“Organic Love”

Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18

Sunday, April 21  - Creation Care/Earth Day

First Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Today, we begin with a question. You don’t need to answer it out loud, but it’s not rhetorical. I would like you to actually take a moment and try to find the answer in your mind. Ready? Here it is: When did you last spend a good chunk of time outdoors with no real agenda?

I’m not 100% sure of the answer, myself. I spend a lot of time outdoors. I enjoy going on walks. But I’m usually focused on where I’m headed or the podcast in my ears. I love sitting in my hammock but I’m almost always reading a book. Or sometimes napping. I almost always go outside with another purpose in mind. I’m doing something else and just choosing to do it outdoors. 

I can remember a time, though, when “going outside” was, in and of itself, the only item on the agenda. What I can piece together from my own memories and what I have noticed from observing young children is this: children go into nature as if it were a friend. They don’t know what they will do once they get there. They don’t have plans. Their plan is just to greet their friend, the outdoors. They trust that something wonderful will happen once they are there.

Speaking of young children, have you ever noticed that some of the best wisdom is found in children’s books? Here’s an example. At the end of The House at Pooh Corner, there is a poignant interaction between Christopher Robin and his dear friend Winnie the Pooh. Christopher Robin asks Pooh, “What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?” and Pooh thinks for a while and finally responds, “What I like best in the world is Me and Piglet going to see You.”

Christopher Robin says, “I like that, too, but what I like best is doing Nothing.” Pooh wonders what doing Nothing is and Christopher Robin responds, “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to go, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.”

Doing Nothing is, of course, what children do when they greet nature. When they go out into the world looking for nothing in particular and find that dear friend, the Earth, waiting for them.

And then Christopher Robin goes on to explain that he’s not going to do just Nothing anymore, that when you get older you aren’t allowed to do just Nothing.

And, gosh, isn’t that true? Adults don’t do Nothing very often, do they?

I don’t think it’s an accident that after God creates the heavens and the Earth in the first chapter of Genesis, the first thing God does when the work is done is what? Nothing. God rests. God goes out and greets the day as if it were a dear friend, walking into the open arms of the Earth as a child settles into a patch of grass to look up at the sky and do….Nothing.

Tomorrow is Earth Day, an international holiday that happens on April 22nd each year. The first Earth Day was in 1970. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin launched a massive effort to raise awareness about environmental sustainability issues. As a result, 20 million Americans took to the streets on April 22nd, demanding radical changes in how humans interact with our planet. In the following months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was founded and the Clear Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were passed.

Twenty years later, Earth Day was rekindled in 1990 on a global scale, mobilizing 200 million people from 141 countries. Earth Day has always been about making massive shifts in how we treat our planet – public policy, putting pressure on corporations, and launching major educational initiatives to help people make better individual choices. [1] 

I could easily preach an entire sermon about what we should and shouldn’t do to care for creation. Talking with our politicians about public policy that affects water use, industry, agriculture, animal welfare, our food, our household products, and more. Buying local food as much as we can. Reducing our own carbon emissions. 

I’m not going to preach that sermon today, though I do hope that you will use the occasion of Earth Day to talk with your friends and family, read up, and make some new commitments that will benefit our planet.

Instead, I am struck by a line from the film at the Flint Hills Discovery Center. I’m paraphrasing, but somewhere in the film, one of the speakers says something like, “You can’t love what you don’t know.”

We can reduce and reuse and recycle, and bike or walk to work, and pay attention to where our food comes from, and write impassioned letters….and those are all good things.

And I would also add that we are called to something else. We are called to organic love.  

I’m not talking about buying fruits and veggies with the little USDA Organic logo on them. I’m talking about the other meanings of the word organic. Organic stuff is stuff that is living or derived from something that’s alive. Not synthetic. Organic. We need to love things that are organic.

Of course, organic also has another meaning: something that happens naturally. And that’s what happens when we place ourselves in nature. When we go out into the big, wide world to be among other living things….just to do Nothing like Christopher Robin does….when we do that, something natural and lovely happens. We begin to fall in love.

We slow down. We notice small things we didn’t notice before. We begin to learn the Earth, to know the Earth. We can’t love what we don’t know. And we can’t know the places and creatures of this Earth unless we are present. We have to get out there and greet the natural world as if it’s a friend. Only then can we know the Earth. And when we do, love often blossoms organically.

Many congregations observe Good Shepherd Sunday on the 4th Sunday of Easter (that’s today). You may have noticed this theme in our readings. From the 23rd Psalm, “God is my shepherd. I shall not want. God makes me to lie down in green pastures, God leads me beside the still waters, God restores my soul.”

And then, in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks, “I am the Good Shepherd. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and runs away – leaving the sheep behind and the wolf snatches them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.”

