you read the story carefully, you will find that Thomas doesn’t ask for anything that the other disciples had not already gotten.  Thomas was one who wants to make sure he has all the facts, and he needs to know that he understands. The last time Thomas spoke was in response to Jesus telling him that he was going to prepare a place for them, and that they know the way. It was Thomas who spoke up, saying, “Uh, Lord, we don’t know where you are going.  And if we don’t know where you are going, how are we to know the way?” Thomas just wants to make certain that he understands.  We know that he gets it when his is the one who first confesses Jesus to be, “My Lord and My God.”  When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, it was Thomas who was willing to take the risk of death at the hands of the religious leaders along with him.  So when Thomas heard of Jesus’ presence with the other disciples, Thomas wanted to, Thomas needed to have the resurrection experience.  He needed to touch the scars on Jesus’ hands and his side, and Jesus wanted Thomas to do whatever it took to believe.

But it isn’t Thomas so much who captures my attention in the gospel for this morning.  It’s those scars, Jesus’ scars.  When God raised Jesus from the dead, why didn’t God fix him up?  Why did God leave the scars when Jesus was raised from the dead? We are reminded that the Word had become flesh.

We might make the assumption that God didn’t do that so that the disciples would know for certain that it was Jesus, dead and risen. But Mary knew it was Jesus when he spoke her name.  Jesus’ followers on the road to Emmaus knew it was him in the breaking of the bread. There is something in the scars – something important.  “Touch the mark of the nails in my hands, and my feet. Touch where the spear pierced my side” Christ says.  “Touch my wounds, and peace be with you.”

You know, we don’t have pictures of our hands and feet to identify us on our driver’s licenses, but yet, they say a lot about who we are.  Before my grandmother died, I went to see her in the hospital.  There were two older women in the beds.  Neither one looked like my grandmother.  Neither one was wearing the glasses that had made my grandmother’s eyes look so big, and their faces were gaunt.  They were both skinny.   So I approached the one that most resembled her.  When I got to the bed, I saw her hands. She had hands much like my father’s. The pores on her skin were large and noticeable. Her right hand bore the scars of working with them for so many years. Her index finger was badly bent a little toward her pinky fingers.

Look at your hands.  They are unique. My own hands are freckled from too much sun, and though faded, you can see the burn marks on my left hand from my days of putting food in the deep fat fryer at Burger King.  Scars will never completely disappear.

“Touch my hands,” Jesus said.  His hands that had pressed mud into someone’s blind eyes so that they could see.  His hands that took the dead little girl’s as she got up.  Jesus’ hands that held those of a leper.  His hands that blessed and broke the bread so that it was enough to feed the throngs of people who had come to hear him.

“Touch my feet,” Jesus said.  His feet that had walked hundreds of miles, kicking up dust as they went. Jesus’ feet that had sunk into the desert sand for forty days of temptation by the devil.  His feet that had become wet with the tears of a woman, who then dried them with her hair.  His feet that that had walked into the graveyard where the Gerasene demoniac lived, and took him up the mountain to pray.

“Look at my hands and my feet,” Jesus tells his disciples.  “Touch my wounds.” They would know Christ through his scars.  Christ, living but not all fixed up.  Christ, not bound by death, yet scarred for eternity.  The symbol for Christ in sign language is to put your finger of each hand into the palm of the other.  Jesus, the one with wounded hands.  The marks of the nails screamed that Jesus had gone through pain and suffering, not around it.  They told the truth about who he was.  They said where he had been, and whom he had touched.  Love that saves is vulnerable and costly.

It is Christ’s bearing his wounds that says to us that each of us, that Christ is with us in both our woundedness and our healing. We all have wounds, those that others can see, and those that are hidden. It is Christ’s wounds still visible that says our hurts become part of who we are, and that is how God would have it be. Christ’s scars give us hope that our wounds can be transformed into scars, too, and that they will become a gift.  It is in the sharing of our wounds that enable us to be healed, and it is in the sharing of our wounds that we can help to heal others. Our hands, because of our wounds, bear unceasing witness to the love of God in Jesus.

When we come to the table for the Lord’s Supper, we open our hands to receive Christ’s wounded body and poured out blood. Researchers have found that our physical bodies carry with them past traumas. We will bring to the altar our own wounds, our physical, emotional, and spiritual ones. We will be fed with bread, and wine, –by the life, and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In doing so, our wounds won’t disappear, but through God’s forgiveness and love in the Risen Christ, they become blessed.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

Ephesians 2:1-10     John 3:14-21

Fourth Sunday in Lent

It was right after Jesus had raised a ruckus about unscrupulous people in the temple exchanging money, and selling cattle, sheep, doves, and cats, that a leader of the Jews came to Jesus in the darkness of the evening.  His name was Nicodemus, and he was a Pharisee.  You’ve heard of Nick at night, right?  The Holy Spirit stirred his heart slightly.  Perhaps he even had a mustard seed of faith.  Whatever urged him on, it was enough to make him want to know, even need to know, more about Jesus.  Nicodemus realized that religious leaders are highly scrutinized, so he came to Jesus in the cover of darkness.  Meeting Jesus, he was the first to speak.  “We know you are a teacher who has come from God. We see the signs,” he said.  “Let go of what you think you know,” Jesus told him.  “You have to be born from above.” After a confusing conversation about being born of water and the Spirit, he asked, “How can these things be?”

