Readings for Fourth Sunday in Lent | March 14, 2021

• Numbers 21:4-9  
• Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22  
• Ephesians 2:1-10  
• John 3:14-21

In the Air, Rev. Fred Kinsey
In the new season of Queen Sugar, love is in the air! All three Bordelon children have landed in a good place.  Nova and Calvin have finally resolved their issues and settled into a committed relationship.  Charlie has finally decided to let all her rebound relationships go, and concentrate on being there for her son Micah who’s starting college at Xavier, her alma mater.  And Ralph Angel and Darla are getting married! 
 
But, as you might expect, love is not the only thing in the air, this season.  Like all sitcom’s, Queen Sugar is dealing with multiple tensions.  It’s the unseen stuff, in the air, good and bad, that’s always hard to get a handle on.  And now they’re having to deal with the virus of Covid-19, on top of the virus of 1619.  
 
The three grown Bordelon children – Nova, Charlie, and Ralph Angel – were brought together on the family farm, just outside New Orleans, in season one, when their father died unexpectedly.  Only Ralph Angel, the youngest, had stayed on the farm, and had, at least a rudimentary understanding, of the sugar cane business.  Nova the oldest was nearby in New Orleans, a journalist and traditional healer, which was nothing lucrative, not like her younger sister, Charlie, who had built a multi-million dollar company around her husband, an NBA star on the west coast. 
 
But – stuff is in the air – and Charlie’s, handsome but hapless husband, turns out to be sleeping around, and they soon divorce.  Nova writes a book that’s wildly popular, but in it, she exposes all the failings and secrets of her family members, who then, in their anger, shun her.  Ralph Angel, is trying to prove he can manage the farm and be a good father to Blue, his son with Darla, but until this season, he continued to make bad decisions, going in and out of prison, a couple times. 
 
As one of the few African-American families who farm in St Josephine’s Parish, they are always fighting the invisible virus of 1619 too, which, like an unseen aerosol, is floating in the air all around them.  The virus finds a welcome host in the old Anti-Bellum Landry family.  They own the Parish’s only Sugar Mill, and all the black families are forced to pay their oppressive prices.  When Charlie heroically starts a new Sugar Mill for the black farmers, the Landry’s vow to put them out of business.  Charlie is able to defend her mill, at great risk to her financial investment, staving off every attack, until the Landry’s, never able to give up their historic supremacy, clandestinely have it burned to the ground. 
 
The air of Queen Sugar is filled with relationships of, love and sadness, triumph of the spirit and heartbreaking falls, hard won pride and devilish deceit, in every episode of all five seasons.  (A great show created by Ava Du Vernay, on Opra’s OWN network.) 
 
The theme’s in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, struck me in a similar way, with its contrast of, grace and wrath, love and sinfulness.  One of the Pauline Epistles penned from prison, Paul knows what it’s like to suffer unjustly, because you pose a problem to the authorities.  As a follower of the Way, a disciple of Jesus, Paul would push up against the Roman Empire in each new city he preached the gospel in the public square.  Christianity was not yet legal, and its members were seen as trouble-makers, something like Ralph Angel was perceived to be, as a young black man growing up in the south. 
 
Paul’s zeal for preaching the gospel in Hellenized cities, far from Jerusalem, put him up against cultures and people who had little or no knowledge of Judaism or its new offshoot of Jesus followers.  They were pagans, not monotheists.  And that put them at a disadvantage, Paul believed.  They hadn’t yet encountered God’s Law – the laws, like in the 10 Commandments, yes – but what he really meant was that they didn’t even yet know, that they were sinners.  The law hadn’t convicted them in their conscience, yet.  They “were dead through the trespasses and sins” in which they lived every day.  They just didn’t know it. 
 
That’s what was in the air, for them.  And that’s what Paul was addressing, when he said: “1You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3All of us once lived among them… and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.” 
 
Turns out, “the ruler of the power of the air,” that Paul mentions, (I had to look it up!) was the ancient belief that evil spirits lived in the air, one of the four basic elements of, earth, water, air, and fire.  And air, they believed, was the murky, polluted region between the planet earth and the moon in which the four elements are mixed.  Air, is where both, good, and evil, angels dwell.  (NIB, Pheme Perkins; pg. 390) 
 
Something was in the air, alright, the very air they breathed.  And they didn’t know what it was until Paul began to teach them that there was a standard, a law, that God had set up that they were ignorant of – and thus, they were dead in the lives they were leading.  They didn’t even know it – they didn’t know the God who was One.  Jesus had summed up the Law and the Prophets into one standard measure: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.  That was a universal truth, a rule that everyone could learn and agree to live by.  And yet, knowing it, still, we fail.
 
And, says Paul, that was me too.  No one worked harder than me to obey the law, and love the LORD.  And what did I do?  I persecuted the followers of Jesus, helped throw them in jail, and approved the stoning of St. Stephen.  And that’s when the Word of God in Jesus, finally came to me.  It’s not that the law has been abolished, but something else entered the world, God-sent, that lives in the very air we breathe.  For, “God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made me -us- alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…” as Paul wrote to the Ephesians, from his prison cell.
 
This, is the good news, that’s in the air!  The One God, who has created the world and everything in it, loved us even when we were dead, even when we didn’t know it, even when we tried our best and failed, even when we did nothing wrong and were treated as second class citizens or less-than human, even when we don’t like ourselves – even then, God loves us.  This, is the grace of God.  Let it wash over you, and let your former life go – turn around, and follow the Messiah, Christ our Savior, God’s Son, who was sent into the world to reveal God to us. 
 
“The ruler of the power of the air” has been conquered by the power of grace.  The polluted spaces, and invisible viruses, have been met by the mightiest vaccine of them all, the power of the cross, and the gift of the Holy Spirit (the true ruler of the air).  “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, in the same way the son of man had to be lifted up, so that everyone who trusts in him may share in the life of God’s new age.” 
 
Good or bad, can happen to us, whether or not, we, are intentionally, good or bad.  But, in the love and grace of God, we too can live a life of forgiveness and love for our neighbor.  Both powers, are in the air.  And God, in Christ Jesus, has already won the decisive battle. In Lent we learn to turn around and go in the direction of our merciful Savior, knowing that nothing can compare, as Paul says, to “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness, toward” us, that we have found “in Christ Jesus” – our love, that’s in the air!   

Readings for Third Sunday in Lent | March 7, 2021

• Exodus 20:1-17  
• Psalm 19  
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-25  
• John 2:13-22

Direct Action, Rev. Fred Kinsey
On our walk the other day, down Milwaukee Avenue – a beautifully clear day, for a change – Kim suddenly caught sight of the skyline downtown.  Look, she said wryly, it’s Emerald City!  I understood the joke immediately.  We haven’t been downtown for, at least a year now, because of the pandemic.  Haven’t been on the CTA Blue Line, once.  So, it almost seems like the fabled Chicago skyline, is a distant mythological façade.  Is it, really, real?  We hope so, because, it is, something to behold, and with any luck, we’ll visit again, some day soon! 
 
It also symbolizes, I think you could say, an elite, upper-class life-style, and perhaps even, like it or not, the corruption that plagues our city.  Chicago was recently named the #1 corrupt city in our country. Again!  But still, it doesn’t cost anything, to gaze at the magnificence of our, Emerald City! 
 
Something like that was going on in Jesus time, in the city of Jerusalem.  Both, the outstanding beauty of the Second Temple, recently rebuilt by Herod the Great, and also, in the corruption of Jerusalem’s elite: its Roman overlords, and the scribes and other elites who benefited from their patrons.
 
If you visit Jerusalem today, of course – which Kim and I did in 2005 – the beauty which adorns the ancient Temple Mount is the 7th century Islamic, Dome of the Rock, with its shining cylindrical gold crown.  The Second Temple was destroyed by Rome in 70A.D., just a few decades after ‘Jesus was killed, and on the third day rose again,’ so that, only the western wall of the Mount was left standing, or what’s affectionately called today, the Wailing Wall, where Jews, and others, go to pray, converse, and imagine how it once was. 
 
And, it was, magnificent!  It was rebuilt to the detailed biblical specifications in 1 Kings, and at the time of Herod’s rebuilding project, was the largest Temple in the Ancient Near East.  And like the Dome of the Rock, it too was glittery with gold trim, reflecting the sun’s light for miles around, though structurally, in traditional squares and rectangles, instead of the rounds and circles, of the Muslim shrine.  (You’d have to ask Rodrigo what the proper terms are!) 
 
Our gospel reading today has long been called the “Cleansing of the Temple,” as if Jesus had come to purify, and scrub clean, the holy building, from any visible form of money, ever again.  For a long time, churches seriously prohibited holding Bake Sales, based solely on this passage.  But no one – not Jesus, or any of the pilgrims coming to the Passover festival from around the known world wherever Jews lived – was scandalized that you had to convert your local currency into the Temple’s currency, in order to buy your sacrificial animal or jug of oil.  Money in the Temple was not the problem.  Animals were not the problem.  Jesus was after something much deeper and more fundamental.  It wasn’t a Cleansing of the Temple.  It was a Symbolic Direct Action, on the Temple!
 