“I know my own.” It begins with knowledge. Not the knowledge of facts and figures but knowledge in a more intimate sense. Knowing that the seasons are changing because the light is shifting – you know because you walk that path at the same time every morning. The knowledge that we need rain soon because the pond is low – and you know because you take time to sit by the pond every few days. Knowledge that the baby birds have flown the nest– you know because you’ve been keeping an eye on the nest in the big tree in your front yard.

We can only love what we know. And we can only know when we show up.

That’s what shepherds do, you know. More than anything else, they show up. They are there day in and day out. Some days they don’t do much at all. Just wander a bit with the flock and be on the lookout. The shepherd’s most important jobs are to show up and pay attention. That’s why the hired hand is useless – they run away just when they are needed. The good shepherd stays.

And that’s why the writer of the psalm feels secure. Because God does not run away, either. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. For you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” We are not alone. We live in God’s world. God is present with us. Knows us. And love blossoms organically from that knowledge.

Barbara Brown Taylor is a retired Episcopalian priest and arguably one of the best preachers in North America. In her book, An Altar in the World, she says, “My first church was a field of broom grass behind my family’s house in Kansas, where I spent days in self-forgetfulness. A small stream held swimmers, wigglers, skaters, and floaters along with bumps of unseen things moving under the mud. When I blurred my eyes, the sun sparkling on the moving surface turned into a living quilt of light.” [2] 

As an adult, Taylor learned that,  “The easiest practice of reverence is simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably near a body of water, and pay attention for at least twenty minutes. It is not necessary to take on the whole world at first. Just take on the three square feet of earth on which you are sitting, paying close attention to everything that lives within that small estate.”

From there, Taylor describes what it looks like when love blossoms organically. She writes, “With any luck, you will soon begin to see the souls in pebbles, ants, small mounds of moss, and the acorn on its way to becoming an oak tree. You may feel some tenderness for the struggling mayfly the ants are carrying away…You may even feel the beating of your own heart, that miracle of ingenuity that does its work with no thought or instruction from you. You did not make your heart, any more than you made that tree. You are a guest here. You have been given a free pass to this modest domain and everything in it.”

When God finished the work of creation, God stopped and looked at it all. God pronounced it good. And gave us instructions to care for it all. To be present with creation and let our love grow. 

Let us follow in the way of the Good Shepherd, who refuses to leave when the sheep are in trouble. Let us be present and pay attention. May our love for this wonderful, astounding, endangered planet we inhabit blossom organically. May it be so. 

NOTES

[1]  Information about the history of Earth Day from http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 10.

“We covenant with God and with one another:”

John 15: 5-12

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Last Friday night, 15 youth in grades 6 through 9 gathered for an all-night lock-in here at the church. We baked brownies. We crafted. We played video games and card games. We made music. We prayed and read scripture. We watched movies. We burned off a LOT of energy at City Park.

We did not sleep much.

The youth in our congregation have been begging to have an all-night event like this. But staying up all night is not something I can do. Literally. At all. And so I knew this could only happen in partnership with other adults. In addition to the wonderful adults from our congregation who volunteered to make the event a success, my primary partner in joy was the Rev. Jacob Poindexter from Wichita UCC. It turns out Jacob CAN stay up all night. It also turns out that he’s great at many things like making music and helping the youth craft a vespers service. We made a great team with Jacob taking lead on programming while I handled behind-the-scenes stuff like registration, background checks for chaperones, and meals (have you ever seen a $350 curbside pick up?).

Jacob also led some excellent get-to-know-you activities. One featured a lot of toilet paper; I’ll let you ask the youth about that. I was a little worried that the group might have a hard time gelling in such a short period of time but by the end of our first hour together, that worry flew out of my mind. Youth from all three churches, who had never met each other before, were mixing and mingling like they’d known each other a long time. 

Towards the end of our large group time, Jacob invited the youth to create a covenant together. We were a little hyper and punchy, eager to get into the more active parts of the evening, so the adults carried some skepticism. Would a bunch of 11 to 14 year olds be able to have a conversation about COVENANT at this moment? Turns out, again, we didn’t need to worry. When asked to share how they wanted everyone to treat each other during the lock in, they had no problem coming up with a group covenant. Jacob wrote it all down on a whiteboard, the youth signed it, and away we went. 

I suppose it’s only natural that a group of UCC youth would be fluent in the language of covenant. Even if it’s not something we explicitly talk about every week, it’s something they’ve grown up with. If you’ve been UCC for a long time, you might not know this, but not all churches have covenants. I grew up outside the UCC and we didn’t recite a church covenant in worship, we recited creeds. The creeds were about what we believed together as a group and, in my tradition at least, were a litmus test for entry into the church. 

