This summer at Lutheran Campus Ministry we are meeing on Wednesday nights to worship. I signed up to preach this week, so this is the sermon I did on Wednesday using the alternate readings from the lectionary. This weekend is my family reunion and our reunions always end with a worship service on Sunday, so I'll be preaching this sermon on Sunday too.
As
Nadia Bolz-Weber says "Sermons are spoken art form," so I hope you enjoy this, but I'm sure it is better in person.
Readings for Sunday July 22,
2012 : Ruth 1:6-18, Exodus 2:1-10, John 20:1-2, 11-18
Many of you know that I work
at Riverside; it’s a Bible camp just outside my hometown of Story City about 25
minutes North of Ames. I’ve worked in
the kitchen at Riverside for about 7 years and before that I was a camper
there. One of the most special things
about Riverside is the mime. Now I’m not
talking about a “guy in a white and black striped shirt, red scarf, and beret
pretending to be stuck in a box” kind of mime. The mime at Riverside tells the
story of Jesus without words. A
different set of camp counselors practice the mime each week and perform it
every Thursday night. They wear colorful face paint and clothes to correspond
to the character they are playing—the God/Jesus character has white paint,
Satan has dark paint. There are many other
actors that take on additional roles, from demons to disciples; and their faces
are usually mixtures of colors varying in darkness depending whether their
character is more good or evil. There is
also one character with no face paint and wears regular clothes, this character
is known as “humanity.” This person
connects the viewer to the story; they are us and show how God had each of us
in mind when God created the world. So
the mime usually starts with creation and then the entrance of evil in the
story of Adam and Eve, God coming to earth in Jesus and then Jesus’ life, death
and resurrection.
I’ve probably seen the mime
a hundred times, but there is always something different that sticks out to me
each time I see it. It’s basically the
same story every time, but my heart is in a different place each Thursday I’ve
witnessed the mime.
One of my favorite mime
moments was a few years ago when my friend Red, a charasmatic and joyful woman, was playing Mary Magdalene in
the scene from our gospel reading from today. When I’ve read this gospel lesson
or heard it in worship my first thought has usually been “Oh silly Mary—that’s
Jesus not the gardener!!,” because I get to see the story from the viewpoint of
the narrator. It wasn’t until Red played
Mary that I saw the panic and concern that Mary Magdalene must have felt in
that moment. How all her hopes and
dreams died when her Lord was crucified and if that were not enough: it appeared
someone had stolen his lifeless body.
She was desperate to find the body of Jesus and bring some order to the
terrifying situation that all who had loved and hoped in Jesus faced. She was blinded by her fear and panic and
didn’t even see that what she was looking for was right in front of her. When Red played Mary it was a revelation for
me to see the countenance of her face change from utter defeat to complete joy
as she came to the realization that this guy was not the gardener but her
beloved Jesus. Her immediate response was
to run to him with open arms and embrace him—to feel the life in the one that
she thought was lost forever. Jesus then
commissions her to go and tell the others about his resurrection and she obeys
running faster than she’s ever run to share the best news she’s ever heard.
How often do we face
situations of panic and fear and run to all kinds of things in our lives other
than Jesus? Psalm 73, verses 23-26 says:
Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My
flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my
heart and my portion forever.
This psalm describes how
God is right here with us, now and always—holding our hand, and sustaining us
when everything else fails. But then why
do we feel alone sometimes? Why when the
darkness seems to surround us do we not always feel the reassuring hand of our
Savior? All of our readings point to the
fact that God is there. Sometimes, like
Mary we are too blinded by our circumstances to see Jesus. We reach out to other things and people to
sustain us when Jesus is right there. In
our first reading from Ruth, Naomi is done: her husband and sons are dead and
she just wants to go home, she is bitter, mad, and heartbroken. Her daughter-in-law, Ruth, decides to follow
Naomi and identify herself with Naomi in every way. All Naomi wants is to move past the loss of
her family and go home. Ruth coming with her is just another mouth to feed and
a reminder of her suffering. God is
there through all of this and even though Naomi can’t see it at first, God goes
on to do immeasurable good through Ruth, even bringing her into the lineage of Christ.
And the story of Moses,
what a great example of God’s presence in a time of despair. The Pharaoh of Egypt saw how numerous the
Hebrew people were and worried about them gaining power so he oppressed the
people with slave labor and instructed all the midwives to kill the Hebrew baby
boys as soon as they were born. The
midwives did not follow the orders and the Hebrew people continued to increase,
but families still feared for their sons’ lives. When Moses was born his mother did her best
to protect him, but after 3 months she couldn’t do it anymore so she sent him
down the river in a basket. I’m sure his mother and most of the marinalized
Hebrew people wondered where God was at this time.
Somehow
that basket that Moses was in ended up on the bank of the Nile where the
daughter of Pharaoh just happened to be bathing. Pharaoh’s daughter accepts this child from a
basket into her family, and little does she know he will change the course of
history for the Hebrew people. No wonder
this bible story was made into the film The
Prince of Egypt. This is a tale that
we can get emotionally involved in, a hero arises from the direst of
circumstances to lead his people to freedom.
Now the real story is not that triumphant. Moses is not always willing to risk it all to
be the hero and needed lots of encouragement from God to get the Hebrews out
from under the oppressive rule of the Pharaoh.
I
do not claim to be any expert in suffering.
I have lived a relatively pain-free life thus far, but even in my smallest
struggles; looking back I can see the hand of God. I think Naomi’s anger at God for all the
tragedy she’s faced makes her more real.
Moses’s struggles to follow God’s call are relatable, and Mary
Magdalene’s blindness to her savior’s presence rings true with my life. The Bible is full of stories of real people
who sometimes struggle to trust God when things get rough. But just because we can’t see God in our
current situation doesn’t mean God isn’t there. We may not see the good God
will bring immediately or necessarily ever understand our circumstances. But when we do see God may we run to him
with open arms like Mary and rest in God’s presence.