The first clue we get, is Jesus’ deliberate reconnaissance, the day before.  If you backup 4 verses from our text today, and read verse 11, you notice Jesus did what all good organizers do in preparation for a direct action.  They scout out the building, plaza, or Temple where you’re planning it, and get the lay of the land.  When the right people, or wrong people, are around, who controls the doors, what’s considered public, and what’s private, etc.  Verse 11 says, “Then Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.” 
 
Jesus scoped it out!  He looked around, at ‘everything,’ says Mark.  Then, because the sun would be setting soon, he went to Mary and Martha’s home in the nearby suburb of Bethany, with the disciples. 
 
!Not sure how well Jesus slept that night, but the next day, he gathered the disciples and headed right back, to the ‘Emerald City.’  They snacked on figs on the way, and ‘immediately’ upon entering the Temple he began to enact his well-constructed, plan, designed to shock and gain attention, and to show who was in control (God).  No people or animals were harmed in this active non-violent, Symbolic Direct Action. 
 
Jesus had two immediate targets: the changers of money who sat at their tables, or “banks,” and symbolically represented the larger banking industry that was profiting off, the mostly poor pilgrims.  And, the “sellers of doves,” the sacrificial animals that the pilgrims were required to buy to make an offering. 
 
Jesus had already made clear, back in Galilee, that he was opposed to the exploitation of the poor, lepers, and women, by the religious leaders.  Now, arriving on their territory in Jerusalem, at the heart of the cultic system, Jesus demonstrates in protest form, that he is serious, that God is demanding change. 
 
Mark says, “he drives out,” the exchangers of money and the sellers of doves, using the exact same word, ‘drive out,’ as Jesus uses when sending the demons out of people in his exorcisms.  This, is the kind of wholesale cleaning Jesus did!  And then he turned upside down, their tables and chairs.  For this, Mahatma Gandhi once said, “[Jesus] was the most active resister known, perhaps, to history. His was non-violence par excellence.” (Gandhi, Non Violence in Peace and War, Volume I, p. 16)
 
I remember the direct action we planned, against Illinois’ richest citizen, at his building in downtown Chicago, presumptuously called, the Citadel.  He was the #1 donor to Bruce Rainer’s campaign, that helped elect him.  And when Gov. Rauner was refusing to sign a state budget, an unprecedented impasse that lasted over 2 years, our action, with the support of hundreds of local leaders, shut down his idolatrous Citadel, in the middle of the business day. 
 
The media was on hand to capture the dramatic banners and signs, pleading for a corrupt Governor to sign a budget and end the suffering of the poorest of the poor, in Chicago and the state of Illinois.  Police arrived in minutes, but it took a long time to cut us out of the PVC pipes linking the 5 of us together, who had agreed to be taken to jail, giving the rest of the team outside ample time to get the message out.  A direct action that, planned over some weeks, helped end the cynical budget impasse.  Trudy and Michael might remember, being part of this action, too! 
 
When Jesus, literally, and symbolically, turned the tables, Mark says, “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.”  That is, Jesus shut it down, so that, like in every good action, he could give a defiant speech.  Jesus probably went on for some time, but according to Mark, the heart of it was about overturning the corruption of the whole temple system, which 1) was extracting wealth from the poor, to which he used the words of prophet Jeremiah against them, “you have made it a den of robbers.’  But 2) mainly, this temple is supposed to be, “a house of prayer for all nations,” Jesus insisted, now quoting Isaiah, and that the temple was made for growing the movement of believers, and enhancing the lives of people from near and far that loved their Creator, demonstrated by all the pilgrims flooding Jerusalem. 
 
Ideally, the temple was like a Tree of Life, with branches to the sky, and roots entwined throughout the earth, a symbol of God’s life-giving grace for all, on earth, as it is in the heavens.  All the pilgrims coming to this Passover festival, came to worship their God, who was a God of promise, deliverance and redemption, and who honored them back. 
 
Jesus’ Direct Action plan was Symbolic of what he wanted to accomplish with his whole life.  He was clear that he was not taking over the Temple on this day for more than a few hours.  There were temple guards, as he knew, and he was not aiming for a military coup.  But he was serving notice that, in the tradition and warning of the prophet Jeremiah, the Temple would be “destroyed” if its leaders did not repent from their idolatrous ways. 
 
And if they didn’t, Jesus was offering himself as a replacement for the temple.  It was more explicit in the later edition of the gospel of John.  There, the temple leaders ask for a sign, of his sending out the sellers and overturning the tables, and Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  And John adds, “he was speaking of the temple of his body.” 
 
But, where are we to understand that the temple of Jesus body is today, after Jesus rose, and now sits at the right hand of the Father?  As Ched Myers says, “The new site [of the temple] is neither geographical nor institutional but ethical; the difficult but imperative practice of mutual forgiveness within the community [is the new site]… The community becomes truly the ‘priesthood of all believers,’ the place of prayer ‘for all peoples.’” 
 
Jesus’ courageous, Symbolic Direct Action, which led to the giving of his life, was orchestrated perfectly, by Jesus – for us.  And now, we, all these centuries later, are the direct beneficiaries of his legacy of justice and love.  We hold his gift gracefully in our hands, literally, and symbolically, in the bread we receive each Sunday, along with his words, ‘the body of Christ, given for you.’  
 
In this way, we are now empowered, to organize, grow followers, and build a city of God, beyond exploitation, oppression, and exclusion, by which, as baptized believers, the power of the Holy Spirit may wash and cleanse the temple of our bodies daily, that God’s kingdom may be revealed. 

Readings for the Second Sunday in Lent | Feb 28, 2021

• Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16  
• Psalm 22:23-31  
• Romans 4:13-25  
• Mark 8:31-38 or Mark 9:2-9

"Quite Openly," Rev. Fred Kinsey
They said it quite openly – all over the internet.  Be there, January 6th in Washington D.C.  It’s going to be wild!  The Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, Jericho Wall, Q-Anon, and numerous state militia groups.  They weren’t shy!  The FBI had been following them, and the press reporting on them.  It was said quite openly ahead of time.  It was a lot like the white supremacist Militia that tried to lynch Michigan’s Governor, quite openly, back in October.  In fact, the FBI had been tracking domestic terrorism on social media since the beginning of the year, in 2020, and noting its rise.  It was all done quite openly, and was not a secret. 
 
They brought zip-ties, (plastic handcuffs), and dressed in military gear.  But, they were surprised when they couldn’t find any of the Representatives or Senators in the Capitol, who had started to certify the votes of the Electoral College, just before they arrived.  Little did they know how close they were to apprehending their targets, as they wandered the halls.  Stop the Steal, had been the cry, and someone set-up a noose on a platform, like a good-olde lynching, still, not yet, illegal, in the U.S.  Two bombs were planted nearby.   
 
Back in the summertime, police were deployed in overwhelming numbers, dressed in riot gear, backed up by tanks, just to protect the Lincoln Memorial from peaceful BLM protestors – Protestors who demanded change and reform from within the system. 
 
The domestic terrorist groups that the FBI were tracking all year were advocating overthrowing our government, quite openly.  Not asking for justice-for-all, but threatening a successionist take over.  But even when they arrived in large numbers, even when the U.S. President fired them up and clarified their target, even then – because they looked like the authorities, no one seemed alarmed – Ironically, though they saw them coming, they couldn’t imagine there would be trouble.  When the window-smashing, bear-spraying Insurrectionists breached the Capitol, some Guards were talking casually, with those who had just broken the law.  Others were seen gently escorting such rioters out, hands full of Congressional papers and property.  Can you imagine if that was BLM!
 
What’s wrong with this picture? 
 
It’s a picture Jesus would have been familiar with, and indeed was, in our Gospel reading today.  31“Jesus began to teach [his disciples] that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”
 
Jesus had been teaching his disciples, all along the road on their journey across Galilee, until this point.  Anybody who was following, would have had a pretty good idea what he was talking about.  But, to be fair, this is the first time he says it in those words, quite so openly. 
 
This was right after Jesus had polled his disciples, asking, who do you say that I am?  And Peter answered, you are the Messiah, which set off a heated discussion, a truly apocalyptic struggle, between Jesus and Peter.  Jesus – though he was the Messiah – asked his disciples to keep it a secret, “sternly ordering them not to tell anyone about him.”  Jesus, of course, had already attracted the attention of the authorities, for his ministry of preaching and healing, and announcing the kingdom, and had been threatened once, early on, with a kind of lynching, a death threat by the most popular party in the country (Pharisees; Mk. 3:6). 
 
