The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 5th Sunday of Lent
18 March 2018
Readings:
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Psalm 51:1-13
Today’s Psalm takes me back to my childhood. Growing up at Hope Lutheran Church on 42nd avenue in San Mateo, we would sing the last three verses of today’s Psalm almost every Sunday as a hymn of praise at the beginning of the service. Even now, when I hear these familiar words, starting with “Create in me a clean heart, oh God,” they come alive in my mind and heart with the music of my childhood faith in the wide open sanctuary of green carpets and natural wood beams, bathed in the bright daylight of the glass panel windows lining both sides of the sanctuary. I would stand in awe, taking in everything, and frequently tracing the curved line of the wood beams with my eyes, up to the top of the thirty foot peak of the ceiling, paneled in a double row of deeply colored stained glass in red, green, purple, blue, and gold, stretching the full length of the ceiling from entrance to altar.
Faith was so easy when I was a kid. I felt safe at Church. My friends were there. Sunday school was there. Vacation Bible School was there. And it was a place where my dad was friendly and seemed happy and approachable—a stark change from home. On the familiar playground, we would bounce each other on the chain suspended wood plank bridge every week, laughing—or even squealing with delight when we were bounced so hard that our feet left the ground. In the parish hall, the deeply infused scent of years of coffee hours permeated the multipurpose space whether there was coffee there or not. It was there that I learned to drink coffee starting at about age 7, when it was mostly milk and sugar, sang together with all the Sunday school grades before we split up to our different grades’ classrooms, and performed on the parish hall stage as Martin Luther’s cat in a play my mom had written.
It was also there that my faith started to get more complicated as my simple childhood life and innocence also became more complicated. Within a short span of years between third and fifth grade, my brother abandoned me to start middle school, my favorite youth pastor, David, ran into the back of a stopped bus on his bike—we were told that he died instantly by our inspiring senior pastor, Jerry, who next was diagnosed with lung cancer from his work with asbestos prior to ordination, retired, and also died, my parents split up, and I started confirmation class with nothing making sense anymore except my faith that God was with me through all of it. I left the church after I was confirmed. Too much had changed. Too many people had let me down. Faith wasn’t easy anymore.
Taken by the hand, as Jeremiah describes in today’s first reading, faith was easy because I could see God in the clear descriptions and understandings of my teachers and pastors. It all made sense because others made sense of it for me. When I say faith wasn’t easy anymore, it wasn’t that I lost my faith, or that it lessened, but that the metaphorical cup that had been filled to overflowing was suddenly forced to grow to encompass a newly complicated world. It would take a lot more complex and nuanced faith to fill that larger reservoir. But my experience of faith in the world outside of the safety I had experienced growing up at Hope was one in which my relationship with God was already written on my heart. I knew for all the years that I ran away from God’s call that God still called me. I knew, and wrestled with an image of God that grew to encompass my own experience and understanding of the world around me as I searched for God at the beach, in complicated relationships, and in myself as someone who broke the mold of what my parents taught me was acceptable to and lovable by God. The rest of Psalm 51, in its rich complexity of praise, repentance, faith, doubt, uncertainty, and accompaniment becomes an appropriate model of the refilling of that larger reservoir of my faith in a complicated world that continues to challenge and complicate my understanding of both myself and the rich and sometimes difficult complexity of God’s good creation—that so frequently seems to rebel against the very goodness in which and for which it was created.
It was to this rich and complicated world that Christ came, seeking us out and calling us by name, not to offer a covenant of immediate rescue and salvation from physical slavery, or to invite us back into the comfort of an uncomplicated faith, but, again, as Jeremiah describes, to a covenant of partnership with God in which the world is turned upside down by a love that challenges our conceptions and boundaries, teaches, inspires, and reconciles our hearts to God—and on which God’s word becomes written so deeply that we might finally come to recognize God in everyone we encounter.
The words used in Hebrews to describe Christ’s priesthood as being of the order of Melchizedek is a redrawing of covenant, authority, and blessing from a source more ancient than the temple priests descended from Aaron. Melchizedek is a priest we encounter in Genesis, centuries before God calls Aaron, Moses’ brother, to be the first in the line of priests that extends down to Jesus’ generation’s temple-priests. Melchizedek was a king and priest of the highest God, the same name for God Abram used at the time they met. Fourteen years before God changed Abram and Sarai’s names to Abraham and Sarah, and covenanted with them to be their God and the God of their children in the new name of God Almighty, Melchizedek blessed Abram in God’s ancient name. Christ, as priest according to the order of Melchizedek, rivals the authority of the Temple priests who opposed him, with an even more ancient and eternal claim to authority that came before God’s law was revealed but, as Jeremiah foretells will be the case again, was still written on the hearts of God’s children who knew God without having to be taught who God was. It is this Christ who offers again, as not just priest, but—in John’s words—as God’s Word itself, to covenant with God’s people—to draw us into the abundance of God’s care in communities of mutuality, dignity, grace, and reconciliation that reach out into the world with hands of courageous love to offer that same abundance to those around us.
Looking to our Gospel, the ancient pairing of love and hate Christ uses at various points throughout scripture is not a literal hatred as we conceive of it today, but an ordering of preference, where, in reference today to loving or hating our lives, he suggests that we are to focus on ourselves not as individuals, hoarding God’s abundance selfishly to ourselves, but as members of precisely this kind of greater community of all of God’s children—loving others equally as ourselves, and participating with Christ in the ministry of bringing the abundance of God’s reckless love to life in the world around us.
Faith isn’t easy in this complicated world, where our children march to teach us what we should already know about justice and the right use of power to protect and care for others, where our real life heroes, like pastors Jerry and David when I was a kid and Stephen Hawking earlier this week, get sick or injured, or simply grow old and die; where beloved bishops announce their plans to retire; and where our lives are sometimes quite suddenly turned upside down and nothing makes sense anymore. But it is the complexity of our relationships with God that answer our complicated world with the kind of faith that not only assures us of God’s presence through it all, but also encourages us to hope and keep working in love to lift each other up.
As we near the end of our Lenten journey, may Christ’s reminders of the road to Jerusalem and the cross become also a reminder of the complexity of God’s love for us—a love that would face our ultimate punishment with the hope and courage that would transform the symbol of that punishment into a symbol itself of love, hope, salvation, and resurrection—a symbol of what all the ugliness and hate of this still complicated and hurting world can become through faith and God’s transforming love.
Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with your free Spirit.
Amen.
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