Watch this sermon on video here.

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Yafo is one of the oldest cities in the world, an ancient port on the Mediterranean coast. Nowadays, Old Yafo is considered part of the larger city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. Yafo has a significant Arab population and has historically been an encouraging example of peaceful co-existence.

‘Yafo’ is the name in romanized Hebrew. Another pronunciation is ‘Jaffa’. When we hear today the story of Tabitha, one of our forebears in faith, Jaffa — Tabitha’s hometown — is translated into English as ‘Joppa’. The Israelites received the cedars of Lebanon at this port, for use in building their temples. 

We also find ourselves in Joppa when we meet Jonah, that mercurial, reluctant prophet who tried to run from God and wound up inside the belly of the great fish. Jonah runs to Joppa and books passage on a boat bound for Tarshish, a city in modern-day Spain — that is, somewhere at the very edge of Jonah’s known world. God intercepts Jonah long before he makes it to Spain, as God does with all of us. We can’t escape the reach of God’s piercing but redemptive grace, no matter how desperately we run.

Watch this sermon on video here.

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Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?”

They answered him, “No.”

We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

I expect everyone here has known this feeling of exhausted futility. Many of us feel defeated because of all that is going wrong in the world. We feel powerless to do anything about it. We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

But we can feel like that for other reasons. Some of us are waiting for a diagnostic report about a health scare. Others of us have gotten the report back already, and the treatments have started — excruciating, enervating treatments. One of our members says it this way: when she recovers from chemo, she feels “puny.” Puny: small, little, diminished. We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

Watch this sermon on video here.

Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me.”

There are so many Easters that I want to hold on to, forever. I want to hold on to that Holy Saturday night in the early nineties when I first experienced a Great Easter Vigil. I was thrilled by a wise, long-bearded elder in that community proclaiming the reading about God putting new flesh on the dry bones, the reading where God says, “I will open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.” I want to hold on to the memory of that Minneapolis congregation holding aloft their new paschal candle and placing it atop a huge mountain of flowers, a triumph of color that seared my soul with gladness.

Oh, but I am still holding on to older Easters. For several years, I was an excited kid in a dark theater on Easter morning. Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, we kids were choristers at Memorial Auditorium in Worthington, Minnesota, singing for the sunrise service our church held there. Why there, and not at the church itself? Because our pastor was a painter, and he had created a huge mural of the resurrection garden, and they rigged the theater lights to slowly come up on the mural. In my memory they also piped in birdsong — a bit much, but why not? And there were so many, so many, so many pungent Easter lilies.

I want to hold on to each Easter lily.

Watch this sermon on video here.

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

I would like to read you a story. Would you like that?

The story, written by Barbara M. Joosse, is called “Mama, Do You Love Me?”. It is set in an Alaskan First Nations community. It’s a conversation between a mother and child. Let’s begin.

“Mama, do you love me?” “Yes I do, Dear One.” “How much?”

Watch this sermon on video here.

Peter was following at a distance. When they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. Then a servant-girl, seeing him in the firelight, stared at him and said, “This man also was with him.”

I have spent a lot of time around the campfire with Simon Peter. This is one of the most compelling moments for me across all four Gospels: poor Peter sitting outside on a chilly spring night, where someone had gotten a fire going. We in Seattle can relate. In the springtime around here, it still gets quite chilly at night. But Peter of course has more than the outside temperature causing him to tremble.

I wonder if you also have found yourself around that dying campfire, at one point or another in your life.

We huddle in vain for warmth as the embers glow. We reflect ruefully on joys departed, on irreparable mistakes, on how, maybe even just days ago, everything was looking up, but now all seems to lie in ruins. And we are not just victims. We are, one way or another, complicit in the crisis.

But there are some consolations. If we are lighting Peter’s campfire here in Seattle at this time of year, then we might find a crocus or two at our feet, here or there in the courtyard. While we stare anxiously into the dying fire, the crocuses push their way up, little cups of dew, colorful flashes of tender mercy, even in the sad reflected glow of our contemplations.

Watch this sermon on video here.

“There was a man who had two sons.”

The father and his older son have all kinds of time to talk. They could talk before dawn, when the rooftop gardens are cool and they’re both in a reflective mood. They could connect in the hot afternoon, with the working farm up and running, people in and out of the complex, workers toiling up and down the dusty fields. Everyone is exhausted in the evening, but surely the father and his son could walk together, after dinner?

