Sermon onJohn 6:16-21

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Jesus had fed the thousands of people who had come to hear him speak. They were so excited that they wanted to make him king, and they weren’t going to take no for an answer.But Jesus wasn’t going to let anyone derail his mission.

So, when the disciples turned around, he was gone. They waited and waited and waited, but it was getting dark—what were they supposed to do now?

They decided to get in their boat and head back across the Sea of Galilee.

By the time they were several miles from shore, it was completely dark. A wind had come up, and the water was rough. Their stomachs, full of miraculous bread and fish, started to feel queasy. Their hearts were full of misgiving.

They probably should have stayed put on shore. There had been twelve baskets of leftovers, and they probably wouldn’t have been the only ones to camp out overnight.

But now, they were miles from shore, on choppy waters, in the dark, with no Jesus.

What were they supposed to do now? How would Jesus find them?

They must have felt lost and abandoned by their rabbi.

Except that he had not abandoned them.

Suddenly, they heard a familiar voice cry out amid the howling wind, “It is I; do not be afraid.”

Jesus had found them!

Except, where did he get a boat?

Wait a second, he had no boat!

There he was, walking on the waves like it was no big deal.

Except, of course, that it was a great big deal.

Not even the forces of nature could keep their rabbi from them.

Why not?The answer is in Jesus’ greeting: “It is I.”

It can also be translated, “I am.” As in: “I Am who I Am,” the name God gave Moses from the burning bush.

This is one of seven “I am” statements in the Gospel of John. We get to know God better through Jesus, and these are what Jesus tells us about God. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Jesus is the Bread of Life. And in this story, Jesus is the I Am.Jesus has authority over the water, because he is God. He created the water he walked on.

Not the late hour, not the low visibility, not the rough waves, not even the lack of a boat could keep Jesus from his beloved disciples.

He had not abandoned them and never would.

But even though we know this story, there are times when it feels like God has abandoned us or that God doesn’t care.

There are times in our lives when God feels distant.Maybe during health problems, maybe during a loved one’s decline or after a death, maybe during a job loss or the end of a marriage or relationship, maybe when a loved one becomes estranged, maybe in a season that doesn’t have a clear difficulty to point to but is still hard.

There are all kinds of times when it feels like God has abandoned us.

It can feel like we’re out on a boat in the dark facing big waves.

But Jesus is there on the waves right beside us, calling out to us.

Sometimes his voice is harder to hear over the wind, but he’s there.

Even now, he cries out, “I am—do not be afraid!”

Jesus is our fixed point in the chaos of our world.

This reminds me of something I’ve learned in ballet class, oddly enough. I started taking a beginning ballet class for the first time last year.

Ballet involves a lot of turning, and if you ever in your childhood spun in a circle until you fell over, you know that turning makes you dizzy.

I learned there’s a technique in ballet called “spotting” that helps with this. You keep your eyes focused on one spot and you turn your body as far as you can, then whip your head around until you’re looking at that one spot again. Spotting will make you less dizzy.

I have a long way to go on mastering spotting, and let me tell you from personal, often-repeated experience: when you don’t spot properly, you get very dizzy and you start going in the wrong direction.

When it feels like your world is spinning out of control, let Jesus be your spot. Keep your eyes focused on him. Keep whipping your head around until you can see him again.

Okay, that sounds great, but how do you actually do that? Most of us don’t literally see Jesus on a day-to-day basis.

True, but when times are hard, think about how you have encountered God in the past.

Have you found scripture or devotionals meaningful? What about music? Nature? Volunteering? Talking with a good friend who tells you the truth because they know you so well?

It’s easy to let go of these life-giving things during life’s storms, when we’re just trying to keep the boat from capsizing.

I’m not saying, “Just read your Bible and life will get easier.” We don’t have that much control, and God isn’t a magic fairy who grants our wishes when we say the right words or do the right thing.

The truth is much more complicated and much lovelier than that. God is not a vending machine; we have a relationship with God. Relationships are complicated, messy, and beautiful, even our relationship with God.

God is always with us, even and especially during hard times, whether you feel it or not. Even when God feels distant, God is here all around you. These life-giving activities, whatever they are for you, aren’t about getting God’s attention. They’re about God getting our attention.They’re about reminding us that God is already there, our anchor in the storm.