In the UCC we sometimes stay creeds, but we think of these as “testimonies, not tests.” They are expressions of what some of us find meaningful or true. But they are not a test for whether you can join the group. 

Our congregation has a rotation of affirmations of faith that we say together in worship: the UCC Statement of Faith, A New Creed from the United Church of Canada, our church’s mission statement, our open and affirming statement, and our church covenant. While some of these might not seem like true affirmations of faith to those from more creedal backgrounds, these statements about who we are as a community and how we covenant to be in relationship to God, each other, and the world are at the very heart of our faith as Congregationalists. 

New folks often have questions about what it means to be a part of our congregation. I am often asked “what do you believe about X, Y, and Z?” And I typically answer, “Well, I can tell you what my thoughts are but I can’t speak for every other person in our congregation. If you hang around a while and get to know people you’ll start to learn what’s important to them and you can ask them for yourself.”

For many, this is mind-blowing. In many parts of Christianity, the glue that holds a congregation or denomination together is their theology - what they believe. A lot of churches even have 7 or 10 or 12-point lists on their websites that tell you precisely what everyone is supposed to believe about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, sin, forgiveness, the afterlife, and more. 

But in the UCC, that’s not our glue. The thing that binds us together is covenant. We are together because we choose, over and over, to be together on this journey. 

UCC Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman says “The word [covenant] means many things. But as a beginning it means this much: a way of being committed to each other as God is committed to us, a way of being defined by, accountable to and responsible for each other. God has made that deep and abiding commitment to us. And we affirm that our pilgrimage together is marked by such a costly, disciplined and abiding commitment.” [1] 

It’s a bit like that passage from John that Harper read a few minutes ago. Christ is the vine and we are the branches. God is the source of love and covenants with us. We, in turn, covenant to be in relationship with one another. We aren’t together because we all look alike or have a common hobby. We don’t all come from the same backgrounds. We don’t even have the same beliefs about God, the Bible, or precisely what it means to follow Jesus. What binds us together is not a set of common beliefs but a belief that we want to share life in common. We covenant to be on this journey together because we believe the way of Jesus isn’t a solo flight but a communal journey. 

This is why we show up week after week, even when we might rather stay in bed. It’s why we drag ourselves back to church on Sunday evening to prepare a meal at Second Helping. It’s why we share our resources of time and money so we can continue our shared ministry. It’s why we send cards, pray for one another, and drop off meals when one of us is struggling. It’s why grin from ear to ear and cheer during the prayers when something goes right. It’s why we take time to talk to toddlers and teens at coffee hour. It’s why we listen with open hearts and minds when a fellow-traveler shares a different perspective. It’s why we eagerly show up for book studies and small groups: because we know we are likely to learn from another’s faith journey. I could go on and on but I don’t need to. Because if you stick around a UCC congregation long enough, you’ll see it lived out.

Covenant: “A way of being committed to each other as God is committed to us, a way of being defined by, accountable to and responsible for each other.”

We don’t do it perfectly. That’s for sure. But we keep showing up. And we keep looking to Jesus who made his vision clear: “love one another as I have loved you.” 

May it be so. 

NOTES:

[1] Hoffman, Jane Fisler. Covenant:: A Study for the United Church of Christ (p. 52). United Church Press. Kindle Edition. 

Also consulted: 

https://www.newstimes.com/religion/article/Forum-on-Faith-UCC-is-based-on-covenants-not-1042917.php

“Running towards Resurrection”

Luke 24:1-12

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Easter Sunday. March 31, 2024

What if the story of Easter morning isn’t all that special? 

Okay. I didn’t get hit by a lightning bolt for saying that out loud. That’s good. 

Celebrating Easter IS important. Although the wider culture certainly sees Christmas as the biggest Christian holiday, Easter is actually the highest holy day in the Christian calendar. There’s no doubt about that.

So why on earth would I wonder if the story of Easter morning isn’t all that special? 

Stay with me, okay? 

What I mean is that the story of Easter morning - the story of the empty tomb - is hardly unique. In fact, it’s but one of SEVERAL appearances of the Risen Christ. 

Now, I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying attention much as a kid but I honestly didn’t realize this until early adulthood. Which, I guess, isn’t that surprising. After all, it’s the story of the empty tomb that we always tell on Easter morning. We hear some of the other Resurrected Christ stories in the weeks following Easter but, um, you may or may not know this: those Sundays are not quite as well-attended as Easter Sunday. 

So somehow I never heard all these other stories. Maybe you haven’t heard them either? 

Immediately after the passage we heard today, Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They don’t know it’s him until they sit down to eat together. Something about that act of sharing a meal makes it suddenly snap into place for them: this is Jesus they’re talking to!

And right after that, Jesus appears to a big group of the disciples. He greets them, “Peace be with you!” and invites them to examine his body closely so they’ll know it’s really him. 