But they do not. Perhaps the older son has slowly taken on the burden of running the family operation. Maybe the servants answer to him, not the distracted and uncharacteristically quiet father, who gazes ever outward, his mind many miles away. The exhausted son may feel too strung out to even imagine a risky conversation with his father. And the preoccupied father may not even be aware of the spiraling silence between them. He is watching the road to the farm. He is focusing on someone else.

All of the people I really, truly care about could fit into this room.

Maybe that sounds like a dreadful thing to say. Among billions of people around the globe, I care about one or two hundred, that’s it?! But — it’s true, and no offense, I suspect it’s true about all of us. The people each of us really, truly cares about could probably fit into this room.

Of course I care about the people of Ukraine and Russia, Gaza and Israel, Sudan and South Sudan, Taiwan and China. I care about our unsheltered neighbors, and people in peril across our nation. I care about countless refugees, so many of them children, who groan under the heel of massive injustice and inequity. I care about animals incarcerated in factory farms, too. I care about ocean creatures plagued by toxins and plastics. I do care.

But who do I really, truly care about? Can any of us honestly answer this question? If you look up “Dunbar’s Number,” an anthropologist will tell you that we typically only care about a couple hundred people because evolution selected for humans who built village-sized kinship networks to survive. Robin Dunbar says the number of manageable primary relationships for most of us is about 150… roughly the seating capacity of this room.

When I was a grade-schooler, I took a standardized test of some kind. I can’t remember the name. I do remember that I did poorly, because my mother was upset by the result, and approached my teacher. She suggested that I take the test again, but this time in a study carrel, free of the distractions that (my mother assumed) had brought down my original test score.

She was right. I got a good score, and peace was restored in my achievement-oriented family of origin. I was the first child in the family to present problems like this. It’s not that I wasn’t capable. It’s that I was distracted.

If I had been born in Generation Z, I would likely have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Code 314.00, Predominantly Inattentive Presentation. As a 1970s kid, I never took the ADHD test. The tests I did take reassured my parents that I was a smart kid, but mostly they mystified me, because I did not know how to integrate their encouraging results with my own lived experience. 

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president of the United States. It was a bright cold day in Washington, D.C., with a promising blue sky stretching to eternity. My uncle Ray was there. He was thirty years old, a newspaper reporter from southwest Minnesota who made his way to the nation’s Capital to report the story. He wore overshoes and stood in the snow and cold.

Uncle Ray wrote about the experience, years later. “Golly, it was good,” he recalled. He was thrilled to be there to see the young president, but he also appreciated the old poet: Robert Frost was there, and had composed a new poem for the occasion. My uncle sensed among the excited crowd the feeling that all was well, that the bright future beckoned. Young President Kennedy represented so much. He wore no hat on his head, and his vigorous youth shone bright. He was eleven years younger than I am now.

I love my uncle, and I would love to have been there myself. I admit I am fond of mountaintop civic moments. Maybe in this cynical age you would say I’m a sucker for them. In the mountaintop story we hear today, Saint Peter comes in for criticism as a sucker like me, and once again I can relate to that flawed but enthusiastic disciple. Let’s build booths, Peter says, or tents, to house and contain this mountaintop moment. But as we heard, he did not know what he was saying.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me."

In that sentence can be found all the wisdom of God.

Let’s begin with the brothers. Joseph’s brothers aren’t just scared. They are terrified. They are in a life-and-death crisis. Their aging father is anguished, and may die in despair because of something they did. Their people are enduring a famine. They have just found out that someone who holds their lives in his hands is the same person they sold into slavery, and nearly murdered. He could easily have them executed. But —

Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me."

In that sentence can be found all the wisdom of God.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Just once in my life, I would like to leap for joy. Even when I can no longer physically leap; even if the “leap” I am talking about is in my mind or my heart, I would love to leap for joy.

Have you ever done this? Really: have you ever, for any reason, literally or figuratively, leapt for joy? Well, maybe I did leap literally for joy when I was a small child. Maybe jumping on a trampoline, or jumping on the bed, counts as leaping for joy. That was great fun, but the last time I had access to a trampoline, I declined the invitation to jump. Two kids were preparing for baptism and I was over at their house, chatting with their mother in the kitchen. The kids were jumping impossibly on that trampoline, terrifying me with astonishing, gravity-defying moves. I thought they would surely crack open their heads if they put one foot even a little bit wrong. But I didn’t begrudge them their joyful leaping, even as I cowered in the kitchen. We need all the joy we can get, we humans. We collectively seem determined to destroy all the joy that erupts on the face of this old earth. Let the kids leap.

“Put your sword back into its sheath.”