That’s when Jesus describes to them the new kind of Messiah he is, just to his disciples for now, ‘on the way,’ at this mid-point in his ministry.  And Jesus uses the same title the prophet Daniel had, calling himself the Human One, and predicts this means he must suffer and die, to expose the truth about this world.  This is not the triumphalist return, of political king-making, ala King David, everyone envisioned – Peter included – but rather, a divine inversion of the corrupt human-made kingdoms of this world, a transformation into God’s kingdom and realm, creating truth and love in every heart and institution.  This is what Jesus said, ‘quite openly’ to the disciples.  The opposite of a wild takeover, it was a subversion of violence, that would enable the justice of God to shine its light on earth, as it is in heaven. 
 
But Peter rebukes him, when he hears that Jesus must suffer and die.  Peter was on the side of, a triumphal Messiah, like David, as most everyone was.  Why not heal, teach, AND attack and overthrow their Roman oppressors? 
 
But Jesus quickly pulls Peter aside and rebukes him!  “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 
 
Rene Girard, explains well how Peter is a threat to Jesus, and his mission as God’s Son, the Messiah, and how we are and can be, as humans, at least to the extent that we are part of the worldly powers:
Peter is a good example [says Girard]. When Jesus first announces that he will suffer at the hands of the people, Peter is scandalized. His ideal is the same as ours, worldly success, and he tries to instill it into his master. He turns his own desire into a model that Jesus should imitate. This is how Satan operates, of course. Hence the famous words: “Move behind me Satan, because you are a scandal to me.” If the scandalized disciple had succeeded in [mimetically] transmitting his own [mimetic] desire to his master, he would have scandalized Jesus straight out of his divine mission.
 
So, having retaken his authority back, from Peter, Jesus then calls the crowds, along with his disciples, to teach them all about being part of his movement, and becoming a follower.  Just as I must take up my own cross, you must take up your cross… ‘for what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?  Indeed, what can you give in return for your life?’ 
 
In being candid, and quite open about what kind of Messiah Jesus was, he risked losing his following.  He came quite close that day in Caesrea Phillipi with Peter and the disciples.  It was a spiritual battle, and for Jesus, as the Messiah, there could be no compromising with the powers of evil, and ruler of this world.  It was the battle he was waging throughout his ministry, and for which, to win the war, he came to give his life for. 
 
One of his sharpest weapons in such battles, was his Word.  His Word was truth, but as we saw, it created scandal in those who were possessed by their own human desires for power and control.  And so, Jesus didn’t start in Jerusalem with his spiritual opponents directly, but started in Galilee, where he could gather followers and believers, first.  Speaking the truth, the Word of God, out in the open, will attract some evil stuff!  Jesus knew that.  And that’s what we see in this passage, mid-way in Mark’s gospel.  Even his closest most passionate disciple, Peter, almost turned against him, when Jesus said quite openly, that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, be rejected, and be killed. 
 
When BLM led protests over the murder of George Floyd last summer, this time they weren’t quite as alone or so easily exploited.  Lots of white folks joined in, exceeding even the scale of the 60’s civil rights movement.  Quite openly, America was saying enough, they could see the truth of racism, and they were now going to be part of telling the truth and not backing down.  They were, many of them for the first time, going to rebuke the powers aligned against them. 
 
Q-Anon, Proud Boys, Militias, etc. are organizing from un-truth, from wild conspiracies.  But their backlash, their reasons for Insurrection, are real.  They are opposed to the now, open truth, that white supremacy must be rebuked and made to stand down.  They will try to cloak it, in any, and every kind, of wild conspiracy and half-truth.  But they are reacting to, the spiritual truth, which is now quite open, that we are moving toward a new creation, a multi-racial society, marked by the fact that, people of color are becoming the majority, and the Caste system that has ruled since 1619, is slowly, but surely, being exposed and renounced. 
 
As Christians we have a stake in this spiritual battle.  We have no doubt that the war will be won, by Christ, who has risen from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father.  But Jesus calls us to live as if the realm of God is already here.  We have fought and lost many battles, back and forth, since Jesus spoke quite openly about who he was.  And the backlash to the truth is enormous.  But we know God sees no division, black, white, and brown, in this created order.  And despite the danger, Jesus, God’s chosen Child, spoke and worked openly on our behalf to include the meek and humble, the poor and outcast – to level the playing field, bringing down the mighty and lifting up the down-trodden. 
 
Every day, as followers of Jesus, we are in a battle with the powers of this world, that come disguised, often looking just like us.  This moment in time, in our history as a country, seems closer to winning, or losing, something important, more than ever. At stake, at the heart of the matter, is the battle for the truth.  That God, in the life and death of Christ Jesus, is the only realm, that can pull us forward, toward justice and love. 
 
And so, we know that, in the kingdom and realm of God, there is no room for white supremacy.  Jesus was willing to suffer and die, to get this truth out.  He said it quite openly.  And after three days, he rose again – where he sits at the right hand of God, now, and forever.  

Readings for Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 24, 2021

• Jonah 3:1-5, 10  
• Psalm 62:5-12  
• 1 Corinthians 7:29-31  
• Mark 1:14-20

"Discipleship Adventure," Rev. Fred Kinsey
Now, after John the Baptist was arrested by Herod and put into prison in Jerusalem, a vacuum of liberating-leadership opened up in Israel.  Herod didn’t want to make a martyr out of John by executing him for his preaching in the wilderness, and his ministry of getting people ready for the new Israel, washed and baptized in the Jordan River.  But later, that’s exactly what he did.  That is, Herod would later order the beheading, of John the Baptist, after his wild Bacchanalia birthday party, where the daughter of Herodias danced for him, and he promised her anything she wanted from his kingdom, before all his elite guests, that evening. But for now, Herod had things under control – sort of.
 
Little did Herod know that 80 miles north in Capernaum, after the arrest of John, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming ‘good news,’ to fill the vacuum.  No one but the Emperor had ever used that term, “euangelion” or ‘good news’ before, except the Emperor.  For him it was commonplace.  “Good News,” the emperor has conquered France.  “Good News,” the emperor announces peace will prevail in the whole Roman Empire – that it had mercilessly conquered.  “Good News,” the emperor announces that Herod the Great shall rule over Israel. 
 
Those are the kinds of Good News, “euangelion” announcements, that were expected.  And that’s the scene upon which Jesus arrives, announcing that, the time has been fulfilled, and the kingdom and realm of God has come very near, inviting people to turn around from the direction they were going, and to place their radical trust, with all their being, in the Good News of God, the “euangelion” that Jesus brings. 
 
And, that the realm of God, is close at hand –has come very near in Jesus– is also a unique expression in the New Testament – meaning something like God’s profound imminence, even liminality. (Myers, p.131)  But that meaning, will only be revealed, as the gospel story progresses, and as the signature teaching, indeed, the new school of Jesus, is unveiled. 
 
So, instead, we find ourselves suddenly back in the mundane world of the first 4 disciples, Peter and Andrew, James and John, two pairs of brothers who are fishing on Lake Galilee.  Mark is keenly aware of the Messianic expectations that live and move and have their being, in 1st century Palestine, and also their convergence in a very ‘triumphant nationalism,’ because, as his Gospel shows, Jesus will be careful to steer his disciples away from any organized holy war or insurrection, which can grow from that kind of news – the most famous example being another Galilean, Judas, a Zealot, who in the year 6, when Jesus was maybe 10 years old, organized much of northern Israel to refuse to take part in the Roman Census, and in an act of domestic terrorism, even burned down Jewish homes and requisitioned their cattle, if they didn’t comply. 
 
So when Jesus enters Galilee, as Mark says, and announces his ‘good news,’ it is also aimed at the old order, and ruling elite – but purposefully, to turn it around, using a kind of active non-violence, to reorient his followers toward the realm of God. 
 
So, Jesus turns first to his home turf in Galilee, especially the fishing industry around the Sea of Galilee – also appropriately named, the Sea of Tiberius, after the Emperor.  Afterall, the lucrative fishing business, and thus the lake itself, is occupied by Rome.  The Emperor owns the Sea, and all the trade that takes place there. 
 
And just like we have sport fishing licenses for fishing now-a-days, they had licenses too.  But their licenses were tailored towards family-based consortiums of fishers.  This was Rome’s way of encouraging the success of the fishing industry, but of course, for their own benefit; a business which was full of long, long hours, not only catching fish, but mending the nets and boats, processing the fish, and selling it on the market.  And Rome heavily taxed the profits at every point along the way.  Family and economy were intricately woven in one socio-political system, whereby the fishers were locked into a subservient impoverishment by the corrupted Jerusalem leaders, and the local magistrates of Herod, they were in league with. 
 
