On My Decision to Withdraw Resignation

On My Decision to Remain As Your Pastor

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April 30, 2017

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As I think you all know by now, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor, and the Admin Board has accepted that withdrawal on behalf of the church. This morning I want to explain to you how I came to that decision and what it means to me. What it means to you is not for me to say, but I suspect, or maybe I just hope, that it means a lot.

You all know that back in February I submitted my resignation as your pastor. That resignation was initially to become effective on March 10; but I offered to extend the termination date to the end of May, and the Admin Board agreed to that modification. The Board (or at least most of the people on it) tried to talk me out of resigning. When I asked what the sense of the congregation was they said they’d find out. So they personally interviewed 30 of you and gave me the results of those interviews at the Admin Board meeting on April 10. I did a great deal of wrestling with whether or not to withdraw my resignation and remain as your pastor after I got those results. They showed that some of you have reservations about me and my work with you, but despite those reservations there was a clear consensus in those results, indeed a nearly if not quite unanimous expression, that you don’t want me to leave. I highly appreciate that consensus, and it has played a major role in the decision I have made to withdraw my resignation. I have however always been aware that the decision whether or not to withdraw the resignation was mine to make, not yours. I, after all, was the one who made the decision to resign in the first place. So why have I decided to stay as your pastor? I think there are several reasons that I want to explain to you.

First of all, why did I submit a resignation in the first place? I did it because I was aware, and am aware, that we are not a perfect match as pastor and parish. I used a cliché to explain my perception when I gave the Admin Board my letter of resignation. I said I was tired of trying to fit my square peg into your round hole. There are some ways in which we just don’t fit, or at least I thought there were. I’ll just mention here a few of the big differences between me and at least some of you for purposes of clarity. I am more liberal/progressive than many of you are both politically and theologically. I think Christianity is more about how we are called to live this life than about what we have to do to assure our salvation in the next. Not all of you see the faith that way. I think that Jesus is much more a revelation of the love of God for all of creation and for each and every person in it than he was a sacrifice to pay the price of human sin. Again, some of you do not see the matter that way. I do not think that God wrote the Bible. I think perfectly fallible men did. That idea is new and troubling to at least some of you. There is a lot more that I could say about our differences, but I’ll let it go at that for now.

Let me instead specify some of the things I think we have in common. We are all people of faith. We all accept the reality of God. We may not all understand God in the same way, but none of us is an atheist or a secular humanist. We all accept that there is a spiritual side to reality that we can, at least to some extent, know and participate in. We all accept that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is. We are all Christians. We may understand Jesus Christ and his saving work differently, but we all confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We may understand the Bible differently, but we all accept the Bible as at least the foundational book of our faith without which Christianity is simply impossible. I think we all believe that God calls the church and all people to live lives of caring, generosity, and concern for people in need and to live lives committed to justice and to peace. We all believe, I think, that God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness. We all believe, I think, that the fullest revelation of the nature and will of God that we have or can have is Jesus. That is a lot that we have in common, and what we have in common is foundational for our faith and our life together. It gives us a foundation to grow on.

So why have I decided to withdraw my resignation? I have decided to withdraw it first of all because I love and like all of you. You are good folk. You are kind, caring, Christian people. You do good work both as a church and in your individual lives. My significant disagreements with some of you around significant theological issues don’t change the reality that you are good people. I like being with you. I like serving you. I like working with you as we discern together where the Holy Spirit is calling us in these days, or at least I do when our theological differences don’t get in the way; and most of the time they don’t.

Yet of course I have always felt that way about you, so what has changed since I submitted my resignation nearly three months ago that has led me to withdraw it now? After all, something significant must have changed if I have changed my decision about resigning, assuming at least that the resignation wasn’t a mistake in the first place. I think what has changed is that both you and I have done a lot of discernment around my call since then. Things that were in the dark have been brought into the light. Differences between us have been put on the table and discussed. The interviews that the Admin Board did with so many of you produced what is by far the best review of my work as a pastor that I have ever had in all of my years of ministry. It produced lists of what you think are my strengths and what are areas in which you have questions or concerns that I find very helpful. Most of all those interviews produced, as I said, a broad consensus that you don’t want me to leave. I understand you better than I did. Whether or not you understand me better I frankly do not know, and that is for you not me to say.

Beyond that, in the time since I submitted my resignation I have sensed that at least some of you are curious about some new ways of understanding the faith and are open to learning about them even if you don’t accept all of them. My primary evidence for that claim is the way a good group of you has responded to the book The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg that we have been discussing on Sunday mornings. Borg gives a good introduction to some ways of thinking about the faith that, as he says, are emerging and that have been emerging in American Christianity for a long time but with which a great many Christians remain unfamiliar. I agree with most of what he says is emerging and think what is emerging is a good and necessary thing. I have done my own small part to contribute to what is emerging. I am encouraged that at least some of you are willing to listen to a voice that is new to you, whether it be Borg’s or mine. I have more hope today than I did three months ago that together we can find new ways of being faithful Christians together in this troubled time in which we live.

