sermon for Animal Sunday

(Job39:1-12,126-30; Psalm104:14-23,31; 1Corinthians1:10-23; Luke12:5-6,22-31)
(http://www.letallcreationpraise.org/united-states-ecumenical/wisdom-series-c)

 

For a couple decades, Dave Rhoads, an emeritus professor from the Chicago seminary, has been among the most important inventors and instigators for this ecological edge in Lutheran churches. (He’s also a friend of Joyce Anderson’s from her church in Racine.)

Fitting this Animal Sunday, Dave tells of a dream where he was going to receive communion and found himself next to a snake, and then a person next in line, and then a raccoon with its paws extended, then a bird at communion eating bread crumbs.*

Perhaps that’s an image to keep in mind for this day, and is among the reasons we ourselves are receiving communion each Sunday of this season, even without bears and turtles lined up with us, still a reminder that we are in communion with all creation—not just with wheat and grape, but with pollinators and soil microbes and deer along the roadsides that lead to markets and grazing blackbirds and sunshine and rain and so much more.

But if you’re still feeling that we’re a mainly human contingent gathered in church this morning, then you may yet turn your faithful attention to the words we have from Psalm 104. This is no Isaian (65:25) “peaceable kingdom,” where the wolf lays down with the lamb and the lion eats straw like an ox. No, in Psalm 104 the lion still eats ox like a lion. Those young lions lurk and prowl at night to find their food, food given to them by God, just as the grass is given for cattle and grain for us. It may not be a utopian dream in Psalm 104, but it very much is a faithful “topian” vision. It’s not a “utopia” (literally meaning “no place” or “not a place”) but is firmly rooted in place, in the actual topography of our lives amid this world. With that, the Psalm sees God not only as some distant goal, but as fully engaged and caring about these different and disagreeing creatures here and now. So the lions still get to be carnivores. And humans get wine. (Though, for full disclosure we’re not the only ones who enjoy alcohol; cedar waxwings eat fruit that has hung on trees too long and fermented, until they can even get so tipsy they can’t quite fly on course. Though it’s not that birds need a DUI patrolling squad car—an absurd notion, but which we’ll reflect on more later.)

Anyway, just as we heard in another beautiful and expansive selection in Job that portrays members of creation far from humans, Psalm 104 also nicely attends to distinct habitats as blessing from God for biodiversity, the varieties of life. God grows trees for birds. God created night for nocturnal animals. From our Darwinian understanding of natural selection we may question which direction this actually proceeds, but nevertheless Psalm 104 is onto something in its attention to specific habitats with the thriving of species.

Among that, I especially have been enjoying what we read from verse 18, “the stony cliffs are a refuge for the badgers.” Instead of “badger,” other translations use the odd animal terms “coneys” or “hyrax.” So I sent a note this week to one of my Old Testament professors, Diane Jacobson, who worked on this translation for our hymnals. Since it relates to our own shared habitat, I asked her, “can the Wisconsin Badger fans amid my congregation claim blessing with the appearance of these badgers?” She replied that was, “remarkably insightful and clearly part of original authorial intent.” So there you have it, a special divine nod to Bucky.

Whether it’s as playful as that or not, I also love Diane’s translation in verse 22, where the night ends and the sun rises and, as she phrases it, the lions “lay themselves down” in their dens. It seems a poetic reflection of that old bedtime prayer, “now I lay me down to sleep.” Though we’re awake at different times and eat different things and rest in different places, still the echo in that verse ties our lives to the lives of lions, refusing to let them be too separate from us. We can see other animals as our siblings, as part of this vast family.

But that may confront us with the Gospel reading, which seems to play family favorites. Last week I’d said that our God doesn’t care “exclusively or maybe even mostly about humans.” This would seem to be yet another example of why I should read ahead to the next week’s lesson and actually pay attention to what Jesus says before I open my big mouth. Or maybe it’s an example of the interplay of Scripture, how it doesn’t all say the same exact thing, but does disagree or is in situational dialogue with itself. So last week’s readings portrayed God’s delight in cavorting with Leviathan the sea monster, though it was harmful to humans. But today Jesus promises that “you are of more value than many sparrows” or flowers of the field or ravens. One reading seems to say humans are just one among many, amid the mix of this grand family of creatures, and the other says you are most valuable.