Jesus delivers this sharp reprimand in the Good News according to John, just after his arrest. He is in trouble — big trouble. Peter, in his anxiety, in his panic, had drawn his sword and cut off the ear of a slave. John the evangelist goes to the trouble of telling us the slave’s name: Malchus. The word ‘malchus’ finds its origin in the Hebrew root melech, which means ‘king’ or ‘ruler’. Put it all together: we are meant to understand that Peter, acting in desperation, is trying to slay the powers of this world. He is trying to win a human political battle. He is returning violence for violence.

No. “Put your sword back into its sheath,” Jesus says. We do not win that way. We do not even fight that way. We do not carry weapons on our mission.

This is a hard teaching. Who among us does not want to rise up and overcome the powers of this world? Isn’t that what resistance inherently is? These powers destroy human beings, they separate human families, they foment division and war, and they seem almost intentionally to be rendering the planet uninhabitable for the human race, and countless other living species. They seem to be un-creating the world. If we could only draw a sword and cut off the ear, as it were, of the ruler of this world! If only we could score a strong win, and do that for the good side.

How do you know when you’ve had enough?

This is a good question for both good things and bad things. Let’s start with some day-to-day good things: How do you know when you’ve had enough ginger-molasses cookies? This seems like a light, easy example to begin a discussion of what it means to have “enough.”

But of course even ginger cookies are fraught with complications and controversy. Thousands of people out there think they know how much food is enough – for us, for you, for me. Marketers tell us our bodies need their products. Body-shamers tell us to avoid so-called “guilty pleasures” entirely. Most everyone suffers from harmful messages driven into our consciousness by our food-fixated, divisive, image-conscious popular culture. 

One of my nieces has bravely pushed against all the disordered messaging about the food she likes. She simply listens to her body about the nourishment she needs – nourishment in all its forms. Nutrition? Sure, of course. But we have evolved as a species to enjoy the pleasures of food, the delights of an abundant family dinner, the bliss of a sugar cookie with our morning coffee. And these are nourishments too. These are among the things we truly need. My niece teaches me to decide for myself whether I have had enough of these good and life-giving things.

Ten and a half years ago, on a warm evening in Seattle, late in the evening — I know it was late because it was already dark, in June — I walked around Queen Anne Hill. This had been a sad and traumatic day for our city. This was the day when Seattle Pacific University suffered a mass shooting. 

The neighborhood was quiet, but before long I noticed the smell of fire in the air. I turned onto West Fulton Street between 8th and 9th Avenues West, and saw leaping flames. Someone’s house was on fire. But maybe it wasn’t their house — I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a shed out back. But if so, it was a big enough shed to cause an impressive, unnerving fire, with large bright flames and billowing black smoke. (I can’t even begin to imagine the size and heat of the fires in southern California that have destroyed thousands of houses, businesses, schools, and churches.)

“Oh, Seattle,” I remember thinking, I remember feeling, on that warm, weary June night. “Oh, Seattle,” I said to myself, “Oh, Seattle — rest now. You have had a terrible day.” I breathed quiet prayers for our beleaguered city, torn badly by a violent shooting, vulnerable to devastating fires, heading into another anxious summer in this era of climate catastrophe. I’m sure I was projecting, at least a little, but Seattle felt feverish, even somehow sweaty, that night, the way you feel when you just can’t rest. Your bed sheets are wrinkled and clammy, the fitted sheet keeps slipping off the corner of your mattress, the air in your room is stagnant and ten degrees too warm, you have a dull headache and you just can’t rest. (Have you been there?) “Oh, Seattle, rest now,” I chanted again.

“Omit needless words.”

This is the greatest commandment in “The Elements of Style,” a little guidebook for writers by William Strunk and E.B. White.

If you want to be a powerful, effective writer, then heed Strunk and White’s instruction: Omit needless words.

The rule elegantly obeys itself. It requires only three words to teach writers the power of brevity. 

I first read Strunk and White as a creative-writing student at Sibley Senior High School in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. Our teacher was David Coleman, an Irish scholar of mythology and drama. Mr. Coleman nurtured my first attempts at writing things worth writing. His assignments were deceptively simple: “Write a paper about an interesting person,” he would assign us. And: “Write a paper about an interesting experience.”

It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad.

It’s Christmas.

I have remembered this line from a television sitcom for twenty-three years. It was spoken by the actor Parker Posey, guest starring on “Will and Grace,” a show about a gay guy living with his straight woman friend. Back then, it was a major step forward for gay characters simply to appear on prime-time television, so progressive fans of the show put up with the fact that the queer characters never so much as held hands. They were the most chaste gay New Yorkers imaginable. And of course transgender identity – even the existence of transgender persons – was barely mentioned, let alone explored. 