When, before they talked to all of you, the Admin Board asked me what they should say if they were asked about what my position was, I said you can tell them “I have heard your concerns, I take them seriously, and I will continue to preach the Gospel.” That is still my position, or maybe better it is still my conviction and commitment. I do take the concerns I have heard from you seriously. I will not ignore them, but here is something you must know about me. I am convinced that God does not call people like me to preach only what the people of a particular church want to hear. Jesus certainly didn’t preach only what the people of his time thought they wanted to hear. He preached what he knew to be God’s truth. I know full well that I am no Jesus. Far from it. I am as fallible a human being as anyone else. But I have responded to what I have perceived to be a call from the Holy Spirit to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can. My discernment of that call has been affirmed through rigorous seminary education and the ordination processes of the United Church of Christ. I am called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can understand it, as best I can articulate it. I must and will continue to do that. I can modify my tone, or at least sometimes I can. I can take care in how I express myself. What I cannot and will not do is abandon what I am convinced is the truth of the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is spiritual, but it is also social, economic, and political. The Gospel of Jesus Christ consoles and uplifts, but it also challenges. It calls us to new ways of thinking and new ways of living, not to earn salvation but in response to God’s grace. The preacher’s call is to bring all of the Gospel to his or her people, the consoling, uplifting parts to be sure, but the challenging parts too. In nearly everything Jesus said and did he turned the beliefs and expectations of his world, and of ours, on their heads. We are not true to the Gospel or to our Lord and Savior if we do not do the same. That is a core conviction of mine, and I will not abandon it.

So with all of that being said, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor. We do not have to agree on everything for me to be your pastor. I can respect the differences between us, and I hope you can too. We have work to do together. We have a vital small church to enliven, inspire, and, if it is the will of the Holy Spirit, to grow. We have the Good News of Jesus Christ to live and to proclaim. I have recommitted myself to doing that with you. Will you recommit to doing it with me? I pray that you will. God willing, we have a future together. May it be so. Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Empty Tomb

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Empty Tomb

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 16, 2017

Scripture:  John 20:1-18

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

He wasn’t there.  The tomb was empty.  He had been there, but the tomb was empty.  He was dead, there was no doubt about that; but the tomb was empty.  Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ faithful disciple, had gone to the tomb to do what was customary for one who had died.  She went to put spices on the body, a sign of respect perhaps; or in Mary’s case perhaps an act of deep love.  But she couldn’t do it, because the tomb was empty.  Mary came to the only conclusion she could, that grave robbers must have taken Jesus’ body.  “They,” as John puts it, had taken his body; but surely Mary knew that that didn’t really make sense.  Jesus’ grave cloths were still there.  They were of linen, and they were valuable.  Surely grave robbers would have taken the cloth, which was the only thing of any monetary value in the tomb.  Beyond that, there was the matter of the stone.  There had been a great stone closing off the entrance to the tomb.  It would have taken more than a grave robber or two to move it.  Yet it was moved, and the tomb was empty.

That empty tomb is the central symbol of Easter.  On one level of course, on the level of the story the Gospels tell, the empty tomb is simply a fact.  Jesus’ tomb was a physical place.  It was probably a cave, a hole in very physical rock.  Yet like the other central symbols of Holy Week that are also physical objects—the donkey, the table, the cross—the empty tomb is so much more than a mere physical object.  It is a symbol.  As a symbol it points beyond itself to profound truth, truth about Jesus, truth about God, and truth about us.

The empty tomb is a symbol that points beyond itself to profound truth, yes; but what profound truth does it point to?  To get at an answer to that question let’s take a look at what we know happened as a matter of history before and after the Romans crucified Jesus.  We know that Jesus started a movement among the people of Galilee.  He had a following.  He was inspiring people.  He was exciting people.  Some of them proclaimed him as the long-expected Messiah.  Now, Jesus was and is unique for us Christians in many ways, but he was not unique in that way.  Galilee and Judea, the homeland of the Jews, had seen many charismatic leaders who started popular movements.  John the Baptist was one.  There were others too. The Romans and their collaborators among the Jewish leadership didn’t like these popular movements; and they had a way to deal with them, a very effective way to deal with them actually.  They killed the charismatic leader, and every time they did that leader’s movement died with him.  Even if the Romans didn’t kill all of the leader’s followers, the followers disbanded anyway.  They went home, like Peter and the beloved disciple in John’s story of the empty tomb.  Their movements came to a dead end, disappeared, and were never heard of again.  That’s what the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities were sure would happen with the Jesus movement too.  Publicly execute Jesus in the most cruel and brutal way, and his followers would disperse.  They would go home, figuring that they had been wrong about Jesus.  That would be the end of it.

Only that wasn’t the end of it.  The death of Jesus should have been the end of him.  It wasn’t.  His message about the Kingdom of God should have died with him.  It didn’t.  The community he created should have dissolved.  It wouldn’t.  Jesus died, that’s for sure.  As the coroner Munchkin says of the Wicked Witch on whom the house fell in the Wizard of Oz, he was “not merely dead, but really and sincerely dead.”  He was dead, and yet his followers knew that somehow he wasn’t.  He died yet he lived.  He died, but his truth kept marching on.  He died, but his community of followers lived on.  Death couldn’t hold him.  Death couldn’t defeat him.  For him, for his truth, and for his community death was most definitely not the end. The tomb was empty. Thanks be to God!

Here is one truth to which the empty tomb points.  God raised Jesus from the dead.  God emptied Jesus’ tomb so that we would know that he and his truth are eternal.  He appeared to his disciples to that they would know that his death wasn’t the end, so that they would stay together and continue to proclaim him and his truth even though the Romans really had killed him.  That’s a truth to which the empty tomb points for them, for his first disciples.