You may have heard the story of Thomas, who missed that first appearance of Christ in the Upper Room. Later, Jesus appears to the group again and Thomas is here this time. He had heard about the Resurrected Christ from his friends but had his doubts until he saw it for himself. 

In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Christ blesses his disciples and commissions them to go out and share the story of God’s love with everyone they encounter. 

And then there’s my favorite Resurrection story in John 21, which I like to call “breakfast on the beach.” Pastor Sue gets to preach on this one next week (you should come to worship! It’ll be fun!). It’s a beautiful, dreamlike story of the Resurrected Christ appearing to his friends on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. In a clear parallel to the calling of the disciples at that same location, Jesus helps them find fish as they’re out on their boats. And then they all gather around a charcoal fire and have breakfast. 

This story is especially poignant because of our friend Peter. A few days earlier, Peter warmed himself by another fire and denied that he knew Jesus three times. And now, by this fire, Christ asks him three times, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter affirms, rather than denies. And three times Christ blesses Peter. 

This is to say nothing of the stories in Corinthians and Acts. Paul alone had at least three visions of the Resurrected Christ. And through the centuries, many other Christians have claimed the same: Julian of Norwich, St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena to name just a few. 

So the empty tomb is a great story, of course! But it seems funny to me that it’s often the ONLY Resurrection story we tell on Easter because, well, in today’s story Christ doesn’t even make an appearance! He’s nowhere to be found. Just an empty tomb and confused disciples. 

We have all these other Resurrection stories, though. The empty tomb isn’t the only one. 

And….Jesus’s resurrection is far from the only resurrection story in the Bible. I counted at least 9 others - some in the First Testament channeled by Elijah and Elisha. Several in the gospels are at the hands of Jesus: Lazarus, the young man at Nain, and Jairus’s daughter. And then a couple channeled by Peter and Paul in the book of Acts. 

So we have all these other Resurrection stories, too. It’s not just Jesus who was resurrected. 

I remember when I first heard this, my mind was BLOWN. I had been taught that the Resurrection of Jesus was a one-time-only, incredibly special, and unique thing that proved that Jesus was unlike any other human to ever walk the earth. ONLY Jesus was special enough to be resurrected. And it seemed that ONLY Jesus was special enough to do the resurrecting. When I discovered that there were other stories of other people both being and doing resurrection in the Bible? MIND. BLOWN. 

Perhaps, then, what’s special is not THE resurrection of Christ but Resurrection itself. THE resurrection is a one-time-only occurrence. But Resurrection with a capital R and no article in front of it - Resurrection as a concept is one of the absolute, essential components of the Christian faith. 

Perhaps it’s not the story of Easter morning itself that’s so special. It’s what the story POINTS TO that matters. 

This is good news, incidentally, for those of you who are sitting there like, “This whole thing is a bunch of hogwash. Dead people stay dead.” You’ll be happy to know you’re in good company - several of Jesus’s closest friends had similar reactions on Easter morning. The important thing isn’t whether we believe the stories happened exactly as they were relayed to us. The important thing is discerning what truths the stories point to. And those truths can hold power regardless of how the details of each individual story went down. 

Our faith ancestors were CLEARLY trying to tell us SOMETHING with all these Resurrection stories. It’s like they’re bonking us on the head with them, over and over again. A huge, flashing neon sign: “Resurrection this way!” An announcement over the loudspeakers, “Attention shoppers. This Resurrection thing is REALLY important.” 

The proliferation of Resurrection stories makes it feel more real, more impactful, just…MORE to me. Because when it’s just this one story about what happened to this one very special guy, it’s hard for me to connect the dots and figure out how it can matter in my life. If it’s just about what happened to Jesus 2000 years ago, maybe it’s not happening here and now. But if it’s happening over and over and over again? Well, then. That makes me sit up and take notice. Because maybe it’s still happening today. 

I need a little audience participation here. Can you find your Resurrection glasses? They might be in the pew back or in the bottom of your bag. Let’s put them on, shall we? And let’s go looking for Resurrection here and now. 

Resurrection is the world waking up around us every Spring. The birds start to sing. The grass greens up. The daffodils poke through. The earth looked like it was dead, but now it is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

Resurrection is a black plume of smoke on the horizon. The indigenous people who lived here for centuries before the settlers arrived knew that frequent, controlled burns helped keep our little corner of the earth healthy. The fields burn, then smolder, as dark as the tomb that Easter morning. The darkness makes space for new, green life to rise up fresh amidst the ashes. 

Resurrection is the woman who has been abused: driving all night long with a sleeping toddler in the backseat, hoping for a fresh start. And it’s the man in a suit and tie descending to the church basement on his lunch break to attend his first 12-step meeting. 