So what would make Jesus say we are more highly valued by God than sparrows? We certainly can’t say you’re cuter than a tiger cub or more precious than pandas. It may be claimed that, just as we feel special kinship looking into the face of a chimpanzee, that we’re valued because we are more like God, though I’m particularly reluctant to make that argument. Indeed, as categories of creature or Creator, we’d have to confess we’re more like chinchillas or alligators or poinsettia plants or moon rocks than like God.

Instead, might the value be by body mass, that big creatures get more attention than little ones? That’s often our human tendency, to count and notice the plight of megafauna like elephants or polar bears or whales, but to be less invested in smaller creatures.

Or maybe lifespan gives us more value, where mayflies only last for a day, or rabbits breed three times per year and are mature at four months old, or why Jesus mentions sparrows, that typically live only to 4 years or so in the wild, just as Aldo Leopold noticed chickadee mortality rates were more than 50% after a single winter.

Or maybe another factor in our value and associated with our lifespan is our place in the food chain, that it takes a lot of mosquitoes to feed one bat, or rabbits to feed a hawk, that there are fewer snakes than mice and fewer mice than grasshoppers. Or in your case, that it takes a lot of salmon, who ate even more herring or crayfish, which had to eat scads of larvae or plankton.

To try on a completely different version, though, of why God would value us differently than lilies or sparrows, it might be because of what we’re capable of, or what our potential is. This is true in both negative and positive ways. To return to the absurd drunk flying cedar waxwings, they don’t need police to pull them over for imbibing too much fermented fruit because they won’t do much harm that way, whereas we need laws about drinking and driving because we are all too liable to harm others.

Or, in an apparently more benign perspective, what we cause in getting this bread and wine here today may be terribly destructive. That process may be destroying other life and interrupting cycles of well-being and altering the habitats that other animals depend on. Fields may be covered in pesticides and insecticides that help our grain and grapes to grow, but harm other life and, we’re learning, will even wreck the health of the soil. It’s still a fairly new thing to think of healthy dirt. More, our roads not only bear risk for the deer standing alongside them, but also carry vehicles that are polluting the air and changing the climate of the planet, even for those animals that live far, far away from direct human presence.

And there are those birds of the air that Jesus mentions. My life may be of more value than many sparrows (and our habits benefit house sparrows and crows and seagulls). But I wonder about trading the value of my life, what it would be not to count myself more than, for example, an extinct passenger pigeon. I wonder what I’d trade to be able to see flocks that block out the sun all day. Or to see an auk or 12 foot tall great moa of New Zealand or a Carolina parakeet that was exterminated for the benefit of making hats or an ivory-billed woodpecker that simply didn’t have enough old forests.

Or if I wouldn’t actually trade my life for a bird’s, what would I sacrifice? We figured out how to make do without DDT in order for bald eagles again to soar over our Wisconsin lakes and figured it may be okay that cranes cause crop damage. But what else of my life would I change or give up for the wellbeing of another creature?

That question may be the reason we hear the assigned reading from 1st Corinthians today. There’s nothing very natural or animal-ish in there, but maybe it is the guidance from Jesus that we as faithful humans have a spot in creation not only to cause harm but to ask what we may sacrifice for others (or for “otters”), following the way of the cross that doesn’t try to claim my own life is more valuable for being hoarded, but finds the worth in community of God’s blessing.

Perhaps that’s a perspective of our value, in assessing what can go wrong, and also in figuring how to do better. We’re valued because God strives so much to redeem you. Weighing whether comfort and convenience, our worries in life of what we eat or wear, that this is not worth the loss of life, I’m offering the last word to Aldo Leopold. From his speech at Wyalusing State Park, this is for “the funeral of a species,” on a monument to the passenger pigeon:

We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that [humans] are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us…a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures;…of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.…

These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact [and this potential], rather than in [synthetic] nylon or [computers or nuclear] bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.**

 

* http://www.letallcreationpraise.org/worship-services/blessing-of-the-animals/blessing-of-all-the-animals–a-sermon

** found in A Sand County Almanac

 

(PRAYERS)

Rejoicing with all creation, let us pray for the church, the world, and all those in need.

