A Sermon after a Fire

 

Below is a sermon preached on January 9, 2022 at Christ the Servant Lutheran Church in Louisville, Colorado on the Wedding at Cana.
 

Good morning. I am Zach Parris and I am blessed to be your pastor on the campus of the University of Colorado. 

I am also your neighbor. I live here in Louisville, down on Dahlia Street. I feel compelled, as I have in nearly every conversation this week, to tell you that my family is very fortunate in that our house survived the fire, though it looks like we’ll be displaced for around a month because of ash and smoke damage. 

In these days I’ve been in conversation with my neighbors more than ever. During the fire we were constantly sharing information and screenshots of doorbell cameras. Once we were finally able to talk face to face, I noticed that most of the conversations with my neighbors began by talking about the things that we did or did not bring with us as we evacuated. 

My wife realized the night of the fire that she left the handwritten note from her late grandmother that describes how her grandfather gave her the accompanying sapphire brooch. 

On the other hand, the only shoes we ended up taking for our five-year old daughter were a pair of Crocs. Still, I want you to know, we managed to secure five unripe bananas. As of this morning, each one of those bananas is sitting on the kitchen counter of the home where we are now staying.

My family and I were also fortunate in that we had both taken vacation that Thursday. We had been driving around in the morning and saw the smoke. We were watching the news. We had time to pack. 

 

First and out of an abundance of caution (a useful phrase I’ve learned over the past two years), I set aside our “important documents” file folder. Slowly, we got out a bag and we began to leisurely put some things into it, just in case. 

By the time I took that bag out to the car, it was clear that things had escalated. The wind was howling. Ash and debris filled the air. Suddenly we were in a frenzy and had to identify the things that were important enough to fill our Volvo station wagon.

Every choice we made was a compromise. Everything we put in the car, took the place of something else that would not come with us. 

It was difficult and confusing. We kept getting into the car, buckling our seat belts, then remembering something we needed and running back inside. At one point, I got out of the car and ran all over the house looking for my wife to tell her that we had to leave, but I couldn’t find her. When I went back to the driveway, she was already in the car.

In the midst of all of this uncertainty and disorientation, we had to make the most stark of our compromises. At one point, I stuck my head in the car and told my wife that I needed to talk to her in the garage. 

You see, on Christmas Santa Claus brought our family a hamster. “Cherry Bear Jelly Bean.” As Hannah and I stood in our open garage battered by the wind and the debris, I asked, “Are we really taking the hamster?”

Now, I don’t want you to think me heartless, but we’d only had the hamster a couple of days and it’s cage is large. It's a multi-tier aquarium set-up that was going to take up a lot of space. Despite the delirium, I thought it a bad idea to put a loose hamster into our over-packed car. Early on, when we didn’t think we’d really have to leave, we told our daughter that, “Of course, the hamster would come with us, if we left.” Now we had to make a hard decision. 

My wife, blessed saint that she is, looked me right in the eyes and said, “We’re taking the damn hamster.”

And so, we compromised. Some things came out of the car, so that Cherry Bear Jelly Bean could come with us. 

…

The Wedding at Cana is a familiar and strange bible story. To understand what’s happening, it is helpful to have a bit of context. 

First, there is an implication in the story that the folks getting married and hosting the wedding are a part of Jesus’ family. The problem with running out of wine, the reason for Mary’s urgency is not that they wanted to keep the party going, but that not having enough food or drink for your guests at a wedding was not honorable. It was a shameful thing. 

In the ancient near east honor was more important than money. Losing honor had real consequences. If your family was considered shameful others wouldn’t associate with you. They wouldn’t buy your sheep or goats. Losing honor would hurt real people.

The problem for Jesus is that in all the gospels one of the pillars of his work is to overturn the honor/shame system. Jesus will go on to do all sorts of shameful things, like hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes, in order to re-frame them as honorable.

In this story Jesus is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s come to reject the honor/shame system, but if he wants to protect his large and extended family, he’s gotta play ball. 

What Jesus does in this situation is remarkable. Caught between his ideals and the reality of the world around him, Jesus compromises. 

If Jesus’ ideals stand in the way of keeping people fed and safe, then Jesus will compromise them. That is remarkable and it is good news. 

…

As we have been reminded in these weeks, the world can be a cold and uncompromising place. Far too often, the world does not compromise for us or for our vision of life and love. 

A world where the love and life of God are senselessly denied is not the world God wants.

And yet, God compromises. God chooses to work in and among us in the world as it is, broken as it is. If the world will not compromise for us, God will. 

God demonstrates this not just at the wedding at Cana, but time and again. Since the beginning God has been calling miraculous creatures up from the dust and breathing life into them, and God will do that again.