Jesus answered that Nicodemus did not believe the earthly things he had told him,– how could he believe the things of heaven?  Jesus  said that God would lift him up, just as Moses had lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.  Humiliated and exalted all at the same time, Jesus would be lifted up on the cross, to save people from death.  Then Jesus said to Nicodemus these words:  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

For God so loved the world.  A few years ago, it was popular to toss this phrase around on football field.  Twenty years ago, that was a bumper sticker.  Now it’s a tweet.  But like most tweets, it’s fullness cannot be contained in six words.  Jesus will be sentenced to death.  He will be mocked and tortured, and with his mother watching, he will be hung on a cross to die.

The Holy Spirit must have grown that mustard seed of faith that Jesus had planted in Nicodemus. After Jesus died, he and Joseph of Arimathea came with a staggering amount of myrrh and aloes, and linen cloths to give Jesus a proper burial.  And then God raised his only begotten son on the third day.

In the waters and the words of baptism, we are joined to Christ, to his life, and his death and his resurrection, we, too, receive new life.  When Jesus came up out of the waters of his baptism, God said, You are my son, the beloved.  In our baptisms, God claims us as sons and daughters.  We are God’s beloved.  This morning, Mira, the precious daughter of Michael and Sharon Powell, will be baptized.  Through the Word and the water, Mira will be set apart for God’s use, which is the definition of a saint.  She will receive the sign of the cross on her sweet, little forehead, and her life will become holy because God has laid God’s hands on her.[1]  God loves her, and her parents, and her grandparents, and promises to never let go.  This is God’s pure gift to us. Tim Wengert explains, God comes to us “in the flesh, in the water, in the bread and wine, in my needy neighbor, and even to children and infants. In a world where religion is what we make of it, this external, water and word, with all of its benefits, comes from outside of us and give us what no self-imposed piety can offer:  God at work in the last place we would reasonably look.”[2]

God’s claim on us as God’s Beloved comes not from us, but from outside of us.  I have a story about that.  Like most people when they are shopping in the grocery store, I end up in conversations with strangers.  One evening, I was standing there eyeing the fruit, when a woman looked at me and said, “What do you think heaven will be like?”  Mind you, I was not wearing my clerical collar at the time.  The woman didn’t even take time to catch her breath before she exclaimed, “It will be wonderful!  But some people will be surprised when they don’t end up there.”  I asked her if she thought she would be one of the ones who makes it.  She replied, “Well, I better!  I’ve been baptized 14 times!” (As my husband likes to say, more is better!)  I smiled and nodded as I made my way over to the bread section.  The bumper sticker that I had seen came to mind.  “Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.”

As Lutherans we believe in one baptism, hearing in Ephesians, For by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. So I wonder how this woman understood baptism.  Did its effectiveness wear off?  Did she earn her salvation, like climbing a ladder?  Was it all dependent upon her?  Did she reach a higher level each time she was baptized? If so, what difference does Jesus’ death on the cross make?

As Mira grows, the world will teach her that she is rewarded for her good behavior, and forgiveness must be earned.  She will be loved her for working hard, for doing the things which society desires, and for giving the “right” answers.  But God’s love is not like the world’s.  Our salvation does not depend on us.  Neither does God’s claim on us. As Mira lives her days, the world will also tell her that sometimes she is beloved, and sometimes she is not.  This is our reality, too.  We hear from our society that we are not enough.  We, in our struggle to be who we think we should be, lose sight of our belovedness, and we become separated from God.  This is sin.

Before we can even confess our sin, we hear these words:  But God, who is rich in mercy, loved us even when we were dead in sin, and made us alive togher with Christ. By grace you have been saved.

In our baptisms, we are marked with the cross, in which God claims us as his beloved. There is nothing that can change that, even our refusal to love God with our whole hearts. The mark of our baptism is the foundation for the ashen cross placed on our foreheads at the beginning of this Lenten season. Even in our death in sin, none of us is beyond God’s love and grace and redemption. Where we commit sin, God offers forgiveness. Where we see death, God brings life.   For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

In keeping with the baptismal emphasis of Lent, being reminded that we are joined to Christ in his suffering, and looking to this coming St. Patrick’s Day this coming Saturday, I end with this story.  Legend has it that, about in the middle of the fifth century, King Aengus was baptized by St. Patrick.  Sometime during the rite, St. Patrick leaned on his sharp, pointed staff and inadvertently stabbed the king’s foot.  After the baptism was over, St. Patrick looked down.  Seeing all the blood, he realized what he had done, and begged the king’s forgiveness.  “Why did you suffer this pain in silence?” Patrick wanted to know.  The king replied, “I thought it was part of the ritual.”

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

 

[1] See Seilhamer, Frank.  Lima, Ohio:  We Believe: an historical and spiritual guide to the Nicene Creed, 1993.  61-62.

[2] Wengert, Timothy.  Martin Luther’s Catechisms.  Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2009.  112.

 

Mark 8:31-38     Lent 2

 

“Deny yourselves!  Take up your cross!”  we hear Jesus say.  Oh, my.  Maybe someone copied that down wrong?  The problem with that hope is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all share this story.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus tells us, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Pick up my cross?  Life is hard enough!  I’d much rather hear, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  But this is what our Revised Common Lectionary, the set of readings that guides our worship, gives us for today.

This morning’s reading from Mark is a curious one, and you have to feel for the disciples. Our Gospel begins with Jesus predicting his own suffering and death.  Of course, the disciples were afraid, and fear almost always clouds our thinking. Peter had just confessed Jesus as Messiah, and now Jesus explains just what that entails. Jesus taught his disciples that he would suffer greatly, and that he would be rejected by those whom the religious community held in high esteem.  He told them that he would be killed.  By now, the disciples’ minds must have been reeling.  When Jesus said that he would rise after three days, what was that supposed to mean? All this news was shocking.  It was so devastating that Peter said “No! This can’t happen to you! There must be another way!”  Peter’s reaction resulted in Jesus calling him “Satan.” Then, calling the crowd to come and listen to him, too, Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”’

Let me make this perfectly clear.  Jesus is not condoning abuse.  This text has been used to justify inflicting injury on partners or family members, and to keep them subservient and submissive.  God has created us to flourish, and Jesus came in human flesh to confirm that.  Jesus said, I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). God desires all our relationships to be ones in which we lift each other up, not tear each other apart.