God is our steady presence, the spot we can look to with every turn life throws at us.That doesn’t mean everything will be easy or that if things aren’t easy it’s your fault for not focusing on God enough. Far from it.

The thing about spotting is that you still get dizzy, even when you do it right. Life is still hard. There are always going to be more heartbreaks that take us by surprise. But God is also always there to turn back to, to keep us less dizzy, to help us find our balance.

God doesn’t shy away from any part of what makes us human—God experienced the fullness of what it means to be human: the joys, the pains, the tedium, and the storms. Jesus is called Emmanuel, because it means “God with us.” We remember that especially during Advent and Christmas, but it’s always true.

God never abandons us. God is with us in our storms. God is the fixed point we can always turn to.

God is—do not be afraid.

Sermon onMark 6:30-34, 53-56

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

I got really excited when I read this week’s Gospel reading.

I thought to myself, “This is great! Jesus tells his disciples to come away and rest. This is perfect for our Sabbath theme!”

Two weeks ago, we read about Jesus sending out his disciples in pairs, empty handed, to go town to town sharing the good news of the Beloved Community and casting out demons and healing people.

Our story today begins with the disciples having returned from their travels. Jesus could hardly hear them as they talked over each other in their excitement to share all they had experienced.

So, Jesus said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

“This is going to be perfect,” I thought. “We can talk about retreats and camp experiences that can be so powerful in people’s faith lives. We can talk about how important it is to spend time away reflecting and encouraging each other.”

Jesus and his disciples got into a boat and started toward their destination. But when they got there, there was a huge crowd waiting for them!

“Okay,” I thought. “Their retreat didn’t go quite as planned, but maybe Jesus showed good boundaries and protected the time he had planned with his disciples. I’m sure they all needed to restore themselves and process everything that had happened.”

Maybe Jesus said, “Thank you for your attention, but I’m not available right now”?

No. He did not.

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”

Well, that’s nice, but that’s not showing us good boundaries, Jesus!

Then, the part we didn’t read today that comes in the middle of our readingis the stories of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on water. We’ll read both of those stories from the Gospel of John in the next couple weeks, but our reading today skips them.

Jesus didn’t only teach the crowds, he worked a miracle to feed them out of practically nothing and then defied the laws of nature to walk on water instead of relaxing in a boat. That doesn’t exactly sound restful!

Then, when our reading picks back up, it talks about Jesus being recognized everywhere he went. The disciples’ travels must have been successful, because everyone seemed to know Jesus and want him to heal them. It seems like Jesus must have been even busier than before their interrupted retreat.

So much for a good Sabbath story!

It seems like even Jesus couldn’t maintain good boundaries or carve out time for self-care! Most of us don’t have crowds of people following us around, but our lives feel just as busy. The line about “many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat,” resonates.

It seems like our world is moving faster and faster. Sometimes it feels like one wrong step and we’ll fall off the treadmill of life, making fools of ourselves and probably breaking something in the process.

There are plenty of suggested solutions, though. Everywhere you turn, there are articles and videos and bestsellers recommending another form of self-care: take a bath, have a cup of tea, wake up at 4 a.m. to journal!

That’s not even to mention the marketers who try to get us to believe that this candle, that planner, or this detox diet plan is the key to finally being calm, collected, and in control of our overloaded lives.

But when we try all the things and we’re still tired,

When we buy the products and services and we’re still anxious,

Then it must be our fault, right?

We’re just not upholding our boundaries well enough. Or we’re not finding enough alone time while simultaneously not sufficiently nurturing our important relationships.

We’re just not trying hard enough. Or maybe we’re trying too hard?

It’s a challenge to find real rest in our world today.

As much as I wanted our Gospel reading to give us an example of Jesus resting that we could hopefullylearn something from, this story isn’t really about rest.

It’s contrasting Jesus’ compassionate leadership with Herod’s violent reign.

We did an introduction to Ephesians last week, so we didn’t talk about the gruesome story of the death of John the Baptist from our Gospel reading.

Here’s a quick refresher: King Herod was hearing all these stories about the miraculous works Jesus and his disciples were doing, and he worried that maybe Jesus was actually a resurrected John the Baptist.

That doesn’t sound bad, except that Herod had been the one to order John’s death.

Herod’s wife, who had formerly been his sister-in-law, was not a fan of John, because he called out the political implications of Herod marrying her. His new marriage allied him more closely with the Roman occupiers.