So, the Gospel Good News that Jesus brought to the fishers on Lake Tiberius, and to his first four disciples, was that they were being released from this dead-end, no-way-out, oppression.  Their lives finally had a measure of hope, as they turned to go in a new direction, as followers of Jesus, to be baptized and reborn in the one who was creating a new community. 
 
The first pair of brothers, Simon and Andrew were casting a net from the shore as Jesus happened by.  Jesus bids them, follow me and I will make you fish for people.  And they don’t just ‘leave’ their nets, but as the Greek word means, they “released, or let go,” their nets.  As John Petty says, “they ‘let go’ of their economic livelihood, and ‘released’ their participation in the current market system.” 
 
And barely a few steps down the shoreline Jesus saw James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were mending their nets in their boat and he called them too.  James and John released themselves, from their family, says Mark, and from the business altogether.  They let go of their prescribed narrow hopeless existence and trusted their whole selves to Jesus, repenting of the old, and signing up for a new family, the kingdom and realm of God, which had appeared in the man from Nazareth. 
 
This was good news of a different sort.  Not the Good News of a far-away Emperor’s proclamation, that only resulted in more taxes, poverty, and dehumanization, but the Good News that had come very near in the words of Jesus, addressed to them and their situation, that illuminated the truth, and led to a new way of life, a new system of liberation and love. 
 
This was the good news, of a whole new community that Jesus was forming; blessings for those who were meek and humble and poor.  They too would be freed to dine as God’s royalty at the banqueting table Jesus offered.  Fishers and farmers, tax collectors and prostitutes, rich and poor, men and women, and eventually, Jew and Gentile, would all dine together in this new community of love and equity.
 
They didn’t know that Jesus would also have to be arrested, like John was, and that he would also have to die, and then, that they – the Disciples, and all followers – would be called on to fill the vacuum, left by the Ascension of Jesus.  But his death would also be the final and the ultimate eschatological revealing of God’s desire for them, and the world he came to save. 
 
Jesus’ death, was accompanied by the Good News, of his Rising.  Being sacrificed and scape-goat-ed, for the economy of the kingdom of Rome, was transformed into self-sacrifice for, and citizenship in, the new community inaugurated by Jesus.  Justice and love were God’s gracious gifts of the kingdom, that were ‘imminent’ in Christ’s banqueting table of Jubilee and equity for all, and which broke through the old systems of Rome’s enslavement, and death-dealing-Good-News, announcements.  
 
The 12 Disciples were only the beginning of this new University of wisdom.  Every follower of Jesus, to this day, enrolls in this new and different kind of school.  Not like our schools, with a set curriculum, and day of graduation.  But as Ched Myers says, “The call of Jesus, …is absolute, disrupting the lives of potential recruits, promising them only a ‘school’ from which there is no graduation… [and] a discipleship adventure!”  (Binding the Strong Man, p. 133)
 
The call of Jesus, is never to individuals alone, but always to all who are invited to enroll in this school of followers who are forming the new community, Jesus inaugurated.  A community of justice, hope, and love.  A community that has turned away from an economy of enslavement, inequality, and insurrection, and sits down together at the same banqueting table that has no graduation, only more lessons of life, in the kingdom and realm of God. 
 
This is the community we are called to form together at Unity, and with our neighbors in the world.  Let us leave our boats on the lakeshore, and come and follow.  

Readings for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, Nov. 15, 2020

• Judges 4:1-7 and Psalm 90:1-8
• 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11  
• Matthew 25:14-30

Harsh Master & Jesus, by Rev. Fred Kinsey
This is the last of the parables Jesus tells, before the big reveal, his stunning conclusion, there in Jerusalem, just before Holy Week is about to start.  Of course, that’s out of cinque for the seasons of our Church Year.  We’re not presently, in the midst of Lent!  But, it does fit with the theme of the end times we are about to enter, in the season of Advent, in two weeks.
 
The stunning conclusion, by-the-way, will come next week – to put it in context – on Christ the King Sunday, with the story of the Son of Man, Jesus, who comes in all his glory saying, “Whoever did it to the least of these – the hungry, the thirsty, the naked – did it unto me.”  Christ is the one who suffers along with the outcasts, the downtrodden, all the marginalized of this world.  Our calling is to address this disparity, that of the favored few in the center of society vs. the vast majority of those left out on the margins.
 
That Christ came to save us from our sin, and the structures of sin that create these disparities, so that the kingdom and will of God, may dawn ‘on earth, as it is in heaven;’ that Christ the Bride, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, prepared for her husband, that is, for us, may come to pass – Jesus came to save us, not just spiritually, but in every facet of our lives: physical, mental, economic, social, and political. 
 
So, in this last parable before the big reveal – in our parable today – we see the disparity of Luther’s Two Kingdoms, in this story of a rich landowner, a point 1 percenter (0.1%).  He’s about to go off to do business with other multi-nationals, wherever they met in those days.  Perhaps Caesarea Philippi, in northern Israel, the playground of the rich and famous that Herod’s son, Philip built in honor of Caesar Augustus.  It was a hotbed of paganism, and a swanky retreat of the privileged. 
 
But this landowner was gone a long time, so perhaps he went much farther: to Babylon in the east, or Rome itself in the west?  He would have gone off to make connections with those who could further enrich his estate.  But before leaving, he has this brilliant idea to give his holdings to his slaves, to see what they can do for him, while he’s away. 
 
To one he gives 5 talents, to another 2 talents, and to the third, one talent.  A talent, in the Gospels, doesn’t have anything to do with our English use of the word as an ability, or gift we have.  But Talent is the largest portion of currency in the Near East that there is, equal to maybe 10 years of wages, a huge amount for them.  When the Master finally returns from his business trip, he is eager to settle accounts with them.  And he lines them up, so they can come one at a time before him, to make a report. 
 
We, the reader, already know what they have done with the Talents, but not how the Master will respond.  So, the one who was given the equivalent of 50 years of wages, the 5 Talents, brought 5 more, he had traded for, doubling the Master’s money.  And the one who was given 20 years wages, did the same, making 2 more Talents.  And the Master commends them lustily, ‘well done, good and trustworthy slaves, you have been trustworthy in a few things, now I will put you in charge of bigger things, so you can make more money for me.  You have brought me great joy – come and join me in my “earthly kingdom.” 
 
Then the lowly one who had only received one Talent came forward, with no little fear and trembling.  He had a different business plan.  But he summoned up all the courage he could muster, to (in all honesty) tell his Master the truth:  ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, procuring your wealth off the backs of others, unaccustomed as you are to the hard work of farming or carpentry; 25so I admit I was afraid, and I decided to go and hide your talent in the ground for safe keeping.  So then, here it is, I return it to you intact, every last penny.’ 
 
You knew! said the Master, that I profited off of others without putting in an honest day’s work, as you say!  Did you?!  Well then, why didn’t you do likewise and put it in the stock market and make me a bundle?!  You’re just like all the other low life’s who can’t lift themselves up by their bootstraps.  I’m going to send you back to the outer darkness from which you came. 
 
Give his one Talent to the richest slave, said the Master.  For the rich shall be richer, and the poor shall be poorer! 
 
And so, what’s most upsetting in the parable of the greedy landowner and his laize faire, libertarian values, is the picture of the third slave, the one fearful of this Master, the one who didn’t ‘get it’ how he was supposed to invest his Talent, and how easy it is, if you were to just deposit it in the bank and gain some interest – probably because Usury was against the Levitical laws.  But, it’s difficult to digest, mostly because this is the character that Jesus’ disciples would have identified with!  Not with the favored other two.  The Disciples were relative beggars, having left family and spouse, to follow Jesus, and depend on the kindness of strangers. 
 
From the very beginning of his gospel, Matthew has plainly shown how Jesus is a part of the marginalized, the 99% of society that God sent him to name blessed.  Jesus was born in a barn, raised in poor Podunk Nazareth, wandered as an itinerant preacher and healer, and reached out to lepers and prostitutes, fishers and tax collectors.  He was faithful to his religious traditions, but he also spoke (a heavenly) truth to power, against the worldly corruption in high places in Jerusalem, both to rulers in his own Hebrew house, and to the Roman overlords. 
 
Jesus did not subscribe to the kingdom of this world that reinforced the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.  Neither did he come to claim power by a military coup, though many of his followers, awaiting a Davidic Messiah, apparently expected him to. 
 
Jesus came to fulfill God’s Third Way, the kingdom of heaven, as Matthew called it, the realm of God, already alive, here amongst us.  He came to suffer the violence of those rulers, who have rigged the system to profit off the backs of subsistence working class families, and who falsely portray it as sacred and ordained by God, though it is only an earthly kingdom.  And he came to go all the way to the cross to reveal how unjust that violence is, distorting the created goodness God intends for all to enjoy as a gift, and hold responsibility for. 
 
How are we called to respond to this kingdom imperative, amidst a world of terror, and terribly unfair violence, and repression?  How do we follow in Jesus footsteps and become disciples? 
 
