I am thoroughly churched.  I believe in God. I have come to Jesus again and again.  I am still hungry. I am still thirsty.  

Consider for a moment all the ways we feed people at Grace: pancake breakfast and GLOW, heat respite and during Grace Room distribution, fellowship following traditional worship, stewardship brunches, past pig roasts and Oktoberfests, the Reformation and centennial celebrations, funeral lunches and WELCA Bible study goodies, snacks shared when hungry people appear at the office door, council snacks and occasional luncheons like the WELCA Christmas concert luncheon, not to mention all the other groups who serve food from Grace like Native American Urban Ministry, Trevor's Vision, Oasis Church, and anyone who holds their wedding reception or engagement party or renewal of vows reception here.  At first glance, you'd think we were in the business of feeding people!

One Sunday during my first call, I woke up crabby.  I woke up grumpy. I woke up disillusioned. I had regularly worked 65 hours a week and led worship and visited people in the hospital and led and planned youth activities and worked and led Bible studies and volunteered in the community and gone to meeting after meeting and had difficult conversations with critical people and worked and worked.  And on that particular Sunday morning, it all seemed for naught.

n our reading from 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of a rival group of Christian missionaries. According to Paul, these were the “super-apostles.”  He actually uses this phrase in 2 Corinthians 11:5. But he meant it tongue in cheek because they were, apparently, violent, arrogant, moralistic, and power hungry.  In our reading, Paul describes how these Christian missionaries boast, how they puff up their chests, how they number their own accomplishments, how they share their exceptional relevations with the world.  

On this Pentecost Sunday, I want to teach you two words: one in Hebrew, one in Greek.  First, in Hebrew. Ruah.  Now, in Greek.  Pneuma.

On the fortieth day of Easter, meaning 39 days after Easter and thus forever celebrated on a Thursday (we’re cheating a bit this morning), according to the account in Acts, Jesus ascends into heaven.  The writer of Acts, Jesus, the disciples, and indeed everyone at this time in history believed the earth was flat, with heaven above, the place of the dead below. Watching Jesus ascend into heaven, the disciples likely imagined him rising higher and higher through the clouds, at some point reaching a discreet dividing line between earth and heaven, there to live and reign at God’s right hand until some undisclosed time in the future.

Jesus speaks with the disciples on the night before his death about love, about friendship. Eschewing the term slave or servant, Jesus names the disciples his friends, and he says: “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”  Though I have long celebrated the way God chooses us in Holy Baptism, how God chooses us as God’s own children, I had not caught before the sweet grace of Jesus choosing us as friends

10 years from now, dear friends, I assure you the ELCA and Grace Lutheran will look really different. Not better or worse, just different.

I’ve been meditating regularly. Back in Advent, and even just a few weeks ago, I thought I was doing well.  I like doing things well. Each evening, I would sit on the pillows in my meditation room and spend 10 minutes following the directions of a guided meditation from the app Insight Timer.  More recently, I was sitting in a chair each morning for 10 minutes engaged in a morning meditation from the same app. Then, one day a couple weeks ago, a friend asked: what’s your goal in meditation?  I realized I didn’t know the answer to the question.

Following Jesus is the part of Christianity I find most compelling.  Weekly worship, Bible study, even believing certain things, these for me are not as compelling as Jesus’ call to follow.  I imagine where Jesus’ disciples, his original followers, went when they followed Jesus.  I imagine the people they met and with whom they spent their time.  I imagine their lifestyle.  I imagine their surprise and hesitancy to follow at times because of the outrageous things Jesus did.  And imaging all this makes me laugh because it in no way resembles the lives of most Christians here and now.

My dad’s also a Lutheran pastor.Three weeks ago, he retired after 39 years of ordained ministry from Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church in east Mesa. Of all the Christmas Eve sermons I have heard him preach, the one that sticks with me is the sermon where he told the story of a young woman giving birth in her car, a hatchback, behind a particular Circle K in east Mesa, cold, alone, scared.

John was clear about who he was and who he was not. John knew where his authority began and ended. He was meant to prepare the way of the Lord, to point to Jesus. If John had lived in the 21st century, he might have picked up one of those large foam fingers sold at professional football games and pointed that foam finger in the direction of Jesus, turning everyone’s attention to the star player.

On October 31, 1517, Roman Catholic monk Martin Luther challenged the Roman Catholic Church in their practice of selling indulgences to the peasants of Germany.  These indulgences were meant to confirm the release of their dead relatives and sometimes their living loved ones from purgatory, a space between this world and the afterlife, at least in the Roman Catholic tradition.  We may be well familiar with Luther’s theological concerns: the very existence of purgatory, the ability of a piece of paper to release someone from it, the idea that anything we do can ensure our salvation.

Imagine this scene. Jesus. The Pharisees and Herodians. This is not a quiet, sit-down meeting in Jesus’ office. This is not a polite exchange after church in the fellowship hall over coffee.This is Jesus versus the Pharisees and Herodians, one wise but illiterate peasant against likely a couple dozen learned, powerful men, come to entrap him. Think less Downton Abbey and more Game of Thrones. (Well, at least, I hear. I don’t own a TV.)