Preached at St. Timothy Lutheran on June 26, 2022. The Gospel reading was Luke 9:51-62.
Good morning. Grace and peace to you from a God who created you wise and whole. Amen.
In worship we reflect on the texts that God has given us. Those texts are scripture, and also— sometimes especially— the events of our lives. And so I appreciate your grace as I attempt to speak to the text of this moment we are living in now. God whom we worship today has space for you and all of what you feel.
You called me to be your pastor in all of my particularity, and I am grateful for that. Here I offer you some of my particular story. I grew up in a church in which women were not to preach or teach, and in which I was told that my intellect did not matter. My wisdom, my agency, were the foolishness of the world, and the teachings of our exclusively male pastors were the only correct means to understand scripture and God. It didn’t feel right even then. And I am grateful to my parents for helping me to find new role models, and to church communities that followed which taught me a more expansive theology in which I could breath and think and be.
For many years I have allowed myself to think that the theology and gender norms I first learned in church were no longer relevant to my life. But that has not proven to be true.
We live in a society that devalues the voices and agency of women, pitting women’s wisdom against the sacredness of life, as if they are opposed to each other. They are not. The dignity of all beings, and the sacredness of life, are not opposed. Navigating these truths, however, requires nuance and complexity. What I know in my bones today is that women — who bear the responsibility of pregnancy and birth, and overwhelmingly of child-rearing — do have the wisdom and the God-given dignity to address all the nuance and moral complication of the decisions they face.
When God created us all in Their image, and delighted in us with Their sister Wisdom….
And when God gave dominion to humankind over the earth— which is to say granting us the responsibility of stewardship—
God did not exclude women from that stewardship.
God did not give agency to all humans in relationship to creation, excepting women in relationship to their own bodies.
When God created us and called us good, God also gave us the freedom to live in our morally complicated universe the best ways we can find. And because the choices available to us in this morally complicated universe always fall short, God said, I will also show you abounding grace.
I know that not all of you will agree with me, and that’s okay. This isn’t just about women’s experience, it’s about all our experiences as people who were once born and nurtured. The question of abortion touches our deepest questions about life and death, about what gives our lives value, and how we may live out our desires, and what kind of community God calls us to be. And so I hope you will hold grace for me, as I promise to hold grace for you, if we see differently from each other. I promise to listen.
We must listen and wrestle together, lest this divided country threaten to divide us too. Before recently I have naively hoped that this wasn’t an issue for my generation, but I was wrong. And we are here now, and the road will be a long one in Minnesota, and in our surrounding communities and country.
The people who bear the burden of care for families, and physical risk of dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, are not only women but in particular poor women, and women of color. These are the people who will die from complications at birth; who will be unable to access an education; who will fall deeper into poverty; who will give up their plans, their aspirations, their lives.
In our Gospel read today, Jesus is setting off on a culminating journey of his ministry that will lead to his death and resurrection, the reconciliation of all people to himself. Luke tells us poignantly that Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, which is the heart of his Jewish faith and according to that faith, the dwelling place of God. Jesus knows the journey would be long and hard— with no place to lay his head— and he warns those who would follow him that this road will require self-sacrifice. They cannot proceed with any trace of nostalgia for the world they left behind, but must proceed instead with their faces and hearts set on God.
While it seems we have already journeyed through countless hardships as a country, there is still a long and hard road ahead for us too. The stamina we need won’t come from longing for how things were before. Although we grieve, we are not going back. We can only look forward and set our faces on God, the source of all being and wisdom. We look to God, who confers dignity of Her creation beyond any human judgement, and whose grace knows no bounds. It is setting our faces to God that may pull us through, perhaps even toward a future more just and compassionate than we could have imagined before.
When Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem, he orients himself to the cross. So that God, a man from the peasant class of an ethnic and faith minority, might in his unjust death stand in ultimate solidarity with all who are oppressed. With all who are treated as if their lives, their bodies, their dignity are less. And on the other side of the cross is not only solidarity but hope— for our God was not confined by human brokenness. In the most despairing of all places, the tomb itself, God brought life. In our despair, God brings hope. In the most divisive and intractable conflicts, God shows grace and expansive love that overflows even here, even now.
Friends, we are not done with each other, and we gather here to praise the God who is not done with us. We praise the Holy Spirit who brings joy even in tumult and sorrow. We praise Jesus who stayed the path to Jerusalem with courage, so that all people might be reconciled to God.
Although we journey a difficult road ahead, we are not alone, and are not without the grace of God in our midst. May that grace surround us now as we seek a way forward in dignity and hope. Amen.