God of all creation, with all creation we join in praise. And as Francis of Assisi preached your word to the birds, we pray you open our ears to hear other creatures preaching you to us. We also give thanks for these favorite animals in our household or larger family of earth now (PAUSE) Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We pray today as one among many, as one species surrounded by millions. So we think of those who are close, like the chickens and chickadees, crows, raccoons, and coyotes, and those farther away and more foreign to us, in jungles and deserts, on mountains and in the depths of seas. In all of this, we ask your blessing on these creatures and sustenance in their habitats. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We give thanks for political movements that care for creation, for 100 years of the National Park Service, for the Endangered Species Act, the Department of Natural Resources, for nations working together on climate change, for organizations that motivate us to take up this challenge. Expand our hearts and strengthen us for sacrificial love. Lord, in your mercy,

hear our prayer.

We pray for the health of creatures who are at risk, for snow leopards and orcas, rhinocersoses and manatees, for karner blue butterflies and kirtland’s warbler, for those suffering from too much rain–for farmers, those with flooded homes, and creatures around there. For all these places of concern, for animals as well as the people we worry about and which we name now, silent or aloud (PAUSE). Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Celebrating the beauty of creation’s habitats, we also celebrate the beauty of these quilts that surround us today. We praise you for the blessing of hardworking and deeply caring hands that have made them, and pray for all the places around this world where people will receive them from Lutheran World Relief. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

In the promise that you chose us and, in the fullness of time, will gather all things on earth into your embrace, bring us with all creation around your throne in eternal praise. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Gather all these prayers and whatever else you see we need as we join together with these concluding words:

Jesus Christ, teach us to empathize with Earth. Make our spirits sensitive to the cries of creation, for justice from the land, the seas, and the skies. Jesus Christ, make our faith sensitive to the longing groans of the Spirit in creation. Jesus Christ, make our hearts sensitive to the songs of our kin, celebrations from the sea, the forest, and the air. Christ, teach us to care. Amen

sermon for Ocean Sunday

(Job38:1-18; Psalm104:24-26; Ephesians1:3-10; Luke5:1-11)
In spite of having been an official promoter for the Season of Creation for a number of years, this is my first time actually using it.

The Season of Creation was put together (by Norman Habel, whom Lindy Wilson met long ago up at Holden Village) to cover an apparent gap in the normal lectionary, that there was no explicit time to highlight and reflect on God as Creator and our place amid this vast sweep of creatures in creation. (At the end of the Season, we’ll attend to just how vast the sweep is, on Universe Sunday.) Even without that explicit opportunity, though, I hope I am among those clearly showing you we should be seeing Creator, creation, creatures, creative faithfulness most everywhere we turn. Still, I’m in favor of this Season of Creation…at least basically.

See, I’m also discovering it leaves a couple of conundrums. The first is that in the common lectionary and in our usual worship service, we don’t focus on themes or concepts or nouns in this way. The center of worship isn’t generically love or family or prison or health or morality or whatever. Those things may come up, but it’s through our overall lens: the norm of our focus is Jesus and God. So it’s a conundrum to call today “Ocean Sunday,” as if that’s our primary focus, rather than God.

The other conundrum or temptation is that, since creation isn’t typically highlighted, there’s a lot that could be crammed into these days. There is so much room for faithful reflection on oceans that we’d be flooded with or drowning in the possibilities (as even those metaphors might indicate).

Just as an example from other potential Bible passages, I remember hearing Jeff Wild talk about trees marking the Bible, with the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden at the beginning in Genesis 2, the tree of Jesus’ cross in the middle, and the tree for the healing of the nations at the end in Revelation 22. Well, we could say the same about oceans and God’s trajectory of salvation. The very start of Genesis 1 has the Spirit hovering over the face of the deep, the tehom in Hebrew, a primordial chaos from which God will call forth life, or maybe it’s even a play on the name Tiamat, a dead Babylonian god, with the biblical story as a counterpoint that our God doesn’t battle and destroy, but orderly creates life.