Jesus didn’t just suffer violence as some kind of nice guy, or 99lb. weakling who didn’t like to fight.  He “decided” to suffer – made the conscious decision to endure, even death on a cross, to reveal, and live-out, and make manifest like never before, the futility and unjust way that the whole world was living, and that he would give up his life, to be God’s change factor, once and for all! 
 
Paul Nuechterlein thinks this illustrates what might be the most important verse in Matthew’s whole gospel, 11:12: “where Jesus straightforwardly tells us that the kingdom of heaven is revealed in choosing to suffer violence, while human regimes are only happy to take it by force.” 
 
The Disciples didn’t want Jesus to go through with the Passion.  They were still caught up in the binary choice of who would rule the kingdoms of this world – them or us.  But Jesus shows us a Third Way, the way that makes a conscious decision, for us, a collective decision, to embody God’s realm, as Jesus’ disciples, to not continue to perpetuate the cycle of violence, that always leads to another regime of injustice; Jesus’ way of suffering violence, that ushers in the reign of God on earth, as it is in heaven. 
 
We see how St. Paul did this by starting new communities, new house churches in Jesus’ name, all across the Roman Empire. 
 
Today, we are one of those communities, called to live the ethic of love for one’s neighbor, an ethic of ‘costly grace,’ (as Bonhoeffer said,) speaking God’s truth to earthly powers, yet ready to suffer the consequences.  For when they call us wicked and lazy, to use the harsh Master’s language, we know we are close to the big reveal!  Because the truth is, if anyone was wicked, it was the greedy landowner; and if anyone was lazy, it was the Master who could take off as much time as he wished, on the backs of his slaves, to venture out to enrich his earthly fortune. 
 
Here then, we see that God is at work in the third slave, exposing the Master as a fraudulent Messiah.  We too must reject the worldly kingdom of unjust vengeance.  But we don’t have to be fearful either, like the third slave was.  For we now know, on this side of the cross, that following Jesus, no matter how opposed that makes us to the world-as-it-is, it is our sacred journey that leads to true joy, and a fulfillment of God’s kingdom and realm that we are called to.   
 
In these dark times, the need for true disciples and followers is greater than ever.  Let us be followers of Jesus, that we may reveal the kingdom and realm of God.  

Readings for All Saints Sunday, November 1, 2020

• Revelation 7:9-17 and Psalm 34:1-10, 22  
• 1 John 3:1-3  
• Matthew 5:1-12

The Crossroads, Rev. Fred Kinsey

​“… Blessing and glory and wisdom
 and thanksgiving and honor
 and power and might
 be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
 
That’s the song being sung in the new age, the age that is already coming, where all the redeemed, that God names, have assembled before the Lamb and the Shepherd, as envisioned by John. 
 
We sing it in our ELW as the Hymn of Praise: This is the Feast of Victory for Our God! 
 
It was the vision John had! that was a reversal of the tribulation, so many believers were living at the turn of the 1st Century, especially under Emperor Nero, a time of persecution for the radiant and aspiring movement of Jesus followers, who were starting to gather as worshiping communities all across the Roman empire, before they were legal. 
 
Today, on this All Saints Day, we remember and celebrate, in song and acclamation, in our liturgy and in our hearts, all the saints who have gone before us, and especially those closest to our hearts, our loved ones and family members. 
 
In Revelation, John envisioned a universal choir of people “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne” of God “a great multitude that no one could count!”  Your loved one is included!  God’s grace effects a big yes to all the sinners of this earthly kingdom, we know not how or why, but only that it is so, because God is God.  Now, in this age, Jesus bids us enter by the narrow gate.  Then, in the age that the Lamb has ushered in, God is welcoming everyone from everywhere.  Go figure!  John’s vision is beyond our comprehension.  But by faith, we confidently turn ourselves over to the love and forgiveness of Jesus’ example, that we too might be an example, for our neighbor. 
 
This blessed-conundrum, is not unknown to us, but seems to have come to some kind of a head, this week.  We are at a crossroads as a nation, even as we celebrate All Saints Day, near the end of our Church Season – celebrating with joyful-tears, and anxious-hopefulness. 
 
The election, this week, will define who we are as a country.  Are we a nation of inclusive values, desiring to continue to overcome our early days of white male privilege?  Do we allow people of every race and language to vote and participate in our democracy?  Do we hold one another accountable, when the meek, and the merciful, and the poor, are abused, made fun of, and demonized?  Do we welcome the stranger, the refugee and immigrant, and come to their aid? 
 
On this All Saints, as the church year comes to an end this month, we hear from one of Jesus’ most universal and challenging teachings, the Sermon on the Mount, and specifically, the Beatitudes, or blessings.  Like the Revelation to John, in the gospel, Jesus envisions a world in which all believers no longer suffer a meaningless life, but the world order is reversed.  God’s kingdom is beginning even now in the words and deeds, in the preaching and healing, of Jesus, where the marginalized are blessed, as recipients of God’s kingdom:
         3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
  4“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
  5“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
  6“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
  7“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
  8“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
  9“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
  10“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

American Lutherans have never been known to especially gravitate to this passage.  We have often rationalized, avoided or shied away from its demands and difficult sayings.  But one Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, made it a center piece of his teaching on the Christian community.  In his conclusion to the Beatitudes in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, he said:
"Having reached the end of the beatitudes, we naturally ask if there is any place o[n] this earth for the community which they describe. Clearly, there is one place, and only one, and that is where the poorest, meekest, and most sorely tried of all [humans] is to be found – on the cross at Golgotha. The fellowship of the beatitudes is the fellowship of the Crucified. With him it has lost all, and with him it has found all. From the cross there comes the call ‘blessed, blessed.'”
 
Bonhoeffer, of course, found all and lost all, in Christ.  His earthly battle, even as he stayed true to his faith, was with the Nazi regime.  He could not run away from the call of the cross, and the fellowship of the beatitudes.  He tried rallying the faithful as a leader of the Confessing Church, but many capitulated.  He tried escaping to the United States, but couldn’t remain there with a clear conscience.  Back in Berlin, he aided the secret resistance, and was arrested, even as he wrote this book. 
 
Bonhoeffer met his crossroads, understandably, with great anxiety, but ultimately with great courage.  He preached and taught a costly grace, and lived it too – even by giving his life. 
 
Bonhoeffer knew the Christ of John’s Revelation who was both Lamb and Shepherd.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, gives his life for the sake of the world, the lamb that was slaughtered at the Passover, sacrificed at the high feast, that we, may wash our baptismal robes and make them white in his blood, only to witness Christ lifted up to the right hand of God, exalted and reigning as our king, like king David, the Shepherd who leads us into green pastures, and provides a kin-dom of peace and justice. 
 
Jesus the Christ, is our Lamb, and our Shepherd. 
 
And we are at a crossroads.  Who we choose on Tuesday – and elect, once all the votes are counted – will determine who we are as a country, for a long time to come. 
 
It will not change our faith, or our God, who reigns already from the throne, who our loved ones, we will name, know, worship and praise.  But for us here below, it will make for a crossroads in how we are called to live out our faith.  The cost of our discipleship will likely take on different paths, different shapes, perhaps costlier, choices. 
 
So let us rest in the promise, that, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” who is also our Shepherd, where one day we will join the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”  Let us, the meek and the poor, and all the blessed, be joyful that we have done everything that has been asked of us, at this, and every crossroads of our lives.  Let us rejoice and sing with all the saints!
Alleluia!  Amen! 

Readings for St Francis of Assisi Commemoration Day, October 4, 2020
Genesis 2:18-25 ‘Animals created as partners’
Psalm 148 ‘All creatures praise the Lord’
Revelation 5:11-14
Matthew 6:25-29 ‘How God has made creation beautiful’

Threads of Life, Rev. Fred Kinsey
Why did he do it?  Francis of Assisi had everything.  He was born into wealth and privilege.  His father was a very successful merchant of cloth, who married a woman from a wealthy family from France.  They had made sure Francis was educated at all the best schools, and groomed him to become a leading man in Assisi, to carry on the family business, and do even better than his parents.  But none of that was to be. 
 
How did this heir to a family fortune, end up changing the world, as creator of an Order, based on vows of poverty?  Did it start with the kiss of a ravaged leper’s hand, when giving him his cloak just didn’t seem like enough?  Or perhaps it started before that, when Francis was captured as a prisoner of war? 
 
Francis was about 19 or 20 when he joined the battle of his home town, Assisi, against a neighboring city, Perugia.  But despite the exuberance of valor, and the protection of his armor, Francis was captured and spent nearly a year, helplessly waiting, until ransom would finally arrive.  Then in his release, a debilitating fever overwhelmed him.  He received no warriors’ welcome back home, only convalescence.  Like soldiers who miss the danger and risk of war, Francis intended to enlist again as soon as he recovered.  But his ambitions of knighthood were reoriented unexpectedly by a vision or dream, which bid him to return to Assisi and await a ‘call’ to a new kind of knighthood.  Very mysterious!  But Francis took it deadly serious.  Was this what transformed him?
 