What do you think of when you hear, “Deny yourselves”?  Do you think about giving up chocolate for Lent?   Maybe denying yourself means that life should be hard, and we should not have any pleasure.  Or maybe denying yourself means to deny those parts of ourselves that we don’t like.  Deny your fears.  Pretend you can handle anything that comes your way without help. Or maybe, as our culture teaches us, denying yourself means that you must be someone else, someone you are not.  You should be thinner than you are, and appear younger than your years total.  Maybe denying yourself causes you to think about all those things that you should do to be different than you are.  “I should do more than I do.  I should not make mistakes.  I should write better sermons.”  What are your “I shoulds”?    Put all those “shoulds” that you tell yourself together and you come up with a person who is not you.  Deny yourself.

Jesus did not pretend to be other than who he was.  In fact, if we follow Jesus, we become who God created us to be.  If we follow Jesus, we realize that denying ourselves means that we open ourselves to the needs of others.  We give ourselves away in love.  To deny ourselves means that we are not the center of our universe.  There are times to put others first.  If you have ever been in a healthy relationship, you understand that love expresses itself both in generous giving and in receiving.  Our experience is that the more we give of ourselves, the more we receive.  When our St. Stephen community looks out for each other, we find joy and happiness.

This is how Jesus lived.  He loved people even when they misunderstood who he was, and what he said.  Jesus even loved those who did not follow him.  “Take up your cross” means that our love is a generous love, not one that is destructive or self-serving.  It’s a love that seeks the good of the other, and not glory for oneself.  “Those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus said, “And those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (Mark 8:35-36).  This life of which Jesus speaks is one of an abundance of love and of forgiveness.

The deep secret of Jesus’ hard words to us, Barbara Brown Taylor writes,

…is that our fear of suffering and death robs us of life because fear of death always turns into fear of life, into a stingy, cautious way of living that is not really living at all.  The deep secret of Jesus hard words is that the way to have abundant life is not to save it but to spend it, to give it away, because life cannot be shut up and saved any more that a bird can be put into a shoebox and stored on a closet shelf….[Jesus’ words are] not an invitation to follow Jesus into death but an invitation to follow him into life, both now and later on.  To be where God is—to follow Jesus—means receiving our lives as gifts instead of guarding them as our own possessions.  It means sharing the life we have been given instead of bottling it for our own consumption.[1]

St. Francis captured the essence of this in his prayer:

Let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

 

In the name of Christ, let it be so.

 

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown.  The Seeds of Heaven.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. 79-81.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21    

Ash Wednesday

 

It’s been 73 years since Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is a lot more fun when it falls on Mardi Gras, which is always the day before Ash Wednesday.  But today is Valentine’s Day, and Ash Wednesday. Chocolates and champagne, or ashes on your forehead?  Do you want to hear “I love you,” or hear “you’re going to die.”?  As my husband likes to say, when given a choice, take both.  We might as well, for this is what God gives us this year, “I love you; you’re going to die.”

Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we are going to die.  But I know that there are at least 84 people who do.  That’s the number of people who have downloaded the app, “WeCroak.”[1] (You just can’t make this stuff up, or at least I can’t.) At unpredictable times, just like death, you are sent notices that read, “Don’t forget.  You’re going to die,” or “The grave has no sunny corners.” These are the less graphic of the notices.  According to the app developers, the program is meant to encourage contemplation, and meditation.  It is supposed to promote calm. (This explains why only 84 people downloaded it!)  The concept for it was inspired by a folk saying that in order to be happy, one must contemplate death five times a day.  What better way than to have your phone remind you?

The ashes imposed on our foreheads tonight will remind us that we are going to die.  Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  It’s a reminder that God made us out of perishable stuff.  One of the creation stories in the book of Genesis tells us, Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).  That God made us is what gives us holiness.  It’s the perishable stuff, our bodies, that get us in to trouble. We are both saint and sinner, and while we have difficulty holding these two things together, God does not. Tonight, God says to us, “I love you.”  Tonight, God reminds us, “You’re going to die.”

God shows God’s love for us in and through his son, Jesus, who lived among us proclaiming that love through teaching, and healing and forgiveness. We killed him for it.  These forty days of Lent that begin tonight will lead us to Jesus’ death on a cross before we get to the glory of Christ’s resurrection.  Tonight, we will be marked with the cross of Christ in the form of ashes.  Just as we do not want to be reminded of our death, we do not want to face our sin.  It’s hard and uncomfortable to examine all the ways we fall short.  Tonight, we come head on with both.

I think it is the honesty of Ash Wednesday that makes it my favorite liturgical day.  These forty days of Lent begin with our confessing to God, to each other, and to the whole company of heaven that we have sinned by our own most grievous fault. While God loves us with God’s whole heart, we confess that we have not loved God with ours.  We have given our hearts to things that cannot love us back, like money, or social status, or pride.  Our values and our measures of success are not quite in line with God’s.

Even when we do things that God would have us do, such as give money to the poor, or pray, or fast, Matthew reminds us that we have a propensity to do so for the wrong reasons. That’s why Matthew tells us not to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.   We look for praise and honor and love not from God, but from each other.  We are like children yelling, “Watch me!  Watch me!”  Our desire to be noticed is the result of sin. Jesus tells his disciple, “Do not be like the hypocrites.” The word “hypocrites” literally means “performers.”

