An Appalachian Iliad

a Holy Trinity sermon on John 3 | June 3rd, 2012 | @ Grace, Boulder

It is good to be back living in the shadow of the mountains. As my accent might reveal in an occasional feel or well, I grew up in the shadows of the southern Appalachians. As I’ve grappled with this aspect of my identity, I have developed a deep respect for southern Appalachian literature. 

Life lived and described in prose in this place is always measured against the backdrop of the mountains. They function as monuments to eternity, as sentinels of the centuries. Generations come and go, trying scape together a life in this unforgiving terrain while the mountains remain. Against this backdrop, an emphasis of human frailty emerges and with it a theology that proclaims the importance of the by and by. Humanity’s fragile fate seems as certain as the enduring presence of the mountains. Against such incredible odds, these Appalachian theologies proclaim that the best we can hope for is the life God promises in the world to come, because most assuredly the new life of Christ isn’t coming in this one. 

There is this holy place I know...

A sermon preached @LCMontheHILL on John 3.14-21, Numbers 21.4-9, Ephesians 2.1-10

There is this holy place I know...
It’s where a thread of asphalt winds through the hills of western North Carolina, tying together an old white house on the top of a hill, an apple orchard, the family church, and its adjoined cemetery. It’s a thread that stretches back over centuries. This holy place is a place where as an eight year old I walked barefoot through the apple orchard. Meandering down the rows of trees, I made my way back to the big white house with its rusted tin roof, lost in the captivating world of my own imagination.

I felt the stiff blades of grass and the sun baked clay push back against my exposed feet, when suddenly something shifted and my imaginative world came crashing down into reality. Under foot something moved, something squirmed. My eyes shot to the ground. Pinned beneath my foot were scales, a white under belly, and frantic writhing. I don’t do snakes; not now and most certainly not as an eight year old. So, I can’t tell you for certain if I stepped on a snake or if it was a fire-breathing dragon. Rather, instinctively, I ran, making a bee line straight through the orchard. With each breath, my heart raced and my lungs stretched, until finally I collapsed onto the ground in a heap.

The Oregon Trail: The Way of Christ

A sermon on Mark 1.29-39, preached at Rejoice Lutheran Church in Erie, Colorado. 

When I was in elementary school, I would race to get ready each morning. As soon as I woke up I’d cast off the covers, throw on some clothes, grab a quick breakfast, and be out the door and on my way in just minutes. When I arrived at school, I’d cautiously straddle the fine line between a quick shuffle and full on running, somewhere right around olympic speed walking, as I made my way down the covered sidewalks and linoleum floors of the fourth and fifth grade hall. The classroom at the end of this hall, the last room on the right, just before the principal’s office, cast a warm, yellow glow out into the hall and emitted a continual, reverberating hum that shook the whole of each student’s existence.

Christ the King of Social Media

Christ the King of Social Media

A Sermon on CtK Sunday, featuring Matthew, Ezekiel, & Ephesians.

Again this week the fires of protest rose up in Egypt, as citizens took to the streets to protest the transitional military government. As social media brought about new political kingdoms in the place of leaders who had ruled for over fifty years in Egypt & Tunisia, the church bears witness to a year that demonstrated the power of social media to bring significant change in the world.

Whether in the Middle East or in the United States, the really revolutionary power of social media is its ability to create new kingdoms. In the past our connections to each other were more or less dependent on some combination of physical geography or happenstance. But these technologies have united people on a mass scale on the basis of common interest, regardless of geography.

Freed from the bonds of friendship and kinship, niche communities have formed and thrived. Whether it’s an online kingdom dedicated to overthrowing a political leader or a community of dedicated Doctor Who fans, the social media revolution has allowed us to dive deep into ourselves, to develop connections with those who share all our same quirks and interests.

A Funeral Sermon for the Living

A sermon on Romans 8.26-39

Trinity Lutheran Church was founded by German settlers in the 1840’s. The imposing church structure, one red clay brick stacked upon another, sits resolutely atop a hill in the western Carolina countryside. Walking up the meandering road that leads to the church, its imposing and steely gray steeple juts into the sky, demanding your attention like a glass lightning rod on a tin roof. The ancient stained glass windows, spread along the sanctuary’s length, were long ago covered by a protective layer of glass. Since then decades of condensation have built up in the space between, leaving windows that can only be enjoyed from the inside and the impression that the church like her windows are well defended. It is bordered on one side by the cool, crayfish-filled waters of a meandering brook, on another by a few strands of limp barbed wire clinging to a litany of wayward fence posts, and on another it is bordered by a small patch of cleared hillside in which my ancestors lie.

