Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Matthew 21:1-17

Have you ever been driving somewhere and realized you ended up at your destination with no recollection of how you got there? Or have you read a chapter of a book, only to realize you don’t remember anything of what you read? When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he shakes things up, waking the people out of their autopilot religion. Matthew says, “Unnerved, people were asking, “What’s going on here? Who is this?” This familiar story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey this Palm Sunday is highly dramatic, because it confronts us with our capability of being just like that crowd – they are there, but they aren’t really there. The crowds praise Jesus and are so excited to see him coming into Jerusalem, the son of David, but in just a few days, they will be shouting much different words: “Crucify him, Crucify him.” From the palm-strewn road, Jesus rides on right up into the temple, where he keeps shaking things up. He confronts the traditional religious practices of his day – the moneychangers and selling of animals for sacrifices in the temple. Many people, Jesus asserts, have been striving to be faithful but have not taken time in a LONG time to think about what God’s intent for worship really is: a house of prayer. Jesus comes to wake us up out of our complacency, out of our mechanical “through the motions” faith to discover what it truly means to follow him, and to admit what’s often most difficult to admit – we need help. We need a Savior.
Matthew points out how much Jesus is making people uncomfortable with this entrance into Jerusalem even in his noting what the people are shouting: “Hosanna to David’s son!” Even for us today, we might sing or say “Hosanna” without knowing what we really are saying. The people of Matthew’s time have also forgotten. At our Wednesday midweek worship, I talked about how we as Americans treat the phrase, “How are you?” not as a serious question, but as a greeting that we automatically say, “fine” in response to. We say “God bless you,” when someone sneezes, not necessarily because we really want God to bless that person. And “Good-bye,” also in its root means “God be with you,” but we have lost the power of that blessing when we say “Bye!” “Hosanna,” is a general exclamation of praise, as you might guess, but in Hebrew it means something like, “Save us.” The Palm Sunday crowd is greeting Jesus with words from Psalm 118, the traditional Psalm passage recited at the Passover, but it’s unclear if they realize what they are actually saying.
Ironically, the people who greet Jesus so enthusiastically are very quickly turned off by this Jesus who actually plans to do just that – save them. They don’t want Jesus to REALLY change things – the political system, the hierarchies of power that keep the poor poor and devalue children as some of the least of these, the traditional sacrificial worship system that many people make money from. They are shouting “Save us!” but they don’t know what they need saving from, and they certainly don’t want the kind of salvation that Jesus promises. Of course, Jesus’ name in this story is also significant – Jesus means, “God saves.” Even though most of the crowd and even Jesus’ closest disciples will abandon him on the way from the Temple to the cross, God will save us through Jesus the Christ, David’s son. God will save us when we don’t want him to. This is the hard good news we get to hear this Holy Week as we journey with Jesus to the cross and the empty tomb.
Matthew doesn’t paint humanity very positively in this passage – at least, the adults. Like other passages in Matthew, it’s the children who get it. Did you catch the description of the religious leaders freaking out when the children are running up and down in the temple? Sadly, in some of our churches still today young families and children are shushed or turned away because we think you need to be perfectly still and quiet in church. The children don’t seem to bother Jesus one bit, though. Jesus quotes from the prophets, “From the mouths of children and babies I’ll furnish a place of praise.” The children understand who Jesus is – they get it. They take seriously the words, “Hosanna, David’s son. Save us!” They seem to know what they mean in a way that the adults have forgotten.
It’s fun having two little people in the house who are fascinated by the English language and still learning it. Recently, Erin asked me why she only has a nightstand by her bed. “I need a morning stand for my things that I use in the morning, mommy!” I have a friend whose daughter started kindergarten recently, and she came home from school with a list of “mommy’s favorite things.” Under “favorite drink,” my friend’s daughter had drawn a glass of wine. My friend realized it was time for her to scale back her wine-drinking habit. Children, Jesus points out, remind us of what we’re really saying. Children aren’t afraid to wake us up out of our unconscious bad habits. Children can bring us back to faith, back to what it really means when we say, “Hosanna, Save us.” As we continue this week’s journey with the Last Supper and the story of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, pay attention to how the ones who seem to “get it,” the ones who stick by Jesus when everyone else abandons him or condemns him are the ones who have the least earthly power – the children, women, foreigners and outcasts, the nonreligious, lower-ranking soldiers and guards. It’s a valuable lesson we receive today that when we’re tempted to go along with the crowds or finding ourselves in habitual spiritual “ruts,” listening to those we might not naturally listen to, those who would have a different perspective, is one way to correct our “hive mind” thinking.
