may 24, 2009

Anna Blaedel
First UMC, Osage
May 24, 2009
Isaiah 61:1-4
Luke 24:13-35

When the invitation arrives, Mack Phillips is lost. Angry and overwhelmed by the horrific loss of his younger brother, Mack receives and pursues this strange invitation to a shack. Like most sacred calls, this call comes with confusion and fear-filled resistance. In William Paul Young’s book The Shack, Mack meets God for 48 hours. In the shack, Mack meets God in three persons, the Trinity. Traditional language in the church names God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or we might say, Creator, Christ, and Spirit, or as Augustine put it, Love, Beloved, and the power of Love that Binds. In The Shack, this three person God is: a large, extravagant African American woman, a distinctly Asian woman, and a Middle Eastern man in a plaid shirt who would not stand out in a crowd.

Sometimes we see God, but don’t recognize the vision as sacred. Sometimes we meet God, and don’t realize we are communing with the holy. Sometimes God speaks, and we don’t hear the call as one of faith. Because we don’t want to see. Because our hearts aren’t open. Because the noise of the world drowns out the still, small voice. Because God shows up in our lives in ways and times and places we least expect to find God.

This book, this story, this ordinary, extraordinary encounter in a shack, invites us to re-think God and relationship—relationship in God, and with God.

The prophet Isaiah felt the Spirit of God upon him. The power of the Spirit, anointing him, so awe-inspiring and full of mystery and majesty, Isaiah couldn’t help but know the call was a sacred tasking. The call to ministry, from God, spoken through the prophet: “The spirit of God is upon me, because the Holy One has anointed me: God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of God’s favor, and the day of vengeance; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…”

The faithful, those who hear and follow this call, will be called the oaks of righteousness, Isaiah proclaims. The planting of God, displaying God’s glory. The task is restoration, building up ancient ruins, raising up former devastation. Searching for and finding and tenderly mending broken cities and broken hearts.

Remember, the text we have from the prophet Isaiah is a Jewish text, part of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Within Judaism, the call to God’s chosen ones is known as Tikkun Olam. Tikkun Olam—the mending of a broken world. In my pastoral care class in seminary, we used this text from Isaiah to ground and guide our learning. The careful and compassionate tending to and mending of broken hearts, broken lives, and a broken world—this is the call of a pastor’s care, and it is the call to all Christians to care. Each and every one of us, no exceptions, called by the waters of birth and baptism into ministry. No one is too young or too old, too rich or too poor, too lonely or too busy, too victorious or too defeated, too powerful or too powerless, to hear and follow this call. The spirit of God is upon us, and has anointed us. God sends us to bring good news to those who are oppressed, to bind up those with broken hearts, to proclaim liberty to those who have been held captive, release to those in prison, comfort to those in mourning.

God, reimagined. Our task, recalled. God as a verb, inviting us into anointed action, and real relationship. Faith as a verb, creating and changing us. Ministry as a verb, calling us to recreate and restore.

Last weekend my family celebrated my sister’s completion of her Master’s degree in Social Work. My sister is a hard worker, a kind and gentle soul, a dedicated learner, with a heart filled to overflowing with passion and compassion. The spirit of God is upon her, and she is responding. Ordering her life and her career around bringing good news of love and care to people in need of good news. Mending broken lives and broken relationships and broken homes. Restoring possibility and passion. Proclaiming liberty to people held captive by addiction, violence, systemic injustice.

My family arrived to my sister’s graduation ceremony early (no minor miracle in my family), and sat in the second row. As soon as I sat down, a woman I had never met sitting in the first row turned around and said, “Don’t you live in Osage? Aren’t you the pastor at the United Methodist Church?” And, with that, I met a first grade teacher here in Osage. Through this community’s Bridges Mentoring program, she began mentoring a sixth grade student who had struggled through her first grade class. This young woman was now graduating with her Bachelor’s degree in social work, committed to utilizing the challenges she faced in her own life to help her make a different in the lives of others. Her mentor, this teacher from Osage, was there to celebrate the power of restoration, make known in this life, nurtured in their relationship.

