Author: Steve

“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.”

Thus begins what may be the saddest song in a genre replete with sad songs, Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The words, rhythm and tune capture fantastically the pain of a broken heart, inspired by Williams’ own troubled marriage.

Our text this week is a song from the heart of a man caught up not in his own personal misery, but in the present and future misery of his people. In Micah 1:8-16, we listen to a lament over the captivity and suffering of the cities surrounding Jerusalem during the Assyrian invasion under Sennacherib in 705 B.C. Israel and Samaria to the north were decimated in 722. Now it is Judah’s turn as the “incurable” wound of apostasy and injustice comes (verse 9) to the very gate of Jerusalem.

Hank Williams sang about the sad sounds of whippoorwills and train whistles. Micah in verse 8 describes himself going barefoot and naked as he wails like a “jackal” or an “ostrich” (or perhaps an “owl”). He is heartbroken to see the sins which brought down Judah’s sister kingdom to the north begin to have their disastrous effect on the towns and cities of his own land.

The lament itself begins in verse 10 with a line from near the beginning of king David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan in II Samuel 1:20, “Tell it not in Gath.” Gath was a city on the border of the Philistine territory in David’s time. To tell there the sad story of the king’s and his son’s death would be to give Israel’s enemies cause to rejoice and dance in the streets, like a few Muslims in the Mideast rejoiced and danced on September 11, 2001, when America was mourning.

Most of the rest of the lament is very difficult to sort out because Micah use puns and wordplay in Hebrew to connect the names of cities in Judah with the sad events happening to them. Even in that first line the Hebrew word for “tell” sounds like “Gath.” “Beth-leaprah” sounds like the word for “dust,” so there they should “roll yourselves in dust.” In verse 11 “Zaanan” sounds like “come out,” and yet they do not come out. In verse 13, Lachish sounds like “horse,” so they should harness up the horses and ride away.

However, we can’t quite identify all the towns Micah mentions and so some of the allusions and wordplay is indecipherable for us. Yet we still can feel the overwhelming poetic and prophetic declaration of sorrow and pain rolling over the land surrounding Jerusalem.

We know from the books of Kings and Chronicles that Jerusalem itself and king Hezekiah were saved from Sennacherib, but it was at a huge price. Jerusalem and Judah came under foreign control and the land suffered. Sennacherib did not invade the city of Jerusalem itself, but archaeologists discovered a stone prism in the ruins of Nineveh on which Sennacherib has written that he had Hezekiah shut up like a bird in a cage.

There were good moments under Hezekiah and later under Josiah there in Jerusalem and Judah. But the basic wound, the sin and corruption were incurable, as Micah saw. It all leads eventually to Jerusalem experiencing in 587 B.C. a fate similar to Samaria’s.

We often have the notion that it’s our job as Christians to fight, to battle sin and corruption as it overtakes our country and the culture around us. Perhaps we might do better to follow Micah’s example and learn to lament rather than to fight.

There are two or three very well-known passages in the minor prophet Micah: swords into plowshares in 4:3; the promise of the Shepherd from Bethlehem in 5:2, and the simple statement of what God requires, justice, mercy and love of God in 6:8. But the rest of the book is pretty foggy in most Christian minds, including this pastor’s. So I’m going to preach through Micah as summer ends and on into the fall.

Our text this week 1:1-7 opens with Micah’s very simple statement of his reception of the “word of the Lord” and then God’s judgment, mostly on Samaria but also on Judah and Jerusalem.

The first vision of God coming “smoking hot” into the world, with mountains melting and valleys splitting is a healthy reminder of God’s transcendence. That He is not just our buddy or a cosy piece of our own interior life. He is the Creator of the world and stands outside it in righteousness as both its Savior and Judge.

Samaria and Jerusalem are judged as “high places,” sites where the worship of false gods, of idols, takes place. That’s metaphor for Jerusalem but points to a real failure of the people to worship the true God even while doing the formal acts of proper sacrifice and liturgy in the temple. The problem is a trust in money and power vested in those capital cities, rather than in God. That’s idolatry.

We can take from this dire text a call to examine our lives for own idols and misplaced trust. Publicly and corporately, money and power are still tempting idols, something that will be more and more visible as an election year gears up. Individually it is always good spiritual discipline to clean out the closets of our souls and be rid of anything that demands our devotion above our commitment to Christ our Lord.

For those like me who enjoy action films (at least some of the older ones), our text this week, II Corinthians 6:1-13, might in verse 7 give us an image of Paul the apostle as action hero, a gun in each hand, blasting away at the enemies of righteousness. The phrase he uses is, “with weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left.”