So, when she had the chance, she got her husband to do what he had been too afraid to do: behead John the Baptist.

This story doesn’t seem like it has much to do with Jesus’ interrupted retreat, but there’s a literary device used commonly in the Gospel of Mark that links the two stories.

Officially, the literary device is called “interpolation,” but I prefer the less formal term “Markan sandwich.”

Basically, one story is sandwiched in the middle of another story.

We saw an example of this three weeks ago when we read the story of the woman with the chronic bleeding, which was sandwiched in between the two halves of the story of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead. This sandwiching links the two stories into one unit—wraps them in butcher paper, so to speak—so that the reader knows to look at how the stories relate to each other.

In this chapter of Mark, the story of Herod having John the Baptist beheaded is sandwiched between Jesus sending out the disciples two by two and when they return.

By sandwiching these stories, the writer of Mark shows how very different Jesus’ compassion for the crowds was from Herod’s power hungry and violent rule.Instead of Herod’s bloody birthday party for the elite, Jesus fed the 5,000.

Even the line about Jesus seeing that “they were like sheep without a shepherd” recalls our first reading from Jeremiah, where bad leadership is described as bad shepherds who scatter the flock. Jesus came as the Good Shepherd to bring those who were mistreated by the bad shepherds like Herod and the dominating Roman Empire into the peace and fulfillment of the Beloved Community.

So, even though our reading isn’t about Jesus and his disciples going off on a relaxing retreat, maybe this story is about rest after all: the rest and peace Jesus brought the flock of people who found their hope in him.

We can turn to Jesus for rest and peace, too. That’s what Sabbath is for: to set aside time to enjoy God, to remember that we don’t have to do anything—God loves us because we are.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a beautiful book called The Sabbath. He describes Judaism as a “religion of time” that “teaches us to be attached to holiness in time,” and the Sabbath as “our great cathedrals.” He says, “the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise.”

It's powerful to think of time this way and learn from our Jewish siblings. The dominant culture in the US is very concerned with constructing things, whether projects, buildings, careers, or bank accounts. But in Sabbath, we build a cathedral of time, we pause and dwell in the holiness of time.

Think of the last time you felt awe. Maybe it was in a beautiful church or a view of the ocean or a vast gallery in an art museum. Now picture that sense of awe in time instead of space. That is Sabbath.

We get to admire God, who is bigger than time and certainly bigger than anything we can accomplish by our efforts. We just get to enjoy and rest in God’s compassionate presence.

I hoped for rest for Jesus and the disciples in our Gospel story, but the rest in that story is for the crowds, the lost sheep who found a compassionate Good Shepherd to build a cathedral in time with.

I encourage you to find that holiness in time this week. Even if it’s only five minutes, rest, breathe, be in awe of God. Rest in the compassionate embrace of your Good Shepherd and be at peace.

Sermon on Ephesians 1:3-14

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Our second reading for the next seven weeks will be from Ephesians, so I thought we’d do an introduction today to give some context as we read through much of it through the rest of the summer.

A little background: it’s one of the letters that make up much of the New Testament. The letters would be read aloud to a community of faith and often passed around from one community to the next. This one, though,seems less customized to a specific community than some, since it doesn’t address specific concerns or greet people by name.

This and the way the content and vocabulary differ from the letters that we’re very certain were written by Paul makes some scholars think that it may have been written by a student of Paul’s under his name. That was a common practice then and wasn’t considered plagiarism like it would be now.

Whether it was written by Paul or one of his students, it’s still a part of our sacred scripture and has some beautiful language and important content for the early Jesus followers who were trying to figure out how to live life together, which we can learn from too.

The letter has two halves.

In the first part, the writer reminds the audience that God loved them and cared about them from the very beginning. It talks about God’s grace and all that God has done for us.

Chapter 2 verses 8-9 are verses we often hear on Reformation Sunday: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

The second half of the letter then turns the focus from God to the audience and instructs them in how to live in the world in response to being part of God’s family.

The very structure of this letter is abeautiful illustration of how Luther later explained the relationship between faith and works:

We don’t earn God’s grace—it’s a gift. Our salvation is God’s work, not ours. And then out of gratitude and love for God, we can show God’s love to others without being afraid that we have to earn God’s love or approval.