This evening, we, with Christ, begin our journey to the cross, before we continue on to the resurrection.  Listen again to part of our Invitation to Lent:  We begin this holy season by acknowledging our need for repentance and for God’s mercy.  Do you hear the hope in our invitation?  We begin.  We start. Tonight is our chance to come clean, to die to our sin, and to begin again.  By admitting our sins, we become open to God’s working in us.  Being loved by God, and accepting God’s love, we are set free.  We are free from having to win, and from having to prove ourselves lovable.  We are free from needing the approval and admiration of others.  And if we are free from, we are free to.  We are free to focus on helping others.  We are free to love those who are not like us.  We are free to forgive.  We are free to become who God created us to be. We are free to dance without fear that someone will see us.

Tonight, we will receive ashes in the form of a cross, while hearing the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  The marking of the ashen cross is placed on top of the cross made on our foreheads at our baptism.  Before we are reminded that we are going to die, we are marked with the cross of baptism, in which God claims us as his beloved. There is nothing that can change that, even our refusal to love God with our whole hearts.  As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).  On this Valentine’s Ash Wednesday, God reminds us, I love you, and even your sin won’t change that.  You’re going to die. But even death won’t tear you out of my arms.

~ Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Bosker, Bianca.  “The App That Reminds You You’re Going to Die.”  Technology.  January/February 2018.  Accessed on the web.

Mark 9:2-9     Transfiguration

Do you remember the movie, “Bruce Almighty”?   God gave Bruce some god-like powers.  One of the ways he abused these powers was to lasso the moon, and drew it closer to the earth so that his girlfriend would stand in awe looking at it, and fall more deeply in love with him.  Even the oceans desire to come closer to the moon, drawing up to it in waves over and over again.  The fact is that the moon does at times come closer to the earth than at others.  When a full moon is at a point in its orbit at which it is nearest to the earth, it appears 14% larger and 30% brighter than it usually does.  This is called a “Supermoon,” and we were blessed this year to have had three of them. Did you see one of the trinity?  Were you captured by its glorious, bright fullness against the dark night sky?   The contrast of the light and the dark enable us to see the fullness of both.

Light figures prominently in our reading and our liturgy. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the conclusion of Epiphany.  “Six days later,” we read, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”  Six days ago, Jesus had told his disciples that he would go through tremendous suffering, and that the elders, chief priests and scribes would reject him.  He told the people that he would be killed.  He said that he then would be raised in three days.  Not understanding, Peter rebuked Jesus.  “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus responded to him.

Now, almost a week later, Jesus took Peter with him, and James and John, too.  The four of them trekked up the mountain.  When they reached the summit, Jesus’ appearance changed.  His clothes became dazzling white, even brighter than new improved Tide could make them.  Jesus was transfigured right in front of their eyes. The disciples saw this man, the one they thought they knew in a different light.  He suddenly was more.  Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, Jesus reflected the light of God. What an odd contradiction that the brighter Jesus appeared, the less clearly the disciples saw him.  Seeing Jesus as both divine and human was confusing.

Then Moses and Elijah appeared.  With these heroes of the faith, representing the law and the prophets, we are connected to God’s story.  Moses and Elijah  were not dazzling in appearance as Jesus was.  God bless Peter, who in his characteristic exuberant misunderstanding, blurted out, “Let’s make three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you. Let’s stay here forever, right on top of this mountain.”   Maybe he thought that if they stayed on the mountain, Jesus would not have to suffer and die.  They could live with this view from the top, where life was full of light, forever.

Just then, a voice came from out of the cloud that overshadowed them.  “This is my Son, the beloved.  Listen to him.”  With these words we are brought back to Jesus’ baptism when we hear  a voice came from heaven, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved,” just as Jesus was coming up out of the water.  In our story today, on top of the mountain, Moses and Elijah were not there after God spoke out of the cloud.  Only Jesus remained, but Jesus was all they needed.

They could not, as Peter had hoped, stay up there on the mountain. They had to come down.  Isn’t that true for us, too?  We have moments when we think we are on top of the world.  These times of happy dancing feet don’t last.  Peter, James, and John returned to the ups and downs of their everyday lives.  They came back to a place where people get sick, and hearts break.  They returned to where babies are born, and people die.  The good news is that Jesus came down with his disciples to the place that holds both elation and despair, moments of excruciating pain and deep happiness. The Jesus who was at the top of the mountain was also with them in the valley.

But even though we come back to our ordinary lives, we are different. We cannot be bathed in the light of Christ and stay the same.  The light of Christ illuminates the shadows and exposes the lies the world tells us, and the ones we tell ourselves.  These perpetuated untruths are things such as we are sufficient unto ourselves, and what happens to people we don’t know does not impact us.  These beliefs are part of what the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr terms “the False Self.”  He explains, “Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity…”[1]  Our False Self contains the qualities for which we strive to prove our worth, like being smart or rich or popular.  We end up using the same criteria to judge others worthiness.  Our False Self keeps us entering fully into a relationship with God.  Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

When Jesus went back down the mountain, to walk with us in our sinfulness, he reminded his disciples that he would die, and be risen from the dead. Through the cross, Jesus chooses to show God’s love for us. In our baptisms, God joins us to Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.  “Every time you choose to love,” Father Rohr writes, “you have also chosen to die.  Every time you truly love, you are letting go of yourself as an autonomous unit and have given a bit of yourself away to something else… ”[2]

As Jesus was transfigured through God’s light, we are transformed and called through Christ. We are called to love others as God loves us.  And, I know this is really hard for Lutherans, we are called to tell them that God loves them, that Christ died for them, and we are to speak the words out loud.