Resurrection is the kid going off to college, finally free of the bullies that tormented them in high school. And it’s the person who has applied for 100 jobs and finally gets that phone call with a job offer on the other end. 

Resurrection is the immigrant who has left everything behind, hoping and praying that they’ll find kindness at the end of their long journey. And resurrection is the parent of a trans teenager getting their pronouns and chosen name right again and again and again. 

Resurrection is Jesus on the beach giving Peter another chance. And it’s Christ lovingly saying to Thomas, “Put your hand just here, on my side.” Resurrection is the face of Love suddenly made known to the disciples in the breaking of the bread. And it’s Christ saying “Peace be with you,” and “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” 

Resurrection is Love running towards us over and over and over and over. Even when we don’t think we deserve it. (Perhaps especially when we don’t think we deserve it.)

Resurrection is Love running towards us, and it is also this: 

When the women went and told the disciples about the empty tomb, the disciples wrote them off. The author of Luke says, “The women’s words seemed to the disciples an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter - BUT PETER! -  got up and ran to the tomb

Peter got up and ran. He ran in his fear and shame. He ran, looking like a fool and a saint. He ran because of all that was left undone and all that he wished he could undo. 

Peter ran towards mystery and possibility. He ran towards Love. He ran towards hope. Peter ran towards Resurrection. 

Beloveds, it is my prayer for you that you will find the strength, the courage, the stamina, the humility, the curiosity, the doubt, and the faith to run towards Resurrection, too. 

The Path of Descent

 “The path of descent”

Matthew 16:21-28

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

March 10, 2024

Even though wise friends and my doctor had warned me that taking antidepressants might be rough at first, I still wasn’t prepared for how much worse I felt before I began to feel better. I thought I was a pro at living with anxiety, but the level of panic I felt when I started taking medication was more intense than I had expected. Luckily, my doctor had the foresight to prescribe a second med I could use to get through the rough patches until things evened out. So I gritted my teeth and pushed through, hopeful things would be better on the other side. Within a few weeks, I felt emotionally better than I had ever felt in my life. Yay for the miracle of science! 

(Please note: every body is different and you should, in no way, extrapolate that your medical experiences would be anything like mine. I’m just telling you what my experience was like.)

In my situation, things had to get significantly worse before they could get better. I had to descend before I could come back up for air. But once I made it through, what awaited me on the other side was worth every bit of the struggle. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t carrying around constant anxiety and when I did have anxious thoughts I could not only recognize them as irrational but actually let them go. Amazing. 

Sometimes this is just how it goes, right? Things have to get worse before they get better. You have to sink pretty low before you’re able to rise again. It really can be darkest before the dawn. 

This seems to be what Jesus was trying to impart to his disciples in today’s passage. Peter has just proclaimed Jesus “the Messiah, son of the living God,” and Jesus has named Peter “the rock on which I will build my community.” After this warm and uplifting interchange, we are told that Jesus “sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

Why the secrecy? Well, I’m guessing it had something to do with what comes next: “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

From our vantage point, centuries later we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what’s happening. I’ve heard this story before.” But try to put yourself in Peter’s shoes. His dear friend, his beloved, his teacher, his hope, his spiritual leader is telling him he’s about to be killed. No one would want to hear that from a friend. Especially if you think the friend is leading a movement. Especially if you think the friend is sent from God to bring liberation and salvation. Death is not supposed to be the endgame here, right? That’s not how this ends.

Perhaps he is so caught up in the fear of Jesus dying, Peter misses the part about resurrection. Or perhaps he hears it but writes it off because, as one of my favorite preachers, the Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence says, “If there’s one thing that’s certain in life, it’s that the dead stay dead.” Resurrection would have been so far out of the realm of possibility that Peter may have just glossed over it completely, responding only to the first part of Jesus’s statement - that he would be dying a painful death.

I have to say, of all the things that are said in this passage, Peter’s response to Jesus’s statement feels like one of the more rational things. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Wouldn’t you say the same to a friend? I know I would. 

But Jesus is displeased with Peter’s response. Well, “displeased” is an understatement. Although just a few short sentences ago he named Peter the “rock,” the solid foundation on which the church would be built. Peter is now a “stumbling block” put in place to trip Jesus up. Jesus chastises Peter for taking a human perspective rather than a godly perspective. 

I’ve often heard this passage interpreted through the lens of what it means to be a Messiah. Sometimes preachers oversimplify it by saying, “Peter was expecting a militaristic Messiah to come and fight the Romans because that’s what Jews thought the Messiah would be,” so when Jesus came as a spiritual leader, not a warrior, Peter was confused. The problem with this interpretation is that there’s nothing in this text that supports it. Jews were NOT all expecting a warrior Messiah. That much we know. So there’s no reason to assume that’s what was in Peter’s mind. Peter simply says, “God, please don’t let this be true. Please don’t ever let this happen to Jesus.” 