While we with the rest of the crowds may be confused or even distrustful at times about who Jesus is and what he is doing, Jesus is clear-headed and resolute in who he is and where he is going. Our celebrations and “Hosannas” this morning and every Palm Sunday are always muted with the background knowledge of what will happen in the coming days – that our precious Savior, Lord, Messiah, and King will be handed over into the hands of sinners, betrayed and abandoned by his closest followers, and put to death by the political and religious authorities. It is not a stretch to confess that we are complicit in Jesus’ death with our hollow “Hosannas.” The grace that we receive from Jesus each and every week is that even when we don’t know what we’re doing or what we are saying, Jesus does save. God saves through Jesus Christ. God gives us what we are asking for – Hosanna, save us. God saves us from all that we cannot overcome ourselves – from sin, death, and the devil. Maybe most powerfully, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God saves us from ourselves. May we like those children running through the temple grow to know more deeply what we are saying when we shout Hosanna – Praise the Lord, God HAS saved us! Amen.

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Matthew 28:1-10

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Are your feet Easter-ready? With spring weather finally here, some of you may be thinking about getting your body swimsuit-ready for the summer, but have you thought about whether your feet are Easter-ready?! When the Marys see the risen Jesus for the first time that Easter morning, Matthew tells us they fall to their knees and embrace his feet. Throughout the gospels people are kind of obsessed with Jesus’ feet. Falling down at someone’s feet was an act of worship, usually reserved for the Roman emperor, at the time. Before the resurrection, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume and wipes them with her hair. Another woman washes Jesus’ feet with her tears. People sit at Jesus’ feet to listen to his teaching or to receive healing. Jesus’ washes the disciples’ feet and asks them to wash one another’s feet. Jesus also instructs the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a town does not receive his message. Jesus’ feet and hands are nailed to the cross, and the earth reels and rocks under the Marys’ feet at the empty tomb.
All this talk about feet is not for us to get too squeamish about how our toes will look in sandals in a few weeks, but causes us to ask how God wants us to use our feet after worship is over, to leave the empty tomb along with the women that first Easter morning to share the message about Christ’s resurrection. Jesus tells the women not to hold on to him too tightly, not to stay at his feet in worship, but for them to go use their feet to tell others the good news that he is risen. The angel instructs the women: “Get on your way quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He is risen from the dead. He is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.’ That’s the message.” That’s the message we have to share, too! He is risen from the dead, and you will see him, you will see Christ resurrected! Are your feet Easter ready to share that good news with someone who needs to hear it?!
Your immediate answer to that question may be…no! “Did you hear the good news? He is risen!” This would be the text message my atheist friend in college would send me every Easter – it was an irreverent joke between us as we would argue about Jesus’ existence and my own faith that “yes, I actually believe all this stuff,” and my friend’s doubt. Maybe it is jarring to hear a pastor share on Easter morning that she has joked about Jesus’ resurrection with an atheist, but I share this partly to shake US up with the realization that we are all, those of us who are believers, a bit weird! I appreciate my friend helping me realize that saying “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” is actually a very difficult thing to believe and make sense of today. The Easter message we have to share is the same as the women’s message at the empty tomb, but the women saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes, and we haven’t. Especially in Matthew’s telling of the resurrection of Jesus, it sounds so fantastic to our modern ears, doesn’t it? An earthquake occurs as an angel comes down from heaven with shafts of lightning blazing and his garments shimmering snow-white! This account almost makes the Easter bunny more believable, if we look at it with post-Enlightenment skepticism. This is the way more and more people today look at Easter – a nice holiday spent with family and Easter egg hunts and maybe dressing up and going to church to make mom happy, but a guy being raised from the dead, escaping from a sealed tomb and an angel to tell about it? Kind of hard to believe. Are our feet Easter-ready to share this counter-cultural, unbelievable message?
So, how do we make our feet a little more Easter-ready? How do we let go of clinging to Jesus’ feet with joy and a little bit of fear of what we might say, or who we might talk to, and venture out to share this strange good news that Jesus STILL lives, lives in us and through us and with us and promises us life abundant, life eternal for all who believe?! Can we talk about resurrection in a way that might actually make sense to some skeptics who have a hard time getting past the scientific impossibility of a man rising from the dead? I will confess that I believe the historical Jesus rose from the dead just as the gospels tell us, because God can defy natural law. I also believe, however, we can’t fully explain this mystery of faith, and resurrection is a present reality for us all as Christians, not just a historical fact that we can never really prove or disprove. That is what faith is – trusting in what can’t be proven or seen. Easter reminds us that Christ’s crucified and resurrected presence is all around us, all the time, and we miss it because we are thinking it only took place 2000 years ago in a quite spectacular way. If Christ’s resurrection was only a one-time historical event, though, he might as well have stayed dead, because we worship a living God with a living faith that proclaims resurrection every single day! We God bringing new life out of death all around us, all the time.
