When I was a freshman at the University of Virginia, fresh out of Catholic high school, I took a religion class called Faith and Doubt.  My mother encouraged me to sign up for it–college was a time to learn about different ideas and beliefs, she said. 

But that fall, when I read those new ideas in the books assigned for that class, I was lost.  I was a good reader, but the language was dense and difficult, and the ideas were utterly foreign.  I tried using the tools that I had–a very traditional, Catholic understanding of God–to help me understand what Nietzche, Hume, and others were saying, but I ended up stuffing those writers into a religious container they did not fit.  I  scraped through that class with a low B, but it took another decade before I understood those ideas that were so different from what I knew.   

That experience is as close as I’ve come to how Thomas might have felt in today’s Gospel.  Days before Jesus’s death, Thomas had given up all hope of the Messiah who would rescue them from the Romans while remaining loyal to his teacher, saying, “Let’s also go–we might as well die with him.” After that display of loyalty, he’s not around the day Jesus appears to the disciples.  Given all that’s happened and changed that week, it’s not surprising that Thomas refuses to believe until he can see Jesus’s wounds for himself.  

It’s hard, sometimes,  to see what’s new.  The new things we already know–new babies, new sprouts of daffodils and garlic pushing up through the cold spring soil–are easy to see, understand, and celebrate. What throws us are the new things that unsettle how we’ve always understood something.   Five hundred years ago, it was hard to believe that the Earth is round and revolves around the sun; three years ago, it was hard to fathom how a tiny virus could multiply, spread wildly through the air and kill so many people.   When faced with new truths, ideas that shake our core knowledge of how things work, it’s easier and completely human to sometimes just refuse to believe. 

Still, viruses and the shape and trajectory of Earth can be proven over time, using tools that make it possible for our eyes to see the truth. No tool is ever going to be able to prove that the Resurrection is real.

In fact, believing that Christ rose from the dead can mean putting aside what science and our lived experience teach us.  Even the creeds and other statements Christians have come up with over time to define our beliefs don’t explain the mystery of it all.

Jesus’s body disappears from the tomb, but when he reappears, he doesn’t look the same.  He appears and disappears in locked rooms like a ghost.  He invites Thomas to put his hand in his wounds.  But when Mary reaches for him, he tells her not to hold on to him.  He speaks, walks, and eats with people, and as soon as they recognize him, he disappears again.  Even the people who see it don’t really understand what’s happening.-  Like 18-year-old me, they don’t have a religious container big enough to fit it in.  All they can do is witness. 

Every year I consider all those things and wonder why I still believe in the Risen Christ.  Is it the force of habit? Is it easier and more comfortable for me to believe–to keep stuffing the horror and suffering and pain of this world into a container called Christ, so that I can believe Peter when he tells us in today’s lesson that everything will be okay in the end?   

Honestly?  That is probably some of why I believe. But there’s more too. All my life, a part of me will still be that college freshman who just doesn’t get it.  But now I know that what I can’t comprehend with my head, I can come to understand in other ways.  

People who hope against all odds help me understand the Resurrection.  People who work at impossible problems, finding ways to heal the earth and restore the environment.  People who love the marginalized people around them the way that Jesus loved.  People who experience terrible suffering and still believe God’s love surrounds them. 

The stories of Jesus, healing people who are broken and filling hungry people with food and living water, help me too.  I hear Resurrection in the parables he told about mustard seeds and prodigal sons. The Bible is filled with stories that teach me the endless rhythm and joyful song of suffering that is healed, of birth, death, and rebirth.  

I believe in Resurrection because I choose those people and those stories, that Way of Love, that new kind of life.  In it all, Christ is Risen.

He is risen indeed.  

This past Monday, I walked into my class and wrote on the whiteboard

Last Chance U, English Edition 

This is it!

Get going.

The three guys who had bothered to come to class a minute or two early looked at me.