If you take out the “what kind of Messiah was Peter expecting” question and just focus on what’s actually being said here, Jesus’s statement about Peter focusing on human/worldly/earthly things rather than godly/heavenly/spiritual things isn’t about whether Jesus is a “spiritual” Messiah or “earthly” one. Instead, I hear Jesus telling Peter that what is about to happen - this descent into chaos and pain, followed by the overcoming and rising - is holy. It is the way of God. 

Sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. Sometimes you have to sink pretty low before you rise again. Sometimes it really is darkest before the dawn. 

Father Richard Rohr calls this “the descending way” - the notion that we have to descend in order to rise. [1] We don’t know what it feels like to be “up” if we’ve never been “down.” In fact, he says, this is precisely what Jesus was talking about a few chapters back when he told some other religious leaders about the “sign of Jonah.” When asked for a sign, Jesus says the only sign they’ll get is the sign of Jonah - three days in the dark, nasty belly of a fish. Jonah only rose after he descended. The same is true for Jesus. [2] 

And Rohr says the same is true for followers of Jesus, too. Rohr speaks about ascending and descending paths in religion. Ascending is when we want to get higher, be better, more perfect, more holy. Rohr says we naturally gravitate towards this idea. We want to be on the moral high ground. And we often want to feel morally superior to others. That’s why there have been so many religious wars. 

But there is also the descending path, which Jesus teaches and shows more often. The descending way is about letting go, forgiving, emptying ourselves, getting low, being simple, aligning ourselves with the poor and marginalized, living in solidarity with others rather than trying to make ourselves superior. You can see this pathway absolutely everywhere in the Bible, not just in the words and actions of Jesus. 

Jonah in the belly of the whale. 

Elijah on the run, miserable and afraid.

Ruth and Naomi: impoverished and alone. 

Jeremiah, Joseph, Daniel: all literally sent down into pits before rising up again

And then, of course, Jesus. The one who speaks of a world turned upside down. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the mourning. Blessed are those who are down in the depths, lower than low. 

Jesus’s entire life and ministry followed this spiral of descent. The only way up for him was down and through. There was no avoiding it. 

Poet Luci Shaw speaks beautifully of this in her poem about the Jesus’s birth. The name of the poem is actually “Descent.” She writes:

Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.

Jesus at the beginning of his life walking the path of descent. And now, Jesus near the end of his life doing the same. The way of descent. Or as Glennon Doyle says so succinctly, “First the pain, then the rising.”

Peter only thinks of things from a human perspective, and he only sees what makes sense: pain and suffering. But Jesus invites the disciples into a way of living that doesn’t try to avoid the pain. “Take up your cross and follow me,” he says. 

Like Peter, we usually only hear the first part of what Jesus said, “Take up your cross.” No, thanks, Jesus. You’ve just told us where that leads. And we don’t want to go. We don’t want to see you descend into pain and we don’t want to go there either. We want to avoid suffering and pain. We don’t want to descend. We want to skip to the good part. 

And there’s nothing wrong with the good part - at all. Rohr says it’s not bad to want to continue to grow and seek higher spiritual ground. But the way there isn’t up, it’s down. 

Often, allowing ourselves to experience the pain of this world helps us find gratitude for the absence of pain. Often, the way up is down. Some of the most spiritually enlightened people I’ve ever known are people who have been through the absolute worst of it. And I’m not saying that they would have ever wished for that and I’m certainly not saying God sent it their way, but I AM saying that their experiences carrying the crosses that came their way led them to a place of transcendence. 

Please don’t go out looking for a cross to bear. Our crosses will find us. And I also want to say that it’s not a cross if it can be avoided. God never desires for us to stay in an abusive relationship, for example. That’s not a cross to bear, even though church leaders have shamefully used this verse to encourage people to suffer through terrible situations when they should have been helping people get free. 

But when the absolutely unavoidable suffering of life comes our way, as it sometimes does, we, like Peter, can cling to the words of Jesus: “Take it up and follow me,” he says. Not “take it up” alone. But “take it up and FOLLOW ME.” 

The way of descent isn’t easy. And no one ever said following Jesus was easy. Jesus himself is certainly saying otherwise here. But we do not travel the path of descent alone. 

As Father Rohr reminds us: despite our desire to climb, we sometimes hit a point in our lives where we find ourselves right back at the bottom again. When we get tired of trying to “be a saint,” we give up and learn to be ordinary and simple. We learn to descend. And in that moment of release, Rohr says that we realize that “there’s no climbing necessary. You’re there already. All you have to do is let go and trust that someone else is leading. Frankly, because you don’t always know how to lead. And neither do I. But if you let go, you’ll discover someone else is leading quite well.” [3] 

May it be so. Amen. 