As Francis awaited the call, he didn’t do nothing!  He dedicated himself to solitude and prayer.  He searched all the way to Rome, where outside the Vatican he experienced the poverty of beggars, and even though he had feared lepers, he was moved to minister to one, giving alms and kissing his hand.
 
Or was it, as his biographer claimed, the incident at the ruined chapel of San Damiano, just outside the gate of Assisi?  There Francis heard the crucifix above the altar command him: “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see, is well-nigh in ruins?” 
 
So, was this it?  Was this his new knighthood?  Whether Francis knew it or not, he was slowly but surely becoming alienated from his upbringing, his family, and the wealth of the kingdom of this world.  This pleasure-loving cloth merchant’s son, was becoming disoriented from all he had been taught, and reoriented in his understanding of the ‘threads’ that hold together the basic goods of life.
 
At first, thinking he was supposed to physically rebuild the old chapel, Francis started selling off his family’s warehouse of woven goods to finance the project – before his father called the cops on him!  And taken to trial before the bishop in the public marketplace, Francis admitted this expropriation of goods, and promptly returned his father’s money.  But then, in front of the whole town, he started stripping off the rich robes, the fine threads of a privileged cloth merchant’s son he wore, handed them to his dad, and, stark naked before the townspeople claimed, “Hitherto I have called you father on earth; but now I say, “our Father, who art in heaven.”  In shock, the bishop hastily covered Francis with a peasant’s smock. 
 
In time, Francis would add only a cross to make the transformation complete.  As a person of privilege, Francis had taken up the cross, that the poor and powerless already carry, and now stood with them utterly dependent in their prayer for “daily bread,” deliverance, and resurrection joy.  His renouncing of human wealth and power, and his new open-air lifestyle, first attracted ridicule, but gradually other young men and women (Clare of Assisi) also became radicalized, and the Franciscan, and Poor Clare movements, were born.
 
As a deacon of the church, Francis embraced material poverty as the way of Christ toward a rich and sacramental connection to all living things.  This included the rejection of violence as an offense against the Gospel’s command to love – antithetical to the reverence and wonder, due all living things, as a reflection of their Creator’s love.  The Orders of Francis and Clare kept to this simple rule of love for all creation, but had an especially tender heart, for all things dependent on God’s love and care, and our reflection of that love and care, in service to these creatures, in the web of all life.
 
I wonder if Francis’ realization of his essential nakedness, and his deliberate embrace of dependence on God as the path to joy, is at the heart of his sacramental awareness of the gift of all the small creatures, so that he might call them sisters and brothers?  Today, we bring our animals, these siblings we love, to be blessed, in honor of St. Francis, recognizing in them, and in their companionship, a loyal love and a tender dependence on us, that puts us in mind of our life in God.
 
In our Gospel, Jesus says, 26Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 
 
In this, Jesus encourages and teaches his followers to not lose heart, in our path of discipleship.  This was the task of the Franciscans who took up a life of poverty, so that the rest of us could learn the gospel message and become followers too. 
 
I am reminded of that popular image of St Francis, the statues found in gardens everywhere, of the robed saint with hands outstretched, to welcome the birds he is said to have preached to.  When we lived in the UP, one of our cross-country ski trails had a shelter with a fireplace to stop and warm yourself at.  Someone had also stored a bag of sunflower seeds there.  Because, if you filled your hands with the seeds and stood out in the snow with your hands outstretched, the chickadees would find you, come lite on your fingers, look you in the eye, and grab a seed or two, before flying off.  I don’t know if we were preaching to the bold little birds as much as they, in their clerical black and white feathers, were reassuring us that we are cared for by our Creator God!
 
“Therefore I tell you,” said Jesus, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  
 
For Francis, the clothing that created his privilege from the riches of his father’s business, were not nearly as attractive as the simple threads of his Franciscan robe that connected him with the kingdom of God, and the spiritual riches of the web of life.  Francis teaches us what is important in life, and what to prioritize. 
 
Or as Emerson Powery says: “God will take care of you ... so take care of God's justice in the world.  There is more to life than concern for daily needs, though this may be difficult for some (cf. 6:11). But Jesus expects his followers to put forward energy into things that give more meaning to life.  We must strive to discern how God is working in the world (i.e., "God's kingdom") and how to participate in acts of justice on God's behalf (i.e., "God's righteousness" [vs.33]).  Beyond that, everything else will take care of itself.  [workingpreacher.org]
 
And finally, from our 2nd Reading and Psalm today, words and belief’s St Francis himself, it seems to me, could easily have penned:
(Psalm 148)  10wild beasts | and all cattle,
  creeping things and | flying birds; …
 13Let them praise the name | of the LORD,
  whose name only is exalted, whose splendor is over | earth and heaven.
 
(Rev. 5)  13Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing:
“To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” 14And the four living creatures said, “Amen!”
 
May we, with Francis, have such joy, humility, and trust in God.  May the threads of our lives be woven into the fabric of the kingdom of God, as we await the day of righteousness and renewal.  

Fourth Sunday in a Season of Creation: River
​September 27, 2020
 
First Reading:                  Genesis 8:20–22; 9:12–17
After the flood, God promised that Earth and all of life on Earth will be preserved by God, in spite of the sins of human beings.
 
Psalmody                          Psalm 104:27–33
The psalmist celebrates how God sustains all life on Earth through the Spirit and calls on God to rejoice in God’s own creation.

Second Reading               Revelation 22:1–5
When creation is restored, a river will flow directly from God with trees of life growing on either side to bring healing to all nations on Earth.
 
Gospel                               Matthew 28:1–10
The resurrection of Christ was also celebrated by creation. An earthquake accompanies the advent of the angel and the rolling of the stone.

River of Life, sermon by Rev. Fred Kinsey
The river of the water of life, that flows through the heart of the mid-west, was formed, as we know it, at the end of the Ice Age, about 5,000 B.C.  The Ojibwe native Americans named it the Misi-ziibi, and lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, but some, such as the Mound Builders, formed prolific agricultural societies, alongside its beautiful banks with its life-giving trees, until the first French and Spanish explorers arrived less than 500 years ago; and everything changed. 
 
The Mississippi River, as the European colonists came to pronounce it, flowing 2,320 miles from Minnesota to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico, is the second-longest river in North America, and the country’s largest drainage system.  With its many tributaries – the rivers flowing east from the Rockies and west from the Appalachian Mountains – the Mississippi collects the waters of all, or parts of 32, of the lower 48 states.  
 
About 200 years ago, in the time of Mark Twain, the Mississippi’s waters’ began to serve the Economy of the expanding young nation, tying north to south, and east to west.  But not without an ominous warning.  At the launching of the maiden voyage of the New Orleans, the Fulton steam-boat built in Pittsburg, in 1811, the largest earthquake east of the Rockies, the New Madrid, struck near St. Louis, causing massive flooding, and a sudden relocation of the Mississippi River’s main channel sections, which put the passage of the New Orleans in doubt. 
 
But despite this portent, the progress of American commerce pushed on, and a couple of decades later, thousands of steamers flooded the Mississippi.  Its flourishing was so prolific that it became cheaper to ship cargo from Ohio to ports on the east coast, via the Mississippi thru the Gulf, and all the way around the tip of Florida in the sea, than over the Appalachian Mts, even though the route was 10 times longer! 
 
But bigger changes were in store for the Mighty Mississippi than that.  By the late 20th century, post WWII, as family farming was increasingly pushed out to make way for agri-business, and technology created chemical fertilizers, nitrates and other pollutants, were flowing down it’s once, bright as crystal waterways, all the way to the Gulf stream waters. 
 
Today, the toxic bloom off the coast of New Orleans, which warms and starves the water of oxygen, is killing off fish, shellfish, and other life, at alarming rates.  A number of false starts to clean it up, have all fallen short.  If, and when, it finally begins, it would take a minimum of 3 decades to restore. 
 
Meanwhile, life in the Mississippi River and the Gulf continue to suffer.  And the portents of the New Madrid earthquake, echo in our ears.  Like the earthquake that shook the door open to Jesus’ rock hewn tomb, the quake in the heart of the Midwest 200 years ago, seems to be telling us something – or should I say, yelling to us. 
 
How can we have called the Ojibwa, not to mention the Cheyenne, Sioux, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Fox, Kickapoo, and Chickasaw, uneducated savages, when for thousands of years they lived in relative harmony with the Mississippi, and we have endangered its life, in only a couple hundred.
 