A “Myth-Busters” episode demonstrates that the two-gun strategy is likely to be pretty ineffective, despite Hollywood’s love for that image. Perhaps it was and would be different if the weapons were swords, as Paul probably pictured, but even that is generally not an effective strategy. We won’t even talk about light sabers, although there is an amusing report from my own state of Oregon.

Sometimes Paul’s image is understood to mean a sword in the right hand and a shield in the left, a classic and proven mode of equipping for battle. Apply it to faith and it suggests an enthusiastic sharing/preaching of the Gospel combined with an effective apologetic (defense) for the faith. As tempting as that sounds to me as someone who loves the work of apologetics, I doubt it is correct. Paul is talking about weapons in each hand, and a shield is not a weapon.

As always, it does well to look at the context and see the contrasts spread around this image of right-handed and left-handed weapons. In verses 4 and 5 Paul lists hardships he and other apostles have suffered, while in verses 6 and 7 we find a catalog of the virtues they displayed in the midst of those trials. Verses 8 to 10 then give us nine pairs of contrasts between good states and bad states experienced by those in the service of the Gospel.

It’s wrong to stigmatize left-handed people, but it is still the case that in the Bible, as in cultures throughout history and all over the world, that the left hand symbolizes the less than desirable, that which is wrong or difficult or painful. So I think Paul means us to understand all these contrasts–between suffering and virtue, between honor and dishonor, between dying yet being alive in Christ, etc.–as specific examples of Christian right-handed and left-handed weapons. As verse 10 makes clear, it is by way of these awkward, unwanted left-handed weapons that God often brings about His way in our lives and in the world.

The always amusing and often insightful Robert Farrar Capon expands a notion from Martin Luther along these lines to talk much about God’s “left-handed power” (see chapter 1 of The Parables of the Kingdom). We expect God to show up and take direct, “right-handed” action on our behalf. But it’s often the case that God lets us experience His work in “left-handed” ways that seem weak, ineffective, and not very to the point. The Cross would be the paradigmatic example.

My guess is that we as Christians and as churches would much prefer to use right-handed weapons and have God show up in right-handed ways. So it’s good to be reminded that God’s deepest and greatest work is often left-handed and that there is hope and strength to be found where we don’t seem to see it.

It was a true pleasure to hear a young man in our congregation just home for the summer from graduate school across the country say how good it felt to be back in worship at Valley Covenant. “I just feel so much at home here,” he said.

Paul addresses the deep-seated spiritual roots of our need to be at home in our text for this week, II Corinthians 5:6-17. One of his most famous phrases is from verse 8, often misquoted as something like “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Though not an exact quote, it’s more or less correct unless one goes away with the impression that leaving the body behind is the essence of being with the Lord, i.e., that God intends for us to live with Him as bodiless spirits forever.

In the more modern NRSV translation “present” becomes “at home,” a more literal rendering. Paul’s point is not that the idea situation is bodilessness in God’s presence, but that all else being equal, it’s better to be at home with the Lord than at home in the body.

Ultimately, as we saw in last week’s text, God’s plan for us to have both, to be at home once again in resurrected bodies and at home with Him on the new earth which Jesus will bring at His return.

So as the text winds up, Paul declares that we have a new point of view, fully in keeping with what Scripture says all along, that God is concerned not with outward appearances of our bodies, but with the inward work of the Spirit in our hearts. So verse 7 says “we walk by faith, not by sight,” and verse 12 speaks of giving a resounding reply to those who “boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.”

The alternate Old Testament reading from I Samuel 16 clearly picks up that theme of God’s concern with our inward being as David is being anointed as king. I Samuel 16:7 says, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And the Gospel lesson from Mark 4:26-34 about the growing seed and the mustard seed points to God’s great work using what is at first appearance insignificant.

The upshot is that where we are in this world can often feel not much like home. We want to be somewhere else. As C. S. Lewis observed so well and so often, we are like fish made to swim but living out of water in our longing for something unseen which we cannot have fully in this present world. It has to do with an unseen work going on inside us. So that’s how we come to the conclusion of the text in I Corinthians 5:16 and 17, that we no longer regard anyone from an old, human point of view, but see everyone in Christ as a “new creation,” growing in anticipation of complete fruition in the coming kingdom.