“Ms. G., how d’you know ‘bout Last Chance U?”

“Umm. Because I’ve worked there for 30 years?”

They nodded.  True enough. “So what’s that mean?”

As the rest of the class slowly trickled in, I explained the rules.  We had two days of class before break.  For each of them, I’d listed a set of missing assignments on sticky notes. If they came to class those two days,  they could make the work up without penalty, and bring their grades up to A’s or B’s or passing.  

One of them, a tall beanpole of a basketball paper whose grade had vacillated between an F and a D all semester (they need a C to pass) jumped out of his seat and threw his hands out.  

“Ms. G!  I can’t believe it!  Can I hug you?!!”

He could.  One quick hug later,  he settled down and got to his list.  After two classes and an hour or so of help after class, he pulled his grade up–if he stays on the path for the next two weeks–to that C he needs to stay in school and on the team.  

Advent is my favorite church season  Ever since I was a little girl,  each night as we gathered for dinner, the dark of winter firmly settled outside the window, lighting the candles on the wreath has felt like hope and promise: Christmas is around the corner; the growing darkness will not last; the light is coming.

And each year, the Advent readings do their level best to kill my buzz.  This week, it’s Isaiah’s thrones of judgment, Paul turning light into armor, and Jesus, near the end of his life, going on about the Son of Man, coming like the floods came for the people around Noah, taking one with him and leaving another behind.  Advent, it turns out, is as much about keeping awake for the second coming of Christ as it is getting ready for the joy-filled arrival of a baby in the city of Bethlehem.  We only have four weeks, I’ve always protested inside; isn’t it enough to just get ready for the Incarnation?

Maybe. But maybe it’s not.

This has been a long semester of watching students fail. My class, they all admit, is not hard if they just hunker down in class and do the work.  Even so, they come to class twenty minutes late or leave early because their laptop is out of battery, so they can’t write. They get their grade to a B and disappear for a week.  They start on an essay and never turn it in.  It’s the same every year; at the end of the semester, a few will move on to college-level classes, and too many, like the men and women in Jesus’ parable, will be left behind. 

Still, that’s not why I held Last Chance U, English Edition this week.  It’s not why every week, I stay after class, teaching stuff I swore an hour before that I would not teach because you were not listening.    I stay because my students are genuinely, exasperatingly, a joy to be around.  Because when my mother died this semester, they knew exactly what to say to me.  Because at least once every semester, when I’m working with them, they get what I’m saying and say, “Hold on, this doesn’t make sense at all” and write a sentence full of such elegance and power.  Because when they fail, they often try again and go on to graduate and help communities I never could. Because sometimes they leave but still see something new in themselves. ‘

They are God’s people, and God’s people screw up, don’t live up to their promises, and don’t do as they are supposed to. And so maybe Advent needs to be about the next time God comes to earth as much as it is about Jesus’s Incarnation, because for God’s people, one chance to get things right is never enough. Yet in the story that stretches from Genesis to Revelation, God never gives up on them: God–like a frustrated teacher at an open-enrollment college–showing the way to get the work done, warning of the consequences of not following the path, but always relenting, offering another chance, always seeing the promise in the people before them. 

Maybe the Son of Many is always coming down, not just in some win-or-lose end time, but through Isaiah bringing hope to the people,  Jesus born on a dark night, Jesus rising from the dead, the Holy Spirit blowing around frightened disciples in a locked room, Martin Luther King sitting in jail and setting the world on fire for justice.  Maybe the Son of Man will just keep coming until none of us are left behind.   Maybe that’s the promise of Advent, the light that no darkness can extinguish.  

18 So Jesus said, ‘What is God’s kingdom like? What shall we compare it with? 19 It’s like a mustard seed that someone took and placed in his garden. It grew, and became a tree, and the birds of the sky made nests in its branches.’  20 And again he said, ‘What shall we say God’s kingdom is like? 21 It’s like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until the whole thing was leavened.’