In our First Reading today, when Noah came through the Flood – the only family to survive – the first thing Noah did when he was back on dry land was build an altar, and give an offering to the Lord.  And, in the anthropomorphic portrayal of God in Genesis, the LORD smelled the fragrant odor of Noah’s burnt offering – and it was very pleasing!  But unlike the beliefs of Israel’s contemporary pantheon of gods in the influential Mesopotamian Flood story, the monotheistic Hebrew God is not dependent on people’s offerings, for food.  The LORD does not eat Noah’s burnt offering at all, while the neighboring gods of their primordial text, are said to need the food that is offered, for their survival, and are drawn to it, “like flies,” fallible and dependent. (cf. Robert Alter notes) 
 
Yahweh freely enjoys the offering of Noah, but does not need it.  Rather- the LORD said in the LORD’s heart, telling us, the reader, what God would do: ‘It’s really not worth damning the earth like that again,’ muses God, because, ‘the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth.’  And to Noah, God says aloud, ‘I will set this rainbow in the sky as a sign of my covenant with me and you, and every living creature, for everlasting generations.’ 
 
Like a parent coming to realize that the teenager must become an adult and make their own decisions – to live and learn from them – God must not be so overbearing, to intervene, micro-manage with reward and punishment, in teaching humans.
 
Which means that, we’ve been given a responsibility – just like in the creation story, we are to be the care-takers, for the forests, the land, the wilderness and the rivers. 
 
The river of the water of life, in Revelation, is a vision that was shown to John by an angel.  This visionary hope of the eschaton, which reaches back into our world already, a promise for the redemption of the world, is the age when God will redeem, not just us, the crown of God’s creation, but all of this very good earth. 
 
In chapters 8 and 16 of Revelation, leading up to this vision, the world as they knew it, is full of poisoned rivers, desecrated by Roman rulers who prioritized profits over people and planet.  John urged his 7 churches to resist the Empire’s idolatry all around them, even in the face of arrest, or worse, and God would bring them to the new heaven and new earth of the vision of crystal-clear waters flowing from God. 
 
They should resist the desecration of their local congregations, which John compared to the plagues God sent to Pharaoh in Egypt: “The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch,” says 8:10, “and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water… A third of the waters became wormwood – that is, blood – and many died from the water, because it was made [poisonous],” John says.
 
Over 97% of all the water on Earth is salty. More than 2% is frozen in the polar ice-caps. The rivers, lakes, and water tables underground then, hold less than 1% of all earth’s water, the fresh water we need for drinking, cooking, washing, and industry.  Those who are polluting and destroying this precious resource are endangering, all of us, and this beautiful ecosystem God has created. 
 
We have the scientific evidence.  What we need now is a spiritual renewal, a passionate, prophet call, to conversion.  Jesus spoke up directly to the political leaders of his day, pointing out their idolatry and warning them to turn around and change – to follow the Son of Man, God’s anointed, or all they held precious would be torn down. 
 
This is the same message John of Patmos preached in his letter, we call, Revelation.  If we are faithful, God will restore our world again: the city of God will dwell on earth – and “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, [will flow] from the throne of God, and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, [a ripe fruit each month. The leaves of the Tree are for healing the nations.  Never again will anything be cursed*],” John proclaimed.   (*The Message translation, Rev. 22:1-3)
 
As we say in the ELCA, “God’s Work, Our Hands!”  God will restore all things, including the mighty Mississippi.  And we will be the conduit, the many hands, through which God works.  
 
How do we live, so that the rivers of the water of life, may flourish and be restored?  How do we become the hands of our God, that we may be a pleasing offering to our LORD? 
 
Let us pray with the Psalmist: Send forth your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth – that we may sing to the Lord as long as we live; and praise our God while we have our being. 

Readings for the 2nd Sunday of Creation, September 13, 2020
This Sunday gives us the opportunity to worship with the land, soil, and land creatures. Scripture proclaims Christ as the second Adam who came to overcome the sin and death caused by Adam, including the curse imposed on Earth.

First Reading            Genesis 3:14–19; 4:8–16
Because of the sin of our primal parents, God pronounced some curses. The ground of Earth bears the curse for humans, and from the ground Abel’s blood cries to God. At their death, Earth welcomes humans home again.

Psalmody             Psalm 149
Psalm 149 is a song of thanksgiving. God turns the tables: the humble will be victorious, kings are now bound in fetters; God is now Maker and Monarch.

Second Reading     Romans 5:12–17
Christ is the second Adam who came to overcome the sin and death caused by Adam, including the curse imposed on Earth.

Gospel               Matthew 12:38–40
In death, Jesus too is connected with the ground. He was three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

"The Earth Swallows," sermon by Rev. Fred Kinsey
Sometime since the pandemic started, Kim and I binge-watched, “Six Feet Under,” because when it came out in 2001, we didn’t have access to HBO up in rural Michigan.  Six Feet Under is the story of the Fisher family, who lives in the residence of their family business, an old-time Funeral Home in the L.A. area.  David, is the faithful son, who stays home to work with his dad, in the business, and Nate is the prodigal, wandering son, who comes back, and though, never intending to, ends up joining his brother in the business, after the father suddenly dies in a car accident.
 
One of the more emotional episodes, is the burial of Lisa, Nate’s wife, who dies much too young, under mysterious circumstances.  When it comes time to make arrangements, Nate ends up arguing with Lisa’s parents about the burial.  Her parents want a traditional service in the Funeral Home, and final resting place for her ashes, in the family columbarium back home.  But Nate insists she be buried naturally, no embalming, no casket, simply put in the ground.  Earth to earth; ashes to ashes.  Nate had had a conversation with her about it just recently.  She was clear about her wishes, and Nate feels obligated, as her grieving husband to fulfill this promise to Lisa.  But the parents just can’t accept a green burial. 
 
After the Fisher funeral for Lisa, we watch, as Nate hands a box of cremains to Lisa’s parents who are getting into their car to go home.  Is the quarrel over??  Did Nate really give in to the parents?  They all look pleased as they say their good-byes, though for different reasons.  Only then that we learn how Nate has given them, a random box of ashes, taken from a shelf in the Funeral Home, we had seen the brothers talk about earlier in the season, where many boxed remains were never claimed, by next of kin.
 
Then, in the final scene of the episode, Nate drives to a remote location, one he and Lisa had enjoyed going to together, and he digs a hole in the ground, and puts Lisa’s body in, breaking down in exhaustion and a mournful wailing lament.  He is still sitting there when the sun rises, revealing the beauty of the location, his mind more at ease, now that he has fulfilled his promise to her. 
 
But like Cain and Abel, nature itself rises up to reveal Nate’s sin.  It’s not the soil that cries out to spoil his secret.  Murder is not Nate’s wrong-doing.  But when the parents take the cremains to be put in the family columbarium, the undertaker feels a moral obligation to inform them.  These cremains are certainly not Lisa’s, he says.  These cremains are from a past cremation practice, many years ago.  The dust of the dead can tell their own story, just like the blood Cain spilled in the soil of his field, from his brother Abel, cried out.
 
From Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, in these first four chapters of Genesis, we learn the history of our own jealousy, envy, covetous desires, blindness towards God’s grace, and lack of responsibility for our freedom to choose good over evil. 
 
The story of Adam and Eve and their first children is not so much a story of original sin, as it is about our common human condition; the situation we’re in, in our own lives, living in the world every day.  We inherit brokenness.  Not just the brokenness from Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, but from all people in whom we are in relationship with; from our next-door neighbors, to our fellow citizens, in city, state, country, and world.  But that’s not all.  In this Four Week Lectionary in September, we’re also rediscovering, and recovering our relationship with, and to, the earth, land, desert, and rivers. 
 
And we see this clearly in Genesis, chapters 3 and 4.  There is enmity between people and animals.  And, the soil shall sprout thorn and thistle, making it hard work for us to eat from the plants of the field: in verse 19, “by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, till you return to the soil.” 
 
And most disturbing, and yet at the same time, so revealing, is the relationship of the soil to Cain’s brazen murder of his brother: ““What have you done? [God] question’s Cain, Listen! your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil! 11And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. 12If you till the soil, it will no longer give you its strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.”  Cast out of the Garden, there is brokenness between humans and the land.
 
Robert Alter says of this soil that, “The image is strongly physical: a gaping mouth taking in blood from the murderer’s hand.” 
 
So here, the earth, the very soil, is witness to the brazen awfulness of the murder, this blood-letting, that the ground must absorb; the sacrifice of the soil.  The soil chooses, to no longer give of its strength to Adam and Eve.  And God is intimately aware of it.  God feels the pain and the travesty of Cain’s misdeed.  It cries out to God! God empathizes with the work that the soil must do to absorb, and swallow, Cain’s breaking of the 5th Commandment.
 