I’m making a doubly foolish move as I prepare this week’s sermon. First, I’m switching text horses in the middle of the stream. As  you can see from yesterday’s blog post I had planned to preach on Mark 3 and the “unforgivable sin.” But yesterday afternoon I realized that I had preached that text with the same sermon title just three years ago. That’s just too recent a visit to that scene. If anyone’s interested you can find that sermon here.

Thus I switched to the epistle lesson in the lectionary, II Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1 (I’ll be taking it to 5:5). Then my other foolish move became obvious, that I simply had to use as my title those words from 4:17 which were the title of one of C. S. Lewis’ best-known and well-loved sermons, “The Weight of Glory.”

So here I am starting all over with a text I haven’t thought much about before, but which positively glows with some of that glory which it is trying to convey. Lewis took the phrase “weight of glory” in the direction of recognizing that we each have a coming glory as Christians insofar as God graciously loves and approves of us. He argued, though, that we ought be less concerned about our own personal glory, and more concerned about helping each other toward that glory which we will have as we bask in the loving presence of God.

I would like to take on a bit more of the text, which is part of Paul’s defense to the Corinthians of his ministry. Despite his apostolic role, some in that church had apparently come to hold a low opinion of him, partly because of what they regarded as evidence of his spiritual failure, that is, his sufferings. Following a spiritual logic which we see at work often in the Old Testament (in Job for instance), but also frequently today, they imagined that anyone who experienced so much affliction could not really be in God’s favor, could not be a true minister of Jesus Christ.

Paul argues that it’s just the contrary, that his suffering and affliction are glorious signs of God’s work in and through him, for the sake of the Corinthians and the whole church. So after the incredible disjunctive litany of 4:8, 9, “afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed,” Paul expresses his faith in two aspects. First the fundamental Christian conviction in 4:14 “that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence.” All the affliction, even death, will only lead to resurrection.

The second aspect of Paul’s faith in his afflictions is that “everything is for your sake.” All the bad things happening to him are for the good of others, for the building up of the church and the kingdom of God.

That two-part faith, then, that his affliction will give way to resurrection and that his affliction is doing good for others, allows him in 4:18 to say, “So we do not lose heart.” And then in one of his most beautiful moments, “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”

I would dearly love to embrace that perspective on this life and the hope to which we look, to be able to know all the huge and overwhelming weight of the various sorrows we experience, but to see them in the light of a greater, immeasurable weight of glory weighting for us in the presence of God.

As it says in 5:5, where I’m choosing to end the reading, this is what we were made for, God “prepared us for this very thing,” to enjoy and bask in His glory. We Oregonians endure all the dark and damp of winter, looking forward to glorious sunny, crisp days of summer. It’s the same thing writ large in spiritual life. And the guarantee of it all is the gift we celebrated two weeks ago, the Holy Spirit.

Unfortunately, Christians frequently give the impression that there are any number of unforgivable sins. In the past, suicide appeared to be unforgivable for Catholics, although that was never quite true. Also mostly in the past, divorce was regarded by both Catholics and evangelicals as a kind of unforgivable sin which barred one from full participation in the life of the church. Today, society perceives Christians with a biblical sexual morality as believing that homosexual behavior is unforgivable.

The truth is that neither Scripture nor the Church (for the most part) has ever taught that suicide, divorce or homosexual activity is unforgivable. Nor have other sins been legitimately and correctly regarded as beyond God’s grace and pardon. We have held pretty firmly to what Jesus said in our text today Mark 3:20-35, teaching in verse 28 that, “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven all their sins and all the blasphemies they utter.” It’s only by error and misunderstanding that some common sins or class of sins have either explicitly or implicitly been labeled “unforgivable.”

Nonetheless, in verse 29 of the text, Jesus states pretty clearly that there is an unforgivable sin which occurs when one “blasphemes the Holy Spirit.” Such blasphemy makes one guilty of an “eternal sin,” which can never be forgiven. Those are hard words and a hard concept to understand.

The context, however, takes us a long way toward understanding. Jesus spoke about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit being unforgivable when a group of scribes declared that Jesus was casting out demons by the power of “Beelzebul… the prince of demons.” So the specific blasphemy which sparked Jesus’ warning was the identification of the good work of the Holy Spirit as the evil work of Satan or perhaps one his lieutenants (the precise etymology and identification of “Beelzebul” is unclear). It’s a very specific sort of deliberate and intentional blasphemy which one would not perpetrate inadvertently or by negligence. As J.C. Ryle wrote and which is often repeated, “… those who are troubled about it are most unlikely to have committed it.”

