Sermon on Exodus 20:1-17 & John 2:13-22

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Focus: Just as Jesus showed righteous anger, we can discern whether our anger is righteous by rooting ourselves in the ways God shows us to live in right relationship with God and other people.

Function:This sermon will help hearers learn to befriend and learn from anger.

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible remind us of some of God’s promises.

Two weeks ago, we read about God promising to never again flood the whole world, creating a permanent covenant of peace.

Last week, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

This week, we read a third covenant: what we know today as the 10 Commandments. They’re the big ten among the over six hundred instructions in the Law given to God’s people.

God gave the newly freed Israelites a new way to live in right relationship with God and with one another.And, as we’ve been talking about all year, that way of life includes Sabbath.

The Sabbath commandment reminds them of who created the world by using God’s own Sabbath rest as the basis for the instruction.God rested after working for six days, and we should rest too.

God also uses the Sabbath commandment to remind them of their freedom and who freed them. Every week they took a day off to remind them that they were no longer enslaved in Egypt. They were free people who reveled in free people’s rest.

By remembering who created the world and freed them, they remained in right relationship with God: a relationship of love, gratitude, and joy. They also remained in right relationship with each other and the land by taking a day off from their labor. They had time to enjoy each other and gave their land and animals a break.

We’re focusing on Sabbath, but all God’s instructions here provide a framework for right relationship with God and other people. Respect God’s name and put God first. Don’t murder, steal, or lie about others. And between those: remember to take a break to enjoy God and each other. It’s all about relationship, and rest is the centerpiece between the instructions about how to love God and those about how to love neighbors.

I want to share a recent story of how I did not uphold the Sabbath commandment. I’m not sharing this story to humble brag about how much I do or to make anyone worried about me. I love my work, and in general I take very good care of myself. I’m just also human and sometimes misjudge how much rest I need.

The week before last was a busy week. Not unreasonably busy, but busier than usual. I took my usual Friday off, hung out with friends, and did things that fill my cup. Then, Saturday was our church council retreat, which was wonderful—it was exciting to spend time with our amazing leaders discerning what God is up to in this place for this next year. But it was still work on a day when I normally don’t.

By Monday, after a joyful but very loud family birthday party on Sunday afternoon, I was done. I woke up on Monday morning tired and cranky. I should have taken Monday or at least Monday morning off, but I didn’t think I could afford to because of what needed to get done this week.That was a poor choice, because what happened instead is that I spent Monday morning getting very little done and being angry about it. I was angry about stuff in the news. I was angry about not being productive. I was angry at myself for not listening to my needs.

The problem was that I did not give myself rest when I needed it.

It wasn’t my anger that was the problem, though I spent many years trying not to show anger. I was afraid I would hurt people with my anger.

But we see an angry Jesus in our Gospel reading, so surely anger itself isn’t bad. It’s part of the beautiful variety of human emotion. Emotions themselves aren’t bad—they just are. What matters is how we react to them.

If in my anger, I had picked a fight with my spouse or started insulting people on the internet, those wouldn’t have been good choices. I would have been hurting my neighbors.Anger can be used to hurt others, but it can be used for good, too.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus turned his righteous anger into something like a street performance, a form of protest decrying systemic religious problems. I admit I was unsatisfied with the information I found about what exactly Jesus was angry about. What I found relies too much on speculation or could easily drift into anti-Jewish thought. So, I’m not going to spend more time today trying to explain something I don’t fully grasp.

But what I do see is that Jesus’ act of righteous anger here either commenced his public ministry, as John portrays it, or was the beginning of the end, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke portray it. Jesus’ anger was a tool that he used to defy the authorities who opposed his message of Beloved Community.

Again, anger itself isn’t bad—it just is. Anger can help us recognize when our boundaries are being violated. Anger can let us know when our expectations are unreasonable or not clearly communicated. Anger can energize us to defend our hurting neighbors or work to right an injustice in the world.

For me this week, there was some righteous anger about things going on in the world, but for the most part, my anger was letting me know that I hadn’t respected my own need for rest. I wasn’t in right relationship with myself, which made it harder to be in right relationship with the people around me.

But even though I didn’t fulfill God’s instruction to take rest and honor my relationship with God and other people, God sent me love, in the form of my best friend. I had messaged her during the day, complaining about the state of the world. So that evening, I got a text asking if I was up for getting ice cream. My best friend knew what I needed, and so did God. It wasn’t about the ice cream (though it didn’t hurt). It was about my need for connection. God was bringing me back into right relationship with the world, even when I missed the mark.

That’s what the 10 Commandments are about—not an ultimatum that threatens punishment, but a description of what our lives look like when we’re in right relationship with God and our neighbors.

1.    If we’re in right relationship with God, our love for God comes first.

2.    If we’re in right relationship with each other, we’ll be looking out for our neighbors’ needs instead of coveting, stealing, or lying.

And when we inevitably fall short of those perfect relationships, God is there, loving us no matter what.

So, do your best to take the rest you need. Let that fill you up with love for God and your neighbor. And trust that God is there to catch you in God’s arms when you fall. Rest well, beloved.