Today, the soil, the land around the globe, is crying out to us: the erosion of the soil throughout the midwestern breadbasket; decades of soil depletion.  The soil of newly rootless forests, ravaged by fire, along the west coast, and resultant mudslides.  The EPA super-sites, soil choking from dumped chemicals and nuclear waste, waiting to be cleaned up.  The frozen tundra’s and glaciers melting at alarming rates.  We have not respected mother earth as if our lives depended on it; as if we are aware of our intimate relationship with the land and soil, that God loves and listens to, and has given to us to care for. 
 
When Jesus was asked to give a sign to the leaders in Jerusalem, in our Gospel Reading, he didn’t pull any punches: “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, [Jesus says] but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” 
 
Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, and devastating giving up to his stone-cold tomb, is the best sign of his coming to our world as the Son of God, the anointed One.  Just as Jonah was swallowed up for 3 days in the belly of the big fish, so Jesus will be buried in the heart of the earth 3 days, he says.  Jesus, who was born in the straw of the manger, the innkeepers goat-feeder, close to the earth and the animals, this Jesus, lays down to be buried in earth’s safe keeping, until on the 3rd day, when God shows the world how he is the first-born of the dead, the Second Adam, as St. Paul says, in our Second Reading today, and our redemption. 
 
And so, even Jesus’ greatest sign is not accomplished without our dependent relationship, between earth and humanity. 
 
Today, we are still outcasts from the Garden of Eden, living with Cain in the land of Nod, east of Eden.  One day, in a great reveal, God will restore, rescue, and redeem creation, and, in our relationships with God, neighbor, and land, we’ll be saved and made right again. 
 
It is time we treat the land, as an equal partner on our faith journey, as we come from God, and continue on our way, back to God.  It’s time we treat the land with the same respect God gives to it, for without it, we will die.
 
For now, we are dust, and to dust shall we return, as God told the human, a’dam.  But as we wait, and take on our responsibilities for Land and soil, we also rest in the knowledge of the Psalmist, who today sings: “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.” (Psalm 139:8)
 
God promises to be with us – on the way, all the way, and no matter where.  So let us trust in the Promise of our baptisms, and our death into Christ, who lay “in the heart of earth” 3 days.  That we may also rise up with Christ, and return to God, our creator and redeemer, and be made whole and right again. 

Readings for the First Sunday in a Season of Creation: Forest
Genesis 2:4b–22 “Born of Earth and the Spirit”
Psalm 139:13–16 “Born from the womb of Earth”
Acts 17:22–28 ‘Born to search for God”
John 3:1–16 “Born of water and the Spirit” 

Because We Depend On It, sermon by Rev. Fred Kinsey
Only recently, during our lifetimes I’d say, have we as Christians been recovering God’s understanding of this awesome world we live in.  As Western Christianity became a servant to politics under Constantine, and until the Renaissance, our biblical literacy became more and more divorced from its Hebrew roots.  There is one focus, especially relevant to our message this morning, that has been twisted out of all proportion to God intentions, that I think we should be aware of. 
 
Namely, that in this era of scientific discovery and technological mastery, the interpretation of the creation story from Genesis, in our 1st Reading, has been used to further the narrative that humans were made to dominate the earth, treat it as a commodity – instead of, care for God’s good creation, as if our lives depended on it – because they do! 
 
First of all, I just love this translation by Robert Alter.  Most biblical scholars agree, that even in our relatively new translation, the New Revised Standard Version, or NRSV, that we use in our Lutheran worship, there are, maybe not a lot, but some crucial, inaccurate, word choices in this passage. 
 
In our reading today, this second account of creation, written in a very different style than the first account – which we know for its very orderly and poetic story of everything God made in 6 days, and a 7th Sabbath day of rest – Robert Alter comments, that: “In this [2nd] more vividly anthropomorphic account, God,… does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning [instead of creating], blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib…” transitioning from “a harmonious cosmic overview of creation [in the 1st] and then plunging] into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins [in the 2nd].” 
 
And so, in our reading today, God is like an experienced farmer, carpenter, or shepherd; a logger, a gardener, or a botanist.  God, who has already gotten Her hands dirty and figured out how things grow and live, from the life-giving rivers to all the forests in between, is speaking from nitty-gritty experience. 
 
God was there from the beginning, when in this 2nd account, there was only, ‘wetness that would well up from the earth to water all the surface of the soil.’  And it was then, that God fashioned out that swampiness, the ‘shrubs of the field,’ and ‘the plants to sprout up,’ to give root and dimension to the soil of the ground; and then also, the rains to water them.  God was local and invested. 
 
For God already had the intention that people were needed to work with, and take care of, all this stuff that was sprouting and growing up.  So, God gets down on hands and knees, and digs his hands in the ‘humus,’ the fertile soil, and fashions the human; God molds the first earth-creature from earth, and then blows into a’dam’s nostrils,’ like a paramedic reviving the unconscious, ‘and blows in the breath of life.  And [then! says Genesis] the human became a living creature.’  That’s what this fashioning, craftsperson, does!
 
And God wanted to do more, as Genesis 2:8 says:  “And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, and He placed there the human He had fashioned.”  Now God is really getting excited!  And from the same soil, or humus God fashioned the human from, God causes “to sprout from the soil, every tree lovely to look at and good for food, and the tree of life…” 
 
St. Paul calls this God, our potter, who fashioned us from clay, or mud.  God’s hands are dirty, but delighted, in God’s digging in the beautiful earth, God is fashioning. 
 
And so we are made of the stuff of the earth.  This land is our land.  And in every way, we are co-dependent on each other.  God creates everything, with a value of “good.”  But we are also given the knowledge of what is good and evil, and so have the responsibility to care for it, as if our lives depended on it – because they do. 
 
In our 2nd Reading, where Paul has traveled to the heart of pagan religion, to the Areopagus in Athens, he finds “an altar to and unknown god.”  And Paul uses that to describe YHWH, the One God.  “The God who made the world and everything in it…” the God who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. …For in him we live and move and have our being… for we too are [God’s] offspring.” 
 
When our Book Discussion read The Overstory, an American saga of trees, the cast of nine main characters found their lives interconnected, by their discovery of, the interconnectedness of the trees and their ecosystems they thrived in.  Two young 20 somethings, Olivia and Nickolas, not having anything else in common, connected up in their mission to save the last mighty redwoods in California that were being clear-cut by multi-national corporate interests.  They felt so connected to the Forest, they lived in a tall redwood tree for months, so it wouldn’t be cut-down, killed, and hauled away. 
 
Another, famed botanist, Patricia was lauded by the Redwood activists for her book, The Secret Forest, in which she argued scientifically, for what she had felt deep in her humus-fashioned self, since she was a little girl.  That trees communicated with each other, and were helpers – ‘sustainers alongside,’ as Robert Alter says – alongside each other, in their Forest villages. 
 
This theses is no longer just a fiction of a novel writer, but verified by science: That under the soil, the root systems of trees connect to each other, like our brain’s neurons, and share their nutrients with those trees who need it, aided by the soils’ fungi, God’s humus. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSGPNm3bFmQ)  As St. Paul says, ‘When one member hurts, every other member is involved in the hurt, and in the healing.’ (1 Cor. 12; The Message translation)  
 
The Garden that God fashions for the first humans, is not the garden we usually think of, a mid-western garden, with rows of seedlings – of lettuce, beans and corn.  “The Lord God [in Genesis 2:9] caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food…”  This was a Forest, a garden of trees, sprouting from the humus, for the humans.  And it was aesthetically pleasing, full of fruit trees, from olives to avocado’s, mangoes to figs.  The people, plants, and trees, are intertwined and dependent on each other for their life.  The Garden of Eden was an ecosystem, thriving, because of God’s fashioning of all living things, in this harmonious and awesome way.
 
And so, clear-cutting whole Forests, instead of selective cutting, not only leads to mudslides, but reveals our sinfulness, a separation from God, in the eyes of the Creator, the fashioner of our humus-soil.  We have not acted as if our lives depended on the earth, the soil from which we are fashioned.  For example, we have extracted far too much oil from beneath the earth, and consumed it far too fast, for the air of our ecosystem to in-turn, continue to care for us, much longer, as carbon build-up in the atmosphere, changes our climate, breaking down the systems that naturally work together.  Trees, we know, which helpfully consume CO2, are working overtime, doing their best to help, even as we cut them down. 
 
And so, I believe our sacred scriptures, this chapter 2 of Genesis, has much to teach us about our lives today.  In it, we find the desire and will of our Gardener-God, still speaking to us: We are made to connect with the trees, and are made to live as fellow travelers with the redwoods, and the maples, and apple orchards.  Live with them, as if our lives depended on it – because they do. 
 
And, without them, we have a more difficult time connecting up with our God, ‘in whom we live and move and have our being.’  Let us dig-in to our task; let us humans, dig into God’s humus, our life-blood, the stuff of who we are, fashioned by our God.