NOTES:

[1] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-descending-path-2023-02-24/

[2] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-sign-of-jonah-2022-08-19/ 

[3]  https://cachomilies.blogspot.com/2019/08/ascending-religions-and-descending.html 

“Called Back and Beyond in the Shadow of Empire”

 “Called Back and Beyond in the Shadow of Empire”

Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

March 3, 2024

Questions you don’t need to answer out loud: 

Have you ever run away from yourself? 

Have you ever been so confused or discouraged that you forgot yourself? 

If you have ever run away from yourself, have you ever needed a friend to call you back to who you are? 

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I think Jesus might have been running away in Matthew 16. He’s been trying to escape for quite some time. The pattern repeats again and again  - he tries to get some space, people follow him. 

It’s not particularly flattering to say this, but Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew can be downright grumpy. He scolds the disciples. He calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Later on, he throws tables in the temple in Jerusalem. Matthew’s gospel is the one with all the weeping and gnashing of teeth. And I wonder if Jesus had trouble sleeping at night. I wonder if his exhaustion was too close to the surface. 

At the beginning of Matthew, Jesus is baptized by his cousin John and a voice comes from the Great Beyond, “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” But this middle portion of Matthew feels like an absolute slog - people every which way are clamoring for his help AND second-guessing his teachings. His disciples won’t leave him alone AND they don’t seem to understand what’s going on. 

And so I wonder if there’s any chance Jesus began to forget himself. And I wonder if he forgot himself so very much that he decided to run away. 

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Geography is critically important in Matthew’s gospel. I had a seminary professor tell me once that when the gospel says something like “and then they came to…” you’d better get out your map and figure out why this detail is included. At the beginning of chapter 16, after Jesus gets into an argument with some other religious leaders, we are told he “went away.” But we’re not told where he’s going. Once again, the disciples follow him. Once again, Jesus performs a miracle of feeding multitudes. 

The next thing we hear about location is “Now when Jesus came to the area of Caesarea Philippi…” and this is WEIRD. They are more than a day’s walk north of their home base. They’ve never been this far north before, for any reason. If you look at maps of Jesus’s ministry, you’ll see that almost all of it was concentrated around the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem. The map pin for Caesarea Philippi is way far away. Further, this is not a place you’d expect to find many Jews. It was a longstanding holy place for competing religions, considered idolatrous to Jesus and his friends. 

So why is he here? Traditional interpretation says he took his disciples here to make a point. But the text makes it sound like he was just making a pit stop on the way to somewhere else. It’s not, “Jesus took his disciples to Caesarea Philippi…” it’s “Now when Jesus came to the area….” almost as if it was just a place to pause.

And that’s part of what makes me wonder if he was on the run. Fed up. Trying to retreat far, far away to do some real soul-searching. 

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If you’re trying to soul-seach, Caesarea Philippi is a good place for it. Its modern name is Banias and it’s a nature preserve. Located at the base of Mount Hermon, it’s all scraggly tan rocks and sheer cliff faces. A spring of water that comes out of the base of the mountain feeds the River Jordan. Greenery lining the water’s pathway. It’s stunning. 

Small wonder, then, that people honored this place by building monuments to their gods. The place was even named after gods: originally called Panion after the Greek god Pan, Philip the Tetrarch renamed it Caesarea to honor the emperor and added on Philippi to honor himself. In the time of Jesus, there would have been a large temple honoring Caesar Augustus, built by Phlip’s father, Herod the Great. Kings, gods everywhere. 

Some scholars believe the temple of Augustus was built right over the place where the spring emerged from the mountain. This cave’s mouth is still present today, a giant, dark, gaping hole in the side of the mountain. You can see it in the photo on the screens. 

Next to the cave entrance was a shrine to the Greek god Pan and his consort Echo. Pan was a god of nature and fertility. In some legends, Echo, who was pursued by Pan, was cursed by having her voice taken away and was forever only able to echo back what others said, never speaking her own thoughts. 

It is in this setting that Jesus found himself with his disciples. Surrounded by monuments to various gods and kings, they were, quite literally in the shadow of empire. Jesus asked his friends, “Who do you say I am?” Interestingly, he shows his hand a bit in the asking, calling himself the Son of Man or Human One. He highlights his humanity when he asks the question. And that’s part of what makes me wonder if he had been battered so much at this point, pushed so low, that he wasn’t quite sure who he was anymore. Traditional interpretation of this text is that he took his disciples to this place to prove a point: that in the shadow of all this empire, HE was the Messiah, the Son of God, the light from true light, the great I Am. He was the great one, not all these other gods. And the question, “Who do you say I am?” was a test to see if they’d been paying attention. 