In the middle, instead of the tree of the cross, we might notice the Sea of Galilee, not only in today’s reading, but even more instead of the tree of death we might say the sea is life, as the resurrected Jesus meets his followers there to lead into the next part of the story (John 21).

And in Revelation 21, alongside a new heaven and a new earth is a change, that the “sea was no more.” Admittedly that’s a strange line for today, when we are called to notice faithfully the goodness and life in the oceans, the extravagant abundance of coral reefs as the richest biodiversity on the planet, the remarkable foreignness of bioluminescent creatures that somehow survive in the dark depths that would crush us with such severe water pressure, or the currents ebbing and flowing across the globe, responsive to the moon and rotation around the sun, and the amazing migrations and whale conversation along the leagues of those open expanses, or even the liquid breathing that is hydrologic cycles of evaporation and rain and clouds and temperature exchange that form hurricanes to stir up weather and nutrients and in some enormous way sustain patterns of life. Revelation can’t want to get rid of all of that when it says “the sea was no more,” right? The thrust of Revelation, rather, is symbolizing an end to the fearful primordial mess that didn’t want to cooperate with a God of blessing and life.

Indeed, in another way that 21^st chapter of Revelation emphasizes some of the same main point as this Season of Creation, that faith isn’t about heaven that’s elsewhere or else-when, but is for the here and now. “The home of God is among mortals,” Revelation declares, as does the overall message of Scripture. God is with us. And not just us. This isn’t a God who cares exclusively or maybe even mostly about humans.

That points us—at long last—to an ocean reading we do have assigned today, from the book of Job. (Incidentally, in three years of Revised Common Lectionary readings, we hear from Job twice but will have three readings from Job in these four weeks of the Season of Creation.) At this point in the story, for 37 chapters Job had been puzzling out why life wasn’t going well, why he suffered, and his friends said God was punishing him.

But then God speaks, and maybe even seems a bit distracted, or at least clearly and certainly isn’t focused on punishing Job. God in some way says that life isn’t centered on us. And so life amid creation may seem confusingly chaotic to you, but it’s also much vaster, grander, and more complex than we can understand. That was true of what people knew back then, and in substantial ways it is true even of our scientific knowledge today. There’s still so much we can’t quite comprehend, of how our blood levels relate to the salt of the ocean, of how dolphins communicate with brains that exceed ours, or simply of how jellyfish came to be.

But maybe more important than the message that we’re in the same incomprehensible boat as Job is that in this speech God has delight for creation, for creatures God made, not as natural resources waiting to be used by humans, maybe not useful to humans in the least, and even on occasion harmful to us, but still a delight to God.

This comes out also in the snippet of Psalm we read, about God sporting and cavorting with Leviathan. That delighted, almost giddy appraisal takes up a whole chapter in Job 41, comprising the culmination  of God’s speech. What’s significant is that Leviathan was the sea monster, the most fearful part of that oceanic chaos, the thing that swallowed sailors and couldn’t be caught and ruled in destroying boats with tremendous terror. Now, we don’t need a fish finder searching for the Loch Ness monster in order for this faithful sentiment of these verses to be true. It means that God can see fearsome great white sharks as good, as well as giant squid that we’ve never even seen alive, much less plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs and weird enormous trilobites and chambered nautilus and millions of years of sea life that existed—or, better, were creatures—long before humans were anywhere in sight.

Maybe with that non-human emphasis, we’re ready for a change in tone amid this reflection. It’s a task of striking some sort of balance. God wasn’t saying Job was unimportant or that his suffering was trivial or meaningless to God. Similarly, it’s not that God doesn’t care about you to highlight the fact that God delights in lantern fish of the deep and oozy sea cucumbers and that God would mourn the overharvesting of blue tang because they look like “Finding Dory” and people want them in aquariums or cod for Friday fish fry.

But that overfishing becomes exactly a hard point with our Gospel reading. We may take this in all kinds of ways that would be contradictory to the overall point of this day. The reading has creatures of the deep, but it doesn’t seem to emphasize marine ecology. Instead, the people catch too many fish (apparently at Jesus’ instruction) and then leave behind their boats for what would seem to be claimed as the more important task of catching people. And it would be an obvious stretch to say that Jesus called them away from their boats in order to stop the overfishing of the Sea of Galilee and let the natural ecosystem restore. In spite of having a nice setting along the sea, this reading seems too human-centered.

