Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
Prepare our hearts, O God, to accept your word. Silence in us any voice but your own, that hearing we may also obey your will through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The reading is from Isaiah, chapter 55, verse 1 through 9.
I will be reading the first verses 1 through 5 in English and verses 6 through 9 in Spanish. You can follow along on your pew Bible or watch the screen.
Come, all of you who want to thirst, come to the waters and all who have no money. Come buy and eat.
Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what not satisfy?
Listen. Listen to me and eat what is good and you will delight in the riches of the fair. Give earth air and come to me. Listen that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you. My faithful love promised to David. See, I have made him a witness to all peoples, a ruler and commander of all people. Surely you will summon nations you know not and nations you do not know will come running to you because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.
Bustain El senor miantra se deja encranta Llamo miantras. Este sercanto que abandonen el madavo suc Camino e el provasso que se olva el senor enustro Dios que es generoso pera perdando e del reciprocal pasion joque mis pesiana mitos nos san nos de ustas ne su caminos so los mios a forma al senor Ms. Caminos e mis pasiana mitos son mas autot que las do isted mas ellas que siabros sombre los tierra.
This is the word of our Lord.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Let's try that again. Good morning, friends. Many of you are unfamiliar faces, but this is not an unfamiliar space for me. I spent 11 years either working in the front office with Matt or serving in the children's ministry or as the associate pastor. And I bring to you today greetings from Fayette Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, Georgia. And they send their primary prayers along with a gift of funds for the disaster relief that I'll be giving to you all as well.
They join with so many Presbyterian churches around the country in mourning our loss.
Friends, 15 years ago, I was in Birmingham, Alabama. This weekend I was at a hotel looking at a beautiful white dress, taking pictures in the pouring rain with my very soon to be husband, Brian, at a warehouse not A church where we got married, sadly, without any of our brand new California friends. Because we had moved to California about eight or nine months before our wedding. But surrounded by family and college friends, we promised to be there for better and for worse.
On Friday, we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary and we woke up at our friends the Stencils house, which has been a home where we've celebrated my ordination. Two baby showers for our kids and they graciously offered to host us because we don't have a home here anymore.
When I think back 15 years ago, I couldn't have imagined the life that I would have today. I definitely would have not told you I would be a pastor.
Thank you, John and Marianne.
Thank you, Matt.
I would not have guessed that I would have two beautiful, rambunctious children who even today never wear shoes.
I could not have told you that my life would take me from finally finding a place to be rooted in Altadena, back home to Peachtree City, Georgia, which is the golf cart capital of the world. 100 miles of golf cart path. So if you're looking to retire, it's a great community.
I never would have guessed that I would begin interim ministry work and the work of shepherding a church through change. A lot of that I learned from this community, going through change and through the work of Todd Bolsinger, who was a mentor when I was here.
I couldn't have imagined my life. But we do imagine, right? Think back to when you were a kid. What did you think that your life would be like?
Did you imagine yourself to be a doctor, a nurse, an astronaut, a firefighter?
Did you imagine yourself to run a restaurant? To own a business?
Did you think that your friends when you were five would still be your best friends today?
What's the world that you imagined when we come to this text from Isaiah, I think it's important to know that this is a text written to a community who has been in exile and in exile for generations.
They are coming back into a land that was never their home, but it is their people's home.
It is the storied home, the land that they imagined and dreamed of. And when they arrive, it is not the land that they expected.
They don't have what they need. The ground is not fertile for crops.
So this invitation to come to have food without money, to have wine and milk without money, it's an invitation to this abundant promise of God that even though life hasn't turned out the way that you are, the way that you imagined it, God is still going to Be faithful to God's promises and God throughout Scripture, beginning in the book of Genesis and carrying us all the way through the gospel narratives and into the book of generations revelation.
God has always promised that God will be faithful to God's people.
So what now?
We are also doing this Lenten series by Kate Bowler. The hardest part, and I appreciate so much, this divine intuition that she had to say that we should, during this season of Lent, talk about what it means to live in the in between.
In between the beautiful and the terrible.
How is it that we wake up and we live our lives in this space where we have to say out loud really awful and unimaginable things?
I was at the doctor's office recently and she was asking me how things were going. And I said, well, my house burned down in California in the wildfires and so did the houses of all of my neighbors.
That's not a sentence I think any of us ever imagined uttering.
How do we live in this in between space? How is it that we turn to God?
Because we have these platitudes and in some versions of Christianity, we'll talk about giving it all over to God, trusting in God. But what does that actually look like? How do we live into that?
And what I appreciate about the end of this text in Isaiah, where it highlights the difference between our thoughts and God's thoughts, the difference between the mysterious and unknowableness of God and our grounded earthliness.
It's not that we suddenly have to take on God's view of the world.
It's that they exist together.
And our work is the work of renewing our mind.
Sometimes in the Bible this is called repentance.
But as Marianne taught me, this word, metanoia, it's changing your mind. Just like metamorphosis, how a caterpillar goes from time as a. If you read the Eric Carle book, a very small and very hungry caterpillar and eats and eats and eats and eats until it's a giant caterpillar and then wraps itself in the chrysalis only to emerge seemingly an entirely different creature.