For them, yes: but what about for us?  The empty tomb isn’t really symbol of anything for us if it points only to a truth for them.  It isn’t even a real symbol for us at all if it points only to a truth about Jesus.  For the empty tomb really to be a meaningful symbol for us it has to point to a truth for us, and indeed it does.  The empty tomb points to the truth for us that with God death is not the end, and there are a couple of aspects to that truth.  One is that for God our physical deaths are not the end of us any more than Jesus’ physical death was the end of him.  Paul calls Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection,” which means that resurrection is first of all for him but not only for him.  The empty tomb of Easter is God’s sign and seal that death does not have the last word, mortality does not have the final say.  With God life is eternal, even our lives are eternal. As the scholar John Dominic Crossan says, we don’t die to nothingness. We die to God. Jesus’ tomb was empty. Thanks be to God!

A second aspect of the truth for us to which the empty tomb points is just as important.  We all have, or if we haven’t we will, experience little deaths, metaphorical deaths in our lives.  Illness, despair, addiction, and depression are little deaths that we all, or most of us at least, experience in life.  We all experience loss, loss of love and relationship through death or separation.  There are other little deaths in this life too—loneliness, a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of purposelessness.  If we are honest I think that all of us who have lived any significant number of years have to admit that we have experienced some of those little deaths in our lives.  And we know that we will probably experience others before our earthly life comes to an end.

The empty tomb points to a profound truth about those little deaths.  It says they aren’t the end.  It points to life beyond those little deaths.  It gives us hope in those little deaths.  It says that God wants to and can sustain us in those deaths.  It says that God wants to and can lead us out of those little deaths just as Jesus walked out of that tomb and left it empty.

The empty tomb of Jesus Christ speaks to us.  It speaks truth to us.  It speaks divine truth to us.  It says death is not the end, not for Jesus, not for his first disciples, not for us.  It says that death is not the end both in this life and beyond this life.  That is truth we can cling to, truth that can sustain us, truth that leads us out of death and into abundant life, indeed into eternal life. That’s why Jesus’ Resurrection is the best news there ever was or ever could be. The tomb was empty. Death was not the end. Death is not the end.

The tomb was empty. The tomb is empty!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Amen.

Just the Gardener

Just the Gardener

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 27, 2016

Scripture: John 20:1-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! It the most joyous proclamation of the Christian faith. It is the most joyous proclamation that there ever was or ever could be. It is the foundational proclamation of the Christian faith. Without Christ’s glorious Resurrection there would be no Christian faith. If Jesus had only died as he did, brutally executed by the Romans as a threat to public order, we’d never have heard of him. If he’d only died with nothing more his followers would have disbanded and gone home, disillusioned perhaps or at least gravely disappointed, but certainly not inspired to proclaim the empty tomb and continue his teachings. Jesus’ Resurrection is certainly the most amazing thing that has ever happened to any human being. I mean, dead people don’t just get up and walk out of the grave, only Jesus did. Jesus rose to eternal life, eternal life for him and eternal life for us. Easter is simply amazing. Easter is simply impossible, it just happened, that’s all. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

All of which leads me to ask: If Jesus’ Resurrection is so amazing, why do the Gospels make it sound so ordinary? I mean, they really do, or at least most of them do. Take John’s version that we just heard. First in that account Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away from the front of Jesus’ tomb. She assumes that something quite ordinary has happened. Mary stands outside the tomb crying. Two angels ask her why she’s crying; and she says it’s because someone has taken Jesus’ body, but she knows not what they’ve done with it. For her Jesus is still dead, and someone has removed his body from its tomb.

Then Mary turns around. She sees what she takes to be something perfectly ordinary. There’s a man standing there. He must have looked perfectly ordinary, for Mary just assumes that he’s the gardener and that he must be the one who for some reason has taken Jesus’ body out of its tomb. At first he’s just another man with nothing extraordinary about him. To Mary, at first, he’s perfectly ordinary; but he turns out to be the risen Christ.

How can it be that someone who just got up and walked out of his tomb can seem so ordinary? More importantly, why would God choose to have the risen Christ appear so ordinary to the first people who encounter him? I mean, God could have appeared in the risen Christ like Christ appears in so much Christian iconography: cosmic, immense, stern, surrounded by angels, appearing as judge of the world and everyone in it. Yet God didn’t do that. The risen Christ didn’t appear that way. No, God in the person of the risen Christ appeared as someone Mary Magdalene took to be just a gardener, a perfectly ordinary man. Certainly there is nothing wrong with being a gardener, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it either.

You know, I don’t think God ever does anything for no reason. And when God does something in the world there must be some lesson in it for us. It must have some significance. So what message would God be trying to send us by having Godself in the form of the risen Christ appear as someone so ordinary that one of Jesus’ closest followers didn’t recognize him and just took him to be the gardener? Well, during Jesus’ lifetime on earth he was forever turning the world’s expectations on their heads. Welcome the prodigal home without question. Praise the hated Samaritan and criticize the honored temple authorities. Pay those who worked one hour as much as those who worked twelve. Dine with people the world calls sinners and tells us to shun. Say the poor and the peacemakers are blessed, not the rich and the war makers the world so honors. In almost everything Jesus said and did he turned the world’s expectations upside down and showed us that God’s ways are very, very different from the world’s ways.