Even worse is when we transform these natural details and the realities of life instead into spiritual metaphors, that when Jesus says to cast your nets in deep water that it’s about trying to be open to a deep and mysterious experience of faith. I’m sure loads of sermons have been preached that way on this text, but it has little to do with what Jesus says, and it sure doesn’t have much direct connection to lives of faith in this world. For some pious-sounding lesson, it becomes detached from life and interactions amid creation.

And if that’s a risk with the Gospel reading, it’s a direct impediment in the Ephesians stuff. It’s trying to open our eyes to the vastness of a cosmic Christ, to which we’ll return next month, but in the meantime it’s convoluted and dense and the whole thing in Greek is one long run-on sentence and it’s thick with technical theological jargon and—even though it wraps up by proclaiming that the ultimate goal of Jesus is to attend to and care for all things on earth—still it hardly touches down to the ground or dips its toes in the actual water of what this really means here and now.

That seems like an anti-climactic point to wind up this sermon, but I’m going to do it anyway, maybe as a caution: if we’re only encountering creation (in this case, the oceans) for how they’re useful to us, for resources or recreation, or—probably even worse—if we diminish their reality by making them an ancient symbol of chaos or a contemporary symbol of beach-side relaxation, if they become an idea instead of a reality, then we’ve taken away the mystery and the otherness that God intends and loves, and with which God intends us to be in relationship and loving for its own sake as well. Perhaps God’s retort to Job can stand for us today and in these weeks as well:  “Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?” Let’s keep diving into that challenge from our Creator.

a funeral sermon

With Thanksgiving for the Life of Greta Karen Hammonds

June 24, 1939 + September 9, 2016

Exodus34:6-7a; Psalm23; 1Corinthians13:4-13

 

This is about love. It’s a gathering about love. It’s ultimately about the love of God in Christ Jesus, as we’ll say more later. But firstly you’re here for love because you loved Greta or because she loved you. Those may be bonds of family, or chosen ties of friendship, or relationships with some sort of care, that you received or gave or even simply observed. Through that, in some way, this isn’t general loveliness, but is the very specific love you connect with Greta.

Now, I’m at a disadvantage for only having met her once, and only knowing small bits from her sister Jean, so I’d like to hear maybe in a word or a sentence some of the ways you associate love with Greta. (Things mentioned:  family, she cried when I left home, marrying into a great family, she babysat my children, community table meals, the cat lady, potato salad.)

I’ve heard she was giving, that she was very generous in sharing what she had and not keeping it for herself. I’ve heard she always gave hearts each year as Christmas presents, a sure symbol of love. I’ve heard she took care of her mother at the end of her life. I’ve heard she cared for our country and fellow citizens in working the polls. So there are these things to recall, memories to cherish, stories for telling and reminding each other in these days (and that’s an important part of the reception and chance to share more of this after worship) and it’s also for understanding that they continue to shape you, as you embody this love of Greta in an ongoing way.

This is some of what we heard in 1^st Corinthians and why we heard it. It’s most common as a wedding reading, but with Greta we can see it as a frame for all of life in our relationships. This is how things are supposed to work and what our connections ought to be like.

Of course, it can also seem sort of idealized, that we’re not always patient or kind and don’t always do the right thing and sometimes just can’t endure it. That is true for me, and I’m sure for you, and I know it was true for Greta, too, because it’s unfortunately just how we are, just true for all of us, as much as we try and as good as we may be.

But that’s also exactly why we heard the couple of brief Bible verses from Exodus, where there’s sort of a message that if it were easy and we didn’t have to keep struggling at it, then it wouldn’t really be love. These verses where God models and promises love, steadfast love, love that lasts through the generations, and God can do that precisely because love must be slow to anger and faithful in striving for forgiveness, this kind of love from God is exactly because we need it.

This is the point in the Bible story leading up to these verses. God makes this strong declaration and promise at a surprising moment in the story; it comes just after the people had made the golden calf, that premier example of idolatry and turning away from God, and Moses was furious at them, and all of this even as they were right at the foot of Mount Sinai where God was giving them the 10 Commandments. Even with that direct and present reminder, still they could blow it.