The moon is about 238,855 miles away, and yet we see its light shining on all the earth.  The light of Christ is closer.  Can you see it?  Christ is as close as the baptismal waters, and the wine and bread.  Christ is close enough to touch in the passing of the peace, and hear in the reading of the scripture.  How can we come this close and not be changed?

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Rohr, Richard.  The Immortal Diamond. San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2013. 64. Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

[2] Ibid., 65.

Mark 1:21-28     Epiphany 4

Possessed by demons.  What image does this create for you when you hear that?  I think I am safe in saying that for many of us, the movie The Exorcist was both moving and terrifying.  We watched Linda Blair’s character, Regan, as she turned from a sweet little girl into a murderous creature.  Can you still picture Regan sitting up on the bed, her head spinning 360 degrees, something like split pea soup violently spews out of her mouth, drenching those who are standing in the room?  As Father Merrin and the young priest Father Karrass perform an exorcism, the older priest’s heart gives out and he dies.  Father Karrass becomes enraged.  He then begs the demon, “Take me!  Take me!”   For the brief period that the priest and the demon are together in the same body, the young man throws himself out the window, thereby killing both himself and the demon.   But this is just a story, isn’t it?  Enlightened people of the twenty-first century are not possessed by demons.  Are they?

It is interesting to me that the writer of Mark chooses to present an exorcism as Jesus’ first act of public ministry.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus first public ministry is his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  In the Gospel of Luke, it was Jesus’ preaching in his hometown, which offended people, as we know preachers often do.  In the Gospel of John, it was the wedding at Cana, in which Jesus turned water into fine wine, that began Jesus’ ministry to the people.  But in our gospel of Mark, Jesus’ first public act is one of that begins with controversy and confrontation.

The controversy begins because Jesus was teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath. A man with an unclean spirit was suddenly there.  Maybe he was there all along, but no one interacted with him. Why didn’t anyone notice him? Had he been here before?  Whose seat was he sitting in?  Eyes glared when he stood up, and gasps were heard when he cried out loud, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”  It’s a good question.  “Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  “Be silent!” Jesus commanded, “and come out of him.”  The demon did, but not without first crying and shouting and convulsing.  Demons always try to resist God.

I’ve come to treasure Mark’s perspective of Jesus’ initial ministry.  In his first public act, Jesus looks at this being, and sees the unclean spirit.  But Jesus sees more than that.  Jesus sees the person, too.  And this broken human being, who does not seek and has not asked for it, receives healing anyway.  Jesus restores this person to himself, and to his loved ones. Jesus heals him into wholeness, and this once demon possessed person becomes part of the community again.

Seeing the humanity in people is something that Jesus does so well.  He does that with lepers, and those who are blind, or cannot hear.  He sees the value in prostitutes and greedy tax collectors. Jesus sees into the souls of those possessed by the demons.  Truth be told, we all have demons. Our holiness and our un-holiness reside in the same body.  For some of us, it is addiction to drugs or alcohol.  The demons of addiction are many.  Some people are addicted to work, and some to praise, and some to shopping.  The demons that haunt us may be incidents of physical or emotional abuse.  Demons, the things that defy God, come in many sizes, shapes, and textures.

Our society today seems to have lost the ability to see past people’s demons, to find our commonality in the midst of our craziness.  We fail to see the humanity in the other, especially when we disagree with them.  And we have had a lot of disagreements recently.

Dr. Brene Brown, a research professor and author, spoke recently at the Washington National Cathedral.[1]  She observes that over the past twenty years, we have “sorted ourselves by our ideology into factions.”  We spend time with those who think like us, and we have no interest in being with those who don’t. There is a fascinating correlation to this.  The rates of loneliness have risen in proportion to our grouping ourselves with the like-minded.  The more sorted we become, the lonelier we become.

We think that being part of a group will make us not feel lonely, but we have no real connection with those whom we hang out. “We just hate the same people,” Dr. Brene Brown says.  She terms our relationships like this, “common enemy intimacy.” [2] We aren’t interested in getting to really know those who share our same dislikes.  We just want validation.

In his TED Talk, What Makes a Good Life, Robert Waldinger points to the on-going 75-year research project, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.[3]  The study reveals that one in five Americans report being lonely.  Both Waldinger and Brown cite the fact that loneliness kills, literally.  It is a better predictor of early death than our demons of obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking.  According to a UCLA study, loneliness diminishes our brain function, raises our blood pressure, contributes to cardiovascular disease, increases inflammation, and interferes with our sleep.[4]  Loneliness has become such an epidemic that the United Kingdom’s Parliament has appointed a Minister of Loneliness.

This is a “crisis of spiritual connection,” Brown has determined.  She defines spirituality as “the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to each other by something greater than us, something rooted in love and compassion.”[5]  We have forgotten this.  We failed to see the humanity in those who do think like us, or vote like us, or look like us.  When we dehumanize people, it is easy to treat them as if they do not matter, or even worse.

Dr. Brown asserts the answer lies in holding hands with strangers, and being in communion with people you don’t know, sharing moments of collective joy and pain.[6]  Healing happens when we sing together, and pray for people we have never met.  We are called to find the face of Jesus in the other.  Together, we who are possessed and broken come and gather around the altar.  In community, we come, bringing our demons with us, to receive again God’s love, forgiveness.  Together, our wounds will be healed in our sharing, in Jesus’ broken body and his poured-out blood, — the body and blood of Christ given and shed for us.  Christ does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  We are fed to go out into the world, looking for Jesus in others and being Jesus for them, too.