Christians have used “ordinary,” or “natural” symbols for years to explain the mystery of the resurrection, which is truly miraculous in God’s order of creation. A caterpillar is “buried” in a chrysalis for several weeks and is transformed into a beautiful butterfly. Jesus himself described resurrection as a seed dying in the ground to become a new plant bearing fruit or grain that feeds us, sustaining life. And some of us have had the holy privilege of witnessing someone else’s death, not seeing the full transformation of the soul after death but having a glimpse of the peace, comfort, and hope amidst the grief that comes with letting a loved one leave this life for the next.
Getting our feet “Easter-ready,” to share the good news of resurrection, in the end, is less about rationalizing or explaining away the miraculous Easter event, and more about sharing how we have experienced God’s gift of new life after death. My atheist friend from college, who facetiously texted me “good news” every Easter, is now married to a Methodist pastor and goes to church almost weekly. I can’t explain that, and I definitely don’t attribute that transformation to me, but something about that Easter message got to my friend and made sense, despite the odds. I can only thank God for that. In my own life, as I reflect on my own experience of going through times of sadness, loss, death, and difficulty, I can always find those resurrection moments of feeling and seeing Christ’s crucified and risen presence right there, in the midst of the mess, with joy and hope ALWAYS on the other side! Today, we Christians dare to believe and share that message in spite of the skeptics and in our own skepticism. Even when others think we’re a bit crazy, or pretty intelligent “but I don’t know about that Jesus stuff she believes in.” We say joyfully today, “Did you hear the good news? Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” Some of us may make sense of Easter’s resurrection differently than others of us to come to a place of belief – but together we say, “we believe!” My Easter prayer for you ALL, which is really a prayer every Sunday because every Sunday is a little Easter, is that God leads your feet to the feet of Jesus, and then sends you out with a good news resurrection experience to share. That’s the message! Christ is risen! He has risen indeed Alleluia! Amen

Rebecca Sheridan
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Galatians 6:1-10

Christians worship God in community. As I serve our synod in the capacity of a Synod Evangelist, this is one of the phrases I repeat over and over as one of the top reasons I feel it is important to go to church and belong to a church. Not only is this honoring the third commandment to honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, being a part of a church community is practicing being the body of Christ in the world, as our readings urge us to do this evening. As we worship together this Lent, I am grateful that we are able to focus on this topic of being Church Together and grateful for the reminder that we at Bethel are not alone in enduring the grim trends in our society away from being Church Together…low worship attendance, aging membership, and society’s overall distrust of institutions like any club, organization, church or government. In my work as a pastor trying to connect and connect others to the unchurched and dechurched, I’ve had to rethink why I am a part of a church, too. Because for a lot of us, we just grew up going to church, it was what you did – like going to school and to work. “I go to church just because I always have,” is not really a way to explain or convince non-churchgoers why it’s important.
Sharing joys and burdens, however, I think is a better way to talk about why we’re a part of a church family, and why that is important to us. The author of our Synod materials for tonight quoted a Swedish proverb that I’d never heard before, which says, “A joy shared is a double joy. A sorrow shared is half a sorrow.” Why are we Church Together? Because you can read the Bible alone, pray alone, worship God on a hike in the woods or on a boat on a lake, but your joy won’t be doubled, and your sorrow won’t be halved like it is when we worship God in community –when you are a part of a family of faith.