But that sure wasn’t the first time; it seemed all too natural for their history in this story. Before that golden calf, the people were complaining about wandering in the wilderness and grumbling about the miracle of manna that kept them nourished day after day. And before that, before the escape through the Red Sea and the plagues striking Pharaoh and all the wonders of God’s work to save them, of love as this ongoing salvation project, before that they were complaining even that they didn’t want to be freed from slavery.

Which is all to say that these weren’t easily loveable people. For all the blessings that surrounded them, they weren’t always appreciative. As God is promising and practicing steadfast love through their generations, we can’t help but notice they weren’t especially holy or nice or smart. And all too often they could be lousy, nasty, curmudgeonly boneheads. But through their best and their not-so-good, God promised to love them anyway, and kept at it, with enduring patience and more.

That’s true of love and Greta, as well, in all those things you named about her and so much more, for all the really remarkable care and tender affection, and also for when that fell short or fell apart for some reason. It’s true in your relationships with her, maybe in very small ways or maybe really dominant ways. It’s true in love that spreads throughout family and across the years.

And it’s especially still true of God’s love. See, we gather today because of love. We gather because love isn’t the same as understanding all the answers, not the same as everything working out just how we wish, not the same as everything going right. But we gather because of love. We gather to celebrate relationships and what has gone well, of life well lived and enjoyed. We also gather to lament the things that haven’t gone that way, most especially that you are separated from the love of Greta, and that there isn’t any good, clear reason of why that is, of why she died now, or why any of us need to face the loss and pain of death.

But this love isn’t an explanation or a solution. This love will lead Greta and you with her into light and life, but in the meantime it goes through the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death, because that’s what love does.

We gather because love endures. Just as we heard, it persists in promise to the thousandth generation. That means it’s for Greta and her siblings. It’s for her parents, back to old times in Stoughton, and beyond that back to Norway and wherever else. It’s back to the very beginning, and it’s also forward, to you six children of hers, and your families, and on to generations so distant yet to come.

And for all the interruptions and disruptions, for all the disappointments and desperations, for Greta and for yourself you may be faithfully confident that nothing now, nothing in your past, nothing yet to come will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. For that amazing promise, all that’s left is to say Amen.

“God’s work. Our hands”

a reflection for a day of service

Welcome to worship, or welcome back to worship, as you’ve been off working on service projects. Besides this reflection, though, those projects may in themselves be worship.

To think faithfully about what constitutes worship, a frame might be in German terminology, where this gathering is known as Gottesdienst. It’s a fun almost play on words (if ever before the sprechen of Deutsch has been referred to as “fun”). Gottesdienst is literally translated as “God-service.” The play on words is in the tension of whether we are serving God or God is serving us. (In typical faithful paradox, the answer is probably “both!” A similar tension exists in the Old English origins of our word “worship,” which was fully “worthy-ship.” Our usual sense of worshipping God is that we offer praise, but this is also the venue for God making us worthy.)

With the Gottesdienst or God-service version as a good frame for this morning’s various projects, the play on words gets complicated when we add some pronouns and prepositions into the mix. It’s not just a matter of God serving us or of our service to God. It is also God serving “them” (to choose a broadly generic third person pronoun), and—still a notch more for playing with the words—it is God serving them through us, plus we serve others for Christ’s sake.

In another twist amid this already complex mix, as we understand God with us and embodied in us, we’re left with the question of where to identify Christ’s presence. With the “what would Jesus do” sense and when we describe behavior as Christ-like, we say that when we do good things, we are acting like Jesus. But also central to our faithful understanding is that what we do, we do to Jesus, in the “as you did it to the least of my sisters and brothers, you did it to me” verse (Mt25:40). There, Jesus may identify himself even more closely with those who need help than with those helping. In the upcoming Bible reading (Luke 15:1-10), then, God may be identified both with lost and finder, and we may equally be shepherds for God or sheep needing to be found.