At the place in the Gospel of Luke when we hear this parable of the mustard seed,  things are starting to heat up for Jesus.  There’s the usual threat of Roman rulers who ruthlessly punish anyone they considered an enemy of the state.  But now many religious leaders are getting riled up as well.  They’re afraid of what might come their way from the Romans as more and more people start calling this guy Jesus the  Messiah, the one who will restore their kingdom.  And then there’s Jesus’s annoying habit of healing people on the Sabbath and otherwise just not showing a lot of respect for the way good, religious people had always done things. For all those reasons, at this point in the Gospel, they’re doing their best to discredit and get rid of him.  

Also at this time, there is a huge split between the affluent folks who mostly go along with the Roman authorities and the working folk barely getting by.  And so many others are living on the fringes of both of those groups, marginalized because of poverty, mental illness, and chronic disease.  

People are divided. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. The personal attacks are getting uglier. 

Sound familiar?

In the midst of all of that trouble, Jesus takes a different way.   Yes, speaking out strongly, angrily even, against those leaders who hold so tightly to their own power and authority that they can’t see the Spirit of God at work right in front of them.   

 Mostly, though, Jesus just pays attention, seeing and reaching out to the people everyone else would rather ignore. He heals them and feeds them and fills them with words of hope. But his words of hope aren’t centered on any of the stuff–the power, the wealth, the influence–that everyone is fighting over.  

All of that stuff that angers and divides and fills people with fear?  It just doesn’t matter to Jesus.  It’s a distraction from what matters most.  It keeps them–and us–from God’s kingdom.

The kingdom that is like…a  mustard seed?

Mustard seeds–at least the ones in the Middle East that Jesus knew–are tiny, almost invisible to the human eye.  But when they are planted, they grow rapidly–often taking only a day to send up a green sprout.  In one growing season, they can grow up to 10 feet tall, with stems so thick and woody, they can be mistaken for trees.

This week, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those mustard seeds that Jesus says are like the kingdom and wondering, as we say in Godly Play, what they could really be.  

At first, I thought that the mustard seed might really be my friend who wanted to plant trees where some of our boulevard trees had been cut down and–while the rest of us worried about ordinances and City Council and public opinion–found the number of the guy who knows about planting city trees at the University of Minnesota–the director, as it happened, of their urban forestry program.  That phone call grew into a grant for three truckloads of trees, a gravel bed to start them in, and folks to show us how to plant and care for them–and now, hundreds of young trees have begun to shade us as we walk and rest under their branches in our parks and by our sidewalks.

I parented three children in this town with a community of other adults supporting me and loving them. So I began to think about how the mustard seed might really be the mom or two (or four) I know who sit in one or two (or four) of our churches on Sundays.  Moms who saw a child looking lost, different, on the margins, and quietly took those children into their nests and under their wings–children I’ve seen grow into strong, healthy adults who know from their cores how to love others and themselves.

The mustard seed might even be the people in four churches who used to come together once a summer on the street outside one of their buildings to share a meal together. Folks who decided one year that maybe they could leave their buildings and their differences even further behind that day to worship their God together.  And that mustard tree looks just like this.

I wonder where you see those mustard seed growing?

Here’s something I think Jesus might be telling us through the parable of the mustard seed. God’s kingdom isn’t about the stuff that divides us.  God’s kingdom is a thing apart from and bigger than that.  Its seeds grow when we pay attention to the people and the natural world and the communities around us–especially the people and places and spaces that make us feel uncomfortable, where we prefer not to go or even look. God’s kingdom grows when we choose to take those seeds and tend them in our gardens.  Jesus is telling us too, despite all the anger and violence and hopelessness that whirls around us, to never underestimate how big and strong those seeds can grow. And once we make space for them in our garden, to not underestimate how many will come–from the north, he says, the east, the west, the south—to rest in their shade and find peace.