It is not even clear that the scribes whom Jesus was warning here had committed that unforgivable sin. It may be that Jesus was simply pointing out to them that their foolish suggestion (which He soundly refutes in verses 23-27) that He was using the power of evil to defeat evil verged closely on a blasphemous identification of the Spirit of God with the evil spirit Satan.

The warning is to beware of calling good evil, especially the holy and good Spirit of God. Isaiah 5:20 says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” It’s a spiritual condition which taken to its furthest point could put one beyond the possibility of repentance because one has become blind to the very need for repentance, failing to perceive the evil in one’s own sin. Yet anyone with any remnant of conscience (through which the Holy Spirit speaks) is not yet in this condition. Hence the truth that if you are worried about this sin you can’t have committed it, because you still have a functioning sense of good and evil.

Moreover, it is by the Holy Spirit that we are given grace to accept Jesus Christ as Savior and be saved. To reject the Spirit as something evil is to push away the very means by which God convicts us of our need for Jesus and by which He pours grace into our hearts and adopts us into His family (as our text from Romans 8:12-17 said last week). As long as we are ready to receive that “Spirit of adoption,” none of our sins will be unforgivable.

So it makes sense when the Gospel text for Sunday concludes with yet another hard saying from Jesus, His seeming rejection of His mother and siblings. Jesus was pointing to a deeper relationship than biological kinship, the family relation created when we receive the Spirit and do God’s will, thus becoming true adopted kin of the Son of God.

As ancient Christians were swift to point out, Jesus was not wholly rejecting His biological family, but simply inviting them and everyone else to enter into that deeper relationship with Him as children and family of God by the Holy Spirit. Mary His mother was already in that divine family by her acceptance of God’s will at Jesus’ conception. Later witness in the New Testament shows us that some at least of Jesus’ brothers also became His spiritual kin and leaders in the church.

Which all invites us, as the long season of Pentecost begins to unfold, into a deeper appreciation of the Holy Spirit and toward sensitivity to being guided by Him. That’s the lesson to learn here rather than some anxious worry about an unforgivable sin.

I suppose it’s almost required that preachers comment on the recently released Pew Research survey which shows that Christianity, and religious belief in general, declined rapidly in the United States in the last 7 years, between 2007 and 2014. Here is a link to the Pew site and the survey for those interested in examining the data and some interpretive commentary for themselves.

And I’m sure that a number of preachers will perceive a tie between one of the text options for Pentecost Sunday, Ezekiel 37:1-14, and the declining percentage of Christian faith among the American population. The prophet’s vision of a valley of dry bones may seem like an apt picture of the religious landscape in America, particularly among Catholics and the Mainline Protestant churches, both of which shrank significantly both in numbers and as percentages of the total population. Evangelical Christians grew slightly in number, but also shrank somewhat as a percentage of the population.

The thing to remember, and constantly say aloud, is that America is not biblical Israel, not God’s chosen people. There’s a great deal of evangelical confusion on this point, along with much willingness to draw simple parallels between Scripture passages about Israel and the current American situation. That sort of thing should be resisted on every front, remembering that from the perspective of the New Testament the whole church of Jesus Christ, throughout the world, is the new Israel, the new people of God. To identify American Christianity, or even worse, the nation itself, as Israel is to disenfranchise and ignore the greater and perhaps more fervent portion of the church spread over the rest of the world.

With that caution against a simple identification of ourselves as Israel, it’s still permissible to find a message of hope and encouragement in Sunday’s text from Ezekiel. But there’s a bit of irony in the fact that if we make that move in relation to the Pew report, then Ezekiel’s message might offer the greatest hope for those shrinking, dying, Mainline and Catholic churches in America. The bones which represent Israel are “very dry” (verse 2), that is, hopeless cases. Evangelicals still holding the line in numbers and in spiritual faithfulness may not yet be dry enough to qualify for a resurrecting wind of the Spirit.

Yet there is hope and promise in Ezekiel and in the celebration of Pentecost for the whole church of Jesus Christ. Our hope is that the life of our movement, of our existence as people of God, comes not from us but from the Holy Spirit. That’s the message in all our Pentecost texts today. Psalm 104:30 declares that all life is renewed as God sends His Spirit. Acts 2 tells of the powerful beginnings of the church in Jerusalem by the wind of the Spirit. Jesus explains in John 16:7 that it is to our advantage that He depart and send the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, who will guide us into all the truth we need to know.

As I recently discussed with one of our church members, it is just exactly when the church feels oppressed, defeated, and nearly dead that God sends the Spirit to revive, empower and teach us just what God has to give us. That’s the Pentecost message for what may seem a dry time in American Christianity and what may be a dry time in our own spiritual lives.