So why wouldn’t Jesus continue his revolutionary teaching and living in his new form as the risen Christ? Well, he would; and he did. See, what would the world expect of a man who was also the Son of God who rose from the dead? Fireworks, that’s what. We’d expect a great big show. We’d expect power and glory. We’d expect a Cecil B. DeMille movie. That’s what the world would expect, wouldn’t it? Sure seems to me like it would.

God and Jesus Christ of course knew that that’s what the world would expect, so they did exactly the opposite. They had the risen Christ appear as someone Mary Magdalene took to be a gardener. He rose with essentially no special effects. He rose with no fanfare, indeed with no human witnesses to the actual event of his rising. He rose looking perfectly ordinary. He rose looking like an ordinary working person, a man of and from the people, a man of no remarkable appearance or affect. He rose as a gardener. Only after Mary had seen him as a gardener did he reveal to her that he was actually the risen Christ.

Folks, there is a great lesson here for us. We so want to look for God in the spectacular. We want Jesus to return with all the power and fireworks that weren’t there when he rose from the grave. We don’t expect Christ to come to us looking like a gardener. Maybe we especially don’t expect that today because so many people in our context who work at gardening are Latinos, people so many Americans (for no valid reason) look down on and are suspicious of. We don’t expect it. We probably don’t want it. But there it is, right in the Gospel of John. The risen Christ looked like a gardener.

See, God is telling us something really important in that part of the Resurrection story. God calls us to look for God in the ordinary, the mundane, the unimpressive. God calls us to look for God among the poor, the rejected, the outcast. That’s where we should look for God among us, among those Christ came specially to save, the poor, the downtrodden, the scorned, the despised, the rejected, the excluded. That’s where we are to look. That’s where we will find God.

Christ rose from the grave. Yes, he did. That we believe. That we know. That we confess. And when he did he looked like a gardener. Not like a prince. Not like a king. Not like an angel. Like a gardener. God is in the midst of us in our ordinary, unexciting, everyday lives. God is present with us in those lives bringing us grace, peace, and salvation. To find God don’t look up as much as you look across and within. Find God where you live. Find God in how you live. Find God in your gardener. That’s what Mary Magdalene did, and it’s what Easter calls us to do too. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Cross

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Cross

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 14, 2017

Scripture: Mark 15:21-39

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This week, in our Holy Week services beginning last Sunday, I have focused in my meditations on the symbols of Holy Week. So far I have talked about the symbol of the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem and about the symbol of the table of the Last Supper. This evening we come to Good Friday, and the central symbol of Good Friday is, of course, the cross on which Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, died. Like the other symbols of Holy Week the cross is, on the most basic level, a physical object. It is a most terrible and fearful physical object. It was an object the Romans used to execute people. They used it as their form of execution especially for political prisoners, for people they feared could stir up the masses against them. They used it in very visible, public places. Crucifixion is a terrible, horrible way to die, and when the Romans executed someone they wanted everyone else to see the condemned person not only dying but suffering horribly as he died. They wanted everyone to see so that they would think twice about daring to defy Roman power. As a physical object the cross is an instrument of terrorism every bit as horrible as a bomb exploded in a public market place. On that level of meaning the cross is an abomination, a crime against humanity. On that level of meaning we should despise the cross, we should hide the cross, we should have nothing to do with the cross.

But we don’t. We don’t despise it. We don’t hide it. We put it on top of our church buildings. We put at the front of our worship spaces. We wear it around our necks, just like I’m doing right now. So if the cross is such a horrible thing—and it is—then why do we cling to it the way we do? Why has it become the central symbol of the Christian faith? Are we sadists? Are we delighting in suffering and death? Of course not. The cross is so central to us because like the other symbols of Holy Week the cross is for us Christians so much more than a mere physical object. It is a symbol. As a symbol it has another level of meaning beyond its meaning as a mere physical object. It has a much deeper level of meaning. As a symbol it points beyond itself to profound truth. As a symbol it connects us with profound truth. It connects us with a truth about God and a truth about Jesus as the Christ. So if we are to understand the cross as the central symbol of Good Friday, indeed, as the central symbol of the Christian faith, and not merely as the instrument of execution that the Romans used to kill Jesus, we have to ask: What is the profound spiritual truth to which the cross of Christ points, what is the truth with which the cross seeks to connect us?

Christians have given different answers to that question over the years. The most common answer that the Christian church has given to that question, at least since the High Middle Ages, has been that the cross points us to the truth that Jesus suffered and died as an innocent victim to pay the price for human sin that had to be paid before God could or would forgive our sin. This evening, however, I want to suggest a different truth to which I believe the cross of Christ points that, for me and for many people today, speaks loudly and clearly of the love and grace of God in a way that touches my heart and stirs my soul. Perhaps it will touch your heart and stir your soul as well.

To get at that truth we start with an understanding of just who is it that is being tortured and killed on the cross. He is Jesus of course, and for us Christians that means a whole lot. It means that the man on the cross is fully human, yet it also means that he is at the same time fully divine. He is the Son of God Incarnate, the Word of God made flesh. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is God in human form suffering and dying on the cross. During his life as Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus taught us with his words and showed us with his life who God is for us, how God relates to us human beings. In his life he taught and lived God’s compassion and God’ grace. Now we come to his death. What does seeing him even on the cross as Emmanuel, as God with us, tell us about the meaning of his death, the meaning of his cross?