(Video below begins with the Godly Play lesson, followed by this sermon)

One thing I love best about St. Mary’s is the way someone (usually under 12) blindsides me with a question that I don’t have a good answer to.  Last week, it was a question at the end of our reflection time about why Abram (or anyone really) would be sacrificing animals to God. My answer at the time, “Well, because that’s what people did back then,” was both accurate and way too easy. Here’s another go.

When it comes to understanding deeply complex stuff like suffering and love and commitment, we often need something concrete to anchor our thoughts and focus our energy and attention.  It’s a reason why we create rituals: saying grace before dinner or writing our faults on rocks before the confession at church.  It’s a reason for sacraments (outward signs of invisible graces): sharing bread and wine at communion,  pouring water on someone’s head at baptism,  the laying on of hands at ordination or confirmation.  The ritual or rite matters, not in itself but because it points us toward something more profound than words can express, or our brains can fully fathom.

I think sacrifice was also meant to do this. Faced with great joy or great need, the sacrificer took time away from the ordinary busyness of a day to make a special bread or cull an unblemished animal from their herds and give it reverently to Yahweh, in order to express something too deep for words. And so, in his anger and grief over his continued childlessness, Abram carefully prepares a sacrifice and spends the whole day driving off birds of prey. When he finally falls asleep, a “deep and terrifying darkness falls on him.” There, as he lies submerged in that sea of anxiety and despair, God comes to him in smoke and flame, and this time, Abram’s finally able to stop arguing and listen.  

There are other means as well. In the first reading for the third week of Lent Moses wanders around in the desert tending his father-in-law’s sheep, years after he ran away from Egypt because he killed one of Pharoah’s soldiers for his cruel abuse of an Israelite man.  It takes a burning bush for Yahweh to catch his attention and send him back to Egypt.  So much of the history of God’s people depends on Moses’ metanoia–change of mind–sparked by that strange fire in the desert. 

But there’s a flip side to how we use sacrifice, rituals, and burning bushes.  Sometimes, the thing that is intended to help us find our way becomes an end, not a means. We hold on to rituals in government (electoral college, anyone?) or in church just because that’s the way we’ve always done it.  

Things really go south, though, when a ritual or happening leads to people justifying the suffering or exclusion of others. So a church teaches that without a correctly conducted baptism, a person will go to hell or cannot fully participate in the church.  Or I hear someone has a cancer diagnosis and start making a mental list of all the things that person did that caused it.  In the Lent 3 Gospel, people are convinced that a group of Galileans–brutally murdered by Roman soldiers on the temple altar, their blood mixed with the sacrifices–must have done something deeply wrong to deserve such a horrifying death.

When we seek to explain why bad things happen to other people, we’re usually not doing that out of concern for them, but for ourselves.   If I can pin down a concrete reason why people suffer, I can control it and reassure myself it won’t happen to me.  Jesus sees his questioners’ desire to blame the Galileans as a way to distract from looking at their own “terrifying darkness.”

So Jesus tells them to repent: to stop asking the wrong questions and, like Abram, to face the darkness inside; to see, like Moses, what they are running away from.  And he’s also reminding them of the other meaning of the word translated here as repent: metanoia.  He’s asking them to change their minds, to reset their perspective. He’s reminding them of what the prophets have told them repeatedly: that the heart and purpose of sacrifice lie in doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with their God.  This is the kind of deep, real sacrifice that Jesus practices every day as he heals and prays and teaches and casts out demons. It’s the sacrifice that heads him, steady and unflinching,  toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, and beyond.

Welcome to Lent!  This Sunday, we heard the story of the temptation of Jesus through the Godly Play, as we do each year on this day. You remember the story: after 40 days (in Bible speak, 40=a really long time when bad stuff happens) wandering in the wilderness, Jesus–exhausted, hungry, and thirsty–gets grilled by the devil three times. 