The Big Red Dirt & the Big Green Vine

A sermon fragment on Isaiah 55.10-13

My brother and I, as children, were failed entrepreneurs with perpetual hope. One summer, on the tails of the roaring success of our roadside squash stand [2 happy customers served], we launched a new endeavor the following week.

Back in a hidden corner of our family’s pastures in North Carolina was a hole, carved eight feet deep into the red clay. It was while playing in the loose, crimson, granulated soil at the bottom of the hole that a light bulb illuminated over each of our heads. Squash did not sell, but perhaps, just maybe, red dirt would. And so, we hauled five gallon bucket after five gallon bucket of red dirt out of the hole to our roadside stand where it sold for five dollars a bucket. Sadly, this time, not even our grandmother was so kind as to buy our wares.

This hole and its red dirt spilled out on one end, into a bare spot in the middle of the pasture. It sat away from any trees or shadows and was baked each year by the summer sun. The sanguine  patch was the cause of much consternation for my father. Each year bag after bag of grass seed and fertilizer was spilled on this spot. Yet the grass never grew, and the rain continued to wash this free dirt away in an ever widening gully.

There was one option, a nuclear option of sorts, one seed which could be spilled and no doubt would cover the spot and halt the rapid withering of the soil. It is the one seed that will grow regardless of rocks, thorns, or scorched earth. Some call it mile-a-minute vine and others foot-a-nite vine. Kudzu, as it is most commonly referred to, was introduced in the south from Japan in the early 1900’s to halt erosion. And that it did, it holds the soil firmly in place, but then it keeps growing and it does not stop for anything or anyone. There seems to be no dirt, no soil, no object which the Kudzu does not find habitable. And so, it grows unchecked, reaching out and grasping the landscape, seemingly holding the whole world in the arms of its embrace. Driving through the countryside one is expected to find this vivid vine draped over telephone poles and power lines, old barns and abandoned homes. The legend goes that you have to keep your windows closed at night to keep it out, and even then there’s a reason the windows are tinted green.

Like the kudzu, the promise proclaimed this morning is the promise of the God who is beginning a new creation one small seed. One seed this creation is growing and will grow until all things, all people, the rocks, the thorns, and even the good soil will be held together in its ever widening embrace. And with that seed already been planted in the Christ, and God, bringing bread to the eater and water to the parched, is like the kudzu vine on the run. AMEN.





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Dwight, Don't give up on your Lenten journey just yet.

A sermon for Lent 3A on John 4.1-42.

It’s not so much that Jesus is in a hurry; rather the boldness of each step is fueled by the inertia of the Word of God set loose in the world. John begins his gospel with some audacious claims about Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And all things came into being through him, not some or just a few, any, every, and all things came into being through him.”

These claims would seem a bit ambitious atop a resume. Yet through these first couple of chapters Jesus moves with the power these bold statements proclaim. The Spirit descends on him from heaven like a dove. With just a short beckoning, “Come and See,” Jesus attracts disciples and crowds everywhere he goes. At the wedding at Cana, he turns water into wine. At the temple Jesus drives out the money changers, overturns their tables, and declares that if the temple were destroyed he could raise it up again in just three days. And then, last week it seems Jesus, like Chuck Norris, does not sleep, he sits awake in the night to welcome and engage Nicodemus. Again, at this point we are only three chapters into John’s gospel, and already it is quickly apparent Jesus has a serious aversion to both dilly and dally.

It is the force behind his steps thus far which make this morning’s gospel so striking. Jesus has stayed up all night with Nicodemus and then has to hit the road towards Galilee early in the morning. Somewhere along the way, next to an ancient well, hunger pains set in. Jesus sends the disciples out to scrounge for some food. But Jesus, the one who brings all things into being, surprisingly, does not go with them. Tired from their journey and for the first time in John’s gospel, Jesus sits down.

Certainly his need to rest is understandable, Jesus has done so much already. Over three weeks into our Lenten journeys, maybe we also feel the need to sit down for just a moment and catch our breath. Perhaps our Lenten disciplines have fallen to the wayside like well intentioned, but short lived New Year’s resolutions. But just because we need to sit down and catch our breath, and certainly just because Jesus sits down by the well, do not let us give up on our Lenten journeys just yet. As we will see, the Word of God, who moves with such audacity and power, takes even sitting down to the next level.

As Jesus was sitting by the well, collecting his breath, perhaps closing his eyes for a moment, a Samaritan woman approaches. Samaritans were considered a community outside of the righteous Judean community, who thought of themselves as the true keepers of the old time religion. As she approaches Jesus does the unthinkable, Jesus engages this woman at the well and asks her for a drink.