Sometimes sharing our joys and sorrows isn’t easy, even with our church family. It can be easy to sit in your favorite pew, be inspired by the music and the message, maybe shake a few hands, even stay for coffee and fellowship to catch up on March Madness or talk about how terrible this winter was…and slip out without sharing how you’re really doing; what God has placed on your heart that you might want other Christians to know about and pray about with you. We’re trying to be better about this at Bethel to create spaces for people to share meaningfully about what’s going on in their lives through discipleship groups, sharing God sightings, and a long prayer request/prayer chain list to take praying for one another seriously. As a pastor in my first congregation, I tried to have it all together most of the time. I had learned from a mentor that it’s OK to show our scars but not our wounds to our congregation – we are supposed to be pastoring the people, not having people pastor us. But then I suffered a miscarriage, and I felt that it was too big of a thing to happen to me to not tell people what I was going through. It was one of the most horrible losses of my life, and I would be OK, but I needed my sorrow to be halved. Growing up in the church I had experienced the church community being there for me in so many ways through ups and downs – my grandpa and grandma’s deaths, my moves to college and seminary and my year abroad in Slovakia, being there at my wedding and at my ordination. And after my miscarriage, people pastored me by showing up with hot food, lots of desserts, lots of cards, flowers, and prayer. It was a humbling time for me to let the church really be the church for me, to share my burden as much as I was striving to share theirs. It was a relief to discover I didn’t break them by sharing this burden, and I didn’t stop being their pastor. In fact, I think this vulnerability helped us trust each other more to really be church together. I was human after all, just like them. I needed daily reminders of Jesus’ love, forgiveness, and presence, just like them.
After this experience, when people at church ask me how I’m doing, I try to respond honestly. As Americans, this is often an automatic “fine” response because the question is more of a greeting than one that is waiting for an honest answer, but if you asked it…I’m going to tell you! For me in my journey, I’ve found that sharing joys and burdens as a church family is a way for us to authentically be the body of Christ, the church, in the world. It’s something we can do as a community of faith that other relationships and friendships can also provide, but we as the church do it in a unique way – through confession of our sins, through forgiving one another, through praying for one another and sharing the peace of Christ, through the intergenerational coming together of all kinds of people I honestly would not otherwise be friends with.
When we talk about why we are a part of a church, hopefully it’s not just about preserving a beautiful building, or “because that’s what I’ve always done,” but we can share how God has been there for us through other people truly being Christ for us – rejoicing with us at the births and baptisms of our children and grandchildren, celebrating an anniversary or birthday, being there for us at family funerals, when we’ve lost a job or gone through a divorce or struggled with addiction and mental illness, you name it. It’s so important that when we talk about church we don’t just talk about a place or a time on Sunday morning, but a way of life that is tied to community. This being together in community you ALL know is not always easy, just like being a part of a family. There are people who really get on our nerves sometimes as we get to know them, people we disagree with politically or disagree with in terms of church politics. But there are also people who truly love us with a love that can only come from God, because at church there are people who love us in spite of ourselves and just because we’re ourselves. Here in this place with these people, we are held together by a common love for and by One who took all our burdens to the cross, was buried with them, and then rose victorious over all our shame and pain to give us true joy and hope, as we work together for God’s kingdom that has no end. When we gather together with other Christians, it doesn’t take long, no matter where you are, to know that common bond of faith that unites us and allows us to share in our own joys and burdens. The love of Christ holds us together in a bond that is deeper than anything else I know or can describe. As Paul reminds us in the letter of Galatians, we remember tonight, “So then (since we are the church together), whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” Amen.

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Matthew 25:1-30

Have you ever asked a question and gotten a much longer response back than you wanted? Well, the disciples are in this position with Jesus. This passage we heard this morning is part of a much longer “judgment discourse” that is taking place on the Tuesday of Holy Week, which is all of Matthew chapters 23 through 25, before we get to Maundy Thursday with chapter 26. Let’s keep in mind that this sermon from Jesus (it’s not really a conversation, Jesus is the only one doing the talking) is happening in Jerusalem, on his way to the cross. Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples to continue to follow him in faith after his death and resurrection, and the disciples are wondering what they will do while they wait, and when and how they will know that he’s returned. Jesus is at the Mount of Olives, actually, when his disciples ask him way back in Matthew 24:3, “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” The disciples are wondering when this will all happen so that they can be prepared. A chapter later, In THAT context, then, Jesus is still talking! He tells a story about ten bridesmaids who are getting ready for a wedding, but five don’t have enough oil for their lamps when the bridegroom arrives. Jesus is answering the question about what will happen at the end of the age where Jesus tells the parable of the servants who invest their talents in different ways, and the one who doesn’t do anything but bury it.