Sermon on Mark 8:31-38

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible will remind us of some of God’s promises.

Last week, we read about God promising Noah that God would never again flood the whole world. Indeed, that God’s weapon, God’s bow, was hung in the heavens, never to be wielded again. God made acovenant with humanity—a promise and agreement founded in relationship. It was a covenant of peace for all time.

This week, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

These two promises, as well as the ones coming up in the next few weeks, all connect to baptism.

When we see a rainbow, we remember that God saved Noah and his family from the flood. In baptism, we remember that God saved us by becoming human, living and dying and rising again,to restore our relationship with God. Baptism is a reminder that God has already saved us.

And when God made those promises to Abraham and Sarah, God gave them new names, new identities in God. Baptism reminds us of our identities as children of God.

All of this—salvation and identity as children of God—comes through God’s grace. We don’t do anything to deserve it. God loved us before God made us. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less.

Still, we are sinners—we mess up and hurt each other and ourselves. By God’s grace, we are also saints—people who love God and let God’s love show through the way we live our lives. Martin Luther said that we are simultaneously saints and sinners. We can’t escape either side of that paradox, but God loves us exactly as we are.

On this side of death, we will never stop messing up and hurting each other, but God chose us, knowing that full well and loves us no matter what. We mark that in baptism, because God knows we need physical things like water to remind us of the truth: that we are part of God’s family forever and God’s love will never leave us.

In baptism, we are reminded of God’s covenants with humanity: that God saved us and that God’s family is vast and includes us.

When we remember these truths, we are freed and strengthened for the work ahead: the co-creation with God of the Beloved Community.

We’ll need that strength, because when we get to our Gospel reading, Jesus has some harsher words for us. He tells his disciples of the sufferings he must undergo and warns them that following him means being willing to suffer and even die for the cause.

Jesus isn’t glorifying suffering or saying that his followers should seek out suffering or meekly put up with abuse. Christianity isn’t about trying to suffer. Jesus here is just being realistic about the path he was on. He was saying and doing things that the occupying Roman Empire wouldn’t like. He was defying the emperor and upending society. He didn’t need to seek suffering—it was coming to him, and he knew it.

And if his followers were really learning from him, there was impending suffering for them, too.

But again, the point wasn’t the suffering. The point was that living out the Beloved Community means living in a way that upsets the people in power, the people who benefit from keeping things the way they are.

There’s no freedom for captives, food for the hungry, or good news for the poor without changing the way the world works. And that’s what Jesus was here for. And he was preparing his followers for what that meant.

That kind of world-changing justice comes out of freedom. Freedom like we receive in baptism. The freedom to see what Jesus is up to and decide we want that love and freedom for others too. And so, we take on the task of helping the Beloved Community become a reality, which upsets people who benefit from the status quo and puts us in danger. We live in a society that doesn’t actively persecute Christianity, so we are likely not going to lose our jobs or be threatened or be subjected to violence, like Jesus was warning his disciples.(Though, there have been people like Martin Luther King Jr. who were 20th-century American martyrs.) In general, we’re more likely to suffer awkward family holidays or raised eyebrows from neighbors or getting asked to step down from leadership positions.

But even our Sabbath theme might earn us the names “lazy” or “irresponsible.” We’re going to disappoint people who want us to do things. It might earn us the resentment of our colleagues and friends. It’s very easy for people who aren’t taking care of themselves to resent the people around them who are. Rest is countercultural and so needed.

And when we are restored by resting, we might feel moved to advocate for rest for others. And the people who benefit from cheap or unpaid labor will feel threatened by the prospect of people being paid better or having more paid leave or having more support to care for their families. That’s the slippery slope of following Jesus.

It starts with God’s grace rooting us in our identity as beloved children of God, which frees us to live without fear or shame, which stirs in us a longing for others to live that way too, which leads us to take costly action for others’ freedom and wellbeing, which contributes to the Beloved Community. And if that costs us everything, it’s entirely worth it.

All of that starts with God’s covenants with us. God’s promises of peace and grace and love allow us to follow Jesus and make the world a little more as it is in heaven.

A commentary by the organization The Salt Project reframed God’s covenants that we’re reading during Lent not as “a series of separate covenants here and there, but rather that God’s covenantal relationship with creation unfolds in salvation history, like a single flower blooming over time…helping to reveal the inner depth and beauty of what was there all along.”[1]

So instead of reading this series of covenants over the course of these weeks as individual episodes, we can see them as a collective unfurling of God’s grace, each helping us to understand God’s love for us better.

Beloved, we don’t earn God’s love through works. We are free to rest in God’s grace. God has already saved us, and there is nothing we can do to change God’s love for us.

And still, a hunger may creep into your life for others to experience that freedom and love too. That’s when following Jesus becomes both costly and powerful. That’s when the Beloved Community becomes more real for us. That’s the road that leads to the cross and the resurrection.

Remember always that you are a beloved child of God, saved by God’s grace and included in the flower of God’s covenants.