I believe that seeing Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us, even on the cross tells us how God relates to us not only in the good times of life but also, and much more importantly, in the bad times. Jesus, Emmanuel, on the cross shows us that God does not abandon us in the bad times. God does not scorn our suffering and our death. God is not remote and removed from our suffering and our death. Rather, God is with us even in the worst that life can hand us. In Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, on the cross, God in God’s own person enters into the worst that life can hand a human being. God experiences in God’s own person suffering, and even more.

There is a great paradox in seeing Jesus as God with us even on the cross. In Jesus on the cross God experiences everything that a human being can experience in the worst of times. On the cross Jesus cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In that cry God is paradoxically experiencing being abandoned by God. God enters into the human experience of being abandoned by God. God demonstrates the seemingly impossible, that God is with us even in our feeling of God abandoning us. In Jesus on the cross God does not observe our feeling of aloneness, our feeling even of abandonment, from afar. Rather, God enters into those feelings and shows us that God is with us even there.

And there is an even greater paradox in Jesus on the cross. On the cross Jesus dies. On the cross Emmanuel, God with us, dies. On the cross of Jesus God experiences death. God dies on the cross. That’s a shocking statement I know, and it is one the Christian tradition has been very creative in finding ways to avoid. Yet Jesus Christ is precisely God with us, and Jesus Christ dies on the cross. In the death of Jesus on the cross God enters into and experiences human death. In the death of Jesus on the cross God shows us in the clearest possible way that God is not absent from human death, that God does not scorn or reject or judge human death. Rather God enters into human death and is present in it, is present with us even as we die, never truly forsaking us, never truly abandoning us.

The Christian church has long taught that the death of Jesus on the cross functions as an sacrificial atonement for human sin. Yet for me, and for a lot of Christians today, the cross of Christ speaks less of atonement or sacrifice and more of the unfailing presence and grace of God in everything that comes our way in life, up to and including suffering and death. The cross then is about us and about how God relates to us. God doesn’t prevent the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, and God doesn’t prevent suffering and death in our lives or the lives of our loved ones either. Rather, in the cross of Jesus we see demonstrated in fullest measure God’s abiding and sustaining presence with us in suffering and death. We see God with us even as Emmanuel suffers and dies.

Let me tell a personal story that some of you have heard before that, I think illustrates the point. In May, 2007, my twin brother suffered a severe stroke. Somewhat to our surprise he survived it, but he was (and is) in bad shape. I flew to Tucson, Arizona, where he lived at the time. I went to the hospital he was in. It was a Catholic hospital. In the ICU unit that my brother was in there was a family room. I spent a lot of time in that family room grieving, hurting, being deeply concerned about what my brother’s life would be like from then on. Because it was a Catholic hospital, on the wall of the family room hung a crucifix. A crucifix is a cross that isn’t empty. It has the body of Jesus on it. As I looked up at that crucifix on the wall I thought: Oh yeah. That’s right. You get it. You’ve been where my brother is and where I am, and worse. And that made a big difference in my life. In seeing Jesus on that cross I know that God had abandoned neither my brother nor me no matter what was happening in our lives. I knew that God was with us and would never leave us. Knowing that didn’t make the grief, pain, and fear go away, but it made it possible for me to bear them and not love heart. Not love my faith. Seeing Jesus on the cross made all the difference for me in those terrible days.

That, for me anyway, is the Good News of Good Friday, of the cross of Christ, and it is very good news indeed. It means that we can face and handle whatever life throws at us or our loved ones. It means that we can face and handle those things because in the cross of Christ we see God’s unshakable solidarity with us no matter what. We know that wherever we are, God has been there too, and worse. God is there too, and worse. That is the good news of Good Friday. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Table

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Table

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 13, 2017

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We, many of us at least, are used to thinking about symbols in connection with Communion. We know—at least in the Protestant tradition we know—that the bread and the wine of Communion aren’t really the body and blood of Christ even if the New Testament stories about the Last Supper have Jesus say “This is my body. This is my blood.” We know that the bread and the wine are symbols of the presence of Jesus Christ with his people as they gather to remember him and what he did, and does, for them. So you might expect a meditation in a Maundy Thursday service on the meaning of the symbols of the bread and the wine of the Last Supper. Tonight, however, I don’t want to talk about the bread and the wine. I want to talk about another symbol from the Last Supper. I want to talk about the table.

There was, after all, a table. Jesus gathered his disciples for the feast of the Passover, a real, full meal. There were, we assume, at least thirteen people present, Jesus and the twelve disciples. I actually think that there were at least fourteen people there because I am pretty sure Mary Magdalene would have been there too. They came for a meal, and they would have had a table on which the meal was served. The table of the Last Supper was a real, physical object on which the food of the Last Supper was set.