We will drag our feet. The world will drag its feet. We will continue to live in a society that knowingly creates the conditions that spur on disaster. Even riding these weeks’ overwhelming waves of generosity, well-intentioned people will make mistakes as they try desperately to breathe life into us and into our community. We will make mistakes as we attempt to resuscitate ourselves. For these mistakes God will grieve, but then…God will take that deep breath that I hear Jesus taking before he stands up from the table and tells the servants to fill the stone jars with water. Then God will go down into the ashes and bring us back up out of them again. May it be so. Amen.

A Sermon on a Merciless Man

A Sermon on Matthew 25.14-30

Preached on November 19, 2017 at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church 

This morning we find ourselves in the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew with what sounds on it’s face like a difficult parable. The one who has been telling us story after story about how blessed are the merciful, that we should offer not just our coat, but also our shirt, this morning this same Jesus tells a story of a man with no mercy, a man who reaps where he does not sow, who takes everything from those who have nothing. What are we to make of such a dissonant parable? 

The part of my biblical spirituality that finds hope and inspiration in Jacob, the limping conniver, seeks to redeem the initial thrust of this parable by hearing it as a part of Jesus call back in Matthew chapter 10 to be as “wise as serpents and gentle as doves” (with a lack of emphasis on the gentleness). 

Before we get too far down that road, let’s go back. Over the past five chapters the story has pushed Jesus closer and closer to Jerusalem and the cross. Along the way he has told parable after parable, story after story. I want to lift up two of these parables in the hope they might help us make sense of the one we hear this morning. 

I Am Told It Is True: A Sermon in Utero

A sermon preached at the Ryssby Church on December 12th, 2015 on Luke's birth of Jesus. 

Alleluia, Christ is risen! 

Oh, I’m sorry, please excuse me. I tend to get Christmas and Easter mixed up. It is an honest mistake, of course, because beyond the ham they also have this very interesting detail in common. You see, on both Christmas and Easter Jesus doesn’t have a very active role to play. You could say that on the two highest holy days of the church year Jesus is largely absent. 

At Easter the good news is that the tomb is empty. The good news is that Jesus is not here, he has gone on ahead of us while we stand at the entrance of an empty tomb and rejoice. 

Throughout Advent we wait and watch and prepare for the promised messiah who removes disaster, deals with our oppressors, heals the lame, and gathers the outcast. We await the coming of the one who will fulfill all that God has promised in the past and pull us into a new future. And into those very large shoes steps…a baby.

Why is it that we call the days most holy, when Jesus does not seem to be here?

The Spirit, Rhubarb, and Pumpkin-filled Visions and Dreams of a Late Night Pentecost

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly while we wait…hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?

- Romans 8

David Letterman’s run on late night ended this week. While the Late Show hasn’t been a regular part of my television viewing habits in a number of years, it played a critical role in my development as a person of faith. As a kid the very best part of Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation was that my mom allowed me to stay up to watch the Late Show. I loved it. It was absurd and ridiculous. It had the veneer of your average network produced show, but then when you paid attention it was…weird.

With all due respect to Rupert , Richard Simmons and Regis, Stupid Pet Tricks and the Top Ten, my favorite recurring segment was Guess Mom’s Pies. Every Thanksgiving (which meant I got to watch it) the Late Show went live to Dave’s mom’s house in Indiana with a simple premise. She had prepared two unidentified pies for Thanksgiving. It was the job of Dave, Paul, and the audience to guess what kinds of pies Dave’s mom had made. 

That’s it. It was stupid. There was no skill involved, there were no prizes, and I loved it. (So did a number of online fans. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to tracking the historic results of Guess Mom’s Pies.) My favorite was the 1994 edition of GMP. That year Dave’s mom bucked the trends and prepared, not two, but three pies. Get this…two of those pies were cherry! Insanity, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! Certainly the third pie would be something different, but, no! Cherry, again!

Dave’s mom is now in her mid-nineties and the segment came to an end a couple of years ago, but it has stuck with me. It’s absurdity, how it turned the familiar (Thanksgiving, apple pies, moms) into the strange. Guess Mom’s Pies was one of the first times that I began to see that the world is not as it seems. That’s where we find ourselves in the church year. At Pentecost we speak of seeing visions and dreams, not as illusions or the supernatural, but as the natural, as the way the world really is. This weekend we proclaim that despite all signs to the contrary (I’m looking at you Game of Thrones) life has the final word over death. As the Late Show comes to a close I give thanks for the role it played in revealing the coming kingdom.  This Pentecost may the Spirit come and open our eyes to see the world as it really is, as a world filled with life and pies.

peace,

z

Good news... Jesus is not here.