Here, under the statues of Pan and Echo, the disciples echo what they’ve heard from others: “Some say you’re John the Baptist, others Elijah.” But Simon Peter has other ideas. He confidently speaks his own thoughts, naming Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. 

These two titles together are the strongest confession of faith we have in the gospels. Simon names Jesus both the Messiah, the anointed one, the hero who has come to save the oppressed AND the Divine Son of God. And he has the boldness to speak these words in this place, where they are surrounded by monuments to empire. Remember: Caesar Augustus was also called the Son of God. To name Jesus as the Son of God instead was dangerous, seditious stuff. 

Traditional interpretation says that Jesus’s next statement bestows an A+ upon Simon for passing the pop quiz. The other disciples were clueless, but Simon had been paying attention and gave the right answer. 

But I wonder if Jesus asked the question because he needed his friends to help him remember himself. I wonder if Jesus’s response is less a teacher giving a gold star to his pupil and more Jesus receiving his friend’s confession with joy and gratitude. Jesus calls Simon blessed; and here, in the shadow of this sheer, rocky cliff, going 70 feet almost straight up into the heavens, Jesus gives his friend a new name: “I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my community. And the gates of Hades will not hold when my community storms the gates. Peter, I’m giving you the keys to the Great Beyond. Whatever you say here on earth holds true and whatever you say in the Great Beyond is also true.”

Theologians have been arguing about those six little sentences forever. Usually, they want to argue about whether Jesus really said Peter was the foundation of the church (it’s a whole thing about the gender of some of these words in Greek - and a whole thing about whether you’re team Catholic or Protestant). Some familiar art and funny jokes have come out of this little speech: you know Peter standing at the pearly gates, holding the keys to heaven? Yep, this is why. 

But that word that we translate heaven and think of as a place with gold-lined streets wasn’t in Jesus’s mind. The Greek is more like the kingdom of the great sky above. Somewhere over the rainbow - way up there - beyond. And the “gates of Hades” is sometimes translated as “gates of hell” but you probably already know that what we think of as hell doesn’t exist in the Bible. Instead, the gates of Hades were just the gates of the place where went when they died. In fact, the cave mouth that they were sitting by? That was known as one of the gates of Hades. That cave was so deep and dark and mysterious that no one had explored it fully. It was known as a portal to death. That absolute that is everyone’s end. 

There is also a lot of chit-chat about what Jesus meant by ekklesia here. It’s usually translated as church. Which is weird because the concept church didn’t exist until MUCH later, well after Jesus’s death. And the word is only used twice in all four gospels. Ekklesia simply meant a gathered community. And so, Jesus speaks here of his community and radical hope that the yawning jaws of death, staring at them from that cave across the way, were no match for their strength. 

Jesus, it seems to me, is somehow both here in this moment with his friends and somewhere way out there Beyond in a place they haven’t been yet. Something about Peter’s words has called him back to himself. A few moments ago he was a Human One, but now he is far away in mystical places the disciples can’t yet touch. What he’s speaking of is the hope of Resurrection. Which, I regret to say, we don’t have time to fully unpack today but if you mark your calendars for March 31st, we’ll get there together on Easter morning. 

Peter has called Christ back to himself. And we are told that “from that time on, Jesus began to reveal to his friends about what would come to pass in Jerusalem….how he had to be killed and raised on the third day.” He remembered who he was. In spite of the exhaustion, the chaos, the fear, the ugliness, Jesus remembered himself in this place. At Caesarea Philippi, in the shadow of empire and next to the gates of death, Christ spoke of hope, new life, freedom, Resurrection. 

Jesus named Peter on this day. But Peter also named Jesus. In gratitude for these two friends, and in the spirit of Jesus who taught with questions, I  leave you with just a few:

Who in your life has the power to call you back to yourself? 

Who in your community might need to be reminded of their belovedness? 

And, how, in the shadow of Empire that we still live in, are we called to be about that work?

Notes:

I learned a lot about Caesarea Philippi and Greek mythology as I researched this passage. Here are some of the sources I consulted:

Hamilton, Adam. Peter: Flawed but Faithful Disciple.

Helyer, Larry R. The Life and Witness of Peter. 

Feasting on the Gospels Vol. 2

https://www.holylandsite.com/caesarea-philippi

blueletterbible.com for Greek research

https://www.understandchristianity.com/timelines/chronology-jesus-life-ministry/ 

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/peter-receives-his-name-and-his-gender 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41LYEU48cIg 

https://cannundrum.blogspot.com/2015/08/caesarea-philippi-and-cave-of-pan-israel.html 

Wikipedia articles and accompanying source material for Hades, Pan, Echo, Caesar Augustus, Caesarea Philippi, Herod the Great, Philip Tetrarch,