The image most of us have of the Last Supper, and its table, probably comes from Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous depiction of the scene. In that picture Jesus and the twelve disciples all sit or stand along one side of a long table. None of the figures faces directly out toward the viewer, but they are all turned toward the artist enough that he can paint their faces. It’s a great painting that captures the tension and the agitation of the moment when Jesus tells the disciples that one of them was going to betray him. It’s a great painting, but I seriously doubt that it accurately portrays the actual Last Supper. An upper room in an ordinary house in first century Jerusalem probably wasn’t long enough to fit a table as long as the one Da Vinci depicts. The room in his painting looks more like a room in a Renaissance Italian palace than a room in a first century Jerusalem house. But even if the room were that long surely the people present would have gathered around it, not along just one side of it. Their being all on one side is an artistic device that lets Da Vinci give them all faces. A friend imagines Jesus having just said “Everybody who wants to be in the picture, on this side of the table!” I’m sure a picture showing them around a table, not all on one side of it, would be truer to what actually happened. People who gather for a meal normally gather around a table, not along one side of it.

If we see Jesus and the disciples gathered around a table we can, I think, more easily see the table as a symbol. The table becomes central to the gathering of the people. It is the table that draws the people together. They come to partake of what will be placed on it and to have fellowship with those who will gather around it. The table becomes the center of their time together. They form a circle around it. Gathered around it they face one another. Across it they share food and drink and conversation. Around it they become community.

Community is what the table of the Last Supper symbolizes for me, and in symbolizing community it draws our attention to something really important about Communion, something about Communion that we too often overlook or even forget. There are of course different names for the sacrament we celebrate this evening. Technically it is the Eucharist, a word we get from the Greek that means thanksgiving. Sometimes we call it The Lord’s Supper. Our most common name for it, however, is Communion. Why Communion? What does Communion mean? Dictionary definitions of communion (with a small c) include things like “an act or instance of sharing” and “intimate fellowship.” What strikes me about the word is that it is so similar to the word community. It clearly has the same root as the word community. Communion and community aren’t quite synonymous, but they’re pretty close to it.

The symbol of the table as a symbol of community reminds us that Communion—with a capital C—and community are inseparable. Communion, the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, to use it’s more technical name, is an act of the Christian community. Yes, usually someone who is ordained presides at the sacrament, but Communion is never something that one person can properly do alone. European kings used to have their private chapels where they could receive Communion without community, but that was an abuse and a misunderstanding of the sacrament. Communion requires community.

More than that, however, Communion properly understood builds community. In our kind of Protestant tradition that puts so much emphasis on words and on right belief we might define Christians as those who believe in Jesus Christ, but some other Christian traditions, on the Protestant side especially the Episcopalians, define Christians as those who gather around Christ’s table for the sacrament of Communion. In that way of looking at things Christian identity and unity are established by Communion. We could learn a lot from their way of looking at it.

So let me suggest that when you partake of the bread and the wine—juice actually, but it doesn’t matter—this evening you think of the table around which those first disciples partook of bread and wine with Jesus just before his arrest and execution. Open your hearts and your minds to the ways in which our coming to the common table forms us into community. Be aware that we are partaking of the elements of which Jesus spoke around that ancient table together, as community. Try seeing taking Communion not as something you do by or for yourself but as something that we do as and for community.

In a few minutes I will invite you to come to the table up front here to partake of Communion. Around the table we gather as a group of Christ’s disciples much like those original disciples did on that fateful night so long ago. The table that holds the bread and wine of the sacrament is a powerful symbol. It is a symbol of community. May our coming to the table this evening strengthen us as a community, a community of Christians with Christ as our head. Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 9, 2017

Scripture: Zechariah 9:9-10 Mark 11:1-11

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s the beginning of Holy Week, that most sacred week of the Christian year, when we enter Jerusalem with Jesus in triumph, share his last meal, weep at his cross, and only then rejoice in his glorious resurrection. Let me ask you something: Have you ever noticed how each of those central events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life has an object at its center? Well, each of them does. Today, on Palm Sunday, it’s the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Mark just calls it a colt, but trust me on this one, it’s a donkey. More about that donkey in a minute. For Maundy Thursday one central object is the table. More about that on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday the central object is of course the cross. For Easter it is the empty tomb. Each of the named days of Holy Week has an object associated with it.

All of these things—the donkey, the table, the cross, and the empty tomb—are material objects (even if one of them is an animal), but the important thing about them for us Christians is that they are much more than mere objects. They are symbols. They stand for something. They point beyond themselves to some profound meaning, a spiritual meaning, a meaning that tells us something about Jesus Christ and about God. Through them we find our connection with Jesus Christ and with God. So in our four Holy Week services this coming week (not counting the early service on Easter morning) I want to explore each of these objects, each of these symbols. Today we start with the donkey.

The background of the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is that after Jesus has spent perhaps about a year teaching and healing in Galilee to the north of Jerusalem he has made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. It was the site of the temple, the seat of the religious authorities of the day. It was by far the biggest city in the region, and it was the city the occupying Romans worried about most. It had been the scene of violent rebellions against Roman rule in the past, and the Romans feared that it would be again in the future. (They turned out to be right about that, by the way.) It wasn’t where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hung out most of the time, but it was where he would go during the Passover, bringing a lot of soldiers with him. At Passover the population of the city swelled dramatically because of all the pilgrims coming to the temple and that made the Romans nervous. So when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful day he was entering the center of both the religious and the secular powers of his day. He was entering a city full of people, excitement, and anxiety.