It’s important to remember that these 40 days in the desert  begin with Jesus’s baptism, with the Spirit of God descending from the heavens, surrounding Jesus with the blessing, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you, I am well pleased.”  Last week, we heard those words one more time on a mountaintop, just before Jesus starts his final walk to Jerusalem.  Both times, God is blessing and holding Jesus close right before Jesus heads off into danger.  A related blessing and holding is there for us all in Psalm 91, where God promises to be there in our trouble, to bear it with us and deliver us out of it–but not to keep us out of it.

That’s tricky, right?  The Spirit fills Jesus with blessing, naming him God’s beloved, and then that same Spirit sends him out to starve and thirst the wilderness.  There, the devil tempts Jesus to do something to prove the Spirit is really with him, quoting some of the best-loved words in Psalm 91: “[God] will command his angels concerning you, to protect you… On their hands, they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”  

In Matthew and Mark, the temptation story ends with the devil departing and those angels, sure enough, waiting on Jesus, but Luke doesn’t give us that satisfaction. Because the angels aren’t the point; as Jesus says, the wilderness isn’t a test to prove God is real.  The wilderness is where God gets real. And it’s where Jesus, filled this time with the power of the Spirit, is sent out again: ready now to preach, teach and heal and, ultimately, to die on a cross.

I’m not sure why I find all of this comforting, but I do.  Because you know what? Life is hard. Bad stuff happens–sometimes awful, painful, 400-days-in-a-desert level stuff that sears the soul. And while we might sometimes wish for a God that created a world where nothing that bad ever happens or where God would just yank us out of danger like a protective parent, that’s not how things work.  

Instead, we live in a world where, when we hurt as we all will, one day or another, God is always there with us–blessing us, covering us with love, rescuing us, healing our wounds–and then, also, delivering us, driving us out to tend to the woundedness of the world around us.  Because in this world, God makes us, like Jesus, part of the rescue plan. 

I have a strange relationship with my stuff.  Partly out of concern for global waste and the environment, and probably because I grew up with a frugal mom, most of my clothes, furniture, books, and household goods are second-hand.  But even though (or maybe because) we don’t have a lot of new stuff, we still have way too much of it..  

Because someone before me owned the stuff I own, you’d think I’d find it easy to pass it on, but I don’t. What if they just throw it away?  I think.  I might need it.  Maybe Phoebe will want that.  I should save that for when kids come to visit.

And yet, whenever I ignore those voices and pack up a box of stuff I no longer need, the minute I drop it off and walk away, every time, I feel a lift.  I feel lighter, happier.  And yet, the next time I declutter, there it is again–that reluctance to let go of my Stuff.

So I read this week’s Gospel with compassion for the young man who comes to Jesus in today’s Gospel, owning everything he needs and yet, still searching for something more.  When Jesus tells him what he needs to do–sell your stuff and use the money to help the poor–he just can’t do it because his Stuff owns him, and there’s no room to let God into that mess.

You might be that person who, unlike me, loves to declutter and live with minimal possessions.  You might look at that rich man as just another incredibly wealthy, incredibly selfish person.   But every one of us has stuff we’re holding on to as tightly as the rich man holds on to his worldly goods, as tightly as I hold on to toys my kids haven’t touched for more than a decade.  I don’t know what that is for you, but I do hear Jesus telling me–us–sternly and lovingly:  hold on to that, and you’ve got no room for the Light to come in. 

We’ll read the Gospel this week against The Quiltmaker’s Gift, a book most of us probably know well because Elyite Gail de Marcken illustrated it.  The joy that the king finds when he learns to give up his stuff is a beautiful and hopeful take on the rich man’s story.   As Jesus says, all things are possible with God, and I love the way the king’s journey to joy begins by giving up just one marble. 

Sometimes, too, we learn to let go in another way, through the losses that we cannot choose. My favorite poem by Mary Oliver is perfect for this week as the maples lose their leaves, and many of us continue to live through the hard losses of this past year.