Cabela’s opened a big store in our area a few years ago. I can easily kill an hour or so wandering around in there looking at reels, rods, fly-tying supplies, and all sorts of fishing gadgets and gear, as well as taking a turn through the backpacking section to note the latest in tents, lightweight stoves, etc. It’s a similar story for a different kind of gear at the big Fry’s Electronics north of us in Wilsonville.

At either place or others like it, an eager store employee may ask, “May I help you find something?” You know my answer because you’ve probably said it yourself (and it’s the title of the sermon this week), “Just looking.” That’s what we find the disciples doing at the end of this week’s text, Acts 1:1-11, on Ascension Sunday (Ascension Day is actually this Thursday).

We don’t know exactly what was going through the minds of those disciples as they stood “gazing up toward heaven.” It may have been wonderment at the miraculous departure or, as the angels’ directions to them imply in verse 11, the very first Christian attempt to discern just when Jesus would be returning.

The whole text, however, makes it clear that in regard to our Christian take on Jesus’ second coming, it is not a matter of “just looking,” that is, not just casually considering the possibility that Jesus will return someday. But neither is it a matter of actively buying into some predictive scheme that provides a day, an hour, or even a year for the return of Christ and the set-up of His kingdom.

Christians are not just shoppers, neither passive “lookers” wishing for whatever products our Lord has on display nor active buyers thinking that we are able to purchase the kingdom through our own efforts. Instead, rather than looking, the disciples were to tell what they had seen, to be witnesses. It’s a posture that involves waiting rather than shopping for something new.

Jaroslav Pelikan says, “The history of the church suggests that Christians are not very good at such waiting, as they have oscillated between an occasional eschatological fervor that stands on tiptoe and asks eagerly (and repeatedly), ‘Lord is it at this time…?’ and their more customary torpor which has needed to be reminded yet again ‘that the end of the world comes suddenly.'”

So waiting for Jesus is not just looking, but neither is it buying completely into either this present world or some scheme that sees the kingdom arriving immediately. It’s a diligent, thoughtful labor of witness and love that maintains a constant readiness for the arrival of our Lord.

One of the things I really like about our church buildings is that they were built totally accessible from the beginning. Everything is on one level, with good-sized doors, accessible bathrooms, etc. And with chairs rather than pews, walkers and wheel-chairs are easily brought into worship. We still have things to work on and recently began a discussion of how to provide some assisted listening opportunity for folks who cannot hear well.

It’s a natural fit with the Gospel, especially as we read about its spread in Acts, to work a removing hindrances to worship. The story of Acts, as some have suggested, all aims at the last verse in Acts 28:31, where Paul is finally in Rome and in prison, but is “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”

That same Greek word for “hindrance” pops up here and there throughout Acts to remind us that the aim is to remove hindrances, so that anyone can hear the Good News and come to Jesus. Last week in the lectionary reading from Acts 8 we heard the Ethiopian eunuch ask whether anything hindered his being baptized. Now this week in a reading from Acts 10:44-48, we hear Peter asking about the Gentiles of Cornelius’ household, “Can anyone hinder them from the water of baptism?”

This theme and the whole chapter of Acts 10 calls for two responses. First, let us rejoice that our Lord invites anyone to come to Him unhindered. Nothing stands in the way, not sin, not race, not gender, not economic class. I and my congregation are believers in Jesus because the Lord first let nothing hinder those who were Gentiles from being brought into His kingdom. Acts 10 shows how God took great pains to teach Peter how not to get in the way of His work with people Peter might have wrongly hindered. Praise God that some hindrances were removed which might have kept us from the Lord.

Second, let us consider what hindrances might remain for those who still want to come to Christ and to the water of baptism. Is it building accessibility or musical style or unwritten dress codes or unconscious racial attitudes by which we may still hinder those around us from receiving the gifts of God’s grace in Jesus? Is it our own lack of welcome or our lack of participation in mission efforts which share the Gospel? Is it something as innocent as our congregational sense of “family,” which may feel intimidating and exclusive to those not yet a part of it?

It’s clear that God wanted nothing to hinder the Ethiopian or those Romans in Cornelius’ house. He wants nothing to hinder us. May we learn the lesson Peter learned and do all we can to let nothing hinder others.