As I sat through the commencement ceremony, surrounded by new social workers and their support systems, I could not help but feel the power of the Holy Spirit at work. God’s name was not invoked, but the ceremony felt, to me, like worship. One student speaker quoted Gandhi—“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Another called the graduates to do their work in the world from their hearts, and build human connection. Another challenged them not to get lost in the endless tasks their jobs would entail, encouraged them not to forget who they are in the work, and to let who they are and are created to be shine through and guide them. I am sorry to say the whole event felt more sacred, more holy, more spirit-filled than many sessions of the Iowa Annual Conference where we squabble and name call and accuse one another and act out of fear rather than faith.

Sometimes we meet God where we least expect to find the sacred. Sometimes we hear God, calling through the voice of social workers, not pastors. Sometimes we see God, acting through the lives of teachers. Sometimes we find ministry happening outside the church because the church hasn’t made room inside. Sometimes we pray with our bodies, by showing up, by walking with each other, by supporting each other, by paying attention to the pain and beauty around us.

The two men in Luke’s gospel account are walking on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. As we walk with then, they, we learn about seeing the holy in the only place they we aren’t looking. As they walked, they were sharing stories about everything they had seen, how their lives had just been turned upside down.. Suddenly they met someone else on the road. A stranger. Someone who stood out, because he wasn’t one of them. And Jesus asked them, “What’s up? What are you guys talking about? What’s going on in your lives? Why do you look so sad?”

And one of them, Cleopas, answered, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place these days?” Of course, this is kind of funny to us, the readers already familiar with the end of the story. But the ones who are walking along are amazed. Do you really not know what’s been going on?

And then they start telling this stranger all about Jesus, about this prophet who had turned things upside down and inside out, who ate with and welcomed people the religious authorities called unclean and abominations, who went looking for the very people most people tried very hard to ignore, who guided and led the task of tikkun olam, mending the broken world around him, proclaiming good news to the oppressed, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, release to those enslaved and imprisoned, comforting all who mourn. This one, this prophet, we had high hopes for him, they say. He was The One, we thought, who would restore us, and restore this city. But the politicians and priests in power got scared, he threatened their wealth and the way “things had always been,” and they handed him over to be condemned to death, and crucified. Now, not only have we lost this friend and prophet, but his body is gone and we don’t know where to find him and we don’t know what to do or where to turn without him…

And Jesus, hearing their story and their pain and anguish and fear, walked with them, and told them a story, about Moses and prophets and God’s call to restoration and recreation and redemption, about the commandment to love God and neighbor, to offer hospitality to strangers, to bring and be the good news of love in a world in desperate need of love. And then they reached Emmaus, and these two men begged Jesus to stay with them, and share a meal. Of course, they didn’t know it was Jesus. But they did what Jesus had been teaching them to do. To offer an invitation. To share food. To gather together. To offer hospitality to the strange, and the stranger. And Jesus accepted their invitation. When he was at the table with them, he took break, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And you know the rest of the story.

With this, they see the Holy One. Their eyes were opened and they recognized who the stranger among them was. And like that, Jesus was gone. And they turned to each other and said, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” The sacred had been there, with them, all along. And something deep in them knew. Their hearts burned, set afire with the good news of love and compassion they heard and saw proclaimed. Their faith, restored. Their hope, renewed. Their call, remembered.
Scared about their future, consumed by the loss of the recent past, they couldn’t see, at first, the sacred presence there with them, with us, here and now. But doing what they were called to do restored them. Offering welcome to the stranger, breaking bread together, entertaining the Beloved without even knowing they were doing so—these ordinary, extraordinary acts of faith set their hearts afire with the restoring power of love. And then they knew. And they saw God. And they communed with God.

Mary Oliver is a poet whose poems speak to me as prayers. You have heard her poetry woven in other sermons I have shared. Listen for her sense of wonder and awe, hear how she encountered restoration, in this poem, “The Summer Day”:

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Sometimes, Jesus is walking with us, and we don’t even notice. Sometimes, the spirit anoints us to do exactly what we are least prepared to do, and most fear doing. Sometimes we are called to go where we don’t know, and never, ever again be the same. Sometimes we don’t know how to pray, but we can find prayer by paying attention to the world around us, falling into it, and knowing we are blessed.

We receive our commissioning for ministry, from Romans 12:1,2: So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life; your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life; place it before God as an offering…fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.”

The spirit of God is upon us, because the Holy One is anointing us. God is calling to us. Are not our hearts burning within us?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Amen, and amen.