A sermon on the road to Emmaus from Easter evening.

I trust that you had a lovely Easter; that you found all your Easter eggs, that it was a day filled with triumphant trumpets and jubilant proclamations. 

Alleluia, Christ is risen! 

I hate to throw a wet blanket on the celebration, but...if you would allow me to speak frankly for just a moment, I have an unseemly question to ask. Easter is the apex of the church year, the holiest of holies on the church calendar. Easter is the day when we mark Jesus’ greatest triumph, defeating death. Which is great, but there is an elephant in the room…where, exactly, is Jesus?

This Lent Remember to Forget...

Below is my monthly contribution to Bread for the Day.

"Has his steadfast love ceased forever? Are his promises at an end for all time?

Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”

- Psalm 77

Remember.
Remember...that you are dust and to dust you shall return. (note to self...remember this. it seems important.)
Remember...the person God has made you to be. (not to self...figure out exactly what this means.)
Remember...to call Norma, Sara, and Sara with an H. (I know you hate making phone calls, but you can't put this off anymore. just do it. it's not that bad.)
Remember...to send an email reminder to students about this weekend's vocational event.
Remember...to actually get this YouTube channel off the ground.
Remember...to buy more toothpaste.
Remember...to forget.

Forget.
Forget...what the world has taught you about what success looks like.
Forget...that power is a force to be exerted over others.
Forget...the idea that all you have is not enough.
Forget...about taking Friday off this week.
Forget...the idea that this was going to be the semester where I stay ahead of the game. 

There is much to remember and much to forget. For us…and for God. Today the psalmist pleads with God to remember. To remember to be gracious and compassionate. The psalmist points back to what God has done in the past; leading the people, time and again, through the wilderness, through uncertainty and fear. Today the psalmist tells God to remember that this is what God does. God remembers. God remembers to be gracious, to be compassionate, to...forget. 

Anytime we speak of God remembering, my mind always goes to Jeremiah when God promises to forget the people's sins. Not to set them aside or disregard them, but God promises to forget them altogether. It is one of the mysteries of the faith that ultimately our hope is tied up in God's promise to remember...to forget. 

The season of Lent is a season of self-examination. It is a time set aside to consider what's important to us. What should we remember and what should we forget? Who is it, exactly, that God has made us to be? These are difficult questions, but we are not alone in wrestling with them. With the whole people of God we will remember and forget over the next forty days. May we begin this journey boldly, held by the promise that holds us all along our paths. Held by the promise of the God who always remembers to forget. 

peace,

z

Why we'll administer ashes on campus today...

Yesterday a friend and colleague published a pretty compelling blog post arguing against the increasingly popular Ashes to Go movement where clergy people administer ashes to passersby on street corners and bus stations in a momentary exchange.

While I've offered ashes publicly each year that I've been doing this whole ordained pastor thing, the questions Tim raises have haunted me. I've wondered whether we were cheapening the ritual. Tim's right, the repentant Lenten movement does take time. It takes time to move from death into life. Truly, it is essential that we hear that we are dust and to dust we shall return; that our confession is also communal. 

Yet, it is the communal nature of our Ash Wednesday confession of brokenness and hope that will lead me (and my Episcopal colleague) onto campus later today. 

I suspect that my context and Tim's have some significant differences. Perhaps one of those differences is that my identity as a religious official does not lend me much credibility when I step onto campus. When I position myself to distribute ashes the masses will not rush to receive the sign of the cross. There will be very few members of the campus community for whom this opportunity will bring the relief of conveniently fulfilling one's religious obligations. 

Truth be told, very few people will stop at all. Last year in two hours on a street corner, I recall only around ten students who wished to receive the sign of the cross. Some passersby will observe me with curiosity, some disdain, some complete obliviousness. 

It's a weird experience for me, but I suspect it's an uncomfortable experience for students as well. Last year, with traffic slow on my corner of campus I began walking through academic buildings during class changes. I wore a black cassock, which made me feel like one of Harry Potter's death eaters floating through a sea of students who looked at me like I was more likely connected to Draco Malfoy than to Jesus Christ. Like most of our public theological acts on campus this act has a high degree of weirdness and a low degree of participation.

That's why I think it's important to offer ashes on campus to thousands of students, faculty, and staff who aren't particularly interested. It is my hope that today we might be the ashen cross on the forehead of our community. That we might be that smudge that surprises us with each look in the mirror. It's my hope that our presence might be just the kind of awkward and awakening proclamation that will help pull our community and world into the hope that is found only in death. 

peace,
z