In his first act of ministry among the people, Jesus chooses to bring healing so that the person possessed with demons can be part of the community.  Our service of baptism, and affirmation of baptism are done in community.  In our profession of faith, the first question we are asked is, “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?”  We promise to do so with God’s help.  We cannot do it without God, and Lord knows we cannot do it without each other.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” the demons ask. Everything.  “Have you come to destroy us?”  Yes.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

[1] https://cathedral.org/sermons/sermon-dr-brene-brown/  accessed January 27, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Robert Waldinger, What Makes a Life Good.  TED Talks, November 2015.

[4] https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-health-effects-of-loneliness.html.

[5] “Something greater than us” is not cats, even though the cats think so!

[6] https://cathedral.org/sermons/sermon-dr-brene-brown/  accessed January 27, 2018.

1 Samuel 3: 1-10, John 1:43-51          Epiphany 2

Hannah, in Biblical language, was barren.  She wanted a child so badly that she often wept uncontrollably. She stopped eating.  One day, at the Temple in Shiloh, she was crying so hard that her whole body shook. Her tears dripped down, drenching her dress.  With her lips moving in prayer, Hannah promised God that if God gave her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord’s service.  Eli, the priest at Shiloh, saw her body and her lips moving, and concluded that she was drunk.  After they straightened out their misunderstanding, Eli blessed her prayer. Hannah bore a son, and she named him Samuel.

When Samuel was weaned, she brought him to live at the temple with Eli.  The days and years passed, and at the time of our story, Samuel had been sweeping the floors and locking the doors of the temple at night for about nine years. He had listened to the sounds of worship, and smelled the clashing scents of roasted sacrifices and of incense rising.  Now a young man of twelve, Samuel had spent virtually all his life watching the priests prepare the offerings and hearing them pray. He knew the days dedicated to repentance, and the celebrations of God’s rescue of his ancestors.

By the time of our story, Eli’s age had caught up with him. His eyes squinted to focus, and his ears strained to hear.  The night had just begun to fall, and Samuel was lying down in the Temple. The ark of the covenant, with the tablets containing God’s law, stood within his reach.  Eli was in the next room, in his own darkness.  Every time he rolled over, his joints groaned from wear.  He chased thoughts of his sons, Phineas and Hophni, away.  They had been abusing their priestly privileges, demanding the best meat for themselves instead of sacrificing it to God.  They were corrupt and worthless.  They dishonored God and the temple.  It was easier for Eli to pretend not to know than it was for him to deal with them.

So there Samuel and Eli both lay in near total darkness, Eli thinking of declining health and the disappointment of children. Both of them recalled the wounds of the day, those they inflicted, and those they received. As sleep escaped them, they worried about the things that were, and the things that were to come.  The darkness intensified both their regrets and their fears, and the voices that called to them in the night seemed anything but friendly.  Have you ever been haunted by nights like that?

What happened next is interesting, particularly when you keep in mind that Samuel’s name means “God is heard,” and the name Eli means, “my God.”  A voice called, “Samuel!  Samuel!” Samuel jumped up and ran into Eli’s room, answering, “Here I am!”  “Go back to sleep.  I didn’t call you,” Eli told him.  It happened again, and again.  I guess growing up in the church is no guarantee that you can recognize God’s voice. After the third time, the priest Eli figured out that it must be God, and so he told Samuel to respond the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”  And that is what happened the fourth time God called Samuel. God told Samuel that God’s promises of judgment and justice against Eli and his sons would be fulfilled, and that Samuel was to speak this truth to the priest.

The next morning, Eli called Samuel, and Samuel responded to Eli just as he had the night before, “Here I am.” Then Eli asked the young boy to do something that must have difficult, given their relationship. “Tell me, tell me what the Lord said to you. Don’t hide it from me,” Eli demanded.  Eli knew it couldn’t be good news, but maybe he was tired of listening to his own voice in the night, the one tormented with lies and regrets.  After all his years as a priest, he was finally willing to hear God’s truth.  Telling God’s truth to his priest and mentor was the turning point in Samuel’s life.  “God told me to tell you that your house will be punished for the sins of your sons,” he said.

Telling God’s truth isn’t always easy.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that.  Tomorrow we commemorate Dr. King’s life, and give thanks for his hearing God’s call and his telling of God’s truth. He entered Morehouse College determined to become either a lawyer or a physician, but found that God had other things in mind. Dr. King said, “As I passed through the preparation stages of these two professions, I still felt within that undying urge to serve God and humanity through the ministry.  I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders, and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.”[1] Like Samuel, and like Philip in our Gospel reading, King heard God say, “Follow me,” and then spent his life, in fact he gave his life, saying, “Come and see!”

King wanted to work with black youth, but God thrust him into the Civil Rights Movement.  God’s work through Dr. King resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. His achievements continued past his untimely death.  He spoke with God’s spirit and promise for the future.  Even in darkest times, he proclaimed to African Americans, “Go ahead!  God can be trusted!”[2]

For King, God’s voice came in the form of an undying urge.  When he didn’t respond, it came louder, in the form of frustration.  Reading of King’s life, you will find that God’s call also came through mentors, friends and colleagues.  It came crying out through the need of the world.  There was God’s truth to be told.