Slavery is wrong. The Bible does NOT teach that slavery is O.K. Those are the first thing that need to be said before we can talk about this week’s text from Colossians 3:22 – 4:1. Any African-American listening to or reading these verses is bound to react in a way which I as a white person in America will not. To hear the beginning of verse 22, “Slaves, obey your masters,” has to cut deep into the heart of anyone whose ancestors were slaves and for whom the effects of slavery and concomitant color bias still shape one’s experience.

So before I blithely launch into using this passage to speak to contemporary employer-employee relationships, I have to carefully point out that the whole trajectory of God’s kingdom is toward the freeing of slaves from oppression and that if dutiful life in Christ requires a humble submission to an unjust institution, that in no way condones or justifies that institution.

What is more, it could be well to draw the analogy between ancient slavery in the Roman world and some modern employment more tightly than we might expect. That is, those factors that we imagine make today’s employment different from slavery, like being paid a wage, freedom to choose an employer, and more respect and human dignity than slaves received, are definitely not significant in the working conditions of many people in the world. For many workers today, their wage is really no more than the subsistence given to slaves; they have no genuine freedom to choose other employment; and they are treated not as human beings but as simple means to the end of profit for the stockholders of a company. That latter condition is true even of some highly-paid workers who suppose that they have a great deal of freedom. What they lack is any genuine acknowledgement of their humanity, which is evident as soon as their employment or level of compensation is no longer conducive to an expected level of profit.

Thus despite the danger of hearing or communicating in this text things that Paul, and God through Paul, never meant to say about slavery, it has much to say about how Christians in current employment situations at all levels ought to behave, even when those situations are unjust and/or unpleasant.

One other caution, however, is necessary. These directions to slaves and masters come in the context of directions for ordering of a Christian household in a time when slaves were often a part of the household. Thus, it may be stretching things a bit too far to see these directions to obey masters as applying in exactly the same way to employees and employers in work situations outside a home.

With all those cautions in mind, there is still in these verses a gracious possibility for the redemption of work from its curse in the fall. Verse 23 offers a way to labor with a spirit and attitude which gives profound meaning to our work, that it is all, no matter how menial and difficult, service to Christ. Thus ordinary work, even degrading work, becomes a holy, sacrificial offering to God, a carrying of the Cross, when it is done in the right spirit. Working conditions may not improve, but our self-perception of who we are when we work is vastly changed.

My enthusiasm for gardening did not outlast the appearance of the first serious crop of weeds. Living on a small budget in married student housing during graduate school the first spring after we were married, it appeared to me that growing our own vegetables would be a winning proposition. But I grew up a city boy in southern California, where my family’s only venture in vegetable gardening was a cherry tomato bush which grew year round and which we regularly had to prune back viciously to keep it from taking over the whole backyard.

I was totally unprepared for the plain hard work of getting things to grow in Indiana soil tilled up for us by our apartment groundskeeper at the edge of a wild grass field. Getting the plants and seeds in the ground had a kind of excitement to it, but beyond that it was shear drudgery. There was no water source nearby, so we either had to carry it in buckets or drag out, then put away, a couple hundred feet of hose every time our little garden patch got dry. Then all that grass and all those weeds that had been tilled under to create our garden began to come back and try to reclaim it for its natural state as waving prairie.

We did get a few heads of the best and tenderest broccoli I’ve ever tasted, loads of tomatoes, and the typical bumper crop of zucchini which we tried to pawn off on all our other friends who, unfortunately, usually had plenty of their own zucchini. But gardening is definitely not my idea of a pleasant pastime or even good work.

Yet tending a garden was a large part of the first work of the first human beings. As we look at what Scripture says about work in the first three chapters of Genesis this week, we find Adam placed in a garden planted by God. Adam’s assignment was to take care of it. Ultimately Adam finds himself cursed for his sin by a future of laborious toil needed to wrest a living from the ground, perhaps an explanation for how unpleasant I found my first serious gardening venture.

Yet we need to read the account of that first human labor in the earth in the wider context of the story of God’s creation of the world and human beings. In Genesis 1:26-28, we find a call for them to “have dominion” over the earth as an outworking of being made in the image of God. Creation was clearly God doing work, as can be seen in chapter 2 verse 2 when He is said to have “rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” Human work then follows on God’s work and is in the image of that work. God creates the world and human beings continue that work by caring for it.

Fortunately for folks like me, you can also see a kind of intellectual or scientific work assigned to Adam as well, the naming of the animals in 2:19 and 20. While the focus is on the absence of a proper partner for Adam among the animals, there is also a reflection of all the human curiosity about the natural world, along with the classification and naming of both living creatures and many other aspects of creation throughout human history. That intellectual work also reflects God’s own work of love for His creation and even His naming of Day and Night and Sky at the beginning of creation.