But “Will and Grace” had this terrific line, and they gave it to the dry, droll Parker Posey. She played a tough, uncompromising manager at Barney’s department store, and she was reviewing a store window that Grace had decorated for the holiday season. Grace’s window featured crimson trees, sad people in festive masks, and images of haunting characters from some of the darker Christmas stories and films. And this was the hard manager’s take on Grace’s work: “It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad. It’s Christmas.”

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

Today’s Good News includes a happy reunion of two of our matriarchs in the faith. But this delighted meeting of two pregnant women got me thinking about two more matriarchs, Sarah and Hagar.

Sarah is the savvy wife of Abraham, famous for being startled and then amused by the ludicrous promise that she could have a child in old age. Sarah found that idea so ridiculous that when it finally happened, she named her child Isaac, a name that means “Laughter.”

Soon after she gave birth to Laughter, Sarah wasted no time expelling the household slave Hagar and her illegitimate son from the family compound. Abraham had slept with Hagar (at Sarah’s suggestion!) to hedge his bets on God’s promise of a son by Sarah. (It’s highly doubtful that Hagar had much of a choice in this matter.) Hagar had duly given Abraham a son, who was named Ishmael, a name that means “God will hear”. But with Isaac’s arrival, the clock was ticking loudly for Hagar. She and Ishmael had to go.

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone.”

I vividly remember something said in a class at Seattle University, back in about 2010. The professor was Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez, a member of the religion faculty who specializes in U.S. Hispanic theology, liberation theology, and women’s spirituality. Dr. Rodriguez said that persons of color in this country are angry, they have every right to be, and people with white privilege just need to understand that fact, and accept it. 

I am about to offer a reflection on the spiritual practice of gentleness, but I want to begin here, with Dr. Rodriguez, and her good words. “Gentleness” as we understand it — “gentleness” as healthy Christian communities understand it — “gentleness” is not about protecting white fragility, or what people from my home state call “Minnesota Nice.” It’s not about everyone being sweet, brushing off disagreement, and delaying justice so that we all just get along. It’s most definitely not about oppressed persons grinning and bearing it. “Gentleness” is not passive; it is not reticent. Gentleness makes no peace with evil.

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

Recently I’ve been taking little mental-health breaks from the traumatic news around the world by watching YouTube videos about the solar system, about stars, about the natural universe. Guided by a soothing narrator and expert astronomers, I take serene trips through outer space to, say, Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has only thirty to fifty million years of life left, before the tidal forces it shares with its parent planet tear it into countless pieces. Mars will one day be adorned with a new planetary ring. 

I also watched a video illustrating the formation sixty-six million years ago of the Chicxulub [CHICK-shoo-loob] Crater, when an asteroid slammed into what we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the era of the dinosaurs. I marvel at the speed of death and destruction that circled the globe in the minutes and hours after that catastrophe.

But maybe that’s a little on the nose, that particular video. I don’t necessarily want to imagine the world as we know it coming to a violent end. And yet even that video offers a strange sort of consolation: after all, the biosphere recovered quite well in the following eons, and here we are. Our home planet has seen a lot of ecological “reboots,” if you can call them that, over millions of years. We humans ironically may not survive the Anthropocene Era, the age of the planet we’ve named after ourselves, Earth’s most ingenious and most destructive species. But whether or not we survive our own dubious adventures, the planet itself will be fine.

“Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” —Joel 2:21

Our forebears in faith are not above a little healthy anthropomorphism. They ascribe human qualities to rivers and trees, who clap their hands to praise God. They ascribe human qualities — or at least animal qualities — to mountains and hills, who skip like rams and lambs. The sea roars its praises to the Lord, and the desert lifts up its voice.

And so it should not surprise us that the prophet Joel is heard talking to the soil, to the earth, to the mud beneath our feet. Joel sings consolation to the people of God in the wake of a devastating plague of locusts that ravaged the land, causing terrible starvation and despair. The people had assumed that this was God’s punishment for their wrongdoing, and so, when the land was restored, they assumed it meant that they finally had been reconciled to God.

But again, the people were not alone in their rejoicing: the prophet bids the soil to rejoice, too. “Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice!” Then Joel sings to the animals: “Do not fear, you animals of the field!” he cries, “for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree and vine give their full yield.” Only then does Joel encourage the human population to rejoice, to sing in the rain, oh, the luscious, life-saving rain!