The world still cries out in need, and God’s truth is still to be told.  God’s truth is that we, who are black and white, and tan and yellow, and cream colored, and every shade, we are all created in God’s image.  God’s truth is that we are to care for the widow and the orphan, the ones with no home, and those who cannot afford medical care.  God’s truth is also that we are all sinners, and that we are loved and forgiven even in the midst of our sin.  The truth is God sees us, as God saw Nathanial, sitting under the fig tree, —sees into our heart of hearts, and calls our name.  This is God’s truth.  We, who both listen and turn a deaf ear, we who are full of both doubt and certainty, we who are both terrified and fearless, are called to tell it.  We, who are both sinner and saint, who are both bleeding and bled for, are called to live this truth.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Baldwin, Lewis.  There is a Balm in Gilead.  Minneapolis:  Augsburg Fortress, 1991, 279-280.

[2] Lischer, Richard.  The Preacher King.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995, 269.

Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve 2017

It is as if time is standing still here on this most holy of nights, the night of our dear Savior’s birth.  All that has been, all that there is, and all that will be converge on this night in this place.  We are transported to Bethlehem, with Mary and Joseph.  In the dark of the night sky, the stars sparkle brightly.  They look to be so close that you think you could reach out and grab them.   The baby Jesus is soon to be wrapped up tight, and sleeping in the manger. All is calm, all is bright.  Right now, right here, this night is perfect.  Maybe.

When we got into our car tonight to come to church, a lot came with us.  Our thanksgivings, our hopes and dreams jumped into the car when we opened the door.  Perhaps it is the excitement about gathering with family, or the dream of a hoped-for gift.  Some of us bring more than that.  We also bring our burdens that we carry with us almost everywhere we go.  Grief can be a constant companion, especially during the Christmas season.  I am certain that when we put our coat on to come to church, it went over top of concerns about medical insurance and money.  We stuffed into our pockets our worries about our loved ones.  When we parked the car, we had hoped to shut the door on broken relationships, if only for an hour. Tonight, memories of Christmases past showed up, for good or for bad.  And then there are our expectations and hopes for Christmas.  What did you bring with you tonight?

A friend of mine posted on FaceBook her hopes for Christmas.  She writes:

Every Christmas you always hear people saying what they want and bought. Well this is what I want: I want sick people to be cured. I want children with no families to be adopted and parents who want babies to be blessed with them. I want people to never have to worry about food, shelter, & heat. And cliché or not, I want world peace, too.[1]

Perhaps this is why we come tonight, if only for an hour, to a place where all is calm, and all is bright.  We come to live out, if only for an evening, peace on earth and mercy mild.  But the trouble is that all those things that we carry around with us didn’t stay outside in the parking lot when we came through the church door.

We came through those doors with both thanksgivings and sorrows.  We come on this holy night to hear the story of God among us.  But while Luke’s telling of Jesus’ birth looks like the front of a Hallmark Christmas card, Luke left out the messy details.  Truth be told, while we envision our Lord and Savior quietly fast asleep, at some point he woke up cold and hungry, and this holy baby’s cries were loud enough to for the shepherds to find him.  I picture Mary, who had just given birth, without any pain relief measures, and lying on cold, stiff hay which was poking her in her back, turning to Joseph and saying in that voice he dreaded, “This is YOUR hometown.  Where are all your friends?  Where is your family?  Why couldn’t they put us up for the night?”  And then she began to cry.  Poor Joseph—all he wanted to do was to comfort his baby and his wife, but he felt responsible for their circumstances and so he, too, began to sob.  The sounds of everyone crying were not in harmony with the donkeys’ braying and the sheep’s baa-ing.   It was anything but quiet that night.

This is the birth of the holy child, born in flesh and blood, both wholly human and wholly divine.  This is the babe in the manger, the King of Kings, who, with his borning cry, smelled the sheep and heard the cows moo.  In this low estate, with chickens clucking and goats chewing, came our savior, called Emmanuel, God is with us, in the middle of the noise and things that poke us in the back.

Theologian Edmund Steimle writes,  “For what other message on Christmas Eve is worth listening to?  What peace?  What hope?  If it is simply a forgetting—when we can’t forget, really—then we’re reducing the Christmas story to a bit of nostalgia and indulging ourselves in the sentimental orgy that Christmas has become for so many, or we are reduced to the deep depression that grips so many others on Christmas Eve.”[2]

How did we get here, writing on FaceBook about our desire for a perfect world and at the same time, celebrating God’s birth in Jesus’ human flesh?  When God hung the stars in night sky, and sent water crashing onto shores, when God orchestrated the dance of the peacock and the ballet of the platypuses, God declared it good.  When God created male and female in God’s image, God blessed them.  On that sixth day, God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.[3]

And then came Adam and Eve, formed in God’s own image, Cain and Abel, David and Bathsheba, and all our fears and jealousies, our prejudices, our egos. Our sin rose up.  But God responded with grace and mercy. When God’s people were enslaved in Egypt, God led them out of bondage into freedom, even providing bread for them on their journey.  Through Moses and the Ten Commandments, God again entered into a covenant to help us live as God’s people.  God spoke to us through the prophets, telling us what is, and what God wants things to be.  God’s grace is given to us over and over again.   And we broke our part of the covenant over and over again.

Then God sent his son. On this holy night, In the town of Bethlehem, the Son of God, was born of Mary to be among us.  The one whom through our sins are forgiven comes with flesh and blood, and tears and crying. God was willing to risk everything for us, that we might know how much God loves us.