Jesus keeps describing in these two parables what God’s kingdom is like, and it’s hard to find good news in these stories. These are not easy texts to preach, especially for us as Lutherans who always are emphasizing that it isn’t about what we DO, that our works can’t save us! It’s hard to make that argument when you read these chapters of Matthew. One of the characteristics of the gospel writer Matthew is his focus on what we as Christians do. Faith and works can’t be separated. If we’re going to call ourselves Christian, we ought to act like Christians, is Matthew’s general argument. And Matthew’s Jesus is harsh in his judgment of people who claim to follow Christ and do otherwise. There’s really no whitewashing or overlooking Jesus as a righteous judge in these gospel passages. BUT in the parable of the talents today Matthew also emphasizes that we are not to let our fear of God hold us back from living a Christian life as best we can, so it is my challenge this morning to help us move beyond fear of God’s judgment to listening for what might be good news for us from Jesus today.
SO…the good news I’ve found in these parables as we’ve been reading through Matthew is that what we do MATTERS to God. God wants our lives to matter. God has given us the gift of this life on Earth to make a difference for God’s kingdom. Sometimes when we only talk about being saved by grace apart from works of the law, it can sound like Lutherans don’t care about works at all, or that God doesn’t care about what we do. But God does. And the questions the disciples ask Jesus about what will happen at his second coming are questions we might ask a little differently, but they’re still relevant today: “What would I want to be up to when Jesus returns?” and similarly, “When I come to the end of my life and look back at how I’ve lived my life, will I be proud of what I’ve done? Will God be proud of what I’ve done?”
So first, let’s turn to the example of bridesmaids waiting for a wedding. This story sounds very strange – wouldn’t you just call a wedding off if the groom was so late it was midnight? You bet I’d be sleeping at this point. Well, maybe this isn’t so strange in another culture, on African time, for example. A few years ago, Pastor Rich got to be a groomsman in our friend John Badeng’s Sudanese wedding. It was an interesting collision of cultures as the Sudanese celebrated this wedding and worked with the Omaha Marriott to do the catering. The wedding invitation first came with a date, but no time. When we asked when we should come, John told us “about noon.” I’m somewhat familiar with African time, so I showed up at 1pm. Only the white guests were in the church. About 1:30, the choir showed up and started a worship and praise time. About 2:30, the wedding party arrived and we started the wedding ceremony in the church. We got to the Marriott for dinner about 5pm, the food had been out and waiting for us since 3. So maybe weddings in Jesus’ day were more like a Sudanese wedding, where no one was exactly sure when the bridegroom was coming, they just knew to be ready. But when the five bridesmaids go out to buy oil because they didn’t have enough, they miss the actual wedding. In focusing on the details like having a lamp trimmed and burning, in their last-minute preparations, they miss the most important event – the arrival of the bridegroom and the wedding itself.
How many of us end up in situations like those bridesmaids, distracted by “important” details so that we miss out on what’s most important to us in life – our family time, time with God, time tackling our bucket list and time spent serving others? For me, the recent Nebraska floods have helped prioritize my time in a different way. When my friends and neighbors are suffering, my worries and to-dos seem less important. The purpose of the church is more clear during these times – we are there to help those who need help, to serve as Jesus served. This parable is not kind to procrastinators. Jesus seems to be asking us to plan ahead, to think well before our time on Earth ends about what’s most important to us, and to spend our time as best we can living out our Christian faith in word and in deed.
Then we turn to the parable of the talents, where a man going on an extended trip gives sizable sums of money to three of his servants. It’s important to know that one talent was worth fifteen years of wages, so the servant given five talents was basically given a lifetime of wages to invest (75 years’ worth!) But the last servant buries his master’s money – why? Because he is afraid. Our fear, even our fear of God, can keep us from living the life God has given us to the fullest. God instead asks us to trust him and take risks for the sake of the gospel. Remember, Jesus is telling his disciples this on the way to his own death on a cross. He doesn’t expect the disciples to be completely without fear, or that their journey in following him will always be easy. But all of us who have sought to follow Jesus and live life as a Christian also know the great reward we receive in following him, in living a life of abundance because of our life in Christ. It’s worth the risk of investment, and our fear of God should be nothing compared to what we’ve known and experienced through God’s grace and love in Jesus Christ.
So, what “oil” might you need to keep on hand that will keep your lamp lit and burning until Jesus comes again? In other words, what daily or weekly or monthly practices help you stay focused on what is most important in life, focused on God’s will for your life? What might be holding you back from prioritizing your life in an intentional way so your life is an investment in living for God and for others? What are you afraid of? How can you give that over to God, knowing that your life matters, more than anything else, so much so that Jesus is willing to die so that you might live? These are the holy questions of Lent as we journey with Jesus to the cross. As you strive to stay focused on what matters most, take courage, and don’t be afraid, because you matter most to God. Amen.