And when that hunger for following Jesus stirs you to action, take up your cross and follow him. The Beloved Community is always wort

[1]https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/2/20/cross-purposes-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-2

Sermon on Mark 1:9-15

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

As we begin Lent, we’re back to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. We’ll be traveling with Jesus this season from the beginning of his earthly ministry to his death, and then, well, you know what comes next.

But for now, Jesus gets baptized by John, spends time in the wilderness, and then begins proclaiming the good news around Galilee. In the next verses, he’ll collect some followers, get attention for his ability to cast out demons and cure people, and we’ll see him begin that action and reflection cycle we talked about a couple weeks ago. He’ll take time alone to pray and reflect away from the crowds he ministered to and will come away with a stronger sense of his mission and next steps.

His earthly ministry starts, though, with his baptism. God tears open the sky and speaks Jesus’ identity to him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

As we talked about at the very beginning of this year, Jesus hadn’t done anything yet at this point, and yet God was well pleased with him. His identity, not his actions, made him Beloved.

It’s only when Jesus is grounded in his beloved identity in baptism that he can withstand what he experienced in the wilderness. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t give us many details the way the Gospel of Matthew does. Mark simply says, “He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.”

The concept of wilderness is important in the Bible: from Hagar and her son Ishmael running away from Sarah and Abraham into the wildernessto the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for forty years to Elijah fleeing into the wilderness to save his life and many more stories. And all these people encountered God in the wilderness.

As much as our reading names Satan and wild beasts and angels as Jesus’ companions in the wilderness, it’s the Spirit that drives him out there. So, God’s presence is surely there with him too. The wilderness is a place where people encounter God.

In the wilderness, the distractions of daily life are stripped away, and our reliance on God is made clear. Now that Jesus had affirmation of his identity and belovedness, he was ready to spend time focused on God.

And we see what comes of it: when Jesus returned, he “came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”He knows what he’s here for, and he’s ready to begin his mission of sharing the good news of God with the people around him. And after this, he’s ready to start teaching others to do the same.

It's only once Jesus was grounded in his identity as Beloved and had spent time focused on God that he dove headfirst into his mission of spreading the good news.

We, too, need that grounding in our identity as beloved children of God and that clarity of mission that comes through time spent in prayer and discernment.

Living fully into God’s mission for us isn’t easy. It goes against the grain of so much in the culture around us. It’s costly and difficult. Loving our neighbor is way easier said than done.And still, we each have a unique contribution to the Beloved Community, Jesus’ way of justice, love, and abundance.

It's easier to live your life from day to day, going with the flow, doing what’s expected of you without question than it is to slow down and carve out time to really listen to what God has in store for you and then to do that.

Lent can be a wilderness for us. It can be a wilderness in time instead of space, and we can seek to quiet the distractions of our ordinary lives. We spend a lot of time trying not to be alone with our thoughts. How often do we pull out our phoneswhen in line at the store or put on music while doing the dishes or busy ourselves with pretty much anything so that we don’t have to be alone with ourselves?

Let’s find some simplicity this season—not for simplicity’s sake, but to counteract the noise and busyness in the world around us and in our own heads. When we stop filling the silence, we can make intentional choices about what to spend our time, energy, and resources on.

Instead of seeing Lent as a time of deprivation or restriction, let’s look at it as a time of simplicity for the sake of orienting ourselves toward what God has in mind for us.

We can use Lent to practice meeting God in the wilderness—as free as possible from the distractions we fill our lives with.Like Elijah, once the cacophony of the world around us quiets, we might find God in the still small voice.

Whatever happens this season (or any season), remember that you are a beloved child of God, and nothing can change that. It’s a truth you can hold onto in the wilderness times of your life.

And when you are in a wilderness time, whether it’s the season of Lent or a period of difficult circumstances or an existential crisis, it’s okay to wrestle with God. It’s okay to have questions, doubts, and frustrations. Having good questions is a mark of strong faith, because you’re curious and not willing to simply accept what you’ve been told. It’s good and faithful to wrestle with God.

In that wrestling, you might figure out your unique contribution to the Beloved Community, to making earth a little more as it is in heaven right now. There are so many amazing people in this room and among us virtually. You all have such important qualities that the world needs, like compassion, generosity, honesty, insight, and creativity. This season is about listening to God about why your gifts are needed in this place and this time.

And it’s a lot easier to listen to God when we pause some of the distractions that fill our lives. People of faith have been using practices that help with that for millennia. Sacred reading practices, meditation, ways to move our bodies in prayerful ways—there are so many tools that can help us slow down and listen to God. Let’s explore some of them this season, together and individually.

Beloved children of God, you are loved beyond measure.

But there are so many in the world who don’t feel loved.

God has given you specific gifts with which to love the world.

Let’s spend this season listening to how God wants us to use those gifts.

Rest in God’s love, slow down enough to listen to God’s dreams for you, andhelp share God’s vision of a justice-seeking and compassion-fueled Beloved Community.

Rest well, embrace the wilderness, and share God’s abundant love.