To tie this into our Sabbath theme, we don’t have to work ourselves to death trying to be good enough, because God already loves us and nothing can change that. We can rest in God’s love.

Another important theme in this letter and a bridge between the two halves is unity. The early Jesus followers were made up of both Jewish people and Gentiles, and they were having a hard time figuring out how to do life together.

Chapters 3 and 4 reminded the audience that they are one in Christ—made into a holy temple to God and making up the Body of Christ.

It’s both comforting and frustrating to realize that the Church has always had its internal conflicts.

But Ephesians reminds us that our kinship in God is more important than our disagreements.After all, as the letter says, “there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

We are one in Christ, and we all have different gifts and viewpoints that enrich and also challenge our community. And within that, we are equals in God’s eyes. God loves each of us infinitely, and therefore, equally.

How would our lives be different if we saw every person as completely beloved by God and then we appreciated their uniqueness?

The second half of the letter has more specific instructions on how to live.

We don’t have enough time today to fully explore the instructions. If you want to dig deeper, please let me know. We can schedule a Bible study and nerd out together—I’d love that.

But here are some important parts of the instructions and some caveats.

Overall, the second half of the letter calls people to live differently because of the grace and love they have received from God. Again, salvation is God’s work, and there’s nothing we can do to earn God’s love.

And also, out of gratitude for that incredible gift, following Jesus means being transformed inside and out, which shows up in our behavior.

The behavior the letter talks about ranges from speaking the truth to forgiving one another to not being foolish to singing to God together. There are some lovely reminders to imitate Christ and love one another.

And then there are also parts where the behavior of people who are not followers of Jesus is described so abominably that one could come away thinking that it isn’t possible for non-Christians to do any good in this world. That just isn’t the case. Christians do not have a monopoly on ethics, thoughtfulness, or compassion. There are Christians who do terrible things and loving things, and there are people of other faiths, atheists, agnostics, and any other non-Christians who do terrible things and loving things. The binary of “Christians equal good” and “non-Christians equal bad” just isn’t true or helpful. The writer used extreme language to exhort people to live differently, which is the point of that section.

Then, there are the household codes. Take a deep breath—we are treading in controversial territory.In chapters 5 and 6, there’s a list of instructions for households: for wives and husbands, children and fathers, and slaves and masters. We definitely don’t have time today to fully explore the various ways these have been used and abused over the centuries.

These texts have been used to justify the domination of wives, children, and enslaved people. Abusers of this text conveniently forget the parts that talk about husbands loving their wives as their own body or the instruction for fathers not to provoke their children to anger. And of course, there is no acceptable way to treat enslaved people except freeing them.

These are difficult texts. It may be that the behavior laid out in this section was milder and more mutual than other household codes of the time, but this passage has done a lot of damage over the years. This part isn’t even included in our prescribed readings over the next seven weeks, but it’s important to know what’s there.

The final section of the body of the letter talks about spiritual warfare and the need to don the “whole armor of God” to stand against the evil forces that oppose God.

This is a rich image and can be very inspiring. We need to be careful, though, that it doesn’t lead us to eitherspiritualizing people’s problems instead of tending to our neighbors’ physical needs or dehumanizing other human beings into “enemies” that need to be defeated.

There is so much more to cover here, but that is a brief overview of the contents and challenges in the second half of the letter.

As with much of scripture, when we get too into the weeds about individual instructions and forget to look at the big picture of our loving God, it can be frustrating, produce anxiety, and even justify judgmental behavior.

So, let’s remember that the overall arc of this letter is that God chose you and loves you, and therefore you’re free to love your neighbors in union with your siblings in Christ of all kinds.

We are unified in Christ and still have a lot of different perspectives and understandings. We’re allowed to see things differently and decide through discernment both on our own and in community how to live in a way that’s honoring to God and true to our consciences.

So, that is a glimpse into the letter to the Ephesians. I invite you as we read more of it over these next seven weeks to watch for the themes and messages we talked about today. May it enrich your experience of hearing from this part of our sacred scriptures.

I’d like to close as the letter begins and ends: with a blessing.

Praise be to God who had us in mind while creating the world.

May you rest in that love and be at peace in God’s salvation.

And may gratitude spur you on to serve your neighbors while appreciating their uniqueness.

Let that unity in God strengthen you and bring you peace. Amen.