One final bit of ambiguity to throw at you. I really appreciate the phrase, “God’s work, our hands.” It is the ELCA’s motto, the catchphrase of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and it’s a good one. But just like the good UCC motto of “God is still speaking,” it leaves ambiguity. Not everything we say is God’s speech, and not all that our hands do belongs to God. So what does? We might claim our projects today as godly—in quilts and advocacy and tending creation and all. What about what else you’ve done this morning, in getting your family ready and preparing breakfast and driving on streets and singing hymns and greeting others and even breathing? How do we see these more as God’s work for or through your hands? How can we consider all these layers of reality of your life and God’s more fully intertwined?

The breadth of the question is indicated in a poem I’d like to share. In spite of “God’s work, our hands” being a phrase claimed by modern Lutherans, this 550-year old poem is by a Spanish Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours

a labor hymn

In daily toil for daily bread

we sweat and strive ‘til we are dead.

With nothing new under the sun,

our chores and tasks are never done.

So the question still must lurk:

what gains are there in our work?

 

Yet even as we wonder “why?”

we may still be quite satisfied.

The jobs well done and lessons learned

are even more than paychecks earned.

Confidence we can do right

certifies our rest at night.

 

We do not just receive profits

but share our labors in service.

In roles of living as we should

our skills enrich the common good.

Through varied talents and arts

we are Christ’s own body parts.

 

Equipped for big tasks and small things

our vocations are God’s calling.

In office, neighborhood, or home

we are employed for God’s kingdom.

Inspired and sent across lands

we do God’s work with our hands.

 

Trying to capture various senses of “work,” this moves from the fairly unhappy realism of Ecclesiastes, toward contentment of Proverbs, on to Paul’s views of shared and mutual responsibility, until finally the broadest sense of Christian vocation throughout life.

a funeral sermon

With Thanksgiving for the Life of Ruth Eleanor Mithus Olson

March 3, 1918 + September 2, 2016

Genesis9:9-16; Psalm23; 1Corinthians13:7-10,12-13;  John10:1-6

 

The good shepherd and good gatekeeper has called Ruth home.

I’m typically reluctant to say that. It’s a phrase that can be misused or can give a nasty image of a vengeful or capricious God, who one day decides we’re fine here, but then suddenly interrupts life to whisk us off someplace else. Generally I disagree with that, and even in this specific instance we still have to confess and confront death as an interruption and sorrow; we can never say life is better without Ruth around, that it was her time to go and so now we just need to deal with God wanting her elsewhere.

Yet I should come to terms with that phrase. After all, this isn’t just a popular concept trying to explain away death. No, it’s even right there in our funeral liturgy: in the prayer of the day we prayed just a couple minutes ago, we were asking God for confidence and hope to sustain us until “by your call, we are gathered to our heavenly home in the company of all your saints.” So in spite of my trying to toy with and argue about the helpfulness or positive side of it, and my theological grumbling (which I hope you can hear with a playful twinkle in my eye, as well), if ever there were a time for this notion of God calling someone home, it’s now and it’s for Ruth.

98 years. And 98 very good years. 98 years with lots of smiles and laughter and joking, and this family’s characteristic playful jibes. 98 years of strong health, and an end that came quickly and without long suffering. 98 years of productive life, whether we count that in secretarial work, or count it as weeks traveling with family each summer, or count the fruitfulness of 98 years in being a wonderful mother, or the 30 years of marriage, or even the 47 years as a widow and in spite of that loss for how full life still was.

Certainly I’d be eager to count the 56 of those 98 years that marked Ruth’s time as a charter member of this congregation, now leaving only Karen in that category. That’s not just the mark of beginning- and endpoints, but the span of all that happened in this place amid those years, recalling the bigger marks of pastors who have come and gone and preached sermons for her and offered her communion. It’s the myriad of hymns she sang and anthems in choir and the zillions of prayers of that long and faithful life. It’s the stitches in practically countless quilts and the way that thread continues forward, from a well-tended past even in these weeks to prepare for more quilts to be shared and sent, to wrap around unknown and unimaginable bodies across this world.