As unpleasant, then, as gardening and many, many other forms of work may be, there is a basic foundation in creation for regarding the purpose of work as partnering with God in His own work of loving and caring for what He has made. The highest form of that creation calling is caring for other human beings in a way that reflect the Lord’s own love for us.

It’s that partnership with God in good work which was damaged by sin in the Fall recorded in Genesis 3. Our hope for our work now is that, like all the rest of human life, it can be redeemed and restored to at least some of its creation purpose through the healing grace of Jesus Christ.

In a loosely biblical fantasy I imagine that several of Jesus’ disciples had dream jobs. They were fishermen. Imagine being paid to do what you do for recreation! Of course, reality quickly clobbers my fantasy when I consider that Peter, Andrew, James and John were what today we would call “commercial” fishermen, that they fished with nets (except in Matthew 17:27!) rather than lightweight fly rods, and that they probably regarded their fishing activity largely as everyday labor rather than happy sport.

Yet because of my fantasy, in the season of Easter my favorite post-resurrection appearances of the Lord is found in this Sunday’s text, John 21:1-19. I like to suppose that after the crucifixion and resurrection the disciples found themselves at a loss for what to do next. So led by that impulsive fisherman Peter in verse 3, they simply returned to their first and beloved occupation of fishing.

Again I indulge my imagination by supposing that Jesus Himself so enjoyed His followers’ love of fishing that He blessed them once again in verse 6 with a miraculously large catch. And He patiently waited while they counted this haul (verse 11) because He too wanted to know the number!

There may be some justification for a bit of my fantasy in that we Christians do believe our Lord created all things and takes great delight in them, including His delight in our delight in them. Yet a more sober appraisal of this text suggests that the fishing was simply a distraction and time-filler for worried men at loose ends (but again not so different from those of us who fish in other ways today). Jesus arrived there on the beach not so much to bless the fishing as to call them, and in particular Peter, back to their primary occupation as His followers and witnesses.

So the text continues with Jesus’ conversation with Peter in which He asks the disciple three times whether he loves Jesus more than “these.” There are several exegetical rabbit trails here which have often been followed by well-meaning interpreters and preachers. One is to note the difference in the words for “love” used in the original Greek by Jesus and Peter, and suggest that Jesus asked Peter the first two times for a deep sort of love while Peter affirmed only a shallow love. This is a bogus notion, since the conversation was in Aramaic not Greek, and in any case the Greek words for love are often interchangeable in the New Testament.

Another false start is to suppose that “Do you love me more than these?” is asking Peter whether he loves Jesus more than his boat, his nets, the whole occupation of fishing. But that really cannot be. This disciple leapt from his boat when he realized Jesus was present. At the very beginning he had left all that behind to follow Jesus. There is no real comparison to his love for fishing and his love for Jesus.

No, the point of Jesus question is to put back to Peter the claim which he made in the face of Jesus’ arrest and impending death (see Mark 14:2) that even if all the other disciples deserted Jesus, he would not. Jesus is asking, three times, in memory of the three times Peter denied Him (John 18), whether Peter does in fact love Him more than the other disciples do.

Jesus is not really inviting Peter to compare his devotion to that of others. He is trying to steer Peter away from a mere, and possibly fallible, vocal profession of faith toward a life of doing what really matters to Jesus. If Peter truly loves Jesus, then he will care for those for whom Jesus cares, His “sheep.” That is to be his lifelong occupation now, not just a brief departure from a career of fishing or something else.

This conversation with Peter invites us to consider how we as Christians regard the work by which we make a living. For some of us what earns a living may bear directly on that occupation which Jesus gave all His followers, to tend and care for each other as His flock. Others will need to let that first and foremost Christian occupation to care for others rise up in the midst of selling insurance or teaching algebra or building houses or bagging groceries. It may not be entirely possible to love our work, but Jesus asks us to love Him and love those He loves while we work. May He give us the grace He gave Peter to make that love possible.

I was relieved to discover just now that at least my particular cell phone does not automatically offer “OMG” as an autofill option when I type an “O” and an “M” into a text message. Like (I’m guessing) many Christians my age, I’m flabbergasted by how a casual use of God’s name to express surprise or dismay has become such a commonplace that it even has an acronym.