Jesus could have snuck into the city unnoticed. After all, it’s not like his face was all over the television or the internet the way it would be today. No one in Jerusalem knew what he looked like. He could have done it quietly, in a way that would not draw attention to himself. He didn’t. Instead he rode in on a donkey—why that would draw attention to him I’ll get to shortly—to the acclaim of the crowds who lined the road to hail him. Why? Why would Jesus come into Jerusalem that way?

To get at an answer to that question we need to go back several hundred years before Jesus and look at those two verses we heard from Zechariah, an Old Testament prophet. There the prophet tells of a king who is to come. He says that the king is, or will be, triumphant and victorious; but he comes not in a war chariot or riding a magnificent Arabian steed but “humble and riding on a donkey.” The prophet says that this king will “cut off the chariot from Ephraim,” that is, from Israel. He will cut off the battle bow and “command peace to the nations.” This king of whom Zechariah prophesies is pretty clearly a different kind of king. He is humble. He comes in not on a symbol of war, not in a military chariot, but riding a symbol of peace, a simple donkey, an animal of the farm not of war.

When Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem he is acting out this scene from Zechariah. That he is doing so isn’t necessarily obvious to us. I mean, who knows anything about Zechariah today? Not many of us, I suspect; and frankly I don’t think it’s really worth knowing much about. It is a very strange book. Still, Jewish people in Jesus’ time would immediately have understood what Jesus was doing riding into town on that borrowed burro. He was saying through his action rather than through words I am indeed a king, but I am a very different kind of king.

In their book The Last Week, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg imagine this scene this way. On one side of town Pilate and his Roman legions are marching into the city. Consider that scene for a moment: The military commanders ride in war chariots drawn by grand horses with magnificent tack. They are animals of war, animals of might and oppression. They make a fearful sight. The troops follow wearing their armor that flashes in the sun. They carry shields and spears, the implements of war. It is a grand procession, and a fearful one. It is Rome saying we have the power, and we’re not afraid to use it. It is Rome saying do not dare to defy us, for we can and will crush you.

On the other side of town Jesus is riding into the city on a donkey. Now consider this scene: It is a parody of the Roman military procession. There are no implements of war. Instead there is a humble animal from the farm. A useful animal to be sure but hardly a grand one, certainly not a frightening one. The donkey is a symbol of the peaceful life of the ordinary people. His time is the time of peace, the time of plowing, the time of pulling a cart taking the produce of the field to market. He is Zechariah’s donkey. He symbolizes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. He symbolizes a world in which everyone sits under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one makes them afraid, to use the words of Micah 6:6.

None of that may be obvious to us, but it would have been obvious to the people who saw Jesus engage in this prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly Jesus must have intended people to understand what he was doing in this way. The parallel with that passage from Zechariah is too strong to be mere coincidence. Jesus didn’t sneak, or even just walk, into Jerusalem unnoticed precisely because he wanted to be noticed. He had come to Jerusalem to make a proclamation. He had come to Jerusalem to proclaim to the powers of his world—and ours—that their way is not God’s way. During the week that lay before him he would do that with words. Upon his entry into Jerusalem he did it with his actions.

Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was nothing less than a provocation. It was a provocation directed to the powers of the place, to the Romans and to the Jewish temple authorities who collaborated with them. Later on Pilate will ask Jesus if he is the king of the Jews. Jesus has already answered that question. He answered it when he acted out the prophecy of Zechariah. Yes, he said with his actions, I am a king; but I am a very different kind of king. I am a king of peace not war. I am a king of peacetime pursuits, of agriculture and peaceful trade. I am a king from among the people not a king reigning over the people. Maybe the Romans didn’t get all of that from Jesus’ symbolic act of riding in on a donkey. They probably weren’t up on their Zechariah. The Jewish people of the city, however, surely did. If they didn’t get all that, if they saw only a man on a donkey, or if they saw a reference to a king but missed the clear depiction of what kind of king Jesus is, then they missed his meaning altogether. Maybe that would explain why five days later these same people were shouting Crucify him!

The Romans for sure and the people of the city perhaps missed Jesus’ meaning when he rode into the center of power in his world on a donkey. Christianity has missed his meaning pretty much ever since. We’ve seen his riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as an act of humility. We haven’t seen it as a provocation aimed at the powers of the world. Yet that surely is what it was. We haven’t seen it as a prophetic act proclaiming the kingdom of God as a very different kind of kingdom from the kingdoms or other political structures of the world. Yet that surely is what it was.

So thank you little donkey, and thanks to whoever owned you for letting Jesus borrow you. You played a role you could not possibly understand. You became a symbol, a symbol of peace triumphant over war, a symbol of ordinary, productive pursuits over military ones. A symbol of providing for people not conquering them. Most people who saw you, and most people who have read about you, have misunderstood you. As we begin our journey with Jesus through Holy Week, may we at last understand what you were all about. Amen.

No Dry Bones

No Dry Bones

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 2, 2017

Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

O hear the word of the Lord.

I’ve know that song, or at least those opening lines of it, for about as long as I can remember. Here’s one thing I didn’t know until much more recently. I didn’t know that those words about dry bones came from the Bible. Much less did I know that they come from a book of the Bible with the odd name Ezekiel. Even less did I know that Ezekiel was a prophet and that in the book Ezekiel these words come from a vision the prophet had of a valley full of dry bones that represent the whole house of Israel. And even less did I know the historical context of the story. I learned much more recently, like just a few years ago, that the book of Ezekiel dates from the early sixth century BCE. Ezekiel, it turns out, was a priest who had been hauled off from Jerusalem to exile in Babylon after one of Babylon’s sieges of the Judean capital but before Babylon’s final conquest of Judah in 586 BCE. He wrote his book for the Hebrew people who were still back in Judah.