It's that word meta. Change your mind.
Father Greg Boyle, who many of you probably know, for his ministry in the east part of Los Angeles, working with people who have been in gangs, have been incarcerated, he talks about this renewal of mind, this repentance.
And he uses a particular example, talking about a gentleman who had been incarcerated, had lived his life as a gang member. And he said, how is it possible that this community loves me?
They know exactly who I Am. And surely they cannot love me for who I am.
And Father Boyle describes how he began to see that he was loved because the community loved him, that he wasn't the sum total of what he had done that was bad.
Instead, he was a beloved child of God. And as he began to embrace that identity, to step into that belief in his belovedness, in the love of the community, his mind changed and he was able to embrace living in that kind of love.
So, friends, I think there's something here wrapped up together in changing our mind that has to do with love, that has to do with abundance, as we see in Isaiah, that has to do with God's faithfulness to us, that living in the hardest part is embracing wholeheartedly and full throatedly the practice of lament that I'm guessing you all talked about last week.
And at the same time, it is imagining together what it means to be the beloved children of God, that this community is what it means to love one another. Because we are beloved children of God who are called to live in covenant relationship with God, to love one another like that, not loving one another because of what we've done or haven't done, not loving one another because we like each other, not loving one another because we look like one another, but loving one another because it's the practice of the people of God, to gather in community, to worship God and to see one another exactly as we are.
I was sitting in the back with my daughter and we were singing the song come as you are. And she said to me, mama, what does it mean to come as you are?
As I'm sure many of you who are parents, you're trying to think quickly on your feet.
But it came to me, come as you are. Come if you're angry, come if you're sad, Come if you are despairing. Come if you are hopeful, come if you are playful, come if you are joyous. Come if you don't know what you are or what you believe. Come.
This passage in Isaiah, come have food that will satisfy you, have drink that will save, slake your thirst.
Come be a part of a community.
And surely together we can walk through this hardest part.
During COVID which I'm sure you might remember, Matt was not your favorite moment in life.
Matt really loves people. He really loves people. He loves being with people. All of his energy comes from being with people. So Covid was pretty much the worst possible situation for Matt.
Whereas I, I thrive by myself.
I like people. You're great. But I really enjoy being alone. To think and process and do things.
And I remember walking with Matt through that season and how difficult it was. And I called him a few weeks ago to check in to talk about the loss of our homes and being a pastor in this season of time. And I said to him, matt, this is your disaster because you're with people and with community. And I know that he has been a fan, faithful pastor here, carrying unimaginable loss.
And I'm so grateful for all of you for taking care of my beloved friend and colleague and for taking care of each other.
That is the work of the Kingdom of God.
That is what we're called to do in this hardest part, where so much is uncertain and we don't know how to move forward.
We can't imagine the future.
And I don't know what the future will be. I wish that I could stand here and say it's going to be great.
But what I can stand here and say is that God is faithful.
What I can stand here and say is that there is school going to be light at the end of this.
I had to preach during COVID sometime, and I don't remember this sermon at all. But Christy Jenstad reminded me that I described coming out of COVID not like flipping on a light switch, but like a sunrise. That light fills the whole earth slowly, gradually, and you don't perceive it at first.
I thought about that as I was writing this sermon about our imagination of what the world might be, that it's much the same coming out of this disaster.
There's this moment of sunrise, there's this Easter story that we're coming to in a few weeks.
And I thought about, you know, what are the stories about darkness and things being so overwhelming and so unknown? And of course, I immediately thought of the Lord of the Rings, because that's what you do.
And in the second movie or book, I have read the books and seen the movies multiple times, so there is a scene, spoiler alert, where they have been fighting all night and it seems like all hope is lost. So there is no way that this battle can continue.
And right at the moment where you imagine that they're going to give up in this beautiful cinematic description or this elegant prose by Tolkien, there's this imperceptible light that starts to fill this valley.
And all of a sudden you see one of the members of the Fellowship riding down on a white horse with a staff held that is just illuminating the brightest light Imagina behind him is this flood of horses coming in to save the day.
It's this amazing image of the way that light can break in, the way that something can turn in an unimaginable way.
Now, I don't know that there are going to be amazing horses coming in to rectify everything that's been lost. That's not going to happen. And that's not what I mean.
But God, who is faithful and true to his word, is that light Christ, the light of the world that was imperceptible at first, coming as a baby, came into the world, lived among us. And we serve a savior who knows what it's like to live in this, in between the beautiful and the terrible.
So I invite you this week to work on changing your mind.
One of my favorite practices for that is the prayer of Ignatius of doing this examine prayer and starting to see the world differently, asking God to show you what it is that you're looking at. If you'd like to learn more about that practice, I'm going to invite Cynthia Erickson, because I know this is her daily practice to share that with you and hear these words as our prayer from the end of the chapter that we didn't read.
For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace. The mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song. And the trees of the field shall clap their hands, Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress, instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle. And it shall be to the Lord for memorial for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off, the word of the Lord.