Showing my age again, I tend to associate the frequent sprinkling of “Oh, my God” into conversation with an air head “valley girl” stereotype that arose not long after I moved away from the near vicinity of the San Fernando Valley in California. But that thoughtless voicing of a theological affirmation is no longer confined to teenaged young women or the area surrounding I405 north of Los Angeles. You can hear the words and see the acronym constantly on television shows and in media. Even Christian young people get pulled into this common violation of the third commandment.

There’s another misuse of the phrase “my God,” which Christians too often commit. We are apt to speak of “my God” as though it were a true possessive and separated the God we worship from lesser gods or non-gods of others. “Your god may be dead, but my God is alive and well,” for instance. Though there’s a bit of Old Testament justification for such distinction between the true and living God and the other gods worshiped on earth, the actual practice tends to imply that the very existence of God stems from the fact that He is “mine.” Somehow by claiming God as our own, we are empowered to assert His being. But the reality is just the opposite. We exist and live because God claims us as His own.

Despite its transformation into a disrespectful exclamation  or into a belligerent assertion of Christian superiority, saying “my God”  expresses a truth which we want to maintain. It’s a truth made possible by the work of Jesus which we are celebrating this week. That’s why in our Easter text, John 20:1-18, the Lord directs Mary Magdalene in verse 17 to tell the other disciples that He is “ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Because of what Christ has done for us in dying and rising, we have the right to say, “my God,” to claim Jesus’ God and Father as our own God and Father.

As the Son of God, Jesus regularly and constantly affirmed His relationship with God the Father, calling Him both “Father” and “my God.” By dying and rising to reconcile us to God and make us children of God together with Him, Jesus bestowed on us the gift of being able to say what He said with complete truth and confidence, “my Father, my God.” The gift of Easter is the gift of being raised into that secure relationship with God, along with Jesus.

I’ve no idea what our Palm Sunday palms will look like this year. Two weeks ago I called our usual palm supplier, a floral outlet in our area, only to learn he was no longer dealing in our usual lovely fan or emerald palms. So I was directed to a local florist where I ordered fewer than usual of an unfamiliar type of palm (“Commodore”) for more money than we used to pay.

I was bemoaning this year’s palm deficit to one of our members, an older gentleman who has seen a lot of life. He brought me up short by saying, “Well, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? On the first palm Sunday, do you think all the palm branches they cut down were beautiful and perfect?”

My friend was right, and reading the Palm Sunday story from Mark’s Gospel this year (Mark 11:1-11) made that even clearer. We tend to dress this Sunday’s celebration up in all sorts of details borrowed from the other Gospels, palms from John’s Gospel, two donkeys from Matthew, complaining Pharisees and praise to Jesus as a king from Luke. But Mark’s account has none of that. Reading Mark, one can easily get the impression that this little parade of Jesus and His disciples was pretty unimpressive, hardly a “Triumphal Entry.”

Palm Sunday, then, was probably less impressive than we imagine it. Yet that fact in itself is full of significance. Our Savior came to us taking on our complete humanity in all its usual drab and unimpressive reality. Even arriving as our King, he comes on the humble animal which kings rode in peacetime, rather than on the warhorse of a conqueror.

Jesus doesn’t even accomplish much at all on Palm Sunday according to Mark. Matthew and Luke give us the impression that He cleansed the temple that same afternoon, but Mark shows us that Jesus arrived in Jerusalem late in the day. All He had time for before dark was a look around the temple before retreating back out of the city to where they were staying in Bethany. The cleansing of the temple happens the next day.

So Palm Sunday is a good time to remember the slow, gentle, humble way in which God saved us, and in which He still works in our lives. Whenever we are tempted to display a Jesus of pomp and glory to the world, a Jesus who takes impressive action, let us remember our true Lord who came riding into the capital city of His kingdom pretty much unnoticed and unremarked, and who didn’t do all that much except die. That was good enough for Jesus. Maybe it should be good enough for us.

As videos of persecuted Christians in the Mideast go viral, it’s a good time to be hearing this Sunday’s Gospel lesson from John 12:20-33. That little girl declaring that she wishes no harm to ISIS members who drove her from her home, but only wants to forgive them, is an incarnation of Jesus’ teaching that we gain our lives when we lose them.

And as Christians actually lose their lives in various places around the world, we recall Tertullian’s words, often wrongly quoted as “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” but in actuality perhaps even stronger in its true form. What Tertullian said was, “As often as you mow us down, the more numerous we become. The blood of Christians is the seed.”

May our Lord give us grace to truly believe His teaching about falling like a seed to the ground and dying, and to discover how to practice that in whatever form of sacrificial living God asks of us.