It’s a very strange book, one of the strangest in the Bible. It is full of all kinds of weird visions, some of them a lot weirder than the one of a valley full of dry bones. It has an excruciatingly boring, detailed, description of the new temple to be built in Jerusalem. Why anyone bothers to read that part of Ezekiel escapes me. The book’s language is horribly stilted and repetitive. The story of the valley of dry bones is that only thing from Ezekiel that appears in the Revised Common lectionary, and there are really good reasons why nothing else does. But let’s take a look at that story of the dry bones and seen what we can find in it that might be worthwhile.

I start with an understanding of the historical context of the story. When Ezekiel wrote of his vision of a valley of bones Israel hadn’t yet been finally conquered by Babylon, but there wasn’t much left of her. What was let would disappear soon enough. If Israel were going to survive it would need a miracle. That miracle actually came decades later when the Persians conquered Babylon, but Ezekiel of course knew nothing of that. He knew that the Babylonian Empire had attacked, defeated, and greatly diminished the Hebrew homeland and that only what would seem to be divine intervention could save what was left.

In his image of the dry bones coming back to life Ezekiel held out the promise that God would indeed provide that miracle. In that vision Ezekiel sees a valley full of dry bones. He follows instructions God gives him, and first flesh comes back on the bones; but there is still no breath in them. Or they have no spirit in them, for in Hebrew breath and spirit are the same word. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath, which could also mean to the spirit. Whereupon breath—or spirit—enters the restored bodies and they come to life. Ezekiel’s vision ends with God telling Ezekiel that the bones are “the whole house of Israel” and Israel that God will settle the people of Israel in their own land.

The story itself makes it clear that we aren’t dealing with historical facts here. Ezekiel starts this story by saying “the hand of the Lord was upon me.” That’s an odd expression. I take it to mean somehow Ezekiel was in some kind of Spirit-induced, abnormal state of consciousness. He’s having some kind of powerful spiritual experience. He says that God brought him out “by the Spirit of the Lord.” Whatever his experience actually was, we can be sure that this was no ordinary one. Ezekiel is describing a visionary experience not a physical one. God says the bones are “the whole house of Israel.” That’s clearly a metaphorical statement not a literal one. Ezekiel had a vision, and it is what that vision signifies that’s important.

So just what does it signify? Metaphorically speaking, a whole nation is dead. Then God brings them back to life by breathing the Spirit of God into them. Now, perhaps we aren’t terribly concerned with the fate of ancient Israel. After all, that’s just ancient history to us. The bones in Ezekiel’s story are a metaphor for a people who aren’t all physical dead but who are spiritually dead and threatened with extinction, with ceasing to exist as a people. Have you known people who were spiritually dead like that? I have. Have you known institutions that were still in existence but spiritually dead and threatened with ceasing to exist? I have. I’m the pastor of a church like that today. Or rather, I’m the pastor of a church that tends to think of itself that way even though I don’t think it really is. Some of you at least fear that this church will not continue to exist very long into the future.

And it is precisely in situations like the one this church faces that the meaning of Ezekiel’s vision is so important. Maybe sometimes we see dry bones, but with God there are no dry bones. Ezekiel’s vision show us that no matter how dry we become, no matter how dead we think we are, God can and will breathe new spirit into us. Now, that doesn’t make us humans immortal of course, but it does mean that no institution is necessarily beyond resurrection. In our story God tells Ezekiel to “prophesy,” first to the dry bones, then to the breath or the spirit—again, those two things are the same word in the Hebrew in which Ezekiel wrote. Now, in the Bible to prophesy is usually to speak a word to the world that God has given to one of God’s prophets. Here God tells Ezekiel to tell the bones that they will come back to life. Then God has Ezekiel speak to the breath (or the spirit) and told it to come into the restored bodies. It’s a little hard to see how those words apply directly to us, so let me suggest something. God probably hasn’t given us new words with which to prophesy to something or someone. But God has given us a call to pray. To pray without ceasing, as Paul says in one of his letters. When we read God saying to Ezekiel “prophesy,” let’s hear God saying to us “pray.” Pray, and listen. Listen for what God wants to say to us. Trust that God will never dessert us. Do our fallible best to discern what God wants from us, and have the courage to do it. That’s how dead bones come alive. That’s how churches that are discouraged can come alive again. It’s all up to the Holy Spirit, and it’s up to the people of those churches to turn to God and listen for Holy Spirit. Listen for the rattling of dry bones. Pay attention to new life entering the church.

There is new life entering this church, you know. There actually are remarkably many new people with us in my time here. A church doesn’t have to be big to be alive. A small church can be as alive as any big one, in a different way to be sure, but just as alive. So let’s remember. With God there are no dry bones. We’re not dry bones, and needn’t ever become dry bones. Pray to God. Listen for the spirit. I already hear a rattling sound.

Dem bones, dem bones, no dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, no dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, no dry bones.

O hear the word of the Lord.

Amen.