This most amazing event, this first Christmas morning, in that little town, tells every one in every place, and in every time, that it is God’s will to come to us, to be with us.  To be with us in our living and our dying, in our hunger and in our feasts.   God is enfleshed in the middle of all that is sweet, and I all that is sorrowful, to be with us in birth and death, and love and heartbreak.  Jesus was born to be here with us tonight, in our praying and our singing.  To be present for us in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

God promises there will be a time when there will be no famine, no war and no tears.  My friend’s prayers for Christmas, for healing, for the blessing of children and families, for the homeless and the needy will come to pass, for God has given us that promise. But until then, it is here, now, in the midst of our fleshy mess, that God choses to meet us in Christ Jesus. Through this baby, God blesses broken hearts, and newly found love, the birth of newborns and the loss of partners.  Through this child, laying in swaddling cloths in the manger, God is present in our goodbyes, and our hellos, in our marriage and separation, and in our healing and reconciliations.  God is with us in the middle of our wars and our peace.  Through this holy child, we are given hope, and the resilience of our human spirit.

God did this extraordinary thing in a most ordinary manner and in a most ordinary place. And perhaps that’s central to the message of why we gather and celebrate tonight – that this God, who is beyond anything we could imagine, is bound up with our everyday ordinary lives. There is no place too nasty, too painful or too sinful for the grace of our Lord to enter.  There is no darkness that exists which can overcome the light of Christ.  Christ is in the midst of it all, making all things holy in his name, and giving us peace that the world cannot give.

And so, we come here on this holy night, waiting to hear the sound of the newborn baby’s cry among the bray of the goats, and the beating of our hearts.  We come in darkness, to bathe in the light of Christ, and to sing with the angels. Thanks be to God.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Used by permission.

[2] Edmund Steimle, “The Eye of the Storm.”  Chorus of Witnesses. Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.  241.

[3] Genesis 1:31

 

John 1:6-8, 19-2 8     Advent 3

She was in fifth grade at Sunrise Elementary school in Colorado.  Ashwanty Davis had big brown eyes, and a subtle smile.  She hoped to grow up to become a Women’s National Basketball star. Some didn’t see her as the person she was, and Ashwanty would have to endure their bullying.  When she had enough, she confronted one of the girls who were taunting her.  Someone took a video of the encounter, and it ended up on social media.  As views of the video increased, so did the bullying.  ‘“My daughter came home two weeks later and hanged herself in the closet,”’ her mother said.[1]  This little girl, who has been described as a child of joy, spent two weeks on life support before she died.  Ashwanty Davis was victim of “bullycide.”  Suicide after being bullied is so common now that we have a word for it.

There were witnesses to the fight.  The person who videotaped it and uploaded it onto the internet was a witness.  All those who watched it were witnesses, too.  Some of those people testified to what they saw by taunting Ashwanty even more.  They testified to darkness, tormenting her until she could no longer see the light.

We are witnesses every day.  We see and hear and experience things that impact others on a daily basis.  On these cold winter days, we see people walking on the street carrying everything they own because they have no permanent home in which to keep them.  We hear people telling jokes that demean a particular race or religion. This week, I read about someone who needs to choose between paying rent and paying health insurance.  How does our faith impact our witness?

Flip Wilson, when asked about his religious affiliation, said, “I am a Jehovah’s Bystander.  They wanted me to become a Jehovah’s Witness, but I don’t want to get involved.”  How does our faith impact our witness?  Our witness put into words and deeds is our testimony.  As one professor reminds us, witness and testimony are terms that come from the legal sphere, and are used when something or someone comes to trial.[2]  Witnesses are put on the stand to testify to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Perjury, bearing false witness, is not only against the law, it is against God’s commands.  Bearing false witness is a sin.  Luther explains in the Large Catechism the fullness of the eighth commandment:

No one shall use the tongue to harm a neighbor, whether a friend or foe.  No one shall say anything evil of a neighbor, whether true or false, unless it is done with proper authority or for that person’s improvement.  RATHER, we should use our tongue to speak only the best about all people, to cover the sins and infirmities of our neighbors, to justify their actions, and to cloak and veil them with our honor.  Our chief reason for doing this is the one that Christ has given in the gospel, and in which he means to encompass all the commandments concerning our neighbor, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” [285-286].

To what does your witness testify?  Or are you a bystander, afraid to get involved?  What would have happened if those who witnessed Ashwanty being bullied testified to the light of Christ’s love?

Jan Richardson writes:

…the light comes as a vivid reminder that we have, at the least, the power to help illuminate the path for each other.  It matters that we hold the light for one another.  It matters that we bear witness to the Light that hold us all, that we testify to this Light that shines its infinite love and mercy on us across oceans, across border, across time….  Blessed are you who bear the light in unbearable times, who testify to its endurance amid the unendurable, who bear witness to its persistence when everything seems in shadow and grief.[3]

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.  He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.  As the Gospel of John explains, Jesus is the true light, the one who creates and maintains life.  This light of Christ comes as God’s presence sitting at the bedside of someone we love.  The light of Christ comes as a friend who will see us through dark times.  The light of Christ stirs our hearts to speak out for those who have no voice.  The light of Christ illumines a path we did not even know existed.  The light of Christ brings hope.

Our witness and testimony are based on what ultimately matters–Jesus’ witness and testimony to us, for us, about us.  In the legal court language of witness and testimony, Jesus’ birth, his life, death, and resurrection will find us guilty, and declare that we are forgiven.  In this season of Advent, as we wait for Jesus to be born and for Christ to come again, live in this sure and certain hope.  Live in this light.  Witness it.  Testify to it.

There are people, sent from God, whose names are Sue and Bob, Sandy, Linda, Jane, Paul, Alan, your name and mine.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] https://www.theroot.com/10-year-old-girl-killed-herself-after-video-of-fight-wi-1820887617  web accessed December 13, 2017.

[2] Long, Thomas.  Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2004.  28.

[3] http://adventdoor.com/2014/12/12/advent-3-testify-to-the-light/ accessed December 13, 2017.