And Ruth’s years are marked not only by the humor and joyful conversations, but also the simple happening of relationships in this body of Christ, this communion of saints, the mutual conversation and consolation of the sisters and brothers, as Luther termed it, those very visits and unspectacular moments of interaction, gathered where Jesus himself has promised to be present in our midst. Those were surely part of Ruth’s strong connections here over the years, and continued right up to the last bulletin that Mary Maxwell delivered and the last prayers that Martha Nack offered. All of this, in its most mundane and so very regular reality is exactly where God is present in our lives, where God is incarnate and continued to be embodied in Ruth, for Ruth, and for us. All of this is well worth celebrating the 98 years and this moment where she is called to the next new awareness, where we will live no longer by faith and seeing in mirrors dimly but will know it face-to-face.

But that also raises another side of this whole idea of being called home, of this good shepherd and good gatekeeper who tended to Ruth so well in her life and even now gathers her up into his arms to carry her home. It is one of the first things you were able to say about this moment, Karen, and I fully agree with you.

Jesus said, “I call my own sheep by name. They follow me because they know my voice.” Well, I’m especially excited about that for Ruth. Because the first time I went to visit her was my first week here, when David Keesey-Berg took me to Oakwood for the introduction. Now, David has a good voice. We know his voice and his stories and his faithful words. And Ruth recognized his voice. But whatever I tried to say—maybe because of my tone or pitch or volume—she didn’t recognize my voice.

On the next visit, Ruth and I talked about quite a bit. Well, I talked. But the only thing she could hear and understand was who I was. She kept repeating, with a smile and a nod, “So you’re Pastor Nick.”

On a subsequent visit, she was out in the dining room, and just as it’s uncomfortable to try to shout at you here, I found it wasn’t easy to try to make myself heard by Ruth as others were eating their lunch.

Sometimes Ruth would hear bits and other times she wouldn’t understand what we were saying to her. Sometimes she would recognize, and other times voices would go unheard.

And so I celebrate this moment for Ruth and this reality of faith. I celebrate because her good shepherd has called her and she recognized his voice, this voice of Jesus who will bring her home forever. I rejoice that what was lost will be restored, both in life laid down in order to be renewed in the resurrection forever, but also the restoration from hearing loss so she can once again recognize voices and offer those jokes back to her family.

Besides this future hope, though, when you’ll be reunited with Ruth, and when I’ll at long last be able to have a conversation with her and not try to shout or wish we could better understand each other, besides such heavenly hope, I celebrate today that Ruth recognized the voice of Jesus and heard his call. This voice called her in baptism so very long ago, nearly a century ago. As the promise after the flood with a rainbow, an everlasting promise of blessing, for human and all creation, so the flood of baptismal waters made that call specifically to Ruth, an assurance from God no matter what. That voice continued to call even when her own ears weren’t hearing well, still continuing to call her heart and spirit. That voice called throughout 98 years with the reassuring promise of care and compassion, of faith, hope, and love, a voice that would not let up through bad times or good, through gain or loss, through life or death. That voice has been always calling her to find her home in this promise, and that’s the voice that will call her and eventually you with her out from death to follow into life forever. Amen

a newsletter article

Holidays can be in flux.  Some are well-observed.  Some just pass by.  Some are religious (like Christmas, at least sorta and originally).  Some are secular but offer religious connections (like Thanksgiving, with President Lincoln’s proclamation of praise for our “beneficent Creator”).  Personally, I’m in favor of claiming more from the neglected Labor Day holiday.

More than a last hurrah of summer or a transition into busy school years, we Christians who are dedicated to carrying out God’s work in our lives and in our world should well celebrate Labor Day.  We believe our labors are part of the immense shared community of creation, each in some way caring for and serving the others, each with our unique capabilities.  When a work situation falls short of that standard by being demeaning, coerced, or unfairly compensated, we argue for better.  We can do no other.

Also in that way, we don’t limit some callings as holier or see work as only serving to get a paycheck.  Martin Luther rightly understood that some of the most consistent and God-given of our vocations are those that take place in our homes and amid our family.  Even if those aren’t the easiest, most well-acclaimed, or best-compensated, within that close proximity of our relationships is the primary venue where love is shared and life is sustained, which is the fundamental character of God’s work in our world.

Besides blessings for and celebrations of Labor Day, at MCC we’ll continue part of our observance a week later with “God’s work, Our hands” Sunday on September 11 as we join together in volunteering on a variety of service projects and missional tasks.