This well is not just any well, it is Jacob’s well. And while it was located in the Samaritan north, a place Jesus as a Jew would not be particularly welcome, the identity of the well itself points beyond this division between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. The well points back to one of the patriarchs of the faith, to the time before any such division existed between north and south, between Samaritan and Judean. The spirit of Jacob must have been floating around in its deep waters that day. Because as Jesus, sitting by its edge, engages our Samaritan woman an argument breaks out. Like Jacob’s encounter with the night visitor alongside of another body of living water, this encounter becomes a wrestling between the human and the divine.

Jesus says, “Give me a drink.”
And the woman responds, “Who are you, a Judean, to ask a drink of me, a Samaritan?”

Jesus quickly counters with, “If you knew the gift of God and if you knew who it is saying to you, “Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him for a drink, and he would have given you living water.”

Still somewhat less than amused, the Samaritan woman tries to get a grasp onto what exactly this Judean is up to, so she speaks with the kind of slow, deliberate pace known only by those who have worked at the retail customer service desk.

“Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.” But she’s still intrigued by this idea of living water, in the same way that Dwight was intrigued by a small packet of magic legumes on this week’s episode of The Office. A small packet marked “Professor Copperfield’s Magic Legumes” lies alone on a table at a rummage sale. Dwight knows the beans can’t be magical, but he wants to believe that they just might be. Dwight is so intrigued he ends up trading his large, expensive telescope for the small packet of beans. And so the woman by the well extends a hopeful feeler, “Where do you get that living water?”

Jesus in his own patience responds, “Everyone who drinks of this water out of the well will be thirsty again. But those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty. This water will become a spring gushing up to eternal life.”

While the woman’s interest grows, she still doesn’t get it, but she keeps grasping. “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

The Samaritan woman is unable to see outside of herself and her situation. What Jesus is describing lies outside of  her imagination. Tired, worn down by the rigors of her life as an outsider of among outsiders, she wants only to put down her bucket and never have to return to this well again. But Jesus promises something bigger than this woman’s physical thirst. And just because we might be tired and need a moment to sit our buckets down, let us not give up on our Lenten journeys just yet.

Because Jesus and the woman continue to move forward together. Jesus reveals something about the woman to herself, about her lack of or excess of husbands. She calls him prophet, and again Jesus calls her further beyond the limits of her imagination. “The hour is coming when the Father will be worshiped not on this mountain or in the temple in Jerusalem, but in truth and in spirit.” And then like Dwight from the office stepping out on the limb and going after the magic legumes, the woman continues to wrestle in faith and lays out the most outlandish promise she can think of, “I know the Messiah is coming.” And Jesus affirms their back and forth, all of her questioning, and all of her hoping. “I am he,” he says, “the one speaking to you.”

And with that powerful proclamation the woman is off and running back into the city to tell everyone what she has seen, to proclaim the arrival of the awaited Messiah. Certainly her life is changed. She moves from calling Jesus; Judean, an insult, to sir to a prophet, and finally she breathlessly calls him Messiah as she runs back into town. But as she runs, filled with spirit and truth, a peculiar thing happens. She leaves her water jar lying on the ground next to the well. It was only a few moments ago when her highest hopes for Jesus was that he might unload her of the burden of having to come with her jar to this well each day, to lift this burden so that she could rest.

But Jesus promises and brings something that lies beyond her hopes, far greater than her need to come back to the well. In the end the transformative power of the Messiah brings her right back into the intricate details of her life. She leaves the bucket by the well and she’s going to have to come back to get it. Her whole life is baptized into, is covered by, these living waters. And the former chore of fetching water from the well everyday becomes a spirit filled discipline and proclamation of the Messiah’s power. Baptized into these living waters, she wants to come back to the well to see what this Messiah might do next. So, don’t give up on our Lenten journey just yet. Leave your bucket by the well in hope, and see what the Messiah is bringing into the world.

And the Messiah is bringing is life. Even when it seems we’re sitting still, God is moving ordinary water into living water. God transforms the stuff of our everyday lives into the stuff of God, and brings us into the intersection of the human and the holy. Our enemies, Samaritan or Jew, become our neighbors. The waters flowing out of our shower heads become the living water, the blue highways, of everlasting life. Our pedestrian activities and chores, even the park benches where we seek a moment of rest, become the places where the divine and the earthly intersect. The whole world, filled with these living waters, is the place where God makes the ordinary, the extraordinary.
So, while Jesus sits, let us not give up on our Lenten journey just yet.

For we hear proclaimed today that wherever and whenever Jesus abides or even sits is a place always filled with the possibilities of God’s transformative power. And the promise is that God is abiding, forcefully, in the waters of this well. So, don’t give up on our Lenten journey yet. Feel free to sit your water jars down next to this well in hope, because God will bring us back again and again. We sit our buckets down, to step out in hope, faith, and uncertainty because the fate of our journeys rests only on the one who turns well water into living water, the one who brings all things into being even while sitting down. Amen.